drink some bread

2009-06-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

The belgian style golden blew up in secondary, after following a recipe's recommendation of adding more dextrose when you move it to the carboy. The airlock clogged and the stopper shot itself out of the bottle. I sanitized the stopped, put it back in, and refilled the airlock. It's still bubbling, so I think I might be in the clear. CO2 is heavier than air, and there's a pretty good chance that as a result, the beer didn't oxidize. It's also pretty high in alcohol, which reduces the chance that some bacteria got a toehold in there while it was exposed.

I kicked a "housecleaning" batch of something resembling a belgian dubbel to the yeast bed of the golden. It was partially an excuse to use up some expired liquid malt extract, including a can of Cooper's Old Ale. As well as some treacle, some table sugar, and a few ounces of honey I had lying around.

Honey quality apparently does make a big difference in mead. The half gallon batch I made using a pound of honey from the farm in Peabody, MA where I shot my friend Paul's wedding was outstanding.

Belgian White and my first wine (in a long time)

2009-05-17T17:49:00.000-07:00

I just kegged my third or fourth Belgian style white beer, and I'm pretty happy with it and with being able to make it pretty consistent. The amount of trub I had in secondary was kind of mind boggling though, like, almost two inches.

I just pitched my first yeast starter, to a Belgian style golden ale. I've never seen an airlock spit out water like that before.

I just started up an expired red wine kit. This is going to be my first wine since the very first time I ever fermented. Hopefully it'll be a step up from EBT purchased grape juice concentrate, Poland Springs jug swiped from an office, and extra sugar from Dunkin Donuts sugar packs. I do have to thank my perennially homeless couchsurfing friend's foodstamps for my current interest in brewing, because at the time, we just thought it would be funny to sidestep that whole "you can't buy alcohol with foodstamps" thing.

A quick update

2009-05-11T10:39:00.000-07:00

I made my first yeast starter yesterday. I've never really bothered with one before, but I'm going to make a fairly hefty belgian golden this week and decided that a recipe that calls for over a pound of priming sugar and over six pounds of liquid malt extract could probably benefit from a larger initial yeast culture. I'm going to go with the seasonal white labs offering of "Abbey Yeast IV", mostly because, well, the golden ale yeast is always available and this isn't. I did, however, learn one important lesson from this:

Don't pour boiling water directly into a growler without giving it a chance to cool first. Over your burner. So that the boiled wort goes directly into the insides of your stove.

That being said, my second attempt at making a start appears to be bubbling nicely, on what someone dubbed my "mad scientist shelf" in my pantry which also has a couple of gallon or less meads and ciders bubbling along in growlers and repurposed carlo rossi jugs. (Are you a friend of Carlo? At times, haven't we all been friends of Carlo?).

I'm also going to take my first stab at minimashing with my next dry stout. I'm going to add two pounds of flaked barley to my steep, and hold it at 155 Fahrenheit for 45-60 minutes before starting my boil.

Cheese
I've been dabbling in cheesemaking. I got a paneer recipe from a book and i've been mucking around with it. The key seems to be getting milk that hasn't been "ultrapastuerized", which apparently isn't very good for cheesemaking. The process can be as simple as heating up milk in water, and tossing in some leftover citric acid from meadmaking until the milk curdles, then stretching a grain bag over a pasta strainer, pouring the curds and whey through it, and rinsing the curds. Then you hang it to dry over your sink, and you eat it after it's dry. Or you could grab some of your roommate's "fresh herb" mix from whole foods and mix it in, with a tiny bit of salt.

You can make cheesemaking really complicated, but you don't have to.

Pickles
I've also been dabbling in pickling. I was ordering some zines to sell at the collectively run vegan pizza shop I work at, and I came across Wild Fermentation,by Sandor Katz. It's hands down one of the best two dollars minus wholesale discount plus shipping purchases I've made in a long, long time.

The pickling recipe is pretty simple, and mostly involves boiling up some salt in water to make a brine, adding some cucumbers, and adding some other spices and odds and ends for flavor and firmness.

Other Stuff
I'm going to finish and post my "Beers of Chicago" entry from January before I leave for Chaos in Tejas in Austin, and I'm going to write a "Beers of Texas" entry when I get back. I thought I was too cool for Oi! when Cocksparrer last came to the US, and I'm getting a chance to remedy that mistake. That and seeing Amebix again is going to be pretty great. I don't think I've ever seen a room of crusty kids as happy any time in my life as at their show in Providence earlier this year.

PS
It's college move-out season. You put up with them from September to June-ish. Those damn kids are wasteful. I just got myself a couple guitar stands, a gig bag, and a bunch of other odds and ends from a dumpster near a dorm. It's a free thrift store.

