cdh

My method was designed to keep the basil from boiling (or hotter) temperatures except for the 10 seconds of blanching. I wanted to keep the volatile aromatics from escaping into the air. To recap my method: 1) blanch and ice 2) buzz with a bit of sugar and cold water 3) add sugar to hot blanching water (to recapture flavor leached out in the blanching process) and dissolve as much as possible. 4) add some of the hot (but not boiling) syrup to blender and blitz a bit more 5) strain 6) (because it was a bit thin and more than my bottle could hold) boil 1/5 of the volume down to a real syrup, dilute with enough water to get the temperature back below 212 and re-add. Shake vigorously and then refrigerate.

With the first hard freeze predicted for last night, earlier this week I took the final harvest of Thai Basil from my garden. Having more ice cube trays full of basil than I can predict using soon, I tried doing something else with it-- basil syrup. I blanched some basil, shocked it in ice water, ran it in the blender, made a simple syrup out of some of the blanching water and added it to the blender, gave it a whirl and poured everything through a reasonably fine strainer. I've got a murky green syrup that has a lovely anise-y, basil-y complex herbal flavor. It is quite remniscent of herbal liqueurs... so I mixed some into a drink- a couple of dashes of thai basil syrup plus gin plus soda is very nice. Much more complex than you'd expect. The sweetness and herbal complexity remind me of chartreuse. It would be better if I could strain it clear and get rid of the murk... but I've not got the equipment to accomplish that right now.

The brewing world is in a bit of an uproar right now: there is a serious shortage of hops on the market, and grain prices are climbing. The hops shortage is predicted to go 3 years, unless unknown and untapped hops sources come to light. I'm interested in seeing how the fight between economics and beer plays out in our pint glasses. I know that prices will climb a bit, but a 50%+ increase in raw materials cost won't result in a +50% end cost... I'm more interested in what is going to get brewed by the guys who just can't get enough hops from their suppliers to keep putting out hyper-hopped IPAs and northwest-style hop bombs. I am going to guess that low-hopped Belgian styles will come forward, particularly the very low hopped sour ales that intentionally use low-flavor low-bittering old hops. I foresee more herbs other than hops getting used in beers- maybe an absinthe ale bittered with wormwood rather than hops. I foresee old style non-hopped beers from the RenFaire cookbooks getting a chance on the market: nordic juniper beers, celtic heather ales, gruits and such. The big question is who will succeed in the new market conditions. Anybody who runs across new and wacky products that stretch the definition of beer, post 'em here. It will be an interesting collection, and maybe a good bit of compiling some history while living through it. I'll start with a beer that fits this model- Dogfish Head's Chateau Jihau. This is a beer from the hop-mad creators of Dogfish Head's famous 60, 90 and 120 minute IPAs that has no hops in whatsoever. It is a very interesting drink, but much more akin to wine or mead than beer. Off-dry, very grapey, not very beer-like at all. Your turn!

Dextrins are long-chain sugar molecules... they're the kind of sugar yeast can't eat, so they get left behind in your beer after the yeast are done. They're responsible for the body and mouthfeel of your beer. You can influence how many of them are formed when you mash grain by selecting temperatures that favor or disfavor dextrin formation. "Mashing high", around 155F -160F, promotes dextrin formation, while "mashing low" promotes short chain sugar which is full fermentable. A beer consisting of only fermented short chain sugars would be very thin bodied and wouldn't be quite right. Dextrin powder is a tool for fixing a beer that tastes too thin.

Did anybody go? I'd meant to, but realized I had other obligations in Manhattan that same evening. I'd bet it was good fun.

If you plan on mashing at 156, then you have no need of the dextrin powder. I'd up the malt, though, as all of those spices are going to want a stronger malt background than you're providing. I'd say 9 lbs would be the lowest you should be thinking. Strongly spiced ales don't really work well at lower gravities. Try for a temple or valencia orange, and do use a peeler to separate the zest from the pith. You only want the zest. As to the math on the beers- Really? The red should be cheaper, as the malt extract in the golden is much more expensive than the grains in the red, and the red uses less malt extract if I remember right. I know the market for homebrew stuff is really wacky right now, with both a malt and a hops shortage and prices spiking through the roof, but the relative costs should remain the same, I'd thought. Hmmm.

