Don's beer review, Part I

Here's the suspect in question:

 

This is Don's Blonde ale, he tells me. He states he put in;

"5 lbs 2-row-  steeped
5lbs extra pale extract
1 oz cascade-60 min
1 oz willamette- 5 min
white labs california ale liquid yeast"

And that's the whole shebang. 

In the picture, she looks innocent enough, however... Huge foam with carbonation levels off the chart. A loud "pssfftt" when de-capped. Suspect contamination at work here. Because this is a bomber and I'm drinking this solo, it all goes into a 22oz double wall, straight sided Bodum glass.  Gold is color of choice. Fairly clear in color.. and then, INFECTION STRIKES! There's a definite Brettanomyces wild yeast at work here. Plain as all get out and strong as the day is long. I detect it in the aroma right off the bat. It is inviting to me. A seperate aroma of "chalk" reminiscent of my own Brett beeers... is this just me, with the chalk thing? A big flavor of Brett yeast, with high carbs felt on tongue.. Brett beats the life out of any sutle flavors that might have been here. Atomically small flavor of cherries or strawberries.. A fairly good ammount of residual sweetness still remains, and I have fears that any remaining bottles of this thing will pop soon. Drink it up, Don! Don't hold back for long!

In any case, this is a Brett beer (whether he wanted one or not), and as such, I loved it!  Drank the whole damn bomber solo! I'll mention, I've never had a Brett infused pale ale before.. this was my first. I was contemplating doing one, but have been nervous, as I wasn't sure how it would come across.. I've been under the impression that the darker beers were mostly used as Brett test subjects because the roasty notes left a bit of complexity in there so as to not make it one dimensional.. but apparently, it can work just fine. I'll be looking into more it from here. Thanks for the fix, Don!

Cheese flipping and a beer review.. sorta.

 So I got my hands on this beer sort of by default, because Jeremiah (hi!) failed to kindly refused to take it home, and insisted I keep it. Havlicek Pils, it was named... and it wasn't too bad. A lot sweeter in flavor than most Pilsner's I've had in the past, it also wasn't as carbonated, giving it a really full, soft flavor. A different approach to Pils style than I'm used to. It had only a taste of that "corn" that you usually get from these, but not the mean corn from the macro beer types. I think, although I'm not sure, it may have had just a hint of skunk to this, but it wasn't objectionable. If that makes any sense. :) No real hops here, probably a bit on the old side for that to remain.. but not bad.

And then there's this picture of my cheese. You'll remember this beauty from last week when we stuffed 'er in the beer fridge, but I failed to get a picture of this wheel in her new home. So, here it is, the cheese wheel resting place. Check it!

It just kind of sits there on that block of wood and I'll be flipping it once a week until I decide to cut it open and dive in. It's till hangin' at 48 degrees in there and the humidity, which I suppose I should measure, you'd think would be relatively high, surrounded by all those kegs of liquid and nothing to absorb and of the humidity that is produced/trapped in there. 

And this:

 

..is a picture of a small sample of beer that I made with the cultured remains from the bottle of Allagash White. It fed off the tiny bit of wort from the smoked beer I did with Jody a while back... and has a huge acidic bite, followed by a tangy green apple flavor (high, uncontrolled fermentation temps), and then a hit of smoke flavor in the finish. Wacky! But, it can be done with this yeast.. perhaps in the future some time.

That's it!

Tiny cheese press..

Just a quick blurb to document the build on my new, tiny cheese press. This one is for making small, 1 pound wheels. It's a 4.5" inside diameter unit, as compared to my 6" diameter piece I used for the first wheel. Check it:

 

There's another follower (wooden thingy on the right side, in this pic..) that goes with this too.. that's gonna be used to stabilize the "piston" inside the PVC pipe press to keep the cheese from getting lopsided. I hope to test this beauty out this weekend by making a block of Jalapeno Cheddar.. we'll see how that works out.  I'll get a better pic of the complete piston unit when I get it totally built.

That's it!

Cheese waxing party..

OK, so it was a solo party, but... still, the job is done. Man, is it messy! Here's my dedicated cheese wax pot on the left and my (thankfully) paper towel covered kitchen counter and cutting board. This could have been ugly!















And here is half the wheel of cheese waxed on the bottom and side in this pic, on the first coat of wax..















And here's a shot of the finished item. I wasn't sure how the pros tagged and kept their stuff organized, so I waxed the whole wheel, twice, and then made this card up and waxed the edges of it into the wax on the cheese, hopefully, making it somewhat stuck there so I don't get stuff mixed up should I get more than one wheel in the fridge at a time.

