entirely safe and fun

By Ninkasi, I do believe it’s beer!

By this Saturday, precisely one week after the beer went into the fermenter, the airlock had stopped bubbling and the specific gravity had settled at just about 1.012. The liquid in the bucket had an appetizing look, and it tasted undeniably like (flat) wheat beer. Success! Now, for bubbles.

Contra Yahoo Serious’ 1988 masterpiece (or at least high-water mark) Young Einstein, getting bubbles into beer doesn’t take earth-shattering genius or what the kids these days call rock-and-roll music. It does take CO₂, which you can get into the beer either by hooking up a tank of the gas to an airtight beer container — kegging or counterpressure bottle filling — or by having a small second fermentation in the bottle — bottle conditioning, frequently called the méthode champaignoise, for so champagne is made. I rather like bottle conditioning’s many merits (longer shelf life, aging potential, the nutritional benefit of leaving yeast in the beer) in spite of its flaws (sediment, clouding, hard to get exactly the right CO₂ pressure), and besides, I don’t own a counterpressure filler.

Ian plays the ancient Discordian game of “Sink” with the bottles. “I sunk Blue Moon’s pretensions to quality!”

To start, I transferred the finished beer to a fresh sanitized bucket, leaving behind a good half-inch of yeasty goop on the bottom of the fermenter, along with crusty malt deposits along the top, and little bits of floating matter such as escaped coriander seeds. I then dissolved 4oz of corn syrup in about 1.5 cups of boiling water, and added that to the beer, stirring thoroughly but trying not to further aerate the beer, which would be bad at this point. This sugar will be used by the yeast to generate my carbon dioxide. It’s true that fermentation had come completely to a halt in the bucket, but like Cthulhu, the yeast was not dead but merely dormant. It will wake up and start fermenting again, since the sugar-alcohol equilibrium has been disturbed. Finally, I cleaned the fermenter bucket and refilled it with sanitizer solution for use in cleaning the bottles.

Filling the bottles was deeply absorbing, as you can see.

A few nights previous, Ian and I had removed the labels from about 60 non-screw-top beer bottles, being careful to scrape off all the glue with razor blades. This is not just cosmetic. When you put bottles into a hot sanitizer solution, if they have glue on them, it will get into the sanitizer and then into the inside of the bottles, which is not cool. On bottling day, we blasted out any remaining dust or residues with my high-pressure bottle washer (fun!) and submerged the clean bottles into sanitizer for a few minutes, working in batches of about 12 bottles. We then rinsed them, let them drain thoroughly, and laid them out on a towel on the kitchen floor underneath the brewing bucket. Then, using a funnel, I siphoned out a full measure of beer into each bottle, leaving as little headspace as I could. In practice, this meant filling the bottles with the funnel all the way in, then removing the funnel to leave around 1/3″ of air at the top. As the final touch, I capped the bottles, and Ian rinsed off their outsides.

The capper is almost, but not quite, as cool as the high-pressure bottle washer.

Now, I just have to wait for a few days. Two things have to happen for the beer to be properly carbonated. First, the yeast needs to efficiently convert the corn sugar into gas, and second, that gas needs to reach a solution eqilibrium in the bottle. That usually takes about four days. Ideally, then, I’ll be hanging out my red star on Wednesday.

The home stretch!

The wort is fermented nearly dry at this point. It smells like wheat beer, it tastes like wheat beer… I think it may be wheat beer! Between today and yesterday, only one additional point (that is, .001 water densities) of solutes fermented out. The bubble rate is down to 4/min, which is probably high in that there was a bubble right at the beginning of my measurement interval. I think that the sampling theorem would normally dictate a sample interval of longer than one minute, at this point, for reliable measurement.

The last two days have seen the bubble rate at 6 and 4/min, the gravity at 1.0135 and 1.0125, and the change in SG at .0025 and .001, respectively. That leaves the correlation coefficient between bubble and SG change at .955, which I’ll call a high-quality result. Going forward, I’ll be more willing to trust the airlock as an indicator of fermentation progress than I was before.

