The Hopopotamus™ Debuts and Time Inconsistent Preferences

Despite my claims that it is the Best Beer in the History of the World™, this the first iteration of The Hopopotamus™is good but could use some fine tuning.  The hop alchemy yielded stong citrus but fewer floral notes than I had hoped.  The yeast (Wyeast American Ale II was a wonder, hungry and effective - the final gravity of 1.010) was a good choice and I am pleased with the color and bitterness. But the hops don't sing in perfect harmony.  I slightly under-primed the bottles intentionally to give it a bit of a cask mouthfeel.  And it is definitely a beer that does not like to be served too cold.

UPDATE: Serving it at appropriate temperature transforms the beer. It is really quite tasty when not chilled beyond recognition. My fridge seems to have gone a bit hyperactive, once I solved the temp problem the beer really shined. I am very pleased.

I have an idea of making the The Hopopotamus™ as an annual experiment in hop alchemy.  Each year the same recipe save for a new mix of many hop varieties.  

Anyway, The Hopopotamus™ made me think of another way in which I fail to act like a textbook rational economic agent: I have a hoarding problem and therefore "time-inconsistent preferences.

...

Do you ever get caught up in the moment - at a pub say - and have that extra beer that later you regret ("I really didn't need that last one and now I have a headache...")? These types of indulgences that lead to later regret - something you would do differently if you had the chance to do it again - are examples of what economists like to call "time-inconsistent preferences."

It applies to procrastination as well, putting of an unpleasant task (like mowing the lawn, say) and then having to do it later under worse conditions (longer grass) is another type of time-inconsistent preference.  

What the term refers to technically is when people make mistakes in their choices because they put too much weight on the present. If people acted like computers they would very rationally take into account all future time periods appropriately and we would never regret our actions (or at least those with predictable outcomes).

For me this behavior manifests itself in many ways but one of the most apparent is my tendency to covet.  I hate to consume something that I enjoy because once I do, I know it will be gone. This could be rational if I get enjoyment in the anticipation and in the consumption - by delaying consumption I could maximize the total enjoyment I get for the good. But for me it becomes a burden, delaying until finally to good itself degrades, or the optimal moment passes. In fact this why, after a period where I was building up a collection, I stopped cellaring wine. I could never deal with the whole waiting until the optimal time problem.

Well, this same type of time-inconsistent behavior bedevils me in beer brewing as well. Last weekend The Hopopotamus™ was finally ready for its debut, and the result is great.  But now I have the problem of coveting it - I want to drink it and it is fresh and ready now, it will only get worse through time, but I don't want to reach the day when it is all gone. So I find excuses not to drink it and eventually will have a number of bottles in the back of the fridge that are way past their sell-by date so to speak. I will then regret coveting it so much and wish I had been less stingy with it early.  

At least I have an understanding and a name for my disorder.

The Hopopotamus™ Lives!

I am very pleased with my new all-outdoor brewing set-up, and was so determined to brew outdoors that The Hopopotamus™was delayed by the extended wet and cold weather we have had over the last few weeks.  But last Friday the weather cleared, I wrapped up all the tasks I had to do early, and set to brewing.

After a trip to Steinbart's, where many hops were purchased, I swung by and picked up The Beerax for moral and spiritual guidance and then set up my al-fresco brewhouse on my patio.  My new propane burner was fantastic and in no time at all I was ready to mash.  So mash I did.  Here is a picture of the grain sack early on in the mash.

 

Then it was time for the powdered malt extract andhere the trouble began.  After stirring the malt extract a little I noticed my floating thermometer was trying to float horizontally. I figured at fist this was due to malt extract - pretty gooey stuff before it dissolves - sticking to it.  But when I pulled it out I discovered, to my horror, that it had shattered at the bottom leaving behind glass and weighting pellets of unknown provenance. [In the picture you can see the offending thermometer] The thermometer itself which rests inside the glass container, was intact (and thus no mercury contamination - if there is any in these things anymore), so there was a few moments when I pondered continuing on and straining out the debris.  After all, the little weighting pellets couldn't be lead could they?  No one would be the wiser, I thought, and what is a little shard of glass in a beer anyway but a fun amusement?  

