Two Jews Brew

Roll Up for the Mystery Brew

2011-10-16T13:59:00.000-04:00

OK, it's been awhile since the Two Jews got to brewing. Why? No matter - we're brewing now, and that's the thing.

Now, I'd be lying if I said that our 1st brew in some time went exactly according to plan. We pored over the possibilities and settled on an Oktoberfest recipe (even though it wouldn't be ready until November...a minor detail). Nahum was going to call the ingredient order in, and I was going to pick it up.

Which I did. Our regular guy was on vacation, so I dealt with the kid working behind the bar. He didn't have an order for "Nahum"...but there was one that looked about right for a "Naron." An easy mistake to make over the phone.

But when I got the stuff home and checked in with Nahum, he informed me that he had not, in fact, put in our order. Really? Well, it was now too late in the day to go back to the supply shop...and anyway, the ingredients were bought and paid for, and ready to deploy. When you can't brew with the ingredients you want, you brew with the ingredients you have. Sorry 'bout that, Naron.

And anyway, the bag of stuff we had looked like our kind of brew - likely a porter or nut-brown ale, both of which we've made an thoroughly dug. So we put the 1/2 lb. of crystal malt, 1/4 lb. black patent malt and 1/4 lb. of chocolate malt into the gran bag, and got to boiling in 2 gallons of water.

It was immediately clear that the Mystery Brew was not going to steer us wrong: nice dark color, good nutty aroma. At the boil, we added a 3.3 lb. can of Briess sparkling amber malt and 3 lbs. of light amber DME. Once it got back to boiling, we split out 2/3 of the oz. of Northern Brewer hops, and added the last third after a half-hour. Twenty minutes later, a 1/2 oz. of Willamette finishing hops, followed by a few more minutes of boiling.

As we strained the wort into some cold water, it looked and smelled just right. Oh, and it tasted good - a quick sample showed that (unsurprisingly), the brew is more malty than hoppy, but certainly good. (We're debating some dry hopping after it's had time to ferment.)

Nahum had to hit the road after we strained the hot wort, so we're letting it cool and will pitch some English dry ale yeast later in the day, then the Ale Pail goes down to the basement.

Some of the beer-brewing reflexes might have been a little rusty, but the result seems right on target. And we owe it all to Naron, the (accidental) Honorary Third Jew, who helped make it happen.

Short and Stout

2010-11-20T14:26:00.000-05:00

Oh, apparently we made a batch of stout and I forgot to say anything. I could make all sorts of excuses for why this update is more than a month overdue, but one interesting excuse is that this batch seemed almost effortless. We decided to make it and then did so, and it all seemed to breeze by without undue effort or noteworthy details.

Basically, it went like this: we decided to catch up with the cooling fall weather by brewing another batch of the stout from the year before, but this time with a tweaked recipe. We ordered up 8 oz. crushed black patent malt, 4 oz. roasted barley, 2 cans of Cooper's Dark Malt Extract, 1.5 lb. light dry malt extract, 1.5 oz. Northern Brewer hops, 1/2 oz. Cascade hops, 1/2 oz. Fuggles hops and some yeast. The grains and malts were essentially identical to our initial stout, but we altered the hops profile to make it a little more robust.

And like I said, it turned out to be one of our easiest brews, with even the cool-down working out pretty quickly; the bottling was mostly a breeze, too. Which makes it hard to say, exactly, why this particluar batch turned out to be so...OK.

Don't get me wrong--it tastes pretty damn good, with a nice full body, a good aroma and a clean finish. But something about this stout didn't break past good into great. Did we pay insufficient attention to some part of our easy-breezy brewing? Was our hopping change not entirely for the better? Was something off with one or more of the ingredients? Or was it just one of those things? Take a look:

My guess is that it just kind of happened this way. Hey, we're not pros, and not every batch turns out exactly the way we intended. This one seems a bit more high-alcohol than the last stout, and that might be it right there. But I'm not complaining: it's a fine stout, one worthy of the 2JB name...even if it doesn't quite scale the heights of the Grape Nuts Ale, Ale to the Chief or its other brothers in brew.

Cereal Brewers

2010-07-18T13:27:00.000-04:00

Well, I see it's been awhile since I recorded any 2JB activity. I have only one excuse: My wife an I adopted a newborn baby boy 6 months ago, and that turns out to take up a bit of one's time. So there.

But that doesn't mean there's been a cessation in 2JB activity. Soon after bringing my son home, Nahum and I bottled up the Parlor City Porter; actually, it was long enough ago that the whole batch has been drunk up. And it was delicious.

Flash-forward to: One of the reliable tropes that comes up every time we brew is that, at one point or another, the wort smells like Grape Nuts cereal. It makes sense, since Grape Nuts is primarily malted barley and such, much the same as what goes into the grain bag at the beginning of each brew. Which got me to thinking...and to searching, specifically on Hopville, for beer recipes that used Grape Nuts in the brew. Sure enough, the similarity between early-stage brewing and morning-stage breakfast had occurred to other folks as well, and there was a variety of Grape Nuts recipes from which to choose.

I chose a cereal-based wheat ale (perfect for the summer season that was imminent during our early-may 2JB session) and bought 2 boxes of cereal to complement our regular haul of hops, extract and yeast.

Two pounds of Grape Nuts went into the grain bag, which was lowered into 2 gallons of water. Oddly enough, once we got the water boiling, this batch was smelling less like Grape Nuts than pretty much any we'd attempted before. Go figure.

At the boil, we put in 6.6 lbs. of light LME, returned the wort to a boil and added 2 oz. of Willamette hops. And while I don't know the science behind it, for some reason we got a very cool hot break once the hops dropped in.

At the 35 minute mark, in went 1 oz. of Crystal hops and a tsp. of Irish moss;with 10 minutes to go, we added another 1.75 oz. of Willamette. (The recipe had called for nearly all of the hops to go in at the beginning; Nahum and I agreed that this didn't sound like it would lead to maximum deliciousness, so we spread the hopping out a bit.)

Since it was not yet The Hottest Summer Ever (though it was getting there), we used an ice bath to get it down to 80 degrees, strained it into a bucket and added refrigerator-cooled water.

The OG was 1.050, more or less what we'd been told by the recipe to expect. It still took awhile to drop down enough for pitching the yeast, but pitch we did with German Wheat Activator.

Now...at this point, I would usually sign off and come back for bottling and then tasting. But please recall the aforementioned new baby and accept the following facts:

It fermented in the bucket for a couple of weeks.
We racked it into the carboy, along with some dried orange peel, and let it sit for another couple of weeks.
Bottling was quick & efficient, producing about 40 bottles.
Grape Nuts ale was perfectly fermented, as delicious as anything we'd ever brewed, and unbelievably perfect for a hot summer day(s).

Parlor Game

2010-01-19T12:16:00.000-05:00

Even as our medium-bodied Abbot Ale was finishing up in the basement, Nahum and I had our eye on the next brew. Specifically, something dark, heavyish and delicious...which meant, after very little contemplation, that we'd be brewing a batch of porter.

The recipe that leaped out at us on Hopville was Parlor City Porter (which abbreviates, unfortunately, to either PCP or PP...maybe this one should just be PC Porter, yeah?). The ingredient list was enough to put the taste in our mouths, and even before we'd placed the order at the Gaslight we were both impatient to be drinking this latest batch.

However, once we did put in the order, we ran into a new wrinkle: our supplier didn't have several of the ingredients, specifically coffee malt and golden oats. Now, he's had to make a substitution or two before, but usually just a minor adjustment; in this case, he gave us a whole different kind of oats than what the recipe called for (the type we put into the oatmeal stout, actually), and chocolate malt instead of the coffee varietal. Obviously, this would alter the final product, but we wisely decided to relax and make some homebrew.

I opened the box of ingredients (another difference--they've always come in a bag before!), and put 1 oz. of American Crystal 60L, and 0.8 oz. each of chocolate malt, oats, and black patent malt into the grain bag, which steeped in 2.5 gallons of water.

At the boil, we pulled out the bag and dropped in 2 lbs. of DME and a 3.3 lb. can of light LME, followed by 1 oz. of East Kent Goldings hops. Right from the start, the wort had a coffee-dark color and a rich, dark-roast aroma. Clearly, the substitution parlor game wouldn't be a problem for the Parlor City Porter.

After 30 minutes, we put in another ounce of EKG hops, along with a tsp. of Irish moss; 25 minutes later, half an ounce of Fuggles hops went in as the finisher, and the whole thing got another 5 minutes of boiling before we strained the dark, dark liquid into the Ale Pail and topped it off to 5 gallons.

At this point, we've alternated methods for cooling down the wort: sometimes we've used an ice bath, sometimes added chilled water, and last time we just put the bucket out in the wintry weather. This time, we had a couple of our top-off gallons in the fridge, which seemed like it would do the trick--the temperature was already about halfway to where we needed to be before pitching the yeast.

So we waited. And waited. Nahum went home. I did some stuff around the house. Hours passed. Many hours. And even with the lid open, we'd only lost a few degrees.

Finally, I lost patience with the PC. It had been almost 5 hours, and it was only down to 85 degrees...but that was going to have to do. I pitched the Activator pack of 1968 London ESB yeast, sealed it up and popped the pail in the basement. It's supposed to age for 2 weeks...but you can be very sure I'll be looking in on it very frequently. The yeast was already pretty active at the pitch, and the high temperature tells me that there will be a lot of activity in the bucket. To avoid a second Explosivo! incident, I wrapped the pail in plastic and am keeping a watchful eye on the airlock.

Pour One for Len

2010-01-19T11:49:00.000-05:00

In addition to our shared passion for homebrewing, love of good food and conviction that Mad Men & The Simpsons are two of the best shows on TV, Nahum and I often come across other little places where our lives and interests overlap. This weekend, there was one more: Nahum's wife had invited Len, one of her good friends from college over to their house...someone we'd learned, through the magic of Facebook, was also a friend of mine from high school.

Since Len's visit coincided with the ready-date of the Abbot Ale clone, it seemed like the natural thing to do was to pour one for Len as we took our first sips of the latest brew. Which is exactly what we did.

The Abbot poured with good carbonation and a light-brown (but still somewhat cloudy) appearance. It looked good and had a nice aroma. We split two bottles into three glasses for Nahum, Len and me. L'chaim, Len!

The taste was just about what we'd figured: malty, not very bitter, medium-bodied and quite good. It's probably more autumnal than wintry in taste and feel, but you can't always nail the season right on the head, eh? I would probably rate the Abbot somewhere in the lower third of the dozen-plus brews we've produced over the last year and a half...which just means it's on the low end of an overall highly rated bunch.

Draft App

2010-01-08T14:12:00.000-05:00

Silly, but the fun kind of silly:

Hey Abbot!

2009-12-17T21:18:00.000-05:00

Where do ideas for beers come from? Why, from other beers of course. Nahum recently took a family trip to London, and while there he sampled one of the UK's fine premium bitters, Abbot Ale. He liked it. A lot, in fact. And since my new favorite homebrew site, Hopville, had a recipe for an Abbot Ale clone, there really wasn't much to discuss as far as what we needed to brew next. Hey Abbot!

Since Nahum was running a little late for our Sunday morning brew session, I got things rolling by heating up 3 gallons of water (with 1 tsp. of gypsum) and filling up the grain bag for the initial steep. In addition to 8 oz. of British crystal malt (70 - 80L) and 6 oz. of British Amber malt, the recipe called for something we'd not used before: 4 oz. of Belgian candy sugar. It looked like rock candy!

As soon as I mixed it all up in the grain bag and got it steeping...I immediately started to panic. Did I just put rock-candy sugar into the 1st stage of the brew? Wasn't that probably for the carbonation? The recipe didn't suggest I'd gotten it wrong, but I totally convinced myself otherwise (and forgot to relax and have a homebrew). See, one of the good things about having 2 Jews brewing instead of 1 is that we're less likely to make mistakes or overlook something. We've got each other's back, and I think it helps the beer.

Anyway, Nahum arrived, calmed me down, and on we went with the Abbot. After the initial steep, in went 6 lbs. of light dry malt extract. It was a heavy, heady amount of malt, and the wort now had a frothy head and looked like a 3 gallon cappuccino.

As it came back to a boil, we added 1.5 oz. of Progress hops. There was a pretty immediate (and pretty cool) reaction, with a hot break that sent hoppy green tendrils snaking through the beeruccino foam.

On we went: 1 tsp. of Irish moss after 30 minutes of boiling; half an ounce of Progress hops after 80 minutes, and .75 oz. of Fuggles in the last 2 minutes. By the end, it had a lightly hoppy aroma and a dark-straw color that were already hitting good notes.

This batch had called for a 90-minute boil and more water than we usually start with, so the cool-down was clearly gonna be a lot of work. We dunked the pot in an ice bath. but the ice didn't last long and we'd only gotten it down to 75 degrees. We were out of ice in the house, but you know where there was abundant cold on this wet December morning? Outside, that's where. So we strained the beer into the Ale Pail, snapped the lid on, and put the whole thing out on the porch for a couple of hours.

(Nahum took a really cool photo of it with his phone...but then lost it! You'll just have to picture the scene of a big bucket o' beer chillin' on the front porch.)

After lunch, we hauled the pail back in and had a nice, cool wort with an OG of 1.054, which according to the Hopville recipe is right where we want to be to get an alcohol content in the mid-five percents. Then we pitched a very puffed-up Activator pack of Thames Ale Yeast, sealed it back up and put the Abbot away for a long winter's nap.

P.S. - A couple of nights later, I checked on the bitter to see if there were signs of progress. Were there ever! The lid was puckered up, the airlock was full of yeast sludge, and some liquid had spurted out. Again, a panic set in (Nahum had to remind me, once again, to relax and have a homebrew) as I rushed to avoid another Explosivo event. The inside of the lid had a ton of yeast sludge (no wonder that Activator pack had looked ready to burst), but in short order I'd cleaned everything up and got it more or less back in place. Now it seems to be happily bubbling along on the way to being sweet sweet bitter.

2JB Interlude: Prague Pints

2009-12-06T21:17:00.000-05:00

This recent article in The New York Times reminded me that I have been remiss in posting about the many delightful beers I sampled during an October trip to Prague. It was a while back, but luckily I took notes (and had beers worth remembering).

9/25/09: Our first day in the Czech Republic, and we need to work through the jet lag. After touring the sights in Prague's Jewish Quarter, we stopped to have local fare for lunch. Along with my goulash I had a mug of Pilsner Urquell, the country's #1 brand. For my 1st in-country brew, I choose the one that's a mix of the brewery's light & dark varieties (sort of a Czech black and tan).

