Jon Savage

That looks great Pam. Not so coincidentally tonight's dinner was: Romaine hearts + Radicchio, blanched green beans, sliced red potatoes. capers, homemade pickles, olives, hard boiled eggs and some Albacore I poached gently in Olive Oil + garlic. I also threw a couple of pepperoncini in (because I like them) The vinaigrette was lime juice, some olive oil, a little smoked Cayenne, Dijon and a touch of S&P. Tasty even if the plate was not so pretty. --edit forgot the tomatoes... Wanted to inculde some but forgot...

Liberating isn't it? We have not bought bacon since starting to cure our own. It is also economical since bellies are around $2 / lb or less and good bacon is more like $10 / lb and up...

Back when I was in shape and running a good bit (a Saturday training run was 6+ hours in the hills) I had to work to keep weight *on*. Swimming 6ish hours a day certainly is a recipe for eat all you want just to (barely) maintain weight.

The stuff Trader Joe's sells in 1 L tetra packs is decent. They don't always have beef though.

On deck for this weekend's brewing: A Boddington's Bitter clone HefeWeizen Flander's Red.* *Chris did you pitch the Roeslare straight into the wort or first primary with ale yeast then pitch? Also for secondary on lees or racked over? conflicting opinions on varied brew boards there. --edit drinking a glass of the steam we brewed weekend before last. 5 days in the keg to condition @ ambient moved into the fridge last night. We still have our groove; tasty!

I was joking about the oak keg. My wife and I are having a semi serious conversation ATM about pitching some of the bitch (my own sourdough starter, Bourdain reference notwithstanding) into some wort to see what develops. What do we have to lose really? Its a mean starter! And not Vinegary! Agreed that the O2 permeability of the corny kegs is too low. PET Sparkletts bottle should do the trick for the secondary I think and the price is right. The stout is burbling away already maybe 5 hours post pitch. Go beserker yeast go! The IPA is also showing signs of life . Apte's Page wow what a good read Apte is. Lots to digest there. --edited to add the link to Raj Apte's page

Thanks for the info on how you do your Flanders Red. Is your secondary in carboys, buckets, kegs or PET bottles? I'm thinking I'll try 7-14 days primary in a (plastic) sparkletts bottle with the long secondary + Oak chips (8-12 months at least) in a Cornelius keg. On the other hand I could get hold of a 5 gallon Oak barrel. As can be inferred from above I'm going to be making a Flanders Red soonish! We just racked & pitched the IPA; clean up is also done and the process was a lot easier this weekend, funny how things come back to you. I'm really looking forward to the stout. Now off to google the finer points of Flanders Red...

Sounds like a good batch of beer in the making Chris. Tell me more about the red- are you mixing old/young beer? Aging in Oak? Or just using Oak Chips? I like wild yeast/lambic beers a lot and am pleased to see a nice assortment of appropriate cultures available. I really want to try one and the Flanders Red sounds like a good place to start. Both of the beers we brewed last weekend are on their target FG. Both have been kegged and should be ready to go after a week or two to condition. The samples we took in order to test FG were quite good and provided a nice preview of how the finished product will taste. The stout is sparging as I type this. We also got a gallon of apple cider started this morning as well. I might make another IPA today as well since I have grain on hand for it and well... The bulk of the "work" is set up and tear down of equipment anyway. DME is $3.67 /lb here, I only really use it for feeding yeast cultures so 3 pounds goes a long way for me. I'm paying $1.09 for domestic base malts, $1.59 / lb for imported. The specialty grains are either $1.59 or $1.69 depending on type. I re-use yeast and still have a hop stash but even if I were purchasing both my (5 gal) batch cost would be around $20 or so. That is about twice as much as 5 years ago if my notes are any indication. All grain is certainly more cost effective than using DME or LME, the prices for those have *really* shot up. I also get a 5% discount at our local store (as a member of the local brew club). -edited with exact local prices.

Care to explain? Sounds... interesting. ← Beer Butt Chicken. Basically prop up a chicken on 1/2 can of beer open end pointing into the body cavity (with or without spices and or herbs in it) on a grill using indirect heat, makes for a tasty bird. Rub skin with salt whatever you like as usual. Takes an hour or two IIRC. Worth the modest effort. I'm sure beer butt experts will chime in at some point.

Honor thanks for a wonderfully written piece. Although I'll probably never actually eat it the idea of dog suddenly seems very palatable indeed. (My terrier suddenly flees in terror when the stock pot comes out).

I'll sometimes take a photo of a memorable meal. No flash of course. Last June a friend from another forum stayed a few days with us and I introduced her to pho (for breakfast of course). I took the pic both to post in said forum and also to preserve the moment. I guess this is mundane (a $5 meal) for most but for us it was a special meal. Gotta love Little Saigon!