A very quick update

2008-12-04T11:57:00.001-08:00

In the keg:

My second attempt at a Pumpkin Ale. I was going a little bit British Brown with this, and used Fuggles in the nose and a SafAle 04 yeast. I think the yeast taste is a little too strong and the spice mix is wrong, but it's not bad. Which is almost more frustrating. I think it may age into something a little better. I brewed it with a friend who was going to be gone for a few months, and I procrastinated getting it into the bottle and the keg because it was going to be a hassle. Also, the big sugar pill carb drops don't dissolve very quickly, and I should have put them straight in the bottle and not in the bottling bucket, because I found them all half dissolved when I'd finished bottling.

In the bottle:

My last few bottles of the simple sweet mead that I started in May 2007. I think it was 3 pounds of bulk grade a supply shop honey to a gallon of water. I boiled the honey and water while I was brewing an Imperial Pale Ale (which succeeded in being an Imperial Pale Ale, but was a terrible choice of keg homebrew for the fourth of July, and may have scared one of my friends off of my homebrew entirely*.). I used a pack of Red Star champagne yeast, and racked it off the yeast bed a month in. I bottled it the first week of October because I needed a gift for the wedding I was both attending and shooting**. I'm extremely happy with how it came out. It's light and sweet and it's at least as good as the cheap mead you get at the ren faire, and better than a few commercial meads I've had. The only problem is that it all went very, very quickly and I'm trying to hang onto these bottles so they don't go away before I have another batch ready to drink. A sidenote about mead is at ***.

In my six and a half gallon carboy****:

Six gallons of a mead with heather and ginger added. I pitched the yeast in September after it all spent a day on campden tablets. I should have already racked this down to a five (and bottled the extra gallon) but right now I don't have the $ for another carboy or better bottle, and I don't want to eat up that much more space in my apartment than I already do, because my roommates are very sweet about it.

In my first fermenting bucket:

Wheat beer hopped with Amarillo for flavor and aroma. I think I added coriander, and I used a Belgian Wit Yeast. I like a little bit of citrus in my wheat, and Amarillo seemed to fit the bill.

In my second fermenting bucket:

Straightforward IPA monohopped with green bullet, from New Zealand. My friend's roommate got me some, which is very hard to come by on the East Coast. I'm going to rack this to secondary and dry hop this with the last half ounce of green bullet pellets.

In my third fermenting bucket:

Belgian Wit. Straightforward to the style.

In a half gallon growler from Macneil's:

A half gallon batch of mead made from two pounds of fancy local organic honey, on Cote de Blanc yeast.

In my five gallon better bottle:

Five gallons of cider, made from cider from the same farm the honey came from. This is the secondary, and it's ready to bottle.

In a five gallon glass carboy:

More of the same, but spiked with a pound of brown sugar.

Beer I am currently drinking:

Flying Fish Extra Pale Ale that I bought in Philly at the little pizza shop near Fiume and Clark Park last March. It's ok. It's also been in my closet since then, so I don't necessarily think a review is fair.

* It was a pretty damn good double IPA. My beer geek friends liked it. But 10% ABV and an aroma you can smell from across the room is probably too much for people who aren't beer geeks.

** Being around your high school friends is weird. Also, the wine bottle full of mead was killed minutes before the ceremony by the groom's party, whisky shot style. And being a first shooter for a wedding for the first time is stressful.

*** People who are alcohol geeks do fine around mead. People who aren't can easily fall prey to how light it tastes and not give it the respect it deserves. People like my librarian-like very quiet and calm friend who for the purposes of this blog shall remain nameless who, after drinking too much mead, got glass breaking, chair throwing, puking on The World//Inferno Friendship Society's merch girl drunk, and looked like hell in the morning. Then again, this kind of comes in hand with opening your home to touring bands and random friends with no where else to stay.

**** Left behind by former friends in a move "back to the land" to start an intentional community in Tennessee.

Pumpkin Oatmeal Stout opened:

2008-02-10T14:56:00.001-08:00

I like how this came out, but it's not entirely what I expected, and the flavors aren't quite balanced how I'd like them. I went a little too heavy on the vanilla extract, and I'm going to tone down the bittering hops the next time I brew this - I think I put in two ounces of Magnum, which is usually something like 8% or 10% Alpha. It's a little too much. I like the smoothness, I like the spices, and I like that it's not immediately apparent that this clocks in somewhere in the neighborhood of 8% ABV.

