Saison du Mont, Big Brew 2009

Why don’t more women brew beer?

Women I consider capable of holding national office or even starting a new country have described to me how they stand by and watch men homebrew. I have also run into more than one woman at the homebrew store who was there to pick up the ingredients for the boyfriend’s brew day.

This may be because modern American homebrewing — a hobby that in the U.S. is legally only about thirty years old –  is dominated by men,  with the attendant big-batch, outdoorsy, size-matters, Gawd-you-won’t-believe-how-hard-this-is characteristics of masculinized cooking activities.

It’s not that women are sissies (although, full disclosure, I am strictly apres-ski when it comes to outdoorsy stuff), but that men-brewing-beer has become an incomprehensible cultural habit, like driving in circles to get a really good parking spot at the gym.

Yet once upon a time, it was the good housewife who milled the malted barley and brewed it with hops to make beer (afterwards giving it a good stir with her magic stick that impregnated it with yeast). In the 18^th century, nearly 80 percent of all licensed brewers were women, and many ancient myths “credit the creation of beer to women,” as beer anthropologist Alan Eames noted some years back.

And she didn’t spend hundreds of dollars on fancy equipment, either… nor did she suspend all her other domestic activities to concentrate on her brewing… and she expected her beer to complement her other domestic products, such as the family dinner (if not breakfast and lunch, or even snack breaks for lactating mothers, for whom milk stout was recommended).

So, as a newbie who has nonetheless learned a few things in the past year, here are my insights for the woman who has considered homebrewing when the rainbow was enuff.

First, remember:   homebrewing is only cooking. Not only that,  it’s not particularly complex cooking.  If you can  clean your kitchen, use a measuring spoon, and make a grilled-cheese sandwich, you can make beer, right in the comfort of your kitchen.

If, like me, you like cookbooks, you’ll enjoy learning from the homebrew canon. The beginners’ books are Papazian and Palmer, and the Basic Brewing DVDs are fabulous. Cooking is very much visual technique — I once took a half-day class in cleaning and killing Dungeness crab, acquiring skills I’ll have for life — and seeing James and Steve sparge and vorlauf and lauter is worth the price of admission.

Plus don’t you feel a little happy inside saying “vorlauf” and “sparge”?

Beat the mystique. Many of the magic arts in homebrewing turn out to be simple crafts. I’ve read lengthy instructions for boiling  sugar with water. Cooks in the know call that a simple syrup. Some homebrewers will breathlessly suggest placing your ingredients on the counter to build a visual inventory before you begin brewing. Hello, mise en place?

Speaking of which, think food-friendly brewing. I love the great big India Pale Ales, I truly do.  On its own, or paired with a bold food such as blue cheese, a crisp, sassy, over-the-top-hopped glass of beer is a more interesting experience than just about any wine I could possibly afford.  But living in Germany, and near Belgium, for two years in the 1980s taught me that some beer styles pair beautifully with food. The current fad for hoppiest-brew-evah is fun, but if you’re thinking about integrating your beer into your cooking, look elsewhere — preferably toward Belgium (though several months back, dining at 121 in Providence, I paired a Pilsner Urquell on tap with a broiled duck leg, and can still taste the crisp-fruity malt tones mingling with the earthy gravitas of duck. Oh my…).

Despite all the huzzah over $300 brewpots and thousand-dollar “brewing sculptures,”  homebrew can be done fairly economically–at least cheaper than yachting or skydiving–and a lot of the equipment can be multi-purpose, such as my digital cooking thermometer and my humongous funnel.  My $69 starter kit has brewed some excellent beer (even after factoring in the occasional addition of a funnel or a replacement hydrometer), and because I know how to use measuring spoons, my bottle of sanitizer will last me til, hmmm, at least 2011.

If you have sunshine and space, you could even  grow hops. Like growing tomatoes at home, the point is less to save money (I once had a boss who calculated that his homegrown tomatoes cost about $5 each) but to enjoy truly fresh hops, something I experienced once, when a homebrew store clerk invited me to hold and crush a single dry hop flower from his garden.

Brew at the level that makes sense for you.   Moving to partial-mash or all-grain theoretically saves money, since grain is one-third the price of extract, but it more than doubles the amount of time you’ll spend brewing, and it introduces a complexity to the process that may not interest you.

