beer fountain

Ever since my first days as a homebrewer, I’ve been dreaming of trying my hand at a barley wine. Described by some as “the drink of the gods,” and capable of being aged for years, barley wine stands in the minds of many as a test of a brewer’s mettle. And with an original gravity of as much as 1.120 (or even more!), it’s about as big as beer gets.

Of course, to make a beer that big you need to start with a lot of ingredients. Malt is often doubled, and hops are too. And, in order for the yeast to have a chance to get through all that sugar before succumbing to the stupor-inducing alcohol, I’ve heard it’s best to pitch at least a pint of healthy yeast slurry in a five gallon batch.



Lucky for me, I have a yeast connection. A few months ago I had the good fortune of meeting the Brewmaster of my local brewery, Aloha Beer Company, and when I mentioned my dreams of making a barley wine, he offered to give me as much yeast as I could carry. I ended up walking out of there with two quarts—definitely more than I needed, but that’s the size of the container I’d brought, and he filled it almost to the brim.

It was lively yeast too, coming straight from a twenty barrel vat, raring to get back to work. In the few minutes I stood there chatting with the Brewmaster, the yeast swelled to fill the container. A few minutes more and the sides of my plastic container had begun to bend outward from the pressure.

I hurried to my car, put the yeast on the floor in front of the passenger seat, and turned the AC up full blast. For the whole ride home I was on edge, wincing at every bump in the road, afraid the yeast would go off like a bomb.

In the end I made it home in time, and got the yeast in the fridge without incident. Little did I know, “incident” was just taking a rain check.



Next day’s brew went fine. I started with ten pounds of Maris Otter grain in the mash, boiled the wort for an hour, adding four ounces of hops during that time. And then I took the kettle off the burner, mixed in four pounds of pale malt extract and three pounds of honey, and brought it back to a boil for thirty more minutes. I wound up with about four and a half gallons with an original gravity of 1.095—not as high as I wanted, but still within style guidelines.

Once the wort had cooled, I pitched the yeast. I wasn’t crazy enough to add all of it, so I split the difference and only threw in half. If a pint was good, I reasoned, then a quart would be twice as good.

And here’s where things went wrong. In all of my research about barley wines, I’d somehow failed to take in the importance of a blowoff tube. I figured a six and a half gallon carboy and an airlock would be good enough. Turns out it wasn’t. Not even close.

About two hours after pitching the yeast, my girlfriend and I heard a percussive sound, sort of a mix between a pop and a thud. “What was that?” she asked. I was afraid I knew.

I ran to the door to the basement, where I’d put the beer. It sounded like it was raining in there. I pulled the latches back quickly, and threw the door open.

The top of the airlock had blown off, and my carboy had turned into a beer fountain. A mighty stream of liquid shot straight up, to splatter against the ceiling, and then rain down on everything else.



I was able to jerry-rig a blow-off tube pretty quickly—amazing how fast you can make something when you’re supplied with the proper motivation—and I ended up saving about three and a half gallons of the beer. While it’s true I ended up losing almost a quarter of the batch, and several hours time spent cleaning up the mess, I gained something from the experience, too: a name for my barley wine, Kīlauea.

spent grain veggie burgers

My wife likes to try to use the spent grains I have left after brewing. Her most recent creation was veggie burgers. She based the recipe on one posted by the Spent Grain Chef, but she didn't use bbq sauce, and she added in some other vegetables, garlic, veggies, pepper, ginger, sunflower seeds, and some Shoyu (soy sauce). The burgers were actually pretty great--I didn't think the grains would be all that palatable without being further ground-up, but the burgers were delicious!

Brewing with Sage

Sage is a classic herb--just ask Simon and Garfunkel. I've got a bush growing in my vegetable garden, and I recently decided to try to use it in a homebrew.

Typically, sage is used in savory dishes, especially poultry dishes of chicken or turkey. Its flavor is unique, sort of peppery and bitter, but hard to define in more specific terms. It's also used for medicinal purposes, and has been recommended for treating just about any ailment you can come up with. And, perhaps most famously, sage is burned for spiritual reasons--it's smoke is considered a cleansing agent in rituals carried out by hippies and certain Native American tribes.



I decided to try to use sage in a Pale Ale. I thought its peppery bitterness might blend well with the hop-oriented nature of the Pale Ale style. Sage is an herb that combines in wonderful ways with other spices, such as thyme, and it's also sometimes used to accent acidic/sour fruit flavors, such as fruit-based vinegars. With that in mind, I figured I'd pair the sage with Centennial hops, a hop known for its citrus-like aromas and bittering qualities.



