Ancient Sarcastic Doorman

Well, maybe not ancient.

The Sarcastic Brown (that one glass looked amber, but it's been pretty brown in all other lighting) has turned out to be a bit of a blessing, in that the Home Brewers' Guild meeting has a brown ale theme this month and I wouldn't have had one otherwise.

But, I have just discovered in the back of the brewing closet a few liters of the "failed" batch before this one, which has in fact been greatly mellowed and smoothed out by the extended secondary, so I'm going to bottle it sometime this week and see what people think.  I don't think I'll make it exactly the way I did that time again anyway, but certainly it looks like some of the mistakes of that batch were less severe than they at first appeared.

And it is definitely, definitely a porter.

COMPLETION: Sarcastic... Something Red?

Well, I checked a bottle today, and despite being in a rather cool corner for two weeks it's all carbed up and ready to move into the fridge.  It's a pretty pleasant drink, as well.  What it is not, in any respect, is a porter.

Even when I was bottling it, it was pretty red/brown, but it really seems to have lightened even further in the bottle somehow (though it hasn't cleared at all) - it's a cloudy amber, now.




It's not a beer I'd be embarrassed to have produced intentionally, but it's a pretty big defect in what was supposed to be a porter.  I'll have to get another batch on the go quite soon, and fix the grain bill - more chocolate ought to do the trick just fine, maybe a longer boil...  I've promised these to a number of people, so hopefully they can all be patient for another month.

Meanwhile, though, I have to figure out what I'm going to do about labeling these...

BOTTLING: Sarcastic Doorman

Whew...  I cleaned a LOT of bottles today for this.  In the end I only actually got 24 330mls and a couple of bombers, a little less than I expected out of the batch, and I'm not sure I have enough bottles left for the other batch I was thinking of packing up this weekend.  Still, it was overall pretty successful.

This batch came out differently than I was expecting.  The rye seems more prominent, though still pretty subtle, which is good, but the Cascade hops do not do the same job as the Amarillo did in terms of giving that little hint of citrus in the finish that balances it, so I'm worried people will find it more off-putting now.  Next time I can't get Amarillo, I'm going to have to really jack up my late hop additions during the boil, maybe double?

It's a little lighter in the alcohol and the body, which was intentional, but it's also a good deal less chocolatey.  That's definitely an overreaction on my part to the somewhat acrid results of my last attempt.  The Caramunich malt is working really nicely, though, adding a little toasty-ness.  I feel like I can't really judge it until it's carbonated, which will change the mouthfeel and give it a little bite from the carbonic acid...  I decided to shoot for 2.2 volumes of CO2, which I understand is pretty typical of an oatmeal stout and should work nicely here as well.  The colour's a bit lighter than I might have hoped, but again, that's probably the cut-back chocolate.

I think next time, some actual rye ale malt to supplement the pumpernickel, a little more chocolate, and a good deal more late hops (if it's Cascade at least), and I'm within a hair's breadth of absolutely nailing this thing.

And then I have to work on the juniper version.

Tomorrow, if all goes as planned, I brew something a bit different!  What I'm going to bottle it in I have no idea...

Conspiracy Theories & Beer Design

The ninth episode of Community's second season is possibly one of the best written things, of any kind, ever.  It's like a little master class on showing rather than telling, a concept lots of people will parrot at you but very few really understand, to say nothing of how elegant the script is, no wasted motion.  And of course the direction, acting, and score are beautiful as well - I get caught up in it every time, which is impressive considering it's basically a big goof.

Also, la Corriveau Oat Stout is way better than I remembered.  I think we can actually get more different kinds of beer here in Alberta, and I'm pretty hooked into the community where you can get GOOD beer in Edmonton, but still, sometimes, I really miss drinking in Quebec.  Still, I probably wouldn't have started homebrewing if I hadn't moved here, and that's been pretty good for me in some ways.  Not physically so much, maybe, but you know, liver function isn't everything.

Delirium Nocturnum

It's really, really nice, but man does it take a long time to drink...

Decisions, Decisions

Arrested Development on Netflix, or my new Community Season 2 DVDs?

Water, or homebrew?

Trim my beard, or be alone forever?

I tell ya, there's always another decision to make...

Apple Cider

There's a certain amount of crazy stuff going on right now, some good, some just crazy, but it's awfully nice to be able to relax in the evening with a glass of homemade apple cider.

