You Pee it, We'll Pimp It

I just saw a reference to "manlaws" on the web. Can I ask a question that has really been eating at me? Remember the Miller Lite "Man Law" ads? Tell me something. How can anyone suggest, even as a joke, that we pay any attention to "Man Law" made by five guys who DRINK PISS?

And Triple H...he married the boss's daughter! Man Law...brought to you by a BITCH-MADE MAN. Does that even make sense?

Eddie Griffin...he's such a wuss he can't drive a manual transmission. He plowed a gorgeous Ferrari into a wall because he's a pansy! "Man Law"? How about Men Who Should Let Their Wives Drive Law?

Don't even get me started on Burt Reynolds. He doesn't just have a wig. He has a WIG COLLECTION. Why not just call it "Wigmaster Law"? And have you seen him lately? Burt Reynolds can't tell other people how to drink beer, because if Burt Reynolds drank a whole beer, he would DIE. I don't know if he has AIDS or anorexia or tapeworms or tuberculosis or what, but he for damn sure isn't going out every night with the boys and playing "quarters". He looks better than he did a few years back, but when he stands between the camera and the sun, you can see through his chest.

Supposedly, they made a law about not putting fruit in beer. Okay, first of all that doesn't apply to Miller Lite (or any Bud product) because corn and rice lager is not beer. It's more like flavored seltzer. But let's let that go and move on to a more important fact. SOME OF THE GREATEST BEERS IN THE WORLD HAVE FRUIT IN THEM.

Jesus, have you ever had a lambic? Or a delicious wheat beer with fruit added? It's magnificent. I'm supposed to give that up for a bunch of showbiz sideshow freaks who drink canned piss? You're joking, right?

No wonder Miller killed the ads. They were stupid, and the Miller people were probably afraid Burt would try to lift a beer by himself and rupture something.

I admit, the commercials were entertaining. The worse a beer is, the better the commercials. But still, stupid.

I think you all owe me one, because I've decided to try not to tear into the Half-Assed News Hour this week. Too awful much. I didn't see it this week, but Moxie claims it was actually worse than usual. I'm sure she wouldn't lie, but how do you make something worse than "The Little Engine That Couldn't Quite" and "Don't Tell Mama, I'm for Obama"?

Actually, she told me some of the jokes, and it was as though she was making things up, spoofing the spoof. But she was serious. It was almost creepy.

My God, what buffoons and idiots. They've been doing this show for a YEAR now, including development. A SOLID YEAR. That it continues to be bad at all is amazing. But for it to get worse? That is prima facia evidence of a bona fide curse straight from the throne of God. If I were Joel Surnow, I would be on the lookout for a plague of frogs pretty soon.

How can it get worse? Are they even trying? Is Joel Surnow a liberal mole, deliberately being unfunny and off-putting and disturbing, in order to help Piano Legs win the White House?

I'll help them. I'll write some quick sketches. How about "Liberal Law"? Michael Moore, Babs Streisand, Janeane Garofalo, and maybe Ed Begley, sitting around an IKEA table, making laws like, "It's not okay to put fruit in the beer, but you can put beer in a fruit." I don't know. I'm just brainstorming here.

A liberal blogger somewhere was crapping on .5HNH and Red Eye, and he claimed .5HNH wasn't funny because it never picked on conservatives. I think that's a valid point, although it's unfunny mainly because the writers and director and actors have no talent. If you can't laugh at Rush Limbaugh making his Little Brown Person maid score drugs for him, or at Bill O'Reilly telling a producer he wants to get in the shower with her and soap her big fat tits, or at George Bush nearly being taken down by a rogue pretzel, you need some kind of ass-loosening surgery. Maybe I should revive Huffington's Toast and live up to the failed promise of Huffpo and Pajamas Media by being truly nonpartisan, reaming idiots on both sides of the aisle.

I'm kind of doing that here, anyway.

And I guess I crapped on .5HNH after all.

Here's a Man Law for you. Don't drink piss and pretend it's beer. Or we'll put you in a Ferrari with Eddie Griffin and tell him to take you on the freeway.

More

Moxie has a chilling eyewitness account.

Posted by Steve H. at 10:05 PM | Permalink  

Not my Thing

My editor is trying to get me to do some "caveman-style" recipes for the book. It occurs to me that a recipe for fermented berry juice would be useful. However I don't have any recipes like that.

Anyone got a good, tried-and-true berry melomel recipe I can use? If it looks good I'll put it in the book and credit you. Has to be some kind of berry, though, like blueberry or raspberry. Can't be apple or peach.

Also, I need it by tomorrow.

Never Mind

Found something suitable.

Posted by Steve H. at 12:50 PM | Permalink  

Daddy Needs His Prime Steaks

The experimental dry-aging beef is in the beer freezer and loafing along nicely at 33-35 degrees. I had a hard time deciding what kind of cloth to wrap it in. I have a ton of white cotton pillowcases I don't need, so I stole two of those. I figure I'll use one today, use the other tomorrow and run the first one through the washer, and so on.

Gosh, after putting all that work in, in intimate contact with the beer freezer, I keep feeling like there is something I should do. But what is it? I feel like I should know...

Oh, yes. I should get shitfaced on homebrew and write a song about Pajamas Media.

I'll get right on it.

Posted by Steve H. at 3:56 PM | Permalink  

My Gas Problems Continue

All you engineers, speak up.

I keep having gas leakage problems. And I don't mean the usual kind. I mean in my beer kegs.

I have this idea that it's because I need to put fresh O-rings in the tops of the kegs every time I fill them. I think maybe the O-rings get deformed while they're in the kegs and I should rotate them so they have time to expand again.

Is that standard O-ring practice? This is not really my field.

Posted by Steve H. at 3:08 PM | Permalink  

Ale of the Gods

I was pooped because I cooked for nine straight hours. I sat down and flipped channels and settled on The Kung-Fu Hustle and regretfully poured myself two of the last three glasses of my astounding Room Temperature Ale. And I drank them and enjoyed the movie and marveled at the indescribable flavor of this complex, aromatic, sweet, bitter, sour beer.

And then I got up and tried to walk to the computer and realized I was hammered. What IS it with this stuff?

I used to think I was born to be a serious writer. Then I thought I was supposed to be a physicist. That lunacy passed, and then I figured I was supposed to be a humorist.

Now I am starting to think my predestined occupation is food and beverage wizard. I get good results I don't deserve and which don't even make sense.

Someone help me stand up.

Posted by Steve H. at 9:58 PM | Permalink  

Too Good, I Guess

I was planning to put on a feed for my cousin and his friends today, but they decided to hit the Keys instead, giving me an extra day. I think that worked out well.

I planned to deep-fry dolphin and snapper and have some twice-fried fries and roasted corn on the side. But since I had more time to screw around with it, I was able to make a batch of brownies and add macaroni and cheese to the offerings. I made the brownies today, and the fine people at the grocery set me up with some free beef fat for the fry grease, so things are looking good. Tomorrow all I have to do is fry the fish and make the macaroni. The fries are already blanched and in the fridge.

I decided to reward myself for my industry by trying a new beer today. Sea Dog Raspberry Wheat Ale. I went to the beer store and checked out all their crap, and there were so many things available, I didn't know what to do. I had never heard of Sea Dog, but raspberry wheat ale sounded like it would hit the spot, so I bought a six-pack.

