Poi Beer

Poi is one of the most sacred and important dishes in Hawaiian cuisine, and I've been dreaming of finding a way to work it into a homebrew ever since I moved to Honolulu. On Sunday I made my first attempt.

For those who don't know, Poi is a thick, paste-like substance made from the mashed up roots of taro plant. Although I've brewed with starchy root vegetables before--in my Fenton Smith's Sparring Spud Stout (which I consider one of my more successful recipes)--my approach to the use of poi was slightly different. With Fenton Smith's I used potato hoping that it would affect the body and strength of the beer. I wanted the poi to have an affect on both of those characteristics, too, but there's another quality to poi that I wanted to harness: it's lovely purple color. I wondered if there was a way to have that purple color come across in a beer.

I figured my best chance of capturing some degree of the color was to base my recipe on a beer-style known for it's light, nearly-white hue. At first I thought of a hefeweizen, but the truth is I'm not fond enough of that style to want to produce five gallons of it. I decided to start with a grain bill modeled on the Weissbier style, instead. Here are the grains I used:

4 lbs. white wheat malt
4 lbs. Pilsener malt
1 lbs. Munich malt

Another choice dictating my approach relates to the Brew in a Bag article I read in the last issue of Zymurgy, which claims that mashing in the total amount of water planned for the entire recipe results in conversion at least as effective, and sometimes more effective, than the more traditional dense-mash-and-then-sparge approach. So I filled my kettle with six and a half gallons of water, brought it to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, and threw in all of the grains and two pounds of poi. (You might be thinking that 165 degrees is pretty high for mashing temperatures, and you'd be right. I brought the water up to that heat because I figured the room-temperature grains and the refrigerated poi would drop it down to mashing range, which it did.)

(For those who were wondering, I got the poi at Fort Ruger Market.. I'd planned on buying a bag, but on the day I was there they only had poi in little containers, and I bought out almost all of their remaining stock, which cost me about eleven dollars.)

So, all the grains and all the poi are in the pot, mashing. First thing I noticed was how viscous poi is--even when dropped in hot water it holds together. I wanted to break it up, thinking that dispersing it more evenly with the grains would give it greater contact with the enzymes in those grains, allowing better conversion (does poi have converting enzymes of its own? I don't know). Although I've heard people caution against disturbing the mash, claiming that stirring will only add more chance for oxidation, I threw that caution to the wind and STIRRED the mofo pot.

When it was all mixed in, I let it sit for another twenty minutes. The temperature dropped a bit, so I turned the flame on low and stirred some more, until it rose back up to 155.

At the end of an hour I drained out the liquid. Absorption from the grains reduced my total volume to lower than what I wanted, so I ran about a gallon of straight-from-the-tap water through them, and put that in with the rest of the liquid in my boil kettle. I probably had around eight gallons to start with.

From there on it was a normal brew. I used cascade hops--an ounce for 60 minutes, a half ounce for 30 minutes, and another half ounce at five minutes to flame-off--because I like cascade and I thought the citrus characteristics would give the beer a more tropical feel.

My original gravity reading came out as 1.047. I don't know if that number indicates conversion of the starches in the poi, or not. I have seen a recipe that used a nearly identical grain bill (minus the poi) and claimed an OG of 1.049, but frankly I'm skeptical. I don't think I've ever gotten gravity that high from nine pounds of grain. Or maybe I'm just really ineffecient.

When the wort was cool enough, I threw it in a 6.5 gallon carboy and pitched the yeast. Twelve hours later it was bubbling heartily, but I noticed something I hadn't expected. Instead of the purple color I'd hoped for, the beer has taken on a slight-green hue. Maybe the grains resulted in a yellowish color, and that blended with the purple to produce green. I don't know. I guess green is sort of cool, but I'm a bit bummed I didn't get purple.

a few thoughts on bottling

Two of the homebrewers I know best, Danny of Deeper Roots and Chris of Lewy Brewing, seem to prefer kegging to bottling. I think they feel like it takes a lot less effort to put a beer in a single keg than 50 bottles, and it's probably a thrill to be able to pour a pint of your own homebrew out of a tap. I remember Danny saying, also, that getting the right level of carbonation was easier with a keg--you just set the pressure and wait a week, instead of trying to guesstimate with priming sugar amounts and conditioning time. I've never had the opportunity to keg any of my beers--and I'm not expecting to have the opportunity anytime soon--so I can't really speak to its merits from personal experience. But the main reason I haven't kegged a beer is this: I like bottling.

