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How to Brew a Boddingtons Clone

August 26, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

When looking for a new recipe, the adventurous homebrewer is faced with a breadth of choices so vast that it can be debilitating.

You can, without too much exaggeration, brew almost anything you can think of. Want something spicy? Try a Jalapeño/Haberno recipe. Feeling a bit light, perhaps craving some fruit in your malt? Try a watermelon wheat, or a strawberry blonde, or blueberry lager. You can even start messing with the types of sugars or yeasts you base the beer on and journey deep into the weird world of sweet potato, pizza, creme brulee, or even beard (yes face-hair) beer.

With so many options, so much potential just waiting to be mashed and fermented, it seems wrong to brew a clone of an existing beer, to recreate what has already been created, to add nothing new and plagiarize the work of another brewer so brazenly.

But, despite being the safe and boring choice, cloning is one of the best things you can do to improve your homebrewing skills. We know why we like certain commercial beer, be it the flavor or smell or presentation (or a little from columns A, B, and C), so by attempting to brew a clone, we can see how exactly the brewers used their alchemical skills to bring about such a well done beer. It gives us a standard to measure our own brew, and ultimately brewing skill, against.

How to Brew a Boddingtons Clone

I won’t try to hide why I picked Boddingtons of all the beers out there; it was, and will always be, my dad’s favorite beer. As my Untappd profile says, I’m pretty sure I drank Boddingtons before milk. I understand it may not be everyone’s cup of Earl Grey, especially since it was purchased and retooled by Whitbred and then ABInBev, but this is the brew that my dad used to teach me about beer, his rambunctious youth in British pubs, and how to tell a good story over a pint of ale.

“The Cream of Manchester” is a standard English bitter, fiercely golden with a thick white head, that, outside of pubs dotting the northern English countryside, comes in tall yellow and black cans, each of which contains a floating beer widget. Hopefully my all-grain homebrew will be less like the stuff available in the US today, and more like the stuff my dad drank on tap back in Manchester during the late 70s and early 80s. He always said there was nothing quite like a cask-condition, freshly pulled pint of pub ale.

Stuff You’ll Need

For a five gallon batch:

6.2 lbs of 2-row malt (British preferred, American accepted)
4 oz of Crystal 40 (for that golden color)
1/2 oz Patent Black Malt (for roasted goodness, and a little more color)
1/3 lb of invert sugar (which requires brown cane sugar and citric acid, explained below)
1.25 oz Fuggles (for bitterness and aroma)
.75 oz Kent Goldings (for aroma and flavor)
British Ale Yeast (I used WhiteLabs WLP013 but WYeast 1098 should work well, too)

You’ll also need all of the standard all-grain brewing stuff, like a mash-tun, brew kettle, bucket, carboy, fire, spoon, etc.

Step 1: Mash it up

The first thing you’ll notice is that this isn’t very much grain for a 5 gallon batch. Most American Ale recipes call for at least 10 lbs of malt, and we’re nearly 4 lbs short of that here. That’s because Boddingtons is a pretty low ABV brew, bubbling in at thoroughly sessionable 3.9%.

Because it’s so little grain, it’s best to mash for a bit longer than normal, say 90 minutes instead of 60. Mash the 2-row and specialty malts at ~151 degrees, stirring once or twice to make sure there are no malty dough balls floating around. Sparge once to loose the sugars, settle the grain-bed by draining off a liter or so, then send the rest right into your kettle.

You might be surprised at how brown the wort is, but that’s OK. From my experience, the color of the beer in a carboy or other container is much, much darker than it is in a glass.

Step 2: Make some invert sugar

While the grain is mashing, you’ll want to start your invert sugar. For the record, you can buy something like Lyle’s Golden Syrup, but if you’re putting in the work for all-grain brewing, you might as well create all of the ingredients from scratch. Consider it a lesson in self-sufficiency. Or survival preparation. Your call.

Invert sugar is naturally found in a lot of fruits and honeys, but you can make it yourself by adding citric acid to normal cane sugar, and heating it in water. The citric acid breaks the bonds of the sucrose in the cane sugar, resulting in free fructose and glucose (which are both sweeter than regular old sucrose). For those curious, this is the same chemical structure as the dreaded high fructose corn syrup, but our version is made from completely different ingredients (namely: not corn).

You want to heat 1/2 a lb of cane sugar (not table sugar) in 3/4 a cup of water. As it’s heating, add 1/8 a teaspoon of citric acid. Let it simmer, stirring frequently, for at least 20 minutes. The longer it simmers the darker and thicker it will be. You don’t want it too dark or thick for this beer, so try not to simmer it for more than 30-40 minutes.

Step 3: Boil her up (or down, not sure how it works)

Now that your grain is mashed and your sugar is inverted, you can start your boil. As soon as it’s roiling enthusiastically, you’ll want to add 1 oz of your Fuggles and .5 oz of your Kent Goldings. Boil for another 45, stirring as your impatience dictates. Next, add your invert sugar, a teaspoon of Irish moss (or a whirlfloc, if that’s how you roll) and the rest of your hops. There are no hop additions at burnout for this recipe, so you just need to wait another 15 minutes. Now is a good time to drop your (cleaned and rinsed) wort-chiller into the beer so that the boil can do most of the sanitation work for you.

Step 4: Drink a beer and chill out (while the beer chills out)

I always try to drink something in the same style as what I’m brewing. Three guesses as to what I was drinking this time around.

This is a good time to use the excess water from your wort chiller to water your poor, droopy hydrangeas. You can also use some to hose the bird-poop off your car. Get creative with it.

This is also a good time to get an original gravity reading.

Step 5: Pitch your yeast

Around ~75-80 degrees you are ready to stir the hell out of your wort and pitch your yeast. Remember that the more oxygen the yeast has, the better it will get established, and the better it will attenuate. I sometimes seal my bucket and shake the hell out of it once the yeast is already in there, just to make sure it’s well distributed and has enough oxygen to breathe comfortably.

Step 6: Prime and bottle

Let the golden-brown joy ferment a week, then rack to secondary. Bottle by priming with 2/3 a cup of cane sugar. Let the beer very slightly carbonate (to mimic the traditional style) for another ~14-21 days.

That’s it! Enjoy one for me and my old man.

How to Peer Edit

May 9, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

It’s easy, as a writer, to think of your craft as a one-way street. You write words, send them bleeping and whirring through the wiry innards of the internet to a reader, who then reads them. It’s all very binary. Writers are 0, readers are 1.

But when you start getting up and out, into the writing world, into the community of like-minded crazy people and neurotics and geniuses, you’ll start to notice that the writer-reader relationship is just the final product of a massive word factory, an interconnected automaton that clunks and steams as writers feed it raw materials through their laptops and tablets and notepads.

This factory is where all the drafts between 0 and 1 happen, where those oft-spoken-about but rarely seen editors do their editing things. While there are some wonderful and talented professional editors holding senior positions in the factory, the majority of the day-to-day editing is handled by the writers pulling bad words off of never-ending conveyor belts and turning big red valves on proofreading machines. This factory is the thumping mechanical heart of planet writing, the place where little baby mewling essays turn into triumphant opinionated masterpieces and sad, confused stories grow up to play in the literary NFL.

Good news: they’re hiring.

Editing another writer’s work will improve your writing. It gives you a chance to read all kinds of stuff you might not see otherwise, but also gives you a chance to see what mistakes other writers are making. Editing gives you the chance to learn from other people’s lessons, dissect how a writer created an image or a theme or a tone. It’s also one of the few ways you can truly give back to the writing community short of becoming Rowling-famous and giving away money because you’re feeling particularly philanthropic.

Seems easy, right? Go join a workshop group, grab some stuff, and edit! I like that attitude, that energy. You’ll need that. But not all edits are created equal. Prior proper preparation leads to efficient, effective editing.

How to Peer Edit

Things You’ll Need:

Something to edit (preferably something that needs to be edited)
A word processor with a “track changes” feature (MS Word, although I don’t like to admit it, works great. GoogleDocs ain’t bad in a pinch either)
A printer and a red pen (in case your computer explodes or the hamster-wheels powering the internet suddenly fail)
Your brain (that thing you routinely confound with whiskey and words)

Step 1: Take it for what it is

Before you take your crimson, inken scalpel to the page, bent on excising the grammatical tumors of the piece, take some time to just read it. Enjoy the story. Let the language court your brain and take it out to a fancy dinner, listen to the nuance of the word choices as they dance their elaborate syntactical ballet. Make friends with the characters, take a mental vacation to the setting, and really just let the narrative wash over your brain like a beautiful word wave.

