Pints 'N Snifters

Shush Yo’ Mouth Snobs

For once I’m going to let somebody else do the writing so you guys and girls don’t have to put up with my labored wordsmithing.

But first some background for those not-so-in-the-know: Beer Advocate is a website/magazine/organization built on the premise of promoting beer (their slogan is ‘respect beer’, how cool is that?). Beeradvocate.com, like pretty much any website since the primordial days of the internet, is home to a time-sucking, work-inhibiting forum that I honestly try my damndest to avoid at all costs.* These forums routinely play host to flagrant beer snobbery of the worst sort as a small, yet vocal population of the beer nerd citizenry duke it out from the safety of their computer chairs. Which is simply too bad. Sites like these are few and far between and it’s a crying shame to see them ruined by the sith lords of the beer world (see my first blog post, “Of Nerds and Geeks: A Treatise on Beer Snobs”).

*Note: The beer review sections are well worth your time however, as is the magazine subscription.

A recent snobby thread was called “Most Overrated Brewery”. In which the minions of the dark side bashed a number of breweries for ‘selling out’ or becoming too popular/expensive/up their own asses or perhaps just making beers that don’t necessarily appeal to everyone. That is until Dogfish Head Founder/President/Beer Ninja/Voice of Reason/Rapper and All-around Cool Guy Sam Calagione showed up to set these fools straight.

You can read his post here.

Regardless of what you think of Dogfish Head or the beers they make, it’s hard to admit that what Sam Calagione has done and continues to do for the beer world is not impressive. The guy has done nothing but champion for the cause from day one. Whether he’s serving on the Board of Directors for the Brewers Associaton or simply raising awareness of craft beer through his business, tv show (why the hell did they cancel that?) or his books, Sam is responsible for a lot of good in the world. And it’s obvious from the responses to his post that when he speaks beer nerds shut up and listen.

Hybrid Shmybrid: A Pre-Colonial/Post-Prohibition English/American Pale Ale

Pale ale. Who doesn’t love it? It’s the everyman’s beer; a style beloved by all from Burton-Upon-Trent to Chico, CA. It’s ludicrously refreshing and typically sessionable enough to be quaffed pint after pint for hours on end. It’s a rather broad family of beers ranging from low gravity bitters to huge, highly hopped ales of the imperial Indian variety.

I just so happen to have (if I do say so myself, and I do) a damn near fantastic pale flowing rather furiously from my kegerator at the moment. The formulatory period for this particular recipe was rife with thoughts of style hybridization. You see, dear reader, I’ve developed something of an affinity for the beers and brewing practices of the British Isles. Steeped in history and bountiful brewing tradition, the country from which our own nation was once birthed holds a special place in every beer lover’s heart as the point of origination for nearly all modern ales as we know them. This being the case, I would have been quite content to simply a brew a nice, sessionable English bitter But it just so happens that, like every beer geek worth his weight in fuggles, I’ve been known to thoroughly enjoy a nice, clean, refreshing American pale ale as well. 

There I stood on the verge of an impasse of the Anglo vs. American sort, wanting so badly to brew a pale ale but not quite sure which country of origin to side with. So, like any homebrewer is wont to do from time to time, I decided not to choose, or rather, I chose both.

Here’s how I went about it:

The beer was going to start out as English as a cup of earl grey, fish and chips, and substandard dentistry only to be West Coastified late in the process. The goal would be to create a hybrid, a perfect marriage of both sides of the pond. The grain bill would have to be very British; a lot of Marris Otter and Crystal malt. The yeast utilized would be slightly estery and minerally, straight from London or thereabouts. The early hop additions would also be of mainly English varieties: fuggles and east kent goldings. But all hints of The Isles would stop there. From here on out it would be hops that reek of the Pacific Northwest: citra and cascade for the flameout and dry hopping additions respectively. The result was a beer of supreme drinkability and somewhat notable complexity. The recipe is as follows. Enjoy.