I like bottling for a lot of reasons. First of all, I like the fact that I don't have to buy, maintain, and store kegging equipment. I'm a cheapskate at heart, and when I can get something for free, it makes me happy. So far no one has offered me a free keg, or any of the other equipment running a keg requires, but empty bottles are easy to come by. I can usually get enough for a batch of beer just by talking to a few friends on Sunday afternoon. And bottles, when they're packed in their boxes and the boxes are stacked up, don't take all that much room to store, and don't need to be refrigerated.

Another thing I like about bottling is how low tech it is. You don't need extra tubing and valves and custom refrigerators, and a semi-permanent place to set that all up. The most esoteric piece of equipment you need is a bottle capper, and you can get one for $10 bucks and be set for life. Bottle caps and priming sugar (I usually use dried malt extract) are cheap too, and easy to come by. If you're out of priming sugar, you can always borrow a cup of table sugar from your neighbor, but chances are they won't have a tank of CO2.

Bottles themselves are a pretty beautiful thing, too. It might take a bit of work to get them ready for use the first time (stripping off the labels, and cleaning out any mold if they weren't properly cleaned when you got them), but after that initial prepping all it takes is a quick rinse right after pouring out the contents, and then a quick dip in sanitizing solution right before refilling. And you can keep using them again and again. In San Francisco I had bottles that got reused with more than 30 different batches of beer!

Since the bottles are cheap (i.e. free), there's no reason not to give them away to friends and family, which gives you an opportunity to share beers with people that don't have the time or inclination to stop by and drink from your keg. You can bring a few bottles along to parties and other places too--transporting a bottle of homebrew is way more convenient than transporting a keg and keg system.

Having mentioned some of the more practical reasons for bottling, allow me to get a bit more far out. With a keg all of your batch goes into a single place (unless you're using extra small kegs), and then you keep pulling from that same body of beer. With bottles, each individual bottle becomes its own world; the living yeast continue in their life cycle, each bottle a different colony. You get a chance to observe changes, and experience uniqueness, with every bottle. You can age them longer, age them in different conditions (cooler or warmer, or maybe stick one in sunlight to try for that Heineken effect), or even add specific things to specific bottles (like throw some raisins in one, or prime different bottles with different sugars). The possibilities are endless.

And since I'm on the topic of bottling, here's one thing I've learned just since having moved to Hawaii: the labels on Kona Brewing bottles are pretty easy to peel off, just soak the bottle for an hour or so first. (Sierra Nevada labels used to be easy to get off too, but they seem to be a bit tougher now that the label has changed).

Stouts in Ireland

Just before moving to Honolulu, my girlfriend and I spent several months traveling in Europe. I made sure to sample local brews everywhere we went, and I'm planning on posting my impressions on this blog. First up: Ireland.

The picture above was taken in the Gravity Bar, in the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. I love stouts, and Guinness Extra Stout is one of my all time favorite beers. That being said, I must also say that Guinness has a stranglehold on the stout market in Ireland, and they're doing a remarkably effective job of flooding the entire country with their least-interesting (in my opinion) beer, Guinness Draught. Every single pub we visited during three weeks of travel in Ireland had Guinness Draught on, well, on draft. It was so ubiquitous, and the beer is so middle-of-the-road and don't-challenge-anybody in its characteristics, that it had me wondering if Guinness has some sort of clause they make pubs sign, preventing them from carrying the competition.

(Guinness also controls a significant portion of the tourist trade in Dublin. Their Guinness Storehouse is practically a theme-park, with multi-media displays (the picture below is an example) and floors and floors of exhibits. I'd guess that the majority of tourists visiting Ireland stop in at the Storehouse, even though a lot of them probably don't drink or like beer.)

