This Thursday, the Homebrew Chef, Sean Paxton, will host another of his legendary beer dinners at Mercedes in San Francisco. It’s an eight-course dinner. The cost is $98, and that includes all food, beer and gratuity. There’s limited seating, so snap up your tickets now. This should be a good one. It will feature the collaboration beers of Belgium’s De Proef Brouwerij and our own Firestone Walker Brewing. Tickets can be purchased online. See you there.

Collaboration: A Beer Dinner

Thursday, February 11th, 6:30 pm

Aspall Cuvee Chevallier Double Fermented Cyder

First Course

Local Fromage
cowgirl creamery Mt. Tam, Humboldt fog goat cheese, dried apricots, cinnamon smoked almonds,
malt crackers, Saison Imperiale beer jelly, white pepper infused 30 year old aged honey

De Proef Brewmaster’s Collaboration Signature Ale with Tomme Arthur

Second Course

Union Barrel Smoked Day Boat Scallops
atop Reinaert Flemish Wild Ale braised Belgian red endive, Les Deux Brasseurs Ale biere blanc and micro herb salsa

De Proef Brewmaster’s Collaboration Les Deux Brasseurs Ale with Jason Perkins

Third Course

IPA Ceviche Margarita
fresh halibut cured in citrus juices, Union Jack IPA, mangos, red onions, peppers and chilies, topped with an IPA foam

Firestone Walker Union Jack

Fourth Course

House-Made Sausage
Sonoma pork, infused with Sauserful of Secrets, thyme, dried fruit and caramelized shallots
on a bed of lentils, drizzled with a chorizo amarillo hop oil

Firestone Walker Bourbon Barrel Aged Saucerful of Secrets 2007

Fifth Course

Local Pork Belly
braised in Zoetzuur Flemish Ale on a bed of parsnip purée, Flemish ale reduction, raddish pickle

De Proef Brewmaster’s Collaboration Van Twee Ale with John Mallet

Sixth Course

Belgian Tamale
bison short ribs cooked “canronade style” in Van Twee, onions, shallots and thyme
stuffed into a sweet potato masa pillow, Black Xantus TCHO mole, beet foam

Firestone Walker Velvet Merkin

Seventh Course

French Flan
DBA beer caramel topped with dark chocolate Lozen Boer Abt pot de crème
pork fat shortbread cookies, malted mascarpone chantilly cream

Firestone Walker Double Barrel Ale, 100% Oak Aged on Cask

Eighth Course

My Sweet Valentine

(chocolate truffles made with Pete Slosberg)

Van Twee Ale Caramel in a Dark TCHO Chocolate Shell
Black Xantus Caramel with TCHO Cocoa Nibs in a Dark TCHO Chocolate Shell
La Grande Blanche Brittle Infused with Blood Orange and Milk Chocolate in a Dark TCHO Chocolate Shell

Firestone Walker XIII Anniversary Ale

Pizza Port’s Welcome Back Wipeout IPA was chosen best in show at the 10th annual Double IPA Festival yesterday at the Bistro in Hayward, California. That’s the second year in a row that a Pizza Port beer has won. The full winner list is below.

• 1st Place: Welcome Back Wipeout IPA, Pizza Port Brewing
• 2nd Place: HopSauce, Rubicon Brewing
• 3rd Place: II Max Imperial IPA, Triple Rock Brewing

• People’s Choice Award: Russian River Pliny the Younger

Below is a video of Vic and Cynthia announcing the winners.

Oakland’s newest beer store is set to open today. Beer Revolution, located at 464 3rd Street in Oakland, just off Broadway. Co-owners Rebecca and Fraggle plan to open the doors at Noon. Stop by and check it out. Better yet, pick up a few bottles to let them know you support better beer stores.

On Friday, the 2nd annual SF Beer Week will begin, and with two days to go, we’ve just surpassed 200 events, roughly fifty more than we had last year. More importantly, all the events look spectacular and there’s a wide range different types of them taking place throughout the ten days of SF Beer Week. Check out the Schedule to find out what you’ll be doing next week.

What does wine and real estate have in common? Location, location, location.

The next time you’re at a dinner party and someone serves you Champagne, ask them what part of France it’s from.

Nine times out of 1o, they’re pouring you a sparkling wine from California, a Prosecco from Italy, or a cava from Spain. Those are all great sparkling wines, but they’re not from Champagne.

Get it?

The Office of Champagne was a founding member of the Joint Declaration to Protect Wine Place & Origin. It was signed on July 26, 2005 in Napa Valley and its aim is simple: To educate consumers on the importance of location in winemaking. Others who signed that day include Jerez, Porto, Walla Walla, Oregon, Napa Valley, and Washington State.

Now, the wine regions of Long Island, New York, famous for cool climate wines such as riesling, and Rioja, Spain, known for its big push in the value red market in the United States, are the latest signatories of the Joint Declaration to Protect Wine Place & Origin.

It now has 15 members including Chianti Classico, Paso Robles, Porto, Sonoma County, Victoria, Tokaj, and Western Australia.

