Beer Soaked Video

A big shout-out to Jeff Linkous of the Beer Stained Letter. Jeff diligently documented our homebrew adventures with the Tun Tavern's brewmaster Tim Kelly and posted a crisp little video.

Hot, Wet & Dirty

By Sal Emma

I always knew homebrewing is hot, wet, strenuous and potentially dangerous work. Today, I know making beer for pay is hot, wet, strenuous – and even more dangerous.

It brings new appreciation for that hoppy IPA or tart saison they’re cooking up at your local brewpub or micro. It’s (almost) like eating king crab after watching “Deadliest Catch” on Discovery. Sure, few brewers pay the ultimate sacrifice for their craft. But you could easily mess yourself up pretty nicely in a brewery.

Whether it’s wear and tear after hand loading a ton of grain or having 220-degree steam melt your face off … the men and women who brew your favorite beer are putting their all into it. Next time you hoist a glass, toast the folks who forced it into existence.

We had an up-close and personal look at all this recently, apprenticed to a patient and gracious tutor, Tim Kelly. Tim’s the brewmaster over at Tun Tavern Brewpub in Atlantic City. And he was saddled with overseeing our attempt to scale up our 1.5 barrel homebrew recipe to 5.5 barrels at the Tun.

Terry Leary and Sal Emma at Tun Tavern, Atlantic City

We won the Tun’s annual homebrew contest. We entered three beers: Bruges Blonde, a Belgian-style golden; Old Coot, a British old ale and Black Hole Porter, a big, hoppy, robust porter. The Black Hole took first, which earned us the privilege of brewing it at Tun. (The Bruges took third, which didn’t win us anything – but it’s kinda cool.)

Picture the scene. After five years on the job, Tim knows every tic and burp of this aging Newlands brewery. He gets it – and routinely churns out delicious varieties in spite of a few bad motors, bum thermocouples and other bits of busted gear. At 15, the brewery is starting to show its age. Tim works it like a musician – and makes it sing.

Into that well-oiled orchestration toss three ogle-eyed homebrewers, all gung-ho to get their boots wet in a real brewery: yours truly; Terry Leary, a retired letter carrier from Marmora; and Terry’s nephew,  Brian Hutchings, an I.T. man from Somers Point.

For days before our scheduled brew, I was fretting over how our romp through Tim's brewery might affect him. Imagine trying to get a day’s work done with a bunch of photo-snapping tourists at your elbow. What a pain in the neck! I had little to worry about. Tim was an amazing host and teacher. I think this can be credited directly to the fact that he started out as a homebrewer. He knows the neurosis from which we suffer, first hand.

It was clear from the minute we walked in that we were the day’s brewers. Tim supervised – to keep us from ruining the beer and destroying ourselves. After that realization, Terry asked, “So, if the beer sucks, it’s our fault?” Tim’s response. “Absolutely.” One of many great laughs throughout the day.

Brewmaster Tim Kelly and apprentice Brian Hutchings

Tim had all the numbers crunched before we arrived, adapting our recipe to his brewhouse. And he let us do just about everything, within the safety margin. We monkeyed with the pump manifold, dipped into a furiously boiling brewpot for a test sample, hoisted 50-lb. sacks of malt, raked out the spent grains, weighed out the hops … the whole nine.

There’s a bit of voodoo in the process. Scaling up a recipe for a different brewhouse is not straightforward. A lot of judgment calls and creative decisions – substituting hops, settling on the various temperatures, for example. But, by day’s end, we had produced a beautifully hopped, rich and roasty brew that was delicious, even unfermented. We could taste potential there.

Now we wait, as it bubbles in Tim’s fermentation room. After dry-hopping and conditioning, it will occupy a tap at Tun in June. And we’ll serve it on the Battleship New Jersey at the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild’s Annual Beer Festival, June 23.

Update: Tim will tap our beer at the Tun the same day as the beer festival, Saturday, June 23. Get yours while it lasts.

Burned by Scantily Clad Women

By Sal Emma

Every word of what you’re about to read is true. Honest!

Beth, of course, says differently. And she takes great pleasure in telling her side of the story. Here’s what really happened.

On the long drive home from North Carolina after a recent family mini-reunion, we were targeting a spot to walk the pooch and grab a bite. The weather was OK. Sunny and dry, so we opted for the outdoor mall at White Marsh, Md.

As the family’s resident beer snob, I volunteered to pick the venue while Beth and Max took Westmonster for a walk. Lots of choices, but as always, beer selection was the prime motivator. I stuck my head into two or three places. Narrowed it down to the brewpub and, across the way, Tilted Kilt, a chain pseudo-Irish pub.

Let the record show, your Honor, that I’d never before heard of this particular establishment nor had I ever set foot in one before this occasion.

On any day, I’d go with the brewpub. I avoid chain joints like the plague and will almost always opt to enrich the true local economy by patronizing locally owned haunts. But I couldn’t this day. The problem, the place was heavy with the dense and somewhat overwhelming aromas of brewing. Stink, most would say. As a brewer myself, I have only respect for any brewpub trying to make a go of it (especially in such a horrid location as this, a Disneyesque fake main street in a fake mall parking lot.)

