Mead Day!

It is a bit of a meadstravaganza around my apartment these days:

By now you must sense that I love any reason to celebrate food and drink. In fact, I was just talking with some neighbors this weekend about our need to celebrate International Crepe Day. The group agreed that it's too many months away, as is Nutella Day, though felicitously the two are a mere three days apart, so we agreed we needed to make some practice batches between now and then. For research.

While sipping on a little snifter of mead after dinner tonight, I realized that many of you might not know there is a National Mead Day. It was on August 5th this year, and I was fortunate to have my mead making mentor, Tysen (yes, I have a mead mentor!), and my boyfriend  Matt, (yes, I have a boyfriend!) over to celebrate. After a lovely brunch, we got to tasting five different varieties.

I'll be writing a full post on the mead making process and results -- Tysen will be editing the excerpts from our planning, brewing, and tasting sessions, and posting the finished podcast in coming months on his site -- but as I decompress from my amazing summer travels and dive back into teaching, I didn't want to miss the chance to share this most important day that you should mark on your calendar so you don't miss Mead Day next year: it's the first Saturday in August. You have almost a whole year to learn about and learn to love mead before then! Those who are around may be invited to taste the by then 18-month-aged varieties pictured here:

Which will you prefer, I wonder? The classic? The quince-infused? The tangerine and thyme variety? What I can say is that there will be no more of this smooth, barrel aged one, hand carried all the way from western Poland:

Take comfort, though, DC-area mead lovers (or those who are mead-curious): you can reference Tysen's awesome website to learn how easy it is to make your own mead. Or you can pick up some of Charm City's latest limited-release meads at many a local grocery. I have a can each of raspberry coconut and orange lavender in the fridge now. For research, you know. Cheers!

The spent grain baker

I love everything about brewing beer. The way it perfumes my kitchen. The happy memories of my first experiences homebrewing with a former partner in his tiny little Brooklyn apartment. The excuse to gather friends together to make a 5-gallon batch, and the sitting around and laughing and cooking and eating it always entails. (The cleanup can sometimes be a pain, especially when a stovetop boilover happens, but it's a small price to pay. Plus I already spend half of my professional life washing, drying, and organizing dishes, so what's another few hours on the weekend?)

In recent years, I've found one of my favorite parts of brewing is figuring out what to do with the spent grain after it comes out of the wort. Sure, I could compost it -- a perfectly acceptable means of disposing of it -- but instead I save up my gluten chits (yes, I am still trying to cut down on it) for brewing days because I know there is going to be some spent grain baking involved. Even since my favorite spent grain recipe source -- the Brooklyn Mash -- took down their website, I have not been deterred. Just had to get more creative on my own. This time around, we made some spent grain biscotti that was, according to various taste testers, pretty stellar. So much so that one of my foodie brewing friends asked for the recipe! So, here it is....

Lemon Almond Biscotti
Adapted from Country Living Magazine. Though it might seem like an unusual flavor combination, the mix of bright citrus and smooth, grassy olive oil works incredibly well in these classic Italian cookies. Makes 48 biscotti, or so. Best dunked in your morning coffee.

Ingredients
1 cup spent grain flour
1½ cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
1 cup plain almonds, chopped
2 large eggs
1 cup sugar
½ cup olive oil
Zest of 2 lemons
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 bar dark chocolate, melted, for drizzling
sea salt for sprinkling

Directions

In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.

Preheat oven to 350F.

Stir together eggs, sugar, olive oil, lemon zest, and vanilla. Gradually add flour mixture and mix until dough just begins to come together. Do not overmix. Stir in nuts.

Divide dough into 2 equal pieces and place on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Using damp hands, shape each piece into a 12" long log, 1/2" high.

Bake logs until firm, about 28 minutes, rotating baking sheets halfway through. Reduce oven temperature to 250F. Cool logs on baking sheet for 12-15 minutes.

Transfer logs to a cutting board. Using a serrated knife, slice cooled logs into 1/2" thick biscotti. Place biscotti back on parchment-lined baking sheets, with a tiny bit of space between each slice, and bake until until slightly crisp, about 14 minutes, rotating baking sheets halfway through.

Transfer to a wire rack to cool. Drizzle with melted chocolate, then sprinkle with sea salt. Refrigerate to set chocolate.

Will keep in a sealed container in the fridge for... well, the record for not eating them is two days, so at least that long.