Fortunately, seeing my moment of weakness, Jeff looked at me in the eye and said "I 'aint drinking your beer man..."  Of course he was right and so a mad dash to Steinbart's ensued - in rush hour, argh! - to procure more grain and malt extract.  And in this cautionary tale lies yet another reason homebrewing is not a money saver - this will end up being an expensive beer, economies of scale indeed.  

So after a refreshing jaunt through Portland traffic, back we arrived and re-started the entire process with a new thermometer.  Once the grain bill was fully infused the fun began.  I, being the Beer-Whisperer, had an unconventional sense that I should add the low alpha acid hops early, creating a base of gentle bitterness that would then be layered upon with pungent, high AA, hops later in the boil.  Jeff, however, started getting skittish about the result being under-hopped and was strangely unimpressed by my Beer-Whisperer's certainty that my instinct was True and Good.  

This unsettled me.  Jeff is, after all, the Beer-Savant (or the Rain Man of beer as I like to call him) and my conviction started to wane, so I capitulated.  [Later Jeff would say that he was merely posing the question and not making a suggestion - so now I call him the passive-aggressive Rain Man of beer] I thus threw in an ounce of the ultra-high AA Simcoe hops and switched the order of the moderate AA Cascades and the lower Crystals.  More Simcoe and Amarillo were added late and in the picture below you can see the wonderful, glorious oil-slick of hop resin as well as the remaining Amarillo waiting in the carboy as my dry-hops.  

Maybe Jeff was right, thought I, as the final product in the carboy whispered to me that it was good.  I have had a bit of a under-fermentation problem recently, so I pitched two packs of Wyeast's American Ale II yeast, which reputedly is the Anchor Ale yeast.  Never used it before but it, of course, whispered to me that it was the One.

And so The Hopopotamus™sits in my basement fermenting away getting ready to make its world premier in another few weeks.

Over at the Beeronomics blog (which is simply a collection of all my Beeronomics posts from this blog) A commentator noted that perhaps my assertion that The Hopopotamus™name was a registered trademark was suspect as Roots has already had a beer of that name.  I had not known of (or more likely not remembered) the Root's brew, but in any event Craig spelled it Hoppopotamus whereas I go for the more parsimonious use of the p.  Regardless the registered trademark symbol was entirely a joke, but lest the feds get whiff of The Hopopotaumus™- and surely they will what with all the hops - I have switched to the TM symbol.  So there.

And I did rip-off the name, but not from Craig Nicholls, rather I stole it from The Flight of the Conchords.  Enjoy:

Hops Poll

Hey thanks for chiming in on my now closed hops poll. I think the Hopopotamus®
will begin life with a four different hops (because a Hopopotamus®
should really full of both lots of hops and lots of varieties). So I am going to go with Crystal as a base, and Amarillo, Cascade and a touch of Simcoe hops for flavor and aroma.  Crazy, I know, but the people are going to expect something crazy good when they hear the name Hopopotamus®. And what the people want, I deliver.

The wisdom of the crowd - well really just a gaggle - suggested Willamette, but Simcoe is just too alluring...

I'll let you know how it turns out.

A Beeronomics Poll: Hops in THE HOPOPOTAMUS®

Okay, spring leaves beer on the mind.  I am preparing for the worldwide premier of THE HOPOPOTAMUS® and yet I have not finalized the recipe, especially the hops.  I am pretty sure that Crystal, Cascade and Amarillo will make the cut, but I figure why not let my dear readers chime in?  Besides I am an economist and should not be trusted to brew a beer as anticipated as THE HOPOPOTAMUS®.  So I have created a poll to tap into the wisdom of crowds.


So, lend me your expertise and take the poll (over at The Oregon Economics Blog)!  I probably won't make it to Steinbart's until the weekend after next, so you have a little time to ponder. 

Fail

Update: Just transferred it to a secondary fermenter and took a little zwickel.  Result: not half bad.  A little intensely bitter, but the hops do sing - beautifully aromatic and flavorful.  I think this, done again properly, may well be the HOPOPOTAMUS flag bearer.

It is with a bit of sheepishness that I admit to being, up until recently, a partial extract brewer.  Partly this is because of how successful you can be brewing with part grain/part dry malt extract, partly it is due to the the additional equipment requirements, but mostly it was due to lack of imagination and motivation.  But my brother, the professional brewer, called me a wimp for not going all-grain and extolled the virtues of the added flexibility all-grain brewing provides.

