Zymurgical Transparency
Finally, after much prodding and criticism, the President has seen fit to release the White House beer recipes. Obama’s beers: 2. Romney’s tax returns: 1.
As an amateur brewer, writer, and judge of some repute in a past life, I feel obligated to offer commentary on this release. First, these are a politician’s beers, designed to be accessible to most tastes. Likewise, with minimal investment in kit, anybody who can warm up a can of Campbells Tomato Soup on their stove can make these beers.
As beers made from extracts, they’re starter recipes, and in my experience it’s rare (though not impossible, both from personal experience and beers I’ve judged) to make a professional-grade beer from extracts. While I appreciate the need to be approachable in both taste and process, c’mon man! You have the resources (and credit) of the Federal Government at your disposal. You have ten Nimitz class carriers and the old USS Enterprise to hand. Why brew a frigate? Kick it out a bit, and set up a proper home brewery! The use of dry yeasts would have likewise normally bothered me, but last weekend while hanging out in Northern Virginia / DC with some brewing friends, old and new, I’ve learned that dry yeasts have made great strides in quality and cell count since I was active. Of course, this shouldn’t come as a surprise, as brought to my attention six months ago, according to an extensive thread concerning my one recipe that stubbornly remains famous after all these years, it was designed in “the dark ages” (and yet they still love and brew the damned thing). Finally, if at all possible (and there’s probably the odd spare fridge available in the White House somewhere), don’t ferment at room temperature. Hook up an external thermostat, and ferment your ales at a consistent 65F, give or take. Consistency in temperature is more important than the precise level.
Also interesting from a political perspective is the reliance on two yeasts of English lineage, and hops of both English and continental origin. There’s not an American yeast cell or hop in sight. The Republicans could use that in some nefarious way, but they’d have to tell the truth about it, which would strain their strategy.
As for the beers, the honey ale is, well, enjoyable by anybody, possibly even the Republican nominee. I like the use of bisquit malt, the use of both Fuggles and EKGs in hopping (though please use whole hops, especially for flavor / aroma, and not pellets), and the Windsor yeast strain is known for being estery, offering some character.
The porter is more promising. Nice variety of malts (though I’d ease off the 20 degree crystal in favor of more black, chocolate, and brown malts), good yeast selection, bittering hop subtle enough to not distract from what should be a malty-ish beer. Nobody should use HBUs as a measure, but again, accessibility. And as the bittering hop was unspecified, this is where the porter can be made American. Any hop starting with a “C” will suffice.
Of course, the signature aspect of these recipes is the locally harvested honey. And by local, look to the left of the picture above that I took last Friday. Honey does little for beer beyond adding fermentable sugars and precious little added flavor. Good meads, on the other hand, are a different thing entirely, and at one BBQ in Virginia last week I had brought out a 1994 and a 2000 vintage straight mead of mine, which the host matched with some of his own stock. But in a beer, it attenuates the assertiveness of the flavor profile, replacing it with accessible alcohol. Yet, that the White House staff are making their own honey, and brewing with it on premises, is inherently cool.
As much as my vote was in doubt, that the President is brewing training wheel beers in his basement tipped me over the edge. I’ll add my vote to Obama’s column in the critical swing state of Oregon.
Which apparently has a university, with a football team, one capable of scoring touchdowns against Arkansas State. Go Rob and Eirk.
Extract brewing is fine, but why do it with liquid malt extract?
There’s a difference? I recall from back in the day how dry is better at the margins, but those margins are irrelevant once you start brewing properly.
Yeah, the benefits of dry have been mostly eliminated at good homebrew shops (with lots of turnover in malt extract, you don’t have to worry about staling nearly as much). It’s a bit easier to deal with liquid, and a lot of the better homebrew shops can give you the exact amount of LME you need. Both of these have been tilting the field toward LME lately. Also, Northern Brewer just announced a maris otter LME that doesn’t come in a can….
I didn’t know there was an otter named after Roger Maris but I don’t think I want to drink any of its extracts.
Wait, what??
Not even if it looks like Benedict Cumberbatch?
I was a bit surprised at the clamor for these recipes. I assumed there was no chance they would be better than, say, any recipe in Brewing Classic Styles.
Your anti-pellet bias sounds like more dark ages cane waving to me. :)
With dry yeasts, the main disadvantage is a lack of variety. But if you’re going to have the equivalen of california ale yeast or the standard english ale yeast, you won’t see much if any difference with the dry equivalent.
