What are 2 beers that are Mmmm Mmmm good (according to me, Mrs. Brew Meister)?
Maudite and Matilda. We had the pleasure of trying both brews back-to-back during a recent Tap House visit.
The food at the Tap House is okay, although vegetarian selections are limited. Actually, the food was pretty good--a nice hummus and a deconstructed bruschetta were tasty--once the waitress remembered about leaving off the cheese. But the portions were small and the prices were high.
Same could be said for the beers. Tulip glasses were like buying gold, especially Matilda's price tag. Lucky for us, a high percentage alcohol makes us unable to consume more than a glass when we are out. We sipped, enjoyed, and now can confidently re-purchase these fine beverages for home consumption. Yummy and economical.
Friday, August 15, 2008
M&M
Monday, July 28, 2008
Don't try this at home
Or anywhere...
Schlitz high gravity. Ugh. Said new. Looked fancy. Was cheap. Smelled like, well a lot like "schlitz", but without the L, capisce? Undrinkable unless nose was held. Or, as I (Mrs. Brew Meister) found, take it with a tablespoon of straight lemon juice poured in. Then it was tolerable. Seriously, save the buck and a half.
Monday, July 7, 2008
FINALLY! A recipe (or more) for White Beer
We were inspired to create a Belgian Wit beer that would be ready around our anniversary. Mrs. Brew Meister always enjoyed Blue Moon Belgian White. We also just drank a bottle of Unibroue - La Fin Du Monde. Holy cow is that a good spicy beer; and at 9%, one bottle is the perfect size.
I took a recipe from a book at the local brewshop and adapted it to fit what the store had in stock, and the modifications I wanted to make. In honor of the anniversary, I give you...
White Wedding Beer
- 1# Belgian Biscuit Malt in 2 gallons of water @ 160F for 30 minutes
- Sparge with 1 gallon of water @ 168F
Bring the water to a boil
- Add 6.6# of 55/45 Wheat DME, 1oz crushed coriander seeds, and 1oz sweet orange peel
Boil for 5 minutes
- Add 1oz Saaz hops
Boil 40 minutes
- Add 1oz Cascade hops and 1# clear Belgian candy sugar
Boil 15 minutes; cool to 75F
- Add White Labs Belgian White Yeast
It has fermented for a week, I am moving it to the secondary today. It will probably be there for five weeks before bottling.
Here are some other Belgian White Recipes I found on the Interwebs. I have not tried these yet, but they sound good, and have various skill levels.
Partial Mash From BYO: Blanche de Chambly (look halfway down the page)
All grain from jrhomebrewers: Leffe Blonde clone
An extract recipe from BYO: Celis White Clone
Cheers!
Friday, May 2, 2008
Should have known it when we named it
Clever name, that Dubbel Trubbel. I thought my husband had something catchy going. Little did we know that a "wardrobe malfunction" would cause some real trouble...
Tap-A-Draft is not our friend. The first time we ever used it, we noticed that the rounded bottom of the PET bottle couldn't stand up straight, so we left it on its side. A trail of ants led us to realize it had leaked beer through the floor.
This time, we figured we'd sit the bottle up within a cardboard box. No leaking. Brilliant. Bought the charging cartridges. They didn't work out. I defer to my spouse on the technical details. And, of course, then the bottle wasn't airtight.
Our beautiful Belgian beer, the one we waited months to savor, was now on the edge of air damage. All because we dressed her up in a Tap-A-Draft. Well, no longer. We are kegger/bottlers from here on out.
Of course, my devastated better half thought we ought to pour the entire batch out, but I, Mrs. Brew Meister, am a terrible influence. I said, "For all of the waiting and trouble, the least we can do is get drunk off of it." And we did.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Touring the regional brewpubs (aka why we were MIA)
Business travel has advantages. One of those is the opportunity to check out brewpubs for an expensed dinner out. And if the family pays its own way and tags along, we can all enjoy the experiences--with one of the family members dining for free. And so I, Mrs. Brew Meister, have been inspired as a result of my husband's local travel...
