10 – Goose Island Bourbon County

This is a big and bold beer with a lot of great barrel aged flavor to it. It doesn’t work for a light beer fan sitting at 14.7% ABV and being very dark and almost syrupy. It has hits of chocolate and coffee bitterness coming through that help balance out this big flavor. I’m generally a big fan of these darker barrel aged beers during the winter here in Minnesota when you want something that just kind of sticks with you. There are others similar to this that could have made the list as well, but because it’s a limited release it makes it feel just a bit more special.

9 – Steel Toe Size 7

Now onto more of a summer beer for me, though I will drink IPA’s throughout the year. Steel Toe is a local brewery that actually does three different versions of this be, a Size 4, Size 7, and Size 11, which refers to the ABV. I personally like the Size 7 best, the Size 4 is just a bit too light whereas the Size 11 is a bit to malty, the Size 7 gives you that good beer body while balancing it out nicely with the hops.

8 – Deschutes Zarabanda

This was one of the first odder beers that I tried and really loved, unfortunately I don’t believe it’s put out by Deschutes anymore, or if it is, it’s going to be at their tap room only. Zarabanda had a lot of unique flavors to it including peppercorn, it was just a fun one to try and something so very different. I hope, maybe, Deschutes would consider bringing this one back for a limited run at some point in bottles so that I could enjoy it again.

I also got to try this at one for the first Tryptophania’s that a local bar does the night before Thanksgiving. It’s a great even where you just show up like normal, but they’ll have a guest brewer doing a tap takeover and you’ll be able to try beers that you wouldn’t normally see on tap. They’ve had Deschutes, New Holland, and Indeed as various breweries that have done it.

7 – Deschutes Fresh Squeezed

Back to back Deschutes, but this one is more straight forward. Fresh Squeezed is just a good citrusy IPA. And most of the time when I want an IPA, I like it to have a bit of that grapefruit bite to it. Fresh Squeezed definitely has some of that. It’s an odd beer that I think works much better in a bottle than in a can. The can just tweaks the flavor slightly so that it doesn’t work as well. The only knock on this beer for me is that it’s best when it’s perfectly cold, if it gets too warm on a summer’s day, it isn’t as good.

6 – Surly Axe Man

Another IPA for the list Surly Axe Man (formerly known as Todd the Axe Man) is a pretty big IPA. Sitting just over 7%, it’s not that much stronger but it just has a good consistent flavor. It has the citrus flavor that I really love. A bit harder to find, this beer is very much worth it though and is another one that just has that great summery taste to it.

5 – Insight Crazy Aunt

Now for something completely different again. This beer is out there as a Gin and Tonic style beer. And it does taste a good amount like a gin and tonic, maybe just a bit sweeter. Canned it is a great refreshing taste but, oddly enough, not as good on tap. I actually think the slight metallic taste that it can pick up from a can cuts down on the sweetness that you still get on the tap making it a better and more balanced flavor profile. If you want to try something completely different, this is amazing.

4 – Founders Kentucky Breakfast Stout

Another great winter beer, I could have gone with the CBS instead of the KBS, but the CBS (Canadian Breakfast Stout) has more of a sweet note to it with the maple syrup. This is another one of those big barrel aged stouts that really holds up well in the winter. I wouldn’t drink this beer in the summer at all just because of the darkness and heaviness of the beer, but it is great for sticking to your ribs as you drink it. If you want to try a big barrel aged stout, I’d probably start here or Dragon’s Milk from New Holland.

3 – East Lake Nicollet Nicollet Mauler Mauler

The Nicky Nicky Mau Mau as I know it, this is the double black IPA version of the Nicollet Mauler a black IPA. So you get a good malty flavor, but unlike a stout or a porter, you have less of that sweet malt backbone, instead you get more of the dark roasted malt flavors then with a strong hit of the hops. This one is another one that isn’t being brewed anymore, but I hope comes back at some point. Fortunately, I can brew an double black IPA myself that is basically the same, so hopefully this winter I’ll be able to drink something like it again.

