Thanksgiving pairings are so arbitrary because adding one more random flavor to the meal would not be abnormal; just think about all the random and contrasting dishes you already have at the table.  Turkey is often dry (womp), has some umami, is subtly sweet, and it can take on flavors of whatever else you throw at it (aromatics, etc.).  Stuffing is usually herb-y, savory, mushy, dense, and rich.  Gravy is rich and if done right packs umami.  Cranberry sauce is tart and sweet and cold.  Bread is bread.  Butter is butter.  Green beans taste like wet, clorophyll-y rope (just a slight bias on my part; they’re pretty bad if cooked wrong).  Mashed potatoes are heavy, dense, starchy, and savory.  They coat your mouth.  The point of these descriptions, incomplete and somewhat biased as they are, is that they point out the variation at the Thanksgiving table.  They show that one more random flavor could be just fine.  However, they also, when considered altogether, show a need for something that is less represented.  Clean.

Beer is great, because it cleans up.  Many beer geeks and professionals will talk about the way beer’s bubbles cleanse the palate like a good champagne does.  No matter how dark the beer is in color; how roasty and deep it is, it usually wakes up the mouth after heavy dishes.  Some beers, however, clean up better than others.  And I’m not implying the role here is to take away the flavor of the food.  The golden rule that we all learned early in life, “Do unto others as you would have done unto you” really translates into food as well.  You want your food and drinks to play nice together.  So you want to develop a balance.  Although complementary flavors can be great together (brownies with stout? yes.), when there are a lot of flavors causing a hubub at the table, you want one beverage that can pair with your whole plate.  One that can take on all the flavors at once, a contrast.  And if you really think about eating on Thanksgiving, it almost becomes less about the flavors of the food and more about the way they make you and your mouth feel.  Heavy, tired, bowled over by weight.  That is how you and your mouth feel, and you need something snappy to say, “Hey!  Dinner just started!  No food comas for another three hours!”

Let’s start by eliminating the beers that might be bad with Thanksgiving dinner.  Guess what?  There are really no bad choices.  If you paired a barley wine with your meal, it would probably taste pretty good, the hops pairing up with the herbs, and the malt enveloping the roast turkey flavors.  However, it would knock you on your ass with its intense alcohol content, and it might drink a little heavy for the food.  Instead of having that with dinner, have it before!  It will warm your spirits, awaken your palate, and maybe put you in a more family friendly mood.

Probably not Thanksgiving beers:

Barley wines could be a bit rough.  They load hops, malt, and booze in a mad intense way, and this will only hasten the food coma.  If you want to be more amiable with your family members, enjoy one at happy hour.  It will wake up your palate and bring on some warm, fuzzy feelings.

Light beers are a legitimate no go.  Forgot to mention that at the outset.  No light beer and no “fast food beer”–you know what this is.  They will not add anything to your dinner besides past regrets from your college days.

I’d venture to say beers with a lot of residual sugar would be a little much for the main course, i.e., milk stouts and some of the danker amber/red ales.  Just a little much for the main event.

What about a nice, crisp pilsner for the main, you ask, moving to the extreme, desperate to counteract the heavy food?  Nah.  The flavor is generally a little to mild to stand up to heavily flavored foods.  Nothing wrong with pilsners, but I think there is a better way.

Stouts are a potential, but they are damn heavy.  The roast is nice, but it also has more roastiness to it than many of the flavors involved in Thanksgiving dinner.  In my opinion, stout can overpower.  Kind of like a big Cab could be a bit much, a stout is a little intense for Turkey Day.

Yes beers for Thanksgiving:

Beers with a medium body, good carbonation, and complex smell and taste nuances are the way to go on Thanksgiving.  They provide  both a palate cleanse and an interesting addition to the Thanksgiving table.

Weizen or witbiers are a cool idea for Thanksgiving, because they have a tang to them as a result of the wheat used in fermentation.  Also, traditional European wheat beers are usually made with nice, aromatic yeast strains that often carry some spice notes and fruity esters.  Hence, nod to spices, nod to fruit on the table (cranberry sauce ).

Nut browns can also be pretty awesome; they echo the roasted aspect of the turkey and roasted vegetables.

