Penguin??

First it was Burgess Merideth then Danny DeVito but it seems the Penguin is still at large. Will Batman catch him?? Or will BrewDog finally realise that the Penguin was a lame super hero, Tactical Nuclear or not. The Sea Lion shits all over Penguins in the Animal Kingdom, how long till someone brews something stronger and calls it a Sea Lion??

I guess it depends how long the tickers keep buying into the hype. First it was extreme beers, then cask conditioning. Is Freeze distillation the latest craze?? Stay tuned and take total blessed care.

For those who like to Fag

It seems that old puffing Billy and his anonymous mates are complaining about their rights as smokers. Apparently they have lost their freedom of choice. I see it this way. If I farted in a room and wafted it in their face they would be offended. If my fart was comprised of chemicals that are going to kill them they would be even more upset.
Those who don't like the smoking laws should find a sympathetic politician and lobby them. The laws were put in place by a democratically elected government, which was elected by the majority of people. Smokers are a minority - if you can't beat the anti-smoking lobby, give up and join them. Some say it's and erosion of civil rights, but actually its protecting the rights of non-smokers to enjoy a pint and a meal in an environment which isn't laced with carcinogenic fumes.

As for the anti-smoking lobby being a prelude to an anti-drinking lobby, this may well be the case. But I really can't see the anti-drinking lobby becoming a majority and being able to pass something through parliament. I'm not worried either way, I'd just brew my own and wave my middle finger high.

The Kettle

The photo to the left is my brew kettle. It's a 60 litre aluminium pot which I picked up a number of years ago. It doesn't look pretty and has a nice beer stone inside as well as a good thick player of protective oxides. Ideally it would be made of stainless steel and soon enough it will be, but for now aluminium does the job. I think it is important to note that at wort temperatures and pH there is little chance of aluminium leeching into the beer. If it did, it would be in lower concentrations than in more deodorants (not that a lot of UK based readers would know about those!), or in an antacid tablet.
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The tap at the bottom is a stainless steel ball valve which is connected to a stainless bulkhead. Inside is a stainless pickup tube so I can completely drain all the wort after the boil. In this photo I have a polypropylene hose barb fitted into the ball valve to facilitate removal of liquids. This was a slight oversight on my part and would melt as soon as my high pressure burner is lit underneath it. It has now been replaced with a stainless steel part which was $6.95 as opposed to $0.69 for the poly part!
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It may also be worth pointing out that the kettle will be doubling up as a hot liquor tank as well. Ultimately I will be getting an instantaneous hot water heater to provide hot liquor, which is unusual for most home setups, but its More efficient and quicker than heating up water separately.
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So that's the kettle. I'll post about the heart of the system, the pump on Friday. I plan to brew on Sunday and may include some action shots and recipe next week. Until Friday take total blessed care.

The Mash/Lauter Tun

My mash tun is an adaptation of a an earlier incarnation which was grossly inefficient. The re-design isn't great either, but it should get the job done with minimal of fuss.
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The guts of the mash tun is an old 25 litre esky. It used to have a really dodgy acetate bulkhead fitting, but I replaced this with an irrigation polypropylene bulkhead which provides a better seal and is food grade rated up till 140 degrees Celsius. The lautering manifold inside is a 12" length of stainless steel braid. It's totally inefficient for fly or float sparging but I am lazy and batch sparge anyway. The difference in efficiencies when brewing a 23L batch is hardly worth the extra effort of a continuous sparge method.
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The tap is a stainless steel ball valve I picked up from Beerbelly.com.au. These guys are probably the best source if brewing related plumbing in Australia. They also make a number of custom made bits of kit from mash paddles to full brew microbrewery pilot plants. I ordered a few bits and pieces from them and can't recommend them enough for their excellent and prompt service. The hose barb which sits on the other end of the stainless ball valve is just a polypropylene hose barb which I picked up in the irrigation section of the local hardware shop. It was 65 cents if I recall correctly. Cheap as chips.
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Again this is just a cheap interim piece of kit until I can justify spending more on a jacketed stainless steel 50L vessel with a false bottom. Even though it's cheap, it will still turn out awesome mash liqueur with minimal fuss and minimal heat loss over conversion time.
Tomorrow I'll post some pics of my boiler.

