Best Lightning Ever

Last night was one of the best lightning storms I've seen in awhile. Lightning was going off at least every 7-10 seconds. The power went out and my friend was stuck in the elevator. It was a good night! I took lots of photos, my favorites can be seen on my flickr profile at http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianwestcott/.

In other news, Friday was my very last day working for Alley Kat Brewing. As mentioned in previous postings, I'm heading off to Edinburgh Scotland for my MSc in brewing & distilling at Heriot-Watt University in October. I'm taking the next two months off to do some traveling to Ontario & New York, then moving out of my place in Edmonton, then maybe going up to Northern Manitoba again to see the girlfriend.

I will probably be visiting the Toronto Beer Festival on August 9th, but more on that later...

Cheers!

Canadian Bacon

Oddly, in my 28+ years on earth I had yet to see the film Canadian Bacon... its funny, and quite prophetic really.

That is all.

Great Canadian Beer Festival?

Anybody out there want to do a road trip to the Great Canadian Beer Festival with me in Victoria? Its being heald Sept 7-8 this year. I won't be working for Alley Kat any more at that time, so I'm free to do pretty much whatever I want (although hmm... I wonder if they would be in for paying me to be a rep? Free trips are fun :)

Anyway, this festival is apparently the best of all Canadian beer festivals as far as I've heard.

Let me know if you want to go!

In other news, I'm heading off to Northern Manitoba (Cranberry Portage, to be exact) for the next week with the girlfriend, and I'm quite excited for it.

Cheers, and happy Canada Day (tomorrow)!

New Camera

Well, this last week I finally gave into this new 'ebay' craze and actually bought something I wanted off of it. I bought a Canon EOS 350D / Rebel XT Digital SLR. As you may know, SLRs have replaceable lenses and are generally 'better' that compact cameras. My brother had a bunch of lenses and other photography equipment so I figured it was about time I got a nice digital camera to use them with. This is my first digital SLR.

I used to be pretty into photography, but I fell out of it for awhile I guess. Mostly because I only had film equipment and it was way easier to just use my 3.2 mp digital point and shoot than to deal with rolls of film and the costs associated with them.

Of course, this purchase is just on the heels of my purchase of a Canon Powershot G7, and awesome camera in its own right. But yet, not SLR (its not even really that compact, but it has manual abilities, loads of good features, and can take a speedlite flash unit). Thus, my spending has been rather INSANE of late. The dSLR is great but bluky, so the G7 is still good when I don't want to haul all that SLR stuff around (camera plus 2 extra lenses, maybe an extra flash).

I've been biking a lot more lately, and I also just purched a Lowepro Slingshot 100 sling bag (over one shoulder) and its perfect. It doesn't slip around my back, is uber-comfortable, and holds everything I need it to.

Anyway... thats it. Oh beer? Hm, nothing new of late.

Silver Medal!

Oh, and I forgot to mention in my last post that the rhubarb/berry beer a friend of mine and I made won a silver medal in the fruit beer category!

The recipe/method is outlined in this old post.

London Porter Showdown

Yeah yeah, I know, I suck at posting these days. I have lots to post about, I just lack the time/energy.

Anyway, I tried Paddock Wood's London Porter side-by-side with Fuller's London Porter (which is considered the standard for the style). While Fuller's London Porter is a nice easy drinking good beer, I found the Paddock Wood version to have just a bit more of what I like - a moderate but not overpowering roast and slight coffee flavour. Quite tasty.

What else is new in beer? We (the Edmonton Homebrewer's Guild) had our annual homebrew competition last weekend, with much success. I judged beer for the first time, judging the Oktoberfest and Stout categories. The stouts were very competitive. There were 5 excellent samples of which I would have paid money to drink any of them. Unfortunately, only 3 can get medals. One person will be receiving a couple of score sheets with a 41 score (of 50, a VERY high score for a beer) but get no medal... sucks to be that guy/girl. The winners were decided amongst me and three other judges, so no it wasn't just me picking beers.

I have a lot of pictures from the competition, you can see them at my (new) flickr address: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianwestcott/sets/72157600336465572/

Cheers!

