Hump's Brewing

On Wednesday I kegged Hump’s Farmhouse Ale. From what I sampled, I have very high hopes.

It tastes big, strong, malty, yeasty, and fruity. The spices (coriander and orange peel) were also quite apparent in the beer’s flavor – at least when the beer was still flat. I had a small taste tonight to see how the carbonation is coming along. It isn’t completely carbonated, but it was missing the distinct citrus and spice touch that I noticed on Wednesday. We’ll see if it comes back.

I also racked Hump’s Peachy Ale off of the peaches. I expect to keg it this weekend. I’ll have to bring them in to work to celebrate a co-worker’s (and long-time friend’s) last day at work (he’s leaving to pursue new web development opportunities with a start-up company here in Atlanta).

I have a lot of Hump’s Blissful Bock left over. I’ll have to either drink a lot this weekend or put a whole lot into bottles (put your money on the latter – I ain’t in college no mo’). Or I could always postpone the kegging of the peachy beer… We shall see how I feel this weekend.

On a completely unrelated note, I bought some new brews this week. Both are American pale ales, and both are pretty decent: North Coast’s Red Seal Ale and Sierra Nevada’s Anniversary Ale. The North Coast offering is better – it has a more polished malt profile and is slightly cleaner tasting. The Sierra Nevada brew suffers from almost soapy-looking carbonation and a much grainier flavor. I’ll write up reviews for them at RateBeer.com in the very near future…

Great, big, black beers seem to be the most intimidating brews to casual beer drinkers. I’ve brought homebrew in for some of my co-workers on numerous occasions. One such time, one of my co-workers said that she was a little scared to try the Full Moon Stout (a hoppy Imperial stout I made in late 2006).

If my homebrew seemed scary, pouring thick and black and weighing in at a hefty 8.3% alcohol by volume, then two of the beers I sampled this week would be absolutely horrifying.

Avery’s Mephistopheles’ Stout and Dogfish Head’s World Wide Stout are two of the strongest Imperial Stouts made. At 16.03% and 18% alcohol by volume, respectively, they make Hump’s Full Moon Stout look downright puny. I like to think that any beer that can make my Full Moon Stout look bulimic by comparison must be the kind of substance that puts hair on chests and causes voices to dip by an octave.

This, as it turned out, was not the case. Despite the photos you see here – an attempt (albeit perhaps weak) to showcase the fright-night aspect of these monstrous beasts – these beers were easily tamed by me and my wife. Her voice is unchanged, and no hair grew on her chest (but if it had, that would have been a truly hellish beer!)

We started with Avery’s rendition. It is the more complex of the two brews. It has such a wide range of flavors that are so tremendous that they probably would make lesser men shudder. Its only weakness: some of the flavors didn’t work harmoniously together. In particular, there was a peculiar funk that I find hard to describe. It had some acidity, but some earthiness, too – almost like a drop of Worcestershire sauce was splashed in the beer. For the most part though, it was a tasty brew that truly lived up to its name.

Tonight, we split the Dogfish Head offering. It was much sweeter and, honestly, a bit more palatable. It wasn’t as complex or decadent as Mephistopheles, but it seemed to work better. Its flavors melded well together. And I certainly don’t mean to suggest to that it is not decadent. Black, chocolaty, sweet, and surging with over 2 ounces of ethanol in each 12 ounce bottle, this brew is for serious contenders only. Despite its slightly greater heft in the alcohol department, it seemed a little smoother. Perhaps this is really the more devilish beer. Supposedly, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. And the devil in this beer is a bit better hidden than in Avery’s mega-stout.

The labels wrapped around these bottles provide excellent foreshadowing of what you’ll find lurking inside. The Dogfish Head is simple and unassuming. The Avery teases with demonic pomp. Of the two, it is most appropriate that the Avery bottle displays horns – befitting of the fluid within those dark, glass walls.

