Best Beer Ever!

What did you get for Christmas?

I got beer.

Jealous yet?

You may not think beer to be as cool and sexy as say, an ereader tablet (I got one of those, too), or the one pound Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup (yup).  And you might think beer might not be the best gift for a DIY homebrewer, but you’d be totally wrong.  I love beer, and I’m always on the lookout for new beer styles and better beers.

And this year, I might have gotten the Best Beer Ever.

Aren’t you just dying to know?

It’s not what you think.  It all depends on individual taste.  My Best Beer Ever is probably not your Best Beer Ever.  And it has almost nothing to do with the beer itself.

Sometimes, the Best Beer Ever is a Bud Light, served in a plastic cup, alongside a hotdog with extra mustard, while sitting in the bleachers of Fenway Park.  Or it could be a bottle of Rheingold’s served in a Romanian steakhouse in NYC during one of my best friend’s bachelor party.  Sometimes, it’s the beer you made from scratch, with your own two hands, idiot grin on your face as you add bacon and coffe to the brew.  (More on that later.)

In other words, the very Best Beer Ever is not just a beer, it’s also a situation, a setting, a slice of time, in which beer and happiness meld together, forming a kind of perfection.

This Christmas, I got to spend the day with my family, watching my daughter open presents, helping my wife cook a ham dinner, eating and drinking, with some of the Best Beer Ever (a spiced winter ale, by the way, and it was fantastic).  And now, with my brother-in-law in town for just one more night, I’m planning on splitting a geuze lambic with him before he leaves.

I have a feeling it might be the Best Beer Ever.

On a slightly different note, even the Best Beer Ever might not be the best present I got this year.  My personal fav might just be a bottle of floor cleaner.  It's called "Dave," is eco-friendly, and has the silohette of a man holding a child on the bottle.  Check it out:

Best Floor Cleaner Ever.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Princess Cake Construction Company, Inc.

Christmas is right around the corner (lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce, like a jungle cat), and there’s so much left to do.  Tree decorating, cookie baking, present wrapping (ahem, present shopping).

But no time for that now, I have a birthday cake to construct!

Yep, I said construct, not bake, because when you have a birthday for a princess, you need a castle.  It’s a rule, or possibly a law of nature.

I started off some days earlier, with two boxes of cake mix (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, but it saves so much time, and I got to hand it to Betty Crocker, she makes a tasty cake), and two boxes of pudding mix.  You should always mix pudding into your cake batter.  It makes all the difference.  I baked the layers of cake (three of them, two large, one small), let them cool, then moved them into the freezer.  After a brief digression to make a test batch of chocolate stout beer cupcakes, I let the cake layers freeze hard while I went out and bought ice cream cones.

On party day, I took the cake layers out of the freezer, and whipped up the frosting, pink, of course.  I frosted the top of the two larger layers and stacked the layers on top of each other, putting the small layer on top.

Next, I carved out circles at each corner and one in the middle, fitting an ice cream cup into each hole.  Then, I frosted the rest of the cake.  I put the ice cream cones upside on top of the ice cream cups, using a small amount of frosting as glue to hold the cones in place.

Finally, I put on the finishing touches.  I put a border of frosting around the bottom and around the top layer, around each cone (covering up irregularities on the holes I cut in the cake), and a drop of frosting on top of each cone.  Then, I made a batch of blue frosting to lay down around the castle, making a moat.  My wife and daughter helped by adding candy and mini-marshmallow touches all around the cake.  The result: magnificient!

I’m also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Now, some of you might have noticed me mention something about chocolate stout beer cupcakes.  This is a recipe I’ve adapted from the Coca-Cola chocolate cake recipe which can be found here.  I used Young’s Chocolate Stout (and jotted down a chocolate stout recipe to make myself at some point).  I mixed up a chocolate stout frosting to go on top.  The results were quite yummy, with a strong taste of the component beer.  I’m jiggering the recipe a little to make it a little richer, but the stout frosting is simply fantastic.  Want to try it at home?  Here’s the recipe:

2 cups sugar

2 cups flour

½ cup butter

½ cup vegetable oil

3 tablespoons cocoa

8 oz. chocolate stout

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ buttermilk

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

½ cup chocolate pudding

Mix together, pour into cake pans or cupcake holders, bake at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes.

