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Two Announcements, One Blog Post

January 16, 2015 · by Oliver Gray

Resolutions. Never liked ‘um. They always seem like psychological scapegoats, faux-vagaries and promises cobbled together to atone for holiday gluttony.

So no, I won’t be making any resolutions for 2015. Instead, I want to announce my two big projects for the year. Admittedly 2014 was sort of punchy and random on the blog, partly because my neurons naturally fire punchy and random, partly because in the blur of re-adjusting my life after loss, I found it difficult to look too far into the future.

But 2015 offers a fresh twelve on the Gregorian, plenty of time to plan, and a coming spring packed to the petals with potential. I’ve always worked best within the confines of a larger tasks, knowing I’m working towards some discernible end, tackling the very large by splitting it into the very small.

Nonfiction Project: Homegrew.com

My garden embodied emotional peace for me last year, and as I was planning out what I wanted to grow this year, it struck me: why not grow my own barley? I’ve already got hops in the ground, so grain seemed like a natural progression. From there I figured I might as well reclaim my own rainwater to water said crops, and it didn’t take too many logical leaps to add wrangling my own yeast strain to the list of springtime yard-jobs.

And then, if I had all four ingredients, just sitting there all nice-like, I might as well brew some beer, right?

Thus, from the verdant loamy field of my brain, Homegrew was born. I plan to grow and malt my own barley, isolate and cultivate my own wild yeast strain, collect and filter rainwater, and pluck and dry some hops all to brew a beer completely made by my hand. Nothing store bought, ingredients wise. I will not, however, be building my own tools (he says now…).

I’ve already created the site, and will track every step of my journey via categorized posts. My goal is to turn the site into a searchable archive of how I did each step, the problems I faced, and (hopefully) how I overcame them. It’s sort of like extreme homebrewing meets extreme gardening meets extreme blogging. Sort of.

Please stop by and check out the new site at: www.homegrew.com. I already added some preseason content, but new posts will start rolling in as I do research, buy seeds, etc. I may cross-post on Literature and Libation some, but for the most part, it will be all original, new content.

Thanks to my friend Melody for the “From Seed to Sip” inspiration

Fiction Project: “December, 1919”

The last Session had Alan McLeod asking what beer books we’d like to see in the coming year. While there were many excellent suggestions, one collective desire sounded a bit louder (or a bit closer to home) for me: beer fiction. I’ve written some tangentially beer-related fiction before (here, here, and here), and many other short stories inspired by beer, but they’ve always been one-offs, standalone flashes, never anything of any real substance or scale.

In 2015, I plan to remedy that. Instead of following the traditional path of writing a whole manuscript, editing it, and sending it off to collect rejections from publishers, I figured I’d do what I (like to) do best, and blog the story. Or serialize it into 52 parts. One chapter a week, every Wednesday, for a year. Around a thousand words per chapter, give or take a plot point or two.

Without having to add a “spoiler alert” tag, the story is titled, “December, 1919” and tells the story of Matthew Cooper, a young man who unexpectedly inherits his father’s brewery (and legacy) on the cusp of Prohibition in the US.

The first chapter will go up next Wednesday, January 21. I hope you’ll stop by and read a while.

Cheers, prosit, sláinte, and thanks for all the support.

The Session 84 – Round-Up (Part 2)

February 19, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

(Same note as yesterday: If I missed anyone, it was not intentional, I just didn’t see your link on Twitter or in the comments of the announcement. If you don’t see yourself here, send me a link and I’ll add you.)

I broke my round-up in half, right down the perforated line on the edge of the blog, partly because of length, but partly because a full third of the entries seemed to follow the same motif. In a style I like to call “beer memoir” (memboir? Bemoir?), lots of intrepid writers dug down into their memory banks to lift out their favorite beer-splashed stories.

I enjoy this nonfiction format because it gives me more context about why beer is important to a person, their family, and their history. It fizzes in all those otherwise fuzzy details about their identity as human beings, not just as drinkers, and lets me connect to them on a personal level that is missing in a generic review. A beer memoir is a microcosm of what I think all beer writing should be, the heart of why beer matters, so bravo to all of you took exit 6B for Memoirtown.

I’ll start with our next Session host, Doug Smiley, who showed us through a touching homage to his home and family, that beer isn’t always about the fanciest ingredients. It’s more about who you share it with, and the memories you build around it. His Iron City is my Boddingtons; a single beer, that despite objectively better options, somehow sends out taste buds longing. I think we all have one of those, a generally “meh” beer made better by that adjunct we often overlook: nostalgia.

