Neglect

The wom has been going through a period of serious neglect. I’ve had some busy times at work and I’ve also been getting another blog off the ground. You folks who have read the wom for beer might be happy, because now all my UNC Basketball related posts are going to be on another venture, The Rafters.

therafters.wordpress.com

So from now on, only beer related posts. Hopefully I will get into blogging mode here soon.

Really need some beer news? Check out dcbeer.com for DC area stuff, like how the new Birch & Barley and  Church Key are rumored to open up like now-ish!

You could have found out for yourself at dcbeer, but **SPOILER ALERT** I know I’ll be trying to snag a pint of the extra rare Founders Canadian Breakfast Stout.

Biere de Garde

Biere de Garde is what I set out to make a few weeks ago. I’m not quite sure what’s in the carboy right now, but we’ll find out.

I modeled my recipe after one that appears in Beer Captured, except I decided to use only Styrian Goldings and some Strisselspalt hops and no Tettnanger. There’s also some extra little ingredients that found their way into secondary. More on that later.

Brewing in the DC summer is tough. Lots of guys in my homebrew club avoid it altogether. The water coming out of your sink is luke-cold  at best. Here was my solution to that. It sort-of worked.

This being my second batch in which I used a carboy as a primary fermenter, I was ready with the blow-off hose instead of an airlock.

This has become the post of videos. Anyway the whole brew day went fine and all and the batch seemed to be progressing very well. Then I had the chance to make a goof while transferring to secondary about a week later, so naturally, I managed to goof.

I had to just push it in and use another. So while my stopper is sitting happily at the bottom of the carboy with a nest of yeast and trub to keep it company, my homebrew club has decided to have its first competition. The “Iron Mug” will be a contest much like the show Iron Chef, in which a secret ingredient is revealed to contestants, who then must use that ingredient in their concoction. It’s a inter-club competition with the Wort Hogs of Herndon, Va. Our ingredients were revealed to be 1 oz. of dried woodruff and 6 oz. of white wine concentrate. Because I was moving (which I did this past weekend) and didn’t seem to have enough time or ingredients to whip up a new batch, into the secondary went the woodruff and wine concentrate. The carboy, which had stopped bubbling regularly for several days, began to bubble away after an hour or two. That concentrate’s heavy stuff.

The results remain to be seen. The wine concentrate will probably add some acidity and the woodruff some kind of slight vanilla aroma (hopefully). Not sure if it’s going to clash, though, with the .75 oz of dry hops I added about a week before. Oh well.

On a side note, the Saison I brewed about two months back is in the bottles and probably still a bit young, but delicious. It has a weiss beer quality (clovey?) to it that I’m assuming comes from the yeast. It’s probably a bit too cloudy, but I don’t mind, and probably a little sweet, but the people I’ve had taste it don’t mind at all. Very happy with the 8.5 percent abv. beer that was my first “original” recipe. **I put original in quotes because I most certainly pulled and copied and pasted and cut etc. from other recipes I had seen. But one thing is sure, no one has ever made this beer.**

New Arlington Brewpub!

It can certainly be argued that DC, while generally a very good beer town, is lacking in the brewpub department. There’s a couple of national chains in Rock Bottom and Gordon Biersch, and a local chain in Cap City. Rock Bottom also operates The District Chophouse.

“They all make great beer, Sam!” you say. “Why are you complaining?”

I’m not complaining as much as I’m just asking for some kind of independent establishment where I can feel more like “This brewpub is mine! People who don’t live here don’t know what they’re missing! Muhuahahahahaha!”

Yes, its true, not every Rock Bottom sells Ballston Brown, but the snob in me wants somewhere to go where you can only get the “experience” of it in that particular place. You know if you talk to your friend out in California and say “Oh, going to this great brewpub over here called Rock Bottom.” They can just reply, “Oh, I’ve been to one of those.”

Well with Mad Fox Brewing Company, there will be only one. Not one of many.  I was alerted to this via DCBeer.

Looking at their site, it seems they’re going local for most of the food (always a plus) and will have a nice stable of beers to try. Now I might actualy WANT to go to Arlington, again some snobbery at hand there. (Or maybe not snobbery as much as laziness. I tend to stay in the city closer to my apartment.)

Pub Crawl on Saturday

Join a Saturday Pub Crawl with M.A.L.T..

Via DC Beer

New DC-Area Brewery

Via BeerActivist

Looks to be a new brewery coming to the DMV. Name: Rhino Chasers, after surfers who are in search of “the big wave.” Both brewers(and owners) are of the recently sold Old Dominion stock. I have always enjoyed OD beers, though I don’t think they push the envelope too much.

In my oh-but-so-humble opinion:

Their Millenium Barleywine was really estery and nice if I remember correctly. I also had their Spring Bock, which was OK. Other than that, the regulars you’d expect from any brewery (pale ale, lager, amber) were middle-of-the-road examples, well made but not standing out in any respect. 

That, I would assume, had a lot to do with whatever the company OD wanted with its beers, so it doesn’t mean that these guys won’t break out and make something unique. At least I’m assuming they will make their own beers under this “Catoctin Brewing Company” brand. Now it looks as though they will be reviving the Rhino Chasers brand, because it had already existed once in California, and marketing beers under Catoctin. I will most certainly give Rhino Chasers a try, although much like Chris at BeerActivist I’m not sure what the surfer reference means to DC. I wish them well and hope to be drinking their stuff soon. 

July 4th Saison Brewing

What better way to spend Independence Day than brewing up a batch of American homebrew? Not exactly an Ameican style, but hey, it’s a free country. 

