Everett Cellars

Garden: Hopping into Spring

2011-04-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

Been a while since I posted a non-beer post. It's a nice day so I went out and took some photos of the Spring garden prep.

The hops are all coming up and doing ok so far, given the worst Spring on record. These are the 2nd year Tettenangers and they're doing the best of the lot. I repotted all the hops into 18 gallon tubs last fall. Got them at Fred Meyer for about $4 each, drilled some drainage holes, put some fresh potting soil in, and repotted the plants. Hopefully this will solve some of the watering and root-binding issues I had last year. Hops like space.

Nevertheless the plant has developed a soft yellowing in the leaves. Don't think it's a disease, maybe just a slight nitrogen deficiency? I'd applied some 9-4-7 organic fertilizer a month or two back but it didn't seem enough. So I've decided that, where the hops are concerned, I'm relaxing my generally organic principles. Last year the hops were sickly and prone to insect problems. This year I'm hitting them with some 20-20-20 Miracle Grow every few weeks. Hopefully that heavier fertilization will make them more robust, so that I have fewer fungal and insect problems over all. Still not going to be spraying DDT around or anything...

The Tettenangers and Cascades get the most sun, but the Centennial and Chinook are coming up as well. This time of year they still get a fair amount of shade though. Stupid tilt of the Earth and my neighbor's roofline. Also, as you can see I gave all the hops a layer of organic compost a couple weeks back. This should keep the weeds down and seep in some more nutrients.

There is a school of thought, particularly among commercial growers, that you should trim back the early hop shoots and allow later shoots to grow as the weather improves. My suspicion is that in areas that get less sun and cooler seasons, the hops need all the help they can get. So I'm not trimming mine back. Just going to watch them and see if any mildews are attacking and treat accordingly. If this Spring and Summer are going to be as cool as they say, seems to me the more time the plant has to grow leaves the better. Now that these are 3rd and 2nd year plants I will be trimming back to just six shoots per plant though, three on each line. I'll be pickling the trimmed shoots in a few weeks. Also: my over-wintered parsley and chives are both very happy.

The garden is in a holding pattern of sorts right now. My winter kales have all bolted and been picked. You can see the last Collards have bolted and so are going into a Portuguese Linguica stew tonight. You can see the bed in the back is covered with compost. Tomatoes will go there. Probably in June... sigh. The last of the over-wintered leeks are in their pot, and I planted a row of shallots in another long row-pot. Planted some fresh sage in the little black pot, since last year's didn't make it through winter. In the same pot is the sad, sad remains of the sorrel. Something, I don't know what, ate it down to the roots. Mowed down like a lawnmower. Squirrels? My dog? An army of slugs? It's a mystery. But there are signs that it's not dead yet, so I'll see if I can get it to grow back. The mint in those two pots, had died back for Winter but it's coming back with a vengeance. Mojito time!

Cold Frames

Last Fall I found some sliding glass doors and decided to turn them into cold frames. Well, it's been 6 months, how did they do?

Overall they did best in the late Fall and later this Spring. In Dec-Feb I really got little noticeable growth of anything in them. I think this is partly due to the location, they get shaded most of Winter there. Also, it's our Maritime Northwest Winter. What little sun we get doesn't have much umph behind it. Still, in the worst Spring on record my little winter lettuces and mustard greens are doing great, and the garlic is loving it. Planted a row of shallots in there, and some green onions. Just sowed another round of lettuces, mizuna, and mustard greens in there too.

The other frame has been replanted for Spring. In the back I sowed a row of Sugar Snap Peas. In front of them are some Ruby Orach Spinach. Both of these did fantastically last year. In the front I put in some Purple Mustard Greens. These did great last Spring. Also sowed some lettuce around, will harvest when small before the Spinach and Greens get huge. The glass has protected these guys from some hail storms recently. So that's nice.

But how well do they trap the heat? I was wondering that, so I took my infra-red laser thermometer out and tested the soil surface. It was 58 degrees outside around noon.

In the shade of the bed.

In the sunny part of the bed.

Not too shabby! And this is with the beds propped open about 4" for airflow. May move the frame off the pea-bed and onto the tomato bed until the 'maters get fully established. Rather than the flimsy plastic cloche I cobbled together last year.

POTATO EXPERIMENT 2011

Planted two varieties for this year's experiment in growing potatoes in odd things. Warba, a high yield all-rounder and Rose Finn, an early season red fingerling. Hope to get two rounds of the Finns, will plant the next round in a couple weeks. As you can see I'm trying something new this year: tires. Just stack and fill as the plants grow!

Good thing the forest roads around eat my low-profile tires... Wait, no. Well at least I have several dead tires around for this project.

Brewday: ASBO Bitter

2011-04-18T09:37:00.000-07:00

I always find it fascinating how law and beer are historically related.

We all know about the effect of the Reinheitsgebot on German lagers. But let's take British Bitters. By American standards, these are some light, wimpy beers. An Ordinary bitter clocks in around 3.7% ABV, Standard bitters around 4.2% and the mighty ESB or Special Bitters around 5%. This can lead to warnings from well-intentioned publicans of "Careful with that one, it's strong!" Despite the fact that most of our familiar NW "session" beers are at least as strong or stronger. As so often happens in history, the reason for this has to do with Victorian England.

In 1880 the Free Mash Tun Act shifted beer taxes from a tax on individual ingredients (malt and hops), to a beer tax based solely on the original gravity of the beer. Beers above 1.057 original gravity were taxed more highly than those with lower gravities. One interesting side effect of this is that the tax and regulations didn't care where that extract came from, so the use of sugars (treacle and invert sugar, for example) and cereals, like corn, increased dramatically. Hence the presence of Lyle's Golden Syrup in many homebrew recipes.

But the most important impact of this law is that, as so often happens, vice taxes tend to rise. The original 1880 tax rate was not that heavy, and beers averaged around 1.055. But by the 1920's, to help pay for the Great War, taxes were very high indeed. At that time Bass is reported to have been spending about 53% of its total production costs in taxes! The trend only continued. On top of the increased tax rate, the 1.057 baseline from 1880 was dropped to 1.037 by 1950. So the incentive was to brew weaker beers, that turned around quickly. IPAs and Old Ales went nearly extinct. Fortunately, since then tax burdens have been relaxed a little and the CAMRA/Craft Brew movement has helped increase demand for more expensive, stronger beers. For more on the remarkable history of British Pale Ales check out Foster's Pale Ale, 1999.

So Americans think of British Ales as low-alcohol, warm, flat, and fruity. But is this a bad thing? For a house beer, absolutely not!

RECIPE: ASBO BITTER

A decade ago in order to combat a wave of perceived lawlessness the UK introduced the ASBO or Anti-Social Behaviour Order, a civil order covering a variety of misdemeanors designed to combat, wait for it, anti-social behavior. Basically, it grants license to magistrates to spank yobbos for minor crimes and has become generally associated with juvenile delinquency.

I'd set out to make a little session Ordinary Bitter. Something pleasant and British, and about 1.037 O.G. so that I'd have a nice 3.7%ish house beer to quaff by the imperial pint and wake up hangover free the next morning. Well, as often happens, efficiency increases on small beers and I ended up with a mighty 1.041 O.G., moving it into Standard Bitter territory. Oooooooh! So in reflection of the warnings about the dangers of "strong" British beer, I decided that this was clearly liquid delinquency in a can. (Though here we just call that Four Loko)

ASBO BITTER

10.5 gallons, All Grain
O.G. Est 1.038, O.G. Act 1.041
Est ABV: 3.7%, Est Act ABV 4.1%.
10 SRM, 30 IBU
Calculated at 75% efficiency, got about 80%. :/

12.5 lbs Gambrinus ESB malt
12 oz Crystal 120
4 oz Organic Crystal 40
8 oz Special Roast
4 oz Flaked Wheat

Mashed in at 153, mashed out 168.

Mash Water Treatment: 4 gm Gypsum, 1 gm CaCl2. Boil Water Treatment: 9 gm Gypsum, 2 gm CaCl2. Should get the Ca up around 100, SO4 up around 130, and Cl around 30. Mash pH was 5.2.

90 min boil.

2.25 oz Willamette, leaf, 5.1% AA, at First Wort
0.75 oz Willamette @ 30 min.
Whirlfloc tab @ 15.
1 oz Willamette @ flame out.

Used Willamette because I have a lot of it around. It's the US version of Fuggles, which is a bit harsher and spicier than the standard Kent Goldings, but when I ordered in my massive hop stockpile part of the deal was no more buying hops if I can sub something close. We'll see if it's an ok substitute. Used 4oz because I vacuum sealed them in 4oz blocks.

Cooled to 66 pretty quickly. Very clear wort.

Yeast choice is important for British Ales. For smaller bitters you want a yeast that will produce some fruity esters and has an attenuation on the lower end, around 70%. Otherwise it will be dry and over-bitter. So I pitched a quart of Danstar Windsor Ale yeast, saved off a previous brew. Fermenting in my 15 gallon conical, temp reading was 70 this morning. Luverly. I've had some good luck with this strain, but it doesn't floc well, and forms a top crop. Some careful racking and/or isinglass is in order.

Once it's done I'll probably cask condition it in kegs. British beers like cellar temperatures and there is an unheated room in my basement that's holding about 55. I'll just keep the kegs in there and hook up a cobra tap to it, goose it with co2 every now and again to push it.

Then let the reign of 4% fueled ASBO lawlessness begin!

Brewday: Bolt Thrower & the Buckwheat Honey Stout

2011-03-02T14:41:00.000-08:00

Right, final beer post for today. Then we should be more or less current.

Every year since (let's see... 2006!) I've brewed a version of my Buckwheat Honey Stout for St. Patrick's day. This year's was delayed a bit due to inclement weather and the fact that I brewed two pale ales and two IPAs this last month. But with just seventeen days to go, I got to brewing.

One thing I've noticed recently is that I seem to listen to metal when I'm working on a stout. Or maybe listening to metal makes me want to brew stouts? Chicken and egg. But it all makes sense. Stouts are Metal. \m/ You can see this in my last stout, Iron Swan Stout, named after a song by The Sword. Well this time around I was working on my buckwheat honey stout and listening to Bolt Thrower's Those Once Loyal.

Unsurprisingly, this got me in the mood for a big, bad American stout. One of the problems of the Buckwheat Honey Stout has always been that it's...on the fence. I've usually made it like a bigger, Americanized Dry Irish Stout. But Guinness it is not. The buckwheat honey gives it a little sumpin sumpin, describable only as 'buckwheat honey-y'. Either it needs more buckwheat honey, so that becomes the primary flavor, or more complexity in general. So this time around I decided to throw it firmly into the hoppy, complex American Stout camp.

2011 Buckwheat Honey Stout
All grain, 5.25 gallons
O.G. est 1.066, act 1.068
F.G. est 1.016
Est ABV about 6.75%-7.0%
IBU: 58
SRM: 45+

8 lbs Gambrinus ESB Malt
1 lb Flaked Barley
1 lb MFB Special Aromatic
8 oz Black Patent
8 oz Roasted Barley
8 oz Chocolate Malt
8 oz Crystal 80
4 oz Crystal 135 (The Hugh Baird dark crystal. Briess Extra Special Roast would be perfect here.)
2 oz Rauch malt
1 lb Buckwheat Honey

Mashed in shooting for 152, got 149, adjusted up with boiling water to 153. Fine. Mash pH buffered with 12 gm chalk and 5 gm baking soda. Less soda next time, pH was 5.5, so I lowered it to 5.3 with lactic acid. After 30 minutes to full conversion mashed out at 168. Sparged 7 gallons for a 60 minute boil.

1 oz Apollo (leaf) @ 19% AA @ 60 min
1 oz Centennial (leaf) @ 11% AA @ 5 minutes.
Buckwheat honey added at the last minute or two.

Cooled down to 68 and pitched a half-growler full of the yeast from the IPAs, which I'd washed earlier. Kraeusen within about 30 minutes again. Brewday, start-to-cleanup, about 4 hours. Must be a new record.

So this thing will go for about week, then I'll cold crash it and rack it into a keg for St Patty's. Not sure whether I'll put it on nitro or not, and I may blend some of it with a secret project I've got going on.

In conclusion, CENOTAPH!!!!

Brewday: IPA Experiments

2011-03-02T13:03:00.001-08:00

Moving on in my quest to brew a decent hoppy beer I geared up to brew some IPAs.

Similar to the SMaSH Beers, I developed a base recipe for the wort, then divided the boil to test out two different hop profiles. Something reasonably light, with restrained crystal malt, and about 6% ABV. One would be a single hop IPA using Centennial, in the spirit of Bell's Two Hearted Ale. The other would be a more complex session IPA, in the spirit of Bridgeport IPA. Bridgeport uses an interesting mix of American, British and German hops. Complexity seemed worth a try. One of the problems here is that they use five hops, only one of which I had. So I made some substitutions.

Speaking of substitutions. I had to throw my ideal malt bill out the window. It's winter here in the NW and I still have to brew outside. A sunny, crisp cold morning arrived and snow was forecast for the upcoming day I'd intended to brew on. Well, better make beer while the sun shines! Unfortunately I didn't have all the ingredients I wanted and the stores weren't open for a couple more hours, so I made a few substitutions.

Get It Right IPA - Ideal Grain Bill

11 lbs ESB Malt
2 lbs MFB Special Aromatic
8 oz CaraHell
4 oz Crystal 40

Get It Right IPA - Actual Grain Bill

12 lbs ESB Malt
1 lb Vienna Malt
8 oz Crystal 10
4 oz CaraWheat (55L)

Same deal as last time. Mashed in at 152, mashed out at 168. 6 gm gypsum, 3 gm CaCl2, 5 gm Epsom salts. Pulled 9 gallons, divided and topped up to two boils of 5 gallons to get 3.25 into the fermenters. 60 minute boils for an O.G. of 1.060. Repitched right onto the happy yeast from the pales. Kraeusen within 30 minutes!

Get It Right IPA - Centennial (Two Parted Ale)

1/4 oz Centennial (leaf) @ 11% AA @ 60 minutes
3/8 oz Centennial @ 45
3/8 oz Centennial @ 30
3/8 oz Centennial @ 15
3/8 oz Centennial @ 1
2/3 oz Centennial @ Dry Hop 5 days.

IBU: 57

Get It Right IPA - Four Hop (Sub-Humulone)

1/2 oz Apollo (leaf) @ 19% AA @ 60 min
1/4 oz Centennial @ 11% @ 15
1/4 oz Willamette @ 5.1 @ 15
1/4 oz Ger. Hallertau Hersbrueker @ 3.5% @ 15
3/8 oz Centennial @ 1
3/8 oz Willamette @ 1
3/8 oz Hersbrueker @ 1
2/3 oz Centennial @ Dryhop 5 days.

IBU: also about 57

These just went into the kegs yesterday, so I haven't really got an opinion on them yet. I'm hoping for good things, but always pessimistic about my IPAs.

One problem occurred while racking off the dry-hops. I'd wrapped cheesecloth around the tip of the autosiphon to filter out the loose hops. But as they clogged up around the cloth, the pressure difference caused the loose gasket of my aging autosiphon to draw air bubbles into the line. I'm going to be really upset if these beers are badly oxidized. :*(

Brewday: SMaSH Pale Ales - Apollo and Cascade

2011-03-02T11:01:00.000-08:00

SMaSH - Single Malt and Single Hop.

The best way to see exactly what a hop or a base malt tastes like, without any distractions.

Recently I've been looking for a new base malt. In the past I used Great Western 2-Row Pale, which I liked because it's from Washington and it's cheap. But I was unsatisfied with the grain uniformity, chaff levels, and I was getting really inconsistent grinds off of it. Moving the rollers closer together did a better job, but ended up pulverizing the other malts in the grain bill. As a result I was getting a fairly low yield and, dissatisfied, I started looking around.

I was gearing up to brew Free Ballard! and went shopping for a sack of Pilsner malt. My preference is to use Weyermann. It is simply fantastic malt. But you'll also pay through the nose for it. Unfortunately most shops around here carry Best, which I have not been as happy with. Well, I came across a sack of Gambrinus Organic Pils that had mistakenly been delivered to my LHS. Got it at a steal and gave it a try.

Excellent. Kernels are nice and plump, and quite uniform. Much closer to Continental malt. Which is interesting, because Gambrinus is in Canada. Low protein levels, so no rest was needed. Nice. Brewed a little lager up using just it, some Horizon for bittering, and Sterling for Flavor and Aroma. Free Ballard! came out great, there's a lovely maltiness to it, with just a hint of sweetness. Big fan. And it's way, WAY cheaper than Weyermann. Sweet.

So I decided to give their ESB malt a try. Picked up a sack down at Larry's for about $40, and brewed up some pale ales.

Now, one thing that I freely admit in my brewing is that I suck at brewing hoppy beers. I don't know what it is, but my pale ales and IPAs have always seemed lackluster. Maybe I'm just really picky about it, and maybe I'd been guilty of using hops that were free but less than fresh. So I decided to try and do it right this time. A decent pale ale and a decent IPA, or bust!

The first step was getting some decent hops in. Now, it's great that I live in WA and that most of the country's hops are grown about three hours away. But I also feel that the really choice hops tend to go to breweries, and we homebrewers seem to get the next grade or two down. I've also seen hops from two years or more ago floating around. Not much you can do about that other than get to know the difference between fresh and not-so-fresh hops yourself and get picky. Also, the shops charge a huge markup. I was sick and tired of paying $6-$8 for two ounces of hops.

Fortunately, I got a vacuum sealer for Christmas. (I know, just what every kid wants!) So I went to HopsDirect and ordered in six pounds of hops for about $70. Got a representative selection, covering all my bases:

Cascade - the classic NW hop. Piney and citrusy. High cohumulone levels.
Centennial - more alpha acid (AA) than Cascade, similar flavor, lower cohumulone.
Willamette - I really like Willamettes. They've got a pleasant British hop character, reasonable AA level, and as a very heavily planted hop, they're cheap!
Sterling - Back before I brewed lagers I never really had much use for Sterling. But now I love this hop. It's like Super Saaz. Same noble, perfumy, floral thing going on, but with twice the AA levels so you don't need loads of it.
German Hallertau Hersbrueker - Wanted to get another noble variety in to do a little side by side comparison later on.
Apollo - Rare new variety released just a couple years ago. One of the latest "Super Alpha" varieties. These clocked in at 19% AA! I was a bit skeptical. The last time I used a Super Alpha variety it was Summit, and I'm never using those again. Whew, the onion and garlic of hops. But looking further Apollo has low cohumulone levels, around 26%, and basically three-way split in its hop oils. This means it should have a clean bitterness, with flavor and aroma qualities across the Noble/American spectrum. Very interesting. Clearly worth a try.

Whipped out my vacuum sealer, repackaged into smaller bags. Hops Direct is usually somewhat generous on their measurement, and now I've got a freezer full of hops for the year.

I was really curious about the Apollos. Would they be useful as a flavor and aroma hop, or are they only good for cheap, effective bittering? SMaSH time!

The idea would be to pull enough wort for a 6.5 gallon batch, but split it into two different batches of 3.25 gallons. One would be the fancy new Apollos, the other would be Cascade, as a classic 'control' group. Normal American Pale Ale, somewhere around 5% ABV and 40 IBUs, with a flavor addition at 10 minutes and flameout, and a dryhopping. Then I'd keg them in my two 3-gallon kegs, carbonate and compare.

SMaSH Pale Ale - Gambrinus ESB and Cascade/Apollo

Calculated at 6.5 gallons, All Grain
About 5 SRM, O.G. 1.052

12 lbs Gambrinus ESB malt

Mashed in at 154 with 6 gm gypsum, 3 gm CaCl2, and 5 gm Epsom salts. Mashed out at 168 and collected 8.5 gallons of wort.

Divided the wort into two 4.25 gallon batches and added 1/2 gallon more water to each for a starting boil volume of 4.75 gallons each. Kettle geometry means an hour boil will be very vigorous for a 3.25 gallon batch, estimated (quite accurately) a 1.5 gallon boil-off.

Each got a 60 minute boil. Hop Profiles:

Apollo

1/4 oz Apollo (leaf) @ 19% AA @ 60 minutes
3/8 oz Apollo @ 10
3/8 oz Apollo @ 0
3/8 oz Apollo @ Dryhop (3 days)

Cascade

1 oz Cascade (leaf) @ 7.3% AA @ 60
3/8 oz Cascade @ 10
3/8 oz Cascade @ 0
3/8 oz Cascade @ Dryhop (3 days)

Fermented both with Safale 05 American Ale yeast, at around 66-68. Kegged and carbonated to 2.5 volumes.

Results:

Both beers are young but I can draw a few conclusions.

Appearance. Both (surprise, surprise) have the same pale straw color verging on gold. Both have a slight haze from the dryhopping. Holds a decent enough head, but not fantastic. Maybe a little CaraHell next time I brew it as a non-SMaSH beer.

Aroma. Noticeable hop aroma. The Cascade is distinctly piney, while the Apollo is much more complex. Pleasantly hoppy, slight floral.

Taste. The Cascade, again, has a distinct piney edge to it. A little bit grassy too. The Apollo seems much cleaner, more just generally 'hoppy' and less assertively bitter. They're both quite drinkable, but a little light crystal malt would help balance the hops better. But that would miss the point of a SMaSH beer. Slight biscuityness from the ESB malt.

Conclusion. We'll have to give them another week or two cold to rest, but to my tastes the Apollos are a real winner. I also think though, that I am really turning against high cohumulone beers, so if that's your thing you might like the Cascades more. I'm going to bring both to my homebrew club meeting tonight and see what the jury thinks. I do like that I could brew twice as much of the Apollo version using the same amount of hops as the Cascade version. Go 19% AA!

And we're back. Again.

2011-02-28T13:31:00.000-08:00

Well a few weeks ago my laptop bricked. And for whatever reason I just can't seem to get much writing done on my desktop. Too many distractions. Screen hurts my eyes. Etc. But I've arranged use of another laptop. Even if (thanks to a prior soy sauce related disaster) it doesn't have a comma key. :/ Also the T key doesn' work very well. Ugh.

One question I've been dealing with is whether to post brew updates as soon as I brew them. On the one hand I've been hoping to get more of a complete wrapup of each beer start to finish. On the other I've found that writing as soon as I brew acts as a really useful brew journal. Records of gravities, last minute substitutions, mishaps and so on. So I think I'm going to keep a record as I go unless it's a big project.

Brewday Catch Up

2010-12-29T12:53:00.000-08:00

I've been brewing up a storm. Many of these have been test-batches of some Belgians I want to try and work on, others are seasonal or session house beers. Some good, some not so good. Always a work in progress. Here is about 3 months worth of brewing.

Brother Russell's Dubbel

Repitched the yeast from the Chanterelle Belgian, which is certainly the best of the string of Belgians. O.G. 1070. Pale, Munich, Aromatic, Special B, and Caramunich, with blackened honey and amber candi syrup, and 3 oz each dried cherries and prunes at the end of the boil. Came out ok, but finished a little sweet, probably due to a little too much Special B and a little too cold a ferment. The blackened honey had a nice toasted marshmellow thing, but it would be better in, say, a Toddy Porter.

Tom Kha Tripel

Fresh yeast, Saf T-58. O.G. 1080. Pilsner, Special Aromatic, Caravienne and Wheat. Magnum and NZ Hallertau. Inverted Thai palm sugar, galangal, lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves. Decent attenuation, up around 80%. Nice and dry, good carbonation. A bit heavy on the lemongrass, 4" at the last 5 minutes was too much.

Cider

Picked up 10 gallons of cider this time. In secondary in the cellar until April or May when I'll bottle it. Given that the last batch is 2 for 2, that is, 1st place in the WA Mead and Cider Cup and Best in Class at the Evergreen State Fair, I have high hopes for the next batch!

Pumpkin Spice and Christmas Spice Ales

10 gallon batch. O.G. 1054. Pale, CaraAmber, Crystal 60, Extra Special Malt, Melanoidin, Roast Pumpkin, Pumpkin Seeds, and Invert Sugar. Northern Brewers and Kent Goldings. Windsor Ale Yeast. Spiced half with Pumpkin Pie spice soaked in Liquor 43, half with more gingery Christmas spices in Bourbon. Total nightmare to sparge, chundery and thick in the ferment, pain to clear, finally needing Isinglass. Going to have to use a stovetop partial mash next time to get the pumpkin to sparge better. Otherwise, fairly tasty on nitro.

Free Ballard! Secession Lager

10 gallon batch. O.G. 1050. 100% Gambrinus Organic Pilsner malt. Horizon and Sterlings, about 35 IBUs. Saf-23 dry lager yeast, then some Wyeast Bohemian Lager when the 23 was being sluggish. Currently lagering.

Yggdrasil Mk 1

The World Tree. Designed to be this year's Winter Ale. A jet black, 9% Belgian Strong Dark, oaked, with Aquavit Spices. O.G. 1090. Pale, Munich, Caramunich, Aromatic, Carafa II, Chocolate, and Special B. Magnum and Pacific Hallertauer. Homemade Amber and Dark Candi Syrup. Aquavit Spices in the last 5 min. Repitched T-58 Belgian yeast. Toasted oak chips for a week. Unfortunately I'm beginning to think the homemade candi syrup isn't wildly fermentable, and also that the T-58 is very temperature sensitive. FG was 1030 so I added the dregs of two bottles of Orval and left it to Brett itself for a while, maybe knock that gravity down a few points. Tried again, sort of.

Yggdrasil Mk II

Brewed it again, this time knocking it down to 1084 with the intention being that increased attenuation and lower FG would keep the alcohol level about the same. Dropped the amber and lessened the dark candi syrup and the Special B to make it more fermentable. Swapped the pale for pilsner malt for more maltiness. At the last minute I decided to do a double batch, splitting half off into a different beer. Thought the color would come out ok but it lightened up, the Dark Candi wasn't as effective a darkener as BeerSmith thought. So it's more of a Dubbel. Decided to wood age it, and so it got a 1oz stick of Palo Santo wood for three days. Spicy and intense! Currently in secondary. Can't wait to try it.

Ratatoskr

The horned squirrel that lives in the World Tree. The second half of Yggdrasil II: an English Nut Brown, appropriately enough. Designed as a little house beer. O.G. 1.050. Fermented with Windsor ale yeast. Crushed a half pound of Victory malt, steeped on the stove at 150 for 20 minutes, then added the strained liquid to the boil to add the needed biscuit malt that was absent in the main grain bill. About 25 IBUs, just some Nugget for bittering and that's it. Going into a keg tonight if I can get a move on it.

Iron Swan Stout

Needed a winter beer that was big but not too big, hoppy but not too hoppy, and what better to do than a big American Stout. 10 gallons. O.G. 1062. Pale, Munich, Aromatic, Flaked Barley, Black Patent, Roasted Barley, Chocolate Malt, Extra Special malt. Columbus and Cascade for hops, about 60 IBUS. Windsor Ale yeast. Serious water mods on this one, estimated that the pH, unaltered, would be 4.8 thanks to the lack of buffering minerals in Seattle's water. Took quite a lot of chalk and baking soda to buffer it to 5.3. Beer came out great! Very pleased with the first keg. Unfortunately I added some bourbon soaked oak chips into the second keg and, while drinkable, it's not nearly as good.

Up next: Ninja...

