brewing day, tasting

(not so) secret october project v2.0

soon after the success of last year’s volo cask days, eric and i started planning and plotting for our return this year. from the start we knew that even though hopocalypse was a huge success and crowd favourite, we didn’t quite want to repeat it. instead we chose to use it as the inspiration for something new. as soon as eric suggested making it bigger, my first thought was of ‘apocalypse now’. when apocalypse now was re-released a few years back, it came with an extra hour of footage, bigger and longer than before. right away we knew it’d be an imperial ipa and at least 50% bigger than before.

hopocalypse redux was born.

the grain bill stayed mostly the same, but increased from 23# total to 30.5# total. the hops took a big jump too, from 12.25oz up to a staggering 19oz. double dry hopped. up from 6% to 10% ABV, and from 65 to 93IBU.

jan, eric, and i were on hand for the brewing, with jason joining us to see things in action. i actually met jason at last year’s cask days and spent a while talking with him about homebrewing and beer in general. he’s been trying to make it out for a brew day ever since, and finally made it out.

this was one badass beer to brew, and we hope it’ll be at least as exciting as last year. if not? who cares, i know we’ll like it.

and this isn’t all we have in store for this year’s cask days. stay tuned for more.

on with the photos. as a bonus, we’ve got a whole bunch of photos taken by jason added in with the usual ones. he did a good job of showing some of the finer details. thanks jason!

several shots of my motorized barleycrusher.

the cooler and manifold.

strike water coming up to temp. cheapo 5gal pot on the left, and one of my two 7.9gal keggles. these things are pretty sweet, and damn near indestructable.

the grist for today’s beer, waiting for water.

the completed chiller that we worked on last week. you can see how i wove copper wire up the sides to make it good and solid, and added a couple on the neck too. also have the hose hookups, making it easy to disassemble and store.

the manifold fitted in the cooler. there’s a scrap piece of copper under the left hand end to keep it mostly level. the right hand end has a T that fits fairly snug into the bulkhead. just in case, i’ve also got a little piece of copper on the end in case it happens to slide out. it never has, but better safe than sorry.

there’s me checking the water temp.

jason was curious how we store and propagate yeast, so i showed him my stir plate that i use when making starters and a big old slug of yeast slurry from a couple recent batches. yeah, that’s nearly a half gallon of thick slurry. the last blurry one is a vial of white labs wlp007 dry english ale.

back to the action. strike water up to temp, eric and i were doing the infusion. two tricks to observe here. first, we’re not using the handles on the keg to hold it. pouring over the lip on them is a big pain in the ass, and it tends to splash all over the place. scalding hot water just isn’t any fun when it hits your legs/feet. so we just hold the top ring and pour through one of the handle holes. still splashes a little, but much easier to work with.

the second thing to note is that i’m not holding the bottom of the keg. the ring on the bottom gets hot enough to burn right through a pair of oven mits nearly instantly (eric and i know from experience). so one day i grabbed my hammer off the work bench and used that. just hook it under the end and it allows you to tip the keg up without cooking your hand off. i suppose any other hook-like object would work.

eric jumping to grab the mash paddle and stir things in. it’s crazy how much air is trapped in the grain, and it stars bubbling like mad when you dump in the water. as you can see, we had this one pretty darn close to the top. we needed to get it mixed and didn’t want to lose any of our grain.

this mash paddle is pretty kickass for getting things mixed together and breaking up dough balls. it’s pretty stiff to move at first, but the strong oak paddle is up to the challenge.

an hour later, we were bringing things up to mash out (168-170F). i was keeping things moving while jan checked the temp.

is it too early for a beer? of course not! jason brought out a growler of grand river plowman’s ale. this shit is damn good. they’ve definitely tweaked the recipe a little since my first sampling and it’s now much more balanced (but still pleasantly hop-forward). great beer.

when i’m bumping the temperature of the mash up like this, it’s really important not to go too crazy with the temperature of the burner and also to keep the mash moving so that it doesn’t start to burn. very important, especially with high BTU jet burners.

the plowman’s ale and an assortment of morning snacks.

here’s me and my lovely wife jenn. she’s the keeper of the snacks and makes sure we’re fed and hydrated on brew days.

almost there…only a couple more degrees…

here’s me loading up the tun.

i think this is where eric was asking “are you sure it’s all going to fit in there?”. this was the maiden voyage of our cooler tun, and although i was fairly sure it was the same size as jay’s, i wasn’t completely certain. turned out that it has the exact same capacity (30# of grain and 1.5qt/lb of water). actually, we had 30.5# in there. just need to get the runoff going a little before you can fit that last little bit of grain in…

jan enjoying a snack.

more filling…

just in case we didn’t have enough shots of me filling the tun…

yeah, that looks like we’re pushing maximum capacity.

nobody gets out of the brewmonkey chores, not even me. once i had emptied the mash into the cooler i needed to wash up the keg so we could start collection.

everyone relaxing and enjoying a beer during vorlauf.

initial runoff.

