Brews you can Use

I had been planning to brew today, ever since I checked the weather report and saw it forecast to be 40 and sunny, not a bad day to sit outside warmed by a propane flame. I picked up the ingredients for a Scottish ale on Friday, made a starter, etc. Then Grace got sick last night, and suddenly the idea of sitting on the couch watching football with a warm cuddly toddler on my lap sounded much more inviting.

So, for most of the day, my lap had either a toddler, and infant, a cat, or a computer occupying it. Not a bad day, in other words.

In lieu of brewing, I managed to get some racking done, about 20 gallons worth. The two batches of cider from the cider pressing are now put up to age for a while. The cider from the buy wasn't so lucky -- I appear to have some preservative-laden stuff in those batches. The maple cider, which I was most excited about, hasn't started fermenting even after 3 doses of yeast. The other one, which I was planning to spike with brown sugar and raisins, managed to ferment somehow, so I'll be keeping that a straight cider rather than pushing it by adding more sugar. Just for giggles, though, I racked it to a keg with a few toasted oak cubes.

While planning this racking session, I noticed that my Raspberry pseudo-Lambic had developed a few spots of mold on its pellicle. Time to rack that (and consign some tubing etc. to the "funky squad" -- Lambics have some nasty, tenacious bugs). That racking was the highlight of the night.

First, I had to deal with the clogging. Between the raspberries and the pellicle, there was enough solid matter to clog the siphon. Since I was siphoning directly to a keg through the liquid disconnect, I tried taking the shutoff valve and "poppet" assemblies out, to see if that freed things up. It worked -- it seems that the disconnect's shutoff assembly is most prone to blocking, rather than the actual keg post. Handy for getting the stuff in, if not out...

Then came the clean-up, probably the most disgusting one I've ever done (and not just brewing related -- I'm hard pressed to find a nastier clean-up I've ever done, and yes this includes diaper blowouts, vomits, fuzzy leftovers, etc.). Between the very thick, rugged pellicle, the slimy sediment, and the spent raspberry fragments, the texture was reminiscent of fish guts and/or roughly chopped animal lungs (Mmmm... Haggis). Of course it still smelled of vinegar and pickle juice which made it all the more disturbing (although, of course, preferable to the smell of fish guts). I was glad to finally get that all worked down the drain. Whew.

And to think, not two months ago, I had stuck a turkey baster into this, drawn out a sample, and actually ingested this stuff (it tasted ... good?). Perfect Steve, don't eat it moment, if you ask me....

After almost 30 years of life, it's surprising to me that this is the first time I've stepped out of the English-speaking world. Yes, most Montrealers I've talked to have enough English to, say, have a mutually-confusing conversation about mustard, but a little conversational French is in order for next time I come here...

I arrived a little earlier than expected, and wasted a bit of time looking for wireless at the airport. The taxi ride was the first time I finally felt like I was in a foreign country (the customs agents were quite polite). The driver greeted me at the curb with what I understood as "<Francais><Francais>." I responded with a blank look, he got the hint, and said "bags in back, sir." The actual ride was rather awkward, with the driver speaking/mumbling to himself in French the whole time. I didn't catch any of it, except for a few "<Francais><Francais> fooking idiot <Francais><Francais>" outbursts while negotiating a traffic snarl. That part I could follow. Road rage has no native language.

I'm at the Delta Montreal, the conference is at the Delta Centre-Ville (downtown). Oops. I don't know if the two are affiliated, but at least they're within a mile of each other, a very manageable walk. Since I'll be walking around anyway, I took the opportunity to explore and get my bearings (ok, ok, I got lost...) and found a late-night coffee shop/bistro that might have wireless, and a bagel shop just a block out of my way to the conference hotel.

Since the hotel restaurant looks quite pricey, I decided to check out Bieres et Compangie (via pubcrawler) for dinner. The Rue St. Laurent location is actually pretty close to the hotel. It was a touch pricey also, but worth the trip. I had a very yummy sausage sampler (3 sausages, sauerkraut, fries and mayo) with a Liefmann's Goudenband, and finished with a decent semi-sweet cider and a Hoegaarden. This place has a large enough glassware collection to serve each beer -- no matter how obscure -- in the proper glass, complete with brewery logo.