Despite having indicated the Dogfish Head beer as the more palatable and despite having given it a higher score at RateBeer.com, I thoroughly enjoyed them both. I have great respect for both beers and both brewers. I look forward to nabbing more of both of these beers and seeing how a year or few in the cellar transforms them.

I will leave you with one last parting shot of the two behemoths. This photo happens to be my favorite of this set:

Today I dug up the photo of myself that I use as my RateBeer.com avatar. I retouched the photo this evening, so it looks a little better now. I figured, while at it, I would load some of these pics onto this blog.

So here is the original photo – after retouching in order to “get the red out”:

And here is another shot of me, tasting a brew (if I recall correctly, it is a glass of Ayinger Celebrator):

And at the same restaurant as above – but now trying to balance a coaster on my head:

Finally, below is the last one from that same restaurant. I believe it is a glass of Paulaner Salvator – we were having a Doppelbock Death Match that evening:

All of these photos, by the way, are from about one year ago. In fact they were taken on my 4th wedding anniversary, 7/27/2006. And, no, I don’t just take my wife out for beer on our anniversary. We did this during the week and celebrated our anniversary in more formal style that following weekend.

But we did exchange gifts that day. My wife’s gift was the Nikon D50 camera with which she took these photos. Since then she’s gotten herself addicted to photography, upgraded to a Nikon D200, and is now the best professional photographer in Atlanta.

Avery Brewing Company makes some very delicious beers. They have a whole line of devilish, high-gravity beers. One is named The Beast, another Samael, and finally Mephistopheles.

The other week I tried The Beast. It is a malt powerhouse: very, very sweet and nuanced in interesting, malty ways. This evening I tried a much more interesting one: Samael. Whoah.

This beer is ridiculous – but in a good way. Like its sibling, it is incredibly malty. But it is much more complex, primarily from the extensive use of oak. Its flavors range from molasses and vanilla to rum-soaked fruit and bourbon. It is decadent for sure – and quite strong.

Georgia liquor laws outlaw the sale of beers with more than 14% alcohol (by volume). All three of Avery’s demonic brews top that. I managed to score a bottle of each while in Seattle. Perhaps tomorrow night will be the night for Mephistopheles. But while Samael stands alone, unique, his cherubim brethren, Mephistopheles, faces stiff competition from Dogfish Head’s World Wide Stout.

I’ll let you know how they fare against one another. Both are extremely highly-rated on RateBeer.com. As they supposedly say in the hills of Scotland where whiskey is made by immortals, “There can be only one.”

While taking pictures of my latest influx of specialty beers, I realized that I hadn’t adequately captured my home brewery for all of you readers to see (I know, I know: readers may be exaggerating).

Here you can see the inside of the basement fridge. I’ve posted some photos before, but those were before I adapted the rig for double-keg duty.

A close up of the kegs reveals numbered taps. This is critical to knowing what is dispensed from those taps at any given point in time.

On the wall in the kitchenette, to the right of the fridge, is the key to decoding the tap numbers.

One of these days I may even have real taps – possibly attached to the door of the fridge and definitely with my custom Hump’s logos…

I know it looks a dreadful mess of entangling hoses at the moment, but it really isn’t so bad. It is easy to pour a beer, and it is easy to keep the hoses out of the way while retrieving bottles. The only thing that isn’t easy is removing and replacing a keg. That requires moving everything around, typically bringing the CO₂ canister and regulator out of the fridge for a bit, and slowly dragging the thing out. When it’s empty, it’s no problem. Moving around a full keg, however, is a different story. They only hold five gallons, but their oblong shape makes them a pain to easily move around. Also, they are resting at the back of the fridge so that their weight doesn’t crack the glass floor. Moving them around while making sure they aren’t resting on an unsupported area of glass is part of the fun.

Read More »

This week my shipment of brews from Seattle arrived. I’ve got the crafty beers stashed all over the place.

