first brew, part 2

The Beer Machine holds 2.6 gallons. Pretty much following (but scaling down) the Simplest Homemade Beer recipe combined with the machine instructions, I decided that for that quantity I'd use all 2.5 pounds of The Cellar's bulk pale ale liquid malt extract, and no sugar. I brought about 3.5 liters of tap water (it's good here) to a boil. The tub of LME had been sitting in a sink of warm water and poured easily into the pot. I had to taste it, of course, and found it pleasant. I left it boiling away for 20 minutes, enjoying the aroma.

As the wort was boiling I used no-rinse sanitizer on the machine, following its cleaning and assembly instructions. I was alarmed to discover that the clamps which hold the two halves together with a silicone seal in between were distinctly loose. Loose enough that it seemed very unlikely to be watertight. Some testing confirmed this suspicion, so I followed the instructions for soaking the main seal in hot water then cold water to return it to its original dimensions. It did not seem to help. I suppose it's simply too old. I repeated the seal treatment to no avail, then resorted to the egregious hack of putting layers of tape over the seams of the two halves, creating much more pressure between them once the clamps were installed. It now seemed to hold water and I had wort ready to go, so I took a deep breath and poured the wort into my questionable carboy. I topped it up with tap water, which I did not boil.

Rather than simply sprinkling the yeast into the wort as instructed, I proofed it, although only for a few minutes rather than 10 or 15. I pitched the yeast, gave it a good stir, and closed up the machine. Carrying it downstairs to the laundry room I set it into the sink (just in case) then cleaned up the kitchen. A week or two and I'd have beer!

Now, I figured, it was time to do more research. I had seen several references to The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing. I looked it up on Amazon and read the comments. Very good, but there were a couple that led me to the third edition of How to Brew: Everything You Need To Know To Brew Beer Right The First Time. There I learned that the first edition of this highly regarded book was actually posted online at the author's web site! I started to read.

Oh dear.

It took all of two minutes before I was certain that my first batch of beer had a 0.0 probability of success. And that was before I took a look in the sink and saw that there was a small malty trickle down the side of the keg. And before I realized that I had used no hops at all and the LME was not pre-hopped. Drat.

seventh brew (Belgian witbier), part 1

Brewing my first witbier was a lengthy and educational venture. More educational than fun, as a recall. I've wanted to brew another for many months, both because I love the style and because I was so thoroughly tormented by the first. Everything has been in the garage just waiting since last June!

In my witbier tastings I've certainly encountered great variety in the implementation of the style. I don't know that it's my very favorite but Hoegaarden is surely a benchmark and I like it very much. I would be thrilled to come close to the great original, even if it has suffered at the hands of InBev.

After scouting around online I settled on this recipe for a Hoegaarden clone.

So, I finally got things together on 2010-03-27. First order of business on brew day: follow the sage advice of Charlie Papazian. Relax and have a homebrew! One of the few remaining witbiers from last March seemed appropriate. Not bad. The phenolic notes have quieted a little, but are still dominant. Nice body and carbonation. I do like it; it's just not the result I'm after.

The ingredients and recipe for what I guess I'll have to call Clonegaarden ended up like this:

• 2 cans Muntons wheat liquid malt extract, 3.3 pounds (unhopped)
• 4 ounces flaked oats
• 8 ounces flaked wheat
• 8 ounces aromatic malt
• 1 ounce Kent Golding hops pellets, 5.0% AA (60 minutes)
• .5 ounce Saaz plugs, 7.7% AA (15 minutes)
• .5 ounce Saaz plugs, 7.7% AA (5 minutes)
• 1 ounce coriander seed (15 minutes)
• 1 ounce coriander seed (5 minutes)
• 1 ounce bitter orange peel (15 minutes)
• 1 ounce bitter orange peel (5 minutes...but I forgot it)
• White Labs Belgian Wit Ale Yeast (WLP400)

All the ingredients except the coriander came from Brewmasters Warehouse. Good site and good prices. No complaints at all for my first order.

The grains in separate bags went into 1.5 gallons of tap water at 157 degrees. I kept the heat at 3, and the temperature actually climbed to 170 after 30 minutes. Research: what is optimal, and what about thermometer calibration?

This wort ended up surprisingly dark. Gravity at 170 degrees (77 C) was 1.00. Correcting for temperature, that's 1.025. Research: How much of that is fermentable? All three grains need mashing. According to Palmer, temperatures above 158 inhibit starch conversion, so I was running pretty hot. Palmer's typical malt yields table (Table 27) says PPG for steeping these grains is negligible. So what does that gravity mean, exactly, considering that the final gravity was 1.014? Some significant fraction ended up being fermentable, right? Ah, but on other hand this is the boil gravity, so 1.5 gallons of wort at 1.025 becomes only 1.007 at 5.25 gallons. So I guess it's quite possible that none of that is fermentable.