After dinner, I went exploring a bit more, turned down a little boulevard heading toward the Rue St. Denis, which I hear is the most happening street in Montreal. Apparently the happening part is a bit Northeast of here, and it was getting late so I walked the other way down St. Denis to get to Rue Sherbrooke and back to the Hotel. On the way, I passed a little hole-in-the-wall grocery store, the kind you usually see in urban areas with "WIC and EBT", or in a particularly amusing Minneapolis instance, "Goat Lamb Kidneys Phone Cards" painted on the windows.

In Montreal, these stores say "Biere et Vin" instead, which I find much more appealing so I ducked in. Not an earth-shattering beer selection of course: mostly the same old swill and malt likkers, with the Quebecois brewers Boreal (decent) and Unibroue (quite good) thrown in. The Unibroue here is just a touch over $5 Canadian compared to $8US in the states, with a wider variety available to boot. I could get used to this. I grabbed one I hadn't heard of (seigneuriale) as a nightcap and headed back to the hotel. On the way back, a little "rice rocket" style sportscar drove by blasting "Don't worry, be happy" on the stereo. That, I think, was the highlight of the night.

... to Montreal for an anti-spam/anti-phishing conference. Not sure what to expect of the conference, but a couple of co-workers are big fans of Montreal. Hopefully, I have some free time to explore a bit, and don't wind up just enjoying the hotel :-/

Doing some final preparation for the trip, including kegging the Cranberry Relish Wheat brewed for this Saturday's early-thanksgiving gathering. I really should have bottled it last week, it would have made good gifts for others to take home. Now the options are do a dicey bottling from the keg (no counter-pressure filler here), just bring a few growlers, or bring the keg. I don't think our host would like the keg, but at least 4-5 of the guests would...

I now have 20 gallons of cider going. So far, I have only done one fancy batch, 5 gallons spiked with a pint of grade B maple syrup. All the others are on their way to being straight dry cider, one with my old favorite White Labs English Cider yeast, another with Lalvin D-47, and some with whatever yeast was hanging out on the apples.

The latter is looking quite promising. The juice came from the October 29 club pressing. I added some campden tablets (2 per gallon, so 60-100 ppm SO2), and a teaspoon each of pectic enzyme and chalk. The chalk was a lame attempt at keeving, which didn't happen, so I will probably leave it out in the future. The pectic enzyme caused the cider to drop clear overnight, and turn readable-through-the-carboy in another couple days. About Wednesdy (4 days after pressing), I took a gravity sample and noted no drop, but no infections either... Thursday, I finally saw some positive airlock pressure and a slight ring of bubbles. Saturday night, it started fermenting visibly, and was raging on Sunday.

One week's a pretty long lag time, but hopefully the sulfites killed most of the organisms that can make a truly wild cider go bad. The best part: while the White Labs English Cider yeast gives of a smell best described as "apple farts", the natural yeast fermentation is still giving off a soft, smooth, apple smell. If that keeps up, I might have to do a natural ferment with most of next years juice, and save the pitched yeast for a backup batch or any pasteurized juice I use.

Good thing I went back downstairs for another brew before calling it a night. I heard an odd "pfft.... pfft... pfft..." sound, went to investigate, and saw that the airlock on a batch of cider was filled with cider foam. I pulled out the bung, and heard a rather loud pop. Yikes! That means the glass carboy was holding significant pressure, certainly much more than it's rated for (which is, approximately, 0 psig). If I had let it go overnight, there's a very real possibility that it would have exploded. Whew....

....

One of the most popular bits of brewing advice is "never give up on a batch of beer". New brewers often ask "is my beer ruined?", to which almost any experienced brewer will answer "no!", almost automatically. It seems that it takes a picture of beer covered in white fur and crawling out of the fermenter devouring small woodland creatures until the Internet peanut gallery will finally write it off.

I'm not quite that dedicated. I needed another keg for the beers I currently have on deck, and grabbed the keg of Munich Dunkel I had written off early this year, due to a stuck fermentation that I couldn't get going again. I prepared to dump it, pulled the pressure release valve on the keg, and got a surprisingly loud hiss, followed by foam spraying everywhere. I hooked up a tap to empty it more neatly, and got pure foam out. On a lark, I de-pressurised it some more and got what liquid I could into a glass. It was clean, smooth, and rich. It tasted great. Part of me, no, most of me wanted to put it on tap, but....

