Sour Company

by Damon on July 24, 2009

So I’m brewing my first ever sour beer.

It’s not a copy of any particular sour beer that I’ve had, which means I only screw it up if I don’t like it.  I’m using the cherry nut-brown I made last summer as a base and Wyeast’s seasonal Roeselare blend of beasties as my grand priests of funk.

I remarked at the time that the cherry nut-brown would work well as a sour beer. It being cherry season and one of the plastic buckets I use for primary fermentation starting to wear out, I decided that now was definitely the time to give it a try.

As I started my boil, some friends who share my love of food and drink dropped by. We talked about our favourite subject and pretty soon were thoroughly salivating. They quickly ran home to pick up a few goodies and the party started.

With the wort boiling in the background we laid out our entirely impromptu and home-made spread:

I’ve remarked on porter’s affinity with duck-breast prosciutto before and rye bread slips in nicely between those two.

The unique mix of musty goat-milk flavours and yoghurt sourness from the labneh balanced well with the other treats and gave a kind of funky milk-stout effect to the porter.

The revelation was chutney with duck-breast prosciutto. The powerfully sweet and spicy chutneys worked really well with the concentrated game flavours of the duck. Porter is not the ideal complement to chutney, but the chutney, duck and porter combination wasn’t bad.

Great company, great food, great drink: an excellent way to make a 3 hour boil evaporate into the warm summer evening.

Chutney is now on the menu and with a significant peach and plum crop on the way expect to see some ideas here soon.

The beer is now safely in the fermenter while my post-brew mess remains. Before I start cleaning up, I have a bunch question for anyone who has used any of Wyeasts bacteria and yeast blends to ferment a fruit beer.

If I remember correctly, Cantillion beers spend their entire lives in one fermenter. Isn’t this a recipe for the yeast autolysis? or does the bacteria inhibit autolysis in some way?

Fruit normally gets added to 6-month old beer. I presume this is because they can only make these beers in the colder months and only get fruit in the hotter months. Does the timing of fruit additions affect the final beer?

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Dungeness Crab Linguine Recipe

by Damon on June 8, 2009

Dungeness Crab

Dungeness Crab

Dungeness crab season goes from April to July. You can catch crab any time of the year, but if, like me, you only go after crab when they are spawning in shallow waters, then crab season is April to July.

Waiting for the crabs to move to shallow waters means crabbing involves wading in shallow waters looking to scoop up any legal-sized crab. It’s a lot more enjoyable when compared to periodically checking traps dropped in deep water.

Crab season may last up to 4 months, but, most of the time, you’re not going to find more than a couple of legal-size crabs.

This past weekend was not most of the time. After 2 days of catching my limit, throwing back tons of otherwise legal crab, I found myself with a lot of crab that needed to be eaten soon. Time to make something special.

Dungeness Crab Linguine

Just saying it makes my mouth water, mmm Dungeness crab linguine. I don’t measure when I cook so all quantities are rough estimates

Ingredients

  • 2 Dungeness Crabs
  • 1 tsp Fennel Seed
  • 1 tsp Salt
  • 1/2 tsp Paprika
  • 1 pinch Ground Chili Pepper (or anything else that adds a tiny bit of heat)
  • 1 small bunch of Chive (or shalott or onion)
  • 1 tsp Fresh Thyme
  • 3 cloves Garlic (or more if you’re like me)
  • Olive Oil
  • 375 mg Linguine

Instructions

  1. Crush or grind fennel seed.
  2. Pre-heat olive oil and add fennel seed.
  3. After about a minute, add crab meat, salt, paprika, chili pepper and enough oil to lightly coat all of the ingredients.
  4. Just before the pasta is ready, add thyme, chive and garlic. Cook until you start to smell the garlic (30 sec to 1 min) and remove from heat.
  5. Serve over pasta.

Beer Pairing Recommendations

Dungeness crab goes well with herbs and citrus fruit so British and American IPA are both on the menu.

Wheat beers go with pretty much any food, but anise that sometimes gets added to Belgian Wit beers will get you bonus points with the licorice-flavoured fennel seed.

Strong Belgian Amber beers will also do a nice job balancing all the strong flavours in the recipe. The extra sweetness in a strong beer is a nice counterpoint to a recipe that otherwise lacks sugar.

On this particular day, I had a home-brewed ESB. The ESB was less hoppy than typical American ESBs, but was more caramelised than British ESBs. It was quite nice, if not sublime. The caramelisation wasn’t ideal, but the malt sweetness and hop aroma and bitterness blended nicely.

