Double Blind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: