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Sumatra Stout Recipe

I forgot to post this the other day. Recipe for the Coffee Stout I brewed on Wednesday.

1/2 lb Black Patent Malt
1/2 lb Chocolate Malt
1 lb Munton's Roasted Non-malted Black Barley
3/4 lb Water Street Sumatra Coffee
6.6 lbs Dark LME
1 oz Northern Brewer (45 min)
0.5 oz Liberty (5 min)
0.5 oz Liberty (0 min)

The wort came out dark as fuck on this one, and the aroma was heavenly. I made a Coffee Oatmeal Stout before, which turned out fine, but I didn't add enough coffee and the beer turned out a lot lighter than I wanted. I'm hoping this is going to be a nice roasty jet-black stout with a malty backbone.

I guess we'll see in a couple of weeks. The plan is to move it to glass this Wednesday, leave it in the secondary for another week, then bottle around July 1.

Beer Review, Double Crooked Tree IPA

Dark Horse Double Crooked Tree IPA
Marshall, MI
13.6% ABV

Appearance: Pours darker than expected, a ruddy brown more like a malty lager than a DIPA, with a thick slightly-off-white head that reduces to about a quarter-inch fairly quickly. Very nice impression from the appearance. 4.5/5

Smell: Oooh. Sweet, malty, but with a nice dollop of crisp grassy hops. (Perhaps Centennial?) Rich, invigorating, very well-executed. 4.5/5

Taste: Sweet with unfermented sugar, slightly "hot" with alcohol. Hoppy but balanced with a nice sweet malt backbone, intense but not overwhelming. These would probably age very well, although true hopfiends will probably find this a bit underpowered for their liking. 4.0/5

Mouthfeel: Thick, coats the tongue, with a nice wallop of hops and high carbonation. 4.0/5

Drinkability: For thirteen+ percent, this is amazingly smooth. Fans of the style should at least give it a once-over. 4.5/5

Overall: 4.25/5

Beer Review, Founders Double Trouble

Founders Double Trouble Imperial IPA
Grand Rapids, MI
9.4% ABV

Appearance: Hazy yellow-orange appearance, thin white head that dissipates quickly. 4.0/5

Smell: Sweet citrus, heavy with grapefruit, with a strong dose of crisp white hops. Very nice aroma. 4.5/5

Taste: Hops. Lots of clean hops. All over the entire body of the beer, with a strongly alcoholic finish and a drying aftertaste. Some notes of citrus. It's good, but very strong. 4.0/5

Mouthfeel: Moderate. Heavy with hops (obviously) and a high carbonation (not quite so obviously). 4.0/5

Drinkability: Quite a good DIPA. Not the greatest ever, ends up a bit one-note, but not bad at all. 4.0/5

Overall: 4.1/5

Beer Review, Edmund Fitzgerald Porter

Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald Porter
Cleveland, OH
5.8% ABV

Appearance: Dark, nearly black velvet, but not opaque like a stout (slight transparency to the body) and with a reddish tinge to the liquid. Half-inch khaki-colored head. Amazing appearance. 4.5/5

Smell: Dark malts, lots of sweet grapes and raisins, very bready. 4.0/5

Taste: Delicious dry malts, roasted grains, slightly dry on the finish. A touch of raisin sweetness, but not too much. Basically a note-perfect American Porter. 4.5/5

Mouthfeel: Moderate thickness, mild carbonation, no significant hops. Smooth. 3.5/5

Drinkability: This may be my all-time favorite porter. 4.0/5

Overall: 4.25/5

(And that's probably being a bit too harsh on it, numerically speaking.)

IPA Update

Just a quick status update on the homebrewed IPA.

The Pacific Ale Yeast didn't want to activate after two days, so I sterilized a plastic stirring spoon and stirred up the batch, aerating the yeast. There was a nice thick layer of yeast on top of the beer already (unlike my last yeast problem with the hefeweizen, when upon opening the batch I found it exactly as I left it), so stirring the yeasty muck back into the wort was a simple process. I re-sterilized the lid and the airlock, and sealed the batch back up, leaving it on my warm enclosed porch so it would stay a bit warmer than my house, which stays around 65F most of the time.

