Been a while Weebles! Good to be back!

So I brewed up a batch of honey blonde yesterday, but more on that later. Which reminded me that now we're back in Canada and not gallivanting around Vietnam I can start writing again. In that time a fair amount of new stuff transpired and I'll get it down as best as I can recall from my hazy memory banks. 

Now that we're back on home soil, and the new year has officially settled from holiday partyness into get-the-hell-back-to-work-ness, settling on days for climbing, running, gym workouts, swimming etc... along with brew days all in there is packing the calendar fast. 

Sundays are brew days. End of story. Brewing, bottling, transferring. Something to further my understanding of the craft. I now have a few recently acquired recipe books like the Brooklyn Brew Shop's and Calagione's Extreme Brewing 1st ed. (have the 2nd ed on my kobo app!). Add that to the Water, Yeast, Hops book series, a really really really old beer and wine book I got in my 20's and never read thoroughly enough, and some old brewing books of my dads he's going to pass along to me since he hasn't made his own beer or wine in a couple decades now. 

Now beer updates. Important stuff etc. 

  1. The jalapeno lager is a crushing success. It rocks. Initially the first taste was early in the aging, first taste was sharp almost vodka-like overtones and eventually the lager came through. Lastly the jalapeno would creep in with the heat, an accumulator, it built up as you drink it. Tried another bottle not long ago, and it had mellowed into a beautiful brew. It's damn refreshing and delicious. Honestly happily surprised as making a jalapeno beer was never really on my radar and glad Dude was hell bent on trying it. We have a few changes we want to make but honestly I wouldn't cry about keeping the recipe as-is as a baseline, re-brewing it as a comparison for the next batch which will have some minor changes to the recipe and seeing how it fares. 
  2. The chocolate porter ain't bad but room for improvement. Dude and I brewed this up at his place so I could get a brew day in, and let it bubble while away. He stored and bottled it for me in his basement (and I am forever jealous of not having a basement). Now the beer itself was decent, I'd personally like it a bit sweeter, tastes more bitter than I'd hoped and the body is a bit thin even after letting it mellow. Think I need to do a few things: A) boil a bit harder, not enough evaporation to condense the beer in the boil. When we transferred to the carboy it filled right up into the neck, which has never happened to me before.  B) add honey/candy sugar/something.... I want more chocolate and less bitter, my sweet tooth will not be stopped. 
  3. I got a new phone. A phone that does not suck. After suffering with a sluggish, tedious, agonizingly slow HTC for the last year or so my SO gave me a Samsung S4 for xmas. It's beast. So I may actually be able to start posting pictures to here soon, using the app, and a phone that doesn't suck donkey balls. it's great! Another bonus is that it has a massive screen, so putting in text is hopefully going to be easier now. 
  4. So the honey blond: Had some crazy tunes cranked from my iPod, and later in the boil, in between hoppings, tossed some youtube onto my TV via the newly acquired Chromecast (neat little thingamajig by the way), have some Battlefield Friends episodes going for old times sake. Added a full cup of a wonderful local honey to the boil with about 10 minutes left, very curious to see how that plays out in the final mix. Also planning on dry hopping, adding about 8 pellets of a currently unknown hop type when I go to swap the blowoff tube for the airlock in a couple days. Now those hops are the "2 minutes left" addition hops to the Amber ale batch I lost in the Raw Chicken Incident. I leave the bag in when I drink my tea no matter how bitter it ends up.I leave the bag in when I drink my tea no matter how bitter it ends up. of yore. At some point I should ask the folks at The Brewer's Market what kind of hops those are. Not sure if a meagre 8 pellets will do anything at all, but we'll see it is only a gallon. This will also be the first batch I've brewed with the intention of swapping to a secondary which I'm still not 100% decided on yet. A secondary is supposed to make for a clearer beer. I haven't done that yet as I'm by habit someone who likes to make everything soak, steep, marinade, etc. so having all that trub at the bottom is a good thing in my mind. Transferring to a secondary gets most of that gunk out, and also means less likely to end up in the bottle later. We'll see what happens if I do. I may not at all as I want to brew again very soon and only have two carboys and no fermenting bucket. I leave the bag in when I drink my tea. 

