How to Homebrew event at Vox Pop

Sorry for the last minute notice, but if there's anyone reading this in Brooklyn, you're welcome to join me and a fellow Brooklyn brewer at Vox Pop at 7:30 tonight for a little How to Homebrew tutorial. Samples will be provided!

Don't rush the chiles

Q: I was wondering how your chili beer turned out since I am thinking about making a chili beer myself

Asked by Andy

A: Hi Andy,

I've actually just been thinking about that chile beer again. A family emergency brought us out to Fort Collins, CO last week, where after all was said and done we made our way down to Coopersmith's so I could have myself a glass of Sigda's Green Chili Ale--the very brew that inspired me last time. I have to say, it was much better than I remember mine being, and not just because it was properly aged. There was a very appealing smokiness to the heat, such that I think when I try it next I'll roast the fresh chiles first to convert them to chipotles.

Still and all, while I'm a big fan of flavored, spiced, and/or fruity beers in general, I think the single most important thing I've learned so far is that you've got to give them time to mellow or that flavor will hit you in the face and you won't even taste the beer. That chile beer was a relatively early effort, back before th'usband and I had learned some moderation and we were doing well if a given batch was in the keg for 10 days before we tapped it. I think we might have even wound up with pumpkin ale on one tap and the chile beer on the other, which embarassed me initially because both were very unbalanced when they were young. I know I whined about it to a brewing friend of mine, who consoled me with the story of a juniper beer he'd made one September, thinking it would be a great winter warmer for the holidays. In fact, it tasted roughly like turpentine that first year, and disappointed, he left the bottles under the steps or some such out of the way place, where they sat undisturbed until--I want to say nine months later, but that's probably just baby on the brain talking--I think he actually must have cracked them the next year, by which time he assured me they were great.

I still haven't done any bottling, though I picked up the stuff to do it and am working on a Belgian ale tonight that could probably really benefit from a nice long sit. I've also got the fixings in the house for a Shakemantle Ginger Ale clone (not that I've tried one--it just sounded interesting) and should get that started now if we want to drink it this summer. Fortunately I also recently was given a fifth keg by BrewUnc #1, and if I manage to keep them all full, I'll have a bit more lagering time built right in.

Good luck with your chile beer. It's definitely worth a try. Proost!

Ask The Huisvrouw a question.

Taking a stab at Bridgeport

Q: Hey Huisvrouw, welcome to Askablogr! I'm a lapsed homebrewer, but if you have one, I'd try a really good recipe for a small batch (5 gals) IPA in the spirit of Bridgeport Brewing Co's. Have one?

Posted by Chris DeVore

A: Hi Chris! Thanks for the link to your Askablogr widget and for this first question!

I'll do my best to answer, though I'm not a big hop head myself; you might have noticed that I'm most partial to yeast, and to fruity and/or spicy adjuncts that tend to make the big boys cry, or at least shake their heads. (I recently read an article about brewesses in Bust magazine supporting my theory that these preferences are typically pretty gendered.) I also must confess that I haven't tried Bridgeport IPA, though in my defense, I'm out of their distribution area.

So what did I do? I first consulted Beer Captured, my favorite recipe book of the moment, and then--both to get a second opinion and to respect their copyright--incorporated a couple of alternate ideas from another homebrewtalk.com member who shares your love of the stuff. Finally, I made a tweak of my own to keep the total number of varieties to five, as per the description on the Bridgeport site. Since you said you're a lapsed brewer, I'm assuming that you are looking for a recipe using malt extracts as opposed to that all-grain hoo-ha. Here you go:

Mash (steep) 1 lb. 40L Crystal Malt for 30 minutes in 1 gallon of 150 degree water.

Strain this water into your brew pot and sparge (rinse) the malt with another 1 1/2 gallons water of the same temperature.

Add 4 lbs Alexanders Pale Malt Syrup and 3.5 lbs. Munton's Extra Light DME. Stir well to dissolve, then add 1 oz of Cascade hops and .5 oz of each of Williamette and Mt. Hood (substitute an equivalent amount of Chinook if any of these aren't available due to the hop shortage). Most recipes tell you to wait until the wort is boiling to add the hops, but this method--called first wort hopping--is purported to produce "a fine, unobtrusive hop aroma...(and) a more uniform bitterness."

Bring your wort to a boil and keep it there for 50 minutes. Throw in a Whirlfloc tablet to aid with clearing the beer and boil for another 8 minutes. Then add 1/2 oz. each of the following aroma hop varieties: Cascade, East Kent Goldings, and Crystal (or Hallertau Hersbruck or Liberty, depending on what's available).

Boil for two more minutes before you take the pot off the heat. Set it in a sink or two of ice water to chill it down to about 120 degrees in about 20 minutes. In the meantime, add 3 gallons of cold water to your sanitized fermentation bucket. Strain the chilled wort into this, snap the lid down, and shake it until your arms hurt to help aerate the wort. Rest for a couple of minutes and repeat the process.

(This shaking business is a refinement I've only recently learned to do myself, after watching a friend brew an all-grain batch a couple of weeks ago. I'm not ready to go all-grain or even convinced that it's worth it, but while I'm thinking that over I've been trying to improve my existing technique in a few key areas, mostly by making better use of the specialty grains through the mashing and sparging process I described above, and by working harder to ensure that my beloved yeasts have the oxygen they need to do their job.)

Hydrate and pitch some American Ale yeast--Safale 05 should be fine. Dry hop for 7 days with 3/4 oz. Cascade hops and either transfer to a secondary fermenter or bottle the stuff.

Good luck! Let me know how it goes!

I feel flinty.

So let me tell you about where I'm at with the whole brewing-as-creative-outlet thing.

