Football Beers

Here is my appreciation post celebrating the awesomeness that is fall, football and beer.  On a personal note, Week 1 is always a big transition for me.  As a teacher, I hold summer as a sacred season and never want it to end.  Starting school is always a big downer...the end of freedom and the start of working.  If I am going to accept the start of school, I want everything that goes along with it.  I want cooler temperatures, playoff baseball, football Sunday's and fall beers.  I want an excuse to make homemade chili and a reason to sit at a sports bar for 4 hours. 

Brains, our barleywine, was brewed for this season.  I know, I know.  Real football fans, real men, drink Coors Light or Miller Light while watching football.  That's what the magical box on my wall tells me.  But fall season beers are about high ABV and huge flavor. 

Today my beer fridge is stocked with Bell's Octoberfest, Flying Dog Table for Two, New Belgium Trippel and one lonely Bell's Oracle. 

Hooray football and hooray beer!

What's your Week 1 beer?

Lessons on Failure

The first attempt at a lager did not go as planned.  We were making a Czech-style pilsner for the national Pilsner Urquell homebrew challenge.  We withdrew.

I specifically remember the yeast vial saying that one was enough.  It didn't mention a starter either.  These are huge rookie mistakes.  After a few weeks of agitating the fermenter, we decided to up the temperature a few degrees instead of re-pitching the yeast.  This was a huge mistake.  Increasing the temperature causes the yeast to release all sorts of fun off-flavors.  The biggest being diacetyl acid, which smells like butter.  Gross.

So we bottled it and hoped for the best, but we got the worst.  I tried to convince Dan to pour the whole thing out.  Dan always wants to think the best about our products and insisted that we try it out.  Dan was ready to pour it all out after two sips.

Not only was the final product entirely too dark for a pilsner, it had a terrible aftertaste.  Oh yeah, and I stuck my entire arm in the fermentation vessel.  Nothing went right with this beer.  It's our first disaster in brewing; much worse than the hefeweisen that didn't carbonate properly.  Butter beer = bad.  Really bad.  Now if we could only brew a salty beer, Casey would LOVE it.

We tried brewing another pilsner about three weeks ago.  We used a starter this time around, but apparently didn't pitch enough yeast again.  I re-pitched a week ago and should be done fermenting in the next couple of days.  I'm still hopeful!

Lessons Learned: Chloramines

I recently finished reading Gordon Strong's excellent book Brewing Better Beer and there were a great deal of useful tidbits and interesting new (to me) techniques presented in the book, but there was one particular part that I think will really bump my beers up to another level. I'm talking about chloramines.

Chloramines are used by some municipal water supplies to disinfect the water going to their customers' homes. Chlorine is also used for this purpose by some municipal water sources, but because people are more sensitive to the presence of chlorine and not as sensitive to the presence of chloramines, in terms of both taste, smell, and feel (dried out skin, etc.), more and more municipalities are switching to chloramines.

The only reason I know anything about this is because I notice the change every year in smell and taste in the tap water when my local water supply switches from chloramines to chlorine to make sure bacteria don't become resistant to it. I know that chlorine is bad for brewing water, since that is spelled out in most introductory/intermediate level homebrewing books and I've read a few of those. I didn't know that chloramines are just as bad and actually probably much worse since chlorine can be removed by simply running your water through a carbon filter (a Brita filter, for example) and chloramines form a stronger bond in water and aren't as easily removed.

This is probably the biggest thing I've been doing wrong with my brewing up until this point. The information on chloramines that I got from my municipal water supply's website said that chloramines are removed by the same type of filtration systems that remove chloramine, so I had no idea that this was not the case and that chloramines were probably the reason my beers always had a slightly astringent off-flavor that I couldn't place. It wasn't too bad, so I suspect that my Brita filter was removing some of the chloramines, but I noticed it and didn't like it.

The solution to this problem is to treat your brewing water with Campden tablets (sodium metabisulfite) to remove the chloramines before adding any malt to the water. The tablets work fast (less than a minute) and one tablet will treat 20 gallons of brewing water.