State of the Blog

2010-12-29T12:30:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since the last post. Too long in fact. Truth be told I just haven't felt like writing much lately. Like to say I've been busy, but I've not been any more than usual. It's time to get back in the saddle and get some posts up.

One of the interesting things I've observed over the months of writing this has been the slow changes in subject matter. Without our weekly CSA to provide a sort of forced creativity, the cooking posts have trailed off. Mostly because I haven't really felt like I've been cooking anything really interesting. Not to say I haven't been cooking some good things, but I've been doing a lot of last minute, make it up as I go along, what have I got in the fridge, kind of cooking. Also, the charcuterie posts have dwindled as we've been eating more near-vegetarian things in the last few months. We try to eat only quality meat, from farmers that we know and trust. But quality meat is expensive, so we're not eating a lot of it. Still, a little good bacon or some decent home made stock goes a long way.

Certainly the brewing projects have been a major part of this blog, and I have been brewing up a storm in these last few months. Sadly, I've failed to post a lot of them. I'm sure this is disappointing to those of you who might read this for those recipes, but it also hurts me. I didn't realize how I valued the immediate record of the minor changes and screw ups that occurred on the brew day. So I plan to get those back in order.

Anyhow, here's to another year and another 200 posts. Well ok, probably 50 this year. Let's shoot for one a week.

Cold Frames (Winter Comes)

2010-10-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

"The days are getting shorter, the air is getting colder, and while you sip your rum and coke, kid, you're just getting older." - Jason Webley, Winter.

I've been thinking a lot about the upcoming Winter. Apart from the fact that it's likely to be horrendous, (for Seattle anyway), I've actually really appreciated having noticeably different seasons again. South Florida has two seasons, the Wet Season (aka Hurricane Season) and the Dry Season (aka 'Winter'). But here, trees change colors, plants flower and then die, mushrooms begin to pop up everywhere with the first late-Summer rains, the sun tracks lower and increasingly weakly across the sky, and growth is notably stunted in most of my remaining garden plants. It smells differently this time of year, and it makes me realize: Winter Comes.

First up, after harvest I decided to repot my hops. They were rootbound, and I was thinking of different ways to get cheap, large pots to put them in. Solution: 18 gallon Laundry Tubs from Fred Meyer, $5 each. Now they're sitting pretty in much bigger pots, with some fresh potting soil. Hopefully the harvest will be better next year.

The tomatoes began to show serious signs of Late Blight about three weeks ago. We let them vine ripen as long as we could, but we got a sunny weekend day and decided it was time. So we picked all the tomatoes that were in good shape, ripe or green, and have been storing them. They're slowly ripening away inside, and they're pretty darn tasty. My guess is they'll last at least another month.

The basil that was planted with them and spent the entire summer kindof sad and stunted suddenly took off. Then two nights ago it was 38 degrees. Now they look pretty sad. One last round of pesto and that's that. Got a few more zucchinis too, but they were getting pretty serious powdery mildew, so I pulled them. Not wanting a glut of zukes I only planted two plants. Unfortunately, at the end they seemed to put up only female flowers so while there were several proto-zukes possible, I couldn't pollinate them. Lost quite a few that way.

With Summer's veg wrapping up I was faced with a decision. One option would be to let some of the beds go fallow, planting a cover crop of Rye, Vetch, Peas, and so on. Then mow that down in the Spring, mulch it on in, and arrange some cloches to get things off to a good start in, say, April. Some portion of the beds could also be planted with hardy, overwintering crops like leeks and kale.

But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that I'd like to see what I could grow in our maritime winter. We tend to rely heavily on the supermarket during the Winter, importing bright and shiny fruits and vegetables from far, far away. But it wasn't always like that. What about here? Maybe I could manage some fresh salads past the New Year? Maybe with a little thought and a little effort I can grow a lot of my own food this season, and store the rest in the form of my potatoes, and root veg from the Farmer's Market.

So step one was acquiring plants. I signed up for a Winter Plant Start CSA through Cascadian Edible Landscapes. These folks are really friendly and helpful, and you can usually find them at the Ballard Farmer's Market selling plant starts in the Spring, right up until the first berry harvests begin. I love their idea of a plant start CSA. The investment helps them plant without needing bank loans and to plant more of what people actually want, and it removes some of the guesswork of sales. We get a box of great starts, picked to be just the sorts of things that will grow really well, right here, right now. For about $30 we got, near as I can remember:

Six Std. Broccoli starts
Six Mixed Variety Broccoli as well
Six Collards
Six Asst. Kales
Six 'Eros' Endive
Two pounds of organic cover crop seeds
Two heads of seed garlic
A start of Sorrel

Plus I picked up some leeks and six Brussels Sprouts starts at Swansons. Couple that with some Mild Mustard Green seeds and Mache seeds and I've got the Winter Garden going.

I managed to find enough pots for the kales, collards, broccoli, and brussels. Frankly, if it stunts the kales or collards I'll consider it a blessing. I pulled the big Red Russian kales that grew up all Summer from random seeds in a mesclun greens mix. They were huge, over three feet tall and several feet across. This provided shade for lettuce underneath during the Summer, but by now we were sick and tired of kale, and shade was no longer our friend. They had to go. Added some of Walt's Organic Rainy PNW Blend in and planted mache and mustard greens in its place. The scattering of salad seeds began to pop up all over, which made me happy.

Then the squirrels came.

It's that time of year where they bury little caches of food around, digging up any patch of open looking dirt. Scattering and mauling my little lettuces. Grrr.

The solution appeared one afternoon when I drove by a neighbor's house. They were in the midst of some remodeling and there, on the street corner, were two sliding glass doors and a 'Free' sign. The wheels began to turn and I ran back and hauled them into the garage.

Cold Frames! Basically, cheap mini-greenhouses. A solar oven for plants. The glass traps light and keeps excess wind and rain out. On colder nights, or if it snows, the plants will be significantly warmer and protected from the harshest of Winter. With any luck I'll have salad through February, and be able to start plants earlier in the Spring. Ideally I'll get tomatoes in a couple weeks earlier, without resorting to my semi-effective penny-conscious cloche, and have a head start on other things as well.

So this weekend I got some lumber, conscripted a friend and got to building.

The basic idea is that it's a collar that sits on top of the existing raised bed. In fact, it's exactly the same as the bed, with a few minor adjustments. To make two, 2' x 6' frames I needed:

two big old thick sliding glass doors
four 2" x 12" x 8'
two 2" x 6" x 8'
two 4" x 4" x 8'
3" wood screws
six 6' long 1" diameter sections of foamy pipe insulation

Basically, cut the 12" plywood to a 6' section and a 2' section. That's the sides of the base. Cut the 4x4 into four 12" sections and four 16" sections. These are the corners. Screw the 2' sections onto the 4x4s, one short one on one end and one long one on the other. Then screw the 6' sections of 12" onto the 4x4s, front and back, forming the frames. Cut the 6" boards into 6' and 2' sections. Screw the 6' sections onto the back side of the frames, where the 16" 4x4s stick up. This creates a slope that will allow rain to drain off the doors. Cut the remaining 2' long 6" boards on the diagonal, and screw the triangular pieces down on the sides. Then run around and staple the pipe insulation around the edges. This isn't so much to make it more airtight, as it is to protect the glass. I don't want to have to clean up a broken sliding door from my lettuces. The frames really don't need to be airtight. Which is good, because fine woodworking this was not...

The frames just sit on top of the existing beds. When it's cold out, say it's snowing or we have a cold, clear night, I can close them. The rest of the time they get propped open a bit with some removable sections of scrap 4x4. This keeps them from getting too hot and humid. Once the rain really starts up I'll open them completely every few days to water everything. To muck around inside them, pick things, weed, etc., I can prop them up against the siding of the garage and they seem pretty secure. The glass is really, really thick and heavy.

Hopefully they'll work out. Unfortunately, there's nowhere in the yard that gets really great full sun, so I hope the added shade from the lip of the frame doesn't hurt too much. It's a balancing act between providing space for the plants to grow tall, and shading them while they're younger. They have about 12" of headroom in the front and closer to 20" in the back. But one of the cool things about this is that conceivably these are just basically planter boxes, so in the future I could always put them in the yard as such, if say, there isn't enough light for them to work well where they are or if we move somewhere with a spot of full sun.

As for flaws, I overbuilt them a bit. They'll last a while but they take two people to move. And the glass is heavy, and I'd like an easier way to open them up fully. I may also paint the inside black, to harness more heat, or coat it with tinfoil to reflect some light into the darker corners.

So that's the situation. Will I have fresh Salad in February? We'll see how it works out.

Experiment: Belgian Candi Syrup

2010-09-27T14:32:00.000-07:00

Most homebrewers are taught, or have somehow come to believe that sugar, plain refined sucrose, is the devil. It makes your beer "cidery". It's a relic of the old days. Of a time of poor ingredients and even poorer methods. It smacks of the sort of cost-shaving that is the hallmark of The Big Guys, added to save a few pennies at the expense of real flavor and "real" beer.

Across the pond, well, outside the confines of the Reinheitsgebot at least, brewers have long known that yes, sometimes you could save a dime by using sugar but you can also add character to a beer. In fact, sugar allows you to do some things that are much more difficult to do with all grain brews, and to achieve flavors unavailable from malt. That these sugars and syrups have left such a mark on the brewers of England and Belgium is shown by the fact that many continue to use brewing sugars, even after changes to tariffs and tax structures have made the sugar much more expensive in comparison to malt than it once was.

Though there are some notable Belgian brewers who do not use sugar, almost all do. And for good reason. Sugar, and here I mean plain sucrose, will ferment out almost completely. This means you can add alcohol without adding body, a hugely important characteristic in the effervescent, strong, and yet satisfying beers of Belgium. The monks call this balance 'digestibility', a character that everyone should try to emulate whenever brewing a Belgian. Without some serious skills, equipment, ingredients and practice, it is very difficult to get the degree of attenuation seen in most Belgian strong beers, typically more than 80%, without the use of sugar. Failure to reach that level of attenuation results in a heavy, cloying beer that seems to sit in your belly like a gargoyle in a cathedral basement, rather than a spray of Summer sunlight through an Abbey stained-glass window. (Preferably not a spray of Summer colors on an Abbey window. Always in moderation.) Point is, you should always be adding 10-20% sugar to your Belgians, and I like to add up to 10% in British beers as well.

But not just any sugar will do. Much has been said about how "Belgians use beet sugar" and that that somehow makes it clearly superior. Allow me to say poppycock.

Poppycock!

At the level of refinement we see table sugar, the clear white crystals, sucrose is sucrose. It's a fructose and a glucose showing a little too much PDA and that's it. Any 'character' between the sugars would be the result of impurities, which you just don't see much of in refined sugar. Sugar is sugar, cane or beet, and I've not seen anything to convince me otherwise.

However, Belgian brewers are known for using something called 'Candi Sugar'. This has been available for a while in rock form, and more recently in syrup form. In it's lightest form, clear candi sugar, it's basically just the exact same damn thing as table sugar. If you buy those little clear rocks you are being suckered into paying roughly 10 times too much. Just use table sugar. If you really, absolutely must have it in little rock form, go ahead, make a simple syrup and dangle a string in it for a week or two. Rock candy will form, just like in elementary school. That's how they do it. Really. It isn't magic. Clear Candi sugar is just table sugar. Don't waste your money.

The darker colors on the other hand are something more special. Without them you really can't make a proper Dubbel or Strong Dark. Many of the abbey brewers will mash in with pilsner malt, maybe a little wheat or carpils, and then add color and flavor solely with the darker syrups. Fortunately, in the last few years Dark Candi, inc. has made them available to homebrewers. But how special is dark candi sugar?

It's just caramel after all, how hard can it be?

Well, yes you could take plain sugar and caramelize it until it is really dark and you'll have something that will have some interesting dark caramel flavors. But you'll get more toffee and burnt caramel, like you might find in a nice Toddy Porter, than you'll get dark fruit, cherry, rummy flavors. Also it will probably turn into a rock when you're done.

To really get at the dark fruit and chocolate notes in dark candi sugar, a little chemistry is needed. If you were just to caramelize the sugar as above, you're using pyrolysis to break down the sucrose under heat, at temperatures about 320 degrees F. But the flavors in the darker candi syrups come also from a different process, our good friend the Maillard Reaction. Here the sugar browns through the combination of heat and complex reaction with amino acids, producing similar yet distinct flavors from caramelization. It's the reason bread crust browns and tastes good, for example.

Poking around on the internet one day I came across this thread on Homebrewtalk. Though I'd read about this sugar chemistry in both Radical Brewing and Brew Like A Monk, I'd never tried to actually make some dark candi sugar from scratch. In the past I'd just made do with inverting and deeply caramelizing various sugars, which frankly works fairly well. But this looked like a fun experiment.

The basic idea is that you're making a syrup with the notable addition of an ammoniac compound, in this case our good friend and common yeast nutrient di-ammonium phosphate (DAP). The DAP breaks down, providing free nitrogen and a phosphoric acid to supercharge the maillard browning process. Once either boiled off or consumed in the reaction, the ammonia is gone, leaving a funky dark maillard candi syrup.

Sweet!

Literally.

So I set out one afternoon to make a test batch or three.

The recipe I used was SnickASaurusRex's Sugar #5:

Over medium heat bring to a boil

2 Lbs Sugar
1 Cup Water
3 tsp DAP

Raise this to the terminal temperature of 290F. At 290F begin stirring and add in:

1 Cup Water

Continue stirring until the sugars are dissolved. Again, bring the solution up to 290F over medium heat. At 290F begin stirring and add in:

1 Cup of Water

Stir this until the sugars are dissolved and the temperature starts to rise a couple degrees. This Should be right at or just above soft ball (240F). This is when the syrup is done. Stop the cooking by submerging the pan in cool water or by transferring the syrup to a preheated mason jar.

So I got everything together and started boiling it on the stove.

And it was a complete failure.

A word on yeast nutrients. Frankly, there's a poor naming convention with regards to what is a "yeast nutrient", "yeast energizer" and so on. For this you need DAP, straight pure DAP. If it's clear, it's probably DAP. If it's brown and labeled 'Yeast Nutrient' it's one of the blends, which probably does have some DAP in it, but also has dead yeast cells, vitamins, and other things in it. It will not work for this.

I used some "Yeast Nutrient" because that is what I had around. As you can see, at the various temperatures where the reaction should have been taking place, it wasn't. Oh well, waste not want not. I poured it in a preheated mason jar and later inverted it, caramelized it up a bit more, and used it in a little British Fresh Hop Bitter which turned out delicious.

Once back from the store with some proper DAP I set out again. As you can see, this time I got a much more marked color progression. The first syrup I took a bit far, maybe 295 and it has an edge of burnt bitterness, but also exhibits dark stone fruit, plums, cherries, and a deep dark rumminess. I think it will be great in a Strong Dark.

One problem though was that, despite my best candymaking techniques, I could see small sugar crystals starting to form. This wouldn't be shelf-stable indefinitely. Yes, you could just make this on the day of brewing and pitch it right in at the end of the boil. But I figure it's better to make it beforehand and have it ready when you need it. No one wants to clean a boilover of this stuff, brought about by a busy and inattentive brewer.

So I set out again and made a batch of Amber, bringing it up to only 280 degrees. This time, at the end when I added the water back in I also added a tablespoon of tartaric acid. Bringing the whole mess back to a boil with this acid addition partially inverted it, meaning that some of the sucrose broke down into simpler sugars, fructose and glucose, which act to impede crystallization. This one was a much, much smoother syrup.

Just for fun I put a pound of honey on the back burner and caramelized the hell out of it. Unfortunately I was wrapped up in the candi sugar experiment, and it went a bit far. But it's still got a really interesting flavor, which I'd describe as burnt marshmellows with an edge of honey.

Finally some advice:

Ventilation. The syrup will pump out ammonia in the early stages. Don't take a big whiff, and make sure you open windows or run your stove fan. It was...intense.

Fresh air good!

Choose the right pot. You want one with a thick, conductive bottom and high walls. The syrup will bubble up and I promise you, you don't want a caramel napalm spill. I've got a nice high wall 4-quart All-Clad that works great. If it's too big you'll get a hot spot in the middle, which could make for uneven browning and probably darker syrup than you're shooting for.

Prevent crystals. Stir in the sugar really well at the beginning but stop stirring once it comes to a boil. You can take a pastry brush and some water and wipe down any sugar crystals from the side of the pan, if they're left there they could provide nucleation points for crystal growth later. I do recommend inverting the syrup when you're done, or you could just add a few tablespoons of corn syrup (glucose) at the end.

Preheat your jar if you're using glass. Let the syrup cool to at least boiling temp before pouring it in the jar and be sure to fill the jar with hot water for a few minutes first. Otherwise it may shatter from heat shock. Broken Glass. Scalding caramel. Bad news.

I'll be trying out my syrups in a series of brews to come, stay tuned!

You Say Potato, I Say Ye Chick'n Of The Dirte

2010-09-17T13:37:00.000-07:00

So the Potato Project is officially finished. In terms of rigorous scientific method it was a total disaster. Which is why all my evidence will be of the best kind: anecdotal.

I managed a harvest of about 18 lbs of Yukon Gold and Purple potatoes from two 1 lb. packs of starter potatoes. Not bad, but not great. I think I can do better next year.

Here, in short, is what I learned.

Potatoes are really, really easy to grow. Seriously. I neglected the hell out of them and they still grew just fine. Barely watered them all Summer. Never fertilized them once. Subjected them to daily psychological and emotional abuse. The soil was just a 2:1 mix of garden dirt and compost, without any lime added to soften it and no fertilizer. And yet they struggled through it. Lesson learned: Potatoes appear to be immune to psychological torture. And yeah, I probably should water them more next time. Maybe a dose of fertilizer wouldn't hurt either. But damn, potatoes sure are hardy critters.
Potatoes grow just fine in whatever you put them in. Just plant them near the bottom and mound away. In terms of yield, I didn't notice a difference between the boxes and the grain sack. The potatoes in the plastic tubs were larger, so I guess the tubs win. But those potatoes were planted a couple weeks before the rest, so they had a head start. Lesson learned: plant earlier. Around St Patty's.
The plastic tubs and the grain bag held up just fine and will be used again next year. The cardboard boxes though... Ok. They held up just fine, in that they more or less kept all the soil in and supported the plants as they grew. But the bottom did eventually rot out around them, so moving them once planted: not an option. Also my Weedwhacker did a number on the cardboard, so watch out for that one. But it was nice to chuck the boxes and spent plants into the compost bin all at once at harvest time. No fuss, no muss. Lesson learned: the plastic bins are probably the best, but cardboard worked out just fine. I seem to be racking up old tires right now, so I may try the tire stacking method next year too.
I recommend harvesting on a sunny day if possible. It's much more pleasant to dig around in the dirt and the potatoes are easier to spot.. Also, they face less chance of molding or anything else untoward.
Growing potatoes in boxes is a great way to plant them without having to dig up your landlord's lawn or put in a bed. I'd say if you put a good tarp down underneath (to help with cleanup) you could do this pretty much anywhere.

So the harvest is now in a big paper bag, sitting in the house in a corner. You need to keep the newly harvested potatoes in the dark and reasonably warm for a couple weeks in order to "cure" them. The skin thickens up and dries out a bit, giving them a much longer shelf life.

Not that they'll last that long. They're delicious.

Died back and ready to harvest!

Rotten right down to the core.

Digging Yukons is fun. They're like buried gold bars. Arrr, treasure!

Sometimes I can take OK photographs.

Brewday: Double Batch - Chanterelle Belgian Blonde / Seattle-Belgique

2010-09-08T10:39:00.000-07:00

Vacation, while fun, did put a ripple in the ol' beer production line. Time to get brewing again!

In Miami I always brewed Belgians in the late Summer, early Fall. The reason being that we airconditioned our house down to 80 and there was always a chance that a hurricane could swoop in and we'd lose power for an indefinite period. I'd start them off in my chill-chest, it's best to start Belgians off in the mid-60's and let them climb on their own, but due to space issues they'd secondary at room temp. So I brewed things that could take the heat: Saisons and big Belgians. Starting with a Blonde or a Dubbel, by brewing back to back I could repitch the yeast four times or so, growing an impressive yeast cake before the final brew of the season, a big, Belgian Strong Dark. Remember, in Belgian beers attenuation is king. Keep your yeast happy and plentiful, then let them do their job, or you'll end up with cloyingly sweet beer.

Here I don't have to worry about hurricanes or 80 degree houses. My place is 66 right now, which is just about perfect for an ambient temp ferment. Jumping on the chance of a nice, sunny day I decided to brew a double batch to make up for a month of non-brewing. By a bit of crafty use of the kettle, I was able to brew two very different beers from the same mash.

The first beer was designed to be a very typical Belgian Blonde. Now, normally my rule with Belgians is: start with a good base recipe, then mess with one thing. Mix it up, get creative, but if you tweak too many things you can end up with off-balanced chaos. Typically the easiest way to do this is just to play with the sugar, which should constitute at 10-20% of your fermentables.

But for this beer I wanted just a plain nice Blonde, because it is going to be this year's Chanterelle Mushroom beer. Last year I brewed a Chanterelle Golden that turned out pretty great, even taking Best in Show at last years' Cascade Brewer's Cup. Recently popped a bottle and as it aged it has taken on strange, saisony characteristics. Strange, but still good.

Nevertheless it has some flaws, some imbalances, and so I'm tweaking it a bit. I want the beer to be clearer, lighter, and more straightforward so that the Chanterelles will really come to the forefront. Now if I can just find some freaking Chanterelles... We went up to the North Cascades last weekend and managed to find a few tiny button sized Chanties. They're still a week or two out. At least I hope so. I don't want to have to buy them at the $17/lb they commanding in the market right now.

On the day of brewing I decided to double the recipe and pull a second beer out of my hat. A Northwest IPA / Blonde that I'm code-naming Seattle-Belgique. It's in the vein of New Belgium's Belgo IPA and Stone's Cali-Belgique; a Northwest IPA, but blond-yellow and with spicy Belgian yeast character. Maybe I can finally break my streak of mediocre IPAs? Due to the last minute decision to double the recipe I had to make a few substitutions. See the note below.

Chanterelle Blonde / Seattle-Belgique Double Brew

10.5 gallons, All Grain, 70% efficiency
Est. O.G. 1.068. Act. O.G. 1.067 for the Chanterelle, 1.070 for the IPA.
Est. F.G. hoping for 1.012-1.014
ABV estimates: 7%-7.5%
SRM: 6
IBU: Chanterelle = 26, IPA = 48 IBU

20 lbs US 2-Row (could try US Pilsner or Continental Pils too)
8 oz CaraPils
8 oz Wheat Malt
8 oz MFB Special Aromatic
8 oz Munich
8 oz Honey Malt

NOTE: the 5 adjunct malts were because of last minute substitutions and my not wanting to go to the store. If I had my way I'd use either 1lb Carapils or Wheat (building a little body and head retention), and either 1 lb Aromatic or Munich (adding a little color and maltiness).

Mash in at 150, mash out at 163.

Water modifications (Seattle-Tolt water):

Mash: 1 tsp Chalk, 1/4 t gypsum, 1/2 CaCl2, 1/2 Epsom salts, 1/4 salt
Boil: 1 1/4 tsp chalk, 1/4 t gypsum, 3/4 CaCl2, 1/2 Epsom salts

This should create a nice background level of minerals, with a 1:1 chloride and sulfate ratio and RA fit for a 4-9 SRM beer. If I was just doing one or the other, I'd tweak this to balance toward chloride for the Chanterelle beer and sulfate for the IPA.

Collected 12 gallons for the boil. Added another 1.8 gallons of water about half an hour in once boilover danger had passed.

90 minute boil:

1 oz Magnum (leaf) @ 15%AA @ First Wort Hop
2 whirlfloc tabs and 2 t yeast nutrient at 15 min remaining
Add 4 lbs Invert Sugar at 10 min. (Note: don't buy it (Lyle's Golden Syrup) and don't waste your money on "Clear Belgian Candi Sugar". Make your own, invert sugar is easy and cheap. Or just add table sugar right into the boil if you're lazy.)
1 oz Willamette (pellet) @ 6% AA @ 5 min remaining.

Now comes the crafty bit. If you're capable of cooling less than the whole batch, run 5.25 gallons off through your chiller. That's the basic Blonde. Now bring the remaining volume back for 10 minutes more of really intense boil. From here on out you could add spices, more sugar, fruit, or as I did, hops:

1 oz Cascade @ 10
1 oz Centennial @ 10
1 oz Cascade @ 1
1 oz Centennial @ 1 min remaining.
1 oz Willamette (dry hop - 5 days)

Then cool this second half as your IPA. Oxygenated both and pitched a packet of Saf-T58 dry Belgian yeast, properly rehydrated in a cup with some warm water, GoFerm, and yeast nutrient a half hour before pitching. Try to start them off at 66 degrees or so and then let them climb (within reason). I had some chilling issues due to warm ground water and probably pitched a bit higher. Just don't pitch the yeast at 80 or you'll have a world of nasty phenols and fusel alcohols.

Beers are fermenting away in the basement at 66 ambient (certainly a couple degrees warmer inside the carboys.) Two week primary, and the IPA will get a 5 day dry-hopping of Willamette at the end of its primary. Then rack and into the lager fridge for two weeks' cold conditioning at 36. Then bottling in corked Belgian bottles, bottle conditioned to about 3.5 volumes co2 with a fresh hit of yeast. The BJCP says 1.9 to 2.4 volumes, but that's BS. They just don't want bottle bombs, which, having experienced them while judging, I can understand. Just remember: thicker, bigger bottles if you're going over 3 volumes.

Assuming I forage/buy Chanterelles in the next two weeks or so I'll take 1 lb of the mushrooms, chop them up fine, cover with vodka in a mason jar, and stash somewhere quiet for two weeks. Then add the mushroom schnapps to taste at bottling.

Garden Update: Late Summer

2010-09-07T13:30:00.001-07:00

Right, it smells like Fall outside now, so it's time for a garden update. It's apparent that my beds need more compost and maybe some moss or something, the 2:1 ratio of Veg soil and Cedar Grove compost tends to drain really quickly and doesn't hold moisture as well as I'd like. A project for the Spring.

After a wet and cold June some of the plants did better than others. The clear winner is the Red Russian Kale. It grows like crazy, needs almost no maintenance, fertilizer, watering, or care. Nothing really seems to eat it. Interestingly, it came in a seed packet of Mesclun Greens that I'd planted for salads. Everything else did fairly poorly, but the Kale plants are several feet tall. They actually serve a cool purpose though, the wide fronds shaded my more fragile lettuces from the worst of the Summer sun. But they also shaded the chiles I'd planted, stunting them. Oh well. Looks like I'm going to be buying chiles in the future. The zucchinis did pretty well this year. Produced a few good sized ones, but not so many that we were totally sick of them. Just flowered again too, may get another one or two zukes out them still. The Yard Long Beans were a complete disaster. Should have planted them much, much earlier. But the ones I'd planted in June got sad and diseased in the wet and cold, while the ones I started inside to replace them didn't take off until the heat of August, by which time it's just too late. I need a grow light inside to do starts, we just don't get enough light in the early Spring. The Yard Longs need more heat, and full sun. Maybe I'll plant them in the middle of the front lawn next year. Because they are delicious.

