Category Archives: Brewing

Volunteering at the National Homebrewers Competition, round 1

Posted on April 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

We didn’t quite have the guts to enter one of our own beers, but when the call went out for volunteers to help at the first round of the National Homebrewers Competition, we eagerly raised our hands!

Is NHC a big deal? Well, there were 12 judging centers all across the country this year, and each of those 12 centers accepted 750 entries. Do the math: that’s 9,000 homebrews! Registration was filled within hours. Yes, it’s that big.

As beginning homebrewers, we volunteered to be stewards. It’s the steward’s job to bring the right beer to each judging table at the right time, to keep the tables supplied with judging forms, pencils, glasses, water, crackers… and occasionally to gratefully accept a few sips of a beer that a judge might decide is worth sharing.

According to the official style guidelines, beers are classified into 20+ styles, each of which has several sub-styles. For this competition each style had its own “queue” (or several queues for popular styles like IPA). Each steward was responsible for coordinating all the beers within his or her queue.

We volunteered for the Saturday afternoon session, which was the third of three judging sessions in Seattle. The event was held at the Pyramid Brewery in downtown Seattle, within walking distance of the ferry. We walked there in a gentle spring PNW downpour.

Once we’d checked in, the head steward gave us a quick briefing and then instructed us to wander through the tables and ask who needed a steward.

So we wandered. We stopped a likely looking table and asked. We got an unexpected response: “We need a steward. But what we REALLY need is someone who is willing to sit in as a novice judge.”

It took me (LKS) a couple of nanoseconds to respond: “I would LOVE to! Which style are you judging?”

The answer: strong ales — a style I have actually BREWED! Strong ales are amped-up English-style ales. The three sub-styles are Old Ale (of which Slow Happy Brewing’s “Grand Festivus XII” is an example), English Barleywine (our “Ides of Festivus XIII”) and American Barleywine (like the English version but with American hops).

So I found myself sitting down with two very experienced beer judges who walked me through each step of the process, asked me what I was smelling and tasting, validated my perceptions, and encouraged me to put them in writing on the judging form.

We judged eight Old Ales. Two were excellent, one was pretty good, three were okay and two had obviously gone bad somewhere during the process of shipping and storing.

Almost three hours passed while I experienced utter tunnel vision. I was oblivious to everything in the world but the feeling of being completely immersed in those beers. It is an amazing experience of concentration and flow.

The pours are only about three ounces, and I was probably only drinking half of each pour. It was absolutely not about consuming alcohol; rather it was completely about absorbing and seeking to understand the subtleties and intricacies of each beer.

I think I was on the fifth beer before it occurred to me to share a bit of my glass with our loyal and patient steward, my very dear CFL!

When we finished our queue of eight beers, I was elated and exhausted, but not too sated to go downstairs and enjoy a couple of pints of Pyramid’s Outburst Imperial IPA along with an excellent margarita pizza.

It was a good day!

I’ve been seriously working at cultivating my nose and my taste buds for a while now. I’ve been thinking about attempting the judge qualifying exam, but I’ve been reluctant to commit that much time to actually studying for something. By offering me a chance to try judging and coaching me through it, those two judges from the American Homebrewers Association opened a door that I could not otherwise have dreamed of going through. I’m very grateful.

I will never taste beer in quite the same way again.

And yes, I’m going to take that judge qualifying exam and make it official!

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Brewing

Tagged , , , ,

Mile Marker 13

Posted on February 25, 2013 | 4 Comments

We bottled our third batch of India Pale Ale (IPA) the other day. We’ve found it very challenging to produce a good American IPA — we couldn’t seem to get it hoppy enough, or pale enough, or carbonated enough. Based on our tasting of this batch on bottling day, we think we’ve got the “hoppy” and “pale” parts right… so now begins the two-week wait to see whether this batch will have a rich, foamy head when opened and poured.

True to our tradition, the beer required both a name and a code. We write a code on the bottle cap so that when we open it later we’ll know which beer it is. We have grand ambitions of creating labels one of these days, but for now the code works pretty well.

