Goodbye Guinness

Yesterday, my new stout was finally ready to drink.

I kegged it a few days ago, but I made a mistake and confused two gas hoses, and I ended up pumping it full of CO2 when I thought I was hooking up beer gas, which is a nitrogren/CO2 mix. As a result of my mistake, I kept pouring glasses of foam, and when the foam subsided, the beer was flat. It was nasty. I have been letting the keg sit without pressure so CO2 would come out of it, and it has been working. Last night I poured beer I could drink.

It’s very sad. I guess I lost half a gallon of beer. But I’m still learning how to set up the system, and losses are unavoidable.

When I started drinking the stout, I thought it needed more alcohol, and it seemed too thick. As the carbonation balance improved, I realized there was nothing wrong with it at all. It was astonishing. For me, a two-beer day is a big deal, but I drank 4 glasses of stout, and I wished I could have kept going. It was mesmerizing.

I have several cold cans of Guinness pub draught stout, and I feel like pouring them out. I can’t drink that stuff any more. I used to think Guiness was wonderful, but comparing it to my stout is like comparing cube steak to a prime rib eye.

Guiness is a very light beer. It’s extremely dry. It has no body. It has very little alcohol. It’s low in calories. The aroma is lacking. The head is weak. It’s a very simple product.

It seems fantastic if Budweiser is what you’re used to, but the truth is that it’s just a cheaply made working man’s beer. A good product, but not something you can set beside a quality homebrew.

My stout tastes like coffee, dark chocolate, licorice, and dried fruit. It has a little sweetness, but not too much. It has a lot of body. The head looks like you could take it out and make couch cushions out of it. It’s not strong, but when you drink it, you can tell it’s beer. Guiness comes in at a little over 4% ABV, so it’s barely beer.

I can understand why a lot of old beers are weak. Beer used to be used like water. For example, British sailors drank a gallon of beer per day, at work. Moving a beer from 4.5% ABV to a respectable 6% would increase alcohol intake by a third. In the old days, people drank beer to get drunk, but they also drank it to stay hydrated, so I suppose weak beer was a necessity.

These days, beers fall into two categories: session beers and everything else. A session beer is a beer you can drink slowly all day. Guinness is a session beer. My stout is also a session beer, but it’s less sessiony than Guinness.

Budweiser has a reputation for weakness, but its alcohol level is around 5.5%, so it’s considerably stronger than Guinness. What’s really weak is the taste. Like carbonated dishwater.

My stout can be drunk liberally, but it would be hard to make myself do it. It’s too good. When I bring it up to my face, I have to stop and smell it. I move the glass from one nostril to the other and think about what I’m taking in. Then I take one mouthful and hold it briefly, experiencing the initial sourness, bitterness, and sweetness. Then I swallow, and all the flavors rise up in my head. After that, the beer seems to stick to my teeth. It makes my teeth taste good.

It reminds me a lot of Old Rasputin imperial stout, a much stronger beer with a more powerful flavor. It’s like Rasputin had a little brother. Old Rasputin is breathtaking.

In short, my stout is a success. I think I’ll still fool with it, though. I believe I’ll make a batch with a different finishing hop. The current version uses Kent Goldings, which are very good British hops. I think I’ll bitter with Kent Goldings and finish with Crystal, an American hop derived from European noble hops used in things like German lager. Crystal tastes like spices.

I’m a hack brewer, so when I drink my stout, I have to wonder what better brewers are making. I would think there must be some incredible stout out there in garages and game rooms.

I’m not sure, though, because I know most people can’t cook. Brewing is a form of cooking. If the ability to make and recognize good beer were common, Coors would have gone bankrupt decades ago.

It seems like a lot of new brewers are falling for gimmicks. When I got back into brewing, I was happy to see that a local grocery had a ton of different beers, but when I started looking for things I would actually want, I saw there weren’t many. A lot of kids are starting breweries and making ridiculous things. Strawberry cheesecake stout. Gluten-free hibiscus maple syrup IPA. Okay, these are slight exaggerations. But you get the idea. It’s like they’re trying to out-weird each other, and they are piling on flavoring ingredients instead of learning how to get flavor and aroma from grain, yeast, and hops. You can do beers that vary a great deal without resorting to dumping things like lactose and coffee into your wort.

Lactose beer is disgusting. Trust me. If you haven’t acquired a taste for actual beer, you may love milk stout, but if your palate is developed, you’ll be amazed that anyone would drink it.

Today I’ll try to make my wheat beer again. I think the first batch is infected. It tastes very bitter. I kept moving things around and changing things after it was kegged. I was trying to get the draft system right. I may have introduced bacteria or wild yeast.

I am now up to three freezers. A serving keezer, an upright fermenting freezer, and a new chest freezer for fermenting and storage. Because beers vary a lot in their temperature and fermentation-time requirements, one fermentation freezer is not enough. I could tie it up for weeks with one beer, and during that time, nothing else could go forward. If I have two freezers, I’ll always be able to ferment at least two beers at once and store maybe two below room temperature.

It sounds extreme, but I’m not so poor I can’t afford cheap freezers, and doing this wrong will take half the pleasure out of it.

I made a light lager two days ago. I thought I was making wheat beer, but I got the bags mixed up. I was going to pressure-ferment the lager, which speeds things up, but my pressure fermenter already has a lager in it, so I’m using a regular fermenter at 66°. The yeast I’m using will tolerate that temperature.

I’ll make the wheat beer and put it in the new freezer with the lager.

The new lager is interesting. I created it years ago to see if I could win over a Bud addict. It has corn in it to make it taste more American, and I originally used what is believed to be Budweiser’s yeast. Bud has a green apple flavor which may be from the yeast. A chemical byproduct called acetaldehyde can cause it. Anyway, the beer is light and easy to drink. I love it. The guy I created it for had no interest, though.