Good Dog

[ 1 Comment ] Posted on 07.23.10 under Alcohol, News

So many people are hating on Brew Dog for their latest stunt. Packaging 55% ABV beer in dead rodents.

That’s right, I called it a stunt, but I’m not about to lash out at them.

On the surface this latest move is wrong on several levels:

  1. At 55% ABV, I think it’s a stretch to call it a “beer”
  2. This is clearly just an attempt to gain attention. In a way, Brew Dog is like the middle child in the birth order of today’s breweries.
  3. The beer comes packaged in a dead rodent that’s been preserved and stuffed.
  4. You have to pay 500 pounds (the English currency, not the SI unit for weight) just to get one bottle. And the bottle is only 12 ounces large. Apparently taxidermy is rather expensive.
  5. There were only 12 bottles made of this. Total. Twelve bottles. Talk about a limited production run!

But you know what, I just can’t get enough of the insanity that seems to drive their crazy ideas for huge beers. As if 110 proof isn’t enough (that’s stronger than almost all distilled spirits on the market) it’s packaged in dead animals and costs a fortune and is impossibly rare. I love it!!!

I wonder if they have an equivalent to PETA* over there? And don’t they have a TTB*?

At any rate, this sort of thing still hasn’t gotten old to me. Even if most of the commentators out there are not happy about it. But in the end, for every person spilling their guts on the web about the move contributes a drop in the bucket of Brew Dog’s marketing machine, which is the whole point.

* PETA=People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. In other words a bunch of American hippies that refuse to eat animals.

* TTB=Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. I wonder how they decided on TTB. Why not ATTTB? Or even ATB? Anyway they’re the folks that regulate labeling, taxes, permits, etc. in the US for beer.

Pipeline

[ No Comments ] Posted on 07.11.10 under Uncategorized

Pipeline: the backlog of home made beer supply you have.

A good pipeline is three full kegs sitting there at cellar temp “conditioning” while waiting for space in the keg fridge, while two more batches ferment getting ready to be kegged in a week, perhaps even before kicking one of the active kegs. (The IPA has come to what I call the “bottomless keg” portion of the keg where I expect it to pull nothing but foam any time – for about a week now)

The key to keeping a good pipeline is brewing faster than you can go through the beer. For me the main motivator has been brewing to fill the gap that will be created when I get to making the Oktoberfest party beer. I know that there are six batches (three brew days) that will be dedicated to serving for the enjoyment of others. In order to compensate for that, it’s become important to make more beer more often so that over those 6-8 weeks of lost brew days I will have enough overage to make up for the lack of fresh supply.

It’s amazing the amount of planning and preparation that goes into maintaining the pipeline. I have spreadsheets for brew day scheduling, and spreadsheets for pipeline maintenance. I plan my brew days to make sure I have an appropriate variety on tap at any given time. I’ve found that if I just brew whatever I feel like, I can end up with three oddball experimental beers on tap and only one really good one. Hopefully moving forward I can keep a good strong pipeline going – both plenty of beer and a good variety.

Don’t Dump It!

[ No Comments ] Posted on 04.29.10 under Rants, Tasting

Excuse me for a moment.

WTF is it with people that dump relatively high quality beers, calling them “undrinkable”?

OK So you might not prefer that particular offering. But there’s no way you’re telling me that this particular beer is “undrinkable”. I’d say that so many years of history demonstrates that the beer in question is totally drinkable. Maybe you are just too jaded to appreciate its subtleties, or maybe the bottle you got hadn’t been treated as well as possible, but I assure you that beer is not undrinkable.

Next time before you take to the keyboard, log onto BeerAdvocate, and decry a beer you don’t like as undrinkable and a complete drain pour…stop. Maybe I have low beer standards (I don’t think that I do) but there are so few beers that I’ve tried (and I’ve tried many) that I actually had to dump because I couldn’t finish it.

Actually I can think of one. Consider this: the first Rodenbach Grand Cru I ever had, I dumped the latter half of the bottle because I found it “undrinkable”. Which obviously just meant I couldn’t handle it, or in other words the mouth-puckering sour tartness was not for me at the time. I found it undrinkable in the moment I was trying to drink it. But even so, I gave it a fair chance, nursing it for nearly an hour, waiting for my tastes to magically acclimate to this new form of “beer”.

These days, a Rodenbach Grand Cru would be welcome here any time. Turns out it isn’t “undrinkable” – it was just not in favor at the time I originally tasted it.

Look, even Natty Ice, Nasty as it may sound, is not “undrinkable”. Even the most “undrinkable” beer you could think of (for me it’s Rolling Rock) is someone’s favorite beer. So save your irrational discarding for something that’s actually inedible, like spoiled milk or moldy vegetables, but for Christ’s sake just drink the Goddamned beer!