Guinness's main competition, in the stout department, is probably Murphy's. And Murphy's probably owes a lot of that success to the city of Cork, which is the second largest city in the Irish Republic, and which suffers a sort of sibling-rivalry relationship with Dublin. The people of Cork (would you call them "Corkers"?) often claim they're the "real capital" of Ireland, and they take every opportunity to differentiate themselves from Dubliners. One of the ways they do that is by drinking Murphy's, which plays a sort of "little brother" role to Guinness. To tell the truth, the Corkers might be getting the better end of the deal with that situation: Murphy's is drier, with a more pronounced roasted-barley flavor, than the milquetoast Guinness Draught.

Also in Cork, though operating on a much smaller scale, is the Franciscan Well Brewery, which hypes itself as a brewery that operates on the site of an ancient Franciscan Monastery, using the monastery's well-water for its beer. The picture you see up above is me getting ready to partake in their beer sampler. They've been around since 1998--operating in the "brew-pub" capacity that was so crucial to the craft-beer movement in the United States in the 1980s--and that longevity in itself is a success. The place was nice enough too--a quiet/dank hole to hide in for a while. Unfortunately, the beer wasn't very memorable.

The other big Irish stout brewer is Beamish. When I first moved to San Francisco, and would frequent the local Irish pubs with the other Parkside brewer Scott, Beamish was my beer of choice. I remember it as being smoother than Murphy's, but with a bit more lactic-tang and a bit more chocolate-aroma than Guinness. I got only one chance to sample a Beamish in Ireland, while out on a night in Galway, but I can't attest to its flavor from that drink. To start with, it was a long night. And to top it off, the pub I found Beamish at was a rather rundown affair, with draft-lines in sore need of repair. My pint of Beamish drank more like a cup of curdled milk--chunky and sour--than a world-class stout. You wouldn't know it though, looking at the picture above.

In the end, the finest stout I had in Ireland was from a little brewery I'd never heard of before: Carlow's. Their O'Hara's Irish Stout was a perfect example of what I love about the style: roasty, dry, full-bodied, black and beautiful. I stumbled across the beer by accident, at a pub in the tourists' drinking center of Dublin--the Temple Bar area.

I'd also like to mention that while writing this post I've been working my way through a six-pack of Deschutes' Obsidian Stout, which is an excellent beer.

And here is a picture of me and the most intimidating sheep I've ever met, which lives in Kenmare, Ireland.

Zymurgy's Jan/Feb 2013 issue

I've been a member of the American Homebrewers Association since the National Homebrew Conference 2011, which I wrote about on my old homebrewing blog. One of the most tangible benefits to being a member is a subscription to their bimonthly magazine "zymurgy." I just got my copy of their current issue, for January and February of this year, which is the 7th annual Gadgets Issue, and flipped through it. I have two articles I wanted to comment on.

First up is the cover article about "gadgets." Is it just me, or are this year's gadgets pretty lame? "Disconnect Markings"? Does putting some paint on your keg really qualify as an innovative gadget? An "Ice Cream Freezer Kegerator"? The guy didn't even drill any holes in the fridge, he just got a ice cream freezer and put his kegs inside. "Custom Oak Inserts"? The dude takes seven paragraphs to describe a few pieces of oak with a string through them. "A Drip Bucket"? How is a little bucket a "gadget"? I don't mean to come across as an asshole, and I'm sure these brewers are probably nice guys who brew better beer than me, but c'mon! Is hanging a bucket from your spigot really worthy of mention in a national magazine?

The second article that caught my attention was the feature on Brewing in a Bag. Now, I'm a pretty simple guy--less-generous folks might even call me an actual simpleton--and I generally favor the easiest way to do things with the least amount of equipment. But reading that brewing in a bag actually increases your mash efficiency--it's almost too much for me to take. After seeing friends brewing with tower systems, running three kettles for one beer, or buying and modifying coolers to use as mash tuns, it's pretty mind-blowing to hear that the only special equipment you need to brew all grain is a bigger grain bag. And you don't even need to sparge the grains! If this article is correct, we were probably doing a better job of mashing with our old mini-mash beers than with our fancy lautering systems. Just put all of your grains in a big bag, drop the bag in the total amount of mash-temperature water you're planning on using for the whole brew--that's right, you don't need to mash with less water and then rinse the grains later; the enzymes in the grain apparently convert starch to sugar even better when the mash is more diluted--and then wrap your whole kettle in a blanket. Forty minutes later you pull the bag out and start your boil. How easy is that?

