The Revenge of Brewblog

Brewing, exercising, vacationing--two of those things are way more awesome than the third (guess!), but all three are the subjects of today's random nonsense post.

Brewblog, Entry Three

Another two weeks have passed with another two Saturday brew days. We will need a well stocked beer inventory to get through summer, so there will hopefully be another two May brew days and then one in June before summer vacations and weddings and life interrupt.

On May 8th, we brewed our fourth experimental--for science!--beer, aka the Brewniversity series, a Blonde Ale made with a simple grain bill of Pale and Munich Malt and only US Goldings hops for bittering, flavour, and aroma. Previous Brewniversity beers have included: the not-so-great 101, originally known as "Ten, One, and One," which is a reference to its simple recipe of ten pounds Pale Malt, one ounce of Cascade hops for bittering, and one ounce of Cascade hops for flavour; the much, much better 122, which added specialty malts to the mix and more Cascade hops; and the arguably even better (I still prefer the 122, but it's close) 124, which was similar to the 122 but with slight modifications to the grain bill and a notably different Cascade hops addition schedule, and the unusual dry hop addition of loose-leaf Perle. The recipe for Brewniversity #4, aka Goldings Ale, aka the 112, was primarily formulated in the spirit of the 122. If it turns out as good as I think it will, a 124-style recipe may be attempted at a later date. Or maybe we'll do Brewniversity #5 as a 124-style Willamette Ale?

With Trevor's Blonde done its primary fermentation, the plan for May 15th was to make use of the Belgian Abbey yeast cake that had formed at the bottom of the primary fermenter. We had originally thought we'd attempt a second Tripel, but ultimately there isn't a huge difference between most Tripel recipes and the recipe we'd used for Trevor's Blonde. This gave us an opportunity to try something different.

Not to toot my own horn too much, but the following story is an illustration of my growing intuition for beer recipe formulation, with notable aid from Beersmith Brewing Software. Since late last fall when brew days moved to my garage, I have been responsible for formulating 90% of the recipes for brew day. Most of the early recipes came directly from external sources such as books or the Internet, and I was simply transposing them to Beersmith. But, more and more, I have been creating the recipes on my own, sometimes with inspiration from similar recipes, often with inspiration from past brew days, but increasingly pulled straight out of my head (or, if you prefer, ass). It is worth noting that beer recipe formulation is actually not that hard (for most beer styles that we regularly make) with the help of brewing software, but it is a critical component for creating an excellent beer and I take it very seriously--and I'm always striving for improvement. The 122 and 124 are examples of beers that I made up and am quite proud of. I also made up our Vanilla Porter (some minor adjustments could take it from good to awesome), Blackout Stout (jury's still out), and Scottish Ale (significant room for improvement). And I am always tweaking our recurring beers such as the Matrimonial Ale and Scott's Stout series. This whole paragraph is just a long preamble to the actual story.

We often plan our brew days through email while I am at work, which puts me in the shitty position of not being able to browse beer recipes (blocked by Internet filters!). But I do have the PDF of the BJCP Style Guidelines with me at all times. So, with a Belgian yeast to use, and no recipe selected, I opened up the style guide for inspiration. And there it was: Category 16E, Belgian Specialty Ale. From a quick read it appeared that you could make any base beer style but use a Belgian yeast, and you just might have an entry for Belgian Specialty Ale. And it immediately came to my mind that we should do an IPA--a Belgian IPA! And, with that inspiration, I started formulating the recipe in my head. We could use a similar malt profile as the Matrimonial Ale series, with minor tweaks, but use different hops (our Matrimonial Ale almost exclusively uses Columbus hops) to give it a more Belgian feel. For bittering, I selected Chinook, an American hop which had worked quite well in our Punk IPA clone. For flavour and aroma, I decided to go with the traditional Saaz, as you will find in many, many Belgian beers. I quickly drafted up an email, sent it off, and got very positive response from the group. When I got home, I pulled out Radical Brewing, my favourite of my books on hand for recipe ideas, to see if Randy Mosher had a Belgian IPA recipe. And he did. And it was exactly the same as the recipe I had made up in my head at work. Same malts, same hops. Awesome. I took that as pretty strong validation that I know what the fuck I am doing.

