A Meditation

What is essential?  Is it love, success, a fancy car? A fat wallet with a handful of thin, multicolored plastic cards?  Truly, have you ever taken the time for self-examination, or have desire and societal norms gotten their grasp so tightly around you that escaping are only the expected rote actions and thoughts devoid of life?  Desire is the cause of suffering, and the only way to end suffering is to rid yourself of desire.  Separate from the self.  But wait . . . is not the desire to rid yourself of desire a desire in itself?  If so, what hope do we have?

These are the dangers of teaching an Honors Philosophy in Literature course at a high school.  While most are either at work during the summer or enjoying their vacations (greetings, fellow educators), I am quietly, almost secretly, engulfing my mind with questions I have no answer to.  When I first heard I would be teaching this course, beautifully rife with underpinnings of Eastern philosophy -- specifically Buddhism -- I was anxious to begin my journey into familiar, yet almost forgotten thought.  The readings have always fascinated me, but my fear was that I would not have the answers to my students' questions.  I am no Buddhist or existentialist scholar.  Strangely, however, this state of quasi-trepidation led me to a zymurgical (bask in its glory, lexophiles) epiphany...

Though my blog has remained barren for months, rest assured my brewpot has not.  I have been brewing at a steady pace since June, and I have five different batches either in fermenters or kegs at the moment.  I won't go into detail for each, but now featured at Buddha Brew Co. are (percentages refer to alcohol by volume [ABV]):


1.  2009 The Buddha's Reserve Russian Imperial Stout (12.8%)
2.  Hard Cider (7.0%)
3.  Belgian Quadruple (9.2%)
4.  Pumpkin Ale (6.5%)
5.  Chocolate Russian Imperial Stout (10.0%)

Double-barrel action

I actually had another beer that is worth mentioning.  I created a unique recipe for an India Pale Ale (IPA) that included nothing but citrus-flavored hops, and boatloads of them.  In the secondary stage, I added more hops for the dry-hopping process, but also two ounces of fresh grapefruit zest from two deliciously fresh grapefruits.  I exhausted my linguistic artistry as I titled it: Grapefruit IPA.  Well, the beer took my kegerator by storm right around the time of hurricane Irene, and I figured: What could be better than inviting some friends over for a pre-catastrophic-natural-disaster celebration.  Good friends. Good beers.  Good times.  About a week or two later I decided to enter the beer into a regional Connecticut homebrew competition, mainly to get objective feedback from licensed beer judges.  Sounds like a great idea, right?  Well, as I ambled upstairs to fill up the mandatory two bottles for the competition, my kegerator spit at me.   

Check the gas -- no, it's on and flowing.  The lines are not obstructed or frozen.  Let me see if the lines are properly connected to the ke -- holy hell, the keg is empty.

My Grapefruit IPA was gone.  My chances for placing in the competition vanished.  Most importantly, my opportunity to have expert judges taste my brew coldly drifted past the horizon.  So it goes.

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As I've mentioned in the past, while brewing is contemplative, meditative, and therapeutic, brewing with a good friend is even better.  I've been lucky enough to have a constant co-brewer this summer, and I must wholeheartedly thank him for his patience -- I have a habit of haphazardly going about my business -- and support.  Thanks, Fizz.

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Next on the agenda, a fan-favorite: The Bourbon Vanilla Porter.  Of the beers I've made, none have garnered more praise and quickly emptied glasses than The Bourbon Vanilla Porter.  Those that know me well know that I like to brag about things that, deep down, mean nothing to me (e.g. winning dart matches, trivia games, etc.); it is done out of fun, maybe boredom.  Sorry for the semicolon, Vonnegut (look it up).  Those that know me also know that I never like to praise my beers.  My usual response is unabashedly stolen from the mind of Larry David: "Meh."  That's how I generally rate my beers.  The Bourbon Vanilla Porter is one of a select few of my beers that has broken the prestigious yet cryptic meh scale.  I love this beer, and you will too if you are lucky enough to have a try.  I'm sure it wouldn't win more than a bronze medal at the Great American Beer Festival though.  The previous sentence was an example of what my friend John Murphy would call a "humble brag."  Brilliant concept, but purely a joke in this case.