I had already written it off about 9 months ago. It was a very light beer, and wouldn't normally keep that long. I needed the keg free, and had it about half-empty when I decided this was good beer I was dumping down the drain. Grr... I know how maddening it would be to have a great beer on tap, knowing I had dumped half of it.

So I told myself "it tastes oxidized... yep, definitely 'wet cardboard'" and kept emptying the keg. Maybe I'll take another stab at the style this year.

I still have a Dopplebock attempt from the same brew session, that's probably in the same state (lower gravity, tasty, massively overcarbonated). I've also written it off, but if anyone's interested I could be persuaded to rescue it, or at least a few "samples" for the curious. Otherwise, it's most likely going down the drain like the Dunkel, whenever I need the keg (which, with 20 gallons of cider and my normal brewing could be quite soon).

Man, what a crappy last few days at work. Nasty shit going down between me and my former co-workers, all of whom I still consider friends aside from the aforementioned <insert term for excrement here>, which makes the <poop> much harder to deal with. It's beyond the "barleywine night" stage, so I'm on my second martini (gin, of course) and am plotting a chaser of a big Belgian which I stupidly put on tap even though the bugger's potent and goes down like a girly drink... I'll sleep as well as the kids do tonight!

....

Since the last update, I've brewed a couple more batches, 5 gallons of Mild and 10 gallons of Alt. I'm really excited for the Alt, since it's pretty much a clone recipe for Uerige Classic, based on what information I can find about its production. If it turns out half as good, I'll be ecstatic. As for the mild... it's kind of hard to get too excited about one of those, since it's supposed to be a boring everyday easy-drinking beer. Still, it may be able to kick one of the bigger beers off tap, which might get me off my arse to bottle.

I also have 10 of 20 gallons of this year's ciders going. Saturday was the club cider pressing, and quite a blast. I'm definitely going next year, even if it's 35 and rainy. There's nothing like the taste of juice fresh out of the apples. It's almost a shame to ferment it (never thought I'd say that :-). Until I get my own orchard, this is definitely the coolest way to do cider.

In previous years, my ciders have all been the "add yeast and walk away" type. That's always been nice and simple, and gives good results, but I wanted to get fancier this year. Five gallons of the pressing juice is getting the usual treatment, but I'm also trying a natural fermentation on another 5 gallons. The next 10 gallons of cider will be split between a cider with maple syrup added, and a a cider with sugar (brown, turbinado, or maybe maple, I haven't decided) and raisins added. I hope this gives me enough cider to have on tap for most of next year, as well as some in bottles for the years to come.

I tried to get an early start to the cider making this fall. Cub Foods sells Wescott Orchards cider for a reasonable per-gallon price, which was what I made my first batch of cider out of a couple years ago. That batch turned out pretty good, so I was pleased to see the same stuff in my local Cub on Saturday. I bought 6 gallons of it (5 for fermenting, 1 for drinking/mulling), and pitched yesterday afternoon.

Just a bit ago, I checked on it again. Not fermenting. Uh-oh. I took a closer look at one of the empty jugs. "Ingredients: Apple Juice with up to 1% potassium sorbate added to preserve freshness." And, apparently, to frustrate my cidermaking plans. Crap. It's not even good for vinegar, and since I added yeast and left it unrefrigerated for over a day, it's neither tasty nor safe to drink.

And all because I couldn't wait 2-3 weeks for some bulk unpasteurized, preservative-free juice from a homebrew club pressing and/or bulk buy. Damned impatience.

See that last post? I think that's the first beer-free post I've done in quite a while. The cosmic balance of Pfft! and glugluglug must be restored. To wit:

Saturday, I went to Autumn Brew Review. It was a great day for it, about 60-65, sunny and calm. A lot of good beers, and a few surprises. The biggest surprise to me was Town Hall's booth. It was all experimental beers! Usually, Town Hall doesn't do very many of these, usually one off-the-wall tap at the pub. That's understandable, since their standards are world-class, with their IPA and Scotch ale garnering well-deserved national awards.

Other worthwhile repeats from previous years include White Winter Winery's booth, serving one of only two braggots/bracketts at the festival. Viking Brewing brought the other, a lighter more mead-like interpretation, as well as a number of other interesting beers, for instance the festival's only smoked beer. Lastly, Summit brought a cask version of their flagship extra pale ale, a real treat.