It's rather cloudy in part because the juice I used was cloudy to begin with, and in part because it's a bit yeasty - I just fermented it right in the bottle I'm pouring it from now, with a bit of Cooper's ale yeast and about a quarter cup of additional corn sugar.  I don't think it's terribly alcoholic at all (I didn't take any measurements) but it's pleasantly fizzy and not too dry.  Just the thing.  I may even try doing it properly sometime!

Of course it isn't making any of those crazy things less crazy, but sometimes it's just about, as the poet says, "Whatever gets you through the night."

BOTTLING: "Poseur" Wheat-Date Ale

I don't have a lot of pictures this time.  Bottling this much beer solo, I find myself without enough hands to go around as it is, so I didn't really have an opportunity to take any until I was done.

The beer cleared up a lot in secondary.  It's still a little cloudy, I can't easily read text through a glass of it unless it's fairly large, but it's about as clear as my buckwheat beer was now, and actually more or less the same colour.  It'll be less carbonated - I meant to add a little more priming sugar but I forgot to measure it out - but hopefully because of the wheat the head will be comparable.  I'm not sure what the actual percentage of wheat is in the grain bill for the Brewhouse American Wheat kit, though.

The flavour's evolved a lot in the last two weeks.  The banana esters seem to have mellowed, although that may just be because the flavours from the oak have really covered it up.  The oak was certainly effective, lending all the flavours for which it is known (including, unmistakably, the leather). It's a bit of an odd duck, not to any particular style, but I like it.



Anyway, I've got two Tap-a-Draft bottles and about 21 bottles (mostly 12oz, but a few larger ones) in the closet now, carbing away.  The temperature is good, so if it doesn't cool off dramatically in the next two weeks it should be ready to drink in time for me to take some to the first Homebrewer's Guild meeting in September.

(The full label will be revealed after I've got around to printing them up and attaching them.)

The Man We All Should Try To Be

There are many qualities I admire in people, and many (many, many, more) that I find irritating or even despicable.  It's impossible to divide the whole world neatly into two groups, one good and one bad, and still be in contact with reality.

If I were to create such a division myself, though, it would be this: Do you like answers, or hate questions?

People who like answers love questions, because asking them is how you find the answers you wanted, and one of the great things about answers is that they lead to even more questions.  It's pinball - your reward for playing well is that you get to play again, even harder.  It makes you willing, sometimes even eager, to admit you were wrong about something, because you want to be right.  It requires you to accept logic, to build ever better approximations of the world as it really is.  Wanting answers and going looking for them is what makes a skeptic, a scientist, a rebel, a gifted kid, a great artist or a friend of mine.

People who hate questions only have, want, or need one answer.  They may phrase it many ways, saying, "God did it," "The Furher commands," "Because I said so," or, "Shut up." They all mean the same thing: Stop asking questions.  It's chess - your reward for playing well is that you win, and the game is over, and you don't have to play anymore.  It makes you unwilling to ever admit you were wrong, because you always want to be right.  It requires you to bury your head in rhetoric, to build ever more elaborate illusions about what the world must be like.  Hating questions and seeking to stop others from asking them makes a denier, a zealot, a despot, a fool, a bigot, a follower, a pretentious artiste, and above all a crushing bore.

I have enjoyed a game of chess now and then, but I'd much rather play pinball.  Wouldn't you?

Nelle Harper Lee

Also the man we all should try to be.

Unbelievable...

I just broke my new hydrometer.  There has to be a way to make these things stronger...

Maybe I'll just break down and spring for a refractometer this time; I've been meaning to get one eventually anyway.  Long tubes of thin glass that have to be balanced precariously in my dish drainer may just be a bad idea, you know?

RACKING: Wheat Date Ale

Featuring: The Return of Pictures!  I have the pictures for the last couple of beer posts as well, I just haven't had time to rewrite them recently.

Geoffrey K. Pullum

He is the man we all should try to be.

BREW DAY: Oaked Date-Wheat Ale

(Clever name TBD.)

Yet another disaster!  If I didn't drink so much I might start to get discouraged.

Actually, today wasn't so bad really, the usual spills and so on, but I did manage to break my hydrometer (this happens to every home brewer eventually), so I have:

1. No way to confirm the starting gravity of my beer, and:
2. Tiny pieces pieces of very thin broken glass in the bottom of my shower.

I also managed to cut my thumb, but I don't know if it was on the glass from the hydrometer or not.

