Yes, it’s true.  I’m horrible at remembering to blog.  But can you blame me?  Sure.

Truth be told, I haven’t been feeling very beery lately, since our last batch has yet to carbonate.  I had a friend try it, and even after explaining the situation to him, his response was, “Where’s the body?!”  Beer without carbonation equals sweet alcohol water.  Considering how many batches we have done that have gotten their fizz on, what was different about this one (we keep asking ourselves)?  It’s not that this one has absolutely no carbonation, but it’s way less than I’d like to see.  We’re talking a "sck” when opening a bottle as opposed to a “sckxxxxxxx”.

Possible Problems

• We added the water and dried malt extract right off of the stove.  It went in when we had about a 2 gallons of the wort in the bottling bucket, with 3 still to go.  Even if the heat killed whatever yeast was in that 2 gallons, the next 3 should have brought the temperature down.
• There wasn’t enough yeast left alive to carbonate.  But the heat and additional sugars should have brought them out of hibernation.
• Too much alcohol!  Even with the extra sugar water, the yeast were suffocated in their own excrement (thanks Kurt Vonnegut!)
• Improper sterilization.  Always a possibility, and there’s no way to know exactly how it happened.
• Time!  We just need to wait.

Possible Solutions

• Pour all of the bottles into a soda keg and pressurize with CO2.  After a day or two, we’ll have beer!
• Distill the beer and make whiskey.
• Suck it up and drink it as-is.

My guess is that we have too much alcohol for the yeast to quickly carbonate the beer, but given enough time, it will be good.  Of course, the problem with time is that you have to give it, well, time.  I guess I can use that time to catch up on my blogging…

Cheers!

We had a great time brewing the IPA on May 2nd!  A handful of people told me they wanted to come see the process, but when the grains went into the water, it was just me, Joe, and Ben watching the clock for the next ingredient to add.  Sandip was there for emotional support, but I get the impression he’s more interested in the final product…  If you’re interested in learning to make beer, come join us the next time!  It beats paying for classes or learning the hard way.

Here’s the recipe we used.  It’s based on the Yippee IPA from my favorite recipe book, the Homebrew’s Recipe Guide.  We went with all light malt extract instead of half-amber/half-light, added 2 lbs of honey, and messed with the hops a little lot.  This was the first brew that our cooling coil worked as expected, taking less than half an hour to get the temperatures down.  Not too shabby for $20 worth of copper tubing.  I collected the waste water and brought it right outside to water the grass, and all of our spent grains and hops went right into the compost pile.  No waste brewing!

It’s been in the carboy for just over a week now, and CO2 is still bubbling out slowly.  This weekend, we’ll be reracking it onto more hops and letting that sit for another week before bottling it up.  I had a smaller 1 gallon batch with some special ingredients that I put into growlers last night, and after a quick taste, it’s definitely what we were going for.  We’ll see how the big batch turns out soon enough!  Stay tuned for our next brew—we have to try another fruit beer for summer, since our last attempt, a cranberry wheat, left much to be desired.

Brew #10: B&O Stout

Joe and I were trying to figure out a number for our latest brew, and after a few back-of-the-napkin calculations we decided that this would be brew number ten.  It’s a mouth-watering recipe from The Homebrewers’ Recipe Guide that is also our first attempt at a dark, thick beer using a partial mash (and our first attempt at actually following a recipe…)  It’s our most complex beer to date, running over $70 for ingredients and including roasted barley, chocolate malt, and Carafa.  George over at Home Sweet Homebrew made a few substitutions. (listed after the jump).

Tuesday

I accidentally started Tuesday a little early, attending Drexel’s Culinary Arts program hosting Patrick Jones from Triumph Brewpub in Olde City.  After a brief overview of beer, we got to sample 4 styles (Centennial IPA, Irish Red, Irish Stout, and Honey Wheat) and their accompanying dishes prepared by culinary students.  While there, I ran into Andrew Miller, who’s getting the Drexel Brew Club started up.  I got to see their 30-gallon boiler and chiller—quite impressive.  I’m looking forward to stealing it for a few hours to pursue my own devious recipes…

Grace

Grace Tavern had Harpoon as their guest, but no sign of a brewer.  Oh well.  The IPA wasn’t bad, but it didn’t stand out either.