The Mill

Over the next few posts I am going to describe my ad hoc brewing setup which I have constructed from the viable remnants of an existing setup I used years ago. The grain mill pictured though is new. It's a Millmaster I purchased from Mashmaster Specialised Brewing Equipment.
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This is one heavy duty piece of kit. It weighs in at about 15kg's and has 2.5 inch diameter rollers which are over triple the size of other commercially available mills such as the Crankanstein, the Barley Crusher and the Monster Mill.
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This beast is probably a little bit on the overkill side for a home brewing setup and more suited to a microbrewery (they are used in a number of Aussie micro's), but I wanted something that was going to last longer than I do.
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In the past I have used a Marcato Marga grain mill which was an OK option but was designed to crush up muesli for breakfast not crush grains for brewing. I still have this tiny mill and it still works well, I just wanted something big new and shiny.
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I still haven't decided if I will motorise the mill or leave it as a hand cranker. Either way it's sure to make short work of whatever grain I decide to put through it. I also want to give Mashmaster Specialised Brewing Equipment a plug. Top service and an excellent product.

Paranoid

There seems to be a lot of paranoid types in the beer world at the moment. It's evident from the number of impersonators currently infiltrating the comments section of various blogs. It seems that Jeff (Stonch), Tandleman, Sausage, Barry and I all seem to have people pretending to be us. I really don't care as it just shows how weird most people in the beer blog world tend to be.

This post goes out to Barry. It has been brought to my attention that Barry has updated his user profile and states he is "Currently being cyber stalked and impersonated by Tim." He has also setup a flame blog called The Chronicles Of Timmy.
Whatever...... If you need to blog about me you obviously have too much time on your hands. But thanks for caring.

This track goes out to you.
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Us vs Them

It seems that there is plenty of Us vs. Them like debates happening all over beer related blogs at the moment. I have said my bit on CAMRA and banged on about the merits of Proper Real Keg for over a year now and its good to see that my 'extreme' views are now becoming generally accepted.

Here at the Beer Diary we like, drink and celebrate all beer and don't need any special organisations, institutes or consumer groups to push/pour a pseudo-political objective down our throats. If a particular style of beer is not commercially accessible to us like real ale in the 1970's, or boutique lager in the noughties - instead of forming whinging unions, collectives and soviets, we adapt, immerse ourselves in the arts and brew our own.

Amen

"We like beer. That includes all styles from ale to lager and craft to crap - We like it all."

Busy Bee

Apologies that I have too busy to fill in the world on my past couple of weeks. I have been busy looking at houses and snowed under at work. I have had the opportunity to pick up a sixer of Storm from the Mildura brewery. This beer is an Australian interpretation of the American Pale Ale theme. Its cloudy, but has an intense bitterness and Amarillo hop aroma. Overall a good quaffer which suits the warm Australian climate well. I have been working on restoring and rebuilding my home brewery when time has permitted. It's nearly finished so I will hopefully get around to posting about the various aspects of the basic system. As with most home breweries its a work in progress and is cobbled together with parts I have had for years. I have a goal of how I want it to be when I am finished, shiny and full of stainless. I think I will get there over the next 18 months.

The Nags Head

The Nags Head in Glebe is one of only a handful of venues in Australia that offer cask conditioned beer and even then it's only for one night a month. For the month of November that day happened to be last Friday.
They had two beers on offer, or which I only bothered with one. they had a Pilsner (Pictured) and a Ginger Beer. Hardly what I was hoping for! Come on, you need to at least have a bitter on, and a porter is what was secretly hoping was on offer. The beers are brewed by Matt Donelan who owns and brews for the St Peter's Brewery in well St. Peter's.

