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By D Self, on December 9th, 2010
 Beer 25
Name: Belgian-Style Dubbel
Brewery: Choc Beer Company
Location: Krebs, OK
Brewing Since: 1909?
Sight: Beer-bottle brown.
Scent: Fruitastic.
Texture: Small bubbles, smooth mouthfeel.
Taste: What you (and I) would expect from a dubbel.
Thoughts: This was a pretty good Dubbel. If you don’t believe me then believe the “Gold Medal at 2010 Great American Beer Festival” sticker on the bottle. I want to say that I remember trying Choc while I was there but if I had to bet (who’s going to make me?) I would bet that I did not. The company’s website is crazy: too many spinning beer bottles. Why do they spin? And why so fast? There is also a lengthy story about the history of Choc beer. I read it. It made me want to try a few of the other beers they make so I guess the story did its job.
How to Drink: First, announce that you will attempt to drink and write about a craft beer brewed in every state. Start of pretty quickly and then slow to a walk, then to a crawl, next to whatever you call the way an inchworm moves, and then stop for about six months. Tell yourself that it is not your fault that you haven’t finished the country’s beers. After all, only so many beers are available in Maryland and you can’t ship them in. Hang your head in shame. Then, one winter day, while travelling for work, find a bottle of beer brewed in Oklahoma and revel in the fact that you are now, finally, half-way finished. Exhale contently. Then realize at this pace you will finish all 50 beers in the year 2063. Lower head back to shame level.
By D Self, on December 7th, 2010
 Beer: Our Very Holiday Very Spiced Dubbel is delicious. We did a sneak-taste of a few bottles last Sunday. Its official debut will be at the SFB Christmas Party in two weeks. It smells fruity like a Belgian does and tastes oh so spiced. Some may claim that it is too spiced. To those I say “bah” and suggest your tastebuds need a good kick in the pants (assuming they even wear pants — you know how tastebuds are!).
The Danil and Jamil Project: So I finished entering all the recipes from Brewing Classic Styles into a spreadsheet for easy one-fifthing. It was a great experience just reading through all of the recipes. In processing through the book, it became obvious to me that it is the work of two (or more) people. I notices a few little differences between the recipes. Sometimes it was “Fuggle,” other times it was “Fuggles.” Sometimes it was “Pilsener,” other times it was “Pilsner.” Sometimes the recipes used amounts all cut to the nearest quarter pound or ounce, other times the recipes used amounts with decimals out to the hundredths. In thinking about the fact that two (or more) people wrote the book, I have decided that I can no longer call this project “The Danil and Jamil Project” out of respect to John Palmer. I still working on a new title.
Image: I like this little guy. I found him by again searching the Microsoft Office Image database for “beer.” He may be SFB’s new mascot. I’m calling him A.C. until I think of something better. Just look at him. He’s happy, expelling Carbon Dioxide, and giving you the thumbs-up. If only he was winking too. I might be able to do something about that…
By D Self, on December 3rd, 2010
No beer but…
By D Self, on November 25th, 2010
 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.
By D Self, on November 17th, 2010
By D Self, on November 16th, 2010
 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…
By D Self, on November 11th, 2010
 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.”
By D Self, on November 9th, 2010
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…
By D Self, on October 31st, 2010
SFB was hacked! Not to sound too excited about it… The home page was the image above for a brief time yesterday. The hacker replaced our index files so that any request to our main URL was shown his home page. For that I am grateful. I guess he hacked our FTP password and could have done a lot more damage. From what I can tell, this dazzling intellect call himself iSKORPiTX and is from Turkey and boy does he hate Armenia (although he sends his best regards to the rest of the world). I would love to know the series of events that led up to his hacking. My guess is that he was not too pleased with our offerings at the Homebrew Showcase at Havana’s. Sorry iSKORPiTX. Next time we will do better. I can promise you that.
By D Self, on October 18th, 2010
 Last year, about this time, I wrote something about how I didn’t even know about Baltimore Beer Week until it was over (nevermind if that coincided with starting to follow BeerInBaltimore on twitter). If I recall, the title was (or should have been) “Baltimore Beer Weak.” I thought that, as someone not knowledgeable about the Baltimore beer scene, Baltimore Beer Week should have done more to reach out to people like me, to tell me that there is this wonderful quasi week full of beer events.
This year it seemed to me that Baltimore Beer Week must have doubled just about everything. There was plenty of advertising for the norms and plenty more events. I also increased my participation this year. I attended two events and took part in one. I was surprised (and pleased) to see that a non-headlining event, The Homebrew Showcase, had over 200 people attend. The opening ceremony was a hit, there were many, many tweets about the events I didn’t go to, and the Canton Waterfront looked crowded as I drove by on Sunday.
Speaking of the Homebrew Showcase, I am proud to say that we did not come in last… on of our beers tied for last place! Someone else was down there with us. We also received a nod having another beer come in third to last place. Very exciting. No where to go but up. The beers turned out well except they were under-carbonated. We lost to some delicious beers and apparently, fell victim to one of my own beer festival rules: we did not bring our “A” game. Three hours in a row being nice to people was a little much for me. I feel for the guys that have to do this sort of thing all the time. Although it was fun to talk about beer for three hours in a row. And thats me at the showcase in the picture (I stole from the events SnapFish page) with a stern gaze out into the crowd of people, most of whom would not be voting for SFB.
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