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.

My Brew Crew

When B. James and McPaddy started brewing beer about 3-4 years ago I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. When they let me join in on their brewing actvities, they took me under their wing and guided and nurtured me like the special child I am. I was like the small boy the officer lets sit in the front of the squad car and play with the siren, or the kid the airline pilot lets sit in his lap and steer the plane.


I was on top of the world. But in my world, they were the Beirmeisters and I was only the lowely apprentice.

When I think about the guys I've brewed with, I think we all have something different to offer to the beer making process. Each of us has a different idea of what perfection is. McPaddy definitely likes the hops more than the rest of us, I love a nice rich malty Scotch Ale, while B. James' preferences lie with dismantling the emersion cooler and making a still.

The point is, we all have different individual preferences, but that is exactly what a good beer needs. Balance. My contribution is they let me play with the Auto-siphon. One of the few things I can't screw up.

Fermentation Friday for November

Adam has been kind enough to let us host Fermentation Friday this month and we couldn't be more excited while still sober. While we are all about the hangover, the topic this month is your homebrew community. For us, this blog serves as that, though people sometimes think we're but one split personality writing in triplicate. Sadly, that is what happens when you come through cub scouts together. Aside from the blog, we each have our own communities as well. I love the Chicago Homebrew Scene, twitter, judging and my love hate relationship with CAMRA (where I went fake-gay for membership). bJames loves him some homebrewing at Paddy's, and Richard Dicks takes it on the road, across the ocean, with his family, and in his home.

The task we set out is as follows: Please tell us about your homebrew communities. Are you into the BN, BA, weblogs and other 1337 f0rm5 of 21st century brewing? Do you while away the evenings in crowded halls with you area's finest, sampling and talking homebrew into the wee hours? Does your brew crew keep you sane? Or do you get your fix sitting at the bar plotting the next move? How do you keep them all going and what does each bring to your life?

Since FF is the day after Thanksgiving this month, we'll take comments, linked to this posting, any time that week. Our roundup will help you ease back into the work week on Monday the 30th of November. As an added bonus to the homebrew blogging community- we will send a JABB care package to our highest referee between now and the New Year.

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.

Fermentation Friday: Half-assing your way to innovation

Through the centuries, there have been some bizarre things people put in their home brew.  Sometimes to add flavor, sometimes to serve a functional purpose in the alcohol making process.  Some of these additives became part of the standard processes and recipes, and others, well...

I bet you didn't know that if you don't have a lid or bubbler for your primary fermentation vessel, you can float a layer of dried, crumbled horse turds on top.  It forms a layer that will allow gasses created by fermentation to escape, but not allow harmful infections from the air to get to your sweet, sweet horseshit brew.  But make sure the layer is even, you don't want all that nasty stuff in the air to get through your horseturds.

If your fermentation slows or stops before you have enough alcohol in your brew, it can be a bad day.  But there's no need to dump it down the drain and lose all that time and money you put into your batch; simply add something to your brew that will get your yeast going again.  Like a dead mouse.  A decomposing mouse carcass will add yummy yeast food to get things going again.

Or you could throw in... I mean carefully add old, weeping dynamite.  The waxy, crystalline stuff "weeping" out of the stick is pure, unstable, holy-fuck-nobody-move nitroglycerin.  The nitro will act as a chemical catalyst to wake your yeast up like a triple shot of espresso or... um... a stick of dynamite.

Paddy and I like to carry on this tradition of innovation and half-assery.  The weirdest thing I've ever put in a batch of home-brewed beer?  Grass.  Not marijuana, actual lawn clippings.  This was our very first batch of beer ever and we had been very careful to sterilize everything and prevent any and every possibility for infection.  Paddy was upstairs grabbing a bottle of vodka to fill the bubbler, and I was tidying up a bit.  I picked up a rag on the floor and shook it out for no reason I can really figure out.  The rag had grass clippings on it, and they flew into the beer and sank heartrendingly and irretrievably to the bottom.  It didn't seem to hurt the flavor, though; that's still one of the tastiest batches we've made.  But that was an accident, so I don't think that counts.

No, we're talking about things we put in beer on purpose, often with much less successful results.  And Paddy and I often stray quite a bit from the beaten path when making beer.  We like to do drastically different things, often things that a professional or even serious amateur brewer would never ever suggest trying.  When making wine, that usually takes the form of using just about everything but grapes.  But beer isn't as widely varied.  You make a beer out of kiwi fruit instead of grain and... well, it's not really beer anymore.  So what do we do to keep things different?


Rice Sugar
This is the most recent experiment on this list.  Paddy and I like Miller High Life.  No, seriously.  On a sunny, 98º Saturday afternoon in August, do you really want to be swilling down a Goose Island Bourbon County Stout (described as pouring like motor oil and being so sweet and chocolaty that “only the most decadent chocolate dessert can stand up to it”) or do you want an ice cold, thin beer with light taste and large sized bubbles?  If you said you would rather have the stout, you're wrong.  Or clinically insane.  Or maybe you lost your sense of taste in a horrible large-mouth bass fishing accident.