God Save The Queen American Pale Ale

Estimated for 70% Efficiency

Estimated Original Gravity: 1.055

-9 lbs Marris Otter

-1 lbs Crystal 40

-.5 lbs Carapils

-1.62 oz Fuggles @ 60 mins - 5% AA - 27 IBUs

-1 oz East Kent Goldings @ 20 mins - 5%AA - 10 IBUs

-.5 oz Citra @ Flameout - 13% AA - 0 IBUs

-.5 oz Cascade @ Flameout - 6% AA - 0 IBUs

-Wyeast 1028 London Ale, 200 Billion Cells

Single infusion mash at 152 for 60 mins.

Ferment in the mid 60’s.

Dry hop with 1 oz of Cascade at 2 weeks.

Brews of Our Lives: Septemberfest Edition, Part 1

Well, dear reader, I tried and failed to brew one of my beers-of-days-past a second time (see my earlier post titled ‘Like Pale Malt Through The Mill, So Are The Brews of Our Lives’). Although that may be misleading. After all, I didn’t fail in brewing it. It’s happily fermenting away in my basement as I write. I was, however, coaxed ever so slightly from my course of best intentions to recreate a great recipe from the past by the all-to-familiar siren song of innovation and discovery. This second attempt really isn’t the same beer at all.

Now, dear reader, before you start grabbing your sharpest, most menacing pitchforks and fashioning a noose, please allow me to explain my betrayal.

Things started out honestly enough. I found my brew sheet, recipe and notes from the original brew day. I then made my way to the local homebrew emporium to procure the various necessary ingredients: a few pounds of malt, a couple ounces of hops, a smackpack of the finest Saccharomyces pastorianus I could get my hands on. It wasn’t until later that evening, after my yeast starter was happily churning away on the stir plate, that I began to feel the familiar itch of spontaneous recipe deviation.

The beer in question is an European Amber Lager. It exists somewhere in the practically ignorable rift between Vienna Lager and Marzen/Oktoberfest. The first time I brewed this particular recipe I was forced by both time and temperature limitations to brew this ‘lager’ as an ale. This time, since I have no such restrictions (oktoberfest is practically a year away and it’s cold as hell in Wisconsin right now), I figured I would try to brew this second attempt as a true lager.

If I had stopped deviating from the plan at this point, the differences between the two beers would have been somewhat significant, although perhaps forgivable given the circumstances. But, of course, I continued thinking about making this amber ale turned lager in a truly traditional manner. Those of you familiar with traditional lager brewing probably have a good idea where this is headed: decoction mash.

Note: I could write at length for those of you who aren’t familiar with this particular technique (just start brewing already so you can be in the know too!) about decoction mashing but that kind of explanation is beyond the scope of this blog (we’re trying, after all, to keep this fun and only mildly educational). If you’re interested in learning a little bit you can read more here.

I decided on a double decoction mash. Just enough decoctions to make it worth it, but not enough to take all day. The brew day took quite a bit longer, as is bound to happen with a beer like this, clocking in at around 6.5 hours. But boy, was it worth it. My kitchen still smells this morning of sweet, bready munich and vienna malt.

I can’t wait to give this one a try and compare tasting notes with the original. I’ll post that in Part 2.

So, before I bore you all to death. Lets get down to brass tacks. The recipe….

Septemberfest

Estimated for 75% Efficiency

Estimated Original Gravity: 1.052

5 lbs Vienna

5 lbs Munich

1 lbs Caramunich

1 oz Hallertau at 60 mins - 4.6 % AA - 17 IBUs

.9 oz Saaz at 15 mins - 4.9 % AA - 7 IBUs

Wyeast 2124 Bohemian Lager - 1800ml starter (previously 1056 American Ale)

Mash Schedule: Previously a single infusion mash at 152.

Currently a double decoction mash as follows…

Protein Rest @ 125 for 20 min

First decoction: Sacch rest at 150 for 10 mins then boiled for 10, add to main mash

Main mash beta sacch rest at 148 for 20 mins

Second decoction: Boil for 10 mins, added back to main mash

Main mash alpha sacch rest at 155 for 20 mins

Boil thin mash and add back to main mash for mashout at 170.

