Portland II

I’ve been such a procrastinator this week, and now I still owe you a post about last Sunday (8 days ago!) from Portland.  To be sure, I’ve had real things to get done in the interim.  I’m starting a new job soon that will require moving and having a car.  I’m not being intentionally secretive, but I’m not sure what the blogging policy is at my new brewing-related employer, so I’m hesitant to mention them on the blog at all.  I may even end up having to discontinue the blog while I work there, but that’s just speculation, I’ll find out for sure when I get there.  Anyway… I had to cut my 3 weeks in Seattle (part of which to actually be spent at GABF) short, one day after I arrived.  I’m still going to be in Seattle for the last of my original 3 weeks, but instead of staying in Seattle post-Portland, I borrowed my sister’s car for a week and drove it home, in one day, alone.  It’s not the most impressive accomplishment ever, but I’m pretty proud to have driven it 840 straight miles from Seattle, in 13.5 hours, only having gotten out of the car once (I had to stop for gas twice, but in Oregon they pump it for you!).  I had only 6 days in which to find an apartment in a California city I had never seen except from the windows of my car as I speeded by on the freeway, and to buy a car for the first time in my life.  This may seem a little ridiculous, but I’ve been in big cities (Boston & San Francisco) my entire adult life, with no real need for a car beyond an occasional Zipcar rental.  I’m happy to say, I got both the apartment hunting and car buying done in 5 days, so now I’ve got an extra day to take on the drive back up to Seattle to return my sister’s car and continue my Seattle trip.  I decided to take the scenic route, heading around Crater Lake, which I’ve always wanted to visit, so now I’m in a hotel in Eugene, resuming my blogging and preparing for the final lap up to Seattle tomorrow.

But where I last left off was last Sunday.  We had spent Saturday in Bend, and we woke up there Sunday morning, ready to head back through Portland on our way up to Seattle.  Two pubs I had been told by  friends not to miss were The Horse Brass and The Green Dragon, and I hoped we’d have time for both.  Turns out, we not only had time for those two, we hit up Belmont Station (a bottle shop/bar), and visited the Roloff Farm (at Melissa’s request and my insistence after I saw how much Allie didn’t want to go – sometimes that evil older sister instinct still kicks back in, despite the two of us both being adults now and her being my best friend).

The Horse Brass Pub was by far my favorite of the day, one of the best good-beer pubs I’ve ever been to.  First of all, I loved the list!  They had, by my count, about 48 taps (36 domestic and 12 import) and 5 beers on cask.  They also had about 30 bottled beers (8 domestic, 23 import) and 3 ciders.  They also had a whole page of single malt scotches, not that I know anything about those, or that we’d be dipping into those at 11:30am when we arrived.  But, more important than quantity is the quality of the list.  The craft beer scene is at the point now that there’s enough out there that places not interested in investing a lot of time and energy can have a huge list fill with a combination of absolute crap and mediocre ho-hum beers.  By contrast, The Horse Brass had a lot of seasonals (this being primarily fresh hop and oktoberfest beers at the moment), many of the harder to find beers from really respected Pacific Northwest and  California brewers, and beers from tiny local Oregon breweries.  I think the abundance and diversity of IPAs and Imperial IPAs didn’t hurt my assessment of them either!  The whole list is two long for me to type up here, but to give you a taste, so to speak, of what’s there, I’ll list these IPAs:

Available when we arrived:

• Bridgeport’s IPA
• Clinton Street Brewing’s Captured by Porches IPA on cask
• Eel River’s Organic IPA
• Full Sail’s Prodigal Sun IPA
• Hair of the Dog’s Blue Dot Rye Imperial IPA
• Hale’s Mongoose IPA on cask
• Laughing Dog’s Rocket Dog Red Rye IPA on cask
• Laurelwood’s Boss IPA
• Lost Coast’s Indica IPA
• Mt Hood’s Ice Axe IPA
• Ninkasi’s Mt. Hops Fresh Hop IPA
• Stone’s IPA
• Terminal Gravity’s TG IPA
• Walking Man’s Homo Erectus Imperial IPA

Coming up next:

• Bridgeport’s Hop Czar Imperial IPA
• Lagunitas’ Hop Stoopid Double IPA
• Russian River’s Blind Pig IPA
• Full Sail’s Lupulin Fresh Hop IPA
• Bear Republic’s Racer 5 IPA
• Ninkasi’s Tricerahops Double IPA
• Hale’s O’Brian’s Harvest IPA on cask

While I might normally have gone for the Laughing Dog Red Rye IPA, being a huge fan of rye beers, and hoppy reds, and trying beers I’ve never had before, I decided to go with the Ninkasi fresh hop.  These beers are only around for a few weeks a year and I can get the red rye any time.  Luckily, I didn’t end up having to choose, since Allie got the red rye.  Even better, Melissa got one of the other beers I had my eye on, the Willamette Brewing Espresso Stout.  My notes are very brief, and honestly, pretty predictable for a fresh hop beer: hazy light amber, lasting thin yeasty head, assertive bitterness but matched with floral perfumey taste, like having whole hops in my glass, juicy and green, killing my palate.

