Some up-coming beer events in Pittsburgh

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Fermentation Friday - Summer Brewing: A face-smashing, tasing good time!

Ah, Summer. June 21 to September 22. Sunshine, blue skies, scantily clad women, grilling, golfing, swimming, and me trying to keep my pale ass from burning to a crisp.




But the weather doesn't stop the brewing. Nosir! There's usually a batch or two made for an annual party Dicks throws. After that, we mostly put down our grains in exchange for the fruits and berries that come into season in the hotter months. But no matter what we're brewing, we're still brewing. And that means heat on top of heat.

But we have ways to keep from melting into a puddle of sweat and malt on the floor. One huge advantage we have is our brewing location. Paddy has a 130 year old farm house. Now, that means that the house doesn't have air conditioning, but it also means he has a large basement stays between 65ºF and 70ºF all year. It's perfect for primary and secondary fermentation, it's an excellent place to store bottles of beer and wine we've made, and it's an excellent hang-out after the day's brewing is complete. However, there are no facilities to actually brew down there (yet...), so that must be done elsewhere.

One key investment that was made to help this was a turkey fryer. Just one that was on sale at Trader Horn, a general store kind of place. We set it out in the driveway, turn on the propane, and hang out around it like a camp fire. This not only allows for the heat to disperse more in the open air, but you can be some distance away from the pot and still have an eye on it. An outstanding investment, and one which I highly recommend.

Another piece of equipment that is important for cooling your brew, not necessarily you, is a cooling coil. We made ours from copper tubing, hose clamps, and a sink sprayer thingie all purchased, once again, from Trader Horn. The coil gets submerged in your brew, then you run cold tap water through it. It turns what could be hours and hours in the summer heat waiting for your brew to cool into maybe 10 minutes before you can pitch your yeast. They're not hard to make, but shop around carefully. Sometimes the price of copper gets high enough that making one of these is more expensive than buying one pre-made. Oh, and if you're the type of person who likes to say things about the mothers of federal agents, you should be aware that having a cooling coil makes your beer brewing equipment look an awful lot like moonshining equipment.



Ice cold beverages are also a must. Often our traditional glasses of Wild Turkey give way to glasses of Wild Turkey on the rocks. Maybe an ice cold beer or two.

But that brings me to one way to stay cool while brewing that is not a good idea. That's drinking a fifth of ice cold vodka straight from the bottle while naked in a swimming pool. It keeps you nice and cool, and away from the heat of the brewing, but it ends in smashing your face on the pool deck. Trust me.




So that's my advice. Keep it outside, drink cold beverages, and try to make the hot part of the process as quick as possible. Just use plenty of sunblock, watch your face, and mind the tasers.

Iron City: Now with less iron!

So, Paddy sent me an article this morning: Iron City soon will be brewed in Latrobe. The headline pretty much says it all right there. But if you're not from Western Pennsylvania, you might still be confused even after reading the article, so I'll go into some more detail.

The "idled Latrobe brewery" is the Latrobe Brewing facility located in Latrobe, PA. They used to be the sole producer of Rolling Rock until Anheuser-Busch purchased the brand in 2006, and "moved" the brewing to their own facilities (read: started filling green bottles with Bud Light). I still have a 6-pack of ponies tucked away that were brewed in the Latrobe facility. I'm sure they're terrible by now, but I'll pretend they're great when I drink them some day.


But I digress. When Busch purchased Rolling Rock, Latrobe was hit hard. It was a huge source of jobs for the small town. Not much later, the plant opened back up to do contract brewing. "Contract brewing" you ask? Ah, well... that could be another article in itself. Big beer companies will sometimes play local breweries to make their beer instead of shipping from their main plant to that region. Do you enjoy that great Boston water they make Sam Adams from? No you don't. They fucking make it in Pittsburgh. Well... to be fair, its now made in many places, but originally all Sam Adams beer was brewed with the mighty waters of the Allegheny River.


