I’m sure a number of you do not have fond childhood memories of bee stings. In fact, I’m pretty sure most of them are horrifying, or at least they were when you were 5.

Nevertheless, I have come to terms with bees — in spite of being stung numerous times. I don’t plan on going all “Lil’Kim Queen Bee” anytime soon, but the reality is that my name — Melissa — is Greek for “honeybee.”

Couple my newfound interest in bees with the recent March/April BYO article I read — “Club Profile: Barossa Brewers Club” — I came across Barossa Valley Brewing’s Bee Sting, which is a honey wheat beer. The name inspired me, and I wanted to make my own Bee Sting Ale, not a clone. I came up with the idea of focusing on the “bee” and the “sting.” For the bee, I wanted to use honey to bring about a dry sweetness, and for the sting, I wanted something with zip — leading me to choose the peppery, earthy seeds of paradise. And there you have it!

12 April 2009
Bee Sting Ale
5 gallons, 60 minute boil

5.0 lbs Pilsen Light Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)
2.0 lbs Orange Blossom Honey (15 min)

Specialty Grains:
0.5 lbs Crystal Malt 15L

1.0 oz Chinook Hops [11.1% AA] (60 min)
1.0 oz Amarillo Hops [8.2% AA] (15 min)
3.0 g Seeds of Paradise, crushed (5 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

White Labs California Ale Yeast WLP001

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Create a yeast starter 2-3 days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Heat to 155°F.

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

Remove grains, turn off heat, add malt extract. Bring back to a boil. Add Chinook hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

At 15 minutes, turn off heat. Add orange blossom honey. Stir until dissolved. Return to boil. Add Amarillo hops.

At 5 minutes, add seeds of paradise

Chill wort to below 70°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion at 60-65°F.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. Age for 1 – 2 weeks.

Rack to bottling bucket. Boil corn sugar with 1 c filtered water and add to beer. Mix well.

Bottle. Age for two weeks.

So far the beer has a wonderful flavor, with Chinook’s grapefruit coming out to play with the Amarillo’s citrus notes. When we racked the beer we noticed that the zip of the seeds of paradise wasn’t quite there yet, so we created a seeds of paradise extract to be added when we bottle (We’ll update the recipe here once we know how much extract is needed). Honestly, I’m happy with the sample I had after racking, but it’s not a true representation of my idea of a bee sting — it’s all bee, and not enough sting. I think the extract will help us bring up the sting, while still being refreshing.

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes 2 Comments »

Northern Table is hosting this month’s Fermentation Friday, a last-Friday-of-the-month blogging event specially made for homebrew bloggers. This month’s topic: “Beer and Liquor”

One of the easier ways to add spice flavors to a beer is to steep the spices in vodka for a week or two and then add a measured amount of the resultant “potion” (as Randy Mosher likes to call it in Radical Brewing) to the beer at bottling time.

The advantage of this technique is that the recipe for the spice extract is easy to reproduce with precision, and it’s easy to make sure you’re adding the exact amount of spice flavor that you want. We’ll go over the details of this process in a future post.

The biggest disadvantage is the potential increase in alcohol content in the final beer, unless your personal philosophies dictate that this is not, in fact, a disadvantage. If alcohol content is a significant factor for you, it will pay off to learn how the addition of liquor to your beer will affect the final %ABV.

Get ready. This is gonna be mathy. Skip to the end if you’re not interested in the derivation.

Before mixing the liquor into the beer, we know the following quantities (note that percentages must be expressed as decimals, i.e. 35% is equivalent to 0.35):

, the %ABV in the beer
, the %ABV in the liquor
, the volume of beer
, the volume of liquor

From these quantities, we can derive the following:

The volume of alcohol in the beer: (1)
The volume of alcohol in the liquor: (2)

We can now derive our final equation. The final %ABV is equal to the total volume of alcohol in the beer and the liquor divided by the total volume of the beer and liquor:

Final %ABV:

Substituting in our equations for volumes of alcohol in the beer and liquor (equations (1) and (2), respectively), we get the final equation:

(3)

Now for an example. Suppose we add 8 fluid ounces of 80 proof vodka (40% ABV) to a 5 gallon batch of beer at 6% ABV. We need to be working in the same units for each volume, so let’s convert the volume of beer to ounces:

Plugging all of our numbers into (3), we get the final %ABV:

So the final %ABV will be 6.4%. As you can see, the difference will be small (though not insignificant) for even a half-pint of vodka. In reality, assuming you make a concentrated spice extract, you’re likely to need much less liquor than that, so in most cases, the change in alcohol content should not matter very much.

