I decided to start out as simply as I could.  I bought a 1 gallon home brew kit with ingredients from the Brooklyn Brew Shop.  They specialize in small kits that can be made in small apartments in NYC.  Because it’s only a one gallon kit, I had everything that I needed to brew it.   I actually bought two kits, I bought the special Black and Tan kit that they have available.  This past weekend, I brewed the dry stout.

With extract brewing, the malt extract is already made and ready to be used.  Most kits come with some specialty grains that you steep in the brew pot to add some flavor to the wort but that isn’t where most of the fermentable sugars come from.  Most of that comes from the malt extract.  If you don’t already know, the wort is the liquid that is created from the water, malt and hops to which you eventually add yeast to turn it into beer.   When you are brewing with all grains, there is no extract and you are creating all of the sugars that the yeast needs to eat, grow and create alcohol.

The first step is to bring your water up to temperature (160 degrees) and add the grains to your brew pot.  This step is called mashing in.  I have heard this term before and read about what it is but I learn much better by actually doing so a lot of things became clear to me this past weekend.  The mash turns into an oatmeal consistency and stays in the brew pot for an hour.  You have to stay on top of it and make sure it stays in the proper temperature range.  I am assuming this is the step where the enzymes are doing their work but I don’t really know.  After an hour, you raise the temperature to 170 degrees.  This is called mashing out.

Here is a pic of my brew pot after this step

The next step is the sparge.  During this step, you pour water through the grains in an attempt to extract all those wonderful flavors and sugars that you created with your mash.  You do this by using a lauter tun.  In this case, the lauter tun was simply a strainer put over another pot.  I poured the contents of the brew pot into the strainer and was surprised at how little liquid there was.  I hope I didn’t do anything wrong as there was only a trickle of wort that poured through the strainer at this point.

The next step was the actual sparge.  In this step I poured 1 gallon of water through the lauter tun in an effort to extract more of the precious flavors and sugars that I worked so hard to create.   You want to end up with 1.2 gallons of wort when you are done because you need to overcompensate to make up for what you will lose during the boil.  Unfortunately, I don’t think I was at the 1.2 gallon mark.  Not sure what I did wrong but I was barely over 1 gallon.  After the sparge, I ran the wort through the grains one more time.

Here is what it looked like

After this step, it’s back to what I was used to doing and that’s the boil.  You boil the wort for 60 minutes, adding hops along the way at specific times.  The hops add both aroma and flavor to your beer.  After the boil, the wort is cooled down as rapidly as possible and added to the fermentor.  I was way off on quantity of wort, I only had 2/3 of a gallon, I had to add more water to the fermentor to get it up to the gallon mark.  Once I did that, I pitched the yeast which just means I put the yeast in and shook the fermentor to get the yeast going.

So far, I haven’t seen a lot of activity.  I hope I did everything correctly.  I don’t know why I didn’t have more liquid after the sparge and I hope I did the right thing by adding more water to the fermentor.  I am going to take a hydrometer reading this weekend to see where we are at.

I placed my order with them over the weekend and received my kits two days later.  They were running a Black and Tan Special.  You got two full home brew kits and ingredients to make a Dry Stout and an ESB.  The kit was supposed to include a pouring spoon as well but they forgot to include that in my shipment.  I will have to wait a few days for that piece of the kit.

The double kit I purchased includes two 1 gallon fermentors, a racking cane, tubing, sanitizer, rubber stopper, 2 airlocks and the ingredients to make the two beers.  I have never made an all-grain beer.  All of the beer I have made up to this point has been with extract kits.  I am hoping that doing a smaller 1 gallon batch for my first all-grain batch will be easier than jumping in and doing a 5 gallon all-grain batch.  I am going to brew this weekend so we will find out.  I will blog more about it after my brew session this weekend.

Before I started this Year of Beer, I had never had a Belgian beer and didn’t know a whole lot about the style.  My first exposure to the style was Ommegang’s Abbey Ale and since then, I have been hooked, I have really been enjoying the Belgian style.  She knows this so she bought me a bunch of Belgian beer on her last trip.  This was one of them.

The bottle she bought me is 1 pt 9.4 oz. so there is plenty to drink while writing this review.  The Abt 12 is a classic Dubbel style.

The beer poured a dark reddish brown and had a great tan colored head on it.  The head stuck around for quite awhile and as I drank the beer there was a good bit of lacing on the side of the glass.

It has a sweet malt aroma with a hint of citrus.  It’s not an overpowering aroma but it’s also not one that you have to work real hard to get, it’s really nice.

The beer is pretty smooth and has that classic Belgian taste to it that I believe comes from the Belgian yeast.  I don’t get much of the citrus flavor that I was smelling but I do get some really nice malt and raisin flavors.   As the beer warmed up, the flavor becomes more complex.  I started getting really nice banana and clove flavors along with the raisin.  Although this beer is 10% ABV I don’t taste much of the alcohol.

The mouthfeel is great, it’s very smooth and is pleasant from start to finish.  A little sticky after awhile but not so much that it’s a problem.

Earlier this month, we were up in New York City for a few days on business.   For my day job, I go to Toy Fair every year (loads of fun) and usually take my wife.  She used to work for me so she would go up with me as part of the job.  Now she just goes because it’s a lot of fun.   While we were up there, I stopped in a store that had an okay beer selection and picked up a bottle of Allagash Odyssey.   I picked it up for two reasons: I have only ever had one Allagash Beer (the White) and I really liked it and secondly, I have never had a beer that was barrel aged.    It was $14.99 for a 750 ml bottle but it was well worth it.

