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