Category Archives: Beer

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

Beer, , , ,

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

Beer, , ,

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.

A Tale of Two Beers

Beer, ,

I opened a couple of bottles of Westy 8 last night, from my stash lovingly schlepped all the way home from Belgium.  And the first thing I noticed was that one of them had the expected creamy white head, while the other one was decidedly tan.  Possibly even beige.  But I went ahead with them anyway, giving Wind the better glass.

Turns out I was right to be suspicious.  Her glass was just the same as we had it back in Belgium.  Malty, rich, earthy, and spicy.  But my glass was still malty, but all the spiciness was gone and replaced by a kind of smooth creaminess.  It wasn’t terrible (I’ve had truly spoiled beers, like some Rochefort 10 that was a drainpour).  But it definitely wasn’t the same beer, by a long shot.

When I came back to the kitchen, I noticed the little ring of brown under the seal in my bottle’s cap.  So I guess there was some spoilage along the way.  All of the beer has had the same life — in my trunk on the way home, in our cellar in the Netherlands, in our baggage on the flight back to the US, in our winebeer fridge since we’ve been home.  So I don’t think we did anything to one bottle that we didn’t do to the other.  So it’s probably just the vagaries of living beer.

Fun With Refractometer

Beer, , , ,

A refractometer was on my list of shiny brewing equipment I might get.  And with my hydrometer in shards, I figured now was the time to try it out.  Amazon had a ton of options, many reasonably priced, and so one arrived at our doorstep in a few days.

I was excited about using a refractometer to do gravity readings, because I’d read about it being more precise, using a tiny sample, and not having to do temperature corrections (the tiny sample makes the temperature insignificant compared to the refractometer temp.).  However, I quickly learned two things:

1. You don’t have to do temperature corrections.  But once fermentation starts, you have to do some pretty complicated math based on the original gravity.  So I still need a computer to do gravity readings once fermentation starts.

2. While in theory the display is supposed to be very precise (it’s supposed to look something like this):

In practice, it looks more like this:

So I’m not sure it’s actually any more precise.  Still, the sample size really is just a few drops, and I’m looking forward to the next brew where I can do gravity readings with hot wort and not have to use a computer to do temperature corrections.

Brewing Like a Monk

Beer, , ,

Well, maybe with a little more swearing.

My fantastic mother-in-law got me the perfect birthday present this year — Stan Hieronymus‘ Brew Like a Monk.  We’ve been thinking about brewing a tripel ever since we did a big tasting in the Netherlands earlier this year.  And we finally got organized to brew a batch today.  I went to the homebrew shop after lunch and picked up the supplies.  I hadn’t really been planning on brewing today, but I looked at my saison brewing notes (where I actually kept detailed times for everything), and realized we would have time.

So, the mash and boil all went pretty smoothly, except the wort collection ran faster than I intended and so the gravity was low.  But there was enough wiggle room with the addition of candi sugar to the boil, and evaporation, that I wasn’t really sure that it would be a problem.

But, alas, it was a problem.  So I wound up extending the boil by 15 minutes and just barely getting it up to the target (1.080).  Then the fun part started when I turned on the hose for my wort chiller and remembered that I was going to get a new hose, because it leaked last time.  But I guess laying around in the yard for two months didn’t help, because it was leaking a lot more than last time.  So I come back into the house to see a geyser of water spewing from the hose, and the output hose slipping out of the sink onto floor.

I yelled for help and madly grabbed towels to contain the damage.  After some decidely un-monk-like swearing, we got it mostly under control and down to pitching temp.  But one thing and another, we only wound up with about 3 gallons of beer.

Two Brewpubs

Beer, , , ,

We’ve recently had the chance to visit a few brewpubs in upstate New York.  A couple weeks ago, we went to Bandwagon Brewpub in Ithaca.  Their menu was somewhat limited at about a dozen entrees, but did have some interesting options — and I loved the cornmeal waffles with shrimp and andouille sausage.  We got a flight of Bandwagon’s beers, which packed a few surprises:

  • Raspberry Jalapeño: I initially dismissed this as a novelty chili beer, but found it pretty enjoyable.  The raspberry was more creamy than tart, and there was just a little chili heat.
  • Ezra Red Ale: Very hoppy aroma, but pretty mild and even a little sweet.  Nothing wrong with it, but not really winning me over either.
  • High Step Weizenbock: Like a sweeter hefeweizen.  By this point in the flight, I was starting to wonder at liking the novelty beer best.
  • Pirate Eye PA: Very sharp resin.  I’m not a big IPA fan, but I found this undrinkable.
  • Sully’s Irish Stout: Smoky and dry.  I’ve warmed to stout recently, especially malty imperial stout.  But this is a very dry Irish stout, which I just didn’t enjoy much at all.

So their food was good, if not a ton of options.  And none of the beers really captured my imagination, though the Raspberry Jalapeño and High Step Weizenbock were both pretty good.  So I had a great time, but I probably won’t be drinking any more of their beer.  In fact, we took the kids there for lunch last week, but we got beers from other NY breweries.