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This wheel is now resting comfortably in my spare fridge downstairs (the keg fridge..), which is about two degrees colder than optimal.. and I'm not sure what the humidity level is in there, but it's better than hanging out on the counter top unregulated, I guess. The surface of this thing is not smooth.. very irregular, like a bad paint job (the wax, I mean..) I wonder how you get this job done to make it look nice.. I'll have to look into that aspect before next time..

Double brew session..

Did up a double brew session yesterday with Pete and Rob. Me and Pete kicked off the morning at 0800 hours brewing an ESB style English beer. Rob came over a few hours later and, while me and Pete were running off the first beer into the boil kettle, Rob and I were milling grains for an American Pale Ale style thing. Things went relatively smoothly.. a little confusion on my part with hopping schedules and such, so good thing I had good backup and brew partners to monitor that stuff while I was a bit flustered.. but everything came out well. Here's a couple shots of the machine in progress with Pete in one of 'em:

And here's one of the finished product. Check it and be so jealous:

The chickens are fat, the cheese is drying and I'll be waxing it very soon for proper storage, and the kids are fairly well. Times are good!

First cheese making experiment..

Wish I had more pics of this, but the Boss had the camera on the day I whipped this one off.. so the only pic I have is the finished, new cheese, right out of the cheese press mold. I started out to make a Monterrey Jack style cheese, with two gallons of milk (Pasturised, non Homeginized Organic style stuff). Not the raw cow or goat milk I aspire to, but I'm just starting out, right? Well, I followed the recipes in my Ricki Carrol Home Cheese making book step by step and used the stuff I got from Thecheesemaker.com to build it up and I'll be darned, the whole thing worked out just fine! Only 'problem' I had was the pressing part, where my one wobbly follower design make a 1/4" taller cheese on one side than the other. It's hardly noticable, unless you measure it or really stare at it awhile while spinning it, but it bothers me. I already have a solution in mind and I'll be doing that build up and documenting it soon enough on here.. stand by! Anyway, here she is, in all her fresh cheesey glory!

 

Simply awesome!

The book didn't say, but I notice a few airgaps along the edge of this wheel and wonder if I was supposed to break up the curds into smaller pieces before I packed 'em in the press. I might look into that a bit more before I do the next one. I still have to flip this wheel a couple times a day till it's dry, then wax it with the cheese wax I have to go pick up today.. then the aging part comes in. I hope to do another one next week so I  can get a stash of cheeses going here. I'll say, a two lb wheel of cheese is a mighty big chunk to look at.. It's 6" across and like, 2" on one side of the wheel and 2-1/4" on the opposite (told you it was lopsided.. I just measured it!). It's definately substantial! Unfortunately, it's got an even longer wait til than beer does.. whereas I can have a beer from brew day to pint glass in 20 days +/-, this cheese is a *minimum* of 30 days.. and they reccomend up to 120 days if you can handle that. That's why I need to make another really quick, so I can see the difference between an aged and a younger one, side by side.. see what I like better.

While whittling it down to a nice shape, I tasted the bits I shaved off the outside of the wheel.. it's a bit tangy in taste, like yogurt, but not terribly complex at this stage. The whole aging part is where the magic happens and why old, properly aged cheese bring in the big money. We'll see what the basement in Barkhamsted can do for that..

In other news, I'm back to messing around with my old standard roasting machinery, the heat gun. Having some quality control issues with the flavors of my latest batches coming out sort of baked and lifeless from the Behmor.. stand by for some clarification on that when I get some more roasts done. 

That's all for now.. go click my Google money link! I need the cash! ;)

The great Cheese Press build..

And so it begins..

 

 Me and Pete W. started fabricating the fantastic cheese press I'll be using shortly.. What you see here is just a standard 6" diameter piece of PVC pipe and a wooden 'follower' for the press, cut out with my 6" hole saw from a block of White Oak. More stuff to get assembled to this, eventually, but this is the raw basics. Pete got an identical copy too, which he heroically cut out, free hand, with a table saw (the cut on the PVC pipe, not the follower..). This was truly insanity, as I thought at any moment we'd be making a trip to the hospital for a lost arm or broken nose when this thing kicked back from the saw. 

Fortunately, everything turned out OK, and this is the beginning. Still waiting for the stuff I ordered in the mail to arrive, and I've gotta make a trip out to Hartford for a block of cheese wax I forgot to order from the mail order place... but I've been studying a few videos and websites lately and it doesn't look too hard after all. The aging part will be somewhat weird, as I need high humidity and low temps.. (80% humidity and 55-ish degrees for temps..) and I don't have a spare fridge in which to make this happen. We'll figure that out later...