CREATED BY ERIC STEEN
OCTOBER 29TH TASTING
MENU & CATALOG
MATT KUPFERER
RICH MOCK
SCOTT BUCHHOLZ
TOM BROWN
MENU
LIMBER BLOND ALE
By Scott Buchholz
With Limber Pine and Strawberries
Hike Location: Mueller State Park
A light bodied blond beer sitting at an easy 5.5%
with a pine backbone and 30 pounds of strawberries added to the secondary fermentation.
GRUIT TO IT
By Rich Mock
With Yarrow, Wild Sages, and Wild Hops
Hike location: Old Midland Railroad Grade
London Ale grain bill and yeast, bittered with
yarrow and wild sage. More sage was added for
aroma and wild hops for flavor.
EVE’S FORBIDDEN FLOWER
By Tom Brown
With Bee Plant, Amaranth, Tansy Mustard and
Rose Hips
Hike Location: Catamount Trail
A 4.5% saison using as many nontraditional
ingredients from the hike as possible. The yeast is
Trinity’s house yeast.
OLD MAN OF THE WOODS
STOUT
By Matt Kupferer
With Sarsparilla, Hazelnuts, and Spruce
Hike Location: North Cheyenne Canyon
An American Style Stout sitting at 6.5% with
sarsparilla, hazelnuts, and spruce added to the
boil.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction........................... 4
Scott Buchholz...................... 7
Rich Mock............................. 8
Tom Brown........................... 9
Matt Kupferer...................... 10
Thank You........................... 11
Allergy Alert
The beers are made with the following ingredients:
Hazelnuts
Wild Sage (Artemesia)
Sarsparilla
Yarrow
Spruce and Pine
Strawberries
Bee Plant
Amaranth
Tansy Mustard
Introduction
Thank you for attending the second, and final, tasting session for this year’s Beers Made
By Walking. BMBW was a four-month-long program that consisted of seven hikes, eight
homebrewers, and eight beers. On each local hike a homebrewer, naturalist, and a public
audience set out and identified edible and medicinal plants along the way. The homebrewer created a recipe and a beer was then produced based on the plants from that trail.
Each beer is a portrait of the landscape/trail that inspired its creation. The beers you taste
at this event are inspired by Mueller State Park, Old Midland Railroad Grade, the Catamount Trail, and North Cheyenne Canyon. The first four beers were available in August
and were made with prickly pear cactus, piñon pine nuts, chokecherry, juniper, three leaf
sumac berries, and ponderosa pine needles. The program was organized by myself, Eric
Steen, and is sponsored by the UCCS Galleries of Contemporary Art, Pikes Peak Brewing, and Brewer’s Republic.
These final four hikes proved to be vastly different from the first three. To start with,
the beginning of the summer season was very dry and many plants that normally are in
bloom at the time were nowhere to be found. Sometime in early August, however, the
weather began to change, but so did the location of our hikes. The first three, early in
the summer, took place in somewhat similar terrain along the front range (Garden of the
Gods, Red Rock Open Space, and Palmer Park). For the next hike we drove nearly an
hour west to Mueller State Park, near the town of Divide. The area was lush and many of
the flowers were in bloom. At the Old Midland Railroad Grade we returned to the springs
area (Manitou) after a hiatus of a few weeks, and were surprised to see a huge amount of
wild hops growing around the mouths of the caves we walked through. By the time we
hiked the six-hour Catamount Trail in Green Mountain Falls, the leaves in that town were
beginning to turn yellow and orange. Back in Colorado Springs, however, autumn had not
quite arrived. In Green Mountain Falls we had to walk a mile through town to get to the
trailhead. A small stream runs through town and we identified many plants that we did not
see during our climb to the reservoir. Finally we visited North Cheyenne Canyon, where a
number of conditions allow for some vegetation that we had not discovered on any of the
other hikes. The hazelnuts and the wild sarsparilla are plants that are remnants from the
last ice age and have disappeared from almost all other areas along the front range.
The idea for Beers Made By Walking has been developing over the last few years. The
initial inspiration came during my time in the Yukon Territory where I spent a week
canoeing down the Yukon River with a group of artists and an environmental education
professor. There I was introduced to the term ‘friluftsliv’ a Norwegian term translated
as ‘Free Air Living.’ The term describes a way of living in which people make a habit
of being outdoors on a regular basis, simply because it is the world we live in. There are
Friluftsliv Conferences that host ‘walking lectures’ where attendees hike for a few days
on end, stopping every now and again for a lecture and food. A year or so later I spent
some time in Scotland, where I built a pop-up pub that served homebrewed beer. While
I was there I visited Williams Bros. Brewery in Alloa. They make beers that are historically Scottish in that they use ingredients that naturally grow in the Scottish Highlands.