eric prepping the foil. lay a piece on top of the grain bed, cut some slots in it, and you can pour your sparge water on top without worrying about disturbing the grain bed or creating channels.

eric cutting the slots in the foil.

sparging.

about half way through the collection.

a quick and rough check on the gravity of the runoff. we usually keep going until we hit volume or the gravity drops too low (which rarely happens). as for “too low”, we usually want to stop the runoff before it falls below 1.010. at sparge temperatures, i know that 1.000 is comfortably above that, so it’s generally what i watch for.

eric skimming the scum, aka hot break. this stuff isn’t desireable to have in the beer, and by skimming it off you also avoid boil overs. double bonus!

hopocalypse is all about amarillo. here you see most of a 1# bag of whole amarillo from the wonderful freshops. bonus that it was on sale the last time i hit adventures in homebrewing.

next brew for the day, stone 07.07.07 vertical epic. this one is definitely built to last, but unlike some previous offerings i didn’t find that it was all that great fresh. i can see it growing into an excellent beer, but it’s a little spicy and hot right now.

after finishing the sparge, we drain off any liquid left in the cooler and push on it to squeeze out as much of the liquid as possible. makes it a little lighter when i dispose of it.

the new chiller in the kettle. fits perfectly!

mmmm, hops.

here’s me hooking up the chiller to the hose. i finally found a use for the lid to the cheapo aluminum lid that came with my turkey frier burner. i cut a notch in the side so that it’ll fit around the chiller and cover the top nicely. no more taping on plastic wrap!

to stop the whole hops from clogging up the racking cane, just sanitize a hop bag and throw it over the end. make sure it’s tied off pretty well though, so it doesn’t fill up through the top.

promash, my refractometer, and my empty volo cask days 2006 glass.

desipte the hop bag, we had a hell of a time trying to siphon the beer. the 2oz whole plus 10oz pellet really caused havoc. after a while we resorted to pouring the wort through a strainer to pull out most of the hop material. it was still tough to siphon, but this definitely helped. we ended up a little low on volume – it’s crazy how much they absorb.

sanitizing the stone before oxygenating.

iodphor, our sanitizer of choice. no rinse, and works great.

the view in the fridge. old ale and pale ale on tap, a couple growlers of yeast, and a bunch of other great beer.

airlock filled with canadian club whiskey. i don’t drink the stuff, so this is a good use for it.

eric and jan with beer.

in addition to this being a brew day, it was also a celebration of my birthday (sept 4th). once the brewing wrapped up we relaxed with a few choice beverages and a feast of salmon and king crab legs.

i mentioned this last week (when jan brought up several girardin beers), but need to mention it again. he returned from belgium with a ton of great beer, and this week was no exception: westvleteren blonde, 8, and 12. i paired this with the full rochefort line (6, 8, and 10) as well as our rochefort 10 clone from 2005. one heck of a great way to celebrate my birthday.

all of us putting up the horns.

the lineup for the evening tasting. not too often you get to sample the full lineup from two trappist breweries, especially not two as fine as these.

equipment, tasting

new gear in markham

when we setup our brewing operations at my place in markham, most of the equipment came from my apartment-bound biergotter bretheren, mostly DrJay. when a new job brought him down to philly he left most of it here since they were still in an apartment. when they bought a house earlier this year, i knew jay would be setting up the first US biergotter contingent. that means it’s time to build some new gear!

the first order of business was a new chiller. we’d been unhappy with the old 25′ chiller for doing 10gal batches, so were already interested in going up to 50′.

next up, we needed to replace jay’s cooler tun. i caught a sale at walmart and grabbed a pair of 48qt coolers. picked up the copper for the manifolds and got everything cut to size the other night, so the only thing left to do was cut the slots in it.

there’s me with my sweet tee from homebrewtees.com. chris (oxmasterscream on beer advocate) is a fellow homebrewer and puts these together on the side. check them out!

you can see a little better in this photo, but i was trying to move the stupid pipe bender. sure, these things are great for making sure you don’t kink the soft copper when you’re bending it, but goddamn are they a pain in the ass. put even a slight bend and they start binding up and barely move. after the first two bends we gave up, then spent the next 20min trying to pull the damn thing off. more time was spent trying to remove it than bending the whole coil (which went flawlessly around a corny). more trouble than they’re worth.

here i was showing eric how to use the dremel to cut slots in our copper manifold for the coolers. not much to see really.

now we have eric working on the manifold in the background, and jan working on a beverage. can’t quite remember what it was at this point.

eric hard at work.

i managed to get a metal sliver, but it was easily removed.

the first two bends on the new 50′ chiller.

another shot, also showing the associated hose, two coolers and the second manifold.

the chiller, nearly done. i attached a few pieces of twine to temporarily hold things together and later switched to some copper wire.

eric posing with the new hardware. check out my next entry for some shots of the completed chiller in action.

another shot of the coolers + manifold.

progress on the manifold.

one half done, onto the other.

had some tasty oskar blues gordon and were just about to open a heavyweight lunacy. both were quite tasty.

