A Year of Craft Beer, Vol. 5, Yuengling Lager

Yup, I consider them craft beer.  I will have to have an article on "What is Craft Beer" but if you were fortunate to try this years small batch octoberfest from them, you would say they were craft beer.

The Lager:  Basic lager.  The bottle fails the homebrewer test.  Screw top!  BAH!

Description of the lager:  Looks and tastes better than Bud.  The green bottle usually has no problems with UV skunking as it gets drunk so fast in these parts.

In fact, the below picture shows you what a refreshing tasty Yuengling Lager does to your hair after a hard day of work on the river:

Yuengling is truly refreshing when thirsty and hungry.  In the summer it's a good go-to beer at the beach or wherever beer is needed in the heat.  That's all I got tonight as I have been quite busy and need to go have a good time with friends, so Shaka!
-Fish

A Year of Craft Beer, Vol. 4, Wiss Brau Mocha MaryAnne.

This may happen on occasion.  My vision may be too blurred Friday afternoon after getting home from work and being fairly "haggered and gruff" {-new beer name for Wiss Brau, I claim it-} and it being all too easy to have an awesome English style ale on tap at my convenience that I partake on a few of these fine beverages and am caught unawares at the lack of cold bottled beers in my mini-fridge for this endeavor of learning for me.  I'm not too distraught though as I find Mocha MaryAnne to be drinkable year round.  Really, I don't care about pilsners in summer.  I like dark beer! Although there are much more thirst quenching beers for those 60 degree F plus days where I have to don shorts!  For me, it's ale.  I do enjoy lagers and pils, but it's ale.  Mocha MaryAnne is ale.  She's dark, she's lively, and her booty is bountyful!

Here is my half drunk Mocha MaryAnne.  Just the way I like her!  :

 



This is where I parallel my critique with Weird Science:

I first created Mocha MaryAnne with a pair of tighty whities on my head... Nope, I didn't do that.  Actually this is my third attempt with this beer which represents, in some fashion, a chocolate stout.  One of my faves is Youngs Double choccy stout, but I haven't gotten it yet.  The correct formulation of the beer I mean.  I could try and google it and get a recipe, but... I dunno, I think it better to actually try on my own without someone telling me how.  I think they add a ton of lactose.

Anyway, this wound up being a ten gallon batch and it turned out that the beer recipe was sacrificed to learning how to do a ten gallon batch AND doing a second runnings Small bier with the grains.  That is how this one went.  Plus I started a new job with a new routine and time management was much different.  All in all, it's a good beer.  It's still young.  Tastes it.  And evenly more so in the keg as I don't think it conditioned long enough and taste a tiny hint of the priming sugar.  The bottles are older now and I am sure taste quite different.  I gave most of them away and might cellar the rest until this summer when I grow weary of humidity and dream of crisp clean COLD air from canada that has not been laiden with soot and chemicals from the lower half of the continent and desire a hearty dark brown ale.  Foulweather Press,  you know what I am talking about right?  Dirty black beer that will leave you sweaty, disoriented, and panting on your bed opposite of the headrest sprawled on your belly muttering something about "If there is a God..."  The dirty harlot wooed you with her sweet talk, and ruined you with an extensive session of euphoria and gets up and leaves you in the morning while you are sleeping!  Spawn of Satan Stout (gonna have to copyright that one too, sorry).  Shedevil Stout (yet once again, my drunken intellectual property Wuh ha ha ha!) 

So!  Mocha MaryAnne, other than being my (stealing from Donovan's intellectual property in which he confesses that "Brown Eye'd Girl" was actually "Brown Skinned'girl" -Westwood One Radio Show, circa 1990) ultimate fantasy, is really a Stout.  I may have tweaked the ingredients a little to make her a Russian Imperial Stout (she is a Goddess after all) and added a twist of ginger to her profile.

I'm sitting here trying to get a smell from her after the third beer and it's not happening.  I have kind of a weird relationship with beer in as I have a gluten intolerance or possibly mild celiacs and beer make me feel really good mentally, but physically she beats me up.  I'm not old or weak, just weird!
But alas, my nose sometimes shuts down.  Sinus Swelling.  MaryAnne smells like a stout!  Ginger was apparent in the first two batches, but only a little in this one.  I tried making ginger tea and adding at bottling.  It worked, and pretty good, but the amount I used was light.

