We decided to take the day off of work today and head down to Plymouth to visit Mayflower Brewing, where our buddy Matt Steinberg is the brewmaster. I’ve been meaning to get down to Plymouth for more than a year now as Matty is making some classic, traditional beers, including perhaps the region’s best porter. I expected to find a few folks from the New England beer scene there but was pretty surprised at the size of the turnout and the number of familiar faces. Defying the old too many cooks maxim, brewers from across eastern New England stopped by to lend a hand with hop additions, running hoses, cleaning tanks, and hauling spent grain. The roster included Matt and Drew Brousseau of Mayflower, Will Meyers of Cambridge Brewing (who was leading the group as the Brewers Association’s selected brewer), Scott Brunelle of Rock Bottom Boston, Tod Mott of Portsmouth Brewing, Dann Paquette, Jeremy Goldberg of Cape Ann Brewing, along with several folks from Cambridge Brewing, Harpoon Brewery, and others.

The beer, the Audacity of Hops, will be a somewhat strong Belgian-style IPA, similar to the beer Will brews at Cambridge. It was an entertaining brewday as a half-dozen or more brewers appeared to be manning the operations at different points, in between pizza and beer stops. At a little over 20 barrels, the beer included more than 1700 pounds of malt (hauled away by the sheriff for an inmate run farm), a healthy addition of Belgian candi sugar, as well as every hop the guys could get their hands on (Tettnang, Magnum, Columbus, Cascade, Simcoe, Amarillo, Palisades, Hallertau Hersbrucker), with additions used in the mash, dry hopped, in a hop back, in fermentation, and before bottling. All told, it appears they will be using about 60-70 pounds of hops.

The beer will be available for attendees of the upcoming Craft Brewers Conference in Boston and for purchase in select local bars during the conference. In celebration of the occasion, we’re debuting a new video segment on BeerScribe and hope the bugs get worked out.

Here’s Matt Steinberg introducing the beer…

And here’s the gang packing the hopback in, um, a very scientific manner…