Snowflakes in Hell

Many people aren’t all that familiar with the adult beverage known as mead, which is a form of wine that is made from honey rather than grapes. I’m a brewer, and not much of a wine maker, but I figured I’d try my hand at making a batch of mead.

I have to declare my experiment only a partial success. Success in the sense that I have something alcoholic, that isn’t disgusting to drink, but only partial in the sense that it has a lot of autolytic notes. That’s usually a result of leaving the fermented product on the yeast cake too long, and not racking into another fermenter often enough. I certainly am guilty of getting lazy with this batch. I started this batch late last winter, racked it to secondary in late spring, put it off into a corner and kind of forgot about it until earlier this week.

Fortunately, my friend Gene tells me that autolytic notes are a feature of champaign, so I decided to actually keg the mead, and charge it with some carbonation. If the mead is sparkling, it might actually taste correct for that style. One thing is for sure, at least, it’s effective stuff. I drank a little of the leftovers, and I’m doing pretty well right about now.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has a great editorial up on beer buying in Pennsylvania, for those of you who are unfamiliar with our arcane alcohol control laws:

It still makes little sense for the state to be in the liquor business, but the nearly $500 million in annual revenue generated by liquor sales and taxes is a powerful incentive to maintain the status quo.

Where does that leave consumers? Hoping for whatever customer-friendly upgrades to the state’s liquor-sale rules are possible, that’s where.

(Remember, it’s still against the law to zip over the bridge and bring back your favorite, reasonably priced tipple from New Jersey.)

Enter the Sheetz convenience-store chain, along with its years-long legal battle seeking the right to sell beer for take-out.

I am south of the Wawa/Sheetz line, but I wish Sheetz the best of luck with this case. Wawa is sure to take advantage of this as well, so a win for Sheetz is a win for everybody.

Michael Jackson, who is the beer critic of beer critics, has died as the age of 65 from Parkinson’s disease:

Jackson especially loved Belgian brews. His books “The Great Beers of Belgium” and “World Guide to Beer” introduced them to many export markets, including the United States.

By identifying beers by their flavors and styles, and by pairing them with particular foods and dishes, Jackson helped give birth to a renaissance of interest in beer and breweries worldwide that began in the 1970s, including the North American microbrewery movement.

This is to the beer community like losing Jeff Cooper was to us gunnies.  This weekend, I will enjoy a bottle of Liefmans Frambozen in his memory.  So long Michael.

Hat tip to Rustmeister.

I’m familiar with the neighborhood Dock Street Brew Pub is going into.  A former girlfriend of mine lives at 48th and Baltimore.  I will definitely pay it a visit when it opens.

Pennsylvania is home to some really fantastic breweries, from Victory Brewing Company in Downingtown, to Pennsylvania Brewing Company in Pittsburgh, it’s a great state to live in, if you’re a beer lover.  I’m happy to see us adding Philadelphia Brewing Company to the family of excellent Pennsylvania brewers.

I have to congratulate the Boston Beer Company, makers of Sam Adams, for choosing to open a new brewery in Pennsylvania rather than Freetown, Massachusetts.

Bit of advice for Deval Patrick: When business is fleeing Massachusetts for Pennsylvania, man, you have a real problem.

This is very cool.   Unfortunately, it means you have to drink beer from a can, which is sacrilege.   Beer is properly drunk from a glass, unless you’re a heathen.   I suppose it would be possible to construct a robot that would throw you a bottle, and a fresh glass, but failing to catch it could get rather messy.

Summer is usually the off season for me in regards to home brewing. For one, I generally keep pretty busy doing other things I like, most of which involves being outside. For two, it’s just too friggin hot. Brewing is pretty BTU intensive when you mash your own grain. For three, I just don’t drink much beer in the summer during the week, because of the previous two reasons. I haven’t yet drank what I made this prior winter.

I’m thinking about getting one of these. It’s a plate chiller, called “The Therminator”. It would solve one of the big problems I have making beer in summer; the water coming out of the tap is too warm. Typically, in summer, my tap water is about 65 degrees, and it takes forever to chill 5 gallons of wort down with my self-made immersion chiller. In contrast, winter time tap water temperatures are typically about 50 degrees, which gets the job done much faster.

Counterflow chillers have their downsides, in that you have to work hard to keep them clean, and keep them sanitized. Immersion chillers can just be rinsed off, and that’s about it. Not so with counterflow chillers, which must be cleaned and sanitized. But being able to get my wort chilled and into the fermenter in just a few minutes would be a big help.

Sorry for the light blogging today. I had the day from hell at work, and when I got home, I had to sacrifice blogging to the beer god. After work, I decided to stop by the home brew supply store. I picked up a tower faucet to add to my kegerator. Glenn Reynolds has been blogging recently about wanting one, but you can spend a few hundred dollars at Sears, and another hundred fifty or so from the home brew supply, and build one yourself.