jan took over and finished the second half of the manifold.

on to dinner and some sampling. tasty steak sandwiches (with cheese and carmelized onions), salad, deviled eggs, and fresh tomatoes from our garden. i’m pretty sure we were drinking the weihenstephan 1809 berliner weiss.

jan had recently returned from a trip to belgium and brought back a ton of excellent beer. here i was opening the first of three bottles from girardin, their 1882 faro. later we also had the 1882 gueuze white label (filtered) and the 1882 kriek. after that we moved on to a bottle of bar harbor cadillac mtn stout. great stuff!

a successful day working on some equipment, great dinner, and some excellent beers. does it get any better?

brewing day

belgian brewing 2

our last brew day here in markham included a belgian pale. basically, that batch was just a big starter for today’s beers: a belgian strong dark ale and a tripel. i chose white labs wlp530 abbey ale yeast (the one used by westmalle, achel, and westvleteren) for this batch, loosly aiming for something in the neighbourhood of westy 12.

scott came out to join us for this brew day. as a bonus, he lives right around the corner from grand river brewing and was able to grab the 2nd and 3rd growler that they filled on their first day in service. i actually enjoyed the galt knife old style lager a little more than the ploughman’s ale, which is saying something since i’m usually an ale man. the ale was also quite good, but i felt the bittering was just a little out of balance (something they’ve agreed with and scaled back just a little since then). this was quite a treat. unfortunately, my laptop crashed before i could save the reviews, so i still need to resample them.

back when we brewed up our imperial stout we pulled off an extra couple gallons at the end and boiled the hell out of it before adding a quart back into the main wort. we pulled off the first gallon or so for the strong dark, added our demerara sugar, and boiled the snot out of it while the sparge finished. this was added back into the main wort before it came up to a boil.

on with the photos!

there’s me loading up the barleycrusher. i love this thing.

strike water coming up to temp.

eric stirring up the mash for the strong dark and scott and i looking on.

gotta get out all the lumps. nobody likes a lumpy mash.

me verifying the temperature. needed a little bump to hit our strike temp.

the magic, er, monk’s elixer. gallon or so of first runnings along with 2.2lbs of demerara.

we boiled the heck out of it until it had reduced by about half and then added it back into the main boil. mmm, delicious!

the rest of the belgian strong dark. love that colour.

hmmm, is eric happy or did he just get caught doing something wrong?

the elixer after boiling.

and added back into the main wort. crazy how much shit there was floating around in there.

good strong boil going on the strong dark. this one kept getting angry with us, but we managed not to have any boilovers.

the tripel on its way to a boil. tons of stuff floating in this one too. i think it’s from the belgian pilsner malt, since that was the only new thing for the day.

scott flipping through brew like a monk, our bible for the day.

the chaos that is my garage. this was towards the end of the brew day, with most of the gear piled up under the brew table on the left. eric and i looking for something to do while the tripel was cooling.

jenn, best brew wife ever! which reminds me, we somehow managed to forget to take a photo of our fine brewday lunch. doh!

three phases of beerdom. madness, happiness, and quiet contemplation. or maybe just three random photos of me.

eric was on a mission, killing flies in the garage. seems kind of futile killing bugs in the outdoors…

the tripel going into the fermenters, with eric and i keeping an eye on things.

another successful brew day, and two damn fine brews.

festivals

GCHC 2007

each year the Canadian Amateur Brewers Association holds several homebrewing competitions, including the Great Canadian Homebrew Conference and Competition 2007. the biergotter crew entered 3 beers in this competition and were rewarded with medals in 2 of the 3 categories.

our first entry was the “eised” version of the single malt scotch ale [brew day report]. feedback on it was positive, and although it didn’t win a medal it actually scored higher than our bronze medal beer.

the first award went to our wheat wine [brew day report]. this beer took the bronze medal for 3rd place in the barleywine category. sweet!

the second award went to our Imperial Stout [brew day report]. this one stole the category, earning a gold medal for its first place finish. excellent!

i also got scoring sheets for all three beers. for reference, here’s the BJCP scoring guide:
world class (45-50): world class beer. great character and now flaws.
excellent (38-44): exceptionally exemplifies style. needs little or no attention.
very good (30-37): exemplifies style well. requires some fine tuning.
good (21-29): generally within style parameters but requires attention.
fair (14-20): does not exemplify style and/or has several major flaws.
problem (0-13): problematic. recipe or brewing technique needs attention.

