Beer Obsessed: Beer and Brewing Journal

young cherry melomel still needing to clear

Mead making is easy, juggling fermentations and rackings is tricky. While I have enjoyed putting together many different meads, I forgot the extra commitment there is during fermentation and subsequent rackings (as compared to beer, which is nil). I have six meads right now that I have to track on a spreadsheet in order to know when one is coming up for racking, or a nutrient addition, or general stirring. So far, it has been a great experience and I have learned a ton about honey, dry yeast (dry wine yeast in particular), and managing the fermentations of.

Cherry Melomel notes
I initially racked two gallons of Orange Blossom honey mead onto four pounds of stemmed and pitted Tulare sweet cherries. All of this went into a 2.5 gallon corny keg for three weeks. I pushed the liquid off of the cherries via CO2 to keep things within a closed environment. New carboys were backfilled with CO2 as well. I estimated the original gravity (amount of original sugars in the must), with cherries, to be about 1.106. Final gravity is 1.000 giving about a 14% ABV alcohol level. The kitchen was filled with the smell of cherries and alcohol.
I had read on the web that sweet cherries should be avoided due to “cough syrup” tastes. I also read that those flavors will dissapate over time. I didn’t have any cough syrup notes at all. The melomel seems pretty balanced with firm tannins (felt like my gums were getting cleaned). One of the reasons I pulled the cherries off after three weeks was to avoid any issues with long skin contact time. The tannins I did get much more mellow with time. This one seems to be shaping up well.

Joes Ancient Orange fermenting under my desk

JAO
It seems that when you are new to a topic and you start exploring it, you run across an acronym that everyone refers to but you have now idea. Searching on the acronym in the forums ususally leads to “your search term is too short” or something to that effect….probably a by product of spammers searching forums. With mead, it was “JAO”.
So I finally found the answer: Joe’s Ancient Orange. This is a pretty intriguing, simple to put together recipe that uses bread yeast….hence the ancient part(?). Many users swear that after a couple months you are left with a very tasty beverage for not much work. I have one gallon now sitting under my desk at work. If anything, I’ll name it “office hooch” and I’m sure we will all enjoy it. FWIW, fleischmanns bread yeast is a vigorous fermenter. The orange and raisins help but as you can see the airlock is full of yeasty must and some has even settled out in it. I actually left some headroom in it. When the vigorous portion of the ferment subsides, I plan to top up with honey water.

Gary standing over the beers you received in your registration bag. A Saison by Port Brewing and an IPA by Alpine brewing. Both were fantastic.

The numbers this year for the National Homebrewers Conference were impressive. The event was sold out for the second year in a row…there were 1100 attendees. Pro Brewers night had 52 brewers. Yes, that is 21 attendees for every brewery there. Club night had over 30 clubs in attendance.
Oakland and the west coast showed their pride in their land (and there beer) and came up with the goods. I caught up with Gary last Friday and asked him a bit about this. Check out the audio below:

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Thank you to the AHA, the volunteers, and everyone I met or didn’t meet. NHC 2009 was a great time. I’m looking forward already to Minnesota in 2010…and I better start talking with the family now.

Two of the west coasts finest in both pro brewing and homebrewing. Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing Co. and Oakland resident, Nathan Smith who has beers in the final round of the nationals.

First off, I have to admit that this is my first NHC ever. As a homebrewer on and off for 20 years, I figured having it in my hometown was excuse enough to go and I’m glad I went. So far, I’m pretty sure I’m going every year no matter where it is.
I realized on my way to the convention that my brewing is pretty siloed in that I don’t have a lot of regular friends to talk with about brewing. I have made some professional-type connections through the website but no regulars. I was a bit nervous as I was about to go hang out with my tribe of people who I have never really met.Fortunately,  we have a lot in common. I did end up talking to folks and everyone has been great so far. I reconnected with some acquaintances that I haven’t seen in a while either. Hopefully what I get out of this weekend are some new friends who share a hobby that is near and dear to my heart.
The opening speech featured Gary Glass: head of the American Homebrewers Association, Charlie Papazian: no need to explain here, and Jamil Zainasheff, Homebrewer, AHA board member, and tireless volunteer. Jamil spoke about how the event was not about the beer but about the people. Coinky dink, exactly what I was think about this morning and great to hear someone else say it.
I rolled through a couple of seminars one by Matt Brynildson of Firestone Walker and Vinnie Chilurzo of Russian River. I did get them on tape and hope to post them later. Matt’s was on wood aging and Vinnies was on fermenting with “wild yeast”: brettanomyces. Both were excellent. I also also spent a good amount of time in the hospitality suite were many vendors had their wares out. Blichmann has come up with their version of a gravity fed all grain brew system and it was impressive. Highly modifiable by the user and one option was a shelf to sit your mash cooler on….something I have been wanting to see for a while. I don’t know the cost but hopefully it is close to other systems.
Tomorrow is day two and it will be packed with seminars. Looking forward to the panel on Mead, great brewing tips with Ray Daniels and Randy Mosher. Others as well.
I forgot to mention that this is a beer event. It was everywhere. Wyyeast had three taps in the registration area. There was a club pouring about 8 different beers at the hospitality suite. There was beer being poured…and served to you at your seat…at the opening toast and Vinnie had beers to go with his presentation….brought to your seat while you listened to the lecure. Very nice.
More soon.

