But the big news is that in one of my classes, a fellow student indicated that she had need of some assistance filling a tutoring position. So I contacted the place, and a phone interview seemed to go very well. I am now waiting on references and transcripts to finish arriving.

However, some things just don’t change. I have been sitting here at the computer all day, trying to make myself do this three-part assignment for my class tonight, and it is as though I’m frozen. I’m making the barest of headway. Two hours to go until it becomes irrelevant. Yay, ADD.

Concerning the beer, I have enough time now that I’ve brewed up my first two batches. I’ve already thrown together my plan and recipe for the next batch, an American IPA, so I should put further beer thoughts to rest until after the IPA is actually in fermenter. I am a tad behind on my reading, and that is directly attributable to the allure of XCOM: UFO Defense. It’s an old game, but wow, does it hold up well. I have established some letter-writing, but there are so many people I want to reach out to that it bottlenecks in my head whom to start with first.

I am using my wiki, though, and that will serve for now. Whiteboards are such a pain in the tail in practice, and what’s the point of my wiki if I don’t use it? My tasks this semester culminate in writing a “teaching recipe” and writing a lesson plan. I will get this done.

Fortitude!

Getting dressed for the debutante's ball

In a situation like this, where I have never used a particular variety of malt before, I go find a recipe to crib from. The one I went with was the Gluten-free McGee on Homebrew Exchange. It’s a 5-gallon recipe, so right off the bat I needed to make some tweaks; my setup is currently only capable of about 3 gallons. So I started by just scaling down the ingredients to my kettle setup, trying to keep the numbers about the same–OG, FG, IBUs, SRM, etc. Then I looked at the ingredients list closely, and saw that I had a good approximation of what was called for. The only thing I didn’t have was the dry rice extract, and when I went to the homebrew store to get the last bits of ingredients, I hadn’t seen any there. Fortunately, I had some brown rice syrup left over from the Sidhe’s (rather successful) attempt at vegan Rice Krispie treats. And then to add a little of my own kick, I factored in a little bit of molasses. Here’s the recipe I ended up with: Stovetop Sorghum Amber Ale

The sorghum malt extract tastes somewhat different than barley. Sweeter, perhaps, or maybe more like honey? I’ll certainly be interested to see how this flavor changes when all the fermentable sugars are chewed up. The rest of the process is pretty straightforward: boil the wort, add the hops, cool the wort rapidly, measure the volume & take a gravity sample!, calculate and add top-up water to fermenter, rack the wort onto the top-up water, pitch the yeast, and cap the fermenter with an airlock. The beer is currently bubbling away at 60℉! It has a relatively low krausen so far, which is acharacteristic from the other beers I’ve brewed. The yeast this time is Danstar Nottingham, which should be not too dissimilar to Safale’s US-05: clean, crisp, and well-attenuated. I want a little more bitterness to come through than the original recipe’s yeast (Windsor) would have provided.

My numbers are good. In fact, I ended up with a slightly high OG, even after top-up calculations! So I will hopefully net something like an extra quart of beer out of the final product. The biggest issue I had was during the late malt additions. My kettle is showing its lack of capacity–3 gallons is not enough to hold all the wort at a boil. Toward the end, I had a small second pot on a separate burner to handle the extra quart that didn’t fit! I should start looking for a 5-gallon pot, I guess. And here I was, hoping I had gotten all the equipment I needed for a while…

One extra note: I was able to take a few videos of the process, and they’re up on my YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/stovetopbrewing

And now, the photos:

29 bottles of beer on the wall, 29 bottles of beer...

This brew has been pretty much all upsides and no downsides. Before pitching with Windsor, I read up on it some more and saw that it was not very attenuative. (Which just means it will ferment less of the sugar in the long run. It’s not greedy.) Fortunately, I thought to add some corn sugar–a very easy-to-metabolize sugar–to the fermentables. So the yeast did its job and then some. All in all I was expecting a 4% ABV beer, but with the slightly higher Original Gravity and  the slightly lower Final Gravity, I got a beer that is 4.3% ABV Best of all, the Sidhe’s comment on tasting it was that I should enter this into a homebrew competition!