The second thing I really liked was layout, decoration, and overall feeling of the place.  It really looked and felt like an English pub plunked down in residential Portland.  The walls, counters, and mantles were covered with coasters, beer signs, and other memorabilia.  The wooden benches and tables were tucked around the room into cozy niches.  It wasn’t very busy when we were there for obvious reasons, it being 11:30am on a Sunday, so I can’t comment on the patrons or crowd.  But perhaps best of all, the owner Don Younger was hanging out at the bar, talking with two of the servers, neither of whom were very busy yet.  I didn’t want to barge in on their conversation, or take up too much of their time, but I very much wanted to tell Don how much I loved the feel of the Horse Brass.  In retrospect, I wish I had come up to tell him earlier, because once Allie, Melissa, and I introduced ourselves, they immediately took us in like old friends.  Sit down!  Have a couple drinks with us!  Let us tell you about The Horse Brass!  I would have loved to, and we did stay and chat for a while, we had too big a day ahead of us to just stop for another hour or two.  You can bet though that next time I’m in Portland, I’m heading there and staying all evening.

Belmont Station was next, since it was just a couple blocks away.  It was an awesome beer store, with stuff I had never even seen in City Beer Store, Healthy Spirits, or Bottleworks (near my sister in Seattle).  Of course, there’s some regionalism to all fo these places, and they have some beers that I’m sure Belmont doesn’t have, but Belmont has the advantage of space on all of the other three.  It has two spacious rooms, one with coolers around the walls and room temperature shelves in the middle, and the other with their bar counter.  I loaded up with all kinds of beers I just couldn’t pass up, but for every one of the beers I bought, there were two or three I wanted just as badly.  I couldn’t afford them all, but here are the ones I did get:

• Dogfish Head’s Raison D’Extra (malty, raisiny 18% brown ale)
• Jolly Pumpkin Fuego del Otono (belgian-style amber with chestnuts)
• Bridgeport Hop Czar (imperial IPA from a brewery that makes one of my favorite every day IPAs)
• Mikkeller Beer Geek Breakfast (oatmeal, coffee stout)
• Mikkeller It’s Alive (Brettanomyces beer, a tribute to Orval)
• Hitachino Celebration (wheaty spiced strong ale with orange peel, coriander, nutmeg, cinnamon, and vanilla beans)

The best moment of the trip to Belmont Station came as I rounded the corner and spotted a beer high up on a shelf that I knew was going to win me some major bonus points with Allie.  Grand Teton Brewing Company was one of the first breweries we together, the very first we visited together post-college, and we had a great time there.  On top of that, Allie has a special place in her heart (and her fridge) for fruit beers.  So, when we heard a month or two ago that in honor of their 20^th Anniversary they were making an imperial version of their original huckleberry wheat beer, the XX Mountainberry Double Wheat, we both knew that Allie would be doing anything she could to get her hands on a bottle.  First I emailed the brewery, before mentioning it to her, to ask whether it would be distributed in California.  They emailed back to tell me that unfortunately it would not be.  So, I let her in on it, and after flipping out she called the brewery.  It was either sold out or never available near her, I forget which, in any case, I know she was honestly considering spending a weekend driving to Jackson Hole and back (over 1700 miles and 25+ hours round trip) just to pick up a few bottles.  Luckily her common sense kicked back in.  So, this was all a long way of saying that when I spotted several bottles of it on this shelf, I knew she’d be ecstatic.  She was, in fact, I’d say she even yelped.

Green Dragon Tap Wall

Once we got back on the road, it was off to Green Dragon for more tasting and for lunch.  Much as I loved The Horse Brass, traditional English pub food isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, so we had held off.  Maybe we hit the dragon on the wrong day, or it suffered by comparison, but it was a little bit of a disappointment.  They had 18 taps, one of them nitro, and 2 beers in bottles.  Unfortunately, they had no beers were cask, and of the taps several were either from breweries that don’t have a great track record for tasty beers in my book (Carlsberg, Widmer, Mad River), or were particular beers that I’ve had a million times or had just had (Duchesse de Bourgogne and Ninkasi Mt Hops respectively).  The list:

