Advanced Extract Brewing

So Jeremy and I had a couple of extract recipes we'd planned on brewing indoors, but the weather here in Chicago has been so unseasonably warm that we ended up being able to brew them outside this past weekend with our all-grain gear.

After doing exclusively all grain last summer and then dicking around in my kitchen with a couple of extract batches this winter, brewing an extract kit literally felt like cheating. (The extract recipe out of Brewing Classic Styles was only slightly less so.) It felt like last summer was really about dialing in our process and getting acclimated to the new equipment we inherited, bought or built along the way. With the exception of adding a whirlpool return to the immersion chiller, everything else that we use in brewing is familiar at this point.

Jeremy had a "Dead Ringer" kit from Northern Brewer which didn't get brewed last summer and we'd gone in on the ingredients to brew an extract version of Janet's Brown. (The hops and yeast from the original kit were tossed and replaced. Buying cascade and centennial by the pound makes it a far less painful decision to consciously throw away 6 ounces of hops after opening a bag and getting some of that barely present cheesy aroma.)

But back to the process - getting starters ripping 24 hours in advance and being able to use our gear outside made cranking these batches out wickedly efficient. From starting setup to having pitched the yeast and getting the carboys situated with blowoff tubes in the chest freezer was about four and a half hours. (And we probably lost about 30 minutes troubleshooting the propane burner putting out low heat.) The actual process of starting the water, crushing the specialty grains, steeping them, getting to boil, adding hops and extract per a schedule, and then chilling back down just flies by.

Not to mention the fact that the only variable which affects whether you hit your numbers in this process is if your evaporation rate in your software is correct or not. OG was dead on in both beers.

So after a largely painless brewday, I'm excited for the summer. We've got an ambitious plan for some awesome all grain batches. And I'm excited to taste the end product of these batches, bring it to club night, and enter it into competition in a couple of months. If these taste good to Jeremy, me, the club and fare well in competition, it'll be a great sign that we're starting to actually understand the inputs which matter to making great beer.

A Night at Local Option

I met one of my buddies for a few beers at The Local Option after a pretty rough couple of days at work last week. After a couple of prior visits with some mixed impressions of the place, I've come around on it. 


That said, I'm pretty sure that it's not the place for everyone. It's loud, they rotate their taps all of the time, and have one of the most eclectic selections in the city. They also don't go out of their way to make you feel particularly welcome or special. Apparently the owner loves to come back to the bar and blare metal on the weekends.


But there's something about the place that you just have to respect. It takes balls to run a place like these guys do. They contract brew three or four of their own recipes at regionally local brewers and run a list of mostly beers you wouldn't have heard of elsewhere. 


I had their "Anthony of Bourdania", a Vienna Lager brewed at Against the Grain down in Kentucky. A little kitschy in name and concept unless they've actually met Tony, in which case it'd rock. For a contract beer, it was solid. Highly drinkable, well brewed, definitely to style. 


And then on to the reason I like this place. I had a Lost Abbey Devotion and a Jolly Pumpkin Madrugada Obscura as the night went on. I'm not going to delve into why each of them was awesome, which they were, but the fact that they always have beers like these on tap is even more awesome. Neither are on tap at more than a couple of other places in Chicago and they're both awesome beers from breweries which do great work.


So for the record, I'm just fine with blaring metal, reasonably disinterested service and pulling up beermenus.com on my phone instead of staring at a list of beers without prices or descriptions knowing that every time I come here I'm going to find a well-curated list and be guaranteed to find something new I love.

The Evolution of a Palate (Continued)

I was out last night with a few friends and ordered a bottle of Firestone Walker's Union Jack IPA. This is definitely one of my favorite beers and one that I'd say I know well. Unfortunately, this one tasted a bit off. The hop aromatics had largely dropped out, leaving a sharp bitterness and some yeast / malt character behind without the balancing notes which make the beer so good.

I don't fault Firestone for this one - I'm guessing that the offender was the bar which served the beer and that they sat on their inventory for a while prior to serving it and may not have stored it properly. (We had multiple bottles and they all exhibited the same characteristics.)

But the fact that I noticed this and neither the fiance nor the other person drinking the beer did is just the latest example of a somewhat disturbing trend that both Jeremy and I have noticed lately. After making the jump up to all grain, getting really critical of our own beers and starting to really notice the contributions of different ingredients in finished beers, I'm starting to pick out off-flavors and imperfections in commercial beers in a way which I haven't previously.

And I'm not saying this as a "beer snob" or to say that I have some freakishly evolved palette which is capable of picking out every flavor in every beer. I'm saying this as someone who loves to drink beer who is now finding it more difficult to genuinely enjoy a really wide spectrum of commercial beers despite their imperfections which I just never noticed before. This isn't necessarily a good thing. (Outside of the Cicerone or BJCP courses of study, which I have been thinking about pursuing. But I know that I can easily get caught up in being esoteric and I don't want to indulge that here...)

Anybody else out there notice this?

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks Chicago's beer scene really is awesome...

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/02/chicagos-booming-beer-scene-explained/1356/