The English outlawed the use of these ingredients in the 18th Century but in the1980’s
the brewery began making these beers from old recipes. This brewery has had a huge
impact on how I think about beer, as I have become interested in the idea of ‘indigenious
beer,’ beer that celebrates the land that it is made in (‘terrior’ could be a similar word;
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wine connoisseurs use it to denote how differing landscapes provide unique and specific
characteristics to its crops).
As an artist and homebrewer, I am inspired by the aesthetics of beer and brewing. My
work (the events I create) is fueled by the idea that beer is the people’s drink – that it
brings people together, loosens barriers between people, and that these social elements
are integrated into the entire idea, production, and consumption of the beverage. Beer
is a social lubricant, as conceptual artist Tom Marioni stated, and it is also a social glue.
Drinking good beer, to me, is a form of activism as it brings people together, inspires local economy, develops a sense of landfulness, and is known for shaping how people think
about where their food comes from. This fascinates me and is a major topic of exploration in my work. The pint is a center for relational activity; sharing a pitcher is an activity
that, by the end of the pitcher, will likely have inspired warming conversation and bonded
people together. In my opinion, drinking together and community is at the center of wellmade beer.
The artists, in this case, are homebrewers. They have purposefully embedded their
observations into their craft. They worked to create a recipe that balances, or purposefully imbalances, tastes traditionally associated in beer with ingredients that are a part of
the world we live in. The recipes are very experimental and not much groundwork in the
beer-world has been laid on how to best brew with these ingredients. The ingredients are
beyond non-traditional, they are untested and open many new possibilities. So, please
enjoy yourself and strike up a conversation with friends and strangers as you taste the
work of local homebrewers.
- Eric Steen
Enjoying the view from the Catamount Trail
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Naturalist Kimberly Banzhaf lead us to the picturesque Rock Pond at Mueller State Park, where we identified wild raspberries and strawberries. Scott, the
homebrewer, chose strawberries for his brew.
Liz Klein is a botanist and led the hike at Old Midland Railroad Grade in
Manitou. There we walked through five tunnels that had wild hops growing
around the openings.
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Scott Buchholz
Limber Blond Ale
With Limber Pine and Strawberries
Hike location: Mueller State Park
I started homebrewing almost three years ago. I originally started brewing
because my favorite beer was Czechvar it was hard to find and expensive, so I
thought why not make it myself. My first two batches were made with extract
but I didn’t feel like I was really brewing so I switched to all-grain brewing
pretty quickly. With all-grain the possibilities are infinite, you are only limited
by your imagination. I started brewing in the kitchen but as time went by I upgraded my equipment and moved the operations outside. My first all grain batch
of Czechvar turned out pretty good. After trying my first batch of Irish Red I was
hooked on the complexity of flavors from an ale. Since then, I haven’t looked
back and what started out as a hobby has turned in to an obsession. In the words
of Charlie Papazian, “Give a man a beer and he wastes an hour. Teach a man to
brew and he wastes a lifetime.”
When first approached about Beers Made By Walking I was excited. For me
Colorado means the outdoors, and when I was told we would be going on a hike
and learning what plants could be used for brewing I thought “this is awesome.”
I usually brew according to a style (with a few beers produced using spices). I
am always up for trying new ingredients in brewing and thought this would be
a perfect venue for something out of the ordinary. On my hike we came across
a few plants that I thought might have some merit, but until we tried the Limber
pine I hadn’t been blown away. The Limber pine had a orange/citrus taste that I
knew instantly had to be in the beer. Coupled with the wild strawberries it was a
no-brainer. Hope you enjoy, Nostrovia.
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Rich Mock
Gruit To It
With Yarrow, Wild Sages, and Wild Hops
Hike Location: Old Midland Railroad Grade
I developed a taste for beer at an early age pouring schooners for my Dad and
his brother. I’d purposely overpour so I had to sip off the overflow. I brewed
my first batch of homebrew in 1985 in Rome, NY, but didn’t follow-up until I
moved back to Colorado in 2005 and my buddy, Mike Bordick (aka AxeBrew),
bought me an all-grain starter kit and “The Joy of Homebrewing” by Charlie Papazian as a welcome back gift. Since then I’ve been an active homebrewer, beer
judge and founding member of the Brew Bros. of Pikes Peak. I chose DinoBrew
as my call sign to show respect for dinosaurs who ruled the earth for over 200
million years and left only fossils, footprints and fuel. Humans have ruled the
earth for a far shorter time and left our mark in many negative ways. So being
called a dinosaur should be a compliment not a slam.
I enjoy the social aspects of homebrewing and find brewing solo to be boring.
I like to solicit ideas for improving my recipe and sampling other beers while
brewing. The Brew Bros.’ motto of ‘Independent Together’ stems from our early
sessions when no one had all the necessary equipment and had to get together to
share wort chillers and such. This trend continues, now that I need a grain mill.
