Local Brewers

Dan told me that a group of folks interested in brewing was organizing in the Page County area.  They've named the group The Blue Ridge Brewers Association - there's a blog, linked in my blogroll, and their doing lots of other things to organize.

Yesterday was the regular meeting.  There was serious business to cover:

1) a local effort to develop a local source of malt for brewing - a farmer has planted about 3/4 acre of two row barley for this purpose;
2) a visit from the folks over at Copper Fox Distillery over in Sperryville, where they are already engaged in crafting malts for their products, and for special orders nationwide; and
3) results from a tasting given at the Luray Downtown Initiative (LDI) and the prospect for another soon at the Luray Caverns CX.

As I mentioned, this is the first of the meetings I'd attended.  There was this obscure item on the agenda that I was especially curious about, called "Around The Cooler."  This ended up being the tasting section of the meeting - quite a few of the members had brought samples of their latest or a recent batch, or even a commercially available craft brew.

Although I had found a bottle of my recent Belgian Black on Saturday, I figured that one 22 oz. bottle wasn't enough to bring for this purpose.  I hope to have something to share in the future, however.

In any case, it was quite an educational program, as we progressed through a couple of items you wouldn't traditionally expect to find at a homebrewers' meeting:

• Kabuchi - a fermented tea
• A Marzen-style lager
• A Belgian Chimay-style
• An IPA
• A porter
• An Imperial Stout
• Whisky from Copper Fox

We also had some very tasty sauerkraut and wursts...There's more to come from this group!