Tag Archives: Phil Ebel

He missed a trip to the GABF, but his beer won gold in Pro-Am competition

The story behind this year’s pro-am winning beer and Long Island home brewer Brian Giebel

Great South Bay Brewery owner Rick Sobotka, Brian Giebel and lead brewer Jon Gomez (photo courtesey Great South Bay Brewery)

Great South Bay Brewery owner Rick Sobotka, home brewer Brian Giebel and GSB lead brewer Jon Gomez  brewing Muscat Love. (photo courtesy Great South Bay Brewery)

By Alan J. Wax

A new job prevented a high school chemistry teacher from Babylon, New York from attending the Great American Beer Festival and its annual awards ceremony. But minutes after the first gold medal was announced for the festival’s Pro-Am competition, Brian Giebel, stopped grading his students’ work to answer his phone.

Pitcher of Muscat Love at GABF's Pro-Am tasting table

Pitcher of Muscat Love at GABF’s Pro-Am tasting table

On the line at 10:15 a.m. Mountain Time was Phil Ebel V, chief operations officer at the Great South Bay Brewery (GSB) of Bay Shore. The reason for the Sept. 26 call: to tell Giebel that the beer he initially entered in a local home brew competition and later brewed at GSB for the Pro-Am competition, Muscat Love, had just been awarded a gold medal, topping 91 other brews that were collaborations between home brewers and commercial breweries.

“I told him we won—he won—the gold medal,” Ebel said. “He asked, ‘Are you kidding?’ ”Just days after the medal ceremony, Ebel recalled, “I was pretty crazy. It’s Its really an incredible feeling to sit down for the awards ceremony and win gold within five minutes of sitting down.”

Ebel and his GSB colleagues had arrived at the ceremony at the Colorado Convention Center hopeful that Muscat Love would have a chance in competition with 90 other brews. “It’s a fantastic beer,” said Ebel. But when the gold was announced, Ebel recalled, “I was speechless. I was over the moon”

GSB also won a gold medal for its Hog Cabin Maple Bacon Porter in the specialty beer category, which had 59 entrants. The 2015 Great American Beer Festival (GABF) competition awarded 275 medals to some of the best commercial breweries in the United States, plus three GABF Pro-Am medals. (You can view the 2015 winners or download a PDF list of the winners.) Presented by the Brewers Association, GABF is the largest commercial beer competition in the world and a symbol of brewing excellence.

Muscat Love labelThe story behind this year’s pro-am gold winner goes back a decade, when Giebel, now 40, started home brewing. Giebel, who now dreams of going pro, produced Muscat Love, a Belgian-style triple that used canned Muscat grape puree instead of candi sugar as a fermentable, on his 10-gallon, garage- housed system. Giebel had intended to use the grape puree in another brew, but decided instead to brew a tripel, because, he said, “I liked that style and that yeast character and thought it would work well with the grapes.” He entered into a competition for members held monthly by Long Island Beer and Malt Enthusiasts, a home brew club. Each monthly winner is brewed on GSB’s 1-barrel pilot system and sold in the brewery’s taproom.

Earlier this year, Ebel, brewery owner Rick Sobotka and Andrew Luberto, a national Beer Judge Certification Program home brew judge, selected Muscat Love from among the club’s half-dozen winners of the past year, including an IPA, a pre-Prohibition-style lager with chilies and a gose, to enter in the Pro-Am.

“We felt Brian’s beer was the best tasting and most complex out of all of them,” Ebel said..

Days after the Sept. 26 award announcement, Giebel, who has a PhD in chemistry, says he’s still stoked about becoming a hero home brewer. “It was a little surreal. I never really thought I had a shot at it.”

And, he adds that winning the Pro-Am, could provide new impetus to his aim to go pro. “This ramps up my interested a hundred fold to get things going.”

 

 

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Long Island Craft Beer Week early start

 

Dan Burke and Greg Martin of Long Ireland Brewing and Great South Bay's Greg Maisch at Croxley's Craft Beer Week preview party.

Long Island Craft Beer Week for 2012 got underway today—for most folks.

For me, this 10-day celebration of Long Island brewers and beer purveyors (May 11-20) got underway a day early at Croxley’s Ale House in downtown Farmingdale, where four local brewers poured limitless cask-conditioned samples of their brewers’ art in a crowded back part of the bar’s dining room, and a parade of servers carried in trays of boneless hot wings all night. I was disappointed I didn’t get to try the promised sldiers, bacon sticks, crab cakes and the like. Gone, perhaps, just two hours into the five-hour event or never served.

But never mind, We were there for the beer. And there was plenty of that.

Greg Martin and his partner, Dan Burke, of Riverhead’s Long Ireland Brewing Co., were easy enough to spot in their dark green tee shirts. They were serving up glassfuls of their original brew, Celtic Ale, a sweetish mild-tasting brew.

A few steps in and you tripped over one of the several brew crew members from Bay Shore’s Great South Bay Brewing Co.: Phil Ebel V, the brewery’s energetic director of sales, sales rep Sean Nolan, brewer Greg Maisch and assistant brewer Kevin Ryan. So many of them, but just two Great South Bay brews, the lovely, fruity and spicy Kismet Saison and the potent Massive IPA.

Barry McLaughlin of distributor Clare Rose / Long Island Craft Beer Specialists was there with a Blue Point Brewery team pouring the Patchogue’s brewery’s resiny, dry-hopped White IPA and its black IPA, Toxic Sludge, which is eminently more drinkable than its name would suggest.

And last, but certainly not least, there was Mike Philbrick of Port Jeff Brewing Co. with casks of his idiosyncratic White’s Beach Wit with lime zest and Schooner Pale Ale with cherries. The former packed a wallop of coriander, which became less noticeable as the level of the beer in my glass got lower, The latter offered just a hint of cherries, just a new accent for the brewery’s fine pale ale.

Enough beer, really for a few hours. As the hours ticked by I remarked to Philbrick that I had it. His response: “I’ve got 10 more days of this.”

A wide range of Long Island Craft Beer Week events will taking place across the region, including the Golden Tap Awards, a people’s choice awards competition that will honor Long Island’s best bar, brew pub, brewery, sales rep, new beer and overall beer. It will be held on May 15 at the Boulton Center for Performing Arts in Bay Shore. There will be plenty of chances to enjoy the local suds.


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