Twas the night before Thanksgiving drinks

So last night I went to my best friend’s house for her annual “Twas the night before Thanksgiving” party. It twas a blast and had some great beers.
There were the standard Harpoon Brewery and Magic Hat beers. Then we had a few specialty beers like the new Corsendonk Christmas Ale – which to me got an A+. It is such a wonderful full body taste of a Belgium dark with just a hint of spices. Traditional Christmas beers are heavily spiced and over roasted malty. This was so not the case.
There was also plenty of Affligem Noel beer. To me it tasted a bit like a fruit cake – in the good way. Again not too spicy.
The host Doug created (at least it was new to me) a warm apple pie beer. It was a combo of a hard apple cider (I can’t recall what variety) and a Harpoon Dark.
All in all it was a great event with great beers

A typical homebrew day at the O.C. - 9 simple steps

The first rule of home brewing is………. Relax, don’t worry, and have a home brew. Done

So next, what are we going to brew? As it is my day, and we have not done this style in a while I decided to go for a traditional Czech Pilsner. Yummy.

Our brew days go a little something like this.

1. Get the water ready for the Mash.
a. Clean the kettle (in our case our customized keg)
b. Hook up the propane tank
c. Put in 2- 2.5 gallons of H2O. We do this so we can be on the same level as the spout on our kettle.
d. Light propane tank
e. Put in 6.5 gallons of water in the kettle as well as a thermometer and heat to 150 degrees. FYI - The water used changes depending on the beer.

2. Get the grains ready for the Mash – Because we are brewing a Czech Pilsner we are going to need a combo of Pilsner malt and Cara Pils malt.
a. Measure 1.5 lbs of Cara Pils malt
b. Measure 19 lbs of Pilsner malt
c. Crush all the grains
d. Clean mash container & manifold
e. Jam in manifold to our mash container (cooler) No need to jam if yours is constructed with great care and detail. As ours is more on the creative side, we need to jam.
f. Get water to the right temp, here we need about 170 degrees


3. Mashing
a. Add the water to the mash container and grab your grains and pour about 1/6 in and gently mix the two together. Be sure there are no clumps.
b. Repeat until all grains are mixed well with as much you need to get a proper ratio of 1 1/3 quarts per pound of grain. (thanks Steve for the details – I just knew it as “mix well”)
c. The grain/water mixture is your “mash”. Bring your mash temp to approximately 150 degrees.
d. Let sit for 1 hour, but stir it every 20 minutes or so.
e. Break and have another home brew or blog ;)

4. Sparging Water
a. Add 9 more gallons of water to the boiling kettle and heat this up 180
b. Pull a few quarts of the wart from the bottom of the tap (this is why we use a manifold) and pour it back on the top of the grains.
c. Get out a piece of tin foil, and poke a bunch of holes in it. Put this tin foil over the grains. We do this to disperse the sparge water over the grains.
d. At the same time “sparge” (aka – pour) the boiling water on top of the grains while simultaneously pouring the wort (the liquid portion of the mash) into the next boiling kettle. The sparge water should be flowing at the same rate as the wort leaving the tank.
e. Smell the mixture – it smells so yummy.
f. Take a few cups of wort and put it to the side to help the yeast get started.
a. Boil this wort in a pot and then cool it down to about 50 degrees.
b. Add this to your yeast mix. It is used as an appetizer for the yeast to get them hungry for dinner (beer).
g. Feel free to test the gravity of your wort to see what kind of “efficiency” you have. Basically how much sugars and other good stuff you were able to abstract from the grains.
h. Once the sparge is complete, put the kettle back on the burner. We move our burner to ground level because
i. It is heavy
ii. We don’t need to rely on gravity as much
i. Let this boil for about 1 hour adding hops when needed (see below)
j. Break and have another home brew or blog ;)

5. Adding hops – for this Pilsner we will have 4 rounds hops
a. After about 30 minutes of boiling, add 4oz of Saaz hops. Do not stir, just let it do its thing.
b. Smell the mixture now. So yummy again.
c. After another 20 minutes add another 4oz of Saaz hops.
d. About 10 more minutes after that add 2oz of Saaz hops.
e. And at the end of the boil add 2 more ounces of Saaz hops.

6. Cooling
a. Right after you take it off the burner add a dash of Irish moss to the mixture to help make the beer clear.
b. Put in a cooling coil and run cold water through the coils to cool down your wort. We want to get it to the 60-50 degree range.
c. You can stir your beer while cooling, but above 100 you want to stir slowly so you don’t add too much oxygen to the beer. Under 100, feel free to stir as hard as you like.

7. Fermentation
a. Transfer the cooled wort into your carboy (glass fermentation vessel) or other vessel.
b. Pitch (add) your yeast – ½ per container – unless you have a really large container, than add it all.
c. Put it in the fridge to ferment until it is done fermenting - Approximately 3 weeks or so.

8. Lagering
a. Once the fermentation process is complete you want to transfer the beer into your kegs or bottles to “lager” the beer – approximately another month or so.

9. Drinking – Enjoy your fresh home made beer.

Is there a shortage on seasonal brews?

So the night before last I went to a bar in Newburport MA and ordered a Harpoon Winter, and they were out. I know for certain (a little birdie in the industry told me) that Oktoberfest beers were hard to come by. Does this mean that there is a shortage of seasonal brews?

If I had to guess the production of seasonal brews has remained constant or has had moderate growth over the last few years, but the consumption has increased. I think that beer is starting to gain some notoriety (not the red-headed step child it once was – not sure it is PC to say that any more but hay this is my blog) and kick some wine butt.

I truly believe people are trying to expand their beer palates but don’t know how to start so they go with the obvious choice a seasonal brew. To be honest it is not a bad choice.
Although I am not a fan of many winter brews – it is a personal choice – I don’t like nutmeg in beer - I hate to see beer choices limited and people forced back to ordering their same-old same-old just because they don’t know what to do.

So I plead to the breweries out there, please make enough seasonal brews to get us through this winter.

NERAX cask festival is coming to The Tap

I guess it has been a while since I wrote. The NERAX cask festival is coming, the NERAX cask festival is coming! It is one of the few times per year you can get multiple real cask conditioned beers. Most of the time (if you are lucky enough to find someone service cask) you get 1 option. To have 20-30 options is just awesome.
Setup for the festival started last weekend. With the kegs settling in, http://www.tapbrewpub.com/">The Tap is ready to start this show on Thursday. I will be there on the weekend, so be looking for me. I will be the one with the big smile on her face.
Come, drink, and enjoy some of the best beer in the world.