Monthly Archive for March, 2006

Double Nut Brown Ale Recipe

Published
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DT
on March 30, 2006
in Beer, Brewing and Recipes
. 0 Comments

03.26.06 - Double Nut Brown Ale

Info:

  • Type: Extract w/grain
  • Size: 5 gallons
  • Bitterness: 22 IBU
  • OG: 1.061
  • FG: 1.015
  • Alcohol: 6.0% v/v (4.7% w/w)

Ingredients:

  • 5 oz. Breiss Victory Malt
  • 10 oz. Briess Crystal 60L Malt
  • 2 oz. Weyermann Chocolate Wheat Malt
  • 5 oz. Briess Special Roast Malt
  • 6.6 lb. Amber malt extract (Northwestern Amber Malt Extract)
  • 1 lb. Amber dry malt extract (Northwestern Amber Dry Malt)
  • 1 oz. Galena (12.0% AA)
  • 1 oz. Cascade (5.3% AA)
  • 1 oz. Mt. Hood
  • 1 packets of Safale S-04 Dry Yeast

Description:

Bring water temperature up to 165° and steep grains for 25 minutes. Bring crushed malt “tea” to a boil and add 1.0 oz. of Galena hops for 30 minutes. Remove brewpot from heat and dissolve 6.6 lb. of Amber malt extract and 1 lb. of Amber dry malt extract thoroughly. Return to a boil and add 1 oz. of Cascade hops for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes turn off heat and stir in 1 oz. of Mt. Hood hops. Proceed to cool wort quickly to 70°. Pitch Safale S-04 dry yeast and aerate. Pour wort into primary fermentation bucket. When bubbling has stopped, then bottle.

DT

Imperial Stout Recipe

Published
by
DT
on March 30, 2006
in Beer, Brewing and Recipes
. 1 Comment

03.19.06 - Dry Hopped Imperial Stout (Reparation Stout)
Info:

  • Type: Extract w/grain
  • Size: 5 gallons
  • Bitterness: 87 IBU
  • OG: 1.095
  • FG: 1.028
  • Alcohol: 8.7% v/v (6.8% w/w)

Ingredients:

  • 2 lb. American Crystal 60L
  • 1 lb. American Crystal 120L
  • 1 lb. British Chocolate Malt
  • 1 lb. Roasted Barley
  • 9.9 lb. Light malt extract (Northwestern Gold Malt Extract)
  • 1 lb. Light dry malt extract (Northwestern Gold Dry Malt)
  • 2 oz. Galena (12.0% AA)
  • 1 oz. Centennial (9.9% AA)
  • 1.0 oz. Columbus (14.2% AA)
  • 1.0 oz. Columbus Whole Hop (dry hop)
  • 2 packets of Safale US-56 Dry Ale Yeast

Description:

Bring water temperature up to 160° and steep grains for 30 minutes. Remove grains and bring water to a boil. Start 60 minute clock and add 2 oz. Galena hops. With 15 minutes left on the boil, cut the heat and add 9.9 lb. of malt extract and 1 lb. of dry malt extract while stirring. Start heat again and bring wort back to a boil. Once wort is boiling, start 15 minute clock and add 0.5 oz. of Columbus hops and 0.5 oz. of Centennial hops. At the end of the 15 minute boil, add 0.5 oz. of Columbus hops and 0.5 oz. of Centennial hops. Bring wort temperature down to 70° and add 2 packets of Safale US-56 Dry Ale Yeast to wort and aerate. Pour wort into primary fermentation bucket with lid and airlock and let sit at 68° for one week (or until fermentation slows). Syphon beer into secondary glass carboy to continue fermentation, to filter the beer, and to start dry hopping. Add 1 oz. of Columbus whole hops in a mesh bag to secondary glass carboy (this time I added marbles in the hop bag to help it sink farther into the carboy). Leave in secondary for up to 2 weeks (I’m only doing one week). Remove hop bag. Disolve priming sugar into 2 cups of water and pour in bottling bucket. Syphon beer into bottling bucket (this allows the beer to properly mix with the priming sugar, but keeps it from getting air bubbles). Bottle beer. While you can probably drink this beer a week after bottling, it probably won’t be ready for primetime for a few months.

