New beer is on the way! Last weekend I made a batch of wheat ale and decided to go off-recipe and try my own thing. Yes, this is the part of the story where Uncle F#*k-Up makes an appearance. But I have to say that brewing might be even easier than baking. I made a 1-gallon batch of regular wheat ale, and my grain mix was half wheat and half 2-row barley. And I used some kind of hops with a German name that are supposed to be mild…see, if I were a real home-brewer I’d know the percentage of bitterness ratios and the quadrant of malt extraction units. But I made my mash and decided to spice it up a bit with a few (3) cardamom seeds, a dash of ground coriander, and a 1-inch segment of crushed lemongrass. Here’s the mash in all its grainy goodness:
Look, there’s a little bit of lemongrass there! And more in the pot! It’s very bright green, isn’t it? Let’s ignore that for now. I made my wort and once again remembered I was supposed to buy a very large mesh strainer so I could do this all at once and not in small batches. Sorry, am I losing some of you who aren’t interested in home brewing? Let me tell it from Child Harbat’s perspective:
Babbo is making beer and I get to sit on a chair in the kitchen and play Toca Boca on Mama’s iPad and right now I’m styling the hair of a Brave fashionista and giving her purple curly hair and a hair bow and Babbo what accessories does she need and pick a bow for her hair and look at her crazy face she makes when I do the blow dryer!!
Back to beer. Once I made the wort, I threw in one very small piece of lemongrass, did the hops, funneled it into the fermenting jar, dumped the yeast, said “hocus pocus” and set the whole thing up in a dark closet for two weeks. Hmm…that’s interesting. Normally when you drink wheat beer it is cloudy and tan. This batch is muddy and green/tan. Imagine newly-hocked phlegm, just a hint of green in the color of new rubber bands. So it looks like the lemongrass gave an unwelcome tint to the beer or I need to filter this before bottling or I’ve just made an early batch of beer for next year’s St. Patrick’s Day. When it comes to bottling I’ll show you all the result. You tell me if it looks green.
Writer, architect, father, husband.