As mentioned below, one of my favorite IPAs: Brew Free or Die by the 21st Amendment tasted different to me lately, the munich malt that I loved so much had all but dissapeared. 
If you drink the hell out of this beer because you love its malty goodnes then be patient. 21st has no intention of changing the recipe, they have just done a little tinkering. Brewmaster and Co-Founder, Shaun O’Sullivan saw my entry and sent a response:

“I saw your post about our IPA in your blog and you are dead on right. We have been tweeking the recipe and incorporating new malts to achieve that Munich malt flavor. Unfortunately, we are not a huge brewery so the beer drinking public is getting to taste test our R&D. I am confident that we will get there. In fact the last batch is particularly good and has a good healthy charge of German Munich malt with the addition of caramalt.  We have been also trying a new way of dry hopping the IPA where I think we are picking up more aroma, which can be so elusive when you package an IPA. Thanks for trying and thanks for the comments. “

…and thank you Shaun for checking out the 22oz blog.
Folks, actually a great opportunity here to enjoy some of that R&D and try some interesting tweaks to the IPA in a can that you know and love. Save what you have now, run down to your store and grab some more to see if you have one of the tweaked recipes. Grab some more down the road to see the final version. Compare and contrast the different tweaks and learn a few things in the process. Send 21st your feedback. I’m sure they would appreciate to hear how folks are taking to it.

the last couple of weeks have been spent with my second daughter who was born on May 27. Family and I are all doing well and the time off together was great. Now that we are getting a new flow going to our lives plus one, it’s time to get back to the business of beer.
Thanks to all the kind words from everyone!

Corny Keg Fermentation.
I wanted to split out a batch of mead so that I could rack some of it over fruit. I knew one of my 2.5 gal cornies would be the way to go but I needed a way to get an airlock on. There are expensive corny lids that you can buy out there that have a drilled out hole and coupler welded over it so that you can attach any variety of hoses, etc. but I knew there should be a much cheaper solution out there. My solution? How about free!
I took off the gas in body connector and dip tube and replaced with a short section of 1/2″ hose. From there I inserted a short piece of 3/8″ hose and inserted airlock into the 3/8. Done and works great. Click on the detail photo for a bigger view of it all.
So what is in there and why? I had 3 gallons of orange blossom honey mead fermenting away in a secondary and got the wild idea to put some of it on fresh bing (Tulare) cherries. With my nice new high performance cherry pitter (13.99 at Andronicos), I was able to stem and pit 4lbs of cherries in 15 minutes. Prior to pitting, I steamed both the cherries and their nylon bag for about 10 minutes to help sanitize. The mead was running about 8% ABV at that point so I wasn’t too concerned but wanted to steam and clean nonetheless. Cherries went in the sack that was tied shut and pushed into the carboy. I then co2 pushed the mead out of the 3 gallon carboy and filled a 1 gallon carboy…leaving the remaining 2 gals to the corny. With 2 gals of mead and four pounds of cherries, it came close to topping off the corny.
As of a week later, airlock is still bubbling nicely with it’s new sugar source. I’m sure the cherries have also buffered out any low acid levels that I may have had and I know the yeast appreciates that as well. More later.

