FuzzyBrew

The first annual Harbortown Beer and Food Festival takes place Saturday, featuring over 60 different beers for sampling.

The event is from 2 to 6 p.m., with beers poured from about 18 craft breweries from across the country, including regional breweries such as Ghost River Brewing, Yazoo Brewing Company, Schlafly Beer, Lazy Magnolia Brewing Company and Blackstone Brewery. Each brewery will have food paired with its beers.

The event will be on Mud Island in Harbor Town in front of Movie & Pizza Company, 110 Harbor Town Square. An after-party featuring music from Charvey McLemore takes place from 7 to 9 p.m.

Presale tickets are $33, with tickets costing $38 on Saturday. Three bucks from every ticket sold will benefit the Mid-South Food Bank. Get tickets on http://www.brownpapertickets.com/.

Any questions? Call the Movie & Pizza Company at 527-2233.

James Ottolini, brewmaster at The Saint Louis Brewery Inc. and Head of Brewing Operations at Schlafly Beer since 1992, won an achievement award for innovation in brewing this week from the Brewers Association.

Ottolini won the prestigious Russell Schehrer Award for Innovation in Craft Brewing, awarded at the Craft Brewers Conference in San Diego.

Here’s more from the Brewers Association press release:

Described by a fellow brewer as an artist, a scientist and an inventor, James Ottolini of the St. Louis Brewery, Inc. is the recipient of the 2012 Russell Schehrer Award for Innovation in Craft Brewing. The list of his creative brewing solutions ranges from redesigned milling processes to reduce brewers’ exposure to dust to extensive research on dry-hopping, which has been said to result in “beer with bold floral characteristics, but a soft, inviting quaffability.”

Others winners were Doug and Wynne Odell and Doug’s sister, Corkie Odell, of Odell Brewing Co., recipients of the Brewers Association Recognition Award; and Tom McCormick, full-time executive director of the California Craft Brewers Association, who won the F.X. Matt Defense of the Industry Award recipient.

The Brewers Association is a trade association representing small and independent brewers.

Russell Scherrer winner @OttoAtSchlafly enjoying some @fourpeaksbrew Kilt Lifter cans at #cbc12 in San Diego tonight. twitter.com/Schlafly/statu…

— Schlafly Beer (@Schlafly) May 4, 2012

The Brewers Association, a trade group that represents the craft beer industry, has released its annual list of Top 50 Craft Brewing Companies in the United States, based on 2011 beer sales volume.

Craft beer companies are defined as “small, independent and traditional,” with annual production of beer less than 6 million barrels.

The top three remain Boston Beer Co., which produces Sam Adams, followed by Sierra Nevada and New Belgium.

Regionally, St. Louis’ Schlafly has moved into the top 40 at No. 39, while Atlanta’s Sweetwater Brewing Company has moved up from No. 27 to No. 24. In addition, Louisiana’s Abita dropped two spots to No. 17.

Here’s the list:

Meanwhile, 36 of the top 50 overall brewing companies in the U.S. are small, craft breweries, according to the association.

“In the last 15 years, craft brewing has gone from one percent of the overall beer market to almost six percent in 2011,” said Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association. “We attribute a large part of that growth to the many talented brewers who are providing beer lovers with more beer style and flavor choices than ever before.”

There’s an auction on eBay under way for “Schlafly Titanium,” a beer so rare, only one bottle will ever be produced.

Here’s more about the beer from Schlafly Beer, St. Louis’ leading craft brewery:

Fermentation was carried out with a wild “space yeast”, harvested from ancient residue recently unearthed at a meteor crash site. Schlafly Titanium is dry-hopped 7 times with our proprietary hybrid of Galaxy, Amarillo, Simcoe and Citra hops, resulting in a beer with a theoretical count of over 10,000 IBU’s.

In addition to the choicest raw materials, Schlafly Titanium is also brewed with a host of other premium ingredients. This process is so exhausting, so extravagant, so expensive, that it yields but one single bottle of Schlafly Titanium.

Only one bottle of Schlafly Titanium will ever be made available to the public. This is truly the Ultimate Craft Beer White Whale.

By now I hope you’ve figured out that Schlafly Titanium is a joke and the video is a parody commercial for April Fool’s Day.

But what IS real is the auction.

Schlafly is auctioning off the actual, EMPTY bottle seen in the Schlafly Titanium commercial, handmade specifically for the April Fool’s joke. The winner of the auction gets the bottle, as well as a $50 gift certificate that can be used at either The Schlafly Tap Room or Schlafly Bottleworks in St. Louis. The gift certificate is good for dining, as well, at Schlafly’s retail shop.

All proceeds go to the Gateway Chapter of The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Inc.

The auction ends Sunday. As of this morning, the current bid was $355.