2 – Mikkeller Brewing Raspberry Blush

Now, I’m normally not a fan of the fruity beers unless they are very sour, but this one just is fascinating and really good. It’s a raspberry coffee berliner weisse, so technically a sour, but it isn’t as sour as most sours. The coffee note balances it all out and creates a very unique flavor that I just really love. I’ve had it on tap and in cans and either way it is just really good. Definitely an interesting flavor profile, but a good side step from your traditional sour.

1 – Odell St. Lupulin

Finally, another one that isn’t being brewed anymore, which is a real shame. If I could only drink one brew for the rest of my life, this would have been it. It was light and refreshing with a great hop profile, but not one that just tasted like a summer beer but it had more depth to it than that, even if it was only brewed for the summer months. The hop profile is less citrus on this and more floral in terms of the profile, but not potpourri floral, but more hop fragrance. BRB, just found that it’s available on one of their variety 12 packs, but if you’re an IPA/EPA fan, definitely worth checking out.

Now, there are so many more beers that I could list, and I’ll probably do a top 10 brewery list coming up here soon because I can talk about more of them then. There’s the Lazer Cat (Elysian Day Glow IPA) that just missed the list as well as a massive collection of coffee beers and barrel aged stuff that I have also enjoyed. And even stuff like Light Hearted, a low ABV IPA that I’ve found that I’ve really enjoyed recently on summer days.

What are some of your favorite beers? Are there any that you think would make my list if I tried them?

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The Nerd Who Likes to Drink – Get them an engraved beer glass or whiskey tumbler. You can find all sorts of interesting ones out there, and they aren’t extremely expensive. They are also better options than a shot glass, because most people have too many shot glasses from college. I have two stein style beer mugs that Kristen and I got at ConVergence with Lord of the Rings theme on them. But you can find them on Etsy with almost anything on them. If you want the rebel symbol from Star Wars, or the Vulcan salute, you can get that. This falls into that category of things that are a bit more unique. Or unique booze, that always works too.

Board Gamer Bling – Now, this is slightly different than the next one RPG’er Bling, but basically, help a person bling out their board games. There are a lot of games that use cardboard coins, help them start replacing that money by getting them some metal coins for the game. There are a ton of shops that make awesome coins. Or, maybe they play a resource management game where there are different types of resources, you can probably find little molded or 3D printed pieces to replace those. Little things like that can elevate a gaming experience. Or, maybe a game has meeples in it, you can get custom meeples of the various colors, so that the game has a little bit more of a fun factor to it.

RPG’er Bling – If this was like board gamer bling, I’d just say look back at the RPG list. However, I am going to add in some apparel stuff this list or little fun things. You can get things like D20 (twenty sided dice) earrings that are different, and there is even one place where you can get some glow in the dark ones. There are also necklaces that have D20’s or various dice hanging from them that you could go with. And, tons of goofy RPG related t-shirts that you could consider as well. In the RPG listed, we did some table bling, this time, the suggestion is bling out the player or the DM.

Collector’s Sets – This is really for anything nerdy, and I talked about it in fantasy, while people might have a version of something that they like, they probably won’t, since they already own it, go with the nicer version. So you can do that for them. This can be for books or movies or whatever it might be. But a hard backed version of a book, or the cool collectors version of a movie that comes in a nicer case or with something extra, that is fun. For, for video games, you can sometimes get a larger release pack that comes in a cool case or comes with a figure. With a video game, I would try and get a game the person doesn’t have, as compared to books or movies which can replace the old version on the shelf. I’ve found that people tend to go back to video games as much or at least display them as much. Now, that might be who I hang out with, but that’s my recommendation.

Manga/Anime – This one is pretty simple, if they have the anime or love the anime, consider getting them the manga. If they love the manga, consider getting them the anime. You can also look at what anime or manga that they like and find things adjacent to that, but it can be tricky with some o books or shows, because they are pretty unique.

