Wedding Beer

Last night we sampled the second version of pumpkin porter for the first time. It's only been in bottles for two weeks. It was, well, good. It's never good after only two weeks. The beer always needs more time to age a little and mellow out. After only two weeks it's usually still way too bitter and the complexity of the flavors don't shine through clearly enough. In short, after only two weeks the beer is usually not quite drinkable yet.

But this pumpkin porter was drinkable. Bitter without being overwhelming. Relatively clean after-taste. Not exactly sweet, and much smoother than I expected. There was a little bit of depth to the flavor but the spice and pumpkin notes were really subdued. So much so that you wouldn't know it was a pumpkin just from tasting it. And it should only get better as it ages.

I wish I had time to play around with it a little more, but I don't. I'm going to spend May brewing the beer for the wedding so that it has a few months to even out and reach its peak. Maybe I'll add more spices to the next batches, but I'll keep the amount of pumpkin the same. I'll taste the first version of pumpkin porter again to be sure, but I'm pretty sure this second version is the keeper. I based it off of Papazian's recipe for Goat Scrotum Porter, but I'm going to call mine Black Bird Pumpkin Porter instead. Seems a little more autumnal and wedding-appropriate (although I'm sure some may argue that scrotums of any variety are wedding-appropriate).

Oh, also, I got a new chair:

Red Tulips, Red Ale

These are the gorgeous flowers Nico surprised me with yesterday morning. They bring some wonderful color and freshness to our apartment. I think tulips make more sense for Valentine's Day because they're spring flowers. And I can't wait for spring.

Alright, so I've been homebrewing since last summer, and it's been alright but I haven't been obsessed. Until now.

I recently read Red, White and Brew by Brian Yaeger. And now I want to start a brewery. Anyone want to help?

Right now I've got an Irish Red Ale in the secondary fermenter. I've got a pumpkin porter resting in bottles, and I'm going to brew a different pumpkin porter recipe next weekend. The winner will be the wedding beer. After that I think I'll make another amber ale, maybe with honey this time. And Nico has recently fallen in love with Belgian-style dubbels, so I'll probably make one of those and we'll let it sit until the fall. I'm also itching to try a little experimental brew I thought up last night. And this summer I want to make some wheat beers. I'm thinking a honey wheat, which I'll start in May so it should be ready to try in June, and then a raspberry wheat once raspberries are in season. Oh there's so much to brew, and I have so few bottles to store it all in!

Pumpkin Brew Day

I love pumpkin beer. Really. I mean, I luuuurrrvve it. I look forward to the fall and the first pumpkin beer of the season. And when I lived in Tucson I could get as much of it as I wanted. I could just go down to Plaza Liquor, where they sell hundreds of different brews, by the bottle, and knock myself out. Literally.

But now I live in Washington, where all the liquor stores are state-owned and focus more on actual liquor than on beer and wine and where the grocery stores, even the better ones, just don't have the selection I crave. So far I have seen only two pumpkin beers for sale here: Harvest Moon Pumpkin Ale (owned by Coors) and Jack's Pumpkin Spice Ale (owned by Anheuser-Busch). The beer snob in me finds this simply unacceptable.

What to do, what to do?

Since I started learning how to brew this summer the obvious answer is to make my own damn pumpkin beer. So I am.

A warning: I have only just started learning how to brew. So far I have only made two beers, each from a kit, plus today's pumpkin ale. I found the recipe called Thunderstruck Pumpkin Ale, by Yuri Rage, here. Credit where it's due. Because I'm so new I am doing the extract rather than the all-grain version.

So how's it done?

Well, first you take 60 oz. pure pumpkin puree

and spread it out on a cookie sheet.

Then you bake it at 350 degrees for an hour.

I know, it looks pretty much the same, right? Notice the difference in color, though. Now that pumpkin is carmelized! While you're doing that you take your flavoring grains,

and put them in a mesh bag, which you steep in 155 degree water for about 45 minutes.

Once that's done you remove the grain bag and bring the pot to a boil, then you add the light malt extract

and the baked pumpkin and stir like crazy until it comes back to a boil, at which point you add your bittering hops

and start your timer.

After boiling for 50 minutes you add the Irish moss

which is apparently some kind of dried seaweed that helps to clarify the beer, and because of all that pumpkin puree this beer will need clarifying. Then you boil for 10 more minutes. Then you chill the mixture, which is called the wort. You can chill the wort any number of ways. I put the pot on ice and add enough cold filtered water to make 5 gallons. When the wort is chilled you strain it into the primary fermenter

aka Big White Bucket, add your yeast, seal it up, pop in the water-lock and wait. In two weeks I'll transfer it to a secondary fermenter, add the flavoring spices, and wait again. Two weeks after that I'll bottle it, and two weeks after that I'll taste it to see how it's doing. It will probably need to age a little bit more. And hopefully it won't suck. I think it'll be pretty good. I'll keep you posted.

Summer Projects

Have I mentioned how much happier I am since moving to Oly? I am so happy that I've even begun to get back to my old ways of having little (food-related) projects going on! In fact I've got three different projects going right now! Woohoo! I feel good.

There's the sweater of course, that's one. Knitting is always a good project and the best thing about it is that you can put it down and totally ignore it for a while. I have to admit that I'm not making the headway on my sweater that I should be. Part of the problem (if you can call it that) is that the weather is finally starting to behave! We're getting more sun and more warmth and I loooooove it! For a little while there I was thinking we wouldn't get a summer AT ALL. It's not that summer is my favorite season, autumn is, but how can you enjoy the cool crispness of autumn when you haven't had the sun and heat of summer? It would be impossible. Everything in season.

Then there's the beer. Nico and I stumbled through our first batch of home-brewed beer; a stout. It's bottle aging right now, and in another week we'll take the first taste, but I'm betting it will need longer than just 2 weeks in the bottle. I'm sort of itching to begin a new batch tomorrow, if I make it down to the brew shop to buy ingredients. I've found a bunch of good-looking (extract) stout recipes online, and they all use at least twice the DME our kit came with, so now I'm convinced I need to immediately begin a heftier stout. I can't stand the thought of doing it wrong, you see.

And my third project is that I am back to growing chile peppers! Yayyy! I've got 4 generic types in the ground outside, and then another 4 in pots - 2 jalapeno and 2 cayenne. They've started to make progress since the weather's gotten sunnier.



As you can see, they've still got a ways to go and we're already pretty late into the growing season, but these two at least have begun to flower, and I'm hoping the worm tea will help them make up for lost time.

Worm tea?

Yes, worm tea. This morning my upstairs neighbor gave me some extra worm tea since he noticed I've been growing plants. Imagine - vermiculture in an upstairs apartment! That's pretty hard-core. I've never used the stuff before, but I've heard all about how it's the super-magic-grow-formula for your plants, so how could I resist? The guy also told me that he's trying to drum up support for a community garden to be added to the new city park being built down the street, so I promised him I'd whip up a little letter about that.

Other than that, I've got a couple awesome dinners planned for the weekend. Right now I've got chicken strips marinating and later we'll skewer and grill them, serve them with some fancy-pants rice I'm going to make and some mango salsa. Maybe some sliced avocado and some salad greens too. And margaritas, since it's finally margarita weather. Tomorrow we're going to marinate some skirt steak, which Nico will grill and chop up to make a burrito bar. Yum! I wish we could eat like that every night.

And meanwhile, the books are biding their time.