Anyway, the beer itself!  I picked up a 450ml jar of pure concentrated date juice from the Italian Center little while ago, and I decided to combine it with a Brewhouse Prairie Wheat kit.  Based on some pretty much unfounded estimates of the extract value of the date juice, I calculated a starting gravity of about 1.052, not that much higher than the ~1.046 expected from the unaltered kit.  With the Safale US-05 yeast, I'm expecting to wind up with something around 5.2% which isn't bad for a nice drinkable summer beer, and I think the date flavour will be subtle but detectable.

Once it's fermented about a week or so, I'm planning to rack it on top of the very dark-roasted Hungarian oak chips I mentioned in a previous entry and give it a month or so on those.  So my nice summery beer should be ready just in time for fall.

I'll rewrite this post with pictures, once again, after I get the technology to get them off my camera.

RACKING: Sarcastic Doorman (Juniper)

Wow.  That didn't work at all.

Juniper Berries

Technically, they're not berries. They're more closely related to pine cones -
if you look very, very closely at one you may be able to see the scales.

It's not easy to find good information about brewing with juniper berries. You'll find some vague, folklorish stories about sahti (a Finnish beer made with rye, juniper, and bread yeast), and quite a lot of people saying they've done it and either liked or hated it, but little in the way of hard and fast data about what they did.  Google the subject, and you'll find a lot of message board threads where people recommend googling it.

I based the juniper addition to Sarcastic Doorman on the most substantive Internet folklore and guesswork I could find, but I'm starting to think I was misled. Further research turned up... Well, very little, but I did find this recipe for a juniper porter that makes me think, after doing some hasty conversions and a bit more guesswork (it's just stupid that there are two totally different "gallons"), I could have used a little more.

I'm going to be splitting the batch in half for the secondary, just for reasons of capacity.  I'm thinking "dry hopping" with another couple of grams in each, at least, wouldn't be a bad idea.  It's not going into secondary for a couple of weeks, though, probably, so I'm writing this post as a reminder note to myself.

HIGH KRAUSEN: Sarcastic Doorman (Juniper)

It's a nice, big, healthy looking krausen (the biggest I've yet had in fact), so despite any irregularities yesterday, the yeast appears to have taken off.  You can see some bits of juniper berry that have been lifted up on top of the krausen there; as I do not skim my krausen off, these will fall back into the fermenting beer eventually and hopefully a little further flavour or aroma may be extracted once there's a bit of ethanol present.

It's a good sign!

EDIT 2011/07/12: If you expand that picture, you can see the 20 liter mark on the scale on the bucket.  The top of the krausen is about four lines below that (it's actually higher in the middle, but hard to measure how much), putting it around the 16 liter mark, while the top of the wort only came up to the 12 liter mark.  That means something over 4 liters of krausen on a 12 liter batch.  Like I said, the biggest I've had yet.

BREW DAY: Sarcastic Doorman (Juniper Edition)

July 10, 2011

This was an interesting brew day, but it was also a long one and this will be a long post.

Should It Bulge Like That?

I noticed today that my laptop battery is bulging ominously, and no longer fits properly into the machine (I took it out to get a better look at it and eventually gave up trying to get it back in). Fortunately, I am currently on vacation, and happen to be staying directly upstairs from a Mac shop where I can get it serviced. I've actually been looking into buying a new machine anyway, but I'd rather not do it right this second...

Anyway, it still runs if it's plugged in, but I'd rather not do it too much so I'm not going to be online a great deal for a little bit, I guess...

Y Could Be Anything, Really

SMBC presents a shorter version of my earlier post about chemistry sets. You could relabel the axes to make it apply to lots of other stuff as well - it wouldn't be far off for a lot of airport security measures.

Get Yourself High

Chemical Brothers "Get Yourself High" (2003) from Joseph Kahn on Vimeo.

Comments from the director at that link.

I haven't seen this video in ages; I had no idea it was by Joseph Kahn, the visionary behind Torque.  I just started checking on him on Twitter recently hoping for news about distribution of his new movie, Detention, and he's been posting music videos and ads from his portfolio.

Graduation

After four short, grueling weeks, I have graduated from technical college!  My certificate will be mailed to me, and now I just have to find a new job.

Oh, god...  Where's that other Mikkeller?