Now, this isn’t quite as stylish looking as the commercial kegerators you can get, but it’s far more versatile, which is important for the home brewer. If you’re just drinking beer, you’re probably buying the standard sized kegs, and you’re only using it to keep the beer cool. If you’re a home brewer, you use your kegerator for fermenting and lagering when you need more precise temperature control. When I’m using my kegerator for serving, which is just a converted deep freeze with a temperature regulator added, I can chill four Cornelius kegs at a time.

Pouring a beer is the real test. Sadly, the first glass out of my new tap was rather cloudy, because I had to take the keg out to drill the holes in the top for the tubing and anchorage. The second glass was much more clear. It’s going to be quite nice, to be able to leave my beer on tap all the time, and just mosey over and draw a pint off any time I want.

The word dregs is actually a bit of brewing terminology.  The dictionary defines it thusly:

The remnants of a liquid left in a container, together with any sediment or grounds.

After the yeast have completed primary fermentation, they settle down on the bottom, producing a thick mud.  The goal of racking to secondary or to the keg is to get your beer off this mud comprised of yeast cells, before it ruins the flavor.   The last bit of beer out of the fermenter presents a bit of a dilemma.  You can do one of two things with it:

1. Dump it, in which case you lose about a quart of beer.
2. Drink it, in which case you’ll find out the next day that yeast is a natural laxative.  Yeast are good for you otherwise, though, and have some helpful nutrients.

Tonight I’m opting to drink the dregs.  If you really wanted to be gross you could drink it after swishing up the sediment off the bottom, but I doubt most would have the stomach for that.  As it is, with a highly floctuating yeast, you can pour a fairly clear glass off of the sediment on the bottom.

I’m having to rack two ales into the kegs tonight.  The first is the Bitter Bitch American IPA that was made several weeks ago.  It’s ready to be put into the keg, carbonated, and served.  I’m also having to do Joy’s Birthday Stout, which is really just from an extract oatmeal stout kit.   I told her I’d make her a stout for her birthday, which is next weekend, but I didn’t have a whole day to make a beer from malted grain, so I had to cheat and use extract.  It’ll really need to condition for another two weeks in the secondary keg, so if she’s intent on drinking it next weekend, it’ll taste kind of rough.

After this, I think it’ll be time to try a lager.  I think I’m up for it.

We took a VIP tour of the Budweiser brewery here in St. Louis yesterday. We decided that a brief break from the convention was in order, so we took a cab ride over to the brewery. From a home brewer’s perspective, the tour isn’t all that interesting, because it’s not done in a lot of detail. But the brewery is architecturally a work of art:

This is the view from the outside. It’s beautifully landscaped all over the Anheiser-Busch plant.

Inside the old brewery, they have a hop chandelier, that’s quite nice.

Anheiser-Busch’s Mash Tuns.

Brew kettles. Forgive the orangeness of the picture, as the light wasn’t very good.

The tour wraps up in the hospitality room, where we sampled a few of their beers. As best I can tell, the VIP tour is a small group, of about 10 people, rather than the giagantic tour groups, plus you get an “Honorary Beermaster” certificate at the end, and get to sample two bottles in the nicely appointed hospitality room. But in a regular tour you get to see the same stuff. The brewery is architectural art, so if you’re ever in St. Louis, I’d recommend stopping by for the tour.

My currently fermenting “Bitter Bitch IPA” it turns out would be illegal in the State of Alabama, since it’s original gravity reading predicts it will have about 6.7% alcohol by volume.   Check this out:

The Alabama House said “no” Tuesday to a bill that would have increased the alcohol content allowed in beer sold in Alabama. Rep. Thomas Jackson, D-Thomasville, sponsored the bill, which he said would have allowed the sale of some imported and gourmet beers that have a higher alcohol content than the 6 percent now allowed. Jackson’s bill would have increased the allowable alcohol content to 14.9 percent. …

“I can’t see us doing something that’s going to encourage people to drink more and get drunk faster,” said Rep. DuWayne Bridges, D-Valley. Bridges said the measure would increase the problem of teenagers drinking by making more potent brew available to them. “Our children don’t need to increase their alcohol consumption,” Bridges said.

Read the whole thing.

I think Alabama is the only state in the union where home brewing is still illegal.  So you won’t find me moving there unless pigs grow wings and begin to fly.

I’m going to add a new topic called “Brewing”, because that’s my other hobby.   I don’t plan on posting about it much, but every once in a while, I will.

We gun owners are often concerned about preparedness, especially during shit hits the fan situations.  Beer making is all about preparedness and survival, because, let’s face it, life without beer isn’t really worth living is it?  So it’s good to know how to make the stuff yourself.

Beer is civilization.  Don’t believe me?  Just look at the societies that won’t touch the stuff.  I rest my case.