21st Amendment Brew Free or Die recipe change??
My beer drinking has been light since I had been on call to run my wife to the hospital for the delivery of our second daughter, but also I was very tired afterwards and I needed to be awake to help out and get settled. Well, I was pretty excited to pick up a sixer of brew free or die and have a nice IPA after all of this. But whoah! from my first sip to the last, this was a different beer. Where was all of that lovely munich malt? It was gone. One of the things I loved about this beer was a healthy dose of munich which gave it a nice malty, ballsy balance to the hops. I couldn’t belive my eyes (er, tongue and nose). I’ll finish this sixer to double/triple check and I also have a friend who has some older cans to compare….all of this just to be sure. Anyway, for now it seems like their beer has gotten rid of most or all of their munich malt. Ouch. I liked it with that malt. Maybe research showed that people don’t? Before I speculate too hard, let me go back and confirm this.
Comments are very welcome here.

note: as my family and I are on the verge of having our second child, there may be more of a delay in getting this interview out! Keep an eye on this blog and the micro-blog on the beerobsessed.com main page.

I’ve just started to review the audio interview with Todd this week. This is shaping to be a great story and will probably distill down to somewhere around of 1.5 hours of audio. Todd has a lot of brewing history prior to his position at Fifty Fifty. He was a brewer at Flosmoor Station for a while and was barrel aging beers almost 10 years ago way before it was popularized. This all culminated with a bronze medal at GABF last year for his barrel aged Imperial Stout.  When Todd was brought on to Fifty Fifty, the brewery was not complete. Owners, Andy and Alicia Barr, felt it was important the the Brewmaster have a role in the design of the brewhouse. My respect for those two folks grew thoughout the interview.

I first heard about Todd when he won the peoples’ choice award for his IPA at the Bistro IPA festival last year. To me, the peoples choice speaks to the drinkability of your beer and I do ask Todd about this in the interview.  Some other topics that came up were brewing at high elevation. Fifty Fifty is at almost 6000 ft. in elevation and his 1 million BTU burner operates at 750,000 BTUs. This affects not only your gas bill but how your hops isomerize into your wort.

I do have to mention my favorite beer from the interview: their Trifecta Triple. Oh baby, probably one of my top three all time favorite triples. It was that good…and I’m picky about triples. It even deserved some picture staging as you can see from above. One of my favorite characteristics of a good triple is smoothness. A nice blending of the alcohol strength into the flavors of the beer. Todd achieves this and then some. He uses honey in this beer as a substitute for cane sugar and the flavors subtly came out.

Look for the interview coming soon. Cheers!

Couple personal notes first. I finished bottling my west coast big red ale last night just in time before having our second child, who is due at anytime now. The beer is big, 7.4% (mash temp was a little lower than I hoped….1.010 was final FG) and 55 IBU. My wife should love it, it is her style (read: hoppy/bitter) and she’ll get to enjoy some after we have our daughter. My personal gift to her.

On to business:
We started our second Take it to the Brewer road trip by hooking up and talking with Brewmaster Nick Campbell. Nick was humble and gracious host and we thoroughly enjoyed his beers. I got to know Blue Frog through their bottled offerings and I really enjoy their Blonde (actually an Imperial Blonde by stats) and their DIPA. At the brewpub, I had probably what is one of my favorite rye beers, which says alot because I’m not too big on rye as a beer ingredient. Very drinkable and we polished off a growler of it later that afternoon in Chico (yep, we liked it so much we had to take some with us). We were able to sample some of his barrel projects, both were wonderful. I wish we had recorded that tasting as my memory is now a bit thin on it but both beers had very inviting aromas and a smooth taste. One was being aged in a Syrah barrel (Nick, correct me if I’m wrong on that) and that beer was particularly smooth and the wine essence blended particularly well.
I have to say, I walked in to the interview already having respect for Nick’s beers but afterwards, I have even more. Nick is gifted. Look for some of his specialty beers to come out in bottles this year in Northern California and listen to the audio for more detail on that. Thank you to Nick and Blue Frog for their time, beers, and hospitality. Also, don’t forget to have a look at the photo gallery that goes with the tour.
Cheers.

FOR PHOTOS, CLICK HERE

FOR THE AUDIO INTERVIEW, GO TO TAKE IT TO THE BREWER PAGE

The Survivorman phenomenon, I fell for it right away. One man goes into the wild for 5 days and survives usually with nothing more than a match and a multi-tool. I’m not a survival guy myself. What I found intriging, since I work in film/broadcast, is that he shoots all of the footage himself, sometimes in complex three camera setups. There he is out there, little water, no food, no sleep, surviving…and still setting up camera shots, changing batteries, and maintaining gear. I love it (as I sit there on the sofa in my warm house drinking great beer).