The proprietor of Malt & Vine (the bottle shop in Redmond that shipped everything to me), Doug, even called right after I received the package. He had gotten a FedEx alert that the package had been delivered and called to make sure everything arrived in tact. Now that is good customer service.

Some of the newly arrived brews are in our main fridge. I figured these would be the first to go, so I put the lower-alcohol beers up here. The heavier stuff went downstairs.

Some of the new beers have been stashed into our small wine fridge (we ran out of wine bottles, so it is currently packed with beer bottles – three from this venture and three that have been in there for months). You can see the big bottle of Dogfish Head Fort on display. I tried to put the large bottles in this location (since the fridge was made specifically to fit 750ml bottles).

The last of the stash is in “the beer fridge” along with my homebrew. The hoses that are visible in the foreground of the picture, hanging in front of the impressive selection of bottles, are the tubes that carry sweet homebrew from the kegs to the taps.

So I’ve finally made up my mind about Malt & Vine: they are awesome. I still need to give their shop a rating on RateBeer.com (as well as several of the other places I visited while in Seattle). Doug told me that if I wanted to order more to just call him. I asked if they could ship to Pennsylvania (a friend of mine lives there and recently inquired as to whether I knew of good mail-order brew shops), and the answer was “not really.”

Apparently they can only ship to Pennsylvania if shipping directly to a retailer. So if my friend can get chummy with the management of his favorite retailer, he may be able to convince them to accept packages on his behalf for brews that are unavailable to the retailer. On the top of the list of those brews are the beers from Hair of the Dog, which are generally not available outside of the Pacific Northwest.

I may soon be overloaded with homebrew.

I have two brews in the fridge, sitting in kegs, waiting to be consumed. One of the kegs probably holds about one gallon of Hump’s Berry Weizen, and the other probably holds close to three gallons of Hump’s Blissful Bock.

Earlier tonight I racked two more beers that will, hopefully, be ready to go into the kegs in a couple of weeks: Hump’s Farmhouse Ale and Hump’s Peachy Ale. Both are very nice so far. The Farmhouse Ale turned out quite strong – I boiled off more water than originally planned while brewing and didn’t bother replacing it with fresh, sanitized water. I also used some candi sugar in the beer so it would attenuate well, and it worked. The estimated alcohol content is a whopping 9.4%! The Peachy Ale tastes quite nice: it is a mild-mannered wheat beer with sweet malts, wheat, and both hints of acid and a decent amount fruit thanks to the funky Belgian yeast strain. Today I racked it over 7.5 pounds of peaches. It tasted like it would be well-suited to the peaches, so I think this fruit beer will turn out better than did Hump’s Berry Weizen.

To top it all off, I plan on brewing again in a few weeks – a beautiful, bitter, bold beer: Hump’s Best Bitter. To make sure I don’t end up with a major traffic jam at the kegging line, I’ll probably dispense a lot of the kegged beer into bottles. I’ll need to dispense at least some of it so I can save it for giving away to others (particularly, to my sister and brother-in-law in LA).

I finally got a call back from Malt and Vine – the bottle shop in Seattle with whom I left a significant amount of fine wine and beer.

They gave me a quote on shipping, and I paid over the phone with a credit card. They told me that the shipper expects transit to take five days, and that they would try to get it out today (if not today then tomorrow). That means I should have my prize sometime early next week.

Also, my Peach Ale really took off. Fermentation was not only visibly noticeable but quite vigorous after less than twelve hours – despite the fact that the yeast were nearly three months old (usually older [i.e. less fresh] yeast exhibit a greater lag time between pitching and active fermentation). I should be able to rack it over the peaches this weekend.

At that same time (if not sooner) I will be racking the Farmhouse Ale into its secondary fermentor. It is still trodding along slowly – bubbles still emerging from its fermentation lock, although slowly and infrequently. I hope that means that it will attenuate well since I was shooting for a somewhat dry beer with that recipe. I even used Belgian candi sugar in the grist to aid in the effort of a dry and light-bodied product, but only time will tell.