Smuttynose Baltic Porter

2008-02-10T14:52:00.000-08:00

I picked this up the other day, having forgotten that I generally don't like Baltic Porters all that much. It pours out extremely dark, and has a vigorous brown head to it. It's really bitter - like I can't entirely tell if it's hop bitterness or just a lot of black patent malt, or both. That, and the bitterness drowns out a lot of other things about the beer. It has a fairly nice aroma, and is fairly smooth and a little bit sweet, once you get past that initial wallop of bitterness. Overall, it's ok, but I'm not sure it's anything i'm going to pick up again any time soon.

Pumpkin Oatmeal Stout:

2008-01-07T11:04:00.000-08:00

My mom grew a lot of pumpkins this year and gave me a few, and I wanted to make some beer with them. I had a pumpkin stout that I really liked back in October, and started thinking I wanted to go darker with my pumpkin beer, since the first one I’d brewed was pretty close to a UK styled brown ale. I was drinking an oatmeal stout and it struck me that the smoothness of the flaked oats would probably go really, really well with the sweetness of the pumpkin. I just brewed this on the first of the year, so it’s not going to be ready for a bit, but here’s the recipe I used. That and I felt like I ought to make something on the first day of the year.

Pumpkin:

Get a few pumpkins

Grains:

1 Lb Chocolate Malt

.5 Lb Roast Barley

.5 Lb Black Patent Malt

1 Lb Flaked Oats

Extract:

6 LBs Dark dme

2 Lbs Light dme

(mostly since I work at a homebrewing store, I have a bunch of slightly leaky bags of dried malt extract that we couldn’t sell to customers that I’ve adopted lying around, so I decided to go big with this recipe. I’m expecting this to roll in at around 7-9% alcohol by volume.)

8 Oz malto dextrin

Hops:

1 Oz Magnum at the start of the boil, for bittering

1 Oz Fuggles five minutes before the end of the boil, for aroma

Yeast:

WLP004 Irish Ale yeast

Spices:

2 Oz organic cinnamon sticks

a pinch of ginger

two pinches of nutmeg

a squirt of vanilla extract

Process:

Cut up the pumpkins, clean out the insides, and roast them. Make sure you have a big enough cookie sheet to deal with the amount of pumpkin you’re cutting up. I missed this step and now have a freezer full of pumpkin as a result. Oil the sheet, and put it in your oven for 45 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Supposedly the skin will just peel off, but it didn’t. Maybe I didn’t roast for long enough. Anyway, if the skin has not peeled off, cut it off. Put the chunks of pumpkin into your grain bag. Bring enough water to cover the grain bag to 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Steep for about a half hour. Pull the grains.

Bring the water to a boil. Add your dme and your bittering hops. Towards the end of the boil, add the spices, the aroma hops, and the malto dextrin. Malto dextrin is a nonfermentable sweetener that gives beer a bigger mouth feel. This recipe is low in hops because traditionally, stouts are low in hop flavor and bitterness. There are a few exceptions, and some of them work, but I think hoppy stouts are a little weird.

Pull the brewpot off the stove, and put it in a sink with running water. Fill the sink with ice cubes. Wait for the beer to drop to less than 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and then pitch your yeast. Seal in fermenter, leave for two weeks, bottle.

Brooklyn Brewery Black Chocolate Stout

2007-12-04T19:46:00.001-08:00

This is easily one of my favorite seasonal beers. Dark like filthy motor oil, with a deeply tan head to it, and almost imposing at a first taste, this once a year visitor clocks in at an impressive 10.6% ABV, which I think is up .1% from last year. This also puts it cleanly in the "imperial stout" category, although the label won't tell you that unless you give this beer a closer look. This is also one of the strongest beers I have ever seen available this cheaply - I got my last six pack for a little under nine dollars. The first taste is very bitter and acrid, and more flavors emerge after that first sip. There's a lot going on here, somewhat like the complicated taste of a good barleywine. There's also a notable but not overpowering hop aroma. This drinks like a dessert, and a few of them will hit you pretty hard. I should really remember to cellar some of this for next year.

bad idea beer?

2007-10-14T10:36:00.000-07:00

Today I am going to brew a Yerba Mate IPA. I'll post later and let you all know how it went.

Q: Why would someone with a sub-poverty line income spend almost $12 on a six pack of beer?

2007-10-12T23:36:00.000-07:00

A: You haven’t had anything that victory brewing company has made, have you?

