Saturday, February 23, 2013

Makin' Lamic (Part 2)


Constant readers of this blog (both of you) will know that I’m a little obsessed lately with sour beer.

Why?  What’s the appeal of beer that’s been intentionally turned bad?

I don’t know, to be honest.  No the other hand, ask your average homebrewer why he wants to brew something topping off at 100 IBUs.

(IBU, for you non-homebrewers out there, is a standard measure of beer bitterness.  It stands for International Bittering Unit, and it’s calculated by measuring the type and amount of hops in beer, how long the hops are boiled for, the conversion rate of the alpha acids in the hops, and a bunch of other stuff you don’t care about.  Put it this way: more hops=higher IBUs=bitter beer.)

Homebrewers, perhaps because commercial brewers were for a long time reluctant to make bitter brews, love highly hopped beer.  Which explains why there are so many homebrew variations on the IPA, a traditionally bitter type of beer.

I am not a fan.  So instead, I guess in a kind of almost teenage-like rebellion, I went the other way, and embraced the sour brews.  Now, I can’t stop.

About a year ago, I wrote here about my attempt to create a homebrewed lambic.  I said it would have to age for at least a year before I could do anything with it.

Well, the year is pretty much up.

Time to bottle?

Not on your life.  But it is time to sample, and the sample tastes amazing!  Perfect acidic bite, perfect weirdly “off” flavor.  Excellent, but not done yet.

Instead, I brewed ANOTHER batch.  Originally, I was just going to brew a 1 gallon mini batch, but that seemed a terrible waste of yeast and bacteria, so I scaled it up to a full 5 gallons.

After a little more than a week of primary fermentation, producing a suitably horrible-tasting very young lambic, I racked off 1 gallon, which I poured into the aforementioned aging lambic.  Then, I racked the remaining new lambic onto cherry puree, which will eventually result in a sour cherry lambic, known as a kriek.

Now what?

Now, I wait.  Lambics, as I’ve said before, take a lot of patience.

Some months down the road, I will bottle these two batches, and let them age more.

In general, time is the enemy of beer.  That’s one of the great things about homebrewing; the beer is fresh, in a way that beer from almost anywhere else isn’t.  Beer tends to lose flavor as it ages, and the other flavors it develops tend to not be very good, resulting in skunky, stale, or at least very bland beers.

There are some exceptions.

Every time I bottle a batch of beer, I put a couple bottles aside, partly to give me a quick visual record of my brewing, and partly so I can revisit certain beers, if the fancy should strike me.  



And recently, I was struck by just such a fancy, grabbing two beers that were more than 2 years old.  One, a doppelbock, had matured beautifully, and tasted much better than I remembered.  The second, a spiced Christmas ale, did not fare so well.  I drank it, but found the experience wholly unsatisfying.

The stronger the beer (from an alcohol point of view), the better it seems to hold up to aging.  And considering the glorious alchemy that occurs in a whiskey barrel as that harsh liquor ages, that makes perfect sense. However, the specific chemical reactions the go in the bottle (or in the carboy in my case) involve the complex reactions of various chemicals, oxidation rates, temperature, and the whole process is pretty poorly understood.  Poorly understood by me, anyway. But from my experience, the doppelbock, at 8% abv, was a perfect candidate for aging (which makes me regret drinking all the rest within the first month).  Stronger beers, like barleywines and Belgian Trappist ales (both of which I’m planning on brewing this year) are also perfect candidates for long-term aging.

And so are sour beers, regardless of strength.  After all, one of the great dangers of letting beer (especially unfiltered homebrew) sit too long is that it might turn sour.  Sour beers can’t turn sour.  And they can’t lose their hoppy bitterness (you can lose something you don’t have).  The kriek I’m making will probably start to lose its cherry taste, but that’s by design.  The cherry taste is supposed to slip into the background, providing just enough fruit taste to balance the sour tang.

So wait, I hear you say, you’re brewing 10 gallons of sour beer, and are planning 5 gallon batches of two high-alcohol beers that will require extended aging…so what are you going to drink in the meantime?

What do you mean?  That's just two bottles....

It’s a fair question.  But brewing requires patience.  And sometimes this homebrewer even 
demonstrates the necessary level of patience.  But not often.

After all, how will I know when the beer is ready, unless I’m constantly taste-testing?

Yes, it’s a burden, but somehow, I’ll survive.

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Of Wool And Wort


My wife recently celebrated her birthday and immediately took up knitting. 