• Bridgeport ESB
• Captured by Porches Belgian Brown
• Carlsberg Export Lager
• Cascade Lakes 20″ Brown
• Duchesse de Bourgogne Flemish Red
• Hale’s El Jefe Hefeweizen
• Hale’s Special Bitter on Nitro
• Leavenworth Oktoberfest
• Leffe Belgian Blonde
• Mad River Steelhead Double IPA
• Ninkasi Mt. Hops Fresh Hop Ales
• Paulaner Oktoberfest
• Pike IPA
• Roots Stout
• Sierra Nevada Harvest Wet Hop IPA
• Spaten Oktoberfest
• Widmer Oktoberfest
• Redstone Black Raspberry Nectar (Melomel: fruit mead)
• Full Sail Session – bottle
• Iron City Lager – bottle

I thought the Captured by Porches Belgian Brown sounded the best, and so I was disappointed when I asked the bartender about it and was told that though she was a big fan of this brewery in general, this was her least favorite beer from them.  Bummer, but I decided to give it a try anyway.  It wasn’t the deepest or most interesting Belgian I’ve ever had, but it had a some really nice features.  It was light brown with a melon-y smell accompanied by a potent mixed-spice bouquet weighted towards a German-like banana-clove character.

I might have written more but this was when I was distracted by something horrific I witnessed.  Someone, please write in if this really isn’t as bad as it looked, but here’s what happened: a woman and her boyfriend had claimed a table outside on the sidewalk and she came in to order 2 Hale’s El Jefe Hefeweizens.  The bartender started pouring one and it came out looking like a muddy gray milkshake of yeast slurry.  This wasn’t like what you get if you agitate a bottle conditioned beer and pour it in a glass.  This is what you might get if you made a homebrewing yeast starter and drank it straight.  Everyone at the bar had a curled lip and was looking at the bartender like, “Whatever you do, lady, do it fast because if keep holding that in front of me, forcing me to contemplate drinking it, I might lose my lunch.”  Yeah, yeah, I know yeast won’t hurt you, but that doesn’t mean I want a chewy yeast cocktail the color and texture of wet concrete with my pulled pork sliders (which, by the way, were my second choice after hearing they were out of my first choice, the pesto, fig, and goat cheese panini).  The bartender didn’t really want to serve it either, but checked with a guy from the bar (The owner? Another bartender? Who knows!) who said, “There’s nothing wrong with that. Serve it!”  It was truly vile looking, I have no idea why the customers accepted it.

And on a more humorous note, but in the same vein of grossness, was the chip incident.  We had ordered a crab and artichoke dip that came with chips.  We were sitting at the bar and at one point a chip or two had gotten knocked off the plate, over the bartender’s side of the bar, and onto to the floor behind the counter.  As Allie, Melissa, and I were chatting, not really paying attention to the bartender, I noticed the other two of them start cracking up.  “What’s up?” I asked them.  “Did you just see what she did? ” they asked.  “Um, no.  Who?”  “The bartender – she noticed the chips on the floor and as she was walking by to take that other guys order she scooped them up and put them back on our plate.”  “The serving plate???” I asked.  “Yup!”  Ewwww.  Food from the floor?  From behind the bar, where the tenders tread around in a thin, scummy, muddy layer of beer on the ground?  What restaurant employee puts food from the floor back on patron’s plates?  I’m all for the 5-second rule (as long as the floor isn’t particularly foul), but I think that’s it’s an individual choice, and not one I’d force on my customers as a waitress.

Us at the Roloff Farm Pumpkin Patch

The last Portland-area stop was a non-beer stop.  You know, we let one of these creep in every once in a while.  I love my u-pick produce more than just about anyone except my dad (who once suggested, after realizing that I would leave for summer camp the next day, that I take the artichoke he had purchased at a roadside fruit stand to the camp and ask the cook to steam it for me, perhaps with a little melted butter – even as an eleven year old I knew this was batty).  However, I have no need to visit particular roadside farms or stands, whether they’ve appeared on cheesy TLC reality shows or not.  For Melissa, this was a bonus.  For Allie, it was an opportunity for potential embarrassment, should we try to tell the Roloffs that she sometimes watches their show, so she was against it.  But, Melissa and I dragged her off to Roloff Farms, owned by the Roloff Family, the stars of “Little People, Big World.”  She got into the spirit though, when Melissa and I had each picked our pumpkins and told her she needed to get one of her own.  She trudged off and staggered back under the weight of the biggest pumpkin in the yard.  Before the visit was up, we had been surprised to see all of the Roloffs actually on the farm, and Melissa had even introduced herself to Amy and told her she enjoyed the show.

By then, I was all worn out (funny how a weekend of nothing but sleeping, drinking, and driving [not in that order] will still do that to you).  I slept the rest of the way back.  I really should go into describing Harmon’s, a Tacoma brewpub we went to for dinner, but it’s quarter till 1:00am now and I’ve got about 7 hours of driving ahead of me tomorrow, so that will have to be for another day.

