Historical Brews

Interesting article in the New York Times on Great Lakes Brewing attempting to re-create an ancient Sumerian beer.  Better yet, the recipe (such as it is) is contained in a song.  What better way to honor beer?  Oh--it's actually a hymn.  To Ninsaki, no less--the Sumerian goddess of beer.

Anchor has done an interpretation of this beer before, but I've never been able to try it.  Dogfish Head, however, is great at more than just IPA's--they also have a line of historic/ancient beers as well.  Most are limited release, like their Birra Etrusca Bronze, which they recreated from an analysis of beer found in Etruscan tombs, and Ta Henket, made according to an ancient Egyptian recipe.  Their Midas Touch, however, is available year-round; it tastes more like a spiced mead to me, but it's a very ejoyable, different brew.

Unfortunately, it does look like Great Lakes has no plans to release their creation commercially.

Great White (Wh)Ales

The May 2013 issue of BeerAdvocate magazine had an interesting article called "Beer Baggers" about compiling and pursuing a list of "great beers" to try.  I think anybody who has a serious interest in craft beer has at least considered creating a wish list of beers.

The author used the BeerAdvocate Top 100 (now Top 250), and says he had no idea how difficult it would be.  I know that for me it would be even harder--my wife doesn't drink beer, and is not going to be receptive to me taking time away from what we're doing every time we travel to look for beers I haven't tried.  Buying beers from traders and having them shipped isn't really in the cards either, as I frankly have better things to spend $30 on than a single bottle of beer.

There are problems with this approach beyond cost, as well--it is likely to contain beers that are no longer available, and trendy beers are going to be on it as well, and will likely fall off long before I get to them.

The article describes another aficionado who used BA's "Beers of Fame", which are the top 100 beers that have over 2000 ratings and have been on the site for at least two years.  This might be more approachable, although there's nothing that prevents an old, impossible-to-obtain beer to appear.

Let's see which ones I've had the opportunity to try (beers I've tried appear in bold):

