The Beer Hall Guide to Long Island is almost completely indexed. All the articles are written, proofread, and spell-checked. I’ll probably do some more tweaking, but sometime next week we are taking this to the printer. Hopefully, I can keep the cost of printing low enough to be able to sell copies of the guide for $10 each. (I’m not trying to make any money with this, just covering the cost of production and research.)

I finally got around to adding Thrifty Beverage in Rocky Point to my online guide.

For you regular readers of The Beer Hall, you might want to take advantage of subscribing to Donavan’s Brain. For years I used to send out an email newsletter. I got out of the habit when the software I was using to do the mailing went obsolete. I’m resurrecting “the Brain” as a Google Group. It’s really just a mailing list.

If you want to read a good story where craft beer is featured, I’ve just published a story by Charles D. Phillips called “Dead Men Can’t Give Orders” in my magazine The Angler. In a few days I’ll be posting a review of the story on the front page of my magazine, so check back.

FYI. If you like The Angler, the first print issue (in about five years) will be mailed out in August. It’s not too late to get your name on the subscriber list. Just send me an email with your snail mail address and I’ll drop a copy in the mail. Cheers!

Indexing is an activity that distinct from the act of writing. While I’m looking for items to index I’m really thinking about how people might be using and reading my guide. Will they want to look up a certain beer before ordering to see what I had to say about it? Will they follow threads about people and breweries across articles? Should I index locations so that people can look up the town they are in and see what’s available?

Making an index is a lot of work, but I think it will make for a much more useful guide when I get it finished.

I caught up with Dudley outside of Shoreline Beverage one sunny Saturday afternoon in April 2007 (the subject of episode 86 of my podcast). I put a few questions to him.

My first experience with Crop Circle Ale was back in 2004 when it was on tap at the Brickhouse. At the time Blue Point Brewing Company partnered with Dudley Cates Jr to brew and distribute Crop Circle Beer, an English-style Bitter brewed with Crop Circle Optic pale malt from Warminster Maltings in Wiltshire, England. Supposedly the malt came from fields where crop circles were found. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant, it’s an excellent beer. The last pint of Crop Circle I had at the Brickhouse Brewery in late March 2006. The next time I saw the beer it was in the bottle at my local beverage shop.

I asked Dudley about the move to bottling. By the time I spoke with him in 2007, the arrangement with Blue Point had come to an end. All of the Crop Circle beer was being brewed by the Clipper City Brewing Company in Baltimore under contract. They were making bottles and kegs and sending them back to Long Island. My impression is that this was a successful move since Crop Circle is in the bottle and on tap all over Long Island and in the City. I took a trip into Brooklyn in September 2007 and Crop Circle was in every bar I visited.

Dudley gave me a bit of the history of his Crop Circle Ale. He’s a bit of a crop circle enthusiast. Of course, you know that crop circles are those geometric figures found in barley fields in England. Barley fields. Hmmm. Why not malt the barley from the field and make beer!? For a time the Hop Back Brewery in England made a crop circle ale from the Crop Circle Optic malt. In fact if you look at the Hop Back Brewery’s web site today, you’ll see they still brew a Crop Circle Ale.

Dudley Cates brought the Crop Circle malt to the US and tried to get the beer to fly on this side of the Atlantic. After a couple of false starts, one with a brewery in California, and another with a brewpub in Connecticut, Dudley found willing partners at Blue Point Brewing Company in Patchogue. Dudley says that the recipe brewed at Blue Point was completely reformulated by Mark Burford and is a completely different beer from the other two previous state-side incarnations.

Even though Dudley Cates isn’t partnering with Blue Point anymore, he still runs his operation from Southampton and his Crop Circle beer has a big following on Long Island. Technically, Crop Circle isn’t a Long Island brewery, but it is a Long Island beer.

Last I was there was during happy hour. The bartender gave me one of these pull tab things. Whatever is inside is your happy hour “prize”. I pulled my tab and was rewarded with a 25 cent Blue Point pint from the tap. A pretty good deal, I thought. I’ll have to come back to this place more often. The only problem is that it’s a too far to walk.

When it came time for choosing a “local” I went with DEKS instead of Mobo for two reasons, the architecture at DEKS has a ton of character and its not a far walk from my house. But I would have gone with Mobo if the choice was made on the basis of beer selection alone. At the time I started “drinking in place” both DEKS and Mobo were tied with five taps each and Mobo was pouring three Blue Points instead of one. Now DEKS has 12 taps, 100 bottle selections, cask nights, and beer dinners.

