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 …

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 …

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.)

“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 …