Sparge and boil as usual.

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

I recently had the opportunity to participate in my first BJCP sanctioned homebrew competition as a judge. Now, as those of you who know me will surely attest, I love to analyze beers, really pick them apart, but I’ve never really done this in any official capacity. Mostly it’s just me wafting and quaffing, sniffing and sipping while my bride-to-be pokes fun at me for checking the BJCP Style Guidelines via smart phone (yes, there’s an app for that).

And while one could argue that I’ve spent a lifetime developing a somewhat discriminating palate, it wasn’t until recently that I had the chance to put my finely tuned, perfectly calibrated sensory organs to use. Watch out beer nerds, court is in session and Judge Eric is presiding.

I’m sure most of you reading this (does anyone actually read this?) have a pretty good handle on beer competitions and what they typically consist of, but for you uninitiated laypeople out there I’m about to drop some devastating knowledge bombs of background story on you. The BJCP (Beer Judge Certification Program) certifies and ranks judges. They also set style guidelines for each beer style. In a sanctioned event, each beer entry is judged against the guidelines for aroma, appearance, flavor, mouthfeel, and overall impression. The beers are then given a score out of 50. While the number scores are important for choosing which beers make it to the best of show round and eventually deciding the overall winner of the competition, the real aim of the BJCP style event is for the judges to give usable feedback to the brewers.

While it’s safe to say I was pretty damn excited to put my beer geekdom to the test, I was also a little terrified. The judges present ranged in experience from first timer me to a Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup judge. I felt like a simple moisture farmer in the presence of the Jedi Council. But, in the end I think I did pretty damn well. I was paired with a rather experienced judge, whose scores and feedback were very similar to my own. I tasted some beers that were quite fantastic and a couple that weren’t so impressive but, regardless of the overall quality, I was able to give the brewers some real-world advice. That is the point after all.

After carefully scrutinizing that many beers for an extended period of time, not only were my taste buds exhausted and my hand thoroughly cramped from writing pages of notes, I had also developed a greater appreciation for the local homebrew scene. While we may not have the most active homebrew clubs around, or even that many local competitions, we do really have some talented brewers. Not only were the winning beers great, but many of the beers that didn’t make it to the final round could have easily been passed off as commercial products from an actual production brewery. The whole process just kind of validated what I already knew: real, world class beer is not out of the reach of simple homebrewers. Whether you’re brewing small extract batches on your stove top or you’ve got a 30 gallon, three tier, propane fired all-grain nanobrewery in your garage, you can make truly artisinal beers if you’ve got the drive and passion to do it.

The moral of this story, if there must be one, is that beer competitions are awesome and I learned how to put links in my blog posts. Boom.

Like pale malt through the mill, so are the brews of our lives.

I’ve been thinking an awful lot lately about brew days past; mashes come and gone; hop additions lost in the mists of time. As a homebrewer, I almost never brew the same beer twice. And why should I? There is always some new ingredient or process to play around with, new experiments to be conducted, new hybrid styles to be invented. That is perhaps the crowning glory of homebrewing in the first place: you have only yourself to answer to. I’ve made plenty of good beers in my day, but lately I’ve been reminiscing about the great ones. The ones that kicked the proverbial keg before their time. I miss them and I want to experience them again.

So, like a beer shaman, malt medicine man, or yet-to-be-cannonized miracle-working saint of saccharification, I will ressurect my fallen friends so that they may once again bring mirth, frivolity and a pretty solid buzz to me and mine. I’ll post updates, compare tasting notes from current and previous batches and, of course, post recipes so that you too may bask in the glorious glow of rediscovery.

Now let us bow our heads and pray that I kept good notes.

We don’t need no stinkin’ badges (but they sure are fun).

Well,  the Holidays are just about over and I think it’s quite safe to say that my liver is breathing a sigh of relief. The jury is still out on exactly how many different beers I gulped down in the name of holiday celebration, but I assure you the number is quite high. I lost count between my second glass of Goose Island’s Fleur (which is far too drinkable by the way) and the moment I single-handedly finished off a bottle of Chimay Rouge. 

