Meeting Today! - May 17, 2011

Just a reminder for all of you that our monthly general meeting is tonight at 7:30 PM at the Bridgeport VFW Post 5079 at 3202 S. May! The board of directors meeting begins promptly at 6:30.

Big Brew 2011!

Big Brew is tomorrow starting at 10 AM. Last year the club brewed 140 gallon, 70 of Dunkelweizen and 70 of American Rye Amber. This year a single 120 gallon batch of English IPA will have to suffice. Beer and bbq will be enjoyed by all.

See you there!

How to brew mauby

Those of you who showed up to last night's meeting sampled a new beverage I recently discovered called mauby. It's a Caribbean soft drink that was originally fermented, if only for carbonation, though I'm sure you can let the gravity drop a few more points to make things a bit more fun.

The following recipe I obtained from an old book about native Haitian plants and vegetables used for medicinal purposes. Maby, as the Haitians call it, was implanted from Jamaica and was one of the earliest fermented beverages drank in Haiti, before the importation of English beers in the late 1800s under the administration of President Boisrond-Canal. Similar in flavor to a ginger beer or root beer, maby can be occasionally served with white rum or gin.

The units of measurement in the recipe were rather arbitrary, so I'll list the measurements the recipe called for and what I actually measured out are in parentheses.

Mauby bark - 6 finger-length pieces (approx. 5 grams)

Chewstick - 3 pieces the same length (approx. 25-30 g)

Ginger - 3 grated legs/branches of the root (approx. 3 TBSP grated)

Melegueta leaves - 1 TBSP

Lime peels - 3 whole peels

Cinnamon - a strong pinch (1/2 tsp)

Star anise - a strong pinch (1 tsp--the star anise wasn't ground so after pulverizing it a bit, I settled on 1 tsp rather than 1/2 since most of the scoop was still empty space)

Raw brown sugar - 1 1/2 lbs to 2 lbs (I used 2 lbs)

1 gal water

This recipe makes a 1 gallon batch. Just dump everything into the pot and boil for about half an hour. There are plenty of solids from the spices so I definitely recommend using a mesh bag as it'll make filtering at the end easier. The recipe shows that maby was traditionally bottle fermented, so I just used a simple rehydrated dry ale yeast and let ferment at room temperature for a day or two in 22-oz bottles or larger. As this is being bottle fermented, I wouldn't recommend using 12-oz bottles as they may not be able to withstand the pressure.

Finding the ingredients can be tricky, but thankfully Chicago's wonderfully diverse with plenty of ethnic grocers and markets. Most Caribbean and West Indian markets will have the mauby bark and chewsticks available. I found mine at Rogers Park Fruit Market on Clark St. between Touhy and Howard. Raw brown sugar can be found at any Hispanic grocer sold as piloncillo.

The only ingredient I couldn't find during my hunt were the melegueta leaves. Aframomum melegueta, produces the spice more commonly known as grains of paradise. However, this recipe doesn't require the seed, but rather the leaves. I was fortunate enough to have family in Queens who mailed over a couple packets of the leaves for me. If anyone knows where to find this in Chicagoland, please let me know!

UPDATE: Same time, different location for tomorrow's meeting

This meeting's going to be a bit different. Since the VFW was double booked, the Board of Directors is meeting at Maria's Community Bar on 31st & Morgan at 6:30 PM. From here, those of you taking mass transit can meet and carpool with some of the drivers to The Plant for the general meeting.

The general meeting will be at The Plant, located at 1400 W. Bishop, near the corner of 46th & Bishop. It's just behind the Super Mas Market visible from 47th St.

Several members checked the place out on Saturday and recommend those of you who have them to bring your own lawn chair. The location's still undergoing development and there wasn't much furniture around.

Details for this month's meeting up in the air...

We recently received word of a potential conflict with the Bridgeport VFW (where our monthly meetings are held) for this month's general meeting, currently scheduled for this upcoming Tuesday, the 19th. As such, there's a strong possibility that the location (and perhaps even the date) of the meeting could change. We'll post the time and location of the meeting as soon as we get everything worked out, so please check back here before heading out to the VFW on Tuesday. However things shake out, we hope to still have a regular meeting with Homebrewer's Corner, the monthly tasting, etc. Thanks for your understanding.

Congrats to Tom Saldana--Binny's/Sam Adams Homebrew Champ!

We're very excited to announce that current HOPS! member and former HOPS! president Tom Saldana won the Binny's and Sam Adams Long Shot Homebrew Contest! After waiting in line on a cold Tuesday morning to make sure he was one of the fifty contestants, Tom emerged as the victor on Saturday. His winning entry was a Russian Imperial Stout which has aged for two years. His prize? A trip for two to the Great American Beer Fest that includes tickets, airfare, and hotel. Now that's a prize.

