About Jay

My name is Jay Maslar, and this blog is all about enjoying great beer, food, wine, spirits, coffee, and anything else consumable. I am 26 years old, married, and live in my birth city of Binghamton, New York with my beautiful wife, Tara.

I am co-founder of a nano craft brewery named Black Heart Brewery (www.blackheartbrewery.com). We are currently in the final stage of build out and will be entering the licensing process shortly. We specialize in American style beers, and hope to be open for business by the end of 2010. We have the manual side almost finished and will be brewing at full force on it by the end of September.

We recently moved back to Binghamton after spending 14 months in Winter Park, Florida – just North East of Orlando – where I graduated college with a degree in Recording Arts from Full Sail University. I currently do audio /video work for a local college, and have a few independent projects underway. Albums and films to come.

I started Down The Pie-rate Hole (DTPH) because I wanted a place to keep my beer reviews, without relying on another website. When planning for the blog, I realized I would need to widen the scope of topic to be about not only beer, but also food and other beverages. I also want to be able to share information about our nanobrewery. We have been in the last 10% of construction for the past year. The brew system was very time consuming to finish designing and building. There were many tasks that were new to us, such as etching circuit boards, and had to be researched and fully understood before we could tackle it.

We are a very short time away from brewing, which will provide me with an endless supply of material to write about and post, as well as an equal amount of beers to review. I have reviewed a few of our beers on here, and I feel that I give an honest opinion on how I feel about it as a finished product. There have been beers we have made that I was not a fan of, and I did not hide that. There are other ones we have made that are among my favorite brews of all time. When I review a beer, I always try to keep the brewers intentions in mind when reviewing it. That is why I try to provide information with every review, so people know what the purpose of the beer is.  Knowing exactly what was intended when we brew actually makes me a harder judge of our product. I have tried hundreds of different beers (I should have started reviewing earlier), and when we set out to make a beer, I know exactly what I want it to look, smell, taste, and feel like. We might make a product that is good, but if it is not what we set out to be, we did not succeed; defaulting to something good is being lucky, not something you want to build a business behind.

I am currently in process of starting a video blog for DTPH. What I hope to do is be able to make short, interesting episodes. I am not looking to doing a formatted show, but more shorts that can range from brewery tours, to brewing, to a beer tasting, to a brewpub review etc. The first episode will most likely be about this year’s Ithaca Brew Fest (that is, if I don’t do one before that…we will see). The BHB crew will be there, and I plan on shooting some video. More info to come.