Blackfriar, and my big Guinness Discovery

Inside the Blackfriar

My first stop was the slightly touristy Blackfriar Tavern, just on the north side of Blackfriar Bridge. They have good pub grub here, so I had a bite to eat, and tried a couple of the cask ales they had on tap. I first tried the Deuchar’s IPA, on cask. This is a British IPA, and it’s a pretty good one, but it’s not anything like an IPA in the states. The hop presence isn’t nearly as pronounced, and it’s not nearly as strong a beer. However, it is a well-balanced beer that’s very refreshing, and very easy to drink. I would order it again, but I didn’t, because I wanted to try as many beers I can’t get in the US as possible. So my next beer was Guinness.

Guinness Extra Cold at Blackfriar Tavern, London

The very first thing I noticed upon taking my first sip of the Guinness was how unbelievably cold it was. Even in the states they don’t serve it this cold. This was particularly shocking given that I’d just had a wonderful cask ale served at cellar temperature. Why was it so darn cold?

I took a look around the bar for clues, but there were none, so I asked the bartender why the Guinness was so cold and she said “Ah, it’s Guinness Extra Cold”, and she pointed at a tap that was clearly branded by Guinness with the “Extra Cold” label on it. My heart sank. When I asked if she had any other Guinness on tap, she said no. Oh man. Was all of the Guinness in London going to be like this? Turns out it wasn’t. It’s actually quite unusual in my experience to *not* be offered a choice when one orders a Guinness in London.

So how do they get the Guinness to be so cold? Do they put it in a separate fridge or something? Is it some kind of spooky glycol cooling system? What’s going on? Well, there’s no separate fridge. Guinness (or perhaps the distributor) provides a small refrigerator box that is small enough to be placed unobtrusively under the bar. The kegs are kept with the rest of the kegs in the cellar, so it is around 12C (around 54F) at the point where it’s tapped, but then it runs through this cooling box, which brings it down below 5C (around 40F). It’s far too cold for me. I serve the beer out of my kegerator at home at somewhere between 48-54F, and that suits me about right. I was not at all surprised at the beer temps in London as a result. When beer has actual, desirable flavors, this temperature is very pleasant!

Here’s the “Extra Cold” tap, for those on the lookout:

Guinnes "Extra Cold" Tap Branding

Note that it’s right next to what is perhaps the only lager in the place: Foster’s, which is also served super cold, and which I learned later also utilized a cooling box under the bar. Lots of pubs in London serve lagers that americans would recognize on tap, and they serve them very cold. The interesting thing is that if you’re in a pub frequented by locals, these beers seem to be seen as “alternative”, and you very well might not see them at all!

I read everything there was to read in this tavern, and it was a bit of an eye-opener. They had a pamphlet that would guide you along what I believe is a fictional trail of a mayor of London from long ago, hitting pubs along the way. All of them, I believe, are owned by the same company. You can tell because the food menus are largely the same, and the signs with pics of the food are exactly the same. Even some of the “guest ales” are the same between the different pubs owned by the same company.

To sum up my experience with Guinness, having now consumed it at several different pubs all over London, it’s not really all that different from the stuff you get in the US. It’s a great beer, yes. It *is* slightly different, and there *is* a difference between Guinness at different pubs in London, but it’s not the huge, sweeping, it’s-a-completely-different-beer type of experience that people talk about. For that, as I’m told by the locals, you really do have to go to Ireland. Someday.

The Toucan: Obsessive About Guinness

In the meantime, if you’re in London, and looking for folks who are obsessive about how the Guinness is served at their bar, check out The Toucan.

