Sunday, June 21, 2009

5 Gal Brew kettle

Yesterday my friend brought over a stainless steel stock pot that I had in the past used to make a big pot of gumbo in. This and the propane burner he brought was all that was missing before I could take on my first 5 gallon batch of true brew. I would have done it today but it decided to rain, and I can't fire up that burner in the house! So instead, I will clean my house and get the kitchen ready for the big brew day. I think I have a lot of planning to do such as how and where am I going to cool 5 gallons of wort weighing up to 45 pounds for starters. Eventually I will get a wort chiller. Even still, moving it around may be a back breaker, literally.

So instead, last night I went to Thrash Zone, a beer bar in Yokohama that I found about in this blog. Well Thrash Zone carries almost all of the Stone Brewing's beers, even one on tap! Now being from San Diego, Stone was (is) my favorite microbrewery. I plan on making a clone of their Arrogant Bastard ale as soon as I get all of the ingredients, now on order. At the Thrash Zone, I had a pint of the Stone Ruination IPA and what a shock to my system that was. I've been away from Stone beers for a while now and the hit my system with a double IPA was a bit much but very enjoyable. The bitterness was unrelenting but that is why you drink a double IPA right?

I would have had a bottle of ABA also but the IPA on my empty stomach said I'd better get something to eat or I would not be able to walk out of there. So ABA will have to wait until the next time. Even so, at ¥1300 for a pint of Ruination or ¥2000 for a bottle of ABA, I won't be able to indulge as much as I would like to. When I was in San Diego, I used to grumble because ABA was getting close $4.00 for a 22 oz bottle! How living in Japan changes my perception of what expensive is! I now know what I will be doing on my next visit to San Diego :)

Partying with Jero

This week, I had the opportunity to cater a dinner party for Jero. I served a blend of southwest and soul food to his friends.





Thursday, June 11, 2009

Naw'lins in Yokosuka

My son told me about a New Orleans style restaurant that recently opened near the Yokosuka Navy Base. Now I fancy myself a pretty gumbo chef and love the food of Louisiana in general and New Orleans specifically. I have spent many happy times of my life in Louisiana and have attended several jazz festivals in New Orleans. But it was always the food that brings me some of the best memories.

The name of the place is Naw'lins. I tried the oyster poboy. It was authentic and delicious. The french fries were also very good and spicy as just about any food from New Orleans should be. I also tried their gumbo. The gumbo was quite good but it was a bit watery for my taste, but of course I'm biased. I plan to go back there and try out the other items on their menu. Here is their flyer, try them out, it is the best New Orleans cuisine I have tasted in Japan so far (outside of my own kitchen of course!).

Living in Japan, access to good gumbo is few and far between, unless and of course I make my own gumbo which of course I do. And I've taught cooking classes on making gumbo to an eager Japanese audience several times.

Even so, getting the right ingredients to make gumbo is another problem that I have solved. The missing ingredient is the andouille sausage. I can get just about everything I need to make a good pot of gumbo in Japan except for the sausage. I solved the problem by making my own, well smoked and all. I've documented the process in my Benesse Japanese blog.

Here are some pictures of the process:

Start with some well marbled pork shoulder. Fat is essential to the sausage.

I use fresh thyme for the best flavor.

After mixing all of the ingredients and a rough grind, we have raw sausage ready for stuffing.

Good old KitchenAid, all purpose kitchen tool.

I used this stove top smoker for this batch but I now have an electric smoker which can do much bigger batches.

And here is the final product, beautiful authentic Louisiana andouille sausage in Japan.



Bottling Day, sort of

Yesterday was bottling day for my "Practice Pale Ale" batch that I'm making with ingredients on hand but with my new brewing equipment kit. The wort has been fermenting for 7 days and with no further fermentation visible, I decided it was time to bottle. I may have been too quick but read on.

After sanitizing the bottling tub and the bottles and other equipment, I sat the carboy with 2 gals of brew on my counter and positioned the bottling tub beneath it.

First I put some dry ice into the bottling tub to fill it with CO2 and to drive out the oxygen, I read that somewhere.


Notice the mix of sanitized bottles I have sitting in the big pot in the background.

After a few fits and stats, I got the siphon going using an air filter to blow air into the carboy.

Anyway I measured the FG and it turned out to be only 1.020 where it should have been 1.010 to 1.015. But I thought it tasted pretty good, the hops were well balanced unlike my previous efforts which screamed "HOPS". I did notice a slight lingering sweetness which further adds to my suspicions of the incomplete fermentation. Oh well, too late to stop now. And anyway the point of this batch was for me to learn to use the brewing equipment it to prepare for a full 5 gal brew I plan to start on after I finish bottling this batch (I'm still looking for a brew kettle).