First taste of the first beer

After the fiasco-in-process of the second beer, I'm happy to post some more positive news: I've opened the first bottle of the first beer, and it taste's great! The pithy bitterness from the tangerine peel has disappeared (though, truth be told, so has any other trace of the tangerines), and the cloying sweetness is gone. What's left is a delightfully light, delicious, clear and crisp beer with a nice bite to it. I wouldn't think it qualifies as a pale ale anymore, but I'm not sure what other style it more closely resembles. In any case, I'm thinking it'll be a perfect beer for a hot winter's day in Hawaii. Cheers!

Update on the second brew

On January 2nd, the first day I figured Homebrew in Paradise would be open, I stopped in and got another carboy and airlock. As soon as I had them, I went back home to transfer the Southern Breakfast Stout. During transfer I took another gravity reading, and tasted the beer to assess for contamination. The original gravity of the beer was 1.040, and the hydrometer showed a gravity of 1.023 at transfer to secondary. Not much of a drop, so I'm taking that as a sign that something did indeed go wrong during my fumbled cleaning on New Year's Eve. I couldn't detect any significant off-flavors when I tasted the beer, but maybe it's too soon to tell about that. I do know that the beer didn't start bubbling with any renewed vigor after the transfer.

My plan at this point is to wait a few more days and then test the gravity and flavor again. If the flavor isn't horrible, but the gravity still hasn't dropped, I might try pitching more yeast. If the flavor is really messed up, maybe dumping it will be the best option. I'll have to wait and see.

Problems with the second brew

Homebrew in Paradise, the only homebrew shop I know of on Oahu, has very limited hours. They're not open on Sundays, they're not open on Mondays, and they're only open from noon to 5 pm on Tuesday through Friday. On Saturday they open up a bit earlier, but they still close by 5 pm.

I wanted to brew a beer on Sunday, December 29th, and my plan was to drop by on Saturday to pick up the ingredients. Saturday morning I went for a hike, Saturday afternoon I was at the beach. I remembered that the homebrew shop had longer hours on Saturdays, but I thought that meant they stayed open later. When I finally realized that they close at five on Saturdays too, it was twenty past four.

I jumped on my moped and raced over there. I got there at ten minutes to closing, so I started grabbing everything as quickly as I could. In the end, I forgot one crucial item: an air lock. The kit I bought from them a few weeks back only came with one airlock, and it was still in use on the surprisingly high gravity beer I brewed three weeks ago. That beer is still bubbling, so I don't want to bottle it yet. And that means the airlock is occupied.

So, on Sunday, after brewing a new recipe I'm developing called Southern Breakfast Stout (which is an Oatmeal Stout spiced with molasses), I had no airlock for the fermenter. I decided to jerry-rig an airlock, which you see in the above picture.

The airlock worked well enough for the first 24 hours, and it might have kept on working too, but my uptight nature wouldn't let me leave it be. See, the fermentation kicked off strong, and twelve hours into fermentation the cup in my pseudo airlock was overflowing with foam. Hawaii is cockroach country, and when I spied a cockroach coming round to sip the spilled suds, I got paranoid. I worried that if I left a puddle of sugary wort on the floor, that one lush of a cockroach would soon have a whole party going. So I decided to clean it up.

I mopped the floor, wiped down the fermenter, and changed the cup. But, in the process of all that, the tube coming out of the fermenter came loose. And when I got it back in place, it wouldn't bubble anymore.

That was New Year's Eve. My girlfriend was hollering for me to hurry up--we were on our way out--so I left it as it was. I had hopes that the pressure in the fermenter would return to bubbling levels if given time.

The next morning, it still wasn't bubbling. I disassembled and reassembled the makeshift airlock, and still no bubbles. I'm not sure if the seal on the fermenter wasn't good, and was letting air out somewhere else and thereby not running it through the bubble cup. I don't think that was the case though, because it didn't smell like beer near the fermenter.

