New Year's Day has come and gone, as has the ridiculously strung out college football bowl season, but it's still the first half of January, so I figure it's not too late to for my annual resolutions. Perhaps the only New Year's resolution I've ever kept was the one I made a handful of years ago to brew--and to drink--more beer! Hoping for similar success this year, here are my Brew Year's Resolutions for 2009:
1.
Build a kegerator. I celebrated my 40th birthday a few years back with a new refrigerator in the garage for my beer. This included acquisition of a few "Cornelius" kegs, a pressure regulator, and all the other basics that one needs to set up a basic home draft system. Well, like so many other homebrewers before me, I've found the shift from bottles to kegs to be truly revolutionary. But the fascination of drawing pint after pint of my own homebrew from a cheap little picnic tap has finally worn off. I've grown frustrated by having to fumble through a tangle of beer lines and to swap over a gas line from keg to keg every time my wife and I want a pint. Plus I've got a couple of tap handles I purchased on eBay a few years back just sitting around gathering dust. It's time I finally correct this situation.
2.
Plan a brew sculpture. My brewing setup is still rather primitive, featuring a hodge-podge of converted coolers, half-barrel kegs, pots, plastic buckets, and carboys, but it's mine, and it works. Still, it would be nice if I could build something just a little bit more elegant to, if nothing else, reduce the heavy lifting of hot water currently required on my brew days. I know myself well enough to know that it would be overambitious to expect to finish this project this year, especially when I've got a kegerator to build. But it would be nice to have some specific plans to carry into 2010.
3.
Make a mead. I don't drink mead, and I don't particularly like honey. I'm always looking, though, to expand my fermentation experience, and I listened to an absolutely brilliant podcast on the drive home from our Christmas trip to the Bay Area. The podcast featured a long conversation with Ken Schramm, author of
the book on the subject,
The Compleat Meadmaker, and, well, he inspired me to give it a shot. I think I'll even start with the Vanilla Orange-Blossom recipe he presented on the show. If nothing else, it should help prevent my wife from drinking all my beer.
4.
Make a cider. Speaking of my wife, on that same Christmas trip north, we went to see our sturdy Golden Bears play in (and win!) the Emerald Bowl. Since the game was at the San Francisco Giants ballpark, we were obligated to enjoy some pre-game festivities at the
21st Amendment, one of California's premier brewpubs. I had an absolutely fantastic series of beers, while my wife thoroughly enjoyed the pomegranate cider (made in Sacramento) they were serving. I enjoyed it, too, so I think I'll try making some of my own.
5.
Make a wet-hopped beer. I've been growing some hops at home for a couple years, and I've now got several Cascade plants well established. I yielded enough this past summer to help hop a recent IPA, but I still haven't got the drying process dialed in. So this year, I'll make a fresh "harvest" ale instead.
6.
Become a "Certified" BJCP beer judge. One of my biggest brewing milestones in 2008 was to finally take the
Beer Judge Certification Program exam. I passed, and I came agonizingly close to scoring high enough to rate as a National-level judge. With just a pair of experience points, though, I'm still a ways off from being eligible to achieve a National ranking, and I'll just re-take the exam when that time comes. My immediate goal, then, is to acquire the small amount of experience I need to officially become "Certified". There are enough local competitions that I should be able to accomplish that by summer.
7.
Make significant progress on my beer book. The first paper I wrote in grad school was about brewing--an historical geography of the industry in the United States. I've long regretted letting that project lie dormant for so long, and for the last year or two, I've been compiling notes and sketching some crude outlines that would extend my original essay into a book. My summer travels to Munich last year only confirmed my desire to take the project global, and I'm already scheduled to give a talk on the subject at
my college in March.
8.
Go to the NHC. During my first stint as a homebrewer, again back in my grad-school days, when brewing was more a curiosity for me than a full-fledged hobby, my wife and I attended the annual
National Homebrewers Conference. It was just down the road in Milwaukee, and we made a weekend day trip out of it. The NHC has since grown into a far bigger event, and ever since I re-started by homebrewing in earnest, I've been eager to return. Since this year's conference, in Oakland, is once again in-state for me, it would seem an ideal year for me to attend. Now if I can only get approval from my wife; perhaps the promise of mead and cider will do the trick?
9.
Blog more. I started this blog almost two years ago, and while I haven't truly ignored it, I haven't contributed to it nearly as much as I had originally planned. I'd like to pledge a new entry every week. But let's keep this realistic: how about a new entry every month? If nothing else, I need to actually begin that series of beer-style posts I promised here several months ago.
10.
Brew more. Last but not least, I need to make more beer. I was on a nice run for a while, with several consecutive years of growth in the number and volume of batches brewed. Like our economy, though, 2008 proved to be a year of recession, as my brewing output fell off a bit. My goal in 2009 is nothing less than a new personal record: more brews, more beers, more fun.
Happy Brew Year to you all!
I brewed ten gallons of Beach Cruiser Blonde ale, yesterday. This is my first go-round with this beer, one I'd named long before I had fully conceived what it would be like. The blonde ale style never has been a personal favorite, and I usually turn to a crisp pale lager or spicy wheat beer when looking for a summer thirst quencher. But a recent family trip to North County San Diego led us, inevitably, to Pizza Port Carlsbad, and I found a blonde ale that really hit the spot. I was too busy enjoying the beer to recall its name, and I didn't bother trying to track down a brewer, either. But what made this particular blonde so alluring was a subdued clove spice reminiscent of a Bavarian hefeweizen. With a round of Bavarian weissbiers already planned at the home brewery, I knew then and there exactly what I would be brewing soon. After all, I'm German-American (more or less), I'm blonde (more or less), so why brew a German-American blonde ale?
The two carboys are fermenting happily right now, protected from the summer heat in their insulated water baths around 66°F. If all goes to plan, the Hefeweizen yeast from White Labs (WLP300) will add its characteristic stamp of clove phenolics and maybe a little banana ester, but dialed down somewhat by the relatively cool ferment (less banana) and the limited quantities of wheat malt (less clove, because wheat malt contains more ferrulic acid--the precursor of 4-vinyl guaiacol--than barley malt.) Hopefully, all of this will meld nicely with modest additions of candied ginger, bitter orange marmalade, and Willamette finishing hops, to produce a refreshing, easy-drinking, but still interesting pale summer ale. And my early reviews of the unfermented wort are promising.
The base beer under these spice additions is very straightforward: 75% American two-row, 10% German wheat malt, 10% Vienna malt, 5% Crystal 20L. The starting gravity was 1.050 (or about 12 Plato), with a mix of Crystal and Fuggle hops providing 20-25 BUs. I expect the finished beer to come in around 5% ABV.