The 4, 6, 8 quart (etc) containers sold @ smart and final and restaurant supply stores do the trick for me. These are airtight. And cheap as well. Since starting to store *all* grains, flour, rice & legumes in them our moth problem has gone away. I don't know what they are called, translucent white with markings both in quarts and liters.

Great News. The yeast I thought to be dead lives. It took 1/2 a mason jar of wort to something tasty and beery, just slow to start. Stepping it up into fresh wort tonight for use in stout this weekend. All hail the return of Jon and Carries beserker yeast . This weekend will be a simple stout - looking at my notes I made many many batches of this one. Fitzpatric's Celtic Stout (all grain) The recipe as written is (probably) for fly sparging. I've always scaled up grains by 1.1ish to account for the less efficient batch sparge process. Speaking of back from the dead- This is a glass of the 5 year old steam beer we discovered a 5 gallon keg of last weekend. Tasty!

How did it turn out Pam?

Yep. Problem is the way that recipe is worded one could be tempted to use pure sodium nitrite rather than pink salt (which has only a small % sodium nitrite). Pure sodium nitrite can kill you.

The amount of pink salt (not sodium nitrite) called for in the NY Times adaptation of the cure seems excessive. Looking at the master recipe for the basic dry cure in the book using sugar instead of dextrose shows 10 teaspoons pink salt for a recipe that yields circa 3.5 cups cure. One belly probably needs just 1/4 cup of the curing mixture which contains about 1.5 teaspoons pink salt. A little bit of this stuff goes a long way! I do think the nitrite addition does have a positive effect on both color and flavor in the finished product.

Ooh, that's a good tip. I have two round Le Creusets, but I wouldn't mind getting an oval pot, and at $20, the price is right... ← Its a great tip. I purchased one of the 7 qt ones earlier this year also on sale (but not as good of a sale). Great pot and really a bargain at that price. My lid fit is a little off, if you buy one play around a bit until you find one that fits well. Not a major gripe though I'm overall very happy with the pot.

Do tell how you overcame that. The Butt I did yesterday came out OK but the last couple hours with the firebox choking itself were not pretty.

Thanks for the great EGCI course Chris - it (and the Q&A) made for a most enjoyable read. Informed you ask? OK hopefully not TMI: The beers we made this weekend are both favorites of ours, ones we always liked to have a keg or two each on hand back when we were brewing most every weekend. Links to recipes below; we adjusted the grain bill up by 10% since we batch sparge. The steam is Sweet Hitch-Hiker Steamer - that is the one that held up well for over 5 years in a keg. The IPA is Sister Star of The Sun; this is certainly a "big" IPA but very tasty indeed and also a favorite of my wife and I. The Sister Star might be a little tricky if you don't already have a stash of Chinook hops on hand; those too seem hard to come by probably because of the high alpha. This re-incarnation of our brewing commenced around 10:00 Saturday morning - not with any sense of mise en place on either of our parts but rather with my wife's announcing "I want to brew beer today". Seemed like a good idea at the time. A couple hours of scrambling around in the garage later we'd located everything we needed except for grain, fresh tubing (the old stuff had become grody) and of course yeast. We embarked on our vision quest fortified by home roasted Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee accompanied by some cut off ends of grody vinyl tubing, a list for the hardware store and 2 grain bills. After a fairly brief stop at Lowes for tubing (and bleach) we promptly got lost en route to the homebrew store but discovered a great little breakfast/lunch place whose menu promised "food we don't screw up". The food was excellent (and not at all screwed up). A quick map consult on my Iphone got us back on track to Steinfillers, a nifty home brewing store here in Long Beach that we were glad to see was still around since the next nearest store was 45 miles away. When we plan ahead we call them Friday morning and our crushed grain is ready to pick up on the way home from work. We picked up 2 batches of grain for each brew, were duly appalled at the hop prices and made our way back home, first stopping @ a supermercado to get some pork butt, some vegetables and.... a 52 quart tamale pot for the princely sum of $32. Heck I always wanted a bigger brew kettle. Once home Carrie grabbed our 3 ring beer binder and pulled the notes for the last two batches of these beers we'd made. Great to have the notes at hand which for the most part were really helpful to our rusty old selves. I never did write down the temp offsets for mashing (water onto grain in Igloo cooler) but a quick Google search indicated that circa 10-11 F over our target mash temp would be a good place to start (and so it was). Note to self: Write everything down. --footnote did each of those pages really mean 5 gallons of beer... Good thing the ATF does not enforce homebrew quotas! While the first mash was well... mashing away I got to work cleaning and sanitizing everything. I moved all 8 corny kegs onto the patio wishing I'd cleaned the lees and sanitized them oh... 5 years ago instead of throwing them in a corner. OK we were stressed at the time and that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. One of the kegs felt full which was a relief since when I was on my game I'd rinse lees out when the keg was spent, refill with water and sufficient iodophor to sanitize and seal until the next time to fill. I cleaned and sanitized the first 7 kegs, thought I'd eyeball the full one just to make sure. I hit the pressure relief on that keg and noticed it was under pressure. Odd as I'd not habitually stored these under pressure. Then I saw the painter's tape on it "Sweet HH Steam 03/03". I threw a tap on it and sure enough that keg was full of beer. Kind of cloudy and nasty - not off just nasty like the first pint off of a cask conditioned keg of beer is wont to be. We decided to put that beer in the fridge to cool off a bit and settle. As already noted it turned out to be just fine. Slowly but surely we both found our rhythm. Notes and google eased our process and by the end of the evening we were decidedly less rusty in our brewing skills than we'd been that morning. Between the late start (we did not actually start brewing until 1600 or so) and fits and starts and thankgodforwirelesslaptopsandgoogle moments we pitched the second batch, and put same to bed, in the wee small hours (0230 Sunday morning). It felt freaking good. Since we ferment at ambient which this time of year is in the high '70s both beers should be ready to rack into kegs for secondary + conditioning next weekend. We did *exactly* hit our target OGs which just goes to prove that this is not rocket science. We'll do another two batches of the same beers using reserved yeasts from the current batches. We've had great success in the past training yeasts to be happy in our micro climate. It may well evolve to something altogether different than the strains we started with but having one's own pet yeastie beasties is a good thing. Alas our "beserker" strain of years gone by is thus far unrevivable - maybe I can culture some from the lees of the keg we are drinking now. The sample in the fridge was dead dead dead. What's next after those? Maybe a Wit, a WeissBier or a Saison. Probably a dry stout as well. Carrie is eyeballing something that includes fruit.

