Dog Sitting Beer Advent

Ed graciously agreed to do some dog/house sitting for us while we were out on our belated honeymoon.  I wanted to do something very special for him, so I Total Wined without him and pulled together this little set up.  He needs the carbs, he has been riding to work every day.   It is a twist on our annual beer advent adventure we have leading up to our winter birthdays.  (This time around was only 7 days, but I snuck in a couple extra so Lex could join in on the fun two.). The twist on the traditional countdown is that I wrote clues on each bottle.  This way he could have what he's in the mood for rather than leaving up to my foresight.  For beer nerds, it is fun to be fun while giving gifts or enhancing the experience.  Anyone else have a great way to mix beer and surprises?

If you can't read the clues in the picture, they are as follows..."hoppy and bready", "dark and perky", "high abv", "hoppy", "dry hoppy refreshing", "earthy", "light and relaxing", "little and bold", and "big and bold".   Something for everyone!

Sam, who is helped us out too, got a more traditional 7 day countdown.  He's a newbie to the experience, so no need to shock and awe.  I will post the line ups once I get some feedback from the boys.

In other news, I have a Dandelion and Fennel Seed Honey Ale going in the kitchen and we have some hops starting to pop out of the ground, so we'll be blogging about both of those real soon!

Brewery Visit: Chocolate City

Liz and I took advantage of a nice day in early March to check out Chocolate City Brewing near Catholic University.  Well, actually, we were there to visit the BBQ Bus that catered our wedding back in August.  Being Rockville suburbanites that work even further north, we don't get to partake in the food truck scene as often as possible.  So two birds with one stone.

I always fret about travel, and since Chocolate City is new enough there isn't a lot of web info on it, we decided to metro.  Being the environmentally friendly folks we are, we drove to Silver Spring to avoid sitting on the metro a hour coming from White Flint.  (We need a purple line already folks!)  The brewery is about 10 blocks from the Brooklyn metro stop, which helps you burn the calories you drink (or drink and eat in our case).  Aside from getting through some construction at the university, it was an easy walk.  It turned out, there was plenty of parking on the street adjacent to the brewery, so parking wouldn't have been an issue.  It is sort of a gritty industrial/resident area, but was pretty void of too much activity on a Saturday afternoon.

There was a pretty good crowd for a small and fairly new brewery.  About a constant 20-15 people (mostly hipsters) throughout the hour or two we were there.  You'd have no idea it was a brewery had a garage door not been opened up on the side.  Pretty non descript brown and red building.  Inside, there were about 8 smallish tanks and a table with a cooler keggerator set up serving 3 beers.  They had you a plastic cup and walk you through that day's tastings at your own pace.

They were offering up their Cornerstone Copper Ale, Cerveza Nacional De La Capital, and Mothership Connection.  The copper was a really solid leadoff.  It had a nice subtly sweet malt flavor.  The Cerveza Nacional was not at all what I expected.  It was a dark Vienna Lager, not what you usually imagine when you hear "cerveza".  I did not realize that the German's had been introducing beer to Mexico back in the day, but apparently they were.  This tribute was rich, with bold toasted flavors.  I was getting really excited to see what they finished.  Then I hit the Mothership Connection, a weizenbock, which had a respectable flavor, but isn't my taste.  The bubble gum flavor was just too strong and I could taste the sweetness of the 8.5%.  Technically sound, but not my taste.

Growlers were filled straight out of the tanks.  Have to love that freshness.  They also had a growler exchange if you have one branded by them, which let's you quickly grab a full one and leave your old one.  They do a brisk business from folks stopping on their way from work for just growlers, it seems.  I walked away with a growler fill up of the Cerveza for $10.  Money well spent!

Overall, a great trip, something to look forward to as the weather starts ripening.

Tampa Bay Local Finds

Always a great day when you find a hidden gem while on vacation.  Ed was just down in the Tampa area last week for a separate bachelor party Spring Training trip and got a hold of Florida Cracker by Cigar City.  I am down there this week. Not only did we find an old favorite in Cigar City Maduro, but I found the bright green can with neon pink writing of Jai Alai.  Really good taste.  Not overly hoppy, but good balance of sweetness and hoppiness for a 7.5% abv.  (Though 3 of these guys on an empty stomach and in a parking lot leaves you a bit loopy for a noon baseball game.)

I also stumbled upon a sixer of Florida Cracker and Hotter Than Helles, but with it being my second to last day, I knew I could choose only one.  I had to take Florida Cracker, knowing it would make a better beach beer.  The toughest of vacation choices.  It was heavenly.  The corriander really comes through, making it interesting and drinkable.  At 5%, I could have a couple of them and still be good to function in the sun.  Best of all, I had enough room in my luggage to sneak one of each can home.  I even got to taste some Oak Aged Jai Alai at the airport on Saint Party's day before departure.  Thank you Tampa International Airport.

This made a pleasant trip, since last time I came up short at the Publix and Sweet Bay grocery stores I was able to get at on our infrequent stops.

Throw Another Squash on the Barbie

So it appears Battery Brewing has seasonal brews now.  This year marked the third time we've made both the Strawberry Kolsch and now the Butternut Nut Brown Ale.  

How great this is, right?  We've had three beers successful enough that we've wanted to make them three times?  Right?  Uhhhhh, not so much.  You must not remember 2011.  This was the beer that drove me to make the wort chiller.  It was gross.  I don't like abusing my beer knowledge, but I'll admit,  we rid ourselves of it by telling novices how good it was and then watching them gagging it down as they tried to tell themselves it was good.  A clear abuse of power, I know.  I'm not proud of it.

