Posted by Utah Stories in Local Spotlight, News
Bohemian announces its expansion, two new products, and awards
by Jacob Hodgen
Over the last few months, the industrious gentlemen at theBohemian Brewery in Midvale have been very busy. You might think that coordinating a massive expansion that has helped allow them to nearly double their barrel per year output would be sufficient, but this family owned enterprise still has few tricks up its sleeve.
Pete Petras shows off the new batch of Cherny Bock that will be soon be distributed in cans throughout the country.
Though they have been brewing their award winning Cherny Bock for years now, thirsty Utahns have been discontent with only being able to find it on tap. Bohemian’s answer is to launch Cherny Bock in cans, and this month over 55,000 will ship from their Midvalebrewery to locations around the region, and even as far as South Carolina.
Pete Petras is the son of Bohemian owner Joe Petras. He maintains an active role in the growing family business, and he is an evangelist of aluminum cans, which Bohemian has exclusively adopted instead of bottles.
“Cans are much more environmentally friendly,” Pete says. “People are much more likely to recycle them. They weigh a fraction of what bottles do empty, and so the carbon footprint of just getting the package to the brewery is significantly lower. Plus they chill quicker and block out 100% of all light. There really is no comparison.”
Pete took Utah Stories on a tour of their newly expanded facilities and showed us the canning process. He says that massive canning machines used to be impossible for smaller, craft breweries to be able to afford or find space for, but recent advances in technology have simplified the process
“Other breweries use bottles,” Pete tells us, “because they can buy up a bunch of bottles and then just slap on whatever label they want. They do it because it’s easy. Buying cans requires commitment, and that’s what we are all about.”
Cherny Bock with a growler of Pumpkin Patch lager. The word Cherny literally means “black” in Czech
Pete tells us that they have also been promoting the use of refillable glass growlers. “There’s no better way to go green than to take your growler down to your local brewery for a refill of your favorite hand crafted beer.”
Bohemian has also just launched a new holiday beer entitled Pumpkin Patch. And before we could conjure up memories of the ghosts of bad pumpkin ales from our Christmas pasts, Pete reminds us that at Bohemian, it’s all lagers all the time.
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| Time | Saturday, December 18, 2010 · 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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| Location | The Miners Club 4070 Willow Draw Dr. Park City, UT |
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| More Info | The Miners Club will be featuring a chef’s tasting menu which highlights local beer and spirits. Festivities begin at 5pm Saturday December 18, 2010. Menu includes: High West Whiskey Bread Hideaway Salad Bohemian Viennese Chili Uinta Labyrinth Ale Short Ribs Vodka 7000’ Cured Salmon Underground Ice Cream An evening of good spirits and good company as we sample selections from: High West Distillery Ogden’s Own Distillery Underground Herbal Spirit Uinta Brewing ‘Crooked Line’ Bohemian Brewery & Grill $15 in advance, $20 at the door Call The Miners Club at (877)646-3779 to pre-order tickets. |
A casual night out at the Bohemian Brewery and Grill in Midvale on December 7th at around 8:00 pm.
The kind folks at the Bohemian have agreed to give everyone who comes for Utah Stories Night a take home, 15% discount coupon that can be used on a return visit to the Bohemian. Drink specials include $3.50 pints and $10 pitchers of all their unique and award winning local beers.
Our group will meet in the downstairs area. This is an informal gathering, so feel free to grab your own table. Na zdravÃ!"
Register as a user ofHomebrewersAssociation.org and win a trip to the 2011 Great American Beer Festival!
To qualify for the contest, all you need to do is register as a user on HomebrewersAssociation.org. Register before midnight MST on November 30, 2010. Soon after, the AHA will pick a winner at random from all registered users of HomebrewersAssociation.org. It could be you!
The contest winner receives airfare for two, 3-nights of hotel accommodations and two all-session passes to the 2011 Great American Beer Festival in Denver, CO, September 29 - October 1, 2011. See the Prize Giveaway Rules.
Once registered on the website, AHA members can update their contact information including email, mailing address and phone numbers, and sync their member record to access special sections of the website. A brand new area is Ask the Experts, where AHA members have access to pick the brains of notable brewing experts and access the Commercial Calibration fromZymurgy magazine
Register as a user on HomebrewersAssociation.org for great member content and you could win a trip for two to the 2011 Great American Beer Festival!
"Darkness Cometh!" That's right, we are now offering our darker, richer and roastier black lager in the form of a canned Schwarzbier called "Cherny Bock". Can you say awesome?
Photo Credit: Pete Petráš
From the Bohemian site:
"The word Cherny literally means ‘black‘ in Czech referring to the color of the rather surprising dark Schwarzbier with gentle bitterness to appeal your palette. A true gem to be discovered by specialty beer lovers."
Bohemian is currently selling cans of their Cherny Bock the brewery but those of you in their distribution area should see it on shelves relatively soon. For those of us that don't live close to the brewery, well, we can just sit around and hope that maybe someone we know who does will send us some!
Check out this great video of Bohemian Brewery's canning line filling and sealing fresh cans of Cherny Bock!
With the tall snifter. This is the recommended glassware of choice for this chocolately schwarzbier
Once you go black you'll never go back.
Up in the Utah high country you can see the snow is already here. We hope it will be a good ski season. We can't wait to get back on the mountain.
