Hump's Brewing

This past weekend I decided to take a detour on the way to Munich Dunkles that involved a bit of Belgian ale yeast. Perhaps the detour is better named Chambly, Québec rather than Brussels, Belgium since this particular strain of yeast is the same used by that magical Canadian brewer of Belgian-style ales: Unibroue.

If you are not familiar with Unibroue then you owe it to yourself to go out and buy some Trois Pistoles and Maudite right now. No, you can’t wait – I don’t care if you’re at work or for any other pitiful excuse you might have. These beers are worthy of this level of urgency and ridiculous hyperbole.

So, what is a Munich Dunkles? It is a style of dark lager that is very rich and malty. It is most comparable to a Bock, except lighter in alcohol and a little lighter in body and richness. Like Bockbier, Munich Dunkles is typically brewed with a very large amount of Munich malt as the base malt. Munich malt has a much toastier, breadier, and richer malt tone than Pilsner or Pale malts due to the presence of melanoidins. Melanoidins are compounds that make toast taste like toast instead of bread. They are formed during Maillard reactions – the same reactions that cause color-formation (browning) when bread is toasted.

So the beer I just brewed is a recipe for a Munich Dunkles, but fermented with Belgian ale yeast instead of German lager yeast. The result should be something akin to an Abbey-style Dubbel, but richer and more straight-forward. Richer due to the rich Munich base malt, but more straight-forward and less complex due to the absence of Belgian specialty grains and of dark Belgian candi syrup. It will also be lighter in alcohol. If a style named Belgian Brown Ale existed, this would be a fine example of it, no doubt (and, no, Oud Bruin / Flanders Brown does not count, because I did not brew a sour beer).

I call my recipe Hump’s Munich to Brussels Dunkles.

Speaking of Belgium, the next recipe I intend to cook up will be a Belgian Dark Strong Ale that I call La Brabançonne.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve returned to The Porter twice. We’ve also made a stop in at The Brick Store Pub. We still haven’t managed to get over to The Bookhouse Pub (we tried once, but they weren’t open for lunch) or The Bureau.

The Porter has been nice to us. We went there the week after Christmas, the day before New Year’s Eve. We sampled their burger (awesome) and their mac & cheese (also awesome – but slightly less awesome than the way we make it at home). And then just last weekend, we took my sister and brother-in-law to eat there. We enjoyed their hush puppies and their mac & cheese yet again. This time we also tried their calamari which was terrific. It was served with fried julienned jalapeños, fried onion petals, fried lemon curls, and a lemon aeoli – delicious through and through.

Also while my sister and brother-in-law were in town (here on a week-long whirlwind tour of the east coast), we finished off my last bottle of Hump’s Dancing Monk Ale. This was a strong Belgian-style ale that I made over two years ago. The final product was close to 11% abv. It was a mellow, warming, smooth, malty, complex ale and much better than I remember – no doubt with help from 2+ years of aging. Its more intense fruity and licorice flavors – which stood out in not-so-perfect ways – had subsided. The beast had been calmed. Did I mention it was smooth? It was quite drinkable for 10.6% abv. I was pleased.

I’ll try to get photos of the “cellar” in my next post. I’ve collected some amazing beers over the past few months and don’t have a drinking partner to help sample the goods (my usual co-conspirator, my wife, is in her third trimester carrying our unborn son). So the fridge has turned into a stock pile – which I gleefully raid when we have company.

Today, on my birthday, instead of celebrating with a nice beer (I have an insane number of fantastic ones in the cellar), I chose to have short glass of Scotch.