One of those breweries is Rooster Fish from Watkins Glen.  We drove over to Corning to see the excellent glass museum and were driving through Watkins Glen on our way back and stopped for lunch.  They had a much bigger menu, with a lot of good options to agonize over, even for the kids.  Instead of having a pre-set flight, they let you get samples of as many beers as you want.  The next table had a couple with samples of all 12, but we stuck with just 5:

  • Aspen Wit: a nice and spicy hefeweizen, reminding me of some of the better spicy/herbal German hefeweizen we tried.
  • Summer Sky: much more tart and clean.
  • Tripel Witch: probably my least favorite of the bunch, this tripel was reedy and herbal, reminding me of some of the tripels we tried and didn’t like.
  • Mysterious Amber: tons of toffee and caramel, almost a little too sweet, but very nice for a malt-lover like me.
  • Scotch Ale: very peaty and smoky, a wonderful wee heavy that isn’t too sweet or chewy.  Ranks right up with my favorites.  We picked up a growler of this to take home.

So it was a much nicer experience all the way around.  Of the beers we tried from the two breweries, I think I liked my least favorite from Rooster Fish (the tripel) as much as my favorite from Bandwagon.  

The Session 65: Drinking Alone

Beer, , ,

I should be blogging about tasting our new saison, or the new beers I’m trying in upstate New York where we’re spending July.  But those posts aren’t getting written, so they’ll have to wait.

On a more timely note is The Session — loosely-organized beer blogging on a monthly topic.  I’ve only just heard about it, and I find this month’s topic fascinating: drinking alone:

The way I see it is that I love beer and pubs and I don’t see why I should only go to the pub when I’m with other people.

Am I weird for going to the pub alone?

How do you feel about going to the pub alone? Do you feel it’s necessary to be around friends to spend time in a pub?

As it turns out, it’s rare for me to go to pubs or bars at all, and even rarer that I’d go alone.  Partly this is due to my own laziness, and I’m sure it’s partly due to the general social pressure against hanging out alone in public, especially where eating and drinking are concerned.  Though the social pressure against drinking alone is most acute in public, it’s definitely there in private too.  If I’m home alone for the evening, I might have a beer or two, but it’s definitely the exception not the rule.

But there have been a few times, mostly when I really wanted to try some beer you could only get at the pub.  The most recent example I can remember is when I took a trip to Cologne.  It’s a city famous for its local style of beer, and for the most part it’s not bottled or exported at all.  So you pretty much have to go to the pub to get it.  And since my young children are generally in bed by 8pm, that left a few hours each evening where I could venture out by myself and grab a few glasses of Kolsch, as Wind graciously volunteered to hang out at the hotel with the kids.

I was glad to have the chance to try a few more Kolsches, but it wasn’t much fun.  I’m quite introverted, and really not up to chatting with strangers in the pub.  So I mostly fiddled about on my phone, reading the news or playing games.  Not a terrible way to pass some time, but much less comfortable than hanging around a hotel room.

It really brought home for me the fact that drinking is a social activity, like eating really.  You can enjoy it uncritically or poring over every detail and hint of nuance.  You can enjoy it with two people or twenty.  You can enjoy the most exotic, expensive and rare, or the plain, wholesome and everyday.  But removing the social aspect really changes the experience, reducing it to just fulfilling a need.

I was thinking about all this when I went to a sour fest in Tampa last month.  The situation is very different from your typical pub, since there were some couples and groups, but many more people by themselves.  And the focus was more clearly on enjoying and analyzing the beer, and even I found myself chatting and joking with the servers and other attendees.

His & Hers

Beer, ,

We didn’t get any barrel-aged Marshal Zhukov — although we are normally very organized and early people, we arrived at Cigar City about 15 minutes after they started selling growlers, to find a rather long line snaking out of their tasting room and out into the parking lot.

When the news came out that the last keg blew, the line dissolved, with most of us heading into the tasting room to pickup whatever bottles and growlers we could.  There was a big crowd right in front of me swooping up the last of the Cucumber Saison.  But they brought out a few more boxes, and I did get a few bottles.  I also got a couple bottles of their collaboration with the Bruery, Dos Costas Oeste — cedar and lemon wood versions.

The cucumber saison tastes like, well, cucumber.  And since Wind likes cucumbers more than me, I guess it’s no surprise she likes it more than I do.  Though I’m now wondering why I like cucumber so much more with creaminess, and thinking about pairing cream cheese and cucumbers on a bagel.  The Dos Costas is the other way around — we tried the cedar aged version first, and I liked it quite a bit, particulary enjoying the spicy, astringent cedar.  Wind didn’t like it nearly so much, and glady handed me her glass to finish.

I guess the moral of the story is: don’t show up late for a Cigar City release, there will be a crowd of people in front of you.  Though they put out so much good beer, it really doesn’t matter, you can still find something interesting anyway.