Weekend brews
April 7, 2008
While Hanne was busy all weekend with homework, I spent my weekend primarily dealing with brewing and brewing-related activities. The first two batches of 2008 went off (largely) without a hitch, and both are happily fermenting away in the relative darkness of the entryway to the apartment.
I say “largely” without a hitch only because I taught myself a lesson in carbon dioxide and how rapidly it expands. To get a cleaner brew and faster fermentation, you take your yeast and you make a starter, exactly the same way you would with sourdough bread, though for beer it’s a liquid starter and not dough. One lesson is to aerate your beer on occasion to continue oxygenating the yeast so that it can continue to eat the sugar, and generally the rule is to gently swirl the starter. Swirl the starter.
90 minutes of boiling, 30-45 minutes of cooling, and I have 4.5 gallons of cooled wort in the fermenter, ready to have the yeast pitched in to begin fermentation. Two hours of work, and what do I do? I pull the airlock out, cover the stopper with my thumb, and I shake the yeast starter. Yeast + sugar = carbon dioxide. The container was full of it, and there were lots of bubbles that still contained it. Ever put your thumb over a champagne bottle and sprayed it? This was pretty much what happened, except I wasn’t expecting to spray it over a winning team. Instead, it geysered up and out much to my surprise, and instead of pouring it gently into the wort I ended up cleanign it off the ceiling and just about every other exposed surface in the kitchen. Fortunately, I didn’t lose too much of it, but it was a bit frustrating to make such an idiotic mistake on my first batch of 2008.
That batch was a really hoppy amber ale which will likely be fairly similar to what I’ve made before, but Sunday’s batch was really the more interesting one. I remade my porter from last year, tweaking the base recipe very slightly and then expanding upon it by adding two tablespoons of organic cocoa powder for that nice chocolately taste and then dumping three chopped chilis de arbol directly into the primarly fermenter. I was after a sort of Mexican chocolate experience (without using Mexican chocolate since it would be too subtle in the beer), where the chocolate is sweet when it hits the tongue and then a little spicy and you can feel some heat when you swallow. Like good hard liquor, in a way. It’s a huge gamble with five gallons at stake, but I figure that either there won’t be enough chili in it and the heat will either be undetectable or underpowered, or it’ll be too strong and I’ll five gallons opf marinade and base for chili. I used three chilis that have a Scoville rating of between 15,000-30,000 units compared to a Habenero’s 300,000 rating, and since I found a recipe that called for 1-3 Habeneros, I think I’ll be on the underpowered side of things.
Saturday night Hanne and I wandered over to a friend’s house to have some snacks, drink some expensive hard liquor, and play around with a stand-up arcade cabinet he has that has the ability to play any number of around 4,000 different arcade titles. We played some blasts from the past and generally had a good time. I want one, but there’s just no place I can think of to put one like it in our current apartment. Curses!
Oh well. Someday. Someday….
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