My mother-in-law bought me a bottle of Laphroaig for Christmas – cask-strength and aged 10 years (a little young next to other bottles in its price range). After sipping it, I was blown away. It is the ultimate Scotch. This takes all of the crazy peat-smoked malt flavors that you get in other Scotch whiskeys (smoke, seaweed, dirt) and takes them to the next level. I don’t want to suggest that it is over-the-top or will assault your palate. These descriptors may not sound pleasant to some (seaweed!?! dirt!?!), but, in fact, these wild and strong flavors meld well and make for a relaxing and quite smooth glass of whiskey. Despite its being cask strength (~56% abv instead of diluted to the usual 40%), it is remarkably clean with little of the heat and solvent flavors you’d expect from such a strong liquor (which are present in many lesser whiskeys). It is so strong that, after swishing it around in the mouth to really detect all flavor therein, it begins to make the inside of your mouth and your gums go numb – without being harsh on the palate.

I am far from a Scotch connoisseur, so I’m a novice (bear with me if you actually know something about Scotch). I like whiskey. I usually prefer bourbon: Evan Williams Single Barrel Vintage in particular because it is tasty and sippable – but also because it is inexpensive enough that I can mix with it in drinks that call for bourbon. It’s a great value if you like bourbons on the sweeter side (which I often do).

My last nice bottle of whiskey (other than Crown Royal, which is a staple in our liquor cabinet) was a gift from my friend Bob: Tyrconnell Irish whiskey. It is very smooth and well-rounded, but lighter in flavor than Scotch. It is closer to the Crown Royal from Canada than to any other whiskey in my collection.

My favorite – at least as of this moment – is definitely the newest addition. This crazy bottle of Scotch. Delicious. It’s actually nice enough, despite the incredibly high alcohol content, to sip neat (i.e. poured straight from the bottle with nothing else – no ice, no water, nothing).

This is a beer blog, so I should probably say something about beer. I did drink some beer today – one 12 ounce serving of Anchor’s Christmas Ale. I also had a few sips of homebrew while dispensing Hump’s Credit Crunch Ale into bottles to make room for Hump’s Smoked Maple Stout. I’ll be adding some Grade B Maple Syrup and some lactose to that keg so that it keg-conditions over the next week or two (as opposed to the usual force-carbonating it from the CO₂ tank).

Speaking of homebrew, my friend Rob from work has begun brewing. He brewed his first batch last week and kegged it today. I think he’s pretty happy with it. I’ve been trying to help him out with the hobby. I don’t have any other friends that actively brew (lots that used to though), so it’s nice to have someone to “talk shop” with. And since I have more experience, I can feel useful by answering questions and helping him out. His first batch was actually one of my recipes – though modified to accomodate available ingredients and his setup (extract with specialty grains, partial boil).

Sunday, I finally cooked up my Smoked Maple Stout. This sweet stout recipe features smoked malts and maple syrup to give it what should be a warming and comforting flavor for a cold winter night. Not that we have cold winter nights in Atlanta – at least not really so far this year. Based on how complementary the flavors of maple and smoked pork are (like in pancakes with bacon and in maple-flavored sausage links), this sweet and savory duo should be a knock-out. The smoke should be a pleasant accompaniment to a night in front of the fireplace, too. I just hope between the time it’s finished fermenting and the time it’s all gone we have at least one cold night on which to truly enjoy it.

I used Grade B maple syrup this time. My experience is that Grade A, the more common grade (though still less common than “pancake syrup” which is just high fructose corn syrup with maple flavoring), doesn’t leave enough maple flavor. Since maple syrup is mostly sugar, like honey, it dries a beer out leaving it stronger and lighter in body. So simply using more maple syrup isn’t the solution to getting more flavor since that just leads to a stronger, lighter-bodied product that can easily get too dry to make good beer. That avenue would simply require too much syrup to get a nice, rich maple flavor, and the result would be a maple braggot – closer to mead than to beer.

Grade B has more “impurities” in much the same way that dark brown sugar has more impurities than does light brown sugar. In brown sugar, the impurity is rich and beautiful molasses. In maple syrup, the impurity similarly is the strong-flavored undertone that makes maple syrup taste “mapley”. Grade B is what is typically called for in baking to provide a good maple flavor, so it makes sense that it should also be the syrup of choice for flavoring beer.

