DrFermento.Net

Before I delve into my weekly rant, it’s with great pride that I get to announce the arrival of my long awaited website. It’s been fermenting for a long, long time, and I’d almost given up on its inception, but one day, out of the blue, a gift arrived in my email inbox. Rob Weller of Specialty Imports had created the site in his spare time because he felt that a website with a blog is a much easier and more convenient venue for my sudsy news and would allow me to enhance what I offer with graphics, links, pictures and the ability for you, the reader, to fire right back at me and share your sentiments with others. I am deeply appreciative of Rob’s efforts and selfless work to help bring beer news to a broader and thirsty audience. All of the past blogs are linked there and the site continues to ripen like a heady barley wine. Explore it at http://drfermento.net. Be sure and leave comments about what you see, what you read and what you like and don’t like. My vision is to have the site become the portal to the most current, timely and relevant

Alaska Excuse me while I reach for my celebratory beer. beer information that’s available.

One of the things I do in my spare time is collect and archive information about the state’s breweries. I’ve been doing this since I got involved in homebrewing, so that takes me back to somewhere around 1988 or so. It’s not a noteworthy collection, but it spans a very important couple of decades of beer and I’m hoping that some day, the information might be useful to me or someone else. To that end, I pay attention to what goes on, which in turn helps my various writing chores. My interest is especially piqued when I obtain some tidbit of information that, like a missing puzzle piece, fills in a gap in the bigger picture of brewing in the nation’s northernmost state.

Last week’s blog got a surprising amount of response centered around the recount of the club’s first pub crawl and my experience with a certain beer I enjoyed at the Schwabenhof stop on the Palmer/Wasilla highway during the crawl. Not to rehash what’s already been said, I tried a beer called Matenuska Thunderbock that I assumed was brewed by Ravens Ridge Brewing Company out of

Fairbanks. Information began pouring in that one of a number of things probably took place to create the experience. Interesting to me is that it turns out that both Ravens Ridge and Borealis Brewing Company brewed a beer with the same name. In fact, at one point. Borealis brewed the beer for Ravens Ridge, but for an individual named Stewart Wells to distribute under his own label, which was Matanuska Brewing Company.

Thanks to the efforts of

Scott Stihler, a talented homebrewer who also organizes the E.T. Barnette Homebrew Competition in

Fairbanks, I was put in touch with Hal Tippens, one of the founders and brewers of Ravens Ridge. I got a whole pile of puzzle pieces from him and continue to fill in an interesting corner of Alaskan Brewing history with his help.

This isn’t the time or place to recount what I learned and I don’t aim to bore, so I’ll move along, but not before mentioning another key individual and another key event that beer lovers of

Alaska that go back a ways might appreciate.

Stewart Wells was a homebrewer that edged toward commercial aspirations in the Valley even before Great Bear Brewing came along. Wells also sold homebrew supplies in what is now Great Bear, but before they were simply a restaurant with a brewery name and hadn’t expanded to fill the entire building they now occupy. He eventually moved his homebrewing supply shop and although details remain unclear, controlled the Matanuska Brewing label. This is not 100 percent accurate, and I’m still fishing, so don’t quote me on any of this yet. (more…)