Saturday ended with an impromptu party at my house, with a few college friends and their husbands I ran into at the beer festival, complete with pleasant conversation, homebrew, and barbecue from Ted Cook's (my current favorite hole-in-the-wall place, near the house we all met up at). Alas, the party was called around 9:00 on account of cat allergies. That's why it works better for me to bring beer elsewhere.

On Sunday, I brewed. Five gallons of Historical IPA and 10 gallons of a lightly-hopped American Wheat, five gallons of which will be racked onto cranberry relish, and five gallons of which may get doctored at some point. Yes, this means my recipe finalization record is currently being shattered. Previous: 15 minutes before end of boil, current: 33 hours past end of boil and counting :-)

The undetermined batch is fermenting with a somewhat spicy, fruity, earthy Belgian strain, so that limits me to something Belgian in style. Which is to say, sarcastically, "that narrows it down." The simplest option is doing a Gin or Vodka extract of the traditional Wit spices (coriander, orange peel) and doping the beer to make it another Wit. I'm also entertaining adding more fermentables and perhaps some dark malts to make something completely different out of it.

Quite the beery weekend planned here...

Saturday's the Autumn Brew Review in downtown Minneapolis (Peavey Plaza, 1-7 p.m. -- be there or be vertical :-). I've been to a few of these, and they're a blast.

On Sunday, I'm planning to brew. I'm not 100% sure what I'm planning to brew just yet. At least 5 gallons will be a lightly-hopped American wheat beer, to make the Cranberry Relish ale from October's BYO magazine, which is (as far as I can remember) the first beer Jess has requested I brew!

Of course, I don't feel like brewing a mere 5 gallons when with just a little more work and juggling, I can get a good 15 gallons out of the brewday. So, I'm considering:

• 5 gallons Cranberry Relish wheat, 10 gallons American IPA (use up some American hops from my stash).
• 10 gallons wheat (split batch, cranberry relish and something else, most likely Jamaica), 5 gallons Historical IPA.
• 5 gallons Cranberry Relish wheat, 10 gallons Historical IPA (spiked with some high-alpha hops so I don't blow my beer budget on this by spending a mint on hops (mint... hops... get it? feh...)).
• 5 gallons Historical IPA, 5 gallons cranberry relish wheat, 5 gallons of something Belgian (via some serious post-boil doctoring of half of the wheat).

Decisions, decisions... I've pretty much stocked up on ingredients, etc. to do any of these, and will most likely decide sometime before I start brewing. Maybe. I think my record at this sort of procrastination is having the recipe finalized at 15 minutes before the end of the boil.

The bad (well, odd anyway): I watched almost no football... Just as well, since all "my" teams lost this weekend (the Gophers positively cratered against Penn State; I'm glad I avoided watching that).

The good: Football was pre-empted by three parties. It's almost like I had a social life for once :-)

The usual: Of course, beer was involved. On Friday night/Saturday morning, I finally bottled the Rochefort 8 clone I had been sitting on for a couple months. I did something slightly different, mixing the priming sugar and beer in a keg, so I could push the beer with light CO2 pressure instead of gravity. It was mostly an experiment to see if I could make bottling a little more ergonomic by manipulating the bottles at a better height, but it didn't quite work out that way. I reverted to moving bottles around on the floor, just like old times... As an added bonus, I'm less than confident that the priming sugar was well mixed, and the beer stopped fermenting at a higher final gravity than I expected, so I'm on a dual "bottle bomb" and "persistently flat beer" watch for the next couple weeks.

That's why I keg most of my batches. I only bottle if I'm planning to keep the beer around for a year or so.