So now, with wort chiller in hand, we tried our hands at it a third time.  

Ed, apparently a glutton for punishment, wanted to push the boundaries of brewing and try our hands with outside brewing since we have a backyard now.  Where we'd love to have a propane burner with significant btu's, we're on a budget, and we workable burner on the grill.  It was really nice to brew outside in nice weather, but it didn't heat the water up fast enough and it left me convinced nasty critters (bacteria, wild yeast, bugs) were getting in the brew.  Nothing ventured, nothing "grained".  (<--...hrrrm, just thought of that, so don't steal it, and we will be making shirts that say that.  Posted here 11/11/13, so dibs on that phrase)

Let me backtrack a bit, we had a homebrew store adventure where we picked up some grain for the brew.

Smoked malt speciality grain?  Don't mind if I do.  This should be good a good flavor in our butternut brown ale, right?  I'll get to that later.

We picked up:
2 lbs 2 row malt
1.5 lbs Munich
4 oz Crystal 60
3 oz Chocolate Malt
1 oz Black Patent
.5 oz Roasted Barley
1 oz Smoked Malt
2 lbs lightly hopped LME
.8 oz of Willamette Hops
London Ale 1028 Wyeast


You can see from the shopping list that it is a partial mash.

Before we started we roasted 2 butternut squash and some odds and ends from pumpkin carving.  The trickiest part of this is cutting up the squash.  I have no good advice from this other than watching out for your fingers.  Please leave a comment if you know the secret to cutting up butternut squash.

We sparged the specialty grains at 165 degrees after bringing the water to a rolling boil.  We let them sit for about 20 minutes, with off and on dunking.  We did our best to rinse them out and squeeze out the sugars, until it ran mostly clear.

From there, we brought it back up to a rolling boil and covered it back up.  10 minutes into the boil we added our liquid malt extract and the about half of the squash.

At about 50 minutes we added in the hops and the other half of the squash.

We let it finish to about 65 minutes, then went about prepping the yeast and setting it up in the carboy.

It took a while to get started fermenting, which had me nervous.  I attribute this to having it in the basement, which is sort of cold.  Much to my wife's dismay, I moved the carboy up to the kitchen for about 10 days for it to do it's business.  In all, we bottled two weeks after setting it in the carboy.  I would have let it sit longer (as my experience is the longer dark beers sit in the primary/secondary, the better flavor you get), but we had a hard deadline of our yearly Battery Lane Family Thanksgiving in about 10 days, that we needed getting ready for.  We bottled with a split between maple syrup and priming sugar, which gave a good carbonation.

The beer ended up with a bit of a burned smell, and we contribute this.  I don't think it was the grill.  I think it was the smoked malt.  The taste is there though.  I know smell is a major part of a beer experience this, but I can move past it once I taste the butternut.  One friend called it an "ash tray" smell, but he's a bit obtuse and I think that's over-stating the smell.  Overall, the beer turned out pretty solid and none of the homebrew taste from last year.

Now for something a bit more refreshing.

 And just to whet our whistles during the boil, we enjoyed vintage Saison du Buff's.  I know, I know, light colored, low abv herbed beer should be enjoyed currently, not 2 years after the release, but we all know I have a beer hoarding issue.  It took me about 6 months to allocate all 3 of the series of Stone, Victory, and Dogfish, but I found them that year.  The Stone one was the first I found, but it cost me 6.99 for the bottle in Joppatowne, which historically has very cheap beers.  The other two were Total Wine finds for like 1.99 and 2.99 a bottle respectively.  The flavors actually held up awesomely.  This was the beer that inspired us to make the Rosemary Wheat Ale.  Our's actually holds up to the professionals for once, I think.  Anyways, clearly you can see my awesome pours below, but Ed, Liz, and I enjoyed this treat during the brew.

Guest Post: Gifts for Homebrewers

This post is by Liz, Kevin's wife.

I feel like at this point in my relationship with Kevin, I should be able to write a book on "Gifts for Homebrewers." (I've done quite a bit of Googling). For Kevin's birthday last year, I gave him a homebrew store gift card and a membership to the American Homebrewers Association. This year, I decided to get creative and up the ante'... 

Here's some back story: About a year and a half ago, Kevin and Ed picked the name "Battery Brewing" for their homebrew operation based on the street name where we all lived: Battery Ln. Subsequently, Kevin designed a logo and screenprinted some rockin' t-shirts for Team Battery Brewing at the annual Dogfish Dash in Milton, DE.

It wasn't long before I scanned the design, did some photoshopping, set up this blog and named myself the Chief Marketing Officer of Battery Brewing. A title which is sometimes stripped from me when I say things like, "hm, this beer tastes like chicken."

So for his birthday this year, I decided to do what any *good* marketing person does and slap that logo on EVERYTHING. I mean, who doesn't love custom beer-related swag? (We certainly bring a lot of it home from other breweries). 

I started with some basics from Zazzle and Cafe' Press like stickers, magnets and a key chain. I designed a lovely poster with some choice pics of the Battery Brewing team in action. Finally I found some specialty shops to order a bartender's bottle opener and, the best part, a dozen custom pint glasses. Ooooh, ahhhhh.

All I will say is... it was worth having the glasses done professionally. I ordered a first round off Cafe' Press and they were a disaster (for which I got a refund and got to keep the disasters... woohoo?). The professional ones were expensive if you think of the per-glass cost, but it was the perfect thing and I literally did a dance when we got them in the mail.

To round out the birthday celebration, I hosted a Battery Brewing-themed dinner party with each course paired with one of their homebrews (menu below). Each lucky guest got to take home a pint glass!

I have know idea how I'm going to top this next year!