Weizen-wit wonderwort

Anyone who knows even the slightest bit about me could have guessed how this was going to end up. In the tail end of my post on a brewing technique by which we sometimes strive to create two completely different beers out of a single brewing session, I wrote:

Or! I'll give in to my slothful nature because it's in the 80's out and I've had a hard week, and I'll just toss all the grains together, boil the whole stinkin' lot in one batch and let the fates sort it out in the carboys (and try to make amends later with dry hop and spice tincture additions) while I work on my tan and soak my feet in the kiddie pool.

The ultra-observant amongst you will note there are what appear to be oats and flaked barley mashed in with the rest of the grains in the above image. It was 89 degrees yesterday. There was only one brewpot. All the ingredients went into it. And my tan looks fantastic.

For those of you keeping score at home, here's the lowdown:

The following grain bill was tossed together and mashed in some good old-fashioned Marin County tap water:

9.00 lbs. Wheat Malt
5.00 lbs. Belgian Pale Malt(2-row)
5.00 lbs. German Pilsener
1.00 lbs. Cara-Pils
1.00 lbs. Flaked Oats
1.00 lbs. Flaked Soft White Wheat

After dough-in, we mashed at 148 for about 50 minutes before starting a continuous sparge (I still can't comfortable with the waste of batch sparging), running the lot into a single (lazy!) kettle. The kettle was hopped with (organic!) Hallertauer Mittelfruh. After boil, the remaining 10 gallons were split into two fermenters. One had a an ounce of East Kent Goldings in it, and the other some more Mittelfruh, the former receiving a dose of Belgian witbier yeast and the latter some Bavarian hefeweizen yeast (to be followed by a hit of German lager yeast before it goes in the fridge). The carboy with the witbier yeast will be getting a nice dose of coriander, lemon peel and grains of paradise when we rack it over to the secondary. It's already exploded nicely all over the basement in what can only be construed as a good omen.

But will either of them taste any good? Most likely, they'll be okay. More interesting to see will be how different from each other they'll really taste, considering the only true difference between them is the yeast. We shall see...

7-10 split brewing

Some homebrewers have, for whatever reason, a lot of time available to devote to their hobby, while others, like myself, have to carve into the 4th dimension in order to extract enough of the highly prized space-time material needed to construct a fully functional (yet still entirely abstract) mechanism known in these parts as a "free afternoon." But oh, the fun we have when February 30th rolls around! One of the amusing experiments I've concocted in the quest for maximizing the efficient use of such a precious resource is a little thing I call 7-10 split brewing, whereby we save some time by trying to brew separate, distinct batches simultaneously out of the same brewpot, a name derived from the perceived impossibility of hitting two discrete targets with a single trajectory. Anyone who's brewed in batches 10 gallons or larger who still ferments in 5-gallon carboys can relate to the allure of tinkering with the wort a little when it's broken into several smaller containers, especially considering that even if you tried your hardest, two identically fermented but separate batches of homebrew are likely going to taste a little different from each other, anyway.

In some ways, it's sort of a sister concept to partigyle brewing, a historically-minded technique where a brewer breaks a large mash into different runnings, each weaker than the next, in order to make strong ales and small beers from the same tun of grains. But the way we do it is a little more Dr. Moreau than Dr. Villa in the unorthodoxy of its approach.

The victims of this month's experiment: a singly mashed wheat beer which will be cruelly divorced into a Bavarian hefeweizen and a Belgian witbier. Here's the plan:

We're gonna stuff our Rubbermaid bucket with 8 lbs of wheat malt, 4 lbs of pale malt, 4 lbs of pilsner malt, 1 lb of Carapils, and some rice hulls, do a dough-in and strike the mash at 148° F. Meanwhile! I'll be conducting a little mini-mash on the side consisting of 1 lb wheat malt, 1 lb pale malt, 1 lb pilsner malt, 1 lb flaked wheat, and 1 lb flaked oats. When we mash out, I'll do some fancypants arithmetic to ensure that the gravity of wort A (mostly the early runnings from the lauter tun) will be similar to the gravity of wort B (later runnings blended with the mini-mash). Then I can do two side-by-side boils with separate hop and spice additions.

Or! I'll give in to my slothful nature because it's in the 80's out and I've had a hard week, and I'll just toss all the grains together, boil the whole stinkin' lot in one batch and let the fates sort it out in the carboys (and try to make amends later with dry hop and spice tincture additions) while I work on my tan and soak my feet in the kiddie pool.

