Guys Weekend: Beer, Cars

I had an old friend up for the weekend with the goal of bottling a batch of beer we'd put down a month ago, and servicing all the brakes on my car. You don't get much more of a guys' weekend itinerary than that.

Left to myself, I'm not necessarily a car person -- but I am a person who likes to have some money left to my name occasionally. And so when the shop had humbly submitted a request to divest me to $1600 dollars, I had to equally humbly decline to have all the work done. Thus Saturday morning was spent becoming covered in brake dust.

Now, the thing about doing car work all morning on an August day in Texas is that it pretty much destroys your will to do anything else from there on out. But when you have five gallon of beer sitting on your kitchen counter that your wife would really like to see find another home, you know what is required of you.

For any other brewers out there (or those who could be tempted to become so) the project was to produce a mild, dark beer which was light enough in alcohol content that it would be refreshing (rather than debillitating) on a Summer afternoon, and which got most of its bittering from dark roasted grain rather than hops. We'd tried this before with some success, and the tastes before bottling suggested that this will be at least as much a success as the last one.

The recipe is:

6lbs Extra Pale Malt Syrup
1lb Chocolate Malt
8oz Crystal Malt 80
6oz Peated Malt
3oz Black Patent Malt
6oz Roasted Barley

1oz Fuggles (bittering)
0.5oz Fuggles (flavor)

This produces a dark brew of about 5% alcohol with slight amber highlights. It doesn't have the same this-is-your-meal-for-the-day thickness of a stout or porter (said as someone who edges towards baltic porters and imperial stouts) but definately has that good, roasted, dark beer taste.