Notes on a Brewday: Northwoods Double Porter

Seven grain mash, roasted grains ground in coffee grinder

Black ales are the adopted bane of homebrewers. It seems like from one's inception into homebrewing, the popular camp means to get us started on the campaign to disassociate dark ales from the idiom that these black liquids are 'thick and highly alcoholic'. Each of us is given that old Guinness recipe for Dry Irish Stout, with it's high percentage of flaked barley, and made to adhere to the gospel fermentation time frame that produces an opaque black refreshment that never fails either adjective.

Notes on a Brewday: St. Edhar 8

Ah, the middle ages.

What is it about monastic beers that's so evocative of older times? The time capsule-like nature of Old World breweries in cloistered communities? The romance of a religious order living outside the flow of secular time, preserving the traditions of brewing, manuscript illumination, healing, and so on and so forth, intact through the centuries?

Whatever.

Rye Malt Syrup

Rye malt syrup: sweet.

My fellow beer nerds,

I speak to you today as a fellow citizen-homebrewer, as an unreformed and unrepentant extract brewer, and as an enthusiastic user of all kinds of cereal grains:

Rye malt syrup is pretty sweet.

Brewing TV - Episode 42: King's Coolship

The King is in the building! NB soldier and determined yeast junkie Jeremy King (you remember him from Episode 4, right?) is back with yet another twisted yeast experiment. This time he's trying wrangle wild yeast from his environs in Milwaukee, WI for eventual commercial use. He's got a very interesting way of going about it - utilizing a coolship. Wild yeast, microscopes, fire, and fermented fish. You never know what you're going to get when you're hanging out with J-King. Prepare to be - KING'D!

Related Blog Posts by J-King:
2 Things Literature Says You Shouldn't Do That You Shouldn't
Better Brewing Through Chemistry
Beer and Your Body: The Alcohol Hangover
Eat Your Beer Like a King

Thunderbolt Pale Ale: Hop Substitution Experiment - UPDATE

Thunderbolt, the pale ale

Tasting notes for my Thunderbolt Pale Ale, using a blend of hops to approximate the profile of Simcoe: 

7/11: 1.5 weeks in primary - 1.009 gravity. Hop bitterness is nearly the same as the original recipe. Centennial & Mt. Hood flavor totally unabridged. Hop aroma seems to be leaning toward pine, though at this early in fermentation it's not all that different from the aroma profile of the original recipe. Secondary transfer 7/12.

Notes on a Brew Day for Someone Else's Wedding, Pt. 2: Marie avec Visage-Sale

Rub some dirt in it
and get back out there.

Sometimes, when you wake up with the flu but you've already measured out and acidified the strike water and weighed the grain the night before, and you're now at zero hour for bashing out a biere de garde commissioned for your cousin's wedding reception, well sir ... sometimes you just gotta start heating the water, go puke, wipe your mouth on the brew sheet, and then mash in.

Notes on a Brewday: Eye of the Sun Winter Ale

I'd like to toast homebrewers in the southern United States. I have too much skin to haul full liquor kettles across my backyard or stand over a 200,000+ BTU propane stove when the summer swelter gets angry. My desire to brew suffers under an oppressive 86 degree dewpoint & 116 degree heat index. Such afternoons signal it's too late to brew any lawnmower beer that isn't already sweating in hand; it's time to get a winter ale brewing.

Notes on a Brewday: John Ireland Blvd. Bitter

I was brewing on a Wednesday. It was the third batch outside on the Banjo Burner, a wind screen fashioned with Aluminum foil. It seems like a bitter northwest wind swept around St. Paul on that otherwise fair summer day. I woke up to that wind spreading word of the newest tent in the ongoing Minnesota state government shutdown circus: media outlets were warning Joe Six-pack that MillerCoors' MN state seller's license couldn't be renewed & their M-C brands were to be pulled from liquor store shelves.

In any other year, the expiration of a state license would set into motion the process of a renewal. This year, the civil servants that process state license renewals at the commerce department were laid off along with thousands of other state employees when elected officials couldn't come together & draft a state budget.

The Most Under Appreciated Tool in my Brew House:

My flashlight.

