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I Brew and I Understand.

9/28/2013

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One of my favorite things to do in life is study. I spent 5 years getting my undergraduate degree (Human Biology), and 3 years getting my master’s (Secondary Ed).  [Note I was on the slow track both times.]  I spent a good deal of time in my daughters’ classrooms and with their friends as they were growing up. I’m telling you this because I want to emphasize that I’ve spent a decent amount of time around educational research and practice. And I’ve heard this (in 3 languages, though I only understood it in two and had to trust a translator in the third) a dozen times:

“I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.”

Let me tell you what everyone should do to bring home how true this is. Everyone should brew a batch of beer in his or her kitchen.

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[Ironic -- but hey, it was a free wardrobe for 16 years!]
I’ve seen TimCo and various friends brew dozens of times. I have enjoyed the fruits of their labor every time – except once when he dropped a glass carboy full of wort on the way to the shower (otherwise known as our fermenting room in Whitefish Bay, WI) and what I now recognize to be precious liquid that he and ChrisMo had just created ran away through the floorboards to the basement. I have savored beer from breweries gigantic and tiny in many corners of the world. But I had never brewed a batch myself, until yesterday.

Throughout the past few months, since we really committed to making this brewery a reality, I’ve been paying a bit closer attention when TimCo brews. And over the past 3 months, he’s stopped brewing altogether. Starting a biz tends to grind some other activities to a halt, even when the biz is related to one of your favorite things. Then Linsey came on board and in her casual conversation she lets drop about 3,000 things an hour that I’ve never heard of in brewing. She talks serious chemistry here and knows minutiae about yeasts, for crying out loud. So to try to get a handle on this foreign language I began to read about the process a bit. All that got me was more confused -- I see why there’s a need for an official fermentation sciences course of study (and bravo, CSU, for developing it). It’s a broad and complex field that encompasses a whole lotta’ science, agriculture, mechanics, and artistry. Overwhelmed, I harkened back to the key learning in that phrase above and figured I’d do and understand – I needed to brew my own batch of beer.

When I announced my experimental brewing intention to Tatum, she wanted to participate. AGAIN – one more way in which beer brings people together and adds balance to our life. She took time out of a zany college and work schedule, I stopped looking at spreadsheets and paying innumerable bills for Horse & Dragon, and I got to spend some time with our daughter. We scheduled a date, I poked around for inspiration and ingredients (thank you Zach at High Hops Brewery and the nice guys at Hops And Berries), and we set to it.


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We banished TimCo from the house so that we wouldn’t be too reliant on him. And we are about halfway through making a (delicious, nutritious, fresh & tasty, smooth) better-than-pie pumpkin ale which should be ready just in time for Thanksgiving dinner. (Beware, you folks who are dining with us.)

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I’m not too sure there’s an audience for this, but here are some things we learned. [If you’ve brewed before, you will say a big, “DUH!” If you haven’t, you just need to stop reading right this second and go brew, because as we know from the adage above, if you just hear, you forget. Nevertheless, I’ll keep typing.]

1. If you’re making a 5 gallon recipe of beer, you really need a gigantic pot.
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[Workin' out with the big pot.]
Me: “We clearly need a bigger pot.”
TatumCo: “I thought of giving you one for Christmas, but then I realized you’re getting one that’s approximately 100 times the size of this one.”


2. Chinook hops smell amazing. Even in pellet form.

3. Brewing is a good thing to do on a cold day in arid Colorado. You'll get a little mini-sauna going.
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[Cold & rainy outside, tropical rainforest inside.]
4. Brewing is enough like cooking that if you love to cook, you’ll probably enjoy brewing. Especially if you like beer, but even if you don’t. For example, I took the yeast out before Tatum got here because y’all know that if you put cold yeast in the pizza dough it takes fordangever to rise. And then lo and behold, when Tatum read the tiny (I mean TINY) print on the yeast capsule, it said to take the yeast out of the fridge 3-6 hours before you pitch it. Kitchen chemistry: it’s cool, even if I don’t know the underlying true chemistry. Which brings us to:

5. There’s terminology. You might, if you’re like Tatum and me, have to Google. For e.g.:
Sparge.
Pitch.
Crash.
Flame out.
Boil. [Do you mean steeping for flavor? Or a gentle boil, to stir a tad and get it all toasty hot? Or rolling-all-over-the-place (RAOTP) boil, hot as bejeezus to kill stuff. And if the latter, does that take 90 minutes? What kinda’ organisms are LIVING in our water?!]
All this was just for this one recipe. I’m sure there’s some crossover in the next recipe, but I’m equally sure we’ll encounter some other new vocab.