Fermentation Friday, Homebrewing, Technical 2 Comments »

On Saturday, Ray and I participated in The Parkinson Council’s 8th Annual Walk for Parkinson’s in Philadelphia, along scenic Kelly Drive. As Team Betty—in honor of my grandmother Betty Ward who battled Parkinson’s for probably close to 20+ years—we raised $725 through the donations of friends and family, which will help with Parkinson’s research and education. We also were walking in support of our friend Alex Forte’s father, Michael Forte, who also has Parkinson Disease. According to the Council, a total of $131,902 was raised, which is more than 2008’s total. [Note: As of 6:30 AM 4/22, the total has climbed to $134,345.]

It was a beautiful morning, and Ray and I got to see Boathouse Row, as well as some sort of rowing competition—we even spotted the UD and Cornell women’s crews. We completed the 10 miles in 2.5 hours, and by the end we were seriously feeling it. All in all, we walked probably closer to 12 miles, because we spent the afternoon in the Fairmount neighborhood at The Belgian Cafe.

The Belgian Cafe is the brainchild of beer great Tom Peters, of Monk’s Cafe fame. As a treat for our hard work we had a leisurely lunch, beginning with a pint of Avery’s IPA for myself and Kira Wit for Ray. Both were wonderfully refreshing, and exactly what we needed after all that walking.

Since we weren’t quite ready to dig into lunch, we began with the pommes frites. It would be criminal to enter either The Belgian Cafe OR Monk’s Cafe and not order a basket of their frites, which are double fried, fresh cut fries served with Monk’s Cafe’s famous bourbon mayonnaise and The Belgian Cafe’s smoked ketchup for dipping. They were wondrous, and hit the spot.

We then placed our lunch order, which was the Brouwer burger for me (sauteed onions, mushrooms, and goat cheese) and the Delvaux burger for Ray (beer brined cheese and spicy sprouts). I ordered a bottle of Dr. Fritz’s 1809 Berliner Weiss, which was tart and refreshing, and Ray went a little more local with a pint of Philadelphia Brewing Co.’s Rowhouse Red. The burgers were delicious, and our beer selections provided to further pump the live back into us.

Since we just couldn’t resist one more round, I ordered a glass (most likely a 12 oz serving) of Dogfish Head’s Aprihop, a strong IPA brewed with apricots, and Ray had a glass of Avery’s IPA. Both were an excellent way to end our meal.

After paying the check, we limped down the street to the car and headed home. Though we were both sore as all hell, it was an accomplished soreness. I look forward to the walk next year, and hopefully by then I’ll have some better sneakers (and won’t be tromping about in my Doc Martens).

Craft Beer, Miscellany, Pubs Add Comment »

I have a question for you, and I’d like you to answer honestly: How much harm has AB|InBev caused you? No, making you drunk dial your ex-girlfriend does not count.

There was a hell of a lot of Big Light Lager vilification in Beer Wars. Overall, though it was quite entertaining, I found the movie cynical, masturbatory, and very much preaching to the choir. Close to half of the film was spent illustrating the detrimental effects macrobreweries are having on craft beer and customer choice, and the rest was spent portraying the craft brewers as persecuted visionaries. It has certainly been successful in stoking the righteous indignation of independent business owners and their faithful patrons, but it makes me wonder just what we’re getting so upset about.

Most of the beer varieties sold in America are barely differentiable light lagers all brewed by the same conglomerate. We can spend all day arguing on the grounds of spirit and soul over how obviously horrible this is for the beer world, but when you stop and think about it, does it really matter?

In every creative marketplace, given enough time for growth, there will emerge a dichotomy of commodity and culture, be it food (McDonald’s v. Morimoto), movies (Scary Movie v. Sundance), comics (X-Men v. Watchmen), games (EA v. 2D Boy), art (Kinkade v. Not Kinkade), or beer. In every case, the two sections of the marketplace are so distinct and separate that it’s rare that they overlap. Sure, AB|InBev is probably in a position to purchase and digest every microbrewery in the world, suing the last holdouts into oblivion, but if this was really such a big threat, don’t you think it would have happened by now?

