DRAFT Magazine

By Chris Gigley

Greg Taylor has always been a car guy. But until a few years ago, the co-founder of Steam Whistle Brewing in Toronto never knew how excited other people get when they see one with a fancy paint job.

He does now. Since Taylor bought and tricked out his first classic vehicle for the brewery in 2000, a 1949 International Stake Truck nicknamed “Lumpy,” Steam Whistle has become almost as famous for its fleet of eight vintage vehicles as it is for its beer. These aren’t just showpieces, either. While the vehicles are valuable promotional tools for the brewery, they also do honest-to-goodness work, delivering beer or serving suds at live events and shuttling people to where ever they need to go.

“We want these vehicles out on the road so they’re constantly being seen,” says Taylor. “The idea is that these vehicles start a dialogue. People will ask about them later on or they’ll come up and address the driver. People are engaging us and talking about the brand right away without us having to reach out to them.”

Taylor decided to amass a vintage fleet before he even launched Steam Whistle. While working for Upper Canada Brewing, he helped deliver beer in a couple of old vans that had not aged gracefully under the workload. When Taylor caught wind of a graffiti festival in town, he figured even a coat of spray paint would be an upgrade. So, he let a group of graffiti artists go nuts.

“When I drove one of the vans back to the brewery, people were shouting at me, ‘Right on!,’” he recalls. “The paint job didn’t really promote the brewery, but I realized what an impression a vehicle can make.”

Sleeman Breweries bought Upper Canada in 1998, and Taylor, Cameron Heaps, and Greg Cromwell left to launch Steam Whistle two years later. But Taylor didn’t forget about the vans. That’s why he immediately made an offer to buy a souped-up stake truck he saw near his parents’ home in southwest Ontario.

“It was the perfect vehicle, because it was vintage and still could be used to haul beer,” he says.

Taylor’s determination and persistence paid off. He kept checking in with the owner, and a year later he finally sold Taylor the truck, Lumpy. Taylor quickly acquired and revamped other classic trucks for duty. He found a 1950s Chevrolet Sedan Delivery, for instance, at an old fire house south of Montreal.

“I almost didn’t make it back to Toronto,” he remembers. “The thing was shaking so bad I couldn’t sleep that night because of the back and neck pain. A couple days later, we were driving it somewhere and a wheel fell off on the road. I learned some lessons right there. You never know where the weaknesses are when you get these vehicles.”

Now the Sedan Delivery, appropriately nicknamed “Shakey,” runs smoothly for its regular driver, Steve Ellery, Steam Whistle’s customer service supervisor.

The most unique-looking vehicle in the fleet is Chuckles, a 1956 Dodge Fargo that looks like it came from a cartoon. The cargo vehicle was once used for postal service. Now, it hauls fresh kegs and cases of beer to private house parties in greater Toronto.

The most popular vehicle, however, is virtually unanimous among Steam Whistle customers. Even Taylor says the “Steam Machine,” a 1967 Ford Econoline Heavy Duty van with a tap built into the side, is his favorite.

“It’s just such a ridiculous design with so much character,” says Taylor. “We put blue shag carpet inside and added a sound system that plays different songs and the steam whistle sound. But most people love it because we can pour beer from the side of it.”

Recently, Steam Whistle added a 2010 Chevrolet Camaro to the fleet, which seems like an odd move.

“It’s not really a departure from the rest of the cars,” Taylor insists. “The Camaro has a retro design and we’re getting it in its first model year, so we get the same kind of reaction we get from our vintage vehicles.”

For those who prefer the authentic rides, Taylor says not to worry. He and his car guy, Paul Speirs of Speirs Automotive, are currently rehabbing a 1958 Chevy, nicknamed “Retro Electro,” to run on electricity. That vehicle will be sent West to promote Steam Whistle in the Vancouver area.

Taylor says his goal is to convert most of the fleet to electric and have the larger trucks, such as “The Party Bus,” a 1965 Ford Blue Bird, run on biodiesel. Taylor says he is currently scouting for a streamliner truck, a popular hauler in Canada in 40s and 50s. If he finds one, he says it will also be switched to biodiesel.

