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Many possible additions to your favorite beers can be found…

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Some of you may have seen the BeerBug Kickstarter last year.  The concept was a digital hydrometer that would connect to your computer or phone and deliver real time specific gravity and temperature readings.  Their software would make nice graphs for you and calculate your ABV on the fly.

Want to read more? Please click…Some of you may have seen the BeerBug Kickstarter last year. The concept was a digital hydrometer that would connect to your computer or phone and deliver real time specific gravity and temperature readings. Their software would make nice graphs for you and calculate your ABV on the fly.

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Big Buck Brewery and Steakhouse – GaylordBloomfield Hills, Michigan

I walk into the liquor store with my sunglasses still on and my head down. Hopefully no one will recognize me as I slowly drift past all the glistening craft beer bottles, heading toward the macro-beer cooler. An employee asks me if I need help as I’m opening the cooler door. “All set, thanks.”

As I walk toward the register with my cans of Red Dog, a cheap adjunct lager I used to drink growing up, I start to feel guilty. I quickly add a six pack of a micro-brew that I’ve never seen before and plop them both down on the counter. I drive away wondering about this odd pang of guilt.

There’s been a weird movement in the craft beer world that’s polarizing the beer scene: If you like craft beer then you must hate macro-beer. If you like macro-beer then you’re not one of us; you’re just a poser or at best an ignorant neophyte.

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Brewers who use municipal water for their beers know that it is treated with chlorine for disinfection and that residual chlorine may react with phenols in malt to produce chlorophenols, which lend a plasticlike taste to beer at parts-per-billion levels. Most brewers also remember from their days of keeping pet goldfish that allowing water to stand, aerating it, or boiling it will allow chlorine to escape, thus rendering the water fit for Goldy and for brewing.

In recent years, more water authorities have started to treat water with ammonia in addition to chlorine. This treatment results in the formation of chemicals called chloramines, which are similar to chlorine in that they kill bacteria and aquarium fish and ruin beer.

Standing, aeration, and boiling will remove chloramines from water, but not very effectively. Water in my area (Fairfax County, Virginia) contains the equivalent of 3 mg/L of chlorine in chloramines, a fairly high level. Ten gallons of this water allowed to stand in a 25-gallon stock pot required weeks to lose chloramine down to the <0.1 mg/L level. Almost two hours of boiling is required to get the chloramine in Fairfax County water down to the hundredths of milligrams per liter.

This article explains how to measure chlorine and chloramines in your brew water and how to reduce or eliminate these beer-spoiling chemicals if they are causing you problems.

What Are Chloramines?

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Walking into Black Abbey’s taproom feels a bit like walking into church. As you enter the door and pass through a Gothic arch, you’ll see hand-crafted wood tables and church pews. The eight taps on the far wall rest under a deep-red Gothic arch. The lights hanging from the ceiling used to illuminate a little church in East Tennessee. It feels like a sacred place. But as Martin Luther said, “It is better to think of church in the ale-house than to think of the ale-house in church.”

The taproom is open to the brew house, so you’ll see everything that goes into beer production. Congregants are separated from the brew house by rustic wooden beams and railings. The wood in the beams and tables was recovered from a storm-damaged tobacco barn. That wood spent a century working, now it gets to retire to a brewery. There are five eight-foot tables for beer lovers to gather around and discuss things like fermentation and sanctification.

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I’ve long considered myself a bit of a geek, but the genesis of this Stone Farking Wheaton W00t Stout is so geeky, it’s almost outstrips my ability to process its nerdiness.

The beer is a collaboration between Stone Brewing co-founder and beer geek supreme Greg Koch, child actor turned geek hero Wil Wheaton, and Drew Curtis, the web geek behind Fark.com, a news website fueled by cleverly rewritten headlines and Photoshop contests, like this recent one featuring a hairy couch.

The origins of Stone Farking Wheaton W00t Stout can be traced back to 2005, when Stone Brewing went to congratulate the 10,000th person to sign up for their mailing list, to find that it was the one and only Wil Wheaton, star of the ‘80s coming of age story “Stand By Me” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” where he played young Wesley Crusher.  A friendship between Wheaton and Koch followed, and the idea to brew together took root.

 

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