carbonation drops

I've mentioned before that I've had trouble getting standard levels of carbonation in my bottles since moving to Hawaii. Some bottles come out flat, and others are so over-carbonated that the whole beer foams out of the bottle when you pry off the crown. One theory I've developed, as a possible reason for this irregular carbonation, is that the bottles end up with varying levels of priming sugars. Typically, I'll melt some priming sugar in with a cup or two of water, and add that to the carboy immediately before bottling. I'm wondering if the that sugar doesn't mix in evenly with the unbottled beer. Perhaps it sinks to the bottom of the carboy and then gets sucked out by the syphon, so that the first several bottles get more of the sugar than the last few bottles.

In order to test this theory, I've bottle my last two batches using carbonation drops for the priming. The way they work is you add one drop per 12 oz bottle, or two drops for a bottle 22 oz or bigger. The amount of sugar per bottle should be pretty even, using this system. And so far it seems to be playing out. I've been drinking bottles from the first batch, and so far they've all been perfectly carbonated.

The downside is that the carbonation drops end up costing around 10X more than just buying sugar and mixing it in with the whole batch. But in the end that's still just an extra 10 cents a bottle. If I can do away with one more brewing difficulty, 10 cents a bottle is worth it to me.

waxcapping

Back in April I posted about making mead for marriage gifts. The batch that inspired that post is in bottles now, and we've already given the first bottle away. I figured I'd do a quick followup to mention a final step I took before considering this project complete.



Mead is a drink that does best if aged for long periods. The last batch I brewed didn't really start to seem "right" until about two years after adding the yeast to the must. But the typical crowns we cap bottles with aren't really meant to sit for very long. The rubber on the inside starts to degrade, and the crown loses its ability to maintain an airtight seal.



So, for this most recent batch of mead, I capped each bottle with a layer of wax. The was isn't subject to the same degradation that can affect the rubber in the crowns, so it should create a more durable, longer-lasting seal. It wasn't hard to do: just buy some wax and melt it in an old pot, then dip the top of each bottle in the melted mixture. Make sure the pot you use is one you don't plan on using for anything but melting wax in the future, because it's a pain in the butt to try to clean out the pot afterward.

A book to drink beer to

Just a quick post to help spread the word about my new fiction offering. I've been working on a zombie apocalypse story, releasing it in segments as I went along, for about a year. I just recently finished the project, and stuck it all together as an omnibus edition. It's pretty massive--nearly 450 pages long, 140K words. For a limited time you can get it for 99 cents.

Here's the book's description:

Hipsters. Shane hates them. They dress like artists, but they think like yuppies. They drive up the cost of living in San Francisco, making it nearly impossible for people like Shane to survive. And now they're starting to act really weird, moaning and shuffling and trying to bite.

A terrifying sickness is spreading through the city, transforming the streets into a nightmare of cannibalism and murder. Shane joins forces with a ragtag band of misfits--Mexican punks, butch Chinese lesbians, Castro bears and Oakland thugs--to seek shelter and stay alive. But safety doesn't always come in numbers. And chaos isn't always unplanned...

San Francisco is dead. Welcome to Zombie City.

Click here for Amazon.
Click here for Smashwords.

Thanks all, for your support.

BREW'd is now open

More (sort of) old news: BREW'd is open... and it's beautiful. It's got a classy ambiance--think dark woods and dim lighting instead of REAL's yellow walls--but they've worked some irreverence into the wall mural. Sixteen taps, and the same cicerone-type level of beer knowledge and passion. My wife and I stopped in for the Sierra Nevada Beer Camp event a few weeks ago, and had a great time.

Main downside: expensive. Most of the beers start at $7 and up (click on my picture of the chalkboard and you'll see that there are no beers listed for less than $8). Four beers and an appetizer will run close to $50 when you throw in a tip. Because of that, I haven't been frequenting the place like I thought I would.

Homebrew in Paradise has moved

This is sort of old news, but I figured I'd put up a post just in case any readers of this blog haven't stopped by the homebrew shop recently. Homebrew in Paradise is no longer in their old location on Kilihau Street. Their new address is 740 Mooawa Street, off of Dillingham (if you're driving Ewa-bound on Dillingham, it's after you pass the Community College but before you get to the Correctional Facility). It's just as industrial as the last location, but it's a little closer to town.

American Homebrewing Association members now get 10% off at Beerworks

blending juices for cider

I made my first cider almost a year ago, and enjoyed the experience. It was incredibly easy to do, and I was happy with how the final product turned out: a refreshing drink on its own, and an interesting alternative to beer.

I've been meaning to brew another cider, and I finally got around to it a few months back. This time I wanted to experiment with blending juices, to see how that would affect the final drink. Despite enjoying the first cider, it felt a bit simple, less-interesting than it could have been. I wanted to see if mixing in another juice would result in a more complex drink.



I decided to try adding in a little grape juice--hoping the sweetness of the juice would convert into a tartness that would enhance the crispness of the apples--and I settled on a mix of one quart of grape juice to two gallons of apple juice. I used the same yeast I'd used before--Red Star Pasteur Champagne, which is a very dry champagne yeast that removes virtually any sweetness from the drink, allowing the tart and sour flavors to shine forth.

The most interesting thing for me about adding the grape was how potent it is as an ingredient, how strongly it effects the aroma, flavor, and color of the final product. Despite there being 8 times more apple juice in the mix, the presence of the grape juice was undeniable.



Another interesting thing about the final drink was the way the aroma of the grapes carried through pretty much unchanged, despite the complete transformation of the grape flavor. It was fascinating, even slightly jarring, to bring the glass to your nose and smell sweet grapes, and then take a sip and experience absolutely no sweetness.

And one last little note: back in January of last year I tried brewing a poi beer, hoping to somehow capture the lovely color of the poi in final drink. In the end I failed to do it there, but to my surprise this apple-grape cider turned out to have pretty close to the exact color I'd been hoping for with that poi brew.



So try it. Start drinking purple!

Brew Your Own Magazine published a story of mine!

I just checked out the Brew Your Own website, and realized they've posted a brewing misadventure of mine. Click here to check it out.

reflecting on the opening of Honolulu Beerworks

Friday, April 11th, 2014: a big day in the history of Honolulu. On this day, Honolulu finally got its first craft brewpub. Sure, we had Aloha Beer before, and Vice Inferno, and even Brew Moon way back when. But each of those places played it safe. They tried to create brewpubs that would appeal to a cliched concept of "local" tastes. And what do locals like, according to those cliches? Tacky nightclubs and green-bottle beers. So that's what these brewpubs tried to give us: colored lights and black-painted ceilings and beer that tasted closer to mass-market brews than to real craft ale.

None of those brewpubs succeeded. Two of them didn't even survive a single year.

Honolulu Beerworks, on the other hand, is trying for something different. It's not a watered-down-for-"local"-tastes type of place. It's a craft brewpub, a real one. From the oak-barrels flanking the entrance, to the center-stage setting for the bar, to the gleaming stainless-steel brewery in the back, Beerworks is following a vision previously unseen in Honolulu. Because of that, it's got more in common with the brewpubs thriving on the mainland than it does with those other, short-lived local breweries.



That difference in vision applies to the beer, too. I drank a sample of every beer currently on tap, and went back for a couple pints of my favorites, and I can tell you with full confidence that Honolulu Beerworks is real beer. Not every beer won me over, but there were a few that satisfied my beer-cravings like no other local beer has managed to do.

The standout for me, by far, was the South Shore Stout. When I tipped back my glass and took my first gulp, it nearly brought tears of joy to my eyes. Big-bodied, malty, rich with caramel, and packing a notable alcohol punch. The ethyl-caramel combo made me recall bourbon-barrel aged beers I've had before, though of course this brewery hasn't had the time to age beer in barrels, yet. It also brought to mind the Russian Imperial Stout style, but Russian Imperial Stouts, in my experience, tend to have such a high alcohol level that the ethyl just burns your palate (unless they've been aged for a long time, and it's hard to find one that's been given enough time to mellow). This beer is a smoother, lower-alcohol drink than those. It didn't feature much of the smoky, roasted flavor that I favor in certain stouts, but I loved it anyway. Awesome beer!



