July 6, 2009 at 5:28 pm (Uncategorized)
It’s been a long-running joke among us that Fautz can’t brew. Chris, being the Insult Master, decided to capitalize on this for his Christmas present last year. Look at the happy little feller!
Sadly, looks like we were a little overconfident in his abilities. Take a look at what we found today:
Looks like we need to find something a little easier than a Mr. Beer if we’re going to get him into the wonderful hobby of homebrewing. Any suggestions?
June 30, 2009 at 2:28 am (Uncategorized)
It’s been two weeks total since brewing, so I’ve racked the gruit beer, and decided that it wasn’t quite bitter or spicy enough, so I’m doing the herbal equivalent to dry hopping. I just put an ounce each of Yarrow and Wormwood, along with 1/4 tsp of Coriander into a pint of 100 proof spirits, where it will steep for two weeks, at which point it’ll be added back into the beer. This should extract the essences of the herbs nicely, without any deterioration from boiling, and you can add portions to taste, so I won’t make things too bitter by accident. That sort of control is good in an experimental brew. Just making a post so I remember every step that went in to the beer when I want to recreate it.
June 20, 2009 at 4:54 am (mead)
Talking tonight about how much we’re missing in the modern age of brewing mead:
June 9, 2009 at 3:51 am (beer, gruit, recipes)
For several months I’ve been wanting to do a gruit beer, substituting herbs for hops and making a truly old school beer. I’m heading to the brewstore tomorrow to pick up grains, having already bought the herbs at the local shop Nature’s Magic. (Total cost on the herbs is a little under $6, which compares nicely to the cost of hops these days.) My basic idea is something like this(update: final recipe):
My reasoning is as follows: Many grains were used in ancient brewing, so I’m adding wheat to approximate the mix. Likewise, honey was added to all sorts of fermented goods to be sure they reached the proper strength (this batch should be just shy of 5%). The herbs should be a nice earthy blend, slightly spicy, with bitterness coming from the mugwort – mugwort, or Artemesia vulgaris, is a relative of Wormwood. Both yarrow and mugwort are traditional ingredients in gruit. Note the absence of hops of any kind. Since in ye olden days this would have been casked, I’ll oak it in secondary to recreate that aspect of brewing. All told, it should be a fun, cheap, somewhat historical partial mash. I’ll post the final recipe when it’s final.
Also, should you want to learn more about brewing gruit ales, check out the aptly named gruitale.com, and for a broader look at herbs and spices and a whole lot of other cool stuff, pick up a copy of Radical Brewing. It’s worth it, and it’s 5 stars on Amazon for a reason.
June 5, 2009 at 7:34 pm (brewing, news)
Back in 2005 Discover ran an article about Dogfish Head’s attempt to recreate a 9,000 year old Chinese brew. There’s a reason they’re my favorite brewery. They’re re-releasing it to the unwashed masses in June or July (so I can finally get a taste of it) and have several other interesting brews planned, including sahti. Impressions of the stone age concoction, which Dogfish calls Chateau Jiahu, sound wonderful. Quoth the Beer Babe:
“What’s great about this drink is, in addition to being historically reproduced from molecular evidence (a history geek’s dream brew) it is sweetened with honey, grapes and has a lovely warm taste which resembles wine, or mead. It’s pretty cloudy and smells like sweet grapes, with an amber color and some carbonation that isn’t overwhelming but reminds you that it isn’t wine. I think this would be a good candidate for aging, and I am hankering to have this on a moonlit summer night for some reason.”
It’s a great time to be a drinker.
May 14, 2009 at 6:44 pm (drinking songs, news)
But I’ll try to make up for it. To get started not failing, let me just shout to my cousin Nate. If you check the Big Beers Festival winners page, he’s the joker on the far right, taking the silver in Belgian Strong Ales. Congratulations!
Also, I’m pretty sure that the intrepid Flagon Slayers have another theme song. And this one’s not ever by Korpiklaani! Check out Alestorm’s Wenches and Mead:
Scottish Pirate Metal has never sounded better. I have a ton more to post, including hop propagation news, but I’ll split it up into small posts so I actually do it, instead of waiting and never getting around to it.