After bottling, I took a sample of my Mustard/Pepper ale, which I still haven't transferred out of the primary fermenter. It's really coming along. It has a crisp, spritzy mustard bite followed by a mild black-pepper burn. All of this is backed by a light malt flavor and some yeast fruitiness. It's looking like it will be better for something other than torturing beer judges :-)

On Saturday, I got a chance to show off my last Oatmeal Stout at one of the parties. I think my favorite comment was something like:

	"Beer usually makes me break out in hives, but..."
	(sips)
	"...I don't mind, this one's worth it"

The funny thing is that this was the half of the batch I almost dumped. I had fermented it with somewhat suspect yeast (my favorite strain stepped up from a petri dish via multiple "sterile" transfers performed in my definitely non-sterile kitchen). Worse, I left it in the primary fermenter for too long, and it was invaded by fruit flies. They seemed to stay out of the beer itself, but were way to close for my comfort. Luckily alcohol and hops are preservatives :-)

I brewed today, pretty much on a whim. I had the day off, the weather forecast was absolutely beautiful: 70-ish, breezy, and sunny. There have been too many of these days I spend inside at work, coming home for dinner followed immediately by the kids "going" to "sleep" (these words do not mean what you think they mean) which usually takes the rest of the day's time and energy. Today ended about the same, but at least we all got to enjoy some time outside. Oh yeah, and I made some beer :-)

The beer was an adventurous one for me. I rarely do spiced beers, and have had some real hideous ones in my time. I pretty much stick to coriander, which has a surprisingly mild beer-friendly flavor. Today, however, I made a Belgian-ish golden ale with black pepper and mustard seed.

I have had a beer with mustard seed (Wostyntje, I think). I didn't like it at all, but the concept still intrigued me. Mustard seed is a favorite flavor of mine, especially in the summer sausage I grew up eating, from Zillman's in Wausau. Their sausage is dotted with mustard seeds which have soaked up the moisture that used to be in the meat, as well as smoke and other spices. The other spices include black pepper, to my taste buds, so I figured I'd throw some into the beer while I was at it. If the beer's a tenth as good as the tasty summer sausage mustard seeds, I'll be happy :-)

If nothing else, it should pair well with pork, which is always a plus for beer. If that doesn't work, I'll use it to torture judges at beer contests :-)

OK, so I now no longer have enough beer. Too many barleywine nights finally did in my barleywine keg last Friday, and I just blew another keg earlier tonight. The good: it blew right as I filled my glass; The bad: I don't have anything to replace it. Must brew! Suggestions and/or requests are definitely welcome.

We have fruit flies in the house. This makes it hard to enjoy beer, especially the, er.. "fruitier" ones. They love my cider, and are huge fans of my Witbier. One just went for a swim in the Oud Bruin I'm drinking. I tried to fish it out with my finger, but wound up dunking it instead. It sleeps with the fishes. My beer! With extra protein...

(The Oud Bruin is unfortunately not a homebrewed one, but a bottle of Petrus I picked up at Surdyk's a couple months ago. It's absolutely heavenly, and I think I need to brew up some of this style so I can have it ready in a couple years, i.e., this does nothing for my short-term shortage.)

What a couple of days....

Last Friday, I got handed the on-call pager by surprise. I thought I was off the on-call rotation, but I hadn't been taken off the list yet. Oh well. It was either take the on call pager, or call abiku into the office for a surprise on-call week. I didn't want to do the latter, and on-call's usually pretty quiet, so I took the pager.

Unfortunately, the on-call gods also thought it was abiku's week, so I got what they had prepared for him. As in 5 drives failing within 8 hours on a RAID device. Everybody says a double drive failure is a rare occurence. Maybe if they said it some more, the disks would agree...

So after spending all night in the office, on and off the phone to the RAID vendor's tech support to see if they had any tricks to get the data back, writing off the data (at least temporarily), and getting back home at about 7:00am, getting some sleep, and then going about a rather pleasant (if delayed) labor day, I blew my keg of barleywine. All those barleywine nights added up to about 5 gallons, apparently. Now I really need to brew more, since I'm down to a half-case of my 2003 vintage now. My boss encouraged me to take an unofficial "comp day" for the work I did during the outage, so I may take that as an opportunity to brew a replacement. For now, though I'll make do with IPA.

But of course, this wouldn't all be worthy of a rant without noting that my cursed laptop also got in on the act, providing me with a sixth disk failure in 72 hours. At least I won't have to explain this one to management, but I may need to ship it to Taiwan again. Of course, it could just be a loose hard drive cable. I have my fingers crossed, but with my recent tech luck, I'm not too optimistic.

If this keeps up, I may have to take some time away from any technology not fixable with a length of 2x4 and a mouthfull of 10 penny nails....