Shangri-La?

I hope you took the time to check out the Great American Beer Festival link.  If you didn't, go back and check it out.  Now.  My friend and fellow beer enthusiast, Karl, and I will be attending this glorious gathering two weeks from now in Denver, Colorado.  I challenge you to find a brewery worth mentioning that is not on that list, besides Southern Tier.  Yes, visiting the Russian River and 3Floyds tables will be exhilarating to part of my brain and inebriating to another, but what I am most excited about is the sight of an empty table.  You will notice that Anheuser-Busch, Coors, and Miller will also be at the festival.  I've never been to this event before, but I'd imagine their representatives must feel like Mario Mendoza at a Baseball Hall of Fame convention.  I know that reference is a stretch, but just imagine the gall these companies have to show up at a place designated for the best beers in the best beer-making country in the world (That's right, I wrote that -- bring it, Belgium/Germany).  My only hope is that they will need hand trucks to carry out their kegs at the end of the day, while others are hoisting theirs over their heads with one hand.  That's enough cynicism for now.

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The more I think about it, the more I realize the name, Buddha Brew, is the perfect name for the beer I make.  While I may never attain nirvana and break from Saṃsāra, I do take from this philosophy a new understanding.  Do not live for the now -- live in the now.  Both yesterday and tomorrow are hypothetical, unrealized, and inconsequential.  Self-discovery does not come from searching where it is easiest or most accessible.  It is a journey that one must neither make presumptions nor rush through.

I am reminded of a Sufi parable where a man is walking down a dark corridor with a shaft of light coming through the ceiling.  He is on his hands and knees desperately searching for something.  A friend comes across the man and asks what he is doing.  The man explains that he has lost a ring, and he is now searching for it.  Inquiring where he lost the ring, the man points to a location far behind him down the darkened corridor.

"Why are you looking here then?" asks his friend.

"Well, there is more light here," answers the man.
 
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Like the man in the story, I've searched for myself in the lightened corridors of life when what I've been searching for is buried, obscured by unnecessary desires.  For me though, that's where my Buddhist belief ends.  I do still desire a certain desire, and that is to brew.  My meditation and self-discovery comes as I mix celestial chemistry with artistic uniqueness.  In the moment, I join East and West.

Just as the man in the story, my students in class will never make their discoveries by asking me questions.  They must take their own journeys into the darkness.  All I can do is share experiences with them.

And that is essential.

Nature > Matt

“If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you.  It does it often enough anyway even when you don’t give it opportunities.”

                                                                        - Robert M. Pirsig

It's been awhile since my last post, and the only thing that comes to my mind as I stare at my screen is that passage from Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  It struck a chord in me when I first read it years ago, and that chord still rings clearly today.  I’ll get to that shortly . . .

Resetting the clock for 2011...

While the masses gathered this past February to watch the Super Bowl, I prepared myself for one of my favorite events of the year – the Polar Bear Plunge in Lewes Beach, Delaware.  So all male readers can breathe again, yes I did still watch some of the game, but I genuinely have no interest in football.  It glorifies mental regression and really, who can take a sport seriously when one of its infractions has a name like encroachment?  It sounds like something one of my college roommates (use your imagination) had to get a shot for at the infirmary after a night out with a . . . welcoming female.  Anyway, it was my fifth or sixth plunge, and by this time I’m proud to say that I’m a bit of a seasoned veteran.  The water temperature this year was balmy at 37ºF.

I include this anecdote to eventually return to Pirsig.  After the plunge, we gathered ourselves for the trek back to New York when I received a phone call from my father.  One of my two fermenters containing five gallons of Bourbon Vanilla Porter sweet nectar apparently developed a small crack at its bottom that remained unnoticed for anywhere from several hours to a few days.  This was a durable fermenter that had withstood a batch of a 13% ABV (alcohol by volume) Russian Imperial Stout.  The drive home was interminable, most notably through the NJ Turnpike Blues (exits 1-8A).  In the end, I lost roughly 2.5 gallons of the five-gallon batch, but its full effect is still uncertain.  I have bottled the salvaged beer, but there is a good chance the batch will be dumped.  Unfortunately, while beer science often appears magical, there are a few rules that you must follow, and one of them is never introduce large quantities of oxygen to your beer.  This is why you never directly pour beer from a fermenter to a secondary tank – always (while we’re on the matter of the oxymoronic magical science) use a siphon.  My beer had been exposed to oxygen for an extended period of time, and at this point I honestly do not know what effect it will have on it.  Time will tell.