6. No one wants to have his or her surgery done on our kitchen counters.
This learning lesson will not surprise anyone who knows me and didn’t shock me, so I’m not sure we can call it a lesson gleaned from homebrewing. But just in case you were thinking of scheduling that over here…


On a related note, (7) there’s a lot of sterilizing going on in brewing. There are beer enemies. Bacteria and suchlike. Even oxygen is a hostile attacker – except when it’s beer’s friend. (Apparently wort should aerate. Who knew?) There’s a magic chemical, which I sincerely hope does not cause growth of a second nose, that’s marketed as Star San. By the end of our brew day we were pretty much spraying that stuff on everything involved in the process. After reading the label and Googling the ingredients, I realize I should stop reading labels. The bottle recommends we wear gloves and protective clothing and be careful not to inhale the mist (which is all over our kitchen at this point). Hazardous to humans and domestic animals. And then this: “Do not rinse.” [After applying it to everything THE DELICIOUS PRODUCT YOU ARE GOING TO DRINK TOUCHES OR RUNS THROUGH, you’re supposed to leave this “dangerous to humans” stuff right there on it and let your treasured wort run over it.] I’m going to have to assume that there’s some magical chemical reaction during the fermenting process that neutralizes the Star San chemicals and makes it less hazardous to humans who drink good fresh beer or I won’t be able to sleep nights.

8. The giant pot produces incredible aromas.
Tatum: “Mmmmmm. I wish that you could take a picture of smell.”

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[Looks:  yuck.  Smells: 10.]
9. There is no saving a thermometer whose alcohol (or mercury, god forbid) has separated. I know this because I have tried to resuscitate such a thermometer twice. Just bail.

10. Wort is a fabulous insulator. We were all done boiling (vigorously, BTW) and needed to drop the temp to around 70 so as not to kill the yeast we were about to pitch in there. We rigged up a little homemade heat exchanger in our fridge:

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[Homemade heat exchanger.]
and then we began to wait. We waited. We stirred and checked the temp. We waited. After two hours, the temperature was still at least 40 degrees above where it was supposed to be. We went out to have a beer and a pretzel:

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["Don't mind us, we're just cooling our wort."]
We came home and stirred and measured. We went over to some friends’ house for a bite of their Friday-night challah. [She makes challah from scratch every Friday. I’m telling you, she’s just a hair’s convincing away from becoming a home brewer.] We came home and measured again.  We finally poured everything in the carboy thinking that process would help everything along.

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[Yes, that is a lily-shaped funnel.  Hey, it's a women's collab beer.  We get to choose the utensils.]
We came home and stirred and measured. We went over to some friends’ house for a bite of their Friday-night challah. [She makes challah from scratch every Friday. I’m telling you, she’s just a hair’s convincing away from becoming a home brewer.] We came home and measured again.  We finally poured everything in the carboy thinking that process would help everything along.

When I got up this a.m. everything looked happy and tidy in the carboy, so it must have gone okay.

Having listened to Tim and Linsey talk Horse & Dragon tanks and having chatted with at least one supplier, the time it takes to drop the temp to a yeast-friendly level on a more commercial system seems to be a big selling point. I am sincerely hoping this is because, as a business needing to sell your product, you just don’t want to wait eons for those 15 barrels to cool down. If it’s because there’s a pivotal effect on the flavor of the beer that you achieve through quick cooling of the wort to fermentation temp, our better-than-pie pumpkin ale might not live up to the descriptor.

The upshot of all this is, I think we should brainstorm on some other applications for hot wort. It definitely should be in those mini-barrels around St. Bernards’ necks. I think it has potential in ski boot liners, SCUBA wetsuits, and waterbeds. Where else?

11. Wort is possibly the stickiest substance known to humankind. Heat this stuff up and Super Glue has got nothing on it. I know this because, as mentioned previously, we concluded our pot was too small. And we know THIS because:

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[Permanent alteration of stovetop via homebrewing.]
When we do this again, of course we will not let our boil boil OVER. But on the off chance that we aren’t as diligent as we should be and it DOES boil over, I’m going to take the risk that interrupting the home brewing process to remove the (too small) pot from the burner to clean that stuff up immediately might jeopardize the beer. Because if you leave it on the boil, you have changed the structure of your stovetop by the time the wort is happily bathing in its home-made heat exchanger.

12. Adding even just a small baggie of fresh hops grown on a close-as-family friend’s front door vine as part of your aroma hops is the best secret ingredient ever. Don’t tell me there’s not love in that Thanksgiving beer.


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How 'Do?

9/10/2013

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“How ’do?”

Growing up in Colorado, I always used to wonder about this phrase/greeting coming out of my mom’s – or my grandfather’s – mouth.  After some thought I realized it must have devolved from “How d’you do?”  A la:  “How d’you do?” --> “Howdy do?” --> “How ’do?”  To my 80’s teenaged self saying this to various and sundry strangers as we passed seemed almost intrusive.   Grandfather, come on!  When you’re walking or riding to get somewhere, you’re focused on yourself and where you’re getting to – you’re not focused on whom you’re passing on the way.  You don’t even know that person!  

I moved to California, and then to Asia.  I lived in big cities in these places and there was not a lot of greeting going on in the street.
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[A few thousand people going somewhere in an airport.  Nary a, "how 'do" betwixt us.]
People were plenty friendly enough if you got to know them through work or an activity or at a bar (see previous comments on how you can’t NOT get to know someone if you visit a craft brewery’s tap room).  But you pretty much were a stranger on the street, and this was functional.  There are a million other people (or 8 million) out there in a city and there was no way you were going to be friendly to everyone you passed – they were strangers.  Even in the Midwest, where we moved after Asia and which is a legendarily friendly place, not too many folks said “hi” on the streets unless they already knew you.  My own kids probably learned more about Stranger Danger techniques than Being Friendly ones.

