Category Archives: Beer

Just Tapped A Keg of Big Nose IPA

Beer

We knew our last keg was going to kick soon, so I called our local beer store to see what kegs they had in stock.  They were out of our first choice, so I found myself talking my wife into getting a keg of Big Nose IPA.

Now, saying that I’m not an IPA fan is a bit of an understatement.  I generally compare IPAs to sandpaper, bleach, or some kind of tongue-stripping assault.  But for whatever reason, I really like Big Nose.  It’s not really pale (more of an amber, in fact), so maybe there’s enough malt in it that I don’t mind the hops so much.  And I think, as the name suggests, that they’ve focused on the aromatic hops, not so much the tongue-violence-bittering hops.

Anyway, in goes the new keg, and the hissing sound I normally expect when tapping a new keg doesn’t stop — it just tapers off to a steady hiss.  So I turned everything off, pulled the release valve on the keg, and turned the gas back on — still hissing.  I’d loosened the CO2 line on the keg coupler, so I retightened that, retapped the keg and turned the gas back on — still hissing.  It was dinnertime by now, so I let it sit, rechecked everything and turned the CO2 back on — still hissing.

By now, I was getting pretty frustrated and starting to worry that my regulator was broken.  So I ran my fingers around all the seals in the regulator, and found the problem: the regulator wasn’t screwed in to the CO2 cylinder securely (maybe it got bumped?).  So I tightened that and the hissing stopped.  So, score one for the check-everything-twice school of troubleshooting.

Surprisingly Like Mead

Mead, ,

We pulled the mead to second fermentation yesterday.  Since we only have one 1-gallon growler, we siphoned it to a 6-quart pot, washed the growler, and siphoned it back.  It all went pretty smoothly.

We actually remembered to check the gravity when we brewed and when we moved to second fermentation.  It started at 1.064, and was down to 1.010 (with a bunch of yeast messing up the sample) and 1.004 (with a clean sample).  By my math, that’s in the 7.5% – 8% ABV range.  Of course we sipped at the sample after checking the gravity, and it was surprisingly mead-like.  Definitely unfinished, just like beer coming out of the first week of fermentation.  But definitely promising.

Belgian “Research” Project: First Round

Beer,

Between my local beer shop and a few other sources, I’ve managed to find several of the beers on my list.  Here are my impressions of the first batch:

Affligem Dubbel

I picked this up at the beer shop when I went without my list.  It’s wasn’t on a lot of top beer lists, but it does have a good rating on BeerAdvocate.  This beer is a lot like an English brown ale, with earthy overtones and a nice mild sweetness. It started out a little bland and underwhelming, but quickly grew on me. It’s sweet, but not cloying, with some fruitiness.  Solid.

Westmalle Dubbel

Giant sticky malt with lots of fruit, sugar, biscuit, etc. — much sweeter than the other abbey ales I’ve sampled.  A nutty body and a little darkness in the finish.  Didn’t like this as much as the Affligem.

La Trappe Quadrupel

This is the only Trappist brewery in the Netherlands.  Definitely one of the better heavy abbey beers I’ve had. Not too sickly or overwhelming. Definite subtleties with spiciness and nuttiness.

Rochefort 6/8/10

We picked up one bottle each of the 6, 8 and 10, and tasted them back-to-back. In a word, disappointing.  The 6 was very mild, with a lot of carbonation, and some mild earthy flavor, a little sweetness, but not much else.  The 8 and 10 definitely had a bigger alcohol kick, and a little more malt, but were pretty similar.  These are all very highly rated online, but we didn’t find much to justify that.

St. Bernardus Abt 12

Sweet and highly carbonated, with some caramel, toffee and light mineral notes. Very smooth and complex, with the typical fruitiness and spiciness.  Better than Affligem.  Made in a small town not far from Westvleteren, so maybe a day trip is in order.