I decided to drink it out by the pool with Maynard, with my new Casablanca DVD. I can't say I'm thrilled. I think any beer will taste good if you put raspberry syrup in it, but this stuff had kind of a Budweisery finish, so I suspect it's like that unbelievably shitty Hurricane Reef stuff they make down here. Basically megaswill with a pretty label and a hefty price. Hard to tell without drinking a non-raspberry Sea Dog product. I'll say this. It was pleasant. I just wouldn't buy it again.

After the Sea Dog, I rationed out a pint of my magnificent, awe-inspiring Room Temperature Ale. I honestly have no idea how I managed to come up with this recipe. As brewers go, I'm fairly ignorant. But I have a way of getting lucky. Supposedly Napoleon preferred lucky generals to brilliant ones. I think there's something to that.

You don't realize how great a good beer is until you drink it after a shitty one. The Sea Dog stuff had a nice raspberry flavor, and it gave me a slight buzz. But that was it. I inhaled the aroma, trying to see if they had done anything interesting with the hops, and there was nothing there. As I drank it, I looked for complexity, but I couldn't detect a damn thing other than generic beer flavor. Then I tried the Room Temperature Ale. Oh, God. Before I even got it to my face, the scent of citrus and allspice (which isn't in the recipe) whacked me like a bat between the eyes. And then as I drank it, there were so many flavors...sweet, sour, bitter from both hops and suspended yeast, and something like peaches. More citrus. Cloves. That weird, penetrating aroma you get from crystal hops. Caramel. And after I put it down, I was still tasting it, and the flavor was still changing.

I knocked that recipe out of the park. I can hardly wait until the new batch is ready to keg. As soon as it stops blasting out CO2, I'm going to keg it. I don't even care if it's done fermenting. Let it finish in the keg. I need my fix. By eyeball, I would estimate that I have two pints of the last batch left.

A recipe this good makes all my lame, unsuccessful recipes seem worth the trouble and expense. I come up with something good about 80% of the time. The relatively bad stuff is just part of the cost of experimentation.

I have to get a grip on myself. If I keep falling in love with my beer recipes and making huge feeds on weekends, I'll end up on a Paul Prudhomme cart in no time. No, a halftrack. I'll be a big pallet of jiggling flesh with a head at one end, motoring back and forth between the beer freezer and the stove until I explode.

I better take Marv out and make him listen to some jazz.

Tomorrow is going to be sick. Someone really needs to stop me.

Posted by Steve H. at 8:20 PM | Permalink  

More Hard Times Ahead

My father and I spent yesterday fishing with my cousin Robert and his friends, who came down from Kentucky on Thursday. Nothing big and interesting is biting right now, so we went out and dropped some lines on a couple of artificial reefs. Caught some extremely weird-looking snapper and some porgies and about 3,000 grunts.

It's always weird, taking freshwater fishermen out on the ocean. They want everything fileted and skinned. I filet reasonably big fish like dolphin, but the small embarrassing fish just get scaled and gutted and have their heads chopped off. I don't bother skinning them. The skin on a snapper fries up just fine.

Anyway, they wanted filets, so we fileted. Thank God today we're planning to fry the results. I can't handle the shame of having four-inch-long filets in my freezer.

I figured I should also make a few sides and a dessert, so I'm about to hit the grocery store. I'm going to roast corn and make twice-fried fries. And brownies. I contemplated making a huge container of macaroni and cheese. I still might.

I don't have much beef fat on hand to fry the fries in. Luckily, I saved the grease from my last turkey. I threw it in a sauce pan, and I had half a pound of beef fat in the freezer, so I put it in there to render down. I should come out with around a pint of animal fat to flavor the frying oil. Maybe I can get a little more fat at the store.

We're going to sit outside by the pool and eat like pigs.

The ale I brewed day before yesterday is scaring me. I decided to try oxygenating the wort with a tank. I had never done that before. I thought it was overkill. However, it is safe to say that I was mistaken.

Yeast needs oxygen to thrive, and when you boil wort to make beer, you drive the dissolved oxygen out. You have to get it back in if you want the yeast to do well. Some people just shake the fermenter. I used to use a hand mixer or a paddle-y thing called a Mix-Stir, which you attach to a drill. I thought I was doing okay, but lately I've had batches where the yeast pooped out, so I didn't want to take chances.

An oxygenation setup consists of a disposable Bernzomatic oxygen tank, a small regulator, a filter, and a stainless "stone" at the end, like an airstone in an aquarium. The stone breaks the oxygen up into tiny bubbles that dissolve well. You put the stone in the wort and pump bubbles out for a minute, and then you seal the fermenter.

I did all that, and when I got up the next morning the beer was bubbling away. I thought that was nice. Then I came home from fishing, hours later, and I noticed that the lid of the fermenter had been blown open and was sitting at a thirty-degree angle, with the low side still attached to the bucket.

I rigged a blowoff hose, which is a hose that goes from a fermenter's gas outlet to a container of sanitized water. The gas goes out of the hose and up through the water, and hopefully, no bacteria finds its way up the hose and into the beer. Ordinarily, I only do this for wheat beer, which ferments furiously. Generally, I use a little thing called an airlock, which is a tiny container of liquid that sits in the gas outlet. The CO2 goes up through the liquid and out. But this batch was nuts. I needed something bigger.

All night long, it sat out in the living room going "WHORRRRRRT" every three seconds as the bubbles escaped. It sounded like Darth Vader was snorkeling in my beer. It's still going pretty strong. It's kind of scary to walk by it at night. I think the beer will be great, if it doesn't jump out and attack me.

In other news, my Barley Crusher grain mill arrived, and I used it to re-crush the barley for this batch. The barley was supposedly crushed when it arrived, but I wanted to be sure, so I ran it through again. The mill pulverized it pretty severely. I was worried that it would gum up when I tried to rinse the sugar out of it after the mash. But it worked ridiculously well. I was expected an original gravity of 1.056 for about five gallons, and I ended up with 1.060 and six gallons.

The mill works fine, although cranking the handle by hand is impossible. It would take fifteen minutes to do eleven pounds. I attached a drill to the handle, and all was bliss.

That's all I have for now. Time to raid the grocery store and demand fat.

Posted by Steve H. at 12:08 PM | Permalink  

This Town Doesn't Care About Sophisticated Drunks

I'm sitting here thinking how sad it is that Miami so rarely has beer festivals. Yes, we have a yearly festival where filthy gutter trash celebrate Columbus Day by having sex in public, but when it comes to celebrating really important things, like beer, we fall short by a wide measure.

I went to a festival here in 2003, and it was really good. They grabbed an area of sand over on South Beach and set up tents and kegs and casks and so on. For your entry fee, you got a few tickets, each of which was good for a two-ounce serving of beer at any of the booths or tents at the festival.

They had pretty girls serving the beer, and girls being what they are, it was generally possible to charm them into going way past the two-ounce mark and forgetting to take your ticket. So for the price of admission, I got so hammered I saw old episodes of My Three Sons on the backs of my eyelids.

I learned a good deal about beer that day. I had my first serving of Fin du Monde, and I got to compare various wheat beers side by side, and I determined that there was no point in drinking Old Shipyard products regardless of how pretty the bottles were. The festival helped me shape my own recipes later on.

Unfortunately, nobody in Miami gives a crap about beer. This is a town where everyone drinks rum, which is the worst hard liquor you can buy without going to a hardware store. We have a fairly good microbrewery here (the Titanic Brewery), and it's October, and they don't have a single beer event on their calendar.

I used to live in Austin, Texas. They were much more serious about beer. I'll bet half of the town will be drunk until the first week of November. Why can't we be like that?

