Acerglyn

Wow.

Bottled two cases of Acerglyn last night after I got home from work. I brewed this waaay back on New Year's day, with a total of five pounds of honey and 1¾ liters of maple syrup. It fermented down to about the lowest reading I've ever seen on my hydrometer, like off-the-scale-low. It should be about 8.7% ABV.

It's amazing, with a rich, warm golden color, a bouquet like fresh-baked bread, and a rich complex flavor I can only describe as the warm embrace of maple without the sweetness. This is a showcase project I thought about for a long time before executing, and it seems like nothing I've ever tasted before. I'm going to see if I can hold off until well into fall or early winter before I bust one of these out. Maybe for Thanksgiving?

Can-not-wait.

Is there a Librarian in the house?

So I'm looking at the bookshelf, and I notice that "Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap" is on the shelf with the brewing books. Because Margaret Mead, I guess.

Snowpocalypse Porter post-mortem

Well, the time spent in the bottle did the Snowpocalypse porter no favors.

Hard to describe, but it had a thin flavor profile which did little to bolster and round out the smoke notes. 'Phenolic' is a polite way to describe it, and like the description of the apocryphal book, "...once I set it down, I couldn't pick it back up again!"

So bottle #1 was poured and languished in half-drunk mugs in various places around the room until the following day. However, phoenix-like, it (along with bottle #2) was resurrected that evening in a simple but hearty stew of ox-tail (okay, really cow-tail, but a convention is a convention) which was absolutely awesome.

I'm pleased. It was fun to brew at the time, pleasant enough to drink along the way, a fun reminder of a unique time, and it met a good end. What else could you ask for?

Now on to other brews. Two all-grain batches teed up for February...

A Recipe for Beer—The Infamous Snowpocalypse Porter

Snowpocalypse Porter—February 10, 2010 (Round 2 of the Blizzards of 2010)

2 lbs. Wasmund's smoked malt

2 lbs 120-l malt

2 lbs Chocolate malt

1 lb honey

½ lb Blackstrap molasses

½ lb Molasses

1 tsp gypsum

3 quarts water from melted snow

Step mash

Initial gravity 1.052

Chilled wort in snowbank, which is remarkable inefficient unless you are constantly fiddling with it.

*******************************************************

We have two champagne bottles of this stuff left, and we haven't tasted it in well over a year. We will be killing those off sometime over the holidays, so keeping fingers crossed...could be spectacular.

Benchmarks

October 6, 2012: Fired up the wood stove for the first time of the season. I love the smell of hot dust.
October 13, 2012: First frost.
October 14, 2012: Cabernet bottled, 25 bottles.
October 15, 2012: Last hen transferred to the winter yard. Summer yard gets a chance to rest.
October 15, 2012: Sauvignon blanc started.

RDWHAH

I posted this to an online homebrewing forum, and thought it worth reposting here as well: 

For anyone who hasn't been paying attention, the acronym 'RDWHAH' gets tossed around here a lot...it's pretty much my stock response to most questions posted here, as well as a solid philosophy of life. ('RDWHAH' = "Relax, Don't Worry, Have A Homebrew'--which I think Charlie Papazian came up with BITD)

Seriously. This isn't rocket surgery. If you're getting angsty, you're doing it wrong. Remember there are still cultures that make their beer by chewing up grains, spitting them out so the salivary amylase converts the starch to sugar, then letting native airborne yeasts do their thing. They catch a buzz off of it just like any beer, and without software or hydrometers or anything.

Beer=Alcoholic beverage made from fermenting sugars whose primary source is from grain—as opposed to from fruits, vegetables, honey, et cetera. Got a source of grain-based sugars? Got other sugars to add in just for fun? Got yeast? Then you'll get beer--I swear.

I (and my friends and family) have enjoyed, and finished up, pretty much all of the hundreds of batches of beer, cider and wine I've ever made. I can think of two experimental beers I dumped post-bottling and one or two that I forgot about and left in secondary so long I just didn't care to bottle them, but otherwise, wherever I began, I ended many months later with two cases of empty bottle once again.