DT

TNS 03.21.06

Published
by
DT
on March 28, 2006
in Beer, Bikes and Road
. 1 Comment

So I don’t have a whole lot of words for last Tuesday’s ride. We rode, we swilled, and we didn’t fall down…We managed to hit both Rustico (a new place in Alexandria) and new old time stomping ground - Paradiso. With so few words, I’ll leave you with the photo gallery.

DT

Music Monday (just a bit late)

Published
by
DT
on March 28, 2006
in Music
. 2 Comments

Cut Chemist/DJ Shadow: Brainfreeze

Artist: Cut Chemist/DJ Shadow
Album: Brainfreeze
Song: Track 1 and Track 2
Description: This is an essential mix CD. I think they only released 2000 copies and I was lucky enough to get one of them. It’s filled with the sounds of rare soul and funk, all from original 7″ vinyl 45s! This is the CD that really challenged all those crate diggers and beat geeks. You can really hear the different styles between Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow. Because this CD is so rare and no longer in production…I’m gonna be a nice guy and give you the opportunity to have both tracks that make up the almost hour long CD. That’s what you get, because I forgot to post something yesterday.

Download here.

DT

Weekend Wrapup

Published
by
DT
on March 20, 2006
in Beer, Bikes, Brewing, Dirt, Food and Life
. 5 Comments

This past week went pretty quick, only to continue that trend on through the weekend. I missed out on the usual TNS ride, but Stoner pulled it off at Wakefield (not sure if he actually included the Swill though). Big Gary turned another year old on Tuesday, so we headed to the Korean BBQ joint, WooLaeOak. The place has great food, but damnit if I can only eat there once every couple of months as it really does a number on your digestive system…

I ended up doing a mini TNS on Thursday night. Sent the word out and was looking to do something other than Wakefield, because I wasn’t exactly feeling up to be social with all the group riders there would be at the park. A lot of them are my friends, so I didn’t want to be rude. Plus it’s really easy to get burnt out on Wakefield. You can ride all the trails there and put together some nice loops, hitting everything a few times, but you still don’t end up with a whole lot of mileage. Your also almost never out of the lights of another group of riders as the trails are really twisty ( a good thing), but we’ve managed to cram about as much trail in as small a space as we can, so there’s a lot of close proximity trails. Anyway, I sent out a note saying I was hitting Colt’s Neck and probably just going solo, but Spearmint and Brauny decided to meet me out there. Stoner went with the Thursday night Wakefield ride, a good one if your looking for some fast riders. We did our regular loop in Reston at a fairly fast pace. We stopped a few times to talk smack to each other, but other than that it was just some good pedal time. Back at the parking lot we broke into our beverages, trying a new to me tripple Belgian. Nothing blow your mind spectacular, but good all the same. I’m still learning a lot and I’m pretty weak on my Belgians…well I’m pretty weak on anything not Imperial, ha. So with the quick wit of Brauny, I give you the “true beerfan” gallery…

03.16.06 Colts Neck Gallery

Next thing I knew, the weekend was upon us. Friday afternoon, Steve and I made our way over to the homebrew store, myLHBS. Steve needed to pick up some ingredients for what would be his first ever batch brewed in his own homebrew system. He went the hoppy IPA route. I on the otherhand picked up two recipes worth of ingredients, an Imperial Stout and a Double Nut Brown Ale. The Imperial Stout is my own recipe and sort of modeled after Old Rasputin. With a little tweaking from Derek at the shop and it was ready to go. We actually decided to tone it down a little, the thought being I can always work up the beer ladder, but if I go too big the first time around I might end up with 5 gallons of harshness. The second recipe is one Derek put together and I had a taste of from the fridge. It’s a nice brown ale, but with a good kick of hops. I’ll be sure to put the recipes up in a seperate post for anyone interested. Again, I gotta say Derek really has been taking care of us in the customer service area. I didn’t look at his time schedule and he closes a little early on Fridays. We got there 30 minutes after he closed (on St. Patricks Day!) and he still stayed late and humored us as we worked our recipes. Good stuff.

