Category: Food

… there’s always this advice for making cheap wine. As the writer emphasizes, this is “hobo wine.” No doubt.

Direct from Bill HD (aka (“The Beer Master”) himself:

The beer racked into the carboy:

What brewing is really all about:

(Which, btw, is why I am more or less a beer watcher rather than a beer master– ed.)

What’s a “hefeweizen?” you ask?

According to the German Beer Guide, it’s

“Hefe” means yeast, “Weizen” means wheat. Hefeweizen is a top fermented, unfiltered, bottle conditioned wheat beer with a noticeable yeast sediment and a cloudy appearance. Wheat beers are also referred to as /Weissbiers/ (white beers) because before the invention of pale lagers and pale ales, most beers were dark. Wheat beers were the exception as the wheat content lightened the colour of the beer.

Hefeweizens are usually quite sweet and fruity, with a full body. The typical hefeweizen taste, which distinguishes it from its Belgian wheat beer cousins is produced by the types of yeast used in Bavaria. There are often medicinal or clove flavours, produced by chemicals called phenols engendered by the yeast. Other chemicals produced by the yeast, called esters, produce bubble gum, banana and vanilla flavours. Esters are also used in sweets like pear drops or fruit gums. Hefeweizens are very lightly hopped so have little bitterness and harshness. The ratio of wheat to barley malt used is commonly around 50:50 but the wheat portion may rise to as much as 70%. With the exception of Gose, German wheat beer brewers don’t add coriander or other botanicals and spices to their beer as Belgian brewers do.

Bill also expressed some concern about potential contamination because of the blow-off, but I’m guessing we’ll be okay. We’ll get Bennie to taste it first just to be sure, though.

From “the beer master” Bill HD comes news:

Well, some drama happened regarding our wort. I went down to check it last night and the airlock was blown off the top – it had clogged with hops and foamy beer stuff and there was some on the wall nearby too. So I guess we had a very vigorous yeast colony going. When I opened the lid it was quite foamy in there too. Not sure what that means for the whole process – I cleaned up the airlock and put it back on and it was hopping and popping normally.

This could be bad, I guess, if there was any contamination. Also, the beer guy says that if the yeast is too active for too long, they basically eat everything and the beer doesn’t have any flavors at all. I don’t think this is going to be the case since it was some sort of airlock clog that caused the mishap. But we’ll see come racking time, I guess, whether it is worth continuing or whether we have our first failed batch.

Bill further consulted his guru/master, “The Beer Guy” (aka the book he has), and discovered that this event is common enough in home brewing to have a name: a “blow-off.” Apparently, it isn’t as serious as we had originally feared:

If the fermentation is so vigorous that the foam pops the airlock out of the lid, just rinse it out with sanitizer solution and wipe off the lid before replacing it. Contamination is not a big problem during the primary phase. With so much coming out of the fermenter, not much gets in. If the fermentation keeps filling the airlock with crud and popping it out, there is an alternative, a blowoff hose.

Bill went on to add:

I cleaned out the airlock, sterilized it again, stuck it back on and it seems to be going along fine. It also smells very much like a normal batch, for what that’s worth. As for why, the books I have consulted say that it just happens sometimes when you get a vigorous ferment. They recommend having a blowoff tube for such occasions, or going to a 7 gallon primary fermenter. But it seems to be a minor issue by all accounts.

So, we’ll see what happens. I guess the beer master will be getting the first taste and the beer watchers will be watching not the beer but the master for the results.

We (meaning me, Bill H-D, and Steve B) started another batch of beer yesterday morning, a wheat beer recipe from “All Things Beer” called “Williamston Wheat.” Compared to the first season of the beer watcher, a recipe that involved moss, grain bags, multiple applications of hops, etc., etc., this recipe was ridiculously easy:

7 lbs Wheat/Barley malt extract
1 oz Saaz hops
Wyeast 3056 or Munton’s Ale dry yeast
3/4 cup priming sugar and caps

Directions:

Add the wheat/barley malt extract and 1 ounce of hops to 1 1/2 gallons of water and boil for 1 hour.

