Search For A Free Web-Based Brewing Tool

I've decided to start brewing my own beer again. I once entertained a thought of actually brewing and selling my beer someday, but right now I'll just settle for brewing. It's been about 4 years since I seriously (seriously meaning 2 or more batches a year...which isn't that serious!) brewed, and two since I've made anything at all! But it's fun and easy to do, and I'm hoping to get back on the horse.

I decided to look for an online and free utility for brewing, and after a couple of quick searches I saw mention of Brewtility on a brewing forum. The site first came online as a place to store and share recipes as well as communicate with other brewers. It has a recipe generator (more on this later) and will soon have the ability to log brew sessions. Sounds awesome to me - I'm tired of using pencil and paper, and besides my brewing notes are so scattered, it'll be good to put them all in one spot online.

I've had a couple of glitches with it. I can't seem to upload a profile photo, and the recipe generator crapped out once on me trying to select hops for the recipe. In its defense, it auto-saved what I had done, so I didn't have to go back and rebuild the malt bill. I've emailed support about the picture (Cuz it's that cool picture of sailors drinking beer on shore leave in WWII.)

My first recipe is going to be an IPA. I made one a few years back that came out okay, but I missed my target gravity (that means I didn't have the amount of fermentable sugar I'd planned when I started fermenting and therefore came out "light" on the alcohol content). So, as best I could remember (I have the notes somewhere!) I put together the recipe on the generator and was very impressed.
Adding and subtracting ingredients is pretty intuitive. It flows well from top to bottom, and you can play with everything from mashing efficiency to the alpha acid content of the hops you select. You can also work in whatever scale/measurement system you want to use by adjusting your preferences.

The menus for recipe items (grains, extracts, hops and yeast) are pretty good, they even have "generic" liquid extract values on there, but not dry ones, which I prefer to use. Still, assuming one is like the other I could pick a DME (I used Breiss vice Coopers which I prefer). It would be nice to see a way to submit new items for consideration. The generator will even go as far to predict the final gravity, %ABV and calorie content for your beer.

So all that's left is to verify what I put in with my old notes and go from there. Once I dig up my gear, figure out what I need to replace, and buy the recipe.

All in all, I like what I see so far in Brewtility. It's not a big network - only a handful of active users - right now, but it has what I need so far until I can find a full-blown social network for actual brewers. I'll keep looking.

Apple Crisp, Imperial Stout and Quantum Theory

I'm a sucky photographer in general, but believe me, it tastes awesome! I haven't done a food post in a while, and as I'm too distracted to do much else, that's what you get to read tonight...

My wife made an amazing apple cobbler last night. So amazing that between her, my son and I we nearly wiped it out. We ate it in an "English" style, pouring fresh cream over it, though we lamented the lack of vanilla ice cream. Today, when I was shopping for some din-din, I bought some vanilla ice cream.

Plain vanilla ice cream is good, but it's best when you have something warm and baked to eat with it. Since I din't feel like making a crust for a pie, I decided to make an apple crisp since it's soooooooo simple.

Filling:
2.5 lbs apples (we used 2 each cortlands, red romes, and honey crisps) - peeled, cored and sliced
2 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/2 c brown sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp freshly ground nutmeg

Crisp:
1/3 c each of flour, sugar, rolled oats
1/2 stick butter (cold, unsoftened)

Toss apples and lemon juice. Mix brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg, add to apple/lemon mixture and toss to coat. Combine dry ingredients. Cut up the butter and cut into mixture until you get a crumbly mix. By the time you're done cutting the butter in, the apple mixture should be nice and wet, with a small puddle of syrupy mixture in the bottom of the bowl. Put the apples in a buttered baking dish, sprinkle the crisp mix on top, and pop in a 375-degree oven for 45 minutes or until golden brown. Serve warm with ice cream. Repeat as necessary.

Found here and modified only slightly.

BEER UPDATE:
The Pozharnik Imperial Stout is absolutely UNBELIEVABLE. Most aromas are pretty muted, but the taste is great - initially chocolaty and roasty, with some toffee-like notes, then a hint of sweet vanilla and a finish that brings out the oak and whiskey of the barrels it was aged in. Drink chilled, not cold, the character changes wonderfully as it warms. In a wine glass or snifter. I opened it yesterday, resealed and continued today. Most of the carbonation is gone (evident in the photo), but it's still amazing to drink. This is my holiday brew. I am definitely getting some of this to cellar for a year.

OH WAITAMINIT!!! Look at today's history note. It's the 108th birthday of Planck's Theory that the energy of a photon is quantized and proportional to it's frequency. E=hν baby!!! Without ol' Max, we wouldn't have this here blogging thingy we love so much...

Steak and Beer Make Bull Healthy and Strong!