So I finally relented.  I have now made the great leap forward to all-grain brewing.  I had no doubt that I could do it without much extra effort and I had no doubt that I could do it exceptionally well.  Hubris.  What I did was a complete botch-up job.

But first a little background.  When I begin to consider going all-grain, I of course thought of the cheap converted plastic cooler and was ready to invest the $50 and get going.  But alas my wife, erstwhile employee of an environmental organization, starting yammering on about heating up plastic, venting toxins, yada yada yada.  [Next she'll be on about the dangers of storing waste from an alumina plant in a big reservoir - yea right, like what could possibly go wrong with that?]  Anyway, so the plastic cooler plan was scuttled.

Thus it came to pass that my birthday arrived and my whole family got together and bought me an obscenely fancy - but obscenely cool - mash tun and I was a-ready to brew.  [They also bought me a massively outsized but incredibly awesome mash paddle]

The Mash

What better way to begin my life of all-grain brewing, thought I, than to brew the next installment of THE HOPOPOTAMUS - the best beer in the world?   So off to Steinbart's I went, collecting The Beerax along the way, to buy an enormous amount of grain.  13.5 pounds to be precise.  I also grabbed five, yes five different varieties of hops, one upping the previous Hopopot by adding Columbus hops to the mix.  

The Beerax and the Paddle

And we were ready to begin.

The Oregon Brewers Festival

I got back from my little vacation just in time to fulfill my annual obligation to meet up with old Lewis & Clark College buddies at the OBF.  We bumped our little rondez-vous up to Thursday this year as it has gotten so popular that even meeting on Friday at the Noon opening exposes us to uncomfortably large crowds.  Fortunately Thursday is still reasonable and the weather yesterday couldn't have been more delightful.

But this raises the question in my mind (and in the mind of my fellow economics major): why after all these years is the price essentially the same as it ever was - or in real terms even cheaper? Put another way, why don't they double the prices and start to limit the crowds?  This suggestion was met immediately with derision form our humanities major friends who considered the suggestion elitist and just the sort of crap you could expect from economists.  I suspect that the answer is in the objective function of the OBF organizers.  The festival is supposed to be a showpiece for craft beer and the more people they can expose the better.  They want the festival as big as can be.  For those of us who dislike crowds fortunately there is still Thursday, which is reasonable in terms of population.  I shall get nowhere near the festival today or this weekend.

But you should: there are some great beers to be sampled.  I particularly liked Boundary Bay's German Tradition Double Dry Hopped Pale Ale.  It was excellent and the German Tradition hops interesting if a little astringent.  This year's Collaborator Pilsner is a real winner and will be an excellent choice for the weekend which is supposed to get hot.  Green Flash's LeFreak is interesting and great - hoppy Belgian.  FInally for you hop heads look no farther than THE HOPOPOTAMUS inspired Hop Valley Alpha Centuri Binary IPA.  Er, what were those hops again?  Ah yes, Simcoe, Cascade, Amarillo - a coincidence? I think not.  And I have become a huge fan of Kolsch, especially on hot summer days, so if you are looking for a refreshing beer in the 90-something degree heat try the Three Creeks Creekside Kolsch.  You will not be disappointed.

Oh and for the love of all that is good and true: avoid the Three Skulls Hop The Plank IPA, it is horrible.

Sadly THE HOPOPOTAMUS was not invited, but based on the AGs recent interpretation of the homebrew law, the OLCC would have banned its consumption anyway.

Anyway, go, have fun and explore good beers.  One obvious trend that mimics the local scene is the rise of Belgian styles, so this is a great opportunity to get to know those as well as the traditional hop forward styles we Northwesterners love.

Oh and check out all of the banners flying in the tents.  These things are getting seriously old now and there are as many defunct breweries represented as thriving ones.  Which just goes to my point about the inherently turbulent nature of the business.

Parliament Hopadelic

All right I give up.  After visiting OakShire and seeing that one of their fermentors is called, yes, Hopopotamus, and after Silver Moon Brewing named their fresh hop beer Hoppapotamus, and since it was Roots that started the whole thing I am hereby jettisoning the name Hopopotamus.

