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!)