It’s also ok to start with a mix — and to stay there, if that’s your speed. A good beer kit will produce far better beer than you’ll get at at most grocery stores, and kits are engineered to be close to foolproof. You will end up with five gallons of beer (contradicting my “brew small batches” suggestion), but if you watch your temperatures and keep everything clean, there’s a very good chance it will be five very decent gallons.

Your local homebrew store may have its own kits, and these generally make wonderful beer.  My first three beers were “kit beers” (an ESB, a porter, and E.J. Phair’s Phat Quail Ale).  There are also many, many good recipes, in books, on the web, and so on. I recently brewed a milk stout (despite no actual need for it, if you know what I mean) that came from a recipe scribbled on a recipe sheet by the owner of San Francisco Brewcraft.

Build brew projects into your household workflow. I don’t cook my dinners sequentially; the spinach, rice, and main course all come out at the same time. After several homebrewing sessions, I began questioning the sacrosanct “brew day” I kept  reading about (a project conducted out on the patio or in the garage, no less).

I did two five-hour partial-mash brew sessions on Saturday mornings before asking on a list, why can’t I break up this “day” into its components — mashing, and then brewing?

It turns out I can; I just need to cool the wort quickly and keep it sanitary (though how sanitary it really needs to be before a 60-minute boil is an interesting question).  Now brewing can be a background activity concurrent with other housewifely chores: dinner and cleanup for the mash, Saturday cleaning for the boil. I also do other things while I’m homebrewing, using the kitchen timer and notes to myself to stay on schedule. Heck, maybe I’ll skin a deer, or weave a new blanket… or not.

Take back that kitchen. Brew some beer today!

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The decision to stay with Centennial all the way through appears correct, despite the recipes that sneak in a little this or that.  I was quite radical and did not “secondary” the ale (transfer it–known as “racking”–to another container for clearing), simply dry-hopping in primary, though I will the next time so that it is clear enough to enter in the Queen of Beer competition or similar events.

Here’s a link to the XML for this recipe, as well.

Big-Hearted Gal (Half-Batch)

Brew Type: Partial Mash Date: 8/15/2009
Style: American IPA Brewer: K.G. Schneider
Batch Size: 2.50 gal Assistant Brewer: Emma and Dot
Boil Volume: 2.75 gal Boil Time: 60 min
Brewhouse Efficiency: 70.00 % Equipment: PM Half-batch Equipment
Actual Efficiency: 65.83 %

Taste Rating (50 possible points): 45.0
Note: Partial-mash clone of Bell’s wonderful Two-Hearted Ale. Can substitute WLP051.

Ingredients Amount Item Type % or IBU

2.25 lb Pale Liquid Extract (8.0 SRM) Extract 40.91 % [note: late extract addition, at 15 min.]
1.50 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain 27.27 %
1.25 lb Vienna Malt (3.5 SRM) Grain 22.73 %
0.25 lb Caramel Pils Malt (3.0 SRM) Grain 4.55 %
0.25 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt – 20L (20.0 SRM) Grain 4.55 %
0.66 oz Centennial [8.00 %] (60 min) Hops 30.1 IBU
0.33 oz Centennial [8.00 %] (Dry Hop 3 days) Hops -
0.33 oz Centennial [8.00 %] (15 min) Hops 7.5 IBU
0.33 oz Centennial [8.00 %] (5 min) Hops 3.0 IBU
0.33 oz Centennial [8.00 %] (1 min) Hops 0.6 IBU
1 Pkgs California Ale (White Labs #WLP001) [Starter 35 ml] Yeast-Ale

Beer Profile Estimated Original Gravity: 1.065 SG (1.056-1.075 SG) Measured Original Gravity: 1.063 SG
Estimated Final Gravity: 1.015 SG (1.010-1.018 SG) Measured Final Gravity: 1.011 SG
Estimated Color: 8.4 SRM (6.0-15.0 SRM) Color [Color]
Bitterness: 41.3 IBU (40.0-70.0 IBU) Alpha Acid Units: 7.9 AAU [believe the IBUs are higher, due to late extract addition not noted by Beersmith]
Estimated Alcohol by Volume: 6.58 % (5.50-7.50 %) Actual Alcohol by Volume: 6.79 %
Actual Calories: 281 cal/pint