Another thought is that somehow, during my hurried fumbling with the airlock, I contaminated the beer, and the contamination knocked the yeast out of its cycle. Or a final idea is that the yeast finished with all the sugars really quick, before I got a good seal set up again, and is now lying dormant. Or maybe CO2 built up in the fermenter during the time without a good-working airlock, and poisoned the yeast with its own waste product.

In any case, I'm kicking myself for not getting an airlock when I picked up ingredients, and for not being more careful when I tried to fix the foam-over. The best next-steps I could come up with at this point were: pick up a proper airlock and another carboy as soon as possible, transferring the beer to a secondary fermenter and sealing it up again, and testing the gravity and the taste at that time, to assess whether fermentation really did finish, and/or whether the beer has been spoiled. I did all of the above, and tomorrow I'll post about my findings.

First beer goes into secondary

So I transferred the beer to secondary, and took another hydrometer reading. The gravity dropped from 1.100 to 1.010! I don't know if I've ever had such an efficient fermentation. And once I put the airlock on the secondary, it bubbled for another 24 hours. I'm guessing it'll be over 12% ABV when it's finished.

I also tasted the beer, and got another surprise. Despite such a dramatic change in gravity, I didn't note any harsh ethyl flavor. The sweetness is still there, though it's mellowed considerably. It's still a bit pithy for my taste, but that's mellowed some too. In any case, it doesn't taste like any barleywine I've ever had. (Doesn't look like one either. It's got a delicate honey color, cloudy but light.)

I double checked my hydrometer in plain water, just to make sure it wasn't messed up, and it reads right. I'm still bewildered as to why the fermentation was so efficient, and why there isn't more of an ethyl harshness with such a drastic gravity change. Is there something in the honey, or tangerines, that goosed the yeast to greater heights? Or was it the yeast itself--a dried British strain I've never used before?

In any case, I'm planning on measuring the gravity again in two weeks, and then--assuming the fermentation has finished--priming and bottling. I'll definitely be putting a lot of the bottles aside for aging. I'm excited to see what time does to it!

My first Oahu-brewed beer

When I left the Parkside in San Francisco, about five months ago, I gave my brewing gear to the other founding-brewer of Parkside Brewing, my friend Scott. Now that I'm settled again, in Honolulu, I wanted to pick up new gear and get back to brewing. As far as I know, the only place to buy beer gear in Oahu is Homebrew in Paradise. I stopped in just a few days after arriving in Oahu, and picked up their kit, which included the ingredients and recipe for their "Paradise Pale Ale." On Monday, December 10, I found the time to brew it, and eight days later I moved it to secondary.

But of course I couldn't leave well enough alone with their recipe, which had a grain bill consisting of 6 pounds of extract and 1 pound of 40L crystal. I haven't done an extract beer since my third or fourth batch, and a single pound of crystal didn't seem nearly fancy enough to dress it up. My beer-snob instincts kicked in. I decided to try to dress it up on my own.

Unfortunately, I didn't think to buy more grains while I was at the shop, and I didn't want to drive back to the shop just for supplementary ingredients, so I started thinking of other stuff to throw in the brew pot, hoping to add complexity without grains. I'm very interested in the idea of using locally-produced ingredients in my beers, in hopes of adding some island flavor.

One thing I've got plenty of access to right now is tangerines. My girlfriend and I are staying with her grandma in Palolo valley, and her grandma has a tangerine tree in the backyard that's covered with fruit--I've been eating two or three every day since arriving. The picture above gives an idea of how many tangerines I'm harvesting each week. (It shows a bunch of lilikoi too, which are the round green things in the picture. I'm planning on using them in a beer soon, and will write more about them then.) With all the tangerines I've got access to, it seemed logical to try to use them in the beer.

The idea I had was that the tangerines could be used to complement the citrus-like aspects of the cascade hops in the "Paradise Pale Ale" recipe. I've heard of orange peel used in certain beers--mainly Belgian Wits--and I wanted to give it a try in my pale ale. Also, after reading the Hana Hou article, in which two of the three interviewed brewers claim honey as their favorite local ingredient, I figured I'd throw some honey in too.