There were two points that were made in Beer Wars that really bugged me (among the many that only bugged me a little bit), because while they were obviously intended to show that macrobrewing is bad and you should be ashamed of yourself for having ever looked at an MGD, all they did was prove, albeit obliquely, that microbrewers really have nothing to worry about.

The first was the revelation that macrobreweries are starting to try to mimic the craft breweries. Sam Calagione pointed out that these faux-craft beers will go onto the shelves at much lower prices than is feasible for the more expensive to produce microbrews. Customers might see, say, a $3.99 pumpkin beer made with cheap spices and adjuncts, and choose that over Dogfish Head’s $10.99 pumpkin beer made with all of the best ingredients. They’ll get home, try the beer, think it’s disgusting, and never try another craft beer again. SCARY!

Do we honestly think the typical Joe Minivan or Jane American Idol who eats at McDonald’s and has eight Kinkades on their living room wall is even interested in craft beer in the first place? Hell, do you even want to associate with them? These people are members of the commodity marketplace! Maybe 1-2% will try a craft beer and join the culture side of the market, but other than that, you’re talking about an entirely different world. It’s like saying Morimoto has trouble getting business because McDonald’s food is cheaper, or that The Hold Steady can’t sell records because they’re not a member of a big RIAA label.

The other point that just drove me crazy was the story of Ronda from New Century Brewing Co., makers of Moonshot “Premium Beer With Caffeine”, and her epic struggle to market her beer and feed her poor babies. At no point did we see Ronda in anything but the Victimized Hero role as she sacrificed family time to meet with “No” after “No” in her battle against the evil corporations. There are so many layers to this story for me to hate. I’ll focus on two.

First, the easy one: “Beer With Caffeine” has got to be one of the worst marketing gimmicks I’ve ever seen. There are already other (better!) beers that have caffeine in them. This is nothing new! The only people you’d ever fool with this are the consumers in the commodity market, and they’re not interested anyway.

Secondly, the way Ronda was portrayed as a helpless victim in a big corporate world was mind-bendingly frustrating. If she didn’t spend all of her time trying to sell out, I might have some sympathy for her, but instead of starting at the grassroots level and slowly building her brand through a good product and word of mouth, she tried to play the corporations’ games, and came off as hopelessly naive because of it.

Look, yes, for all small businesses, there is the danger of losing everything you’ve built to a large corporation, but it isn’t that hard to prevent. I’m not an expert in business, but it just seems like a bit of common sense and patience is all you need. The most important things to do are these:

Cultivate — You will never have the tons of customers that the big companies have, so take the fans you do have and make them obsessively loyal. The way to do this is through simple good faith. Put out a consistently wonderful product, interact with them, let them know that you are real people, and they will grow to trust you, thus allowing you to count on them.

Grow Slowly — Ronda kept trying to run with the Goliaths, hoping to turn her brand into a breakout overnight hit. Unless you are expansively lucky, that is never going to happen for you. Be happy with 8% growth per year, and learn to work with it. It’ll take you longer to come up with the several million dollars you’ll need to expand your operation, but that’s several million dollars that’ll be earning interest in your company’s bank accounts until you’re ready to make the leap.

Own Your Business — If you want to grow fast, you’re going to have to sell pieces of your business to investors. Do not do this. Make sure that you and your most trusted business partners own a combined 51% at all times. If you ever get the inkling that one of your partners is going to sell his share and the voting power that comes with it to someone else, buy him out, even if you have to pay more than what his share is worth. It’ll hurt in the short term, but it beats losing your controlling interest in the company.

We’ll all be a lot happier, and enjoy our beers a lot more, when we stop trying to convince ourselves that the Man is keeping us down. Chill out, pretend Budweiser doesn’t exist, relax, and don’t worry.

Breweries, Craft Beer, Miscellany, Opinion 17 Comments »

After trying to summon my inner Dogfish Head and it not quite working (not Sam’s fault … just mine and my inability to differentiate between 8 oz by weight and 8 oz by volume), I decided that my next recipe would be a little simpler and more classic.

15 March 2009
Sweetheart Kölsch
5 gallons, 60 minute boil

4.0 lbs Pilsen Light Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)
2.0 lbs Wheat Dried Malt Extract (60 min)

2.0 oz Vanguard Hops [54.4% AA] (60 min)
1.0 oz Sterling Hops [6% AA] (5 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

White Labs German Ale/Kölsch Yeast WLP029

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Create a yeast starter two days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Bring to a boil. Turn off heat and add liquid and dry malt extracts while stirring.