Anyway, we decided to try to make some High Life.  So we set off to the brew shop with a vague idea of what we needed to do.  We knew we needed the lightest grain we could possibly get, but we'd heard of another ingredient that gives High Life its thin body and light, crisp flavor: rice sugar.  Or rice solids.  Maybe it's the same thing, we're not sure.  Like I said, we only had a vague idea.  But they had a big thing labeled rice sugar, so we bought it.  Then we bought some light malt and a random beer yeast.

The result?  High Life.  The color, flavor, and mouth feel were perfect.  The only difference between what we made and real High Life is that our beer had absolutely no carbonation.  Something went wrong when we primed it, and the beer was flatter than something that's really flat.  Oh well.  We'll probably try again last next spring just before the fruit is ready for wine making, so it should be ready to drink on those hot summer days when lunatics and snobs reach for a warm bottle of chocolate syrup.

DME for priming
And speaking of thick beers, they're not all dark.  There are some very light colored beers out there that go down like a triple-thick milkshake.  The best (and only) one I've had that fits into that category?  Old Speckled Hen.  It used to be on (nitrogen) tap at our now defunct favorite bar.  I used to love going there and getting a shot of rye, a bacon-egg-and-cheeseburger, and a tall, cold glass of Old Speckled Hen.  We all loved this beer so much, Paddy and I decided to try to make some ourselves.  We found a clone recipe somewhere, but true to form we showed up to the brew shop without it.  So we winged it, and I thought I remembered reading that a way you could get that rich, foamy head was to prime the beer with DME instead of priming sugar.  Makes sense, in a way.  DME is sticky, so the bubbles should be small and foamy.  Or does that only make sense to me?

At any rate, we picked up an small bag of DME and used it to prime the beer.  And it kinda worked!  We pretty much made Old Speckled Hen, and couldn't resist putting a cock joke on the label.  Ok, a lot of cock jokes.  But that's just how we roll: foamy and cocky.

Cherries and Honey
Another clone of a favorite beer or ours was Mad Elf.  We've made it twice, once with amazing results, once with less than amazing results. To make Mad Elf you need really dark grains, cherries, and honey.  The second time, we forgot the honey, and the lack of honey turned up the suck quite a bit.  This clone recipe was not from some clone brew book; it was based on info from Tröeg's website, some clever thinking on our part, and some help from the guy at the brew shop getting the proportions right.  So it's a pretty original recipe with some pretty different ingredients and some pretty impressive results... when you remember to get the honey.

So we've covered the win, now here comes the fail...


Ginger
Ah, the Ginger Fail.  I know I've covered this one, so I won't go into too many details.   The short and chubby of it is ginger was the weird additive, and that part worked brilliantly!  We essentially chopped up some ginger and chucked it in with whatever else we were brewing.  After a couple weeks, it seemed like it was on the right track, but it wasn't sweet enough, so we added more sugar when we racked it.  The mistake?  Not boiling the shit out of the sugar.  So what was a bitter gingery brew turned into something that smelled like someone pissed in an old, sweaty gym sock.

 

We have added sweeteners to our home brew since then, and I'm pleased to say that boiling the shit out of it avoided any more sockpiss incidents.

Strawberries
Then there's the Serious Strawberry Fail.  This was a really half-assed idea.  Coming off our resounding success with the first Mad Elf clone, Paddy and I felt like maybe we knew something about brewing beer and decided to totally wing a recipe.  Once again, we headed off for the brew shop with no idea what we were going to get.  Starting with the recipe for the Elf Clone, we modified it in ways we thought would make an excellent summer beer.  The dark grains were swapped out for light grains, we kept the honey, and changed the fruit from cherries to Strawberries.  What went wrong?  Well, I don't think those ingredients were ever intended to go together.   I can't sum up the end result with anything as simple as "sockpiss", but it was not good.  Not terrible, just... unpleasant.  I think we ended up with some citrus notes, possibly from the yeast, that clashed with the tanginess of the honey and the sweetness of the strawberries.

Guess we should stick to the grass clippings.  But when all is said and done, I've just listed 5 times we tried weird ingredients in our beer, and 3 of those 5 times it turned out ok.  4 out of 6 if you count the grass!  Hell, 3/5 is 60% and that's a passing grade!  So if your idea of mixing things up is switching your brand of priming sugar, I encourage you to take a bigger chance.  Head down to the brew shop with only a vague idea of what you want to do, and don't be afraid to wing it.  Pick some random ingredients, throw in some stuff that probably shouldn't even go in beer.  If you have the same luck we do, there's only a 40% chance whatever you come up with will suck!

