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I forgot to post about this because of our Maine vacation, but the day before we left for Maine, Cath and I went to the BeerAdvocate American Beer Fest. This was her last day of surgery, so we were ready to have fun, but we also needed to drink responsibly since we were leaving for Maine the next day.

Fortunately, the BeerAdvocate folks changed the format of the fest. Instead of 5 tickets and 4-oz. pours, we now had unlimited samples of 2-oz. pours. It’s counterintuitive that unlimited drinks == less drunkenness, but that’s how it worked out. The smaller pours combined with the lines prevented you from drinking excessively, and it also let us try pretty much every beer there. So I think it definitely worked well for us. We left feeling mostly sober, and we had no problem leaving for our trip the next morning.

The beers were tasty, but frankly at an event like this your mouth gets kinda numb after a while and you can only taste the really crazy beers. Normal beers that you would like in any other setting taste bland here. Cath and I both really liked one of the double IPAs, but I think that had to do with the strong hops taste hitting us over the head. The beers were generally excellent.

The next fest is a Belgian Beer Fest. Should be awesome.

Last night Cath and I bottled the homebrew we started with Eric a couple weeks ago. It was a messy process and took us maybe 3-4 hours including cleanup, but it’s kinda fun filling all those bottles. And it’s a pretty laid-back process.

A quick review of the brewing process: Previously we created the sugar mixture for the yeast to munch on, then left it in a tub for two weeks. The yeast did their thing, eating the sugars and producing CO2 and alcohol. Once fermentation is done (about 2 weeks), you basically have uncarbonated beer. Most real brewers force CO2 through this, bottle it, and sell it right away, but as a homebrewer we don’t have access to that kind of equipment. So instead we use natural carbonation. We add a bit more sugar to the uncarbonated beer, then bottle it. The yeast now have more sugar to eat, so they produce CO2 in the closed bottle, which carbonates the beer. This takes 2-4 weeks, and then you can drink your finished beer. So our stuff should be ready toward the middle of July.

We tasted a bit of the uncarbonated beer as we were bottling, and it was actually darn tasty. I’m not sure I would call it a Belgian Dubbel, but whatever it is, it’s pretty good. We’re taking a 6 pack home to my parents, and we’re also giving a 6 pack to Eric. Can’t wait to try the finished product!

This past weekend Catherine and I were, among other things, in Cooperstown, NY, for a wedding. Cath spent Saturday morning with the bride, helping her with here makeup, hair, etc. Girly stuff. I was left to fend for myself, so I decided to check out the Brewery Ommegang just outside Cooperstown. Ommegang is one of the few U.S. breweries making Belgian-style beers; nearly everyone else is doing English-style ales and their American derivatives.

The brewery tour was very cool. Some interesting facts:

• They only have capacity to brew one batch at a time.
• Their fermenter is open. It’s enclosed in its own room, but there’s no top on the fermenter; you can look down right into the fermenting proto-beer. This is surprising to me given the emphasis in homebrewing of avoiding anything that might contaminate the beer. But apparently open fermentation is the correct way to brew Belgians, and according to the tour guide, real Belgian breweries just leave the beer out to ferment and let wild yeasts help in the fermentation.
• They spend a lot of time aging the beer. It is bottle-conditioned (CO2 comes from yeast in the bottle, not from force carbonation like most beers), but they also let it sit in a warm room for several weeks before selling. They showed us this large, warehouse-like room with crate upon crate of aging beer, stacked to the ceiling.
• They are owned by Duvel, a Belgian beer company, and they don’t have enough capacity to meet demand for the Ommegang beers. So the brewery in Belgium also brews Ommegang and ships it here to help meet demand.

My favorite part of the tour was the tasting, as you might expect. We got to try small servings of all five Ommegang beers, and it was neat to be able to taste them back to back. All were excellent, but my favorites were the Ommegang, an abbey-style dubbel, which was very dark and complex, and the Hennepin, a Saison, which was lighter but with lots of flavor.

In the gift shop, I picked up a bottle of “cave-aged” Hennepin — they dropped it into a local cave for 8 months to age. The tour guide claimed it was quite different from the normal Hennpin, with stronger flavors. I’ll be sure to report back once I’ve tried it.

Long ago, when Cath and I got married, Eric got us a homebrewing kit as a wedding present. Within a couple months, we brewed a red ale from the kit he provided, and the results were OK. The beer wasn’t bad, but it had an off taste that was probably a result of bacterial containmation. Don’t worry, it was safe to drink (the alcohol in the beer will kill any bacteria), but it causes some off flavors. We still have a bit of this stuff in our fridge nearly 1.5 years later.

Fast forward to this weekend. I’ve been wanting to brew another batch for a couple months now, and with Cath on call this weekend, it seemed like the perfect time. I called Eric for help, and he brought a couple friends over and we went at it. Early in the day, I stopped by Modern Homebrew Emporium to pick up supplies. The store clerk was super helpful and helped me pick out a recipe and the ingredients. No kit this time. I wanted something strong, and Cath likes Belgians, so I picked a Belgian Dubbel.

The brewing process went OK. First you boil 2 gallons of water along with the malt and hops. This takes about an hour. Then you pour the results into a big pail along with 3 more gallons of cold water and let this cool to 75 degrees. This was the painful part; without the proper equipment (a wort cooler), it takes a long time to get the temperature down. In our case, it took nearly 6 hours. This is bad because the longer the wort stays warm, the more likely it is for bacterial continamination to occur. Again, not a problem in terms of health, but it gives the beer an off flavor.

Anyhow, once the wort cools, you add the yeast, cover it, and wait. At this point you’ve basically added the yeast to a big pail of sugar, so they have plenty to eat and will go nuts producing alcohol and CO2. You let this sit for around 2 weeks, until the yeast have digested all the sugars, then you add a bit more sugar and bottle it. This is called bottle conditioning: You use the natural CO2 produced by the yeast to carbonate the beer in the bottle. You let this sit for 2-4 weeks, and then you should have tasty carbonated beer to drink.

I found that this time, I had a much better understanding of what we were doing and why we were doing everything. Last time, I was just following the directions in the kit. This time, I knew why we performed each step and was able to adjust things where the instructions weren’t clear. I was definitely concerned about how long it took to cool the wort, and I’m thinking about getting a wort cooler if I want to keep doing this. I was also concerned because fermentation didn’t start for about 2 days, which is on the long end of these things. To have the thing sit there for a day without bubbling at all was pretty concerning, but now it’s happily bubbling away.

I’m excited to try the beer when it’s ready in a couple months. Hopefully it will be tasty.