The May/June 2010 issue of Brew Your Own magazine (byo.com) includes a recipe from Joe Short of Short’s Brewing Company in Bellaire, Michigan. You may remember that Travel by the Pint featured Joe in Season 1, Episodes 3 and 4. The recipe is for The Magician Ale, described on the Short’s website as “A lustrous dark red London ale”.
Tonight, we popped the caps on our first two bottles of home brew — which Sally has christened “Doobie Blonde” in honor of the suspected doobie-smokin’-hippies that built our beloved house back in the early ’70s.
Our expectations were low. After all, how could a kit beer actually be good? We were pleasantly surprised. Not only did the whole experiment work (it feels a bit magical to actually make beer) but it’s not half bad. Pretty good, in fact. We’re definitely energized to try another batch and make our way toward an all-grain brew. For the record, this kit came from Homebrewers Outpost and I wouldn’t hesitate to order from them again. In fact, I see they have some all-grain kits…
A couple of beer-related links I ran across this week: it seems that Pyramid Breweries has a new logo and updated packaging (via the Brand New blog). And Manolith has posted a graphical timeline of the history of beer.
Sunday was our first bottling day as we added priming sugar and transferred our Blonde Ale homebrew into 46 bottles. All went fairly well if you don’t consider things like a sticky kitchen floor or your whole house smelling like beer to be problems. We don’t. So now we have a 10-day wait before we get to taste our first sample. It looks pretty good. A little cloudy like an unfiltered wheat and a nice golden-amber-ish color. According to our before-and-after hydrometer readings, we should be looking at an alcohol content of around 6%. A pretty good first attempt, no matter the outcome in terms of taste. We already feel much more confident about the process and are looking forward to finding our next recipe. It will probably be sometime in June before we can start another batch due to our travel schedule but it will most likely not be a kit. We’ll challenge ourselves a bit more with each batch until we’re ready for an all-grain attempt.
The waiting truly is the hardest part.
The crops are in! As mentioned before, we decided to try our hand at growing our own hops this year and ordered 10 rhizomes from Freshops in Oregon. We decided on two each of Fuggle, Hallertauer, Nugget, Saaz and Sterling. The rhizomes arrived in great shape and a few had already begun to sprout before we could even get them in the ground.
Since the plants have to be grown at least five feet apart (three feet if they’re the same variety) we had to use a couple of different sections of the yard. The side of our garage will represent the Czech Republic, while the garden wall holds hops from Germany, England and the US. We also purchased hop twine that we’ll use to create a trellis for the hops to climb.
We’ll see what happens. We don’t expect a usable crop the first year but we should at least get some idea of what varieties do best in our climate.
Sprouting news will be posted here!
If you watch the AMC series, Breaking Bad, you may have noticed that Walt’s brother-in-law, Hank, is a homebrewer. It was revealed in this week’s episode, “Breakage” (season 2, episode 5).
We had received some inside information about this while interviewing brewmasters in Albuquerque last month for season 2 of Travel by the Pint. Breaking Bad is set and filmed in Albuquerque and, as luck would have it, one of our interviewees was the consultant for Hank’s “man cave” homebrewing set up and even gave the film crew a crash course in brewing at his brewpub.
More on that in our second season so — as always — stay tuned.
We’ve decided to get our hands dirty. If we truly want to better understand beer, we can’t just talk to people who make it — we need to make it ourselves. Thus, yesterday afternoon, we set up our homebrewing station and put the first batch in the fermenter.
We decided to start small and went with a kit we purchased from Homebrewers Outpost & Mail Order Company. Nothing flashy, just a simple blonde ale. Our thinking is to start with a kit or two to get the basics down and build some confidence. Then, we’ll slowly build on our skills, moving toward brewing from scratch and being able to predict and influence the end product through different ingredients and techniques. But for now… we just need to know how to brew beer.
Down the road, we have big plans. Suffice it to say for now that we’re going to be planting five varieties of hops this Spring. We don’t expect a useable crop until next year at the earliest so we’ll get the basics down while we wait for the vines to mature.
We’ll post progress updates on this blog — successes and failures — so stay tuned.