Pale ales, as long as they have subtle, clean hops and a nice malt structure, can be a great friend to turkey, mashed taters, cranberry sauce, and vegetables.  One of my all time favorites is Oskar Blues Dale’s Pale Ale, but Samuel Smith’s does a great one as well.

Some hard core beers that could be a little strong for Thanksgiving are the lambics.  I believe in the pairing, especially with an unfruited gueze beer (a lambic that is a blend of younger and older beers).  It has a little bit of funk to it, which would stand out from the rest of the feast, and the acidity and small bubbles in the beer would hold up well against the army of heavy foods in front of you.

American India Pale Ales may be awesome for us hopheads, but if you’re worried about getting lost in a sea of humulus lupulus, you may want to give British India Pale Ale a shot.  Seriously.  The Brits have a sexy way with their IPAs.  It’s kind of like their IPAs are Prince, and ours are ACDC. When they let the grooviness take over, we fire the cannons.  Our IPAs are resinous, piney, citrus-y, and hard core, taking over the mouths of innocent people with their awe-striking intensity.  Theirs generally smell more herbal–more subtly seductive, and the flavor is far less of a competitor on the palate against the Thanksgiving food.  Even though Thanksgiving is about the Pilgrims leaving Britain, I think Turkey day is a time to nod back to the old country with regards to IPA.  However, I do salute our A.IPA’s for being a more badass version of the stuff.

Belgian abbey ales and farmhouse ales would be great with Thanksgiving dinner in my book. They all usually have a good strength to them, putting them up their in merry-ness with wine.  Also, farmhouse saisons offer citrus-y, fruity, aromatic scents and flavors with a refreshing crispness that would be incredible with Thanksgiving dinner. A tripel would be awesome with everything as well.  Its subtle maltiness gives some stability to the meal, but unlike a pilsner, it has a fuller body that stands up to the meal.

This guide is by no means the end-all-be-all of Thanksgiving beer pairings.  As I implied, the food choices at Thanksgiving are so fucked up that you might as well pair whatever you fancy at the time with your meal.  But the thing is, I think trying something new and capable of taking on all your meal’s components is a good idea.  A Brooklyn Brewery Sorachi Ace ale would be baller with your dinner.  A Jack d’Or Pretty Things would be amazing.  An Allagash White ale would strike through all those crazy, heavy flavors and meet the cranberry sauce on the other side.  If you’re not being cerebral about things, open a pale ale, and you’ll be satisfied, especially with one of the ones I mentioned above.  You want subtlety with strength?  Unibroue’s La Fin du Monde.  The point is, try it.  What the shit could go wrong? Answer: if you forgot Keystone Light is not an effing beer.  But that’s besides the point.  When everyone else is saying wine this Thanksgiving, be thankful for malted barley, yeast, hops, and water.  They’re gonna bring the magic to your feast.

Nom nom!

Because Chase is so avid to learn about all things wine, we decided to approach our wine choices from a more educational standpoint.  We wanted to do summery wines, and since cold whites can never be bad on a hot day, we picked one from Italy, one from France, and one from Spain.  A Gavi, a white Bordeaux, and a Verdejo respectively were delicious and all somewhat similar.  However, each had a distinction from the others.  After our attempt to learn from the tasting, I didn’t want to lose the opportunity to gain more insight on those styles and grapes.  So, I messaged Chase some research I did:

white wine tasting research, including a blurb about petit sirah, which we also had last saturday

Moral of the story: find a friend or loved one to taste, drink, and learn with!  You will feel more driven to learn together, most likely, and will grow as tasters by getting each other’s thoughts!  It’s worth it.

I realized, at that time, that most people who balk at the beer store are simply lost among the styles, unsure of what they like most.  I myself am still learning about which wines I enjoy the most, but when it comes to beer, I feel people would be more interested if they knew what they liked.  Furthermore, few people understand how much artisanship goes into making craft beer.  In the following piece, I hope to change that–after reading this and buying some samples, you, too, will be able to navigate beer stores and fall in love with their offerings.

I will attempt to delineate beer’s glorious ways by presenting the following topics:

• Beers that you should avoid and should not consider “beer”
• What beer is
• Beer styles and suggestions

Beers that you should avoid and should not consider “beer”

If I offered you a beer, would you immediately think about the awful, urine-like Bud-light you chugged at your last frat party?  The pale, grody Coors dregs they sell as Keystone?  I beg you, have mercy; these are not beers.  Technically, they are brewed with all the necessary beer components.  However, they are the Franzia of the beer world.  And why, then, are they the top sellers?  Gross, America!  If our country’s perception of beer was an animate object, I would punch it in the face.  So now that I have gotten that out in the open, try your best not to ever associate these sad liquids with beer.