We had the pleasure of going to Indianapolis for the first time. Sure, it was a drive-through town between Chicago and Cincinnati, but now we got to see what it had to offer. I didn't expect much, and I was wrong. Indy has a terrific district called "Broad Ripple", with adorable coffee shops, boutiques, and restaurants. We dined at Brugge Brasserie, with a respectable beer selection (and some pretty special fries). But the real treat was hitting the Broad Ripple Brewery. The vegan food selections were only surpassed by the amazing beer. There wasn't one we didn't love! As evidenced by the empty growlers...ahem.
After Indianapolis, we were inspired to hit the Chicagoland region. We toured the Two Brothers Brewery, met the brothers, dined at their new taphouse (also veg friendly--the kids adored going "off menu"), and fell in love with their Domaine Dupage. Later, we check out America's Brewing Company at Walter Payton's Roundhouse, where we got a special tour from Brewmaster Mike Rybinski. The brewery has been as adventurous as making pizza beer (I didn't attempt this tomato-basil concoction) and a blond chocolate beer (really dessert-like; as if a candy bar was melted in it). My current favorites are the coffee stout and barleywine.
Going to Florida was just the death knell for good beer. Having the grandparents to babysit, we went on a mission. Our two months in Europe inspired us to check out a German-inspired bar. At our wits end, we asked the bartender to suggest one spot where we could buy a decent take-home brew. He recommended the strangest place--and my husband had actually heard of it! It is called The Corner Store. It is a round building, in a not-so-friendly neighborhood, but it is run by the quirkiest fellows. Where else can you buy random items like bait, porn, cookies, horseshoes (I bought one), wine, and microbrews?
Since there aren't any vacation or business travel plans for the family in the near future, and we need inspiration for our own next brewing experience, we have to stay relatively local. Next on the list will likely be Goose Island, Flossmoor Station, and Three Floyds. Will the inspiration never cease? At the very least, we have certainly answered why the children think museums are "where they make the beer".
Saturday, February 9, 2008
It's all about the equipment (part 2)
Psst....Hey buddy….Can I interest you in a used Cornelius Keg?
That is how the transaction seemed to go. I was getting ready to go out of town for a bit and needed to bottle a batch before I left. I really wanted to keg the batch, but had not yet purchased a keg. I ran to my local brew shop with hopes of getting a 5 gallon keg, new or used. Truth be told, I was ready to spend $100+ for a new keg, knowing that I did not plan the purchase out, and there may not be any used kegs in stock. When I arrived, there were no kegs to be found at all.
I was given a story about one of the guys traveling to Michigan to meet a guy about a thing and probably come back with a truckload of used kegs, but at the moment they didn’t have a reliable source. To their credit (and one of the reasons I continue to go to this shop) they offered to drain one of the kegs at the shop and let me borrow it until they did get some in stock.
After a several ideas, I left without my keg and went home to bottle my batch of Dubbel Trubbel. I did use the Tap-a-Draft, so that saved me a bit of time. We’ll see how well beer ages in there; I also filled about 10 bottles as well.
While I was out of town, Mrs. Brew Meister followed up with the LBS to see if the Michigan connection was able to come home with some used kegs. She visited the shop, and while they did not have any in stock, one of the guys decided to sell two of his personal kegs to the LBS so they could sell them to us! 40 bucks, and 2 pin and lock kegs at last.
The CO2 cans are really expensive. I bought I setup from an online retailer that sold a 5 lb can, a 3 foot gas line, a 2 foot beer line with a picnic tap, and a single double gauge regulator.
There is a bit of learning curve in kegging beer. The first lesson learned was replace all seals in any keg that is new to you. Even though the keg had been washed (and was holding pressure when I bought them) the seals would not hold after I transferred the first batch, and I lost all the gas in the CO2 can of the course of a few days.