1. Pliny the Elder (no surprises there)
2. Heady Topper (I didn't realize this wasn't a new beer--I've only recently heard of it)
3. Founders KBS (Kentucky Breakfast Stout)
4. Founders Breakfast Stout
5. Bell's Hopslam Ale
6. Zombie Dust
7. Trappist Westvleteren 12 (XII)
8. Bourbon County Brand Stout
9. Trappistes Rochefort 10
10. The Abyss
11. Bourbon County Brand Coffee Stout
12. Supplication
13. Parabola
14. St. Bernardus Abt 12
15. Sculpin IPA (I got to try this recently at Fireworks Pizza; I'd heard of it but didn't realize it was so highly rated--though I did thoroughly enjoy it)
16. Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier
17. Dreadnaught IPA
18. Imperial Russian Stout
19. Troegs Nugget Nectar
20. Consecration (this isn't good; a the entire top fifth done and I've tried only one)
21. Ruination IPA (I really wanted to like Arrogant Bastard better, but I had to admit that Ruination was my favorite Stone offering)
22. La Fin Du Monde
23. Ten FIDY
24. AleSmith Speedway Stout
25. Ayinger Celebrator Doppelbock
26. Founders Imperial Stout
27. Peche Mortel (Imperial Stout Au Cafe)
28. 90 Minute IPA
29. Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout
30. Chimay Grande Reserve (Blue) (One of the first Belgians I tried, and one I really loved.)
31. Double Jack (haven't tried it, but Firestone Walker will be at the Northern Virginia BrewFest next weekend, and I'm hoping they bring it)
32. Blind Pig IPA (anyone else losing count of the number of Russian River offerings on here?)
33. Furious
34. Victory At Sea Coffee Vanilla Imperial Porter
35. Two Hearted Ale (given that the label looked like a box store store-brand label, I was blown away by Bell's.)
36. Duvel
37. Double Bastard Ale
38. Founders Backwoods Bastard
39. Trappistes Rochefort 8
40. Schneider Weisse Tap 6 Unser Aventinus
41. IPA (India Pale Ale)
42. Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald Porter
43. Alpha King Pale Ale
44. Westmalle Trappist Tripel
45. Dark Lord Imperial Stout
46. Hop Rod Rye
47. Founders Porter
48. Choklat (I can probably (hopefully?) pick this one up relatively easily--I see Southern Tier all over the place.)
49. Union Jack India Pale Ale
50. Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout
51. Green Flash West Coast I.P.A.
52. A Little Sumpin' Sumpin' Ale
53. Burton Baton
54. Founders Double Trouble
55. Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale
56. Oak Aged Yeti Imperial Stout
57. Terrapin Coffee Oatmeal Imperial Stout
58. Arrogant Bastard Ale
59. Racer 5 India Pale Ale
60. Oaked Arrogant Bastard Ale
61. Maharaja
62. Trois Pistoles
63. Yeti Imperial Stout
64. Flower Power India Pale Ale
65. Hop Stoopid
66. Founders Red's Rye PA (the first RyePA on the list?  Wow.)
67. Gumballhead
68. Tripel Karmeliet
69. Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale
70. Orval Trappist Ale
71. Bell's Expedition Stout
72. Gulden Draak (Dark Triple)
73. Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA
74. Sierra Nevada Bigfood Barleywine Style Ale
75. Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout
76. Palo Santo Marron
77. Hennepin (Farmhouse Saison)
78. Sierra Nevada Hoptimum Imperial IPA
79. Maudite
80. Chocolate Stout
81. Black Butte Porter
82. Northern Hemisphere Harvest Wet Hop Ale
83. Founders Centennial IPA
84. Samuel Smith's Imperial Stout
85. Saison Dupont
86. Jai Alai IPA
87. Miles Davis' Bitches Brew (Interesting--this is one of the "collaboration" beers I was looking for for an earlier post, but I couldn't remember.)
88. Ommegang (Abbey Ale)
89. Allagash White (is this the first witbier on the list?)
90. Shakespeare Oatmeal Stout
91. Three Philosophers Belgian Style Blend (Quadrupel)
92. World Wide Stout)
93. Hercules Double IPA
94. 60 Minute IPA
95. Hop Devil Ale
96. Delirium Tremens
97. Chimay Premiere (Red)
98. Smuttynose IPA "Finest Kind"
99. Anchor Porter (huh.  Their porter made it, but their flagship--Steam--didn't, nor did any of the others.)
100. Storm King Stout

I was hoping after that slow start (only one tried of the top 20) that I would find that I'd had mostly moderately-great beers, but I really didn't find that. Score: 15/100.  That's an F by any scale.  I'll have to get to work.

A Return to Mashing: My First All-Grain

I've been determined for a while now to try my hand at mashing again.  After my disastrous previous attempt at doing a mash, I spent a lot of time thinking about what went wrong.  My conclusions were two-fold: 1) I did a horrible job of temperature control; and 2) I have no idea what really went wrong.

I've since attempted a mini-mash with three pounds of left-over grains (the same size as my previous partial mash), and it went pretty well.  I learned a few things, the biggest being that there's a significant temperature differential between the top of the grain and the middle.  In other words, laying my floating thermometer on top of the grain bed won't give me an accurate reading.

Still, given how poorly my first attempt went I don't want my first all-grain to be an expensive or difficult recipe.  I asked around on homebrewtalk.com, and I got a fairly universal response: BierMuncher's Centennial Blonde recipe.  So, I'll be making a 5-gallon batch of this on Wednesday:

BeerSmith's estimation of the color of the Centennial Blonde

Recipe Type: All Grain
Yeast: Nottingham
Yeast Starter: Nope
Additional Yeast or Yeast Starter: Nope
Original Gravity: 1.039
Final Gravity: 1.008
IBU: 21.6
Boiling Time (Minutes): 60-75
Color: 3.9
Primary Fermentation (# of Days & Temp): 4 days at 68 Degrees
Additional Fermentation: Kegged, chilled and Carb'd for one week
Secondary Fermentation (# of Days & Temp): 5 Days at 68 Degrees