Miami struggles and strives to be super-hip and trendy, and beer isn't "rad" or "awesome," so we neglect it. We have one bottled beer made here, and it tastes like dishwater. Hurricane something or other. It's basically Bud in a prettier bottle. One of the dumbest, most pointless products I've ever seen. Putting corn-and-rice swill in a microbrew bottle is like putting a Timex in a Patek Philippe box.

Thank God I have my own beer to save me from the drought. I feel like a survivalist, huddling in my office next to my beer taps while the unwashed outside my doors torture their livers with Bacardi and other household cleaning products.

Posted by Steve H. at 9:26 AM | Permalink  

Give Him a Kiss and a Big Advance

By God, I have two fabulous pieces of news. First, the amazing homebrewed ale I stuck in the Hoglodeck fridge a month or so ago is still fresh and tasty. Second, the music DVD I recorded, which doesn't work in my awful Panasonic DVD player, works just fine in the Hoglodeck's cheapo Sony.

Imagine. I have something like 1600 tunes on one DVD, and the machine holds 5. I should be able to keep my entire classical and jazz collections on three or four disks. And if I turn on the TV, I can see the file structure and pick the albums I want to hear.

I should just lay out there drunk for the rest of my life.

I'm not just drinking by the pool because I'm a fat lazy slouch. Oh, no. I'm finishing Treasure Island. I sent preliminary samples of the pirate book to my editor, and while he said he hooted out loud and disturbed people while reading it, they would like something with a little more pirate info and not quite so much wacked-out bullshit.

That Long John was a son of a bitch, wasn't he? Served him right, being named after a doughnut. Or a pair of scratchy wool drawers.

I'll bet he couldn't cook chicken planks for shit.

I'm strongly considering coming up with my own chicken plank recipe. I love those things.

Posted by Steve H. at 3:11 PM | Permalink  

Time-Saver

Ever brush your teeth and then realize you want to drink a whole lot of beer right away? But you know it will taste awful because the toothpaste flavor won't go away? Sucks, right?

I know a way out of your hell.

After you brush, rinse your mouth out with vinegar. It pretty much kills the toothpaste, and you can be well on your way to a buzz five minutes later.

Uncle Steve is always looking out for you.

Posted by Steve H. at 3:43 PM | Permalink  

To be Swilled Soon

I'm done with the bulk of my part of the ManCamp book proposal, so now I can take a breath and wait for Val to catch up. That "job" thing he keeps talking about...it really slows things down.

That means I can talk about beer.

The wheat beer I brewed the other day is fizzing along beautifully. I'm paranoid about starters, because of past fermentation problem, so I made a big starter for this beer, even though it's wheat. Usually, wheat goes nuts when the yeast hits it.

True to form, it went off in less than a day. The morning after I brewed, I could hear it through the fridge door, going "blerpblerpblerpittyblerpblerpblerpittyblerpblerpblerpittyblerpblerpblerpittyblerpblerpblerpitty."

I don't think I'll be drinking it this weekend, but next weekend is a lock.

I highly recommend crystal malt and citrusy hops for wheat beer. Everyone said I was nuts, as usual, but the combination is awe-inspiring. I can't get enough of this stuff.

I have ingredients for an ale, so I better get started on that next week.

I am so glad my slump is over. I was so afraid I'd have to buy store beer.

Posted by Steve H. at 12:23 PM | Permalink  

Slump Finally Over?

I'm brewing today, which is why I'm not getting a hell of a lot done on the ManCamp book. I'm always going to be a little ahead of Val, because he has a pesky little thing called "a day job." And I'm waiting for my editor to catch up with me on the Nigerian book. I work too damn fast for my own good. I still like the title "Spam of the Damned," but I also think "Nigerian Rhapsody" would be funny. Albeit meaningless.

By the way, this is fricking ridiculous. I just realized I didn't have Robert from the 26th Parallel blogrolled. I can't believe it. Sorry, Robert. Fixed. Anyway, Robert got Val in touch with a newspaper guy who just happens to want to write about men who create their own little "guy spaces" in their homes. How about that? Some coincidence.

I'm brewing my tasty wheat beer. It's mostly wheat, with a little Pilsner and crystal, and I hop it with Centennial. Which I'm not supposed to do. Try and stop me. The yeast is White Labs Hefeweizen something or other. It's mashing right now.

Because I'm brewing, I feel obligated to sample my last brew. I was really worried about it, because I had been having one lame fermentation after another, and this one stopped for a while at 1.020. But thank God, it took off again, and I ended up at a perfect 1.016. And it's clear and beautiful.

It's mostly 2-row malt, with a little Munich and 60L crystal. And I hop it with Nugget and Crystal hops. Don't ask me where I got the idea. Man, does that combination rock.

It's a lager, even though the grain says "ale." I used Geman lager yeast and fermented at about 55. I didn't secondary it; I think that's a waste of time. You end up losing a lot of beer, and you risk exposing the beer to too much oxygen. And many brewers think it tastes about the same either way. If beer gets better than this, it gets better than I need it to be.

I racked it directly into the keg, and I didn't suck a lot of sediment into it the way I would if I were doing a secondary. You pretty much have to suck up crud from the bottom unless you want to leave a half-gallon of beer in the fermenter. A small amount of yeast and hop sediment got in, but it came out in the first couple of glasses I poured. Now there's no sediment to taint the beer, and I ended up with a bigger yield. So screw the secondary.

Here is some other silly news. I got a 100 MHz oscilloscope. Cheap. If I can remember how to use it, it will be a fun addition to the tool collection. If not, I plan to fill it with dirt and plant impatiens. Or maybe I'll have a chia oscilloscope.

I think I can hold off on buying more junk until I twiddle around with the stuff I have and decide whether I really have any interest in this stuff. But I think it's fair to say that a few basic electrical and electronic tools will come in handy sooner or later.

Today I actually needed a grinder, by the way. For an actual task not related to workbenches or fixing other tools. How about that? And I didn't have one, so I had to use a pocket knife.

I can tell that grinder is coming soon.

After I have a few more beers.

Posted by Steve H. at 3:52 PM | Permalink  

Not Brilliant

This week I read about a new toy Guinness is pimping. The "Surger." It's vibrator for beer.

You get yourself a can of Guinness, and you pour it in a glass, and you put the glass on the Surger. Then you turn it on. An ultrasonic device (i.e. vibrator) shakes the Surger, and the beer foams up.

So in other words, if you like flat beer but you're too lazy to shake it yourself, this thing does it for you. And afterward, I guess your girlfriend can sit on it and think of Colin Farrell while you lie on the floor in a puddle of beer vomit.

I read about the Surger, and I suddenly remembered how pathetic life was before homebrewing. People are actually excited about beer that sort of LOOKS LIKE draft stout. When I want draft stout, I get up and pull the handle.

Guinness Pub Draughts are okay, but this thing is SAD with a capital "S."

I kegged a beer today. My marvelous red lager. I'm hoping it will be fizzy enough to drink by tomorrow. I may have some guests here for pizza and BBQ.

I'm very nearly out of Room Temperature Ale, my fabulous ale made with Trappist yeast. I have ingredients on hand for a wheat beer, however, and I recently got a yeast culture going. I'll brew it today or Sunday.

Thank God I have a nice supply of lager already. My Magnum-hopped Pilsner-based lager. That will keep me alive until the red lager and the wheat beer are ready.

I'm not buying a beer vibrator. I wish joy to all those who do.

Posted by Steve H. at 3:55 PM | Permalink  

New Toy

Homebrewing is an endless drudge. I work and work, and I have to order new gadgets constantly in order to feel adequate.

