Moving again: FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU$#($*&K!

Sometimes I really think I am dumb for being a homebrewer. Not just an average beer-obsessed homebrewer, but one that does not own an home and insists on brewing multiple beers that take over a year to age.

All the beers above, except for one carboy, were down in the crawlspace of our home, which meant I had to crawl down to a soot-covered, uneven dirt floor where I can barely crouch, and lift them over my head through a 2x3 foot hole above me. Luckily none of them broke and all my major arteries are still intact.

That was just the stuff in the crawlspace. There was also a large deep-freeze kegerator, a dorm fridge, various bottles both empty and full, and 9 cornies which all had beer in them. And a metro-shelf. And 3 keggles. And the propane burner, and lots of little stuff.

This is my last move in Portland, unless we for some reason buy a house. I'm seriously thinking about pairing down the homebrewing equipment to a single 10 gallon system, and brewing less often. It would seem to fit in better with the fact that I am brewing at work now.

Don't even let me get started on moving out the 3 garden beds and laying down sod! Damn, I need a beer. Right now. Cheers.

I gotta say it was a good day: Hoppy Pilsner and Carbonnade Flammande

I did some brewing on Thursday, and some cooking too, and it occurred to me while enjoying some well-earned vittles after the brew session that hey, today was a good day. Just like that classic rap song from 1993, except I guess instead of playing dominoes and not having to use my AK, I just brewed a nice pilsner, and instead of getting the Fatburger at 2 in the morning, I made a fancy beef stew from Belgium. But sentimentally, it was very much the same.

I'm pretty psyched to have finally gotten lager season rolling. I usually get to do at least a couple of lagers each winter, but I got a late start this year since I had a few other yeast strains already in action. I'm planning on doing at least another batch of the smoked helles (pretty much a Schlenkerla Helles clone) and a Baltic Porter with Paul Key.

When I design a recipe, whether it's "to style" or free-style, I like to think a lot about how I want to final beer to taste, smell, and look like. I like to keep a couple of commercial examples in mind if there is anything close to what I am looking to target. For example, if you are talking about German Pilsner, you have anything from Bitburger or Radeberger pils (very light, clean, and somewhat hoppy but pretty much a lawnmower beer), to something pretty radically hoppy and aromatic like Victory Prima Pils. More often than not, there's a huge range within the style to work with. Less so for German beers for sure, but still there's a range. This is why I think it's funny that some brewers make a point to say it's below them to brew to style. It's as if they think you can't make a creative expression if you stick pretty much within a recognized style. If you think about that for more than a second, you realize that's just not true. It's like saying that a cubist or a surrealist isn't really a painter. Not that beer is fine art, or that it has to be taken so seriously, but I guess art works as a good analogy. Maybe a food analogy would work even better: Do all cheeseburgers taste the same? Of course not!

Anyway (end of rant), I wanted my beer to be more on the hoppy, full-flavored end of the spectrum, like Victory, Jever and even Sly Fox Pils. I wanted to really push the hop flavor and bitterness, and have some residual body to counter the bitterness. I had a lot of noble hops still in the mylar package from 2008, and they were smelling great. I didn't adjust the alpha acids down for time on any of the hops still in the mylar.

One issue I had with this recipe is an extremely long time to go from the boil pot through the heat exchanger. I think there was a little too much hop matter and I just had to wait 40 minutes to knock out into the carboy, but when I did, the wort was at a great pitching temperature: 50 degrees. That's the lowest I've ever pitched a lager yeast, which should make for a really clean fermentation.

The Recipe:

7 gallons pre-boil, 5.5 gallons post boil, all grain

O.G. 1.055 F.G. 1.012 ABV 5.7% IBU's 45

9 lb. Weyermann Pils malt

.5 lb. carafoam

13 gr. Hallertau (1 plug) FWH

14 gr. Perle pellets 6.5% 60 min

8 gr. Magnum whole 12% 60 min

56 gr. Czech Saaz pellets 3% 20 min

28 gr. Czech Saaz pellets 3% 0 min

28 gr. Hallertau pellets 4% 0 min

Mash: 4 gallons + 5 gr. gypsum, 2 gr. calcium chloride

152 for 60 minutes

Sparge with 5 gallons at 166

Collect 7 gallons at 1.043 = 84% efficiency

Boil 90 minutes

wyeast nutrient & whirlfloc at 15 minutes

Whirlpool, rest 10 miuntes. Chill to 50 degrees, took 40 minutes to run through heat exchanger! Ground water was run though a copper pre-chiller in an ice water bath.

