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 …
Tag: BEER & HOMEBREWING
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 …
Stepping Out of the Shadow of Maybe
Well, Miss Jiwaku and I are paying close attention to the news about Japan’s ongoing crisis in Fukushima, and the good news is that it seems to have stabilized. (The bad news is that it still doesn’t seem to be getting better, so the stability is probably precarious and it’s stable but at a very dangerous point.) It seems a little self-indulgent to worry too much, since compared to a lot of people in Japan we’re insanely lucky right now. But unlike some people around here, we’re both acutely aware that national borders, as fictions, do nothing to block the …
Cascadian Brewday: St. Vitus of Cascadia RyePA
Since I’ll be going on a trip soon, I wanted to fill up all my fermenters, so I’d have something bubbling way while I’m gone. Therefore, though I rarely have two brewdays in a row, I decided to go for it today. Yesterday’s Saison was a long, slow mash, but I figured today I’d get a nice mix of grains, including a lot of highly enzymatic base grains, and just let ‘er sit for an hour or 90 minutes, and then get the damned boil done. Today’s quick brew is a RyePA, which is an American IPA with a substantial …
Belgian Brewday: L’identité Secrète (“Super” Saison)
I’ve been ill for the last week or so, and this prevented me from going on a trip with my writing group to Jeonju. I’d promised to show them around, and I have to say, it was a bit heartbreaking when I wrote up a short guide to places to eat and drink in Jeonju and Iksan, not just because I was suddenly dying to eat some of their amazing, wonderful food and make a last trip with those friends (since several of them are leaving), but also just out of a desire to see those cities again. But when …
Belgian Brewday: La Corée en a Quatre (Saison)
For those who don’t live in Korea, the name of this Saison (Korea Has Four) is a bit of a quip; anyone who has lived here a month or two knows that for some reason, the fact that Korea has four seasons is considered very important by a lot of people here — a fact lampooned in at least one film I’ve seen, Dasepo Sonyeo (Dasepo Naughty Girls). I could get into why this is, and the reasons that such a common thing in the temperate zone attained such an important status in Korea, but this is a post on …
Rye Brewday: Wonmisan Kvass
Yesterday, I managed to bottle a couple of batches that I suppose couldn’t be more like night and day: a batch of Berliner Weisse (about 2-3% alcohol, a gorgeous blonde color, and somewhat sweetish sour — though less sour than I expected given how much of the sugar was converted to lactic acid) and a batch of dubbel (~7% alcohol, brownish-black in color, and very dry yet also flavorful). The dubbel went into 500ml bottles, and the Berliner Weisse (which would have been a perfect keg beer, if I had kegs) went into 1L bottles, including a number of plastic …
The Year in Review
I don’t think I have the strength to write a whole year in review, because I ended up staying up all night to finalize my grading, and then waking up early because I hadn’t heard back from the office assistant I emailed the gradesheets to (for system entry). I’ll give it a stab, though. Let’s see:
Not Quite Sourdough, But It Rose
I made some bread today, my 2nd try at making bread with Brettanomyces Claussenii yeast. Brett C. is, as you may know, a strain of wild yeast of the kind used in some kinds of brewing, and I brewed a beer using it as my sole yeast back in late October of this year. (It’s been in the bottle a week and I plan on testing out a small bottle this afternoon, to see if the carbonation is where I’d like it to be.) Anyway, I saw that The Mad Fermentationist had made some baguettes with a strain of Brett, …