Sure enough, within a few hours the fermentation process was chugging along nicely. It stopped after another day, though, so I repeated the process a day later. Then I moved it inside to my basement where I could keep a closer eye on it and let the attenuation process go forward.

Yesterday I moved the batch into the secondary fermenter (glass carboy). I sterlized my racking cane and plastic tubing, as well as a plastic funnel. I racked several gallons of hot water mixed with no-rinse cleanser into the carboy, and let the whole thing sit for about an hour. Then I moved the primary fermenter outside, setting it on a small outdoor table. The carboy went out next, and I carefully poured the sterlizing solution out onto the dirt underneath the wooden deck. I put the plastic funnel into the top of the carboy (in case of spillage) and ran the tubing into the hole. Then I carefully opened the primary and enjoyed the sweet grassy aroma of Centennials.

The racking tube went into the beer and was attached to the plastic tubing. I racked the contents of the plastic fermenter into the glass, leaving the trub behind. Then I removed the plastic tubing and poured two ounces of Centennial hops into the funnel, shaking slightly to get them all down the tube. A sterilized airlock and bung was placed onto the carboy, and then it was moved inside and placed in a black garbage bag in a dark area of my basement.

Then I cleaned the tubing, plastic fermenter, lid, racking cane, and funnel, and stored them in my garage. I'll have to sterilize the whole mess before I can use it again, anyway, so I figure leaving it in the garage isn't the worst idea I've ever had, but I like to get the sticky beer off immediately so it doesn't set and become impossible to clean.

I'm planning on leaving the IPA in the secondary for about two weeks to give time for the dry-hopping to be effective and for the leftover yeast to have time to clear the beer. The color was a bit darker than I was expecting, probably because of the large volume of Vienna malt, but it's probably within reasonable bounds of expectation given an IPA. It smelled delicious even now, so hopefully it'll turn out well.

Homebrewing

So it's no secret that this blog has been pretty damned silent as of late. Which is more-or-less de rigeur of my blogging life -- periods of furious updating on a variety of subjects punctuated by long droopy silences. When no one reads you, it's easy to just let yourself forget about updating for awhile.

Also, I've been spending my energies in other pursuits. I've been playing Dead Rising obsessively, and may actually end up writing a three-years-too-late walkthrough just for my own amusement. And since the end of March I've been homebrewing, and just a few minutes ago finished my fourth batch, an American IPA.

Since the blog has been so silent, I figured I'd go ahead and put up the recipe I've used today for reference, and will eventually write up the resulting product and link it back here.

Grains:

1 lb 10L Crystal Malt
1 lb Breiss Vienna Malt

6.6 lbs light LME

Hops:

1 oz Chinook 60 mins
1 oz Centennial 30 min
.5 oz Centennial 5 min
.5 oz Centennial 0 min

Original Gravity: 1.043 at 85F.

I boiled the grains in a bag for thirty minutes at 160-170, then boiled the LME for an hour. Hops were added according to the listed schedule. I'm planning on moving the beer into a glass carboy in a week, and dry-hopping it with another ounce of Centennial for aroma. We'll see how that works out as the brewing process goes on.

Beer Review, Samuel Adams Chocolate Bock

Samuel Adams Chocolate Bock
Boston, MA
5.6% ABV

Appearance: Mostly black body, slightly red-orange-tinged towards the bottom, with a thick brown head that dissipates over time but leaves some significant lacing. 4.0/5

Smell: Very nutty, chocolatey, malty. Slight astringency and very dry. 3.5/5

Taste: Interesting. Dry malty roastiness up-front, with a syrupy chocolate texture on the back. Aftertaste strongly of chocolate. Almost doesn't quite taste like beer, it's so sweet and syrupy, but it's very interesting. 4.0/5

Mouthfeel: Very thick, as above, syrupy. Low carbonation. 4.0/5

Drinkability: Well, this isn't worth eighteen dollars. I wish it was a little higher alcohol and had a bit more balance. But it's fascinating the things that Sam Adams will try, and it's amazing that they even got something drinkable out of this kind of mix. 3.5/5

Overall: 3.85/5

Beer Review, Arcadia Imperial Stout

Arcadia Imperial Stout
Battle Creek, MI
8.4% ABV

Appearance: Jet-black, completely opaque body with a thin brown head that sticks around. 4.5/5

