Brews you can use

I think I may have ended a drought.

I haven’t brewed a beer since last November. I’ve thought of doing it a few times — even got to the point of gathering ingredients — but something always comes up. Kids, other plans, just a royally bad day, illness, sometimes acute laziness. I’ve been ==>this<== close to selling off my brewing equipment, just because its idleness [yeah, it's idleness, that's the ticket ...] was driving me mad.

Driving me to drink, in fact. For a while, I was substituting beer for soda (probably a net win, healthwise), but this and other unpleasantness had me first supplementing with, then switching to the distilled stuff to take a bit more of the fabled “edge” off. I would go weeks without having a single beer, but the whiskey (and occasional gin, rum, or tequila) would disappear at an alarming rate. Not good for motivation, or health.

Then I started biking to work. Amazing stress reliever. The alcohol consumption dropped to normal levels, I felt much more human, felt that I could do things. Perhaps even brew beer.

I was going to brew on Labor day, in memory of Michael Jackson (“no, not that one” as we once needed to say) who had passed away suddenly the week before. It almost worked, I had a plan, I had a free day to do it, and I had the ingredients.

In retrospect, though, I should have made the yeast starter the day I spent fixing the TiVo — the old tube of yeast didn’t revive in time, and my “emergency dry yeast” supply was even older. Feh, brewing canceled. To work off *that* stress, I tossed the kids in the bike trailer and started pedaling, eventually finding my way home after about 25 miles of wandering.

So, today was the day. I fought a nasty, exhausting headache all morning, couldn’t even stomach a lunch beyond crackers and ginger ale, but dammit, I needed this. I finally started around 2:00 pm, and tried to keep it simple and stress-free. I took only fragmentary notes, and no gravity readings. I did a shorter than normal mash (the result was still very clear) and boiled a little less than normal, and was all cleaned up and put away at quarter after six. So fast, I swear I must have forgotten something…

I’m not worrying too much about it (“Did I kill the yeast?” “Will it ferment?” “How will it taste?”) — any stress would be very counterproductive at this point. Either I get a decent little (or big?) brown ale or porter-ish vageuly-English beer out of it, or I don’t. Either way, I’ve taken a big step out of a nearly year-long brewing funk, and that feels good.

Surprisingly, I did manage to enter the Upper Mississippi mash-out as I mentioned a couple posts ago. I included the Imperial Stout, bringing the total to 6 entries. I hope at least some of them do well, I won’t know until the 27th.

I’ve recently gotten into Rye Whiskey. A New York Times Article had quite a bit to do with it. If it hadn’t been posted on Making Light and mentioned in a conversation with a co-worker in the same week, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought, and continued to view the few Ryes on the liquor store shelves with a suspicious eye. The article sold me on the style, so I decided to give it a try, starting with a mid-range “value” rye to avoid being turned off of the style by a low-quality example.

First up was Sazerac, ~$25/750ml at Surdyk’s. Quite good, light bodied and spicy. Next, I tried the next step down, Rittenhouse ($12/750 mL) which disappeared pretty quickly also. Rittenhouse was somewhat mellower, but definitely a quality whiskey. Currently, I’m down to “Old Overholt”, a $10/bottle whiskey and thus among the cheaper liquors sold in glass bottles… It’s also my favorite so far, a wonderful value and a good example of the Rye style. I haven’t tried Jim Beam or Wild Turkey yet. As for high-end examples, the only one I’ve seen locally has been a 21yr Rittenhouse for $130/bottle, so I won’t be having one of those anytime soon…

All have been decent sipping whiskeys, but an old out-of-style liquor calls for an old out-of-style cocktail. Rye shines in an Old Fashioned. Its bold spicy flavors give a tasty and balanced version of the cocktail, in contrast to the mellow, sweeter, usual Bourbon version.

They’re also a simple cocktail to make. Put a sugar cube, a thin (1cm) wedge of orange, and a splash of water into an Old Fashioned glass (short, thick bottom, straight sides, ~6-8 oz capacity) and muddle until the sugar is dissolved and the oranges are nicely bruised, especially the skin. Add a dash of Angostura Bitters, top off with 3-4 oz of Rye Whiskey and ice, stir. and serve. This is now my favorite cocktail by a large margin.