For the frosting, mix together with an electric blender:

½ cup butter

3 cups confectioner sugar

3 tablespoons chocolate stout

3 oz. melted baking chocolate

Was There Beer at the First Thanksgiving?

Myths pervade our history.  The signing of the Declaration of Independence.  George Washington and the cherry tree.   The First Thanksgiving.

We all know the story.  Brave pilgrims cross the ocean to find a place to practice their religion without persecution, endure a harsh winter, befriend the local Native Americans, who teach them to work the land, hunt the local animals, and to say thanks, they all have a big turkey dinner.  The end.

"Havest thou any beer nuts?"

History is rarely so simple.

And yet, in this case, it almost is.  Sure, it wasn’t exactly a turkey dinner, although wild turkey was served, and “The End” fails to take into account the lingering distrust that grew with later generations which led to arrogance and violence on both sides, culminating in King Phillip’s War, but that’s still more or less what happened.

This past week, I stopped by our local library to pick up some books to read to my daughter about Thanksgiving, to get her in the spirit, so to speak.  I was a little late, and there were only a half dozen books left, but I made do with what remained.  Along with an enthusiastically illustrated version of “Over the River,” that we sang to together over and over again, and a picture book about Abraham Lincoln declaring Thanksgiving a national holiday (sorry, did I mention I’m a history geek?), I picked up a book about time-traveling twins visiting the First Thanksgiving (Thanksgiving on Plymouth Plantation by Diane Stanley).  And about halfway through, one pilgrim says to one of the twins, “It’s a pity we have no beer for you.”   Yes, quite by accident, I found the only children’s book on Thankgiving to talk about beer.

This isn’t that surprising, really.  Not only was beer important to life in England in the 1600s, it is also the real reason we celebrate Thanksgiving at all.

Beer was of vital importance to the English.  European city-dwellers did not know anything about microbes or bacteria, but they did know that polluted river water made them sick, but turning the water into beer somehow made it okay.  And since beer also contained residual carbohydrates from the barley malt, and vitamins from the yeast, it was downright healthy.

The English Separatists (those people we now call Pilgrims) boarded the Mayflower in 1620 with a charter to start in colony a the northern reaches of Virginia Colony, specifically a site near the mouth of the Hudson River.  But the wind and current were against them, and the ship traveled a little further north than originally intended.  They made landfall along the outer banks on Cape Cod, and quickly realized their error.  They attempted to sail south of Cape Cod, but a storm and poorly charted shoals forced them to turn back and seek shelter in what is now Provincetown Harbor.  Now, they had a choice: continue on to their original site, or set up an unchartered colony somewhere along the New England coast.

How they arrived at their decision is described by William Bradford in Of Plimouth Plantation: “[W]e came to this resolution—to go presently ashore…for we could not now take much time for further consideration, our victual being much spent, especially our beer.” 

The rest is history.  The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, near a big rock, endured a terrible winter, met first Samoset, then Massasoit and Squanto, learned how to work the land, and by the following autumn, had a harvest big enough to call for three days of feasting.

Was beer served at the First Thanksgiving?  Probably not.  Or at least, not much.  Though the harvest was plentiful enough to keep them from starving, food remained a problem in Plymouth for years to come.  Without a food surplus, with starvation on everyone’s mind, and with the grudging acceptance that the water was safe to drink, I doubt anyone brewed much beer the first year.  But by the following year’s harvest, I guarantee some industrious homebrewing pilgrim was making beer out of barley, or maybe corn.  But for sure, our story of the Pilgrims and the First Thanksgiving owes its existence to the very circumstance that usually spells the end of college frat parties.

(Let me be very clear: things are very different now than in 1621.  Today, we have things like water filters, antibiotics, the germ theory of disease, microscopes, science.  We have a bountiful supply of fresh water, and access to many other wholesome, non-alcoholic drinks.  Under no circumstances, not even for the sake of historical accuracy, should anyone give their young child beer for Thanksgiving!)



I'm a little behind on my holidays.



