End of 2010 updates

There is not going to be an homage this year like Travis the Chimp got last year.  We will miss Jimmy Smitz, but that is a WIP.

Brewing has all but stopped while 50% of the organization moves East and the other 50% decides the ideal manner in which to continue.

In the meantime:

We held a tasting for Secession Gallery's Holiday Party last Friday to a fun and welcoming audience.  Eden and company do an incredible job of showcasing very talented artists.   Just in case we were worried about our name, the mentions we've seen were pretty funny and supportive.  Same could be said for the audience.  Alas, it could be German right?

On offer, we poured the following:
- Belgian Pale Rye
- At Giza (Oaked Bourbon Porter)
- Annapurna (Smoked Malt Porter)
- Racer 5? (IPA clone)
- Giggy Smile (Brown Ale)
- Berhipsterweisse (Berlinerweisse wheat beer with woodruff syrup)

If a winner had to be declared based on feedback, they are listed in order above.  Tough call since everyone had their favorites and we tried not to be partial during pouring.  In the end, we think they got it right.  Giggy Smile is designed to be aged (it is used as the base of our souring projects) so it was richer than what everyone thinks a brown ale should be.

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Bottled Stupid Flander Deel Twee a few weeks ago.  Bottle conditioning will be a bit longer than normal as this one spent over a year in secondary fermentation.  So far so good.  We have a lighter version of Consecration on our hands!

Happy Holidays from Die Hipster Brewing.

New logo?

Thanks to a good friend for taking a crack at a new logo.  Thoughts sent to @diehipsterbrew on the Twitter.

October Updates, Go!

• Fairly long brewing drought in these parts as we play the patience game while Giggy Smile, Accomplice! and Stupid Flanders 2 continue to age in their various forms.  Stupid Flanders will be a year old in a few weeks and is coming along nicely.  We'll be bottling that one very soon.
• The Racer 5 clone is done, bottled and ready to go.  Not enamored with this one and we'll give it some more time to see if bottle conditioning cleans it up a tad.
• New label/logo is coming soon thanks to some hard work done by a friend of ours.
• Our Belgian Pale Rye was on tap for the Niner's opening game at our friends Elizabeth Street Brewing.  The Niner's are semi-wretched, but fortunately the beer made up for it.
• This is our new favorite thing and probably yours:

(No such thing as a) Clone

We've really never nailed down an IPA that we felt worthy of promoting.  That said, we've only tried a few times so just picking up that effort, we found the recipe for Racer 5 IPA in a recent issue of Zymurgy.

No such thing as a clone in our opinion, rather some guidelines to reconstruct someone else's product that we happen to respect.  Our deviations due to available ingredients:  We did not use Belgian CaraPils and we replaced Cascade hops with Centennial.

The recipe (as we brewed it):

10.5 lbs. 2-row domestic Pale

1.5 lbs. Malted Wheat

0.5 lbs. Crystal 20L

0.5 lbs. CaraPils

Mash at 152.  Sparge at 178

Hop Schedule (90 min boil)

60 min:  0.5oz Columbus 14%AA

20 min:  1.0oz Columbus 14%AA

20 min:  1.0oz Amarillo 9%AA

10 min:  0.5oz Columbus 14%AA

10 min:  0.5oz Centennial 9%AA

Dry Hop

1.0oz Columbus 14%AA

0.5oz Centennial 9%AA

Yeast:  White Labs California V

Belgian Rye 2.0 and Misc

Starting with Misc:

- We bottled 5 gallons of the brown ale that was used as the base for two other souring projects that make up 35 gallon's worth of longer term projects.  As it turns out, the base beer (thankfully) very good.  It is a rich brown ale that the malt is surprisingly not heavy handed.  Instead the aroma and taste are closer to dried fruits.  This one is just now bottle conditioning and we'll be ready to provide samples in about a week.

-  If there was a benefit of running the Napa to Sonoma half marathon, (beyond raising raising a lot of money for a good cause, getting in shape, being around great people. . .) it's that when it was over we finally got to visit Lagunitas Brewing.  Great tour and people.  Need to head back when the beer garden is open.  That's where all of the experimental goodness we see in their Twitter feed meets the public.

Variations on a Theme Tasting

It took some time, but the three Imperial Porters were finally ready for their blind tasting.  The Variations on a Theme experiment results are below.  Also, pretty sure that our blatant use of OM's album cover will go unnoticed, but we're more than happy to donate samples if that's not the case.

Feeding the Barrel and Related

As of today, we've now made 45 gallons of the Giggy Smile/Accomplice! recipe.  Since we went straight to using this base for souring projects, we thought it might not be a bad idea to actually find out how it tastes sans aging and bugs.