So Latrobe Brewing has been doing that sort of thing for a few years, but Pittsburgh Brewing (or whatever they're calling themselves this month to dodge water bills) lost their contract with Sam Adams, and have been on the skids for awhile (see the article I linked to up above). And now Iron is moving to Latrobe. Which is great for Latrobe, don't get me wrong. I harbor no malice towards Latrobe. But Iron City is a Pittsburgh thing. And I don't mean it's a "Pittsburgh Tradition" or something like that, no; I mean it's named after the fucking city!



And not only do I not harbor any malice towards Latrobe, I actually liked old Rolling Rock better than Iron City! On a personal note, I'm kind of hoping Iron might start tasting more like old Rolling Rock once it's brewed in the glass lined tanks of Old Latrobe. But that's not the point. And neither is this:

"We're moving 40 miles down the road. We don't see that the sales will be impacted."

So, what do you mean by that, Mr. Hickman? Do you mean that your trucks won't use too much more gas for shipping? Or that the locals will speak the same language? People aren't pissed at you because they think sales of Iron City will drop because of your finincial shennanigans, they're pissed at you because you're firing all your workers during a peak in unemployment and selling off the old brewery during a trough in real estate value. Because you're betraying the name of the brand you're in charge of. Because you lied to the city and the union. Becuase you're skipping town owing a metric fuckton of money to damn near everyone in the city! I also heard you molest small dogs.

And I know Latrobe needs this. I know it will be good for them. But Pittsburgh isn't exactly a shining bastion of economic might, built from gold bricks and quail eggs. And the specific area Pittsburgh Brewing is moving out of has been trying to turn themselves around for about a decade, and they're starting to succeed! What you're doing is kind of like throwing bricks through your neighbor's brand new windows. And all the while you were "looking for new canning equipment." What were you really doing all that time?



But let's be frank, this decision was motivated by the financial success of the company. You don't owe any debt to Pittsburgh... well, actually, you do. A pretty big one. Like, two or three dump trucks crammed full of money. But you don't owe any sort of emotional debt to the city. You have no obligation to do the "right thing" here, assuming you have no sense of morality, justice, or conscience. If moving to a different brewery will make you more money, then perhaps that's the thing to do. And who cares if Pittsburghers won't drink Iron City anymore? You have your huge national and international market share to rely on. Right? And there's always the amazing taste of your product, that's probably won some medals or something. Right? It's not like Pittsburghers only drank it out of a sense of loyalty to your brand. Right? If everyone in the Pittsburgh area stopped drinking Iron City tomorrow, you'd totally still be swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck. Right?



It's an uber-dick move, buddy. You pulled a bait-and-switch. You strung everyone along, promising that you wouldn't pull the obvious cocksucker move everyone was expecting. You prentended to be a decent person, then... SURPRISE! Silly us, we should have known better than to think you were anything less than a complete, self-serving bastard.

Hope Latrobe doesn't make the same mistake...

Fermentation Friday: Fire, boobs, and beer

Standing around a turkey fryer in the driveway after sundown really gives you a feeling for the mystical side of brewing beer. The stars twinkling in the crisp, cool spring air. An owl hoots in a nearby tree, the breeze picks up and chills you just a bit. It's such an ancient process, and creates such a historically important item that it almost feels holy somehow. Standing there next to the licking flames and hollow whoosh of the propane burner, you can almost picture hooded monks standing around wood-fired kettles. Scantily-clad pagans smeared with paint praying to some since forgotten deity that their brew yields fermented goodness. Ancient Greeks making some form of offering to Bacchus. Hell, the oldest written recipe on record was for making beer! Alcohol in one form or another has been vital and sacred to so many societies over the years... but no more.

Now it's frowned upon. Decried and denounced as the work of the devil, not holy men. Hatchet in one hand, bible in the other, alcohol has been inextricably linked with the evil some men do under its influence. Needless. Senseless. Wrong.