If the final gravity is indeed 1.012-1.0125, then I’ll be looking at a beer with around 4.6% alcohol by volume, minus probably negligible losses to higher organics via secondary metabolic pathways. It’s right on target for the yeast strain’s 75% attenuation, assuming that a point or two of the weight of the beer was coming from sources other than fermentable sugars. Science is fun!

Part 1 of this series is here; part 2 is here. Part 3 is here.

After five days in the fermenter, 38 gravity points of sugar have been transformed into something happier. As of this evening, the wheat beer is down to a specific gravity of 1.016, near the final gravity it’s likely to settle at. Beer has almost happened here!

One of the things I’d like to do is correlate fermentation activity with bubble rate a little more confidently. Now, absolute bubble rate is not comparable across fermenter setups, or even between batches, and perhaps not even between measurements which require the top to come off. There’s no hope of reliably saying something like “oh, 30 bubbles per second means that we’re fermenting out 8 points per day.” But it’s possible that we’ll be able to say that, in general, fermentation rate within a batch correlate pretty strongly with day-over-day change in specific gravity, that is, that more bubbles means more fermentation. The rate of bubbling depends on the volume of the headspace between the top of the beer and the bucket lid, on the level to which the airlock is filled with water, on precisely how tightly the bucket’s lid fits… but also, we hope to show, on the speed with which CO₂ is being generated.

Here’s four days’ worth of measurements from this batch:

For the three bubble measurements available — a pretty thin data set, to be sure — the correlation coefficient between the bubble rate and the real fermentation rate (ΔSG/day) is 0.997, which is very significant, even more so than I expected. It will be interesting to see how it holds up with more measurements.

Part 1 of this series is here; part 2 is here.

The yeast is bubbling merrily away and has made a significant dent in the sugar. I’m seeing 94 bubbles a minute in the airlock — the bubbling rate is proportional to the yeast’s metabolic rate along the efficient metabolic pathways that produce carbon dioxide, so it is a back-of-the-envelope estimate of brewing progress. For harder numbers, I turned to the hydrometer, which revealed that the beer is already down to a specific gravity of 1.032. That is some fast brewing!

For the record: On Saturday, I established that the original gravity was 1.054; Sunday, with the yeast just taking hold, I measured it at 1.050.

Part 1 can be found here.

Sanitation is next to sanity.

Today’s project: a kind of hybrid wheat beer, using the spices of a Belgian wit but an all-German malt bill and yeast culture. I decided to make my first beer in nearly four years a simple one, with no addition of grains; here, I’ll just use dry malt extract (DME) as my source of fermentable sugars.

The recipe I’ll be following is this: Sanitize a five-gallon fermenter bucket, its lid, an airlock, etc (see the first picture). Boil 3.25 gallons of water in a big pot. Add 6 lbs Bavarian wheat DME, which is 60% pale barley and 40% wheat. Also, throw in about half an ounce of your favorite bittering hops (it’s not going to be an important flavor component, so you might as well pick something cheap). Return to boiling, and hold it there for forty minutes, stirring frequently. Then, add .5oz bitter orange peel, dried. Keep stirring for another fifteen minutes. Then, add 1oz crushed coriander. Stir for another five minutes. Turn off the heat. Siphon off the wort (for so this sweet solution of malt sugar is called) into a food-grade plastic bucket with a little less than 16lbs of ice in it, straining out any solids. Thoroughly aerate the wort and ensure that all the ice is melted, then check the temperature. If it’s between 60°F and 80°, add water to bring the level of the whole mixture up to 5gal. If it’s too cold (unlikely), add warm water; too warm, add ice. Pitch in one dose, calculated according to the directions on the package, of German-type wheatbeer yeast (I used Wyeast 3638). Check gravity, put on the lid, and wait. Pictures below…

On a recent trip to New York City, which required me to stay in the Times Square area, I had the good fortune to walk past the BXL Café (125 West 43rd Street, New York) as I found my way from my hotel to our clients’ office. “Good fortune” because I could have sensibly walked across town on any of seven streets (48^th - 42^nd), and I just happened to select 43^rd. That worked out pretty well!

