Author Archives: Llalan

Bottled Sunshine: a Summer Beer Sampler

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Southern Tier's Hop Sun: the last & best beer we try...coincidence?

Last summer we discussed a variety of styles typically put out as summer beers. This year it’s time to get down to brass tacks (whatever that means!) and sample some breweries’ summer offerings.

We pick the first beer to try because its label was the most summery: Brooklyn Summer Ale. Its initial sharp bite brings you right out into a sunny summer afternoon picnic before it smooths out and takes you to a shady place. In fact, these exact words float through my head as part of the Pixie’s hit, Gigantic. Though an ale, the beer is pilsner-esque with that taste in the back of the mouth that borders on skunky. Must not be too bad though, because I quickly forget to taste it and instead debate the relative creepiness-level of this song: like, is the singer a voyeur or envious or both? And then admit that, man, it took me a long time to get that whole “hunk of love” line.

Up next is Victory’s Summer Love — far from a beer you’d get at a baseball game, despite the game-themed label. The perfect juxtaposition to Brooklyn, its bright sunny taste began smooth and ended dry. Reminiscent of a good pinot grigio. Suddenly and inexplicably I’m watching Liam Lynch’s This Town Sucks which I immediately recognize as my own teenage anthem to summertime doldrums. I think I quite like this beer and ponder what a difference a little Summer Love would have made to my seventeenth summer. Continue reading →

Funny T-Shirts & Beer Festivals: Two of My Favorite Things

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Four hours and, like, 50 samples later...

There is always a time-lapse between the beginning of a beer festival and the point when people react to my T-shirt; that is, people have to have enough samples in their bellies before they’re willing to point at my chest and say, “Huh. That’s funny.” The shirt appears to be designed after an Arm & Hammer box, but instead of the usual logo the arm holds a gun and the seal reads, “Armed & Hammered.” In that I have arms, by this late point in the afternoon at the beer festival my T-shirt had a perfectly truthful statement. And yes, those are two unhappily sober policemen behind me, perhaps wishing we weren’t all so goddamn goofy and nonviolent.

"I'm a Cleveland Fan"

Last Saturday I went to what was billed as the World Beer Festival, though in reality it was primarily US breweries, heavy on the Ohio-end of things. But that’s fine by me, given that Ohio makes some pretty rockin’ beer.  It took place on the harbor in Cleveland under tents, inside a huge open warehouse, and beneath a brilliantly blue sky. Its proximity to the lake made it easily the coolest location I’d ever been to for a beer fest. The first funny T-shirt — spotted walking in before we even arrived at the entrance — epitomized the city and its love/hate relationship with sports and its reputation for rampant alcoholism. I laughed, but maybe just because I’m an Ohioan. (Click on the images to see them larger.)

Everything's better in stick figure

This is the next funny shirt I saw, while standing behind the guy in line for the ever-amazing Rockmill Brewery stand. I hadn’t had enough beer yet to tell him I thought it was funny, so Ben and I snickered behind his back and snuck a picture while he pretended not to notice us. If it had been later in the day I would have said “HA!” and pointed, but as it was I thought I should probably be feeling somewhat uncomfortable. Continue reading →

Pennsylvania Beer Kicks Sweet Patootie

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Me hiking, pre-shellacking

Ben sat the tulip glass gently on our table and looked at me seriously. “This is strong…like, really.” I hiccuped and snorted a little in agreement. We were sitting on the lower patio of the Shawnee Craft Brewing Company, near the border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey, which looked out over a small waterfall and a river that flowed away into a lush forest. Wildflowers. Delicate breeze. Bird song.

We were on our honeymoon and we were thoroughly shellacked. I’ve heard that’s normal. We had ordered a flight of Shawnee’s beers and a glass of the extremely potent Triple Pale Ale on nitro, and that 32 ounces of beer kicked our respective asses.

To be honest, Pennsylvania beers just kick ass, in general. I recognized several of the breweries while browsing the state store a few weeks ago and we took the opportunity to try new varieties.

Victory, out of Downingtown, may be best known for its Prima Pils but my favorite is Hop Wallop, an IPA that does, indeed, pack a wallop, whatever that is (I think it’s equivalent to about one kick in the pants). I also enjoy their Hop Devil, which tastes sharper than Wallop to me, despite the lower abv — maybe more of a smack on the head. Continue reading →

Matrimoni-Ale Bliss & A Hoppy Ever After

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It was all beer and pretzel necklaces in the beginning...