Tell me what you think a porter or a stout should taste like.  Personally I think it is just a stronger version of a brown ale.  Not a different entity, but a version two or three steps darker and heavier than a brown.  Mocha MaryAnne is roasty foremost, in my mind, a mild english bitterness that begins well after the beer rolls over the tongue, with chocolate and coffee hints carried along with it like a mining car in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Part II  and ending with coffee laden Kent Goldings hops.

Out of the keg the carbonation is fine, I like a little bit more, just me, otherwise it's more than acceptable.  The bottle is more effervescent.  I think that I had a couple dirty bottles...wait, that was last run that I served at Barry's Homebrew Christmas party... they tasted like Chipotle of all things!  They were a freaking mistake and they tasted f@cking awesome!  OK Shedevil Stout is now a Imperial Russian Chipotle Stout and he who doth not like thine inspiration shall NOT drink with the Devil but can have boring old distilled water with the angels in LA LA LAND and look at pretty flowers while I'm surfing 150'F steaming hot barrels during the day and getting red hot pokers upon my jacksie at night!  You boring Feckers!  Sidetracked...sorry, that is what my brown skinned girl does to me.

Not much lacing.  She doesn't need lace to look good!  What froth there is is (two is's in a row and I meant it) ... what froth there is is a almost rosey brown and lasts half way through the kegged beer.  Bottle, IDK  I should have done a comparison, still can, but f@ck it, I'm happy!  That is all that really matters isn't it?  You should only be concerned to as what you think of a beer, not what other's think.  You won't be happy that way!  Drink what you like and pay what you think is fair for a beer that you like.  Most of all, Relax, Drink a Homebrew!  

-Fish
 

A Year of Craft Beer, Vol. 3, Pennsylvania Brewing Company Nut Roll Ale

Pennsylvania Brewing Company's Nut Roll Ale is on the list for tonight.  This was one of the beers in Scoats's 24 beers of Christmas cases that he did out of the Grey Lodge with Michael Ryan Lawrence Writer/Director of "Beeradelphia".  24 cases of 24 different winter beers.  They can only get better!

I did a little poking around on Beer Advocate before I opened this bottle.  Many of the reviews were average about this beer.  The first one that I read, however, was pretty critical and I am going to have to side with that fella and give this beer a 5 out of 10.

The bottle passes the homebrewer test and can be reused, so I will up that to 6 out of 10!
The color, well see for yourself, the pic is pretty explanatory.  And yes it is hazy, but as a homebrewer, that is more than acceptable to me!  

It is mildly cabonated with barely any head and no "lacing" (I'm stepping up my vocab).  Lacing is sort of like "legs" in wine for the beers' head if I recollect.  

The aroma?  Gingerbread.  Fairly strong.  Too strong for my liking, but might be good to cook with!  I'm not quite sure how they captured the bready aroma of gingerbread, but from looking at it and knowing a bit about cooking, I'd say they actually cooked with gingerbread. 

It tastes just as strong in that respect, but instead of a good brown ale base to the beer, it tastes to me like Schmidts (sp?) with the christmas flavors added right to it.  I'm smelling that cheap corn lager stench that Schmidts had and tasting it as well.  Maybe its the natural flavors that they put forth on the label in some weird combination.  It does have a malt hint to it and it is sweet.  Has a good mouthfeel and is pleasant to drink with a little aftertaste immediately and tapering off.  I'm guessing that very little hops were used in this beer.

I personally don't like it too much.  I would drink as many free ones that were offered to me though!

yeah, a generous 6 out of 10

What do you think?

Anchor "Our Special Ale" Turkey Stew

I'm hijacking my pictures from last night's post to recap on the stew that I made with Anchor's Christmas ale.

Before I get into that, I tapped into BeerAdvocate to see what other people were saying about it and I wasn't that far off.  I'm not as good as picking up peppery, pine, and other flavors off the top without a hint that they are in there so from now on I'm going to research the beer a little before I dive in.

Back to the stew:   8 qt.? CROCKPOT

In the recipe I used one bottle of Anchor 2012 "Our Special Ale" which is different every year but is classed as a Winter Warmer beer so there are probably others that you can substitute for it in the class.  Lots of folks said the spices in the beer were overpowering, but I have had some that were much stronger, they might work in this recipe as well.

