Second Floor Brewing

My tour of Oregon and Northern California continues.

As I write this I am in Healdsburg, CA — home of Bear Republic Brewing.  I stopped by their Brewery and Restaurant today and had a Peter Brown Tribute Ale.  It was delicious and entered my belly rather quickly.  I’ve had a few other good beer-related stops including the Barley and Hops Tavern in Occidental, CA where I had a Pliny the Elder (my first one) and a Death & Taxes from Moonlight Brewing in near-by Fulton CA.

I had a few good local Portland beers as well and it seems that craft beer logos are on every set of tap handles I see.  Today I stopped at the Hop Kiln Winery which — before grape vines grew a-plenty in Sonoma County — used to dry hops from local hop farms.  The main building should be my Wordless Wednesday tomorrow.

At another winery I got to taste the grape “wort.”  It is the juice from the crushed grapes before fermentation.  I expected it to be sugary and hard to drink but it was delicious, perhaps more so than any of the wines I sampled today.

So far so good.  Six days to go.

Well lets call it a week of anticipation: waiting to see if Devil’s Pale Ale is the winner of the Pratt Street Ale House homebrew competition and waiting to hear back from Mr Marlon, requester of our first “pro” brewing gig, to see if he still wants the Old #1 we brewed for him.

Beer Notes: The only thing wrong with the aforementioned Evil Ale is a bit of over-carbonation.  We will try to cut back on the bubbly next time we bottle.  Maybe 3/4 of a bag of priming sugar would be enough, maybe just 1/2.  On the positive side, everyone seems to like the beer.  Everyone except one PSAH brewmaster so it seems.  As for the Old #1, the brew started out at a low OG so I threw in some extra DME we had from our last extract brew.  That raised the OG to just under what I expected.  There was a large amount of fermentation activity.  The beer seems to be coming along nicely.

Full On Double Racking: This weekend we transferred both the Old #1 Pale Ale and our beleaguered Munich Helles to clean carboys for dry hopping and lagering respectively.  The pale ale looked, smelled, and tasted amazing.  The pale lager, on the other hand, looked, smelled, and tasted like it needs some serious help.  We’ll see what a month in fridge does for it.

Adios: I’m leaving for the west coast for a dozen plus days.  I hope to have some sweet beer shots for you when I return and maybe a few posts from the road.

Week in Review

Thursday (8/12): Plane delayed coming back from Texas, just barely got to Max’s Rare & Obscure, met Marlon of Vino Rosino, received first brewing gig – for Marlon’s 30th birthday we’re brewing up a batch of Old #1 Pale Ale a.k.a Marlon’s XXX Pale Ale.

Friday (8/13): Anticipation of SFB’s first brewing gig, anticipation of turning in our Pratt Street Ale House homebrew contest entry, dreams of both going well.

Saturday (8/14): Dropped off Devil’s Tale Ale at the Pratt Street Ale House, looked around for other entries in the homebrew contest so that I could sabotage them, found none, drank the evil ale, smiled devilishly, enjoyed pro-brewed craft beers (save one Boh) at various spots around the city.

Sunday (8/15): No beer but rocked out to Ray Lamontage at Merriweather,  he started off slow but then really got into it, did an amazing version of “Shame,”  first song on the new CD is so funky, David Grey shakes his head like a crazy person when he sings, left half way through David Grey’s set.

Monday (8/16): Worked on converting the Old #1 recipe from extract to all grain, planned to go to Maryland Homebrew to get ingredients and then brew, found out that Maryland Homebrew is closed on Monday, #fail, Thirsty Brewer?, also closed on Mondays, #doublefail.

Tuesday (8/17): Realized that those two-bit hacks over at ESPN started up their much lamer Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, shook my fist at my laptop screen, calmed down, decided that I must not write a TMQ this week lest it be confused with the pile o’ dung over at ESPN.com.

Wednesday (8/18): WMQ returns! At least I think I’ve done one of these before.  Attempt to buy ingredients for Marlon’s XXX Pale Ale take 2.  If all that goes well, there will be a rain brew today.