What beer is

What the hell is beer, anyway?  Beer is an ancient beverage–probably one of the first alcoholic beverages known to man.  When people became privy to its production, they finally created laws to legitimize beer as a beverage.  The Reinheitsgebot, a treaty created by Germans, mandated that all beer be brewed with water, malt*, hops**, and yeast***.  And that’s all beer is.

*Malt is barley that has been germinated to allow it to create the enzyme that allows conversion of its starches into fermentable sugars, or glucose.

**Hops, or Humulus lupulus, are conical buds that grow on vines.  Cousin to marijuana, hops provide an herbal, sometimes fruity, grassy, or piney smell to beer.  Added during the boil, after the boil, after primary fermentation, or infused right before bottling, hops can add bitterness and/or aroma to beer.  Early hop additions tend to be for bittering, and later ones tend to be for infusing fresh hop aroma.

***Yeast for brewing is not the same as baking yeast.  Saccharomyces cerevisiae consumes the malt sugars, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.

When brewing, brewers simply heat up water, steep malted barley in it to make “wort,” or a barley syrup, and then add hops to add flavor.  Once the wort cools down to about seventy degrees F, the brewer adds yeast.  The yeast, then the yeast consumes the sugars extracted from the malted barley, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide as by-products.  Hence, booze!

Variations of beer come from using different malts, hop varieties, and yeast strains.  In the following section, I will go over what those differences come from.

Beer Styles

Most Americans get screwed when it comes to choosing beer, because they are only familiar with one half of the beer world.  That is the lager world.  The other half of the beer world is made up of ales.  These are very different beers, because they are made in very different ways.

Lagers

Lagers are those crisp, cold beers such as the popular Corona, Heineken, and Stella Artois.  Bud-light and Coors are also technically lagers, but, like I said, they don’t count as beers.

Lagers are made with yeast that ferments on the bottom of the barrel, which requires a colder climate (around 45-55 degrees F), and ferments more slowly, producing a crisper, clearer beer commonly enjoyed very cold.

As for lager sub-categories, there are Pilsners, Oktoberfests, bocks, and more.  Pilsners are lighter, made with pilsen malts, which have not been roasted or kilned much to add roasty flavors.  A great example of a pilsner, in my book, is Dogfish Head’s My Antonia.  

Oktoberfests (also commonly sold as Marzens) are equally crisp and refreshing but bring a more malty, amber profile to the table.  This is simply because they are made with slightly darker malted barley.  An American take on the classic Oktoberfest that I really enjoy is Flying Dog’s Dogtoberfest.

Bocks are generally brewed with a little wheat malt and therefore have some nuances not generally found in other lager styles.  Although I am still working on my bock repetoire, I am on my way to picking out some choice suggestions.

Other than those basic lagers, variations exist, such as one I really like: the black lager.  Brewed with dark malts to add roasty, toasty flavor, the black lagers have a complex palate but are still refreshing and crisp.

Ales

Ales are my favorite category of beers, in case my brevity in the lagers category didn’t already give that away.  Brewed with yeast that ferments at the top of the barrel, ales are also made at higher temperatures (about 65-75 degrees F) and take less time to brew.  Generally, ales are more aromatic and fuller on the palate than lagers.  If we were talking about wines, I would compare ales to reds and dessert wines and lagers to white wines.  Depending on the alcohol content, ales can also be served closer to cellar temperature, where the volatile aroma compounds can be better enjoyed.

Ale styles are vast and numerous, but I’ll do my best to cover most of the basics.  Pale ales, India Pale Ales, Amber Ales, Nut Brown Ales, Weizens and Witbiers, Belgian Dubbels and Tripels, and Stouts are probably a good start for the newb.

Pale Ales are probably one of the most traditional, simple ales you can drink.  Brewed with light colored malt, they are often an expression of full bodied, light, maltiness with some hop bitterness and aroma.  To me, Dale’s Pale Ale, by Oskar Blues Brewing Co., is a great example of a pale ale.