I also really liked the Pia Mahi' Ai Saison. Slightly hazy, pale gold in color, with a good foamy head. The funk was in effect, but it was paired with an interesting sweetness that I'm not used to seeing side by side with that farmhouse flavor. A good, refreshing beer. I'd gladly go back for more.

There were a few disappointments, too, and since I value balanced journalism I feel obligated to mention them. The Kakaako Kolsch felt a bit thin and bitter. The Rye Not Pale Ale was so slight with its rye component that I could barely even notice it, and it poured completely flat with absolutely no head or carbonation (maybe they forgot to attach that keg to the CO2 system in advance, so it never got a chance to condition?). And it looked like they used plenty of PVC piping in their brewing system, which seems like a really bad idea to me.



But all in all, I'm excited about this place. Very excited. Take a look at their current line-up in the picture above, and you'll see that they've got two farmhouse beers and a rye. Beers featuring those flavors are relatively new to the American scene, definitely not as proven-to-sell as typical pale ales, IPAs, and lagers. You certainly wouldn't have found anything like them on tap at any of the other Honolulu breweries.

Which brings me back to my opening thoughts. This is the first brewery in Honolulu that isn't focusing their approach on appeasing that cliched concept of the "local" masses. Honolulu Beerworks seems to be trying to appeal to local beer geeks instead. (And there were plenty of them in attendance on the opening night--lots of Stone Brewing shirts, and even some other-than-west-coast gear like Three Floyds and Half Acre.) It's a gamble that no one else has tried here before. Personally, I'd love to be able to go back for more of that South Shore Stout, so I'm hoping it's a gamble that pays off.

Update (4/20/14): I sent an email to Geoff, owner of Beerworks, when I put this post up. He read the post and responded. The key things I took from his email, which I think should be posted, are these:

1) He confirmed that Honolulu Beerworks is "definitely not trying to appeal to the mass market green beers". They plan on rotating styles and should have barrel-aged beers available soon.
2) He's planning on upping the rye quotient in the Rye Not, and he says he's worked out the carbonation issues present in the first few batches.
3) (most important point) The PVC pipes I saw are actually just external cores for double-insulated glycol piping. The beer never comes in contact with PVC.

Honolulu Beerworks opens tomorrow (April 11th)!

Guess where I'm gonna be tomorrow night!



(Picture taken from Tim Golden's article at Honolulu Magazine.)

It's been a long time coming, but Honolulu Beerworks is scheduled to open tomorrow night. The pictures I've seen online look awesome, and the lineup looks very promising. All the local beer-lovers have been working up a serious thirst, so I'm sure tomorrow is gonna be an epic opening. My hope is to try every beer on tap!

Also, very interesting tidbit from the Honolulu Magazine article linked above: Dave Campbell has been brought onboard as daily brewer. I wonder what that means about Hoku Brewing? Is he gonna be brewing at both places?

Making Mead

Wedding season is coming up. My wife and I have four weddings we'll be attending this summer, three of which are happening here on O'ahu, and going to weddings usually involves giving a wedding gift. I'm not especially excited about picking an item off a Williams Sonoma registry--seems sort of impersonal to me, you know?--so I've decided to give the newlyweds a gift of homebrewed mead instead.

You see, mead is a drink traditionally associated with weddings. The term honeymoon even relates to it. In olden days, after the wedding ceremony the couple would go into isolation for the period of a lunar cycle (which *cough cough* just happens to roughly coincide with a woman's menstrual cycle). During that time they'd drink mead and work on producing a male heir. The isolation was to help insure that the heir was the true sire of the husband. The mead was to inspire them in their work, and to increase the chance of the fruit of that work being male (mead can affect the PH of the body, and the PH of the woman's body during conception apparently affects the gender of the child conceived).