Don’t try to fix mistakes, even if they’re obvious. Don’t try to analyze the voice or theme.

Just read.

And when you’re done, put it away for a little bit.

It’s important to appreciate the art of the piece you’re revising before actually offering any feedback. You need to understand what the author was going for, what message they hid deep in the emotional soul of the writing. If you don’t “get” the story, or haven’t taken time to just read it as a non-writer would, your final feedback won’t be as helpful, and might even, at times, be hurtful.

Step 2: Fix the easy stuff

Once you and the story are BFFs, you can start your actual review.

I find typos, misspellings, grammatical mistakes, and punctuation faux pas the most distracting things on the page. Before I can look at theme or metaphor or fancy things like sentence structure and variation, I have to go through and (try to) clean up as many eye-luring boo-boos as possible. It’s OK though; I’ve got a big supply of backspace band-aids.

There are many ways to do this, some really effective, some not so effective.

My favorite technique is to read the story backwards, starting with the last sentence working towards the start. This lets you view the sentence as a whole and fish out any little inconsistencies without your brain automatically filling in the gaps of what it already knows and expects to come next. By going backwards, you can focus on the sentence in a vacuum of itself, all without damaging its relationship to the rest of the paragraph.

Some people might argue that this isn’t a good use of editing time, but I disagree. The writing will have to be proofread eventually, and training your eyes to spot inconsistencies will make your own drafting stronger.

Step 3: Look for writing tics

As you read, try to notice if the writer repeats certain ideas or constructs or words. It’s possible that something (an idea, a memory, an ancient evil) has wormed its way into their processes, influencing every single sentence they type without their knowledge or express written consent.

This can be as simple as a person using the same kind of transition (say a terminal simile) or as complicated as a person creating the exact same kind of metaphors with very little variation. For example, I know I have a problem with creating too many magic/wizard/fantasy/medieval metaphors, like a hardened warrior whose sword and steel soul is tainted by blood and battle.

It is your responsibility as an editor to point this stuff out for the writer. This kind of feedback is the most revered and praised, as it often brings into focus topics and issues that would have been near impossible for the writer to discover on her own. Read carefully and note anywhere things seem to sound or feel the same. Highlight similarities in the same color (say bright orange), so the writer has a stark visual of just how often a tic is sneaking into her writing.

Step 4: Ponder the mysteries of theme

Theme in a piece of writing (especially a short piece of writing) can be an elusive gremlin that pops his head out of a hole for a second and then disappears, only to pop up again in some impossibly distant place a few seconds later. Sometimes it’s blatant, like dozens of thick slices of chopped jalapeno on the top of a pizza when you specifically wrote “no jalapenos” in the “additional notes” field on the pizza ordering website. Sometimes it’s so subtle that you can barely pick it out, like the addition of a tablespoon of dry Amontillado sherry to a traditional enchilada sauce.

But it’s gotta be there if the piece is going to succeed. Try to find examples of a writer carrying the theme that you like and specifically call them out with colors or comments. In a recent story (it’s short, I promise) I used a lot of Christian allusions and references to support the theme of a lapsed Catholic being unsure of her place at a funeral. Some were intentional, others weren’t. I had an editor friend point out some that I, caught in the energy of the writing itself, didn’t even know I’d written. It was pretty cool and taught me a lot about the piece.

When you’re editing, point out every example you can find, even if they seem loose or under-formed. These help the writer see if his theme is strong, or if it needs to be bolstered in certain places. It also helps you develop closer reading skills, which will benefit you when you’re self editing early drafts of your own work.

Step 5: Write pointed, specific feedback

There is nothing worse than getting all pants-peeing excited to digest someone’s comments on your work, only to find things like, “this is good,” “I don’t like this,” or “I don’t get this at all.” Comments like that are worse than not reviewing the piece at all.

Fight your baser instincts to immediately point out what you like and don’t like. In the grand scheme, your subjective tastes don’t matter. Just because you didn’t like it doesn’t mean it’s bad. Just because you did like it doesn’t mean it’s good.

A writer needs objective feedback about how it is written.

If you can’t, you just don’t possess the fortitude to not voice your opinions, then make sure you accompany any vague comments with a clear and specific why. Did you like it because it was beautiful to read or because it established the tone? Did you not like it because it was confusing or distracted you from something more important?

The more specific your feedback, the more the writer learns about his own craft from your edits, and the more you learn about the writing process as a whole. This is one of those, “you’re only cheating yourself” situations, like lying about how hard you worked out to impress your coworkers who really don’t care either way. If you take short cuts in your editing, you’ll be missing great examples to learn about bigger issues at work in all writing, and you’re just being a dick to the person whose work you’re reviewing.

Step 6: Do it again, and again, ad infinitum

Yea, nothing fancy to say here. Do 10 sets of 30 edits three times a week for maximum results. Apply ice to any finger injuries. Apply beer to any brain ones.

How to Live like a Writer

February 22, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Do you know what a lot of historically famous writers have in common? Aside from depression, alcoholism, psychosis, failed relationships, monomania, poverty, destitution, and narcissism, I mean.

Give up?

They all lived fascinating lives. Hemingway survived back-to-back plane crashes while he was bumming around Africa playing chicken with lions and rhinos. Christopher Marlowe was an alleged spy for the British Crown and was stabbed to death in a pub, probably for discovering some super secret Illuminati plot. Mark Twain was a gold prospector and steamboat pilot who spent a ton of time drinking with Nikola Tesla, who was his BFF. He also accurately prophesied his own death.

These men definitely had innate talents for writing, but their art was set ablaze by the events of their lives. Their work was a reflection of what they had experienced, a living mirror of who they were, where they’d been, and what they’d seen. Without the wanderlust and random chance of life, they may not have written anything of note.

Whether catalysts for personal artistic transformation or just examples of the good and evil woven into the quilt of our reality, the life of a writer is just as important as their mastery of language or the vividness of their imagination.

If you want to write things that readers will connect to, you have to get out there and live. How can you understand universal human emotions and appeals if you haven’t felt them yourself?

But you’re busy, and don’t have time to go camp in Africa/spy for Britain/chill with a revolutionary scientist. I’m right there with you. Our commitment-centric lives don’t leave much time for such wild and irresponsible adventures.

That doesn’t mean you can’t learn from the way you are already living. You still have to get off your duff and see some things from time to time, but there are several things you can do to capitalize on whatever situation you just happen to stumble into during your nine to five. There are lots of ways to improve your writing on a daily basis, but they all involve a proactive attitude towards improvement.

1. See the details

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was hiding all of the best stuff in the details. I think that’s how the saying goes.

It is your responsibility as a writer to watch closely and carefully. Instead of mindlessly walking through the park, scan your surroundings and process what is happening. Did an English Mastiff break from its leash to chase a squirrel? Did the squirrel run through a bunch of picnic-goers to get up the nearest tree? Did a robot, programmed to protect humans, see the squirrel as a threat and try to climb the tree? Did the dog then collide with the robot causing a hilarious pile-up of fur and tungsten alloy?

Probably not, but these are the kinds of details you need to notice when you’re out in the world. These are the London broil and garlic mashed potatoes of your narrative-entree. These are the things that make up the microcosmic stories of our daily lives.

It’s not always easy. Sometimes you’re tired or distracted or so lost in your cloudy head that a wizard could conjure some fire imps right next to you and you’d barely notice. You still need to make a conscious effort. You can attune your brain to watch for these details (like Shawn Spencer from Psych) and over time get pretty good at spotting what most people miss.

The more you pay attention, the more you’ll realize that a lot of what we experience can almost be directly translated into storytelling. What is a day in a life other than a self contained event with a beginning, middle, end, arc, and lesson? When you know what makes up the basis of a good story and can spot real life examples without much effort, it becomes a lot easier to recreate them on the page.

2. Note how many notes you take

Our brains are more like long-term storage databases than USB flash drives. If you expose yourself to a content for a while, chances are you’ll remember. If you get a tiny fleeting glance of it, chances are you’ll forget.