Put that way it makes perfect sense. It was a most pleasant surprise to have a little keg on hand to drink while the batches we made this weekend ferment and then condition. I guess I never considered that scale of keg aging before. Bottle aging, sure. We've got some imperial stout that is at least 6 years old in bottles that is coming along quite nicely. I'm drinking a bit of the old stuff now and you are absolutely correct in the assessment of what happens to the hop bitter notes. Those are largely gone but the aromatic top notes remained. We'll do another couple batches this weekend so as to have a little reserve supply in the pipeline. My wife's diagnosis with BC in early '03 and subsequent surgery/chemo is what derailed our brewing in the first place. She just passed the 5 year milestone and thinks that batch we kegged maybe a week prior to her initial surgery is a great way to commemorate and celebrate being cancer free. No wonder we forgot about that keg - we had a good bit of stuff going on in our lives around that time. On a more brewing related note- I was shocked to see that many hop varieties are currently unavailable; those that are have probably quintupled in price. We actually had about 5 lbs still vacuum sealed in oxygen barrier bags in the freezer so we have a supply in the meantime. Still looked/smelled good and hopeful that the results will be OK. We did up the hop quantities a good bit to compensate for their age.

What's everyone's experience on shelf life of kegged homebrew? I'm wondering because we started brewing again this weekend after a 5 year hiatus and I discovered that a 5 gallon batch of steam beer (brewed in 03/2003) had been sitting quietly neglected in a corner of the garage since it had been kegged. I chilled it and it is actually fine. The IPA and Steam we made Saturday are burbling away quite happily.

On the rum front I'd recommend Zaya. Even the 20 YO stuff is reasonably affordable around $20- a bottle. Great for sipping OK for mixing.

I made Bun Vit ( Vietmamese Duck Noodle Soup) the other day that was sublime. The recipe was from a (Vietnamese) colleague's mom and it rocked. Simple and to the point. The stock was nothing more than a duck, ginger, onion, nuc mam a little sugar. Nice ginger nuc mam dipping sauce for the meat. Sublime.

He finishes the dish with butter as noted in the last paragraph of the recipe linked to above. It is hard to go wrong with roast chicken even if using el cheapo commodity birds IMHO.

For a rub I'm partial to 1/4 cup dried ground California (or New Mexico Chiles), about the same amount of kosher salt, generous addition of (freshly) ground black pepper, 1/8 cup or so brown sugar, good whack of garlic powder, same whack of sweet or 1/2 sharp Paprika and freshly ground nutmeg to taste + maybe a dash of smoked ground cayenne or chipoltle (how's that for a multi-cultural rub?). As for time with a temp or 225ish in the smoke chamber a equivalent size of bone in pork shoulder has taken around 8-11 hours for me. I'd expect the beef to be in the same ballpark; just let it get past the plateau and rise 7-14 degrees or so then rest. I look forward to hearing how it comes out Pam. While I don't keep at all kosher I'm always quite open (appreciative) to/of non-porky alternatives.