Know What You’re Paying

This may be the most useful widget ever. The six-pack equivalent calculator.

Even though no one would expect beer consumed at the point of sale to be priced similarly to a retail six-pack, the six-pack equivalent is still a useful way to compare prices in a situation where the volumes offered are different.

Oregonians are beautiful people!

Road Brewing – Skull Hollow Juniper Pale Ale

Earlier this spring a friend of mine decided he really wanted to try brewing with Juniper berries, and suggested a trip to the eastern side of the Cascades (where there are lots of Juniper trees) to camp and brew. I thought it sounded like a great idea too, so we decided to set a date to go. We added a third member to our brewcrew, and headed over the mountains to the drier side of the state on May 15 at the Skull Hollow campground near Smith Rock. I sanitized and rinsed the fermenter before we left to try and save on water.

Senior Project Brew – Belgian Grand Cru

I’ve been lazy about brew blogging lately, so today I’ll make up for it a bit. This year I decided to start a new departmental tradition – a senior brewing project. So in late April five of the six graduating chemistry and biochemistry majors came over to brew, along with one of my colleagues who had always wanted to see the process. I chose the style and purchased all of the ingredients, and they did all the work.

Alt Bier Update

On Sunday evening I racked the Alt Bier to a secondary fermenter and dry hopped it with 0.5 oz of Czech Saaz hops. The gravity was 1.030, so the yeasties were obviously doing their jobs. The beer is currently the color of apple cider. It is somewhat sweet, with a good malt aroma and flavor. There is an initial bit of acidity when it first hits the palate. I’ll let it sit in the secondary for a while, probably over spring break (so at least until the 27th or so).

Duesseldorf Alt Bier

One of my favorite beer styles is Alt bier (in German, “old beer”).  Alt is brewed in Duesseldorf, a city on the Rhine river near Cologne.  I acquired a taste for Alt when I was a summer intern at Bayer A.G. in Leverkusen, which is a little south of Duesseldorf, and across the river from Cologne.  Today I brewed an Alt, with a bit of a northwest tilt:

Zymurgy!

Today I kegged the beer I’ve been planning for several years – Hairy Porter. Hairy Porter is a chocolate-habanero porter: dark, thick, rich, and spicy. The initial flavor is something like a semi-sweet mocha. The heat from the chilies is subdued, but builds in the top of your mouth and back of your throat. Ok, it goes all the way down to your stomach. As I write this, it is snowing here, in the Willamette valley, and I can think of no other beer I’d like to drink and watch the snowfall than Hairy Porter. One of my inspirations for this beer was the chocolate-habanero stout from Roots Organic in Portland, Oregon.

Why am I blogging about this here? Because beer is chemistry. Lots of good chemistry. I’ll write about it someday, but for now read on for the recipe and beer-geek details.