On a rainy weekend, while checking out the FAQ on Les’s website, I found this:

Great question! Particularly since they asked for his favorite TWO beers. It gives us much more insight into the tastes of Survivorman. So when the day comes that Survivorman drops by my house and wants to drink some beers, what are we going to drink?

OK, don’t panic, what information do we have? The two beers he likes are “light lagers” but they are not budweiser. The first assumption I am going to make is that knowing who Les is through his show and website, he isn’t going to go for a big corporate beer like budweiser anyway. Although Stella is not exactly a small craft beer…I could see someone picking Stella as something a little more significant in beer choice than bud. Remember, I am also assuming that Les is not fully in the beer obsessed clan, so a choice like that may not reflect the research that some of us have done about big breweries, buyouts, brewing ingredients, etc. His second beer helps to establish my assumption. Muskoka Cream Ale looks to be small a small brewpub in Ontario (somewhere around his neck of the woods) and Les is someone who probably would support local products and small businesses. Stella can be had anywhere but when you’re home, nothing beats his other favorite, Muskoka Cream Ale.

My next assumption is that since Les has eaten everything from raw grubs and cooked scorpions, he knows what he likes and doesn’t like….so I am sure he has tried a few styles of beer out there over his 40 some odd years of life so far. Les also works hard. He survives in the wild and films it. I can see the desire to throw back some light lager when you get out of there….especially after a desert episode. But honestly, light lager is the beer of choice for most of the planet. At least it seems that Les has put some thought into his choices.

So, what would I steer Les towards in order to broaden his beer horizons? As much as I would like to get him to try some darker style beers, I feel that since he is willing to try anything and he has been around a while (I’m not calling him old….he is, like me, in his 40s), he is probably pretty set on his tastes for beer…and that was solidified over time. I should gateway him in to some styles similar to the light lagers he enjoys.

Here we are Les:

Czeq Pils
Czeq Pilsner first came to mind. This is my beer of choice on a hot day. It fits the lighter beer bill and it has body and flavor. If he was in my neck of the woods, I would hand him a Lagunitas Pils right away.

Blonde Ale
There are excellent examples of this light ale style. If we were going to bevmo to get a couple six packs to kill while we talk about the dangers of sleeping on the bare gound in brown snake country, then I’d get Mad River Brewing’s excellent (and recent GABF gold medal winner) Steelhead extra pale ale.

Kolsch
Kolsch tends to be seasonal around here but there are choices. Ballast Point Yellowtail Pale Ale is an excellent Kolsch that is available year round and I can get it locally. Two seasonals that I would have him try are Alaskan Brewing’s Summer Ale. What a great, easy drinking beer. A more local one to try would be Pyramid’s curve ball ale. I would probably take Les straight to the Pyramid Brewery since it is close by. Fresh off the tap, we could drink pints and talk about teh beauty of the Serengeti and filming it after a day with no water.

Cream Ale
The man likes Cream Ale and it is worth mentioning that Schooner’s makes a very qauffable American Cream Ale. If it turns out Les just cannot do the styles above and is longing for his Muskoka, then a trip to Antioch is well worth it to keep him happy and drink some fine beer.

So there it is. A beer menu for Survivorman, Les Stroud. Oh, and if you don’t know who Les Stroud is, look him up and watch Survivorman on the Discovery channel…with your favorite beer in hand.