This hobby teaches me about the biology of yeast, the chemistry of the brew
process, the history of recipes and the geography of ingredients.
The geography aspect is what interested me in Beers Made By Walking. What
ingredients could be found in a high desert climate like Colorado Springs? Of
the many potential ingredients the naturalist pointed out to me on my hike along
the Midland trail, I chose yarrow, wild sages and wild hops to include in my
recipe. Brewers historically used herbs to bitter and preserve their brew before
hops were discovered for this purpose. These brews were called gruit. My recipe
is basically a gruit with herbs used for bittering but since we discovered wild
hops on this hike I added some for aroma. I hope you enjoy my Gruit To It!
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Tom Brown
Eve’s Forbidden Flower
With Bee Plant, Amaranth, Tansy Mustard, and Rose Hips
Hike Location: Catamount Trail
I believe my passion for brewing started early in life with my dad brewing his
own beer. Watching and getting sips of fresh brew was really great. My grandfather also made rhubarb wine. I have been brewing for eight years now, the madness began when I sold a little pop-up camper and bought my first home brew
kit. A year after I started homebrewing I ran across Arctic Brewing Company,
which no longer exists, in Colorado Springs. At first I just wanted to help out
and clean up and I ended up with shares in the company a few years later. I also
brewed beer in Alaska for a time. Considering the circumstances, I thought the
beer always turned out great. Throughout all of this, my main brewing system
has been a 15 gallon gravity-fed stand. In between these stories i had been a
mechanic for 22 years but I recently got out of the business and was given the
opportunity to brew at Trinity Brewing Company. I was a homebrewer when
Beers Made By Walking started, but now I’m also a professional.
Beers Made By Walking was a way for me, being a homebrewer again, to get
my beer served at a bar. Going on the hike and learning about edible plants was
a lot of fun. Pikes Peak didn’t let us down. We identified so many ingredients
that could have been used in the beer, so it was hard to choose. By the end of the
hike I had a good idea of what I wanted. The only thing we did not see on these
hikes were the base grains, which Trinity donated. I’m looking forward to more
hikes/beers in the future to see what other brewers will find to use.
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Matt Kupferer
Old Man of the Woods Stout
With Sarsparilla, Hazelnuts, and Spruce
Hike Location: North Cheyenne Canyon
I started brewing in the late 1990s, when I found a ‘Brew Your Own Beer’ kit at
a bookstore in the mall. It was the size of a couple hardback books and had two
tiny little cans of extract in it that resulted in about a gallon of something that’s
better off being forgotten. Since then, I’ve moved on to all grain brewing, and up
to 10 gallon batches. I consider myself a beer adventurer, and I am always looking around for beers I haven’t tried, and trying recipes that sound a little weird,
including a basil amber beer and a spruce red ale (AKA Alaska Matt’s Pine Tar
Red). During the week, I occupy a large portion of my days testing software and
causing all other kinds of havoc.
What got me interested in this project was possibly my first thought - “A hike?
I need to get out more anyway.” Which was followed by the second thought: “A
strange beer brewed as a result? Hell yeah!” When I found out that North Cheyenne Canon, the location of my hike, was one of the few places in Colorado
where wild sarsaparilla grows, I was pretty stoked, since I had been wanting to
do a root beer BEER for awhile anyway. Then the availability of the hazelnuts
in the area, complemented by the conifers, seemed to be the right combination.
The stout was my choice as a base style because of the changing of the seasons
and the longer night times - symbolic of both the Halloween season and name
inspired by the Green Man legend, a symbol of death and rebirth, fall and spring.
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Thank You
UCCS Galleries of
Contemporary Art
GOCA is the primary sponsor of Beers Made
By Walking. They have provided endless support, advice, and help in many forms. GOCA
has two contemporary art galleries, one in
downtown Colorado Springs, the other on the
UCCS campus. For more info, please visit:
galleryuccs.edu
Pikes Peak Brewing Co.
PPBC donated their space and brewing facilities to make these four beers happen. Without
them, it would not have been possible to
produce the beers commercially. PPBC is
only a few months old and they produce great
beer up in Monument.
pikespeakbrewing.com
Trinity Brewing
Trinity donated ingredients all the base
ingredients for Tom Brown’s beer, including
the malt and the yeast.
trinitybrew.com/
Brewer’s Republic
Brewer’s Republic, a downtown Colorado
Springs pub, donated their space, agreeing to
host both tastings for Beers Made By
Walking.
brewersrepublic.com
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Beers Made By Walking
Created by Eric Steen
Colorado Springs 2011
ericmsteen.com
focusonthebeer.com
ericmsteen@gmail.com