We've lost that holy connection. That mystical feeling that comes with practicing the arcane alchemy of producing alcohol. And on a crisp spring night, the season of pagan rites of rebirth and fertility, the absence of mysticism from the beer making process seems even more obvious. Empty.

Well, let's bring it back, damnit! Let's take booze back to being something magical. Get our your hooded robes and body paint, we're gonna make some fucking beer!

Hey, there's a thought! Fucking beer... yeah.... that could work! Some kind of pagan rite during the brewing process. Once the boil is going, everyone strips off their hooded robes to reveal nude bodies covered in crude body paintings. Then the ritual sex will begin. And by ritual, I mean free-for-all. It'll be epic! And in the middle, the brew in the turkey fryer will be bubbling away.

Maybe take a break for some kind of neo-pagan events like fire-breathing and... fire breathing. Maybe take care of some little brewing details like sparging. Then back to the orgy! There'll be penises and breasts flopping all over the place (note to self: get some girls to participate). Old school mysticism. The spectacle will be awesome to behold!

No, not like that...

That's what I'm talking about!

It'll be so wild, we'll have to be careful not to forget to take the starting specific gravity. Then we dump it in the primary, pitch the yeast, and put the airlock on, passing around the bottle of cheap vodka so everyone can take a swig before we pour it in the airlock. You know, for good luck. Then, if our randomly chosen divinities smile on us, the beer should be ready to drink by the time the summer solstice comes along, and another batch can be brewed in a similar ceremony while the old batch is consumed! It'll represent... something.

So that's my goal for brewing this spring: turn it into a pseudo-religious orgy festival with fire.


Or maybe I'll make a lager. That'd be cool.

Perfection is an affront to god

Weavers and Builders in the Islamic world always put in a purposeful slight imperfection into their product, because perfection would be an affront to god. I'm not sure that in our brewing, or our drinking, that we should subscribe directly to this protocol, putting in a purposeful flaw, but it provides a relatively compelling introduction to this post.

My erstwhile companion in starting this blog, bJames, has suggested that perfection should be our goal. Our brewing should become metered and consistent, but I wonder how far. Were all beer to come out the same I would not drink out, I would just bring my beers in. I live in a state with relatively easy liquor laws, and going out for the $5 draft could be avoided with a $3 single bottle, closer to my house. Where I could also be assured no unrine but my own is on the toilet seat (thankfully the cat has gotten over his most recent bouts with a nasty UTI). So the draft is different- it sits in the keg, pumps through lines and into my glass. There is more carbonation, it dances a little, the beer has traveled, not alone, but with friends, been through some new and interesting narrow channels and has come to tell me what it has learned. Still, it is pasteruized and pressurized to the point that almost any idiot can get it to me in a reasonably consistent condition (except for the knuckleheads at the campus bar-- with the gall to charge a membership fee no less-- for beers that are priced and sourced as premium but pushed through lines that would make the Hilton's plubming look hygenic).

But, perhaps I digress-- beer is alive. As our friends out in California remind us, beer is teeming with living organisms. Any batch of drinkable beer is the result of a miracle of the right bugs eating the right sugars to make the right alcohols-- and flavors too. The British, as I may have mentioned before, love their cask ales. These beers are alive when the hit the floor and are kept by cellarmen and cellarwomyn who keep them the best they can. The elements affect the beers, they leave the brewery in under two weeks from inception. The drive, the cellar, the tempature, season, pollen, lines, other beers, spiders, they all conspire to make the beer different every time. These beers are alive, and I am alive. Sure, I've gone home with migranes from poorly kept beer, sold past its date by landlords who can't sell 6.5 gallons of the same beer in a week. This when they only have a few taps. But I've also had exquisite beers this way, that will never be the same again, only fleeting memories to be replaced by new ones as I try them again. It is the same with brewing- while ending up with radically different brews isn't desirable-- things change and we need to embrace that. 

