First Quote in a Major Publication: Information Week

Date: 2012.03.07 | Category: Social Media | Response: 4

A couple of weeks ago I had an amazing opportunity to speak with Doug Henschen from Information Week about that I do as a Community Manager at Adaptu. I lucked out and Henschen quoted me in his article! Here it is:

InformationWeek, 2/22
How To Get From CRM To Social
By Doug Henschen

Check the stats: 845 million people have signed up for Facebook worldwide, 152 million of them in the U.S.–nearly half the U.S. population. No wonder consumer-oriented businesses are obsessed with how to get more out of social media, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

For business technology organizations, the challenge is figuring out the intersection between social and everything under the customer relationship management sun. CRM broadly covers the software systems companies use to serve customers, generate sales leads, manage marketing campaigns, and analyze and segment customer data. Making the connection between the people in CRM databases and their social media personas will require companies to build a new level of trust with their customers, based on the promise of better service and value. This social connection is the key to unlocking a deeper understanding of customers and making more cost-effective use of sales, service, marketing, and IT resources.

Marketing, sales, and customer service execs often start experimenting in the social sphere without IT’s help. But companies eventually need to link these efforts to on-premises CRM and marketing campaign management systems and customer data warehouses. IT groups also bring experience in data security and compliance with privacy polices and regulations. And IT can bring a much-needed process rigor: Just 17% of companies polled in our 2012 Social Networking in the Enterprise Survey have a formal process for responding to customer complaints on Facebook, despite two-thirds having a Facebook presence.

Startups Get It

Plenty of well-established companies are just beginning to embrace social: Only 19% of companies have had an external presence on Facebook for more than two years, our survey finds. So there’s much to learn from Internet startups such as Adaptu that are born with the assumption of social-savvy service, sales, and marketing.

Adaptu, an online personal financial management and planning service started in 2010, aggregates data from customer financial accounts–banking, investments, mortgage, credit cards, car loans–and delivers budget and financial planning assessments and advice. An Adaptu mobile app includes a “Can I Afford This?” feature that lets people type in a would-be transaction and see how big of a hole it would blow in their budgets.

The service is built largely on Salesforce.com and the Force.com development platform. The customer sees Adaptu branding, but it’s Salesforce’s online software that handles logins, identity management, and customer service case tracking. For customer service, Adaptu uses Get Satisfaction to provide online self-help services; a customer can also submit a request for help on the site, which starts a case within Salesforce CRM.

But companies can’t count on customers diligently exhausting self-service support options before they raise a stink on social networks. So Adaptu uses Radian6 social media monitoring capabilities to capture brand-relevant posts, tweets, and Facebook comments. Radian6 (which Salesforce acquired last year) lists every comment about Adaptu and provides an interface through which company reps can respond to comments directly on Facebook, Twitter, or wherever the message originated.

Adaptu tries to respond in public but resolve in private, tweeting that the customer should email a support question. “If somebody tweets something like ‘I can’t get my bank to link up,’ we want to stop that conversation from happening publicly because it will potentially involve private financial information,” says Jenna Forstrom, Adaptu’s community manager. If the customer does send an email, it creates a Salesforce case.

But Adaptu tries to keep that CRM case connected to the social persona where it began. Agents ask customers to include their Twitter handle or Facebook name, so the support team knows that the original request came in through social media, and so two case teams aren’t chasing the same problem. And once the matter’s resolved, Adaptu posts a comment back to the original tweet or Facebook post.

Connecting Facebook and Twitter identities with known customers in your CRM database is important on several levels. From a service perspective, you’ll see not just the latest support problem raised in a social comment, but the entire history of support exchanges with that customer. From a sales and marketing perspective, you can correlate social profile information with purchase histories and know more about key customer segments’ likes and interests. And with the use of sentiment analysis technologies, you can get trending insight into what the most important customers are saying about your brand, products, and competitors.

The linchpin is that it has to be up to consumers to add their social identities to their profiles. However, as many marketers can attest, offers of discounts and coupons, early product news, sweepstakes entries, or better service often persuade people to grant permission.

Even if lots of customers are going social, does that necessarily mean Facebook and Twitter interactions influence customer behavior? The short answer is yes. Twenty-four percent of the 10,000 consumers surveyed by Accenture last fall say they’re “more likely to do business with a company that they can interact within a social media environment,” up slightly from 21% in 2010. What’s more, 25% of survey respondents who use social sites at least occasionally said social media comments influence their opinions about companies or brands, up from 18% in 2010.

Companies that aren’t at least monitoring social media, let alone participating, “have a real blind spot as to what is really driving consumer purchase decisions,” says Robert Wollan, managing director of Accenture’s CRM practice.

