Yee-haw! Steve Donohue's Santa Clara Valley Brewing Coming Online

Steve Donohue would be one of those rockstar brewers if he lived in San Francisco or Santa Rosa after winning all those Great American Beer Festival Medals at Firehouse Grill and Brewery.   Problem, was Firehouse was located in the far less glamorous towns of Sunnyvale and East Palo Alto, places few beer geeks venture to. Firehouse's management also seemed far more interested in featuring its young, nubile waitresses in short kilts and tight t-shirts to appeal to the sportsbar crowd than being a destination for great beer.  Too bad, since sportsbars with pretty girls are a dime a dozen, while Steve's beers were pretty special.

So Steve Dononue left Firehouse to start his own brewery and the good news is that he now has his California Alcoholic Beverage Control Type 17 License (Beer and Wine Wholesaler) which he happily Tweeted to the world March 21st, which allows him to get brewing!  How soon can we expect the first beer from Santa Clara Valley Brewing?  A recent comment from Santa Clara Valley Brewing on their Facebook page declares "We still have some work to do before we have beer, but we're working on it as much as possible. We're hoping to have beer by early to mid May."

I found Steve's beers, like his Hops on Rye,  Hall and Oatmeal Stout, and Pete's Support, a nifty Belgian IPA, were always flavorful, unique, and distinctive but never strayed too far from traditional brewing styles.  His next beers from Santa Clara Valley Brewing can't touch my lips fast enough. 

Let's raise our glasses to the success of yet another great South Bay Brewery.

Steve Donohue happily Tweeted this permit which allows him to commence brewing

California Cafe' Brewmasters' Dinners Remain in Good Hands

Dessert of Glazed Plums, Pine Nut-Prune Chutney, Honey-Cinnamon Sabayon
paired with Firehouse's  Hardly Thomas Barley Wine

When I heard Chef Todd Yamanaka was replacing departing Chef Mark Pettyjohn at Palo Alto's California Cafe', that proverbial sound of a needle scratching across a vinyl record echod in my mind.  After all, Mark Pettyjohn was clearly a driving force behind the California Cafe's Brewmaster series, with his enthusiasm for both the breweries and pairing their beers with creative plates.  In fact, Yamanaka only assumed his post as Executive Chef at California Cafe's Palo Alto location barely one week.  If that wasn't enough, things fell through with the previously scheduled brewery for April, and so Steve Donohue of Firehouse Brewing came in to pinch hit with just a couple weeks notice before the next dinner held this past April 26th.   Considering the amount of time and effort that goes into these things, sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

Except it didn't.  Sure, for some of the courses, I'd have to admit some of the beer and food pairings were not as cohesively integrated as in dinners past.   But there was this comfortable spontaneity  and "let's just try this" to the whole affair, both in the food and in Donohue's brews, especially his experimental Barley Wine and Sour Ale, that couldn't be duplicated with the weeks of preparation Pettyjohn usually took.  I should add the penultimate course of Coffee Crusted Angus Ribeye and Wild Mushroom Risotto paired with the uber coffee roastiness of Firehouse's Brendan’s Irish Stout hit it out of the park with its warm, earthy comforting character.  Otherwise, I'm not going to go into a culinary breakdown of the evening, since I'm not good at that stuff, especially since my esteemed beer blogging colleague Peter Estaniel was there that evening, and he is good at that stuff, and I expect he'll post something soon.

Yamanaka may not be a hard core beer geek, but in talking with him he clearly appreciates beer, and the man can clearly cook.  With all the announcements of $100 plate beer dinners in out of the way places in San Francisco, Sonoma and Napa Counties, and it's reassuring for rest of us that one at half the cost can be found in Palo Alto and it's future looks at lot stronger than it did a week ago.

Next up, Devil's Canyon Brewing from my home town of Belmont May 31st.   By then, Chef Yamanaka will have time to breathe, get his sea legs, and whatever other cliches you want to add by then.  It ought to be interesting. 

Firehouse Brewing featured at California Cafe Beer Dinner Thursday

The South Bay's Firehouse Brewing is featured this Thursday in another one of California Cafe in Palo Alto Brewmasters Dinners.  The festivities start at 6:30 am this April 26th.  I've said it before, California Cafe does an awesome job in this series, and my reservations were made almost as soon as I heard about it.

What's on the menu?  It hasn't been released yet but frankly, I don't give a damn about it.  The California Cafe always puts on a great dinner and if you don't believe me when I tell you Firehouse brews great beer, maybe all their Great American Beer Festival awards will convince you.  Wanting to know the menu in this collaboration is like hearing Martin Scorsese is doing a mob flick with Robert DeNiro and wanting to know the plot.  If you know great things will happen, does knowing what form they will take really matter?

If you insist on checking out the menu, you probably find it eventually on California Cafe's events page, and recent tweet from California Cafe' suggests will see it tomorrow.  Whatever.  I'll see you there!

Beer of the Month: OTIS by Firehouse Brewery

The name "Otis" has long been associated with excellence in elevators, or just "sittin' on the dock of the bay".  And we can now add "Imperial Stout" to this list of excellent Otis's, thanks to Firehouse Brewing.

OTIS is actually an acronym for One Tun Imperial Stout, as it takes literally one ton of malt in the mash tun to brew.   After looking for a bottle of OTIS in the San Mateo area without success, I finally broke down and went to the source at Firehouse's Grill and Brewery in East Palo Alto.   They didn't have it on tap or even listed on their beer list above the bar.  But I asked the waitress about it, and discovered they did have it in 22 ounce bottles.  Now sitting down for lunch with 22 ounces of an Imperial Stout and a pizza is  a perilous act.   Even just 8-10 ounces of a good Imperial Stout can fees pretty heavy in your stomach, and create a mouth feel similar sandpaper, but such was not the case with OTIS.