The gluttonous fashion in which I inched ever closer to cirrhosis was made even more enjoyable by an awesome little app (don’t worry non smartphone users, it’s available in it’s entirety on the interwebz as well) called Untappd. Now before you start in with the ‘We’ve tried those beer review apps before and they’re all lame’ bullshit, let me start in with the ‘Shut yo’ mouth, this one is cool’ truthspeak. 

Yes, this is a beer review app. And yes, just like all the other ones you may or may not have tried and eventually given up on, this one rates beers on a 5 star scale. Nothing new here yet. It wasn’t until I actually rated my first beer that I realized the true genius behind Untappd: it actually rewards you for drinking. Yep that’s right, one can attain “badges” for accomplishing certain beer drinking goals. My personal favorite is called ‘Top of the Mornin’, awarded to the stout-hearted lads and lasses who drink and rate 5 beers before noon.

While websites like RateBeer and BeerAdvocate will most likely remain the fashionable, and honestly best, forum for sharing your beer reviews with the beer-loving citizenry, creative apps like these will always be an interesting, albeit slightly second rate, tool for whiling away the hours spent on a barstool. 

So drink up, try it out and try your damndest to get the “Elite” badge (awarded for drinking 2,500 different beers). But, for your mother’s sake, try to space it out a little.

Of Barleywines and Relatives

I had hoped to brew a big ass barleywine to give to my family at our annual Christmas Eve Bash. I was going to bottle it in 22 ouncers and wax dip it so they could age it for a year or so. You know, a real special occasion beer. It never happened.

Two things stood in my way:

1) Serious craft beer drinkers don’t number too highly amongst my relatives. That’s not to say that they don’t love to drink. At our family gatherings bottles of Pinot Noir and Gewurztraminer have been known to be emptied with alarming speed. And boy do they love their light lagers. In addition to the vast array of Leinenkugel’s products present, one of my many uncle Steve’s usually mixes up pitchers of something called a Tasmanian Devil that looks like the innards of the Kool-Aid Man’s blue raspberry flavored cousin and smells like it could strip the paint off of your car. But aside from a very small group of likeminded geeks (Sarah, Chad, Danielle and Uncle Tom, where y’at?), most of the people who share a good proportion of my genetic material shudder and turn up their noses at anything darker or more aromatic than a straw colored macrobrew. I don’t blame them. I aint angry. That’s their bag, but it isn’t exactly conducive to big ass barleywine gift giving.

And perhaps more importantly…

2) I forgot to brew it.

So, in the spirit of giving huge, high gravity, highly age-able gifts, here’s the recipe I had planned on using. Happy Holidays.

Huge Phuckin’ Barleywine

Calculated for 75% Efficiency

Estimated OG: 1.096

16 LBS 2 Row

1 LBS Crystal 120L

.2 LBS Aromatic Malt

1.2 Oz 14% AA Magnum - First Wort Hop - 40 IBU’s

1 Oz 5% AA Fuggles - 15 Mins - 6 IBU’s

Single Infusion Mash at 152ish

Ferment in the Low to Mid 60s with your favorite British yeast strain, I really like 1028.

I had planned to “dry hop” this with fresh mint leaves at some point. Feel free to leave this step out.

Of Nerds and Geeks: A Treatise On Beer Snobs

A word of warning: The following is an introductory post to this brand spankin’ new blog of mine. It is both long winded and roundabout. I urge you nonetheless, dear reader, to read on. I promise, nay vow, that future posts will not utilize such flowery wordery.

*********

I was inadvertently reminded recently by my bride-to-be of a very specific moment from my childhood. This particular memory involves just two players: a very dashing 8 year old me and the recess lady (I think we called them aids?). I can’t for the life of me even remember what she looked like, much less what she was called, so for the purposes of this tale we shall call her Mathilda Ann Bowe*. 

*Note: Bowe is a rediculously popluar surname where I come from so chances are quite good that this was probably her actual name anyway.