Ryan Mould wrote similarly, regaling us with tales of Maine, and summers, and cats named after brewing essentials. It’s very awesome to see where a beer enthusiast got his start, and in Ryan’s story we are taken on a quick literary tour of where he first learned what wort was, which I assume, cascaded into a life-long love affair. I feel like I know Ryan a tiny bit better now, and would love to pick his brain about the Shipyard brews he downed in those lost Atlantic days.

There are some stories that are so well written, so spot-on, that they stir up all the dust in the room spontaneously, and make my eyes water (which is totally different than crying). Derrick Peterman (or as I’d like to call him, Brew Dad of the year, 2014) gave us an incredibly insightful and thoughtful comparison of his infected batch of otherwise amazing homebrew, and his autistic son, Brandon. The comparison was no only apt, but so well articulated that I can’t help but want to read more of Derrick’s work. This was the only homebrew related post in the Session, and I think his metaphor could go even further, if applied to all the tribulations we face and try to brew our way through. He closes with a quote surely spawned from the purest corners of a compassionate heart: “If you’ve ever brewed a flawed beer and still loved it anyway, I think you’ll understand.”

Natasha (aka Tasha) captured the very essence of memoir, possibly infused with blackberry and spiked with raspberry, if we’ll allow such delicious abstractions. Her darting reminiscence and wishes for the future, all intertwined around BCBS Bramble Rye, left me with tart tastes on the tongue of my mind. I seriously felt like I could taste the bursting fruit of this blog post. I also find it interesting that BCBS Bramble Rye is now retired. A perfect conclusion to three perfect days that can never be recreated, except in Tasha’s memory.

A lot of us complain about seasonal creep in beer, all those pumpkin beer hitting the shelves in August, all those light, refreshing spring beers popping up while a lot of us are still cowering under the snowy hug of grumpy-ass winter. But Keith Mathais said “damn the man!” (partly due to no other options) and embraced the seasonal creep by drinking Christmas beer on Halloween. I think he touched on a deeper idea that we should just enjoy the beer for what is is when it is, but also about how our holidays, based on how and who we spend them with, are in his perfect word, “congruent.”

Vincent Speranza gave us what feels and read like a drunken night out in SoHo, circa 2000, longing for tacos, drinking beer from buckets. This flash back is similar to a lot of my own; lots of speculation about what actually happened, who I challenged to a foot race or a fight, just how exactly I wound up where, and the ever present, seething, burning desire to find something good to eat. If Vincent’s goal was to capture a 14 year-old blur on the page, mission accomplished, and I love him for it.

The next post could have easily been included with yesterday’s miscellaneous section, but Bill Kostkas was the only person (aside from Alan at Growler Fills) to raise his hand and say, “no, sir, you are silly. I am a beer reviewer and to not review a beer is insufferable nonsense!” But after stating that, also played along, and gave us a third party memoir, from the infamous (and famous?) Clifford Calvin. All I can say is, Cheers!

The Beer Nut (whose real name I could not find for the life of me) took us arid, deep into the lagery depths of The Grand Hotel Tazi, in Marrakesh, Morocco. This was one of the only posts to go international without already being international (if that makes sense) and Nut’s vivid capture of Morocco’s beer scene stood in perfect juxtaposition to the vivdlessness of the beer itself. If the pictures betray anything, all beer in Marrakesh, regardless of brand, looks exactly the same. Nut get +1000 bonus points here for claiming the Session was “under my aegis.” Swoon.

In the post that I think most explicitly aligned with the sentiment I was going for, Jon Jefferson pointed out that “Our emotions tied to memory are our strongest” and that “you can claim you are analytically tasting and all that but the reality is, our flavor and emotional memories are the guiding principles that we use when judging anything.” These two quotes sum up this Session for me: we’re nothing without our memories and experiences, and each and every one fuels what we see, taste, smell, hear, and touch. Objectivity does not exist when even a smidgen of subjectivity slips in, and I think Jon gets that. I’d be happy to try my hand at brewing Orangeboom, if Jon was interested, and a recipe could be unearthed.

To round-out this round-up, James’s post just, excuse my lapse in proper diction, fucking nails it. This is the kind of thing I want to read every day, that echoes the beauty of Good Beer Hunting’s recent treatise on Hill Farmstead Brewing. I get so much about Australia, James himself, and the myriad minutiae that bring him to write. It’s the kind of engaging word-smithery that I long for, and hope others will emulate going forward.

I’m so thankful to everyone who played along with my crazyness, and hope they pulled something from the detritus of an otherwise incoherent Session. Write on, sweet friends. Drink, and write on.