Experiences – There are plenty of experiences that you can give a person when it comes to nerdy things. A lot of escape rooms have a nerdy theme to them. If the person is traveling or lives near a theme park, you could give them the experience of Star Wars or Hogwarts. Or maybe there is a convention that they’ve wanted to go to locally or not, you could pay for a ticket into the convention. Know the persons means to get to go and do these things, but experiences, as I’ve gotten older, are often just as good a gift as something that will just sit around. Now, that isn’t to say that there aren’t some things that people just really want to get, I know that there are some things that I want, but experiences can be something fun and different. Even if it’s just setting up a gaming time where they get to pick all the games and you’ll play games you normally wouldn’t with them, that would be a great gift that is cheap.

There are a ton of nerdy things that you can get for people or experiences that you can share with someone around the holidays. And, obviously, these aren’t tied into Christmas, they work great for birthdays, anniversaries, or maybe the person just needs a pick me up, and you can do that for them.

Hopefully these lists have helped jog some ideas for you for the nerds in your life.

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What You Need:

Mash tun – you can make one of these if you want

A couple of brew kettles

Something to spread out the flow of water – we fit an upside-down colander into ours.

Process

The first step, once you’ve gotten your kit and the grains, is to heat up the water to 170 degrees. You will be steeping your grains in this for an hour or more. Normally at 170 degrees, you would leach out undesirable flavors into your beer, but at this point in the process, you’ll add the water to 12-14 pounds of grains and into your mash tun — this will cause the temp to drop. Your target temp is 156 degrees Fahrenheit — though this is only true if your mash tun is made from a cooler. I would recommend using a cooler over the stovetop for this part of the process, since it allows you to use fewer kettles, and since a cooler will lock in the heat consistently for an hour, as compared to having to regulate the temperature yourself if you do it on the stove top.

When mashing your grains, first put in the water, then add the grains to the mash tun. Stir up the mash tun so that all the grains are wet, and close it up. Every fifteen minutes, open it to stir the grains and check the temp (you should already have a thermometer from the previous instructions). If you find that the temp is dropping too quickly, you can add in more hot water to keep the temperature up. Otherwise, after an hour, you should be able to drain a little of the liquid off the bottom and taste it. It should be sweet to the taste; this means that you’ve gotten most of the sugars out of the grains. If you don’t think it tastes sweet enough, close it back up again and let it sit for another 15 minutes.

During this hour, you should be heating more water — basically the amount of water that you want for your brew, so probably 7-8 gallons of water, since some will boil off later and you won’t take all of it back out of the grains. This water is also heated to 170 degrees.

The next step after the mash is the sparge. Sparging is how you collect any of the extra sugars that are still in the grains. The first thing you’ll do at this point will be to drain off a little of the current liquid in the mash, enough until the liquid coming out has cleared up (this is one area that I messed up the first few times — by “cleared up,” I mean that there isn’t any sediment coming through anymore, not that the liquid has become clear like water). Take this liquid and slowly pour it through your upside-down colander (or whatever you are using to disperse the water); this allow all the grains to filter out any of the sediment that was in the liquid. Taking the water that you’ve heated, start slowly draining the water from the mash and adding to the top of the mash so that the top of the grains are always covered. By doing this slowly, you are draining out the water that has been sitting there first, and allowing the added water to pick up remaining sugars that have stuck to the grains. The recommended length of time this should take is between 30 and 90 minutes, and it appears that, in general, the slower the better.

Now that you’ve done this, you have the equivalent of your boil ready to go with the malt extract incorporated into it, and the rest of the steps are the same as extract brewing.

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So just a quick little set of notes:

Why would you want to switch to this type of brewing? Because all malt extracts are the same recipe, you can create different-tasting malts or tweak the flavors by using the grains yourself.

How hard is this compared to extract brewing? It is definitely harder. I had a couple of batches that went bad or that we didn’t get all of the sugars out of. A lot of brew supply stores will have classes that you can take (often for free) about brewing, and that is a good way to learn, or you could just ask the people working at the store, and most will be able and glad to help you.

