May 10th - Brewing and teaching update

Brewing and Teaching Update

Last week’s lecture at a regional gathering of Mensa seemed to go fine. I had been asked to present a one hour discussion on beer for beginners. I broke it down into two basic sections. The first covered the ingredients in beer and tried to give people a lexicon for the various flavors that are contributed by different ingredients. The second area tried to cover some of the more well known and available styles of beers and what types of flavors to look for in each of them. This was followed by an hour long tasting where we tasted through about 8 different styles. I had about 25 people for it and it seemed to go well. The toughest thing was getting everything condensed into an hour and not losing people by carrying on too much.

I’m also trying to work on some single subject lecture/tastings to start sometime in the next few months. I’m trying to fit them into something that would fit the BJCP Continuing Education rules, because it’d be nice to get points for this, but the main focus would be to set up a series of tastings that give people an opportunity to delve much more deeply into a single style of beer and taste 8-12 examples in a single 2-3 hour session. I have no idea on when this may start. I’ve thought about doing this for a few years and hope I’ll actually get it accomplished this year.

Still have a limited amount of beer at home (OK, I guess having four beers on tap at home and a couple bottled batches of lambic-style beers at home isn’t really limited, but….). The brown ale blew last week, about a day after I was raving about how good it was. The Saison is finally kegged and will be ready to drink in a day. The Belgian golden appears to have perennial chill haze, but has a great flavor profile. Nice spice and fruity esters and a distinct orange note. The steam beer continues to be an enjoyable easy drinking beer with great hop aroma. The Biere de Garde/Biere de Noel is likely need the end, because it’s been such a great drinking beer, despite its higher alcohol content.

We brewed more English style pale ale because as we come into warmer weather, it’s nice to have some “standard” beers with lower alcohol. This one was 86% pale malt and 14% Carastan 35L. That may seem a little high for some people, but I them this way. We used Centennial’s for bittering (because we have them and they’re high alpha), but kept the Goldings for the idle and final additions. It ended up about 1.055, which is higher than we expected, but should still fit the bill nicely.

Since we’re coming into raspberry season, we will be blending this year’s Framboise in the next several weeks. We’re down to about 90 gallons of base lambic, so we’ll likely need to brew more. We’re hoping to blend some gueuze at the same time. I still have some of last years, but it’s not as tart as some previous blends. I‘m hoping it will get tarter as it sits in the bottle, but it’s tough to predict how lambic-style beers will age and change.