Even if you thought that one idea was totally perfect. Especially if you thought that one idea was totally perfect.

Easy solution: carry a notebook. Use a note taking App. Takes notes on napkins or receipts or in the margins of whatever book you’re carrying.

You don’t have to tattoo yourself with every single idea that spontaneously forms in your brain like Guy Pearce in Memento, but taking down some notes about the key points or details of an idea can help jolt your memory into action when you have some time to actually sit down and write.

The more you take notes, the more you’ll remember, the more you’ll write, the more you’ll be happy.

3. Correspond like a writer

I bet you a beer that you write thousands of words a day without thinking about it.

These are the “forgotten words.” They sneak by in the form of text messages, emails, chat sessions, and meeting notes.

Our daily writing is like the running part of soccer; you don’t necessarily play soccer to run, but you might as well get the workout while you’re playing.

Why not use all of those forgotten words (that you’re obligated to write, anyway) as a chance to practice your craft?

Start writing emails with some artistic flourish. Intentionally vary your sentence patterns. Try new vocabulary. Force yourself to use correct grammar, punctuation, and syntax. Don’t be lazy, don’t take shortcuts.

Use every chance you have to improve your writing, even if it’s in an email to your mother reminding her for the 50th time that you’re lactose intolerant and that she shouldn’t make linguine Alfredo for dinner when you come to visit.

Eventually, writing clearly, accurately, and fancifully will become habitual. When it becomes habitual, you can focus on other aspects of your craft, like what to name the Android in your short story about a machine and a dog who became best friends after running into each other at the park.

4. Get up, stand up

Life doesn’t happen in your cubicle or on your couch or at your local dive-bar. A form of life happens in these places, but it’s the boring, generic, perfunctory kind that is tainted by the usual and the predictable.

Life does happen when you take a pin of variation to your bubble of comfort. When you break routine and rout boredom. It happens when you appreciate the pattern that makes up your life (mine is tartan) but recognize that in those well worn grooves you’ll never grow.

Even if you’re not physically, financially, or temperamentally capable of grand excursions to exotic destinations, you can still deviate from your patterns and engorge your brain with new information.

Drive a new route to work; see new buildings and neighborhoods and street-corner life. Have conversations with people you’ve barely met; ask them about their jobs and dreams and families.

And when you feel like you know these routes and these people, change it up again. And again. And again. Every new pattern builds upon the last, layering experiences and life lessons into a thicker and thicker cross-section of life. Eventually, you’ll have experienced so much, that you can’t help but have it permeate your writing.

“A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.” -Eugene Ionesco

How to Brew All Grain Noble Hopped Pilsner

February 20, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

I stepped into Maryland Homebrew a few weeks ago with a focused mind. I had a recipe. I had a goal. A singular idea dominated my mind, and my will was committed to pursing it even if it meant my ruin.

I wanted to move from extract brewing to all grain brewing.

To anyone not familiar with homebrewing, this doesn’t sound like such a big deal. It sounds sort of like going from Shake N’ Bake to homemade seasoned breadcrumbs. A little extra preparation work, but similar end product: breaded chicken.

But to a beersmith it’s so much more than that. It’s a right of passage that we must face armed only with a couple of buckets and our wort stirring spoon. It marks the transition from brewboy to brewman. It’s a bubbling, boiling, fermenting, Bar Mitzvah.

When I told the staff at MD:HB I wanted to do my first batch of all grain beer, they all jumped to attention, quick to help me load up heavy bags of grain and answer any questions I had knocking around in my beer-addled brain. One staff member showed me how to best use the mill to crack my grain. Another talked to me about temperatures for strike water and mashing. Yet another guy called to another, across the warehouse area in the back, “hey, this guy is doing his first all grain!”

As I was checking out, I felt like I had joined an exclusive club. Like Skulls and Bones. Or the Masons. Or the Mouseketeers.

I was part of a club of people who did things by scratch, with purpose, with art and flourish and drunken enthusiasm. I was now on the all-grain inside. And it felt good.

I went home all blissfully happy, grinning like a little kid who had just eaten the slice of his birthday cake that had his name written on it in icing. I set to mashing and brewing, a new man in a new world.

Of course, I couldn’t be simple (or practical). I decided not only to do my first all-grain brew, but my first lager as well.

Sometimes a man has to buy 9.5 lbs of pilsner malt. We all have our vices. Don’t judge me.

Things You’ll Need

9.50 lbs of pilsner malt (this is the good stuff, it smells like sweet bread)
.5 lb Cara-Pils (as a supplement to your main malt to add some color)
1 oz Tettnang hops (Noble hop 1 of 5)
.75 oz of Spalt hops (Noble hop 2 of 5)
1 oz Hersbrucker hops (Noble hop 3 of 5)
1 oz Hallertau hops (Noble hop 4 of 5)
2 oz Saaz hops (Noble hop 5 of 5)
Czech Budejovice Lager Yeast (I used Whitelabs liquid WLP802, for anyone wanting the specifics)

You’ll also need the full brewer’s regalia and accoutrement (I like to say, “ackoo-tray-mon” all fancy and French-like):

A mash tun (good job I already showed you guys how to make one, right? guys?)
A brew kettle (that will hold all of your final volume – 5 gallons for me)
A big spoon (Yup.)
Some oven mitts (if you use the nice matching ones your wife has in the kitchen, try not to spill sticky wort all over them)
Ice bath or wort chiller (I still don’t have a wort chiller, because I’m cheap and cooper is expensive)
Thermometer (if you don’t have a laser gun thermometer by now, I can’t help you)
A hydrometer (for measuring the beeryness of your beer)
Bucket or carboy (unless you want to ferment it in something weird, like 8 two-liter soda bottles)

Step 1: Monster Mash

Malt extract is basically just pre-made (and condensed) grain extract. You’re going backwards one step in the process by doing all grain. It’s up to you and your cleverness to extract all that delicious sugar from that massive pile of grain.

Heat up five gallons of water plus a little bit extra to make up for the volume lost during boiling. Since it takes approximately one epoch to heat up five gallons in one container on an electric stove, I recommend splitting it out into several different containers. If you have a gas oven or a patio stove, feel free to use that, but don’t bring the water to boil.

You want to get your water hot, but not so hot that it scorches the grain. The temperature of the strike water (or the first water you add to the mash tun before the grain takes a nice bath) will vary based on your recipe. For this one, I kept the temperature around 160 degrees. Despite being an efficient holder-o-heat, your mash tun will likely lose a few degrees over the hour you let the grain settle, so heat it up just past your target heat to compensate.

I made some tea afterwards, so this isn’t weird.

Once you’ve added your water to the mash tun, you want to quickly add your grain. This is sort of like adding hot chocolate mix to a mug of hot water: a bunch of grain will sit on top and not get wet. Like a viking manning a long ship, use your big spoon to stir the grain until it has all been thoroughly wetified.

I underestimated my water here. I ended up adding more, but only drained 5 gallons off of the final. I'm not good at math.

I underestimated my water here. I’m probably the worst estimator in the Great DC Metro area.

Step 2: Wait an hour

You’ll need to wait while the hot water sucks all of the sugar out of the grain like a diabetic vampire. To prevent excessive heat loss, wrap your mash tun in some blankets. No, not that one. Or that one. Go get the ones on the guest room that no one ever uses. Deny knowledge if your wife asks why they smell like a brewery.

This is a good time to chill out and drink a beer that is like the beer you’re making. Notice the flavors, appreciate the craft. Sam Adams Noble Pils or Victory Prima Pils were my models. Now is also a good time to stir the grain, but don’t leave the top of the mash tun open for too long while you’re stirring.

One episode of Law and Order SVU later (dun-dun) your wort should be ready for the primary boil.

Step 3: Drain the mash tun into your mash pot

Hopefully you put your mash tun on a kitchen counter or something at hip-height, otherwise, have fun lifting 40 lbs of really hot water plus ten pounds of soaking mash up onto something high. Remind me to go back in time to remind you to put it on the counter, not the floor. You’ll need gravity’s help to drain all of the wort out o the tun.

Position your mash pot on a chair below the spigot coming out of your mash tun. Before you start filling the pot with the precious brown liquid, you’ll want to collect about a liter of wort in another container. This prevents any loose grain husks from getting into the wort.

