So just what sort of things can you trade home-brewed beer for? Well so far I've traded it for other homebrew and about a pound in hops! This month I decided to give my first ever 'beer pass' a try. Essentially, names and addresses are drawn and paired. Each person is responsible for sending between 4 and 6 beers to their assigned person (think Secret Santa... but with beer!) The nice thing about participating in the Northern Brewer Forum beer pass is that since NB is a midwest based company, there is a good chance I won't have to ship my beer very far (St. Louis in this case). I ended up sending out two bottles of Alofskie's Russian Imperial Stout, one bottle of BBC English IPA, and one bottle of BBC Dubbel Down Ale. I haven't heard anything back with regards to any of the beers (although in a separate trade, I did hear back about BBC Dubbel Down... more on that later :) ). The person who sent me beer was in Michigan. He sent two bottles of an amber, two bottles of an alt, and two bottles of an IPA. If you're a homebrewer, I'd seriously encourage you to give the beer pass experience a try, it is a great opportunity to experience new beers and receive some feed back about your own beers. Ironically, this has some interesting parallels with what Matt was talking about with photo print exchanges.
My second experience bartering with beer comes from a recent trade of beer for hops. I saw a post on the green board about a guy who was willing to trade one pound of vacuum sealed Hallertauer hops for a 20oz. bottle of beer. Typically, one batch of beer uses anywhere between two ounces and six ounces of hops (depending on the recipe), so you can get quite a few batches out of one pound. So we exchanged information, I sent off a bottle of BBC Dubbel Down (my Belgian Dubbel), incidentally it was the furthest I've sent my beer so far (California), and in exchange I received the hops as promised. I haven't had a chance to use any of the hops yet, but I did receive a nice message regarding my beer:
I brought your Dubbel to the SCHF last weekend and it was great!! We opened it for lunch and had it with some Brats, it was a perfect combo.
I hate to say it but with around 300 beers on tap your dubbel was one of the best we tasted...
The SCHF is the Southern California Homebrewer's Festival, so that was a really nice complement. I can't wait to see how this beer does in the BUZZ competition :)
New photo over at anthonysnaps (on the right...), in the spirit of trying to remember some of my other hobbies ;) Hopefully I snap a picture or two this weekend at some of our planned activities (summaries of those later!)