I am woozy well before the initial sip, but it's not hard to tell how delicious and refreshing it is. Without this beer, I might not have made it through the time-zone shifts of the day.

9/26/09: While planning the trip, my wonderful wife tracked down and booked an excursion to the heart of it all: the Pilsner Urquell brewery. We woke up early, joined our tour group in the middle of the city and were bussed to the outskirts. When we arrived, it was like the beer equivalent of the Magic Kingdom.

They had displays of all the beers the company makes (it's part of a larger conglomerate you just might have heard of: SABMiller) and even the vending machines dispensed fresh brews.

We toured the facility, and it reminded me what a small operation we run in the kitchen and basement (not that there's anything wrong with that). In the keg room, we got shot-glass-size samples of the regular Pilsner--kind of stingy, but still refreshing and yummy.

Of course, the Pilsner Urquell brewery has an on-site brew pub serving...Pilsner Urquell beers that are fresh as can be. Along the way, I discovered that there was another homebrewer on the tour: Joss, who does his thing in Seattle (Hi Joss--sorry this took so long to post!). I had a pint of Kozel, which is their dunkel/black beer. It was richly flavored but not as heavy as it might look.

Next, we went from the brewery to a nearby Beer Museum. Now, I don't say this lightly...but by the time we got there, I was kind of beer'd out for the moment. Admission to the museum included a token that was good for a beer in the (of course) attached pub. I chose to hold onto it as a souvenir.

9/27/09: Back in the city, we go about our tourist business, visiting museums and historical sights. On our afternoon break, I order up something I'd been looking forward to: a Budvar, aka the Original Budweiser. There's a longstanding chicken/egg dispute between the Budvar and Budweiser brands, but suffice to say it's not hard to guess which one is better. The Budvar Dark I ordered was rich but light-bodied, similar to a porter. I quaffed it at an outside table at the Green Tomato restaurant while the missus hit a museum that didn't strike my fancy. It wasn't a contest, but I totally won.

9/28/09: Our last full night in Prague was full indeed. After lots of touring around, we finally went to a spot near our hotel I'd been eyeing--a little hole-in-the-wall joint with a sign that said "Jazz Bar." I like both of those words plenty, and figured we couldn't go wrong...well, we didn't exactly go wrong, but with no live music (just an iPod-powered sound system pumping out old rhythm-and-blues) and no beers on tap, Jazz Bar was a bit of a letdown. I had a bottle of regular ol' Pilsner Urquell, which wasn't itself a letdown at all, even if the flavor was already starting to seem kind of standard.

9/29/09: We're booked on an evening train out of Prague (headed to Amsterdam...more on that later), so we pack our bags, leave them at the hotel and climb up to the city's top tourist locale, the Prague Castle. While there, we luck onto a terribly terrific little restaurant, and I have the #1 meal of the whol trip: veal schnitzel, potatoes that are mashed w/onions and veggies, and a Krusovich Dark, which tastes a bit like the darker Urquell. At that moment, I'm a pretty happy dude.

But I should note that while the Krusovich was delightful, it's not technically my last Prague brew. No, that would be the bottle of Budvar I bought on the train, which just barely fit into the tiny drink holder in our tiny sleeper car.

In the few days we spent in the ciyt, Prague's beers were not as wide-ranging as what was on offer in Scotland...but not a bit disappointing, either. The Czechs have figured out how to brew a few things very, very well, and brew them often.

Science Proved It

2009-11-27T13:29:00.005-05:00

We're still waiting for just the right moment to sample the Quaker Stout. In the meantime, good news for beer fans from real scienticians.

The key pull quote is, "...the article goes on to list a million caveats and concerns from other scientists, but you know that people are only going to hear what they want to hear, which is, SCIENCE PROVES BEER WILL MAKE YOU IMMORTAL."

http://gawker.com/5407980/scientists-prove-alcohol-is-good-for-you-yet-again
or
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8367141.stm

Quaker Stout

2009-10-25T17:17:00.006-04:00

Two paths converged in the 2JB woods: summer was cooling off into autumn, and Nahum and I were running out of beer. Despite overloaded schedules, we mapped out a weekend moment to get to some brewin', and to some brewin' did we get.

Since last year we'd both loved our November stout so much, we decided to kick off this year's season with an oatmeal stout--all the stouty deliciousness, plus a little touch of Quaker-oats goodness!

Because of the addition of oats to an already heavy/hearty brew, this one was fairly grain heavy: 1 lb. ESB/Mild malt, 1 lb. roasted barley, 0.5 lb. Crystal 120L, 0.25 lb. chocolate malt, and 0.5 lb. flaked oats. I was kind of looking forward to checking out each of these ingredients one at a time, but our supplier at the Gaslight mixed it altogether into one giant, heavy-duty Ziploc bag. While it was disappointing to not get to spend a little time with the chocolate malt all on its own, I ended up finding the big bag of "brewer's trail mix" pretty cool, too.

Because this was a long recipe (the big bag o' grain got a 1-hour steep @ 155 degrees ahead of a 1-hour boil) and Nahum had some stuff to attend to at home, I found myself manning the brew pot for awhile as he dashed back and forth between our houses. (Good thing we live across the street from each other.) I kept myself company with a bottle of 2JB Bitter.

But once the main boil was going, Nahum was staying put, focused, and ready to brew. It's a good thing, too, as he immediately noticed some oddities in both the recipe and our stock of ingredients. First, the recipe called for 6 lb. of amber or Munich LME...which we asked for, but upon examination we found that we had 6 lb. of amber DME. Seeing as the liquid and dried malts are not exactly equivalent in terms of how much malt they deliver, I have a feeling we over-malted a bit (and we only noticed this after dumping all 6 lb. in, missing the chance to dial it back a little). Second, the hopping schedule seemed off: the recipe called for 1 oz. of Tettnang hops @ 45 minutes, and 1.5 oz. of Goldings @ 60 minutes. That put almost all of the hopping near the end of the boil; seeing as we'd already over-malted an already-sweet recipe (and since we'd gotten 2 oz. of Goldings from the Gaslight), we made the executive brewmaster's decision to drop 1/2 oz. of Goldings pellets at the boil, the powdery Tettnang hops at 45 minutes, and then the rest of the Goldings near the end.

How will all of this affect the Quaker Stout? Well...we don't really know. This was a new recipe, and we went with our experience/collective gut without knowing how it would turn out otherwise. Based on the rich, coffee-ish color, the heady roasted malt aroma, and the satisfyingly sweet flavor of our initial sample, I think we made the right call(s).

After straining the wort into 2 gallons of cool water (the strained material was seriously stouty dark), we topped it off to 5 gallons.

The temperature was a bit higher than we'd hoped for (around 95 degrees), so we made another executive decision and went to watch some Monty Python's Flying Circus while the wort cooled. One episode and several degrees later, we took an OG reading of 1.060, pitched in a "Smack-Pak" of Whitbread Activator yeast, and sealed it all up.

Since we'd gone a little off the followed-by path (and seeing as our last attempt at a stout yielded one serious explosion), I put the Ale Pail inside a metal bucket and hooded it in a plastic bag. You can never be too careful when you're this excited to drink a new batch of homebrew...

L'shanah Tovah

2009-09-24T07:37:00.002-04:00

It was going to be an ideal 2JB Moment: a Rosh Hashanah meal at my uncle & aunt's house. My uncle is a beer fan, and his son is the originator of the limited-edition 2JB T-shirts. I chilled a 6-pack of sweet bitter, nested it in a cooler and brought it up the Turnpike to pass around with family.

When I arrived, I showed my uncle the 6-pack...and he immediately asked if he could have it. Not to serve for the crowded RH fete, but for more low-key sippin' after everyone had left.

I was a little disappointed, but also flattered--he'd only had a small sample of our wares, but had tasted enough to know that this was worth stocking away. Well, l'chaim to Uncle Jeff, and a Happy New Year to all in the 2JB orbit!

Bitter Sweet

2009-09-07T11:42:00.002-04:00

Betting on the "sooner" end of the bitter recipe's line, "Excellent within 2 weeks, sometimes sooner," Nahum and I dipped into the batch of bitter just 1 week after bottling. It was a Sunday night, Mad Men was on TV, and we planned to join the show's characters with a tasty libation.

The first and easiest thing to notice was that this beer was fully, frothily carbonated. There was already a gathering head in the necks of the bottles immediately after popping the tops, and the pour showed our bitter to be actively bubbling with the energy of a freshly pulled tap beer.

The next thing to notice was the bouquet of this particular brew. The graduated hopping had given it a delightfully flowery aroma, but it wasn't overpowering or aggressive. Just a nicely bold set of notes on top of a light-colored body. This was clearly going to be good.

And lo and behold, it was. Really good. Nahum's first word after his first sip was "quenchy," and I agree. The light body made it go down smooth, the carefully complex hops gave it plenty of flavor and the energetic bubbling gave it a nice bite in the end.

Luckily we test-tasted this the night before Labor Day...which means we've got the perfect accompaniment to a sunny day off in the last waning moments of summer.

Running on Empty

2009-08-26T19:56:00.003-04:00

The bitter was ready pretty quickly: by Wednesday, there was no sign of bubbling and a SG reading of 1.019 (not exactly the target for Papazian's Palace Bitter recipe, but pretty close), which was holding steady through to the weekend. It was time to bottle this bitter.

We'd scheduled the bottling session for Monday night, and I had some time to kill before Nahum was able to come over to the 2JB brewery & bottling facility. So I decided to get things set up & even rolling a bit. Things started going badly immediately--I took out our bag of caps and found that a plague of rust had invaded the little metal discs. Which wasn't surprising; what was surprising was that this hadn't happened before. See, we've tended to sanitize all of the caps we have on hand each time, and I'd be lying if I said that the unused caps were thoroughly dried before we put them away. This bunch included caps that had been in sanitizing solution at least twice, and had been stored in a plastic bag.

Not well thought through, was it? I had a mild panic, but saw upon closer inspection that only one section of the bag had rusted. So I dumped them out, rinsed the caps and proceeded to inspect each cap, one at a time, for rust. In the end, I had salvaged about 45, which seemed to be enough.

Next I rinsed and sanitized 42 bottles, which, in my memory, was about how many we usually bottled...not that I actually checked my notes or anything. But the bottom rack of the dishwasher was full, and I felt like that's how it usually was when we got to it. Why was I trusting my memory instead of looking in the notebook that was right there in the room? I can only plead "Monday."

When Nahum arrived, we set up and gave the bucket o' brew a quick sniff. It smelled really good, though also less intense than most of the batches we'd brewed recently. As we passed the uncarbonated, room-temperature beer into the bottling bucket (which had 4 oz. of priming sugar that had been dissolved into 1 1/2 cups of water), the tasting sample supported our theory about the bitter: it was delicious. The graduated hopping had given it some complexity in the flavor, aroma and aftertaste, but it also had a light body and an overall straightforward character. In other words, when this gets a little fizzy and a lot colder, it is gonna be one hell of a thing to drink.

But back to the bottling. We got into our familiar rhythm--Nahum filling the bottles and me capping them--but soon hit the next snag of the evening. Some of the empties were Amstel Light bottles...and for some reason the capping tool couldn't get a solid grip. We couldn't get the cap to crimp on the Amstel bottles...which represented 2 of our 42-bottle total.

It wasn't a serious setback until we realized that we were running out of bottles a lot faster than we were running out of beer. A quick look at my notes showed that we typically net a little more than 42 filled bottles from a single batch. Luckily, we had some more empties...but we also both realized that we were running on empty. It had gotten a bit late, we'd had an Originale to go along with our bottling (Papazian suggests drinking homebrew while homebrewing; insists, really), and the idea of going back to the sanitizing process in order to fill the last 4 or 5 bottles suddenly seemed like a steep hill to climb.

I'm not proud to say this, but we punted. Nahum and I each hoisted a bottle and drank down some of the unbottled brew (which was already good enough to drink, if not yet in its ideal state) and poured the last bit out of the bottling bucket. Straight into the drain, the image of which is giving me some serious mental pain as I type.

Still, we have 40 bottles sitting in the basement and carbonating. The recipe says, "Excellent within 2 weeks, sometimes sooner." I'm hoping for sooner, so I can start replacing my feeling of having let down the side with my prep process with the feeling that we made a heckuva batch of bitter.

Happy Bitter

2009-08-15T13:33:00.004-04:00

It had been a long week. It was a hot day. There was only one thing to do.

Relax, stop worrying, and do some homebrewing.

This Saturday morning, Nahum came to the 2JB Brewery to cook up a pot of bitter. Which is not a grumpy euphemism: I'd found a recipe for Palace Bitter in the Papazian book, and with its mix of light malt and frequent hopping, it sounded like a summer-drinkin' version of the flavorful UK bitter ales I'd enjoyed over in Scotland.

Now, I should point out when I say "light malt," I do not mean this recipe didn't call for some serious malt to go in the mix. When Dan at the Gaslight brought out the 4.5 lbs. of light dried malt extract, I initially went into a small panic. Could this flour-sack-sized bag of powdered malt really be right? But since the Palace Bitter recipe doesn't call for any liquid malt extract, it seems to make it up with more dried stuff. The bag of malt was big, heavy, and kind of exciting.

So after steeping a grain bag with 12 oz. of crystal malt in 2 gallons of water (30 min. @ 150-160 degrees), we dumped in the full 4.5 lbs of malt. Holy crap...there was so much of it that it wasn't dissolving! Nahum had to whip out the whisk and have at the pot for several minutes to get it to stop looking like batter and start looking like beer.

It finally dissolved and hit the boil point, which called for 1/2 oz. of Fuggles hops and 3/4 oz. of Kent Goldings hops. 30 minutes later, we flavored the wort with 1/4 oz. each of Fuggles and Goldings, and 15 minutes later there was further flavoring with another 1/2 oz. of Goldings (plus 1 tsp. of Irish Moss about midway through the hopping). With 2 minutes left to go in the boil, we added a final 1/2 oz. of Goldings for aroma...the whole process was very satisfying, with the timed-out additions of hops allowing tight control over the flavor characteristics of the bitter.

We then grabbed 2 gallons of water that had been chilling in the freezer (even with the a/c going it was pretty warm in the kitchen, and we needed an edge to cool the wort), poured them into the Ale Pail and strained in the brew. After topping off to 5 gallons, we had a bucket o' beer that had a delightfully light brown color, a gently hoppy aroma (surprisingly restrained, considering we kept hopping every 15-30 minutes) and a flavor that was already refreshing. Another 15 minutes or so passed before it got down to 80 degrees and we could pitch 11 g. of Windsor ale yeast (in 4 oz. warm water) and seal up the pail.

