Lassie, Steven's fallen down the well...

Ok, I really didn't fall down a well, but I have let my blog go untended for a while and it's covered with weeds and quite a mess. I have been busy on the homebrew scene, mainly in the sense that I finally MADE SOMETHING!!! I made a hard cider! I'll save all the details for the next blog (yes, I intend to write another blog post). Keep your eyes open for: my cider adventure; my trip (or lack of) to one of the Beer-Nirvanas of this world, Stone Brewing; my quest for a cooler place to ferment beer; my trip to Scottsdale (its hot, but they can make some tasty brews there), and I have a few more thoughts on beer-snobbery. I'm not going to promise a certain number of posts in a year but I'll try to do one a month (and maybe more...no promises). Until the next time.....enjoy your beer!

What’s brown, made of glass & filled with homebrew?

…the answer of course is a beer bottle. But let’s take a moment to think about what a beer bottle is. It’s a container for 12 oz. of liquid. Simple enough (no duh, is what you’re all saying). But when you consider that for a 5 gallon batch of beer, you need around 48 bottles of that size to hold all of your beer, you start to think of beer bottles a lot. Where to get them, where to keep them, how to clean them, how to fill them. For one thing, you can buy new ones, but that seems like a waste of money when there are plenty of bottles out there….with beer already in them!! All you need to do is buy beer in good quality bottles and drink the beer. Again, simple enough. Except when you go to the store, there are dozens of styles of bottles. Tall ones, short ones, bottles with raised logos, and lets not forget the ones with twist off caps (in fact, lets forget them all together since they won’t work for what we need). So, after selecting a six-pack of fine brew, in a nondescript, tall, slender bottle (Mendocino Brewery Red Tail Ale, it’s yummy!) I headed home to begin “reclaiming” some beer bottles for home brew use. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t drink beer as fast as I can open it. A six pack will last me about a week. I’ll have a beer with dinner occasionally and I usually have one when I’m watching a baseball game (ok, maybe I’ll have 2 or 3 but who’s counting), but I won’t just sit and drink to excess and certainly not to empty out bottles I intend to “reclaim”. So the process of “reclaiming” 48 bottles has been time consuming. Add to that the fact (as previously pointed out) that there are many different styles of bottles. Well, since I’ve already told you in a previous blog that I over-prepare, I should also tell you that I am a bit of a picky person when it comes to aesthetics. I want to make sure that my beer ends up in a bottle that reflects the proper style. For example; Pale Ale, I think, should go in a tall, slender bottle. California Common should go in a short, smooth sided bottle. So now I’m faced with the dilemma of needing 48 beer bottles for each style of beer I plan on brewing. For now, I’ll just plan on brewing only one style.

Now to address the issue of cleaning all those bottles. Luckily I’ve had a bit of help on that matter (thanks go out to James Spencer from Basic Brewing Radio). If you rinse out your bottles immediately after you pour the beer out of them, you’ve done half the work. All that’s left to do is to remove the labels and sterilize them before putting homebrew in them. Removing the labels is really easy. Soak the bottles in hot, soapy water for about 15-20 minutes, peal off the label, allow the bottle to soak for a few more minutes, then use a scouring pad to remove the sticky residue, rinse well and you have label-free bottles that are also nice and clean. A big shout out to Sierra Nevada for not using industrial strength glue on their labels (Firestone Walker on the other hand uses glue that should be able to hold two trains together). I can also share a simple solution for storing all these bottles. I just asked my local liquor store if they had any empty beer boxes left over. They happily handed me several. Each box holds 4 six packs or 24 bottles, so all I need is two boxes to hold a 5 gallon batch of beer bottles. Of course, I have the added problem of having plenty of bottles but nothing to put in them……for now.

Destiny? And a few words on Beer-Snobbery

So, over the weekend I learned that my Great-Great Grandfather was the Head Brewer at a brewery in Peoria, Illinois. Perhaps there is beer in my blood? And I mean of the genetic kind not the blood/alcohol level kind. I’ve spent a few hours online searching for more info, but since most of that data was pre-computers (Al Gore hadn’t invented the internet yet) and in some cases wasn’t even written down in the first place, I’ve yet to locate which of the 2 smaller breweries in town he worked for. At the time there were 2 “local” breweries and 1 “larger” brewery in town (imagine a town of 50,000 people with 3 breweries??!!). My Grandfather remembers that he worked for a “local” brewery so that narrowed my search. So for now it appears that he either worked for Leisy Brewing or Gipps Brewing. A search for both companies turned up very little useful information other than the fact that both companies did exist and that Prohibition took a severe toll on them and neither company lasted more than a handful of years after repeal. It’s strange to think that in America, a testament to free enterprise if there ever was one, we actually passed laws that crushed an entire industry for no good reason, other than people didn’t approve of alcohol. Of course, that industry did eventually recover from Prohibition but the number of small town breweries was adversely affected.  Flash forward more than 50 years and craft brewing and home brewing have evened the field a bit. It makes my beer-tainted blood smile and fizz just a bit.