I used the same pitcher I use to fill the cat’s water bowls. I hope they don’t notice.

When the pitcher is full, start filling the pot. Pour the contents of the pitcher back into the mash tun as to not lose all of that sugary goodness. If you used exactly 5 gallons, you’ll need to tilt your mash tun slightly to get all of the liquid out.

Ok, so I lied. I didn't use a chair. I balanced the brew pot on a brew bucket. Terrible idea. Don't try this at home.

Ok, so I lied. I didn’t use a chair. I balanced the brew pot on a brew bucket. Terrible idea. Ignore this picture.

(Note: Up until this point, sanitizing your equipment isn’t super important. Everything should be clean and free of anything loose or gross, but since you’re about to boil the stuff for ~60-90 minutes, not everything has to be perfectly sterilized before coming in contact with your wort. After the boil though, make sure everything is clean as bleach. But don’t actually use bleach.)

Step 4: Boil ’em cabbage down

Now you’re back to where you would be with an extract beer. Get the wort to a rolling boil and add your hops as called for by your recipe (for this pilsner, I did Spalter and Tettnang at 60 mins, Hersbrucker and Hallertau at 15 mins, then Saaz at knockout). You don’t have to worry about steeping any grain or anything like you normally would with an extract, as you’ve already done that hard work in the mash tun!

Wasn’t quite boiling yet. Oops. Impatient.

Now you just need to cool and pitch your yeast. If you need help with that part, see my Homebrew 101 post.

Step 5: Make a pizza

There is one slight drawback to moving to all grain brewing. When you’re finished, you still have ~10 lbs of wet, sugarless grain sitting in your mash tun. There are a few options of what you can do with all this perfectly edible grain. Some people like to donate it to local farms (apparently horses and cows quite literally eat this shit up). Others like to make dog treats with it (apparently dogs have similar palettes to horses and cows).

I decided to make a pizza.

These grains are very similar to bread grains, so the crust I formed tasted sort of like multi-grain bread (chunks of grain and hard bits and all). I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I just combined flour, water, baking yeast, some olive oil, and the left over beer grain until I had something that was pretty dough-like.

I thought it tasted pretty good. Not sure my wife was a huge fan.

Beer and pizza go so well together that literally mixing the two was a no brainer.

How to Read like a Writer

February 6, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Reading is like eating seven-layer dip.

At first salivating glance, you see piles of gorgeous green guacamole. A mountain range of avocado-salsa blend contained between four walls of Pyrex. It is easy to be emotionally overcome by the beauty of the guacamole, thinking that, from this angle, the dip is nothing but guacamole.

But if you maintained this perspective, and someone asked you to recreate the seven-layer dip, you’d be content to mash up 13 avocados, stick them in a bowl, and shove them proudly at your party goers with a grin that says, “I made dip.”

To successfully make seven-layer dip, you have to understand that is has, y’know, seven layers. Beneath the obvious top-guac hides delicious cheese and olives and sour cream and beans. The dip itself is kind of complicated. The flavor comes from a combination of foods, all working together to create a single unified taste.

This is the problem with reading casually, only paying attention to the events of the plot and the overall story. You’re only noticing the top layer of the dip. Sure, you’re learning about story telling and enjoying yourself in the process, but you’re missing out of the other layers of literature that make a story robust and complete.

To recognize the layers, stare through the side of the Pyrex dish. Cross-section, not bird’s-eye. Think of it in a whole bunch of parts and techniques sandwiched together to make an engaging story. Think of it in layers.

Things you’ll need:

-A brain (I’ve found that the one inside your skull is easiest to access)
-A book (preferably something with some literary merit)
-A beer (optional, I guess, if you hate all things that are good)

Step 1: Recognize what you should be recognizing

A lot of scholars have attempted to sum up what makes something “literary” (which usually results in a list of 10/15/18/22/25 “things”). There is a lot of grey area. There is even more debate. Some aspects of literature are forehead smackingly obvious, others…not so much. I covered my take on these a few months ago.

It’s up to your inner Sherlock to decide what tools an author used in writing her book. Which means you need to be paying close attention while you’re reading. Which means you can’t just flop onto a beach chair, plow through a Robert Patterson novel while mutating your melanin, and expect to come out a better writer once you reach the satisfying, bolded, 16 pt, “THE END.”

Therein lies the jerk chicken rub. A lot of us read to relax. It’s our escape from the hellish realities of our grey, damp, corporate dungeons. The last thing we want to do while we read is analyze. I get it, I really do. I’m right there wanting to read for leisure with you.

But I’ll play messenger and deliver the bad message even if it means the king will behead me: you need to turn yourself into an analyst. There’s nothing glamorous about it. If you want to write like the authors you’re reading, you have to study the writing.

Start recognizing when an author like Jennifer Egan uses structure and odd timelines to enhance her narrative. Make notes when you see someone like Erik Larson using dueling narratives and foreshadowing to build tension even when we know how the story ends. Start recognizing that these are deliberate choices made by the authors, not just magic leprechaun luck that innately comes from being born during a significant astrological event.

Good writing is the culmination of a ton of intentional choices that are transposed into words and onto the page. Start learning what those choices are, and why they were made. When you learn them, you can emulate them, and your writing will transcend.

Step 2: Recognize what’s missing in your own writing

Talent is weird. It’s like we’re forced through the water sprinkler of talent as kids. Where the spray of talent-juice hit our brains, we’re awesome. Where it missed, we’re clueless.

Some of us are great at playing with language, turning phrases, being grammatically devastating Others are amazing at building tension through dialogue and scenes. Others can use structure to arrange a story in such a way that it is fresh and unexpected to the point where the reader yells, “no effin’ way!” at the book in disbelief.

It’s good to know what you’re good at.

It’s even better to know what you suck at.

If your stories seem one-dimensional, notice how great authors use back story, probing dialogue, and action within scenes to enhance without being all up in your grill about it. Study the latent symbolism in a work and learn how that helps connect the reader to the story in a more universal, approachable way.

Read authors who are great where you are terrible (also admit that you are terrible at certain things). Learn how they do it. Eat it, process the calories, make that technique part of your physical being. The only way to learn what talent didn’t give you is through mindful application of a stubborn will.

Step 3: Take your time

Unless you’re involved in some sort of underground reading death challenge (and yes, I’m fully aware of what the first rule is), the stakes are pretty low. No one except maybe your book club peeps or that one annoying friend (who really only wants to talk about the book, so her intentions are good) really cares how quickly you read something.

It’s not the Daytona 500 with little paper cars with words on them. You can read at your own pace.

Actually, no. You should read at your own pace. Take as much time with the words as you need to understand them. Reread if you’re really trying to internalize a specific technique, or figure out why something was so effective.

The book or essay or whatever won’t self-destruct after five seconds. You’ve got plenty of time to read. Take it.

Step 4: Take Notes

If you can’t seem to dive deep into the creamy nutrient filled sub-layers of literature, force reading to be more active by gluing writing to it.

If you’re like me, writing in the margins of a book is painful (reading is the closest thing I have to religion, so marking up a book feels sort of like defiling a sacred relic). But sometimes, to remember certain spots, commit the best parts to memory, it is necessary. With the help of our new computer overlords, we can at least do this without taking ink to page.

Open a Word doc or keep a notepad nearby when you read. Write down the stuff you find interesting. Ask questions. Try a certain technique to see how it’s done.

By writing while you read, you’re engaging more than just your eyeballs. You’re introducing your fingers and possibly ears to the dance. The more senses you use, the harder your memory works and the more points of reference it has to build a permanent structure in your brain. It’s science, bitches.

Step 5: Read good shit

Sorry about the “bitches” thing. I got carried away.

None of this fancy advice matters if you’re not reading stuff that is well done. Not that everything you read has to be a timeless classic, but it should at least be worthy of your time.

The old saying is, “You are what you eat.”

In our world, “You write what you read.”

The books and essays and memoirs and news stories and shampoo bottles and billboards and waffle iron instruction manuals will seep into your unconscious. Each one makes up part of the synaptic web of what we understand to be “writing.” Each has it’s place and it’s purpose and teaches us something (even if that thing is what color dye is used in peach-scented Alberto V05).

If you’re going to read, read well. Read up. Spend your time with things that will make you smarter. Challenge yourself and strengthen your writing web.