The Toucan recommended to me by a couple of locals as “the” place for Guinness in London. It’s in Soho, not a block from Soho Square. When you see the crowd outside, DO NOT be discouraged. As an American, when I first saw one of these crowds, I turned around and went to another pub. Turns out, it’s not a good indicator of how many folks are inside or how long it’ll take you to get a beer. See, in London, it’s perfectly legal for you to take your beer and step outside for a smoke, or to escape the bar’s interior, as most pubs are NOT air conditioned. Seeing the pic of the Toucan above, it looks like a good-sized pub, with a good crowd, but I was really shocked when I went inside: the entire interior of the bar is probably 10′x15′. People don’t come here for the scene, they come for the Guinness, and I figured out why upon being served my first pint.

I didn’t think too much about my first pint. It was served according to the rules and procedures I had learned myself as a bartender in the states. I took my beer and cleared away from the tiny bar to allow others to be served. I set it on the ledge to let it settle, and before I could take my first sip, the bartender walked over from behind the bar, and asked if he could “fix” my beer. I took a quick glance and didn’t really see a problem, but out of curiosity, I replied “that’d be great!” He took my beer, flopped off a bit of the foamy head, and repoured a bit back in. The result was what he was after:

The line should bisect the word “PINT” on the glass. His complaint about the beer he had just poured was “it’s falling a little low” — meaning the head was at or below the bottom of the word “PINT”.

As if that weren’t enough, after he handed it back, and while I was letting it settle again, another bartender came by with a perfectly clean cloth to wipe of a tiny bit of foam that was just starting to slip down the side of the glass. That’s obsessive.

The Guinness there was extremely good. Does being completely OCD about the beer make it better? Perhaps not, but this kind of attention to detail insures that everyone has a wonderful experience, and this is the only bar I’ve ever seen where *everyone* on the staff seemed wholeheartedly devoted to fantastic Guinness. Not good. Not great. Fantastic. And it was.

By the way, for the record, while in London I *did* see a pub patron return to the bar with his untouched beer to say “we have a problem”. All he did was point to his beer, and the publican knew what the problem was. She took back the beer. It was DUMPED. He got a new glass, and a brand new beer, filled to the proper level. My mind was blown (that was at The Lamb — see below).

Branded Houses

Some pubs in London are “branded”. Many pubs have, in large letters, or on some sign, prominently displayed, a particular brewer’s name and logo. Inside you’ll only find that brewer’s beers on cask, though they may have some other beers on tap. Usually crappy ones. Well, those and Guinness. I’ve been to maybe a dozen pubs or so, and I only saw one single pub who just plain old didn’t serve Guinness, or any other beer not brewed by the brewery that owned them.

Anyway, this whole branding thing becomes a consideration when going out to a pub — or it can become a deciding factor in what beers people drink. It’s a double-edged sword. If you don’t like Young’s beers, but that’s the closest pub to you, you might drink it because it’s the best beer you can get within stumbling distance of your place. On the other hand, maybe you used to like Green King beers, but the pub nearest you that serves it has gone downhill — you might start frequenting the Fuller’s pub nearby instead and develop a taste for that. This kind of thing makes the entire beer drinking experience in the UK quite different.

It wasn’t clear to me whether branded houses were necessarily owned by the brewery, or if the pubs just had distribution agreements with the brewers directly. A local mentioned that these places were owned directly by the breweries. Seems like a whole lot of overhead for breweries to take on, but I guess if they can dictate their presence in the market, and in addition have an iron-clad grip on quality control from the brewery all the way to the pint glass, that’s pretty compelling.

The Lamb, and A Look Inside the Cellar

The Lamb - A Young's House

Not all pubs are branded houses, and some of them serve great beer. But I think my best experiences at pubs in London happened to be at branded houses. One was a Young’s house called The Lamb. This place is renowned by locals, in part because there are very few tourists there, and very few suit-and-tie types. The Lamb really is just a bunch of locals, and some excellent beer, and all of the good stuff was on cask. I had almost every beer Young’s makes that night, all on cask.

The Lamb is like a good number of other pubs in the city which are described as “Victorian” pubs, which usually means that there is a very large amount of ornate wood and glass work in the bar. This is pretty stuff, and lends to the sort of “authentic” London pub feel.