A couple of variables were in play, as I noted in my last update. First and foremost, the late addition of the malt extract and sugars is dramatically noticeable. The gravity sample gave zero “twang” when I drank it–not even a hint of weirdness. I shall adopt this technique from here on out, and I expect that future results will continue to confirm this initial observation. Neither does it taste especially more bitter. (But it shouldn’t, because I adjusted the hopping back to the target IBU.) On the other hand, the change in my hop schedule is definite. I had initially brewed this with Fuggles and Kent Goldings together, but when I changed the hopping, I moved the Fuggles up to aromatics and kept the Kent Goldings in the flavor zone. (Take a look at this chart if you’re confused.) Well, the spiciness that characterized the first batch is gone, and the flavor is dominated by the smooth, even Kent Goldings. It’s incredibly quaffable, but I think the Fuggles added a certain flavor that suits this beer better. In future iterations I shall walk the Fuggles back in (maybe 5 minutes at a time, until I hit 20 minutes) to get a clear understanding of its flavor properties.

Sometimes, all I see is beer.

The extra time in the fermenter seemed to help with clarity. But, as you can see, it’s still quite hazy. I finally acquired some Irish moss, so I’m not going to mess around without it anymore.

One final major factor that I think affected the quality of this beer was the temperature control. During fermentation, yeast generate quite a bit of heat, and this can change the flavor profile of the yeast’s by-products. I was extremely attentive to the process this time, starting at a good pitching temperature (64℉) and keeping it as close to that as I could. I checked on it every few hours for the first day, re-wetting the tshirt that girdled the fermenter and keeping the fan blowing. I have detailed temperature/outgassing rates in my brewing log that I won’t bore you with, but during the main body of activity (when the airlock was bubbling 8 times every 10 seconds), I kept the fermenter under 66℉ the whole time, and only once did it dip below 64℉. This sort of temperature regulation, I have read, is vital to ensure that the yeast are kept in the same environment, and therefore are stressed less and produce more consistent results.

I keep meaning to save the yeast from my batches for reuse, but I never have the presence of mind to do so. I shall do that some time this year, I promise, and I hope to document it! Nor have I forgotten about my YouTube channel; I just don’t have a good computer from which to record video. I was going to use my netbook, but trials quickly showed me that it’s a piece of junk for actual work tasks.

I have 11 more beers to brew in 2012! (I’m counting this one, because it was brewed after I made my New Year’s Resolution to do so.) I have a few ideas about what I’m going to do next, but I open the field to you for suggestions. What styles of beer should I brew? Any special ingredients? Tell me what you think! And while you’re thinking, enjoy the rest of these images of the bottling process.

Happy 2012, everybody!

Today I brewed my second take on it. I upped the bitterness a bit, and changed the yeast to something more characterful and fruity. But I didn’t make it more bitter by adding more hops. Instead, I changed the hop schedule around a little bit to bring out more flavor from those delicious Kent Goldings. I also employed a technique I have been reading about on various homebrewing Web sites for extract brewing. I only added about a third of the malt extract to the water at the beginning of the boil–the rest went in about 15 minutes from the end. Apparently this increases hop utilization, and also eliminates what has been referred to as “extract twang.” I had assumed that the wierd taste I had been getting in my beers was because of the molasses. So we’ll see in about 4 weeks just how attributable it is.

I also got around to making my volumetric displacement stick, or as I like to call it, my Rod of Displacement +1. So for this batch I was able to precisely determine how much distilled water I needed to hit my gravity. I also remembered to tuck the distilled water in the fridge the night before, so it brought my wort down to well within pitching temperature range. 64F, to be exact! I wanted to make a video of the brew session, but this netbook is not up to the task, and I don’t have a better laptop available for use. But I’ll get my shiny new YouTube channel up and going before the new year, I hope.