India Pale Ales are basically pale ales’ jock brother.  Brewed with extra hops and malt, they are higher in alcohol and have intense hop aromas and bitterness.  Why India?  Basically, during the Raj, when the Brits colonized India, they wanted to send beer to their men overseas.  Realizing hops’ preservative powers, they brewed a typical pale ale with higher hop concentrations and a slightly higher alcohol content.  Those properties allowed for long shipment of beer that did not go bad during the journey.  Hence, the I.P.A.  Today, I.P.A.s brewed in the US tend to be more intensely hopped than the British offerings, so when buying I.P.A.s, be aware of that difference.  One of my favorite India Pale Ales is Hopsecutioner by Terrapin Brewing Co.  It is floral and intense–just the thing to keep you interested in life at the end of an exhausting day.

Amber and Red Ales

Amber and red ales are brewed just like your basic pale ale, but with crystal malt, or caramelized malted barley, which adds a more complex, roasty flavor.  These beers are one of my favorite beers to pair with food, especially cheeses like aged Goudas.  The two are very complementary, because amber ales often have caramel or toffee notes in the aroma and palate that echo the subtle sweetness in the cheese.  A great but rather intense red ale is Red Rocket Ale by Bear Republic Brewing Co.  If you like lots of hops, this is your guy.  Also, Oskar Blues Brewing Co. brews an excellent example, Gordon, which has some of that sweet character I was talking about and a full mouthfeel, balanced by some kickin’ hops.

Nut Brown Ales

Nut browns are fun for a lot of reasons.  Brewed with darker roasted malts, they often have nutty, coffee-like profiles.  Perfect, obviously, for the coffee lovers out there.  They also tend to be more approachable for beginners and those who are scared to wander into stout territory just yet.  Because of the nature of the Nut Brown, they are not intensely hopped like other beers, and that can be preferable for some of you out there.  Ithaca Nut Brown is a great example of a Nut Brown with solid coffee flavor.

Weizens and Witbiers

Both of these terms refer to wheat.  Traditionally brewed in Germany and Belgium, weissbeers, witbiers, and weizens are interesting brews that rely on wheat and barley to provide sugar in the yeast’s fermentation.  Obviously, that changes the flavor profile a bit.  If you’ve had Blue Moon, you’ve had a version of a Witbier.  Hoegaarden is also a Witbier.  There are many offerings out there, but in general, they are crisp, pale beers with refreshing, somewhat fruity aromas.  Many times, they are brewed with coriander and/or orange peel.

Another offshoot of the wheat beer category is the Hefeweizen group.  A German tradition, Hefeweizens are unmistakable because of their banana, clove, and bubblegum aromas and slightly sweet flavor.  If that sounds weird to you, don’t freak–try one.  The yeast contributes to the unique flavors and aromas, and it’s really a cool beer.  Brooklyn Brewery recently teamed up with an old German brewery to combine techniques and an old yeast strain, resulting in a nice collaborative effort: Hopfenweisse.

Belgian Dubbels and Tripels

Belgian and Abbey style beers are quite sexy creatures.  They are unique and subtle, and somehow I just find them very arresting.  Monk brewing culture in Belgium really fostered these into popularity.  Brewed with barley and often Belgian candi sugar (a dark sugar that can also be used as a fermentable), Dubbels and Tripels are made simply but carry elegant flavors.

The difference: dubbels are brown, fruitier, and darker, and tripels are gold in color, malty but subtle, and higher in alcohol content.  Where are the names from?  Really, the origins of the names are not certain, but they say the name tripel was used to demonstrate that those beers were stronger than dubbels.  These beers are often sold as trappist ales, which is just a designation of monastery, indicating it is an abbey ale.  The Orval, Westmalle, La Trappe, Rochefort, and Chimay breweries are all well known and for a reason: they all make delicious examples of these styles.

Stouts

Stouts are definitely the big daddy of the beer world.  Dark, mysterious, intense, and comforting at once, they offer comfort to beer lovers.  Some people find them too intense, while others appreciate the darker flavors.  Brewed with black, chocolate, and other kilned or roasted malts, stouts have roasty flavors and colors ranging from dark brown to opaque black.  Some stouts are sweeter, mostly those brewed with lactose and labeled as Milk Stouts.  Those are dessert beers.  Some stouts are more balanced.  Some stouts are really, really, strong.  Try some, try all.  But here are some of my favorites: Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout, Nogne O Imperial Stout, and Yeti Imperial Stout by Great Divide Brewing.  Oh, and by the way: Imperial always refers to mega-strong beers.  That goes for IPAs too.

