On overcoming frustration

As I stood watching and waiting for the beer to swirl down the drain in the shed, I was proud of the deep caramel colour. It damn near glowed in the sink, illuminated by the light that shone through the window. Holding the bottle upside down, and seeing the final few drips cling to the lip in helpless desperation, a little pang of sadness crept up on me. Actually, not really sadness, maybe more frustration. Because whilst the colour was gorgeous, what I wasn’t proud of was the taste.

This was Evie’s Special Bitter, the ESB that, when bottled, gave off that unmistakable green apple smell. After ten weeks in the bottle I wrote the following notes:

Evie’s Special Bitter remains somewhat of an enigma. After 10 weeks in the bottle it remains flat and lifeless, a limp excuse for a bitter, and is far too fruity. I maintain the faintest glimmer of hope that it will resurrect itself, like a homebrew version of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, showing life where previously there has been little more than a flat-line, mocking with its unflinching blandness. But truth be told, I think I’m just fooling myself.

And fooling myself I was. Now, after six months in the bottle, it’s still no good. Barely drinkable. I tipped out most of the batch a few weeks ago, frustrated. But the frustration didn’t end there. I also tipped out the last few bottles of The Doc Wheat Beer that was brewed just before Christmas. It came out ok initially; it was a wheat beer, unmistakably. But the finish, that homebrew tang that lingered in your mouth, just could not be shaken. And after persevering with most of the batch, I’d simply had enough, and the last few bottles followed the ESB down the sink.

I went back through my notes, to see if I could pinpoint what went wrong, and, to my relief, found that these were the two brews that were fermented inside the house as opposed to in the temperature controlled fermentation fridge in the shed. Surely it was the fluctuating temperature in the house that led to these off flavours. Because the other brews, the Pale Ale, Bec’s Amber Ale, and the Ninja Tongue Lager that had fermented under careful temperature control, were all great successes.

Upon first opening though, Bec’s Amber Ale was a disappointment. After three weeks in the bottle it was like drinking a liquid version of one of those formulaic buddy-cop TV shows. You know the ones; The Mentalist or Bones or Castle or NCIS. All shiny and enjoyable on the surface, but with no depth, no subtlety, nothing to keep you coming back wanting more. Sure, all the elements were there; the deep amber colour, slight malt aroma, right amount of bubbles, but there was just no substance. I took a sip, and as I went to comment to Steve about what I thought (not bad, not great), it was already gone, as though it’d never even been in my mouth. It was too thin, with no depth of flavour.

But that all changed a few weeks later, when it suddenly grew another set of legs. It became wonderfully smooth, and where it was once a repeat episode of CSI, it now became an on-demand screening of Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock, a cracking winter’s tale that you could curl up on the couch with mid-week. Looking forward to the next series!

The reason the ESB and the Doc were brewed inside is because we did a lager, which sat in the fermenting fridge at 3 degrees for 10 weeks. Not sure I’d do another one, given the time it takes, but damn man it was a refreshing brew through the summer. It was ready just in time for Christmas, and didn’t last too long after.

Since then, it’s been quiet. My brewing buddy Luke had another baby, so everything kinda went on hold. And the disappointment of the ESB and the Doc meant my motivation was low. But no more my good friends, another round of the Pale Ale is being bottled tonight, and a Choc Porter is to be brewed tomorrow night.

Game on!

On feeling grass between your toes

The sun is shining. Toddlers are running around the backyard, jumping on the trampoline, clambering over the mini slide, throwing sand from the blue clam-shaped sand-pit. There are tears every now and again, but nothing you wouldn’t expect from a bunch of 2 year olds. Mostly it is laughter that floats up into the cloudless sky. Eddie Bo eases from the stereo speakers, occasionally shattered by the screeching of little Molly hitting the hi-hat on the drumkit. She hands me the sticks and I sit down at the kit, bashing out a little 4-4 beat. The other kids come running in to the shed and start dancing in front of the base drum, clapping and jumping and laughing.