This is appropriate as I have tweaked the recipe by adding a fifth hop which has elevated the beer to new heights and it has now crossed over into seriously funky territory.  I am not talking the kind of funky that comes from poor sanitation, I am talking about P-Funk funky. So from now on my IPA, the "best beer in the world," shall be known as PARLIAMENT HOPADELIC (TM).  Aka the legendary P-Hop. 

By the way, I was planning on a worldwide release in the future (like when the beer was actually ready), but that danged Alworth had to start suggesting P-Funk names on the #1 beer blog in the USA.  This is what I get for letting him into my confidence...

Four Great Northwest IPAs

I am in full vacation mode again for a few days while relatives are visiting, so I leave you with this bit of eye candy.  This is from a great NW IPA - off contest that I held with some friends.  They are, in L-R order, Ft. George Vortex, Pelican's IPA, Bear Republic Racer 5 and Ninkasi's Total Domination IPA.  Not pictured: THE HOPOPOTAMUS, which was there in a bottle but never got opened.

The Ft. George was in a growler that was by then two days old, so it was not at its freshest peak so it was at a disadvantage, but it was clearly the most fecund: it smells, tastes and feels alive and all in the best possible sense. Racer 5 is probably the other beer that has that floral essence infused and it is no accident that these two are the two unfiltered beers.  Both Pelican and Ninkasi are cleaner in that sense, a crisper mouthfeel and taste.  What I find remarkable about the Total Domination is the balance between crispness, flavor and nose. It was my pick when pressed - it is a phenomenal beer.  But the really good news is that you don't have to pick and you can let your love of variety (a general assumption in economics about peoples preferences, by the way) carry you away to the far reaches of the beer cooler in the market.

When I demanded that they pick one, the others found it hard to choose a favorite as well, especially since, after a few sips of each, all subtlety is lost - you palate has been nuked.  Since the Vortex was slightly stale, the other winners were Racer 5 and Ninkasi, but the Racer 5 pick was thought to be for Pelican (see below).  We all agreed that you cannot go wrong with any of these.  In fact, they were picked because they represent my very favorite beers over all.  I wanted to add a Hair of the Dog Blue Dot to this flight, but alas it is not in season (oh please, Alan Sprints, make this a year round beer!) and I would have added Double Mountain's IRA, but they do not bottle and I had been in Astoria not Hood River.  So I recommend any of these without reservation and since Ft. George is not available in a bottle, get it when you can.  Double Mountain is easy to find in Portland, but for some reason the IRA is not - always with the Hop Lava.  That's what a cute name buys you, I guess.

Oh and, by the way, we started this as a blind test but we all found it easy to tell which was which.  Almost immediately there was a consensus.  Except for one problem, we all mixed up the Pelican with the Racer 5.  Which, in retrospect, is embarrassing - they don't seem alike at all, especially the way they look.

THE HOPOPOTAMUS would have stood up pretty well against these beers but I decided not to as I wanted to keep it a fair fight.  We did later crack my latest attempt at a NW Best Bitter.  Which is getting there but still a work in progress.  I switched to Whitbread Ale yeast and got some surprising results.

Anyway, got to go entertain the in-laws.  Have a great weekend - pick up one of these beer and let me know what you think.

Getting There...

Doughing in

A while back I wrote a lengthy post about my first disastrous attempt at all-grain brewing.  Surprisingly the finished product from that comedy of errors is quite enjoyable.  It has some residual sugars that didn't ferment thanks to our mash temp going way too high too soon, but we also hopped the heck out of it so the result is actually quite balanced and the hop note is fabulous.  So it is probably the worlds first 3% ABV hop bomb.  Weird but kinda nice.   By the way, such failure does not warrant the moniker THE HOPOPOTAMUS, and as we were worried that it was just going to be a thin beer with an enormous amount of hops, we decided to christen it the FIRE-BREATHING DRAGON!  [This after considering and rejecting 'Chemical Burn' and 'Shock and Awe']  

Still, it was time to get back in the saddle and after much consultation with my baby brother, the pro (and a graduate of UC Davis's Master Brewer Program and an IBD certified Master Brewer) I thought I was ready to do it again. Nice to have an expert in the family. I guess I should note that absent my own hubris I would have had a long conversation with my brother prior to doing the first one which might have headed off many of my problems - thought it is hard to anticipate things you have no experience with.  I am not sure that in the end such a strategy would have been better as failure is very, very instructive.  And doing it all right the first time inevitably leads to questions of whether it is all really necessary and whether some corners could be cut, etc.  Nothing quite like learning by doing...

