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.
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? :-)
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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