The Ballad of El Centennial

Short post today - El Goodo is this year's fall-run batch, and I gotta get on cpf'ing this guy cause the trip is hours away. Let's just chat briefly about hop combos, shall we?

Centennial (homegrown) + Citra (not homegrown) = magic.

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.

Smoke Your Beer, Not Your Butt!

In my efforts to keep up with the amount of beer I produce in comparison to the amount of beer I actually drink, often times a good amount of my home brew ends up in the food I cook. Some of my favorite food in the whole world is smoked pork and BBQ. Since my charcoal fired outdoor smoker has taken up residence in my parents garage, I decided to try and take a shortcut or two to produce some pulled pork sandwiches.

Tasting Showdown: Cider vs. An Apple

Oedipus and Laius. Ken Griffy, Junior and Ken Griffy, Senior. Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. And now, hard cider and apple.

Both have very good records. Hard cider, the boon of American pioneers, mainstay of farmers from New England to regular England, not quite as crazy as applejack, but just crazy enough to get the job done. Apples, the original temptation, Granny Smith to Honeycrisp, ward against doctors, the basis of some of our nation's most iconic pies. Who would win in a taste test? To find out I sat down with a classic food pairing - an apple and a glass of cider - and evaluated each.

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.

Dazed & Infused

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my time of being a homebrewer, it’s that our DIY interests rarely end at beer. Many folks also make wine, mead, cider and more culinary or health-based fermentables like kombucha or kimchi. I like to make infused liquors. Obviously, I don’t MAKE the liquor - I buy it at the liquor store (makes sense, right?). But I like to have fun affecting and infusing those liquors with different things.

Settling Down

I'm the sort of brewer who rarely makes the same thing twice. I've been hopping around from style to style, recipe to recipe, technique to technique ever since I started brewing. That's been great, I feel like I've covered a lot of ground, learned a lot of basics, had a good time. I'm also the sort of brewer who often measures things in handfuls, tosses whatever is lying around into the mash or into the boil, and takes a cavalier approach to using wild yeasts. Also fun, and less work.

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.

Yeast Experiment Round 3

A while back I posted about a yeast experiment that used 6 different ale yeast strains to make mead. Preliminary tasting results from five Northern Brewer employees are in, I've summarized them below.
Some things I've taken away from this experiment: phenolic yeast strains really don't do well at all in mead, just changing yeast strains can create unbelievably different mead, and lager strains may be a better match for meads than ale strains. Three of the five people enjoyed the Wyeast 1272 the best, and two of the five liked the Wyeast 2112.

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.

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.

Short on Supply, High on Concepts

I've had a couple years' run wherein my brewing has been a gently purring animal.

Tastes have become recipes. Those recipes have met practices on brewdays, and then found their way through the cell membranes of various yeasts, until the whole was poured into pint glasses. Those glasses were emptied into dozens of parched mouths; occasionally, a few of those mouths gave coherent, positive feedback. My three & some odd years of homebrewing have led me to a fine place where the only limits have been my imagination, palate & budget.

Kinderweiße Cheese Fondue

Serves 8

Tasting: Twa Oats Roastie

Hello, stout ... nice to see ya. It's been a long time; you're just as lovely as you used to be.

I'm sorry, Conway Twitty - that's your song, and this is an oatmeal stout.

How to Plan a Rebrew: Part Two

This saga began with a recipe I created for an oatmeal stout. The first round of triple oat stout was a decent success, but I wanted to make some improvements to get the beer more where I wanted it to be. Things that I attempted to correct in the second version were color, hop selection and yeast selection.

Here is the recipe for version two:

Seasonal Ingredient: Clementines

Almost every fruit and vegetable is available year-round. Buy in-season, however, and you get produce at its peak of flavor and nutrients. In January, clementines are readily available.

Soar with Sorghum!

There's a product that we carry at Northern Brewer which occasionally gets some attention from customers. Usually, this attention is a begrudging acknowledgment of anticipated frustration, and it is directed towards White Sorghum syrup. This is a high maltose, gluten-free extract syrup made from sorghum by Briess Malt in Chilton, WI.

NB MKE is 7 Dog Years old!

It was a Saturday in November and about 3,614 degrees warm at Northern Brewer Milwaukee...

Send it back

I had a bottle of really bad beer last night.

Chip's Open/Closed Patersbier

[editor's note: this piece was originally published on the Brewing TV blog]



Hello everyone. Chip Walton, the guy behind the camera, here.

When Michael Dawson (or Jake Keeler) says JUMP - I say HOW HIGH?! In Episode 6, Dawson issued our first Brewing TV Challenge. He suggested viewers brew a five-gallon batch of Patersbier, split it into two 2.5-gallon batches, ferment one closed, ferment one open. I took this challenge to heart.