gwax's rumblings

It’s time for a beer update. Before I go any­where, I should like to note that I am a beer brewer and not a beer judge so my descrip­tive ter­mi­nol­ogy may not be offi­cial or even accu­rate. Now, let’s talk about vic­tory; vic­tory and beer.

I cracked open the first bot­tle of my, sup­posed to be pale, lager last Saturday to mixed feel­ings of joy and dis­ap­point­ment. Upon pour­ing the beer from bot­tle to glass, it was imme­di­ately obvi­ous that my attempt at mak­ing a pale lager did not come out very pale. My goal was to pro­duce a very pale lager of 2–4SRM but the result is far closer to 8-12SRM. Accepting that the color might be off but it might still taste like a Pale Lager, I moved on to tast­ing. Upon tast­ing the lager, it was clear that I had not accom­plished the crisp, clear pale lager style but man­aged a heav­ier, hop­pier style of lager. Although the beer is in no way pale, it is nonethe­less very good; it is an accept­able mis­take. I believe that my mis­take prob­a­bly arose from two prob­lems: my malts were too dark and my lager­ing was not cold enough. I like the beer and I fig­ure it makes for a valiant first attempt at a lager but I will be try­ing again to see if I can man­age a pale lager at some point in the future.

On Tuesday, as a birth­day present for myself, I finally tapped my tripel ale keg. Filling a glass, I was greeted with noth­ing less than a com­plete ful­fill­ment of my hopes and aspi­ra­tions. The beer is clear of any haze and has a very nice amber color, give or take, about 15SRM. There is a very pleas­ant aroma, some­what fruity and almost candy-like. Upon tast­ing, I knew that I had met and exceeded my expec­ta­tions; the fla­vor is that of a Belgian white beer, smooth, fruity and with a low bit­ter­ness, but has the strong malt over­tones of a bar­ley­wine or con­ven­tional tripel ale. The malty char­ac­ter is more sub­dued and less over pow­er­ing than that of most bar­ley­wines or tripels I have encoun­tered, which suits my pref­er­ences. The beer’s alco­hol con­tent of about 9–12% is very well masked by the fla­vors of the beer and puts it slightly out of the stan­dard range of a tripel ale, into that of bar­ley­wines and quadru­pel ales. This beer is, in my opin­ion, a phe­nom­e­nal sip­ping beer, with a heck of a kick to it; it’s eas­ily one of the best tripel or quadru­pel style ales I’ve ever had. I will def­i­nitely be keep­ing this recipe and hope­fully I’ll have ample oppor­tu­nity to use it again in the future.

For those of you that I haven’t told, a while back, I took up brew­ing beer, wine and the like as hob­bies. So far, I’ve had a pretty fan­tas­tic run of things with only a small hand­ful of fail­ures, none of which were ter­ri­bly unexpected.

My first brew­ing was some­time last September or October. With the help of my friend Paul, I brewed an Irish Red style Ale. Being our first brew­ing expe­ri­ence, we used a pre-prepared kit. Earlier on the day we brewed, how­ever, I had gone apple pick­ing with some other house­mates so we decided to mod­ify the recipe by toss­ing a few apples into the wort. The result we obtained after 2 or 3 weeks fer­ment­ing and 2 weeks aging/carbonating was really quite good. We had cre­ated a nice, smooth Irish Red style Ale, with a mild but notable taste of apple. While we made our way through the first 24 bot­tles, which had been refrig­er­ated after 2 weeks aging, the remain­ing 24 had been left in the base­ment con­tin­u­ing to age. After fin­ish­ing the first 24 we moved on to the sec­ond to dis­cover that they were even smoother but had lost a lit­tle of the apple character.

Having suc­ceeded at brew­ing a tasty beer, I decided to try my hand at var­i­ous other fer­men­ta­tions so I picked up a num­ber of dry yeast pack­ets at my local brew­ing store and set at it. I made up three 1 gal­lon solu­tions with equal quan­ti­ties of fer­mentable sugar: one with cane sugar, one with molasses and one with maple syrup. These were each given a num­ber of weeks to fer­ment. After fer­men­ta­tion, I gave them each a try and dis­cov­ered that the molasses “wine”, although alco­holic, was totally undrink­able; the sugar “wine” was alco­holic but com­pletely bland (a good result for less than a dol­lar in raw mate­ri­als); the maple “wine” was actu­ally rather tasty but not tasty enough for its cost.

