… is here! For those of you who are just tuning in, PIB is my second-favorite Oregon Beer Fest, and a great way to kick off Oregon Craft Beer Month (well, that is if you miss the He’Brew event at Concordia on Thursday, but I digress). Traditionally, I attend PIB Friday after work, and this year just doesn’t seem like the time to break with tradition.

Friday, July 13th
North Park Blocks (“Mmm … Pastoral.”)

Beer drinkers pay $20 for 10 beer tickets and official (plastic) PIB glass. Additional tickets are $1 each, but I seriously doubt you’ll need them. All 100 (one hundred!!!) beers are 4oz. servings, and each beer costs 1, 2, or 3 tickets depending on “swank factor.”

If you like Belgian beers, this is your Valhalla; there are 40+ bottled Belgian beers available, ones that you’d normally have to drop $20-30 a bottle to sample.

… Make raspberry beer. Right? With a bumper crop of raspberries threatening to permanently stain Sarah and my (and Jasper’s!) teeth red, I decided to do what I do best: take it to an unneccessary extreme. In this case, I picked a bowl of berries from my backyard, and added to it another half-flat of Farmer’s Market raspberries. Take that, Emeril, you lousy sonofa … whoa. Sorry. It’s just that, when I think of Emeril, all I can see is red … berries. And one hack of a cook. Ouch.

I began by setting out the neccessary supplies:

• 1 22 oz. bottle of Bloody Sunday Cherry Brew
• 1 half-flat Oregon-grown raspberries
• 1 Enormous bowl hand-picked Oregon backyard-grown raspberries
• 1 7 lb. container light malt extract syrup
• 1 lb. 2-row malt
• 1 lb. Munich malt
• 2 oz. Cascade Hops
• Wyeast California Ale Yeast (WLP001)

Commence Drinking … er … Brewing

1. While heating 4 gallons water to 150 degrees, of course. More drinking.
2. Once I reached temperature, I steeped the crushed grains for 30 minutes, which just about had me finishing the bottle. Bam!
3. I removed the grains, sparged them, and kicked it up a notch, bringing the wort to a boil. And opened a bottle of Bridget’s Saison, adding just a little love to my liver.
4. Once a good froth was going, I added the malt extract and half the Cascade hops (1 oz), setting the timer for one hour.
5. With 15 minutes left, I submerged the wort chiller to sterlize, added 1 tsp. Irish Moss, a tsp. of Yeast Nutrient, and 1/2 oz. Cascade Hops. With 14 minutes left, I drained the rest of my beer. Oh, yeah.
6. With 5 minutes to go, another 1/2 oz. dose of Cascade.
7. Finally, it was time to catch the last train to Pasteurizationville, and I dosed the wort with all the berries I could muster. I let the berries sit in the pot for 15 minutes, stirring vigorously until the wort was more juiced up than Barry Bonds at a Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing. Hey, some of my best friends are Giants.
8. When the juiced-up wort had reached maximum red-ness, I turned on the chiller, bringing the whole mess down to a cool 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
9. And then I pitched the yeast, putting an end to this beleagured metaphor, and having calculated an O.G. of 1.068. Hot damn.

I make my own beer and I make my own bread (occasionally), so why not make something that goes great with both of those things….. sausage!

Last weekend I completed a project and something I’ve been interested in for more than a year by making my own delicious and tasty sausage at home. At first glance making sausage sounds easy: season meat, grind meat, stuff meat. But much like making beer, there are a lot of steps involved in what sounds like a simple process.

Shameless product plugs:

• Sausage by A.D. Livingston – I used this book as my guide through introductory sausage making. In addition to great recipes for a variety of sausage styles, the book offers a lot of great insight on grinding and stuffing. It was never far away through the whole process.
• Kitchen Aid mixer – using the food grinder attachment, the mixer helped me grind and regrind 10 pounds of meat without breaking a sweat.
• Grizzly 5 lb. sausage stuffer – you may remember the sausage stuffer from the Champagne of Blogs holiday gift guide. This stuffer works great, little to no air is extruded into the casing and the hand crank delivers a smooth and controllable flow. My previous experience with the Kitchen Aid sausage stuffer attachment was a disaster and should be avoided at all costs if you value your sanity.
• Louie’s Finer Meats – Located in Cumberland, Wisconsin, these guys know their sausage. I used Louie’s bratwurst seasoning, which can season 25 pounds of meat for about $6. If you’re ever driving through the middle of the state, I highly recommend stopping in, the store is a meat-lover’s dream.

