All posts by escowles

Hunaphu Day 2013

Beer, , ,

We headed down to Tampa for Cigar City’s release of Hunahpu.  This is no ordinary bottle release — this is their most sought-after beer, the line starts forming up the night before, and if you’re lucky enough to get any at all, you only get three bottles.  In short, it’s more of a festival than a bottle release.

So we got a hotel a few blocks away, and I planned to get up at 5am and walk over.  I couldn’t sleep (strange bed or anticipation?), so I gave up shortly before 4am and headed over.  There was a small line already, with most of the people camped out, and I estimated I was about 75th in line.  There was a steady trickle of people joining the line, which quickly stretched down the block and into the parking lot of the shopping center around the corner.  So they wound up handing out the golden wristbands early (prompting lots of panicked phone calls to people who were supposed to join people in line), and they opened the gates just after 7am.

Cigar City blocked off their parking lot, and setup several trailers to serve beer, in addition to the two bars normally operating in their tasting room.  There were about a dozen food trucks, a few merch booths, live music, and some tents and carnival-style amusements way in the back by their new brewhouse.  The taplist was very impressive.  Everybody was in a good and accommodating mood.

The only problem was the size: there were just too many people in too small a space.  Lines for everything were long, snaking around and into the end of other lines.  Navigating the space was difficult because the lines were taking up so much space.  The police showed up shortly after 6am — I thought they were going to complain about people walking in the street, or drinking on the sidewalk, but they were apparently upset about the line winding around the block, which prompted the early opening.

They’ve already said the event is too big to hold at the brewery, and might be held at a larger venue or spread over several days.  But other than having a larger space, I think there are a couple of other things they might do to help make things go more smoothly:

  • Post the master taplist — I was having my first glass of Hunahpu in the tasting room, when someone at my table noticed a folded-up piece of paper which turned out to be the master taplist.  This was an invaluable source of information for us to figure out which of the serving points had which beers.  Without this, you would have to walk up to each one and read the paper taplist at the bar to figure out where to go.  Maybe this doesn’t get sorted out soon enough to be printed up and handed out to everyone.  But posting it online, or even setting up a bulletin board somewhere so people could consult it would be nice.
  • They required tokens instead of cash for all the outside bars, which definitely sped up service.  But they were letting people get samples and several drinks per person at a time, both of which slow things down.  Of course, more space and more service points is the real solution to the problem.
  • I’m also not a big fan of first-come-first-served-line-around-the-block as a strategy for rare bottle releases.  I think it would make a lot more sense to have a lottery for tickets.  Or auction off a portion of the bottles and/or tickets.  Maybe a combination of all three — they could have a first-come-first-served ticket sale for a majority of the tickets, and then an auction and/or lottery for the rest.  But whatever the method, selling tickets ahead of time would make it much easier to plan for the number of people who were coming.

What’s In Your Cellar? (Session #73: Beer Audit)

Beer

This month’s Session topic is a beer audit: what you have, and what it says about what you drink.  Our “cellar” is actually a wine fridge (that used to contain wine, honestly!) and our kegerator.  Usually, there’s a keg or two in our kegerator, but we’re out of CO2 and the bottles have taken over.

I’ve never done an audit exactly, just checked on a few bottles I was planning on sending to friends.  But I wasn’t surprised that my beer breaks neatly down into four categories:

1. Belgians

We brought more than a case of Westy and Cantillon back with us when we came back from our stay in the Netherlands.  Our stock has dwindled to a few bottles each of Westy 8, Westy Blonde, Cantillon Grand Cru Bruocsella, and Poperings Hommel Bier.

2. Locals

Of course, local beer is well-represented, with a few odd bottles from Tampa breweries like Barrel-Aged Big Sound from different years, a bottle of Pays du Soleil.  From our local brewery, Swamp Head, we’ve got a couple bottles of their first release of Saison du Swamp, somewhat more bottles of the second release, and a half dozen of their Batch 300 Tripel.

3. Homebrew

Of course, our hyper-local brewery (i.e., us) is well represented.  We currently have 20 bottles of barleywine, 35 bottles of cider/mead, 4 bottles of our first try at mead, 7 bottles and a gallon growler of our quad (the growler was filled from the tail end of our last keg after our we exhausted our CO2 tank), and 1 last bottle of our saison.