Today my magnetic stirrer arrived. "What's that?", you want to know. Here's an example. In fact, that's the one I bought. It's fairly cheap. I tried to nail some pricier ones on Ebay, but I kept getting outbid by other beer-brewing fatasses.

What does a stirrer do? It stirs. It stirs starters, to be exact. A starter is a yeast culture you make before you brew. Yeast comes in very small containers, and you're better off using a larger amount, but a large amount would cost tons of money. So brewers culture their own.

Today I mixed two liters of water with two cups of DME (dry malt extract, which is mostly sugar), and I boiled it to get it combined well and kill all the germs. Then I dumped it into a Pyrex Ehrlenmeyer flask and put it on the stirrer. I figure the stirrer will make it cool faster. When it gets down near room temperature, I'll pour half of my store-bought Trappist ale yeast into it and get it stirring again.

The stirring oxygenates the wort and helps the yeast get to the sugar, so you get more yeast, faster. Some time tomorrow or Sunday, I'll be ready to brew.

Using a big starter is a good idea. When you brew, it's not practical to truly sterilize everything, so you reduce the bacteria as much as possible and then pray the yeast beat them to the wort. The more yeast you have, the more screwed the bacteria are. If you pour the contents of your little White Labs or Wyeast yeast container into your finished wort, it will start fermenting noticeably one or two days later. If you make a starter using two liters of wort, it may blast off in two hours.

I have a lager ready to go into the secondary. It's my absolutely astoundingly good red lager, made with Nugget and Crystal hops. God, I can't wait. I need move it into the secondary today so the fermenter will be free when I brew my upcoming ale. I also have my tasty Death Hop lager chugging away in the primary.

I'm running low on wheat beer, so that's next.

I don't know if I'm going to make any more ManCamp Special Wuss Lager. Tommy and George seem perfectly happy with my other beers, and Val seems determined to stick with Bud. I like Wuss Lager a lot, but my other beers are somewhat better.

The stir plate works well, but it makes a racket. As I understand it, they make noise unless you order stir bars with smooth sides. A stir bar is a little Teflon-coated magnet that sits in the flask and spins. Some have raised rings around them, and I am told that they make the bars bounce around and make a racket.

What ridiculous item will I order next? Not sure. I might get a refractometer.

Ah, beer. I am living the dream.

Posted by Steve H. at 2:47 PM | Permalink  

I Need Your Help

My beer freezer has some rust on the inside, where the walls meet at the corners. I'm going to remove it with naval jelly. Since this appears to be a spot where rust likes to attack, I plan to seal the corners permanently.

Caulk and silicone fall apart eventually. I was thinking I would get myself some sort of metal-impregnated epoxy like Devcon or Marine Tex and run a bead of it down each corner. I want something really tough, really permanent, and totally waterproof.

Your thoughts?

Also, should I prime it after removing the rust?

I'm really annoyed about this. I got the converted-freezer idea from fellow beer nerds, but none of them mentioned rust.

More

Thanks for all the suggestions.

I decided to go with truck liner spray. I considered the Liquid Rubber, but I don't know how well it stands up to a beating.

I'm going to get rid of the rust, scuff up the interior of the cooler, and cut loose with the spray. I figure it will be hard for the rust to continue with a coating of vinyl glommed directly onto it.

Problem: the only color I could find was black. I can order white, but it will take days, and I need to get this mess fixed.

I also bought Great Stuff to fill the voids under the tap towers so humidity won't creep in as easily.

I plan to fill the drain hole from the inside of the freezer. Not sure what to use. I don't think it really matters. Hell, I guess spackle would do it. I'm going to paint over it anyway. It just has to be something dry and hard.

I don't look forward to having a freezer with a black interior. Maybe at some point in the future I could blast it with a coat of the white stuff.

Posted by Steve H. at 12:17 PM | Permalink  

Sluuuuuuurp

I'm trying my latest lager.

When I created this recipe, I was aiming for a really light-colored lager with serious bitterness on top of a sweet grain bill. I can't say I got what I wanted.

This baby starts with 9.5 pounds of undermodified Pilsner malt, and I added a pound and a half of crystal malt for sweetness and body. Then I bittered the crap out of it with Nugget hops.

It's excellent; no getting around that. But it tastes like honey. And the bitterness is so smooth, it almost seems inadequate. I think I could go up another 10 IBU without hurting it at all.

I went all-Nugget because I wanted to see what these hops taste like by themselves. It's hard to get a grip on the flavor, because it's so smooth and subtle.

Like most of my beers, this stuff goes down like sweet tea. There's none of that brief gagging sensation you get with beers like Bud that are soapy-tasting or too sweet and insipid.

INGREDIENTS:
9.5 lbs. undermodified Pilsner malt
1.5 lbs. 10L crystal malt
0.5 oz. Nugget hops (13% AAU) 60 min.
1.0 oz. Nugget hops 30 min.
1.0 oz. Nugget hops (dry hop)
Budejovice lager yeast

The only beer I've ever had that reminds me of this is Gosser, from Austria. Smooth as silk, but not as heavy as this stuff, if memory serves.

Posted by Steve H. at 3:11 PM | Permalink  

Talk About "Dead Soldiers"

I just sampled the extraordinarily bitter ale I brewed a while back, and I have to say, I am quite pleased.

I'm not sure what to call it. On a whim, I labeled the recipe "Senseless Cruelty Ale" in my brewing software, but I think I can do better.

Most brewers fart around with clearly defined styles. They'll try to make their own versions of German lagers and Irish dry stouts and so on. I do that sometimes, but I also like to yank bizarre original recipes out of my rear end, and that's how this ale was created. I tried a bottle of Flying Dog's Snake Dog Ale, and I decided I wanted to do something sort of similar, only fruitier, and I threw together ingredients that seemed likely to get me where I wanted to be.

This thing is a moderately heavy (1.057 original specific gravity) ale made from Maris Otter and 10L crystal malt, fermented at room temperature with Trappist ale yeast and hopped ruthlessly with Chinook hops. I believe the Maris Otter and the hops are sort of close to the Flying Dog recipe, but I very much doubt that they use Belgian yeast and ferment at 75 degrees, and I would be amazed if they load the grist with crystal malt.

What I ended up with is an extremely bitter beer (50+ IBU) that's really easy to drink because the crystal malt adds sweetness. And judging from the way I feel at the moment, it's pretty strong, too. Let me check my brewing software. Okay, it says I went from 1.057 to 1.016, giving an ABV of 5.3%. Gee, it seems like more.

I think the next time I make this, I may cut the Maris Otter with a very light ale malt. And I think it would be better if I knocked the starting specific gravity down closer to 1.050. Maybe I should be a real son of a bitch and add a pound of sugar, just to raise the alcohol content.

I'm glad this stuff is so good, because I recently had to dump two full kegs of beer that was undrinkable. Something was wrong with the ingredients, because the beer tasted like grass. I thought I had made a booboo with the hopping, but apparently, that was not the case, because when hops make beer taste grassy, it goes away. The off flavor in my two kegs never faded.

Supposedly, grain that has been stored too long can give off a grassy flavor. That's what happened here, in my opinion.

I really need to brew more wheat beer. The magnificent batch I made recently is more than half gone. It was astoundingly good.

Guess I better get online and start ordering ingredients.

Posted by Steve H. at 2:14 PM | Permalink  

Great Literature For Men Who Aspire to Greatness

A reader wants to know where to get information on brewing beer.