Now it's down in the basement at 74 degrees while the fermenting magic happens. If there's one downside to the whole thing, it's that we both got pretty excited to drink the bitter...and have to find the patience to let it ferment and carbonate. I want my happy bitter now!

P.S. - One of Papazian's tips that we don't always follow is to make sure to enjoy some homebrew while homebrewing. Today, about halfway through the process I reached into the back of the fridge and pulled out the final bottle of our deeply delicious stout. It wasn't exactly the right thing for a hot day, but splitting that last bottle was nothing short of a total treat.

The Audacity of Hops

2009-07-30T12:24:00.003-04:00

This has been a very, very good week for beer in the news. Though I am very, very disappointed to hear that the President drinks Bud Lite:

Red, Lite and Blue: The Beers Obama, Gates, Crowley Will Drink at the White House

[Update: Read this, too]

Broadcast News

2009-07-27T20:25:00.002-04:00

The FiOS News piece ran this week...and it's pretty damn fun.

I kind of love the way it's in such a recognizable news format (the reporter's stand-up in front of our house is the same one it would be for a crime scene or any other regular new story...the key difference being that it's about Nahum and me and our brews). Thank you Ms. FiOS!

Fairy Tale

2009-07-27T20:20:00.002-04:00

This weekend, the Beer Fairy brought 4 six-packs into the 2JB fold, and was rewarded with 5 wheat beers and two Originales.

Which means that my personal stock is running dangerously low.

Which means we really need to get to some brewin'.

Brewing With My People

2009-07-26T15:58:00.002-04:00

Nothing to report on the brewing front (our schedules are unlikely to align in just the right way until August), but Nahum passed along an interesting/topical post from the blog of fellow brewer Amy Mittelman.

It seems Amy is enough of an expert on the intersection of Jews and brews to have been invited to give a talk on the topic for the Jewish Community of Amherst. It seems that my people were not especially into the brewing experience upon their immigration to the U.S., but that didn't stop Samuel Leibmann from starting up the Rheingold brewery in the 1850s...then some other stuff happened...then in 2008, Nahum and I got into the act. That's the story (more or less).

I'll invite you to click here to read the whole thing, but the real takeaway is that Leibmann found an audience for his beer in the same way that pretty much anyone with any product ever found their audience: he put a pretty woman's face on it. Starting in 1940, the brewery started the Miss Rheingold competition, a practice that continued for the next 25 years. L'chaim to that!

Interlude: Trap Rock Brewery

2009-07-19T16:10:00.003-04:00

If there's one tangible difference of all this homebrewing, it's the fact that neither Nahum nor I buy all that much beer anymore. I mean, more often than not we've each got close to a case (and sometimes more!) of 2JB goodness around; and my taste for our brew has driven me to prefer ordering wine in restaurants.

But if one is going to hone one's brewing acumen, then it also stands to reason that one should hone one's beer palate as well, right? With that in mind, last weekend Nahum and I (and the wives) decamped to the Trap Rock Brewery in Berkeley Heights, NJ. This nearby brewpub had, in addition to an appealing food menu, no fewer than eight microbrewed beers on tap at any given time. If one must do one's research, this seemed like the way to go.

Our biggest worry was dispelled immediately: instead of fretting over how many of these beers we could reasonably (and soberishly) sample, the Trap Rock folks offered a 6-beer sampler for under 10 bucks. We each got a hilariously sizable carousel of 5 oz. glasses, each containing a different beer. It quickly became hard to picture how, exactly, our food would fit on the table.

But that was someone else's problem. Our issue was to try the Ghost Pony Helles Lager, Schroeder Weiss, JP Pilsner, Dr. Otto's Rye Bock, Yankee Porter and Kestrel IPA.

The simple evaluation goes something like this: the Ghost Pony was good, a lightly flavored beer, but nothing special; the Weiss was fantastic, with a complex set of citrus notes that rivaled our own wheat-based concoction; the Pilsner was malty, hoppy, and one of the clear highlights of the sampler; Dr. Otto's was peculiar but good, not as clearly rye-tasting as advertised but still summery & yummery; the Porter was a dark-horse favorite, with rich color and flavor; and finally the IPA...which was undrinkable--not because it was bad, necessarily, but more because the inordinate blast of hops and 7.0% alcohol just made it too much to enjoy next to all of its subtler brethren.

Sadly, the sampler did not include two of the Trap Rock's other brews, and Irish Ale and something from their "Secret Tap" (whatever the heck that means). The lessons learned included a realization that it is possible to make a too-hoppy beer, that we totally need to make a porter come the cooler days of autumn/winter, and that we need (need) to get rolling on a batch of pilsner soon.

Linked Again

2009-07-02T13:03:00.002-04:00

This week I had a piece published on The New York Times' local blog...and it goes without saying that 2JB gets talked up & linked up. That's just how I roll.

Some Have T-Ball, We Have the 8:05

Strong Ws

2009-07-02T12:47:00.005-04:00

On Monday morning I put two bottles with W labels into the fridge (tho to be honest, the dubbyas are a little mushy...could be Ms or even Es depending on the angle) and brought the cold ones over to Nahum's for our 1-week sampling of the wheat beer.

Normally, the 1-week sample is just to see how the carbonation is coming along; two weeks is pretty standard for the beer to get a good head o' steam going. Not so for the Ws--as soon as we popped the tops and started the pour, it was clear that these were ready, and were already pretty much our most carbonated beer.

And after a couple of sips...it was also clear that we had pretty much our strongest beer, too! Without doing any actual measuring or math or any such thing, I'd guess these beers are about 6% alcohol. Which considering we're usually shooting for 3 - 4% is a significant bump up. Not that I'm complaining.

Aside from the bubbles and buzz, the Ws had a darker-than-expected color (tho lighter than the pics suggest), but clearly that light feel & flavor that you'd expect from a wheat beer. And the dried orange peel gave it just the right subtle citrus kick; I'll have to remember to drop a slice of lemon into my next one. Now all we need is just the right kind of lazy, hazy warm afternoon for kicking back and enjoying these summer wheats the right way.

Beermergency!

2009-06-23T21:49:00.002-04:00

On Sunday night, I found myself smack-dab in the middle of a genuine beermergency.

The doorbell rang, and when I opened the door my neighbor Marco was standing there with a bottle of wine in his hand. "I've got an emergency," he said, and went on to tell me that he'd put a pizza in the oven and suddenly had a serious craving for beer. Now. So he'd gone to Nahum's house...only to find that he wasn't home. He knew where I lived, assumed I also had a stash of homebrew, and wondered if he could trade me a bottle of wine for some beer.

I smiled, laughed, and said, "Of course." A few minutes later, Marco left with two bottles of Originale II, two bottles of Explosivo!, and a good night ahead of him. Beermergency averted.

P.S.: Nahum followed up with Marco on Monday. He'd loved his first taste of 2JB, and wanted more. Another fan is on deck!

Smile for the Camera

2009-06-23T21:33:00.003-04:00

Just like the best way to get work is to already have work, one of the easiest ways to get media attention is to already be getting some media attention. A couple of days after The New York Times blog ran its 2JB video, I got a call from...another reporter. She worked for Verizon's new FiOS News channel, had seen our bit on the Times' site and wanted to shoot a story about us.

Another story. For TV.

Nahum was game, and anyway we needed to get the wheat beer bottled, so why not? So Karen from FiOS came to the 2JB HQ armed with an impressive-looking HD camera and set up in the dining room (I am kicking myself for not taking some snaps of the setup...doh!). Nahum and I each did a stand-up interview; as with the last one, he got into more detail about the ingredients and science-y stuff that makes our beer work, and I talked more about how we do what we do and why people like it (or something like that--it was a bit of a blur). Then Karen FiOS started following us through the bottling process.

Ms. FiOS seemed genuinely interested (by which I mean: she seemed to think that we'd turned out to be interesting subjects for a story), and when we gave her some pre-carbonated 2JB to try, she was genuinely into how good it tasted. And man oh man, it did taste good--light but strong, with just the right hint of orange in the middle of the flavor.

Anyway, under the close scrutiny of the press, we filled 39 bottles with delicious wheat beer and set them down to carbonate. I'm looking forward to seeing the news piece on TV...but not quite as much as I'm looking forward to drinking my first cold bottle of 2JB wheat!

At the (Dry) Hop

2009-06-23T21:18:00.003-04:00

Our first try at brewing a summer-friendly wheat beer is throwing another "first" into the 2JB mix: dry hopping. From the start, we've enthusiastically pitched hops into the boiling water of our brew, but this was the first recipe that called for adding a final dose of hops after a week or so of fermenting. It's all about the flavor, and the hops are the flavor engine in our sleek beer roadster (if you'll pardon the metaphor).

So Nahum and I headed down to the basement to do the dry hop. We peeled the lid off of the primary fermenter, and man did this beer smell good! The SG reading came up 1.020...which suggests it's also going to be plenty strong.

The dry hopping turned out to be kind of cool, a tiny/interesting new thrill in the process. We took a whiff of the delightful aroma of 1 oz. of Bullion hops and dropped them into the carboy. In went the beer...and almost immediately, there was a green, hoppy top on the fermenting brew. Nice!

A couple of days later, I added a 1/2 oz. of dried orange peel (what's a wheat beer without a little citrus tang to it, after all?), and now we just have to hope the dry-hopped hops fully dissolve into the beer before we get to bottling. The weather keeps getting warmer, so we need (need) this one to be ready to drink soon.

Show Me Your Basement

2009-06-14T19:58:00.003-04:00

Which two Jews are the stars of the latest installment of the "Show Me Your Basement" series on The New York Times' website? Take a guess:

Brewing On the Record

2009-06-07T17:10:00.002-04:00

Today we revved up a new brew, and this one was by request: The New York Times' Maplewood blog, The Local, has a series about things people do in their basements. I'd met The Local's editor in a cafe downtown, and after linking to this blog, she passed the 2JB blog along to the basement profiler. In no time flat, we had a request to do a brew on the record. The weather was warming up, so it seemed like a perfect excuse to get a wheat beer going.

Once we'd set up a date with the Times blogger, we secured ingredients from The Gaslight (wheat beer has its own version of liquid malt, almost twice as much hops as most of our other brews, and a special yeast that came in a refrigerated foil packet).

We were ready...but it wasn't clear what we were ready for. There were only 2 other Show Me Your Basement blog posts, and they weren't quite like our operation. What would she be asking us? (No way to be sure.) Would we be at all interesting? (Well, homebrewing lends itself to self-blogging anyway, so it's a small leap to having an outside blogger join the fun.) Were we opening ourselves up to be mocked? (Probably, but that's half the fun.) We got the brew rolling, the reporter started with a few basic questions as she set up her camera and sound equipment, and we were ready for our closeups!

The interview process turned out to be good fun. We both needed minimal prodding to start babbling on & on about homebrewing, the various 2JB batches, and even the history of beer (Nahum really got on a roll!). It felt kind of like a low-rent version of MTV Cribs as we walked down to our 68-degree Maplewood basement, but it was also flattering to be asked to talk about what we're up to. And we cracked open bottles of Originale II during the shoot, so any worries we might have had dissolved into the Papazian mantra: "Relax. Don't worry. Have a homebrew."

As the wort was wrapping up, the reporter went home and we got re-focused on the business at hand. We'd put 1 lb. of crystal malt 70L into 2 gallons of water, brought it up to a boil and added 3 lbs. of dry malt extract along with 5 lbs. of Munton's wheat malt extract. After 30 minutes, in went 1 oz. of Willamettte hops, then 1 oz. of Bullion hops 20 minutes later, wrapping up with another 1 oz. of Willamette at the end of the boil (we'll be dry hopping one last oz. of Bullion in the secondary fermenter).

The last time we brewed on a warm day, we learned that it's harder to get the temperature down just by adding in room-temp water and filtering the wort. So we went back to the ice bath, which got the temperature down from 200 to 75 degrees in about 15 minutes. We strained out the solids on the way to the Ale Pail, and tried a bit. The taste was less bitter than previous worts, also a bit less sweet--lighter overall, I suppose. It bodes well for the light wheat beer we're aiming for, which will also get a little coriander & dried lemon peel in the secondary fermentation.

Finally, we pitched the Wyeast Belgian Abbey yeast--which came in a "Smak-Pak" that required smacking open an inner pouch of nutrients and letting the yeast get going for a couple of hours while we brewed.

The pail is now sealed up and doing its thing in the soon-to-be-famous 2JB basement. I'll be keeping an eye on The Grey Lady's blog and posting a link when the video is live!

Simple Solutions

2009-05-27T19:28:00.004-04:00

Sometimes a solution to a problem is so simple that it seems like it can't work. So when Nahum said we could fix the carbonation issue in the Explosivo! bottles by inverting them a couple of times (essentially shaking them very slowly) and putting them back on the shelf, I was skeptical.

But dagnabbit if it didn't work. And it did.

Thusly armed with portions of properly fizzy homebrew, we set to bottling the Originale II. We'd certainly taken our time: it had been nearly a month since the initial brew, and the beer had long since wrapped up its fermenting. But we were able to get our suddenly hectic schedules to converge, brought the carboy up from the basement and got to it.

We still haven't fully adjusted to having the 2JB at my house. Even though the actual bottling process isn't location-dependent in any way, we were still fumbling a bit with getting the bottles rinsed & sanitized, and I managed to nearly forget to add priming sugar to the beer (then we would have seen some serious carbonation problems).

We also had to deal with the fact that we only had a half-gallon of sanitizing solution on hand, so meant maximizing our use of every drop.

And then we got into our regular spots--Nahum working the siphon as I crimped the caps--and everything clicked into place. We were all efficiency, no wasted motion. In quick succession we'd emptied the bucket into 44 bottles (1 better than the original Originale!). Simple, fun and satisfying. As we brought the cases back to the basement I think we were both confident that we had a perfectly delicious (and well-carbonated) bunch of beer on the way.

P.S.: Even though the Beer Fairy continues to bring bottles, we somehow ended up short on dark-glass empties for this round. So we brought in some empty Heineken bottles...and boy was that just not right. Aside from being somewhat difficult to cap (the standard caps just didn't fit exactly right), our dark-colored Originale looked wrong wrong wrong in that light green glass.

Fit to Post

2009-05-27T09:24:00.002-04:00

Apparently, 2JB is part of what's fit to print (or at least post) today. This humble beer blog got a shout on the Maplewood blog run by a little operation called The New York Times:

The Day: Your Morning Linkfest

Flat Tax

2009-05-21T20:56:00.002-04:00

After many delays, Nahum and I were able to get together to sample our long-bottled batch of Explosivo! beer (aka, the stout that exploded and went a little hinky). So we took a pair of bottles from the fridge on a warm evening and retired to the deck for a refreshing quaff.