Whirlpool learned about the risk of ignoring social media in 2009 when Heather Armstrong, author of the widely read Dooce.com blog, decided to take her grievances about a repeatedly botched Maytag washing machine repair into the social sphere (Maytag is one of several Whirlpool brands). Armstrong wrote in her blog that she warned a Whirlpool service rep that she had more than 1 million Twitter followers and was contemplating going public. She said Whirlpool’s service rep told her that threat wouldn’t make a difference in the handling of her service case.

After recounting her service woes in her blog, Armstrong also used Twitter as an electronic megaphone, warning her followers with tweets saying things like, “OUR MAYTAG EXPERIENCE HAS BEEN A NIGHTMARE.”

Surprise, Armstrong soon got a call from a Whirlpool executive and her machine was quickly repaired. Soon after that, the 100-year-old company took to social like a new religion. It set up Facebook pages for its Amana, KitchenAid, Maytag, and Whirlpool brands, and it started monitoring Twitter and other social sources, implementing Attensity customer experience management and sentiment analytics applications. Whirlpool’s public relations, customer service, and digital marketing teams now engage with customers through social media, and they collaborate to ensure a consistent brand experience.

Initially, Whirlpool rarely responded to consumer service comments on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Epinions.com, PissedConsumer.com, and My3Cents.com. Instead, it attempted to figure out who those customers were and responded directly through contact information available on sources such as product registration cards. By 2010, the company got over those fears, and it now responds on social media and asks to resolve the complaint privately through email or by phone.

Small Business Gets Social

The most direct way to get to know customers in the social sphere is to get them to “like” you, follow you, or whatever the vernacular is on the network in question. That’s what Wrigleyville Sports–a small business that sells sports-related clothing and novelties like a panini maker that puts the Chicago Cubs logo on your sandwich–has been trying to do as part of a push into e-commerce. Wrigleyville has two stores in Chicago and one in Pittsburgh, but the fastest-growing part of its business is its four e-commerce sites: Wrigleyville Sports.com, ChicagoTeamStore.com, ThePittsburghFan.com, and Philly TeamStore.com.

Wrigleyville has been building a following on its Facebook page for more than three years, and it now has nearly 22,000 likes–respectable for a niche retailer with fewer than 50 employees. The company uses the campaign management tools in its online NetSuite CRM application to track the results of sales and marketing efforts from Facebook, Twitter, display ads on its various sites, and email lists associated with specific stores and commerce sites and customer segments.

Its Facebook page posts use much of the same content as it uses in email campaigns. Its Twitter campaigns have to be boiled down to 140 characters.

Wrigleyville’s 2011 holiday efforts included a Cyber Monday campaign that offered 10% off. Another campaign offered a $10 off coupon to customers who made more than one purchase exceeding a certain value during the year. The campaigns were delivered by targeted email lists, Facebook post, tweets on Twitter, and banners and promos on the e-commerce sites.

Wrigleyville tracks results using unique campaign codes issued through NetSuite’s CRM marketing automation system and embedded as links within the ads. The company counts open rates, click-throughs, and completed transactions by campaign, creative, site, social network, email list, and customer segment. Wrigleyville also knows which customers responded, how much they spent, and what they purchased, so it can measure conversion rates, the value of keyword buys, and the ultimate return on campaigns.

Wrigleyville also mounts social-specific promotions. For example, last year it ran a Mother’s Day contest on its Facebook page exhorting visitors to post a picture of Mom demonstrating why she’s the biggest Chicago Cubs fan. Wrigleyville tracks purchases related to the promotion with NetSuite-issued codes that tell the company which promotions yield the most profitable new customers.

Facebook As CRM Database
With $2.5 billion in revenue, 892 stores, and wholesale, e-commerce, and licensing operations, Guess is at the opposite end of the retail spectrum from Wrigleyville Sports. The Facebook pages for three big Guess retail brands have a combined 2.5 million “likes.” Companies in this class have sophisticated marketing programs, and they’re looking to expand and improve on these efforts with social media.

The retailer’s three major store chains, Guess, Guess by Marciano, and G by Guess, have more than 4 million loyalty program members combined. The company manages the loyalty programs within its Micros Retail CRM system. Guess collects minimal demographic information when it signs up members, because the more information you request, the lower the response rate. Once customers are signed on, Guess offers reward points for adding more tidbits of profile information in addition to the points customers receive for their purchases.

Because Guess gathers that loyalty card data over time, the retailer, as many companies have discovered, finds it hard to keep the information up to date, says Michael Relich, Guess’s CIO and executive VP. The company does the best it can to segment its customer database with available loyalty program information, and it can also append demographic and lifestyle data from third-party marketing databases. But there’s a certain other, very large database out there that Relich and others are hoping to tap.

“Facebook is the largest consumer database of consumer preferences, likes, and demographic and psychographic information on earth,” Relich says. “Everybody I talk to in the industry is wondering how to monetize it, so my thought is that we have to try to turn Facebook into our CRM database.”