Don't worry about re-creating something fabulous that someone else has made. That's one benchmark for sure, but if no one ever struck out on their own, we'd still be drinking just murky ales, or that saliva-based stuff I mentioned above. Go for a style, but don't be a slave to it...most great styles were created from a need to adapt to local resources, not for any noble adherence to the rules.

And Reinheitsgebot? ...Don’t even get me started! It's not about beer purity; it was about protecting interests. It's like passing a law saying "you can henceforth only make soup from water, salt, onion and frog. Anything else is not soup."

The list of things you can brew with/from is pretty much endless, and just to mention a couple I will say pumpkin (messy), red beets (great color, gotta cook 'em, mash 'em, and then, well, mash 'em) mint in lieu of hops (absolutely awful, but re-brewed into a kick-ass stout) sorghum syrup (disappointing, but had promise) an entire watermelon (blenderized first--did you know that once strained, it only leaves about a fist-size lump of solids?) and basically anything else in the house that contains or could be converted into fermentable sugars or has an interesting flavor or aroma (I'm looking at you, spice rack).

My basic point is: Follow the basic instructions and observe basic rules of cleanliness and sanitation common to cooking and canning. There is no reason for this wonderful pastime to accrue any stress or worry or angst. It should relieve you of stress. If you are worrying about it YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.

Cider Time

Looks like cider time is upon us again. We pressed our first batch from mixed summer apples the 10th of September, and subsequently have pressed twice more, for a total of approximately twenty-six gallons under airlock, representing five different variations:

• 'Primitive'—not treated in any way, but simply allowed to ferment away with whatever yeasts (et cetera) it brung with it. I think I'll call this one 'Rabid Raccoon.'
• Raspberry—sulfited, pitched with Pasteur champagne yeast, and with a pound of raspberry puree (thank you, Prince...) added. A beautiful rose color at the moment, which seems to change subtly day-by-day.
• Standard—Sulfited, pitched with Pasteur champagne yeast. 
• Modified standard—Sulfited, pitched with Nottingham ale yeast
• Cider-Perry blend—Approximately 60% mixed summer apples, 40% Asian-type pears from our tree. Sulfited, pitched with champagne yeast. Splitting the difference between the apple s.g. of 1.050 and the pear s.g. of 1.040. Six gallons. 

We hope to keep this pace up for the rest of the fall, entering 2011 with a full cider locker. We've had good results this season by making each pressing into three 'cheeses,' filling each bag partially and using all three at once—instead of maxing out the press-basket with one single bag. More juice flows in less time with less effort, making the whole process that much faster. Apparently peasants the world over have known this for millennia, and it only took me twenty years of pressing cider to figure it out.

Stay tuned. We'll see what happens...

A Fitting Denouement

The sorghum ale has found it's target demographic at last.

I've taken to giving the chickens a bottle or two of it in the afternoon, 'round bout the time humans would be knocking off for a brewski or two. They don't care much for the head, and the carbonation seems to perplex them something awful, but once it settles down a bit, they're on it like white on rice.

Carbohydrates, B vitamins, yeasty sediment? What's not to like? And a chicken with a gizzard-load of homebrew is just a happier chicken, you know?

Dad's famous "Paw Paw Shooters"

Ingredients:

4 - 750 ml. bottles of home made Paw Paw wine*

1 BB pistol & 1 or 2 16g carbon dioxide cartridges

BB Pellets

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

1. Tastefully arrange the bottles of wine (unopened) against a backdrop of canvas or landscape fabric draped over a sawhorse. They should be at room temperature.

2. Draw straws to see who shoots first.

3. Take turns shooting until no bottle is left unshattered. (Or 'NBLU' as we call it.)

4. Deposit remains in recycling bin.

5. Celebrate by drinking something good.

The prep time for the Paw Paw wine is generally what makes this such a special dish to serve, so you won't want to make it very often. But everyone should try it at least once. 

* This would also be great made with home made persimmon wine.

Nixtamal ! (UPDATED)

This weekend I undertook something new out of sheer curiosity. What I did is at the intersection of cooking, science, culture and, I don't know...anthropology?

