Fresh Beer Every Friday

Black Sabbath - Paranoid

2011-12-16T06:35:00.000-06:00

The first time I brewed an imperial stout, I learned a lot about brewing a big beer. The original recipe, simply titled "Black Sabbath", was a pretty basic Imperial Stout, really more like a regular stout but amped up. The plan was to make one of these beers every year, and age it to see how it improved. In that recipe, I was able to use the Wyeast limited edition Imperial Ale yeast. I made 5 gallons and was going for a 12% ABV recipe. I also ended up making a 4% ABV stout with the second runnings.

However, when you're using 24 pounds of grain, your efficiencies tend to go down the toilet. So I got a 10% beer, which really isn't too bad. Considering I was two years into brewing, it turned out pretty good. I "dry-beaned" it with 4 ounces of coffee beans. I won't do that again, as I think the coffee becomes more astringent as time goes on.

There was also some design involved in the labels, in that each succession would line up with the next Black Sabbath album. I figured this would keep me in label art for some time to come. I also picked up some darker red wax from Shoreline Brewery to dip the top of the capped bottles in, akin to Three Floyd's Dark Lord.

In this second iteration, I was learning more about specialty grains, so I wanted to experiment with them. The idea behind the use of these grains was to make a very complex beer. The other issue I had was fermentation. I wanted the fermentation to finish well, so I figured I would make a smaller batch so I didn't have to have such a large (1 gallon) starter. I also didn't have the same Imperial Ale yeast, so I went with the British Ale II (Wyeast 1335) since that was what Northern Brewer was using for the Surly kits, and I like Surly quite a bit. I made a 2000 ml starter for this one. Fermentation began within 2 hours of pitching.

Black Sabbath – Paranoid

Batch Size (Gal): 3.00

Anticipated OG: 1.094 (22.50)

Anticipated SRM: 54.9

Anticipated IBU: 124.6

Brewhouse Efficiency: 75 %

Wort Boil Time: 60 Minutes

5.00 lbs. American 2-row (Great Western)

3.00 lbs. Munich Malt(dark)
1.00 lbs. Golden Light Dry Malt Extract

0.25 lbs. Crystal 80L

0.50 lbs. Chocolate Malt

0.25 lbs. Golden Naked Oats

0.50 lbs. Flaked Barley

0.25 lbs. Honey Malt

0.50 lbs. Roasted Barley

0.50 lbs. Molasses

1.50 oz. Magnum @ 60 min.

1 tablet Whirlfloc @ 15 min.

3 tsp yeast nutrient @ 15 min.

Wyeast British Ale II 1335

In the last batch, I used both honey and molasses. I have no doubt that the honey added to the alcohol content, as that ended up being a 10% ABV beer. I went with Honey Malt this time for more honey flavor. The Golden Naked Oats were supposed to also add a fruitiness, and I went with those instead of flaked oats, which I used in the original recipe. Another change to this recipe was the substitution of some Dark Munich malt for the 2-Row, to give it some more evil.

OG was a little under (I ended up adding the pound of DME for this reason) at 1.088. Fermentation was vigorous for 3 days. I even did a second oxygenation at this time with my aquarium pump for about 30 seconds. I doubt this was enough. The beer ended up finishing at 1.028, which freaked me out, but the beer has been in bottles for over 6 months now. The most recent one had strong carbonation, but others I had were not as carbonated. I didn't want a big carbonation by the style, but I have yet to drink a beer that wasn't helped out by at least 2.5 volumes of carbonation. It's beer for Chrissakes, not wine.

So I ended up with an 8% ABV beer, which is actually all right. The flavors have gotten more complex over the months, with more dark fruit beginning to show up. 2012's version (Master of Reality) will get an increase of 2-row, and I think I will add back the honey and molasses, but put them into the bucket 3 days after primary fermentation has started. If I can get the Imperial Ale yeast again, I will. I would like to use that to make an Imperial IPA and then use the yeast cake from that to make this beer. Vanilla beans are a possibility. Down the road, I'd like to use a Trappist High Gravity yeast to give it more of a Belgian Strong Dark Ale twist. The possibilities are endless.

An Honorable Mention for 2Wicky

2011-12-06T13:21:00.000-06:00

So I responded to a question in the LinkedIn Homebrewer's forum about interesting beers you've brewed or somesuch. Unfortunately, I was mistaken for someone else named Thierry in the post. Whatever. Here's the Drapeau Noir Siason (sic), otherwise known as my 2Wicky Saison Noire. Hopefully, we'll hear back some tasting notes. Might be a chance to brew this one again in 2012, but I really only want to brew a Belgian Dubbel this year. But I will have to brew another beer with the yeast cake from that.

A Brew Day

2011-06-03T09:00:00.001-05:00

This is sort of a photo journal entry of what a good brew day looks like for me. It actually starts about 12-18 hours before the brew day, since I do 2 things before I can get the wheels in motion. "Pre-Brew Day" includes collecting the water for the boil and sparge, making a yeast starter, and possibly crushing the grain the night before. Usually, crushing the grain is the first thing I do in the morning of the Brew Day, but since I had a friend come over to get his grain crushed, he suggested that since I had the 1/2-inch drill and grain mill set up, I go ahead and do mine. It was a pretty good suggestion.

The Yeast Starter

Unless I'm using dry yeast, I like to make a yeast starter. You can use the Mr. Malty Pitching Calculator to help you out, but I've done enough starters to know what works for me. I use 6 oz of dry malt extract for each 1000 ml of water. So if it's 2000 ml, 12 oz, 3000 ml, 18 oz, etc. If the base malt is 2-row, I'll want to use "Gold" DME, if it's Pilsner malt, I try to use "Pilsner" DME. However, I'm cheap, so I tend to use what I have on hand. I also add a teaspoon of yeast nutrient to each starter. 1 tsp is usually what is called for per gallon, so I guess I could use less, but what does it hurt?

I have a 5000 ml flask I bought from an online brewing store, so I can put the DME, yeast nutrient and water all in the same thing, bring it to a boil for 5 minutes, chill and pitch the yeast. I am working on building my own stir plate, but I need to get a rheostat for it. Until then, I leave the flask on the kitchen counter and swirl it often. For 1000-2000 ml starters, I will do those 12-24 hours in advance of pitching. For anything bigger, 3 or 4 days seem to yield more yeast. So you have to plan. Below are my guidelines.

For Ale Yeast (including Belgian strains):

OG is 1.060 or below: 1000 ml starter
OG is 1.060 - 1.075: 2000 ml starter
OG is 1.075 - 1.090: 3000 ml starter
OG > 1.090: 4000 ml starter

For Lager Yeast, I don't usually make a lager over 1.066, so I usually make a gallon starter and actually chill the wort and decant into a better bottle, though I suppose using the 5000 ml flask would work. It's just easier to use the brew kettle and run it through the chiller. I have had success using only one packet of fresh Wyeast and a gallon starter, but I think I will start using 2 packs of yeast in the future. Maybe. A 4-day yeast starter for lager at room temperature has yielded at least 4 good lagers for me (that's 4 for 4, in case you were wondering, 100% success, although one of those was actually yeast cake from another...)

Yeah, and I just use foil over the top, although I don't think a stopper and ferment lock would hurt. This is more of a "a lot of people use foil, so I decided to use foil" thing.

Brew Day

I like to start my Brew Day early. Like when I get up, I make some coffee, and start setting things up. I use ProMash to figure out the strike temperatures, and so I take my pre-measured water and start warming up the water on the stove. I bought a hard copper pipe, and used a measuring cup to determine what the certain amounts of water looked like in my boil kettle. So I put a gallon of water in, put the pipe in, marked it with a pencil, then used a hack saw to score the mark permanently. I did this in increments of gallons up to 7, since it's a 9-gallon kettle. I batch-sparge, so I have a 4.5-gallon kettle I use to heat up the sparge water. However, I measure this water out first in the 9-gallon boil kettle because I don't have another pipe for the 4.5-gallon pot, and transfer it. Then I measure out water for the initial mash in. I leave both these pots on the stove the night before the boil to let any chlorine evaporate. I have friends who bought a Britta filter that they can put on the end of a hose, and can go to town right away. I do this more out of superstition than actual flavor tastings.

This is my mash tun, a Coleman cooler I've had since 1992 that I put a stainless steel valve on, some washers and o-ring/gaskets, a small amount of copper tubing, and a big stainless steel braid that Jon Duder gave me. I used a worm clamp to fasten the hose to the copper tube, then folded and crimped the loose end. It works well.

I have a grain mill that I set on a bucket I bought at the hardware store that I use strictly for grain capture. Grain mills are nice if you're doing all grain, because you can buy grain in bulk (cheaper) and un-crushed, so you can crush it fresh, and don't have to feel pressured to brew if something comes up because your grain is losing freshness (and thus, efficiency).

Once the temperature of the water is right, I pour it into the mash tun first, then pour my grain into the mash tun and stir it with my big spoon. Check that the temperature is right, close the mash tun, and carry it outside to a table where I've got it set up to be wrapped in two big wool blankets. I usually set the sparge water kettle on top to hold the mash tun down. I let the grain set for 30 minutes, open, stir, check the temperature, and if I need to, I'll boil a gallon and pour it in and stir it up. Usually, it only drops 1 or 2 degrees over 90 minutes. I tend to mash for 75-90 minutes, as this has seemed to improve my efficiency.

I use a 2 quart pan for vorlauf, also pictured above is a scale for measureing hops, a small bowl with yeast starter and whirlfloc tablet for an addition at 15 minutes (you can use Irish Moss in lieu of whirlfloc).

With about 30 minutes left in the mash, I start heating the sparge water. I will bring this to a boil. This will go in after I vorlauf the first runnings

Vorlauf

"Vorlauf" is a German word that means to recirculate the beer. I guess I could say "recirculate", but I like German words. Once the mash has reached 75 or 90 minutes, it's time to start filling the boil kettle. I attach a hose to the mash tun and start running liquid into the 2-quart pan. The photo above was shot during the vorlauf after I added the sparge water, so that's why you see wort in the kettle. You want to make sure you don't have any grain (or too much grain) in the boil, which will give you tannin flavors, so you run the wort into the pan until it looks clear. This usually takes me 2 or 3 fills. I fill the pan, then return it to the mash tun. Once it runs clear, I open the valve and let the wort run into the kettle. When it runs dry, I close the mash tun valve, measure the amount in the kettle to let me know if I have enough sparge water, then I adjust the sparge water, and dump it into the mash tun. Stir it in to get even temperatures, and then I go get a drink of water or take care of some minor things to let it set in there for 5 or so minutes (totally unnecessary, but again, some superstition), then vorlauf again. I then run off the wort until I have the pre-boil amount I want (usually 1.5 gallons more than I intend to ferment, so 7.5 for 6 gallons, 7 gallons for 5.5 gallons of wort).

Boil

Next comes the boil. If I'm not using Pilsner malt, it's usually a 60-minute boil. For fun this time, I actually did a 70-minute boil. I was shooting for a gravity of 1.050 and hit 1.051. So I probably would've been good with a 60-minute boil. Note that if you have hop additions at the beginning of the boil (for example, 1 oz @ 60 min) do not change that. Still drop it in with 60 minutes left in the boil. This will prevent it from having more bitterness. I add other hop additions as necessary, and then throw my yeast nutrient and whirlfloc in with 15 minutes left in the boil.

Chilling

I didn't take any photos of my counterflow chiller. Chill the wort down to the temperature you want - I usually shoot below 70, around 65*F, if possible. This was a Koelsch, and at the time, my root cellar floor was 58*F, so it was perfect. Fermentation temps are becoming more important to me. I think a lot of mine have been too low, and my finishing gravities end up higher than I'd like. For ale yeasts, I think 68*F is a good temp. For Belgians, I like to start at 62*F, and once fermentation takes off, I want to start increasing the temps about 2*F per day, and end up around 70*F if possible.

Leave a message if you have any questions. And don't forget to enjoy the brew day. Hopefully they will all be awesome days.

2Wicky Black Saison

2011-05-20T06:00:00.002-05:00

Sometimes I am in awe of the wonderful things that run through my head when I think of beer ingredients. The creative side of homebrewing is the funnest part for me. Building something different used to be my primary motivation, but then this year I decided I'd rather get some recipes down that were solid recipes I could repeat, mostly because I'd make all these weird things and find myself longing to have a simple pale ale or pils.

That's how 2Wicky started. Only it wasn't black. I was pumping out all sorts of crazy Belgian-style beers but putting a twist on them. I had just brewed the #9 clone, and I liked it, but I realized that the amount of apricot extract in one bottle (4 oz) wasn't enough for a 5-gallon batch. I needed another 4 oz bottle, but what was I going to do with the remainder of the second bottle?

Knowing that 4 ounces of extract let you know the flavor was there, but wasn't strong got me to thinking what if you could use 3 ounces and put some other things in the beer, or use a beers attributes to make someone wonder what that flavor was? 2Wicky was born, and sat in my recipe file until I decided I needed to brew some kind of wacky Belgian beer one day ("2Wicky" is a song by Hooverphonic, a Belgian band). I looked at the recipe, but I thought of making a Saison Noire (black saison) instead. Plus, I didn't have the apricot flavoring.

I also had been wanting to use star anise (I would go into the local ingredient store and open the whole star anise bin and inhale) and I wanted it peppery, and had just read about grains of paradise. So I fashioned this recipe.

2Wicky

Batch Size (Gal): 6.00
OG: 1.072 (17.53)
SRM: 21.2
IBU: 44.8
75 % Efficiency
90 Minute boil

8.00 lbs. Marris Otter Malt
3.00 lbs. Pilsener
0.50 lbs. Carafa II (dehusked)
0.50 lbs. Crystal 40L
0.38 lbs. Molasses
2.00 lbs. Demerara Sugar

1.50 oz. Perle (8.25%AA) @ 60 min.
2.00 oz. Strisselspalt (2.60%AA) @ 5 min.
1.00 Anise (whole star) @ 5 min.
2.00 gm Grains of Paradise @ 5 min.

Wyeast 3711 French Saison

There are some tricks to this beer. When I brewed it, I threw the molasses and the sugar in with 10 minutes left in the boil. When I make this beer this year, I will only add the molasses at this time, and not the Demerara. I have a feeling that adding that much sugar to the boil tends to leave me with beers that don't finish below 1.016. Therefore, what I have done before, and what I intend to do the next time, is open ferment for 2 days, rouse the yeast both days, then cover and wait for fermentation to slow. I will then add the 2 lbs of sugar to maybe a quart or quart and a half of water, bring to a boil, and then add it to the wort, to give the yeast some dessert, and dry out the beer. (Make sure to rouse the yeast prior to adding the sugar water to kick start it) The beer was very carbonated after I bottled. It also got a 36 at the Urban Knaves of Grain homebrew contest this year (2011) and was entered in a mini Best of Show. I entered this as a Belgian Specialty Ale (16E). Some of the notes were:

"High molasses aroma with star anise notes, moderate malt aroma, medium-low hop aroma, low esters. Brown with garnet highlights, high, light tan head, good retention. Very light malt flavor, moderate molasses, light grains of paradise malt flavor. Very low star anise flavor, moderate hop bitterness and aroma, some peppery phenolic notes. Creamy explosive carbonation, medium light body, finishes prickly, somewhat dry."

This is a good beer to make as a Christmas beer. Using the warmer temperatures in the summer to ferment, you can bottle it, and then around late November/Thanksgiving, you can start cracking them open. Mmmmm...smells like Monk Basement.

Roosevelt Franklin Rye Stout

2011-04-22T06:00:00.001-05:00

I am not a big fan of stouts. While I think the style is good, for the most part, I don’t really care for that burnt or roasted flavor in my beer, or at the level the stouts I encountered earlier in my life. I always felt challenged in a way that I did not want to be challenged from beverages I drank. Having said that, I would have to say that I’ve had many stouts in recent years that are not as roasty, but more balanced, or even have a nice chocolate overtone to them.

About a year ago, one of my friends brought me a Bell’s Rye Stout. It sounded interesting enough. I was completely blown away when I smelled the beer. It smelled like toasted dark bread. It was only the second beer in my life that I wanted to walk around smelling all day, rather than lose that aroma by drinking the beer. The beer had a nice, dry finish, and more of a chocolate flavor rather than a roasted flavor.

I decided that I wanted to brew something like this. I contacted Bell’s, but only asked if they actually toasted any of the malts in the beer. They replied, saying that they did not toast any of the malts, only the combination of the malts resulted in the toastiness of the beer.

I went to the Northern Brewer forum to inquire if anyone had any ideas on how to modify a recipe that I had fashioned. I was given a nice recipe to try, that was similar to what I had, and rolled with it.

The beer has turned out well. It is a good stout, balanced with roastiness and chocolate flavors. It doesn’t have quite the toasted aroma I want though.

As luck would have it, I was listening to an old Jamil Show podcast about California Common. Jamil uses a small amount of pale chocolate malt in his California Common recipe to give it a “toastiness”. He was asked by his co-host on the show if there were any other malts he knew of that would impart a similar flavor. He stated that for the style of toastiness he was going for, that pale chocolate malt was the only one he was aware of. Therefore, I have modified my recipe to cut back half the amount of chocolate rye, and in it’s place, use a quarter pound of pale chocolate malt.

Roosevelt Franklin

Batch Size (Gal): 5.50

Anticipated OG:1.069

Anticipated SRM: 30.0

Anticipated IBU: 51.0

Brewhouse Efficiency: 75 %

Wort Boil Time: 60 Minutes

10.00 lbs. Pale Malt(2-row)

2.00 lbs. Rye Malt

1.00 lbs. Flaked Rye

0.50 lbs. Roasted Barley

0.25 lbs. Chocolate Rye

0.25 lbs. Pale Chocolate Malt

0.50 oz. Magnum @ 60 min.

0.50 oz. Nugget @ 60 min.

WYeast 1028 London Ale

Re-Using Yeast Cake

2011-04-15T06:34:00.000-05:00

You may have heard of the process of moving your beer off of the yeast either to bottle or keg, or put into secondary fermentation and then using the yeast at the bottom of that fermenter to ferment another beer. I have done this 3 times and have had successful results.

Mind you, my methods might be a little unorthodox. Here are the steps that I take:

1) Plan the brew day for the second beer based on when the yeast is done.

The second time I did this, I brewed a Vienna lager and figured in two weeks, it would be done fermenting. I began brewing the second beer, a Maerzen, exactly 2 weeks after the first. Unfortunately, while the second beer was boiling, I took a gravity sample and found that the first beer was far from done (gravity reading was 1.030). Luckily, I had enough vessels that I was able to move that beer to a secondary fermenter, use half the yeast cake for the new beer, and then return the Vienna into the original fermenter. Both beers turned out great.

2) Sanitize two vessels

One vessel will be for your fresh beer, the second vessel will either be your bottling bucket, keg, or secondary fermenter for your first beer.

3) Sanitize the path

I use a fresh rag and sanitized water and gently clean the top of one side of the first fermenter to get rid of any chunks of kreuzen or gunk left behind during the fermentation. This is probably very unorthodox, so get some other opinions. This is how I’ve done it, and it works well for me.

4) Put the yeast cake into the second beer

Go through your normal methods of infusing oxygen into the new beer (shake the fermenter, use an oxygen stone and tank or aquarium pump, etc.) and pitch the yeast.

You should see fermentation rather quickly with this method. And you just saved some money on yeast.

Good luck!

Magic Hat #9 Revisited

2011-04-08T08:14:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a little bit more than I should about Magic Hat's #9 lately. I don't plan on brewing this beer anytime soon, although I wouldn't mind having 5 gallons of this in my house. I've brewed a clone of Magic Hat #9 before with some success.

Two things have brought me back to thinking of this beer. The first was an email that I get from Magic Hat (in fact, I signed up on BOTH of my email addresses to get this newsletter/email) that suggested making a drink called Black Magic, a Black and Tan style drink with Magic Hat #9 and "your favorite stout". I have just brewed a Rye Stout that I call "Roosevelt Franklin" that I should have a post about next week. I just had one of these beers last night, and it is finally ready.

In case you were wondering, the Magic Hat #9 would go in first. You don't need the special spoon, you can just bend one, but here's a nice video courtesy of the Brooklyn Brew Shop, who have some pretty interesting sounding recipe kits you can buy:

I also found an old Can You Brew It podcast where they cloned the Magic Hat #9. I based my original recipe on a recipe from the book Clone Brews. My recipe used Marris Otter, and a half pound of Crystal 60L, Cascade and Columbus hop additions exactly opposite of what was suggested by the head brewer of Magic Hat on the podcast. Still, I thought the beer was very close to the original, and I enjoyed it. The recipe they came up with on the show was something like:

Magic Hat #9

6 gallons

OG: 1.045

FG:1.011

IBU: ~20

SRM: 6

9.92 lbs pale malt (Marris Otter)

0.20 lbs Crystal 80

¼ oz Columbus @ 60 min

½ oz Cascade @ 30 min

White Labs WLP002 Yeast or Wyeast 1098 British Ale

Mash temp 152*F

Ferment @ 68*F

On the podcast, they used 5 oz of Apricot flavoring in 5 gallons of beer, or the keg. If you're bottling, you can't just add more to each bottle once the caps are on. However, you buy the Brewer's Best Apricot extract in 4 oz bottles, and having made 5 gallons of the beer and adding 4 oz of the Apricot extract to the bottling bucket, I can verify that it was not enough. Brewer's Best suggests 5 oz in 5 gallons, the guys at Can You Brew It also suggested this, so I think that this should be the correct amount.

I should also note that on Magic Hat's web site, they are now using Cascade and Apollo hops in the #9. At around 20 IBU, this probably won't matter, although Jamil says in another podcast that you can taste the difference between 1 IBU. (I'm rolling my eyes at that. This is as bad as the stereo-philes in the 80s saying they could tell the difference between a clean record and a CD. Maybe you can, Jamil, but the average beer drinker, I assure you, can NOT).

In my recipe, I'm upping the malts to 10 lbs Marris Otter and .25 lbs of Crystal 80, because of my efficiency. I'm showing an OG of 1.053 in Promash, so if I hit anything between 1.045 and 1.053, I'll be happy.

Samhain - Version 4

2011-04-01T06:00:00.000-05:00

Just as there are many kinds of beer, there are also many kinds of home brewers. When I got into this, I never made the same recipe twice. Then, while visiting in-laws in Syracuse, New York, I discovered Magic Hat beers for the first time. From what I’ve observed, Magic Hat tends to be a polarizing brewery for home brewers. It seems like people either love them or hate them, and I think a lot of it has to do with their flagship beer, #9, a not-quite-so pale ale with a hint of apricot.

Personally, I like #9. I don’t go out of my way to load up on it, but I enjoy having one or two every now or then. My wife also likes #9, which is also helpful.

However, while on the trip I mentioned above (and also here before), I also discovered Magic Hat’s Jinx. I really liked this beer. So much that I went on a quest to clone it. That beer turned out to be a lot bigger than it needed to be. Again, I liked the aroma of this beer, and I even enjoyed what a malt bomb it was, much to the chagrin of just about everyone else who drank it. I mean, Magic Hat made it with only 20 IBUs. So, yeah, it’s going to be malty. But earlier versions were much too sweet, I’ll admit.

So as I traveled down the path of learning about Scottish ales, which I discovered was sort of the base recipe of the Jinx in a far-reaching manner, I heard that you’re not supposed to put peated malt in Scottish ales, but rather derive that taste from longer boils and darker crystal malts.

The other thing I liked about this recipe is that I grow Zeus hops in my backyard, and I could use them for this beer. However, this year, I just put all 18 oz of my hops in my chest freezer/kegerator instead of freezing them (I didn’t really have the room in my basement beer fridge/freezer due to there being food in there; you gotta eat, you know). After a couple of months, all the hops had turned brown. And I dried them for 16 hours. Perhaps I didn’t bag them well enough. Next year, I’ll try and use a vacuum sealer. I had to use what I had on hand, since I didn’t plan on the hops being bad, and wasn’t paying attention. So I had half an ounce of Perle, and a whole bunch of Nugget and Summit hops (of which a little of the latter goes a looooong way), so I decided to make a different version.

I’ve been dickering with the malt bill every brew, the last time I used a pound each of Crystal 40 and Crystal 120, which kept me up at night. Again, that might have been a better beer had I hopped it heavier. Still, like I said, I enjoyed it. While the color of the current year’s (I believe I’ve brewed this beer 4 times now in my 3 years of brewing) beer a lot, it still doesn’t have that “purplish” hue (actually, when I poured the beer for the photo tonight, I think the color is spot on) but I think if I increased the boil 30 minutes, I could achieve this. That would be okay, anyway, since I ended up with 6 gallons this year instead of 5.5, so my OG was 1.060. I should also note that this year, I added the pound of brown sugar after 3 days of fermentation to dry it out. It still ended up finishing at 1.013, but for this kind of beer, that is okay with me. It finishes dry and there is a tart hop punch.

I think the malt bill is good. The hop schedule will change to 3 additions of Zeus hops, likely a third of an ounce at 60, a whole ounce at 10 minutes, and another ounce at 0 minutes. While, it won’t exactly be the malt bomb it was intended to be, it will be a more balanced beer, and one I will enjoy. Perhaps in version 6, I’ll tone those down a bit, because I don’t know what the alpha acid is on my Zeus hops. I am assuming 11% AA, while Fresh Hops, where I got the rhizome, are selling Zeus hops are 14.2% AA. It’s a great journey, and I’ve enjoyed each version.