The most respected book in the homebrewing sector is How to Brew, by John Palmer. You can find it at Howtobrew.com. Mr. Palmer has an online version of the book there, and if you like it, you can buy the hardcopy version.

Another reader suggested starting with what is known as extract brewing. This is the simplest kind of homebrewing. Instead of taking raw grain and steeping it in temperature-controlled water to convert the starch into fermentable sugar, you buy malt extract, which is the end result of the conversion process.

The advantages of extract brewing are that it's easier and faster. I assume it's more expensive, though, since you're paying someone to convert the starch for you. I don't really know. I've never done it.

I hear that people make very fine beers using extract, but I never bothered with it, because I wanted to do the real deal, and I wanted total control over the ingredients.

The guy who made the recommendation assumes I'm an expert brewer because I do all-grain brewing and put the results in my cookbooks! Don't be deceived. I started doing this in the fall of 2002, and I have a lot to learn. The fact that I get such good results just proves that all-grain brewing is not all that hard.

It's a wonderful hobby, and WAY cheaper than things like golf and fishing. The total cost of ingredients for a 5-gallon brew is $20 or less. As for the equipment, if you were to spend a thousand dollars--peanuts by golf and fishing standards--on fridges and kettles and kegs and so on, you would be outspending most homebrewers by a wide margin. You can get everything you need for around two hundred bucks.

Of course, homebrewing is a hard hobby to share with your kids.

Your beer WILL be better than almost anything you can buy, and you won't have to worry about skunking or having to hunt for the brands you like. And as an added bonus, you'll be drunk a lot.

I am glad to offer advice to anyone who asks, provided you realize that anything I say may be totally wrong.

Posted by Steve H. at 1:37 PM | Permalink  

Ready for ManCamp?

You may recall that I decided to concoct a mild-tasting lager to serve at ManCamp. Val refuses to drink good beer, so I decided to start brainwashing him, by making a beer that resembles Budweiser to some degree, yet doesn't taste like pee.

Here's the grain bill:

6 lbs. German Pilsner malt
2 lbs. flaked corn
1 lb. 10L crystal malt

I bittered it with Magnum hops (26 IBU), and I used American lager yeast, from White Labs.

I'm having the first glass now.

Very nice, believe it or not. You can taste the corn, but it's not overwhelming. The slight bitterness is blunted by the sweetness of the crystal malt. Overall, the beer has a somewhat spicy taste. Sort of reminiscent of cloves or allspice. I think that must be the hops. There's no way this beer has clove-like yeast by-products. That doesn't happen when you use lager yeast at 52 degrees. I think.

People like to call smooth, light beers "lawnmower beers," because they're good for swilling in quantity when you're out in the sun doing strenuous things like mowing yards. I think this beer is a fine example, except that unlike most "lawnmower beers," it isn't foul.

The head is pretty much nonexistent. Maybe it needs a little more carbonation. I don't care. I think foam is overrated.

I believe I'll keep making this beer, even if it's a flop at ManCamp. Even though it has corn in it, it's a quality brew, and I think it would be great to have out by the pool, in a little fridge.

I better light a cigar before I get too far into this.

Posted by Steve H. at 5:35 PM | Permalink  

Improving the Universe, 5 Gallons at a Time

It's brew day, AGAIN. I'm making a new wheat beer with Amarillo hops and crystal malt.

Some wheat beers have orange peel in them to give them extra flavor. To be specific, some types of Belgian witbier (Hoegaarden, Celis White) are known for this. I don't like putting flavorings in my beer. It occured to me that a well-chosen hop could get me into the same place without making me feel like I was cheating.

Enter the Amarillo hop. It is considered similar to Cascade, the hop everyone thinks Sierra Nevada uses in its pale ale. Cascade is known for a citrusy flavor, usually compared to grapefruit. Amarillo is supposed to be more like an orange. So I'm putting Amarillo hops in my wheat beer.

I'm also doing something called "first-wort hopping" for the first time. Generally, when you add hops to wort (beer that isn't beer yet), you start at the beginning of what is known as "the boil." Beer is boiled before fermenting. It sanitizes the wort and gets the hop bitterness and flavor into the brew. A boil usually takes an hour. Some take two.

First-wort hopping is supposed to give you an improved aroma and better hop flavor and a more refined bittering. We shall see.

While I work, I am enjoying Flying Dog Snake Dog India Pale Ale ("IPA"). A marvelous microbrew concoction. I'm very impressed.

The first really hopped-up pale ale I tried was Sierra Nevada, back in 1994, when I was a physics TA in Austin, Texas, and I used to hold office hours at the Crown & Anchor pub. Sierra Nevada is wonderful, but I always thought it wasn't sweet enough to balance the hops.

Flying Dog is a little paler and perhaps less fruity, but I think they must be using a lot of crystal malt, because it's very bitter, yet balanced with sweetness. I don't know what hops they use, but the smell of the Amarillo hops I'm using is remarkable similar to the scent of the beer I'm drinking.

I highly recommend this ale. It's the only pale ale I've ever had that makes me wonder if my own pale ale isn't the best in the universe.

Sierra Nevada is great, but it's inconsistent as hell, in my opinion, and they have never gotten the balance right.

What else is going on? Well, tomorrow the old man and I will be celebrating Fathers' Day with Val Prieto and his dad and whoever shows up at ManCamp, so I'm making blueberry cheesecake and moros. From scratch, as always. As soon as the beer is off the stove, I'm going to get cranking.

I think I need to experiment more with very bitter beers. Apart from my stout, which comes in at 46.-something IBU, I don't have any beers that go past 40. I held back because I didn't really understand how to balance bitterness with sweetness, and because I didn't know about the crazy new hops that are appearing on the scene.

I have a 54-IBU lager planned. Sort of like Steinlager, only not skunked. That should be good. I put a pound and a quarter of crystal malt in the grist to keep it from tasting like a big ol' glass of alum.

Okay, time to throw the Irish moss in the boil and put my marvelous homemade wort chiller in with it.

The wheat beer will be ready to swill in two weeks, tops. I'll let you know how it comes out.

Posted by Steve H. at 6:11 PM | Permalink  

Exciting

It's very exciting. This is the kind of thing that constitutes an event in my sad life. I had to go to Home Depot for some tools, and while I was there, I picked up the stuff to make a wort chiller. I just made the silly thing.

I know you're all dying to make your own wort coolers, so I'll tell you how I did it.

1. 50 feet of copper refrigeration tubing, 3/8" outer diameter

I wanted 3/8" because I read that it had more surface area for the volume, but now that I think about it, that reasoning may not be all that sound. I mean, okay for a given amount of water, the proportion of volume to area may be lower, but the total area is way smaller, and so is the volume, and the speed of the water through the tube will be slower, which means there will be more warm water in the tube.

2. 10" of reinforced vinyl tubing, 3/8" inner diameter, cut in two 5" sections
3. 4 hose clamps
4. 2 female garden hose connectors with 3/8" outer diameter nipples
5. 1 cheap tubing-bending tool, which is just a spring with a flare on one end

I cut the vinyl tubing to length, put two hose clamps on each piece, slid one end of each piece over and end of the copper and the other end over the hose connector nipples, and tightened the hose clamps. Everything fit fine, so I took the vinyl off (so I could slide the tubing tool over the copper) and started shaping the cooler.

I have a 5-gallon Rubbermaid cooler, which is a little smaller in diameter than my kettle. I decided to use that as the form for the outer layer of coils. I didn't need the bending tool for this. I tightened six or eight loops of the tubing so they clung to the cooler, and they looked fine.

