Chili & Smuttynose Pumpkin Beer

Today is the unofficial start of fall; I am making chili.

It's pouring rain outside, and has been for some time now. It's still sort of warm & muggy, but it's definitely September out there, so it is time to sit inside & cook all day. Oh, and also there's beer.

Here's what we're drinking at this very second, if you are interested.

The un-initiated are always taken aback by my chili at first. Things like "where are the tomatoes?" and, "when do you add the beans?" are often heard, usually with varying degrees of concern detectable in the voice of the inquisitor. The only real reply which can be given is "don't ever speak to me that way again." It is only hours later, upon wiping up their plates with a home made tortilla, that they "get it." See, there is great debate among chili afficionados, and various approaches and styles to the dish. If you are using tomatoes or beans, or fucking zucchini or some ridiculous shit like pineapples (I actually heard that for the first time the other day), rest assured that, no matter how good you think your chili tastes, it would be instantly disqualified from any sanctioned competition.

More info to come

-Wrence

Left-Handers

Sigur Rós -Boston, 19 September 2008

The show was freaking TIGHT! Seriously....and our seats were 2nd row center, as you can pretty much tell from the photo above. This shot was taken, as usual, with my phone and sucks. I'm pretty sure this was from the opening song, svefn-g-englar (or, alternately, "unpronouncable song #1").

Damien & Liz came with, but had seats way in the back; the Bones & I were basically on the stage with the band. Observe:

and the venue is my favorite place in town to see a show, outdoors under a giant tent on the waterfront....plus, it was a cool evening so everyone had out their big wool sweaters, Icelandic-style.
I'm thinking about re-naming this blog "Cool stuff I've done but am only able to present in crappy cellphone camera images."
This shot was from one of the last songs, Gobbledigook, which was clearly off the Gobbledihook. (Please slap me in the face for that joke, now). The show may have started slow and mellow but ended on a totally energetic and manic note, and not a person remained seated by this point. Freakin' great.

Edit: here's the setlist-
svefn g englar
glósóli
ný batterí
fljótavik
við spilum endalaust
hoppípolla
með blóðnasir
svo hljótt
heysátan
viðrar vel til loftárása
inní mér syngur vitleysingur
sæglópur
hafssól
gobbledigook
illgresi
popplagið
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So today I'm dedicating some serious time to sitting around & doing nothing except maybe hanging out with the badass pumpkin I got yesterday at the farm. Should be good times.

-Wrence

Coo-coo for Cacao

Today I ditched work.

This morning after coffee I roasted the cacao beans in the oven. I started them off around 400 and slowly lowered the temp to about 300 for a total of 20-25 minutes roasting time. The house smelled glorious. If you are trying it yourself, what you want to hear is the popping sound of the water evaporating from the beans. Afterward, we removed the husks, which was quite easy to do just by hand. Separating them out was a little trickier, but no big deal. Then, they were easily crushed with the back of a spoon and dumped right into the black beer, which is now 2 weeks old.

One snag in this whole plan came about when I went to buy the cherries. I was wondering a few weeks ago when the cherry "season" officially ends, so I went out to whole foods and was happy to see that there were cherries in abundance there. For some inexplicable reason, I DIDN'T BUY ANY, somehow confident that they'd still be there for me when I eventually needed them. Turns out, the end of cherry "season" was approximately now.

SO, after futile trips Wednesday night to 2 or 3 different Whole Foods stores, and also the Harvest Coop, and even after Vanessa drove me around to Shaw's and Stop & Shop, I finally gave up and started re-thinking the whole plan. But it was quite evident that I needed to press on with the original idea. I thought about getting dried cherries and re-hydrating them in some brandy or something, but the ingredient lists for same always included some kind of vegetable oil, presumably to keep them from sticking together in one gross congealed cherry orgy. As we all know, lipids do not play nice with beer, so that idea was written off. I ended up finding jarred sour cherries, not a pie mix, mind you, just pitted cherries in a sugar water brine, with the only other ingredient being food-grade citric acid, which I am fine with. So I chopped the shit out of them and added I think about 1.5 pounds. Oh, also a vanilla bean got in there as well. Here is a video of the first blurp from the airlock after I sealed the fermenter back up.




(Yea, I was rocking Dark Side while all this went down -Cheers, Richard Wright). Normally at that point in the day, I would have been at work, just finishing my coffee and reluctantly getting around to checking my voice mails. This was a much better use of my time, I think.
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In about 30 minutes Diesel & Liz are expected; tonight we are seeing Sigur Ros at the Bank of America Pavilion (or whatever the shit they call it these days) which is probably my favorite venue in town to see a show. Should be tight. I've never seen this band though I've been a fan for a long time. Also, it should be noted that while I'm not POSITIVE, I think The Bones and I have totally kick-awesome seats. More to come on that later

Peace
-Wrence

Meading

I put togther the new mead last night, and I thought I'd get a post up about my procedure, just in case there are any mead people searching around the internet who come across Bros11. In fact, let me begin by just typing a few quick keywords, sort of as bait, if you will....