Added a gallon of water, probably splashing a bit too much. The wort was tasty with lots of body. Brought to boil and added Golding hops. 

Based on my earlier research I've pretty well decided to add malt extract near the end of the boil. Added extract at 45 minutes. This knocked the temperature down to 160 and it took maybe 15 minutes to come back to boiling. That's something to think about with respect to the boiling hops. Also added first half of Saaz hops, coriander (coarsely ground), and orange peel in a nylon hop bag. 

At 55 minutes added the rest of the hops and coriander, but forgot the second half of the orange peel. Grr. I wonder whether I shouldn't make a strong tea and add it during fermentation. (I didn't.)

Cooled, aerated heartily, and added 60 degree tap water to get about 5.25 gallons at 75 degrees according to the bucket fermometer. However, the base of the bucket felt much warmer than the top. I was startled to discover just how ineffectual the delivery of water from the faucet is at blending, even from a height of a foot over the bucket. I'd pulled my original gravity sample already from the spigot and realized that it was useless. Mixed by pouring between kettle and bucket, by which time I'd reduced the temperature to about 66 degrees. And, I also discovered that the kettle thermometer may be high by 8 or 10 degrees. Nice. So, the above temperatures for the steeping are probably erroneous.

The upshot of this latest temperature fiasco is that I really need to mark the kettle so I know exactly volume I'm trying to cool, and I need a new floating thermometer.

Pulled another sample to measure an original gravity of about 1.066. The recipe says OG is 1.055 (and is based on 7 pounds of extract). That's a pretty big difference. The 6.6 pounds of LME at 36 PPG would account for 1.045. I'm not sure whether that's the right figure for wheat malt or not; it may well be lower.

Comparing the two samples...wow. The first one was like syrup compared to the second. I'm shocked at how poor the blending is even when adding that much water. I really need to get the water into the bucket first and then pour in the wort.

The yeast was a bit past its "best-by" date of 2009-10-30. Pitched and and plumbed a small diameter blowoff tube.

Just for fun, I poured the gravity samples into a jar with a sprinkle of Red Star dry champagne yeast I had in the fridge.

Fermentation took a couple of days to get going. I put the bucket in the downstairs bathroom and ran the heater, keeping it in the 70s. During my tussles with the last witbier I had my know your yeast epiphany, so I made sure to keep this at a happy temperature. A week later was still blowing bubbles every several seconds, down from a peak of every second or less. The blowoff tube worked beautifully.

The champagne yeast sample seemed to finish up in a few days. Tasty, but none of the Belgian goodness that the wit yeast should deliver.

By 2010-04-12, or two weeks after visible fermentation started, it had pretty much stopped. The gravity was about 1.017, getting pretty close to the recipe's final of 1.014.

There was just a thin layer of krausen. This one never went berserk -- no crap gunking up the blowoff tube, no cranky stopping and starting.

The flavor at this point was dramatically different from the first witbier. There was no harshness, no phenolic band-aid character. It's good! The bittering hops are detectable and it is considerably more hoppy than the first one, although no hop aroma, really. There's some fruitiness and slight tartness. It's lively on the tongue, almost as if it were already lightly carbonated. There's some bitterness on the finish, and I think that's where I pick up the coriander. Maybe a hint of yeastiness. This is a low-flocculation yeast and it is quite cloudy. From my limited experience I'd say it tastes green, expectedly, and with some time I think it may become quite fine. I am pleased.

Bottled on 2010-04-18, at a final gravity of 1.014. Oh, it's very tasty! No question about its Belgian lineage. It has smoothed out a little in the last week. I think I'm going to be happy with this one aside from the color, which certainly is not possible to achieve using the the Muntons wheat LME.

Bottle count was 25 twelves and 21 sixteens.

first brew, part 3

I devoured the first edition of How To Brew and immediately ordered the third edition in hardcopy. I was soon convinced that my future brewing would be with the standard equipment rather than The Beer Machine.

By Saturday the machine had leaked to the level of the seal. It bubbled through the weekend, though, telling me that at least the yeast was doing something. But by Monday it had stopped.

I talked at length with a buddy at work who is an experienced homebrewer. I enumerated some of the more obvious errors and potential problems:

• the fermenting container leaks
• the water was not boiled
• the yeast was not adequately proofed
• no hops
• no original gravity measurement

Still stubbornly determined to use only what I had on hand, I stated that I didn't think I could dry-hop with the pellets. He suggested making a hop tea from the pellets and adding it to the wort, as well as doing a little taste test to see whether fermentation was complete or stalled.