“Our job is to open a door, and on the other side is a better life.”

It’s OK to be a Brewbie

September 20, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

In a post a few months back, I made mention of a “brewbie” (brew + newbie); that person new to the craft beer scene, overflowing with enthusiasm like a roughly poured pint. They are usually young, energetic, and raw, leaping on new beers and beer news like a kitten on a stinkbug. They mean well, but have a ways to go from “that person who knows about beer” to “a full-keg of beer expertise.”

I have a confession to make: I am a brewbie.

Sure, I know some things about beer. I’ve put my big white ale pails and heavy-ass glass carboys to near-constant use, dog eared and highlighted many books from Brewers Publications, delved as deep into the mines of malts and hops and yeasts as I’ve been able to in the time between writing, video games, and that place I’m forced to go to 8 plus hours a day. But I can’t deny my relative lack of experience, can’t deny that there are people out in this community who have been tasting, brewing, and studying beer for longer than I’ve been alive.

This has become more and more apparent as I’ve waded knee-deep into the ocean of beer-related media, started to really interact with the swimmers near me. I’ve noticed others who are much farther out in the water. Some are surfing. Others are playing waterpolo way past the breakers like it’s no big deal. Some even have boats! It suddenly makes my progress, which I was so proud of, seem significantly less impressive. Looking down at the water swirling around my calves, holding up my shorts as to not get the fringes wet, I feel like a failure.

But then I turn back and see that there are still hundreds of thousands of people sitting on the beach. They haven’t even got the energy or desire to stick a toe in the water, never mind wade out to where the other brewbies and I are figuring out how to swim.

So I say to anyone else in my position: it’s OK to be a brewbie. At least you’re out there trying.

We live in a world where social posturing and image crafting are not only accepted, but often encouraged. Because there are few ways to validate the claims people make on social media, we suddenly find ourselves surrounded by self-proclaimed experts who have done purportedly amazing things, who in turn, by comparison, make us feel bad that we haven’t done amazing things. One only needs to look at the “job titles” of a whole slathering of 20-something administrative-types on LinkedIn to understand what I’m talking about. Assistant Contract Proposal Coordinators with one year of experience, I’m looking at you.

As a result of this creeping feeling of inadequacy, a direct side-effect of having infinite information freely available a few clicks away, we try to puff ourselves up in terms of knowledge and perceived worth. We don’t want to suffer the embarrassment of not knowing, even if it would be perfectly acceptable, given our age and experience and education, to legitimately not know. I’ve been guilty of this too many times; hastily, awkwardly Googling answers to not appear dense or way behind the ever upwardly bending curve of knowledge. It’s a crappy feeling to be on the outside of a group you really want to be apart of. But it’s also a reality of trying to learn something new.

Despite the traditional model, learning isn’t a linear journey from A to B where you digest a predetermined set of data points like some kind of academic PacMan. We can try to quantify beer expertise with BJCP and Cicerone certs, but even well developed standards can’t capture everything. When your brain is spilling with beer facts, historical anecdotes, quotes from master brewers, you’ll still have so much more to learn. The end point is constantly moving, hurtling away from you at a speed that you can’t possibly match like a comet through space too distant to ever colonize with your brain settlers.

Good news though! Chasing that comet is the what keeps you growing.

The masters of the craft – the Jim Kochs, the Sam Calagiones, the Ken Grossmans – even with their encyclopedic knowledge and decades of hands-on experience, still have a little brewbie dwelling inside them, an echo of their 20-something self still urging them to try new things, to sip new beers, to write down those OGs and FGs in a never-ending quest for brewing consistency. They are experts by all definable measure, but that je ne sais quoi inside them still drives them forward. They got to where they are as the paragons of brewing because they were at one point total brewbies: guys with an unquenchable thirst to make an impact on American beer.

So accept that you’ll always be learning, about beer and about life and about how beer goes with life. Accept that even if you do eventually stumble backwards into the comfortable armchair of expertise, you still won’t know absolutely everything, because some tricky maltster will come up with a brand new magical malt roasting technique the second you think you do. Accept that you’ll learn your own things, at your own pace, which may not match the pace of others.

And before you know it, you’ll be debating if that piney aroma is simcoe or chinook, or if you are getting hints of vanilla behind the delicious burn of bourbon barrels. You’ll be explaining the difference between lengths of sugar chains and mash temperatures, the curse of Dimethyl Sulfide in homebrew, which yeast strains are your favorite and why. You’ll find yourself giving advice, helping newcomers out, passing your knowledge to that person who is a mirror of who you were just a short time ago.