Batch Size: 5.50 gal
Boil Size: 6.57 gal
Estimated OG: 1.040 SG
Estimated Color: 3.9 SRM
Estimated IBU: 21.5 IBU
Brewhouse Efficiency: 70.0 %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
Amount
7.00 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM)
0.75 lb Cara-Pils/Dextrine (2.0 SRM)
0.50 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 10L (10.0 SRM)
0.50 lb Vienna Malt (3.5 SRM)
0.25 oz Centennial [9.50%] (55 min)
0.25 oz Centennial [9.50%] (35 min)
0.25 oz Cascade [7.80%] (20 min)
0.25 oz Cascade [7.80%] (5 min)
1 Pkgs Nottingham (Danstar #-) (Hydrated)

Mash at 150 degrees for 60 minutes.

This will also be my first time attempting to calculate my efficiency (things went so badly last time it wasn't worth the effort).  Wish me luck!

This Time, I'll Explain the Name For Sure

It occurs to me that this is the third time I've written about the beer I call "Azog the Defiler", and although I've promised each time I'd explain the name, I still haven't yet.  I intend to remedy that with this post.  The last two posts were all about my travails in brewing the beer--this one will be about the beer itself.

I mentioned before my fears about how this beer would turn out.  When I sampled it during gravity tests and during bottling, it was downright unpleasant: the first thing noticeable was a hot, solventy flavor.  It smelled like rubbing alcohol and tasted like I'd rinsed the bottling bucket with turpentine.  I thought I could detect some nice malty cereal notes beneath the alcohol, but they were masked very well.  The mouthfeel was slick and strangely chewy.

The mantra on homebrewtalk.com is "RDWHAHB", which stands for "Relax, Don't Worry, Have a Homebrew".  It's not elegant, but it's an all-purpose statement that sums up their reaction to anything that goes wrong during the brewing process.  They'll tell you that time will cure almost any problems with a beer.  That's why I chose to bottle it rather than pouring it down the drain, but it was a close thing.  I didn't even bother soaking the labels off the bottles I put the beer in--it didn't deserve it.  It was a rough, ugly thing, and deserved bottles to match.

From my tastings, it was obvious that this beer wasn't anything like Grandma's oatmeal raisin cookies--at least not my grandma's.  Maybe it was like your grandma's, if she hates you and tries to kill you by putting Drano in your cookies.  Your mileage may vary.  However, it was clear that a name based on the cookie idea wasn't really going to work.  I needed something new.

In discussing the beer with friends over IM and texts, I started abbreviating it ORC (for Oatmeal Raisin Cookie).  Being a Tolkien fan, I immediately thought of the horrific monstrosities that Tolkien called "orcs".  Hmm, maybe there's something there?  Like the orcs, the ORC was harsh, it was ugly, and any good person would consider it an abomination and a crime against nature.  Even the beer's home, the bottles, was rude and unfinished, like an orc's dwelling.  Maybe we're on to something.

Azog the Goblin was the orc who killed Thorin Oakenshield's grandfather in the Mines of Moria.  He was powerful, scornful, and disrespectful.  In the recent film adaptation of The Hobbit, he is named The Defiler.  I couldn't think of a better name for this beer.

I've tried the beer again, maybe five months after bottling it.  I won't say it's a great beer, but it's drinkable.  Most of the particulate matter has settled, though it will never be anything like clear; and the alcohol isn't nearly as harsh.  This in turn lets the malt shine through.  It's still a bit challenging, but it reminds me more of an Old Ale or a Barleywine than a brown ale.  Not surprising, since the recipe comes out at 8.2% ABV, twice the maximum of the BJCP style guidelines for a Southern English Brown Ale (which should be 2.8-4.1% ABV).

