I don’t know if this actually is weird, but, for the ESB I am attempting to brew, and which has sat in primary for a week or so now, the yeast behavior in the carboy looks weird. I saw this fully acknowledging that I don’t use the carboys for primary fermentation anywhere near often enough to know whether this is weird or not… but I’ve never seen anything like it. On top of the wort/beer is this thick, almost oily-looking layer of yeast and bubbles: The bubbles are, well, they are bursting only slowly. The airlock, at this point, is …
Month: April 2011
Fundraiser for Japan Tomorrow — DRINK GOOD BEER! HELP EARTHQUAKE VICTIMS!
I posted this on Facebook a while back, but I don’t remember if I posted an announcement here. Tomorrow, in Bundang, my homebrew club will be donating a bunch of beer for a fundraiser to help put together some money for the Red Cross Fund for Japan’s recovery in the wake of last month’s devastating earthquake/tsunami. There are details here. I’m personally donating a keg of Saison and a keg of supposedly-Bavarian wheat beer. (Which doesn’t really taste Bavarian at all, but it’s still beer, and I brewed it specifically for this event!) I would love for any readers to …
Put Your Mouth Where Your Money Is
There’s an expression in English about following in action what one says: “Put your money where your mouth is.” This need not have anything to do with money, which in this expression is a metaphor for “action.” (It might include donating money, if one is advocating such behavior, but it need not be limited to that meaning. For example, one could exhort another to put his money where his mouth is in terms of, for example, following through on a claim or a professed belief.) When I was younger, I admired this concept: I liked to suggest people put their …
Brewday: A Mild? Or Not-So-Mild? Northern Brown Ale
Well, I may have screwed up my English mild. (See the update at the end of the post for how it became a Northern Brown Ale.)
Enjoyment
While grading some homework from my course on Popular Cultures in the English Speaking World, something clicked for me. I was reading through student responses to the episode of How I Met Your Mother that we watched together, and discussed. Something that really stood out for me was the way in which people talk about comedy, or entertainment in general. I’ve noticed it before, in the way many Koreans talk about music, but finally I think I put some pieces of the puzzle together. Now, I’m not 100% sure I have something here–it may be that my students are all …
Brewday Bonus: For the Nonce ESB(?)
“And that he calls for drink, I’ll have prepared for him a chalice for the nonce…” (King Claudius to Laertes, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII) “For the nonce” is a phrase that’s stuck in my head since I first encountered it in Hamlet — not constantly, but it’s a phrase that occurs to me at times, usually when I cannot use it. It was one of those unfamiliar phrases I needed to have explained to me, and when it was explained, I wondered where the hell he’d gotten that word. Turns out there’s a complex etymology behind it, but one suited …
Fusion Brewday: TriplIPA Riff — Wonmisan Tripel IPA
On the weekend, a few of the brewers in Seoul gathered for a goodbye party for a brewer many of us have known and learned from over the last few years, Kevin. I brought a bottle of the OpperBacco brewery’s TriplIPA Speciale, a beer that I’d picked up in Rome on recommendation from the proprietor of the excellent Johnny’s Off-License. We sampled it at the end of the night, which was probably not optimal, but the beer seemed to be well-received. Fitting with what I noticed about Italian craft brew — that there’s a marked Belgian influence — this seemed …
The Don’t Talk About History Law
It’s really hard to talk about Langston Hughes in the context of the Harlem Renaissance without touching on not only his interest in the Soviets and their system, but also touching on why a number of African-American intellectuals (Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, and many others) were drawn to “revolutionary” ideas, and to Communist ideology — after all, after hundreds of years of things not getting too much better, of pretty constant material, cultural, and social oppression and marginalization, I think it’s not hard to see why some African-Americans would have felt that a sudden, forceful reorganization of society would be the …
Yeasts and Gaming and Why I Wish There Was 30 Hours in the Day
Well, there are things that are new, but I’m trying to stem the tide of crap and use my blog to talk about things either neat and shiny, or interesting and cool, or personal-but-not-complainy. So anyway, let’s see. Coming home to find the Bavarian Weizen I’m got brewing is cool. It’s pretty encouraging because it’s actually bubbling like crazy now. It took about 40 hours to start up, but now it’s going well.I’ll probably try to pitch a second wheat beer, same approximate grist but slightly different hopping, onto the yeast cake and build it up a little more, when …
Bavarian Weizen
I brewed up a Bavarian Wheat beer on Saturday. A Bavarian wheat is a beer that ought to be strong in the banana and fruity esters (along with some clovey and vanilla phenolics) given off by the particular yeast strain used to make it (which, in this case, was Wyeast’s Bavarian Wheat yeast (Wyeast 3638). I got somewhat poor efficiency with this batch (getting a gravity of about 1.040 instead of 1.048), perhaps because I did this batch brew-in-a-bag or, more likely, because of the less-than-optimal grain crush on both the wheat and the pilsner malt I used. Oddly enough, …