Well... a couple of new beers brewed, but you get the idea. The sad part, really, is that it has only been a couple of beers. One would think that a beer-lover like myself would be making more than 2-3 batches a year, but in this case, one would be wrong.
There are many excuses I could offer to explain this discrepancy. I could complain that my kitchen is too small. That I find it a tad too cramped to be sloshing 5 gallons of liquid around in. I could say that there's little to no ventilation in Goats: the apartment; that it can take a couple of days for the remnants of the boiling malt smell to clear not only from our 5 square feet of space, but also from the hall where our neighbors get to share in the pleasure (luckily without necessarily knowing who to blame). I could say that the only brew shop in my area is pretty lame and unorganized, and that the people in it are particularly non-helpful, which leaves me somewhat in the lurch when I have questions. I could just complain that their prices seem a little extreme. I could say that I enjoy drinking in the bar too much, and that leaves me with an excess of full bottles, rather than the empty variety required to bottle new beer. I could say that ever since the ghosts of the Franciscan monks started visiting my apartment with critiques of my previous batches, I had lost inspiration.
I could say a lot of things. I usually do.
As an alternative to all those excuses, I could just admit I'm lazy....but where's the fun in that?
Despite that lengthy list of lamentations, I have officially finished my first batch of Goat Scrotum Ale, also my first batch of the year. I mentioned this beer last month. It's based on a recipe I found in Charles Papazian's The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing. The beauty of the recipe is its lack of an actual recipe. Basically, it boils down to throwing random beery ingredients together in a large pot. The basic recipe simply says to use 5 lbs of dark malt extract, 1 lb. of crystal malt, 1/4 lb black patent, 1/4 lb roasted barley, 1.5 oz boiling hops, and 0.25 oz finishing hops. The brewer should then scientifically mix this with a whole bunch of other stuff. Besides the mandated cup of brown sugar, cup of black molasses, and 1 lb. of corn sugar, it's recommended that the brewer add anything from ginger root, to chocolate, to chile peppers.
Being stupid, but not sadistic, I chose to forego the chile peppers. All I added as my extra ingredients was 1/2 lb. of coffee, and 6 oz. of unsweeetened bakers chocolate.
Despite the recipe, the beer is drinkable. I was surprised. This isn't to say it's an especially good beer (hence, my failure to post the recipe in any coherent form). It tastes almost more like coffee than beer, and you could almost sit for a while and chew on a mouthful of it.
Over time, I'm going to work my way through it. In some strange twisted way, I like it -- it's a nice beer to have every once in a while. It's a nice beer provided I limit myself to one in a sitting.
On the plus side, this means it will be a long time before I have empty bottles again, which means it's going to be a long time before I need to think of my next excuse for laziness.
As always, I welcome beer.
-- phillip karlsson, brew guru
april 15, 1998