Unfortunately, the full-sized version of the page is no longer available, so you can’t see the details of what this thing used to look like. I say “used to” because it is now a completely different site:

When I went in to purchase a new hydrometer, I asked Doug about his website. I figured I could help him out by spiffing it up a little. He was interested, and we’ve come up with this new site. It is still just the one page, but we have ideas about fleshing it out a little bit – not too much content, because isn’t interested in the extra work of maintaining inventory and prices. But we’ll add a little more to make customers who’ve never been in a little more familiar with the kinds of products he carries and the kinds of unique services he provides: like one of the best grain mills in the country. It turns out that in his downtime from running the store, Doug is one of the best technicians in entire Southeastern US for all sorts of big, industrial machines and saws. He made the grain mill himself, and all of his customers swear that they get better efficiency in their mash when they use his grain mill than with any other. I am one of those customers: it is a beautiful, miraculous machine. I want to get a picture of it, and add it to the store’s website.

The graphics for the new site came from a company that built an eCommerce website for Doug a few years ago. Several hurdles have prevented Doug from actually taking that store online. But he sent me links to a demo site – or “sandbox” if you will. I snagged the graphics and put them on the new face for his website. His online store had some other facets to it including additional media which I hope to incorporate into the other pages to be added.

I didn’t do all this work for personal gains. But one nice side effect is that Doug wants to pay me for the help I’ve given him (in addition to helping him re-vamp the website, I’m also saving him nearly $600 per year by switching him to new web host and domain registrar). I don’t actually want any money, but it does mean that I’ll be able to more easily snag some new equipment – particularly an 11-gallon stainless steel pot that I’ve had my eye on… I went in Thursday to get stuff for the batch I’m brewing on Sunday (Most Worthy Ale – an American IPA based heavily on a delicious recipe I made years ago named Hellishly Hopped Ale), and he even offered to let me have the ingredients. At that moment, the new website wasn’t yet up, and I insisted that he not try to give me anything until I had actually delivered something.

It is very nice of him to offer payment, but I plan on letting him have my services pretty cheap because I really like having a hand, even if a very small hand, in keeping his store up and running. It’s the best damn resource for home brewers in the area, hands down.

In any event, I’m brewing an IPA this Sunday. This past Thursday was the first time I’ve bought more than three ounces of hops for a single batch in many months. Doug repealed his three-ounce-per-batch rule quite some time ago, but I still stick to it because I would feel guilty if I raided his inventory considering there is still a real shortage. This time, however, he pointed out two alternatives for the hops I was looking for, and I simply asked if he minded if I buy them both. He was fine with that. He told me his Simcoe hops weren’t really fresh. He usually throws out stuff that isn’t really fresh, but he’s hung onto the Simcoe because they’re popular and there’s a shortage. He warns customers before they buy it that it’s probably 1/3 lower in alpha acids than the label suggests (due to age) and that it should only be used as a bittering hop (aromatic oils extracted from late hop additions are the first to go as hops deteriorate). I decided to get Nugget hops as an alternative, but Doug also recommended Summit fresh hops. He said he brewed with them recently, and they were incredibly fresh and pungently aromatic. I got an ounce of those, too. I’ve since decided to hang onto the Summit and to use only the Nugget for Sunday’s brew. Maybe I’ll use the Summit in my next batch (Foreign Extra Stout, anyone?).

The Itsy Bitsy Brown turned out very tasty. It had a good bit of diacetyl last time I tasted it, so I’m trying to vent it off. Hopefully in another week it will be tasty and will have lost the fake-butter flavor that currently tinges it.

Last Saturday I cracked open one of my last bombers of Brain Bludgeoner. It was every bit as luscious and elusive as I remember it. I still have several more bombers, but they are all spoken for. Three are for sharing (one with co-workers next week, one with my friend Jason who helped polish off the one I opened last weekend,  and one with my sister and brother-in-law next month). The last two are for me, but are waiting to be opened until their 1st and 2nd birthdays respectively. I don’t believe in hanging on to homebrew more than two years: by that time I better have brewed even more great beer and thus should have no need to reminisce nostalgicly so far back.

Tonight, I cracked open a 12 ounce bottle of Fiftieth Brew. In retrospect, it really turned out great. When it was still green it was a bit rough around the edges. Now it is quite nice: very firmly bittered but a nice hop flavor and aroma, too. The malt character is a bit heavy (it is pretty much a Barleywine after all), but flavorful with touches of caramel and toffee and perhaps a touch of chocolate. The first few ounces seemed heavy, intense, and difficult to drink. Once the palate gets acclimated however, it is drinkable. The last 6 ounces disappeared much more quickly than did the first.

I used two pounds of rye malt in my recipe. Doug mentioned that he and his friends have designed plenty of rye pale ale recipes, too, and that they’ve found that one pound – or maybe even a little less – is just right. Even one and a half pounds is a little too much since some of the flavors in the rye begin to detract from the finished beer when it is present in too large a quantity. I don’t mind the “Reeb” finished product – in fact I like it a lot. But the rye flavor is certainly strong – at least when drinking the first one. If you have a second helping, you don’t notice as much :)

While at the homebrew store I bought three ounces of high-alpha hops – the final acquisition of luscious hops for my upcoming double IPA. While there I also decided to do my part to help out with the hop shortage by purchasing a couple of hop rhizomes. This, of course, is also a hedge against decreasing hop availability and rising hop prices – and it’s just plain fun! They are already starting to produce shoots, protruding from the dirt. Malin is planning their final planting location in the yard and has already designed a trellis for the vines once they start to get big. The hop vines can grow as long as 20′ in the first year; and, once they are mature and really growing (not sure how many years go by before that happens, but it apparently doesn’t happen in the first year), they can grow as much as 1′ per day! We’re pretty stoked. Doug says that his hop plants grow great, despite our not having a climate like the classic hop producing regions (Pacific Northwest US, Southern Germany, and Southeast England).