Samhain

Batch Size (Gal): 5.50
Anticipated OG: 1.067
Anticipated SRM: 19.0
Anticipated IBU: 25.3
Wort Boil Time: 60 Minutes

9.00 lbs. Golden Promise
1.50 lbs. Munich Malt(dark)
1.00 lbs. Brown Sugar (dark)
1.00 lbs. Crystal 40L
0.25 lbs. Crystal 120L
0.13 lbs. Chocolate Malt

0.5 oz. Perle (Pellet - 7.8% AA) @ 60 min.
1.0 oz. Nugget (Pellet - 11.2% AA) @ 10 min.
1.0 oz. Summit (Pellet - 18.5% AA) @ 0 min.

WYeast 1028 London Ale – 2 quart starter

Novices and Bigger Beers

2011-03-04T06:00:00.000-06:00

When I started out brewing, I was still relatively unfamiliar with the different styles of beer that existed. I knew I liked pale ales, IPAs, and even had a special place in my heart for Belgian-style Wit (or White) beers. While I was known among my friends for a very long time for liking beer, the depth of my knowledge of the various styles was not that deep.

As I began developing recipes, I was also going to forums on home brewing and rating beer at places like ratebeer.com. I started learning about other beers and commercial styles of these beers. Eventually, after having a conversation via private message on ratebeer with a guy from Wisconsin, he pointed out that since I live in northwest Indiana, I must get to drink a lot of Three Floyd’s Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout. I had not known about this beer, or the events surrounding Dark Lord Day, but I became intrigued.

After buying and trying the Dark Lord in 2007, I began on a quest to clone this beer. Searching for recipes on the internet proved to be easy. However, the technique on brewing a beer that was around 13%ABV did not also come with these recipes.

While the first version of this beer turned out to be pretty good, I learned a couple of things about brewing bigger beers. One thing being your efficiency completely drops when you use greater than about 17 pounds of grain. I’m sure if I was wiser about mashing techniques, I could have gotten closer, but I doubt I would ever be able to achieve the 75% efficiency I was looking for. Longer mash times than 60 minutes might have helped achieve this. There is also an interesting method in Randy Mosher’s book, Radical Brewing, about taking half the grain of a big beer, mashing it, then using the wort collected from the first half and mashing the second half of the grain with that wort instead of using fresh water. I haven’t tried this.

I didn’t come here to discuss how to brew bigger beers, though. I’d rather each person learns this process by their own means. I would be happy to discuss this at another time. What I wanted to discuss was how new home brewers tend to get into the hobby, and right away they want to make a 10% ABV beer.

You can be successful doing this, and I’m not against it, but I think there’s something to be said for easing yourself into the hobby and not attempting to make boozy beers right away. I’m not sure you can get a complete understanding of what is going on with big beers.

Of course, this is just my opinion, and recently, I had a friend make a double IPA and he used just one packet of Nottingham yeast. Suprisingly, to me, the gravity started out at 1.090 and within just a week, was down to 1.015. He said it tasted great just after a week. Shows you what I know.

It just reminds me of the scene in the movie, Weird Science where Gary and Wyatt are trying to impress the other two male “cool guys” in the movie, Max and Ian, by making a second girl. When they get to the discussion about breast size, Max and Ian say, “Bigger tits”. Gary disagrees but in the end, frustratingly says, “Give ‘em the knee shooters.”

Of course, it is a hobby, and you should make what you enjoy. I just enjoy the journey a little more.

Give 'em the knee shooters...

Maison

2011-02-25T06:00:00.000-06:00

In the past, when deciding what to brew, I fought against an urge to brew what I really wanted (IPA! DRY-HOPPED PALE ALE! PILSNER! PILSNER! IPA!) to try other styles. For example, the beer that became 2Wicky (a French-style Black Saison with Star Anise, Grains of Paradise and molasses) started out as a standard Saison with just 2 oz of Apricot flavoring so you'd think "Huh? What was that?" The grains weren't very traditional. Only 21% Pilsner malt was used, and instead I went with Marris Otter as the primary base malt (at 55%).

In an enclosed hotel rooftop swimming pool in downtown Indianapolis, I started thinking about the base recipe of the 2Wicky as a simpler Saison. There were posters around the swimming pool that appeared to be some kind of old-timey vacation ads for places in France. I noticed how "Maison", meaning "house" or probably "home" was one letter away from "Saison". I thought that if I made a Saison beer, I would call it "Saison de Maison". As I decided what beers to make this year, the names were made simpler, into one or two-word titles, and "Maison" was born.

I brewed this beer on my birthday in 2010, opting to try another open-fermented, late-sugar addition beer. My buddy, John Hayes, bought me the ingredients for this one.

Maison

5.5 gallon batch

OG: 1.069

SRM: 4.9

IBU: 49.6

90 minute boil

5.0 lbs 2-Row Malt

5.0 lbs Pilsner Malt

0.5 lbs CaraVienne Malt

2.0 lbs Demerara sugar

1.5 oz Perle (8.25%AA) @ 60 min.

2.0 oz Strisselspalt (2.6%AA) @ 5 min.

2.0 oz Mt. Hood (4.6%AA) Dry Hop

Wyeast 3711 French Saison

I do a 75 minute infusion mash at 149-150 degrees Fahrenheit. Batch sparge. I made a 2-quart starter for the yeast. This beer spent 2 weeks in primary fermentation, and then 3 weeks in secondary because I went to Florida over the Thanksgiving holiday, and didn't bottle it until the very first week of December. The sugar was added after 48 hours of fermentation via 1 quart of water and all 2 pounds added to that, boiled, chilled and added with the lid placed on the fermenter. The beer finished with an OG of 1.006.

As of February, I think the beer is good. It might improve over the next few months, but I figured about an 8.3% ABV for this one, so it's very likely it will become more estery. It's definitely free of fusel alcohols, though, and ended up a bit darker (I think due to the Demerara sugar) than calculated by promash.

Belgian Strong Dark - The 8-Ball

2011-02-18T06:00:00.002-06:00

The last time I posted, I talked about adding sugar later in the fermentation, as opposed to at the end of the boil so as to allow for the yeast to eat all of the simpler sugars (matlose?) before they got to their dessert of the sucrose. You know how lazy you get after eating dessert. Yeast are even simpler creatures.

As I also stated in that article, I performed open fermentation on this beer, another technique that I had yet to try. This is where you leave the lid off the bucket after you add the yeast. Keep animals and small children away, and you should be all right.

Here's the recipe:

8-Ball

6 gallon batch

OG: 1.078

SRM: 15.8

IBU: 26.1

12.0 lbs Pilsner Malt

2.0 lbs CaraMunich Malt

2.0 lbs Demerara sugar (I got mine at a local grocery)

0.5 lbs Corn sugar

1.0 oz Tradition (6.2%AA) @ 60 min.

0.5 oz Hersbrucker (3.3% AA) @ 30 min.

0.5 oz Hersbrucher (3.3% AA) @ 5 min.

Wyeast 1762 - Belgian Abbey II - 2 quart yeast starter

When I got the ingredients, I didn't look closely at the hops. I had the ounce of Hersbrucker, but instead of Tradition hops, Midwest Supplies sent me Tettnanger. These had a lower alpha acid %, and probably would've been all right, but I had a lot of Perle hops left over, and I thought their alpha acid % (8.2%) would've served this better, so I adjusted it to 0.75 oz of Perle instead. It turned out well.

Since I was using Pilsner malt, I also opted for a 90 minute boil. In case you haven't seen it a million times already, this is supposed to reduce the dimethyl sulfide (which can impart a "corny" taste to your beer). I haven't been brave enough to experiment with this.

The OG without the sugar was 1.058. A 2-quart yeast starter was therefore a good size starter for this beer.

After 2 days of open fermentation, I put 2 quarts of water in a pan, added all the sugar, brought it to a boil for 5 minutes, chilled it to about 70 degrees F, and added it to the fermentation bucket, and put the lid on. In about half an hour, the ferment lock was popping like a machine gun.

After 5 days of fermentation, the lock showed no signs of fermentation. Usually, you can watch the lock for 2 minutes and see a bubble, but this was DEAD. I still let it stay in the primary bucket for 2 weeks. I checked the gravity (1.008) and then transferred it to secondary. Then I lagered it for 2 weeks and bottled with 5 oz of corn sugar.

The beer has been in the bottle almost 6 months now. It has finally become very good. When I tried it during the first few months, there wasn't much of a scent on it. Now, you can smell the esters. At 25 IBU, there isn't a lot of hop bite, what shines through is a raisiny malt profile with a caramel backbone.

At 9.2% ABV, this one should've been aged at a minimum this long before opening. That's my opinion. Bigger beers need to age so they can actually become good.

I will likely make this again, but I think I will leave it sit in the bottles for a good 8 months before trying it.

A New Trick to Adding Sugar

2011-01-28T06:00:00.000-06:00

This summer I was listening to a Jamil Zainasheff podcast about making Tripel beers, and he was asked if he’d ever had a really good, homebrewed Tripel. He stated that he hadn’t, saying that many of them were too sweet, and even cloying. He suggested that since Tripels usually have a large amount of sugar as part of the recipe bill, that brewers who wanted the beer to finish dry should add the sugar later in the fermentation process, rather than during the boil. This would require the yeast to get all the maltose provided by the malt BEFORE the yeast would convert the easier sucrose. Given the choice of the two, the yeast would spend all of their energy working on the sucrose first and THEN go after the maltose.

I have only made one Tripel, and I found that my beer did not finish as low as I wanted it to. While 1.014 was decent finishing gravity, or so I thought, I still found the beer to be a little more sweet than other Tripels I liked (not to mention the fact that I used a half pound of Crystal 20º L, which I thought would be cool, but was totally unnecessary).

A friend and I wanted to brew a beer together, and he suggested looking at Northern Brewer’s kit called The Number 8. I’m not sure if this kit was patterned after a particular commercial beer (maybe the Rochefort 8?), but it appears to be a Belgian dark strong. I made some small changes to the recipe and named this beer “Magic Eightball” and then later just “8*Ball”. I will cover this beer in another post.

I decided to try two new techniques with this beer. The first was to open ferment it for 48 hours. I was inspired by a Brewing TV episode on this subject. While I think that Dawson let his wheat beer go for more like 72 hours, I was nervous about it. I roused the yeast after about 12 hours, and it had a nice kreuzen going (big clouds of yeasty foam on top), and I did this about every 12 hours, until I was freaked out enough to boil the two and a half pounds of sugar in 2 quarts of water, chill it, and then dump it into the fermenter and pop the lid on it. Within a half hour, the 3-piece ferment lock was popping like a machine gun.

That beer finished at 1.008. Way better than I could have hoped.

For my birthday, my brewing buddy, John, bought me the ingredients for Maison, my Saison recipe. Again, this beer included a pound of Demerara sugar, so I boiled it in a quart of water and added it to the beer after 48 hours of open fermentation. Again, it finished lower than any other beer I brewed, this time at 1.006.

There may be other things at play here with me adding the sugar late. All I know is that both of these beers taste great, and I’ll be discussing them soon in further detail.

Bulldog ESB

2010-12-31T06:00:00.001-06:00

When I made the Red Rooster for a second time, I had 3 ounces of hops left over from a half pound of Willamette pellets that I bought from Midwest Supplies. I think it was for $6, which is a great deal!

I thought about what kind of style of beer I could make with 3 ounces of Willamette, since the Rooster was going to take up 5 ounces. For some reason, I was wanting to have a Goose Island Honker's Ale. I like using Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer's Brewing Classic Styles as a place to start, so I looked up the chapter on Extra Special Bitters. I believe I used the malt bill for the most part to make up what would become the Bulldog ESB.

I've seen that Willamette are good substitute hops for English Fuggle hops. However, the recipe did not call for Fuggles, but for Goldings. I just decided to wing it because I had Willamette.

I was also wanting to have a beer with a big biscuity-malt taste, so I opted to use all Marris Otter as the base malt. In the end, I had also just harvested my backyard hops. The trellis fell in June, so I had to rebuild it, but I didn't take the time to sort through the bines to divide the hops into respective bags. They all went in the same bag; The Magnum, the Zeus, and the Cascade. I christened them 131 Westchester hops and used 2 ounces to dry-hop the beer as an afterthought.

Bulldog ESB

OG: 1.061

SRM: 10.9

IBU: 40.7

5.4% ABV

10.0 lb Marris Otter

1.0 lb Victory Malt

0.25 lb Crystal 120*L

0.50 lb Crystal 20*L

2.0 oz Willamette @ 60 min

1.0 oz Willamette @ 0 min

2.0 oz 131 Westchester hops (55% Zeus, 44% Magnum, 1% Cascade) Dry Hop

Wyeast London ESB 1968

Danstar Llallemand Nottingham dry yeast 11 gram

A note on the yeast: I had planned to make a starter, but didn't. I figured the gravity was low enough that I could just pitch from the package, and the Wyeast smack pack blew up big, and it did it quickly. However, after 36 hours, I opened the bucket and there was no Kreuzen. I ended up pitching a pack of Nottingham I had ordered extra.

The beer turned out great - it has cleared, and has an orange hue. The nose is of the Zeus hops, and has a nice Willamette bite. As an "afterthought" beer, it has turned out to be quite a nice ale. I have added it to my list of annual beers to make.

Red Rooster Ale - This Time with Rye

2010-12-26T20:31:00.004-06:00

I made the Red Rooster ale the first time back in November of 2009 and wrote about it here in January. I enjoyed it so much that I brewed it again in early October.

In early March, I got to be part of a surprise party in Kentucky for a friend I had not seen since I lived in Germany in the 80s. I also got to hang out with a few of my friends from that time in my life that I had not seen since. It had been 24 years since I'd seen most of them. I took a few of my beers down there, including the original Red Rooster.

I was surprised how my friends enjoyed this simple beer. The chocolate rye imparts a slight mocha aroma and flavor in conjunction with the Willamette hops. I get a similar result when I taste Sierra Nevada's Porter, but the rooster is only red, not dark like a Porter.

I don't know when the last of these was drank, but since that time, I was thinking about how I could improve upon this recipe. I decided to substitute 2 lbs of rye malt in place of 2 lbs of 2-row malt, and dry hop with an extra ounce of Willamette. The recipe looks like this:

Red Rooster Ale

5.5-gallon batch

OG: 1.063

28.8 IBU

SRM: 13.8

10.0 lb 2-Row Pale Malt

2.0 lb Rye Malt

0.5 lb Caramunich II

0.33 lb CaraWheat

0.33 lb Chocolate Rye

1.50 oz Willamette (4.5%AA) @ 60 min.

1.00 oz Willamette (4.5%AA) @ 30 min.

1.00 oz Willamette (4.5%AA) @ 0 min.

1.50 oz Willamette (4.5%AA) Dry Hop 5 days prior to bottling

Danstar-Lallemand Nottingham dry yeast, 11 grams

While I bottled the last batch, I had a kegging system set up this time around. I wasn't able to do a side-by-side comparisson, but from memory, I know that 1) I made this one stronger, since the original had a target OG of 1.046, but it ended up 1.041. In that regard, this one ended up at 1.055, so it went from 3.8%ABV to 5.93% ABV (I was hoping for around 6%). The rye gives it a bit more of a spicy taste. Unfortunately, the beer is kind of cloudy. It tastes great. It's got the same kind of mouthfeel, like it's begging for a nitrogen tap, it's creamy, and feels like a thin film of foam is left on the roof of your mouth. The aroma is kind of woody and smells of malt. It doesn't have a big hop nose like American IPAs.

Once again, I have to thank Dawson over at Northern Brewer for his Dawson's Multi-Grain Red ale. It was the inspiration for me to brew this red ale, which is more like a reddish-brown.

Bad Moon Weizenbock

2010-07-16T06:00:00.000-05:00

I can't remember where I first read about the style of Weizenbock. I do know that I was intrigued enough that in 2007, my first year of brewing, I threw together a recipe. After some modifications this year, I brewed one.

Weizenbock is actually a style of bock beer you can make without lagering. Bocks are usually brewed with lager yeast. A wheat beer yeast (preferably one of the German varieties for brewing weizen beers) is all that is needed for this style.

As far as I know, the best example of this style comes from the Schneider brewery in Germany; the Aventinus weizenbock. I've had this a couple times. I liked it, but my favorite one was probably Heavy Seas Hang Ten. Clocking in at 10%, it's probably a bit bigger than your standard style, but I remembered that being a really good beer, and quite possibly, that's what caused me to research the style and take a stab at the recipe I mentioned above.

As a consolation prize for entering a brewing contest earlier this year, I ended up getting back, along with my results, a combined 3 packs of the Munich Dry Yeast. At first, I thought, "Awesome! A new kind of dry lager yeast!" Upon further research, I discovered that it was actually a dry weizen-style kind of yeast.

I'm not a big fan of weizen or "wheat" beers. I don't mind a couple here or there, but to brew 5 gallons of wheat beer isn't very likely for me. They're good, and in fact, I thought it might have been nice to have some wheat beer this summer, but for the most part, they don't fall into my top 10 lists of beers I want to make, unless, of course, you're talking about cloning Gumballhead.

I then remembered the Bad Moon Weizenbock recipe I had crafted. Was that a lager or could I ferment that with the dry yeast I had?

I checked the Advantageous Weizenbock kit that Northern Brewer sells, and right there it was as the dry yeast option: Munich dry yeast.

So I decided that I would use two of the packs of yeast for this beer, and then use the third to brew some kind of Dunkelweizen later. Then I found my dad wanted to make a hefeweizen, so I figure I'll just give the yeast to him.

Another reference I check is Jamil Zainasheff's and John Palmer's Brewing Classic Styles book. In their description of making weizenbock, they state that you can't brew this beer using only Munich and Wheat Malts. Unfortunately, when I read this, I already had my ingredients ready to go the next day. So I decided to not worry about it. Weeks later, I'm enjoying this beer. It tastes great, very much like a bock beer, without all the details involved with making a lager yeast starter or going through the long lagering process.

Bad Moon Weizenbock

6 gallons

OG: 1.086 (20.64)

SRM: 15.4

IBU: 28.3

Boil time: 60 minutes

9.0 lbs Red Wheat

5.0 lbs Light Munich Malt (10*L)

4.0 lbs Dark Munich Malt (12*L)

0.5 lbs Special B Malt

Hops

1.0 oz Perle (7.5%AA) First Wort

2.0 oz Crystal (4.1%AA) 15 min.

1.0 oz Crystal (4.1%AA) Dry Hop

Danstar Munich yeast (2 packs sprinkled onto wort)

Fermented at 68*F

DFK Pils

2010-06-18T06:00:00.003-05:00

There is knowledge in the homebrew community, mind you have to search for it or stumble onto it, but it exists, that if you want to make a true Czech Pilsener beer, that you have to brew it using a decoction mash.

It's really a simple recipe; Pilsener malt, Czech Saaz hops, and your choice of Czech lager yeast. I know of three right off the top of my head, and I'm pretty sure that both Wyeast and White Labs make versions of the Budvar (original Budweiser), Pilsen (used for Pilsener Urquell) and Bohemian lager yeasts.

In the last quarter of 2009, Wyeast released the Staro-Prague (Wyeast 2782-PC) yeast. Northern Brewer also made a simple kit available for use of this yeast. If I'm not mistaken, it was called Farley's Svetle-Pivo (which translates from Slavic to "Farley's Light Beer") and for a 5-gallon recipe, was calling for 10 pounds of Pilsener malt, 5 ounces of Czech Saaz hops, and the aforementioned yeast. Also, it suggested a triple-decoction mash.

For the most part, when you do an all-grain homebrew, you get your grain. It's crushed. Then you get your water hot so that you can put your grain in it, and the grain sits at a temperature between 149*F and 156*F for at least an hour. Then you sparge the grain with hot water (around 180*F) until you get enough to boil down so that when all is said and done, you have 5 gallons of beer (the usual amount, especially if you're serving from 5-gallon kegs).

However, a decoction mash is its own animal. For this beer in particular, I started with 100*F water, put it and the grain into my mash tun for 20 minutes, and then the real fun began: It was early January when I did this, so it was like 19*F in my garage. I had the side door open and the big garage door cracked about a foot and a half to get decent air flow. So I took 2/3rds of the mash (water and grain, mostly grain) and started heating it up on the burner. You have to stir so you don't burn the mash or make the color too dark. I brought the mash to 150*F and then took it off the burner, wrapped it in a wool blanket, and let it set on a crate for 20 minutes. Then I returned the kettle to the burner, and slowly brought it to a boil, let it boil for five minutes, then returned it to the mash tun, bringing the temperature to 126*F in the mash tun, stirring it in so the temperature was uniform. I let it rest 30 minutes. I did this again, to bring the temperature of the mash to 148*F, and then again to 158*F (I didn't let it sit for 20 minutes either time after this, since it was so close or beyond 150*F anyway, just straight to boil). Finally, I drained about 4 gallons of mostly liquid wort and brought this to a boil to raise the temperature of the mash to 170*F for mash out, where you're looking to get all your "sugar water" to make the beer.

This makes for a long day. Especially in January. But I was hoping for an awesome beer. The great thing about mashing this way is that a lot of the proteins that you get from the boil kettle when you're moving the wort into the fermenter actually stay in the mash tun. The result is a clearer, cleaner beer. For more information on decoction mashing, I suggest you check out Kai's decoction mash videos. A three-part series that you can take seriously because of Kai's accent.

As for how the beer looks, here are a few photos:

This is the beer about 30 seconds after it's been poured. Burnished gold.

As the beer is drank, a swirl of foam remains. Smells of sulfur, fresh-mown grass.

It's unfiltered, so while some beers are clearer, this one is not as clear.

Of course, there is a story behind the name. Even though it's Farley's recipe, I upped it to 12 lbs of Pilsener malt and 6 oz of Czech Saaz hops because I was shooting for 6 gallons. I did the work, I get to name it.

Like I stated above, the beer pours with a decent head. Once the head is gone, lacing continues and the foam swirls on the top. It smells of sulfur and freshly-mown grass. The taste is like biting into a handful of Czech Saaz hops. It's quite wonderful. The Pilsener malt is a great vehicle for the yeast and hops.

While I lived in Germany, I had a good friend named Dan Kendall (DFK). I left during the middle of our Junior year. During the summer, Danny was to leave to go back to the states, where his dad, who was a colonel, was getting a promotion. Danny decided to impress his dad's associates by getting a mohawk. Lately, I've seen mohawks being worn as a fashion statement. But in 1986, I guarantee you, mohawks were considered pretty "1981." Hell, I don't even remember too many people wearing them in 1981. But then, I lived in Oklahoma that year.

The point is, you can take the easy way out on anything if you're smart. But to live, sometimes you need to go through all the steps just to see what it's all about. It's easy to get a mohawk when all the cool kids are doing it.

Danny did this, he cut his hair, and he knew he was causing trouble. He knew he'd take suome lumps. Why did he do it? Because fuck them.

Pitching Rate Experiment

2010-05-07T06:50:00.000-05:00

One of the neat things about homebrewing is that you have so many people with different degrees of experience and all kinds of systems. One of the forums I frequent, over at Northern Brewer, will often have someone new to brewing asking a question. A lot of people chime in. The funny thing is, there are usually two camps that end up breaking out on any topic. Glass fermenters versus plastic fermenters is common. One that recently came up involved pitching rates.

As you can see by the introductory question, the starter of this particular thread wants to know that when it comes to pitching liquid yeast into a batch of beer, should he pitch one Activator pack, or two.

Let the shitstorm begin.

Where I stand on this opinion depends on the strength of the beer you are making. My general rule is that anything at a specific gravity of 1.055 or less I would feel comfortable throwing a Wyeast Activator into, preferably fully puffed out after you've smacked it, but still okay if puffed out just a little. Case in point: I made a Patersbier at my dad's place. The Activator pack was 3 months old. I didn't feel real good about the age of the pack, but I trusted the Trappist High Gravity yeast to be a strong one. The gravity of the beer was 1.048, so I wasn't too worried about it. Fermented it for a week at around 63 degrees, finished at 1.011. Done.

At about 1.060, I begin to make yeast starters. So I do believe in starters. In fact, I really wanted the Koelsch I just made to do really well, so I made a quart starter for it, even though the gravity was only 1.050. I moved it to secondary after 13 days. The gravity was at 1.016 at the time, which was kind of surprising; I thought it would finish lower. That starter grew for about 28 hours.

Of course, the most frustrating thing to me about homebrewer opinions, is that at times, people think that their opinion is the only way to do things. That's fine. Believe what you want. But just don't tell me it's the only way to do things. Or tell me I can't do something, especially if I've done it, or if I think it will work. See the Koelsch above as an example. Made with 95% Koelsch malt. Some dude said on the NB forum that I couldn't make a Koelsch with that malt. Guess what? Did it. Guess what else? It tastes fucking great. As my wife put it, "Reminds me of the beers I used to drink in high school." Well, maybe. It is a Koelsch.