It is possible for knock-off restaurants to be considered a rip-off of "trade dress", a subset of trademark law. There was a very famous case in Texas where one taco chain got the Supreme Court to decide that another taco chain was confusing customers about where they were by copying their decor. So it might be possible for Chipotle to bring a lawsuit, depending on lots of details we've not looked at here. Google "two pesos taco cabana" for lots of fun reading on restaurant knock-off law.

The main consideration is whether the newcomer's name is likely to confuse the purchasing public into making a false association between the new venture and the older venture already using the similar name. Federal registration, like FG pointed to, alters the analysis by introducing presumptions that weigh heavily in favor of a pre-registered mark, even outside of the locality where it is located and used. Best practice is make up something totally novel and unique. If you want to tread close to some other venture's mark that's already in use, talk to a lawyer to get the right analysis done about how risky your proposed name will be.

You really think that dictionary boilerplate applies to journalists?

Indeed. The concept of "credentialed journalist" is a problematic one. Were such a thing to exist, then such things as licensure and regulation might be applied, neither of which is exactly congruent with our First Amendment. Other countries do, in fact, credential their journalists, and those places are considered to have a much less free press than we do. Credentials in journalism may be earned through practice, but the right to practice should not be conditioned on credentials. The appropriate credentials to be a food journalist should be wide experience with foods, and a capability of putting words together in a way that others understand and enjoy reading. Neither of those is exclusive to reporters who work beats.

So sad. I was just talking with a friend who brought him up in conversation over the weekend. So many fine brunches were had at his place on the River road up in Upper Black Eddy. Has anybody bought that building and done anything with it yet? It had been for sale for years.

DON'T rack to secondary until it is finished in primary. 10-14 days. Messing with the yeast while they're in the middle of their job is a bad practice. Let them finish and let things settle. Secondary is all about letting things settle even more. Secondary is most effective if it is cold. Everything else sounds good.

Your IBUs will vary very much depending on when you added all the extract. If you boiled at a low gravity for most of the 60 minutes, then added the LME in the 15 minutes you'll get a much better hop utilization than if you added it all at the beginning. The denser your boil is, the harder it is for the hops to bitter the beer. Late extract addition lets your hops bitter the less dense wort, then you bump up the density at the end.

Bingo.

Were I you, I'd add a bit more extract. Your recipe is coming in a little low on the malt side. The low fermentation temperatures are not particularly important if you don't mind the yeast adding flavor to the beer. People who insist on fermenting in refrigerators don't like the flavors that yeast make and are trying to use cold to prevent them from forming in the beer. It's all a matter of taste. If you don't think that beers you fermented at warmer temps in the past are disgusting, then you won't mind what yeast fermented at warmer temperatures do.

Well, the trick to converting to partial mash is to leave all of the specialty grains alone, and substitute extract for most of the base malt. Hops stay about the same if you're doing a late extract addition... you'd need to up the hops some if you're adding the extract at the beginning of the boil. Use the calculator at www.hbd.org/recipator to fine tune the recipe from there. I usually assume a 68% efficiency there, as that is a safe middling number and I don't mind if the actual efficiency is +/- 10%. Give it a try and post what you come up with.

With either of those, I'd do it as a partial mash with extract added late in the boil to bring them up to the gravity you want, particularly if you won't be doing a full boil. For the Holiday Porter I'd do something like: Grain: 2 lb. British pale 2 lb. Wheat malt 1 lb. German Munich 1 lb. American crystal 60L 12 oz. American chocolate 4 oz. British black patent Mash: at 156 for 60 minutes Boil: 90 minutes 4 gallons 6 lb. Amber dry malt extract added with the Saaz hops at 10 minutes. Hops: 1.75 oz. Magnum (14% AA, 90 min.) 1 oz. Saaz (3.75% AA, 10 min.) Chuck in whatever spices make you happy. Cinnamon and I don't get along particularly well, so I'd look to use a few cloves, some allspice berries, a little nutmeg, maybe a star anise or some juniper. Look up the spicing of your favorite christmas cookie, and use that as a start. Hmmm... I'd bet that ginger snaps or pfeffernuesse in the mash would work and do something interesting... The enzymes in there could convert baked flour in dough as as well as raw starches in grain

