Thom & Jonny playing "The Rip" by Portishead

This is really nice & I can't stop listening to it

Of Rose Petals and Lobster

Brewed the Persian Spice beer last week. On hand was the venerable KevBones, who hadn't been to my house since, well....New Years day 2008; also the Deboras joined us halfway through the session. Things went well. Here are the essentials:

(all the grain used was from Dingeman's Malterie -straight up Belgian, BITCH)

5# Pilsner malt
4# Pale malt
12 Oz Aromatic malt
12 Oz Cara-Pils

.5# Honey (added at last minute of boil)


White Labs 530 (abbey....someone.)




Hoppage was a modest .5 Oz of Summit at 45 minutes, just to provide a balancing bitterness. No late kettle additions were needed due to the spice mixture added at knock-out.

The spice mixture was interesting; I made it directly from the recipe in Chef Ana Sortun's great book. My initial guess was that I'd use 1/4 to maybe 1/2 of the spice mix, but once it was combined, smelled, and weighed out, I decided that I'd start with half and see how the wort took to it. We ended up steeping for about 10 minutes before we began chilling. The spices were very mellow and subdued so I added about another 1/4 of the mix into the kettle and then started chilling. We shall pray to Ninkasi that I didn't take a cool idea and completely fuck it up.

Fermentation was ideal, I must say; starting at 68 and slowly creeping up to 74 over the course of 5 days. When all is said and done half of this will go into a case of those nice 330ml Trappist bottles, and half into a case of Champagne bottles which I will cork finish for kick-awesome presentationery. If the beer is actually worth a damn, a few bottles will go down the street to Oleana as a gift.


So that was Wednesday.

Thursday night, DG Lewis showed up at my place fresh from San Francisco CA, via New Hampshire, in a rented Ford Mustang that was so stupidly sweet we couldn't help whipping donuts and peeling out everywhere we went all weekend; which ended up being to Waldoboro, Maine. I had never been before. It was.....remote. Peaceful. Bucolic I believe was tossed around as well. Anyway, we spent about $200 on seafood, local beer, and fresh produce; then spent the better part of the next 24 hours swimming, cooking, playing tunes on about 10 different musical instruments that were laying around DG's Brother's house up there, and ripping down this zip-line they had set up between some trees on their property (like I said, REMOTE) as this was the main form of entertainment these guys have up there. If you're lucky I might be able to post a video of my virgin zip down this thing. Stay tuned for comedy.

One last thing; we here at Bros11 have had a crazy flurry of hits lately, from all over the fucking place - neither RyToy nor I are quite able to explain what happened. Anyway, new to our ever expanding list of internationals: France (Bonjour, mon ami!), Greece, Israel, Slovenia, Germany, another Aussie, and last but not least impressive, Saudi Arabia. WELCOME CITIZENS OF EARTH. WE LOVE YOU ALL!

-'Wrence


(ps: I forgot to mention the American Craft Beer festival where I, in addition to getting completely butt-drunk, also had the most geeky awkward conversation ever with Garrett Oliver, who's like the coolest guy in the world. I suck!)

Petty and stuff

So, I have been MIA for a bit now haven't I? You might be wondering where I have been and what I have been up to lately....but you probably aren't. This post will detail some of my comings and most of my goings as of late.

I've been working Sunday through Tuesday in an office at a local university that does the incoming student orientations over the course of the summer. My job boils down, essentially, to bullshitting with the parents for three days during the day and hanging around with the students at night. For Sunday and Monday they have me living in the dorm because it is A) easier and B) they need staff on hand to take care of any emergency that comes up. Oh, and we have a big ass game of dodgeball on Monday night. It's awesome. So that's the work angle of what I have been up to.

On the slightly more fun side though, I was lucky enough to get to see Tom Petty and Steve Winwood at the TD Banknorth Garden, which is eerily enough not even the worst named venue in the county let alone the state. But before that, I dragged my ragged ass out of bed way too early and helped my buddy move out of his apartment in Beacon Hill. The only thing less fun than having a straw sized tube shoved through your dickhole into your bladder is moving into or out of a place in Beacon Hill. Narrow ass stairways and hallways...lots of stairs...nary an elevator in sight. It was brutal. Exacerbatinbg the brutality was the fact that not much at all had been packed and his girlfriend/fiance wasn't anywhere to be seen. So in addition to lugging shit all over the fucking place I had to pack some of it up.