But the place was really ripe that day. I could have tolerated it OK but I knew Max would be unhappy, with his more easily offended olfactory sensibility.

So I decided the simulated Irish pub would be the better choice. No malodors to contend with and the beer selection was off the charts. Perfect.

I went back in to inquire about the dog. He’s a service dog in training, so most places understand that they have to let him in under ADA rules. But on very rare occasions, we’ll run up against an uninformed restaurateur who holds his ground, for one reason or another. So out of courtesy, we tend to ask ahead of time instead of barging in and demanding that the place accommodate him. I approached the hostess station.

It’s important to note, your Honor, this object’s construction.

It was a tall wooden box, maybe four and a half feet high. A young woman was standing inside. I could see her neck and head, and little else. I’m not much of a fashionista so I don’t normally notice what people are wearing. But in this case, the cabinetwork obscured her duds so they were completely out of mind. I asked if the service animal would be OK and she was very polite and friendly in her approval. I took a closer look at the beer taps, where I saw the second of only two employees I encoutered during this reconnaissance: a guy in a T-shirt.

Key details, your Honor. Woman in a wooden box. Guy in a T-shirt.

Back outside, I circled around to the bookstore to pick up the rest of the family, satisfied with my scouting mission. We headed back across the pseudo-street and marched through the front door.

At this point, we were immediately approached by a trio of Tilted Kilt representatives, female, bubbly and enthusiastically welcoming.

One thought went through my mind: I am so screwed.

Let’s just say the Tilted Kilt work uniform allows unrestricted views of almost all piercings and tattoos. If you’re not against scantily-clad women, take a look. 

Oh well. Already in deep, no turning back. We sat, settled the dog and I held the giant plank of a laminated Technicolor menu before my nose to avoid eye contact with my wife. It was in vain.

“So. We came here for the beer selection, huh?” came my spouse's incredulous response.

For the foreseeable future, “beer selection” has officially become our family’s euphemism for the architectural features of a pretty, perky and barely contained young woman.

“Wow. Would you look at the beer selection on her?”

And of course Beth won’t think of letting me live it down.

Beware the Beer Scams

Miller's newest piece of advertising dreck inspired this post. It's "Triple Hops Brewed" says its new ad agency, BBH-New York. Miller gives them $150 million a year. And that's the best they can come up with? Pathetic.

It's probably not the most egregious. But it's gotta be in the top 10. And since it's the scam that ticked me off most recently, figured I'd wax poetic about some of my favorite examples of big-brew/big-agency beerhype:

1. Triple Hops Brewed: What a crock of you-know-what. It refers to how many times hops are added during the "brewing" phase, when "wort" the unfermented, sweet beer is being boiled in the kettle. The oils in hops are not soluble in wort. So they have to be boiled long and hard to get them to dissolve out. Then we can taste them in the finished beer.

If you hop early in the brew, you get mostly bitterness in the finished beer. But long boiling destroys some flavor and aroma components. So brewers hop both early and late, to coax different characteristics from the hops. Hopping a beer three times is so common it's not even worth mentioning, let alone making it the centerpiece of an entire multi-million dollar national ad campaign.

A barrel of Miller lite has about as much hops as my little finger. The issue is not when they add the hops, it's how little they add.

2. Beechwood Aging: This is a crock that actually has roots in truth. The Czech/Bohemian brewers of the 19th century discovered this trick. Beechwood is used as a traditional "fining" agent in European pilsner - the lightly colored, well-hopped, bottom-fermenting lagers made famous by such labels as Budweiser-Budvar (the original Bud) and Pilsner Urquell.

When people started drinking beer from glass vessels, brewers started looking for ways to make the beer look better. Before the development of filtering, fining agents were used to remove solids from the beer. They mostly go after dissolved proteins that tend to become solid at serving temperature, lending a cloudy appearance to the brew served in glass. Subjecting the beer to wood chips will help. Millions of microscopic nooks and crannies in the beechwood serve as places to trap solid particles. And unlike its cousin, oak, beechwood is relatively inert in liquid - it does not impart any significant flavor components.

America's King of Beers, Budweiser, is beechwood aged. No problem. But then, like all mass-market beer, it's cold-filtered. Cold-filtering removes any and all particulates in the beer, rendering the beechwood aging completely irrelevant. It's done out of a sense of tradition, only. Advertising it as a real benefit is misinformed at best and disingenuous at worst.

3. Cold Filtering You probably recognized that term earlier, because it's another piece of crap that beer ad agencies have been foisting on the populace for years. If a beer is filtered, it's cold-filtered. On his worst day, a brewer would never filter beer warm. Filtering is pointless unless you have something to filter. Remember those dissolved solids from the beechwood aging example? They stay in solution unless you chill the beer. Chill the beer, solidify the solids. Now you can filter them out. See? It ain't rocket science. And it does not make one beer stand out against another.

And there's an even bigger scam at work here. Cold filtering isn't done for you, it's done for them, because Mass Market Model-T beer is made to be packaged. Like pasteurization, filtering makes the beer more stable for sitting on room-temperature shelves for who-knows-how-long. And, like pasteurization, it does little or no good for beer flavor.

Recommendation: drink beer that insults neither your taste buds nor your intelligence.