Barley Wines

If stouts are the big daddy of the beer world, Barley Wines are just, like…King.  Brewed with insane levels of malts and hops, these are strong as wine and not a joke. They age well, too!  My favorite one, right now, is Fred by Hair of the Dog Brewing Co.

: )

I hope this gives you a basis for getting out there and buying some beer!  I definitely just scratched the surface with this one, but for the newbs, I think it’s a great start.  Get crackin’!

You see, I think I had been drinking a lot of the local wines in Ithaca up until that Crianza, and drinking it made me want to get back to Spanish wines.  Last summer, I also stayed with the Galician Mendez family, who make Do Ferreiro Albariño.  Their land was beautiful, and they made the most delicious Albariño, making it easy for me to fall in love with that clean, Galician white.

Saturday, I had some friends over for Passover dinner, and I was sure to include some Spanish vinos in the mix.  One Albariño, one Garnacha, and one Crianza later, it was as though I had never left Spain.  To make matters even better, though, the wines paired extremely well with my Passover dinner.  The Albariño was light and crisp, complementing our lemon roasted chicken; the dates in the Sephardic charoset–a mixture of bananas, dates, nuts, and spices–were great with the fruity Crianza; and the Crianza stood up well to an appetizer of potato crisps with caramelized onions and sliced brisket with sour cream.

Of course I am biased from experiencing most of my wine travel in Spain, but I think Spanish wines are exquisite and unpretentious, often overshadowed by Italian and French wines.  But you know what?  Just try a cold Albariño on the first hot day this summer.  Have a Crianza with those smoky burgers you just took off the grill.  You will understand why I hold these humble wines in such high regard.

If you don’t understand, I leave you with this: when you were in middle school, didn’t you want to roll with the popular kids?  And maybe you did for a little while, but you didn’t understand why everyone thought they were so awesome.  And then you had your real friends–the ones around whom you could be yourself.  Well, Spanish wines are like your real friends.  You don’t feel forced to like them or aspire to drinking them.  But you love them even if no one thinks you’re cool for drinking them.  And don’t we all find out it’s better to be the happy nerd, in the end?

Which is why, reader, I was glad to enjoy a delicious cocktail with my long lost sister (I haven’t seen her since winter break) when I got home to sunny Jerz.  We decided to mix up a cocktail that is gaining popularity once again after it disappeared behind the glitz and glam of more mainstream libations.  The Negroni.

I first read about the Negroni cocktail a while ago and had to try it.  Equal parts Campari, Sweet Vermouth, and Gin, the Negroni is a  bitter yet balanced and aromatic drink.  A few days ago, I was reading through Gabrielle Hamilton’s (chef of Prune in New York) newly released autobiography, Blood, Bones, and Butter, in which she recalls enjoying Negronis on vacations to Italy.  After reading her tantalizing description of the drink, I knew that’s what I wanted to sip on our back deck when I got home from school for break.

I prefer reducing the Sweet Vermouth in this drink to 1/2 or 3/4 of a part; otherwise, I find the drink too sweet.  Also, to give the drink a little lift from the bitter Campari, I squeeze some fresh orange juice into it as well.  Traditionally, orange slices are only really used to garnish the drink, but what the hell, right?  Recipes are made to be twiddled with.

Here is my Negroni recipe–If, like me, you are home for Spring break, let this cocktail transport you to a far away place as you sip it, hopefully, somewhere at least sunny.

Shake 1.5 oz Bombay Sapphire Gin, 1.5 oz Campari, and 1 oz Sweet Vermouth, and 1 oz fresh orange juice over ice until the outside of your shaker frosts.  Strain into a rocks glass with ice, and garnish with an orange slice.

CHEERS!

Back in the 1920′s, as we know, drinking was banned and the government outlawed good, drinking American citizens.  This quasi-dark age only foreshadowed problems that would arise in the United States’ future.  On the one hand, Prohibition sparked creativity in some, who attempted to make moonshine and drink it without losing bodily functionality.  On the other hand, drinking in secret became an ever-popular activity among the oppressed American citizens.