Congrats to Tom for showing us mere mortals how it's done. We look forward to trying some of the beers you bring back from Denver in the fall (hint, hint)!

HOPS! represents at the BOSS Chicago Cup

A guest post from our competition guru, Michael:

The BOSS competition results are up [in PDF form here] and the club made a very strong showing, taking home 17 ribbons! These included a number of 1st place beers! Brian Keyes took first with his Dortmunder Export and Matt & Meg took 2 firsts with their American Stout and their Barleywine. Nate Baker took a1st in Spice/Herb/Vegetable, and Brian Eich took home top marks in the always difficult IPA category. Bob, Klavs, Russ & Leah, and myself all took home assorted seconds and thirds; the people mentioned above took a number of other awards as well.Having 8 brewers take home 17 ribbons completely tops our 5 club ribbons last year. If you are keeping score, HOPS! took home about 20% of the total ribbons up for grabs. Check out the scoresheets for a full breakdown of who won what: http://www.bossbeer.org/BOSS_2011Winners.pdf

A number of us went down to judge including Bob, Tom, Noel, Brian Eich, Nate Baker, Lovey, Klavs, Matt, Meg, Gary Gulley, and myself. We had a great time and the guys from BOSS continue to be the most gracious and awesome of hosts, as does the mighty Maple Tree Inn in Blue Island. We had a number of great beers during the comp and a ton of great beer at their amazing bar. The Muffuletta sandwiches were still amazing and Charlie Orr's memory was justly celebrated throughout the day. Our good friends from Iowa, Scott and Karen Schaar, came out to judge and it was nice to see them and the usual cast of BJCP characters from around Chicagoland. The multi-award-winning Rod-K even shared some homebrew secrets with us all as the beer flowed freely over lunch and afterwards.

I'd like to send a heartfelt congratulations and thank you to all the brewers who have entered, participated in club meetings, and were on the competition team this year. This was a great result and we will build on it in years to come. Back in October we set up the comp team to have members brew widely to get beers into as many categories as possible and have people brew styles they haven't brewed before. Happily this worked and we look forward to doing the same thing next year. Anyone is welcome to join in the comp team as long as they agree to try and enter at least 5 beers into BOSS, have a few of those cover empty spaces in our line-up, and bring beer to the comp team get togethers.

Most importantly, I'd like to thank everyone from the club for being such eager, engaged, and vocal homebrew connoisseurs during the meetings and especially the homebrewers' corner that Steve, Noel, and Brian run each and every month. It can be thankless organizing that but they do a great job getting everyone to focus on a beer and help our brewers get better. These sorts of successes are only made possible by drawing on the knowledge of everyone in the club, be they novices or homebrew hoarders with all the newest toys, theories, and avant-garde hops.

Thanks again to everyone. Now get brewing for Nationals, The Puget Sound Pro-Am, and The Sam Adams Longshot!

Thanks, Michael, for the summary. I'd like to also give a big thanks to Michael for leading the push to put our best brewing foot forward at the BOSS competition, and also thank the folks at BOSS for putting on a great competition (as they do every year).

Getting your blend on

Yesterday I posted on my personal blog about my recent experience with blending beers. If you want to read the whole thing you can check it out here, but for purposes of this blog I wanted to briefly discuss the various purposes of blending (at least the ones of which I'm aware).

Blending has probably been around as long as people have been brewing beer. Historically, brewers blended old sour beers with fresh, non-sour beers to dial in the exact level of sourness (or simply make them palatable). Similarly, partigyle brewers would sometimes blend the various gyles; rumor has it that Newcastle is still a blend of an older beer and a newer beer. And for the record, I'm no expert, so feel free to correct any of this in the comments if I've been mislead or am not telling the whole story.

For those who like to win medals in homebrew competitions, blending can allow you to create new entries from your existing stock (is it cheating? sounds like the kind of pointless debate that Beer Advocate is known for!). While this is most commonly done with British beers, I tried it with German lagers. Did it work? I'll know after this weekend!

For the average beer drinker, blending should bring to mind the ubiquitous black and tan, though there are plenty of other blends out there that are simply intended to create something new and exciting (not to mention commercial examples like Ommegang's Three Philosophers).

Anyway, I was curious to see if anybody has experience with blending. If you have, please post in the comments what you blended, why you blended (competition? an experiment? you were drunk?) and how it turned out. My personal results with blending a Helles with a Dunkel (50/50 blend for a Vienna lager and 2:1 Helles:Dunkel for an Oktoberfest) has got me thinking about how I can get three different styles out of two brew days. More variety is never a bad thing, right?