DeuS (Brut des Flandres)

Sweet and very effervescent.  Lots of champagne flavor, but not dry like brut champagne (despite the name), more like a demi-sec.  Everything about this beer made me ready to love it.  It was definitely packaged and promoted as a special, one-of-a-kind experience.  But it managed to be just OK.  It was good, but not fantastic.  Not enough to justify the hefty price tag.

Westvleteren 12

Quite hard to get (the monks only make enough to support themselves and only sell it in limited quantities at the abbey), so I was hoping it wouldn’t live up to the hype. Alas, it was fantastic.  Lives up to the “best beer in the world” moniker quite well.

The Platonic ideal every other abbey ale I’ve had has been clustered around. Rich and earthy malt with fruity and spicy notes, plus some creamy chocolate and biscuit too. A little dry bitterness in the finish. Packs a decent kick at 10% ABV.  Exceptionally smooth and textured.

Belgian “Research” Project

Beer,

We’re going to be living in the Netherlands for a few months next year, so we’re planning on taking advantage of being next-door to Belgium to sample some hard-to-find brews and maybe visit an abbey or two.  Belgian beer is a domain roughly as complex as French wine (see e.g., A Beginner’s Guide to Belgian Beer).  So I thought I’d do some “research” before we went.

Background

I have had a couple of Belgian beers before:

  • Tripel Karmeliet and Maredsous 6/Blonde: I had both of these in Oakland on a business trip, and was really impressed by the complexity and maltiness.
  • Chimay Tripel: I picked up a bottle of this shortly thereafter (when I couldn’t find Tripel Karmeliet or Maredsous locally).  This has a lot in common with those, if maybe a little spicier.
  • Saison Dupont: I tried this after my not-so-gentle introduction to Saison, when I saw recommendations online to start with a milder variety like Saison Dupont.  This struck me as almost Champagne-like, with a ton of aroma and flavor I didn’t associate with beer at all.

Continue reading Belgian “Research” Project →

Now we get to wait

Mead, ,

Everyone appears to have their own personal mead recipe, with different — sometimes diametrically opposed — and strongly-held views about things like which yeast to use, when to pitch it (and how many times), and how much white stuff to skim off the top of the honey-wort.

We whipped up a gallon of our own mead and put it in for primary fermentation:

We kept it simple: we boiled a gallon of water and then took it off the heat, added 2 pounds of honey, and then pitched 5g of Lalvin D47 yeast (a wine yeast) and a bit of mystery yeast food that our LBBS supplied once the temperature dropped to 85F or so. (We have a fancy-schmancy coiled copper wort chiller, but realized at the last moment that it can’t attach to our new, fancy-schmancy kitchen faucet. Oops. Luckily, with only a gallon to chill, an ice bath in the sink is a perfect (and honestly better) alternative.

Now – we wait for some tiny bubbles to burble up from the airlock. In a couple weeks, we’ll transfer over for secondary fermentation for a few months. With luck we’ll have some lovely mead in time for winter. (Or December, whichever comes first here in North Central Florida.)

 

Have honey, will brew

Beer,

During our summer trip to upstate New York, my uncle gave Redbeard and I enough honey from his bees to make mead with. We’ve been toying with the idea of making mead for a couple years now, but have never before been able to get enough honey in one place at one time. So, in anticipation of an extra day off this weekend, we swung by our Local Beer-Brewing Store (LBBS?) and picked up some 12-14% wine yeast.

(Small jar on the left is some blueberry preserves I made earlier in the summer – not quite up to tackling blueberry wine, though it is popular among local vineyards here.)

I’m hoping this will take our mind off of our mash tun woes…

Re: Beer chauvinism!

Beer, ,

I think it’s pretty strange how some people get worked up about who makes the best beer, and other silly questions like that.  Obviously, it’s so subjective you’d never get people to agree.  On any given day, depending on the weather and what I was eating for dinner, I might have a dozen different favorites.  More than once, I’ve had a taste of a beer in one situation, and thought it was the best thing I’d ever tasted, only to pick up a bottle a few months later and find it pretty underwhelming.  You might as well argue religion and politics.