For me to find beers I’ve never had before takes some work, given that I’ve had around 800 different commercial beers by now, and BXL shows some of that hard work, and done well. Fifteen taps yielded two new beers, Dentergems Wit and the German offering Gaffel Kölsch, along with hard-to-find favorite Rodenbach Red. The bartender was also pouring a good selection of the Belgian-style beers brewed at Cooperstown’s superb Brewery Ommegang — the BXL house beer was brewed by Ommegang as well — along with a very pleasant lineup of Belgian standbys like Chimay Triple (”White”). I’d estimate that there were around thirty or forty bottles, as well, many of them new to me. As a capper, I believe that brewery glassware was available for everything on tap, per the Belgian tradition. All in all, BXL is one of the most impressive Belgian beer bars I’ve found, with fine ambiance, knowledgeable staff, and a well-chosen and resonably wide selection.

Almost unbelievably, BXL doesn’t have a web site that can be found with Google. (If anyone affiliated with BXL reads this — setting up a nice web site is easy and fun, and you really ought to do it!) I did find a picture at Blakespot, some barebones entries at Ratebeer and Pubcrawler, which indicate that the food is good, a fact I had no opportunity to confirm on my purely liquid visit. I found one blog entry at a New York restaurant blog which gushed about the food as well, and this from an author who doesn’t even appear to be interested in exotic beer, so I’ll take his/her opinion as more diagnostic than that of the aficionados at the beer sites.

Bigtree is biiiiiiiiiig!

This past weekend, Punam and I, along with my old friend Noah, travelled up to Humboldt County (far northern California) to spend a little time with some really big trees. The old-growth Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) forest is like something out of a science-fiction novel, silent, dark and wet, with trees as straight as carved columns towering over 300 feet in the air, and nary a branch below a hundred feet. One tree that large would be remarkable, but the forests of that region boast of a thick myriad of them, trees forty feet in girth, just forty feet apart, for mile upon mile along the Eel River and its tributaries — a gobsmacking accumulation of Ur-old giants.

We drove up on Friday night, and then spent Saturday driving the Avenue of the Giants, stopping at some of the touristy destinations along the way and taking a short hike at the Founders’ Grove. By preference, we went to Fortuna for tuna, as well as to eat at the fantastic Eel River Brewing Company. Overnight, we stayed in the Redcrest Resort, which I can heartily recommend to other travelers, and then on Sunday we had a light picnic, and a pleasant hike in the Rockefeller Forest. My previous trip into the Rockefeller was in high summer, and I can say without reservation that the wet season is a better time to go — it was practically empty, and there were no equestrians on the dual-use trail (and thus no boot-fouling equestrian by-products).

We topped this all off with a world-class dinner at the Underwood in Graton, near Santa Rosa. Our friends Sebastian (a local and a foodie) and Rebecca led us there, and I had what, on reflection, was one of the best matches of desire and fulfillment I’ve ever had at a restaurant. They had a find selection of oysters on the half-shell, two dozen items on the menu that I regret not ordering, a moderately sized but remarkably concentrated wine list, and local spirits on the dessert menu, including a Davis Family calvados-style apple brandy with a perfect match of fire, fruit, and oak that far surpassed any European offering I’ve yet encountered.

Below, I’ve picked out a few highlights from the pictures I took on the trip. More are available in my Flickr set here. Seriously, you need to check these out, especially the vertical panorama of an exceptionally mighty redwood.

Every February at the Toronado, San Francisco’s finest beer bar, the excellent folks who run the place take fifty-odd beers off tap and replace them with kegs of barleywine. I recommend strongly that if you find yourself in the vicinity of Haight between Filllmore and Steiner between 17 and 24 February 2007, that you proceed immediately to the Toronado and get your drink the heck on.