The only problem was...when we popped the caps, there wasn't quite the satisfying fizz to which we've become accustomed. The beer wasn't totally flat, but it wasn't fully carbonated either. We even shook it up, which produced foam...but no real bubbliness.

It did taste delicious though, and had a nice color (which we know because I spilled some).

The Explosivo! batch continues to be vexing. I suppose we really can't complain; we've managed to produce, at this point, several batches and hundreds of bottles without a real dud. And the Explosivo! is quite tasty (plus, as the weather heats up, its less-than-stout flavor & heaviness is actually fairly refreshing), but I think it's served to cut down the 2JB bravado a bit.

Nahum claims there's a way to fix this carbonation problem, even this many weeks after bottling (he wouldn't let me bring any home...and I'm down to my last few beers!). He's going to look it up, and I guess we'll give it a shot. But I'm also pretty much ready to write this one off as the dud-like experience we were bound to have and just move on. After all, there's a 5-gallon carboy of fermented Originale sitting in my basement, just waiting for us to get back up on the horse and gallop back to some top-notch homebrewing.

(Not) A Visit from the Beer Police

2009-05-03T19:56:00.002-04:00

As the bottles of Explosivo finish up in Nahum's basement and the carboy filled with Originale II does its thing in mine, a few 2JB details to attend to.

First, I got the following message in an e-mail from Monty: "I was just catching up on the 2JB saga during my not-lunch time, and something caught my eye. I’d noticed it before and kept forgetting to bring it up, and then over time I began to doubt myself about it. But I just looked it up on BeerAdvocate.com for verification: you guys aren’t sparging, you’re filtering. Sparging is when you spray warm water over whole grains to release the sugars to make malt. Filtering is passing the wort through something to remove impurities."

He added, "I’m not trying to be the beer police. I’m just sayin’."

Fair enough. I'd found the term in Papazian and thought I'd clocked it right...but clearly I mixed up a couple of ideas Charlie was laying out. I have to admit that I thoroughly like the word "sparging" for a lot of reasons (mainly a kind of linguistic aesthetic, I suppose), but if we're not sparging, then I guess the word has to go. Whatever we call it, the extra step in the brewing has led to a cleaner, clearer beer; it will remain in the mix, albeit under a different moniker.

Speaking of clean & clear beer, Nahum came over on Saturday afternoon with a bottle of Explosivo. We popped the cap and split it in the kitchen.

The flavor had some nice caramel in it, though it's clearly not a stout (as we suspected, it's turning out to be closer to something like Becks Dark). It's also clearly not yet sufficiently carbonated, so the bottles will have to sit for another week.

While he was here, we stepped down to the basement and took a look at the Originale II. We'd racked it to the glass carboy during the week, and all indications are that it's ready to go to bottles. Our quick sampling of it suggested that the taste is remarkably similar to the original Originale (including that nice sharp bite in the back of the mouth), with the slightly darker color being the only real difference at this point. Due to some tricky schedules, it's unlikely that O2 is heading to the bottling assembly line right away, but definitely soon-ish.

Oh, and one last thing. For about a month, I've been holding onto a Politico article that's delightfully titled, "Beer fans glad W.H. has a drinker." The page has a video podcast that features an interview with Craig Purser, president of the National Beer Wholesalers Association. Turns out there's even yet another thing that makes the new guy better than the last guy. Which, I believe, officially makes it everything. Ale to the chief!

A Moving Day

2009-04-29T20:23:00.003-04:00

In addition to the explosive qualities of Batch Gimmel 2, we had another reason to be a little off-kilter. For reasons we couldn't avoid, the 2JB operation had to hit the road from Nahum's house to the 2JB Annex (aka, my house across the street). We packed up all of the equipment and ingredients into the back of a car and drove the full 50 or 60 yards to my back door.

It was strangely melancholy. I mean, we weren't throwing in the towel or crippling the 2JB machine in any way...it was just kind of weird seeing everything in the car trunk, like school had ended and now we had to get going into a post-graduation future. Which was across the street.

The strange juju of the move was quick to dissipate once we got to brewing. The task at hand: a second batch of 2JB Originale. Once again, we had in mind to test our ability to keep a consistent flavor batch-to-batch...and once again we were foiled. This time it was right in the bag of ingredients. The 1st pail of Originale had mixed a full can of light amber malt with the leftover dark malt from a previous brew. We'd asked for the same stuff, but our homebrew shop seemed to have supplied us with regular amber malt. No biggie, but it meant we'd already sealed our fate and an inconsistently darker batch of beer was to come.

Shrugging our shoulders, we set to it and dipped a grain bag filled with 1/2 lb. of crystal malt into 2 gallons of water (plus 1 tsp. of gypsum). Just before the boil, the bag came out and in went 20 oz. of dried malt extract, our 3.3 lb. can of Munton's regular malt and somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 lbs. of dark malt extract.

The hops went according to plan, at least. 1 oz. of Northern Brewers hops at the boil, followed by 1/2 oz. of East Kent Goldings + 1 tsp. of Irish Moss half an hour later. Ten minutes before the end of the boil we added 1/2 oz. of Cascase hops, and another 1/2 oz. 5 minutes later.

We sparged to the Ale Pail and added 3 gallons of water. Now, I should point out that we picked an unusually hot day for this brew: it was mid-April and we were facing temperatures in the mid-90s. Our wort was at 120 degrees...and we didn't seem to have a smart way to bring hte temperature down to a yeast-able level. We figured this out doubly when we looked at the prepped yeast...and it was already bubbling and multiplying before it had tasted a bit of hops!

No big deal: in the end, we just brought the bucket to the basement, which in the 2JB Annex is consistently cool. The wort got down into the 70s in a little over an hour, and we pitched in 1/2 a package of Windsor Ale Brew yeast (about 5.5 grams) along with another 5.5 g. of Saf Lager S23 Dry Lager yeast.

The cap went on tight, and before we knew it the air lock was bubbling away contentedly. It was an odd brew, and maybe not quite what we'd been aiming for, but the 5 gallons currently doing its thing in my basement is clearly destined to be a top-notch batch of Originale.

Explosivo!

2009-04-29T20:06:00.003-04:00

Our confidence had been somewhat shaken by the exploding vat of beer, so Nahum and I approached Bottling Day with a step or two missing from our game. The beer looked, smelled and tasted fine (not like any kind of stout, but more like a Becks Dark or other dark ale), and had an SG reading of 1.024.

But as soon as we started the bottling process, it was clear that our normally steadfast rhythm was off. I forgot to rinse the bottles before sterilizing them. Nahum kept dumping out the sterilizing solution before we'd wiped everything down. We almost forgot to get the sugar boiling. It was kind of a mess.

So, in my infinite wisdom, I served up this brilliant nugget: Why not switch our normal bottling tasks? See, Nahum always fills the bottles, and I always cap & label them and get the bottles into the cases. And we've developed a sort of effortless production-line rhythm, churning out full bottles with a smile and a spring in our step.

This, on the other hand, was a disaster. I couldn't get the bottles filled quite right, and I didn't have a smooth flow of empties into the bottling area as I got each one done. Nahum struggled to work the capper, with each one seeming to take an inordinate amount of time. We weren't getting anywhere, and it was taking a long while to get there.

In a moment of simultaneous epiphany, we looked at each other, put down our unfamiliar tools and switched into our "normal" positions. Within minutes, we had 42 bottles of beer capped and stacked for a week or two in the cold room. I labeled them "E," both to commemorate the explosion that helped birth this particular batch and the enormous effort it took to get it done.

This one was in no way smooth sailing and at no point easy. But it also seems like it's going to taste just fine, and there was a lesson there: we may not have the pro-level skills for consistent back-to-back batches, but we're at a point where we're unlikely to make a genuinely bad bucket o' brew. I take quite a bit of comfort in that, and I look forward to kicking back with a fresh bottle of Explosivo Beer!

Bound to Happen

2009-04-20T07:39:00.004-04:00

Uh-oh. This just in from Nahum:

So. It was bound to happen.

About an hour ago, I opened the door to the basement to do basement chores, and remarked out loud, "wow, I really smell the beer already and it smells great! It has never been such a strong aroma." Half way down the stairs, I saw, to my dismay, an ale pail with no lid, and with a big head of krausen, and some that had already poured over one edge.

What I didn't see, was the lid to the pail. After some searching, I found it, a few feet away and wedged on its side against the wall.

So what we had was an open bucket of not-yet fermented beer, exposed to the basement ambiance. What to do? Well, I am pleased to say the first thing I decided to do was--you guessed it--not worry. Instead, I thought about the bottled of homebrew waiting to help me relax. Next, I took the lid upstairs, with the airlock, which was full of, and likely clogged with, krausen (thus, I hypothesize, causing a build-up of carbon dioxide, which lead to our beer blowing its top). I washed the lid and sanitized it. I found a clean airlock and sanitized it. I wiped off the edges of the pail with a wet cloth, followed by a paper towel soaked in sanitizing solution. And I closed it up. Tight.

When we open it, if it tastes normal, then we escaped bacterial contamination. I think we will know pretty quickly after the first (pre-bottling) sip whether we dodged a bullet. At some point, I will clean the basement floor of the wort spatter so it no longer looks like a beer-crime-scene. In the meantime, I am going to relax and have a homebrew.

P.S.: The thermometer on the ail pail read 79 degrees, which cannot be correct. However, it is probably warmer than in the past, and I moved the newly capped bucket to the 60 degree room.

Back to the Brewhouse

2009-04-19T15:06:00.003-04:00

After an uncharacteristically long layoff from brewing (caused by a combo of Passover, busy schedules and a slight overabundance of beer), the 2JB crew met this Sunday morning to get back to the brewhouse and back in the saddle.

The return to brewing was marked by another new corner turned: we were, for the 1st time since we started this enterprise in the fall, planning to repeat ourselves. Now that we'd successfully produced more than a half-dozen varieties of tasty beer (including one original recipe), Nahum and I had figured that it would be important to see if we had any consistency. After all, it's one thing to be able to make a good batch of beer, but quite another to make multiple batches that are both good and similar. So we planned to go back to two of our greatest hits: a 2nd batch of Gimmel (aka, stout) and a 2nd run at the Originale.

...and right off the bat, we pretty much failed. Part of consistency is repeating your process, but an even bigger part involves using the same ingredients. Since our 1st run at the stout was a half-batch (part of the inaugural-themed black & tan), we needed to double certain parts of the recipe. The calculations were off just a bit, and we found ourselves there on a Sunday morning half a pound shy of the correct weight of dry malt.

Oh well. It'll still be good, though probably lighter than Stout 1.0...which we decided will be perfect for warm-weather drinking! And we do have the right weight of hops - which we know because Nahum's wife found a digital food scale for us at a dollar store. Our 1st new piece of equipment in a while, and one that will come in very handy.

And so 4 oz. of crushed roasted barley and 8 oz. of Black Patent went into the grain bag and into 2 gallons of water. As we waited for the boil, Nahum and I stepped outside to check out the newest members of the 2JB family: the two strains of hops he'd planted out in the garden.

They're already starting to bud, and each plant has a thin pole nearby so they can grow upward & onward (apparently these suckers grow fast) and we'll be able to start using fresh, homegrown hops for some autumn homebrewing.

Back to the kitchen. We're pulling out the grain bag and adding in 6.6 lbs. of dark malt extract and 1 lb. of dry malt (instead of 1.5 lbs...) along with a bit of gypsum. When we hit the boil at 9:35am, we very nearly had a tragic boil-over (the Papazian book warns of avoiding the Boil-over Blues), but Nahum's fast reflexes on the stove dials brought it under control. In went 1 oz. of Northern Brewer hops; 30 minutes later another 1/2 oz. of NB with a bit of Irish moss; and we finished with a 1/2 oz. of Cascade hops.

After Nahum reconstituted 11 g. of Windsor yeast in 4 oz. of water, we sparged the wort into the Ale Pail (along with more water). It looked good, smelled good...and most amazingly, we lost very little liquid to either the boil or the transfer: it hit the 5 gallon line almost right on the nose.

Our original gravity reading was 1.052, which is not quite what Batch Gimmel had yielded (that was 1.070), but given that the ingredients for Batch Gimmel 2 were different and our process more streamlined, it was just fine.

The Ale Pail is now sealed up and fermenting in the basement. Next weekend: another run at the Originale. This one is more important for the side-by-side comparison between the two batches. Now that we're back into the rhythm of the brew again, I'm pretty confident that we'll get everything squared away for a consistent batch of brew.

P.S.: On my way out of the house after we'd wrapped up, I nearly tripped over something sitting in front of the front door. Mike, our benevolent donator of many many bottles, had left a trio of six-packs of empties along with a note:

2JB Interlude: Scotland

2009-03-19T19:50:00.003-04:00

Nahum and I are enjoying a short (and rare) break between batches, but that doesn't mean there is no beer news to report. Last week, I took a 5-day trip to Scotland with my friend Lee. He was going on an art-related trip and invited me along...which I took as a sign to make it a beer-related trip, too.

A quick bit of back-story: I've lived in Scotland for periods here & there, and I visit when I can. In fact, my time in the UK is where my "beer palate" did most of its maturing. I was very excited to return, not least of all to have some of my fave Brit Brews and try some new ones. I documented all of my Scotland beers, and present a wee travel diary:

3/11/09: Arrived in Edinburgh for the first time in about 5 years. After a quick nap, I headed to one of my old haunts, the Royal Ettrick Hotel, for a proper pub lunch. (How I missed you, pub lunches!). I quenched my jet-lagged thirst with a pint of Tennant's lager, brewed in Glasgow.

It's a cold, clear lager with carbonation roughly akin to champagne. It made me happy all the way down to my toes, and paired with the lasagna perfectly. Actually, I have no idea if it went with the food...the whole experience was just heavenly, though.

Later that evening, Lee arrived and it was right back to the Ettrick for another round of Tennant's. I wouldn't want to keep it all to myself, right?

3/12/09: After a long day of travel through the Highlands, Lee and I arrive in Ft. William (up the west coast of Scotland). Ft. William is at the foot of the tallest peak in the UK, Ben Nevis...so it's no surprise that the Ben Nevis pub offers one of the nicest views in town. I started with a McEwan's 70, which is a smooth, creamy ale with a medium color and light carbonation.

McEwan's is a longtime Edinburgh brewery that was later bought by Caledonian...but I believe it is still made right in Scotland. Speaking of Caledonian...Lee had the Caledonian 80 and spoke so highly of it that I joined in for a second round. The Callie was even creamier than the McE, and a bit darker. (Neither was particularly hoppy...these Scottish brewers seem to be more into the malts, which I guess shouldn't be too surprising).