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[How to avoid strangers.]
Then we moved back to Fort Collins.  I continue walking around in my big-city-trained way, eager to get to the next activity or location where I’ll meet or already know people, and I’m constantly caught off-guard (and a little bit ashamed) by the many people who say “hello” on the way by.  Or nod.  Or say, “How’s it going?”   Biking past people walking on the bike trail, I’ll zoom by with my thoughts focused on the next thing, and their “Hi!” will come at me in the wake of the passing – too late for me to amend the situation by hollering, “HI THERE!” over my shoulder.  I marvel a little at this friendly, friendly town, where people habitually say hello to strangers.

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["HOWDY, PARDNER!"]

And then, when putting together the “fortune cookies” that are in our pint glasses, I came across this good piece of advice, which apparently was part of the Code of the West as chronicled by Zane Grey:

“Never pass anyone on the trail without saying 'howdy'."

I’m thinking Fort Collins-ites’ compulsion for saying hello might be a holdover from the early roots of this city.

Like most other things in the Code of the West and Cowboy Ethics, I think this is darned good advice.  This is despite the fact that I don’t follow it as much as I should.  By saying “howdy” you are signaling your openness to helping out, being friendly, and getting to know your neighbor, on whom you may need to rely (or vice versa).  You’re signaling that you’re either not a bank robber or cattle rustler, or that you’re a very friendly one.  These days in Fort Collins, you’re probably signaling that I might see you soon in one of the great tap rooms or beer joints around town, enjoying some fresh beer and camaraderie.   And you’re broadcasting that you are enjoying the journey; you’re focused not just on where you’re going, but on the experience of getting there and on those whom you might meet along the way.  You’re broadcasting that you’re not wasting your moments, but being aware in them.  There’s all sorts of karmic rationale bundled up in this old west tradition.


So if you say hello to a tall (and likely messy) stranger and hear a belated, “HOW ’DO?!” wafting back at you, that’ll be me.  Forgive my belated greeting; I’ve spent 20 years being trained to ignore others in public passing – it’ll take a few more months of Fort Collins Friendly Training to get used to saying, “How ’do?” when we pass.  I’ll get there.

[The Code of the West, by the way, is still enough of an influence around these parts that it is referenced in an article by John Clarke in our own Larimer County Code; his introduction begins with, “It is important for you to know that life in the country is different from life in the city.”  Mmm hmmmm.]

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[The man who said, "How 'do?"]
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Hijinks in Old Town Fort Collins:  USA Pro Challenge & Tour de Fat 2013

9/3/2013

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Under the category of Better Late Than Never, here’s something we should have posted during the USA Pro Challenge Stage 6 on August 24, 2013.  We enjoyed seeing this come across the finish line – powered by Kevin, o’ course!
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Go Rams!

H&D was repped by Mitzi & Tom at the finish line.

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Y’all know about the Tour de Fat.  We didn’t.  For years, if in Foco over Labor Day weekend, we headed for the hills.  This year we decided we’d see what all the hoopla was about.  It was something to be seen.

First off, there’s no better way to start the day than at your neighbors' driveway breakfast gathering.  This was definitely a crew of people who appreciate FoCo.  And with hosts like these, how can you not have a fabulous time?

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[Your neighbors may be great, but are they THIS great?]
In the event that some of you don’t recognize Nate, here he is in his banker’s guise.  [This was earlier this summer.  Note how TimCo dressed up to go and plead for some startup funding.]
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Next stop was meeting up with some friends downtown who have great instincts with regard to haute couture.
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Shortly after this photo, we joined in the melee for a few blocks of the Tour de Fat.
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[Tour de Fat:  An Exercise in Balance.]
The costumes ranged from highly inventive to somewhat confusing:
I loved this set of spectator/participants on a three-fer trailer getup:
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This fellow’s cart said he was celebrating his 79-1/2 birthday and 221,000 miles of lifetime cycling.
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[Silver Fox.]
The parade went on and on and on.  Hours of interesting viewing.  We stopped at these peoples’ house:
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Again, with hosts like these, a good time is certain, no?

FoCo is a town that knows how to gather – on scales big and small.

[We still did sneak away to the mountains for a bit of Labor Day celebration and contemplation.  Much gratitude to all those who have made it possible for us to plant this flag here:

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[Old Glory & The Fort on Booty Mountain.]
Happy Labor Day, everyone!  Make September a crafty, tasty month!
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    ...is the dragon's wanderings through the world of craft beer. It may be hard to follow. This is best read with a great microbrew at hand!

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    Barleywines
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    Belgians
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    Blizzard
    Book Trust
    Brewers' Olympics
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Horse & Dragon Brewing Company   ••  124 Racquette Drive  ••  Fort Collins, CO  80524  ••  970-689-8848
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