In a large kitchen pot (not your brew kettle), heat 1 gallon (4 L) of water to 161° F (72° C). Place crushed malts in a nylon steeping bag and steep them in the hot water for 45 minutes. Hold temperature as close to 150° F (66° C) as you can reasonably manage over this period. (This is a small mash.) Stir occasionally. Additionally, heat 0.5 gallons (2 L) of water to 170° F (77° C) in a small pot and heat 2.5 gallons (9.5 L) of water to a boil in your brew pot.

When the mash is over, place a colander over your brew kettle and place the grain bag in it. Pour the wort from the small mash through the grains (to filter out any large bits of grain) and rinse with the 170° F (77° C) water. Set grain bag aside. Dissolve roughly half the malt extract in the brew pot and resume boiling. To dissolve the malt extract, put it into one of the pots you used previously. Ladle hot wort from the brewpot onto it and stir to “pre-dissolve” it a bit. Then, stir it into the brewpot liquid. This will help ensure that none of the heavy extract sinks to the bottom of the pot and scorches.

Boil for 60 minutes, adding hops at the beginning of the boil. Do not let boil volume dip below 2.5 gallons (9.5 L) during boil. Top up with boiling water, if needed, to avoid this. Stir in the remaining malt extract during the final 10 minutes of the boil. When the boil is finished, cool the wort to 54° F (12° C), or as cool as you can get it with a reasonable effort. Transfer to a sanitized fermenter and top up to 5 gallons (19 L) with cool water.

Aerate the wort and pitch the yeast. Ferment, allowing the temperature to creep up to 64° F (18° C). Prime beer with corn sugar in bottling bucket. If using standard beer bottles, prime for 3 volumes of CO₂ using 6.5 oz. (180 g) of corn sugar. If you are using heavy wheat beer bottles, prime for 4.0 volumes of CO₂ using 9.5 oz. (270 g) of corn sugar. Store bottles somewhere warm for two weeks. Check for carbonation and move beer to cold storage.

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Mash at 150° F (66° C) for 60 minutes, lauter, sparge, and collect wort. Add hops and lavender stems and boil for 60 minutes. Add honey and lemon verbena at flameout. Pitch yeast at 70° F (21° C) and let beer temp slowly rise to 80° F (27° C) for three days. Carbonate to 3 volumes (6 g/L) of CO₂.

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Any self-respecting person raised in the South has surely eaten collards, if not gone a step further in spending hours over a pot making these delicious braised greens. Collard greens, like many cruciferous veggies, grow well in the winter (depending on where you live), which is why they are traditional New Year’s Day fare. According to popular folklore, eating your dose of greens on New Year’s Day is one way to ensure good fortune in the year ahead. The greens are meant to resemble money—folded bills, specifically. So, take these and stuff them in your pocket for 2018!

Collard greens are more commonly prepared cooked than raw, in large part due to the bitter nature of the greens. Cooking them down in your favorite stock or vinegar is one way to cook bitterness out while also imparting a dynamic savory component to these fan-like beauties. They can certainly be made vegetarian without the use of pork fat, but in staying true to tradition, I say get your hands on a ham hock if you can!

Southern-style Collard Greens

Ingredients:

Directions:

Step 1: After you have washed and stemmed the collard greens, cut them into strips. While you’re chopping the greens, pour the oil into a cast-iron Dutch oven on medium to high heat with the minced garlic and ham hocks. Allow the minced garlic and ham hocks to cook until aromatic and slightly browned. Add the ham hocks and sauté in oil and garlic until lightly browned.

Step 2: Add the stock to the bottom of the skillet so that it may simmer and soak up the flavor of the ham hocks. Slowly add the greens to the pot. The greens will reduce significantly in size as they wilt, so a good technique is adding a little, letting it reduce, and then adding more until you’re done.

Step 3: After you add the greens, leave them to braise in the stock and add apple cider vinegar, salt and pepper. If you have the time, allow the greens to cook for 1–2 hours on low heat. Add more stock to the greens as it evaporates if the greens appear dry.

Step 4: Best served hot with a splash of pepper vinegar.

Pairing Suggestions

Try pairing your collard greens with a dark lager, such as a German schwarzbier or dark American lager. The clean yeast character of a lager will allow the savory aspects of the greens to stand out while the moderate hop bitterness will complement the acidity of the greens. The crisp characteristics of a dark lager on the palate along with the roasted barley will cut straight through the pork fat, too, making for a well-balanced sensory experience.

Schwarzbier Homebrew Recipe

If you’re planning ahead, brew this schwarzbier recipe, “Doktor Schnurrbart Schwarzbier” to go with your collard greens.

