The Washington DC area doesn’t get enough notice for its beer culture (yet). Our actual brewing scene is in its infancy with our oldest package brewery just now turning two years old. If you extend the metro region to the breaking point of geographical logic, we have some very decent breweries and brewpubs in addition to a number of GABF medalists, but it’s a surprisingly small community of producers for such a major metropolitan area.

On the retail end, we have a respectable chain store (Total Wine) that carries some of the more obvious microbrews while stocking excellent seasonal and rarities when they can. supplementing this are a number of amazing independent wine shops that work very hard to curate a small collection of more rare bottles. All in all, we get some really solid beers here that would make many jealous, but few outside of the region don’t realize how DC has become a beer town.

Greg Engert is arguably the person at the forefront of the beer renaissance in DC today. Rising from simple beginnings as a server at the legendary Brickskeller bar in DC to national acclaim as a James Beard Foundation nominee and StarChefs rising star, Greg was also the first beer director in history to be named one of the “Sommeliers of the Year” by Food and Wine magazine.

His work with the Neighborhood Restarunt Group began at the venerable Rustico and blossomed into the renowned 1st floor/2nd floor restaurant and bar space Birch and Barley and Church Key. A mecca for true beer lovers, he has assembled a beer-nerd’s dream bar serving 500 bottles, 50 drafts, and 5 casks all poured in strict style-appropriate serving glasses over a carefully maintained range of serving temperatures. This year the Neighborhood Restaurant Group will finally open the doors on Greg’s next project, the Bluejacket brewery near Nationals Park in DC.

When LivingSocial (also local) announced a series of beer classes taught by Greg Engert at their space a few blocks from my work, a bunch of us gladly signed on for the “Hoppy beers” event. Most people hear “beer tasting” or “beer class” and they’re inclined to assume it’s an easy opportunity to get shit-faced while someone tells them how awesome beer is. Since Brady took us all to a Greg Engert class on farmhouse ales at Rustico last year, I knew that the experience was much more akin to a college-level lecture then a casual drink and think affair.

The evening started in Living Socials 918 F street location, a renovated building downtown that Living Social has turned into something of an adult activity center where people can get drunk on wine while painting, learn how to make indian food from scratch, or in our case – receive a detailed scattershot lecture ranging from the history of beer to the potential pitfalls of modern canning.

We arrived to a room full of diverse students seated in front of three pours of beer in wine glasses stationed at each table. As Greg began his lecture with the origins of beer making, he focused on the orignal antibacterial gruit ingredients used before the advent of hops. I immediately started sampling the Jever Pilsner from Germany while the rest of the participants politely waited with their glasses untouched.

During our Farmhouse Ales class last spring at Rustico, a very sickly Greg Engert charged through minutia of agrarian pre-war Europe and the evolution from potable hydration to regional zymurgical delicacies. He managed to talk through a persistent cold for nearly a solid two hours while barely referencing the beers in front of us, so I knew not to bother waiting for specific direction before drinking.

Jever Pilsener from Friesisches Brauhaus zu Jever in Germany starts our journey. A clean, clear and quaffable pilsener, Jever boasts an atypically high level of hop bitterness when compared against more common examples of the style. I found the beer to be very refreshing, but most others at my table turned their noses up at the taste. A question comes from the audience as to why so many european beer makers package in green bottles when it obviously harms the quality of the beer. The response is indicative of Greg Engert’s style, a slightly meandering, intensely detailed stream of consciousness covering the intricacies of beer marketing, punctuated by an irreverently humorous yet plainly honest statement of fact.

“…and that’s why Heineken tastes like shit.”

Thornbridge Jaipur IPA from England comes next and is followed by Ballast Point Sculpin IPA, a beer Greg declares to be one of the top 5 IPA’s in the US. While I found the Jaipur to be very tasty if simple, the Scuplin is a beer I’ve fought with before and have often found a garlic and onion pungency that is severely off-putting. I’m not sure if this may be a fresher example or my palate was more forgiving on this night, but it went down much easier than it has in the past.

We delve into the regional birthplaces of noble hops, the constituent parts of hop chemistry, alpha acids, beta, and essential oils. The beers in front of us, merely scenery for the lecture rolling by and served a passing reference from time to time. The class takes a pause not when a chapter of information has concluded, but when a specific time on the clock registers with our host.

