This is a compromise of different flavors that the household seems to like.  It doesn’t really adhere to any BJCP category.  The closest I think would be a Classic American Pilsner, but the hops are modern and hence unconventional.  We wanted to experiment with the apricot and clementine flavor of newer hops.

Makes 5 gallons.

Grain bill:

• 4lb German Munich–Weyermann’s Light Munich, made from 2-row.  Bought and milled previous day.
• 4lb Jasmine Rice–mangled in the food processor.
• 8oz Carapils

Hops:

• 2oz Summit 18% AA
• 1oz Amarillo 8.2% AA

I am using a lazy man’s double mash.  That is, do the gelatinize the rice with a manual addition of amylase enzyme powder.  Will use my pressure cooker for the boil.  Combine to unmashed grain for an ALPHA rest, then add water to drop to BETA rest, and pitch in more amylase powder to do the beta rest.  Odd but it doesn’t require so much temperature control.

The mash schedule:

• Beta rest: Rest rice at 140F with beta amylase enzyme addition for 15 minutes
• Gelatinization: Pressure cook rice at 5psi for 10 minutes
• Alpha rest: Add cooked rice mash to milled malt, plus 6.75 quarts water at 137F.  Rest 30 minutes.
• Double mash beta rest: Add about 2.5 quarts of water at 75F or so to drop down to 144F.  Add amylase enzyme.  Rest 30 minutes.
• Mashout: Add a little over 13 quarts of water (3.3 gallons) to achieve 168F.  Rest briefly.

Sparge with 175F water to get 6-6.5 gallons of wort.

Hopping schedule:

Boil one hour

• 1/2 oz Amarillo @ 15 minutes
• 1/2 oz Summit @ 15 minutes
• 1/2 oz Amarillo @ 5 minutes
• 1/2 oz Summit @ 5 minutes
• Dry hop 1oz Summit in primary

Ferment with Saflager W-36 at ~52F.  Lager at 35F until clear.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/food/recipes/9811.kolache.2.php

It makes a good double batch.   One note: I had too much liquid when I was done; consider reducing the amount of milk by a cup.  I’ll update if I find I screwed something up that caused me to have too much liquid.   I’m still looking for a good way to wrap sausages in these; the recipe is meant for open-face kolaches.  We think just wrapping the sausace around in it like a pig-in-a-blanket will do.  I’ll update if when I try it.

Malt is a grain that has been germinated so that it begins to grow; the enzymes in the seeds convert the starches into sugars. The germination is then cut short, leaving a kernel that had converted some starches and began to produce enzymes.  It’s like brewing with little grain fetuses.

This is specifically about my own experiences at malting corn for homebrewing. Corn malt is hard to find elsewhere, so I decided to dabble in this. It was fairly successful, and I’ve become tempted to malt more. I still need to make some refinements. The big rule I’ve learned is that surface area is king, and volume isn’t too useful. You need to be able to spread this stuff out.

Another note, I have since learned that there are a lot of distillers on the web–noteably living in New Zealand. Home distillation became legal there in the 1990s, and corn malt is very important for making Whiskey. Hobbyist distillers in New Zealand have the time and will to share personal experiences in malting. I found a site after trying this that has a slightly different process. You can stop here and go there from Tony Ackland’s “Home Distillation of Alcohol” page.

That being said, my process was good for malting a large volume at once. The downside was that the malt was somewhat inconsistent: some kernels had germinated more than others, but it averaged out in the end.

The sites I used for initial research were:

• Brew Your Own (BYO)’s feature article on home malting, with mention of corn.
• Scott Kaczorowski’s malting section of his chichi page.

First Attempts at Malting Corn

I had heard around that malted corn was used in some pre-Prohibition American beers, and I decided to give it a shot. I’d have to mill the malt myself; mills are expensive, but malt is cheap-and homemade malt cheaper still. If it worked out, I could get the mill. It turns out the malt was good enough to try a mill, and the milled malt was good enough to make a beer.

