We have never talked about Beer

For some reason the Can You Brew It was really enlightening for me. They would taste the commercial beer and start to break down what they thought was in the recipe and things like that. It was great to hear very experienced homebrewers break down something like that and then the process of trying to recreate a brew.

I only wish some other brew podcast had picked that up, or if someone has, I wish I knew which podcast.

I don’t know how people don’t like stouts. It’s like eating a loaf of beer-flavoured bread.

Bingo! It’s like two of God’s great gifts to mankind, in one package.

“And malt does more than Milton can/to justify God’s ways to man.” A. E. Houseman

I’ve decided I like Scotch Ales now, too.

Man, they rock. If they weren’t so rich as a beer I’d drink them a ton more often. Like sipping on manna from heaven.

Disaster! My buddy and I opened the traditional one-week-old homebrews to see how they’re getting on. His poured with a delightful thick, foamy head which stuck around; mine was flat. We thought we might have had some problems with mixing in the priming sugar this time. It appears we did.

We bottled our coconut stout (branding pending) and kegged our spiced coriander and ginger ale (The Karlsen Gang and the Tomb of Annihilation D&D session ale) yesterday. Now we wait for them to age and carbonate.

Half of the coconut stout batch was on our oak cask for a couple of weeks, looking forward to see the difference between them.

I was in a local brewers tasting/drinking room the other day and they had both a coconut stout and a peanut butter stout, along with the normal variety. All were good.

Also neither here nor there, but the fact that we have a thread with over 2600 posts in it titled We Never Talked About Beer never fails to tickle me.

Ha! I love this. I feel like the only part of homebrewing I would enjoy is naming the things.

Making labels is a lot of fun.

Never met a coconut stout I didn’t like, though some of them haven’t had much to do with coconuts other than the name. Peanut butter stouts however are what surprised me the most.

The first time I tried one you could have watched my face contort in expectant disgust, only to be replaced slowly with utter confusion. Turns out peanut butter stouts are actually good, which required altering more than one preconception I had.

3 Floyds gets distributed to a handful of stores around here, but I never paid them too much attention. But last Halloween I thought it would be thematic to bring a 6 of Zombie Dust to the party. Couldn’t find it, and didn’t worry much more about it. Just saw it in a local shop off by itself with a “1 per customer” sign and figured I’d best look it up. Apparently it is only rarely available and has quite the cult following, including a 100 rating at Craft Beer and Brewing magazine. I’ll let you know in a while what I think, though it may suffer from me being naturally suspicious of its reputation.

I had a buddy who actually made a great one in homebrew form. That’s the first I learned there was an actual powdered peanut butter. It makes sense, you wouldn’t want the oils of normal peanut butter in a beer, thus powdered fits the bill. His particular brew was that along with just a touch of cocoa nibs as flavoring on a standard milk stout. It was fantastic.

Zombie dust is AWESOME! It’s how I learned to love Citra hops before I even knew what they were. It’s a great “pale ale” that comes across like an IPA.

You should remember 3 Floyds for their awesome stout as well, Dark Lord.

Yeah - very much an IPA with the name Pale Ale. As an IPA it is good, but not really my preferred style, in that the hops dominate everything - I prefer IPAs like Two-Hearted Ale where there is more complexity than just hitting you over the head with the hops. Plenty good enough to enjoy finishing the 6-pack, but not something I’m likely to spend time hunting for again.

So my first bottle of our homebrew Dry Wit Rye Wit was flat, and my second was a gusher. This third one is just right.

Almost champagne-like in its dryness. For all the flavorings in the recipe, none dominate. It reminds me of the ginger beer I make on occasion.

Look at the head on that bad boy! Did it stick around a while?

You’e tale reminds me of why I went to kegging. I -sucked- at trying to get bottling carbonation just right. I tried the drop ins, I tried a number of priming sugars and options therof. I got gushers or flats, the majority of the time.

But that pic, that is a beaut!

It sank some, but there was still a layer of bubbles in the bottom of the glass when I was done. Very gratifying.

This is the first batch we’ve had trouble with. We ordinarily make a very watery syrup, pour that in the bottling bucket, and use the output from the siphon to swirl it into the wort. This time, we overcooked our syrup, and it got a little treacly, so it didn’t mix as well. Hopefully they’re mostly like this, and not so much explosive or flat.

In other news, my floating hydrometer project is coming along nicely. The software and electrical engineering parts are nearly done—it’s currently sending reports from my workbench test setup to my workbench laptop, which is running the web app portion for testing.

Still to come is the actual physical engineering part, but I can’t get going on that until my various approximately-27mm plastic cylinders arrive, and they’re all literally on a slow boat from China.

So a local brewery, Hudsonville Winery and Pike’s Beer, is having an anniversary party today. A friend and I headed over, and I was surprised to find that the theme was beer based on cocktails.


I’ve had the Pina Colada and Moscow Mule. While neither tastes anything like the actual cocktail, you can certainly recognize the influences. I wouldn’t go out of my way for more, but as a change of pace, it’s interesting.