My beer is alive, sitting in bottles in my closet as the whims of my landlord drive the heat in my house around 10 degrees, with the Chicago weather doing the same for another ten. Beers get better, they get worse, the age. I'll keg soon, but there will still be yeast alive chaing the profile of the beer. We can know a lot about our beers- we can take them to near perfection. But actual perfection-- beer brewed in nine locations in the US tasting exactly the same every day regardless of the season. Miller High Life being innoculated against skunking? These are technical marvels fitting of the first nation to put a man on the moon, sure. But they are also an affront to us as living beings, to nature, to our world, and, of course, to god.

Fermentation Friday: 2009 Plans

2008 was a good brew year. I started brewing on my own, making all-grain bitters, porters, Schwartzbier and a scotch ale that wasn't in the end. Two of them even took medals home, which was a nice surprise. I've had some hurdles that I want to overcome in both technique and composition of beers. In terms of technique, I have to get the time it takes to brew down. The process takes me 7 hours, from firing up to putting the carboy in the closet. Add to that the hour each way it takes to get to the brew store and it becomes a day and a half commitment. 

My next hope is to figure out how to get stuff in bulk. I'd like to brew more spontaneously, and being able to have hops on hand as well as grain would be great. Hops have been a big issue this year, my LHBS is usually out of what I want, and unless the brew heads are behind the counter I don't get great recommendations about swapping out my hops. My main goal is to learn all about hops. I might try to grow some upstate over the summer and I'd like to know off-hand which hops I can trade out and why. To this end, I've been cracking open all my hops when I get them home and taking big whiffs to get a good feeling for what is what.

Stylistically, want to make more American beers. All of this brewing started because of how much I loved drinking English cask ales while living abroad. Now that I'm back home, I want to make some American beers and reconnect with our bigger is better attitude. Still, I hope to expand to some sort of cask set-up, hopefully picking up a beer engine (or 2) while abroad this summer and a cask breather. I also want to drink a bit less beer and a bit more liquor. This will let me feel less like I'm grinding out a new beer every couple of days and give my palette a break from the endless hop explosions that I favor.

Finally, I like this blog. We started it at the end of 2008, but really it is a new-year's resolution to give a little back to the internet who helps us learn so much. The blog will soon have links to our favorite blogs. Coming in 2009 will be details of out different beer-making setups, some more reviews of beers, recipies, and a thorough discussion of getting donked and those who write about it. Sneak peek: "You're not a mixologist-- you're an asshat" & "The Pounder Shoot-out".  The internet, she is good to us and we thank her.

NB: All three of us should be posting on this topic, so check back as Friday approaches.

New Year

The blogs I read all are talking about their new year plans and a recap of the old. As I'm doing this due to my love of beer and booze blogs, I'll follow suit (or enthusiastically engage in mimetic isomorphism as we say in "talk like a dick school").

This last year found me brewing beer, first with my co-authors and then on my own. I had the good fortune of meeting some people in Chicago who did all-grain brewing, and borrowed their gear to make my first batch all-grain. It turned out alright, if weak, and I was off. I made four batches on my own last year, turning out six beers. The small beer experiment is terrible, the scotch ale turned out as an American Porter, the English Porter came out swimmingly. The Schwartz beer was good, and the excess that I did with ale yeast is interesting. I hope to put up detailed information on each of these as well as building a new mash tun for larger batches and high-gravity brews.

This January I have an American DIPA planned, hopefully with hops fresh from California which I am doing with a friend. I'm also going to do another English Bitter and possibly a second shot at the Scotch Ale, with Belgian sugars included to ramp up the punch. I enjoy the weaker beers and abhor the term 'session beer'. More on that to come.

I'm also exploring becoming a BJCP judge. This would require memorizing the beer styles, learning proper tasting techniques and going out to some home brew competitions. I'm not sure how I feel about competing with beer, but I'd love some knowledgeable feedback. And training to get to go out, meet brewers and drink beer just sounds awesome.

I also resolve to go back to drinking cocktails. Too often of late I've stuck to beer, which is tiring out my pallet. To this end, I've spent the weekend drinking Wild Turkey from the bottle. That is the plan.