Ahoy-hoy, fellow beer coneseu    connisor   enthusiasts! Make it Snow is out again this week, presumably hiding from (or fleecing) the locust-like hordes of street musicians descending upon Austin. Keep playing that utterly-cliche-acoustic-guitar-ballad, young Rian; you’re sure to land a record contract some day!

Brettfavrescolonoscopy, in turn, provided perhaps the most Zen Beer Barrel  we’ve ever had- a beer review without any drinking. Tremendously, he actually made it engaging and added a couple of beers to my own “Buy it if anyone in BudLand will stock it” list. That lack of sound you hear is the collective applause of single hands clapping.

I, in further turn, am back to report on the results of my first Solo Home Brewing Attempt: Pope Mayhem’s “X-Treme Unction” Wee Heavy. As you likely won’t recall, I needed something besides meth and SeaLab to occupy my time while Dr. Mrs. Mayhem was in the Himalayas, so I chose to attempt brewing my own beer. I chose a variation on my beloved Scottish Wee Heavy. I won’t bore you with the specifics (there are many, many homebrew books and internet fora which are very happy to bore you to your heart’s content) except where problematic or amusing. For the full monty, see here

I had done this twice before, assisting my former brother-in-law. As a hobby, it seems to hit that sweet spot between Simple Enough Not To Be Frustrating and Complicated Enough To Allow Obsession. Plus, if you don’t fuck up it yields delicious alcohol. This represents a clear advantage over the end products of many other hobbies, such as distance running (sweat, stupid “26.2” sticker on your bumper) or stamp collecting (large number of stamps, madness).

EQUIPMENT:

Fairly simple, in terms of what you “need”, but with plenty of room for expensive upgrades to drool over. I opted for my turkey-frying pot, two plastic water-cooler jugs stolen from work, a significant amount of plastic tubing, a thermostat, an alcoholomometer and a length of copper tubing. As near as I can tell, this set-up will enable me to transition to moonshine or nitrous oxide as soon President Trump abolishes the ATF, FDA and DOT with minimal equipment modification.

ISSUE 1: SPARGING: So after the grains have steeped for a while, just hanging out like you’re making tea, you are supposed to remove the bag and pour hot water over it to get the remaining goodness into the main kettle. Here is where a second set of hands (or a giant colander) might have been helpful. Try to hold a sodden multi-pound sack of grains with one hand and pour 1.5 gallons of nearly-boiling water over it with the other. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Unsurprisingly, this ended poorly for Mayhem. Second degree burns on the bag-holding hand. Also, “sparging” is a tremendously stupid word for this process.

ISSUE 2: COOL THAT SHIT OUT: So after you add additional sugars for the yeasty-beasties to use in their Dark Alchemy and boil that shit for a while, and then add the hops and boil that shit for a while longer, you have to bring the temperature down as quickly as possible, undoing several hours’ painstaking work of heating it. But it apparently precipitates out proteins and dimethyl sulfides and ancient Incan spirits and such. Even with my homemade copper chilling thing, this took bloody forever. Volume difference be damned, I’m going to be pissed next time my Cup O Soup gets cold after two minutes.

ISSUE 3: I’M SORRY, THAT NEVER HAPPENS TO ME: After about 24 hours, the yeasty-beasties finally wake up and start converting the carefully-groomed sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Visually, this manifests through bubbling. Bubblebubblebubble. Content that the yeast were going to 1. stay alive and 2. DO THEIR JOBS!, I left for a long weekend. I come home and it turns out the yeast threw some sort of unicellular Caligula. The bubbles and foam blew the top and airlock off the fermenter, spilled all over the kitchen floor and solidified into a glass-smooth lake of sugary protobeer. My decision to attempt this while Dr. Mrs. Mayhem is out of town looks smarter and smarter.

THE RESULT: I aged this fucker for 8 weeks, tossing in some toasted oak chips at the 3 week mark because I am a sucker for Innis & Gunn. An additional 4 weeks of waiting for the bottles to carbonate and the little bastard is ready. By this point, I am angry. My hard work of late November has been sitting there, mocking my lack of patience for the last three months. It had better be fucking phenomenal.

So the “class description” can be found here under 9E.The key points are:

-Deeply malty, with caramel often apparent.

-Hops are very low to none (expensive to import in Scotland, so used sparingly)

–Light copper to dark brown color, often with deep ruby highlights. Clear. Usually has a large tan head (giggity)

-Alcohol By Volume: 6-10%

ME: Yeah, ok, it’s pretty fucking good. Reasonably close to the class descriptor- almost no hops. Not as quite as sweet as I expected, although in line with others of the style. The final alcohol measurement was 8.1%, so it’s definitely a nursing beer. The oak comes through (cutting the maltiness with vanilla, which I hadn’t thought possible) although I probably let it sit on the oak chips too long. The high alcohol gives it a little astringency which doesn’t play well with the sweetness- imagine pouring a few drops of Islay scotch into a Guiness.

Color is exactly where I wanted it- highland lass red, and clear as anything.

The main problem was carbonation, or lack thereof. It’s flat. Damn flat. Real flat. I’m not sure whether my priming sugar calculation was off, whether the yeast slacked off in the bottle or what. It compromises the expected mouthfeel, coming closer to a very odd port than a beer.

Compare that to my Control Samples: Great Divide Claymore and Hermitage Maltopia. Both are good. The Claymore is a little more hoppy, with some smoked malt to it as well. The Maltopia is a little too sweet and one-note, even for me. In their delirious freedom from the tyranny of hops, they went a little overboard the other way. Would have benefited from some smoked malt or a little more roasted barley.

DR. MRS. MAYHEM: I don’t really like beer, except for a few sour ales. I’m glad Mayhem enjoyed doing this. Can I have my kitchen back now?

BEST FRIEND TABITHA: I’m more of a hop-person, so this a little outside my wheelhouse. It’s tasty, but it really is like port- have a glass after dinner instead of dessert, rather than a “have a beer” beer. The 8% alcohol rating is a little misleading; it’s smoother than the usual Imperial Death Stout you find above 7%, so you find yourself drinking more quickly than you expect and it hits you reasonably hard.

Overall, I preferred the Claymore (a little smoke, more bitterness) but this is quintessentially Mayhem’s Beer- it shuts him up about all his “IBU is a dick-measuring contest!” nonsense and gives him the malty booziness that he seems to crave. And I’m for anything that shuts him up.

FINAL VERDICT: The funny thing is that, even with the astringency and flatness, I actually like it better on the whole than my control samples. It’s not as good an example of the “style”, certainly. Belhaven’s “New Coke” Wee Heavy is absolutely a better beer. But this is my beer. I decided what it should taste like. Like the butt-divot on the couch, this beer suits me. And that’s the best endorsement I can give for trying this homebrew nonsense yourself.

GRADE: O Negative