Tag Archives: beer

Recipe: Beer Bread

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This is my favorite bread recipe at the moment: it doesn’t get any easier or faster, and it makes a nice dense rustic bread that everybody in the family likes.  And if by some chance you have a batch of homebrew that didn’t turn out perfectly or just some spare beer you’d rather eat than drink, this is a great way to put it to good use and free up the bottles for the next batch.

Ingredients:

3½ cups flour
3 Tbsp. sugar
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1½ tsp. salt
12 oz. beer

Directions

  1. Mix dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl.  Add beer and mix until just combined.
  2. Knead in the bowl.  For a smoother consistency, turn out onto a floured board and knead.
  3. Form into loaf and turn out into bread pan, or onto a baking sheet.  For a crisper crust, brush with an egg beaten with 1 Tbsp. of water.
  4. Bake for 50 minutes at 375°F.

Source: Slightly adapted from USA Weekend “Recipe: Homemade bread in under an hour“.  The original recipe says to bake “about 45 minutes”, but every time I’ve sliced a loaf after 45 minutes, it has had a pocket of uncooked dough in the middle.

First All-Grain Brew (Belgian Dubbel)

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We had one of the first cool days of Fall yesterday, cool enough to justify real shoes — with socks!  It probably won’t last, but we’ve been pining for cooler weather and the darker, heavier beers that go with them.  Beers that could plausibly go with shepherd’s pie.  So we took advantage of the nice weather and spent the whole day inside slaving over a hot stove, brewing a batch of abbey ale, using a recipe based on Westmalle Dubbel.

We had (almost) all of our equipment ready, and took the plunge and did our first all-grain batch.  This was also our first liquid yeast, and between those two things, it went about as well as could be expected:

  • Apparently, liquid yeast needs to come out of the fridge 3-6 hours before you can pitch it.  Luckily, I remembered to check just in time.
  • 5 gallons of sparge water took a long time to bring up to temp — roughly an hour.  And I thought I was being clever when I remembered to start heating it 20 minutes before the mash was supposed to be done…
  • It took roughly 8½ hours from starting to heat the water for the mash, to getting the fermenter tucked away in the pantry.  Mashing, collecting wort and the boil combined took 4½ hours, so the other 4 hours was spent waiting for water to heat up (or cool down), filtering wort into the fermenter, etc.
  • Our fancy new kitchen faucets don’t have a standard tap that the wort chiller can screw into.  So I ran a garden hose into the kitchen and hooked it up.  Of course, the hose had a leak and sprayed water everywhere.  Even with copious duct-taping, it still leaked a trickle.  Eventually, I had the hose angled down into a dish pan, collecting the runoff.  But that took a surprisingly long time to get right.

Unlike some previous batches, I actually remembered to take gravity readings at several points.  With the help of a handy little tool for temperature-correcting gravity readings, we got exactly the gravity called for in the recipe.  So we’ve got high hopes.

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 →

Re: Beer chauvinism!

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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.

Family Beer Tasting

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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).

Airplane knitting

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Greetings from Charlotte Airport! I’ve got an insanely long layover here on my way to France (!) for a conference. I’ve got a presentation for the Real World that I really need to get ready, but the 8-hour flight plus 4-hour layover still gives me plenty of time to knit, too. I’ve got two airplane projects: Another ruffle scarf  (Why yes, I do re-re-read my favorite books, too, thanks for asking!) and a NEW pattern (gasp!) – a very cool looking Hitchhiker scarf (LGT Ravelry).

Hitchhiker is up first, using sockyarn for the first time with teeny tiny needles. Okay, US 3 needles, which I know really only qualify as tiny OR teeny. Possibly toony. Definitely not tinny. BUT, I usually knit worsted weight (because I’m impatient and like immediate results) and so I feel like I’m knitting in miniature.

Though, at the moment I’m enjoying a beer. There is a local brewery that has a presence at Charlotte Airport that is almost  entirely unlike a pub. Still – I’m having a pint of Carolina Beer Company’s Blonde and planning to get some knitting in.

Knitting AND beer updates

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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 →