Springfest at the Beach is Tonight!
[ No Comments ] Posted on 05.16.08 under Uncategorized
If you’re anywhere near New London, CT tonight, you have to head down to Ocean Beach from 6-9PM for Springfest at the Beach!
It’s a great way to meet with fellow local beer lovers and sample tons of great beers. I expect a few local brewers and other key beer people from the area to be there. In fact, I myself will be there working as a volunteer!
The beer selection includes Dogfish Head, Thomas Hooker, Berkshire Brewing Co, Mohegan Sun’s beer, all the canned beers available in CT, and too many others to mention. In addition to the beer, there’s food and local band The Rhythm Method.
It also helps out the city of New London, as proceeds are for the New London Rotary Foundation, Inc. Good times for a good cause. It’s going to be a great night, and I hope to see you there!
Butternut IPA
[ 1 Comment ] Posted on 05.14.08 under Canned Beer, IPA
I am normally against tasting two beers in one night, but there’s gotta be exceptions to every rule. So here goes.
I picked up a mixed twelve pack of canned beer the other day. I love canned microbeer, and I get new ones almost whenever I see them. Or maybe exactly whenever I see them. But I saw one the other day, and I got it.
The brewery is Butternut. They’re from somewhere in farmland New York. They appear to be an old dairy farm, and the cans say “Farmhouse Ale” on all four of the Wheat Beer, IPA, Pale Ale, and Stout. If you try the web site, beware, it has a lot of loud noises on it.
Having already had one IPA, I figured another IPA made sense. So I tried the Snapperhead IPA. What a strange IPA.
Wild Goose IPA
[ 1 Comment ] Posted on 05.14.08 under Free Beer, IPA, Tasting
I promised to drink one of the beers that the fine folks at Flying Dog sent me. And I did it. It was hard work, drinking a beer, but I am a true warrior, and I pulled it off with amazing ease. After descending into my basement and pulling open the heavy beer-laden door of my beer-filled fridge, I leaned down with the weight of a thousand ounces of beer weighing on me to grab that one simple bottle of Wild Goose IPA.
This beer poured crystal clear and an orangey-reddish-brown color, much like you’d expect from an IPA. I learned at the CBC from one of the malt guys that Crystal malts give a more red hue while the chocolate/roasted family of malts give more of a brown hue. I would call the Wild Goose a crystal malt colored beer. But then again, who would use chocolate malts in an IPA? Unless it was a black IPA…
An Animal Theme
[ 1 Comment ] Posted on 05.13.08 under Barley Wine, Free Beer, IPA, Lager, Stout, Tripel
On the surface, it would appear that a dog and a goose have little in common. Then you realize that the dog is flying. Wait, can a goose even fly? Oh yeah, they fly South for the winter, don’t they… But the goose is wild. Surely a flying dog must be wild. These two have more in common than it would initially seem. Then it occurs to me: Wild Goose must be the brewery in Maryland that Flying Dog took over a few months ago!
Flying Dog is at it again, sending beer to bloggers! I love this country!!
There are three themes to this package. That means multiple beers, too! Read the rest of this entry…
“Bottled On” Dating
[ 1 Comment ] Posted on 05.11.08 under Freshness
I just love reading BeerAdvocate magazine. I am always so happy to see it come in the mailbox each month or so. Even though I hardly ever log on to post a review any more, I think that the articles in the magazine really do a great job of covering this great subject from so many different angles.
Sure, I don’t read every article. Some of them are not the most interesting to me. But there’s always a few that really do a great job of grabbing my attention. One of my favorites is the ten steps to beerdom, where they interview a professional brewer or brewery owner about basically how they got started and their general view of the industry and their place in it. But this is about the Advocate This article from Volume II Issue IV.
In this article Jason and Todd talk about freshness dating standards. And now I feel inspired to share my opinion on this topic.
Mindbreaker
[ No Comments ] Posted on 05.07.08 under Brewing, Tasting, Yeast
Just a quick note on Mindbreaker. I sampled one a few days ago, and it was not ready yet. It was still too hot and boozy, in that very young beer way.
I had one tonight, and it has come a long way. I think it’s about conditioned, maybe just another few days for the final warm settling action to take place. Then I’ll put most of them in the fridge. They’ll get a bit of chill haze (guess I haven’t solved that problem!) and I want to give them time to settle as clear as they can.
I just had a Great Divide Hercules Double IPA last night, so I’ve got that impression fresh in my mind. I could not help but compare Mindbreaker to Hercules. Hercules has a harsh (in a good way) hop edge to it that hits you right away, and lasts nicely. In contrast, Mindbreaker starts with a sweetness, which eventually gives way to a deep hop bitterness. Mindbreaker is a bit on the subtle side for an IIPA, which wasn’t exactly what I was going for, but I’m sure I’ll enjoy drinking them. Funny how nearly a half pound of hops in a five gallon batch could ever be called subtle.
There is one issue that I have with Mindbreaker, and I think I know how to fix it. It is the sweetness. This sweetness is not so much underattenuation (although that’s part of it). It is more of an estery sweetness. This has combined with a ton of Willamette at flameout and a week of Centennial dry hopping to add a lot of sweet flowery flavor to the beer. This aids initial drinkability, but can work its way towards cloying by the end of the glass. I believe that this is the result of underpitching yeast to the beer. I used one pack of US-05. A few days later, I was on Jamil’s yeast pitching calculator, and found that I should have used more like 1.5 packs of yeast.
