Beer in America: The Early Years

As Gregg Smith tells it, almost everything important in early America happened because of beer. Beer caused the pilgrims to land at Plymouth Rock, beer caused the revolution, Thomas Jefferson made beer, etc. Its a lot like listening to a pothead talk about the greatness of hemp, and how George Washington grew weed. Not that it’s not all true, but the hyperbolae get extreme at times, and aren’t helped by Smith's drowsy writing style.

The best parts of the book are the stories about beer's affect on the history of the colonies, the rise of the prohibition movement, and early colonial beer cocktails. His history of the brewing industry itself is dry, unenlightening, and fairly dull. Overall, most of the book is a decent read.

Buy it here

It keeps going and going…

The peanut butter porter trub restarted the fermentation of the hard lemonade (hopefully without affecting the taste) so I should finally be able to bottle and drink it - but if it works, hard lemonade is an excellent summer drink.

And it's only been going for 3 months!

Turns out I brewed my hefenweizen right after a spring heat wave to perfect mid sixties temperatures, so I expect it will be an excellent wheat with mild esters.

I bottled the peanut butter porter last night - it probably needed to be racked at least once more time, but that's why its called experimental. My bottling bucket sample tasted like a warm, thin, flat porter with a peanut aftertaste (where the hops should have been) that faded fairly quickly.

I might have to tweak the recipe - more hops, more chocolate malt - but the peanut butter itself seems to be working correctly. Once it carbonates I'll have a better idea about how the peanut oils are affecting head retention. I haven't looked forward to a new batch this much in a while.

Victory and/or defeat!

I racked the peanut butter porter again, there seems to be a long settling process going on - most likely the tiny peanut slivers are slowly settling out. Since I don't want a crunchy drink I may give it a third racking.

I put some of the trub from the porter into the hard lemonade in an attempt to restart its fermentation - this may ruin the batch (peanut butter lemonade, mmmm tasty) but hopefully won't have much flavor effect and the new yeast strain will finish the fermentation.

Wheatable

I made a hefenweizen last night, and for some reason the sparging went really easily. Something must have been wrong because rather than a long slow process the wort flowed at a rate of about 1 quart/5min - and that's with a 50% wheat mash. To top it all off the wort was running crystal clear and the grain had no sweet taste left when I emptied the tub.

Or maybe everything went right instead of wrong for once.

Working that nut

My allergies kicked into high gear this weekend which I thought was the perfect time to make a wheat beer...then I double checked and saw that sneezing in your beer isn't a good thing, in fact everything indicated it was a bad thing - so I didn't make any more beer this weekend.

I did rack the peanut butter porter and it smells amazing. There were two small pools of oil on top, but I managed to keep it out of the transfer. I may do another transfer before bottling to get rid of the peanut bits and any oil I may have missed - if it goes well I'll post the recipe and we can all work on establishing this as a legitimate style.

My lemonade is still refusing to unstick - I'm debating throwing a scrap of trub from my next porter racking. The lemonade has a fairly powerful taste so the traces of heavy porter flavor shouldn't show up at all, but screwing it up now would really suck.