eised smoked scotch ale (22B – other smoked beer)
form 1:
aroma: 9/12. slightly smokey aroma and good malt
appearance: 3/3. nice colour and head.
flavour: 14/20. smoke flavour up front, mellows out to malt sweetness.
mouthfeel: 3/5. sweetness and carbonation balance each other well
overall impression: 8/10. not assertively smokey which makes for a nice drinking beer. this is a well made beer.
total: 37/50

form 2:
aroma: 9/12. subtle smoke coming through, can still pick up malt.
appearance: 2/3. fine.
flavour: 14/20. subtle smokiness. a little sweet for a scotch ale, but nice never the less.
mouthfeel: 4/5. nice mouth feel. smoke doesn’t burn me!
overall impression: 7/10. more smoke aroma would have been nice, but nice balance.
total: 36/50

mini-wheat wine (19C – american barley wine). bronze medal winner in barley wine class.
form 1:
aroma: 9/12. nice spicy nose. malt predominates.
appearance: 3/3. ok.
flavour: 13/20. good malty flavour. hoppiness comes through, especially in the aftertaste.
mouthfeel: 3/5. good carbonation and syrupy mouthfeel. warming alcohol.
overall impression: 6/10. nice beer. well made. only fault is syrupy body.
total: 34/50

form 2:
aroma: 10/12. good maltiness. slightly spicy. ok for style.
appearance: 3/3. colour ok for style. head retention low. colour ok.
flavour: 12/20. syrupy taste very slight, nice bitter aftertaste.
mouthfeel: 3/5. slightly lighter body than style calls for.
overall impression: 7/10. nice entry with only minor flaws.
total: 35/50

magic elixer imperial stout (13F – russian imperial stout). gold medal winner in stout class.
form 1:
aroma: 9/12. alcoholic. high alcohols. rich and complex.
appearance: 2/3. dark and dark head, although not much head.
flavour: 15/20. complex malts. chocolatey, prunes, coffee, warming at the end.
mouthfeel: 4/5. has good body, creamy.
overall impression: 8/10. a lovely beer. can i have more?!
total: 38/50

form 2:
aroma: 9/12. slightly burnt aroma – ok for style. slight fruitiness also present.
appearance: 3/3. deep tan head. low retention.
flavour: 14/20. rich. malty, intense burnt flavour on finish. slight coffee-like taste.
mouthfeel: 4/5. full bodied (on low end) but to style.
overall impression: 7/10. good beer, very enjoyable. no major flaws. could drink lots of this.
total: 37/50

pretty darn good for our first competition.

the medals.

the guy from great lakes brewery talking about their orange peel ale and devil’s pale ale. he was nice enough to fill in when the scheduled speaker bailed at the last minute. unfortunately, i have forgotten his name…

a few shots of the crowd. first one is taken down the table from where i was sitting. other photos from the same location showing the rest of the room.

kevin helping john from munro’s meadery get setup. he had 6 different meads for us to sample. i think the raspberry was my favourite, but they were all nice.

john again. i actually sat across from him during the dinner and enjoyed talking with him. really nice guy. i hope to get down and check out the meadery at some point in the future.

the bronze!

the gold!

biergotter biotch!!!

tasting

saison tasting

jan’s summer beer tasting, may 26, 2007.

initially this was planned as a saison tasting, but some other (excellent!) beers slipped into the mix. a beautiful day on the patio, with great beer, great food, and great friends.

first beer of the day: fantome saison hiver. in the background left, barely visible in a white shirt is craig (aka crwills), then jeff (aka tupalev) in the green+white shirt, and paul (aka blankboy) on the right in the black shirt. middle ground we have alexa (aka Lexx) in the light blue shirt and jan (aka biegaman) in the foreground in dark blue.

slightly better shot of craig in the distance, eric (aka Viggo) in blue, and me (aka grub) in the black. still missing from a photo (and acting as camerawoman) is jenn.

jan still admiring the hiver.

here you can see more of the lovely setting for this tasting. nice covered patio in jan’s back yard. perfect place for a saison tasting.

craig

this is a shot of the fridge fairly early in the tasting. tons of great beer. think we’ll get through them all? we’ll definitely try.

paul enjoying the cheese tray and jan working on a review. tons of great snacks were available in addition to the great beer.

jenn’s finger, eric and i talking about something, and jeff’s ass. and bugles!

even more finger, and me smiling for the camera.

i think by this point we were on to the jolly pumpkin madrugada obscura, dark dawn stout. quite an interesting and enjoyable beer. eric on pouring duty.

eric trying to get all fancy on us, posing for the camera.

i think this was the only place we got a picture that included jenn, since she spent the day rockin’ the camera.

here we have jan trying to shoot the cork out of a bottle. he wanted to send it flying over the pool, but wasn’t quite sure how to do it. eric tried demonstrating how to do it properly, but even jan knew he looked a little ridiculous.

on to another bottle. jan is being a good host and pouring for everyone.

hey, haven’t we seen this one before? i don’t think it worked the first time…

this looks more like the eric i know.

jan also did alot of reading from the bottle labels, telling us all about whatever we were going to drink.

those snacks came in handy with all that beer. here we also see jan’s dad in the background. he was hanging out, talking and sampling beer with us for a while. big thanks to jan and his folks for hosting us (and helping cook the excellent dinner!)

me again.

jan.

i think at this point jan was just finishing the barley island bourbon barrel aged oatmeal stout and jeff was starting to pour the church-key catch her in the rye.

