Fermentation Friday for November-- Roundup

Sorry for my late roundup, I spent most of yesterday sleeping off the excesses of the holiday. Thankfully R. Dicks (r huge) held us down here at JABB, telling us about how he's the special friend who gets to help with the brewing. He downplays his contribution a bit, I think, as he's been hosting the brewing and I think has caught the bug. I expect him to be up and running a massive system by this time next year, and incorporated two after that! As mentioned before, Adam talked about his natural independence,and the guys he brews with. He left out his place as a central node of the homebrew blogging community; perhaps even a community organizer. Bob talks about trying to find a community and reaching out to the internet when the physical community won't materialize. My suggestion, if I may, start a local club, you can't have too many. The brew dudes rank order their community, centered on their family and friends who support and consume the product. Next are their blog followers, and finally the forums, twitter and facebook.

Well, how about me. I love the local clubs, I attend three (CBS, NHC and HOPS!) and belong officially to HOPS! I take something different from each, HOPS! brings me a community I sorely lacked when I moved to Chicago. The CBS is full of old-time brewers, many of whom have gone on to some major notoriety. Their first Thursday meetings bring in a variety of brews, both commercial and homebrew, from throughout Chicago land. The NHC is full of people pushing the boundaries of what a beer can be, which is fun.

A second community I love is the BJCP, where I'm a certified judge and learn a lot from the other judges and tasting a variety of homebrew. Finally, I'm active on the BN forums and even donate. I consume the podcasts and it keeps me occupied on slow days at work.

Finally, my biggest community are my co-bloggers here, who put up with my incessant beer discussions over IM and e-mail and keep me from being lonely, thanks guys.

Metro, NHC Winter Brew Off

Its been a good couple of days for beer up here in Chicago's "Little Sweden". On Wednesday the fine folks over at Metropolitan Brewing sold me an empty keg, helped me make it into a boil kettle, tried some of my homebrew and even let me sample the new Dopplebock. It is great, smooth and malty with little hint of the 8+% abv under the hood. The whole crew were also all that is gracious in showing me around and making me feel at home. As I live a scant 1.5 blocks from the brewery, I hope to see them around.

Last night Metro had a release party for the Dopplebock at In Fine Spirits, where I hadn't been before. It was a great time, and I'm a few pins and a lot of knowledge richer (also some tasty samples). The Dopplebock casoulet sounded good, but I had to run to another local bar for the Northside Homebrewer's Connection winter brew-off. Winner got a cash prize and to make their beer at the bar. Spoiler, it wasn't our porter, but the winning beer was very good, a nice muddy stout (their words, not mine) with loads of chocolate, some vanilla and a a medium-thin base of what I gather was an American LME. The effect was entrancing, in that sometimes it was clearly chocolate (especially in the aroma) whereas the flavor moved from chocolate to peanut butter to a good clean finish. The bittering levels were on point to show off the pyrotechnics of the brew.

I kept getting asked what my favorite was, but I can't say I know. I certainly enjoyed our own beer, an aggressive American Robust Porter and my first foray into Ahtanum hops, which are flowery to the point of pollen and are my new obsession. These are one of the secret ingredients to the 21st Amendment's Back in Black IPA, one of my five favorite beers. Our porter was just a porter, a few people kindly remarked it was the one beer they could see having more than one pint of, as opposed to the other more extreme (maybe radical) beers on tap that night, not as a slight to those beers, but to note the delineation between radical and not-radical, if I had to pick a nomenclature.

The second place beer was a great brown ale. I didn't notice the extremeness right away, but I'm told it was a heavy dose of palm sugar. It just tasted like a good, rather sweet, moderately bitter, low hopped brown ale. I'm hoping they put the recipe out there some time. The other brown ale (But Wait There's More... Billy Mays Brown Ale) was bourbon barreled, which was pretty obvious right away. The backing beer was nicely done and showed off the whiskey immensly. Ted (the fearless leader) and his team ran up a fun and funny Coal Porter, which was, oxymoronically, smoky. For those who don't follow malt production, the use of coke to make malt is when beers stopped being smoky. It is a quadruple pun as a result (can you get all 4?). The smoke was a surprise, but pleasant, well balanced into the beer and not overwhelming. The beer stood up well to the added pizzaz, though that is not a surprise given Ted's talents. I can't say much about the host beers at Hamburger Mary's as my pallete and thirst were overwhelmed by the homebrew on display and I didn't have many. I will fix that soon enough (turns out, they get a lot of steelers lovers up there).

