The Beer Hall • Long Neck, NY

The annual cask festival at Blue Point appears to be postponed until April. Over a couple of brews last night a few of us tossed around some ideas for putting on a club-only cask fest. We just need to figure out a good venue. We’ll be doing something on Jan 30 that involves cask ale. Mark your calendar.

Our malt arrived on time for our Saturday brew. Yuri, Mike, and I met yesterday morning at the brewery and found that our starter was stalled (not uncommon when working with liquid yeast in my experience). We decided to go with our trusty dried yeast (always keep some of that on hand). We brewed up Batch #1 of a GSA series (golden strong ale). Our wives have requested something like Duvel or Local 1 and we’re trying to please.

We went with mostly pilsner malt, some wheat, some aromatic malt and enough table sugar to boost the gravity from 1.062 to 1.070. We bittered with cascade (6.0% alpha acid) to get 30 IBU. Mike thought 30 IBU was too high for a GSA. Hey, we’ll see. Once the beer has conditioned, it might be just right.

Also, we took some of the wort and ran it into our small conical fermenter that has an active cake of lager yeast. The idea is to make a light bodied, golden strong lager and see how that tastes. We’re aiming for something dry. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Yuri and I made a quick starter for our Abbey yeast. I mentioned last time about using Malta Goya as a ready-made wort for your starter, well, Yuri noticed that Malta Goya has salt in it. If that’s something you wish to avoid then Malta La Cena appears to be salt free. Instead of aeration we decided to oleate with a drop of tasty olive oil. Evidently it only takes a drop. [See “Olive Oil Addition to Yeast as an Alternative to Wort Aeration” by G. Hull, pdf.]

In other brewery news, we’re restocking on malt. Our order should arrive today. Looks like we’re brewing on Saturday. Yee haw!

We’ll be brewing again next weekend. Yuri has our Belgian yeast, but we need to get them started. The plan is to do a series of Belgian-style beers in our 14 gallon conical. Our wives are demanding something like Local 1 (hats off to Garrett Oliver for brewing something world class), but are we up to the challenge? I think so. If we succeed, I’ll call the beer Real Local. Ha!

Here’s a tip. If you want to make a starter and you are lazy (that’s me), go to the store and get a six pack of that Malta Goya stuff and feed it to your yeast. They do all the work and it’s sanitary already.

The Hop Harvest beer (la bière de la récolte de houblon) is on tap at The Angler now. The Hefe didn’t kick yet (despite my best efforts to drain the keg over the past couple of days), but since today is Le jour de remercie, the traditional harvest celebration, I decided the Hop Harvest trumped my summer straggler.

Now that the beer is conditioned and properly carbonated (avec le gaz carbolique) and at the proper temperature it’s really some and tasty. However, I would say that it could use another month or two of conditioning (gardant? entreposage pour la fermentation secondaire) since it is still a touch sweet.

Mike and I just kegged the batch of beer we brewed with our homegrown hops. Mike has an established crop of German-style hops. This is my first harvest of Santiam hops that are slowly taking over my back yard. A quick tasting proved that the beer was tasty. The keg is now carbonated and conditioning. I’ll put it on at the Angler when the hefe kicks (which should be soon).

Next on the tour, we sat on the beach in Greenport, NY, passed a good time, and ate oysters fresh off the boat at the Pipes Cove Oysters Farm. I am not a big fan of raw oysters — more of a texture thing, but I’ve tried my share in Louisana. Fried oysters are my all time favorite. Sitting on the beach I could see the beds where the oysters were being farmed and I just had to try them. The oysters were good, I mean, really, really good. They were so salty. Boo even tried them. He was not enthralled, but you see he inherited my adventurous palate. We tried to visit SPAT (Southold Project in Aquaculutre Training), but we they were closed when we arrived. This program trains volunteers how to grow shellfish and then release them back into local creeks and bays.

One of our first stops on the North Fork Foodie Tour was The Farm in East Marion. We visited with the owner, KK Haspel, who told us about composting and biodynamic farming. She believes her farm methods helped her avoid the blight that plagued so many farms this year. Her composting skills were amazing. She had all types of nutrients she added to her compost to improve food quality and soil health. She also had these dowsing rods that she spoke to. The rods she used were metal and L-shaped. She had a determined orientation that meant either yes or no and asked the rods where to plant her crops. She completely trusted their responses. Some people think that dowsing rods “detect the energetic patterns around is that are unseen to the eye.” Her farm is thriving, more in part, I think, to her the detail of attention she pays to to her crops, her composting and raised beds. If the dousing rods make it more fun, then who am I to judge?

We had a great time at the North Fork Foodie Tour this year. For the Tour we had an opportunity to visit 14 locations on the North Fork of Long Island that represent and celebrate the diversity of our local area. We picked up our tickets and map at Charnews Farm in Southold. Charnews Farm is owned by the Peconic Land Trust, an organization devoted to the “protection of Long Island’s working farms, natural lands, and heritage.” We sampled a goat cheese and beet salad, a peach pizza, and several different varieties of apples grown on Long Island. We signed a Slow Food petition to mandate local produce into the local school lunch programs and viewed food art. Before we left we picked up a Foodie tour t-shirt (groupies that we are) and a Quail Hill Farm Cookbook. Quail Hill Farm, in Amagansett, NY, is the longest running CSA (community supported agriculture) farm on Long Island.

While I was at Legends yesterday I tried the Long Ireland Celtic Ale. That was the first time that I had Celtic Ale outside the context of a festival. The beer those guys bring to the festivals is fresh and tasty. What I had at Legends was less so. It left me wondering what the turn over for that beer is: beer sitting in warm lines? a keg gone stale?

I’ll have to see how my buddy Ray fairs with his brewery once it’s up and running. The business side of things makes demands that are sometimes outside the control of the brewery. The beer gods have to be with you. The professional brewers that survive have to have a whole lotta luck as well.

The sad thing about getting a lackluster pint of a local beer is that you know that some people who don’t know better are going to taste that pint and decide that all the beer tastes like that. (The don’t understand the complexities.) They’ll think that every beer under that label will be as lackluster as that first. They’ll be turned off. The brand and the brewers suffer. The thing about craft beer is that it is a delicate thing. It has to be treated well. Abuse on the serving end is outside the control of the brewer. Well, I suppose they could decide not to sell their beer, but the problem with that is you can’t pay the bills if you don’t sell it. Catch-22?