Ferm Friday- Cloning

Back in the day, bJames and I played guitar together. He was, and is, by far the better musician, but we differed in more than this respect. I could never play covers, and have to say I often didn't see the point. Sure, now, with age I get the idea that you want to test yourself against the masters, but that's always been the case. Bach wrote some masses, so did Mozart, Hayden and I'm surprised that McCartney hasn't tried his hand at one. But this is putting your own stamp within a familiar framework.

So, I don't really clone. But I will work within very set boundaries. I try to brew to style (usually). I've used clone-brew recipes, but just to find good recipes, which I usually play with and rarely, if ever, compare to the commercial beer. Of course, I live in a state that has decent liquor laws, unlike my colleagues. So I can get almost all the beers I like.

Except cask ale, which I've mentioned in the past both positively and negatively. I love the UK beer, and I've spent this July in the UK twittering about what I've been drinking. So I try to emulate the British style of beer, which is hard without a cask breather, pump and other sundries I can't invest in right now.

This blog, however, was started as a clone, but like all good clones, has grown into something distinct, like US Brown from N. English Brown, we are something different, stronger, more pungent smelling, more aggressively bitter.

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.

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.

Fermentation Friday-- Hops, Hoarding and Hessians

Spring is edging its way into Chicago. The ice is off the lake and we're down to what the weaker parts of the country consider winter coats and our frost-back northern neighbors consider summer frivolities. In this spirit, Byron asks about how spring fever will affect our brewing. I haven't caught the fever yet, but am ready to put out some tentative roots for when warmness is sprung. This spring its all about hops, hoarding and Hessians. Our first task is to put up some hops, though this may or may not happen. I can't do it at mine, but my brewing partner has a fire-escape balcony we can grow on in tubs.

Spring is also our family time to horde like squirrels. I just got a keggerator, with the agreement that the missus can have the freezer. After the quarterly Costco-run, I'm going to invest in brewing and lay some more roots. First off, a barley crusher then some sacks of grain. I only need to go through 4 sacks of grain to negate the cost of the crusher. Buckets will be filled- a sack of 2-row and another of Pils. I'm also trying to find the cheapest way to buy 2-5# of all the specialty grains I like to use. This spring will be dedicated to lighter American, Belgians and Alt-biers. As mentioned previously, I have some candi-sugar to go through, and we're making beer for my brew-partner's (not) wedding, so this will also be a practice run of that.

Finally, it is spring training and I'm still training my pallete in advance of this June's local BJCP exam. Good times, but surprisingly hard, especailly the multitude of German lager styles which I am entirely unprepared for. Still, I'll soldier along in the name of science.

Fermentation Friday - Cheese it! It's the fuzz!

Cleanliness is next to godliness. Old phrase. It has its origins in ancient Hebrew, someone who may or may not be full of shit once claimed. But the expression has more than age to lend it credibility. Science, practical experience, and riding the bus all bear this out. Letting sanitation slip is something you'll pay for in the end. Let your car stay dirty, it'll be more prone to rusting. Let your body get dirty, and you get hit on by Brad Pitt. Let food you're cooking get dirty, and some guy with mutton chops projectile vomits chicken fried steak into a stranger's yard as his car sits with blinkers on in the middle of the road. But in the home brewing world, being dirty can lead to even more horrific results.

Now, Paddy and I are pretty careful when it comes to cleaning our brewing equipment. We dish out the no-rinse pretty generously, and even give it a rinse with hot water after that, in spite of the product's name. It's served us well, other than the fact that it will most certainly kill both of us in some rare or possibly even as-yet-undiscovered way. Every time we open the container, the powder becomes airborn, and we invariably inhale some of it. It can't be good for us.

But even with being so cautious and clean, there have still been some failures related to sanitation. Three stick out in my mind.

Ginger beer. Beer with ginger. Simple idea, right? It was an interesting experiment we'd hoped would lead to epic drunkenness. We essentially brewed up a really light beer with a shitload of ginger in it. 2 weeks later, we had something surprisingly interesting, but it lacked the sweetness we had hoped for. So we decided to blend in some sugars and let it sit for awhile. A quick sample spiked with sugar seemed to confirm this was the way to go. So we heated up a small amount of water on the stove, and began stirring in various sugars. The water was at a simmer. I asked if we should boil it, and Paddy said "Nah, it'll dissolve just fine this way." (If you're keeping score, this was the mistake.) We cooled it, poured it in, racked it into a carboy for good measure, and let it sit with a fermentation lock on it. Two weeks later, we anxiously opened up the carboy and took a big whiff. It smelled like someone had pissed in a sweaty gym sock.




If we had sterilized the sugar water we added, we might have had a couple cases of a wonderful sweet, bitter, alcoholic concoction. But instead, we dumped the awful swill down the drain and chased it with Clorox. Fail.

