cdh
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Posts posted by cdh
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So far, no-one's mentioned the bagel place on Broadway around 107 St. I'm guessing it's still there. I haven't been there in some time but always liked their bagels, and many people compared their softer and probably more flavorful bagels favorably to H&H. And they were a lot cheaper.
You're talking about Absolute Bagels? An old favorite from my Columbia days... much better than Columbia Bagels, and worth the extra couple of blocks walk down Bway.
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But it's disgusting, and geese are delicious to eat.
Only some of them. I've had smoked Canada Goose and it is really unpleasant. Bitter, strong, and posessed of all the unpleasant aspects of "gamey" meat without any of the pleasant attributes.
It makes sense... they must have the evolutionary advantage of being unpalateable to shotgun wielding humans, otherwise we'd likely have done them in by now... or at least made them a lot less numerous.
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Well... in looking through the very well stocked Brewsource.com site, I did notice a couple of less desirable aspects-- 1) minimum order of 1 lb of each grain and 2) no obvious way of requesting your grain be cracked. They appear to be aiming at a much more sophisticated homebrewer who already has a grain mill and storage for unused portions of grain. I've zapped them a note asking if they'll do a special recipe package order, but (not surprisingly) haven't yet heard back from them.
Northern Brewer seems very flexible in their ordering, and will crack grain for you... you just have to be willing to substitute a little. Plusses, minuses all around. I'f you're dead set on doing the exact recipe, you can order directly from my local shop who promulgated the recipe: www.keystonehomebrew.com and it won't cost much more than ordering from anyplace else. .. $34 +shipping as opposed to about $32 with shipping included when ordering from morebeer or northernbrewer or brewsource. Since it is a 20 minute drive for me, and they're good folk, I'm just going to pick up their kit from them.
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Re Carapils-
Specs on this stuff seem to be all over the place. My homebrew shop carries 20L Carapils from Munton&Fison... I've found another place on the web that carries a Carapils rated 9.9-13.6, and googling will get you references to 7L Carapils and a 10L Crystal marketed as a Carapils by a Belgian maltster.
Chalk one up to market variations, and grab what you can and see how it turns out. If I were you I'd grab the Caravienne since you'll get the color and the dextrins, and we're shooting for a pretty brown ale as it is.
I've also noticed that Chocolate malt is variable too, having spotted 600+L chocolates, while our recipe calls for 338L... same advice... grab what you can and see what happens... just make a note of what you used so that we will gain some knowledge when/if we sit down and taste the products of our project.
btw- Merry Christmas, all!
edit to add this link to a very well-stocked-looking online brew shop that appears to have all or almost all of the variations on these grains.
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Fav teas--
Ten Ren's Pouchong
any Jade Oolong
certain Namring Darjeelings
Iced jasmine tea
Twinings' Lady Grey
Li Zi Xiang
Shantou Autumn Bloom
Gold King Anxi Oolong
Re Yerba Mate-
I find that mixing 3 parts mate and one part lapsang souchong makes a really yummy beverage when brewed like normal tea. I've never tried the packed gourd and silver straw mate method, so can't comment on that.
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As to Dean & Deluca, it sounds like they've tried all over town. There used to be a D&D coffee shop with a bit of prepared food in the Art Alliance building where Opus 251 is now... This was way back in 1995 or thereabouts...
As to greenmarkets, yeah, a stellar purveyor of fresh veg would be welcome in town... but we've already got one... Iovine Bros at the Reading Terminal are pretty damn good for quality and variety. Not Balducci-type photogenic, but pretty damn good veg nonetheless.
As to Miel-- must go and see what all this talk is about.
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1.[...]There is also more popular resistance to industrial uniformity of foods in Europe (not to mention genetically modified ones...) than in the USA.
I'm skeptical about the first half of this assertion given what I keep hearing about the mad homogenizers in Brussels. Europeans did elect them didn't they... so they do represent a majority of europeans, don't they?
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Well...