So I'm really not sure what to call this in terms of style.  It isn't nearly bitter enough to be called an English Barleywine, and the yeast rules out any Belgian style.  Maybe it almost fits as a Wee Heavy, though there's no roasted barley in it, and certainly no peat notes.  Maybe I'll just call it an Imperial Southern English Brown Ale, and hide it from the light of the sun.

Collaboration

I'm on the fence regarding collaborative brewing. I'm not talking about collaboration between breweries, like Avery and Russian River teaming up to make "Collaboration Not Litigation Ale", or breweries teaming up with a noted homebrewer, like Stone and Randy Mosher making "Dayman Coffee IPA". Things like that make sense: you basically have an all-star team working on a beer, and by throwing together groups that don't normally work together I imagine you break out of your comfort zone, learn a bit about your partner's style of brewing, and get to work on a really envelope-pushing beer without too much risk (since the expectations are different than if it was just another beer in your standard lineup). I'd consider something like Sierra Nevada's "Beer Camp" to be an extension of this.

(Tangent: These collaborations aren't just limited to two partners, by the way; I saw in the March/April 2010 issue of Imbibe that Russian River, Lost Abbey, Allagash, Avery and Dogfish Head all collaborated on a sour ale called "Proximus". I'd love to try that.)

No, what I'm talking about are the "inspired by"-type beers, where a brewery "collaborates" with some public figure to produce a new beer. A few I'm thinking of:

• DC Brau and D.C. United: "The Tradition".  Apparently the team approached the brewery about producing a beer, which makes it akin to a brewery making the house beer for a sports arena. 
•  The Flying Monkeys and Barenaked Ladies: "BNL Strong Beer", a chocolate Imperial Stout.  The head of Flying Monkeys, Peter Chiodo, admits it's his recipe, and the band simply approved it.  It doesn't strike me as anything more than branding--it's their name slapped on a product they had little to do with (although the band members apparently did come in to help dump ingredients into the vats).
• Dogfish Head and Pearl Jam: "Faithful".  Chido claims that Pearl Jam essentially just allowed their name to be used in this beer honoring the 20th anniversary of the album "Ten".
• Cambridge Brewing Company is making a beer honoring slain MIT police officer Sean Collier, who was killed by the suspects of the Boston Marathon bombing.  I have to admit I'm really uncomfortable with this, even though it's being done with the full approval of his family, and some of the profits are going to the officer's favorite charity.  It still feels like an attempt to profit off his death to me.  I think I would be more comfortable with it if all, rather than some, of the profits were going to charity.
• Dillon Dam Brewery and Denver Art Museum: "DAM Gogh", a beer honoring Van Gogh.  This one actually seems like an appropriate choice: the brewery has a history of Van Gogh-inspired beers, and there was a real effort to tie the beer in with the subject.  It's a bier de garde, chosen because Van Gogh so often used the average French citizen as a subject.  It also uses anise to tie it in with absinthe, the drink the artist famously imbibed.

Some of these seem more like marketing gimmick than collaboration.  Some of them strike me as crass attempts to make money.  What do you think?

The Perils of Partial Mashing, or How Azog the Defiler Got His Name

Thus begins the second part of the story of the beer that would become known as Azog the Defiler.

As described before, this beer was originally conceived as a Southern English Brown Ale, with toasted oats and underlying raisin notes, and was supposed to remind the drinker of eating an oatmeal raisin cookie.  This was my first custom recipe, but I had high hopes.  Alas, it was not to be.

It was a Murphy's Law sort of brewday, which only compounded my trials as I ventured into the world of mashing. As I mentioned in a previous post, it appeared that Mosher's book was calling for a partial-mash recipe.  It was called a partial-mash, anyway; there was no extract or extract-with-specialty-grains recipe listed, and Mosher gave specific instructions for how to do a partial mash recipe.  So, despite the fact that it looked to my untrained eye like an extract-with-specialty-grains recipe (which just requires steeping the grains for a little bit before the boil), I followed Mosher's instructions for partial mashing.  I followed them, in fact, even though BeerSmith was setting off alarm bells, saying that if I treated it like a partial mash the original gravity was going to be way too high.  Besides, so what if the OG is a little (or a lot) high?  It will have a little extra alcohol.  Nothing wrong with that, right?