Mikkeller

I have GOT to find an English translation of the ingredients on the label of this Mikkeller Imperial Stout.  There is something in it that absolutely must go into the next batch of Sarcastic Doorman.

Anyone know what "cassanade" is?  Apparently it can be dark...

FINAL RESULTS: Buckwheat Cuivrée

Well, it's not the most exciting thing I've ever brewed, but it's a lot better than I expected when we bottled it.  It's clean, the hops are pleasant, and when I took it to a party, it was actually probably the best beer there.  It never fully cleared but it's definitely less cloudy than I expected, as well, and the head is actually very good.  It's a little overcarbed, but it's really only an issue drinking from the bottle (you have to keep drinking pretty steadily or it will foam up out of the neck).  In a glass it's actually really nice; you have to pour it cold and carefully to avoid a big glass of head, but it's still nice as it warms up.  I should think about making a dressed-up batch to have during the summer.

I have a few pictures from when I drank one yesterday:

Not very clear at all, but it looks good in the glass.

It's quite fizzy, and it stays that way for quite a while.

The head is actually really nice.  I attribute it to the buckwheat.

I just wish I'd been more aware of the date - I missed my chance to take it to the Homebrewer's Guild this month.  I'll try to save a bottle for the next meeting.

Next time I make this, I think it needs more buckwheat and crystal both, maybe a little ginger toward the end of the boil...

In other beer-related news, there are some big upgrades in progress to the Smashton & Parris brewery.  Pictures (and maybe even video!) when it's all ready.

I Definitely Should Not Parent

One of my coworkers brought his grandson, I'd guess eight or nine years old, to work the other day.  He does this periodically when the little monster doesn't have school, gets him to do little jobs in the back that I will then have to clean up later.  SO helpful.

Anyway, I guess there wasn't enough to keep him occupied this time, because he kept coming around and bothering me.  I'm not a jerk, so I listened to him complain about school and answered his questions about what I was doing, and generally tolerated his mucking about as long as I didn't think he was going to hurt himself or break anything his grandpa couldn't replace.  At some point he was fooling around tying various bits of scrap wire together with wire nuts, and while I was writing up an order and calculating in my head how long it would take to untangle the knot he was creating, he commented that he was really enjoying playing with our electricity, and his parents never let him play with electricity at home.

It took a second for me to put together that he didn't know the difference between electricity and wiring.  My first thought then was to wonder whether explaining it to him would make him more or less likely to accidentally fry himself.  In the end we established that he knew enough only to play with "electricity" that wasn't connected to anything, which struck me as a pretty poor safety standard, so I tried to reinforce his parents admonitions with some stories about my own electrically-induced injuries when I realized two things:

1. This kid has been hounding me all day about what I'm doing, what my tools are, etc.  The last thing that will keep him from electrocuting himself is hearing that I'd done it.
2. I wouldn't be the person I am now, or have the job he was bugging me at, if anyone had ever succeeded at preventing me from "playing with electricity" when I was younger.

So I felt sort of conflicted and just kind of trailed off.  I don't think the kid learned much from that.

Note to Self

New beers are delivered to Wunderbar on Thursday nights, which means they need to clear out the fridge.  This is a task with which I am very much willing to help.  (I had a couple of Trois Pistoles on the way home from work tonight.  If I did that every night...  I'd be an alcoholic.)

CITY OF SIGNS: "What the Hell?" Edition

I've obscured the phone number on the theory that it belongs to someone
who doesn't really want untalented girls calling them.  Hm...  Maybe I
should put up some posters...

Snapped this picture tonight on the way home from work.  It's on one of those big poles that get put up exclusively for the purpose of having posters all over them.

My theory is that someone got dropped from a band to make room for new members, and those members were perhaps female.  Possibly the remaining original member wanted to sleep with one of them.  Terms like, "betrayal," "sell out," "that's my amp," etc, may have been thrown around.

I do like to imagine, though, that somewhere, somebody's living room is full of more-or-less identical bleach-blonde twenty-somethings, each with a guitar their parents just bought for them, sitting around making awkward small-talk while they wait for their turn to audition.  The Sonic Youth song they're being asked to lip sync to filters in from the garage.

Also fun: The coffin-shaped "FATALITY" signs the city apparently puts up at the sites of deadly car accidents.  I understand the premise, but when they genuinely look exactly like the coffin a cartoon vampire would come out of, it sort of undermines it.