Mash Profile Name: Temperature Mash, 1 Step, Full Body Mash Tun Weight: 4.50 lb
Mash Grain Weight: 3.25 lb Mash PH: 5.4 PH
Grain Temperature: 72.0 F Sparge Temperature: 168.0 F
Sparge Water: 0.67 gal Adjust Temp for Equipment: FALSE

Name Description Step Temp Step Time
Saccharification Add 4.88 qt of water at 159.5 F 150.0 F 40 min
Mash Out Heat to 168.0 F over 10 min 168.0 F 10 min [didn't actually do this]

Notes
Due to accident (tipped LME all over floor) went slightly beyond 60 min and am a little unsure how much LME is in there. However, I had boiled off enough that I was well over target, so I brought it up to about 2 gallons. 9/7/09: bottled. Delicious flat, warm, and green! 9/21/09: hazy, but delicious. Fresh hops flavor, no off-flavors, great mouthfeel–not quite a dead ringer, but very close, with lovely color. Had to force myself not to go back for “seconds”!

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Miniature Homebrewing has at least three components I’ve identified so far: brewing small batches, using lightweight carboys, and bottling in small bottles.

Go Half-Batch. The standard batch in homebrewing is 5 gallons, a quantity which brings to mind my father’s occasional excursions into the kitchen when I was a child, which always involved an elaborate, all-day production of some party food, such as chopped liver, cooked in gargantuan quantities that had me bringing chopped-liver sandwiches to school for weeks. (One week, great. Three weeks of that, and it’s only due to my half-Jewish ancestry that I still crave chopped liver.)

For a novice brewer, five gallons can mean about 8 sixpacks of bad beer (or even just average beer) which if you are like me you will feel compelled to drink, one grim bottle at a time, So It Doesn’t Go To Waste.  (Full disclosure, I hid one sketchy batch in the bottom of the linen closet and am trying to forget it exists.) That, and you’re battling — storing, lifting, lugging, and ultimately bottling — a 5-gallon vessel of fluid.

Consider going small. You will need to use (and halve) a recipe, since kits are universally focused on the 5-gallon “standard.”  Your local homebrew store can sell you the ingredients for a halved recipe — one of their own recipes, or something you find in a book. And once you start using recipes, then you’re really having fun.

Yes, it’s almost as much work and time for half the amount, but so what? How many of us have slaved for hours — maybe even days — over a dinner for six, only to watch it gobbled down in thirty minutes? Brewing four sixpacks is pretty reasonable by comparison, particularly if you hit your limit early, as I do, or if you do not have an entire Man (or Gal) Cave devoted to storing your beer, or you want to go wild with some wacky Radical Brewing recipe but you aren’t quite sure how much you’ll really like a beer that is 17% jaggery sugar and an unfortunate pinch of fenugreek.

Half-batch brewing is also much less energy, water, and bottling effort, and by adapting all-grain recipes to partial mash (a discussion for another post), I can brew some very good “advanced” beers in the kitchen, rather than going into exile out on the patio with the turkey fryer. Yes, I know, some homebrewers love their outdoor brew sessions, but I like my lair — I mean, kitchen.

Use plastic carboys. For my first several batches I just used a food-safe plastic fermentation bucket. But then I wanted the experience of watching the beer ferment (yay yeast! better than TV), and I also had batches that for various reasons needed to be drained to another container after a week or two  (or “racked to secondary,” to use brewing jargon).

Lifting five gallons of beer is hard. Lifting five gallons of beer in an immense glass vessel would require two or three of me. I would probably drop it… cut a major vessel… and bleed out on the floor of the sun room.  (No lie, people have ended up in the emergency room due to major cuts from dropped carboys!) Even half-empty glass carboys are formidable — and of course, breakable.

Whether you are brewing large or small batches, food-safe plastic carboys, such as those made by Better Bottle, are  safer, saner, easier on the arms and back, and, it is reported, less expensive, due to the rising cost of shipping glass (which is due to energy — so there is a “green” angle to this as well). True, plastic carboys scratch more easily, so don’t use brushes; fill them partially with OxyClean and warm water, shake, let sit, toss in a washcloth, and shake again, and they will come sparkling clean.

Not only that, but I bought two 3-gallon Better Bottle carboys, and now I can lift my half-batches.

Finally, Bottle small. I’ve gathered a very good collection of 12- and 16-ounce bottles from friends and the local Freecycle list, but I eventually went to my local homebrew store and bought a box of two dozen 6-ounce bottles… and soon returned for another box.