We'd planted Ruby Spinach in-between some Sugar Snap Peas with the idea that they'd be companion plants; the extra nitrogen from the peas would help the spinach out. Boy did it ever. By the time they bolted, the spinach was taller than Meredith. We finally pulled the stalks, stripped the leaves, quickly blanched, packaged, and froze the remaining spinach; netting us several pounds of frozen spinach. Unfortunately, shaded somewhat by the huge spinach, the peas developed a powdery mildew. Spray took care of it, but the peas went through the wringer. Only got a few more pods off the plants before they were done for the season. They'd done well though, I snacked on them every time I went out to check on the garden. The leeks have reached full size and are starting to send up flowers. They didn't get as big as I wanted, but my green onions struggled too. I think the soil mix, either pH or nutrients, is not quite right for alliums. Have to look into that one.

The tomatoes have grown like crazy! This is my first time trying the English hot-house trellis method and I have to say: hell yeah. They're up over the garage roof. It's actually a cool setup here: the garage shades them a bit in the morning, yes, but makes up for it with reflected heat and light from the afternoon sun. Once they hit the eaves I just let them hang freely back down.

You can also track the season on the vines. At the very bottom are the first tomatoes that set back in May. Most of them have ripened and met their tasty fates. Then there's a spot with a lot of dropped buds: June, where everything refused to set. Then further up you start seeing tomatoes again until you hit August's growth, with many many set tomatoes hanging from the very top.

As usual, Seattle grew the hell out of the Cherry Tomatoes. We planted Sungold this year and they are rocking. Easily 100 tomatoes. The Prudence heirloom did very poorly in June, but has more than made up for it during August's heat. The Black Prince set some very early tomatoes, many of which were, ahem, kind of lewd.

The San Marzano Romas started off slow, but have now set a good thirty or so tomatoes. Unfortunately they don't all want to ripen at once, meaning no giant harvest and sauce canning day.

Otherwise the herbs have done well. Parsley is rocking right now, and the mint held up. The dill though. What the heck.

It shot up these long stalks, with almost no leafy fronds. So much for cooking and pickling with it. So I've let it go to seed, at least I can harvest dill seed. I planted it in the same pot as some pickling cucumbers, and they did fairly well this year. I probably harvested a good 10 pounds of pickling cukes from them, ending up with around 8 quarts or so of pickles. Made a 4 quart batch of my grandmother's Bread and Butter pickle recipe, which should be enough to grace our sandwiches until next year.

The hops have been a disaster this year. They got a start in May, but then the cold June stunted their new growth. The bines that were already up never really grew like crazy. Interestingly, the only one not to have sprouted by June, the Chinooks, grew like crazy afterwards, had the best growth, the most and biggest cones.

But the basic story is that they are rootbound. The pots are too small, the nutrients just aren't there, and they need to be watered constantly. Consequently they had stunted growth, insect problems, and bine die-offs. I've got to come up with something better for next year. Maybe half-wine barrels or 30 gallon pots. Of course, planting them in the ground would be nice too. I may get enough hops for a fresh hop beer this year, but it will probably be an English Bitter and not an American IPA, if you catch my drift.

Moving Forward

So we head into Fall and Winter. The daylight is shrinking, rain is moving in, and our Miami cat is constantly seeking out warm laps and scowling at us like it's our fault the world is so cold. In the garden we're eating the leeks, green onions, and last of the zukes. The potatoes have been harvested and are curing, though I'm already using the tiny ones as new potatoes. The Kale will outlive us all. The tomatoes are still producing, we'll have loads through September and probably well into October. I've planted more weird lettuces, and about two dozen more overwintering leek starts, so we'll have leeks all Spring (by the time the storage onions are gone). Planted some Brussells Sprouts as a sort of challenge to Meredith: make them edible! We've signed up for a Winter Plant Start CSA with Cascadian Edible Landscapes. Pickup is Friday, I'll let you know what we get. With the tomatoes still in and one bed full of leeks I'm not sure where I'll put things...

Fermentation Update: September

2010-09-07T12:25:00.000-07:00

Right, so I've had some serious writer's block these last few months and it's been hard to motivate myself to sit down and post. Two posts in August and July. Ugh. Well, no time like the present.

One of the things I've been intending to start up is a sort of monthly update on things. For example, I usually post when I brew something, but I rarely come back later and talk about how it turned out, how it aged, did in competitions, and so on. So here goes.

The Hefeweizen Glucose Experiment

This one came out spectacularly. I'm quite pleased with it, except for its unusually low gravity. Something is up, either with my grain mill or my base malt, but I've been dropping down from my usual 75% efficiency to somewhere near 70%. The last brew I did I calculated at 70% and it came out bang on. So that's the plan, until I can get this back under control. Otherwise this is simply a great German Hefe, and much much easier than a complex decoction mash schedule. Great Success.

The Sake

The Sake continues to age well. Don't like the Genshu strength, going to dilute it next time. And it's a bit lactic. But still, it's very passable sake. It took Best In Class at the Evergreen State Fair last week. Of course it's also the first and only sake they've ever had entered. BUT they're leaving that most mythical and elusive of BJCP categories, Category 29 (Sake) in for next year, so I encourage everyone in WA, and even in other parts of the US, to enter it. Let's get an amateur sake competition built up!

The 2009 Hard Cider

I've been very pleased with how this one turned out. Bottling via a keg, with a concentrated growler of sweet cider for sweetness made one hell of a session draught cider. It took Best in Class at the Evergreen State Fair a week ago. I'm making another batch in a month or so, and this time I'm thinking of getting twice the cider and making one more of a "Foighten' Cider" this year.

Fustigator Eisbock 2010

The dopplebock ferment is done, got it down from 1.094 to 1.023 (9% ABV) before I racked it over. It was then dropped down to 36 over about 5 days and has been sitting there for two weeks. By my rough calculations:

0.09% ABV x about 4.5 gallons before icing = 0.405 gallons of straight alcohol

icing out 1.5 gallons of water we get:

0.405 / 3 gallons remaining after icing = 0.135% ABV or 13.5% alcohol.

Of course it will almost certainly be less than that, the ice removal is never 100% water. Still, it's going to be at least 12%. Two more weeks in the lager fridge, then I'll keg it, freeze it, and use a jumper cable to transfer the eisbock to a 3 gallon keg. Then another month lagering at 36. Then carbonation, and bottling with my BeerGun. Early tastes had it much hoppier than I'd planned on. Hope that calms down as it ages.

Helles Other People

I'm very pleased with this beer. It's clean, nice, hoppy and malty, just a refreshing light Summer beer. If I've got a gripe it's that it's a bit low on body. Maybe I'll mash it a bit hotter next time. Also, I think I'll swap out the Munich for MFB Special Aromatic. It also doesn't have the floral aroma hop complexity of Chuckanut's. Probably just the result of sub-par homebrew hops.

BOOM-Sticke!

This one is still a work in progress. Some of the hops I used weren't as fresh as I'd like, and I'm now convinced that my open-top conical will oxidize the beer if I brew less than 10 gallons in it. Due to either the hops, the conical, or both it had oxidation problems. I think the rye is a bit excessive too. May drop it down to a pound or two and up the munich and aromatic. May use Spalt next time too, if I can find any.

The All Aromatic Oktoberfest

This beer was really quite fantastic. Unfortunately, the entire keg was drained at Beerstock 2010 this year, so if you were there you got to try it. Otherwise, sorry. But the real story is that this is the maltiest damn thing I've ever brewed. It was clean, malty sweet but dry and fully attenuated, pleasant hop levels, nice color (if a bit light). That MFB Special Aromatic is great stuff. Next time I may add just a quarter pound or so of CaraMunich, but otherwise I'm not changing a thing about this. The only problem is that it's now September and I don't have time to brew it again for Oktoberfest. Oh well.

Upcoming:

Dandelion Belgo-Pyment - Dandelion Wine with honey, grape juice, and Belgian Strong yeast. Currently in mid-fining. Post when it's finished.
Chanterelle Belgian Blonde 2010
Seattle-Belgique IPA
Brother Russell's Dubbel 2010
Brother Russell's Tripel 2010
Brettanomyces Russellensis (a 100% Brett beer)
Punk! 2010
Fresh Hop beer of some kind (Maybe. My hops are a total disaster this year)
Mead Day 2010 - a Bochet Mead and maybe a Ginger/Lemongrass Sparkling Hydromel.
Cider Pressing 2010
Yggdrasil

Update: Hefeweizen Glucose Experiment

2010-08-13T17:00:00.001-07:00

Quick post because I'm going on vacation in a few hours and I really should be packing. Just popped the first 22 of my Glucose Hefe Experiment.

In two words:

In more words, it's quite to my liking, thank you very much. The key here is balance. In the past I've made very clovey hefes, but in this one the banana marches in and compliments the clove. Neither is too much (too much clove is harshly phenolic, too much banana becomes bubblegummy.) Body's good, not too thin. Head retention could be a bit better, but the carbonation is still a bit low (it's only been in bottles four days). Bubbles are still large too, as you can see in the photo. Again, it's only been in bottles a couple days and it only had about 2 hours in the fridge. Hops are just right, i.e. not present, just a hint of bitter dovetailing the clove.

It's not crazy or audacious, it's just a really good, basic German Hefeweiss. Honestly, give it a week to finish carbonating and a week or two cold storage and it will be indistinguishable from Paulaner or Ayinger. Just have to work out my efficiency issue, or calculate at 70% next time I make it. Corrected the OG up to 1.048 with light DME, so finishing at 1.011 puts it at 4.8% ABV. Could be about a quarter to a half percent stronger for my tastes.

Brewed this as my vacation/Summer beer and I can't wait to hang out in the sunny High Sierras, drinking this lakeside. Case of 22's is coming with us, that's for sure. Rest of you will have to wait a week. Slice of lemon is optional, but I'll probably mock you.

Brewday: Hefeweizen (Glucose Experiment)

2010-08-02T21:00:00.000-07:00

Zymurgy had an great article in the May/June issue on brewing a Hefe with serious banana aroma. Well, Summer is here and I had the inclination: banana up my Hefeweizenation. The gist of the article is that by mashing low; low low, like 104 in a thin-mash low, you set up both the right pH and right temp to make the most of the maltase in your mash. In theory this will cause the enzymes to favor certain sugars, namely glucose, which the yeast will use later on to make an increased amount of isoamyl acetate, the ester we describe as 'Banana'. Hence: super banana hefe.

Well the original mash program I designed was a quick acid rest at 86, followed by a thick-decoction heated to 145, added back into the main mash shooting for 104, then heating the whole thing to 162 and 172. Complicated, considering I can't directly heat my mash-tun.

Then it hit me, the whole point of this is to increase the amount of glucose in the mash. What if I added glucose? And glucose is just Dextrose, which I have in abundance from sausage making. So I made a modified mash involving a 20 minute Ferulic Acid Rest (clove spice!) at 113, then a sacc mash at 152, mash out at 168. Add a half-pound of dextrose in the last few minutes of boil for (theoretically) increased banana. Much, much easier.

Gravity ended up low low low, efficiency below 70%. So I added 12 oz of Light DME to spike it back up. Pulled a quart or so of the wort and boiled the DME in it for 15 min. Then cooled and pitched. Wheat. Sheesh.

So here it went:

Recipe: Ninnygeddon Hefeweizen

Est 1.048. Act. 1.041 (corrected back up)
Est FG 1.011
ABV 4.5%
Est IBU 12
Est SRM 5

5 1/2 lbs Wheat Malt
2 lbs Pale Malt
1/2 lb MFB Special Aromatic
4 oz Caramel Wheat Malt
Rice hulls added at knock out, a few handfulls.

Mash in with an infusion to 113. Infusion to 152. Infusion to 168. Water mods were 1 tsp Calcium Chloride, 1/4 tsp Epsom Salts, 1/2 tsp chalk. This should buffer the mash but also provide enough calcium for the yeast while making a chloride/sulfite ratio that enhances the flavor. Add another half tsp of chalk into the mash to balance out the hardness and the calcium during the boil.

60 minute boil

@60 min - Sterling (pellet) 5.3% AA
Yeast nutrient at 15
1/2 lb Dextrose added last 10 min

Cool as best you can and pitch a hefe yeast. I did the Bavarian Blend, Wyeast 3056. I'd try to cool to 62, then let it raise itself to say 68. Cooler temps favor clove, warmer banana. This should balance the banana/clove. Unfortunately it was summer and my groundwater cooled to 70, so I managed to ferment a bit cooler but not as cool as I'd like. Don't ferment a hefe like a Belgian. Keep it cool. And 10 days or so max, then bottle. Don't bother with a secondary, keep the chunkies in solution.

UPDATE August 13, 2010

Brewday: Fustigator Eisbock

2010-07-14T13:00:00.000-07:00

Fustigate: (v) To beat with a club.

That about sums up an Eisbock. An already strong Doppelbock that has been ice distilled, concentrated by removing the frozen water and leaving the concentrated beer behind. The last one I brewed was over seven years ago, and it is still probably the most widely remembered brew I've done. It was good, even if my stoner ex-housemates unplugged the lagering fridge while I was away for a month in Norway. But I think seven years' experience will make this next one great.

Step one in making an eisbock is planning. You can't just ice a normal doppelbock, it will be cloyingly sweet. You should brew a doppel expressly designed to ferment as dry as possible, so that when it's concentrated it sweetens up nicely. Also, make sure you have plenty of yeast around. I brewed up a Helles and an Oktoberfest just to be starters for this one. By the end I had just under a half quart of solid Wyeast Continental Lager built up.

The base is German Pils and Munich, with a pound of CaraMunich. At the last minute I decided to add 6oz of Special B, a dark Belgian crystal malt. I think it will add a nice deep caramel complexity, but time will tell whether it also added too much caramel malt and over-sweetened it. Hops are way in the background on this one, about 28 IBU of Brewers Gold and Sterling, because that's what I had in the freezer. Shot for 9.5%, when it's been iced it should be up around 11%.

RECIPE: Fustigator Eisbock

ABV (pre-eisbocking): 9.25%-9.5%. Post Eisbocking: 11%ish.
O.G.: 1.094
F.G.: 1.022-24 probably, 1.020 if I'm lucky.
IBU: 28
SRM; 18

10 lbs German Pils (had to use Best, would have preferred Weyermann)
7 lb Munich (10L)
1 lb CaraMunich
6 oz Special B

Infusion mash to 144 for 20 minutes, then infusion to 156 for 30. Pulled a decoction to mashout at 168. The stepped infusion was due to my 5 gallon stovetop pot being too small for a proper single infusion of that much grain. You could do a single infusion at 154 easy, I just didn't feel like firing up the propane burner until the main boil.

Water adjustments were:

Mash: 2 tsp chalk, 3/4 tsp Calcium Chloride, 1/2 tsp Epsom salts, 3/4 tsp Baking Soda, 1/4 tsp salt.

Boil: 1 1/2 tsp calcium chloride, 1 tsp Epsom.

90 Min Boil.

1 oz Brewer's Gold (Pellet) @ 9.7% AA @ 60 min
1/2 oz Sterling (Pellet) @ 4.3% @ 30 min
whirlfloc tablet @ 15
1 t yeast nutrient @ 15

Cooled as much as possible using icewater in my plate chiller. Need a pump if I'm going to do better than 59. But I do have a new Stopper Thermowell, so I have accurate temp control again. After a couple hours it had cooled to 53. Racked off the cold-break and pitched my yeast. Fermenting away at 50.

I'll give it two or three weeks to ferment out, then a D-rest for a few days. Then rack it. Slowly drop it down to 35 and lager it for a month. Then rack into a keg. Into the chest freezer and I'll drop it to 19 degrees. Swirl the keg until noticeable icebergs have formed. Then I'll use a jump-tube to rack over into a 3 gallon keg. If all goes as planned, nothing will be left in the first keg but two gallons of ice. Then I'll lager the 3 gallon keg for another month, carbonate, and bottle the whole batch in 12oz'ers with my BeerGun. That's the plan, anyway.

Results: The Great Classic American Pilsner Off

2010-07-14T12:09:00.000-07:00

Back in February I brewed two Classic American Pilsners. One to a traditional cereal mash and 6-row malt, the other with a single infusion, flaked corn and 2-row. The object was to see whether the extra effort added anything to the brew, and whether it was worthwhile overall. Well, the last keg has kicked and the results are in.

The two beers were brewed just two days apart, using two packets of Saf-23 dry lager yeast. They were fermented for two weeks at 48, rising to 50ish. Then three days of 60 degree diacetyl-rest. They were then lagered for six weeks, kegged, carbonated for a week, and served.

I brought a growler of each to my homebrew club meeting that month and explained the experiment, doing it as a blind tasting. I'd say about 2/3 correctly identified which was which, but the group was pretty well split as to which they preferred.

The Traditional 6-Row Cereal Mash. Most noticeably this one somehow developed an unfortunate phenol, vaguely plasticky, bandaidy. My theory is that since I'd lost my Thermowell in the move I didn't cool it as well as I should have, and it started fermenting a little hot. So really, it wasn't a truly fair comparison. But the beer still had some things to recommend it. It poured a nice, very pale straw color, with a lasting white head. Slightly cloudy, chill haze from the 6-row no doubt. Just a bit sweet, somewhat corny. Floral hop in the nose, just a bit too much hop flavor and bitterness I think. Probably would scale back on the hops for both recipes, and swap out the domestic Hallertau for something else, maybe Sterling or Czech Saaz.

One thing I discovered, while out doing some work in the garden, was that this beer seriously benefited from the Green Bottle Effect. Just a few minutes in the sun brought out a hint of skunk, and though it sounds off-putting it really brought a nice balance to the beer. Next time I'd even consider putting the whole carboy out in the sun for 15 minutes or so before kegging.

The Modern 2-Row with Flaked Corn. This one fermented out much cleaner. It was a shade darker, and much clearer. That's the 2-row for ya. It was more malty, and more dry. The hops came out more clearly, and I wasn't happy with the profile. Again, I'd probably drop the IBUs down a bit and switch out for a cleaner hop. I won't be using US Hallertau for a while, maybe ever again. This one was my favorite of the two, but a lot of it was due to that weird phenol in the 6-row. It was much easier to brew too, so I guess this one was the winner.

In the future. Due to their being lagers, the experiment took several months. I'm thinking I'll try it again, but quickly this time, as simple Cream Ales for the short, hot Summer. Maybe put them on Nitro this time...

Release the swarm!

2010-06-25T08:32:00.000-07:00

It's been a slow year for my hops. The gray, rainy June stunted the vigorous growth of May, but they seem to be back on track. I also added some more fertilizer, in the form of an organic fertilizer tea, which has helped. I need a bigger pot for my Cascades, they're pretty rootbound. But the Chinooks and Centennials are doing well and the new Tettenanger rhizome is settling in nicely. But as usually, an annual problem has finally arisen.

Hops are fairly easygoing plants overall, but they suffer from a few problems. First among them is everyone's favorite little green bastard: the aphid. Aphids love hops. Left unchecked they will blanket the newly grown leaves and the apical bud, they'll infest the hop cones, and they'll seriously stunt the bine's growth. If you see aphids you really need to get on top of it, ASAP.

Depending on how large the hops have grown you can do several things to fight aphids. Commercially, industrial pesticides are used. And to be fair, there are times when they are really infested that I think "Man, a little Diazinon would show 'em what for!" Which is one of the reasons that organic hops are so hard to come by. It's just so much easier to spray insecticides. But there's a geographical component to the problem too. Three-quarters of the country's hops are grown in the Yakima Valley, and the fields usually touch each other. Organic certification would be difficult for any one field, as the spray from his neighbors would reach his fields. Plus the social flak of "Hey neighbor, I now have to spray my fields more because your organic field is just a nursery for pests and diseases!" Add the economics of it all and you can see why organic hops are somewhat rare. Which is partly why they have been exempted from the Organic certification for beer. Well that, and I imagine that AB-InBev's 'Stone Mill' Organic Pale Ale would use all or most of the country's current production.

But if you are growing at home you can be as organic as you want to be. Not being stuck with an economy of scale, you can use a few more labor intensive methods.
If the plants are small you can just use your hands, crushing and flicking the pests off as best you can. You can use a water jet to blast them off. You can use an insecticidal soap, which works but I've found it's not usually great for the leaves. Or you can set your own biological control in motion: release the swarm!

Ladybugs. Lots of ladybugs. 1500 ladybugs. Picked them up at Swanson's Nursery for about $12. That'll put a dent in the aphid population.

One of the problems with ladybugs though is keeping them around. It doesn't do you any good if they decide the grass is greener in your neighbor's yard and just take off. So you need to encourage them to see the many perks, amenities, tax-breaks, etc. that your yard has to offer.

I started by sticking them in the fridge once I got home. A couple hours cold makes them slow and hungry. Then I released them as it got dark, since they tend to only fly during the daytime. Since it was right around the Solstice, that was about 10:30 at night. I also prepped their new home. First I sprayed the bottoms of the hop plants with the hose a bit. This gives the ladybugs water to drink and also makes them "stick"; they don't tend to fly when they're wet. It helped that it was gray and rainy for a few days too, they explore more on bright, sunny days. I sprinkled them around the base of the hop plants, and a few more around the garden. Then went to bed.
Then next morning they were all over the yard, and especially all over the bines, happily munching away on the aphids. But it's not really about how many they eat the first time around. Yes, the adults will eat lots of aphids but mostly they're thinking about other adult things: are there mates and is this a good place to lay eggs? If there's enough food around, they ladybugs will start getting it on like a tree-full of monkeys on nitrous. And they did. You see, what you really want are the ladybug larvae, which look like little weird alligators . I've heard they can eat 50+ aphids each, a day. And once they pupate into adult ladybugs the next round begins.

They stuck around in noticeable amounts for a good week or so, and I still see a few around. Hopefully the rest laid lots of eggs before they took off to wherever it is ladybugs go.

Brewday: BOOM-Sticke!

2010-06-15T13:09:00.000-07:00

"All right you primitive screwheads, listen up. See this? This ... is my BOOM-Sticke!"

Oh Army of Darkness, you still rock my small, self-centered universe.

If you are one of the benighted masses sadly unfamiliar with this masterpiece of cinema, here's the full scene.

Two factors combined to inspire my first beer dedicated to The Chin. First off, my last Rye Alt was delicious but needed a bit more work. It had to either go more Alt, or more American Rye, and I went with more Alt. But the rye was excellent; it stays. Gives it just a bit of spiciness that really goes well with the malt backbone and German hop spiciness. Secondly, a couple weeks ago I brought back a growler of Chuckanut's kickass Sticke Alt and was inspired to try my hand at a Sticke.

Alts are basically the IPAs of Germany, or as close as it comes anyway. Alt means "old", as in old-style pre-lager ales. A malty ale, clean fermented, usually lagered, and with a hefty dose of German hops. Sticke Alt is a bigger, stronger version, typically brewed on a small scale and released to loyal customers in small brewpub bars. In its infinite wisdom the BJCP puts Stickes into the catchall Category 23 (Specialty Beer) so it's basically useless for competition. Oh well, more for us! And I'm planning on serving it at BeerStock this year, so more for many of you all too I guess.

Brewday went quite well, proving that having nice weather, no one else around, and drinking coffee not beer makes for successful brewday. Only screwup was that I forgot to add the baking soda during the mash, which may have impacted the chemistry a bit. No other real problems though. My LHS was out of CaraMunich, so I subbed in Crystal 60. Use CaraMunich if you can. Had to use Best Munich and Vienna, but I'd prefer Weyermann. My rye was Briess I think.

Gravity was lower than expected, 1.060 instead of 1.064. If I can get it down to 1.014 or lower it will still be in Sticke range, somewhere between 6-6.5% ABV. Shouldn't be too much trouble. I've had gravity problems these last couple beers, probably need to move the rollers on my mill closer together. Malted rye has been giving me gravity troubles too, next time I'll try flaked and see if I get more yield. For yeast I repitched a bunch of Wyeast Northwest Ale (Hale's Ale's strain). It's become the house strain, I just keep repitching it and culturing it up. But any clean ale would work, either American Ale or one of the actual Alt strains, Wyeast German Ale (not the Kolsch strain) or White Labs Dusseldorf Alt (a great yeast for Alts). Here's the recipe.

RECIPE: BOOM-Sticke

5.25 gallon, all grain
Est OG 1.064, Act. OG 1.060
Est FG 1.012-1.014
Est ABV 6-6.25%
55 IBU
15 SRM

5 lbs Munich (Dark Munich, 10L)
4 lbs Vienna
3 lbs Rye Malt
8 oz Crystal 60
2 oz Carafa II Special

Mash Schedule: Protein rest at 122. Sacc rest at 151. Pulled a decoction for a knockout at 168.

Mash water modifications: 1.25 t Chalk, 1/4 t gypsum, 1 t calcium chloride, 1/2 t Epsom salts, 3/4 t baking soda.

Added to the boil: 1/8th gypsum, 1/2 tsp calcium chloride, 1/4 epsom salts. Also, I finally found out that Seattle Public Utilities doesn't use chloramination so I've stopped wasting campden tablets in my brewing water.

90 Minute Boil

1.75 oz Domestic Perle (leaf) @ 7.2% AA @ First Wort Hop.
1 oz Sterling (leaf) @ 8.5% AA 15 min @ 15 min
whirlfloc tab @ 15
1 oz Sterling and the remaining Perle @ 1 min
Dry hop with Tettengangers for 3-5 days

Fermenting away at 70 degrees with Wyeast Northwest Ale. Once it's done I'll lager it for a couple weeks, carbonate, and tap it at BeerStock.

UPDATE: 7/19/10

So after about two weeks in the fridge I decided to tap the keg. 1st impression: This beer seriously needs to lager. A lot of hazy chunder fell out of solution, and the first couple pints were really quite unpleasant. I was worried for the batch, actually. But over a week of half-pint pours it mellowed out and cleared up. I like it more, but I still am not happy with it. There is a serious raw grainyness to it and it's not as malty as I'd like. The bitterness is a bit harsh too, I may swap out the Perle for about 45 IBU of Magnum. I'm switching the Best Malting Munich and Pilsner out for Weyermann. I'm going to drop the decoction and swap it out for a 15 min kettle caramelization of the first gallon of wort, similar to the All-Aromatic Oktoberfest. That thing is a malt beast. Won't be serving this at Beerstock, I'll serve the Oktoberfest instead.

Lake Wenatchee: Morels and Spring Kings

2010-06-11T13:52:00.000-07:00

So this post is going up late. Late late. Three weeks late. Can't really explain why, just haven't been motivated to write. Which is a bit of a shame, because Spring King season is so short. By the time this gets up these spots will have been completely picked over and spent. Nonetheless it was still a grand day out.

Three weeks ago Meredith, our friend Andy, and I, headed over Stevens Pass to the Lake Wenatchee area. The target: Morels. We'd gone out two weeks earlier and been completely skunked. Hours of walking around forests, up and down hills. We found some nice wildflowers, lots of bear scat, and what used to be an Elk, but no mushrooms. I think most mushroom hunters would agree that Morels can be aggravating and difficult to find. Unless you are on, in which case they are everywhere you look.