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Hailing from the South, Millie Shamburger has developed an affinity for the beer industry and all the shiny things that come with it. When not exploring beer, Millie is in the kitchen, enjoying the outdoors, and wearing out her dancing shoes. 

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On December 12, 2017, a remarkable event took place in our nation’s capital when Republicans and Democrats united over something we all love: homebrew and independent beer.

Although it may seem as though Republicans and Democrats are as divided as ever these days, great beer receives bipartisan support. On December 12, 2017, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle attended the Brewers Association’s (BA’s) annual holiday tasting on Capitol Hill to unite and celebrate homebrewing and independent beer in our country.

The event was open to staff and members of Congress and continues to be a great way to promote the efforts and missions of the American Homebrewers Association (AHA) and BA. This year had a little twist on the event by including the second annual Capitol Hill Staff Homebrew Competition awards ceremony, an event that promotes homebrewing in the House and Senate. This year we had 15 entries and opened the event to all Capitol Hill staff. AHA competition coordinator John Moorhead spoke about the competition, the AHA, and the symbiotic relationship between homebrewing and a growing beer industry.

Bob Pease, the Brewers Association’s president and CEO, presented the awards, which included first, second, and third place in two categories, a best-of-show award, and a House vs. Senate award for the staffer who had the highest score between the two legislative chambers. We also had an  AHA booth where beer from all the entrants in the competition was poured so fellow Hill staffers could sample their beer during the event. The list of winners is below.

Competition Results

Best of Show Award: Michael Rodger, Capitol Hill Police (recipe below)

House vs. Senate Homebrew Award (highest scored entry): Trevor Reuschel, Office of Congresswoman Bustos (D-Il)

Category 1: American & British Beer

• 1^st Place: Trevor Reuschel with co-brewers Chris Fitzgerald and James Robertson, Office of Congresswoman Cheri Bustos (D-Il), American IPA
• 2^nd Place: Gray Maxwell, Office of Senator Benjamin Cardin (Md.), British Brown Ale
• 3^rd Place: Perry Yates with co-brewer Jared Eichhorn (cloakroom), Office of House Appropriations, American Pale Ale

Category 2: Belgian, Spice, Smoked & Wood Ales

• 1^st Place: Michael Rodger, Capitol Hill Police, Sweet Stout with chocolate, peppers and spices
• 2^nd Place: Claudia Urrabazo with co-brewer Yuri Beckelman, Office of Representative Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md), Saison
• 3^rd Place: Eric Lausten, Office of Congressman Dan Lipinski (D-Il), Belgian Blond Ale

Additional details on the competition can be found in the official press release on BrewersAssociation.org, and photos from the ceremony—which are you are welcome to share with credit to the AHA—can be found here. We are happy to answer any questions!

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Mash crushed grains in 4 gallons (15 L) water at 150°F (66°C) for 60 minutes in a single infusion mash. Sparge in 4 gallons (15 L) water at 170°F (77°C) to collect 6.5 gallons (25 L) of wort. Boil and follow the hop schedule. Cool, pitch yeast, and transfer to primary for 4 days at 50°F (10°C). Rack to  secondary and continue for 7 days. Rack, prime, and bottle.

The post Argentine Strong Scotch Ale appeared first on American Homebrewers Association.

Who doesn’t love a fried potato? Potatoes, as simple and unpretentious as they may be, transform when they’re fried. The crunchy outer edge of a just-greasy-enough potato latke with a side of sour cream is about as good as it gets.

The origins of potato latkes didn’t start with Hanukkah, though that’s where they have gained most of their popularity via the traditions of this eight-day Jewish festival. The holiday dates back to 168 BCE, at which time Jews found themselves developing recipes to celebrate the tradition based on where they lived. Those on the Mediterranean coasts used fresh-pressed extra virgin olive oil to fry foods because Hanukkah coincides with the end of olive harvest season. Potatoes were not only readily available to European Jews, but they were cheap and easy to store for long periods of time. Thus, the tradition of latkes blossomed, and Jewish mothers kept hungry children at bay with a simple potato recipe.

Spent Grain Potato Latkes & Avocado Cream

Ingredients for Latkes:

Directions:

Step 1: After you peel your potatoes, place them in water to prevent browning. While you’re peeling potatoes, heat oil in a large skillet.

Step 2: Cut potatoes in half and use a cheese grater or food processor to create thin, short, spaghetti-like strips. Use a cheese cloth to drain all the moisture out of the potatoes.

Step 3: In a medium bowl, place the shredded potatoes with the rest of the ingredients and stir until evenly mixed.

Step 4: Drop spoonfuls of the mixture into the hot oil and press down with a spatula to flatten them into pancake form. Cook on each side for 3–4 minutes or until the tops are a nice brown color and crispy.

