Tag: brewing

Loose Cannon

~ Meg ~ 21 Comments

Week 12 in the Year of Drinking Adventurously!  Cask conditioned Ales.

For my adventure this week, I drank Heavy Seas Brewing Company’sheavyseas_banner Loose Cannon on cask.  This is not a beer you find at the supermarket or the beer distributor.  A cask conditioned ale is only found on tap at a pub or restaurant.  This is a very cool thing, people!  Imagine having fresh beer, full of flavor, not force carbonated, poured from a wooden cask via gravity, the way a pub owner would have served you in the days before mass-produced beer.  Oh, and it’s not ice cold, either.  Say what, now?

First of all, the casks:

Remember the post about bourbon barrel aged beer?  How brewers are using discarded bourbon barrels to age a Belgian Tripel, for example?  The barrel actually adds flavor to the brew.  Heavy Seas uses not just one type of barrel to condition the ale.  From their website:  “In our collection of casks, we possess 11 wooden barrels. These barrels vary in age and make: American or European oak, toasted or untoasted wood, converted from wine or whiskey barrels. Wooden casks like these bring history and flavor nuances to the beer.”

The way it’s conditioned:

Before the ale has been filtered, carbonated, or kegged, it gets siphoned into a cask.  The casks are stored in a ‘cellar’ for a time, allowing the yeast to settle to the bottom.

The way it’s served:

At cellar temperature, which is maybe in the 50-degree range, cool but not cold.  But serving at that temperature doesn’t numb your taste buds and all the flavors can come through. Speaking of flavors, the Loose Cannon is an IPA (India Pale Ale).   It isn’t really bitter like some IPAs but has a little hint of grapefruit and pine that ease up the hoppy-ness.

I would love to tell you that I sat at a several hundred-year-old public house having an Imperial Pint with a crowd of rowdy patrons, cheering for the local football club (and by football, I mean soccer my American friends…) but alas I sat in an anonymous sports bar that just happens to have an incredible beer selection.  So I sipped my Loose Cannon while watching multiple athletic competitions on 60 TVs.  And it wasn’t even basketball.  Sigh…

Oh, and in case you were wondering?  Of my five brackets, two of them are still ranked in the top half of all brackets in the challenges I entered!  Not too shabby!  Go Villanova!!!

Make sure to visit Lula and see what she drank this week!

A cocktail fail but a food and beer win!

~ Meg ~ 36 Comments

Week 6 in the Year of Drinking Adventurously!

The Far East is not being well represented so far!  This week is another fail, I’m afraid.  The beverage to sample this week was supposed to be Huangjiu, which translates to ‘yellow wine’ or ‘yellow liquor’ but really isn’t quite either one.  Like Japanese sake, it’s a unique thing of its own.  Which I hope to try someday, maybe when I get back to San Fransisco for a visit.  I think I should be able to get back on track next week.

So, since I can’t tell you about Huangjiu, I’ve decided to torture you with the beer brewing adventure instead!  The first batch -a Belgian blonde ale- is kegged and ready for consumption.  Most brewers name their beers so this one is called:  Blondes Prefer Gentlemen.  The next batch is an English Ale so I want to name it Naughty Princess Meg! (Not that I’m a princess or anything…)  Here’s what it looks like:

I’m not really going to torture you with the process. You’ll need more than my blog to figure out how to brew your own beer.  Anyway, once it’s all cooked up, it goes into a fermenter, which is nothing more than a glorified 5-gallon bucket with a valve in the lid to release the air bubbles created by the yeast “burping” out CO2.  Next, it gets transferred to a glass “carboy” for secondary fermentation and to let the dissolved particulates settle to the bottom.

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Secondary fermenting
Three weeks or so later, it should be ready to go into a keg or bottles and chilled to your desired drinkable temperature.  We were able to drink Blondes Prefer Gentlemen this weekend in celebration of America’s biggest unofficial national holiday:  The Superbowl.

The first Sunday in February is a time of great rejoicing or great sorrow, depending on which football team wins.  It is also a great time of feasting and merrymaking.  At the party we attended, most of the gathered crowd cheered for the Broncos who eventually prevailed.  When your team isn’t playing (we’re in Philadelphia Eagles territory), the party is more about the food and drink. 

One of my few domestic skills is baking.  Not desserts, cakes, pies and the like… No, I bake bread:  Italian loaves, French baguettes, brioche, challah, cinnamon bread, English muffins, AND pizza and stromboli!  And yo, it’s Philly, so the native dish here is the cheese steak. The cheese steak Stromboli (actually 2 of them) I took to the party was filled with a grilled New York strip steak, sauteed peppers and onions, and mozzarella and cheddar cheese.  Served with my own marinara, it was wiped out in minutes!

Anyway, that was my Superbowl weekend.  I hope you all enjoyed yours! Weekend, that is, I know not everyone was glued to the fiasco that passes for the National Championship.  Back to drinking adventurously next week!