Run For The Porter

Saturday night was Cycle Works second Bikers Love Brews/Pedaling for Porters home brew contest, to call it an annual event would be a bit of a misnomer as the last one was held in July of 2013 but plans are in the works to make it so. I was at that event, back when I was a mere fellow customer and ThNNDDR participant; if you'd like to read up on that first event you can find it here.

The concept was originally cooked up by Nathan after several customers brought in some of their home brews and would stick around to talk about the ins and outs of home brewing. From that the idea was born, find a group of home brewers that were also active in Lincoln's cycling community and try to make a fun event for brewers and judges alike with a little friendly competition thrown in for good measure. Nathan was in town for the event but unfortunately had to leave before Saturday due to unexpected circumstances, it's a shame he wasn't around to see the second rendition of his idea come to life. Especially with all the work he put into the event remotely, guy can still work his magic even from hundreds of miles away.


Getting things ready for the big event, showed up about 4:30 to help setup tables and clear out enough floor space for 100+ people. Rick and I were sort of stuck with the setup but Debe's and Michaela's help was totally voluntary and very much appreciated and it allowed us to get things set in no time at all.


Can't forget the raffle prizes, had lots of great sponsors for the event; Northern Brewer, Modern Monks, Zipline, QBP, Boiler Brewing (Lincoln's newest brewery), Ploughshare, Blue Blood Brewing Company and of course Cycle Works and The Moose's Tooth. Blue Blood Brewing really stepped up to the plate and offered to allow the winning team the opportunity to brew their beer at the Blue Blood facilities and have it as a featured tap when they open their new Robber's Cave taproom. I'm not even a home brewer and I was pretty excited about that, can't imagine how stoked the winning team must be.





The only thing that might go better with beer than bicycles is pizza and thanks to the great folks at Spokes Mobile Wood Fire Pizza we had delicious food for the event as well. If you've never had a pizza from them, get on Facebook and find a location where they will be and go there. You won't regret it but get there early or expect to wait a little bit because once they fire up that oven and start making the pies the smell is amazing and draws a crowd.





Right around 6 o'clock the brewers started showing up so that they could get things set and ready for the crowds that would show up at 7.


With a bit of time to spare, the brewers got a chance to walk around and sample everyone else's beer so that they could size up the competition.






In no particular order, a few of the beers that were brewed for the competition. Unfortunately I was pulling double duty for this so I didn't get around to everyone's booth for the tasting or the pictures. All of the ones that I did try were absolutely amazing.



Right at 7 the doors opened for those who had one of the magic tickets, after grabbing their raffle tickets, scorecards and pencils they were unleashed on the 14 brew teams and the judging began. Each score card was numbered 1-16 (room for expansion) and it was the judges job was to taste each Porter and rate them 14-1, with 14 being the favorite and 1 being the least favorite. As you can imagine the tallying of 85+ scorecards can take awhile so there was already talk about narrowing that down for next time and just having everyone vote for their personal top 3.





Had a pretty amazing group of judges for the event, huge thanks to everyone who came out to help determine the winner. With the beer flowing and the pizza cooking, each judge had about an hour and 15 minutes to walk around and talk to each brew team while sampling and rating their beer. I don't know about the judges or the brewers but as the emcee for the night, that hour and a quarter just flew by.


With the time up and the scorecards all turned in it was time to tally the votes and give out the schwag via the raffle while the totals were tallied. A lot of rad prizes given away, I personally would have loved to have gone home with any of them, a big thanks again to all of our sponsors who contributed some truly amazing prizes.

As I said I was on double duty for the night and I dropped the ball on the picture side of things and didn't get any of the raffle winners or ,even sadder yet, didn't get a picture of the winners either. Total and complete failure on that end of things... however I can tell you who did win. The 2nd runner up or 3rd place was the team with the Baltic Porter (affectionately also dubbed the Caucus beer due to the fact that the brewers dropped the beer off and then left to attend the Caucus before returning near the end), runner up was a Chocolate Chipotle Porter and the winning beer, with the opportunity to brew their beer at the Blue Blood Brewing Company's new Robber's Cave taproom, was an absolutely delicious Peanut Butter Porter made with Reese's Peanut Butter Cups! It smelled ridiculously like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and tasted just as good as it smelled, I'd definitely pony up $5 to have a full pint of this beer when it's featured at Blue Bloods.