Excited about cider

As I mentioned in my post about NCHF, I have a massive cider and cyser project underway.  For those who don’t know, cyser is apple-mead, basically a cross between cider and honeywine.  The inspiration for this project is my friend Melissa who loves cider and used to hate beer.  For a long time, this was actually quite useful, since Melissa would cart me and my sister around to all kinds of breweries without complaining about being the designated driver.  When we drove from Jackson Hole to Portland to San Francisco visiting 11 microbreweries along the way, it was Melissa who took most of the driving shifts.  As a thank you for this kindness, without which The Thirsty Hopster might never have taken off, I wanted to brew her a cider.  When I mentioned this to her, the response was a slightly wary, “That’s nice, but I hope you know I am never pressing 160 lbs of apples for you.”  My thoughts on this are, “We’re still even because I am never driving you and your sister across six states in four days. And as long as we’re both ok with these limits on our friendship, I think we’re still good.”

As I started looking into how to do this cider-making, I quickly realized there was an easy way (let plain apple juice stand at room temperature to start fermenting) and a hard way (pick apples, grind apples, press apples, split juice into many batches, add all manner of yeasts and additives, let stand at room temperature to start fermenting).  Why I felt the need to do this the hard way I’m not entirely sure, but I think it has to do with the fact that lately I’ve really felt this homesteading urge.  This happens whenever I go camping.  I start to have these grandiose dreams of living off the land, and rarely stop to realize that without my CamelBak and REI tent and North Face jackets and all manner of technical equipment, much less my local homebrew shop, I’d be toast.  So, I take on projects like this one at a time to get a taste of this do-it-yourself Oregon-trail-ish pioneer ethos, without all the mosquitoes and dysentery and so forth.

The apples, waiting to be pressed

I used my trip to Dobbins in the Sierra foothills for NCHF as an excuse to pick up apples in the Apple Hill area near Placerville.  Anyone from Placerville will point out right away that the two locations, Dobbins and Apple Hill, are nowhere near each other.  And they’d be right, but they’d have forgotten that to ignorant city folk like myself without a car, it’s all the big “East country.”  So, I had a beautiful, somewhat hangover-sullied, 2.5 hour drive south from Dobbins to Placerville following NCHF.  The best part was definitely CA-49 between Auburn and Placerville, which was absolutely gorgeous.  If I ever find myself the means to live without working, or to get serious about living off fallen acorns (Gail – I’m counting on you for that acorn-cake recipe), this is where I will move to.

When I got to Apple Hill, I encountered a few problems I hadn’t really anticipated.  First, it was Golden Delicious season, and Golden Delicious apples make pretty bland, overly-sweet cider.  The whole idea behind making cider from the apples themselves instead of store-bought or farmers market-bought juice was to use the proper blend of sweet, tart, tannic, and aromatic apples instead of making a single varietal cider.  In the end, I found what I needed, but it involved trips to about 12 different growers, and buying 160 pounds of apples of 5 varieties from about 5 different places.  The final apple tally was:

• 60 lbs of McIntosh (somewhat tart, very aromatic) from Boa Vista Orchards
• 40 lbs of Gravensteins (sweet) from a roadside stand in Sebastopol two weeks ago
• 40 lbs of Mutsu (very tart) from Larsen Apple Barn
• 10 lbs of Arkansas Black from (sweet and aromatic) from Bolster’s Hilltop Ranch (picked by me!)
• 10 lbs of Greenings (very tart) from Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco

Arkansas Black and Greenings apples

I also got 7 gallons of fresh-pressed un-pasteurized Golden Delicious juice from Bolster’s and Boa Vista.  I figured that if my mix above leaned too heavily to the tart side, I could blend this in.  Though in retrospect I’m glad I got the juice, since I have it in three different splits fermenting right now, it was a logistical nightmare to get home.  Without refrigeration, that stuff starts to ferment right away.  I was in a car crossing sunny central California in summer, with no room for a cooler since there were apples everywhere, and the juice would have required 2 or 3 coolers anyway.  I did my best to pack it in the shade behind the front seats and then turned on the AC full blast for the ride home.  It worked, but driving 2.5 hours home in that ice-box was a challenge to say the least.  I had my sleeves pulled over my numb fingers and my sweatshirt hood up for warmth.  As I huddled over my stewring wheel shivering the other drivers must have thought I was a lunatic.  Squeezing all that juice into our fridge, already overladen with beer, was another piece of logistics I hadn’t anticipated, but I threw out some leftovers and made it work.

The apple grinder (left) and press (right)

The next day was cider making day!  I picked up my joint grinder and press from The Oak Barrel in Berkeley.  It looked unwieldy and as the Bob from the store started to explain how many pounds of apples two people could press in an hour, I started to wonder what I had been thinking to attempt this on my own.  Even getting it out of the trunk back at my place was a challenge.  Luckily, as a former rugby player, I’m a bit tougher than I look, and with a little elbow grease the press was unloaded and reassembled.