I also used a different variety of smoked malt than in past smoked beers. In the past, I’ve only used peat-smoked barley malt. Peat smoke has a very earthy dirt character to it that can lend a pleasing earthiness to the final smoked beer. It is also intensely smokey. You only need a few ounces in a 5-gallon batch to get a noticeable smokey aroma and flavor.

Award-winning brewer Jamil Zainasheff, however, recommends never using peat-smoked malt in beer. He instead suggests to stick with German smoked barley malt known as rauch malt – which is smoked with beech wood. I originally concocted my recipe to use the Jamil-certified rauch malt, but a discussion with Doug, the homebrew store owner, led me into another direction. He said that he has problems moving rauch malt for two reasons:

1. Home brewers use smoked malt far less frequently than other specialty grains.
2. The consistency in commercial rauch malt available here is terrible.

He has observed it himself and has received complaints from customers about the smokiness of rauch malt varying considerably from one bag to the next. For that reason he only sells rauch malt in 10-pound quantities (the size of the bags that he gets from his supplier). I told him that I didn’t mind buying a 10-pound bag since I have other smoked recipes and could probably use it up after only 4 smoked batches (which admittedly would likely be spread out over a year or more since my palate probably couldn’t handle four smoked beers in a row). He then directed me to a better alternative: fresh applewood-smoked barley malt. He smokes it himself at home using English Pale malt as the basis. The intensity he acheives is a little more consistent than he’s found with German rauch malt, and – like peat-smoked malt – it is much stronger in smokiness than the German alternative. So instead of using two pounds of rauch malt (which admittedly could be too much or could be insufficient – depending on how smokey was the bag of rauch malt I’d acquired), I would only need to use about 6 ounces of Doug’s applewood smoked malt. And I didn’t have to buy ten pounds of it – just the six ounces that I needed.

Applewood works well with bacon and sausages, so why not barley malt?

The actual brewing was mostly uneventful. It seems, however, that something has to go wrong every batch of late. This time it was the manifold of my mash/lauter tun. Apparently it wasn’t fitted to the tun’s opening at the bottom very well. Stirring the mash, I felt the brew spoon hit something plastic that wasn’t on the floor of the tun like it should have been. Stirring a little more revealed the manifold, freely drifting in the mash. So when the saccharification rest was complete, I had to pour the mash into the kettle, re-attach the manifold in the tun, and then pour the mash back into the kettle. This, of course, results in bubbles and aeration, which is generally bad with hot wort as it can lead to possible oxidation in the finished product (which means shorter shelf life and greater chance of stale flavors like wet cardboard). I’ve “poured” the mash before and never noticed any significant level of oxidation in finished beers, so I’m not really too worried about that…

Also on Sunday I kegged Hump’s Bitter. I think this is probably the best example of the style I’ve ever whipped up. Past examples have ranged from being too bold and hoppy – like an American Pale Ale instead of an English Bitter – to being too dry and not malty enough. This one strikes a nice balance of bready maltiness with a firm but far from overpowering hop bitterness. It still tastes a little green, so it will likely taste even better after another few weeks.

As a New Year’s Eve treat, I cracked open the very last bottle I had of Hump’s Full Moon Stout. This bottle was a little over 2 years old. The beer was brewed as an Imperial Stout featuring continuous hopping (or close to it – hop additions every 5 minutes for an hour) and Rogue’s Pacman Yeast.

It had aged very well. The strength in alcohol (just over 8 percent) was well-hidden, with a slight warming in the finish being the only give-away indicator. The body was very full, but tasted pleasant. After it was first brewed, it tasted awesome. But its high finishing gravity made it a little bit too heavy. With this amount of age on the beer, the full body was pleasant and not too heavy. The other flavors have melded amazingly well, and the full body just makes it feel hearty and perfect for a cold winter’s night (not that it ever gets that cold here, but…).

Even after two years, there was a perceptible hop flavor and a decently balancing hop bitterness. Often volatile compounds that create hop flavor and aroma are driven off just from a year of aging, and bitterness also declines with lengthy aging. In the case of this beer, they simply smoothed the beer out.