Although, the book is geared towards advanced homebrewers, I feel like this particular lesson would be useful for all levels of brewers and frankly can't believe that it wasn't mentioned at all in any of the beginner/intermediate books I've read (perhaps an idea for something to add in the fourth edition of The Complete Joy of Home Brewing, Charlie Papazian). So, thank you, Gordon Strong! I've tried this technique in a few batches already and have already noticed that the astringent flavor is gone and my beers are tasting better.

We Have Liftoff!

First of all, After School Special was bottled without incident.  All praise the presence of Casey in such matters. The Irish Moss worked really well to clarify our beer, so this will be our first that won't be cloudy and contain extra yeast and hops and whatever else.  The only regret I have about this beer is that there's nothing inherently interesting about it.  We followed an amber ale recipe, changing only one type of hops and a slight deviation in yeast.  I know I'm brewing for a lot of people that are not nearly as interested in beer as I am, but I still wanted to wow them.  Maybe the fact that it's homemade beer will wow them?

In other news, I got the lager to restart fermentation.  Dan and I had lengthy discussions about repitching yeast - what effect will it have on the beer?  Will it change the flavor?  Will it matter?  We decided to raise the temperature a few degrees and agitate the wort to give it a last chance.  Voila!  It's finally bubbling and gurgling and doing normal yeasty things.  Just thinking about it makes me want to take a gravity reading.

Review - A l'abri de la Tempete Terre Ferme

Once upon a time, drinking at Galaxy Hut, I came across a bottle of A l'abri de la Tempete Corps Mort - an 11% ABV barleywine.  My interest piqued, I ordered it and was blown away.  It was one of the best barleywines I've ever had (and I've had plenty).  I shared it with Casey, who, in the dim light, insisted that the bottle claimed it was made with smoked fish.  Not true.

Anyhow! This is a microbrewery from a Canadian island (the bottle and website is French, so I can't be more specific) but I'm pretty sure they use ingredients from the island.  Their labels are pretty neat and the story seems interesting, so I've been dying to find some of their different beers.

Enter Arrowine.  Side note, I'm moving in across the street from Arrowine in a month and am afraid I will spend ALL of my money on that place.  Awesome beer selection, all sorts of delicious cheese and charcuterie, plus, you know, that other alcoholic beverage wine.  Plus they have craft beer tastings on Thursday nights and wine tastings Friday nights and Saturday afternoons.  All around awesome. (The following was an unpaid advertisement for Arrowine.  Although, if they'd like to sponsor me for free beer and cheese, I'm all for it).

Ok, where was I?  I went to Arrowine and was pleasantly surprised to find they had THREE beers from A l'abri de la Tempete.  I had to bite and buy one (I'm sure I'll get the other soon).  I also picked up a Heavy Seas Mutany Fleet Plank I and a Lindeman's Cuvee Rene Gueze Lambic.  I forced my dad to buy a six-pack of Port City Porter to bring back to NJ with him.  We tasted six different wines from France and then got a sample of some awesome cheese, Bergfichte.

On to the review!



Appearance: Hazy orangy-amber color with sparse bubbles and a thin white head.

Aroma: Peaches!  I get a ton of pine aroma and some alcohol at the end.

Taste: Tasting a lot of that piney hoppiness up front.  A little spice, reminds me of orange zest.  Dries out a lot on the finish, leaving a lingering hop reside in my mouth.

Mouthfeel: Carbonation tingles at first, then the beer feels like it grabs my tongue and cheeks and sucks the moisture out. 

Picture borrowed from BrewPublic

Overall: It's growing on me because it's different from other Strong Beers I've had.  Much less impressive than their barleywine and it's not even close.  Would I drink this again?  No, but that's because of the $7/bottle price tag.  Bring it down to $3 and we'll talk.

Beer Advocate has 10 reviews averaging out to a B- with a few good reviews holding up more subpar ones.  I can't find any other reviews of this beer (I'm such a trail-blazer).