I love making beer, truly I do. If ever there was a way – perhaps a reality-augmenting piece of stainless machinery – that would allow me to curl up close with my beer making and kind of snuzzle my junk up and down on it’s leg all the time, i would totally be in to that. But, unfortunately, that technology is at least a singularity or two away from happening. In the interim, I’ll just attach one of those flashlight pussy things to my brew rack and buy it dinner every couple of weeks. I’ll name it for a french whore, like Fantine or Inara, and together we’ll grow old together, slowly falling apart, drinking too much and always humping like fat, feral dogs in mud. It’s not perfect, but then, neither was Don Cornelius.

But until I can horse glue a flashlight pussy to that filthy lipped, castor strutting, rusting piece of sticky industrial slut I’ve got sleeping in my garage, I’ll use reading to hold me over between brews. With that in mind, I’ve found, time and again, that Gordon Strong’s “Brewing Better Beer” and Randy Mosher’s “Radical Brewing” are my two favorite pieces of bathroom trash that I return to over and over again. They are both very different books in approach, but both work towards a similar end of prying free the detritus of pedantic mimicry that inevitably comes after an initial investigation into something as byzantine as brewing.

Mosher attacks from a kind of joy-filled revelry, combining history, technique and an artist’s notebook to undo the scale of many intimidating crests, juggling probabilities to reveal that the true nature of brewing really is art or, at least, at turns as equally elusive and accessible.

But where Mosher sings Gordon Strong whistles along. There is a zen simplicity to Strong’s approach as he unhinges the mysteries with systems analysis as opposed to Mosher’s poetry. He gently guides the reader into re-examining what is truly important when it comes to the brew day and uses some solid recipes to deliver his message home.

Both are equally effective, rich with information, and indispensable for me on my journey. There’s definitely other resources I use – I love the Brew Strong and Can You Brew It podcasts, Ray Daniels Designing Great Beers is fantastic, the interwebs never fails me, as well as BeerTools and more than a few spreadsheets – but when I think of two books that I lean on more heavily than any other, I always seem to be coming back to these two.

Eliminate all human sorrows. Activate joy, stat.

A co-worker just hit me up with the news that Alan Lake is going to be the new chef at Chief O’Neil’s.

About two days ago, Lake told me he took the full-time chef position at O’Neill’s. What cinched the deal for him, he said, was his experience at the famous Shelbourne in Ireland, where he earned the kitchen honorific Underpants O’Malley (I have no idea what that means, but it sounds Irish and a little naughty).

“My goal is to elevate the food at O’Neill’s,” Lake told me last night, and he has plans to cure his own corned beef and take the native simplicity of the cuisine and see what he can do by sourcing locally and applying to this traditionally simple food the skills of an accomplished fine dining chef.

As Achatz had his way with Thai street food, Lake wants to see how far he can push Irish pub grub toward a kind of haute Hibernian.

Hopefully this means they’ll be adding some decent beers to their draft list as well!!

It’s getting cold here in Weedwolf’s Shitcago. In fact, today the lake front was shut down and manned by Escalades. I saw snow fall from the sky. I pulled the long underwear from my lingerie drawer.

All this means that my previous method of cooling our wort with a displacement chiller spitting upwards of 75 gallons of water out into the alley is no longer sustainable. Bummer.

Our first attempt at solving this problem was clunky and kind of retarded. Especially when I tell you how simple our solution was.

See, initially we thought we would daisy chain 2 displacement chillers together. We’d put one in the HLT with a bunch of ice and then run it through the pump, into the wort and then back to the ice to re-cool the water. The problem with this was that we had to introduce the garden hose to initiate the flow and without a T hookup this wasn’t going to happen.

While I was procrastinating getting the T I began wondering why we couldn’t just get rid of one of those displacement chillers and just pump out of the HLT full of ice water, into the wort and then dump the water back into the HLT. Which is exactly what we’re doing now.

The one pain in the neck is that we have to pull the chiller out of the wort and hold it below the pump initially to get it primed. Once primed, we pop the chiller into the wort and everything is fantastic and cooled to 70* in less than 30 minutes.

Now I just need to get one of those Blichmann plate chillers and all my life’s problems would be solved.

It’s the 11th hour and I need to get this beer carbed up for Thanksgiving. I’ve basically got about 20 hours to get this stuff to a decent level of gas. So I’m going to force carb them.