The Pilsner itself was a nice beer but a little bit too fruity for a Pilsner. It was also fairly cloudy which is also way out of style. To be honest, if this was submitted in a comp it would probably be judged as an Australian Sparkling Ale. It shared a fair bit of similarity with Coopers Sparkling Ale. Anyhow it was good to catch up with the lads and have a handpulled beer again. It's been a whole 4 months since I last had one. I might brew an ale similar to this as a session beer over Xmas. It suits the Australian climate a lot better than the 4% brown session bitters which everyone in the UK blog world seem to be taking for granted right now. I'm thinking 100% Joe White Pilsner malt hopped to 20 IBU's with one of the new Australian varieties (possibly Galaxy?) and fermented out with S05. Should be nice. I will chronicle such an event.

Frozen to The Core

Just a quick update to inform all about the recent events in the life of the wonderful elixir I blogged about last Friday. This brew was shaping up to be a nice hoppy dark ale but a recent turn in the weather has resulted in it become an imperial double black IPA (I made that beer style up. I figured if BrewDog can get away with this stuff then so can I).
The beer was lovely when I took a few schooners straight from the cold conditioning cube last week. On Saturday when racking from the cube to a polypin only half of the beer drained out. The rest of the beer remained behind as ice - well clear ice intermittently dispersed with hop flowers. That's right, I have inadvertently freeze distilled the beer. It's now quite bitter and super hoppy - actually it's so hoppy it has gone from being clear to having a substantial hop oil haze! I estimate that I have about 8 or so litres in the polypin. It should serve up well when served through my beer engine. I'll probably attach a sparkler to mellow down its out of control hoppiness.

Also worth noting is that the weird and wacky world that constitutes the beer blogosphere has given rise to a fake me. That's right, someone has set up an open ID account with my name and profile photo and have been commenting over at Tandleman's blog. My pretender has been giving Barry a hard time so it's not all bad. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery after all. BTW - If you see a comment that you don't think is made by me, just click the name. My profile is open, my Pretender doesn't have a profile.

The Dark Side of The Arts

A while ago I posted about my ventures back into the arts. My own chronicle or sorts. Basically I set up the fermentation of two cans of goop. You can refresh your memories by reading about it here. Anyhow since then the wort has played host to fornicating microorganisms which eat sugar and piss out ethanol. Then the 'green' unconditioned beer was racked of the primary yeast cake into a cube for cold conditioning. I should note that I added a packet of SAFlager 34/70 for microbiological reasons. This brought the gravity down ever so slightly and cleaned up the small amount of esters that had been produced in primary fermentation. It also added a little bit of diacetyl to round out the flavour profile. After two weeks of cold conditioning I decided that I would be packaging this beer by polypin and serving through one of my beer engines on Xmas eve. To give it a unique hop character I added 150g of whole hop flowers which I grew in my hop garden. They are Columbus hops, but tend to have more of an EKG taste to them. Hop flavour is not only varietal but environmental and as such flavours are influenced by the soil, light and other conditions weigh in on flavour - hence these hops have a marmalade flavour similar to EKG rather than a harsh pine like flavour of US grown Columbus. Anyhow I forgot about the beer at that stage and left it for a few weeks. On Wednesday evening I poured off a few schooners of this wonderful dark ruby red beer and it's the shit. I plan to transfer to a polypin tomorrow although I can't guarantee that there will be much left on Xmas eve!
I am also slowly rebuilding my all grain system. I have a new millmaster grain mill which I will post about next week and I have ordered 2kg of hops from a grower in China and 40kg of malt from Joe White malting's. Bring on a new batch in a couple of weeks when the consumables turn up.
Tonight I am off to the Nag's Head hotel for a few pints of cask conditioned Braidwood ESB. Life is good (well until I start house hunting again tomorrow!).

From Japan to Summer Bay

This is about as exciting as a FABPOW (food and beer pairing of the week) will get in my books. Last Friday evening the missus and I joined some friends at a local Japanese restaurant for a feed. I had several dishes I could waffle on about but I think I'll limit myself to just commenting on just my favourite Teriyaki Chicken. It was good. The beer 'pairing' (well the beer that I smashed down while not stuffing my face or drinking Sake) was Sapporo which is a Japanese megaswill lager. It's pretty good and may be above Cookies standard. A nice honey malt taste with a noble hop finish (Hersbruker?). Anyhow this Japanese place was pretty pricey so I got stuck into some of my own cider piss when I got home as I was out of beer.