We had a working name of “Take 3 IPA,” and a code of “T3.” But on bottling day, CFL wanted a more descriptive code so he’d remember that this batch is an IPA and not some obscure beer style that starts with “T.” We settled on “I3″ for the code, but when he wrote it, it looked more like “13.” When I got out my batch log to change the code for my records, I made an amazing discovery! This is our 13th batch!

Well, the 13th batch of beer demanded a name celebrating that fact. I offered up a few ideas like “13th Floor” but nothing was really clicking for us. Then we thought about the trails that we know and love… the places where I run and CFL rides his bike. Those trails have mile marker signs. Our 13th batch of beer is a milestone of sorts.

Voila! Mile Marker 13 American IPA is born!

Well, actually it’s in the midst of bottle conditioning right now, but it will be born in mid-March.

Meanwhile I got to thinking about mile markers, and for the life of me I could not picture the mile marker 13 sign on the Olympic Discovery Trail. Surely the trail construction crew wouldn’t have simply skipped over that sign out of some “unlucky 13″ silliness, would they?

So yesterday I had to go out and run that section of trail to try and find mile marker 13.

I found it!

It was a good five feet off the trail and during much of the year it is probably hidden by brush, but in the dead of February it’s definitely visible. I’ll have to remember to look for it again later in the year…

The hunt for mile marker 13 was a highlight of a rather awesome long not-so-slow 11.3 mile run. This section of trail is flat and fast. Without a great deal of effort I was running at a half marathon PR pace (not counting my camera stop). I wouldn’t have had any problem continuing at that pace for another 1.8 miles and completing the half marathon distance. But unlike my past half marathons, I don’t think I’d need two weeks or more to recover afterwards. I’ll be ready to run again tomorrow.

It’s been a year now since I quit my job and declared myself post-corporate. The time I’ve been able to put into running, hiking, and walking since then has rewarded me with increased stamina and resilience, reduced stress, and a whole lot more smiling! I’m grateful that I can choose to live my life in this way… recognizing that it’s not an option for most people. Still, anyone can choose to do something — anything! — to be a bit more active every day.

Today is day 56 of CFL’s and my activity streak. I’ve logged 155 running miles and 260 total miles. I’ve seen a lot of trail mile markers along the way.

CFL has me beat on mileage, but only because he can go a bit further on his bike in a given time period than I can on foot. We’re totally non-competitive and mutually supportive — we simply make movement a priority in our day. Every day.

We go when it’s raining. We go when it’s cold and windy like today. We walk to most places we go within our small city. And when we’re finished, we relax and have a home brew!

What about you? What are you doing for exercise today? Tomorrow? What mile markers are out there waiting for you to discover?

→ 4 Comments

Posted in Brewing, Running

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

A bit of this, a dash of that

Posted on February 12, 2013 | Leave a comment

Wow, time flies when you’re having fun! Has it really been two weeks since I’ve posted here?

So what’s new? Two more batches of beer! On January 30 we brewed our spring seasonal, which was supposed to be an English Barleywine but seems to want to be an Imperial IPA. I guess we’re starting to figure out how to get the most “bang” out of our hops. We’ve named this big boy, which will finish somewhere in the neighborhood of 9%, “The Ides of Festivus XIII.” We will give this beer a long aging period and debut it in mid-March.

Then on February 8 we brewed our third American IPA, and I think we finally got this one hoppy enough (see my comment above about finally figuring out how to properly nurture our hops). This batch has the working title of “Take 3,” for obvious reasons. We’ve been focused on the American IPA style recently because our homebrewers club is having an IPA contest in March, complete with a genuine, certified beer judge. Take 3 should be ready to drink by early March, so this was our do-or-die batch. We’ll enter it and see what happens.

On the exercise front, our activity streaks continue. We’re both working on increasing our daily distance (he’s on his bike, I’m running). As the days grow longer, it gets easier to find large blocks of time to get out there and go. We’re already looking closely for the first signs of spring flowers on the trails — it won’t be long now.