Wine has had the similar problems twice for Paddy and me. Once was a strawberry wine that ended up moldy. Brown fuzz climbing up the sides of the bucket. Yeah... that shit got Cloroxed before dumping it. I commented that it made the whole room smell like a pool, not bleach. Paddy would later open his pool for the first time, and learn in his research that was the smell of death. Then, most recently, we brewed up a bucket full of blueberry fail. Or rather... didn't brew it. Which was the problem again. Paddy tells me the bucket is currently filled with green fuzz, so at least we're achieving some variety in our mold cultures.

So to close it all up here, I'm going to boil the ingredients for all my beers and wines from now on. I mean, just boil the shit out of it. Literally. Kill anything that's in there. That, and hold my breath when scooping out the no-rinse.

Fermentation Friday-- Sanitation

All of my friends have some sort of phobia in brewing. One is terrified of yeast, another is afraid of all-grain. I am afraid of bacteria. I can't get through the idea that I sanitize things, then expose them to air before putting them back in my beers. So... I sanitize everything, below is the rough process.

First, I oxyclean everything. I use the stuff from Costco- blue specks and all. It is cheap, easy and cuts through any mess. I then make up 2 gallons or so of Star-San. I love the foam. Really. I try to keep a bucket of star-san ready the whole day. I clean and then star-san the boil pot, ditto the mash tun and hot liquor tank (another 5-gallon tun). I also clean and sanitize all the hoses. At this point, I'm not worried about the beer going bad, but I gather all bacteria tastes bad, whether or not it ruins the beer. When I add in the Irish Moss (15 min left) I make sure to clean the immersion chiller with vinnegar, rinse and hit it with the sanitizer (which at this point holds all of the spoons and other equipment to touch the wort after it is cooled). I then let the coil sit for the last five minutes of the boil, put the lid (re-sanitized) back on the pot for the last two minutes of the boil and then put the flame out. I then start the chilling and put a gallon of star san into the carboy and shake for a minute. It is then put upside down in a bucket so it can drain out the foam (as much as possible). Eventually, I'll put a sanitized zip-loc over the neck and let it set out. The beer goes in and a blow-off is put into a gallon jug full of sanitizer that had been used to clean things previously. In secondary, I sanitize the airlocks with whiskey, drinking when we fill them for good luck. Tedious, boring but effective so far. If only I was so careful with my yeast.

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: How the best of '07 became the worst of '08 and why Adolphus Busch is better than you

Miller is better than you. So are Bud, Pabst, and Coors. Now, I don't want you to think I'm singling you out; it’s not that you're a bad brewer –well, you might be, but that's not the point. So am I. So is everyone else who isn't a brewmaster for one of those big companies.

By now, I'm sure you making angry, Nixonesque harrumphs in your wheely office chair and compiling your list of favorite microbrews in your head. I'm sure you're saying beers like Burning River, Arrogant Bastard, and Golden Monkey are way better than Miller Lite, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and the Silver Bullet; but they're not. They're just not.

And I’m sure you have your reasons for picking those microbrews. I’m sure you’re thinking about the mouth feel, the wide range of flavor and scent the carefully selected hops bring to the brew, how much richer the color is, how much fuller the head is. But you’re wrong.

The reason the larger breweries are better than the smaller ones can be summed up in one word: consistency. Winter, summer, fall, spring, bad harvests, blights, new suppliers, water pollution, pesticides, fertilizers, economic hardship, floods, tornados, war… none of these things have any effect on their end product. And that's simply astonishing! Just stop and think about what a monumental achievement that is! You probably bitch when your local shop runs out of your favorite brand of priming sugar.

But don’t think I’m saying I’m better than you. I’m not. I’m probably worse, and now we’re getting to the point. Last winter, MC Paddy and I brewed up a Christmas beer with hints of honey and cherry. It was dark, full, rich, sweet, strong, and even got a bit chocolaty with age. It's probably the best beer we've ever made, and this winter it became one of the worst. We dug out the recipe, gathered the ingredients, and set to work. We did our best to replicate everything from the year before, but something went wrong. What? Who knows.

And there's the problem. What good is expanding your knowledge and developing new and exciting recipes if you can't do something more than once? And I mean doing it exactly the same more than once. We were so excited to make this winter beer again. We came up with a name and a clever label, and really did it up properly. But the stuff inside just didn't live up to our hopes.

So I’m not saying all those things you like about your favorite microbrews aren’t important, I’m just saying that they aren’t as important as being able to do it all consistently. That's what I want to work towards next year, and I urge you to do the same. Whatever level of brewing you're on, no matter how good or bad your beer may be… learn to make it the same every time. That way, when you hit on something really good, you'll be able to make it again and again anytime you want.

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.