As a loyal Southsider in comfortable exile way on the northside, I sometimes feel weird being in both clubs. No one else seems to care, at all, but I notice some crazy difference between them. I think one is the attitude to beer. The southside club is very style and technique oriented, but having a quorum of BJCP judges and both award winning and pro brewers as current or former members will do that to you. The North Side club is very experimental, with people always pushing the envelope to make beers they can't buy elsewhere and no one else ever came up with. Mind you, they also have a cadre of award winners and pros. Maybe it is the proximity of the meetings to the most radical brewer of them all that brings out the weird. The major difference for me is in what people want when you have their beer. I think this comes with age, the NHC is a much younger club and I don't know any of them well, I'm not sure they know each other that well either. Their is more formal politeness and the beer evaluation focuses on what is good. The food, also, was amazing at the meeting I made. The southside group are old friends, brewing together for ten plus years. Punches are not pulled and criticism is the mandate of the day. I like both, though I'm naturally suited to the latter. Learning the former is a good lesson for me, but being asked, "what do you think of this beer" remains a hard question to answer.

Remember, we are hosting this month's Fermentation Friday, where we ask about your homebrew community. We'll take submissions all next week and will post our wrap-up on Monday, November 30th. Also, remember that our top referee between November 1st and the end of the year gets a JABB care package.

Why ask why - Fermentation Friday

... Even in the blogosphere some of you are old enough to complete that line, but the true answer here isn't drinking Bud Dry. But it is related to other forms of low-alcohol beer.

Starting from the beginning, I brew because B James brews and showed me how when I was around visiting one time. I was amazed, he didn't make it look too complicated and the end product was good. As an added bonus it puts men in the kitchen for the day, which I support. Prior to this spate of brewing we had wanted to make whiskey, but it is clearly illegal and not something we aspire to or participate in at all. Fast forward another year and I keep meeting home-brewers. Brewers who live in smaller apartments than I do and produce passable and sometimes even good beers. All this with nothing but a pot and a closet to keep some sort of bucket. Amazingly, the technological barriers to making beer just faded away over that year.

The motivation was slower to come. I spent two years living in the UK, drinking huge, flavorful, low carbonation and low-alcohol pints. Coming back to the states, everything flavorful seemed to be very high in alcohol, which is not conducive to having a pint with a long lunch, or when coming home before getting on with an evening's work. Mind you, the culture wasn't too conducive to that either. I also moved to Chicago, where the apartments seem luxurious in their spaciousness compared to everywhere else I'd lived for a while. So I had the motivation to start brewing. The means came via the wedding registry.

But there is a deeper story here, one of ornery self reliance. The first good beer I ever had was from a Vermont farmer who passed me a ported after I helped him bale a bunch of hay when I was 17. And I do come from true whiskey country. I brew, in short, because I like creating a product that I can't get conveniently. The freedom of expression is certainly liberating and the wrangling of yeast, temperature and malt is clearly an entertaining challenge. Applying the self-same obsession to research and experimentation that keeps me out of the rain and on my own schedule for work has been a nice surprise. In the end, I brew so I can have beer. At the moment I break about even, including equipment, for the amount of beer I drink or give away. Planned upgrades will make that less so, as would an inclusion of my time in the equation. Still, I don't brew when I would otherwise be working, I brew when I'd otherwise be sitting around playing video games. Of the two, brewing might be healthier.

Thanks, as always, to Adam for putting this together and the CNYBrew for hosting. We here at JABB are hosting November's Fermentation Friday. The topic will be, "Tell us about your homebrew communities." We are announcing early and often because of Thanksgiving and will post a wrap up the Monday following, to ease you back into the working world.

Beer Menus Chicago

Beer Menus just launched in Chicago, or at least, this is the first I've seen or heard of it. I love beer menus, as we all know. Now, hunting for a particular pint won't be so hard, and I can comparison shop the vastly ranging prices here in town. They also seem to have a community that might be more congenial than the Chicago Beer Advocate forums here.

But I've got some issues with the local BAs. Maybe its hipster envy hatred; having two jobs, a wife and responsibilities will do that to a much better man than me. But I think it has more to do with the fetishizing of beer to the level of wine snobbery. I've seen some recent threads on there that remind me of the main reason I rarely go on-- not the long-winded reviews, but the venemous bile that greet them. Another would be the embarrassingly slow load times. The third is they are run out of Boston, and that place bugs me, but that is my problem not theirs. The fourth is the uneasy morass I feel when attending the Chicago Beer Society First Thursdays.