Anyway, heir or no, honeymoon or no, mead can be a pretty wonderful drink. I've been thinking about it more seriously recently because, as opposed to beer, the ingredients for mead can be entirely produced in Hawaii.

See, beer consists of barley, hops, water and yeast. The barley and hops don't grow well in Hawaii--they've developed in regions of greater latitude, which offer more sunlight hours in the summertime (in Hawaii we get like 13 hours of sunlight in the summer; in Washington state they get 16). But mead is mainly honey, water, and yeast. And honey is locally produced pretty much anywhere that plants grow, including Hawaii.

Another benefit to brewing mead in Hawaii is that the yeasts normally used in mead fermentation are often more tolerant of higher temperatures, whereas beer yeasts usually like it to be cooler. Dealing with Hawaii's warm temperatures has been a constant struggle for my brewing here. I've resorted to swamp-coolers and a cooler bag, and I've experimented with different yeast strains, all to minimize off-flavors produced by hot fermentations. The best luck I've had resulted from using more heat-tolerant yeasts.

So, for all of these reasons, I've decided to give mead-making another try (I did a batch back in San Fran that turned out pretty good, but I never got back to it till now.) Last month I got my hands on nine pounds of Organic, locally-sourced (Big Island) honey from Wililaiki Blossom nectar, and turned it into a mead. My plan is to bottle it next month, and then to give a bottle to each of the newly married couples with a recommendation to wait to open the bottle until at least their first year anniversary (which doesn't go along with the traditional honeymoon idea, but hey--my experience with mead leads me to believe that the longer the aging process, the better). Of course, I'll have plenty of bottles saved for myself, and I'll be sure to post how they turn out.

The Newest News

My wife, who's signed up on the email list for Beer In Hawaii, forwarded me their new interview with Andy Baker. Baker's story is pretty interesting, but I personally was most intrigued by his mention, near the end, of the two companies that will be coming out of the dissolution of Aloha Beer. From piecing together the bits of info I've stumbled across, here's how I understand it (and I may be way off--a lot of the business dealings in Hawaii seem to be played very close to the vest, with plenty of secrets; innuendo and rumor are often hard to differentiate from truth):

First of all, Aloha Beer is still in business. I'd been wondering about this because you can still find their bottles on the shelves of local stores despite the fact that the brewery's been shut down for nearly a year and the original business partnership behind Aloha Beer seemed to crash and burn like the Hindenburg. Apparently, one of the original owners (those owners being Steve Sombrero, James Lee, and Dave Campbell) maintained rights to the brand, and has plans of creating a new brewpub location and adding a new beer to the bottled product line. (The bottled beers, by the way, were never brewed on the islands; the beer in those bottles has always been handled by a commercial brewery in California.)



Secondly, the actual brewery--that is to say the equipment and location that had been used to make the beer served in the Aloha Beer brewpub--will be reopening with a new name: Hoku Brewing. They've got a website up which is still largely under construction, but it features plenty of pictures of Dave Campbell, the original brewer behind Aloha, so I figure it's safe to say that he'll be involved. As to whether he'll be the sole owner of Hoku, or whether one of the other folks from the original Aloha Beer partnership is going to be part of this... who knows?

Now that I've delivered the meager hard-facts I've managed to gather, I'd like to take an opportunity to spew (probably unwisely, considering my general ignorance) my personal thoughts. Mainly, I'm hoping that Dave Campbell is sole owner of Hoku Brewing. He's the dude who brews the beer, he's the guy who does the real work. The other two dudes--Sombrero and Lee--strike me as businessmen (Sombrero is president of commercial real estate company NAI ChaneyBrooks, and Lee is a partner with the Honolulu law firm Devens, Nakano, Saito, Lee, Wong and Ching) who were primarily involved for business reasons. Campbell, on the other hand, has been a passionate member of the brewing scene in Honolulu for nearly 30 years--he even opened up the first homebrew shop! The sense that I get--mainly from unfounded supposition--is that the shit that went down with Aloha was mainly provoked by the other two guys.

