Chibebräu--the Chibes' online homebrew log

Hello, hello, it's good to be back (and I brought Glühapfelwein)

2012-01-01T08:01:00.004-06:00

Happy New Year! I was never the most prolific blogger on the planet, but I was always really good about keeping track of my brew days . . . until this fall, that is. That's when I learned something: apparently blogging is a lot like exercising--the longer you go without doing it, the harder it is to get back into the swing of things.

See, despite not having posted since September, I've been brewing just as regularly as I always have. I've brewed another Düsseldorf Altbier, a Doppelbock for the holidays (a portion of which had maple syrup added to the secondary) and, just last week, a Munich Helles. I also fermented a hard cider. The problem is, once I got behind on the blogging, I felt like my next post had to cover everything I had done in the meantime. So the task of getting back on the blogging horse seemed to grow larger and larger with each passing day.

But enough with the excuses... Rather than go back and cover everything over the past three months, I'm going to start quasi-fresh just to get going again. I hope to fill in the gaps here and there, but for now I'll get 2012 started by sharing a recipe I came up with that I think is pretty sweet: Glühapfelwein.

To explain what Glühapfelwein is, let's start with something you might be more familiar with: Glühwein. Similar to Gløgg, Glühwein is a German mulled wine that many Chicagoans know as the stuff you can get served in a little ceramic boot if you visit the Christkindlmarket (Chicago's German Christmas market). It translates roughly as "burning wine," and it's essentially wine that's simmered with various spices popular at the holidays. It's also generally sweetened with sugar.

Now, a few weeks ago the kids and I were watching the Claymation Christmas Special (the most underrated Christmas special in the history of television) and they had a running joke about wassailing. This led me to look up some wassail recipes, and I was surprised to find that many were cider-based. Well, by pure coincidence Leah and I made five gallons of cider earlier in the fall, so this gave me an idea: what if I made Glühwein, but instead of wine I used our cider as the base?

The end result is something I call Glühapfelwein (Apfelwein, literally "apple wine," being German for "cider"), and it came out awesome. I based it off of a fairly simple Glühwein recipe I found online which only uses two spices most people already have in their kitchen--cinnamon and clove--so it can make a good jumping-off point for those who want to experiment with other spices, but I found it to be pretty awesome as-is. It also would be lower in alcohol because our cider, at around 6.5% ABV, is significantly lower than a typical red wine, so I added enough brandy to boost it up to typical Glühwein levels. And without further ado, here's the recipe:

Pour 3/4 c. of hard cider into a sauce pan; throw in one cinnamon stick. Add 1/2 c. sugar and simmer until dissolved. At this point squeeze the juice of one orange into the pot. Spear ten cloves into the peel that's left and throw that into the pot too. Bring to a low simmer for 20 minutes to a half hour. After then, take out cinnamon stick and orange peel and add 750mL or 3 c. of cider. Heat for another ten minutes or until warm and carbonation is mostly gone. Just before serving, add 1/2 c. of brandy and stir well. Makes roughly 4 6-oz. servings.

One final note I should add... Our cider is fairly dry (I fermented 4 gallons of cider until completely dry and then back-sweetened with 1/2 gallon fresh cider) so if you use a commercial cider, or if your hard cider is sweeter, you may want to start with less sugar and then add to taste. Enjoy, and happy 2012!

Brew day: F3 Münster Altbier and Gust Front Leipzig-style Wheat

2011-09-04T08:39:00.003-05:00

Before lagers dominated the German brewing landscape, everything was ale. Over time, most of these German ale styles disappeared as people gravitated towards Pilsner, Helles, Doppelbock and the like. However, ales survived in a couple areas: the south (especially Bavaria) and the north Rhine valley. In the south, the ale of choice is Weizenbier (a/k/a Weissbier), which with its high percentage of wheat malt and its distinct tangy yeast is easily distinguished from lager. In the Rhine valley, however, the ale beer that survived is best described as a hybrid: it's fermented at ale temperatures with a rather clean top-fermenting yeast and then cold-conditioned like a lager. Since these hybrid beers still use the "old" method of ale brewing, they're generally referred to as Altbier (literally "old beer").

Two styles of Altbier are prominent today: Düsseldorf Altbier (Uerige, Metropolitan Iron Works) and North German Altbier (Kutcher Alt, Alaskan Amber). There are plenty of resources out there for folks who want to brew either of these styles. But there are other regional Altbiers that are either dying or extinct (you can read about some of them here). The only other Altbier I've come across in the U.S. is Münster Alt--Pinkus Müller can be found in Chicago at Binny's--so I figured I'd brew one for this year's all-Altbier Novemberfest.

Now, while there's plenty of info on Düsseldorf and North German Alts, there's virtually nothing on Münster Alts. Hell, I've found far more information on Gose than I have Münster Alt. But there are a couple recipes floating around that suggest 50% Pilsner, 40% wheat and 10% Munich. It should also be lightly hopped, somewhere between 15 and 25 IBU's. The biggest key, though, is that it needs to have a slight lactic tang.

As I noted in my last blog post, I brewed a Leipziger Gose a few months ago but due to a combination of neglect and bad luck it got infected and I had to dump it. I wanted to brew another one ASAP, so I decided I could do a split batch with the Münster Alt. The Gose should be at least 50% wheat, so as a compromise I elected to go with 50% wheat, 40% Pils and 10% Munich for my grain bill for both beers. As for the lactic tang, I'll have two options: I can add food-grade lactic acid to taste, or I could blend in a little of the soured Gose. I'm still not sure which I'll go with.

Before I recap the brew day, I should note that I had a couple new toys to play with today. The first is my new Blichmann burner. I initially bristled at the high price tag, but several folks assured me it's worth the money. We'll see how much more efficient it is than my old jet burner, but I can tell you it's definitely more quiet, plus I like that it's low to the ground (less chance of my idiot dog setting his tail on fire--again). I also decided to split my hose that runs from the mash tun to my kettle so that there's a second line that I can runs to a pitcher (as you can see to the left). That way, when I'm done recirculating (or when I want the check the flow rate) I can throw a couple valves and switch from filling the kettle to filling a pitcher or vice versa. It's rather simple, but makes things WAY easier for me.

For the brew day, I went with a 20-minute rest at 125°F (I like to do this with wheat or rye) and then a 45-minute sacc rest at 151°F. I collected for about an hour and a half, brought to a boil for 20 minutes, and then collected 6 gallons at ~100°F for my Gose. I pitched lactobacillus into the carboy and it's currently sitting in a water bath which stays between 100°F and 115°F.

The remainder of the kettle was hopped and boiled for another hour. I went with two additions: Warrior hops at 60 minutes and Saaz at knockout. Then I chilled and racked onto the yeast cake from our Schwarze Alt (which is done fermenting--it dropped all the way to 1.011!). As seems to be a pattern, my gravity was high (1.057 instead of the target 1.050) but my volume was low (4.75 gallons instead of 5.25). I used a half gallon to make a yeast starter for my Gose, so I added a half gallon of water to the remaining 4.25 gallons to drop the gravity down to 1.051. It's currently fermenting away in the basement chest freezer at 60°F.

I'm really curious to see how this turns out. I'll also need to decide how I want to do the lactic thing. Adding food-grade lactic acid would be easiest and most repeatable (unless I want to brew a Gose every time I brew a Münster Alt) but at the same time, if I already have a soured wort, why not take advantage of it? Stay tuned to see what I decide.

Reflections on a Gose: a tragedy in two parts

2011-08-29T20:59:00.002-05:00

So, in my last post, I alluded to my Gose going bad. Well, I'm giving it another shot this weekend but in the meantime I wanted to tell my sad story...

Now, the first thing that went wrong was manageable: it was way more sour than I intended. The last time I brewed a Gose with lacto I let it inoculate for roughly 40 hours, and it dropped down to around 3.9. This time I let it inoculate for five days. The result? A pH of 3.2, which might not sound that different but, considering that pH is logarithmic, is. It's the difference between refreshingly tart (think lemonade) and downright sour (like an Oud Bruin). Not only did I feel this was more sour than I wanted, but it also raised the concern that the yeast may not be able to survive.

Well, it turned out the yeast was indeed able to ferment the acidic wort, though it still tasted more sour than I want. The good news was I had five gallons of Hefeweizen as well and could blend to the appropriate level of sourness. EXCEPT...

...while the Gose was in secondary I never changed from crimped foil to an airlock and somehow the foil cap blew off of my carboy while in my chest freezer. The result two days later was a white powder on the top of the Gose and a stench that could best be described as nail polish cleaner. Yup, had to dump all five gallons. It was a sad day, to say the least.

Now the good news is now I have an idea of the range of pH I'm dealing with. 40 hours? pH around 4, not bad but not exactly where I want it. 110 hours? pH around 3.2, which is too sour. So this time I'm thinking of shooting for around 75 hours with a pH of 3.45 (if my use of semi-log paper is accurate, which is a big if).

The other thing I'm doing is switching up my grain bill yet again. In this case, I'm planning on doing a split batch with my Münster Alt, which usually calls for 50% pils, 40% wheat and 10% Munich grain bill. However, Gose should be at least 50% wheat and, well, it's hard to find accurate info on Münster Alt so I decided to go with a compromise grain bill of 50% wheat, 40% pils and 10% Munich. So anyway, that's the plan for this weekend. Can't wait to see how this Gose turns out (and this time I'll be using a stopper and fermentation lock!).

Brew day: Rain Wrapped Schwarze Altbier

2011-08-21T20:44:00.006-05:00

So... I guess it's time for my quarterly "sorry I haven't blogged much lately" opening sentence. I could rattle off the usual excuses . . . summer is busy . . . work and three kids kept me occupied . . . I'm married to the sea . . . etc. However, the simple truth is I was brewing like crazy for a while and so I haven't brewed since early July. Sure, there's been plenty of news I should've mentioned in the meantime (like how my Gose went bad or how I ended up in the Elite Eight for the Pilsner Urquell competition before the judges came to their senses and picked other people to finish in the top three), but I just never got around to it. But then I brewed yesterday, so that means time to get back on the blogging horse.

The quick and dirty update is yesterday I brewed a Schwarze Altbier ("black Altbier" for the Germanically-challenged). But since that's not a real style, I feel like I need to do some explaining. Back in May Leah and I vacationed in Germany. Part of our vacation included the obligatory stop in Düsseldorf, home to one of my favorite beer styles: Altbier. Now the term Altbier means "old beer," which refers to the fact that Altbier is one of the few surviving German ale styles after the lager revolution hit the country in the late 1800s. If somebody just says Altbier they're probably referring to Düsseldorf-style Altbier, though North German Altbiers (Kutcher Alt, Alaskan Amber) are fairly prevalent as well. There are also lesser-known Altbiers such as Münster Alt, a slightly sour ale with a generous portion of malted wheat. So "Altbier" itself is a somewhat fluid term.

Now getting back to Düsseldorf, there are four historic Altbier pubs that have been around since the 1800s. Recently, however, a new pub opened up--Kürzer Alt. I was curious to see what they would brew, and sure enough it was a traditional, Düsseldorf-style Alt (though if you look closely at the picture to the right, their tap was anything but traditional). Anyway, I was thinking that if I opened up a pub in Düsseldorf, I don't think I could compete with the traditional pubs when it comes to making a traditional Alt. Instead, I would make variations on the style as well as the traditional Altbier. And the first variation I thought of was a Schwarze Altbier--basically the Altbier version of a Schwarzbier, one of my favorite styles.

When it came to the recipe, my thought was to start with my Schwarzbier recipe and tweak it to make it Alt-like. So I started with 75% Pils/25% Munich. I had a pound of malted rye sitting around that I thought would work well so I threw that in. Then I added a pound of Carafa III (5% of the final grain bill) to get it nice and black. I discovered on the brew day that I only had 0.7lb. of Carafa but figured if it's not dark enough I'll add some Sinamar. Finally, I decided to go with 30 IBU's of bittering hops--slightly lower than a Düsseldorf Alt but the high end of the Schwarzbier bitterness range--and a generous addition of Tettnang and Saaz hops at knockout for aroma.

Not too much to report from the brew day itself. Time was of the essence yesterday so I went with a single infusion mash at 151°F. Due to some sparge water delays I ended up with a mash of just over an hour, recirculated and collected for about an hour and twenty minutes, and boiled for 75 minutes. I chilled down to about 75°F and ended up with 10.5 gallons at 1052 (a couple points above my target). I then put everything in my chest freezer to get it down to 58°F and pitched a slurry courtesy of my good friends at Metropolitan Brewing (as you can see below, my kids enjoyed hanging out with their robots while Leah got the yeast--and don't ask why my daughter is wearing a witch outfit; it's a long story).

So that was yesterday. I'm excited to see how this variation turns out, and am thinking it would be fun to do some other Alt tweaks if this one's a winner (incidentally, I do plan on brewing a Münster Alt this fall). And if it's really good, maybe I'll sell my recipe to Kürzer.

Brew day: Step Leader Hefeweizen and Gust Front Leipzig-Style Wheat

2011-07-04T21:46:00.005-05:00

While Leah liked it, I wasn't terribly happy with our last Leipzig-style wheat (a/k/a Leipziger Gose). For some reason it came out drier than last time, and though I kept the temperature hotter during the lacto phase it didn't come out any more sour. It also had terrible head retention.

This time around, I wanted to get it a little maltier, and one obvious option was a decoction. That's when it occurred to me that I could do a split batch with a Hefeweizen, taking half at the beginning of the boil to sour with lactobacillus and then boiling the remaining half and pitching a Hefeweizen yeast. With that in mind, I decided to go with my latest Hefeweizen grain bill (65% wheat, 30% Pilsner and 5% dark Munich) instead of the 50% wheat/50% Pilsner bill I've used for previous Goses.

Since I had the day off of work today (thank you, Founding Fathers) I figured I could brew today, incubate the Gose with the lacto, and give it five full days to sour before finishing it on Saturday. It also gave me plenty of time to brew what was one of my most complicated mash schedules to date (though, with friends coming and going throughout the day, it didn't seem that long... at least not until cleanup time!).

Using a schedule from Eric Warner's German Wheat Beer book, I did a double decoction. (To the right, you can see Jonas and I debating whether to do a single or double decoction; he was concerned about sufficient Maillard reactions.) I started with an acid rest at 108°F (supposed to be 99°F; not sure how I overshot it so badly) (while many think acid rests are unnecessary with modern malts, it is supposed to create ferulic acid which produces the clove esters during fermentation). After a 20-minute rest I did an infusion with boiling water to raise it to 147°F. After a 40-minute rest, I pulled a 9-qt. decoction. I held the decoction at between 158 and 162°F for fifteen minutes and then brought it to a boil for a half hour.

When I returned the decoction to the boil it only came up to 153°F instead of the 160 I was shooting for. I added 6 qts. of sparge water to get it up to 156°F and let it rest for fifteen minutes. I then pulled a 16-qt. decoction which I boiled for fifteen minutes before returning it to the mash for a mash-out of 167°F.

After recirculating for ten minutes, I sparged for an hour (quicker than usual; guess I wasn't paying close attention) and collected 12.5 gallons. I boiled for ten minutes and then began to collect six gallons at 110°F for the Gose. It was at 1.044, which should end up around 1053 after the boil.

For the remaining 6.5 gallons, I added bittering hops and boiled for another 75 minutes. Like last week, I had an unusual boil-off rate so I ended up with 4.6 gallons at 1059 instead of 5.25 at 1050. I decided to top it off with .75 gallons of bottled spring water to dilute it to 1051. I chilled to around 68°F and racked on top of a yeast cake from the Dampfbier I brewed last week and racked last night.

So now we have a little over 5.25 gallons of Hefeweizen in the chest freezer and 6 gallons of Gose in a cooler in a 110°F bath. Our basement is going to be the place to be in about three weeks!

Brew day: Steam Fog Dampfbier

2011-07-02T10:04:00.006-05:00

A couple months ago our good friend Tricia, who lives the next street over, asked us to brew a beer for her block party. We had a tight timeframe so I figured I'd do something quick like a Hefeweizen. However, one day it struck me: this is the perfect opportunity to brew a Dampfbier! For those unaware of the style, you can read more here, but the easiest way to describe it is it's like a Hefeweizen brewed entirely with barley. I decided to tweak my Oktoberfest recipe to get a grain bill that would be fairly malty and slightly copper in color. I settled on a 70% pilsner/30% dark Munich base and added 2 oz. of Carafa III for color and just a touch of nuttiness.

As you can see above, Dorrie was more than willing to help out (and I had to post the pic to show off the shirts that Leah bought us). Our good friend Marta joined us for the day, and fellow HOPS! members Scott and Paul stopped by for a bit as well.

Being the lazy guy that I am, I decided to go with a simple infusion for this beer. This made for a pretty straightforward brew day. I mashed in at 152, did a 45-minute rest, recirculated for ten minutes, and sparged for 50 minutes (that's quicker than I usually sparge, but for some reason the mash kept getting stuck at slow flows, which is odd for an all-barley mash). I boiled for 90 minutes with a single hop addition to bring it to around 15 IBU. For some reason I only collected 4.75 gallons rather than the 5.5 I had calculated, but I was also three gravity points above my target so I diluted with a quarter gallon of bottled water to bring it to 5 gallons at my target O.G. of 1051.

One odd thing is it appeared a bit darker than I had planned; Beersmith calculated a color of 12 SRM (think the color of an Oktoberfest beer) but it appears closer to that of a dark lager. Fortunately I'm guessing most people will be drinking out of plastic Solo cups so they probably won't see the color anyway.

Now my chest freezer is occupied with my Wizard of Saaz Czech Pilsner so after aerating and pitching a vial of WLP 300 Weizen yeast (yeah, no time to make a starter) I placed the carboy in a cooler filled with ~60°F water. The beer fluctuated between 59°F and 64°F over the first few days as a got a hang of how many ice packs it took to lower temps, but for the most part it was between 62°F and 64°F for the first three days of fermentation before I let it slowly warm up to the 68°F it's at today (a week later).

So that's the story of our Dampfbier. I'm curious to finally taste it, as I've never actually tried a Dampfbier before. Will it taste similar to a Dunkelweizen? Or will the lack of ferulic acid (the dominant phenolic acid in wheat, which contributes to the clove flavors present in Weizens) due to the use of only barley malt significantly change the flavor profile? I suppose if you want to travel to Chicago's South Side you can always stop by 100th and Artesian and find out for yourself!

Brew day: Wizard of Saaz Czech-style Pilsner

2011-06-12T10:19:00.003-05:00

A couple months ago somebody in my homebrew club forwarded an email from the folks at Pilsner Urquell. They are having a homebrew competition where the winner gets a trip to the Czech Republic. It’s only being held in three cities, and is limited to 30 contestants per city, but Chicago happens to be one of the locations and I got my email in quickly enough that I made the cut.

Now it’s sort of an odd competition. It’s one style only—Bohemian Pilsner (duh)—and 70% of the score is meeting the style guidelines. But 15% of the score is for “artistic interpretation.” So how do you artistically interpret a style as rigid as a Bohemian/Czech Pils? Beats the hell out of me, but fate has helped me out… a little, at least. My original idea was to add a pound of malted rye to give it a little extra spiciness. Unfortunately, some time between brewing our Somethin’ Else India Black Ale and yesterday, the rest of our rye disappeared.

Also, as I sat down at the table at 9pm last night to come up with my recipe, I discovered that most Czech Pilsners have a small addition of crystal malt (usually a half pound of 20L per five gallons). I didn’t have any, and wouldn’t have time to run to the LHBS in the morning, so it was time to improvise.

Here’s what I came up with. First, instead of the rye, I decided I would add a little crushed peppercorn at knock-out to give it some spice. Just a little (3/4 tsp.) so it’s not obvious, but hopefully it’ll give it an unidentifiable kick that will make it stand out.

Second, instead of crystal, I decided to use 3/4 lb. dark Munich plus 1/4 lb. of turbinado sugar. I figured the Munich will give it some sweetness you’d expect from the crystal while the turbinado would give just a little thinness to cancel out the richness of the Munich. Will it work? Probably not, but there’s your artistic interpretation.

The actual brew-day went fairly smoothly. I mashed in at 131°F for a 30-minute protein rest (side note: mashing in at .75 qt/gal. sucks because it's REALLY hard to get a consistent temperature reading) and then did an infusion to get the mash temperature up to 153°F for a 45-minute saccharification rest. Didn't do a mash-out.

One quick note on malt and water, two distinct features of Bohemian Pilsners... The Czech Republic traditionally had under-modified malt (which wasn't a problem when doing decoctions) and Pilsen in particular has very, very soft water. I sort of half-assed both of these features. Since I didn't do a decoction but did do a protein rest, I decided to go with 50% Bohemian malt in my bill. And for the water, I didn't feel competent to build up a water profile from scratch so I used carbon-filtered city water for the mash but then used distilled water for sparging.

I sparged for a half-hour and boiled for 90 minutes with hop additions at 90 minutes, 60 minutes, 45 minutes, ten minutes, five minutes and knock-out (sextuple-hopped!). All were Czech Saaz--the traditional hop for Bohemian Pilsners--except for a little bit of Horizon hops I used in the first addition. I chilled down to 60°F and threw the carboy in my chest freezer to get it down to 45°F. Oh, and I added Irish moss and the turbinado sugar at 15 minutes but totally forgot about the peppercorn. I'm now thinking of adding it to the primary after a few days.

I collected 5.25 gallons and my final gravity was 1052, which is a point above my target. However, I forgot to calculate my starter in my calculations, so after I decant most of my starter and pitch the final quart, I should be at 1051. I'll aerate and pitch this morning and then rack off the trub in a couple days. Will it be Saaz-tastic? I guess we'll find out in August!

Back from Germany... time to brew again!

2011-06-08T20:08:00.003-05:00

So, my plan to blog while in Germany didn't really pan out, partly due to a lack of internet access and partly due to being too busy doing the whole vacation thing. I was hoping to do a wrap-up post or two when I got back, but work's been kind of crazy lately and with various summer commitments (including softball three days a week) I haven't gotten around to it yet.

In the meantime, however, I do have a few brewing updates to post about. First, we just kicked both our Altbier and Gose, which means we only have our Dunkel on tap right now. We actually have three kegs to put on (our Pilsner, Belgian IPA and Black IPA--yes, two IPA's at once; I think it's a sign of the apocalypse) but none are carbonated. Oops. Gotta get on that.

The other immediate plan up our sleeves is to brew our Czech Pilsner this weekend. The Czech Pilsner is for a competition sponsored by Pilsner Urquell. If we win, we get a trip to Pilsen in the Czech Republic! No pressure, right?

So that's the short of what's going on. I promise to post about Germany eventually, but for now here's our vacation summed up in one picture:

I'm off to Germany... You're off to Beerfly Alleyfight!

2011-05-20T15:09:00.002-05:00

OK, so our plane boards in less than a half hour so I'll make this brief. We're on my way to enjoy some of the best beer Germany has to offer (it's been two years since our last vacation--to Scotland--and four since we were last in Germany, so I figure it's about time). However, while we're drinking Hefes, Kellerbier, Alts, and even something called Bönnsch, you should be drinking Belgian IPA's at Beerfly Alleyfight tomorrow! It's at the Haymarket Pub and Brewery here in Chicago, and our good friends Klavs and Mary will be pouring the beer we collaborated on (details here) and serving up something called Stoemp. Tickets and more info here. In the meantime, I plan on blogging about our trip, so stay tuned. Oh, and if you're a robber, I'll let you know now that we have family who are staying at our house and watching our two oldest kids (you know, the ones who would require full fare tickets?) and our two dogs. So be sure to stop by if you want to meet our 85-lb. Collie mix. :-)

Prost!

(Week old) Brew Day: Somethin' Else India Black Ale

2011-05-10T20:51:00.003-05:00

So my non-brew-day posts have always ebbed and flowed. Sometimes I post fairly often about random beer stuff, and other times I might go a couple months posting only after brew days. I'm sad to report that for the first time I can remember it took me over a week to post about an actual brew day. I'm going to use our upcoming trip to Germany as an excuse...

Anyway, last Saturday we (the usual crew plus our good friend Marta) brewed our Somethin' Else India Black Ale which we first brewed for Beerfly Alleyfight a couple years ago. I had been itching to brew it again for a while, but a combination of a surplus of high-alpha acid Warrior hops from this year's Alleyfight combined with an upcoming hoppy beer competition sponsored by Two Brothers provided the motivation to fire up the ol' mash tun.

Most of the details are the same as the first time we brewed it, so I won't bore you with all that. What I will note are two things: first, the peat-smoked malt didn't seem to pack a punch this time around. When we brewed it last time, we used 2 oz., which was enough to give it just a hint of smokiness (like many Scottish ales). This time I wasn't picking up anything, so I added another 2 oz. as a cap. Still not sure if it came through.

The other odd thing was we were a good 8 points below our target (1061 instead of 1069). Can't remember the last time that happened. I cooked up some extract and added it to the carboy so we should be good, but it was still strange. Hopefully it's a one-time fluke. Anyway, the beer has been fermenting away and I plan on kegging soon (the Kräusen is finally starting to fall).