I think I may actually get some entries to the Upper Mississippi Mash-out this year. More entries than ever before, in fact. I almost feel like I have a hobby again!

Of course, competitions means bottling (with the exception of Beer and Sweat keg-only competition, with two drawbacks: location, and insanity), and I keg. Enter the Beer Gun. Quite cool, very easy to use. I’ll be sold on the concept unless/until all the beers I sent to the mash-out get dinged for oxidation.

So, I’m planning to send:

• The steam beer and pale ale I brewed two posts ago. They aged well….
• My 2005 wild-yeast-fermented cider. I tried both the natural and the pitched yeast versions side-by-side before deciding. The natural cider basically screamed apple!, while the pitched version was much more subtle with honey notes and a crisp, dry finish. In beer, at least, subtlety does not seem to do well at competitions, so the natural cider goes.
• The Dubbel I tossed together last summer. This is turning out to be a wonderful beer. Unfortunately, not the beer I’m in the mood for most of the time. I may have to work my way back into liking the Belgian styles again…
• The Rochefort 8° clone I brewed two summers ago with a friend. Since I haven’t been in a Belgian mood, and when I am, I want to save this stuff rather than drink it, I have most of my case left. It’s quite excellent, and I’m sending some.

The Rochefort 8° clone was a tough choice to send vs. keep all to myself. I’m currently drinking another tough choice, an Imperial Stout I brewed back in 2004 (<boggle>, was it really that long ago?), and is developing very nicely. I have somewhat more than a case left, and it did really well in the 2005 State fair competition (high score, no medal — Imperial stouts are a popular style among homebrewers). This one will be a gametime decision….

… and I still need to work tomorrow. Feh. Me sleep now.

… is the earth shaking from my happy dance. Three things:

1. I’m brewing tomorrow!
2. I have some beers on tap! (I’ve had only cider for a couple months)
3. Grafica Obscura is back online!

I haven’t finished all of the prep work for the brewing, as typical. Tonight was spent freeing up fermenters — I moved my Belgian Dubbel from this summer out of its secondary carboy and into a keg. I think this one’s going to be good — moderately dry, smoky, with almost a whisky character. I planned to force carbonate it before putting it on tap, but the liquid poppet started leaking, meaning it had to be hooked up to something, so it went on tap.

I also fixed the other beer, my 2003 Raspberry lambic, which has had a clogged dip tube for well over a month, because of the raspberry chunks and other detritus that made it into the keg. I replaced the dip tube with a shorter one that seems to end somewhat above the crap, so the beer is flowing free, clear, and sour This one’s quite tasty also, and I can’t wait for it to get a little fizzier.

The plan for tomorrow is 10 gallons of steam beer wort, half of which will become a steam beer, the other half will be dry-hopped, hopefully to impersonate an American IPA. I still need to weigh out ingredients, grind grains, get propane…

Grafica Obscura, although a bit dated by now, was always worth a read and re-read. It’s a collection of graphics and origami hacks, essays, etc. by Paul Haeberli, formerly(?) of SGI. The pages used to be hosted at sgi, but about 6 months ago, I was going to refer a friend (hi Dan!) to a couple elegant hacks on the site, but it came up 404, no forwarding address, and the wayback machine had very few of the example images. Now it’s back, and I’m happy.

Even though Grafica’s been static since the late 90s, I still find some inspiration there every now and then. Of particular interest is the (still-)inchoate “Futurist Programming” section, which first led me to the work of Henry Massalin, author of the Synthesis operating system, an OS which rewrites and optimises its own code at runtime. Massalin’s dissertation is an amazing work, and fun to read.

I’ve been lazy.

In the last couple weeks, I finally got around to:

• Racking 10 gallons last fall’s cider into kegs, mostly to empty the carboys so I could:
• Get my latest two batches out of their (open) primary fermenters

which couldn’t have been timed better; I blew two kegs about a week later, and:

• Put 10 gallons of cider on tap

(here’s where the laziness gets really inexcusable)

• updated the mini-whiteboard over my taps so the taps are (gasp) labeled correctly. No more getting the mild from the double IPA tap.
• HTMLized the notes from my latest batch, and
• did the same for the other beers I’ve brewed this year. It’s not too many…
• updated the site.