Oh, and dinner was a steak & ale pie. What goes with steak & ale pie? Some McEwan's ale, that's what!

3/13/09: We spent the day doing quite a bit of trekking, and even had a near-miss with some aggressive Highland bulls.

After some nice locals in a way out-of-the-way town gave us a lift to a slightly bigger town, we waited for the train at the Marine Hotel's bar. The pickings were slim, so we went for half-pints of Guinness.

I should note that there is a promotion of sorts with Guinness that was new to me: Guinness Extra Cold. It's a separate tap, with its own logo and everything. It's just like Guinness...but colder. Still delicious, though.

For dinner, we headed to the Grog & Gruel, which aside from a bizarre Tex-Mex menu (In the Highlands? Really?) boasted of a large selection of Scottish cask-conditioned ales! How was I going to pass that up? Well, I didn't.

It was a bit of a tease, though. The menu listed about 25 beers from 5 local brewers, each with descriptions that made the mouth water. I'd picked out the Orkney Dark Island beer from the Sinclair Brewery...when the waitress informed us that the list was just a representation of all the beers they might have. The board behind the bar showed that, in fact, there were 4 to choose from.

I was a bit disappointed, but that all went away when I sipped the pint of Black Cullin from the Isle of Skye Brewing Co. The ingredients included chocolate, oats and other stouty markers, but the beer was decidedly not stout-like. More like the darkest ale you've ever had, with a light body and a ton of flavor. Lee went with the Callie 80 he'd liked so much the night before, but learned the hard way that the hand-pump tap they had at Ben Nevis made a big difference in how the pint went down. Still, better than a can of Coors, right?

For round 2, we ordered the other beers: Young Pretender, also from Isle of Skye, and William's Joker from the Williams Brothers Brewing Company in Alloa.

The Pretender was a very light ale with a crisp flavor and barely any body (but still quite good). The Joker, on the other hand, was heavy, malty and very strong: a bit over 5% alcohol. The overall effect was actually too much for me, and Lee and I had to share responsibility for dealing with the Joker.

At the end of the night, we each had a Tetley ale while bowling 2 games in a black-lit alley. No, I'm not making any of that up. It was the only decent beer they had at the bowling alley, and it went down easy, like a cuppa tea!

3/14: We traveled south again, toward the city. On the train I was busying myself with a crossword puzzle...and wouldn't you know that that answer to 62 across was "beer."

It was our last night in Scotland, back in Edinburgh and staying with our friend Chris. We bought him a 4-pack of McEwan's Export, but ended up going through a couple of bottles of wine before getting some sleep ahead of an early-morning flight.

It was a bit odd to end the trip with wine rather than beer, but I certainly can't complain that I didn't get a sufficient number of Scottish pints. It was great to drink them again, especially now that my 2JB experience allowed me to deliniate some of what was going on in each beer I tried. Nahum and I are in a pretty good spot when it comes to US brews, but we've still got a long way to go to top the centuries of malt & hops goodness to be found in the Scottish cities & Highlands.

Porch Sippin'

2009-03-09T19:20:00.003-04:00

We had just lost an hour to Daylight Savings, but true to its name there seemed to be lots of spring-like daylight on offer this weekend. Since the 2JB Originale had spent just about a week finishing up in the bottles, we'd already planned to sample the brew...and then Nahum asked if I might be interested in sitting out on the front porch to have some beer.

Would I? In the words of the country's most famous Alaskan: You betcha!

I walked across the street, and Nahum was already out with two bottles and a bag of chips.

We popped the tops, settled back into the wooden chairs, raised a hearty "L'chaim" and tipped 'em back.

The verdict, all at once, was that our first shot at an original recipe was right on the money. Floral & a bit citrusy, with lots of layered hops flavors, just a touch of sweetness and a long, smooth aftertaste. Balanced flavor, nice color, just enough of an aroma to tease the taste. Really just a pleasure to drink. And as the just-saved late-day daylight kept the afternoon going, we mused that this was a beer we both really, really liked. And other people would, too. Heck, they might even buy it. From us.

Don't tell the wives, but we spent a solid 15 minutes thinking aloud about how 2JB could be the real thing. That we could go from being guys who made beer to being beer makers. Of course, there are a ton of obstacles (not the least of which being that neither of us is eager to toss aside the jobs we like for something like this...at least not right now) and it's not something we're seriously considering for the immediate future.

But the future is long. It could still happen. To keep things moving in the right direction, we've decided to make another batch or two of the same Originale recipe and see if we have the ability to stay consistent batch to batch (we've yet to make the same thing twice, so we honestly have no idea). And we'll keep our 2JB pipe dreams humming quietly in the background...but mostly just keep on enjoying the brewing and the brews and look forward to more days where we can just sit out on the porch tipping back our very own beer.

School's Out for Homebrew

2009-03-02T13:19:00.005-05:00

And so it came to pass that the Two Jews beheld their first-ever original-recipe ale. The aroma was most pleasing, the color was bold, and the taste...well, it seems like the Originale is gonna be pretty damn good.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We arranged to bottle Batch Vav once again during Nahum's kid's time at Hebrew school. I take no small pleasure that this has come to be the (more or less) regular time for 2JB activity. When I was a kid, one of the things I didn't like about Hebrew school was an unconfirmable but certain feeling that these weekend hours I spent in Hebrew school were being used by other people for seriously fun stuff. And a mere quarter-century later, I have my proof. We're using this little slice of weekend time for serious, big-smile fun...and all because a kid is in Hebrew school and we're not.

But I digress.

Nahum and I got into our now-familiar bottling rhythm: he'd soaked the bottles in a large pot, so I took to sanitizing them while he prepped & sanitized the bottling equipment. He boiled the priming sugar (additional Originale experiment: 4 oz. of brown sugar dissolved into boiling water instead of the corn-starch sugar we've been using) while I sanitized and laid out the bottle caps. After a quick SG reading (1.014), we racked to the bottling bucket, and Nahum filled as I capped. This might be our single smoothest process thus far - efficient, nearly wordless and still producing the deep pleasure of seeing the bottles pile up in the box. Plus, we usually sample the pre-carbonated brew while we do it.

And as I said, the sampling made us very, very happy. As we'd hoped, the beer is floral and a little citrusy; to our surprise, it also has a subtle but sharp sweetness, making it feel crisp even though it's yet to get either bubbly or cold. And it had a noticeably pleasant aftertaste, something I don't think we'd achieved previously.

The extra hops (25% more than we've used for previous brews), the mix of light & dark malts and the double fermentation seem to have led to a beer that is likely to be very good right away, but will also benefit from a little bit of tinkering & adjusting. I can easily see us working with this brew for a few more batches, trying a little extra something here and a little less of something else there...until it's just right. Worthy of the 2JB label. (Note to self: we really need to make labels.)

But until then, we've got 43 bottles of Originale carbonating in the basement. We'll sample a bottle in a week (maybe during Hebrew school again? Hah!), then move them to the cold room to finish up for another week. Now that we've got a solid idea of how tasty our new concoction is likely to be, that could be a long 2 weeks to wait.

Very Originale

2009-02-15T15:42:00.003-05:00

Today we began Batch Vav, our half-dozenth shot at the many varieties of homebrew (though perhaps technically the seventh, since Gimmel was comprised of two different kinds of beer). Each one has been good, some very good, and at least one or two was excellent, if I do say so myself.

But all of them were someone else's. Whether we got the recipe from a book, the Internet or a fellow homebrewer, we more or less ordered what was on the list and brewed it as per the instructions for brewing. Sure, we got a little creative with the Pumpkin Ale, but even that time we more or less picked an existing approach and followed it.

Not this time. For Batch Vav, the Two Jews concocted our very own original(e) beer. Over the course of the four or five months we've been at this, each brewing session made it a little more clear how the different ingredients, steps and processes affected the final result. So we felt confident enough to order up ingredients based on what we like and how to make that happen. (Plus we had some leftover ingredients from previous batches...and we made sure to include those in the recipe.)

So this morning we put a 1/2 lb. of crystal malt in a grain bag and got it going in 2 gallons of water with some gypsum. Just before the boil, out came the grains and in went 20 oz. of dry malt extract, 3.3 lbs of Muntons extra light amber malt and about half a can (approx. 1.5 lbs.) of dark malt extract that was leftover from the previous brew. The idea here being: get that nice crisp ale taste that has made many of the 2JB batches eminently quaffable, and then turn it just a little in the darker direction that made the two stouts so flavorful.

As the wort hit the boil, in went 1 oz. of Northern Brewers hops with a nice, piny aroma. After 30 minutes, we added a 1/2 oz. of (leftover) Kent Goldings hops and some Irish moss. Then I split up our 1 oz. of our Cascade finishing hops and dropped half at 10 minutes before the end of the boil and the other half 5 minutes later.

The aromas were intense (but pleasantly so) with a nice balance of nutty & floral...and totally our own. We'd worked out the ingredients and the timing and such-like based on actual, honest-to-goodness experience and know-how. It felt good.

(Speaking of feeling good: I should note that after listening to us moan about not having "brew stools" to sit on while we did the 2JB thing, Nahum's wife brought home just such a stool. Super comfy and convenient...though we couldn't help but notice that there was only 1 stool for 2 brewing Jews!)

After our experiment with sparging the English Brown Ale, we were pleased enough to make it the new standard operation. Two gallons of cooled water went into the fermenter, and we sparged the wort one small saucepan-full at a time. The process took a lot less time and effort than cooling the pot and siphoning it into the bucket, with the added bonuses of less sediment and more aeration. Everybody wins.

After topping off the bucket to 5 gallons, it was already down to 95 degrees all on its own, and was sporting a right-on-the-nose original gravity of 1.046 (suggesting an eventual alcohol content of around 5.8%). Nahum pitched a combo of new & leftover yeast - 1/2 a package of Windsor Ale Yeast (about 5.5 grams) and another 5.5 g of Soft Lager S23 Yeast, and then we sealed it all up. The idea is that one of the yeasts will get busy during the room-temperature fermenting phase, and the other will make its magic happen when we move the bucket to a much cooler space.

How will Batch Vav taste in the end? For once, I'm not quite sure...but I'm pretty confident it will be tasty. Plus, later on we're planning on trying some brown sugar in place of the corn-starch priming sugar. And it will be all ours to enjoy, tinker with and eventually build up into an original, signature Two Jews Brew beer.

P.S. - I should also note that we started this pretty early on a Sunday morning and Nahum hadn't had breakfast yet. That led to a funny tableaux of 2JB beer boiling next to a pan of fake/kosher bacon:

Mr. Brown in the Kitchen with a Beer Bottle

2009-02-01T14:35:00.003-05:00

There is a quote I know I've read (but couldn't Google up a source) that goes something like: "Busy hands are happy hands." It went through my head at 9.30am on Sunday as Nahum and I got down to the task of bottling Batch Hay, aka our version of an English Brown Ale.

Bottling is one of the simpler, almost mechanized parts of the homebrew process, and I find that our hands quickly become busy with the rhythm of bottling. Once in that rhythm, it's all smiles and a relaxed air, even as the cat pokes around the sanitized bottles or Nahum's son wanders over from his cartoons suddenly desperate for a juice box. The hands are busy and the 2 Jews are happy as the beer flows from the bottling bucket and the bottles line up in the cases.

In just an hour and a half, we moved 5 gallons of fermented brown ale from the fermenter to the bottling bucket (there was still a light layer of foam which made us wonder if the yeast was entirely done...but the SG reading of 1.0.12 was steady on from the day before); dissolved 3/4 c. of priming sugar into 1 1/2 c. of water and mixed it into the beer; and filled & capped 46 bottles of ale.

The aroma was spot-on for an English Brown, reminding me of the end of a night of Newcastle Brown Ales back in my Scottish days, and the flavor was a little different than we'd expected - less sweet but very, very smooth. I suspect that once it's carbonated and chilled, this is going to be a very refreshing beer, with the bubbles & temperature adding a crisp & sweet mouthfeel to the smooth & nutty taste.

The other good news is that our sparging paid off: we wasted very little liquid and seemed to have much less sediment swirling through the siphon. Oddly enough, the bottom of the fermenter had a lot more yeast than we'd ever seen before; was the Nottingham yeast particularly active, or is this just a recipe that really gets the active stuff active? I guess this is why the recipe we used said the fermenting would be noticeably faster than in other brewing cycles - the yeast gets seriously busy for this one.

Now we've got just under 2 cases of bottles with a "B" for Brown on the cap, sitting in a cool room in the basement making the last bit of the magic happen. Hopefully we'll have a moderate day (or at least one that's not quite so icy-cold!) in a week or two to kick back with bottles of Hay...keeping the hands busy and happy until it's time to start in on the next batch.

Process Progress

2009-01-25T20:13:00.003-05:00

The average day can usually be broken down into a series of processes: wake up (pre-set alarm based on a planned point of departure), shower (get the water to a certain temperature, use certain soaps in certain ways on certain body parts), shave, dress, eat, work, etc. Each step of the day is either a process in itself or a part of a larger process.

I'd go a step further and say that most of those processes are one of two kinds: either a static process that is repeated pretty much the same way every day (e.g., showering), or a progressive process that can be altered, improved upon or cut back on from instance to instance (a lot of what I do in my job would fall under this classification). The 2JB process originally seemed like it was going to be the former (this is how you follow the recipe to make the beer - repeat as necessary), but it's clearly become the latter as we make progress with our process each time.

As we began Batch Hay (an English Brown Ale), foremost in our minds was the fact that we have been wasting a tragic amount of beer each time. When it goes from brew-pot to fermenter, we'd leave some behind so as to try to minimize the sediment and other solids that are at the bottom of the pot; the same thing would happen when we moved it to the secondary fermenter and then to the bottles. All in all, we were probably sacrificing as much at 10 bottles worth each time.

That would clearly be an unacceptable lost in any accounting. So with a little advice from Monty and a little help from Charlie Papazian's book, we decided to alter our process a little and make some progress by sparging. Yes, that's a real word - it's the term for straining out the solids more thoroughly straight from the brew-pot so that you're not wrestling with them in later steps.

So we began with a typical (static) process: 1/2 lb. crystal malt and 1/4 lb. black patent malt went into a grain bag, making sure to shake out some of the loose grain-dust before dropping it into 2 gallons of water and beginning the boil.

Next was approximately 6 lbs. of Mountmelick unhopped dark malt extract, 1 tsp. of gypsum, 1 oz. of Fuggles hops and 1/2 oz. of Northern Brewer hops; after the boil, another 1/2 oz. of Fuggles went in along with some Irish Moss, and finally we finished with 1/2 oz. of Cascade hops.