The reality is we don't get out much with 4 kids (only one of which is school-aged) and now that our babysitter is in Toronto tending to her ailing sister, it's effectively nil for some time.
So I was pleasantly surprised this Wednesday when I arrived at the Charles/MGH T-Station more than 40 minutes early for a nearby doctor's appointment and had time to poke around Beacon Hill for a while. Beautiful brick buildings housing specialty shops and some great looking restaurants - there's a Thai restaurant there I'm dying to try. I only had time to walk up Charles St. a bit, and ended up going into two places, Savenor's Market and Charles Street Liquors, pretty much right across the street from each other.

Savenor's was a cozy little place that had just about every kind of meat and poultry I could think of, including meat byproducts like rendered duck fat, which is absolutely superb for roasting potatoes (put about half an inch of fat in roasting pan, heat to 400F, parboil potatoes, throw them in the pan and roast, turning occasionally - they come out with an awesome deep-fried-crispy-outside-creamy-inside-book-your-bypass-surgery-now flavor). A great deal of it is fresh, butchered right there, and raised more naturally than the usual stuff you buy from the grocery store. They make plenty of specialty meats there, and they import some hard to find (buffalo, wild boar, kangaroo) flash-frozen stuff as well. Throw in a produce section, a cheese section and a good selection of gourmet specialty groceries and it's a place I'll be returning to when I go back next week. All their beef is grass-fed, as corn tends to seriously f**k a cow's shit up. The stuff is expensive, but I was still curious to see their prices. On my way back to the T station I picked up a piece of top round (slightly more than a pound, about $11). We're cooking it this weekend; I'll let you know how it tastes. I also grabbed a piece of aged Vermont cheddar.

Charles Street Liquors is, well DUH you know what it is. I could spend hours in there - they do an amazing job optimizing what little space they have. A little more pricey being in Boston (as a benchmark, Sam Adams Chocolate Bock costs $16.49 a bottle vice $15.99 at most other places) but their beer selection alone is worth it. Tastings Friday and Saturdays from 4-7 pm. In addition to a bottle of Chocolate Bock to replace the one I've consumed, I bought the following to haul back home on the T.
The Lindeman's Kriek (cherry) is the second bottle of lambic I've bought since James gave me a big bottle of their cassis (currant) on my birthday. My last bottle was a framboise (raspberry). I think I'm hooked on lambic. I'll get to this when I do over the holiday season, but the other two are what I'm interested in. I have the Sierra Nevada Harvest Ale in the fridge right now, and will open it later. According to the bottle, the brew is "wet-hopped" with freshly-picked (the previous day) hops of the standard Pacific Northwest variety. Some of the reviews called the beer "piney" but I'll see for myself. (note: I drank it between writing this part and publishing; the hop character was excellent - very complex, citrus, spice, floral and pine accents, strong but not overpowering at all, and you can still taste the malt. Well done, I would drink it again and would love to try it on tap.) And the one I'm saving for later this weekend - Pozharnik Imperial Stout - espresso, vanilla, aged in a whiskey barrel. The bottle states it's great to try now, but recommends "afficionados" cellar it for a year or two. Like Hell I am - it has me as excited and intimidated as "that girl". You know...you've hooked up, and you're gonna' get something you've got from others, but you know it's gonna' be different, and you think probably better, but just HOW better? Or is it going to be lame? Or is it going to be just so damned freaky that you need to cut her loose right now? Lower your expectations, man, lower your expectations...hey waitaminit, this is just beer. Keep 'em sky high! If it's good, then I'll get some to cellar!

It's Time To Get A Smoker

Okay, I'm done trying to defeat the challenge of smoking on a gas grill. Cooked another piece of meat today, this time a 5+ lb beef brisket. I Did pretty much the same thing, with the exception of using apple wood sawdust instead of hickory chips for smoking.

It didn't matter a whole lot - I just couldn't get the grill to sustain the smoke level I want. Even when finding an odd steel grate (for some reason inadvertently delivered by our last moving company) allowed me to lower the plate of sawdust directly over the flames, it still took forever to get smoke. It still tasted awesome, BTW.

The rub was good.




Both the mop and sauce used beer for the majority or part of the liquid. I put more thought into what beer to use than I thought I would. I settled on a Belhaven Scottish Ale that my dad had left with me some weeks ago. It's fairly heavy and malty, and I figured in a recipe looking for smokey, somewhat sweet and caramelly flavors, I figured it was "the go". I had just enough in a 15.9 oz draft can to make the mop, the sauce, and give the cook a mouth full before tossing the can in the recycle bin. It's not as good as a McEwan's, but what is? The sauce was very vinegary (sp?), too much so for my taste. Two tablespoons of light brown sugar made it a much better sauce.

Summer's almost over and I, as a true consumer, will probably find a good smoker on clearance at Home Depot or someplace.