A couple of months ago (and you'll forgive me, please, if I repeat myself--it's been awhile since I've written here) I bought two brewing books, Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels (the former Zymurgy editor and frequent For Geeks Only columnist), and Beer Captured by Tess and Mark Szamatulski, owners of the Maltose Express brewing supply store in Monroe, CT. I thought of these books, not-so-secretly, as Brewing for Poets Who Always Liked Chemistry and Brewing for Lazy Asses, respectively. I thought I knew where I'd shake out. I thought wrong.

Designing Great Beers is a beautiful book in theory, with the first half given over to chapter-length discussions of the basic elements of beer, and the second to detailed profiles of different styles of beer, from bock to bitters. The idea is that with a solid understanding of the elements and how they interact, and a clear picture in your mouth of the characteristics of the beer your wish to create, you don't need to rely on recipes.

My problem with Daniels, as it turns out, is one of intellectual orientation. Basically, he is a judge at the Westminster Dog Show and I am a girl who likes mutts. Or rather, I may happen to like a Weimaraner or an Apricot Poodle, but then mostly for reasons that transcend their adherence to breed standards. Daniels--who, to be fair, wrote this book as a distillation of what he learned from a formal diploma course in brewing, and often does serve as that judge at the Westminsters of the craft beer world--cares a lot not just about water quality (as in: what do I need to add to my tap water to most closely approximate the mineral profile in Burton-on-Trent?), but also about precise calculations of target gravity (chapter 6), Maillard browning reactions and Factors That Can Reduce Color Formation in Pale Beers (chapter 7), and Hop Varieties That Show Changes in Hop Aroma Potential During Aging (chapter 10). It's not that I don't care about these things so much as that I keep breaking my hydrometer and/or forgetting to take a reading on brew day, you know? And when it comes right down to it, how much more do I need to know about the alcohol content of my brews beyond what a sip or th'usband will tell me, i.e. that's a boozy one or a little anemic, hmm?

Anyhow, it turns out that I'm using Designing Great Brews mostly for reference, while my real go-to these past months has been Beer Captured, with its 150 good-to-go recipes that closely cop the moves and mojo of well-known craft beers. The truth is, I don't brew beer out of a burning desire to express the heretofore unexpressed. I just like the process, the smells and the stages and the suspense of that first taste. I like it when friends stop by for a pint and I like having one myself whenever I feel like it. It all makes me feel flinty and resourceful, like a pioneer. It is low-tech and elemental. If the world blows up and I survive it, I may not be able to help the next generation build a toaster, but I will see to it that there is beer.

I am still skill-building, though. These past 4 brews, I've paid particular attention to getting the full benefit from the grains I use in addition to malt extracts in the basic wort. I've been heating a gallon or so of water in a smaller pot on the side, and making sure that the grains spend at least 30 minutes steeping ("mashing") at 150 degrees before straining this water into my brew pot and rinsing ("sparging") the grain with enough 170 degree water to bring the total volume up to the standard 2.5-3 gallon range I use for brewing an eventual 5-gallon batch. This liquid smells nutty and has the rich color of sun tea before I even add in the DME (dried malt extract).

I'm also getting comfortable with improvising. I wound up buying a whole pound of this and two pounds of that on my last stock-up run because I didn't want to wait around for pre-measured kits to be made on my behalf. And due to the aforementioned hop shortage, I came home with what was available, as opposed to what each recipe might have specified. On brew days, I've bumped up or substituted quantities of malt or hops as whim or necessity dictated, and have found that I am as comfortable doing so as I am when cooking. I think that means that I've gotten the hang of it.

And finally, I'm trying new varieties of yeasts that have forced me to try new approaches. Daniels' book confirms that while packets of dry yeast typically yield bigger colonies of yeast cells than the liquid suspensions do, these aren't available in as many varieties. (I just saw that I even could have used NBB's proprietary yeast strain for my recent Fat Tire cloning attempt--dang it!) I got my first Wyeast smackpack when I brewed my Saison d'Etre last summer, and continue to be struck with each batch at how very differently yeasts behave, so I guess I just want to try as many kinds as possible. I've also started filling up Tupperwares with the magical sludge ("trub") left after primary fermentation and storing these in the fridge. What trub amounts to is a lot of fat, sleepy yeast cells that drifted to the bottom of the bucket when exhausted from their orgy of eating sugar and pooping CO2 and alcohol and reproducing like a bunch of drunk bunnies. They're sleepy but they're not dead.

Motivated again by a necessary substitution--I could only get the yeast I needed for a British pale ale recipe in a mini "propegator" pack instead of the full-sized "activator" pack--I made a starter today by boiling about 100 g of malt extract in a liter of water. After it cooled, I poured it into a sanitized growler (read that link--it's cool) and added the yeast. It's fermenting away on the kitchen counter, judging from the bready smell that's filling the apartment, and by tomorrow the colony should have grown enough that I can pitch it into my next brew. I consulted with BrewUnc #1 today, who assured me that I could make a starter from my sludge samples in just the same way. That's how breweries develop and maintain their own signature strains, and it's another very cool and elemental thing to love about brewing. I'll let you know how it goes.

Make our love and talent manifest

Th'usband and I are just back from Fort Collins, CO, where we visited family and toured the New Belgium Brewery. If you live in NBB's mostly west-of-the-Mississippi distribution area, you are probably already familiar with Fat Tire, their flagship brew, and perhaps even with a bit of their story. It's a pretty inspiring one, particularly if you like it when conventional wisdom about the values and priorities that undergird a successful business turn out to be wrong. Just fifteen years after a talented couple of homebrewers took their beer to market and the resolve to "Make our love and talent manifest" to heart, New Belgium has grown to be the nation's 3rd largest craft brewery and 9th largest brewery overall. I particularly enjoyed learning about the ingenious ways they've made the brewing process more efficient and environmentally sustainable--from laying out the pipes to foster heat exchange between cool city water headed towards the brew kettles and the hot wort coming of them, to using methane captured in their own water treatment facility to offset their consumption of wind energy--and walking around in a space where the twin powers of form and function beautifully combine. I brewed a Fat Tire clone today, and will raise a glass in a proper salute a couple of months from now.