Going small on the portion size is the other direction from many homebrewers (“Dude, I’m chuggin’ a 24-ounce IPA!”) but a perfectly fine place to be. 6 ounces works out to a red-wine glass, which is perfect for meals or for that nightcap during Law and Order.

Small bottles are also useful for taste-testing the beer during its evolution, particularly if you’re brewing small batches. Also, if the beer has any kick to it, I’d rather have a smaller serving; when it’s time to brew the Christmas barleywine, I won’t use any other size. Finally, calorically, 6 ounces of beer is easier to work off than 12.

Small is good. It’s worked for my brewing. The only sad spot is when I brew something very wonderful and I know I’m going to run out of it soon. But the 6-ounce bottles buy me more time–and when in a week I break open my half-batch Two-Hearted Ale clone, I’m hoping that I enjoy it tiny bottle by tiny bottle.

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I’ve spent close to a year circling around the question of documentation for an open source software project. Documentation is one of those maturational issues for open source software (and before we get too far, I will add that there’s no shortage of lame documentation in the proprietary software world — but that’s not the problem I’m trying to solve).

I know what doesn’t work, such as assuming documentation will naturally bubble up from the gift economy (the kind of woo-woo philosophizing up there with assuming an unregulated market will police itself). That approach yields at best a smattering of notes in a hodgepodge of formats. You also can’t just point contractors toward the project and say “write this.” I mean, you can, but it won’t work.

In the end, you need focus and direction — or as I put it in a talk a couple weeks back, some people, a plan, and a pickaxe.

The kewl thing about Evergreen is that the project is now approaching the critical mass required to support almost anything the community wants to do, including establishing a documentation project. (I don’t kid myself that a community documentation project could necessarily handle all documentation needs for an open source community, but without a project, we’ll never know what those needs are to begin with — and a community can bite off some chunks of the problem.)

Evergreen’s now got the people, and they are ready and willing to plan. But to give this project direction, it also needed the pickaxe, which is where DocBook XML comes in.

When you look at all the options for formatting documentation, and then look at the basic documentation needs of any project, you work your way to DocBook XML by process of elimination.  Assuming your project needs a single-source, standards-based, non-binary documentation format that supports translation, reuse, and other requirements, with an active user community, and strong fee-or-free toolsets, you end up with DocBook XML or DITA. The ramp-up for DocBook XML is much less daunting than DITA (though not without plenty of daunt on its own), in part due to a couple of excellent books (and though they are freely available online, it’s much easier to buy the print books and have them parked near your keyboard for ready reference).

DocBook XML is a lot like democracy (to paraphrase some pundit): it doesn’t look so great until you compare the alternatives. Nobody thinks writing XML is a walk in the park, and after you’ve produced lengthy XML documents, you still have to transform them into HTML (or PDF), and even at that you need to style the pages so they’re all purty, because plain HTML looks so 1993. But again, after close to a year of banging my head on the wall, I get it. DocBook. All righty.

But it’s one thing to suggest using DocBook XML — and building an entire project around it — and another to actually demonstrate it in action. So about six weeks ago I realized that if I was going to make a convincing, project-energizing argument for DocBook XML — an argument first made two years ago by others in the community and repeated several times  hence, with no objection but also no action — I was going to have to get serious about learning DocBook XML, if not to the level of expertise, at least to a minimal competence.

(It helped that I had been reviewing an intern’s beginning DocBook projects for a couple of months; as is often the case with teaching, I quietly absorbed more than I realized during the process of evaluating the student’s work.)

So in addition to working on the conference planning stuff, I got up at the butt-crack of dawn for weeks on end to review, validate, revise, tweak, experiment with, and otherwise produce real DocBook XML examples. After experiencing the pain of working at a DOS prompt with some free tools, I moved to a nice editor, oXygen, and that helped somewhat — but there was still much to learn (and I repeated all my examples with the free tools just to be sure they could be produced that way as well).

And then, of course, there’s the beer connection

When I started writing this blog post I saw a clear link between this and homebrewing. Circling back to that idea, I still see the similarities.

