Seriously, peppermint extract? I feel for you guys that have to dick with this.  If I pulled anise from the hat I probably would have forfeited since I can’t stand that shit.

The real coincidence here is that a coconut milk stout was next in line for me to brew if I lost the last round.  Last month I stopped by Town Hall Brewery in Minneapolis and had a special release called “Three Hour Tour“.  It’s a coconut milk stout that since my first drink has had me fiending to brew something similar.  I’ve reached out to one of the brewers up there for recipe and process hints on their beer.  Hopefully they’ll call back.

As for the Fruity Pebbles wheat beer, local St. Louisans are more than welcome to get some of this shit since I need to make room for beers that I’ll actually drink.  Serg- I’m sending your shit out once it get’s bottled.

My challenge: generic Fruity Pebbles

If you google fruity pebbles and beer, the result is like 20k hits on Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat beer.  Well that was fucking easy… now off to brewing.  I decided to make a heavily hopped amarillo wheat beer similar to Three Floyd’s Gumball Head.  Well, minus the cereal.

I’ll spare you with the details of the process, just know that an entire 25.5 oz bag of Fruity Dyno Bites went into the mash.  It was a small 5 gallon batch: 5 lbs of American 2-row barley, 4.5 lbs of American wheat malt, and a decent amount of citrusy amarillo hops.  Very basic recipe, here are some more pics:

Mash:

Sparge and awesome shot of all the shit in my garage:

Bittering hop addition:

Setting the mood:

Flavor/aroma hop addition:

Yeast having sex:

I’ll post the results after this shit ferments, gets dry-hopped with more amarillo and I get it carbonated.  If it ends up tasting/smelling like it did going into this this fucker then all the ladies in the bi-state area are going to have wet panties.

Fucking A.

Instructions for all you do-it-yourself’ers:

-Dice 7 or 8 slices of raw bacon and cook on low heat in cast iron pan to render as much fat as possible.  That shit is going to cook for a while.  Make sure them motherfuckers get all crispy.

-Pat bacon down with a shitload of paper towels.  Get those little bacon hoes as dry as possible because this is going to end up in a beer and you don’t want fat floaties fucking up your head retention.

-Add the bacon to a mason jar or other sealable container and cover that shit with Maker’s Mark.  Tighten the lid.

-Let that murky looking shit sit in a cool dark place for at least 24 hours and then put it in the freezer for a few hours (4-6 should do) to solidify the remaining fat.

-Pull bacon bourbon from freezer and strain through a cheesecloth first and then move it through a coffee filter.  One thing I learned with the bacon vodka was to start with a coarse filter and then graduate to a finer filter.  Even after getting a bunch of fat out of the bourbon with the cheesecloth that coffee filter action is still going to be slow as shit so make sure you have the time to do this.  I finally gave up and started squeezing the bourbon out of the filter and repeated it through new coffee filters a couple times.  I could never get the bourbon crystal clear so I finally said fuck it who cares I’m putting bacon in a beer a then went to the next step.

-Get some smoked porter.  I suppose you could get a bottle or growler of this shit from a local brewpub.  I happened to have a keg of my own home-brewed smoked porter lying around and a growler of O’Fallon Smoke (which is really fucking amazing if you get the chance to try it straight up or their whiskey barrel-aged limited releases).

-I used an eye dropper and measured out approx. 100 drops per 12 oz bottle, topped it off with my homebrew and then capped the bottle.  If you are adding this to a bottle or growler of beer just drop it directly in a pint glass and then top with the beer to distribute the sweet, sweet goodness.

-Enjoy.

Since I know the brewers at O’Fallon I took the bacon and bourboned growler of their Smoke up to the brewery and had’em try it.  They though it was good but maybe a tad too salty and the bacon and bourbon characteristics were too faint.  Then I cracked open a bottle of my baconed homebrew and it was apparent the less smokey beer (mine) had much more bacon and bourbon flavor and aroma.  If beer geeks think it’s drinkable then I’d say it was a success.  Other reviews mentioned it tasted like soy sauce and I got more salt and beef jerky than anything, which kinda makes sense altogether.  I’m digging on the remaining bottles but next time, yes there will be a next time, I would maybe add a little more than the 100 drops and take it up to 125-150 (depending on the bacon strength).

