Dr Homebrew & Prison Shakespeare

Good Afternoon Ladies & Gentlemen,

 

So the other nights, Izzy had to watch an Italian movie for her class (almost graduated) and she had a list to choose from… but only 2-3 were on Netflix, so we chose a movie called “Caesar Must Die” which was about Italian prisoners who put on a performance of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” during their incarceration. Now, this was billed as a documentary… but the details are a little shady as… if you’re watching it, the movie looks like it’s a legit movie with real actors, lighting, camera angles, etc. Basically, my understanding from checking the internet is… the movie is staged, scripted & shot like a film… but the majority of the actors were real prisoners in an Italian maximum security prison (with cells bigger than my apartment, but I digress) so it’s… kind of a documentary, but not really? Anyway, the movie is only about 72 minutes long, so it’s a good, quick one… and it’s actually very interesting. It’s interesting how these very proud Italian men take to this story of their Roman heritage, as told by one of the great English writers, and the parallels in that story with what happened to some of them… and how some of the decisions made in both realms are come to… and overall, it’s just really well acted & I really enjoyed it. I highly recommend checking it out if this sounds at all interesting… and trust me, it sounds a thousand times better than other Italian movies that we had to choose from.

  

Sunday night, Izzy & I watched a movie that I had never seen before… and being a fan of good horror movies, Izzy couldn’t believe it. The movie was 1979 horror classic “The Amityville Horror” starring James Brolin (Mr. Streisand) & Margot Kidder (not the 2005 remake starring Ryan Reynolds or the slew of other movies that threw ‘Amityville’ in the title to get watched accidentally). It’s the classic tale of a young family (husband, wife, 2.3 children) who move into a house where a year earlier, there was a gruesome murder where a young man killed his parents & four young siblings in a fit of rage. Well, apparently that greatly affected the resell value, so this young family moves in on a bargain… and soon find out (I think it’s over the course of the first three weeks they’re in the house) that the house is A) Haunted; B) Bloodthirsty; and C) Possibly a gateway to Hell. This movie was… what I found out by watching… basically the original that a LOT of movies borrowed a LOT from in regards to not only getting jump scares & establishing tone… but one of my favorite horror movies of all time “The Shining” came out a year later… and it’s pretty f**king similar… like, maybe Kubrick should’ve taken Take #4 instead of #37 on some of the scenes and released this a little earlier so he wasn’t accused or ripping this movie off by critics of the day. Regardless, the movie was pretty impressive… and if you haven’t seen this movie, you’ve probably seen some of the iconic images already in other things like the bleeding walls (referenced in “Ghostbusters”), father figure going crazy with an axe (“Shining”), flies signaling the presence of evil (“Poltergeist” & many others) or all of the above (Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” #2 I believe). I highly recommend checking it out. Great flick… no wonder everybody wants to try to steal its thunder.

 

Also Sunday night, Izzy invited me to an event that she was helping out at for the Safe House for the Performing Arts in the Mid-Market area of downtown (corner of Crack & Cocaine?). Basically it’s a community group that rents space where available for various classes & projects that otherwise couldn’t be done in the area due to… well, ridiculous real estate costs. There were some great snacks, art being displayed, opportunities for writing & photography classes, and there were even some demonstrations by virtual artists & flamenco dancers… which I personally LOVE ever since my visit to Barcelona back in the day. Anyway, great event, great cause, here are some pictures…

 

Tuesday night, I also had the special opportunity to be part of the Brewing Network’s Dr. Homebrew podcast. Through the guild, the producers were looking to get a few in-house guests & I volunteered… that’s really about it… nothing like “Oh, we heard that you kicked ass at the Napa comp…” or anything like that. Then again, half of being successful is being there, right? Anyway, the podcast is actually done at The Hop Grenade Taproom in Concord, about 45 minutes away without traffic… but this was brought to my attention while at work… when Rush Hour was about to start the day of the show… so about a two hour drive later, I was in Concord… and checking out the taproom while I waited to pop my podcast guest cherry. First & foremost, the taproom is pretty legit. They have about 24 taps with a wide variety of local and national brews on tap so you can try a little bit of everything. There’s also a bottle room where they have even more to choose from… basically just about anything that you could be looking for in a beer, can probably be found there… or at least something similar. Here are some pictures…

 

 Beer Lacing - I see the United States in this one...

