HOMEBREWING: The fate of my empty beer bottles

When you start homebrewing, empty beer bottles become a commodity not unlike rupees or pesos. You hoard them. After all, they will soon contain your precious gold. Here is what happens to my empty beer bottles:



That stuff on them is Oxiclean, and dammit, Billy Mays was right, this stuff is a miracle. Hot water + Oxyclean and in 15 minutes beer labels are floating at the top of the tub, fully intact, looking great, and your bottles get all sorts of clean.

The bad news is that homebrewing is a hobby that causes you to start keeping beer bottles. And no, significant others don't like that. The good news? Homebrewers are environmentally friendly!

So save your bottles, clean 'em, drink up, and be glad you're saving the world.

Quick Sips: River Horse Hop-a-lot-Amus Double IPA

River Horse is very quietly one of the best breweries in New Jersey. For my money, Flying Fish is the best, but only by a hair. River Horse is nipping at their heels. It helps that River Horse has a double IPA like Hop-a-lot-Amus and Flying Fish (as of this writing) doesn't.

This is a pretty straightforward DIPA, with a pine-laden aroma and a fat malt backbone. The malts are maybe too much a part of this beer, however, but it's hard to tell. River Horse doesn't date its bottles, and that is ESSENTIAL to knowing if you have a great pale ale/IPA or not. For real, date your damn bottles.

Bottom line is, this is a good beer that could be better. What I got had decent citrus hops and strong malts, but who the hell knows if I got it in optimal condition? Come on, people. Date it. Balance it. And date it again so us beer geeks know when we're getting an old bottle.

Quick Sips: Samuel Adams Third Voyage Double IPA

Discounting the Longshot entries, which aren't technically beer recipes by Samuel Adams, this big beer is their first foray into double IPA territory, and comes courtesy of their new small batch series.

The aroma is a heady swirl of pine forest and canned peaches. Other double IPAs are more pungent, but for their first effort Sam Adams does it nice. So a pour and a taste? Strong bitterness. Not harsh, but bitter enough to smash through any other tastes lingering in your mouth. This one is a palate cleaner -- which is exactly what you want from a DIPA.

That said, the 8% alcohol by volume is not well masked. This is a strong beer and you can taste it. Even at refrigerator temps some alcohol heat cuts through, which is unusual for modern American craft brews. As it warms, the alcohol becomes even more prominent. Proceed with caution.

Overall this is a good beer, not a top tier double IPA but quite respectable and likely to impress anyone who is a Sam Adams aficionado.

Making the case for canned beer

CANS!

There is a stigma attached to canned beer. And hey, that's not surprising. For most American beer drinkers, the notion of beer in a can conjures up images of old men downing 12-packs on the porch, college kids chugging cheap piss by the 30-pack, meatheads crushing beers on their forehead, and rednecks tossing out empties of Bud nips in the woods.



But here's the thing: If you care about the quality of your beer, cans are actually BETTER for your beer. Really! Consider a few things:

1) No skunking. Despite what you may think about beer being old or being left in a hot trunk or whatever, the only thing that makes a beer get skunky is UV light. It's called being light struck, and it's why smart brewers use brown bottles instead of clear or green. Light reacts with hops in a bad way and causes skunky beer. That's why your Heineken and Yuengling are so often skunky. Their green bottles. Cans? They allow no light at all. And that's good for your beer.

2) Easy Transportation. Imagine you're driving to your buddy's barbecue or taking home a load of beer or coming home from a multi-state trip with a load of regional beers. Yeah, I don't need to say any more. Cans are better for transportation, aren't they?

3) No More Metal Flavor. Remember the days when canned beer tasted like canned beer? They're over. Modern canned are lined. No more can taste (unless you're silly enough to drink from the can, which is a bad idea because all you'll taste is the can). Modern beer cans are lined with the same crap that lines your cans of green beans and tomato soup*. So drink up, Johnny.

4) Drink While You're Out! Out at the park? At the beach? Hiking in the woods? Rafting on a river? Cans can go places bottles can't. They're easier to lug around (see #2), many parks ban glass but are okay with plastic and metal, and for those that don't allow alcohol, cans by brewers like 21st Amendment don't look like beer, paving the way for outdoors fun for all. And hey, what is better than enjoying a beer in a great outdoor setting?