Feedback on Sarcastic Doorman

I took some of my homebrew, the last of the Sarcastic Doorman, to the Homebrewers' Guild meeting last night, and passed it around.  Feedback was actually very positive!  Some of the more experienced hands advised that I should be toning down the rye a bit - I can see what they mean.  After getting quite a bit of advice I'm going to try a batch with half the rye to give myself another reference point, and go from there.

I'm also going to recreate the recipe with light extract rather than dark.  The trouble with dark extract, of course, is that you have no control over the grain bill - it's made from whatever combination of grains the maltster thought was desirable and even if it's the colour you want it may not give you the properties you're looking for.  By going with a very pale extract, you know better what you're getting (pale base malt), and that way all the specialty grains are your own.

I've got a lot on my to-do list after last night, actually, but one thing at a time.

The label got VERY good reviews, though.

BOTTLING: Buckwheat Cuivrée

My fellow brewer, Mr. Smashton, dropped by on Wednesday evening and we bottled this batch in real glass! I've only got around to posting about it now, though.

My first challenge was collecting enough bottles. Here in Alberta you have to take your empties to a designated Bottle Depot, rather than just anyplace that sells beer, so I have plenty of bottles around the apartment, but I didn't want to try screw-tops my first time out. After a thorough search I put together a motley selection of fifteen bottles that were appropriate.

I had to soak them overnight to remove (most) of the labels (the label on the bottle of Japanese Imperial Smoked Porter proved too tenacious for the chemicals I have at my disposal). I sanitized them all, as well as my caps, Mr. Smashton's capper, the siphon, bucket, and all other equipment with iodophor.

Next, we weighed out the priming sugar which will feed the remaining yeast so they can produce CO2 and carbonate the bottled beer. I used approximately fifty grams of corn sugar, which given the amount and temperature of the beer should yield slightly higher than normal carbonation, around three volumes of CO2 (a typical American beer is two to two and a half). We dissolved the sugar in a little boiling water, cooled it, and the gently racked the beer from the secondary into the bottling bucket so as to mix it with the sugar thoroughly without introducing too much oxygen. We took a small sample during racking to recheck the gravity, which is unchanged since last time at 1.020.

~ 50 grams of corn sugar

Sadly it was no longer that shade
of orange soda when we finished.

We siphoned everything into the bottles one at a time.  Even though having Mr. Smashton there to help made this much, much easier, it's still kind of a messy, involved pain (which is why there are no pictures of this part), especially to get started.  I have a ball valve spliced into my siphon line so I can start and stop it, and this is very handy, but I'm going to have to put together a better bottling system, especially as I won't always have Mr. Smashton to help me.  I lost at least a full bottle to siphon mishaps this time, in addition to the usual amounts left behind when racking and so on.

In any event, once we got through that, it was time to cap the bottles!

A bowl of sanitized crown caps and a wing capper,
provided by Mr. Smashton.

The procedure was pretty simple.  First, place crown caps loosely on all the bottles, then, work your way down the line with the wing capper crimping each cap on.  The trick, as it turned out, was removing the bottles from the capper - once again, having two people was essential.

The loose cap.

Crimping the cap takes little force.

I'm using my other hand to take the
picture.  I needed both to actually
get the capper off the bottle.

The end result!

Finally, we lined all the bottles up in a cardboard box lined with a trash bag and some newspaper (I understand that so-called "bottle bombs" are actually very rare, but to read a homebrewing newsgroup you'd think they were the leading cause of death), and stowed them away to carbonate. Probably one to two weeks and a bit in the fridge, and they'll be ready to drink. And drink them I shall, if only to get rid of the things... We tried a little that didn't make it into bottles (you'll notice there aren't actually fifteen bellow), and it's... Well, the hops didn't make it much more exciting.

RACK: Buckwheat... Cuivrée?

Well, it's certainly not an amber anyway.

I transfered my buckwheat beer to a secondary fermenter tonight, after what seemed like hours of very, very thorough cleaning and sanitizing and rinsing (with small batches like this, I don't think there's any such thing as a no-rinse sanitizer, even a tiny bit of iodine will affect the end product). It's going to need some time to clear, certainly, but I'd say it was fully fermented; it had dropped to the specific gravity I expected (1.025 - taking into account I thought my original gravity was going to be 1.04ish and it turned out to be 1.065), and wasn't showing any signs of activity. It's probably going to end up cloudy anyway, but it'll get better than it is now.