One other beer note to add for now... I recently kegged our Pilsener and the one keg is nice and clean but the other had a slight off-flavor that I couldn't quite peg (almost diacetyl-like but I'd think if that were the case all ten gallons would have to have it; must have been some infection in one of the carboys). Anyway, it's cleaned up for the most part after a couple weeks, but I still wasn't entirely happy and I was planning on serving some at the Drinking & Writing Festival this past weekend, so I decided to get adventurous: I added .5 oz. of freshly-ground ginger to 2.5 gallons of beer. It came out AWESOME. As such, I think I might ginger up the 2.5 gallons of the slightly-off keg, and keep the other keg as a traditional Pilsener.

That's it for now. I'm sure I'll post something else before we leave for Germany (if nothing else, a post about the upcoming Beerfly Alleyfight where we'll serve our Trans-Continental RyePA), but my mind is already in Deutschland!

Supreme libations derive from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcicial aquatic ceremony!

2011-04-29T19:05:00.003-05:00

There are lots of reasons today's royal wedding annoyed the crap out of me. From a political standpoint, I find the monarchy--stripped of any actual power as it may be--abhorrent. As a father, I find the notion of little girls looking up to a princess to be ridiculous. And as a fan of the WGN Morning News, I was annoyed that 75% of what I watched this morning was taken up by live coverage of the procession.

But this is a homebrew blog, so I just wanted to take a second to point out one huge, beer-centric reason to be offended by the wedding: there will be no beer there. (Sorry, BrewDog; I'm assuming that includes your Viagra-laced beer brewed especially for the occasion). As reported by respected British beer scribe Pete Brown, a spokesperson for the royal family declared that beer "isn't really an appropriate drink to be serving in the Queen's presence at such an occasion." I don't think I need to tell my two readers (hi Mom and Dad!) why that is a completely absurd statement. While I'm a huge critic of Barack Obama (and lest you start making assumptions, I was a huge critic of George W. Bush, too), at least I can take pride in living in a country where our leader intentionally chooses to hash out issues over a cold beer rather than avoiding it for fear it will make him look like a commoner. It seems like a slap in the face of Britain's awesome brewing tradition, and I have to assume that somewhere, J.W. Lee, John Bird Fuller, Henry Boddington and Barclay Perkins must be humming "God Save the Queen" (and I'm not talking about this version; I mean this one).

On a side note, I stole the image above from an old Chuck Sudo post on Chicagoist.com. I assume the pictured woodcutting has entered the public domain, but if you happen to come across this, Chuck, and it turns out you actually did the woodcarving yourself, I owe you a beer at this year's Drinking & Writing Festival. ;-)

So, about Germany...

2011-04-11T21:44:00.005-05:00

As I've alluded to a couple times recently, Leah and I will be heading to Germany with our youngest in tow in about a month (my mother-in-law will be coming down to graciously housesit and watch our two older kids and our dogs, so any would-be burglars out there shouldn't get too excited). Our last trip to Germany, four years ago, was planned entirely around beer. While it was amazing, the one bad thing was we didn't really have too many experiences where we just stopped in a random pub and had a local Pils or Weizen. As such, most of this trip will be based on non-beer factors and we'll take our beer as we find it.

We know where the trip begins and ends. We're flying into Stuttgart and will make Tübingen (home to the Neckarmüller brew pub pictured above) our home base for the first few days. Nine days later we'll end up in Düsseldorf, where I'll stock up on Altbier (notice I said most of the trip will be based on non-beer factors, not all of it). What we don't know is what we're doing in between. Currently we're thinking of spending a few days in Heidelberg, but we're open to other ideas (particularly ones that are off the beaten path, though still accessible by train). If anybody has any suggestions or recommendations for towns to visit, attractions to see, or bed-and-breakfasts to stay at, feel free to leave a comment below. Prost!

Brew day: Trans-Continental RyePA

2011-04-09T21:27:00.006-05:00

This year is the fifth annual Beerfly Alleyfight. Leah and I have been fortunate to participate every year since the first Alleyfight in 2007. But this year, there's a problem: we'll be in Germany on May 21st, when this year's Alleyfight will be held at the Haymarket Pub and Brewery. Not wanting to be left out, we asked our good friends Klavs and Mary if they'd like to team up with us and take over the gameday duties of pouring the beer and serving the food. They graciously accepted, and we quickly worked on a plan for our beer. Turns out this year's theme is Belgian IPA's, so it's a good thing we asked Klavs since I have little experience with Belgians or IPA's. My one contribution was the idea of using about 20% malted rye; Klavs took care of the rest.

Today they came over to brew (and drink and eat, but also brew). I feel like my posts lately are always about what random thing went wrong. Fortunately today, nothing went wrong. Well, okay, there was one thing at the end of the brew day, but I'll get to that later.

Unlike my crazy German mash schedules lately, this beer was a simple infusion. We mashed in at 152°F (adding 1/2 tsp. acid blend for pH) at 11:20. We recirculated from 11:30-11:50 and collected 11.5 gallons of wort from 12:50-2pm. We boiled from 2:05-3:05 with hop additions at 60 minutes (courtesy of my daughter Dorrie, as you can see to the left), 15 minutes, 5 minutes and flame-out; our late hops were a mixture of Athanum, Amarillo and Cascade. We also added 2 tsp. Irish moss at 15 minutes. We chilled to around 68°F.

The one problem? I took a gravity reading after we chilled: 1064--significantly lower than the 1072 pre-starter gravity we were shooting for. I wasn't sure what the problem was until I looked over our recipe and realized we forgot to add the 2 lbs. of turbinado sugar our recipe called for. Oops. We immediately added a little water to the sugar and brought it to a boil, and then added it to each carboy. I didn't take a gravity reading after that, but according to my calculations it should be 1072. And it only raised our wort temps a couple degrees. Crisis averted.

After adding the sugar, I aerated each carboy and we pitched a half gallon starter of WLP 550 Belgian ale yeast. Now we wait . . . and start to plan our food pairing! I'll post more on that when we figure out what we're doing food-wise. For now, we had a great time brewing, snacking and drinking with Klavs and Mary (and, towards the end, our buddy Chris who's also a HOPS! homebrewer). And remember, if you want to taste the fruits of our labor, keep your calendar open for May 21st. Cheers!

UPDATE: As of Sunday morning our carboy is fermenting away. Hooray for starters!

Brew day: Hail Shaft Pilsener

2011-04-03T08:57:00.005-05:00

Way back in 2002, when I first decided I wanted to start brewing, I started designing logos and labels. And while I never seriously considered opening a commercial brewery, I did come up with a flagship beer and slogan. The beer was Hail Shaft Pilsener, and the slogan was "Get Shafted." I think I even designed desktop wallpaper for my laptop with the logo and slogan over the Chicago skyline.

When I started to actually research the practicalities of brewing, I realized I couldn't brew a Pilsener at first because I didn't have lagering abilities. I soon got a chest freezer with an external thermostat so we could do lagers, but we were still brewing with extract and I wasn't sure extract could produce a quality Pilsener. And even though we've been brewing all-grain for over four years now we've yet to brew our flagship beer.

Until now.

Of course, given how long it took us to get around to brewing our Hail Shaft Pilsener, I suppose it's only fitting that it ended up being the longest. Brew day. Ever.

It all started around 8:30am. I had done my recipe the night before and realized I didn't have any CaraPils. I ran to my local homebrew store but I forgot they don't open until 9, so I came back home and did a little cleaning in the garage. I went back about an hour later to find three people in front of me. After about twenty minutes, the last guy in front of me stepped up and said, "Hi, I'm new to brewing and would like to know what I need to get started." I should had jumped in and said, "Hey, do you mind if I just grab two pounds of CaraPils really quickly?" but for some stupid reason I didn't. And I waited another half hour.

Eventually I got home and got the strike water heating. I had invited my buddy Mark over, and while Mark and I have done collaboration brews before, he doesn't have lagering capabilities so I had invited him over to hang out, drink and watch baseball rather than to help with the actual brewing (I feel bad asking for help when I can't send the co-brewer home with a carboy of wort). Well, given the late start I realized I was going to need Mark's assistance. He crushed the grain while I got the mash tun pre-heated, and at 11am we mashed in at 131°F (with 1/2 tsp. acid blend added, as I do for all light beers). My plan was a three-step infusion so I had to start thick (.75 qt./lb.), and I guess it's hard to get a good reading with a mash that thick because a half hour later when we did the next infusion it was at 136°F. Hope that's not a problem.

After the thirty-minute protein rest we added 2.5 gallons of water to raise it to 150°F and get a mash thickness of 1.33 qt./lb. Of course, I never seem to learn that BeerSmith's water calculations don't work for my equipment for whatever reason and it only raised my temp to 141°F. I quickly brought a gallon and a half of water to a boil and added it to get to 150°F.

During the sacc rest I went to pump our sparge water up to our hot liquor tank when I suddenly heard some clicking and then noticed the adapter that powers my pump was glowing. Then the pump stopped. Turned out my cord was touching the brew kettle's stand so the insulation melted and shorted the adapter. Shit. Gotta work a trip to Radio Shack into the brew day.

We did a full hour sacc rest from noon to 1pm and then added more boiling water to get to our mash-out. Unfortunately, because of the extra water we added to reach our sacc rest we could only add enough boiling water to get up to 155°F. Some mash-out. Anyway, Mark let it rest fifteen minutes and then started recirculating while I ran to Radio Shack and picked up lunch (both stops involved more waiting around, evoking painful memories of my trip to the homebrew store).

The rest of the day was much smoother. We collected from 1:30-3pm and I boiled for 90 minutes with hop additions at 90, 60 and 45 minutes. No late hop additions; I'll dry-hop when I lager. I re-wired the new adapter to my pump and it worked just fine so I was able to efficiently chill to around 50°F. By a little past 5pm I collected 10.5 gallons at 1048 (one point above my target). I threw the carboys in my chest freezer to chill to around 45°F, and when I got home from a buddy's beer tasting (around 1am) I aerated and pitched a nice thick slurry courtesy of Doug and Tracy at Metropolitan.

Can't tell if fermentation started this morning or if it's still foam from the aeration, but the beer has warmed up to around 49°F. I'm sure fermentation will start soon if it hasn't already. And once again I'll stress that Mark was a total lifesaver (and he brought me a bourbon that literally has my name on it!) and I owe him several growlers of the Pilsener once it's done.

In the meantime, it's time to turn our attention to this year's Beerfly Alleyfight. Leah and I will actually be in Germany during the event itself (something I keep meaning to post about, and will eventually) so we're pairing up with our friends Klavs and Mary for this year's event. The theme is Belgian IPA's, a style I'm neither experienced with nor even particularly fond of, but fortunately Klavs is a great brewer of both Belgian styles and hoppy North American brews. The event is May 21st, but we'll be getting together to brew next Saturday, so I'll be posting more about our Alleyfight adventures over the next month and a half.

Altbier showdown!

2011-03-22T18:47:00.003-05:00

If you're in the Chicago area and haven't tried Metropolitan's Iron Works Alt, what the hell's wrong with you??? To say it's been getting good reviews is an understatement. Check out what people have been saying about it here and here. And as you can see in the picture above, even folks who can't actually drink Iron Works still find a way to have fun with it (that would be my daughter, for the record).

Anyway, now that we have a six-pack of Iron Works in the house, and our own F5 Altbier on tap, I decided it was time to do a side-by-side tasting. Here are my notes:

Appearance: The Iron Works alt is a beautiful deep copper/amber with an ample off-white head. Ours is a hair darker--maybe more chestnut than copper--but very close.

Aroma: Some slight grassy, herbal hop notes give way to a hint of bready sweetness with the Iron Works. Mine has a slightly vinous ester note that I've noticed in quite a few of my beers lately (and with the temperature control and generous pitching rates I'm not really sure where this is coming from) along with a sweet malt note but only a slight hop aroma.

Taste: With the Metro Alt, up front you get a nice mixture of sweet Pils and Munich malts and a clean noble hop bitterness. In the middle you get some honey-like sweetness with just a touch of toasted complexity. The finish is nice and dry, but with just enough malt to keep the solid bitterness from being thrown out of balance. Really a remarkable Altbier, and definitely the best I've ever had outside of Düsseldorf.

Now as for my Alt, well... I'm not very happy with my Alt. Simply put, it's too big. The taste profile is quite similar to Iron Works, but both the malt sweetness and the hoppiness are amplified. I think you need the hops to be bigger to balance the beer, but it doesn't have that light, dry finish that the Metro Alt does, and that makes it heavier than an Alt should be. Plus there's still that damn vinous note.

So, the bottom line for now: Metro has managed to do what I've been hoping an American brewery would eventually do, and that's brew an Altbier that's not just a slightly hoppy brown ale brewed with German ingredients but is true to the Düsseldorf style (and yes, I'm familiar with authentic Düsseldorf Altbier, thank you very much) . Just how close it is will be determined in a couple months when I return from Düsseldorf with Atlbier in tow (more on that to come soon).

As for my beer, well I think I have some things to straighten out. The big thing for now is adjusting my mash schedule: I think my Munich-heavy grain bill gives me nice depth, but I need to compensate for that by going with a lower mash temperature so it finishes with a lower gravity. I know Doug and Tracy dealt with this issue by going with more Pilsner malt but I really like the depth Munich gives me (and I know Schumacher's Altbier is 100% Munich so it can be done).

So let's blend . . . and taste . . . and coassssst.

2011-03-20T20:41:00.000-05:00

I've never really thought about blending beers before. Other than mixing old sours with fresher batches or trying to salvage an unbalanced beer, it always struck me as gimmicky. Recently, somebody in our homebrew club discussed blending for the purpose of entering more styles of beer into competitions. Now I'm not that gung-ho about winning medals so again it didn't really interest me.

However, another local homebrew club has a competition coming up (the BOSS Charlie Orr Memorial Chicago Cup Challenge) and we're trying to encourage as many entries as possible in an attempt to win the coveted Chicago Cup. I currently have a Helles (which is a little too hoppy and will probably be entered as an Dortmunder Export) and a Dunkel that I think are quite tasty, so it occurred to me: maybe I could blend them to make an Oktoberfest and a Vienna lager! Some initial tests suggested some good possibilities, but tonight I picked up a Dortmunder (Ayinger Jahrhundert), a Dunkel (Flensburger) and a Vienna (Capital Wisconsin Amber, which is admittedly "loosely based" on the style) so I can both compare my beers to commercial examples and see if blending can make a Vienna. (On a side note, I couldn't find any commercial O-fests in March so I'll have to go by memory on that.)

So first, the comparison of my Helles (Export?) to Jahrhundert... Mine is a tad darker (a deep gold rather than straw) and somewhat opaque. It's actually weird... My first keg was crystal clear but this second keg just doesn't want to clear up. I took this second keg to Wisconsin and back but would think it would still drop clear after a couple weeks. Anyway, back to the beers. The Ayinger has more of a traditional Pils aroma whereas the Helles has a deeper breadiness. Mine is also both richer and hoppier; almost like a Maibock/Helles Bock. I think the balance is about the same; mine is hoppier, but also maltier. I'm almost tempted to enter it as a Helles Bock; while at 1053 it's way low for a Maibock (1064 minimum) it really tastes big. But it's clean, and too hoppy for a Helles, so I guess a Dortmunder Export it will be. (What's annoying is it would be perfect as a Kellerbier, but I already have on specialty beer--my Gose--and you can't enter two in the same category.)

Next, my Dunkel... Similar color and clarity to the Flensburger. The Flensburger's aroma is much more pronounced with sugar and caramel notes, almost sweet tea-like. Mine is far more muted. Flavor-wise, theirs is kind of hard to explain. I'd say the Flensburger is more toasty, like there's a touch of Carafa in there. It's also more grainy. Mine tastes a little fuller, rounder. Overall, however, I'd say these two are much closer than the Exports were. Bitterness is just about the same. It's just that tea-like flavor that I generally associate with crystal malts (mine was 100% Munich, so I wonder if they used some Pils and Caramunich malts in addition to the Munich).

So now it's time for blending! First I figured I'd compare the Wisconsin Amber (the Vienna lager) to the Flensburger Dunkel to see how they differ. I poured a little of the Amber to do a color comparison and it's a tad lighter than the Flensburger Dunkel. Taste-wise, the Amber definitely has a little more Pils-like character to it. It's lighter on the palate and less sweet. Definitely seems like maybe a 2:1 Dunkel:Helles ratio would work. Let's find out...

Much like the comparison between the Exports, the big difference here is richness. Color-wise, the Amber is a little lighter than my blend, though I'm worried that a 50-50 blend will get the color right but be too hoppy. The flavor seems to be fairly good (mine is a tad hoppier, but not much) but there's still a fullness to mine that I'm not getting in the Amber.

Based on the first blend, I tried a 50-50 blend and as I suspected it's closer in flavor profile but hoppier. Hmm...

The last thing I tried was a 2:1 Helles:Dunkel ratio for an Oktoberfest. O-fests have a decent range of color, with Oktoberfests consumed in Germany being a deep gold and exported versions being more copper, almost red. This particular blend (the one pictured at the top of this post) came out a nice honey orange. The taste was pretty damn good, too. The richness of the Helles with a slight toastiness from the Dunkel. Again, it's a tad hoppy but certainly by U.S. standards this would pass as a style-appropriate Oktoberfest.

In the end, I decided to go with the 50-50 blend for my Vienna and a 2:1 Helles:Dunkel ratio for the Oktoberfest. I'll be curious to see how each does next week. In the meantime, this has opened me up to new possibilities regarding future beers... Could I brew ten gallons of one beer, five gallons of another, and end up with a 5-gallon keg of three different styles? Seems entirely possible to me!

We're gonna have an Altbier party tonight!

2011-03-07T19:00:00.004-06:00

Well, not tonight (unless you're reading this a week from now). But forced Black Flag references aside, I'm excited to announce that the release party for Metropolitan's Iron Works Altbier--for which I served as a ~~taste-tester~~ special consultant--is Monday, March 14th, at Hopleaf in Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood. The fun starts at 7pm, so I hope to be there by 6:30. If you stop by, be sure to say hi and buy me a pint... after all, if it weren't for me there would be no Iron Works!* And if you can't make it, you should be able to find Iron Works starting next weekend at your local quality bottle shop (and if you're REALLY cheap, Doug and Tracy will be pouring free samples at the Lincoln Park Binny's on Friday the 18th from 5-7pm, but I guarantee you after one sip you'll grab a six-pack or two!).

*This statement is totally untrue (my job as a special consultant generally involved tasting the various batches and giving them either one thumb up or two thumbs up), but I'll say anything for a free beer.

Radio Friendly Unit Crapper

2011-02-24T23:48:00.004-06:00

Okay, this is only tangentially related to brewing (and when I say "tangentially" I'm being generous) but I figured it's worth mentioning. This afternoon I'll be at McNally's (111th and Western), from which 670 The Score's Boers and Bernstein will broadcast their afternoon sports talk show. Specifically I will be participating in a special live edition of "Who Ya Crappin'?"

What the hell is "Who Ya Crappin'?" you ask? Well, every Thursday at 5pm they do a segment where people can call in or email to call out public figures who have engaged in acts of verbal hypocrisy. For a better idea of what I'm talking about, check out their podcast here. Anyway, I've been a quasi-regular crapper via email for about two years now, and as such I've been invited to participate in the live version.

Now what does this have to do with homebrewing? Admittedly, not much, but as you can see in the label below, my handle is beer-related. And as such, I figure the least I can do is bring some beer with me. So I bottled a six pack of our Nimbostratus Dunkel and re-christened it "Brew You Crappin'?" I think the label isn't half bad:

Anyway, if you're in Chicago, you can tune in to 670AM at 5pm (or stop by McNally's) to enjoy the fun. Alternatively, you can listen to the show online here, or you can wait for the podcast (which, if I remember, I'll link to here once it's up). Hopefully I won't embarrass myself.

Brew day: F5 Altbier

2011-02-12T22:12:00.006-06:00

Coming soon to a liquor store near you*: Ironworks Alt; and coming soon to a kegerator near you*: F5 Alt

*Headline only applicable if you happen to live in the Chicagoland area.

So I've been meaning to post about this for a while, but always seem to get distracted. Anyway, here's the big news: Metropolitan's Ironworks Alt, the Altbier I helped develop as I-Beam Alt last year, will be hitting the bars--and shelves--as a year-round release available on draft and in bottles in roughly a month! There have been a few tweaks since the first batch I helped brew back in March of 2010, so it should really be dialed in to give you the best Altbier experience you can get short of traveling to Düsseldorf! Yeah, I'm a little excited...

Of course, the release of Ironworks won't stop me from continuing my quest to perfect my personal Alt recipe, F5 Altbier. Doug and Tracy have limitations I don't (namely, the inability to decoct), plus every brewing system gives its own Hausgeschmecht, so while I'm excited to see Ironworks hit the shelves I've still got plenty of work to do back at the ranch.

The Alt I brewed back in 2008 was pretty close to what I was looking for. I did a single decoction (from a 129 F protein rest to a 152 F sacc rest) and shot for 40 IBU's and I was pretty happy with the results. While I got dinged in the CBS Spooky Review for being too hoppy, I did a side-by-side tasting with Füchschen Alt (my favorite Düsseldorf Alt) and a collaborative Alt brewed by Pete Crowley (then at Rock Bottom) and CBS and found it was only slightly more bitter than Füchshen and pretty much on par with the Rock Bottom/CBS brew. I decided all I really needed to do was bump up the mash temp a couple degrees to give it a little more malt backbone.

For the next Alt I brewed, in 2009, I indeed upped the sacc rest to 154F. I also ditched the protein rest and decoction since at that point Doug and Tracy had asked for my input on their Alt and I knew they would do a simple infusion. Much to my surprise it was way maltier and/or not as hoppy. Personally, I suspect it was the lack of hop presence that created the illusion of more malt (in other words, it was a change in balance more than a change in maltiness specifically). Of course that begged the question: why was it significantly less hoppy given that I didn't change the hop bill? I have to think I screwed up my hop addition with either the first batch or the second.

Now all that leads to today... What exactly should I do. Well, for the most part I decided to go back to my 2008 Alt and do just what I said I would do: up the sacc rest temp a couple degrees. But as for the hops, well, should I tweak today's brew assuming I added too many hops in '08 or too few in '09? Looking back on it, I recall the bitterness in the '08 Alt as being comparable to Uerige's, which is 50 IBU's, so my suspicion is the hops were wrong that time. As a bit of a compromise, I upped the IBU's to 42 and figured I'd see how it ended up.

The brew day itself seemed to go pretty well, with one minor issue. I hit my protein rest temp of 129°F right on the nose, added 1/4 tsp. acid blend, and after fifteen minutes pulled a 6-quart decoction. (As you can see to the right, Dorrie helped stir the decoction. Sorry for the crappy cell phone pic.) It was more than the 4.5 quarts Beersmith recommended, but I always seem to end up low with my rests after decoctions. I held my decoction at 154°F for fifteen minutes before bringing it to a 15-minute boil. Upping the volume of the decoction was a good idea, because after returning it to the mash I ended up at 154°F right on the nose.

After a 40-minute sacc rest I recirculated for fifteen minutes and then collected (what I thought was) six gallons over the next hour. I did a 90-minute boil with additions at 90, 60 and 45 minutes as well as at knockout. I chilled down to 60 F and while chilling I took a gravity reading. It was 1067 while my target was 1051 (anticipating that the 1/2 gallon starter I made Thursday would knock it down to 1049). Overshooting my expected gravity by 16 points??? Rut roh!
Just as I started to wonder what happen I noticed I had drained the kettle and there was what looked like less than four gallons in my carboy. While I'm still not sure how I ended up collecting a full gallon less than I was supposed to, I did some quick math and found that if I topped off with a gallon of water I'd be right where I needed to be. So that's what I did. I oxygenated and pitched at 60°F and look forward to fermentation tomorrow.

In the meantime, a couple notes on our other beers... I kegged our Nimbostratus Dunkel this past Sunday; it was at 1016 and is now lagering in the Syzlak keg. Also I kegged and primed our Gust Front Leipzig-style Wheat the week before; it finished at 1008 and now resides in the Krabappel keg. After two weeks of conditioning I threw it in the chest freezer to bring it down to serving temp. Finally, I'm carbonating some filtered water in our Hutz keg so we'll have seltzer on tap (I'm planning on making a tonic syrup soon). We've come a long way from the dark days of two months ago when we only had one beer on tap!

Taverns and the First Amendment

2011-01-28T07:20:00.001-06:00

I generally don't post about politics here, but once in a while my passion for brewing and my passion for politics cross paths. Such was the case earlier this week when I came across a fascinating paper by Baylen J. Linnekin entitled "'Tavern Talk' & the Origins of the Assembly Clause: Tracing the First Amendment's Assembly Clause Back to Its Roots in Colonial Taverns."