Collected 5.1 gallons at 1.055, pitched Wyeast 2124 Bohemian lager yeast at 50 degrees.

Fermented at 52 degrees for 12 days.

Pulled into the house on 1/26/10 for a D-rest for 4 days

Pulled back out in the garage to chill to 50 and racked to a keg on 2/2/10

OK, now here are some cooking pics of the Carbonnade Flammande, and this is the recipe that I based it loosely off of. The carrots are not traditional, I just felt like adding some vegetables. I used my flanders red homebrew as the stew base, which is still a little lacking in acidity. After I pulled a sample for cooking, I added some more bugs to the keg to help sour it up, and a couple of bottle of the Belgian Dark Strong to give it a little more maltiness and sugars for the bugs to eat.

The prep...the meat is browned. Use a well marbled meat, unless you like dry stew meat.

Most of the online recipes do not specifically call for Flanders red ale, but it's best to use a sour malty ale. If you can't find that, you can probably fake it with a Belgian Dubbel and a dash of vinegar and sugar.

The end product was excellent. I think it's traditionally served with noodles or pommes frites. I used some leftover garlicky mashed potatoes.

Here's another cooking project that Clarissa and I have been getting into: the no-knead bread technique that is very popular and turns out a great loaf.

Our first loaf, above was made with all bread flour and baked at 500 degrees. It was OK but it was not entirely done when we took it out of the oven. The crust was getting very dark but the inside was a bit moist. So it steamed out the crust and made it a bit chewy, but it was still pretty good.

Here's the second loaf, where we used 1/3 whole wheat flour and 2/3 bread flour. It tasted every bit as awesome as it looks here. We turned our oven temp down to 450 so it had plenty of time to finish cooking before the crust got too dark.

Petit Saison - and a rant about my job.

Free Range Monkey

Office Monkey

Once again, I was supposed to start interning at Sixpoint this weekend, but they recently had to take a break from brewing due to some renovations. So they brewed like crazy this week. Now they have all 4 fermenters full, and no beer ready to keg! Nothing to do, so the brewery was once again closed on Saturday. Looks like my first brewday with them will be on March 14th, which kind of sucks, but it also means I'll have my birthday weekend free and clear to set up the party and make sure all the bees are ready.

The 1 month lag wouldn't be a big deal, but I am just so ready to leave my current job that every delayed week feels like an eternity! Sixpoint may or may not turn into a real job, but at least it's a step in the right direction. Today there's a snowstorm, and there is jack shit to do here at my office-monkey job, so at least I have time to update my blog. I was talking to my friend Zeke the other day, telling him the best thing that could happen to me would be to get laid off, but I know that's not going to happen, because I'm too good of a worker, and I can't sabotage myself. So here I remain, glued to my chair until further notice.

I wanted to at least get a brew in this weekend. I feel like I'm sort of stocking up for when I'll be at the brewery every Saturday and I won't have much time to homebrew. So I had a packet of Wyeast 3724 Saison yeast and I really just made this beer for myself to drink, not really to style, but hopefully very much to my taste. I'm happy to announce that I'm off some of what I considered to be inferior saison yeasts (White Labs 566: Saison II, and Wyeast 3726: Farmhouse), and back to the classic Dupont strain.

This beer is designed to be a low alcohol drinker, and a base to grow yeast, with the next recipe being a re-do of the Saison 566 recipe that did OK in competition, but really just needed a better yeast. Then if the yeast is still clean and in good condition, I might do a black saison, which technically is not a new recipe because I brewed one way back in 2005 which was not really that good. This brew was done with all American hops, but not the classic "4 C's" varieties that are very citrusy. I used a high-alpha Magnum for bittering, and an American grown Goldings for flavor/aroma, to sort of get in line with a classic saison hop, but grown in the states. It is more piney than English Kent Goldings, but there is a similar floral aroma there too. The finish hop additions are pretty big for a saison, which is what I was going for.

The shittiest part of brewing on Saturday was, I set myself up with a LONG brewwday. I had to rack the IPA to get a carboy free, then I decided I might as well rack the "Saison Sans Pantalons" that got infected with the Berlinner Weisse yeast, and has been sitting on my shelf for like 7 months. I think the infected saison was probably a waste of time and should have gone down the drain, but the IPA tasted fantastic! The kegs took forever to clean. One was completely filthy, having recently been acquired from some hillbilly's garage. I had to wash off the spiders and dirt outside and dump out the remaining 4 year old Pepsi inside, break it apart and scrub the hell out of it.

