Keg It!

I have been asked to brew up a beer or two for a friend's picnic, so I have decided to take the plunge and buy a kegging system.  I got to thinking that a picnic might not be the best situation to introduce people to bottle conditioned beer.  Having a kegging system will simplify things:  I won't have tons of bottles to clean and won't have to keep explaining why there is sediment in the bottles.

I figure that a kegging system is a good investment.  I can use it at various functions to help promote our beer and it will be much easier to move about that cases of bottles.  The only problem is that the corny kegs are rapidly becoming obsolete so I will need to secure a few as soon as I can.

Now the question is what to brew for the first beer...

Monster Chickens

While I have little to report on the beer and brewery front, there is much to report on the chicken front.  We have been raising chickens for about four years and have kept several different breeds.  Each spring we would order a new batch of peeps and make sure to get some in at least one breed we had never had before.



The first batch in the brooder.  The infrared heat light played heck
with the camera's focus.



This year we decided to take things to another level. I got Tracy an incubator for Valentine's Day and we started collecting eggs.  Our only full-sized rooster is a Buff Brahma, so we figured he would likely be the sire of any hatchlings. However, given that we have hens of several different breeds, what the final results will look like is anybody's guess. 



Socrates checks out the new arrivals.



The first four peeps hatched out about ten days ago.  They were all brown but their color patterns varied.  All have feathered legs, indicating that they are indeed the offspring of the Brahma rooster. Yesterday and today each saw one more peep hatch out. These little ones are both yellow.

The first peeps are growing very quickly. They already have most of their wing feathers and starting to get their tail feathers. I do not remember having chicks grow this fast in the past.  We can hardly wait to see what they will look like as adults.



A brooder is a nice place for a nap.  The chicks do not seem to mind.



Brewery Update

Keeping an eye to the weather, I am hoping to get back to work on the brewery soon.  After having much time to think about things and visiting a sugarhouse, I have decided to plank the roof of the brewery.  The sugarhouse had a planked roof.  It looked very nice and in 25 years had never had a problem with rot/mildew etc, and that was without a steam hood.  The rafters are literally dripping wet for three weeks every year.

Given that we will have greater clearance over our boiler and will not be boiling off like a sugarhouse would, I anticipate that we will not have any problem with a planked roof.  The big advantage to planking the roof is that it will allow me to work alone on the roof on days when no one else can help.  It will also look much nicer when finished.

Early Ale Early Review

An Historic Taste!

The first reviews of the "early ale" experiment are in.  Recall that this was an attempt to brew one of the Durden Park Beer Circle recipes for a pale ale from the early 19th century.  I had been wanting to try one of their recipes for some time and so I did.

I conducted the first tasting after about a week in the bottle.  Harsh is the only word that can describe what it then tasted like.  Very bitter, almost astringent, with a whopper alcohol bite and after taste.  Some might enjoy such a beverage, but it is not for me.  But remember, Dear Reader, that this is a bottle conditioned ale and taste evolution will occur.

At the week two mark, I took a bottle of said ale to the house of some friends. Without mentioning my initial distaste for the product I poured the glasses.  Both of them liked it.  Kristen especially liked the fact that it was sweeter and less bitter than most pale ales.  She felt it was, overall, smoother than a typical pale ale.

That was interesting!  Was this the same beer that had violently assaulted my taste buds barely a week before? I took a drink myself. What a surprise: The flavor had smoothed out marvelously and the alcohol bite was nearly gone.  The harsh astringency had been replaced by a strong maltiness with a background of fruity hoppiness.  It was the type of taste evolution that would make Darwin proud.

The question that remains is this:  Does my latest effort really taste like a beer from the early 19th century?  That is a tough question to answer.  So many things have changed in terms of materials and supplies that any attempt to reconstruct an early recipe is an exercise in speculation.  The fellows and ladies of the Durden Park Beer Circle are are well aware of that and take great pains to research the processes and materials contemporary with the beer they are trying to recreate and account for those differences when they create their recipes.  So while we cannot know if we have matched the taste exactly, we are at least pretty close to what the original beer tasted like.

Nothing quite like a history lesson in a glass.  Cheers!