December 4, 2008 at 11:47 pm (games)
Don’t feel like calculating the 576 different possibilities of throw combinations you can make to get a score of 55 in Math Darts? Well, today I decided to write a simple script that would take in the Fibonacci number (or any number really) you were trying to get and output all the different ways to achieve this. You can also enter in your first attempt score, or your first and second attempt scores, and have it calculate from there.
Link: http://www.jetastudio.com/client/darts/
-Fautz (can code, and brew)
December 3, 2008 at 4:37 am (games)
Tonight, Fautz (can’t brew) and I came up with a math nerd variation on darts. Your goal is to hit the Fibonacci numbers, in order, either directly or as a combination of throws. Here’s how it works: the Fibonacci sequence is defined as f(n) = f(n-1) + f(n-2) for n>1, and is generally one of the first recursive functions you learn. We’re interested in the beginning of the series, where you can hit the numbers in 3 throws or less on a standard dart board: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, (and 89 if you’re HARD CORE and way better at us at darts).
For instance: to hit a 3, you can throw three 1’s, a double 1 and a single 1, a triple 1, a 2 and a 1, or a 3. Obviously, in this case, it’s better to just shoot for the 3, but as the game advances you’ll get to make some interesting choices. Figuring out your best chance at a 55 after a weird first throw is what makes this game great, especially if you’ve been drinking.
Note: the fact that you can use combinations of throws to advance means that you can do things like throw the first two 1’s in one turn, count those as your 2, then throw another 1 or a 3 to advance. Another example: you can throw a 5 and an 8, count the combination as 13, then another 8 to get to 21. Use plays like this to your advantage.
Something about the way your options change with almost every throw makes it pretty addicting. We’ll be playing it down at the BBC Taproom this Thursday, if you want to see us struggle with simple arithmetic after $2 pints.
November 22, 2008 at 6:35 pm (mead, recipes)
Well, I finally unveiled one of the meads from January at Ross’s brewparty last weekend, and it was enough of a hit that I decided to post the recipe. Briefly:
For the full instructions, check out the full recipe.
As far as the links go, I’m a fan of the gravity calculator on Got Mead. It’s for meads and fruit wines, not beer, but it makes planning your basic brews really quick. I’ve been meaning to link to Jon Sarriugarte’s project VOLT/AGED for a while now, and here’s a good excuse. He ages spirits with a 15kv Jacob’s Ladder, which is possibly the coolest thing a man can ever hope to do.
The windfall cider I mentioned in the last post has been bubbling away happily. Should it turn it, I’m thinking about trying to culture the yeast that fermented it. My cousin Nate, a homebrewer and programmer out in Colorado, gave me the idea, as he’s been doing this for a while with no ill effects. It’ll drive down costs, and allow me to be EVEN MORE OBSESSED with brewing. This can only be a good thing.
November 13, 2008 at 2:36 am (brewing)
I’ll admit it, I’m on a cider kick. It’s just that time of year. Example given: tonight’s experiment. While hiking last week, we found a wild apple tree, full of small, exceedingly tart apples, almost perfectly ripe, and I happened to have a backpack. Serendipitously, today I found a nice juice extractor for $8 at a thrift store, and thus began my attempt at a wild fermentation. I didn’t have enough apples to make a full gallon of juice (far from it), so I mixed the juice I pulled out with some Simply Apple juice from the local grocery store. Now, we wait. I figure I have a 50% chance at this working, and from what I’ve heard, natural cider fermentations, when they work, give some of the best tasting hard ciders possible. I’m willing to risk vinegar for such a prize.
That being said, I’m risking it because I have 5 gallons of cider bubbling away in primary at the moment. For those of you who don’t want to risk a natural fermentation, let me direct you to two heroes, valiantly experimenting with different combinations of yeasts and sugars in cider.
Link the first. Link the second.
The first link is why I’m using Lavlin 1118 on my current big batch of cider, and the second one… I just envy. If my basement looks like that in five years, I’ll be a happy man.