Every fall, Iron Barley (as seen on the St. Louis edition of Man vs. Food) hosts a tomato festival and invites people to submit their best tomato recipe for judging.  Usually it’s food but for the past few years a buddy of mine makes a batch of tomato beer.  This year we’re going to mix a fresh batch of this bacon and bourbon beer with his tomato concoction but with more of a twist.  If you’ve ever been to a beer festival you may have seen a Randall.  Well, we’re going to build one and fill it with lettuce, essentially “dry-lettucing” the beer on it’s way to the faucet to make a BLT beer.  We’re not fucking around over here.

I was hollering at CeePee the other day and he mentioned how you can buy carbonated milk in Korea.  At first it sounded really fucked up and then I came to thinking that it’s probably pretty damn good if a company is selling it.  I mean, there has to be a market for carbonated milk if the company exists, right?  Well, after a couple minutes I realized that I could make some fizzy milk in the comforts of my own home using my homebrewing equipment.

So here’s my CO2 tank.  I use this to serve beer from my 5-gallon soda kegs and to force carbonate beers.  Whenever I brew a beer and don’t have time to wait for it to carbonate slowly I hook up the gas and shake the keg for a few minutes.  With a carbonator cap I can do the same thing if I want to carbonate a smaller quantity of beer like a 2-liter bottle.

So instead of using beer with this shit I decided to try out milk.  We’re not stopping there though.  On the way home from work I picked up some Hawaiian Punch, orange Gatorade, Snapple Iced Tea w/Lemon and a bottle of Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino.

We started off with Hawaiian Punch since we figured it would taste the best.

We were right.  It reminded me of a really sweet fruit punch soda and was quite pleasant. (8/10)

Next we tried the orange Gatorade.

It was really bland.  The carbonation gave it a bite that somehow overtook the orange flavor.  I mean, this shit isn’t that flavorful out of the bottle.  I couldn’t imagine just how shitty this would be if you downed a quart after exercising.  (4/10)

And then we hooked the Snapple Iced Tea.

Wow.  My first impression was lemon Alka Seltzer tablets but then it was like drinking a soda tea.  It was pretty much what you would expect but that first drink wasn’t pleasant.  (6/10)

Next up, Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino.

This shit was weird.  When poured into a pint glass it foamed up like a root beer float.  We took a drink and once you got through the head it tasted fine, almost as if the carbonation completely escaped the drink.  I was kinda pissed off and looked at the bottle with the other half in it and it wasn’t foamy at all so I took a drink.  It was fucking horrible.  That shit caught me off guard and punched me in the junk.  Way too fizzy for something you’d expect to be creamy.  (2/10)

Finally we took on some skim milk.

Have you ever burped up foam?  This was so fucking disgusting. It was like seltzer water that tried to be creamy.  It’s 20 minutes later and I still have this nasty taste in my mouth.  (0/10)

If you have any ideas for other shit to carbonate post’em in the comments.  Things to remember are the liquid needs to be cold and must be thin enough to allow CO2 to escape so ketchup or sausage gravy won’t work.  Perhaps gazpacho?

Not the greatest restaurant out there, but their bloody menu is unreal. After a strait up greygoose, hot bloody mix, and applewood smoked bacon pint at the bar, our table was ready and I was in good enough spirits to go all out on my next round. Behold my favorite new bloody.

Grey Goose, crab, shrimp, bacon, clamato, worschestershire, tabasco, horseradish, pickle, celery, olive, and lime. Nuff said. 

Warning – multiple bloodies will just cause you to start ordering “real” mixed drinks at 11 am, which in turn may or may not become an afternoon of Wii bowling coupled with a case of beer.

Thanks homie!

So what’s up with me?  Every once in a while I come up with an idea and never execute the shit.  Hopefully with the winter months ahead I’ll get crackin and share it all with you.

Lately I’ve been making beer.  Lots of beer like this amazing pumpkin hookup made with fresh pumpkin- no canned shit over here.  It was a ton of work but totally worth it.  Last Saturday was National Teach a Friend to Homebrew Day and my homebrew club met at the O’Fallon Brewery to make some beers.  I ended up brewing a smoked robust porter that will be aged with oak cubes and alot of whiskey (Maker’s Mark).