So this guy, Sean, decided to do an experiment. As you can see, for the cost of shipping, he sent us 3 beers to try. I got my brewing friend, John, to share the tasting with me. I told him, "YOU CAN'T TALK ABOUT THE BEER UNTIL WE'RE DONE!" He looked at me funny.

Here were our comments:

John (A): Cloudy. Not really amber. Hazy. Smells of alcohol. Tastes somewhat fruity, mildly hoppy, tastes of alcohol. Over-attenuated? Slightly astringent. Low mod. body, good carbonation.

Jez (A): Decent foam. Kinda light in color for an amber. Decent lacing. Hazy, smells fruity, apple-juicy, caramel, alcohol. Flavor is a bit appley, hops are nice. Very dry, not much of a malt backbone. Mouthfeel: Back bit of hops. Smooth feel. Appropriate carbonation. Seems like it's underpitched. I seem to have gotten better attenuation from a smack pack.

John (B): Thicker head than A. Same amount of haze as A. Smells slightly estery, flavor is estery as well. Less astringent than A. Is this under-pitched?

Jez (B): Bigger head on this one. A bit stronger lacing. Same haze as A. No fruity aroma, maybe some caramel nose. Very dry, nice hops for an amber ale. Same mouthfeel, nice carbonation. Guessing this one used a starter.

John (C): Same as A.

Jesse (C): Same as A.

So as you can see, I thought A&C were underpitched, John thought B was underpitched.

Overall, I think that there really wasn't that much difference in the beer. One was not really better than the other. I think that if you told me that these came from the same batch, I couldn't really tell a difference.

I'd like to thank Sean for the beer. It's always so nice to share someone else's beer. I'll be in Indianapolis in May. Perhaps I could bring you some of mine?

Also, this confirms my indifference to "amber" ales. I think I like more of an Amarillo-Zeus-Simcoe combo of hops in mine.

Quit Crying for Session Beers

2010-04-29T06:00:00.004-05:00

(Edit: I posted this article the morning of April 30. I was notified by Mr. Chris Lohring with some information I either misconstrued or did not see on his website. The edited portions are in blue)

I get Beer Advocate magazine. A friend of mine got it for me as a gift. It's actually a pretty good magazine that has food recipes, an occasional homebrew recipe, news about craft beer, and reviews of beer. It's decent. In the back of each issue, there's an column written usually by a guest writer called LAST CALL. In this issue (#39), Chris Lohring writes "It's Time for Session Beer".

In case you're unfamiliar with the term, "session" beer is beer that is usually lower than 4.5% alcohol by volume (ABV%). The idea being with less alcohol, you can drink more of that kind of beer, thus having a "session" with the beer. I guess.

It's a decent article - stating that craft beer would be more appealing to people if the alcohol by volume (ABV%) were less, then people could stick around longer without having to stagger out of the bar and keep their wits. Mr. Lohring eventually goes on to discuss his new brew, Notch Session Ale.

There are always these "back and forth" discussions in Beer Advocate. One month, the two brothers that run it were saying that we should all support our local beer cultures by drinking in our local brewpubs and buying from local brewers; stop buying imports. A few months later, in the same Beer Smack column, they're saying we should support overseas markets by buying imports. I'm sure this allows for people on either side of the table to raise a glass to the Brothers Alstrom.

When I try to look up "Notch Session Ale" on ratebeer or beer advocate, I don't find it. I went to the website. Yeah. There doesn't seem to be any description of the beer here, either, but there is a shitload of "marketing" on the Notch website. Reminds me of the Edison Light campaign. That ended up being another light lager in a clear (thanks for skunking it!) bottle.

It's unfortunate that this is how Mr. Lohring and Company want to promote their beer. The footnote at the end of the article states, "Chris Lohring is the founder of Notch American Session Ales, and co-founded Boston's Tremont Brewery. He spent his time out of the beer industry in the world of product design and development."

(edit: Mr. Lohring contacted me, and he was in fact, in Engineering, not Marketing. So I misconstrued what this was, thinking it was "marketing")

The other thing that gripes me also sort of lends itself to the marketing front: "It's Time for Sesson Beer". Really? I think that's been going on a while. In fact, when I searched for "Notch Session Ale" on Beer Advocate, I found a whole list of session beers. I would say East End Brewing in Pittsburgh is kicking your ass on this front.

You also might have heard of Stone Brewing Company in southern California? Yeah, they've been making Levitation since 2002. It's wonderful.

I guess it all comes down to this for me: Beer is beer. Some of it has more hops than others, some of it has funny ingredients, some of it's lower in alcohol, some are higher in alcohol. I like certain ones more at different times of the year. But the one thing that always remains is that I like a variety of beers. It doesn't matter to me if you have a fancy marketing campaign or not. If your beer tastes good, I will buy it.

In my opinion, session beer has always been an option. It's not anything new. Making it a "niche" market is totally unnecessary.

The Display Shelf: When to Drink the Good Stuff

2010-02-17T08:40:00.002-06:00

So in this month's "The Session", the topic is When to Drink the Good Stuff.

To me, I enjoy the good stuff more when I can share it. But giving good beer to people who haven't developed their palate can be somewhat disappointing. While those who have never tasted a rare Russian Imperial Stout can respect what it is from what you tell them, unless they've had several, pulling out that 2-year old bottle of Dark Lord might disappoint you. They might say, "Yeah, that's pretty good," but not really understand why it is good. I'll admit there is some beer douchebaggery going on when I sit there and look at the beer, smell it, and then describe all the flavors I'm taking from the beer. But then, I really like beer.

So, personally, I tend to save these for occasions when 1) I know the people will appreciate the beer, and 2) Where I can share it with a lot of people. Could be a holiday party, could be one of our family's Margarita Fridays. Just depend when the mood strikes.

Oh, and a tip I heard from a pretty great homebrewer the other day: If you're aging stuff, try to keep the temperature steady, and store it cool.

New Beers Resolution - The Session

2010-02-12T06:00:00.002-06:00

I did one of these last year, and I'm going to try and keep up with these, and perhaps go back to the list over the past 3 years and pick out ones that can be of interest to me.

I thought I'd work on the "New Year's Resolution" one since I still am within 2 months of the new year's beginning. The Session in question is:

So we want to know what was your best and worst of beer for 2009? What beer mistakes did you make? What beer resolutions do you have for 2010? What are your beer regrets and embarrassing moments? What are you hoping to change about your beer experience in 2010?

I'm going to go through these methodically, so the first question is, "What was your best and worst beer for 2009?"

I probably didn't do as good of a job rating beers in 2009, and of course, I tried a few new ones on New Years Eve, and those definitely didn't get rated on ratebeer.com, so I'll try to be concise with this, based on the beers I did rate.

The Worst: Hillas pale lager, brewed in Greece. They were selling these along with Bud products at the Greek Fest in New Buffalo that we went to late summer last year. Basically, I paid $4 for a Budweiser knockoff. I also gave Sam Adam's Coastal Wheat a shitty rating, but really, it's a good beer for the style. It just sort of pisses me off that 1) This, along with the Cranberry Lambic was shoveled in with the other Winter Sampler beers, which are pretty good. If you wanted a lighter ale to throw in there, why not just go with the Sam Adams Light, which I think is pretty great, and 2)You already have a kickass seller in the Summer Ale, so what are you gonna do now when you've already replaced the poor-selling White Ale with the Noble Pils? Huh? Is Coastal Wheat going to stand on its own?

The Best: My top rated beers were Boulevard's Double-Wide IPA, which, despite the confusing name, is not a double IPA. I think I enjoyed the one I had earlier in the year more than the couple I had later in the year. It was a total hop bomb in the spring. I had the New Holland Night Tripper at Three Floyd's Dark Lord Day in April. The catch was, that it was last year's Night Tripper, so it had aged a year. I thought it tasted great, but then, it could have been just the atmosphere of DLD. I got another bottle in May and aged it about 2 months, and it was pretty good, but not how I remembered it.

Two other beers worth mentioning that I tried in 2009 were Lazy Magnolia's Southern Pecan, a brown ale brewed with pecans. This is by far, in my opinion, the best brown ale brewed in America. It was just wonderful. Nutty, and sweet, but not annoyingly sweet. Stone's Levitation ale was another first-try at DLD, and at 4.4% ABV, it had a surprisingly awesome hop nose, without being overly bitter.

What Beer Mistakes did you make?

Probably not brewing enough beer. There were shortages between my buddy and I, but we both had busy summers, so we just didn't buckle down and brew a lot. Also, I should have exercised more to counter all the beer I drank. I've been going strong for 4 weeks now and I feel a ton better. There were also a ton of beer brewing mistakes that I made, but as for the pairings discussed in the root article for this session, meh. I didn't get crazy with food pairings so much.

I'm just going to combine the last questions of What beer resolutions do you have for 2010? What are your beer regrets and embarrassing moments? What are you hoping to change about your beer experience in 2010?

First of all, I don't have any beer regrets or embarrassing moments. 2009 will be noted as the year I stopped drinking the American Lagers produced by Bud, Miller and Coors. There were several times I went without a beer when all that was available were these products. Luckily, though, the craft beer industry seems to be infiltrating places not usually associated with what I would call "good beer". I never went to a NASCAR race, though, so I'm sure I'd go without at that event.

Resolutions and changes for 2010?

1) Enter at least one beer into a contest this year.

Ideally, I'd like to enter 3. Some dude out there has already entered an amount in the teens, and it's still January as I write this. Yeah, I guess I won't worry about being "Homebrewer of the Year" in 2010.

2) Get a local homebrewing group going.

Seems like a lot of people want this, but no one is leading the effort. I don't think it will be too hard, and I enjoy throwing a soiree every now and then. I need goals, though. But not anything that will scare people who just want to scratch the surface.

3) Improve my homebrewing techniques.

This is a continuous improvement process

4) Make the 2nd version of the Black Sabbath Imperial Stout

This is my annual big beer, but probably not my only one, since I've got plans for another Belgian as well as an American Strong ale.

5) Be more consistent with my beer blogging.

I was thinking about posting something every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but if I can just make every Friday for the rest of the year, I think that is good enough.

Brewdog Punk IPA

2010-02-05T06:00:00.001-06:00

Around December, I received an issue of Brew Your Own magazine that had an article about the Brewdog Brewery in Scotland. It even included some recipes for 3 of their beers. I had seen this brand in my favorite local liquor store, but the label suggested to me that they were pushing an attitude, and for an IPA, I thought the price was a little too high for me.

I caved, though, when I read the recipes and the ingredients that they used. That being they use only one malt, Marris Otter, to make this beer. Bear with my brewing knowledge for just a second; some of the time pale ales or India Pale Ales use a base malt, such as 2-Row Barley, Marris Otter or some other malt that when converted to sugar, will completely ferment. If your yeast does it's job (and gets good attenuation) 75% of those sugars will convert to alcohol. Thus, the beer is not very sweet. Crystal, or Caramel malt, with varying degrees of colors (measured in Lovibond), will give the beer a darker color, and the sugars this malt imparts are not converted to alcohols. These malts usually make up less than 10% of the grain used in the beer.

So what this means, in the case of the Brewdog Punk IPA, is that the malt base is going to be lighter in color, and not have much head retention (wheat malt is one type of malt that can be used for head retention, but there are others, such as Caramunich), as you can see in the photo.

The hop profile is interesting, because they use hops from New Zealand called Nelson Sauvin hops, as well as Chinook, a high alpha acid American hop, and also Ahtanum, another American hop, that has some Cascade and Amarillo qualities, and is usually on the lower end of the alpha acid scale. All the hops used are citrusy. The Chinook has more of a grapefruit quality, while the Ahtanum and Nelson Sauvin are more on the lemon or orange zesty side of things.

Overall, what you're getting is a beer that is not dry, but it's not necessarily sweet, with a big shot of bitter, citrusy hops. I'll let the guys at Brewdog explain it, since they do justice to the description way better than I ever could:

Here's where IPAs become interesting to me, because this is a nice, extreme example of the style, and when I say "extreme", I mean that it's on one end of the IPA spectrum. The other end would be a sweeter malt base with hops that provide the bitterness, but not the citrus sting. My favorite kinds meet somewhere in the middle - I like a sweeter base with stinging hops.

This is definitely worth trying just to get a base of what kind of beers IPAs can be. However, it is nowhere near anything you should suggest to someone who wants to try IPAs for the first time, because the flavor can be overwhelming.

Red Rooster Ale

2010-01-29T10:30:00.006-06:00

A couple of months ago, I started putting together a spreadsheet of beers I wanted to make along with the ingredients and prices. I frequent the Northern Brewer website, and occasionally post on their forum. I saw a kit they had there called Dawson's Multigrain Red, and it sounded awfully good to me.

Of course, the kit is for a 5-gallon batch, and I try to get enough ingredients for a 6-gallon batch. I bought the Willamette hops over at Freshops for a mere $1 per ounce. I got the grains and yeast at Midwest Supplies for $16.40. That's right, $19.40 for 6 gallons (a little more than 2-cases) of good beer. Of course, add in the postage, too. I ordered the ingredients for a Black Lager as well. That's the subject of a whole 'nother post.

Before this, I had never used the Danstar Nottingham yeast. When I think of Nottingham, I think of Robin Hood, the Sherwood forest, and England in general, even though this yeast is made in Canada.

The difference between my version and Dawson's: His is a little lower in gravity. I upped the amounts of 2-row malt and the color malts (the chocolate rye and the CaraWheat) to bring the gravity up to 1.054 instead of 1.044. Also, since I had to order whole ounces of hops, I ended up using all 3 ounces by adding another quarter ounce to the bittering and flameout additions, and dry hopping the leftover half ounce. The recipe:

Red Rooster Ale

6-gallon batch

OG: 1.054

30 IBU

SRM: 12.7

11.0 lb 2-Row Pale Malt

0.5 lb Caramunich II

0.33 lb CaraWheat

0.33 lb Chocolate Rye

1.25 oz Willamette (4.5%AA) @ 60 min.

0.75 oz Willamette (4.5%AA) @ 30 min.

0.50 oz Willamette (4.5%AA) @ 0 min.

0.50 oz Willamette (4.5%AA) Dry Hop 5 days prior to bottling

Danstar-Lallemand Nottingham dry yeast, 11 grams

I really need to get a back light for photos. The glass here usually makes the beers look darker. In a standard pint, this one looks more lighter in color. It's not like one of those hoppy California red beers that have become so popular. There is nice lacing, you can sort of see it on this glass.

The hop profile is nice. It's sort of "woody". The nose is malts, yeast and just a tiny bit of the Willamette. I will probably buy another ounce and dry hop an ounce and a half next time. Maybe.

What I really like about this beer is the mouthfeel. It's sort of creamy, and I think it would be great if it were kegged and poured using nitrogen as opposed to CO2.

1.054 is big enough. My batch sparging technique was lacking, in that I didn't drain the mash tun all the way with the first bit of water, and then probably used too much water in the second sparge. I need to resolve the sparge water calculation and how to do that to improve the efficiency. As it was, the beer ended up at 1.049, which isn't too bad. It still tastes great.

Update on Monster versus Rock Art

2009-11-20T07:25:00.003-06:00

A repost of an email I received:

Hansen Beverage Company and Rock Art Brewery today issued the following statement in connection with a recent trademark issue:

Hansen Beverage Company and Rock Art Brewery have reached an amicable agreement under which both companies' respective products will be protected - Hansen's Monster Energy® line of energy drinks and Rock Art's Vermonster beer products.

> Rodney Sacks, Hansen's chief executive officer, said: "We are pleased that we were able to resolve this matter expeditiously and put the concerns that had arisen behind us so that both parties can concentrate on their day-to-day businesses, selling their respective high-quality products. Our intent in this matter was simply to protect Hansen's trademarks and prevent any likelihood of confusion arising in the future through potential product extensions and was not to prevent Rock Art Brewery from selling their Vermonster beer."

> Matt Nadeau, owner of Rock Art Brewery, said: "Once Rodney and I were able to talk to each other we quickly appreciated each other's points of view and he acted reasonably, which allowed us to rapidly come to an agreement we are both happy with and allows both of us to move forward positively."

You can read more about it (it's a little too "rah-rah" for me) at Rock Art's site.

Corporate Terrorists vs. Craft Brewing

2009-10-16T06:00:00.000-05:00

Apparently, Budweiser isn't the only company throwing out frivolous lawsuits against craft brewers.

Hansen Beverage Company, the maker of Monster Energy Drink, has apparently filed a lawsuit against Rock Art Brewery to stop them from using the name THE VERMONSTER for their Barley Wine.

I can totally see where someone might be confused:

Although the owner of Rock Art Brewery has consulted 5 trademark lawyers in various states who say he has a good chance to win the case, the fact is it will still cost a lot of money to fight it.

My favorite line comes from their lawyer, though: "Escalator, aspirin, celluloid were once trademarks and they became common jargon because the owners didn't defend them or find a way to stop people from using those names," Riley said.

Yeah. Except MONSTER isn't exactly an original term pertaining to your product. The actual term is ENERGY DRINK. Maybe if you called your product ENERGERIZER or somesuch, you might have a point. As it stands, however, it is a bad analogy.

I think it would be hilarious if people dressed up as the Wolfman, Frankenstein, and Dracula then walked into the Hansen Beverage headquarters with a lawsuit claiming they own the term "Monster". Or better yet, General Mills slapping a lawsuit on them for people getting their drink confused with the Monster Cereals. I hear Boo-Berry is pissed.

I personally don't drink energy drinks. They're full of sugar and other chemicals I don't care for. If I want energy, I exercise and get sleep. If I need a pick me up, a cup of coffee does nicely.

If you drink Monster, you might want to find an alternate beverage until they knock this off. In fact, it's probably a good idea to stop drinking all Hansen beverages (funny how they don't have the Monster products on their product web page. Also funny is that the Monster product website is "under construction" - what's up guys, getting some pressure?) until they stop their corporate terrorism on Rock Art.

Me, I'll be printing copies of the article out and sharing it with management at different retailers, letting them know what's going on, and then asking them to tell their customers why they're not carrying Monster products anymore.

Pass it along. Let's make this thing viral...

Budvar - The Original Budweiser

2009-10-07T05:55:00.006-05:00

I recently discovered that there was a monthly series regarding beer topics, courtesy of The Brookston Beer Bulletin. I am thankful for the inspiration, and will probably hit on one of these each month in the future. You will know that it's part of The Sessions by the logo at the top. Other than that, it will start out like this:

Eastern Beers

I'd like to think that I had two beer awakenings in my life. The first was when I lived in Germany and learned to drink beer there. I got about 3 good years of beer drinking done before we moved back to America. As I finished out high school, I just went along with the crowd, pretty much drinking whatever cheap American lager we pooled our money to buy.

My parents moved back to Germany in 1989. I was in my 3rd year of college and on Christmas break when I returned with my best friend. My mom and dad took us to Sachsenhausen, where we toured the bars, drinking Hefeweizen on tap (for some reason, most places only served these in half liter bottles. The guy told us some story about needing proper pressure to have it on tap. I wonder, now, if that was a casked hefeweizen we drank). The beer that really stuck with me that night, however, was a draft of Budvar.

I remember it was the last bar we went to, and I believe I still had my senses about me. I had both the Pilsner Urquell and the Budvar at this place, both "vom fass" (from the tap). My buddy, Paul, said he thought the Urquell was the best beer he'd ever had in his life. I was kind of shocked, because I felt the same about the Budvar.

A big, fluffy head, and a nice Saaz hop bitterness with a somewhat fruity and dry finish. I still remember how crisp it was to this day. While I've had it in the states, I don't think you can really compare the bottle version to the kegged version. Also, it is difficult to find it in a brown bottle. It really is a shame that both the Urquell and Budvar come in green bottles. They actually had Urquell on tap at U.S. Cellular field for a time. I would gladly walk halfway around the stadium and stand in line for 10 minutes to get that.

There is an ugly side to this story, as well. See, this beer is actually known around the world as Budweiser-Budvar. Adolphus Busch apparently stole this name around 1876, from the town of Budweis in Czechloslovakia, where Budvar had been made in some form since 1245 A.D. As a result of this thievery, the original Budweiser has had to put up with fighting to keep its name in various countries worldwide.

In the U.S., you can find this beer under the name "Czechvar". It is still worth trying, if you want to get an idea what this beer is all about. However, I will always look forward to a future day when I can once again taste the original on tap.

A Few Words About Gumballhead Wheat

2009-09-18T05:46:00.003-05:00

I'm revisiting this old favorite for a couple of reasons. I recently did a beer trade with a Jay in California. I'm not sure if he's ever had the Gumballhead Wheat, and second, this just may be THE "Gateway" beer that I use to convert people to buying craft beer.

Over at ratebeer.com, this beer gets a 96/100. That is pretty damn good for a "wheat" beer.

I first had this beer in April of 2007 when I attended Dark Lord Day. At the time, it was a summer seasonal beer brewed by Three Floyds. Now I can get it at my local Jewel grocery store year-round. I remember another guy in line tasting the beer and speaking as though he was reading my mind with the first taste: "Wow, this almost tastes like an IPA, although it is a bit lemony." Later (about halfway through the beer): "Wow, that really mellowed."

Yes, I do believe still that it is a sensational beer, even though the surprise has somehow worn down. This is one of my favorite smelling beers. I could walk around the house all day with this under my nose. It's loaded with Amarillo hops, which give it a really big hop nose, along with the wheat yeast, which gives it a nice bubblegum background aroma.

I have a friend at work who I would get to try hoppy beers just to see him pucker up and watch his nose freak out. One Friday after work, we stopped by a local liquor store in Michigan City, King Richard's (which we refer to as "Little Richard's") to check out their beer selection. He wanted some help.

I told him to get a sixer of the Gumballhead.

I said, "Take this home and make sure it is nice and cold. Then, seriously, pour it in a glass. Look at how great it looks. Then stick your nose in it. You will want to walk around the house all day smelling this (yeah, I know, I'm redundant). When you drink it, it's going to knock you down with the hoppiness. Stick with it, when you get about halfway, it's going to mellow. You're gonna like it."

He called me about 3 hours later and said, "It's just like you said it would be!" About two months later, he was drinking high-hopped ales like Three Floyd's Alpha King and Bell's Two Hearted Ale. Dude really likes Imperial Stouts and Double/Imperial IPAs now.

Gateway, I'm telling you. Gateway beer.

White Orchard is Pretty Thinned Out

2009-09-11T05:45:00.001-05:00

Beer #2 that I tried from my man, Jay, over at HEDONIST BEER JIVE, was The Bruery's White Orchard. I've always been a fan of White Ales. In fact, as craptastic as it may sound, I think both Blue Moon and Sam Adam's White Ale really got me interested in the whole craft beer movement.

White Ales are pretty simple. Usually, they are made with some pilsner malt, wheat malt, and a bit of oats. They are hopped with central European hops most of the time(known as Noble hops), and then there are usually some spices thrown in at the end of the boil. This is where the originality comes in. Orange peel or Curacao orange peel is common. I've seen lime and lemon peel used in others as well. Coriander is sometimes added, or other spices. I put an ounce of cloves in my first-ever brewed wit bier and it was overbearing. Drinkable, but really, really clovey.

The Bruery puts lavender in theirs, and they do it right - you should be able to get a hint of the spice, but it shouldn't overtake the aroma or the flavor of the beer. I spilled a drop of this beer on my finger while pouring it and picked up the lavender. It was nice. After that, I couldn't really smell or taste it any more.

This was truly one of the most non-offensive beers I've ever had. I don't necessarily think that is a good thing. At times, I describe Belgian beers as "stinky" or having a "hint of monk basement". While these terms are not necessarily pleasant on a day-to-day conversational basis, this is what I expect from Belgian beers. They need to have character.

This wasn't a bad beer, by any means, but it wasn't really a good beer, either. It was just sort of...there. I could pick up a little hint of the yeast. There were banana flavors there, but it wasn't as ester-y as I would have liked. Overall, it was sort of like drinking a seltzer-water with a bit of a yeasty flavor.

This might be a good jumping-off point for those of you interested in trying out Belgian-style beers, but for me, it wasn't all that exciting enough to put into a 750 ml bottle, when a 12 ounce bottle of this would suffice.

New Holland Night Tripper - Not a Big Deal

2009-09-04T05:37:00.000-05:00

I first had a sample of the New Holland Night Tripper on Dark Lord Day, back in April. A friend of a friend cracked a year-old bottle at the tent. I thought it was quite good. After brewing my own Imperial Stout, I saw this at my local Wise Way grocery store for $5.99. I thought it was a pretty good deal. So I stashed it in my fridge in May.

I decided to give this a try, even though it had not aged a year. Nothing says that it had to age a year, I just knew that the sample I tasted was aged that long, and I remembered it being good.

Actually, though, I think it's a pretty average Imperial Stout. Sort of along the same lines as Stone's Imperial Stout. It's not a bad beer, but it just doesn't jump out at you. All the flavors are subdued - you get a little chocolate, a little coffee-ness from the roasted malt, but there's no dark fruit here like I've had in some Imperial Stouts.

For the price, it's not bad. Who knows, that whole Dark Lord Day kind of imparts a euphoria on a person, so it's likely that my mood was different, which can make all the difference when you're trying something new. I just remember the beer being a bit more complex than this.

