Category: Brewing

Michael Jackson, who is the beer critic of beer critics, has died as the age of 65 from Parkinson’s disease:

Jackson especially loved Belgian brews. His books “The Great Beers of Belgium” and “World Guide to Beer” introduced them to many export markets, including the United States.

By identifying beers by their flavors and styles, and by pairing them with particular foods and dishes, Jackson helped give birth to a renaissance of interest in beer and breweries worldwide that began in the 1970s, including the North American microbrewery movement.

This is to the beer community like losing Jeff Cooper was to us gunnies.  This weekend, I will enjoy a bottle of Liefmans Frambozen in his memory.  So long Michael.

Hat tip to Rustmeister.

Pennsylvania is home to some really fantastic breweries, from Victory Brewing Company in Downingtown, to Pennsylvania Brewing Company in Pittsburgh, it’s a great state to live in, if you’re a beer lover.  I’m happy to see us adding Philadelphia Brewing Company to the family of excellent Pennsylvania brewers.

This is very cool.   Unfortunately, it means you have to drink beer from a can, which is sacrilege.   Beer is properly drunk from a glass, unless you’re a heathen.   I suppose it would be possible to construct a robot that would throw you a bottle, and a fresh glass, but failing to catch it could get rather messy.

Summer is usually the off season for me in regards to home brewing. For one, I generally keep pretty busy doing other things I like, most of which involves being outside. For two, it’s just too friggin hot. Brewing is pretty BTU intensive when you mash your own grain. For three, I just don’t drink much beer in the summer during the week, because of the previous two reasons. I haven’t yet drank what I made this prior winter.

I’m thinking about getting one of these. It’s a plate chiller, called “The Therminator”. It would solve one of the big problems I have making beer in summer; the water coming out of the tap is too warm. Typically, in summer, my tap water is about 65 degrees, and it takes forever to chill 5 gallons of wort down with my self-made immersion chiller. In contrast, winter time tap water temperatures are typically about 50 degrees, which gets the job done much faster.

Counterflow chillers have their downsides, in that you have to work hard to keep them clean, and keep them sanitized. Immersion chillers can just be rinsed off, and that’s about it. Not so with counterflow chillers, which must be cleaned and sanitized. But being able to get my wort chilled and into the fermenter in just a few minutes would be a big help.

Sorry for the light blogging today. I had the day from hell at work, and when I got home, I had to sacrifice blogging to the beer god. After work, I decided to stop by the home brew supply store. I picked up a tower faucet to add to my kegerator. Glenn Reynolds has been blogging recently about wanting one, but you can spend a few hundred dollars at Sears, and another hundred fifty or so from the home brew supply, and build one yourself.

Now, this isn’t quite as stylish looking as the commercial kegerators you can get, but it’s far more versatile, which is important for the home brewer. If you’re just drinking beer, you’re probably buying the standard sized kegs, and you’re only using it to keep the beer cool. If you’re a home brewer, you use your kegerator for fermenting and lagering when you need more precise temperature control. When I’m using my kegerator for serving, which is just a converted deep freeze with a temperature regulator added, I can chill four Cornelius kegs at a time.

Pouring a beer is the real test. Sadly, the first glass out of my new tap was rather cloudy, because I had to take the keg out to drill the holes in the top for the tubing and anchorage. The second glass was much more clear. It’s going to be quite nice, to be able to leave my beer on tap all the time, and just mosey over and draw a pint off any time I want.

The word dregs is actually a bit of brewing terminology.  The dictionary defines it thusly:

The remnants of a liquid left in a container, together with any sediment or grounds.

After the yeast have completed primary fermentation, they settle down on the bottom, producing a thick mud.  The goal of racking to secondary or to the keg is to get your beer off this mud comprised of yeast cells, before it ruins the flavor.   The last bit of beer out of the fermenter presents a bit of a dilemma.  You can do one of two things with it:

1. Dump it, in which case you lose about a quart of beer.
2. Drink it, in which case you’ll find out the next day that yeast is a natural laxative.  Yeast are good for you otherwise, though, and have some helpful nutrients.

Tonight I’m opting to drink the dregs.  If you really wanted to be gross you could drink it after swishing up the sediment off the bottom, but I doubt most would have the stomach for that.  As it is, with a highly floctuating yeast, you can pour a fairly clear glass off of the sediment on the bottom.

I’m having to rack two ales into the kegs tonight.  The first is the Bitter Bitch American IPA that was made several weeks ago.  It’s ready to be put into the keg, carbonated, and served.  I’m also having to do Joy’s Birthday Stout, which is really just from an extract oatmeal stout kit.   I told her I’d make her a stout for her birthday, which is next weekend, but I didn’t have a whole day to make a beer from malted grain, so I had to cheat and use extract.  It’ll really need to condition for another two weeks in the secondary keg, so if she’s intent on drinking it next weekend, it’ll taste kind of rough.

After this, I think it’ll be time to try a lager.  I think I’m up for it.