Regardless of how we do it, it'll be fun, right? After the (explosive!) dust has settled, I'll try to post some details in a more recipe-friendly presentation. Enjoy your weekends, all!

You're never too young...

...to learn how to brew. I think this might be a good way to get Mia started, in fact. Heck, she already knows how to run the keg lines.

The Session #14 - Griz revisited

Back in late 2006, the online version of the local fish wrap knocked out a quick character study on one Mr. Greg William Miller Stein, in what was intended to be a series of vignettes that exuded a certain provincial vibe, framing a deliberate tableaux comprised of the iconoclast pirates of the Barbary Coast. And sensibly so, as he's a bit of an easy target as a 300-plus pound, 6' 2", mid-60s, dyed-in-the-wool alpha hippie, complete with standard issue Uncle Jesse beard and overalls, not to mention the lone proprietor of a home beer/wine/cider/sake supply shop in the great city and county of San Francisco. Not to mention, he has the habit of churning out gems like this one:

I answered the phone the other day -- and I really was ecstatic about this -- I answered the phone and I couldn't think of what my name was. If I could have totally forgotten about it for a longer than I did, I would have said I'd have made it. I was that close. But it came to me.

And while his wife - always in the store, ready to lend a hand - goes by Barbara, most people know Mr. Stein by his adopted moniker: Griz. And as I'm no better a man than the good local leisure journalists of this fair burg of mine, I'm taking aim on that same easy target today in reply to Stonch's klaxon call to The Session.

Growing up, I always had fond, strange memories about the beer my father made with one of his good friends, a beer that I oddly recall tasting and smelling like a perfect German pilsner, a memory that was surely reformatted, corrupted, and rewritten once again as my senses of taste and smell hooked into that fine convergence of poorly modified continental malts and Hallertauer hops as a young boy visiting his family biyearly in Darmstadt. In my early twenties, I came across a book on my parents' shelf that had to have been their instruction manual, Byron Burch's Quality Brewing, within which, as a bookmark, was the business card for a homebrew supply store on Taraval, way out in the outer Sunset. I visited that store once before heading up to school in Eugene, where I had a fairly unremarkable time assembling my pioneer brewing rig and gathering the makings of what would turn out to be a rather raunchy pale ale, and moved on. There was more homebrewing back up in Oregon, fueled by a growing thirst in turn inspired by the climactic years of a music degree and nightlong, nearly gymnastic sessions of Mortal Kombat. By the time I'd returned to the city I've always been happiest to call home, that store on Taraval had since disappeared. So, I went packing across the park to Brewcraft, recipe sketches in hand, met Griz, and had my entire conceit of brewing turned on its head.

Much has been said about Griz, his philosophizing, typically awesome store soundtrack, sometimes challenging customer service skills, crazy handwriting, and near-boundless enthusiasm for a good chat about anything and everything. People love to comment on the somewhat feral nature of the shop, crammed to the gills with ingredients and gear, dark corners hiding surplus mysteries (and often a small dog), and the incredibly enthusiastic and friendly people he finds to help man the storefront. Lacking from all the Griz-centric discourse, sadly, is his personal approach to homebrewing, and what wisdom he imparts on his budding, impressionable Bay Area zymurgists as they enter his lair in search of knowledge.

In fact, most of the advice he dispenses to the casual beginner is slightly unnerving in its vagueness, its decidedly ambiguous and unscientific nature, a style attributable perhaps to 40-plus years of brewing combined with a Zen-like philosophy of "letting go" formed by the aleatoric beauty of nature found in the I Ching, the post-LSD trippiness of quantum mechanics, and the slacker/drifter mantra of "whatever." When pressed for the exact, precise details of a chemical process, he almost flinches as the duty-bound part of his psyche forces the buried knowledge out into the open like forcing water through stone. You'll get your spot-on answer about Iso-Alpha-Acids and the relation to Isocohumulone to apparent bitterness and hop utilization at varying pH levels, but he'd much rather tell you to just stop worrying, add an ounce of Hallertauer at the end of the boil before moving on to his thoughts on current issues facing the Ute Indians and theories on Inner Richmond architectural styles (the short answer: caffeine). And this was eminently difficult for someone like me, a young wannabe perfectionist who was ready to tap into the databanks of a the local superhomebrewer and who wanted to get everything *just* right.