To make the inner coils, I took a 3-quart saucepan, set it in the middle of the pile of tubing, and started winding around it. I wound it so I ended up with like 8 loops going back upward from the bottom of the wort cooler.

I left a foot or so of tubing to work with at each end. I put one sharp bend in each end to take the tubing up to the rim of the kettle, and then I bent three or four inches downward to hook over the rim and keep the cooler situated while in use. Then I put the vinyl and the hose connectors back one.

It was really easy. Took about 20 minutes, but it would have been quicker if I had done it by eye instead of using the Rubbermaid cooler and the sauce pan.

I also got a converter piece to connect a female connector to another female connector, so I can use an old piece of garden hose to drain the heated water out through the kitchen door. The particular piece of hose I have has a hole near the male connector, and the converter thing was cheaper than a new hose.

I'll be making a new wheat beer with Amarillo hops in a couple of days, so we'll see if it works.

I also got a hole saw to make a 7/8" hole in my kettle for the weldless spigot I bought from Morebeer. Hope that works as advertised. It's a little weird, using a hole saw for stainless, but I couldn't find a 7/8" bit.

In other news, the Budlike wuss beer I made for Val got stuck at a specific gravity of 1.024, and raising the temperature didn't help, so I made a new starter and pitched it last night. I'm fermenting it out at room temperature. I figure the fermentation is mostly done, so it shouldn't matter if the last part takes place at ale temperature.

It was fun making the starter. I used a crappy old packet of Saflager dry yeast (which expired last year), and my new starter kit, consisting of a 2000-ml Ehrlenmeyer, a bung, and an airlock. I used DME (malt extract) instead of my usual medium, which is malta in a Ziploc bag. It was wild, the way the yeast went nuts after only a few minutes in the starter. Right up there with midget porn.

So the beer situation is well in hand, and even though I'm dieting again, I'm seeing to it that I make an allowance for a few beers every day.

I'll tell you how it all works out.

Posted by Steve H. at 11:05 PM | Permalink  

Wuss Beer Becoming a Reality

I'm so proud. I finally made my weak-ass corn lager for Bud-drinking losers.

I got cranking on it this morning. The stuff arrived earlier in the week from Morebeer.com, and I had to get on it before the weevils descended on the grain.

I found myself with a hopping dilemma. I had two ounces of 14.4% magnum hops, which I have never used before, and I was only using half an ounce for bittering, which gives a girly-beer figure of 26.something AAU. That left me with 1.5 ounces of perfectly good hops, which I planned to either steep or use dry in the secondary.

But I also had some crystal hops lying around, and crystal hops have given me astounding results in two other beers, when used as aroma hops.

What to do?

I want to find out what magnum hops are all about, and I won't learn much if I mix them with crystal. On the other hand, magnums aren't renowned for their aromatic properties.

I decided to steep the magnums, and if it sucks when I sample it after the primary, I can still dry-hop with the crystals.

The mash, sparge, and boil were a smashing success, as usual. Somehow I usually manage to come within .001 of the desired OG, in spite of having no clue what I'm doing. I have the 5-gallon pail of hot wort cooling in the pool as we speak. Later on, I'll throw in the admittedly lame White Labs American Lager yeast starter I have sitting in a bowl.

I timed the last two batches just right. The red lager is ready to keg, and the pale ale went into the can a few days back. I cranked out an ale today (from an earlier batch) for brew-session companionship, and damned if the faucet didn't start spewing CO2. I was OUT, so that gave me a keg to clean out for the new lager.

I'll have to find a place to put the new wuss lager after the primary. All seven of my kegs will be in use. Maybe I should put it in my Tap-a-Draft jugs. It's for ManCamp anyway, so Tap-a-Draft portability will be a positive.

I think this beer will actually be quite good. Corn is like LSD. When it's abused, the way the morons at Anheuser-Busch do it, you get synthetic moose urine and bad craziness. But when prescibed by a person with the proper training, it's a boon to mankind, which relieves needless suffering.

Okay, maybe Dexedrine or Ritalin would have been better examples than LSD. But you see where I'm coming from.

I can already see the comments from my wacked-out Libertarian readers. "YEAH, man, when are we going to have progressive legislation on medical LSD?" Oh, well. At least they like guns and small government.

If this beer is as good as I think it will be, I'll formulate a new version with an OG of 1.056 or so, instead of the current Budlike 1.050.

I think I'm going to order two more Vent-Matic taps, now that the factory in Indonesia is back online. And maybe a real mash tun made from a cooler. I'm kind of tired of farting around with the stove burners and stirring during the mash.

I already bought a weldless spigot for my gorgeous 40-quart Update International brew kettle, but I couldn't bring myself to install it. That means that instead of running the hot wort into the bucket through a wort chiller, I did my usual trick, holding the boiling-hot, 60-pound kettle in my arms and pouring it in the pail by hand, while barefoot and more than slightly buzzed.

Skin grafts are the sign of a true homebrewing artist. What am I going to get? Second-degree burns, at worst? I get those every time I go outside for more than fifteen minutes. No use being a pansy about it.

Life is pain. Geena Davis said that in The Long Kiss Goodbye. That was back before all her girl parts turned into cottage cheese and slid down nine inches overnight. I'd still do her. I am known for my liberal standards.

I'm back on my diet, having discovered that I have to grease myself to get through the front door. But luckily I've found that if I manage to get a hundred grams of protein at breakfast, I can still manage to consume four beers a day without going over my calorie limit. Of course, that means doing without things like all fruits and vegetables. Which is too bad, because I was really enjoying that apple I eat every other day.

I still manage to get my green leafy vegetables. Right now, I'm having a Romeo y Julieta Cedro No. 3.

Shut up. That counts.

Don't talk to me about the Food Pyramid. Have you seen me lately? I AM the Food Pyramid.

All right. Time to finish my unbelievably, astoundingly good red lager, for which I should be awarded a Nobel Prize and a key to the Dallas Cowboys cheerleader locker room.

I know, you wish you were me. This is totally normal. Learn to live with it.

Posted by Steve H. at 4:49 PM | Permalink  

No Room for New Wuss Brew

I am starting to have almost too much beer.

I kegged a batch of pale ale this month, and today I secondaried a new batch of red lager. I have ingredients on hand for an American-style wuss beer (two pounds of flaked maize, low gravity) for ManCamp, and I'm debating whether to start brewing it today.

I make fun of the wuss beer, but it should be pretty good. It's not like it's a crime to brew a highly drinkable beer with a little corn in it. Not a felony, anyway.

I criticize the Budmilcoors brews for being made from corn, but the real problem, probably, is the total lack of hopping. Hop bitterness in beer is measured in IBU, or "Something Something Units." Sierra Nevada Pale Ale goes about 40. Budweiser is generally believed to go about 10. That's just not enough, especially when your beer is watery and tasteless to begin with.

I don't know a whole lot about the flavors of corn and rice in beer, but my instincts tell me that corn isn't so bad. Brewers refer to "corn flavor." Haven't seen anyone talk about rice flavor. I doubt it exists. My guess is that corn is okay and can actually be an asset if you avoid using rice and you make sure there's a fair amount of barley in the brew.

We shall see.

I'm not sure where I'll put the wuss beer. All seven of my kegs are full or partially so. I'm just not drinking enough.

Isn't it wonderful to live in a country where I can have lots of guns and brew my own beer and enjoy both simultaneously?

I think it is.