At a time in which both the Right and the Left seem inclined to ignore our civil liberties when it suits their goals, I found it fascinating to read how taverns played a role in shaping an important but often overlooked First Amendment right. Here's an excerpt:

Compared to speech exercised throughout general society, constraints on speech were relaxed in taverns. This fact is dramatic because it shows that tavern speech—perhaps with the exception of speech uttered in the home—was colonial speech at its most free. Speaking freely under lax authority in taverns led to “open and unguarded expression” of opinions and allowed colonists of various classes to interact more freely. The “relatively free public expression” within taverns fostered “a realm of discourse that existed outside the effective cultural control of both government and private or domestic authority.” Since movements, to succeed, require open assembly, the thoroughly constitutional vision of open assembly that tavern talk evidenced helped lead to “political as well as social change” in the colonies.

While technology can certainly facilitate communication between geographically diverse folks who wouldn't otherwise meet (this blog being a great example of that), I often yearn for the days of the corner tavern. In cyberspace, it's all too easy to surround yourself with people who affirm your beliefs (liberals read the Huffington Post; conservatives read Breitbart; etc.) but your neighborhood bar brings together people of all stripes. This was discussed at last year's Drinking & Writing Festival and I think merits further contemplation. Particularly now, as people complain that our society is becoming more and more polarized and that partisan rhetoric is becoming more and more heated, perhaps the solution isn't more regulations but rather more taverns!

Brew day: Nimbostratus Dunkel

2011-01-15T20:54:00.007-06:00

There's been a trend in homebrewing lately to make "SMaSH" beers--beers brewed with a Single Malt and a Single Hop. More often than not they're done to showcase a hop varietal, but I like the idea of encouraging simplicity. I can't tell you how many times I've seen new brewers post recipes online that have ten different malts plus flaked oats and candy sugar. I was guilty of some of that myself when I started brewing, but at some point I realized it's better to start simple with a recipe; you can always add specialty grains the next time if something is missing.

As somebody who brews primarily German styles, I've found that 95% of what I want out of a malt profile can be accomplished by using some combination of Pilsner and Munich malts. However, I've never done a beer with just one malt . . . until today. I've been wanting to brew a beer with a double decoction and I figured what better way to showcase just what a decoction can contribute than to use just one malt? With that in mind, today I brewed a Munich Dunkel that was 100% Munich malt. I thought about only using one hop as well but I have a bunch of relatively high-alpha Horizon hops that I use for bittering that wouldn't really be good for a later addition, so I added Hallertau Herbsbrucker to the mix as well. But the end result is a very simple beer that will nonetheless offer a complex malt profile (or so I hope).

I used the double decoction schedule I described a couple months ago in this post. I mashed in around 130°F (adding 3/8 tsp. acid blend to keep my pH down) and ten minutes later pulled my first decoction. I gave it a ten-minute rest at 158°F and then brought it up to boiling for a half hour. I returned the decoction to my mash, which had dropped to 125°F (it was cold today!) but to my surprise the mash only raised to 148°F instead of 158°F. I'm not really sure what happened there but I quickly boiled three quarts of water to bring my temp up.

After adding the boiling water, I gave it ten minutes to stabilize and then pulled my second decoction, which due to the added water ended up thinner than the first. I gave it a ten-minute rest at 168°F and then again boiled for a half hour. I returned the decoction to the mash and, as was the case with the first decoction, I was a little off my target--reaching 164°F instead of 168.

After a 30-minute break (I had to heat my sparge water, since my burner was otherwise occupied with the decoctions) I recirculated for fifteen minutes and then collected 6.4 gallons of wort in just over an hour. I then boiled for ninety minutes, with hop additions at 90 minutes, 60 minutes, and 20 minutes, as well as Irish moss at 15 minutes. I chilled to around 48°F and found that my OG was high (1060) but my yield was low (4.5 gallons--not sure what happened there). As such I diluted with a half-gallon of water to bring my OG to my target of 1054. I aerated and pitched a slurry of lager yeast courtesy of Doug and Tracy at Metropolitan Brewing.

Overall it was a long day (around seven hours if you include clean-up) but I could save about a half hour by using my bucket heater to start heating the sparge water as soon as I start brewing. Plus if I'm brewing lighter beers I don't need to do half-hour decoctions. In the meantime, I can't wait to see what kind of malt character I get out of this beer. Should be great for those dreary days of late winter...

Christmas Eve and Boxing Day brew day: Gust Front Leipzig-style Wheat

2010-12-27T08:05:00.002-06:00

I'm a bad scientist.

In a controlled experiment, you want to keep everything constant except for your independent variable. This past weekend we brewed our Leipzig-style wheat (a.k.a. Leipziger Gose) for the second time, and I intended to do everything the same way I did our last Gose except for one variable: how we kept the wort heated during the inoculation phase. In reality, due to a combination of oversight, laziness and unexpected error, a few things are different the second time around. Nonetheless, I hope to end up with five gallons of delicious Gose a month from now.

If you want a full rundown of what Leipziger Gose is and how I brew it, I recommend you revisit this post. But if you're into the whole brevity thing, here's the process in a nutshell: you mash and sparge, pitch lactobacillus (which sours the beer), let it sit for roughly two days, and then bring the beer to a boil and finish it like a normal beer (add hops, cool, pitch). The trick is keeping the beer warm for the lacto; bacteria likes a warm environment, and it seems that both the temperature and length of inoculation contribute to the level of sourness.

The last time I brewed the Gose I simply cooled to 110°F, wrapped the carboy in a bunch of blankets, and hoped that it didn't lose too much heat (I ended up a little over 90°F by the end of the two days). My last Gose had a definite sour kick, but it still wasn't as sour as our favorite Gose. I recently bought some new toys (as discussed in my last post) and now I'm hoping to dial in these variables so I can consistently produce a desired level of sourness.

So how did things go? Well, on my first brew day (Christmas Eve) things started out just fine. I mashed in at 152°F and added 1/4 tsp. of acid blend. I got off to a late start and needed to be done in time to head off to Christmas Eve candlelight service so I skipped the decoction I employed the last time I brewed the Gose--that would be unintended variable #1--though I did use a mashout. After 40 minutes I went to sparge and--ugh--my manifold came undone AGAIN. I've fixed the problem on my large mash tun but it's still an issue on my small mash tun (I think I just need a stainless steel tube to run between my interior hose and my exterior outflow hose). Anyway, I couldn't get the damn thing to connect so I had to bust out my large mash tun which, for a 5-gallon batch of relatively low-gravity beer, is a bit too big. As such, when I sparged, I ended up with a somewhat turbid wort due to the shallow grain bed. So that was unintended variable #2.

I boiled for 15 minutes and miraculously managed to cool down to 110°F with my plate chiller (that was more difficult than you'd think because I had to constantly adjust the flow rate to get the temperature right and my ThruMometer obviously doesn't go up to 110°F). My gravity at the time was 1040. I also collected an extra 1/2 gallon for my yeast starter. I was now ready to pitch my lacto starter.

This brings me to unintended variable #3. The last time I made my lacto starter, I would occasionally dip it on a hot water bath to keep it over 90°F. This time around I discovered that my crock pot, set to "warm," kept it at a consistent 105°F. Also, last time I made my lacto starter, I only made 500mL; this time I made 1000mL. And to top it all off, I can't find my pH meter so I don't know what the actual pH of my starter was (though I have a sample in the fridge so I can find out when my new meter that I just ordered arrives). So I pitched a bigger--and likely more acidic--lacto starter this time around.

Once I pitched the lacto, I immersed the carboy in a hot water bath in a cooler as pictured to the right. I had an aquarium heater in there that would make sure the bath temperature never dropped below 90°F, and I covered the whole thing with a couple blankets. I also used a bucket heater two to three times a day to bring the temperature back up to 110°F, so most of the time the actual temperature of the wort was somewhere between 95°F and 105°F.

After roughly 45 hours, I took the carboy out of the hot water bath and siphoned the wort back into our brew kettle. I can't remember if this happened the last time, but this time around I found a white film on top of the carboy (as you can see below). I also noticed that there was a sickly sweet and vegetal smell, sort of like cream of tomato soup, which I distinctly remember from the last time I brewed so that didn't worry me. Since I had done a 15-minute boil on the first day I finished off with a 75-minute boil to make sure to drive off any DMS (which I believe is the source of the vegetal smell). I also found a little scum floating on top of the beer when the boil started (not sure if it was the film from the bacteria or protein due to the thin grain bed) so I skimmed that off.

I added hops at 60 minutes, Irish moss at 15 minutes and the freshly-ground coriander (1/2 oz.) and sea salt (5 g.) at 2 minutes. I chilled to 65°F and found the gravity to be 1047 (my target exactly). I oxygenated and pitched a 1/2 gallon starter of WLP320 yeast that should bring my original gravity down to 1046. This morning when I woke up the beer was fermenting away.

I kept samples of the lacto starter, the pre-boil wort and the post-boil, chilled wort, so hopefully I'll get pH readings of each of those so I have a better idea of how this beer compares to the last. All I can tell you for now is that I tried the post-boil sample and if my memory serves me correctly it had a distinct tartness I didn't pick up from the last Gose pre-fermentation. Will this indeed be more sour? I suppose I'll know in a couple weeks!

Revisiting Gose

2010-12-23T20:42:00.005-06:00

What the heck is that, you ask? Why, it's a lactobacillus starter. Allow me to explain...

A little over a year ago Leah and I brewed our first all-grain Leipziger Gose. A Gose is a soured wheat beer brewed with salt and coriander. To get an authentic sour quality we use lactobacillus. Lactobacillus is most active around 100°F, and it just so happens that our crock pot set on "warm" creates the perfect bath for keeping our lacto starter at 105°F. We made the starter last night and will complete the first of two brew days tomorrow. (Yeah, this beer requires two brew days: on the first day you mash, sparge, collect in a carboy and pitch the lactobacillus; after two days you then boil your soured wort, add the hops, salt and coriander, cool, and pitch like a regular beer.)

Thanks to the crock pot, keeping the starter warm for two days is a piece of cake. What will be more tricky is keeping the actual beer around 100°F for two days (sadly a 6.5 gallon carboy won't fit in our crock pot). The last time we brewed the Gose it was Labor Day weekend and the weather was nice and hot; we just wrapped the carboy in blankets and it never got below 85°F. This time, however, we're brewing on Christmas Eve in Chicago. So what shall I do?

Well, I picked up a couple new toys. The first is an aquarium heater which is supposed to keep over 30 gallons of water at 91°F. I'll be putting the carboy in a cube cooler filled with water that will--hopefully--be around 90°F thanks to the aquarium pump. I figure if I cool to 110°F and put it in a bath at 90°F it should be a pretty good environment for the lacto to do its thing. Of course, the aquarium pump will also give me flexibility to brew other warm-weather beers like saisons in the winter.

The second thing I got is a bucket water heater. I'm pretty excited about this for two reasons. First, it will allow me to heat up the water in the cooler above 90°F if I want to try to keep the beer closer to 100°F. However, the cooler thing is that I can use it to speed up the heating of my mash and sparge water. In the winter, it can take a while to get water heated--especially when brewing 10-gallon batches. Between this and my propane burner I'm hoping it can shave a half hour or so off of my brew day.

Now will these toys work as planned? If past experience is any indication, probably not. But I really hope so, as it's always fun to have a little more versatility when brewing (and I'd hate to drop over $50 on stuff that doesn't work). Stay tuned to find out how tomorrow's brew day goes.

Brew day: Downdraft Helles

2010-12-07T20:55:00.002-06:00

Our ongoing effort to replenish our kegerator stock continued on Sunday as we brewed our Downdraft Helles. It was pretty cold out that day (24°F when I started and 21°F when I finished) so I decided to go with a simple infusion mash. I mashed in around 1pm at 154°F (a couple degrees below my target) and, since my grains were all light, added 1/2 tsp. of acid blend.

It took a while to heat nine gallons of sparge water so I mashed for a little over an hour. I recirculated for fifteen minutes and sparged for an hour and a half, collecting 12.5 gallons. I started my boil at 4pm with hop additions at 90 minutes, 60 minutes and 20 minutes. My initial refractometer reading showed I was coming in seven or eight gravity points above my target so I upped my bittering hops a tad (just to bring my IBU's up by two).

I chilled down to around 48°F (one of the perks of brewing lagers in the winter) and took a gravity reading... turns out I was only a couple points above my target gravity: 1053 instead of 1051. That brings me to my lesson for the day: my buddy Kevin told me a couple weeks ago that he was thinking of getting into brewing but decided after reading my blog that it was too complicated and he'd rather just drink beer. On Sunday I made my brew day far more complicated by worrying about my refractometer readings and boil rates and it turned out I was pretty much right at my target gravity. So basically, I make things more complicated because that's just how I am, but I would probably brew beer that's equally good if I relaxed, didn't worry, and had a homebrew.

Anyway, I oxygenated and then pitched a yeast slurry courtesy of Doug and Tracy at Metropolitan (and if I've ever overpitched I did it on Sunday), and by Monday morning the carboys were bubbling away. So there you have it.

On a side note, I also racked our None More Buzzed coffee stout over 6 oz. of Intelligentsia Black Cat espresso beans on Sunday, and then pulled the beans out last night. Its final gravity was 1014. It's now on tap and tasting pretty good if I say so myself. So our horrible nightmare of two weeks without beer on tap has officially ended.

FotoFriday #25

2010-11-26T09:49:00.002-06:00

Our keggle (a half-barrel keg converted into a brew kettle).

Brew day: None More Buzzed Coffee Stout . . .

2010-11-21T06:12:00.006-06:00

. . . or, A Middle Finger to the FDA

So I have to be honest: I was planning on brewing our coffee stout before this whole Four Loko nonsense broke. However, the timing couldn't have been better.

For those who are unaware of Four Loko and the ensuing controversy, I'll briefly summarize. People without functioning tastebuds (or the will to ignore said tastebuds) have been mixing Red Bull and vodka for years now. The makers of Four Loko skip the middleman and produce an energy drink/alcopop that not only has caffeine, taurine and guarana but also 12% alcohol by volume. It comes in eight flavors, all of which are quite rancid from what I hear. (Wanna brew your own? Here's a clone recipe!)

Over the past few months several states have banned Four Loko, and the Food and Drug Administration recently declared Four Loko "a public health concern." Why? Because it mixes alcohol with caffeine. Now the reasoning behind this is absolutely ridiculous. Like most public health scares, people start with a truth (too much alcohol and too much caffeine is not good for you) and comically distort it. College students being rushed to the hospital after drinking Four Loko . . . An despondent Iraq War veteran committing suicide after drinking Four Loko . . . As if these things never happened back in the day when people drank regular ol' alcohol. And, in typical American style, our reaction isn't to warn people to act responsibly, it's to ban the stuff altogether.

Now I know what you might be thinking: "But Russ, I don't want to drink that crap so what do I care?" Well, in the wake of this scare, Michigan has banned a California IPA brewed with Yerba Matte. You can read more about craft brewers' concerns about the fallout of Four Loko Madness here. (And, if you're a dork like me you can also read an interesting First Amendment take on the issue over at reason.com.)

Okay, I'll get off my soapbox now, but it really is the perfect time to brew a coffee stout--something I haven't done since the inaugural Beerfly Alleyfight back in 2007. My base recipe is our None More Black oatmeal stout (hence the name None More Buzzed), and I decided to tweak my recipe in two substantive ways. First, I upped my oats from 1/2 lb. to a full pound for five gallons. This was mainly because my local homebrew store sells flaked oats in 1-lb. packages and what am I going to do with the remaining half pound? Second, my previous recipe called for 1 lb. of roast barley and 0.3 lb. of black patent malt. Since the coffee contributes plenty of roastiness, I changed that to a half pound each of roast barley and black patent malt.

The brew day was pretty uneventful with a couple exceptions (as usual). I mashed in at noon at 152°F (a couple degrees short of my target) but when I started to sparge at 12:45 I started getting a lot of grain in my hose. Once again, my manifold had come disconnected. Ugh. After dumping three quarters of the mash out into a stock pot, I was able to reconnect the manifold and I recirculated from 12:55-1:10. I collected six gallons of wort from 1:10 to 2:20.

I boiled from 2:20 to 3:20 with hop additions at 60 minutes, 15 minutes and 2 minutes. I chilled down to 68°F and ended up with 4.7 gallons at 1062. Since I was high in gravity but low in volume I added 1/4 gallon bottled water to get to 5 gallons at 1059.

Now we come to my "I'm A Dumbass" moment that seems to happen at least once every brew day. I recently bought an O2 regulator so I can aerate with pure oxygen, but before buying my own a borrowed a buddy's so I could do some experimenting to see if it made a noticeable difference. Well, long story short, I cracked the cap on my buddy's O2 regulator so I told him when I bought mine we could swap so he wouldn't have to deal with the cracked cap. So yesterday I was using the cracked cap for the first time and sure enough, after about three twists the rest of it broke off.

I could still turn the metal knob without the plastic cap, but it barely stuck up so I had to use pliers to grip it. It was slow going, but it should still work, right? Well, I kept twisting and twisting and twisting and nothing was happening. I started to worry that there was something in the cap that acted as a safety such that it wouldn't work without the cap. I kept twisting and twisting and twisting and still nothing.

Then it occurred to me: I'm probably just out of O2. Now, I had just bought my first O2 canister for my last brew, so there's a good reason I dismissed this possibility earlier. But there was no other explanation; there must have been a leak somewhere. Sure enough, I ran to the hardware store and bought a new canister and--voilà!--it worked. So I aerated and pitched a healthy slurry of yeast courtesy of Bryan at Flossmoor Station and I had fermentation four hours later.

The carboy is gurgling away right now. In ten days or so I'll rack to the keg and add 1/2 lb. of whole espresso beans. It may not be Four Loko, but it'll have to do for now.

Solved Mystery

2010-11-17T22:16:00.007-06:00

So our Novemberfest party was this past Saturday (thanks to everybody who came out!) and while things went well overall, we ran into one glitch... About three hours before the party, after changing my kegerator lines and cleaning all my hardware, I hooked up all my beers and when I poured my first pint of our Hoar Frost Oktoberfest there was a sound that was somewhere between a whoosh and a gurgle, and the beer shot out as mostly foam.

My immediate thought was, "Not again!" You see, at our Novemberfest party two years ago we debuted our kegerator. I was all excited to show it off but due to a wonky new CO2 regulator all of my beer was way overcarbonated and I had to pour everything into pitchers so people weren't drinking cups full of foam. This year I started carbonating my Oktoberfest by leaving it at 30 psi overnight but I do this all the time and never ended up with overcarbonated beer.

While I couldn't figure out why the beer was overcarbonated, it seemed clear that it was, so I started shaking the keg and purging every five minutes or so. This seemed to help a little but not much. By the time 6pm rolled around I had no choice but to pour half a pint, let it settle, then top it off--and even then it still had an overly ample head. The keg was gone by 11pm so obviously people were able to make due, but nonetheless I was both disappointed to serve overcarbonated beer and puzzled as to what exactly went wrong.

Now fast-forward to tonight... I'm kegging our Snow Squall Christmas Ale, which obviously requires cleaning and sanitizing a keg. I just happened to pick the keg I used for our Oktoberfest beer, and I also just happened to lose my deep-well socket to take off the out valve. As a plan B, I figured I could put the keg under pressure and run some Oxi-clean through the valve.

So what happened when I did that? Same whoosh/gurgle. At that point I realized it wasn't my beer... it was the keg. And my immediate first thought was that it was missing the gasket along the top of the dip tube. A second search turned up the socket I needed and when I pulled off the out valve, sure enough, there was no gasket. Don't know if this will ever happen to anybody else, but just in case I figured I'd post about my experience. As a brewer, when something goes wrong my first thought is always that it's the beer, but don't forget that it might be the equipment.

Anyway, while I'm blogging, a few other post-Novemberfest notes . . . First, I'm guessing we're the first people in the history of Chicago's South Side to ever fly a Baden-Württemberg flag in front of their house. . . . Second, for the first time in the history of Novemberfest all three kegs kicked. While I'm thrilled that everybody liked our beer that much, it meant that I never got a chance to sit down and take notes on our first-ever Novemberfest beer. Just going from memory, I thought it was a very tasty beer. It was definitely hoppy, along the lines of a really hoppy Maibock, and the ounce of Hallertau I used to dry-hop wasn't even that noticeable. My only disappointment was that the 25% rye wasn't that noticeable; I'm thinking cutting down on a Munich a bit might allow it to stand out more. Otherwise I thought it was a success, particularly for being my first shot at a somewhat experimental beer. . . . Having all three beers kick also means we need more beer, stat! As such, I'm planning on brewing our None More Buzzed Coffee Stout this Saturday. . . . Finally, I kegged our Christmas ale into the Frink keg today; the gravity was 1015.

The Novemberfest lineup revealed!

2010-10-31T21:32:00.007-05:00

As we're now less than two weeks away from Novemberfest 2010, Leah and I figured we might as well let you all know what you'll be drinking. So without further ado, here are our offerings for Saturday the 13th:

Hoar Frost Oktoberfest (5.2% ABV; 26 IBU's)

A fairly traditional interpretation of the German Märzen style, we started with equal parts Pilsner and Munich malts to give it a nice bready backbone and then added a touch of roasted malt to give it a copper color and just a touch of nuttiness. German hops give it just enough bitterness to keep it from being sweet. John Daley, as in Da Mayor's brother, turned down a sample at our church's Oktoberfest (said he had another event to go to; what kind of Irishman turns down a beer because he has to go somewhere else later???) but it was his loss; this beer just took second place in its category at the Chicago Beer Society Spooky Brew Review so it can't be all bad, right?!

Jade Bräu Schwarzbier (4.6% ABV; 28 IBU's)

Ordinarily this is our Bear's Cage Schwarzbier, but our friend Jade lamented earlier this year that nobody's ever named a beer after her before, so we figured we could take care of that. "Schwarzbier" literally means "black beer," but if you don't think you like dark beer you still might want to give it a chance. Most of the grain bill is the same as a traditional German lager, but a small addition of very dark, debittered roasted malt turns the whole thing black. It has some coffee-like notes but is much smoother and lighter than a stout. Even my Mom likes it, and I don't think she ever liked a dark beer before this one.

Great Storm Novemberfest (6.5% ABV; 67 IBU's)

Every year we brew an Oktoberfest beer for Novemberfest. This year it occurred to me that maybe we should come up with our own "Novemberfest" style. I wanted to keep it in the German tradition, so I started with an Altbier, which is a hoppy German ale. Then, since it's for a party, I figured I would make it extra strong (often referred to as a Sticke Altbier). To make it unique, I ditched the dark grains and added 25% malted rye to give it a hint of spiciness. Next I decided not to filter it in the tradition of a Kellerbier. And finally, right before the party I am going to dry-hop the beer with Hallertau hops. The end result actually tastes like a slightly fruity Maibock. It has a lot of hops, but also a really nice malt profile that keeps it in balance. We can't wait to see what people think of it.

In addition to our three beers, we'll have some sort of non-alcoholic offering as well (probably our Swearengen's Old Tyme Root Beer), and we have an assortment of hard liquor for the gluten-intolerant or those who otherwise don't want to drink beer. Hope to see you there!

Brew Day: Snow Squall Christmas Ale

2010-10-24T22:49:00.004-05:00

After my musings on mashing earlier in the week, I put those musings into practice yesterday as we brewed our Snow Squall Christmas Ale, which is a Doppelsticke (extra-strong Altbier) that will be spiked with vanilla. I decided to go with an step infusion mash rather than a double decoction, and did rests at 131°F and 158°F. Well, at least that was the idea.

The day got off to an inauspicious start as I seemed to encounter some issues with my Barley Crusher grain mill. As I was milling using an electric drill I suddenly felt a bit of a jolt and then the drill revved up but the mill appeared to stop milling. I dumped the grain out of the hopper, turned on the drill and everything was spinning fine. When I refilled the hopper it did the same thing after a couple minutes. From that point on I added a little grain at a time rather than filling up the entire hopper and it crushed fine. I'm still not sure what was going on but I may shoot the Barley Crusher folks an email; I hear they're good about responding to such inquiries. (As you can see below, Dorrie was happy to supervise the milling process even if it was a little loud for her.)

Once I got the grain milled, the brew day was pretty smooth, if a tad longer with the extra steps. I usually try to only employ one new procedure per brew day, but this time I added a few different wrinkles: I did an infusion step mash as noted above; I also did a mash-out (something I've never really bothered with before); I did multiple additions for my bittering hops rather than adding them all at the beginning of the boil; and I oxygenated with pure oxygen.* So first of all, the step mash... It wasn't too bad. I mashed in at 131°F at a thickness of 0.9 qt./lb. and rested for twenty minutes. It turned out twenty minutes was enough time to get another two gallons of water boiling for the next infusion. I came in a little low for the second rest (155°F instead of 158°F) but I suspect that was because I lost a few degrees during the protein rest that I didn't factor in. I did a half hour saccharafication rest.

During the saccharafication rest, I got 3.5 gallons of water boiling. I used about two gallons of that for my mash-out; the rest I added a little cold water to and used for my sparge water (since the mash was to nearly 2 qt./lb. by the end of the second infusion, I didn't need much sparge water). I also added 1/8 tsp. acid blend to my mash during the mash-out since I like to drop the pH in my sparge water, and I figured the final infusion was basically like sparge water.