Brewers are bound to experience hiccups along the way; if we didn’t then it wouldn’t be much fun, would it?  I was disappointed in myself, but at least I still had a full, five-gallon batch of sweet nectar porter unaffected in my absence at the plunge.  As I began siphoning to my keg, gravity, that merciless bitch, kicked in.  I needed a greater angle between the fermenter and the keg, so I decided to slap Nature in the face by using my auto siphon, which was downstairs in the basement.  Just a thirty-second trip – what could go wrong?  I’ll try to paint this as clearly as possible: imagine a large plastic container (fermenter) sitting on a glass table with a tube in it.  The other end of the tube rests on the rim of a half-filled keg two feet below the table’s top.  As I went to grab my auto siphon, the tube on the keg fell onto the nice area rug in the room, kick-starting the siphon’s flow.  I found one way to dye a rug brown.

This past brewing experience reaffirmed a notion that had been ingrained in my mind for years, but never as sturdily as it is now.  It doesn’t matter how badly you want something or how preciously you revere your craft: keep Nature’s fundamentals nestled at your side or be prepared to be embarrassed time after time. 

Nature made a complete fool out of me.

Luckily, shortly after my foolish fermenting follies, I embarked on my annual trip to Stowe, Vermont, where I characteristically spent far less time on the slopes as I did slouched over a bar stool sampling outrageously unique beers.  Two highly noteworthy destinations:

1)   The Alchemist Brewpub – the locals recommended this little goldmine right outside of Stowe.  Fresh high-gravity beers, delicious bar-food, and friendly wait-staff make this place a definite repeat-visit.

2)   Rock Art Brewery – this was our second time visiting this inexplicably unknown brewery.  Their beers are some of the most complex that I’ve tasted over the years, and honestly, what beats Kokopelli as a logo?

Not-so-noteworthy:

1)   Trapp Family Lodge Brewery – I recognize I am a bit of a lager-hater, but I challenge anyone to go from a Heady Topper and a Magnumus Ete Tomahawkus ESB³ to a Golden Helles Lager (don’t trust those 8 reviewers – that place is a straight-up brainwashed Twilight Zone episode) without producing some vile regurgitory matter.

One of the most significant events of my trip, however, came courtesy of my friend.  She came up with the brilliant idea of using a program for my phone called Evernote to log all the different beers I try on my adventures and then share them with fellow friends with similar interests (Hi Karl).  I then extended this idea to possibly include beer reviews on this blog.  Now, I have no delusions of trumping the beauty that is Beer Advocate, but I would like to illuminate some of the more hidden treasures of the craft beer world so others may continue to expand and flex their hypoglossal nerves as they sip fine beers such as Wolaver's Alta Gracia Coffee Porter.  But I’ll expound upon that in future posts.

I apologize for the unnecessary, yet unavoidable hyperlink mania.

I’d like to leave you with some of my foolish aspirations.  I am currently reading Sam Calagione’s Brewing Up a Business (ugghhh . . . more hyperlinks), which, so far has been truly insightful and inspiring.  I can’t help but get chills as I imagine doing what Sam did – going for broke, ghetto-rigging a brewpub, and serving “off-centered ales for off-centered people”.  The more I immerse myself in this world, the more I realize this is more than just a hobby for me.  Those chills are more than just the primordial teacher, Nature’s ancient lessons from the past kicking in – they are an affirmation that at some point in the future I will make brewing a part of my everyday life.

On the upside, for now my research entails seeking out and drinking damn good beer as often as possible . . .

