Late autumn update

OK enough introspecting. So what's been going on beer-wise? Well lessee...

Sigue-Sigue Mashtun

I got a new mash tun. Since buying a HERM system last February and directly selling off my old kit, and then having the HERMS get busted by the cops, I've been fussing around with various pots, pans, vinyl sacks, old bathtubs and hollowed-out gourds, trying to brew beer without investing in new, real equipment, with the view that I will be back on the HERMS "any time now", just as soon as...Well, it just has to happen that's all, and I'll be darned if I'm buying new kit even for the short term because the HERMS was a delight and also really expensive and...urgh! Goddamn brewing laws in Japan! It's not been an easy year, gear wise. (frowns)

Well along comes Jeff (not his real name...OR IS IT???) outside my building one morning telling me, 'Hey man, need a mash tun? I have to move like, soon, and I'ma throw this beast in the gomi if somebody doesn't take it.' Tcha! Giddyup. (Gomi is trash, like dump it on the stoop kind of trash.)

So I got this huge 15 gallon mashtun with a false bottom from Jeff, with built-in ports galore for valves, thermometers, sight glasses, wort returns, sparge arms (in the lid). You could even install an electric element if you wanted, like to do a recirculating mash system. Actually I think that's what it's for, because in addition to getting me back in the game sort of, I also discovered that it doesn't retain heat for shit. Thus the space blanket in the photo above.

I've brewed on it twice. The first time I got 48% mash efficiency, even with the space blanket. Ouch. The second time I used the space blanket and a polar sleeping bag and got up to 55%. So it's been a learning experience. I brewed my Sasquatch on it. That called for some juniper, so I did some research.

Research

Fronds of destiny

That's the other thing I have to report, the Sasquatch.

I can hear you now, 'What the hell is a Sasquatch?' Well, in addition to being a possibly mythical huge hairy humanoid that stalks the forests of the Pacific Northwest, it's also a style of beer emerging, surprisingly enough, from that same region. I won't go into it here. If you want the details as I got them, give this a listen. Thing is, as soon as I heard the general idea of this thing I knew what it would have to be like, and that I had to try brewing it. There's a recipe here, but I kind of did my own thing with it.

I knew it'd be smokey and dank and woodsy, and maybe verging on undrinkable. I thought of adding juniper instead of flavor or aroma hops to achieve some of the woodsy character, and I spent an evening roaming the area around here getting cuttings and making a tea of them to see which varieties yielded the best characteristics. I settled on this particular one from a local arboretum, which was really fragrant and nice. I was like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible the way I zipped in (horizontally though, not vertically, and also on my bicycle, and not on a wire like in the movie) and got the job done right under the authorities' noses. Sweet, right?

Anyway, the Sasquatch is a long-term project and I'll do another report focusing on that when it's done. Suffice to say for now that it's been interesting and I have high hopes for it. And now...for something completely grainy.

I hear my grain a-comin'

The missus and I hosted a grain bagging party. Hella grains came to our place last month. It had been weeks of sorting out who wanted what among some local brew brethren, and how we could get that to equal 25 kg/50lb. sacks. We finally did, and there's the result, just in time for the cooler weather of brewing season to begin.

[insert 'bag' pun here]

Also there were hops. Oh, were there hops. Yes, we got a hop hook-up. Hops were hooked up. And then there were hops.

Still-life with hops

So realizing that this is not really a very interesting story (we got hops, now we have hops, etc.), I will end this. But man, oh man, do we have hops. Ah, hops. In the freezer like.

K, stay tuned.