Just as it’s impossible to call a sweet wine made outside of Jerez by the name Jerez, the growers and vintners from these regions believe their wines are distinctive and should be accurately reflected on a label.

In other words, consumers deserve to know what they’re getting, and that the label matches the juice. It’s kind of like buying a bottle of olive oil and getting canola oil.

I stopped by Russian River Brewing today, because my friend Pete Slosberg told me last week that he would be there for the first bottling of Consecration in the new proprietary 375ml bottles. Pete was there with a few volunteers, including Peter Estaniel, from A Better Beer Blog.

The new bottle was developed for exclusive use by Russian River Brewing, along with North Coast Brewing and the Lost Abbey. So for now, those will be the only breweries you”ll see using this new bottle.

This is the third beer to be bottled by Russian River in the new bottles. The first two were Supplication and Temptation.

In other exciting Russian River news, the brewery is about to go off the grid, and go completely solar. One-half of the production brewery’s roof has solar panels already installed and the second half has the frames laid down, waiting for the panels. It may go live as early as this weekend and should power all of the brewery’s electricity needs.

Below is a short video of Consecration moving through the bottling line.

Below are some photos from today’s visit to the brewery.

Here is a slideshow of the Consecration bottling. This Flickr gallery is best viewed in full screen. To view it that way, after clicking on the arrow in the center to start the slideshow, click on the button on the bottom right with the four arrows pointing outward on it, to see the photos in glorious full screen. Once in full screen slideshow mode, click on “Show Info” to identify each photo.

Marin Brewing released their newest beer, an herbal beer made in collaboration with San Anselmo herbalist Dr. Yen-Wei Choong. He runs the Yellow Emperor Natural Healing Center and Zen Garden and has been involved with Chinese herbs all his life. For the last twenty, he’s been working on just the right combination of herbs to improve beer, and make more balanced from the perspective of Chinese medicine.

Brewmaster Arne Johnson started with his E.S.B. as the base beer. To that, he added 38 pounds of the proprietary mix of Chinese herbs that Dr. Choong created. The nose was subtle herbs, almost gruit-like. The flavors were soft and also subtle, in a good way. The herbs were there but never overpowered the beer, and in fact the two integrated together quite well. It was smooth and easy drinking, almost like a session beer, though I believe the beer is around 5.5% a.b.v. A tasty collaboration.

Marin Brewing owner Brendan Moylan, Dr. Yen-Wei Choong and Brewmaster Arne Johnson.

For now, the beer is draft only and will be at several events and places during SF Beer Week. They’ve submitted a label for approval, so it may be available in bottles eventually.

Today begins the 8th annual Strong Beer Month once more, with six new extreme beers each at 21st Amendment and Magnolia throughout February. Try them all, and you get to keep the commemorative glass. To see a list of the twelve beers, check out the Strong Beer Month website. This year’s theme is the wild west and specifically High Noon.

There’s an excellent conversation going on at 1Winedude.com about how wine bloggers and others in the industry are changing the face of wine criticism in magazines and trade pubs.  Namely, shedding light on how numerical wine ratings of mostly expensive wines are not an accurate representation of what real people drink, like, or afford.

It started with Joe Roberts’ interview with Robin Goldstein, author of “The Wine Trials 2010: The World’s Bestselling Guide to Inexpensive Wines.” I spoke with Goldstein last year, when I ran a review of the book’s inaugural 2009 edition. I’d post a link here but we don’t keep stories on our Web site that long. Sad, I know.

Anyway, I am particularly interested in how the hoax Goldstein performed on the Wine Spectator and its annual restaurant Award of Excellence program in 2007 has played out a few years later – and how it will continue to effect change.

Basically, he created a fictitious Italian restaurant and made up a wine list – including wines that the Spectator rated quite low – and they awarded him for it anyway!

For a lot of us, particularly in the newspaper industry, it only confirmed what we already knew. That the lack of separation between advertising and editorial in a lot of these magazines is very iffy, and so is why, consistently, wines made in a certain style – and for certain palates – continue to rate the highest.

While SF Beer Week will get most of the attention in the coming weeks, there is one more beer festival before February. That’s the new Winter Brews Festival that will be held this Saturday, January 30th, at the Linden Street Brewery in Oakland from 1:00 to 8:00 p.m.

The festival is being hosted by The Brewing Network.

Tickets are $25, which will include a commemorative glass and five tastings, with more available for purchase at a rate of 3 for $5. For more information on the event, please visit www.brewingnetwork.com/ontap

So far, participating breweries include:

21st Amendment
Speakeasy
Iron Springs
Lagunitas
Moylan’s
Marin
Russian River
Firestone Walker
Linden St
Magnolia
Triple Rock
Drake’s
Odonata
Valley Brewing CO.
The Bruery
Gordon Biersch
Ale Industries
Firehouse Grill
Stone
Deschutes
Rogue
EJ Phair
Schooner’s
Elysian
Alaskan
Black Diamond
Pacific Coast
Two Rivers Cider
Uncommon Brewers
Moonlight
Drake’s
Black Diamond
Jack’s
Green Flash
Bear Republic
New Belgium
Fifty-Fifty
Shmaltz