We have a major travel adventure planned within the next several weeks… I’ll tell you more about it as we get closer, but you won’t hear all the awesome details until after we return…

Life is good! It’s a wonderful thing to be happy and healthy. CFL and I both feel very fortunate to be able to do the things we are doing. I intend to enjoy every one of these moments as fully as I possibly can. Even if it means I don’t sit down to blog very often.

Until next time…

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Brewing, Cycling, Running

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“We’ll brew!”

Posted on January 29, 2013 | 4 Comments

At some time during the getting-to-know-you-better phase of our relationship, CFL pointed out to me that I have a habit of saying “we’ll see.” I hadn’t really noticed this small verbal tic, but it made perfectly logical sense to me that I would say it. I do have a sense of reality as an emergent phenomenon… and of my life as a process of continual becoming. Given that everything is always up in the air and in process, then so much is unknowable at any given time that “we’ll see” is as close as I’m going to get to predicting the future.

At the time, of course, I replied that he had a knack for filling every potential gap in our conversational space with a long, drawn-out “so, anyway…” that kept me from ever getting a word in edgewise.

That generated a most lively conversation.

Since then we’ve negotiated a few things and learned to love one another’s unique characteristics. We’ve now reached the point where we can affectionately mock one another’s habitual speech patterns and laugh together about them.

Last weekend we took a road trip down to southern Oregon to visit some family members. There were long hours in the car during which we talked about many things. Beer was a major topic. We’d planned several opportunities to visit microbreweries and sample some well-known Oregon beers. We also had upcoming batches of home brew to plan. At some point I inevitably said, “we’ll see.” Suddenly we both laughed and simultaneously exclaimed, “we’ll brew!”

Has a brewery slogan been born? We’ll see… um… we’ll brew!

As for the beer tourism… a night’s stop in Eugene allowed us to take in Ninkasi, Falling Sky, and Rogue’s Tracktown Brewery.

Ninkasi’s fermentation tanks were impressive. This photo includes a studious-looking CFL, carefully positioned in my attempt to provide scale. However, he’s standing in a large doorway so you can’t see the tops of the tanks. Oh well…

Ninkasi is well-known and features big, bold, hoppy beers with names like Total Domination IPA. We shared a flight of several 4-ounce tasters and that was plenty.

In contrast, Falling Sky is only a year old, grew out of the home brew supply store next door, caters to locals, and features relatively low-alcohol “session” beers that nicely accompany its tasty, simple pub food. We might have stayed there all evening, but the Rogue/Tracktown brewery promised good pizza so we carried on. The pizza lived up to the hype and the beer was good too. We ended the evening quite satisfied.

During our time in my family’s small town in southern Oregon I got out for a nice run along the Rogue River. Eventually this trail will connect with the one a few miles further south where I ran the Rogue Run half marathon last September. On this trip I did an easy 6 mile run and then spent the afternoon with my family, while CFL took at bit more time and ended up walking about 8 miles.

It was a good trail.

This part was even better! There was a half mile side trail that ran right along the river bank, for those who like to bound over roots and mud puddles. That would be me!

That afternoon we held a family tasting of eight of our home brews (numbers 2 through 9). The verdict: They’re all good! (Thanks guys.) We ended the day with a visit to the nearby Wild River Brewing and Pizza for — you guessed it — microbrews and pizza!

Through all of our travels and other adventures we have kept our activity streak going. We walked — in a downpour — to all those breweries in Eugene. We stopped to do two laps around a shopping mall in the midst of our 550 mile drive home. We’re now 29 days into 2013 and I’m approaching 120 running/walking miles, while CFL has a larger number of walking/biking miles. At this point our streak will not be broken for anything short of an unimaginably dire emergency. The longer we continue, the stronger is the imperative not to stop.

But you know what? It’s still one step at a time, one day at a time. This streak wasn’t envisioned as such beforehand. It’s an emergent phenomenon.