The winter ale of our discontent

You may recall that the weekend after the election I headed out to visit my friends Matt and Amanda near Charlottesville, VA. While I was officially there for the Homebrew for Hunger event, we also got to brewing our first collaborative ale. When planning our first co-brewed beer in the months leading up to the election, we'd thought to call it Across the Aisle Ale or somesuch. You see, though Matt is a card-carrying Republican, and I am obviously not one, we could agree on a few things:
1) Trump is a jerk
2) Beer is awesome
3) After a handful of years of friendship and beer drinking it was about time we brewed something together

By the time I arrived in Barboursville in early November, we had decided to rename the beer: The Winter Ale of our Discontent was born. It was to be a winter warmer-style beer, with cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla bean, and featuring honey from both DC and VA. Yum, eh?

It was a lot of fun, and marked my first time getting to play with tools that are part of the next level of homebrewing. First, we got our wort going on a serious propane stove on the back deck:

Once cooled, we added yeast and aerated our brew with a stirring spoon drill attachment:

I totally want one of those now. Then we waited a couple of months for it to ferment to perfection.

The cold and rainy Saturday before the inauguration of He Who is Orange and Shall Not Be Named, Matt and Amanda came for a visit, with TWAOOD in tow:

After a few beers and some snacks, it was time to break out the bottling equipment. Things went quickly, thanks to Jess and Ben who joined us for bottling... and dinner and cocktails out, but who's keeping track?:

It's going to be a rough winter -- who am I kidding, it's going to be a rough FOUR YEARS -- but at least I've got a few 6-packs of homebrewed winter warmer to get me through the first bit. Cheers to collaboration beers!!

Star-crossed ale

Well, it had to happen eventually: my first brewing mishap.

Few things are more sad than throwing out a batch of homebrew. A death in the family, of course, or the 2016 election results, say. Thankfully I am not dealing with the former, though I am going to need significantly more beer around to cope with the latter. This batch of psudo-beer, however, went to the worms....

Back in mid-September, my lady friends and I got together to whip up our second-ever all-grain beer: a rhubarb saison. With a fancy Belgian yeast and many pounds of freshly milled grains from 3 Stars, a few pounds of rhubarb from my landlady's garden, and a homemade mashtun inherited from my pal Bobby, we were all set for brewing greatness. With successful batches of pumpkin saison, belgian dark ale, persimmon red ale, scotch ale, and even an all-grain vanilla porter under our belts, we had no reason to expect anything other than delicious results. As recommended by the dude at the 3 Stars shop, I'd even read a homebrewing book cover to cover -- The Joy of Homebrewing, in case you're interested  -- prior to brew day. After a fairly organized brew session that Sunday afternoon, things were smelling good and looking good that first evening as the carboy bubbled away in my kitchen. However, as we were transferring the wort into the fermenter, I had noticed we had barely 3.5 gallons of wort, so I boiled a few more gallons (you never know what's in DC tap water) on the stove. It wasn't nearly cool enough even 3 hours later to add to the carboy, so I left it til the morning -- covered to prevent contamination, of course.

But maybe it wasn't sterile any more, I worried the next morning, so I boiled it again. By lunchtime, the doubly boiled supplemental water was cool enough to pour in, bringing our brew up to the five gallon mark. And then... no more bubbling. I waited another 24 hours. Still no sign of activity. A panicked search through my homebrew book yielded this advice:

WHAT?! You don't just drop this into a little bullet point tucked away in the middle of a chapter! THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN IN BOLD FONT AND UNDERLINED!!

Maybe the lesson learned here is that I shouldn't have been so greedy for a full five gallons of rhubarb ale. Or maybe it's that I need to be a better note-taker, should have marked that very important point while reading. I teach whole lessons on following directions, for heaven's sake! I shook my fist at the heavens, and then at the carboy, but there was still no bubbling.

A week or so later, my friend Jessica sent me an article on when to dump a batch of homebrew gone amiss. The long and short of it is: pretty much never, unless it tastes bad. Well, it didn't taste like much. We added more yeast -- this one not as fancy, but perfectly acceptable -- a few days later, but in retrospect I think I might have accidentally sanitized the yeast when trying out a new sanitizing solution on the funnel we poured it through. (Was this beer star-crossed from the beginning, I wonder?) More than 24 hours later, still no activity. Did I kill the yeast again? Or, one of my brewing companions suggested, was it possible that maybe we hadn't gotten sufficient sugars from the grain using the mashtun during the initial steeping so there was nothing for the yeast to break down? The measurements we took suggested there was practically no alcohol in there. Hmm. Maybe it needed more time?