I dare say, and excellent day

So I had this Monday off, and what a day for it. Edmonton weather had a high temp of 30 C, and there wasn't a cloud in the sky until about 3 pm. I had to get my passport application into the passport office, so I took the morning to do that. I walked through the river valley and in about 40 min and a relaxing walk I was at the government building. I had heard the wait was insane these days for passports now that the paranoid American administration require every damn person to have a passport to enter their country. I was smart and did my passport application on-line before arriving at the office, which they reward by letting you skip line. I had to wait in the "pre-screen" line for about 50 minutes... after I was pre-screened I was given my number... I had barely sat down for 2 minutes when my number came up, way before people who had been waiting since before I even got there as far as I could tell. So, I was there for about an hour and 5 minutes.

I strolled back through downtown snapping a couple of photos that wern't very good and purched some ice cream, which made me quite happy. I was just thinking how great this day was going so far when I looked down and to my surprise... there was a five dollar bill sitting on the ground in the grass! This day just keeps getting better!

I decided to put my newly found five bucks to good use, and since I've been slacking on a scholarship application that I need to do for school starting in october, I went to my favorite local coffee shop and hacked out some ideas over coffees and beer. Quite a productive day for me, really.

The great day continues as I sit here on my balcony in the blazing sun tanning my ridiculously white skin (or, more likely, burning it) with my laptop typing this and sipping on some fine raspberry mead from our brewery.

All in all, I could do this every day, and I intend to for the most part in August-Sept before I leave for Scotland (which, btw, is only about 112 days away!)

Speaking of time off, I really want to learn how to sail. Anybody out there have time to teach me some weekend? I love watercraft. It must be the newfie in me.

Cheers,
Brian

Birthday & Imperial Stout

Well, here in Alberta its slowly fighting its way toward summer with periods of crappy rainy-snowy coldness followed quickly by days like today. This photo is what I see in front of me right now, at my parents place. Nice eh?

So my calendar told me that tomorrow is my 28th birthday. Last year I did absolutely nothing for my 27th, so this year I decided to put a mild effort and have a small BBQ tonight. I'm serving up some rather nice homebrewed wit beer on tap, as well as some leftover Amber Brown Ale that our brewery makes. People like free beer, so hopefully that attracts a few people.

Speaking of homebrew, I've decided to brew what I hope is an interesting "imperial stout". I put the quotation marks around the style as I'm not realy too concerned with style in this case. Here is the planned recipe, with some discussion afterwards:
28th Birthday Imperial Stout

Size: 25 L
Efficiency: 86.0%
Attenuation: 73%

Original Gravity: 1.085
Terminal Gravity: 1.023
Color: 40.5
Alcohol: 8.19%
Bitterness: 47.2 (BU:GU = 0.56)

Ingredients:
3.4 kg Standard 2-Row (40%)
3 kg Maris Otter Pale (35%)
510 g Oats Flaked (6%)
650 g Roast Barley (7.7%)
595 g Black Malt (7%)
340 g Crystal Malt 120°L (4%)
37 g Centennial (9.5%) - added first wort, boiled 90 min
30 g East Kent Goldings (6.2%) - added during boil, boiled 15 min

Mash at 67 C for 1 hr, mashout 78 C.
--------------
Now some style purists might exclaim "but Brian, an Imperial Stout is supposed to have at least 50 IBU in it, preferably much much more!" but I care not. In fact, I was thinking of having even less hop bitterness. You see, 14.7% of the malt bill is very dark malts. My hope is that the bitterness from the 'burnt' roast barley and black malt actually balance the other malt sweetness in this beer. It will be nice to see if its over the top. I plan on aging it over a year while I'm gone in scotland too.
I might actually take out the EKG hop addition and make it all FWH centennial hopping, not sure yet.

Anyway... let me know your thoughts on the recipe/etc.
Cheers

New Books

So I ordered some brewing books from amazon.ca a month or so ago, and the just arrived today. It was only because I ordered 4 books, and one of them (a book on cask ales) wasn't available yet, so they eventually just shipped what they could (at no extra cost I'll get the 4th later... not a bad deal).
Anyway, I ordered:














"Principles of Brewing Science, 2nd Ed" by George Fix
"Extreme Brewing" by Sam Calagione
and "Brewed in Canada" by Allen Winn Sneath

Principles of Brewing Science will be a great way for me to pre-study for my MSc program coming up in September. It really gets me back to my biochemistry knowledge and has the science behind brewing I really like (and need) to know.
Extreme Brewing is a little bit of a disappointment so far, but it does seem to have some good info about using weird spices/sugars/etc that is hard to find elsewhere. But it also as a lot of introductory info about the basics of homebrewing... I'd figure that anybody who is going to buy a book on extreme brewing should have started with brewing basics, but whatever.
Brewed in Canada is a history of the 350 year old Canadian brewing industry. I've only barely started to read it, but it shall be interesting for sure.