Looking for a few good hop growers

...actually, I'm looking for a whole bunch, preferably from an array of climate zones. There's a shortage of hops this year, one that will hit craft- (over 15,000 barrels per year) and microbrewers (fewer than 15,000 barrels per year) hard, and homebrewers the hardest. Maltose Express in Connecticut, where I went on Christmas Eve for a much needed stock-up, has had to impose a strict 4-oz. per customer limit, and is frankly out of the more popular varieties. In the coming batches, I'll be substituting Challenger for Yakima Magnum hops, Hallertau for Northern Brewer, and Willamette for almost everything. I'm not really that much of a hop-head (that Bust article I mentioned recently claimed that aggressively hopped beers are more of a guy thing than an American thing per se), but there's no getting around the fact that they are a key ingredient. According to uber brewgeek Ray Daniels,

(Hops) provide bitterness to counteract the sweetness of malt, thus making the beverage more palatable. They also provide some antibacterial properties that at one time increased the safety and potability of beer. Today this quality still aids in the preservation of beer....Hops contribute to head stabilization...(as well as to) appealing flavors and aromas.

Most recipes call for the addition of high alpha acid varieties, also referred to as bittering hops, at the beginning of the one-hour boil to establish the basic sweet/bitter balance of the brew; medium alpha acid varieties, or flavoring hops, about 15 minutes before the end of the boil to contribute to the beer's distinctive flavor profile; and medium-to-low alpha acid varieties, or aroma hops, in the last couple of minutes. Aroma hops can also be tossed in dry and allowed to soak for a week or more as the yeast ferments the wort. This technique is called dry-hopping and produces particularly pungent aromas. Using different varieties and strengths of hops and adding them at different times layers their impact and plays a key role in a beer's complexity.

Anyhow, that's why I need them--and while hop vines are reportedly quite hardy, their root systems are necessarily too big for me to try to grow them in planters on our fire escape. That's where you come in. If you have a fence, trellis, or pole and a place in your garden that gets at least a couple of hours of sun per day, have I got some rhizomes for you. Or more precisely, if you have a good heart and that sunny patch and are someone whom I know, drop me a line and I'll see to it that some suitable plants are delivered to your door in early spring. Some growing tips here. We'll figure out how to ship the cones later.

P.S. I'm serious.

Brew day walk through

On Tuesday, I came home from work to find the smack pack of yeast I'd whacked on Sunday finally swollen to the requisite 2 or so inches, thick enough for the pouch to stand on its own. I haven't been working with liquid yeast for very long and my impression of it is that it's a little fussier and more fragile than dry yeast is--I'd probably still be choosing dry if it were as readily available in specialty varieties like the Belgian Ale yeast that this recipe requires--so I figured I'd brew right away rather than try to put it on hold in the refrigerator. I also figured this would be a good time to find out exactly how long the brew process takes. I estimated 3 hours, but called it about an hour and a half short. Then again, in an effort to continue improving beer quality with each successive batch, I spelled out a couple of steps that I'd abbreviated for many of my previous batches.

I have been brewing for about 8 months now at the rate of 2 or 3 batches a month until the recent career-induced slowdown, and have grown impatient with the kinds of kits that are available at homebrew supply shops. Some are definitely better than others; the good ones identify the hops, malts, and additives that go in at each stage of the boil, and although they rely on dried extracts for most of the malt sugars, they include specialty malts in the form of cracked grains that get soaked in the brewing water prior to the boil. That makes them "partial mash" recipes, and I've learned a lot about what contributes to the flavor profile of a given beer by paying close attention to those ingredients.

You can make very good beer from kits; and because of the exploding interest in brewing and consuming craftbeers, you can probably find a kit to approximate pretty much any beer you've ever heard of. But for me, there are a couple of problems with them. First of all, the whole DIY premise that underpins the hobby seems a bit shaky if someone else is doing all or most of the thinking for you. It's not that the not-so-great kits don't make fine beer--it's just that they have a nasty habit of packaging everything in unmarked foil bags so that when someone raves over your beer you are about as knowledgeable about what's in it as in that cake you made from a mix and frosted from a can. Second, I have the nasty habit of comparing myself to the kind of folks who contribute thousands of posts a year to their favorite brewing community: I don't actually want to be so obsessed with achieving the optimal fermenting temperature that I set up a mini AC system in my closet on brew day, and we'd have a rough time finding room in a New York apartment for the equipment that a truly "from scratch" all-grain operation would require, but secretly I am a bit of a geek. I want to ponder the nose and the optimum timing of the aroma hops, calculate the bitterness and characterize the hue of my finished beer; I want to lower my eyelids and smile modestly when that someone raves about my beer. I want to be able to give it a name, and in order to do that, it has to be mine first.

So I've begun the process of making my beer my own by moving into recipes found in Zymurgy or online and tweaking them ever-so-slightly with the addition of chocolate malt (as in the case of the stout currently on tap) or grains of paradise (as in the current batch I'm about to describe). I'm also trying to improve my technique, whether by adding a second fermenting vessel where the beer can hang out a little longer and clarify, or by adding in a mash phase on brew day, as I did this time.

Here's how brew night proceeded: at 9 p.m., I filled my 5 gallon brew pot about half way up with water and put it on the stove. (Geek option #1: you can get pH testing strips and a set of four chemicals and knock yourself out trying to approximate the well water favored by an ancient brew house. Brooklyn water is fine with me). While it was heating, I snipped open the bags of malted grains--in this case, 2 lbs. of Pilsner, 1 lb. of Cara-pils, 1/2 lb. of Belgian Aromatic, and 1/4 lb. Light Crystal--and poured them into two large muslin bags, knotting off the ends when filled. Malt is grain (usually barley) that was moistened so that it would germinate and the conversion of starch to sugar would begin. Before the seeds could actually sprout, the water was drained off and the barley was heated to dry and toast it. Light beers are made from lightly toasted malts that taste "biscuity," or more or less like grape nuts when you eat them raw; dark beers are made from super heated and caramelized grains that can taste like rich, bittersweet chocolate, caramel, or coffee. In an ideal all-grain world, you'd get all your malt sugars from these grains, crushing and breaking them first, then "mashing" them in a big vat of water maintained at about 150 degrees for an hour or more before "sparging" them with even hotter rinse water to extract every last bit of sweetness from them. Then you'd take the spent malt outside and feet it to your livestock, which would look adoringly at you and reward you with sweet butter and happy-tasting eggs.

