Memories of my first Anchor Party

Those of you that are members of the Maltose Falcons newsgroup have already seen the challenge I have presented to the club to enter at least 30 beers in the California State Homebrewing competition (aka Stern Grove) to help our finishing push to win the 2009 Anchor California Homebrew club of the year award.  As an effort to motivate club members, to pull their weight in this challenge, I thought I'd share some stories from my first Anchor award party in 2005.  I'm hoping some other older club members could chime in with stories of their own.

By way of background, I first really got into home brewing shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 2003.  I had taken part in some badly failed brewing experiments in my college days, but I had never really had a "good' homebrewed beer, although I had managed to develop a taste for fine Belgian Ales by that point.  Anyway, my former coworker Kurt Weiler was an avid participant in the annual Amgen (our employer) homebrewing contest.  Before I knew it, I was out in Kurt's garage learning the basics of all grain brewing.  My first Falcons event was the Oktoberfest party in 2003

but I didn't actually join the club until 2004.  By that point I had moved to Woodland Hills and had a very basic all grain setup of my own (my first solo attempt was a Fat Tire clone).  I went to the club's 30th anniversary party that fall (a great party in it's own right) and I remember hearing some older club members talking about something called "Anchor Partys" in hushed, reverent tones.  Shortly thereafter, I found out we had won the award again and the celebratory party would be in February of 2005.  I decided to go, in part because it was an excuse to visit  an old college buddy Josh who lives in the Bay Area.  I made him join the Falcon's so he could go to the party.  Anyway, it was raining pretty hard that day, and we walked from the nearest BART station to the brewery.  We must have looked like wet rat's when we showed up, but that was OK because the taps at Anchor were following for what felt like at least 5 hours.  I quickly found that Old Foghorn is a good cure for being wet and cold (who knew Old Foghorn could be sessioned?).  After walking around and looking at the Anchor brewing gear (very impressive in it's own right) the food came out.  So something about my friend Josh, he had been a vegetarian for 6 or 7 years up to this point.  He started while he was in law school because he was too cheap to buy meat.  Anyway, the Anchor staff brought out what looked like a couple of metric tons of tri-tip and Josh just snapped.  He must have eaten a pound of meat himself (and he's never gone back to vegetarianism).  We then continued to consume more of Anchor's fermented products, while listening to the Falcon's Band jam in the tasting room.  At some point, we limo-ed (I have no recollection of who actually arranged for the limos) it over to the Rogue taphouse and continued the evening, which got pretty blurry as things went on.  It was a hell of a party, not to be missed.

  I went to the Anchor party again in 2008, the next time we won the award.  It was every bit as fun as my first one.  The longer I'm a Flacon, the more proud I am that I'm a member of a club that actually has a chance to win an award like this.  As John A pointed out, we've had a good history of winning this award on important anniversaries.  I know I can count on the club membership to do their part to help us win this award again, and I really believe that, come February, we'll all be toasting our success in San Francisco yet again.