Bottoms Up

Hey,. I’m a bit envious. Two brothers, Jesse Edwin Evans and Samuel Evans who run a high-tech enterprise – latest project – digitalizing bird calls of the world for Google maps –in Emeryville, have launched a beer video site gravitybrew.com. The videos are short and intelligently done.

Their first video is an interview with Fritz Maytag, the second, with Adam Lamoreaux and Carey Peterson at Linden Street Brewing in Oakland. their third, with Dean Biersch at HopMonk, his new beer pub and music venue in Sebatopol.

They’ve done a neat job by being good videographers. They turn the cameras on (three tiny Aipek high def recorders, two stationary, one hand held), put a high powered condenser mic on the floor, ask a question and let the brewers speak, literally without interruption. Then, they edit the result in Adober Premier, adding background shots – in the Linden Street video, they use some vintage footage of downtown Oakland from the early 20th century. It marries neatly with Adam’s ideas about Linden Street beers. He sees them as a throwback to the kind of beer made and drunk in Oakland a century ago.

They’re from Champaign , Il. and being interested in technical things wound up here in computer central. Sam, 24, handles the cameras; Jesse, 28, asks the brewers questions off camera. They said they love good beer and are doing Gravitybrew for the fun of it.

“The beer scene is so huge, we were trying to think of something to do for the Web,” Jesse said. “We’ve gone to plenty of brewery tours and tried every local beer we could find. So we thought, why not sit down with the brewers and discuss what they do.”

They started cold. “We started working the phones. Anchor listened to us and said yes, even though they hadn’t seen our work,” Jessse said.

Fritz Maytag heard their idea and went ahead. He was really surprised when we walked in with one little digital camera. But they really liked what we did.”
Linden Street and Dean Biersch were next.

They’re looking around for more subjects and are in conversation with Boston Beer for a look at the Sam Adams test brewery and barrel room in Boston. ”

“We really want to continue expanding this project,” Jesse adds. “We have started to get viewers from some far off places such as the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, UK, Brazil, France, Finland and various states in the U.S.”

Their day-job media company, by the way, is 30proof.com. They explain that what they do is make layers for Google Earth Web sites.

Here’s the link to the Linden Street video, which I really like.

GravityBrew.com – Episode 2 – Linden Street Brewery in Oakland California from Gravity Brew on Vimeo.