I wonder what would have happened if Mobo were within walking distance?

Running across this reference to Mobo in my guide forced me to ask the question: why isn’t Mobo in my guide? It’s a nice little drinking spot that is certainly worth dropping into occasionally. Is it just the number of beers? The architecture? Yes. Nice little places with their local following and their idiosyncratic tap selection are probably more interesting than the big craft beer bars catering to the “geek” crowd. The beer bars come off like they are trying to be something. The little places where “Everyman” drinks really are places.

I typeset what I have this morning and the whole guide comes to right around 70 pages of text. I’m thinking about including some photos and eventually I’ll want to get maps into the book. But these additions will probably have to wait for the 2009 edition.

In the age of the iPhone my suspicion is that the online version will end up being the most used (and perhaps the canonical) version. I’ve had a “pre-order” option for people on my web site for nearly six months and only two people have bitten. Perhaps print is going the way of the dinosaur.

Instead of heading back home I ambled down to the beach and found myself a nice log to sit on. The cornflower sky was a bit hazy after the rain, but the surf was gently lapping at the shore and the surface was nearly smooth as glass in places. Hardly any breeze to speak of so I lit my pipe and watched the sunlight spill and shimmer on the rippling water.

I thought I should have brought my fishing rod. I watched the other fisherman. The fish didn’t appear to be feeding yet. Still casting would have been peaceful, but smoking my pipe was just fine.

Back home there’s a carboy of porter conditioning in my basement. Denise and I poured off the last glass and a half of hefeweizen from the keg and I set about cleaning it. I rinsed the keg and then cleaned my tap lines: 1 gallon of hot water, 1 gallon of tap cleaning solution, 1 gallon of hot water to rinse. I blessed the keg with another rinse and then sanitized with a dilute iodine solution. The keg is ready to receive the porter — a step that can wait until tonight.

It was getting close to 10 so we put some music on in the home pub, lit a candle, dimmed the lights. Denise and I sat around chatting for a couple of hours sipping homebrew (my Pilsener is back on tap, bright and tasty) and discussing decorating options for the pub space.

The beer bread recipe is a quick way to make bread. It’s also a way to cook with beer. I’ve been trying difference beers in the bread. Yesterday, I used some of my w2 Witbier to make the bread. Once baked, a slice of this with a hunk of brie and some roasted red peppers makes a filling snack.

Mike N. and I brewed an 11 gal. batch of saison. My half of the batch is bubbling away in my basement (right behind our home pub). Soon I’ll have a keg of saison to sip on. Saison is probably my favorite year-round drinking beer.

After we mashed, I took a scoop of the spent grains from the mash tun and put them into a bag. I’m going to use the spent grains in another loaf of beer bread.

BTW, John is selling his basic brewing kit. If you want to get into brewing, you might want to snatch this stuff up. I don’t know the price. Retail, all the stuff would probably cost $150. Send me an email and I’ll send you John’s phone number if you are interested.

A year ago I was writing articles about beer cocktails. (I still need to write the book, but not until I finish The Beer Hall Guide to Long Island.) So I used some of my experience as a beer mixologist to doctor my homebrew.

Basically, the recipe is this: 1 oz. of juice (orange or apple) to 12 oz. of w2. This makes a perfect and refreshing wit beer. It might not win any competitions, but it sure is tasty with the dose of juice.

The idea is to think creatively about the end product of the brewday. If it’s not exactly what you want, there are things you can do after the fact to turn that keg of so-so beer into something delicious.

Oh, btw, there are some new beer events on the Long Island Beer Scene Events Calendar.

I did have some interesting beer at the Elk Head Brewery in Buckley. They have a blonde mild which tasted nice at the brewery, but didn’t stand up in the growler the next day (some wag on the BA gave it an “F”, idiot). I mention the mild since it’s not a style you often see brewed commercially here in the US and I expect it garnered the “F” because it wasn’t a super-alcoholic hop-monster. Drink it at the source and don’t try to take it home is my advice.

The other interesting beers were the Elk Dandee made with dandelions (a tart blonde beer, I really liked this one) and the Blast Zone made with smoked malt and hot peppers. Blast Zone by itself was a bit intense (read hot-hot-hot), but when blended with Black Stag Stout and Kilted Elk (a Scottish ale) it made a quite tasty brew.

I tried to get the ear of Rich Dirk, the brewer/owner, but he was much too busy with the large Thursday afternoon crowd of beer enthusiasts in his tasting room. I passed him a card and annoyed the other patrons by taking pictures.

Elkhead Brewing Company

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