Photo Credit: Will Scullin

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Umami Stout

by Damon on April 11, 2009

I used to live in Japan. Whenever I ate out with a group of Japanese friends, without fail, someone would always tell me about how Japanese cuisine was more complex because Japanese chefs understood umami.

So what is Umami?

It’s sometimes called the 5th taste. It was first identified in 1908 by Ikeda Kikunae (don’t you just love Wikipedia). It wasn’t acknowledged by Western science until later and continues to be ignored by school science text-book writers, but, like salt, sweet, bitter, and sour, it has its own taste receptors on the tongue.

The sensation that is umami is triggered by glutamate. Glutamate is found in some types of fish, seaweed, and cheese and is also the active ingredient in MSG.

Don’t stop reading.

Some people claim to react badly to MSG, but studies testing MSG against a placebo don’t show any statistically significant effect. Furthermore, glutamate occurs naturally in a lot of foods.

Designing Umami Beer

The love for MSG stops here. My beer may be bent, but it’s natural.

For inspiration I looked to Japanese food. Umami in Japanese food usually comes from the ubiquitous dashi which translates roughly as bouillon.

Recipes for dashi vary. Actually restaurants can make their name by their dashi. But typically dashi consists of soy sauce, konbu (dried kelp), katsuo-boshi (dried flaked tuna), iriko (some tiny dried fish), niboshi (dried sardines), and shitake mushroom alone or in combination. All of these ingredients are sources of glutamate, but the largest concentration of glutamate is found in konbu.

Konbu also does well when boiled for extended periods of time. If you’ve had shabu-shabu, that brown leathery square in the boiling water is konbu. If you haven’t had shabu-shabu, go try some. Now.

So konbu does well in a long boil. One piece of the puzzle.

Now what kind of beer to use as a base for my umami beer? I’m so great at building suspense when I’ve given everything away in the title.

Stout. And for a couple of reasons.

First, stout goes well with oysters. And something about the smell of the sea joins oysters and kelp in my mind more than other sea foods.

Second, the bitter roast flavours of a stout are of about the same intensity as konbu-dashi. I would guess that the hops in an IPA would beat up on the kelp and leave it for dead in a pile of cast-aside dry hops while the kelp would strangle a milder pale ale.

Brewing the Umami Beer and the Control

On brew day I made an extra large mash and created a normal stout with the extra wort. I use two large pots to get full volume rather than a single large brew kettle, so I added kelp into one, distributed the hops evenly between the two, and then used wort from the kelp-free pot to top off the main fermenter.

Since I was making full batch with an experimental ingredient I decided to go easy on the kelp in the boil and add more at bottling if warranted. I ended up boiling 2 strips of kelp in the wort and boiled another three strips creating a kelp tea which was added at bottling.

Next time I make a beer with dry ingredients that need long boils I’m going make a tea and add them at bottling. Tasting as I blended allowed me to get a perfect flavour balance.

Head to Head Tasting: Umami vs Control

Appearance: Both beers have the same colour. The head on the Umami Stout is a little smaller than the regular stout, but I didn’t measure my priming sugar carefully enough to say this is significant.

Aroma: Roast and chocolate aromas dominate both beers. The control stout seems to have more aroma than the Umami Stout. This comes as a bit of a surprise since umami is known to enhance aromas. I guess just not the aroma of stout.

Flavour: This is where the kelp leaves its mark. The control stout has a very sweet, rich flavour punctuated by coffee notes. The Umami Stout has more bitterness and a wonderful balance across the tongue. A spritzy feeling similar to carbonation from soda pop dances before everything fades into an extended bitterness.

Questions and Notes for Future Umami Beers

Umami didn’t enhance the aroma from roast malt, but it is supposed to enhance some aromas. What will umami do for hop aroma?

The Umami Stout is definitely noticably more bitter than the control stout. Does the extra bitterness come from bitterness in the kelp? or is it the umami enhancing the bitterness already present from the hops?

I think these questions point to trying an Umami IPA next. I happen to have an IPA ready for bottling right now so it shouldn’t be too long before I can find out how that works out.