They fruit in the Spring, usually in May and June, generally starting at lower elevations and moving higher as the seasons turn and the world warms up. They can be found on our side of the mountains, even in Seattle if you know where and when to look. They sometimes can be found growing on wood chips. But your best bet is the other side of the Cascades. It's drier and warmer, and the conifer forests tend to be more open-floored. They grow around rivers as well, Cle Elum is noted for that. They also like areas that have had recent wildfires, and really big burns will be blanketed with mushroomers when the time is right. Basically, to paraphrase David Arora, they grow where they damn well feel like it.

It should be mentioned that we are still very new to Morel hunting. Last year we were graduating, moving, working on theses, and so on, during May and June and we missed the season. So this was only our second morel trip, and Andy's first mushroom trip ever. We'd waited eagerly for months as Winter slowly plugged along. Watching the weather, waiting expectantly for Spring to give us a flush of fun before Summer bakes the mushrooms off until Fall. We had high hopes, little experience, and only a vague idea of where to go.

The weather was cold and crappy on this side of the mountains. We had freezing rain in the pass. But on the other side the sun broke through and the day turned warm (for May anyway), dry and breezy. But clouds on the horizon warned of thunderstorms to come.

We got lost several times. I'd never been to Lake Wenatchee before, and my GPS is not overly fond of forest roads. We accidentally took a scenic tour of Leavenworth, the quaintest Bavarian village outside a Leni Riefenstahl movie. Eventually we found the lake, then got lost again. As usual we started with a plan, but ended up just pulling over whenever anything looked promising.

The first stop was a trail to an old fire lookout on the North side of the lake. In all honesty we stopped there because we got lost and decided to stretch our legs and just dive right into the woods. Soon we were off trail, heading up a steep slope, keeping an eye out for tiny brown lumps on a brown forest floor.

Nothing. Not a thing. Despite the views and pretty flowers we were a bit dispirited and it was clear that we had to move on. So down the hill we went. Back in the car, a quick look on the GPS, and we headed over to the Eastern side of the lake, where we'd originally intended on starting anyway.

Picking a spot to stop is mostly about luck. We just pulled over on the side of the road at an open and pleasant looking forest. A couple hundred yards of valley floor gave way to a hill which went up another 600' or so. Elevation looked promising for early in the season, starting around 2000' and going up to 2600'. Doug Fir and Ponderosa Pine nicely spaced apart. Signs that it had been logged, then burned to clear the brush and allow the surviving cones to sprout. Criss-crossed by random logging roads too. Promising.

Parked the car and began to walk toward the hill. Within five minutes Meredith spotted the first mushroom. And it wasn't a morel. It was much, much more exciting.

A Spring King.

Meet Boletus rex-veris: the Spring Porcini. Until a couple years ago it was thought to be sub-species of the supremely awesome King Bolete, Boletus edulis, but it has been established as a species in its own right. We began to look around the area and started finding them left and right. Usually you could spot them breaking through the pine duff, and of course the biggest ones were the easiest to spot.

Unfortunately, Spring Kings share the common traits of all boletes. They are putrescent, meaning once picked you have to keep them cold or they turn to goo, and they are prone to larval infestation from various mushroom flies. The bigger they are, the more at risk of nastiness they are. So you have to do some immediate field dressing of any promising looking mushrooms. Cut them in half or in quarters. Look for bugs. Grimace. Trim nasty bits or toss the mushroom if it's too far gone. Better it stays there shedding spores on the forest floor than shedding worms on your counter, I say. We probably lost as many or more boletes than we kept. C'est la vie.

We wandered around for an hour or so, finding many more Kings and unfortunately discarding just as many. I am happy to say that the biggest and best was found by yours truly. But the majority were found by my companions... My Mushroom Blindness kicks in. Anyhow, the majority of the Kings were on the valley floor at around 2000 feet. Once we began to climb the hill they were gone by 2100 feet. We had still not found any morels, so we decided that we'd summit the hill and see what was up on top.

For several hundred vertical feet we found bupkis. Suddenly as Andy and I were climbing the hill, talking about the apparent lack of mushrooms, he said "Hey, isn't that a morel?"

And what a morel. The largest we found the whole day. If it was a snake it would have jumped out and bit us. In retrospect, it was good that it wasn't a snake. There are rattlesnakes on that side of the mountains.

We began to look around. Much, much more carefully this time. Soon we began to find them. Ones and twos, growing in little clusters right out in the open. Hinting that their more bashful friends were in the area, hiding just out of sight. Making you work for them.

I can't remember whether it was Andy or I that dubbed them "Stupid Mushrooms", but soon we were calling them that. Stupid, because that is how you feel when you find one, don't see any others, and then a friend finds one right smack in the middle of the spot you spent two whole minutes staring it. We went around shouting "Durrrrrrr" every time we spent a while looking at the ground, only to finally see one right there in front of us.

But the feeling, the excitement of being on a good flush is really superb. It was a nice day, we were finding mushrooms left and right, life is good.

There certainly is an art to spotting them. Here's an example of one next to it's best friend (and the mushroomer's natural enemy), the pine cone.

We wandered around the crest of the hill, finding Morels scattered throughout. Elevation was probably around 2500'. Here's a photo of the forest floor:

Not the prettiest forest, I'll admit. But it was full of tasty mushrooms, encouraged by the open floor and fairly recent burn. And this style of logging is vastly more sustainable and aesthetically pleasing than clear cutting. So it's ok in my book.

As we crested the hill it began to grow colder, and the wind picked up. Seeing the incoming clouds we decided to call it a day rather than act as lightening rods. Down we went to tally the haul.

Not bad for a day out. All told we brought in over six pounds of Spring Kings and seventy-six Morels, about a pound and a quarter. Once home we got to down to rough cleaning and trimming. Cleaned off the worst parts, and then stuck the mushrooms in the fridge.

Kings don't last very long while fresh. So we ended up drying about four pounds of the Kings with a friend's borrowed dehydrator, which came out to about four ounces of dried porcinis. Yeah, mushrooms are mostly water.

We cooked a variety of things with the mushrooms. Frankly the Kings don't need much other than some oil or butter and a hot pan, but I'll cover all that in future posts. My laptop's running out of juice.

Finally, I'm not a professional mycologist, but I am a lawyer so here's the Disclaimer. Get yourself a good guidebook, or talk to some friends who know what they're doing, before you ever eat a mushroom you have found. I recommend that you join a local mycology society. Don't eat unidentified mushrooms. Don't eat questionably identified mushrooms. When in doubt, toss it out. There are several things that look like Boletes and Morels that can make you sick, so learn to identify them. There are bold mushroom hunters and there are old mushroom hunters, but there are no old bold mushroom hunters.

Brewday: Helles Other People

2010-06-01T16:54:00.000-07:00

I've got an Oktoberfest going. And I want to build up my lager yeast from the Oktoberfest for a project I have planned. And it's summer, and it's going to be hot by the time a lager is finished. And I wanted another light, low alcohol beer after I broke my "nothing bigger than 5% rule" with my IPA. After a Beer Week chat at Naked City over some tasty beers with Kevin of Chuckanut Brewery, I decided I'd brew a Munich Helles, somewhat aimed at Chuckanut's own excellent version.

The Helles is Munich's response to Pilsner, and a recent one at that. Despite claims to the contrary, most versions appeared as recently as the 1990's. The beer is yellow, malty and light, with a much diminished hop profile compared to a Czech or even German Pilsner. The main difference probably lies in the water as well, Munich's high carbonate profile is very different from the water used in other Pilsner-brewing areas. Hence, the city's fame for darker lagers, Oktoberfests, Dunkels, etc.. So I was shooting for something in the 1.048-50 range, fermented dry, malt forward, with restrained German hop character. Here's what I did.

Helles Other People
All Grain, 5.25 gallons
O.G. Estimate: 1.048, O.G. Actual: 1.044
Est. F.G. 1.010-1.011
IBU: 21
SRM: 5
Est. ABV: 4.8%, Act. probably about 4.4%

7.5 lbs German Pilsner (I wanted Weyermann but only found Best. No one carries Weyermann anymore, what a pain. Yes, it's expensive. But it's GOOD.)
0.5 lbs Munich Malt (again, only Best)
1 lb Carahell (It's true, I loves me some Carahell.)

Mash in at 150 for 90 minutes. Infusion to 168 before sparge.

Mash water modifications for 2.8 gallons: 3 gm Calcium Chloride, 2 gm Epsom Salts, 1 gm Baking Soda. Sparge Modifications for 7.5 gallons: 0.7 ml lactic acid, 8 gm Calcium Chloride, 5 gm Epsom Salt, 3 gm Baking Soda.

If you haven't noticed yet, this is a bit weird. My thinking is this: Seattle is basically rain water. There's nothing in it. Munich has high carbonate water, which is fairly hard to duplicate actually. Too much chalk and the residual alkalinity and calcium levels go too high. Too much baking soda and the sodium level gets too high. And it's supposed to be a malty beer, which the calcium chloride will accentuate. But given that Seattle water has 2, count 'em 2 ppm sulfate, adding a bunch of calcium chloride would make the chloride/sulfate ratio monstrously out of whack. The solution was to build my 100 ppm calcium, add some chloride, and lower the RA using Calcium Chloride. Then add Epsom salts to get at least some sulfate in there, and get the magnesium levels up to help the yeast out. Finally, use baking soda to up the carbonates, but restrain it to keep sodium below 30 ppm. The result is a water profile that is as if a Munich brewery added Calcium Chloride to its water, except that the sodium is much higher and the residual alkalinity is only half that of Munich. Anyhow...

90 minute boil

1.25 gm German Hallertau leaf hops @ 3.8% AA @ 90 minutes
0.5 gm Hallertau @ 30 min
whirlfloc at 15
0.25 gm Hallertau @ flameout.

Cool to lager temps and lager with yeast cake of Wyeast Bohemian Lager yeast from the Oktoberfest.

Brewday went spot on, but the gravity ended up 4 points low. Not sure why. May move my grain mill rollers a bit closer. The water from my new Rain Barrel cooled the beer, but only to 66. So I moved it into the fridge to crash it (I needed to rack off the cold break anyway). Fortunately, this time around I finally have a replacement Stopper Thermowell. Unfortunately, I had some issues getting the probe in the well and broke the very tip off the probe. But some swearing quick work with sandpaper narrowed it just enough and it finally slipped right in. I set the thermostat to my pitching temp of 47, hopped on my bike and went to Miro Tea. So it's cooling away as I sit here writing this. Thermowells really illustrate the power of water's heat retention. Hopefully after I come home from checking out the newly opened Noble Fir it will be cool and I'll pitch. But it could be much, much later tonight. Next time I'll get more ice for the cooling water.

Project: Rain Barrel

2010-06-01T15:52:00.000-07:00

So Saturday my friend Al arrived at my doorstep with one of the stranger birthday presents I've ever received, a 55 gallon plastic drum. "This guy was selling them on Craigslist for like $20, so I bought two!" It was from the back dock of some kind of bakery and contained 'Maltitol', a sort of sugar-alcohol artificial sweetener. It was slightly sticky, and smelled of cupcakes.

Actually, as birthday presents go this one is pretty sweet. Part of our renewing out lease was an effort to cut down on our water bills. Get landlord to fix leaky things, put new guts in the toilet, etc.. A rain barrel was also on my mind. So seeing how it was Memorial Day weekend and we had nothing else going, Al and I hopped into the car and sped off to Home Depot.

Rain barrels are actually really easy to build. At its heart you need something to divert your rain gutters into the top, then something to filter leaves and bugs, then a spigot on the bottom. Finally, and most importantly, some kind of overflow setup (more on this later). The goal was to make it modular, so we could fix anything that went bad or was ill-thought-out. I wanted it to cause little or no damage to the existing gutter system, so I can put that back together when I eventually move. I also wanted the water to divert well away from my heating oil bunker, and still allow access to it. So we looked around the yard, looked around the garage, wandered around Home Depot for a while, and came up with this setup.

The gutter diverts (via some duct taped pipe fittings) to a hole on the top. In there is an atrium grate, with window screen rubber banded on to keep bugs out. The spigot is a threaded plastic electrical bulkhead, glued in with a bunch of Plumber's Goop glue. A garden faucet is screwed on that. The overflow is a 2" to 3" ABS coupler, glued in with more Plumber's Goop at a sloping angle. The overflow and main pipes were cut from an 8' section of 3" PVC that I used to protect my fishing rods during the move. The whole thing is propped off the ground by some sections of 4x4 that was left over from building the raised beds in the garden. All told, the barrel cost about $20. (Well, $40 if the barrel itself hadn't been a gift.) But how well does it work?

Do you know how many gallons of water pour off your roof every time it rains? A LOT. The guestimation formula is:

Roof Square Feet x 0.6 = Gallons of Water per Inch of Rain.

Based on City estimates, I'm going to say that rain gutter drains about 1/3 of my 1500 sq. ft. roof space, maybe 500 square feet. Which means that for every inch of rain 300 gallons fall on that part of the roof! Given that it rains about 37 inches annually in Seattle, that's 11,100 potentially useful gallons that otherwise go to the storm drain.

Here's where the overflow comes in. As we finished the project it began to drizzle. Soon we could hear a drip, drip, drip in the barrel. By morning, it was full. Completely full. 50 gallons. The overflow was draining nicely into the blackberries off on the side of the house. Guess this is why people put three or four barrels in series. But since it takes 1/6 of an inch of rain to fill the barrel, and it rains about 150 days a year here, I don't think I'll run out very often. My garden's not huge anyway, and I don't water the lawn in the Summer.

The BIG use I had planned for this was in cutting down on my brewing water use. My plate chiller uses a lot of water, usually 20 gallons or so to cool 5 gallons. Typically I either just drain this off, or use it to water plants if it's Summer. Today though, I used rain! And it worked pretty well, I got a good cooldown to 66. Perfect for ales! Unfortunately, of course I was brewing a lager... Best part though, I just poured the used water back into the barrel. This cut my total brewing water use down by at least half.

Of course, the City charges me about $3.80 for 100 cu. ft. of water (over 700 gallons) so in terms of savings...yeah I saved 11 cents. Wooo! But it's about Green building, and the DIY gratification I guess. My part of the city is under a major stormwater reclamation project right now, as each of those 11,000 gallons would otherwise drain into Shilshole Bay. And once I start watering the garden more often the gallons will start piling up.

Unfortunately the flow from the barrel is pretty slow. I blame drag from the long hose I have attached to the barrel, I'll try a shorter one and see if that changes anything. No way I'll be spraying anything with water pressure from the barrel, but if I get a watering can and maybe a soaker hose I should be set.

Sake Update 5: Filtering and Bottling

2010-05-28T12:59:00.000-07:00

The Sake Project is finished! It's taken four months and it's finally in bottles.

After aging in bulk for five weeks it had cleared fairly well.

But I wanted it clearer, and here I made a bit of a mistake. I mixed up about two teaspoons of bentonite and 2/3 cup boiling water. Mix well, then let it sit for a couple hours minimum, and mix again. It doesn't want to mix at first. Then into the sake and swirl it around. It will take a few days to a week to re-settle. Honestly, I think it was clearer before I put the bentonite in. So my suggestion for next time is to bentonite it right after it goes into the jug. That way it'll have a month or two to settle.

Then it went into the filter. It tasted fine unfiltered, but hey, why not make it more complicated? I have a gravity-fed Vinbrite filter which works well, if very, very slowly. Really it's only good for about two gallons max, so it worked well enough for the sake.

Yes, the humble washing machine really is the homebrewer's friend. The filtration, slow and obnoxious as it was, did however produce a very clear sake.

Then into bottles and pasteurized again on the stove. I ended up with 16 twelve-ouncers of filtered, and another pint or so of unfiltered sake (towards the end I got tired of waiting for the filter).

So how is it? After all this work, is it any good?

Yes.

It's really pretty good. Melon and pear in the nose, sweet rice/grain, with of course a strong alcohol note too. Too strong, next time I'll dilute it down to 16% ABV. Just a bit of a spice, cinnamon? A bit of lactic there as well.

Upfront the flavor is sweet, there's rice there, almost a caramel flavor, and a nice smoothness to it. Then it moves into a rush of warm alcohol, and ends on a tart, lactic dry note. If there's one complaint it lies here, just a bit too much lactic acid. I blame the natural sour mash moto. Next time I'll try adding straight lactic acid instead and see what happens, maybe it will mellow that aspect. Still, with the exception of that lacto bite, this is pretty much commercial grade sake. Not bad for a first try!

But it's going to be a while before I make another batch.

Spam Sushi

2010-05-28T12:27:00.000-07:00

So I ended up cooking a Hawaiian themed dinner for my mother-in-law's birthday. A perfect excuse to make a special classic of Hawaiian cooking: SPAM Musubi. Easy, portable, tasty, spammy... hey why not?

SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM...

It's easy to make. Step one is to make rice. Short grain is better, about three cups full. Once it's done you can dress it up with a little rice vinegar and mirin if you want.

Next: SPAM! Un-tin your spam. Slice into eight even slices lengthwise. Fry em up in a pan with some soy sauce and a little brown sugar till golden brown and delicious. Or use sweet soy sauce like I did.

If you've got a sushi press, great. I didn't have one. So we're going ghetto style here. Cut the bottom off the spam can, trying to minimize any sharp edges.

Get a sheet of nori and slice it in half. Lay the nori on on a cutting board and put the spam can in the middle. Grab a ball of rice, put it in the can, and tamp it down as best you can. Then sprinkle it with some furukake (a Japanese mix of sesame seeds, seaweed, and so on). On goes a slice of spam. Then another ball of rice, tamp it down. Then carefully remove the can. Use some water to wet the nori, wrap it around seal it shut. Done.

A can will make eight rolls, which is quite a lot actually. And they're pretty filling. But they seem to keep well enough for a couple days.

Garden Update: May

2010-05-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

My how time flies. It's been almost a month since the last post. No real excuse. I cooked a few things that weren't really exceptional. Then Seattle Beer Week, ahem, intervened. We had a mushroom expedition that was a total bust. Haven't brewed anything due to a current surplus of homebrew (lagers finally coming home to roost). Honestly I haven't felt much like writing these last few weeks. But it's time to get writing again.

First up, I think I'm going to start doing a monthly garden recap. It'll help me keep a record of what grew where and when, what worked and didn't, etc.. That way next year I can plan accordingly.

Above you can see one of the real success stories so far. Purple Mustard Greens. We planted four and they're growing like crazy. Seems every day I come out and it's shot out another two foot leaf. Also, after one minor caterpillar attack in the first week it seems that nothing is interested in eating them. Does a good job of shading the lettuces too. Definitely planting them again.

The lettuces we planted from starts are doing well. We've been pulling one or two a week for salads. My mesclun mix that I started from seed is still very small, and very sad. Could be the weather, they grew fine when we had a few days of sun but they seem to hate the cold and wet. But I think something is up with the pot they're in, though I'm not sure what. Next time I'll start them indoors.

The radish leaves keep getting bigger and bigger, but don't seem to be setting radishes yet. They should be ready to go any day now, but aren't.

Green Onions: Slow. Very slow. I think the soil dries out a bit too quickly on top of the row. I planted another round in front of them, down at the base of the row. We'll see how they do.

The Yard Long Beans have sprouted. Five for five. W00t.

The Potato Project is going along swimmingly, though it makes the yard look a bit rednecky. I may have planted too many seed potatoes in the grain sack, but it does seem to be draining well. The cardboard boxes are holding up well enough, but we moved them to this spot in the yard so they 1) get maximum sun, 2) are near the mound of leftover dirt, and 3) won't need to be moved again until harvest. The tall thin box shades the leaves pretty heavily. We'll see if the increased mounding pays off in the end.

The tomatoes are doing well. However, my penny-conscious cloche is a bit flimsy in the impressive wind and rain we've had lately. Next year I'll rig some PVC pipes. Also: these went in when the first starts showed up at the farmer's market. Now, though, the starts in the market are three feet tall, with proto-tomatoes already growing. I'm jealous of dry, warm, sunny Eastern Washington greenhouses. Maybe I should wait a couple more weeks next year? Or will the increased root growth from early planting pay off in the end? We'll see.

The Ruby Spinach is doing very well and we've started chowing down on it. We made a round of Swimming Rama with the Ruby Spinach and Purple Mustard Greens last night that was fantastic.

The shallots and leeks are plodding along. Sweet Peas are climbing and have started flowering. They need more sun though, and the weather isn't cooperating.

The Bok Choi and early planting of Mizuna were disasters. Pulled them and replanted new things. Too cold? Not enough sun yet? Replanted mizuna seems to be doing well so far.

Seeded this month: basil, sage, radishes, pickling cucumbers, more mizuna, more Hakurei turnips, lettuces, thyme, more green onions, yard long beans.

Hops. The hops need more sun, but are doing ok given that it's still only May. The Chinooks had been lagging but seem to finally be going now. Going to trellis them this weekend. The Willamettes are toast. Re-potted, gave them a month, no sign of anything. Somehow died over the winter, too damp perhaps? Going to dump them and use the pot for cucumbers. Fortunately the new Tettenanger rhizome has already broken the surface. Aphids and caterpillars attacked the Centennials. Water and soap to treat. Hateful little green bastards... Brown tips on the leaves of the Centennials and Cascades, either water issues (the pots are too small) or iron deficiency. Time to fertilize them again probably.

Final note: poor bed planning. I wanted to put the beds flush against the fence and the garage, but there's a buried concrete foundation that made that impossible. Now grass has grown quite high behind the beds. I'll have to come up with some way to control that, even if it's just me and a pair of scissors. If the grass goes to seed I'll never get it out of the beds...

Chive Blossom Vinegar

2010-05-04T16:43:00.000-07:00

My chive plant overwintered just fine and is already flowering. So just for kicks I picked a handfull of the flowers and stuck them in a bottle with some white wine vinegar. A week later it looked like this:

What a fantastic neon-pink color. As for taste, it's garlicky vinegar. Goes great in salad dressing.

Brewday: All Aromatic Oktoberfest

2010-05-04T15:11:00.000-07:00

So this last weekend was the annual AHA Big Brew and I had a couple of my fellow homebrew club brewers over for a brewday. The idea behind the Big Brew is that clubs across the country all get together and brew the same recipes on the same weekend. I liked the idea of trying a 100% Munich beer, and my lager fridge had just cleared up, so I went for the Rocktoberfest recipe. But I decided at the last minute to use MFB (Malteries Franco-Belges) 'Special Aromatic' malt instead.

Special Aromatic is made in Belgium from French barley, using a special process that keeps the color light yet heightens the grain's maltiness. Rumor has it that it can convert itself, but I'd never seen anyone use 100% of it. So I figured I'd give it a try. It wasn't in BeerSmith's malt index so here's the details:

MFB SPECIAL AROMATIC

Potential: 1.038
Color: varies a bit from 4.5 to 5.5 SRM
Dry yield: 82%
Coarse/Fine difference: 1.5%
Moisture: 4%
Diastic Power: 32 Lintner
Protein: 11%

As for the recipe, I tweaked the Big Brew recipe a bit to accommodate my system and to get the best use of my hops.

ALL AROMATIC OKTOBERFEST
6 gallon, All Grain
Est OG: 1.057. Act OG: 1.061 (so I added distilled water to dilute it a bit).
Est FG: 1.014. Act FG: probably 1.015
ABV: 5.6~5.75%
SRM: calculated to be 7, but kettle caramelization probably got it to 9 or so.
IBU: 20

12 lbs MFB Special Aromatic (100%)

Mash in at 151. Special Aromatic has enough diastic power to convert itself. Barely. So it will probably take an hour or so to convert. Use iodine tests to check. Mash out at 168. Water modifications to the mash: 2 gm chalk, 2 gm calcium chloride, 2 gm epsom salt, 2 gm salt.

Now to make some dextrines. Take the first gallon of the runnings and bring to a boil in the kettle or a pot. Get a rolling boil going and go for 15 minutes before turning off the heat and resuming the sparge.

90 min boil. Used 2 oz Domestic Hallertau (leaf) at 4.7% AA.

0.75 oz @ 90 min (first wort, basically)
0.5 oz @ 60 min
0.5 oz 20 min
0.25 oz at flameout

Whirlfloc tab at 15 min. Mineral Additions to Boil: 4 gm chalk, 4 gm calc chloride, 4 gm epsom salt.

Yeast is Wyeast 2124 Bohemian Lager. Made a 1L starter on the stir plate, gave it two days then cold crashed. Decanted sulfury, nasty beer off the top, repitched into another starter for another day and a half or so. Cold crashed again, decanted again, before pitching. Fermenting at 47 to start, which is a bit cold. As it goes along I'll let it rise to 50-52. Then it will get 6 weeks, maybe two months of lagering. Beer has a really nice color and clarity so far.

Considering the chaos of the Big Brew, the brew went pretty well. Only problem is that as Spring marches onwards my ground water is heating up, so the wort only cooled down to 60 degrees. I gave it two hours in the fridge at 38 to settle the cold break and cool it down a bit more, then racked, aerated and pitched. Left the fridge at 40 overnight to help cool it even more. I really need to get a new Stopper Thermowell.

The Potato Project

2010-04-29T08:28:00.001-07:00

How about another garden post? This year we're growing potatoes for the first time, but I'm trying something a little different. One of the problems of growing potatoes in a bed is that potatoes are subject to a wide and interesting variety of diseases and over time your bed will probably develop blight. So you'll need to rotate beds at least every three years. On top of that, potatoes need to be mounded, so they also take up a lot of space.

Or do they? One solution is to grow them in containers. As the plant grows, you 'mound' by raising the dirt level in the container. Every time it is about 4" above the soil you add 3" of new dirt. The plant responds by growing taller, and will start to shoot off future potatoes from the newly buried stalk. When the season is over you can just dump the whole container out on a tarp and sift through it to find the taters. If it looks like there's a disease afflicting one container, it is isolated to that container's soil, which can be disposed of.

I've seen people grow them in a variety of things. Garbage cans, old oil drums, packed earth columns. A stack of old tires is interesting: as the plant grows you just stack on tires and fill with more dirt. So I decided to try a few different things, with the goal of finding something cheap or recycled that works well. At the end of the season I'll weigh the potatoes harvested from each container and compare.

First up are two big storage lugs that I got at Home Depot for about $4 each. They're 18 gallon capacity. I took a 3/8" spade bit and drilled drainage holes all around the bottom. Then put in about 3" of moisture control potting soil. (Potatoes do not like wet toes.) Then put four little Certified Seed Potatoes in and covered them with about an inch of soil. Pros: cheap, easy, big, reusable. Cons: cost $ (though not much), not recycled, possible chemical transfer from cheap-ass plastic?

Second, a cardboard box. I know this seems crazy, and it might be, but hear me out. It only has to last for one season, and if you've ever left cardboard outside for a while it holds up better than you'd think. And at the end of the season I can just toss the whole thing in the compost bin. This one was a leftover box from a 6-gallon carboy, and my only concern is that it may be too small. Poked some holes in the bottom and planted as above, but only three seed potatoes. Pros: free, recycled, compostable. Cons: chance it will completely fall apart on me. But I can always use duct-tape to reinforce it.

Third, a malt bag. A leftover Maris Otter bag to be precise. Took the plastic inside-liner out and rolled the bag down the sides. The plastic mesh should drain well. Filled and planted as above, again only three potatoes. My favorite part: as the plants grow I can just unroll the bag up as it fills, meaning the plants will probably get more light in the early stages (not being shaded by the walls of the container). Pros: free, possibly reusable(?), recyclable, quite large, and the whole-roll-up-thing is neat. Cons: a bit floppy, I'll have to lean it against something as it gets more full.