All in all, the stew came out excellent.  Not perfect.  I can see where it was going, but I slacked on the veggie broth boullion goop from Herb Ox.  If that was doubled, BINGO!  I can definitely taste the beer but as it has the sweet Christmas spices flavors, these match really well with the sweet potatoe in the recipe.  It was a light broth low in salt which is best.  You can always salt to taste later.

Reicipe:

One pound bag celery, bottom removed, leaves removed, chopped.
1/2 cup green onion,  roots removed (I usually don't like the white bulb at the bottom, but this needs it),  chopped.
One medium sweet potatoe peeled and diced (1")
14 small white potatoes, halved or whole, skin on.
One pound cut carrots
One 3 lb. turkey breast leftover (which was previously frozen) 
Two Herb Ox  Vegetable Broth bullion goop cup things
Two cups water
One teaspoon Bells poultry seasoning

Heat 2 cups water and add the Herb OX Veggie broth, Bells Seasoning
Layer Crockpot with carrots on bottom
Add leftover frozen Turkey breast
Add all potatoes and celery
Pour Veggie broth mix over stew
Top with green onion
Pour one 12oz. Anchor Christmas Ale over stew.

Since the breast is frozen I would cook this on low for 6 hours.  I cooked mine for 10 hours and all was fine, maybe a little overcooked.

Serve to people who are tired of turkey leftovers and they will thank you!

A Year of Craft Beer, Vol. 2, 2012 Anchor "Our Special Ale"

This is the 38th edition of Anchor's Christmas ale as I gleaned from the bottle.  I'm not going to be all Wordsworth tonight about this beer like I was last night, only to have read someone elses take on Black Ops and thought my post was shite!  I definitely need to learn!

Number One:  I like the bottle.  It pours nice and is compact and can be used for homebrewing!  What comes after that is a nice dark brown in color ale.  In fact, it may even be a brown ale, sweeter than most but built upon with the various spices that were added.  And not the usual nutmeggy type spices either.  It has a pleasant caramel nose to it and that flavor takes you all the way through to the end which ultimately has a very slight hoppiness to it.  Somewhere in the middle mellow bittering hops evolve to remind you that this tastes very English.  English ales being my favorite.  Unfortunately that celery that you see in the picture left a very strong smell on my hands and is mucking up things a bit.  

There is a very smooth mouthfeel and towards the end of the glass one notices that the beer is actually a dark coppery colour and very attractive.  The head, although thin, has stayed the 20 minutes that I have taken to drink this beer.

I wish I could lend more information about this beer in the way of ingredients, malts, hops, adjuncts, etc... but truth be told, I have no idea.  I could google it, but so could you!  Ha ha ha, I am a lazy bastard tonight!  All that I need to know right now that this is quite a good beer and because of it's intermediate alcohol percentage is VERY drinkable and not hot at all in the way of ABV taste.  I definitely have to give this beer high 9's or even a ten in it's class!  I love it!  I would drink this beer all year round!

Do you notice the lamp in the picture?

Just in case you are wondering what happened to those veggies: Anchor "Our Special Ale" Turkey Stew!

Have a great night everyone!

-Fish

A Year of Craft Beer, No. 1 Brooklyn Black Ops (or not)

Pictures first please! Then intro...

OK OK,  This is my first installment of "A Year of Craft Beer" in an attempt to learn more about beer with you the reader.  If you are new to beer drinking, this will be helpful to you probably... I don't know.  Some terms that I used in the article might be -pretentious- but they serve a purpose in describing beverages of this nature and you can probably figure out what they mean anyway.  I just hope that it is readable for you guys.  I'm always looking for feedback.  So let me know...  Anyway, It's a beer blog on my regular blog.  It just feels natural for me to stay here than to set up another blog solely for beer drinking as I really don't want to abandon my other hobbies.  I need to keep this here for my reasons.  As you may have read, I'm going to be doing interviews with professionals in several different fields relating to beer so I look forward to learning from them as well!  So please stay tuned for tomorrow's beer.  God knows what it is, I'm all over the place with this.  Relax, enjoy a homebrew, or a craft beer!