Umami Stout Recipe

Grains

Weight (lbs) Weight (kgs) Grain
10 lbs 4.54 kgs 2-Row
1 lbs 0.45 kgs Roast Barley
1 lbs 0.45 kgs Barley Flakes

Hops and Adjuncts

Weight (oz) Weight (g) Ingredient Time
1 oz 28 g Zeus/Columbus whole 90 min
2 strips Dried Kelp (Konbu) 90 min
0.5 oz 14 g Cascade finish
3 strips Dried Kelp Tea after secondary

Yeast

Wyeast 1187: Ringwood harvested from lees

Brewing Schedule

Brewed: 03/07/2009

Racked: 03/14/2009

Bottled: 03/24/2009

Water

No water adjustments to local Pilsen-like water.

Brewing Stats

Stage Time / Temp
Mash In Temperature 149°F 65°C
Mash In Time 75 mins
Mash-Out Teperature 172°F 78°C
Mash-Out Time 20 mins
Sparge Time 80 mins
Boil Time 90 mins

OG: 1.052

IBU: approx. 20

Ferment Temp: 72°F 22°C

FG: 1.014

ABV: 4.5%

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Get Your Roast On

by Damon on March 26, 2009

In order to learn how to control malt aroma in my beers, I brew several similar beers in a row and compare mash temperatures and recipes to try and figure out how to formulate recipes with malt aroma in mind.

There were few months where I was concerned about the lack of malt aroma in my beers. I started paying more attention to aroma in my beers and in commercial beers.

After sampling a number of commercial examples, I realised that malt aroma is the exception rather than the rule. But I’d still rather my beers be the exception when I choose.

I also noticed that I get accustomed to aromas very quickly and need to give myself some time between tastes to fully appreciate the aroma.

Roast Aroma in Stout

I don’t write about ordinary beers because there are plenty ordinary recipes on the web.

Last month, I brewed two stouts and a porter. On their own they are very ordinary, but plenty good. Comparing the aromas, however, is very interesting.

The two stouts are interesting because one has a pleasantly strong roast aroma, while the other is bland.

The first stout used 0.83% roast malt mashed in at °149 F (°65 C) and has a very strong roast malt aroma.

The second stout used 0.55% roast malt mashed-in at °150 F (°66 C) and doesn’t have nearly as much aroma.

I believe the Roast Malt I use is from Pauls Malt, but I have to check with the local retailer to be sure.

Honey Malt Aroma

The Porter was a platform for learning what Gambrinus Honey Malt brings to a beer. I used 0.82% Honey Malt in the porter mashed in at a high °156 F (°69 C) and had almost too much Honey Malt flavour, but not nearly enough aroma.

I was led to believe that Honey Malt was very aromatic, so maybe the problem was with my high mash temperature.

If you’ve used either Gambrinus Honey Malt or Pauls Roast Malt, I’d love to hear how the aroma turned out and what mash temperature you used.

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Sanitation Practices

by Damon on February 28, 2009

I don’t want to understate the importance of sanitation. If you’re an all-grain brewer like myself, every batch doesn’t just represent 6 gallons of beer (or however much you make at a time), but it also represents at least 6 hours of time.

I think of sanitation as being in two categories: pre-boil and post-boil.

Equipment that is used pre-boil (and during the boil) doesn’t need to be thoroughly sanitised; equipment that is used post-boil does.

If I need to stir my finishing hops and haven’t sanitised the big spoon that I use, I use it as is unless it’s obviously dirty. But that same spoon gets cleaned and thoroughly sanitised before I use it to aerate.

Sometimes I sanitise my pre-boil equipment, but mostly I try to make sure it stays clean and let the boil handle any small left-overs.

Post-boil is a different story. If you are like myself and like to minimise work, then focus on post-boil sanitation because that is where some flock of bacteria is going to mess up your hard work.

For more on sanitation, check out this month’s homebrew sanitation pracitices Fermentation Friday.

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Burnt Orange Tripel

by Damon on February 11, 2009

This, my second beer using burnt orange, is a cross between a tripel and a winter ale.

I wanted the spicing of a winter ale with the phenol of a tripel to serve as a base for the flavours of burnt orange.

Burnt orange gives beer a nice copper-orange colour so I made a very pale beer to let the colours from the oranges dominate.

Tasting the Tripel

The beer pours with a nice thick head that quickly dissipates. The colour is exactly what I expected, but it is one of the haziest beers I’ve ever made. I think haze might be a necessary sacrifice if you’re going to add burnt orange to the secondary.

The tame aroma is limited to burnt orange. Pleasant, but a little too weak.

The burnt orange flavour is a lot milder than in the previous small batch. It’s doesn’t assert itself as much in this stronger beer, but it is still evident. When I tasted it at bottling, mace really dominated. It seems to have mellowed now to the point where it’s evident but not out of balance.

