The Brew Arrives

We were extremely nervous about the brew when the day came...

Okay, that's not exactly accurate. I was nervous, my girlfriend had since moved on to throwing spent grain flour into everything she could think of. The beer at this point was an after thought for her. For me it was nerve wracking. I don't know why. I mean, it's not like I sell this. We didn't bet the farm on this five gallon batch of partial mash milk stout. Still, brewing beer is a bit like expecting a baby. You wait, you clean, you measure.You clear out rooms so it has somewhere to sleep after it's been delivered (which here means bottling).

So here I was, worrying about whether I could afford private school for the Milk & Honey Stout so that it could get into a good college, while the beer just sat there in bottles, judging me for being a bad brew-daddy.

So the day came, we cracked one open (we probably served it a little too warm, optimal temp here is between 38-40 degrees and ours was probably around 60 when I poured it) and drank it and it was ... good, but not great. Or at least so we thought.

When you tell people that you brew beer, if they're not into that whole DIY food thing they look at you a bit as though you've told them you're a wizard. "Beer? From your home? What is this sorcery?" And of course, because they're your friends (or at least they should be, I don't recommend giving your home brew to random passersby) every word that comes out of their mouth is tainted. "This is delicious. I would totally buy this." And I want to believe it. I want to think that on my second batch of beer I've someone managed to master what took the Belgians and Germans the better part of two millennial to perfect. But I'm far too neurotic to believe that I've produced something palatable to a human being who is not me. Even out of the mouths of the local homebrew club (which were not nearly as kind, but still very complementary) I was suspect that I had made (I say I, but really it's we, but since I'm the only one freaking out about it I'm going to continue to use first person pronouns) a good beer.

That's probably part of it though. The desire to do better comes from the belief that what you've done is not as good as what you will do. And I believe that to be true of any endeavor.

Our next beer will be better than this one. The one after that will be better than all the ones that came before.

And I will be terrified that every last one of them is a delinquent.

Lady Homebrewers

As you can tell from some of the previous posts, we are homebrewers. To me, the fascination with this process does not necessarily stem from my desire to drink beer. Instead, it is the challenge of cooking and creating something new.

Yeast is an endlessly fascinating creature, as is natural fermentation. Brewing beer is just another aspect of canning, pickling, and preserving food. These processes makes something normally wasted, inedible, or at the end of its shelf life, last for a much longer period of time. At the end of the season you can preserve fruits and vegetables from the garden to last through the winter.

This process then, is what I find to be really appealing. And, since my boyfriend likes drinking beer, I like brewing it!

So recently, we went to a local home brewers meetup group. It was in the back room of a bar. We walked into the dimly lit room, and there was a long table set up with a few tubs of ice, and quite a few rocks glasses. We were some of the first folks to arrive.

It didn't take long for me to figure out that home brewing is apparently dominated by men. Everyone was incredibly welcoming and very excited to hear that the two of us brewed together. But, I still struggled with the fact that I felt out of place. It didn't help that the space was also shared by a military reunion of some local veterans.

Two other ladies arrived a little bit later, one of whom I found to be quite helpful. She started brewing less than a year ago and had already won some awards! But, in a room full of 20 brewers, to only have 3 women seemed a pretty terrible ratio.

I guess the question becomes then, are there no women in it because women don't like brewing? Or is it more because getting into brewing is pretty scary - without someone to mentor you the whole process is pretty overwhelming. And when the vast majority of those brewers are guys who started brewing together in college, or do it during the football game, it seems very much a perpetuation of the old boys club.

So ladies wanting to get into brewing - some advice!

Just do it - it's rewarding, delicious, and a lot of fun.

Don't be intimidated. I heard so many times at the home brew club. "Man, I wish my girlfriend would come!", "I wish that my wife would brew with me!", "How'd you get your girlfriend here, man?" Clearly you are wanted and desired in the community, so don't let the fact that there will be a lot of guys there be a turn off.

I would also suggest, even if you aren't super into beer, (maybe you drink wine or cider, those things are cool too!), if friends invite you to brew, do it! It's a lot of fun, and if nothing else, doing it once is a new experience. And if you absolutely hate beer, and don't want anything to do with it, making wine and cider is almost the exact same process as brewing beer. It just takes much longer to get to the end product.

I find myself to be very particular about the beer that I drink these days. Even of the home brew that we make I only have a bottle of it every now and then. The reason I keep brewing is the challenge to create something new, but also the opportunity to share delicious things with friends. We frequently keep very little beer for ourselves - it's a process of creating and connecting with friends over that creation.