AleSmith Grand Cru

2009-08-22T21:01:00.007-05:00

According to AleSmith, their Grand Cru is:

Our other famous Belgian-style offering is our Grand Cru. As with Horny Devil, it is fermented using yeast which originated in a Trappist monastery in Belgium. A darker type of Belgian candi sugar gives it more color and a richer complexity of flavor, consistent with the Belgian style.

So, yeah. I got this beer in a trade with a guy named Jay, who reviews all sorts of beer and places to get beer at Hedonist Beer Jive. Jay's been good enough to send me plenty o' beer for reviews.

This is my first AleSmith beer. The IPA gets rave reviews on ratebeer. Other than that, I'm not sure. Just another California brewery trying to outdo all the great Indiana and Michigan breweries I have access to. But this Grand Cru is mighty nice.

Unlike the photo, it pours a dark brown with reddish hues. It smells of molasses, caramel and dark fruit. Tastes this way, as well, with hints of licorice and chocolate. It reminds me a lot of the Chimay Blue I had the first time, around Thanksgiving 2007. I've had the blue other times, but it wasn't as good as this beer.

It's definitely a sipper at 10.5% ABV, and while my wife could tell it was strong, I could only taste it in the finish. According to the Stan Hieronymous book, Brew Like a Monk, Belgian ales should aid in digestion, and this one was carbonated enough, but not fizzy, to do just that.

I drank this one in a goblet, and it was a nice beer to look at. Check out the surface lacing in the photo as well as the nice lacing ring around the side of the glass. Very nice.

Thank you, Jay. And thank you, AleSmith!

Simpler Times Pilsner

2009-08-12T19:00:00.004-05:00

Just for fun, I picked up a sixer of Simpler Times Pilsner at Trader Joe's last weekend. It was only $3.99 and I thought I would give these a try, to see if the Pilsner was better than the Mountain Creek Lager, which was right next to the Simpler Times.

You know what? I'm kind of impressed. Sure, I've had better Pilsners. Vicotory's Prima Pilsner is good. Budvar in Europe is my favorite. But if you had the choice of buying this, or a sixer of Bud Light, Busch Light, PBR, or MGD, I would definitely pick this.

I poured a can into a German tulip-shaped pilsner glass. Big, white head that is gone in aboutt 30-60 seconds. Smells of pears. This is the most awesome thing about the beer. It actually has a decent Pilsner yeast smell. I figure the IBUs around 30-35. Not sure if they triple-hop it, but that's about triple the amount of IBUs in a Miller Lite.

If you had all your beer drinking buddies over to sample PBR, Bud, Busch, Coors, and MGD, I'd bet you $2 and a half eaten bag of Doritos that this would edge them. Although, those are lagers, so I guess that's to be expected.

White House Beer Summit

2009-07-31T08:27:00.004-05:00

I have to hand it to our current Pres for being so visible on the beer front. I remember at least one other time that he was in public, drinking a beer. I can't remember which campaign stop it was, but he ordered a Pabst Blue Ribbon. I do have fond memories of Pabst, especially during my visits to Marquette University in the 90s, visiting friends there. I think you could get Pabst in bottles for less than a dollar, or only a dollar, and cold Pabst in the bottle was probably as fine an American lager you could get. Although I still think Leinenkugel's is the best mass-produced American lager (Sam Adam's Boston Lager is also very good, but that's more like a Pre-Prohibition Lager rather than an American Lager. If you like that style, check out Brooklyn's Lager, it seems to use Cluster hops, which are more of a traditional style of hop for that style, from what I've read, whereas the Boston uses Hallertauer. New York vs Boston? I think so.)

I found it hilarious how they released to the media the exact kind of beer each person was drinking. My stance on the situation is irrelevant. It appears that Gates and Crowley have worked it out, and also that both parties involved escalated the issue further than it needed to go. Here's a funny footnote: Blue Moon, the beer Crowley chose, is known as a Wit Bier, or Belgian White ale. I'm just sayin'.

It would almost appear the beer lobbyists found out about this and took a huge opportunity with it. Gates originally wanted to have a Red Stripe, but must have had to settle for a Sam Adams Light. Being from the Boston area, that might have been a politically correct thing for him to do. It was also the best beer at the table, in my opinion.

The Pres disappointed me with his choice of Bud Light. Here's the most powerful man in the world drinking one of the worst beers (really, you want to tell me there's a difference between Miller Lite, Coors Light and Bud Light? Taste tests show people can't tell the difference, despite the billions of dollars these people spend on trying to differentiate themselves from one another) in the world. I would suggest that he import some Three Floyds into the White House. Why not? Hell, work it out so that a local bar could host a keg of Alpha King, Gumball Head Wheat, and Robert the Bruce, three of the four standards.

I'd actually like to set him up with a chest freezer and temp controller, modified with taps and able to serve up 2 or 3 corny kegs of homebrew, any style of his choice. You want 3 light American lagers? I can set that up for you, Mr. President. I'll be your personal brewer. The White House legacy will be set for all eternity.

Seriously, call me! We can change what people drink in this country.

Homebrewing Etiquette

2009-07-25T13:27:00.002-05:00

I have an acquaintance on facebook named Eric who is trying hard to get a brewery going. He discusses his efforts here. The other day Eric posted a status stating he was enjoying one of his Mayan chocolate black ales. I asked what kind of ingredients he was using because it sounded kind of inspiring. He replied he was keeping this one "secret."

I thought this was kind of funny, because (a) he shared his Imperial Stout recipe with me, and (b) even though I know that he’s trying to start a brewing business, I could probably concoct similar ale by tasting it.

I did not use his Impy Stout recipe, but wanted to get an idea of the balance before making my own. I think I reviewed 6-8 different Impy Stout recipes. In the end, most of them confirmed my original recipe, although I did use information in some of them for targeting certain amounts of an ingredient, such as molasses. If I could taste his ale, I would, however, I don’t plan on visiting Minneapolis any time soon.

This brings me a question to brewing etiquette. I understand if someone has a secret recipe that they don’t want to share because giving up the recipe would possibly allow someone else to make money off of it. However, with beer, this is always going to vary because of the variables involved when brewing beer. The water I use in my town will be different from water used by someone even a couple of miles away. My brewing system could have different quirks, the temperature I mash at, the amount of water I mash with; these are just a few things that would make a difference between two people’s version of the same beers, even if they used the same recipe.

So, why not tell someone what ingredients you’re using? For example, I am going to develop a recipe based on Harpoon’s Saison Royale, which they have an ad for in the most recent issue of Beer Advocate. The ad tells me what malts are used, the hops, and even a style of yeast strain. To top it off, the bottom of the ad has the IBU, OG and ABV numbers, all of which can be used to determine how much malt and hops to use. If I build a beer from this information, will it taste EXACTLY like the Harpoon version? It might taste close, but most “clones” I’ve made or tasted, have different nuances. The clones are still good, and sometimes even better, but they’re not the same.

There’s this guy named Denny Conn out there on the internet, and he frequents various message boards. He’s so well known that Wyeast even developed his house yeast for mass packaging, on a limited basis. Denny has stated that he just wants a simple, hands on approach to brewing, and he’s really helped me not to worry as much as I do, since he posts his recipes to the forums, people make them, and comment about how great they are. His recipes are so popular, that Northern Brewer is actually building beer kits you can buy based on two of his recipes. Denny doesn’t aspire to “go pro” and he probably should get paid for providing therapeutic beer brewing advice (in my opinion).

If you ever want any of my recipes, let me know. Also, if you ever want to trade beer, let me know, I don’t mind hand delivery as long as it’s not outside a 30-mile radius.

The other question I have is, Is it ethical to enter a beer made from a beer ingredient kit (such as those from Northern Brewer) into a contest? My fellow brewer, John, was saying he wanted to enter a Dunkel lager that he made from Midwest Brewing into a contest. I said, “You can’t do that!” He said, “Why not?” I said, “You didn’t make that up!” He told me, “You’re really not doing anything different when you enter any of your recipes into a contest!” I was kind of taken aback by this. Of course I am! I did the research, put the ingredients together myself, and made the beer.

But I think I see his point. Based on my argument above, Northern Brewer could sell 30 of their Pale Ale kits to 30 different people and each one of them would be a little bit different. So maybe I’ll relax my stance on this, but I’m really curious to know from people:

1) Do you share recipes?
2) Do you enter kit beers into contests?

Monk Basement Black Sabbath Tasting

2009-07-19T11:24:00.003-05:00

As I've mentioned, I brewed a Russian Imperial Stout a couple of months back, along with a second beer, using the partigyle method, where wort for the main, or bigger beer is collected first. Once I had about 7 gallons of wort, I boiled it, and then collected enough wort for a second, lower gravity beer, this time, approximately 5.5 gallons.

The Mr. Crowley beer turned out to be a stout, but I did dry-hop it with an ounce of Simcoe hops because I thought it would turn out more like a black ale. The roasted barley made sure to keep me focused, though, and so a stout it is, albeit dry and floral-wood smelling. I was very happy at how this one turned out, as it was a total shot in the dark, without any specific recipe, but now I know what to expect, and when I make this beer next year, I'll plan hops accordingly, and may even sparge some more oats and drop in a little dry malt extract to the boil to give it a little more "oomph." It pours black with a head like soft serve cone of ice cream.

I waited exactly three weeks after I bottled the Imperial Stout to try it. It finished at a final gravity of 1.021, or 9.7% alcohol by volume. Not the 13% I was going for, but then, it started at 1.094, not 1.125.

As I poured it into the snifter, I wondered how much of a head I would get on it. Turns out, in a German pilsner, which sort of looks like a tulip, I had about 1 finger-thick worth of tan head on it. Very nice.

After 3 weeks, I can taste chocolate, coffee, and dark fruits, with just a touch of cherry in there. It still has not mellowed yet, but I expected this, since this is a beer that should age well. I would have to say this turned out less like the Dark Lord, but more like Bell's Expedition stout.

I think this may very well be one of the best beers I've brewed. If anyone is looking for a decent clone recipe for Dark Lord, I would recommend the recipe I posted. Hopefully, your efficiency will be better than mine, and you will get closer to the Dark Lord than I did.

Parallel Lines Blonde Ale

2009-07-10T06:07:00.003-05:00

I wanted to make a simple ale after concocting the Imperial Stout I made a few months back. So I looked up a whole bunch of Blonde Ale recipes and built one from scratch. It’s been in the bottle just 4 days shy of 3 weeks, so I tried one yesterday, and it turned out well:

Parallel Lines Blonde Ale

10 lbs Golden Promise Pale Malt
1.5 lbs CaraHell Malt

1.0 oz Liberty hops @ 60 minutes
1.0 oz Sladek hops @ 20 minutes

US-05 Dry Yeast, sprinkled into carboy

OG: 1.062 (Looks like I got about 62% efficiency, so I ended up at 1.052, which is fine)
IBU: 28

I like it, although I’m not sure it’s a true Blonde ale. The IBUs are a little high because I didn’t account for the Liberty hops being in pellet form, and that seems to make a bit of a difference than if they were whole leaf hops. I should have used Saaz instead of the Sladek to correct this issue, but you know what? I like hops, so I don’t mind the IBU on the high side. This still doesn’t have the same level of IBUs as Sam Adams, or at least it doesn’t appear to be, since I had a Sam Adams after I had one of these. I would say this hop combination would be better served in a lager or pils, though, so I will keep that in mind when I make one of those styles of beer.

I bought all of the ingredients except the yeast from Shoreline. I never tried Golden Promise before, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. Seemed appropriate for a Blonde Ale. Golden Promise is a bit darker than Marris Otter and even more so than American 2-row. So it’s more of a dishwater blonde.

The Liberty hops are a nice Hallertau substitute that I wanted to try. I wanted to try the Sladek, as well, because I like Saaz, but Sladek is more potent, it has a higher alpha acid. No, it’s not Triple Hops Brewed, but it’s got twice or three times the IBU of Miller Lite.

I calculate this one at 5.2% ABV. It’s a swell summer-drinker.

What Does Triple-Hopped Really Mean?

2009-06-19T09:11:00.006-05:00

We were at a party a few weeks ago where the guest had a keg of Back Road Brewery's American Pale Ale. I think this beer is a good example of the style. The hops used in the beer seem to be a bit more catty than your typical APA that uses Centinniel and Cascade hops, trying to copy the original Sierra Nevada pale ale. However, there were quite a few people at the party, so after the keg was gone, the host asked for donations and brought back a keg of Miller Lite. As I may have stated, I would rather drink water than Miller Lite, so I was kind of bummed out about this.

Fortunately, my friend Chris R, showed up with a sixer each of Alpha King and Hoegaarden, and was gracious enough to let me have an Alpha King. I said, "Yeah, unfortunately, we had to get a keg of Miller Lite," and Chris said, "It's tripple-hopped, dude!"

I was wondering what the whole "Triple Hops Brewed" ad campaign was about. The average person probably doesn't even know what a "hop" is, let alone what they add to the beer. Miller uses a lot of words on their web page to describe what hops add, including "flavor" and "spiciness", but never do you see the b-word ("bitter").

That's right! Hops make a beer bitter. When I brew beer at home, and it depends on the style, some are more hoppier than others, but I would say, that on average, I use at least three hop additions (thus, triple-hop) in a batch of beer. The wort, which is beer without the yeast in it, is boiled, usually for 60 minutes. I add hops at the beginning of the boil (60 minutes), somewhere in the middle (30, 20, 15, or 10 minutes left of the boil), and usually at the very end (5, 2, or 0 minutes - 0 being where I turn the fire off under the kettle and throw the last ounce or so of hops in). Then I cool the wort down, and pitch the yeast. Yeast eat the sugar in the wort and poop carbon dioxide and alcohol.

The hops added at 60 minutes are called the bittering hops. That's right. That is the correct technical term! In fact, a calculation is used based on the alpha acid content of each hop, multiplied by the amount, multiplied by the time in the boil to give you International Bittering Units, or IBUs. This will make no sense to you unless you already know that hops cause bittering, and have tasted many beers to get an idea of how bitter each number means.

However, this dude explains it with in this article , and discusses IBUs as simply as it can get:

Today’s Budweiser and Miller might take their inspiration from true pilsner, but they lack key elements. Number one is malt. A great pilsner or lager should be based on nothing but. Instead, many light lagers are made with cheaper substitutes like corn and rice, which can be fermented to produce alcohol, but they lack that sweet richness that only malt can provide.

Number two is hops, which adds bitterness. Bitterness is measured in International Bitterness Units (IBUs), and according to Sapsis, a true pilsner should have anywhere from 25 to 45 IBUs. Pilsner Urquell, for example, weighs in at about 40 IBUs. Miller Lite and Bud are somewhere in the 10–12 range.

So basically, even though you triple hop your beer, if you're only getting 10-12 IBU, that's really not a big deal. It's unfortunate that a company has the need to trick its customers into believing that they're drinking a quality product, when they are not. It's too bad that the Macro-brewers in this country spend BILLIONS of dollars on advertising, trying to show how different they are from each other, when they could be spending that money on making good beer, and using better ingredients.

Mr. Crowley Black Ale - Now with Big Coffee Flavor

2009-06-05T08:14:00.007-05:00

This week has been a new learning experience for me in regards to homebrewing. As I might have mentioned, a couple of weeks ago I brewed a huge Russian Imperial Stout. I decided to try to make another beer from the second runnings, because I knew that other people had done similar things, and it turned out pretty good.

I wasn't sure what to expect. I added honey to the second beer, which I dubbed Mr. Crowley, figuring it would help out with the gravity. I used a dry yeast, and it went from a starting gravity of 1.042 to a final gravity of 1.012, or about 4.2% ABV. Not bad. Didn't figure it would be a very heavy beer. Initial tastings of the final gravity were chocolatey and coffee-like. I thought it was...interesting, but still drinkable. I threw it in the fridge for a week to clarify it; it's something I've seen done to ales and I thought it would be cool to try, since if the fermenter fit, it would enable me to also lager in the fridge.

I took the beer out of the fridge and decided to dry hop it with an ounce of Simcoe hops. I sanitized a hop bag and shoved it into the carboy. I think next time, I'll just dump the hops in and siphon through a hop bag when I put it in the bottling bucket. A day after I did this, little floaties started to appear on top of the beer. Not a lot, and after the third day, it appeared that they were disappearing. Not sure what this was all about, but I thought it meant the beer got infected, which doesn't mean that you'll get sick if you drink it, just that the beer will have some off-flavors.

Last night, after 5 days, I pulled the hop bag out, and took a gravity sample. The aroma of Simcoe hops coming out of the top of the fermenter was amazing. Still at 1.012, which I expected. Poured the sample in a glass.

It smelled like coffee. Serious coffee. And it tasted like coffee, as well. Strong, black coffee that was 66 degrees. It was definitely not infected.

I walked the glass two blocks to my fellow brewer's house. He drank it. Swished it around. He said, "Did you put coffee in this?" I told him I did not.

I'm not sure I should still bottle this, but I'm curious as to find out what it will taste like after being bottled.

Goose Island Mild Winter Ale

2009-05-29T16:54:00.004-05:00

I got a case of this beer in November. As of today, May 29, I still have 2 left in the fridge. I've gone back and forth with this beer. Overall, though, I'd say it's better than average, and at times, I think it's decent.
At first, in November, I wasn't all that impressed. It was definitely mild. Sort of watered down tasting, like a lower gravity (watery) brown ale, with some kind of Christmas beer spice thrown in. Not sure what kind of spice, but maybe something cinammony or cardemom or something that you'd find in a Christmas ale.
I kept looking at it. Who will help me drink this beer that is just okay? That's what I would ask myself when I would see the label in the fridge. The boy helped out with its cause. He's always liked the label. He'd say, "Dad, I will go and get you a beer." How can you refuse an offer like that from a seven year-old? Without fail, he would always return holding a bottle with a goose on the label. Over time, I thought, "This is a lot better than I thought it was." Maybe it just needed to age a little. The flavors really started to come out. A little chocolate, a little fruit, a nice bitterness. It seemed less watery.
In some ways, it is good that I got a case of this. It got to age. Would I have had a sixer of it, it would have been drank within a month's time and not allowed to develop. I would have written it off.
Goose Island has some decent beers. I don't seek them out, but they seem to pop up at various potlucks and parties, and as gifts.
My favorites still remain the Pere Jaques, the Matilda, and the IPA (although the IPA is pretty average. Average IPAs are like the standard beer for me). I would like to try the Demolition again, and the Bourbon County.

Black Sabbath Imperial Stout and Mr. Crowley Black Ale

2009-05-22T10:50:00.008-05:00

Last weekend I was able to pull the trigger on making my version of the Three Floyd's Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout. I found a couple of recipes online, but not one that could be verified. So looking at the two recipes, as well as doing some research on Dark Lord, and finally checking some reliable Russian Imperial Stout (RIS) recipes, I was ready to go.

When I was doing research, I found that Three Floyds actually makes a beer out of the second runnings of the grain from the Dark Lord. That is, the beer is so big, that they actually have enough "runnings" or liquid sugar converted from the grains to make a lighter beer. This is called the Slave Princess, and it is described as being somewhat chocolatey and hopped up. So I knew that if I was going to make something big, dark, plodding and heavy, I would have to name it after the forefathers of big, dark and plodding, Black Sabbath. I was going to call the secondary beer Dio ale, or Holy Diver ale, but it just wasn't working for me. Then I decided that Ozzy left Sabbath first, so he should really get some credit, and at this time I went looking for some Ozzy CDs and thought, Mr. Crowley would make a great name for the beer.

The recipe:

Black Sabbath Imperial Stout

20 lbs 2-row malt (went cheap, could've done Marris Otter)
2 lbs roasted barley
1 lb chocolate malt
1 lb Crystal malt, 80*L
1 lb flaked oats
1 lb flaked barley
1 lb, 3 oz Duneland honey
8 oz Grandma's Original Unsulphured Molasses
2.5 oz Magnum hops (13.6% AA) @ 60 minutes (102.6 IBU)

Wyeast Imperial Blend 9093-PC Yeast

Targeting an Original Gravity of 1.125

The only difference between this brew and other all-grain brews I have done is that I had to use John's equipment. He's got a couple of old kegs that he bought at the junk shop and converted into a mash tun and another that we use as a hot liquor vessel.

Usually, I can put in the number of quarts of water per pound in ProMash, and my dough-in temperature is spot on. That is, I wanted to mash the grain at 154*F; the grain is reading 62*F on the thermometer I got sticking out of the grain, and therefore, at 1.4 quarts per pound, I needed a total of 9.1 gallons of water at 168*F. That's when I'm using my plastic 48 quart cooler/mash tun. This is stainless steel, so when I doughed-in (dropped all the grain into the water), it ended up mashing at 158*F for an hour. You might be thinking that 4*F shouldn't make all the difference, but 154*F will yield more sugar from the grain. I just let it ride. I figured I was maybe 5 lbs over the amount of 2-row that I needed, so screw it, I'd be okay.

Everything did go fine. I ended up starting the boil with 6.5 gallons of wort, but my boil wasn't as vigorous as I thought, so I ended up with 6 gallons instead of 5. Original gravity (OG) was 1.094, a bit lower than the 1.125 I was targeting, but that's what I get for 1) mashing at too high of a temperature, and 2) not boiling down to 5 gallons.

We ran it through the counterflow chiller and pitched the yeast at 68*F. I made a 1.25 gallon starter. We decanted the yeast and threw it in there. After 3 hours, I was starting to see some action in my sad excuse for a blowoff tube. I modified a ferment lock and had a 3/8" hose running into a quart mason jar. In the morning, I had a surprise.

As I made my way to the basement, I could smell the molasses. It smelled great. As I rounded the corner into the mancave, I saw about 12 ounces of dark wort on the ground and the top of the conical lid being forced off:

Mind you, this photo is from after the first cleanup. I actually tried putting a 10-lb weight on the lid to see what would happen, and sure enough, the blowoff tube started working somewhat. Then the lid blew off again. So I said, screw it. I was going to go get a 1-inch blowoff tube from the hardware store, but it didn't open until 8:00 a.m., so I just decided to relax and not worry about it.

I got home, sanitized the lid, used a clean rag doused in sanitization solution, cleaned around the lid, dunked the blowoff tube into the sanitizer and put it back together. Soon, it was chugging one bubble per second, keeping perfect time with the clock. The black ale was moving at about the same speed.

Today I did a gravity check, and it's down to 1.040. Still pumping a bubble into the jar every 3-4 seconds. The beer tastes great. At first I thought the hops were too big, but then I returned to the sample about 15 minutes later after the sediment had settled and it was just right. I could taste the roasted barley, chocolate, and some cherries in there. Plan is to let this finish, harvest some of that yeast so I can make an Imperial IPA in the future, then dry-bean it with some strong coffee and a vanilla bean. I think this beer will definitely be one that will improve with some bottle conditioning over the years.

The black ale started at 1.042. Not bad. I used the runnings from the mash tun as well as added the same amount of honey to this brew. Hops used were 0.5 oz of Magnum @ 60 minutes and 0.5 oz of Columbus @ 20 minutes. I'll likely dry hop it with an ounce of Simcoe. I will taste it first, once it is racked to see if this might add to the beer. If not, I'll rack it to secondary, wait two weeks and bottle it.

April Events

2009-05-15T10:37:00.000-05:00

Sorry to have been out of the loop for so long. I sit when it is quiet and realize that I do have plenty of things to write about. Here are two events that I attended last month:

On April 16, I went to see the world premier of Beer Wars: Brewed in America. I don't know what the deal was with this movie; were they trying to raise funding for wider distribution? Trying to pay for the manufacture of the DVD? Perhaps because there was some live satellite feed going on before and after the movie, they needed to pay for that, but it cost $15 per ticket. This might have accounted for there only being like 20 people in the theater where I saw it in Michigan City. Or it just could be that there aren't a lot of craft beer geeks like me in LaPorte county.

As a documentary about craft beers goes, it's good. There was some great information about the big 3 brewers (Bud, Miller and Coors) in there, like the fact that Budweiser and its ventures account for 49% of the beer sales in the U.S. I've seen reviews that talk about how this is the small brewer verses the big brewer. While the two main breweries (Dogfish Head and Stone, and probably Yuengling is mentioned more than Stone) are not the smallest craft breweries vying for space on liquor and grocery store shelves, I felt they were good choices.

I think the most hilarious part of the movie is where they take three people in two different settings whose favorite beers are Bud Light, Miller Lite, and Coors Light, then do a blind taste test on them. No one can tell the difference in these tests. In one of the scenes, a guy actually smells the beer. As a habit, I will smell all the beers I drink, however, when you smell any brand of light lager, I find it difficult to smell anything – it’s mostly corn and cardboard. But then, my nose has lived through about 8 years of paper mills, and I'm allergic to a lot of pollen, so it doesn't work very well at times.

I’m a little late in delivering my review. Some bloggers have taken the director to task over her selections of people shown in the movie, as well as the fact that she is allergic to alcohol and can’t drink beer. Also, she was the president of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and she considers that part of the beer industry. Some bloggers disagree with this, and I would tend to agree, but that is not important. Because of that background, she has a great insight into what the larger corporations are doing, and that gives her credibility, in my opinion.