So let us give thanks for those Pilgrims (homebrewers, one and all), and give thanks that they ran out of beer when they did.  Let us give thanks for those Native Americans who helped them survive, teaching us how two different people can live together in peace (even if their own children, and most subsequent generations ignored that particular lesson), and let us most of all give thanks for this holiday, for spending time with the ones we love, and for eating lots of turkey.  With, or without, beer.  Happy Thankgiving!

A Short Guide to Beer



It usually happens like this: a conversation turns to a subject I happen to enjoy, beer.  The other people in said conversation say something along the lines of either a) “I don’t like beer,” or b) “I only like microbrews from strange and exotic locations that make less than a hundred gallons a year.”



For a judge, that is
one bad-ass mustache!

I can’t help but think that someone in this conversation is missing the point.  And I don't think it's me.  The other night at dinner a friend of mine commented, “I never liked beer before I met you. Then, I tried some Belgian beers, and I now I realize I just don’t like crappy beer.”

Exactly.  Beer can run the spectrum from crappy to great, like any other beverage in the world. 

In the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes,
"Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about — you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer."  But I can try to convince you
that maybe, just maybe, you haven't given beer a fair shake, and maybe help you identify different styles of beer that you will like.

And despite the microbrew revolution which has created a fair number of great beers and raised the bar for beer quality around the world, the sheer production volume or geographic location of a brewery is not in absolute indicator of quality.  The only guides to what is good and what is not are your own senses.

So how do you make sense of beer, and find that delicious rose among the zymological thorns?

Why don’t we start with the understanding that beer is not a one-dimensional drink.  Rather, it’s two dimensional.  It can be neatly divided into either ale or lager, the difference lying in the yeast and (to a lesser but related extent) the fermentation temperature.  Ale yeast, which is essentially the same species as bread yeast, ferments ideally under warm temperatures, around 60-70 degrees Fahrenheit.  Lager yeast is a close relative that was discovered in northern Europe where brewers stored their beer in cold caves, and which can continue to ferment at temperatures that would cause ale yeast to go dormant, close to freezing.  Each kind of yeast lends a particular flavor to the beer, from the crisp, clean aftertaste of lager to the subtle fruitiness of ales, but for the most part, you’re either drinking ale or lager.  Figure out which one you prefer, and go from there.

Those of you who like nice, neat answers to problems should stop reading now and go have a beer.  The story hereafter gets very, very complicated. 



The primary difference from between ales and lager is the species of yeast
and the ideal fermentation temperature.



Within each category, there are nearly infinite permutations, from pales ales to stouts, from pilsner to schwartzbier, based on the ingredients and techniques used to brew.  And each style of beer can also boast dozens of variations, some sublime, some much less so, some down-right crappy.

To help make some sense of this, it might help to look at what beer is really made of.  Besides yeast, all beer is made from some kind of malted grain and almost all use hops for bitterness.  Oh yeah, and water.  Simple, right?  Not so fast.  The grains being used can be barley, wheat, corn, rye, and more, each adding a unique flavor to the brew.  Hops come in close to a hundred different varieties, each with its own characteristics.  Four simple ingredients can lead to tremendous variation of styles.

So, for instance, India Pale Ale, porter, and stout are all ales, all made from the same basic combination of ingredients, but it’s the proportions that make the difference.  More malt leads to darker color and stronger taste, and more hops lead to higher bitterness, and sometimes the two can be strong but balanced, like in the best varieties of stout (which generally get their dark color from malt that has been roasted to a darker color), while less malt and more hops lead to the powerful hoppiness of the IPA. 

Likewise with the range of lagers, where pale malts result in pale lagers, often with a strong hop bitterness like in the case of pilsner, and darker, stronger malts resulting in doppelbocks and schwatrzbiers.  There are some outliers, like the wheat-based witbier and weissbier, some of which traditionally leave out hops in favor of orange peel and coriander.  And, it should be noted, while darker beers do generally have a stronger taste than lighter colored beers, color is a poor indicator of overall strength.  Certain Belgian styles, for example, use pale malt and candy sugar to produce pale, malty beers that taste light but pack a strong alcoholic wallop!  