Years later, we young people find ourselves suffering a similar plight: that of the 21 year drinking age.  Much like our unfortunate Prohibition-era comrades, we resort to closet-drinking.  Although some of our oppressed people, such as myself,  attempt to carry out the legacy of the moonshine-producers, the idea of enjoying a good drink with friends is drowned in the white noise of trying to get a buzz before going out.

Pregaming is a difficult sport; sometimes, like a fussy mother making sure her kid has enough to eat before his soccer game, we try to drink extra in case we don’t find anywhere to get our drink on.  Just like that fussy mother’s child ends up puking on the field due to too much snackage, so do we suffer over-compensating’s ill effects.  And so the cycle of abuse goes.

More depressing than goodly minors ending up in the hospital due to pregame fails is the law’s effect on drinking quality.  You know you’ve done it: you need some booze for the weekend, and you know that 21 year old dude, and he’s going to the liquor store, and you’re low on cash, and you’re like, Goddamn.  Here’s ten bucks.  Just get me some crappy Barton’s vodka. Barredfrom the counters of liquor stores, we make rash decisions about our alcohol purchases, and the result is often chugging crap and chasing with whatever flavorful soft drink or junk food we have around.  Tisk, tisk.

You see, when minors can’t choose wisely, craft beverage producers suffer.  They are the Picasso’s and Monet’s, creating lovely works, and we are the bastards buying mass-produced prints to hang on our walls!  My heart breaks every time my friends ask me for one of my home-brews, just because they are out of booze, want an inkling of a buzz, and don’t even care enough about the investment I put into making my little babies that they will drink it warm.  It’s a killer.

As you can see, our pre-gaming habits are not our fault; they are an evolution of oppression imposed on good-willed American drinkers by our randomly-strong-willed-about-unimportant-issues-government.  And thanks to our good old boys in the White House, artisans are suffering economically, kids are ending up in hospitals, and drinking has become a sloppy, means-to-an-end clusterfuck.

In closing, take this with you: try getting your hands on some quality shit and enjoying it with others who appreciate it as well, and take your time drinking it in the appropriate way.  Beer?  Chill it down between 40 and 55 degrees F (warmer the darker and stronger the beer) and pour it into a clean glass!  White wine?  Chill and serve in a clean glass!  Red wine?  Room temperature, served in…yes, a clean glass.  If you’re gonna go for cocktails, please, for the love of G-d, shake or stir it on ice.  If you don’t have ice, buy or make some, and if you can’t do that, don’t have a cocktail.  Perhaps you have some whisky you could drink straight.  Whatever you do, realize there can be more to drinking than getting trashed on rocket fuel before entering that mosh pit of sweaty humans they call a frat party.  Cheers!

How do we achieve sweet beers?  Lactose, most would say.  Otherwise, a yeast with less ability to attenuate may leave more residual sugars.  For my purposes, I chose lactose to ensure sweet stout quality.  Before realizing that many stouts are brewed with lighter barley and some dark roasted or kilned barley, I ordered dark malt and some wheat malt (to mimic the wheaty-ness of a cookie).  I also chose a number of specialty grains to steep in hot water before hand, some Tettnang hops for subtle spiciness, and some cinnamon and ginger.  Northernbrewer.com recommended Irish Ale yeast as a great one for stouts, so that is what I pitched, around 68 degrees F.  My OG was 1.07.

Once my little baby is all grown up (the beer is done with primary fermentation), I will rack it into a secondary fermentor containing chopped or pureed raisins.  Ultimately, when I prime for bottling, I hope to make a sugar solution with brown butter consomme.  Although I originally planned to make wort with said consomme, I made the consomme with salted butter, and after gelatin clarification, it was, obviously, too salty, and I decided to wait to make it again with unsalted another time.  I just know it will add the right buttery flavor to the beer that would amp up the cookie-esque-ness, if you feel me.

I can’t wait to indulge in a beer that both Dorie Greenspan and master brewers would equally approve of.  Nomnomnom.

But Why?