Anyway, the prospect of the last great day of the season induced The Beerax and me to brew.  So we came up with what we thought would be a perfect beer for the season: a nice porter (a little extra hopped because we are, after all, in the NW).  So we ran off to Steinbarts again and were a-ready to roll. 

So here were the adjustments I made which I share in case others out there are ready to give it a try:

The mash

-My prized and overly fancy mash tun is quite wide and has a false bottom that is about an inch and a half off of the bottom of the kettle.  When figuring the appropriate amount of water I need (roughly one quart per pound of grist) to figure it as in addition to the water below the false bottom.   A little test revealed that this area contains 1.75 gallons of water!  So my original mash was way low in water volume.

-My original strike temperature (heat of the water before you dump in the grain) was 165 degrees, my brother suggested that 175 would have been better for my last beer.  For this beer, given its lower grist volume, we went for about 172.   This ended up being spot-on and we mashed beautifully at our ideal 150 degrees.

-My brother urged us to vorlauf (recirculate the mash water by draining off the bottom and slowly pouring it on top of the grain bed) slow and long.  We did it for about 20-25 minutes.  Previously we drained about two quarts off until it seemed clear and then dumped the thing back in and called it good.

-My brother also urged going very slow on the sparging (adding fresh hot water to rinse the grain) and draining the mashing out at the same rate as the sparge water was coming in. We increased the sparge water temp at the advice of the bro to 175.  Last time we drained and sparged very quickly (in about 5 minutes).  This time we sparged for 30 minutes.

Sparging ... slowly

-Previously we lost a startling amount of liquid in the boil, partly this was due to loose hops we figured (and the sheer volume of hops) but we also thought (and my bother agreed) that we underestimated evaporation.  This time we figured for one gallon loss rather than the half gallon we had before.  We also increased our estimate of water loss from the hops.  

-Final advice from my brother: increase the amount of grain by about a pound because you can always add water if your OG is too high, but if it is too low you have no recourse.

So what was the result? Almost a complete success, our mash efficiency was spot-on and the wort and hops additions appeared just about perfect.  Our only problem was that we did not loose the amount of water we thought we would and so our sparge water calculation was too high.  This might be because we boiled in a narrower pot, and thus the loss due to evaporation was less?  Anyone know if this difference could have a significant effect?  We did adjust our grain bill by adding an extra half pound but in retrospect we should have probably done a full pound extra as the bro suggested.

We also put our hops in a nylong bag this time rather than using the mash tun as a hopback which I think means a lot less water is lost through the water retention of the hops.  Maybe loose hops also increase the surface evaporation?  Anyway, we ended up with a lower OG than we were targeting and out final result will be a bit too light.  Dang.  Still, I consider it a huge success with only one final little wrinkle to iron out.   It will still be a good beer, just not quite perfect.

Next time...

By the way, my brother now brews for Summit in St. Paul, Minnesota check it out when you are in the area.  

Hops May Help Prevent Prostate Cancer

USA Today reports that an ingredient in hops, xanthohumol, may help prevent prostate cancer by acting as a testosterone blocker. From the article:

An ingredient of beer may someday help ward off prostate cancer, new animal experiments suggest.
The compound in question, xanthohumol, is found in hops — the bitter flavoring agent in beer — and is known to block the male hormone testosterone, which plays a role in the development of prostate cancer.

"We hope that one day we can demonstrate that xanthohumol prevents prostate cancer development, first in animal models and then in humans, but we are just at the beginning," said lead researcher Clarissa Gerhauser, group leader of cancer chemoprevention in the division of epigenomics and cancer risk factors at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg.

The findings were to be presented Dec. 9 at a conference of the American Association for Cancer Research in Houston.

Xanthohumol is a flavonoid, a group found in many plants, fruits, vegetables and spices. Studies of xanthohumol have shown that it blocks estrogen by binding to its receptor, which may lead to prevention of breast cancer, the researchers say. It's known that estrogen and testosterone receptors react in similar ways.

As always, I bring such good news at perfect moments in which to conduct your own experiments. Quick, run out and get yee to Belmont Station and load up with a crate full of Hopopotamus® and hunker down for the ice storm of the century! Your prostate will thank you (and will probably get a lot of exercise as well as you make many trips to the bathroom - okay, a little too much: getting giddy from the end of the term euphoria).