Now to address an issue that popped up in the beer world, recently; Big Industry Beer advertising in craft beer magazines. This actually happened in both magazines I subscribe to. Anheuser-Busch placed an ad for their flagship beer, Budweiser, in the pages of Brew Your Own and Zymurgy. Well, let me tell you, people were up in arms. Crying foul and claiming that “Budweiser represents the enemy of good beer”. WHAT???? I was so shocked by this statement I couldn’t see straight. While I wouldn’t call Budweiser a flavorful beer, there is no way I can call them an “enemy”. I’ve enjoyed a few Buds in my day and so have a lot of people. Again, isn’t this America where entrepreneurs are applauded for their hard work? Anheuser-Busch has never done anything but supply the market with the product that the market demanded. And if people read up on their beer-history, they would see that Anheuser-Busch started out as a small brewery making ales before they moved on to mass-produced lagers, just like the public demanded. If people don’t like the taste of Budweiser, don’t drink it but don’t claim it is “the enemy”. They brew the beer they do because our Great-Great Grandfathers (mine included, probably) asked for that kind of beer. And the last time I checked, Budweiser was the top selling beer in the world. There must be someone out there that likes it. Beer-Snobs can be quite severe in their attitudes about what makes a great beer, but let’s never forget that what might not be your favorite style (Budweiser, Coors and Miller Lite are in an accepted style: Light American Lager) may be the greatest beer to someone else. I’d be willing to bet that most “Beer-Snobs” started out drinking Light American Lagers and eventually moved on to other, more flavorful beers. Let’s hope that the positive letters about the ads that were received by both magazines and printed in the next issue were enough to make the “snobs” rethink their furor. So now my beer-tainted blood is boiling, perhaps I should add some malt and hops and see if I get beer.

The Mis-Adventures of the Rookie Brewer

They say the first step is admitting it to your self. I am a Rookie brewer. I’ve been interested in brewing my own beer for nearly 6 years and yet, I’ve never brewed. Not one bottle. Not one batch. Nada. Zilch. Zippo. Maybe now would be a good time to give you some background about myself. Back in 2003 I lived in Santa Monica, Ca. not too far from a brew shop in Culver City (Culver City Brewing). I like beer and by beer I mean tasty, hoppy, malty, flavorful beer. Now, don’t get me wrong, the Big 3 (Miller, Bud & Coors) have their place in the world (the beach, the lake or out by the pool, mostly hot summer days).What better way to get great tasting beer than to brew my own. Well, one afternoon I stopped in to the brew shop, asked a few questions, looked over the equipment required and after about 30 minutes, I was the proud owner of a starting brew kit. The kit included: 2 glass car boys for fermenting (essentially a Sparkletts bottle, only made of glass), a long metal spoon, a thermometer, a hydrometer, an airlock, a plastic bucket for bottling, some flexible tubing and some ingredients to make my first batch. Nothing fancy, in fact it didn’t even include a brew kettle.

Now, it was late summer and the winds of change were in the air. We had been trying to sell our house and get out of Los Angeles and the direction the wind was blowing made us speed up our exit. So we packed up and moved to Las Vegas. After a few months of unpacking and setting up the new house and getting life back on track, I brought my attention back to my beer making. Since the brew shop in Culver City had a brew club I thought I would look for one in Vegas. Enter Snafu (Southern Nevada Ale Fermenters Union), a small but dedicated group of guys meeting out of a brew shop and talking beer and beer making. I learned a lot in the first few meetings, mostly that there are way more styles of beer than I had ever imagined, but I still hadn’t put fire to kettle to make my own beer. Well, time and life and the increasing demand of family and work took its toll and here I am, 2010, in my early 40s and wondering why I have all this equipment and have never taken the time to use any of it. (All caught up? Probably not, but we’ll push on in the interest of time)

I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t want to do something wrong or waste time and materials, so I have the tendency to be a bit of an over-preparer (is that even a word?). I haven’t been idle during all these years. I have 3 different books on home brewing and I now have 2 magazine subscriptions about home brewing. I listen to several beer-related podcasts and I’m even a member of the American Homebrewers Association, and yet, I don’t homebrew. I have been doing a few experiments to prepare myself for my first brew (like I said, I over-prepare). First of all, I needed to make sure that I could maintain a constant fermentation temperature. That seems like a simple thing but not so easy in the scorching heat of Las Vegas in the summer without running the air conditioning 24/7. My first experiment was to find the “coolest” room in the house during the hottest time of the year. My family was a bit confused to find thermometers all over the house but I finally narrowed it down to a downstairs bathroom (imagine my wife’s relief when the dining room turned out to be a few degrees warmer but a close second). Next I filled a car boy with 5 gallons of water and set about determining the ambient water temperature for the room. Well, let me tell you, Las Vegas in July and August are not the coolest time of year. If I needed to take a bath, I was working with the right water temperature (about 85 degrees), but for making beer, not so good. I would have to say this experiment was a FAIL. I’ve been working lately on a few cooling methods I’ve read about, including setting the car boy in a tub of water, covering it with a towel and keeping all of it wet. So far I’ve noticed a 5-10 degree temperature drop, but since the fermenting beer will generate about 10-15 degrees of internal heat, all I’m doing is returning to ambient room temperature. That’s a good thing to know for the future but still doesn’t get any beer made. So, for now the experiment continues and the anticipation mounts. I’m hoping that before Christmas it will have cooled down enough….ah, who am I kidding? It’s Vegas.