I got into a conversation with a publican at The Lamb, and we got to talking about the differences between how beer is stored, cared for, and served in the US vs. London. There are lots and lots of them. First, there are three different sized kegs, which I had no idea about. There are 9-gallon “firkin” kegs, 18-gallon kegs, and the more common 11-gallon (50 liter) kegs. In the US, all US brewers as far as I know use standard “half barrel” kegs: 15.5 gallons. Of course, if a bar in the US serves a foreign beer on tap they might get a different sized keg, but generally kegs are 15.5 gallons.

Another enormous difference is attributed to the serving temperature. In the UK, beer– especially cask “real ale” is served at cellar temperature — about 54F (12C). I didn’t really understand how enormous a difference this makes in the cellar itself until my new publican friend invited me into the cellar to see their operation. Here’s the thing: what we call a “cellar” in the US is really a walk-in refrigerator. What they call a cellar in the UK is, in fact, the ENTIRE cellar level of the building. See, when you’re only cooling a basement to 12C in an area that’s only barely above that even in the summer months, you can cool the entire cellar pretty cheaply and use the entire cellar as a refrigerator. However, in the US, it would be prohibitively expensive to cool an entire cellar to 34F (1C), which is the temperature that most US mass-produced beers are served at (unless you can get them colder!)

There’s SO MUCH room when you can use the whole cellar. See that white thing sitting on the floor? That’s a vessel that holds line-cleaning fluid. Since you can pretty much leave it there all the time and change it without wrenching your back climbing on top of the kegs, you can clean the lines more often. In fact, The Lamb cleans the lines between every single keg! I was floored by this. I thought the guy was pulling my leg, until another pub, unsolicited, told me they do the same thing! I assure you, Americans, this is not the case in US bars. At least not in the vast majority of cases.

Another difference is more specific to the kegs themselves:

There’s a bung there. It’s made of plastic. After a keg is delivered, it’s allowed to chill and settle for a few days. Then, a few days before serving, they insert a plastic pin in that hole called a “spile”. This first plastic pin is called a ’soft spile’, and it allows some beer and gas to escape. At some point (and I’m not clear how they know when to do this), they take out the soft spile and put in a wooden one called a ‘hard spile’ which completely plugs the hole. This is all a part of the conditioning that takes place, and I believe it’s specific to cask ale — I don’t believe any of this takes place for plain old kegged beer served on tap, pushed by CO2.

Too. Much. Writing.

I had such a great time in London and I got to see lots and lots of pubs, and the people I spoke with were amazingly candid and friendly about their operations. I could write a book about London pubs, and would happily do it, but I can’t do it here on the blog. If I think of an interesting topic that would make a good blog post, I’ll post more, but until then, we’ll get back to homebrewing beer, drinking beer, and the regularly scheduled program, as it were

The movie is a commentary on the business side of beer. Beyond brewing (in fact, the movie didn’t get very deep into the actual nuts and bolts of brewing to any great extent), it talks more about how the beer we all drink actually gets to us. It’s branded, labeled, sent to distributors, and from there goes to the retailers, who then sell it to us. But of course, there’s much, much more to it than that. Hidden in the nooks and crannies of this system are political contributions, lobbyists, enormous business concerns, buyouts, and illegal bribes, all in a battle over shelf space and positioning, and market control and dominance.

Sam Calagione

There are three main threads running through the movie. First, Anat Baron, the producer and director, as well as the film’s narrator, follows the story of Sam Calagione at Dogfish Head Brewing, which by now is a major force in the craft brewing movement. Independently, so is Sam himself, who is on the cutting edge of the whole food/beer pairing and beer sommelier push resulting in a rash of “beer dinners” and books about beer and food pairings which has been interesting to watch.

Through the course of the movie, we watch as Sam grows his brand, and his brewery, taking ever-bigger risks to keep his dream alive, putting nearly everything at stake.