What will happen next? We’ll see.

We’ll brew!

→ 4 Comments

Posted in Brewing, Living, Running, Travel

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How much slow happy living can we fit on the calendar?

Posted on December 20, 2012 | 2 Comments

Ten months after I left the corporate world, I still marvel at how busy my days are. One of the things I’d hoped to do was write more — a lot more.  But CFL and I have been so busy doing that the block of time I try to set aside each day for writing gets wedged in between other calendar entries, and then somehow squeezed out. I’ve got a whole lot of “happy” going on but not so much “slow.”

One of the big post-corporate life changes for me has been turning off the alarm clock. I’d jolted awake to an alarm most days of my life since high school. It takes a while to catch up on decades of lost sleep and develop a natural wake/sleep cycle. Most days I awaken around sunrise, which in the Pacific Northwest is earlier than 5:30 AM between mid-May and mid-July. When your summer day starts that early and stays light until 10:00 PM or so, it’s easy to pack in lots of activities and still find time to write! But now, with the sun rising around 8:00 and setting around 4:20 (and when entire days go by without much sign of the sun), it feels like the day is already half gone before I’ve had my first cup of coffee.

Currently my “morning” runs are turning into noon-ish runs or no run at all. I run outside as often as I can and use the treadmill when the weather outside is frightful, but sometimes there doesn’t seem to be time for either. CFL follows a similar regime: hiking or biking on nice days, climbing stairs indoors when it’s stormy, and sometimes foregoing his exercise completely.

In addition to the seasonal schedule adjustments, we’re finding that brewing beer can be time intensive! We spend a lot of time reading about, discussing, planning for, and producing our beers. Then there is beer tourism.

In my last post I mentioned the winter beer festival that we’d planned to attend. It was quite enjoyable and extremely educational. About 35 local microbreweries were there, pouring more than 60 beers — each beer meeting the general description of “winter beer.” There are basically two different types of winter beer: (1) spiced beers and (2) high-alcohol beers like “old ales” and barleywines meant for sipping in front of a crackling, cozy fire. CFL and I share a belief that the only truly proper ingredients for beer are barley, hops, yeast, and water. We’re not enticed by orange peels, coriander, cinnamon, peppermint, coconut, or any of the other weird things that some brewers put into their “spiced” winter beers. But a nice English-style barleywine? Bring it on! It suits us well up here in the seemingly endless PNW winter. So we sampled lots of barleywine, talked to a bunch of friendly brewers, and had a great day! (I do approve of the current trend of aging barleywine in bourbon barrels…)

This past weekend we managed to fit beer tourism into a weekend trip that we’d already packed with events. We made a quick jaunt down to Las Vegas to see the Moody Blues!

I’ve lost exact count, but I’ve seen my favorite musical group the Moody Blues about 40 times since 1974. They usually tour the west coast about every other year, so I guess I’ve managed to catch two shows on many of their tours. About a third of the times that I’ve seen them, it’s been in Las Vegas. I have made a bunch of trips to Las Vegas over the years.

This year’s show was their last one of 2012, winding up their “Highway 45″ tour commemorating the 45th anniversary of the release of “Days of Future Passed.” High energy and enthusiasm and great musicianship made for a wonderful show as always. These guys aren’t that young anymore, nor are we, but we all still know how to rock.

While in Las Vegas I had the pleasure of introducing CFL to my brother and his wife, who’d come over from southern California for the show. The four of us spent an afternoon with an old friend and her husband. He’s become a bit of a celebrity as a regular in a popular reality show filmed in Las Vegas (I’d tell you the name of the show, but I’ll keep some privacy for my friend’s sake). As it happened, he was scheduled to make an appearance at the show’s location for a fan meet-and-greet.  The four of us got the “celebrity” treatment as well — we bypassed the line outside, hustled through the door with my friend and her husband, and spent a couple of hours onsite checking out the ensuing madness. Given that I watch almost no TV, I haven’t seen more than a few episodes of this show. So I was honestly surprised at what a big deal this is!