Allagash Odyssey is the second beer in their series of barrel aged beers.  The Odyssey is a dark wheat beer.  They aged half of the beer in stainless steel and half in oak barrels and then the blend the two together.   I had this beer when I got back home and it might be one of the best beers I have tasted during my year of beer so far.   Even though it was a bit pricey, I really wish I would have picked up more.  You could taste the oak but it wasn’t so strong that it overpowered the beer.  It was just delicious and I always find it depressing when I find a beer that I love only to find out that it’s limited and I won’t be able to get it for very long.

I live in Pennsylvania,  a state with notoriously outdated and ridiculous alcohol laws.  It’s been one of the challenges I had to overcome during this year to meet all my goals.  At least, I thought it would be one of my challenges.  So far, I have tried a wide variety of beer from all over the world that I have purchased within an hour of my house, tried while I was traveling or that I purchased online.  I really need to take the time to update my goals page as I have really racked up a pretty impressive resume of beer over the last 5 months.

But enough about all that, the point is, if you try hard enough, regardless of the laws, you can find legitimate sources for great beer.  Selling beer online is a really tough business but there are some great sites out there that have a wide selection and will ship to your door unless you are in a state where they aren’t allowed to ship.  The law varies based on the state you live in and the state from where they are shipping.  If you intend to buy beer online you will need to make sure that particular store can ship to you.

The options that I am aware of are below but it’s far from comprehensive.    If you know of others, please tell me so I can add them to the list.  If you have any experience with any of these stores please let me know so I can post that as well.

Brewforia

I don’t know how long this store has been around but I got the impression that they were fairly new.  I only just came across their site a few days ago so I haven’t bought anything from them yet.  I like the site and the people behind it seem to know what they are doing but was a little disappointed in the selection.  They didn’t have a lot of the beers that I was looking for.  But, I do intend on trying them out and I hope they grow their selection.  You can find them at Brewforia

Bruisin’ Ales

This beer retailer was recently voted as the 3rd best beer retailer in the world by the community over at RateBeer.com.  They are based in North Carolina and have a brick and mortar store in addition to their online presence.  They have a full list of the beers that they have available on their web site but they don’t have an Ecommerce platform that allows you to order the beer online.   You need to email them your order and they will contact you for payment information.  They have a very impressive list of beers available.  I first found out about this store on Twitter.  They are very active on Twitter and are always talking about good beer.  You can find out more about them at Bruisin’ Ales

Liquid Solutions - (Out of Business)

LiquidSolutions.biz is the first store I came across that sold beer online.  I found them a few months ago.  I wasn’t impressed with the site itself, the design and layout was clunky (my real job is a partner in an Ecommerce business so I am pretty picky) but they had a great selection.  I had intended on ordering some beer from them but I waited too long.  Unfortunately, they announced just last week that they are closing their doors and liquidating all of their inventory.

BeerGeek.Biz - (Out of Business)

I believe this store has also gone out of business.  I have never ordered from them but they had a very wide selection and had intended on giving them a try.  Unfortunately, when I went to buy something from them earlier this week I noticed that I couldn’t add anything to my cart and that each item has a message added to it that says they have ceased shipping inventory.  I can only assume that they are out of business.  You can check out their web site while it is still up at BeerGeek.biz

Beer on the Wall

Beer on the Wall is based in California and specializes in West Coast Beers.  I have never ordered from them but they claim that their #1 priority is to offer the best selection of beer that they know they can send while it’s still fresh.   I respect the fact that they are specializing in a region to try to deliver the best product they can.  That doesn’t mean they only carry West Coast beers, they just specialize in it.  They sell individual bottles of beer, sampler packs, beer of the month club, beer gift baskets and beer memorabilia.  You can check them out at Beer on the Wall

Bottle Trek

Bottle Trek is located in Oregon.  I have never ordered from them because they aren’t allowed to ship to Pennsylvania, we aren’t reciprocal states.  I know, it’s stupid, but that’s just the way it is.  They have a good selection of beer with over 500 beers to choose from online and have a handful of rare/vintage beers that are hard to find.  You can check them out at Bottle Trek.

Bierkraft

Bierkraft is a beer, cheese and chocolate shop in Brooklyn New York.  They have both a retail store and sell online on their web site.    Unlike a lot of stores, they sell the beer in 6 packs and cases, you can’t get individual bottles which is actually what I prefer to do.   They claim to have over 1000 beers, 250 artisan cheeses, and 100 gourmet chocolate bars.  Pretty impressive!  You can check them out at Bierkraft

I had a good time, it was a bit intimidating being the new guy, there were 30 or so other home brewers there and it was a pretty casual atmosphere.  When I walked in, there was a large table covered with beer in bottles and growlers that the members each made and brought in.  Tasting glasses were available and you could sample and talk about the beer at will.

It was really fun tasting all the beer, and talking about the styles and how they brewed it.  I probably spent more time than I should have standing in the background trying to break into the conversation but that is what happens when you are the new guy and you don’t know anyone there.

They seemed like a really knowledgeable group and they liked the ESB I brought but had some good feedback on how I could improve it.  Most of the negative things they mentioned as far as taste, were things that I knew going into it and appreciated the different ideas on how I might be able to improve upon it next time.

The club meets once a month and has other activities that they do throughout the year.  The real question is not whether I had a great time but whether I will be going to the next meeting.  Sadly, even though it was fun, I won’t be going back.  York is an hour and fifteen minutes away and I no longer have it in me to drink a lot and then drive all that way home on a work day (on any day for that matter).   They drank a lot of beer that night and it was hard to show restraint.  I would love to attend a regular meeting like that but I am just going to have to wait and try to find something closer to home.