So now we let them grow. I'm planting "All Blue" purple potatoes and Yukon Golds. All the purples are in, and soon as I get another malt bag and reasonably same size cardboard box I'll get the last of the Yukons in. I'm hoping to end up with 30-40 lbs of each by the end of the season. We'll see.

UPDATE 9/17/10

The Final Results

Let the turnip feast commence!

2010-04-28T18:19:00.000-07:00

This Hakurei Turnip was the first non-herb thing harvested from our garden this year!
It was crowding out the others, who are all still a few more days from harvest. It's cute!

Brewday: Get It Right IPA

2010-04-21T15:07:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make. Two of my most favorite beer styles are IPAs and American Pale Ales, and I haven't ever made a good one. I don't know what it is, but I just never end up making one that I like. Perhaps I'm a bit hyper-critical of my efforts, or perhaps I was getting sub-par hops in Florida. Either way I've got a bit of a New Year's Resolution going... make a good IPA and an APA this year.

Here's the first try. I tend to follow Vinny of Russian River when it comes to IPA theory. Make it light, keep the caramel malts down under 5%, ferment it dry, let the hops speak. It is India Pale Ale, after all. I'm giving Wyeast's Northwest Ale strain a try too, it's the Hale's Ales house strain. I'm using Columbus for bittering because I've got a gallon bag of them from Fremont Brewing in the freezer. Centennials for flavor and aroma, and some Amarillo for aroma too. It will be dryhopped with Cascade and Amarillo, because I've got those in pellet form. Here the conical will shine, I think. Finally, taking a page from the Big Book of British Brewing I'm adding a pound of invert sugar. This should ferment out completely, adding alcohol without boosting body and residual sweetness.

Brewday went well enough, but disaster soon struck. The new conical has a long dial thermometer, which goes down from the lid into the beer. On pitching it said the beer was at 50 degrees, so I got the electric blanket going on full blast to pull it back up. The next day the beer was at 65 on the dial, when I touched the side and noticed that it was markedly warmer than the room. Some swearing commenced and I yanked the thermometer. Some testing with boiling and near freezing water showed that it was off by nearly 20 degrees, and that the beer had been heated to 84 degrees. $#%&*$#@$%^%$##!!!!!!! The cloud of profanity rose into the atmosphere, where it then came down like acid rain all over the city. So if your plants die or your clothes bleach, sorry. Anyhow, the beer was rocking by that point and there was no realistic way to cool it without crashing the yeast. So I had to relax, have a homebrew, and just let it go. We'll see if it's undrinkably full of weird horrible fusel alcohols and phenolics, or whether it survived relatively unscathed. A local brewery, which shall remain nameless to protect the innocent, recently had their glycol system go down and an IPA go that hot in one of their fermenters. They couldn't distribute it, for quality control reasons, but I got to try it at the brewery. It was fine. So there's hope. It calmed down to 67 within a couple days. Ugh.

Funny thing about progress: ever notice that when you introduce something new into an established system, something inevitably goes horribly, horribly wrong, causing you to doubt the usefulness of your supposed 'improvement'? The conical has some serious growing pains going on right now.

IPA version 1.0

6 gal., All Grain
OG: 1.065 / FG: 1.014ish
SRM: 7.5
IBU: 65
ABV: 6.5%

11 lbs Pale Malt
1 lb Munich
4 oz Carapils
4 oz Crystal 40
1 oz Chocolate Malt
1 lb Invert Sugar (add in the last few minutes of the boil)

Mash at 154, Mash out at 168. Water Mods: 2 gm Chalk, 4 gm Gypsum, 1 gm Epsom Salts, 1 gm Kosher Salt.

90 min boil:

1.25 oz Columbus (aka Zeus, Tomahawk) leaf at 14.4% AA, First Wort Hop
Whirlfloc at 15 minutes left.
1 oz Centennial, leaf, @ 9.5% AA @ 15 min
1 oz Centennial @ 2 min
1/2 oz Amarillo pellets at flameout
1/2 oz Cascade pellets at flameout
1/2 oz Amarillo pellets, dry hop 3 days
1/2 oz Cascade pellets, dry hop 3 days

Yeast is Wyeast Northwest Ale, 1 L starter on the stir-plate. Ferment as I say, 68-70, not as I do, 80-66.

To Make Invert Sugar:

Known as Lyle's Golden Syrup in the UK, invert sugar is just normal table sugar that's been boiled in the presence of an acid. This breaks the sucrose down into glucose and fructose, and sets it as a syrup. Yeast have an easier time eating the simpler sugars, so it ferments out almost completely. This boosts the alcohol, without upping the residual sweetness, resulting in a dryer, lighter tasting beer and upping the yeast's possible attenuation level. And it's easy and cheap to make.

1 lb white sugar
1 cup water
1 t Cream of Tartar (tartaric acid. You could also use lemon juice, lactic or phosphoric acid, etc.)

Bring to a boil on the stove for at least 5 minutes or so. The longer you cook it the more it will caramelize. If you want funky, complex caramel flavors cook it somewhere between light amber and black. If you just want it to ferment, without adding color or much flavor, just boil a few minutes until it's clear or light yellow. It'll keep in a jar for months, or you can add it to the last few minutes of the boil, or into the fermenter as high krausen starts to ebb.

Tomatoes

2010-04-21T08:54:00.000-07:00

This Sunday the first tomato starts appeared in the Farmer's Market. We had a 2x6 bed all ready to go, but I was concerned about the cold and wet stunting them. We're past any frost danger, but it's still going to be cold and rainy for another month or so. A brilliant solution was arrived at by my lovely wife: use the plastic tarp I'd bought to cover the mound of dirt as a penny-conscious cloche for the bed.

So there it is. Stapled to the back of the bed, suspended over some of last year's tomato cages, and held down in front with some radish pots. It's easily 5-10 degrees warmer in there, and with the ends open it gets good airflow to keep the humidity down. The tarp and cages were technically being reused, and all in all this cost about $1.50. Hopefully, the added warmth of the cloche will let us start harvesting tomatoes in mid-late June, easily a month earlier than normal.

Unfortunately rain is pooling in areas on the top. I go out and knock the puddles off once a day or so, but if this becomes bad I'll go get some PVC and make a more rain-friendly frame.

There are four tomato plants. The first is Sun Gold, cherry tomatoes grow amazingly well in Seattle. Second, Black Prince - a black tomato variety from Siberia, well suited to Northern climates. Third is a variety called Prudence, which I believe is a big ol' beefsteaky heirloom type. Finally, San Marzano Romas, so we can sauce and can some for Fall and Winter. All of these are indeterminate varieties so I'll have to rig a trellising system when they get a bit bigger. I'm done with tomato cages.

Brewday: Jasmine IPA

2010-04-20T10:39:00.000-07:00

A while back I got my grubby mitts on a recipe for Elysian's Avatar Jasmine IPA. We were living in Miami at the time, seriously missing it; it's one of my wife's faves. Fortunately, I was able to brew a reasonable facsimile. And since I bought jasmine on the internet, it was... in bulk. Nearly a pound of it to be exact. Time to use some more of it.

You may notice that it's a bit low on the IBU side for an IPA. But if you've ever had over-steeped jasmine tea, you know it can get a bit bitter. The problem is how bitter? So err on the light side and let the jasmine do the rest. Also I change the hops in this thing pretty much every time I brew it. This time I had Columbus and Amarillos around, so there you go. I've used Magnum and Horizon to good effect. Any 'clean' flavor and aroma hop will work. In the past I have also noted that the jasmine really doesn't come out until it's finished, cold, and carbonated. So have faith.

Speaking of faith, it was the brewday from hell. Scale decided to freak out, wouldn't measure small amounts. (Turned out the batteries were dying.) Mash-in was off by 15 degrees due to computer error. (I'd changed some of the mash settings in BeerSmith and it didn't adjust for the new hot liquor volume) Then the valve on my Hot Liquor Tank gave out and sprayed my hand with 170 degree water. (Ow ow ow.) I was running out of propane, it started to rain on me, my lighter got wet, and so I had to light the burner with a match, resulting in more burns. (Ow.) But eventually the sun came out and I think the beer will be great. Of course the repitched yeast from the conical took over 24 hours to get going, during which time I'd bought more yeast as a CYA, which I smacked at the store so it would be ready to pitch after we ran some errands downtown. But the car got locked-in overnight in a parking garage with inadequate signage, so the yeast didn't get pitched until another day later. The pack was so swollen, I was afraid it was going to pop in the trunk.

This batch is, apparently, cursed.

JASMINE IPA (*cursed)

5.25 gallons, All Grain
OG: 1.064 / FG: 1.014
SRM: 6
IBU 43
ABV: 6.4%

11 lbs Pale Malt
1 lb Munich
4 oz Crystal 40
4 oz Carahell

Mash at 154. Mash Water Mods: 1 gm Chalk, 3 gm Gypsum, 1 gm Epsom Salts, 1 gm Kosher Salt.

90 minute boil.

3/4 oz Columbus (leaf) @ 14% AA for 90 min
Whirlfloc tab at 15 min
1.5 oz Dried Jasmine Flowers @ 10 min
1.5 oz Amarillo (pellet) @ 8% AA for 5 min
1 oz Dried Jasmine at flameout
1 oz Amarillo at flameout

Using Wyeast 1056 American Ale Yeast. Fermenting in the mid-high 60's.

UPDATE: It bubbled along happily for 8 days, and at transfer to the Secondary it was just fine. Whew.

Goose Egg

2010-04-20T10:27:00.001-07:00

Last Week Seabreeze had goose eggs! Having never had a goose egg, we picked one up. I then carried it around in the padded protection of the pocket of my down vest for an hour while we finished up shopping; all the while envisioning disaster, wherein some lady would push a stroller into me or my seat-belt would crush the egg. Safely home, we poached it, the biggest damn poached egg I've ever seen, and served it on top of a large chef's salad. Excellent.

Sake Update IV: Racking

2010-04-20T08:58:00.000-07:00

After about two weeks in the lager fridge the sake had settled nicely and it was time to rack it off the remaining kasu.

I used two 1-gallon jugs to contain it, which was just about the perfect volume. The jugs went into a hot water bath until they hit an internal temp of 140. Then on went a growler lid.

This should pasteurize them, remove excess co2, and help them keep a lot longer while they mellow a bit. I figure two months should do it. Right now it's technically muroka, or unfiltered sake. But I want it to be seishu, clear sake. So I'll hit them with some bentonite about a week before I run them through my wine filter. Then it's into bottles, re-pasteurize, and drink!

So far taste tests of the muroka have led to a verdict of: delicious. I'm very optimistic about the final product. Just have to wait two months...

Garden 2010

2010-04-14T18:27:00.000-07:00

Check out that gorgeous day in Seattle! The new raised beds are in and the garden is prepped for 2010. We moved right around the beginning of June last year, which sortof cut the preparation/harvest cycle in half. As a result, we grew a few things in pots but it wasn't really on a big scale.

So this year around we decided to do it right. I built three 6' x 2' raised beds in the back, up against the garage and the back fence. The fences in the yard block the sun during part of the day, but the house also blocks afternoon sun in the back, so I decided that this was probably the ideal place. Even this early in Spring it gets sun from about Noon to maybe 5:30, though it's getting dark about 7:30 right now. Oh sweet June ... dark at 10:00. As the sun gets higher in the sky it will get even more sun too. So I think this will work.

Each bed is made from two 8' x 2"x 12"s, and about half a 4' x 4'. Not pressure treated because of poison and not cedar because I'm not made of airports. So it won't last more than a couple years, but hey, we rent. I had trouble organizing the topsoil to fill it. I only needed about a cubic yard, but I also knew I'd need compost. So I settled on a yard of premium garden topsoil from Sky Nursury and a half-yard of compost. Had a local 'man with a van' deliver the small mountain, which cost as much as the soil did. Ugh. But I don't know anyone in town with a pickup, and the hassle of U-haul was worth the $10 savings to have this guy pick it up for me. And he was quick and relatively cheap. Anyhow, last weekend we got to work with shovels and now the beds are in.

All told the garden now has:

Snap Peas
Ruby Spinach
Various Lettuces
Purple Mustard Greens
Green Onions
Shallots
Leeks
White (Hakurei) Turnips
Mizuna
Thyme, Parsley, Chives, Rosemary

I'm gearing up to plant some Yukon Gold potatoes soon as my seed potatoes start to sprout. This will be its own weird post. Some radishes will go in one of the beds to kill the time until tomatoes are in season. Yard Long beans will go up against the trellising in the middle bed next month.

Razor Clams

2010-04-07T17:16:00.000-07:00

A week ago we went out for one of the Northwest's favorite foraging edibles: Razor Clams. It's been a week and I've been trying to figure out the best way to write about it. Ultimately, I think the photos probably tell most of the story.

None of us had ever gone Razor Clamming before, so we had only a vague idea about what was involved. The WA State Dept of Fish and Wildlife has a comprehensive and helpful website, so we began there. Digs are strictly regulated, and often the beaches are only open for a couple tides at a stretch. We chose Saturday the 27th, which had an evening tide and coincided with the Ocean Shores Razor Clam festival, so we figured it would be a popular day to go. The State divides the major clamming areas into five management zones: Long Beach, Twin Harbors, Copalis Beach, Mocrocks, and Kalaloch. Having never been to most of the beaches we just headed for the coast and figured we'd play it by ear.

Of course, there's really no quick way to get to the coast from Seattle. Puget Sound and the Olympics are in the way, after all. So we left Seattle about 10 AM. A brief stop at the Cabela's in Lacey scored us a new PC clam gun for $12, and one day razor clamming licenses ($7) for those who needed them. By noon we were at Fish Brewing in Olympia for a tasty lunch and beer procurement. Then another two and a half hours or so to get to the beach. We decided to avoid Ocean Shores, due to the festival, and instead headed up Copalis Beach, ultimately parking at Griffiths-Priday State Park.

There is not a whole lot there, but free parking, beach access, and a bathroom counts for a lot. So we unloaded gear, strapped on waders, grabbed shovels and clam gun, and set off toward the beach. Of course, the roadway to the beach had washed out, and with dunes, cars and many people in sight on the beach, we still had to walk along the Copalis River for about a quarter mile to reach a footbridge. Fortunately, for March, it couldn't have been a nicer day.

Next time we're definitely going to just drive on the beach though. It's legally a state highway after all.

There were already dozens of people pulled up there, busily clamming away as the tide retreated. We got to work.

We weren't having a lot of luck. In fact, the only razor we bagged in the first hour and a half was one that I found at the tideline. Presumably it fell out of someone's bag, but it was still alive and fine. Finders keepers.

We then tried an area where no one else was and, surprise, had no luck there. Turns out that the Copalis River went into the ocean there, so we assume the freshwater was too much for little clam tolerances. So we went a bit further up the beach, and after some helpful conversations with people toting full catch-bags we started to get the hang of it.

Basically you're looking for tiny, nickle-sized indents in the sand, which take some time to recognize but eventually become easy to spot. Then you start digging, trying hard not to damage the clam's brittle shell. They're usually about 4-5 inches long, and can dig nearly a foot a minute, so you need to chase the little buggers up to your elbow, sometimes further. I had good luck using my clam shovel to dig most of the dirt away, then reaching in and feeling around until I could pull out the clam.

Meredith's weapon of choice was the Clam Gun. Basically, it's a sharpened 4" PVC tube, with a handle attached on top and a small hole drilled in the endcap. You work the tube down around the clam, put your thumb over the hole (creating suction) and (bend with the knees!) you pull out a tube of sand. Two or three times doing this and if you're lucky there will be a nice intact clam in the last shot of sand. No fuss, no muss.

In theory, anyway. Apparently I suck at the Clam Gun. I had one major success with it, and a whole lot of failures.

Meredith seemed to get the hang of it though, and was the first to catch her limit: 15 clams. Queen of the Razor Clams that day, who'd have thought a marine biologist would be good at this kind of thing?

As the light dimmed and the tide turned, the remaining three of us only had 1/2-3/4 of our limits. We'd just decided to call the day a partial loss and head home, when we picked up the backpack we'd brought along. There, underneath, was a clam hole! And near it, another! As the tide had gone further out, apparently the beach had drained and now the holes were easy to spot. A half hour of running around "Look, there's one! There's one! There's three!" and we all had our limits. 60 razors in total. Sweet...

Victory. Cold, wet, tired, sore and sandy victory.

We headed home as the sun set. Three and a half hours later we were back in Seattle, almost 12 hours to the minute after leaving it. The clams were kept alive overnight on trays in the fridge, covered in layers of wet paper towels. The next day everyone got back together to clean, cook, and divvy up the spoils.

Unlike Atlantic Razors, the big Pacific ones need to be shelled, gutted and cleaned before cooking. And after an hour or two of cleaning the clams, an unpleasant business, we ended up with about eight pounds of ready to go clam steaks. Not too shabby, considering they sell for $15 a pound.

For dinner we cooked them three ways. I took some of the more abused ones and chopped them up for a Razor Clam chowder. Wine, leeks, potatoes, cream, homemade bacon, razors. Excellent. Just made it up as I went along, no recipe.

Next I made a sortof pseudo-Spanish thing, using some of my chorizo, a shallot, some garlic, bay and thyme, and roughly chopped razors. Good, but went really excellently on toast the next day!

Finally, ask most razor clam fans and they'll tell you: fried is best. So I panko-ed up some strips and fried them until crispy and delicious, about a minute a side. I made up a cocktail sauce using ketchup, Worcestershire, lemon, Sriracha and wasabi. It was outstanding.

So we divvied them up into 1/2 pound containers and stashed them in the freezer. I'll bring them out from time to time.

Last night, for example, I made a sortof Northwest Springtime Paella using stuff from my fridge. Razor clams, chicken, pork, chorizo, mussels, fiddleheads, peas, bell pepper, leek, onion, garlic, olives, risotto rice.

And I managed not to light the pan on fire too! Though it still bears the scars.

There's three more Razor Clam tides scheduled two weeks from now. But they are all morning tides, which means we'd have to camp overnight. Think I'll pass, and maybe go for some littlenecks instead. Though there is talk of another tide in May...

Brewday: All Blacks IPA

2010-04-03T08:41:00.000-07:00

Black IPA. Legitimate beer style or marketing gimmick? A lot of breweries out there are marketing Black IPAs to legions of weary West Coast palates right now. There's also a fair amount of derision regarding these beers. Are the breweries brewing it because it's actually good, or just because it's different? Does it really matter?

Blackening beers is a bit of a cliche in craft brewing. Oooh you added some Black Patent or Roasted Barley to a Wit. You rebel you. But I think that, done properly, it actually creates a different olfactory experience and thus, a different beer. I've been playing with Blackening things for a bit and here's a bit of somewhat uppity theory I've come to follow.

There's a French saying in cooking: "First the eyes, then the nose, then the taste." Your first impression of something you're going to eat or drink comes from its visual appeal, so first and foremost it should look good on the plate or in the glass. This is where Black IPAs show their legitimacy as a style. The visual shock of a dark, near black, beer stands in contrast to the expected straw to amber of a normal IPA, creating a sense of delight in the unfamiliar. Next, it should smell good. Complex, intense hoppiness confirming that yes, this is indeed an IPA. Finally the taste. It should taste like an IPA, and only an IPA. Similar to a Schwarzbier, the predominate flavors should not be in any way bitter, astringent, or roasted. You want all the color of a stout with none of the flavor. Perhaps a bit of roast is unavoidable, so if there is any it should be mellow and compliment the overarching style. If there's too much, congrats if it's still good, but you've made a Robust Porter or an American Stout. So with this in mind I set out to craft a recipe.

Recipe: All Blacks IPA 1

Naming a beer can be a bit tricky sometimes. The working title for this beer was The Black Sun IPA, named after the virtual hacker nightclub in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. But that term also has weird esoteric Nazi-SS significance, and as a general rule you never want to cause confusion when it comes to Nazis. So instead I decided to dedicate it to my favorite rugby team, the New Zealand All Blacks.

The All Blacks are best known for their performance of the Haka, a traditional Maori dance, before each game. It's outstanding.

ALL BLACKS IPA v.1
All grain, 5.25 gallons
O.G. Est 1.063. F.G. Est 1.015
Act O.G. 1.068, Est FG 1.017
SRM: 28-30ish
IBU: 64
Est ABV 6.3%, Act closer to 6.6%

10 lbs US 2-Row (Great Western)
1 lb Munich
1 lb Carahell
4 oz Crystal 40

Mashed at 149. Mash Water Treatment: 2 gm Chalk, 2 gm Gypsum, 1 gm Calcium Chloride, 1 gm Epsom Salts, 1 gm Kosher Salt. Knock out at 168.

The Blackening. You'll notice that there is no dark malt in the grain bill. To keep the astringency and roastiness down, we're taking a page out of coffee brewing: the cold brew method. By soaking your ground coffee in the fridge overnight before pressing, you can create a very flavorful cup of coffee with none of the bitterness caused by the hot brew methods. So to blacken the beer, I started with 1 lb of Carafa II Special, a dark roasted and dehusked malt from Weyermann. Ground it up in a food processor, the finer the better. Put it in a pyrex bowl and added about 1.25 pounds of cold water. Stirred it around until it there were no dry pockets. Then into the fridge overnight.

At Sparging, I drew off about three gallons, then strained the Carafa and added the black liquid to the top of the mash tun and sparged the rest as normal. In retrospect I would add the carafa extract right after the grain bed is set, I lost a fair bit of color by waiting that long. Next time I may also just add the Carafa grinds to the top as well, rather than straining them out. I'm going to have to ponder that one.

90 minute boil.

1 oz Centennial (10% AA) as First Wort Hop
.5 oz Columbus (14.4%) at 60 minutes. (I'm an idiot and added 1 oz without thinking, so this batch is probably closer to 85 IBUs. D'oh!)
Whirlfloc at 15 min.
1 oz Centennial at 5 min.
1 oz Cascade at 0 min.
1 oz Cascade as Dry Hop, 5 days.

Pitched a packet of Saf-05 American Ale yeast that I'd made a starter of the night before.

This seemed like a great opportunity to try out my new toy, a 15 gallon Mini Brew conical fermenter. This was the Best-In-Show Prize for the Cascade Brewers Cup, as well as some other great prizes including De Clerck's A Textbook of Brewing. Time to try it out!

Things were chugging along swimmingly but after 10 days it does seem like it's stalled out at 1.020. The thermometer on top showed why, it was down to 62. It was going along fine at about 67-68 while fermentation was active, but cooled as fermentation slowed. My house is 65 in the day and 58 at night, so it's been dropping temp and that's caused the yeast to drop out. Also, it wasn't as black as I wanted it to be, thanks to my adding the carafa too late to the sparge. So my two-fold solution was to take my last half-pound of Carafa II Special, grind it, place it in a grain bag, steep it in a quart of water on the stove at 150 for 20 minutes, then drain and add the hot black liquid on top. This upped the temp to 66 and stirred things up a bit, while adding color and hopefully not too much dissolved oxygen. I moved the whole thing closer to a heating register and it seems to have maintained that temp. We'll see. Before I brew another beer in it I'm going to go get a small, cheap electric blanket for the conical. Otherwise I'm fairly happy with it so far.

Dry Cured: Chorizo and Landjaegers

2010-03-29T12:34:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago I began my first experiment with fermented, dry-cured sausages. I figured it would be best to start small, with something reasonably easy. The big problem was setting up a curing chamber for this. Until I was sure it would work I wasn't going to risk a large sausage going bad on me. So salami was out.

Chorizo, on the other hand, is something I really love to cook with. That tangy, garlicky, slightly spicy flavor is great with so many dishes, and I like the neon-red color it brings to things. So I figured I'd make a round of it, and have it hanging downstairs ready whenever I needed it.

As long as I was getting the equipment out and, importantly, ordering expensive bacteria cultures, I figured I'd do another kind of sausage as well. I'm a huge fan of Landjaegers, and I liked the idea of having a stockpile ready that would provide snacks for a whole Summer's worth of hikes. Fermented, smoked, and air-dried, these sausages will last for a very long time, happily unrefrigerated and hanging down in the basement. Historically, Landjaegers were often in the rations of European soldiers and I like to think of the armies of Napoleon, Wellington, and certainly Blücher snacking on them during breaks in the action at Waterloo.

The Recipes

The Spanish Chorizo recipe was the one in Ruhlman's Charcuterie, with some minor changes.

5 lbs of Pork Shoulder
50 gm Kosher Salt
6 gm Insta Cure #2
10 gm Dextrose
8 gm Bactoferm F-LC (Ruhlman calls for 20 grams, which is most of the $15 packet. Nope, not doing it. Reasons explained later.)
60 ml distilled water
2 T Smoked Paprika
2 T Ancho Chile Powder
1 1/2 t Nambe Pueblo Chile Powder
1 T minced garlic + 1 t garlic powder.

My plan was to make a Chorizo that was basically Spanish-style, but with some Southwest twists. When it comes to the riotously red color of Chorizo, you need chile powder, and lots of it. Paprika is absolutely necessary and using smoked paprika gives a great flavor and saves you from having to smoke the sausages. I liked Ruhlman's use of Ancho powder. Fresh, it has an almost raisiny aroma and great chile taste without serious heat. For heat, I went with some heirloom Nambe Pueblo Chile powder that I've had for a while now. Unfortunately, it seems to be losing its kick over time. The chorizo didn't end up as hot as I wanted. The final last minute change happened when I ran out of fresh garlic and had to sub in some powdered. Next time I'll use all fresh, but this worked I think.

The Landjaeger recipe was basically the one from Len Poli's amazing sausage page. After a few changes here's what I put in:

2 1/2 lbs Pork Shoulder
2 1/2 lbs Beefalo
50 gm kosher salt
2 t Liquid Smoke
12 gm Dextrose
12 gm White Pepper
7 gm Insta Cure #2
1 1/2 t Caraway Seeds
3/4 t Mace
3/4 t Powdered Garlic
8 gm Bactoferm F-LC

Len calls for 2.5 lbs of lean beef, and while I was at the market looking for something that would work I spotted some very lean Beefalo steaks that were reasonably cheap. Perfect. So they're actually half Beefalo, half pork sausages. I also cut his Caraway in half because I'm not huge on it.

Grinding and Stuffing

The first step was ordering some things from Butcher & Packer. First up was curing salt. I've got plenty of Insta Cure #1, sodium nitrite, but for this I'd need Cure #2, sodium nitrate. Nitrites preserve sausages, keeping bad critters like botulism from growing, as well protecting the color and providing that 'cured' taste. Over time the nitrites will be used up, however. So for long term fermented sausages, you need to use sodium nitrate. The nitrate will break down into sodium nitrite and cause a slow-release of the chemical, protecting the sausage for much, much longer.

The next thing I needed was a bacterial starter culture. Bacteria! But you just said the nitrites stop bacteria. What gives? Well, certain bacteria are useful in sausage making in that they can consume sugars and produce lactic acid, which lowers the pH of the sausage and prevents harmful critters from growing. Another line of defense, as it were. They are also helpful in getting the nitrates to break down, and they give the sausage a nice lactic tang.