In both cases I have been learning a fairly arcane skill through books, websites, discussion groups, and iterative practice. There’s a geek level to both I enjoy; I’m not ever going to be a truly yee-haw XML/XSL cowgirl any more than I am going to open my own brewery, but I admit that the first time I got a reasonably long document to not only transform but to get styled with CSS, I did feel a wee spark of pride — similar to the first beer batch I made where I actually, and successfully, “mashed” (that is, converted malted barley into wort, the liquid that when boiled with hops and activated with yeast, eventually becomes beer).

Plus in both cases, by mastering some fundamental skills (and a domain vocabulary), I can now communicate within their respective communities. I understand terms such as single-source, transform, validate, XSL, stylesheet, FO, FOP; sparge, pitch, vorlauf, lauter, rack, mash, tun. (And to my delight, there is an XML schema for beer called, of course, BeerXML, proving that all roads lead to London.)

The ability to communicate is key; getting past that initial hurdle is crucial for learning. (Remember Helen Keller, spelling out “water”?) I may not understand every question that flies past me, but my feet have some purchase in the loam of their fields.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just in it for the language. But these processes happening in parallel have me marveling at our capacity to keep learning, sometimes when we least expect to.

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I’ll follow up with another, more thoughtful post in the vein of “Brewing David,” but hey, take a looky-loo at this yeast activity from my second batch of “Dave” (Saison du Mont), brewed for the May 2 Big Brew of the National Homebrew Association! I adjusted the recipe, prepared a kick-ass yeast starter two days earlier, and vavoom! Is homebrewing fun or what? (A week later, the beer has hit its final gravity on the nose, and though young and flat, is a gorgeous gold and quite delish.)

The video is sideways not because we live in the Big Bend and are therefore skewed 90 degrees, but because I took this with my camera video and wanted to get the airlock-plus-yeasty-snowglobe-action in there.

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David’s not a love interest — I already have one of those — but a 3-gallon carboy filled almost to the brim with a persimmon-colored liquid that in the past month, as David has gently chugged through a fermentation process, has changed from an impenetrable haze (think foggy day on Mars) to a seawater-like translucence.

I haven’t always thought of David as David. For the first several weeks of his existence, I thought of him as a half-batch of Saison du Mont, a type of Belgian beer. I decided to create David when I read about the Big Brew, an annual event for homebrewers sponsored by the American Homebrewing Association.

The AHA listed two suggested recipes for the Big Brew. One was a mild brown beer, and since at this stage in my homebrewing career almost everything I make turns out dark whether I want it to or not, that didn’t seem fun.

But the recipe for Saison du Mont was a little different. It had an author, a title, a story. There was a man named David Levonian; he was a husband, father, and homebrewer; he loved to brew Saisons; he created Saison du Mont; people liked him; he died far too young. This recipe — one of his creation — was offered in his honor.

I knew nothing of Saisons — I have possibly tasted one or two — but I knew this was the beer I would create, and I decided I would start early, well in advance of May 2, the day of the Big Brew, so I could try it several times.

The recipe itself was also alluring, with its interesting ingredients, such as honey, and grains of paradise — who knew paradise had a grain? — and its pre-European-Union flair. I lived near Belgium for two years in the 1980s, when Uncle Sam sent me to an airbase in Germany, and what I remember of Belgium is rakishly good food, mouth-filling beer, and highways flanked by tall yellow lights that gilded my Friday evening drives to Liege and Bruge and the Benalux.

David probably isn’t a good choice for a new homebrewer.  Saisons are fussy and complex, with counter-intuitive fermentation temperatures and delicate spicing, and David was only my fourth brew. My previous efforts at fairly modest beers — bitters, red ale, and porter — had their share of quality-assurance issues. My first beer would be undrinkable by most standards, with its mild malts overwhelmed by tannins extracted through clumsy timing and poor temperature control (though it does look pretty in the glass — a lovely amber with a creamy head).  With these clownish efforts, how could I possibly pretend to be ready for David?

My beginners’ beers have been somewhat of a lark, but I feel obligated to David. It bothers me that I can’t get his gravity reading (measured through a simple glass hydrometer dropped into a narrow flask of liquid) pushed low enough to be  a classic Saison. It makes me quite sad and worried that I cannot convince the yeast I fed him to make a lively enough presence to burn through the sugars in his wort until he is respectably dry, as a Saison should be.

“You don’t have to worry about that as long as you like the beer,” says my local homebrew store. I understand their point, but it bothers me that someone could live and die and leave a recipe, and now that he is gone and his recipe remains, I cannot enthuse a batch of yeast into recreating his beer.

