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 Many would say the obvious answer; the day that Prohibition was repealed.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!

Home Brewery

So, I've moved, so I haven't been posting much. I still owe you guys some notes from drinking in the UK and how I went (fake) gay for CAMRA. It was Roger Protz's deep blue eyes, and his amazing British teeth.

 Actually, he has very lovely teeth and is a thoroughly lovely man.

But today, today is about home brewing. I took some photos of the new setup, which is like the old setup but with less space. Why less space, well, its the new layout. Now, its less space for brewing, but more space for fermenting. And Kegs. By which I mean, out with the old:

And in with the new!

15 cu. ft. of cool wonderment. Fermenting, lagering,

6 kegs on draft and at least a case in there as well.

So here's how it rolls, for all you people claiming you can't do all grain because you don't have the space. I have a 950 sq ft apartment 1 bedroom apartment. You probably have a kitchen bigger than my bedroom. Hell, you might have one bigger than my living room. Suck it up.

Cooler on counter, cooler on chair, kettle on floor. Fill up seven gallons. Lift to stove and boil. It won't boil well, you'll get a shitty hot break, but you'll make beer. If you have decent stove, you'll be OK. I have an old apartment stove, I'm still ok. Boil it down to 6 gallons, rack 5.5 to the carboy/bucket, toss it in a corner or closet, maybe in a bin of water with ice packs and let it rip. To make the tun, I used a 12.5 gallon (50-75 can) Igloo cooler. Its not the best, but it works. Leeches some heat (2F) in a one hour mash, but what doesn't. I drilled through the lid and have a sparge arm built in. Ball valves are put on with stuff I got at the hardware store, using O-rings, washers, pvc and brass. More on making mash tuns in a few weeks I hope. HLT is the same. I use 2 Ikea brand pitchers to recirc through a funnel. That's it. I mean, with a pump I wouldn't have to lift the kettle, which is nice and could recirc better. I could also get a burner out back, but this is the system. Anything more means I'm moving to a RIMS setup somehow. Not the best idea right now. Oh, and stir the crap out of it when cooled, look at this cone of trub!

HOPSTOBERFEST is coming, October 3rd.

Hopstoberfest is coming on October 3rd. I'll be there with a Mild and something else, maybe a Black IPA.

If you are in Chicago- be there!

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!

I see your comic, and raise you a second...

Ha ha, more comics of relevance.

http://www.octopuspie.com/2009-08-05/313-it-gets-the-job-done/

Leads to...

http://www.octopuspie.com/2009-08-10/315-stuff-u-need-2-kno/

Now, this arc means a lot to me as my grandparents used to bootleg beer on the big island of Hawaii (the old country, or territory at least; stupid hukilau). Anyway, so this fine tradition of bootleg beer touches my family, where my grandfather would make his father's recipe, and his island wife, 15 years his junior, would serve it to his friends. Luckily this included the local revenue man, so they never got caught.

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.

Late Post

Today I'm giving you the cookie and the cream- a late post and one hastily thrown together. Sorry. Its the first time in weeks I've actually hit my day, though my weekend 'tech posts' haven't been as erratic as usual ("YES THEY HAVE" screams BJames- who I can hear psychically across time zones; sadly I can also psychically feel Richard Dicks Rogering his desk chair during his coffee break, so these powers are both a curse and a curse).

Back to beer--- I went out and judged again last weekend. Great time and a Muffalatta sandwich that blew my mind. I did APAs, with not only a master judge but one of Chicago's many homebrew authors. I won't say which one, but it was quite the experience, despite my being unaware of who he was at the time and having never read his book. As usual I learned a lot from him and from the process, hopefully I also helped out the entrants.  The APAs were so-so, most missing the essential hop character that makes it an APA. Still, no gushers, no rings and overall a decent selection of beers. The other category was wood-aged beers. I like these 'freak beer' categories, which is a good thing since novices often have to pay dues in those categories. We had some good and very good beers that were aided by the wood (these won), some good beers harmed by it and some mediocre beers that used the wood as a distraction. I made a rye-IPA recently that could have used some distraction. It is all bottled, but I'm thinking of flushing a keg with CO2 and dumping all of the bottles into the keg, oaking the shit out of it and seeing if it gets more palatable. Phenols and over-oaking might work-- it can't get worse. The other suggestion has been to use it to cook brats. 

Back to the wood aged beers- it is a nice category for me as a novice because I get to see a range of base styles at one time- which requires some odd comparisons: is this porter a better porter than that triple and does the oak character help the beer? A nice process. 

As for other things happening here. It was a weekend of technical mishaps and corrections- starting with my keg fridge getting down to 28F, helping my buddy put his kegerator back together and ending with dropping my iPod in the gym toilet (shockingly it still works). This week I'm meant to be ordering bulk grain and a crusher for the first time (very exciting) and will be getting ready for a brewing series that goes Cream Ale, IPA, Barley Wine, the Cream Ale and IPA are testers / backups for my friend's not-wedding this summer, the Barley Wine is just to try doing.

That's all here- I might finally do a system post this weekend so I can draw people to the blog off the forums by having details of the mash-tun and build and other things. I also might add thermometers and valves to my boil kettle and a thermometer to my mash-tun.

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.

Today was a good day

Alright- so I went a judgin' today. Good times. I did English Bitters and Strong Ales. I got to judge with a master judge (I'm but an apprentice) for the Bitters, and it was a good lesson in how to judge. The Bitters were ok, but they tended to being overly astringent. The strong beers were all over the place and we didn't agree much in the judging. This was in part due to the lack of hierarchy, I think, as we had no master or otherwise highly ranked judge to defer to. Overall, I was surprised the range of quality in the homebrew at the event. Most either had technical flaws or were clearly out of style. In most of our sessions, it was hard to find many more than three beers that were ok on both ends. Still, my beer didn't place in the IPA category- so I'm curious to see what the feedback is.

I got into the raffle, after not winning last time (though I got a t-shirt from a dude I met there). This time, I made out. I got to go up three time, landing some pint glasses, some shirts and a copy of Beer Smith, which I tried to pay for unsuccesfully on Friday. I also got to win a beer sign, which the lovely young woman across from me wanted. I had been judging with her fiance and was extolling the virtues of marriage, so I was more than glad to pass it along to her. Next round up, she won and I got some dark Belgian candy sugar. Later, I gave my ride some Isodaphor, and got light candy sugar. The gift economy of brewing is fascinating.

So, fun to judge, fun to enter and fun to be in the raffle. Good times. 

Draft Dodgers

Someone posted this to Tasty Brew, and I thought I'd share with the blog. A great post about homebrewing as the start of craft brewing and part of the libretarian agenda: http://www.reason.com/news/show/131411.html.

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.

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.