Once that was done, I showered real quick and met up with Goober and Angie at the Seaport Bar and Grill down on the water next to the WTC in South Boston. Boozing in the daylight on the roof of a bar on the water is pretty fucking righteous. Even if you are forced to drink macro-swill out of plastic cups. So I got wasted there right up until showtime at which point we hoofed it across town to the Garden for the show. We had seats really fucking close. Like, 2nd-row-down-low-close. Like, I-could-see-Winwood's-pecker-through-his-pants close. Like, one-time-Petty-sneezed-and-I-said-bless-you-and-he-said-thanks close. I have seen Petty at other venues, and this killed any outdoor experience I have had with him. The sound was better, the vibe was better, and the show was better when you can actually see shit as opposed to being halfway across town on the lawn like at the Tweeter Center. I don't even really remember the set list beyond the fact that he definitely closed with American Girl as usual. It was pretty tight.


Otherwise I have not been up to too very much. I managed to bottle my heffe the other night, which was a complete and utter juncque show. Firstly, the fermentation on this bad boy was REALLY VIGOROUS at first and wound up blowing off the foil cap i had on the thing. So, there was yeast all over the side of the carby and on the blanket that had been wrapped around the thing to keep the light out. So that all snelled pretty rank. After finishing sanitizing the bottles, which is the worst fucking torture in the world I commenced bottling. I typically have the bottles lined up on a towel on the floor and I fill as I go placing caps on the top of each as I fill it. Never had any problems with this method before. But this time th etube line that I have coming from the bottling bucket grabbed an empty bottle knocking it over and causing it to hit a couple of others which hit a couple of others. Long story short, there was beer fucking everywhere and i lost about six bottles of it in the process. I cannot stress strongly enough how much I hate bottling. The next time I have any money to speak of I am doing a keg set-up like my main man KG. Anyway, I am hoping to crack the first heffe next weekend. We'll see how that goes.

&RyToy

Je Suis Beer-ing

(the title of this post is an actual sentence that appears on my fridge via magnetic force)

Busy busy with the beer already

Weather has been kind, just warm enough during the day and cool enough at night for me to put my stupid A/C unit back on the bench. It's nice. Even got in another swim at Walden Pond this weekend, and another session with Smokey Joe in the driveway.

But on with the adult beverages:

Friday night: after catching the replay of Holland/France (the Orange look so sick right now) I got to bottling the Summer Wheat beer alluded to here. Final gravity was a bit low at 1.008 or so, but it tasted awesome, dry and almost cracker-like, yet still an almost sweet suggestion on the palate (likely due to the low IBUage). Me so happy.

Sunday: after the making and stuffing into my face of eggs benedict, the kitchen was cleaned and I was off to the brew store to redeem a free White Labs vial; the species was 530, "Abbey Ale." Back at home, I blasted through another bottling session with the help of a few of the Greeks; it's amazing how much easier and faster bottling is when you have 2 people to help/do all the work for you. This was the new Mead which was mentioned back here. The bastard fermented down to 0.996! On normal beer yeast, none the less -OMG!1! I was colored quite impressed. The only thing here was, I couldn't enter anything lower than 1.000 on amateur mash when I tried to calculate the booze-by-volume (unsing the refractometer trick) so It's somewhat of a guess to say that this one is hovering around 9-10% bbv. Oh yea, it tasted awesome, and is still only 5 weeks old. Then I racked the pale ale brewed last week, and dry-hopped it with another ounce of Sterling flowers. Ohh yea, also I started the shit out of that abbey yeast and we are...

Onward to the next brew

While discussing the idea of using rose petals in a beer, Gena mentioned a Persian spice combo they use at Oleana, which is sort of their take on a Chinese 5-spice or an American pumpkin spice mix (by the way, check out Chef Ana Sortun's awesome book, Spice for details). The basic gist is mostly dried rose petals and cinnamon, with some other stuff like coriander and black pepper, all of which I could imagine going well in a medium-bodied Belgian Ale, which is exactly what I decided to do. More on that later in the week as I'm still finalizing & conceptualizing at present. Please just leave me alone for a few minutes while I conceptualize, I beg you.

Also - Donald Gordon "A.O. Smith" Lewis is scheduled to appear at my house later this week. I fear for my poor, poor roomates. As an added bonus to this post, since Donnie does not read blogs, I leave you with a shirtless photo of him listening to me serenade him on his porch in San Fransico (and no, he does not live in the Castro).