I win

Dr. Strangebrew Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Force Carbonation

So it's been awhile since my last entry, but please do not mistake my textual negligence for inactivity.  Buddha Brew has been busy, mostly preparing for future batches, but active nonetheless.

Had a hard time waiting to take the picture...

The Bourbon Vanilla Porter I wrote about in my previous entry turned out to be a far greater success than I could have imagined -- hands down the best beer I've brewed since I began roughly three years ago.  This was the first beer to go on tap in my kegerator so, being the pessimist that I am, I'm overcome with worry about the quality of the beer I put in to replace its now-empty keg shell.  I'm good at brewing beer, but it would be difficult to replicate that sort of success batch after batch.

My successful previous batch marked an important milestone for me in the homebrewer's world; it was the first beer I attempted to carbonate using only my CO2 tank, not priming sugar -- a concept known as force carbonation.  The idea was daunting.

Let me backtrack and run through a beer brewing crash course to hopefully illuminate some of the more scientifically cryptic parts of my entries.  Beer essentially has four main ingredients: water, a starch source (in most cases, malted barley), hops, and yeast.

Recirculating during the mash process

The malted barley is submerged in water ranging from 148-156ºF and soaked for 60-90 minutes in a process called mashing.  The goal here is to extract as much fermentable sugar from the grain as possible.  More malted barley = more potential alcohol in the final product.  Think of a teabag (no, not the teabagging incident of 2003) -- similar idea.

Once the liquid (now called "sweet wort") is drained from the mash, it's added to the brewpot and boiled.  This is where the hops come into play.  Depending on the desired characteristic (i.e. bitterness, aroma, flavor), hops are added at a specific part of the boil.  Next time you see a Miller Lite commercial touting that their beers are "triple-hopped", please contain your strong desire to micturate on the television (it really does tie the room together) because I'm going to let you in on a little secret . . . ready for it?  All beers are triple-hopped.  Bitterness.  Aroma.  Flavor.

After the boil, your "hopped wort" is cooled as quickly as possible to around 70ºF and transferred to your fermenter where yeast is added.  This is where it gets really interesting.  The yeast perform their two-part prestidigitory act and beer is formed.  See, this magical organism (yes, yeast is alive) eats the fermentable sugar and excretes alcohol and carbon dioxide.  More technically, it poops alcohol and farts CO2.  Yum.

Science class is dismissed.  Now that I've hopefully demystified the process a bit, let's return to force carbonation.  So, normally during the bottling process I'd add a small amount of dextrose (corn sugar) to the beer and fill each bottle with this new solution.  Once they are capped, the leftover yeast -- yes, sadly their army does greatly deplete during the epic sugar war -- eat the newly introduced dextrose.  But . . . where does the CO2 (yeast flatus) go?  Nowhere.  Since the bottles are sealed, the CO2 builds up, creating the characteristic beer effervescence.

Now that I'm kegging, however, it seemed beneficial to force carbonate my beer.  Instead of using dextrose and yeast to build carbon dioxide, I now use an external CO2 tank to pump the desired amount of gas into my beer.  Seems easy, and it is, but it's new, and I don't do well with "new".  I guess I'm mostly worried about overcarbonating my beer because apparently once CO2 gets in, it's Herculean to get it out.  In fact, I think that's the phrase's etymology.  You heard it here -- Hercules got his strength from the beer he brewed.

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So this entry turned into more of a science lecture, and for that I apologize.  I do think, however, that it gives you an idea of just how engrossed I can easily become in this craft.  Remember that happy place Chubs always wanted Adam Sandler's character to go to in "Happy Gilmore"?  That's me in my basement with my brewing equipment.

