Category Archives: Beer

Knitting AND beer updates

Beer, knitting, , , , ,

A rare occurrence – something to say about both of the topics of this blog at once. Alas, I have not yet figured out how to knit beer. BUT… Redbeard and I just took possession of a kegerator (did I just say that?) – thus completing our transformation from wine snobs in our 20s to frat boys in our 30s.

In hindsight, it was inevitable that we’d get a kegerator eventually. First, bottling is the least-good part of brewing, particularly because the yeast does insist on having CLEAN bottles to work with. So, now we can keg our own brews, which I am already looking forward to. Second, two of our three local breweries, including the one just a few miles away, don’t offer a lot of their brews in bottles. And our LBS (local beer store) stopped doing growlers recently.

No home brew yet, but you can’t leave a kegerator empty. Even though I’m new to this, I know that’s just not right. So, Redbeard went out yesterday and bought a keg of Swamphead’s Cottonmouth, which is one of my favorite summer beers. Light, but still full of tasty goodness. We made fish and chips for dinner, because, well – if there was ever a dinner that went with beer, this is it. But, we just got a lot of foam instead of actual beer. The crack team of experts we consulted (i.e. the tubes) suggested that the beer was too warm or over-pressured (perhaps this makes the beer too anxious?). The beer did seem a little warm, so we adjusted the pressure and will see tonight. With much willpower we resisted the urge to have beer for breakfast. Though, now that we have a kegerator, all things seem possible.

KNITTING! I have learned a very important new thing. Don’t tuck in your loose ends until you are 100% sure that you will not need them ever again. Which for me means do not tuck until 5 minutes before you give the project to its intended recipient. Luckily, I am a crappy tucker, and so it was irritating but not impossible to untuck as I frogged the handles on my felt bag project.

More happily, I have also just got Sandra McIver’s new Knit, Swirl! book and have been drooling over it, trying to maintain some sense of perspective on my knitting speed and free time (I found five sweaters in five minutes that I want to make for five people). I am torn between knitting one for myself first (selfish, but only I will have to suffer any mistakes) and knitting one for someone I love (who will thus have to love the sweater regardless of any mistakes). As far as I can tell the technique and pattern itself seems very straightforward – I will have to learn a couple new things, including how to cast on one billion stitches and how to join them into a round without twisting. But, this seems very doable, even for my meager skills.

So, I am knitting like crazy on my Magic Thief scarf (almost done!) so that I can justify starting a new project. Which I can do with an endless supply of beer to sustain me.

A Paean To Cigar City

Beer,

It came to my attention recently (when Untappd gave me a badge for being such a fanboy), that I’ve had quite a few different brews from Cigar City recently:

Vuja De (6/21)
A very dark saison, practically black.  But still very light and easy-drinking on the first evening of summer.  A collaboration with St. Somewhere (and it shows — this reminds me of their Pays du Soleil).  Very tart, but balanced by a sweetness — but not malty sweet: the bottle mentions cane sugar, so I think that’s where it’s coming from.  The sweetness provides a nice counterpoint to the very tart, cherry twang.  A second drinking yielded more mixed results: we both soured on the blackcurrant flavor.

Tocobaga Red Ale (6/18)
Definitely hoppy, with a piney finish. Balanced with a smooth and mild malt.  Wouldn’t have liked this a year ago, because of the hoppiness.

110k+OT Batch #4 Imperial Red Ale (6/17)
Very dark with highlights of dark red. Full malt with a strong balance of hops, both aromatic and bittering with a long smooth bitter finish.

Continue reading A Paean To Cigar City →

Latitude 48 Deconstructed

Beer

I heard about the Sam Adams Latitude 48 Deconstructed pack a couple months ago — an IPA brewed with 5 kinds of hops coming in a 6-pack with the normal beer and then 5 versions brewed with just one of those hops.  It sounded like a great way to try out the individual hop varieties, but I hadn’t been able to find it locally.  Luckily, my wife is more resourceful, and gave me a pack for my birthday.  So of course we had to do a 5-way tasting.

Unsurprisingly, they varied immensely.  Both in flavor and in aroma, they ran the gamut.  So on to the hops:

EKG: We both liked this the best, very mellow, earthy.  Herby, with a definite Henna taste.  Smells like wort, probably because we’ve brewed with these before.  “The comfort food of beer”.

Zeus: This reminded me of Swamp Head’s BigNose IPA or Bell’s Two Hearted Ale, especially the aroma, which is very sweet and almost floral.  Very strong start of citrus, sharpness and pine, but finishes more mild.  “Punch-you-in-the-face”.

Continue reading Latitude 48 Deconstructed →

American Craft Beer Week

Beer

As part of American Craft Beer Week, our local brewery (Swamp Head) and Cigar City from Tampa had a “taproom takover” (I’d call it a “tasting room exchange”, but that’s not as alliterative). So we got our choice of eight CCB beers on tap.

The smallish tasting room was already packed at 5:00pm, so we got a pint of Florida Cracker Wheat Ale, and a growler of Table Saison.  It took me nearly 15 minute to get those, and I almost changed my order halfway through to add another couple of growlers.  I should have done that, because by the time I came back to get more growlers, the crowd was much worse, and three of the kegs blew while I was waiting to get a couple growlers, including both the beers I wanted.  So I had to take my third and fourth choices (Jose Marti Porter and Maduro Brown Ale).