The adults chatter about nothing in particular, half an eye on the kids, but mostly just enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon in the springtime. I can feel the freshly-cut grass playing peekaboo between my toes. It feels good.

Bec; “I bought you a present.”

It’s a box of beer glasses. Nothing too fancy, just a gentle tulip shape on a short stem, but perfect for the pale ales that have been in the fridge the last couple of days, cooling down, yeast settling to the bottom, going through final preparations before Luke and I finally get to taste them. To me, this is our first real batch of homebrew, and waiting for this day has felt oh-so-long.

“You want a beer mate?”

Luke looks over with a big grin.

The lids are flicked off, and the gas rushes out whispering at me, kicking off the first wave of relief; the beer is carbonated. I gently tilt the bottle and watch the beer swirl down the bottom of the glass, bubbles rushing to escape. It’s a dark golden colour, darker than I expected, with a tight, generous head that puts a smile on my face. I take a glass out to Luke, but not before having a decent smell. I’d dry-hopped this batch with cascade and citra hops, but really had no idea what it would smell like. What I got was a big hit of passionfruit, reminding me of the Mad Brewer’s recent Hoppy Heffe. I smelled again, yep – sweet, passionfruit, yum.

“Cheers!”

Luke and I take a sip, then another, and another. Oh man, this is bloody fantastic! It goes down smooth, free of the homebrew tang that lingered in our first attempt. “Maybe it could do with a little more carbonation?” Probably. But to be hung up on the little details, analysing the minutiae like the beer nerd I will inevitably become, kind of misses the point I think. That’s not what this day is about.

This day is about having a bbq in your backyard, with friends who live nearby, watching and laughing as kids run around carefree, eating sausages in bread, and enjoying a beer that you made yourself.

Yep, this is a good day.

On Granny Smith's knuckles

I bottled Evie's Special Bitter last night. Of the 5 batches we've brewed so far, this was the one with the smoothest brewing process, and the least likely chance of major fuck-ups.

Luke was stuck at work, so I had my brother helping me out. But something wasn't right. As we got to the last of the bottles, with just a few hundred milliliters of beer left in the fermenter, I stuck my nose in there and was overcome by a smell of green apples. It was like being punched in the face with a sack full of Granny Smiths. Here's the SMS conversation with Luke once we were all done.

"Mate, I think the ESB is fucked. Has a distinct green apple smell. Fark."

"What! That's disappointing. Where did we go wrong? Disinfecting I guess, but not like we did anything significantly different."

"Wait, all might not be lost. Doing some reading now, and it might just need a long time to condition in the bottle. Fingers crossed."

"Oh, that's a little more positive! Bring on the green apple!"

"Oh man, I fucken love green apples!"

"That's the ticket big fella! Just means we have to wait and have it when the weather is hotter. Perfect."

Always look on the bright side folks.

With the ESB now bottled, we've currently got a Pale Ale, Bec's Amber Ale, and now Evie's Special Bitter all bottled and conditioning. A few more weeks, and we can crack open our first real batch of home brew (I'm not counting the first kit beer, because, well, it was a kit wasn't it.)

On momenumum.

Things are ticking along nicely here at Ease Down the Road headquarters. We're still in that phase when everything is new and exciting, and ideas are bouncing round the shed, gaining traction here and floating out the window there.

People keep asking if this home brewing operation has a name (and by people I mean my wife and Luke's wife). I'm not too fussed either way, but Bec and Ellie kept throwing up suggestions, typically related to our two-year-old girls given we all met through the local mothers group when the little'uns were just a few months old.

Luke's little girl Evie has the moniker Duck, and our little one Audrey has a beautiful streak of ginger through her hair, so Ginger Duck Brewing was an obvious choice, but given the wonderful Red Duck Brewery is just up the road in Ballarat it wasn't sitting too well with me in regards to originality. Duck n' Ginge Brewing was the other option, and then Bec threw out Ninja Duck Brewing. Has a nice ring to it I reckon. It's still sitting with Luke, swirling round and round like a cloudy ipa, still in that moment when you've taken your first sip and you're not sure whether your taste buds are going to sing with delight or howl in protest.