On the way home from work I stopped by The Cellar and picked up their deluxe mini-brewery kit. I asked about the speed with which fermentation seemed to have stopped and was told that it was a highly variable process, and that three days was not out of the question.

Monday night I gave it a taste and found that it was not bad! I mean that literally: It did not have any unpleasant flavors. However, neither was it something one might seriously consider drinking even as an alternative to Coors Light. But it was no longer sweet, so it appeared that the yeast had done its job. I took a reading with my new hydrometer and found a pretty high specific gravity of about 1.014. I extracted about a pint of wort and boiled about eight hop pellets into a green sludge. Back into the wort it went. I probably didn't boil it for long enough, and probably didn't cool it adequately before pouring it in.

Tuesday night the specific gravity was unchanged. I took that as a sign that fermentation was complete, although it was still fairly cloudy. I used Munton's active brewing yeast, which I believe is a low-flocculation yeast, which I believe might result in less clarity. I need to do more reading about that.

Wednesday would be bottling day!

first brew, part 4

Since I hadn't yet purchased any glass bottles or a capper and was already fairly convinced that I had produced the Brew of Doom I figured I might as well stick with the Simplest Homemade Beer plan and use two liter plastic bottles.

I sanitized the bottles, new six gallon bottling bucket, racking cane, siphon hose, bottle filler, and all the rest. Maintaining cleanliness is a real challenge. Where do you set things? What do you do when you accidentally touch something you shouldn't have? It was a very awkward experience!

I dissolved about six teaspoons of cane sugar in a pint of the beer. I warmed it while doing so, but did not bring it to a boil, and did not sanitize the saucepan. There's another potential source of infection, I suppose! I poured it into the bottling bucket.

I had no luck getting the siphon started without backflowing water into The Beer Machine. I think this was difficult because of the machine's horizontal orientation and, by now, beer depth of only a few inches. Although I had read about the need to avoid aerating the beer when transferring it I ended up putting the bucket in one sink, machine in the other and resting on the edge of the bucket, and gently letting the beer flow from the tap down the side of the bucket into what was, I must say, an attractively luminous golden pool. A sampling revealed it to now have a slight hoppiness. There was a thick layer of yeast at the bottom of the machine.

And so I bottled, ending up with less than five liters – quite the nanobatch. Here it is as of Friday. You can see that yeast continues to settle. The full bottles are rock hard!

first brew, part 1

As I was organizing some recipe clippings after Thanksgiving I happened across a document I'd printed years ago: How to Brew Beer in a Coffee Pot. It was Friday, I had the day off, and it sounded like a great project. Plus, it was a use for that old Braun that I hadn't used for years. I wrote down the ingredients, leapt into the car, and tore down to the closest homebrew shop, The Cellar. All I needed was malted barley, hop pellets, and yeast in order to make about two quarts of beer.

I used my autocross training to successfully navigate the gigantic pothole outside the shop but was less successful inside. So many choices! So many cones! Confused, instead of the barley I bought liquid malt extract. Two and a half pounds of it. Apparently, I was 1) completely ignorant of how to make beer, and 2) prone to constructing shopping lists stupidly.

Back at home I picked up the directions again and immediately realized that I would not be making coffee pot beer after all. I stomped around for a bit and then remembered that many years ago my brother gave me The Beer Machine. I have never used it, partly because the last time I thought about it I didn't have refrigerator space, partly because I thought the sanitizing instructions were pretty terrifying, and partly because it came with a package of light golden lager or something else I didn't want to drink. But could I make it work with what I now had?

I began googling for basic homebrew information. I scanned many pages and eventually found what I was looking for at Simplest Homemade Beer, which did indeed describe a far simpler process than anything else I had seen. And it looked like I could adapt my ingredients for use in the machine (which normally uses dry malt rather than liquid) thanks to a bit of assistance from this Brewing Formulas page. I wouldn't have to bottle at all, since the machine is essentially a little keg with its own CO2 and dispensing system. Sweet! I gathered up my gear and headed for the kitchen.

first homemade kvas, part 2 (the sour!)

While the first bottle of my first homemade kvas was disappointing, I wasn't entirely surprised. The second bottle made up for it by being something completely unexpected and quite good! The third was the same. The difference? Months of conditioning.

It has been nearly nine months since I bottled it. I opened the third and final bottle tonight, having opened the second several months ago. I don't think there was much difference between those two. But the difference between them and the first was stunning. An aged kvas can apparently be a delightful thing.