That post and the comments do talk about something a little easier to quantify though: actual availability of craft beer.  Within a mile or so walk of my house, I’ve got two grocery stores, a specialty wine/beer shop, and a handful of restaurants with beer on draft.  Of those, the specialty shop obviously has the best variety, with a decent selection of local and national craft beer, European imports, etc.  One of the restaurants has a couple taps from Swamp Head, brewed here in Gainesville (note to local restaurants: we go there all the time, in part because of this).  I’ve got two other specialty shops in town that I go to more often, mostly because they’ve got a better local craft beer selection, but also because their service is much better.

So I count myself lucky to have the selection I’ve got.  I’ve got friends in big cities with tons of options I don’t have.  But then again, lots of Americans don’t have anything within an easy walk of home.

Visiting Ommegang

Beer,

The other big event of my summer vacation was visiting Brewery Ommegang near Cooperstown, New York.  We’re both big fans of their beers, so we thought it would be great to go see where they’re made, and hopefully get to taste any special brews they had on tap at the cafe.

Alas, the cafe was closed due to unspecified “plumbing problems”.  So we knew as soon as we arrived that we weren’t going to stay for lunch, and there probably wouldn’t be anything special to sample.  So we took the standard tour which ends with a tasting of their standard beers (Witte, BPA, Hennepin, Rare Vos and Three Philosophers).  The tour was reasonably well done — walking around the outside of the brewery, getting a decent look at the goings-on inside (even if it’s mostly just big tanks), with a good overview of the brewing process and a constant focus on how Belgian-style brewing differs from the regular American brewing.  I’ve taken a few brewery tours and brewed a few batches myself, and I still learned a couple things (like they store their spent grains in a giant cow-patterned silo because they sell them for cow feed, and their kegs aren’t bottle-conditioned so they’re really quite different from the bottled beer).

The tour suffers from Ommegang being an uncomfortably middle-sized brewery.  I’ve taken the tour at a giant brewery like Guinness, and they’ve got a giant, slick production with museum-quality exhibits, movies about barrel making, and a gift shop that wouldn’t be out of place at Disneyland.  And I’ve toured a few tiny breweries, where you can wander freely around the brewery floor, and the tour guide is taking time off from brewing to show you around, and the older guy in the tasting room turns out to be the master brewer.  But Ommegang is a little larger, and obviously growing quickly.  They’re too big to let you wander around while they’re busily cranking out product, but they’re not big enough to have given up letting you watch them actually brew beer.

The tasting at the end of the tour was well done — out on the patio on a nice summer day, with a very good description of each beer, what they’d pair well with, etc.  The gift shop was crowded, but did have great prices for the standard Ommegang beers and nice glasses.  We headed into Cooperstown for lunch, and found a nice pizza place on Urban Spoon.

In all, I’d say it’s well worth the trip, but frustratingly fell short of the awesome experience I was hoping for.

A wet dry run

Beer, ,

Redbeard and I (mostly Redbeard) have been tinkering around with a new insulated mash tun that will allow us to more easily do all-grain brewing.

Yes, I know – but “insulated mash tun” sounds so much better than “10-gallon cooler with a bunch of weird hardware we shoved into it.”

A view from the inside:

Things were going so well, until we sprung a small leak at a little over 4 gallons. You can see the drips on the silver and then coming off at the bottom.

Oh, well… the search for the right-sized rubber washer continues…

Family Beer Tasting

Beer, , ,

We went to visit family in upstate New York and brought some local beer to share.  We started with Swamp Head’s Saison du Swamp, which we’d been thinking of as a gentle introduction to saison.  But it was a much bigger shock than we’d expected.  We followed it up with a couple Cigar City beers: Sea Bass (which is very sour and funky, even compared to the average saison) and 110K +OT.

While we were there, we also had a few local beers: Saranac Summer Ale is a light, easy drinking Hefeweizen, and Southern Tier Crème Brûlée Stout is a crazy stout with an amazingly accurate crème brûlée flavor.  We also had some family homebrew: a wonderful strawberry mead, and a chocolate raspberry stout (which I liked a lot more than the Southern Tier).