The father-in-law also made it into town for the weekend, which is great. A ship captain always and I mean always has interesting stories to tell. Pirates, check. Submarines, check. Unwieldy natives, check. Plenty of international travel, check. The stories just get better and better. So we spent most of the weekend just catching up and relaxing. Saturday afternoon, while Kristin and pops took in the “V for Vendetta” flick, I grabbed the Fuji scorcher and hit the nearby Pimmit Run trail for some offroad action that would lead me to the den of homebrew…a BURP meeting. These guys and gal have it down! They meet once a month somewhere in the DC/VA/MD area (usually someone’s backyard) and swap homebrews and knowledge, and even have contests and raffles. A fun group of people, who turns out are really into bicycling. Turns out I was o1 of 3 people who biked to the meeting and they regularly do bike rides involving good beer, always a plus! I had to bust out a little early to get home for dinner as we headed out to Lost Dog cafe in Arlington for some super duper pizza. The fun continued on Sunday when Kristin cooked up a fantastic pork tenderloin, it seriously doesn’t get much better than this.

Sunday afternoon proved to be a good brewing day. The wind made it a little on the chilly side, but a clear and sunny day, much too nice to be inside all day watching the basketball games. So after lunch and after the father-in-law left, I started up the system and brewed my Imperial Stout. About the time I was starting my boil, Steve showed up with his gear and ingredients. So after I was done, we set him up and brewed his IPA recipe. While he was steeping the grains, a couple of slipped out to get some stuff to BBQ out on the grill. We had some issues with Steve’s wort, but I think it’s gonna be fine. It was a good cap on a fast weekend. Back to work today, ug, and I already can’t wait until next week…bottling my IPA thats dry hopping in the secondary as I type, then moving the Imperial Stout into the secondary, and hopefully brewing up the Double Nut Brown Ale to put in the primary.

03.19.06 Brewing

For all those TNS riders, looks like there is a good chance of percipiation through the night, possibly snow, which might make it a good time to check out the newest beer bar/restaurant Rustico. If it’s not open for biz yet, maybe a long round about to Paradiso again…

DT

Music Monday

Published
by
DT
on March 20, 2006
in Music
. 7 Comments

John Scofield: A Go Go

Artist: John Scofield
Album: A Go Go
Song: Hottentot
Description: This is an album I recently borrowed from my friend Chris. Surprisingly, I never heard this one even though it’s from 1998. Why is this such a good album?…because it’s funky, funky like my non-wool bike jerseys on a hot summers day. Scofield is pretty amazing on the guitar and with the backing of Medeski, Martin, and Wood, the funk really shines through. My only complaint would have to be MMW just isn’t as all out crazy as they are in their own endeavors. Martin’s drums keep me in the groove the entire time though and Sco does what he does best…playing the guitar like no one else.

Download here.

DT

What’s Brewing?

Published
by
DT
on March 14, 2006
in Brewing and Recipes
. 1 Comment

This past Sunday I finally got a chance to give my next batch of homebrew a go. Using my new brewing equipment made the time to finish much quicker. Knowing that it will only take me 3 hours from start to finish, including clean up is huge for planning new batches in the future. No longer do I have to plan on giving up a whole day just to brew. So now I have no excuses for turning out more batches of beer this year, with the exception of probably having to buy a few more batches of bottles. Maybe I’ll get a bunch 22oz. big boys…certainly would make the bottling process go quicker. It seems each time I brew I lose about a 1/2 case of bottles for various reasons. Mostly they just get thrown away when you pass on some homebrew to friends.