Lesson learned. Next time, check Jamil’s calculator first, and pitch the right amount of yeast. I probably would have had better luck with two packs than I did with one. I could have even tried to split a pack, since the Mindbender really only needed a half a pack of yeast.
The more I think about it, the more I think that perhaps underpitching is responsible for a wide array of homebrewing problems.
Brew on!
Session 15: Where It All Begins
[ 2 Comments ] Posted on 05.02.08 under Stories, The Session
Welcome to The Session. See our fine hosts Boak and Bailey for the full roundup of other posts on the same topic. Tonight’s post is about where the love of great beer began for me.
I am not like a lot of other people. I never drank beer in high school. All I ever seemed to see was yellow fizz, and it was gross. Even in college, beer wasn’t really high on my list. I was always too scared to try to use a fake ID before I was 21, and I wasn’t really too motivated to pursue what I thought beer was at the time.
My roommate in my Junior year tried to get me to like beer. He tried with some of the right stuff, too. He was a big fan of Bass. He tried with Sam Adams. He tried a few others. None really hit the spot for me. But I kept trying. Here’s where it gets fuzzy… but then suddenly one day it’s nickel night at the college bar and I’m getting drafts of Red Hook ESB for a nickel apiece and loving it. Come to think of it, they had a pretty decent beer selection in the late 90s at the Civic Pub.
So that would seem to be the end of it. I started on good beer and never looked back. But that wasn’t the case.
High Gravity Brewing
[ 1 Comment ] Posted on 05.01.08 under Alcohol, All-Grain, Bottle Conditioning, Brewing, Extract, Troubleshooting, Yeast
I wrote a post a while back about calories in beer. It was really fun to write, and even more exciting when Bob Skilnik called me out on a few ambiguous and incorrect statements I made. But just having Bob Skilnik reading my site was cool!
The other day, I got a new comment on there, with a commentor named Kiwi asking the following question:
So my question is, your 10%ABV russian stout (sounds most excellent) got to that % by the recipe…which has more… sugars? and a better yeast? I am trying to up my alcohol %, but not ruin my homebrew.
Such a great question deserves front page answers, not some answer hidden in the comments of an old post. So, Kiwi, this one’s for you!
Mindbender
[ No Comments ] Posted on 04.30.08 under Bottle Conditioning, Brewery In Planning, Brewing, Hops, IPA, Tasting
A few weeks ago, I started working on brewing recipes which I intend to use in my real brewery. My first one was the IPA family of beers. Mindbender is a small 3% ABV IPA, and Mindbreaker is a big 9% ABV IPA. These are the beers I made as a partigyle, with two mashes of about 9 lbs each, first three gallons of wort from each going to Mindbreaker, and second three gallons of wort going to Mindbender.
I bottled Mindbender and Mindbreaker on Saturday. Mindbender is predictably conditioning quicker. Since it has a lower alcohol content, the yeast are a lot more zealous attacking that priming sugar I added. Mindbreaker is coming along nicely, just at a more measured pace. What do you expect, I know I move slower when I have more alcohol in me.
Mindbender is moving along so nicely, that it’s almost ready already. My barometer plastic bottles are showing that Mindbender is quite firm, and Mindbreaker is still a day or two behind. This morning before I headed out, I put a bottle of Mindbender in the cold fridge so it would be ready for me when I got home.
Diacetyl
[ 4 Comments ] Posted on 04.29.08 under Tasting
At the Craft Brewer’s Conference, I had my first ever Fat Tire from New Belgium. I had been drinking San Diego IPA all day, and I was really C-hopped/dry-hopped out, so I sought respite in a malty brown ale. But I immediately was struck by this weird sweetish sort of grainy flavor. I made my way through the full glass, and was just left scratching my head. What was that strange taste?
Discussing this with fellow CBC attendees throughout the various beer sampling hospitality events during the rest of the week, I was informed that the mysterious character was diacetyl. One person even told me (this is unconfirmed hearsay) that New Belgium took diacetyl out of Fat Tire, and found it resulted in a beer with significantly less character, and people actually didn’t like it without the buttery layers. This person went on to say (uncofirmed hearsay, again) that New Belgium now intentionally doses Fat Tire with diacetyl to retain its signature character. If anyone can confirm or deny this, I’d love to see some more substantive evidence than a conversation over literally 100 taps full of free beer at the Tiki Pavilion.
I was initially relieved to finally have an idea of what diacetyl probably is. The problem is that now I taste it everywhere. Firestone Double Barrel - diacetyl. Magic Hat Roxy Rolles - diacetyl. Harpoon IPA - diacetyl. A Hallertau-only Pilsner from German hopgrowers at the CBC - diacetyl. I’m practically expecting my coffee to taste like diacetyl tomorrow morning!
For the longest time, I wished to know what diacetyl was, and now that I do, I wish I could ignore it. I drank copious amounts of Roxy Rolles a little over a year ago, and never was bothered by any of the dreaded “d-word”. Part of me thinks that my diacetyl detection delirium might be all in my head.
So let’s hear it: what beers do you find to have noticable levels of diacetyl?