Tag Archives: beer

Spent Grain Bread

Posted on by — 1 Comment ↓
Spent Grain Bread

I love spent grain bread. It’s one of my very favorite things about brewing. You see: brewing is sort of a wasteful process. You take eight or ten or twelve pounds of grain, soak it in water, and convert the runnings from that little bath into five gallons of sweet wort, and then eventually into five gallons of beer. And all of that is great. And tasty. But when the process is done, it’s not as though the grain has Continue reading →

Special Bitter, and Floor Malted Barley

Posted on by — No Comments ↓
Malted Barley

So I’m making a new beer, probably next weekend.  It’ll be a Special Bitter — largely minimalist in hops and grain, and as true to the style as it exists in Britain as I can manage.  That means British hops, which I prefer anyway.  And it means Maris Otter malt, which has, for the past half-century or thereabouts, been the (well-deserved) standard malted barley for beer in the U.K. Why has it been the standard, you ask?  Because it’s good. Continue reading →

Brown Porter Pictorial

Posted on by — No Comments ↓
Brown Porter 4

I have been absent.  But I have not exactly been remiss.  Real life — academic obligations, travel to parts Midwestern, the lack of a working kitchen — has kept me from posting here for the past two weeks.  But this blog, and you, dear readers, have never been far from my thoughts.  Regular posting will continue soon.  But for the moment, please enjoy this. I brewed on Saturday.  It was my first real foray into the kitchen since returning from Continue reading →

October is the Cruelest Month; or, Beer and Crazies

Posted on by — 1 Comment ↓

So where have I been, you might ask, friends of the blog that you all are. I haven’t seen you ’round much, you might say. Have you been avoiding us? Have you stopped writing? Have you cooked at all this week? The answer, dear friends, is that no, I have not abandoned you. But life, such as it is, has stuck out its big ugly foot and tripped me up. By which I mean that the meetings of the American Continue reading →

Star Trek and Brown Ale

Posted on by — 1 Comment ↓
Boiling Wort

** Update: The answer, dear friends, to the question of whether my yeast problems would kill this beer, is a big, resounding yes.  I bought some additional yeast this morning, thinking that I would re-pitch.  And when I opened my fermentation vessel, what I found was kind of horrifying: colorful, clearly bacterial colonies floating on the surface, and a smell like curdled milk (be glad this blog isn’t scratch-and-sniff) that is unmatched by anything I’ve ever smelled in this house Continue reading →

Northern Brown Ale

Posted on by — 1 Comment ↓

It’s brewing time again — or at least planning-to-brew time.  Now that I have an appropriate temperature control mechanism, brewing during the summer is a piece of cake.  So I figure that when I get home from a short trip at the beginning of August, I’m going to start beer number five for the year.  It will be a Northern Brown Ale, in the style of something like a Samuel Smith Nut Brown, or (in a roundabout way) a Newcastle.  Continue reading →

Black Dot Bitter

Posted on by — 6 Comments ↓

So I’ve bottled my latest foray into beer brewing. It shall be called “Black Dot Bitter,” because I marked the caps with a black dot to distinguish them from (the unmarked) bottles of my previous beer attempt. I did some tasting as I was bottling, and it was very yummy. A little bit on the bitter side, even for an English Bitter-style beer. But there’s a considerable quantity of malty sweetness to counterbalance it. So I can’t say that that Continue reading →