All in all, an amazing end to this recipe. I’m quite happy that this beer turned out so nicely. I’m excited at the prospects of making an Imperial Stout using only grain and no extract. But first, I’ll be cooking up a sweet stout flavored with maple sugar and beechwood-smoked barley malt. I think this combination of flavors should make for a great winter beer.

Speaking of recent/upcoming brews, this year’s Holiday Lager has turned out decent, but it is still pretty green right now. I wish I had thought about making this beer earlier, because I think it will really need at least a month – perhaps three – of lagering. It’s in the fridge now, aging in the keg. I’ve had a few samples of it over the past few weeks, and it is pleasant. But it definitely tastes young.

Tonight we’ll be having a Lindeman’s Pêche for our New Year’s toast. My wife is pregnant, and my son is about to turn four – so I’ll be having most of the bottle all to myself. At least I’ll sleep well…

The other weekend – December 13^th to be precise – was my planned time for brewing up Hump’s Bitter. That Saturday, unfortunately, I was struck with a nasty stomach bug – sharp cramps in my lower abdomen mainly.

My wife had a photo-shoot, so my son and I hung out around the house. After laying on the couch for a little bit, hoping the discomfort would pass, it finally faded to a point where I could get up and brew. I brewed, heroically dismissing the torturous pain, because I knew that I would not get another such day to brew until after Christmas – probably not until 2009.

Unlike my past several batches, nothing went wrong. Everything seemed to go almost perfectly. There was one bummer for the day: my digital thermometer got screwed up again. This has happened to two digital thermometers before. The moisture gets into places in the digital probe that aren’t adequately sealed and short something. The result is that the thermometer reads about 10-20 degrees high. Unfortunately, I am not 100% certain when this happened. Judging from the efficiency I got (typical – ~70%) and from the vigor of fermentation, I am guessing that everything went well and that the thermometer didn’t start acting up until after the critical temperature reads for the mash saccharification rest. So, assuming that the awry digital thermometer didn’t completely ruin the mash, everything went smoothly. We should have a delicious English Special Bitter on our hands any day now (there was still a big floating yeast cake on the beer last time I looked – which was a couple of days ago). It isn’t as easy to check on regularly because it is in an opaque plastic bucket instead of in a glass carboy. Unfortunately, both of my six-gallon carboys were in use when it came time to pitch the yeast for this latest batch.

One of the carboys was full of wine – a red wine made from 2007 Australian Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. I bottled the wine last Monday (12/22), so I have a case of wine in the basement, waiting for my wife to no longer be pregnant (since she is the main consumer of vino in this household – at least when she’s not preggers).

So the batch went okay. My stomach cramps didn’t completely disappear but did lessen in intensitiy. The next day I felt much better, so the whole family went up into the city (i.e. Atlanta) to take our son Will to see Santa Claus, to do some last minute Christmas shopping (at the Georgia Tech bookstore/gift shop of course), and to try out a new restaurant/bar: The Porter Beer Bar in Little Five.

I had read about the Porter in a mailing list (Ale Atlanta). I had heard it was a nice place that combined favorable elements of some of the best beer destinations in Atlanta: Five Seasons Brewing and The Brick Store Pub.

I more recently saw an article that discussed new “gastro-pubs” in Atlanta. The most notable two until recently were TAP in midtown and Holeman & Finch Public House in Buckhead. We now have three relatively new ones to add to Atlanta’s repertoire: The Porter Beer Bar of course, The Bookhouse Pub, and The Bureau.

As it turns out, the owners/operators of The Porter have served me and my wife before. One was the sous chef and the other our server at Seeger’s on an anniversary dinner in 2005. Seeger’s was a fancy-schmancy restaurant whose head chef, Gunther Seeger, first earned The Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead its five-star rating. By all accounts, Gunther is an asshole, and his restaurant was closed after some shady dealings – tax evasion I think… One year later, Malin and I celebrated our anniversary at Quinones – the nicest and best damn restaurant in all of Atlanta. Again, the sous chef and our server were coincidentally the same couple as at Seeger’s. So when I read in that article about The Porter that the operators used to work at Seeger’s, I went to my Quinones menu from 2006 (yes, I still have a copy – it was that good). Sure enough, the sous chef’s name on the menu matched that of the chef at The Porter: Nicholas Rutherford.