5) Easy storage. They stack easier than bottles. They take up less space. You don't have to worry about random breakage. You can stack up a big ass pile of cases in your closet or garage or wherever and it'll be cool. Hell, you can throw them on their side and that's probably cool, too (though I don't know if the tops are lined, too, so don't take my advice here). So storage is awesome. Super awesome. Super duper awesome.

6) Better Recycling. Recycling aluminum rocks, and nothing is cheaper, easier, and more profitable for recyclers than aluminum. Want to know a bit about recycling and why it doesn't always make sense? Check out this video, along with part 2 and part 3. I won't deny that these guys are off base at times, but they're right about one thing: Recycling aluminum is cheap, easy, profitable, and benefits the environment. So hey, drinking canned beer is green!

7) Minimal oxidation. What the hell is oxidation? Essentially, it's stale beer. It is oxygen interacting with the beer. Here is a beer geeky essay on the topic. In some beer styles, such as barleywines, a limited amount of oxidation is desirable. LIMITED is the key word. In most cases, oxidation is bad. And yeah, guess what? A sealed can is far better than a capped bottle when it comes to protecting from this beer-killing phenomenon.

8) You Can Be Counterculture. You want to be hip, don't you? Of course you do. Yeah, you think you're already hip with your craft beer and limited releases and shit, but think about it ... are your other friends touting canned beer? Of course not. And make no mistake, canned beer is trending upward. Heck, even Sierra Nevada is canning beer! Now you can be ahead of the curve! Start cheering cans now and you'll look like a prophet in a few years!



9) Cans Looks AWESOME. Okay, this is subjective, but folks like 21st Amendment really know how to make beer packaging look amazing. And hey, look, we're all friends here, so we can admit that we're all shallow assholes who get sucked in by pretty things, right? Because I am. I really am. And I buy their stuff all the time because it looks so cool. (Of course, it helps that they brew fantastic beer.)

10) Number ten. This entry makes it an official top 10, even though it has no content. So, errr ... cans. Yeah!?


*In the interest of full disclosure, right now beer cans are lined with something that contains BPA. Even though many canned foods have this liner, it's new to beer. In addition, there are now some concerns about its long-term effects. So know your stuff before you commit. Personally I'll keep trying canned craft beer, but only because it's a minority. If it becomes a majority, I'll want to know more.

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HOMEBREWING: How I brew beer (badly)

I can't claim to be a great homebrewer. I'm not. I love experimenting, I think I sometimes have good ideas, but aspects of my process suck and my technique is still very much that of a beginner. With about 16 batches and maybe 24 different beers (due to split batches) under my belt I think I'm getting better, and I do work to improve with every batch, but I'm certainly not immune to brewing up some garbage.

Anyway, for those interested, today I thought I'd show folks a bit about how I make beer at home. Beer is a lot like cooking a big stew. You boil some water, add ingredients, and in the end have something (hopefully) delicious. My process takes about 6-8 weeks between brewing and drinking, though many people do it in much less.

This little photo journey chronicles the making of a summer ale made in the summer of 2011. The recipe was not my own; it came courtesy of the Brewer's Apprentice.

First, I had to set up what they call "specialty grains." You steep them like a tea to provide some flavor and body to the beer. What you see below are the grains I'm about to add to a grain bag.

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The grains go into a "grain sock," a porous bag that lets water through but keeps solids in. You steep it for 30 minutes and have to maintain a steady temperature.

At this point you need to pour yourself a beer, because you can't make beer without drinking beer. So this is what I drank while I made this beer:

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That's a Quelque Chose from Unibroue. It's utterly unique, very elegant, and quite delicious.

But I digress. Once the grains have been steeped, they go into a big ass pot of water that is now about boiling. "Big ass pot" is a technical term; most people call it a brew pot:

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I steep the grains in a separate pot in order to save time, transferring the "tea" to the main pot as it begins to boil. At the time I first started to write this post I brewed on a stove top, on an electric stove. (I've since moved on to an outdoor burner not unlike a turkey fryer.) It takes a long time to bring several gallons of water up to a boil on my stovetop, so while the grains steep I'm also heating up the big pot. This cuts upwards of 30-45 minutes off my brew day.