“We take environmental initiatives seriously because it’s a big part of our brand,” says Taylor. “We’ve probably spent about $35,000 on Retro Electro alone, but it’s worth it.”

Spoken like a true car guy.

– Chris Gigley is a freelance food, travel, and sports writer who has discovered that Natty Greene Red Nose Ale, brewed in his hometown of Greensboro, NC, is an excellent cure for writer’s block.

In the second of our two interviews with winners at the 2009 Great American Beer Festival, we catch up with Chuckanut Brewery and Kitchen head brewer Josh Pfriem who talks about what it was like to win Small Brewpub of the year, Small Brewpub brewer of the year, and a whole host of medals

Small Brewpub of the year and Small Brewpub brewer of the year. What’s that mean for you and Chuckanut?
It’s a huge honor for us, especially since it’s our first year at GABF. We’ve only been open a year so to come in and do as well as we did was quite the honor. We’re stoked. We’re still getting warmed. Some of these beers that won we’ve only done two or three times. We hope that our beers just keep getting better and it’s more motivation to working hard and making better beer.

Describe the emotion when you heard your name and you were walking across the stage.
Head up in the clouds. It was crazy. You work so hard for something like this and when you win, you’re stoked. It’s never a guarantee, but it’s such nice recognition when you do win. Your heart’s aflutter and pounding. You’re so excited. It’s great to be recognized by your friends in the brewing community and all around. Just so much excitement.

Going into the competition, what beer did you feel like had the best chance to win?
I would say we worked hard on all the beers, but the Pilsner. It’s such a hard category. It’s such a hard style of beer. It’s such a classic, but it’s such a simple style of beer. Really, it’s a beer that shows brewing techniques and the work that a brewer does, so that was quite the honor. I was really hoping I would do well and it was very exciting that it did.

How’d you celebrate?
We went out to the Cheeky Monk in Denver. Family and friends surrounded us. We ate well and drank well and laughed and told stories. We also talked about our next step and how to make our beers even better to get ready for World Beer Cup.

Did you get any time to reflect on the weekend or is it back to the grind already?
I did. I got some time yesterday. Your head gets up in the clouds and it’s quite the high there for a little bit, but I tried to reflect on it and what it means. I’m fairly young in the industry and things have progressed pretty fast for me. I’ve always told people that it’s impossible to make perfect beer, but I’m going to keep trying. These beers that we made are really good, but they could be better. Just because we won a bunch of awards doesn’t mean we’re there; it’s just more motivation to take it to the next level and to try to make the best product for the consumers.

Devil’s Backbone had quite a weekend at the 2009 Great American Beer Festival. The Roseland, Virginia brewery is so new it doesn’t even have an About Us page on its Web site, but it still managed to win a gold medal for its Gold Leaf Lager as well as thrree silvers. On Monday afternoon, DRAFTMag.com spoke with head brewer Jason Oliver to get his thoughts on what the wins mean for Devil’s Backbone.

What’s it feel like to win?
It’s great. It feels really good to walk up across that stage. I don’t know what felt better: when the first of our medals was called out or when the second was. To get the four was really good. It’s an exciting time. To walk across that stage is a pretty unreal feeling.

What were you expecting before the competition? Did you feel there was one beer had the best shot at a medal?
I thought I had a definite chance at the Vienna [Lager, silver in Vienna Style Lager] and, well, the Keller Beer [silver in Kellerbier/Zwickelbier] and the [Danzig] Baltic Porter [silver in the Baltic-Style Porter]. The Gold Leaf Lager I was a little less, I don’t know, confident just because it’s such a delicate category. I didn’t know how the beer shipped or aged and that sort of thing. It seemed like it held up, but I didn’t really expect the Gold Leaf to do as well as it did. I was more confident on the Vienna than anything else.

How do you build off of the wins?
We’re a new brewery; we’re less than a year old, so I think this is going to help us greatly get the word out about us, to get some street cred. We don’t have a long track record because we opened a week before Thanksgiving last year. I think this is going to be huge for us. This is going to tell people that we’ve arrived, we’re here. We’re not just a new brewery. We haven’t had that much time to build up a reputation.