So we chose The Porter as the first of these three new places to visit. The three of us split a couple of appetizers (brandade, hushpuppies) and a single entree (shrimp and grits). The food was good. The brandade was a bit too salty I think, but the hushpuppies were to die for, and the shrimp and grits were excellent as well. They also had Sweetwater’s first “dank tank” creation on draft: Creeper – a highly hopped and bitter Belgian Tripel. Unfortunately, I didn’t eat a whole lot because my stomach started to act up again, and I lost my appetite. But I did try everything, and remember everything being tasty. We didn’t actually see Molly – I doubt she would remember us from Quinones or Seeger’s. And we wouldn’t know what Nick looks like since he was in the kitchen during those two evenings on which we ate his food.

Our next stop of the three will probably be The Bureau. The chef there used to work at Babbo in New York (one of Mario Batali’s restaurants). Malin and I ate there during a trip to New York over two years ago, and it was absolutely amazing. That is one menu that I really wish I had saved but unfortunately did not. So we’re interested to see what sort of chops Chef Clark learned at Babbo and how they translate into gastropub fare.

A week or two ago (maybe three) someone in a local beer e-mail list posted a link to a great article in The New Yorker about Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. It was an interesting read, but I thought some of the random quips from Garrett Olive (brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery) seemed a little oddly weaved in – a little out of place.

Last night, while catching up on my blogs, I came across a link to a discussion on BeerAdvocate.com about the article. The comment threads are a good read and feature several comments/responses from Mr. Oliver himself – who also felt that his comments were oddly weaved into the piece and that the author may have twisted things up a bit when composing the final piece. The author, Burkhard Bilger, even chimes in to defend his article. Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head, also leaves his mark on the discussion.

The article is a great read – do yourself a favor and read it now if you haven’t already. The discussion at BeerAdvocate is also worth your perusal. If you read either one, the title of this post will make a little more sense.

Onto homebrew news:

The second attempt at brewing up a holiday lager went much more smoothly the other week than did the first. There were still some frustrating hiccups – mainly the fact that my digital thermometer has a “hold” button that is too easy to hit. Also my thermometer calibrator broke (luckily not in the beer/wort/mash, which would have completely ruined it with chemicals). But after a difficult brew session on a thoroughly miserable day (disgustingly wet, cold, and rainy the whole day), I emerged victorious. Fermentation has pretty much completed, too. Attenuation is about the expected level, and the spice mix is decent and tastes good. I don’t know if it tastes particularly like a Bock, but it is very bready, toasty, and malty. The malt sweetness is a little lower than anticipated, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The spice mix is good – I got the formula for quantity and proportion of spices from Doug, the operator of Just Brew It! (my local homebrew shop). I think the clove and ginger are a little strong – mask the cinnamon and nutmeg a little – but that overall it is a fine tasting blend that suitably reminds me of the holidays.

Tomorrow I will be brewing up a English Bitter using a special release yeast strain from Wyeast. They call it “West Yorkshire Ale Yeast”, and I’ve read that it comes from the Timothy Taylor brewery. I think it will make a good beer.

My New Year’s Day brew session will be spent whipping up a Smoked Maple Stout – awesome, eh? I’ll be using another special release strain from Wyeast – their  English Special Bitter. This yeast is a relatively low attenuator which, along with a classic English ester profile, will be perfect for this beer as the base style is Sweet Stout. The recipe calls for some beechwood-smoked malt to provide the smoke flavor. Real maple syrup is also used, but my experience here is that this doesn’t add lots of maple flavor. Since maple syrup is mostly sugar, a lot of the character ferments away and leaves the finished beer drier and stronger. So I’ll be adding a little lactose to give the beer some residual sweetness (if necessary – I’ll taste the fermented beer before adding lactose to make sure it’s needed). I’ll also prime the keg with some maple sugar, instead of force carbonating from my CO₂ tank, to give the beer some residual maple flavor.