Our wounds from replanting the hops plants healed enough to be barely noticeable in our wedding photos. In fact, in most of the pictures, save a few formal ones for the parents, I am sporting my red sunglasses and a tall glass of our homemade beer. The brew, a floral pale ale called “Hop Burst,” was a hit — or at least everyone felt obligated to compliment us since we dressed up and everything. We filled pitchers of the Hop Burst for every table at toast time, and it felt quite nice to have everyone toasting us with our own beer, I do say.

But now what?

Though our guests drank an admirable amount of beer during the wedding and the next day’s barbeque, Ben and I are still left with a fridge-full of bottled homemade beer, complete with cute labels, which someone was supposed to hand out to guests as they left. (That someone was quite possibly me.) We surprised ourselves yesterday by saying to each other, “how are we going to drink all this beer?” Did I really say that ? What is happening to us?

In the beginning, we didn’t tell people we were planning to make beer; it seemed crazy from the mouths of two people who’d barely just met. But by our third date we knew we were destined to brew together. Continue reading →

When Two Hop-Heads Fall in Love…

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Last year's ripening hops

Four days from our wedding and I find myself sitting in the dirt of a mostly unplanted garden, wishing I could turn the hose on myself. Ben and I have just finished uprooting an entire row of hops plants from his parents’ old home and replanting them at my family’s place out in the countryside of central Ohio. Bill, my parents’ orange cat, is rolling around in the dust next to me, but knew enough to not get too close. It is so hot and sticky and dirty and we haven’t even set up the trellis yet. But if we want to make beer right ourselves, we have to do it right. Ourselves.

Hops on a trellis

Hops are a climbing perennial plant, much like grapes, only taller. They grow in rows on trellises about 12 feet high. They are said to have originated in China, but apparently no one there thought, “Hm, I wonder what would happen if I threw this in water and drank it after several weeks!” There are records of the Dutch processing hops as early as the 1400s, which is how it got some fun-to-say phrases attached to it like “oast house” (drying barn) and “scuppet” (flat spade for turning drying hops).

We knew the plants were pretty tenacious and spread easily, but we did not fully grasp how hard they’d be to move. First, I have to admit here that I’m not exactly the most experienced of gardeners. So when I was handed a shovel I eyed it warily before pushing at it ineffectively with one tennis shoe. Fortunately Ben’s father saw I was struggling (as much as you can call not trying “struggling”) and took the tool from me — clearly this was not a two-person job for these particular two people. Continue reading →

Issues of Connotation in the Phrase, “Beer-Themed”

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Beer-themed invites...so subtlety is not our forte

When I saw the phrase “beer-themed” noted on the wedding photographer’s invoice, I felt surprisingly embarrassed. My stomach fell in a way it hasn’t since the Fritos incident of 1988. Yes, the wedding is beer-themed, though we had never used those words to describe this momentous occasion. I felt “beer-themed” better described certain dude movies like Beer Fest or, you know, real beer festivals (which, coincidentally, are actually dude-themed).

As a beverage, beer has earned a certain reputation — that being that it is not wine. Or champagne. I believe I’ve soap boxed before about beer being my drink of choice to cheers with for celebrations large and small. But how do we differentiate between a “beer-themed” celebration of a union of two people in love and a thinly veiled (sorry) excuse get blotto. …Perhaps the larger question here is: does it really matter?  Continue reading →

Brewing for the Masses: Always Be Prepared

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Wedding beer label prototype

Ben and I are attempting to make our homebrew as non-beer-drinker-friendly as possible. We are getting married in a month (…a month from tomorrow, exactly. Holy shit.) Anyway, the plan is to craft our Matrimoni-Ale with home-grown hops and lots of love and to have enough to send everyone home with a bottle. It seems strange that we would be friends with many non-beer drinkers, but family had to be invited too, or so I was told.

There are a number of differences between homebrewed and store-bought beer, some which may frighten off the uninitiated. Par example, sometimes there is a weensy bit of bonus beer sludge at the bottom of a bottle. In my opinion, not nearly as gross as a worm in bottom of my tequila, but what do I know, I won’t eat any dead animals, in bacon form or no.

Scientifically known as "beer sludge"

When you let your homebrew sit and stew for a minute, a sizable amount of sediment settles out of it into a righteously gross sludge on the bottom. It’s composed of yeast, hop detritus and other nontoxic beer-making byproducts, but discovering a bit of this roughage in the bottom of the bottle really freaks some people out, especially if they’re used to crystal clear, ice cold, virtually tasteless, but very well-marketed American lagers. We are siphoning our beer off the yeast bed from one fermenter into another carboy a few times to have as little of this harmless but unappealing phenomenon as possible. Continue reading →

Beer-Making Take II, Featuring Brita and The Bavarians

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My baby is already two weeks old!