-'Wrence

Heat Wave Sweatfest Clusterfuck `08

So I managed to crank out that Pale Ale on Friday night, finising up just in time for Diesel Damien, who showed up at my place around 11pm straight outta Hartford, with his sister Nicky in tow, whom I hadn't seen in probably 5 or 10 years. At this point, the weather was still cool; we enjoyed a mellow night with beers and smoked Hungarian sausage. Then the next morning, this whole heat business started. Saturday Swimming at Walden Pond was a godsend, even though it was a complete clusterfuck. I mean it, it was sincerely crowded; the place was lousy with Redneck picknickers, Yuppies pushing their babies in those "mountain bike-style" baby pusher alongers, old people floating in kayacks but unable to row any measurable distance under their own power. By the time we got home from that it must have been 97 degrees (the exact temperature of my balls) but we still stopped at Whole Foods for mangeables, undaunted in our quest to cook an awesome meal in this hellish weather. I made cevice; normally I just use shrimp but the local scallops they had at the store looked too good to pass up, so I used some of them as well, and it came out great. Dry-aged Ribye steaks and lamb chops were the other protiens, cooked on a sweet little Weber model I'd never seen before. The venue was Diesel's cousin's awesome's pad in Somerville, just a hop skip & a jump from my place (in fact, that is just how I got home later that night). Inexplicably, it seemed to only get hotter as the night progressed; our only recourse was to drink beer. A lot of beer. We pretty much floated Tom's house in it down Spring Hill. After 8 hours of that I basically felt like the condensation-coated bottle of Sierra Summer Lager in Nicky's hand, which she had wrapped in a paper towel to keep from completely soaking herself (which we all pretty much did anyway). When I finally stumbled home that night I gave in and threw the old reliable AC unit into my bedroom window. The Pale Ale from the night before, which had spent its first 20 hours of fermentation at a glorious 72 degrees, was now actually too warm for the little thermo strip to even register. It was frightening. The yeast was Wyeast 1272, with which I've gone a little warm before, but this was totally crazy-time. Anyway, that shit got hauled up to my room before you could say "Goodnight, Gena." The following few days were alternating blurs of sweat, air-conditioning, and hallucinogenic napping episodes; all the while battling to keep my fermenter at a somewhat reasonable temperature. Oh well, the krausen has long died down and it seems to be finishing up now, just as the weather starts to mellow back out (thanks for nothing, God). All there is to do now is dry-hop the shit out of it and hope for the best. _____________ Last night the Greeks & I went out, in an effort to escape our swampy apartment. This place is so freaking bad-assed I don't even know how to put it into words! We crushed about a hundred of those ice cold 22 ouncer Sapporos, in addition to my first ever Sho Chu, a Japanese distilled spirit made from rice & barley (kind of a distilled sake, I guess), which was awesome served on the rocks. I only wish I could have put my entire body on the rocks at that point and it would have been the perfect night. Oh, and I ate my weight in sushi. It was killer. -'Wrence

A Tale of Two Brews

As some of the previous posts have alluded to, there has been a palpable increase of hangingoutitude around my house; between a few little parties and lots of driveway beer-having, we have somehow managed to plow through almost 10 gallons of beer in the last three weeks. This means I must make more.

So, Monday night, with a few of the Greeks assisting, I brewed up a nice little wheat beer:

4# Pilsner (Weyerman's)
3# Wheat malt
1# Munich malt

.25 oz Summit flowers - 60min
1 oz Hallertau flowers (U.S.) -knockout

Fermented with Wyeast 1272
Gravity was 1.045 - just right where I wanted her.

This beer is already finished up with primary and will be racked tonight to make room for the following Pale Ale I am cooking up:

5# 2-rowed malt (U.S.)
4.5# 2-rowed malt (U.K.)
.75# Cara-foam (dextrine malt)

1 oz Sterling flowers - 60 mins
1.5 oz Sterling flowers -knockout
1 oz Sterling flowers - dry hop

the hop schedule may be adjusted on the fly as I see fit. Looking for about 30-40 IBUs for this brew, and a good nose. I've never used the Sterlings before so I am psyched for this beer to give me a good sense of if they're worth a damn or not. Anyway, all I've read on them has been positive.

Both beers were designed for quick conditioning; they will go right to bottles as soon as possible, and with any luck we'll be crushing these guys in a month or so.

Peace

-'Wrence

(post-script: that's right, I'm calling it "2-rowed" malt instead of "2-row" now. Read up on Barley and you'll be doing the same. It's totally geeked out awesome)

The Aftermath

After getting properly crunked on good homebies and Sparks in 'wrence's driveway on Saturday night, we ventured off in good cheer to the LHBS for some brewing essentials. To our dismay, the place was a complete fucking junk show when we got there. Many of your typical stereotypes were in attendance. First we had your typical clueless older couple complete with the wife who waddles around the fucking store in a daze with a homebrew recipe book open in her hands repeating a word or phrase whose meaning completely evades her. This is her penance for last week's trip to Nordstrom's. We had another middle-aged dude, who I guess seemed like he knew what he was doing, but unfortunately due to his age and proximity gets lumped in with the douchey older couple. We also ran across a couple of moderately attractive younger girls who would have been even more attractive if they weren't wearing those stupid fucking socks that all these idiots wear now to make themselves ugly. They are trying to brew beer both because it is cheap and they think that somehow it is alternative enough to get them some street cred with some dudes or something. They are tackling a lager out of the gate...my heart goes out to them. Working the crowd were the larger, rather socially inept dude, the creepy shirt-half-unbuttoned drunk dude who loves talking about his DUI, and behind the counter we had heart-breakingly normal by comparison dude who probably dreads Saturday mornings more than his annual prostate exam.