(Note from Mrs. Brew Meister: While the LBS guys said the seals wouldn’t need attention just yet, the guy who sold the used kegs to the shop urged and insisted that the seals really should be replaced. He repeated this advice to me several times. It should go down in history like all great lines: “Replace the Seals!”)
CO2 containers can be filled at several places, but the best place may be a paintball shop. I have several options in the yellow pages for industrial gas, but most places do the swap program. I was not about to trade in my nice new clean can for a potentially dirty or greasy can. Also, the industrial guys wanted $17 for a 5lb can. Mrs. Brew Meister did a quick search and found the paintball shop in town will fill our can while we wait for $10.
Teflon tape and keg lube are essential. The Teflon tape works on any threaded connection to help seal and make the connection easier to tighten. The keg lube helps extend the life of the o-rings, and allows for an easier connection of pin connectors.
Let the CO2 carbonate the beer. I know it is possible to have a “bottle conditioned” keg, but why bother? All the yeast settles on the bottom of the keg, and is at the front of the line when you dispense the beer. It all works out best when you learn to pressurize the beer so that there is a nice equilibrium between the carbonation level and the dispensing pressure.
Here is a great introduction to kegging beer with Cornelius kegs. It was one of the best investments I have made in homebrewing.
Cheers!
(To be continued, with ISSUE 2: Plumbing...)
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
It's all about the equipment (part 1)
As I ramped up my beer-making efforts this year, I realized that I had to update some of my equipment. I love the DIY and problem-solving aspects of brewing. Finding a way to easily sparge the specialty grains with common household tools, creating climate-controlled areas for fermentation, and creating a new beer from the inconsistent supply of hops at the LBS, are all part of the fun. However, I don’t like when some of the work is tedious or plain difficult.
I have come across two areas that I needed to improve if I am going to brew to the limit this year.
Issue 1: Kegs
I have been complaining for as long as I have been brewing about bottling entire batches of beer. It is usually a messy, time-consuming process that requires a small warehouse to store the bottles that may need to be pulled into rotation. I don’t have a problem supplying the needed empties, as Mrs. Brew Meister and I fill that channel well enough. We have a stack of bottles ready in a back room of the house, but I just can’t fill those darn things without spilling beer on every bottle.
There is also a little more room for error in natural carbonation versus forced. Picture this: I am in the basement with a few friends, drinking some beers from the previous batch and bottling the new batch. Twenty or so bottles into the process, I noticed the priming sugar still sitting in its sealed package on the counter. Oops. Forgot to add the sugar to the bottling bucket. I then went into mathematician mode of dividing the amount of sugar to the balance of beer in the bucket, and the rest into premeasured scoops for each bottle.
Somehow the math may have been made a bit fuzzy from the session prior to bottling. Regardless, the results were a six-pack that exploded a few days later, leaving two quarts of beer on my bar, and there was a bottlecap-sized hole in the ceiling from the main troublemaking bottle. The rest of the beer turned out to be the best batch I ever made; it was a shame to leave so much of it in the mop bucket.
I have been swearing ever since to go to kegs. I tried the half-arsed approach and bought the Tap a Draft system. This was due to the cost of a 5 gallon corni system and my commitment to brewing at the time.
The advantages to the Tap a Draft:
- I only need to fill a few large PET bottles, greatly simplifying the process
- The pressure level creates a nice, albeit slow, pour
- Easy to take places
- Inexpensive to add more bottles
The disadvantages to the Tap a Draft:
- The bottles can only be stored vertically, as they leak when stored horizontally; however, the bottle bottoms are ROUND so keeping them vertical takes a bit of rigging
- The CO2 cartridges are only for dispensing; they cannot carbonate the beer
- The cartridges can only be used for one bottle, as once you pierce them, you can’t close them off when you take the tap off the bottle (so any remaining CO2 escapes when you remove the tap from an empty bottle)
This was a good answer for the price, but if I really wanted to lift my game, I was going to have to go for the five gallon kegs...(to be continued)
