The concept of trading hard-to-find beers among fans has been around for a long time and chances are that if you’re a self-proclaimed “beer geek” you’ve either traded beer yourself or have friends who do. I first wrote about (well to be fair, Josh @ brewsandbooks.com wrote a guest post and I published it) the phenomenon in October of last year here — but the tradition of beer trading goes much beyond that — and its popularity has only increased with the burgeoning trend of special beer release days, such as Kate Day at the Portsmouth Brewery, Dark Lord Day from Three Floyds, the release of Sexual Chocolate from Foothills, Vagabond from Allagash; the list goes on, across the country.

The results of a disc golf themed "beer-it-forward" trade conducted by Russ from TwinBeer.com

So it’s interesting to see the trend getting some media attention outside of the beer world. The large food & drink themed site, Chow.com, recently wrote a piece on the rising popularity of beer trading (please ignore the gross inaccuracies about Kate Day in the opening paragraph; no one ‘reserved bottles the day before’) with instructions on how to trade (or how people get away with it currently, since it is technically illegal) and a list of some of the more sought-after beers people are looking to trade for on the popular beer forum, BeerAdvocate.

Check out the piece for yourself; who knows what you’d be able to snag for that bottle of Black Tuesday from The Bruery you’ve been stashing away. Do any of the readers out there have any experience with beer trading? Please share (if you are willing & able) in the comment section!

I was excited when my friend Jonathan Lunardi who runs craftbeerclothing.com (see my review here) and a number of other craft beer-related web ventures told me about his latest start up, BreweryFans.com, so I asked him to tell me a little bit more about the project. What resulted was a very long-winded (I mean that in the best possible sense) interview with Jonathan about the site and what it provides to both beer fans and breweries around the country. Since the outcome of the interview was literally so much information, I’ve decided to break it up into kind of a multi-part series of posts, with each question serving as a different story posted sporadically over the coming weeks. We’ll start with the nitty-gritty, What does BreweryFans.com do for the average person?

Jonathan: Our mission is to better connect craft beer fans with the beer and breweries they love. Now that is a very broad mission and can mean many different things. For this first version of BreweryFans.com, which launched March 1st, we focused development on the following functions:

• The BeerSpotter – an interactive tool for distributors, breweries, retailers, and individuals to post where specific craft beer brands are available. This data is then easily searchable within a large Google Maps interface and within a filterable list on each specific beer page, see example of a SweetWater Brewery Beer here. This data will also be available on the iPhone soon as well. I will mention that since we are just starting out the data is a bit sparse at the moment, but we are constantly adding new beerspots and it is very easy for any craft beer fan to add where they have seen a specific beer by going to the add beerspot page. We are building a community and need everyone’s help to add beerspots!

• Brewery Fan Pages – there are over 2,000 breweries in our database from around the world. Each one of these has their own fan page where we pull in data on their beers, where the brewery is located, the latest twitter talk about that brewery, photo slideshows, videos from Youtube, and a wall for fans to post their favorite beer memories. Wow that is exhausting just typing that! Also, when you join a fan page, we ask you what beers you have tried from that brewery and what you thought of each beer. That information is then sent to the brewer so that new styles can be developed based on their most loyal fans tastes. For the site to be successful, we need people to join brewery fan pages so brewers can get a large pool of taste information to base their brewing decisions on in the future.
• Email Alerts – the next most exciting feature is our email watch dog alerts capability. Since we do not have a ton of beerspots on the site yet, you can get an alert on a specific beer when someone posts a beerspot in the city you live. This is a revolutionary feature and one that we hope a lot of beer fans will use because it has the potential to influence where beers are distributed. For example, we can show a brewery that there are 800 people will email alerts for the Oatmeal Stout of XYZ brewery in Dallas, Texas but there is no distribution there. If a brewery gets a distributor and the beer is availabe in Dallas, Texas an email will be automatically sent to all 800 people letting them know! How awesome is that? The brewery can minimize risk by determining the demand for specific brands based on real data, imagine the possibilities! I have alerts set for 10 beers that I want to find in Washington DC. They may be out there, and if someone posts a beerspot for one, I will know about it right away.
• Other Fun Stuff – there are a ton of other cool things on the site as well such as our daily craft beer quiz question, your craft beer buddies network, and a beer points system for doing activities on the site. We are constantly adding new tools for fans to connect with the beer and breweries they love, so if you have ideas, send them to jon@breweryfans.com

All in all, we love craft beer and the breweries that spend endless hours brewing truly incredible beers. We want to help craft breweries grow and make smarter decisions by connecting them with their most valuable asset, their fans!

Enjoy the website, be sure to register on the site, join your favorite brewery fan pages and tell others to as well! The site is integrated with Facebook Connect so it is very quick to register.

And look for part two of this series coming soon. Cheers.

