Beer Blog For The Ladies

This girl has a pretty neat thing going on. Any celebration of women enjoying beer is something we want to get behind. Get your mind out of the gutter. 

Beer love + nail art love = Nails and Ales

Baird Kurofune Porter

Japan is one of the most enigmatic places on planet earth with a people who have a gift for mastering anything they set their mind to. One needs to only to look at the intense thought and dedication that goes into Japanese tea houses to understand the extent and beauty the Japanese have been able to accomplish. As many of you know, one of my favorite brewers currently in Hitachino (We're doing a beer dinner with them on December 2nd!). So when I stumbled across the Baird brand I had to have it. It not only met but exceeded my expectations.

They truly live up to their motto: Balance + Complexity = Character.

We've had the Red Rose Amber and Dark Sky Imperial Stout in bottle format for some time. I was lucky enough to come across a keg of their Kurofune Porter. Kurofune is the word the Japanese used to describe the American warship that forced open their ports to western trade.  The appearance of this porter is midnight black with very dark mahogany around the edge when held up to light. The head smelled of caramel sweetness, roasted malt and coffee, with a traces of dark fruit. Wonderful mouth feel that lingered long after the first taste. Sat itself right down on the palate and hung out for a few minutes. Coffee, coco, and roast malts prevail with a light hopped background.

We had our first session of Beer School this week and it went very well. Together with the cheese genius,  David Conway-Lama, at C'est Cheese in Port Jefferson we put together a real tasty pairing. He really helped me out by picking three perfect pairings to our Rochefort beers.



The Rochefort 6 was paired with one of my personal favorite cheeses, the Beemster. This Dutch cheese is aged for an astonishing 26 months. It develops little crunchy sugar crystals and very nice toffee flavors. This was a nice way to pair the light fruit, malt, and yeast flavors that characterize this classic beer.



With the Rochefort 8 we called upon the Comté, a French unpasteurized cow's milk cheese. The slick creamy mouth feel and spice characteristics of the 8 blended with the cheeses herb spice. It gets this quality from the cows grazing on wild herbs in the highlands of the Alps. It was a very interesting combination that had different flavors emerge depending on which you consumed first, the beer or the cheese.



Rochefort 10 is an absolute monster of a beer. David provided a great soft blue cheese, St. Agur, that was able to stand up to this legend. This was my favorite pairing for several reasons. I'm usually not at all a fan of blue cheeses with some of them making me feel like total crap. I'm looking at you Gorgonzola. However this cheese was incredible. Both the beer and cheese had an intense creamy mouth feel that coated the taste buds and didn't budge. Along with the fruity, malty, and dark sugar flavors the beer provided, the funkiness of the blue was undercut. By far David's best choice in my opinion. 

Keep your eyes peeled for new events we have coming up soon. There's a Spanish style pig roast on the 26th and an all Japanese craft beer dinner in December.

Time for Secondary Fermentation

Last Sunday I brewed a batch of English style pale ale with the chefs before we started service. Even Chef Guy came by to see what the hell was going on. Today it had been two days since the airlock stopped bubbling so we transferred our beer into a secondary fermenting pale. The guys over at Brewtopia in Port Jefferson were nice enough to lend me a pail until more glass carboys arrive.  

What exactly is secondary fermentation and why would someone go through the extra step? 

Secondary fermentation is the processes of siphoning off your beer from the initial fermenter into another carboy there by leaving behind the sediment at the bottom of the primary fermenter. The yeast cake at the bottom of the fermenter contains dead yeast, remnants from the malt such as gluten, and any remaining hop particles and resins. 

This can alter the taste of your beer by lending yeasty and other rounded flavors to your beer. Some people are especially sensitive to yeasty flavors and it can turn them off from your otherwise tasty brew. The insoluble compounds also have hop resins that can leave your beer with a very harsh aftertaste. 

An additional benefit from this process is that it will greatly improve the clarity of your brew. There are other ways to improve clarity for more experienced brewers, such as employing slightly longer boils (75-90 minutes), using wort chillers for a very effective cold crash, or Irish Moss in the last ten minutes of the boil. All of these steps will help coagulate the proteins and beta glucans. This will help produce a more clear beer.  To be accurate, there isn't any additional fermentation that takes place during this process. It's more accurate to consider it a conditioning phase. 

Next week we will bottle! 

Beer Fridge

I'm more happy than a seven year old on Christmas. We got our new fridge yesterday! We're going to stuff it full of 18 beers in can format. Thirteen of those will be new to our list. It's also freed up some space in our tall fridge for some classics! I'll be posting reviews of all of the new beers over the next few days.

Cheers! 

We're Finally Moving!

Hello Everyone,

The thing about working with your friends is that they are in fact your friends. Deadlines get pushed back, details forgotten. A web developer friend of mine has been swearing up and down for months that our new custom webpage would be up and running. Eventually it faded to the back of my mind as we worked hard on everything else we do here. Friendships endure as webpages die. Thus is life.

However we still alive. I'll be updating here until we revamp and get rolling again with the new website. I'll also be recapping some of the beers I've had over the last few months.

Sorry for the delay! I hope all of you have been enjoying some great brews in the mean time.

Go Share a Beer

Hello Everyone

I apologize for my absence the last two weeks.  I lost my grandfather very unexpectedly and in a manner totally unbefitting a man of his greatness. He made the Most Interesting Man In The World look like Milhouse. He taught me to garden, clam, crab, fish for and fry up flounder, and offered an amazing example of what it means to be a man. Not to mention that my first ever memory of trying a beer was on his boat after a long hot day digging for clams.

 It was the Silver Bullet. This beer catches a ton of crap with beer nerds(in all honesty, rightfully so) but it holds a special place in my memory and heart. Cases of it have been living in my fridge since he's passed. I implore all of you, call your old man, uncle, grandfather, or that buddy you haven't seen because of work and family obligations, grab a six pack, and enjoy them together.