Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Monday, December 24, 2007

Why Blog?

So as I sit here on my flight to Atlanta (Cheers Monday Night Brewing!) I have been pondering the whole purpose of this blog. Why do we do it? This has come up in conversation amongst the brewing staff (all two of us, staff meeting are always hectic). My first thought was that I blog because I want to share what we are doing with everyone else. But let’s face it, for all the writing that goes up on this blog there are not millions of fans flocking to the site. I think then our purpose is primarily entertainment of sorts with a bit of education thrown into the mix.

Most people that would read this blog can be divided into two groups. One group is made up of the people that are just starting to get into homebrewing themselves and they are looking for more information on how it’s done. This is what I did and I imagine it’s what many people do. The internet is such a wonderful resource, making the details of homebrewing much more accessible to everyone. Case in point, we got a hit on the blog from someone who was searching Google using the terms “brew kettle” and “garbage can.” Now I don’t know if this is good or bad but apparently Google thinks highly of us when you search for homebrewing and garbage…. Seriously. I think it’s because I described garbage in the kitchen in one post. I certainly don’t think our beer is garbage, with the exception of the raspberry wheat. Now to you, the intrepid up and coming homebrewer out there trying to turn a garbage can into a brew kettle let me say this, don’t. Please. That’s just gross. Sure you may buy it new (thus hopefully relatively clean) and you are saving money on a better brew pot but seriously, why? Invest a little more money in some quality and in the long term it pays off. I would suggest the turkey fryer readily available from Home Depot.

The second group of people reading this I see as fellow brewers. I read several other blogs myself. It’s a great way to learn more about techniques other brewers are using but learning aside I think it’s just fun. I enjoy reading about the trials and tribulations of the Monday Night Brewers and Beaux’s. I don’t really know how I could put it any better.

That first group of people, the learners, raises another interesting point. Recipes. When we were first starting out brewing with our almost exclusively extract based brew how did we find a recipe? On the web of course. There are many, many sites out there with recipes for all different styles of beers. As it was those recipes posted online that got us our start should we in turn post our recipes? On the one hand it is nice to call a brew your own, a unique beer that only you know how to make. I would call this the “real brewery” perspective in the sense that it is the actual breweries that consider their recipes to be proprietary. On the other hand without the freely available information online we would have had a much more difficult time learning the process of brewing and eventually coming to a point where we could formulate our own recipes. This spirit of sharing information is true of most hobbyists and homebrewers are no exception. So what should we do?

On this question B brewer raised another good point. Although it would be nice to share our brew recipes with others, what happens when someone takes a recipe that we have not really perfected (I bring you back to the train wreck of a disaster that is known as the Midnight Brewing Raspberry Wheat), brews it and then discovers they have wasted their time brewing something that tastes like a mix of under ripe raspberries and windex? Clearly that reader would never come back to us for information or advice.

So I am back where I started on this question. Post recipes or not? We’ll decide in the next staff meeting.

Christmas is coming, have you gotten dad a gift yet? Perhaps you should consider an intro homebrewing kit! Cheers and don’t forget to drink a homebrew now as a reward for slogging through more of my meandering thoughts!

Bottling the Spiced Christmas Ale (Finally!)

So it has been some time since either of us made a post to the blog. Apologies all around but B Brewer has had finals and vacation time and A Brewer… Well I really have no excuse other than rampant laziness as of late.

In any case, we bottled the Christmas Spiced Ale/Holiday Spiced Ale last weekend (Dec 15th). Now if you are reading this blog reverently, which I imagine you are, then you would most likely notice that that was almost a month after we brewed the beer to begin with. If you are a brewer yourself you are probably thinking something like “Ah they must have been racking every week or so and just letting the beer condition in fresh new carboys to enhance all the flavors.” Or if you are not a brewer you might be thinking “I have no idea what this guy is talking about, he sounds lazy to me, and I just like reading bout beer.” Okay well truth be told the non-brewer is closer to the truth. We just never got around to racking. No, no, not even once. The beer sat on the lees for almost a whole month! Well nothing to be done about it now and in some cases beer is intentionally left on the les for extended periods of time. I would leave you with an example of such a brew from teh interwebs but I am actually on a plane right now flying home to Redmond, Washington so that’s out of the question.

So we bottled. And as always we took some hydrometer readings and through some complex calculations we determined that we had a potential alcohol of about 8%. This is what I was aiming for so I was very satisfied. If you read the post about when we brewed our goals were twofold for a seasonal winter holiday beer: Higher alcohol content than your standard ales, and a complex spiciness. More on both of these with the tasting notes later. We got slightly more than two cases worth of your standard beer bottles with 53 bottles. Oh and on the note of bottles, I can tell you that Saranac labels are still the bane of our bottling lives. I have never found a label more unwilling to come off of a bottle… ever. We use the most abrasive scrubbing pads we can find and after much scouring we can get the paper of the label off but are left with this gummy sticky residue from the glue that, try as we might, goes nowhere. (I try to give all those to either B brewer or someone else…)

Alright so bottling was finished, the caps were marked with a C for Spiced Christmas ale or something along those lines and the kitchen was cleaned. As usual we dumped the muck left on the bottom of the fermenter outside in the snow. So usually I have very little patience and I end up opening a bottle 4 to 5 days after bottling. I know, I know, its not enough time to let some of the more bitter flavors settle down and get that complexity that ends up shining through but I can’t help it. When you put so much blood, sweat and tears into a brew (where do you think the “complexity of flavor” comes from? Kidding) you can’t help but want to reap the fruits of your labor.

So I opened up a chilled bottle last night and poured myself a glass. The aroma was absolutely amazing. All of the spices were there. It was like no beer I had ever smelled and the color was dark on the level of a porter. Tasting. Delicious. I know I say that every time but it’s true. You can definitely get the flavor that you would expect from a darker beer with hints of maltiness and it was slightly thick, along the lines of skim milk. Thicker than water, lighter than cream. The cacophony of spices is amazing. I can’t say that I could pick out any one spice that really dominated over the rest. They all blended together into a symphony of flavor. The taste lived up to all of the expectations I had built up from the aroma. Then there is the alcohol content. I have definitely had beers that have high alcohol content that dominates the beer, something that to me is undesirable. It’s the whole idea of say painting a picture and using only one color. Sure you get yourself a painting but it isn’t particularly involved or exciting. So at 8% our beer is strong enough that it gives you a warm feeling as it goes down your throat, as it should for a winter beer, but it is not so strong that it overwhelms any of the other flavors and complexities. In a word, balance.

So there you have it. Those are my impressions of our first attempt at a spiced beer using a recipe exclusively of our own formulation. Perhaps B brewer will be by later to leave his thoughts. In any case now that you have slogged through my meandering thoughts you are likely parched. So go to the fridge and get yourself a homebrew!