And then some people do really crazy stuff to make their beer unique, like use smoked malt, or add extra hops after fermentation, or throw in a slab of bacon.  You name it, somebody's tried it.  Sometimes to good effect, sometimes less so.

And then there is the North American pale lager, the beer most non-beer drinkers think of when they hear the word, "beer."  Many homebrewers turn up their noses at such beers, believing beers with names like Pabst, Schlitz, and Busch are the bottom of the quality barrel and not worth their consideration, when in reality these breweries are named for the pioneers of lager brewing in America.  These nineteenth century brewers and their pale creations changed the way Americans and, eventually, the rest of the world thought about beer, as important to the history of beer as Fritz Maytag and his tiny microbrewery in San Francisco.

I could go on for another thousand or so pages, but that’s basically it.  These are just the most broad guidelines of what makes a beer one way and not another.  What to do from here?  How do you take this admittedly oversimplified breakdown of beer styles and find the ones you really like?

Keep it simple.

Start drinking beer.  Grab as many different styles as you can, and try them.  Every one of them has something important to say, something to contribute to our larger understanding of beer history, culture, biology, chemistry, ethnogeography, and creativity; what a beer anthropologist might call the Great Six Pack of Life.  Each style is going to tell you something special and unique about how and why the style was first brewed and continues to be brewed today.

Be prepared to take some time.  I’ve been at this for almost four years, and I’m still trying new styles.  (I’m about to try a batch of Rye-P-A; I’ll let you know how it turns out.)

As you do, you will find many tasty beers, and just as many that you do not care for at all.  And a few that are downright crappy.

And when you find that great beer, enjoy it.  But remember this: that great beer has some less handsome, less interesting, dumber cousins.  They’re still family.  They deserve a little respect.

I’ll drink to that.

Trick-Or-Treat! Now, Hand Over the Candy

Mother Nature cancels Halloween and keeps us from our trick-or-treating rounds?

Not on my watch!

After our town cancelled Halloween in the wake of the terrific snow storm and power outages, we had to wonder if we’d get to beg for candy at all this year.  But since going door-to-door asking for food and threatening reprisals is an important life-skill, we found a way to make it happen.

I might have mentioned before that my daughter’s idea for a costume this year is a rainbow.  But I do not think I mentioned that she had ideas for my own costume and my wife’s too.  Being a rainbow, she decided my wife had to be the sun.  And me?  Why, I’m a little black raincloud, of course.

And what kind of self-respecting homebrewer and general DIYer would I be if I didn’t make my own Halloween costume?

I didn’t help with the rainbow, because that required sewing and I’m not the best in the house when it comes to needle and thread, but when it comes to metal wire and hot glue guns, I’m all over that!  If you want to ever make your own little black raincloud costume, I recommend getting

Game on!

good quality fabric, something fleecy, or with some kind of visible texture to it.  Fold it in half and cut a cloud shape out of it, giving you two identical pieces of cloud.  Get some kind of bendable wire and bend it to match the outline of the cloud pieces, and glue the wire to one piece of cloth.  Glue the other piece over it, with a small amount of filling to puff the cloud out a little.  Use some piece of doweling or metal wire across the back to help keep the shape, then just attach a piece of heavy-duty elastic band to go around your neck.  As a finishing touch, I cut small pieces of ribbonand glued them to the bottom to simulate falling rain.

Wouldn't you like to know what house was giving out the
treats on the right?

All done.  Now, give me candy!

I know this has nothing to do with beer, but it has a lot to do with being a dad.  And rest assured, after trick-or-treating was done, and our exhausted daughter was tucked into bed, I kicked back with a bottle of homebrew and enjoy the rest of Not-Halloween.

Double, Double Toil and Trouble

Or maybe that should be, “Doppel, Dupel, Porter, and Tripel.”

Happy Halloween!

My Halloween was spent indoors, keeping the cold at bay with spaghetti and meatballs, a bottle of Belgian abby ale, and some good friends (since they brought the beer).   A snow storm on Saturday knocked out power throughout the state and while we are fortunate to have power now, it’ll be awhile before everyone gets the lights back on.  Which is why I’m posting about Halloween on November 1^st.