So, get yourself out there, find some brew friends, and get started!

Spent Grain Brownies

Spent grain brownies - absolutely delicious re-purposing of spent grain from the beer brewing process. A goodly portion of the spent grain from our Milk and Honey Stout was chocolate malt. Chocolate malt smells, as one might suspect from the name, like dark chocolate. I'd like to think that this makes the brownies extra chocolate-y but to be honest, the main culprit is likely the fact that there's more cocoa powder than flour in this recipe.

Ingredients:
2 1/2 sticks of butter, slightly softened as much as patience will allow for (for us this was just slightly less than hard as a brick)*
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups cocoa powder
4 eggs
1/2 cup spent grain flour (we recommend something that uses chocolate malt like a stout or a porter)
3/4 cup all purpose flour
1 cup walnuts, smashed with a rolling pin by your girlfriend who will cut you if you take this from her... sorry, where were we? Oh right, brownies.
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

Cream butter and sugar together (if you're like us this means trying to cream the butter and then trying several methods of varying degrees of failure to get the butter to soften). Add eggs 1 at a time and mix (or all at once, we're bloggers, not cops). Meanwhile, mix dry ingredients together. Add dry ingredients 1/3 at a time to wet, mixing thoroughly after each (this step is not negotiable, your kitchen will look like Pompeii otherwise). Pour into greased 9x13 inch pan, and bake on 325 degrees for 35 minutes. Cool completely before slicing. Seriously. Completely cool. There is nothing so heart breaking as f*@#ing up your brownies because you couldn't control yourself. Go for a walk or something.

Enjoy! 

Spent Grain Flour

My girl is extremely resourceful. We're talking McGuyver levels. Blindfolded, with her hands tied behind her back and armed  nothing more than a rubber band, a coffee straw, and a chicken bone she can make a three course meal. Like that level or resourceful. So when the brew produced spent grain, which I casually mentioned could be turned into flour to make stuff. I probably should have assumed that was going to be a thing.

So the Milk and Honey Stout used a partial mash with chocolate malt, honey malt, and roasted barley. She dried it out using a dehydrator with cheesecloth on the trays (I'm still attempting to determine whether dehydrator ownership is prerequisite for food blogging or the cause thereof). Then we pulsed the s*#@ out of the dried grain in my blender.

Here's what you get

It smells kind of like brownie mix less the sugar, so naturally the plan is to make brownies with it.

Stay tuned...

In Anticipation of the Brew

While, I’m not new to home brewing, I definitely consider myself an amateur. As such, I am awaiting the near completion of the final stage of our Milk and Honey Stout with equal parts eagerness and dread. I can already point to some things that went wrong:

1. We probably waited too long after buying our kit to start brewing. I don’t know what the half-life of one of those packages of WYeast is but letting it sit in the crisper drawer for two weeks probably wasn’t optimal for the health of the critters living in there.
2. Our wort chiller was missing an adapter so we couldn’t use it. As anyone who has ever boiled a substantial amount of liquid will tell you, it takes FOR-F#@%ING-EVER for it to cool of its own accord. Impatience eventually got the better of us and rather than pitching the yeast at between 65-72 degrees like the recipe called for, we pitched it at 80.
3. We did not move the wort to a secondary fermentation in a carboy. Saturday was something of a s%&* show between my being sick and our having plans which required us to be in the Loop that evening. In asking the internet for advice, they suggested that all this bulls#&$ was just going to result in infected beer and that I was better off just leaving it in the brewing bucket until bottling day.
4. Probably bottled too early. The initial gravity of our beer was 1.061 and the final gravity was 1.030. Some rudimentary math shows that our beer, by those numbers, is going to end up around 4.1% ABV. That’s like, half, of what you expect for a milk stout. Not a good sign, but then again, it’s entirely possible I f@*$ed up one, or both readings. Or that said readings were off because of temperature differences in the wort at the time of the measurement.
5. Even though I scrubbed the s%&@ out of those bottles and sanitized (and re-sanitized) them, the things I saw come out of them will haunt my dreams. I’m sure they’re fine. Hell, I’m even planning on giving some to my friends and relatives. Needless to say I’m not drinking any of that s@&$ out of the bottle. It goes in a glass where I see it. I guess this is the home brewers equivalent of “watching the sausage get made”.

At any rate. I’m nervous about the results. We’ll see how Saturday goes.