So good brews are on the horizon.

The fridge is currently stocked with some good stuff, too: Credit Crunch Ale (American Amber) is a very nice ale with a very nice, citrus, floral bouquet and a distinct bready malt backbone with just enough malt sweetness to leave the beer balanced. I also still have some of the Itsy Bitsy Brown left. Yummy…

I better go to bed before I make myself thirsty for a night cap…

This weekend I will be trying again to make a Holiday brew. Like the last one, it will be a pumpkin spice bock. Unlike the last one, it will not actually have any pumpkin in it – just the spices. My English Bitter will have to wait until the week thereafter…

My past couple of posts have had phrases along the lines of “this weekend I’m going to brew this” or “this weekend I’m going to keg that”. Well, frankly, none of that came to fruition.

I’ve had a carbon dioxide shortage recently. The empty tank sat in the fridge for a few days, and I finally took it in to swap it for a full tank last Friday. Just yesterday, I tried to hook it up and use it to dispense the Honey Nut Ale into bottles – to make room for the Credit Crunch Ale (a “West Coast America Amber”). But when it began to give off no gas, I was worried. I couldn’t tell just from lifting the tank if it was full – although I now know that I could have used a scale: 7.5lbs. means empty, 12.5lbs. means full. I even tried taking apart the valve to see if something was wrong and it simply wasn’t opening up.

As it turns out, they swapped my empty tank for – yes – another empty tank. Luckily they had no qualms with taking it back and replacing it with a full one this time.

So tonight I dispensed Honey Nut Ale into bottles. I also dispensed the rest of my Most Worthy Ale into bottles. What an awesome Double IPA that turned out to be… I had to bottle it before I accidentally drank the keg dry. This way I have some spare bottles saved – for company, for the future, etc…

I’m about to return to the basement to finally keg the amber. I would say “wish me luck” regarding my holiday bock this weekend, but I don’t think I’ll need it since I won’t be using any ingrediens that could ruin brew day this time. I will definitely try my hand at a pumpkin beer again, but I now have some knowledge about how not to do it. My next recipe will not get stuck! I may use more rice hulls. I may use less pumpkin. I may cube the pumpkin instead of smashing it, or I may try a little of each of these three changes…

As it turned out, the title of my last post was all too appropriate. Brew day today could simply not have been a bigger nightmare.

My first problem was, like nearly all brew days unfortunately, a late start. I didn’t really get started until 3pm which was about 2 hours later than ideal.

My second problem was encountered upon opening my mash/lauter tun after pulling it up from the basement: it was covered in mold – disgusting. I had to scrub it out and then rinsed everything in a solution of water and bleach (only 1oz bleach per gallon water, so hopefully that was actually strong enough to kill the mold… I may need to do more cleaning with a more potent solution).

One thing actually went quite right: I hit my mash temperature almost perfectly. I think I just got lucky… I was going for 155 and hit 154. It was still around 154 after one hour per my handy thermometer calibrator, so it may have actually hit around 155 and just cooled off by one degree.

The third problem was something I should have realized beforehand. It wasn’t necessarily a problem – just a complication. My lauter tun only holds 10 gallons. The total mash+sparge volume would be around 12.5 gallons. The reason was twofold: this beer featured a lot more grain than usual so there would be more water lost in spent grains, and this beer would undergo a 90 minute boil, which means I need to start with more to compensate for more of it boiling off. The long boil is due to the extensive use of continental pilsner malt (about five pounds) – which needs a long boil to boil off DMS precursors. So I would have to do a double batch sparge (i.e. fill the lauter tun to 10 gallons, sparge, and then add more hot water, and sparge more)

