New Zealand

So went to Gisborne, New Zealand with Becky for a month over Christmas and New Years to see the family and do some shows with my band, Nun of the Tongue. Caught up with old friends, swam lots and soaked up some well needed vitamin D. I also made a beer with my dad, who is now quite interested in pursuing grain brewing (as he had just been doing kits). It was just an extract brew with specialty grains. The beer we made was a clone of a famous Stone beer: Arrogant Bastard. I wanted to call it 'Ignorant Bastard', but dad liked the original name, so we just called it that. It turned out ok... Also drank quite a lot of this:

That is a 2 litre plastic bottle of (in my opinion) Gisbornes finest export, Sunshine Breweries Gisborne Gold. A brutally bitter, super refreshing beer. And you can get refills at the brewery, which is located right in town (a rather small city, of about 40,000 people). They also make Gisborne Green, the hoppier 'Pilsner' version of the Gold (everyone makes hoppy Pilsners in NZ instead of IPAs, i have no idea why), the Reserve Ale, which is basically a brown ale, and 'Black Magic'.

Black Magic is amazing, that's all i'll say.

About 90% of our beer money, that we had specifically saved to try awesome NZ beers while we were there, was used on Gisborne Gold... (it was only $10 for 2 litres!)

We did manage to try some amazing NZ beers, i'll list the good ones:

Three Boys Oyster Stout - Fucking amazing oyster stout, really rich and malty with some salty undertones. Definitely worth a go.

Kereru Kumara Brown Ale - Kumara is basically New Zealands answer to the sweet potato, but it is far superior to the sweet potato. This beer was amazing, super dry maltiness with a good hearty kick of sweet kumara essence.

The Mussel Inn Manuka Beer - The 'Captain Cooker'. This beer was really nice, super easy to drink, and because they use branches of manuka, and not the honey, it doesn't come out sweet, just very floral. It is worth mentioning this was recommended to us by Dave from Hashigo Zake, an awesome craft beer bar in Wellington. If you're there, go check it out.

And finally:

Garage Project: - We didn't manage to get to the brewery while we were in Wellington, and that made me very sad... But we did manage to try a few of their beers. I feel like they are the New Zealand version of Moon Dog, and they all come in cans! Anyway, the beers that we tried were:

Pernicious Weed - An insanely hoppy IPA, just hops everywhere, all up in your face. Delicious.

Angry Peaches - Awesome peachy beer, nice and bitter.

Day of the Dead - The chipotle dark lager, reminiscent of the Bock Naked by Moon Dog. Awesome, but not overpoweringly spicy (it does creep up on you though).

Now back home, to find a cupboard full of these that i made!

That is the Christmas beer i made with some friends for my friends. And yes, i waxed the shit out of the top of it using crayons and hot glue sticks. Just melt them in a can, in a pot with some water in it and then dip them.

Here was the recipe:

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Panforte Porter

Malt

Pale Ale Malt - 4kg

Crystal 120L -  700g

Choc Malt -      400g

Crystal 60L -    200g

Carafa III -       100g

Flaked Wheat - 200g

Hops

25g Chinook @ 60 mins

20g Fuggles @ 20 mins

Others

280g of Lactose @ 15 mins

100g of Sultanas at 30 mins

8 Cloves @ 30 mins

tsp of Cinnamon @ 20 mins

95g of Glace Cherries @ 20 mins

30g of Candied Ginger @ 15 mins

Yeast

Safale S0-4, fermented for 2 weeks and then bottle conditioned for a month.

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It tasted good, very winey. I think that was half because of the fruit, and half because of the amount of Crystal malt i used. Next time i think i would add more spices, and try and maybe dry hop most of the ingredients with some vodka.

WHAT ELSE HAS BEEN HAPPENING?

Well, i think my favourite beer that i've had all summer was the Belgian Summer Stout by Boatrocker. (We still have some left on tap at Deja Vu...)

The tartness of the raspberries made this beer so insanely refreshing, and once again reaffirmed my belief that stouts are definitely summer beers, stop the seasonal trend! (i'm looking at you Mornington).