As for Las Vegas beer tourism, we hit a couple of brewpubs, one a franchise restaurant and the other a truly local place called Ellis Island Brewery and Casino. It looked rather dubious (read “local dive”) from the outside, but inside it was authentic vintage Las Vegas, with polished concrete floors, low ceilings, and a cave-like bar. Their beer was decent (and a dollar a glass during the football game!), the service was prompt and courteous, and the locals were friendly. The world needs more places like this!

I intended to show you photos from our trip, but I never took the camera out of its case. I was having too much fun to stop and take photos.

Yesterday we bottled our 8th batch of beer and purchased the ingredients for batches 9 and 10. We’re now tweaking recipes and trying to improve on previous beers. I’d like to get us on a schedule of brewing every two weeks, but with everything going on it’s tricky to fit so much slow happy living on the calendar.

I guess that’s not such a bad problem to have, but in this busy holiday season, I’m trying to create some white spaces on my calendar and make a little more room for sloooowwww and happy.

I hope you can find a little slow and happy too. Cheers!

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Brewing, Living, Travel

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

The weather outside is frightful!

Posted on December 7, 2012 | 10 Comments

Those who know me well are aware that I have a rather low tolerance for Christmas songs… but there is one song that I not only enjoy, I collect! I confess to owning, as of this moment, 65 versions of the song “Let It Snow.” One of my holiday pleasures is playing my “Let It Snow” playlist softly in the background when friends are over — I enjoy watching to see how long it takes them to figure out that they are hearing the same song over and over. I have versions from such a wide array of genres that it can take a while for people to catch on.

Looking out my window today, the weather is indeed frightful. It’s not snowing — yet — although friends who live a thousand feet higher than me had a flurry this morning. It’s 40 degrees, raining, and very windy here. The sun will set, somewhere to the south and hidden by clouds, at 4:20 PM today. Welcome to Pacific Northwest almost-winter!

CFL and I saw a new movie last night, the world premier of a 48 minute documentary called “Out of the Mist” (the link will take you to the official trailer) about the Olympic wilderness. The film played to an over-packed house at our local college. So many people showed up, in fact, that they opened up a second theatre and had two simultaneous screenings! CFL has met and hiked with one of the people featured in the film, while a couple of their names were familiar to me. In the audience we saw lots of people whom we both know. This is, after all, a film about the beauties of “our own back yard!”

Most of the places shown in the film are far in the back country, well beyond where I have ever ventured. CFL was able to identify many of the locations (he can boast of having climbed Mt. Olympus, a feat I can only imagine). But although I haven’t seen the specific places shown, I’ve seen front-country places that are enough like them that I left the theatre homesick for our mountains… and impatient for next summer when I’ll be able to get up there again.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Ridge looked like this earlier today:

Hurricane Ridge 12/07 1:51 PM

There are 69 inches of snow on the ground, with, obviously, much more to come!

I do find it a challenge at times to stay active and upbeat this time of year. But this morning I decided to make the best of it and did 6 miles on my treadmill. Even though it’s a boring old treadmill, at the end of my run I did feel a sense of accomplishment and just a touch of runner’s high. That’s not so bad!

This evening CFL and I are going to our local homebrewing club’s holiday party, where you can bet we’ll all pass around our various masterpieces. And then we’ll bundle up and walk home — no matter how frightful the weather (well, unless it gets really frightful in which case we’ll call the designated driver whom we have waiting in the wings). Tomorrow we’re off to Seattle for our first beer festival, at which local commercial brewers will showcase their special winter/holiday beers. For that outing, we’ll park the car an hour-plus away and take the ferry and bus to and from our final destination.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a pot of veggie chili simmering for tonight’s party. Downstairs our “Beyond the Pale” IPA is quietly winding down its fermentation in the secondary fermenter, while our second iteration of “Up the Elwha ESB” is bubbling away at a mad 65-beats per minute pace in the primary fermenter. All is good.