I had read about the ancient process of nixtamalization, where dried corn is cooked and soaked in an alkali solution. In various cultures, this results in Posole, Masa Harina, or Hominy and Hominy grits. The process yields a number of results: the tough outer shell of the corn is removed, as is the germ; the grain swells, becomes soft and starchy, and a number of nutrients are made available that would otherwise be sequestered. Cultures that adopted corn as a staple grain without nixtamalization, such as many groups in the American south, quickly developed deficiency diseases such as pellagra and kwashiorkor. And while this is all new and exciting and exotic to me, it's been common knowledge among countless cultures for thousands of years.

In any case. I took two cups of the whole kernel corn we use for chicken feed. I boiled it for about an hour, until the grains had begun to swell slightly. Then the recipe I had read called for adding ½ cup of wood ashes to the pot to provide the alkali.

Well, our woodstove provides a steady supply of hardwood ash, but I didn't like the idea of having little bits of stuff mixed in with the corn (for example, we dispose of dinner bones in the fire) so first I gathered about a cup of ash, sieved it, added a quart of water, shook it vigorously for a few minutes, then strained the ash solution through filter paper. The sieving and filtering process left altogether about ¼ cup of solids behind.

The effect of adding the opaque gray solution to the simmering corn was spectacular. The color of the liquid turned a clear golden orange, and for the first time, it released the distinctive "tortilla" aroma of hominy, like it had been hiding somewhere.

The nixtamalization process continued for three hours from that point. Somewhere around the two hour mark, the aroma became unmistakably that of fresh sweet corn cooking—a wonderful summertime smell to have in the kitchen in late February. At the three hour mark from adding the ash liquor, the corn grains were plump and swollen, floating in a thick golden gelatinized liquid.

I drained the liquid, rinsed the grains with cold water, drained them again, and covered them with cold water one last time. At this point, I had completed the nixtamal process, and had a big pot of posole/hominy to do something with. (The chickens would devour the leftover liquid for breakfast the next morning). I pondered the issue overnight, consulting a few posole recipes here and there. Come morning, this is what I decided:

Posole Stew:

1 medium onion, coarsely chopped
1 fist-sized chunk of Virginia ham—rind, fat and all (any good seasoning meat would do—a ham hock would probably be awesome)
3 whole dried chile peppers
1 tsp black pepper
2 tsp garlic powder
2 cans black beans, with liquid
1 tsp dried oregano
1 batch Posole/Hominy (From 2 C dried corn)
1 bottle ale*

Combine all ingredients in a crockpot and simmer on low, stirring occasionally. After several hours, remove ham and cut into small bits; return to pot and continue simmering. Season to taste—I deliberately omitted salt as the Virginia ham seems to provide enough salt on its own. The posole and black beans together make a complete protein, so the meat could be omitted for a vegetarian dish. However, in that case I would be sure to add some good olive oil to make up for the lost fat.

Conclusion? The posole stew was well-received by the panel of judges (...considering it was made from chicken feed and all...). Personally, I find the whole process absolutely fascinating, and after just one batch don't feel like I really understand what I did exactly. The transformational nature of nixtamalization reminds me most of the magic of mashing beer, where suddenly, with just a little nudging from the cook, something appears that wasn't there just a minute before. In mashing, it's the activity of enzymes...here, it's chemistry and probably some enzymes as well. It's all very cool, regardless.

I suppose I'll try it again sometime...in the meantime, there's leftovers to be put away.

* Please note this was the aforementioned "Sorghum Ale," and as a result, the stew developed an awful flavor upon standing. Please substitute any good stock, broth, bouillion or even plain water. It also solidified, so I would either halve the quantity of posole or double the quantity of liquid.  I would stay away from beer--hops does not work well in this recipe**.
** I'm actually surprised how frequently when beer is used as an ingredient, the hop bitterness dominates the contributed flavor--beer bread is a great example. It's rarely the malt, unless the beer is a stout with a strong roast and a low hopping profile. I'm starting to rethink beer as an all-purpose ingredient.

A Verdict...

The Sorghum Ale?

Awful.

Thick, acrid, sour, sludgy. Possibly the worst thing I've brewed in memory. It reminds me of that monster from the end of "Dogma." But with less personality.

The Great Beveragepalooza of 2009

My great expectations for a day-long roofing-fest were cruelly dashed by the carcass of Tropical Storm Ida, who waited until mid-November—MID-NOVEMBER—to come die on us. It started raining Tuesday night and rained and rained and rained straight on through into Thursday morning. So, no roofing for us!