Having spent three wonderful years in Austin, I can see how Jaymes is bristling at the assertion that American produce is uniformly inferior. In Austin it just isn't. But Austin has the best grocery purveyor in the country as well. Supermarket produce in the Northeast, like in Pennsylvania and NJ is, indeed, inferior. Selection is bad, quality is bad, even the aesthetics are sometimes bad.
As we've been noting previously, America is a BIG place, and some parts of it are more culinarily deprived than others... or at least some parts of it are populated by enough people who don't give a damn that they encourage inferior produce vendors to thrive and multiply. The hunt for good produce is materially hampered by the demand for out-of-season produce at all times and the vendors who capture that market and use it to lever their inferior goods onto the shelves when better alternatives are available too.
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As the size of our brewing group increases, the thought occurred to me that it would be fun to actually get together to sample the products. We should all chime in with our whereabouts and see if any significant proportion of us are geographically convenient to one another.
I'll start- I'm in the greater East Coast megalopolis, Philly locally, though not opposed to making a run as far as DC or NYC for festivites. Will also have cause to be in Austin, TX in March sometime.
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I've never tried making wine. I wouldn't know where to begin... OK... yes I would... with grapes... but I really wouldn't know where to go from there. If you're into winemaking, do please start a thread and tell us a story about it. When did you first crush a grape with boozy intent?
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Indeed.
If you can boil water, you're 7/8 of the way there. -
Walt- finally got morebeer's page back... three days of "Not Found" had me worried.
and, btw, 1 Gallon = 3.78 liters... a 16L pot == 4.25 Gallons. Within the spec given for the project.
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This particular nut brown is not one I've brewed before, but has been on my to-do list for a while. My last many batches have been alternating between wit, Belgian black, and abbey dubbel. (all a bit funky and off the beaten track for this particular project.)
At the end of the summer I brewed something closely related to a nut brown (3 lbs of amber malt, 3 of pale malt, 1lb of Special B and an oz of Pearl hops with the Thames Valley Wyeast), but have not done a whole and proper nut brown for probably 8 or 9 years. I want to see what the toasted and the chocolate malts do to it. The ingredients list comes from my local homebrew shop, www.keystonehomebrew.com, who are extraordinarily talented at putting together good recipes.
If we want to tweak it even further and create something truly original to eGullet I'd suggest maybe striking the toasted and adding a 1/4 lb of Special B to it b/c I happen to like that malt and not enough people use it... and I'd probably pick a wackier yeast too, but that is my particular taste rearing its head again.
Come to think on it for a bit, I'm now intrigued by the idea of leaving one of the specialty malts slots open as a wild-card where each brewer gets to add a 1/2 lb of a malt of his/her choice. We'll then get to see just how much effect that little of a particular malt has on a 5 gallon batch of beer.
So, for those purchasing ingredients, strike out the toasted malt and pick something that appeals to you. A very small personal touch to make each batch different and unique to its brewer. (And a great way to strike up a conversation with the staff/owners of your local homebrew shop to hit them up for recommendations... and for those ordering stuff from Northern Brewer or such, read the descriptions of their caramelized malts and pick what appeals.)
Jan 10 sounds like a good day to brew.
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MichaelKlein- Thanks for keeping up with the thread and chiiming in with such useful facts.
As you were observing the court proceedings, did the US Trustee make any other specific indications about other restrictions that might affect the potential future of the place? I imagine Starr's lawyers must have gotten pretty deep into operational matters... did they do it on the record?
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While I'm at it, we need a list of the required equipment that any prospective brewer should have handy for the purposes of taking part in this project. I'll brainstorm up a list starting with the first things that would be required and moving on chronologically. Feel free to chime in if I appear to have forgotten anything important.
A large kettle, somewhere in the 4-5 gallon size range, at least.
A big spoon for stirring the contents of the kettle (a hand blender doesn't do so bad for that purpose either).
A can opener (or a scale if you're using dry malt extract rather than liquid)
A large fine nylon (or cheesecloth) mesh bag that can hold 1.75 lb of crushed grain. The bigger the better.
A thermometer.
A timer
Muslin hop socks.