The barrel is in need of a few gallons of topping off so we brewed a 10 gallon batch today that will be used to top off the barrel as well as provide us with a chance to try the beer as is with the portion that is left over.  It's about time.

5 gallons of today's recipe is fermenting directly with White Labs Belgian Sour Mix.  We have not tried using this yeast blend to do the majority of the grunt work in the past.  However, since it is destined for a larger pool of beer that has already been aging for a little over a month, we should be ok for this experiment.  The remaining 5 gallons was fermented with English Ale yeast and will be ready in about a month for us to distribute.

Some odds and ends for this post:

-  Accomplice! has developed quite the pellicule and in a very short amount time.  Yes, it looks scary now, but it will be delicious.  Remember this contains the ramped up dregs from some amazing beers.  This segues to the item below that used to look very similar.



-  Enjoyed hanging out with Richard over at Elizabeth Street Brewing last weekend.  He managed to entertain and brew 10 gallons of an IPA with grace.  Also had a really good double version of one of his staples.  Super tasty.  Here's an austere pic of one of our contributions hanging out with some Black Butte Porter empties.  This was an experiment that was worth waiting for!  If all goes well, we'll be doing our first kegging soon and will be giving it to him for World Cup.

-  What is the difference between Simcoe and East Kent Goldings hops?  Awesome tasting at Monk's Kettle a few weeks ago.  They brought in 10 of Mikkeller's single-hopped IPAs, all on draft!  What an awesome way to learn your Centennials from your Cascades and your Amarillos from your Warriors.  Our tastebuds were crushed, but we both liked the Centennial (happens to be growing out back) and the Simcoe examples.  Really great experiment and we'll probably be doing a similar series with our Amarillo Hopped Wheat.
 

-  We can't say enough about how incredible the weather can be (is) here in SF.  After today's brew, we had enough perfect sunlight to just relax with a sausage and beer while being serenaded by some Hawkwind.  If we were paid to spend our days this way, we'd call it a life.  No action in this shot, and that is the point.  Just another crystal clear day to relax after a labor of love.  Wort chiller cleaned and dried in 20 minutes.

Hold music, probably Melvins

Post barrel project, lots of waiting.  We now have three long term projects going.

• Stupid Flanders Deel Twee has been in the secondary since November and we're probably going to get in in the bottle sometime in June depending on how our sourness is progressing.
• Accomplice! has been in the secondary since the end of March and all of the bugs we added from some of our favorite sour beers have already produced a pellicule.  It's going to be pretty damn sour.
• Giggy Smiles has only been in the barrel for about a month and we're going to top it off and add some more bugs soon.

So now we wait.  In the meantime, we've done another 10 gallon batch of our Amarillo hopped wheat beer.  This time around we split the primary into American Hefe and CA Ale yeasts to check on the impact.  We've now made this one three times and the feedback on it is consistently excellent.  With some tweaks, this is proving to be a staple as our most accessible brew.


This next batch is partially destined for kegging.  It's about freaking time and god knows what we'll be doing when it comes time to bottle 30 gallons of our barrel aged brown.

The Wizard is Dead. Long Live the Wizard.

We here at DHB enjoy occasionally partaking in some disc golf.  One of the best local spots is Stafford Lake.  It's a fairly energetic hike, peaceful, sunny and a welcome getaway from the city.  We suck at actually playing, but it's enjoyable.

The first time I was interested in playing disc golf, I had no idea where to get the discs so I resorted to the interwebs.  With zero knowledge, I went with a driver (Wildcat) and a putter (Wizard) based solely on the graphics.  Pretty scientific.  Well many discs have come and gone but the Wildcat and Wizard have somehow managed to escape nature's clutches.  That is until today.

The Wizard has been quite a reliable putter and has been like a severely abused and ignored family member.  Today he decided to move on.  On an approach shot facing the edge of the lake, he decided to see what this God thing is all about.  As soon as it was out of my hand, things felt very strange.  The disc is designed for short flights, but on this occasion it took off like a rabid duck straight towards the water.  No amount of 'roid rage could have empowered me to throw the disc with this level of venom.  The Wizard took the Salem Witch Trials way out and will be missed.  The rescue was called off after about 1 minutes.  Perhaps in 500 years when the lake is no more, someone will discover the skeletal remains and their face will melt off.  We can only hope.

Good bye Wizard.  Hope you cut a few strokes off God's disc golf game.

30 Gallons in 12 hours. A Recap and What we Learned

Our barrel is calmly waiting for us to put it to good use.  The biggest hurdle (hopefully) was completed last Sunday.  In about 11 hours, we managed to brew three 10-gallon batches on one set of equipment.

The first burner ignition kicked off at 10:50 am and the last primary fermenter was sealed around 10:00pm.  We were exhausted in the best way possible and have to say that the day was remarkably smooth considering the potential variables as well as a few 'firsts' that we were able to adapt to remarkably well.