Towards the end of the summer, back in August, I started toying with the idea of buying a teacup pig and bringing it back to school with me, kinda below-the-radar-style.  How cute it would be!  How fun to have a creature to care for, etc.  Well, unfortunately I could only find breeders in Texas, quite far from my New Jersey hometown.  No big deal.  Although I really wanted a pig, I was not heart-broken.  However, I still had this need for something extra to call my own; something to tend to.

One thing led to another, another, and I started getting curious about the pastime of making hard cider.  How difficult could it be?  Ithaca has plenty of cider to offer, and all I would need was to ferment it…So I did my homework on this cider deal, and when I searched how-to’s, I got a lot of information on beers.  That’s when I started to wonder about the possibilities.

Then What Happened?

I realized beer would actually be more feasible for me to make.  Cider making required me to find five gallons of cider to begin with.  Meh.  I’m tiny, and although I did try making cider once so far, I did not enjoy carrying the cider home.  Brewing beer with malted barley extracts seemed easy–and online stores had kits!  I mean, could it be any harder than using an Easy-Bake Oven?

I promptly dropped a hefty enough sum on equipment and a Dunkelweizen extract kit.  I would begin when I got back to school.

And Then?

After a couple days back at school, I tried my hand at a first batch.  It was an interesting process, but the most challenging part was cooling the wort after boiling it.  The first time I brewed, I didn’t know that oxygen could poorly effect hot wort, and i tried to poor my wort into every container I owned to cool it.  It finally cooled, but after realizing that could cause off flavors in beer, I never did that again.  We live and learn.

By now, I have brewed one batch each of cider and mead and 5 beers.  My most recent brew is a peated blonde ale, appropriately named Smokin’ Blonde.  It’s kind of a black sheep beer; combining a lighter style with many hops and peated malt was kind of bold.  But it had a very unique, smoky character, and I like it.

My other beers include Ruddy Little Lady, a curry-spiced stout; Prelim Fail Ale,  a red ale; Boogeyman Ale, my first attempt; and my currently brewing green cardamom IPA.

Success Measures?

I would chalk up my venture to a huge success.  From brewing, not only have I learned a new craft and hobby, but I also gained a whole new passion.  I realized how many amazing styles of delicious beer are out there and the science behind their making that drives perfection.  Because I can’t legally sit for the Certified Cicerone exam in March in New York, I still hope to be as prepared for the exam by that date as I would have been if I could take it.  That way, at least I can pass along the wealth of beer knowledge I have and spread the gospel of craft beer.

In the past year or two, I’ve become particularly obsessed with, in love with, and passionate about beers in particular.  At first, I was merely surprised by the vast spectrum of flavors the beer kingdom had to offer, but then I turned into much more of a beer freak.  I started brewing, reading up on beer science, and just seriously living beer.  I would drag my family and friends on quests to find special brews, sometimes over an hour from home.  I thank them for their support, but this brings up my main point: I am still not legally, in our grand old country of the United States, allowed to purchase or consume beer (or any other alcoholic beverage, for that matter).

Luckily for me, New York State law allows minors to taste alcoholic beverages for educational purposes, so I’ve had some experiences in which I was allowed to drink in public without feeling like I should be hiding my hooch in a flask, inside a paper bag.  On the other hand, however, there are limits to this law, which led me to create this blog.

Today, I was denied registry for the Certified Cicerone exam, an exam which, when passed, certifies a beer nerd like me to be regarded as having a certain knowledge mastery on the topic of beer.  Much like a sommelier is a wine expert, a Cicerone is a beer expert.  The first set of three Cicerone exams is the online Certified Beer Server exam.  I passed with flying colors just a week ago, and I was on cloud nine, thinking I could sit for the Certified Cicerone exam in a month.  Unfortunately, I soon realized a tasting section was involved, so I contacted the program’s coordinators.  They confirmed my fear that, because the U.S. government is a little bitch, I can not take the exam for another three. whole. years.

So you see, I decided that there must be more youngin’s like me out there, wishing the drinking age allowed them to blossom as young beverage aficionados.  However, perhaps they were barred from taking a great exam they probably would have passed with a much higher score than that 40 year old buffoon who is allowed to take it.  Perhaps they were not allowed to take a class that would educate them about their passion.  Perhaps they just needed a community of underage beverage lovers, just like themselves, who could learn with them and create a strong force of underage “bevies” to fuel the learning.

Cheers!

Shaina