The Philly Beer Top 50 - Part 1

Philly Beer Week is pretty much the biggest beer thing ever this side of the Great American Beer Festival when it comes to the not-shitty side of the Mississippi, so needless to say I'm stoked to be writing the 50-Beer Countdown To Philly Beer Week for the Philadelphia Weekly.

And hey, I care for you (not really), so I'm happy to divide it up into handy little five-beer lists like this. So here are five of the 50 beers available in Philly that you MUST drink. Part 1 of 10!

Yards General Washington's Tavern Porter
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/drink/philly-beer-week/Yards-George-Washington-Porter-PWs-50-Beer-Countdown-to-Philly-Beer-Week-Day-1-202327311.html

Allagash White
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/drink/philly-beer-week/Allagash-White-PWs-50-Beer-Countdown-to-Philly-Beer-Week-Day-49-202328771.html

Lindeman's Framboise
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/drink/philly-beer-week/Lindemans-Framboise-PWs-50-Beer-Countdown-to-Philly-Beer-Week-Day-48-202330031.html

Bell's Two Hearted Ale
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/drink/philly-beer-week/Bells-Two-Hearted-Ale-PWs-50-Beer-Countdown-to-Philly-Beer-Week-Day-4-202714031.html

Fuller’s London Porter
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/drink/philly-beer-week/Fullers-London-Porter-PWs-50-Beer-Countdown-to-Philly-Beer-Week-Day-5-203062311.html
 

HOMEBREWING: Looking fancy, Mr. Carboy!

When the wife doesn't want to see a carboy sitting around the house, try this...

KitBashing a Midwest Oatmeal Stout

Whether you’re a new brewer or an experienced brewer, “kitbashing” can be a fun and easy way to get wild and creative while brewing.

But first, let’s get this out of the way: For many, I’m using the term “kitbashing” incorrectly. Kitbashing is model aficionado lingo for taking pieces of existing models – tanks, planes, etc. – and building something new with them. To me, though, taking a beer kit and mixing and matching to create something new is in the same spirit, so let me coin it now for homebrewers.

The idea is simple. You take a beer kit from your local homebrew shop or a retailer like Midwest Supplies, you tweak it with other ingredients, adjustments, and your own creativity, and the end result is a new beer.

This is homebrew kitbashing! And this is a kit:

I LOVE to kitbash. I’ve done it since my earliest homebrew batches, and feel like it’s a big part of the fun of brewing. The great thing about it is, it’s EASY. You just have to be willing to have fun, take inspiration from beers you like, and to think outside the box.

Most recently, I tweaked two intro kits from Midwest. I generally find that basic, stripped down recipe kits make for great kitbashing fodder, because the recipes tend to be simple, clean, easy-to-brew, and wide open for creative possibilities. That means you have a great canvas to paint upon.

The first Midwest kit I played with was their oatmeal stout. Bashing up this kit into something new was easy. I’ve played with oatmeal stout kits in the past, using them as a base for my Old Kicker, a beer I look at as a session version of Founder’s Breakfast Stout. I took inspiration from a favorite beer, and it's what I suggest you do, too

For their oatmeal stout, my adjustments were easy. At flameout (the time when you stop the heat on your boil), add two packets of Swiss Miss milk chocolate mix.

Yep, that’s it. I’ve used baker’s chocolate powder and other variations on the theme in previous versions, but simple hot chocolate mix will do. The basic idea is, add enough chocolate mix, no matter the source, to make yourself 2-5 cups of hot cocoa, depending on strong you want the chocolate to be.

When you are ready to bottle – no less than three weeks later, in my opinion – brew roughly one cup (8 oz) of coffee. I have done the brewing many ways, from simply making a cup in our Keurig to cold-brewing a robust cup over the course of a few days. Results WILL vary depending on how you do it and your taste for coffee, so feel free to experiment (I’ll offer coffee advice in another post), but however you do it, make the coffee and add it at the same time you add your priming sugar or, if you keg, right to the keg.

And that’s it. That’s all you do. It's simple!

The result is a low-gravity, i.e. low alcohol, beer with rich, complex taste you won't expect from a simple, run-of-the-mill extract kit. I’ve done many variations on this over the years (including one with bourbon and oak chips, another with orange peel, and others), but the end result is almost always a pleasant, drinkable beer that emulates many of the flavors I want at a low, manageable ABV.