Unless my Tap-a-Draft bottles are bigger than advertised (that's what I'm using as a secondary, my small-batch airlock fits it), I've got about five and a half liters of beer there, so that's not too bad in terms of racking losses and so on. Procedure-wise this has been pretty successful.

I tasted the hydrometer sample, and it's not bad... I knew it wasn't likely but was hoping in my heart for something akin to Coup de Grisou, a buckwheat beer I enjoyed in Montréal, but what I'm ending up with is, I would say... Well, it's beer. It tastes kind of beery. It'll probably go fast enough, but I'm probably going to chalk this one up to experience. I think buckwheat, even unmalted, requires a mash, next time, and it has to be a much larger percentage of the grain bill. In an effort to make this one more interesting, I've thrown four grams of Amarillo pellets into the secondary to dry-hop it; we'll see how that works out.

BREW DAY: Buckwheat Amber?

Not much to it, really.

Sanitation is very important.

This was a fairly simple beer, just some extra-light DME, a little crystal malt, the buckwheat I roasted yesterday, Amarillo hops left from my porter and a packet of dry yeast.  The day was never-the-less not without its complications, which started when I realized I didn't have any cheese cloth to strain the water from my steeping grains and had to go out to buy some on the sheets of ice Edmonton is currently experimenting with as replacement sidewalks.  Fortunately, I've been trained to fall without getting hurt.

First off, I needed to crush my steeping grains, the buckwheat I roasted yesterday (which weighs in at a little less after the roasting) and 50g of extra-dark crystal malt.

Although I'm making a larger batch than last time, you can see I'm steeping a lot less grains, since I'm trying for a lighter colour:

The colour I got from this steep wasn't as red as I would have liked - you'll see at the end it's more of a cuivrée than an amber - but I think that's down to my choice of grains.  Oh, well.  The steeping water is slightly cooler to start with this time, and I wrapped a towel around the cooler in the hopes that I would have a more consistent temperature over time.  It seemed to work.

Estimating that I got about four liters back from my ~4.5 liter steep (I probably got less, the buckwheat took up a lot) and that I would get something like one liter of boil-off in sixty minutes (based on my last batch), I topped up with about a liter and a half (okay, actually that number was as arbitrary as these parentheticals are becoming) for the boil and added my bittering hops.

I only used three grams, since this is meant to be a light
"session" beer.

I boiled for about 45 minutes before adding the extract; for some reason I wanted to add it before the aroma hops, which went in with ten minutes left (out of 60 minutes total boiling time).

Three grams this time as well.

Finally, while my wort was chilling in the sink like last time, I rehydrated my yeast.  Package directions call for rehydrating in water between 80-92 degrees Fahrenheit, and then adding a little wort at a time to bring the yeast gradually down to the wort's temperature (about 72 degrees).

Once again I underestimated my boil-off and/or over-estimated the yield from my steep; I was more than a liter short of where I expected to be.  I decided to top it right up to six liters - it's meant to be a session beer anyway, only three or four percent alcohol.

My original gravity (OG) reading doesn't line up with that at all, though!  It's something like 1.065, and temperature correction doesn't make much difference...  According to every brewing calculation I can find, this is way off, and my OG shouldn't be much over 1.040.  I'm guessing it's starches from the buckwheat, mostly, which is probably going to mean cloudy beer but isn't going to increase my ABV at all - it should still come out around 4%, maybe 4.5% if the yeast really goes to town (I've heard Nottingham gives high attenuations).



All's well that ends well, of course so...  In about a month, when this is ready, I'll let you know if it's well.  There's still one last complication with this batch, too...  I've decided it will be my first in glass bottles.  We'll see how that works out!

ROASTING GRAIN: Buckwheat Amber

I'm making a little batch of amber (hopefully) ale this weekend, about five liters, no clever name or labels at the moment. The only particularly noteworthy aspect is that I'm going to use up some buckwheat groats I had about in it, and I decided to home roast them a little bit.  This is the first time I've tried either of these things.






I started with about 158.8 grams of buckwheat (it's a 75 gram measuring cup).

While the oven preheated to 120 degrees Celsius, I soaked the groats briefly in cold water, shaking frequently:

I decided to rinse them because I currently only steep my grains rather than doing a proper mash.  If I were mashing with a base grain (some pale malt, say), there would be enzymes converting starches into sugars the yeast can eat, but no such process takes place in a steep, so washing a bit of excess starch off (a great deal, actually, after a few minutes the water you soak buckwheat in has turned to sludge) will help my beer's clarity and flavour.  It's also possible that steam from the water left on the grains while I roasted them would at least partly gelatinize the starches inside the groats, but I'm not really getting my hopes about that.