Sight: After you have poured your beer into the proper glass with a 1-1½ inch head, take a moment to observe the color, effervescence and clarity.
Aroma: You interpret 90% of the taste of something by it’s smell. Take 3 short sniffs of your beer. What does your beer smell like? Floral, grainy, fruity, roasted like coffee beans, nuts, bread-like.
Taste: Finally...take a sip and let the beer fill your mouth and pass over all areas of your tongue before you swallow to get the full flavor spectrum from the start to finish.
Mouthfeel: Pay attention to the texture of the beer: Is it light? Heavy? Does it coat your mouth? Is it a clean finish? Can you feel the carbonation?
Why do people always sit in a circle? I'm leaned back in my nylon camp chair, fishing around in the mesh net of the cup holder for a lighter. Most of the people at this BBQ know each other from work, so conversation sometimes takes a little time to ramp up.
"What's that beer?" The guy across from me is wearing a metal band t-shirt and flip-flops. Later he'll grill me about Android phones. But for now he wants to know what I'm sipping from my steel-and-saffron can.
"Mama's Little Yella Pils. There's more in the cooler. Try one."
"I'll just have a sip if you don't mind." He daintily avoids backwashing, which isn't very metal. "Fancy."
Bullshit.
I'll spare you the "craft beer vs. mainstream beer" sermon. If you're happy drinking beer from the big brewers, it's no skin off my dick. And while I don't prefer the standard American pilsner, I think it's laudable that the big brewers can pump out millions of gallons of Bud, Coors, and Miller every day that tastes consistently similar year after year. It may not be art, but it's sure as hell engineering to be proud of.
But truck no guff about drinking beer out of a can, from real ale snob or otherwise. Bottles are fragile, heavy (620 grams compared to 366 grams on average for a standard 12-ounce bottle), let in light that can skunk your beer, and are harder to pack in and out on float trips and hikes. Bottles don't stack in the refrigerator. Plus if you drop a can it doesn't shatter into a hundred tendon-lacerating shards. Half the time you can pick it back up and finish your drink! (Dropping a can on a sharp rock was how a caveman first discovered how to shotgun a can of beer—another thing you can't do with a bottle.)
Oh, and if you are only out for a day or two, you can totally take a can with you. Pop it in a frigid Sierra stream for an hour when make camp, and enjoy it as the sun sinks behind your favorite mountain. – Mat Honan
Bottles are fine, I guess, if only because so many beers I love come only in bottles. But the thing that matters most—taste—doesn't change a bit in a can.
The next time someone says canned beertastes "metallic", cut a can in half and ask him to show you where the metal ever actually touches the beer. Then he'll point at the inside of the gleaming can and say, "Right there, asshole. I'm guessing all the metal."
What your friend is missing is the epoxy lining that is sprayed on the inside of every can, the same stuff we've used for about 40 years. You might get a littlebisphenal A leaching into the beer, sure, but no metal.
There's not enough BPA to fret about in cans, frankly, especially since beer isn't heated at home. (Unless you're making beer-can chicken.) Nevertheless, Ball, one of the largest producers of aluminum cans in the world, as well as the company that makes the cans used by the majority of craft brewers, announced plans to make a BPA-free epoxy lining within the next couple of years at a recent packaging conference, according to an attendee.
Think about your beloved draught beer. That comes in a keg, right? A big, metal keg that is lined with the same type of coating as your humble little can. In fact, back in the '30s—January 24th, 1935 to be precise—when American brewers started selling beers in cans they advertised it as "keg-lined." Unlike a lot of beer marketing, the claim wasn't that ridiculous.
Is it possible that canned beer tastes better than bottled beer? Well, sure. Maybe. Probably not. But that's often because of the way beer is transported from the brewery to the store. Light will accelerate the oxidation of beer—that's why most brewers use brown bottles, not green—but it's not the only way a beer develops off flavors like that of the aldehyde trans-2-nonenal, which can make light-colored beers taste like lipstick.
Heat's actually just as big a factor. If your beer stays refrigerated from the brewery to the store, without sitting on a shelf somewhere at room temperature, everything should be great. And a canned beer won't be subject to light oxidation like a bottle beer would. But to be fair, one of the things that makes a canned beer great—that it cools more quickly—is also going to make it more subject to the vagaries of heat differential. Factor in that many retailers view canned beer as "cheap" beer not worth keeping cold and canned beer's advantages on the oxidation front start to wane a skosh.
You can thank one company for making craft beer in a can a reality: Cask Brewing Systems, a small Canadian firm that made their first canning system in response to the then-flagging "brew on site" phenomenon. Amateur brewers were finding their beers were going off too quickly, often because of less-than-optimally cleaned glassware.
Cask created a manual canning system and sold dozens to brew-on-site facilities. In 2002, Colorado brewery Oskar Blues bought a Cask canning system. Now nearly ten years and a handful of fully automated systems later, Cask can't make enough canning systems to keep up with demand. Cask told me the company is backordered until December. "We can't make them fast enough."
What that means for the craft beer drinker is even more canned beers coming online from your favorite breweries over the next year. It wouldn't surprise me if every mid-sized craft brewer has a canned option in the next couple of years. That's excellent news for beer drinkers and can collectors alike.