Have you noticed anything change?
I guess I haven’t had time to let it sink in. Call me in a couple weeks. [Laughs]

Ryan Van Duzer has never owned a car, and he doesn’t have a driver’s license. No, he’s not 10. He’s just a firm believer in living green, being fit, and getting around on sheer, two-legged, two-wheeled manpower.

You’d think this guy’s life-radius is about seven blocks.

Though, last week, Van Duzer embarked on a two-month bike trip from San Diego to Washington D.C., with hopes of spreading the message about fitness and creating more bike-friendly communities.

VanDuzer hosts “Out There,” a Boulder-based, local-access TV show about the outdoors. A Fat Tire fanatic (since high school, he confesses), in recent years, he visited New Belgium’s Tour De Fat and shot films of the event for his show. Last September, New Belgium gave him one of their signature cruisers, and he decided he would take it to the streets — all of them, everywhere, across the entire country. He’s been welcomed to a slew of cities by Team Wonderbike, New Belgium’s global network of bike enthusiasts, where he plans to share beers, talk shop, and ride with locals. But, more importantly, he will meet with city officials and other advocacy groups to motivate kids and adults to ride for health and to promote ways to make cities more rider-friendly.

“I would like to inspire other people to think, ‘Okay the grocery store is three miles away, I could probably ride there once a week,” he says. “I’d also like to start the whole movement of getting people to think about humans having a negative impact on the world and the health benefits of riding.”

This is not Van Duzer’s first lengthy sojourn. He served in the Peace Corps in Honduras and, when he finished, he biked back home to Colorado. “It was an awesome way to travel and see the world,” he smiles.

On this trip, he’ll also be rolling through some new places. “I’ve never been to Kansas, and I don’t know how much I’m looking forward to it, but I heard it’s downhill which is good,” he says. “I’m going to see a lot of different landscapes, from desert, to farms and cornfields, to the West Virginia mountains.”

If you see a guy on a New Belgium cruiser, wearing a bike helmet with a propeller on it, you’re probably getting a first-hand glimpse of Van Duzer in action. Rather than waiting for him to swish through your streets, you can track his journey on www.ryanvanduzer.com, and if he’s coming to a city near you, meet him for a beer or keep him company for a bit of his ride.

By Justin Shady

You would think that the second largest city in the country would have an enthusiastic and active craft beer scene.

Unfortunately, you would be wrong.

Even with a population near the four million mark, Los Angeles struggles to get its own personal hold on the world of craft beer. Some beer enthusiasts feel it’s behind much smaller cities, like Portland and Denver, by as much as a decade; and when placed next to its sister city to the south, San Diego, Los Angeles pales in comparison… at best. So what does Los Angeles need to spark a craft beer community?

Apparently, it needs a cabal. Or, more accurately, a C.A.B.A.L.

Unlike your average, everyday cabal, the Los Angeles Craft and Artisanal Beer Appreciation League (L.A. C.A.B.A.L.) isn’t interested in secretly plotting to overthrow the government. Instead, this group of a half-dozen passionate beer lovers has made it its mission to bring the City of Angels out of the craft beer stone ages.

“It came about one evening nine months ago when Kevin Kansy, Bob Kunz, and I got together to try some fun beers we had,” says one of the group’s founders, Alex Macy. “We got to talking about the local beer scene, lamenting about the lack of a good craft-oriented beer festival in the area. We decided the city needed one, and since no one else was going to do it we decided to just do it ourselves.”

Los Angeles C.A.B.A.L. became a reality soon thereafter, with six members sharing responsibility of the group: Alex Macy is currently heading up the beer department for Bottle Rock in downtown Los Angeles; Bob Kunz is a taste maker at the prominent Father’s Office in Culver City; Kevin Kansy runs a boutique distribution company called Artisan Ales; Ben Ling runs the vegan pub Pure Luck Restaurant; and Alex Brown and Evan George are the beer geeks behind the veggie blog Hot Knives, as well as organizers of the bi-annual Grand Crew L.A. bicycle tour of the best beer stores in the city.

