cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Not the Entry I'd Intended Last night I did not get to make my gingered ale. Basically from the second I walked in the door after work until 11 pm I was looking after the baby or playing with Ida or both. Did you know it's Friday? How the hell did that happen. I would actually just go home right now except that I have a big important thing happening at work. Last minute shit where the client will be well and truly fucked if I don't have all of his shit straightened out before I leave this office. Tomorrow Trish is going to come a-hunting with me in the late afternoon and hopefully bag her first deer. She'll do fine. She doesn't practice shooting nearly often enough but has the basic skill necessary to make a straight forward shot with a scope within 150 yards. I'll go over the anatomy stuff with her tonight so she knows exactly what part of the deer to aim for. And then when the actual hunt happens I will be right there next to her where I can whisper when to shoot. I'll also have a rifle at the ready to back her up with (ie make a fast follow-up shot to anchor the deer if anything goes wrong with her first shot). We have a New Years Party to go to but babysitting is obviously an issue. I have all of this lovely beer happening just in time so I do want to go. It's a little awkward to even ask our parents to babysit on New Years, since by definition we'd be out until at least 1 am. Maybe a sleepover can be arranged at Trish's parents house? It would be a first for them doing that with the baby, though. Ida does it all the time but the baby is still only 10 and a half months old (or something like that) and would be freaked out with Trish not there for a whole night. Oh yeah, the beer. I tasted it last night. Oh it is going to be wonderful. It's exactly what I'd intended. The generous amounts of naked Kent Goldings hops give it this sort of chewy taste (if that makes any sense) that I really like. By 'naked' I mean that there are no other varieties of hops used for flavoring or bouquet. Usually for a pale ale I would throw some cascades in there as well. But then even with just a hint, cascades hops can really dominate a beer with either the citrusy flavor or floral aroma, depending on when you add it. That's all well and good and I love cascades hops to death, but this beer was all about indulging my craving for big, soft, chewy Kent Goldings hop flavor, which you only really get when it's naked. There aren't many commercial beers that do that. My one regret is that had I designed this one before ordering my malt, I would have gone with an english amber malt with a hint of a biscuit flavor to it. Which would be a much better presentation on the palate for the kent goldings hops. Instead I'm working with your basic ultralight extract supplemented with a pound of 40 Lovibond crystal malt and another pound of some other whole grain malt that I forget at the moment. This kind of shit is exactly why beer is much more complex than wine, both in terms of flavor and in making it. With wine-making you've got your grape juice and your water and your yeast and that's about it. Which, incidentally, is why wine is so much more regionally defined than beer is. It's just the grapes, which are very expensive to ship very far away from where they were harvested. In any kind of condition that a winemaker would be interested in and at a price that would work, that is. Malt, on the other hand, keeps comparatively well. You can put a load of barley from Germany or England on a container ship to the US and a month later it's still in good shape. You malt it and there you are. Pellet-ized hops are the same way. They ship rather well and arrive in good condition, provided that you have not allowed temperatures to climb too high. This is why I can make a beer in my kitchen that is literally every bit as good as a pint of ale drawn from an English pub or brewed at a 200 year old German brewery. Because I can work with literally the exact same ingredients if I want to. Or I can combine remarkable new hops varieties from the Pacific Northwest with German Munich malt and English yeast. In this way one may come up with completely new varieties of beer that draw on the best ingredients from around the world. This doesn't happen with wine. Practically speaking, you can't get fresh grapes from Bourdeaux and combine those with your favorite grape from Napa to come up with a completely new wine. In theory, sure. In practice, you can't get the ingredients together. Hence over the last 15 years or so, there has been incredible innovation in the beer world. Which is not the case in wine. They are growing the same fucking grapes and making the same fucking wine that they have been for ages and ages. You don't see new varieties of wine. Existing ones comes in and out of fashion, but there's nothing new. But small breweries are constantly innovating and their more successful experiments are often echoed by larger breweries like Sam Adams or whomever. Now that wasn't even remotely the diary entry I had intended to write. I need to work on my children's book some more. I wish somebody would pay me to write essays or white papers on completely random subjects at extremely short notice because that is probably what I am better at doing than anything else. 1:57 p.m. - 2007-12-21 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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