I gained more respect for Sam and his plight in watching this movie, overall. I’m not a big fan of most of his beers. To me, beers should be hoppy, but not really *about* the hops, and I feel that Dogfish Head puts a little too much emphasis on the hop. His off-the-wall beers are really interesting, but not something I’m going to buy six pack after six pack of. I do like his Indian Brown Ale though… and some of his writing has been great!

What I liked about Sam, though, was that even though he is growing, he does seem to be “keeping it real”, to a large degree. His staff are pushing the envelope. Doing things nobody has tried, or nobody has nailed, and he’s nailing them. He’s fighting for real beer, whether you like his particular beers or not. His approach is not “drink my beer”. It’s more about “drink real beer — any one will do.” I find that when I evangelize beer, that’s the approach I’m taking as well. Picking a beer is a highly nuanced, subjective, and ultimately personal choice. Sam knows that, and isn’t so arrogant as to think he has a beer to satisfy everyone on Earth.

Rhonda Kallman

Then there’s Rhonda Kallman, co-creator of Sam Adams, who left Sam Adams to start her own venture. Her story is a heart wrenching tale of struggle for a marketing hustler trying to establish a new beer in the market, trying to get funding, going deeply into debt, all in the name of keeping her dream alive in the face of cut throat tactics by bigger brewers to dominate retailer shelves.

I have respect for Rhonda for her work at Sam Adams, but I really have a hard time sympathizing with someone who seems to have thrown out all she ever learned about the beer business in starting her own brand. I mean, she worked for a company that helped launch the craft beer movement and is now the biggest brewery in America. The company that reintroduced America to things like hops, and beers with a color other than pale yellow. Heck, Jim even got busy with some top-fermenting yeast and had the balls to market (gasp!) ale to a 100% lager-drinking public. He’s *still* pushing the envelope, and continues to support the brewing craft.

OF COURSE SA’s success had a lot to do with marketing, and hustling, and shmoozing, and all of the stuff brewers would rather not be bothered with. But there’s a soul to a brewing operation, and it’s the craft, not the marketing. She missed that, left it all behind, threw it away, and began marketing a gimmick. Moonshot is the not result of a passion for great beer. It was created from a love of money, and a lot of (perhaps misplaced, as it turns out) confidence.

What’s ironic is that she considers AB the devil, but isn’t doing anything much different from them. Heck, at least AB owns actual breweries!

I guess I respect her perseverance, but I think she made some horribly bad choices, and perhaps put more faith in her ability to sell than the ability for a good product to sell itself.

Anat Baron

Finally, there’s Anat herself, who travels around the country to expose some of what goes on in the political spectrum as it relates to brewing, and spotlighting some craft breweries that are making it, against all odds, and keeping the dream alive. Namely, Stone Brewing, and New Belgium Brewing. Both make good beers. Stone is perhaps my favorite American brewery at the moment (that’s always subject to change on roughly a quarterly basis).

Keepin’ the Dream Alive

But what is this dream, exactly?

In listening to Sam, Rhonda, Greg (from Stone Brewing), and others in the panel, they’re all sounding rather pie-in-the-sky about it. Some quotes are a little cliche by now… “It’s about what’s in the glass.” says Charlie Papazian, a homebrewing pioneer. Sam says he has zero interest in being bought by a big outfit. The implication by most of the panel was that becoming big, beyond a certain point, was “selling out” or something. But then they go on to talk about the fact that Sam has employees outside the brewery all over the country working as sales people, and Stone now has a pretty wide distribution and is a 100-barrel brewery themselves.

Well… you can’t have it both ways. You can talk a good game about keeping it small, keeping it simple, living the dream, keeping it real, and keeping it alive, but it’s hard to swallow when you’re upgrading to a 100-barrel house and trying to get distribution in all 50 states. Those are business growth moves. There are business decisions that are made in support of a move to geolocated sales offices and a quadrupling of capacity, and those aren’t necessarily “all about what’s in the glass.”

I found quite a few similar contradictions in the panel discussion after the movie, but I didn’t go into the movie in “reporter mode”, and so didn’t write down all the quotes I’d need to make a stronger argument. My bad.