Finally, I put the grains in the oven for about an hour, turning them every fifteen minutes or so and increasing the temperature to 300C about halfway through.  The end result wasn't a terribly dark roast, but it has a nice nutty flavour I'm hoping will come through and should do me fine when I brew tomorrow.  Fingers crossed!

Don't Cook This At Home

You may recall that I posted a two-part pilot episode for a "cooking show" called Don't Cook This At Home on this blog some time ago.  I mentioned in that new episodes would appear "highly irregular[ly]" and I meant it - we're still working on the second one.  It's tricky to achieve just the right balance between something wildly impractical and something we can actually do.

In the meanwhile, though, I've finally gotten around to cutting that first episode, nearly thirty minutes in two parts, down to something more appropriate for the Internet Age attention span, a mere seven minutes and twenty-one seconds.

And here it is:

Yep.

TASTING: Miraculous Jewbelation

I recently picked up one of the Vertical Jewbelation packs from HE'BREW (Shmaltz Brewing Company) at my preferred local liquor store.  It contains Jewbelations 8-14, as well as a bottle of Vertical Jewbelation, a mixture of all of them to date aged in a Rye barrel, an empty "Shamash" bottle, a package of Chanukah candles, and a very attractive beer glass to drink from.  Jewbelation is of course their annual special brew; on the eighth anniversary of the brewery, they brewed the beer I'm drinking tonight with eight malts, eight varieties of hops, and 8% ABV.  Every year, they brew a new recipe and those numbers go up by one (how long can they keep it up?).

Most of these I'm going to sit on and "cellar" for a while, but I just had to break out ONE of them, so I cracked open a bottle of the Miraculous Jewbelation (#8, the first) this evening.  It's delicious!

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

APPEARANCE: Very dark but not opaque; it's actually a very dark amber on the edges if you hold it up to the light.  Good initial head that, as you might expect from a higher ABV beer, doesn't last, soon reducing to a ring around the edge, but it leaves a pleasing layer of bubbles down the sides of the glass as you drink.

AROMA: Eight kinds of hops in one beer is very unusual, and you can definitely sense it in the nose.  It isn't overpowering at all, very well balanced, but very complex.  I'm thinking there was an emphasis on German hops, but I'm not sure.

TASTE AND MOUTHFEEL: So, so good.  Hop bitterness is prominent but extremely smooth (the years of aging may have something to do with that, of course).  Despite being a dark beer with a serious grain bill, it's not really roasty or burnt at all, rather rich and subtly caramel-y.  It's really just sweet enough to balance the hops, though, and the body stays pretty light without being thin.  The carbonation is perfect, leaving the beer only slowly as you drink it and seemingly helping to distribute each sip to every part of your mouth and carry some more of that hop aroma to your nose.

FUN FACTS: "8 is a miraculous number in Jewish life," the label informs you, providing many examples, such as:

• Chanukah, Passover, and Sukkot span 8 days,
• Solomon completed the First Temple in the 8th month of the 8th year,
• "Seinfeld" ran for 8 seasons,

among others.

There aren't many of these packs around, but if you have the chance to pick one up, you'd better do it.

TASTING: Sarcastic Doorman

Cracked open the first bottle of new brew tonight for a little sampling with Mr. Smashton, co-founder of the brewery.  It's our inaugural beer in a sense, the first one without any kind of kit involved, so we're pretty excited.  On the labels we went with the slogan, "The beer that finds you...  Wanting," but we could easily have gone with our alternate idea, "As dry as his wit, as black as his soul."

Appearance: Black as a cloudy night in a cave, and more or less opaque.  Tan head, largish bubbles but it sticks around pretty well.

Aroma: Roasty, maybe even burnt.

Tasting: Roasty AS HELL.  Not burnt, but lots of coffee & dark chocolate, malty but not over-sweet.  Amarillo hops are there, a little hint of citrus, but I'll probably add a larger late addition the next time we brew this.  Very rich mouthfeel, maybe a little closer to a stout than a traditional porter.  Definitely a sipping beer for a cold night.

Overall verdict: SUCCESS!

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