Lacking the big huge mash vessel ('tun') and the barnyard, I just put these big muslin tea bags into the 150 degree water and let them soak there for about 30 minutes. I did get fancy and scoop out a 4 quart pot's worth of water, which I heated just short of boiling and used to sparge the bags as I lifted them out of the brew pot. These weighed considerably more than 3.75 lbs. following their soak, and the fact that my efforts to hold them with tongs while I poured scalding water over them didn't land me in a burn unit is something of a miracle. In the past I've just dumped these in at the same time as the malt extract and removed them when the water reached a boil, but higher temperatures can apparently cause bitterness or other off flavors. We'll see if this added step makes a discernible difference in the finished product.

Next came the extract sugars. I turned off the heat under my pot for just a minute to add them in and get them dissolved before bringing the water to a boil and throwing in the first addition of hops, which at this stage of the process add the bitter element that will balance the beer's sweetness. This recipe actually included 3 different kinds of sugar--4 if you make a distinction between the powdered and liquid malt extracts--and I'm hoping that these will add depth of flavor as well as boozy heft to the beer. These sugars are pictured along with a pound of Belgian candi (a.k.a. rock) sugar, a pound of honey, and an ounce each of Cascade and Hillertau Milfreu pellet hops.

After the future beer ("wort") had boiled for 30 minutes, I added a half ounce of Fuggle hops, which will have more of a flavoring effect due to their abbreviated brew time. At 45 minutes, I added some grains of paradise and sweet orange peel. I also put the strainer I'd need in the next step into the pot to boil and sterilize. At 55 minutes, I threw in a Whirlfloc tablet to help clarify the beer (the recipe called for Irish moss, but I've heard that Whirlfloc is more effective) and Czech Saaz hops to give the beer its bouquet. After an hour, I took the pot off the heat and transferred it to a sink of ice water.

I'd already sanitized the pot lid in the iodine solution I was using to prepare the fermenting bucket and a couple of other tools. This went on to the pot at this point to protect the cooling wort from airborne yeasts that could otherwise colonize it. (Note that the Belgian monks who invented the type of beer I was essentially trying to copy relied on wild yeasts alone, but while I'll vouch for Brooklyn water, I'm less sure about the quality of Brooklyn yeast.) For the same reason that you don't want to allow enough time for anything to grow in your nicely sterile pot of boiled wort, you want to cool it as quickly as possible (Geek option #2: you can buy or create a chilling system using a series of chest-sized coolers).

After about 40 minutes, when the wort was cool enough for me to touch (Geek option #3: you probably should use a thermometer a bit more assiduously than I do, but I've baked a lot of bread and know what temperatures make yeast happy), I strained it into my fermenting bucket. With the exception of the bittering hops that went in at the beginning of the boil, I didn't use little mesh bags for my hops this time, which was a mistake considering how messy and slow it made the straining process. I then topped off the wort with enough tap water (which comes pre-sanitized by the city of New York) to make 5 gallons, and would have gone so far as to measure the amount of suspended matter with a hydrometer at this point (so that I could have participated in Geek option #4, which is to compare this figure with the amount of suspended matter left after the yeast has fermented away all the sugar and calculate the percentage of alcohol from this difference) except that I'd managed to break my hydrometer on the counter while struggling to shift and strain the pot. Oh, well.

The last step was to snip open the bag of yeast, pour it in, snap on the lid and fill the attached airlock with enough water to make the little inner cap float. It was by this time about 1:30 in the morning, so I left the whole business in the sink and flopped into bed. In the morning, I tested the lid and saw that pressure was building, and by the time I came home from work that night, the air lock was bubbling and heaving like a lung. My beer was alive and well, and the primary fermenting stage had begun.

How to Homebrew date slated

Hello, hello.

It's been awhile. I'm still adjusting to working a regular job after 4 years as a freelancer. Taking the train into Manhattan every day has made me feel much more like a real New Yorker, but it's eaten into my blog time a bit.

I haven't been brewing much lately, either, but all of that is about to change. I just smacked a smackpack of liquid Belgian ale yeast, releasing the contents of a nutritive pouch into a purported 100 million dormant yeast cells, and hope to be able to brew the Saffron Tripel you chose as this year's official holiday ale tomorrow. I've also been browsing a couple of awesome books with an eye towards lining up the next several batches. It may still be 80 degrees out there, but they tell me winter's coming, and that's the weather our little apartment is made for. I need to get busy if I'd like to have beer on tap throughout party season. And if you had my bar, wouldn't you want to?

Here's the cool news. I recently met S., chief instigator at neighborhood joint (for lack of a better all-encompassing word) Vox Pop, who invited me to dream up a homebrewing how-to talk, to presented con cerveza and a little manual, written by yours truly and produced on the Vox Pop printing presses. I figure I'll sketch and develop the contents of said book right here on this blog, which means I'll definitely be posting more, too. Mark your calendar for December 15 if you live in Brooklyn or thereabouts. If you are far, far away, we'll have to muddle along without you--but I'll welcome your comments and suggestions. Go ahead and Ask.the.Huisvrouw (@gmail.com) anything you ever wanted to know about homebrewing but were afraid to ask.