 

The town here even cancelled trick-or-treating, which seemed a shame, but was probably the right thing to do.  Still, it’s hard to think of it as Halloween without trick-or-treaters asking for candy and with snow covering the ground.

Not counting this year, I love Halloween.  I truly do.  I have since I was a kid.  I love the candy, the dressing up, the goofiness of it all.  And I love the spooky stuff, ghost, graveyards, witches (no, not real witches, I know some real witches and some of them are really awesome people), and things going bump in the night.  I got away from the kiddy aspects of Halloween as I got older, not dressing up for quite a few years, not trick-or-treating since high school (yeah, I said high school), but never let go of my overall love of all things Halloween. 

And then, I became a dad, and I could go back to loving every single thing about Halloween.  Did we go trick-or-treating with our daughter when she wasn’t even old enough for solid food?  You know we did!  Now, she’s older, choosing her own costume (rainbow, this year), and I have to be more careful about sniping a few of her candy bars, but I still get caught up in the excitement.   The hardest part these days is in reconciling her love of the lighter parts of the holiday (see, rainbow costume) and my love of the spooky stuff.  She’s too young for the Exorcist, or even The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  But the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is just about right, I guess, since she has taken to calling me, “Blockhead.”  As in, me asking, “What do you want for dinner?” followed by, “Dad, you’re a blockhead.”

Suddenly seemed like we were on the same wavelength.

But Mother Nature has a way of messing with things, and this year, she set her vengeful ire on our Halloween.  Saturday night the snow blew in, the trees came down, the lights went out, and Halloween went away, or at least postponed for sometime later when it’s, you know, not actually Halloween.  What’s a guy to do, in a situation like this?  Brew a pumpkin beer, of course.

I tend to stay away from flavored brews, preferring my beer to taste like, well, beer.  And I’ve had bad luck before brewing with fresh fruit.  I’ve made blueberry ales and Belgian lambic-style peach ale, but have had to resort to concentrated flavorings and fruit-flavored liqueurs.  These have given me much more control over how much flavor I’m adding.  The problem with fresh fruit is in adding enough to create the desired flavor.  To make the problem a little more complicated, pumpkin is a pretty bland flavor on its own.  But the beer history nerd in me knows that pumpkins enjoy a special place in beer history, being full of delicious fermentable sugars.  Early American colonists made pumpkin beer when malt was both rare and expensive.  Pumpkin’s bland flavor made it a logical choice.  Now, it was my turn to try it.

(Quick unrelated aside.  I just discovered that my auto-correct turns lambic into limbic.  I find this tremendously entertaining, especially when I consider the affect of lambic on the limbic system!  Just me?  Ok, nevermind.)

Anyway, the pumpkin beer (recipe below) was fun to make, if a little challenging.  Pumpkin is pretty squishy when cooked, which made a little bit of a mess, and the jack-o’-lanterns kept staring at me as a cooked their friends like I was some kind of monster.  In the end, the pumpkin side of it was a little weak, but the brown ale side was quite tasty.  Next time around, I’ll increase the pumpkin and skip the second hop addition.

Either way, someday soon I hope to be able to sip one after a long-overdue night of trick-or-treating.  I might even bring my daughter along. 

And now, I have just the thing to serve with my Thanksgiving turkey.

Next up: Turkey beer!

Just kidding.

Or am I?

-----------------------------------------------------------

Daddy Blockhead’s Great Pumpkin (Charlie) Brown Ale:

-          8 lbs of sugar pumpkin, scooped out, cut in quarters, and roasted.

-          3 lbs pale 2-row malt

-          3 lbs amber dry malt extract

-          1 lb crystal malt

-          ½ lb roasted barley

-          ¼ lb black patent malt

-          1 oz. cascade hops (5% alpha)

-          ½ oz. fresh-grated nutmeg

-          1 cinnamon stick

-          Ale yeast

Heat 2 gallons of water to 120 degrees, mash in the pale malt, crystal malt, black patent malt and the roasted pumpkin, and mash at 155 degrees for 1 hour.  Sparge with a gallon of hot water, collect wort and bring to a boil.  Add DME, and boil for 1 hour.  Add ½ oz hops at 30 minutes, and ½ oz and 45 minutes.  Cool wort, transfer to primary fermenter and pitch yeast.  Let it sit in the primary for 3 days, rack to secondary and add cinnamon and nutmeg.  Keep it in the secondary for 4-7 days, then bottle and allow it to condition for another week.  Target O.G. 1.045, ABV 4%

Daddy Makes Beer

It’s all my daughter’s fault.  She drives me to homebrew.

