Due to holiday season travel schedules, there is no new Brew Ha Ha show today, so here is a repeat of a favorite show from last August featuring Ramon Tamayo, brewer at Russian River Brewing Co, and Mike Gilmore, Paris-based micro-brew shop owner. 

Brew Ha Ha today welcomes Ramon Tamayo and Mike Gilmore. Ramon Tamayo is the brewer at Russian River Brewing, working for Vinny Cilurzo. He used to work for Mark Carpenter at Anchor Brewing. Mike Gilmore is a brewer in Paris, France. He runs Brew Unique Paris, a shop in Paris where customers come for home brew classes and learn to make beer.  He grew up in the American northeast but has lived in Paris for 20 years.

Mike says that there are some good new breweries in and around Paris. He has friends who organize guided tours to Belgian and French breweries. He worked for Boulder Brewery in Boulder, Colorado, starting in 1991. Two professors from CU Boulder started it in 1979. Mark Carpenter remembers that Boulder had a hazy beer, back then, called “The Ugly Beer” that they used to serve as a joke in a paper bag.

Herlinda just judged at California Craft Beer Summit competition. She judged hazy beers, and double and triple IPAs. Some hazy beers were really good and some really bad, nothing in the middle.

Mark tells about when Ramon worked for him at Anchor in San Francisco. Ramon started in the bottling house and worked his way up into the brew house. Anchor has a classic copper brew house from a German brewery. It is all operated by hand. Some people were surprised that they had no computers in the brew process. Mike teaches people how to brew at his shop in Paris, by making 5 gallon batches. His customers do everything by hand.

The Beverage People, the home brew shop that has equipment and classes for home brew, wine, cheese and cider, is a new sponsor of Brew Ha Ha. Their work is similar to Mike Gilmore’s work in Paris, catering to home brewers. Some clients are individuals, they also have groups such as corporate team building and weddings. It’s a four-hour course. They also give you a recipe from HenHouse to attempt.

Mike says that there are a lot of nanobreweries in Paris and some are making the transition successfully from that to a larger scale functioning business. There aren’t too many in Paris but in the suburbs there are a lot.