And then we made progress. Instead of spending a ton of time cooling down the wort and siphoning it into an empty pail, we started the fermenting pail with 2 gallons of cold water that had been chilling on the porch, cooled the wort just enough to make it stop steaming, and got on with the sparging.

The wort went through a mesh strainer and into the cold water, getting a cereal-bowl's worth of solids out of the wort before it even hit the pail.

As a bonus, this progressive process ended up aerating the wort more than usual (which is a good thing) and by the time we pitched 11 g. of Nottingham yeast (dissolved into 4 oz. of warm water) onto the top, we had a full 5 gallons of beer in that there bucket, sporting an on-target original gravity of 1.046.

Progress indeed.

P.S. - Another change came by way of the recipe we used. Apparently, this ale ferments fast, and will be ready for brewing before the week's up. Looks like we'll need to get on top of the next batch faster than we'd originally thought!

Double Blind

2009-01-25T17:12:00.002-05:00

As soon as Monty mentioned that he was brewing up a batch of his coffee stout at the same time that we were producing the 2JB version of his recipe, I knew that we'd have to do a side-by-side tasting.

So on a cold Sunday afternoon, Monty came to the door with a six-pack and Nahum brought his whole clan over to the 2JB Annex. In the interest of getting a solid blind taste-test going (and keeping Nahum's kids interested), we had the young'uns choose between a Bugs Bunny and a Daffy Duck glass for decanting a bottle of each brew.

Once the beers were indistinguishable (though Monty suspected his would be visibly less carbonated; I don't think that happened) our wives each tipped back a sip from one of the glasses.

Then they switched and tried the other.

Nahum's wife Sarah picked her favorite, as did my wife Eileen. The kids lifted the double-blind and it turned out that Sarah had preferred the 2JB bevvie for its heavier stout flavor, and Eileen had favored Monty's more pronounced coffee flavor (she's less of a stout fan than Sarah is).

Then we men-folk took our turns, and pretty much agreed with what the gals had tasted: Monty had a more-coffee/less-beery bottle of brew, with noticeably less stout; and the 2JB product was heavier, slightly more carbonated, with less pronounced coffee overall.

The most interesting part, though, was seeing how much variation there was between two beers born of roughly the same recipe. We'd each gotten our hands on a couple of slightly different ingredients (especially the hops, which clearly have a major impact on the final flavoring) and approached them a bit differently (I think we put in less coffee; Monty had a more skilled hand with racking his beer and leaving the sediment behind), leading to noticeably different beers.

After cracking open a few more bottles and spending another hour or so sippin' and chattin', we agreed on a winner: everyone who'd gotten to sample either (or both) of these very tasty coffee stouts.

Two Men and a Beer

2009-01-20T20:58:00.002-05:00

Nahum and I both had the day off for MLK Day...which just so happened to coincide with a) an unexpected snowfall of several inches, and b) the maturing of Batch Dalet.

Like Hannibal, I love it when a plan comes together.

At around 4.30pm, Nahum came to the 2JB Annex holding two freshly chilled bottles of coffee stout. "Your house is kind of my Man Room," he said, referring to the excellent attic/fortress of solitude where this blog is put together. And since the missus was not so lucky to be off work, we'd be able to drink as two unfettered fellows, kicking back with their homebrewed creation.

We popped the caps on the two bottles and poured them into frosted mugs. I opened a bag of chips and jar of salsa (no wife present=no plates/bowls required for the snacks--we just dropped 'em in the middle of the remote controls) and put on some CDs. We clinked a hearty "L'chaim!" and kicked back to some serious enjoyment.

The stout was noticeably different from the previous, non-coffee brew. Drier, mellower, more roasted-tasting (which I think gives it a flavor and mouth-feel of chocolate). The carbonation wasn't too crisp, which was a good match to the solid body of the stout. We smiled, took another sip and spent the next hour or so as two men (well, at least manly for us...) discussing the topics of the day over a cold, tasty brew. And I'd even throw in a suggestion that the snowy scene added to the tastiness--looking out the window from the warm room to the cold yard turned the coffee stout into a kind of grown-ups' cup of hot cocoa on a snow day off of school.

By the time we'd gotten to the bottom of the glasses, we were enormously pleased with our latest creation and eager to pounce on the next batch. We picked an English Brown Ale recipe that will be the basis of Batch Hay...coming soon to a NJ Man Room near you!

P.S. - Today was Inauguration Day, and I finally was able to open up one of the bottles of pre-mixed black and tan, made specially for this day. Did we make a beer worthy of the momentous moment? Yes we did! This one's for you, President Obama...

Buzz Beer

2009-01-13T21:07:00.003-05:00

If I've got one worry about the 2JB project, it's that we're potentially veering into the same thing that brought the housing market and finance industry to their knees: the idea that it will just keep getting better and better, with no end in sight. I mean, here we are on our fourth batch of beer (fifth, if you count the two half-batches of Gimmel's black & tans as separate brews) and it's the best yet.

Just like the last one was. And the one before that. It's almost like we know what we're doing.

But pride cometh before the proverbial fall, right? So to try and sidestep too much bragging: the Batch Dalet coffee stout seems on course to be pretty damn good. We uncapped the final bottle of pumpkin ale and set to work bottling the latest concoction.

First up was a specific gravity reading: 1.020, which according to my little chart means we're going to have about 4.5% alcohol. Just right.

The next, and maybe even more important, step was sampling the pre-carbonated brew. Oh. My. Goodness. This stuff was delicious. The coffee is definitely in there, but it ends up working with the stout to form a kind of chocolate cast to the overall flavor. (Nahum pointed out that coffee and chocolate were both the results of roasted beans, so they're related flavors.) We each drank a small glass of warm, flat stout and could barely figure out how many ways to express how much we dug what we were tasting.

Back to the practical matters. 4 oz. of priming sugar was boiled into 1.5 cups of water, and into the brew it went. We then turned to the bucket o' bottles that Nahum had been soaking for a few hours, scraping the labels off as best we could. (There have been a lot of commercial bottle donations as we've quickly outgrown the original order of virgin bottles.)

38 bottles got filled, capped and stored, and hopefully we'll find the strength to wait 2 weeks to try these out. I have very high hopes for the Dalet bottles, and look forward to seeing how the buzzy coffee and smooth stout come together in the final product.

[Side Note: Monty tells me that he's just brewed a batch of his coffee stout, too. Given that we'll have used slightly different ingredients and approaches, I think a side-by-side tasting may be in order!]

The Greatest Gift

2008-12-30T16:49:00.002-05:00

I received many, many wonderful gifts from friends and family this holiday season, and I'm grateful for each and every one. But there was one particular gift that was both unexpected and particularly relevant to the expanding 2JB enterprise.

One side of my family does a "limited" swap amongst the adults, which this year entailed everyone getting 1 name (drawn out of a hat) to whom you'd give a gift. When we got together for the latkes and candles Hanukkah extravaganza, I certainly had no idea who had gotten my name or what to expect.

As my very good luck would have it, my cousin Ben drew my name at random...and proceeded to knock the gifting ball so far out of the park that it very nearly achieved orbit. Ben is a follower of the 2JB blog (via Facebook, I think) and liked some of the 2JB graphics that people had been submitting via e-mail. So he took one, downloaded it, and sent it off to a company that will print up limited runs of custom-designed T-shirts.

He was considerate enough to order 2 shirts (one for each Jew!) that had the logo on the back and "One Jew" in the name-tag spot on the front.

I didn't tell Nahum about this until he came over with bottles of lager & stout for us to sample from Batch Gimmel. His face lit up like an 80-candle menorah, and we cracked open the latest brew while wearing our Official 2JB Uniforms. Dorky? Maybe just a bit. But also a bunch of fun and a fantastic gift.

P.S. - I almost forgot about the beer! The lager was very good, but the stout was out of this world. Really terrific! We mixed up an initial black & tan, and it was pretty much as delicious as you could ask a beer to be. I'm saving my pre-mixed black & tans for a toast to President Obama in January, and am now doubly, maybe triply excited for the coffee stout that is wrapping up fermenting and awaiting bottling.

Processing Power

2008-12-30T16:21:00.003-05:00

Brewing Batch Gimmel in two parts has generated an unintended, though excellent, side-effect: a new perspective on how to use the equipment that came in our homebrew kit. See, we'd looked at all the stuff, read the instructions for all the steps necessary to create a batch of beer, and done just that. Step 1, step 2, step 3, etc...and when it was all finished, the result was a batch of beer.

But here's the thing: many of the steps use their own discrete piece of equipment from the overall kit. So our process had us waiting until the entire set of steps was complete before starting the next brew...which sounds perfectly reasonable until you consider that during any given step, several pieces of equipment were sitting unused.

In other words: we had the right equipment to brew a batch of beer, but we also had enough equipment to be brewing multiple batches at the same time. All we had to do was game it out a bit and make sure that the different batches were timed to hit different stages of the process (and therefore be occupying different containers). So if Beer One has been in the Ale Pail for a week or two, it can move to the glass carboy...which frees up the Pail for Beer Two to start fermenting. Then Beer One moves to bottles (and out of the carboy), Beer Two shifts to the carboy (and out of the Ale Pail) and your intrepid brewers can get rolling with Beer Three. Everything moves over one step, and the brew keeps flowing.

When we first read that the NJ Homebrew Permit allowed for a max of 200 gallons a year, that seemed preposterous. Who the hell had the time (and necessary equipment) to brew nearly once a week? Well...it turns out that we just might.

Which is why on a cold December Saturday, we took the lager and stout batches (which had been in the carboy and Ale Pail, respectively) and bottled 'em up...while at the same time getting Batch Dalet (aka, 5 gallons of Monty's coffee stout recipe) boiled up and ready for the Pail. It not only was a ton of fun, but it eliminated the standing around that can accompany the brewing process - with several things going on at once, we were continually bouncing around from attending to the brew or cleaning the bottles or racking to the bottling bucket or...well, let's just say there were no idle hands (which is partially why there are so few photos for this brew!).

By the end of the afternoon, here's what we'd accomplished: 15 bottles of lager, 16 bottles of stout and 9 bottles of pre-mixed black & tans were sealed, boxed and moved to the basement for carbonation. On top of that, we had 5 gallons of stout with a 1.055 original gravity ready to ferment (containing: 1/2 lb. crystal malt, 1/2 lb. chocolate malt, 1/2 lb. black patent, and 1/2 lb. roasted non-malted black barley; 6.6 lbs. Cooper's Dark Malt Extract; 1 oz. Northern Brewer's hops, 1/2 oz. Fuggles hops, 1/2 oz. Kent Goldings hops, and 1 tsp. Irish Moss; and a topper of American dry ale yeast) and 2 Jews worth of very tired, very satisfied homebrewers.

The Other Half

2008-12-30T15:56:00.002-05:00

I seem to have gotten sidetracked from my 2JB business, but am back to make it all right again.

As indicated at the beginning of the black & tan project, the next step was to get a half-batch of stout going. An upside of coming back to the brewing process so soon after the last is that we were able to keep in a kind of rhythm (or, at the very least, not have to re-read the basics of what we were supposed to be doing here). So after we shifted the still-fermenting lager from the bucket to the carboy, the grain sack got 4 oz. of crushed black patent malt and 2 oz. roasted barley, which was submerged into 2 gallons of water that had 1 tsp. of gypsum mixed in.

And it was not hard to guess that we were making a dark, dark stout beer: the wort looked and smelled plenty dark before we'd even reached the boiling point. And once 3.3 lbs. of Cooper's Dark Malt Extract went in...hoo-boy! The liquid was pitch-dark, with an aroma that was just this side of burnt.

Since we didn't have the exact hops called for in the recipe we found online (unless one is willing to track down every last exact iteration of hops and malts and such, one is often at the mercy of what the supplier has access to), we went with 3/4 oz. of Northern Brewer and 1/8 oz. Cascade hops, some Irish Moss, plus another 1/8 oz. of Cascade for finishing.

By the time everything had been boiled and mixed and brewed up, we had a dark, dark brown, almost syrupy wort on our hands. As a long-time fan of dark, heavy beers (time spent living in Scotland will do that to a fella), I had two immediate and simultaneous thoughts: 1) Wow, this is going to be good, and 2) Why, exactly, did we only make a half batch of something so potentially yummy?

As we sampled the pre-ferment stout, it was clear Nahum was having the exact same thoughts. I mean...it's not really any more or less effort to brew 2.5 or 5 gallons (most of the water is added at the end to get the proportions balanced out right), and our experiences with Batches Alef and Bet suggested that 2JB homebrew does not have a long shelf life - it gets drunk up pretty quick. In fact, we were pretty much out of beer (save for the 4 bottles of pumpkin ale I'd set aside for my wife's family to try over the holidays). So as we measured out a 1.070 original gravity and sealed up the bucket, the Two Jews made a solemn vow: never again would we make puny half-batches, and we would make it our central mission to never be this low on ready-to-quaff bottles of 2JB product.

Half & Half

2008-12-09T20:56:00.003-05:00

One of the key features of a good partnership is the ability to be on the same page but also bring different things to the table. That balance has served the 2JB enterprise well: I like the process and enjoy documentation efforts like this blog; Nahum is more into the characteristics of the ingredients and likes digging into a new challenge. Between the two of us, we seem to bring most of what we need to the table.

So apropos to his love of challenge, Nahum reconsidered our plan to make an inauguration-season batch of black & tan. Sure, we could do another 5-gallon brew like we'd done in the previous two batches...or we could break down the two ingredients of a black & tan (stout & lager, respectively) and mix up half batches of each in rapid succession.

Now, I was just fine with the original idea of kicking back with 40 bottles or so of homebrewed black & tans, but who was I to not be up to this new challenge? We found recipes for each beer type that could be reasonably broken down into 2.5 gallon batches, put in an ingredient order at the local supply shop and got to work.

Upping the ante on the brew process ended up providing an additional new factor to our process: now that we were buying individual ingredients (instead of the prepackaged kit that had powered our two ales), we had to focus on the materials a bit more. Packs of hops had to be measured and divided; bits that would go into one brew (like the gypsum that would "harden" the lager water) but not the other had to be separated out; and we had to pay more attention to how the brew was proceeding, since the recipes were just ingredient lists (assuming you already knew the process for your beer type).

So the challenge was a good one - it was keeping us from resting on our homebrew laurels and helping make us better brewers. It was very satisfying to make our half-batch of California Common Lager (you can't call it "Steam Lager," since that's trademarked by the Anchor Steam folks...but we were basically following their lead).