The lead up to the pressing was maddening.  All I wanted to do was turn 160 lbs of apples into juice, how hard could that be, right?  Between driving to pick up the press, bringing it to my place and unloading it, returning the Zipcar, hauling all my apples down stairs from the apartment to the backyard, and cleaning and sanitizing equipment, it was 3:00pm before I got down to the actual pressing.  This was the part I had worried about all day, but it was actually quite simple.  Here’s the process:

• Go through a box of apples and cut each apple in half.  Also cut off any brown spots.  As you cut the apples, throw them in a tub of water to rinse them off.
• Turn on the grinder’s motor, take a handful of apple halves, and throw them in.  The mushy pulp will fall out the other end into a mesh bag.
• When the bag is full, place it in a slatted wooden cage under the screw press and place a wooden plate on top.
• Start turning the screw press down and eventually it will hit the wooden plate and start compressing the apples.  The press breaks the walls of the apple cells to release all of their juices and enzymes, which will flow out of the bag and cage and into a bucket placed under the end of the press.
• When the bucket gets full, empty it into carboys.  That’s it! Ta-da!

It took me about 3.5 hours to go through all of my apples.  I had thought it would take much longer, but the grinding and pressing went really fast.  The most time consuming part was slicing and trimming the apples.  The ones I bought pre-picked and fresh were pretty good, but the ones that I hand picked and the ones that had sat around for two weeks needed more attention.  Generally, apples are supposed to sit (“to sweat”, technically) for a short while after being picked but before being juiced, to let them soften and sweeten up a bit.  However, two weeks might have been pushing it.

In the end, I got about 8 gallons of juice out of those 160 lbs.  It’s not the pressing efficiency I would have liked – I’ve heard that it generally takes only 14 to 15 lbs of apples to make a gallon of juice, but it took me 20 lbs.  However, considering that it was my first time and that I didn’t have a second pair of hands, I don’t think that was too bad.

My friend Brian Cooper of the Mad Zymurgists had agreed to go in on the apples and press with me, and he came by right as I was finishing up to pick up his 4 gallons of juice.  He’s making a batch of strong cyser with blended yeasts out of his share.

The splits!

As for me, I had 4 gallons left of the Thirsty Hopster special blend juice and 7 gallons left of plain Golden Delicious juice and decided it was time for some experimenting.  I’ve got 10 batches going: one big (5 gallon), 2 small (1 gallon), and 7 tiny (1/2 gallon).  The half gallon batches were the result of my unproductive search for gallon jugs.  I’ve heard that the best place to find them is just to buy a gallon of apple juice at Trader Joe’s and then save the jug.  However, when I went to a Trader Joe’s in SF, the only apple juice in glass jars was quart size and all the gallon servings of apple juice were packaged in plastic jugs.  In the end, I found glass jugs at Brewcraft, my local homebrew store, but by then I had already given up and bought ½ gallon mason jars, figuring they were the best I could do.  I modified the lids of these jars to fit an airlock by drilling a hole in them, sticking in a rubber plug with an airlock, and then sealing the area around the plug with wax.

Here’s what’s fermenting away:

TH = Self-pressed blended juice

GD = Pre-pressed Golden Delicious juice

1. 0.5 gallons TH juice with Lalvin D-47 (White wine yeast)
2. 0.5 gallons TH juice with Lalvin D-47 (White wine yeast) & oak chips
3. 0.5 gallons TH juice with WLP775 (English cider yeast)
4. 0.5 gallons TH juice with WLP775 (English cider yeast) & oak chips
5. 0.5 gallons TH juice with WLP720 (Sweet mead/wine yeast) & tropical flower honey
6. 0.5 gallons TH juice with WLP720 (Sweet mead/wine yeast), wildflower honey, & oak chips
7. 0.5 gallons TH juice spontaneously fermenting (no added yeast)
   • [There was going to be an oaked version of this one but there was a hole in the jar that I didn't notice until filling my jars so I ran out of jars and lost a little juice]
8. 1.0 gallons GD juice with sour cherries and Lalvin D-47 (White wine yeast)
9. 1.0 gallons GD juice with spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, allspice) and Lalvin D-47 (White wine yeast)
   • [There was going to be a ginger version of the Golden Delicious but I forgot to go buy fresh ginger so that didn't end up happening]
10. 5.0 gallons GD juice spontaneously fermenting (no added yeast)

So, there you have it!  It will be a while before I know how this massive experiment turns out, but I will post the results here when they are ready.  In fact, we will probably have to have a cider tasting as part of the Thirsty Hopster tasting series one of these next few months.

Cheers!

Rolling in the green: Hop season has arrived!