Cool down the wort, put it in the fermenter with 3 1/2 gallons water, pitch the yeast.

That’s it. Compared to last time, this beer practically makes itself.

I was late, and Steve B and Bill H-D already did the most active steps of this beer, which was boiling the water and adding the malt and the hops. So my roll here really was watching, especially since Steve and Bill spent a fair amount of time moving some furniture out to the driveway since there was a yard sale in progress. And actually, I only half-watched; I spent more time trying to figure out a new WordPress set-up.

Two amusing things happened in all of this that are photo-worthy, but unfortunately, the batteries in my camera died. One of the great fears of home-brewing (perhaps the only fear) is that of the dreaded boil-over, which is a danger when you add the syrupy malt extract. But Bill was really not worried about it because he had a new pot for cooking up the wort this time, a five gallon rig. The water wasn’t quite up to temprature, so he put on the lid, and, worry free with the largeness of the pot, we sat around at the kitchen table and chatted.

We heard the boil-over first. Bill and Steve B sprang into action, removed the lid, turned down the burner (we had some debate as to whether or not the electric element of a stove could properly be called a “burner”), and stirred. Tragedy was probably averted, but a lot of the hops boiled up and onto the sides of the pot. So I guess the test will be in the tasting, about a month or so from now (I think about a month).

The other photo-worthy moment involved Bill spilling enough of the ice water we were using for chilling the wort on himself to require a change of clothes before lunch.

… maybe I’ll take the food tour with Fat Dave the cabbie. He’s got an amusing blog, too.

I’m not entirely sure why, but this guy who keeps a blog called The Last Angry Young Man has embarked on a week where he has decided to eat nothing but monkey chow. He is keeping track of his adventures (complete with videos!) at a web site called The Monkey Chow Diaries. Funny stuff, and it is another one of those things to write in a memo to myself: don’t eat monkey chow.

I would have liked to have had posted this message while I was still in Chicago, but time was short and, even more important, Internet access was shitty. You’d expect different in a big city like Chicago, but I had a hard time getting a free wireless connection, even at a Panera’s that promised it. It worked one day, kind of, the next day fine, and the third day not at all.

Anyway, in brief, here’s what I did on Wednesday, which was more or less my “day off” before my part of the conference activities began in earnest:

After spending a fair amount of the morning grading essays for my online class, I hiked down to the Tribune Tower to see my friend Bruce, who works there. He and I have known each other since freshman year in college, which I guess was 22 years ago now. Jeesh, that’s depressing; I was a freshman before most of our current first year students were born.

Anyway, we had a lovely lunch at a sort of yuppie Thai restaurant in that sort of yuppie/touristy neighborhood near the Trib Tower and the Magnificent Mile. I had a Pad Thai with some kind of fish that was pretty darn tasty. But hey, what do I know about Thai food, other than I like it and, because Annette isn’t so fond of it, I don’t tend to eat it that much. We talked some business, we talked some sports (Bruce is crushing me in the NCAA Basketball tourney as far as picks go), we talked family, etc.

On my walk back to the hotel, I went through Millenium Park, which is right off of Michigan and just north of the Art Institute. I can’t remember the last time I was in Chicago, but this was new to me, and pretty darn cool. If you follow the link above, you can see the real photographs, but I have two here from the camera phone that turned out pretty good if you ask me.

This is a picture of Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate,” what the web site describes as a “110-ton elliptical sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates, which reflect the city’s famous skyline and the clouds above.” It’s pretty cool, but I was a little disappointed to find that the bottom part of the sculpture, which you are supposed to be able to walk under and such, was closed off– you can kind of see it in this picture, I think. The blue line on “the bean” (as it is popularly known) is tape, and underneath it is a crew polishing the thing.