“The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.” -Sydney J. Harris

How to build your own Mash Tun

January 28, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

I know you’ve been looking at your prosaic smattering of material goods, wondering why you don’t have a custom made mash tun to brew all grain beer. It’s OK. I was too. It’s a normal and healthy question to ask yourself.

Until very recently, I had done all of my homebrew with malt extract: big cans of thick gloopy brown stuff that is packed with sugar for the young voracious yeast in your beer. This is great for learning the basics of brewing (it is simpler, takes less time, and is less messy), but it’s an established fact that real home brewers make their tinctures from 100% whole ingredients. Making the move to all grain is like a homebrewing right of passage; the malty vision quest that all young brewmasters must go on to realize their beer-soaked destinies.

All grain brewing basically means that you make your own mash from pounds and pounds of grain, instead of using extract. Aside from making you into a total beer brewing badass, using cracked malt leads to better tasting beer and gives you a lot more flexibility in flavor, color, and final ABV.

But how do you get the sugar out of all that delicious grain?

With a mash tun.

(Kudos/credits to the guys at Maryland Homebrew and Don Osborn for giving me the ideas and confidence to build this contraption)

Things you’ll need:

A large drink cooler (I used an family sized 52 quart Igloo cooler. The key is to find one with the drain spigot on the side, not the bottom.)
A large stainless steel toilet or sink supply hose (I used a 24″ tube, but you can use whatever best fits your cooler)
Two to three feet of 3/8″ plastic hosing (you don’t have to spring for the heat resistant kind if you want to save a few cents)
Two 3/8″ hose clamps (to clamp off the ends of the supply hose)
Various parts to make an on-off valve (I’ll explain this in detail below; you’ll probably have to order these online or get them from a local brewing store)
A hacksaw (to hack things)
Pliers (to ply things)
An adjustable wrench (to wrench things)
Beer! (Yuengling Porter for me, as I had it left over in a sampler my neighbors gave me for Xmas)

Tasty porter on a beer man’s chest.

Step 1: Prepare your supply line

A mash tun is just a large receptacle for grain and hot water. You want your grain to sit and steep inside of it so that all of the delicious sugars blend with the water and make tasty wort. The key here is that you don’t want the grains to come with sugar/water concoction, as they can cloud up (and add nasty chunks) to your beer.

The supply line hose you bought is going to be a filter inside the cooler that stops the cracked malt from entering your wort.

First, hack off both ends of the supply line with your hacksaw. This is easier if you have a vice. I don’t have a vice, so I held it with my super manly hands. Be careful that the frayed pieces of steel wire don’t poke and hurt your manly hands. When you get near the end, if a small section of the steel won’t saw, clip it off using some wire clipper to fully separate the ends from the main tube.

Braided stainless steel is surprisingly hard to hacksaw. Who’da thunk it?

Once the steel beast has been (double) beheaded, use your pliers to pull the plastic lining out of the steel part of the tube. This will leave you with a mesh hose with very fine holes all up and down it. A perfect grain filter if I’ve ever seen one.

The tube now functions like a Chinese finger trap. Please don't stick your fingers into it.

The tube now functions like a Chinese finger trap. That was me being figurative. Please don’t stick your fingers into it.

The last thing you need to do with the hose is fold it over itself two or three times and clamp it down as tight as it will go with one of your hose clamps. This will keep grains for sneaking into your filter through the end.

Please excuse my cuticles. I need a mani/pedi real bad.

Step 2: Install your on/off valve

This is really important. If you just connect a hose to the spigot of your cooler, chances are pretty high that you’ll have boiling hot wort all over your floor as soon as your start to sparge your grain. I tried a few different variations here, and a ball-lock valve with some nice copper fixtures makes for the most solid, leak-proof seal.

You’ll need parts similar to (or exactly like) the ones pictured below:

3/8″ hose adapter, threaded extension tube, washer, inner cooler o-ring, threaded middle piece, outer cooler o-ring, locking nut, ball valve, 3/8″ adapter (+2 hose clamps for the hose on each side)

You have to build this device in two sections: one on the inside of the cooler, one on the outside of the cooler. The “threaded middle piece” sits in cooler limbo, half in, half out, all ready to receive its respective end of the device.

When you’re ready to install the valve, carefully remove the original drain spigot by undoing the plastic bolts that hold it in place. Save this piece as you could always put it back in a re-convert this into a regular old cooler when you need it for a party.

Assemble your valve, make sure the o-rings are tight against the walls of the cooler, then fill it with a small amount of water and check for leaks. It helps to wrap the “threaded middle piece” in some Teflon tape if you’re getting small drips on the outside of the cooler.

Your finished product should look like this:

Tap on, tap off.

Step 3: Install your grain filter

This part should be pretty easy, just connect your pre-fabbed toilet-hose-filter to a piece of 3/8″ inch tubing that connects to your valve on the inside of the cooler. Secure it with hose clamp if you can’t get a very good fit.

Crude, yet sophisticated.

Step 4: Buy some grain and start brewing!

As long as this bad boy doesn’t leak, you’ll be all grain brewing in no time. When using this, make sure to keep it insulated (with towels or blankets or insulated wrapping) so that all that sugar-sucking heat doesn’t escape. Also elevate it so that you can use and abuse gravity to get all of that sparged wort into your brew pot as quickly as possible!

But more importantly, enjoy. All grain brewing brings a whole new level of dorkiness to your homebrewing activities, and puts you one step closer to owning/running your own brewery. Dream big my friends, dream big.

Looks a lot like oatmeal, huh?

How to Homebrew: Back to Basics

January 14, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

In honor of my first batch of all-grain beer, this week on LitLib is all about homebrewing!

I fell into my homebrewing hobby as a side effect of growing up in a household that consumed and appreciated a lot of alcohol. My dad used to make what I can only call “odd” wine: carrot, rhubarb, banana, and other things you won’t find at the local liquor store. Our basement was a menagerie of white buckets, glass carboys, empty green wine bottles, and a utility sink over flowing with sodium metabisulfite and thick bristled white brushes.

I learned how to brew the same way a kid learns how to use a Q-tip; through a lot of painful trial-and-error. One of my first batches ended up at about 2% alcohol because I added four gallons of water to a single gallon of actual brew. An early batch of English style pale ale had the delicious added flavor of rotten-eggs sulfur because I did the entire main boil with the lid on the pot. I never made anything undrinkable, but I certainly made a lot of beer only its brewer could love.

As my brewing skills slowly evolve, I spend a lot of time poking through homebrewing forums, looking up recipes, learning about proper yeast pitching temperatures, sometimes even stumbling upon a some unexpected pictures of pimped out kegerators. This has given me a pretty broad knowledge of various homebrewing techniques, but I still have yet to find a single, succinct overview of the very basics of brewing.

So I decided to make my own.

In addition to this guide, I am happy to answer any and all questions about the basics of homebrewing in the comments below!

What is homebrewing?

Without sounding dense, homebrewing is brewing that is done at home, without commercial equipment. It usually means brewing on a significantly smaller scale (5-10 gallons as opposed to say, 7,000,000 gallons) with significantly less control and consistency in the final product. It encompasses beer, wine, cider, and any sub-genre therein, but does not include distillation, as that is illegal and should be left to those few (with even fewer teeth) in the Appalachian foothills.

Despite popular belief, homebrewing is pretty safe. There are some minor threats that come from over-filling or over-sugaring, but for the most part, it’s a low risk, high reward hobby. In a poor attempt at humor, Buffalo Wild Wings lampooned home brewers with a less than flattering commercial. The truth is that most homebrew, even the poorly sanitized or drank-too-early, isn’t going to send you to the ER with GI issues.

And if you don’t believe me, believe science! Yeast eats sugar and poops out carbon dioxide and alcohol, which has the added bonus of sterilizing the liquid. Alcohol disrupts the natural equilibrium of water outside of any bacteria cells, killing them as osmosis forcefully pushes water out of the cells to reestablish the balance. Thermodynamics are awesome. The only obvious health concern is mold, which aside from being visible and gross, usually makes the beer so foul tasting that not even the most self-destructive frat boy could stomach enough to make him sick.

So you want to be a home brewer?

First, ask yourself why.