the empties table when the first half of the crew left. we lost jeff, paul, and craig early. that’s ok, more beer for the rest of us!

dessert! jenn baked brownies, which we had along with some ice cream.

most of the remaining crew as the day wore on. we had many great laughs along with all the great food and beer.

one of the cats decided to clean up somebody’s dinner place after they left it sitting out. eric got a good laugh out of it.

are the ducks fighting or making out? you decide.

our excellent host late in the day.

cork carnage.

the table when jenn and i left. already full, with a couple more left.

the final lineup (i think in the order they were drank):

an excellent tasting. thanks to jan for organizing and to everyone who contributed.

brewing day

first markham brew day 2007

after taking a few months off, the first markham brew day of 2007 happened last weekend. on deck for the day was a big batch of hopocalypse, so eric and i could finally each have a keg to enjoy, and a belgian pale ale. the belgian pale would be something we’d never tried, and would give us a yeast cake to use on a bigger belgian beer. initial talk was to do a quad/belgian strong dark ale, but now it looks like we might split it and do this and a tripel. stay tuned for news on that…

start of the brew day. eric is cleaning up some gear before we get going.

there’s me, keeping the barley crusher going and tearing up the grain. have i mentioned how much this thing kicks ass?

warming up the strike water. small pot for the 5gal belgian pale, larger pot for the ipa.

still working on the ipa grain.

the grain bill for the belgian pale.

there’s eric doughing in the hopocalypse.

first beer of the day, moyland’s hopsickle imperial ale. “triple hoppy”.

both batches sparging. hopocalypse in the red cooler and the belgian pale in the bucket.

lunch is served. bbq burgers with cheddar and/or blue.

but before lunch i had to tend to the sparge.

burgers and doritos. mmmmmmm. jenn always hooks us up with a great lunch. we also had some tasty chocolate chip banana nut muffins early in the day.

eric likes his burger.

me too!

the belgian pale boiling. it started getting this wacky film on top. not the typical break (which we had already skimmed before adding hops), this was something different.

eric skimming the scum and first wort hops from the ipa. chunky!

the flameout addition for the ipa was 2oz of leaf amarillo. looks tasty.

it’s become a tradition that during the transfer to the fermenter we always listen to some iron maiden. start things off with number of the beast, then move on to a few of the other tracks i have. really need to get more…

the final lineup from the brew day and some evening tasting (left to right):

  • central waters brewers reserve bourbon cherry stout
  • central waters brewers reserve bourbon barrel stout
  • kuhnhenn extraneous ale
  • homebrewed christmas ale from a fellow homebrewer
  • moyland’s hopsickle
  • moyland’s moylander
  • north coast old rasputin x
  • another homebrew
  • duck rabbit rabid duck imperial stout
  • north coast old rasputin

another great brew day!

festivals

dark lord day 2007

back in january i put out a feeler to the other biergotter guys. i was considering attending dark lord day, the one day a year that three floyds sells their dark lord russian imperial stout. this year’s release would be on saturday april 28th and i was thinking of making the trip. most of the other guys thought they’d be unavailable, but eric expressed interest.

as the date got closer, we started to finalize plans. eric’s girlfriend alexa would be making the trip down from toronto, and even had a friend in downtown chicago that was going to let us stay there. free crash space = good! we decided we’d drive down on friday, stay in chicago friday night, head to dark lord day on saturday, back to chicago to crash saturday night, then back home to toronto on sunday. while in chicago we’d visit some local spots, and having someone from the area with us meant we should be able to avoid most of the traffic headaches.

if you’re not aware, dark lord day is much more than just a chance to buy the highest rated american beer, it’s a full day festival. three floyds are very supportive of the whole beer geek crowd. there is a tent and lots of tables for beer tasting. really, it’s a giant beer tasting free for all. everybody adds bottles to the tables and you’re pretty much free to sample whatever you like. there’s also a ton of beer trading that goes on. some folks set them up in advance, and just about everybody brings extra beer along to share and trade. 3F also had bands for entertainment and their own wares available for purchase.

so we had all the plans laid out, trades arranged, and everything ready to go. then we hit a bit of a snag… the monday before DLD started like any other. dropped jenn off at the go train and headed in to work. by about 10am, i wasn’t feeling that great. my stomach was starting to hurt and i was feeling a little nauseous. thinking i might be a little hungry, i had a light snack. still, but it didn’t help. i continued to feel worse, and the pain intensified. i started feeling dizzy and incredibly nauseous. by about noon i knew i couldn’t stay at work, but also wasn’t in good enough shape to drive myself home. i made a quick walk around the office to see if any of the guys on my team could drive me home, but it seemed everyone was either working from home or away at lunch. by about 12:30 i had mustered up enough strength that i thought i could get myself home, so i left, taking the back roads and taking my time.

when i got home i pretty much dropped into the bed and tried to sleep. i was still getting worse, and couldn’t fall asleep. it felt like my entire abdomen was in knots and i was really struggling not to be sick. shortly after this jenn arrived home, having left work when i talked to her before i drove home. she ran out to pick up some gravol, hoping this would help. it didn’t, and i continued to feel worse. i was also running a slight fever. it was like nothing i had ever felt before, so i thought something could really be wrong.