How good is it? Here’s what Hurricane Ridge looked like an hour later, at 2:51 PM:

Hurricane Ridge 12/07 2:51 PM

Things are getting better! Surely summer can’t be too far behind…

How about you? What keeps you going in the dark cold days of December? What places do you dream about revisiting next summer when the world is once again warm and green?

→ 10 Comments

Posted in Brewing, Hiking, Living

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

You win some, you lose some

Posted on November 28, 2012 | 4 Comments

We’re continuing to gain both experience and enthusiasm with our Slow Happy Brewing project! After the positive comments from our homebrew peers, we opened our next batch with high hopes and we were not disappointed. Dare I say it, Grand Festivus XII is an awesome winter beer — perfect for sipping in front of the fire if I only had a working fireplace (a chimney sweep is on my to-call list).

For our next batch, we thought we’d dip our toes into the wild and wooly world of IPAs (India Pale Ales). Neither one of us is a hophead, but it’s such a hugely popular style that we have to give it a go.

I fiddled with recipes, tweaked a few ingredients, and came up with something that I thought would nicely fit the style guidelines. We bought the ingredients and scheduled a brew day for last Saturday.

Everything went perfectly. We brewed outdoors on a propane burner for the first time. This allowed us better temperature control and we were confident that we’d gotten all the potential fermentables out of our grains and into the wort. We got the wort cooled relatively quickly. We were all ready to pitch the yeast (put it into the carboy with the cooled wort) and let it do its magic.

CFL decided to dip the thermometer in the carboy one more time to double-check that it was exactly 68 degrees.

He dropped the thermometer into the carboy.

It broke. The tip broke right off.

We looked at each other and immediately agreed that this beer was history.

We dumped the carboy and went out for pizza! No worries, no finger pointing. Good pizza.

So yesterday we went out and bought the same ingredients again. Today we brewed again, using an expensive new digital thermometer with a metal probe. It registers quickly and precisely. With its help, we successfully steeped our grains at a more or less exact 150 degrees for 30 minutes. Then, after an hour of boiling, we cooled our wort to 68 degrees in a record (and just about ideal) 20 minutes.

You win some, you lose some, and sometimes you even learn from your mistakes!

The next batch on our schedule to be opened is another porter, which we weren’t impressed with on brew day two weeks ago — it seemed a bit watery. But we have big hopes for today’s IPA take 2. We’ll see how we did, about a month from now.

Meanwhile I’m going to relax and have a homebrew.

→ 4 Comments

Posted in Brewing

Tagged , , ,

The tasting of the beers!

Posted on November 19, 2012 | 2 Comments

Filled with hope, a dash or two of quiet pride, and a good bit of trepidation, CFL and I took two of our homebrews — the Angeles Porter and our just-debuted Up the Elwha ESB — to yesterday’s monthly meeting of our local homebrew club.

We were feeling semi-confident of our porter, as several of our friends have tasted it and pronounced it good, yet we were nervous about what our fellow brewers might have to say about it. We were on shakier ground with the ESB. When we opened the first bottles Saturday evening, I was pleased but CFL was unsure and a tad uneasy. I have many fond memories of drinking “bitter” during my year as a university student in Scotland, but it’s not a style that CFL knows well and I didn’t have a bottle of Bass Ale handy for an easy comparison tasting.

We’ve been to enough brewclub meetings now to know how these things work. Most everyone brings a couple of bottles of at least one homebrew to share with the group. Everyone gets a few ounces of beer in a plastic cup. For the first couple of rounds, each beer gets presented in an orderly fashion, we’re all attentive, and we try to provide some feedback to the brewer. After the third or fourth round everything descends into chaos with multiple bottles on the counter and everyone talking at once.