Another criticism is that she chooses to show the story of Rhonda, who is pushing Moonshot, but also started out her own business with Edison Light. Rhonda used to be Sam Koch’s right-hand woman at Sam Adams but left to start her own business. I liked Rhonda’s story in that it showed her working her tail off to sell her beers, bar-by-bar, liquor store-by-liquor store, when she could have continued to cruise with Sam Adams. The thing that is off-putting is that the beer she is trying to sell is pretty much everything the craft beer industry is NOT, in my eyes: Making good beer, and furthering the art of tasty beer. Both Moonshot and Edison Light are basically Pilsners. I wouldn’t be surprised if Moonshot is the Edison recipe with caffeine. In a brown, as opposed to a clear bottle. Reviews on ratebeer.com compare Moonshot with the flavor of Budweiser. Does the world need another trendy beer? I guess it’s good for those who want to be a wide-awake drunk…

I’d recommend the movie for how it shows the big guys, but especially Anheuser-Busch, use creepy tactics, that are even sometimes illegal, to push out the little guy. I’m all for capitalism, but let’s all play by the rules.
On the last Saturday of April, I took my Golden Ticket for Dark Lord Day over at Three Floyds in Munster, Indiana. I’m sure that the GABF and other beer festivals are awesome, but I’ve only been to Dark Lord Day. I think it’s like going to Beer Mecca! This was my second time. 2007 was okay, but this year, it seemed like it was organized better. There were more places to get a beer outside in the lot, and people carrying around Three Floyd’s four beers that they sell in six packs (Robert the Bruce, Gumball Head, Pride ‘n Joy, and Alpha King) around for $5/pint. A little steep, considering you can get a sixer for $8 at Jewel.

With the Golden Ticket, I was able to get about a third of a glass of the 2008 Barrel-aged Dark Lord. I got my sample and moved into the line waiting to get in to buy bottles. I believe I cut. Sue me.

I smelled then drank the sample, and I have to say I was pretty disappointed. Dark Lord is pretty complex coming straight from the bottle. Lots of dark fruit, cherries, coffee, vanilla and other flavors in there. The barrel-aged version completely took the edge off the beer. It was smooth, oakey, and bourbon-flavored. I guess that’s a nice quality if you’re looking for that in a beer, but I would hope it would ADD to the original flavors, and not detract from them. A shame.

So as I stood there with my empty glass, I noticed this guy with a 750 ml bottle of Dogfish Head 120-minute IPA. From 2003. Yes, a six-year old bottle of this awesome, 21% ABV ale! He said to me, “Hey, you don’t have a beer,” and poured me about 2-3 ounces. It was so smooth, and sweetish. Sort of like drinking smooth honey.

You can go up and start talking to anyone at these things. Everyone is there to enjoy beer, and there are bottles of beer everywhere, from everywhere. I walked around after I got my beer (plus a bottle of Popskull and Dreadnaught) and talked to a few people. I even ran into a few of the young Notre Dame guys who are mug club members at Shoreline.

Even if you are unable to get a Golden Ticket when they sell them next year, I would totally recommend checking this out, especially if you live in the Chicago area.

Apricot Ale - 9 and a Half Weeks

2009-03-03T05:57:00.005-06:00

If you read this with any regularity, you will notice that I seem to have a love/hate relationship for Magic Hat beers. A lot of people are down on Magic Hat, mostly because a lot of people don't really dig fruit beers, and Magic Hat promote the hell out of their #9. It really doesn't help that they also include the Circus Boy wheat beer (and let's face it, because they throw lemongrass in it, it's really not a hefeweizen per se, it's more like a Spice-American Wheat beer, but that's just a technicality) in every sampler. So, if you're a newcomer to the brand, you buy a 12-pack sampler and get only 3 of the SeasonAle (Jinx, Roxy Rolles, etc.) and 3 of whatever Odd Notion they are putting in there (and for the most part, all of these have been outstanding; I've had a Belgium Dubbel, a Braggot, and a mild ale. Only the mild was sort of disappointing, although it was pretty). I find both the Jinx and the Roxy Rolles to be excellent beers, although I have recently discovered that the Jinx is mostly a Scottish Ale, which I'm getting interested in, but when I discovered it, I didn't know of the style. Roxy Rolles changed my attitude towards what an Amber ale could be. I always found them pleasant, but never anything compelling.

For the most part, I think that Magic Hat's #9 is a fine ale. It's a fruit beer, and for the most part, I enjoy a fruit beer now and then, but I don't really want to sit around all day drinking fruit beer. If you look at their ingredients on their website, Magic Hat also says that they use a "English Ale" yeast. According to various homebrewing forums out there, this appears to be a Ringwood-style of yeast. This yeast provides sort of a funky, old, London Dungeon sort of character to the beers, but more to a greater degree on the #9.

My first all-grain beer I brewed at home was a clone based on Magic Hat's Jinx, called Samhain, and it turned out pretty well. I was also reading about re-using yeast at the time, did some research, and got a wild idea to use the yeast by making the #9, because I never made a fruit beer, and thought it would be fun and simple. Instead of the Ringwood yeast, I used Wyeast's London Ale. I was a little scared of performing a diacetyl rest, which some people said was required of the Ringwood yeast. This would appear to mean that you just have to allow the beer to rest a little longer in the fermenter, but I have not researched this thoroughly.

I have an advantage to re-using yeast because I have a conical fermenter, which allows me to draw the yeast off into a mason jar quite easily. I sanitized a jar and lid, then after the yeast completed fermentation, I pulled some off, tightened the lid, and put it in the fridge. I made sure to crack the lid every 2 days - there is still gas build up. After two weeks, I made a starter and used it.

My efficiency doing batch sparging wasn't very good. I thought my original gravity would be about 1.054, but ended up at 1.045, which is actually closer to what the #9 is, so I was pleased. Also, I think I need to tone down the gas use during the boil. I had about 6.5 gallons, but only got 5 in the fermenter after I added the 2-quart yeast starter. I was hoping to get the final gravity down to 1.009, but only made it to 1.011, which was still fine.

The differences between my clone and the original are as follows: The yeast is cleaner, and the hops and tartness of the apricot flavoring come through without distraction. The #9 is actually lighter looking than mine. I'm not sure if Magic Hat uses Marris Otter as their base malt, but I did, because I like the biscuity flavor and roundness Marris Otter gives ales.

9.5 Weeks Apricot Ale

9.0 lb Marris Otter Pale Malt
0.5 lb Crystal Malt 30-50*L (This is what my LHBS has)

0.5 oz Cascade @ 60 min
0.5 oz Columbus @ 15 min

4 oz Apricot Flavoring in bottling bucket

OG: 1.054
SRM: 7.9
IBU: 21.4

Beer Wars Movie

2009-03-01T09:51:00.002-06:00

My wife was looking for a movie we could take the kids to yesterday, and found out about a movie called Beer Wars. I would really like this to show up in as many theatres as possible, but as it is a documentary, I'm not sure how lucrative it would be for theatres to show it.

Here's the trailer:

The website for this (so far) is called Beer Wars Movie. Do what you can to get this in your local movieplex.

A Crash Course in Home Brewing

2009-02-22T10:29:00.004-06:00

I’ve had a couple of friends over on Facebook mention that they were interested in trying my beers or brewing their own beer. The main factor for them (or as it is considered in beginning any new hobby) is “How much is this going to cost me?”

Brewing beer, like any hobby, can cost as much or as less as you want it to. You can buy a used set of golf clubs at a garage sale, and depending on your local public course greens fee, can probably golf relatively cheap. On the other hand, you can spend tons of money on new clubs, goofy looking balls, a golf cart, accessories, join a country club, etc. Personally, I think I’ve golfed 4 times in my life. I like the part of being outdoors and hanging out with people, but I don’t really feel the need to go chasing after a little, white ball.

The best thing for you to do is look for local brewers in your area and ask them when they are brewing so you can see how it is done. I had a buddy who had all the equipment, so I started out buying a piece here and there until I finally splurged last fall and bought the equipment I really wanted.

Equipment

When it comes down to it, you probably have what you need to do the actual brewing part of beer in your house: A good-sized kettle and a big spoon for stirring. I had a 3-gallon aluminum kettle that always burned my jambalaya when I cooked it. Some people say you should use stainless steel, but recently, I’ve read on various forums that some people have used aluminum pots for the boil for years.

I would suggest getting at least a 9-gallon kettle. Ingredient kits are made for brewing 5 gallons of beer, which should yield you about 2 cases of beer, and you have to boil the beer (wort) for 60 minutes (sometimes longer), so you want to be able to put about 6 or 6.5 gallons in your kettle.

You’re also going to need (at a minimum) a hydrometer and a tube or vessel to put the wort in so you can measure the gravity, so you know when it’s done fermenting, some kind of fermenting vessel so it can ferment, a ferment lock, a bottling bucket, caps, a bottle capper, and some sanitizer. It might not hurt to buy some muslin bags for the grain and some hop bags for the hops.

You should shop around, but both Northern Brewer and Midwest Supplies have some decent basic starter kits. If you live in a bigger city, there may even be a local homebrew store (noted in most beer forums as LHBS)

Ingredients

If you’re going to go at this alone, I would suggest buying a kit or two and brew those. Both the Northern Brewer and Midwest Supplies have their own kits. I would recommend trying NBs Kolsch, or the Wit Bier. You can try the other recipes, but these two extract kits don’t come with any specialty grains. You just heat your water up to about 150, stir in the syrup or extract, then bring the whole thing to a boil. Then you follow the hop schedule.

Extract kits with specialty grains aren’t difficult to master. They just require one extra step, and you just need a thermometer. See “Brewing” below.

If you really want to make a certain style or clone a recipe, you can usually find one out there by googling the name of the beer and using the words “clone recipe” or just “recipe” after it. Some breweries will even list the ingredients. You can use beer brewing software to help you figure out quantities, and get close, or even nail it. This is an medium-beginner technique, though, and you shouldn’t worry about it yet.

Once you get your kit, take the yeast out and put it in the fridge. Don’t freeze it. I always put the hops in the freezer, but if you’re brewing in a week’s time, I wouldn’t sweat it.

Brewing

Here’s what you need to brew:

The biggest pot you have
A big spoon
A stove or one of them turkey fryer burners (I have a turkey fryer burner because I can do the boil outside and not stink up the house, plus, they have a higher BTU rate than the big BTU burner on my stove, and they kick ass).

If you’re using a Wyeast product, follow the instructions on smacking the pack. Do this up to 8 hours before you use it, or no less than 3 before you start brewing. If the package doesn’t look like it’s puffing up, then you might have a bad yeast, and you may as well call of brewing unless you can get another one right away. The White Labs are little test tubes that you shake up. Take it out of the fridge and set it on the counter before starting to brew, to warm it up. I’ve never used dry yeast, but it’s probably the easiest. I recommend the Wyeast products.

Like I said above, you’re going to follow the instructions included in the kit, and basically do the following:

If you have specialty grains, put them in the included muslin bag. Set this bag of grains aside in a bowl or outside on the porch, because dust will fall out of the bag.

Depending on how you are going to chill the wort will depend on how much water you use. If you plan on immersing the pot into a tub or sink of ice to cool it to 70 degrees after the boil, then I would use about 3 gallons max for the boil. If you have some kind of immersion chiller or a huge bank of snow, then I would pour 6 gallons into the pot, if your pot is that big.

Get your water heated up to 154 degrees and then turn off the heat. Put the bag of grains in there and let it sit or steep, for like 45 minutes (check the instructions, sometimes it’s longer). Keep an eye on the temperature. You don’t want it to go above 160, but you should try to keep it about 154-156.

If you got the Wit or the Kolsch kit, you won’t have to worry about this step. Instead, as the temperature gets up to about 140-150, start pouring in the extract syrup and stir it vigorously for about 5-10 minutes. You don’t want the syrup burning on the bottom of the pot.

Bring it to a boil. Watch the kettle here. It will help if you have a thermometer on a string that goes into the kettle that you can pull out and read, or one they sell that looks like a big meat thermometer. When it gets close to boiling, you may need to lower the heat so you don’t have a boil over. This is another reason I do this outside, and not in the kitchen. I also had a buddy tell me that he screwed up his girlfriend’s white kitchen cabinets brewing inside. I’m just sayin’.

Once it starts boiling, note the time. You will note the hop schedule will look something like:

2 oz Strisselspalt (60 min)
1 oz Coriander Seed (10 min)

You’re doing a 60 minute boil. So, you’re going to boil the 2 oz of Strisselspalt hops for the whole 60 minutes. 50 minutes later (at 10 minutes left in the boil), you’re going to throw in the Coriander seed. I know this seems backwards, but that’s just how that bird sings.

Depending on how you are going to transfer the wort to the fermenting vessel, you may want to use nylon hop bags that they used to include in kits (but no loner appear to do so). Whole leaf hops actually serve as a nice filter, but you can’t exactly pull them out of the steaming wort at the end of the boil if you’re pouring it into a bucket. Pellet hops (most common style used in kits and for availability) need to be put into bags, as they turn to mush.

Once you’ve reached 60 minutes, cover your kettle and turn off the heat. This is where stuff gets interesting.

Chilling and Pitching Yeast

You’re going to have to get the wort down to 65-70 degrees. Some people say cool the Kolsch wort as cold as you can get it and let the temperature come up. I’ve never tried this, and I wouldn’t recommend it for your first brew, unless you’re crazy like me, in which case go ahead.

The trick here is to cool the stuff as quickly as possible. I have a counterflow wort chiller, which is this kickass tool that allows the beer to flow through a copper coil that is inside a larger plastic hose where cold water from my faucet flows over the copper pipe cooling the wort to the desired temperature. That, coupled with a thru-mometer, which gives a colored readout of the temperature, is just great. You also have some other options:

Using a thermometer put the kettle into a sink full of ice and water. Obviously, don’t fill this to high, as you will overflow the sink if you do. Move the kettle around in the water. You may have to add additional ice and water to cool the wort (which you should check by keeping the thermometer in it). Keep the kettle covered. Banks of snow work surprisingly well for this application as well. I was able to chill some wort for a yeast starter in about 5 minutes, but then, that was only 2 quarts of water.

You can also buy an immersion chiller, which works kind of the opposite of a counterflow chiller, in that one end of a copper coil is attached to a water source, while the other comes off the other end and either goes into your sink or onto the ground (my buddy has an area in his yard where the kids can dig. When we started brewing, this is what we used. It usually resulted in something like 20-30 gallons of water onto the ground, creating an excellent mudpit for the kids).

Probably even simpler is to reduce the size of your boil to maybe 3 or 3.5 gallons so that you end up with 2.5 gallons of hot water. Then, in your fermenting vessel, have the coldest possible amount of water to make up 5 or 5.5 gallons. Pour the hot liquid on top of the cool liquid. You may have to wait a couple of hours or so to pitch your yeast to get it down to 65-70 degrees, but this is easiest.

The most important thing is to try and keep a lid on the kettle to prevent outside organisms from getting into the wort. You’re no longer boiling, so you don’t have a sanitized environment. That’s why the counterflow chillers are so great. We sanitize ours with boiling water before each use, and so the wort flows from the hot, boiled kettle into a clean copper tube, into the fermenting vessel.

Fermenting

When you buy a kit, if you’re going with the cheapest version, you will get a fermenting bucket. These are nice in that the top is a wide open bucket so you don’t need a funnel to pour your hot wort into. If you get a big plastic bottle (I have 2 six-gallon Better Bottles), you will probably need a funnel with a screen on the inside (to prevent excess hops and other particulates).

Once the temperature is 65-70 degrees, pitch the yeast. Have yourself a bucket (fill the bottling bucket or fermentation bucket with up to 5 gallons of water and add an ounce of sanitizer or whatever they provide in the kit) of sanitizer set up, either while you’re brewing, or while you’re waiting for the temp to fall in the fermenter. In this bucket, put in your ferment lock. It’s important to make sure the wort is going to touch sanitized surfaces. If you haven’t sanitized your fermenting vessel, you will also want to do that before you pour the wort in there (not an issue if you did what I said at the top of the paragraph). Let that sanitizer set for a good 15 minutes or more.

Siphon some of the wort out of the vessel into the big hydrometer test tube in your kit, and drop the hydrometer in there to check your Original Gravity. Compare it to the O.G. on the kit to see how well you did.

When using liquid yeast, shake the hell out of it before putting it into the fermenting vessel on top of the wort. If you’re using Wyeast, dip the end of the bag you’re going to cut into the bucket of sanitizer and then pour it on top. Follow instructions if you’re using dry yeast (usually bring a small amount of water to about 70 degrees, shake yeast on top, stir it up and then pour mixture into wort).

Fill the ferment lock with some water about halfway and secure it onto the top of the vessel.

Next, you will need to get oxygen into your mixture. If you have a bucket or a plastic bottle, pick it up, making sure the ferment lock is held onto and shake it for about 30-60 seconds. Glass ferment bottles are available as well, but I have read horror stories about these breaking for no damn good reason. I mean, really, do you want to be dancing in your basement with about 50 pounds of glass and liquid? Me? Not so much.

You can also buy an oxygen stone (around $40) from a beer supply place and a small red tank of oxygen (about $10) at your local hardware store. Sanitize the oxygen stone (not the tubing, stand over a small pan with boiling water) by immersing it into boiling water for 5 minutes. Cover the stone with foil and put the tubing into the sanitizer without dipping the stone into it for about 5 minutes. Also avoid immersing the filter. I usually dip the stone (without the foil, of course) into the fermenting vessel for about 2 minutes. By that time, foam is usually pouring out of the top.

Set the vessel in a corner where it’s going to be at least 65 degrees until the fermentation stops. We’ve done this using space heaters, heating pads, blankets and such in the winter. In the summer in NW Indiana, my basement temperature goes between 68-72 degrees, which is perfect.

In about 24 hours, you should see bubbling in your ferment lock. If so, congratulations, you are making beer! If not, shake it up some more and wait a day. Hopefully it will work out for you.

As the days go by, check your vessel and the lock. Once the bubbling has gone to less than one bubble per minute, it’s likely done. Use a siphon to once again check the gravity. If it’s around 1.009 – 1.016 for those kind of beers you have, it’s probably done fermenting. Make sure by seeing if you get the same result 3 days in a row.

I recommend having a second vessel for secondary fermentation. This step gets the beer off the dead yeast and other crap that has floated to the bottom of the primary fermentation vessel. Using a siphon, set the primary vessel on something higher than the secondary vessel, which should be placed on the floor. Allow the beer to flow from one vessel to the other. Then set this vessel aside without worrying about the temperature. Ideally, you’d like the temperature to be between 35-55 degrees. This will help with the clarity of the beer, unless it’s supposed to be cloudy, then you don’t have to worry about it being so cool. Just don’t allow the temperature to get around 80 or above, because this will impart some off-flavors to your beer.

Bottling

After a week or two in the secondary, you can bottle the beer. Prep by cleaning around 50 bottles. I would recommend making about 10 gallons of sanitized water and placing the water in a clean cooler that you use for picnics and outdoor festivals, something that can hold 50 bottles lying on their sides. Immerse the bottles in the sanitized water. I have a bottle washer that I use that goes on a sink in my basement. You can buy and adapter for your kitchen sink as well. This is a handy tool that I use after the bottles have been immersed for at least an hour. I usually do this the day before, though.

Next, you will need two pans. In one, put about 55-60 bottle caps and cover them with water. Boil the caps for 5 minutes, and then take the pan to the place where you will be bottling.

In the second pan, boil 2 cups (16 ounces) of water and put three-quarters of a cup of PRIMING sugar (don’t use normal table sugar, as this will fuck up your beer) that came with your ingredient kit and also boil for five minutes. Do not put more sugar than this into the mixture, as it is likely to cause exploding bottles.

Siphon or pour your beer into your bottling bucket. Make sure you have sanitized your beer filling wand (that came with your kit) and the hose that connects the wand to the bucket. You can put these in the cooler with the bottles.

Pour the sugar water into the bottling bucket on top of the beer. Don’t worry about stirring it in.

Fill your bottles and cap them, then set them aside.

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

Usually, in 10 days, I pop a bottle and check the beer. Most of the time, it’s decent. What I mean by this is that it has some what of a head and tastes like beer. The beer usually becomes perfect after 3 weeks in the bottle. By then, you’re getting a decent head, good carbonation, and the flavor has developed.

Summary

I totally recommend reading a book or two on the subject in conjunction with brewing a batch or two with someone who knows what they’re doing. Some homebrewers are choosey about who they let drink their beer. My friend, John, told me after I had bought my first batch that we brewed and I was going to take 12 to a party that I shouldn’t. I ended up finding bottles of my beer that still had a good third of the beer in the bottom of the bottle. This was a lighter, hoppier ale, and it was bitter, so there’s no doubt that it was an acquired taste.

Understand that this is the shortest I could make this article. There are tricks and tools out there that I didn’t mention. Mostly, I just wanted to give you an idea of what was required to brew beer. It’s definitely more work than going to the grocery and picking up a sixer of a microbrew. I enjoy it, though, and want to spread the joy as much as I can.

Dark Lord Day '09

2009-02-19T12:41:00.004-06:00

Three Floyds has actually developed a website and a new system for buying the Dark Lord here. Dark Lord Day will be held on April 25 this year.

I'm working on a post that should be up, as scheduled, tomorrow. Sorry for not getting one up last Friday.

Update - February

2009-02-06T05:57:00.001-06:00

When I got back from my Christmas Break, I had a bunch of ideas to post about, mostly reviews, and some stuff focused on homebrewing equipment. I've sort of become uninspired by the beer review thing. I still like to try new beers, but I'm tired of buying pale ales and reviewing them. I mean there are a lot of pale ales out there that are great, and worth mentioning, but there's nothing really new going on with the style.

Part of the reason is that I think the last beer I bought was a sixer of Shiner Black to share with my friend, John, on Christmas Eve. I still have at least one of those in the fridge. Mostly, I've been focused on putting recipes into ProMash, going back and re-reading my Brew Your Own magazines and throwing the recipes that look interesting into ProMash for later inspiration.

I started out the year making a schedule of beers that I wanted to make. I haven't done a good job sticking to that list. I was going to knock out one beer a month, starting with a Smoked Porter, followed by the Rocka Rolla Amber that I cloned from Magic Hat's Roxy Rolles ale, and in March, make the Pilsner I made last fall, only with all-grain

Instead, I focused on building a Mash Tun, which I will post an article about after I brew this weekend, and I just finished building a fly-sparge arm, which will also be included in that article. Then I had to remake the Jinx.

I decided to remake the Jinx (I decided to call mine Samhain Ale - which I believe was a Pagan celebration of Fall, as well as Glen Danzig's band after the Misfits and before Danzig) because I wasn't satisfied with the more malty version I created in 2008, I had the hops to make it, and I was interested in making something with Marris Otter malt. I've tried it out of the fermenter, and it appears to be very good. By the time I post this, it will be bottled and ready in 3 weeks.

After brewing the Jinx, I decided to utilize my conical fermenter. It's got a valve at the bottom of the cone, where you empty the trub and yeast that is done fermenting. So I read a couple of articles online about re-using the yeast, after another homebrewer I talked to, named Tom, re-used his yeast on two batches of his Sierra Nevada Pale clone.

So I thought that I could use this yeast to make 2 more brews, both Magic Hat clones, the Rocka Rolla, and a version of the Magic Hat #9, which I will call 9.5 Weeks. It appears that Magic Hat uses some generic English Ale yeast for all of these beers, so I figured I would try it to see how regenerating yeast worked.

The obvious choice would have been to do the Rocka Rolla, since I already have 2/3 of the hops for it. However, I got so interested in the #9, and thought it would be nice for my wife to have some beer, AND thought that if the yeast was weak (I will make a starter), the #9 had a low enough gravity that it would probably be the better choice.

So I'm making the 9.5 Weeks on Saturday.

Then, on Sunday, Shoreline is having the Mug Club Chili Cookoff.

Schafly American Pale Ale

2009-01-30T06:02:00.001-06:00

My dad was harping on how good he thought Schlafly's American Pale Ale was. I actually had a Schlafly Pale Ale shirt one time. I bought it when I visited their brew pub in St. Louis years ago.

The pale ale I had at his house had a different label, and I didn't remember their pale ale tasting like this. I thought it was more of an "English" style of pale ale. This one had a better hop profile than say, the Sierra Nevada, which I refer to as the American pale ale standard. It was good. I do still like pale ales, but I think I'm going to put them on the backburner as anything I buy anymore, unless it's one of Shoreline Brewery's pale ales, which are just awesome.

Dad also had some of Schlafly Christmas Ale, which appeared to be a brown ale with spices in it. I thought that it was an excellent beer, although I was drinking it out of a stein mug, and therefore didn't get to see what it looked like except from the pour.

Schlafly only distributes to a 300-mile radius, so I don't get their stuff up here in NW Indiana. I used to be able to get a few varieties when I lived in Mattoon, Illinois, which I thought was pretty great for a town that size.

On the way back, we passed a Schlafly truck. I think a trip to St. Louis in the late spring/early summer would be in order to maybe go see the Cubs play down there and visit Schlafly.

What Does This Tell You?

2009-01-23T06:00:00.000-06:00

So, is Miller admitting what I've said all along about Miller Lite? There's seriously an underlying theme here that is pretty obvious: It's piss!