I got a little impatient with my sparging and ended up collecting 6.3 gallons in only 45 minutes. I'm usually pretty slow with my sparge so that surprised me; I guess I just wasn't paying close enough attention. I then did a nice, long 90-minute boil that got me down to a little over five gallons of wort. An pre-boil refractometer reading showed I was about five gravity points low, so I cut my bittering hops to get from 70 IBU's to 65. I did four additions, at 90, 65, 55 and 45 minutes because Noonan's lager book suggests this gives a smoother, more rounded bitterness. I didn't do any late addition hops because I found I didn't have any Spalt hops and I figured it would let the vanilla come through better.

While my pre-boil gravity suggested I'd be five points low, I actually ended up three points low, at 1067 instead of 1070. I suspect this was due to a combination of fast sparging, a short sacc rest (next time I might do an actual iodine test when doing a step mash; with a simple infusion mash my rest is always at least 40 minutes because it takes me that long to heat up my sparge water), and possibly high mash pH (I didn't bother to add pH to the mash because I had an ounce and a half of dehusked Carafa III malt, but that may not have been enough to lower the pH). Anyway, three points low isn't a big deal, but seeing that mash-outs are supposed to increase your efficiency it's something I took note of.

I chilled down to about 64°F, oxygenated for sixty seconds with pure O2 and pitched the yeast slurry from our Novemberfest beer (WLP 320 yeast). Here's the awesome part: I got done around 4pm and by the time we got home from dinner at 10pm fermentation had already started!

So that was our brew day. I moved our Novemberfest beer (which I kegged this past Monday) to the garage fridge so it's now officially cold-conditioning. Oh, and speaking of Novemberfest, it's officially Nov. 13th, so if you're in the Chicago area and want to stop by just let me know and I'll hook you up with the details. Cheers!

* Technically, this isn't the first time I used pure oxygen. I borrowed a buddy's O2 setup and did an experiment with this year's Hoar Frost Oktoberfest, using pure oxygen for the 6.5 gallon carboy and aerating one 3-gallon carboy using the basic "shake the hell out of the carboy" method and the other with olive oil. They all finished at the same gravity but the olive oil sample had hints of acetaldehyde (which I also picked up in our Bear's Cage Schwarzbier which was aerated only with olive oil) which is what led me to invest in my own O2 setup.

Thinking about mashing

2010-10-22T23:12:00.000-05:00

Leah and I brew a lot of lagers (our first major investment, long before going all-grain, was a chest freezer and external thermostat) so my buddy Michael, who heads up our homebrew club's competition team, asked me to talk to the team about lagering. Now, we've made a lot of tasty lagers--including two that have won awards--but I'm not an expert. In fact, our lagering process has evolved over time so I don't really even have a specific method to champion. So I decided to turn to a book I read a long time ago; a quite technical book that I didn't even really understand when I first read it: Greg Noonan's New Brewing Lager Beer.

Re-reading it really got me thinking about mashing... To me, the primary reason to brew lagers is to let the malt shine. After all, if you're just going to make a hop bomb why go through all the effort of lagering? I think most ale brewers don't give much thought to mashing other than the temperature of their infusion because it's just not as important as the hop schedule or the yeast used. But if you're brewing a nice, clean lager, the depth of your malt character is the difference between a so-so beer and an incredible one.

Now I've occasionally employed protein rests and decoctions, but honestly I never really thought that much about them. I just knew that they're traditional, and some people swear by them while others think they're pointless with modern, modified malts. The specific mash schedules I've followed (usually either decocting from protein rest to saccharification rest or decocting from sacc rest to mash-out) were chosen because 1.) somebody said it worked for them and 2.) it wasn't too labor-intensive. But lately I've defaulted to simple infusion mashes because most American breweries do them and I figure if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me. Is it though?

Re-reading Noonan reminded me of one fact: a single saccharification rest around 152°F is a compromise. So is a rest at 148°F or 156°F for that matter. Beta amylase, which breaks down starches to highly-fermentable maltose, works best between 131 and 150°F. Alpha amylase, which also converts starches to maltose but creates unfermentable dextrins (more complex sugars that make malty beers taste malty) in the process, works best between 154 and 162°F. Notice how those two don't overlap? Yeah, when you do a single infusion mash at 153°F (something I do all the time) neither enzyme is in its happy zone.

Anyway, lots of people think the only advantage of a decoction is the boiling, which causes Maillard reactions. However, when you decoct, you step mash, and when you step mash, you're resting at different temperatures and getting more out of your enzymes. And when you decoct, you're taking parts of your rest through various temperatures repeatedly, thereby going through optimal temps for various enzymes at least twice. The end result, according to some, is a fuller maltiness. Maybe you could draw an analogy to adding hops throughout the boil rather than at once?

Now, there are traditional double and triple decoctions, with a double doing protein and sacc rests and a triple doing an acid rest in addition to protein and sacc rests. However, in each of those they still employ one sacc rest that strikes a balance between beta amylase and alpha amylase. However, both Noonan and David Miller mention an alternative double decoction with rests at 131°F and 158°F. The first rest acts as both a protein rest AND a beta amylase rest while the latter is optimal for alpha amylase. In fact, Miller recommends such a schedule--stepping with a hot water infusion rather than a decoction--for Pilsners. Seems like a logical way to go to me.

Tomorrow we'll be brewing our Christmas beer, which once again will be a Vanilla Doppelsticke. I'm thinking of going with a 131°F/158°F step mash. This winter I'm thinking of brewing a Munich Dunkel with 100% Munich malt and doing a double decoction just to see what kind of malt character I can get out of it. Who knows... maybe I'll find it's not worth the trouble. But you never know until you try!

Brew day: Great Storm Novemberfest

2010-10-05T22:17:00.005-05:00

As I discussed last week, I decided that for this year's Novemberfest party (Nov. 13th for those of you in the Chicago area) I would create and brew a new style. What I came up with is sort of a light-colored Sticke Altbier with 25% rye. I'm pretty excited to see how it turns out.

I brewed my creation on Saturday. Leah and I had to check out a school fair in the morning (yes, Dorrie will be starting Kindergarten next year) so, since I would be getting a late start, I decided to only brew five gallons. I also decided to go with a simple infusion mash.

I mashed in around 12:30 and noticed I seemed to have a lot of water in the mash tun for only five gallons. I later figured out why... I measure how much liquid I have in my keggle by measuring the distance from the top of the keggle to the top of the liquid. However, I have two different keggles that were cut differently, so the numbers are actually off a little between the two. I accidentally used the wrong number, which meant instead of 1.5 quarts per pound of grain I intended to use, I was actually a little over 1.7 quarter per pound. (On a side note, I usually use 1.25 but with 25% rye I wanted to avoid a stuck sparge; a pound of rice hulls helped too.) I also added 1/4 tsp. acid blend since I didn't have any dark malts.

I was afraid I would end up with poor efficiency since the enzymes would be diluted. I also got impatient and started sparging after only 45 minutes (which is pretty typical for me when using a 1.25 qt./lb. ratio, but a bit short even for 1.5) which wouldn't seem to help things. I recirculated from 1:20-1:30 and collected 6.25 gallons of wort between 1:30 and 2:30. After a 1:25 boil, I ended up with five gallons at a gravity of 1069, three points above my target--so I guess my efficiency wasn't so bad after all. After chilling to 70°F and adding a 1/2-gallon starter of WLP 320, my gravity was diluted to 1066; perfect!

So overall, a quick, relatively non-eventful brew day. I also had the pleasure of being joined by my new neighbor Gustavo, who's interested in learning how to brew. Gustavo's into Belgian beer, so I might use that as an excuse to brew my Worst Case Scenario again. Oh, and as you can see below, despite the chilly October temperatures Dorrie and Jonas were more than happy to help clean the mash tun:

And on the Seventh Day, there was a Great Storm

2010-10-01T22:00:00.002-05:00

So when I last posted, I was contemplating a new style of beer for our Novemberfest party. I threw out a couple of ideas, and some commenters had some great ideas as well. In the end, I've decided to go with what I guess I could call a Chicago-style Altbier.

The initial idea I floated in my post was: "Grain bill of 55% pilsner, 25% rye malt, 15% Munich, 5% carapils. Starting gravity around 1048. Around 35 IBU's. Fermented with WLP 029 (German ale-Kölsch yeast)." After some consideration, I decided to change that up a little bit. I decided, in true Festbier style, I should raise the gravity a bit. I suppose if my first idea was based on an Altbier, this one would be based on a Sticke. And of course, if I'm going to jack up the malt I have to jack up the hops as well. Finally, since Uerige dry-hops their Sticke, I figure I'll dry-hop this one too.

So what's the end result? My Great Storm Novemberfest, named after the Great Lakes Storm of November 1913 (I dropped the "Lakes" so it wouldn't sound like something from Great Lakes Brewing Company, which coincidentally has a beer--Edmund Fitzgerald Porter--which is named after a boat shipwrecked in a similar storm). I'll be brewing it up tomorrow, but for now here's my recipe:

7 lb. Pilsner malt (50%)
3.25 lb. Rye malt (23%)
3 lb. Dark Munich (10L) (22%)
0.65 lb. Carapils (5%)
1.9 oz. Horizon hops (12% AA) (67 IBU)
Dry hop to taste
WLP 320 (American Hefe) yeast

I've used WLP 320 with great success with Alts; I generally filter it but this time I'm going to go Kellerbier-style. You know, the funny thing is looking over the recipe now it really looks like a German version of an IPA, but in my head that's not my intention at all. Of course, some consider Altbier to be a German IPA anyway, so I guess it's not that surprising.

So anyway, that's what's on deck for tomorrow. And then on to Novemberfest!

On creationism...

2010-08-19T07:31:00.000-05:00

No, I'm not talking about creationism in the theological sense. I'm talking about creating a new beer style! So here's the deal...

Every year we brew three beers for Novemberfest, and one of them is an Oktoberfest/Märzen style. Well, it occurred to me that since the party is called Novemberfest, not Oktoberfest, we should come up with a unique style to declare the official beer of Novemberfest (a Spätjahren--"late year" or autumn beer--if you want an analog for Märzen). Now I've already brewed an Oktoberfest, as well as a Schwarzbier, for this year's Novemberfest. Initially I was planning on making the third beer an Altbier, and then I thought of making it a Dampfbier (since it's a little more of an easy-drinker than the Alt). But now my inclination is to go brew the inaugural Novemberfest/Spätjahren. So what should it be?

Here are my initial requirements:

1. It must be German-inspired in its ingredients, techniques, etc.

2. It must be relatively light (i.e. it won't scare off casual beer drinkers).

3. It must be an ale (I might have time to brew one more lager before Novemberfest but I'd prefer to have the flexibility of brewing an ale).

So there we have it. Somewhat restrictive, but not overly so, right? Well, I have a few ideas up my sleeve. I figured I'd post them now and see if anybody has other ideas (or suggestions regarding mine). Here are the two I'm considering right now:

Prototype #1: Grain bill of 90% pilsner, 5% Munich, 5% wheat. Starting gravity around 1065. Around 30 IBU's. Fermented with WLP 380 (American Hefe yeast). The idea here is to make a beer that's part Kölsch (the ratio in the grain bill and the fact that it's an ale), part Maibock (the higher gravity and the more aggressive hopping), and part Kellerbier (the American Hefe yeast, which was originally an Alt yeast and is fairly similar to a Kölsch yeast but doesn't flocculate well, thus giving it a cloudy appearance).

Prototype #2: Grain bill of 55% pilsner, 25% rye malt, 15% Munich, 5% carapils. Starting gravity around 1048. Around 35 IBU's. Fermented with WLP 029 (German ale-Kölsch yeast). The idea here is to basically make a light version of a Düsseldorf Altbier but adding rye to add some complexity to the malt profile. I had an awesome Belgian tripel brewed with rye at the now-defunct Mattlingly brewpub in St. Louis that opened my eyes to what rye can do in lighter ales so I think this could be quite interesting. My only concern is that it might be too hoppy for many people there.

Thoughts? Warnings? Anybody else have an idea for this new style?

P.S. I stole the above image from these guys. Just figured I should give credit where credit is due.

So, about that kid...

2010-08-14T10:42:00.008-05:00

Yeah, I've alluded to it a few times now, but I figure I should formally announce that Leah and I welcomed our third child, Lillian Margaret, into the world on July 20th. She was another big baby, weighing in at 10 lbs. even (which means that Leah has now had TWO babies weighing ten pounds or more via natural birth; not bad for a chick who's only 5'2"). As you can see, Lily's doing just fine:

Lily's arrival meant that it was finally time to crack open the baby beer (which I hope to review soon). We brought it along to the hospital and cracked it open that evening... Needless to say Leah's excited to be back among the non-teetotalers again. On a side note, we've still got a few bottles left so if you're in the neighborhood feel free to stop by and grab one!

Finally, I'll note that the new addition hasn't slowed down our brewing. As has been documented on this blog, we've already had two brew days during the first three weeks of Lily's life. I would be remiss if I didn't post a picture of Leah and Lily during Lily's first brew day:

Something tells me there will be plenty more where that came from. (Brew days, that is. Not kids. I think we've got our hands full as it is!)

Brew day: Bear's Cage Schwarzbier

2010-08-08T08:30:00.004-05:00

So I've sort of gotten back-logged with stuff I have to post about (like how our third child--Lillian Margaret--was born just a couple weeks ago!), and I'll get to them eventually, but the brews keep a'comin' so for now I'm just going to post about yesterday's brew day.

Today it was time to brew a Schwarzbier, a style I love but haven't brewed in four years. It was a fairly non-eventful brew day until we got to the chilling. My buddy Kevin came over to help out and learn about the brewing process, and we mashed in by 10am. We were a little low on our target mash-in temp (149°F instead of 152°F) thanks at least in part to Dorrie helping stir/add the grains (as you can see below), which meant the process took a little longer than usual. I was above my target temp in the kettle before we transferred to the mash tun, so from now on I'm going to start measuring my temp in the tun before I add the grains so I can get an idea of how much heat I'm losing in the transfer.

We mashed from 10am-11am; recirculated until around 11:20, and then did a nice long sparge until 1pm. I should note that, for this recipe, I decided to go a little crazy with the Carafa III (a whole pound for ten gallons) but kind of wussed out the night before so I decided to do half of the pound as a cap at the end of the mash. We collected a little over 12 gallons at 1048 (one point above my target), and after a 75-minute boil, it was time to chill.

That's when we ran into more problems. Armed with ten gallons of 35°F water, two blocks of ice and a new pump (you can read about my last chilling adventures here) I was confident we would be able to chill down to 50°F. I was wrong. We started running out of water after chilling only about three gallons, and because I couldn't find my icepick the new hose water we were adding was not getting much cooler. Long story short, we only chilled to around 65°F (something I could have done using hose water all along).

Then, as I am wont to do, I compounded the problem. How, you ask? Well, I had a family party to get to and I figured I'd throw the carboys in my chest freezer, drop the temp to around freezing so they cool more quickly, and then reset the thermostat to 50°F and give it overnight to hit my target temp. Well, at the last second I figured I'd speed things up even more my dropping it to 25°F. After all, I was only going to be gone a few hours and the temps couldn't drop THAT quickly, could they? Well, I think we all know the answer is yes. They were near 40°F when I checked last night.

So I set the thermostat back to 50°F before I went to bed and, when I woke up this morning, the temp had risen . . . one degree. Great. Well, I pulled the carboys out of the chest freezer all together and surprisingly they came up to 50°F in just a couple of hours. Finally, SOMETHING going right. So I just pitched the yeast slurry from our Oktoberfest, which led to one final curious observation: the slurry clumped up like Spätzle when I poured it into the wort. The yeast had been in the chest freezer overnight too so it should have been at or around 50°F, so I don't think it was temperature shock, but who knows. We'll see what happens.

So that was that. Thanks again to my buddy Kevin for his help. We're now 2/3rds done with our fall brewing trifecta! (Oktoberfest and Schwarzbier down; one last Novemberfest beer to go.)

Brew day: Village Green Mild Ale

2010-08-01T08:19:00.004-05:00

As the calendar turns to August, I'm reminded that my Maibock (Mai being German for "May") is not long for this world. And though we're cranking out the brews right now, they're all for various events in the fall (as I described in this post). With our other two beers on tap right now being our Big Mistake (a soured rye beer with raspberries that was originally supposed to be our Roggenbier) and our 1908 Old Ale, we need a session beer to carry us over until around November.

With our chest freezer currently filled to capacity with lager, I needed something that could ferment at ambient temps (low 70's right now). I also wanted something quick. That was when it occurred to me: why not try something British? My first thought was an ordinary bitter, but I had recently enjoyed an awesome dark mild at Flossmoor Station so I've had that on my radar for a while. Doing a little research, I discovered there's a substyle of mild called "AK mild" that's essentially a cross between a bitter and a mild. If one relies on the BJCP guidelines, a beer overlapping the mild and bitter styles would have the following specs:

O.G.: 1.032-1.038
IBU's: 25
SRM: 12-14

So now I had something to start with. When it came to developing the grain bill, I was fairly clueless. The German brewing tradition rarely uses crystal malts, so I don't have much of an intuitive sense on how to work them into a beer. Fortunately my buddy Brian over at the Daily Ikura is as passionate about British beer as I am about German beer. He's never brewed a mild but for his bitters he generally goes with around 6% crystal, a mild toasted malt, and a combination of either a medium or dark roasted malt such as Victory.

Next I consulted Ron Pattinson's "Shut Up About Barclay Perkins" blog. If you've never checked out his blog, you should. Ron's an English beer researcher who's got more historical figures on beer than you could ever use. Anyway, I found some grain bills for milds brewed in the 1950s and discovered they used invert sugar for milds. Subsequent googling found various British beer geeks lamenting that American brewers don't understand the importance of sugar in milds. Okay, okay, I'll add the damn sugar!

Anyway, when all was said and done I came up with the following fermentables:
5.25 lb. Maris Otter pale malt
0.5 lb. Crystal 120L
0.25 lb. Special Roast
0.65 lb. invert sugar

That only gets you up to around 10 SRM but I want to keep it light (I always like to have one brew on tap for people who are afraid of dark beers). I also decided to back the hops down to 20 IBU's instead of 25 because in the end I wanted it to be more mild than bitter. So I finally had my recipe and was ready to rock!

The brew day itself was fairly straightforward (and pretty quick given that I was only dealing with six pounds of malt). I mashed in at 149°F at 10:10am (with Dorrie helping me stir the mash as I added the grain), began to recirculate at 11:10am, sparged until 12:30, and boiled until 1:30. I added 1/4 tsp. acid blend to the mash to keep the pH down, I added the invert sugar at 15 minutes, and I added Irish moss right after the sugar. I chilled down to around 71°F.

Only a couple of minor issues... First, my gravity came in at 1045 instead of the targeted 1038; it's an imperial mild! Honestly, I'm not sure what happened. Perhaps it's because I sparged so slowly with only six pounds of malt? Anyway, I didn't discover this until after I had already chilled (I actually just bought a refractometer so I could monitor such things--you can see Jonas below pretending that an old yeast vial is a refractometer--but I completely forgot about it during the brew day), and I thought about diluting the wort to 1038 but then my IBU's would be diluted as well so I decided to just let it be. The second issue is that I pitched a Wyeast smack pack and apparently I didn't actually smack it properly because I discovered the yeast nutrient pouch was still intact when I added the yeast. As such, I underpitched and as of 9:45am the next morning fermentation is just getting started.

So it may not technically be a mild, and it's certainly not a bitter. But hopefully our Village Green Mild will be good enough to get me through the fall!

Brew day: Hoar Frost Oktoberfest

2010-07-17T13:04:00.004-05:00

As I noted a couple weeks ago, we've got lots of beer to brew and the baby will be here any day so I decided to knock out our Hoar Frost Oktoberfest today. Sure, it's a little warm (94°F with a dewpoint of 67°F as I type this) but you gotta do what you gotta do.

Last year I decided to brew a more traditional Oktoberfest, or more specifically the kind that's generally found in Germany, which is basically a slightly ramped-up Munich Helles. I went half Pilsner malt and half Munich malt and it turned out to be a very tasty brew. This year I decided to give it a little more of an Export feel (exported O-fests are what we tend to find here in the States; they're slightly darker and have a slight nutty/toasty quality to them) so I added a touch of dehusked Carafa III malt. And because it's hot and I'm lazy I did a simple infusion mash rather than a decoction.

I mashed in at 9:45, overshooting my target temp of 154°F by a degree. Around 10:30 I started to recirculate but noticed an awful lot of grain coming through. That's when I realized my damn manifold had disconnected. (This is a too-frequent problem with my mash tun, but I've yet to figure out a good way to permanently connect the manifold to the tube since the manifold is PVC and thus I can't just use a hose clamp.) Anyway, I had to dump out half the mash, reconnect the manifold, and then dump the mash back in. Only set me back about ten minutes, but still a pain in the neck.

Anyway, by 10:40 I was recirculating. I started collecting my first runnings at 10:55 and had collected 12.5 gallons by 12:10. I boiled from 12:10 to 1:40. I ended up at 1055, two degrees short of my target gravity. I think this was due to a low evaporation rate because of the heat and humidity, which meant I did collect a higher volume than expected. (Quick math tells me that, had I collected my calculated 10.5 gallons instead of the 11 I actually got, I would've had an O.G. of 1058). No biggie.

Now, things did get a bit interesting when it came time to cool the wort. As I mentioned above, it was hot today, and I finally came up with an idea to cool things down to lager temps: I bought a submersible aquarium pump. Specifically, I bought this pump (pictured to the right). Then, the night before, I threw a carboy full of water into my garage fridge and filled three buckets with water and threw them in the freezer. When it came time to chill, I threw the water and chunks of ice into a cooler and pumped water from there to my plate chiller. Seems perfect, right?

Well, there was one slight problem: the pump wasn't as strong as advertised. It claims 258 gallons/hour, but I did a test afterward and was only getting 180. That was enough of a difference from my garden hose output that I had to slow my wort outflow to a trickle and even then only got down to around 62°F. As such, 1.) I'm going to take the pump back and (hopefully, if they'll let me) exchange it for this one, which claims 1315 GPH and comes recommended by another guy in my homebrew club; and 2.) for now I had to throw my carboys into my chest freezer set to 30°F so I can drop it to around 50°F before pitching.

Anyway, if all goes well I'll pitch a yeast slurry courtesy of Doug and Tracy at Metropolitan Brewing before I go to bed and we'll be rockin' in the morning!

Hose info

2010-07-17T12:41:00.007-05:00

Anybody out there reading this, you can file this post under "stuff that is not remotely interesting to anybody else but Russ needs to put on the record for future reference."

Anyway, I'm going to be replacing the hoses in my brewery so I figured I'd record the dimensions so I know exactly how much to order in the future. Here it goes...

3/8" thermoplastic tubing:

Kettle to pump: 3'
Pump to valve: 1.5'
Valve to chiller: 3.25'
Valve to HLT: 6.25'
Total: 14'

3/8" clear high-temp tubing:

Chiller to carboy: 3'
HTL to mash tun: 2'
Total: 5'

That is all.

Bottling the baby beer: a family affair

2010-07-11T22:32:00.005-05:00

So, a couple weeks ago we brewed our baby beer (by which I mean the beer we'll be passing out when our third child is born, not a beer FOR babies). Yesterday--two weeks and a day before the due date--we bottled five gallons and kegged the other five. The traditional Hefeweizen finished at 1014 and tasted surprisingly clean; there was some clove and just a little banana, but frankly next time I might ferment at 66°F instead of 64°F just to get a little more of that classic Hefe character.

Since we've been kegging for over four years now, I tend to forget what a pain bottling is. Fortunately, I had a little help. Initially, Jonas helped me load bottles into the dishwasher:

Then, after the bottles were cleaned, Dorrie helped sanitize them before I filled and capped them:

All in all, we ended up with 49 12-oz. bottles and one 750 mL bomber (which we'll take to the hospital with us to celebrate). Now we just have to wait for the baby to make her grand entrance!

FotoFriday #24

2010-07-09T11:18:00.000-05:00

Taking a hydrometer reading.

You can read it in the Sunday papers

2010-07-02T15:29:00.003-05:00

Okay, so technically it's not a Sunday paper, but lots of people read the Chicagoist, right? Sure they do! And the Chicagoist just happens to have named Metropolitan's I-Beam Alt their beer of the week. I even get a shout-out (though I'm pretty sure the only way I qualify as a "master of the Altbier style" is if you define "master" as anybody who's actually been to Düsseldorf). Anyway, you can check out the full story here. Thanks to everybody who's managed to track down a pint or two... There are still a few kegs floating around the city, and hopefully it'll be back soon!

The plan keeps coming up again...

2010-06-30T15:49:00.003-05:00

Late summer is always a bear for us when it comes to brewing. See, there are three different events that we need to plan for: my church's Oktoberfest party, my homebrew club's Oktoberfest party, and our Novemberfest party. We generally bring one keg to each of the Oktoberfests and have three kegs for Novemberfest, so that's 25 gallons of beer right there. Since we can brew 10-gallon batches, that translates to three brew days with three different styles, two of which need to be ready by late September. This year we're planning on brewing an Oktoberfest/Märzen, an Altbier and a Schwarzbier.