Saturday mornings before brew days are often busy for me. I frequently start by cleaning my house, vacuuming up as much of the dog and cat hair as I can. Typical brew day preparation includes recipe finalization, measuring out the grains, cleaning equipment, checking our propane stock, warming up the mash cooler, and stocking the fridge with precious brew day fuel. The morning of May 15th was even busier than usual, as I had to rack the 112 (aka Goldings Ale) into a carboy to free up a primary fermenter, and I had to sort bottles, because that day's plan included the bottling of our Anniversary Bitter 2 and Simon's Blonde during the Belgian IPA mash.

At the tail end of the brew day, we had to rack Trevor's Blonde to allow us to reuse the Belgian Abbey yeast cake. We took one scoop of yeast for the Belgian IPA and a second scoop to try our first experiment with yeast ranching. That second scoop of yeast is sitting in my refrigerator right now in a large plastic container also filled with water. At some point I will attempt to decant the cleaned yeast into a smaller container and store it until the next Belgian brew day. I need to do some more research on exactly what I am doing here...

The plan for tomorrow's brew day is Scott's Stout 4. I don't intend to modify the Scott's Stout 3 recipe much, as it is pretty much exactly what it was supposed to be, but there is one major change in that we will be using a liquid Wyeast (1028 London Ale) instead of the standard dry Safale yeast we have used in the past. At the end of primary fermentation, I intend to try to ranch this yeast as well, because it should come in handy over and over again, but my fridge can't hold much more containers of yeast than that. With nothing to bottle tomorrow, it will likely be a 30-minute mash day. And this will be the first 90-minute boil for a Scott's Stout, which could have interesting results.

The one additional task I have for tomorrow, or possibly tonight, is the racking of the Bushwakker Russian Imperial Stout that was created on May 8th at the ALES club Big Brew Day. I don't want to go into too many details about that day, but effectively: the brewmaster at Bushwakker brewed over 600L of wort, we collected our 20L share, and we added our own yeast. We used Wyeast's Denny's Favorite 50 for this beer, which is an interesting all-purpose yeast that I will also try to ranch for future experimentation.

Shaping Up!--for reals

I have now biked to work on nine out of the last ten days. That definitely counts as shaping up. I now see no reason why I can't continue to bike to work every (reasonable) day this summer.

To counter that, I have been slacking heavily on the 100 Push-ups and 200 Sit-ups challenges. I can't help but notice that both push-ups and sit-ups are much harder when you have twenty extra pounds in your stomach area. I also need to step up the strength training for my arms before I start losing whatever little muscle I have there.

I'm already starting to see evidence of weight loss, and I am definitely feeling much better about myself. The daily bike rides are only one piece of the puzzle. I have also significantly improved my diet by eliminating the consumption of bags of chips (which is easy when you simply skip that aisle at the grocery store). One of the biggest unhealthy kicks I was on for the past few months was Tostitos and salsa, often consumed a bag and a jar at a time. Thanks to some smart thinking by a couple of friends, I have now replaced the tortilla chips with celery and cucumbers with acceptable results.

Daisy would probably appreciate more walks, but when I get home after biking from work, I don't exactly feel like going for a walk. Especially when there are TV finales to watch! But that excuse runs out on the coming Monday, so... fuck.

My Summer Staycation (now with 50% less Stay?)

My two-week holiday in June was always going to start with a weekend trip to Hanna, AB, to attend the wedding of my ex-brother-in-law. And I was hoping to follow that up with a short visit to Calgary. But now I may end up spending most of my first week in the Calgary area, with some of that time spent camping in Banff--which is by no means at all a bad thing. I can read a book in a camping spot in Banff just as easily as I can in my backyard. And I don't really care about the extra costs--although National Parks do rip you the fuck off with their park entry fees...

The major thing in my life that keeps me stuck at home (or quite possibly it's just an excuse) is my pets. Daisy will be coming with me to Alberta in June, which does make the situation easier in this trip's case, but there will still be three cats left at home. I will have to get someone to pop in to see and feed the cats a couple of times, which is not in itself a big deal, but that also means training that person to use the alarm system and trusting that person alone in my house. What can I say?--I worry about stupid things sometimes. I wonder if my dad would be up for doing this...

There was very nearly some big news re: that wedding of my ex-brother-in-law last week. In the most shocking question asked of me in all of 2010, my ex-brother-in-law (that I never talk to anymore) asked if I would be one of his groomsmen. Surprisingly, I actually considered the offer for a good ten minutes before turning it down as gracefully as possible in 140 characters--because this important conversation was via text messaging! Kids, today!