Force carbonating is a black art, elusive and highly subjective in it’s execution. I’ve tried several techniques, but the one I prefer is found in Gordon Strong’s excellent book “Brewing Better Beer”. I can’t say enough good things about this book, Strong’s approach is sensible and informed by years and years of experience. And his jedi like approach to brewing gives legs to Papazian’s abused mantra of “Relax, Don’t Worry, Have a Homebrew.” Good stuff.

Anyway, here’s the long and short of Gordon Strong’s force carbonating technique pulled from “Brewing Better Beer”.

1) Chill your keg to near freezing.
2) Attach your gas and dial it up to 30 psi.
3) Slowly rock your keg back and forth about 50ish times until you don’t here gas bubble up into it anymore.
4) Take it off the gas and let it sit for a day or two.
5) When it’s time to check it, release the accumulated head gas and taste.
6) Rinse and repeat as needed.

That is it, go with god.

Our country of fat fucks are about to hit their annual apex of indulgence and I couldn’t be happier.

You see, I fancy my self a fairly learned sensualist. Certainly, at times, my adventures slant nearer towards escapes than escapades, but I’m comfortable with my batting average. And what kind of sensualist demands perfection anyway? Be it moral, idealogical or otherwise, perfection is anti-septic and boring. Sensuality lives in those lines between intent.

But there’s a great divide between properly dipping your neurons into the velvety rivers of impress and flat-lining your fat ass into a narcotic stupor with cheap, shitty food, lousy music and bad conversation. Which is why, every year at this time, I’m reminded of two of my favorite men of letters, Allan Watts and William S. Burroughs.

First, everyone’s favorite philandering philosopher, the Zoro of Zen, that drunk monk you know and love, Mr. Alan Watts:

“The commonly accepted notion that Americans are materialists is pure bunk. A materialist is one who loves material, a person devoted to the enjoyment of the physical and immediate present. By this definition, most Americans are abstractionists. They hate material, and convert it as swiftly as possible into mountains of junk and clouds of poisonous gas. “

Amen, Doctor.

And then there’s Uncle Bill, who, in his inimitable way, can carve down any bogeyman to it’s proper size, weight and gravitational pull with a few choice words.

Between these two pillars I level my gravy boat.

This year we’ll have a few selected handmade beers to enjoy during our 4 day bender:

We’ve got a decent American Pale Ale I lovingly call the Maggie Thatcher as it’s very dry, extremely bitter and the yeast has it smelling a bit like eggs. I used the White Labs WLP060 in it, so I knew that the eggy smell would be around, but figured it would pass. Maggie’s been sitting for about a month now and she’s still a stinker. I actually kind of like the sulphur stink a bit and the agressive dryness of the yeast is impressive, but it’s hard to convince other people that her sulphur stank is all that “interesting”. I probably won’t be using WLP060 again.

We’ve also got a yummy belgian golden strong ale weighing in at 7.77% ABV and named for another brit, this one a queen. The Golden Dawn has been given it’s title in honor of that fat little cocksucker Aleister Crowley and his first hermetic society. This was made with the Achouffe yeast and some spices. It’s really quite good and a little fruity, just like Frater Perdurabo.

Lastly, we’ve got the Lemmy, an 11% coffee stout that clocks in at about 51 SRM, made with Metropolis coffee. We monkeyed around with a couple different ways to get the coffee into this, but found that racking on top of coarsely ground coffee and letting it sit for 60 hours was the best way to get the most flavor without any shitty side effects. Thanks to the Jamil show and the guys at Terrapin for this bit of insight.

There’s our beverage profile. Add into that a few bottles of decent bourbon, some Bailey’s and a theives ransom of coffee and we should be solid. Some red ambulance never hurt either.

For food this year I think we’ll try something different and make a Turkey on Thursday and then maybe eat shredded Turkey and mayo sandwiches for the rest of the weekend. But, seriously, why mess with success? There is a Platonic ideal that is the Thanksgiving Turkey and to stray too far from that premise is treasonous at best. But, since we’re talking about it, I did come across a recipe for braising the turkey that sounds amazing. Seriously, say that slowly with me: Braised Turkey.

So there you have it: turkey, beer, and booze. Throw in some guns and bath salts and we can send off this holiday with the panache it requires.

My money is on Green Bay.