[HT: John Foyston]

Brewing it Yourself and Growing Your Own

Over a year ago I mused about whether brewing your own beer was a cost saving strategy and concluded that at the scale of a part-time homebrewer the answer was no.  A big part of the cost of ingredients (inputs in econospeak) was the cost of hops (which were particularly high at the time).  But hops are practically a weed man, thought I, what if I grow my own?   So I did, or am about to, to be precise.  For $4.50 I bought a rhizome, a scrounged about for some unused pieces of wood to build a makeshift support for the vine and voila - hops!!  I hope.  

What to grow caused me to ponder - but not for too long.  I really wanted to grow two varieties (and in fact bought two rhizomes) but the wife convinced me that given our wee garden and my inexperience with gigantic hop vines, I had better just start with one.   I chose Cascade - I mean was there really a choice: high yielding, wonderfully versatile with a lovely citrusy-floral bouquet?  No.  Willamette was the other rhizome I bought (anyone want it?), I thought it would be a good complement but alas, next summer.

Finding space was a challenge and of course a good economist thinks about opportunity cost, so... out went the sage!  Opportunity cost of just about zero, right?  Apparently my wife was not so sure, but what's done is done and I am sure she will stop being mad at me once she tastes the beer that will result - and between now and then is only 6 or 7 months...

Nevertheless, your intrepid beeronomist jury-rigged a hop support and prayed that he would still have a fence come winter. Besides, I kept them out of the veggie beds which my wife controls (and hasn't gotten around to weeding yet) so I am on pretty firm ground here.  If only she were a beer lover...

So at about $2 an ounce, Cascade hops at Steinbarts are not cheap.  I think I can get at least a pound (though I have been told not to expect too much the first season).   But for a beer with a 8oz hop bill we are talking $16 saved...wow!  Okay, best we not think in terms of pure monetary reward.  The real reward comes in being a yeoman farmer (that is a way inside economics joke, by the way, for you macro-types - here's to you Bruce!) close to the earth and self-sufficient.

Unfortunately (or happily) it is now time to brew again and to gear up for the spring unveiling of my ultra special Hopopotamus® will require no less than three varieties of hop (and maybe even four) - so off to Steinbarts I shall go.  But I shall dream of Emerson's Special Wet Hop Ale come the early fall.

Going Extra Local - Cask Ale

Over at Beervana, Jeff has a really nice post on Ted Sobel, Oregon's Pied Piper of cask (or 'real') ale, trying to lead Oregon's craft beer lovers to a new frontier - but here the analogy ends for this frontier leads not to their doom but to a new and glorious part of Beervana.  Ted is the owner and brewer at Brewers Union Local 180 in far-off Oakridge, Oregon (pretty far even for the real Pied Piper to get followers to come) and he is the states only cask-only brewer.

Here is Jeff:

There are a lot of ways to sell beer in this state, but the easiest is to make them big and hoppy. It helps if you're conveniently located in East Portland--though Eugene seems like a pretty good location, too. A sure-fire business model includes a pub/taproom and capacity to distribute 22-ounce bottles and/or kegs to alehouses around the Northwest. Do that and your road is lined with rose petals.

Ted Sobel ... has not chosen the easy way. He makes small beers with low levels of hops. His pub is three hours from Portland, in Oakridge. He brews real ale, sold exclusively by firkin, and only really trusts one other pub to handle his beer. To reach the Portland market, he must load the casks into the back of his station wagon and drive them up himself. For his trouble, he earns less per firkin than he would if he sold the beer in his own pub. In the term of art, Ted has not yet figured out how to "monetize" his vision in the way other pubs have. His road is thorny, cold, and lonely.

For those Portlanders and Oregonians who are into fresh, natural and local, cask ale would seem to be a no-brainer. Cask is all of those things and nothing is more local and ephemeral than a locally brewed and prepared cask. In only a few days it will spoil after it is tapped, no artifical gases are injected into it - all carbonation is naturally occurring (and as I write this I am fearful of making a error that Ted will surely correct for such is the state of cask knowledge that even someone such as I, a huge cask enthusiast, only has rudimentary knowledge of the art).  The absence of injected carbon dioxide tends to reveal flavors that are hidden by the gas and, to my mind you get a fuller, richer experience of the ingredients and flavors that mingle on your tongue.  Which is also why mild beers are perfect for cask, flavors that CO2 washes out will remain on cask.  Mild beers are also perfect for an evening of socializing - quaffable, enjoyable and easy on the brain.