 

Then it was my time to set the internet on fire with my sexy voice… so the producer led me to their soundstage and I met the stars of the show (JP, Lee & Brian) and they gave me a quick run-through of the show and how to properly make sweet love to the microphone, etc. The concept of the Dr Homebrew podcast is there’s the MC named JP who kinda leads the show & operates the equipment… and then Lee & Brian are two master BJCP judges who break down styles of beers sent in by homebrewers from all over the world… and in my case, who are willing to bring them in personally… and then they’ll break down how their beer would be scored by the BJCP standards, whether it’s a good/great beer, and offer a few tips to make it better the next time around so that you can take your brewing to the next level. Of course, along the way, they also make a few jokes, have a few laughs & just have a good time talking about beer with their bros (and I assume broads from time to time). I had only heard about it a few days prior, but the two episodes that I listened to beforehand where pretty helpful, so I was obviously intrigued.

 

Anyway, they invited me in… and I brought my offering… my newly bottled Raptor Red!!! The information they were about to provide would be very useful as… well, because it was newly bottled, I hadn’t really tasted the finished product yet. It hasn't been posted yet, but you can listen to the entire episode HERE!!! If you’d like… and it’s free of charge. I think it'll be Episode #44 or #45. Basically they did a quick intro, and then we poured a sample for each of us… and then they break down everything from the appearance (absolutely gorgeous, clear red ale if I say so myself), malt & hop characteristics, head retention, possibly brewing errors, tastes that seem out of place for the style, all of that. Granted, we weren’t making this beer to the specific styles that’s in the BJCP guidelines… as we were really making a beer that we’d love… but there were definitely some flaws in the beer as we were tasting it… and offered me some great pointers on how to make the next batch better that I’ll definitely try. I also got to stick around, crack some wise, throw in some questions that I thought the listeners might want to know (not just myself) & also got to try this wonderful imperial stout that a gentleman named Garrett sent in from Minnesota and… damn… it was just fantastic. Kudos to Garrett! Their scoring of his beer made me feel a LOT better about my low score… but it was definitely a great time! Hopefully they’ll invite me to come back when our Barrel Aged Imperial Stout is ready… or maybe whatever we make next. That’s right, I’m down for being a repeat guest… and with proper planning I can make it out to Concord a little easier too. Thanks for having me, guys!!!

 

Aside from that, it’s been a pretty relaxing weekend… still doing the smoothie thing. Obviously I’m not living exclusively on smoothies… but basically just replacing Mountain Dew with smoothies… and so far it’s been going great. I’ll keep you posted, but so far I’m recommending it. Fresh fruits & vegetables instead of high fructose corn syrup and… extreme? Not really sure what’s in Mountain Dew but I assume crack-cocaine has similar qualities. Anyway, have a great weekend everybody!!!

Adventures in Barrel Aging

Good Afternoon Ladies & Gentlemen,

 

Friday, Izzy stopped by Seven Stills of San Francisco, which is a local distillery that makes whiskey by distilling craft beer. Distilling is essentially the process of heating wort (you know, that solution of water, sugar, etc that you get during the brewing process) until it evaporates… and with alcohol being lighter than water, it will pass through the process more efficiently, producing a solution with higher alcohol content. Basically, after a few times, it’ll take about 5 gallons of beer that’s normally about 5% ABV… and turn it into about a gallon of whiskey that’s more like 40% ABV. Then Seven Stills will age this whiskey in a charred oak barrel for a few months or years depending on what they want to do with it. In this case, they had filled these barrels with whiskey distilled from a coffee porter… so on top of the smoked oak flavors from the barrel… and the whiskey portion, there’s also a little hint of coffee & malty porter in there too… but honestly, for my pallet, I’m sure the burn of the 30-40% ABV will pretty much conquer that until it wears off on the back end. I’m curious to try their shine though… and in the meantime, they were offering some of their smaller five-gallon barrels to our homebrewer’s guild to make some delicious brews… and so we picked up one of their barrels to age some of our homebrew.