Finally, now more than two months later, our moment of truth arrived as the Ladies Sunday Brewing Club gathered to start working on our first batch of hard cider. (That is a WHOLE other tale, with its own misadventures, for another day. It is still bubbling away... at the moment, at least.) We decanted some of the maybe-rhubarb-beer-maybe-not from the carboy and tasted it. I believe the resounding assessment confirmed my suspicion that we'd accidentally made artisanal Bud Light, which in the homebrewing world is tantamount to a felony. (Or if it isn't, it should be.) We looked up how we could use our five gallons of not-beer. No, not this article, this one. After reading about beer-based home distilling (a no-go if it's bad tasting beer to begin with) and culinary uses (I couldn't imagine using 5 GALLONS to braise poultry or make mustard), we stumbled upon the fact that beer provides an excellent boost for microbial activity in the garden. And... done!



R.I.P., Rhubarb Saison. My garden thanks you, even if my fragile homebrewing ego does not.

Madam Brewski

A couple of months ago, over a couple of happy hour beers at Glen's, my buddy Josh was telling me about how he and his girlfriend were debating whether or not to host their annual persimmon festival.

"Excuse me? I adore persimmons! How have I not heard of this gathering before??" I spluttered, nearly knocking over my pint of porter. (Probably because I tend to have my head down and focused on teaching during the first few months of each school year, working to get the garden back in order and routines in place. Okay, fine.)

We began to brainstorm things we could make. Persimmon cupcakes... icecream... beer. Yes. Well, as it turned out, the festival never came to pass, but as recently as three weeks ago I remained fixated on the idea of persimmon beer. I happened to mention my idea to my friend Kate, who in turn got very excited, as she has just purchased some basic, used homebrewing equipment. And she had a couple of persimmon trees on her property. And hops -- fresh Cascade hops grown at nearby Wangari Gardens. (Hooray for uber local ingredients!) That settled it: it was time for me to eschew the pre-measured, scripted beer kits and strike out to create a new beer.

Okay, maybe I would see if there was some guide online.... Thankfully, there was. The next step was to gather the ingredients, which involved a series of emails and then trip to one of my favorite local breweries to pick up the remaining supplies: malt, yeast, barley, and a few other odds and ends. I suggested I could hand grind the malted grains at home -- I've had lots of practice grinding wheat into flour with hand-powered mills at school lately -- but the helpful gentleman at the 3 Stars brewshop pulverized a whole pound of grain for me in less than 5 seconds. Oooh. Maybe I need one of these:

Last Sunday afternoon, some of my favorite lady friends gathered to nibble, drink, catch up, and get a 5-gallon batch of persimmon ale started. First, we needed a pound of [persimmon] flesh. Kate got to work:

As the wort began to simmer, we sterilized equipment, nibbled on the persimmon peels, and mashed the pulp. Then it was time to add the malt:

Then we stirred in the persimmon pulp, cinnamon, and freshly grated nutmeg:

And then the hops:

As we were about to kick back and rest on our brewing laurels, the first kink in the plan arose: the wort chiller's end cap wouldn't fit onto my kitchen faucet. Must I revert to my rudimentary wort cooling methods of yesteryear? I wondered. Luckily, Farmer Kate had some irrigation equipment in her truck parked out front:

A bit of fiddling and we were back in business:

I'm going to skip over the splashy pouring of the cooled wort into the glass carboy in my bathtub -- nobody needs to see that -- but suffice to say Madam Brewski has been moved to a nice warm part of my apartment and has been bubbling away in my kitchen ever since:

Kind of looks like she has a bit of Polish heritage, no? Definitely Eastern European.... My people. And my brewing people were all about toasting and grinding the spent grain to make some Mexican wedding cakes to scarf as we finished the last of the beer in my fridge and patted ourselves on the back for a job well done. Check out Jessica presenting her delicious handiwork, mere moments before the vast majority of confection-sugar-dusted mouthfuls were devoured:

One more week til we transfer to the secondary fermenter, then another couple of weeks before bottling. Should have some finished persimmon ale ready right around my birthday. How nice....

Tall, Dark, and Belgian

No, it's not the tagline for a personal ad. It's my latest homebrew: a dark Belgian strong ale, recently unveiled. While I still prefer the pumpkin ale for overall drinkability, this one is pretty good. It's mellowed a little since bottling.

Since having my first official beer dinner last weekend -- it's like a wine dinner, with each course paired with a particular vintage, in this case 4 different beers -- I can't stop thinking about other ways to accent and infuse things with beer. The main course was a venison stroganoff, featuring dried porcini mushrooms soaked overnight in TD&B. "Yum" is an understatement. (To be fair, the handmade egg noodles were as much the stars as the the Italian mushrooms or the fancy venison loin from Gary.)

