Monthly Archives: October 2012

Improvised Blow Off Tube

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The quad is fermenting away nicely, and I was just thinking how smoothly everything’s going.  The brew went well and we hit our gravity right on the mark.  In fact, it went a little too well and we wound up with a little more than 5 gallons, but we figured there was enough head space in the fermenter, so why not keep it?

Now fermentation has started, and is going perhaps a bit too briskly — foaming up out the airlock and gumming it up.  I just cleaned out the airlock and two minutes later it was all gunky again.  So I rigged up a blow off tube.  Luckily, our normal tubing we use for siphoning is the same gauge as our airlock stem, so I just plugged it into the airlock hole and put the other end in a half-full gallon growler.  It’s bubbling very musically every minute or so.

The Tripel that Almost Wasn’t and the Quad that May Yet Be

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Well, we haven’t gotten around to blogging about the tripel because, well, we were too busy drinking it.  Because of the trouble in the brew, we weren’t quite sure what to expect.  But it turned out to be very nice, probably my favorite tripel.

It’s not quite as strong as a tripel should be, stalling out around 8.5% instead of the 9.5% we were aiming for.  But it’s nice and creamy, with a rich mouthfeel as a result of all the extra unfermented sugar.  So in many ways it’s a bit more like a dubbel.  So we’ve taken to calling it “Dubbel Axel”, since it’s more like 2.5x instead of 3x.

In any event, flush with quasi-success, we decided to brew a quad.  Well, I should say we were planning on brewing a stout, but even after trying a dozen or so of them, couldn’t agree on what we liked.  So we gave up on the stout idea and just made a Westy 12 clone.  Most of the recipes you see online have a ton of specialty malts that I know St. Sixtus doesn’t use.  So instead we went with a very elemental recipe: 16 lbs. of Pilsner malt, 3 lbs. of candi sugar syrup, Styrian Goldings and Hallertau hops, and White Labs 350 yeast.  Instead of paying a ton for the candi sugar syrup, I found a recipe online and it worked out pretty well.  It took longer than I expected to boil off the water and get the temperature up high enough to convert glucose to fructose.  But once that happened, it worked like a charm.

Unlike last time, things went off without a hitch.  The only small problem was that we had two old thermometers and they couldn’t bring themselves to agree on anything (even boiling water and ice water had 20°+ differences).  So we picked up a new candy thermometer.  Since we were also making candy, it worked out very nicely.

The Session #68: Novelty Beers

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This month’s topic for The Session is novelty beers.  Several of the breweries I like make some weird stuff all the time, but I don’t think I count a regular saison made with cucumbers or with a ton of herbs added to the barrel a novelty beer.  Those are a little offbeat, but well within the normal range of beers, especially for saison.

No, I think of novelty beers as beers you’d pretty much only drink as a gag.  I remember going to a garlic-themed restaurant called the Stinking Rose — they had garlic ice cream on the menu, with a note saying they had it for completeness couldn’t really recommend it.

And that’s about what I think of novelty beers.  I’ve seen Cave Creek Chili Beer in the grocery store, but I was never tempted to drink it, even though I have a friend who grew up in the small Arizona town where it’s made.  When we went to the Chocolate Museum in Cologne, we picked up a bottle of chocolate beer that was just passable.  And I was pleasantly surprised by Bandwagon’s Raspberry Jalapeno Ale, which was very good for a novelty beer.

But I think the most novel novelty beer I’ve ever had, and probably the most interesting to drink, was Indra Kunindra from Ballast Point.  This is a collaboration with a homebrewer, that used Madras curry and a bunch of other spices.  The base beer was a stout, so there was a lot of body and sweetness, but the spiciness came through strongly, making for a very intense slow-sipping drink.  And it even had a little bit of lingering heat to it.

I don’t think I’m going to use curry in any of my brews any time soon, and I certainly don’t expect a big national trend of curry beers to get started.  But it was very different and thought-provoking.  And that is the promise I see in novelty beers.  Sure, they are often not very good.  They are sometimes just cheap crap to give dad something to buy at the gift shop.  But every now and again, they expose you to a new element you could see using in other beers, and make you think about a possibility you’d never have given a chance otherwise.