Make that a Tripel...and then a Quadrupel

Well, the masses have spoken. As there was a tie between candidates for my forthcoming holiday brew, I'll just have to make both the Saffron Tripel and the Caramel Quadrupel. I found a promising base recipe for the Tripel and the ingredients are already on their way; I'm not sure exactly what makes a quadrupel a quadrupel other than more sugar (caramel, anyone?) leading to a greater alcohol content, but I'll figure that out this weekend when none other than my three BrewUncs pay me a collective visit. These are going to be some boozy brews, so I need to get them bottled and aging as soon as I can. Ho ho ho.

Brewing by committee

Someone did th'usband and me a tremendous kindness, and although we can't repay that individual, it was pointed out to me that beer is always welcome. Then it hit me that right about now would be the time to get some holiday brews going anyhow, and the next thing I knew, I was planning a big step backwards, as it were, from the spiffy keg system I started with into more portable and gift-worthy bottles. Now all that's left is to choose my recipe.

I've posted four possibilities for your polling pleasure, selected from a list of a delectable dozen holiday beers dreamed up by one Randy Mosher. If you'd be so kind as to vote (look up to the right for the poll) for the one you'd theoretically be happiest to receive a couple of months down the road (I'm not making any promises, but if you live & move in my world it's not at all out of the question), I'd be much obliged. Here are the descriptions and how-to's for the finalists:

1. Caramel Quadrupel. Gravity: 1100; color: deep reddish brown.

A caramelized sugar and malt mixture imparts a lingering toffee-like quality. Mix a pound each of light malt extract and white sugar in a heavy saucepan. Heat until the mixture melts; stir only enough to mix together and continue heating until it starts to darken. Use your judgment about when to stop. Once it starts to brown, things happen quickly, but it can get fairly dark before it will make the beer taste burnt. When done, remove from the stove and cool by lowering the pan into a larger pan of water. Once cooled, add brewing water and reheat to dissolve the caramel, then add to your brew in progress.

2. Saffron Tripel. Gravity: 1090; color: orange-gold.

Pick your favorite Belgian tripel recipe as a start. If there’s no sugar in it, substitute 20 percent of the base malt for some unrefined sugar, such as turbinado or piloncillo. Jaggery (Indian palm sugar) is lovely. Add the zest of one orange at the end of the boil, along with a pinch of crushed grains of paradise or black pepper. Ferment with Belgian ale yeast, and add 1/2 teaspoon saffron threads after transferring to the secondary.

3. Crabapple Lambicky Ale. Gravity: 1050; color: pale pink.

Crabapples add not only a festive touch, but tannins and acidity as well, which makes it easier to get that tart, champagne-like character without extended aging. Brew a simple pale wheat recipe. If mashing, go low (145 degrees) and long (2 hours). Ferment with ale yeast, Belgian or otherwise. Obtain 3 to 4 pounds of crabapples (cranberries work also), wash well, then freeze. Thaw and add to the beer when it is transferred to the secondary, along with a package of Wyeast mixed lambic culture. Allow to age on the fruit for two months, then rack, allow to clear, then bottle. Lambic character will continue to increase with time.

4. Spiced Bourbon Stout. Gravity: 1050; color: India ink.

Take your favorite stout recipe and dose it with a vodka infusion. Into 6 ounces of vodka and 2 ounces of bourbon (more if you wish), add 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract, 1/4 teaspoon allspice, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, 2 tablespoons crushed coriander, 1 whole star anise (or 1/4 teaspoon ground), 1/4 cup crushed juniper and a pinch of black pepper. When beer is ready to package, pull off some 1-ounce samples. Use a pipette or syringe to dose the samples with the strained infusion, increasing until you find the right dose. Then scale up and add an appropriate amount, plus a little extra to account for aging.

On tap: Saison d'etre

In the past month, I've made the decision to leave my freelance existence behind and give corporate life a whirl. I'm really excited about it, but all the interviewing and thinking it over and tying up of loose ends has left little room in my head for blogging or beer.

But if you could just taste what I've got on tap--the self-same saison, or Belgian farmhouse ale I cooked up with that groovy heat-loving yeast--you'd have figured out weeks ago that there must be some huge topsy-turvy something going on, or else I'd surely be bragging about it.

Quite simply, my Saison d'etre is perfect. Thanks to two-stage fermentation, it's crystal clear and deliriously amber in color; thanks to that yeast, it's complex and peppery and fruity but still dry. Saison d'etre is also quite boozy, th'usband has pointed out, though exactly how boozy I couldn't say...I only just this week got a hydrometer. Maybe 6%-7%. I might mellow it out a little bit next time to make it a lighter, more summery beer, but for now, I'm glad for anything that keeps us from swilling it down too quickly. I've just learned that my three Brewing Uncles are paying me a collective visit in a couple of weeks, and I'd love to have some left for them to try.

What's more likely is that we'll polish it off before then, and be down to what's been a rather disappointing batch of chili beer. I modeled it on a crisp and frisky brew I'd tried last summer in Fort Collins, CO, but while mine has some appreciable heat, there's really not enough beer behind it to make that interesting. I began scrambling around last week for ingredients for a new, more conventional seasonal beer, but wound up with a kit containing liquid yeast that is taking forever--2 days and counting--to reanimate. Even if I am able to brew tomorrow, the resulting beer will still be too young to drink by the time they get here.

Ah, well. Here's a picture to remember her by.

Ask the Huisvrouw: Hefeweizen and Hangovers

Many thanks to a concerned citizen, who by directing said concern my way (see below) nudged me back into the blogosphere:

dear Huisvrouw:

you seem to have a preoccupation with yeast. interesting.

a question: what's this i hear about hefeweizen and its positive prophylactic qualities (in the matter of hangover avoidance)?

signed,
a concerned citizen

Dear concerned citizen:

I do indeed love yeast. I think that ultimately my love comes down to mystification, and that in this I share the awe that brewers, bakers, and vintners must have felt for hundreds and thousands of years prior to 1859, when Louis Pasteur traced the phenomenon of bread rising to the CO2 pooped out by happy, gluttonous colonies of yeast cells.