There are a number of practical advantages to using pelletized hops over whole-leaf (better storage, higher utilization as a bittering hop, less space, less wort loss), and I’ve never met someone who can genuinely tell a difference. The brewers I talk to with a strong preference always invoke intangible descriptors that are hard to identify. I can see an aesthetic preference for using whole-leaf hops when dry-hopping in a cask for CAMRA-related reasons (or, in my case, because I don’t want to clean pellet hops out of a keg when my hop back inevitably comes open), but, really, this isn’t a battlefield in the hobby today.
hop bag, not hop back. I’m not quite sure how that typo happened.
Agreed. I do give Brockington credit for emphasizing keeping ferm temps on the low-ish side (I think this is the biggest beginner screw up, bigger than sanitation issues).
Oh, I mainly had quibbles with the post. Overall, good and just a little bit crotchety.;)
Given that they’re probably pretty good at execution and know their environment, I believe they probably do a decent job with the malt extract, given that they are basically brewing generic beer. But if you’re going to do it for any period of time, may as well step up. But maybe they can’t find a place to recycle spent grains.
And, yes. Aspiring homebrewers: control your temperature. It’s surprisingly easy to do (in the winter with light bulbs, cardboard boxes, and towels. In summer with fans and wet t-shirts). A lesson I had to learned early on in a Somerville apartment where it was 80+ degrees in the summer and 60 in the winter. Hey, look! fermentation finished…in a day. Oh dear. Hey, look! fermentation stalled…in a day. Oh dear.
Yeah, my anti pellet bias is likewise crotchety dark ages opinion born out of some sort of non-empirical mystical new age belief in whole flowers, which is so not me. I get the better storage and higher utilisation of alpha acids, and when I worked in a shop back in 1994, I said the same things: no, really, pellets are OK! Of course, I never brewed with them myself, but then I had a source in Oregon who ran his own hop company, and I had the good fortune of a steady supply of massive bags of hops, gratis, both domestic and imported, to brew with.
My house in Seattle during the 90s when I was a grad student, which I shared with another brewer, had an expansive kitchen. It fit four fridges, only one for food. (Farley, Lemieux, and Watkins can all attest). We even had a little dorm fridge for slants and plates. Hence my likewise crotchety anti- dry yeast bias. We cultured our own. Usually sourced from Dave Lodgson’s Wyeast, but also whatever we picked up in our travels. In addition to emphasising colder, consistent ferm temperatures, we also extolled the virtues of high cell counts when pitching. Treat your beer with respect, it will treat you with respect. For a while, anyway.
The other thing in the modern era is that it’s easier to get a wider variety of pellet hops. Given current tastes, that turns out to be significant, especially for hop-heads. Glancing at the morebeer website, I see six varieties of whole leaf and thirty-two of pellet hops.
But, okay, then, what are the differences you perceive between whole-leaf and pellets at the aroma and flavor stage?
IIRC, the vaguely defined essential oils that work at the flavor and knock out stage are seriously compromised by the process of pellitizing. While pellets are good for AA% and storage, it was (back in the dark ages mind) bad for maintaining the aroma and flavour that a good hop should impart to the beer. Am I wrong?
That’s always been the theory, definitely. And, as I said, I usually dry-hop with whole leaf hops, partly for the theory, partly because it’s easy to clean and partly because whole-leaf fuggles is easy to get. But what does the difference taste like? Can you tell from tasting that one’s been made from pellets and another from hops? I’m sure I don’t know.
Good meads? No such thing.
To the best of my knowledge, no government money was spent producing these beers. So, no, he did not have DOD levels of funding available. Just whatever Michelle allowed him to spend out of his own funds.
Yeah, I was sort of being ironical.
Yes you were being ironical, but you know that a opposition super pac has already run an ad attacking him for wasting Government money on beer.
That is me being ironical.
You think you’re being ironic, but that’s only because you haven’t seen the ads.
Then again, the Republican base (the poor white ones that still vote for them) enjoys beer a lot. I doubt it’s an issue they want an ad on.
I can see the rebuttal now – Republicans are anti-beer! Vote Obama!
Okay, something seems really off about the honey ale. The ABV is huge, and the IBU is low. Does that make sense to anyone else?
Also, the recipe calls for 1.5 oz fuggles, but only mentions 0.5 oz going in at the last minute. It’s obviously a typo, but which is right? I’m guessing the 1.5 oz.
Finally, what degree is “amber” crystal? I’m guessing 40L. Any more experienced brewers have any ideas?
Actually, I made a miscalc, putting DME instead of LME into QBrew. 6.6 ABV isn’t such a big beer.
On honey ale I am convinced the Fuggle and East Kent Goldings are flipped. Don’t know when I will have time to test brew.
What do you mean? if you mean temporally, doubtful. fuggles is used almost exclusively as flavoring/aroma hop (lore is that it can be harsh and “unstable”), while ekg are extremely common for bittering.