A co-worker is planning to celebrate the end of his Triathalon season the way god¹ intended: with pork and beer. I'm bringing some of the beer, so I brewed 10 gallons of my favorite Oatmeal Stout today. This, and perhaps a keg of cider should go very nicely with pig.

This was also the first time I used a stir plate to grow the yeast. I had considered building a stir plate for several months, since they're quite expensive new, eBay deals are rare (you get killed on shipping), and there are several well-documented homebuilt stir plate designs out there. Mine got as far as picking up a DC fan and some magnets at a surplus store. Then I headed to Northern Brewer to pick up some stir bars, and happened to walk by the stir plates. It finally occurred to me that a homebuilt stir plate would involve a few more trips to pick up parts, a fair amount of tinkering time, and that after all that, it still might not work. So I broke down and bought one. I'll save such tinkering for when the kids are grown(tm).

For the inagural run, I grew some Essex ale yeast from a couple colonies on an agar plate to a pitchable quantity (well, hopefully pitchable -- I pitched it, after all...). For (my) future reference, the timeline was:

• Monday night: Boil up a quart of starter wort in a 1L flask, pour about 150 mL into a smaller flask. Add stir bars, cap with foil, sterilize (15 psi for 15 minutes), and leave out to cool overnight.
• Tuesday morning: Inoculate smaller flask and start it spinning.
• Wednesday evening: pour contents of smaller flask into larger flask (using magnet to hold stir bar in place), and stir large flask.
• Thursday morning: visible activity in flask, stirring is releasing bubbles. Would probably foam over if not for the squirt of Foam Control (like Mylicon for beer :-).
• Thursday evening: no more visible activity, take it off plate and put it in fridge to settle.

The brew went quite well, but I got hit by a few precursors to the proper praire thunderstorm that rolled through town later that afternoon, hence the name of the brew and title of this post. I would have just ridden it out, except that the toddler alternately wanted to go outside with papa and go inside to keep from getting her hair wet....

¹ Which god is unclear though. Presumably not Allah or Jehovah, both of whom appear to have accepted improper gifts from pro-pig lobbyists. Must be one of those non Ancient Near East gods.

Feh, another barleywine night. But I probably won't get around to one.

I sent in a couple of beers to the state fair competition, and remembered I hadn't tasted either of them in a couple months. So, tonight was capped off with an IPA and my most recent Imperial Stout. The IPA has come a long way since making my house smell like bad tobacco, and actually tastes better overall than when I last submitted it to a contest (where it won a gold medal). The Imperial Stout also tastes better than I remember it. Both were brewed last December, and somehow I've actually managed to keep them around this long.

Now, to reward myself for the self-restraint.... Pfft! glug glug glug...

....

I'm plotting a few more brews, as always. My next brew / brew day will probably be a celebration related to possibly working 12-hour shifts, 7 days a week at work. I'll either be celbrating not having to do this, or celebrating not having to do this any more. Both are worth celebrating, although the latter will require a little rest first. I should know which it is within a week.

Since hopefully I'll be brewing this sometime soon, it'll be a Belgian style, so I can ferment it in the summer heat. It should also be strong enough to be "special", and I've already got a white (wit) and a couple strong dark Belgians going. That leaves a possible Tripel, a strong golden ale (e.g. Duvel), or a big Saison. Of course, the results will be shared with interested friends and co-workers. "Celebrating" alone wouldn't be nice to my liver :-)

(Now with pictures :-)

Believe it or not, this:

should actually turn out good, horrible as it looks. It's my first attempt at a Lambic beer. The scum on top is a pellicle of some mixture of Brettanomyces yeast and possibly some Acetobacter. The above sight is accompanied by a rather pleasant odor somewhere between vinegar and pickle juice. To this, I just added about 6 pounds of perfectly good raspberries, so now it looks like this:

I was going to add 12 pounds of raspberries, but there's not enough room, and I didn't feel like racking it.

On a less ugly note, the Thomas-Hardy's-ale-by-alcohol-lamplight adventure was a success:

(although the picture wasn't). The thick, blotchy shadows are the colonies. I still haven't mastered the fine art of streaking [plates], so they're mostly in one big clump. After I took this picture, I transfered some of this yeast into slants and vials of sterile distilled water, where it should hopefully keep until I'm ready to brew with it, hopefully this fall.