The barley has arrived!

Well, to be precise, the barley landed last Wednesday, but the hot spell we’ve been having, in spite of being perfect weather for sowing barley, isn’t conducive to actually doing any work. Add to that the long Easter weekend barbequing and generally not being in the house, I only managed to get the barley in on Easter Monday, but, thanks be, in perfect weather and in plenty of time. However, the irony of not getting any barley sown because of boozing in the sun didn’t escape me.

So one of the allotments in the town plots has been given over to barley. My absence from the allotments had been noted, but I really did need the good weather… though I’ll be known as the fair-weather gardener now. I’ll have to put in some rainy hours to put paid to that. Having said that, while every other gardener is labouring over the lettuce, or caring for the courgettes, I’ve two months till I need to do anything with mine. Maybe I’ll take a chair down there… watch the world struggle by.

My wonderful barley, coated and treated with something nasty, means I should have a trouble free germination, with barley resistant to almost every disease known to a farmer. It’s guaranteed not to catch TB, scabies, the lot. However, this blessing took an interesting turn the morning after I’d sown, when I woke up in a cold sweat, worried I’d poisoned the avian population of Moville. Apocalyptic images of bird carcasses littering the streets, newspaper headlines scaremongering the public, top military scientists get involved, and upon discovering the source of the problem, point their combined, accusative finger at me; well it got me out of bed early enough to get back to the allotment to add some bird deterrents before my nightmare vision came to pass.

As usual, either no picture, or one doctored from the internet. Never mind, soon I'll be posting pictures of the 'Adventure in Barley' up in the Challenge page. But for now, please close your eyes and imagine some dirt with nothing growing in it, and you'll be on the same page as me.

Anyway, after that week, I think I deserve a pint. And I'll get one precicely 5 months from now.

Kids, come down, the cider's ready!

“Psssssht!” encouraged the bottle of cider, as I twisted off the cap.

I’m not really a cider drinker, so I can’t reliably describe what I poured into my glass. The best I’d do is the primary school essay: ‘If an alien landed on earth and asked you what cider is, how would you describe it to them’, an essay for which I’d probably get low marks anyway. I did go through a Kopparberg phase, like everyone else in that balmy summer of 2007, when we all thought we’d discovered a new drink, having in fact only discovered a new advertising campaign, (and Frosty Jacks’ doesn’t count, though it’s a hell of a lot clearer than this stuff in front of me), so I’m not really qualified. Nevertheless, the primary school essay that never was reads as follows:

It tastes a lot like watery apples.

I’m sure there’s alcohol in there somewhere, but as I’ve only had a glass so far, it’s hard to say if it’s in this bottle or the next. I’m going to leave it for now, though. It’s been a warm one, and I’ve been stuck inside all day painting, so I’d earned a drink, but the rest will placate the non-beer drinkers during this elusive homebrew party.

The finished red ale recipe, Smithish, is as follows:

5lb 3oz Pale Dried Malt Extract
1lb 3oz light crystal malt
4oz toasted barley (1oz roasted barley used)
1 ¾ oz Fuggles hops (5%AA, bittering)
½ oz Goldings (aroma)
Irish Ale Yeast (Safale US-04 used)
Possibly some Carragheen / Irish moss to make it look pretty

Anticipated O.G.: 1.048, IBU 30, ABV: 4.5-4.8%
(Actual O.G. 1.036, F.G. 1.014, ABV: 3%)

With any luck it’ll at least be drinkable, and with all the luck of the Irish, it’ll be perfect, and I’ll never need to buy Smithwicks’ again.

1 ¾ ounces of Fuggles… how did you come up with that? I hear you ask*. Well, sums, is the answer. In his book ‘The Complete Joy of Homebrewing’, Charlie Papazian has several formulas for working out things like, how dark will the beer be, or how bitter, or if you want it this bitter, how much of what ought I put in. The rest, as I’ve mentioned before, is all composed from averages. And the sums are the least of my problems. CP’s book is so weighty it takes me 20 mins to find any charts I want. I think I’ll be typing some of the important calculations up and laminating them. What kitchen isn’t improved with laminated International Bitterness Units calculations or a wipe-clean ‘lb per gallon’ gravity table?

So, that’s the end of this weeks’ post, and I’ve just started my second pint of cider. Now, these days I only have to look at beer to have a headache the next day, but I can definitely feel this pint ‘doing its thing’. The alcohol must have all settled to the bottom of the bottle, with the yeast.

Don't ask. I got it wrong in the end! Nevermind, read a later post for the craic.

Not going against the (speciality) grain.

Last night, after hours of research and printing stuff off the internet, I devised a recipe for an Irish red ale. Far from an eureka moment, it happened by taking the ingredients for 8 different recipes (all off the net) and working out an average for each ingredient. It leaves me with the following:

5lb 3oz light DME,
1lb 7oz of speciality grains (Crystal and roasted unmalted barley)
roughly 2oz hops (Fuggles and Goldings) whatever I need for an IBU (bitteness) of about 22 - 28
Irish Ale Yeast and some leftover DME for conditioning.

It's an exactly average recipe, but hopefully it will ease me into extract brewing and I'll have a good base on which to work. A canvas, if you will. We'll find out soon. I'm not short of 'quality control' volunteers.

Any suggestions, with the recipe or a name for it, are very welcome.

I've also heard that the local barley farmer, my dealer, is planting Quench soon, which is great news. I love it when a plan comes together!