Think about it: completely oblivious to microscopic life that teemed about them, these people nonetheless trusted that if they exposed a flour-and-water sponge to air, it would start to bubble and they could look forward to a nice loaf of sourdough; or if they dipped a stick into a vat of particularly tasty beer, carried that stick to the next village and swished it around in their own vat, the resulting beer might share many of the same flavor characteristics of that first batch; or to go way back, or way deep into the present-day Amazon, womenfolk could spit into a cauldron of cassava mash and a few days later they'd have a drinkable brew. It must have felt like magic, or at the very least reinforced a belief in the universe as an overwhelmingly friendly place.

Even now that we can see the wizard behind the curtain, it's still pretty cool. Properly understood, the yeasts we use in baking and brewing are domesticated organisms. They're fungi, yes, but I still tend to think of them as little beasties, because the rhyme is endearing and because like us and unlike plants, they can't generate their own food out of solar energy but thrive by breaking that plant matter down.

But I digress. After creating this opening for me to natter on about yeast, you then asked about hefeweizen and hangovers, which makes me suspect you already have an inkling of the most scientific explanation for the hefeweizen effect. Hefeweizen is a style of deliberately unfiltered wheat beer that owes its cloudiness to suspended yeast. Yeast has a strong impact on the flavor profile of beer--which is to say that not all yeast poop tastes the same--and a good bartender will deliberately pour a bottle of hefeweizen to stir it up.

Binge drinking of alcohol--the kind of behavior that produces hangovers--not only dehydrates you, it impedes absorption of B vitamins, including vitamin B12 and folate. The resulting imbalance makes you tired and fuzzy-headed. But as many homebrewers will gleefully tell you, the yeasts contained in hefeweizen and their own imperfectly filtered brews are a great source of B vitamins: hence, hangover protection. This effect actually checks out with some actual studies, though I've heard a lot of chatter about B12, when the only B vitamin reputably traced to beer is folate; if I understand correctly, only meat, eggs, and dairy products supply B12.

[No, wait, hold the phone....I just ran a generic 12-oz. serving of BEER, ALE through My Pyramid Tracker (love it) and came up with 21.6 micrograms of folate, .2 mcg of B6, and .1 mcg of B12. Those are pretty trace amounts, but presumably they would be more substantial in an unfiltered beer like hefeweizen or homebrew.]

Craftbeers also tend to be more conducive to savoring than some of the more poundable commercial giants (and hefeweizen, like many other summery wheat styles, tries to be crisp and refreshing rather than big and boozy), so maybe moderation plays some role in the hefeweizen effect. I'd still drink a nice big glass of water before you go to bed--but then rest easy, because the beasties are your friends.

Sincerely,
the Huisvrouw

(botulism free) Chile beer: a recipe

Most of the cool farm wives and frugal huisvrouwen these days freeze rather than can, but I've always been fascinated with jars of preserves.

It's complicated. It's about going down into the dank, slightly scary basement at my grandparent's house in earliest memory to pick out a quart jar of beans or peas, and how much I would give to be standing there now. It's about the home ec barn at the Minnesota State Fair, where the colors and patterns of backlit preserves rival those of the quilt display. It's about a kitchen 10 miles out of Athens, OH, where A. and I put up apples and tomatoes, lining up the jars on shelves by a window that framed frosty laundry and a defunct pump in the yard.

And it's about botulism toxin, the stuff that stills the palsied and spastic and makes so many New Yorkers look smooth and impassive, that grows in oxygen-deprived spaces and that is lethal in in doses above one microgram. And that is potentially lurking in tens of millions of cans of chili sauces, hash, beans, and other meat- and chili-containing products made by Castleberry Food Co. for major store brands like Meijers, Krogers, Piggly Wiggly, Food Club over the past two years. (For a complete recall list, click here.)

All the more reason to cook up your own tasty chile products at home. Here's my recipe for chile beer, adapted from Shawn Davis and Fred Colby's 'Hot Chihuahua' Jalapeno and Santa Fe Chile Blonde Ale (Zymurgy Sept/Oct 2005) and originally inspired by Sigda's Green Chili Beer. I just cooked it up yesterday so I can't speak for the results yet, and honestly, several critical recipe alterations were the unintended consequences of mistakes. It is bubbling furiously right now, though, and you know how much I love that.

for 5 gallons/19 liters:

• 7.5 lbs. (give or take) Cooper's Light malt extract
• .5 lb 80L crystal malt
• .5 lb clear candi sugar
• 1 oz N. Brewer pellet hops, added at the start of the boil
• 1.5 oz. Cascade flower hops, added with 15 minutes left on the boil
• [This would also have been a great time to throw in an oz. of ground coriander seed to give the beer a little citrusy something something, but I forgot. On the other hand, it's deep summer and our apartment is never in the temperature range (70-75 degrees, tops) recommended to prevent 'fruity esters' from cropping up in my beer, so I guess I can just leave it to the little yeasties.]
• Irish moss added in the last couple of minutes to clarify
  
• [Usually I use Whirlfloc tabs, but dried seaweed seemed much more sporting.]

After the wort was cool, I pitched Windsor yeast. This was a mistake; I was supposed to use Doric Ale yeast, which apparently I must have thrown in my Irish red batch a couple of weeks ago, also by mistake. I haven't found a really detailed description of the flavors imparted by either one, but I have no complaints about the work ethic of the Windsor strain in this batch.

Primary:

• Dry hop with 3 oz. of dried Guajillo chiles and 3 oz. of dried New Mexico chiles.

Secondary:

• Dry hop with .5 oz flower hops; I'll probably use Saaz.
  