I understand this has more to do with me than Dave Levonian; I realize this means I am worried that someday I will die and take all of myself with me, with nothing left to remember me by.

But I’d still really like to get this beer right.

So into the attic I creep. “I am trying to be my best for you,” I tell David, and adjust a crocheted afghan around him. The blanket keeps him warm; the blanket keeps him dark. The blanket reminds me I am not done.

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Summary: Stepping into All Grain, a DVD produced by James Spencer and Steve Wilkes of Basic Brewing Radio and Basic Brewing Video, is an essential purchase for libraries building “how-to” collections on homebrewing, and a boon for any homebrewer even thinking about making the move to all-grain brewing or just interested in learning more about the process. The DVD, part of a series, is about $20 and can be purchased at local homebrew stores, through online resellers, and through Basicbrewing.com. Format: NTSC DVD Video. Length: approximately 60 minutes. No region encoding.

Review

Stepping Into All Grain

One of the dirty little secrets of any hobby is that beyond the alluring entry level, with its promise of simple access to a fun homespun craft, true expertise is hard-won, and generally involves more expense and stress than was initially anticipated the day the participant first mused, “Gee, it would be fun to [brew beer] [build a remote-controlled airplane] [raise miniature sheep].”

Many homebrewers avoid all-grain brewing because it seems complicated and spendy — far beyond the “fun” part of the hobby that first drew them in. Many might change their minds after viewing Stepping into All Grain. Even if the viewers don’t step into all-grain now or ever — and it would be hard not to after watching this DVD — they can at least become armchair all-grain brewers, stoked with the kind of knowledge to keep them looking smart on the many homebrewing bulletin boards and mailing lists, and pleasurably revisiting their fantasy hobby time and again. (Or like me, they could take one step forward, with countertop partial-mash brewing.)

The genius of Stepping into All Grain is twofold.

First, homebrewers interesting in all-grain brewing quickly encounter too much information from all directions. The beginners’ books on homebrewing are invaluable, and yet are not enough. Websites, chat rooms, and YouTube present information that is sometimes contradictory, incomplete, overly biased, or simply a sales pitch for equipment you might not need. Furthermore, cooking is an art where the techniques (if not the theory) are best taught visually, as is obvious from the wild popularity of television cooking shows.

Stepping into All Grain — targeted at the homebrewer familiar with extract or partial-mash brewing — expertly meets this need by boiling down a voluminous amount of information into seven tidy, well-produced chapters that hone in on exactly what a homebrewer needs to know to “step up” to all-grain.

This DVD understands its medium, balancing careful editing, expert close-ups of equipment, and frequent cuts to the  narrators. It is one thing to read about fly sparging, and quite another to watch Spencer and Wilkes talk about sparge arms and hold one up, followed by a scene where a sparge arm spins water over a grain bed. One of the priceless low-tech moments on this DVD is when Spencer dips his fingers into a mash tun, tastes the liquid, and notes that it is now sweet. Oh right, I thought. Starch converting to sugar!

There are many sexy equipment close-ups.  I was so inspired by the equipment chapter that last weekend I built a mini-mash-tun (after spending an embarrassing amount of time in the plumbing section of Home Depot mooning over brass and PVC fittings). I don’t have any intention of fly sparging… and yet, how I yearn for that sparge arm.

Spencer and Wilkes

But the narrators are crucial to this DVD as well.  Smiling, affable, and garbed in nerdy business-casual while they stand in an enviously-clean “garage” or sit on a patio, Spencer and Wilkes — the Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans of homebrewing — are calmly reassuring as they stir grain into mash tuns, calculate the amount of water needed for a brew session, drain the first runnings from a mash, heat up their strike water, explain vorlauf and lautering, or describe how they built their equipment.

Just as in their popular and information-packed podcasts and video blogs, Spencer and Wilkes never rush a scene; it is not criticism, but high praise, that after the first couple of times I viewed this video, I tripled the speed to run through some sections and could still clearly comprehend their comments.

(Spencer and Wilkes appear relaxed, but this DVD is very carefully produced. Though they promote themselves as just a couple of guys who like to brew, I learned from Spencer’s Twitter feed that he has a background in broadcast journalism. Spencer’s own media company, Active Voicing, produced this DVD.  Wilkes has his own chops in the media world.)