The Homebrew Gods have left you a message:

The homebrew gods have been busy dropping hints this week. Firstly, things are coming together nicely for The Challenge. Someone I know knows someone who will be sowing barely in the next week or so, and he’s agreed to get a kilo of barley for me. The Co-op we’re helpful, as usual, but they didn’t know if the varieties that they had in stock were 2- or six-row barley. Two-row is traditionally used in proper beer, and the lighter beer from America uses 6-row, as it lends itself better to additional (cheaper) ingredients, like rice etc. Six-row is also used in malt whiskies, but that’s a bit out of my league just yet. Anyway, I’m left with two varieties, Quench and Snakebite (both sound like words thrown around a pub, so I must be on the right path). I’ve also been allocated a small plot at the allotments, and a couple of friends have offered me some space in their gardens, one in a veg patch, and the other in a lawn. I’m thrilled at the idea of having somewhere to grow my barley, but less so about returning a lawn to its original state after I’ve turned it into a barley patch!

I’ve also found a massive stock pot in which to boil the beer. It’s at the local GAA club (God knows what they use it for), and I’m sure they won’t mind lending it to me once in a while if it’s for a good cause. I was ‘looking for the bin’, and rummaging through their cupboards after a meeting the other night, and ‘happened’ across it. Nothing quite like thrift to keep the price of a pint down.

But, whilst being both gracious and generous, the homebrew gods have also been encouraging me to ‘get my finger out’, as it were. There’s competition! I hear there’s a fella in the next town over who wants to set up a microbrewery. Now, I’m not saying that I do (yet), but if I did, I don’t need this upstart who’s been brewing for years getting in before me!

And finally, I’ve also been sort-of asked to present a homebrew demonstration at the local gardening club meet. Quite how I’m going to condense a 4-week process into a 90-minute talk is yet to be worked out, but I suspect it’ll involve something Blue Peter has been doing for years… cheating.

St. Patricks' Day and other days

Firstly, the Irish Blog Awards ceremony was last night, and though I didn't win owt, I was listed on the site as a contender in the Newcomer category, so I'm happy with that. The blog needed a little tart up anyway. However, in the meantime I've come up with a great idea to get noticed for next year! I'm going to make some beer using only ingredients I've grown myself and blog about it. Seems easy, really, considering barley can grow in most places, and you can’t stop hops growing in others, but that's just the easy bit. I'll also have to malt and toast the barley, dry the hops, and find some way of bottle conditioning the beer. Now do you see where it becomes more challengeing? Anyway, I've got my eye on the 'Food & Drink' category. Read Homebrew Challenge for more information on the challenge.

In addition to that new page, I'm looking forward to receiving a review of the Triple from Richard, which you'll find on Richard's Review page soon. And after St. Patrick's Day, I'm pretty sure I know what it'll say!

17th March is St. Patrick's Day in Ireland (he was Welsh too), and as per our new household tradition, we got all our muckers to parade with us a bit, before spending the rest of the afternoon with a drink in our hands. And like last year, it wasn't long before we cracked open some homebrew. Edward brought down 5 bottles of his Brewferm Pilsner, the same as I’d brewed the year before, and I opened a couple of bottles of the Triple. I think I can say without fear of contradiction that the pilsner went down better. However, there’s a redeeming factor in this. The main problem with the Triple was the strength of flavour and alcohol, made all the more prominent by the fact we’d been drinking canned tasteless lager all afternoon. So, really, in spite of the initial reactions, the triple was enjoyed, and none was left to waste. And as for the pilsner, which was excellent (well done Eddie B.), who will brew next years’ batch?

Oh, and finally, I've finally bottled the cider! I'd been putting it off for ages as I had no idea when it was ready to bottle, but 5 months ought to do it. So, here's to a little more waiting.

Yeast...

Beer, bread and poetry?

Having run out of Homebrew tins, I thought the next best thing (after the cider) was to bake my own bread, to evoke that lovely yeasty smell I remember fondly from my last brewing session, way back in September.

I made a loaf of wholemeal bread, from a readymix packet, and that worked fine… then I made pizza bases, with normal flour and yeast etc., and you really get the smell of brewing from that, which is almost what it was all about.

Pizza is a poor topic for discussion on a homebrew blog, granted, but while following the method in the recipe book, it instructed the baker to empty the sachet of baking yeast into a cup of warm, sugary water, and allow it to sit for ten minutes… which sounds to me like the perfect yeast starter!

I’ve been half-experimenting with different ways of pitching yeast (pitching = introducing the yeast into the wort) and didn’t really notice much difference in the quality of the brew, whether I pitched it in a sugar solution, or just sprinkled the powder straight into the wort, but I did notice a significant difference in the bread. The readymix loaf took ages to rise, and it was a half-arsed effort at that (saying nothing of the alcohol content), but the sugar solution yeast was very active within its little starter solution, and the yeast was 2 years past its sell-by as it was. The bread rose really well (even for a pizza base) and I think, from now on, I’ll be pitching all my yeasts in a sugary starter.

Though not too sugary, or we'll be confused by a cidery taste again!

Any chance of a pint?

Because I'm clean out of homebrew.

Homebrewing isn’t really happening for me at the moment. The closest I’ve come is decanting a bottle of Triple into an empty, to take it with me on the bus (to a mates house, for after a gig). It went down well, and kept most of its sparkle, though there wasn’t much to begin with…
However, as usual, when I’m not doing something, I’m reading about it. My latest home brew book, ‘The Complete Joy of Home Brewing’ by Charlie Papazian, has inspired me onto the next step; malt extract brewing. It sounds just like the kind of thing I’d be into. You still open a tin, but it’s pure malt extract, not flavoured by hops or other adjuncts like the no-boil tins. So I’d be a little freer to experiment with flavours and hops and so on. All I need is a big pan, and some way of straining the beer. But rest assured, it’s the future.

I also siphoned the cider off its lees, and really wish I hadn’t now, because in opening and disturbing the cider I may have introduced a little of God only knows what. Those white things floating on the top are good, aren’t they?