It has become something akin to a sour Belgian beer. It's not a beverage I'd want to drink in any great quantity, but a small glass is delicious and refreshing. The molasses flavor, for which I don't much care, is basically gone. There's a slight dark fruitiness, perhaps in part from the few raisins or perhaps as a byproduct of the fermentation. The tartness combined with a medium body and robust mouthfeel is really pleasant. As far as I know bread-based kvas is intended for fresh consumption so this result was a complete surprise.

I've been wanting to brew a sour beer ever since tasting the fantastic Flanders red ale that Zach brought to a homebrew club meeting last summer. Maybe I'll do one of those next.

coffee pot ale, part 1

Tuesday afternoon I revisited my original brewing notion and made an attempt at following How to Brew Beer in a Coffee Pot.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup organic US two row base malt
• 1/3 cup English crystal 60L (or was it 40L?) malt
• Saaz hops, 2007, alpha 4.0
• Muntons active brewing yeast

I used the Saaz hops because that's what I had on hand after the first fiasco, but I don't think they're all that suitable as a boiling hop.

Other than using slightly more malt I followed the mashing and lautering instructions exactly. The coffee pot holds the temperature at just under 160 degrees. This is all the grain the filter basket can hold. Mashed-in for for an hour, sparged six times, plus poured the wort over the grain one last time into the kettle. This whole process takes about an hour and a half.

Total of 8 cups of wort. The flavor is grainy and pleasant but not particularly sweet. The color is deep and opaque. I should have measured the boil gravity at this point.

I was surprised to see that the grain has visible sprouts. These I now know are called acrospires. It's kind of fun to see them rehydrate. The spent grain is not nearly as tasty, with the preponderance of base malt, as the crystal malt I used in the red ale.

Started the boil and added two hop pellets. Added six more after 20 minutes. Closing in on 40 minutes the wort volume was getting awfully low so I added a couple of cups of water. Added three more hop pellets at 45 minutes. Off heat after 55.

I have no idea what the quantity of hops was by weight. I don't have scale and did not get a pellet count before using in the first batch so I can't make a good estimate.

Cooled the kettle quickly in ice bath. This quantity took only 10 minutes or so to reach 70 degrees. Added some water to fermenter and poured wort. Aerated vigorously. Pitched rehydrated yeast, probably nearly half a packet, and aerated again.

At this point I did take a gravity reading and was shocked to see it somewhere between 1.012 and 1.014. The volume is only about 6 cups even with the water I added, so the wort should be more concentrated than what I started with. This must mean that not nearly enough sugars were extracted from the malt. The flavor is not much different than the original wort. Not getting much from the hops, either. The color is about what I would expect.

Poured into a 2 liter bottle fitted with a homemade cork and blowoff tube arrangement (I love those rare occasions where there's some benefit to being a pack rat) but I think it's unfermentable wort. After two days there wasn't a single CO2 bubble as far as I know. Update: I now know the cork/tube arrangement was not airtight so it's possible there was some CO2 production that I did not see.

After some reading I concluded that I did not come even close to adequately cracking the grain. The instructions about avoiding a marble rolling pin and gently applying pressure led me to really underdo it, I think.

I had less than 1/2 cup of grain left, but cracked it pretty thoroughly and made another smaller pot of wort. I didn't bother with exact measurements, but this wort was probably at twice the concentration as the first one. The gravity was only 1.020. I supplemented with three tablespoons of cane sugar, boiled with a few more hop pellets, combined with the first wort, and now have a gravity of 1.028 or so. I think this may give the yeast something to do.

So I'm left to wonder what theoretical maximum gravity is possible with this method. This is a very rough estimate since I didn't weigh the malt, but: I bought about 1/2 pound, used 4/3 cups, had perhaps 1/3 cup left over, so used about 2/5 pound of malt to produce 8 cups of wort, or 4/5 pound per gallon. If this were all 2-row pale ale malt with a maximum yield of 38 PPG and a 70% efficiency, which I think would be pretty good for homebrew procedures, then the yield would be 38 x .7 x .8 = 21.28, for a gravity of 1.021. Working backwards from OG of 1.014 at 6 cups the boil gravity would have been 1.0105 at 8 cups. That's an extract efficiency of 10.5 / 38 / .8 = 35%. Given that a fourth of the malt was crystal with a PPG of 34 rather than 38 and making large allowances for estimation error I'm willing to believe that this result is actually not an enormous surprise. I think I will try it again with properly crushed grist and careful measuring and see what kind of extract efficiency I can get. It's an interesting experiment.

I really don't know what to expect from my 6+ cups of fortified weak sauce. If it doesn't show signs of fermentation in the next couple of days I'll probably just dump it. I am very interested in figuring out how to do these nanobatches experimentally, so I do want to see how this simple carboy works. Probably gallon glass jugs are a better size and material, though.