So, as a homebrewer, the first thing that I wonder is if I can reuse the bottle or not, and well, I cut off the most important aspect of this pic which was the cork in which I would have indicated that it IS possible to do, Ben Potts told me how to do it with my crimper by removing the metal grab bars or something, but I haven't mastered that, which must be a mindblock because Im usually a pretty good problem solver.  I think it looked like I would break my crimpers so I gave up on the effort.  So, NO, I can't reuse this bottle.  Bummer!

I go by what the bottle says about the beer and try and match that to my palate.  This beer I am serving rather cold.

As soon as I popped the cork I was rushed with a sweet smell of bourbon and I wondered, "do I let this breathe?"  So, does one let it breathe?  It's cold so it needs to warm up a little.  But anyway, I didn't, I poured a glass, the rest can breathe while I drink this one!  LOL

It pours smooth.  It's more viscous than most beer.  As the beer rolled down the side of the glass there wasn't much of carbonation escaping, but more aromas did!  And as I lowered the bottle and straightened the glass a creamy brown head with the tiniest of bubbles formed about 1/8 inch thick and still remains 15 minutes later.  You know, from what I have read on the bottle (in the future I should google each beer and elaborate more) I was looking for a bourbon aroma and it's definitely there.  There are other smells as well, less apparent, but no less important!  In fact, they work so well together that it is difficult to distinguish the oak or the vanilla.  I don't want you to think that the bourbon is way overpowering, of course it is, but compared to other bourbon barrel aged beers that I have had, this is more mild.  This is my first or second bourbon barrel aged stout and I believe that this will be one of the best.  It may be too sweet for some to be thought of a common stout.  Or it may not be bitter enough as bittering hops are light as well as the aroma hops.  In fact, most of the bitter taste in the end comes out as mostly coffee.

By time this article posts, I am going to be hammered I do believe!  There is definitely alcohol in this beer and it's noticeable, but more as a warm feel on the tongue and throat and not much in taste.  Generally the taste is a playfully bourbon sweet overriding what you would think of a nicely balanced stout with a terribly smooth mouthfeel and coffee finish.  The beer is perfectly conditioned with champagne yeast and I think that lends a bit to the finish as well and matches fairly well with the coffee flavours.

The amount of differen't beers that I have tasted is probably about 100 give or take 20.  Actually, probably more.  But there are so many out there and it would be impossible for me to give this a rating as all I have to go on is what I have tried.  My favourite stout is Young's double Choccy Stout to date with MANY close seconds.  This beer is better than Youngs.  To me.  Everyone is different.  But Youngs is more accessible and much cheaper as this bottle is 19 bucks.

OMG I have to drink this whole bottle myself AND get up for work in the AM!  Wish me luck!  And please, PLEASE, give me some feedback!  I'm looking for reference books to learn how to judge beer.  Anyone have a favourite?

-Fish

Happy New Year in Craft Beer!

Well, it's time for me to put pen to paper again!  Too many people have been asking about my blog and I feel that I have let you all down since I became a sausage inspector for a big east coast meat producer.  It's taken much of my focus to become a productive, innovative and reliable employee there and it's paid off.  My job is interesting and it's not a huge deviation from my path towards brewing, where I ultimately want to be.  Woodworking, surfing, and fishing all will remain my hobbies.  I'm not giving up on the woodworking!  NEVER!  But no income has flown my way in the last 3 years and I have to ask myself if it's worth any more investment to try and make it a successful business.  I do know that I want to make brewing professionally my focus.  I just love it too much!  There are so many exceptional craft breweries now doing some truly extraordinary projects that it would be the ultimate expression of myself to be a part of that scene in some fashion.  True, I am a Dogfish Head fan.  Very much so.  Especially now that they are doing this project on early 19th century industrial revolution ales.  Oh, let me find the link for you.  Hold on... 

http://capegazette.villagesoup.com/p/dogfish-doppelganger-drives-new-beer-series/940664


