Aloha!

by Michelle Hodges

I won't be able to brew until I get settled, but I did tour the Gordon Biersch brewery this past weekend at the Aloha Tower Marketplace in downtown Honolulu.

The brewery itself is the same German techno-type they have in SF, but the room is not glassed in like the breweries are on the mainland. It's all open air. Only one room is cold, but it's not refrigerated. They run a cooling agent through hoses all over the place (the name of the cooling agent escapes me at the moment). When a tank starts to get too warm, a thermostat-like contraption pulls the cooling agent into a space in the jacket around the tank. It must be hard to control, though, because the first time I visited I ordered a Dunkel and the line was frozen. But nothing takes long to thaw out around here.

I don't know how they manage to keep the roaches out of the grain that's stored in silos on the pier, but I started to think that maybe they can't keep the roaches out and I didn't want to know about it. Maybe that's their secret ingredient...

Anyway, I miss the brisk air and the smell of fresh hops that they had in the breweries in the bay area. Here the brewery was warm and humid, and smelled like mold. The resulting condensation made the brewery more like a rain forest.

The GB restaurant is great. All open air. They have live jazz and Latin music out on the patio (they call it the "lanai" here) right on the ocean. The beer is very good... typical German-style lager that hasn't suffered from the heat.

Some German tourists toured the brewery with me and they commented that the beer was the best they've had in Hawaii (although the beer here has been typically bad in my experience). They serve the Export, Marzen, Dunkels and Hefeweizen at the moment.

It's been difficult to find good bottled beer because nobody seems to take care of it on the trip over and it tastes old and light-struck.

The menu is good, too. Not much in the way of vegetarian fare, but good fresh fish dishes, including most of the fish you can get in the waters here, like mahi mahi and ahi tuna. The chef made up a vegetarian pasta dish special for me, and my friend had the salmon. Both were wonderful.

I'm looking into joining a club here. Evidently the sales manager for Gordon Biersch is the president of the Hawaii Homebrewers Association. They put out a magazine every other month called "Brew Hawaii". The June/July issue had a picture of Tom Dahldorf in it, saying something about how there's so many pictures of him in the Celebrator that they didn't have room for anymore, so they put one in Brew Hawaii. It's a good publication ... too bad the commercial beer here isn't any better. It'll be fun to see how the locals deal with the challenges of brewing in Hawaii.

Well, that's about it from here. Tell everybody I said "aloha"!

Michelle

(Temporary e-mail: michelleh@juno.com)