The fourth problem would be the ultimate issue, overshadowing (and foreshadowing) the rest of my evening: a stuck mash. Bad. Really bad. I had not even collected a quart or two of wort by the time it stopped flowing. Usually I have to restrain the valve on the lauter tun to insure a slow flow, but even with the valve wide open it trickled and ultimately stopped. I was worried about this possibility due to the use of pumpkin (nearly six pounds of roasted [caramelized] pumpkin flesh). To mitigate this issue I had added 1/2 pound of rice hulls to the mash. Rice hulls help to form a filter bed, much like barley husks. When only barley is used, the husks alone provide a sufficient filter bed. But when large quantities of wheat, rye, or other starches (like pumpkin) are used, rice hulls are a handy additive to prevent a stuck mash. Apparently they didn’t do their job.

Now here’s where things started getting really messy. After fighting the mash for a while – stirring it up heavily and digging the brewspoon into the bottom of the grain bed to stir it up and jar it loose – I gave up and decided to transfer the mash to the kettle (the only vessel in the house big enough to hold all ten gallons of it). After doing this by hand, two quarts at a time, using a two-quart Pyrex measuring cup, I added my remaining 1/2 pound of rice hulls. I stirred them up, hoping they would resolve my stuck mash, and then transferred it again by hand – this time back into the lauter tun.

Problem number five: another stuck mash. At first the extra rice hulls seemed to work. The wort flowed. But the flow slowly decelerated and eventually came to a stop after only collecting about 2.5 gallons of wort.

I tried the same trick again, but this time I had no more rice hulls to add. I simply transferred to the kettle and back. I saved the 2.5 gallons of wort collected so far in another, smaller brewpot. But the goddess of brewing had turned a frown on me…

At this point, things were looking grim. I could not get any more wort. I even tried vigorously stirring up the wort and manipulating the grain bed with the brewspoon – with the valve open. I had decided I cared a little less about how clean the resulting wort would be. I just wanted to get on with it. It still wouldn’t work. I was being spurned by that cruel goddess.

Problem number six (or potential problem at least): efficiency. A full 7.25 gallons of wort was supposed to have a gravity of 1.048. I assumed only 60% efficiency – less than the typical which is 68-70%. I assumed the pumpkin would provide less gravity per pound than would the barley (15 points per pound per gallon – vs. 37.5 points per pound per gallon for the base malt). But I think the real situation was even worse – either worse than 60% efficiency or way less than 15 points per pound per gallon for the pumpkin. The 2.5 gallon “first runnings” had a disappointing specific gravity of only 1.059. Considering I’ve read that you typically get 2/3 of the total gravity out of the beer using the first 1/2 of sparge water, this should have been a little thicker I think (although it’s hard to tell – I think I was expecting closer to 1.070, but I don’t have hard scientific data to support that expectation – I don’t even think I have sufficient knowledge/formulas to calculate the proper gravity at this point).

My last ditch attempt to get this beer brewing was desperate indeed. I got out my old mini-mash setup: a nylon grain bag and a metal colander. I tried to suspend the colander on the lip of the brewpot and pour the mash through it. This resulted in a spectacular failure: the colander was too small to safely hang on the lip of the new, bigger brewpot. It fell into the beer, ruining it with grain husks and rice hulls. And splashing sticky crud on every surface of the kitchen at the same time.

At this point in time, I had been fighting this batch for over four hours. It was nearly 8pm. I should usually be finished at this point – or at least cooling the wort by now, preparing to pitch yeast.

My wife was great help throughout – she offered assistance through most of this frustrating process. But it was to no avail. The kitchen was an appalling mess (even though we had already performed significant clean-up twice after the previous missteps). I had nearly thrown my back out – from lifting a full ten-gallon cooler up onto the counter not once but three times. And I had lost four hours of my life. Actually, I wish I had simply lost these hours. Instead I found four of the most infuriating and maddening hours of my adult life.

