Man, vacationing is hard work. I needed to burn some of my accumulating vacation time, so I took yesterday and today off from work. My plan was to lounge around the house for a couple days and finish season three of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but beer had other ideas.

After I got off work Wednesday night, my wife and I headed out to Sam Bonds where we finally got a chance to try Oakshire’s Harvest Ale. The brewery is calling their Fall seasonal a PNW Festbier, an apt description. Like traditional German Festbiers, Harvest Ale has a wonderful bready aroma and a dense, grainy flavor. The cooler fermentation temperature gives the beer a clean lager-like quality that lets the malt character shine. And the late kettle German Hallertau hops provide the finish with a spicy punch.

I spent the rest of Wednesday night racking my Oaked Munich IPA to secondary. I’m a little worried about how this beer is shaping up. The beer is already much drier than I would have liked. The Safale yeast tore through the sugars, taking the beer from a starting gravity of 1.058 to 1.008. This puts attenuation in the mid 80′s, much higher that the 75% I usually get from the strain. I also thought the beer could benefit from another round of dry hopping, so an ounce of German Tettnanger accompanied it to secondary.

Yesterday morning, I picked up right where I left off the night before, using my now free primary to brew a hoppy Tripel. I was shooting for something like Flying Fish’s Exit 4 or Achouffe’s Houblon, a classic Belgian Tripel with a huge amount of hop flavor.

Hoppy Tripel

Batch Size: 4.0 gallons
Boil Volume: 4.75 gallons

8.0 lbs 2-Row
1.0 lbs Flaked Wheat
1.0 lbs Cane Sugar
1.0 lbs Turbinado Sugar

.50 oz Columbus (14.5 AA%) @ First Wort Hopped
.50 oz Columbus (14.5 AA%) @ 15
.50 oz Columbus (14.5 AA%) @ Flame Out – Steeped @ 180(F)
.50 oz Columbus (14.5 AA%) @ Dry Hopped (secondary)

.60 oz Coriander @ 10

Wyeast 3787 Trappist High Gravity (1/2 Gallon Starter)

Estimated Efficiency: 70%
Estimated Attenuation 85%
Estimated OG: 1.074
Estimated FG: 1.011
Estimated ABV: 8.1%
Estimated IBU: 34
Estimated SRM: 5

Mash @ 149 for 90 minutes

Brew day went flawlessly and I hit my target starting gravity of 1.074. I wanted to start fermenting on the cool side, about 65 (F) for the first 24 hours, then let the temperature free rise. This meant that I had to cool my wort more than usual before pitching the yeast. I decided to toss the fermenter into the beer fridge and go have a beer while it cooled. I checked the Bier Stein’s Facebook page for their current tap list and noticed they were pouring the wet hop version of Oakshire’s Harvest Ale. Target acquired.

The wet hop version of Harvest Ale also uses Hallertau, but trades the German variety for some grown locally in Mt. Angel. The wet hops mask a little of the beer’s grainy body, but gives it that unmistakable fresh hop flavor. When the keg of Harvest Ale blew, it was replaced with Full Sail’s Lupulin #1, hopped with First Gold. Lupulin was also fantastic, the wet hops giving it a earthy/herbal flavor with just a hint of citrus. Curiously, all of the wet hops beers I have tried so far, which admittedly consist of only these two and Ninkasi’s Parley, eschew the bold citrus hops in favor of more subtly, spicy varieties. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues when I visit the Eugene Fresh Hop Festival next month.

On the way home from the Bier Stein, we decided to stop at Sixteen Tons and pick up some fall beers. We had the fortune of walking into a massive tasting featuring Elliot and the BoozeWeek crew and thirteen oak-aged beers. The flight consisted of:

Goose Island – Sofie

Great Divide – Rumble

Stone – Oaked Arrogant Bastard

Rogue – Hazelnut Brown

Rogue – John John Hazelnut

He’Brew – Lenny’s RIPA on Rye

Boulevard – Bourbon Barrel Quad

Great Divide – Oak Aged Yeti

Full Sail – Top Sail

Brewdog – Paradox (Glen Grant)

J.W. Lees – Harvest Ale (Port Cask)

J.W. Lees – Harvest Ale (Lagavulin)

Dogfish Head – Palo Santo Marron

Ok, I lied. It was ONLY twelve oak-aged beers and Rogue’s Hazelnut Brown. I believe the order above is the order in which we tasted them, but I may be a little off. A dozen oak-aged beers can (and does) leave the memory a touch foggy. And for the life of me I cannot remember the vintages of the J.W. Lees brews; maybe Mike or Jeff can chime in and clear things up a bit?

My favorites of the tasting were the He’Brew RIPA in rye whiskey barrels, the Boulevard Quad in bourbon barrels and the two J.W. Lees brews. The port cask version, rich and sweet with an intense raison flavor, and the Lagavulin version; lighter and saturated with smokey peat flavor. Elliot had a very similar top four, opting for the Oak Aged Yeti over the Lagavulim J.W. Lees. Score sheets were available for the tasting and either Booze Week or Sixteen Tons (again a little foggy) will be tabulating the results.

I also had a chance to talk with Mike before I left about what he and Jeff have waiting in the wings for Sixteen Tons. The shop launched a club program at the beginning of the month. For $25 (annually) you receive 10% off all purchases and priority invitation to special tastings, events and releases. The shop will also be getting a set of taps in the near future, so the guys can sell growlers of beer not available in bottles. Again, thanks to Sixteen Tons and BoozeWeek for the great tasting.