Of course, that kind of connection has to happen one customer at a time and with the individual’s consent. One way Guess is encouraging people to connect to it on Facebook is via a mobile app with built-in Facebook integration that can be used if customers opt in.

The app, launched in January, lets members of Guess’s loyalty program find stores, look up their purchase histories, and see their loyalty points and rewards statuses. Members can also scan bar codes while they’re in the store for more detailed product information, and they can browse and buy through a “Look Book” mobile commerce feature that shows the latest merchandise and related accessories.

The app is built on MicroStrategy’s Alert mobile platform, which supports Facebook integration. When customers download the app, they’re asked if they will grant Guess permissions to look at their base Facebook profiles and, as a second option, to look at their Facebook likes. If granted, this permission unlocks Facebook access tokens, letting Guess connect to that data.

Most of the mobile app’s functionality works whether customers grant permissions or not, but if they do, they can log in to the mobile app with their Facebook credentials. They can also share their “likes” with friends as they browse the Look Book and Guess Facebook wall.

Guess uses the tokens along with a cloud-based MicroStrategy service to convert profile information into relational data that Guess can then analyze. It taps that data through Facebook’s Graph API, which provides a consistent view of objects, including people, photos, events, pages, plus the connections among these objects. By looking at loyalty program information plus Facebook profile information, Guess is hoping it can better segment customers and target campaigns.

“We’ll be able to aggregate data and get a better understanding of who our customers are, what they like, what other brands they value, what kind of music they like, and where they shop,” Relich says. If Guess finds that customers are talking about the new Fiat 500, the company might come up with a contest in which customers can win a new car.
This sort of insight has long been obtained through customer surveys and purchases of third-party psychographic and demographic data, but gathering all that data takes time, costs money, and yields a much smaller sample than Relich is hoping to develop.

Not only might Guess use that Facebook data to offer tailored promotions, but it can also send those promotions directly to customers who use the mobile app. “We can communicate with loyalty program customers through email, but inboxes are inundated, people use spam filters, and the open rates are very low,” Relich says. “Now I have more detailed information from Facebook, purchase behavior from the loyalty program, and location information often available from mobile phones.”

If people allow access to their basic profiles, likes, and networks of friends, companies can access that data through Facebook’s Graph API, but that can require tedious and repetitive data calls. For example, if you’re trying to figure out which Facebook fans are frequent communicators with the potential to influence lots of friends, you might have to make hundreds of calls to the Facebook API, according to MicroStrategy. The vendor has developed a shortcut that makes it easier to access and query that data.

Down To The Details
Social media analysis is often rightfully associated with big data: Tens or hundreds of terabytes worth of data might be crunched to develop insights. Sentiment analysis–where companies monitor Facebook, Twitter, and important social sites for trending conversations about products or brands–does require that kind of horsepower.

Supplementing loyalty card and other in-house data with social data doesn’t necessarily require big data analytics, because the data sets aren’t nearly so large. But working with social data presents other problems. Privacy standards, for example, are a moving target. In recent weeks the European Union has talked up tough data management and data access standards that would require companies to let customers easily delete data pertaining to them in online data stores.

There’s also the problem of data quality, long a struggle for companies using presumably well-managed internal data. Social media are littered with plenty of fabricated identities with garbage profiles tied to free Web-based email accounts. On the flip side, though, people who value Facebook and willingly share their profile information are much more likely to keep that information up to date than they would be to update any single company’s loyalty program profile.

As companies delve more deeply into the social sphere, they typical start with a small experiment and expand by tying their social efforts into other campaign channels, such as email and e-commerce, says Roland Smart, an executive at Involver, a technology and services firm that helps big brands (including Nike and Cisco) and ad agencies reach customers through social networks.

For example, a common campaign approach is to buy ads to drive traffic to a microsite on a brand’s own website. But by also posting that ad content on Facebook and promoting it to fans of its brand, “companies often find they can get 25% to 50% more out of the same spend,” Smart maintains.

Many of those initial experiments that Smart refers to were likely shadow IT initiatives, ones run without IT involvement. The upshot for IT is that those early experiments now need to become part of the data management, data analysis, and CRM mainstream. IT needs to build a bridge with the marketing experts in their companies to make the most of the social experiment.

What do you think of companies using social media to help their customers engage with their brand and get help?  Got a good or bad story about brand engagement over social media?