When I first started to go to CBS meetings, the combination of my beard and being under 30 got me mistaken for a BA member who wandered back to try some homebrew, having exhausted all of the commercial options available. Bringing my own brews helped, a bit. It was unfortunate that my first CBS meeting was after the BA started 'sharing' space with them, but I've heard stories of former glory at the homebrew meetings. Today it just seems like two ill-defined groups uneasily jockeying for position. Well, I'd say that if I felt the BA people ever realized they were placed on top of a long standing group; why they two meetings got scheduled together still baffles my mind. I should mention here I am in no way officially affiliated with either of these organizations, having never actually joined CBS (despite a valiant effort thwarted by the post-office). I've gotten great feedback from the CBSers, but I'd love to know if the meetings used to be as educational and intense as I've heard.

My own bile aside, I'm glad to see Beer Menus has made it off the least coast and into the heartland of beer drinking country. Welcome guys.

This Day in Booze: Homebrew Legalized

What is the greatest day in booze history? And you can't say the invention of alcohol. That's a cop-out for unimaginative plebeians who bicker about how Poke-mon is so much better than Yu-Gi-Oh, and argue for three hours on how the two are nothing alike. You're better than that. Many would say the obvious answer; the day that Prohibition was repealed. But for all its obvious downfalls, Prohibition actually did a lot to fuel growth and innovation in the booze industry and promote new social ideals. There were these hip little places called speakeasies. Let’s just say you aren't going to find any tacos at a sausage fest.


Another possible answer would be the invention of the cocktail. Yes, those candy sweet concoctions, which since their inception have been primarily used for the purpose of removing clothing from women. They are quite tasty and are very good at doing what we all hope. But they are rooted deeply in having the original purpose of masking all that was bad about alcohol of old, like rat feces. Also we here at JABB would like to start a petition to get the word -tini stricken from the English language. Nuff Said. There are probably even a small few readers out, who are on this site looking for fodder to fuel your immeasurable contempt and hatred of all things fun, who might say the day Prohibition was enacted. I hear they also kill puppies.


For me, my answer would have to be the day they legalized homebrew beer, which I shall defend as best I can in my current inebriated state. But first the details.

When prohibition ended, everybody and their grandmother wanted to make beer. It was a guaranteed money maker after nearly 13 years of sobriety. The problem was everybody wanted to cash in, and quick. Combine this fact with the limited availability of resources due to the war, and you wind up with the wonderfully bland and unexciting light golden lager we all grew up with. Over time, as some businesses succeeded and others flopped, the world of American beer was soon dominated by the big breweries. As long as these corporate giants were making money, they didn't care about the quality of their product, so long as it sold. Any new upstarts that tried to get a hand in on things were either forced out or bought up. Thanks to this consolidation, there were only 42 breweries operating in the United States in 1978, and most sucked donkey balls.


On October 14, 1978 that all changed when President Jimmy Carter signed a bill that removed the restrictions on Homebrewers and allowed your average citizen to brew (tax free) beer in small quantities for their own consumption.

Able to brew beer at home, craft brewers were allowed to develop their beer without the influence and meddling of the big conglomerates. The legalization of homebrew finally allowed creativity and originality to be explored freely. And if you don't think that that is important, in 2006 congress passed a resolution commemorating American Craft Brewers for supporting American Agriculture, providing jobs, and improving the balance of trade. The resolution also supported the establishment of an "American Craft Beer Week". By 2008, forty years after the legalization of homebrew, there were 1493 breweries reported to be operating in the United States, 1420 of which were considered craft brewers (smaller, independent, traditional brewers) by the Brewers Association. Take that, Budweiser.

Cranberry Nut Crunch Fuck'n Ale!


OK, it's true that with the microbrew and craft beer movement there have been some bad ideas. There have been some flops and some jokes and I think the term "yuppie" got thrown around quite a bit. But that is all part of the experimentation process that makes average citizens like us get together on a Saturday afternoon with a box of ingredients, a tub of no-rinse, and a handle of Vladimir. We are free to create something original, even if it's just a new strain of blue fuzzy goodness that later is found to be the cure for male pattern baldness.


And look at the industry now. All the big name brewers are struggling to keep up with the Great Lakes and Magic Hats of the beer world, especially the King of Beers. In recent years we've seen Anheuser-Busch try to market such beers as their Budweiser American Ale and Bud Light Golden Wheat. And then there is the Michelob seasonal line including their Bavarian Wheat, Märzen, Porter, and Pale Ale. The little guys have taken the lead, and the big guys can only follow. Any time the large breweries try something new on their own we wind up with such wonderful concoctions as Michelob ULTRA Tuscan Orange Grapefruit and Pomegranate Raspberry....really?!?

But in the end, we the consumers are the winners. The gates have been opened and great beer is pouring out like the Johnstown Flood.


Just about anywhere I go, I have to opportunity to taste something I've never tasted before, to enjoy something new, and to throw up a new color of the rainbow I never knew existed. Woohoo!