The second bit of genius about Stepping into All Grain adroitly avoids competing dogmas about the “best” methods for all-grain brewing by offering alternatives throughout the DVD.

Whenever possible, Spencer and Wilkes begin with the simplest and least expensive alternatives, such as assembling a mash tun from two stacked brewing buckets (the top bucket drilled with holes), or fly sparging with a large Pyrex measuring cup. Then they move through other choices, such as using a round versus rectangular cooler for a mash tun.

There isn’t a best method; there’s just a method that will work for you right now — your time, your budget, your interest level, even your whims. I was very tempted by Wilkes’ choice of a garden faucet for his mash tun simply because it is creative and amusing, but I eventually chose a ball valve just because it felt right in my hands.

Though Stepping into All-Grain is carefully vendor-neutral, Spencer and Wilkes do show equipment for purchase such as false bottoms and sparge arms, and Spencer notes that even much of the “do-it-yourself” equipment shown in the DVD is available preassembled in local homebrew stores.

Mini-Mash Tun

(I admit that when Spencer held up a ball-valve assembly and noted that it could be purchased by people who weren’t “handy,” the former jet engine mechanic in me immediately decided to build one — and to one-up Spencer’s example by plugging the end of the straining hose and containing the jaggy edges, even though deep down I know that for the DVD’s sake he deliberately selected the simplest path.)

Furthermore, at two crucial points in the DVD — mashing and sparging — Stepping into All Grain offers alternate chapters for viewing the major techniques. This clever chaptering not only lets the viewer skip a technique she’s not presently interested in, but also becomes invaluable as a quickly-accessible reference to the flustered homebrewer standing over a mash tun and suddenly wondering, “Uh — exactly what was that next step, again?” (Yes, that would be me.)

The DVD “extras” section includes two recipes and the obligatory outtakes, which leads to my only criticism.  Stepping into All Grain would have benefited from a small insert, such as a single 8.x5″x14″ sheet, folded twice, with a list of suggested parts for the equipment shown in the video, the two sample recipes with a little more information about why they were selected and what they will taste like when you’re done brewing, and a list of links and recommended books (and, crucially, references to Basic Brewing’s other DVDs and their store SWAG).

Such an insert would have been a useful reference not only for the individual brewer, but also for reviewers and librarians. Never underestimate the library market; a favorable review in a preferred review source such as Booklist, Video Librarian, or Library Journal can sell a lot of copies, particularly for books, DVDs, and other materials related to hobbies, do-it-yourself, and so forth. Make it easy for us to buy, catalog, and recommend your stuff.

In any event, at about $20 — or about half the price of a typical all-grain homebrew session, once you factor not just grain, hops, and yeast, but also equipment, supplies, energy, and water — this fun, useful DVD is a terrific value. Relax, don’t worry — buy Stepping into All Grain!

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But I keep meaning to update you with my homebrewing — the reading, in any event.

Homebrewing is a surprisingly bookish craft, and many of the books make wonderful reading.  But if you can’t read all of the homebrewing books (or watch all the videos) you could start with these two books (scandalously underrepresented in public library collections):

Papazian, Charlie. The Complete Joy of Homebrewing.  Now in its third edition, this cheery, reassuring book has walked many a new homebrewer through that crucial first brew. The pictures and illustrations are hokey, but not in a bad way.

Palmer, John. How to Brew.  A thorough book that digs deep into the technical aspect of brewing.  Palmer is a metallurgist, and his love of science and technical precision combine with an engaging voice to make an absorbing read. A great second book after Papazian.

If your poor downturn-eviscerated book budget has even a nickel to spare, you could add these as well:

Mosher, Randy. Radical brewing : recipes, tales, and world-altering meditations in a glass. Go to the edge of brewing and back! Elegant and inspiring.

Hieronymus, Stan. Brew Like a Monk. Great for understanding those wonderful Belgian beers, and beautiful reading.  A book of style and history — not a how-to or recipe book.