We've managed to drink all but one or two of the original batch of pale ale. It improved slightly, but always held onto that green apple tinge that, while not being so over powering as to make it undrinkable (in fact, it was only barely noticeable by the last few bottles), was enough to have me frustrated by the end of each glass, and more determined to make high quality brews.

After the ridiculous delays prior to brewing our second batch, I was keen to generate some momentum in the shed, and so followed up the second batch by brewing a batch of Bec's Amber Ale on my own one Monday night. It went reasonably smoothly, until I took the original gravity reading prior to pitching the yeast and was shocked to see it only register at 1.020 (this is extremely low).  That will happen when you forget to put the can of liquid malt extract in. I added it just after the yeast, and tried to gently stir it in without getting too much oxygen in there. Fingers crossed it's going to be ok.

That batch was followed a few days later by bottling the second batch of pale ale, and then a few days after, thanks to the donation of another fermenter from a retired home brewing friend, we brewed up a batch of Evie's Special Bitter; the perfect spring weather enabling us to have two fermenters going at once, with one sitting inside at a solid 18 degrees. The brewing process has become much smoother, mostly because I'm no longer running around like the proverbial chook without a head. Looking back now, I was pretty stressed for those first few batches. Maybe stressed isn't the right word, I certainly didn't feel stressed, but man, I was all over the place running around the shed like Audrey after a sugar hit.

Yesterday I bottled Bec's Amber Ale, so we've currently got a Pale Ale and Bec's Amber Ale conditioning in the bottle, Evie's Special Bitter in the fermenter, with plans to get a lager going as soon as possible, and maybe a California Common after that.

It's great to have some momentum going, which is only helped by drinking some inspiring local craft brews, recent favourites being the Feral Hop Hog, Hawthorn Brewing's Amber and Pale Ales, and Holgate's amazing chocolate porter, the Temptress.

What I'm looking forward to the most at the moment is brewing a beer that I'm proud enough of to give away. Let me know if you want some.

On summing up the parts

I've got an old ipod kicking round here somewhere. It's a 4th generation, 40gb machine, the one with the tiny black and white screen at the top. It's about is thick as a matchbox, and heavy enough to drag my pants down if it's in my pocket, hence why I rarely use it in public anymore.

Back in 2005, it broke on me; froze at a ski chalet halfway up a snow covered mountain in Slovakia. Literally froze, I guess. This made the rest of our travels a little quieter, but for some reason I never threw it out. It sat in a draw for a year or so, while we saved money for more travel. I had taken it to the Apple store, where the guy serving me listened to the whirring sound the hard drive was making, holding it up to his ear and squinting his face.

"Hmmm, I've never heard one do that before." 

I had no money for a replacement, and so during a quiet day at work I went searching on the net for any possible fix. After scouring various ipod forums (yes, they really exist), one particular method kept popping up. I'd dismissed it, mostly, as a bit of a myth. But the frequency with which people were swearing by this method to bring a dead ipod back to life meant I just couldn't ignore it. And so that night I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and slid it along the seam of the ipod, between the white front and silver back. I jimmied the knife until the white part came loose, and I pulled the face off the ipod.

It was still connected to the silver back of the ipod, which held all the hardware, and I was careful not to rip them totally apart. I gingerly prised out the hard drive, gave it a few taps with my index and middle fingers, and put it back in its snug little spot. I forced the front of the ipod back on, plugged it into the charger, and hit the buttons for a reset.

A few minutes later, my ipod was alive again.

Don't ask me why. It just worked. Over the next few years, every now and again the ipod would once again pack it in, and I'd have to pry it open with a knife, give the hard drive a tap and a shake, plug it into the charger and jiggle the hard drive just so, like an old tv antenna, before the ipod would spark back to life and I could put it back together. The silver case is all bent out of shape from where I've stabbed it with the knife over the years, but I kind of like it like that.