Raspberry Wheat Recipe

Date: 2012.01.27 | Category: Recipes, Social Media | Response: 6

My friend Heather, from Blendhappy.com is here visiting me for a couple of days.  As part of my duties as PDX Tour Guide, I’ve been showing her the beer culture of my lovely hometown.  We started making beer smoothies and I realized after she posted the first video I never posted the Raspberry Wheat Recipe that we featured in the video.  That being said, here it is:

Raspberry Wheat Recipe:

Recipe adapted from HomebrewExchange.net: Raspberry Wheat

Ingredients:

• 3.3 lb Wheat Liquid Malt Extract
• 1 lb Light Dry Malt Extract
• 1 lb Malted Wheat
• 1 oz German Hallertau Hops
• 1 oz Mt. Hood Hops
• American Yeast
• 1 lb German Pislner
• 1 lb Wheat Malted
• 6lbs of raspberries from family friends
• 1/4 tsp of Irish Moss

Instructions:

1. Heat 3 galloons of water to 160F.
2. Steep grains for 30 minutes.
3. Remove grains and bring water to boil.
4. Add malts and bring to boil again.
5. Start hop schedule.  Add Mt. Hood Hops (60 minutes).
6. At 30 minutes add German Hallertau Hops.
7. At 15 minutes add Irish Moss.
8. Chill wort and add water to top off to 5 gallons.
9. Pitch yeast.
10. Add raspberries.

Note: Raspberries might cause your beer to throw up!  (See image below)

Anyone else have this problem?  How do you make sure your beer doesn’t explode?

Toastmasters (and Beer!)

Date: 2012.01.23 | Category: Events, Social Media | Response: 4

True Fact:  I’m petrified of public speaking.  I have all the classic symptoms: feeling nauseous, sweaty palms, mumbling, stammering and the inability to make eye contact…

… But, I’m trying to do something about it.  I started doing Toastmaster’s through work and got the chance to talk about beer!  Check out my fourth project: How to Say It

Cheers to Summer – A Lesson on Beer

Mr. Toastmaster, fellow toastmasters and honored guests.

When contemplating topics to speak about for today’s speech, which is focused around words, particularly descriptive ones. My first thought was “Oh, I’ll talk about beer!”  Followed by “Wait a minute, Toastmasters is work-related.  Maybe that is not a good idea.”  Then after going through my list of options, I finally settled on talking about beer.  Today I’ll be talking about the homebrewing process and different types of beer.  Hopefully, you’ll learn more about the beer making process and maybe get some summer beer selection ideas for your upcoming BBQs.

It is no secret with my friends that I love beer.  I blog about it on my personal blog, BiteSizeBrews.com.  I love the social aspect of it, going on adventures to find breweries and enjoying a beer with friends while catching up or cheering on a sports team.  I also love the science behind beer, how it has shaped history, influenced culture and the process behind making a good beer.  It is like a science project for adults!

I’ve been homebrewing on my own since I graduated from college.  The process is pretty simple, although time consuming and water intensive.  It is definitely a labor of love.  There are three main steps when it comes to homebrewing: brewing, fermentation, and bottling.

Brewing is the process of creating the actual liquid.  Depending on what type of beer you are making, you take grains and cook them to a particular temperature.  This takes some time.  I measure time in beer.  While waiting for the right temperature, enjoy a beer.  Then you remove the grains and add malt to the water, bring this to a boil.  Enjoy another beer.  Right now the enzymes in the malt are breaking the starches into sugars and the brew is called “wort”.  Basically your  creating food for the yeast to eat to create alcohol later on.  Once the malt is boiling you start your hop cycle.  Enjoy another beer.  This is where a lot of your flavor in your beer comes from.  Think of it as the spice you add to cooking.  Hops are what you add to beer for flavor.  This is also when your house starts smelling like a brewery.  Since we all live in Portland, I’m going to assume you know what I’m talking about.  Some people love it (me) some people hate it (my mom and my roommate).  Once the hop cycle is completed.  You chill the wort by adding ice or running it through a whirpool.  Then you place the wort into large glass vessals called carboys to start the second step, fermentation.

This is where wort becomes beer.  Think of it as a fitness center for beer.  This is where weaklings go in, work out and come out marathon runners.  Yeast is added and works on converting all those sugars into alcohol.  Primary fermentation takes about a week, then you move your beer into a second carboy for secondary fermentation.  This also filters your beer before bottling.

Depending on what sort of system you have at home, you have two choices, bottle your beer or keg it.  Kegging involves pouring your beer into a keg, connecting it to a C02 and pressurizing it.  This process takes about two days before you can enjoy your beer.  Bottling involves priming bottles with a small amount of sugar for some last minute yeast activity and then bottling each beer invidiually.  This process takes about two weeks before the beer is ready to enjoy.

Now that you know the process for making a good beer, let’s talk about styles.  Think of tasting beers like wine tasting, sophisticated and classy.  When you go wine tasting, you sip from the lightest white wine to the boldest red wine.  Beer is the same way, you start with light beers and work your way to the darkest beer offered.  A beer style is the category of beer based on factors including: color, flavor, alcoholic strength, ingredients, production method, recipe, history and origin.

There are two main types of beers: ales and lagers.  Ales, are top fermenting yeast, they have a warmer and shorter fermentation period and have an earthy fruity character.  Common ales include: Pale Ale, Indian Pale Ale, Porter, Stout, Wheat and Spiced.  The Pacific Northwest is know for their Indian Pale Ales, since we produce 70% of the US hops.  India Pale Ales have twice as much hops as regular Pale Ales since the hops were used to perserve beer being shipped from England to India during the British Occupation.