A half pound of crushed amber crystal went into the grain bag, which we boiled in gypsum-hardened water. Pretty quickly we detected a doughy smell, and the water darkened quite a bit. At the boil point, we pulled the grains and kicked in 3.3 lbs. of light malt extract, and soon noticed that there were odd bits floating around in the wort. (Even odder was when they all began to move and gather together in one spot toward the side of the pot - it reminded me of the scene in The Right Stuff where John Glenn's capsule is surrounded by a luminous swarm of specks.)

Northern brewer hops went in next, followed by cascade hops and Irish moss, and eventually the rest of the cascade hops. As we racked the wort into the Ale Pail (though this was to be lager, not ale!), we noticed that nearly a half-gallon of water had boiled off, and there seemed to be more sediment matter than the ale had generated. Intriguing stuff folks, I promise.

Anyway, we topped it off with some more water and 1 tsp. of lager yeast...and now we've got a half-bucket of lager doing its thing in the basement. There's no rest this time, though: we'll need to move the lager into the glass carboy later this week, and then move on to whipping up the other half of the black & tan equation - a half-batch of creamy, delicious stout.

P.S. - I couldn't resist taking a picture of Nahum's cat, who took about 10 seconds to figure out that she'd fit perfectly in the empty half of the box of spring water:

A Brewful Holiday

2008-11-30T16:42:00.002-05:00

When Monty told me that one of the side-effects of homebrewing was an always-ringing doorbell, I figured that had something to do with the relationships he had with his particular neighbors. But now that all of the fermenting & such is finished for Batch Bet, it's becoming clear that half the fun of making beer is sharing it at opportune moments.

I brought a six-pack of the freshly minted 2JB pumpkin ale to my parents' house for Thanksgiving, chilled it in their extra fridge and brought out the bottles for the cocktail/appetizer hour. I'd originally thought there'd be some mild interest from most of the gathered family, along with a smaller core of fans who'd want a bottle.

It only took a few minutes to realize that six bottles of 2JB wasn't going to cut it. Everyone wanted in on the action! So I distributed small portions in paper cups to everyone from my grandmother on down (saving meal-time bottles for my bro-in-law and me). Uncles, aunts, cousins, parents and sibs all agreed that it was a fine, thankful brew.

A couple of days later, the missus and me had a few friends along for a night of leftovers...and wouldn't you know there were requests all 'round for some 2JB. So out came more bottles and more happy drinkers.

(Oh, and btw: I thought it turned out great...a solid, clear beer with the right touch of the flavors we'd added in.)

So here we are on the last day of November, and I think I've got 4 bottles in the refrigerator and 4 or 5 more coming to me from Nahum's basement (I know he's been spreading the holiday cheer at his family & friend meals, too). And that's it - Batch Bet is nearly as gone as Batch Alef...which means next weekend we have to get the next brew rocking!

In-Between Days

2008-11-24T19:44:00.002-05:00

At the coming-out party for Batch Alef, my friend Monty told everyone about his days as an avid homebrewer. At all times, he said, he'd have two different batches in some stage of preparation and two finished batches in the fridge. "Basically, I wanted to never have to buy beer," he said, adding, "Plus, the neighbors rang the doorbell a lot."

Now, I'd be happy to entertain the neighbors from time to time...but I really don't see Nahum and I carving out the time to brew that often (or that much - there's only so much beer I'd really want to be drinking in a given time frame). But on the point of not wanting to buy beer anymore...that I can get behind.

So what to do in the in-between days? Right now, I'm down to my last bottle of Batch Alef, having quaffed one of the two pictured here with dinner.

As for Batch Bet, I've got a six-pack set aside for Thanksgiving (hands off!)...and that's it. If I suddenly decide I want to take it easy and have a homebrew, I'm kind of out of luck until either the rest of Batch Bet is ready & available...or until Batch Gimmel makes an appearance.

This, of course, is not much of a complaint. And I'm not really complaining. It just seems odd to be making beer five gallons at a time and finding myself low on bottles of brew!

(P.S. - I think this is also on my mind after reading The New Yorker's recent article on "extreme beer." I'm very tempted to go out and pick up a six of Dogfish Head right about now...)

On the Straight & Narrow

2008-11-23T15:14:00.005-05:00

While Nahum and I have been having no end of giddy, satisfying fun with the Two Jews Brew venture, there is something we'd turned out not to be so diligent about. Homebrewing is a hobby, like collecting stamps or building model of vintage cars...but it also involves the creation of alcohol.

Which is where The State gets involved.

All states oversee matters of alcohol, tobacco and firearms...but NJ has one of the more draconian approaches to the first of those. Getting a liquor license for a restaurant is a serious hassle & expense, and you can't go to your average grocery or convenience store to pick up a six-pack. (How this squares with NJ being one of the few states with pockets of legalized, non-reservation gambling isn't entirely clear to me, but so it goes.)

All of which is to say: NJ requires homebrewers to get a permit. When Nahum first brought this up, he told me that the permit was aimed at people turning out a bit more brew than we are (it limits a homebrewer to 200 gallons a year...which at our rate of 5 gallons a brew, would mean we'd be at this 40 out of 52 weeks annually). To which I replied: "So instead of being Nahum and Brian the Homebrewers, you and I can be Nahum and Brian the Licensed Homebrewers?"

After a minute or so of laughing, we decided to each pony up the $15 (plus a stamp) to fill out & send in the application to the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Off it went to Trenton, and within a week or so...a thoroughly official-looking document showed up in the mail. Festooned with the seal of the State of New Jersey and signed by Jerry Fischer, the D of ABC's director, this suitable-for-framing page makes me an officially recognized member of the NJ Brewing Class.

There are a few Ps and Qs to mind about how much we make, where we make it and with whom we share it (plus, of course: no selling!), but it feels good to be back on the straight & narrow after a brief stint as homebrew scofflaws.

Ale to the Chief

2008-11-15T18:23:00.002-05:00

If there were to be such a thing as The Number One 2JB Fan, that post would no doubt go to Nahum's friend Jay. He not only counseled and encouraged us from the very start of our homebrew enterprise, but he also has been providing a steady stream of Two Jews Brew graphics. The latest is not only timely but also pretty damn funny:

Still, the message was not lost on us. As the Pumpkin Ale sits in bottles, ramping up both its carbonation and deliciousness, we started plotting out Batch Gimmel. As Jay slyly suggested, we'd probably be uncapping these beers around the time of President Obama's inauguration. Could we possibly link a 2JB project to this momentous event?

Yes we can!

After much debate about the right message to communicate with our beer (yes, I know - we're a bit far gone), Nahum and I agreed that the moment would pair well with...a batch of black & tan. (And if McCain had won? A bitter, no doubt.) A little bit too on the nose? Perhaps. But it also seems like it'll be an enjoyable winter bevvie that will be perfect to celebrate a very happy piece of history.

Pump(kin) Up the Volume

2008-11-09T16:32:00.002-05:00

Is it my imagination, or is Batch Bet rolling along more quickly than the 1st set? I mean, all of the right things are happening, and the beer looks, smells, tastes and seems just right. It must be the additional ingredient - a dash of self-confidence as brewers - that's making the process seem like it's moving at such a heady pace.

But I digress. Yesterday Nahum broke out our latest tool/toy - The Thief, a long tube that lets you draw out a smaller volume to check specific gravity - and got an SG reading of 1.012 (again: just right!). He then dropped some cracked nutmeg and a cinnamon stick into the carboy. Within just 24 hours (or maybe just a bit less?) the pumpkin ale now had a more powerful aroma, the spices making themselves more present and highlighting the pumpkin notes that had been sitting underneath.

Not wanting it to get too strongly spiced, we racked the carboy (which had a lot less solid matter in it, a nice benefit of the double fermentation), boiled up a sugar solution, waved the bottling wand (no lie: that's the totally real name for the bottling attachment that goes on the end of the siphon), and filled 43 freshly sanitized bottles with 2JB Pumpkin Ale.

To be honest, it probably could have been 44...but we had to sample enough of this new brew to see what we were dealing with. The beer has a deep color (maybe just a bit darker than the non-pumpkin ale, but not too much); it smells spicy & intense, but the taste is much smoother/less intense than the aroma suggests. It's somewhat spicy and fruity, but the sweeter flavor is in the back of the overall taste.

Just like last time, we felt like we'd be perfectly happy drinking it as is...a sign we're taking to mean that it will be thoroughly delicious in 2 weeks' time. Hmmm...you think pumpkin ale will go well with a Thanksgiving meal? As America's Alaskan Sweetheart would say: You betcha!

Graphic Content

2008-11-08T17:37:00.002-05:00

Another graphically inclined homebrew fan, Elizabeth, has contributed a logo to the 2JB movement:

Twice as Nice?

2008-11-06T22:10:00.002-05:00

Despite being knocked ever-so-slightly off balance by the addition of pumpkin and spices to our ale, the second batch actually seems to be going very well. The yeast activity is moving at a good pace, the aroma is fab (slightly mellower than the last batch) and the color is a nice, rich brown.

It's going smoothly enough that we've moved ahead with another effort to kick up our homebrew game a notch. Although ale doesn't really benefit much from a dual fermentation, we decided to try adding in the extra round for two reasons: 1) a second fermentation will help clarify the beer, and the addition of the pumpkin has introduced more solid matter than we dealt with last time; 2) we've got this kick-ass 5-gallon glass carboy and we really, really want to use it already.

So just one night after Obama's electoral-college victory (yes we can!), the Two Jews uncapped the Ale Pail, sanitized the carboy & siphon, took a specific gravity reading (1.014, which is about where we want to be for an eventual 4 or 5% alcohol content) and then transferred the almost-beer from plastic to glass.

The process was actually extremely satisfying. For one, it really did allow us to leave a lot of the sediment and sludge behind. (Of course, we stuck our heads into the sludge again; the smell was again very pleasant as long as you kept your eyes closed.) But it also added something more ephemeral: the glass container just looked somehow more...right. Like we were Real Beer Guys, using Real Beer Guy equipment.

Anyway, now it sits for a few more days, and then Batch Bet heads to the bottles. We were a little unsure about whether to put the cinnamon and nutmeg back into the liquid at this point; when we sampled some of the bucket leftovers, it was hard to say if we detected hints of pumpkin & spices because we knew we'd put the pumpkin & spices in the wort or because the flavors were really there. I suspect we'll end up adding them for just a day or two, but it's hard to know how to best strike the balance between adding enough extra flavor without turning it into "mulled beer" or something like that.

Standing Around

2008-11-03T20:01:00.002-05:00

Those in the entertainment biz say that making films or music or theater or whatever tends to have one major ingredient: lots of standing around. In between the steps of creation there is, inevitably, a lot of downtime.

As Nahum and I began our second brew, we'd shed some of the puppyish enthusiasm of our initial effort, no longer able to kill 15 minutes just sniffing the wafting aromas and discussing what we thought it smelled like. Sure, we took a sniff...but it smelled more or less like it did last time.

Well, except for the pumpkin.

Ah, the pumpkin. Feeling that we'd achieved basic mastery of the American Amber Ale process, wanting to see if we could do it again and change it up a bit, the 2JB Executive Council settled on Pumpkin Ale for Batch Bet. And while the pumpkin will no doubt add a whole range of flavor notes to the beer, it also jacked up the standing around quotient exponentially.

We'd done some research, which mostly involved checking out a bunch of recipes online, making some decisions, and then running those decisions by the homebrew guy at the Gaslight. Once armed with information and a plan, we met up at 2:30pm on Sunday to run through the next brew.

And wow, was that not nearly early enough to start. The pumpkin - the biggest new variable in the recipe - turned out to be quite a time-suck. See, we needed to caramelize it first, to make sure that the starches and sugars and such interacted correctly with the wort. So Nahum chopped the pumpkin (which turned out to be a Sweeney Todd-level challenge, knife-wise) and put it in the oven...which all told added an extra hour and a half to the brew.

Since we needed the caramelized pumpkin before we could really get rolling with the rest of the brew, we waited. Nahum pulled out a couple of guitars and we strummed. We shot the breeze about the election. We ate pumpkin seeds. We bought ice.

We waited.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, we got the rest of the brew going. But to be honest, I think the pumpkin threw us off our rhythm a little. Like, we almost forgot to put the finishing hops in. We hadn't gotten the liquid malt quite liquidy enough. We couldn't find the nutmeg (which, along with some cinnamon sticks, went into the brew along with a cheesecloth bag of pumpkin pieces). There was the Irish Moss to deal with, which would work to clarify the pumpkin-infused beer. And as we got ready to rack the wort into the bucket, Nahum realized the yeast wasn't prepped. Plus, it got late enough that we each had to also start cooking dinner for our respective families (I was running back & forth across the street!).

In short, we were not the very model of a modern pair of experienced homebrewers. But you know what? Just like Jay and Papazian told us, each in their own way, making beer is not an exact science (relax!). We made some (little) mistakes, we got a little distracted, but when we checked out the pre-fermentation liquid in the pot...oh man, did it smell and taste and look good!

It had taken from 2:30 to 6:50pm, but it was clearly worth it. So now we do more waiting, this time for the yeast to do its thing. And in a couple of days, we'll evaluate whether our new ingredients did the job during the boil or if we need to re-add the spices during fermentation. Despite the slow (and slightly erratic) brew process the second time around, I'm still confident that we've got something good going in the 2JB basement brewery.

A Growing Movement

2008-11-01T14:41:00.003-04:00

Is the 2JB wave sweeping across the nation? If it is, Nahum's friend Jay is our top Field General - he whipped up this graphic upon hearing of our plans to make pumpkin ale:

The Great Pumpkin

2008-10-29T21:44:00.003-04:00

Now that we've successfully birthed a batch o' brew, it would be tempting to just sit back, relax and have a homebrew. But the 2JB ethic requires us to forge ahead, and we're prepping for the second brew this weekend.

Nahum and I agreed that we wanted to up our game for our sophomore effort, but also test our ability to duplicate our initial success. So we decided to brew another batch of amber ale, but with a seasonal twist: Pumpkin Ale!

The box of ale ingredients arrived today (we've found recipes online that suggest ways to add the pumpkin & autumnal spices as you're brewing), and Nahum called with a report (no unboxing was necessary this time). Interestingly, we ordered the exact same thing from the exact same place...but not all of the included ingredients were exactly the same. Specifically, we got a Windsor brewing yeast which, according to the folks at danstar.com, should yield a slightly heavier, more complex ale than Batch Alef. Throw in some cinnamon, nutmeg and carmelized pumpkin, and we're in for a whole 'nother brewing adventure...