I really thought I had another 30 years before the mandatory knitting clause in our marriage kicked in.

The truth is, I can’t make fun of knitting.

I mean, I could.  It would be ridiculously easy.  Easier than learning to knit.

But I can’t, because knitting is exactly like homebrewing.

I know, that surprised me, too.  Ever try drinking a wool sweater?

Well, my wife started out very simply, just some yarn (apparently, it’s called a skein, which sounds like something you should see your doctor about) and two sticks.  (They’re called “needles,” but don’t be fooled; they’re not.)  She figured it wouldn’t be too difficult to learn the basics, considering how many books have been written, or the number of websites dedicated to knitting (and not one of them is Pinterest, which I still can’t believe), plus Youtube videos, and the ever-helpful experts at yarn stores.  

So, how easy was it?

As easy as learning to make beer, which is to say, pretty easy, until it dawns on you that you have no idea what you’re doing and no one actually wants to help you learn.

The problem, it seemed, was that nothing was geared toward teaching the beginner anything beyond the very basics.  For example, one book on knitting actually contained the following: on the first page, it nicely listed and illustrated most of the essential knitting equipment, a quick glossary of common terms, and some other genuinely useful information.  On the very next page were detailed technical instructions on how to design a sweater.

Couldn’t start off with a decent scarf pattern, could you?

And as for the helpful online videos, I watched a couple with her, and they all reminded me of a Staples commercial.  Some woman performed a sleight of hand magic trick with yarn while saying, "Isn't this easy?" over and over again.

And when she went to the local yarn store, the incredibly unhelpful woman (always women in yarn stores, for some reason) seemed to make of point of making her feel like a complete idiot.

But my wife bravely soldiered on, figuring out how to “cast on” (sounds like a leisurely afternoon spent on a lake with a fishing pole, but it’s not), learning a simple stitch, and producing a scarf.  And what did she get for her hard work?  People helpfully telling her she should have used different yarn.

You know, that might have been more helpful at some early point in the process, like when she was buying the freakin’ yarn!

But it turned out to be an adorable scarf, which my daughter loves, and as a bonus my wife made a matching scarf for her doll, Molly.

And she made it herself, and feels rightly proud of my work.  And will rightly punch anyone in the face who criticizes it.

And who wouldn't be excited by a RAINBOW scarf?


Which reminds me of learning to brew, of buying a basic kit and picking up my first how-to book.  The kit made it seem pretty easy: mix some stuff in here, let it sit for a week, bottle and enjoy.  Which explains why my first batch was so terrible.  The how-to book (and almost every book I've read thereafter) started off explaining how to brew from just simple extracts, but then, on the very next page, explained that nobody but the most incompetent brewers used extracts and I should start by bringing my 6 gallon mash kettle up to 150 degrees.  

(To which I thought: What’s a mash kettle?)

I made my first trip to a homebrew store and the guy there (always a guy in the homebrew store, for some reason) started asking if I needed things I’d never even heard of, like wort chillers and carboys.  What’s a carboy?  I just want to make a beer!  What strain of yeast do I want?  How the hell should I know?

So here we have knitters and homebrews, cousins in insanely steep learning curves.  In both cases, you have a hobby, something meant to be relaxing, fun, a chance to meet people with similar interests to you, made absolutely obtuse and frustrating by what can only be described as a willful attempt to PREVENT newcomers from getting any kind of useful information.  I can only conclude that this is some conspiracy to keep people from actually becoming knitters/homebrewers.  

What the hell?

Not pictured: Anything helpful.


Guess what?  This is not the 18th century, anymore.  Knitting and homebrewing are not necessary to the functioning of our society.  Nor is there any need for secretive guilds to protect the hidden knowledge of our ancestors.  Seriously, this is the 21st century. I can go buy a sweater made by a machine for a tenth of the cost of just the yarn it will take a knit one, and I can buy a six-pack of beer fermented in a vat bigger than my house in most gas stations for under 10 bucks.

I homebrew because I enjoy it.  No thanks to the secretive gatekeepers who tried to hide their knowledge from me.  Was it some kind of test, to see if I was good enough to be considered a real homebrewer?  To see if I could get my malt to convert starch into sugar?

Who cares?  This is supposed to be relaxing!

Which is why my wife and I are going to open a knitting and homebrewing store, geared specifically toward novices and beginners.  

I’m thinking of calling it the “We’re Not Assholes Emporium.”