So… the point?

So what was the point of Beer Wars, exactly? The stated purpose is to start a conversation. But it’s obviously biased in how it frames the conversation. They frame it as a war between David and Goliath, and we should all be dutiful little beer-drinking hippies and start spending all of our money on craft beer and shaving our heads and knocking on doors to spread the word. I think that’s silly, and way off base, not to mention completely unnecessary.

First, it’s completely unnecessary because the movie’s target audience is clearly people who already drink, or make, craft beer, so in that regard, they’re preaching to the choir.

Second, most of the things they say the big boys do to make it hard on craft brewers has clearly not stopped the likes of Dogfish Head, Stone, New Belgium, and Sam Adams from becoming succesful ventures anyway. This isn’t to say that state laws couldn’t be more amenable to fostering a brewing industry in their state (I’m looking at you, New Jersey), and the lobbyists make that harder, but there are craft breweries in damn near every state of the union!

Third, most of the challenges talked about in the beer industry aren’t really unique to the beer industry. If I decided to go out and market a new cereal, or a new soft drink, I’d have challenges very similar to those faced by brewers.

The Verdict

From the above you might think I hated to movie. Not so. I thought it was entertaining, and educational. If they’d taken away the sensationalism around the whole “war” mantra, it would have been entertaining, and educational, and not annoying at the same time.

It was great to see Sam and Greg sharing their thoughts on their beer, and the industry, and their fans, and it was enlightening to learn a bit more about the NBWA and the 3-tier system. As someone who can envision “going pro” one day (I’m not yet delusional enough to say “will go pro”), it was a great “head’s up!” movie, and I mostly enjoyed the heck out of it, and appreciate Anat Baron’s immense commitment and follow through on this project.

My Take

When I was a kid, the only beers you could get that weren’t made by BMC were Bass, Guinness, and Harp. There were still a few regional breweries like Rolling Rock and Yeungling, but it wasn’t a given that they’d be on the shelves of your local liquor store even if it was a mere 50 miles from the brewery. Today, I live less than 5 miles from two liquor stores where I have my pick of over 100 different beers from all over the US and the world. Works for me!

As a brewer and beer evangelist, the coming of the internet (almost completely neglected in the movie) has made it far easier for me to both brew and talk to others about beer (for better or worse). I have a vast collection of anecdotes about peoples’ experiences with beer, both drinking and brewing, from people I would never have known or heard of otherwise. This helps me, and it helps beer.

Being connected with others, and communicating, and debating and discussing, is ground zero for the formation of any community, and building a community and building a brand are ever so deliciously intertwined.

The tweets, the dinners, the handshakes, answering your own phone and talking to drinkers, having a great time and sharing your beer might be tiring, but it’s great fun, and it’s great community-based marketing, and it doesn’t require you to shed any notion of ethics, integrity, or the idea of creating an honest product that you have a passion for and makes other people happy.

People who drink Bud… well, they drink Bud. It’s part cultural: they drink it because their father drank it. They drink it because the guys at work drink it. They drink it because it’s the coldest beer at the bar where they play in the weekly Bud-sponsored pool tournaments with their friends. Saying “they don’t know any better” might be true, but it’s also a little condescending and taking the easy way out. These people make up vast, virtually uninterrupted swaths of the American population. Taking 50% market share to split up amongst the various breweries is going to take quite some time. The good news is that Sam and Greg are proof that you can at least make a living and drink phenomenal beer while you wait for that to happen.

So take it easy. Let the fighters fight. Drink good beer. Drink real beer. Make an adventure of it. Above all, to quote Papazian, “Relax, Don’t Worry, Have a Homebrew.”

Everyone I talk to who knows I brew my own beer eventually asks me if it’s hard to get started, if it’s expensive, etc. So here’s a post that’ll discuss it at a little more length. The short answer is “it’s not hard, it’s not expensive, and yes, even you can do it”.