During the event, one of the dudes in the club came up to me and was talking about a tomato beer he brewed over the summer and it gave me the idea to develop a bacon beer recipe and blend it with his tomato jawn for a BLT type drink.  The guys at Schlafly have a hop infuser which is basically a hop-filled canister in which cold beer passes though right before serving to give the beer mega hop flavor.  We may ask to borrow that shit and for our blended beer and add iceberg lettuce or some shit to the infuser for laughs.

Anyone have a clue how to extract a shitload of bacon flavor into a small quantity of vodka?  Holler in the comments if you have any suggestions.

Oh yeah I’m still DJing at Nelly’s booty cake club so that shit’s been majorly time consuming and I haven’t had much time to experiment in the kitchen, but I got this awesome pork chop thang in my head so look out for that soon along with some possible videos of my newest kitchen gadget.

Stay tuned motherfuckers.

-G

You may be asking yourself,  ”why is this so awesome?”.  For starters it has the fucking recipe for Olde English “800″.

I have been on the lookout for a good malt liquor recipe for a while now.  My searching started off with St. Ides and then went to Colt .45 but nothing turned up.  Rumors that a recipe for OE was included in this book were flying around a few beer nerd message boards.  I opened up the book like a kid on Christmas day, went right to the table of contents and quickly flipped to the Gold Award winning entry for American Malt Liquor…

My eyes widened as I quickly made my way through the recipe.  I whispered “yesssssssssss” to myself knowing that I have access to all of the ingredients and equipment required to brew this masterpiece.

So the homies and I are going to cook some of this shit up in the next few weeks.  In the meanwhile, check out some of the absolutely amazing reviews of OE at beeradvocate.com while I try to find a way to put this crap in old 40 oz bottles.  I need to find some 40’s that don’t have the twist-off caps and that would have required a bottle opener but I have a feeling they don’t exist.

EDIT: Here’s the all-grain recipe taken from the book for those wanting to try it out on their own:

Olde English 800
5 Gallons

OG: 1.055 (13.5)
FG: 1.004 (1)
ABV: 7%
Color: 4.5 SRM
Bittering Units: 14

3.5 lbs. American 2-row pale malt
3.75 lbs. American 6-row malt
3 lbs. flaked corn
2 HBU (56 MBU) American Cluster hops (pellets) – 105 minutes (bittering)
1.5 HBU (43 MBU) American Nugget hops (pellets) – 105 minutes (bittering)
1/4 tsp. Irish moss
Wyeast 2007 Pilsen Lager yeast

A step infusion mash is employed to mash the grains.  Add 10 quarts (9.5L) of 130-degree F (54.5 C) water to the crushed grain and flaked corn, stir, stabilize and hold the temperature at 122 degrees F (50 C) for 30 minutes.  Add 5 quarts (1.9 L) of boiling water.  Add heat to bring temperature up to 150 degrees F (65.5 C).  Hold for about 60 minutes.

After conversion, raise temperature to 167 degrees F (75 C) water, lauter and sparge with 4 gallons (15 L) of 170 degree F (77 C) water.  Collect about 6.5 gallons (25 L) of of runoff, add bittering hops and bring to a full and vigorous boil.

The total boil time will be 105 minutes.  When 10 minutes remain, add Irish moss.  After total wort boil of 105 minutes (reducing wort volume to just over 5 gallons), turn off the heat, then separate or strain out and sparge hops.  Chill the wort to 65 degrees F (18 C) and direct into a sanitized fermenter.  Aerate the cooled wort well.  Add an active yeast culture and ferment for 4 to 6 days in the primary at 55 degrees F (15 C). Then transfer into a secondary fermenter, chill to 50 degrees F (10 C) to age for two more weeks, then lager for two to four more weeks at 40 degrees F (4.5 C).

When secondary aging is complete, prime with sugar, bottle or keg.  Let condition at temperatures above 60 degrees F (15.5 C) until clear and carbonated, then store chilled. 

This is why I haven’t been cooking shit.

Lately I’ve been working on my birthday present from Sarah.  She bought me this Magic Chef chest 7.2 CF chest freezer that I’m in the process of converting into a kegerator.   Sorry exotic and stupid food, beer will always win.