A good kitchen scale is definitely on the to-buy list, as it sort of has been for years.

first try at a ginger beer

Based on this ginger beer how-to I set out to make my first ginger beer. I simplified and modified the recipe a bit, and also doubled it to produce two gallons.

In three quarts of water I boiled for 30 minutes a cup of shredded/pulped ginger, 16 tablespoons of lemon and orange juice, and a cup of white sugar. It should have been two cups, I realized later.

I strained into five quarts of cold water, cooled in an ice bath to 80 degrees, and pitched half a teaspoon of Muntons ale yeast proofed in 3/4 cup of water.

It went into four two liter bottles. Upon sampling I was surprised by its lack of sweetness. That is when I realized that I forgot to double the sugar. I added 1/4 cup of corn sugar to each bottle, but did not taste again or take any gravity readings.

I think the flavor has more lemon than ginger character. It could just be that my ginger sensor is a little blown out right now since I was nibbling on it raw.

It's now resting at room temperature. I think I'll probably test one, two, three, and four days of fermentation.

2010-03-30 update:

All bottles were rock-hard in less than a day. The first bottle went into the refrigerator after 24 hours at room temperature. The second went in after 48.

The first two are pretty comparable. Carbonation is stronger in the second, and it may be just slightly more dry. I think I pick up the slightest hint of yeast and a touch more ginger bite in number two. All of those differences could be the effect of the effervescence, but they result in number two being more successful.

It's really pretty good. I don't detect any of the orange juice. The lemon is strong; I'd actually dial it back a bit and try the lime of the original recipe. It's far, far less sweet than the commercial ginger beer I have had most recently, Reed's Ginger Beer, which is so cloying as to make me queasy.

I don't think the degree of carbonation can actually increase much, so the next two bottles should give me a pretty good read on how the sweetness changes.

I wouldn't say that I can detect any amount of alcohol. A half cup of table sugar and a half cup of corn sugar per gallon gives an original gravity of only about [(3.5 oz 46 ppg + 3.5 oz x 42 ppg) x 1 lb / 16 oz], or 1.019. Even if it attenuated completely it would be less than 2.5% ABV, and I'm sure it will be less in actuality. This stuff should be only 80 - 90 calories per pint -- that's compared to 145 in 12 ounces of Reed's. This is quite a nice light summer drink.

2010-03-31 update:

Added number three to the tasting tonight. Absolutely massive carbonation, demanding several minutes of bottle opening ministrations. It wasn't quite chilled. One effect of this is that it kicks up all of the sediment, which probably affects the result.

That said, I don't actually notice much difference between two and three. Possibly a bit more dry. I'll have to try again tomorrow when both are equally cold. Number one is not entirely flat, but it's close to lifeless. Definitely dominated by the others.

I bought a bottle of Reed's Extra Ginger Brew. Bleah. It's like syrup compared to mine.

2010-04-02 update:

Tasting number four completed the flight. I compared to number two and it is assuredly drier. I measured the gravity of both. With temperature adjustment, number two was 1.014 and number four was 1.011. I don't know that I have a preference. Assuming that my original gravity estimate is correct, that would be about 1% ABV, or nothing to worry about if the boys want some.

I think it's pretty easy to experiment with the recipe in very small amounts. Unlike beer, I don't think that any yeast strain I'm likely to use is going to make much of a difference. Starting with a base of ginger and sugar it should be easy to incrementally add ingredients until reaching something that seems worth upscaling and bottling.

second brew (red ale), part 9

The serendipity of both the red ale and the Arizona Cardinals being properly conditioned for Superbowl XLIII (and for the first time in the history of the universe) led to the obvious christening of the second brew as Tipsy Bird.

Photoshop 7.0 does not run at all on Mac OS X 10.5 and the fine folks at Adobe refuse to fix it so I have been without a really good photo editor for quite some time. I almost reinstalled it on the last Tiger box in the house but decided instead to give GIMP a try. I've poked at it a time or two before but never had the motivation to get past its annoyances. It's still no Photoshop but it mostly did what I wanted and I became moderately comfortable with it over a couple of hours. My main gripes in this limited engagement were that window management is awful, text capabilities are very limited, and handling of selections and layers is awkward. Oh, and the first use of a drawing tool is often accompanied by an infuriating delay.

I also tried the online SUMO Paint but found it unstable enough to prevent me from discovering very much about its capabilities. And I poked at Seashore but it crashed in short order.