But with each of the organization’s members already playing some kind of role in the craft beer world in Los Angeles, why has it taken the city as a whole so long to connect the dots and form a community?

In Macy’s opinion, the enormity of Los Angeles has been part of the problem.

“Greater Los Angeles is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world, and these various establishments are so spread out that it takes some effort to build a strong beer scene here,” he says.

It was a challenge the C.A.B.A.L. set out to overcome when they organized the First Annual Craft Beer Fest on May 9th at the Echoplex north of downtown. The event boasted over a dozen of the state’s best breweries, showcasing gourmet pub grub and nearly 30 different handcrafted beers.

But the question was, would Los Angelenos come out?

“It went better than we could have imagined,” Macy says. “Leading up to the event, we were fearful we’d find ourselves standing around with a dozen of our friends, trying to make use of thirty kegs, but we had a much larger turnout than we even thought possible.”

It was so large, in fact, that the event had more people waiting outside than they could legally let into the building. Luckily for the organization, Los Angeles’ craft beer lovers are patient people.

“The enthusiasm people had around trying different beers, and their willingness to wait in rather long lines to be able to take part are strong signs that our local beer scene is on the verge of blowing-up,” Macy says.

By the end of the night nearly 1,000 people had attended the event and almost $10,000 had been raised for 826LA, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students with their creative and expository writing skills.

So does this mean Los Angeles can expect a Second Annual Craft Beer Fest? Or will the scene fade away like a forgotten movie star?

According to Macy, the craft beer-loving citizens of Los Angeles can count on a sequel.

“The goal for next year’s festival will be for it go bigger and better… and outside.”

– Justin Shady is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.

By Zak Stambor

Like Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne playing together in the Traveling Wilburys or Grant Achatz and Thomas Keller partnering to put on a 20-course dinner, suddenly it seems like just about every other brewer is/plans to/has collaborated with another on a beer.

Doing so breaks brewers away from their normal routines.

“It’s truly about disconnecting from your brewery and seeing how others do things,” says Tomme Arthur, head brewer for Port Brewing Company. “Maybe they have a process that you’re not using, or you have one that they’re not using.”

Most of the collaborations are one-off, limited batch affairs between longtime friends, breweries with long-term relationships, or those with a shared admiration. But some, like Left Hand Brewing and Terrapin Beer, are annual partnerships that each year leads to the production of a different beer that melds the two breweries’ styles. Others, like Stone Brewing Company, bring together two different brewers who often don’t know each other to create one-time three-brewery brewing alliance. Then there’s the Avery and Russian River Brewing Co., which each January releases Collaboration Not Litigation Ale, a blend of the two breweries’ Belgian strong ales (both of which are named Salvation).

“Collaborating shows the brotherhood of craft brewing — you don’t see that in other industries,” says Adam Avery, Avery’s president and brewmaster.

Likeminded brewing
One catalyst sparking the trend is breweries’ desire to see how their likeminded brethren work, says Three Floyds brewmaster Barnaby Struve.

For instance, Three Floyds bills its beers as “not normal,” while Dogfish Head Brewery suggests it brews “off-centered beers for off-centered people.”

“We have the same philosophy about how beer should be made — our continuity is discontinuity,” Struve says.

So it’s not surprising that when Dogfish Head’s Sam Caligione flew to the Midwest to collaborate with Three Floyds owner Nick Floyd and Struve, the threesome crafted something unlike anything they — or anyone — had brewed before.

The result, Popskull, is an experimental German brown ale aged with botanicals in Dogfish Head’s Palo Santo wood barrels.

“It was interesting,” says Struve, referring to working with Palo Santo wood for the first time. “It’s very aromatic… It added quite a bit of bitterness and perfumey qualities.”

Popskull (which will be released in 22-ounce bottles on April 25, Three Floyds’ annual Dark Lord Day when the brewery releases its Russian imperial stout) is just the latest brewing partnership for Three Floyds. Struve has also worked with Jonathan Cutler, from Chicago’s Piece brewpub, and Todd Haug from Brooklyn Center, MN-based Surly Brewing Company.

Each collaboration brings with it an opportunity to try something new, says Struve.