Home Brewing is Not Hard

There’s hard, and then there’s expensive. In brewing, the two aren’t necessarily related. In other words, you don’t necessarily have to spend all kinds of money to get an easy-to-use system. Likewise, spending money on stuff can sometimes make your brewing life much harder than it was before you bought the fancy equipment. I can’t tell you how many batches it took us to finally make friends with our pump!

You don’t need fancy equipment. Most of what you need is probably around your house, or available at the local Home Labyrinth. If you’re not completely broke, home brew starter kits are available. At time of writing, morebeer.com has a starter kit for $69, and northernbrewer.com has one for $75. There is absolutely no reason you can’t make fantastic beer with either of them. Seriously, none. They even include instructions.

The instructions may or may not use some fancy lingo, but the basic steps in brewing beer are all things you’re familiar with already:

1. Make oatmeal
2. Drain the liquid from it
3. Boil it
4. Add hops, and boil s’more
5. Cool, transfer to a bucket (or something), add yeast, and let it sit for a few weeks.

There you are. Brewing in 5 easy steps. The concepts are all cooking concepts. Things need to be at certain temperatures, for a certain amount of time. That’s all cooking is, too: heat, and time.

So, $75, maybe another $20-30 for ingredients (depending on what kind of beer you brew), and you’re all set to brew 5 gallons of your own beer.

Wait. That’s not quite right. For $75, you’re ready to make as many 5-gallon batches of beer as you want! Which brings us to…

Home Brewing is Not Expensive

In fact, home brewing is less expensive than buying beer in the store. Let’s prove that:

I live in NJ. Where I live, unless you buy Bud, Miller, or Coors, a 6-pack is $9. So, $1.50 per 12 ounces of frosty goodness. That’s 12.5 cents per ounce.

Now let’s say you spend $100 on ingredients and equipment to make a 5-gallon batch of beer. How does that work out?

5 gallons at $100 = $20 per gallon. That comes to about 15.65 cents per ounce, or about $1.87 per bottle and $11.25 for a 6-pack. But here’s the thing: that includes your one time $75 equipment purchase! If your spouse got you the kit for your birthday, it’s nothing. What’s the cost per ounce then?

5 gallons at $25 (ingredients) = $5 per gallon. That comes out to about 48 cents per 12-ounce bottle, or $2.88 per 6-pack.

So now the question is, if you bought your equipment yourself for $75, how much beer do you have to drink before this stuff pays for itself?

Well, we’re working with $9 vs. $3 per six pack (I’ve purposely put home brewing at a disadvantage in the equation for the sake of round numbers). That’s a savings of $6 for every 72 ounces you brew yourself. 72/6 = 12. So you have to brew 12 6-packs. How many gallons is that? 6.75. Your equipment pays for itself before you’re halfway through drinking your second batch of home brew.

It sounds so good it must be wrong. Let’s try it another way. Let’s add up the costs for the equipment kit, and 3 5-gallon batches of beer:

$75 for equipment

$75 for ingredients to make 15 gallons of beer.

That’s $150 to make 15 gallons of beer (and note, there are ingredient kits that’ll have you making beer for under $20, but I digress). All told, you’re looking at $10 per gallon, and it comes to $5.63 per 6-pack. Let’s call it $6 per 6-pack, for a savings of $3 per 6-pack. At a $3 savings, you now need to brew 25 6-packs to break even. How many gallons is that? 14 gallons, or less than three batches of beer. If you only brewed once per month, your equipment would easily pay for itself by Labor Day.

It’s a Hobby!

This has been a good exercise. There are things that could add to your initial expenses. You might spring for a shiny new pot to boil in if you don’t have one already. There are things that could cut your costs too — go to a deli to get those buckets (that’s what their pickles are shipped in) instead of paying for the kit, and save bottles from parties so you don’t have to buy them.