Now we did something in Asia i never thought I'd do. Go without hoppy beers for nearly a month. Chang and LEO in Bangkok, 333, Siagon's various varieties, Huda, so many good beers in Vietnam, Angkor in Siem Reap. So many! All of them the lighter not hoppy, refreshing on a hot ass day lager, pilsner types I usually avoid here since we have an insane selection to choose from. Also learned how to say cheers in Vietnamese which led to many good times when the locals realized what we were doing. 

It's fun as hell, you count to three then say cheers. Simple stuff but very satisfying. I even bought the t-shirt. Bright green. It's awesome. 

Mot (1, pron: Moe)
Hai (2, like Japanese Hai, pron: Hi!, just not saying hello or yes)
Ba (3, ba ba black sheep kinda ba)
Dzo! (Cheers! pron: Yo! in most of the country, but some places in the north like Hai Phong they pronounced it Zo!)

Mot Hai Ba Dzo! 
Next time you go for Pho (pron: Pha) use it at the table and see what the staff say with their eyebrows :p

Chang and 333 (BaBaBa) were by and far my favourites. With Saigon Special coming up a close third. I can and did drink 333 breakfast lunch and dinner. When we finished a crazy 5 hour bike ride in the mountains near Da Lat, the guides said "It's Ba Ba Ba Time!!" and promptly took us to a place for beers. 

Who are we to disagree? :-)
That be a Rhyme & Reason ale from Collective Arts brewing.  Damn fine.
 
Now I finally bottled the Honey porter last night. And once again reminded myself that I don't necessarily hate bottling, actually quite enjoy it. But bottling from a pot after mixing in the priming sugar/honey is not great. The auto-siphon is at a bad angle, damn near popped out of the pot, the curl of the tube would knock over an empty bottle if I let it go for a split second, then of course trub I picked up from the carboy was hard to filter out. So I'll end up with sediment riddled bottles like the brown ale (yeasty as hell). 

So I've figured two things:
1) I will start doing the secondary transfer like my bud of the jalapeno lager fame has been doing
2) I will bottle straight from the carboy, which allows the auto-siphon to be mounted, stay upright and make it a far simpler less potentially messy process. 

All in all the porter smelled delicious but I didn't try a sip. Yield was just shy of 9 bottles. Half a bottle at the end and that was with pouring everything, including the trubby bottom into the last bottle. That one will taste pretty funky I bet. 
 
Jalapeno lager
Batch size: 1 gallon
The kit: The Brewers Market Great Lakes Lager
The Thang: 1 jalapeno, sliced in half, soaked in vodka to remove impurities

Damn the vodka smelled good, if I liked Caesars I would have made a Caesar with that. 

Brewed up a lager with a friend after helping put some furniture together. Incredibly tired from no sleep and running on coffee, I'd say I more assisted with chatter than in the brewing itself. Wasn't a whole lot to do but catch up with a friend I haven't hung with in a long time. 

Also had one mean ass awesome smoked burger. With.... jalapenos. yum. 
 
Yesterday was one hell of a long day. Aching, tired, and spent. The night before I placed the dubbel and brown ale batches in the fridge, and after getting home from driving all day cracked open the brown ale. This was one of the singular forces keeping my eyes open on those boring long stretches of road in the rain even when you can't see much.... sooner I get back the sooner I can crack open a beer. 

Verdict: Tolerable to decent, maybe the sock puppet wasn't half bad afterall.  

It's okay, surprised by the "pssst" bottle opening sound, honestly was thinking the capper didn't do it's job on the different style bottles Founders uses and was going to be treated to 10 bottles of oxidized stale swill. But that little gasp made me smile. The beer itself turned out to have better body and flavour than I was expecting too. Little tart, but dark, smells nice, and goes down easy enough when blowing shit up on the Xbox before finally succumbing to the drift of snoozdom, actually cracked open a second one even. It reminded me actually as being very close to Mr. Beer's bottle brew Brown Ale, which ain't all that bad. 