But a cold grey rainy day laid the groundwork for The Great Beveragepalooza of 2009. It was a day-long campaign during which we managed to bottle fifteen gallons of hard cider and create a 2009 vintage apple wine. The process by which we made the apple wine was as convoluted as anything we’ve done—so convoluted it makes my head hurt to even think about it—so let me see if I can even remember the whole thing:

1. We gathered the dregs from four carboys worth of hard cider and set them aside.
2. Set aside one gallon of scrumpy from the six-gallon carboy.
3. Warmed up about 4-1/2 quarts of raw sweet cider (from the fridge) to room temperature, stirring vigorously with a whisk to aereate it thoroughly.
4. Warmed another quart of raw sweet cider enough to dissolve about 2 pounds of local honey in it, along with about ½ teaspoon of yeast nutrient.
5. Poured the dregs in the 2-1/2 gallon carboy; added both batches of sweet cider; topped it off with most of the gallon of scrumpy.

The initial gravity was in the neighborhood of 1.095, and with so many warm fat happy yeasties feasting on such a sugar-rich solution, the carbon dioxide output was almost immediate and phenomenal—one long stream of bubbles out the airlock even though the liquid volume is half that of a regular carboy. It’s about the ugliest stuff you’ve ever seen at this point, but in about a week it should calm a bit and get prettier, and once it’s racked, it can settle down for a nice long slow maturation process. I’m looking forward to it, anticipating a final ABV of about 10% with a dry finish. The question remains: Still or sparkling? Both?

The other benefit of The Great Beveragepalooza of 2009 is we now have four carboys freed up! Even anticipating the cider pressing to come when the gang is here for Thanksgiving, that still leaves us room to finally brew beer again! Woo-Hoo! Many, many good brewing ideas have been held in abeyance whilst the cider did its thing, and now it’s finally time to cry havoc! and let slip the yeasts of beer…

Awesome.

Yeast Music

It is quite the modest spectacle to have three large carboys and one small carboy—seventeen gallons of cider in all—fermenting at once. In the quiet predawn darkness, there is a syncopated gurgling of four airlocks bubbling away in slightly different rhythms, superimposed over a subtle sizzling—the sound of millions of tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide rising through the cider and striking the inside of a carboy.

Taken together, it is the work song of ten billion yeast plants, contentedly chewing away at molecules of various sugars, burping out tiny little burps of gas, secreting ethanol, and budding off their daughters.

Yeasts of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! (...of long-molecule sugars!)

Whew!

Two batches of beer bottled (Septemberfest, a.k.a. 'Old-Fashion Horse-Powered Sorghum Ale' and Autumn Brown Ale), nineteen gallons of cider pressed—seventeen gallons of cider fermenting. Not bad for one three-day weekend!

A Tale of Two Sorghums

For a while I have been planning to brew a couple of experimental projects to satisfy my limitless curiosity about all things fermentable; one of these is a sorghum-based beer, which you may have seen or heard about as a gluten-free alternative for sufferers of celiac disease.

In preparation, I did teh Googlez for a while to see the current state of the art, then made an interesting realization: there are two distinct products which could be considered sorghum-based beer. One is a cloudy, sour product of African origin, similar to a lambic or other sour beer fermented with wild yeasts or bacteria, but based on malted millet (the seed of sorghum) or cooked millet catalyzed by salivary amylase.

Hmm. This, apparently is what is meant by a gluten-free beer; it is brewed entirely from millet with no barley component whatsoever. Sounds scrumptious, but that’s not what I was after.

It turns out what I am looking for is not exactly a 'sorghum beer.' It's more a 'beer with sorghum in it.' I plan a simple ale, lightly hopped, with a small portion of light or amber malt (say, 2 to 3 pounds) augmented with sorghum molasses.

A traditional favorite of the deep south, sorghum molasses is made by crushing sorghum stalks and boiling down the extracted juice in open pans, as you would boil maple sap into maple syrup. More flavorful than cane syrup, less intense than molasses.

Now all I need to do is figure out how much a given amount of sorghum molasses will contribute to the specific gravity. I don’t want to have another debacle where I end up with an absurdly low starting gravity by underestimating the contribution of an adjunct—as so often happens with honey, et al.