Consider doing this at home – and it works with almost ANY standard oatmeal stout. I first did it with my local homebrew shop’s recipes, and here applied it to Midwest’s. The results are similar.

The great thing is, kitbashing is fun and easy and CHEAP. I could make a list a mile long of kits I’ve “bashed” into something else. I took Midwest Supples’ Boundary Waters Wheat and added lemon peel, coriander, and sea salt to create a refreshing summer beer. I added some of my favorite hops to their Amber Ale and did it Dogfish Head 60 minute IPA style (additions staged over an hour) to make a hoppy amber. I’ve racked my local homebrew shop’s witbier onto cherries and raspberries and blackberries to create fruit beers. And so on

The ideas are endless. I have “bashed” countless kits and come up with many great beers. Some duds, sure, but that is part of experimenting. It’s part of the fun. So DO it!

For ideas and inspiration, I recommend Extreme Brewing by Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head fame, Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher, and your own creativity. These things + a disregard for the rules will result in awesome beers you have never tasted before!

Quick Sips: Weyerbacher Fireside Ale

I like me some Weyerbacher, enough so that I even toured the Weyerbacher Brewery. On the surface, this brewery has historically looked like shit because they had awful labels. Sorry, label guys, but it's true. You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but in the real world people do, and beers as good as Weyerbacher's should not be subject to such awfulness as this ... and that's a mild example. I went with something easy to Google.

Thankfully they underwent a total label reinvention last year, so maybe now more people will start paying attention to their great beer.

Anyway, Fireside Ale is their take on a smoked beer. Best I can tell, this was last released in the fall of 2011 -- so yeah, this review is late to the party! (I drank this and took these notes in late winter/early spring 2012.)

The beer pours a rich brown with a modest, fizzy head. There is nutty, caramel malt in the aroma, but no smoke to speak of. I've had smoked beers that smelled like bacon (and didn't like them), so the approachable aroma was welcome.

And sure enough, the taste was smokey but approachable, too. Hints of smoke in the middle and finish, but not strong and not bacony, only just enough to give it a pleasant, Earthy taste. There is mild sweetness in the middle, but not nearly as much as the nose suggests.

I really liked this. This is an accessible smoke beer. One of the most accessible I’ve had, in fact. It pairs fantastic with meat and drinks nice. A "starter" smoked beer, maybe, but for someone who doesn't care for the deep smoke of high-octane smoked beers I really enjoyed this.

Too bad it looks like they don't make it anymore.

HOMEBREWING: Summer weiss, one year later

In March 2011, I brewed a hefty summer weiss, a high(ish) gravity wheat beer fermented with Belgian yeast inspired by a recipe by Brewer's Apprentice. It was a beer intended for the summer months, something delicious and enjoyable for the warm weather, perfect for a fat slice of orange. And indeed, it was. I had brewed this beer two other times before to good results -- goes GREAT with an orange slice -- and looked forward to another batch.

Unfortunately, the beer was a dud. It never fully fermented out, leaving it overly thick and sweet, like a carbonated beer syrup. The coriander and orange peel I brewed it with were buried in all that sweetness. The result was that it was a beer I rarely opened because I just plain didn't like it.

That's why, some 15 months after I first brewed it, I still had a few bottles left. And amazingly, they were better more than a year after brewing than they were when fresh. Look how pretty it was:

This will not surprise some. One common theme you hear in homebrewing is, "Time heals all wounds."

That's not entirely true, of course. A bad beer is a bad beer. I've had lousy batches that stayed lousy. But the idea is, be PATIENT. Don't rush to judgement, and if you're not sure about your homebrew, don't drink it all right away.

With this beer, it was a much different beer than it was when fresh, so it's not as if it turned out the way I intended. It was far from the refreshing beer it was meant to be, but what it turned out to be was still good. It was an interesting, malty sipper with some compelling complexities from the Belgian yeast used.

Had I dumped this or given it away or rushed through drinking it just to be done with it, I'd never have known that the seeming dud I had would eventually turn out to be really good. And it's not the first time I brewed something that was ugly at first but that got tasty with time.

Homebrewers, be patient. Time doesn't actually heal ALL wounds, but it sure as hell heals a lot of them.