The Corn

This started with a 50lb bag of feed corn from the local supermarket for $7. The corn had an apple aroma added to it; it was 97% feed corn and 3% this aroma. The aroma is used to attract the deer towards it, and it must at least not poison them.  But my plan was to wash it all out anyways. I didn’t see that until I brought it home and had it opened, something sure smelled funny. This odor washed out towards the end of rehydration and was gone by the time I had malt; anything left would have been removed from boiling the wort used to produce the beer. This being said, I’ve discovered some feed stores in/around town that could have untampered corn.

Using feed corn is fine. Make sure the kernels are intact; they shouldn’t be cracked. Rinse the kernels, but I wouldn’t recommend letting them get down the drain. Imagine the kernels germinating and sprouting in your plumbing. It is dark and damp in there after all. This happened to some wheat I was malting and it’s a pain in the ass to clear. I don’t think the EPA is fond of the RoundUp I’ve poured into my drain. This was the bathtub-the kitchen drain tends to run so much volume in a day that it’ll purge the kernels after you, say, run the dishwasher.  But watch the sink just in case.

To avoid having to put grains near a drain, consider filling a large pot with water and running the grains through it inside a fine-mesh colander.  You shouldn’t lose any grain this way, and in the end you should just have some dirty water to dispose on the lawn.

Rehydrating

The kernels had to be immersed in water to trick them into growing. However, they can kind of drown if you keep them in water too long. The idea then is to alternately hydrate the kernels and air them. I used a fermentation bucket and my 5 gallon stock pot for water immersion and a colander and baking sheets for airing. Whatever containers you use should have some head space because the kernels will expand.

Here is the original method I used:

Fill the buckets up with the corn, giving some head space in both buckets. Fill one up with water, wait 12 hours, and then fill the other. Every twelve hours, drain the kernels with the colander and spread over the cookie sheets. This gives the kernels some time to breath. The alternation allows you to have half the batch out breathing while the other half are immersed. Don’t do this and you will probably run out surface space to air the kernels.

Do this for 48 hours, for a total of two changes of water for each bucket. The volume of the kernels will expand during the process. This was the directions I got from the chicha site. A fermentation seems to start in the second change of water. My thoughts now are that this much rehydration isn’t necessary; fermentation will take away some of the sugar we want for the beer.

I wish to revise my method by just using the colander with changes of water and a 20 minutes soaking regime.  That might be appropriate enough to kick them off, and leaves less water in the end.  You have to get as much water out as you can or else mold will grow on some of the malt.  It’s a real pain to separate out the moldy grains.

Germination

Leave the kernels without water in their buckets for a few days–in the dark. You’ll fool them into thinking they’re in the wet ground and begin to sprout. The roots will grow first; ignore them. What you want is the acrospire. That’s the little pecker that runs along the kernel. When those start rising out, then you’re in business.

The sites I used originally recommended an acrospire of 2-3 lengths the kernel. The New Zealand whiskey distillers disagree. An acrospire of one kernel length is “fully modified” and anything more is “over modified.” An over modified grain is mostly plant, and has lost much of the sugars you want. All that’s needed is a fully modified kernel. There are other ways to test if the germination is complete. If a kernel crushes fairly easily in the fingers to a thin powder, then the corn is ready. This might not hold true for wheat or barley.

One thing you’ll find odd is that the kernels will be warm. I measured a temperature inside a bed of germinated corn got 100F! Also, the grains on top will think they are exposed and growth will halt. For these reasons, stir the grain every few hours. To solve the problem with exposed grain, I have been recommended to use a wet towel to cover them. This has a benefit of keeping mold away. I think parchment paper might work better because roots like to grow into cloth.

Drying

Spread the germinated kernels out and run a fan near them. This is where I messed up with my large volume. I didn’t have enough surface area set aside for this. I only had so many baking sheets. If your were to do 50 pounds in one go, hijack the kitchen table or even the floor. The germination needs to be stopped, and the grains dried before they spoil. The kernels are pretty resilitient up to this point, but now mold will want to cover the whole mess.

Drying will of course work better in warmer weather, but don’t expect to need more than 2 days to do this if you keep air moving. There is also some dispute if drying should be skipped in favor of going straight to kilning.

Any alternative I will be trying it laying out the grains in sheets in the back of my car in the hot summer sun.