Bring back to a boil. Add Vanguard hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

At 5 minutes, add Sterling hops

Chill wort to below 70°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion at 60-65°F.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. Age for 1 – 2 weeks.

Rack to bottling bucket. Boil corn sugar with 1 c filtered water and add to beer. Mix well.

Bottle. Age for two weeks.

Originally, since I like being witty and giving things weird names, I wanted to come up with an alliterative name for the kölsch. I had already come across one named Kölnnel Klink Kölsch, which I thought was pretty darn klever (ha! I crack myself up). The closest I came was calling my brew the Kurnitz Kölsch, after Grandma Kurnitz, the character I played in Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers. However, Grandma Kurnitz is extremely bitter and harsh, and that’s not what I was going for in my kölsch, so I renamed it the Sweetheart Kölsch, under the guise that you would share a bottle or two with your sweetheart. Collective “Aw!” on the count of 3 … 2 … 1 … oh nevermind. Back to the beer.

We just recently bottled this beer, so a tasting post should be around the bend in a week or two. My hope is that this beer is balanced and refreshing. Sure, it might not make you fall off your seat with a burst of flavor, but at least you’ll stay seated with no beer spilled.

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes 5 Comments »

Y’know, maybe this simple recipe malarkey is overrated. Let’s get creative again.

I am (in)famous within our social circle for my love of all beers Belgian — quite a shame, I’m sure you can agree, thanks to the vulgarity of it.

Belgian-style Dubbel is a dark amber ale, a bit on the strong side (up to 7.5% ABV), and usually sweet and fruity, often sporting subtle plum and dried fruit notes, with just a touch of roasted malt to round the whole thing out. Hop character is generally subdued, providing a careful balance against the malt.

Sass that, I thought to myself when I started to write this recipe. Spring would be arriving by the time this beer was ready, so I knew we were going to be in the mood for a nice hoppy quaff. Bearing that in mind, I decided it might be fun to take the plummy sweetness and hints of chocolate found in a Dubbel and see how they would play against a bit more hop bitterness and some pronounced spicy hop flavor and aroma. On the same vein, with the weather warming up, a high gravity beer would become less and less satisfying with each passing day, so we targeted a lower starting gravity of about 1.050 instead of the usual 1.060 – 1.070 range.

Vanguard and Sterling both impart a pleasant hop spice to a beer, so those were our first choices. Our goal with the hops was to have a fairly pronounced flavor and aroma, but without too much bitterness, so you’ll notice our early hop additions are pretty light.

As for malt, pilsner malt extract tends to result in a very light body and color with a bit of residual sweetness. Some candi sugar should dry that out. Meanwhile, we’ll also add some Caravienne for its caramel, Special Roast for its nutty biscuit flavors and deep orange color, and Chocolate for its roasty cocoa character and a bit more color. In the end, we should end up with a lot of malt complexity for such a light bodied beer, backing up some strong hop notes.

This was also our first dry hopped beer. Dry hopping involves adding hops to a finished beer and letting them steep cold for a week or two. This adds a very distinct hop aroma. “Dry Hop” is also the name of my Rock Band band.

31 January 2009
Hoppy Dubbel
5 gallons, 30 minute steep, 60 minute boil

5.00 lbs Pilsner Malt Extract (60 min)
1.00 lbs Belgian Candi Sugar Amber (60 min)

Specialty Grains:
0.50 lbs Caravienne Malt
0.50 lbs Special Roast
0.25 lbs Chocolate Malt

0.50 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (60 min)
0.50 oz Vanguard Hops [4.4% AA] (60 min)
0.75 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (15 min)
0.75 oz Vanguard Hops [4.4% AA] (15 min)
0.75 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (dry hop)
0.75 oz Vanguard Hops [4.4% AA] (dry hop)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

White Labs Belgian Style Saison Ale Yeast Blend (WLP 568)

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Create a yeast starter at least three days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Heat to 155°F.

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

Remove grains, turn off heat, add malt extract and candi sugar while stirring. Continue stirring until candi sugar is dissolved.

Bring to a boil. Add bittering hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

At 15 minutes, add flavor hops.