Now I still have to work on my bottling. Don't think I've made a batch yet that didn't have sediment, and this one by far had the most. Doesn't phase me much but still, not a clean presentation. 

Still have to crack open a dubbel, but as I only have five 650ml bottles, will wait on it for a proper moment with others to taste test. 

Now before all that, halfway through driving for an eternity yesterday and landing at the Buffalo airport, my loving partner in crime and I saddled up to the little bar there with friendly wait staff and tried a couple bottles of "Rusty Chain" Amber Ale from Flying Bison Brewery, who are local to Buffalo and Utica. This being the only beer there I hadn't had before, and the only beer there that wasn't your garden variety sports bar mass-produced piss in a bucket, we decided to give it a go. 

It wasn't bad, little light on the body (I say that about almost every beer, I like my brews to unfairly feel just shy of melted butter on the way down so truly, it's not bad at all), refreshing flavour, nice to no aftertaste, and we went for round two.Another thing that struck us once again was the label, both of us being avid cyclists, the chain and cog on their label was a familiar bit of niceness. I'd have gone for round three if I didn't have a two hour highway drive ahead of me still and trying to cross the border to boot. 

Over the second helping we started wondering out loud about future labels that may go on my bottles. I've always been a minimalist, desiring a more tasteful approach without the glam. I love Flying Monkeys out of Barrie, their Smashbomb IPA is still one of my favourites and my all time favourite of their under-the-cap sayings was simply: "Hi!". But their labels are so bright and tacky I think I'll leave that level of tie dyed artistry to them. Though have to admit, it certainly draws the eyes in the store away from other beers and there is an amazing amount of creativity and positive energy in every one of those designs. It's a blast, but not my style. 

One that recently struck me both in labeling and taste was Collective Arts Brewing. I'd only just seen their name for the first time earlier in the week walking by the Gladstone Hotel when it was making a delivery. A tiny black minivan with their tasteful circular label on it. It was simple, tasteful and still drew the eye. That weekend for a Halloween dancemadnessdrinkathon with friends at a little bar just off Bloor, we found their "Rhyme & Reason" IPA. 

So after a warmup dance, I dove into their IPA, and found it quite amazingly different, it had a unique taste I couldn't quite put my tonguebrain on. I'm not good enough to guess the hops they used, but it was fresh, spicy, and herbal. It tasted unlike any IPA I'd had before, and after a few more bottles, would place it not too far behind Muskoka's Mad Tom as something I truly enjoy. Mad Tom being second only to Ithaca's Flower Power in my mind for sheer awesomeness. Any beer I can drink a gallon of in a day and still love, is damn okay in my books. Rhyme & Reason may very soon join that very short list. 

Now where this gushing leads us is back to their labels. Every single one was different. I don't know the story behind the brewery (yet!), but between the name and the variety of art on the labels I'd venture it's a beer loving crowd of artists using one art to share and advertise another. I'd say it is successful. We spent as much time admiring the bottles as drinking from them. 

Now I'm truly understanding just how high the bar is set on craft/micro brewing in general, and I've only just begun. Those already involved, are hopefully only going to get better. How to differentiate ourselves, and make a name, will be truly challenging. 

This will take a bit more thought and practice and brewing and drinking and talking and drinking and drinking. We'll see where the remaining brain cells go with this in the future. 


In the meantime I still have to mark my bottle caps with a sharpie. 

Sláinte
 
Batch No. 4: Toronto Brewing Co.'s Honey Porter

Now TOBC's kits (the two I've purchased anyhow) include a muslin steeping bag (henceforth known as the "Sock Puppet" for holding the grains in the water like a giant tea sock. I used this for the Brown Ale and decided two and a half things noted in that post:

1) it made cleanup really really easy. 
2a) was never fully confident I got everything out of the grains I could.
2b) it made the mash really really boring. 

So I said bugger that this time around. Recipe called for 7 quarts (1.75 gallons) of water, so I did a 3/4 split for mash and sparge. Which went smooth and was a lot more fun than teabagging my stock pot with the sock puppet. 

