Back from Travels

Ok, so I did one blog post while I was gone for two weeks. Not so good. I drank lots of new beers and had a great time visiting friends & family along the way through Ontario and then down into New York.

Now that I'm back, I do intend to post my photos and update the blog with the beers I've tried. But I may have to wait a bit since I'm actually freaking out a bit on how much I need to get done in the next few days. See, I need to move out of my place in Edmonton, and get all my shit together for moving to Scotland at the end of September. Oh, and of course I need to spend lots of time with the girlfriend.
Oh and I need to do some upgrades to the condo before I rent it out.

In any case, I'll get around to it in a couple of days when things die down a little. You can probably check out some photos of my trip on Facebook or at my flickr site http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianwestcott/ (I haven't added them yet, but thats a project for the the next hour...)

Cheers!

Stratford, Ontario

The first stop on my little trip here is in Stratford, Ontario, which for you not in the know is right about here. I have family here, so I've mostly been relaxing, eating good food, and doing some sailing. Quite a nice start really. Tomorrow I'm off to Toronto.

I've finally had a chance to try Creemore Springs Lager. Now, I'm aware that Creemore was bought by Molson a few years back, and that people were worried that it would suddenly drop in quality because they'd be forced to change or something. I don't know what it tasted like before, but I quite enjoyed the several I had. It has a nice hop-malt balance and some hop flavour, certainly more than the average lager. Its a good beer.

What else in beer... hm. I tried "Stratford Pilsner". I hadn't heard much good about it before I tried it, but I gave it a chance. Unfortunately I had to agree... it had a harsh grainy malt character. I also tried a blonde ale from a craft brewery in Windsor.. I can't remember the name though. Whitmore? Perhaps. It wasn't bad, but it also wasn't really special... nothing stood out as interesting to me. But that may just be because I've tried a lot of beer.

Anyway... cheers!

Going on Tour

I'm just packing to leave for a 2 week stint around Eastern Canada and the States visiting friends and family. Stops at:
Stratford (Ontario)
Toronto (theres a beer festival here too!)
Ottawa
Montreal (maybe, if I feel like it)
New York City (Amon Tobin concert on a boat!)

I'll actually attempt to write about beers and breweries I find along the way, which should make my blog interesting again ;)

Cheers!

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!