So during our last brewer interview tour, we went up to Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. and visited their brewpub. I had never been there and it was time to find out all of the great things I have been hearing about it. It was worth it. Here we go:
The brewpub itself is occupies a corner of what looks to be their main building. I don’t mean to make the pub sound small, the building is their “main” building that houses the brew systems and fermentation tanks located on the frontage of their property. Funny, if you look at google maps and survey the area while you are up there, you realize the Sierra bought their property at a time when it was probably the edge or outside of the town of Chico. Today, it is surrounded by the standard outlying and freeway access fare…there are a couple hotels and the typical chain type foods joints (applebees, etc) and all the big stores (home depot, target, etc). It looks like if Sierra want to expand further, they are either getting a different property or they are going up. Fortunately, it looks like they had great vision and everything they have today fits well on their large property, including some fairly large acreage of hops.
We checked into the Oxford Inn which is about a 10 minute walk from the brewpub, perfect location right on the other side of highway 99. After dropping off our stuff and downing a growler of an excellent rye beer from Blue Frog, we headed over to the pub. At 5:30 on a Friday (a beautiful night weather-wise, by the way…about 70 degrees) the pub was hopping and we had about a 20 minute wait for a table. We proceed to the bar and were overwhelmed to see about 16 of their beers on tap (wait….they don’t have that many bottled beers). The brewpub itself, I would call “large brewpub” in size. It is not huge, which Sierra Nevada could have easily done but they kept it as a pub atmosphere and size does have something to do with that. OK back to those beers. Where to start? I love brown ales and they happened to have one so I ordered that. They also had a Brown Saison which Mike ordered. The brown was excellent and I stuck with it most of the night. Malty, balanced, and luscious…exactly what I expect from a brewery of Sierra’s caliber. The brown saison was very basically the brown but with a Belgian yeast. I’m sure there is more to it than that but it worked. Generally, I am not a fan of “throw Belgian yeast into a non-belgian beer” but this one is a winner and does what others don’t: it gelled, melded, coalesced well. While were enjoying this first round, our little coaster/buzzer thing start going off and we were led to our seats on the patio. Another round was ordered and I either got another brown or their bock which I loved as well. I’m pretty new to the bock style so one of the great things that can happen is finding an example of said style that really does the trick for you. I love this beer, very drinkable. Pilsner malt aroma, great body, and a nice hint of toast. Fortunately, they had six packs of this beer in their gift shop so we grabbed a couple the next morning. What other beers did they have? I suggest looking at the photo gallery since there is a great shot of the sampler tray with names and also a shot of the beer list. There was a kellerbier that I would have invested more time in if we were there for another night. Couple of weizen beers, a blonde, and more.
I was happy to finally understand and dispel one myth while I was up there. The going phrase I knew was “you gotta go to the brewpub because the Pale Ale is different up there”. The real story is that Sierra Nevada has different recipes for their draft pale ale and the bottled version. The nice thing about their pub is not only do they have the draft version (of course) but they had the bottled version on draft as well so you can do them side by side. Unfortunately I didn’t do a comparison since I was so enamored with their other beers that are not available anywhere else. Our server said , I believe, that the draft version is higher ABV but I could have it backwards. Anyway, if I was dying to try it, I could set up that side by side back at home.
The food? Standard pub fare plus. I went for the plus and got the fillet mignon tips in fettuccini. The sauce was a light white sauce. Oh baby was it good. Ended up splattering a bunch of it on my new, white brewers association t-shirt. There were other shirts in my travel duffel so good to go.

So Sierra Nevada brewpub? Do it. Pay homage to America’s original craft brewery. I would recommend that if you are a beer lover, that you do two nights up there. You could take the 2pm tour the next day and hit the pub again the next night to finish out what you couldn’t the night before.
Oh and don’t forget to check out the photo gallery.

Auburn Alehouse:
We wanted to interview Brewmaster, Brian Ford but he had surgery earlier in the week and couldn’t make it. We managed to stop at his brewpub (he is also the founder) on the way to an interview later that day. The Alehouse is easy access from the freeway and would actually make a great place to stay as it looks to be in the “old town” area right south of interstate 80. We sampled a few of the beers and the nitro stout and his porter were our favorites. The porter was on the side of coffee, chocolate with good fullness (as opposed to clean, roasty porter). Food was good and we had a couple appetizers while we were there.
Would definitely like to spend more time at this pub in the future so we’ll get back to it one day but wanted to note that it looks like a good stop for a pint. I have a couple shots of the pub at the end of the photo gallery for this entry.

We had very successful audio interviews last weekend with three Brewmasters: Nick Campbell of Blue Frog, Todd Ashman of Fifity Fifty Brewing, and Scott Cramlet of Rubicon Brewing. Interviews will be edited down and put up on the Take it to the Brewer page, along with a photo gallery, in the order listed above. The interviews will also be available via the iTunes store for free download. Hopefully about every two weeks. Look for announcements forthcoming.
A big round of thanks to all three brewers for their time and hospitality. I highly recommend folks check out all three breweries in their travels. We were impressed and learned from alot from them
I’ll get some trip photos up on the blog and probably facebook (beer obsessed) very soon since we hit other spots during the trip including, Sierra Nevada brewing and Auburn Alehouse.
Until the next entry, please check out the websites of the breweries we visited below. Also check out the quick photo gallery showcasing the mugs of each brewmaster.
  
Blue Frog Grog and Grill
Fifty Fifty Brewing Co.
Rubicon Brewing Co. 

 photo gallery requires flash