If there is a walking encyclopedia of beer, it would look just like Greg Engert. Decked out in his signature black tie on black shirt, he takes the art of being a beer-nerd to extraordinary new heights. Not unlike that cousin that can recite baseball statistics of players who retired before you were born, Engert has such a command of brewing history that his digressions become epic voyages that stop in their side-tracks once he realizes how far he has veered away from our orignal course. He becomes distracted only when confronted with a temporary difficulty recalling the most minute of details, like when he spent a few moments inside his head trying to remember if the domestic hop consumption of a particular northwestern valley was 17% or 18% per year. Most of us would be proud to recall minutia within a couple of degrees of accuracy, but Greg’s brain contains so much data that it is as if the facts themselves are battling for his attention.

DC Brau’s The Corruption begins the next flight, followed by Firestone Walker Wooky Jack and the evening is finished off with Moylan’s Hopsickle, a deliciously strong Imperial IPA which I sip while we finish with an impromptu question and answer session. The majority of our classmates are trying to absorb the most basic overview of the world of hops, a few obvious fellow homebrewers ask more pointed questions and the remainder are either completely overwhelmed or are simply enjoying their beverages.

We managed to squeeze in a few questions about Bluejacket and my wife Gretchen openly wondered after the class if there’s any chance they’d be hiring. Greg politely fielded a few personal greetings before donning earbuds and rushing off into the night to his bicycle/bus/subway/scooter/whatever (he offhandedly noted the fact that he doesn’t drive).

If you’re a drunk, the admission price of $45 might seem very steep for six half-pours of beer, but I would hope most people would attend to learn and not to taste. Greg Engert is a walking fount of beer information who’s obvious passion for the field results in a lecture where he has to struggle to stop talking. While the breadth and depth of beer could ironically become a very dry topic, Greg has both a wit and a method of punctuating with profanity that both enhances and lightens his points.

Considering his casual often witty delivery and his deep understanding of brewing, it’s obvious that if he ever takes to writing he could be heir-apparent to Michael Jackson’s legacy of beer evangalism. My only potential criticism would be that his extensive knowledge results in an occasionally meandering and confusing pathway through topics, so I think he could be well served by a simple powerpoint to keep him on a linear track.

Something tells me that just wouldn’t be his style.

This post is so incredibly late, but I realized that I never ended up publishing it.  Please excuse the tardiness as I try to push these updates out more frequently.

Well, the house is a disaster.

Gifts, boxes and paper are strewn about and dishes piled in the sink.  The recycling bin is overflowing despite being emptied once already and worst of all – there’s no beer left.  It can only mean one thing, that Santa has passed through and we’re all busy scribing a list of the resolutions we plan to ignore next year.

While I received a number of great gifts that will improve my wardrobe, there were a few notable beer related items under the tree this year.

Moms got me a thick stack of Brew Your Own Magazine back issues that will take me some time to work through (it also came with a BYO “euro” sticker).  I also asked for a subscription…but I assume no one got me one since I didn’t explicitly hear otherwise, but if I get a car someday the BYO sticker will be displayed prominently.

My sister and brother-in-law got us a $75 gift certificate to Northern Brewer.  We’re at a relatively good place in terms of brewing equipment, so this might be the kick to finally build up a kegerator and use those seven cornies I have sitting in the garage.  I have a tank, regulator and picnic tap setup, but I’ve been reluctant to convert our garage fridge into a kegerator in hopes  of eventually building a chest freezer “keezer”.  As with many things in life, I tend to wait around forever and never stumble across the perfect moment, so I should probably just take a drill to that thing and install some taps.

The wife gifted me with a $25 gift certificate to Bottle Mark.  For those unaware, Bottle Mark is a cool little company that offers custom printed bottle caps.

While it’s not exactly beer or homebrew related, the wife also gave me a cheese making kit.  I feel like I’m falling down a DIY hole, so if you see a post about me building a chicken coop, send a rescue squad.

Finally, Scott D of the Hopping Scotts homebrew team dropped of two holiday 3-packs of homebrew for me and the wife along with two “Hopping Scotts” koozies to fill out the fourth slot in the four-pack.  As we drink those beers, I’ll build another blog post about the beers themselves.

All in all, it turned out to be a decent year.  We made some advances in our brewing setup I hope to detail soon and 2013 is looking like it’s going to be a bang-up year in terms of beer production.

Prosit!