 

What we decided to do with our barrel is use it to age our Imperial Stout that has been aging for the past few months in my apartment. The result is taking our Imperial Stout which should already have a strong malty backbone with molasses, caramel, chocolate and vanilla notes up front… and then with the barrel aging will bring out some of that smokiness from the charred oak and possible some of that lingering coffee & whiskey notes that has soaked into the wood on the back end… which should make for a great full bodied beer (with about a 10-13% ABV overall) ready just in time for my birthday in April. First though, we have to prepare the barrel…

 

When you get the barrel, because of a multitude of things… like it being made of wood… and bacteria & other things can get into it VERY easily… and frankly, we have no idea where this thing has been other than passed along through a warehouse in the Dogpatch for the past few months/years… we have to do a few things to unsure that we don’t get a lot of living things growing & reproducing in our beer besides our own yeast in the stout. The first step is to clean the barrel up a bit on the outside (luckily this one was pretty well maintained).

 

 Mmm... smellovision... check out the oak layers...

  

Then you’ll usually get enough water to fill up the barrel and let it soak overnight to make sure that the wood hasn’t shrunk a little bit & left gaps between the wood planks that comprise the barrel. Again, luckily this is a fairly fresh barrel so we didn’t have to do the overnight thing… but this brings up another point.

 

Sidenote on Barrel Maintenance: If you’re going to use a barrel for multiple brews (which we intend to) then you never really want the barrel to be empty. That’s to say, you always want liquid in the barrel. If we didn’t have a batch of beer ready to put in it this weekend, then we would’ve put five gallons of water in there. This is to make sure that the barrel doesn’t dry out & crack or just cause the barrel to become less uniform and leak. We plan on having our next batch ready to go when we take our Imperial Stout out in a few months… but to be honest, we have no idea what it’s going to be just yet. Also, just as a rule of thumb, after about three batches of so… your barrel IS going to get a bit of an infection, meaning that some bacteria and/or wild yeasts are going to get into the wood. However, these yeasts that would otherwise just sour your beer (because you can’t brew anything that’ll kill you, just taste unexpected) can also be utilized to make some rather unique Sour Beers or bring out different flavors in an old recipe that you might want to try or experiment with. Some of the world’s most unique & highly regarded beers are from process like this. So yeah, we’ll probably try something like that with our 3^rd or 4^th batch with this barrel… but that’s a bit down the road. For now, let’s continue to prepare this barrel for our first barrel aging batch…

 

The next step is to disinfect the inside of the barrel. We do this by heating up enough water to fill the barrel (in this case, five gallons) to somewhere between 140-180 degrees Fahrenheit. Water this hot will kill any bacteria and other organisms that it comes into contact with. In this case, we were on the high end of 170 degrees because better safe than sorry. I’ve read that the higher the water temp, the more stuff is taken out of the oak (in this case whiskey) but it’s probably just a miniscule difference between 145 & 175… and we just don’t want bad things growing & then dying in our beer. This also takes the place of other sanitizers such as StarSan or One Step because the chemicals in those are bad for the oak from what I understand. Anyway, you leave the water in there for about 45-60 minutes… and then you drain it… pulling out what appears to be heavily diluted whiskey from the barrel as well as any floaty things that you don’t want in your beer…

 

Once the water has been drained… now your barrel is ready to receive your brew…

 

From there, you just transfer it into the barrel, plug the top with a bung & stopper, and set in a cool, dark place for a while. Well, technically you probably don’t really need it to be that dark since it’s surrounded in oak & light won’t get through… but don’t put it in sunlight or anything, that’ll dry out that oak REAL quick & cause cracks. We put it in our brewery corner. Also, as far as how long you want to leave it be… there are a few trains of thought, but it’s really up to you. Some just give it a set amount of time… and then bottle or keg when the time has passed, of course checking periodically to make sure that the pressure release stopper on top is still bubbling periodically. Others test the beer periodically through a little sampling port or just scooping some out of the barrel… but that can obviously lead to more infection from the open air or the vessel used to get the sample. It’s your barrel, do what you want… we’ll be keeping an eye on the bubbling… and probably checking and/or bottling around the first part of April, depending on the activity. That way we can get a LOT of whiskey out of the oak… and it’ll have to be quite a lot of be noticeable in the Imperial Stout… and we have some high gravity yeast in there anyway (had to repitch a little bit just before Christmas) so it’s still working pretty good.

 

 Cleaning out the carboy with PBW...