Chill wort to below 70°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion, starting at 65 – 70°F and allowing the temperature to rise to 80 – 85°F over two to three weeks.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. Add dry hops. Age for 1 – 2 weeks.

Rack to bottling bucket. Boil corn sugar with 1 c filtered water and add to beer. Mix well.

Bottle. Age for two weeks.

The yeast in this recipe is notoriously fickle. Saison yeast tends to take several days to start working, and will sometimes stop dead in its tracks after a week only to start up again another week later. The key with these idiots is patience. I’m not talking long red light patience here, either. More like airport security line the Friday after Thanksgiving patience. Take gravity readings every day after the first week. If the fermentation stops before it should, leave it be. It should wake up again. You might try pointing a space heater at the fermenter to get the yeast riled back up. If there’s a lot of sediment, it also can’t hurt to gently stir the beer with the handle of your (sanitized!) brewing spoon, but be careful to avoid splashing so you don’t introduce any oxygen into the beer (there should be a blanket of CO2 over the beer anyway, so don’t worry if a little bit of splashing occurs).

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes Add Comment »

We’ve been meaning to do the tasting session for our Dry Irish Stout for a while, and time was running out because the beer has been something of a hit — we went through quite a few bottles serving it to family at our engagement party. I don’t imagine we have many more than seven or eight bottles left by now.

So, to the task at hand:

1.034 OG; 1.016 FG; 2.4% ABV; 31 IBU

Appearance: Pitch black. Fluffy, blackish-brown head.

Nose: Sharply roasty and nutty, backed by a fruity sweetness.

Taste: Very roasty. Hints of chocolate. Assertive coffee notes. A lingering black bitterness, balanced by caramel and fruit.

Mouthfeel: Light-to-medium body. Smooth in the mouth, yet dry after swallowing.

Overall: A great surprise. Satisfying and thirst quenching. The big coffee notes and the subtle fruity ester and caramel flavors really blend together well. It reminds me of Kona, actually.

I really felt like I was flying blind when I wrote this recipe, especially grain-wise. Neither of us knew a whole lot about roasted barley and malts, so I’m glad it didn’t turn out that I overdid it with them.

Do any of you out there have attenuation issues with your stouts and porters? ‘Cause this was two in a row that under-attenuated. We were shooting for 75% and ended up a little more than 50%. Maybe this was a good thing, though; according to one of our brew buddies, when she and her husband have made dry stout and gotten it to attenuate all the way, it’s tasted much too dry when carbonated instead of being kegged on nitro, whereas ours tastes great despite not having finished. Just thought I’d ask.

Our Brew Days, Tasting 2 Comments »

Our friend Derek over at The Best Food Blog Ever recently tweeted about The Bread Art project, and his contribution to the cause. Ray and I figured the ole’ brewery could use a little artin’ up, so I present to you our toast!

Nifty huh?

The Bread Art Project was created by the Grain Foods Foundation to increase the awareness of the growing hunger problem in the US. GFF has donated $50,000 to Feeding America, and will donate an additional dollar for each piece of bread art that is created, with a maximum donation being $100,000.

So check it out, make some bread art, and remember: Grains aren’t just used for beer. Shocking, I know.

Miscellany Add Comment »

Our last three or four brews were a bit… out there. Successful, mind you, but generally inspired by muses who like their jobs too much.

And so, we dialed it back a notch for our January brew session, creating a recipe for a low alcohol dry Irish stout.

4 January 2009
Dry Irish Stout
5 gallons, 30 minute steep, 60 minute boil

4.0 lbs Ultralight Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)

Specialty Grains:
1.0 lbs Black Roasted Barley
0.5 lbs Black Patent Malt
1.0 lbs English Brown Malt
0.5 lbs Crystal Malt 75L

2.0 oz British Kent Goldings Hops [5.7% AA] (60 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

White Labs Irish Ale Yeast WLP004

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Create a yeast starter two days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Heat to 155°F.

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

Remove grains, turn off heat, add malt extract while stirring.

Bring to a boil. Add hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

Chill wort to below 80°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion at 65 – 70°F.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. Age for 1 – 2 weeks.

Rack to bottling bucket. Boil corn sugar with 1 c filtered water and add to beer. Mix well.

Bottle. Age for two weeks.

Easy, hands-off boils like this one are so refreshing.

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes Add Comment »