Category: Food

On the Colbert Report tonight, they had a little report on about something that’s being served at some minor league baseball park that is essentially a cheeseburger with a Krispy Kreme doughnut as a bun.

Now, look: I’m all about the cheeseburgers, and I’m all about the Krispy Kreme. Together? I dunno, that sounds kinda gross.

Though maybe it has a “sweet ‘n salty” kinda thing, like the pretzels in Chubby Hubby ice cream….

Click here to see a more complete story.

Technically, I believe the process is called “racking.” Neither Steve B. nor I were there, so here’s the report from our beer master, Bill H-D:

Ok, the beer has been racked to the secondary fermentation vessel. All went well. No spills, no drops. Our still immature little IPA has quite a lot of character already – it is way more hoppy and “dry” tasting than Taste the Joy was. No off flavors or spoilage that I could pick up during the taste test either. So we are on track. In about 10 days, I’ll start testing the specific gravity to see where we are with alcohol content.

Bill uploaded pictures to his flickr account; here they are:

First, there’s the cleaning (I hope he cleaned the tub before this…)

Second, there’s the “dry hopping,” where Bill is pouring even more dry hops into this big glass bottle called a carboy.

Here Bill is preparing the siphoning set-up, the so-called “racking” of the wort from the fermentation bucket to the carboy, which is now on the floor.

“Siphon action,” as Bill labels it.

Here the wort is getting sucked out of the fermentation bucket. That residue on the side of the bucket at the top? Flavor crystals, my friend.

This is Bill taste-testing the beer– the label on Bill’s Flickr site is “taste test, mmmm, hoppy!”

And here is the wort in the carboy ready for secondary fermentation, which will generate even more rich beer-y goodness.

As witnessed in photos, it looks to me like this is what Bill said it was: probably the least time-consuming part of the process. Right now, it looks like we’ll bottle a couple weekends from now. Stay tuned….

It’s been a pretty darn busy week around here for me with work, but I made some room last night and this morning to write the next entry of my “beer watcher” activities of the previous weekend.

Bill and I were joined for “brewing, part 1” by Steve B., who was MIA last weekend, dealing with family visitors, etc. Actually, I was a little late on Sunday, so by the time I showed up, Steve B. and Bill were heating up the water for what would be the “pre-beer” or “wort.”

Here’s the recipe for what we were making:

Trout River IPA

(A recipe that comes straight from the “Things Beer” folks)
7.5 lbs Muntons light extract syrup
1/2 lb Crystal malt
1/2 lb Aromatic malt
1/2 lb Carapils
2/3 oz Centennial hop pellets
1.25 oz Centennial hop pellets
1.25 oz Centennial hop pellets
1 oz. Centennial whole hops
1 tsp Irish Moss
Wyeast 1056 (American Ale)
2 grain bags
3/4 cup priming sugar and caps

Steep speailty grains in 3 gallons of water at 150 degrees for 45 min. Remove grains, add 7.5 lbs Muntons light extract syrup.

Bring to a boil for 30 minutes, then add the 2/3 oz of hops. Boil 40 min and add 1.25 oz of hops and Irish Moss. Boil 15 min., add 1.25 oz of hops. Boil 5 minutes. Cool to 70 degrees. Transfer to fermenting vessel with yeast. Fement at 68 degrees until complete (7-10 days). Transer to secondary with 1 oz of whole hops. Hold one week, rack into bottels with corn sugar. Age for a few weeks.

So, here’s what happened:

First off, before either Steve B. or I arrived, Bill made a point of sanitizing everything– the pot we were cooking in, the spoon for stirring, the bucket where we’d store the beer, etc., etc. I haven’t spent much (well, any) time reading home brewing books, but Bill claims (and I believe) that a big deal is made out of sanitation.

After we got the water up to 150 degrees (which amounted to standing around and waiting for the thermometer in the water to reach 150), Bill added the grain bag, as seen here:

Inexplicably, Steve B. looks pretty pissed.

Here’s a close-up of the grain sack:

The comparison between brewing beer and making a big cup of tea is probably pretty clear.

Then, after this stuff steeped for a while (again, like tea), Bill added the malt, as seen here:

This was an interesting part of the process for a couple of reasons. First off, the malt is essentially a big ol’ tub of syrup, which, as Bill is fond of pointing out, is why beer is fattening. Second, this is the most potentially problematic stage of the cooking process because if you’re not careful, this sweet gooey stew can boil over, and if it does boil over, you have a big-ass mess on your hands. That didn’t happen.