We also sampled some of our Imperial Stout as is… and it’s f**king delicious. Like I mentioned earlier, very rich, malty, molasses & caramel notes, hint of vanilla… and you get a little bit of burn as well because… if my calculations are correct going from 1.088 OG to 1.010 gravity reading right now… it’s already about 11% ABV and now it’s being soaked in a whiskey barrel… and still bubbling away… so it should be pretty potent… and have a LOT of different flavors giving it a full body flavor (hopefully not too dry since it’s turning a lot of the sugars into booze, but so far so good). Anyway, we’ll obviously keep you posted.

 

Since we had everything out, we also transferred our Ramble Tamble Red Ale into the secondary fermenter… and thanks to being an all-grain recipe, dry hopping AND remembering the Whirfloc tablet this time… there was a lot of trube to be cleared out… but the beer is looking great…

 

After doing beer stuff, we headed a few houses down to J-Mo’s Smash Party… you know, setting up old Nintendo gaming systems (N64 & GameCube this time) and playing games of our youth? Well, I never had an N64 or GameCube, so this was my first time playing games like “Goldeneye” & “Super Smash Brothers” but I’ve obviously played similar games… apparently these were the original 4-player first person shooter & battle field style games… and honestly, they held up pretty good. Of course the 1997 graphics from “Goldeneye” are nothing compared to 2015 ANYTHING but for being almost 20 years old… you can definitely tell who is who at least… and the gameplay is pretty good too. I can see why this is always on the lists of Top 25 games of all time. We of course also played some “Super Mario Kart” as that’s just a fun f**king party game… so yeah, good times.

 

Sunday was the Super Bowl Party at Izzy’s Aunts… and we brought some beer… and some beer muffins… and it was just amazing fun… and of course my predictions were really, really, really, really close. I was one point off the final score (Patriots scored 28 instead of 27) and the game did technically end on an interception by the Patriots Defense… but it was their 3^rd string situational corner instead of Darrelle Revis. That’s pretty close… and let’s face it, Katy Perry was the real winner of the Super Bowl.

 

Anyway, that’s about all I have for this weekend… but plenty more fun still coming up this next week… including a batch of Cider, making another batch of “Damn Good Beer” with Izzy’s Aunts, and a wonderful dinner at Elevation 66 Brewing coming up next Monday. Have a great day everybody!!! Oh… and one more thing…

 

MLK Weekend 2015

Good Afternoon Ladies & Gentlemen,

 

This MLK weekend was a lot of fun… Saturday we did a lot of errands & running around mostly… but Sunday, we started with a little walk around the Presidio to see some of the free museums (paid for with my rent and/or taxes) and just the gorgeous scenery… first up was a museum of the Fallones, an island chain just off the Pacific coast that apparently is a sanctuary for a LOT of sea animals…

 

 Beautiful view of Golden Gate Bridge... through the fog...

 Baby seal pelt... you can feel what you're missing...

Then we found the Pet Cemetary… now conveniently located under Doyle Drive’s construction…

 

Then there was an art gallery adjacent to the Walt Disney Family Museum…

 

… and lastly was basically an artist’s rendering of what they want to turn the Presidio into with thanks to my rent & taxes…

 

 Sigh... yeah, a handicap ramp to f**king nowhere...

Coming soon... Thank you Presidio!

That evening, we made Chocolate Porter floats with Marionberry Pie Ice Cream… like a boss…

 

Monday, we celebrated the good Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. by starting up a batch of Elevation 66’s own Ramble Tamble Red Ale using our home system… there’s really no more fitting way to celebrate it in my opinion…

 

With some of the spent grains, Izzy made spent grain bread…

 

… and will make some horse/doggie treats… but that will come later… no peanut butter handy this time around… The birds enjoyed the rest…

 

Tuesday night was our monthly SF Homebrewers Guild meeting, and we had a special guest Rich Higgins, who is one of only nine master cicerones in the WORLD!!! He talked with us about tasting beer, including the scoresheets in competition, the science behind it, and just the overall experience. We probably had about a hundred guests this meeting as we’re growing at a pretty steady rate. Afterwards, Izzy & I also got to pick his brain a little bit with a drink at Steep Brew.

 

That’s really about it this entry… but we’ve got a lot of things coming up including my brother & buddy Chris’ visit, beer related activities, and another Learn to Homebrew Day potluck probably in the next month or two. In the meantime, have a great day everybody!!!