I mashed in at 2:00 p.m. and took a break before boiling to eat at a local bar (accompanied by a Racer 5 IPA). I finished cleaning after 10:00! Christ...this is supposed to be fun!

Recipe is for 7 gallons pre-boil, 6 gallons post boil, 5.25 in the fermenter
O.G. 1.048 F.G. 1.008 5% ABV IBU's 26

8 lb. Durst Pils Malt
1 lb. Wheat Malt
8 oz. Raw Spelt
4 oz. Aromatic Malt
2 oz. Melanoidin Malt
1/2 oz. carafa special II (for color and "pH balance" - wasn't that a shampoo commercial?)

All whole hops:
12 gr. US Magnum 14% 60 min
28 gr. US Goldings 5% 10 min
35 gr. US Golings 5% 0 min

Wyeast 3724

Mash: 3.75 gallons + 1 tsp gypsum. Total time 105 min.
130 for 15 min, raised to 150 over 10 min
150 for 60 minutes, fell to 145. Raised to 160 over 10 min
160 for 10 min, raised to 170 over 5 min

Sparge: 4.5 gallons at 170. Collected 6.75 gallons at 1.042 = 82% efficiency

Boil 90 minutes, adding 3 cups of top-up water during the boil
Whirlfoc at 15 min
1/2 tsp Wyeast nutrient at 10 min

Chilled to 66, whirlpooled 20 minutes, and racked to a carboy.
Aerated by hand for 8 min.
Pitched 1 quart starter (with liquid) made on a stirplate at 68 degrees.
Fermentation peaked at 76 degrees, and then fell back to 72. I am not rushing this one so I'm just letting it hang out there.

Racked to keg on 3/30/09. Amazingly (or unamazingly) this beer is still at 1.010! The yeast is still working but it seems like the low ferment temp was just making it limp along. I attached a heating pad to the outside of the keg to push it through the final fermentation. I think it may help with the flavor/aroma too.

5/14/09 This beer turned out really fantastic as a session saison, and it was incredibly clear. The only recipe adjustment I might make is to ferment a little higher for more yeast complexity. I'll try to post an official tasting soon.

Moratorium on new Recipes

Ahh... We are now finished with Homebrew Alley 3, the annual NYC Homebrew competition, and I can finally relax! Much of my recent time and mental energy was involved in organizing this competition and making sure it went off right.

Also, I entered about 8 beers, one of which took first in Dark Lagers & Bocks: JZ's Schwarzbier recipe (which I never posted here, sorry!) I thought I had some other really strong beers though, and I was sad to see that they got only middling scores. I have not seen the scoresheets yet, but I know the Dubbel, based off Jamil's recipe, scored only a 27 and I know this was a really nice beer. Also, the smoked helles, which I am drinking like water off the tap and loving every sip, scored a 30.

Well, this is the way competitions go and as long as the judges provided detailed feedback, it's their right to score them as they see fit. Above all, it's important not to base the strength of a beer off of the results from only one competition.

However, I also think that a lot of the beers I have been brewing are not quite up to my own personal standards. In that spirit, I am going to try to display more discipline and focus in on some of the recipes that I already have.

As boring as this may sound (or maybe it's exciting?) I am going to put into effect a moratorium on any new beer recipes, until I have gone back and really improved on the recipes that I am already brewing. For instance, Mr. T: This beer, which I entered as a Tripel, received 1st place in Belgian Strong Ales in one competition, and at Homebrew Alley it scored a 22! I have no idea how that can be. There was no bottle inconsistency issue, so I can only guess that in one competition, the judges liked it too much, and in the next, they were too eager to slam it. Now granted, I never thought Mr. T was good enough to deserve a 1st place ribbon, but I certainly think it was a 30 point beer at least. There is much room for improvement and I know where it is, even without seeing any scoresheets.

Maybe this can be some sort of meditation on style...I mean, the people who look down their noses at brewing to style never really give enough credit to the vast room to play that there is within a style. And here I am, 90% of the time being perfectly content brewing to style, yet knowing full well that there is so much room for interpretation and self expression within these parameters. You have to start by imagining the beer you want to brew, and in trying to actually make that happen you may come across some happy surprises, but ultimately you want end up with the beer you imagined. If you can't see it in your head before you brew it, maybe you shouldn't try?

At the same time, I think you have to be comfortable with your beers, if you know they are great, because beer judges are not always right, and quite frankly some are much better than others. Sometimes they just pick the wrong beer to advance. Sometimes your beer is good, but it was just a big flight and somebody's beer was better than yours.

Oh yeah, and with the organizer points from this year's competition, I should be a national judge by the next cycle! Cool...