Where Has the Time Gone?

These past several weeks have been sort of crazy, in a good way, and I haven't really had much of a chance to try any new beers recently, so I took a bit of an unplanned hiatus.  But I'm back.  And I have a keezer full of varieties I haven't tried yet.  I did, however, finally get a chance to tap my Belgian Tripel homebrew, which has been conditioning for about a year:

Vittles:

Belgian Tripel

9.2% abv

Score:

Appearance: 8/10

Aroma: 22/25

Taste: 36/40

Mouthfeel: 8/10

Style: 5/5

Drinkability: 8/10

Overall: 87/100

Impression:

It turned out a lot better than I had hoped for, so I'm pretty impressed with myself.  There wasn't much of a head when I pulled it off the keg, but it hadn't had a chance to carbonate -- I was too eager to try it and didn't want to wait.  The aroma is full of all that Belgian yeasty goodness that I love so much, and a fair amount of sweetness undercuts the banana and clove scents.  The flavor follows suit, and there's quite a bit of alcohol warmth as it slides down your gullet.  This is definitely a sipping beer, one to enjoy slowly and in small pours.  It also seems like just the thing to take the chill out of your bones after shoveling snow, so I hope there's enough to last through the winter.

I brought a growler of my homebrew to a party last night, and I was surprised by how many compliments I got.  I was kind of blown away by how much people enjoyed my brew.  I'll have to make this one again, though it does take a lot of patience, since it conditions for so long before I tap it.

~Cheers!

Why I Started Homebrewing

For Christmas 2007, my mother-in-law got my husband a homebrew kit.  He and I were still just dating back then.  I didn't really know what homebrew was, and I wasn't overly excited about it -- it sounded like a lot of work, and I'll admit I'm pretty damn lazy.  And it sounded a little hectic, what with the strongly worded warnings about messy boil-overs and the need for stringent sanitation methods.

Early in January 2008, we made our first batch.  It was a California Common.  I remember how delicious it made the whole kitchen smell while it was gently bubbling away on the stove.  It was such a lovely golden brown soup in the brew kettle.  It almost looked like very liquidy caramel.  And the wort tasted so very good before the wee yeasties even went to work on it!  When it was done cooking, we pulled it off the heat and dunked it in an ice bath in the kitchen sink.  We made a bit of a mess pouring it from the brew kettle into the primary fermenter, and I remember thinking, "This better be some damn good beer for all this mess I'm going to have to clean!"  We pitched the yeast, closed it up, and tucked it out of the way.

The next afternoon, when I was getting my lunch together, I heard a strange soft clicking noise.  It was a steady, constant sound, and it took me a couple minutes to track it down.  The fermentation had kicked off, and at that moment, when I could see the yeast farts escaping through the airlock, I was hooked.  Before me sat a 6 gallon plastic bucket full of life.  Those bubbles coming through the airlock told me that millions of little yeasties were alive and thriving, busy converting the sugars in the wort into alcohol.  You could smell the breadiness, that yeast smell, when you leaned in closer to the fermenter.  I sat enthralled, watching the airlock tick-tick-tick for some time.  Before I went to bed that night, I checked up on my little friends again, and they were madly at it.  I went to bed with happy thoughts.

In the morning, the bubbling was slower again, and by night, it seemed to have stopped all together.  I was a kind of disappointed and sad.  I knew it couldn't have kept bubbling away forever, and I knew that no more bubbling meant the beer was just about ready to bottle, but my voracious little friends were now starving.  They had destroyed their own environment, filled it up with their delicious waste.

We let the newly produced beer sit for about another week, just to make sure that the fermentation was completely finished, since we would be bottling our brew.  There were several more strong warnings about making sure that the final gravity really had bottomed out, lest one's beer bottles turn into glass grenades.

So, mid-January, we primed and bottled our first batch.  We numbered the caps, too.  We wanted to drink a few immediately and tuck a few away for longer and longer periods of time, so we used the numbers on the caps to determine when we would let ourselves try it.  We wanted to see how the flavors changed as the beer aged more.

The problem was that it was such a damn good beer, especially for our first time out of the gate, that we couldn't help but ignore our numbered cap/aging system.  Before we knew it, we only had a couple bottles left.  Sadly, we didn't get much of a chance to brew again until a couple years later (our second batch was an Irish Stout).

The more batches I brew, the stronger my love for brewing becomes.  My only regret is that I didn't discover my love for brewing beer until well after I had chosen my profession and spent many thousands of dollars getting my degrees.  I think the last decade or so of my life could have played out very differently if I had been allowed to experience the brewing world, and my passion for it, earlier in life.

Finding your passion in life is important.  Get out there and figure out what makes you happy, and go after it. Cheers!

My Beer Rubric & Homebrew Pumpkin Ale

So, I'm a professor.  And one of the things professors do is make rubrics.  I basically took the 100-point rubric I grade my students' essays on and converted it to a beer rubric.  I'm hoping this step makes my reviews a little more fair when it comes to styles that I don't particularly care for (Light American Lagers, for example).  I included a drinkability category so that my own preferences and tastes can still play in to the overall score, but I'm going to try to base most of my reviews on how well the beer matches its style.  If I don't know what style it's supposed to be, I'll use my best guess for the purposes of my review, and update my information when I can.  Here's the rubric I came up with:

It's a work in progress, but hopefully it'll help keep my reviews more even and balanced, especially for my least favorite styles.  So, let's give it a go with my homebrew pumpkin ale:

I brewed this beer over a year ago, in February 2012.  I used 60 oz. of organic pumpkin and spiced it with nutmeg, cinnamon, and ginger, then I added a few extra cinnamon sticks and whole cloves to the primary fermenter, too.

