Jeremy, Rachel, Tonya, and I finished up a hike on Mt. Tamalpais with drinks at the Marin Brewing Company. We sat out back in the beer garden and enjoyed a few beers under the late afternoon sun. I tasted their Star Brew Triple Wheat Ale (a tasty wheat wine), San Quentin's Breakout Stout (a great name, considering that the brewery is a stone's throw from the infamous San Quentin Prison), and Albion Amber (an average west coast amber). This was my first time visiting the Marin Brewing Company and I would definitely return.
The Virtual Village Homebrew Society has posted a series of online Q&A transcripts with such brewing luminaries as George Fix, Chris White, Garrett Oliver, and Randy Thiel. The transcripts, from Q&A sessions that took place in 2000, contain a ton of good brewing information. Poor formatting makes them a little difficult to read but worthwhile nonetheless.
There's a great thread of Brewing Haiku on the HBD Forums.
Some of my favorites:
Mash temperature?
One-forty or so, I think.
Still made yummy beer.
My foolish in-laws
Say "Why bother making beer?"
No lager for them
Why make a starter?
Wyeast makes pitchable tubes!
Newbie frustration.
Been drinking since noon
Time to step up the mash temp
The skin should grow back
Do a full-wort boil
Oxygenate the wort well
Pitch a lot of yeast
Drinking barley wine
Wow, this tastes quite heavenly
Woke up on the floor
While staying in Huntington Beach for work, I stopped by an incredible beer store, Hi-Time Wine Cellars in Costa Mesa. They have an absolutely unbelievable beer selection. Great beers from Belgium, Germany, England, Scotland, and especially the US West Coast pack a large walk-in refrigerator in the back of the store. While it's slightly cramped in the walk-in fridge, the amazing selection more than makes up for the inconvenience of trying to navigate the beers. They also have a supposedly nice wine selection, although I don't really know wine so I can't attest to this. I picked up a couple dozen beers that I've been having trouble finding in the Bay Area. I also picked up a few that are available in the Bay Area but were a lot cheaper at Hi-Time. Here's what I came home with:
If you're ever near Costa Mesa, I highly recommend checking out this shop. They're incredible.
My latest brew, a Wee Heavy, is in the can...er, I mean fermenter. I used a fairly simple recipe based somewhat on Skotrat's Traquair House clone. To get a nice slightly-smoky carmel flavor, I carmelized three quarts of my first runnings in a sauce pan and added it back for the last 15 minutes of the main boil. By the time I added it to the main boil, the carmelized wort was the consistency of maple syrup and probably would have tasted great on pancakes. I missed my gravity by 10 points (D'oh!), ending up at 1.075 when I should have ended up at 1.085. I'm still getting used to batch sparging and I think that it's a little less efficient at high gravities than at low gravities. There were also probably some errors in my gravity calculations with regards to the carmelized wort. Regardless, it tasted good going into the fermenter and will probably turn out to be a nice beer.
I bottled my latest Kölsch tonight. I brewed it in early June, fermented it in primary at 65°F for a couple weeks, then transferred it to secondary and sent it to the deep freeze--35°F--for a month. The cold definitely did it some good; the small glass I tasted tonight was extremely clean and crisp. This will be a beer for my light beer drinking friends, with enough going on in the background to keep me happy. Perfect for the warm Bay Area indian summer coming up in a couple months.