Other news? Well, Honolulu Beerworks still isn't open, and neither is BREW'd. (Remember my post back in September of last year? At that time, the word on the street for both Beerworks and BREW'd was that they'd be open by November.) Rumors continue to float around concerning other potential breweries--like this one, who apparently got funding but haven't been able to move much farther along--but precious little actually seems to take place in the real world of Honolulu. This town just doesn't seem to be a very easy to start a business.

News relating to my personal brewing? Well, I've been developing a greater interest in mead, and have been revisiting my cider attempts--but both of those are topics for future posts.

Hawaii Brewing Doldrums

We're into the third month of 2014, and I'm finally getting around to posting here for the first time this year. Why the silence? Well, a couple reasons. First of all, I came down with a cold, and then I got the stomach flu, and after that it was the regular flu. And then I had to go back to work, which is something I like nearly as much as being sick. Also, I've recently been putting most of my writing time into my new fiction project--a metaphorical exploration of the gentrification of San Francisco... with zombies--which has left me less time for this blog.



But frankly, looking around the beer scene in Oahu, it doesn't seem like I'm the only one going through a fallow period. Two of the big beer-related things we've been looking forward to around here--the opening of the Honolulu Beerworks, and the opening of a Kaimuki-located craft beer bar by the people behind the incredible REAL: A Gastropub--are still not open. And there's no telling when they might come to fruition.

The last I heard about The Honolulu Beerworks was the post Tim Golden put up on Beer In Hawaii on January 17th. The title of that of post--"Honolulu Beerworks is Brewing!"--got a lot of people all excited. Finally, more than 6 months after the closing of Aloha Beer, we'd have a chance to drink ales and lagers brewed on Oahu without having to go to Gordon Biersch! (No offense to Gordon Biersch, their beer's are good, but it's not easy for me to get excited about a chain.) But... a month and a half later, and there's still no sign of when Honolulu Beerworks will be opening their doors. And then I went back and looked at the first in-depth piece Tim Golden wrote on the brewery, which was published in Honolulu Magazine last September, and saw that the estimated opening date at that time was November. Which means we're currently at least three months behind schedule.

November, it so happens, was also the planned opening month I'd heard about for REAL's new location in Kaimuki (which is gonna be called BREW'd). I heard that date back in August, when I'd decided to try to trick REAL owner Troy Terorotua into giving me a job. "Yeah, try contacting me again when the new location opens up. Oughta be in October or November," he told me. Well, yesterday I ate breakfast across the street from the storefront that BREW'd will hopefully be occupying sometime soon. They had the signs up, but as you'll see from the picture I snapped (which follows below), they've still got a long ways to go.



So, the two new beer places we've been eagerly anticipating here in Honolulu are both at least three months behind schedule, and there's no telling when they'll be opening up. Considering the astronomical cost of rent for business spaces here, delays of that sort seem like a potential threat to the viability of the businesses themselves. I mean, if you're paying tens of thousands of dollars in rent every month, then every month you aren't earning is a month you're building serious debt. And that sort of debt seems like it might be hard to deal with and still survive. (All of this is of course supposition on my part, and I'm an ignorant schmoe who's never owned a business of any sort, so take it all with a grain of salt.)

At first I was wondering if the delays were just examples of "Hawaii Time," in which nobody's in a hurry and everything takes ages longer than it's expected to. But a recent conversation with Bill Comerford, the owner of four of the Irish bars in Honolulu, clued me in that other factors might be involved. In our conversation, which turned into an anti-government rant by Bill (which is exactly what's happened to every conversation I've had with him), he told me that he'd been trying to get approval to open up the upstairs section of Anna O'Brien's pub for a year and a half, and that the city still hasn't granted it to him. So maybe the delay's for Honolulu Beerworks and BREW'd are city-related.

In any case, Honolulu still doesn't have locally-brewed beer, and Kaimuki still doesn't have it's new craft pub. People are getting thirsty--me especially.