Before she was born, I’d never made a single beer, barely knew anything about beer, and really didn’t think I was missing much.  Looking back now on my pre-homebrewing days, I often wonder why I never got into the hobby more.  I think the answer lies in my feelings about beer at the time.  I wasn’t a big fan of what I now know is pale American lager, and I was only barely aware of other beers.  Now whiskey, that was a different story.  I could talk to you forever about whiskey (and still can)!  In fact, it was during one particularly brilliant brain-storm that I came up with the idea of trying to make my own whiskey.  I quick scan of the internet turned up the depressing fact that making whiskey has the downside of being a federal crime.

But, it turned out, whiskey and beer were very similar creatures, and making beer was both easy and legal.  I decided it might be worth a shot.  And somehow, I managed to convince my wife, who was nine months pregnant at the time, that homebrewing was a good idea.  How did I manage such a thing?  My powers of persuasion are legendary.  Did I mention I have the greatest, most understanding wife in the world?

And so it was that on Christmas day, just one week after my daughter was born, my wife gave me my first homebrew kit, and two books about beer.  The following week, with my daughter napping nearby, I brewed my very first batch.  It was an IPA, and it was terrible. 

I was hooked.



Hey Daddy, what are you doing down here?



That first year, I made a brown ale, a blueberry ale, a witbier, and a spiced ale, and by the end of the year, even my daughter was getting in on the act.  I don’t blame her.  She was crawling around, and wanted to know why Dad was sitting on the floor with all those brown glass things.  And the dad in me just wanted to teach her all about beer, or about as much as an eight month old is prepared to learn.



 Since then, my darling daughter has been featured on more than one of my beer labels, and I named a batch of homemade wine after her.

How do I reconcile my parenting credentials with my loving of brewing and imbibing adult beverages?  Do I ever feel guilty about exposing my young, impressionable child to the existence of such things as beer and wine?  Or do I hide what I do for when she is not around?

Ask my daughter, “What does Daddy make?”  and she will answer: “Beer!”



My little wort chiller, getting her old man some ice.  In princess dress, of course



And yes, sometimes she still helps.  Just not with the hot parts.  Safety first.

I have helped raise a daughter and made over a hundred gallons of beer over the past nearly four years.  So far as I know, my daughter has not turned into a raging alcoholic, or been corrupted by her exposure to the existence of things that grown-ups drink.  I have never accidentally given her the wrong kind of bottle, and I have never tucked my beers in and kissed them goodnight (well, almost never). 

I treasure the time I have with my daughter, watching her grow up and learn about the world around her.  I have tried teaching her about the world, tried to make her love books and reading as much as I do, and tried to give her a safe, happy home to grown up in.  And, at the same time, I treasure my brewing times.  Brewing has become a kind of working meditation.  Brewing is a fairly slow process, whether I’m slowly stirring the mash, methodically cleaning and sanitizing ever piece of equipment, or just waiting while the yeast do their job, it takes anywhere from two weeks to a month or more just to make a batch of beer.  It forces me to slow down, to think differently, and when my daughter is bouncing off the walls with enough renewable energy to permanently replace fossil fuels, homebrewing helps me shift gears, to a place where things don’t move so fast, don’t need to go to soccer practice right after school and before a pajama storytime at the library.  Beer helps remind me of the pace of life, and that I sometimes need to slow down to make sure I’m enjoying every moment.  I can’t slow down how fast my daughter is growing anymore than I can speed up the time to make a good marzen lager.  But I can slow myself down sometimes and take the time to enjoy my family, and enjoy a good beer.

So like I said, I blame my daughter.  She drives me to homebrew.

I love all my children...