Now the tricky thing with planning is making sure we have adequate space for everything. You figure the lagers will need at least three weeks in our temperature-controlled chest freezer for primary fermentation, and the Alt will need around two. After primary, we have a fridge in the garage we can use for lagering, but that only holds three kegs. Of course, if the chest freezer is being used for primary fermentation, that means we can only lager three kegs at any given time. Therein lies the problem.

There's also the issue of timing. If I need at least three weeks in primary for each lager, that means the brews have to be staggered three weeks. And if it takes roughly six weeks for the lager to be ready overall, that means nine weeks before two batches of lager can be ready. Looking at my calendar, that means I have to brew the first beer by August 1st for everything to be ready by the 25th. Oh, and we have a baby due six days before August 1. Hmm...

For now I think the easiest solution is to try and brew our first beer (probably our Oktoberfest) sometime in early July. Then it gives us a little more flexibility for a brew day in August. And then we can brew the Altbier in late September, thus avoiding any issues with refrigerator space. This does run the risk of Leah going into labor during a brew day, but if that happens I guess we roll with the punches.

In the meantime, it looks like we'll have to put our Rauchbier on the backburner (my buddy Mark and I want to try smoking our own malt in an effort to duplicate Schlenkerla's Fastenbier). Nonetheless, between the brewing and the baby it looks like late summer/early fall is going to be rather busy!

Brew day: Step Leader ("It's a Girl!") Hefeweizen

2010-06-27T09:18:00.007-05:00

We're now down to one month before Leah's due date. For each of our first two kids we brewed a beer to hand out instead of cigars (a Kölsch for Dorrie and a Dunkelweizen for Jonas). Since baby #3 will be arriving in the dog days of summer, we figured a traditional Hefeweizen would be a good call this time around. And since, as I just noted, we're now a mere month from the due date, I had to brew this weekend to have it ready by then. So I headed out to the garage despite a high temperature of 91°F to brew some Weizen!

Given the heat and the fact that I had been out rather late the night before (I trekked up to the North Side to see Ween at the Aragon) I decided to go with a simple infusion mash rather than a decoction. It actually ended up being one of my most efficient brew days ever. I mashed in at 152°F (hitting my target exactly!) at noon; I went with 1.5 qts./gal. instead of my usual 1.25 to avoid stuck sparge issues (my grain bill was 54% wheat and I didn't have any rice hulls on hand) and added 1/2 tsp. acid blend to keep the pH down. I started recirculating by 12:45; collected wort from 1:00-2:30; boiled from 2:30 to 3:45 and chilled down to 70°F by about 4pm. I pitched a 1000mL starter of WLP 340 (Hefe IV) yeast. I finished at 1052, one point above my target. The carboys are now sitting in my chest freezer at 64°F.

The only issue I ran into was that one of my hose clamps broke while pumping from the kettle to the plate chiller. I was able to improvise but I will now be sure to keep an extra clamp or two on hand just in case.

While the brew day went well, I did have one slight beer emergency... I tried our Roggenbier which had been conditioning at room temperature for the past month and, um, apparently we shouldn't have left it at room temperature for a month. Yup, sour. The good thing is it's a clean sourness and actually not too bad. My thought is to add some raspberry extract and make it sort of like a fruit lambic. I'll bring it to our next HOPS! meeting and see what people think.

Anyway, lots more brewing coming up as we get into Oktoberfest season, but for now we've got to get ready for another addition to the family. Pray for us; we'll need it.

Beerfly Alleyfight Revisited

2010-06-19T10:27:00.005-05:00

Last year I kept saying I would do a recap from Beerfly Alleyfight but sadly I never got around to it (and my sincere apologies to Naomi Ashley, the wonderful singer-songwriter we were paired with that year who performed an awesome song inspired by our Somethin' Else India Black Ale). So this year it may have taken me a little over a month to post about the 2010 Alleyfight, but compared to last year that's practically realtime!

Anyway, as I posted about a while back, we brewed a Cocoa Puffs-infused Dunkelweizen we called Kokopüffenweizen. We paired that with mini Swabian soft pretzels encrusted with Cocoa Puffs crumbs and bacon bits for which I came up with the name Eine Kleine Schwabische Schweinenkokopüffenbrezeln. The day before the Alleyfight I tasted the beer and was disappointed to find that it wasn't very Cocoa Puffy. This surprised me because the last beer we brewed with Cocoa Puffs, our Cocoa Puffs Stout, had a very pronounced Cocoa Puffs flavor so I cut down on it this time, especially considering that this was lower gravity than our last offering. However, I suspect that the somewhat drier quality of the Dunkelweizen combined with the phenols and esters meant more flavors competing with the Cocoa Puffs while the sweet, roasty flavors of the export stout enhanced the flavors. Bottom line was it needed a kick, so the night before I threw a couple cups of Cocoa Puffs in a muslin bag and I dry-puffed it.

The next day, I still found both the aroma and flavor to be subtle. I mainly picked up the Cocoa Puffs in the finish. Reviews from folks at the Alleyfight were mixed in terms of the Cocoa Puffs contribution... some said it was way pronounced while others said they couldn't notice it at all. This was entirely consistent with my experience with both vanilla and peat-smoked malt; I guess different people have different taste thresholds. Overall, however, the beer got very positive reviews, and the keg kicked fairly early. I also thought it paired well with the pretzels. Obviously wheat beers and pretzels go hand in hand, and both the Cocoa Puffs and bacon bits were subtle enough to give a little sweet and salty complexity without being overpowering. I was definitely proud of our offering overall (even if the pretzels took WAY longer to make than I anticipated).

Now, we had a good idea of how our pairing would turn out. The real mystery of Beerfly Alleyfight is the art. The artists tend to be pretty tight-lipped about their creation, so we waited in anticipation for Laura Grey and Laura McKenzie (who just happened to draw the last performance of the Alleyfight) to take the stage. As a little background, Laura and Laura recently concluded a run of their original show, "The Laura on Laura Comeback Tour." It was about two teachers who decide to throw off the shackles of the classroom and follow their dream of becoming rock stars. It's absolutely hilarious but kind of hard to explain so just go to their Youtube feed here and check out some of their performances.

Anyway, they reprised their roles as Laura and Laura the teachers (as opposed to Laura and Laura the actresses) for Beerfly Alleyfight and performed an absolutely hilarious song about--oddly enough--Kokopüffenweizen. Much like their show, it's hard for me to explain the song and do it justice, and unfortunately I'm not sure if anybody videotaped it. But to give you an idea of what was going on, check out this pic of their performance:

As soon as they were done I knew they had the best art award wrapped up. It was funny. It took a lot of talent. It totally integrated both the spirit of the event and our beer specifically. And it had a vibraslap.

Sure enough, when it came time to announce the winners, Laura and Laura took home the Best Art trophy! Given how great their performance was, the announcement was about as surprising as hearing that Mayor Daley has won reelection. We didn't win best beer, which didn't surprise me given how many other great beers there were. But there was one award left... best overall pairing of beer, food and art. Considering how well Laura and Laura integrated our beer into their performance, and also how well-received our beer was, I honestly believed this was our chance to finally win a Beerfly Alleyfight. And when they announced the winner, it was...

...not us. Oh well. We will remain the Susan Lucci of Beerfly Alleyfight. But that's fine because we had yet another great time with great food, great beer, and great art. I had lots of friends involved and I won't bother to mention them all because I'm sure I'll leave people out, but I will give a shout-out to fellow blogger Brian Mitchell of the Daily Ikura and his wife Euni. Brian brewed a slightly soured wheat that was a wonderful balance of complexity and drinkability, and he and Euni whipped up some Vietnamese subs that Leah is still raving about.

So thanks again to Laura Grey and Laura McKenzie for the time and effort they put into the Alleyfight. That's Laura Grey to the left of Leah and Laura McKenzie to the right of me with the coveted Alleyfight trophy. Sadly (for us Chicagoans, at least) Laura Grey recently moved to New York so I'm not sure if she'll be performing anything around here any time soon, but if you ever get a chance to see anything involving either Laura, DO IT. And then afterward, buy them a beer and ask them to write a song about it. But you might have to provide your own vibraslap.

HAWKS WIN!!!!!

2010-06-10T00:07:00.004-05:00

Back in September of '06, Leah and I brewed our S.O.B. ESB, named in honor of then-Chicago Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz. Who would have imagined that just under four years later the very same Chicago Blackhawks would hoist Lord Stanley's Cup???!!!

In honor of this momentous occasion (49 years in the making), I'm planning on brewing a Stanley Cup Coffee Stout. Here's the trick... I'd like to use espresso beans from roasters in each of the cities the Blackhawks went through in their quest for the Cup (for non-hockey fans, that would happen to be Nashville, Vancouver, San Jose and Philadelphia). Since it's really about the symbolism, a handful of beans sent in a business-sized envelope will do. Hell, they don't even have to be espresso beans. Anyway, I'll be in Philly next week so I think I'll be able to take care of that city myself, but if anyone in Nashville, Vancouver or San Jose happens to read this (and yes, I realize this is a long shot) and is willing to help me out, shoot me an email at rchibe @t gmail d0t c0m.

In the meantime, I'd just like to state one more time... THE BLACKHAWKS ARE STANLEY CUP CHAMPIONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

FotoFriday #23

2010-06-04T13:45:00.002-05:00

Okay, this one requires an explanation. When Leah and I add Cocoa Puffs to beer (in this case, our Kokopüffenweizen) we mix the Cocoa Puffs with water and bring it to a boil, which creates a pudding-like mixture. After adding the mixture to the secondary, Jonas discovered there was a little bit left in the sauce pan. As you can see, he really liked it.

"And if you've noticed, I ain't said sh*t for a couple minutes now."

2010-05-30T19:43:00.003-05:00

Getting housekeeping done is so much easier while watching Fear of a Black Hat (from which the subject of this post is taken). If you've never seen it, rent it NOW. Anyway, a few housekeeping notes. First, we recently ran out of our Mr. Kim's Secret Microbrew and replaced it with our 59° Fahrenheit Maibock. Prior to tapping the Maibock, our kegerator was actually without a German-style beer for the first time ever. Leah took a picture to document the event:

Anyway, a few beer-related tasks I've knocked out over the past few days that I should note for my records... First, I kegged the Roggenbier on Thursday night. The gravity at that point was 1015. I let it sit a couple days and then primed it today with 1/2 cup corn sugar. Based on the fizz when I opened the keg today, I'm going to guess that it dropped two more points (really scientific, right?) so I'm calling the final gravity 1013. The Roggenbier is conditioning in the Nahasapeemapetilon keg.

Also, I cleaned three kegs today. The Hutz, Frink and Wiggum kegs are all nice and shiny; they'll just need a quick rinse with some sanitizer and they'll be ready to go.

Finally, I have some exciting news from Beerfly Alleyfight (though, sadly, it does not involve Leah and I winning) but I want to get some more cleaning done so that will have to wait for another day. Yeah, I'm a tease...

Doppelbock, American-style

2010-05-17T21:51:00.003-05:00

Since I'm leading a tasting on Doppelbocks and Eisbocks tomorrow night, I'm using it as an excuse to drink--and review--some beers and I figured I'd post my notes here. You can get the full back story, along with my review of Celebrator Doppelbock, in this post from last week. But for now, let's get to the next beer!

Tonight I'm enjoying a Bell's Consecrator Doppelbock. Americans tend to do things bigger, and Doppelbock is no exception. At 8% ABV this one's actually kind of tame by U.S. standards, though that's bigger than just about any German Doppelbock you can find here in the States.

It pours a deep copper-red hue, brilliantly clear, with a creamy tan head that dissipates quicker than I would expect.

The aroma of the Consecrator is fairly typical of a Doppelbock: brown sugar sweetness with just a hint of DMS (cooked veggies). I'm also picking up a very slight note of of grassy noble hops.

Taking a sip you get pretty much all malt. It's a complex maltiness, with that characteristic Munich malt flavor (bready sweet as opposed to sugary sweet). You've got hints of honey and molasses as well, and just a little nutty toastiness. There's no real hop flavor, though you get a nice bitterness in the end that keeps the beer from being cloying. For 8% ABV, the alcohol is very well masked.

I've got to be honest, I picked this one up so I could highlight American-style Bocks, which in two words are big and boozy. However, despite the elevated ABV this one is actually pretty true to style. It's not as balanced as the Celebrator, nor does it have the chocolatey notes of Weihenstephaner Korbinian, but it's got a nice malty depth to it. Kudos to Bell's for this one!

Brew day: Debris Cloud Roggenbier

2010-05-15T11:53:00.004-05:00

When we first started brewing six years ago, we wanted to focus on German beers but didn't have the capability to lager so I did a lot of reading up on German ales. Our first beer was a Hefeweizen, and we quickly followed with Kölsch, Altbier and Weizenbock. However, our desire to try new styles led us to discover some of the lesser-known German ales. We brewed a Berliner Weisse and then a Leipziger Gose--two soured wheat styles. Then we bought a chest freezer and started lagering, and our German ale quest was diverted...

...until today. Two German ales that have been on our radar for a while are Roggenbier and Dampfbier. Both are variations on the Hefeweizen: the Roggenbier substitutes rye for wheat and Dampfbier just sticks with barley malt, but all three share the unique Bavarian Weizen yeast. Anyway, I like to keep one light beer and one dark beer on tap at all times, and we're good on light beer right now (we're about to put our 59°F Maibock on tap), so I decided to go with the darker Roggenbier over the lighter Dampfbier at this time.

After two aborted brew days (due to some problems over at Midwest Homebrew Supplies my malted rye didn't get here in time to brew two Saturdays ago--when I meant to brew--and then last Saturday I couldn't get into my garage, but that's another story...) I finally fired up the ol' brew kettle this morning. I was worried about a stuck mash (rye is notoriously prone to stuck sparges and it would comprise of 50% of my grain bill) so I opted to both add rice hulls AND do a beta-glucan rest at 90-95°F and then employ a single decoction to bring the malt up to my sacc rest.

I ended up mashing in a little high (right around 100°F), let that rest for 15 minutes, and then drew off just under three gallons for the decoction. I brought the decoction up to 156°F, rested at that temp for 15 minutes (during which time it dropped down to 146°F) and then brought it up to boil for 15 more minutes. At that point I returned it to the mash where it reached a temperature of 156°F. That was a bit high (my target was 150°F) so I added 1.5 qt. of water at 63°F. According to BeerSmith, I needed 2 quarts to drop my temp down to 150, but it turned out that the 1.5 quarts dropped it down to 146°F (I should have known better than to trust BeerSmith when it comes to water-temperature adjustments). Fortunately, most of the mash was in the decoction so I doubt I'll have a problem with the mash being too thin.

After letting the mash rest for 45 minutes, I went to recirculate. It was the moment of truth: would the rye prove too much for me? I opened my valve and... nothing. Crap! I checked and the manifold hadn't come detached. I blew through the hose in case something was blocking the flow but still nothing came out. What the hell? I looked at my valve (which is opaque plastic) and noticed there was some grain stuck in there. So I clamped my hose with some pliers, took off the valve, blew the grain out and reconnected everything. The wort started flowing freely. Crisis averted.

Since I had to disturb the mash to check on the manifold connection--and the wort was really muddy-looking--I recirculated for twenty minutes. Once I started to collect wort, I went really slowly at first (only collecting one gallon in the first 25 minutes) but then ramped up quite a bit at the end (collecting FOUR gallons in the last 25 minutes). Maybe that's not the best way to do it because I ended up a little short on my target gravity: 1049 instead of 1052 after a 75-minute boil. I only did one hop addition at 60 minutes and then added Irish moss at 15 minutes. I chilled down to around 65°F and then pitched 1000mL of starter I made yesterday from the yeast slurry from our Kokopüffenweizen. I'm guessing it will take off like gangbusters.

Overall, a pretty efficient brew day. Now to (ugh) mow the lawn...

Mmm... Celebrator Doppelbock

2010-05-11T21:31:00.004-05:00

A week from today is our monthly HOPS! meeting, and I've volunteered to lead this month's tasting. Of course, it wasn't hard to volunteer when the style is Doppelbock and Eisbock. Due to budget constraints, I only bought two bottles each of Weihenstephaner Korbinian (my personal favorite Doppelbock) and Aventinus Eisbock. However, I have extra bottles of our other two exemplars--Ayinger Celebrator and Bell's Consecrator--and in an effort to properly lead the tasting I figure it's my duty to review these two beers. If I'm writing down tasting notes I figure I might as well post them here. So tonight it's Celebrator (and with the Blackhawks playing Game 6 as I type this I hope I have something to celebrate by the night's end).

The beer pours a deep, dark mahogany. If you hold it up to the light you see the beer is brilliantly clear with beautiful ruby highlights. A rather thin tan head rose to the top, though I suspect that's because I was overly cautious with my pour.

While I generally associate Doppelbocks with sweet, bready, malty aromas, this one is surprisingly balanced. You get some sweet molasses and sweet rye but it's complemented by a slight herbal hop aroma as well as a subtle roasted coffee note.

When you take a sip, you get a nice bready malt flavor up front but it's not sugary. As it lingers in your mouth you get some brown sugar sweetness but personally I'm not picking up too much stone fruit which you often get with German malt bombs. The finish is great... much like the aroma the sweetness is balanced beautifully with a noble hop bitterness and a touch of roast malt that is in no way bitter or astringent.

Overall, I think Celebrator is a great example of what makes Doppelbock such an awesome style: at 6.7% ABV, it's no lightweight (particularly by German standards) but yet it's incredibly drinkable. The notable hop and roasted notes render Celebrator somewhat unique for a German Doppelbock. While personally I like a little more depth in the maltiness of my Doppelbock, this is still a wonderful beer. Cheers!

Final analysis: Piper at the Gates Saison (Gluten-Free)

2010-05-02T22:44:00.004-05:00

So roughly five months after brewing my gluten-free Piper at the Gates Saison for my buddy Pete (who happens to be gluten-intolerant), I finally got the damn beer to him! Seemed like an appropriate time to review it as well...

Style: Saison/Sorghum beer. Orig. gravity: 1061. Final gravity: 1014 (est.).
ABV: 6.1%. IBU's: 29.

Appearance: Very frothy, very ample ivory head (as you can see above); persistent at first but dissipating after a few minutes. Appears a cloudy apricot color.

Smell: Very sweet and cider-like. Tart apple and (maybe because it's in my head) apricot, along with an earthy, yeasty background. Slightly estery and spicy once you get past the cider notes.

Taste: Surprisingly bitter up front, with the spiciness coming through right behind it. No real cider-like notes to speak of, despite the aroma. In fact, the flavor is rather dry. You get some nice, herbal hop flavors towards the finish along with some more spices (pepper and coriander) and some yeast bite. There's also a slight soap-like note that I also pick up in some of New Belgium's beers (maybe it's a Belgian yeast thing?). The finish is dry with the orange peel really coming through in the finish. [EDIT: After typing up this review and re-reading my brew day notes I discovered that I forgot the orange peel while brewing. As such, I'm not sure where the orange flavor is coming from but it's there!]

Mouthfeel: This one really has a beer-like body to it. It's quite effervescent, and the bubbles seem a little bigger than in a real (i.e. not gluten-free) beer. Beyond that, however, it doesn't really come off as thin at all.

Overall: This may be my most beer-like gluten-free project to date. Really, the only thing that tips you off to the fact that it's not malt-based is the cider note in the aroma. The heading powder appears to have been perfect for the lack of head issues (though I still have one bottle that was sans powder so I can do a side-by-side comparison). I'd like to taste this along side a Hennepin, but initially my two thoughts are that the hops need to get knocked down a tad and I could bump up the spices a bit (perhaps add the spices I forgot in the brew day?). I'm curious to hear what Pete thinks, though I hope the assertive hops at least make this stand out from the relatively flavorless commercial offerings out there.

Another reason to come to Beerfly Alleyfight

2010-04-29T22:16:00.004-05:00

You know what those are pictured above? They're homemade Bavarian-style mini soft pretzels (or, auf Deutsch, Brezeln) that are encrusted with bacon bits and crushed Cocoa Puffs. Think it sounds good? I promise you it tastes better. Yes, that's what we'll be pairing with our Kokopüffenweizen for this year's Beerfly Alleyfight (May 22nd; more details here).

I used this recipe I found on homebrewtalk.com rather than this other recipe I found because it was faster and I didn't get started until 8pm. It was also the first time I've ever made anything with lye (and I didn't lose any skin in the process!). I actually tried three different methods of mixing the bacon and Cocoa Puffs into the pretzels--the other two featuring the bacon and Puffs inside the dough--but I liked the crunchiness of the crumbs on the outside, plus it made the Cocoa Puffs a little more noticeable. My only complaint is the dough was rather sweet (the recipe I used called for brown sugar). I think next time I'll cut the sugar other than a minimal amount used to get the yeast going. Otherwise I'm thinking these should be ready to rock when the Alleyfight rolls around. If you live in or near Chicago, don't miss it!

Beerfly Alleyfight update

2010-04-25T19:41:00.004-05:00

We're now less than four weeks away from Beerfly Alleyfight (if you don't know what that is, read this post, then go here to buy tickets, then go to Rock Bottom on May 22nd and drink and eat and have fun!). I have a couple of exciting updates regarding the Alleyfight...

First, I found out who Leah and I will be paired with for the Alleyfight: actress/musicians Laura Grey and Laura McKenzie. For all of you, it's exciting because they have a hilarious show out right now called "The Laura on Laura Comeback Tour." I haven't seen it yet but I'm hoping to get there soon (it's every Thursday night for the next month). And I know it's hilarious because they were guests on the Drinking & Writing radio show this month, ~~which you can listen to via podcast here~~; the podcast feed seems to be down right now but I'll let you know when it's back up.

Now, for me personally, working with Laura and Laura should be a blast because Laura Grey and I were actually friends back in high school (huzzah for Downers Grove South! (sorry, "huzzah" is my new favorite word)). I didn't even know she was active in Chicago's theater community until I heard the Drinking & Writing show the other week, and now I find out we'll be working together for the Alleyfight. It's a small world, especially here in Chicago.

Okay, I feel like this post is one giant run-on sentence but since I've read both Faulkner and Pynchon over the past few months I know what a run-on sentence looks like and this post is not a run-on sentence. Pressing on (focus!), here's my update on the beer side of things. I "dry-puffed" our Kokopüffenweizen that we brewed for the Alleyfight. The term isn't totally accurate since I actually crushed four cups of Cocoa Puffs, blended them with 2.5 cups of water, and then boiled the mixture for fifteen minutes before adding it to a carboy and racking on top of the goop. My estimate suggests that 1/2 cup (~19 g) of Cocoa Puffs has a gravity of 1.010-12 in 2.5 cups of water, so our starting gravity should get a bump of about three points. Right now our gravity is down to 1.016, which is just about terminal, and the Weizen aroma is awesome... the perfect blend of estery and phenolic. I also designed the label that you see above; it took me the better part of a day and I'm actually pretty proud of it.

One last brewing note... This past Monday (April 19th) I racked our 59° Fahrenheit Maibock. Holy crap does it taste good. I'll give it a couple weeks to lager but then I'm putting this bad boy on tap even though ideally I should let it lager for a good month. If my notes are correct, it finished at 1017.

Final analysis: Gust Front Leipzig-Style Wheat

2010-04-19T07:37:00.001-05:00

So this is long overdue, but I finally got around to doing a formal tasting of our Gust Front Leipzig-style wheat (a.k.a. Leipziger Gose). It's a good thing, because as you can see in the picture below, it ran out halfway through the pour! This beer took second place in the specialty beer category of the BOSS Chicago Cup competition, so I guess it's not too bad, but I still may tweak it in the future. Here's the review:

Style: Gose. Orig. gravity: 1050. Final gravity: 1014.
ABV: 4.8%. IBU's: 15.

Appearance: Pours a cloudy, deep straw color with a hint of orange. A nice white head tops the beer.

Smell: You pick up the tart smell of the lactic acid along with some green apple. There's a touch of yeast but not much.

Taste: The sourness hits you up front. It's definitely there but not overwhelmingly so; it's also a very clean sourness. As the tartness settles down, you get a nice combination of yeast and bready wheat maltiness. It's never savory but you do get a mineral bite in the finish. Very refreshing.

Mouthfeel: Nice body--not too heavy; not too thin--and adequate carbonation, though not quite as effervescent as a Hefeweizen.

Overall: As I noted a while back (towards the end of this post), I did a side-by-side of this with Döllnitzer Ritterguts Gose (my favorite Gose from Leipzig) and the biggest difference was mine was still significantly less sour than theirs. Now, Leipzig actually has two different breweries making Gose, and mine was in between the two when it comes to sourness. I still like the Döllnitzer best and I may try to make this more sour the next time I brew, but this one was definitely more accessible such that beer newbies still enjoyed it (something that probably wouldn't be the case with Döllnitzer). The other thing I'd like is to get more of a yeast bite from the beer; not sure how I'd do that but maybe I can mess around with different yeasts. But for my first time experimenting with lactic fermentation, I would consider this a resounding success.

