Posts Tagged Mustache Cat
Brewing with Strawberries and Apples
Posted by DLThurston in Home Brew on June 11, 2013
Remember Mustache Cat? If you go digging through the blog archives you’ll see it first show up in April 2011, when I brewed up a combination of Canadian Blonde ale and a lot of strawberries. Six pounds of strawberries, to be precise. It was my first try at full-sized brewing, and it tasted like someone’s first time brewing. Not a bad beer, per say, but what my wife and I kept calling a very “sharp” beer. A little more bitter than either of us liked. A little more alcoholic sting. No real strawberry flavor.
Funny thing happened the other day. I found a few bottles of Mustache Cat hanging out in the basement, and as we were looking to create some empty bottles for the batch I’m about to talk about, we stuck them in the fridge to give them a try. The resulting beer was smooth with a very pronounced strawberry flavor, both on the front end and in the aftertaste. Like some slow working magic trick, it took only two years for a beer we weren’t all that fond of to turn into a fantastic strawberry ale. This is the kind of funny patience that’s necessary for home brewing. I’ve heard people say no stout should be touched for six months, and even then it should still be thought of as immature. Meads, which I hope to get into one day, take years to even approach complete. Part of the fun of home brewing is finding that old bottle from the less than stellar batch and discovering a decent beer inside.
So, yeah, Mustache Cat rocks.
We were emptying bottles, however, ahead of another batch I brewed based on an Austin Homebrew recipe called “Apple Peeler.” Most of the beer I make is through a process called a “partial boil.” This means I don’t boil all the water that goes into the fermenter, instead only boiling about two gallons. This is then topped off with water until there’s about 5.25 gallons (20 liters, actually). Apple Peeler was different. Oh, there were the normal steps of steeping the grains, adding the sugars, bittering with the hops, but when the partial boil went from the pot to the fermenter, it wasn’t topped off with water.
It was topped off with apple juice.
There’s a subtle brilliance to this change. More so if you, like me, are a fan of a pub cocktail called a Snakebite. In its simplest form, a Snakebite is a shandy that mixes equal parts beer with non-alcoholic cider. Or, even better, alcoholic cider. It’s refreshing, and in the shandy form makes a fantastic drink with a pub brunch. This recipe struck me as a pre-made Snakebite, so I couldn’t resist. It’s fermenting in the basement now, and will bottle sometime in July. Hopefully it’ll be ready for a taste before the summer is over, as this strikes me as a late summer, early fall type of beer. If not, it can always wait until next summer and get all the tastier in the process.
Tasting some of the wort, an odd habit of mine, it was more bitter than I expected, and I’m already prepared to dial back the hops if I try the recipe again. It’s fun to have a few go to recipes to double back on, tweak a little, and turn into better and better beer.
I’ll also need a name. Apple Peeler isn’t a bad name, but what fun is it to use the pre-assigned name? I’m thinking just Fall Ale as an allusion not just to the season but the Fall of Man, which feels like a required reference with the combination of apples and snakes. What’s up with all my Biblical beers?
I look forward on reporting the flavor.
Mustache Cat: Bottling Day
Posted by DLThurston in Home Brew on May 15, 2011
Adventures abounded during the bottling of the first batch of DL’s New Peculiar. While doing all my santization, I re-read the instructions and saw that it was recommended to turn the priming sugar into a priming syrup, so the process got put on hold while I did some quick boiling and cooling. During that time, I started working on sanitizing all my tubing, just to discover the bottling wand (a fantastic device that makes it a lot easier to fill a bottle to the correct level) and the tubing didn’t form a seal.
Look, I’m not saying I did the right thing. I used duct tape. Going forward I’m going to seek out a solution that doesn’t involve having to dunk duct tape into every bottle of beer I’m filling, but for yesterday it worked. I got the solution in place, and started bottling. Had a good thing going. I was filling bottles, wife was capping them. We were through about 18 of 24 22-ounce bottles we were filling when I suddenly remembered the priming sugar. Sitting upstairs in the fridge.