The other main type of beer is a lager.  Lagers are bottom fermenting yeast, with a colder and longer fermentation period and have a smooth crisp taste.   Lagers are identified primarily by color: amber (light) or dark lager, pretty simple to keep track of.  When you travel to Prague, Czech Republic, the home of Budwiezer, most breweries don’t speak English so bartenders will ask you “Light or Dark?” and that is it.

That being said, my rule of thumb is light colored beers on sunny days and dark colored beers for dark days.  Some of my favorite summertime beers here in Portland are the Hopworks Urban Brewery’s Organic Lager (if you are a beer newbie, ask for the Raddler, it’s half beer and half lemonaide)  and Burnside Brewing Company’s Sweet Heat.  I hope you learned a little about beer today, the process and the varieties.

Cheers!
Mr. Toastmaster.

Afraid of public speaking?  How are your conquering your fear?  (And what do you think of my speech?)

How to Kill Yeast (and solve the problem)

Date: 2012.01.18 | Category: Equipment, Recipes | Response: 14

My Bentley/PDX friend, Garrett, made the a New Year’s Resolution to 1) learn how to brew beer and 2) brew beer in 2012. I offered to let him borrow my homebrew set up since I haven’t been doing that much brewing these days. We met up last Sunday to watch the Patriots (WIN!) and brew some beer. The recipe he selected comes from Homebrew Exchange, called: Kevin’s Amber Ale.

The recipe is as follows:

• 6.0 lb Light Liquid Malt Extract
• 1.0 lb Crystal 80 Malt
• @60 mins 1.0 oz Centennial hops
• @ 5 mins 1.0 oz Centennial
• @ 5 mins 1.0 oz Mt Hood hops
• (dry hop 7 days) 1.0 oz Mt Hood hops
• @15 mins 1/4 tsp Irish Moss

In about 2 quarts of water, steep crystal malt at 155F for 30 minutes. Remove grains and rinse with 2 qt hot (~170F) water. Discard grains. Bring total volume in pot to 3 gallons. Bring to a boil. Turn off heat and add half of malt extract. Stir until dissolved. Turn heat back on and bring to boil. Boil for 60 minutes. Adding hops and Irish moss according to schedule. At 15 minutes before end of boil, add the rest of liquid malt extract (turning off heat to avoid scorching). Cool wort to about 75F, add to fermenter. Add clean H2O for total volume of 5 gal. Pitch yeast around 70F.

That last part is key.  Pitch yeast around 70F. For those of you who don’t know, yeast is a living organism.  If it gets too cold, it dies.  If it gets too hot, it dies.  Since I don’t own a wort chiller I drop the temperature in my carboys by filling it up with a bag of ice before adding my hot wort.  Since I was brewing at a friend’s house I completely forgot to add ice and thus pitched the yeast when the wort was ~100F!

What a great teacher I am!

Needless to say, we had some dead yeast in our beer.  Lucky enough, wort doesn’t go bad with 100 billion dead yeast cells in it.  (I know, gross, just don’t think about it.)  Garrett ran to the store, bought another Yeast Pack and saved the day.  We are now a couple of days into fermentation and the beer is happily bubbling away.

What is your worst home brewing mistake?

I Live Here: PDX (And I love it!)

Date: 2011.11.30 | Category: Breweries, Social Media | Response: 1

It’s no secret that I love my city, Portland.

I talked about it nonstop while in college on the East Coast.  Convinced college friends and world travelers that anyone who comes to visit will fall in love with the city too.

Plus, it doesn’t help that Portland has more breweries and pubs per capita than anywhere else in the world!

This being said, I was thrilled when my friend, Sara Gray reached out to me for her project I Live Here:PDX. The concept is simple, show case local residents, who are involved in their local communities, doing cool things across the city.  I immediately agreed, filled out a quick survey and a couple days later Sara and I met up for a photo shoot at BridgePort Brewery Co.

On Monday morning, I woke up for my post-Thanksgiving food coma to find my profile was showing on I Live Here:PDX!  Definitely check it out.

Check out those cute earrings!

Name & Age: Jenna Forstrom & 25

Hometown: Beaverton, OR

Current Neighborhood: Old Town Chinatown

How do you pay the rent and what is your slash? Community Manager / Beer Blogger

What do you create? Engagement and conversations. Laughter and love. Beer.

How did you land in Portland? Returned back to PDX after four years of college on the East Coast.

What is the last book you read? Currently reading Game of Thrones.

Name your favorite tattoo. The only one I’ve got! My Native American Orca on my left foot.

What was the last thing you ate at a food cart? Pad kee mao.