I cut five large sprigs of sage from my plant, rinsed them in fresh water, and then chopped them thoroughly. Five sprigs turned into a bout three large handfuls when chopped. I added half of the sage right and one ounce of Centennial right at the start of the boil, hoping to utilize its bittering qualities. I added the other half of the sage at flame off, to see if it would contribute to the beers aroma. I also made sure that all of that chopped and boiled sage made it into to the fermenter with the yeast. I've read that certain chemical components of sage are most effectively extracted by alcohol (also apparently true of cannabis, though I can't say I've got any first-hand knowledge of that), so putting the sage in with the alcohol-producing yeast was a way of trying to utilize that concept.



The beer is in bottles now, and won't be ready to drink for another few weeks. After making the beer I realized there's an entry for sage in the book Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers, by Stephen Harrod Buhner. Buhner says that "sage ale was one of the primary ales brewed throughout the Middles Ages." He also describes some of its medicinal uses--everything from healing infection to inhibiting Alzheimer's disease--and he mentions that sage is known to make beer "especially inebriating." I'll let you know if I find that to be true.

Mahalo and Aloha to Tony from REAL Gastropub

(Above picture taken from the website for REAL a Gastropub. Below pictures taken by my wife Tara.)

I'd stopped in at REAL a few times since arriving in Hawaii last year, but it wasn't until last month's tasting event that I finally realized what an incredible place this is. The tasting events happen once a month in the upstairs seating area, and they give REAL's beverage director Tony Raso a chance to pour five beers grouped around a key theme. Last month's event focused on beers that had been awarded the highest ratings at Ratebeer.com. The beer lineup included Trois Mousquetaires's "Porter Baltique," St. Bernardus's "Abt 12," Birra del Borgo's collaboration with Dogfish Head called "My Antonia," and North Coast's "Old Rasputin"--and amazingly, all of these beers were poured from draft.

Anyway, the beer was awesome, but what blew me away more than anything else was the sense of knowledge and passion for beer displayed by the presenters, especially by Tony. The guy has managed to bring an incredible variety of beers to Hawaii, in many cases for the first time ever. He's been working with breweries across the mainland, and with distributors supplying product from breweries worldwide, to give people on Oahu a chance to try some truly remarkable beers they'd probably never get a chance to try otherwise. The beers often come in one-time shipments, sometimes of just a few bottles or a single keg, and the fact that Tony is putting in the effort to secure beer in such limited quantities strikes me as incredible. Effort like that only comes from one place: a true passion for the endeavor.



Just take a look at the picture above (click the picture for a bigger version), which shows the beers on offer on the night of last month's event. The variety is impressive, but it's even more impressive when you consider what it takes to get these beers to Hawaii. For example, take the Moylan's beers listed in the lower right corner of the board. Moylan's is a relatively small brewpub in Northern California, so small that they didn't have enough kegs to spare for Hawaii shipments--the wait for the kegs to travel by boat to Hawaii, and then to return by boat to California, would have left the brewery without enough kegs for normal operation. But Moylan's produces some incredible beers--including the 100+ IBU "Hopsickle" Imperial IPA, and the multi-award-winning "Ryan Sullivan's" Imperial Stout--and Tony wanted to be able to serve those beers at REAL. He kept contacting Moylan's until the brewery agreed to purchase one-time use, plastic kegs to ship the beer to Hawaii. The effort was above and beyond normal business practices, but Moylan's beers made it to the taps at REAL, and it wouldn't have happened without Tony's efforts.

Alas, as indicated by the title of this post, Tony's time here in Oahu is coming to a close. He's recently become a father, and he and his wife have decided to return to their hometown so that their son can grow up near his extended family. This past Monday, August 5th, was Tony's last beer-tasting event. Tony set it up as a sort of "swan song," with an emphasis on beer's from his native state. The lineup included beers by Ballast Point, Moylan's, Coronado Brewing, and Sierra Nevada. My wife and I attended, and though the event was bittersweet, the beers were excellent.



Tony's duties as beverage director are being handed over to Anthony, and next month's tasting is an "Oktoberfest Pregame" scheduled for 6:30 p.m. on September 9th. REAL is having a farewell soiree for Tony on August 13, 2013, from 2:00 pm – 11:30 pm. If you live in Hawaii and you love craft beer, consider stopping by and expressing your thanks.

Mahalo, Tony.

bottle grenades!

A few weeks back I mentioned I'd had a bottle explode. It was a bottle of my Lilikoi Amber, and in 35+ batches this was the first time I'd had it happen. Well, now I've had it happen a second time, and with a different beer. One of the last remaining bottles of my Palolo Gold, which I brewed back in January, exploded. I didn't actually hear it happen, but I was snooping around in the basement, and I saw the evidence (shown in the picture above).