Spencer, James. Introduction to extract home brewing. This is a DVD by the host of Basic Brewing podcasts and video casts. I listen to Spencer’s podcasts regularly and have watched his free online videos. Though I haven’t yet viewed his DVDs, I recommend anything he produces. His relaxed, reassuring style and his deep domain knowledge are a winnable combo, particularly when he pairs up with cohort Steve Wilkes and they nerd it up in their button-down shirts in an  average American kitchen (I love it when the dog wanders in and out).  Spencer has a number of other videos; his Stepping Into All-Grain is on my personal purchase wish list (since only 3 libraries carry it!).  I’m not sure I want to try all-grain brewing without Spencer holding my hand.

There are many more good brewing books, some broad and some quite specific (I’m seriously tempted to write Brewing for Little Old Librarians) and I may have left yours off. Make a pitch for the brewing books you love!

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First Homebrew!

Originally uploaded by freerangelibrarian

Cracked open my first bottle Friday (two weeks after bottling my first batch, 3 in a Bed Bitters from HomeBrew Den)… carefully tasted… yum, it’s delicious! Milder and less fizzy than I expected, but very good, and very fresh-tasting. It’s like homemade ice cream and sorbet: there is no substitute for the freshness.

For all the hoopla, this is really just a timeless kitchen craft (though the industry has figured out how to upsell with expensive equipment — there’s a whole lot of guys out on their back porches, with their turkey fryers and 15-gallon pots) but it’s a lot of fun.

I think what surprises me most about brewing beer is not making tasty alcohol, but making a carbonated beverage. I am very proud of my bubbles!

I’m bottling my porter this coming weekend, before I head to Code4Lib, then will make a batch from a kit I bought in California.

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The previous day, a member had encouraged me to pony up for premium or lifetime membership (respectively, $25 a year or $100 for life). I understand websites need resources to survive, but I’m a careful shopper, so I checked the FAQ to see what the two fee memberships offered.

One of the perks is access to “Brew Babes.” Hmmm, I thought. So I asked:

I see “Brew Babes” listed as a perk for Premium/Lifetime membership, but in searching HBT, the FAQ, etc. I can’t find a clear description of “Brew Babes.”

A member responded,

And you won’t unless you pony up for a membership either, some things we just don’t talk about on this side of the wall….But I bet you can guess…

To which I responded,

That’s what I was afraid of… so in other words my $100 would be better spent on a donation to the National Organization for Women. It’s not my call how this forum is run but as a consumer I have no interest in subsidizing that stuff — or having friends/colleagues seeing me identified with it, either.

I’m not at all a prude, and it’s the site’s business decision to scope its services to its target market, but now the thread about how few women are on this forum makes a lot more sense. Call it the beer-glass
ceiling.

Followed by other comments in the manner of,

It’s just pictures of beer drinking babies fighting in a club. Nothing to get excited about.

kgs there are many other perks available to premium supporters. brewbabes is just a bonus that guys(and some ladies) really enjoy. I find less advertising and the private forums to be the real value.

To which I responded:

Whatever, and nothing I’m paying for, either. /me sighs

I went out, shopped, came home… and the thread was gone. No note to me, just whooosh! No longer there; tracing my own post history, it is no longer listed.

Entirely their prerogative, of course. It’s a private website, so on and so forth.

I am sure they are thinking “humorless bitch.” You know, the broad who’s no fun (and there are always women who are only too happy to go along with the “fun”).

Fine, whatever. But more and more I’m voting with my pocketbook. No, I will not shop at WalMart, I will not eat at Chick-fil-A (which has been known to harass gay employees), I am eating almost no factory-farmed meat, and I’m not underwriting sexist trash.  But this incident has completely emptied the fun out of participating on that website, and that’s too bad — though it’s a good reminder that private forums are just that: privately owned, whimsically managed.

(Librarianesque observation: thank goodness for books!)

The site comments, “Becoming a moderator for a specific forum is usually rewarded to users who are particularly helpful and knowledgeable in the subject of the forum they are moderating.” If they ever want someone to represent sensitivity to diverse groups, they know where they can find me.

Meanwhile, I’ve met other brewing librarians, and I keep running into other local homebrewers, and I’ll meet more.  It’s a growing craft and a nice skill to have, and there are many nice homebrewers, including at my local home brew store, Home Brew Den, where today at my request they carefully measured out a half-recipe of Plutonian Porter.

Today I’m going to write for six hours, so I will have to save the story of wrassling with nearly fifty pounds of flat beer, aka “How I Bottled My First Batch,” which also explains in part why I’m moving to half-batches. (Short version: I won, and it was fun, but we’re in a small house!)

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