Anyway, this batch is a run of the mill IPA, thats an India Pale Ale, not an Imperial Pale Ale. My last batch was an Imperial California Pale Ale (box set from Best Brew) and it had good and bad moments. At first there wasn’t enough carbonation, then it was good, but a little bitter, then it somehow gained an almost apple taste to it, and finally after a few months of sitting it was spot on…a spicy hopped beer with caramel undernotes. Timing being what it is, we finished off the last batch of homebrew while brewing the newest batch.

I like hops and I’m like them BIG! So with this recipe I took your regular IPA, added a bunch of hops to get the IBUs (International Bitterness Units) up and after it’s done sitting in the primary fermenter for a week, straight over to the secondary glass carboy to sit some more. When it’s moved over to the secondary I’m going to try and dry hop the batch. Dry hopping is a sort of misnomer as it’s full on wet. I’m basically taking an ounce of fresh Columbus hops and letting them sit in the beer while it’s in the secondary so the oil from the hops can get absorbed into the beer. If it works, the beer will have a much recognized citrus like hop taste (think Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA or Clipper City Loose Cannon IPA).

This brew was a lot of fun as I was joined by neighbor friend, Paul, an old roommate, JK, and my wife, Kristin. Having that much help is really great. It allows you to really concentrate on what your doing instead of having to worry about the little things, like boil over. I also got a great deal of help from myLHBS, which is new to Falls Church. Derek Terrell is the owner/operator and was a microbrewer back in the day. He gave me tips on how to use my turkey fryer as a brewing system, sold me my copper piped wort chiller, helped me nail down the recipe, and sold me all my individual ingredients (my first time not using a box since college). So without further ado, here’s my latest recipe:

03.12.06 - Dry Hopped India Pale Ale

Info:

  • Type: Extract w/grain
  • Size: 5 gallons
  • Bitterness: 61 IBU
  • OG: 1.063
  • FG: 1.016
  • Alcohol: 6.1% v/v (4.8% w/w)

Ingredients:

  • 1 lb. British crystal 50-60L (Crosby & Baker - Muntons Crushed Crystal - 2 Row Barley Malt)
  • 3.3 lb. Light malt extract (Northwestern Gold Malt Extract)
  • 4 lb. Light dry malt extract (Northwestern Gold Dry Malt)
  • 1 oz. Galena (12.0% AA)
  • 1 oz. Centennial (9.9% AA)
  • 1 oz. Amarillo (8.3% AA)
  • 1.0 oz. Columbus (17.0% AA) (Dry Hop)
  • Safale US-56 Dry Ale Yeast

Description:

Steep grains while water temperate reaches 160-170°. Remove grains and bring water to a boil. While stirring, add Malt Extract and Dry Malt. Start 60 minute clock and add 1 oz. Galena hops. With 15 minutes left on the boil, add 0.5 oz. of Amarillo hops and 0.5 oz. of Centennial hops. At the end of the 60 minute boil, add 0.5 oz. of Amarillo hops and 0.5 oz. of Centennial hops. Bring wort temperature down to 70°, add Safale US-56 Dry Ale Yeast to wort and aerate. Pour wort into primary fermentation bucket with lid and airlock and let sit at 68° for one week (or until fermentation slows). Syphon beer into secondary glass carboy to continue fermentation, to filter the beer, and to start dry hopping. Add 1 oz. of Columbus hops in a mesh bag to secondary glass carboy. Leave in secondary for up to 2 weeks. Remove hop bag. Disolve priming sugar into 2 cups of water and pour in bottling bucket. Syphon beer into bottling bucket (this allows the beer to properly mix with the priming sugar, but keep it from getting air bubbles). Bottle beer. After the beer has had a chance to carbonate, enjoy!

