brewing

This past Sunday, right as Sandy was just grazing the edges of Maine,  I made a twenty minute trip with a carload of brewing equipment, a baby, and a wife. The latter two didn’t stay with me, but I powered through. Three Gents, strangely all starting with G, met up and got to brewing. A fantastic club brew-day.

Let me step back a bit here and say I was extremely weary of going to a homebrew club meeting. I know there are some young folk brewing beer, as myself, but wasn’t convinced that the older guys would even acknowledge me as a respected brewer let alone person. My worry was that these dudes were going to be super weird, horrible, and painfully unreliable. Luckily, I was wrong. The guys are pretty great and almost spooky how nice they are.  But on to the beer.

Brew day produced a pilsner split between two, an oatmeal stout, and my ‘farmhouse brown.’ Mine consisted of three different chocolate malts (meaning roasted to blackness, and what adds a ton of flavor/color to most “dark” beers), a “coffee kiln” barley, some medium crystal malt (mostly adding sweet/roasted unfermentable sugars), and more wheat malt than barley malt. I wanted to use up a bunch of old malt I had from when I moved to Maine, and to make something with the ‘sour’ blend pulled from a personal favorite homebrew. The wort (beer pre-yeast) smelled amazing like toasted wheat bread crust dipped in dark chocolate, I selected mild citrus, spicy, floral hops to compliment the sweetness instead of trump the real aim – the roast/toast malt profile meets wheat/sour. A clove/banana profile is strong in the wheat yeast while the sour yeast blend will pull out a cherry tartness, dry palate, and punchy sourness if left long enough. I’ll have to taste this often to see where it goes from tasty and funky to face melting tartness – mostly because this is my second run of this sour yeast, and I got it from another guy who fermented once off it who got his yeast cake off a buddy of his who had reused and washing the yeast at least three and up to five times – and it has a reputation of gaining strength each reuse.

Next on the list? Maybe I’ll finally kill off those SMaSH beers I’ve been waiting to take down. Three fermentors full of cider or beer and not a one to drink. Keg of IPA is nearly kicked, but I’ve squirreled bottles. I’ll be chewing through that supply for sure.

I thought I’d take a second as to why I love brewing and to a greater extent – beer. Initial impressions would lead people to think I’m a drunk; that I make the cheapest swill garbage possible with as much booze as spirits, and then get blasted for fun. Reality being, for me, that drinking my work is only an added bonus. Then folks may say, oh sure – I brew huge bomb beers, sure I enjoy the process, but I’m basically out to get plastered. Still not true, I brewed a ~3.5-4% abv last go-round. Then ‘they’ will say oh, so you are just a super ned with a hobby of fun toys, making a slightly more complicated version of tea, and reading. To that I’d say – oh, so you are a homebrewer as well?

It’s really less about the drunk part so much as the process. The ability to make something that [nearly] everyone can enjoy. It’s about cultivating a living organism, watching it grow and chew away at sugars and hearing the ‘clink clink’ of the airlock. Sure, like most homebrewers the process can lead to frustrations, burning your extract, missing your target OG, having a stuck sparge, ect – but the clouds clear after the first deep sniff of a bubbling blow-off tub. Even if the beer sucks (I’m looking at you cranberry beer) there is a flood of happiness that fills you when you watch someone drink your beer. It’s a learning process, something to be picked up, cleaned up next time. You shuffle again and deal. Didn’t like the bitterness in this one? Want to tweak a famous beer you had? There is almost nothing the big boys do that you cannot. There are few hurdles, which I think make it appealing in the first place.

A year only I’ve been at it. I’ve plowed thorough a handful of beer making books, cram my day full of reading beer blogs, it envelops my day. Finally a passion, a goal orientated hobby, and a relatively cheap one, comparatively. I don’t see this ending soon. You could maybe expect bottles for Christmas gifts.

This week I brewed up two (sort of three) brews.

On Wednesday, I brewed up my first real mini-mash – an (attempted) red farmhouse ale in which I call Red Barn. This is also the first (of hopefully) many farmhouse ales that I will create for the time being. Recently, I’ve been evaluating the beer I’m drinking a lot more closely and find myself drawn to these types because of their straightforward ingredients but complex in the profiles – seemingly beautiful in their simplicity. Easy drinking, easy to make – what is not to love? Their fruity profiles allow  for those who “don’t like beer” to drink up, and those beer snobs to find the malty buried blow the yeast profile or sniff the complex hops – heavy or light. The broad definition also allows for any kind of interpretation as well, from inky black to a clear pilsner-like color, adding any spices, adjuncts, etc. I  created a darker farmhouse ale using the same yeast (3711) this past summer and wanted to make something a bit less ‘sip-able’  and more ‘drinkable.’ This is that attempt.

I’ve looked at brewing a braggot (1/2 honey/malt) for sometime and finally was able to once my uncle shipped me some of his wild flower honey from his farm in Michigan. Again, I wanted something low alcohol so I aimed for two gallons to split between two gallon jugs I kept from whole foods apple juice. I pitched two separate yeasts in them, which is where the “sort of three” comes in. In one, ‘normal’ yeast that will showcase the honey and malts nicely, and the other was dregs from a local brew and one with wild yeast from Michigan – quite fitting, I think. First, the dregs from the local brew were pulled and incubated to a point where they could become pitchable – creating a wort and simply pouring the dark muck that sits in the bottom of bottle conditioned beers. I grew the sample to ~1L yeast starter, then [drunkenly] decided to toss in the Jolly Pumpkin sediment after finishing the bottle off on New Years Eve. Simply chilled (or cold crashed) the samples till the yeast separated from the “beer” and on brew day warmed, shook, and dumped it in. My first sour beer.

All three are happily bubbling away and I’ll post more on them once they become drinkable.

Two brew week

Category

Beer