we decided to call telehealth and see what they said. when i explained my symptoms, the nurse said that i should probably see my family doctor, and if it got worse i might consider going to the hospital. we decided that the family doc would likely just send me to the ER, so we skipped the middle man and went to the hospital.

we arrived at the hospital at about 3:30pm and began the great wait. i was barely functional at that point and pretty much curled up in a chair. we sat there for what seemed like forever, continuing to feel worse. somewhere around 7:30pm i finally got in. i got to lay down, and they decided to do some tests. they took a bunch of blood and urine and hooked me up to an IV. the morphine and gravol did a good job of making me feel better, and around 12:30am the results were finally back. no problems in the urinary track. no obvious GI issues. i did have a slightly elevated white cell count and a lingering low grade fever. their biggest suspicion were either appendicitis or some kind of bug, but i didn’t have the usual localized appendix pain. since i was pretty much feeling better by that point, they sent me home and said to come back in the morning for an ultrasound to verify that there was no appendicitis.

i got home around 1am after a long and incredibly unpleasant ordeal and finally managed to sleep. bright and early at 7am the phone rang. it was the hospital telling me that i was scheduled for the ultrasound at 9:30am. i sent out a quick email to let work know what was going on and headed for the hospital. fortunately the ultrasound was negative, and they said that i definitely didn’t have appendicitis. woohoo! sigh of relief. but what the hell was that?!?? it sure didn’t feel like any bug i’d experienced before, and i sure hope i don’t again.

when i heard ‘appendicitis’, i figured that the trip would be canceled. i know that’s not the sort of thing that you do on tuesday, then hop in the car and drive 3500km on the weekend. i was unhappy, but glad to be feeling better. getting the news that there was no appendicitis was good, but it didn’t explain why i’d felt like that and if it was gone for good.

i took the next couple of days pretty easy. i talked to everyone i had trades setup with what had happened and that my status was uncertain. when wednesday evening came and i was still feeling great, we decided to go ahead with the trip. the only condition was that if i started feeling anything like on monday, we’d be turning around right away. jenn helped to map out some hospitals along the way, just in case.

when thursday afternoon came and i left work, spirits were good. i was still feeling great and the trip was looking good. eric and alexa took the bus up to my place and we started packing the car. wow, we had a lot of stuff. really. a lot. 4 passengers, 3 of us with weekend bags and one with a large suitcase. both eric and i setup trades, and we also grabbed extra local stuff to bring down for trading/tasting. i ended up bringing down some stuff for a few trades that jan had setup too. and some homebrew for a tasting that i was trying to setup at DLD. did i mention that it’s a little mazda 3? yeah, lots of stuff.

on friday morning we got the last of the stuff in the car and rolled out of the driveway at about 9am. the car was full to the max. the middle of the back seat was full, and both eric and alexa had stuff on their laps, with stuff at my feet in the front. jenn had volunteered to drive the first shift down to her parent’s place, where she’d be staying for the weekend.

we stopped in stoney point and dropped off jenn, stopping to have some tasty sandwiches for lunch.

from there it was off through windsor and over the border to detroit. our next stop was at kuhnhenn to pick up some growlers for trading (2x american ipa) and sharing (penetration porter and simcoe silly). we sat long enough for a beer (penetration porter for eric and i, banana stout for alexa), then headed out again.

the next stop was adventures in homebrewing to pick up some supplies. this is where i get most of my homebrewing supplies, and we needed to get a few things for our next few batches. i also grabbed a sweet old guardian glass, since i forgot to bring something for sampling at DLD. it’s become my favourite sampling glass.

with traffic between those two stops, we were running a little behind schedule, so we skipped our last stop at merchant’s and left for chicago.

the drive down was (pleasantly!) uneventful and we arrived in downtown chicago at about 8pm. we stopped at sam’s for a couple goodies, then went across the street to the goose island clybourn brewpub. we relaxed and enjoyed some food and a couple beverages. the english malt porter was awesome. we headed over to alexa’s friend’s place and crashed for the night.

the next morning we woke and left for munster. it took about an hour to get there, with a quick stop for some breakfast on the way. it was about 10:30am when we arrived, and the crowd was already growing.

crowds out front of three floyds.

it’s noon and the doors open! wooho!

the line was moving slowly.

getting closer…

finally inside the door (but still in line), i snapped a few photos.

this is about where the batteries in my camera died. i had an extra set, but of course they were in the car and i was trapped in line.

eventually i got to the front of the line and got my dark lord, as well as rabbid rabbit, robert the bruce, and black sun. i wanted a bottle of behemoth, but sadly it sold out before i got to the front of the line.

i brought my dark lord out to the car and started trying to resolve the last of my trades. it didn’t take too long, and soon i was finally able to relax and enjoy a few samples. we slipped inside to get samples of the barrel aged dark lord. another favourite was the thomas hooker barrel aged imperial porter. got to sample some nice homebrew too, though i wasn’t able to round people up for that homebrew tasting. maybe next year.

after putting the new batteries in my camera i went back inside and snapped a few photos. gotta love the piles of kegs, bottles, and the wall of 1000# bags of grain.

one of eric’s favourite parts of the day: imperial battle snake. he was talking about how awesome the band name was for the entire trip, so it was nice when they were pretty good. he even bought one of their shirts, and seems to have worn it every time i’ve seen him since then.

the alpha king.