Oregonian, Willamette Week, or Mercury? None… Katu.com, CNN.com, Mashable.com

What is your favorite bridge and why? Steel Bridge. It’s right by my house and I love walking the Waterfront Loop.

Stumptown Coffee or _________? If it has caffeine I’m happy.

Coast or Mountains? Why not both? That is what makes Portland so great. You can go skiing on a Saturday and hike at the coast on Sunday!

Only in Portland moment? Anytime I have a friend visiting from the East Coast something crazy happens. Great people watching any time. Day or night.

A favorite local business? Any of the breweries! Particularly, HUB, Upright, Migration, Rogue, Deschutes and Bridgeport.

Are you a car person or a bike person? MAX, have a car though, bike was recently stolen

If you could change one thing about Portland, what would it be? Homelessness. It breaks my heart seeing people sleep under the bridges.

And finally, where can we find you on the web? At BiteSizeBrews.com and on Twitter @bite4size

At Bridgeport Brewing Co.

Live in Portland and want to be part of I Live Here:PDX, sign up here.  Also, need a photographer?  Check out Sara Gray’s website! We grew up going to church together and I’ve loved working with her on previous projects.  Check them out here,  here and here.

Ever been to Portland?  What did you love most about it?  (It’s the beer, I know!)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Date: 2011.11.24 | Category: Recipes | Response: 10

Last Thanksgiving, I was in Praha celebrating the holiday with my best friend, John, and a childhood friend Jordan over local beers.

Thanksgiving 2010 - Jon, Jenna and Jordan

This year, my brother and I will be heading to his friend’s house, Kelsey to celebrate with her family.  The past year I’ve had a lot to be thankful for, an awesome family, amazing friends, a good job, opportunities to travel and good health.

My co-worker sent me this great article from the Wall Street Journal, What did George Washington Drink? which had a Homemade Harvest Ale, no special beer equipment needed!

HOMEMADE HARVEST ALE
Despite the modern conveniences, this remains a very rustic recipe, and makes a rough-around-the-edges brew.

1 small pumpkin
Handful malted barley
1/8 ounce spices (I used a mix of fresh ginger, licorice, anise, and cinnamon)
1/4 cup molasses
1 pound malt extract
1/8 ounce hops (I used Fuggles)
1/2 packet dry ale yeast
1 ounce brown sugar
A few raisins

TOOLS YOU’LL NEED:
Mesh bag
3-gallon pot
1-gallon glass jug
Strainer
Funnel
Diluted bleach (for sanitizing)
Plastic wrap
Empty beer bottles, caps and capper, or re-sealable bottles

1. Split pumpkin in half and roast in oven at 350 degrees until soft and caramelized, about 30 minutes.

2.Put malted barley in mesh bag (or wrap in cheesecloth), and steep in 1½ gallons water as you bring it to a boil. When it boils, remove malted barley. Boil hops and spices in water for a few minutes, then add pumpkin pulp, molasses and malt extract. Boil for another minute. Cover pot and let it cool to room temperature. You can put it in a sink full of ice water to speed this up.

3. Sanitize the jug, strainer and funnel by rinsing them with diluted bleach, then with water. Pour liquid through strainer and funnel into jug, add yeast and cover tightly with plastic wrap (poke a few holes in it to let CO2 out). Leave in a dark corner for a few days. It’ll bubble and foam as it ferments.

4. When beer stops bubbling and starts to clear, sanitize bottles and pour in beer, leaving dead yeast sediment in jug. Boil brown sugar in 1/2 cup water to sanitize it. Let liquid cool, and use it to top off bottles. Drop a raisin or two into each bottle; cap and wait. This is an old trick: When the raisins float, the beer is carbonated and ready to drink.

What are you thankful for this Thanksgiving?  What is your favorite beer to go with Turkey?

The Love of Beer

Date: 2011.10.10 | Category: Events | Response: 5

Last night, I got the opportunity to attend a free screening for The Love of Beer, at Coalition Brewing.  (Great brewery – check out their The Loving Cup Maple Porter!)  The Love of Beer is a documentary celebrating women in the Pacific Northwest beer industry.  It was definitely an eye-opening movie.  Did you know ancient Egyptians forbid men from brewing beer?  It was considered women’s work.  This shows such a dramatic culture shift to present times, with an industry completely dominated by men.

I love how close to home this documentary was, featuring local breweries, brewers, and events.  Definitely made me fall over in love with Portland again.  The most powerful aspect of the documentary was the stories the women told and how much they had to education themselves and fight for recognition within the biz.  Something I could truly appreciate.

Alison Grayson, the genius behind this movie says, “I was blown away by how instantly warm and welcoming this community was – it was unlike anything I had ever seen.  The craft beer community quickly became my second family, and I started incorporating my background in video production by making short videos for my friend’s beer blogs, festivals, etc.  I started going to more events and met more and more people in the community and in the industry.  I began to notice a huge disconnect between the vast amount of women beer consumers and the sparse amount of women who worked in the beer industry.”