So that’s my latest beer. I’ll be sure to let everyone know when it’s ready for primetime. Being that I have another primary fermenter bucket, I’ll probably brew up another batch fairly soon. If you have any fun suggestions, let them fly. It doesn’t have to be hoppy and I’m guessing my next batch will be a little more creative. I’d like to try and reproduce Shenandoah Brewing’s Chocolate Donut beer, which I’m guessing is simply a chocolate stout with a bit of vanilla extract. Then there’s Bear Republic’s Red Rocket Ale, an upfront malty sweet red ale that does a 180° turn and slaps with you some hops at the tail end. In general I like beers you can really taste. Whether it’s just sweet malty goodness or actually being able to taste the roasted grains, it needs to be something that leaves an impression. Heck, maybe I’ll try a stout and add some oak chips. Who knows?

DT

Music Monday

Published
by
DT
on March 13, 2006
in Music
. 7 Comments

So I’m thinking Monday should be Music Monday. I’m going to try and post a song up each Monday. No idea how long I’ll keep the previous weeks available for download, just don’t get your panties in a ruffle if I end up pulling something later on to make room on the server.

Make-Up

Artist: Make-Up
Album: Destination: Love; Live! At Cold Rice
Song: Don’t Mind The Mind
Description: Straight from Chocolate City, this is an album Steve let me borrow. They are a punk band on the local Dischord recording label and the whole album rocks.

Download here.

DT

Weekend Wrapup

Published
by
DT
on March 13, 2006
in Bikes, Dirt and Life
. 3 Comments

What a glorious weekend! Spring is finally here in the DC metro area. We’ve had several days of 70° weather with the possibility of hitting 80° today. Of course this comes with the inevitable return to freezing temps before the end of the week. Get out while you can!

This was one of those weekends your just happy to be able to get outside, enjoy the weather, see old friends, AND get a ton of stuff done. I finally feel refreshed and have caught up on my sleep. Saturday I was up and about by 7:30 AM to get a jump start on the day. Out to the yard, fire up the lawnmower and made an attempt to cut the grass (leaves). Unfortunately, my plan of using the lawnmower in place of raking the entire yard didn’t pan out. Out comes the rake and 16 giant bags later, the job is done. It only took about 4 hours, but I had other plans for that time, oh well. Finished up around noonish, plenty of time to eat some leftovers from the grilling the night before and get my stuff together for…the ride.

This would be my first official MORE ride I’ve led this year. A 2:00 PM ride at Colt’s Neck in Reston, doing the full loop. I lubed the chain on Steve’s Karate Monkey and put her up on the car and headed over to the ice rink. Thought I was going to have 6 people, including myself, but turns out we had 10 people and a great ride. We rode the loop forward, stopping occaisionally to regroup and catch a breath. Lee ended up coming out, which is great, because I haven’t ridden with him in a long long time…probably since last summer. He even pulled his patented move on “Lee’s Crossing”…full steam ahead to cross a fair weather creek crossing, which is essentially a concrete bridge just under the water and it typically is slick with slime. You can see where this is going…squirelly entry with a splash at the end. Last time I saw Lee pull this off was 2 winters ago in 19° weather…his hands/gloves froze to his handlebar. But other than getting a little wet on a 70° day, Lee pulled out ok. No mechanicals that I know of, with the exception of pulling into the parking lot and a guys chain decided to blow up about 20 feet from the car…must have taken a big withdrawal from the kharma bank.

A fantastic day, a good ride, beers and chips afterwards…a truely great time. I took a few pics, but there aren’t many riding photos. I’m more of “ok we’re stopped, let me fish out the camera and snap a pic” kind of guy. Especially when leading a ride, you definitely feel the pressure to step it up a notch to make sure your not setting a slow pace for everyone. Check out the gallery:

03.11.06 Colts Neck Ride Gallery

I figured Sunday would be just as nice of a day for riding…I was right, only I didn’t even touch my bike. Kristin and I took the Busterman for a nice long walk around the hood. We checked out all the houses for sale, the ones that had been bought and redone, and finally the ones that have been demolished and rebuilt into giant 2 and 3 story boxes. Goodbye history, goodbye style, goodbye yard, hello ugly ass box with bay window views of my neighbors tiny wee house and less yard than middle unit townhouse. What a steal at 1.3 million…I’m not bitter, ha.