It turns out that is not the case; different strains of yeast have different tolerances for alcohol and differing abilities to chew up sugar in the wort.  In addition, a heavy alcohol presence can be hot or solventy if you don't handle it correctly, and it's also not appropriate for most styles (barleywines being one of the exceptions; more on them later).  But that's a problem that I didn't have to deal with until later.

The first step in transitioning to partial-grain or all-grain brewing, of course, is getting the right equipment.  I had gotten a pretty large (7-gallon) brewpot with my original equipment, so I was sitting pretty there, and I figured I could use kitchen pots for my sparge water.  All I really needed was a mash/lauter tun.

For anyone who's unfamiliar with all-grain brewing, the central vessel is called a mash/lauter tun, or MLT.  This is the vessel that holds the grains--you steep them in carefully temperature-controlled water for about an hour, depending on the style (it's possible to get much more complicated, with steps and rests and multiple temperature changes, but it's generally just one steep in water between 150-155 F).  This is called the mash.  A decent MLT will have a drain valve and a false bottom to keep the grains away from the valve.  Draining the liquid out of the MLT is called lautering.

In addition to the MLT, you need a vessel capable of holding and heating several gallons of water for sparging, or rinsing the grains in the MLT, and another vessel capable of holding the total volume of liquid for the boil.

At this point all I really, really needed was an MLT.  I decided to go with a round cooler-style 5-gallon homemade tun.  The advantages were that it was relatively inexpensive, easy to assemble, and flexible.  The only real downsides were that there was some assembly required, and I would need to get a bigger one if I got into doing large all-grain batches (bigger than 5 gallons) or high-gravity all-grain brews (like barleywines and the like).

Finding the cooler wasn't particularly difficult, but like with all projects the cost I found was a lot higher than online guides said it would be.  Assembling the brass for the valve, on the other hand...I spent a week and easily a hundred dollars buying, testing, and arranging connectors.  My local Home Depot and Lowe's didn't have all of the pieces I needed (particularly washers), and being relatively new to brass plumbing features I underestimated how many similar-but-incompatible styles there are.  Thankfully Home Depot will accept returns even of opened items, but I still ended up with probably $20 worth of brass that I couldn't find the bags for despite careful organization.  I eventually broke down and ordered a $25 pre-assembled kit.  It was about twice what it would have been had I been able to find all the parts, but a quarter of what it cost me to try it myself.

Finally my mash tun was assembled, and I ordered the ingredients from Northern Brewer for my Oatmeal Raisin Cookie brown ale.  I've had good experiences with them overall, but this time I opened the box and everything was there...except for the pound of rolled oats, which is kind of central to the recipe.  So off to the store I go.  My local homebrew store (MyLHBS) was closed by this time, but I'd heard that quick oats would work just as well.  Turns out Quaker Quick Oats are just about a pound, so it was perfect.  I poured them on a baking sheet and popped them into the oven for a few minutes.  They browned a lot quicker than I'd been told to expect, though, so I might have overtoasted them a little.  I'm not really sure.  After toasting they need a couple of days rest to get rid of some nasty aromatics, so I stuck them in a paper bag and let them rest.  (Addendum: NB was very quick to send me out a pound of rolled oats as soon as I alerted them to the problem.)

I was oh-so-careful in starting my yeast starter.  Exactly eighteen hours before I anticipated needing to pitch I started my starter.  I boiled up the correct amount of dry extract, cooled it, pitched the yeast, and stuck it on the stir plate. 