“We just want to turn people on to some cool, unique product,” he says.

Brewing bros
For years both Avery and Russian River’s Vinnie Cilurzo thought they were producing something unique — a Belgian strong ale called Salvation.

Then, in 2004, they discovered each others’ beer. Neither was particularly concerned about maintaining exclusive rights for the name.

“We both said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’” recalls Avery. “He said that I had the name first, but I’m pretty sure that he did. Either way the conversation led us to think about brewing something together in the future.”

Three years later, they decided to blend their two Salvations, dubbing the result Collaboration Not Litigation Ale.

“Not everyone is super cool with being laissez-faire about copyright infringement,” says Avery. “But as far as collaborating goes, we’re either going to work with our really good friends or someone we highly respect at another brewery, like Vinnie.”

Since brewing Collaboration Not Litigation, Avery and Cilurzo have collaborated again, on a beer they called Isabelle Proximus. Only this time it was part of the brewing equivalent of the Traveling Wilburys. Dubbed “Allaverdogportrush,” the project also included Allagash brewmaster Rob Tod, along with Caligione and Arthur.

Allaverdogportrush came about after the five brewers toured a slew of Gueze and lambic producers throughout Belgium as part of Caligione’s research for his book “Extreme Brewing.” To commemorate the trip, they decided to recreate the trip’s highlights in a beer.

When they convened to brew the beer at Port, each member of the five-some contributed four barrels (except Dogfish Head, which contributed two) and their own yeast strain. After brewing the base beer, they filled each brewery’s barrels and added the individual brewery’s particular yeast. After 16 months of aging, they created a blend that incorporated each brewery’s unique characteristics.

“When we announced the project was going to go down, there was noise that there would be too many cooks in the kitchen,” says Arthur. “Once we laid out a traditional recipe, it was just a matter of it all coming together.”

The idea worked, suggests Arthur, noting that he can pick out aspects of each brewery’s barrel-aged beer from the funky, citrus-like, sour blend.

Cultural exchange
The collaborative phenomenon is not limited to American breweries.

In fact, Brooklyn Brewery’s Garrett Oliver has been brewing with his European colleagues for at least 10 years.

When he started brewing abroad, most brewers he encountered couldn’t fathom the breadth of the American craft brewing industry.

“It was enlightening to learn that despite our robust craft brewing industry, no one in Europe had heard about it,” he says, adding that the last few years have seen that lack of awareness rapidly disappear.

But no matter how far American craft brewing progresses there’s no substitute for century-long European brewing traditions, he says.

Collaborating with Schneider’s Hans Peter Drexler allowed Oliver to learn about brewing weiss beer, while Drexler explored American hops. In the project the two decided to brew essentially the same pale, hoppy weissbock in the other’s brewery, but with different hopping to reflect the local hop flavor.
What resulted were two beers, Brooklyner-Schneider Hopfen-Weiss and Schneider-Brooklyner Hopfen-Weiss. The Brooklyner-Schneider, which Drexler brewed in Brooklyn, features American Amarillo and Palisade hops that add a sharp American hoppiness to a traditional weissen flavor. The Schneider-Brooklyner, which Oliver brewed in Kelheim, Germany, is dry-hopped with Hallertauer Saphir, giving the beer a spicy hoppiness.

“It’s an interesting process,” says Oliver of collaborating with another brewer. “We have to figure how to find ourselves through a process to make something interesting and delicious that also melds the two worlds.”

In working with brewers at traditional breweries like Schneider, Oliver sees himself as part of a long food tradition.

“What we’re doing is similar to what chefs do when they travel to each other’s kitchens in order to come back to their own kitchens with new ideas,” he says.

But the collaborations aren’t only brewing beer, he says, they’re about strengthening the industry as a whole.

“We feel that the rising tide lifts all our boats,” he says.

– Zak Stambor’s first taste of collaboration was when he watched the Jetsons meet the Flintstones. He’s been a fan of unlikely pairings ever since.