The ciders are spectacular. One of them is naturally fermented, and has noticeable residual sweetness and great apple character. The other got some White Labs English Cider yeast, and came out a bit dryer. Because I procrastinated getting them into kegs, they got the benefit of extra aging, and I’ll be drinking them during this year’s cider season. Motivation!

The wine/mead/cider world is probably more suited to my available time and motivation — in general, beer can only be ignored for a month or so, but wines &c. can be, no need to be ignored for most of a year to get really good.

I think I’ll stick to beer though. Beer’s tasty, bottling’s fiddly, and mead on tap would be very, very dangerous.

Finally got around to brewing again, first time since late May/early June. That brew session (a mild) was last-minute enough that I actually didn’t take any notes. My friend was showing his house, and just happened to have that day free, so we brewed a quick mild to be ready in a couple weeks before he was anticipating moving out of town. Of course, I didn’t get around to racking that one for 5 weeks. It’s still good! It’s still good! (Actually, it’s not bad …)

After chasing the ants, spiders, and centipedes off the equipment (heat kills everything), I managed to put together two batches: a Belgian Dubbel (try later if the link doesn’t work; no guarantees I’ll transcribe it tonight) and Jess’s birthday brew, a spiced apple beer I meant to brew back in May.

The dubbel is my first try using the real Belgian dark candi sugar syrup which started getting imported earlier this year. It’s a jet-black syrup much like molasses , but derived from beet sugar, and provides color and alcohol to a lot of dark Belgian ales. The nearly-black Westvleteren ales are supposedly brewed with no color malts, just with this stuff. So far, it seems to contribute much more color than the dark rock candy that’s normally sold as “candi sugar.” The hydrometer sample tasted promising too; if this batch ferments well it’ll be a great one.

The spiced apple beer is currently a 3.5-4 gallon batch of a light extract ale (3# light DME) with an ounce of Saaz hops boiled for 30 minutes. I added a 96oz can of “Apple wine base” and pitched some US-56 dry yeast. I probably won’t be using the Apple wine base again; it’s basically diluted concentrate, might as well use the frozen stuff. I probably will anyway, to supplement the apple character. The spices will be added later, probably as a vodka extract (or maybe a cinnamon stick in secondary, hmm….)

I can’t wait for that nice familiar bubbling to start again. Mmmm… beer.

I’ve been slacking. Haven’t brewed since late November’s Scottish Ale, hadn’t updated my notes page since mid-December, etc. I’ve barely had the time and energy to drink beer, much less brew it.

The Scottish ale turned out better than I expected. It’s somewhat similar to Summit Winter, but smoother and maltier. Definitely not bad for a recipe I threw together in a few minutes using a few odd ingredients.

Back when I’d brew two or three weekends a month, I would play around like that a lot to avoid getting into a rut. Now that I seem to be averaging a brew every couple months, I think I need to do a known-good beer every time so that I can have good beer on hand, and revisit some of my old favorite recipes. Working on a recipe by trying out several variations is right out. All I’ve got room for is rut.

This means I will have to abandon my quest to clone Uerige. My last attempt convinced me I’m on the right track, but I still have a long way to go. This beer appears to require fermentation temperature control and a way to do proper lagering: the basement in winter just didn’t cut it. Maybe I need to return to my more forgiving earlier recipes, which got me hooked on the style in the first place, after all.

Hmmm… maybe I should take a stab at an Anchor Steam clone. It’s kind of alt-ish, and I haven’t done a Steam beer in a little over 3 years.

Looking at my first post/TODO list, I seem to have procrastinated more than I thought possible. Nothing there is done, and I’m particularly peeved at myself for not getting anything into bottles for the Upper Mississippi Mash-Out competition, and entries are due tomorrow. I have some good stuff brewed, but it’s all on tap. I meant to spring for a semi-fancy bottle filler, and almost pulled the trigger today, but the desire to get home after a frustrating day at work (there are other kinds?) won out.