I have a little over two quarts of sorghum to play with. For a five gallon batch, that could be as much as 1:10, so I suppose I could test its contribution by dissolving ¼ cup of sorghum in 2-½ cups of water and measuring the gravity. That sounds all science-y.

I like science-y stuff. Stay tuned; I may brew in the morning. If that's the case, look for a test-drive around...Thanksgiving!

Update: Okay, science-y types: It turns out that one part sorghum in 10 parts water yields approximately 1.050; therefore, when I brew, I plan to start with 3 pounds of light/amber malt extract, then add one full quart of sorghum (1:20) and take a gravity reading. That should put me in the ballpark for a decent session ale. Updates as they happen.

Update #2: In Which Your Faithful Brew-Ogger discovers he is, in fact, making green beer: As I read the label of the sorghum, I discover it is:

"MADE THE OLD FASHION WAY WITH HORSE POWERED MILL AND WOOD FURNACE"

and is made (THE OLD FASHION WAY) just one state away. So how local and renewable can you get? In any case, so far we've got a pound of crystal malt, two pounds of NB golden malt, gypsum, and—hold onto your OLD FASHION hats—8-½ pounds of sorghum. Yeah, I went all in on the sorghum, based on some more intermediate science-y stuff I did once the brewing was underway. Look for a fairly modest hopping schedule, but I'm very optimistic and enthusiastic about how this stuff will turn out.

Update #3: I did the usual trick of adding gelatine to fine the beer, but it seemed to do absolutely nothing whatsoever. As a result, we bottled "SeptemberFest" as a murky brown ale with an odd yellowish cast. Perhaps it will bottle clear, or simply remain cloudy. Don't recall seeing this effect in any other brews. Oh, and a preliminary taste test suggests two things: One, it has a similar taste profile to the ale I brewed using maple syrup; two, to me it has a pronounced caramel (like Kraft Caramels) flavor, though Mary doesn't notice this. Now we wait.

Done and done!

Yesterday I bottled the ale I brewed mid-May. It's a simple, standard light summer ale, with a substantial measure of honey in the mix and a fairly modest hopping—a nice, post-lawnmowing quaff. While the total weight of malt and honey seemed enough as I was brewing, the initial s.g. surprised me at only about 1.035. I always forget that pound-for-pound, honey doesn't contribute as much as malt, though it attenuates nicely and adds a nice character. The final s.g. was 1.005. so the ABV works out to only about 3%, a little bit low for my homebrewing preferences but still in the ballpark.

However, if nothing else, it's a test platform for a new secret ingredient that I've been itching to try brewing with, and I don't recall seeing in many recipes. My intent is to introduce a flavor I've wanted to add to an ale flavor profile, but has never survived the brewing and fermenting processes. From my initial intra-bottling taste testing, I'd say it's a success, and I'm ready to move it outta beta into my next full-mash production: Brassy Kit! Coming soon to a carboy near you!

Holiday Spirits

Yesterday, in a fit of industry, Mary and I bottled two of the last three batches of this year's cider. One was a full-batch blend, and the other was a half-batch of Arkansas Black varietal. Both hold great promise, and I find the idea of varietal ciders increasingly appealing after years of pressing grab-bag blends. We did not fine either batch, accepting a certain amount of haze in exchange for the fuller flavor the extra tannins provide.

They are nestled all snug in their bottles, waiting to make a grand entrance with the new year, if all goes well. I'm looking forward to their debuts.

To top things off, in the evening we set to work on a full batch of welsh ginger beer, a modified version of this summer's hit, "Rat Shandy."

White and brown sugar, a little extra lemon peel and juice; peel, raisins and fresh ginger all chewed up to bits in the food processor (so the raisins don't end up looking like those hideous bloated, swollen ticks--which they tend to do when left whole) and powdered ginger added for good measure.

At one point, the dry ingredients looked like a good basis for a baked holiday confection; some flour and shortening (instead of boiling water) might have taken it in a spectacularly different direction. But this morning I pitched the yeast and so it's on the way to being a fantastic and potent libation for a certain celebration we will be having in about six weeks.

Yum. Can't wait. Slainte!