P.S. - I neglected to share this little nugget of homebrew goodness. Nahum's friend Jay, who consulted via phone from Florida as we were hatching our initial 2JB plans, wished us well with Batch Alef by whipping up this totally fun graphic:

Batch Alef

2008-10-28T20:57:00.005-04:00

Was it really only a month since we'd hatched the plan to brew beer in our NJ suburb? Really just 3 weeks or so since we'd turned that first box of ingredients into Two Jews Brew? Could it really, actually be time to drink the stuff?

Yes, really. It was time.

Last Saturday afternoon, we invited a couple dozen local 2JB enthusiasts over for a sort of Semitic Beer Cotillion: the coming-out party for Batch Alef.

Nahum brought over the box of bottles from the basement fermenting lab, and soon most of the middle shelf of the fridge was filled with brown glass bottles (none of which, perhaps miraculously, had exploded during the last part of the process). Between our two families and our invited guests, there was a great spread of sweet & salty snacks.

Everything was ready. All that was left was the drinking.

Just before everyone arrived, Nahum and I popped a cap and split a bottle into two frosted beer glasses. We looked (it looked good), we sniffed (it smelled just right), we clinked our glasses (l'chaim!) and gave it a try.

And wouldn't you know it - the beer was good. Really good. It tasted just like a glass of amber ale was supposed to taste. Smooth, a little hoppy, a little crisp, and totally tasty. If I'd given a bartender a fiver and gotten this in return, I would have been perfectly happy.

Though in this case, we weren't perfectly happy...Nahum and I were ecstatic. We'd made beer! Delicious beer! Let the party begin!

For the next three hours, people came and went and we proudly poured our creation. I'm pretty sure my mug was never entirely empty, and each sip just felt right. Everyone who had a glass of 2JB seemed pleased and impressed (and maybe just a little surprised - but who could blame anyone for that?). The food was delicious, more bottles were popped open, and we had just about as much fun as two brewin' Jews could have asked.

Of course, the conversation eventually turned to the most crucial question of all: the next batch. Not content to rest on our laurels, this coming weekend we're going to do our darndest to skip the sophomore slump, mix up 5 gallons of seasonally correct pumpkin ale and get the whole thing going again.

WWJB?

2008-10-24T10:25:00.002-04:00

The next step in the 2JB tale is coming very soon...but in the meantime, a story on CNN.com caught my eye. The question, "What would Jesus brew?" might be the exact antithesis of the Two Jews Brew credo.

Which reminds me: we really need a credo (or at least a good tag line). Any suggestions?

A Beer is Born

2008-10-18T15:26:00.002-04:00

Tom Petty wasn't kidding: the waiting is the hardest part. After bottling our batch of brew last week, Nahum and I had agreed to give it 2 weeks to do the carbonation thing. But within a day or so...it suddenly seemed like what we really should do is try 1 bottle after just 1 week. That way, we'd have another benchmark between what we'd tasted directly from the fermentation bucket and what we'd have at the end.

Y'know, for the science of it.

And so it came to pass that this Saturday afternoon, we took a single bottle out of the Beer Room (aka, a small space in Nahum's basement) that had been sitting at a steady 65 degrees for a week. And we opened it. And we drank it.

And it was good. Really good.

As soon as the cap came off, we knew something good had happened in 7 days: after creating the beer and giving it dominion over the hops and barley, it had gone into a restful state of reasonable carbonation. You could see the bubbles in the bottle, and the pour yielded a very healthy looking head atop a deep amber color.

It was beer! It looked like beer, smelled like beer, tasted like beer, the whole megilla. Sure, it wasn't quite done (it could use a bit more carbonation, and maybe sweeten just a tinge), but what we quaffed was something I would in no way be ashamed to serve to another human being.

Once we got over our giddy satisfaction, the two brewing Jews tried to do a little critical assessment. Basically, it's now a bit like a British bitter: warm, lightly carbonated and a little cloudy. There's a bit of a crisp feel when drinking, and a nice hoppy aftertaste that doesn't linger long.

All in all, I don't think we could be happier. We're letting the remaining 41 bottles sit for 1 more week, and then it's time to chill 'em and gather round for the official unveiling of Batch Alef from 2JB!

42 Bottles of Beer on the Wall

2008-10-12T15:18:00.004-04:00

On Saturday, we saw the sign (and it opened up our eyes): The hydrometer returned a steady reading of 1.014, which is both a) the same reading from the day before, meaning the fermentation had stopped; and b) within the final target range for this batch o' brew.

It was bottling time!

Not only was this exciting because it meant the 2JB project was rolling apace, but it also meant we got to use 2 more pieces of equipment from our brewing kit: the bottling wand and the capper.

The wand was, true to its name, a little piece of magic. It attaches to the end of the siphon hose, adding a slim, solid tube that can go into the to-be-filled bottle. But the magic part was the little plastic dohickey on the end (that's the technical term, I believe) that only lets the beer flow through while its pressing down on the bottom of the bottle; when you lift it up, the flow cuts off immediately. This means the flow doesn't start until the wand is all the way in (which cuts down the risk of over-aerating during the bottling), and it allows for a perfect volume of beer in the bottle. Brilliant.

Once we sanitized our bottling equipment and 2 dozen bottles & caps, we dissolved 5 oz. of priming sugar into 2 cups of water and boiled for 5 minutes. That went into the sanitized "bottling bucket," followed by the siphoning of close to the full 5 gallons of wort from bucket #1 to bucket #2. (The sugar solution will be key in adding carbonation to the finished product.)

It's at this point that I want to mention one good thing and one bad thing.

The bad thing first: When we siphoned out the wort bucket, we got a peek at the residue that had formed at the bottom over the course of a week. Put simply: it was deeply, profoundly foul. Nahum was digging the concentrated hops aroma that came out of this sludge, but unless you closed your eyes and cleansed your brain, it was hard to get past just how disgusting the sedimentary byproduct is. (Note: the only "bad" here is the look; the sludge is supposed to be there.)

Now the good thing: Nahum and I tasted the fermented wort and...it was really, really good! Granted, it tasted like warm, flat beer...but that's a pretty accurate description of where we were in the process: pre-carbonated, pre-chilled beer. It's only subtly different from the post-carbonated, post-chilled beer you've got sitting around the morning after a party, but that's nonetheless beer, right? The alcohol and mouth-feel are still coming together, but the flavor is there.

But I digress. Working in a two-man assembly line, Nahum siphoned from the bottling bucket into the bottles, and I used the bright-red capper to seal each one shut. In the end we filled 42 bottles, which are now sitting in a 66-degree room.

In just 15 days (long, long days, no doubt), the carbonation and other final bits of brewing magic should be complete, and we'll have some honest-to-goodness Two Jews Brew to sample!

A Delicate Balance

2008-10-10T15:23:00.002-04:00

When we first called Nahum's friend for homebrew advice, one of the (many) good tips he gave us was a book title: The Complete Joy of Homebrewing by Charlie Papazian. The title pretty much sums up what you get in its 400+ pages.

While the Papazian book goes into a lot of details as far as procedures, recipes and other homebrew ephemera, it's key point comes up again & again: "Relax, don't worry, have a homebrew." Anytime a potential problem or tricky bit of craft come up, Papazian doles out that sage advice.

Nahum and I did our best to take this to heart, but it's not always easy for the first-time brewer. On Monday, I got the following e-mail from Nahum: "I am violating the cardinal rule. I am worrying. In the new room I am concerned it is too cold. Shelf thermometer reads 65. Bucket temp reads 70 (I moved it this morning because it read 73). Now I am worried it is bubbling too slowly," adding, "I am sick and need help."

I wasn't sure how worried to be about this, so I decided to relax and not worry (and I drank a beer at home). Nahum soon followed suit by shifting his focus to something that was actually very productive, namely monitoring the specific gravity readings.

Now, I thought you just took a reading at the beginning and another at the end. And at first I worried that this was going to just be an added worry-maker, but it turned out to be yet another good sign. The 10.8.08 reading revealed that the brew was up to 2.9% alcohol by volume (which is well on the way to the target of three-point-something) and even better was his note that, "it is already really tasty!" Nahum's wife even joined in:

All good signs. We're going to take another reading tonight (and I'll get my first taste of the not-quite-yet-ale), followed by bottling this weekend.

Bottled Up

2008-10-06T19:35:00.003-04:00

Just like the "comprehensive" CD box set that is missing some key tracks, our "complete" homebrew starter kit was missing one crucial element: bottles.

Now, bottling is a bigger deal in homebrewing than you might suppose. Because we don't have at our disposal a full brewery set-up (or at least not yet...), part of the process actually happens in the bottle: the carbonation.

Which means you can't have just any old bottle for your beer. For instance, it can't have a screw top, since we've got to lock these suckers down tight. And they need to be very clean - we'll be sterilizing the bottles before pouring in the brew, but I think it helps if they're not crudded up with lime rinds, cigarette butts and such.

So we decided to order some bottles. Nahum went to order from the same outfit that sold us the kit...but he soon discovered that a brew-pub in the next town over would sell us brew-quality bottles. Cheaper. And no waiting. I think we both hate waiting.

On Sunday I got in the car, headed to the Gaslight, and about 15 minutes and $23.35 later, I had two cases of pristine 12 oz. brown-glass bottles in my possession. Nahum says the Ale Pail is bubbling (though he's a little nervous about the temperature in his basement), so by Sunday we should be ready to bottle.

The First Brew

2008-10-05T16:05:00.008-04:00

At 12:28pm on Saturday, October 4, 2008, Nahum and I lit the fire under our inaugural pot of homebrew. I know the exact time because it's a specific part of my job in the process: to take notes, keep track and document the process (see: the page you're reading right now).

And I now have a page of notes regarding our 1st crack at making beer. Prepping the 5 gallons of American Amber Ale took almost exactly 3 1/2 hours, a very fine way to pass a Saturday afternoon. Nahum is a veteran of endeavors like this, having already made his own cheese, his own (kosher) sausage, his own apple butter...you get the idea. The man already had most of the right equipment and all of the right attitude for home brewing - at each stage, as we followed the step-by-step instructions included in our American Amber kit, Nahum took a moment to take in the smells of the ingredients and notice the changes in color, consistency, etc.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We started by sanitizing our equipment, putting 8 oz. of crushed crystal 60L malt into a muslin sock, and heating it in the pot, kind of like a giant tea bag that steeps beer (if only!). Then 2lb of dry malt went into the pot as we kept it at a steady boil for 55 minutes, after which 1 oz. of Willamette Bittering Hops went into the mix. [UPDATE: As Nahum pointed out, " Just prior to the 2lbs of dry malt, we poured 3.3 lbs of Munton's amber malt syrup."]

By this point, the pot was giving off a very strong, and very specific, smell: malty, yes, but also noticeably earthy...kind of like cereal covered in moss (especially after another 8 oz. of finishing hops went in). We had no real way of knowing if this was the smell it was supposed to have, but it did seem to be a sort of logical alchemical combination of the individual ingredients' scents. So far so good, then.

After the boil, we had to get the temperature of the wort (the technical term for the liquid at this stage) from 220 degrees to 70 degrees as fast as possible. Nahum devised an ice bath in the sink, and we plunged the pot while keeping the liquid in motion to spread out the temperature. And in just 16 minutes...we'd done it! Comfortably cool wort.

Now, we technically won't have any beer to drink for another couple of weeks...but you didn't think we'd actually wait that long, right? Perish the thought. Nahum and I sampled the lukewarm wort, and it tasted like...well, it didn't taste like beer yet. But it was certainly a beer-related flavor, bitter and still very earthy.

Next came the most science-ish part of the process: taking a specific-gravity reading. Now, my relationship with science is tense, at best; when it comes to explaining the reasons behind how the beer works, I'm more on the Homer Simpson tip: "Fire made it good." But I soldiered on, dropping the hydrometer into the bucket (which we'd filled with more science-related activity involving a long-hosed siphon) and taking the reading.

And wouldn't you know it: 1.040. Which, according to the recipe, is right about where it should be. As we added the yeast and sealed up the bucket to let it ferment for a week, we both noted that somewhat to our mutual surprise, everything had gone as it should. Each step took about as long as the recipe and books and websites said it should, and each result seemed to be as it was supposed to be.

As Gov. Palin might put it: "Doggone it, we might be able to give Joe Six-Pack some beer here, folks." And we just might, after the bucket ferments for a week, and we head back to the Two Jews Lab for the next step(s).

Unboxing Day

2008-10-04T11:34:00.005-04:00

Two boxes arrived: one large one with the "starter kit" of equipment for the novice homebrewer; the other with the pre-measured ingredients for brewing 5 gallons(!) of amber ale.

We set to unboxing the stuff with the collective force of two kids on all eight nights of Hanukkah. Starting with the big box (of course), the first kick was seeing that the two plastic fermentation buckets were labeled "Ale Pail," in a kind of quasi-biergarten font. And once we felt the heft and solidity of the glass carboy (a name I still need to trace the root of), the decision to spend the extra dosh for glass instead of plastic seemed right on the nose.

Nahum seemed especially fascinated by the mechanics of it all. He reached for the bottle-capper and flexed its handles until it was clear how it did its thing. And once we had all of the equipment laid out, he went step-by-step through the instructions, figuring out how each item in front of us participated in making the magic happen.

The box of ingredients was slightly more frustrating: because we weren't getting to the brewing immediately (curse those day jobs!), it seemed wrong to open the vaccum-sealed bags of hops and malts and such. But that meant that the sensual pleasures - inhaling the aromas of the hops, feeling the grit of the raw ingredients as they fell through our fingers - had to be put off. No small loss.

Now we're on to the next, and crucial step: the inagural brew. Some marital negotiations cleared out 3 hours this weekend, which means we're likely to have a drinkable (fingers crossed!) batch ready by Halloween. Seems kind of perfect timing, eh?

And So It Begins

2008-09-28T18:08:00.001-04:00

Yesterday my neighbor Nahum asked me if I'd be interested in going in on a home-brew kit. I'm not sure he even got the full sentence out of his mouth before I'd agreed.

Today we sat in front of a laptop, splitting a bottle of Old Speckled Hen and pricing out a starter kit for first-time brewers. Our initial concept of getting the cheap/small 3-gallon plastic starter was quickly torpedoed by Nahum's friend, an experienced home-brewer, who pointed us toward a 5-gallon glass rig.

Even more important was what he told us next: "You can brew beer in a boot, really, but you have got to have a cool spot with a constant temperature," adding, "preferably somewhere the wives and kids won't bother you for half a day." Since Nahum has already made cheese in a side-room of his basement, that immediately became home base for the two brewing Jews.

The kit is ordered. The spot in the basement is set. Now we wait for delivery. And then it begins.