Antibacterial sanitizer- I'm partial to activated oxygen powder.
A primary fermentor with a lid and airlock.
5 feet of surgical tubing and a racking cane.
A bottling bucket.
Priming sugar.
A bottling attachment for your surgical tubing.
Bottles and enclosures and a means of sanitizing and sealing them.
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My humble recipe suggestion for the project-- a nut brown ale:
Ingredients
6.6 lb. Amber Liquid Malt Extract
½ lb. Crystal Malt 60°L
½ lb. Carapils Malt 20°L
½ lb. Toasted Malt 25°L
¼ lb. Chocolate Malt 338°L
1 ½ oz. Kent Goldings U.K. Hops (Bittering)
1 oz. Fuggles Hops (Finishing)
Wyeast # 1098 XL British Ale Yeast
All of the above should be readily obtained through a quality homebrew shop... the °L notations should serve as a fairly universal indicator that any brew shop staffer should recognize and be able to get for you. The hop factor can be kicked up to each brewer's taste, insofar as the variety and the quantity are both easily variable, and the true hop-heads amongst us could, if the fancy took them, dry hop it at the end too.
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I'm an extract brewer who would like to participate as well. I've heard lots of good stuff about Northern Brewer, but buy all my supplies from the superb Beer, Beer, and More Beer (http://www.morebeer.com) because they're close by. Anyone else in the San Francisco Bay Area interested?
Walt-
I've purchased stuff from morebeer.com before and been pleased... Do you know what's going on w/ them lately? Their site has been down for the past couple of days. Are they still in business? Is this just a technical glitch?
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I hope you're not too disappointed with your cider... we had so much success with our ales, lagers (yes, you can do it without special equipment but you need to live somewhere where winters are cold enough) and fruit wines we decided to do a cider. We used a a wyeast for cider (don't remember which one, I think it was the sweet one) and it fermented to stone dry, so that all that was left was the citric acid. Very tasty mixed with other things (fresh apple juice or a dry sour cherry wine) but not so palatable on its own.
I see what you mean about the cider getting a lot too dry. Glad that it was fine and tasty with enough residual sugar back on Thanksgiving when I poured off 1.5 gallons into my
Tap-A-Draft wotzit. and brought it along to dinner. In the week and change since Thanksgiving, my cider has taken a downright acetic turn... hope there isn't any "mother of vinegar" in there accounting for it... Anyway, I freed up my bottling bucket and put the last of the cider into a gallon jug and left it sitting outside in the cold. Hopefully it will turn out fine. Or maybe I'll have to follow your lead and cut it with some fresh cider.
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I think a $ 15 (excuse the spaces b/t the $ and the numbers, but funky symbols sometimes appear when the $xx appears as a string.) budget is a little optimistic. A 1.5 Kg can of malt syrup costs me 10.50 at my homebrew shop, and a packet of Wyeast is 5 or more. Doing this for $ 25, on the other hand could be a reasonable budget.
I'm not opposed to picking a universal kit, but would suggest that the $ 10 cans one sees, i.e.
are not the whole story. Those kits are about half the fermentables required to make a batch, and the directions usually make it sound OK to use white sugar for the second half of the fermentables. This is really sub-optimal 
. It destroys the body and mouthfeel the beer could have had and gives an off flavor as well that you should never taste in a quality beer. One of those kits would require the purchase of either dry malt extract or liquid malt extract to supplement its inadequacies... so the idea of steering clear of non-kit options just isn't workable. If you have to find and buy 3 pounds of malt extract, why not just get 6 and some hops and be done without ever thinking of a kit?
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Did you read Prial's original piece on the under-25$ burgundies? They seem to have been plucked from the shelves at random.
So what Prial's really 'proving' here is that hand-picked 40$-and-up domestic pinots are generally better wines than luck-of-the-draw under-$25 burgundies. BFD.
As to the question of $25 burgundies in general, the results are long in: if you have access to a wide enough selection, you will do very well indeed if you choose well. Unfortunately, the continuing slide of the dollar may change that, and soon.