Anyway, after the walk we cooked some shrimp and asparagus out on the Weber Grill. We had a surprise visit from a neighborhood friend, bringing his dog Lucky over to run around with Buster…one of the many advantages to having a semi-big yard (for me at least) and having it fully fenced. The dogs can run round and round the house and play to their hearts content and I don’t have to worry where the dog is at every moment. Not too long after that, my friend JK showed up with his completely neurotic dog Neuman (or is it Newman). It was virtually a dog park at the house with 3 dogs running every which way. Figured with all the people at the house and the fact I’d been wanting to do something since Thursday night, I ran and grabbed my new brewing setup and got under way!

I’ve made some really nice upgrades in the brewing equipment area thanks to Kristin and her parents. They gave me a turkey fryer, specifically for cooking up 5 gallon batch of wort. I also picked up a wort chiller, which is just some copper pipe coiled up with a hose on each end.

Beer Kit

Now you can brew by yourself, but it’s more fun and a hell of a lot easier if you have some willing helpers. In my case I had Kristin, Paul, and John and everyone did great! I recently made the switch to coming up with my own recipes and buying all the individual ingredients. Where I used to only use malt extract, now I’m using both extract and dry malt. I’m even venturing into the area of dry hopping. Anyway, I’ll have to make a seperate post on the actual brewing, so I can have all the details written down, but the process took a considerable less amount of time than I was used to…like 1/3 the time.

After spending most of the day outside, we headed in and watched Wallace and Grommet. Pretty funny british comedy flick. Easy end to an easy weekend.

DT

03.07.06 TNS

Published
by
DT
on March 8, 2006
in Bikes and Dirt
. 1 Comment

Last night we took the TNS ride back to the dirt. With the random weather of this winter we have had quite a few warm evenings, but the warm nights came on the heels of rainy days or snowy weather. This always makes for bad trail conditions as the freeze/thaw cycle really takes a toll. Well last night we got out and rode and the trails were dry and fast! For some, it was the first real dirt ride of 2006.

I tried to get the TNS crew to take a trip to Colt’s Neck having ridden the trails there a few days prior and knowing they were incredibly mud free, but the vote went to Wakefield. I see positives and negatives of both, so it’s a tough choice. You can go to Wakefield and ride with a ton of people (if they aren’t riding *with* you, you are still passing them out on the trail a lot) - that can be a positive and a negative in itself. More people usually means you can have seperate groups riding at different speeds, but it also comes with the possibility of more mechanicals. Wakefield is also probably a little closer than Colt’s Neck. Now Colt’s Neck is an actual loop, so you don’t end up riding the same trails over and over as we do at Wakefield, so I see that as a positive for Colt’s Neck. There’s also a lot less trail traffic in general at Colt’s Neck, and like I said before, both positive and negative…more in the positive range for me. Anyway, when there’s a choice between Wakefield and anywhere else for dirt, we have routinely gone to Wakefield, mostly I think, because there are going to be other people there, like the Rickster for example. I’m not complaining, I just like a little variation. Riding with people like Ricky makes me ride faster than I would by myself, so it’s not hurting me at all…with the exception of lungs.

So back to Wakefield, we hooked up with Braun and headed out in our own little group. Eventually Ricky found us and started leading us around. We covered the newer race trails about 5 times before heading over to the Bowl and doing the trails over there. At some point I managed to fall on my side and my phone fell out of my jacket. Ended up finding it right where I thought it would be after our ride was over, so that’s good. Stoner bailed early, citing a bad lunch that might be coming up sooner rather than later. We continued on and ended up with a little under 10 miles. The biggest thing on the night for me was riding a 29er the entire night. Not so long story to be put in another post along with my impressions of how it rode.

Wakefield TNS

DT