Belgian Dubbel

[ No Comments ] Posted on 04.10.10 under Dubbel

At work on Friday I had a conversation with a beer lover, and we got to talking about Chimay.

As a result, I was really eager for a Chimay Blue. Or was it a Red? Anyway, I wanted a Chimay Dubbel – brown, raisiny, deep, rich Chimay. I wanted to find a cold 750 at the beer shop so I could go home and crack it right away.

It was not to be. No cold ones at the store. So I ended up with an Ommegang Abbey. Half the price of the Chimay, and probably approximately the same thing. Especially compared to the IPA and Wheat I have on tap at home.

Now tonight the Ommegang is ready to drink. And I am not disappointed. In my Chimay glass, it is Dubbel enough for me right now. I might have to plan one of these on the brewing roster soon.

Columbus!

[ No Comments ] Posted on 04.01.10 under Brewing, Hops, IPA, Kegging

It might still be a little early to judge, but I just kegged my latest (I)IPA, all Columbus. Bittered to nearly 100 IBU with an OG of 1.075 and dry hopped for a week with two ounces of Columbus. This beer is incredible right now!

Aroma? YES!
Flavor? YES!!
Bitterness? YES!!!

If it holds up over the next few weeks as it cools and carbs, I’ll post the whole recipe. But for now, I’m basking in it.

Bottling from the Keg

[ No Comments ] Posted on 03.04.10 under Bottle Conditioning, Bottling, Kegging

Over a year ago I started kegging my beer, forgoing bottling forever. Or so I thought.

It wasn’t long before I wanted to be able to bottle off some brews to share with friends. So I bottled a batch or two, just to be able to share it, or when my original keg fridge was at capacity with two kegs in it.

This did the job for every now and then, but eventually I wanted to be able to bottle beer from a keg at any time, or to carbonate with CO2 in the keg and then bottle after that (such as for a very strong beer that could pose problems bottle conditioning).

Read the rest of this entry…

Ultimate Efficiency

[ No Comments ] Posted on 02.24.10 under All-Grain, Brewing

As a brewer, extract efficiency is a key metric. Each grain you use in your brew has a certain amount of potential sugar stored in there. Due to our limitations as humans in the real world, we can’t really get all that sugar out. So extract efficiency measures the percentage that we do manage to run off into our kettles.

Maximizing this number gives you the ability to get the most out of your grains. This saves money and expands the possibilities of what you can make without needing to add sugar or malt extract. Consistent efficiency allows you to craft more precise and repeatable recipes.

Efficiency relates to many variables, including how you crush the grains, mash filter arrangement, possibly mash thickness and duration, and so on. Most of these are pretty constant from batch to batch. But my efficiency has been hovering around a meager 65-70%. This is not where I want it. It’s OK, but it seems to leave a lot on the table (or in the tun, so to speak).

Read the rest of this entry…

Ice Ice Baby

[ No Comments ] Posted on 02.17.10 under Alcohol, Fun, News

Once again Brew Dog has done it. They’ve gone and raised the ire of all wings of the beer and political communities. Not complacent to be second best, it’s time to make the world’s strongest beer… again!

First off, Sam Adams Utopias is the strongest beer, when it comes down to it. By American legal definition, a beer can not be fortified by any method, including “ice distillation”. Sam Adams is cooked as normal wort and fermented as such by yeast all the way to its nearly unnatural 27% ABV. All others higher than that, to my knowledge, are done by ice distilling.

Read the rest of this entry…

Questioning the Wisdom

[ No Comments ] Posted on 02.14.10 under Brewing, Tasting

My Glass of Anchor Christmas 2007Maybe I have become too confident. Maybe it’s boredom… I just don’t know what inspired me to try to copy a beer that I don’t even really like all that much. I mean Anchor’s Our Special Ale is a true American classic, released once a year in time for the holidays, and somewhat different each year. Time after time it’s basically a black beer with trees added to it. I’ve written about it before, and I’ve liked it, but these days, this is not exactly my kind of thing. However, it is a classic, so I always get at least one sixer, just to have it.

One time, I think it was December of 2008, approaching the start of my third year of brewing, I got the idea that OSA was really pretty similar to what you’d get if you took a porter and used a Bavarian wheat beer yeast to ferment it.

Read the rest of this entry…

That’s Cold

[ No Comments ] Posted on 02.08.10 under Uncategorized

The downside to watching football on TV:
Coors Light. Of course it’s aged cold! Of course it’s filtered cold!!

« Previous Entries