This particular day on the playground, Mathilda Ann saw me staring intently skyward as a jetliner, presumably bound for Minneapolis, passed overhead. Whether it was my devilishly good looks that compelled her to approach me or her concern over whether or not I had sustained some kind of brain injury whilst playing dodgeball, I will never know. But regardless of her motivation, Mathilda Ann strode over to me to ask what I was looking at. 

It is at this point in my story that I must pause to apologize, dear reader, for not possessing the steel trap of a memory required to recall my conversation with Ms. Bowe word for word. Though I think it may have gone something like this:

Mathilda: Are you alright kid? Do I need to take you to the nurse?

Me: No answer. (Attempting to build an aura of mystery)

Mathilda: What the hell are you looking at?

Me: I’m only trying, my dear recess lady, to discern the model of that airliner up there. It can’t possibly be a DC-10, for even from this distance I can clearly see that it has no engines mounted on it’s wings. Perhaps it’s a Boeing 727 or a DC-9. It couldn’t possibly be a TU-154, for as far as I know Northwest Airlines doesn’t have any soviet made planes in service and that is without a doubt a Northwest flight. That fact is clearly evident by the red aft section of the fuselage. 

I’d like to think that at this point she commented on how eloquent I was, especially for an 8 year old or said something akin to “Boy, you sure do know a lot about airplanes”. But she probably just said “Ok” and wandered off to break up a fight near the swingset.

The point I’ve been trying to make in an extremely roundabout way is that, as an 8 year old boy, I knew A LOT about airplanes. And I don’t mean I happened to have a mild affinity for them, I fucking loved them. I built models. I took frequent trips to the public library to check out every single book they had about aviation. I probably watched Top Gun 800 million fucking times.

But it wasn’t just airplanes. Before that it was whales (again more trips to the library, and many, many viewings of Free Willy), after airplanes it was skateboarding (anyone remember Gleaming the Cube? It was the only skateboarding related movie one could rent at Celebrity Video and Tan and I’m pretty sure, if you were to check their records, I rented that one at least 50 times). 

It seems that throughout my entire life I’ve had this propensity to learn every single detail about whatever it is I happened to be interested in at that moment in time. And that is, ladies and gentlemen, because I am (drumroll please) a nerd.

And no I don’t mean nerd in the sense that I could tell you that Grand Moff Tarkin not only served as the commander of the first Death Star charged with seeking out and destroying the Rebel Alliance, but was also the Governor of the Imperial Outland Regions (even though I can). And no, I don’t even mean nerd in the sense that I can debate Picard Vs. Janeway Vs. Kirk with the best of them (even though I can). And lastly, no I don’t even mean nerd in the sense that I own a $4000 suit of armor that was hand forged in Italy from 14 gauge carbon steel and made specifically to fit my measurements (even though I do).

No, I proudly proclaim that I am a nerd for other reasons. It seems that lately, ‘nerd’ has taken on some other connotations, specifically in the beer community (ah, now we are finally getting around to the true aim of this blog). You see, dear reader, in the beer world nerd is a term of endearment. A badge of honor and initiation into a brotherhood of malt beverage afficionados. That’s right, I’m a Beer Nerd. 

It would be wise at this moment to make a point that there has been much debate in the beer community about this adopted title. Guys like Sam Calagione use it, I think rather wisely, to differentiate between someone who is honestly passionate about beer (nerd, or possibly geek) and someone who simply uses their amassed beer knowledge to hold over other people (snob). It’s awfully hard not to draw a comparison between the Jedi and Sith at this point.  Both use the force (beer knowledge), but the Jedi (beer nerds and geeks) use it for good whilst the Sith (beer snobs) use it for evil. A passion for beer is a powerful thing and when one makes the decision to start down the road of beer geekdom, one must make a considerable effort not to stray to the dark side.

The aim of this blog is to provide some insight into my misadventures in beer. I will try my damndest to make an honest effort at promoting the craft beer community and my homebrewing brethren all the while staving off the dark side. After all, beer means many things to many people, but there is perhaps no greater facet to the beer experience than sitting down with some good folks for a great pint and simply having a good time. So let’s try to have fun with this, ok?