This is “The Crown Fountain,” which was designed by Jaume Plensa. Basically, it’s two big glass towers which project these enormous video faces. “Weather permitting,” as they say, water comes spitting out where the mouth is. Also very cool, and it looked even more cool when I ended up taking a cab ride by it at night.

I went back to the hotel and did some more grading, and then it was time to meet up with my friends Troy and Lisa. I picked Troy up at his downtown office, and let me just say that driving around downtown Chicago (really, any very large city) is a bit like an elaborate video game. Judging by some of the quasi-illegal/questionable things I did, it appears to me you get three lives.

Anyway, we went out to their house, which is on the Chicago-side of the Chicago/Oak Park line. A really neat neighborhood with lots of “Chicago Bungalows,” a house style I hadn’t heard of before. Troy and Lisa don’t have one of these, but their house is brick and of a similar 1930’s era. We went out for my second Thai meal of the day, one decidedly different from the yuppie-fied lunch. This place was clean and no frills, and while I think you could get Pad Thai, we all ended up with selections quite a bit different from that– crispy omelette (which was shockingly orangish-red), a soup with coconut milk in it– I believe it’s called Tom Ka Gai– spicy chicken and beef, little egg roll-like things, etc. Very very tasty.

Thanks again for the hospitality, folks.

As for the rest of my trip: it was conference/work stuff pretty much all day on Thursday (that’s “official blog” stuff), a bit of conference stuff Friday morning, and then back home. Despite the fact that I was out until well after 2 am on Thursday, I am up this early after not being awake off and on for the last couple of hours.

I have always heard old people need less sleep….

Anyway, happy birthday to me. To wrap up my birthday week, I’m hanging out with Will today (while Annette gets caught up on school stuff) and then we’re all going out for fancy Italian tonight.

Slight Update:

Troy emailed me to let me know the restaurant we went (and that is just down the street from them, too) is Amarind’s and here’s a review.

I’m in Chicago right now– for work, the Conference for College Composition and Communication– and I need to get ready for my full day of conference activities in a few minutes here. But before I head over to the conference and give up my free internet connection at Panera’s, I thought I’d post a bit about the “fun part” of my trip so far.

We (meaning me, Bill H-D and Steve B) drove into town on Tuesday. After spending several hours in the car (literally) going over a tit-for-tat/crazy email exchange I had with some one at work, we checked into the Congress Plaza Hotel, which I would describe as a lovely dump of an old hotel. Not elegant, but it works for us.

Dinner Tuesday night was at Frontera Grill, which is one half of celeberity chef Rick Bayless’ restaurant empire (the other half if is the much more expensive Topolobampo). Basically, it’s high-end Mexican food, and oh yes, it is very good. We began in the bar, where the three of us and three other folks (two from work, Heidi and Linda, and one from Australia, Clair) shared a table about the size of a large hubcap in the bar. We started with some appetizers there, including some excellent tamales. Then Steve and Bill and I ended up with a table. Here’s Bill and me eating (sorry about the sad quality of my camera phone):

Bill and I both had “small plate” orders of Ceviche; in addition, I had Enchiladas de Pato, which were duck enchiladas, and Bill had Huaraches de Huitlacoche, which the menu describes as “grill-seared, corn masa flatbread topped with black beans, Tracey’s huitlacoche (corn mushroom), roasted winter vegetables, tangy tomatillo salsa, sunflower greens and homemade fresh cheese.” By “corn mushroom,” they mean this moldy stuff that grows on corn. I tried a piece of it, and I have to say it was excellent– very earthy and mushroom-y like.

Here’s Steve B:

He had the special for the evening (and arguably more manly meal), ribs.

Oh, and the celebrity chef himself, Rick Bayless, was wandering around the restaurant. He was surprisingly short and skinny, if you ask me.

All in all, a great dining experience, and, considering what it was and how much we ate and drank, it wasn’t even that crazy expensive.

I’ll have to update some more Chicago fun later; now I gotta work….