But because of the difficulty of preparing, serving and keeping cask ales, until the appreciation for the product causes a real demand shift it is hard to make them profitable.  Which is why I am here to tell you that if you missed the meet-the-brewer event at the Green Dragon last night, you have another rare chance to meet Ted and taste his beer served the way it is supposed to be served - from a fresh cask - tonight at Belmont Station.  The cask gets tapped at 3.  I shall be making a mad dash to meet Jeff there after my last meeting in Corvallis and hoping that y'all have to wait until later so there is some left for me.  [If you see me, say 'hi.']  It is only through repeated exposure that cask - just as craft beer itself - will catch on and create its own market.

The Hopopotamus™ Update: It has been racked into bottles and will be ready in a week or so, but the occasional zwickel has left me confident that it is, and I am sure all tasters will agree, The Best Beer Ever Brewed™.  In case you were wondering...

Also, my wee hop plant is not so wee anymore, and have been convinced by the beer savant to add about 6 more feet to my trellis support.  It has about 15 feet to grow up now.

Now all we need is some sunny weather and I can get to work perfecting my Northwest Best Bitter.

Growing Your Own - the Hop Update

Well, I never claimed to have a green thumb...  My initial rhizome didn't seem to want to emerge from the earth and greet the sun, so I had to declare a failure to thrive and make an emergency dash to Portland Nursery to get a new Cascade hop plant (which apparently is the hop of choice as the pickings were slim among Cascades, but there were ample choices of very mature hops of different varieties).  Now, after taking quite a bit more care with the planting, giving it lots of fresh soil and compost, I am happy to report that my new Cascade hop is thriving albeit still a wee thing (picture above - now about a week old, so it has grown probably 2-3" since then).  My cherry tree also looks to be gearing up for a banner year so beers with home grown ingredients are in the offing.

One side benefit to having to dash off to Portland Nursery is that I pass right by Belmont Station - a misnomer now that it is on Stark, but no matter - and, well, when in the neighborhood one must stop in mustn't one?  Since spring was in the air and hops were on the mind, I picked up a selection of IPAs that are hard to find in my local stores:

Oakshire Watershed IPA - A lovely hop aroma, amber color and medium body. A bit aggressively bitter, but another of the excellent NW IPAs out there for us hop heads.

Hair of the Dog Blue Dot - As a seasonal, it is only around part of the year, so now is the time to track this über-classic down.  Every time I try this after a long absence I am absolutely floored by it.  It is aggressively hopped but has a wonderful creamy body that balances the bitter hops.  It is much lighter than the average NW IPA and I suspect that a dose of wheat gives it its creamy body.   The hops and malt do a dance on your tongue and the floral aroma sings to your nose - rhapsodic.

Rogue Brutal Bitter - My favorite Rogue beer which apparently is being renamed Rogue Brutal IPA.  It is really not a bitter in the british sense as it has more IPA characteristics, but it is not especially bitter so I have always thought that the name did it a disservice.  As I can find about 10 other Rogue beers locally but not this one, I suspect that I am right about the name scaring people off.  Of the four beers here, this surely is the one a non-hop head would be the most likely to love.  The Crystal hops are so clean and bright on the palate it amazes me that they are not used more (at least to my knowledge). I tried to clone this beer with a few twists and it came off pretty well and now Crystals are among my favorite hops to brew with.

Bear Republic Racer 5 - This was the true revelation.  I had not had it before and I have missed out.  It is bottle conditioned (like Bridgport's IPA) which allows the flavors to shine and oh what flavor!  It is aggressively hopped by not aggressively bitter, has a wonderful aroma, floral and citrusy, a lovely amber color and is lightly carbonated thanks to the bottle conditioning. It has vaulted into the top shelf of my favorite IPAs - which includes those listed here as well as Ninkasi, HotD, and Boundary Bay, among a few others.  

I highly recommend all four.

Tomorrow I shall update the latest news on the eagerly anticipated arrival of The Hopopotamus™