There’s very little evidence of phenol. Normally, I don’t like phenolic beer so I’m a little surprised that even when I try to get it I can’t. I’m a little disappointed too because I thought it would replace the citrus sourness that is lost when burning the oranges.

While the head has already fallen, the high level of carbonation really brightens the beer making it seem refreshing in spite of the high alcohol.

Burnt Orange Tripel Recipe

Grains

Weight (lbs) Weight (kgs) Grain
14.5 lbs 6.58 kgs Pilsner Malt
1 lbs 0.45 kgs Barley Flakes
0.5 lbs 0.23 kgs Biscuit

Hops and Adjuncts

Weight (oz) Weight (g) Ingredient Time
1 oz 28 g Perle 5.7%, whole 90 min
0.89 oz 25 g Coriander finish
0.25 oz 7 g Mace finish
8 oranges Burnt Valencia Oranges secondary
2 lemons Burnt Lemons secondary

Yeast

Wyeast 1388: Belgian Strong Ale harvested from lees

Brewing Schedule

Brewed: 01/03/2009
Racked: 01/09/2009
Added 1st Half Fruit:  01/09/2009
Added 2nd Half Fruit:  01/16/2009
Bottled: 01/24/2009

Water

No water adjustments to local Pilsen-like water.

Brewing Stats

Stage Time / Temp
Mash In Temperature 153°F 67°C
Mash In Time 80 mins
Mash-Out Teperature 172°F 78°C
Mash-Out Time 20 mins
Sparge Time 80 mins
Boil Time 90 mins

OG: 1.070
IBU: approx. 20
Ferment Temp: 79°F 26°C
FG: 1.014
ABV: 7.4%

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Brewing Big Beer

by Damon on February 8, 2009

One of the great things about home brewing is that you aren’t limited by commercial concerns.

You can brew using fresh fruit or wild mushrooms, or you can brew beer that is so ridiculously strong that commercial brewers would have to charge wine prices to make it worthwhile.

Whoo-yaa, we home-brewers aren’t limited by paltry such concerns.

Strong Beer Brewing Tips

I can’t say that I’m an expert yet, but the Internet is sadly lacking in good advice for brewing strong beers and I’ve brewed enough to give useful advice to someone starting out.

Before You Brew

Pitch a lot of yeast

Screw the starter. Make a batch or two of weaker beers and harvest the yeast before trying a strong beer. Trust me, it’s a lot easier to pitch more yeast than your wort knows what to do with than to nurse a low volume of yeast through a strong wort.

Let me add a paragraph to emphasize: you will hate yourself for not pitching enough yeast. I’m sorry, hate is such a gentle word.

Think about your final gravity

Say you get 75% attenuation.

With a wort that begins at 1.040 you end up with 1.010. 1.080 ends up as 1.020. 1.120 ends up as 1.030. That is a cloyingly sweet beer.

Think about doing something to balance your beer:

Add a ridiculous amount of hops

Use a lot of fully fermentable sugar (dextrose for sugar without flavour, or unrefined sugar like demerara for sugar with flavour, or honey, or maple syrop, or…)

Use a mash schedule that that produces a highly fermentable wort, or

Combine these techniques to balance your beer.

Think about your mash capacity

You might need to add a little extract to get the gravity you desire. Max-out your mashing system and then don’t be embarrassed about adding a little extract. You’ll still have plenty of nutrients to nurture your yeast through the trying fermentation.

When You Brew

Mash Schedule

You can get by with a basic infusion mash, but I really like to do everything I can to dry out my big beers. Dry horse piss tastes like horse piss. But if you’re drying out big beer, then you’re doing well to make your beer average.

Try a step or decoction mash that hits 140° (60°) and 158° (70°) degrees to get a highly fermentable wort. Or add fully fermentable sugars.

Bitterness and Gravity

The stronger your beer, the less you’ll perceive bitterness.

I don’t know the exact proportions, but you need to add a lot more hops to get the same perceived level of bitterness.

But it gets worse. The stronger your wort, the lower your extraction.

So take advantage of needing to add sugar or extract and get your hops in well before you add the gravity boosters.

I’m doing an Imperial Stout right now with 16.75 lb of malt. I’m adding 2.4oz (68g) of 16.4 AA Zeus/Centennial as bittering hop.