When I did the brown ale, the resulting wort was not as dark as I'd imagined it should be. Though this is all conjecture never having done a brown ale before but still.... it looked and smelled "weak". 

The honey ale: No such conniptions. It was dark, very very dark, ran off the stirring spoon like warm syrup, and honest to goodness smells between the brewing and the slow cooker full of my SO's chili/stew/beef cilantro mix my senses were going haywire. 

During the mash though the usual problem of impatience and not entirely understanding the stove top still gave me the problem of temp control. The mash was running about 10-20F too hot for most and by the time I got the temp down to 152-ish it was time to jack it right back up again for 10 minutes at 170 again. 

Now all in all though hoping this will be a positive impact. Same thing happened with the IPA and it turned out better than expected. Fingers crossed. Also ended up filling the carboy to the last drop right the gallon line, no extra water needed which was a nice end to it. 

This recipe also does not call for a blow off tube but goes straight for the bubbler. Crossing the fingers a lot on this one, here's to hoping I don't come home to a porter flood this evening. The cats would just love that I'm sure. 

Maybe I can use the sock puppet as a cat toy. 
 
Truer words have never been spoken, at least in the last week. This is the motto and mantra of my cousin's brewing group. A phrase I have the utmost respect for. Even when playing Risk. But more on that later. 

Now last Friday I visited a cousin who've been brewing his own beer with friends for a few years now. This was my first foray into teamwork and large batch brewing. They were firing up two 5 gallon batches. One of a lager they came up with and found successful, and were going to tweak slightly. The second the same recipe but as a true experiment, altering the hops added, and several other factors. 

By the time we even started the water on the stove we were pretty far into the beer we'd brought to drink while brewing. There was some of Kieth's Hops varieties, Lake of Bays Crosswind, and weissbeer. All went down damn fine. 

Now they do it a bit differently. Where I've been doing grain mashes for malt, they've gone with malt extracts which simplifies the process a fair bit. Boil your water, toss in the extract, begin hops and boil schedule. You skip the mash/sparge process, which also kinda removed the fun for me a tiny bit, but we were drinking and telling stories too much for me to care ;-)

The space involved was considerable, both kitchen and laundry room were co-opted for it. Two large pots boiled both batches almost simultaneously. Now the pots were both 10-12 quarts no different than my own, at first I wondered at what point this boil would become the 5 gallons it's supposed to be but then as we poured the wort into the carboy we then added water from the tap until it was at the right amount. Shake that baby up a bit and take a gravity reading (something I haven't done yet, basically checks the sugar density of the brew, which is basically a measure of it's eventual alcohol content). First batch was more or less in a range where they'd expected it to be. 

Now the second on the other hand.... Using almost all the same ingredients except a different type of hops I believe (I'll confirm later), the experimental batch had a much higher gravity reading, leading to some low whistles when the foam settled. High 60's, damn near 70. The yeast will be having some fun with this one. 

Now I haven't played Risk since I was in grade school but the basics are easy: beat the hell out of everyone else until you rule the world. Now I've never been big on(read: terrible at) strategy, Add a long day or work, travel and drinking on top of that and what you have is a confusing giggle fest that was a lot of fun but not very conducive to effective warmongering. 
 
Public Service Announcement: If keeping grain kits in the fridge for freshness, do not put frozen meat on the rack above them to thaw. 

I lost a amber ale kit from The Brewer's Market to chicken blood dripping out of the packaging and into the top of the bag, which was tied closed with twine. 

Am sad, but at least it wasn't the kit for the Chocolate Porter. That would have made me cry. 

Must find a semi-flat but really wide container with a lid. 
 
Batch number 3: Toronto Brewing Co.'s Brown Ale
Yield: 10x 355ml bottles

This was an odd one for me. Instead of a mash and sparge which splits the water up through the process, they included a giant muslin sock to steep the grains in a full 7 quarts off the get-go. This, while making cleanup incredibly easy. Did not give me the confidence the grains are being fully soaked as with a straight porridge style mash. It also, more importantly to me, took some of the fun out of it. 