In any event, GIMP let me produce something good enough for this bit of silliness and now I feel a little more comfortable turning to it for quick image editing tasks.

book list

This reference entry will be maintained as a list of cooking, roasting, brewing, and general gastronomy books that I've either read or use as references. This initial partial post is so I can get it linked for future updating.

cooking

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee is the cook's indispensable reference for food science. This is the 2004 update to the original 1984 edition. It describes the history and nature of all types of foods, as well as the transformation of those raw materials into finished products ranging from cheeses to breads to sauces to fermented drinks. It contains a chemistry primer.

I have not yet read it completely. It's a good random access book and every page delivers fascinating reading.

The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore by Harold McGee...

The Barbecue Bible by Steven Raichlen offers BBQ techniques and recipes from around the world. It's not the only BBQ book you might want, but if you were limited to one this might be it. It is well organized and has the excellent feature of calling out in obvious fashion the prep time. I often find that I draw ideas from various regional recipes and end up with a fusion of some kind.

I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking by Alton Brown was my introduction to cooking as a science. As anyone who has seen Good Eats knows, Alton is entertaining and the book is loaded with techniques, food science, and some decent recipes. It's pretty poorly edited, though. Certainly a gateway to the works of McGee, whose works are much more technical but still quite accessible.

The New Best Recipe Cookbook from Cooks Illustrated magazine is an immense collection of recipes developed in the Cooks Illustrated test kitchens. It also includes much of the explanatory content that is found in the magazine.

Last Thanksgiving I got excellent results with the large turkey roasting technique (but used an Alton Brown brine rather than a Butterball). The discussion of how to make a good stuffing was also useful, and I liked the apple, onion, and bacon variation (though I overcooked mine).

The Gourmet Cookbook edited by Ruth Reichl is a huge collection of recipes from the late great Gourmet magazine. I've had good results. I do have a major usability complaint in that all of the titles are in a low-contrast shade of yellow that is very difficult to see.

French Cooking in Ten Minutes: Adapting to the Rhythm of Modern Life by Edouard de Pomiane is a fantastic little book. I've written a bit more about it here.

The Short-Cut Cook by Jacques Pepin has many elegant recipes that can be prepared quite quickly. The cold cucumber yogurt soup is one of my favorites. I've never been disappointed by a recipe in this book. (The Amazon link goes to a newer edition than mine.)

roasting

Home Coffee Roasting by Kenneth Davids is a good introduction to roasting. It covers roast styles, bean varieties, equipment, methods, and the like. It provides a sufficiently detailed look at the alternatives for home roasting that one can readily decide which to pursue. However, one then quickly discovers that there is much more to learn about that particular method than was exposed in the text, and that the author's experiences with a particular method may not be representative.

brewing

How To Brew: Everything You Need to Know to Brew Beer Right the First Time by John J Palmer was my first brewing book. I purchased it after reading online the writings that eventually grew to become this text. I think it is very good. It has a friendly organization that gets you started brewing right away, then in subsequent chapters delves into quite a bit of science and technique. I turn to it frequently as a reference. I have not tried any of the recipes.

general gastronomy

The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten is one of the most entertaining books I've ever read. Steingarten is so funny, clever, and tenacious that when he turns his attention to a gastronomical pursuit the results are both hilarious and tremendously educational. It's worth rereading any time.

The introduction, in which he describes his personal program for overcoming a large number of food aversions, is fascinating.

It Must Have Been Something I Ate by Jeffrey Steingarten is essentially a second volume of The Man Who Ate Everything. Brilliant.

Are You Really Going to Eat That?: Reflections of a Culinary Thrill Seeker by Robb Walsh is a selection of essays on food and culture from around the world. It is part travelogue, part natural history, and part cookbook. Fascinating stuff.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan is a slightly uneven look at foods derived from industrial corn, pastoral grass, and the forest. It drags in places, but the basic idea is interesting and Pollan is a good writer. I find his thinking and the depth of his fact checking suspect in a couple of places, but I appreciate his willingness to express uncertainty as well.

The role of industrial corn in the American (and, increasingly, global) diet is probably the most politically and scientifically charged section. The degree to which human and livestock food should be engineered is a question laden with ecological, societal, and nutritional controversy. Even without contemplating those issues, the picture Pollan paints of our huge food industry being built almost entirely on commodity corn is startling (and a little long).

The section on grass farming is really interesting. It's largely about a farmer in Virginia who operates on the principle that if you manage your pastures and other natural resources properly you can produce impressive yields of beef, chicken, pork, rabbit, eggs, and just about anything else organically and without the use of factory farming methods. It also explores "big organic" and the reality that most organic produce is now being produced using industrial-scale methods that may not violate some set of organic standards but definitely violate the ill-defined notions most people have about how their organic produce, milk, meat, and eggs were made and delivered.