These days, I've worked out that as long as I don't let the battery run out, it keeps chugging along. I can no longer update it, but the 40gb hard drive is currently holding 45gb worth of music, so I'm not complaining.

I don't understand how it works, I don't know why simply tapping the hard drive brings it back to life, but it does.

For me, that's how homebrewing kind of feels at the moment. I get the ingredients, I know what goes in, and kind of understand what those ingredients are up to in the big plastic fermenter, but despite all the reading my distinct lack of any understanding of chemistry or biology means I'm still just taking it all for granted, that throwing this malt and yeast and water and hops together turns into beer.

Just like my trusty old ipod, it takes a little bit of love, a little bit of trial and error, and a little bit of faith to get the beer going. It ends up more than the sum of its parts, and that's pretty awesome.

We've cracked open a few bottles of the first batch, and it's pretty much as I expected; drinkable, but nothing spectacular. It looks like beer. It smells ok. It has a nice frothy head. And it tastes reasonable. But there's a lingering taste, a green-ness, that annoys me, as though I'm drinking a beer brewed by the Grinch. This may be due to having only been in the bottle for a month, but is more likely related to the fluctuating temperature during fermentation. We've got a few bottles left, and will give them another few weeks before trying again to see if they've improved any.

The second batch has been brewed and is fermenting away in the old fridge, doing its little thing; the yeast dancing with the sugars, or something. Something sciencey, that I'd love to be able to describe in an entirely non-sciencey way. But first I think I need to know why they're dancing together.

On Being a Patient Boy

I'd like to think I'm reasonably patient. I have moments when things get the better of me, I'm sure we all do, but they're pretty few and far between these days. It has been tested lately, with my second daughter being born three months ago, and for the most part I've held it together amongst the nappies and tantrums and vomit and crying. Having an amazing wife helps of course.

We traveled together for a while, my wife and I, and once you've sat on the side of the road in rural Laos waiting hours for a truck that may or may not turn up to take you to the Vietnamese border, and then sat on a stationary bus at the Laos-Vietnam border for two hours while people argued over the price to get to Hanoi, and then been kicked off the bus in a town half-way to Hanoi late at night with no idea where you are, you kind of learn to suck it up and wait. And you have to know, really know, that things will be alright.

And you learn that things will happen at their own pace after you get engaged in a jungle treehouse in the north of Laos and it takes a week-and-a-half before you find a working phone to call your family and tell them the good news. It's one of the more valuable things you can learn from traveling through developing countries, that they have their own time. Nepali-time, I wish I could invoke that here in Australia sometimes.

But it's not something that comes easily, patience, and for that reason, amongst many others, I'm not sure that its value can be overestimated. There's a reward that's not immediately obvious from waiting patiently; a certain pleasure that can be derived from the confidence you need to believe in something that hasn't arrived yet.

Brendan wrote a nice post over at The New Timer the other day, about slowing down and enjoying things as you go, rather than chasing after that ultimate goal as fast as you can. And he's right, in that waiting feels pretty damn good.

That slowing down of time is one of the great things beer, and especially home brewed beer, has going for it, and why the beer store in Richmond, Slow Beer, is one of the best named small businesses I could ever think of. Waiting for that bottled beer to carbonate, anticipating the punchy hop aroma when you flip off the bottle cap, and looking forward to sharing your beer with your mates, there's something special in that. Strangley, that approach is completely opposite to how a lot of folks (well, me) start drinking beer; as a teenager, when all you want to do is get loaded and forget things, and you'll drink anything that helps you get there.

The first brew that Luke and I put together has been in the bottle now for a month. Once we'd bottled those 27 long necks, we penciled in this Friday night as the time to crack them open over a few pizzas and with the Tigers game on the telly. In the meantime, we planned our second brew. Another pale ale, but this time using a light malt extract, steeping our own grains and doing a full hour-long hop boil, rather than throwing together a kit as we did for the first batch.

