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.