Barrel warm-up, Accomplice!

Per the previous update, we're soon on the hook to create 30 gallons of something and that 30 gallons is going to be aged.  So what is the recipe that we're willing to commit this volume and time investment?  Logic dictates that this one should come from something already successful in our wheelhouse.  A huge version of Stupid Flanders fits that scenario and we've done the math to make that happen if that's the way to go.

We wanted a second option, more of standard brown ale.  In researching recipes, we stumbled across a recipe for Jolly Pumpkin's "La Roja" on BYO.  We'll call this a guideline more than a recipe since

Hey wine barrel, good-bye comfort zone

In one quickly decided maneuver, we found ourselves the new owners of a 30 gallon 2005 Bryant Cabernet wine barrel.  Looks like that wine retails for $500.  Unreal.

We've been kicking around the used barrel concept for a while.  A few have been made available to us, but we passed because the standard barrels are 55/60 gallons.  Making that much beer in a short time at our scale is out of reach.  Instead, we've had reasonable success using soaked oak chips in our secondary fermenters (Flanders Deel Twee and Variations on a Theme:  At Giza).

30 gallons now puts us in a 'we can probably pull this off' spot, so we'll make the attempt.

Variations on a Theme: Annapurna

The third installment in the series.  This version will receive the least amount of meddling of the three.  The base recipe is identical to the previous two with the following addition:

0.75 lb smoked malt added to the grain bill.  This was a straight add rather than a substitution.

In term of process, the only difference is that we used a starter comprised of the late runnings of Thebes.  About a quart was frozen for the week then boiled to give the yeast an exact head start into the recipe.

Die Hipster Weighs in on the Shin Guardian Roundtable

Our friends over the Shin Guardian are doing a truly incredible job of covering all things USMNT and related topics.  Every now and then they allow us to weigh in.  If you pay attention to us and like soccer, you should 100% be RSSing their site.

Check out their latest post and thanks guys for letting us contribute!

Variations on a Theme: Thebes

As we alluded to in the previous update, the next two releases are going to be based on the Oaked Bourbon Porter base recipe.  They will all have the same grain/hops/yeast, but they'll get a different treatment at some point in the process.

To tie the three together, we'll be calling them "Variations on a Theme".  And in order for the trilogy to make sense, Oaked Bourbon Porter will be getting the new name, " At Giza" and that recipe was previously posted.

Update/SF Beer Week (only just slightly)

Weather is looking up and we're planning the next few batches while waiting for our Dax II to finish bottle conditioning.  Speaking of bottle conditioning, we're leaning ever so close to kegging from now on.  It's a bit of an investment, but the time saved and ability to place product elsewhere seem to be more than worth it.

Not quite finalized, but it looks like we're going to do a few variations of the the base recipe used in Oaked Bourbon Porter. 

"Man's best friend's a carboy and I made my best friend a. . .

. . .sweater".  Early spring cleaning produced several sweaters bound for Community Thrift.  Sans arms, these can easily be re-purposed to keep our fermenters warm.  So that's what we did.

And this is helpful because:

Winter Doldrums

In the Phantom Tollbooth, the Doldrums was a place sans thought or laughter.  Considering the weather and the day job stress, this might be where San Francisco has been for us for the last few weeks.

We needed rain.  We got rain.  We need more and February tends to be pretty wet.  Not coincidentally, it's also an awesome month for Bay Area beer events.  As it relates to our efforts, huge damper on brewing and almost nothing to report other than Dax II is bottled.  We amped up the aroma hops and this might get it's own category of 'Session Wheat Pale Ale'.  The nose is excellent so far.  The only other updates we have are some tasting notes around previously made beers.  As far as tasting notes go,

Dax II: The Hoppening

Update:  Interview with Dax where he (meaning the USMNT Press Sec) received his namesake brews: ShinGuardian Dax interview

Last summer we fired up three pale ale recipes and let our friends decide which one they liked best.  Let's just say that we're going to be poor if we ever do open a full-scale brewery.  One beer won by a landslide.  Even WE voted for it, but that's not the Die Hipster way.  We decided that the Dax recipe had the wider appeal beyond a few oz tasting.  This time around, we doubled the recipe and will be handing over a portion to our friends over at The Shin Guardian.

Brew day went as follows:

Die Hipster Goes to Camp

Not sure how we neglected to mention this, but Die Hipster's MLS Most Valuable Pale summer 2009 project piqued the interest of our good friends over at The Shin Guardian.  They have tremendous content and are appropriately picking up some journalist access to something we love dearly, soccer.

They were interested enough in our project that they allowed us to guest author a blog post that is located here. 

Well, that has been taken to the next level