By Mike Piontek

On January 2nd, I found myself on a plane headed for Berlin Germany. I had dreamed about taking this trip for year, but had only finalized it six months earlier when I accepted my admission to Brewer’s school. The school is called the Versuchs-Und Lehranstalt Fϋr Brauerei In Berlin E.V., better known as the VLB Institute. The world-renowned research institute also offers several conferences annually for the brewing community, as well as numerous classes for those aspiring for advancement in the industry. The class I enrolled in is the five-month Certified Brewmaster Course.

My classmates represent 14 countries on four different continents. The experience levels vary from home brewers and assistant brewers in major breweries to executives and those who specialize in specific areas of the production process. My personal experience consists of several years of home brewing and a three-month apprenticeship at Harpoon Brewery in my hometown of Boston. It is now the beginning of March, I have just completed my exams for the first module of courses — thankfully having passed them all — and I’m here to share a description of my day-to-day life as a brew-student.

Monday morning classes start at 8:30; we all filter into our rooms and head for our seats, eager to share stories of our “practical work” from the weekends. Our first course of the day is one and a half hours of Brewing Technology. We have finished Malting Technology in the previous module, and will now focus on technology; past, present, and theory, in the Brew house. Today we discuss milling and its relation to the mashtun. The focus is more on the process than the equipment, ranging from a brief summary to the specifics of enzyme reactions throughout a spectrum of temperatures and Ph levels.

Our next course is appropriately named Water, a continuation from Module 1. We focus on topics such as filtering, chemical breakdowns, and processing plants. Specifically today we discussed the effects water’s hardness and chemical composition can have on wear and tear in a brewery’s piping. This course is followed by a 45-minute economic lesson focusing on basic bookkeeping that could be applied for most business. We are working on balance sheets and how they can be analyzed to determine the cash-flow, liquidity, and other factors of a business. Our final course before lunch break is Sensory Analysis. Today we discuss theory — no actual beer drinking yet — but the discussions of different factors that will affect flavor and aroma. After lunch we conclude the day with a lesson on Brew house Plant Equipment.

Tuesday morning starts with another lesson on Brewing Technology. The class is hands on and we are constantly called to write on the board anything we have previously learned, or to test our current knowledge of the upcoming topic. Today we brainstorm everything occurring during the mashing process. Following a brief break we have a lecture in Biochemistry. We are studying the different energy levels of electrons and how to determine them by reading the periodic table. We have been focused mainly on theory and basic concepts up to this point, but will soon be taking a turn to the practical applications of this knowledge and how it can be utilized by the brewer. After another lecture on Plant Equipment, focusing again on milling and the different mills in use throughout the world, we break for lunch.

In the afternoon a guest lecturer from Novozymes, an enzyme company based in Denmark, comes. He’s a former brewer and researcher who teaches us about the enzymes currently (and soon) available on the market and how they can be applied in the brewery. Specifically, he focused on how breweries can become more efficient, and realize more gains, through the use of specific enzymes to make the brewing process more efficient.

Wednesday is a science day, with a morning lecture on Microbiology, which we spend the rest of the day applying in the lab. We are currently working on how to identify Microbiological beer spoilers that can be found within the brewery. We have previously focused on the differences between yeast strains, as well as identifying a range of microbiological elements that can be found within different areas of the brewing stages. We finish up the afternoon with a lesson in Brewery Arithmetic.

Thursday is mainly based around preparing us for Friday’s practical work in the lab; this course is known as Chemical-Technical Analyses. Today we learn about the next phase of our current experiment, focused on the Kjeldahl method. This helps to give us a way to grade our raw materials and determine different levels of chemical substances found within. This is followed by lectures in Brewing Technology and Sensory Analysis. Finally we split into groups and attend a computer course on Process Control Engineering, which is teaching us the basics of programming software utilized to automate a brew house.

Friday we again split into two groups and spend the entire day in the lab working on our Chemical-Technical Analyses. We follow the Kjeldahl method to determine nitrogen levels in our kongress wort. We then work through several mathematical formulas that give us the soluble nitrogen levels, as well as help us determining the kolbach index. More experienced brewers could explain this better but I am still learning and will be writing the first part of my lab shortly after finishing this article.