"Don't ever set out to emulate a beer, because you just can't do it no matter how hard you try." Might as well go out and buy that beer you revere so much while working on making one of your own that you like even better, he might say. Sure, he'd look at the recipe idea you brought into the store and subtly recommend little tweaks here and there. And sure, after he lectures you on the amount of money, number of scientists, loads of high-tech gear and whatnot supporting the major professional brewers in the world in their pursuit of consistency and flawlessness, he'll reply to your request of an Anchor Porter-style recipe with some runic scribbles on a blank sheet and a set of barked orders to whomever's manning the grain bins. But if you really want to see him light up, approach the topic of wild fermentation, when the brewer admits the limitations of his control, and nature takes over, like it does in the naturally fermented apple ciders of Griz's youth. And this, an aesthetic of brewing that takes into account the wilderness factor, the magical, unreliable and oftentimes pleasantly surprising roll of the dice involved in asking a pot of grains to convert their starches into a sugar that some helpful microorganisms can further refine into a psychoactive drug (not in replacement of the hard sciences involved, but of higher priority in the ethos of brewing), is the world into which Griz took my little hobby, and from there it'll never leave.

The regrettable coda to this little essay is that I haven't had the chance to see master Griz in over a year now, thanks mostly to the ever-increasing challenges on my time presented by work and parenthood, but also a casualty of having moved pretty far from his shop. Place that alongside my eagerness to make my own mistakes now (in no small part due to Griz's own guidance) , and an online shopping habit inspired mainly by laziness, and the main incentives for my hanging around his shop haven't been strong enough to change my current habits. But as a guru, Griz is always calling me back, to introduce my daughter, shoot the breeze (about Jungian analysis or Napoleon's horse, likely), and remind me that while reflecting on the complexities of life, it pays to "relax, don't worry, and have a homebrew."

A LongShot by any other name...

If you're the competitive procrastinator type, there's probably just enough time left to whip up something maltilicious (if you keep it simple enough) to submit for this year's LongShot homebrew contest, hosted by good man Jim Koch and the equally good people at Sam Adams now for the third year in a row. (For Jim's sake, though, you might want to avoid anything that requires copious amounts of a ridiculous variety of hops.) Like the article above mentions, anyone who's ever brewed their own beer has doubtlessly had a friend comment, "Dude, you could totally sell this stuff!" after trying one (or two (or three)) of your amateur amalgamations - not that pushing pyschoactive, centrally-acting depressants through their systems should inspire unwarranted compliments or anything.

The nice thing about a contest like this one, especially for a homebrewer like myself who isn't part of any brewing clubs or routinely submits specimens for AHA competitions and doesn't actually have a clear idea my own beer's mediocrity, is that after losing out to Joe Bob BillyJo's boysenberry dunkelhefe, I can say with certainty, "No, no, I really shouldn't try to sell this stuff. And hey, I just lost four bottles of my primo hooch down the drain to the Boston Harbor." Not just that, but they'll be kind enough to send you copies of their judging notes so that you can finally learn what diacetyl and brett and acetaldehyde and dimethyl sulfide actually means.

Not to mention, here in this house we hardly ever brew the same thing twice - even if it starts out as a duplicate of an earlier successful recipe, the obnoxious experimental improviser in me inevitably has to go and change some major ingredient or process, just for kicks. But maybe you're more like my friend Christopher, who loves certain recipes of his so much that he brews them with the regularity that the rest of us brew coffee. If you're one of those brewers - and you really believe what your friends have been telling you all these years while they take advantage of your generosity at their parties, weddings, bat mitzvahs, parole hearings, what have you - go on, I dare you. Just think, your entry might cut through the other thousands of entries to make to the top, allowing yourself to be depicted as a line drawing caricature on a beer bottle instead of a milk carton for a change!

A completely hopless situation

My good friend Christopher - a dedicated habitué of hops, baron of bitterness, cuckoo for beaucoup IBU - is feeling the pinch this season as our good friend humulus lupulus is in short and desperate supply. Still brewing his stable of homebrew favorites but having to substitute AAs from lesser gods of the hop pantheon with previously unknown varieties, he's feeling the pinch like the rest of us. Gone are the Fuggles, the Willamette, the Hallertauer and Hersbrucker, the Cascade and Chinook, the Saaz and Tetnang; in their place one finds Simcoe and Sorachi Ace, Cluster and Centennial, Millenium and Magnum. If they're green and bitter, we're resignedly throwing them in our kettles - even if they do sound like they were manufactured by Monsanto.

