In 1984, Jim Koch brewed a batch of beer in his home kitchen using a recipe he found in his father’s attic. The resulting Boston lager launched Koch’s own brand, now known worldwide as Samuel Adams.
For the past 20 years, the Samuel Adams Boston Beer Company has honored that legacy of home-brewing with its LongShot American Homebrew Contest, which recognizes the most talented home-brewers in the country — along with one Samuel Adams employee winner. The intention is to promote the innovation and expansion of the craft beer frontier.
The winners of this year’s competition were announced at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver last August and include local home-brewer and Sam Adams employee Colin Foy. Foy was one of three winners who were given the opportunity to have their beer packaged and sold in the Longshot American Homebrew Contest Variety Pack along with brews from the two other winners, Kevin Nanzer of California and Tim Thomssen of Nebraska.
Foy crafted a Flanders red ale called Neighborino; Nanzer brewed a Belgian golden ale; and Thomssen made a raspberry Berliner weiss. Foy’s Neighborino is brewed like traditional Flanders red ale, blending a younger beer with a more mature beer that has been aged in a wood barrel for several months. Brettanomyces yeast and lactobacillus work together to develop a fruity, tart and acidic flavor with a 6.3 percent ABV.
The beer’s name, Neighborino Flanders Red Ale, ties Flanders, a region in Belgium known for its sour ale, with the iconic character Flanders from The Simpsons. Foy says a Flanders red is probably about as far as you could get from the TV show’s famous Duff beer, just like Flanders is pretty much the opposite of Homer.
“A Flanders red is a deep ruby beer that starts off with an aroma of stone fruits like cherries and plums, with some oak and wood notes,” Foy says. “The flavor starts off on the malty-sweet side, with those fruit flavors coming through, and transitions to a dry, tart, woody finish. The beer is sour but not puckeringly so.”
Located in Over-the-Rhine, the Boston Beer Company’s Cincinnati brewery is housed in the old Schoenling brewery on Central Parkway, where Koch’s father worked as a brewer. Foy, who has been a brewing supervisor for three years, received a voicemail from Koch himself telling him that he was a winner.
“I couldn’t believe it when I heard my beer was in the top 12, much less was the winner,” Foy says.
Along with having their beer sold in the variety pack, contest winners also receive a free trip to the original Oktoberfest in Munich.
“I spent the better part of a year living just south of Munich, so when I was told I won our employee competition and won a trip to Munich, I was very excited to go back,” Foy says. “Being in Munich is a great reminder that sometimes a perfectly brewed lager is just as flavorful, complex and interesting as the latest craze in American craft beer.”
Foy started brewing beer in 2005 while a startup he worked at floundered. He found plenty of time to devote to other activities, and when a friend gifted him with a homebrewing starting kit, a new hobby was born.
While he doesn’t keep close track of how many batches or styles of beer he has brewed, Foy does know that the recipe for Neighborino is special because Flanders red is his favorite style of beer.
“This recipe also took the longest to perfect out of any beer I’ve previously brewed,” he says. “It was about a year from brew day to bottling day because this beer spends a lot of time aging on oak chips to create a complex flavor profile.”
To a novice brewer, the process of home-brewing any style of beer might seem daunting — the American Homebrewers Association’s guide to beginning brewing spans the lengthy process of boiling, pitching, fermenting and storing. At first, Foy was pretty intimidated himself because of all the brewing terms and the strict admonishments about everything being spotless, but he says brewing at home can actually be really easy.
“A lot of instructions and recipes make it sound like creating liquid explosives in a surgery-sterile lab, but brewing at home is more like making a soup,” he says. “I spent a lot of time just reading about it before trying to home-brew, and I wish I would have just jumped in.”
“You’re really just boiling a bunch of ingredients,” he continues. “People have been brewing for thousands of years and getting it right.”
For those looking to try home-brewing, his advice is always to just dive in and try a batch and to not get hung up on details or intimidated by funny-sounding terms for things.
In the past, Foy’s home-brews have always been for himself, friends and family to enjoy, but now craft beer fans around the country will be able to sample his work. This was his second year entering the LongShot American Homebrew contest — he entered a coffee stout alongside the winning Flanders Red.
“Winning is a really nice validation of a hobby my wife has been putting up with for years,” Foy says. “My next goal is to win back-to-back. I’m simply a beer guy deep down, so I continue to home-brew just for the love of beer.” ©
This article appears in Jun 15-22, 2016.