Tickets went on sale yesterday for the 3rd annual American Craft Beer Festival. Sponsored by BeerAdvocate and Harpoon Brewery, the American Craft Beer Fest features over 325 craft beers from over 80 American brewers. The festival is held at the Seaport World Trader Center on the waterfront in Boston, Massachusetts. The ACBF is the largest annual craft beer festival on the east coast.

This year’s event will take place over two days, June 18th and 19th; tickets are $40 a piece (plus service charges) and unlike many beer festivals — including all those here in Maine — include unlimited 2 ounce pours (no drink tickets required). Be sure and get your tickets early, however, as all sessions of the ACBF will undoubtedly sell out. For more information, visit beeradvocate.com/acbf/

Thanks to a ticket hookup from my friend Ally over at WhereMaineEats.com (under construction), I was able to attend the Maine Bartenders Bash this past Monday night (a helluva way to end a day which began with a 4am trip to Kate Day…). I’m not usually one for vodka but I must admit that nearly all of the cocktails served at the “bash” (more of a cocktail tasting than a bash, I have to admit. Still a very good time but “bash” implies flair, and there wasn’t any) were mighty tasty. One particular drink though really hit home for me, probably needless to say.

Photo by Michael Barriault of PortlandTown

“The Native” from Vignola was created by Scott Doherty and features the White and Black ales of Allagash Brewing Co, blended with a number of spices, boiled and mixed with Maine’s own Cold River Vodka. If you’re feeling adventurous enough to try making it yourself, the recipe is below. I told Scott at the time that I think “The Native” would be fantastic served hot on a cold New England evening. While it didn’t win the overall best cocktail of the evening, it was the best drink at The Bartenders Bash in my book.

The Native:

~1 1/2 oz Cold River Vodka
~6 oz Four Spice Black & White Agave syrup:

Agave Syrup:

1 pint Allagash White
1pint Allagash Black
8 oz water
8 oz Agave Nectar
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cinnamon stick
1/2 tsp whole white peppercorns
1 star anise pod
1/2 tsp whole clove
1/4 piece of ginger

Bring water, cinnamon stick, whole white peppercorns, star anise pod, whole clove, and ginger to a boil. Then add agave nectar and return to a boil. Remove from heat and cool. Cover and refrigerate over night, strain and cover. Bring 1 pint of Allagash White and 1 pint of Allagash Black to a boil. Add 3 tablespoons of agave syrup and 1/2 cup sugar. Return to a boil and reduce liquid by half. Pour agave syrup and vodka into a shaker, add ice, and shake vigorously. Strain into pilsner glass. Enjoy!

I’m just back from a successful, if not wet and chilly, Kate The Great Day at the Portsmouth Brewery in beautiful Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And what a wild & crazy morning it was. Josh Christie (of BrewsAndBooks.com fame), a few mutual cohorts and I piled into the car this morning around 3:50am and departed from Portland en route to Portsmouth for The Portsmouth Brewery’s Kate the Great Russian Imperial Stout – the beer which is considered by many to be the best beer in America (and is towards the top of just about every list for sure).

The bottle "lines" at about 8:40am

If you’re unfamiliar with the way “Kate Day” (as it’s called) works, there are a total of 900 bottles of the infamous Russian Imperial Stout for sale one morning each year. The first 450 people in line get a single page from a page-a-day calendar (well, calendar and a half). When the pages are all handed out, the beer is essentially gone. Folks then mill around downtown Portsmouth in search of warmth and breakfast until they start letting people in to pick up their bottles (limit 2 per person; $10 a bottle) in order of month beginning at 9:00am.

Our carload arrived right around 4:45am and got December 28-30 of the first year. By 5:25 all of the 450 pages were gone. Reports said that folks began lining up at 1:00am last night when the bar closed and stood in line overnight until they began handing out pages at 4:30 this morning (so all the bottles were spoken for in less than an hour).

If you miss out on a calendar page and aren’t able to pick up a bottle, not all hope is lost. The Portsmouth Brewery opened for lunch at 11:30am and promised to have a couple of kegs of Kate on tap. However, when we left with our bottles at 9:30, the lunch line was already down the street and around the corner, two hours before they opened. Our rough estimate was that if we had gotten in line at that exact moment, we might have been eating by 3 o’clock. And the brewery was sure to kick all of their Kate kegs before the day is out. Pure insanity.

Look at all those bags of Kate The Great!

However, if you’re within striking distance of Portsmouth, Kate Day is a definite don’t-miss, at least once in your drinking career. I do wish they would host the event on a slightly warmer day than March 1st, but I guess standing outside in the cold and the rain adds a bit to the mystique.

Did you make it down this morning? What’d you think? And if not, I’ll see you there next year (BlogAboutBeer.com Kate Day Party Bus anyone?). Oh, and I won’t be trading either bottle so don’t waste your time. Sorry!