For the uninitiated: Barleywine is the strongest traditional style of English ale, typically around 9-12% alcohol by volume, and it poses some serious challenges to its brewers. The long fermentation time invites contamination, and the high final alcohol content brings with it the possiblity of a “stuck” fermentation. The yeast must be kept at a temperature that allows it to keep going, but if it gets too warm it will flood the beer with unpalatable higher organics, and they’ll stay in solution, and the result will be highly suboptimal. The huge amount of sweet malt used to fuel that fermentation tends to leave a syrupy mess of a beer, unless carefully balanced out by a proportionate dose of bitter hops; even competently brewed barleywines can end up treacly or bitteres Biergesicht-inducing. Brewers that successfully navigate these straits wind up with a product so intense in flavor that most American beer-drinkers are not prepared to enjoy it. Since malt and hops are expensive ingredients, and barleywine calls for large amounts of each, barleywine is expensive to brew, and given the possibility of failure and the limited market, only serious artisans generally bother.

Dear serious artisan brewers: Thank you. You rock unreasonably hard.

The Toronado opens at 9AM on the weekend of the Barleywine Festival, and before noon the crowd at the bar is four deep. Attendees make pilgrimmages from all over the West to sample rare barleywines and meet with their fellow beer connoiseurs, marking down notes on the handy spreadsheets provided, deploying six glasses at a time onto heavily marked-up placemats. A productive tasting day might stretch over twelve hours, including a trip or two to the Rosamunde Sausage Grill next door for a sandwich, and include forty tasters spread out among four or six people plus a few retastes - in case you forget, you know.

San Francisco is a great food-and-drink city. Sometimes, it forgets the food part, and that’s OK too.

The rainy season has finally gotten started in earnest here in California. Punam and I took a jaunt down the coast to Santa Cruz yesterday and were surprised at the fact that there were just a few people in the Burrell School tasting room, and no one at all on the wharf, in any of the restaurants. A small party of local teens rolled up to pick up some clam chowder, and that was it. We ate crabs in the cold rain, with no human presence other than two guys behind the counter, and Madden and Michaels on a tiny TV in the crab stand. M&M were describing the Doom That Came Upon Philadelphia. My fantasy team has Philadelphia as a defense, and I had carelessly left the victorious Colt’s Joseph Addai on my virtual bench as he had his best game to date, so the Doom was not pleasant company. But Punam is cute, the crab guys were nice enough, and the crab was fresh and tasty.

Despite the fact that it’s crab season, we had those tasty decapods entirely to ourselves because our neighbors couldn’t risk getting wet. Now, I will concede that rainy California is not as nice as sunny California. But an inch of rain and 60°F is hardly like the Yukon blizzard of “The Fatal Glass of Beer” (”It ain’t a fit night out, for man or beast! [blast of snow to face]“). Only one conclusion is available to this investigator: Californians are highly soluble.

I leave the investigation of their paradoxical, constant immersion in pools, hot tubs, and the Pacific to my collaborators.

Sometimes, the correct number of tacos is four.

Last night, I picked up some dinner at the Tacos del Mar right near Matchplay, Mountain View’s best place to play Magic. To be exact, I acquired precisely two chicken tacos. Since the beginning of the draft was drawing near, I brought my repast into the store and prepared to tuck in. Since I was drawing my food from an opaque sack, the magnitude of the feast wasn’t clear to the people in the store, but only Victor cared enough to ask about it. I replied that I had the correct number of tacos.

“I guess it’s better than a negative number of tacos,” Victor replied.

And this set me to thinking. There are tacos of which I wish I had eaten a negative number, foul tacoids whose uneating would have given me greater pleasure than any I could derive from merely digesting them. But that wouldn’t really be eating a negative number of tacos — it would just have been breaking even. “Eating negative tacos” is an act that would consist in (perhaps) eating a stack of saltines and a handful of dirt, then after some mysterious metabolo-­alchemical transmutation, producing from one’s gorge a warm, filled, garnished, and above all whole taco. For maximum awesomeness, the taco would be sheathed in aluminum foil, which could be derived from the abundant aluminum in the Earth’s crust. Wax paper would be an acceptable, organic alternative.

I shared my vision with all present, to a decidedly poor reception, except from Victor. He imagined having such a power, and being driven power-mad by it, but above all having the opportunity to share it, with the battle-cry and summons to dinner, “Sup from my taco-hole!”

It was futher agreed that the nose would be a serviceable taquito-hole, but would not serve well or comfortably in the taco-hole role. It only occurred to me much later that there was no occasion in my life on which I wished I had eaten negative taquitos.