The next day I got everything set up.  I added my grains to the mash tun and started heating up my mash water.  Once it hit the target temperature (167.5 F, which should cool to 156 F once it was added to the grains) I added it to the grains and stirred.  It seemed rather thick; I suspect I fell significantly below the 4.75 quarts during the boil (a lot of water probably boiled off).  After about five minutes the temperature was below 150, so I boiled another several cups of water and added it.  Five minutes later it was still low, so I repeated the process.  I checked halfway through the mash, and the temperature was way too high (maybe in the 170's?), so I added some cool water.  I don't recall the exact numbers or times but it was a mess.  Temperature control was probably my single-biggest problem during this ordeal.

I say that temperature control was the biggest problem I had with this brew, but whether that's true depends on whether you think a lack of temperature control was responsible for what happened next.

Generally what happens next is you open the tap part-way and collect what are known as first runnings.  The first stuff out of the mash tun generally has a lot of husk and other particulate matter in it.  You collect it and pour it back into the tun until it runs somewhat clear.  Mine never really did that.

In fact, mine hardly ran at all.

The most dreaded thing in all-grain brewing is known as the stuck sparge.  That's when the grains form a tight, compact bed and let very little liquid through, and the draining slows to a trickle.  I could hardly work my way up to that.  I would open the tap (part-way; opening it up too fast is one of the leading causes of stuck sparges) and get a slow flow for a few seconds, then a trickle...and then a drip.  Closing and re-opening it would restart this process as long as there was a lot of liquid in there, but mostly vigorous stirring/scraping of the contents of the tun is the only thing that got any liquid out.  What I did manage to extract was sludgy and thick with particulate matter.

I spent hours trying to drain this liquid.  I added the sparge water early in hopes that a higher liquid/grain ratio would ease things (it didn't).  I stirred.  I pleaded.  I adjusted the tap.  I begged.  Nothing worked.  Finally around 11pm I posted a query on HomeBrewTalk (God bless these people): am I doomed if I just cover the wort and do my boil tomorrow?  The quick consensus seemed to be I would probably be all right, although there was a slight possibility of some off flavors.  I laughed.  After this ordeal, their minor concerns were the least of mine.  I covered the kettle with aluminum foil and trudged off to bed.  Did I mention this was a weeknight, so I was getting up again in a few hours?

I mentioned earlier how carefully I timed the creation of my yeast starter.  I wanted to pitch it eighteen hours after I started it: no more, no less.  Except I'd just added another twenty-four hours to that.  Eighteen, forty-two; what's the difference?

My yeast had kind of a greyish color and smelled a little sour when I checked on it the next day, although it otherwise seemed healthy.  Hopefully that won't be a problem.  The boil itself was not so bad--even I can't screw up a partial-volume boil too badly.  Unfortunately, the stuff I ended up transferring to the carboy for fermentation was thick with particulates, and it was only the homebrewer credo of "relax, time can fix almost any problem" that kept me from pouring it down the drain.  Eventually I would almost come to wish I had.
To Be Continued...

Mapping the Rise of Craft Beer

Very interesting article in the New Yorker on the rise of craft beer in the United States: http://www.newyorker.com/sandbox/business/beer.html.

Virginia was pretty much in the middle on all counts: we're 12th in total number of craft breweries, 28th in total production, 12th in overall increase, and 30th in craft breweries per population.

Most of the data isn't really that surprising.  The biggest states are California, Washington, and Colorado; followed by Oregon, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, Texas and Wisconsin.

In terms of growth, however, the order is much different: Alabama leads the pack (not surprising, considering the official stance on craft beer has changed rapidly recently; see the recent legalization of homebrewing there); Minnesota, Connecticut, Nevada and Tennessee round out the tops for growth.  Again, this makes sense: since they started so low there's lots of room for growth.  It is interesting to see craft beer spreading away from the West Coast, however.

Perhaps the most interesting to me was breweries by population: suddenly Vermont was in the lead, with 20 craft breweries for every 500,000 people.  Oregon, not surprisingly, was second, with Montana trailing close behind.  California, surprisingly, had barely a fifth of Vermont's density, with 4.2 craft breweries per 500,000 people.  Perhaps this is a commentary on the vast population of California than anything else, but I found it surprising nonetheless.