CFL and I were bringing a relatively “light” beer as homebrews go. An ESB (Extra Special Bitter) is supposed to be golden to copper with low to medium bitterness/hoppiness and a moderate level of alcohol — ours is 5.5%. Here in the Pacific Northwest, which is one of the great hop-growing regions of the world, everyone wants to brew an IPA (India Pale Ale). An IPA is basically a higher-alcohol ESB with as many hops as the brewer can force into the brew kettle — it’s a “bitter” ale on steroids. A more traditional English-style ale like our ESB can seem mild and bland by comparison. Knowing that, we hoped to be early in line so that people could actually TASTE our beer instead of losing it in the aftermath of something with a more robust flavor.

Well, that didn’t happen.

The meeting began with a mini-lecture on porters, complete with several demonstration rounds. We looked at each other, shrugged, and added our porter to the line-up on the counter.

Many porters (including those in the demonstration rounds) have heavy roasted or smoky flavors; ours is a bit on the sweeter side but still within the style guidelines. So we weren’t surprised when several people told us ours was a bit too sweet… but then we began to get some very positive comments, along with constructive suggestions for making it “even better,” from some of the more experienced brewers. A few people even asked for a second pour — a good sign that we’re on the right track!

With our confidence bolstered just a bit, we cautiously brought out the ESB. We initially offered it only to those few who’d been so helpful with their feedback on the porter. We were immediately rewarded with our highest praise yet: “This is a good example of the style, and there are no off flavors at all. You did a good job!” That gave us the courage to pass the bottle on to others. Given everything else that was being tasted at that moment, we weren’t surprised when we got a few raised eyebrows. By then we knew that we’d achieved what we’d set out to do with this beer.

As a further quality control check, we picked up a couple bottles of Bass Ale after the meeting and treated each other to a blind, eyes-closed tasting yesterday evening. I correctly distinguished our ESB from the archetype of the style, but CFL got it wrong. The two beers are that close in aroma, taste, and mouthfeel. With eyes opened, ours is cloudier visually because it is bottle-conditioned with residual yeast still in the bottle, but the color is almost identical.

We did well, and we’re pleased.

It’s a good thing we’re pleased with this batch (#3) because brew day for batch 6 did not go as planned on Saturday. We were making another porter… I had researched and tweaked ingredients to create a recipe that I thought would be an improvement on our first porter. But something happened, and the wort that went into the fermenter was a medium brown, several shades too light to be a porter. The worst part is I have no idea what went wrong. We figure we’ll ferment it, bottle it, and age it as planned — and then figure out what to call it… assuming it’s drinkable at all. I guess we are all allowed a bad batch now and then.

It’s bubbling away happily in the carboy right now, so I guess the yeast don’t care what color it is! And as long as they’re busily and contentedly creating alcohol, who am I to complain about the details?

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Brewing

Tagged , , ,

Slow happy dining extravaganza

Posted on November 15, 2012 | 6 Comments

Tonight I sat down to a simple but very meaningful meal: homemade sauerkraut (six weeks in the making after months of growing the cabbage), homemade 100% rye sourdough bread (a week and a half from beginning the sourdough starter to baking the bread), and a couple of nice cheeses (not local but excellent), all topped off with an Angeles Porter from Slow Happy Brewing (now about a seven weeks since brew date).

Is this slow happy dining or what?

While CFL and I do carefully control the ingredients and environmental conditions for our beer, the sauerkraut and bread are wild and crazy!

The cabbage fermented on its own in a crock, happily doing its thing on whatever wild yeasts had chosen to inhabit our cabbage. When we finally tasted it, we were amazed at how crisp and crunchy it is! Really flavorful too — it’s not like the limp store-bought stuff at all.

I kicked off the sourdough starter with whatever wild yeasts happened to be hanging out on an apple from a tree in my front yard. My first attempt a month ago failed because I got lax about feeding the starter more flour after it began to bubble. I kept a close eye on my second attempt at a starter and caught it at its prime, just in time to start my first loaf of bread. It then took me about two days to get a lively bread dough going in my cool kitchen. When baking day finally came, I used a brand new cast iron loaf pan and held my breath.

The bread came out perfect! CFL and I consumed almost half of it in the first half hour, and then we had another large chunk of it at dinner.

