Cynic Ale

Smashton & Parris started a beer series over the summer, themed around famous philosophers.  The first entry, the awkwardly-named "The Horror of Wit-Kenstein ('s Monster)" (no one has ever actually called it that, but it's on the label) was a dark buckwheat pseudo-witbier with American yeast and LOTS of citrus.  It was pretty successful, but too much work to do the same way again.  Maybe there'll be a Bride of Wit-Kenstein ('s Monster) someday, without quite so much mandarin orange zest in it.

There are plans in the works for a couple of other entries, but the first follow-up is a very small batch of "Riogenes the Cynic", an ESB of sorts brewed with flaked rye, oats, and Nugget hops.  It just went into bottles today, and unlike the last one, I think I actually will brew more of this one, because the pre-carbonation sample was pretty good and it doesn't involve grating all my fingers off.  It could be maltier, but it's easy enough to adjust that.

Anyway, I ran out of tape, but here's the one bottle that got labeled:

Not bad, eh?

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.

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.

BOTTLING: Sarcastic Doorman

The great advantage of brewing a very small batch of beer is that it can only be a very small disaster.

I kid.  Somewhat.  Bottling is now finished, but it was a bit of a trial.  To begin with, the beer didn't attenuate quite as far as predicted - it's actually only 5.9% alcohol, I estimate, with a final gravity of about 1.028 or 1.029 - but that's fine.  It certainly tastes good.  Unfortunately, though, between the unavoidable losses, some spills resulting from my still far-from-perfect solo bottling technique, miscalculations, and so on, I've probably got less than three liters all together actually bottled.  This means both that I'm 25% short of my target batch size, and that I probably have too much headspace in my bottles which may affect carbonation.

Still, fingers crossed.  I'd like to crack at least one open in about ten days at the next Edmonton Homebrewer's Guild meeting (my first!), so hopefully it will be ready by then.

It's all worth it in the end, though:







(The label, based on that doodle in a previous post, was made in Inkscape, which is a very cool program I wish I could run the latest version of, and attached with tape, because the glue stick I bought turned out to be no good.)

Well, I've learned a lot of lessons for next time...

Painting the Cave

Perhaps you recall the original version of the logo at the top of this blog.  It was one of the better examples of my own particular artistic style, "painstaking doodle," which consists of fairly crude, sketchy drawings which never-the-less take me ages to do.

Sometimes when work is very slow, or I manage to have a quiet lunch hour for once, I'll do a little doodling at work and post it on one of the walls of my area to brighten up the otherwise squalid surroundings.  And considering these things brighten the place up, you can imagine how squalid it is...

I really did just give up on finishing
this one.  So many teeth...

I was listening to Bauhaus on the
way in to work.

The beer can was originally "LUCKY",
but I realized only "KY" showed up in
the actual picture...

This was supposed to be something else
but I'm not good at drawing people.

This was inspired by a Language Log
post.  "Balas" can mean either "bullets"
or "candy" in Brazilian Portuguese.

This is just how I felt that day.  Yes,
it is in the correct orientation.

I was reading something that mentioned
Edison's film version of Frankenstein.

Playing around with a label idea for a
beer I'll be brewing soon.

There is a story behind this.  I will not
tell you what it is.

The images are presented here in no particular order; Spy in the Cab was the first one I drew, but after that I'm not sure.  Click for much larger versions.  All pictures taken with my new digital camera, and then very clumsily cropped and rotated as necessary.