Ok, time to shout into the void. Bacteria Culture industry! Listen up. A 25 gm packet of Bactoferm runs $15 and is enough for 220 lbs of sausage. I am not going to make that much sausage in years of work, maybe ever. But the packet goes bad fairly quickly once you open it. Also, the bacteria are suspended in a media of some kind, so that you have to use at least 1/4 of the packet to insure that enough live bacteria make it in. So I had to put in enough to do 50 lbs of meat in order to make 5 lbs of sausage. It's not going to hurt anything to put too much bacteria in, there's only so much dextrose to eat, but it's still expensive and annoying. Take a hint from the homebrew world and make 5 gm packets for us home hobbyists making 5 lbs at a time! Sheesh. Ok, end rant. I ended up using 1/3 of the packet for each of the batches, so I've still got 1/3 left over for something else in the near future.

One of the really great things I ordered in was this 25 lb meat lug. Food grade, fairly strong, very useful. So I diced up 7.5 lbs of pork shoulder and the 2.5 lbs of beefalo, then put the lid on and set it outside. It was about 40 out, so I figured that would keep it cool enough while I got the grinder set up.

I ran 5 lbs of the pork through the largest die for my Chorizo. It's supposed to be chunky and rustic after all. Then switched out for the 3/16" die, combined the remaining pork and beefalo, and ran it through for the Landjaegers. Spices were added and both recipes were mixed in up in my KitchenAid.

I stuffed the sausages into what I believe are 29 mm hog casings. They are really pretty small casings, but unfortunately I have a lot of them (had to buy a full butcher's pack) so until they're gone all my sausages will be a bit on the skinny side. C'est la vie.

Here are the Landjaegers on the right, all in links.

For the Chorizo I needed to make individual servings. So I stuffed them out in about 12-16" lengths, pulled the casing forward about 4", then stuffed another link. When I was done I went back, cut the links and tied up the sausages with kitchen twine. These were then hung in my kitchen for a while to air-dry and to get out of my way while I worked on the Landjaegers. You can see one is a bit off colored. It had the last of the Landjaeger still in the tube, so it's a half-and half-Landrizo.

Fermenting

The sausages needed to be fermented, and the bacteria really like a nice warm, humid spot. Something a bit hard to find in Seattle in the Winter. Also, the Landjaegers needed to be pressed, which helps them dry out later. The solution came to me thanks to my new meat lug.

I put the Landjaegers on the bottom, arranged in a single layer. Then I put a cookie sheet over the top of them. They need about 5 lbs of weight pressing them. Guess what, my chorizos weighed about 5 lbs! A match made in heaven. So I put them on top, and put in a bowl of water to keep the humidity up. Then on went the lid and into the oven they went.

But turning it onto the 'Warm' setting for a few minutes every now and then, I was able to keep the whole mess surprisingly, ridiculously, impressively close to 85 degrees for two days straight. At that point, I took the chorizos off and gave the landjaegers a break from the pressing. By now they had become somewhat rectangular, and though not as regular as ones pressed in a mold, they had a nice shape. Chorizos went back in and they all got a third day at 85. The whole kitchen smelled garlicky and fermenty.

Smoking

Landjaegers are cold smoked, which apart from flavor gives them another layer of protection from mold. This presents a problem for me, as I only have a hot smoker. But I've been able to jury rig a solution using my Weber Smokey Mountain. By putting six lit coals in the bottom, and piling the smoke wood around them, I've been able to do a fairly good job of keeping the temp around or below 90 degrees. I say fairly good job because it is by no means perfect, but it works well enough.

After three days of fermenting I took the landjaegers out and hung them to air-dry for a few hours. They'd taken on a nice color, were somewhat rectangular now, and smelled really quite good already. I fired up the smoker and they went on for four hours. For wood I used hickory, maple, and alder. I also put some cheese on because, hey, smoked cheddar is tasty too and the fire was already going.

Drying

Careful drying is the really tricky part in making dry-cured sausages. Too hot and you encourage spoilage bacteria. Too humid and you encourage bad molds. Too dry and you get what's called Case Hardening. The outside casing of the sausage dries too fast, creating a hard barrier that prevents the inside of the sausage from drying properly. Since it never really dries out, something eventually starts growing and the inside of the sausage rots. Not good eats. I wasn't really worried because my sausages were so darn skinny, but still, this was uncharted territory.

I suspected that my basement cellar, where my wines, mead, cider, etc. were all aging away, would also work pretty well as a curing chamber. My experience has shown that it maintains a pretty close 60 degrees in the winter. On the hottest day ever recorded in Seattle it was only 74 in there. It's totally dark, so light won't spoil the fat in the sausages. It seemed reasonably humid, but I also put a bowl of saltwater in there just to help it out. Finally you need a bit of air circulation to help dry off the casings. I had a small fan from my old beer fermenting chamber back in Miami, so I plugged it in and aimed it near but not at the sausages to get some air moving.

I hammered some finishing nails into one of the beams and used pliers to bend them into a J shape. Then hung the chorizos off the hooks. The Landjaegers were in long chains, so I hung these off some hooks in the back of the closet. All in all I was pretty happy with the setup.

The basement smells really interesting now.

The chorizo gave a sort of tart, cured smell while the landjaegers gave a smokiness. That small room now smells delicious. Hopefully the airlocks will do their jobs and my wine won't end up smelling like sausages.

I figured it would be three weeks before the sausages were properly dried, but due to their skinny casings they were pretty much ready after about two weeks. I cut a chorizo open after day 10, just to watch its progress and check for case hardening. Still a bit mushy in the middle, but almost there. And no hardening to report. A couple days into it I did notice a few small mold spots on a couple of the chorizos. This was easily dealt with by wiping them down with a little white wine vinegar. Didn't come back.

The Big Moment

I'm very happy with how both sausages came out.

The chorizo has a really rustic appearance, and a great dark red color. As you can see it has a nice definition, with large white chunks of fat standing out against the red background. It has a good tangy flavor, garlic and chile are there too, with just a hint of smoke. It cooks up nicely, producing vibrant bright orange grease, but it's good raw too. This one went excellently in some scrambled eggs for breakfast. My only complaint is that it's not spicy enough. I need to ditch my older chile powders I guess. Next time I may put some cumin and Mexican oregano in as well.

The Landjaegers are excellent. Nice texture, good level of smoke, excellent spicing. I regret not adding all the Caraway just a bit, biting into one is a mini-flavor explosion. The sausage has a nice definition, small chunks of fat and a good distribution of spices. The smaller grind gives them a good texture, dry but not tough. Like beef jerky, but in sausage form. They're still weeping a bit of oil, I'm hoping that will stop eventually and isn't a bad thing. But I'm quite happy with them, and they have already made a good snack on an outing. And there are about two dozen more hanging downstairs. Summer is set.

Brewday: 'The Theme From Titanic Is Now In Your Head' American Rye Alt

2010-03-25T08:53:00.000-07:00

Ok, strange name. But Celene Dion is now scorching your neurons. And mine. Ugh. Anyways, I was feeling a bit nostalgic for one of the places in Miami that made there life bearable. The place where everybody knows your name. Well that is if, like me, you happened to frequent it at least once a week. I speak of Miami's best brewpub, one of the only places in town to get a good beer, my former home away from home, The Titanic.

Probably the single beer I drank the most there was Captain Smith's Rye. And rightly so. It's a great beer. Under the Titanic's first brewer, Jamie Ray (now at Montgomery Brew Pub in Alabama) it took a GABF bronze in 1999 and a silver in 2000. The current brewer Steve hasn't changed it much, and I don't even want to know how much of it I drank during my time there. Twenty ounce mug, five years...

So I was missing it a bit. And I had four pounds of malted rye in the stores. It also turns out, and I'm not sure how or why, that Jamie Ray made a version of the recipe that comes included with BeerSmith. How convenient! So I tweaked it to my system, modified things a bit, and got brewing.

The basic idea behind this beer is that it's a hybrid of styles. It's too dark, strong and hoppy to be a 'traditional' American Rye, and it's fermented with Dusseldorf Alt yeast. Though it is hopped like an Alt, it's also a bit strong, and has rye and no caramel malts. So it's not quite an Alt either. All I know is its a spicy, dry but smooth, 6%, amber rye/alt delicious bastard.

A note on brewing with Rye. As you may have heard, Rye is a bitch to brew with. The reason has to do with it being huskless, and with a smaller diameter kernel than barley. It will turn to goo in the mash, and unless you keep the sparge hot, and use some rice hulls, your mash will get stuck. It's also hard to mill, you need to adjust the rollers closer together to crack the kernels. But it's also kind of gummy, and if you move the rollers too close it will jam (and if you're me, the drill's torque will flip the mill over, spraying rye everywhere. D'oh!). Setting the mash bed took a long time, and I vorlaufed a lot of wort. Little rye chunkies kept slipping through. So it's not a bad idea to use flaked rye. Unfortunately I had malted. Oh well, needs must.

This was also a chance to try out my shiny new magnetic stir plate; a prize for taking 3rd Best In Show with Captain Slow's SEB at the Cascade Brewers Cup. I made a 1L starter of White Labs Dusseldorf Alt the night before. There's a small magnet inside the flask that is being spun by a magnet in the base, creating the vortex which introduces oxygen and keeps the yeast in suspension.

What a fascinating modern age we live in.

Brewday was somewhat eventful. First mistake, I must not have had enough coffee because I missed my infusion temp by ten degrees! Mashed in at 140. My only guess is that I misread my water level and put in 2.75 gallons, not 3.75. So I got some water boiling and had it up to the correct 150 within 15 minutes. No biggie. Second problem was just more of my not checking my freezer first. I though I had some Northern Brewers in the freezer, but it turned out that I had a different 'N' hop, Nugget. So I made some last minute substitutions. If you've got Northern Brewer, I'd add an ounce of that instead of my half ounce of Nugget. O.G. was 1.063, so it will be closer to 6.4-6.5% when it's done.

Brewday: American Rye Alt

5.25 gallons, all grain
Est O.G. 1.061, Act. O.G. 1.063
Est F.G. 1.015, Act. probably 1.013-14
Est ABV 6.1%, Act. probably 6.4-6.5%
SRM: 7
IBU: 27

9 lbs Weyermann Pilsner Malt
3 lbs Rye Malt
1 oz. Chocolate Malt

Mash in at 150. Water modifications were 2 gm chalk, 2 gm calcium chloride. Mash out at 168 with an infusion. Sometimes people skip the mash out. I would not skip it on a Rye beer if I were you. Also, add a few good handfulls of rice hulls at knock out.

90 minute boil.

0.5 ounces Nugget pellets @ 12.5% AA @ 60 minutes left
1 ounce Stirling pellets @ 5.3% AA @ 15 minutes
whirlfloc at 15

Cooled to 63 and pitched my Alt yeast, White Labs 036. Some say to ferment Alts at 60-62. White labs says 65-69, or you risk stressing the yeast causing sulfur or premature flocculation. My house is 65. I figured I'd pitch a bit cool and it will climb to where it wants to be, somewhere in the mid-60's.

So it will get about 2 weeks to ferment, then a week cold and bottling. It probably should lager for a month to mellow. Problem is I want to get an entry off to the Puget Sound Pro Am in a month. I may pull just four bottles and lager the rest. Of course, my lager fridge is also full of sake and pilsner right now...

You Should See Bainbridge On A Full Moon...

2010-03-24T12:08:00.000-07:00

I think the problem here, was that he was hunting without a license.

I remember the night I bagged my first 'Were. Those were the days.

"One thing about living on Bainbridge Island I never could stomach...all the damn werewolves".

Nettles: Metheglin

2010-03-22T18:25:00.000-07:00

I had a quart of nettles leftover from that last round of foraging. What to do with them? As so often happens, my thoughts turned to alcohol...

You can make beer with nettles. In fact, it's been used as a flavoring for centuries, if not thousands of years. In ages past it was used in place of hops in Gruits, and in all kinds of teas and tinctures. More recently, H.F.W. over at River Cottage in England has revived interest with a recipe for Nettle Beer, that really is more of a "Country Wine" than a beer. I thought about making it, but ultimately decided against. I already had something ready to go. And I wanted something for St. Patty's, which was rapidly approaching.

Mead.

I would make a Nettle-Spice Metheglin.

"What the hell is a Metheglin?", I hear the Interwebs scream. Metheglin is simply the traditional word for spiced mead. Traditionally, people would put all kinds of things into mead as a folk cure. One, because the honey and alcohol made it taste better and two, the alcohol and steeping allows extraction of various compounds that aren't soluble in water. Also, in medieval times, your local water probably had a lot to do with why you were sick in the first place and did not usually end up as a chief ingredient in any effective 'cures'. So we get the word Metheglin, from the Welsh for 'Healing Liquor'. The astute among you will have noticed that "Metheglin" sounds a lot like "Medicine". Well there you go. Now drink your metheglin! Is good for you.

I had a spare half-gallon growler of mead from last Fall's Purple Daze Melomel. You can see the growler in the back of the big carboy. The main batch is still sitting pretty there on the fruit, by the way. Seven months and counting. It's going to be so good. In 2013.

So step one was to make an infusion to blend in with the mead.

Into a pot with a quart of water went:

1 quart of Nettles, blanched (about 3 quarts raw Nettles).

Boiled it for 45 minutes. Then added the spices.

Peel of one Satsuma, all white pith removed
Peel of one Meyer Lemon, pith removed
two coins Galangal
two coins Ginger
one nutmeg, quartered
one cardamom pod, smacked with the flat of a knife
two dozen allspice berries
one kaffir lime leaf
1/4 oz hops. Sterling. In a tea ball, because they were pellets and I didn't want them getting everywhere.

Boil for another 15 minutes. Then strain and cool.

This was a lot of uncharted territory. I wasn't quite sure what the nettles would taste like, or which spices would dominate. So I got to blending. For blending you'll want:

spare honey to back sweeten if necessary
the zest-less lemon and satsuma
acid blend, and sulfites/sorbates if you're going for long term storage. I wasn't.
A good blending vessel.

Here's my setup.

You can see I carefully decanted the mead into a pitcher. The nettle mixture is on the left, looking like swamp water. Then it just became a matter of blending. A little of this, a little of that. The mead was on the sweet side, so no backsweetening was necessary. A little bit of the citrus juices really brightened it up. I used most of the nettle extract. Subtlety is nice in theory, but if you can't taste the spice it's not a spiced beer/mead. Let the spiced speak, but not shout.

Then it was just a matter of bottling. I figured that some yeast got in from the mead, and sure enough, a week by the heating register and it was 'petillant'. Which is, easily, my least favorite word in all of brewing. But a little carbonation helps in spiced meads, if lifts aromas up to the nose.

So what did it taste like? Quite good, I think. Nettles taste like spinach when just cooked, but boil them for an hour and they change dramatically. The best I can describe it as is arrowroot. Kind of bready and sweet. Weird. The citrus and spices worked out well. Nutmeg goes great with nettles. As expected, the cardamom is there, shouting above the din. One is certainly enough. The ginger and galangal were subtle, but in the background.

Unfortunately, the spice infusion was very turbid. And the resulting mead was a bit cloudy. Tasted fine, but was a bit unappealing visually. (Though I was actually hoping it would turn bright green!) As a result it didn't place when I sent a couple bottles up to the Cascade Brewers Cup.

Nevertheless, it did take Honorable Mention in the Mead Best of Show Round, out of over 60 meads. The crowd loved it too. Well, those lucky few that got to taste the last two bottles anyway. Honestly, a week or two would have settled it out.

Oh well. Next time...

Nettles: Pesto

2010-03-22T17:51:00.000-07:00

Ugh, this was almost a month ago. Way behind. But I think there's also an appropriateness to this delayed writing, most of the pesto is still around. In frozen form.

Anyhow, nearly a month ago I went out again, paper grocery bag and gloves in hand, to harvest some more Stinging Nettles from a local park. They grow everywhere around here, and are an obnoxious weed. Still, I try to be choosy where I pick them. Too near the sides of trails? Dogs. Too far off trail? High chance of me getting tagged by either the nettles themselves or sneaky blackberries. So this day I picked a few near the main trail.

As I was working my way along a jogger stopped and asked me, "Hey, are you picking nettles?" "Why yes, yes I am." "There's a #$%&-ton of them down around that bend." "Thanks!" Sure enough that part of the park was rife with them. I've still not quite got a firm answer on the legality of picking in city parks, so I consider it my civic duty to eradicate some of this green menace from areas where say, children and the elderly might be: benches, scenic overlooks, etc.. Honestly, the park crews have to clean it out. I bet they'd be thrilled if someone else did it. Got tagged twice in the process, need to be more careful! So itchy! But sure enough, I soon had my grocery sack and was on my way home.

Washed and blanched, I ended up with about two quarts of ready-to-go nettles. But what to do with them?

Lang Cook of Fat of the Land never ceases to amaze me, and his post on Nettle Pops got my mind going. You make pesto. Then freeze it in an ice-cube tray. Voila! Little pesto pops that you can just heat up whenever you need to pesto something. Brilliant. So one quart of nettles became pesto. In a food processor:

1 quart Nettles, blanched, drained and squeezed, and roughly chopped. Probably 3 quarts of dry nettles. I really should go by weight. Oh well.
1 cup shredded Parmesan
1 cup toasted Pine Nuts
8-10 cloves of garlic
a little lemon juice or wine vinegar to brighten things up

Blitz everything for 30 seconds or so, then start to drizzle in olive oil until it becomes the texture you want. I like mine a but chunky. A cup or so of oil should do it.

Once you've got it like you like, you can stick it in the fridge for a week or so. We chowed down on it with a simple loaf of bread, and I made a few simple pasta dishes with it.

But if you're thinking long term, you can spoon or pipe it into an ice cube tray. Each cube is enough to dress two servings of pasta pretty decently.

As a pesto it has all the right garlic, nut, Parmesan flavors, but not the 'basil'. I don't see why you couldn't put basil in it, other than it's not in season when nettles are. But I like it as it is, the nettles have a spinach thing that's mellow but nice. And very, very nutritious. And I've got a dozen Summer dinners half-done, ready in my freezer. Sweet, and worth the sting.

Sake Update III: Kasu

2010-03-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

Sake Update III.

At the end of the last post, I'd pressed the sake and bottled some as nigorizake. The rest is sitting cold in my lagering fridge, and I'll rack it in a few days, pasteurize it, and let it bulk age for about two months. Then it'll get bentonite, filtering, repasteurizing, and bottling. Then drinking! In the meanwhile, I've got cleanup to do.

One of the fortunate side effects of making sake is the lees, or sake kasu. Kasu is composed of yeast, koji, spent rice and unextracted sake left over after pressing. Fortunately it is really useful in the kitchen, a lot like its soy-sister: miso. So I made a tasty weekend dinner for my lovely wife to showcase a couple of its various uses.

Kasuzuke Black Cod and Halibut

First up is my favorite, a very traditional way prepare fish: kasuzuke. The idea is that you make a marinade of the kasu, as well as some sugar, mirin and miso. You leave fatty fish (typically Black Cod, aka Sablefish or Butterfish) in the marinade for several days, then grill or broil it. The salt, sugar, and sake all work to cure the fish, extracting moisture and making it dense and flavorful. The kasu, mostly but not completely wiped off, caramelizes, making the skin crispy, sweet, salty, and very, very tasty. Here in Seattle, it is a staple at several restaurants, and you can buy it fresh and ready to go in the marinade at Uwajimaya, and at Ballard's own Fresh Fish Co., where I buy most of my fish. I've used the recipe Uwajimaya before, but this time I used the nearly identical one from Tom Douglas' Seattle Kitchen:

1 pound Kasu
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 T light miso
1/4 cup mirin
1 1/2 pounds fish, preferably 4-6 oz steaks with (well-scaled) skin on.

Brine the fish in a quart of water and 2 T kosher salt for about half an hour. Then pat it dry. This will help it release water and be firmer and more awesome later.

I used a Black Cod steak, and a nice piece of Halibut fillet. Think fatty, firm fish not oily. Black Cod, Salmon, Halibut, work great. Heck I used Pompano once and it was great. Really killer fresh Kingfish (though typically considered very oily) might work too, if it was caught that day.

Combine the kasu, miso, sugar, mirin and a cup of water in a bowl and whisk together. In a pyrex baking dish or plastic tub of some kind, pour some of the marinade on the bottom, then place the fish in and pour the rest of the marinade over. Make sure the fish is covered. Then lid it or plastic wrap it, and into the fridge for three days at least.

Mmmm smells like sake.

After three days, you can go ahead and cook it. Or leave it there for a while longer, no worries.

Preheat your oven to broil. Spray a baking sheet or broiler pan with oil. Take out the fish and wipe off most, but not all of the marinade with a brush or paper towel. Arrange on the sheet and broil for 10-12 minutes, flipping halfway, until it's golden brown and starting to flake.

Serve toasty warm and dig in with chopsticks. The fish flakes nicely, and the kasu gives it an awesome sweet-tart-salt-sake flavor that it very unique. Just watch for bones, if you're not using a boneless fillet.

You can save and reuse the marinade a couple times. Just use your nose. If it smells pleasantly of sake, it's good. If it's growing fuzzies and smells like low tide, then ditch it, obviously.

Soup: Kasu jiru

Yep, just like miso you can make soup using kasu. There are a lot of recipes for it out there, some with enough ingredients to make a full meal. But I just wanted a side soup, like a simple miso.

So I made one up.

Step One in a lot of Japanese cooking is the dashi, fresh fish stock that is found somewhere in many, many Japanese dishes. Basically it's a quick stock of katsuobushi, (dried, fermented, smoked, and shaved Bonito) and kombu, (dried kelp). For this round I decided to go a little more on the fish route, and instead of using katsuobushi, I made iriko dashi.

Iriko, are dried tiny little sardines. They haven't been smoked like the katsuobushi, and so their flavor makes for a fishier soup, which I thought would go well with the kasu. The recipe for the dashi came from Elizabeth Andoh's Washoku, an excellent and beautiful guide to Japanese home cooking. I recommend it highly.

15-20 small Iriko, trimmed (pop off the head, scoop out the guts as best you can. As you can see I kind of forgot to do this. I don't think it really hurt anything.)
4 1/4 cups cold water
10-12 square inches of kombu
1 dried shiitake mushroom

Put everything in a pot and soak for 20 minutes. Then put on medium heat until tiny bubbles start appearing around the edges. Lower heat and keep at that level of simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and let sit 5 minutes. Then strain. You could keep the shiitake and kombu for other uses, including another round of stock or in a dish. The stock is best when used fresh, but it will also keep for three days or so.

Now to make the soup. Put a tablespoon or so of kasu in a serving bowl. Add a dash of stock, then whisk to get the cold kasu warmed up and dissolved. Add a pinch of dried seaweed, wakame, if you've got it. Then ladle some more stock in and add a dash of soy sauce to counter the sweet kasu. Sprinkle on some green onions or, in my case, fresh chives. Done. Soup. Like miso, but more sake-y.

You could add cubes of tofu if you wanted to, and it would be very similar to miso soup. I was fresh out. I'll probably make a more complex soup later on.

Madrona Smoked Scallops

Ok, so this doesn't really involve kasu but I found some Sea Scallops on wicked sale and decided to try an experiment. The previous weekend we were up hiking the Oyster Dome trail and came across a few Madrona trees that were peeling their bark. I happily grabbed a small bagful and brought it home. Madrona (Arbutus menziesii) is also often called Madrone, or Arubutus, but I've always known it as Madrona. No matter. Point is it's a plant that was traditionally eaten by the native peoples of the area, and it's getting a new resurgence in cooking. The bark is most often made into a tea, though the tree produces edible berries as well. For example, see Hank Shaw's great posts over at Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. I am covetous of his Madrone Tea Egg.

My thought was to try an wok smoke something with the bark, as you might wok smoke with tea leaves. It makes a good tea, what kind of smoke would it produce? Experiment time.

I had three large sea scallops, so I sliced them in half into six smaller scallops. More surface area for smoke, and twice the value! They went into a marinade of:

a tablespoon of mirin
a tablespoon of soy sauce
a teaspoon of sesame oil
a few minced chives
a bit of grated ginger
a bit of minced garlic.

The scallops marinated for two or three hours in the fridge. Then I washed them off, patted them dry, and left them to air a bit on a paper towel. A bit of a pellicle, formed from the cure, will help the smoke adhere later.

Put my wok on high, and put a folded over piece of aluminum foil in the bottom. Otherwise cleanup will be a royal PITA.

Next I took my veggie steamer, gave it a spray with some oil, and arranged the scallops on it. Soon as the bark started to smolder I set the steamer in the wok, put the lid on and turned down the heat to medium. Kitchen fan on full blast, I smoked the scallops for about 10 minutes until they were done.

Meanwhile I knocked up a sauce. I didn't know what the scallops were ultimately going to taste like, so I just got creative. Some decent homemade Ranch Dressing? Check. Medium-Sweet Soy Sauce? Check. Rooster Sauce (sriracha)? Check. Not bad. Not bad at all!

Arranged the scallops on a bed of the sauce, with a squirt of wasabi and some chives. Only four actually made it to the table, as two fell apart after smoking and were eaten by a hungry cook.

They were delicious, but not at all what I thought they'd taste like. Despite the heavy Asian influence of the recipe, the Madrona had a real hardwood smoke character that I reminded me more of barbecue. Honestly, you could totally give these a light dusting of BBQ rub before smoking and they'd be excellent. Or steam some duck or chicken, dust it with BBQ rub, then wok smoke it for 'BBQ on a Rainy Day.'

As it was it was still pretty great, for an experiment. Next time I'm inclined to try throwing other things on the foil with the bark. A Star Anise? Brown Sugar? Some whole Coriander and Cumin Seeds? Mmm possibilities...

Finally, to complete the dinner I made a quick salad, and steamed some rice with furikake on top. Served with the Nigorizake that gave it rise, the Kasu Dinner was a delicious success.

Sake Update II: Pressing Matters

2010-03-12T16:29:00.000-08:00

The Sake Project continues.

The sake has been pressed! After three weeks of waiting I popped the lid off the bucket and got my first taste of it. Gravity reading of 1.000. We are go for pressing!

Of course I had to find a way to press several gallons of rice and proto-sake. Fortunately, I scored a couple nylon paint straining bags from Home Depot for about $3. They're designed to fit a 5 gallon bucket, and come with elastic bands around the opening. My only advice on this is once you get the bag secured around a sanitized bucket, secure it somehow. I started scooping the rice into it and it slipped off and made a bit of a mess. So just have someone hold it, or use some clamps or something while you scoop the rice into the bag.

Next you have to get the sake out of the mix somehow. My first thought was to let gravity do the work. You could just hang it and let it drip I suppose, like you would cheese. But it would take a long time and I'd worry about oxidization.

A word on contamination while we're at it. By my guess, the sake is at least 18% alcohol! So that in itself is protecting it. But on top of that it will be pasteurized, twice, before drinking. So I wasn't too worried about manic cleanliness. Just sterilize things and wash your hands really well. You're going to need them.

Next I tried using two cookie sheets to form a sort of press, using my body weight to push down on it. It worked fairly well, but was ultimately a bit ungainly. If I had a fruit press, or a proper cheese press, those options might work well. Ultimately what worked best was just holding it over the bucket and using one hand to squeeze handfulls of the bag. Eventually I managed to wring just over three gallons out of it.

I racked the sake from the bucket into a couple bottles, with the rest going into a carboy. These bottles would be nigori, or cloudy sake, bottled with the lees. This will make it a bit sweeter and more aromatic, and a bit chalky like rice milk.