Getting 7 quarts of water up to temp on a cheap apartment electric stove is not the easiest process as well. Though once there did make it easier to maintain temperature through a combination of mass and the fact I learned to not crank the heat up so fast like I did with batch no. 1. 

Now this one was only a day behind schedule on the bottling having brewed it several days after the dubbel. Now learning lessons again, this time I chose Founders IPA bottles. Slightly shorter and a bit wider in the neck, this may or may not be a problem. I found the capper did not entirely pull down over the bottle due to the wider neck so I'm not 100% confident that the seal is good. I may end up with a buggered batch but at this time it's hard to tell. 

Also, maybe it's the style, sugar amount, yeast type, but there was no call for a blow off tube for a couple days as with the previous two batches. Straight to the bubbler in the top, and thankfully it's fine. No explosions or flooding! I like that part, I enjoy my explosions but prefer them to stay in video games. 
 
Batch number 2: The Brewer's Market Belgian Dubbel
Yield: 5x 650ml bottles

A nice odd batch, cooking went wayyyyyyyy smoother being more familiar with the process. Now due to the untimely death of a close friend who's family is like our own, literally on the day I was supposed to bottle this batch, it sat for an extra week in the primary before finally being bottled. I chose the 650ml bottles for this on purpose and thankfully Cameron's Brewery puts two of my favourites, their Rye Pale Ale and Obsidian Rum Cask Porter, in bottles this size. Which I consider a "proper" serving size. This whole 355ml thing is...quaint.  

When closet time is done, taste test it, see how it's turned out and if appropriate, I'll be passing along a bottle to my sister and her husband who were very close to our fallen comrade, and another to his father and brother. 

Now initially, when it was first put into the primary the instructions said to put in "half" the yeast. Not having a small enough measuring cup handy I had to eyeball it so no idea if I tossed in half, more, or less. 

Figured from the effects I'd tossed in possibly too much due to the fact that the blowoff tube for the first couple days needed some space. For both the IPA and Dubbel I'd used my second carboy as the sanitzer blowoff holder. 

Thank trout I did. 

The dubbel went gyser on me and the sanitizer in the blowoff carboy was as dark as the primary and tube had to be soaked for the better half of a day before I could get it cleaned out from all the gunk. The primary bubbled like a pissed off volcanic crater. If i'd used a smaller bowl or glass to hold it there would have been a moat of dark beer flooding the bottom of my closet. What a waste that would be... 
 
Alright that Weebly App for iOS is nice, but when it crashes.... it crashes hard.

Anyhow I digress. 

First batch ever! (yay!) 
Brooklyn Brew Shops Everyday IPA recipe kit 
Yield: 9 x 355ml bottles
Code Name: Jupiter's Arse
Result: quite palatable, better than expected, room for improvement

Now.... one of the challenges in home brewing is always space. As previously mentioned why I already love the concept of 1 Gallon batches. The other: 

Cats. I love them. But they love to be cats. 

Now the most important thing about brewing is the sterilization hands down. Anything stray get in there that doesn't belong you can end up with all manner of unpleasantness. Go figure the moment I had my back turned one of our little furballs (Jupiter be his name) decides it's a great time to take a tour of the table. I catch the little blighter on the table sniffing, nuzzling and rubbing against all my previous sanitized equipment. When he sees me see him... he just plops his butt down on the paper towels and meows at me all proud of himself. Hence the code name of Jupiter's Arse. 

Sanitation round two thus begins. Brewing in an apartment is a two person job. 1 to brew, the other to entertain the kurious kitties away from the equipment.

Now the cook up itself was a lot of fun, high maintenance taking temperatures and by the end I was tired and ready to not be on my feet. But definitely worth it. Found it really hard to keep the temp where it was supposed to be and it ran hot in both mash and boil by anywhere from 10-20 over in both. 

Anyhoo, the eventual end result was a great first try. I chose, fittingly, Muskoka Mad Tom bottles to use for this batch. Good karma I suspect aided my fledgling efforts.