On Sat I went house hunting. NEWSFLASH::: House hunting sucks. You don't even get to carry a gun - you clearly need one when dealing with Real Estate Agents.

On Sunday the missus and I went for a drive and to grab some lunch out, we drove up to Palm Beach (where they film 'Home and Away') but it was a bit windy and cold so we took some token photos of the Summer Bay Surf Club (Pictured) before heading to the Newport Arms Hotel for lunch. I had the burger. It was pretty good. Possibly better than Bell's chefs offering at the Gunmakers. I also had a couple of schooners of Fat Yak Pale Ale. It's pretty good, very similar caramel malt flavour to San Fran style steam beers like Anchor Steam. It's inoffensive, but interesting enough to drink when the weather is warm and you just want to get on the piss. Perfect Australian session beer. Matilda Bay seem to have added this offering to their line up while I have been abroad. I approve.

BTW - Congrats to Bazza and Gazza for coming out on my blog. The Beer Diary does not discriminate on sex, gender of sexual orientation. Congrats.

CAMRA = Fail

"I blame Camra for single-handedly holding back innovation in British brewing" - James Watt, Founder and Head of Stuff @BrewDog.


Full article can be found here.

Australian Cider

Along with the emerging Australian craft beer movement which is playing host to a number of new micro, nano and contract brewing operations, there is a new wave of Australian cider operators producing a product that fits between artisanyl craft cider and the glucose wines characterised by the Irish style craze which swept the UK in 2006. These 'ciders' are made with pure fruit juice, however the fruit they use are generally not cider varieties. Australian apple cultivars such as Granny Smith and Pink Lady are used predominately and produce a dry sparkling wine style cider that is clear, tart and refreshing. The tannin component that pervades the best west country ciders is noticeably absent which makes these drinks a little uncomplicated, but then UK ciders tend to be simple compared to the complexities of French examples from Normandy. Its horses for courses (speaking of which, I just won $60 on the Melbourne cup!).
First cab of the rank is Pipsqueak which is brewed by the same blokes who bring us Little Creatures (OK, Lion Nathan is a major shareholder but push that to the back of your mind). This cider gets the thumbs up from my wife so that's an indication towards its styling. Actually it tastes and smells very little of apples. Its neutral and if anything could easily be confused with Champagne - which is the style of dry cider I think LC were setting out to achieve.
Three Oaks Cider Co. are also a relatively new player on the scene. Their Original product takes a different approach to Pipsqueak and while still being clean flavoured, still maintains a strong apple and pear aroma and a residual sweetness. Their product range of Sweet, Dry and Original is slightly concerning though and mirrors that of a famous glucose wine manufacturer - Strongbow.
Punt Road Napoleone & Co Apple Cider is produced by a notable Yarra Vally vineyard which is branching out into the emerging cider market. Their offering is more in tune with the dry fizzy styling of Pipsqueak although the bottle I had displayed a rotting fruit aroma on the nose. If you have ever had the cider or perry from the cider stall at Borough Market you will know the aroma I am describing. Putting the aroma aside the cider was fine, if not a little dry and bland.
Continuing with the Yarra Valley theme, Coldstream Cider by the Coldstream Brewery was very much in the mould of the 3 Oaks offering with a semi-sweet slightly fruity offering. But still lacking the body and flavour that you get from a cider brewed with real cider varieties.

In a nutshell this is the current state of play for these emerging ciders. Its an interesting market play for these products as they are looking towards piggybacking on the niche craft brewing market where some of the more artisanyl products from Thorogoods Fine Apple Wines, Sully's Cider House, and Small Acres Cider seem to have found a niche within the fine wine industry. Fingers crossed my small operation will be able compete in both of these niches in just a few years time - well after these early market entrants pave the way and reintroduce cider to Australian drinkers again.