Is the extra time worth it? I would say yes — it might add more time to the process and require more equipment, but I think that it is; it gives you control over another aspect of the beer. I’ll actually be doing an article on that in the future (a while from now), and I’ll talk about what can influence the taste of your beer.

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So that has been a quick overview of brewing and beer. There will be more coming in the future, when I’ll give a more in-depth look into creating a recipe, how water and yeast influence taste, and even more things about beer than you’ve ever wanted to know!
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What do you need?

A brew pot –  6- to 8-gallon brewing pot.

A carboy – glass over plastic

Siphon

Extract Brew Kit

A Large Spoon

An Airlock

A Thermometer – Digital Kitchen Thermometer

Sanitizer

Brew Bucket

Bottles

Bottle Caps

Capper

The Process

First step in my process is to sanitize everything. It’s most important to sanitize the stuff that will come in contact with the beer after you’ve boiled it, so that means the carboy, airlock, thermometer, and spoon. The reason for this is that you don’t want to introduce any bacteria into the brew after the boil. Now, that doesn’t mean you need to wear surgical gloves and breathe through a mask after the boil — in fact, I’ve cooled off the beer during the winter by setting it outside, uncovered — but it’s better to sanitize and control what you can. While completing this step, if I have liquid yeast I activate it so that it is warm and active at the end of the brew, since the yeast should be kept in the fridge until it’s ready for use.

Next, you fill the brew pot with 3-5 gallons of water and start to heat it up. During this process, you’ll steep the grains. A kit will come with a bag to put the grains in, like a cheese cloth, and the grains themselves. Most brew shops will help you grind up the specialty grains, but if you are going to get a kit and not brew for a few days, you shouldn’t grind the grains. Just before steeping the grains, you can prepare them by crushing them with a rolling pin, or grinding them in a grain grinder. While steeping the grains (generally 20-30 minutes), you’ll need to keep the temperature of the water between 120 and 155 degrees. Any lower and you won’t pull out the sugars and flavor form the grain; any higher and you’ll start to get a bitter flavor from it.

Once the grains are steeped, bring the water to a boil. Once it boils, add in the malts. Recipes will often recommend that you take the brew pot off the heat at this point, because you can burn the sugars on the bottom if you aren’t stirring constantly. If you have someone helping you, one of you can pour while the other stirs; otherwise, just turning down the heat works nicely, as this will keep it from burning as quickly. After the malts are added, return it to a boil. At this point, the boil goes on for an hour. During that hour, you’ll be adding in hops at different points — the recipe will tell you when. Remember that the early hops are added for the nose, and hops added later will make more of a difference with flavor.

Taking the wort (the product you’re left with after the boil) off the stove, you’ll then need to cool it down. There are wort chillers you can use, which basically run water through copper tubing to cool the beer faster. I’ve also put it in a bathtub that was filled with cold water. Or you can come up with some other way to cool it off, like setting it outside in the dead of winter. Once it has dropped to 80 degrees, which can take a while, you can move it to the carboy.

This is where the siphon comes in — you’ll now siphon the beer from the brew pot into the carboy. Alternatively, you can use a funnel instead of a siphon, but you’ll get more of the residue into your fermentation that way, and you’ll need a siphon later anyway. At this point, you’ll probably find that you have less than five gallons of water, so you’ll need to add some — taking water from the sink, or using filtered water, fill the carboy until there are 5 gallons. Next, add the yeast to the carboy, then put the plug from the airlock on and cover up the opening. Then, shake the beer up for one to two minutes to circulate the air into the beer. This will help the yeast work faster and keep less of it from dying.

To finish up on day one, fill the airlock with a little bit of water so the bottom of it is covered and air can’t pass through it. Next, put it on top and move the beer to a dark room. If you don’t have a dark room, you can cover the carboy with a towel, which is what I typically do. If things have gone correctly, within a few hours (or by the next day at the latest), you’ll start to hear air bubbles escaping through the airlock. This means that the yeast is doing its work. You then let the beer sit for two weeks, checking in on it once and a while. After a few days, you’ll notice that the bubbles are infrequent or may have completely stopped. This is normal, but continue to let it sit for the full two weeks so the flavors marry.