So what's the enterprising yet frugal brewer to do? Well, one option is to take a stroll in The Man's Garden and examine some bittering and flavoring options often overlooked in deference to the Reinheitsgebot that most homebrewers feel some sort of weird allegiance towards. If you're the type of homebrewer that decided to first start making a mess of your kitchen for reasons that had nothing to do with the gist of an antiquated set of laws designed to protect the use of winter wheat for use in bread-making, you've probably got a touch of the aleatoric in you. With the global harvest situation looking dire and prices climbing exponentially, it may just be the right time to let your freak flag fly.

There's plenty of reading material out there to get yourself started, too. To get started, The Homebrewer's Garden has an entire section devoted to alternative bittering and aroma herbs. You can also see this as an opportunity to try your hand at some historical styles, like gruit (yes, the beer that supposedly increases sexual drive - enjoy).

If, on the other hand, you're a more risk-averse brewer, you may just want to check what's coming down the pike from your local craft breweries to see if there's a style you'd like to emulate. (I'd bet good money that we're all going to see more low- or no-hop beers on store shelves sooner rather than later, while everyone tries to figure out some slick marketing trick that will allow them to pass the 100% increase in production costs on to us consumers.) The exceptional Williams Brothers brewery in Scotland makes a full roster of delectable historic ales (again with stimulated "animal instincts"!) the that use little or no hops. And big man on campus Sam Calagione has built almost his entire reputation upon some of Dogfish Head's crazy (yet scientifically crazy!) interpretations of ancient beers.

Meanwhile, it might be worth your while to rekindle those friendships of yours that may garner access to their sun-drenched backyards. Perhaps you could even send them a fun, conversation-starting present...

Hops, shoots & leaves

While you wouldn't know it from the weather out there, it's still early February - way, way, way too early for the green shoots and buds of spring to be pushing their way out of the darkness. But that's exactly what's happening, and in hops gardening, that can only mean one thing: It's Ausputzen time!

As tempting as it may be to carefully nourish and foster that first tender, young growth of the year as some sort of persephonic talisman to ward off any chance of winter's unruly return (like when it comes back in March, charged with freezing rain and wicked winds, saying "oops, sorry, I forgot my car keys"), one will find themselves being well rewarded in the flower department if those early shoots (and then subsequently, all but two of the healthiest late spring bines) are pruned away. (And if there's a year when we homebrewers can use all the hops we can grow ourselves, this is the one.)

If you're the "use the whole bison" type, you might feel a little guilty chopping the heads off your cute little sproutlets just to toss them in the compost pile, so you'll be happy to know that the little guys are considered a bit of a delicacy in some parts, even being celebrated at festivals in hop-growing regions (be sure to pay your tribute to the King next time you're in Poperinge!) with all manner of raw, fried, sauteed, steamed, and pickled hop shoots for your perusal.

And, if the weather holds and the industrial farms look as promising as our backyards, maybe we won't all be looking at brewing Catsfoot ales next year... but it's not looking good.

The "lost" year, ep. 2 - the frowny face files

Following up from the other day's highlight reel of items that sat on the Pfiff! backburner last year while we attended to more pressing distractions, here's a quick hitlist of things so unfortunate they made me reach for a nice, comforting beer:

The death of Michael Jackson
This is a little bit of a cop out because I did, in fact, find the time to give a quick memorial to one of food journalism's most inimitable contributors. And there's not much to add to the eulogizing that Jackson has received: Simply an irreplaceable voice in beer (and whiskey) commentary, I was tempted to take up some of all y'alls time about how it was his humor and wit that was the reason a lot of us to decided to sit down and publish our thoughts on something as commonplace as beer, what with us all obviously having other interests or passions that we could easily voice our opinions on. But the ideas never really gelled, never became anything worth writing down, and by now there are plenty of folks who have taken the time to talk about how much of an inspiration Michael was for them.

Prices on malt and hops at an all-time high
The email from Griz opened "What hop'ned?" Flooding three years straight in Europe, farmland conversion to ethanol-producing corn in the US, 5-year hop contracts being written up by the major breweries, and replacement of flavor and aroma hops in the fields by "super alpha" varieties in the Yakima valley pretty much erased the cost benefit of homebrewing over, say, hitting the corner store for a six-pack. That and the fact that you had to scour all the online homebrew shops to find any hops that weren't five years old...

Clambeer
Not much to say about this, really, but the day will come when I'll get bored enough to combine Anheuser-Busch's newest "I double-dog-dare you to try it" beverage with some of this with a dash of this other monstrosity to create Cioppino beer under the project codename Cloverfield.

Arr. My beloved, ye broke.
I'll miss you, oversized Piraat tulip glass. You're irreplaceable (kinda). And yes, I recognize the irony of the situation.