I took the lid of this hoe and built a wooden collar out of 2×10’s that sits perfectly on the lip of the cooler.  The collar gives the cooler additional height and provides worry-free drilling so I don’t hit a coolant line.  The extra height permits me to add two additional (5-gallon soda) kegs so I’ll have a total of 6 when it’s completed.

Over the past few nights I’ve been hooking up the CO2 lines and fittings and plan on getting my used kegs cleaned out tonight.  Hopefully I’ll be able to transfer the cider, Pilsner Urkel, Gnome root beer (it’s beer) and English Brown Ale into the kegs tomorrow night and get them carbonated.  I still need to add some insulating foam, seal all of the collar seams and holes with silicone, calculate/install the beer line lengths to get proper pressure, attach the lid and hook up the digital thermostat that will regulate the freezer to beer serving temperatures.

I’ve also been really contemplating buying a gang of St. Ides or Colt .45 40’s and transferring them to an empty keg and having them on tap since my research on brewing my own malt liquor seems like it would be a pain in the ass.  There are ways to transfer the beer without spoiling it, just need to do some more research and bid on a Billy D. Williams autographed 8×10 to hang above the kegerator.  

I’ll be back with more food shit soon.  My homie Daeng just sent me an amazing care package from Thailand that includes some suprisingly tasty durian chips and an assortment of other really cool looking stuff that I haven’t gotten into yet.

-G

I made the jump to all-grain brewing this weekend.  So far I’ve brewed 2 batches of beer (American Wheat from Homebrewing 101 and Pilsner Urkel) using extract kits and decided to take my shit to the next level and actually do all of the work from scratch myself.  Homies DBlue and Shojonz came over on Saturday and we cooked up 10 gallons of Southern English Brown Ale.  If you don’t give a shit about how you can make beer like the breweries at the convenience of your own home than jump to one of Serg’s posts about bacon dogs or deep-fried pancakes, they are way more entertaining.

First, I’ll try to enlighten you guys on the overall brewing process before I nerd out.  In order to make beer, you need 4 things: malted barley (milled), hops, water and yeast.

Here is a synopsis of the all-grain brewing process (taken from John Palmer’s book, “How to Brew“) :

1. Malted barley is soaked in hot water to release the malt sugars.
2. The malt sugar solution is boiled with Hops for seasoning.
3. The solution is cooled and yeast is added to begin fermentation.
4. The yeast ferments the sugars, releasing CO2 and ethyl alcohol.
5. When the main fermentation is complete, the beer is bottled with a little bit of added sugar to provide the carbonation.

I’m going to cover steps 1-3 today.  Steps 4 and 5 will be covered in follow-up posts. 

Step 1:

I needed to buy some more equipment so I picked up a mash tun and sparge vessel (or hot liquor tank) from my homeboy brewd00d.  He sells some awesome rigs and I can’t recommend checking out his site enough.  Here’s the shit in action:

“The Mash Tun is simply used to steep the various grains selected for brewing beer. Grain is mixed with water and allowed to steep for a set amount of time (60 to 90 minutes) which allows the starches to be coverted to fermentable sugars. After the mashing is complete, the liquid mixed with the grain is allowed to slowly drain off through the bottom valve into the bucket.  At the same time, water is introduced from the sparge vessel (or hot liquor tank) and introduced to the top of the grain bed. This allows the residual sugars to be rinsed from the grain and is known as fly-sparging.”

Yes, I copied the explanation above from this place because it was written way better than what I had.

In the photo below (taken from brewd00d’s site because I’m too lazy to go outside and take my own picture) you’ll first see the bottom manifold inside the mash tun which is basically a filter to keep the grain inside. 

For our batch this weekend we heated up 5.5 gallons of water and poured it into the mash tun. Once the water cooled down to 163 degrees we added the milled grain I bought from Dave over at St. Louis Wine and Beermaking and stirred it up to prevent clumps of grain from forming. The temperature of the mash hit 153 degrees so we closed the lid and set the timer for 90 minutes while we drank some of DBlue’s homebrewed lemon wheat and APA beers and heated up some more water for the sparge vessel.  Once 90 minutes passed, we slowly began to drain the liquid (now called wort) from the bottom cooler into the bucket.