One of the best reasons I love my stovetop setup is this ability to brew the same recipe with only minor tweaks. When Clinton and I brew on the big rig, there’s a pressure to do something awesome that we haven’t done before. (Especially since we did a LOT of repeat brewing for Rob’s wedding!) But I can be as boring as I like at home.

[Update 12/15: Whoosh, the yeast (Danstar Windsor) are off like a rocket this morning! The airlock is bubbling away. Definitely a change from the first yeast I used (Wyeast London Ale), whose activity was much more tepid even at the beginning. This bodes well ]

But I have done a number of things in the last couple years that I didn’t think I was capable of. I wrote one novel and most of a second. I brewed beer for my friend’s wedding. I got into grad school. These all tell me that I am heading in the direction I want to be going. I am becoming someone dedicated to education, to science, to writing, to craftsmanship. And there are areas I want to make strides into–I want to document more of my life in pictures, and to be timely about doing so. I have taken scads of them over the last year, but I never seem to make the time to publish them. There are easy avenues to do so, such as facebook, but that has ethical baggage that I’m not willing to take on. Facebook deserves the bare minimum of my personal life. I feel the need to be a self-published person. That’s the whole point behind this blog, my wiki, and my eventual self-hosted status.net site. As Rob Carlson said to me: “Guard your inputs, maximize your output.”

The other side of that, the inputs, is harder. I’m a terrible news junkie. It’s easy to say what you will do, but it’s much more difficult to say what you won’t do. Breaking habits is….non-trivial. (It took me nearly 20 years to kick my nail-biting.) But I think the secret to kicking habits is to supplant them with healthier ones. I changed nail-biting into nail-trimming by carrying around a nail clipper on my person, and every time I started to put my fingers in my mouth I would try to remember to use the nail clipper. So it must go with my Internet habit. I need to supplant the Web site hopping with something more productive. That is what I’ll be chewing on for the next week or so.

So without further ado, here are my discrete goals for the coming year:

• write, edit, and submit one novel OR three short stories
• read 25 new books (that’s two books a month–slow pace, but one must crawl before walking)
• brew 12 distinct styles of beer on my stove
• find paying work in the teaching/tutoring field
• volunteer 50 hours in the local community
• write 50 letters (actual, printed and/or hand-written correspondence)

These are all things I can do and have done severally, but I have never tried to do them as a whole or in such quantity. But I feel I am at the tipping point, and so I must push myself to reach them. It’s not going to be easy, but I have a wiki to keep track of them

What are you thinking about for the coming year?

It’s pretty straightforward, really; it just requires a small amount of preparation. Just before you start veg prep, soak a little less than 3/4c TVP in 3/4c vegetable stock (or a water/soy sauce mix, but homemade veggie stock is cheap and easy to make). Then take a brick of silken tofu (I prefer the Mori-Nu aseptic packs) and mix in a food processor with about a tablespoon of olive oil, 1/4t salt, and about half a lemon’s worth of lemon juice. This is the “sour cream.”

Once that’s out of the way, you just start throwing it all together. Basically you saute over medium heat a nicely-chopped onion and a stupid, ungodly amount of thinly-sliced mushrooms (though you might call it a godly amount if you’re a fungus-worshiper like myself). Add to that minced garlic (or granulated if you don’t feel like mincing garlic), and then some herbs (parsley and thyme are nice), salt, and pepper to taste. Once most of the moisture is gone, add the TVP, which should have mostly soaked up the stock by now. It’ll add a little bit of moisture to the pan to deglaze any scorching. Cook the TVP for about 5 minutes, maybe 10 if you cut the heat down, and then add the sour cream. Let the heat get through it, stirring thoroughly, and when you start to see it bubbling again it’s chow time! I like to serve this over rice or short noodles. Egg noodles are traditional, of course, but if it’s got starch it’ll probably be ok.