The Victory Storm King Imperial Stout pours out dark as way past due for a change motor oil, with a creamy, slightly fizzy head to it the color of very old athletic socks. That being said, it’s actually pretty appealing looking. The aroma almost smells chewy in a way that doesn’t actually smell like cookies but makes me think of them nonetheless. It’s very inviting. This is very pleasantly bitter and solid, and almost a little sweet. That being said, it’s still a little bit smooth, although people more used to dry stouts like Murphys or Beamish or in a worst cause scenario, Guinness, may think it has a little it of a bite to it. That being said, this is on the mellow end of imperial stouts, especially for a beer that’s 9.1% alcohol by volume. The high abv makes the hefty price per twelve pack seem a little less over the top, both in terms of the amount of ingredients you need to toss in to make it that strong, and also in the “Well, I could have gotten two six packs of PBR for this much money, but this is almost as much alcohol”sense. If this wasn’t so damn expensive, I’d drink it all the time, and I’d rank it pretty high on my list of favorite stouts. Actually, I can’t think of an imperial stout that I like more than this off the top of my head.

Otter Creek Copper Ale

2007-10-11T21:11:00.000-07:00

Another of my “beer I bought because it seemed like the most interesting option I hadn’t already had from a limited selection at the liquor store next to where I happened to be” reviews. In other words, neither this nor the Sam Adams Mix Pack would have been my first choice at a good liquor store, but hey, you’re not always at a good liquor store and sometimes a limited selection makes you try things you might not otherwise. That and Otter Creek’s porter is pretty great. The label says “Copper Ale”, but if you just handed me the pint glass, I’d call it a brown, with maybe a hint more ruddiness and darkness than is typical for the style. Smells like a brown ale, tastes like a brown ale, drinks like a brown ale. The hop aroma is pleasant but faint, and almost a little fruity. This tastes a tiny bit sharp and metallic, but not in a bad way. I’d gladly take this over the Sam Adams brown that I reviewed in my last post, though. Also, boo to Otter Creek for using screwtop bottles – commercial craft brewers should have more respect for their homebrewing roots and use bottles that can be recycled at home. This is a nice beer, but I just don’t have all that much to say about it. It’s not like I won’t finish the six pack. I just don’t know if I’d buy it again anytime soon.

Sam Adams Brewmaster's Collection Mix Pack

2007-10-10T20:42:00.000-07:00

Brewmaster's Collection Samuel Adams Mix Pack

Oh, Sam Adams, where to start? Part of me is happy to see locals doing well in craft brewing. The rest of me just wishes they'd do a better job making beer. Then again, maybe I'm not the target demographic for this. Sam Adams seems to brew a lot of beer that seems tailored to be a little bit like craft beer, but not to the extent that it will be uncomfortable to palates more used to big corporate beer. They do, however, make the occasional beer that I really like, so I thought I'd give this six pack a chance. The mix pack is a mixed bag.

Starting off, we have the Honey Porter. Stouts and Porters (the difference, historically speaking, is splitting hairs) are my favorite beer style, so I may as well start here. The best way to start with any beer is pouring it into a glass, and you should smell it before you drink it. There's not much hop aroma, which is appropriate to the style. The taste is strongly malty, and the beer tastes heavy without really being satisfying. It almost seems like they went really heavy on one of the specialty malts in a way that feels really out of balance. It's sharp and bitter and not particularly smooth. A much better bet for porter are the fine offerings from Left Hand or Otter Creek.

The Black Lager is a lot better. Not amazing, but much better. Beers made with dark malts and lager yeast aren't particularly common. At first smell, this has more hop aroma than the porter, but it's nice and subtle. The first sip has a very nice stout-like smoothness, but the lager yeast makes it into a different beast. It's also pleasantly bitter, and almost a little sour. This is very thick and bitter for a lager, and if someone just gave me a pint glass and didn't tell me what it was I'd probably never guess about the yeast. The grain bill feels a little out of whack in the same way as the porter, but not as strongly.

The Brown Ale is the best of the bunch. This is a very nice take on a traditional British style of beer, made slightly more assertive in a very American craft brew fashion, without losing the nice subtlety and balance of a proper brown ale. The hops come across a little stronger than in most British imports, but it doesn't jump down your throat like a lot of American beers. The label says they're using Spalt and Golding hops, neither of which are all that aggressive. Visually, this is the lightest of the bunch, but still a few shades darker, than, say, a Newcastle. The grain bill still tastes a little bitter and sour, but not much as the either two. I could do without the sourness. I might actually order this one at a bar.

I find it kind of frustrating that Sam Adams is so much more available than so many other, better beers, and that they present themselves as if they were craft brewers. The beer I get from them at any liquor store in Boston doesn't seem any fresher than beer from much further away, either. I wish they weren't so ubiquitous, and that some of that bar tap space could go to actual craft beers. On the other hand, they make everyone who works for them brew at least once batch of beer a year, no matter what they do for the company, and I kind of respect that.

In other beer news, ethanol production is going to make malt prices increase sharply in the future. More on that as I read enough about it to write a coherent post.