If you are interested in beer and also want to know the kind of projects that I think are the ultimate expression of craft with a reverence of history, you've got to read that article!  I get excited about the implications of melding craft beer with history because, to be dead honest, I think history revolved around beer!  The first written language of ancient Sumeria was developed to tabulate ingredients involved in making beer!  NOT BREAD.  For me, I love to be engrossed in either crafting wood, or crafting beer.  Woodworking allows me to put my demons at ease through hard work and manual expression with a good bit of cerebral putting of "tab A" into "slot B".  Crafting beer is a whole different story.  It involves 80% of your time into deep investigation of that different beer that you want to create with the rest being hard work and on the cuff ingenuity.  For me, much of the research has been looking into gluten free beers and I started off with the most difficult to date with the chestnut mash of 24 hours!  I've since scaled it back to a few experimental sorghum batches because of the amount of time needed, ease of brewing from an extract AND most importantly cost.  Those two chestnut batches cost 180 bucks!  At this point, I can't afford the time or the money for that again any time soon.  I also did two experiments using the second runnings of grains from a porter and a stout batch to produce two batches of beer from one set of grains and did pretty well on both!  The "small beer" from the second runnings is really pleasant!  The Stout that I just made is good, young, but good.  It was a wee bit complicated from the amount of fat from the bakers chocolate in that I got a bit of, what looks like curd, in the beer.  LOL but it settles out.  Next time, I have to be more strict.  I start to get cocky and think that I have it all covered without much thought put into the project and forget to add fresh ginger to a secondary.  Or I even blow off the use of a secondary fermenter when in fact I am experimenting with a new style and the secondary fermenter becomes necessary to eliminate particulates and emulsions.  I also need to be more attentive to conditioning in the keg.  I don't like to force carbonate my kegs.  I haven't had a good experience with that yet.  Conditioning the keg seems the best way to go, it just takes longer I think than bottle conditioning.  My experience so far anyway.  I've kegged about 8 batches now.  In fact, I have some keg work today.  I'm going to pull my Mocha Maryanne out of the kegeration unit and let it condition more.  I have a gallon of Eddie's Small Bier to put back in the kegeration unit and by time that is done, Mocha Maryanne will be conditioned better.  I hope.

So, I want to do a blog called "A Year of Craft Beer" or something like that where I drink a different craft beer every day for a year.  Basically, I'm going to drink a new beer everyday, within my means, and talk a little about it.  I will talk about the resources needed to discuss beer intelligently for a beginner like me.  So far I made one mistake in a purchase in a beer tasting kit which was poorly described on Amazon as a way for a beginner to learn beer tasting.  But it's just a box with paper bags in it to put over top a bunch of different beers with no real instruction on what to do when you taste the beer like smelling first, what to look for in color and carbonation and head, what flavors you initially taste and how to decipher them as well as flavors after you have swallowed it, etc...  Those are things that I need to work on.  This will give me a chance as a beginner to become more knowledgeable about beer varieties and what I like (the most important bit) as well as to hopefully inform my audience a bit about beer and how to judge it.  I will also tackle nutrition and fitness aspects involved with beer drinking.  I think it would be good to write or co-write an article about fitness and do some interviews with different beer judges, and brewers from around the country to find what they do or don't do to stay fit.

 I can do these articles on this blog since it has a following of sorts, OR I can easily though google start another.  If you are still reading this right now, I value your opinion.  What do you think would be best for me, as a guy who wants to put forth his brewing and learn learn learn!

So Here are some pics of the last beer I did with the collaboration of Donny Smith, Chris Simmons, and Joanie Countryman.  This first picture is Mocha Maryanne and Eddie's Small Bier.  They are first and second runnings from the same grains in the mash tun.  While Mocha Maryanne was boiling, I was mashing the same grain for Eddie's Small Bier.  These are out waiting to be bottled and kegged.

Because I didn't secondary ferment, I never added the fresh ginger like I had hoped and after thinking on several different methods on getting the ginger flavor into the beer at this very late point of the process I decided to make one gallon of tea with dried ginger and adding that to the racking bucket along with the different amounts of corn sugar to condition the beer in either bottles or kegs.

I basically just put a few ounces in a muslin bag and boiled on very low for about ten minutes.  It probably could have set longer as I'm not getting much ginger flavor in this batch.  Fresh Ginger in either the boil or secondary is much better!  But this is one example of me not giving my beer my "all" and trying to fix it at the end.  It's all a learning experience, and that is why I love it!

Hey everyone, I've reached my limit on looking at a screen and have run out of things to yap about.  It's great to be back!

Happy New Year!!!!!!!!!

-Sean