Cheers!

HOLY F'N CRAP

Ok, so I haven't been the best blogger. In fact, I've been one of the worst in the last few months. If you want to blame something, I'd blame my super-awesome girlfriend. Those female creatures have a way of diverting you from important things like writing seldom-read articles about small-time brewing that a normally lonely and bored guy like me would write daily.

In any case, I'm sitting on my 10th floor balcony tonight drinking the 2007 barley wine that I had the extreme pleasure of brewing & filtering for Alley Kat (my most prized accomplishment, as far as I'm concerned), and damn that beer is good. I'm not one to toot my own horn... but BEEP BEEP. It wasn't my recipe, but I figure if the brewer sucked (who is me) it would have certainly not been as good. In any case, I'm quite proud of it and you should go get some.


In other beer news, the Edmonton Homebrewers' Guild participated in the 2007 Big Brew! It was a fun day that was hosted by our brewery. We (the other brewer, Sean, and I) produced what seems to be a lovely wheat beer (60% wheat malt, 35% barley maly, 5% munich). We produced 23 hL, which I think will be a contender for the top amount produced in North America by any club. Last year we were 3rd with 15 hL. Personally, made 5 batches using different yeasts:
(OG 1.050)
-Belgian Wit (has fermented down to 1.012, tastes ... tasty)
-Belgian Saison (has only fermented to 1.036!! I will give it more time)
-LALEGER (a mix of Alley Kat Ale & Lager yeasts fermented at 19C for 1 week then dropped to 3C and aged... has fermented to 1.012 and has a assy sulfur taste to it :(
-Rosselare Lambic strain... (so far fermented to 1.026, but seems to still be going and has a mild sour character to it... I'll let this one age for a couple of months)

I've also been having good luck with my other homebrew/test batches these days. I get excellent feedback from the homebrewer's guild (full of BJCP judges and people who will give an honest opinion). Recently, my blueberry-rhubarb wheat beer was presented to them and it was actually pretty nice. I couldn't drink a pint of it because of the sourness, but its really good for about 5 oz.

The EHG is having its yearly brewing competition soon, I advise anybody out there who homebrews to enter some beers to it, and even come by for the events. We're very welcoming and there are some awesome parties (with lots of beer... naturally :)

Cheers!

A new post...

Ok, well I'm far too tired to create a real new post now, but I have lots of beer news. First, I brewed another English bitter... but then I lost my brewday logsheet and I did a lot of things different than my planned recipe. That sucks.

Next, our brewery is releasing a raspberry mead which is quite awesome if I don't say so myself, it should be out in a few weeks, even though we have it in bottles now, we just need labels. If you ask nicely I might let you have some early... ;)
In addition, I just filtered out kristalweizen today, and its rather tasty. It won't be available for a few weeks. Oh, and don't buy any Kiltlifter (our last seasonal) as I want to take it all home...

I'm currently listening to Amon Tobin's Live aux Docks de Lausanne set, and its pretty awesome. But then again, what of his isn't awesome? He is by a wide margin my favorite artist ever. If you haven't heard his stuff, get it and listen... because seriously he is brilliant.

Cheers

200th Post Extravaganza

Ok, well since this post is my 200th post I have been avoiding actually writing it as I feel I should write something big and important...

But alas, faithful readers (all 6 of you), I have nothing exciting to report. My beers that I entered to Regina didn't win any medals, perhaps because I definitely over-sanitized the bottles with a too-strong sanitizer solution. The bottles I tried that were left here tasted sharp and 'bitey'. Either that or all my beers sucked. But at least the stuff I served on tap to my friends and to the Homebrewers' Guild were very well received, so thats all I really care about. In fact, in the last two weekends people have drank about 30 L of my homebrew... I need to make more homebrew now!

Speaking of making more homebrew... well, it seems like my time is lacking these days. I'd love to make an English IPA though.

Ok, so thats it for my lame 200th post... cheers.