Smell: Dark malt, some hints of red grapes, very bready, sweet. Perhaps some chocolate-covered cherries? Very complex, very inviting. 5.0/5

Taste: Ooh, a bit of a misfire. Very "hot" with alcohol, pretty much overpowers the palate. Underneath are some nice dry bready malts, some nice bittering hops, and a sweet (but astringent) aftertaste. If the alcohol was a bit less prominent this would get a much higher rating. 3.5/5

Mouthfeel: Not as thick as you'd expect for an RIS. Still heavy, but not exactly super-thick. Coats the palate well. 4.0/5

Drinkability: I may buy a couple of these and try them in six months or so. It's a good beer, but there are much better examples of an RIS out there -- anyplace that has this should also have Bell's Expedition. 3.5/5

Overall: 4.05/5

Booklog, Pandora's Star

Pandora's Star, 2004
Written by Peter F. Hamilton
988 pages (Mass-Market Paperback)

I feel like I've been reading a lot of space opera lately. Partly this is because, well, I've been reading (or at least flipping through) a lot of space opera lately. But mostly I feel this way because I've read Pandora's Star, which is all by itself a hell of a lot of fucking space opera. It's 988 pages of fairly dense mass-market text, covering dozens of worlds and characters, with about half a dozen narrative arcs subsumed into one long one, that ends on a literal cliffhanger that leads into an equally-long (and likely equally-dense -- I haven't read it yet) sequel.

So how does it hold up? Pretty well, considering. It's the year 2380, and a series of wormholes connects humanity into an interstellar Commonwealth. Rejuvenation technology and memory backup have made death a thing of the past. The story is kicked off by the discovery by an astronomer at a small university that a distant pair of suns long-known to be enclosed by Dyson Spheres actually vanished behind those spheres instantaneously. This being the kind of engineering project that is astonishing in what it portends of the species instigating it, an FTL starship --the first ever built-- is commissioned to investigate.

This sounds like the premise for a Big Dumb Object SF novel, but Hamilton has other agendas on his mind. He intersperses the main plot with stories from around the Commonwealth that seem tenuously connected to one another, if they are connected at all. There's a group of anarchists bent on destroying the FTL vessel before it can be completed, and an investigative officer seeking to catch the perpetrators. One of the inventors of wormhole technology visits an elflike species of aliens and travels along their forest paths through the stars. And a long series of supporting characters is revealed, each surrounding the project, the investigation, or some combination of the two -- at least a dozen characters become extended viewpoint characters, and huge sections of the book cover their backgrounds and the history of the individual planets on which they live.

All of this is immersive, and Hamilton is clearly at his best when he's throwing out the details of his fictional worlds. The characters are often a bit stock, though, and many of the secondary characters blend into one another so it's difficult to tell them apart, especially during the plot-heavy second half, but it's all pretty competently done. The novel has many of the problems of any Big Fat Book, most notably the fact that any reader is going to find some sections of the book far more interesting or entertaining than others -- personally, I felt the book kind of stopped in its tracks whenever it spent more than a couple of pages on the political conflicts of the Commonwealth. But for the most part the author keeps the characters interesting enough and the stories compelling enough to engage reader interest.

As it turns out the first half of Pandora's Star is mostly stage-setting, for what is revealed once the starship reaches the Dyson Pair kicks the narrative into high gear. At the risk of including spoilers, the alien species encountered there is brilliantly conceived and the menace it poses to the Commonwealth is clear. Hamilton spends one long section of the novel learning of the details of the species' history and psychology, and by the end I was convinced that the coming conflict would be epic and fraught with real danger for the future of humanity. And I was not disappointed. Hamilton wisely mostly steps out of the way during the last few hundred pages of the novel and lets the events speak for themselves, which helps keep the pace up. There's still a lot of intercutting, but by dealing mostly with the characters' individual reactions to a small number of Big Events, all the background work helps to enrichen the reading experience by providing a broader scope through which the view them.

Overall, Pandora's Star is mostly a success, and I'll definitely be picking up Judas Unchained soon. The prose is a bit flat and the characters are unfortunately a bit interchangeable, but it's a fun ride and, as said before, a hell of a lot of space opera. Not many writers can entertain for a thousand pages, but with this novel Hamilton proves that he is one of those authors.

Rating: B+