Kegging/bottling day:

• I plan to chop up 3 fresh serrano chiles--I like them better than Jalapenos and anyhow that's what's in Sigda's--boil them in 2 c. water, strain out the chiles and throw the cooled water in the keg along with the priming sugar.

the importance of secondary fermentation: the jury is still out

This morning I moved the Irish red ale from my new secondary fermenter, a glass carboy, into a keg, and then the Saison that was the source of all that ruckus a couple of weeks ago from the plastic primary fermenting bucket into the glass carboy. This involved a considerable amount of washing and sanitizing, not to mention an episode of spatial impossibility when it came to extracting a muslin bag of hops from the carboy's 2-inch neck. It was floating at the top like a big tea bag, so it wasn't hard to snag it and pull the first couple of inches through, but eventually I had to cut the bag open and pull out successive wads of hops until finally I could wrest the rest out; it brought camels and eyes of needles to mind, and the certainty that there has to be a better way...right?

Two-stage brewing purportedly makes for clearer beer; sure enough, only a small amount of trub had collected following transfer from the primary fermenter, and it was easy to leave this behind when I siphoned the beer into a keg for the final conditioning phase. Worth the hassle? I'll let you know when we tap it.

The Saison continues to be a mystery. Fermentation had slowed but not entirely stopped, judging from the 2-3 lazy bubbles per minute still visible in the airlock this morning, 10 days after the batch was brewed. I wanted to get the beer into glass, though, to prevent it from oxidizing. I don't really know what that means in a beer quality sense, but it sounds bad; anyhow, I want to be able to keg it by the end of next week, when we're headed away for a few days, so there was no more time to delay. I heaved the bucket up onto the kitchen cabinet at the beginning of the whole process so it would have time to settle before siphoning. When I finally pulled off the lid, though, I saw evidence of the most cataclysmic fermentation my bucket has ever known. There was trub blown all the way to the top of its walls, trub caked and dried on the underside of the lid, trub creeping up the airlock's central tube, impossible to remove. I'm not sure what this means, if anything; I just know that it's as different from the scant inch or so of mayhem that I usually scrape off the fermenter as the 10 days were from the customary 2, and I'm really curious to taste the results in about a month.

If I have time tonight, I think I'll finally make that chile beer.

yeast poop, continued

I cannot emphasize enough how much I love this Saison yeast (Wyeast 3724).

Generally speaking, the active fermentation stage in brewing goes all too fast. Somewhere between 4 and 12 hours after adding ('pitching' in brewer-speak) the yeast, the airlock starts bubbling and the air fills with the smell of rising bread. It's my favorite part and I could hover around all day loving it, except that it tends to be all over with by the time I think to look again. The first time this happened, I freaked out, requiring multiple telephonic assurances from my Brewing Uncles that there had not been some kind of catastrophic yeast blight. By now I've gotten used to it, but it's always a little disappointing, like fireworks can be. Just when it's getting good, poof.

Anyhow, this batch got started on Saturday night and is still bubbling along slowly. I have no hydrometer or the kind of patience it would take to measure the amount of malt sugars left in solution. All I really need to know is that for four days, a colony of living fungi has been living fat and happy off of my beer, chomping up the malt sugars and pooping out CO2 and alcohol. Mine is a rough science.

From everything I've read, this slow attenuation, besides providing good, relatively cheap entertainment for the better part of a week, will result in a dry, estery brew. That's really the word They use, estery. It means perfumey, more or less; fruity like pineapple, banana, or bubblegum. That may sound gross in association with beer, but I'm imagining something with a wine-like character, a fruity pucker. And it's incredible to think that those flavors are the byproducts of little one-celled mushroom geniuses, or that anyone ever was smart enough to figure this out.

The hard part is going to be waiting to tap this eventual keg. The same sources that tantalize me with aromas of juicy fruit also insist that it takes around 10 weeks for Belgian yeasts to hit their stride. I may just have to take that on faith; I want to be drinking this stuff before the saison ends.

back to the yeast again

...I forgot to mention the other cool thought I thunk or maybe just read in Omnivore's Dilemma with regards to yeast: that is, that beer is what you find at the intersection of the four elements...of water, of course, and earth in the form of grain; of fire as heat, and yeast from the air. Isn't that fabulous?

in praise of the sturdiness of yeast

In the last meal that food journalist Michael Pollan prepares in Omnivore's Dilemma--the meal assembled of hunted and foraged ingredients--he makes an interesting comment with regards to the bread. It's a sourdough, made from a strain of yeast Pollan captured in his yard. The air around us is teeming with microscopic yeast spores, so all you really have to do to get a starter going is to create an environment with the food and moisture yeast need to thrive and let nature do its thing. Pollan mixes flour and water to make a loose paste and waves the container around in the air for a few seconds before covering it. Within a day, he's got a bubbling, beery smelling sponge, a live culture of yeast that he can use to leaven his bread.

Recalling that incident comforted me yesterday in the moments--OK, not the first moments, but within the first hour--following a long chain of brewing mishaps that culiminated with the discovery that my yeast had not been incubating for the past several hours as I'd thought. I'd been pondering and mixing and boiling rather expensive ingredients all afternoon in my first attempt at beer recipe development, and waiting several hours to properly culture that yeast would put the cooled wort at risk of bacterial infection. I panicked and threw the contents of the yeast packet in cold.

I've been off my game a bit lately, culinarily speaking. Last Monday, in a fit of let me just clear out the refrigerator here before the next CSA pickup frenzy, I'd made a dinner that was nothing short of God awful. In one pan I had Swiss chard with olives and raisins, in another pea pods and garlic, and in a third, hanger steaks with some red wine, mustard and stock that I was trying to use as a braising liquid for mustard greens while still keeping the steaks well left of medium. Oh, and I forgot (then as now), a saucepan full of red lentils on the back burner. Needless to say, the steaks were way overdone and tough; the mustard green "sauce" I'd cooked them in a stringy, disconcertingly greyish mess; the lentils blown apart into so much baby food. Th'usband tried to put on a brave face and assured me that "most people would think of this as a fine, homecooked meal," but though I might have graciously accepted such a meal had Most People in fact made it for me, what with my pride all mixed up in there it was really, really hard to swallow.