It's a cloudy burnt-orange color, which is about what I'd expect to see in a pumpkin ale.  The head is a little foamier than usual since I topped up the CO2 right before I pulled this mug from the keg.  9/10 for appearance. (It's hard to get a low appearance score.)

The aroma is predominantly pumpkin, but the cinnamon and cloves are very apparent, too.  I do, however, catch a little of the odor associated with the off-flavor that haunts my homebrew.  There's also a much more understated sweetness behind it all.  22/30 for aroma.

Sitting in the keg untouched for several months really helped this beer -- it tasted a little raw when I served it on Thanksgiving, though I still got quite a few compliments on it (my friends and family are thankfully honest with me; many of them have told me they don't like certain beers I make).  The flavors don't taste as sharp now as they did a few months ago.  I might have overdone it with the cinnamon, since that seems to be the one lingering taste on the back of the tongue.  The other spices, though, are mellow and mild.  It is difficult to taste the malt or the hops through the pumpkin and spices, since there is such a strong pumpkin taste (unlike many commercial pumpkin ales, which taste thin to me).  I think I should use less pumpkin, less cinnamon, more cloves, and let it mature longer next time around.  There is also, unfortunately, a slight off-flavor common to all of my homebrew batches, so I should knock a few extra points off for that.  My beer is warming up as I type this, and it's tasting better the closer it gets to room temperature, too.  It was probably about 35F out of the tap, and it's more like 55F now.  31/40 for taste.

It has a creamy, silky mouthfeel when you swish it around, but it finishes moderately dry.  I don't think the dryness goes very well with the flavors, though.  But, as it warms up, that dryness is less and less present.  7/10 for mouthfeel.

This beer is certainly drinkable, and it pairs very well with hearty meals.  It doesn't have that watery taste some commercial pumpkin ales have.  I like that you can taste the pumpkin clearly and easily -- if I'm drinking a pumpkin ale, I want to actually taste the pumpkin, not just get a hint or a whiff of it.  I would mark it an 8/10, but the off-flavor does slightly detract from drinkability, as well.  7/10 for drinkability.

Overall, that adds up to 76/100, and that seems about right.  This is not anything special, but it is a decent brew.  It has more flavor than many commercial varieties, but it also has off-flavors and is not well-balanced.  With 4.67% ABV, it's not surprising that there is no noticeable alcohol-warmth.  I enjoyed brewing and drinking this beer, though as I said, there are a few things I'd do differently next time around.  Hopefully next year's batch will be better!

Cheers!

Homebrew: Foamy Roggenbier

For many, many years, I've tried to keep up with writing something on a regular basis, but I found that I ran out of things to write about.  I hope that doesn't happen with this blog.  Unless I'm too busy out finding and sampling new beers.  I think my main issue before was that I just hadn't found my real passion yet.  Now that I have, cyberspace beware!

My passion for beer has led me into the world of homebrew, which has turned out to be a most fantastic hobby.  My husband and I started our homebrewing experience a few years back with a California Common, and that was the only batch we bottled.  It was pretty tasty for a first go.  We switched to a 5-gal. keg system after that, since washing and sanitizing bottles is pretty time consuming.  We also bought a nice big chest freezer and adjusted the cooling knob so we could lager in the summertime if we want, and it also lets us maintain more consistent temperatures for better conditioning.  Right now, we have the remnants of a grand cru, about a gallon left of the pumpkin ale I made for Thanksgiving, and a couple gallons of a roggenbier.  I also have a Belgian Tripel that's still conditioning, and I can't wait to try it!

I have notebooks full of notes and calculations, and I worked up a spreadsheet to keep track of my recipes, calculations, and other helpful information, like grain and hop characteristics, water quality, yeast strain profiles, keg psi charts, etc.  It's a very fulfilling hobby, to say the least.

I have, however, run across a small issue I can't sort out with my roggenbier.  It looks like this coming out of the keg:

I brewed it and fermented it like normal.  The OG was 1.043, and FG was 1.012 when I kegged it.  I topped it with CO2 at about 12psi and disconnected it from the CO2 tank.  Then I put it in my keezer, which was set around 40-42F, to let it condition -- colder than I would have preferred, but at least the temperature was fairly constant, instead of being subjected to 20+ degree temperature swings twice a day, every day.  When I went to tap it, it was under so much pressure that foam backed up into the CO2 hose when I tried to connect it.  The keg lid has no pressure relief valve, so I had to push in the poppet to bleed off enough pressure to get the tap on (very messy -- foam was spraying everywhere in my mudroom while I did this).  I left the CO2 hose off, since there was already more than enough pressure in the keg.  I've emptied more than half the keg since then, and it is still under enough pressure that all I get is foam, and I still haven't attached the CO2.  I fill up a half-gallon pitcher, wait about 10-15 minutes, and get about a pint of beer out of it.  I let the glass of foam above sit for about five minutes, and it looks more like this:

The beer smells and tastes like it should after the head settles, but I can't figure out for the life of me where all that extra pressure in the keg came from.  My husband thought the beer might've kicked off again when we kegged it, but the fact that the FG was already so low, coupled with the pretty cold temps in the keezer, make me wonder if that's what really happened.  Any suggestions or thoughts would be helpful, since I'd rather not run into this issue again.

If you like beer and are looking for an interesting new hobby, try looking into homebrew.  It's made me learn so much more about beers of all kinds, and it has really enriched my life.  Cheers!