This isn't something we think of as a brew house tool, but I can't say how often in a brew day I'll need to randomly retrieve old Flashy for one reason or another. If this was a Western, Flashy would be my horse. I don't know if I could brew without him.

The Haphazard Brewing of Free Kick EPA

*** This blog post was recently uncovered deep from within scattered brewer's notes. It's timeliness has been lost, but its moral fortitude has not. We begin in late April 2011. ***

Let me tell you about what may be the best homebrew ever brewed. Or it may be a total disaster. We’ll just have to wait and see.

The Joy of Extract Brewing

I recently took what some might consider to be a step backwards in my brewing. I put away my mash tun and my large(ish) kettle and I brewed a batch of extract beer. When I first started brewing, "all-grain" seemed like a peak to surmount: the pinnacle of the art of brewing and the black belt in homebrewing Karate and after making the leap to all grain brewing several years ago, I had not looked back. 

Mash Tun Time Machine

All that's old is new, and I for one welcome our Victorian throwback overlords. There seems to be a developing trend in the world of IPA: a hearkening back to the days of yore with ultra-traditionalist rebrews of 19th century export ales from the days of the Raj.

Thunderbolt Pale Ale: Hop Substitution Experiment

So far, it's been a hot summer and a short summer. And that's to say summer hasn't officially yet begun. As manic as winter had been, summer crept around the Twin Cities like a lurking radioactive monster. From windy to above average hot, that was only after the tornado season began in north Minneapolis.

Amarillo Slim

In case you haven't heard, there is a bit of a hop shortage going on for some of the most popular American varieties. Some of the newer varieties that craft breweries and homebrewers love so much, like Amarillo, Simcoe, Ahtanum, and Citra, simply didn't have enough acreage to meet demand this year. Here at Northern Brewer we decided to look into an alternate source of hoppy goodness: Amarillo HopShots.

Brew like a Homebrewer

This is a concept that has been expanded upon by the likes of Jamil Zainasheff in Brewing Classic Styles, page 244 - suffice it to say, it is very easy to get carried away when you've got some 80 types of grain to choose from. Different maltsters, base malts, "specialty malts," even malted oats. Sometimes you really just have to brew like a homebrewer.

What's in a name?

I've read that you should never name your chickens, because it makes it that much harder to boil 'em and pluck 'em when the time comes.

Perhaps in a similar vein, I've never named my beers. They are usually referred to as something like, "that one stout with the oak in it that I brewed last fall, or was it in the winter? Whatever, it's probably that one." But friends and other recipients of my beer always want to know what a particular beer is called. I once named an all-Fuggle hops bitter "Fug 'em" but in general people don't know what Fuggle is, so they didn't really appreciate it.

Brewer's Log: Kansas City Lager

Occasionally, I find myself & the wife in a type of restaurant that repeats itself across the country. These aren't the eateries that entirely play off some combination of fries and fried-meat-patty-on-bun as an excuse for wining & dining; rather, these are the places that have a signature appetizer, followed up by gastric proportions of steak, salad with shrimp, & the like. And it's often the case that the best pour these same chains offer is Sam Adams' Boston Lager.

Coffee Beer Collaboration

Coffee beer: it just sounds right. Like when you hear "oatmeal stout", you know that it will be good, even if you've never tried one before. Deep down inside, every brewer wants to be eating oatmeal and drinking coffee and stout at the same time. It is a fantasy that largely goes unspoken, but search within yourself and see if it isn't true.

Notes on a Brewday: Scum and Villainy IPA

S&V IPA: Sorachi Ace, homegrown Centennial, staggered dry hopping with Glacier and Columbus, blah blah blah. That's actually not what I want to talk about.

Do you like to brew? Do you brew ... frequently? Do you often find that there's still a beer actively fermenting even while you're boiling a new wort?

Vlaai met witbier

Cooking with beer can be a real challenge, due to the fact that beer is often one of the only sources of bitterness in a person's diet. Bitterness is a taste that is rarely considered desirable in cooking, as it tends to invoke a negative response on the palate. Part of the reason may come from the primal association of bitterness with poison. Conversely, many animals seek out sweetness, because sweetness often indicates fat, sugar, and protein - all the things we find desirable in our diets.