On behalf of the faculty of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, I am delighted to announce that you have passed the PD 697 capstone project. Please accept our congratulations for a job well done and our good wishes for your future plans.
I brewed my first Lambic today. I’ve wanted to make one for a few years - it seemed like a good way to celebrate the end of school. The process is a bit different from what I’ve talked about before.
Tuesday evening I took the yeast out the fridge & woke it up by popping the nutrient pack inside. It was a bit old & took a while to get started. Eventually it swelled a little & looked like this:
Since it had taken so long to swell & was a propogator pack rather than the bigger activator pack I made a starter. Basically that means that I put it in another container and added malt sugar so the yeast could eat/reproduce
So what exactly goes into a lambic? Water, yeast, bacteria (its OK, really), barley, wheat and hops. For this batch I used 60% pilsener malt and 40% organic unmalted soft white wheat. The homebrew store didn’t have unmalted wheat in stock but they pointed me to the Lexington Co-Op.
You might notice that there are a LOT of hops there. 4 ounces of debittered (aged) hops. For a lambic you want the preservative power that hops lend but not the bitterness or flavor. Paul (Dickinsonbeer over on Ratebeer) was kind enough to send me the aged hops I used for this batch. Thanks Paul!
The unmalted wheat was a giant pain. I mill my grains by hand. Malted grains aren’t hard to mill - they’re extremely dry and more or less crack when crushed. The unmalted wheat didn’t quite *smoosh* in the mill but it was distinctly gummy. You remember how when you were a kid you would stand in a doorway, pushing your arms up against the frame for a 30 second or so, then walk away and your arms would ‘magically’ keep rising? Milling the unmalted grain was kind of like that. My arm just kept going after the grain was milled.
So, once the grain was milled I got to try my first turbid mash. I explained an infusion mash in this earlier post where you add water at a specific temperature to the grains, let it sit for a while and then drain the sweet wort. The turbid mash ends with collection of sweet wort but has a number of steps before you get there. This mashing style came about as a result brewers trying to get around an old dutch tax law. Without getting too technical, this method results in a chemical profile of the liquid you eventually collect that makes lambic better. You start with a small amount of water just to wet the grains & bring them up to 113 degrees. Then you wait a while.
Then you add some more water to bring the temperature of the grain up. Then you wait a while. Then you draw some of the liquid off, put it on the stove and hold it at 190 degrees. Its gross - it looks like this:
Then you add more water to the grains and wait. Then you take some water off the grains and add it to the pot of 190 degree liquid. Then you add more water to the grains and wait. Then you drain most of the water from the grains, add the 190 degree water, heat the whole thing to 190 and re-introduce it to the grains. Then you wait a while. Then you drain the water (now wort.) Then you add a bunch of hot water, let it sit for a while and drain it off again.
Confused? There is a flowchart on this page - not exactly what I did but close enough.
At the end I had about 9 gallons of wort in my brand-spankin-new brew kettle.
I brought that to a boil and then added the hops. Like I said, thats a lot of hops!
Where most beers are boiled for 1 or 1.5 hours, lambics go 4+ hours. I stopped after 3 hours and 40 minutes just because I didn’t want to boil off *too much* liquid.
At this point the beer is cooled like any other & then moved to another container to ferment. All those hops were left behind.
I shook the beer around for a while in it’s new home to oxygenate it and added the yeast. This is the container it’ll stay until 2011. Tomorrow afternoon I’m strapping it in to the back seat of Ang’s car and driving it over to my parents where it’ll sit, undisturbed, in a basement corner for a long, long time.
Overall I think it went well for a first attempt. I was concerned that the mash was going to be difficult. It was long & involved but in no way difficult. I put about 4.5 gallons in the fermenter rather than the planned 5 but thats close enough for the first time using a new pot with an unknown evaporation rate. The specific gravity (the amount of sugar in the liquid) is a bit high - 1.058 while I wanted 1.05, but I can deal with that in future batches. Its a learning experience. It took around ten and a half hours from start to finish. Long for sure but not taxing.
Music wise I listened to less than expected today. I started off the brewday listening to my favorite Belgian band’s first album - Front 242’s Geography. While cooling I listened to Mono’s You Are There and Tom Waits’ Closing Time. Good music for a good day.
As for the title of this post (and the name of the beer) — it was raining all day. When I went outside to bring in the turkey fryer I found that the weather had broken & there was a rainbow. It seemed a fitting end to a day spent making a sour beer. The picture didn’t turn out that well, but it did make me think of the Perry Bible Fellowship.
3D Visualization Final Exercise
3D Visualization Term Paper
3D Visualization Final Paper (different than the term paper)
Conflict Resolution Final Paper
Conflict Resolution Final Presentation
Masters Project Edits
Economics Final Paper
and the fun stuff
Build up a starter for my Lambic
Brew my freakin’ Lambic!
3D Visualization Final Exercise
3D Visualization Term Paper
3D Visualization Final Paper (different than the term paper)
Conflict Resolution Final Paper
Conflict Resolution Final Presentation Economics Final Paper
Masters Project Edits
and the fun stuff
Build up a starter for my Lambic
Brew my freakin’ Lambic!
Congrats!
In order of when they need to be turned in…
3D Visualization Final Exercise
3D Visualization Term Paper
3D Visualization Final Paper (different than the term paper)
Conflict Resolution Final Paper
Conflict Resolution Final Presentation
Masters Project Edits
Economics Final Paper
Is there usually a guy on Main St. downtown riding a horse decorated with signs advertizing for a jewler which proclaim in very large letters “WE BUY GOLD!”?
I’ve been hemming and hawing over buying one for a long time…I finally caved
10 gallon capacity!
Such a wonderful day. In addition to requisite schoolwork (I really never wanted to be a programmer. Really.) I transplanted the majority of our tomato seedlings into larger containers & planted a cherry tree. By ‘planted a cherry tree’ I mean that we had pits from last year’s CSA share.. and a big ‘ol pot that wasn’t being used.. so I buried a few. Time will tell. I wonder if they were sour or sweet cherries. Or Queen Anne?
I also took the weather as a sign that Ommegang’s Ommegeddon which had been sitting in my cellar since September was probably ready for prime time. They added Brettanomyces when this was bottled last July & it has developed quite nicely over the past 9 months. Drink them if you’ve got them - I can’t see it getting much better than it is right now. Perfect (but beware the 8% alcohol) for refreshing you when you’re working outdoors.
Happy Passover all. Beware locusts, frogs and the high school power of creeping death.
-r
A project I’m working on was accepted for presentation at the Urban and Regional Systems Association Conference this August. At the project’s core we’re examining distribution of cases of Lupus around a superfund site on the east side of Buffalo. Its the same dataset I used when writing my final paper for Spatial Stats last semester.
The lead on the project is pregnant & can’t go.. so maybe I’ll get a trip to the Cayman Islands at the end of August!