Another thing that might justify the cost is that it’s a hobby, and people really should have hobbies, and no matter what your hobby is, it’ll cost money. Hobbies are good for your mental health, and brewing is a great hobby to get friends or the spouse involved in. Matt and I brew year round, and the wives won’t have anything to do with that, but in the summer, they’re out there with us. My wife and I brewed our first batch of beer together with Matt leading us along. It was great fun.

As time goes on, you’ll likely want to buy or build fancier equipment. Check out a book called “Brew Ware”, which has great ideas on how to save money by repurposing stuff around your house for use in your home brewery. Otherwise, northernbrewer.com and morebeer.com likely have anything you could ever dream of adding to your brewery.

Really, home brewing is as hard or easy as you want to make it. On the ingredient end of things, if you decide to study chemistry to understand your mash better, and microbiology to understand your yeast better, more power to you — but it’s not necessary to make awesome beer.There are also people who culture their own yeast (Matt’s starting to do this for the Bamf operation), grow their own hops (I might go this route this year), get deeply obsessed with things like kernel sizes of various brands of grain… It’s all pretty unnecessary. You can make awesome beer without this amazing depth of knowledge.

The equipment part of the equation can be as complex as you want as well. There are folks with all kinds of fancy electronics, heating elements, pumps, computers, etc. I’m a geek, but I kind of like the fact that brewing is my one break from geeking out (at least as far as computers are involved). When Matt first taught me to brew, we were using a coleman cooler for our mash tun. It was probably the same cooler his mom bought him for our fishing trips when we were in middle school, so… free to us.  Our sparge consisted of us taking turns ladling hot water over an upside down bowl sitting on top of the mash, so that equipment was around the house already. Our chiller was a counterflow chiller Matt made by putting some copper tubing through a garden hose. There are instructions on the web and in books on how to do that, and if you want to go even simpler than that, you can still just sit the whole thing in a tub full of ice for a while to cool it down.

Nowadays, we have added a pump, and a Shirron chiller, both of which we love. We’ve replaced our Coleman cooler with a converted (legally obtained) beer keg, and added another keg for a boiler, and yet another for heating sparge water (the “hot liquor tank”, or HLT). We also brew in 10-gallon batches now, and we do it outside on one of those cajun cooker propane burners. So, our equipment costs went up, but we brew, on average, 10 gallons every 3 weeks until we have no more vessels to ferment in, and our efficiency is greater than it would be in a plastic bucket setup, so our savings per batch is higher.

In the end, we still consider it a hobby, but it’s progressing, like most hobbies do, whether it’s model planes or stained glass. You get better equipment, you do more different things with it, you spend time and energy to learn more about it, you spend more money. At least the outcome of our hobby helps justify the cost in real dollars in addition to being incredibly satisfying.

Anyway, Matt put together a recipe for a “Steam” beer, but then realized during his research that “Steam beer” is actually a copyrighted term, so he called it “Vapor” instead. The term “Yankee” pegs it as decidedly East Coast, and I think his recipe is going to do a good job at leading the style in the direction it so desperately wants to go in, at least on this coast.

I’m actually not sure about Matt’s experience with lager yeasts, but for me, this will be my first time brewing with a lager yeast at all. I have very little interest in lagers in general, and in the lagering process specifically. There are some lagers that I enjoy drinking, but I really like the simplicity offered by the ale brewing and fermenting process, especially since I don’t have a dedicated fridge to devote to lagering, and am on the road too much to really pay close attention to the minutiae involved in lager fermenting. Besides, for most, if not all lagers, there’s sort of an ale “equivalent” that can be made. You can also get some of the clean crispness out of some ale yeasts (usually by fermenting them slightly colder than the label would indicate is “optimal”, mainly because they’re making assumptions you’d like to dismiss).

I’m looking forward to using a new and different yeast. We’re not lagering the beer, we’re using lager yeast and fermenting it like an ale, but at a temp of about 58-60ºF. We’re using the White Labs “San Francisco Lager” yeast.

We’ll get the brew day notes and the recipe up some time this weekend.