After that time, if you are going to keg the beer, move the beer to the sanitized keg with the siphon, so that any sludge that has settled on the bottom of the carboy is left behind. Closing the keg, put it under pressure and in a refrigerator or kegerator immediately. Cooling off the beer to the temp of a fridge or kegerator will stop the yeast from eating away any more sugars or doing anything else that might make your beer taste funky. The beer is put under 30 PSI of pressure for 24-48 hours to get it carbonated, and then find your serving pressure between 4-8 PSI.

If you are bottling, you’ll use the priming sugar from the kits, turning it into a simple syrup. Add this to a beer when you move to to the brew bucket. Use the spigot to fill the sanitized bottles. Taking the caps and the capper, put a bottle cap on each bottle. Once all the bottles are filled, the beers need to sit out for two more weeks out of sunlight.The yeast will eat the newly added sugars, but since there is nowhere for the air to escape, the beers will carbonate. After two weeks the beers are ready to enjoy.

And that’s how one brews from an extract kit. Next week, we’ll talk about how all-grain brewing differs and what you’ll need for that process.

Pros:

• Cheaper
• You can experiment
• You get to drink something that you’ve made
• You can brag about it to your friends

Let’s talk a bit about the pros. Your average homebrew beer price is cheaper than most any beer that you’ll get from a store. Sure, you can go down the level of Miller and get 48 beers from basically the same cost as brewing your own IPA, Stout, or whatever beer you want to make. But you also can make a wide variety of beers; you aren’t limited to what is in the liquor store. You can experiment and take a kit and add different hops, malts, or grains to it, to see if you can get a taste you like better. And then there are the two best parts: drinking it yourself, and drinking it with your friends. Drinking beer is a great social activity, and the process of brewing and bottling (or kegging) your own to share makes it even nicer.

Cons:

• It takes time
• There are initial start-up costs
• You can mess it up so it goes bad

Now, there are some cons, the first being that it does take time. If you are bottling your beer, it will take a minimum of four weeks — two weeks of it fermenting on its own and two weeks in the bottle, until it gets to the point where it is carbonated and tasting like you’d expect it to. There is also the initial cost, which really isn’t all that high, but there is more initial cost than just buying a kit for brewing. For example, there is a brew pot, bottles (though you can just use empty bottles from most any beer brand that doesn’t sell twist-offs), carboy, sanitizer, bottle caps, capper, and a few other things that you’ll need. However, for initial start-up, you can often buy a kit for as little as $100, and it’ll have everything that you need to get started. And finally, there is a chance that the beer can go bad — if you didn’t sanitize correctly, or if too much air gets into your beer once it starts fermenting, it can grow mold and go bad. But if you follow the directions and sanitize very well, it isn’t that likely.

So, if you still want to jump into brewing, you are likely going to want to start with a malt extract recipe kit — or if you are really daring/brave/possibly unwise, you can go straight for all-grain. The difference between malt extract brewing and all-grain is that the all-grain brewing process, which is more intensive, extracts the sugars from the grains themselves, whereas with a malt you are using the sugars that a company somewhere has already extracted. Either way, you are getting the sugars for you beer to ferment.

I would recommend starting with malt extract recipe kits. First off, they are cheaper, because you don’t need as much equipment as you do for all-grain. It is also cheaper in the initial start-up phase, as a mash tun can run over $100. The downside to the malt recipe kit is that you can’t tweak it as much as you can with an all-grain kit. But with all-grain, it takes more time, and it’s trickier to get all the sugars you want and need out of the beer. With an extract recipe kit, you can still brew just as wide a variety of beers; you are just a little bit more limited in the flavor profile from a kit. This is the case with an all-grain kit as well.