I was talking about the whole home-brewing thing with my father last weekend– I recall that he went through a stage at one point in my youth where he made some pretty bad home-made wine. He said he never did home-brewing because he heard cooking the stuff stank up the kitchen. Well, based on my very limited experience, I don’t think that’s true. But Bill kept telling Steve B. and I that it smelled like a “malted milk ball shake” at this stage. I don’t think that’s true either. Basically, to me it smelled like cooking beer, like cooking up a batch of raw brats in a broth of a couple of cheap beers and some chopped onions (well, minus the onion and meat smell). This doesn’t smell great, but I’ve cooked stuff a lot more stinky than that in my kitchen.

Anyway, in the course of the cooking process here, we added hops and (of all things!) Irish Moss to the pot.

This is when you really start getting a very pleasant (depending on your opinion of the smell of beer in the first place) beer smell happening. I’d go on into more detail of the cooking, but there’s not much to tell. Hops and/or moss were dumped in, it was stirred, a timer was set, and we sat around and watched football until the next step. In other words, as long as the previously mentioned dreaded boil-over was avoided, much of the brewing process seemed to be standing/sitting around. Kind of like many other manly activities, like watching sports or ice fishing or drinking, or, if you’re lucky, doing all three at the same time.

Anyway, after the cooking, the next process was cooling the wort down from a boil to 70 or so degrees, something you want to do as quickly as possible to avoid contamination. Alton Brown had an episode of “Good Eats” where he accomplished this by adding ice to the mix, but Bill thought that was a bad idea for cleanliness reasons. I’m not sure who is right, frankly. What we did is put the pot into an ice bath in the sink:

Seven pounds of ice wasn’t quite enough– we had to collect some snow.

Once everything was cooled down, it was time to pour the wort into the fermenter bucket, as Steve B. is doing here.

The next step here is to add (or, in brewer lingo, “pitch”) the yeast, which is what changes this mess of steeped grain and malt into “beer.” And this is where we experienced the afternoon’s only “oh shit” moment. Apparently, Bill had not properly activitated the yeast a few hours before. Because the window of opportunity here is not large (though it isn’t that small, either), there was some concern that we’d have to dump not yet activated yeast into the fermenter with the wort and we’d simply have a 5 gallon bucket of crap.

We decided to wait around a bit to give the yeast to activate a bit, and while I had to leave before Bill and Steve B. actually pitched the yeast, I’m happy to report here that Bill says that all signals are positive. The fermenter is parked in Bill’s basement with an airlock in the top– a little do-hickey that allows gases out of the bucket but does not allow air (and potential contaminants) back in– and it’s bubbling away just like it should. In a week or two, Bill will transfer the beer into a different container (he’ll do this by himself– hopefully, I can get him to take some pictures to include here). A week or two after that, we’ll bottle; and a week or two after that, we’ll drink.

So, am I sold on the home brewing experience now? Well, I’m still on the fence, actually. On the one hand, it is clearly not rocket science; in fact, other than the fact that the whole process is spread over several hours and there are specific times in which you have to add specific ingredients, it’s not a whole lot more difficult than heating water and keeping it at a specific temperature.

On the other hand, it still seems a kind of pain in the ass. Sure, there is (and certainly will be when we’re all done here) a certain satisfaction in making your own beer, just as there is satisfaction in baking your own cake or your own bread. But they also sell those products in stores, and in the case of both cake and bread, I can buy much better versions than I can make myself, and it’s a lot less work to give someone money. So we’ll see.

By the way, the name that we’re playing with for the beer now is “Three Asses Pale Ale,” though I thought it might make more sense to suggest “Three Pale Asses Ale.” Bill was thinking of a label based on the five-assed monkey made by Dr. Mephisto on South Park. I can’t imagine something that says fine, drinkable beer better than references to asses.

Last weekend, after a dinner with friends, Bill (one of the previously mentioned friends) presented me and Steve B. each with four bottles of his first batch of home-made beer, an amber ale he titled “Taste the Joy.” Bill was quite proud of his beer making achievement, telling us in detail the tale of the brewing process over dinner. To be honest, I was skeptical, but when I tried one of the beers after getting home that night, I have to say I was impressed. Considering it was a first effort and such, I thought it was pretty darn good beer.