You can try loading up the grains into old pillowcases that seal shut and run them through the dryer.  I did this with some wheat, and I think that was the death nail for my old dryer.  You have been warned.

Kilning

At this point you have a dry malt that isn’t much better than a “green malt” and still too moist to use. A lot of people use it just fine, but you need to kiln to make even a pale malt. Roasting will stop germination for good and will also impart special flavors based on how you kiln. This involves lightly roasting the malt. For pale malts, this is a very light roast. 125F for 24 hours is considered about right.   Note that if you dried in your car, you might be fine.

Delivering that kind of heat is troublesome. Check your oven and you’ll find it probably can only go down to about 200F. If you have an oven light, you might be safe. Test with a food thermometer to see what kind of temperature you get after an hour.

I don’t have an oven light. I bought a 150W incandescant bulb and installed it in one of my worklights. In the oven, this could maintain a 140F temperature. My recommendation is to use a 120W bulb because 140F is considered too high for a neutral kiln. It worked fine for me though.

You can roast the malts to get various effects at this point too. I’ve been told that 212F for an hour creates a lightly roasted malt of about 20 lovibond that still has some diastetic power. It’s a tricky affair because you can denature the enzymes at these temperatures; then you’ll just have a bunch of brown starch. For crazy roast malts like black patent or something for stouts, you’ll want to do this outside because of smoke. I have no experience with it to share.

Removing Roots and Acrospires

The roots are considered undesireable in the malt. They tend to be thin and turn brittle after kilning, making them easy to remove. The trickier part is the acrospire, which is much heartier. You can leave them in, but there is some reasearch indicating it leads to bad flavors–particularly dimethyl sulfide (DMS).  It’s vegetable-like flavor and aroma like canned corn.  A full wort boil should take care of it. I half-assed it and came out OK. Your mileage may vary.

If you can wait, then wait and let everything dry out more flush. But eventually you’ll have to get the dangling bits free from the malt. A popular technique for doing this is winnowing: running the grain through a fast wind so that the brittle roots get blown away. Pouring the malt from bucket to bucket actually works very well for starters, but there will be some obstinate pieces. I ended up running handfuls of grains between my hands, and outright picking out stubborn pieces.

I have thought about better ways of doing this. I’m thinking shaking the grains around in a colander will probably help loosen everything. This step is mentioned very casually so it must be easier than I make it.

The dryer method does a good job of beating up the roots and acrospires, but it also does a good job of beating up your dryer.  You will still have to winnow.

Finished Malt

Whole malt should store well, and consider getting some large containers for the task. I have them in bags at this point, but I understand that air contact won’t work forever.

Once you have the roots and acrospires separated, you have malt! You’ll have to mill it to make any use of it. I’ll tell you now that large corn malt disagrees with most homebrew grain mills. It’ll go through, but not without some coaxing. I bought an Automatic mill (”Automatic” as in the company name, not as in motorized) for milling this corn. After I took out the supporting rod in the hopper, corn went through much easier. However, I still had to coax it in with the backside of a stirring spoon. It’s not the mill’s problem because it eats barley like it’s nothing.

Use of this Malt

I have used 9 pounds of corn malt in a recipe for 10 gallons of light American lager. A major concern with this inconsistent malt like this is dimethyl sulfide (DMS). This imparts an off-flavor of cooked vegetables or canned corn. The solution is to boil longer, with the lid off–which you should do anyways. It did smell kind of funky at the start of the boil, but that could have been from a first wort hopping experiment. Either way, DMS is not present in the final flavor of the beer. It wasn’t a problem.

Another concern is gelatinization of undermodified malts. Since the malt is inconsistent, some kernels haven’t malted well or not at all. Those kernels can gelatinize–thicken up–and cause the sparge to stick. The traditional solution for adjuncts that can cause a sparge to stick is to boil them for 20 minutes before using them in the mash. I didn’t quite do this, but I did end up boiling a good portion of the grains because my recipe called for a triple decoction mash. If the malt works in a single infusion mash, then I can speak with 100% certainty gelatinization isn’t a problem. But I have to test this yet.

I assumed I’d get a lower efficiency with this malt and I was right. In StrangeBrew’s recipe planner, I penciled in my malt as flaked maize, but reduced the gravity contribution per pound by ~25%. I managed to get right on target with this, assuming a 70% mash efficiency.