Step 5: After you’re done frying the latkes, allow them to dry on paper towel and blot away any excess or unwanted oil.

Ingredients for Avocado Cream:

Directions:

Step 1: Take the sour cream out of the fridge and let it soften a little bit while you cook the latkes.

Step 2: Peel avocado and add it to the sour cream in medium bowl along with the lemon juice, salt, pepper, and garlic powder.

Step 3: Depending on how ripe your avocado is (the riper, the better), you may have to use a hand mixer/blender to mix the sauce. If the avocado is super ripe, you should be able to mix it until it’s a smooth consistency.

Step 4: Put cream sauce in fridge until you’re done with latkes.

Pairing Suggestions

It’s hard to think about what to pair with a fried potato because, let’s be honest, they take on the flavor of anything you cook them with and they’re pretty delicious with virtually anything. I decided to go with a fish-and-chips concept by pairing these latkes with an English-style strong bitter (sometimes generically called “ESB” in North America, but ESB is a trademarked brand of the Fuller’s Brewery in London). The biscuit-like and bready aroma of the strong bitter will complement that toasty fried crunch on your latkes, while the mild bitterness will elevate the flavors of the avocado cream sauce. This meal can get pretty heavy between the fried potatoes and the dairy, so the sessionable qualities of the English pale ale make it a great pairing as well.

English Style Bitter Homebrew Recipe

If you’re planning ahead, brew this English-style strong bitter recipe, “I’m not Bitter, I’m Thirsty!” originally featured in Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer’s Brewing Classic Styles. 

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Hailing from the South, Millie Shamburger has developed an affinity for the beer industry and all the shiny things that come with it. When not exploring beer, Millie is in the kitchen, enjoying the outdoors, and wearing out her dancing shoes. 

The post The Homebrewer’s Table: Spent Grain Latkes & Avocado Cream Paired With English-style Bitter appeared first on American Homebrewers Association.

Do beer drinkers build up a resistance to hops? It’s a question that’s surrounded by controversy and uncertainty, with experts from all over giving their input on the matter. In 2005, Vinnie Cilurzo at Russian River Brewing coined the phrase “lupulin threshold shift,” to describe when a once extraordinarily hoppy beer now seems pedestrian.

Hops are wonderful. Believe it or not, there was once a time when beer wasn’t hopped. Instead, medieval brewers used spices, flowers and other herbs to give beer flavor (think gruit). In the 13th century, brewers started using Humulus lupulus (female hops) to improve flavor and aroma, which soon became commonplace as it improved beer’s head retention and shelf life. Today you’d be hard-pressed to find a beer that was made without hops.

Our ability to taste bitterness evolved as a way of detecting poison. It’s interesting that we’ve developed an acquired taste for bitter food and drink as it seems rare elsewhere in nature. Is it this contrast that has driven us to crave a good IPA?

Because of the lupulin threshold shift, it seems as though we’ve built up a tolerance to hoppiness and bitterness. Beers that once impressed you with their flavor, bitterness and hoppy aroma don’t seem as interesting or have the same punch that you’ve come to expect and desire.

Two years after Cilurzo coined the term, it came up during a Q&A session at the First International Brewers Symposium. Following a presentation detailing results of research related to bitterness quality, an attendee explained the concept of lupulin threshold shift to Tom Shellhammer and drew an analogy to spicy food. “When you get used to hot food you have to put in more and more spice to get the same perceived spicy heat; the same analogy applies to beer and bitterness, in my opinion,” he said.

Shellhammer replied: “I use the same analogy to describe temporal and qualitative effects of bitterness. For instance, the heat from ginger is different than the heat from chili peppers. But in regard to what you described as lupulin threshold shift, we don’t see a shift in how the panelists perform over time.”

However, human olfactory psychophysics, the study of how humans perceive odors, indicates that the impact of an aroma may change. Andreas Keller and colleagues at Rockefeller University discovered that the perceived smell of an odor at a given concentration changes over time and depends on prior experience. In other words, the more you’re subjected to a smell, the more you adapt to it, thereby raising the threshold of that smell. Although this does not completely apply to nonvolatile bitter components, it has been shown that the brain, smelling hoppy aromas, expects a more bitter drinking sensation, or a lupulin threshold shift.

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John Moorhead is Director of the National Homebrew Competition and AHA Special Projects Coordinator.

Sources

• For The Love Of Hops, Stan Hieronymus
• The Oxford Companion to Beer, Garrett Oliver

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The AHA celebrates its 39th anniversary by sharing the original issue of Zymurgy magazine

Can you believe it? December 7, 2017, marks the 39th anniversary of Charlie Papazian publishing the first issue of Zymurgy magazine and launching the American Homebrewers Association.