This reminded me of my on-again/off-again curiousity about home brewing. I suppose it’s something most beer drinkers have contemplated, especially after drinking a few beers. When we lived out in Oregon, there were a number of people we knew who home brewed, and every once in a while, I’ll see one of these brewing kits in a catalog or something and I’ll say to Annette “hey, I think I’ll start brewing my own beer.” To which she generally responds “yeah, whatever.”

Generally, I guess I would say that I am torn about the whole idea of home brewing. On the one hand, it seems like it might be a kind of fun hobby, and one where you get to enjoy the labor involved more than, for example, collecting snow globes. On the other hand, it seems like it might be kind of a pain in the ass, especially balanced against the ease of just going to the store and buying it from the pros. On the one hand, it is a fairly cheap hobby since you can get the fixings to make a batch of beer (five gallons, which is a shitload of beer) for about $25-30. On the other hand, it is not really cheap enough since you have to spend $80 or so on the equipment (which you can reuse, of course) and it involves several strategic hours spread over time.

Anyway, I wasn’t in the mood to go spend $100+ on beer making equipment and fixings only to decide that the whole thing wasn’t worth it– and, besides that, my wife/head accountant wasn’t crazy about this idea either. So Bill generously offered/was convinced to allow me to observe the process of making the next batch. Brewing-by-proxy. Beer watching.

According to Bill, home brewing is a four part process, five if you count drinking: shopping for the beer fixings, brewing part 1, brewing part 2, and bottling. Had we planned better, we probably could have combined shopping and brewing part 1, but the rest of the steps require two to three weeks of waiting. In any event, we started with the shopping yesterday.

Bill’s beer supply store is “Things Beer,” which strikes me as a gramatically incorrect or problematic name– shouldn’t it be “All Things Beer?” Anyway, it is in the same warehouse complex as the Michigan Brewing Company (we’ll get to that in a moment), both of which were located on the outskirts of Webberville “middle of no where”, Michigan. It’s right off the Interstate, disturbingly within walking distance of a truck stop.

The store was basically three rooms of, well, things beer. There were lots of glasses, posters, lights, and other beer drinking paraphernalia, but most of the store was devoted to the stuff you need to actually make beer: all the tubes and tubs and hoses and pots and stuff, but mostly bags of different grains, and hops, different kinds of malt, refridgerators of different brewing yeasts, flavorings and extracts you might add to beer if you’re inclined, etc. Things Beer conveniently has pre-made recipes for different kinds beers– they measure stuff, give you caps, the whole nine yards– which is definitely a plus for beer novices like Bill and mere watchers like me. We decided on a mix that is called something like “Trout Stream IPA,” which, according to the guy waiting on us, is supposed to kind of like Bell’s Two Hearted Ale.

We learned much more from our overly friendly and chatty home brew salesman. He and Bill exchanged words about some home brewing book, and our new found friend told us again what a fine choice we had made in our pre-made recipe. Alas, our beer master was no longer able to drink much beer himself. “My wife and I are on one of those low-carb diets. I’ve lost a lot of weight, but I can’t drink beer because the sugars in beer go right to the gut. There’s a reason they call it a beer gut. So I can only drink one beer a week. Jeesh, it’s killing me.”

“Too bad you don’t make wine,” I said.

“I do make wine,” the beer/wine master replied. “But I can’t drink too much of that. Makes my gout act up.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, and my gout has been acting up a lot since the holidays. I guess I drank just a bit too much, had a little too much fun. Usually my gout only acts up for a day or so but it’s been going on for a couple weeks now. I guess that’s what happens when you have too much fun.”

In any event, after a little too much “sharing,” Bill and I went over to the brew-pub portion of the Michigan Brewing Company next door to and associated with Things Beer. It isn’t really much of a “brew pub,” at least not in the way that I think of a brew pub, places like Grizzly Peak, which is really pretty nice restaurant that happen to make and sell beer. No, this was a brewery that happened to have a small, hole-in-the-wall styled bar connected to it. There was a meager menu (we both had the Reuben– good and straight-forward food) and a wide selection of Michigan Brewing Co. beers. I had an IPA and I believe the Porter (both of which were really good), and Bill started with some kind of desert beer or something that tasted like some kind of syrup. Icky, IMO. But he followed it up with a “real beer,” and all was well.

So, next week, we brew. By the way, Bill– I don’t have that big pot after all. Let me know if you want me to hunt one down or not.