“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 …
Category: BEER & HOMEBREWING
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 …
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, …
Birthday Cyser
Well, I am a few weeks late in starting it, but when you’re bulk aging something for a year, a few weeks seems like not so much to worry about. For those who don’t know the term, a “cyser” is simply a mead/cider fusion. That is, it’s an alcoholic beverage in which the alcohol is created by the fermentation of sugars in honey (mead) and apple juice (cider). I went with a five gallon batch, with approximately two gallons of the must being apple juice. The remainder is water in which 5.2 kilograms of acacia honey has been dissolved. The …