It may seem like a lot of hops, but I’ll be adding 4.5 lbs of extract and another 2lbs of sugar in the last 20 mins of my boil to hit my target gravity without wasting hop bitterness.

Long Boil Times

This one’s pretty obvious. If you’re mashing a lot more grain, then extract more wort and take your time boiling to get the same level of extraction.

Aerate Like It’s the Last Oxygen You’ll Taste in a Month

Yeah. Lots and lots and lots and, in case you haven’t got it yet, lots of oxygen is needed for your high-gravity wort.

After Brewing

This is where you wish you’d done everything above as I’d instructed. Big brews can be a huge pain in the beering muscles (I hope you’re exercising your beering muscles at the gym every day).

Help, My Fermentation Has Stopped

Big Beer = Long Fermentation.

Accept it, now deal with it.

To start with, pitch with the yeast that you want to be the dominant yeast flavour. Don’t worry if it can’t handle high levels of alcohol. All it needs to do is handle enough to assert itself.

Your Yeast Can’t Handle Your Wort

You’ve got a stuck fermentation.

If you’ve added sugar, remember that you should expect a lot higher attenuation than normal. So even if you’ve got average attenuation, you might have a stuck fermentation.

The first thing to do is to add yeast nutrients or yeast energizer. If you’re not even close to your final gravity think about re-aerating, but try to do it without adding oxygen outside the fermenter, or do it with the next step.

Plan to Add Champagne Yeast.

Champagne yeast is plain, resistant to high alcohol, and works at a wide range of temperature.

I add Champagne yeast to strong beers that seem fully attenuated before bottling to remove the last bit of sugar and make sure I have enough yeast to carbonate the beer.

I also add Champagne yeast and re-aerate stuck fermentations because it kicks unfermented sugars’ ass.

Give Your Beer Time

Strong beer takes time.

The first really strong beer I made, only using a starter, took 6 months to ferment. The less yeast you use, the longer you should be prepared for the process to take. As long as the beer is slowly fermenting, all is good.

If you want to give it some help, swish it around in your fermenter. All you want to do is replicate the process of rolling the barrel. Rolling the beer used to be a common practice with strong beers. Add a little oxygen, but not too much.

Only do this if your fermentation is truly stuck. Half a point a week is not unusual so don’t worry. Put your beer in a cool dark place and let the yeast do its thing.

Strong beer takes time. Relax and let the yeast do its work.

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Brewmaster’s Chicken

by Damon on February 3, 2009

Roast chicken slathered in stout gravy and barley-fennel stuffing.

How much beer and beer-related ingredients can one put into a chicken? I might now have the record, but I’ve got a few ideas on how to beat it.

For starters, try marinating the chicken in beer. I used stout for the gravy, but for some reason crappy lager seems like a good marinade. You don’t use vintage wine when cooking so you probably don’t need to use quality beer.

My beer cheesecake had a lot of really intense flavours. If you want a really intense gravy, start reducing the beer 20-30 min. before the chicken is ready.

Personally, I’d prefer the intense beer reduction sauce with pork or maybe game, but if you’re trying to break a record.

Use your favourite roast chicken recipe and try the recipes below for stuffing and gravy.

Barley-Fennel Stuffing

The fennel and barley in the stuffing were decent matches. The moisture in the fennel helped soften the barley while the spent barley from brewing soaked up moisture from the chicken.

The combination worked well with the chicken and gravy, but I wouldn’t hesitate to try more typical seasonings with a barley base.

The barley was still little dry and, if you’re not trying to break a record, try using a 50-50 barley-rice mix as the base of your stuffing in place of bread crumbs. With the gravy, though, it didn’t seem so dry.

As with anything I cook, quantities are approximate.

Remember this recipe when you have guests with wheat allergies.

Ingredients

  • 1 cup of barley (after brewing)
  • 1 stalk fennel
  • 4 cloves garlic
  • 1 tsp salt

Chop the fennel and mix with barley and salt. Peel and add the whole garlic cloves to the stuffing. Then stuff the beast.

Stout Gravy

I can’t say it’s the first time that I’ve used beer in gravy, but it’s definitely the best beer-gravy I’ve made to date.

Hoppy beers seem to bitter even more when cooked. The stout I used this time was bitter, but not hoppy, and worked just fine.

Ingredients

  • pan drippings from chicken
  • 300 ml of stout
  • 1.5 tsp salt
  • 2 clove garlic

Mix drippings with stout and salt and boil at high for about five minutes. Once it comes to a boil, whisk corn starch with warm water and add it to the gravy. Crush and add garlic about 30 seconds before removing from heat and serving.