Once you’ve gotten down how to turn out a recipe consistently, you can then start to make up your own recipes. It is smart to continue with extract at this point, as you can buy all the ingredients needed from a brew shop to make your own beer and recipes without following anything that they have put together. This is where you can really home in on creating your own style and flavors and make the beers more uniquely yours. You’ll also be able to experiment with brewing in such a way that you are less likely to have a batch go bad, as compared to all-grain brewing.

Next Week: The Full All-Grain Brewing Process (and where extract falls into the spectrum).

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But my real first passion is with beer. I love hoppy beers, light saisons, dark porters and stouts, and basically everything in between. The variety is something that has really increased my interest, as well as taking up the hobby of brewing beer. What flavor can I get from different combinations of grains? How can I make the beer stronger? What types of hops will give the beer a different profile than before?

So I’m going to start with some basic stuff about beer.

There are two overarching classifications of beers: Ale and Lager. The difference between these two types of beers is the yeast.

So let’s back up a little bit further and talk about yeast. We know it from making bread or pizza dough — to name a few. It’s what allows the dough to rise and poof up. Why does it do that? Yeast eats sugar, turning it into two separate parts: alcohol and carbon dioxide. When you bake bread, the yeast eats the sugars in the bread and causes it to puff up, but when you brew a batch of beer and the yeast eats the sugars in the mixture, the carbon dioxide is expelled, leaving the alcohol behind.

So, to create ales and lagers, different types of yeast are used. An ale yeast will eat the sugars at a higher temperature and will ferment the beer faster. Lager yeast is a colder-temperature yeast, which means it takes longer to get the same amount of fermentation. The most common beers in the world, Budweiser, Coors, and Miller, are all lagers.

But what about the other differences in beers? Some are hoppy, some are stronger, some are bitter, and some are vastly different colors. What causes those differences?

Hops: Hops are one of the other ingredients that can make beers very different from each other. Hops, depending on when you add them while brewing, will influence the flavor in different ways, and different types of hops will make a difference in the flavor as well. Some hops can be very earthy in flavor, while other hops have a citrus flavor, and depending on which ones you use and when, it will influence the beer’s flavor. The earlier you add hops in the brewing process, the hoppier a beer will smell. But the longer you wait until the end, the hoppier the beer will taste. Think about cooking — the earlier you add an ingredient, the more everything else in the dish will take on its flavor; this will also cause it to blend into the overall flavor more than it would if you put it in at the end. The same holds true for beer.

Hops also can influence the IBU (International Bitterness Units) of a beer. The higher the number, the more bitter a beer will be. There is a misconception, though, that any beer with hops is going to be a bitter beer. The Apollo hop has an Alpha Acid (read: bitterness) of 19%, where as Saaz hops have a mere 4%, so depending on which ones you use, it can really influence how bitter the beer is.

Color: A beer changes color depending on the malts that are used in it. A toasted malt grain is going to give the beer a darker color, as will different types of grain. If you were to make a rye beer, it will end up having a very red color. If you use primarily wheat, the beer will have a much lighter color. Most beers will have primarily barley as the base to get most of the malts, but depending on what you add to that, you influence the color and the flavor of the beer. The malt itself you can get one of two ways — you can purchase malt that has already been extracted, or you can soak your own grains in hot water until the sugars have been leached from them.

Strength: And why are some beers 3.2% alcohol, and others 12%? This comes down to two things that we have talked about above: the grains and the yeast. The more grains you use, the more sugar you’ll get out. The more sugar you get out, the more there is for the yeast to eat; the more the yeast eats, the more alcohol is converted. So the stronger beers will often have a maltier flavor to them, no matter the color of the beer. If you want to keep the maltier flavor down, you can also add sugar directly into the beer, which I’ve done before with a Maple Stout, or you can use rock sugar.

So that is just a little bit on the basics of beer and what makes different beers taste the way they do. With beer, it can be at times an acquired taste, but most people will have some type of beer that they like, if they can find the right one. So I  recommend going around and trying different beers. With the small brewery boom that is happening in the United States, there are many ways to get your hands on a lot of different types of beer to try.

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