Brew day: Kokopüffenweizen

2010-04-17T21:45:00.006-05:00

Ah, the signs of spring... The days get longer. Baseball starts. I brew for the Drinking & Writing Brewery's Beerfly Alleyfight.

Yes, Leah and I will once again participate in the awesomeness that is Beerfly Alleyfight. For those of you who have never been, every homebrewer who participates in the Alleyfight is asked to brew five gallons of beer and pair it with a food item that we prepare. We are then paired with an artist who interprets our pairing. Over the last three years we've come up with some pretty good beer-food pairings if I do say so myself (our None More Buzzed coffee stout paired with tiramisu bites; our Worst Case Scenario Belgian dark ale paired with roasted sweet potato slices topped with banana salsa; and last year our Somethin' Else India black ale paired with bacon smoked mac 'n cheese). We've also been fortunate to be paired with some awesome artists (writer/actress Mary Fons, filmmaker Ren Velarde and singer/songwriter Naomi Ashley). This year Beerfly Alleyfight is May 22nd at the Chicago Rock Bottom (State & Grand). It's a whole lotta fun and if you live within a 100-mile radius of Chicago you should go; more info and tickets HERE.

Anyway, this year the theme is wheats, and after a little thought I decided to play the ace up my sleeve: Cocoa Puffs. When I first started brewing I read about a homebrew competition where everybody had to use breakfast cereal in some way, and I thought it was a cool idea. Now I've never really outgrown kids' cereal (Hey Mom, you remember how you made me eat Total as a kid? Well, behold the monster you created.) and I'm particularly fond of Cocoa Puffs, so a while back I decided to brew a Cocoa Puffs stout. It was good, but the Cocoa Puffs didn't really stand out.

A couple years later I decided to give it another whack. This time the base stout was much higher gravity and I was pretty generous with the Cocoa Puffs. I brought a bottle for a friend who later emailed me a critique which didn't pull any punches. She said something along the lines of "It really tasted like Cocoa Puffs, though I'm not sure if that's a good thing." Yes, it's a good thing. It's an AMAZING thing.

Given that Beerfly Alleyfight is all about having fun, I decided to go way outside the box this year and thus we'll be serving a new style I call Kokopüffenweizen. It's basically a Weizenbock spiked with Cocoa Puffs. Now I add the Cocoa Puffs in the secondary, so today was a cereal-free day. But here's a recap of the first step on our journey to malty, estery, Cocoa-Puffy goodness.

It was actually a pretty boring brew day. I mashed in around 11am. Due to a last-second decision to change mash tuns my strike water dropped a few degrees and I mashed in at 151°F instead of 155. After 45 minutes, I pulled a 1.5-gallon decoction which I boiled for a half-hour (twice as long as my typical poor-man's decoction). I sparged for just under an hour, collecting just under six gallons. (At this point I realized that I accidentally made my recipe for 5 gallons instead of the usual 5.5, hardly anything to lose sleep over.)

Since I want the Cocoa Puffs to shine, I only went with one hop addition when I reached boil at 2:30. After a 90-minute boil I chilled to 61°F, ending up with just under five gallons. I had only planned on doing a 75-minute boil, so between the mix-up on batch size and the extra boil-off I was a bit low on my target volume. Fortunately, I overshot my target gravity by five points (1062 instead of 1057). With this in mind, I diluted with a 500mL bottle of water as well as my 1000mL starter of WLP 380 Hefeweizen IV yeast. This got me above five gallons at around 1059 for starting gravity. Obviously this will get a bump from the sugary Cocoa Puffs, which is why that gravity might seem low for a Bock style.

So that's what I did today. Next week I'll add the Cocoa Puffs (I'm thinking of going with four cups; last time I did five, but that also had an original gravity of 1080 vs. 1060). Stay tuned for more updates on the beer that will make you Kuckuck für Kokopüffen!

UPDATE: You can read about the "dry-Puffing" process here.

FotoFriday #22

2010-04-16T11:36:00.000-05:00

This is what happens when you let an amateur fill a firkin...

Let there be Alt! Tonight!

2010-04-09T08:04:00.001-05:00

I just go the word yesterday that Metropolitan I-Beam Alt (for which I did some heavy lifting) will make its debut to the drinkers of the world tonight! The best part is it will be available at a special event featuring ALL of Metropolitan's beers including their awesome Baltic porter and their hopefully-as-awesome (I haven't even tried it yet) Maibock. Those last two are extremely rare (only ten gallons of each were brewed) and were made especially for the Craft Brewers Conference which is being held in Chicago right now.

The event starts at 7pm at Jake Melnick's near the Water Tower in the River North area. Doug and Tracy from Metro will be there and I'm sure some other brewers will be stopping in from time to time as they're ALL in Chicago right now. Yay beer!

Gin makes you sin (or so I'm told)

2010-03-30T20:51:00.008-05:00

Three* awesome things about beer: 1.) It's usually cheap enough that you can take a chance on a beer you've never heard of; 2.) even if you don't want to commit to a 6-pack, you can always go to a bar and order a pint; and 3.) even if you can't find a pint at your local watering hole, there are countless websites where you can read reviews of beers.

I'm not that big of a hard liquor guy (though I have been getting into whisky lately) but I like to have a decently-stocked liquor cabinet. I've always enjoyed gin and tonics, and my brother-in-law is a big gin guy, so I like to keep a good gin on hand. But what's a good gin? I tried to find a good website with gin reviews but failed. So I had to go with plan b, which was assume that a more expensive gin is a good gin.

The first good gin I ended up buying was Citadelle, which is a French gin. Do the French make good gin? How the hell should I know? It was $30, which seemed to be a good price point for something above Tanqueray. After I got home, I found I liked it, so that was a good thing. I'm running low on that gin, so the other day I was at my local liquor store and picked up a bottle of North Shore Distiller's Gin #6. North Shore is Illinois' first craft distillery so I figured I'd give them a shot.

Anyway, I have a little Citadelle left, and I also have some Seagram's gin left, so I figured it's a good time for a tasting. To make things a little more interesting, I decided to do the tasting blind. Here are the results:

GIN #1:

Okay, one whiff and I realized this is going to be tough. It smells like . . . gin. I know, I'm gonna have to do better than that. This one has the requisite juniper berry aroma, but it also has a good dose of lemon zest.

Taking a sip, the citrus comes to the fore. There's a little sweetness and a slight alcohol burn in the finish. Definitely a gin I could sip.

GIN #2:

This one smells a little more aggressive; a little more solvent-like. There's still some juniper, but no citrus.

The flavor on this one is kind of hard to peg. It's sweet and spicy, but I'm having trouble pegging the spice. While the aroma is juniper, the taste is a little more complex. A nice clean finish. I wouldn't say I like this one more or less than Gin #1, but I would consider it to be more traditional, at least in terms of what I think of when I think of gin.

GIN #3:

Again, I'm not picking up any lemon. Like Gin #2, there's some a pine-like aroma, but it's much more subdued.

Taking a sip, the first thing I notice is it's much more aggressive and sharp than the other two. It finishes with a fairly harsh burn. Frankly, I'd be surprised if this wasn't the Seagram's.

And now, time for the reveal. Gin #1 is . . . SEAGRAM'S! Gin #2 is Citadelle, and Gin #3 is North Shore. This really surprises me, as I was sure #1 was North Shore. When I first got the North Shore I did a side-by-side with it and Citadelle and thought North Shore had a much more pronounced citrus flavor. As such, as soon as I picked up the lemon this time around, I was positive it was North Shore.

So what can I conclude from this? Well, I'm not going to knock North Shore. It's a little higher proof as compared to Seagram's (90 proof vs. 80 proof) which might contribute to the burn, and the more complex spices might make the gin a better mixer with tonic. Plus, I'm an idiot when it comes to hard liquor.

What it does make me question, however, is if premium gins are worth the price. If you compare Jim Beam bourbon to, say, Buffalo Trace, there's no comparison. The fact that Seagram's didn't smack me across the face and say, "Yo! I suck!" tells me that, at one third the price of Citadelle or North Shore, it's a hell of a deal.

Anyway, that concludes my fun with gin. And now, back to beer!

* Obviously there are countless cool things about beer. I'm just mentioning three relevant to this post.

Brew day: 59° Fahrenheit Maibock

2010-03-28T18:44:00.003-05:00

So I was planning on brewing our Maibock yesterday, but the night before we went out to celebrate my 31st birthday. For some reason, after enjoying Metropolitan Kränkshaft, Sam Adams Noble Pils, Hofbräu Maibock, a shot of Underberg, some Würzburger lager that I swear was unfiltered, Schlenkerla Fastenbier, a shot of Malört, Flossmoor Station Pullman Brown Ale and Great Lakes Dortmunder Gold (I think; I can't guarantee the accuracy of the last beer I ordered), I didn't feel like brewing the next day. So I postponed the brew day until today, and since both Dorrie and Jonas came down with pinkeye this weekend (ah, the joys of parenting), we skipped church and I was able to get somewhat of an early start.

The brew day was rather uneventful for the most part, and Leah was too busy with the kids to take pictures, so I'll just give you the highlights... I mashed in around noon and, for the second brew day in a row, came in waaaay low on my mash-in temp (150°F instead of 156). I'm not sure what's up with that, but I decided to roll with it. To somewhat make up for that, I did a 2-gallon decoction for the mashout instead of a 1-gallon decoction (which, last time I brewed this, left me with a mashout temp of 162°F instead of the target 168). After a 15-minute decoction I returned it and started recirculating ten minutes later.

Oh yeah... one other small problem I had. The accidentally disconnected the hose that runs from my hot liquor tank to my mash tun and, as a result, lost about a half gallon of sparge water. Coincidentally, I ended up collecting about a half-gallon too little wort. But beyond that, the rest of the day went pretty smoothly. I did a healthy 90-minute boil with hop additions at 60 minutes, 20 minutes, five minutes and knock-out. I chilled to somewhere between 45 and 50°F and pitched a healthy amount of yeast slurry courtesy of Metropolitan brewing. I hit my target gravity right on the nose: 1070.

I will be shocked if we don't have fermentation by the time I wake up tomorrow morning. In the meantime, a couple of other beer notes... First of all, our Christmas ale kicked and I replaced it in our kegerator with our Road House Red. Second, I finally kegged our 1908 Old Ale which is unfortunately only down to 1022 (lately my beers all seem to finish high). I put a half gallon into a growler with some dry malt extract (the extra extract will make it 50% extract, which is the minimum for an extract competition our homebrew club is holding), somewhere between 2.5 and 3 gallons into a 3-gallon carboy which will be oaked and bottled, and the rest into the Lovejoy keg. Third, I learned that the Metropolitan I-Beam Altbier (which I helped brew--more here) should be hitting bars as soon as later this week. You can be sure I'll post more here when I know about it. And finally, I learned that our Gust Front Leipzig-style Wheat (a.k.a. Leipziger Gose) took second place in the specialty beer category of the BOSS Chicago Cup Challenge; I'll go ahead and ignore the other beers we entered that didn't win.

And now, on this relaxing Sunday night, I have actual work (as in, for my actual employer that signs my paychecks) to do. As my daughter would say: "bummer."

Pro Brewer for a Day; Fool for a Lifetime

2010-03-10T21:25:00.005-06:00

(That's me on the left and brewmaster Doug Hurst on the right. Didn't know that the pros wear safety glasses and rubber gloves just to check the original gravity? They absolutely do. Safety first!)

As I've discussed before on this blog, I tricked Doug and Tracy Hurst of Metropolitan Brewing into thinking I'm some sort of Altbier expert (I mean, I've been to Düsseldorf and read Horst Dornbusch's book on Altbier; that's enough, right?), and as such they asked me to serve as a consultant for their spring seasonal, I-Beam Alt. Well, after helping them brew a test batch back in January, I took a day off of work today and trekked up to Ravenswood to help them brew 22 barrels of Alt. Yes, for one day I got to pretend I am a professional brewer.

So how did it go? Well, things didn't start off too well. My plan was to take one train that arrives on the south side of downtown Chicago and walk across the loop to a train that leaves from the north side of downtown and ends up four blocks from Metro. Unfortunately, I decided to stop at a Dunkin Donuts between the first and second trains and they took forever to make a frickin' egg, bacon and cheese wrap. As such, I missed the second train, and the next one wasn't leaving for two hours. So I had to walk over to the el, which meant much more walking and me arriving 45 minutes late.

Once I got to the brewery, I discovered that I forgot the power cord for my laptop. I also discovered that my camera didn't have a memory card in it. This ended up being a moot point as my camera battery was also dead. You'll notice I don't have a ton of pics from today; that's why. (Fortunately, Leah and the kids stopped by later in the evening and Leah had her camera, so we got a few pics.)

Anyway, after those initial problems, the brew day itself went fairly smoothly. I had heard from my pro brewer friends that most of large-scale brewing is cleaning, and they are pretty much right. If I screw up a 5-gallon batch, I waste a few hours and maybe $30. If a pro gets an infected batch they're losing a lot more than that, so there's lots of cleaning going on. Of course, they do have a few gadgets that make things easier, namely drains in the floor and a hose with scalding-hot water. Man, would that be awesome if I could have those in my garage!

The brewing process itself wasn't that different from homebrewing except that most tasks could be completed by moving a hose, opening a valve and throwing a switch for a pump. It was definitely nice to simply turn on a pump to recirculate rather than collecting four cups in a pyrex measuring cup and dumping it back into the mash tun.

The one thing that was definitely harder on a pro scale? Cleaning out the mash tun. For starters, you have to shovel out over 300 lbs. of spent grain. But after shoveling out most of it, getting the last bits of grain out of there is a real pain in the ass. The next time I brew at home and clean out my mash tun by dumping out the grains into a trash bag, filling it with hot water, and then dumping it back out, I'll appreciate just how easy that is.

In the end, I'm pretty excited about the Alt. The test batch had a small addition of chocolate malt and a significant flavor hop addition, both of which aren't exactly to style and it definitely showed in the results. For today's brew, we got rid of the chocolate malt and cut down on the flavor hop addition. The end recipe ended up almost the same as the Alt I brewed last year that I really liked, so I'm hoping this one will be a crowd-pleaser as well. If you live in or near Chicago, you'll be able to find I-Beam Alt at your favorite watering hole right around April 1st (no foolin').

So that was my day as a pro brewer. As of tomorrow, it's back to my normal life as a mild-mannered reporter for a large metropolitan law firm. At least my co-workers like beer. :-)

P.S. The firkin you see to the left is not being filled with the Alt (since it was just brewed) but rather with Metro's Flywheel Bright Lager, which will soon be available on cask, Kellerbier-style, at Revolution Brewing on Chicago's North Side.

Brew day: 1908 Old Ale

2010-03-06T21:25:00.005-06:00

It seems like with most homebrewers the first thing they want to do is go big. It's like the saying goes: "Life begins at 60... 1060." However, since Leah and I gravitate towards German beers, most of our brews are relatively tame--at least as far as gravity is concerned. Rarely do we cross the 1070 threshold, and prior to adding extra fermentables (such as cherries or honey) in the secondary, I don't believe we've ever brewed a beer over 1080.

Well, that changed today. I had been thinking of brewing an old ale or barleywine for a while now, and then my buddy Mark said he too was thinking of brewing one. Perfect! Well, I've always felt that the line between old ales and barleywines (at least English-style ones) is blurred, so I decided to shoot for a target gravity of 1080, which straddles both styles. And thus, 1908 Old Ale was born.

Mark and his wife Marlowe came over to brew with us, and my good friend Lovey (who is transitioning from partial mash to all-grain) stopped by to lend a hand as well. As has been documented on this site before, our pump is sort of wonky, and it ended up giving us some problems early on. Actually, our initial problem was with the hose (I think all the repeated clamping had caused it to seal poorly, which meant it took forever to drain into our mash tun, at which point the temperature had dropped quite a bit). The end result was our initial mash-in temp at around 10:30am was 144°F instead of 154°F, so we quickly boiled a gallon of water and added it to the tun (dumping instead of draining, as you can see to the right) to get the mash temperature to around 151°F.

After that we ran into one more problem when the pump started to crap out pumping up to the hot liquor tank. Fortunately, it turns out that when you have two grown men to lift the hot liquor tank, it's really not that hard, so we were able to get things ready to sparge without too much effort.

We started recirculating at noon, and by 12:15pm we began sparging. By 1:45 we had collected 12.5 gallons and at 1:50 we reached boil and added our hops.

Shortly after boil, we had a boil-over which, in and of itself, was no big deal (after five years of brewing, I've had more boil-overs than I can remember, and since moving to brewing outside I really don't give it a second thought). However, my 85-lb. Collie mix Ogie decided he wanted to lap up the spilled wort which was under the brew kettle. Next thing I know Mark exclaims, "Oh, crap. Your dog's on fire!" Fortunately, it was just a small portion of his fur which was singed, but damn did it smell bad!

After insuring that my dog was extinguished, we went on to add 9 lb. of malt extract around 2:15 (my mash tun isn't big enough to brew ten gallons of 1080 wort, thus the extract). We added some Irish moss at 2:35 and killed the heat at 2:50. It was cold enough that chilling was a piece of cake, and by 3:10 we had collected roughly 12 gallons of wort at 66°F. Our gravity came out at 1084 and we pitched gobs of yeast slurry which was generously provided to us by Bryan Shimkos at Flossmoor Station.

Despite the complications at the beginning of the brew day and the canine immolation, the brew day went pretty smoothly overall. Afterwards we watched The Nightman Cometh Live on DVD and then headed out to Flossmoor Station for dinner. Beautiful weather, great friends, great beer and dinner at a great brewpub. What more could you ask for?

FotoFriday #21

2010-03-05T22:20:00.002-06:00

Dark Horse Brewing Company, Marshall, Michigan.

ME for Lieutenant Governor of Illinois!

2010-02-27T08:43:00.006-06:00

Illinois state politics is messed up. I mean, REALLY messed up. Seven of our 40 governors have been indicted. Our last one (Rod Blagojevich) is currently awaiting trial on corruption charges, and the one before that (George Ryan) is in jail. And, considering that Blago is a Democrat and Ryan a Republican, corruption isn't partisan around here.

The latest tragicomedy in Illinois politics came last month when a pawnbroker won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor and shortly thereafter we learned that he had previously used steroids and beaten his prostitute ex-girlfriend. Oops. Well, the Dems convinced the Mark McGwire wanna-be to step down. But how are they going to find a replacement? Well, they're soliciting applications online. Seriously.

Now all this got me thinking... Maybe it's time to send a homebrewer down to Springfield to clean up this mess! I've never considered myself a Democrat (I guess I'd classify myself as an independent libertarian) but I'm not above whoring myself for political gain. I was born and raised in Chicago, after all. It turns out the application is only five questions long, so without further ado I present my application to be the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor of Illinois...

1. Why are you a Democrat?

Well, to be honest, I wasn't before just now. However, the Republicans already have a nominee and Lyndon LaRouche won't return my calls, so I guess I'm a Democrat now. Free everything for everybody!

2. Have you previously held elected office? If so, which one(s)?

I have been legal affairs officer of Homebrewer's Pride of the Southside since 2004. During my tenure, we have run a surplus budget and never been sued or indicted. Can the State of Illinois say the same thing? I was also elected president of the St. John Youth Forum (Darien, IL) from 1995-97, where I successfully avoided excommunication.

3. What do you believe are the greatest challenges facing the State of Illinois and areas of greatest opportunity?

Greatest challenges? Well, we're broke. I'm talking California broke. That's gonna be a pain in the ass to fix. Also, we're really, really, really corrupt. (May be a connection there... I'm not sure.) Honestly, if you think the lieutenant governor is going to fix all that you're even more gullible than Illinois voters. However, until we can be annexed by Wisconsin I think we're going to have to deal with all this somehow.

Greatest opportunities? We've got some kick-ass breweries here in Illinois. Several have opened (or are about to) over the last two years. However, if we do away with the current three-tier distribution system and liberalize our business laws, we could rival California, Colorado and Michigan when it comes to brewing meccas. From there, turning around the rest of our economy will be a piece of cake!

4. What strengths would you bring to the ticket?

Well, I guess German beer is my specialty, but I like to dabble in all styles. As President Obama has shown, people like to talk over a nice, cold beer. You think people are going to come out to a fundraiser to drink some downstate Chardonnay? Hell no! Democratic fundraisers are going to become the toast of the town when you've got six different homebrews/craft beers to choose from at each event. Plus the homebrewing/beer geek community includes people of every political persuasion... when given the choice between two bozos, they'll vote for the bozo who brews!

5. Please list any organizations or elected officials that have endorsed your candidacy for lieutenant governor.

Well, I haven't been endorsed by any elected officials, but isn't that a good thing? As for organizations, I just decided to run this morning so I haven't really had a chance to talk to anybody else yet. However, I invite homebrew clubs, beer appreciation clubs, and brewer's guilds to offer their support for my candidacy at my campaign homepage, chibebrau.blogspot.com. Together we may not change Illinois, but we'll get it really, really drunk. Thank you, and God Bless America.

So there you go. I think the good people of Illinois are ready for a homebrewer in the Lieutenant Governor's Mansion*, don't you?

* I'm not sure there's actually a Lieutenant Governor's Mansion, but a fellow can dream, right?

Red Ale update and plans to come...

2010-02-23T07:39:00.001-06:00

On Saturday I finally got around to kegging the Irish Red Ale. Unfortunately, it was right before Jonas's first birthday party (like, literally, fifteen minutes before the party... I had cleaned the basement and my two options were hide the carboy or rack it to a keg, and as it was two weeks since I brewed and the Kräusen had fallen I decided to go with the latter) and because I was in a hurry I didn't take a gravity reading. Eh, no biggie...

In the meantime, I have some plans a'brewin' (no pun intended--at least initially--but I'm not changing it now). First, next weekend our friends Mark and Marlowe of Zoo Brew fame (who co-brewed our Mr. Kim's Secret Microbrew) will be coming over to brew an Old Ale. We're calling it 1908, in honor of the year my beloved Chicago Cubs last won a World Series. We're planning on aging some of it on oak and we'll each stash a bottle away to save until the Cubs finally bring another championship to the North Side (well, all of us except Marlowe, who's a Sox fan).

Depending on how things work out this month, I may really get things cranking. I have a couple of other beers in the pipeline... I'd like to try brewing our 59° Fahrenheit Maibock again and I'm also itching to whip up another batch of our None More Buzzed coffee stout (though now that Jamie and Christine are in Minnesota I probably won't be able to score freshly-roasted espresso beans from them again).

Oh, and sooner or later I hope to head back up to Metropolitan Brewing to brew the first (non-test) batch of I-Beam Alt. I haven't tried the test batch myself yet, but I got some feedback from Tracy the other day and hopefully with some minor tweaking the good folks at Metro will actually bring a true Düsseldorf-style Alt to Chicago!

Brew day: Road House Red

2010-02-07T18:34:00.002-06:00

St. Patrick's day is around the corner, and while I'm not really sure what will be going on around here this year (as the annual South Side Irish Parade is no more, though some are pledging to show up anyway) I figured just to be safe I should brew up a five-gallon batch of my Road House Red, an Irish red ale.

The day started out rather inauspiciously. When we got back from church I discovered our dog Ogie had knocked down the doggie gate and strewn garbage all over the kitchen. Then Leah took Jonas and headed to the store, leaving Dorrie to hang out with me while I got things started out in the garage. However, Dorrie's going through this separation anxiety phase where she freaks out if Leah's not around, so she wouldn't go out. As such I had to wait for Leah to get back to get my water heating.

Once Leah got back, I went outside only to discover that I couldn't find my sheet of paper with my keggle calibration (I keep track of how much water is in my keggle by measuring the depth of the wort). A long time ago I posted the calibration for my other keggle, but since that measurement was taken without a false bottom I didn't think it would be accurate. Anyway, I eventually figured out a way to estimate the volume, though I wasn't entirely confident in my accuracy. I guess I'd have to wait and see what I yield and what my gravity is to determine how close I was.

Last but not least, once I measured out the strike water and started heating it, I discovered my thermometer was being wonky (it was reading "HI" when I knew the temp was well under boiling). After changing the batteries and cleaning the wire well, I finally got it to work, though at times if I moved the probe a certain way it would go back to reading "HI." With that in mind, I'm not entirely sure what my mash-in temp was, though the last temp it showed before it crapped out again was 152°F--my target mash temp.

Fortunately, once I mashed in the rest of the day went really smoothly. I mashed in at 2pm, recirced from 2:40 to 2:50, sparged from 2:50 to 3:40, and boiled from 3:40 to 4:40 (with hop additions at 60 min. and 5 min.). I was chilled down to 75°F and pitched by 5pm; definitely my shortest all-grain brew day to date. I ended up with closer to 5 gallons than the 5.5 I was shooting for, but I overshot my target gravity by five points, ending up at 1056.