Just prior to draining the wort from the mash tun, we filled the sparge vessel with the water we heated while waiting for the mash to finish.  A sparge vessel is basically a giant thermos that is used to hold the hot water at a constant temperature.  This hot water is slowly trickled into the mash tun via the built in sparge manifold.

Here is a photo of the mash tun’s sparge manifold in action.  The manifold is that thing attached to the lid which evenly distributes water to prohibit channels from forming in the grain.  The grain bed has settled and is now naturally filtering shit so I’m not getting grain husks and crap in my wort.

Step 2

Once I collected the required amount of wort, in this case 11.5 gallons, I dumped it into the brew kettle. We collected the extra 1.5 gallons because we are nerds and calculated the evaporation loss from a 60 minute boil.

My not-so-ethically aquired brewing kettle is an old keg that my homie Jamy gave me in exchange for a six pack of the first beer I brewed.  These things are perfect.  They hold 15.5 gallons, are stainless steel and much cheaper than a kettle you would buy from a homebrew shop.  I cut a hole in the top of that bitch with a sawzall and cleaned it up with a Dremel tool.  A spigot was later added after I drilled a hole in the side of the keg and returned the $45 drill bit to Home Depot.  The burner is a Bayou Classic hookup that I got at the same Home Depot and shit is rated at 200,000 BTUs.

Once the wort hit a boil we added our first stage of hops. Hops add bitterness, flavor and aroma to beer. The longer that hops boil they lose their aroma, flavor and then become bitter. So we added some magnum hops for bittering at the beginning of the boil then let that shit go for 45 minutes while we ate some of Sarah’s chicken adobo. With 15 minutes left in the boil we added some East Kent Golding hop pellets for flavor and aroma.

Step 3

After 60 minutes passed we cooled off the wort with DBlue’s immersion chiller.

An immersion chiller is basically a coil of copper tubing that you place in the hot wort to cool it down.  Here’s a damn good explanation by Karl Lutzen and Mark Stevens from their book, “Brew Ware“:

“Wort chillers are used to quickly cool the hot wort after boiling. Rapid wort cooling is important to the making of good beer. It helps to reduce the formation of off-flavor compounds and it allows the brewer to add the yeast to the wort more quickly, thereby reducing the chances for bacterial spoilage. Immersion chillers are usually built from a coil of copper tubing with connectors on each end to which hoses are attached (garden hoses are often used). One connector is run to a source of cold water; the other is run to a drain for expelling the hot water. The immersion chiller offers a simple, effective way to quickly cool hot wort.”

There are a few other wort cooler contraptions out there that are much more efficient but I’ll get into that when I post the “Build Your Own Immersion Chiller” article.

Once the wort was cooled to 80 degrees I drained it into a sanitized fermenting bucket and 6 gallon carboy (big glass jug). I made a yeast starter from a pack of English Ale yeast a few days before so it would be ready to kick ass when I placed it in the wort.  Airlocks were placed on the bucket and carboy to allow CO2 (one of the byproducts of fermentation) to exit but keep bad shit from entering and infecting the sterile wort.

I placed the bucket and carboy in the closet of our guest bedroom away from the light.   For this style of beer you want it to be at around 65-70 degrees for optimal fermention and let it go for 11-14 days.

So last night I was at DBlue’s crib and mentioned how much extra wort we had and how I practically topped off the carboy.  He laughed at me and advised me to check on it when I got home and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t overflowing with foam (krausen) produced by the yeast.  Here’s the email I sent to DBlue:

“dude.

I got home and checked the bucket and carboy- shiiiit.

The bucket was ok but that fucking carboy practically exploded shit everywhere. No glass breakage but it probably wasn’t too far off. The airlock has crap all up in it and I tried to release some pressure but was greeted by a spray of foam shit all over the front half of my body and the closet wall. I managed to wrap my shirt around the top of the carboy and airlock but the middle piece of the airlock kept coming out with the foam so I said fuck it and walked downstairs and built myself a blowoff system out of an old #7 bung, some tubing, an avocado and a glass bowl from the kitchen filled with sanitizer (that I sanitized the tubing and bung with). I hope I didn’t contaminate anything but I’m assuming not since all the shit was on it’s way out.

I’d say we’re bubbling away like a motherfucker now.”

To be continued…