__

Mead

Cyser

Peaches

Wyeast 1056

Honey

Cider

Japanese Schoolgirls

(Wait, how did that last one get in there??)

And now, off we go:

First, what we are making is technically a "Cyser" -which is a type of Melomel (a fruit mead) made with apple cider.

I started with 2 gallons of fresh Apple cider. It should be noted that all my ingredients (save the yeast) came from within about 30 miles of Boston, though this of course is not necessary. I started heating the cider gently on the stove. I then stirred in 10 pounds of wildflower honey and brought the mixture up to about 165-170 degrees F, and held it there for about 15-20 minutes to kill off whatever bugs or wild yeast may have been hanging out. I am hoping though that this temperature was not hot enough to "set" the pectin in the cider, which can cause a haze in the finished product. Next, I threw in the wort chiller and cooled the mixture (must?) down to about 80 degrees. I poured the mixture straight into a sanitized fermenter and blended in 2 gallons of bottled spring water and a big 1056 starter that I had prepared. Shit, I just realized, while typing this out, that I forgot to add any yeast nutrient last night. Oh well. Forget that. Then I pumped about 2 minutes of pure O2 into the beast and that was all she wrote. This morning it was working away nicely at a perfect 68 degrees F. In 2 or 3 weeks I'll transfer this into secondary on top of some local peaches and nectarines: Peach Cyser Baby!

MEAD ON

Here is a pic RyToy took of the Braggot I made last winter

-Wrence

Mega-Productive week

Damn.....I've been stupid busy for the last month, but this is just one of those weeks where everything sort of went really well.

In addition to a full 5 day work week (which hasn't happened in a LOOONG time) I managed to:

-Get all my schoolwork done for the week
-Dry hop the pale ale
-Start yeast for the mead
-Buy peaches for the mead at the farmer's market and prep them for use
-Dinner/Beers @ Redbones
-Beers @ Atwood's
-Thorough cleansing of the entire apartment
-Neck-hair trimmage
-The purchase, writing on, and mailing of a birthday card for Amanda
-Tuition payment sent in (only one left)

Can you guess what I'll be doing tonight? If "beer" was part of your answer, you are right.

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Tomorrow I have a date with my Mom, who is coming into Cambridge to hang out and go shopping & eat & stuff at some of the neighborhood places I'm always talking about. I think she is really psyched; everytime I'm out at her house and I've brought some cheese or chocolate or wine or something she's always all "I wish we had places like that out here where I could shop for stuff"...should be good times. I'm thinking of starting things off at the newly opened Sofra, hitting the beautiful Mt Auburn Cemetery for a walk, and maybe Formaggio Kitchen while we're out in west Cambridge; followed by some walking around Harvard & Inman Square....I've got plenty of places I think we should go so we'll be tired & THIRSTY at the end of this adventure

Bon Weekend,
-Wrence

Our Amazing World, (science-style)

This will be the first of a new regular column here at Bros11 (no, it won't) dealing with topics in current science (don't worry, it won't).

I'm sure we've all heard much about this new particle accelerator thingee all those physicists have built out in Europe somewhere, and to be fair it IS realy impressive, but the name....come ON, guys: the name needs some work.

Behold, the Large Hadron Collider

One would think, given the truly unbelievable amount of sheer brain power it must have taken to conceive of, design, build, and operate such an amazing piece of equipment, that they could have come up with something, ANYTHING more creative than that. Those guys must have just burned out that part of their brains while spending so many years studying freakin bosons or leptons or whatever.

This reminds me of some other names I've come across over the last year or so that have given me a laugh.

These are all real:

The Very Small Array

The Very Large Array

The Very Long Baseline Array (at which they engage in "very long baseline interferometry" -no joke)

also, I came across something called, inexplicably: The Large Millimeter Telescope -oh, it's a LARGE millimeter....I get it now.

My only guess is that eventually we will see such marvels as the "Wicked Tall Ladder to the Moon" and the "Freakin Tiny-Ass Robots "

Keep it coming, science!

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Anway, enough of that crap.

Last night, I dry-hopped my latest pale ale; I plan to bottle it Sunday. Also I fed my 1056 starter that I am building up for the new Mead (a Cyser, specifically), which I also hope to put together Sunday. I just have to get that black beer out of the fermenter first, but it should be ready for secondary by then anyway. Also, I just came back from the farmer's market (gov't center) where I bought about 4 pounds of locally-grown peaches & nectarines, upon which I'm going to age the new mead. Thirsty?

-Wrence

More Brew Crap - & "Post Previous"

So Friday night I boiled the black beer alluded to in the post previous. Things went well, I took my time seeing as how it was friday and I had the whole weekend in front of me. Oh, but also I was working on finishing my exam as well. I got home from work (after a stop at the brewstore for my specialty malts) around 6pm and got the mash started right away. Basically, from 6-9pm, whenever I wasn't doing something with the brew I was sitting in front of my computer scribbling out answers. I was hoping to have the eXam finished that night but at around 9pm I gave up with 8 questions still remaining (out of a total of 25)....so not too bad. Anyway I had to get that brew session wrapped up. Here's the 'pe:

9lbs Maris Otter 2-row malt
.75lb Munich malt
.5lb Cara-foam dextrin malt
.5lb Belgian De-husked black malt
.25 Chocolate malt

I hit a gravity of 1.064 which might even be a touch high but I am happy with it. A mere .25 ounces of Pacific Gem flowers in the kettle should have gotten me about 14 IBUs....everything is proceeding as I have foreseen (-the Emperor).....I imagine a nice, sweet-ish, malty-but-not-too-malty base beer with its own natural chocolate undertones. This should work well with the cocoa nibs, vanila beans, and sour cherries I plan to addd during conditioning.