As crazy as it may sound (with two brews in kegs and two more on the way currently in fermentors), I am already getting excited about my next brew: Hump’s Best Bitter. This will be my version of an ESB (Extra Special Bitter) – using traditional English ingredients (English Maris Otter malt, English hop varieties, and English ale yeast) but hopped a little more than typical, authentic ESBs. I’m hoping for a nice cross between an ESB and an American Pale Ale.

I’ve realized this year that I am a full-blown hop-head. I’ve always liked bitterness and hops in beer. But this year I’ve really come to appreciate hoppy beers more than before. I used to disdain the American Pale Ale and IPA styles because every microbrewery, including less-than-stellar chain brewpubs, offered them. They all tasted the same to me. But my palate is a little more distinguishing these days, and I find that I can detect nuances in these styles that have reignited a new passion within me for these hoppy treasures. Sure, most microbreweries, including chain brewpubs, offer one of these beers, and it is generally a straight-forward and fairly unimaginative offering. But if they have the right balance with a firm hop presence and a decent malt backbone then I’ll probably enjoy it nevertheless.

And so, this year, I have had cravings to make hoppy ales that I’ve never had before. This next batch, the Best Bitter, will be my third one this year! That is a lot considering I’d only made four of them in the previous seven years (one of which hardly counts because it didn’t turn out very hoppy or very good).

Last week I was in Seattle on vacation with my family. I discovered that a vacation spent in a hotel room, out of town, with a 2-year old is no real vacation at all. But we had lots of fun. I racked up 47 new posts on RateBeer.com (and, no, I did not consume 47 servings of beer in Seattle – all but six of them were 2 oz. samples), and I have 19 more to go. Those 19 remaining brews are bottles I bought in Seattle and shipped to myself (along with a couple of bottles of wine). They represent some of the most sought after beers that are available in the Seattle area but not available in Georgia.

The day after returning, I took it upon myself to brew some beer. I actually purchased all of the ingredients a week ago, before I left for Seattle, with precisely the intention of brewing it up when I was back in town. This beer should be very appropriate for the state of Georgia: Hump’s Peachy Ale. Currently it is just a Belgian specialty ale. But once it is done with its primary fermentation I will be adding eight pounds of peaches to it!

For those that may be curious, I’ll provide a brief recap of the beer-friendly destinations that I visited while in the Seattle area. Read More »

Next week I am going to Seattle for vacation and taking my wife and son with me. Malin and I have already made a list of beer-friendly places to go. Top on the list will be to get to a good package store, find reputable local brews, pack them up in a padded, cardboard box, and ship them back to Georgia. Various other places are on the itinerary as well, including breweries and brewpubs. You can check out this map to see the places we’ve scoped out so far.

On a side note, the Blissful Bock is now on tap at Hump’s (aka my basement). Now that it is carbonated, I’m quite pleased with it. It is not a particularly complex beer, but it wasn’t meant to be. It is a beautiful gold in color, it has a strong aroma of fresh, rising bread, and it is very malty with an earthy and somewhat fruity hop bitterness (thanks to the use of Glacier hops instead of a noble variety).

I brewed a Farmhouse Ale the other week, and I have, quite appropriately, dubbed it Hump’s Farmhouse Ale. I used one of Wyeast’s VSS varieties (short for “Very Special Strain”): 3726 – Farmhouse Ale Yeast (somehow fitting, eh?). I’ll rack it to the secondary before leaving for vacation on Sunday. I also plan on going to the homebrew store on Saturday to get supplies for Hump’s Peachy Ale – a Belgian-style specialty beer made with lots of fresh peaches. I’ll need to hit the store this upcoming Saturday in order to brew on Sunday the 12^th because we don’t get back into town until late evening on the 11^th. I’m hoping to grab another VSS yeast for the peach brew: Wyeast 3822 – Ingelmunster Ale Yeast.