Okay, next I add some malt extract. Extract comes in the form of a syrup and is essentially all the barley and such pre-prepared to the point that you just need to boil it. I'm an extract brewer, which means I don't mess with milling grain and all that other stuff that the hardcore homebrewers do. You get more control and the potential for a greater variety of beer if you do all grain, but you know what? Forget that! You can make great beer as an extract brewer; you can design hundreds of awesome beers; and your brew days will be hours shorter. Plus, I'm just not yet equipped to brew all grain, nor do I have the space. One day, but for now, in goes the extract.

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Now here's the good stuff. Beer has hops, a vine related to cannabis. (Really!) Hops are the 'spice' of beer. They contribute flavor -- you'd be surprised at how much different hops can change the taste of your beer -- and more importantly, they contribute bitterness to counteract all the sugars that make up the beer. Without hops, beer would be sickly sweet. Though you can use the actual buds from the hop plant, these days most hops come in the form of pellets, as you can see here:

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The first hops to go into the pot are the bittering hops. They need to be boiled for an hour to extract all the bitter goodness from them, so you dump, and stir stir stir stir for the next hour. Fun!

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The wort -- that's what the unfermented concoction you're making is called -- must boil for a while not just to extract the bitterness from the hops, but also to sterilize the malt. You don't want funky stuff in your beer. Because I currently brew on an electric stovetop (I hope to convert to an outdoor propane burner later this year), it's very difficult for me to keep several gallons at a rolling boil. (UPDATE: I no longer brew on a stove; I'm brewing on a propane burner now.) Because it's so hard to keep a boil on my stove, I keep the pot lid partially on. Only partially because you need to boil off some components of the wort. It's a chemical thing I won't bother to go into here:

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You boil this bad boy for an hour. In the last 15 minutes or so you usually add another dose of hops. These are "finishing hops," and they contribute flavor and aroma to your beer. If you've ever noticed the floral pine smell or citrus aroma of a hefty India Pale Ale (IPA), what you're smelling is the finishing hops. I also add the second half of my malt extract at this stage:

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So after about an hour, you're done cooking the slop that will become beer. Now you need to cool all that not-yet-beer down as fast as you can. I do a combo ice bath and wort chiller. Below I'll explain what a wort chiller is. For now, it looks sort of like this:

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All those tubes and cooper, that's the wort chiller. It goes into your wort. You pump cold water through the copper. As the water passes through the copper tubing, it picks up heat from the wort and draws it out. Cold water goes into the tubes, hot water comes out, cooling your wort the entire time. Pretty cool, and one of the best investments a homebrewer can make. Used to take me more than an hour to cool the wort down to the proper temperature. Now I can accomplish the same in 20 to 30 minutes -- and that's a good thing, because rapid cooling makes for a better, more stable product.

Once the not-quite-beer (wort) is cooled to the proper temperature, you move it to your fermentation vessel. This can be giant steel conical fermenters, large glass carboys, or in the case of many homebrewers, food grade plastic buckets. That's what I use:

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After that you do some science on your beer (while having another beer):

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That tube thingee filled with not-quite-beer (wort) and a thermometer looking thingee sticking out is a hydrometer. It measures the "gravity" of liquid, or in layman's terms, how much "stuff" is in your wort. You measure now to determine how much fermentable sugar is in your beer and to see if your wort is the appropriate gravity reading for the kind of beer you're brewing. When the beer is done fermenting, you take gravity readings again to see if it's truly done fermenting and how well it fermented. Using those two figures you can also calculate the alcohol content of your beer. (This one was a fairly light summer ale, and based on my records came in at about 4% ABV. A light beer, essentially.)

After that you shake the hell out of the wort to get oxygen into it -- yeast like oxygen in the same way I like tacos -- then you add your yeast. The yeast will eat up all the sugars, burping out carbon dioxide (the dodad on top of the bucket is an airlock, which lets the CO2 escape) and converting that liquid to alcohol. So this bad boy sits around your house for a few weeks:

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Sometimes those things can blow, but if you're careful it's not a danger. You come back a few weeks later for your bottling process, which results in a pretty row of freshly-bottled homebrew like so, roughly two cases per five-gallon batch:

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It will be swell. Usually. Sometimes.

And that's how Eric makes beer.