I originally started drinking craft beer because it just plain tasted better. It still does, but now there are other reasons to drink craft beer that are at least as important to me. I like the do-it-yourself aesthetic of the beers, preserving a traditional craft, lest all beermaking become impersonal and mechanized, and no one remembers why or how certain steps are important to the final product. Sure, the brewing of many craft beers is mechanized, especially at the bigger breweries, but the brewers there have an understanding of the process from end-to-end and a tasty final product (rather than simply profits) as their end goal. This is stark compared to the giant macro-breweries where many employees conduct a single task in conveyor-belt-like fashion, without ever understanding how it fits into the big picture. It reminds me of the great Cathedrals in Europe that could likely never be replicated today because the craftsmanship that went into them died out, and even if a sufficient number skilled craftsmen could be found, no one would be willing to fund such a project today. Luckily, in beer, the craft is more alive than ever, and there’s a growing number of consumers willing to pay for a craft beer. The best of all, craft beer (most of it at least) is still many times more affordable than, say, high quality wine, keeping it within just about anyone’s budget for at least an occasional treat, if not a daily staple.

I also like the way many craft brewers shows greater respect to people (their employees and their customers) and the environment than the macrobrewers. Sierra Nevada uses fuel cells for electric power and heat, runs heat and C02 recovery systems, and is proactive about maximizing water and energy conservation through efficiency. New Belgium is 100% wind-powered, incorcoporated green design elements in the brewery building, and treats their wastewater. Several smaller breweries such as Wolaver’s and Eel River are organic. And the hops shortage has prompted an increasing number of breweries are experimenting with self-production, kick-starting an appreciation for local hops that mirrors the local produce movement that began in farmers markets years ago. By contrast, Budweiser’s claim to greenness is that it uses 8% renewable energy (compared to NB’s 100%), and that they recycle aluminum. That’s about it.

Me and my brother Dan cutting down hop bines

Yesterday was a celebration of all of these elements I love about craft beer: great taste, great cultural tradition and craftsmanship, and great use of local eco-friendly ingredients. This was all courtesy of Brian Hunt of Moonlight Brewing, a one-man operation based in Sonoma County, that has achieved cult-like status for churning out one astoundingly well crafted beer after with its improbably small employee count. Yesterday was the first of two days devoted to picking his ¼ acre of hops, which will go into a fresh hop beer that will be ready some time over the next several weeks. Don’t ask me what kind of fresh hop beer, because not only do I not know, but as of yesterday even Brian didn’t know. He said he’d have to smell the crop we picked, think about it, and figure out what he wanted to make. It is exactly this kind of attitude, a respect for one’s ingredients that bases the final product on what the ingredients are suited for, rather than forcing them to fit some preconceived plan, that I love about craft beer production. It’s a world away from our current notions flying in raspberries from Chile in December, instead of focusing on making treats from fresh and local winter crops.

Cutting the bines

We started by cutting down the vines, excuse me, the “bines”, from the wires on which they were trained. This was the first thing I learned yesterday: the difference between a vine and a bine. Grapes grow on true vines, which climb using tendrils or suckers, and become hard and woody. Hops grow on bines, which climbs growing its shoots in a helix around a support and remain tender, green, and plant-like instead of woody. We made my brother do much of the cutting work, both because he’s an aspiring hop grower himself, and because he’s young and hearty. : ) I gave this job a try though, and cut down about half of the first row, of the four rows we harvested yesterday. Our tool was a bit makeshift (an exacto-knife duct taped to the basket of an apple picker), but it worked. This is another one of my favorite features of craft production: if the right tool isn’t handy, improvise! MacGuyver would be awfully proud. It’s one way to get around the fact that the benefits to scale are so great that while it used to be that self-production was the economical choice, today it’s an unavoidable fact that most things can be obtained most economically from Wal-Mart, McDonalds, or Budweiser. The cost of the equipment and supplies for hand-sewn, hand-grilled, and hand-brewed items ensures that today, a do-it-yourself lifestyle costs more, not less, than having others do it for you. At least homebrewers generally embrace the idea of tinkering, recycling, and jury-rigging such that almost anything tool be constructed or mimicked with a little improvisation instead of purchasing a shiny, new, expensive made-for-one-purpose only device.