4. Stuff In The Fridge

And then there’s the stuff in the fridge.  It’s not really the cellar, but some of it sure does hang around a while.  Right now, there’s a selection of year-rounds and recent seasonals from Cigar City (Jai Alai, Maduro, Cubano Espresso, and Sugar Plum), plus an uninspired amber called Rollin Dirty they brewed for the Tampa Brew Bus, some Magic Hat Pistil, a few bottles of Michelob Amber Bock we picked up for our mother-in-law who doesn’t even like saison but brought some from down from Hill Farmstead for us anyway.  There are also a few singles: a Holy Mackerel Special Golden Ale, and two bottles that have slowly migrated to the back: a Shiner Octoberfest and a Magner’s Pear Cider that nobody wants to drink.

 

So, I think there are a few key takeaways from that list:

  • To start with the obvious: the selection is pretty well driven by where we live and where we’ve traveled.  Not just in where the beer is from, but also in the dominance of Belgian-style beers.  Having lived right next to Belgium last year, and living in Florida where there is a strong selection of Belgian-style beers, really shaped what I drink and what I value.
  • There are very few aged or even aging-worthy bottles.  We plan to age our barleywine for quite a while, obviously.  The barrel-aged Big Sound should keep, and I suspect the Grand Cru Bruocsella will last long enough for us to experiment with making our own lambic before we try making some kriek with it.  But the rest of the beers should really be drunk soon.
  • Most of our keeping beer is in our wine fridge — which used to be full of wine.  We were really not big beer fans a few years ago, when we mostly drank French and Californian wine, and maybe the occasional Sam Adams with pizza.  Then I had my first sour beer — Lost Abbey Sinners 09 followed by Cigar City Sea Bass — what an introduction to sours!  Now there are only two bottles of wine in the house (a local dessert wine, and a Merlot we picked up this summer at a winery in New York).  So that’s a pretty big change.
  • Drinking local: and one thing about the beer and the wine: we’ve gotten quite a bit of it directly from the brewery.  That’s true of the Westvleteren, Cantillon, Cigar City and Swamp Head beers, and both bottles of wine.

Bottling Barleywine and Cider

Beer, Cider, Mead, , , , , ,

We bottled our barleywine and cider this weekend.  Since it was Obama’s second inauguration day, we used a couple of kitschy tea towels we picked up at his first inauguration to dry out bottle caps and equipment after sanitizing.

The gravity of the barleywine had not changed since I moved it to secondary, so we probably could have just bottled it after two weeks.  Many of the comments about the yeast mentioned how fast it ferments, and I guess they were right.  Barleywine is traditionally aged for ridiculous amounts of time, so we’ve tucked the bottles in the back of a closet, keeping only a handful of small bottles in the pantry to test whether it’s ready.

We tasted samples of the four batches of cider/cyser.  The first batch (plain juice) was nice and dry, lots of good apple character without being juicy at all.  The second batch (juice plus concentrate) was fine when I had a sip of the sample I used to check the gravity, but was decidedly off when we tasted a sample from the end of bottling.  So we’re not sure if it’s just a problem with the dregs or if the whole batch might be off.  The third batch (juice plus honey) was a very interesting cider/mead combination, with a lot of the cider character of the first batch, but also the floral and reedy/bready notes of mead.  But the last batch (juice plus twice as much honey) was the most promising — it was a little sweeter, much more pronounced mead flavor, with the cider tartness really fading to the background.

Knights of the Barleywine

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Our local brewery held their second annual Knights of the Barleywine event today — they made a high-gravity barleywine mash and a couple dozen or homebrewers setup propane burners in the parking lot to brew.  My normal inclination, when presented with an all-pale ale mash clocking in at 1.100 SG, would be to use a Belgian yeast and make a quad.  But we just kegged one of those, so we wound up deciding on a more traditional English ale yeast, and East Kent Goldings for flavor and aroma hops (though still considerably less than what many people use for barleywine).