6 barrels (left to right, top to bottom):

  • DL 07
  • BLACK SUN 11.14.06
  • ALPHA KLAUS 11.??.06
  • BEHEMOTH 12.16.06 (with what appears to be a cherry?)
  • BEHEMOTH 12.16.06
  • VB DL 07 (vanilla bean?)

piles of bottles, and the swag table in the distance.

peering over to the brewery.

late in the day, this guy was one of the most memorable moments. a six pack of alpha king, purchased (likely warm) inside, 4 down, 1 on the go, and 1 unopened. asleep at the wheel. hardcore.

not long after this we decided to head back to chicago. it had been a long, hot day and we were all pretty tired and sunburned. we loaded up the (still overflowing) car with the spoils of the day and headed out. after a brief stop at alexa’s place so she could pick up her car, we headed downtown again. our initial plan had been to check out the map room, but instead we just went back to the goose island clybourn brewpub again. dinner and a few more tasty beverages. exhausted, we left for alexa’s friend’s place.

then we had the pleasure of driving around for an hour trying to find a place to park. i was so tired and beyond frustrated, but we finally found a place (good one too!) and i basically passed out as soon as we were inside.

sunday morning i woke up early, and at about 7am eric and i hit the road. a pleasant and uneventful drive, and we were in detroit shortly after noon.

crossing the border was fun. since it was just eric and i, when i told them we had about 8 cases of beer, i knew we’d be paying duty. we each got a case duty free since we’d been in the US for 48 hours, but still had to pay duty on 6. this was complicated by the fact that all the beer was from trades and/or gifts, so we didn’t have any receipts. i told them that i’d brought about 6 cases of beer down to the US with me and had traded for things of equal value, so we just went with the approximate price i’d paid ($42/case). we each paid about $50 duty, which wasn’t too bad considering what we had in the car.

eric and i posing with the haul. yep, there’s that imperial battle snake shirt. he also had about a case and a half of beer waiting for him there, so the final total when we left for home was about 10 cases of beer in the car.

when i finally got home this is what i had. some stuff in the middle for jan, but most of that is mine.

dark lord day was one hell of a party. what a blast. though the 2500km in 2.5 days was a little much. even though i was driving and had to take it easy the whole time, i still got to try some great stuff along the way and bring home a ton more. some stats:

14x 22oz
1x 11.2oz
3x 750ml
42x 12oz
1x 64oz

total ~ 82x 12oz = 3.5 cases, 12 wants, 42 different beers, 38 that i’ve never tried.

that doesn’t include the approx 4 cases eric had, or the case i had for jan. i don’t think i could have possibly fit any more in my little mazda…

already looking forward to next year.

brewing day

two tun old ale

eric and i started talking about brewing an old ale a while ago. we knew we wanted it to be big, aiming for something like thomas hardy’s ale rather than the traditional old ale guidelines. we thought this would be a good time to revive the two tun madness we used for the imperial stout last november. that was a doble-ish setup with one cooler and a bucket and 45# of grain. this time we decided to go bigger: two coolers and 60# of grain. we figured we could pull the second runnings for some kind of hoppy brown ale. a little reading and some tinkering with promash and it was set.

the parti-gyle recipe (grain bill only), dirty old brown ale, and the two tun old ale. the grain bill on the old+brown are mocked up to get the gravity right for calculating the hop utilizations and such.

grain for the batch. special b, honey malt, aromatic malt, and maris otter. tim loaned us his cooler tun, seen in the background.

the rest of the grain. total for the batch: 60.5 pounds, which should give us two 10 gallon batches.

the two tuns, waiting for action.

and two kegs, each with about half the grain bill. one is a standard 15.5gal, the other is only 13, so one has a wee bit more than the other.

eric, looking a little rough this morning!

and me, showing off my beer advocate toque.

strike water coming up to temp.

morning snacks. banana bread, chocolate chunk cookies, tangerines, and some deadly awesome savoury shortbread.

coffee, music, promash, and designing great beers. all the necessities for an early december morning brewing.

me again, a little dusty from the grain.

lunch! some pulled pork sandwiches, bbq fritos, and dogfish head olde school barleywine.

the two tuns, sparging away.

we collected into separate vessels so we could be sure we were sparging at the same rate and got the same amount from each tun.

that’s 15 gallons of old ale at a gravity of 1.090. oh yeah, that’s also before the 2 hour and 40 minute boil.

continuing to sparge. second runnings for the “brown” ale.