What choice did I have? We popped all 18 bottles and dumped them back into the bottling bucket along with the priming syrup. This syrup provides just a little more sugar for the yeast to feast upon and provide some carbonation for the beer. So I was damn close to bottling a full 5 gallons of really flat beer. Redoing the bottling then resulted in my tubing clogging up with strawberry chunks twice. Whole lot of not fun, but at least when everything got cleared out we had a good system in place.
It’s all in bottle now, priming and conditioning. Few more weeks until I actually get to have any, but had a quick taste of the natal beer going into the bottles, and it wasn’t bad. So here’s hoping for a good batch.
State of the Writer: May 2011
Posted by DLThurston in Conqueror Worm, Home Brew, Script Writing, State of the Writer on May 2, 2011
Hey, look at that. It’s a new month, so it’s another chance for me to unbutton a shirt button to allow for optimal naval gazing. April was an oddly productive month for me, which is largely to say that I was productive in odd directions. The primary project of the month has been working on updates for my Lucha Libre story, something that’s turned into a pure joy to write and work on in a way few other stories have. Almost a shame it’s so short, but there’s really nothing else I can do with it. Going into May, that story is still going to get much of my focus because even though it’s not due until July 1, I’ve got a personal deadline of May 12 set.
In other projects, Future Lovecraft has just opened up, and yes, that’s the story I was talking about in my previous post. I have a concept that I like, I just can’t quite crack the blank page to really get a start that I like. Perhaps because I’ve got a few other stories running around my brain that are insisting on being told one-by-one. These are the Steam Worlds. These are the stories that came from my curiosity with the way that the Victorians imagined the earth and the cosmos working. One already existed, then four more titles came about in the course of about an hour. By the end, these stories will head to Mars, Venus, Phaeton, the Moon, and even inner Earth. Right now they exist in the following formats:
- Mars: Submitted to an anthology, still waiting to hear back (anxious, anxious)
- Venus: Plot noodled. I’m loving the plot I’m coming up with, which will include elements of Chernobyl, UrbEx, and 1940s air pollution disasters. And robots.
- Phaeton: Title with a vague X meets Y notion. Least developed of the five.
- The Moon: Change of title, change of focus, and suddenly there’s a story to be told here.
- Inner Earth: This one depresses me a little. Possibly the most ambitious theme and concept of the set.
I don’t know what will ultimately end up happening to them. Mars, being in current circulation, could really help the others get told and sold. Perhaps one day when several are sold and some rights revert they might merge together and be my first short story collection. For now, I’ll search for homes where I can find them without worrying about continuity between them. They don’t share characters, and don’t really share a timeline, they just exist in similar worlds.
Been reading too much Save the Cat. Has me wanting to write another screenplay. A proper one. Maybe one that I could put up on Amazon Studio. More on that if it actually starts happening. Also been thinking about a certain xenophobe and his Serbian mentor.
State of the writer’s beer: Mustache Cat fermentation has slowed. Bottling could happen this weekend, is more likely to happen next weekend. Might be able to crack a bottle in time for June. Looking at my options for batch two, considering a Ginger/Lemon/Honey Ale offered by Austin Homebrew.
It’s going to be a three Fortnightcap month. First one will be up tomorrow, probably in the form of a new article.
DL’s New Peculiar: Mustache Cat
Posted by DLThurston in Home Brew on April 26, 2011
It’s been a long time since I’ve made home brew. Far too long. I first got into the hobby back in my old apartment when the Mr. Beer kit went for sale over at Woot. I watched it most of the day, staring at that little “I Want One” button trying to decide if I did or not. Brewing is something that has always fascinated me, and while I’m not a huge fan of beer in general, I have never had a home brew I didn’t like (at least up til that point, more later). Just after noon the button started bouncing, the kits were selling out, so I clicked through fast and a few weeks later I was in possession of a little brown jug a can of malted extract, and instructions for how to make my first beer of my very own.
This is going to be a long one, so I’m going to put in a break here. More after.
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