When I got home last night, I somehow managed to pitch the yeast for my Tripel and set up a “cooling chamber” to keep the fermentation temperature in check. It is bubbling away happily at 64(F) right now.

When I finish typing this post, my “work” will be done for the day, but tomorrow morning I will be back at it, bottling the smoked wheat beer I fermented with captured wild yeast. After that, I plan to put in a few hours on my new obsession, Minecraft.

For those of you not familiar with Minecraft, Markus Persson, the game’s creator describes it as:

Minecraft is a game about placing blocks while running from skeletons. Or something like that..

It was that description that piqued my friend Jesse’s interest, and in turn, got me hooked. Though still in alpha, Minecraft is already an immensely engrossing game. You wander around a randomly generated world, chopping wood, mining stone and shoveling dirt. All these things are then used to craft items which can then be used to build fortresses and structures. Why build a fortress? Because at night zombies, spiders, skeletons and the ultimately terrifying skeletons riding spiders come out to terrorize the land and you will need some place to hull up until morning. And that is just scratching the surface of the gameplay. Minecraft is pure indie game bliss, skinning in wickedly simplistic, 8-bit splendor. Damn, now I got myself excited, time to grab a beer and place some blocks while running away from skeletons…or something like that.

Cheers!
Kevin

A couple quick website updates and a comment on the “new” homebrew-restricting OLCC’ law should do it for today.

Eugene Beer Directory 
When I posted my Eugene Beer Directory a few weeks ago, Bill and Jack were quick to point out that the Beer Mapping Project had most of the information I was looking for.

Now, Beer Mapping is a great tool, but it doesn’t have everything I want, and the information it does have takes a few mouse clicks and page loads to get at. Not knocking their design or anything; it is perfect for what they are trying to accomplish, but I want something that is more take-out menu than interactive map. And I think I am getting closer.

If you take a look at the Directory (tab at the top of the page), it now has much more information that when I started, including hours and prices. Please excuse the general ugliness; I am working on a style sheet that will display correctly in IE7, IE8, Firefox and Chrome, but until it is finished, you get drab gray boxes.

Bottleshops and an Event Calendar are next on my list of things to add. I will also probably embed a Beer Mapping Project map at some point. I fiddled around with their WordPress widget a little, but I think I will end up using their API directly instead.

Beer Test
Looking back even further (March), I coded up a simple Beer Test; a starting point for an eventual Android App. At launch, it provided a BJCP style and asked you to correctly choose the ABV, IBU or SRM range from a list of 5 possible answers.

For phase two, I was going to include correctly matching BJCP aroma, appearance, flavor, mouthfeel, overall impression, comments and ingredients descriptions. This proved to be more of a challenge than I anticipated. Many of the descriptions reference the style within them, either directly (Export Stout), or indirectly (Stouts). This made about half of the questions dead giveaways. I tried to solve the problem programmatically, scanning the description as it was chosen and masking all occurrences of the style name. This worked for direct references, but not indirect ones. Next, I tried a static black list, but it filtered the descriptions too much; removing the word Stout from the comments description of a Robust Porter and the like. After several attempts, I arrived at the conclusion that I am just going to have to create a new table of modified  BJCP descriptions, edited on a case by case basis.

In the mean time, I tied the Beer Test into the database used for my Beer App. Beer and brewery matching questions are now part of the rotation. I have set up the code that chooses beers to pick only those that are available year-round and have unique names, so there is no chance you will be given ”Summer Ale” and five breweries that all produce a beer under that name. I’ll warn that the beer matching is still far from perfect. I still need to put some filtering in place to keep obvious things like “Full Sail Amber” out of the list.

By tapping into the Beer App database, I will be able to expand the possible questions, like match a brewery to the correct state or pick which beer is a winter seasonal. I will also be changing the test from its current open format to a finite length, providing a score at the end. Until then, the current test can be accessed from the Beer Test tab at the top of the page. I will mention that my host is pretty laggy today, so it may take a couple seconds to load a new question after pressing the “play again” button.

OLCC’s “New” Law

ORS 471.403
“No person shall brew, ferment, distill, blend or rectify any alcoholic liquor unless licensed so to do by the Oregon Liquor Control Commission. However, the Liquor Control Act does not apply to the making or keeping of naturally fermented wines and fruit juices or beer in the home, for home consumption and not for sale.”

This law was reinterpreted this week to mean that homebrew can only be consumed at the site it was crafted; effectively making everything from homebrew competitions to taking a beer you made to your buddy’s house illegal. While this probably isn’t going to hinder any summer cookouts, it does stop dead any organized competitions that want to keep things legit. It also creates a problem for homebrew clubs that meet at breweries and don’t want to put their hosts in the OLCC crosshairs.

Already the Oregon State Fair has cancelled this year’s beer and wine competitions and the Oregon Brew Crew has posted a notice not to bring homebrew to the next club meeting at Widmer. I am going to try to get a hold of someone from the Cascade Brewers Society to see if they plan to issue a similar restriction at their monthly Eugene City Brewery meetings.

Both Lisa and Jeff already have discussions going about this topic, so if you have something to add, I would suggest doing it in one of these two posts:
Lisa Morrison – Oregon Homebrew Threatened
Beervana – OLCC Blowback Escalates

Lisa has links for contacting state representatives, senators and the OLCC. And at the end of Jeff’s post, you can find the Facebook group set up to protest the “new” law.

Well, as usual, this turned out much longer than I had originally intended. I need to learn to stop using the word “quick” in the opening sentence.

Cheers!
Kevin