The flavor contribution of the corn malt is fairly neutral and leads me to believe I could pull an American light lager with 100% corn malt. I won’t be trying this right away because I’m still dicking around with my recipe. The beer as I’ve tasted it already reminds me of light lagers and pilseners so I can’t pin anything on the corn. Keep in mind these beer styles tend to be unmerciful and flaws expose themselves readily. The corn manages to hide with everything else under these circumstances.

Conclusions

Would I recommend malting? I don’t know. There are people that make perfectly good beer with just extract, and most everybody else would be mashing. However, there really isn’t a clear progression towards making your own malt. Malts these days are fully-modified and well-made. The logical progression towards malting starts with milling; you should have a mill first before malting. Don’t expect the homebrew story to mill your grains.

Milling your own grain lets you buy in bulk, store the malt, and use it as you go. You can mill much more fine than the store, and get a more efficient mash. A side benefit is you can mill your own malt. I didn’t get the mill first, so this was an additional frustration with which I had to contend. I won’t share tips on milling or buying a mill here.

Malting lets you buy $7.00, 50lb bags of grain and turn it into beer. They say you shouldn’t consider the cost savings, but that just glares at you. Malting also lets you handle grains you can’t get at the homebrew store, such as corn. If you don’t care about corn, then there are a lot of other grains people like to malt. These people have gluten allergies and would keel over drinking a beer made from normal grains. They’re interested in alternatives like sorghum, flax, and buckwheat.

Malting your own lets you control the malting process, but commercial maltsters generally do a good job. I can’t decid if having a ton of overmodified malt would be good for anything; that’s the only type of malt I don’t hear any being produced. Kilning can be done with commercial malt without having to make your own, so don’t do it for that.

I will continue to malt because of the restrictions it places on my ingredients. It starts to seem silly to make some kind of beer that doesn’t jibe with the 200 pounds of malted this or that in my garage. It also prepares me for the apocalypse or something. I’ll spend it off my rocker since I’ll be pretty self-sufficient; wait for my next article about growing barley in my backyard (just kidding–I hope).

When I tell people I homebrew, I usually hear two things in response. First, that they know somebody who tried to make something or another, and it exploded on them; and that was the end of it for them. Second, that they are daunted by the whole idea. People who have looked into the whole process have been recommended a bunch of equipment to get started. I’ve been working on minimizing the amount of equipment so people can check it out with the least amount of commitment.

A note about homebrewing culture: what I’m sharing here is sacrilege to a lot of people and would normally solicit some very skeptical–sometimes hostile–responses from homebrewers. I think a lot of it is American engineering culture which puts process above other things. There is some merit to this; you don’t want to ruin 5 gallons of beer due to a preventable mishap. But take this advice above all else: There are no absolutes in homebrewing. For the egoists, I normally do whole grain batches and some will vouch for the crazy shit I’ve done (malted corn for a lager, made a Belgian Tripel from 25 pounds of crimped feed barley using enzymes…). I’ve made normal beer too, but it does bore me.

(Note from January 2008–Methinks homebrewing culture has matured a bit so this has become an unfair generalization. Still, keep it in mind.)

So my best advice to you is to be discreet about what you’re doing and refuse to cave in if they start ramming the conventional wisdom down your throat. Remember that brewing is a modestly-controlled spoiling of food. You will have to really bungle up to infect the beer with something bad or otherwise ruin it.

Some notes on the recipes and this process. This process uses 2 gallons of bottled water. You don’t want to use tap water because of chloramine. That stuff doesn’t boil out like chlorine. You can use campden tablets (potassium metabisulphite) to drive that stuff out, or use filtered water, but then you still need two 1 gallon jugs to ferment in. All these recipes are extract only. They don’t use crushed grains in any way. Most of the recipes use wheat malt extracts. Wheat extracts are good for first-timers for a few reasons:

1. Wheat beers are naturally cloudy, so you can’t lose style points for clarity.
2. Two wheat beers are becoming popular in the US: Belgian Wit, and Hefeweizen.
3. They can be consumed young. This is good for your first time because first timers want to drink their first batch quickly.

