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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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).

After much reading, I decided that the Beer Gun was the way to go. Less clumsy, one hand operation, CO2 purge for ultimate storage stability. It sounded awesome.

It turned out to be a little awkward to use: it needs its own gas connection, and it’s top heavy, so finding a place for it between bottles is tricky. But it did a great job of making foam free bottles pretty quickly (once you got the whole rig set up).

Lately it has just seemed like too much work to take a half an hour to hook up the beer gun just to bottle one or two for a few friends. So I’ve been cramming some tube onto the end of my tap and releasing most of the pressure from the keg and filling larger bottles very successfully.

I decided last night that I would give this a try with standard 12-ounce bottles. It turns out to work just as well on that smaller scale. And now I have a beer gun that I don’t think I’ll be needing any time soon. (Not that I’m quite ready to list it on Craigslist.) Maybe if I want to bottle an entire keg, the beer gun will be the way to go, but for the six to twelve bottles per keg slated for charity (AKA my friends), the ghetto tube on the end of the tap works just fine.

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).

I targeted sparging as the process step with the greatest opportunity for improvement and I have found a consistent high-efficiency method: no-stir batch sparging.

Sparging is the process of rinsing sugar off grains from the mash. Batch sparging is the process of removing all water from the mash, and refilling the mash tun and running off all the water again. This is repeated until the kettle is full of wort. Normally two to four batches total, depending on how many pounds of grain you’re using. The alternative is fly sparging, where water is continuously added to the top of the mash at the same rate as it is drained from the bottom of the mash.

It seems counter-intuitive. You’d think that continuously sparging would be effective, maybe just because it takes more human intervention. You’d think that, given batch sparging, by stirring in between runoffs you’d expose more surface area of the grains to water, and thus aid in extraction. But you’ve got to trust the data, and my recent experiments show no-stir to be the way to go. Stirring my batches: around 75% efficiency. No-stir: 88% efficiency.

Jeremy, my chemist friend and co-brewer thought it might be better without stirring, and it turns out he was right!

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.

Ice distillation takes advantage of the fact that alcohol freezes at a lower temperature than water. By freezing beer, the alcohol portion will tend to stay unfrozen, or at least will thaw first. This gives an opportunity to remove water from the mix by draining the liquid portion of the beer from the frozen part. The runoff is concentrated beer and the result is a higher alcohol by volume beverage.

This is the method that those zany Scots used to make Tactical Nuclear Penguin a 32% ABV Stout. This is the method that some remarkably anonymous Germans used to make some 40% ABV thing. And this is again the same method that the Brew Dogs used for their 41% IPA “Sink the Bismarck”.

Most seem to view this as senselessly inane, and the “chef with the saltiest soup” analogy keeps coming up. The difference is that you don’t just sprinkle alcohol into the beer. There is no “alcohol shaker” that you can work your wrist lame adding more and more alcohol to the beer in the brite tank. You still have to work to get more alcohol content into the final product. You have to sacrifice something, in this case a tremendous amount of beer volume. The saltiest soup thing holds up well against the idea of the hoppiest beer, but not quite here.

My favorite offended response was one where the writer was upset about Brew Dog’s use of a tragedy where many people died, just for their own shameless self promotion. Ever heard of James Cameron?

The thing is, I like the shameless self promotion aspect of these stunts. This is the sort of thing that craft beer needs. Shameless self promotion is what the big brewers practice, and it is a big part of their big market share. Face it, you can’t make a “whassssup” line of commercials without a heavy dose of hubris.

My response to all of this is to take my own 7% ABV porter and transform it into the newest strongest beer in the world. All I have to do is reduce its volume by about 83% and I’ll increase its alcohol by volume sixfold. That will leave me with a 42% ABV “beer” on my hands, and allow me to seat myself at the head of this table of strength.

Tonight I’m taking one 16-ounce plastic beer bottle, and drawing 12 ounces of the porter off the keg. I’ll leave it out overnight to de-carbonate and put it in the freezer tomorrow. If I let it freeze while carbonated, all the CO2 would violently come out of solution while freezing, which would be messy, and possibly spill some potential alcohol.

Then I will run off the concentrated beer after a few days, and refreeze and runoff as many times as necessary until I end up with a mere 2 ounces of liquid. As long as I am sure to leave nothing but clear ice behind, I’ll know that I got all the alcohol out of there, and I’ll end up with my world’s strongest beer.

Very limited supply, served in one-ounce pours.

Excuse me, I have to go prepare my championship belt.

Image of Vanilla Ice, thanks to Wikipedia.

BrewDog Logo, thanks to Beernola.com.

Titanic image, thanks to Denison University.

Championship belt, thanks to Elfsar.

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.

In the year since then, I’ve convinced myself more and more that this combination of common ingredients would do a damn fine job of approximating the experience of the OSA, with no special exotic tree additions needed.

This thought became so overwhelming that I had to finally try it. I had a packet of WB-06, some black grains, and some porter-friendly hops. It seemed the perfect time to try this crazy idea, and put to rest forever the question of whether Anchor’s OSA was basically a porter made with wheat beer yeast.

Now the beer is in the keg, and fully carbonated, and I’ve been going at it for a few days. I haven’t yet bought a reference sample of OSA, so I’ll leave that comparison for a future follow-up. But I can say that at this point I would not recommend this combination of ingredients.

I don’t know if I’m just sick of black beer, wishing for warmer weather. I don’t know if I am just not that into the clove flavor and aroma of the WB-06. I don’t know if it’s just the comparison to my favorite IPA bursting with Amarillo hop goodness in the other keg. I don’t know if it’s some combination of all of the above. All I know is that I am just not loving this beer. It’s not that it’s got any specific defect or off-flavor, it actually came out technically quite well. It’s just that the flavor profile is not hitting me where it counts. I just don’t like the recipe.

I will have to try the real OSA and see if I came even close. That could help me see this beer for its true worth. And I harvested the yeast to reuse in a normal wheat beer, just to see how it works in there. But for now, I’m not shy about working my way through “My Special Ale” in a hasty manner.