I’ve slowly come to realize while building our brew system that the tools and techniques compiled to create our beer are as much a part of us and our creation as the finished beverage that comes out of it. And, like every good work of art, this one, too, will never be finished. Transcended, maybe – most likely abandoned – but definitely never finished.

It will also never be pretty.

I spent a lot of time before we built this beast looking at really sharp, elegant systems on line, fantasizing that that is what our set up would someday look like. Lots of polished stainless, clean enclosures for electronics, switches, blinky lights and maybe even some finishing wood that could compensate for so many generations of this scotch-irish curse. Thumbing through all that beer nerd porn I bedazzled my foggy head into believing those shallow lies about my fleeting attention to aesthetics.

Now, working out of a garage that’s got surge protectors for switches and air-exposed pumps half-bolted to rusting metal that sets below huge volumes of open and hot liquid, honesty about my approach is a bit easier to come by. My system won’t ever win a beauty contest – or instill much confidence in the unimaginative – but, I wouldn’t fuck a Howitzer either and that seems to do just fine.

We got most of the parts for our kettles from weldlessfittings.com. And for the most part I’m very happy with what they have provided. The high-heat washers and bulkheads stand up as promoted and the construction was remarkably simple. Their instructions weren’t always the best, but the guys at weldlessfittings.com were always quick to answer emails when the instructions were a bit lax.

One hole in the plan came in trying to get our diptube to set aligned and through the false bottom on our mash/lauter tun. We got our false bottom from Climax Homebrew (wait, what?) at a great price for the piece, but we cut our hole in our kegs just a bit higher than we really wanted to in order to get it to go through the false bottom. Not a big deal, I just cut about a 4″ piece of 1/2″ hose and slid it onto the diptube. This added an easily telescoping end to the tube which allowed us to get as close or as far away from the bottom of the kettle as we like.

Unfortunately, this didn’t solve the problem of keeping grains out of our sweet liquor when we moved it to the boil kettle. To solve that problem we started buying 3 packs of stainless steel brilo pads and wrapping one around the tube every time we brewed. This worked OK for the first half dozen or so brews, but we could see that the half-life on this jury-rigged hack job was not very long.

With each brew we started having more and more issue with our prime and saw more and more air moving into the hose during recirculation. Finally, last week when I had to dig around in 155* water to try and reset our lame ass filter during the mash, only to get my rubber gloves full of hot water over and over, I made a serious commitment to upgrading our mash/lauter tun’s filtering capabilities.

Enter the mash/boil screen, or, as I’ve mostly seen it referred to, the Bazooka Cage. This thing screwed right into the bulkhead and, with no issue at all, made my life and my brewing time so much easier. No air, no grains, no pain or issue at all and it uses the grain bed like a straw to help you get every last bit of sweet liquor into your boil kettle.

I love a simple solution to a problem and this little bastard is just that.

Ok, so I finally got to the end of the two-week alcohol extraction of fenugreek seeds that I found digging four pages deep into a google search on fenugreek and maple syrup alternatives. The experiment was successful though I did need to make some adjustments.

I wound up using twice the amount of vodka as stated in the article since the fenugreek was very absorbent. Just use your eyes and best judgement on the amount of alcohol needed.

When I strained out the fenugreek yesterday, and after I spilled some of the extract being a knucklehead, I had about 50ml of extract remaining. That’s a pretty high absorption rate considering I probably had about 6-8oz of vodka in there initially.

To the 50ml of fenugreek extract I added a half a teaspoon of vanilla extract.

I mixed the fenugreek and vanilla up and put about a half teaspoon into 4oz of soy milk. The nose was pretty good, I was quite happy, it did indeed smell like I had put maple syrup in the soy milk. The taste was terribly bitter, however, so I added some agave syrup to balance that out. At that point, I’m happy to say, I had a tasty little beverage.

So what I know so far about fenugreek as a replacement for maple syrup is that the alcohol extraction works at 2 weeks (I’ll probably try a longer length extraction, too) but that further experimentation with adjusting the hop profile in the beer is going to be needed as the extraction requires some serious sweetness to off-set it’s bittertude.

The next step is to do a larger extraction and then start adding it to 1 gallon of beer adjusting the hop schedule as I go. From there I’ll scale it up.

Stay tuned, there is more to come.

I like this page over at winning-homebrew.com that describes the yeasts and then tells the brewery source of them. It’s nice. It’s not as nice as those posters that wYeast and White Labs have been giving away at events recently, but it’s nice.