This recipe changes just about every time I make it. Sometimes I play with the consistency of the sour cream; other times I change up the herbs or veg base. Celery is not unheard of, nor is eggplant. But I have laid out the basics, and it’s out there for you to play with now. Bon appetit!

The Sidhe taught me the basics. She had her standard recipe, as handed down to her by her grandmother, and I followed that for a few months. (I mostly still do.) But the thing about crafting is that if you have the knack for it, you’ll notice things. Specific details about the material you’re working with, how they behave together, and the subtleties of the changes they undergo as they become a unified whole. And this is true as much with bread as with beer, pottery, metalwork, writing, and even (albeit more abstractly) programming. It is the border between reason and reality–the territory that the ancient Greeks called techne. It’s art. And there’s something maddeningly irrational about it. You can describe the process to someone who has never done it before, but until your friend undertakes the process in turn, nothing whatsoever is communicated. Art lends itself to mentorships, either of the autodidactic variety or the more traditional master/apprentice. But it is the sort of activity that is best done with your whole self thrown into it.

Now, I’ll admit that I used to get a great deal of meditative joy out of hand-kneading dough. But our stand mixer now takes care of that part of the work while I can do other things. The important part to remember, though, is that I’m not just letting the mixer go unsupervised. You can do that, but the important part of the kneading process is the assessment and re-assessment of the dough’s texture. Bread machines are handy for those who don’t delight in the details. But bread is way too much fun to watch at every step to use something like that. The smooth texture of a freshly-kneaded doughball, the smell of yeast doing their part during the rising, and the hollow “pop-pop” sound a well-crusted loaf sounds like when it’s out of the oven all contribute to the satisfaction I derive from baking bread.

And then, of course, comes the eating. Mmmmm, bread. It’s like a lattice of deliciousness. The yeast create pockets of air within a gluten-bound matrix, and this matrix solidifies during baking to create the perfect union of five simple ingredients. Fresh bread is incomparable to any other food. It’s pretty great that after all these thousands of years we’ve been around, the art of making bread has really changed very little. We understand the science much better–but the recipe is not the loaf.

With my stovetop setup, all I need to do is throw some malt in the pot and get cooking. And that’s the point. I want to continue exploring beer, but a home setup is a little more manageable. OK, I don’t brew as much in terms of quantity–the electric range limits my kettle size to about 3 gallons, realistically. But that puts useful constraints on my process, giving me that much more incentive to figure out how to make decent beer with just what I have. So here’s my breakdown in terms of what I intend to do with this new habit:

• Brew good table beer. First and foremost, my goal is to make reliably yummy alcoholic beverages using malt & adjuncts, hops, yeast, and water. I want to be able to pull this stuff out of the fridge and relish the various flavors and aromas without getting drunk.
• Make beer for an ingredient cost of less than $1 per bottle. Obviously this is not a hobby that will pay for itself, but since I enjoy drinking beer anyway, I might as well at least try to save some money while I’m doing so. Since I’m using mostly household items, I can just write off the small hardware layout I’ve done; the equipment, handled with care, should last me for the foreseeable future.
• Explore the BJCP Style Guide. Beer has a fun and complex history, and the styles that we have come to know and love offer a nice completionist’s prize–”I did these!” And the challenge of attempting the different styles on such a low-budget setup will be all the more fun.
• Improve my all-grain brewing. Having a small side workshop means that I can bring a better understanding of unique ingredients to the table. I can try out different hops and malts in more rapid succession, so I will have greater ability to make impactful aesthetic judgement calls in my Serious Beer.

The small size of my kettle means I can’t reach those high-gravity altitudes, but I have a few plans to take it up a step from the 3.5-4% range I’ve been exploring thus far. And this brings me to the point of this post: I’ll be documenting my efforts with a Youtube channel! Starting in the next couple of weeks, I’ll be posting videos to share with you about brewing, beer, and the like. I hope you’ll join me.