The bread, sauerkraut, and beer complemented one another perfectly, with the cheese adding a few nice notes as well. CFL tells me his pastrami completed the ensemble nicely; I’ll take his word for that.

I forgot to photograph my plate, but here is a photo of our Angeles Porter. In contrast to our first batch, this beer has an impressive head! This particular bottle was actually a tad more exuberant than most – which is why I’d grabbed my phone to capture that moment.

There is something immensely satisfying about eating a meal that you not only prepared yourself, but waited a loooooonnnng time for! As I write this, the second batch of cabbage is aging in my pantry, to be enjoyed beginning about two weeks from now. It will be a lovely shade of pink, as it’s two-thirds red cabbage.

Two batches of beer are aging in my upstairs loft, to be debuted this weekend (Up the Elwha ESB) and next weekend (Grand Festivus XII). The still-unnamed strong Scotch ale is downstairs in a carboy, enjoying a long cozy relationship with a bunch of oak chips before it will be bottled (probably next week) and then aged another 45 days. Today we bought the ingredients for our second porter. It’s a recipe that I invented based on a lot of reading and my determination to create something as true to the “robust porter” style as possible. We’ll brew that one this weekend and plan to debut it just before New Years.

I think I’ll wake up the sourdough starter and begin another loaf of bread tomorrow morning… and maybe bake on Sunday.

Although CFL and I are committed to living one day at a time and enjoying each moment as much as we possibly can, I’m coming to love the long slow happy rhythm that fermenting requires. Especially this time of year, as the nights get longer and colder, it’s good to know that there is genuine, living, local, healthy food growing all around me. It’s good to mark the calendar and anticipate the first tastes. It’s good to plan a couple of batches out and realize that I’ll be eating or drinking them next year.

We’d both lost so much — we’d both lost the person whom we hoped and expected we’d spend the rest of our lives with. Somehow, when we create the slowest of slow foods together, it’s an affirmation that for us, life will indeed go on.

Slowly and happily.

→ 6 Comments

Posted in Brewing, Living

Tagged , , , , , ,

The naming of the beers

Posted on November 4, 2012 | 4 Comments

Somewhere along the rambling way of my life, I (LKS) developed a penchant for naming things. I have given names to favorite places, childhood toys, items of furniture, cars, plants, and a large array of cats, dogs, finches, and koi. Naming is an act of respectful objectification — what was once undifferentiated is now called out from the whole, made distinct, unique, separated from other things and from nothing.

Sometimes I have to name things just to keep them all straight in my mind.

For me, one of the joys of creating is finding the perfect words to describe just what it is — whatever it is — that I have created. Therefore, a batch of homebrew isn’t really completed until it has been named.

Five batches into our adventures in home brewing, it is becoming necesssary to call a beer by its name. Yesterday we bottled Up the Elwha ESB, moved Grand Festivus XII from the primary fermenter to the secondary fermenter, and brewed our next batch. This still-nameless beer is a strong Scotch ale, so I’m mulling the possibilities of names with a connection that is both local and faraway. There is an area up in the mountains that I have not yet seen but CFL tells me I will love (it’s on the hiking list for next summer) called Heather Park. I’m liking that connection and it may be the name I’m looking for… but choosing the name is so final and it needs to be just right.

When we’d finished brewing yesterday, we both sat down with a homebrew. CFL enjoyed one of our last few Call 911 Amber Ales (batch 1) and I luxuriated with an Angeles Porter (batch 2).

After three straight brewing weekends in a row, I’m ready to go to an every-other-week schedule — or start recruiting a lot of friends to share our beer with! Next weekend we’re bottling Grand Festivus XII, and racking the Scotch ale to secondary. The week after next we’ll be ready to brew another batch… just as we’re settling down to enjoy our first bottles of Up the Elwha ESB.

Meanwhile, if you have any suggestions for what to name a strong Scotch ale, I’d love to hear them. Cheers!

→ 4 Comments

Posted in Brewing

Tagged , , ,