I gave up. I cried, “uncle!” to that wicked goddess of brewing, cursing her under every breath I drew. Probably over forty dollars worth of ingredients down the tube. Completely wasted. I might as well have withdrawn a pair of Andrew Jacksons and tossed them in my fireplace. And let’s not forget four frustrating hours of my life, also down the tube.

I was livid. Perhaps livid does not adequately describe my mood. It was all I could do to restrain from destroying something. If I did not have a wife and kid, my psyche’s id would have taken over in a most childish and destructive display of rage. But, thinking of my family and knowing that I had already scared Will enough (he could tell I was upset for a good bit of the evening as I tried to make things work – ultimately in vain), I remained calm. Mostly. Only a few muted curse words. And then I poured everything out into the backyard, washed and rinsed all of the equipment, and went to pour myself a beer. I resisted the urge to pour an entire pitcher – and the urge to pour an ounce of Crown Royal into the mug…

Blogging, it seems, can be a form of therapy. The ability to describe the evening – to reflect on it (in horror) and then formulate the words that might, hopefully, do it justice – is therapeutic unto itself. Knowing that someone will read it (okay – I don’t actually know that – but I have a feeling at least of one of my friends will peruse through it) helps, too – as if you, the reader, are my silent psycho-analyst.

My nightmare is over. I still have a starter of lager yeast in the fridge downstairs – nearly 300 billion little organisms, anxiously awaiting whatever sweet nectar I ultimately give them. I also have an entire other batch of ingredients down there – for the English Bitter that I will be brewing next weekend.

Who knows – perhaps there is still time for a holiday ale this year – if I brew it next weekend and postpone the bitter until December 6^th…
This time it will definitely not have any cursed pumpkin.

I now I bid thee farewell. I’ll let you have one last look at my vision of Christmas for this year. That vision has been dismantled through my miserable evening, but it was pretty – dare I say beautiful – while it lasted:

This year’s Holiday Ale was inspired by Tim Burton’s twisted tale… okay, not really… but maybe sort of.

After two years in a row of mediocre spiced beers standing in as Hump’s Holiday Ale, I’ve decided on something a little a more interesting and hopefully something a little “safer”. Something that still fits with the season – mostly. It still features the same spice angle – the same blend of spices commonly found in pumpkin pie. But the big difference this year is that the beer will feature real pumpkin. And it will be a strong lager.

The 2008 Holiday Ale will be a “Pumpkin King” if you will. We bought several pie pumpkins the other week from the pumpkin patch (in addition to the big ones we carved into jack-o-lanterns). With 5-7 pounds of fresh, caramelized pumpkin puree in the mash, this beer should offer plenty of pumpkin flavor – unlike my last (and first) pumpkin beer, which had pretty much no noticable pumpkin quality. The previous beer was a pumpkin hefeweizen, and the banana esters produced by the yeast completely overwhelmed any chance of pumpkin flavor in the finished product.

This one will be a Bock. It will be brewed fairly big for a Bock – perhaps Doppelbock would be a more accurate appelation. Lots of clean, biscuity, toasty, thick, sweet malts married to lots of pumpkin and pumpkin spice. The spicing should be more subdued than the spice monsters I’ve cooked up over the last two years. I think it will come together nicely.

I’ll be cooking it up this weekend.

I’ll also be kegging Hump’s Credit Crunch Ale this weekend. It turned out nicely. I haven’t tasted the final product, but I sampled it after fermentation was pretty much finished last week, and it was nice. Since then, the yeast have fallen out of suspension, and beer is now much brighter. I think it will be a big improvement to the tap list over the current occupant (Honey Nut Ale – a nut brown ale that has a few minor but nagging flaws – at least nagging to me anyway).

I was originally planning to cook up a Smoked Maple Stout as the subsequent batch (in December). But Wyeast has several interesting specialty strains out now, all of them for making good English beers like bitters, brown ales, and milds. So I’m going to cook up a bitter instead. The Smoked Maple Stout will have to wait until the new year. In fact, it will probably be my New Year’s Day recipe.