Making the sausage:

I’m making 10 pounds of bratwurst using 7 pounds of pork shoulder and 3 pounds of top round beef. First up, cubing 10 pounds of meat for the grinder. Note: throughout this whole process I worked in batches keeping half the meat in the freezer to prevent any contamination issues and keep the meat firm for grinding.

By the way, helping me through this project was a Marin Brewing Co. IPA, which I thought was a little too sweet and needed a little more hops.

OK, so after cubing all the meat I laid it out on sheets of wax paper and worked in the sausage seasoning. For the rest of the way the kitchen smelled like brats.

After a little clean up and cooling the meat, it was grinding time.

Here’s another view. I actually ran all the meat through the grinder twice in order to get the seasoning and the two meats well mixed together. Mmmmmm, grinding…

After grinding, it’s time to extrude the sausage. Here’s a somewhat disturbing picture of my first attempt. Too much air in the casing and I wasn’t really filling the casing to capacity.

Eryn graciously jumped in and withstood the somewhat bad smell of the hog casings and as you can see, the subsequent sausages are much better.

And here we are, 10 pounds of sausage! I cooked some up that night and they are delicious! I’ll definitely be bringing some to BS Brewing’s Fourth of July Boom-Fest 2007.

My first beer, Boni Fide Sucka, was a strong batch of IPA brewed on Cinqo de Mayo, 2007 with my own gear. Its a clone of Hop Rod Rye by Bear Republic. This was made possible by a purchase of some fine products from the nice folks at Let’s Brew.

The recipe calls for a lot of Rye (obviously) along with some other grains. This took as much liquid malt extract as I’ve ever seen anyone use at BS Brewing. I was also careful to not use the handle while pouring the liquid malt extract from the plastic bucket into the pot, as it can (and has) snapped off (more than once) and fallen into said pot.

However, I was mildly disappointed in myself by forgetting to cut the heat on the pot while I poured the liquid malt extract into the pot. When the heat is on the pot, the malt will burn slightly when it touches the bottom of the pot and flake up. Killing the heat will let the liquid malt extract just blend in nicely without flaking. I used Centennial hops for bittering, Cascade hops for flavor, and pitched a California yeast on the end. After one week I used Cascade hops again for the dry hopping process.

Let’s Brew sold me a great kit to get started. I’ve been brewing batches with BS Brewing for a while now as Chief Bottle Capper and it feels really good to move on up and enjoy the full merits of owning a custom beer. There’s nothing quite like brewing your own batch to really understand how subtle parts of the recipe shape the result.

Bottling went super smooth with the integrated side spicket on the five gallon bucket. I’m really happy with the brewing kit. The special plastic bucket and the bottle washer are a toss up for my favorite brewing tools. I love the bottle tree too — a keen recommendation from a fellow brewer, Thom Schoenborn.

I fully understand the beer must remain in the bottle a minimum of two weeks but I broke down the other night with the notion of experimentation in my head. I wanted to know what kinds of changes were going on with the flavor, so I grabbed a bottle and had a taste. I wasn’t expecting great things but I was pretty happy by the end of the pint so I finished the open bottle. I think I might try one bottle a week for the next two or three weeks to see how the flavor matures and improve my knowledge of the overall process.

The beer is definitely a strong IPA. With just a week in the bottle, the pressure hadn’t built up much under the cap, but enough to let me know something was going on. Some bubbles cascaded up the pint glass too. I’ll really be looking for an improvement in the head on the beer over time too. As Papazian says so well in The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing, no beer tastes quite as good as one you brew yourself.