I put the rest of the Palolo Gold bottles in the fridge. I've been drinking them since the busted bottle, and they pour fine, with no sign of the gushing that started happening with the Lilikoi Ambers. So why did this bottle bust?

My thought is that it's a combination of time, temperature, and bottles. Seven months is a pretty long time for a beer to sit in bottles, unless it's a low-carbonation beer like a Barley Wine, and the temperature in the cellar is warm enough to promote vigorous fermentation. So pressure must have just kept building in that particular bottle. Why haven't other bottles exploded, and why don't the other bottles of Palolo Gold gush when I open them? Maybe that particular bottle got more than its fair share of priming sugar, and maybe the bottle itself was somehow flawed.

Which brings up another important point: both of the bottles I've had bust were re-used Kona Brewing bottles. I've noticed that Kona Brewing has changed their bottles recently, and I don't if the change relates to defects with the bottles, but I suppose it's possible.

making sidra

Back in May I attended the Big Brew Day event held by local brewclub HOPS (Homebrewers on Pacific Shores). I met a bunch of people there, and drank a bunch of homebrew. One of the drinks that stood out to me was a home-made cider. I can't remember the name of the guy who did it, but he confided that it was the easiest thing he's ever brewed: just buy a bunch of unfiltered, unpasteurized apple juice and throw it in a carboy with some yeast. I decided I wanted to give it a try.

And so I have. I went down the local, organic grocery store and bought four one-gallon jugs of Mrs. Gooch's cider. Cost me about $35 bucks. Then I went to the brew store and bought a packet of dry champagne yeast for $1.75. I poured the juice in a sanitized carboy, pitched the yeast, and stuck an airlock on top. Two weeks later I primed it with 2/5 a cup of brown sugar and put it in bottles. I started drinking it the next day.

At this point the cider has been in bottles for less than a week. I'm not sure how it'll change, but right now it really reminds me of the "sidra" you get in the Asturias region of northern Spain. (The picture above shows me pouring sidra in the traditional manner, in which you try to maximize the fall to force air into the drink.) It's lightly carbonated, just enough to give a certain sharpness to the drink (cider never really forms a head like beer because apple juice doesn't have the same proteins found in grain, its carbonation is more like soda). It tastes mostly like apple juice, with a hint of champagne. And it's deceptively strong--about 7.5%, but you end up drinking it faster than beer, and you might be two bottles in before it starts to hit).

All in all, it's a decent drink. Try it!

(Here's another picture, showing a guy wearing traditional Asturian clothes, pouring cider in the traditional way--though it looks like he's missing the glass more than hitting it.)

swamp-cooling a carboy

Hawaii has two main seasons, winter and summer. They aren't as drastically different as seasons on the mainland, but they're distinct nonetheless: winter is rainier, with more clouds in the sky; and summer is drier, with clearer skies and slightly hotter temperatures. After an unusually long and wet winter here on O'ahu, we're finally moving into summer. And that means that the temperature of the basement where I've been fermenting and storing my beer has moved from "barely cool enough" (72 degrees Fahrenheit) to "really just too hot" (75 degrees) for the English and Irish styles I prefer.

The reason I'm using the basement for fermenting is because it's the absolute coolest part of the house. There's nowhere else on this property that's cooler, so I can't just move my beer somewhere else. That means I've got to find some way of beating the heat.

I've mentioned in past posts that I'm not a real gadget-oriented person--I generally prefer to try to do more with less. I'm also famously cheap. For both of those reasons, I didn't want to go the route of buying a refrigeration unit just to be able to keep brewing--though I know there are plenty of homebrewers in Hawaii who eventually do just that. What I've settled on, instead, is a swamp cooler.

A swamp cooler is, basically, a system set up to lower temperatures through evaporation. You can probably find plenty of info on the scientific principles by doing an internet search, so I'm not gonna bother to go too far into it here. All I really needed to know is that when water (or other liquids, I guess) evaporates, it reduces the temperature in the immediate area. That's why we sweat--it cools us down.

So, to keep my carboys cooler, I've started using a very basic swamp-cooler. I found a basin wide enough to fit a carboy into (my cheapskate nature was pleased to be able to find one on the property, instead of having to buy one), and then I set the carboy inside. Next I wrapped a towel around the carboy, and poured water over the towel. I filled the basin with a reasonable amount of water to continue to supply the towel with moisture--it draws the liquid up through its fibers in another scientific process I'm not gonna bother to explain--and that's it.

The temperature in the basement is currently getting to about 75 degrees Fahrenheit during the heat of the day. But the swamp-cooler keeps the carboy at around 70 degrees. Easy, simple, cheap, and good enough for now. If the temperature rises significantly, I'll have to find some other way of dealing with it. But for now I'm pretty pleased with this solution.