If the answer is to save money on your alcohol, you need a new/better business model. While the ingredients-per-gallon cost is pretty cheap, you have to factor in equipment and opportunity cost. In the long run, you’re not going to save yourself an extraordinary amount of money by making it yourself.

If the answer is to impress your friends, I hope you’re patient. An ale takes on average 3-4 weeks to be ready to drink, where a lager takes 6-8 weeks. Wine of almost any variant takes even longer. Your first few batches won’t likely win any contests either, so it’ll be a while before your friends start greeting you as “Brewmaster.”

If the answer is for fun and because you’re so stubborn you have to try to do everything yourself, then you’re at least temperamentally ready to fire up your boil pot.

What do you mean you don’t understand these words?

Veteran home brewers like to throw around a lot of jargon and hardly ever qualify any of it. It’s like they expect us to figure these things out, as if there were some kind of widely available, magical book that contained definitions of things.

This is list of the things I had to discover on my own, but it is not nearly exhaustive:

Wort (beer) – a mixture of grain sugars and waters that will be fermentted into beer
Must (wine) – the same as wort, but with different sugars, including fruit pulp
Yeast – eukaryotic microorganisms that are obsessed with eating sugar and produce alcohol as a biproduct
Sugar – alcohol is formed in beer and wine based on the amount of added sugars, which are introduced to the brew bia fruit, grain, honey, or other sources
Sparge (beer) – the process of removing sugars from cracked grain using very hot water to create wort
Fermentation – the process of yeast converting sugars into alcohol
Primary fermentation – the initial conversion of the sugar into alcohol after yeast is first introduced to the worst/must
Secondary fermentation – the secondary conversion that removes extra sediment and allows time for the brew to settle/clear/mellow
Priming – adding extra sugar after secondary fermentation to promote carbonation in bottles/kegs/growlers (only applicable if you want to carbonate your beverage)

What will you need?

Before I get into the actual equipment that is necessary, I’m going to point out a few things you should have that often get overlooked by early brewers:

Experience drinking what it is you’re brewing (know, at least roughly, why you like certain styles and what they’re made of)
Basic cooking skills (if you can’t boil water without scalding yourself or manage temperatures on the fly, you’re going to struggle to brew anything)
Upper body strength (seriously, a gallon of liquid weighs about eight pounds, so a five gallon batch will weigh 40+)
Patience, commitment, and persistence (a full brew can take most of a day, and can’t really be hurried)

As for the gear (you can buy all of this stuff online, but be a good member of the community and pick it up at a local homebrew store, if reasonable):

A stove (like the one you usually make pancakes on)
A sink (like the one you usually leave dirty dishes in)
Towels (and not your wife’s good towels; don’t even look at them)
Your ingredients (this is going to vary wildly per type of brew and recipe, think of it as the “food” part of your recipe)

1 x brew boil pot w/lid (large aluminum or stainless steel, 5.5 gallons at minimum)
1 x plastic brew pail (these are the infamous “white buckets” used for primary fermentation – 5.5-6 gallon)
1 x lid for your brew pail (if you seal it, they will brew)
1 x air lock w/rubber bung (there are several styles of air locks, but any will work)
1 x glass carboy (this is for your secondary; the brew will sit and clarify in this)
1 x big metal spoon (for all the stirrin’ you’s gonna be doin’)
1 x container of a no-rinse sanitizer (never use soap, try not to use bleach)
1 x large thermometer (or just get an infrared temperature gun already)
1 x auto-siphon (this will save you a ton of headaches and sticky spill spots on your kitchen floor)
6 x gallons of water (distilled, spring, anything clear and tasty)

You’ll also need bottles, growlers, or a keg for your finished brew, but that’s up to you (as I won’t be including bottling in this overview).

You’ve got all the stuff, now what?

This is a high-level, technical overview of the steps involved in brewing almost anything. Some specialty brews requires steps other than these, but that’s what a recipe is for!

Boil/sanitize your wort/must without the lid on the pot – If you’re brewing beer, you’ll want to bring your wort to a rolling boil in your brew pot. If you’re making a fruit based wine, you don’t need to achieve a full boil just raise the internal temperature to ~175 degrees.
Add any other ingredients – like hops, spices, etc. – while the pre-brew is still hot.
Put the lid on your pot and rapidly cool down the liquid using an ice bath or something similar.
Pour your cooled wort into your primary fermentation vessel.
Stir the wort vigorously to oxygenate the brew, then add your yeast.
Seal your bucket and wait for primary fermentation to finish (the bubbles in your airlock should slow down considerably)
Siphon the brew into your secondary vessel, avoiding any of the settled sediment.
Allow your brew to settle/clarify as per the recipe.
Bottle/keg your brew.
Enjoy!

Clicky for biggy.

How to Brew Sweet Vanilla Sack Mead

January 2, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

New year means new brew. The brew kettle is all sanitized and ready to boil here at Gray Breweries, and it is just a matter of what is going into my big ol’ white buckets first.

Last year I had several dreams that coalesced into waking recipes: a traditional British Pale Ale with caramel as a finishing sugar, a first attempt at a noble hopped Pilsner, and several fruit and spice variations of sweet mead. I bought 10 pounds of Vienna Pilsner malt, all five noble hops, and some Budejovice lager yeast in support of my first ever all-grain beer. I’ve also had 15 pounds of white clover honey taking up precious shelf space in my brewing cabinet.

Personal laziness dictated which to brew first. I can’t do an all-grain beer yet, as I haven’t completed my home made mash tun (stayed tuned for that adventure in a future post). Sparging is pretty difficult without a mash tun, so merry mead making it is for me!

I guess 2013 is to be the year of sweet, sweet honey wine.

Things you’ll need:

Honey (lots of it – 15-20 pounds of white clover, but orange blossom is permissable)
Water (4-5 gallons of spring water)
Fresh vanilla beans (3-4 bourbon, Mexican, or Madagascar beans, depending on taste)
Good vodka (I used Stoli, but anything not in a plastic bottle should work)
Sweet wine yeast (I used WLP720 Sweet Mead/Wine, but something like Yeastlab Sweet Mead yeast M62 could work, too)

Grade A or Grade get-the-hell-out-of-here.

Step 1: Infuse!

Let’s do the easy part first. Using a good, sharp, elvish blade, slice your vanilla beans lengthwise, then chop them into three or four pieces (depending on length). Once they’re all nice and split, drop them into the vodka. It will take a while for the vanilla to seep into the vodka and create an infusion, so just seal your jar or bottle and set it aside. By the time you’re ready to rack your mead, you should also have some delicious home made vanilla extract, too!

Do not be tempted to take the shortcut down the well-worn path of store-bought vanilla extract. The preservatives in the baking stuff can completely ruin the flavors of your honey, which might result in five gallons of something tragically unpalatable.

Word to the wise: no matter how good the beans smell while you’re cutting them, do not eat them. They do not taste like you’d think (or hope) they would. They’re actually sort of sour. Weird.

It takes about 3 weeks for the beans to fully vanilla-fy the vodka.

Step 2: Stir and Sanitize!

Traditional sweet mead is incredibly simple. Honey, water, yeast. Nothing else. Nothing fancy.

But with great simplicity comes great responsibility. You need to be attentive when adding your honey and sanitizing your must, as it is the most crucial step to making good mead. Anything that touches your water or your honey needs to be sterilized (seriously, everything). You have to keep stirring to make sure no honey settles on the bottom of your pot and scorches.

Every time honey gets scorched, a viking in Valhalla sobers up.

Note: Honey takes up a deceptively large amount of volume. Roughly 10.67 fluid ounces per pound, for anyone trying to do math and stuff. Be sure to leave enough room in your boil pot to allow for all that yellow sugary joy. I started with three gallons, just to be safe. You can always add more water after the must is sanitized to make up the difference.

Once the water has reached ~130 degrees or hotter, you can start to add your honey. You don’t want to add it much earlier, or it will pool on the bottom like a lazy salamander. Or something. You’ll want to add all the honey and then let the entire must get up to at least 160-170 degrees for 15 minutes to make sure it is free from any unwanted yeasts or sneaky mead-ruining bacteria.

Honey by any other name would taste just as sweet.

Step 3: Keep stirring!

You need to make sure the mixture homogenizes, so keep stirring aggressively. The pre-mead will develop a thick, white froth. This is normal. And awesome.