Ingredients were bought weeks ago, but then my 2-year old copped a broken nose and a bout of gastro on the same day, while my three month old fought a cold. So we postponed for a few days and rescheduled. Tuesday night, after work, we said. Which was all fine, until Luke texted me at 9pm Tuesday night to say he was still stuck at the office. The weekend after was out, while we journeyed home to Echuca for a family get together. Which brings us to this week, where brewing plans have once again been put on hold while Luke's wife fights a nasty bout of the flu. And I don't mean one of those colds when someone sitting next to you at work coughs and then moans, "Oh, I've got the flu". I mean the FLU, where you can't get out of bed for days. To add to the woe, her ear drums have both burst, and she's 27 weeks pregnant. So Luke and I have postponed again, indefinitely, while he looks after his wife and two-year-old.

Having to wait to make your own beer seems pretty darn easy, given the circumstances.

On diving right in

I started riding my bike again a few years back. After hardly riding at all during the 2.5 years Bec and I spent overseas, even riding a clunky old mountain bike I borrowed off Bec’s brother was a joy. I rode the rickety old tank to my job on a building site in jeans and work boots and hi-viz vest. As much as I enjoyed it, I would never wear lycra, I said. I didn’t need to. Soon I got my own bike, an old Italian racer off my brother that I converted to a single speed. But I still didn’t need the lycra. “Just because I’m riding a bike,” I explained to Bec, “doesn’t mean I need to look like a dork.”

A few years later, I had shaved legs, a carbon road bike that I was racing in multi-day stage races, and a dedicated track bike that I raced on the velodrome. And lots of lycra.

When we started travelling, back in 2005, I got my first digital camera; a relatively simple point and shoot. Just to take some happy snaps on the road, you know? Two years later I was trekking the back streets of Kathmandu carrying thousands of dollars worth of camera gear (a digital SLR, multiple lenses, tripod etc.) getting immense joy from documenting what I saw.

I have this tendency to dive right into things; driven by an urge to learn and soak up as much as I can. If I’m going to do something, I want to do it bloody well. Strangely this doesn’t seem to extend so much to my professional life, but let’s not get into that now.

I think this is why I’m enjoying this beer brewing stuff so much, despite it not really making any sense for me to start. In the last nine months I’ve probably drank the least amount of beer since I started drinking as a teenager. I no longer have that urge to crack another beer as soon as I finish one, so instead of drinking six beers on a Friday night watching the footy, these days it’s more like two. So why would I start an endeavour that’s going to produce around two-and-a-half slabs of beer every time I brew?  It makes even less sense when I consider that I plan on brewing every two to three weeks.

Much like photography, brewing beer has that perfect combination of science, nerdiness and creativity that I love. Once you understand how the beer is made, what the science is behind the beer’s structure, there’s comes the freedom to create flavours and styles however you wish. You want to make a chocolate IPA? Sure, give it a crack.

It also goes back to that slightly obsessive nature of my personality, the joy that comes from burying myself in new things; reading forums and asking questions and stumbling through until you learn to walk and then run. I’m not doing this to make cheap beer, I’m doing this to make great beer. And that’s going to take practice, practice, and lots of drinking tasting.

The first batch of beer has been bottled. I’m brewing with my buddy Luke, and we managed to avoid any major disasters on bottling day. Only just though. It was with enormous pride that we got to the final bottle, having filled and capped 27 others. As I went to put the final cap on, I stopped, as if struck by the ray of a stun gun. “Oh fuck.” Luke stopped too, looked at me, and then realised exactly what I’d just realised. In perfect harmony, we both exclaimed, “We haven’t put the sugar in!” Uncap all the bottles, add the sugar, re-cap the bottles. Job done.

The beer is now sitting in our linen cupboard, and I’ve crossed my fingers in the hope that none of the bottles explode. The beer is a basic pale ale, made from a Blackrock Pilsner kit, with some Cascade and Williamette hops added at the end of the wort boil. Supposedly, if done correctly, it should taste similar to a Little Creatures Pale Ale. I have no doubt in my mind that our beer will taste nothing like Little Creatures Pale Ale. But if it’s drinkable, we’ll be happy. Three more weeks and we’ll find out.