Thank You, Drunk Monks

I am brewing again.

I took some time off for some reason I no longer remember. I’m not sure there was a reason. Laziness may have been involved.

Early this year, I stocked up on grain, hops, and yeast, but I let things slide. My house is full of brewing supplies. I had to get back at it.

I am out of wheat ale, and my amber/orange lager, Last Trump Lager (may be changed to Final Trump Lager) is definitely stale. My supply of Emergency Management Ale is dangerously low. My first imperial stout needs to be drunk and replaced with a recipe I like better.

Today I brewed my first batch of Happy Halfwit Christmas Ale.

My first heavy beer is called Happy Halfwit because it has a lot of wheat in it. It’s sort of like a Belgian ale. Belgians call their wheat beers witbiers. My beer’s grain bill is around 1/3 wheat, so I decided to call it Halfwit. Poetic license. No one would think Thirdwit was…witty.

About two years ago, when I started getting back into brewing, I bought a bunch of store beers to sharpen up my palate. I bought St. Bernardus Christmas Ale, from Belgium. I believe it’s a quadrupel, or what the BJCP calls a Strong Dark Belgian Ale.

When I first got the beer, I was not crazy about it. It had a coarseness to it. Too much funk, as I have said in an earlier post. I bought a 4-pack, and until today, I had two in the fridge.

It improved a great deal while I was debating throwing it out. The funkiness went away, and it became like Belgian beer Kool-Aid. Very easy to drink, but still complex.

Today I made something like a Belgian Dark Strong Ale, but I used a lot of wheat, while Belgian Dark Strong Ales are made with barley alone. Stunts like this make other homebrewers think I’m weird, but I really like the beers I make. They are my favorites.

It seems like all the great Belgian beers are made by monks. It’s like they spent the Dark Ages and the Renaissance doing nothing but lying around drunk. They didn’t stop with beer. They also invented a lot of well-known hard liquors. Supposedly, the European wine industry was developed by monks.

Why were they drunk all the time? Was life really that dull?

My brewing method is pretty slick now. I have it dialed in. I mash and boil in a 10-gallon pot straddling two stove burners. A mesh bag goes in the kettle to hold the grain. I strain the results and pour them into a 6-gallon stubby Torpedo keg, using a big saucepan. I put the keg in the pool so the wort chills fast. Then I pitch the yeast, add a valve to control the building CO2, and put the keg in a freezer with a Chinese temperature controller on it.

It’s really simple.

When I got back into brewing, I assumed other people had made a lot of progress with tools and methods, and I foolishly bought a computerized German machine that takes grain and turns it into wort. It was a stupid thing to do. I blew about a thousand dollars on something that should cost three hundred, and it was a pain to take apart and clean.

Now it’s just me, the kettle, and the bag. I spend about a third as much time cleaning and putting stuff away. And the beer is just as good.

I guess I shouldn’t make it sound like there has been no progress, because the kettle-and-bag method is relatively new. It’s called brew in a bag, or BIAB. But while it’s progress, it involves a setup more primitive than the one I started using in 2001.

There are guys out there using HERMS equipment. I’m not going to Google to find out what HERMS stands for, but it involves several huge stainless containers and at least one pump. I would quit brewing if I had to wash all that.

Here is the thing: men love gadgets. If we didn’t, women would be living in burrows and behind bushes. We love tinkering and engineering. When you get started brewing, it’s easy to fall in love with unnecessary machinery. You begin with the idea you’re going to make really good beer, and you end up trying to become a really good mechanic instead.

There are guys out there with big, shiny, three-vessel systems that take up their entire garages, and they could be using 1) a pot, and 2) a bag.

It’s not like BIAB is a compromise. BIAB people win prizes all the time.

I’ll just say it. You have to be stupid to buy a fancy brewing system. I know, because I bought one. I should sell it.

To a stupid person.

Okay, “stupid” is not the right word. But a person with knowledge and common sense would buy something else.

The beer I made today will probably ferment out in 4 days. I know this because ale I used as my starting point fermented out in three. This new one is a little heavier. I should be drinking it in 10 days or less.

So that’s nice.

In other news, our wonderful Lord has given me more revelation, and I should put it on the blog.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural. That’s the starting point. Look for symmetry, and you will save yourself a lot of time in the school of hard knocks. You will learn more quickly.

Pride is horrible. I have written about this. It goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit goes before a fall. Self-confidence is poison.

I have also said that God showed me that pride is a fence we build to protect our iniquities. We don’t like to listen or change, so we make excuses and dig our heels in. We protect our bad habits and delusions as though they were our children, because we think we know better than everyone else.

Pride is also a fence we build to keep God away. The Bible makes this clear. It says he is close to the humble but far from the proud.

If we build a fence to keep correction out, and it keeps God away, who is it bringing near? Evil spirits. Symmetry.

Here is revelation: by the symmetry of the supernatural, humility is a fence we build to keep destruction and evil spirits away. It’s a fence that surrounds God and ourselves, keeping him close to us.

Humility is actually power and victory. No one ever teaches this. They don’t know. They’re too busy telling us to work hard, grin while we are abused and defeated, and give them money to buy more jets.

If you’re humble, God will be close to you, so he will keep evil spirits far off, and he will bless you in every way.

Think of this: in the Old Testament, who saw God? One person, as far as we know. Maybe Adam saw him before the fall, but Moses is the only person we can say saw him, for sure.

What quality did Moses have?

No one was more humble than Moses. Look it up. The Bible says it.

I didn’t see the connection until God showed it to me yesterday.

Moses was close to God. Moses was given so much power and authority, he was able to stroll up to the ruler of Egypt and tell him off.

The one thing that Moses did that got him in trouble with God was an act of pride. God told him to speak to a rock and make water come out, and Moses struck the rock instead, making it look like human strength solved the problem. For this, Moses was kept out of Israel.

We tend to think of humility as something that makes us weak. We think it empowers others to abuse us. But it’s actually the entrance to the strong fortress the Bible keeps telling us about. It’s safety and power.

I wish I had known this a long time ago.

I hope this is useful to you. Now I’ll finish this beer and go to bed.