Check out the trailer:

The message behind the movie was all about education women on good craft beer.  Figuring out what you love to drink and where it came from.  So my question to my readers is:

What do you like to drink?  Do you know where that beer came from?

Total side comment, I think I feel in love with the movie’s logo.  The heart shaped hop.  Future tattoo?  I think so…

Meet Dave.

Date: 2011.09.26 | Category: Social Media | Response: 3

Dave (in plaid), Jenna (me) and Andy (in grey) at Word Domination Summit! (Right before we broke the hammock.)

Meet Dave.

He’s the guy I lovingly refer to as “hubby” on Twitter.  (There is a beer story involved here*).

His favorite beer for the fall is Shipyard Brewing Company’s Pumpkinhead, based out of Maine.  “I’ve been drinking them like crazy and apparently they ran out of stock in Rhode Island last year.”  (I’m sure Dave isn’t solely responsible for that one…)  Samuel Adams’ Summer Ale is his summer classic brew of choice.  And another “crazy good!” beer is Jacob Lienenkugel Brewing Company’s Sunset Wheat, brewed in Wisconsin.

Writer. New Englander. All around great guy.

He’s much more than that.  He’s humble, passionate and hardworking.  He puts people’s needs in front of his own.  (Babysitting a Twitter friend in Boston or giving money to the homeless outside a club).  Loves his Boston sports teams.  (Willing to skip out on a conference to cheer on the Bruins to be 2011 Champions).  And he won’t let obstacles get in his way (like hurricanes).

He’s also an author.  And today, September 26, 2011, his debut book, Lead Without Followers comes out!

Lead Without Followers is the culmination of the last three years of Dave’s life.  (And the only thing Dave has talked about the entire time I’ve known him.)  Lead Without Followers details Dave’s journey through leadership and aides the reader to understand the underlying causes of our world’s modern leadership problems.  Through radically redefining the meaning of leadership, Lead Without Followers reveals an inspired, widely accessible and intrinsically human solution, a heartfelt alternative leadership philosophy based in love, selflessness, compassion and hope.

Do yourself a favor, if you are even remotely interested in leadership in any way shape or form, and get the book.  As Dave says, “Your leadership is birthed by your own choosing and made special through your own unique talents, gifts, passions, and abilities.”  As someone who works with middle school girls as a leader, I cannot even begin to tell you how right on Dave is with that one.  Follow your heart, play to your strengths and do your best to completely understand the culture within you are trying to do work.

I have to ask: If you only have one sentence to pitch somebody on why they should want to be a leader in any way, shape or form, what would you say to him or her?

* While at World Domination Summit, I brought my friend, Sean, who was working crazy hard assisting with the conference a beer at the opening party.  Dave was standing right next to him and said, “You bring beers?  OMG! I love you, will you marry me?”  And the rest was history (or at least a really long running Twitter joke.)

Breakside Brewery – Portland, OR

Date: 2011.08.16 | Category: Breweries | Response: 0

I’ve been to Breakside Brewery twice.  Once to meet up with a fellow #WDS friend to try their Mango IPA.  I tried this beer at the First Annual Portland Fruit Beer Festival and fell in love.  An IPA that I actually like?  Heaven!

Then I went back again Friday night for their Beer Challenge.  In honor of Oregon Craft Beer Month Breakside posted the following message on Facebook:

“Breakside Session Beer Challenge! We have 5 beers with an ABV of 4.2% or less. Anyone who drinks all 5 of these “light” beers in a “session” this week will get a free Breakside Hat. We Love Beer! Especially beers you can drink several of and not fall off your stool.”

Needless to say I was sold.  It was easy to round up some friends who wanted to take on the challenge (and a designated driver).  What’s not to like about a sunny Friday evening in Portland when it’s 85 degrees out and the chance to win some cool hats.

Katie, David, Garrett and I headed to Breakside.  Ordered fries (both the Rogue Smokey Blue Waffle and Sweet Potato – cause we are fatties like that) and some beer.

First up was the Gose, coming in at 4.0% ABV this rare, German-style wheat ale that was purported to be popular among university students in Leipzig thanks to its supposedly aphrodisiacal qualities. This beer is brewed with a mix of wheat, barley, salt, and coriander. It gets its tartness from the inclusion of lactic acid bacteria.  JF Notes: Definitely a sour beer.  The guys next to us doing the challenge suggested starting with this one since it was in their opinion the worst beer of the bunch.  However, it wasn’t too terrible.

Kate and I enjoying Breakside Gose

Next was the Farmhouse Grisette, at 3.8% ABV this farmhouse-style biere de table–a beer that might traditionally have been consumed by Belgian children. It is made with two types of wheat, a saison yeast, and German hops; it gains additional complexity from the use of sour wort. Our lightest beer ever is equally easy drinking and layered.  JF Notes: An easy beer to down, light and refreshing.  Good summer drink.

