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, …
Tag: BEER & HOMEBREWING
Writing About What You Love
Notice, it says “what” you love, not “who” you love, which is another kettle of… well, fish? Hops? I am working on a short story about homebrewing, brewing, yeast, beer-mythology (there’s a lot of it), art, transformation… well, and finally I’ve come to think of it as my attempt to write something Zymurgico-Lovecraftian. (Zymurgy is the fancy-dancy word for the branch of applied chemistry related to fermentation — making beer, mead, wine, and the like using yeast. Lovecraftian is a term I expect I won’t have to explain to anyone reading this blog.) Anyway, I’m busily revising the story now …
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, …
Experimental Brewday: Ship O’Boons I and II (15 Minute Hopping Challenge)
What, what?! I’ve been wanting to brew up a few experimental things, and in theory at least summer is when I have time. But this experiment is not a lone, mad-scientist experiment… no, it’s a collaborative experiment within my brewing community. No, not forcing people to hop for fifteen minutes, but rather, adding hops to a beer only in the last fifteen minutes of the boil. (Normally, we add hops at earlier stages too, but the end of the boil means more flavor and aroma, and if you add a lot of hops you can maximize those and still get …
Franco-Belgian Brewday: Wonmisan Raison (Rye Saison), and What I May Have Learned from Blending
Another day, another brewday. This one has a backstory, though. A while back, I tried to make a RyePA, which if you don’t know the substyle is simply an IPA — often an American IPA, as far as I can tell — that has a significant amount of rye malt in the grist. I was mashing in my brewpot/MLT setup, and the sparge got stuck, and it was hell… but it tasted pretty good nonetheless. Later, when I was kegging a batch of Saison, I realized I had an extra gallon of the stuff, but nowhere to put it. Meanwhile, …
Parti-Gyle Brewday: Wonmisan Oldboy & Wonmisan Fenian [Cookiejar] Raid
Yesterday was a big day for brewing stuff. Yesterday was the day to transfer Miss Jiwaku’s Old Ale to a keg to bulk age on cherries. That suggested that the optimal way to do it would be to rack the Old Ale onto however many Washington cherries I had on hand (which turned out to be the better part of 3 kilograms). I was faced with the question of what to do with the yeast cake from her Old Ale. While I realize that the Brett B. might have reproduced more, so that the blend is no longer at the …
Wonmisan’s Old Thin Man (Apple Cider)
A few weeks ago, my friend and former colleague did me a favor by picking up six gallons of apple juice from Costco, and finally I got the time to put it all into a carboy and dump the yeast in. The yeast, by the way, is Wyeast 4766, a common cider yeast. I call it the “Old Thin Man” because it’s not fortified, just apple juice and yeast. I don’t think that’s a mistake: I want to see what pure apple juice fermented tastes like. Well, as pure as commercial apple juice ever is, anyway. I don’t need it …
Racking and Racking
This morning was a fruitful one as far as racking various brews into kegs and such.
Steam Injection Brewing? (and some Belgian brewing links)
Good grief, this sounds cool. (There are more posts on the subject, too, of course, like this one, or these ones, over here, if you search around.) Like I said, it sounds cool, but a little hard to set up. Sometimes I wish I had a little stronger background with hardware and building stuff. I think I really would like to have a small steam-powered mash/boil setup. Also, here are some links connected to Belgian beer, which I’m posting here so I can find them again, but which others might appreciate too: I always forget to go and check out …
Belgian Brewday: Wonmisan Shiktakju
Shiktakju is probably a nonsensical word in Korean, but I like the sound of it nonetheless. Shiktak means table, specifically the kind of table at which one eats. The suffix -ju denotes a kind of alcohol. Now, normally, it’s appended to the stuff from which the alcohol is made — baemju is snake liquor (baem=snake), bokbunjaju is wild black raspberry liquor, maeshilju is plum liquor, and so on. So it may be that my usage is a nonsense coinage, but on the other hand, some liquors are named for other things. (I don’t know for sure the etymology of baeksaeju, …