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 Tofurkey! Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. While I’m not making one this year, Turtle Island puts out some of the most authentic-meat-tasting products available. Tofurkey tastes especially like real turkey when served cold on a sandwich the day after Thanksgiving. However I don’t suppose any of you became vegetarians so that you could go around eating processed meat-like ovals all day long. And neither did I. Once a year, though, its pretty good.
This week we bottled the Spiced Dubbel. It certainly has the fruity aroma of a Belgian-style beer. It also, most certainly, has an unusual taste. Thats a switch from before when the beer smelled horrible but tasted good. I will reserve final judgement until after it has been bottle conditioned and chilled. I think its going to be good.
More on The Danil and Jamil project: I’m still working on converting all the recipes in Brewing Classic Styles into one-gallon sizes. My spreadsheet is getting large and complicated. There are 93 recipes in total and if I want to brew them all in 2011 I still have a lot to do. I need to gather equipment and do a brew to test the one-gallon process. I also need to figure out the order in which I will brew the recipes. I don’t have a fridge to lager so I might have to put those off for a while. There are a few beers that need to be bottle conditioned for several months and one (so far) that needs to be conditioned for at least a year. The project is to brew all of the beers in a year, not to drink them all in a year so maybe that is not as much of an issue as I think.
 If only I had been using 50% efficiency to calculate my recipes the whole time… or our entire all-grain era. Everything is on track for our Holiday Dubbel except the smell. I don’t know what it smelled like. It didn’t smell like fully fermented beer. It didn’t smell like wort that didn’t ferment enough. Honestly, it kind of stunk. Maybe that is what all Belgian-style / T-58 beers smell like at this stage. Its either that or the spices. I guess its the spices. I’ve known for a while that the bobo keggle I bought off of Craigslist doesn’t contain heat that well but I didn’t realize that it was this far below what (supposedly) most other homebrew operations work at. Maybe its time for the cooler conversion or a proper sparge setup.
As for the picture… sometimes I don’t have a picture to add to a post but, for aesthetic reasons, would like one. I usually just Google some phrase from the post and put up a picture from the image search results. Today I went to the Microsoft Office Image Gallery and searched “beer.” This one is called “Man with beer and fries.” He seems contemplative. My guess is that he was doing his taxes, got fed up with some mumbo-jumbo rule and decided that in order to get his mind off of the problems at hand, he needed a smoke, a Biggie Fry, and a beer. He’s now relaxed, savoring the time between drags, and pondering whether he has enough detergent to do his undershirt laundry tonight. I’m betting that he doesn’t.
Saturday I attended the birthday celebration of an SFB founder. During that celebration we decided to open a bottle from the SFB beer cellar. For those who don’t know, we have saved three 22oz bottles of each beer we have made. The oldest (and ones not capped properly) have grown mold inside the bottle and so are now undrinkable. The beer we picked, the oldest drinkable one, we decided, after much debate, was our honey brown. I expected it (as I expect of all the beers in the cellar) to be disgusting. It was not. It was delicious! I hope they are all now delicious. The next beer from the cellar, I assume, will be opened during an upcoming “SFB and Friends” Christmas costume party. If only the next beer will be as delicious…
 I’m told that the beer we brewed last week has been happily bubbling away and should be ready for rescue soon. Sadly, no pictures are available.
This one is a Dubbel with some extra spices thrown in for holiday cheer. So, a dubbel — with left over jaggery instead of candi sugar (Mosher said its ok) — with peppercorns, grains of paradise, cloves, and one little star anise. A few notes about the above spices. I threw the star anise pod into the boil by itself at about 20 minutes remaining. The rest of the junk I put in zip lock, smashed with a crab hammer, and then emptied the bag into the boil at about 10 minutes remaining.
The star anise pod almost immediately released a wonderful odor from the boil. It floated around the top until I turned off the burner. The smashed spices behaved fine and may have also been floating on the top of the boil but they were too small to see. After chilling, while getting the wort out of the brew kettle, our siphon got stuck several times. Why? A star anise pod at the end of the siphon tube. Lesson one: get that little guy out of the wort as soon as possible.
I pitched Safale T-58. I will have to see if that turned out to be a good idea or not. We’ve had such good results with dry yeast that I am wary to change my ways. If I had some yeast starter equipment I might be persuaded to branch out to the vials. This week we am going to rack the beer to a clean carboy and throw in one vanilla bean, some cacao nibs, anywhere from one to a handful of cinnamon sticks. Some might say that I am just throwing all the spices I’ve ever wanted to use into this beer without concern for the final product. They would be right. The first part anyway. I think that (besides the cinnamon) all of these spices may work well together to form a delicious output. If they don’t, at least now I’ll know.
Coming soon (most likely in the form of a premeditated new years resolution, and just in time for the opening of his new brewery): ala Julie and Julia, I plan to brew all of the recipes in Jamil Zainasheff’s (and John Palmer’s [sorry John, three names just work]) Brewing Classic Styles recipe book. A few caveats: I will be changing my name from Daniel to Danil in order for this project name to roll off the tongue a little better, I will be brewing one-gallon all-grain versions of the recipes in the book (five gallons x 90 or so total recipes is a lot!), I will be documenting my process (including any heartwarming revelations) on this site. So keep your eyes peeled for the debut of “The Danil /Jamil Project.”
Sometimes you need to take a break from blogs and twitter and however else you communicate from the world-incognito. Other times you just forget about them. Still other times, you get hacked by some Turkish guy.
So when you come back (as I am hoping to and), like Conan did tonight, it is best to recap what you have done in the time since you last posted (or use WBAL clips featuring the masturbating bear).
1. Remeber “50 beers-50 States?” Don’t worry, I barely do. I’m stuck at 24. Really Arizona? C’mon Alabama. Distribute to Maryland (or Texas) already.
2. Beers, Just brewed: Extra Spiced Christmas Dubbel. More on That tomorrow.
3. Beers, Just drank: Unibroue Terrible, maginfique+ I get to read the bottles and pretend I know more French than I do.
4. No coming soon GABF or BBW to look forward too and the Anchor Christmas tree only intrigues for so long…
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Tofurkey! Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. While I’m not making one this year, Turtle Island puts out some of the most authentic-meat-tasting products available. Tofurkey tastes especially like real turkey when served cold on a sandwich the day after Thanksgiving. However I don’t suppose any of you became vegetarians so that you could go around eating processed meat-like ovals all day long. And neither did I. Once a year, though, its pretty good.