My First All Grain: Esseola 181 Pale Ale

2009-01-16T05:47:00.000-06:00

We were finally able to get John's new mash tun and boiling kettle up and running (okay, so really, John did his own work on both of these things). He ordered a Roggenbier kit from Northern Brewer, also All Grain, and I made up a pale ale recipe, loosely based on Three Floyd's Alpha King, but also just on the American Pale Ale style I had seen somewhere else, as well as an early recipe I had made up based on what I thought was the hop profile of Shoreline's SumNug IPA. Top that all off with a song by Jolene called "Esseola 181" which reminded me of Asheville, North Carolina with the chorus, "This town in Blue Ridge..." and there you have the basics.

So after fucking up a few recipes, I've sort of learned some things (I would say for the most part, the beers we've made have been good, but there have been shortfalls: I don't know what happened with the Tongue Splitter kit. I think the yeast didn't have enough healthy food. The first Witbier had like a quarter pound of cloves in it, and was definitely overwhelming on that front, and the Pilsner, which actually was pretty excellent, came out about 0.010 lower in the original gravity than I wanted due to me shoving about 5 pounds of grain into one bag instead of 4, for better utilization of the sugars...pretty much everything else except the Jinx clone which turned out not to be a Jinx clone has been very good), including dry-hopping, using yeast starters, oxygenating the beer with a tank of oxygen, etc.

I have also been screwing around with Promash, which is a software for homebrewing. I think it can be set up for businesses, but then those guys know way more than me, so I'm not sure how they do it. I finally bought the whole version instead of messing around with the sample, and life is good. I totally recommend it.

I was also able to use an 1.25 oz of Zeus hops that I grew in my back yard for this. I opted to use these primarily as the boiling hop, but next time might use the Nugget instead, and use the Zeus for flavoring hops. I put 1 oz in at 60 minutes, and used the remainder of Nugget and Zeus in the secondary. I also got an ounce of Amarillo hops for the end of the boil, because I really like Amarillo hops.

So we made the beer, and after about a week in the bottle, John and his family were over for Christmas Eve dinner and he says, "That beer should be ready by now." I'm skeptical. I always like it to be bottled/kegged for at least 3 weeks, and then wait another week for good measure. I'm patient that way. Plus, I was giving my dad a case at first, for Christmas, but then I ended up only giving him 12 plus 6 Tad, 2 Ciders, and 4 beers he can't get in Missouri.

So we try the beer, and there's definitely not enough head on it for me, but it smells good, tastes good, and it's carbonated. Of course, I figured I would wait and see what happened, and sure enough, on January 11, I tried it, and it's awesome. The hop profile is great, plus, there's this underlying caramel taste that I haven't picked up in a pale ale before. It's very nice.

Esseola 181
5 gallon batch - All Grain

11.0 lbs U.S. 2-row Pale Malt
1.0 lb Crystal Malt 60*L
0.5 lb Caramunich
Steep at 155*F for 45 minutes
1.0 oz Zeus @ 60 min.
0.25 oz Nugget @ 30 min.
1.0 oz Amarillo @ 5 min.
0.75 oz Nugget - Dry Hop
0.25 oz Zeus - Dry Hop
Wyeast American Ale II Yeast

Boulevard Smokestack Seiries - Saison

2009-01-09T06:00:00.000-06:00

My friend, P-Mart, guest-wrote a blog on this site about Boulevard's Doublewide IPA, which is another of the Smokestack Series. While in Missouri over the holidays, I got to try the above-mentioned beer for myself, as well as try two of the other four in the series. The only one I didn't try was the Long Strange Tripel, mostly because my dad opted for a bottle of this Saison, again, after we had one the first night I showed up. I've been a little tripeled-out, lately, so I wasn't too disappointed. Since it looks like they're going to brew this style year after year, I can probably try that one at a later time.

The Saison pours and appears like you would expect a Saison to pour and appear - golden and cloudy with a nice, white, fluffy head. There is a smell there that somehow reminds me of when I first smelled beer in Germany. I know it's the yeast, but it's not necessarily the entire smell you get from the yeast. You get a distinct sharpness in the nose that tells you this isn't any normal ale or American lager. It's a stinkiness that I enjoyed.

The beer has a smooth flavor with a slight hop bite at the end. It's a very good example of the style, maybe even better than the bottle of Saison DuPont I shared with my dad over Thanksgiving.

This was my Dad's third beer of the first night we were there, and I think he was full. He said, "We should have started off with this one," and left half his glass full. After about 10 hours in the car, which was a longer trip than I expected, due to a driving delay on the ice-rink that I-94 became the day after Christmas, I just wanted to go to bed as well.

New Belgium Tripel

2008-12-12T05:45:00.000-06:00

What we enjoy in life helps to add character to who we are. For me, a place becomes more tolerable when it has a decent beer selection. When I say place, I can mean anything from a gas station to a restaurant to a town.

For example, we were going to a business dinner one night at a Mediterranean restaurant (Sahara in Michigan City). I figured I would probably be drinking water there because they more than likely were not going to have anything except American Lager. I was suprised to find Rogue Mocha Porter and Bell's Two-Hearted Ale there. The dinner was great, of course, but the beer selection made it even better to me.

When I travel to see my folks in a small town in southwestern Missouri, I know there's not going to be a lot going on. It's nice that way, because really, I am there just to see them. However, at the end of the 8-hour drive I know that I'm going to be able to go into my Dad's fridge and find a variety of New Belgium and Boulevard beers there.

Before coming up for Thanksgiving, my Dad said they had loaded their old treadmill into the back of the truck and he was wondering what else they could bring. I told him I wanted some New Belgium 1554 and anything else he wanted to bring. He ended up bringing me some New Belgium Tripel.

I thought that a Trippel was a Trippel. Then I remembered over the Labor Day weekend, I had two really good Trippels at a friend's house in Illinois, and one average Trippel. La Fin Du Monde and Victory's Golden Monkey rate up there with a nice flavor, and a decent alcohol kick. I have to say the New Belgium Trippel was just okay. Not as strong as the two mentioned, and not as spicy as say the Dark Horse Sapient Trip Ale or Flying Dog Kerebos versions I had in Illinois.

Also, that yeast that they use I suppose I've gotten used to, but the harsh bite of dirt is there with the first drink. I can't describe this any other way. Can I say "Earthy?" Mayhap that will do.

Still, it kills me that the old man can buy cases of New Belgium beers at his local Sam's Club. I guess I shouldn't complain, I can get 4 kinds of Three Floyd's at my local Jewel grocery store.

Beer Social Networks - Sharing the Love

2008-12-03T06:01:00.004-06:00

I wanted to let everyone know about a new social network called Must Love Beer. I found this through a facebook link. It looks like it's just starting up. I already frequent the boards on Northern Brewer and ratebeer.com. I think some Bud drinkers must be hacking ratebeer.com, though. It's been crashing a lot lately. And someone took my Cheap Trick icon down.

As you may already know, blogging about beer isn't an original idea. I've got a few bloggers listed to the right, and most of them are from people who have linked to me or left comments. One thing I am kind of interested in are women who appreciate craft beers. Let's face it, for the most part, it would not appear that there are as many women interested in different styles of beer and brewing as men are. I'm not saying that there aren't ANY women out there who really like beer and want to try a lot of kinds, I'm just saying, you're not showing up in large quantities. This, of course, is reflected in what American society considers as beer, and depending upon what you read, when all the men went to war in Europe and Asia from 1941 - 1945, this affected how brewers made their beer (lighter, less hoppy).

Here's what fascinates me most: Women homebrewers. What kind of styles do they like to brew? Are they pretty much the same as most men? (Although, I have to admit, some homebrewers out there pick some pretty boring and standard stuff to brew). Do they do a better job with their ingredients, are they more creative? I'm not sure, but I bet you the folks over at Beer for Chicks could tell you. Obviously, as I don't possess the correct equipment, I am not privy to this site. However, that does not stop me from supporting the cause.

Another good place to check out is the forums at Northern Brewer. I've received good advice from the brewers over there.

Places like Must Love Beer, Beer Advocate, and Rate Beer all allow you to talk about beers you've tried, and also look up beers you've heard about to see what people think and maybe determine if you want to find something new. Plus, if you're one of those youngsters out there who has some kind of mobile internet device, you can check out BA or RB right at the store, if you can get a connection. Find out right on the spot if you're getting something great, or pisswater.

Have an excellent weekend!

Trip to Southeast Ohio

2008-11-28T05:45:00.000-06:00

Sorry about not posting last week. I was in meetings all day for two solid weeks and then I had to go on a business trip to the southeast Ohio/West Virginia area.

I flew into Columbus and rode with some other people to Marietta. At the airport, there was a Columbus Brewing Company restaurant just outside my gate. I had two hours to wait for my co-workers, so I decided to see what kind of beer they were serving.

They had two offerings from Columbus (as well as offerings from Budweiser and Miller), a pale ale and a porter. I got the pale ale but wish I would have tried the porter. I was feeling like something hoppy, though. I thought the pale ale was reminiscent of the Sierra Nevada pale ale. Good, but not very original.

Marietta is a cool, little town. There are lots of good restaurants and it's sort of an "artist's town" if you know what I mean. Two rivers run next to it, the Muskingum on the west, and the Ohio River to the south. Very hilly, and lots of cool bridges. Across the way in West Virginia are small towns, curvy two-lane highways, and a good bit of industry. Still, this is small town, rural Ohio and West Virginia, and the fridges of the people around here are like most small town fridges in the U.S., full of Bud Light.

During the trip, I had the opportunity to eat at the Marietta Brewing Company. It would appear that they don't keep their website up to date, or they had a massive turnaround of their beer since last Tuesday. At the time, they had 5 beers of their own on tap, plus Woodchuck Cider. The beers, as I remember, were the Marietta Pale Ale, McLaren's Scotch Ale, a raspberry wheat, a smoked porter, and a "weiss" beer. I was able to sample each of these.

The MBC knows the people in the area, and having to stay in business, caters to these tastes. I was told the place was packed on the weekends, and it was doing good business on Tuesday night.

The MBC pale ale was similar to the Columbus pale ale, in the way it tasted pretty much like Sierra Nevada pale ale. In my opinion, it's pretty much the standard for American pale ale.

I didn't care much for the Raspberry Wheat. I like a good fruit beer, but this reminded me too much of the raspberry tea that I've had in certain chain restaurants while travelling.

The Scotch Ale was dangerous. No alcoholic aftertaste. This batch was 7.8% ABV, and I was told by a person I was eating with that it had been higher. I told one of my co-workers to be careful with this one. Sweet and malty, and disguising the higher than average ABV. He didn't listen, and subsequently was looking around the opposite end of the hotel parking lot the next morning for the car. He didn't drive the night before.

The smoked porter was very smokey, almost had a "hammy" taste to it. This was very nice.

The "weiss" beer tasted like a Belgian Wit, even though the waitress said it was a German weizen beer style. The ingredients are pretty close in those style of beers, but the yeast tasted to me like a Belgian. Whatever. My palette hasn't always been as true to me as I've wanted.

The food at MBC was excellent. I can't recall any specifics other than decent burgers, even a buffalo burger, other sandwiches, and full entrees. I know it was pretty standard stuff, but solid.
Definitely support the local brewer if you're in this area. Also check out The House of Wines up 3rd Street, as they have over 400 beers in the shop, but no "Make your own 6-pack" option.

Special Thanksgiving Post

2008-11-27T05:45:00.001-06:00

Seeing as I was out last Friday, I decided to make it up to the couple of you who come here. If you're here on Thursday, let me wish you a safe and hangover-free Thanksgiving.

I thought I would pass this awesome article from The New Yorker on to you while you drink your coffee. It's long, but it will give you some insight into the minds of a couple of Craft Brewers, especially Dogfish Head owner Sam Calagione.

The regular Friday post is back tomorrow. Enjoy!

Rocka Rolla Woman for a Rocka Rolla Man

2008-11-07T05:41:00.004-06:00

Here's another Magic Hat beer that was a pleasant surprise. The Roxy Rolles smells so good, I thought that maybe I mis-judged amber ales altogether. While that might be a little out of hand, this is really a good beer.

In fact, it is so good, that I thought I would like to clone this and keep some around. The ingredients from the Magic Hat page are simple: Pale malt, Caramunich, and crystal malt. With an ABV of 5.1% and the gravity of 14.5 Plato (1.059 SG), I determined that the FG would be 1.022. Is that right? I would think you could get the FG down to at least 1.016, if not 1.012. Maybe my ABV calculator spreadsheet is incorrect. If anyone has a simple method of determining ABV from OG and FG, that would be helpful. I'm using two equations to get there.

It would appear from this fellow beer blogger, that they have changed the recipe, though. Looking at the hop profile, which is 20 IBU, the same as the Jinx, I was kind of confused. They use CTZ hops in the jinx, and Brewer's Gold and Simcoe for the hop profile on the Roxy Rolles. It only takes about 0.75 oz BG hops and 0.25 oz of Simcoe (at 15 minutes) to go over 20 IBU. Then I remembered how hoppy the aroma was and thought maybe they dry-hopped the beer with Simcoe. The above article confirms this. Also, I can make more sense with the older recipe's IBUs.

Rocka Rolla Ale (a Magic Hat Roxy Rolles clone - sorta)
5 gallon boil

8.0 lbs Pale Malt
2.0 lbs Crystal Malt 90*L
1.0 lbs Caramunich

1.00 oz Brewer's Gold @ 60 min.
0.25 oz Simcoe @ 15 min.
0.50 oz Simcoe dry hop in secondary

California Ale V Yeast

O Gravity: 1.058
IBU: 35
SRM: 23

I went with the California Ale V yeast because I like the American style yeast more for hoppy beers. I will check how my Jinx clone turns out, though, and if I like the London Ale yeast, I will go with that. Oh, and the name of the beer is a play on the original as well as the title of a Judas Priest song and album.

Three Floyds IPAs

2008-10-31T08:00:00.000-05:00

As recent as Labor Day, I've had a friend who has shared two newer Three Floyds IPAs with me. I love Three Floyds. They truly do make some excellent beer. But these two IPAs? They're just fine. I don't think that they're all that great to write home about.

In case you weren't aware, Three Floyds makes what is probably the best American Pale Ale out there called The Alpha King. If I weren't interested in trying every beer in the world out there, this one would be a staple in my home, along with Bell's Two-Hearted Ale. If you're a beer novice, Alpha King will rock your world. It's got an amazing body and hop profile.

Then they went out and released this Blackheart IPA. I saw this at Pat's and at first was tempted to buy it ($10.99 for a 22 oz bomber), then I saw it was a British IPA. There was a bottle of the Three Floyd's Dreadnaught (an IMPERIAL IPA) for the same price. I've had the Dreadnaught. It's very nice. So why would I pay the same price for a British-style IPA? British-style IPAs and Pale Ales just don't jump out at me like the American versions do. They're okay. They're usually good beers, but I'm not going to spend $10.99 on a 22 oz bottle when I can get a better beer for the same price, or a sixer of the Alpha King for $8. What? You got a well-known California tattoo artist to design your label? Yay! You've just become the Magic Hat of Indiana.

Anyway, I tried the Blackheart, and it was pretty good, but still not $10.99 pretty good. I've had similar IPAs for less.

Then I had noticed that they released an 11-year anniversary beer called Fantabulous Resplendence XI. I had the Fan Res X (An American Strong Ale - whatever that is) and it was one of the best beers I ever had. I swear it was more along the lines of a Belgian strong ale, but then, that was over a year ago, I just read my notes on ratebeer.com and I raved about the thing like it was the second coming.

So as I was saying, I saw this thing in the store and thought it was going to be awesome. I went home to find out what kind of beer it was on ratebeer.com and found out it was an IPA. Huh? Maybe they're saving the special beers for the big anniversaries (10, 20, etc.).

My friend, Gumbo, brought this one over just this last weekend. I was still kind of hoping it would be good, but had forgotten it was an IPA. I seriously thought it was a Belgian pale ale when I drank it.

Both of these IPAs were not as hoppy as I thought they would be, but British IPAs don't usually knock me out with the hops anyway.

Just a note to Three Floyds: Maybe if you're going to make average beers, don't spend so much money on the label art, then you won't have to charge us $11 for a bomber. I know we love capitalism, I'm down with the cause. Just don't expect me to spend that much money on a bomber when there are plenty of others at Pat's for $5.99 and $6.99 that are just as good, or maybe even better than these.

Indiana Apple Cider or Scarecrow Graf

2008-10-24T06:12:00.003-05:00

There's this series of Stephen King books I love called The Dark Tower. I really like the character of Roland in these books. He's a gunslinger. The story crosses different time periods, and may seem goofy if you're not familiar to King's works, because in this seven-book series, he pulls out characters from other books. Unfortunately, he even writes himself into the books, which is sort of a downfall. It's sort of a The Good, the Bad and the Ugly meets Lord of the Rings.

But I didn't come here to write a book review. In The Dark Tower, they drink something called graf, which is supposed to be some kind of apple beer. Leinenkugels made what might be considered an apple beer, called Apple Spice. In my humble opinion, it sucked! Fortunately, for all of us, they retired it, and apparently make a brown ale in its place now, which appears to be getting rave reviews.

A few weeks back, I was fortunate enough to talk to one of our friends' dad, who owns property with quite a few apple trees. He told me he was making cider the next week, and I asked if I could fill a 5-gallon carboy up with some. He said sure. I went the next week and worked for two hours moving apples around and throwing them into the cider press. Then I found this recipe, which I call Scarecrow Graf.

Scarecrow Graf
5 gallons fresh, unpasteurized apple cider
3 lbs Indiana honey (from our friend, Ken, who raises bees)
3 lbs Dark Brown Sugar (from the ultra-mega corporate Domino Sugar company)
2 packs of Five Star dry champagne yeast
Several cinnamon sticks for secondary fermenter
Optional handful of raisins for secondary fermenter

You have to get fresh cider. That stuff from the grocery store apparently has some kind of pasteurization going on that will actually kill your yeast, so get your cider fresh from a farmer's market or the like.

I looked around the internet for recipes, and the first 4 ingredients were used in one recipe I found. I thought the cinammon sticks would add a nice touch. I'm still not sure about the raisins. Nothing out there really about sanitation, and nothing really about bringing the cider to a boil. Instead, I opted to bring 3 gallons of the cider up to a temperature of 100 degrees, stir in the honey and brown sugar, and then mix it back into the carboy with the remaining 2 gallons of cider. Follow the directions on the yeast pack, making sure your mixture of cider is around 70 degrees, and then pitch the yeast. I think we did the whole "brew" in about 30 minutes. The original gravity on the thing was a 1.100.

When I move the cider to the secondary, I will add probably 3 cinammon sticks for a hint of cinnamon. After a week in the secondary, we will bottle, and hopefully this stuff will be ready by Christmas.

Smells Like Monk Basement

2008-10-17T08:00:00.000-05:00

You may have read here that I like to rate the beers that I drink on ratebeer.com. For the most part, I'm not very creative when I describe the quality of the beers I drink. I mean, you can only use so many of the same words to describe the same beer 500 other people have also described.

However, on my discovery of Belgian Tripels, I found a smell that I could only describe as "monk basement." I guess the proper European term would be "cellar," but tell me, if you keep beer stored in your house, and your specific geography allows for certain types of domestic construction, don't you usually keep, or ferment your beer in a basement? That is the first thing that came to mind when I smelled the yeast of those golden, strong, Belgian ales. I thought, "This has a smell reminiscent of all those damp, European cellars I occasionally found myself in when I lived over there." But to call the smell "European cellar" was not quite colorful enough for me.

Most Belgian styles of beer, according to my limited study of the style, were made by monks, so why not give them credit?

So please, I ask you kindly, use my terminology to describe the smell of Belgian ale yeasts. It's more prevalent in tripels, dubbels, and strong ales. Seek it out. Enjoy it.

Here are my favorite North American-influenced Belgian-style beers:

1. Pere Jacques (4.4) - Goose Island Brewing Company
Pours brown with a slight haze. Smells of toffee, caramel, and slight licorice. Taste is strong alcohol, but with a caramel back.

2. Hell Hath No Fury (4.1) - Bell's Brewing Company
Beautiful beer. Pours almost black. Smells fruity and slightly of monk basement. Tastes are many here: chocolate, coffee, fruit, licorice and dirt finish. I like it. I think it’s a decent example of the style.

3. La Fin Du Monde (4) - Unibroue
Nice blonde beer, with a little white fluffy head. Sweet smell. I notice the carbonation followed by a yeasty taste and slight alcohol burn.

4. Maudite (4) - Unibroue
Dark amber pour with a nice head. Fruity and raisin aromas. Nice mouth feel typical of all Unibroues.

5. 1554 Brussels Style Black Ale (3.9) - New Belgium Brewing Company
Black ale with a tint of red when held to the light. Beautiful. Smells of monk basement, malty, some nice chocolate overtones, and finishes with a "pinch of dirt" taste I always get from NB beers. I think I actually like aftertaste now.

6. Trois Pistoles (3.8) - Unibroue
Dark brown pour with fluffy white head. Has a fruity wine smell to it. Nice smooth, flavored mouthfeel.

7. Raison D Etre (3.8) - Dogfish Head
Dark red color. Slight head, no real lacing, just fades quickly. Smells like a sugary beer. Taste is malty, derived from raisins, and somewhat biscuity. Palate leaves a nice finish, and with two bottles, you can feel the alcohol burn.

8. Springboard Ale (3.3) - New Belgium Brewing Company
Pours a hazy light yellow. Nice white head that dissipates quickly. I can’t quite place the smell, but the yeast is nice. Has a nice citrus aftertaste and is an overall nice average summer beer.

Audit This Week - No Real Post Here

2008-10-10T05:54:00.003-05:00

I've had a Safety Audit all week, so I didn't get a chance to write anything here. Should be done with the audit by 12:30, hopefully.

We have a friend whose dad has a bunch of apple trees. They're pressing cider on Saturday, so I'm going to try and get 5 gallons of that and order a cider yeast.

Have a good weekend!

Green Bottle Hell - The Sweet Smell of Skunk

2008-10-03T05:47:00.000-05:00

It's hard for me to understand why some companies still use green bottles. If you've ever drank Heineken, you might have noticed the skunky smell that accompanies this. I was at a party a few months ago where the host had two of those little kegs of Heineken, and a guest poured himself a glass and said, "Hey, this doesn't taste like Heineken, it tastes...good." I asked him if the skunkiness was missing, and he said that it was. I then told him, "It's because it's not in its usual green bottle."

Doing about 5 minutes of research on the interwebs, I found that really, there seems to be only two reasons that companies use green bottles: First, it is all about marketing the product. Yep, nevermind that the beer has that skunky effect, it looks good in green. Second, the company may actually be going for that effect, as some people actually like the skunk. For those people I ask, "Where were you when the skunk fell into my window well last spring?"

The best information I got was from, of all places, a Yahoo! Answers post answering the question, "Do green bottles really make beer skunky?":

Not the green bolttes but UV light. Brown bottles do the best at filtering out the UV light. Heineken beer was once known for this defect and built its world reputation on peoples' ignorance of it. Many people thought the "skunkiness" as normal and a quality beer aroma and flavor...

Lots of really decent information in that whole answer.

I'm not really a fan, honestly, of most beers in green bottles, but there are a few pilsners that I think I would enjoy a whole lot more if they were only in brown bottles. Jever, Czechvar (Budvar), and Pilsner Urquell taste so much cleaner from the tap.

As far as Rolling Rock, Heineken, Stella Artois, and Beck's go, they can keep them in the green bottles, since I don't ~~drink~~ buy those. I saw a Beck's commercial during a Monday Night Football game giving examples of things that said "no" then it came to "Beck's - The beer that said no to compromise" or something like that. What a sham. You compromised your beer with a green bottle!

Hop Harvest

2008-09-26T05:40:00.006-05:00

I started out this spring with 5 hop rhizomes in pots, and in May moved them over to my garden. Over the summer, I added onto existing garden trellises and let the bines just grow. I only got a couple of bines out of the Willamette and Cascade. The Mt. Hood, Magnum, and Zeus bines seemed to grow the best. However, only the Zeus bines bore any hops this year.

This is before I dried them. Afterwards, I was able to stuff them into two quart-sized bags and stick them in the freezer. I need to get a scale and weigh them. I'm guessing, if I'm lucky, I got 2 ounces. However, all I'm hoping for is at least 0.66 ounces, so I can make my Jinx clone I talked about last week.

I'm a Jinx, Bedlam Follows Everywhere

2008-09-06T16:42:00.005-05:00

It's been close to a year since I mentioned The Jinx, a beer brewed by Magic Hat in Vermont. The good news is when I went into Pat's about 2 weeks ago, they had six packs of #9 and The Jinx. So, naturally, I picked up a sixer of The Jinx.

It does not appear to be showing the purplish hue I remember from last year, but it could be the glass that I drank it from. I need to pour it into more of a traditional pint glass and verify it. The smell of smoked peat malt is there, as is a tiny aroma of CTZ hops that they use. Since I harvested my Zeus hops (more on that next week), I can identify the smell easily.