To make it worse, a few days earlier, I truly had made that roast chicken I'd been going on about, a lovely meal to warm the kitchen and the cockles of one's heart--in November. Outside and now in our kitchen, it was at least 95 degrees. How was I managing to take all these fresh, locally produced, seasonal ingredients and turn them into such heavy, wintery meals?

But then get this: the day after the steak disaster, needing to pack a lunch for a day at the office, I filled a to go container with arugula, layered it with the swiss chard and olives stuff, and topped it with a few strips of steak. . . and Reader, it was gorgeous: peppery, summery, and light. I repeated that lunch 2 or 3 times before it was all gone, and was sorry to see it go. Sometimes food is merciful like that.

As I learned last night, so is yeast, particularly the Belgian strain I was using for this particular batch of Saison beer. Tim at Bierkraft had introduced me to the style, explaining that it was farmhouse ale traditionally made in the spring to ration out (at the rate of 4 or 5 liters per day) to summer field hands. No one was using fussy, refrigerated yeast cultures; some brewers just left their wort in vats open to the air, and others carried yeast strains from village to village on the end of a stick. (This notion comforts me too, in that lacking a Y chromosome, I don't seem to have the crazed sanitation gene common to most other brewers.) In the words of Erik the Brewmeister--who'd sold me the yeast in the first place, then spent the better part of Friday and Saturday calming me down when I started freaking out about the wisdom of shipping liquid yeast cross country on the hottest week to date of the summer--

Saison yeast is about as bullet proof as anything. After all, Saison's or Farmhouse Ales were made up of just about anything the brewers had that would ferment, and fermented in the barn, so hot temperatures and stressed yeast just adds to the complexity and is normal. Seriously, it will be fruity and estery, but it is that way anyhow.

I really hadn't set out to make a seasonally appropriate beer, but it turns out that I did. And the happy ending to the whole story is that five or six hours later, when th'usband and I returned from a dinner to celebrate the near-completion of his (totally excellent) documentary and keep me from doing violence to myself or flushing the wort down the toilet, fermentation had set in. Tick, tick, tick goes the little bubble in my airlock. Bring on the fruity esterytude! And long live this streak of successful batches brewed in a stuffy 1-BR apartment in the heat of a New York summer!

Chile beer? Hold, please....

Finally some traffic from brewers! I was getting a swelled head about how many hits I got this week until I traced pretty much all of them back to a homebrewing forum's interest in those Kathy Ireland pics. (Sigh...and here I thought it was my legs that you loved.)

Well, welcome Kathy-obsessed homebrewers, because the upshot for me so far has been a helpful tip--thanks, Ron & Brenda--with regards to my current batch of would-be chile beer. It seems that chile oils wreak havoc on head generated by barley malts, so you're best off adding some wheat or Cara-pils, a.k.a. Dextrin malt.

Anyhow, the English Pale Ale I had hoped to dry-hop with chiles during the secondary fermentation stage didn't contain either of these head retainers, so I decided to keg it just as it was yesterday. I then dug around in a bunch of old Zymurgies until I found a wheat-containing, contest-winning recipe for 'chili' ale, as well as one for that (Belgian) saison-style I'd been wanting to make. Things are getting a bit more complicated, as I had to go beyond my usual supplier to find the specific yeasts these recipes require. (Can someone please explain to me why there is no brew supply store anywhere in the five boroughs?!) I'm also about to have my first experience with liquid malt extract and yeast. Meanwhile, New York is finally starting to heat up, and the witbier, my current light offering, is going fast--so I have a hunch that I'll be glad to have the plain old English Pale to fall back on with so much experimenting going on.

beer update

I haven't said much about the beer lately. We're back to having two different brews on tap, a Witbier and a Porter, after running dry following my birthday party last month. I'm quite pleased with both, and like the contrast of light and dark beers.

Yesterday, I cooked up a batch of pale ale that I intend to dry hop with chiles when I transfer it to my new secondary fermenter, a glass carboy that minimizes oxidation and hence permits longer lagering. A recipe I found for chile beer in Zymurgy recommended 'New Mexico chiles,' which I don't think are available around here, but since the real inspiration for this batch was an unforgettable pint of Sigda's Green Chili at Coopersmith's Pub last summer in Fort Collins, I think I'll go with their mix of Anaheim and serrano chiles. I'd love some quantity guidelines from any brewers out there who might be reading this.

brew news

On Thursday I kegged the batch of Belgian Witbier that I made the week before. Like all 'white' beers it owes its light color and refreshing taste to the partial substitution of wheat for barley. I also brewed up a batch of Porter, based on a standard English Sweet Porter kit but with chocolate malt (the grain, not the ice cream drink) added. It smelled great as it was all going into the pot, and when I took it off of the boil, I noticed an extra creaminess owing to the rolled oats in that recipe. There was a bit of a sanitation breakdown towards the end when I was trying to strain it all into the fermenter--first the doorbell was ringing ('Do you want an exterminator, Mami?') and the dog was barking and then the phone was ringing (twice) and both the dog and the cat were running crazed circles around the kitchen past the open lid of the fermenter--but hopefully I'll get away with it. If you're nervous about it and you stop by, you can have a nice summery glass of the Wit instead.

Meanwhile, th'usband has ordered me some more brewing gear for my birthday, namely a fourth keg and a second fermenter. This new fermenter is to be a glass carboy, which is purportedly better when you can't keg right away because the glass protects the beer from oxidation. Having a second will also allow me to space batches closer together and to clarify them with a two-stage fermentation process.

Many beers with a hoppy aroma get it from an addition of hops to the secondary fermentation stage, 4-7 days prior to bottling or kegging day. What I'm wondering is how that works given the narrow neck of a glass carboy. I guess I can't use a muslin bag with plug hops or it will expand like a sponge in there and I'll never get it out. If anyone out there is a brewer, I'm asking what may seem obvious to you: what do I do? Just throw the hops in there loose so I can rinse them out later? Am I missing something?