Oh and a shout-out to Sean from Killer Sprocket, well done on your new smoked pale ale 'Bandit'. Experimental beers are the best beers.

Playing a gig tonight at Boney, will probably go to Deja Vu for a beer before hand.

SEEYA

I so Pale.

You can tell she's thinking about brewing a Pale Ale.

Time to brew a session beer, i thought.

While buying the grain for the Amber Ale i brewed, me and my friend bought a 25kg bag of pale ale malt because it cost less to buy over 20kg, we knew we'd use it, and it was a fucking 25kg bag of grain.

Mate.

So after brewing 2 all grain brews: the Coffee Stout and the Amber Ale, i decided to finish off the hops in the freezer and use some of this grain i had sitting around to make an awesome session beer that my friends could drink, and the idea was to make lots of it.

As mentioned previously, i have a 32 L pot, and i wanted to make 30 litres of beer. The best way to do this would be to dilute. 

The recipe was simple:

Grain:

-6kgs of Joe White Pale Malt, finely crushed.

Left over freezer hops (guess work):

-20g Chinook at 60mins

-20g Centennial at 30mins

-And a definite 30g of Cascade, dry hopped for 7 days.

It was a 20 L mash for 60 minutes from 68C down to 65C and then an hour long boil, giving me a very concentrated 15 L of sweet wort. Just before adding the yeast i added an extra 15 L of cold tap water, bringing me up to 30 L at about 1.045. Perfect!

I had a friend come over and help out on the brew day, he is the bar manager at Deja Vu, his name is Joe.

Another thing was that i borrowed my friend James' grain mill for the day, which he had recently purchased. It was fun... I got to use a power drill.

1.5L of grain = 1kg of grain.

Hamish's "power drill".

Getting better at sparging i think...

Thanks Joe!

Something something boil is finished! And this is what it looked like after leaving it to chill on its own in the bathtub for a while!

A nebula of beer...

A nebula of beer... Changing my blog from 'Smell My Beer' to 'The Beer Nebula'. DONE.

Here is the tasting of the beer about 2 weeks after bottling:

Photos and video taken by Becky Nosiara unless otherwise stated or obvious.

It begins with a B.

I started brewing beer because it was cheap.

Beer is massively overpriced, and when you are an artist living on $300 per week you don't have much to spend on beer, even though you somehow always do.

I figured that i could help myself and my friends by brewing cheap beer that would be better than any of the cheapest beers at the bottle-store. To start with it wasn't better, but it was definitely cheaper and my friends appreciated it.

I lived with my older brother and his good friend about 4 years ago, and they had been brewing cheap Coopers kit extract beers for quite a while and had 3 plastic fermenters. Their main concern was cost. They would buy about $30 worth of extract and would end up with about 5-6 slabs of beer that was better than most low end beers from the store for about 1/5 of the price. Doing a few brews with them was fun, they liked to experiment and would often put things like chilies and coffee beans into the bottles after fermentation.

I really had no idea about how any of it worked, but i drank the beer, and it tasted good.

A couple of years later, after talking about brewing for a while, me and my flatmate went out and bought a coopers starter kit:

The plastic bottles didn't last.

We followed the instructions and made a beer:

Pride.

It was ok. It was the first, so we weren't fussed. We had a bunch of cheap beer to drink, we were all happy.

It disappeared quickly.

Around this time my girlfriend had gotten a job at a craft beer bar and so i had started trying beers that i didn't understand. Hops and malt became apparent to me. I had been reborn in a world of hops, within a magical placenta of malt. I still didn't understand what they were, i knew malt was somehow one of the main ingredients in a popular chocolate treat, and i knew that hops smelt dank quite often and were a distant cousin of weed, but that was the extent of my knowledge.

The bar i'm talking about is called Deja Vu, and it does a $6 pint night. It is located in Melbourne near the corner of William/Lt Lonsdale. Go say hi to the bar staff on Wednesday and have a beer!

This is what it looks like:

I think...