Technically I guess it's Junmai Ginjo Nigori Genshu Sake.

Junmai: only water, koji, and rice. Not pressed with grain neutral spirits.
Ginjo: the rice was polished down to 60% of its original size.
Nigori: it's bottled cloudy, with lees from the pressing in the bottle.
Genshu: I didn't do a yodan addition of water to dilute the sake down to the normal commercial strength of 14-16%. It's full bore, 18% rocket fuel!

The carboy went into the fridge at 50, where it will sit for a few days while I get my Classic American Pilsners ready for lagering. It will then ramp slowly down to lager temp with them for a few days. Then I'll rack it off the lees, pasteurize it, bentonite it, and leave it to sit and bulk age for a couple months. Then filter it, bottle it, pasteurize it, and drink it!

This is proving to be a lot of work for not a lot of sake.

The bottles of nigorizake went straight into a pot of water on the stove. I slowly raised the water temp until the sake was 140 degrees, then capped it. This should pasteurize it and make its shelf life much longer. As I mentioned earlier, the sanitization isn't crazy important. But the lactic bacteria in the sake will still, somehow, find a way to make the sake sour. Also acetobacters could get in and vinegarize it. Finally, sake oxidizes really, really quickly. Heating it drives off the dissolved co2 and helps purge oxygen from the bottles.

In the straining bag I was left with a problem. Or, perhaps, an opportunity. There was nearly three pounds of sake lees, or kasu, in the bag. You could just throw it out, but why waste such a potentially delicious gift? Kasu is one of my favorite cooking ingredients. It's like miso, but with a very perfumey-sake aroma, and a bit of alcohol. The Japanese use it in place of miso in many dishes, including soups and pickles. However, the best use by far is as a marinade for grilled fish: kasuzuke. So I scooped it out, pressed it into a pyrex dish, and popped it in the freezer to help it set up.

So how is the nigorizake?

Pretty delicious! No real off flavors, though there is a bit of a lactic bite to it. Maybe next time I'll do the sokujo style starter, where you use straight lactic acid instead of bacteria in order to get a more controlled level of acidity. But iIt smells like sake, all the right ethereal perfuminess is there. It is strong though. I decided not to do a yodan dilution this time just to see what it's like at full volume. Next time I'll turn it down a bit, maybe 16%. Note: a side effect of dilution is that you make more total sake as well, so your effort goes farther. It's also pretty young, I think it will be better as it mellows in a couple months.

Can't wait to try the filtered version!

Your Morning Data

2010-03-12T08:58:00.000-08:00

Article in the NYT presents this lovely chart:Culled from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, watch as the prices for vegetables and fruits diverge from sodas, butter, and meat over the last 30 years. Go Soy, Corn and Dairy Subsidies! Also, notice that the price for fish is relatively the same? Despite increased demand and consumption? That's why we'll be the last people to enjoy wild Bluefin.

At least the price of Beer is relatively unchanged.

Ok, it's been a week of indolence and sloth. Time for some writing today!

RIP Mark Linkous

2010-03-10T18:36:00.000-08:00

Just found out that Sparklehorse front-man Mark Linkous shot himself Saturday. It's A Wonderful Life is one of the most bittersweet songs ever written, and I've been a fan of Linkous' work from the first time I heard it about eight years ago. So by way of tribute, here it is:

The whole album of the same name is one of my favorites and well worth a listen, as is his most recent collaboration with David Lynch and Danger Mouse, Dark Night of the Soul.

R.I.P.

Bacon of Doom II

2010-03-04T16:05:00.000-08:00

It was time for more bacon. Arguably, it is always time for more bacon but that's not the point. We were fresh out. It was time for more bacon. Bacon of Doom II.

(Maybe that's why the Cyber-Demon is so angry.... Someone stole his delicious belly.)

Since last Summer's Bacon of Doom had had come out so well I went ahead and ordered another pork belly from Sea Breeze, and a week later I showed up at the farmer's market to pick it up. This time around I didn't get the mighty proud iceberg of pork, it was a much more normal sized belly. It also happened that Liz, the farm manager, was at the market that day and so we all ended up having a chat about the pig. Turns out she'd named the pig Squeaker, since it was always so excited whenever food showed up. So I've come to think of this as Squeaker Bacon.

There may have also been a discussion of pig nipples (the skin was still on) but that's neither here nor there.

So here's the belly. As you can see, this time around 10lbs was pretty much a full belly.

The plan was to make three kinds of bacon. First would be five pounds of maple cured, smoked bacon. Next would be 2.5 lbs of dry cured spiced bacon. Finally, I'd go out on a limb and see what curing the remaining 2.5 lbs with honey would taste like.

So I divided the belly up as evenly as I could. One of the problems is that, depending on how you plan to use it, certain parts of the belly are better than others. For long strips, center cut is best. For lardons, cubes, etc you can use the ends and oddly shaped parts more effectively. Since that's how I use the dry cured bacon the wonky end ended up spiced.

The cure was 1/8 cup of the Ruhlman Dry Cure from Charcuterie, plenty of fresh cracked black pepper, some minced garlic, crushed juniper berries, crumbled bay leaves, dry thyme, some crushed grains of paradise, and dry marjoram.

For the maple cured bacon, the belly was coated with 1/4 cup of the dry cure and a half cup of maple syrup. For the honey bacon, 1/8 cup dry cure and 1/4 cup honey.

Each went into its own little bag and they went into the fridge. I'd recommend putting them in a 13x9 or on a cookie sheet in case they somehow leak a bit, which one did. Cleanup on Aisle 9.

They spent 8 days in the fridge, being flipped ("overhauled") every morning. Then I took them out, washed them off and left them to air dry while I prepped the smoker. Right before sticking it in the smoker, I decided to coat the honey bacon with a thick paste of honey and Dijon mustard.

I used a combo of about equal parts hickory, alder and maple to smoke the maple and the honey bacon. The problems began when I only had about 3/4 of a charcoal chimney full of charcoal. Being under-fueled I had a hard time holding 225-250, and as a result the bacon was, well, sort of cold smoked. But actually, I don't think it's a bad thing. It's salted and cured, and will be kept frozen until I need it. So the fact that it's not already cooked isn't a problem for me.

Otherwise, I trimmed off the skin and trimmed the bacon into more rectangular forms. Of course all the ends and scraps have their own bag, which is great for soups, chowders, etc. Then the bacon was sliced into about 4oz portions and all but one block was labeled and frozen.

The honey bacon gave me a chance to finally try out the deli meat slicer that I got for Christmas. The only problem was that it was a floor model and didn't come with instructions. So, as is natural whenever dangerous spinning blades are involved, I just winged it.

And shredded the heck out of my first few strips. So I threw the bacon in the freezer for about 45 minutes and tried again. This time it was much, much easier. So there you go, a tip.

The end result was pretty decent looking, minus the pile of shredded scraps in the corner. As for taste? The honey bacon is certainly good. No doubt about that. But was it particularly "honey" flavored? Not so much. Neither a failure, nor a wild success, just decent bacon from a local, happy, and apparently loud pig.

The dry cured bacon spent a few days in the fridge while I waited for an order to arrive from Butcher & Packer, then I hung it in the basement on my shiny new bacon hanger.

Unfortunately, a white mold seems to have taken up residence on it while it was in the fridge. It's not fuzzy, more the crusty kind like on a salami, so I'm not really worried. But I'd still prefer it not be there. So I gave the bacon a wipe down with some white wine vinegar and a coating of salt and pepper before I hung it. That basement room is holding a constant 58-60, and the humidity seems about right, but there's no airflow. Fortunately I've got a small fan that I can hopefully hook up to the light socket and get some air moving down there. Then we'll see. I've got some other dry cured things planned and I really hope this basement room works out. If the mold doesn't get under control soon, I'll wipe the bacon down again and then freeze it.

So there we go. 10 lbs of belly has made enough bacon to last me pretty well into the late Summer. Brilliant.

Always Double Check Your Connections

2010-03-02T18:29:00.001-08:00

Yep. Whole Pony Keg of stout gone, and most of a co2 cylinder.

My cloud of profanity is still hanging somewhere out over Puget Sound.

Can't wait to clean this up.

Tomorrow.

Firmly filed in the Don't Do This tag.

Update: Schwarzweisse I

2010-03-02T09:07:00.000-08:00

So after 10 days in the primary at 60 degrees the Schwarzweisse was finished.

It's been a while since I bottled a whole 5 gallon batch. It's a great feeling of accomplishment when you are finished, like you've just laid four dozen happy little alcohol eggs.

The big questions though: how was the color and did it end up too roasty/astringent?

Color: pretty good, as you can see definitely on the far far end of the style. Still, not quite as dark as I wanted. Next time I'll use a whole pound of Carafa II and cold steep it.

Taste: At first taste it was dry and lemony, which was disappointing. But that was more because it was too cold. As it warmed up a nice banana/clove thing came in. In the back there's some malty caramels, but they're quite low. There's just a hint of toasty, but no bitter burnt. Not too shabby. My only complaint is there is a bit too much lemon esther. The curse of every hefe I've ever made. I may try a different yeast next time, but I've got one packet left of the Saf-06 so I think I'll try it again, not muck up the mash, and see if it tastes any different.

Brewday: The Great Classic American Pilsner Off

2010-03-01T14:28:00.000-08:00

American Pilsner.

Could any beer be more loved, and loathed, than American Pilsner? Loved, because it makes up the vast, vast majority of beer sold in this country, and increasingly, the world. Loathed, because it has a reputation for being tasteless, bland, low-brow and unstoppable in its quest for total world beer domination.

It's hip to trash on American light lager beers when you're a homebrewer/beer snob. After all, we owe much of the current craft brewing movement to a rejection over the last 40 years of these mass-market lagers by small brewers and their supportive customers. Popular mass-market beers are bad, because they're popular and mass-market, while all the cool kids drink craft beer.

This contrarian stance seems a very human one to take. Many people start drinking fizzy yellow beer, then move on to more complicated styles as they get into brewing or are exposed to more craft beer. Your tastes grow up. "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways."

I was going to paraphrase that as "When I was a child, I drank as a child..." but that didn't seem quite right. The point is that these beers are something you move past as a regrettable proof of your earlier state of ignorance. Now you're a Big Boy and drink nothing but Double IPAs and Russian Imperial Stouts. You rebel, you.

Eventually though I think we come full circle. The fact is, American Light Lagers are very, very hard to brew. There is no room for error, nothing to hide behind. And it's a technological marvel that every can of Bud tastes the same the world over. Seriously, that's an achievement on par with the Moon Landing. So you begin to respect it, in a grudging kind of way.

But it's still, well, bland. But it is designed to be that way. The irony of American Lager is that the very height of the Brewing Arts is used to produce a beer that tastes as much like nothing as possible.

But it wasn't always like this. What if there was another way?

The Classic American Pilsner

The story of American Light Lager is the story of Railroads, Immigration, Prohibition, Class Warfare, Junk Science, Television, Advertising, War, Monopolization, Baby Boomers, the Growth of the Middle Class, Suburbia, and well, basically, the story of everything that happened in the last 150 years. In short, way too complicated for much discussion here. Suffice to say, many factors contributed to a race-to-the-bottom in terms of flavor. Bud-Lite today doesn't taste anything like Budweiser did, say, 120 years ago. In fact, the beer that built the fortunes of Messrs. Busch, Miller, Coors, and Pabst was a very different beast indeed.

So why not make one? After all, the joy of homebrewing is the ability to brew whatever strikes your fancy. Why not brew a Classic American Pilsner like Grandpa, or even Great-Grandpa might have drank when he was young?

Unfortunately, this beer is functionally extinct. What would such a beer look like? Much of the homebrewing revival of the style can be attributed to the writings of Jeff Renner, whose research and methods have been used for years by homebrewers resurrecting the style at home. (See The Revival of the Classic American Pilsner, Zymurgy, 2000; and Reviving the Classic American Pilsner - A Shamefully Neglected Style, Brewing Techniques, 1995.)

Traditionally, recently immigrated Continental brewers would have been faced with a challenge. Most barley grown in America back then was 6-row, meaning that the kernels grow in six vertical rows around the stalk, instead of just two as in 2-row barley. This created a problem, because 6-row has higher protein and thicker husks than 2-row, which means it could cause chill haze when used to brew the newly popular, and preferably clear, lager beers.

But 6-row had other tricks up its sleeve. Firstly, it was suited to a wider variety of growing conditions which meant that it was planted and thrives in many areas of the country. When malted, 6-row also had the benefit of increased enzyme levels over its 2-row brother, meaning it could easily convert high percentages of unmalted grain adjuncts. The higher percentage of husks also meant that lautering was fairly easy, even with gummy adjunct grains. Substituting in a percentage of corn or rice meant that the protein levels of the 6-row could be tempered a bit, resulting in a clearer beer, while the cheaper adjuncts and ready availability of the malt saved the brewer money. Consumers also enjoyed the mellow sweetness of corn, and the crispy dry quality of rice. It is a match made in heaven that continues in the American Light Lagers and Malt Liquors of today.

So what's the difference between those beers of yesteryear and today's beers? Well, there are several important technical differences in the industrial brewing process, but I think the most important difference is hops. The German and Czech brewers tended to hop these beers like a Continental Pilsner, making the hops noticeable not just as bitterness but also in taste and aroma. Traditionally they would have used Cluster, America's historic variety, but also possibly some of the Noble varieties, either imported or cultivated for the brewery. But over the years this hoppiness was slowly chipped away, until now most American Pilsners are about 1/3 as hoppy as their forebearers.

So in a nutshell, a Classic American Pilsner (or CAP, as they're often affectionately called) is a light lager, made with 6-row malt and high percentage of corn or rice, probably a bit stronger than modern lagers, and hopped at a level similar to a German or Czech Pilsner.

Well, I'm up for a challenge and my New Years Resolution was to brew lighter, more drinkable beers, so I figured I'd give it a try. I set out to write a recipe in BeerSmith, trying to use as many ingredients that I already had as possible. Most notably the beer would be based on 2-Row pale malt, because I had a 50# sack of it.

Another important step would be the use of First Wort Hopping. An ounce of my hops, normally destined for late addition for flavor and aroma, would instead go into the freshly run-off wort and kept hot (175-180) for the duration of the sparge. This results in a smoother bitterness, and retention of aromas and flavors that would normally be boiled away in a conventional hop addition. Why this works no one really knows. One theory is that the hop oils and acids attach somehow to other molecules in the wort prior to the boil, which helps them survive the process and emerge on the other side. Personally, I chalk it up to magic elves. Thank you magic elves.

Water is really important for pilsners, and Seattle's water is, big surprise, basically rain water. In the winter our water comes from rainfall, and in the summer it's melting snow. So it's well suited to brewing Pilsners. Just a little calcium chloride would be needed to drop the pH into the right area, and lactic acid to lower the pH of the sparge and knock-out water.

But as I worked on the recipe I quickly got in over my head, mostly due to mash schedule issues. Protein rest or no protein rest? Multi-step, or just infusion? Cereal mash or flaked corn? Decoctions? Argh...

So I sent a post out on AHA Techtalk to see what others thought and ended up kicking a beehive. I received a lot of advice, opinions, uppity snide comments, and well meaning suggestions, much of which was contradictory. Finally I even heard from Jeff Renner himself. Based on his suggestions I put a recipe together, but I was still somewhat attached to the first one I'd cooked up by myself.

The Project - A Tale of Two Pilsners

In the end I decided that I would brew two CAPs. One I would make as simply as possible. 2-row malt, flaked corn, single infusion. The other would more or less follow the recipe in Renner's 2000 Zymurgy article. 6-row malt, corn grits in a cereal mash, with multiple rests following the traditional American Double Mash schedule. Yeast will be the same. Hops the same. Water treatment the same. Fermentation temp the same. Carbonation levels, etc.

It was to be a battle of convenience vs. authenticity. Historical Perspective vs. Modern Sensibilities. At the end, I'll take a couple growlers to the club meeting and see what people think. Was it worth the extra effort? Is one more stylistically accurate, but the other tastes better? Well have to wait and see.

Brewday #1: CAP 'n Trade 2-Row Classic American Pilsner

This recipe was designed to use ingredients I already had, and to be a simple and easy as possible.

Classic American Pilsner, All grain, 5.25 gallons, 90 minute boil
Est. O.G.: 1.057
Est. F.G.: 1.015
Est. ABV: 5.6%
Act. O.G.: 1.060, overboiled so diluted down to 1.053 with distilled water
Act. F.G.: 1.011-1.012
Est Act ABV: 5.5%
32.5 IBU
3.7 SRM

Grain Bill:

8 lbs 2-Row Pale Malt (Great Western)
3 lbs Flaked Corn

Mash: Single Infusion Mash at 150, then infusion to 170 for mash-out. Added a couple handfulls of rice hulls with the mash-out infusion, and 0.1 ml lactic acid to the knock-out infusion water.

Mash Water treatment: 3 gm Calcium Chloride. Campden tablet to remove chloramines.

Sparge water treated with 0.5 ml lactic acid. Collected 7.5 gallons for the boil.

The Boil:

1 oz Domestic Hallertau, leaf, 4.7% AA. First wort hop.
1/4 tsp Calcium Chloride at 90 (to help buffer pH of boil)
1 oz Domestic Hallertau, at 60 minutes.
0.25 oz Domestic Hallertau, at 15 minutes.
Whirlfloc tablet at 15 minutes.

After 90 minutes, cooled to 53 degrees using my plate chiller. Settled cold break in carboy for two hours in a chest freezer set at 40 degrees, which you can see in the image to the left. Racked off of cold break into another carboy and oxygenated wort. Pitched two packets dry SafLager-23, rehydrated in warm water with some GoFerm 15 minutes prior to pitching.

Fermenting in a fridge set to 48 degrees. I'll pull it out and give it a D-rest at 60 degrees for three to four days after 9 days fermenting cold. Then lager for 6 weeks at 34 and keg.

Notes:

Nearly flawless brewday and super easy. Had my first boilover in a long time though, too busy blogging... :) Minor mess, need to pay more attention! Vigorous boil to encourage protein break, actually overboiled wort and had to dilute with distilled water. My tap water is cold right now, on full blast it was chilling to 53. Not too shabby, was shooting for 48-50. Mash was easy, but flaked corn tends to float, which made seeing the sparge water level over the grain bed a bit difficult.

Procedure for first wort hopping: collected a gallon of wort in a 5-gallon bucket, then mixed in the 1 oz. of leaf Hallertauer First Wort Hops. Continued to collect wort until I had three gallons in the bucket. Transferred to the kettle and kept wort and hops around 175-180 degrees as best I could. As the rest of the wort continued to sparge I kept adding it to the kettle at 1 gallon intervals, keeping it hot, until I had the full boil volume and began the boil.

So there's the 2-row CAP. Two days later I invited some interested members of my homebrew club over and we brewed the 6-row CAP.

Brewday #2: CAP 'n Trade 6-Row Classic American Pilsner

This one is designed to be a far more traditional CAP than the 2-row version. The recipe is based on Jeff Renner's 2000 Zymurgy article. It utilizes a cereal mash, which gelatinizes the starches in the corn grits and acts as a sort of decoction to pull the main mash temperature up for an alpha rest at 158. Otherwise pretty much everything is the same: water, hops, boil time, minerals etc.

Classic American Pilsner, All grain, 5.25 gallons, 90 minute boil
Est. O.G.: 1.052 (6-row has less extract yield than 2-row)
Est. F.G.: 1.013
Est. ABV: 5%
Act. O.G.: 1.050 (Underboiled, ended up with closer to 5.75 gallons)
Act. F.G.: 1.010-1.012
Est Act ABV: 5.1-5.3%
33.8 IBU
3.7 SRM

Grain Bill:

8 lbs 6-row malt
3 lbs Corn grits (Two 20 oz. packages was only 2 1/2 lbs. It was like hot dogs and hot dog buns, I wasn't going to buy another box just to get that last half pound. So I used a half pound of coarse cornmeal instead.)

The Classic American Double Mash

This was the mash schedule I worked from. I printed it out and posted it in the kitchen so it was readily available.

Prepped 3 gallons of water at 114 degrees with 3gm of Calc Chloride and some campden tablet.
Time 00: In a large pot, mash in 3 lbs corn and 1 lb 6-row malt with 5 quarts of 166° prepared water to hit 153° F
Time 15: Mash in main mash of 7 lbs 6-row with 1.4 gallons at 114° to hit 104° F
Time 20: Bring cereal mash to boil
Time 30: Cereal mash boiling
Time 35: Add about 1 gallon boiling water to ramp main mash to 144-146° F
Time 65: Add cereal mash to main mash, adjust temperature as needed to 158° F. Have boiling water and cold water ready for this.
Time 95: Ramp to 170° F mashout. Should take about 1.5 gallons of boiling water. Include .1ml lactic acid in water.
Time 105: Begin sparge and lauter

That was the plan anyway, and it went more or less like that. I had to use some boiling water to adjust temperatures here and there. Most notably, as the cereal mash got thicker I turned the heat down, and so when I added it to the main mash it wasn't as hot as it could have been. As a result I had a hard time hitting the 158 degree target and got closer to 154. Oh well. Iodine tests confirmed conversion at Time 95 so I mashed out and began the sparge. Included .5 ml lactic acid in the sparge water.

Sparge, boil, hopping, cooling, pitching and everything else was the same as the previous beer. As a result of the 6-row and a less rolling boil, I ended up with an O.G. of 1.050 and 5.75 gallons of wort. Oh well, at 5% ABV it's still stronger than Bud-Lite...

So there we have it. A tale of two pilsners. They are fermenting away, and the next post will be in two months or so when they've been lagered and kegged. Then comes the taste test. Will authenticity triumph? Will modern malts make a cleaner beer? Will both be good in their own different ways? Most importantly: did I brew a clean lager?

We'll find out.

UPDATE: The Results

Doom Doom Doom

2010-02-27T10:39:00.000-08:00

Tsunami Doom.

We'll be fine. Japan and Hawaii on the other hand...

Update: looks like my friends in Hawaii and Japan are just fine.

Taiko Drumming

2010-02-25T11:21:00.000-08:00

I was watching my sake fermenting happily away and I got to thinking about the odori, or "dancing ferment" of the yeast. That made me think about Taiko drumming, so I brought some up on youtube and it brightened up my morning. So I present one of Seattle's Taiko groups playing a couple years back at the Seafair's Bon Odori Festival at the Seattle Buddhist Temple.

The Sakura Festival is coming up in April, looking forward to making it out for some live Taiko. And my sake should be done by then!

Here's another one from that festival a couple years back.

Thoughts on the Upcoming WA Bar Exam

2010-02-23T19:19:00.000-08:00

The first day of the Winter Washington State Bar Exam began today, and my best wishes go out to ~~the poor dumb bastards~~ everyone taking it, especially a friend of mine from UM. Good luck! You'll do fine.

I thought I should come up with some encouragement, so I present this:

The Story of Wajahat Ali, a terrified young attorney who saved his very first clients from foreclosure at the hands of Wells Fargo. His writing captures exactly what it's like to be a new attorney.

My favorite part:

Despite being equipped with some—some—knowledge, I shared the quintessential trait of all young attorneys: unrelenting, paralyzing fear. It overwhelms everything we do and contaminates the first two to three years of our law jobs. The thought process goes something like this: "I know nothing. How the hell did I get this degree? How the hell did I pass the bar? Law school didn't teach me anything. Do my employers know I'm incompetent? How long can I fake this before they figure it out? Are my peers like this? How come everyone else knows what they're doing? What if I never learn? What happens if I get fired or fail? Will I get disbarred? I bet I'll get disbarred! Damn, I'm getting disbarred! Please, God, don't let me get disbarred."
I had all these thoughts as the Lipkin family sat on my friend's office couch and told me that they were about to lose their home. These people trusted me more than I trusted myself. God help us both.

It's a great read, and also a timely view into the current state of the legal job market and the workings of the housing crisis.

Nettle, Goat Cheese, and Wild Mushroom Ravioli

2010-02-23T13:32:00.001-08:00

Here's the first thing I've done with nettles this year. They have a taste and texture that can be similar to spinach, so this seemed a natural choice.

Made up a batch of pasta dough. There's a bunch of recipes on the 'net, but pasta is basically just water, flour and eggs.

Still managed to screwed it up, of course. Not enough liquid. It was like kneading a brick. Also, thanks to a bike accident some years back I'm now partly bionic. It hasn't really hampered me but and kneading is about the only thing my shattered wrist really, really doesn't like to do. Well, that and pushups. But my wrist and I are in agreement on that one. So I tend not do much baking or anything that requires lots of kneading. But between the limit of my kneading abilities, my stand mixer, and my wife's capable hands we managed salvage some decent semolina pasta dough out of it. Stuck the ball of dough in the fridge to rest and worked on the filling.

The Filling

Into a Cuisinart went:

A cup of Ricotta from Seabreeze Farm
Two marinated crotins of my homemade Mushroom Marinated Goat Cheese (about 5 oz.)
A couple tablespoons of the marinated wild mushrooms from the jar
A cup of nettles, blanched first to remove sting, shocked and drained
Salt and Pepper
A dash of balsalmic

Blitzed to a nice texture, tasted and adjusted seasonings until it seemed ok.

Right. So I have to admit that I hate making raviolis and every time I do it I tell myself that I won't ever do it again. But eventually I fall off the wagon and find myself making another round of oddly shaped, floppy, leaky, and generally messy ravioli. This time would be different! But unlike all the other times, this one actually was.

This was due to three major differences. First, semolina flour in the dough made it a bit more stretchy and forgiving. Second, I managed to somehow inherit a ravioli crimper from my mother. Third, I used a pastry bag to fill the raviolis.

So I divided up the dough into four balls and got to rolling.

For the first set I had a brilliant idea. I would press parsley leaves into the dough before the last run through the pasta maker, creating a decorative leaf pattern in my pasta.

It looked great. I was excited.

Back to the drawing board. Total failure. The #6 setting just shredded the leaves up, though it did press them into the dough. So it wasn't a total loss.

Thus only 1/4 of the ravioli's had the Mark of the Beast on them, the rest were just normal pasta dough.

Once the pasta had been rolled out onto a floured work surface, I folded the long sheets of pasta over on themselves lengthwise, then trimmed off the ends to square things up.

Then it was just a matter of piping a tablespoon or so of filling in two rows down half the sheet of pasta.

Using a brush I put a little water around all the edges and between the fillings, then carefully laid the other half of the sheet over the top.

The next step is fairly important. You gently press down around the raviolis and try to press out as mush air from the pockets as possible, or it may expand and pop the ravioli during cooking.

Then run the ravioli crimper around and cut out the individual raviolis. There you go, 1/4 done! Transfer them to a floured cookie sheet in one layer and either freeze them or get ready to cook them. I froze about half and cooked half.

The Sauce

I had some wild mushrooms around, Hedgehogs and Black Trumpets, and they needed to be used ASAP. So I made a Brown Butter sauce similar to this one.

Sweated a large chopped shallot for a couple minutes, added the mushrooms until they started to give off liquid, then deglazed with 1/2 cup of white wine. Once the wine was cooked down I added a stick of butter and cooked till it browned. Finished with a bit too much lemon juice. Still good though.

To cook the ravioli, bring a gallon or more of salted water to boiling, then back just off the boil. Add the raviolis and cook until they float, about 1-2 minutes.