And yet, my favorite course might have been the beer floats. My friend Kevin introduced me to the idea of mixing beer and ice cream during his decadent beer dinner dessert course: Brooklyn Brewery's deep chocolate stout with a scoop of Moorenko's mocha chip ice cream, drizzled with melted chocolate and topped with crushed malted peanut butter milk balls.

Seeing as I have some good ice cream in the freezer, for a change I would not be surprised if some of it ended up in a frosty mug of TD&B sometime soon....

Eat more whole grains

So batch #2 of homebrew (name TBD) is underway. This time, it'll be a Dark Belgian Strong Ale, started using a kit I picked up during the jaunt up toThree Stars Brewery recently. Funny, Amanda, Jessica, Kenton, and I arrived too late for the brewing demonstration, yet with plenty of time for tasting the four beers they had on tap. But, really, what could we have learned, us semi-pros with a whole, single batch of homebrew making under our collective belts? Well, probably a lot.... One thing I could maybe show the master brewers a thing or two about is cooking with spent grain. Because I'm an expert now. At least on whole grains.

Bread and another round of some pretty darn tasty veggie burgers emerged from my kitchen after the pumpkin ale brewing this autumn. With this darker malted grain for the Belgian strong, brewed for the cold weather, I cranked out some pretty stellar falafel -- who doesn't love falafel? -- on brewing day, then biscuits with scallions and parmesan using the hearty whole grains to feed the masses. But my favorite thing so far may well be the pretzel rolls Carina, Kenton, and I made after we racked the dark ale into the secondary fermenter. 

Check out Carina's expert racking method. (Yes, we're getting fancy here.) And here's Team Pretzel at work.

Delicious. And not just because of the generous application of sea salt. They were good and good for you!

Admittedly, the pretzels were a little more work than the other recipes, but so worth it... especially hot out of the oven and slathered with (homemade, of course) spicy mustard. I toasted the spent grain and then ground it up in my coffee grinder the day before my sous chefs arrived. I'd gotten lots of practice during the two prior weeks, teaching five classes of 3rd graders about the parts of the grain and the importance of eating whole grains. Part of the lesson involved making whole wheat flour and white flour using coffee grinders and sifters. It was a pretty informative lesson for me as much as it was for the kiddos.

Did you know that white flour (aka all-purpose flour or even 'wheat' flour) isn't all that good for you? You know, that stuff that most of us have used -- myself included -- for baking all of our lives? I was horrified to learn during my lesson prep how little nutritional value even 'Enriched' All-Purpose Flour has in it. "You see," I explained to each group of rapt 8-year-olds, "when you eat anything made from flour, unless it says 'whole wheat,' you're only getting the endosperm part of the grain." That means you pretty much only get the carbs and miss out on the other two main parts, the really good things that whole grains have in them: the bran (where all the fiber is that helps keep your digestive system running smoothly) and the germ (where the fat-soluble vitamins hang out).

"Don't be fooled by packaging that tells you that the loaf of bread you're holding is 'wheat' bread. That just means it comes from the wheat plant. Look at the label." A number of the parent volunteers in class were as concerned as the students to learn this, but I tried to minimize the freaking out by pointing out how a good food detective can easily tell by looking for the words WHOLE WHEAT. "That means that it has to be made from the whole wheat kernel, right? And have all of the parts of the grain ground up in there, and have all of the vitamins that should be there? Otherwise, the company is breaking the law?" one astute young student asked. Exactly. And don't fall for that "Enriched" flour -- it's better than nothing, but they don't put everything back in. And it's usually bleached. (Blech.)

Now, readers, I'm not saying you should never, never, ever use all-purpose flour again or you are sentencing your friends and loved ones to a life of malnutrition and diabetes. I'm just saying you might want to try mixing WHOLE WHEAT into your baking when you can. It doesn't work for everything, but you can sift in at least some whole wheat flour into most recipes and things will turn out just fine. And if you need some ideas for ways to use whole grains -- spent or otherwise -- you know who to call. (Me.)

All spent grain recipes mentioned in this post are based on ones I found on the Brooklyn Brewery blog.

Rushing the Saison

Okay, fine, so I may or may not have happened to stop by Meridian Pint last night, where the judging of the DC State Fair homebrew competition was taking place. And my charming companion, Kenton, may or may not have wandered off from the main bar area away from the men's room "by mistake" in the general direction of where we suspected the judging might be happening. Fear not, though various friends have offered to try and sway the judges' opinions in my favor, I have not in any way tampered with whatever the outcome will be. No, I am confident that once they taste my very first beer, with pumpkin grown not five blocks from the site where my inaugural homebrew -- along with as many as 99 other DC-area submissions -- was first tasted by the professionals, they will conclude that the "Rushing the Saison Pumpkin Ale" is undeniably delicious.