I hate it when I have two TMQ’s in a row.  Sometimes you have stuff to say.  Sometimes you have to aggregate.  Other times you have to write longer than necessary intros.

DTA is bottled but the concept is dead.  I even went to far as to call it out “Jaggery British IPA” on twitter.  It fits the style guidelines for an IPA but I don’t really think it should be called one.  That’ll do until I think up a better name.  If we win the PSAH contest, I hope that they can do the recipe justice, make it a true Evil Ale.

I’ve been wanting to do a sour beer for a few weeks now and while I may still do a Berliner Weisse, I think our next beer may end up being our anniversary beer.  I’ve known that is going to be our first lambic attempt for a while now or as I like to call it: a wonderful way to take one of our carboys out of commission for a year.

Either way SFB’s first anniversary is September 29.  Mark your calendars.  On that day we will break into the SFB beer cellar for the first time and try a few of our earlier beers (aged one year).  Honestly, the first few beers in the cellar are corked in old wine bottles and are growing mold so we wont drink those.  And a few bottles have exploded so we wont drink those either.

Bad News:

• I ruined the batch of California Red I was going to share with my block party.  Carboys are used for a reason.  I will remember that.  I think it was going to be delicious though.  Perhaps I will remake it one day.
• The Munich Helles is not coming along as we would have liked.  Lagers, lagers, lagers…  Why must you irritate me so?

Good News:

• The Devil’s Tail Ale is coming along well as far as I can tell.  We should be set to add a little something into the secondary this week and bottle in time for submission to the Pratt Street Ale House contest.
• Next I think our next beer will be a sour one.  I’m thinking Berliner Weisse.  Gotta love a good sour beer.  Can we make an imperial Berliner Weisse? Hmm…

If you are looking for what has happened at SFB between last Wednesday and today well then look no further.  This is the post that will inform you.

We brewed our brand new Devil’s Tail Ale. That’s right, the ale so evil that even though we brewed it under (the day before) a full moon it refused to conform to our narrow expectations.  It would not end up at 1.o666 OG and I expect it will not finish at 6.66% alcohol, 6.66 SRM, nor will it have 66.6 IBUs.  You can’t contain the devil.  We should have known.  Every one should know.

I also updated the “Beers” pages with the last two beers we have brewed.  I don’t have much information but what I do have now is more to talk about.

Upcoming this weekend: SFB has its public debut at a block party on my street.  A few pictures should follow if all goes well.  The beer I’m serving is a red I’ve had in my kitchen for a few weeks that I thought was going to be trash but then turned into beer after I re-pitched yeast and then added blueberries to.  I’m going to keg it and hope it turns out better than the last beer we tried to keg.

The omens are all around.  Can’t you see them?

A brew day is approaching.  It will, without a doubt, be the most heinous SFB brew day of all time.  On that day we will be brewing our new Devil’s Tail Ale.  A beer (in design at least) so evil that we must only mention it once in this article and that it must always be bolded.

I’ve discussed how the number of the beast will be worked into multiple parts of the recipe in a previous TMQ.  But, to make the beer as evil as possible it will contain one of the most pungent (trust me!) ingredients I have ever used: jaggery.  I bought two of the fez-shaped blocks (pictured) at a local Indian grocery for a few dollars.  If it turns out odious enough, we are going to enter this devil beer in the Pratt Street Ale House’s homebrew contest.

In other, non-evil, news, I replaced our faux-BP logo that came with the WordPress theme which used to be in the upper-left corner of the site with a little crescent moon icon.  I tried to get it to match the font.  It’s pretty OK.

The moon goes with a SFB logo I created last week and that will be tomorrow’s Wordless Wednesday unless I get something better between now and then.  It’s just step one of my evil (!) plan that also involves printing many shirts with the afore mentioned logo on them and distributing them to various thrift stores under the guise of donations.  Soon all the kids will be talking about this “Second Floor Brewing.”  Guerrilla marketing at its finest, courtesy of SFB!