All in all I was pretty happy with this. Wish I had some better photos, the lighting in my kitchen is really quite terrible. I think if I had anything to change I might add a dash or two of red pepper flakes into the filling. Otherwise, it made enough ravioli for probably 8 servings and I've got some in the freezer for later. Pretty good use for an obnoxious weed!

Kvass

2010-02-19T21:05:00.000-08:00

So I was shopping for ingredients for the Soup Dumplings in my local Pan-Asian/Mexican/Russian market and I came across something that seriously tempted me. A week or two later I was back looking for sake koji and finally gave in.

Kvass. Russian Kvass. For like a $1.50 a liter. Look! It's got a fat and happy little monk. And yet it's only 73 calories a serving.

Kvass is a malt beverage, like Malta, for example. It's basically a form of un-or-lightly fermented beer. To be clear, I hate Malta, and similar brands like Vitamalz. Seriously, sorry, it's terrible. Just too darn sweet for my tastes. But Kvass... I couldn't resist a try. And it was only a $1!

How was it? Like Lemon Iced Tea and Tootsie Rolls. Actually, reasonably good. The sweetness was cut with a tart lemon thing that is lacking in other malt beverages. Not too shabby, but I'm not sure I want gallons of it.

Check out the wiki, Kvass has a weird and interesting anti-cola war going on in the former Eastern Bloc right now.

Brewday: 'Oz Is Not A Proper Irishman' Irish Red

2010-02-19T13:11:00.000-08:00

The lovely weather continues and as they say, "Make beer while the sun shines!"

St. Patrick's Day is a month away and while I have a good half-keg left of the Buckwheat Honey Stout I felt that I needed to get something else ready for the other tap. Why not an Irish Red?

The second most popular traditional Irish beer, Reds are an exercise in balance. Not too strong, not too malty, not too hoppy, fruity but not too fruity, toasty but not too toasty. A nice red session beer. And they are easy. Here's my take on it, based on the one from Brewing Classic Styles.

Irish Red

5.5 Gallons, All Grain, 90 min boil.
Est OG: 1.054
Act OG: 1.056
Est FG: 1.014
Act FG: 1.012-14
Est ABV: 5.25%
Act ABV: 5.5%-5.75%
SRM: 17
IBU: 22

10 lbs 2-Row Pale
6 oz. Crystal 40
6 oz. Crystal 120
6 oz. Roasted Barley

Mash in at 153. Water treatment for 3.5 gallons mash liquor: 7 gm chalk, 2 gm gypsum, 2 gm Calcium Carbonate, 1 gm Epsom Salts, 1 gm Baking Soda, 1 gm salt.

1.5 oz. leaf domestic Hallertau @ 4.7% AA @ 80 minutes.
whirlfloc tab at 15 minutes.

Yeast was Wyeast Irish Ale yeast in a 1L starter. Will ferment at house temp, 65 degrees.

Brewday was largely uneventful. Had my first boilover in a long, long time. Less computer, more attention! Minor mess. Gravity was a bit high, I think I may have boiled a bit too much. Oh well. Used Hallertau because I had some around for my upcoming Pilsner. Had planned on Nugget, could use EKGs. Doesn't really matter, just use 22 IBUs of a clean bittering hop. Decided to name it after an episode of Oz and James Drink To Britain, where James May refuses to believe Oz is part Irish. It was either that paraphrasing, or "You're about as Irish as my arse, and that came from Seattle". Guess this makes it the second beer I've named after James May. That's not creepy or anything.

Nettles

2010-02-18T13:07:00.000-08:00

It’s been an unusual Winter here in Seattle. In fact, it’s turned out to be the nicest Winter I can remember. El Niño has kept temperatures high, and lessened the otherwise constant rain. In fact, this last January was the warmest ever recorded in Seattle. As I sit here it is sunny and 60 degrees out. In February! Outrageous!

Also: "More please!"

Spring is here.

As a result, things are coming up early. A walk around the neighborhood shows bulbs sprouting in every yard. The Cherry trees are blooming all around. Mushrooms are beginning to pop up too. Last weekend I spotted some Fairy Rings, as well as other assorted small brown mushrooms. There was even on large white one growing down the road. Not sure what it was, it looked like a Field or Horse mushroom, an Agaricus of some kind, but it had a viscid top. Beats me. Yesterday I spotted some small Oyster mushrooms in a lady's yard, and told her about them, but she just complained about having to weed again. Some people.

With the warm weather another perennial pain in the ass is also sprouting: Stinging Nettles (Urtica dioica). But this year I resolved to put the hurt on them for a change. I am going to eat them.

For all their stinging obnoxiousness, nettles are actually one of the most nutritious plants you can eat. Loaded with iron, vitamins, and other medicinal goodies they’ve been recognized as a folk cure for ages. You can make tea, beer, pasta, soup, pretty much anything with them. So I packed some scissors, a glove, and a plastic bag and set out to a local park to see if they were sprouting yet.

They were.

The trick is to pick them when they are no more than 8” or so tall. At that stage, you can go ahead and eat the whole thing. Later on in the season, the stalks get woody and unpleasant, forcing you to either harvest just the tips, or pick just the leaves.

There is a way to pick them using just your fingers and a quick, firm grasp. No thank you. I opted for scissors and a yard glove. In no time I'd picked a grocery bag full and set off home.

From this point you you have to remove the sting, caused by tiny silica needles that inject you with a cocktail of itchy, obnoxious chemicals. You can either lay them out on a rack to dry for several days, which will remove the sting and which I might try later this week. Or you can blanch them for 20-30 seconds in boiling water, then plunge them into some icewater to shock them and set the vibrant green color. Which is what I did with this batch.

As the season unfolds I'll post a couple things that I'm going to try with them. It is so nice I out right now I'm thinking I may go pick some more this afternoon, soon as this brewday is finished.

Cat and Girl: Food Fight

2010-02-18T10:45:00.000-08:00

Today's Cat and Girl made me laugh. It's one of the best webcomics out there, but then again I was a liberal arts major and spent a lot of time Exoticizing the Otter.

You should check it out.

Brewday today, so I'll try to get some posts up while I'm sitting around twiddling my thumbs.

(P.S. I had a bit of trouble sizing the comic correctly, so if you can't read it just click on it.)

Sake Update

2010-02-16T13:56:00.000-08:00

The Sake Saga continues.

So I've made it through the Moromi stage. The idea here is that you add three additions (the hatsuzoe, nakazoe, and tomezoe) of rice, koji and water over four days. Each addition doubles the volume of the mash, sequentially stepping up the amount to the full volume. This stepping-up allows the koji enzymes to keep working on fresh rice while the yeast is replicating and fermenting, preventing shock to the yeast and the koji, and allowing for a fully fermented sake with a greater alcohol level. I expect it will be around 18% when finished.

The problem is that the rice must be steamed, not boiled.

A lot of rice. 10 pounds of rice.

The hatsuzoe wasn't a problem. The night before, I took out the now completed moto, and added a cup of koji to it. Left it upstairs to warm up overnight. The next day I soaked 2.5 cups of my rice in water for an hour and a half or so, then steamed it in two layers using my bamboo steamer. The steaming took 45 minutes. While that was going on I mixed 1.25 teaspoons of Morton Salt Substitute (potassium chloride) into 2.75 cups of water and stuck in the fridge to chill. When the rice was done I moved it to a large clean pot, added the water, and mixed until it was chilled to below 85. Then I mixed it into the moto.

I also took this opportunity to drill a hole in my bucket lid to accommodate an airlock. Isn't the vinyl in my kitchen lovely? I call it The Gong Show Kitchen. At least it doesn't show dirt. I had white tile in my last one. Never again.

Ok: first major deviation from the recipe. The Recipe says "Long-time beermakers hate this step" and he's right. You're supposed to wash your hands and forearms really well, then use your hands to stir the mash, breaking up clumps, for a full half hour.

Screw. That.

I decided that I'm more willing to chance a few clumps than stick my filthy paws into the mash. So I used a sanitized wire whisk and just whisked the heck out of it, breaking up clumps as best I could, for a good 10 minutes. Seemed to work well. The way I figure it, Gekkeikan isn't mixing it by hand, they're going to use something like a whisk, so I will too. If the sake is a failure, well, lesson learned. Somehow I think it will turn out just fine.

Anyhow, the mash was to be stirred every two hours for twelve hours. Well, I mashed in at about 8 PM on a weeknight. So it got stirred once before bed, then again a couple times in the morning. C'est la vie. I took to just swirling the bucket around really well rather than opening it. The rice turns to watery goo pretty quickly.

It started to bubble away within an hour. The noise actually woke me up in the middle of the night, and I was worried that it might be getting too hot. But a 4:00 AM thermometer check showed 69 degrees. Perfect!

Next came the nakazoe, the middle addition. After 12 hours of fermenting (i.e. the next morning) I added 1.5 cups of koji. That evening I soaked 6 cups of rice for an hour and a half in preparation for steaming it. This created a problem: how to steam that much rice? 2.5 cups basically maxed out my bamboo steamer. At 45 minutes a batch, I wasn't excited to spend two hours steaming rice.

Then it hit me: my couscousiere! It's basically a big aluminum pot, with an even bigger lid that has a bunch of holes in it. In Moroccan couscous cooking the idea is that you make a big stew in the bottom and use the steam generated by it to cook the couscous. This sucker will make couscous for a village. Seriously, the smallest amount I've ever made in it fed twelve. And it was about $30 at a Middle Eastern market in Miami. But it doesn't have a lid, and I worried that the rice on top wouldn't cook as fast as that on the bottom. So I used my wok lid. Fit perfectly. Sweet.

Steamed the rice for 45 minutes. Put it in a big 4 gallon pot. Added 8.75 cups of cold water. Whisked to break up clumps. The idea was to chill it to 70, and it was taking a long while. So I put it in an icebath in the sink. Worked great. Pitched it into the mash. Stirred every couple hours.

The next morning: the tomezoe. Mixed in the remainder of the koji, a whole 20 ounce container. Stirred a couple times during the day. By now the airlock was bubbling away and fermentation was clearly rocking.

That evening came the Big Steam: the rest of the rice. Over five pounds of it.

The couscousiere worked like a champ. Here it is pre-steam. I like how the soaked polished sake rice looks like Styrofoam pellets.

When the rice was done it went into my 4 gallon pot, set in a sink full of ice water. Added a gallon plus a cup of cold water and got to work with the whisk. Whisked till it was 70 degrees. Given the volume of rice, I figure this is important. If say, you only cooled to 90 it would take hours, maybe even a day or more, to drop to ambient 70. But in the ice-water bath it took maybe 15 minutes to whisk it down to 7o. Then into the mash it went, along with some good whisking to mix everything up a bit.

It took off like a shot. Happily burbling CO2 out the airlock. Interestingly, the bucket created a sort of drum, and the airlock made a thurb thurb thurb noise all night long. ALL NIGHT LONG. By morning it had actually krausened out the airlock. The Japanese call this odori, the Dancing Ferment.

I made this video so you can experience the magic yourself.

Next time, it gets to dance somewhere more quiet. Like the basement.

Fortunately in the morning it was time to chill it. So I moved it downstairs into my lagering fridge. There it will stay for three weeks at 50 degrees. I lowered the fridge to 45 degrees for the first 12 hours to help cool it, and even then it was probably warm for a while and I hope that won't impact it badly. Ideally I'd use a Stopper Thermowell and set the fridge to stay on until the sake hit 50, but I lost the thermowell in the move. Man I need to get another one.

So there we go. Sake is bubbling away. I think the project is going swimmingly so far. Most importantly, it smells like sake. No off-sour notes or anything weird, just sake and a bit of yeasty. We'll see how it turns out.

Next up: The Pressing.

Guest Post Up at Nose To Tail At Home

2010-02-16T11:10:00.000-08:00

Hey, I've got a guest post up at the excellent Nose To Tail At Home.

You should go check it out the site for some serious organy goodness.

And to visitors linking over, welcome.

I've got a couple posts in the pipe that I'll try to get up today, but first I've got a hefeweizen to bottle.

Pain d'Epi FAIL

2010-02-10T13:09:00.001-08:00

Yep. Going to have to try that one over again...

It looks like a Mummy's severed arm. Maybe it will cure 16th Century diseases. Or bring me good luck. Or perhaps an angry Zahi Hawass.

Still tastes good though.

Here of course is the goal, perfect Pain d'Epi:

(Photo: http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/?p=152)

Tool + Wine = Blood Into Wine

2010-02-10T10:32:00.000-08:00

Maynard James Keenan, frontman of the band Tool, is making wine in Arizona. And he's made a documentary about it, Blood Into Wine. Here's the trailer:

Sadly, it's not showing in Seattle. Still, neat.

Terry Pratchett - "Shaking Hands With Death"

2010-02-09T10:22:00.001-08:00

A week ago Sir Terry Pratchett gave the 34th Annual Dimbleby Lecture at the Royal College of Physicians, a speech entitled "Shaking Hands With Death." Following his Alzheimer's diagnosis Sir Terry has become a spokesman for Alzheimer's research, health care reform, and the Right to Die. It's hard to understate just how beloved he is, not just in the U.K. but worldwide. Over 65 million books sold. Annually at least 3% of all books sold in England, or so I've heard. A well-deserved knighthood last year. I've been a huge fan of his books for many years now, and I was immensely saddened by his diagnosis. But I was also uplifted by his response to it.

So here's the lecture, in which Pratchett discusses his disease and makes his case for the Right to Die, on his terms, at home, and with dignity. It's about an hour long. It's well worth watching. It's bittersweet. It's actually mostly read by Tony Robinson, forever 'Baldrick' of Blackadder fame, due to Sir Terry's condition. And he does a bang-up job.

If you haven't got an hour, no problem, the text of the lecture is here.

Brewday: Schwarzweisse I

2010-02-08T14:15:00.000-08:00

So I'd planned on brewing a Weizenbock this month and ordered ingredients to that effect. A big malty, wheaty, spicy 8% beast. However, around New Years I formed a resolution of sorts to brew more reasonable, low-octane house beers, hence my latest English Brown. So I figured I'd scale it down to a Dunkelweizen of some kind. But then I got to thinking, which is always dangerous: "Has anyone ever made a Schwarzbier-weizen?" Lo and behold, yes a few have. So I decided to take a crack at it myself. Ideally it will be a wheaty, spicy, malty, jet-black hefeweizen.

Recipe formulation was tricky on this one. At its heart it's a Dunkelweizen, but I'm tweaking the color and toastiness by careful use of Carafa II. Ideally, I'd planned on using Carafa Special II, which is dehusked to lessen any bitter, astringent character it might add (the bane of Schwarzbiers everywhere). Unfortunately, it can be tricky to find, and I only had 7 ounces of it.

But there's another way to make dark but not astringent beers: cold steeping. Like making cold-process coffee, soaking the roasted grains overnight in cold water will leech out the color and flavor, but not the harsh bitterness. So I steeped 5 ounces of normal Carafa II in a pound and a half of water, then sparged into another bowl with a little hot water, and added the steep near the end of the main sparge.

Brewday was a bit of a disaster. Long story short: I made a big, stupid mistake on the recipe. See, I'd gone to all this trouble to avoid getting the roasted grain above 170 degrees so it wouldn't leech tannins and roastiness. Weeeeeell I mashed in, looked to see what my next step was, and realized that without thinking about it I'd designed it for a double decoction mash! I was set for a protein/ferulic acid rest at 111-113 degrees, followed by a decoction to 152, followed by a decoction to 168. I was literally set to boil a portion of the grains I'd tried so hard to keep cool and pH buffered. So I swore for a bit, then thought about what I was going to do.

The miserable solution was four pseudo-decoctions. I pulled about 2.5 gallons, heated to 154, held for 15 minutes, heated to 168, added back into the mash. Repeat. As a result I ended up creating rests at 111, 122, 131, 144, and 151. So if this is the best beer ever it certainly will be a pain to replicate.

Other than that everything went mostly fine. I got an OG of 1.o50, which is less than expected. I attribute some of that to the crazy mash schedule, and some to my grain mill. Wheat berries need to be ground on a wider setting than barley kernels, as they are fatter. I learned my lesson on this a couple years ago when I was brewing a Triticale Pale Ale ("Tri-te-KAY-ley Pale-y Ale-y"). I left the mill set where it was for barley, put the pound of triticale in, and pulled the trigger on the hand drill I use to power it. The mill immediately jammed up, and the resulting torque of the drill flipped the entire mill over, spilling all of my grain across the deck. Lesson learned but the scars remain. Unfortunately, in a flash of stupidity, I mixed my wheat and Munich malt before I ground it. As a result, I had to grind the mix coarsely, and so I think I lost some efficiency off the Munich.

As a result of this chaos, I'm going to brew the same recipe again in a few days, with a double infusion this time and cold steeping all the Carafa separately. This way I can try them side by side and see the differences, if any.

Schwarzweisse I

Dunkelweizen/Schwarzbier/Experimental
All Grain, 6 gallons
Est OG: 1.053
Est FG: 1.014
Est ABV: 5.1%
Act OG: 1.050
IBU: 16
SRM: 29

5 1/2 lbs Wheat Malt
2 1/2 lbs Dark Munich Malt (20L)
2 lbs Pale Malt
12 oz Carafa Special II (or 12 oz. Carafa II, cold steeped separately)
6 oz Special B
4 oz Caramunich
4 oz Caravienna
rice hulls before knockout

Mash as it should be: infusion at 113 for a Ferulic acid rest of 20 minutes, then infusion to 152 for a rest of 40 minutes or so until conversion. Add a few handfuls of rice hulls. Then infusion up to 168 for the sparge. Mash water treatment for Seattle water was: 8gm chalk, 1gm gypsum, 4 gm soda, 2 gm salt.

Mash as it was: infusion at .5 gallons/pound of grain at 113, then pull 2.5 gallon decoctions, raising to 152-54 for 15 minutes, then 168 and add back to the mash. Took four of these. Oy.

Collected 8 gallons for a 60 minute boil.

Whole Tettenanger Hops at 4.5%AA

1 ounce at 60 minutes
1/2 ounce at 30
1/2 ounce at 0

Yeast is Safale WB-06 dry wheat yeast. Giving it a shot to see how it stacks up. Dry hefe yeasts have a bad rap, so hopefully this new one comes out great. Fermenting at 60, that's right, 60, down in my basement. Some people ferment them hot, like a Belgian, but I am firmly in the hefes-need-cold camp. The ferulic acid rest should provide enough precursors the the 'clove' character, 4-vinylguaiacol or '4VG', without it being overwhelming due to excess temperature.

Anyhow it's sitting downstairs chugging away. I'm giving it a 10 day primary then straight into bottles if the hydrometer says it's done. Should be drinkable inside of three weeks.

Update: 2/17/10

After 9 days gravity was 1.012 and I decided to bottle it. Got a good 19 22's and 25 12's out of it. It's like I laid 40 delicious little alcohol eggs.

Bottled the whole batch with 6 oz of priming sugar. I actually had to melt in some Cooper's Carb Drops because I only had 4 oz of corn sugar. It's been a long time since I bottled a whole batch, but that's the only way to go with hefe's. My past experience kegging them (given no separate regulator for upping the pressure just on the hefe) has been...not so good. The pressure creates a lot of foam and the yeast and haze just settle as they get cold. I actually hear some commercial breweries store their hefe kegs upside down so they get flipped when finally delivered to the customer. Anyhow, this should be 2.9 volumes of CO2, high but right for the style. Seriously looking forward to popping one of these. There was a nice banana thing going on. My only concern is a bit too much lemon-tartness. Also: not black. Not black at all. Very, very dark Dunkelweis, but not dark enough. Back to the drawing board.

UPDATE: 3/2/10 Taste.
UPDATE: Bronze at the 2010 Cascade Brewer's Cup!

Goat Cheese

2010-02-05T14:30:00.000-08:00

Chevre to be precise. It's been a while since I last made cheese, and after last Summer's minor failure I was itching to give it another go. And do it right this time.

First up: milk. Goat milk can be tricky to find, particularly if you're planning on making cheese with it. The reason is that, while most grocery stores stock some kind of goat milk, it's almost always Ultra Pasteurized. Which means, it's useless. The higher temperature of the Ultra pasteurization process allows the product to have a longer shelf life (which is good for broad distribution/low turnover products like goat milk). However, the high heat denatures many of the milk's proteins, meaning that it will no longer form a "clean break" when the rennet is added.

Fortunately, we can get straight, raw goat milk at the farmer's market from St. John Creamery up in Everett. The milk is fresh, raw, whole fat, nearly organic, and from rare-breed Oberhasli goats. Sweet! $15 a gallon. Bummer. But, needs must. And it ended up making chevre for about $10 a pound, which isn't so bad actually.

Step One: Pasteurization

Wait, didn't you just say pasteurization was bad? Well, yes and no. Ultra is bad for cheese, yes. Also, there is a compelling argument to be made that well controlled raw milk is as safe, or safer, than pasteurized store bought milk. On the other hand, Listeria, E. Coli, Tuberculosis, Salmonella....you get the picture.

For cheeses, my feeling on it is that if it's going to be a dry, long-aged cheese, pasteurization isn't necessary due to the salting, drying, and heating process. If it's something quick and creamy, like chevre, pasteurization will help it last a while longer than it might otherwise and might just kill something nasty off. So I opted to pasteurized my gallon of milk.

Stick a two gallon pot on the stove. Put a half cup or so of water in, heat to boiling, slap the lid on, turn the heat down and steam clean everything for about 10 minutes. Take it off the heat, ditch the water, pour the milk in. Put it back on the heat, on medium to medium low, and slowly raise it up to 145 degrees. Hold it there, as best you can, for a half hour. It's not that easy (it works better if you can rig a double boiler of some kind), and I went a bit colder at times, but so long as you don't go way too hot it's ok. Useful tools include a sanitized spoon to stir (no scorching the bottom!) and a laser thermometer or sterilized probe thermometer to check the temp.

I *heart* my laser thermometers.

Step 2: Sour The Milk, Set The Curd

Cheesemaking is a lot like brewing: it's all about temperature. Cool temps and mesophilic (read: "Moderate loving") starter bacteria produce a softer, creamier cheese like Chevre, Cream Cheese, etc. Warmer temps and thermophyllic (read: "Heat loving") bacteria produce firmer, dryer cheeses like Parmesan. Go beyond that to the point where enzymes are deactivated, proteins denatured, and you get Mozzarella.

So for this one I used a starter packet of New England Cheesemaking Co's 'Chevre', a pre-mixed combo of mesophyllic bacteria and rennet designed to set one gallon of goat milk for ladling into goat cheese molds. It's a direct set culture, so you set it and forget it. Har har.

I took the hot, now pasteurized milk and set it in a sink full of ice water. Stirred it around with my sanitized spoon until it was 86 degrees, then added the culture and placed it in a slightly warmed oven. There I left it for 12 hours.

Step 3: Cutting The Curd, Draining The Whey

At the end of 12 hours (and about 10:30 at night...) the curd had firmly set and was settled at the bottom of the pot. The next step is to ladle it into a mold of some kind to help it take shape and drain off the excess whey. Unlike many firmer cheeses, no weight is used and chevre is not pressed. So you use special molds. Several years ago I bought four of these little goat cheese molds and it's about time I get some use out of them. They were sanitized, then I began to ladle the cheese in.

One thing I should mention: in most kinds of cheese there is a step where you 'Cut The Curd', which is basically a way to dice it up so that the whey drains properly. The chevre packet doesn't tell you to do this, but I'd recommend it. I took a long, thin sanitized knife blade and diced up the curd, at an angle, into 1/2"-3/4" dice.

Place the molds on a rack over a 13x9 pan. Then ladle this into the molds until they're full. It took about an hour and a half to add all the curds, you have to wait for the whey to drain before you can add a bit more. But four molds will do a gallon of whole goat milk chevre. Just barely. Patience.

Leave the cheeses to drain for about 18 hours. At this point, you can start to flip them over every six hours or so. With very clean hands, pop the crottins out, flip them over, and carefully reinsert them into the molds. This helps them maintain that familiar cylindrical shape.

Of course, you don't actually need the fancy chevre molds. You could just use cheesecloth and hang the bundle over the sink to drip.

After a about a day and a half they were almost dry enough. So I gave the top a light sprinkling of kosher salt, flipped, and then sprinkled the other side. Left to drain another six hours or so and they were ready.

Wrapped them in plastic wrap and popped them in the fridge. They'll be good for two weeks or so.

If you want you could roll them in spices. Black pepper and slightly ground Herbs de Provence are faves of mine.

All told I got about 1 1/2 lbs of cheese from the gallon of milk. That's a fair amount to eat within two weeks. So I began thinking of ways to use it. First, one would obviously just be snacks. Another would go to Meredith for a baking project of some kind. I'd planned on making a St. Maure style mold-ripened cheese, but I couldn't get any of the white penicillium in time. So this left me with two crottins to play with.

Marinated Goat Cheese - Wild Mushroom, and Lemon, Rosemary and Fennel

One tasty thing you can do with goat cheese is marinate it. This creates a pretty-near instant appetizer, ready to go whenever you need it. So I went with two recipes off Epicurious. The first would be a Wild Mushroom Marinade. I followed the recipe, except that I subbed in an ounce of Foraged And Found's Wild Mix instead of pure dried Porcini's. This meant there were also Morels, Chanterelles, Lobsters, and other wild mushrooms on top of the Porcini's that were in there. The second cheese was a Lemon, Rosemary, Fennel and Red Pepper Marinade. These little olive oil filled jars will last much longer than the plain cheese would.

I began to wonder how long, though. The recipes said to stash them in the fridge, but I wonder if that is just the American knee-jerk "stash everything in the fridge!" reaction. Olive oil in the fridge sets up quite unattractively, meaning that I'd have to bring these back up to room temp before serving, which is a bit of a pain. If you think about it, many things are conserved in oil: peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, truffles, and sometimes: cheese.

One of my favorite meze foods is the Lebanese cheese-balls-in-oil, Labneh Makbous. These are basically a cheese similar to chevre, made from strained yoghurt, rolled and jarred in olive oil with spices. And notably not refrigerated. So long as everything is nicely submerged under the oil, and was pretty clean to begin with, I think it will be fine in our relatively cool kitchen for a couple weeks. Wouldn't go much past a month though, before it goes into the fridge.

Not that they'll last that long...

UPDATE: 2/7/10 Tried the marinated cheeses. The fennel, lemon, rosemary one is quite good. The mushroom one could probably use another week. Also, I wish I had less oppressive olive oil.

The Organic Grocery Budget

2010-02-02T10:00:00.001-08:00

...as a Catholic Indulgence. Pretty much sums it up.

Achewood is hands down one of the best webcomics and comes out with these flashes of insight with disturbing regularity.

I'm sure that for some people a trip the supermarket is a: "Lord, I know I should not have had that New-Zesty-Fiesta-Gordo-Burritoburger(tm), perhaps it will return me to thy favor if I purchase these Organic Cheesepuffs...Amen."

Of course, I'm not sure what sins I'm paying for with my own food budget. Maybe I just made peace with the fact that good food must necessarily cost more under the current agricultural system. But this is not the time to debate the Farm Bill.

Here's the full comic.

Ramona Falls - 'I Say Fever'

2010-02-02T09:47:00.000-08:00

Thank you Internets.