After the exper­i­men­tal “wines”, I decided to give proper wine a shot (by proper I mean grape fla­vored, not high qual­ity). I pro­ceeded to make up two large buck­ets full of wine from Welch’s grape juice and sugar (as an adjunct, if you will). the buck­ets were allowed to fer­ment for a num­ber of weeks. The wines’ fer­men­ta­tion cycles coin­cided very nicely with the sched­ul­ing of a Mardi Gras party my house was throw­ing. Myself hav­ing 8 gal­lons of really cheap, but not all that bad, wine and throw­ing a party made for an obvi­ous com­bi­na­tion. I set aside 2 gal­lons of the wine as my “Special Reserve” and used the remain­der to pro­duce san­gria for the party. The san­gria went over very well, tast­ing so good that it prompted a num­ber of indi­vid­u­als to ques­tion whether or not it was alco­holic. Tasting of the wine prior to san­gria pro­duc­tion and lat­ter con­sump­tion of my “Special Reserve” con­firmed that the wine was plenty alco­holic. Consumption of the “Special Reserve” also proved quite tasty on a lat­ter date.

My next attempt, which was started whilst the Welch’s wines were fer­ment­ing was also my great­est fail­ure, a sake. I didn’t feel like deal­ing with koji-kin (it’d take a while to explain, so you can look it up inde­pen­dently) so I decided to go with the old-fashioned way and mas­ti­cated a whole lot of rice. It was a bit of a gross thing to mas­ti­cate my way through two gal­lons of rice but it was an inter­est­ing exer­cise. After adding yeast and wait­ing a num­ber of weeks, the con­coc­tion was a ter­ri­bly smelling, undrink­able mess. In ret­ro­spect, I prob­a­bly should have pas­teur­ized it before adding the yeast.

Prior to start­ing the wines, I started my sec­ond and third batches of beer. The sec­ond was the result dis­cov­er­ing that I could dis­as­sem­ble empty beer kegs and fill them with my own beer. That dis­cov­ered, I set about design­ing a cross between a Hefeweizen and a Belgian Tripel Ale (two of my favorite beer styles). The Belgian Tripel Weizen designed, I enlisted Paul’s aid once more and we set about brew­ing 18 gal­lons of beer. The beer was allowed to fer­ment for two weeks and then the spe­cific grav­ity was checked. The grav­ity had not decreased suf­fi­ciently so another week was waited, then another and then finally 15.5 gal­lons of the beer were moved into the keg (Tripel Ales take a long time to fer­ment due to high sugar con­tent ). It was about two or three weeks ago that the ale was kegged and I am wait­ing until April 3^rd to tap it; I’m giv­ing it plenty of time to con­di­tion and this way I can make it a birth­day present to myself. All pre­lim­i­nary tests seem to indi­cate that it will taste fan­tas­tic and I am wait­ing with bated breath.

My third beer attempt started shortly after my sec­ond. I fig­ured that the cold Minnesota win­ter would likely make some place in my house cold enough for lager­ing. The deci­sion of what sort of a lager didn’t take too long; I went with the clas­sic, albeit a lit­tle bor­ing, Pale Lager style. Wanting to take the purists approach, I decided to base mine on the orig­i­nal Pale Lager style beer, Pilsner Urquell. This beer has fin­ished its fer­men­ta­tion and just recently fin­ished (as far as I’m con­cerned) its lager­ing and was bot­tled. Preliminary test­ing sug­gests that it’ll turn out well enough, time now to wait for carbonation.

These, of course, have been all of my inten­tional brew­ing adven­tures. Now, don’t get me wrong, I very much enjoy my inten­tional brew­ing and have been mean­ing to men­tion it here for a while, but this post was inspired by a recent bit of acci­den­tal brew­ing. As a result of prepar­ing and drink­ing some left­over frozen juice con­cen­trate as plain juice. More specif­i­cally, I’ve been drink­ing lots of white grape juice and vari­ants thereon. A few days ago, I made up a pitcher full of white grape-pear juice and brought it up to my room. I was drink­ing the juice slowly and then a few days ago it started to taste a lit­tle off. The taste wasn’t off enough for me to think any­thing was amiss but then, two days ago, I noticed some funny spindly things that looked like mold in it. I decided to throw out the spoiled juice but it was late and I was tired so I put off doing so until the next day. Yesterday, the next day, I for­got about the juice for a while, remem­ber­ing only at a time when I didn’t feel like doing any­thing about it. By yes­ter­day, the spindly things had set­tled into a beige mass at the bot­tom of the juice that looked an awful lot like what grows in inten­tion­ally fer­mented bev­er­ages. Putting the mat­ter off again, I went to sleep. Today, when I went to check on my pitcher of juice, I noticed that it was bub­bly and smelled of alco­hol. Without adding yeast, in fact by doing noth­ing more than leav­ing a pitcher of juice in my room, I had cre­ated wine. This inter­ests and amuses me greatly because it was quite likely the way in which alco­hol was orig­i­nally invented.