I'll close with a recent anecdote.  I've just transfered an IPA I recently brewed (a Green Flash West Coast IPA clone) to my kegerator, which should be consumable in a few days.  I've got high expectations, as I damn well should; I've given flesh for this batch.  Literally.  Funny story actually.  I was brewing by myself (never a good idea) and I was preparing to pre-heat my mash tun with three gallons of boiling water.  Now don't let the italics misguide you.  As I lifted my 60 quart stainless steel brewpot from the 60,000 BTU propane burner, I felt the pot's sheer dimensional awkwardness take over -- or maybe it was my shameful muscles giving out -- and I had to do something drastic to prevent the water from creating the "Massacre at Buddha Brew".  I kicked my left leg forward to create more leverage and disaster was averted . . . or so I thought.  Once I silenced the heartbeat in my ears, another sense took over -- smell.  It was the smell of burned flesh.  Apparently my left leg had chosen an inopportune spot as it kicked out, namely the side rim of my 60,000 BTU propane burner that had only been turned off seconds ago.  Whoops.  No worries -- chicks dig scars.

I'll take a vanilla porter please . . . with a side of bourbon

So this is a blog, huh.  It always sounded pretty nerdy and tedious to me, but now that I think about it, I am a nerd, and nothing gets me going like tedium.

I have been brewing beer for around three years now, and - as many of my friends (or passersby) have noticed - I love to talk about it.  It's one of those things that, when I first did it, I knew right away that I wanted to do it for the rest of my life.  I also love to write, but up until recently I have kept my works relatively hidden.  I was always that kid who did well in English class but never really thought he had any noted ability whatsoever.  I still feel this way, but now at least I have an excuse to share my writing: Americans love beer, and I make beer.  Damn good beer.

Feel free to click the little red dot in the upper left corner (or red "X" in the upper right, depending on your operating system) of your browser if you are looking for piss-water musings.  Yes, Bud Light fans - I mean you. My advice to you is: Go out and pick yourself up a six-pack of Lagunitas Maximus, pour a glass, then get in Manny Pacquiao-defense mode.  Bend your knees.  Get on the balls of your feet, and prepare your mouth for the hellacious hop barrage.  Or, you can keep pretending that Bud Light isn't the A.J. Burnett of beer.

My hope is that my blog will be:

• informative for those interested in homebrewing
• insightful for those who wonder what exactly it is I am ranting about on Facebook
• therapeutic and philosophically quenching (a la Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
• an entertaining way to communicate with friends, past and present

My most recent batch was based on a recipe I found on my go-to website for all things beer, Homebrew Talk.  The beers I like to brew are generally big.  I'm not sure if that sufficiently explains my point, so I'll try it again.  The ingredients that impart a beer's bitterness are my close personal friends, the hops.  Brewers measure how hoppy a beer is by using international bitterness units (IBUs), which are quantifiable based on which type of hop was used and in what dosage.  Bud Light generally has about 8-12 IBUs.  Dogfish Head 60 Minute has 60 IBUs.  The human palette is capable of recognizing up to 100-120 IBUs, depending on which study you refer to.  My last bottled IPA had 247 IBUs.  That's right.

Anyway, back to Saturday's batch, the bourbon vanilla porter.  I was particularly excited about this session because it was a collaboration between Buddha Brew and Chew's Brews.  One of my dearest friends, Casey, has come back to NY from Colorado for the month of December before he ships off to China for a year to teach English.  He is a wickedly smart guy with some brewing experience - brew day could not come soon enough.

As we got down to it though, I quickly realized that it was not the brewing that was important to me.  Casey is a friend that I hadn't seen or really spoken to in over a year, yet all it took was a friendly hug, genuine smile, and hearty laugh to kick it back into gear.  I've been fortunate in my life to have friends that have traveled this Earth extensively, but it seems that no matter how far they've gone or how much time has elapsed, we have this uncanny ability to pick up, almost mid-conversation, from where we had left off.  It is a gift I do not take for granted, and for that I am thankful.

Safety First

The brew went smoothly, no major injuries sustained, and we only lost one guest brewer, literally, in the process (I'll leave that one a mystery for the masses).  I also came across a new piece of equipment that will more than likely become a staple in my future homebrew adventures . . . the Golden Helmet.

As I type this, the sweet wort is grumbling in the fermenter, slowly devoured by the yeastie boys, who, when they get their fill, excrete alcohol.  My goal is to have this batch ready for the kegerator by Christmas, so if you are in the area, and you'd like to sample it, let me know.  'Tis the season.