Hmmm... thoughts re bottles and priming: Getting your bottles clean a few days ahead of time doesn't mean you can skip the sanitizing step just before you fill them. Giving them a few days for airborne beasties to settle on/in them is suboptimal. I always run my bottles through the dishwasher right before I fill them. (Dishwasher detergent is powered by chlorine, so does a fine job of killing beasties, particularly when coupled with the heated dry cycle.) Priming sugar scales linearly. Add 50% more for 3 gallons than you would for 2 gallons... unless you'd like to experiment with a less fizzy beer, which might be quite nice. The danger of exploding bottles comes more from jumping the gun and bottling before all the sugar in the wort has finished fermenting. (Another cause of bottle explosions is infections with beasties that can eat sugars that yeast can't...) As to yeast culturing, yes, it is possible. Doesn't always work, but it can be done. You can go from seat-of-your-pants attempts all the way to lab-style culture selection. To get going, you need a medium in which to propagate your new generation of yeast. You could use latino Malta drinks for that purpose, but you might want to dilute them about 1:1 with sterile water and degas them and add a tiny pinch of baking soda or chalk, as many of them them are dosed with phosphoric acid as a preservative to kill off things that might start growing in them (read the ingredients). IF your target yeast is a monoculture, you should be able to just pour (through a sterile funnel) 1/4 cup of your growth medium into a freshly opened and decanted bottle of beer with yeast cake on the bottom. Give that a good swirl (and oxygenate it if you can) and let it go a couple of days in a warm place. You might put a balloon over the top of the bottle so you can easily tell if any CO2 is getting made in there. If it looks like things are growing in there, get some more growth medium , add a bit of yeast nutrients, and step up the size to a full pint, and then to a quart. A lab-type magnetic stir plate really helps to get the yeast vigorously growing. (People are building their own out of old computer power supplies, case fans, and magnets nowadays... which seems like fun, but I've not gotten around to playing with that idea yet.) IF your target yeast is a blend of things (like many belgian beers are) you're going to need to remember your high school bio class where you grew a petrie dish of beasties from swab samples. Identifying which colonies that grow are the ones you want takes more microbiological skill than I've got, but it could make for fun experimentation. There's enough inexpensive lab equipment out there that you could get a good enough microscope and some petrie dishes for less than a small fortune.

I'll play around with it, and let you know on the 5th if anything really rocks.

For the hazelnut or macadamia soils, are the ground almonds even necessary, or could the almonds be replaced by the other nut variety? The higher fat content of the macadamias might require less butter and more flour, right?

I'm with FG. The texture and flavor of a banana is perfect when there is just a little green left on the skin, and no black splotches have shown up. The green is a guarantee of a little tart bite that complements the sweetness.

Welcome to the hobby, Mallet! As to secondary fermentation, I'd say that for most average strength beers you don't have to worry about it. I'd put the carboy away and forget about it too, as I have an aversion to large slippery-when-wet glass vessels that can break into razor sharp shards and really hurt you. There is an unfounded paranoia about "yeast autolysis", where the yeast begin to cannibalize themselves, generating awful odors and flavors. That is why people urge you to "get your beer off the yeast" as quickly as possible, hence moving everything over to a secondary fermenter. I've left beers in the primary bucket (in my 65F basement) for nearly a month and not noticed any signs of autolysis. In my dozen years of brewing, autolysis has yet to rear its ugly head. And I've never secondaried anything but Belgian styles that I've infected with brettanomyces in the secondary.

That "soil" recipe seems like quite a versatile tool to play with... savory and sweet both work with the almond base. What else has worked particularly or surprisingly well? Any notable failures with stuff that looked like it would work? Also, does it matter if the almond flour is blanched, or would the Trader Joe's stuff with the skins ground up in it work just as well?

Don't rush it. Give it at least 10 days.

Welcome terapinchef- Don't worry! Everything will be fine. Your yeast did exactly what they should. As to the 3 gallon batch in a 5-gallon carboy being a no-no... I'd not say so. The yeast is going to create great masses of CO2 that will push all of the O2 away from your beer while it is fermenting. Don't worry if you're fermenting below 70F, that is fine, yeast like it. It sounds like your yeast ate all the sugar quickly. That's not unexpected if you used 11g of dried yeast in a low-gravity wort. Let it continue doing its thing for the full 10 days before bottling, but don't expect the churning and swirling show from the first days to continue throughout the whole time.