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.

voor wie ik lief heb wil ik heten

I've been brewing, four batches since the New Year.

I've been reading.

I've made it to the park with the dog 5 mornings in a row.

The other morning in the shower, I even knew what I would say here. What story I would tell. I was smiling at the time. I forgot.

I can't put off writing this any longer.

On January 6, my beloved grandmother died. We were very, very close.

I've told the story a hundred times already, and winced at how I keep telling it the same way. How she was 98, but still beating us at Scrabble. How she'd only just the day before got a hankering for Chex Mix, and made three ice cream buckets full with my uncle, her youngest son, who happened to be there visiting. How she had a little stomach bug, but urged everyone to go to church without her, then sat at the table while everyone had a little soup at noon because she'd be damned if she missed out on anything. How when they finished and she was too weak to walk, her youngest and her oldest carried her to the car, where she drifted off past Sedan, halfway to the hospital. How a letter came from her the day after she died, as I'd hoped and deep down knew it would, and how I laughed despite myself when th'usband read her words out loud to me, and finished with her blessing.

What I've really wanted to say is something about how she lived, but those words haven't come to me yet. The best gift I've received? A friend listened to all of the above and then asked me, so tenderly, "What was her name?" And let me say it. Her name was Helena Hillegonda Segaar TeBrake, and I loved her.

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.

crazy, the sequel

Yep, it was her--the Minneapolis girl and my alter ego. We've decided to keep each other.

crazy

Here is a story.

In my early-to-mid twenties, I became aware of another person with the same name as mine. I ordered a new pair of frames, and when I arrived to pick them up, the optometrist handed me the other girl's glasses. I'd call for a haircut appointment, and the receptionist at the salon would say, "Weren't you just here last week? No, wait, that must have been the other one." Once in a shi-shi stationery store, a saleswoman urged me to "sign the guest book"--and when I bent to comply, I saw that the name inked just above mine was, well, mine.

I got pretty paranoid about it. This was in Minnesota, where my family is from and where my parents had returned after a detour to the East that had taken up most of my kidhood. Minneapolis isn't a huge city, but it is funky and offbeat, and I thought of myself as funky and offbeat; and I'd just be there for a brief visit, seeing what there was to see, and not only was there someone running around with my name on, but we appeared to have similar tastes and habits. What if she's not as cool as I am and she's giving me a bad name? I worried. Or worse, what if she's way, way cooler than I am?

What our name is is not important. It could have been, it might have been you, you understand. Don't pretend you were any more secure back then. That's just not what those years were about.

Anyhow, time passed and Google was invented. If you type in our name today you get 5,910 hits. About 150 are for a real estate agent in Seattle, a chemist who works in the same general field as my brother, or a romance novelist. When th'usband and I first met, he dredged up maybe three or four that were about or by me; the other 5,756 or so are all Her. She's a well-known photographer with a show this week in the West Village. She's the type of artist that critics call a Beautiful Young Thing or a Glamour Puss when they're trying to be withering. Mostly they just can't stop talking about her.

I still get mistaken for her every once in awhile, because we are about the same age and both live in Brooklyn and although I'm no longer making art, I still really like the stuff. After I read--in an interview in my favorite magazine ever, naturally--that she suspects her "completely un-feminist" tendency to conflate the beautiful with the broken woman traces to the back brace she wore in junior high and high school, I knew I really wanted to meet her. "I think that that had a lot to do with the outside isn't what the inside looks like," she explained in the interview. "I didn't have the kind of brace you could see, it was under my clothes, but it was hard...." I nodded reflexively as I read. Me, too. That's how the one I wore was, that's the way I am, too.

I'd actually forgotten about the back brace thing when a package intended for her showed up at our apartment this week. It was full of DVDs about the 10th Mountain Division, soldiers who'd fought on skis in the Alps before coming home to found resorts like Aspen and Vail. The documentary makers shared our family name. "This is beyond coincidence," said th'usband, who is a aspiring documentary filmmaker and a World War II freak. He'd just been telling me about the 10th Mountain Division the other day.

I had to do a little bit of digging, but I found her number and gave her a call. The filmmakers were her parents, who live near my inlaws in Colorado. It turns out that she did live in Minneapolis for a little while, and that we live just a couple of neighborhoods away from each other now. "I know you're much cooler than I am," I told her, "but I'm OK with it." She laughed, protesting. Come to think of it, now I'm not even sure that's true--not because she didn't seem incredibly cool or because I'm still an insecure little wanna be, but because she seemed instantly familiar, like someone I've been friends with forever. In any case, we'll find out tomorrow, when we meet at last.

Ask the Huisvrouw: Hello? Hello?

so what's the deal? no time to blog while basking on a beach in mexico? or have you been stuck in a hotel room the whole time? we the readers need a beer, book, baking, beast update. at least copy in a letter to grandma so we know what's going on over there . . . .

No, no, I'm back. I'll get right on that. Soon. In the meantime, here are some things to read:

1. A long interview with my friend Alberto Blanco published serially. It's about poemas. I've been reading a new bilingual edition of his work put out by Bitter Oleander, and thinking a lot about the act of translation again: what I like, what I don't. So that's one thing.
2. Dorris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech. Those are always good. Thanks, jvan.
3. Oh, yeah, read jvan's blog. It's pretty impressive, and besides, if we wear a groove into the links between the two pages my technorati rating might go up.
4. An article in the current issue of Bust about female beer makers that someone passed along to me and that doesn't seem to be online. Damn. I'll have to summarize that.
5. Further evidence of the unstoppable power of this wave we're on.
6. ....except that we postponed the How to Homebrew event, drank that whole keg of saffron tripel and I haven't been brewing. Gotta get on that. I think I'm going to check out these folks. Or these. Have I mentioned how ridiculous it is that there isn't a dedicated supply store in NYC? Gotta get on that, too.
7. We did go here and got whacked with oak leaves by Russians. Thanks, J.
8. I'm trying to do a Zen mental flip on a difficult acquaintance. It's, well, difficult, but she did point this out to me yesterday, which was great.
9. OK, and to make sure you don't get anything done at work today, check out this teapot video and feel your own dry, clenched little inner flower unfurl.

That oughtta keep you busy. Meantime, I've gotta go to work.

Ciao, bella/o