This was my first time brewing outdoors on a propane burner.  After a slow start, I was comfortable cranking up the gas and getting a quick and steady boil.  It was a lot of fun hanging out and chatting with the other brewers.  And pretty much everybody brought some homebrew to sample, so I tasted a few barleywines from last year, plus pale ale, cream ale, Scotch ale and even a Raspberry saison.  We speculated that we collectively brewed about 100 gallons (3 barrels).  There was several pallets of spent grain like this one.

Cider Four Ways

Cider, Mead, , , , ,

We’ve been drinking a lot of cider recently, and decided to make our own.  I had a hard time finding any decent cider recipes online (well, beyond “any old juice and any old yeast and it’ll be fine!” type recipes).  But got a good recommendation of a recipe that had worked for a co-worker of mine.  Though he switched the yeast and used Safeale US-05, so we went with that too.

Since this is our first cider, we decided to repeat our Saison experiement and make five different 1 gallon batches in growlers instead of a single large batch.  The plan was to make one gallon of plain juice, one gallon juice with apple juice concentrate, one gallon juice with candi sugar, one gallon juice with honey, and one gallon of water with honey.  But our small candi sugar batch was too shallow and wound up a caramelized, crystallized lump.  So we went with plain juice, juice with concentrate, juice with honey, and juice with even more honey.  We found unfiltered, no-preservative (not even Vitamin C) apple juice at our grocery store.  And we used a 1 lb. jar of Tupelo honey from Cross Creek Honey.

One thing that was surprising was the gravity of our apple juice.  I’d seen estimates online ranging from 1.035 up to 1.050.  But our juice was actually 1.059.  So we did some experimentation and found 12 oz. of apple juice concentrate added to a gallon of juice brought the gravity up to around 1.070.  We matched that with honey (about 5 Tbsp.) in one batch, and used the rest of our honey (about 10 Tbsp.) in the last batch.  We’re particularly interested in comparing the difference between honey and concentrate at the same gravity — how different will they be?

Another question was whether to heat or boil the honey.  In typical fashion, I saw opinions online ranging from “you have to boil honey or you’ll get botulism” to “probably good to heat to 170° to pasteurize” all the way to “don’t heat at all and don’t bother filtering out honeycomb and wings — they’ll settle out eventually”.  So we sterilized everything but didn’t heat our juice or honey at all.  Luckily there were no wings or honeycomb bits to filter out.

It’s Westy Day, But I’m Not Buying…

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So today is the big day: the first (and maybe only) official commercial release of Westvleteren beer in the United States.  When I heard about the release earlier this year, I expected to find myself at the head of the line today.  But that’s not the way it turned out.

As someone who has driven across two countries to buy Westvleteren beer, driving 90 minutes to the closest beer shop to get any Westy 12 didn’t seem like a big problem.  But a couple of factors conspired to make it just not worth it.  First of all, we’ve had Westy 12 before.  In fact, we’ve still have a couple bottles that we brought home with us from the Netherlands.  Second, it’s a great beer (and worth the $15/bottle you pay on the gray market), but that’s what they are selling it for retail, so I’m not sure why I should go to so much trouble to pay extortionate prices.  Third, Wind has this pesky thing called work that won’t let her drop everything and spend the day buying beer three counties away.  If I go by myself, I only get to buy one six-pack.  I did the math, and when I drove to Belgium to buy two cases, I was driving about 8 miles per bottle (which is totally reasonable, right? Right?).  But driving 85 miles (each way) to buy a six-pack comes out to more than 28 miles per bottle.  And that’s completely ridiculous…

So what am I doing instead?  Brewing my own, of course.  I’ll be stopping by the homebrew shop pick up some supplies for bottling the Westy 12 clone we’ve got in tertiary fermentation, and to make some cider and mead.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat…

Beer, ,

It was about a year ago that our first belgian brew was suffering from a stuck fermentation.  And now here we are again with a quad that’s made a lot of progress towards the final gravity target, but still has a little bit left to go and hasn’t made any progress in the last week.  So we’re trying the same trick again, and have moved the carboy (and growler for the Bruxellensis version) to the warmest room in our house (our home office) to try to get fermentation unstuck.

With any luck, this will get the fermentation completed and the results will turn out as good as that dubbel.

Improvised Blow Off Tube

Beer, , , ,

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.