TAP New York Craft Beer Festival

This past Sunday I had the opportunity to check out TAP New York, a "craft beer & fine food" festival at Hunter Mountain. To begin with, Hunter Mountain and the surrounding area is absolutely stunning, especially in the early spring. I can't quite explain how awesome it was to be literally 10 feet away from touching snow while the temperature was hovering in the high 70s...all while drinking some awesome beer. For a brief moment I thought I was dead and had gone to heaven, but then I remembered that they probably wouldn't let me in, so I must still be alive.

Alright, enough sappy crap about how beautiful it was. I came to drink beer, not take in the scenery! Firstly, kudos to TAP for giving us real tasting glasses, not prissy little plastic cups. Appearance is a huge part of appreciating any food or beverage, and the real glass definitely helped on that front. Almost every NY brewery I can think of was represented, and they did not disappoint. A few of my favorites include:
-Brown's Whiskey Porter
-Brown's Rauch
-Peekskill Brewery's Vanilla Bourbon Porter
-Peekskill Brewery's Oatmeal Raisin Stout (it had a name, but I can't remember it)
-Chelsea Brewing's Gyle (I can't remember the exact name, but it was basically an American Barleywine)
-Wagner Valley's Sled Dog Trippel Bock
-Brooklyn Brewery's Coffee Stout

One beer that I was looking forward to trying, but failed to deliver in my opinion, was C.H. Evans Brewing's Kick-Ass Brown. I had heard really great things about this beer, I got to say that I wasn't impressed. Maybe it's just not my style, but I think a brown ale should be a little more malt focused. Granted it was an American Brown Ale, in which hops are supposed to be more prevalent, but the BJCP guidelines indicate that the beer should still be balanced. I found the Kick-Ass Brown to be completely out of balance. I was expecting a rich, malty beer with some ample hops to back it up; what I got was a hop bomb that literally kicked my ass (I guess that's where the name comes from).

In other news, I brewed again this weekend on Saturday, throwing together a Belgian Wit with some coriander, bitter orange peel, and fresh orange zest added in the boil (yes, I zested an orange for the first time in my life...all in the name of beer). The Wit is my attempt at a Blue Moon clone for my dad, who only drinks that and Corona Light. I realized after the fact that I used a true Belgian Wit yeast to ferment it, and I'm guessing that Blue Moon probably uses a cleaner American yeast, as I really don't sense any Belgian yeast character in the Coors product. In addition to the Wit, I still have my Marzen lagering at around 35F, where it'll sit for a few more weeks, and my Flanders Red Ale is packed away in the corner for a few months to allow those "bugs" to do their job. And now for your viewing pleasure, here's two pictures of me brewing on Saturday. The first is me stirring the mash before I covered it up to rest, and the second is me enjoying a homebrewed Belgian Pale Ale (though it looks pretty dark in the photo) while the mash is being lautered and the wort drained into the boil kettle.