Well, assuming I didn't somehow end up giving them one of the uncarbonated bottles.... Eep.

The first taste I had of the much-anticipated pumpkin ale was with my friend Jessica last Monday, after we finished canning a whole mess of tomatoes at her place. It was, in a word, DELICIOUS. Nice color, nice body, nice flavor, not overly pumpkinny....

Then Kenton and I, while we were finalizing the name of this most homegrown of homebrews, split a bottle a few nights later. Again, though slurped surreptitiously out of travel coffee mugs downtown and thus enjoyed in a less than optimal drinking vessel, the beer was quite delicious. I was perhaps getting a little cocky. Oh, I should know better by now....

Then, as part of the celebratory final dinner with my friends Michelle and Forrest out at their farm in Berryville on Friday night, we cracked open a bottle of chilled pumpkin beer goodness and... it was flat! (More on that stellar dinner later, though I cannot help but mention that dark-chocolate-covered, local, pastured bacon was one of three desserts involved. It would have been perfect with a nice, carbonated pumpkin ale to wash it down.) It didn't taste bad, exactly, but it just wasn't great. Hmmm.

Well, here's hoping that everything turned out alright with the homebrew competition. Assuming that they followed my very specific instructions to drink it cold, and I didn't manage to inadvertently submit 3 flat 12-ounce bottles of the RTS pumpkin ale, I think we have a good shot at winning... something. I'll find out when they make the big announcement at the fair proper on Saturday afternoon! (By the way, I wonder how someone gets on that panel of judges....)

Many thanks to all who helped brew, bottle, name, and taste my very first batch! (Don't worry, dad, I'm saving a 6-pack of it for your birthday dinner in a few weeks.)

A cure for what ales you

(Before you say it, relax: it's a pun, not a typo.)

This is Bubbles:

He'd been living under my back deck for about a year, woefully unemployed until just yesterday when he began a two-week gig. He's now babysitting over a million yeast cells eating and pooping away in five gallons of pumpkin ale in the corner of my kitchen:

Last night, my friends Kate, Carmen, Amanda, Carina, and Aaron -- all novice brewers like me -- found themselves up to their elbows in beermaking tasks. (Is it my teaching background, or a latent proclivity for management, I wonder.) We all had our assignments. Amanda led the instruction following, timing, and drink opening:

Kate was the measurement maven (and, later, the biscuit making queen):

Carmen took the lead on making the spent grain veggie burgers:

Oh, wait, the burgers came after the beer making proper. Hang on. Let's see, where was I?

Ah, yes. There was pumpkin roasting and malt pouring. Then an hour of boiling. Drinking and nibbling and checking the timer. Some spicing and straining:

As we slid our tureen of wort off of the hot burners, things got a little more technical and I started harassing... I mean reminding... everyone to keep things sterile: anything that would be touching  our cooling beer, including fingers and thermometers, must get dunked in the sanitizing solution first. We had to cool the beer FAST so no weird other things would land in the optimal growing medium and start reproducing. Carina showed up just in time to help with her instant-read thermometer:

We had some technical difficulties at this point, as after things dropped to about 85 degrees -- still 5 degrees too hot for yeast to survive, according to the instructions -- the temperature started to rise again. We had to take emergency measures to cool down the wort quickly! Carina rummaged through my freezer while channeling Macguyver's hipster doppelganger to save the day:

Don't worry, I sterilized the frozen waterbottle and bag of frozen edamame with sanitizing solution first. Hmm, that does look kind of unappealing, doesn't it? Well, it worked.

Then there was the ongoing debate about whether the pre-inflated yeast packet would work. After a poll among the six of us, we decided we'd try it. (Also, there was no alternative.) So, it was on to scampering outside to battle mosquitoes and get 5 gallons of wort from the giant brewpot into the (sterilized) carboy using a little (sterilized) funnel.

The directions insisted that we vigorously stir the beer to aerate it. Well, I'm pretty sure we aerated our pumpkin ale enough merely with the vigorous pouring process. I mean, look at that foam:

Finally, after adding the yeast, sealing the top with a (sterilized) airlock, and installing Bubbles back inside my apartment, it was at last time to devour a feast of spent grain veggie burgers with homemade lemon caper aioli on baked-from-scratch biscuits, massaged kale and peach salad, loads of fresh fruit, and more wine and beer. (Lord, I love spent grain burgers.) Not a bad way to spend a Friday night. Now if only I can cajole them back in two weeks to bottle our pumpkin ale....