As I said, we aren't sure if this is going to be a semi-annual event or an annual one but we will be back for sure either way. Thank you one final time to all the sponsors, brewers, pizza crew and judges for helping to make this a really rad event. You guys all rock!

The Golden Ticket

Last night Cycle Works hosted Bikers Love Beer at the shop and a whole lot of awesome followed after that. The concept was to get a bunch of home-brewers who like to brew and ride bikes together in one spot and have a friendly little competition to see who could brew the crowd favorite IPA. Luckily finding volunteers to judge such and event amongst the cycling community wasn't all that difficult, something about beers and bikes just go together... even more lucky for me, I managed to get my hands on one of the tickets to get in.

If you didn't have one of these...


...you couldn't get in here and believe me in there was where you wanted to be last night.


I think the unofficial count for the night was somewhere around 150 people, most of whom biked, we showed up about 5 minutes before the event and were greeted to a full bike parking area. It was pretty rad to see that many bikes outside the shop at one time that weren't for sale, if there hadn't been beer and burgers a person could have spent hours looking at all the different bikes but who in their right minds is going to do that when there is cold beer and hot grass fed hamburgers to be had.


Those that chose not to ride were almost the lucky ones as far as parking was concerned, on this night it might have been easier to find a place to park your car than your bike.

Once inside you were treated to 12 different home-brewers with their own take on an IPA, all you had to do was grab a Hoegaarden sample glass (which was free to take home... like a drunken door prize) a score sheet and then just sample each of the 12 beers and rate them. Krampus and Mukluk from TNNDDR fame,  unbeknownst to me until now, are also home-brewers as well as dirt shredders, of course they weren't at the booth when I snapped this picture but they brewed a very tasty IPA.


Nathan, the man who brought it all together, giving out instructions. It was loud in there and just got louder as the night and the drinking progressed, I am guessing Nate's voice is gone today but that's a small price to pay for pulling off such a hugely successful event.


Damon's idea of a modern day two wheeled station wagon, I have to talk him into giving me a ride on this one of these days, those bells are calling my name and really what would be cooler than sitting on the back of this constantly ringing those bells while people stare at you in disbelief.


Those of us who decided to ride our bikes to the event were also eligible to win one of these sweet door prizes provided by the awesome sponsors of the event if you were lucky enough to have your number called.


If riding your bike on a Sunday night, free beer and door prizes weren't reason enough to come out, they also had grass fed beef hamburgers for sale at a minimal charge supplied by the great people at Open Harvest. And I do mean minimal charge at $3 a burger I'm guessing they just broke even.


The event was so big they even had staff photographers on scene to capture it all, I guess the budget was blown by this point and all they could afford was Joel... he looks a bit perplexed by all those buttons and knobs. Kidding of course, good dude right there but of course that can be said of any of the staff at Cycle Works.


Once the competition was done, Corey was hard at work tabulating the votes while the rest of us went back for seconds, thirds and perhaps even fourths of our favorite brews. Even though there had to be a winner, none of the brewers that came out and competed had anything to hang their heads about as all of the beers were top notch, I opted for a pencil while voting as I often changed my vote as I made my rounds of the booths. It seemed like each one just kept getting better than the one before, the fact that I was getting a good buzz on probably also helped those at the end of the voting string but everyone has their own method, that's just mine.


The winners of the door prize raffle with all their swag.


And the winning brewers... If I'm not mistaken I think Black shirt took first, White shirt second and Gray shirt third but as I said all of the beers were really good.



Even the ride home was an awesome experience, albeit a much slower ride with a belly full of beer and burger than the ride there, I didn't win any of the swag (except the Hoegaarden glass) but the GF walked away with a t-shirt. I guess if you want to look at it from a different angle everyone who came out was a winner, great beer, tasty burgers, a chance to socialize with people who love bikes and beer in a great venue... if you rode away that night somehow feeling cheated because your number didn't come up for the raffle you missed the whole experience of the night and the purpose of the event. I can't even imagine the amount of time, planning and prepping that Nate and the rest of the crew at Cycle Works put in for the event but I sure hope they do it again. I'll be first in line to sign up for that.