Don't know what article you're talking about, but the one linked to in this thread mentioned none of the under $25 burgundies by name... the whole lot was dismissed out of hand. But he did go through 25 of them and claims not to have picked a winner in the bunch. That says something about how frequent the particular needles we're looking for occur within the haystack. Sure good sub$25 french pinot noirs exist... just be prepared to blow a lot of $$$ going through the haystack looking for the needles... assuming you have access to the whole haystack... which those of us in some ass-backward states most deinitely do not.
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A brief delay is not a bad thing in my book either. I should just have enough bottles freed up for another batch by now, though my bottling bucket is doing douible duty as a secondary fermentor for some cider I've had going for a few weeks. By the time we get going, that should give the cider enough time to do its thing (or I'll have "sampled" it out of existence...)
Cider, btw, is the easiest brew project I've ever done. Acquire several gallon jugs of really good fresh cider, pour into primary fermentor, add pound of honey, stir tiil frothy, add wine yeast, walk away.
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I also think we might need a "brewmaster" to lead this project. Someone who has done this before and understands the ins and outs. I've brewed a handful of times in the past, but not for a few years - and I've never really looked into water chemistry issues, caramelization properties of different grains, etc. Anyone else think this is necessary? Anyone want to volunteer?
I'm in total agreement that we need somebody who knows what's going on to lead this brigade. I know that there is a whole lot that I don't know about what's going on in brewing...
The caramelization thing re grain is simple- when you roast something with sugar in it, some of the sugar caramelizes. Caramelized sugar is what darkens beer. Lovibond ratings express how much darkening a particular malt will contribute to a batch of beer. See this article for a good discussion of the issue.
As to water chemistry, I know nothing whatsoever about the mechanics... only that it is generally reported to make a difference in the outcome. I've never tried to figure out what the water in my well is specifically suited to brewing, and have been reasonably pleased with everything I've brewed with it, so I've not ever tried to doctor the water chemistry by throwing gypsum or epsom salts or other such things into my brew kettle.
It would be good to see if we can get a beer pro onto our project to act as moderator and one-man tasting panel.
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Why not get 20 people involved and brew 20L of beer each. We can each send 19l of beer to the other brewers. It would be brilliant! We then could pick a saturday night to taste all the beer and could respond live online with our critic!
Great thought, but would be cost prohibitive for me. Since a liter is a kilo (or slightly more), sending each liter (quite illegally, I believe) within the US would cost me more than $4... adding up to at least $80 in postage... not to mention ingredients. Were I to decide to blow that kind of dough on beer, my first inclination would be to go and pick up a case of Rochefort 10 or such for not terribly much more.
Sending along a bottle or two to one person/place would be within the budget... legality be damned.
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Have just looked over the Northern Brewer site... one issue I see for those of us with local homebrew shops is that their inventories specify the specialty grains by brand rather than by Lovibond rating... I know I can walk into my shop and get a pound of 10L crystal malt... I don't know whether they stock Simpson's or Dingemans or otherwise... So we run the risk of significant variation due to different levels of caramelization in whatever specialty grains we find ourselves using.
Another variable I don't know how to control for is the differing chemistry of our water that we'll use to brew with. I know it makes a difference, but I don't know how to test for trace minerals in my water. Anybody know a cheap source of water analysis devices? We should all know and declare our water type in this project.
One final issue comes to mind- if a bunch of us do brew the same recipe, then we should be distributing a bottle or two of our own product to the others so that the differences can be experienced... Or (considering the likely high cost of mailing a bottle of beer to a dozen different people) at least one person should be the designated taster and receive a bottle from everybody who brewed and then write up a critique of the range of beers received.
A Chef's Beer
in Beer & Cider
Posted
Have purchased all the grains now, and am following the recipe verbatim in that regard. Will diverge in my choices of yeast and hops. Am using Willamette hops in place of the fuggles, and am using Wyeast's Ringwood yeast b/c the Wyeast website made it appear that recommended british ale yeast was from Whitbread, and I have always hated their beers.