YGingras^.net

It's been a while since I last brewed beer but I'm finally at it again. As I write this, my apartment is filled with the aroma of fresh hops and barley. That smells always makes me incredibly thirsty; I can't drink any of it for a few weeks but I can write on the pleasure of brewing in the mean time.

Back when I did my last batch, I was a caffeine addicted young programmer, running on Penguin Mints and on dark chocolate. I was looking for something extravagant, something with a kick. I made two batch that summer: a coffee flavored stout and an green tea flavored red. When I say flavored, I really mean it: the stout contained one kilo of really dark and oily espresso coffee and the red was just as excessive but I unfortunately can't find the original recipe anymore. I'm certainly not the first to think of making a coffee flavored stout. Dieu du Ciel was serving one at the time, a 9% monster that was extremely strong on all senses of the term.

My stout turned out to suffer from a sever lack of bubbles. The coffee taste was way too strong and it lacked that creamy head typical of good stouts. The red was lost in the secondary fermenter when it was attacked by molds. So I decided that I would wait a bit before brewing again. That was in 2002.

Before the stout and the red, I had a brewed a few kits and they turned out to be quite good. The stout and the red were more ambitious: malt extract, specialty grains, and fresh hops. Even though I was not brewing for some time, my love of that ancient art was bearing fruits. My lively discussions with master brewers in local brewpubs convicted a few friends that they should give brewing a try and I let anyone who asked use my equipment.

One major annoyance of brewing in my opinion is scrubbing, sterilizing, rinsing, filling, and capping 60+ beer bottles per batch. When you take into account that many smoker can't tell an empty beer bottle from an ash tray, cleaning the bottles becomes simply wrong. After receiving a lot of pressure encouragement from coworker for getting back to brewing, I started to look at alternative to those tiny little bottles that take forever to prepare. An obvious solution is 750 ml bottles: you cut the work in half right there. But the revelation came when I discussed the matter with my mentor. Without knowing, I was looking for kegs.

It turns out that I'm not the only one to be turned off by bottling. And it also turns out that the soft-drink industry switched technology a few years ago which sent a bunch of cheap and convenient kegs on the market. Those kegs are designed to distribute carbonated beverages; it did not take too long for the homebrewers to adapt them to their needs.

Now that I'm older and wiser, I don't feel the need to add caffeine to everything that I consume; I run on espresso shots instead. Specifically, I don't want to tamper with the ingredients of a beer that already has all it needs to be great. The one that I'm brewing right now is an extra bitter amber ale. Here's the recipe:

• 3 kg: liquid malt extract
• 2 cup: dark brown sugar
• 750 g: caramel pale malted barley
• 250 g: crystal malted barley
• 100 g: Amarillo Hops (40g for 60 mins, 30g for 30 mins, 30g for 10 mins)
• 1 vial: California V yeast

Yes, that's a lot of hops; that one won't be for sissies. I'll probably start another batch soon, something that goes down easily for hot summer day. It's not that I really want a new batch, it's just that these keg systems look much better with two taps. And there it's also that brewing is a lot of fun. Now I need to find enough drinkers to keep the those kegs in a reasonably short rotation. Cheers!