Posted by Steve H. at 3:52 PM | Permalink  

Ladies, Frost Your Little Pink Mugs

I'm formulating the recipe for my new Wuss Pacification Beer.

In the past, I've taken various beers I've brewed to ManCamp, and while Tommy has pretty much bathed in them, I have had a hard time getting a certain other person to imbibe. A certain person who drinks Budweiser.

I decided to put together an inoffensive but still tasty brew to begin turning him to the dark side. I'm trying to sort of copy a couple of lagers I've had in the past. One is Gold Star, from Israel, and the other is Point, from Wisconsin.

Gold Star is okay, although you are not likely to give it a whole chapter in your beer diary. The hops are detectable, unlike the ones they supposedly put in Bud, and there's a little malt flavor. Point is sort of similar, if memory serves.

Here's what I'm thinking:

6 lbs. Belgian Pilsner malt
2 lbs. flaked maize
1 lb. 10L crystal malt

The Pilsner is the sort of light-colored malt usually used to make lagers. The corn is a wussification ingredient that will suck some of the body out of the beer, and I'm hoping it will add flavor that Bud drinkers (used to corn and rice in their beer) will find familiar and comforting. The crystal malt is to add a little sweetness so the beer won't be like water.

I'm planning to use White Labs American Lager yeast and Magnum hops. Point uses Magnum.

The beer will have a bitterness level of around 25 IBU, which is double Bud's score but still pretty weak.

I'm tempted to jack the IBU number up to 40 and add another pound of Crystal malt so the beer will actually have some alcohol in it, but like Hillary Clinton said after having her fat ass handed to her on the health care thing, sometimes baby steps are best.

The red ale I made a week or two ago is ready to keg. It went from 1.056 to 1.012 (specific gravity) during brewing, which gives an alcohol percentage of around 5.6%. Tastes swell, as always.

My orange lager is now fermenting nicely. I DO look forward to that one.

Of course, this means I have to dispose of my existing ale and orange lager quickly, to make room. Whatever will I do? It's a puzzle.

I'm sure the county has a facility for disposing of excess beer.

Posted by Steve H. at 4:45 PM | Permalink  

Second Batch of Beer Working

I got done working early, so now I'm making a batch of my hideous red lager!

I also cleaned and sanitized an empty stout keg, and I'm almost ready to fill it with the ale I brewed last week.

The mash for the lager is in the mash tun right now, going through a totally pointless protein rest! Can you imagine my excitement? Can you?

I'll bet you can't.

Posted by Steve H. at 3:55 PM | Permalink  

The Pinto of Beer Glasses

A commenter who rides a plastic rice rocket is taking me to task for recommending lager glasses for beer. This is like Richard Simmons giving tips on how to throw a spiral.

He says steins are the way to go. I see somebody went to Oktoberfest on his senior trip!

Hate to break it to you, kiddies, but steins are for tourists and people who want to get kneewalking drunk in a hurry. No knowledgeable person who wants to really enjoy a beer uses a stein.

Steins are bulky, so their mass warms the beer. Unless you freeze them first. Freezing beer glasses is the mark of a person who will never get past Bud. A beer glass should be completely clear, so you can see the product. It shouldn't be covered with a layer of frost which immediately turns into drippy condensation.

Steins also have wide mouths and straight sides, so they do nothing to focus the scent of the beer. Which is fine, if you drink the kind of piss habitual stein users drink. In fact, it's probably an advantage, much like that frost that helps your Bud stay so cold you can't taste it, and which obscures the loogie-like, filmy layer of chemical head.

The only thing a stein is good for is chugging a vast amount of beer as quickly as possible. That kind of activity has its place, but once you graduate from high school, it becomes less and less appealing.

There are all sorts of specialized beer glasses, but if you don't want to be a beer nerd and fill your house with ugly glassware, you can do very well just by buying lager or pilsner glasses. These are tall, thin glasses that generally curve inward toward the top. They look nice, they're easy to hold onto, they concentrate the aroma of the beer, and the big ones have lots of room for foam. They actually resemble Champagne flutes, as far as the shape of the cavity goes. That's understandable, because Champagne is a kind of beer.

I like blown glasses, because they have nice thin rims and they don't have lumpy sides that produce weird visual effects.

A lager glass will be fine for most beers. If you get into really heavy beers, you'll want something smaller. But how many people drink barleywine?

Anyway, a stein is like a Bose stereo. It sets you apart as a sucker. So there.

Posted by Steve H. at 10:34 AM | Permalink  

Brewhouse Resumes Operation

Are you as excited as I am? I made new beer yesterday. Making beer gives my life meaning. Although so do my generous donations to the Society for the Preservation of Vintage Midget Porn.

I decided to make more pale ale. That recipe is a killer. I still have a gallon or so of the old batch, so I'll see if I can't drag the keg to ManCamp in a couple of weeks so we can drain it.

I feel like I'm way behind the curve in beer technology. Everyone else is batch sparging, and I'm doing it the old way, just because it's so damned easy. And I never did buy a wort chiller. I still throw the bucket of hot wort in the pool. People say a wort chiller will give me a better "cold break" and improve the beer, but I don't see how it could be better than it is now.

And I don't know what a "cold break" is.

Here's an interesting bit of news: the tsunami disrupted the beer faucet supply. The best beer faucet in the universe is the Vent-Matic. All other beer faucets (except stout faucets) get stuck if you don't use them a couple of times a week. People will tell you to grease the parts with keg lube, but it doesn't work.

The Vent-Matic somehow avoids sticking. It absolutely never sticks. I bought one, so I know. But when I tried to buy more, I kept seeing "out of stock" on the sites where I shop. Turns out the Vent-Matic is made in Indonesia. It went out of production for months because of the tsunami.

They're supposed to be up and running now, so I'll order two more faucets as soon as I can. Try these things. You'll put your old stainless faucets in the trash.

Posted by Steve H. at 9:56 AM | Permalink  

Mon Dieu

My phony Belgian ale is blerping away in the garage. Anticipation is killing me.

I think I made a mistake by putting 2-row malt in it. It may taste a little heavier than I wanted. But you know what that means. I'll have to make a new batch. More to drink.

I was afraid it was going to spew all over the floor because it has so much wheat in it, but so far it seems pretty docile.

I was going to do my usual thing and ferment it in a freezer with a temperature control, but the freezer was full, and the spare fridge has malt in the freezer so I don't want to turn it up to fermenting temperatures and let the malt thaw.

The Belgians do a lot of crazy things with their beer, letting wild yeast in and fermenting at room temperature and so on, so I figured I'd just wing it. The temperature in the garage will vary between maybe 50 and 70 degrees over the next two days. Let the yeast fend for itself.

Is this still a hobby, or have I reached the stage where an intervention is called for? I don't care. If anyone tries to sit me down and talk me out of brewing, I'll just get them drunk and put them outside with no pants.

Posted by Steve H. at 11:04 AM | Permalink  

Seriously

I'm waiting for the fake Belgian ale to finish saccharification (see if YOU can type that while tipsy), and I am working on a tall tasty glass of my first lager.

You HAVE to make this stuff for yourself.

For the first month or two, it will taste too sweet, but then it matures or mutates or whatever and [SLURP] it turns into something so wonderful I can't even describe it.

Let's see...the aroma is like...[SNORT SNIFF] something I can't even describe. Like I said, you bastards. Maybe a little like a really potent Cognac. Maybe Remy Martin VSOP but not XO. And a touch of caramel...[SNORT, INHALE, SNORT] no, screw it, I can't describe it.