Problem is, I think I went too far with both. Honey was on sale at the local Foodlands grocery store, so long as you bought two pounds. So I bought two pounds and threw it all in after flameout. And five minutes before that I threw in the peels from four tangerines.

The result, which I tasted right before putting it in the fermenter, was a cloyingly sweet liquid that also managed to be exceptionally bitter, in a citrus-pith sort of way. Plus, it clocked in at an OG of 1.100, which is way way way higher than I'd been planning on. Thinking back on it now, I'm guessing I should have just zested the tangerines, and taken it easy with the honey.

Tomorrow I'll post about what I noticed when I transferred it to secondary.

Hana Hou Magazine's beer feature

As luck would have it, when my girlfriend and I flew to our new hometown of Honolulu, the issue of Hana Hou magazine (the inflight magazine for Hawaiian Airlines) on board had Hawaiian craft beer as its focus. You can read the article here, or, if you want to cut to the chase, here's a summary of what I found most interesting:

The first important "beer person" mentioned in the article is Tom Kerns, who runs a brewpub on the island of Hawaii ("the Big Island") called Big Island Brewhaus. The picture above--taken from the Hana Hou online version of the article--is of Kerns. He's been brewing for 19 years, 16 of which have been in Hawaii, and the article refers to him as "probably the most decorated beer maker in the Islands." He used to be head brewer for Maui Brewing, but now focuses on his own stuff. As far as I can tell, the only place to try his beer is in his brewpub.

The article goes on to mention, briefly, Hawai'i Nui brewing, "the state's lone commercial bottler of beer." They're located on the Big Island too, in Hilo, but they're working on a pretty small scale--3,000 barrels a year.

From there the article gets into Kona Brewing, by far the largest brewery with Hawaiian origins, though none of the bottled Kona Brewing beers actually come from Hawaii anymore--they're brewed on the mainland now. The article goes into the financial aspects of running a Hawaii brewery--basically its more expensive to brew here than elsewhere because of higher taxes, higher energy costs, and higher shipping costs (ingredients and bottles boated in, then finished product boated back out). Kona was started by the family that started Kettle Chips, but was bought out in 2010 by Craft Brew Alliance, a company headquartered in Portland Oregon. If you want Hawaiian-brewed Kona beer, you're limited to what's on tap in their brewpubs--one in Kona on the Big Island, and one in Hawaii Kai on Oahu.

Kona Brewing's mainland-brewed beer, and the controversy relating to them still marketing themselves as Hawaiian, leads the article into the origins of Maui Brewing, started by Garrett Marrero. He's a 33-year-old dude from San Diego who was apparently so pissed off to discover Kona beers' mainland origins that he started Maui Brewing in protest, figuring to cut costs on production by packaging in cans instead of bottles. Or at least that's the story he tells, capitalizing on controversy to get more coverage for his company.

In any case, as far as I can tell, none of the above-mentioned brewers actually come from Hawaii; they're all mainland transplants who came here to start businesses. The article does include coverage of Dave Campbell, brewmaster for the recently opened Aloha Brewing, though his inclusion is mainly in a sidebar and no mention of Aloha Brewing is made in the article's primary text. I'm not sure if Campbell is island-grown or not, but he did go to high school here, and he's been involved in the local brewing scene since the 1990s.

There's mention, too, of Primo Beer, Hawaii's beer of yesteryear, which constituted 3 out of every 4 beers drank in Hawaii in the 1960s. Primo was bought out by Schlitz in 1963. Now it's owned by Pabst, and brewed at the Miller plant in Irwindale, California. Humbug.

Aloha!

I like beer. I like drinking it and I like brewing it. I started brewing back in 2009, while living in the Parkside neighborhood of San Francisco. And while I lived there I set up a blog about my brewing. Now I live in Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, in the state of Hawaii. I've been here for just over a month, but I'm planning on staying here indefinitely. And I'm planning on drinking beer, and brewing beer, while I'm here. Since this is a new home for me, I figured I'd start a new blog, to share the beer experiences I have while I'm here. Welcome to Homebrewing in Hawaii.