That’s a week in the life of a brew student. Glamorous, no? After a tough week of worts and enzymes, the weekend calls. I will spend this particular one driving with several classmates to Cologne (Köln) for Karneval. The trip promises to include more “practical work” and equally important a look into the Germany culture. Thanks for reading and please feel free to contact me with questions and comments (or job offers, as I graduate in June).

Mike Piontek is a student at VLB Institute in Berlin. He can be reached at Mike_Piontek [at] hotmail [dot] com.

By Lilit Marcus

Some parents teach their children a love for music. Some teach their kids to appreciate hiking through nature. Brothers Eric and Will Stephens, however, spent their childhoods in the New York City suburbs learning admiration for the fine art of beer-brewing.

They both admit to spending their college years drinking less-than-stellar beers at keg parties, but as their palates matured they developed tastes for more interesting brews. By his senior year of college, Will, now 24, was helping his father make “strong, hoppy beers” at their family home. Eric, 27, also got in on the fun. “We brewed a clone of Arrogant Bastard that was unlike any beer I had tried,” Eric recalls. “I wanted to compare our clone to the real thing and became obsessed with tracking down a bottle of Arrogant Bastard. It proved quite difficult and required lots of online searching and phone calls, but eventually I tracked one down.”

It was that same beer, Arrogant Bastard, which sparked an idea a few years later. Eric and Will were trying to locate a bar in New York where they could drink the brew. “Neither of us could believe that in 2007 there was no way to find out which bars served your favorite beer, and the light bulb went off,” the elder brother says. “After discussing the idea for a few minutes the name BeerMenus hit us, and I raced to see if the domain name was available.” It was, and the bar trip was immediately forgotten as Eric, who had experience with user interfaces and product development, immediately got to work on the site. Over the next few months, he worked with Web developers and designers to create a look for the site. Inspirations for BeerMenus’s streamlined, utilitarian design came from Menupages, Craigslist, and other similar service-oriented sites. The simple but easily understood logo — the word “BeerMenus” with a glass of beer for the “U” — was the brainchild of designer Jillian Danziger.

Conviently, at the same time, “I was managing databases of electronic documents for big cases at a law firm and thought databasing beer would actually be useful,” says Will. “I quit my paralegal job and spent a month adding over 150 bars and restaurants [to our index] before we launched the site. It was difficult to convince people to participate in the beginning… but the best beer bars recognized the potential and helped get it started.”

BeerMenus.com officially launched in April 2008, serving the New York City area (including the boy’s native Westchester County). The initial list of 150 drinking establishments has grown to more than three times that many. Many of the bars, including Manhattan’s Blind Tiger and Rattle ‘N Hum, have hosted BeerMenus events or offered drink specials to site visitors. “The biggest criticism we received when we launched was that it would be impossible to keep the menus up to date,” says Eric, but they quickly developed a way to solve the problem. Now, bars whose menus are listed on the site have the ability to update their listings themselves, giving BeerMenus readers a heads-up about new specials and offerings. Another recently added feature is an index of beer stores, in case you’d rather grab a six-pack. There’s also a new user-focused “List” area, similar to the one on Amazon.com, that lets users recommend beer tasting menus or suggest what other beers to try if you really like, say, Blue Moon.

For the brothers Stephens, the site was the perfect outgrowth of their lifelong relationship with beer. One of the best perks of the site has been taking what Eric calls “beer evangelism” to a wider audience. “I would consider myself a discerning beer drinker who looks for inspired beer,” Will says about his approach to the art of imbibing. “I have no problem with people drinking boring beer, but my passion for more interesting beer tends to rub off on those around me.” Those around him now include BeerMenus’ readers and subscribers, some of whom choose to sign up on the site for special offers and exclusive “free beer” coupons. After all, what better way to be a beer evangelist than to spread the word via comped drinks?

Will and Eric have big goals for 2009, namely expanding to additional cities to serve more  ale and lager-loving populations. They’re currently keeping mum on exactly what those cities might be, but a strong contender is Los Angeles, where Eric now lives. No matter what happens to BeerMenus in the year to come, the Stephens kids are getting to live out their beer-flavored dream.

Lilit Marcus is the editor-in-chief of SaveTheAssistants.com.