The crew, picking the hops from the bines

Next, we set the bines in a pile under a sunshade, sat ourselves down in some chairs, and started picking. The shade was key, not just for protecting the hops from drying out in the sun, but also for our own protection. It got up to just about 100F yesterday, and sitting in that glare for hours would have been tough without any shelter. The hop picking circle was a lot of fun, and really brought out the communal aspect of agriculture and hop production. As Mike, who was sitting next to me, mentioned, it reminded him of an actual harvest process from real agricultural times, in which the family and neighbors would gather round together, work in concert, and bond over the work, telling stories and teaching the process to the kids. Of course, the one aspect that was missing was the back-breakingness of that work. We had only about half the hops on a ¼ acre of land to harvest, or as Brian put it into context when I asked him what recipes he would make, “Recipes? Plural? Haha, no, this will yield one 14 barrel batch of beer.” But still, I had to agree with Mike. It reminded me of the barn raising scene in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (a staple of visits to my grandmother’s house as a kid), minus all the color coordinated outfits, singing, and dancing, of course. Over the course of the morning, we picked Cascades, Chinooks, and a Canadian Red Vines, which we separated into buckets and placed in Brian’s refrigerated room, which was a welcome temporary respite from the heat.

The freshest Death ever

We also savored Moonlight beers straight out of the tanks. Death and Taxes was the first Moonlight beer I ever tasted, and it has remained my favorite, across the two years I’ve lived in SF and through yesterday. It’s a black lager with a rich, balanced blend of dark flavors that never fails to surprise me with its boldness and simplicity. The aroma is full of coffee, but the taste follows through with a rich smokiness. Tim, another of the hop picking guests, mentioned that as a former smoker, the trace of tobacco flavor in the D&T keeps him from ever wanting a cigarette. The tan head on the beer is dense and long lasting, and even though the body of the beer is light, it is full of crisp, dry flavor. This is a lager I can (and do!) love, and a session beer (4.2% ABV and light bodied) that doesn’t compromise flavor. If I had had this beer in England at the GBBF, I wouldn’t have come home lamenting low ABV beers. I can’t quite convey in words just how rich and thick the flavor is in contrast to the light body. It is truly a feat.

We sat around in the early afternoon, after the last of the hops had been picked, sampling beers fromBrian’s stash that he brought out disguised with paper wrappers to make us guess what they were or what was in them. Since many were oddball beers that he had picked up in his travels (kelp beer, gooseberry beer, heather beer, etc.), we were often way off. But as the selection moved closer to home, the group was surprisingly accurate and quick. Death and Taxes from a bomber (it is usually only available on tap, so he thought it might throw people off) fooled almost no one, and Adair needed just one sip, and Tim just a smell, from one of the newly available bottles of Pliny the Elder to guess what it was.

Gravensteins

On the way home, I made my brother Dan put off the nap he was craving for just another half hour so we could take a detour to Sebastopol for Gravenstein apples. I’ve been dying to make cider for months, and now that it is apple season the time feels right. I got a giant box that by my best guess is about two bushels (or eight pecks). Never mind that I only got online to try to figure out the requirements of cider making after I had all these apples. Problem number one: I need an apple press. Problem number two: you need a blend of sweet, tart, and bitter (bittersweet or bittersharp) apples to make the best cider. So, I’m going to hold onto these for a couple weeks, eat some of them, and pick up a whole bunch more when I head out to Dobbins for NCHF. That’s apple country and I figure that I can get a whole variety of apples out there of the types I need, and that I can get them to press them for me, so that I can just bring home the juice. Problem number three? All this cider isn’t going to be ready to drink for months. But that’s ok, I can wait. And having two weeks until I pick up the rest of my apples is giving me a bunch of new ideas. I think I’ll also make cyser, which is apple mead, and that I’ll split my batches of cider into several fermentation vessels so that I can make some sweet, some dry, etc.

FEmalt Enthusiasts: Adventures in homebrewing

Gail and I have been planning to homebrew together for months, but with both of our busy schedules, it just wasn’t possible… until yesterday! Now that I’ve got a little extra time on my hands and Gail was able to take a half-day off work, we resolved to get down to some serious business.

The original inspiration for this plan was the Queen of Beer competition, open only to female homebrewers. Since we’re pretty much the only female homebrewers we know in this area, and since we’re both beginners at this, we decided to band together. Now of course, neither of us has any lack of enthusiasm for big, fancy beers, so we picked an odd concept (to remain a surprise until the beer is ready), and then started modifying the heck out of our original, modest recipe. Suggestions started flying around fast: “What if we throw honey in it?” Or, “Why don’t we just put a pinch of special spice in at the end?” Or, “Oooh, let’s just throw some Brett into it and hold it for a year. No, I know, we’ll take it to my cousin’s farm and let it sit in the open and spontaneously ferment!” Needless to say, I think our enthusiasm outran our talent at this stage in the game. We reigned ourselves in a bit and settled on a formula that is still pretty interesting and unusual, and ought to have been completely manageable…

Yet, as I’ve found every time I’ve brewed: What can go wrong, will go wrong. I had made a few adjustments to my cache of equipment, trading up to a carboy from a bucket, and buying the colander I so desperately needed next time. I even had the foresight to test my outside camp stove to make sure I had gas left (plenty) and to make sure the burner was working (just fine). What we didn’t count on, however, was that over the course of the day, the pressure in the gas line from the propane tank to the stove would go lower and lower due to a leak somewhere in the line. This was probably highly dangerous, but at the time, we mostly thought it was highly annoying since our wort took forever to reach boiling again after we added our extract. We never did get it just right, but we’ll just have to wait and see how it affects the beer.

