After a long trek for coffee the final day of the National Homebrewers Conference began. I managed to avoid a hangover from club night and made it to a 9 am seminar. Mission accomplished!

My 9 am seminar was Mastering the Art of Hop-Fu by Kelsey McNair. Hop-Fu is a an IPA that has won McNair multiple medals in the National Homebrew Competition, including a habanero version that won this year. He detailed the evolution of this beer and his process in heavy detail of what he does to make a batch of Hop-Fu and considerations for making it for competition. I enjoyed the talk and will be trying out some of his processes to see if they work with my brew system.

My next seminar was Introduction to Experimentation by Denny Conn and Drew Beechum. The talk was an extension from their recently published book Experimental Homebrewing. They focused on the importance to understand that most of the research that is done from homebrewing is not real science and should be treated as such. It is difficult to design true experiments that would stand up to scientific rigor and even more difficult to follow through and truly isolate the variable that you are testing. It is important to experiment to find what works best for you and the way you want to brew. They presented some experiments and methods that you could try for that purpose.

After the break for lunch I skipped the next seminar session and walked around the expo floor. It was nice being able to talk to vendors during a seminar because it was not as crowded and you could actually maneuver in the expo hall. I spent that time comparing some conicals that I really should not buy but will research anyway because stainless.

The final seminar I attended was Blurring the Style Guidelines: Brewing Great, Mixed-Style Beers by Peter Zien of Alesmith. Zien was quick to point out that this talk is not meant to condemn beer styles but rather to encourage brewers to take the guide portion of guidelines to heart and try to make your own path. One method he recommended was to look at the beer styles and find where they are in common and try to play around in the differences to create a new hybrid beer. I enjoyed his talk and it didn’t hurt that they were liberally pouring Alesmith Nut Brown and Speedway Stout.

The conference was capped off with the banquet and awards ceremony for the National Homebrew Competition. People started lining up for the banquet an hour and a half before the doors opened in hopes of getting their preferred table. About 40 minutes before the doors opened word started spreading that they would not be allowing homebrew to be poured in the banquet hall. This was due to California law that requires separation of homebrew and commercial serving areas, but really was not handled well by the AHA. What they didn’t say was that you could have homebrew, but you had to pour it outside and bring it in. However they did not make this announcement until after everyone either opened their beer in line or sent their beer back to their room.

The dinner was excellent and was served with Lagunitas beer. Beef short ribs highlighted the main course and were very tender and delicious. The Lagunitas beer provided with the dinner was good, but a bare minimum of beer was placed on the table for dinner. At tables of sixteen, eight twelve-ounce bottles were provided for each of the first three courses and the dessert course brought three bombers to be split by all sixteen people. Because of this there was no beer left in the room after the first hour and a half of what was supposed to be a four hour event. This is usually the time when people start sharing their homebrew and commercial beers they’ve brought but people were told they couldn’t have anything so the event was essentially dry. This is a beer conference and I consider this a failing on the AHA’s part to adapt to the California law. I don’t think they needed to provide enough beer for everyone to get plastered, but at least think ahead to make sure we can have something in our hands throughout the event.

Overall, the conference was a big success. The seminars were excellent and the nightly events were done well despite outdoor lighting issues and the banquet beer situation. This was my favorite conference since Seattle in 2012. I look forward to Baltimore next year.

The weather seems to be getting worse in San Diego, but that’s not stopping anyone from enjoying the conference. Everyone seemed to recover from the welcome reception for another day of beer and brewing fun.

My first seminar of the day was Blending and Post-Fermentation Adjustments for the Homebrewer by Kyle Kohlmorgen. He comprehensively covered his methods for blending beers and altering the flavor profile of a beer. Kohlmorgen gave tips on getting started with blending and was quick to point out that these are methods to enhance your good beer not fix your bad beer. I really enjoyed this talk and recommend checking it out when released by the AHA.

The next seminar was my favorite for the day and possibly the conference so far. Jamil Zainasheff’s Managing Yeast: Better Fermentation at a Lower Cost talk was full of actionable information and he is a wealth of info regarding yeast. His presentation demystified the process of harvesting and repitching yeast. It is something I will likely start trying out this year.

I almost skipped the next session of seminars, but on a whim decided to go to Tasting Beyond the Scoresheet by Master Cicerone Rich Higgins. The description of the talk seemed a little out there and abstract, but I’m glad I went. It was a very interesting talk about deconstructing the way to experience a beer as a drinker and can build a beer as a brewer. He broke down the way we experience the aroma and the taste to create flavor and how we can use that to create the desired drinking experience as a brewer. I recommend this recording but you can get away with only listening to about the first two-thirds of the talk. Once they start pouring the beers to taste it will probably lose value without tasting along.

My final talk of the day was Send in the Clones: Sensory Analysis and Recipe Formulation Techniques for Homebrewers by beer writer Amahl Turczyn and guests Mitch Steele and Jamil Zainasheff. This seminar was a bit of a disappointment. The information was very general and quite a few times we were just told to read or listen to another source. At the start of the talk Turczyn pointed out that he was going to have an article in the next printing of Zymurgy magazine. I don’t know if he just stripped too much information out of the article for the presentation or maybe just didn’t organize the presentation well. If you are interested in the topic you may just want to read the article. To his credit, Turczyn did get really close on his best guess clone recipes (Stone IPA and Heretic Evil Twin) as confirmed by Steele and Zainasheff. So I think the knowledge is there and hopefully it comes out in the article. If you are interested in some of the techniques and processes used at Stone and Heretic there is some info from the two brewers sprinkled throughout and may be worth a listen.

As usual, club night did not disappoint. Southern California is host to some of the oldest and largest clubs like the Maltose Falcons and QUAFF. I truly believe I had more good beer at this years club night than previous conferences. The Arizona Society of Homebrewers had printed up their own beer-centric version of Cards Against Humanities cards and had a game running at their booth the whole time. My favorite beer of the night was a mild with coffee from the DOZE club. I wish I could remember the brewer, but, hey, its club night… There was beer involved.