I was told beer-making was easy, and based on the Spaghetti-Os-heavy diet of the dudes who told me this, I believed it. After all, your basic beer has (or should have) only four ingredients: water, grain, hops, and yeast. This has been the basic recipe for hundreds of years. Despite our mutual distaste for following the rules, Ben and I embarked on another brewing adventure with this in mind, even as our first attempt still sat in the basement, sulkily maturing into an adolescent IPA. (They grow up so fast!)

First, of course: water. After having soundly lost the Brita vs. Tap Water battle last time, I fished the pitcher from the fridge and began the grueling process of filtering water and pouring it into the kettle. Now, I am not known for my patience…but this takes FOREVER. I’ve got to say, there really is something to be said for boiling water, like, that it sterilizes things. I’ve heard that way back in the day, before germs and public sanitation were discovered, everyone drank beer because it was safer than the water. Everyone! Or so I’ve heard — this would take far too long to actually research.

Barley: not just for horses

Next comes the grain, in our case barley. Barley is the grain of choice for most beers, rye and wheat beer being obvious exceptions. This wasn’t always the case. Before the Bavarian Purity Law of 1516, or the Reinheitsgebot (geshundheit!), laid down the literal law about what could go in beer, it was anything goes. Afterwards, only water, barley, and hops were allowed in beer. (Wild yeast fermented the concoctions, but those little guys weren’t given any credit till discovered in the 1850s.) It was less purity of the drink they were actually concerned about and more the price of bread; that is, ensuring a sizable-enough quantity of wheat and rye that they could be bought cheaply and made into affordable bread …that is, for relatively little dough (eesh, sorry). Continue reading →

Making Your Own Beer, Step 1: Have a Beer

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The gloves are on: no more messin' around

By far the most time consuming step of last Tuesday’s brewing process was the argument that took place before even pouring water into the pot. Nothing serious. Just a tap water vs. Brita-filtered water disagreement; a this-is-going-to-take-forever vs. it-will-taste-like-ass-otherwise spat; a so-you’re-too-good-for-city-water-now? vs. and-here-I-thought-you-were-a-real-brewer quarrel. Turns out it takes just as long for Ben and I to reach a draw as it does to pull five gallons of water through a filtered pitcher made for drinking water. Whatever.

Ben -- I call him The Sanitizer

The first, most important ingredients for any decent batch of home brew are the beer you will be drinking and the music you will be playing while cooking it up. We chose a classic craft beer: Dogfish Head 60 Minutes, and one of my favorite snowy-afternoon albums: Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica. During the approximately seven hours it took to watch five gallons fall drip by drip into the pitcher, we used a one-step sanitizer to clean everything that would come in contact with our future brew, including both of us up to the elbows and a good deal of my sweatshirt. By then it was time for another beer and The Kills’ Blood Pressures.

Stew of dirty socks and thermometer

The first step in which something actually happens is when you heat the water to between 150 and 160 degrees and steep the grains. The difficult part of this is, of course, taking the temperature of the water. In our case, brewing is less of a science and more an engineering project. To save us from burning our hands, Ben rigged our thermometer on wire that he wound around both pot handles so it dangled in the middle of the hot water. Clever boy, this one. The barley grains are knotted into a bag made of cheese cloth-like material that is, when floating in an increasingly dark kettle of liquid, reminiscent of a soaking pair of dirty, balled-up socks.  Continue reading →

The Black & Tans and What to Drink This Bloody Sunday

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1920 Cork after the Black and Tans set it on fire; next from Yuengling, Gestapo Stout

St. Patrick’s Day is nigh. That green-hazed day on which we celebrate the historic moment when pilgrims sat down with leprechauns over soda bread and green beer. The Irish sprites taught the pilgrims to lust for gold and the pilgrims introduced the leprechauns to the ancient white man tradition of back-stabbing, later forcing them down the Rainbow of Tears.

Oh my. We all know that in truth we are actually celebrating the day Bono chased all the snakes out of Ireland! Eternally grateful, people around the world celebrate the day by getting drunk, kissing Irish wannabes, and wearing the traditional Irish shiny-shamrock-head-bobber-thingies.

And here is where I must be honest: though I am authentically Irish, though I wear a claddagh ring, have smiling Irish eyes, and really love me some potatoes, I do not actually enjoy the Irish beer available in the US.

BUT WHAT ABOUT GUINNESS?!?! they shout in disbelief. Okay, yeah; it’s a good beer and you look more suave drinking that than some piss-colored swill with the calorie count on the label. For me though, it was a gateway beer, a beer that bolstered my courage and allowed me to take the next step toward more flavorful, imaginative craft beers. Also, during lean times it was cheaper and more filling than a sandwich at lunch. Continue reading →