Hunting, gathering, and the ethics of eating meat are addressed in the final section. This part of the book covers some interesting material but aside from the ethical questions doesn't offer as deep or relevant an exploration of food as the earlier pages.

Overall, definitely worth reading.

The Pedant in the Kitchen by Julian Barnes is a brief and amusing biography of "a late-onset cook" who in the kitchen is "an anxious pedant" rather than an inspired free spirit. "I adhere," he says, "to gas marks and cooking times. I trust instruments rather than myself. I doubt I shall ever test whether a chunk of meat is done by prodding it with my forefinger. The only liberty I take with a recipe is to increase the quantity of an ingredient of which I particularly approve. That this is not an infallible precept was confirmed by an epically filthy dish I once made involving mackerel, Martini and breadcrumbs: the guests were more drunk than sated."

It is very funny stuff, and an intriguing look into the mind of someone with whom I may share some pedantic tendencies, thought generally not in the kitchen. Still, in the case of Nigel Slater's recipes I could appreciate some of the author's frustration. His discussion of various cookbook authors and what he finds objectionable or sublime is wonderful, and introduced me to Edouard de Pomiane (see above).

His rants are drily comical. "Being a great cook is one thing; being a decent cookery writer is quite another, ... 'Artists should have their tongues cut out,' Matisse once said, and the same - if even more metaphorically - applies to many chefs."

The Unprejudiced Palate: Classic Thoughts on Food and the Good Life by Angelo Pellegrini describes the author's childhood in Italy, his emigration to the United States, and his thoughts on growing, preparing, and eating food. Pellegrini settled in Seattle and was an English professor at the University of Washington. As he died in 1991 the majority of his time in this country was during what I suppose was the low ebb of American culinary culture. The love and respect for wholesome and simple food that was his heritage and avocation was desperately out of place in space and time. His writing is a reminder of how fortunate I am to have had my values develop in the context of home-grown and healthy food as a child, the abundant resources of the Pacific Northwest, and this period of culinary reawakening.

The Amazon link is to a newer edition. Mine has a great afterword by M.F.K. Fisher.

Gastronaut: Adventures in Food for the Romantic, the Foolhardy, and the Brave by Stefan Gates...

first brew, part 7

Amazing. I chilled and opened bottle 1 of the Flat Wan Ale. I poured a pint glass. It had a head! It had a steady upflow of tiny bubbles! It was perfectly carbonated. The flavor is, frankly, not an abomination before the beer gods. Not complex, not particularly interesting, no bitterness to speak of (given the tiny boiling hops oversight), but with mild malty and hoppy flavors and a faintly sweet, fruity finish. If I ordered it in a pub I would not be enraged. If I hadn't followed Joe's suggestion of desperation dry hopping I'm sure it would be worthless.

Gravity is about 1.018. If a pound of LME per gallon yields an original gravity of between 1.034 and 1.038 then the ABV is somewhere around 2.5 percent. That feels about right; there isn't much kick to the stuff.

Two hours after opening the two liter bottle there's still plenty of carbonation. This would be a serviceable bottle size for any sort of social occasion.

Update: Opened bottle 2 on 1/1. I think the results of the experiment are clear. Pints from this bottle had a better and much longer lasting head. Both shaken and unshaken carbonated adequately, but the shaken bottle is the definite winner. I suspect that it was probably ready before the unshaken bottle.

first brew, part 6

This afternoon I had a glass of what I am now calling Flat Wan Ale. This was from the bottle I tasted a week ago. There may be slightly more carbonation now, but it's nowhere close to where I'd like it. (Tracey sampled it last week, too. She said, "No offense, but it tastes like warm flat beer." Far from being wounded, I was happy that she successfully identified the room-temperature uncarbonated liquid as vaguely beer-like!) It is fairly hoppy and today I thought it had some bitterness too, which surprised me. But it remains dull and has very little body.

I do know that at least some CO2 is still being produced because the partial bottle had again developed a little pressure. It may still be premature, but I think I'm going to take this opportunity to do an experiment since I have two identical two-liter bottles remaining. I am going to give one a good shake to redistributed the yeast, and leave the other alone. I'll keep them at room temperature until, say, the end of the year. This ale is a major clunker, as expected, but at least it affords an opportunity to test this technique.

OK, bottle #1 is unperturbed and bottle #2 has been shaken. Much of the settled yeast is back in suspension. It foamed when shaken, but I don't have a good sense of how to relate that to degree of carbonation. When I checked an hour later the foam was gone and the bottle had not exploded, for which I was grateful.

first brew, part 5

Sunday afternoon I couldn't help myself and had to have a taste. I cracked the half-full bottle, which had a good bit of settled yeast and some amount of pressure, and poured a few ounces. The only evidence of dissolved CO2 was a small number of bubbles clinging to the side of the glass (wrong glass, I know).