Monthly HOPS! Meeting - March 15, 2011 @ 7:45 PM

Just a reminder that tomorrow is our monthly HOPS! meeting @ the Bridgeport VFW Post 5079 at 3202 S. May!

We're going to have a lot of business to cover so the meeting will start promptly at 7:45 PM.

Style of the Month - 3 a Vienna Lager

So, to keep you on your toes, this month we're going to do a lager that is far more ubiquitous than meets the eye. If you were to ask a random person what a Vienna lager is, you'd probably just get a blank stare. The style is really something of an anachronistic name, relying on the fact that the whole lager brewing craze began with Anton Dreher after the isolation of S. pastorianus (formerly S. carlsbergensis) in Denmark. Curiously, the story goes that he studied at Barclay & Perkins in England and fathered the adoption of lager brewing in continental Europe. However, as a result of his studies in England, he also brought with him the English malting processes and adapted English pale ale techniques to his lager brewing, resulting in the copper-colored beer that we know as Vienna lager. Originally, it was called Märtzen by Dreher because it was brewed in March, when the weather remained cool enough for the fermentation and ice remained available. Eventually, it came to be known as Vienna style due to Dreher's proximity to Vienna, Austria.

So, what is Vienna lager and where can I find it? Oddly enough, it is all around you and goes by curious names such as Negra Modelo and Victoria (the Mexican one) because of the influx of Austrian immigrants into Mexico (and Latin America) in the late 1800s, led by Santiago Graf. Unfortunately, the vast majority of amber lagers in Mexico tend to be heavy in the adjunct department and get away from (quasi) traditional aspects that made this a desirable style. There are also a ton of great American craft-brewed examples that are available from a wide breadth of brewers as lager brewing among craft breweries has become more commonplace.

Ultimately, what make a great Vienna lager is the use of Vienna malt, which falls somewhere between Munich and English Pale malt in terms of character. It tends to have an increased sweet melanoidin character but preserves and nice and biscuity toast character. Utilization of this robust malt lends a certain richness while maintaining enough of a soft hop balance to keep it quite refreshing. The beer should finish dry and be medium bodied. Think of this sort of as Oktoberfest light. It should have no roast or caramel character and a very clean lager fermentation. And, in a nutshell, that's Vienna.

HOPS! t-shirts are on the way; pre-order yours now!

ZZ Top once sang, "Every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp-dressed man." We suspect sharp-dressed women get their fair share of action as well. So in an effort to keep everybody as fashionable as possible, HOPS! is excited to announce that we are in the process of ordering two brand new t-shirts which will be available for the low cost of $15 for non-members and the extra low cost of $10 for members.

The first shirt we have to offer is our Classic Black T:


The second shirt we have is our South Side Heritage T:


Both shirts are available in size S-XL (XXL may be available for a few bucks more; email for details). For the time being, you'll have to either pick up your shirt in person at a HOPS! meeting or have a HOPS! member pick one up for you... in other words, we're not shipping. (Hey, we're a homebrew club; not UPS!) To reserve yours today, send an email to hops.shirts (at) gmail (dot) com with the following information: name, which shirt(s) you would like (Classic Black or South Side Heritage), what size, and whether each shirt is for a member or a non-member. You can also send any questions you might have to the address above. We only plan on taking orders through this month's meeting (March 15) so hurry up and get your emails in now. It's time to look sharp!

BJCP Exam Class is AWESOME!

Photo was taken at the most recent BJCP exam class on Mar. 1, led by BJCP instructor, Steve McKenna (shown in photo). Yesterday's class covered German/Czech styles in the tasting portion.

Brewing Education - Call for Volunteers

In the past year, we have seen a significant increase in the quality of the beers being brought in by fellow homebrewers and I feel that a large part of that has been due to increased education among the membership, not just in terms of the Commercial Examples Tasting portion of the meeting, but in having the group evaluate the beers brought in for Homebrewers' Corner. I feel that continued education and research will breed better beers and with that, I have an invitation to announce.

Historically, the Commercial Tasting has been secondary and somewhat passively approached by a single person leading the tasting. One of the goals over the next year plus is to have this portion of the meeting become more educational and more focused on getting a feel for the style and techniques that go into specific styles. As such, at this time I would like to invite fellow members to volunteer for future Commercial tastings. The process is quite simple, I'd ask that you shoot me an email letting me know you have a particular style in mind. If we haven't done the style in the last 12-18 months or so, I'll give the go ahead and ask that you do a bit of research into the style, see if you can come up with some interesting facts and either you can write a blog post and forward to me or you can send me a basic outline and I'll put it together as a post. You also will be able to choose what beers for the tastings, we only ask that at least one of the beers is a classic example per the BJCP style guidelines. The club has budgeted for reimbursement as well. So please, send me your thoughts and let me know what you think would be a good style for the next tasting!