I bought one rhizome each of Mount Hood – a US aroma hop based on a German Hallertauer cultivar – and Chinook – another US hop that is high in alpha acids (so it is frequently used for bittering) and has strong notes of evergreen (pine needles) with some bitter citrus (grapefruit).

The double IPA I’ve crafted will require six ounces of high-alpha hops for five gallons of beer. Not too long ago, I thought that was an outrageous amount of hops. I even wrote about that being excessive when I talked about the amount of hops used to brew Sam Adams Hallertauer Imperial Pilsner. Using standard methods for calculating IBUs, my beer will weigh in at about 130 IBU. This is of course on paper only. In reality, the chemistry of IBUs put a physical limit of around 100 – maybe a little more (the Sam Adams beer is 110 IBU – measured, not calculated). That sounds like a lot, but I’ve read recipes for double IPAs that call for far more. The “award-winning” recipe in Jamil Zainasheff’s and John Palmer’s latest book (Brewing Classic Styles) is based on a clone of Russian River’s Pliny the Elder and calls for a whole pound of high-alpha hops!! Using standard methods to calculate IBUs, that would be 284 IBUs – outrageous! The actual beer is closer to between 90 and 100 IBUs.
Next in the brewing line up, after Hump’s Dunkles Hefeweissbier, will be Hump’s Black Kriek: a Robust Porter with a large addition of sour cherries. And after that, I should have enough hops accumulated to cook up the Brain Bludgeoner.

Speaking of hops and the hop shortage, our near-and-dear Terrapin Beer Company finally has a brewery of its own. Until recently, their beer was contract brewed in Maryland and then shipped to Georgia. Now it will be made in Georgia. Their beers are generally quite good – good enough for me to forgive them for picking Athens as their brewery location (after all, I’m a Yellowjacket, and Athens is the home of the Bulldogs). They have taken the opposite tact as most brewers: they are making a ridiculous, over-the-top hop-bomb in the face of the hop scarcity. They have even named this new brew Hop Shortage. It will be a one-time release, part of a new series of unique, single-batch brews – made possible by the fact that they now have their own brewery. You can read more about it here.

In other news, I will be bottling my Fiftieth Brew tonight. It has aged in the keg over a month now, and is quite good. Flavors of chocolate, dark toast, and citrus hops are strong, and it finishes dry with a strong bitterness from both citrusy and piney hops and from alcohol. But I have to move it into bottles to make room for the Reeb.

Speaking of which, I tasted the Reeb this afternoon, while drawing a sample to read its finishing gravity. It tastes pretty good. The dry-hops didn’t make quite as big of a punch as in the Fiftieth Brew, but it does have a decent hop presence in the nose and front of the palate. It has a solid, fruity bitterness in the finish, and a nice light, dry, bready maltiness in between. It will taste great once it has some more bubbles in it…

My small beer requires 2.5 ounces of hops, 0.5 ounce of which I already have in my fridge – left-over Chinook. The Double IPA calls for six ounces of hops – all high-alpha hops, too. When I took eight ounces of hops up to the counter, Doug politely informed me that there is a three ounce per recipe limit. I was hoping this was a financial thing – perhaps his costs went up, and he felt he would alienate his customers by raising his prices to cover his costs, so he was simply limiting the amount of low-or-negative margin goods he was selling. So I offered to pay more for the hops than he was asking. He said he still couldn’t do it, and then he told me why. His primary supplier has completely cut him off; they have no hops available to sell to him. Another supplier of his said they only have another nine weeks of supply for him. That means in nine weeks, he will have no supply of hops for his customers. He had calculated that, at the rate he usually sells hops, that he would completely run out by May. Upon hearing that distressing news, I changed my brewing plans. I figure I’ll just make the big beer another day (maybe I can find an online supplier that is willing to sell large quantities of hops – although it is completely possible that the online shops are encountering similar situations). And, instead of buying the two ounces of hops I needed for Reeb, I figured I’d just use more of the other left-over hops in my fridge and so only bought one.

What a bummer!!!

So it looks like I’ll have to stick with brewing low-hop recipes for the foreseeable future. That is certainly depressing because I was really wanting to cook up an IPA or two. The fact that I can’t make the Double IPA anytime soon is certainly a let-down.

In addition to the hop problems, there are also, apparently, similar problems with the supply of barley malt. Some of the blogs I’ve read even indicate that some small-scale brewers may not be able to get any malt in the near future. This could be devastating for small producers of craft brew, which is truly a shame.

So, expect to see prices going up at your local retail store for craft brew. Macro-brew isn’t as susceptible to these sorts of shortages. Very large brewers have the buying power to forge longer-term contracts. Their contracts give them higher priority when it comes down to who will get part of the limited supply of malts, and they also keep prices relatively stable for these big brewers. Furthermore, macro-brew is not particularly strong with either barley or hops. So any increase in price will be less evident than would be seen in all-malt, high-gravity, hoppy brews. If the price of water goes up however…

Who could talk about brewing and beer ingredients without bringing up the l’il beasties? Of course, I speak of yeast. I noticed this past weekend, while buying supplies for my last batch, that Doug had posted on the yeast and hops fridge a piece of paper that indicate the origins of several of Wyeast’s varieties. I searched for the same information on the web, and I found what will likely be an invaluable reference: especially considering I was a big fan of White Labs yeast before Marietta Homebrew closed (Just Brew It! only carries Wyeast liquid yeast). The reference shows the origins of nearly all varieties of both White Labs and Wyeast yeasts. It also has useful comparison charts that are good to have when trying to find the right Wyeast product when a recipe called for a White Labs strain. That reference can be found here.