There are still no off flavors that I can detect. There is no bitterness to speak of. There is a very faint aromatic hoppiness. The overall flavor is pretty uninteresting. There is no sweetness, but I did not taste immediately after adding the bottling sugar so I'm not sure how it compares. And the carbonation is very, very slight - though I think that's to be expected after only three or four days. Clarity has improved noticeably.

John Palmer notes that carbonation should have occurred by about two weeks, and take no longer than a month. Possible causes of carbonation not occurring are premature settling of the yeast (shake it up), and not enough bottling sugar (no cure identified). Low temperature is also a factor in slow carbonation, though I don't think so in this case. It's been at a pretty steady 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Overall it looks like things are going surprisingly well.

sixth brew (goldenflower ale), part 1

My starter recipe for this simple summertime pale ale was Peter Berger's Goldenflower Ale. His description:

This is an extremely estery beer...heavy on the pear and raspberry. If you want to understand the difference between ale and lager, brew this one. It is the epitome of "fruity." The slight hop aroma and very mild bitterness, tied with the lightness of the beer, really allow the esters to shine through; I suspect the honey aided them strongly.

Ingredients:

• 3.5 pounds Laaglander dry extra light malt
• 1 pound fragrant clover honey
• 8 grams Galena hops (8% alpha) (boil)
• 1/2 ounce Fuggles hops (dry hop)
• Wyeast American Ale yeast

The choice of American Ale yeast for something that's "extremely estery" and the "epitome of fruity" seems odd, since Wyeast's description is "Low fruitiness and mild ester production".

This is the first time I've brewed with honey.

The Laaglander malt is no longer available, as far as I can tell. It seems to have had a questionable reputation. I decided to give Brewmasters Warehouse a try for ingredients for this and my next brew. They carry Munton's extra light DME, $3.99/pound, so that's what I got.

The Galena plug hops were 14.2% AA. According to Palmer, Galena is a U.S.-grown strong, clean, bittering hop with a citrusy aroma and AA range of 12 - 14%. That makes me wonder whether the 8 grams or 8% in the recipe isn't a typo: 0.028 ounces, for 2.2 alpha acid units? (And what's with mixing metric and standard units?) I decided to use half an ounce; I don't mind if it's hoppy.

I wanted a light color, so decided to boil just a pound of the DME for the full hour and add the remainder and the honey for the final 10 minutes. Per my earlier research, having some sugars and enzymes helps with hop utilization, so you don't want to boil the hops in only water. DME yields about 44 points per pound per gallon, so the initial boil gravity was 1.015. According to this utilization calculator, that's about 33 IBUs per the Tinseth method. Adding the rest of the DME and the honey (38 PPG) brings the gravity up to 1.064, so 10 minutes of boiling at the higher gravity might reduce the IBUs by about 5. I doubt it works quite that simply, though.

The Wyeast 1056 American Ale smack pack did not inflate per my expectations. It took a cross-country trip with cold packs that had completely melted by arrival, so I wonder whether it isn't in poor health. It puffed slightly, but nothing like it usually does after four hours. This is the yeast I just used for the light ale so I am making a recent comparison.

Pitched the yeast at 76 degrees. Once again I couldn't cool the wort as quickly as I wanted. I keep forgetting how long those cold packs take to freeze. They really need to go into the freezer the day before, at the latest. I ended up using a gallon of cold water to aid in cooling from 90 degrees, and may have aerated more than desirable at that temperature. I need to turn that copper coil Joe gave me into a chiller some time soon.

There was some conversation at the last homebrew club meeting about whether hot-side aeration isn't actually a somewhat mythical effect, though. People seem to have plenty of personal experience with aerating hot wort and not experiencing any off flavors due to oxidation. Someone described an experiment in which the wort was split, with the test portion being aerated likely crazy while hot. There was apparently no difference when compared to the control. Unconvincing in a single experiment, but perhaps it's not an effect that's as likely to occur as we've been led to believe.

Original gravity is about 1.043, adjusted for temperature. The wort has is moderately bitter, quite sweet, and the honey is evident. Not much maltiness, as one would expect.

Update: Visible fermentation was a little slow to start, but by the morning of the 14th it was bubbling pretty vigorously. By evening it was continuous. Temperature was 67 degrees. I have the fermenter downstairs, where the temperature should be consistent within a couple of degrees.

Update: Still bubbling every 5 seconds the evening of the 16th.