Meeting tonight!

Just a quick reminder that tonight's meeting will start with the homebrewer's corner at 7:30pm. As usual, our meeting will be at the Bridgeport VFW at 3202 S. May. See you there!

Style of the Month

So I thought I'd start a new tradition with the style of the month being handed over to me by our President and give a little history of the style, as well as outlining what differentiates this style from other styles. I'd also like to send an invitation to all brewers to let me know if you have a beer that you feel fits this style that you've brewed that you'd like included in the horizontal tasting.

To start things off, I thought we'd start this with BJCP Category 13E. - American Stout.

Per the BJCP Guidelines, which can be found at http://www.bjcp.org/2008styles/catdex.php, this style falls into a bit of a nowhere land between Foreign Extra Stout (which is an odd ball category all its own, but I'll save that for another time) and Russian Imperial Stout. It will have a moderate to strong roasted aroma, leaning towards coffee and cocoa and away from ashy. The hop character runs the gamut from medium to very low and tends toward American hops. There are a lot of optionals in this category, from ester and alcohol derived aromatics to the variances in hop flavor. Suffice it to say, this is a very flavorful beer with a wide berth of interpretation.

The primary defining character in these beers tends to be a moderately to moderately high OG and a distinctly American character. Commonly American hops and malts are used, as well as clean American yeast. I like to think of these beers as being the bigger brothers of Dry, Sweet and Oatmeal stouts, but not as big and burly as the Russian Imperial Stouts.

This is a style that has no real historical provenance and seems to have been the result of these types of beers showing up in the other stout categories but not really fitting into the historical guidelines of world classics such as Sam Smith's Oatmeal Stout or Guinness. As such, as with many other styles that are now considered classically American, a variation was born. The BJCP guide lists beers from most of the forerunners of American craft beer as brewing classic versions, namely Rogue Shakespeare Stout, Sierra Nevada Stout & North Coast Old No. 38.

Regarding next week's, and future, meeting(s), I intend to showcase the style and the variation within and hopefull will help to demonstrate how, even though there are definitions to each style, each brewer has a lot of options in terms of how (s)he can produce a beer "to style."

Cheers,

Brian

New Board of Directors

At last month's Jan. 18 meeting, we held our annual election for the board of directors. After the results were tallied, the newly elected board convened and appointed new officers:

Bob Brown (President)

Patrick Bowles (Treasurer)

Noel Wessely (Secretary)

Lovey Bissett

Klavs Dolmer

Brian Eichorn

Steve Marsala

Please wish us and all of HOPS! in having another successful year in 2011!

Ferm Wrap

I was over at Matt and Meg's blog and found this post that describes how to make a really inexpensive Ferm Wrap. There is a link to the company that supplies the parts, and they will even put it together for you. It's a nice solution when you want to raise fermentation temps. You could take advantage of the cold weather and use the wrap to make a lager. A temperature controller is required which they also sell.

Anyone interested? We could save on shipping.

Drinking and Writing at the Haymarket!

First, apologies for our extended absence here at the blog... Rest assured we're still brewing and meeting; we just sort of let the blog fall to the wayside. We're doing some retooling and adding some fresh faces to the blog so we hope you'll be back for regular postings from here on out.

Apologies aside, I wanted to let everybody know about a couple cool events going on at Chicago's newest brewpub, Haymarket. Haymarket is home to the Drinking & Writing Brewery (which puts on the annual Beerfly Alleyfight in which several HOPS! brewers participate), and they've recently announced that their awesome post-holiday show, To Cure A Hangover, has been extended until March 5th. It plays every Saturday at 4pm and I can't stress enough how great it is. You can get your tickets here.

Also, this Monday (which just happens to be Valentine's Day) at 7:37 pm is the inaugural meeting of Local 737, Haymarket's Mug Club. What's particularly cool about this mug club is that the Drinking & Writing Brewery will be curating an art performance at every tapping. This particular meeting will feature a cornucopia of artists including Christopher Piatt, Dr. Chloe Johnston, Rachel Claff, Rawson Vint, Jamie Budzick and Dina Walters as well as the tapping of their Agitator Double IPA. Oh, and the cost is a whopping $1, so hope you're ready to splurge.

Here at HOPS! we like to support all of our local breweries and brewpubs, and we'll try to post events here are we learn of them. Cheers!