I’m considering doing a half-assed bottling job (just filling from the tap and capping on the resulting foam), or maybe just not entering. Not entering would have exactly one benefit — if I signed up to judge at the competition, I could judge the styles I like to brew and enter. The half-assed bottling job has a chance of working, but since the judging isn’t for a couple weeks, oxidation may be a problem. I’m not seeing a clear choice here (other than to get to sleep and save the damned hand-wringing for the next contest).

I think I’m becoming one of the sort who hibernates for the winter. I never used to be this bad. It’s not just the beer stuff: I’ve also abandoned a depressing number of short/quick projects around the house. None of them should take more than 20 minutes and/or a trip to the hardware store, but for some reason, that seems an insurmountable barrier when the kids are “asleep”, and I’m huddled around a warm TV, Laptop, and baby monitor waiting for the next fuss….

I finally posted the notes for the Scottish 80/- I brewed three weeks ago, after racking it just yesterday. This was the first time I’d ever used “Golden Naked Oats” in a brew. They’re quite tasty, and appeare to have given the beer a slighly nutty whisky-ish character. It’s quite promising, and I can’t wait to get it online. It just needs a little time to carbonate.

The wheat beer, at least the half not currently languishing at Jess’s aunt’s house, blew a couple days ago. This was the half with American (Cascade) bittering hops, Belgian yeast (the very spicy Safbrew T-58), dry hopped with Czech (Saaz) hops. It was, for lack of a better term, interesting. It wasn’t my favorite beer, but it was tasty. I may need to experiment with combining these diverse flavors again, but probably not in a wheat beer: The experience/trauma of brewing and drinking 20 gallons of wheat beer in summer 2004 still hasn’t worn off, so I’m still not very fond of wheats.

The wheat was replaced by my latest Historical IPA, which is quite tasty if a bit cloudy. Like the last time, I put a metric ass-ton of hops in it, and they all disappeared leaving a flavorful, moderately-bitter beer. I even added gypsum to this batch, to try to get a harsher more assertive bitterness, but it insisted on coming out balanced and pleasant. Odd, that.

My latest Alt is turning out to be quite tasty. It’s starting to clear, becoming less harshly bitter, and generally getting closer to what I wanted out of this brew. I should pick up a bottle or two of the target of my cloning efforts to compare.

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I’ve been putting off the hobby stuff for way too long. Since my last update, I’ve brewed once (November 27, nearly three weeks ago) and have neither HTMLized the notes nor racked the beer. All I’ve done since pitching the yeast has been to move the bucket to the basement, where it’s currently sitting on top of another bucket saying “rack me!” everytime I walk by. I’ve meant to do it every day for the last week, but just can’t tear myself away from the computer, TV, kids, and Jess (not necessarily in that order) to get it done. I suppose this is what I get from a sealed primary fermenter. When I do open fermentation, I have an incentive to rack before the bugs get to the beer first…

Also, since last update, I’ve written off one of the batches of preservative-contaminated cider (there’s something growing in it, not yeast — I’m still debating whether it warrants a picture before I dump it). So, I’m batting about .500 on ciders this year. I still look for preservative-free cider everytime I go through a grocery store, just in case I get as lucky as with my first cider 2 years ago.

And, of course, I’ve been really busy procrastinating. Since last time, I’ve not:

• Bottled my maple wine,
• Bottled raspberry melomel (I even sprang for the fancy floor corker so I could package these in style, but haven’t gotten around to buying or gathering bottles and corks.)
• Racked/fined Orange blossom mead
• Racked my latest brew (a moderately-strong Scottish ale) to keg
• Bottled anything for the Upper Mississippi Mash-out. I’ve previously dug out whatever I had sitting in bottles, but now all of my bottled beer is the scarce, precious, well-aged stuff, or young stuff I eventually want to be precious and well-aged but not scarce

And, of course, the TOBREW list:

• Rehash some of that “old and precious” stuff, especially the barleywine and Imperial stout
• Oh, and more of the Rochefort 8 clone couldn’t hurt, either
• Attempt cloning Leinenkugel’s Apple Spice beer. (Jess loves the stuff, and I’m pretty fond of it too — very cider-like)