Myself and a couple of friends avoided the DC crowds and hung around the house yesterday to brew this batch. I got some yeast from the brewers at District Chophouse, so I was expecting this to be one of my more healthy fermentations. I was right. I was wrong, though, to think I could rotate this video to be the right direction. 

 

 
So I had to make a trip to the hardware store this morning because  I woke up to my room smelling like beer, very yeasty beer. When I went in with my spare carboy in hand one of the men working there almost had a heart attack thinking I was going to drop it and shatter glass all over his store. After I assured him that I had a good hold of it I got the tube and came back to put it in the active carboy. Below are some pictures from today. Forgot to take any yesterday during the actual brewing. I’ll post my recipe up here soon. 

 

 

SAVOR Beer and Food Pairings

Beer & Pairings.

This list is serious. Makes me really wish I had the $85 or so it took to buy a ticket to this shin dig before it was sold out. It’s one of the best beer festivals, though I don’t know how much of a “festival” it is, in the country, and it’s in DC (aka where I now live). I only say it’s not a festival because there won’t be people yelling every time some bottles are chucked into a garbage can and there won’t be pretzel necklaces and Oktoberfest hats. I’m certainly not saying it’s going to be boring or not fun, it will be. The point is I’m not going. Truly worth an FML.

Double IPA Recipe

I forget how I became aware of Tastybrew.com, but it’s a pretty sweet Web site for the amateur brewer. Now that I think about it, I came across it via a poll question on The Mad Fermentationist. The MF said he sometimes uses the site when he doesn’t have access to Pro Mash. I trust that guy because he’s in my homebrew club here in DC, and he makes really great stuff. 

Pause. The Cavs and Magic are now tied with 33.4 seconds remaining. Will resume blogging momentarily………..oh yeah, save draft………..

Oh. My. God. I just found out where amazing happens this year. LeBron is truly an MVP.

Anyway, the calculators available on Tastybrew are really fun to play around with and I get to tinkering on them trying to come up with recipes. I did this Double IPA tonight. If any of you readers (or with my blog it’s more likely “people who stumbled across this”) out there have some suggestions that might help me with this, I’d greatly appreciate it. I’ve had the most trouble in my lengthy one an a half years or so as an extract brewer with IPAs so if you have any tips on IPAs in general that would also be helpful. 

Here’s the recipe draft. I usually do a full volume boil, starting with about six gallons of water, and I set the calculator to 75 percent efficiency, which I think is how Tastybrew refers to apparent attenuation. (Not sure at which percentage I normally operate, but I figured that was pretty close.)

Double IPA
5 gallons

 

12 lbs. Light (or extra light) Liquid Malt Extract

1 lb. Crystal 60 L (steeped)
1.5 oz Centennial Pellets (60 min)
1 oz Simcoe Pellets (30 min)
1 oz. Simcoe Pellets (5 min)
½ oz Centennial Pellets (5 min)

1-2 oz Amarillo, Cascade, Simcoe or Centennial dry hops for secondary

 

Targets:

ABV: 8.1%
SRM:10
IBU: 82
OG: 1.084
FG: 1.021

Lost Dog Cafe: Carry-Out in Falls Church

Revisited. I’ve already posted my initial visit to Lost Dog, but last night Jenna and I decided to go the delivery route. 

Well, that’s how it started at least. 

We originally decided to reward our hour-long run with some good grub, and grub that we wouldn’t have to move to get — hence the delivery. We decided to go pick it up if it was going to take much longer than 30 minutes though, because one-hour runs make you hungry. 

I ordered the lasagna and Jenna the eggplant parmesan. I also wanted to order a Victory Old Horizontal – they deliver beer!

They didn’t have that, but I still wanted a barleywine (been on a kick lately) so I ordered a Sierra Nevada Bigfoot. It was going to take 45 minutes so we decided to just pick it up. 

Got to the store and they didn’t actually have the Bigfoot, but they already rang me up for a Sierra Nevada single so I had to pick a Sierra brew. Annoying. What were they planning on showing up at my door with? I went with the Torpedo, which I think of as a revved up Sierra Pale Ale. It’s nice.

Anyway we got back, with our very heavy bag, and I really wish I had a picture of this lasagna. It’s the closest thing to the now defunct Rathskeller of Chapel Hill’s “Bowl of Cheese” lasagna that I have had. It’s hard to imagine anything topping the Rat’s, but this sure did satisfy. 

It came in a tin tray, of which the slice of lasagna took up about 60 percent. The other 40 percent, however, was full of sauce and cheese. It was hard to tell where the slice was because the tray was just a level layer of cheese across the top. It came with some garlic bread so I was piling on the excess cheese and sauce onto it. There was some good sausage and ricotta in the layers that were really well done.  I will be getting it again. 

The bite or two I had of Jenna’s parm was also delish. 

The beer situation was the only bone I had to pick. And that’s weird because Lost Dog has probably one of the finest selections in Falls Church, Va. 

Also, I was glad we phoned it in. When we picked it up there was a huge standing line waiting to get seated. I’m a big believer in the logic that places with big lines are the places you probably want to be, and this would hold true of the Lost Dog.

Stone and homebrew tasting

This is not breaking news about a Stone Brewing tasting in the DC area. It’s about the private one that will take place in my apartment this afternoon. My college roommate, Steve, is coming to town, and I have in my possession two vintages of Stone’s Old Guardian barleywine, the 2008 and 2009. I plan to do a side-by-side this evening with them. As well as try my Hefe from Hell for the first time.