both batches on the burners. the old ale on the left boiling away, and the “brown” on the right. we steeped some chocolate malt to try and darken it up, but it didn’t turn out very brown.

old ale starting to get angry.

both batches boiling now. the old ale started boiling 40min before the brown, and finished 40min after it.

both batches again. you can see my makeshift wind screen in the background and the scum skimming pot in front.

there’s me reviewing one of the day’s beers.

first hop addition on the “brown” getting angry…

a glass of something…i think this was the southern tier unearthly iipa. great stuff.

brew day beers: olde school, great lakes nosferatu, unearthly, and dogfish head world wide stout.

the “brown” happily fermenting. this one was kicking ass with almost zero lag time. 11gal at an OG of 1.057.

and the old ale starting to take off. 12gal at an OG of 1.102. didn’t quite get the boil off we wanted, so we ended up with 12gal at 1.102 instead of more like 10.5-11gal at 1.115.

the “brown” got pretty angry, so i had to put it in some bins to keep the mess contained.

and the old ale now going full throttle.

in all, this was a good brew day. the huge grain bill and two 10gal batches via parti-gyle was pretty fun. several good brews sampled. the weather was even pretty cooperative, staying above freezing most of the day.

final gravity on brown was 1.017 for 69% attenuation and 5.28%abv. final gravity on the old ale was 1.034 for 64% attenuation and 8.96%abv.

misc

hops!

this year i decided to grow some hops. i picked up four rhizomes from freshops: two cascade and two centennial. they were planted on may 22nd, 2006. here’s some photos i took at various points through their growth.

june 27th, 2006

hard to judge the height from the photos, but two of the plants are around 4′ tall now (well over waist height), the others are around 2-3′. the blurry ones at the end are me trying to get a closeup of the tiny little buds that have started forming since the weekend.

august 8, 2006

the hops are kind of nuts, so i took a few photos today.

centennial in the center and a bit of the cascade on the left.

me in the photo, for perspective.

shows just how nuts the cascades are going. they reached the top of the 10′ lines i put up and continued to grow. they got to the point where they had about 4′ dangling in the wind, then they caught back onto the original plant and started going up again. they’ve been throwing out side shoots all over the place too, so it’s a big, crazy, tangled mess. if i’d known they’d get this big i would have put the lines up the full height of the house…

the underpants gnome. he guards the hops from the groundhog that we think is living in our neighbours yard under his deck.

close up view of the top of the cascade plant. as you can see, tons of flowers on this one. really looking forward to the harvest on this one.

same thing on the centennial. not nearly as crazy, but there’s a few flowers there too.

here’s a couple blurry photos of phil the groundhog.

august 12, 2006

lots of little hop cones forming.

september 25, 2006

harvest time!

centennial

cascade

here’s me harvesting the centennials.

cascade on the left, centennial on the right.

the hops on my home made drying racks. centennial on the left, cascade on the right. would have been easier if i’d been consistent with the whole left/right thing.

close up view of the cascade, 0.4oz once dried.

close up view of the centennial, 0.1oz once dried.

brewing day

brewing roundup

there has been a bunch of brewing since my last post, so i thought i’d post a roundup and summary of them.

tim did his first fully solo brew, a pale ale on sept 24th. spent 8 days in primary, then 7 days in secondary with 0.5oz cascade. it was kegged on oct 9th. OG 1.051, FG 1.013 for 5.00%abv and 73.69% attenuation.

tim kegged his belgian wit on oct 15th. FG 1.012 for 5.4%abv and 76.58% attenuation.

jayw brewed up a rye pale ale nov 12th. kegged dec 2nd. OG 1.060, FG 1.016 for 5.81%abv and 72.34% attenuation.

tim brewed up a barleywine on nov 19th. OG 1.092.

eric and i were joined by jan and james for a brew day on nov 4th, which was national “teach a friend to homebrew day”. jan had attended a few partial brew days but was happy to come and see the process from beginning to end. james was visiting to learn how his christmas gift would be brewed. i decided to donate a batch of beer to our annual employee charitable fund and it was auctioned off. james’s wife won the auction as a gift for him. being a big fan of boddington’s he liked the idea of trying to brew something like that, and when he saw that i’d done raspberry porter in the past he was interested to try and put a raspberry twist on the english bitter. the result was dubbed “raspboddy“, a pale pink brew with a hint of raspberry. eric and i also finally brewed up the gumballhead clone that he’s had drawn up for a while.

didn’t take many photos, but here they are.

there’s me sparging the (not yet rasp)boddy.

and the runoff.

morning snacks

gumballhead sac rest

me and james keeping an eye on the boddy sparge

the gumballhead getting angry during the boil.

casualty before the brew day. we were supposed to be doing a dark saison, so i was making up starters. sterilized the flask, added the stir bar, and poured in the yeast. then i started to dump in the starter wort and it started pouring out all over the counter and floor. only then did i notice that the flask had blown a hole in the side. unfortunately, the yeast and wort was a writeoff…