When we next meet: I'll be summing up the little newsie bits that were worthy enough of getting me to copy the url into a blank new post, but failed to inspire the least bit of interesting commentary from yours truly...

Three years and still pfiffin' on...

Another year, another anniversary of sorts - the leather anniversary, as it were.
According to Blogger's "born on" dating scheme, Pfiff! has surpassed the blog shelf life many times over with us entering our fourth year of half-heartedly stinking up the web with semi-factual ramblings on all this cerevisiae. (Not that you'd know it from looking - entering pfiff into google reminds one that as much as 'net loves itself some good beer, half-nekkid women's what makes the Interwebs™ really hum.) And while it hasn't been the most blogorific year for me - a newer, busier job at which I actually can't even view the site due to being so subversive and naughty naughty, and my adorable little timesink of a daughter being the biggest hurdles to high-quality alco-journalism - it has been a pretty spectacular 12 months in terms of the beverage itself.

More information on Pfiff! can be found on the internet.

So how to we plan to celebrate? Well, considering that Fairfax nearly became an island in the middle of Ross Valley last night, it seems like the perfect time to fire up the kettle and brew up a lazy partial mash Scotch Ale, whilst enjoying the snacks and beverages I plan on commandeering on my trip to Healthy Spirits this afternoon, and quite possibly returning to this here keyboard to start posting the "lost" beer files of 2007 - all the blogworthy items that got waylaid by other various distractions... Needless to say, there's a lot of them! Cheers, all, and thanks for reading these past three years.

All grown up and nowhere to go

In honor of faithful reader Adam, here are some fresh images of my own private Poperinge:

Climbing!

So tall!

But of course, I still won't get any flowers again this year, which renders these wild tendrils nothing more than deer-proofing for the plants they're wired between and taking over (alas, poor flowering maple, I knew you well), and reminds me that at some point I need to live somewhere that gets more than a couple hours of sunlight a day...

SF Newcraft

While I wasn't looking, what with all the babyfeedin' and workin' and teachin' and rockin' out and such, the folks over at SF Brewcraft did a quiet relaunch of their website, along with a brand spanking new blog of their own, not to mention the next t-shirt I'll be buying (I'm a medium, in case you're feeling gracious).

Ach, if Griz only knew my secret ambition to open up a Brewcraft North, complete with dog, garden chair in the sun, and "no cell phones - yes to about everything else" sign in the front window... sigh.

Third time's a charm

It's always a pleasant reminder of the season change when the hop shoots start emerging from the winter soil. Alas, in the years we've lived here, our hops have never blossomed thanks to our shaded foresty locale, but it is always nice to watch the bines attempt to overtake the garden.

More on St. Patrick's merch branding mania

At a Shrove Tuesday gathering earlier this week, while fattening up on all variety of pre-Lenten pancake goodness with a handful of Brits whilst ELO rocked the hi-fi, conversation turned (as it has before, and likely will again) to the beauty and mystery of Marmite. With recent developments in the Marmite world such as the new Guinness branded version for St. Patrick's Day, this classic spreadable brewing by-product is obviously looking to keep itself relevant (Guinness being no stranger to adventures in marketing). Inevitably, though, as our agrarian demeanors demand, talk turned quickly to trying to make the terrifying stuff in the comfort of your own home.
After all, as sustainability-conscious homebrewers, there are only three things we need to worry about as waste products at the end of the day - spent grains, cooling water, and trub. And while the spent grains and water can go straight into use in the garden, the trub is a little trickier, unless you've got pigs around who need a vitamin B boost. So why not try your hand at converting that stinky caked pile of death into something darker, stinkier, and spreadable on toast?
Here's why not: the process is a secret. With the two largest food manufacturing products in Burton-on-Trent being beer and beer-making waste (to quote Wikipedia: "this gives the area a distinctive smell"), we're left only with the knowledge that the trub from those deliciously gypsum-addled ales makes its way in lorries across town to be "processed" into that tarry paste so beloved by the Brits. But what happend in that process remains a bit of a debate amongst the inquiring masses. So it appears to be a waste of energy better suited for baking breads and growing shitake mushrooms from your spent grains. Just put the trub in your compost pile, hippie. As far as uses for Marmite in homebrewing, however, I'll just leave that topic for another day... [We'll miss you, Karen!]

Willamette

No flowers yet, but the bines are progressing along quite nicely, knocking out everything in their path (that means you, oregano - and double for you, fuchsia!).

And remember kids, it's pronounced wil-am-it. Next person who says wil-a-met-ee is getting the old 86.