The mixture should turn a dandelion yellow and smell intoxicatingly decadent. Honey is probably the best thing ever. Probably.

Don’t forget to re-sterilize your stirring spoon if you leave it out for too long, or if it touches those gross kitchen counters of yours.

I’m like one of those cappuccino artists, except with booze.

Step 4: Cool and Pitch!

After its relaxing, stress-relieving hot tub, you’ll need to cool the must down before you pitch any yeast. Too hot and the yeast will burn to death and die horribly, too cold and they’ll go into hypothermic hibernation.

I’m in the process of making a brass coil wort/must cooler (apparently I have a lot of half-finished projects), but until it’s done, I’m using the classic “fill the kitchen sink with a crap load of ice and promise your wife it will only be in there for an hour, tops.”

Four hours later, your must will probably be the appropriate 70-75 degrees needed to pitch the yeast.

I highly recommend investing in an infrared thermometer if you plan to brew often. It saves having to sterilize a normal thermometer over and over again to take readings, and is fun to shoot around the house like you’re an Imperial Stormtrooper.

I use liquid yeast as it saves having to rehydrate dry yeast and create a starter, which I’ve never had much success with. It’s a little pricier, but I’d rather have something that works on the first try, to prevent the headaches of the second, third, and fourth tries.

Use a large spoon (sterilized!) to create a maelstrom in the middle of your mead and then pour the liquid yeast into the center of the honey storm. Stir once again in the opposite direction to fully aerate your yellow brew.

If you shake this vigorously then try to uncap it with your teeth, it may explode in your mouth, which is generally unpleasant.

Step 5: Wait!

So you’re all like, “OK great, but you promised me vanilla!”

I know. Patience is a virtue and all that.

From my research, adding vanilla beans directly to the fermenting must can lead to all sorts of problems including stuck fermentation and off-flavors. It is also possible to over vanilla your mead(I know, I didn’t think that was even possible either), and by chucking some beans in you lose all control over how much flavor you have in the final product.

When fermentation slows and you are ready to rack the mead into the secondary vessel (probably after a few weeks in primary), then you can add your home made extract. Go slow and only add a little bit of a time, sampling every week until you reach the desired balance of honey and vanilla.

In four to six months, you should have a very sweet, very smooth mead ready for drinking, sharing, and toasting! Cheers!

How to Make (Kind of) Traditional Perry

October 9, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

Perry : Pears :: Cider : Apples

Don’t you just love fruit and alcohol analogies presented using symbolic logic? I know I do. Oh, you don’t? Well this post ain’t gonna get any less logical. Or Symbolic. Or analogic. Yea, that last one isn’t a real word.

Some of you may remember that I made Pear Mead/Cider last year, and it turned out deliciously potent. The same generous lady who gave me a bucket-o-pears last year has given me a box-o-pears this year. I decided to do something a little different, foregoing the honey completely this time for a 100% fruit based beverage.

Last go-round, I juiced the pears using a food processor, which accidentally caused the fruit to prematurely oxidize, which I have since learned is a bad thing, which I have since learned should be avoided if you want your finished product to actually taste good, which I have since learned is an important characteristic of things people want to put into their mouths.

This go-round, I decided to get all Amish on the pears and crush them under the immense wooden weight of a manual fruit press!

I am fortunate to live very near Maryland Homebrew, who offer cider press rentals for a mere $15 for three days.

Note: A 50lb cider press does not fit into a Mini Cooper S very easily.

Paring pairs of pears in a press.

How to Brew Perry (Pear Cider)

Things you’ll need:

~30lbs of pears (ripe but not rotten, easily squishable with a strong grip)
A fermentation bucket (5 gallons or bigger, for best results)
A hammer (you’ll see why in a bit)
A cider press (to squish them there fruits)
A can opener (you’ll [also] see why in a bit)
A large mash pot (to catch the juice)
Cider or wine yeast (unless you want 5 gallons of pear juice instead of cider)
Campden Tablets (in case you need to stabilize your batch)
Beer! (or cider!)

Step 1: Mash up the pears

The kind and helpful staff at Maryland Homebrew suggested that I mash up my pears before trying to press them. Overestimating my Herculean strength and Odyssian ingenuity, I figured I could just use tools and brainpower to juice the pears without going through the trouble of turning them into pulp first.

As usual, I was wrong.

So, I hit them with a hammer.

Stop, hammer time, etc.

This is an incredibly messy and fun process. Just spread out a tarp (or a series of plastic bags) and smash them there pears like they are your work computer right after it crashes in the middle of that huge document you’ve been working on for 6 hours straight.

Hopefully the pears are ripe enough that a few good thwacks will turn them into pear-puree. If not, you’ll be hammering for a while. Have fun with that.

Once you’ve got a big soggy heap of pear parts, drop them in your press.

Science!

Step 2: Supplement

At this point, you’ll realize that you don’t really have enough pears for the amount of juice you wanted to make a 5 gallon batch of perry. Short of going to find a local pear tree, your options are limited. I opted to harness the power of the industrial-culinary complex, and bought cans and cans of pear, floating in 100% pear juice.

If you buy store-brand, you can usually get cans for ~$1 a piece, and they contain a pair of pears with about 10 ounces of juice.

Open them things up. You can use the hammer again if you want, but a can opener might be a little less dangerous. Pour the extra juice into your mash pot to add even more sugar for your hungry, hungry yeast.

Not as visceral as hammer-opened cans, but much more elegant.

Step 3: Juice!

Now you can finally set to juicing the pile of fruit you’ve got sitting out on your back deck, exposed to the air and bugs and falling acorns. The style of press I used had a ratcheting handle that attached to two half-circles of wood that applied consistent downward pressure on the fruit. It was surprisingly effective, but also very labor intensive. I sweat despite the chilly weather.

I was genuinely surprised at how much liquid came out of these pears. I collected nearly 2.5 gallons after I had pressed and mixed the pears three times. I added this to my fermentation bucket, but realized I still needed a lot more liquid to get a full 5 gallon batch.

Pressed Pear Cake, coming this fall to Martha Stewart Living.

Step 4: Supplement again!

Don’t add water to your juice to get the volume you want, this will only (shocker!) water down the flavors. Instead, you can either 1) add unpasteurized apple cider (often found in the produce aisle during the fall months) or 2) use 100% pear juice (often found in 32 ounces bottles in the baby food aisle). The prior has more sugar for your yeast but will obviously add some apple flavor to the final product, the second has been clarified which can impact the final flavor as well.

I split the difference and used a little bit of both. Once you’ve reach 5 gallons, toss in your yeast and seal the bucket. Unlike beer, the airlock may not bubble like a mad science experiment. Don’t worry if it doesn’t. Every few days peak inside the bucket to make sure the yeast looks like it is doing its thing. You’ll be able to tell by the gross brown sediment that lines the bucket as the yeast eats up all of the sugar.

Congratulations! You’ve now got a batch of 100% fruit perry that will be ready to drink in 4-6 weeks.

Note: If the batch smells a little odd, or really yeasty, you can toss a few campden tablets into the bucket to make sure no nasty bacteria ruin your hard work.

How to Brew Spiced Pumpkin Ale

September 6, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

I know not everyone likes pumpkin beer. But I do. A lot. Maybe to the point of obsession. Last year I went on an adventure to find and try as many new varieties of pumpkin brew I could find, which looked something like this:

-Dogfish Head Punkin Ale
-Bluemoon Harvest Moon
-Southern Tier’s Pumking
-Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale
-Wolaver’s Organic Pumpkin Ale
-Brooklyn Post Road Pumpkin Ale
-Harpoon UFO Pumpkin

And, being the kind of beer drinker I am, I loved all of them. I still argue that DFH Punkin Ale is my favorite, but at $7.99 for a 4 pack (and that’s shopping around quite a bit) I can’t justify buying much of it each year.

A few others are comparable in terms of pumpkin taste, but there is something about the spiciness of the Dogfish Head variant I love.

The spices make the beer warm and cozy. They remind me of a night outside in the woods with my buddies, telling stories, drinking beers, keeping the chilly winds of late October at a distance with a pillar of fire and the warmth of fun and cheer.

Being all overwhelmed by sentimentality, but also very cheap, I decided to try my hand at making a Punkin Ale clone, with a little bit of LitLib spice (read: unprofessionalism) dashed in for good measure.