A lot has changed over the last 39 years in the world of homebrewing, most notably the legalization of making beer at home in all fifty of the United States, but the AHA continues to help people around the world make damn good beer at home!

Since registering its first member in 1978, the American Homebrewers Association has grown to over 44,000 members around the globe. These card-carrying members provide the support that makes the homebrewing not-for-profit possible, and you can support the AHA, too!

In celebration of our anniversary, we are sharing the original issue of Zymurgy magazine for download! It truly is a blast from the past seeing homebrew advertisements nearly four decades old. Be sure to keep an eye out for the announcement of the first-ever National Homebrew Competition, which has since grown to be the world’s largest beer competition!

Download Zymurgy Magazine Issue 1

The post American Homebrewers Association and Zymurgy Magazine Celebrate 39 Years! appeared first on American Homebrewers Association.

Mash rest at 150°F (66°C) for 20 minutes, collect wort slowly, and sparge at 170°F (77°C). Add malt extract to filled kettle. Boil for 90 minutes, adding 4 oz. (113 g) of hops at 45 minutes, 1.5 oz. (42 g) at 30 minutes, and 0.25. oz (7 g) at flameout. Pitch twice the usual amount of HEALTHY yeast cells, and aerate twice as much as normal. Pitch a new, healthy yeast culture to prime at bottling. Prime to reach about 2.3 volumes (4.6 g/L) of CO₂. Age for as long as you can wait, ideally at least three to six months.

Primary Fermentation: 7–10 days at 72°F (22°C)

Secondary Fermentation: 2 days at 55°F (13°C), 7 days at 40°F (4°C)

Notes: 

The key to success is a healthy, vigorous yeast, asserts Alec Mull, who provided the recipe. “Otherwise, the beer will never go terminal, and the residual starch will make it cloyingly sweet.” For a 5-gallon batch of imperial stout in the 1.100 OG range, he recommends “pitching the slurry from at least a 1-liter starter, or brew another 5-gallon batch of normal-strength stout or ale and repitch the slurry from that.”

The post Bell’s Brewery Expedition Stout Clone appeared first on American Homebrewers Association.

Lamb and mint are a classic pairing, and despite my best efforts, I haven’t been able to find a historic reason for why these two are irresistible side by side. Either way, this fresh herb and full-flavored meat have been known to be served together as far back as the 18^th century. Who loves braised lamb leg and mint jelly? I do!

I love meatballs, mostly because they are easy, but also because they’re versatile. You can basically make a meatball out of anything, not to mention the endless possibilities for what to serve with them. I like to put them atop a fresh arugula salad with roasted sweet potatoes drizzled with the mint yogurt sauce. The sky is the limit, though. Serve them with a root vegetable puree and wilted greens, wrap them in a pita, or pair with a fresh cucumber and tomato salad. The dynamic flavor of the two together is sure to be the shining star, no matter how you decide to prepare them.

Simple Lamb Meatball & Yogurt Sauce Recipe

Directions:

Prep time: 15 minutes

1. Add all the ingredients except the eggs to a medium mixing bowl. Mix well until all ingredients are combined. Add the eggs to the mixture, making sure the egg is evenly distributed throughout the meat and spice mixture. Roll the mixture into approximately 12 meatballs. Set aside on a plate, covered.
2. Prepare your yogurt sauce. Simply add all the ingredients into a small bowl and whisk together until the mixture is creamy but slightly thin (dressing consistency).
3. Heat oil in a pan on medium-high heat. Toss your rolled meatballs into the pan and cook until they are slightly firm on the outside. Let them rest, and then serve topped with yogurt sauce and a garnish of fresh mint.

Pairing Suggestions

In thinking about a swoon-worthy beer when you sit down to this meal, I can’t help but focus on the key elements of the ingredients. Lamb is fatty and more gamy than poultry or beef, which is probably why it does so well with the fresh, bright, and floral flavor of mint. A California common beer is an excellent choice for this meal because the Northern Brewer hops complement the minty, herbal flavor of the dressing, while the bitterness can cut the fattiness of the lamb and elevate the umami aspects of the meat that we all love so much.

California Common Homebrew Recipe

If you’re planning ahead, brew this California Common recipe, the “Dream Steam,” that won a gold medal in the 2016 National Homebrew Competition in Baltimore, Md.

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Hailing from the South, Millie Shamburger has developed an affinity for the beer industry and all the shiny things that come with it. When not exploring beer, Millie is in the kitchen, enjoying the outdoors, and wearing out her dancing shoes. 

The post Brew & Bites: Lamb Meatballs with Mint Yogurt Sauce and California Common appeared first on American Homebrewers Association.