Mug Warrior

Ok, so, this one is a week (and a few days) late, but the bottling of our brew was so smooth and easy that it was almost entirely unnoteworthy, with one exception. No one told me the trub was going to be so absolutely gross, and rediculously fun to play with. What do I mean? Trub has the consistency of very watery… uhm… excrement, and for all it’s worth stinks in a equal, but dissimilar, way. With that in mind Jarrod and I did the only thing we could think of with it: Throw it in the toilet with some paper, take a few pictures, and call his wife over and trick her into having a look. Priceless. We have some pictures but they are on Jarrod’s phone so I will have to get them for you all later. Nothing useful just pictures of the bottle and the toilet. We are so grown up.

Yes, I did say Jarrods wife, Jarrod (The Least Active MugWarrior Contributer) was married on saturday in a nice small ceremony followed by an intimate brunch with friends and family, where the friends promptly got drunk and danced with the family in a haze of booze and silly hats. Most importantly though Jarrod had the foresight to put a bottle of our brew in his refridgerator before the wedding, just to give it a taste after a week of bottle fermentation. Much to his pleasure the strongest of the hop characteristics had disappeared, and it was “delicious.” So we are in the homestretch, next saturday we drink our brew and start the next, which means sometime next week you will get yourself a review of our own beer. Between now and then I will try to put up something about a brew I have wanted to try for quite some time. Want a hint? Moo.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I was hoping there was some interesting connection between Thanksgiving and beer to write about. There is! Conveniently enough, after being at sea for a few months, the Pilgrims began to run out of beer. What they were carrying was known as “ship’s beer”, a low alcohol brew that provided some nourishment and was more sanitary than water due to the fact that it was boiled when it was brewed. As they ran out people started to get sick and they needed to land. If you want the full in depth story read “Did the Pilgrims land on Plymouth Rock because they ran out of beer?” on The Straight Dope.

So with this revelation, I encourage you to follow some of the Thanksgiving beer and food pairing suggestions from the Alstr&oumlm Brothers at Beer Advocate. You might also want to try a side made with beer from Beer Cook.

Enjoy your Holiday, get drunk and be thankful for the best things in your life; no not family you big sap, beer

So after a week of having a white barrel farting and foaming in my apartment. We have our first specific gravity reading for our barrel of brew (1.14 at 70 degrees or so) which seems really, really high, but the hydrometer is calibrated for 60 degrees so there is actually some leeway in some direction. I am not going to worry about it. After having taken my sample, being careful to sanitize the cup I used to extract the beer, I gave our baby the ultimate test. I took a sip, and it it tasted like…

BEER!

Warm, flat beer, but beer none the less. Actually, it’s quite good, a little hoppy for my taste, but I knew that going in. So I am finishing the sample, which has already had a pleasant warming affect, that could be entirely attributed to the excitement of having made what is going to turn into a decent first batch, or to the high alcohol level the owner of the homebrew store told us it would have. So initial results are in, it’s looking good, and I am very pleased. Part III: The Bottling should, if all goes well, be on your screen by tomorrow.

Magic Hat is a happy-go-lucky brewery based in South Burlington, Vermont and those hippies up there really love to mess around with their Beer Faces! Their Faces are all over the map as far as design, color, type and style. If you look at a Face and ask “What the hell am I drinking?”, it’s probably a Magic Hat brew. This adventurous design approach is admirable, whether a noble conscious effort or unconscious acid-tripped night on the ol’ Flower Power iMac. As you can imagine, the results are often disastrous.

A friend brought over a sampler the other week and I was immediately drawn to the Face of their Hefeweizen, Circus Boy. The bottle has 3 labels, two ovular ones one the body and a Magic Hat promo choker on the neck. The face is largely an illustration, with a warm yellow color palette which looks great against the dark brown bottle. The hand-drawn treatment of the beer’s name works well, the near white letters are clear and their strong contrast from the textured background give the title a high level of prominence. The title’s typography is uneven and organic, flowing from the top down around to the right side of the label and illustration. Below we find a ornate circus carriage dubbed “The Hefeweizen!”, wow, what showmanship! This provides the focal point of the label, which is the dark rectangular shape of the hull of the carriage, barred for transporting animals. Kinda looks like a dark bar code though. Hey, something’s reaching out and grabbing the letter “y” in the title! OMG!

Upon closer inspection, we’ve found Circus Boy! His beady white eye are dotted in darkness as he reaches out for help from a life on the road with smelly animals. Nice touch Magic Hat, a subtle clever interpretation of the name. Fun typography, a great color pallette, appropriate illustration and a drugged-out game of “Where’s Weird Waldo?” make this Face a winner. So get yourself out the circus (er, bar) and save this freak (uh, boy) today!

Yesterday Jarrod and I went to Brew Your Own Beer, absolutely not ironically, a store dedicated to homebrewing. We bought a kit and ingredients, and will either tomorrow, or next friday be taking the first steps to brew an American Brown Ale. We aren’t doing anything fancy, we are using prepackaged grains and extracts, and fermenting in a big ass plastic bucket. All told, we split a bill that came to $112 and it should net us two, or just slightly more, cases of beer. It’s a pricey case, but the initial investment of $63 for the starter kit (we spent $49 on ingredients, but we are actually attempting something that is a smidge more complicated), opens us up to try to brew a whole bunch of shitty beers. That is not to say homebrews are shitty (quite the opposite in fact), it is to say that the beer we brew will be shitty, maybe. The fellow who runs the shop (John Reynolds, a very friendly and helpful sort of chap) says it’s not rocket science, and Jarrod is displaying confidence in our ability to boil water and dump the ingredients in.

So in a few weeks we will know if we have become brewers, or we have become purveyors dirty water keeping in the tradition of dysentary. We’ll keep you posted.

11/11 Update: Brewed. We may have kind of burned some… We’ll let you all know next saturday if that buggered the flavour.

I was looking through the cases at the Frontier Saloon last night and had almost resolved myself on a six pack of the Golden Monkey and I was slapped with a wonderful feeling unmatched by 26 years of present unwrapping. Sweet baby Jesus, I wish you were born more than once a year. I spotted what that bright star was pointing me to. Tröegs Brewing Company has shipped this years Mad Elf.

I’ll be damned if Christmas doesn’t come earlier every single year. It’s not even black Friday and the Christmas crap is already popping up in the stores. Bah-freaking-humbug. This encroachment into my life of my least favorite holiday has finally pushed into one of my favorite things in life and for the first time I am elated.

I was introduced to the Mad Elf last year around Christmas shopping season. Mug Warrior writer Mark, myself, and our friend Geoff, went to the Frontier for drinks prior to shopping, and the Mad Elf was on tap. Two pitchers between three guys later and I had my best shopping experience since Mark and I downed a bottle of Southern Comfort before shopping a few years ago.

It’s a dark red Belgian Ale packed like Santa’s bag with honey and cherries. At 11% ABV it packs a wallop like Prancer’s hoof to your groin, but it goes down so smooth and nice that you’ll feel like Mrs. Claus is massaging your yule log. Not only that, but tomorrow morning when you get up early to make the toys, you won’t have a hangover.

The Tröegs brothers may have saved Christmas for me in a way the Grinch never could. Find yourself some Mad Elf and bring in the holiday right.