One quick note on the recipe... Last time I brewed this I wasn't too happy with it (I had both melanoidin and Caramunich as specialty malts as well as the requisite roasted barley and it just had this pungent maltiness to it that was offputting). This time I ditched both the melanoidin and Caramunich and instead went with a little Caravienne to give it a touch of maltiness and upped the roasted barley. I also went with an American yeast (SafAle US-05) instead of the English ale yeast I used last time. We'll see if that all makes a difference or not.

I have a few ideas up my sleeve that I hope to get to soon (including a barleywine and a Pilsner) but for now it was good to get back on the brewing horse.

FotoFriday #20

2010-02-05T11:27:00.001-06:00

You can never train 'em too young...

From the top you can see Monterey, or think about San Jose (though I know it's not that pleasant)

2010-01-30T10:56:00.009-06:00

So here I am sitting in the San Jose airport, waiting for the fog to lift so I can head home. San Jose isn't that bad (their airport has free wifi; their hockey team--the San Jose Sharks--gracefully lost to the visiting Chicago Blackhawks Thursday night; the weather was in the 60's), but aside from a Gordon Biersch (which had a tasty Sticke Alt on tap, by the way) they don't have much beer-wise. Fortunately I spent a full day in Monterey, where my good buddy Eric introduced me to two local brewpubs.

The first brewpub we stopped at was called Peter B's Brewpub. It sits right off the harbor, and seeing that a little over 24 hours earlier I was in sub-freezing temps, we took advantage of the sun and decidedly warmer temps and sat outside. Eric had heard that their food was better than their beer, which indeed seemed to be somewhat of an afterthought for management. The only seasonal they had was a porter, which seemed like a fairly pedestrian style for a specialty release. (In their defense, the waitress said they were about to tap a Scottish Ale--too bad they were too late for Robbie Burns Night.) With nothing jumping out at me, I opted for their sampler. While nothing blew me away, their beers were solid (and I realize that probably sounds pejorative but I mean it in a good way). The Pilsner was a little light for my liking (clearly their offering for the Bud/Miller/Coors crowd), but the Hefeweizen was pretty tasty. Their IPA was rather balanced, which would probably bum out hopheads but I appreciated. And their seasonal porter was really good... roasty but rather clean, the way I like my porter.

Their food was quite good for pub fare. We started out with their "stinky fries," which were hand-cut french fries drenched in garlic butter made with local garlic. Stinky? Yes, but also awesome. Eric had the pulled pork which he seemed to enjoy and I had fish tacos made with local fish. Was it the most amazing brewpub I've been to? No, but the food was tasty and the beer--while nothing I'd go out of my way for--was enjoyable. If you're in Monterey and are heading toward the water, it's definitely worth stopping by. And while it appears management isn't really catering to hardcore beer geeks, hopefully the give the brewmaster some more latitude in the future to brew some more adventurous seasonals.

Later that afternoon we stopped by English Ales Brewery in nearby Marina, CA. Unlike Peter B's, English Ales was clearly all about the beer, and specifically all about the U.K. pub experience. It had a bit of a hole-in-the-wall feel, but in a good way. It had a wooden bar with English-style taps, including what appeared to be two beer engines for casks. Around the bar they had small tables that appeared to be patio furniture. There was one older gentleman working the entire pub. And as you can see in the accompanying picture, the place was covered with mugs for its mug club members.

We got there around 3pm with it rather empty and by the time we left an hour or so later it was pretty packed; they definitely seem to have a following. After I tried my first beer, an English-style IPA on cask, I could tell why. It really was an English-style IPA, bright and fruity with a bracing, earthy bitterness in the finish. Anybody brewing that kind of beer in the middle of West Coast Hop Bomb Land is serious about their English ales. Next I had their Good King Senseless Winter Ale, which I thought was on cask but I'm pretty sure was not (at least not the pint I was served). It was a really nice winter warmer; rich at ~7% ABV but not too heavy; fruity and spicy but not overdone; and just enough roastiness to keep it from being sweet. Overall, I'm not obsessed with British ales, but if I were I would have been in heaven.

So anyway, that was my pub experience in Monterey. Nobody's going to confuse it for the San Francisco/Santa Rosa area further north, but you could certainly do worse than to spend a day visiting Peter B's and English Ales.

The Electric Beer and Mustard Test

2010-01-26T20:49:00.003-06:00

Sunday night I decided to give this mustard-making business a go. The two ingredients you need for mustard are mustard seed and liquid. I wanted to get an idea for the basic flavors I'm dealing with, so I made four small test batches: yellow mustard seed with beer (our North Kilttown Scottish Ale, to be specific); yellow mustard with cider vinegar; brown mustard with beer; and brown mustard with vinegar.

My procedure was pretty simple: I took one tablespoon of seeds and soaked them in one tablespoon of liquid for two hours. After the two hours I added a little more liquid so that you could see liquid at the top of the seeds (the seeds soaked up liquid--especially the yellow ones--so after a couple hours it didn't look like there was any liquid in the glasses). I then ground the seeds. The volume of seeds was so small that our small food processor wouldn't work. I tried putting the mixture in a zip-loc bag and crushing them with a rolling pin but that didn't work too well either. Eventually I used the flat end of a meat pounder to crush the seeds in a zip-loc bag. That seemed to work well, though hopefully when I up the quantities I can use an actual food processor.

Last night I again added more liquid to get the mixture to roughly the consistency of ketchup. It's recommended you let it age at least a couple days so the flavors can blend, so tonight (two nights later) I decided to do a tasting with Leah. (As you can see in the picture above, I decided to pair my mustard with some Half Acre Magnus Schwarzbier; an awesome brew despite the fact they spell it "Schwartz," which would not please my old German professor.) Here are our tasting notes on each:

Yellow mustard seeds with beer:

Leah- "Tastes somewhat like rottenness, but with a mustardy undertone."
Me- "Kind of bitter and flavorless up front. You get a little mustard heat in the finish, but otherwise it's rather bland."

Brown mustard seeds with beer:

Leah- "Mild but noticeably mustardy, with a hint of heat though it is still not at all spicy."
Me- "Horseradish-like brown mustard flavor; kind of mellow but still noticeable as mustard."

Brown mustard seeds with cider vinegar:

Leah- "A fairly typical-tasting spicy mustard. The spice is noticeable but not overwhelming. The texture is really good."
Me- "Initially it has a tart, sour mustard flavor; after you swallow you get some noticeable mustard heat."

Yellow mustard seeds with cider vinegar:

Leah- "Quite vinegary, with the mustard taste coming through a bit after the vinegar. Still has a decent amount of heat, but it's overwhelmed by the vinegar taste."
Me- "This one tastes the most like yellow mustard. It's tart like the brown, but it seems to bring out the mustard flavor more. It has more heat and pungency up front, but lacks the slow burn of the brown mustard."

A couple thoughts in response to the notes above... First, as I mentioned earlier, the yellow mustard seemed to soak up more liquid, which is why I think the yellow mustard with beer tasted so weird and the yellow mustard so vinegary. I'm thinking if we do something with predominantly yellow seeds we may want to add some water to whatever liquid we use if it's too thick. Second, according to this site introducing acidity will stop the formation of heat, so if I want really hot mustard I should use water first and then thin it out with vinegar (or any other acidic liquid) later to lock in the appropriate level of heat. That may be a fun thing to experiment with later.

For now, it seems that beer and yellow mustard isn't too good of a combination by itself. For a mild mustard, perhaps initially soaking the mustard seeds in yellow and THEN thinning it out with beer may work better. Brown mustard seeds definitely work better with beer, though even then it's fairly mellow. Both brown and yellow mustard seeds have more of a kick with cider instead of beer.

A good start to our mustard-making experiments. Look for more to come!

Final analysis: North Pole Export

2010-01-25T20:57:00.003-06:00

A while back I said I need to catch up on tasting notes, and tonight I'm finally getting around to making good on my promise.

Style: Christmas/Winter Specialty Spiced Beer. Orig. gravity: 1070. Final gravity: 1019.
ABV: 6.7%. IBU's: 25.

Appearance: As you can see above, the beer pours a deep ruby, almost mahogany, color. It's fairly opaque with just a wisp of head. I'm not sure if it's due to subdued carbonation or the addition of vanilla beans (which introduce oil into the beer), but it's not something I'm too hung up about given that Scottish beers aren't exactly known for their head.

Smell: Mmm... vanilla. It definitely predominates. There's a hint of sweetness from the malt, and I swear there's a touch of brandy (which is what I soaked the vanilla beans in), but I'm guessing I'm only picking up the latter because I know it's there. I suppose some people might complain there's too much vanilla, but as somebody who rarely spices his beer, when I do I like to go all-out.

Taste: The vanilla hits you up front and then gives way to a honey-like malt sweetness. You pick up a little of the kettle caramelization before you get more vanilla in the finish. The sweetness at the end is tempered by a slight, neutral hop bitterness and a kiss of roasted barley. There's also a weird flavor that lingers that I can't put my finger on. When I brought the non-vanillaed Scottish to a recent HOPS! meeting, it was suggested the flavor might be the result of fermenting at too high of a temperature. I also noticed the same flavor when I brewed my Irish Red a while back--which I then attributed to the use of melanoidin malt--and also when I tried Short's The Magician London Red Ale.

Mouthfeel: It's a little thin, but I suppose similar to what you would find on cask. Still, I would probably make it a little more carbonated next time.

Overall: For a Christmas ale, I wouldn't mind getting the gravity down just a hair and upping the dark malts (maybe complement the roast barley with some Carafa?). I could also see complementing the vanilla with a little clove or allspice to add a little complexity. As it is, it's still a satisfying winter warmer.

We said Yes! to M!ch!gan!

2010-01-17T22:31:00.005-06:00

I'm a huge Blackhawks fan, and Leah--a native of Petoskey, MI--grew up a Red Wings fan. However, she's never been to Joe Louis Arena, so for Christmas I got her tickets to see Sunday's Hawks-Wings game (which, incidentally, the Hawks won in a shootout... LET'S GO BLACKHAWKS!!!).

We left yesterday morning and spent the night in Ann Arbor. Of course, you can't drive across Michigan without hitting up some breweries, right? Well, we planned stops at two brewpubs: Dark Horse Brewing Co. in Marshall for lunch, and Arbor Brewing Co. in Ann Arbor for dinner. Here's my review of each...

We pulled into Marshall, MI (conveniently located just off of I-94) around 1:00pm local time. Dark Horse wasn't hard to find. From the outside it didn't look that impressive, but inside it was awesome. It had all the cool elements of a dive bar--beat-up hardwood floors, odd pictures along with some random graffiti all over the walls, metal on the jukebox. But there were little touches that told you this clearly wasn't a dive bar. Hand-designed wrought iron decorations over the windows (which we stupidly forgot to take a picture of). Great beer on tap. Oh, and the mugs.

The entire place is lined with hand-made ceramic (?) mugs for their mug club members. Despite having seating for somewhere in the neighborhood of forty people, they have over TWO THOUSAND mug club members. Apparently it's $46 to join but you get a lifetime membership, so it's not that big of a commitment to sign up. Hell, I was ready to sign up if I knew I'd be back more than three times in my lifetime (and I certainly hope I will be). The food was great pub fare, but I don't feel like writing about food. On to the beer...

Dark Horse is one of my favorite breweries, and they're widely available here, so I tried the three selections that aren't available here. The first was their Boffo Brown Ale. Brown ales can be quite hit or miss, but this one was definitely hit. Not too sweet, not too roasty, with just enough Pacific Northwest hops to give it a little citrus note without being bitter. Next I had their Four Elf Winter Warmer. I'm not a huge fan of spiced beers, but the combination of alcohol plus rich malt and roasted notes (it was a dark beer, almost stout-like though not that roasty) stood up well to the spices. Nice. Finally, I tried a sample of their Smells Like Weed IPA. Having been to many a concert I'm familiar with the smell of pot, and I didn't think it smelled that much like weed, but it was tasty nonetheless. Overall, I highly recommend anybody trekking across I-94 take a quick detour to Dark Horse.

That evening we proceeded to Arbor Brewing Co., in the heart of downtown Ann Arbor. I'm afraid to say our experience there was not as positive. The inside was nice enough, though not terribly distinct. I started out with the Olde Number 22, which they claim is a Sticke-style Altbier. It came without a hint of a head and, not surprisingly, tasted flat. On top of that, it didn't really taste like a Sticke at all. It wasn't hoppy, it wasn't malty. At first I seriously wondered if they accidentally gave me their porter on cask. It was simply a thin ale with enough roasted specialty malts to give it a dark color without making it overly roasty (perhaps they used Carafa?). But an Alt it was not. To say I was disappointed is an understatement.

Next I had the aforementioned porter on cask (which allowed me to confirm it was different from the Olde Number 22). Fortunately, the porter on cask was much better. Unfortunately, after drinking about a third of my pint I suddenly came across a bit of something slimy. I reflexively spit out my beer and discovered a glob of something floating in my glass. Upon further inspection it wasn't a piece of a hop leaf; honestly I'm still not sure what it was. The waiter got me a fresh pint though he didn't seem particularly troubled by my discovery.

I will say in Arbor's defense that the two beers which were most highly recommended--their breakfast stout and Doppelbock--were both out, so maybe I would've had a different opinion if I had tried those. And hopefully the random floatie in my porter was a freak occurrence. Overall, however, I'm not in any hurry to return.

So that was our weekend from a beer-centric perspective. Michigan is definitely spoiled when it comes to breweries (as the folks over at Michigan Beer Buzz will tell you) so I've still got plenty of other breweries to check out. But I'm definitely glad to have finally gotten to Dark Horse and hope to return soon.

P.S. On the way back, I snapped the following picture at a gas station. It's a good thing they had the "out of order" sign on the pump, or else I would have had no idea:

Mean Mr. Mustard

2010-01-12T21:04:00.003-06:00

A while back I ordered some soft pretzels at Rock Bottom Chicago and they were served with a whole-seed beer mustard. That's when I first got the idea to try to make mustard with my beer. Then I visited Düsseldorf, home of the famous Düsseldorfer Mostert. Not only did I bring home three bottles of Altbier, but I also brought back two jars of Füchschen's mustard (yes, my favorite brewpub there makes their own).

Well, I finally decided to take the plunge and ordered five pounds of mustard seed--three pounds brown and two pounds yellow--from Amazon.com (which surprisingly was cheaper than eBay). Initially there are two types of mustard I'd like to try to make . . . the first is the whole-seed mustard like the one I had at Rock Bottom, and for that I found this recipe:

12 ounces stout beer [I'll likely substitute whatever homebrew I have on hand]
1 ½ cups brown mustard seeds
1 cup red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon Kosher salt
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
¼ teaspoon ground allspice

The second mustard I'd like to make would be a Düsseldorf-style mustard, but I can't seem to find a recipe. The best info I could find is this:

The original Düsseldorf mustard is the ABB (Adam Bernhard Bergrath) brand which used to be available only at a certain market stall here, but nowadays can also be found at a couple of high-end supermarkets located in department stores. Traditionally, it is made only with brown mustard seeds from which the oil is not extracted, as well as with verjuice instead of vinegar. Today, commercial Düsseldorf mustard is made with yellow and brown seeds, and with aromatic spirit vinegar.

Is it true? I have no idea, but it sounds good to me. Anyway, for now my plan is to start simple (perhaps make four mustards--one brown seeds with vinegar, one yellow seeds with vinegar, one brown seeds with beer and one yellow seeds with beer) so I can familiarize myself with the flavors involved and then go from there. I also think I'm going to pick up a book or two on mustard to get a better idea of what goes in to various styles of mustard.

In the meantime, I figured I would post this in case anybody out there has 1.) information on Düsseldorf-style mustard and/or 2.) experience making mustard themselves. I'll definitely post recipes and results once my mustard seeds come in. Beer and mustard . . . does it get any better than that?

A different kind of brew day

2010-01-09T21:55:00.010-06:00

My good friends Doug and Tracy Hurst of Metropolitan Brewing know their beer. If you're in Chicago and have tried their beers, you know what I'm talking about. However, nobody's perfect, and to demonstrate that Doug and Tracy foolishly solicited my input when developing their spring seasonal, I-Beam Alt. Of course, I wasn't about to turn them down (especially with the prospect of free beer!) so this afternoon the family and I headed up to Andersonville to help brew an 8-gallon pilot batch of Altbier.

We had an awesome time. Quasi-Metro brewer John Laffler (who primarily practices his art at Goose Island's Fulton brewery) joined us and ended up doing more work than I did, and a constant parade of visitors trickled through as well. As you can see above, having a forklift makes a three-tier brewing system a piece of cake. And as you can see below, Dorrie had a blast being chased around by Tracy and Phelps. The brew day itself went rather smoothly, save a couple issues with the burner. Needless to say I'm excited to see how this first batch comes out; the thought of having a true Düsseldorf-style Alt on tap in Chicago makes me kind of giddy.*

As a bonus, we met Robert Birnecker, the owner/distiller at Koval Distillery (which is conveniently next door to Metro). He invited us to stop by and check out the place . . . and sample a few spirits of course. I must confess I'm fairly ignorant when it comes to grain spirits (if you don't believe me, I invite you to check out my post describing my trip to a Scottish whisky distillery), so I may have missed some of the subtleties of their offerings, but I really enjoyed their Rye Chicago which was almost like a cross between whiskey and vodka. As you can see below, I'm really good at drinking things and looking like I have any idea what's going on (and that's Robert in the "Master Distiller" sweatshirt dumping yeast into the mash).

Oh, one last thing to note. Leah and I finally busted out our final bottle of Döllnitzer Ritterguts Gose so we could do a side-by-side tasting with our Gose. The result? Döllnitzer was definitely more sour, but the sour-to-salt balance was actually quite similar to ours. The two other big differences were the coriander was much more evident in our beer (though I actually liked ours better in that regard) and we had a slight fruitiness from the yeast that wasn't present in Döllnitzer. Overall, I think ours turned out pretty well considering it was our first attempt at souring a beer with lactobacillus, but I'd still like to jack up the sourness next time.

So that was our day. A little exhausting (though I'm not quite sure why since I mainly stood around talking and drinking) but a great time. Now get off your computer and go find some Metro beer!

*I guess technically I should say another true Düsseldorf-style Alt on tap since Kevin Blodger, the brewer at Gordon Biersch's Bolingbrook location, brewed an Alt last year that took bronze at the GABF, but that awesome brew was only on tap out in the 'burbs so it doesn't count. ;-)

One item checked off my to-do list

2010-01-07T22:45:00.002-06:00

So, in addition to neglecting the blog over the holidays, I also neglected my kegerator (shameful, I know). Fortunately I finally welcomed my kegerator into the new decade tonight. Out goes the Metropolitan Krankshaft (the only commercial brew to ever take up residence in our basement), the Hoar Frost Oktoberfest, the F5 Altbier and the Paddy Whacker Cider. In comes our Mr. Kim's Secret Microbrew, North Pole Export Christmas ale, Gust Front Leipzig-Style Wheat (aka Leipziger Gose) and Ten Percenter Seltzer. As you can see in the picture above, I printed out the labels and updated the tap handles so if somebody breaks into our house and decides to pour a beer, they'll at least know what they're drinking. I'll hopefully post reviews on all of these soon (well, all except the seltzer, obviously; for some reason, Leah really likes seltzer when she's pregnant. Oh yeah, I guess I should mention Leah's pregnant again. I know... some of us never learn).

Formed a blog; we formed a blog. Look at us! We formed a blog.

2010-01-06T19:11:00.006-06:00

Okay, so we started the blog a long time ago, but given that I've neglected it for the past month it feels like I'm starting all over. In fairness to myself, I haven't brewed in a couple months so there hasn't been that much to blog about, but there were plenty of times where I meant to post something and got distracted. Funny how that happens around the holidays, especially when you have two kids.

Anyway, we did do a few beer-related things over the holidays. Most notably, we bottled some of our North Pole Export Christmas ale to give away as gifts. Why is this notable? Well, we actually used bottle wax for the first time (I thought it would make them look more fancy when I gave them to my bosses).

The process actually went pretty smoothly. I started by putting some wax beads in an old soup can, which I then heated in a double-boiler.

This took too long, so I removed the top pan and just heated the can in boiling water. That worked just fine. Once the wax was melted, I just dipped the bottle into the can (duh).

Since I was only doing about eight bottles, I didn't add a ton of wax beads to the can, which meant I didn't get as much wax covering the bottle as you see on most commercially-available waxed bottles. Nonetheless, I thought the finished product looked pretty cool:

Not bad for a first time, right?

Anyway, that's the first thing I was meaning to post over the holidays. Besides that, I have a whole bunch of tasting notes I need to post. Maybe I'll start knocking those out one a day. Ah, who am I kidding? That ain't gonna happen. But I will try to start posting more often (which is more than I can say for Brian over at the Daily Ikura or Señor Brew™ at Noble Square Brewing--yeah, I'm calling you guys out!). Here's to lots of great beer in 2010!

A day in the life of a homebrewing dad

2009-12-13T21:52:00.005-06:00

So this weekend was the first in a long, long time where I literally had nothing planned for Saturday or Sunday. A much needed 48 hours of relaxation before the stress of the holidays, right? Um, not when you have a three-year-old who's in a phase of constantly testing limits. Nonetheless, I needed to get some bottling and kegging done, and for a brief moment I was able to get Dorrie to not 1.) pull ornaments off the Christmas tree; 2.) break said ornaments; 3.) derail the train around the tree; 4.) throw flour or powdered sugar all across the kitchen; 5.) spray Jonas in the face with Nature's Miracle; or 6.) draw on the hardwood floor with a Sharpie by asking her to help me clean bottles. She did (as you can see in the accompanying picture), for about ten bottles, and then decided she had better things to do. Oh well.

Help--or lack thereof--aside, I got the Piper at the Gates Saison bottled. Since gluten-free beers tend to have issues with head retention, I used heading powder for the first time. I also did one bottle without the heading powder (marked with a "T" for test) so I can compare the two. A couple other notes... The Saison had serious issues with flocculation so there are a lot of floaties, including some hop bits. It seemed to be worst with the first few bottles so hopefully the rest will be fine. But next time I'll rack to a secondary.

After bottling, I racked the last 2.5 gallons of Scottish ale which will be spiked with vanilla for our Christmas beer. It's in the Hutz keg (with stayed upright with help from Jonas, as you can see to the right). I also cut up 2/3 of a Madagascar vanilla bean and 1/3 of a Tahitian vanilla bean and have them soaking in a couple ounces of brandy; that will be what I use to spike the Christmas beer. Finally, I hooked up the Mr. Kim's Secret Microbrew, North Kilttown Scottish Export and North Pole Export kegs to the CO2 tank and cranked it up to 30 psi.

Tonight I tried all three kegs. To be honest, I was disappointed with all of them. The Secret Microbrew (a ramped-up California Common enriched with oats and wildflower honey) isn't bad, but the hops are quite assertive and harsh. I'd be curious to get a hophead's opinion--which hopefully I'll do at tomorrow night's HOPS! meeting--but I'm not too crazy about it right now. As for the Scottish exports, well, there's this weird taste that I can't quite nail down. It's kind of fruity, but it's not the normal fruity ale flavor. Previously I noticed this flavor in my Road House Red, an Irish red ale, and thought it was due to melanoidin malt. (On a side note, I also picked up the flavor in Short's Brewing's Magician, a self-described London red ale, and suspected they might have used melanoidin malt in their beer, though they never returned my email so I can't really say.) Now I don't know what it is except that I don't like it. The good news is the full keg of Scottish export, which has been cold-conditioning for over a week, had less of the taste than the fresher export (to which the vanilla will be added).

I hope to add the vanilla this weekend and get some of the North Pole Export bottled in time to give to co-workers (i.e. bosses) before Christmas. Hopefully the vanilla will mask any of that flavor I don't like.

FotoFriday #19

2009-12-11T23:59:00.002-06:00

This is what happens when you forget to thoroughly clean a carboy . . . then fill it with water to let it soak . . . then leave it in the backyard and forget about it for a few months . . . then the temperature drops to about 4°F . . . then the water in the carboy completely freezes . . . and the carboy cracks.

Catching up...

2009-12-02T22:20:00.002-06:00

So I haven't blogged too much lately. I'm still recovering from Novemberfest so I haven't brewed recently, and having headed up to Michigan for Thanksgiving (where I had the opportunity to visit Short's Brewing) I've been slacking off. Well, today I finally took care of some long-overdue housekeeping. I kegged the 6.5-gallon carboy of Scottish ale, taking a final gravity reading of 1019. It's nice; you can definitely taste the result of boiling down the first gallon (in fact, you can almost notice to TOO much; it comes dangerously close to having that melanoidin malt taste that I find overbearing). I'm looking forward to trying it once cooled and carbonated. The Scottish is residing in the Syzlak keg.

I also took a gravity reading on our gluten-free Saison, which is at 1014. However, I'm not sure I'm confident in that reading. Oddly enough (and everything's odd when you're brewing gluten-free) most of the hop trub has floated to the surface, so the sample I drew was full of hop bits and floaties. I'm not sure if that would actually cause the gravity reading to be low (if anything, I would think it would raise it), but I tasted it and it seemed sweeter than 1014. It was quite hoppy (as one would expect with hop bits floating around) and had a nice peppery note to it, so I'm looking forward to the final results.