Amidst all the hullabaloo, I somehow switched the tops on the Vienna and German Pilsener malts and 'wrence proceeded to dump three pounds of it in with the rest of his grain bill. After much waffling, he decided to alert the Fat Guy who decided to only charge half price...minor catastrophe averted. Aside from this, the trip was a relatively calm 45 minutes of scooping, weighing, and milling. We both got what we wanted and capped it off with a stop at Anna's in Porter Square for breakfast. And I wonder why I have such a hard time believing that I have had the explosive runs for the better part of a week now.

The rest of the weekend was spent playing numerous games of cornhole, drinking beers, frequenting certain Beverly/Salem drinking and eating establishments and getting my brew on. The second annual Heffe, brewed at Angie's request will be called Don't Hassle the Heffe. The brew sesh went smoothly, despite the fact that I essentially wound up with a stuck mash at one point as I wated for more sparge water to come to temp and the gravity suffered as a result. The recipe was simple: 5 pounds wheat & 4 pounds pilsener mashed at 153 for an hour...3/4 ounce Liberty hops for the full boil, and WLP 380 Hefeweizen IV Ale yeast. The shit took off like a shot out of a cannon and blew a hole in the foil I had atop the carby. Gotta love a nice vigorous yeast chowdown. My nachos are done now, see ya later.

&Ry

It used to be about the guano...

So, as 'wrence mentioned in his post below, we had ourselves some good old-fashioned driveway beerhavery and cookitude on Friday night. Beers were had, texts were sent, and much roasted pig flesh was consumed. Let's begin...

I arrived to discover Man Saun and 'wrence crushing beers in the kitchen. After some consultation and mini-cornbread muffin type thingees, the decision was made to move the party to the driveway. For those who would find such a notion disconcerting, I assure you...the driveway was much more than that on this day.

Natural hardwood charcoal was added to the chimney thing and fire applied. In no time flat we had Smokey Joe looking quite ready to grill indeed. Bockwurst and smoked Kielbasa were thrown onto the grill and in no time flat we were chowing down. We had a few different beers to choose from some (but not all) include:

• 'Wrence's honey wine...delicious and super drinkable for something with such a high bbv
• 'Wrence's cardamom-spiced jaggery concoction (i can't remember if this was a wheat beer or not, i think it was)
• 'Wrence's amber
• 'Wrence's saison (prob about a year old and finally carbonated)
• RyToy's Pale Ale
• Man Saun's orange peel and coriander witbier
• Man Saun's lemon zest and grains of paradise witbier

Both of Man Saun's offerings were delicious, but the lemon wit was so far beyond delectable the girls drinking it actually had to be forcibly unstuck from their chairs...yeah, that good.

I'd be remiss if I failed to mention the ribs, which were unreal. Falling off the fucking bone, great sweet/savory balance, nicely finished on the now-cooling Smokey Joe. They were quite the treat and those in attendance ate as much as possible without bursting. Despite our best efforts there were ribs who remained on a plate in the middle of the driveway for the remainder of the night.

With the visiting Inga in attendance as well as the resident Greeks (Gena, Vanessa, and Nancy[sp]) and the neighboring Lori, the party took a turn for the awesome when I saw to it that Sparks was made available to all who would so desire. For those of you not fortunate enough to know, Sparks is a malt beverage containing caffeine, taurine, guarine, and ginseng, is 7% alcohol, tastes like orange soda and turns you into a miniature version of Robert Downey Jr. I had about 2.5 too many with outstanding consequences.

The highlight of the night (for some) would have to be the incredibly lopsided text message showdown between Vanessa and myself. Despite using the unorthodox "alpha" method to Ry's T9 style, Vanessa managed to defeat me soundly at every turn. The sample texts in question varied from those dealing with tazo tea to something about Biloxi. No matter....revenge will be mine in time.

Later the guitar was fetched and songs were sung. On the soundtrack were some songs from The Band (It Makes No Difference, The Weight, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down) and Radiohead (Street Spirit, The Bends, Fake Plastic Trees). RyToy laid down the entirely substandard vocals while 'wrence axed his way to a couple of bloody fingers.

Events get blurry post sing-a-long, although I do know that the party moved upstairs as the night went on. Individual comings and goings are vague at best, but I do know this...I had a kick ass fucking time at DrivewayFest '08.

&Ry