Stout on the Way

I had a busy day today. In addition to taking care of some nagging tasks, I made a pizza and a keg of Irish-style stout, and I worked on problems with my first post-hiatus wheat beer, which I kegged yesterday.

The pizza was nothing remarkable. An 8″ Sicilian with Boar’s Head pepperoni. I can crank those out all day. The beers were more interesting.

I drew my first wheat beer today. Sour with lots of head. The sourness concerned me a little. Wheat is supposed to produce tart beers, but you can overdo it, and I used about 75% wheat in this beer. A lot of so-called wheat beers are down around 30%, and back during the Bush II years, when I drew up my recipe, people thought I was nuts to go to 75%. Nonetheless, this beer is working.

You can’t judge a beer by the first few samples if you are drawing beer off the bottom of the keg. Yeast and hops flakes will make it bitter and sour. I threw out a little bit of beer, and after that, it seemed the balance between crystal malt sweetness on one hand and wheat acidity and hops bitterness on the other was way better.

Beer starts out as a sugar solution, and sugar is heavier than water. Alcohol is less dense, so as yeast does its work turning sugar into alcohol and CO2, beer gets lighter, and the alcohol content increases. This beer went from a specific gravity of 1.053 or so to about 1.0115, and this suggests it should have a light character and around 5.8% alcohol, which is not a lot. It’s very easy to drink, and cold temperatures don’t detract a lot from the experience. This means it’s a lawnmower beer, even though it’s a quality homebrew and not big-beer industry swill.

“Lawnmower beer” is a term homebrewers use to describe beer which goes down easily and isn’t very heavy. It’s a hot day, you’re mowing the lawn, and for some reason, you think it’s a good idea to quench your thirst with an alcoholic beverage while riding a 20-horsepower machine that can cut a person’s feet off. You want a lawnmower beer. It means you’re probably an alcoholic, but nonetheless, the term itself is useful.

Most people who think it’s intelligent to operate dangerous machinery while drinking will favor gross corn-and-rice-based beer substitutes like Bud and Coors, but any beer that goes down well on a hot day is a lawnmower beer, and it is possible for a truly good beer to fit into this category.

I have another lawnmower beer recipe. A long time ago, I tried to convince a Bud addict he should like real beer. I made a light lager that was partly corn-based, and I used a yeast similar to the one Bud uses. It turned out to be great, but I got nowhere with the conversion because my friend was an alcoholic and drug addict who was not interested at all in the quality of what he drank. He just wanted to stay high and drunk so he didn’t have to face himself and admit he treated people badly. I didn’t understand that at the time.

When I think of alcoholics, I think of vodka, not beer. When I was a kid, an older Irish lady lived next door to me, and she was a good example of a vodka alcoholic. My mother saw her turn up tumblers of pure vodka, and she said that as she drank it down, her Adam’s apple moved up and down like a jackhammer. One tumbler like that would make me very drunk and might even stop my heart, but she was used to it.

Addicts like vodka because they have the mistaken belief other people can’t smell it on them, it’s less likely to cause headaches than brown liquors, and there are a lot of cheap vodkas. But there are beer and wine alcoholics, too.

Anyway, what I drew from my keg today was full of yeast and hop sediment for various reasons too boring to go into. It will clear up as the beer at the bottom of the keg is consumed. The yeast and hops gave the beer sharp acidic and basic flavors, and the live yeast may produce astounding CO2 flatulence, but as I go through the lower layers of beer, the hops and yeast will be removed, and the beer will be outstanding.

What I have now could be called a beer lemonade. I used Amarillo hops, and they produce a strong lemony flavor. They belong to a family of hops, and believe it or not, related hops like Centennial and Cascade produce orange and grapefruit flavors. That’s how crazy hops are. I don’t know of any lime-flavored hops, though.

So I have a light, lemony beer that tastes great on its own, but what about adding things to it?

Ordinarily, I think adding things to beer is an indication that someone is misguided. Generally, really good beers don’t need any help. Wheat beers, however, seem to lend themselves to flavorings. Adding fruit syrups to wheat beers is a pretty old practice even in Germany, where people are so uptight about beer they take all the fun out of it.

I am thinking I may try adding grenadine, which is really cherry syrup. I may try to find raspberry and strawberry syrups. People add these things to German wheat beers from really stuffy companies, so I would not be committing heresy.

Today I brewed an Irish-style stout, sort of like Guiness and Murphy’s. It’s one of my old recipes. At the time, I wrote this:

It’s a bit like Guinness or Murphy’s, but it has tons of body and a silky feel to it. The chocolate malt gives it a wonderful chocolate smell and flavor. I used Munich malt and Maris Otter to make it rich, but it’s not TOO rich. The bitterness is high, at 47-something, but it’s still very smooth. I think it might be better if I dropped it slightly.

It’s in the fermenting freezer now. I have high hopes for it, but I don’t know if it will pan out. As you drink better and better beers, you lose your enthusiasm for old favorites because you grow up. I had a pub draught Guinness yesterday, and I found it thin, too dry, and lacking in complexity. I hope I won’t find these same flaws in my own stout, which I created during a time when I thought Guinness was pretty good. I liked Murphy’s better, however, and it had a friendlier taste, with less of an edge. I hope my feelings for Murphy’s pushed the recipe toward the sweeter, more complex end of the stout spectrum.

Incidentally, stout is dark because it’s made with barley that has been roasted until it turns dark brown. Now you know.

Next up is my orange lager. I am not all that excited about lagers because they are boring compared to ales, but this one can hold its own against an ale. It’s about the color of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, and that means it has a lot of malt flavor. It has crystal malt to prevent it from being abusively dry. It’s smooth and full of interesting aromas and tastes. It’s like a lager that wishes it were an ale. Very, very good.

The big problem with lagers is that they have to be lagered. Lagering is storage at low temperatures. Lagers need it to refine them and dissipate off flavors. I’ll have to leave the keg in cold storage for several weeks.

I’ll just blurt it out: in my mind, lagers are generally inferior to other beers. They are the vodka of beer. If you want something extremely polished and inoffensive, there are a lot of lagers that will make you happy, and there are subtle pleasures in lagers. Those pleasures are real and not to be contemned. Still, if you want to get lost in a beer, it’s easier to do it with ales. That’s my opinion, but there are way more beers now than there were when I formed my ideas about beer, so I may be wrong.

I do appreciate a good lager. I love Spaten and Gosser. But I’ve had a lot of very good lagers that were like BMW’s. Well-behaved. Faultless. Relentlessly similar.

I don’t like dark lagers at all. They taste like light lagers flavored with burned sugar. A good dark ale is another matter. It’s a forest of unexpected flavors and aromas.

In a week or less, I should have stout ready to serve. It would probably be best to wait a couple of weeks after that to serve it, but I don’t plan to do that. I need to get a beer inventory going so I don’t empty kegs prematurely, and besides, the fact that a beer gets better with time doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start on the keg before it hits its prime. You can enjoy it for what it is as soon as it’s ready, and then you can enjoy the way it changes later.

I have this idea that God, or “Tod,” as I call him when I hit the wrong keys, would like me to be able to talk to ordinary people leading ordinary lives. That means not surrounding myself with Jesus buffs who only associate with each other. Beer, strange as it seems, could help me bridge the gap. I think self-righteous teetotaling Christians repel a lot of people. They make them feel dirty and ashamed. Maybe if I can have a couple of beers with people who have tattoos and spit cups on their dashboards, they will understand that Jesus, not I, is the one I want them to admire and love.