The American Homebrewer's Association annual conference in Oakland this past week was a huge success and a whole lot of fun. Highlights for me included a bus trip with 50 homebrewers where we visited 3 breweries and drank 40 different beers together - some commercial some home brews - as the bus took us from place to place.

I also enjoyed giving a talk at the conference on the use of "non-traditional" fermentable sugar sources in beer and Ken Grossman's keynote speech which included a hundred slides on the start-up years of Sierra Nevada.

All of these events and all of my conversations at the conference remind me of how lucky I am to work in an industry where everyone - commercial craft brewers and homebrewers alike - has each other's back. And how the passion we share for great beer transcends our varied batch sizes - from 5 gallons on a home stove top to 200 hundred barrels out of a commercial brewhouse - it's all good in the hood.