It’s Christmastime! Well, for brewers, anyway: if you’re making anything to be consumed around Christmas, and you haven’t already gotten around to brewing it, now would be a good time. For me, Saturday would actually have been a better time, but I was a bit sick, and the mill-shop where I have my grains crushed was unexpectedly closed. (I’ve had a lot of unexpectedly closed / unexpectedly sold-out types of experiences lately, enough to drive me to ranting, indeed. But I’ll save that for another post, except to say that after a failed attempt to find someone else to mill …
Category: BEER & HOMEBREWING
Interesting Ingredients
Ah, my blog seems to have become a brewing blog. Not because I’ve relented in my writing, really, or because I’ve decided to give up on writing about Korea. Mostly just because the stuff I have to say about Korea, and about writing, tends to be less interesting than the stuff I have to say about brewing. Still, I’m thinking about putting all the brewing stuff in a single tab or something, so that those who aren’t interested can leave it out. Hmmmmmm. Anyway, it’s autumn here in Korea, as it is across the Northern Hemisphere, and that means there’s …
Student Brewday: CUK APA / CUK Saison
Note: I am days behind on this post: it was written on Sunday. So all the yesterdays refer to Saturday, 8 October. *** Well, yesterday was a long day. In addition to both moving our new fridge and our new washing machine into the apartment (the fridge in the morning, and the washer at night), and moving my old fridge out to the common room (so I can clean it this afternoon, and start using it for yeast/bottle storage, starters, and lagering), I also hosted a brewday with my students. The brewing part of the day started at 10:00am, and …
Student Brew
Note: I wrote this last night, but fell asleep before posting it. *** So I mentioned a while back how I’d be hosting a learn-to-brew session with some of my students, with the goal of producing two (approximately 5-gallon) batches of beer for a cocktail party being held later this semester. On Wednesday night, we met up and I pulled a bunch of samples of different styles for them to try, including a Belgian Dubbel, a pretty hoppy American Pale Ale, a hoppier-than-style Belgian Pale Ale, a bottle of Leffe (for a proper BPA), an ESB (commercial bottle of London …
Smoky Brewday: Letters from Lichtenhain
So, I have had about 5 pounds (a couple of kilos) of smoked malt sitting around, losing their smokiness. I was kicking around the idea of trying to make some kind of experimental brew. The malt is probably six or eight months old, and so it will not be as smoky as it was when I first got it; on top of that, I only have a few kilos, so I am leery about trying to make a smoky beer unless I use 100% smoked malt. That meant a low-gravity, smaller batch, even if I do add DME. It looks …
Steamy Brewday: Wonmisan Vaporizer
I’m surely not alone in saying that Anchor Steam is the beer I associate with California, though there are, doubtless, plenty of other good beers brewed in the state. But when I first was in San Francisco, I’m pretty sure the first beer I had there was an Anchor Steam. This is fitting, since the Anchor brewery is one of the few that (re-)started production after the Prohibition. I picked it simply because the name was so unusual, which tells you something about the issue of the name of the beer. The style is one that has a long history, though …
15 Minute Hopping Challenge: A Success!
On Saturday we held the meetup for the 15-Minute Hopping Challenge, and I think it’s safe to call it a success. Most of the people who attended were either brewers, or friends/significant others of brewers. On my side, Miss Jiwaku and my friend Charles from Liminality joined in. I’d say pretty much every brew we sampled from the home-brewed stuff ranged from very good to excellent. Bill’s dark hoppy lager, Dax’s fruity Belgian pale, Rob’s “The Shit” barley wine (wasn’t it?), Rowan’s mild and easy-drinking first brew ever (an ESB!), and all kinds of other good stuff thsat may have …
Meadmaking Day: Mittelfrüh Metheglin
This mead is a shot in the dark: I screwed up when measuring the water for my pomegranate mead, and realized too late that I wouldn’t be able to add the pomegranate juice. So I scooped out a liter of the must (as we call the honey water before it is fermented) and froze it, adding more honey to the (now-smaller) must destined for the pomegranate mead. Then I wondered what to do with all that honey-water. Turned out it was about a half-kilo worth of honey, so I figured I could make something with it. 500 grams of honey …
Mead “Brewday”: Meadmaking & Bottling & So On…
Last night, I bottled my “Belgian Pale Ale”. It feels a bit weird to call anything that utterly hoppy by the name, though: it’s definitely out of style, even though the IBUs and the yeast and all are right. The magic of late additions gave this beer a really over-the-top hop flavor (tons of lemon and tropical frut) and a hoppier aroma than other beers I’ve made. (The aroma is not quite so overwhelming as I expected, but it’s certainly present, and I’m a bad judge of aroma to begin with…) I will be kegging my American Pale Ale tonight, …
Something Cheerful, and my Mazing Plans
Both of the other posts I drafted today were about gloomy things — bigotry, on a Korean bus and in an American TV show — but I figured, since it’s the first day of semester, I’d post something cheerful. Miss Jiwaku and I stumbled on something pretty surprising in the Hyundai Department Store tonight, on the way home from dinner: Yeah, that’s three Rogue brewery beers — Dead Guy Ale, Amber Ale, Mocha Porter — and three Lost Coast brewery beers — Indica, Great White, and Tangerine — shelved in the beer section of a department store in Bucheon. Yes, …