A note about Magic Hat: A lot of people find their beers to be wimpy. I have even read and heard people say that they make "beer for women." Whatever. I find that they make good, interesting, lighter ales. The Circus Boy is my 2nd favorite American Wheat (to Three Floyd's Gumball Head), even though some would call it a vegetable/herb beer since it uses lemongrass.

Where I do agree with most critics of Magic Hat is the way they're so into marketing. That webpage of theirs is a mess, and they're always promoting events. I bought a Jinx t-shirt for $20, and boy, was it a dissapointment. Looking at the photo, looks like a decent shirt. When I got it, it was an XL, but the collar was tight, and the material was not like a beefy-T (No, I don't need a 2X. Most of my t-shirts are XL, and my collared shirts are usually L). It was closer to the kind of white t-shirts you get at your local five-and-dime in a package, 3 for $5. I know you hippies are trying to expand your brewery and all, but Christ, if you want me to support your company, don't try to fuck me in the ass.

But I digress.

Using both Beer Smith and ProMash software, I believe I have been able to build a clone recipe for this curious ale. Somehow, using the ingredients given by Magic Hat for the Jinx in the Google search engine, I came upon this recipe, which is a Scottish ale, that has some of the same ingredients. Substitute .33 oz of CTZ hops for boil at 60 minutes, and another .34 oz of CTZ hops at 15 minutes, and you get the same IBUs. Using dark brown sugar seems to give it the color it needs. The dark Belgian candy sugar made it too dark. Adjusting the black malt and the sugar got me within 1 SRM of the color Magic Hat says the Jinx is.

A guy named Wahoo who posts over at the Northern Brewer Forums, posted this about the yeast I want to use:

London Ale Yeast attenueates well and does not produce large amounts of esters the way Ringwood or Special London (Wyeast 1968) do. It finishes dry enough to be excellent in IPAs and Pale Ales, the "minerally profile" Wyeast refers to makes it great in a stout, and I have no reason to think it is anything but the absolute best choice for a London Porter (a style which I haven't brewed in a decade). It does attenuate very well so if you are doing a low OG recipe such as an Ordinary Bitter or Dry Stout, you may want more Crystal or Cara-Pils than you would use with a yeast that leaves more residual sugars in the beer.

The low flocculance of this yeast makes for a beer that is not as easy to get crystal clear as some of the other strains you might use in some these styles. However, I find that as a homebrewer, "working" with the yeast (harvesting, pitching, etc) is easier if it does not make an extremely compact yeast cake, and in that respect the low flocculation of 1028 is somewhat of an advantage.

What Wyeast Says: Rich with a dry finish, minerally profile, bold and crisp, with some fruitiness. Often used for higher gravity ales and when a high level of attenuation is desired for the style. Flocculation: Medium-Low Attenuation: 73-77% Temperature Range: 60-72F, 15-22C Alcohol Tolerance: 10%ABV.

I did read somewhere that Magic Hat uses a Ringwood Yeast, but I liked the description of the yeast above, and how the Wahoo guy is really into this style of yeast.

Based on all of this, I give you my recipe for Samhain ale, since I can't exactly confirm that it is going to be exactly like the Jinx, it will be slightly different, and therefore not a Jinx clone, per se, but pretty damn close, and hopefully even better:

Samhain Ale
Partial mash

Grains
8.3 lbs Pale Liquid Extract
1.5 lbs Caramunich Malt
0.5 lbs Crystal Malt 20L
0.10 lbs Chocolate Malt
0.13 lbs Peated Malt
1.0 lbs Dark Brown Sugar

Hops
0.33 oz Zeus @ 60 min.
0.34 oz Zeus @ 15 min.

Yeast
Wyeast 1028 London Ale

OG = 1.080
IBU = 20.1

Put grains in a couple of muslin bags and steep at 155* F for 45 minutes. Bring to a boil and follow hop schedule. Substitute Columbus or Tomahawk hops if Zeus are not available. Add extract and sugar at end of the boil. Cool to 70*F and pitch yeast. Suggest making a yeast starter or pitching two Activator packs. Ferment at 65 – 70*F.

Two New Brews

2008-09-05T06:00:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday, we racked two new beers: one was an Amarillo Pale Ale, made with 2 ounces of Amarillo hops, and the other was a Czech-style pilsner.

The Amarillo ale is looking good. It's clear, nice color, and currently has a gravity of about 1.014. It will probably end up around 1.012 in three weeks. We had this one in the conical for about 2 weeks, and it's now in the keg. We're still doing partial mash recipes at this time. For this one, the recipe is as follows:

Amarillo Ale
6.8 lbs Pale Malt Extract
1 lb Briess Caramel 60L
1 oz Amarillo Hops @ 60 minutes
1/2 oz Amarillo Hops @ 15 minutes
1/2 oz Amarillo Hops 5 @ 5 minutes
1 TSP Irish Moss @ 5 minutes
White Labs California Ale V (WLP051)
We loaded up about 6 gallons of water and heated it to about 160F and turned off the burner. Put the Briess Caramel grains (freshly cracked from Shoreline Brewery, thank you, Sam) in a muslin bag and let them steep for a good 35 minutes. Added the PME and brought it to a boil and added the hops. Chilled the wort to about 70 F and then pitched the vial directly into the conical. Added a drop of olive oil and oxygenated it for about 90 seconds. I'm looking forward to this one.

For the pilsner, I used a variation the partial mash recipe from May-June 2008 issue of Brew Your Own magazine. This is the recipe:

Wiesbaden Pils
6.0 gallons distilled water
5.0 oz Pilsner Malt (2-Row)
2.0 lb Caramel Pils Malt 2*L
1.5 lb Munich Malt 10*L
3.0 oz Acidulated Malt (0.375 cup)
4.0 lb Generic Light Malt Extract - Light (stir in at end of boil)
1.25 oz Vanguard Hops (60 min)
1.50 oz Vanguard Hops (15 min)
1 Whirlfloc Tablet (15 min)
0.25 oz Vanguard Hops (0 min)
Wyeast 2000 Budvar

O.G.: 1.049
F.G.: 1.014 – 1.018
IBU: 42

Put cracked grains in bag and steep in 3 gallons of distilled water for 45 minutes at around 150*F. Rinse the bag with a quart of cool water. Raise total volume to 5.5-6.0 gallons and boil for an hour, adding hop additions. Be sure to stir the extract in at the end of the boil.

Unfortunately, we did this brew starting around 8:30 p.m. on a Tuesday. The reason we did this was because we bought a big Activator pack of the Budvar yeast and smacked it on Thursday night. We've had a terrible time with this yeast. The first time we tried to brew a Pilsner, we just pitched a single vial of the White Labs version of the yeast and we didn't get fermentation, we got a bunch of growing things on the top of the carboy. So I bought all the ingredients and a Propagator pack, figuring to make a starter. I smacked the pack and gave it 3 hours. Overnight, the yeast did nothing in the starter bottle. So we ordered an activator pack, smacked it, and waited. On Sunday (three days after we smacked it) the pack began to swell. We made a starter on Sunday evening, and had to brew Tuesday.

Instead of just 3 gallons, when I got to John's house, he had 6 gallons going, and I managed to get all the grains into one bag. Looking back, we should have just done the 3 gallons and divided up the grains into several bags for more surface area coverage. I think I'd just prefer to do an all-grain version of this recipe. The gravity ended up at like a 1.039, when we were looking for a 1.049. The nice thing was we had whole-leaf hops for this brew, and they were awesome. Before racking it and putting it back into the fridge at 38 F, we sampled it. It's golden, light in body, but a hop monster. Not overhopped, but hopped like I remember a good pilsner being in Germany. The Budvar yeast is nice, it's very fruity. I'll have photos of these up in a few weeks.

Upland Brewing Company Samples

2008-08-29T05:29:00.003-05:00

Upland is a brand brewed in Bloomington, Indiana. I was first introduced to Upland when we moved here and went to a party where some of this was in the fridge. I think I had a Pale Ale. I thought it was good, especially for "being brewed in Indiana."

That's not the last time I would say that. It's funny, though, because I think there are some really great brewers in Indiana. Indiana was also 2nd in the amount of hops grown prior to prohibition, only second to New York. So that phrase is really kind of an insult.

About a year ago, I decided to try the Upland Maibock, and I don't know why I haven't bought any more. I remember thinking how great and malty the beer was. I think it was because it was around the fall, and the date on the beer was at least six months old (Thanks, Jewel, for rotating your stock!). The beer tasted fine, though. I think I saved quite in my fridge until there was nothing else to drink, so that I might enjoy them.

The Shoreline Brewery did some kind of trade last month with Upland and a couple of other brewers as part of some spotlight on Indiana beers. One of them was the Upland Infinite Wisdom Tripel. While this beer wasn't as golden as some of the Tripels I've had in the past, the smell of monk basement was there, which is what I look for in Belgian beers (it's actually the yeast), and it packed a wallop, without leaving a hot alcohol aftertaste. It was very nice, again, "for being brewed in Indiana." I just haven't had many tripels brewed in American breweries.

I'd been wanting to try the Dragonfly IPA, since I like IPAs and the Upland brand had not let me down. So my wife called me from the store and asked if I wanted any beer. Fortunately, the Wiseway had Dragonfly on sale. Pure destiny. This beer doesn't get the highest ratings on ratebeer, which is a shame. Overall, it's a decent IPA, but the great thing about it is that there's some sort of smokey flavor to it. I won't say it's like the smokiness you get from a Rauchbier, but there is some smokiness or some kind of spice combination there.

Either way, it's definitely moved it's way up my list of beers that I would like to keep in the fridge on a regular basis.

Paulaner Salvator

2008-08-22T06:00:00.000-05:00

When I was a teenager, I lived in Germany. To cut to the chase, we had access to all the great beer over there, but mostly, and quite honestly, we were purely interested in getting hammered. At least I was. So I missed out on a very educational opportunity. During my time during high school, I basically knew about three kinds of beer: Pils, Export, and Weizen. Pils took a lot of time to pour, and it was more bitter than Export, so generally, I just stuck to Export until I found out about Weizen beer.

When I returned during my college years to visit my folks, who had moved back over, I was a bit more educated. I knew about Pilsner Urquell, the original Budweiser (Budvar) and I liked those, but I also discovered Dunkel Weizen, which was very nice.

One style I never really got into was Doppelbock, or bock beers. Which is a damn shame, because right now, those, along with Schwarzbier, are my favorite kinds of German beer. I really like the maltiness of the bocks. A foremer classmate of mine from Germany reminded me of this style on a forum post when he mentioned "Salvator" being strong. I think I had a few of these at a Bush Party over there and got completely hammered. I was lucky enough to find this at King Richard's over in Michigan City. The guy gets it all the time.

Pours a dark gold, or golden brown, with a nice head. Smells biscuity and caramel, and tastes the same, but I detect a slight licorice flavor as well. The alcohol is there, but it's not "hot" tasting. This thing is all kinds of yummy.

Hops Update - August

2008-08-15T06:00:00.001-05:00

I started out the season growing five different kinds of hops. While all of them are sending out bines, the best of the bunch is definitely the Zeus. You may have seen some brewers using CTZ hops. CTZ stands for Columbus, Tomahawk, Zeus, since I guess they're all pretty much the same kind of hop with the same level of alpha acid. You can click on the photo there and see the hop cones, or flowers starting to form. They haven't become "papery" yet, so they still have a few weeks to go.

I was told not to expect much from the first year harvest, but I still thought that with the way these things are growing, I would get something from each one. Unless things start picking up these last couple of weeks, though, it looks as though I'll only have enough hops from the Zeus for a couple of batches of beer. The recipe I've created for the Magic Hat Jinx clone should only require half an ounce, total, of CTZ hops. They've got the bittering units (IBU) set at 20, which is pretty low for using such a high alpha acid hop.

Please leave your recipe suggestions for Zeus hops in the comments section.

Wisconsin Beer Remembered - 1992

2008-07-25T05:25:00.007-05:00

My first experience with Wisconsin beer (other than all the mass-produced stuff like Miller and Pabst) was Leinenkugel's original lager. I first got mixed up with this when I went to my favorite watering hole (underaged, I might add) at Iowa State called Under Where? I remember one fine evening when Mel was working the bar. I saw they had a special on Leinenkugel's: Get 5 beers in a plastic bucket and keep the bucket. I asked him where Leinenkugel's was from. He told my friend, Kurt, and me that it came from Wisconsin.

Granted, I really didn't know much about beer back then. I considered Miller Genuine Draft a fine beer. But I really liked this stuff. To this day, I consider Leinenkugel's my favorite American Lager. While Sam Adams might be better, this remains my standard, when I can get it where I live. I was so excited when I moved to Illinois. The first thing I did was go to Wal Mart, and sure enough, there was Leinenkugels right on the shelf.

Oh, and that bucket became where I stored all my bathroom crap during college and for a few years afterwards.

My second favorite American Lager also comes from Wisconsin. Made by Heileman's, who also brewed Old Style, is a beer that came in green bottles called Special Export. I usually would get this on tap at The Lost and Found Lounge when I became "legal". Dave Loose would serve you a liter mug if you asked for it.

I'm not going into great detail about Old Style in this post. Old Style is fine, but it's not one of my favorites. My friend, Duder, was not keen on any of the Heileman's stuff. In fact, in a discussion about a certain person from LaCrosse, Wisconsin, there was also some cross talk about Old Style and Heileman's. He declared, "I am a firm believer that anything that comes from LaCrosse sucks." We lived with that quote for some time, but never mentioned it when we had to go shopping there.

I discovered Blatz while interning at Speed Queen in Ripon, Wisconsin. My room mate brought home a case of it. The name wasn't too appealing to me, and besides, I could get all the Leinenkugel's I wanted living in Wisconsin, even in cans! I said, "How is that?" He said, "Pretty good for $5.99 a case." I had only heard about cases of longneck bottles of beer in Iowa for $4.99, and that was for Red, White and Blue, made in Dubuque. Everyone said it was terrible. Later, I would try RW&B and discover that while cold out of the bottle, it was a pretty decent beer. However, this had not occurred yet.

One weekend, though, when I was in the apartment alone and had not yet bought beer for the weekend, I thought, "What the hell, I'll give it a try." Halfway through the bottle, I said out loud to no one, "Hey, that's pretty good for $5.99."

I took a case of this down to Davenport for a weekend trip with Tommy Tune to visit my friend, Amy, and Tom's twin brother and my best friend, P-Mart. Amy and P-Mart were like, "I'm not drinking $5.99 beer." Then they tried it. They said, "Hey, that's pretty good for $5.99."

Point absolutely cracks me up, because nowadays, Point is a microbrew. In Wisconsin it was as cheap as Special Ex or Leinenkugel's. I saw point for $6.99 a sixer in Pensacola. This was in the late 90's. I almost bought for the sheer nostalgia, but I stopped myself. I just couldn't do it. I like the novelty of Point, but I just can't take it seriously. It's not really that good. I even bought a sampler 12-pack a couple of years ago, and wasn't all that impressed. Too bad, Steven's Point seems like a cool little Wisconsin town.

My Good Friend Buddy Weiser is Going to Belgium

2008-07-18T05:55:00.000-05:00

Did you think I was just going to sit out on this one?

Wrong.

I don't care that Bud got sold to a foreign company. Miller and Coors sold a few years ago as well. Bud took advantage of that. I recently saw a somewhat faded sticker on the glass door of a cooler in Oklahoma that said, "Budweiser - the only brewer still owned by Americans" or something like that. Guess they better send those people a razor blade and get them to start peelin'.

If Bud drinkers are so offended by this, then I'm glad. Proud of you, really. No matter what kind of Budweiser you drink, you are drinking an inferior product. Sorry. The beer is brewed with rice. It's a cheap adjunct.

The thing that really pisses me off is all the marketing around macrobrews. Even though they're losing their share of the market to craft and mirco-brewed beers, they still continue to market themselves as great. I'm here to tell you that whoever owns who, as far as American Lager goes, Budweiser (and if you want to throw the light versions of beers in there, Bud Light) is at best, in 10th place. I'm sure, though, that I can find at least 10 American Lagers better than Bud.

I've been telling people the old story of how Great Grandpa Anheuser stole the name Budweiser from the Czechs in Europe, then made a recipe (was he cloning it? Not sure, through whatever process changes over the years took place, it's not at all like the original Budvar-Budweis) and this is what you're drinking now. Can the original compete in America under the original name? Sorry, no. In fact, it appears that there is an agreement with the original (now referred to as "Czechvar") company to use Anheuser-Busch's marketing and such. I'm not sure, though. I haven't really seen any ads for Czechvar in the states. Seems like this "agreement" is similar to when a record company signs a band to a contract and then does nothing with them. How are the major labels doing these days?

So to recap, I don't like Bud and Bud products overall, because: 1) They stole then tarnished a good beer's name; 2) It's not real beer because it's made with rice; 3) It's not the Great American Lager like you see on billboards.

If the current Anheuser-Busch was truly interested in making good beer, he'd take his money, and go invest it in Schlafly, down the street in St. Louis. Now that, my friends, is some decent American beer.

Missouri Session

2008-07-11T06:10:00.000-05:00

I went on vacation last week, visited relatives in Oklahoma, then stopped by my folks place in Missouri on the way home. While there, we went to Wal-Mart, of all places, to buy beer. There we got Boulevard Pale Ale, Boulevard Lunar, and New Belgium 1554. Why can't my Wal-Mart carry good beers like these?

On the way back from the store, my sister wanted a bottle of liquor, so we stopped into a liquor store to get that. I also picked up a sixer of New Belgium Blue Paddle. Here's what I thought of these:

Boulevard Pale Ale

Apparently, I have tried this before, since I already reviewed it on ratebeer.com. I said it was a good example of the style, and one of the better Pale Ales I've had. I wouldn't say it smells/tastes like a Sierra Nevada, but it's that same style. It has a decent smell, and just the right amount of hops.

New Belgium Springboard

Dad already had these in the fridge when I got there. This was a nice example of a simple Belgian Ale. Not necessarily a whit, not a triple, just a light ale. A decent summer beer.

New Belgium 1554

I had just a sample of this at the Flying Saucer in Houston one time. I thought it was a Schwarzbier. While it looks like a Schwarzbier, it finishes more like a Belgian ale. Nice yeast in this one. Light, but dark in color with ruby highlights. I really started to appreciate this when I got near the end.

Boulevard Lunar

The description on the outside of the box would have you believe this was a brown ale. As I drank it, I thought it was a bit clovey for a brown ale, but something was familiar about the style, I just couldn't place it. So I looked it up on ratebeer.com and sure enough, this is a dunkleweizen. A very good example of a dunkelweizen, too.

New Belgium Blue Paddle

I've been looking for a decent American pilsner. My favorite German and Czech pilsners all come in green bottles, which skunks the beer, and disappoints me. This one was in a brown bottle and was very nice, with a great hop profile, golden clear in color. I totally recommend this one.

On the way home we stopped at Trader Joe's in Orland Park where I was able to pick up a mixed six pack of Victory Hop Devil and Victory Prima Pils. I'll give those a try and let you know what I think.

Leffe Brune

2008-05-31T08:07:00.000-05:00

Another one of the Belgium 5 in my fridge disappeared. This time, I picked the Leffe Brune (Brown). This reminded me of both the Chimay blue label and Goose Island Pere Jacques, which is odd, considering this is supposed to be an Abbey Dubbel when the above-mentioned beers are supposedly Belgian Strong Ales (must be because of the alcohol content). The Brune comes in at 6.5% ABV, which is not bad.

This thing poured into a tulip glass with a big, rocky head, which slowly disappeared. Smelled of Belgian yeast and sweetness. Nice caramel malt flavor.

Question for Miller Lite

2008-05-30T08:00:00.000-05:00

Hey, Miller Lite, how's it going?

I just wanted to stop and ask you how you did in the 2008 World Beer Cup? I've been hearing these commercials how you won the Gold for the category of American-Style Light Lager several times.

What? You're kidding. You didn't even fucking place this year? I can't believe it! What a travesty. Well, who won the gold, silver and bronze?

Gold - Old Milwaukee Light
Silver - Lone Star Light
Bronze - Natural Light

Wow. You couldn't even beat Natty Light for the bronze? You know, it's not my job to tell you how to market your beer or anything, but to say you won that prize in those commercials, with those kinds of beer beating you, well, I don't know if that's such a good idea. It's like "Hey, we won the Gold medal for piss!"

I guess Old Mil Light and Lone Star Light are both owned by you. Still, I think I see the following billboards being placed where Miller Lite is sold (read: Nationwide).

Beers for P-Mart

2008-05-28T19:32:00.000-05:00

I got an email today from P-Mart today.

I need to find some good beers for quantity drinking. 2 pale ales or IPA's are about all I'm good for now. Bring on summer!

He also linked up a bunch of ESB reviews from the New York Times. I'm not real big on ESBs. There might be better ESBs than Goose Island's Honker's Ale, like the anniversary versions of ESB they make, but this one is fine. It's a beer-beer.

Here are some recommendations for summer drinking. Some are good for sippin', others for large quantity consumption. Make sure you designate a driver if doing the latter, or just consume at home with your spouse or room mates.

Clipper City Heavy Seas Red Sky at Night
Saison

Saison ales are nice. This is a decent example of one. Golden in color, a little tart, with a dry finish. This one has an ABV of 8%, so you don't need to quaf too many. P-Mart may want to see if he can get Boulevard's Saison, since it's in his backyard. Try out the George Brett as well, if you can get that one, it's a little less of a head-cleaner at 6.5%, but still very nice.

Another good style of beer to try in the summertime is Koelsch, or Kolsch with umlauts over the "o" for all you Deutsche Sprachers. This is usually a lighter, cleaner style of ale made originally around Cologne (Koeln, again, for you Deutsche Sprachers). Snubbed by most of the snobs on ratebeer.com, this is a pretty simple beer to make, and quite honestly, is the closest thing to light American beer as you can get without actually drinking something owned by Bud/Miller/Coors. I had a Groovy Brew by Pioneer Brewing Company out of Black River Falls, Wisconsin. It wasn't bad. Just a smooth beer. Very quaffable.

Czechvar (Budvar Budweiser)
Pilsner

You want a nice, clean beer with a fruity yeast and a nice hop profile? You can't go wrong with the original Budweiser, from the Czech Republic, not St. Louis. Thanks to the largest brewer in the world, the original brewers had to change the name to get it sold in the U.S. So look for the Czechvar label, and try to get the brown bottle, because green bottles let green rays of light in, and that "skunks" the beer. You get this with clear bottles, blue bottles, every bottle except brown bottles. Another of my favorite Pilsners, Pilsner Urquell, comes in a green bottle. It tastes way better on tap. It tastes even better on tap in Europe. Anyway, go with a Czech pilsner if you can get it.

Finally, for summer drinking, for something different, try the often misunderstood American wheat beer. I am beginning to understand and enjoy American wheat beers a little more now that I understand they are not a straight across the board Weizen beer. If you're looking for that same bubblegum smell and banana-ester essence in an American wheat, you're likely going to be disappointed. The best American wheat beer, however, that I have had, does have a bubblegum smell. Hello, Gumball Head wheat ale, from Three Floyds. This is like a thirst quenching IPA. You can drink several at a time, and they are well worth every enjoyable sip. You should give Magic Hat's Circus Boy a try as well as Boulder Brewing's Sweaty Betty. I had some Sweaty Betty last fall, and here's what I wrote about it:

12 oz bottle. Pours straw-yellow, typical looking American Wheat. Smelled of toast, with peanut butter??? Yeasty. Tasted the same. I think I’m starting to get a flavor for what American Wheats are all about. Definitely not a Weizen. Taste reminded me of the Magic Hat Circus Boy.

So there you have it; some suggestions for some good summer style beers. If the evenings are still cool in your area, I also recommend a decent Belgian, or Belgian-style beer. The blue Chimay is excellent, as is Goose Island's Pere Jacques, and for that single sippin' beer experience, I totally recommend Unibroue's La Fin Du Monde.

A Gift from Belgium

2008-05-24T09:49:00.000-05:00

Had a conference this week that I hosted. One of my guests brought me a gift from Belgium:

There was a sixth bottle that was broken in the transit, unfortunately, and it was the one that my guest really wanted me to have, the Brugse Zot Blond, which won the gold in the Belgian and French style ale category at the 2008 World Beer Cup. Bummer.

Unfortunately, these aren't long for this world. I had the Hoegaarden Grand Cru last night. I have never had the Grand Cru style before. Not sure if this is a great example, but I did enjoy it. Nice yeasty smell I expect from Belgian beers, that damp, stinky, monastary basement smell. I know this may not sound appetizing to you, but it is very appealing to me. Golden in color, very hazey, with a big fluffy white head that disappeared over a few minutes. Nice lacing as I drank it. Definitely a sipping beer, weighing in at 8.5% ABV. Fruity aftertaste with the monastary basement stench and a swell dry finish.

I'll elaborate on the others as I get to them. I hope you all have a great Memorial Day weekend.

Cheers!

This Just Cracks Me Up

2008-05-17T20:05:00.001-05:00

'Nuff Said

2008-05-07T05:40:00.000-05:00

This picture says it all for me:

That's some mighty tasty PBR you got there. It appears that the blonde is drinking some kind of cloudy beer. You think that might be a hefeweizen? I think so. Meanwhile, somewhere on the Hillary trail...

It's probably going to take something a lot stronger than whiskey to catch up to Big O, now.