Luckily, I’ve never had a bad beer from Cigar City, and these were no exception.  The Cracker Wheat Ale was a great cloudy hefeweizen, with just enough spice and citrus to make it interesting.  The Jose Marti was inky and intense, with a little sweetness and not too smoky.  The Maduro was a great brown ale, with a big malt and lot of subtlety to match it (and I found some 12 oz. bottles at Tipple’s, so we can get more).  The Table Saison was not as sour and bold as their Sea Bass, but a more mainstream farmhouse, very light but with a definite sourness, almost like a kolsch.

We’re going to round out Craft Beer Week with Victory‘s V-12, which should be muscular enough to go well with chili.

I May Be Doing This Wrong…

Beer,

Dinner did not get off to a good start.  I was going to make lasagna, but for some reason that didn’t seem like a good idea when walking home in 90° heat.  So I decided I’d take most of the ingredients and make a pasta bake instead, since that seemed like it would be lighter.  That was going OK until I knocked one of my Guiness glasses off the counter, sending shards of broken glass all over the kitchen.

Then we decided we’d rather have beer than wine, so I opened a bottle of Lectio Divina.  When I opened the last bottle, the cork blew out of my hand as soon as I looked at the wire cage funny.  So this time I carefully held the cork down with one hand and loosened the wire with the other.  But then I had trouble getting the wire cage off and forgot to hold the cork down for a second, and it exploded out of my hand, sending the cork into the next room and cutting my thumb with the wire as it zoomed by.

And then I stained my favorite white shirt with the pasta sauce (that’s my own fault, I should’ve changed my shirt…).

At least the beer was good and all but one of the kids liked the pasta bake.

Beer Bread

Beer,

I made another batch of beer bread today, using a leftover bottle of Sam Adams Double Bock.  It was basically undrinkable, but it makes for tasty bread.

The bread is the simplest I’ve ever seen: mix flour, baking powder, sugar and salt, pour in a bottle of beer, mix until combined, knead just enough to get a ball formed, turn it out onto a baking sheet, brush with egg, and bake.  And it’s good (got rave reviews last time).  The sickly-sweet double bock makes for a great bread, not too sweet, but goes very well with honey.

World of Beer

Beer,

So I was eating the best hamburger I’ve ever had from a restaurant today (at Burger 21, a new-ish place in Tampa) thinking that it was going to be hard to top.  Down the street was a beer shop I’d read about online called World of Beer.

Luckily, World of Beer did indeed top the burger: they had nine coolers side-by-side, full of beer from around the world, with very few duplicates or empty spaces.  I’d estimate 350 unique bottles.  5 of the coolers were European beers (2 coolers just for Belgium!), so that was great.  Unfortunately, it was local beer I was looking for.  I bought their last 3 bottles from Saint Somewhere.  Other than that, they only had two other Florida beers, both IPAs which I’m not interested in.

So I had to make do with a couple of Belgian abbey ales and some Scottish wee heavy to round out the cooler for the trip home.  And of course, now we’ll have to go back.  The bartender said they were going to open up a shop in Gainesville, but who knows how long that’ll take…

code4lib BrewUp (aka Beermaggeddon)

Beer, ,

One of the nice side effects of having people come from all over the country for a conference is that if everybody brings a bottle or two, you wind up with the beer tasting to end all tastings. In fact, we had so much beer we decided to do a pre-tasting last night (which was mostly dominated by stout).

Tonight was the main tasting, and we had a bathtub full of bottles on ice, a two-room suite packed with tasters, and a makeshift bar staffed by my boss and coworkers from UCSD. I started out with my favorite beer from last year in Asheville (French Broad Wee Heavy-est) and followed that up with some Lost Abbey Sinners 09, a Belgian-style sour fron San Marcos. There were some stouts and other interesting things in the middle (even a white chocolate ale), but I finished the night with the beer I brought: Cigar City‘s Sea Bass, also a sour, though Cigar City’s labels are so clever I wasn’t sure until I drank it.

The Sea Bass was a real hit, and I think I’m going to need to pick up a few bottles when I get back home. Though the tastings were all by the thimblefull, so we’ll see how I like it by the pint.

Boxing Day Brew In Bottles

Beer, ,

We bottled the scotch ale last night, after a nice day out at the zoo with the kids.  The gravity was still a few points higher than what the recipe asked for, but hadn’t changed in a week, so I figure it’s done one way or the other.

I did a quick search for the final gravity being too high, and found people suggesting problems with

  • the grain bill
  • inaccurate thermometers
  • mashing temperature
  • stale yeast
  • going to second fermentation too soon
  • temperature fluctuations during fermentation

So I’ve got a few ideas of what to do better next time, but I’m mostly confirmed in my paraphrase of Tolkien:

Go not to the tubes for counsel, for they will say both yes and no and RTFM!

Photo Shoot

Beer, knitting,

So it turns out the default header image was making it impossible to read the site header.  So we talked for a few minutes and came up with the idea of a glass of beer on a scarf.

So I got out the tripod, setup a nice shot, took several minutes to get a good glass of beer poured (from our last batch of over-carbonated homebrew), played with the exposure a bit, and generally took a bunch of pictures to make sure I got at least one good one.

Then I took the camera off the tripod and took one last picture by hand.  So of course that was the best one and the tripod and all that fiddling was a waste of time…