It's surprising smooth for an Imperial Stout, with plenty of roasty flavors of dark chocolate, with a slight sweetness, a barely noticeable alcohol heat, and a grassy herbal hop finish underneath all that bitter chocolatey goodness.  A liquid dark chocolate brownie if you will.  An amazingly drinkable Imperial Stout at 11% abv at a surprisingly high 70 IBU.

But then, if you're familiar with the work of Steve Donohue, Firehouse's Master Brewer, this shouldn't surprise you.  After all, he's won a bunch of Great American Beer Festival medals brewing traditional styles such as his Baltic Porter, or with his more contemperary beers such as the Belgian IPA Pete's Support.   And if you've read this great interview of him, you already know that.

OTIS elevates the Imperial Stout style, and it's March's Beer of the Month.

Beer of the Month: Hops on Rye from Firehouse Brewery

Firehouse Brewery's Hops on Rye earns the title of Beer of the Month for November. This Rye IPA is one of those unique beers that defy simple description. It's got a hefty amount of malt, with caramel and rye flavors up front, and a little sweetness. The malt balances well with all the hops that give the beer a piney and slightly menthol-like finish. Not only is it a great beer, it's the first time Firehouse has ever bottled one of their beers. Since Firehouse has won medals at the Great American Beer Festival each of the last three years, you might say it's about time their beers got more exposure. You can find it at Bay Area BevMo! and Whole Foods locations, as well at K&L Liquors in Redwood City. Renowned bottle shops City Beer and Beer Revolution also should have it before too long.

Firehouse Brewmaster Steve Donohue graciously provided a couple bottles at a recent meeting of the Bay Area Beer Bloggers held at Firehouse, where Devon, John Heylin, Brian Stechschulte, Peter Estaniel, Jen Buck McDaniel, Rich, David Jensen, and myself attended. It was a fun, enthusiastic, and vibrant bunch and I immensely enjoyed being a part of it. It was also rather interesting matching the real life personalities with each individual writing style.

So what actually happens at a Bay Area Beer Bloggers meeting anyway? You'll be shocked to discover it basically involves a bunch of people chatting about beer and blogging while they sit around a table and drink beer. As a special bonus at the end of the evening, Steve Donohue took us into his brewery and showed us around the place he's brewed those award winning beers.

But the beer blogging meeting was not all just about fun and beer. It served as a launch pad of scietific inquiry as Peter Estaniel, John Heylin, Steve Donohue and I contemplated the effect of dissolving Xenon gas into beer rather than the traditional Carbon Dioxide. And beer blogging proved to be an unstoppable force for peace and brotherhood, as Bruce Stechschulte, a graduate of the University of Michigan, and I, a graduate of their hated rival Ohio State University, still had an amicable discussion over a couple of pints, despite the fact that I'm a pretty fanatical Buckeye fan. One can imagine from this example how much destructive carnage and bloodshed could have been averted if only George W. Bush and Suddam Hussien had been beer bloggers.

Beer and Cheese at Firehouse Grill and Brewery

They call it San Francisco Beer Week, but we do drink craft beer down here in the South Bay. So Linda and I really appreciated last Wednesday night's Beer and Cheese pairing at Firehouse Grill and Brewery in Sunnyvale held as part of San Francisco Beer Week. Firehouse Brewing, Milk Pail and South Bay Craft Beer Activist and Blogger Peter Estaniel got together to bring this all together.

The format was pretty simple. Upstairs at the brewpub, six tables were set up with 2-3 different cheeses and beers placed at each table. You simply pick up a flute glass, and start walking around, and popping cheeses into your mouth and washing them down with the different beers, chatting with everyone there, until you get tired of doing that. Needless to say, it took most people the entire evening to complete this mission.

There was an interesting and varied mix of beers to try, with plenty of Belgian Ales, whether stately, sour, or funky, four or five selections from FireHouse, a couple of hop monsters, and a barley wine thrown in for good measure. But the real star of the evening was the cheese.

And did they have cheese. Cheese with funny looking fern-thingies on top. Stinky cheese. Runny cheese. Firm cheese. Crumbly cheese. Cheese infused with truffles. Cheese with spices mixed in. Cheese studded with wine grapes. Cheese with barnyard hay on top. I couldn't correctly pronounce the names of most of the cheeses, but that didn't stop me from trying them all. It's a good thing I have a few fat-burning long distance runs in my training schedule over the next few days.

My favorite cheese, hands down, was the smooth, slightly sweet, and caramelly Gjetost (pronounced: yay-toast). I could have this for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert. I also enjoyed the Horseradish Havarti which had crunchy mustard seeds mixed into it. I could talk about all the cheeses, but really don't know all that much about cheese, let alone a good way to describe how they taste. And while ignorance hardly stops most people from writing on a topic, if you really want to know what some of the cheeses were like, head on over to this post at Peter's blog.

As for the beer, my favorites were a couple of the Firehouse brews. I had previously enjoyed their rich and refined One Tun Imperial Stout, which has a great bitter chocolate vibe, but it seemed especially good that evening. And I also appreciated the Bill Brand Imperial Red, where lots of hefty, toasty malt holds its own against hefty amounts of hops, resulting in a lively, strong yet balanced Imperial Red. As for Linda, her favorites were the Belgian Ales, which evoked carefree weeks of self-discovery spent many years ago in Belgium.

I leave you with this lasting haunting and surrealistic image of that memorable evening. There are people, who do not share my artistic vision, that will simplistically claim this shot is blurry and badly out of focus.