The rest of the weekend saw me gradually finishing my exam, re-writing it all out again so it could be faxed and actually read by another human being, smashing my head into the table repeatedly, and then sampling a few brews. The new Belgians I mentioned in the post previous were both tasted; the pale hoppy one is a DELIGHT, and the dark one is ok but for a sort of acrid, lingering sensation in the back of the mouth which I attribute to the dark sugar syrup I used. We all noticed this. Man, I am really getting sick of those trendy-ass syrups...I might have to break up with them, I mean, it's been years and I am still just unsatisfied with the relationship.
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The Deborah's & I drove over to Kevbone's place in Brookline Saturday night to "help him brew" and meet the new canine in his life. On the way home we ran into a gal named Hanna. She was loud and had winds of up to 40mph. She also dumped gallon after gallon of water on us as we drove home. But, she was nice enough to clean all the dried up beer & food remnants off of the driveway for us back home, so I can't complain.

-Wrence

The State of the Brew-ion

Just thought I'd get up a quick update on all the beering, seeing as how my last mention of hombrew was over a month ago after I had made the Rochefortesque beer.

So, Rochefortesque has been in the bottle for about 3 weeks now. I am not in a hurry to open one for a few reasons: 1- it is a pretty strong beer at around 9% booze by volume and will probably need another month or so to really come into its own; and, 2 - it was somewhat under-attenuated finishing at 1.019 - which would be nice for a barley wine or even a huge double IPA, but for a delicate Belgian beer I would have liked to have seen 1.015 -at most. Also, while I didn't taste it during bottling (I was WAY too hungover to even sip any of it) it still smelled strongly of the syrup I used, which in my experience takes 3-6 months before it starts to fade into the background, even then almost grudgingly so. I plan to throw one in the fridge tonight so we can try it this weekend.

And yes, I did brew that Belgiany-IPAish sort of beer to which I made a passing mention. Really the only reason for this brew was that we were running low in the house and I needed to make something immediately, but it was still just too warm (early August) to ferment with American yeast. But I took an American approach to this, aiming for a sessionably hoppy beer. The Achouffe yeast was selected based on its kick-assitude and also how it drops wicked bright right away. Domestic malts took me to about 1.048 and then generous whole flower Summit, Liberty, and Crystal hops got involved at all points. Looking at about 40 IBUs for that one...it has been in the bottle for 2 weeks and should be ready now. And because I'm a dork, I named it "Houblon Belgique." I'll throw a few in the fridge tonight as well, hopefully this weekend will see 2 new drinkables for us. That is, once I finish my first major exam for brew school (no drinks until I get this thing done - it's a BEAR).

Once we finally saw some cooler temperatures in Boston towards the end of August, I got in another session ale, this one featuring all whole Crsytal flowers and my standard American yeast. It's about to be racked and dry-hopped tonight. I plan to harvest and "wash" some of the yeast from the fermenter bottom for use in the next batch:

Black Forest Ale

I've long wanted to make a black beer with that de-husked caraffa stuff, which is supposed to give you nice color and chocolate-like aromas WITHOUT the harshness or astringency usually associated with the dark roasted malts. We shall soon see for ourselves! I've ordered some on the internets!! It ARRIVED VIA UPS!! Why all the excalmation points?!?!? I DON'T KNOW!

I'm planning on a Maris Otter base, up to about 1.060, with some Munich and perhaps a touch of regular old chocolate malt (depending on how things look in the mash tun), and hopping will be super-minimal as I plan to subject this base beer to a mad scientist-type flavoing regime: In secondary will go several* ounces of cocao nibs, and a touch* of vanilla bean for balance, and then several* pounds of sour cherries. Have you ever had Black Forest cake? Well, there you go. The key to the whole thing either sucking or kicking ass will be the requisite sweetness of the base beer, as I adamantly refuse to use lactose sugar to sweeten this brew (I'm talking to YOU, Southern Tier Creme Brulee Stout) I'll keep everyone posted - this should get boiled at the end of the week current.

Also somewhere on the horizon is another batch of Mead; this time probably a Cyser to celebrate probably some sort pagan harvest kind of thing that may not even really exist but does in my head each year at this time. Basically I dance around my apartment wearing a burlap bag, making batch after batch of chili, drinking brandy in ecstatic enjoyment of cooler weather and fresh autumn produce. For two months. I might dump in some peaches into secondary on that bitch as well, just because I like to party.

PS: If you talk to RyToy, ask him how The Boss is doing. Just ask him.

-Wrence

*These are of course, incredibly accurate measurements - NEVER question the brewer