I should be able to get almost 8 liters from the 2 gal in the fermenter so I prepped a 3 liter used Asahi can, 3-1 liter PET bottles from my Mr Beer set and 6 used Sam Adams bottles. I primed with table sugar ( I didn't have corn sugar) and after filling, I used all except 2 of the Sam Adams bottles. Not too bad. Now I have to wait at least another week for the beer to condition.

Here is a picture of the beer conditioning in the Asahi beer dispenser with the refrigeration and the CO2 turned off.


This setup is great because I can test the beer while condition to see the progress of carbonation, lets hope I don't finish off 3 liters doing the "testing"!.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Brew Day!

As I mentioned previously, I received my new home brew kit that can do 5 gals at a time. This is a major step up from Mr. Beer and I couldn't wait to get started with it. But because the pain would be too great (and expensive!) if I messed up a 5 gal batch, I am going to take this very carefully, one step at a time. Instead of using the ingredient kit I ordered for 5 gals of beer, I decided to start off with a smaller batch using other ingredients I already had on hand. This way I can learn how to use my new gear and if anything goes wrong, it will only be 2 gal, not the expensive 5 gal batch.

The brewing kit came with a special edition of Zimurgy Magazine and a small book "Home Beer making - A Complete Beginner's Guide". These books explained all of the beginner's mistakes that I have made using Mr. Beer. Not Mr. Beer's fault, I was over ambitious in wanting to make my own beer. Anyway, I read these several times to understand the steps. I won't bore you with too many of the details but here is a short picture form is what I did:

The ingredients I had were
1.4 lb can of pale malt
1 lb bag of dry sparkling amber malt
1 oz of cascade hops
1 Munton's Ale yeast

These ingredients should lead to something pretty close to a style of beer called American Pale Ale, one of my favorites.

The first step is to boil the malt extracts with the hops to make a wort. Actually the first step is to clean and sanitize all of the equipment that will come in contact with the cooled wort. Boiling the wort was kind of fun to watch. The bags you see in the boiling wort are hop bags.



Once the wort has been boiled, in this case for 1 hour with timed additions of the hops, you have to cool it, faster the better. I put all of the ice cubes had in the fridge and put it into a big metal bowl and then I put the brew pot with the hot wort into it. The ice disappeared in about 2 seconds and after that I ran cold water in the bowl and around the pot. This took about 20 minutes to reduce the temperature to where I could safely transfer the wort and add (ok, I'm a brewer now, I should have said "pitch") the yeast. Ok, just pictures from here.


Transfer the cooled wort into the fermentation carboy:


Put the airlock on the carboy and we're ready to ferment. I put the fermentation ready carboy into my bath tub partially filled with water to maintain a fairly steady temperature during the fermentation stage. Only the top of the airlock is visible here. And I will be taking only showers for the next few days.


Now all I have to do is to wait several days to a week until the fermentation stops.

Can't wait to see how this turns out. Stay tuned.

GM Bankruptcy

So the old GM we knew (and hated, loved, tolerated) is no more, to be replaced by the ALL NEW and IMPROVED GM owned by us. I won't comment too much on this since others will have far more to say about this BUT:

One of the suggestions for the new GM is build not only cars but also get into light rail systems. I can't let the irony of this escape. Back in the 40's, GM along with Firestone (the tire people) and Standard Oil formed a company named National City Lines. The purpose of NCL was to go city by city to buy up the efficient, clean and fast street car systems by bribing local officials and spreading lies about how much better buses are. Well NCL succeeded wildly and America's love affair with the personal auto was born. The result is smog, congestion and global warming. Now big cities are struggling to restore a small percentage of what they had. Los Angeles being the biggest and sorriest example.

Until 1963, when NCL came in and did their number on LA, Los Angeles had the best mass and local transit system in the world. LA was really a city and suburbs built by streetcars and today's layout reflects this history. I believe they had over 1,000 miles of rail, mostly in right of way meaning they did not have to compete with street traffic. That is of course what irked GM and Firestone and Standard oil (Exxon). These transit systems were sold off to NCL over the objections of many local people who depended on these effective street car systems, sort of like how "health care reform" meaning private insurance bailout is being forced on us today. (But more on that in a future post).

Today Los Angeles is spending BILLIONS to build a small portion of the mass transit system they already had and lost. Some interesting facts, the Blue line between LA and Long Beach runs on the same right of way of the original red cars. The new Metro Red Line subway system uses a portion of the original subway tunnel from the 50's.

So it is indeed ironic if GM now starts to build light rail systems. Ok, so it was Michael Moore who proposed it but I like his proposal.