Then you swill it and [CHUG, GUZZLE, SWIG] there is a definite caramel taste and a little sweetness and crap, I can't describe it at all.

It really reminds me of Spanish brandy. But not the crap stuff people drink because they're cheap. Imagine if Gran Duque d'Alba were made by the folks who make Hine Triomphe. It's that good.

Here, pigs.

8 lbs. US 2-row malt, probably Briess
1.25 lbs. 60L crystal malt
1 lb. Bonlander Munich malt, whatever that is
0.75 oz. Nugget hops, boil for 75 minutes
0.45 oz. Crystal hops, boil 45 minutes
1 oz. Crystal hops, steep at end of boil
1 smack pack Wyeast 2206 Bavarian lager yeast

Use Irish moss to clarify and ferment it at about 50 degrees for 4 weeks. Then age it at least 4 weeks at the same temperature.

It will taste like molasses for the first couple of months, but TRUST ME. This stuff CRAPS on Fin du Monde, which is an amazing beer.

I mashed it at 130 degrees for 30 minutes--no idea why--and then 150 for an hour.

Wheeee.

Try it.

Posted by Steve H. at 6:23 PM | Permalink  

Uurrrrrrp

I can't figure it out. How can Russell Wardlow, AKA Mean Mr. Mustard Part Deux, be such a great blogger and hate beer? Perhaps when he says he hates beer, it's some sort of sarcasm that squirts right over my head because I bailed out of Columbia U. and ended up getting my degrees at U. of Miami, whereas Russell is hanging with the true sophisticates at Berkeley.

Anyhow, I am currently mashing my fake Belgian ale. Which is nothing like a real Belgian ale. It's loaded with two-row and overpowered American hops which would have your average Belgian in the fetal position in two seconds, rubbing his eyes and crying for maman.

Yes, I as an American--a citizen of the land of Buttweiser and Miller--feel entitled to scoff at the Belgians, who crank out Delirium Tremens ale and Cinq Cents Tripel. Because, hey, they speak French.

Losers.

Speaking of French, I violated my own personal boycott today by buying my old man a bottle of Sempe Armagnac. I couldn't buy him Cuban stogies because he has decided the Bauza pyramid--a cheap treat at $80 per box--is the ultimate smoke. He isn't far wrong. They're amazing, and if you set them aside for six months, they can take on anything Fidel and his stooges have to offer.

Armagnac is tasty stuff, and the old man prefers it to Cognac.

I still have to buy something for his birthday, which is this week. I'm thinking maybe Calvados. I've never had Calvados, but why should that stop me? It has to be pretty good. They want like forty bucks for a fifth, minimum.

Man this Fin du Monde is good. It makes me feel like watching bizarre flash animations featuring squirrels.

The stove beeper is going to go off at any moment. Time for the saccharification stage of the mash.

Posted by Steve H. at 5:30 PM | Permalink  

Ale Ingredients Arrive

I am definitely going to hell.

We knew that already, but today my doom is more certain than ever. Listermann.com's latest package has arrived, containing the ingredients for my take on Belgian-style ale. Tripel, to be precise. Tripel is very heavy. Sort of like Witbier mixed with pancake syrup and antifreeze.

I don't know if I can resist brewing this very second. If I start right now, by New Year's, I'll have a beer than's 9 percent alcohol by weight, with enough hops to take the top of your head clean off.

Should I do it? Should I? No.

Yes.

Posted by Steve H. at 1:50 PM | Permalink  

And Zero Tolerance

I don't know what's wrong with me. When I was in college, I could drink like 300 beers and--sure--I hallucinated a little, but I remained basically sober. And by "basically sober" I mean I was conscious and not on a ventilator. Now after like two beers, I get so drunk that if you put me on a barstool next to Teresa Kerry, I'd probably hit on her.

On Sunday, I went to ManCamp. I took three Unibroue Fin du Mondes, four Unibroue Maudites, and one fifth of Ommegang Abbey Ale. I drank about half of this stuff (It is impossible to drink a six-pack by yourself when Tommy is around), and by the end of the evening, I was so plastered my organs could have been ethically harvested on grounds that I was brain-dead.

Fortunately, no one wants my organs. One organ, especially.

So I had like four beers plus half a fifth of ale, and it nearly killed me.

Okay, granted, that stuff is over eight percent alcohol, but still. In high school, I used to drink more than that between classes, to enhance my performance on exams.

Today I'm checking out my beer for quality control purposes (shut up), and I'm just getting into the second glass, and the monitor already seems to be dancing.

I'm not too happy with my latest wheat beer. It's like 2/3 wheat plus 1/3 Pilsner plus 1/4 pound 60L crystal malt. I wanted lots of banana flavor (from the yeast I chose), and I got it, but the beer seems kind of boring apart from that. And it's suspiciously clear. Usually wheat beers are really cloudy. That scares me. Anything new or different scares me. That's why I'm a Republican.

Right now I'm working on a glass of lager. It's really nice, but it smells way too much like honey. Damned Santiam hops, I guess. I'll have to drink it as quickly as possible so I can make something new. Yes...that's a good reason, Steve. Relax. You're not a HOPELESS DRUNK.

I think I'll lug the wheat beer to the next ManCamp. Tommy will probably have multiples. Whatever. I have to move inventory.

These new beer glasses are amazing. I made the right choice. They're a lot thinner than they look in photos, so you have to kind of pretend they're skinnier to understand how they're shaped, or you have to squinch them up with Photoshop.

Think I'll order stuff for the Belgian style ale I'm planning.

*Burp*

Posted by Steve H. at 2:40 PM | Permalink  

I Totally Rock

The second lager I made is starting to taste like actual beer. Seems to take a while for lagers, but it's worth it, because they're tasty and smooth and wonderful.

Beer freaks will recall that my first lager was a deep orange job with Crystal and Nugget hops. It was pretty sweet and very heavy, probably because I put a load of crystal malt in it. And there was a good deal of 2-row malt in it, which gave it an orange color and full flavor, sort of like Sierra Nevada or similar pale ales.

I didn't realize how the taste of the lager would change as it aged. I thought it was too sweet. So I reformulated the recipe. Later, it turned out that the lager was absolutely perfect; strong and complex like a high-gravity Belgian ale. But by that time, the second lager was in the works.

I took a lot of the ale malt out of the recipe and replaced it with Pilsner and Munich malt, and I removed the crystal malt entirely. And I used Santiam hops instead of Crystal and Nugget.

Crystal and Nugget are American hops, and when you combine them, you get a pretty wild result. I'm no hop expert, but my limited experience suggests that Old World hops are generally more subdued and refined. They may have very little flavor other than bitterness, or they may have a pleasant, gentle floral taste and smell. American hops are downright weird. They can taste like grapefruit or oranges or just about anything.

Santiam hops, though American, are supposed to be spicy and floral, sort of like some of the hops that are used in German beers. I was trying to get a result sort of like Altenmunster, which doesn't have a powerful hop smell, so I thought I'd give Santiam a shot.

The result is very nice. The beer is a couple of shades darker than Beck's. It's a bit sweeter than Beck's, but nothing like as sweet or heavy as the first lager. The hops give it a scent sort of like honey and orange blossoms.

I hate comparing it to Beck's, because Beck's is crap compared to a decent homebrew. It has no complexity and no hop flavor or aroma, and it's usually skunked because they sell it in green bottles that let light in.

Anyway, looks like another successful beer. I just wish it were a little clearer.

Posted by Steve H. at 2:01 PM | Permalink