So after a few standard coopers brews i wanted to brew something that tasted more like the beers at the bar. I decided that i would buy the Coopers IPA kit 'cause i liked IPA's a lot at the time.

Old man with epic beard = legit.

This also meant i had my first visit to a brew shop. It was glorious. Looking back, and having been back to this particular brew shop, i now see that it isn't very good, but at the time it was like being little toddler Satan in a high security prison. I found a little bag of hops that you can put into the fermenter to make it taste more like hops, so i bought that too.

Hamish bottling the IPA, me offering moral support.

It tasted ok. Still just ok. I didn't want ok anymore. I wanted amazing. I wanted to produce something that i could hand to a craft beer drinker and watch as his nose and tongue slide down his throat just so he can get more out of it.

I bought a book.

Graphic designers take note.

It was Christmas time and so i bought 3 of these from the book depository, one for me, one for my dad and one for my brother. It is a really good book. You can actually read the whole first edition online for free at http://www.howtobrew.com/ .

This book really walks you through the brewing process. It also goes into some seriously scientific details near the end, down to how to make the water from your tap more suited to brewing by changing the PH and stuff, i dunno.

This book taught me these key steps in brewing beer: (skip if you know this stuff).

- Barley is farmed and then malted, malting is where the Barley is soaked and roasted so the sugars are at their prime.

- The Malted Barley (Malt) is then crushed and soaked in water at a certain temperature for a while to extract the sugars.

- It is then strained and the remaining liquid is boiled. 

- During the boil, hops are added at different intervals. Early is for bittering the beer, middle is for flavouring and the end is for aroma. 

- It is then cooled down to the required temperature, yeast is added, and then the yeast eats all of the sugar and poos out alcohol. During fermentation you can add more hops to give really fresh hop smell and taste. 

- It is then either put into kegs and force carbonated, or into bottles with some extra sugar that the yeast eat and that carbs it up.

- Then you drink it!

So i went out and bought a 32L pot.

Cause when do you NOT need a 32L pot?

I decided to make a beer using malt extract again (same as the coopers cans) but with an 'unhopped' extract. It was a simple pale ale recipe, but i really had no idea what i was buying.

3kg of Golden malt extract

500g of light crystal malt

Lots of random hops

And some yeast.

I was just excited to be able to brew something in that huge pot.

I actually felt like a wizard.

It was a pretty fun, especially adding all the hops. I was probably panicking the whole time, and it ended up tasting average, but i think that's because it was summer and the average temperature during fermentation was about 26 C. The yeast i used was meant to be kept at about 18 C.

Fan + wet tea towels. It doesn't actually work.

It ended up tasting pretty fruity, that's because when yeast is fermented at too high a temperature they have a weird kinda sauna orgy which makes Fusel alcohols which can taste like fruit and give you headaches.

Thanks for nothing.

From then on i became obsessed. My friend gave me a fridge he needed to get rid of, and that became my fermentation chamber, which i then hooked up to a temperature controller.

My ice-cream container of doom.

So now i had a way of making sure the yeast wasn't going to give me headaches or taste like bananas, now all i needed to do was make some real beer. What i needed was grain. So i went to another brewing store in town, and this place did grain in bulk.

THAT'S A LOT OF NUTS!

First beer was a stout, a coffee stout actually. I made some espresso shots at work and used them in the fermenter. It ended up being under-carbonated , and the oils in the espresso ruined any chance at head retention. It kinda felt like drinking wine. 

This is how the brewing process felt:

Hwuh!

Mmmm...

 Hmmm.

Ahhhgg!

Ahhhh.

Phew.

The taste was good. It tasted like a dry stout with some coffee undertones.

This post is getting long. Although it was meant to be an introduction, and now that i've got all the learning and introducing out of the way i might as well start doing separate posts for each of the beers i brew. And i might put up a beer review now and then. Anyway, i hope you've enjoyed reading. 

Here is a picture of what me and my other brew friend James bought not long after making that Coffee Stout, and what led onto the making of my last few beers:

That is actually quite a lot of grain.

Stay tuned for more brewing action!

Smell you later!

Most photos taken by Becky Nosiara