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Brewing Plans for the Year

by Damon on January 30, 2009

I have a mild distaste for New Year’s resolutions. If they help you, then great. But if I’m not going to change my life for the better now, then I’m probably not going to do it on New Year’s Day either.

That’s why I like this month’s Fermentation Friday topic about setting goals. It’s like a New Year’s resolution, without being on the New Year. Other bloggers can write about their New Year’s resolutions, and I can still write about my goals without compromising on my irrational distaste for New Year’s resolutions.

Here are a few things I’m working on now or would like to start working on.

Cook with Beer

I’ve started started this with my beer-glazed cheesecake, but I’d like to cook and post more if I can.

Cook with Barley

Again, I’ve started this as the beer-glazed cheesecake had a barley crust. I’m planning on using it for stuffing, in muffins, and in layered desserts. I’m sure I’ll come up with something

Start Cheese Making

I know it’s not beer, but they go well together so I think it counts. The tricky part seems to be getting my hands on Calcium Chloride that needs to be added back in to pasteurized milk to make cheese.

Get More Malt Aroma in my Beer

As far as I understand it, malt aroma is controlled by mash temperature, but following the advice from professional brewers has only made a small difference in the aroma of my beers.

The Canadian malt I get from the local is supposed to be of a quite high quality. I thought it was all Gambrinus, but if you look at their website you’ll see their only 2-row is organic and I didn’t think I was getting organic malt.

I’d like to try premium malts from other places, but I don’t think it’s worth the effort ordering and storing just yet.

Make Water Adjustments

I’ve tried this a few times before, but only recently bought a quality scale that I can use to properly measure water additions.

I planned on doing my calculations while getting my strike water up to full temperature, but I always forget doing things like bottling or writing here instead.

Time for some math and discipline.

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Time for a Bock Beer Bailout

by Damon on January 28, 2009

Yesterday the Canadian government here came out with a budget including stimulus spending many different sectors of the economy. Similarly, the US government passed a stimulus package today.

But even with all of this money going around to support struggling sectors, I don’t see anything to support Bock beer.

The Case for Bock Beer

Bocks are deserving of stimulus spending, more so than many other areas of our economy.

Bock beer is a very smooth and accessible style that is very rarely brewed in North America. But it’s also got a rich, full, malty taste and unique yeast flavours that beer connoisseurs can appreciate. It is an under appreciated style with potential for mass appeal.

Auto Industry and Bock Beer

Compare that with say the auto industry. Automakers struggle against competition with a product that better meets the needs of ordinary people at a lower cost.

Bock beer, on the other hand, is superior to mass-market beers, can delightfully meet the needs of ordinary people, and can be produced at a similar cost.

They are clearly more deserving of a bailout than the auto industry.

Financial Industry and Bock Beer

Compare bocks with the financial industry.

The excesses of the financial industry leave ordinary people with a hangover. Similarly, excesses of bock leave ordinary people with a hangover.

Both industries are obsessed with constant growth that increase the risk of hangover.

The financial industry saturates the mortgage market and has to dole out increasingly risky loans to sustain growth. Similarly, basic bocks, already quite healthy at 6% or more, morph in to dopple-bocks, and then in to eisbocks steadily increasing the risks of hangover.

Clearly, bocks are equally deserving of a bailout.

Lobbying for Bock Beer

In order to further the cause of bock beer in our countries, I’m starting the bock beer lobby.

My goal is to secure a $35 billion in funding to further the cause of bocks in North America.

In order to achieve this goal I plan to educate legislators in both countries about the value of bocks. Once legislators understand the value of bocks compared with the financial and auto industries, I’m confident that legislators will quickly approve the bailout.

But for the bailout to be truly successful, we need coordinated global stimulus.

Once I have successfully lobbied Washington and Ottawa, I plan to leverage those contacts to achieve global action.

Grassroots Action

In order to start my grassroots campaign, I brewed a bock of my own the other day.

I decoction mashed it using almost 100% Munich malt. Unfortunately, I had difficulty hitting my rest temperatures coming up short each time. I wanted to rest at °149 (°65) and °160 (°71) but instead hit °147 (°64), then °149 (°65), then °154 (°68), then ° 158 (°70). But I never imagined that the road to success wouldn’t be without obstacles.

If any of you see bock listed in the register of gifts from lobbyists, you will know where they came from.

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