Doobies

At Doobies, Sly Fox was featuring their Standard Ale on the handpump, a draught that until now has only been available at Standard Tap.  The owner of Standard Tap, William Reed, and Sly Fox master brewer Brian O’Reilly were on hand, and William shared some great stories about opening bars, buying places on whims, and running two great venues that are looking at some (hopefully) great years ahead.

Devil’s Den

A great way to end the night, I picked up a flight of Ommegang’s best.  They were too crowded to find out what the flight consisted of, but we enjoyed it nonetheless while taking in the madness. 

Wednesday

Nodding Head

A light night, with just a beer at Nodding Head.  The firkin of barleywine had just kicked, but I got the first glass of the new firkin of Palo Santo Marron from Dogfish Head.  Becky had a glass of Da Phunk, a barrel-aged version of Nodding Head’s The Phunk aged 7 months in a red wine (Chambourcin) barrel from Chaddsford Winery.  Over a plate of hummus, this was the perfect 11pm nightcap.  Light night, all in preparation for tomorrow night.

Local 44

I couldn’t pass up an email I got around noon offering all pints at Local 44 for just $3!  I had a porter that started with Sin, and Ben had the Coniston Bluebird Bitter, which we both loved.  It was also featured later that night at Tiedhouse—coincidence?  Probably not, since it was equally refreshing there.  I will be looking for this beer come summer time.

Not drunk?

Tiedhouse

Low-power flight

Monday night, Beer Club had 5 members show up for the Session Beer Project at Tiedhouse with Lew Bryson and Russ Czajka.  After keeping Russ peppered with questions for a good half hour, we have quite a few tips to practice at our next brewing.  We’ve been flying by the seats of our pants till now, with temperature control a complete afterthought.  Time to incorporate that variable into the mix.  I was really impressed with the food at Tiedhouse—only one item on the menu over $10, and the burgers were excellent.  Just the right balance of butteriness and moisture without being feeling like I just struck the cow’s jugular.  It went down perfectly with a pint of the Economizer—Gen. Lafayette’s “recycled” beer—that tasted like a cold peach on a hot summer evening.  The Red Velvet (a half & half mix of the Chocolate Thunder and their Irish Red) brought some much needed sweetness and openness to the porter half, while the maturity of the porter balanced the freshness & shininess of the red half.  Now I know I need a case of the Irish Red to counter the half-case of Thunder at home in the beer fridge.

Lew Bryson talks a good talk, but
just how good can a low-abv beer be?

Green Room

Afterwards, we headed to Becky’s old stomping-ground, the Green Room at 20th and Green.  The always-lovely JC took care of us, pulling out a few oft-overlooked bottles from the fridge.  It’s not the kind of place people order real beer often, but as Tom Kehoe pointed out during Craig LeBan’s chat on 3/3, you can walk into a dive bar and find good beer—something largely unheard of outside of Philadelphia.  I had a Flying Fish ESB and a shot of scotch and called it a night.

What can I say that hasn’t been said already?  The Philly Craft Beer Fest has returned for a third year, bringing what seemed like more people and less breweries.  I’d never been to the late session before, but I would definitely recommend it.  We enjoyed at least 40 beers and I ran into quite a few people who I haven’t seen in a while (John, Eric, & Jake—hi!).  We also made a few friends with our tasting sheets (next year, I’m printing them out like it’s my job).

Emily took a more non-traditional
approach to beer descriptions…

I started off strong…

but by the end, anything goes.

So, what did we taste?  Check out the sheets!  I decided to scale down the rating system to 4 choices:  :(  :|  :) and a double  :) :) .  This seemed to work really well for the crowded tasting room and limited drinking amount.  We ran into Chris from BeerHeads.com, and I got a Philly Beer Geek t-shirt for $5 cause, well, I’m a beer geek.  We played some beer bingo, wondered what was with the multiple cigar vendors, and snagged a few extra tasting cups.  Philly pretzels were going for $2 a pop—definitely the best deal for extending your drinking abilities.  My two favorites were the St. Somewhere Lectia Divina and the always alluring River Horse Double Wit.

By the end, I was happy to beat the crowds out the door and ended up at Tap Room for a brisket sandwich and a Great Divide Yeti.  This was a bad choice—my taste buds were already destroyed, and this was like pouring gasoline on an open fire.

Did you make it to the Craft Beer Festival?  What was your favorite beer there?  Let us know!