The more you know, the more you realize what you don’t know. In some way or another, you and I will always be brewbies. But that’s OK, because so will everyone else.

Do you remember the giddy pleasure the first time you saw a row of these?

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 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 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 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.

Review: Harpoon Munich Type Dark

April 20, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

So, I like beer.

If this isn’t obvious at this point, I can’t help ya.

But therein lies my problem. I like beer. Really like it. All of it.

My friend Justin said that I wasn’t so much a beer critic as a beer appraiser. I’m the “Antiques Road Show” of beer reviewers. Everything has its value, even that weird old afghan you found in your great aunt’s attic.

I have yet to give a beer less than 7 out of 10. I so rarely have a beer that is below a “C” for me, just because I fundamentally love beer so much. I can always find some kind of merit in a beer, even if it is outside my normal comfort zone, or more importantly, flavor zone.

I really try to find problems. Too tart, too watery, too generic. But my complaints are always overshadowed by my appreciation of the positives. I can’t help but think of the master brewer, testing the relative gravity, adjusting it perfectly to his detailed specifications.

Who am I, the lowly drinker, the anonymous end-user, to criticize his art?

I’ve been there. I’ve cracked the barley. I’ve bagged the hops. I’ve boiled the mash and stirred the malts. I’ve handled the ~50 pounds of steaming pre-beer, trying to bring it down to the correct temperature for yeast.

It’s hard work. It’s precise work. It takes part of the brewer to create a great beer, part of his energy and soul.

To give a beer a bad review is to disrespect that soul.

So I always try to find something redeeming. Even if it’s just the label art or the color. Every beer has its place in our world, its place on our palette.

Dark beers that lack hops are not my favorite. Part of the reason I drink beer is for refreshment, and dark malts tend to be antithetical to that notion. I do enjoy a good stout or porter during the winter, but I don’t often buy dark beer just for the sake of it.

Harpoon Munich Dark is toasted and chocolaty. It sits heavy in your stomach; this is a beer to drink while you read or unwind, not while you party. Any hops are sedated by the thickness of dark, traditional malts, making this an incredibly flavorful brew that is more like milk than beer.

I don’t drink them often, but if I were going to, I’d pick this beer again. It’s well done, even if it isn’t overly Oliverian. I think I’ll try to mix this with Harpoon IPA, to make a weird, hybrid Black and Tan.

7.5 out of 10.

Darker than the darkest dark, times infinity.

That concludes this series. Subscribe to check out the next round (which I haven’t chosen yet)!

Pear Cider-Mead: The Bottling

December 15, 2011 · by Oliver Gray

Tis the season for bad sweaters, spiked soy egg nog, misteltoe, and 50’s era Christmas music that has yet to be bested.

It’s also time I bottled the cider-mead! It’s been bubbling in my kitchen for just under three months, and I think it’s time to let it age in smaller bottles.

Mmmm.

I’ve sampled the goods and am pleased with the result. It’s clearly more mead than it is cider, but there is a very slight effervescence that is discernible in the first sips. Using my very scientific method of guessing based on other alcohol I’ve consumed, I’d place the ABV is on the higher end, at ~15-16%. It has very little alcohol taste. If you’re not careful and swallow several large gulps of it while siphoning it into bottles, the alcohol can sneak up on you. True story.

The taste is subtle, but nice. There are soft pear tones up front and it’s slightly crisp and fruity. The smell is similar to most other meads, but as it’s a homebrew and I only decanted once, there is a very slight wine-yeast smell. The full taste is clearly mead with a strong honey finish. It tastes almost like a pear-infused mead, and any hope of a pure cider are pretty far gone at this point.

These photos don’t quite do the color justice. It’s a very pretty opaque yellow that diffuses nicely in direct sun light. A few people have sampled it so far, and I’ve gotten positive results.

The lady who gave me the pears offered the following review:

Good – sweet but not too sweet. Clear pear flavor at first but a lot of honey taste in the body of the wine. A bit yeasty, but not in a bad way. Almost a little bit of bread and butter in the after taste, if anything. I’d give it 86/100.

For something I threw together in an afternoon, I’ll take it!

Om nom.

I’m going to play around with some other ideas, like priming some bottles to see if I can get a slightly carbonated effect. The pear flavors could make this into an excellent sparkling wine, but I don’t want to overpower the sweetness of the honey with too much of a carbonation bite. While it is drinkable and quite tasty at this point, it could probably benefit from a bit of aging, so I’ll definitely put a few bottles aside to see how they taste come spring.

I might try to do another mead (or actually a cider this time) for my next project. Any ideas?

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