Still, I’m proud of us. I got to practice some new techniques (e.g., making a yeast starter) and picked up a lot of science from Gail, who knows her brewing chemistry back and forth. And of course, we didn’t take it all too seriously, and went out to Toronado afterwards to reward ourselves with a beer that didn’t require 10.5 hours of pacing my kitchen.

I’m going to let the picture captions tell most of the story since I was pretty diligent about documenting the process this time. All times listed below are approximate, to the best of my memory from yesterday.

11:00am Getting ready to make the yeast starter

11:15am The malt preparation for the starter a minute or two before it foamed all over the stove

11:40am The pivotal moment -- Getting ready to pitch in the yeast

12:30pm We've got fermenting action! Look at the bubble of plastic wrap on top of the jar!

2:15pm For the first of many times yesterday, Gail checks to see if the water is hot enough yet. Nope, not yet!

2:30pm The water finally reached 158 F and we started steeping our specialty grains

2:30pm We bundle up our steeping grains so they retain their heat

2:45pm During the steep, we weigh out our malt. We had half a pound more than we needed, due to one of our crafty substitutions, so we use my bathroom scale in a way its manufacturers probably never intended

3:00pm While the grain is steeping, we also measure and mark off 1-gallon marks on my carboy

3:15pm When the grain is done steeping, we pour off the wort and Gail sparges (rinses more sugar off) the spent grains

4:00pm Having brought the wort to a boil, we add in our malt extract. The stove must have blown out 5 times while getting the wort to boil. Little did we know this was only the beginning...

4:30pm Still not boiling. We're not really worried yet. But we should be...

5:00pm Still not boiling. We decide the problem is the shelter and so we add some modifications to better hide the stove from the wind

5:30pm Still not boiling. When in doubt, we go with plan B: Drink beer.

8:00pm There are no pictures from hour of "the boil" (and I use that term VERY loosely) because Gail went home in deperation to find what she describes as 'a small torch for melting wax off cross-country skis' that we may be able to heat the sides of the pot with to encourage it to boil harder. By the time she finds parking on her way back, the boil is over. This was one of the saddest moments.

11:00pm The wort needed 3 hours to chill down to 68 F, so that we could siphon it into the carboy and pitch in our yeast starter. This is what is left over after the siphoning. The malt sock contains our secret ingredient!

11:00pm The wort, fresh out of the kettle and into the carboy

11:10pm The wort, after being topped up to 5 gallons

11:30pm All done! The yeast has been pitched and the carboy plugged. There was a moment of panic during the carboy sealing. The stopper I bought at Brewcraft mysteriously disappeared at some point during our brewing marathon and Gail had driven home (again!) to get hers. When I tried to fit it in the carboy though, it kept popping out. I had a moment of "All these hours and the beer is going to go bad because we can't seal it off?!?!?!" Then google came to my rescue. Apparently all I needed to do was dry the plug and the carboy so they wouldn't be slippery. Phew. Disaster averted.

11:40pm The brewers celebrate with a well earned beer at Toronado

+1 Day 9:30am It's fermenting! We've got bubbles racing through our blowoff tube. That's something at least!

A few spots left at the Belgian fusion tasting!

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to update you all on the Belgian Fusion tasting I am organizing at The Trappist this Sunday, August 24th, from noon to 2pm.

There are a few spots left! So, if you want to come but thought you had missed your chance to get tickets, you’re in luck!  Didn’t win those free Outside Lands passes on the radio?  Come to beer tasting!  Sticking around town this weekend because you’re headed away next weekend for Labor Day?  Come to the beer tasting!  Curious about what “Belgian fusion” even means?  Come to the beer tasting!

The tasting will be at The Trappist, in Oakland.  Their address is 460 8th Street, Oakland, CA.  Their phone number is (510) 238-8900.  They are between Broadway and Washington Streets, and a very short walk (just 4 short blocks down Broadway) from the 12th Street Oakland City Center BART Station.

The tasting is $25 and includes five tastes of a series of Belgian fusion beers, as well as a glass of your choice from The Trappist’s extensive draft list, which is loaded with some special Belgian beers, as well as a few exceptional American ones.  The full details on the beers that will be served are available in my original post about the tasting.

To buy a ticket, email me (thethirstyhopster@gmail.com)! I will email you back ASAP to let you know whether there is still space for you on the list.  If so, you may then pay for your ticket to confirm your spot.  Tickets may be paid for via check or PayPal.

See you there!

-JJ