Magic Hat #9 Found Across the Border in Michigan

2008-05-02T14:23:00.001-05:00

I was dorking around the other day on the Magic Hat website, and I found a link to "Find Our Beers" or something like that. It's been just over 6 months since I discovered this brewer. I've been trying to develop a clone recipe for their Jinx. I found that the closest Magic Hat beer was in New Buffalo, Michigan. Right up the road from where I work in Michigan City. For fun, I went up there during my lunch break to see if it's true. The name of the place has changed, but they have this stuff at Lighthouse Liquors for $8 and change. It was cold, and I was actually going to get some but thought my wife would kill me if I got some of this since just last night we got 2 cases of Sam Adam's Summer Sampler. Now, one of those cases is for a potluck we're having this weekend, so I expect that to be gone.
The thing is, while the #9 is enjoyable, what I would really love to have is their Spring Sampler. It has #9 in it as well as the Circus Boy wheat, which are palatable, but I'm more interested in trying the hIPA and the mystery beer, which looks like a spring version of the Jinx. So I told the person working the liquor store that I wanted the sampler, and could she ask the distributor to bring some. So she said she would, and it would be there next Friday, unrefrigerated and waiting.

Tongue Splitter photo

2008-04-30T05:39:00.001-05:00

I know, wrong glass for a "pale" ale, but it sure is pretty. We brewed a Saison a few weeks ago. Put a drop of olive oil in the yeast starter and it was done fermenting in 3 days. It's in the keg and has about 3 more weeks before it will be prime. I think John brewed a brown ale last weekend.

Growing Some Hops

2008-04-26T10:10:00.000-05:00

I have planted a total of five different kinds of hops in buckets. I plan to transplant them into the ground a little later this spring. I just planted 2 more that I got last Thursday (Zeus, Magnum) and am going on a week with three others (Willamette, Mt. Hood and Cascade). This photo was taken before I mowed. The grass has grown really well on this side of the yard. I'm hoping the hops will do the same. I think I may need to raise the soil level to get them maximum exposure.

The Willamette came with a shooter on it already. It was white from being in the fridge for 2 weeks, but as you can see, it's really starting to take off. That thing was sticking out only an inch and was white when I planted it.

I wish I could say the same about the Cascade and Mt. Hood. I need to get on Northern Brewer's forums and start asking questions. I planted all of these in fertilized potting soil and mixed in some organic hummus I had lying around to boot, then watered them with some Miracle Grow.

When Black Friday Comes

2008-04-11T16:07:00.000-05:00

The thing I enjoy the most about this homebrew hobby is creating recipes. I'll just be going about my business, driving, eating, or performing some other exercise that can allow the mind to wander, and I'll start thinking about making a beer, doing research, and creating my own recipe. Unfortunately, most of these end up as a Word document stashed in my Beer Recipe folder.
I've been hankering for a good Pils style beer. I've got one in the fermenter, made with both the White Labs Czech-Budejovice yeast and the White Labs Pilsner yeast. It's a long story, but suffice to say that lagers do better with yeast starters.
So I googled "Pils beer recipe" today and found a listing with a recipe for a Black Pils. I was discussing Chris' Black IPA with my dad, and he told me that once, in Germany, he tasted a black pils. So this recipe piqued my interest. It's an extract recipe, though, and so I opened up Promash to see what kind of equivalent all-grain recipe it would be. As listed, they were a little low on gravity (I guess, I think they're using closer to 6 gallons of water, whereas I calculated the gravity based on 5 gallons). They calculated a 1.044, whereas I got 1.055. IBUs aren't as high as I would like in a Pils. I want it HOPPY. However, with my inexperience, my first shot was to put CTZ hops as the main boiling hop, but had to back off the ounces, since it was coming in at over 100 IBU. The combination below gives me an IBU between 60-62. So here's the recipe. I would appreciate your opinions:

Black Friday Pils
(All Grain Recipe)
5.5 - 6.0 gallon boil
7.0 lbs German Pilsner Malt
2.0 lbs CaraPils Dextrine Malt
4.0 oz Black Patent Malt
16.0 oz Crystal Malt 120L
1.5 oz Mt. Hood @ 60 minutes
1 oz Cascade @ 15 minutes
1 oz Cascade @ 2 minutes
Wyeast 2000 Budvar Yeast
Yeast Starter Recipe: 2.0 lbs DME, 4 liters of water
Original Gravity: 1.055-1.056

A Visit to Florida

2008-04-05T10:25:00.000-05:00

I recently made a trip to Florida with the family to visit family. I was kind of wondering if I was going to be able to get any beer I couldn't get elsewhere. Fortunately, Santa Rosa county has become "wet" over the past few years, so there was actually a liquor store close to my in-law's house called Fusion Fine Wine and Spirits and they had probably close to 75 different kinds of bottled beer available. They also had a select few bottles on the shelf that you could make your own sixpack. I was impressed to see that they had a lot of Bell's beer here. I totally didn't expect to see Bell's this far south. They had a lot of the standard Bell's stuff, but they also had the Cream Stout and the Two-Hearted Ale.

I opted for a cold sixer of Shiner Black, which is a fantastic example of the style. I recently had some of this from tap in another state, and I think that there was actually more of a coffee flavor to the tap version. That flavor seemed more subdued in the bottle version, but it could be I had an old sixpack, since I don't think most of the residents of Santa Rosa county get past the Budweiser aisle. The Saaz hops are apparent in this beer, and the hop/malt balance is awesome.

This is a very nice beer. For those of you uninitiated in the style, black lager is not as "heavy" as a porter or stout. It is just that, a lager that appears black. Just as Sam Adams and Budweiser are examples of lager, this is a lager as well, only the ingredients include Carafa, which is a super dark malt. So depending on what is used, and my guess is that in addition to Carafa, they are probably using some roasted and chocolate malts for that bit of coffee flavor, you get a lager, but with some slight properties of a stout or porter, but with more of a hop bite than a porter or stout will get you. I would call it a "bonus" lager, because instead of just drinking a normal lager, you get a really cool color, and a slightly different flavor.

I also put together a sixpack including two beers from Sweetwater, which is out of Atlanta. I got the Blue and the Hummer. The Hummer is a white ale, and really just an average example, which isn't a bad thing, just not anything super exciting. If you were at a pub and wanted a white ale, it's not a bad call.

Just a side note on white ales: I had been sort of down on Blue Moon for a while, mainly because it was a pretty mainstream beer (not to mention it is owned by Coors). I had a 12-pack in the fridge leftover from New Year's and had been avoiding consumption because I was hoping that my wife would have taken care of them, but NYE had a curtailing effect on her beer drinking. So I had some Unibroue Belgian style ales and a couple of Goose Island Belgian copies (which I should discuss in and of themselves, because both the Matilda and Pere Jacques are awesome in their own right) and figured I would see how the Blue Moon compared. I have to admit, it is a very decent example of the style. The Sam Adams version is similar, and I would almost have to give Blue Moon the nod in a side-by-side comparisson.

The Sweetwater Blue was a light ale with blueberries added. The aroma was overwhelmingly blueberry muffins. Smelled some wheat in there along with the blueberry muffins. It was a nice thirst quenching brew, which you would expect from a brewery out of Atlanta, with hot weather. The blueberries were not as much in the taste as the smell, which is a good thing. This is a proper fruit beer.

I got two Flying Dog beers, the Road Dog Porter and the Snake Dog IPA, both of which were pretty average. Nothing to see here, move along.

I also got a Blue Moon Honeymoon, which basically tasted like the original, only they added some honey, which appears to have made the ABV about 0.2% higher than the original.

The final and best beer of the sixpack was the Sam Adams Doppelbock, which, at 8.8% ABV will knock you on your booty if you drink too many on an empty stomach. Nice example of the style, malty and sweet. Pretty color.

The other beer event on this trip was dinner at McGuire's Irish Pub in Pensacola. I never really tried their beers when I lived here, which puzzles me. McGuire's is kind of a trendy tourist place, but they do have pretty awesome food, and a wide variety of food styles. Also, there is a tradition of people marking up dollar bills and stapling them to the walls and ceiling of the place. The photo shown here is from the Destin location. It's really a cool place.

We went on a Wednesday night, which is mug club night, and members get a full mug of beer for $1. I wasn't a mug club member, but still, my 12-oz beers only cost me $1.88 with tax, which is pretty damn cheap for a glass of beer anywhere. I tried thier light beer (yep, it's for the Bud drinkers), red ale (good red), porter (pretty traditional, a good example) and their seasonal, which appears to have been their ESB. This confuses me, because it was way more hoppy than an English style of pale ale, or ESB. Lighter in color than most ESBs as well. Either way, it was just a great beer. I really enjoyed the flavor of this one.

Homebrew Update - March 08

2008-03-28T20:55:00.000-05:00

This month, we did a couple of brews including a kit from Northern Brewer called the Tongue Splitter, which I mentioned in a previous blog. I also plagiarized a couple of Czech Budvar Budweiser recipes and ordered my own ingredients. This is a lager-style of beer, so it requires that the brew be refridgerated during fermentation. In case you weren't aware, Anheiser-Busch took the Budweiser name from the original beer, and it is not allowed to be sold under that name in this country, even though it is clearly the better of the two. You can find it under the Czechvar moniker. I've had it in the past 3 years, and it was pretty good, but if you ever get to try this beer or Pilsner Urquell on tap in Europe, you will walk away thinking that it's one of the best beers you've ever tasted.

While in college, my folks lived in Europe, and I had to go there during Christmas break. My buddy, P Mart, came over for a couple of weeks, and one night, my dad took the whole family to Sachsenhausen, which I believe is a part of Frankfurt. There were quite a few bars there, one which served hefeweizen on tap, and supposedly, this was a big deal, because everywhere I ever got a weizen, it was from a half liter bottle poured into a big glass. One of the last places we went had the two Czech beers mentioned above on tap, and both P Mart and I looked at each other and said that the beers were not only the best we had that night, but probably in our 22-year old lives.

Unfortunately, I cannot say anything good will come of my own version. After 2 days, the beer had not begun fermenting, and on the fifth day, John told me that there was a white funk growing on top of the liquid. I told him to pitch it on the curb. Better luck next time.

I also recently went to Pensacola, and I will be writing about some beers I tried down there.

Chris' Beer

2008-03-03T05:46:00.000-06:00

I had to go over to John's and dry-hop the Tongue Splitter ale yesterday, so I took over the two bottles of beer that Chris gave me on Friday night. This is actually the first homebrew someone else has given me since I started the hobby. I thought I would review it here.

Oatmeal Stout: First of all, I need to preface this by saying that I'm not a huge stout fan. I can appreciate a good stout, but I will rarely order a stout to drink. Usually they are very filling, and therefore you drink one, and you're done with that style for the evening.
I thought Chris' stout was pretty good. The bottle made just a little hiss, very quick, when opening (Chris asked me to check that as he just recently bottled this) and had a nice tan head on it. It was definitely an opaque black. Nice flavor, left a nice film on the mouth. John thought it didn't have enough body. Honestly, I couldn't agree or disagree. It went down smooth, and that's about all I know.

Black India Pale Ale (India Black Ale): I mentioned to John twice that this was an India "Black" Ale, yet when he poured it, he was like, "Whoa, why is this so dark?" I told him it was an "I - BEE - A" and then he was cool. Same deal with opening the bottle. Both beers did not seem flat, in case you were wondering, Chris. This beer was just AWESOME. It had that hoppy smell that I associate with Amarillo hops, but then, I don't really know my hops that well, but it smelled sort of like a Three Floyd's Gumball Head, and I know they use Amarillo hops. Bitter as all get out. Really a hop head's dream. Nice tan head that stuck with the beer in the glass all the way down. Another opaque black beer. John said, "We should get the recipe for this."

Good job, Chris!

Chesterton/Region Homebrewers UNITE!

2008-02-29T18:47:00.000-06:00

Went to Shoreline tonight with the family and John the Brewer. John had a beer and left, but not before meeting Chris, who also brews. I've been meaning to write Chris, but you know, that whole apathy thing came into play.

Anyway, Chris was telling us that he does all-grain brewing with some modified Coleman coolers. So we were pretty rapt with attention. Chris says, "Later," then John left. Chris returned with two 22-oz bombers of his oatmeal stout and India Black Ale (IBA). I couldn't believe it! So awesome to finally get someone else's beer to try. I told Chris I would return his bottles full of my own recipes. I was gonna post a photo here of the two bottles in my fridge, but apparently, my 13-in-1 card reader has decided to go on the fritz.

We also just brewed a kit I got from Northern Brewer this last week. I guess the Tongue Splitter kit I got for around $26 just went up to $41. Whew! Just got in under the wire for that one. I was actually gonna try to brew my own hoppy pale ale, but I was looking at spending $47 to do that with about 4 different kinds of hops. I figured I would just check out the kit at a lower price and get some more experience under my belt. This is only the 5th beer we've brewed. John brewed an Alt (another NB kit) on 12/31 with another friend. I had to work. I think I'm ready for all grain now. I've read enough about it, now it's time to do it.

Here's the Tongue Splitter recipe:

Tongue Splitter Pale Ale
Grains and Fermentables
0.5 lbs Dingman’s Caramel Pils
0.5 lbs Simpson’s Caramalt
6 lbs Pilsen Malt Syrup
Hop schedule
1 oz Nugget @ 60 minutes
1 oz Glacier @ 15 minutes
1 oz Cascade @ 10 minutes
0.5 oz Cascade @ 2 minutes
0.5 oz Mt. Hood @ 2 minutes
Dry Hop
0.5 oz Cascade
0.5 oz Mt. Hood
Yeast
Wyeast #1332 Northwest Ale Yeast

Steep grains in 6 gallons of water @ 160-165*F for 15 minutes. Add syrup and bring to a boil. Start Hops additions.

OG = 1.045
Optimum Temperature: 65-75*F

Some Good India Pale Ale (IPA)

2008-02-28T04:57:00.000-06:00

I think the first time I ever heard IPA mentioned was when Brian (Mitch Cumstein) was describing another beer and said something to the effect of, "This tastes almost like an IPA." I don't recall the beer in question since this conversation likely occurred sometime between 1995 and 1997.

I do remember being in Asheville, North Carolina, however, for a friend's wedding, and discovering Highland Kashmir IPA. I remember thinking, "I should get some of that, it's supposed to be a good style of beer." After our mini-vacation, where I also sampled Highland's St. Therese's Pale Ale, and the Gaelic Ale, we returned to Pensacola with 13 bottles of Highland, one of which was a 22 ounce bottle of their IPA. When I tried it, I thought, "Wow, that's got some bite to it." But I did enjoy it, and thought that IPAs would be my new favorite style of beer.

Beer desolation in Pensacola along with the fact that I was still mostly pining how I couldn't get Leinenkugel's in Florida kept me from pursuing IPAs. On my many moves over a five year period, I tried an IPA here and there, was reminded how much I liked them, and then hit the motherlode when I finally moved to Indiana.

Here then, are some interesting IPAs to try:

For Beginners: The Loose Cannon, from Clipper City Brewing, or Heavy Seas. I wish they would stick with one name on the label. This one will be hoppy for those used to Budweiser, but will not totally blow you away or scare anyone off. Nice mouthfeel to this one.

Long Hammer by Red Hook is a pretty good beginner IPA as well. It's very mild.

Once you get into IPAs, you'll move along into more interesting ones. Dogfish Head 60-minute IPA is pretty decent, a good standard. I think Bell's Two-Hearted Ale is a great example, if not the prime example of what an IPA should taste like. For the heavy hitters, I suggest the Dogfish Head 90-minute IPA, which is probably hands-down the top IPA I've ever had. Very fruity and very smooth. The hops are there but they don't sting you.

Then there are the "extreme" IPAs: Things like Dogfish Head 120-minute IPA at 21%ABV, which should probably be enjoyed with a friend. And that's the 12-oz bottle. Hopsickle by Moylan's was one I tried at the same time I had Three Floyd's Dreadnaught IPA. I thought the Moylan's was a bit hoppier. Three Floyd's doesn't officially make a regular IPA, but their Alpha King is close enough. It's probably one of the better "pale ales" if not the standard everyone should be trying to copy.

Places to Drink Beer in Downtown Houston

2008-02-01T18:44:00.000-06:00

If you have to go to Houston on business, and must stay downtown, I suggest the Magnolia as a place to stay. There are a couple of places I visited that I'd like to share with you that are both about a block away from the hotel, so you don't even need a car.

On my last trip to Houston, the Flying Saucer was recommended to me. Actually, they have a lot of beers here that I hadn't tried, and you can make a sampler so you don't end up trying to decide how many pints of beer to drink, but instead try 5 different 5 oz beers. On the flight down, I thought about what kind of different food I could eat in Houston, and remembered I had some excellent Sushi on the north side of town back in November 2006. I ended up getting two Sushi rolls the first night at Azuma. I sat at the sushi bar and was served very quickly. They seemed to be having trouble with a salmon order at the bar, which from overheard conversation was taking at least 15 minutes. The rolls were good, but I didn't think as great as the place I went to on the north side, whose name I cannot remember.

As I look for links to these places online, I mostly find local reviews. It would appear to me that you don't want to eat or drink anywhere in downtown Houston on a weekend night, or else, people just don't understand that these are the two busiest nights of the week, and therefore, are probably not the best times to go downtown. I've been to these places between Monday and Wednesday, and they were fine.

On my second night, I wanted Mexican food, but the only place close that was open that resembled Mexican food was Chipotle. Say what you want about Chipotle, I could eat there every day. I love a big burrito, and they have tasty ingredients. Right next door, underneath the historic Rice Hotel was Shane McElroy's Irish Pub. I actually checked the entrance to this place before going to Chipotle to scope out a menu, if one existed. Nope, its strictly a drinking establishment, and their little chalkboard had a Chimay logo on it, so I decided to get a burrito and then come back afterwards.

They've got a really decent vibe. There are apartments of varying sizes for rent in the floors above, as this used to be the historic Rice hotel and is now know as the Post Rice Lofts. JFK stayed here the night before he went to Dallas and was assassinated. They had some decent beers on tap, what you would expect for an Irish pub (Guiness, Harp, no Bass) plus others like Smithwick's, a local St. Arnold's Amber, Full Sail IPA out of Oregon, and the typical Bud and Miller products. In bottles, they have the red label Chimay, Duvel, Hoegarden, and I think maybe one other Belgian. Of course they have Mexican beer, such as Corona. Plus they have a full bar of wines and liquor as well, which is very nice. Pretty woodwork, cool layout, and one of those new-fangled jukeboxes that allows you to use the internet to find songs. I played Slobberbone's "Butchers" and Drive-By Truckers' "Lisa's Birthday". Heh.

Tuesday at the Flying Saucer is Trivia Night. I sat at the bar and had a conversation about stuff with a fellow named Bruce, who had retired from Halliburton about 5 years ago and was working at a satellite communications company. I told him my grandpa retired from Halliburton in 1984.

I came in two questions behind everyone else playing trivia, but decided to play anyway. As I was answering one question, I said to Bruce, "Man, I wish I had a laptop, this place has wireless and I could google this stuff." Bruce then pulled out his Blackberry. We came in second, which was a $25 gift certificate. I gave it to Bruce since it was time to head out, and I wasn't going to be in downtown Houston in the next 3 months.

Beers that I enjoyed on this trip: Avery White Rascal, Duvel, Victory Hop Wallop, Sierra Nevada Porter

My Top Rated Beers for 2007

2008-01-22T05:38:00.000-06:00

I was sitting there thinking the other day that I should make a list of my favorite albums for the previous year. But most of what I bought or listened to in 2007 was not released in 2007. I still might do something along those lines next year. I will have to track what I listen to in 2008 to make sure I have a valid list.

What I can do is go to ratebeer.com and look at all the beer I rated in 2007. Looks like I didn't really start rating beers until April, which looking back, totally makes sense, because I was trying not to drink beer the first 3 months of 2007. Ha! I think I still went to people's houses for parties, potlucks, and whatnot, so I know I didn't stick to that rule. Unfortunately, I probably didn't drink anything new during that time, anyway.

I dig ratebeer. There's also beeradvocate.com, and that seems to be the one a lot more people are hooked up on, but I like the layout of ratebeer.com better, and I found it first. One day, I just might get bored enough to copy all of my ratings over. But I doubt it. Either way, these are cool tools to help you track what you've drank, and also find similar beers to ones you like, and find out more about each beer through the ratings of other users.

Looking at my ratings, I think I might have rated some of these a little different after understanding what I was drinking a little more. I went to see what I rated the Dogfish Head 60 minute IPA, because I had been avoiding this brewery since 2002, when I must have got a bad bottle of it, or else I didn't like really hoppy beers. The review was hilarious. Anyway, here's what I got for 2007:

Rated at 4.9/5.0

St. Arnold Elissa IPA - I really liked this beer. Overall, I think IPAs are probably my favorite traditional style of beers. I only had a sample of this in Houston, right next to the Dogfish Head 90-minute IPA and I think I liked both equally. The beer drinkers in Houston said that this brewery wasn't all that great. I did try their Lawnmower, which was their Kolsch, and was a little disappointed. But maybe it was a bit of a flavor letdown after all the hoppy beers.

Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA - I had the 120-Minute this year, shared it with 4 friends. It was good, but at $8/12 oz bottle and 21%ABV, I wouldn't be drinking a lot of that. But the 90-minute version is probably the best IPA out there by far. Maybe the Elissa shouldn't be so high, but it was their hometown I was drinking it in, so I gave them the benefit. Clean finish on the 90-minute. Quite amazing.

2007 Three Floyd's Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout - Stood in line at Three Floyd's down the road in Munster to pick up 6 bottles of this. Cracked the first one in October, the day we brewed our first homebrew. This is quite amazing. It's not something you're going to sit around and quaff all day, but it's special. Black as old motor oil, I like seeing other people drink it and watch how it stains their lips. Almost looks like they're drinking black blood. Lots of awesome flavors in this: cherry, coffee, chocolate just to mention a few. Nice warm alcohol afterglow (what would you expect at 13% ABV?). Quite honestly, a work of art. Voted in the top 5 beers in the world consistently at ratebeer.com.

4.8/5.0

Three Floyd's Gumball Head Wheat - Not sure if I would call this a wheat beer. It's very clear for a wheat beer, and doesn't taste like a hefeweizen or an American wheat. It's zesty, and the smell is just awesome. This beer makes me want to grow Amarillo hops, which is what this is made with. Starts off almost tasting like an IPA and then changes about halfway through the beer as it coats your tongue. I would have to recommend you drink a full 12 oz glass of this to get the whole story, as a 3-sip sample won't do it justice.

4.7/5.0

Shoreline Lost Sailor Imperial Stout - I had this at the Shoreline Brewery about a week before Dark Lord Day. Not as much flavors as the Dark Lord, but it was sure black as midnight and very nice. Viscous as all get out.

4.6/5.0

Bell's Two-Hearted Ale - A very nice IPA. It probably should be rated higher, but still, 4.6 is a great rating. This one has a great color and nice palate.

Bell's Cherry Stout - I covered this one in it's own blog back in '07 when I discovered it. Awesome stout, but not something you're going to drink 6 of in one setting.

Three Floyd's Alpha King - This is now my "standard" pale ale. Best pale ale ever. Outdoes even the classic Bass Ale.

4.5/5.0

Dogfish Head 120-Minute IPA - As mentioned above, drink one, go to bed. 21% ABV. Very smooth. It's beyond an IPA, actually. The alcohol almost burns as it goes down.

Three Floyd's Fabulous Resplendence (aka: X) - This is their 10th anniversary ale. It was awesome. Nice chewy, dry palate.

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale - I had this when I was still living in Pensacola, and maybe when I lived in Iowa once or twice. Hard to remember. I think it was giving me reflux at one time, when I wasn't used to really hoppy beers. I remember shying away from it. Had it at a potluck back in September and thought, "Hey, this is pretty good." Then realized I never rated it. Shame, I would have liked to see what I had written circa 1999.

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So there you have it. The beer I gave the lowest rating to in 2007 was Point Light, which had absolutely no redeeming qualities. Light yellow, beer-flavored water. I gave it a 0.8.

Shoreline Mug Club First Ever Chili Cookoff

2008-01-15T05:55:00.000-06:00

Seventeen people brought crock-pots (okay, well, maybe SIXTEEN people brought crock pots. One guy brought a kettle of chili. Needless to say, it got cold). Only three people would walk away winners. I'll save you the suspense...I wasn't one of them. But I tried the chili recipes that won, and they all kicked my ass. Even some of the other ones that didn't win were pretty good as well. Nothing I'd push away from if given to me.

Oh, and there was beer.

Not hard to find your mug, as they're all original.

Here's the first place dude. I'm completely terrible with names, so I'm sorry. He said, "My mom's gonna be pissed. I told her I had some left over, but now it's all gone."

I remember these people, though. From left to right, Jessi, Jim, and Sarah.

Again, I can't remember names, but the woman on the rightwon third. I talked to her and her husband (not pictured) about restaurants in Valparaiso, and taking kids to restaurants.

Nicole and Chris. Chris gave me a short sample of his homemade oatmeal stout. Nice.

Buncha people.

We watched the Colts lose.

Sam, Jim and Steve