Farmhouse Grisette

Then was the Dry Stout, at 4.5% ABV this Irish style stout brewed in the tradition of Guinness. Dark in flavor but light in alcohol, this is a roasty and chocolatey beer that won’t make you feel stuffed.  JF Notes:  Amateur move here ordering a dark beer in the middle of our challenge!  However, like Guinness this beer turned out to be pretty light too.

The dry stout

Followed by Scottish 70, at 4.0% ABV.  Who said that all summer beers have to be light in color? Here’s a beautiful brown ale that’s light in body but not short on flavor. For all the malt lovers out there, our brewer Sam has crafted a subtle beer that highlights the simplicity and complexity of the brewer’s art.  JF Notes: Great beer to follow the Dry Stout.

Scottish Ale

Finally, Summer Gruit, another 4.0% ABV.  Gruits are unhopped ales that harken back to former times when hops were only one of many spices used to bitter and flavor a beer. Our low alcohol version is made with raw wheat and spiced with fenugreek, green cardamom, long pepper, Sichuan peppercorn, hyssop, St. John’s wort, and rosebuds.  JF Notes:  Personally, this was my least favorite beer, which was good because it was the last beer we drank so I didn’t really care that much.

Summer Gruit

All in all a great night with friends, Butters (the pug I was puppysitting), sunshine and beer.  If there was one thing I could have changed it would have been our waiter.  While all the other waiters loved Butters, stopped by and said “hi” our waiter was slow moving and seemed bothered by us.  I’m sorry, I brought three friends with me, added three of your beers to Untappd and ran up a $100 tab and you are going to be rude to me.  When I asked about a Breakside pint glass for my collection he said he would charge me for it.  I’ve never heard of a brewery doing that with such a large tab.  No thanks!

Regardless, Breakside is a great brewery.  Their Mango IPA is still my favorite.  You need to go there on Mondays (Mango Mondays) to get it, but it’s definitely worth the adventure to North Portland and they have amazing test beers like a beet one that is actually pink!

Breakside Champs - David, Jenna, Katie

Been to Breakside Brewery?  What did you think?

Making Kahlua

Date: 2011.06.22 | Category: Recipes | Response: 6

Last week, I had the opportunity to learn how to make kahlua with my friend’s Dad, Carl.  He’s been making this delicious coffee liquor for years and is a real pro!  He’s actually working on a custom recipe for a Kona Coffee shop in Hawaii.

Here’s how to make kahlua:

Making Kahlua

1. Mix water and fine ground coffee in a crockpot.  You want a bold style coffee.
2. Heat on high until you reach 145F.  Stir occasionally.  I used the commercial method.  Make kahlua while watching TV, every time there is a commercial, get up, check the temperature and then stir.
3. Turn off the heat and cool slowly.
4. Filter through a cone strainer.
5. Then filter through a paper filter into a pitcher.
6. Add white sugar (we omitted fructose sugar).
7. Add crème de cacao.
8. Add everclear.
9. Add vanilla extract.
10. Add almond extract.
11. Stir and bottle.

Let sit overnight before tasting.

Here is the batch breakdown:

I made my first batch on my own using Stumptown Coffee Roaster’s Holler Mountain Coffee.  It honestly turned out pretty good.  The first time I sampled it there was a little bit of “heat” (a la alcohol burn) in my mouth afterwards.  However, putting it in coffee solves this problem.  I emailed Carl and asked him for suggestions to counter act this and he said to either add water to water it down or add a bit of sugar.  I’m going with the second option, adding a bit of sugar always saves the day!

For those readers who aren’t local: Stumptown Coffee Roasters is an independent coffee roaster based here in Portland, Oregon.  Stumptown is one of the many nicknames of Portland, Oregon.  The city was called Stumptown in the mid-19^th century, when our city’s growth forced land to be cleared quickly to accommodate the growth, but the tree stumps were not immediately removed.  Holler Mountain is Stumptown’s most popular organic blend with directly traded coffees.  Fully washed coffees from Central and South America bring floral fruit notes and semi-washed coffee from the Aceh Province of the Sumatra Island of Indonesia adds a syrupy sweetness and a viscous body.  This carefully constructed blend combines elegant Central and South American coffees and darker toned, earthly Indonesian coffees.

Have you ever made kahlua?  How did it turn out?  What coffee would you suggest I try next?

Funny story:  For those who don’t know me in “real life” I sometimes look A LOT younger than I actually am.  I went to a liquor store before making this batch of kahlua and was looking around for Everclear and was asked by the manager of the liquor store, “Are you looking for something in particular?”  When I responded, “Yes, do you sell Everclear?”  I got, “Do you even know what Everclear is?  Are you 21?”  I laughed and then explained I was making kahlua and showed my ID.