One last note... This Saturday I'll be checking out the Drinking & Writing Brewery's 12 Steps of Christmas over at Hopleaf (I blogged about it earlier today over at the HOPS! blog). If you're not doing anything, I highly recommend you check it out too.

Why yes, I DO think I'm the Pope of Chilitown.

2009-11-22T17:57:00.004-06:00

Today seemed like a chili kind of day, so I volunteered to make dinner. Ordinarily I'm pretty technical when it comes to cooking, but when it comes to chili I take a page out of Leah's book and sorta go by feel. I have a pretty standard list of ingredients, but I just sort of throw everything in to taste.

Now, with all the garbage that one inevitably eats over the holidays, I've been trying to eat healthier lately (with mixed results at best). Tonight I decided to go with chicken for my chili; it may not be as healthy as vegetarian but it's a step up from the usual pork or beef chili I make.

I figured the chicken would probably be best pulled, but I didn't have a ton of time to slow cook it. That's when inspiration hit me... why not simmer it in beer? I still have some Flossmoor Station Ruby Brown Dunkel left in the kegerator, and I figured a nice malty beer like that would definitely work well with the chili. So I chopped up a red onion and a clove of garlic and sauteed it in a stock pot. Then once they started to caramelize I dumped in a pint of the Dunkel.

Next I chopped a half chicken into pieces and removed the skin. I threw the chicken into the pot, sprinkled some sea salt and pepper on top, and simmered covered for about eight minutes. I then turned the chicken over, added more salt and pepper, and simmered for another eight minutes. At this point I removed the chicken and pulled off all the meat with a pair of forks. Once the chicken meat was pulled into small enough pieces I returned it to the stock pot.

The beer/onion/garlic mixture had reduced to the point that there was very little liquid left so I added another pint of Dunkel. I let the chicken simmer in the mixture for another fifteen minutes. After that I did my usual chili routine: I first added two cans of diced tomatoes, one can of kidney beans and one can of black beans, all drained. Then I added the following to taste: chili powder, cumin (LOTS of cumin), Mexican oregano, masa (Mexican corn flour), sea salt and a little celery salt.

I simmered all this together for about another half hour and served with freshly diced red onion and shredded white cheddar (and, for me at least, Frank's Red Hot). The result? In a word: awesome. The chicken was really, really flavorful. I like to think the beer had a lot to do with that. The spices blended well, though I was a little heavy-handed with the oregano and a little light on the garlic. And obviously a bowl of my chili and a pint of the Flossmoor Station Dunkel made an excellent pairing. Overall, this was definitely a keeper.

You know, it's funny. For the copious amounts of beer we have on hand at any given time, we rarely cook with beer. I guess I can credit a.) the incredible brewer's dinner at Rock Bottom Chicago that we attended last month, and b.) the most recent Drinking & Writing Radio Show in which Steve Mosqueda talked with chef Chris McCoy and brewmaster Pete Crowley about said brewer's dinner for inspiring me to make my beer chili. As you can see in the picture below, even Jonas liked it!

(Gluten-free) brew day: Piper at the Gates Saison

2009-11-21T15:41:00.003-06:00

As I've discussed previously, my buddy Pete (pictured in the label to the right) is gluten-intolerant and occasionally I like to brew gluten-free beer for him. It's fun for me because I get to do some outside-of-the-box thinking, and it's fun for him because my gluten-free beers are better than anything currently on the market (or so he claims). In the past I've brewed White Riot Gluten-Free Witbier and Folsom Prison Gluten-Free Stout (which actually came out more like a porter).

Pete liked the Wit more than the porter, and I think that beer worked particularly well for two reasons. First, the spices in the Wit mask the unique character of the sorghum syrup. Second, the one character of sorghum syrup that's hard to hide is a slight tartness, and a slight lacto bite is appropriate for a Witbier. Well, this time around I decided to go with another style that has a similar spicy, slightly tart character: Saison. And thus, Piper at the Gates Saison was born (yes, I'm sticking with the music theme for my gluten-free beers; if you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to purchase this).

One of my favorite Saisons is Hennepin, so I started with the BYO clone recipe. I tweaked the spices a little and changed the yeast but here's the recipe I'm planning on brewing at this point:

6.6 lbs. sorghum syrup
1 lb. cane sugar
1 lb. dark brown sugar
8 oz. maltodextrin
6.5 AAU Styrian Golding hops (bittering hop)
1.75 AAU Saaz hops (aroma hop)
1 tsp. Irish moss
1/2 oz. dried ginger root
1/4 tsp. grains of paradise
1/2 tsp. black pepper
1/4 oz. coriander
1 oz. bitter orange peel
White Labs WLP500 (Trappist Ale) yeast
3/4 cups corn sugar (for priming)

One of the nice things about gluten-free brew days is that after brewing 10-gallon all-grain batches for the past three years, it's a quick and easy brew day. The problem, as I learned today, is that when it's quick and easy you can make rookie mistakes. And I made three.

Things went pretty well early on. I brought 2.5 gallons of water to a boil (as I cut my 5-gallon recipe in half), added the sorghum, cane sugar and brown sugar as well as 2 oz. of Spalter Select hops (I went with Spalter Select because they were old and I didn't trust them for flavor/aroma hopping; I assumed 90% of their alpha acid as well due to aging).

Mistake #1: at twenty-five minutes I realized that I was supposed to augment the 2 oz. of Spalter Select hops with .4 oz. of the Saaz hops (with the rest of the Saaz added at knockout). I added them at that point but according to Beersmith that'll drop my bitterness by two IBU's and may contribute a flavor I wasn't planning on.

At fifteen minutes I added Irish moss and yeast nutrient and submerged my buddy's immersion chiller (I figured using the plate chiller for 2.5 gallons was overkill). I ground the coriander, black pepper and grains of paradise in a coffee grinder and got the ginger ready to go as well. At five minutes I added the spices.

Mistake #2: as I started to type this blog post, I realized I forgot the bitter orange peel. Fortunately this is a Saison, not a Witbier, so it'll change the character somewhat but won't take it out of style.

At knockout I added the final 0.6 oz. of Saaz hops and turned on the water to the wort chiller.

Mistake #3: I thought I had my thermometer between the coils such that my reading should be fairly characteristic of the wort overall. Apparently I was wrong because I thought I chilled it to 80°F but it turns out it was really around 100°F. And, because I'm an idiot, I added the yeast and THEN measured the temperature.

The good news is the Trappist yeast is supposed to be fairly temperature tolerant, so I threw the carboy in my chest freezer (which is around 40°F) and I'll pull it out once it gets down to around 75°F. I guess we'll see how it affects the flavor profile.

So there you have it. Gluten-free beer #3 is complete, even if it wasn't exactly as planned.

UPDATE: I was able to get the temperature down to 75°F in about two hours, and 30 hours later I'm seeing signs of fermentation so I think everything will be okay. :-)

UPDATE II: You can read my final analysis of the beer here.

Looking for an engineer who will work for beer

2009-11-21T11:48:00.005-06:00

At any given time I usually have three beers and one non-alcoholic selection on tap in my basement kegerator, and it can be hard to keep track of how much is left in each. I've looked into various options for monitoring the levels but the best I found (the Keg-Meter) would run $400 for four kegs. Ouch.

Well, the other day I came across plans for this: a tweeting kegerator! Basically, you buy four 100-lb. force sensors and hook it up to an Arduino Ethernet Shield which sends the info to a webpage. You then use a software script to send updates to a twitter account. It seems that it would cost somewhere between $150 and $200 for everything, but how cool is that??!! Now, the problem... Even though the website gives detailed instructions for everything, I still have no idea what the hell they're talking about.

Sooooo... any engineers out there who are willing to work for beer? ;-)

FotoFriday #18

2009-11-13T08:53:00.000-06:00

Leah bought a new lens this week. I don't know anything about it except that it was expensive. I guess it's pretty good, since I'm pretty clueless about photography but managed to snap the photo above. The subject? The kegerator, of course.

Doin' the dumb things I gotta do

2009-11-11T22:53:00.005-06:00

I've been doing a lot of kegging lately in preparation for Saturday's Novemberfest party, so before I forget here's a quick rundown of what's in what:

F5 Altbier (WLP 038) - Krabappel
F5 Altbier (WLP 320) - Terwilliger
Gust Front Leipzig-Style Wheat - Quimby
Mr. Kim's Secret Microbrew - Frink
Hoar Frost Oktoberfest - Nahasapeemapetilon
Paddy Whacker Cider - Wiggum
~~Black Moon Black Witbier~~ - Syzlak [EDIT: It finally kicked right before the party!]
Springfield Lemon Co. Lemonade - Krustofski

I also have a gallon or so left of two beers donated for our HOPS! Oktoberfest (the rule is if you supply the keg for Oktoberfest donations, you get to keep whatever's left at the end of the party):
Flossmoor Station Ruby Brown Dunkel - Hutz
Gordon Biersch Altbier - Lovejoy

Okay, with that all out of the way, a couple other notes... Today I kegged both the cider and the Mr. Kim's Microbrew. The cider finished at 1.003 and I'll be backsweetening the 2 gallons of fermented cider with a half gallon of fresh cider tomorrow morning (once it's dropped to around 35°F). The Mr. Kim's finished at 1014, which means it clocks in at a hefty 7.1% ABV... enriched indeed. I also took a sample of the Scottish ale, and it's already down to 1030 and tasting pretty damn good if I do say so myself.

On a completely unrelated note, yesterday I posted over at the HOPS! blog about three beers I'm looking forward to enjoying this winter. Check it out here and chime in with your favorite winter beers while you're at it.

Vor zwanzig Jahre fiel die Mauer

2009-11-09T22:23:00.002-06:00

Twenty years ago the Wall fell. I think it's hard for many of us to truly understand the devastation caused by the erection of the Berlin Wall. For starters, I encourage you to watch this six-minute documentary:

To get a better idea of communism's impact in Germany, I recommend checking out two movies: Das Leben Der Anderen (The Lives of Others) and Good Bye Lenin! The former is a drama and the latter a comedy, and you can get both through Netflix.

I celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall by enjoying a glass of my homebrewed Leipziger Gose (as Leipzig was in the East) and following that with a bottle of Einsiedler Doppel Bock (from Chemnitz in the East). The Einsiedler was particularly appropriate as its history reflects the tumult caused by the rise and fall of East Germany.

I realize that twenty years later, there are still cultural rifts that have yet to heal, but here's hoping that twenty more years of freedom brings prosperity, both economic and cultural, to the former DDR.

Novemberfest is only a week away!

2009-11-07T09:33:00.004-06:00

So when we moved back to Chicago in 2003 and, coincidentally started homebrewing, we decided to throw a party to catch up with all of our college friends living in the area. We were too busy in October (what with our homebrew club's Oktoberfest party, my church's Oktoberfest party, other Oktoberfest parties, Halloween parties, Columbus Day parties... okay, no Columbus Day parties, but you get the point) so we decided to have a Novemberfest party instead.

Well, five years later Novemberfest is still going strong. The only problem is, I kind of dropped the ball on the invites this year. I put together an evite about a week ago, but finished it around midnight and only got about half my invite list together before I got too tired and called it a night. I meant to finish up the invite list the next day but never did. So here's the deal... If you're reading this you're invited to Novemberfest. I'm going to try and get the rest of the invites out today (after the Festival of Barrel-Aged Beer), but given my level of disorganization and the amount of high-gravity beer I'll be consuming, I might miss a few people. So if you're in the Chicagoland area and want to stop by, drop me an email at rchibe [at] gmail [dot] com.

Now on to the specifics... The party is next Saturday (the 14th) and will start at 6:30 for those of you with little ones (well, anybody's welcome at 6:30, but we're starting early specifically for those who will be bringing their kids, as Dorrie's bedtime is 8pm and that should give them time to play before hitting the hay). We'll have our F5 Altbier, Hoar Frost Oktoberfest, possibly cider if it's not too harsh at that point, and some surprises. Feel free to bring some sort of snack or dessert if you're one of those people who can't show up empty-handed, but you really don't need to bring anything.

Hope to see you there!

Good times, bad times, you know I had my share.

2009-11-02T20:00:00.003-06:00

First the good times...Our Scottish Ale is fermenting away! Despite my worries about a dead yeast starter (as posted yesterday), something is generating a Kräusen in the carboy, and I strongly suspect it's brewer's yeast.

Now the bad times... We went 0-for-3 at the Chicago Beer Society Spooky Brew Review. The three beers we entered were our F5 Altbier, our Hoar Frost Oktoberfest and our Gust Front Leipzig-Style Wheat. My criticism of each are as follows: the Alt isn't hopped enough, the Oktoberfest is too hopped, and the Gose is too sweet. I'll be curious to see what the judges say. And one of these years I'll finally win something in my hometown's only homebrew competition.

If it's tangy and brown, you're in Cider Town!

2009-11-02T14:45:00.004-06:00

We wanted to have some hard cider on hand for our Novemberfest party, but time kept getting away from us.

Exhibit A: Time-Sucks #1 and #2

We also weren't sure how to get preservative-free cider without making a special trip to an orchard which would have turned into some sort of all-day outing. And again, we didn't have a free day. But during one trip to Trader Joe's (It is kind of like my version of Mecca. Maybe if they offered massages or delivery it would be perfect, but it is awfully close anyway.) I noticed that their 1/2 gallons of cider said "UV pasteurized." I double checked on the label and with an employee, and yup, no preservatives at all. So, I called Russ to check on the amount we needed and threw 5 of them in my cart.

Then, of course, I got distracted for a week or so, and then by the time I finally remembered to do it (today) it may be too late for it to be ready for Novemberfest. D'oh.

So, today I asked Russ to run the numbers for back-sweetening and let me know the recipe he had finalized. Then dissolved some white and brown sugar (1/2 lb. and 1/4 lb. respectively) into some cider, then put that mixture plus 4 of the 5 1/2 gallon containers into a carboy. I added 1/8 tsp of potassium metabisulfate to ward off wild yeast, proofed the dry yeast in some warm water, and dumped it all together. Oh, and took a few pictures.

While I was doing that, I also restarted Martha Speaks on the tivo for Dorrie twice, let her help weigh and pour the sugar, and did the vast majority of the above one-armed while holding a very tired and cranky Jonas who just wanted me to sit down and nurse him to sleep and he just did NOT UNDERSTAND WHY, WOMAN, GET YOUR BOTTOM IN GEAR, I NEED MY MILKS.

I would like my award now, please.

Click on the picture for the flickr page with the notes. I would particularly like to draw your attention to the teeny weeny funnel that I used because I couldn't find the big funnel. The big funnel was 10 inches to my right from the above perspective - in the sink. Now Russ can make fun of me for that one instead of the time I couldn't find the orange juice in the fridge.

P.S. (update) Quit making fun of my blogspot photo formatting.

Brew day: North Kilttown Scottish Export/North Pole Export Christmas Ale

2009-11-01T22:02:00.000-06:00

As we did last year, today we brewed a double batch, some of which will be fermented as is and some of which will be spiced (likely with vanilla) for a Christmas beer. We decided to go with a Scottish Export (80/-) for the base style... a style I love but haven't brewed for a while. Our trip to Scotland earlier this year definitely got me motivated to brew one again, and after completing our frenzy of Oktoberfest/Novemberfest German-style beers, we're finally getting around to brewing a Scottish beer for the first time since we went all-grain.

A quick note about the recipe... Historically, Scottish beers have a huge jump in gravity between an 80/- Export (which the BJCP indicates has a starting gravity between 1040 and 1054) and a 90/- Strong Scotch/Wee Heavy (which the BJCP says should be at least 1070). We wanted to go higher than an Export so that it's a nice winter warmer but not as rich as a Wee Heavy, so while we call this an Export it's really stronger than it should be. Maybe we could call it an 85/- ale?

Now, moving on to the brew day... I think I average one stressful brew day for every two smooth brew days. Today was a stressful one. I had issues with my water filter (the nylon that keeps the charcoal in the filter broke, leaving me with gray, charcoally water); my pump crapped out again (I'm pretty sure I need some sort of seal or o-ring replaced); I undershot my target mash temp by three to four degrees; my mash tun manifold came disconnected from the outlet--twice; I believe we had raccoon pee dripping down outside of our garage door (don't worry, it was NOT near the beer, nor did it get on anybody; but I'm pretty sure there are raccoons living in our garage loft); and I might have pitched a dead and/or infected yeast starter.

But those complaints aside, it was a successful brew day. I usually brew on Saturday mornings, but we spent the non-trick-or-treating part of our day going to car dealerships (you can check out our new wheels to the right). So today I fired up the brew kettle as soon as we got home from church. The mash seemed much thicker than usual (I used Golden Promise pale malt; maybe it's more floury than others?) so it took me longer than usual to dough in, leaving me with a mash temperature of 152-ish instead of my target of 156°F.

By 2:10 we had the sparge water ready to go and I started recirculating. Unfortunately, as I started to recirculate I noticed I was getting a TON of grain coming through the hose. My manifold had first come undone from the mash tun outlet when I was filling it with the strike water and I thought I had reconnected it successfully but apparently not (memo to myself: buy a clamp to connect the manifold to the outlet). As such, I had to dump out half of the mash into another pot so I could reattach the manifold. I suppose if I'm ever going to experience hot side aeration, this would be it. That being said, I've had to do this twice before and never noticed any issues.

After recirculating for twenty minutes or so, I started sparging at 2:30. Since Scottish ales are known for their caramelization, and I'm too lazy to do a two-hour-plus boil, I took the first gallon of runnings and sent it to the kitchen for Leah to reduce. Meanwhile, I started the kettle boiling at 3:00pm, when I had collected in the neighborhood of three gallons. By 3:45 I had collected 9.5 gallons (I was shooting for 8.25 gallons of wort, enough for a five-gallon batch of Export and a half-batch to be spiced for Christmas) and was ready to add the hops.

A note on the hops: I've always suspected that bittering hops are pretty much interchangeable, as any flavor or aroma is driven off. I decided to test that theory today, bittering the beer with Simcoe hops, a style generally considered NOT appropriate for European-style beers. We'll see if anybody notices.

At 4:30, I checked in on the reduction and it was down from a gallon to a quart. I tried a little and--damn--it was tasty. It was like liquid caramel corn. Leah was saying it would be great on ice cream or other desserts, and we might just try that with the finished beer. I added the reduction, along with an additional quart of water, back to the wort and also threw in some Irish moss.

By 4:50 I was ready to chill. I collected 8.5 gallons at around 63°F and then began to add the yeast starter of WLP 028 Edinburgh Ale yeast. It was then that I noticed a slightly odd, tart smell. I poured a sample of the yeast starter and it was kind of weird. It didn't seem sweet enough to suggest the yeast was dead, and it wasn't funky so I really don't think there was any wild yeast or bacterial infection, and the flask had been washed and used several times since I had the lacto starter in there, so I'm not sure what the deal is. Maybe it's nothing. I guess we'll see if we have fermentation tomorrow.

So yeah, that was my brew day. The wort tastes awesome and we ended up with an original gravity of 1070, four points above target, so I was happy with that. I'm just hoping we don't have any issues with the yeast and/or an infection. If it ferments well then this will fall into the category of "all's well that ends well." If not, I may try to turn this into some kind of sour ale. Lets hope it doesn't come to that.

FotoFriday #17

2009-10-30T22:29:00.003-05:00

Hopefully the above picture will encourage those who claim they can't brew anymore because they have kids. Or shame them.

Devil made of honey; devil made of honey.

2009-10-27T19:30:00.005-05:00

So, for our Mr. Kim's Secret Microbrew, I noted that I would be enriching it with honey. Well, this past weekend we stopped at V's Bees, the apiary of Buzz and Marcia Vahradian, which is just minutes away from my parents' cottage near Wautoma, Wisconsin. I had talked to Buzz ahead of time and he had three pounds of honey set aside for me.

When we arrived at the apiary, Jonas had fallen asleep so I told Leah I would just run in and pick up the honey. I'm still kicking myself that I didn't tell Leah to wake up Jonas and bring the kids in. It turned out Buzz and Marcia were actually collecting and bottling honey that weekend. I was inquisitive and Buzz was happy to show me the process. (This is where I would post the awesome pictures Leah took... had I gone outside and told her to come in. Yes, I'm an idiot.) The process can be simplified as follows: First, the wax that covers the honeycombs is sliced off, releasing the honey. Next, the honeycombs (which are in slats that slide into boxes) are placed into a centrifuge roughly the size of a keg. The centrifuge spins up and the honey is forced to the outer edge where a spigot is located. The honey then flows out of the spigot where it's collected. It's really that simple (though I'm sure Buzz would tell you getting to that stage isn't so simple).

I think that when you make something yourself--even something like beer, where you're dependent on farmers and maltsters and microbiologists to get you your raw products--you gain an even greater appreciation for people who make other things, and it was really cool to see how Buzz and Marcia produce their honey. It's even inspired me to make mead some time soon (and next time I stop by the apiary I'm making sure Leah--and her camera--is in tow). Oh, and the honey's really good too. It's wildflower honey, and while I'm no honey expert by any means, it's way more floral than the clover honey you get at the store. Thanks to Buzz and Marcia for showing me around; I'll make sure to have some beer with me next time I stop by!

Having purchased the honey, it was time to add it to the beer tonight. Now obviously, since we had already brewed the beer, we didn't add the honey to the boil. Like anything with volatile flavors or aromas, boiling would have killed virtually any character the honey could add. However, adding the honey to the secondary poses its own issues. Namely, how do you avoid bugs? Like many unconventional (or quasi-unconventional) brewing processes, there's no one answer. This BYO story suggests pasteurizing it over 2.5 hours, diluting it to the gravity of the beer, and then adding it. Others (including many meadmakers) suggest doing nothing, suggesting that the likelihood of contamination is minimal at best. You can get a feel for the various arguments in this thread.

Well, I wussed out and decided to pasteurize my honey by heating it up to ~175°F and then keeping it in our oven, set to 180°F, for a little over two hours. I chose not to dilute it afterward, but did add some fermenting beer from the carboy to thin out the honey so it would pour more easily. I took a gravity reading of the honey (diluting it in water, of course) and calculated its specific gravity as 1.044 per lb./gal. This would make the equivalent starting gravity of the beer (in other words, the actual starting gravity plus the honey contribution) 1068. On a related note, the beer itself was down to 1021 before the honey addition. After the honey, the gravity should be roughly 1033. I'll be getting the rest of the honey to Mark and Marlowe to add to their batch; I'll leave it up to them to figure out how they want to add it.

Oh, one other thing I did this evening... I made a starter for our Scottish Export/Christmas Ale that we're hoping to brew on Saturday (2.5 gallons will be aged on vanilla beans, and that's what will differentiate the Christmas Ale from the regular Scottish Export). I suppose I should come up with a recipe for that some time soon...

Brilliant!

2009-10-22T23:37:00.004-05:00

I was bottling for an upcoming homebrew competition tonight (more on that in a future post), and I ran into a problem. I had soaked four bottles in Oxiclean to get the labels off but three of the bottles were old returnables that used some hardcore glue. I wouldn't think it would be an issue at the competition but technically the bottles are supposed to be clean and these were downright sticky. I tried scalding hot water, scrubbing, even scraping with a knife to no avail. I was almost off to the store to by Goo Gone when I decided to do a quick Google search on household products that take glue off of glass.

The winning suggestion? WD-40. Now obviously you don't want to get any IN the bottles, so I put plastic wrap over the tops of the bottles, but saturating the glued area with WD-40 and wiping vigorously with a paper towel took the glue right off. Just to be safe I soaked the bottles in some more Oxiclean before sanitizing and filling, but I was impressed with how well the WD-40 works. And after bottling, I took a close whiff of each bottle and didn't notice any solventy smells. I know other people run into similar issues so I thought I'd pass along the tip. And, to whoever first posted this online, I say: brilliant!

Rock Bottom Brewer's Dinner on Monday

2009-10-22T12:29:00.002-05:00

As I posted in greater detail over at the HOPS! Blog, the Rock Bottom Brewer's Dinner is coming up this Monday. Leah and I used to be regulars... and then we had kids. Well, my awesome sister said she could watch the little ones so we're getting back on the horse. If you're in Chicago, I highly recommend that you come out and join us (we made our reservation this morning, so they still have a few spots left). A good time is guaranteed to all.

Happy 30th Birthday Leah!

2009-10-19T12:43:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I was married to a beautiful, twenty-something award-winning homebrewer/stay-at-home-mom/blogger extraordinaire (even posting a few times on this blog!)/photographer/Red Wings fan (yeah, nobody's perfect)/best wife ever. Today I'm now married to a beautiful, thirty-something award-winning homebrewer/stay-at-home-mom/blogger extraordinaire/photographer/Red Wings fan/best wife ever. And for the record, it IS the same person. So happy birthday Leah! To celebrate (as much as we can on a work day with two kids under the age of four) we'll be heading out to Flossmoor Station for dinner. Here's to a new decade on this planet and many more adventures together (some of which might not even have anything to do with beer!).