How to Brew Spiced Pumpkin Ale:

The recipe isn’t straight forward, but it also isn’t difficult. There is a good amount of prep time because you have to cut up and roast the pumpkin before you even start your boil. The boil itself takes at least two hours, and cooling the wort can take a while if you’re not setup correctly, like me. Make sure to set at least a six hours aside if you want to do this right.

Drinking pumpkin beer while making pumpkin beer. A multi-generational experience!

Stuff you’ll need:
-Pumpkin (I used 10 lbs, which equals about 4 smallish pie-pumpkins once all cut up.)
-Butternut squash (these add to the pumpkin flavor, and tend to be more fragrant than pumpkin alone. I cut up two large gourds, about 3lbs each, and added it to my pumpkin.)
-Cracked Malt (I used 1lb of Vienna, 1/2lb of Crystal 20, and 1/2 lb of wheat. You could sub in any malt that blends well with an American ale, so feel free to be creative here.)
-Liquid Malt (I used 6.6lbs of liquid light malt extract. You could use anything you want here, but the amount of sugar is going to dictate your final ABV.)
-Hops (I used 1oz of Mt. Hood for the primary, as I wanted something to compliment my spices. I also used 1/2oz of hueller bittering hops right at the end of my boil. You could certainly change things up here if you wanted a less citrusy/less spicy final product)
-Yeast (I used a liquid American ale blend. Not a lot of give here if you’re making an ale.)
-Spices (This is where you can go crazy, or not very crazy. I used cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, ground cloves, vanilla, brown sugar, and a tiny bit of molasses. I wanted heavy, sweet, and hearty. You could leave any [or all of these] out and still have a nice, pumpkin flavored beer, but it would lack the things that make it taste like you’re drinking a liquefied pumpkin pie.)
-A big, sharp knife (seriously, butternut squash is no joke. It will make lesser blades look silly.)
-All of your brewing stuff (I won’t harp on [too much] about what you need to brew, as hopefully it is a given if you’re reading a brewing recipe.)
-Water (this is something I always forget when I collecting my ingredients, and it makes a big difference. Grab five gallons of filtered spring water. Any one who drinks your beer will thank you for starting with fresh, clean water.)
-Beer (I chose Harpoon UFO Pumpkin because it is really, really good.)

Step 1: Chop n’ Bake

Before we can even start our primary boil, we have to prepare the fruit. Gourds. Vegetables. Whatever the hell pumpkins and squash are. We’re going to roast everything in the oven for about an hour at 350 degrees, so get to preheating. While the oven slowly bakes itself, start cutting your gourds into manageable chunks. You want them to be small enough to bake quickly and fit into a muslin bag or cheesecloth.

Pumpkin = soft and easy to cut. Butternut Squash = made of solid titanium.

When you’re done, spread them out on a cookie sheet and add a bit of water to the bottom of the tray. I ended up having to use a shallow Pyrex container as well, because it turns out 10lbs of pumpkin and squash is a lot of fruit-flesh. If you’re going to use cinnamon, sprinkle a liberal amount onto the raw chunks before they go into the oven. If you’re not using cinnamon, don’t.

Completely full tray 2 of 2

Step 2: Bag n’ Boil

While the pumpkin roasts and fills your house with the delicious smells of autumn, you can start your primary boil. Fill a large stock pot with as much water as you can effectively cool down later.

Note: There is some debate in the home brew world about doing a partial boil (in which you boil as much as you can of the actual beer, then add water to reach the desired final quantity) or a full boil (in which you boil the full volume of the beer and don’t add any water afterwards). A full boil is usually preferred, but if you’re doing this in your home kitchen and don’t have access to a fancy wort cooler, you can’t really get away with boiling 5 gallons and cooling it quickly enough to pitch your yeast. That, and heating 5 gallons of liquid on an electric stove top takes approximately one epoch of time.

I did a 3 gallon boil, and saved another 2.5 gallons of water to add afterwards.

Place your pot on the stove and set the heat to high. While the water very, very, very slowly heats to a boil, put your cracked malt into a muslin bag. I dumped all of mine into one bag because I overestimated how many bags I had left in stock, but feel free to separate them to make them easier to dispose of when you’re finished. Drop the bag(s) into the pot of water. Let the flavors seep into the delicious pre-beer as the water reaches a boil.

Malt striation: a rarely seen beerological phenomenon.

By now, the timer on your oven should be letting you know that your pumpkin is hot and roasted. Remove the trays, forget that Pyrex gets very hot, burn your hands. After swearing and pressing the cold glass of your Harpoon UFO Pumpkin against your burn, transfer the newly roasted foodstuff to a muslin bag or large swath of cheese cloth. You’re going to put this into the pot with the malts, so you want it to be relatively contained by the cloth. If a few pieces escape, don’t freak out. You can always scoop them out.

Ever wanted to know what 10lbs of pumpkin looked like in 4yds of cheese cloth? No? Well, here’s a picture anyway.

Your setup should look something like this by now:

Appetizing!

Step 3: Sit n’ Sip

Now comes the idle part: waiting for the pot to boil. I heard that if you try to watch the pot boil, it never will. Seems crazy to me, but I’m not one mess with tradition. This is a great time to collect the spices for the next step, or just sit around watching a ba movie on SyFy, nursing your burn and breathing deeply the aromas of primordial beer that are filling your house. Your wife will tell you that it smells like breakfast cereal. Take that as a compliment.

It took about an hour and a half for my boil to get rolling. Once it’s there, remove the malt and pumpkin. They will hold onto a lot of delicious liquid, so do your best to press or drain the bags before you throw them in the trash. They’ll be scalding hot, so do your best not to add a trip to emergency room to this guide.

You can now pour in your liquid malt and add your Mt. Hood hops, sugar, and molasses. Even though the mixture is boiling, be sure to give it a good hearty stir (with a sterilized spoon) to make sure none of the malt sticks to the sides or bottom. Stuck malt can lead to scorching which can leading to burnt taste which can lead to “gross beer face.” Nobody likes burnt beer, not even me.

Sundry supplies supplement spicy suds.

More sitting and waiting. You want to let the whole concoction boil for about an hour, so set your timer accordingly. After 45 minutes, you can add your bittering hops. At the end of the hour, add your other spices and vanilla.

Your final product (sans yeast) should look something like this:

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

Step 4: Cool n’ Drool

This next step is arguably the trickiest; you have to cool your work down to ~75 degrees as quickly as reasonable so that you can pitch your yeast. Letting the beer sit around and cool works in theory, but it can also lead to the unwanted creation of sulfurous compounds that make your beer taste all funky-like.

An ice bath is the easiest solution. I tried a rapid cool-down by adding the rest of my water (slightly chilled) but it didn’t work as well as hoped. To cool it down even more, I used my kitchen sink (with the wife’s permission, of course) as a beer bath. You can do the same, just make sure you have enough ice on hand to keep the bath cold.

I didn’t have enough ice. I used frozen 2 liter bottles of water instead. Ingenuity!

I mean, it’s still ice, it’s just not in cube form. Think outside the cube.

Every fifteen minutes or so check the temperature of your wort. You can use a cooking thermometer, but be sure to keep it clean, as you don’t want to contaminate your beer.

Or, if you’re a DIY dork and IT nerd like me, use your infrared laser thermometer to check the temperature. It’s hyper-sanitary, and the cats love it.

I freakin’ love this thing. I use it to take temperatures of literally everything. The inside of my mouth, the cat’s butt, the list never ends.

You’re almost done! Once the wort is sub-80 degrees (or so) you can pitch your yeast. Any higher temperature and the heat might kill the yeast, so don’t rush it.

You’ll also want to make sure the wort is aerated appropriately, so give it a nice big stir just before you pour in your liquid yeast.

Yeast: it turns brown sugar water into beer.

Now, seal your bucket, add an airlock, and put it in a nice, darkish corner to ferment. Primary fermentation should start in 6-24 hours. If you hear crazy fast bubbling, you’re in business. If you don’t, you did something wrong. Repeat steps 1-4 and do better this time.

This is what your airlock should look like ~15 hour after you add the yeast: Bubbles!

I’ll post again when it’s ready for kegging and I can tell you what it actually tastes like. For now, fingers crossed.

Happy fall!

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