I put a few other recipes at the end of the article that don’t necessarily use wheat extract if you’re enterprising.

Items you will need:

• A pot that can hold 2 gallons with head space. Beer likes to foam up–and over if you let it. You won’t really need a lid but that’ll help the water reach a boil faster. You won’t be boiling the combined ingredients with the lid on.
• A range that can boil the 2 gallons of water.
• A long spoon for your stock pot.
• A sanitizing solution. Note sanitization is not sterilization–the complete eradication of microbes. Bleach works but you must rinse it out over and over and watch your clothes–or brew naked. Perfume-free Oxyclean works pretty well.
• A funnel for pouring off the beer into the jugs–not into your mouth.
• A sink with a drain stopper that can hold cold water. Your pot will be rapidly chilled down with this.
• Old (Clean), empty plastic soda bottles with caps. I recommend the small individual ones. Think of serving sizes here since you’ll keep the beer in these. You won’t need them right away so maybe you could get some single-serve soda bottles while you’re out.
• A dark place to ferment the beer. Specifically, protected from all sunlight.
• Optional: A heating pad to speed up bottle carbonation. Don’t use it for the fermentation.

I heartily recommend you get an auto-siphon too. This lets you pull the liquid off of the settled crud–the “trub”–without mixing them together. I mentioned cloudy beer, but generally people don’t like sloppy bits. But this is an experiment so you can tolerate it.

I also recommend you get a hydrometer and figure out how to use it. The hydrometer will let you know if the beer has fermented out enough. Without it, you can only really go by rough taste and lack of activity to know that it’s done.

The basic procedure is to boil together fermentable ingredients, cool it off into jugs, ferment it a few days, pour off to soda bottles with a little more sugar, and let the yeast carbonate the bottles. First timers are afraid they’ll blow it, so I’m including a ridiculously-detailed procedure. I remember my first time that I was wallowing in doubt, and I would have liked to have had all this when I was doing 5 gallons. For the record, doing 5 gallons isn’t much different–just bigger. Here is the detailed procedure, using this abridged Hefeweizen recipe. Don’t worry about the details–I’ll lead you through what is what. More comprehensive notes on the recipe are at the end of the document.

With two gallons of water:
1.5 pounds wheat DME (Dried Malt Extract)

0.25 ounce Hallertauer 3.1% AA @ 60 minutes

Ferment with Safbrew WB-06; or fall back to either Safbrew W-68 or Safbrew T-58 if you must. You could use a liquid Hefeweizen yeast too but think of the shipping and what it might due to the critters.

You will likely have to get two 1 pound bags of wheat extract, and hops come in 1 ounce bags. The yeast come in little packets meant for 5 gallon batches, but you’ll do fine to use it all for your project.

I. Preparing the Wort.

This is the sweet liquid product that the yeast will gobble up and turn into beer.

Each participant may consider having a beer before beginning, but it’s a bad idea your first time. That being said, friends don’t let friends brew sober. Well I do, and that’s why it makes me miserable and I have to make it interesting by doing crazy crap like this . . .

1. Clean out the stock pot, rinse it out and dry it. Continue to rinse until the only odor you think you get from it is a little chlorine from your tap water. If you’re shoving your nose right up to it to figure this out, then the stock pot’s ok.
2. Pour the water into the pot and heat it on high. If your pot is very large, you might be able to span two burners for this. Covering the pot will get it to boil much faster.  Just check on it often since the first clue it’s boiling might be the wort boiling out the top.
3. Once boiling, add the fermentables. That is the malt extract and sugar if called for. Let it come back to a boil. Dry malt extract clings to moisture such as the steam from the boil, so you’ll probably find this step fussy. At this point you should have the pot open and exposed; no lid.
4. Once it boils again, you can start that hopping schedule. Hop schedules are initially counterintuitive in that the times are counting down, not up. Let’s say you must add hops A at 60 minutes, B at 20 minutes, and then C at 5 minutes. What this means is you add A once everything is boiling again. You then have 60 minutes before your boil is finished. When there is 20 minutes left before the boil finishes, you add hops B; you add hops C with 5 minutes left to the boil. It is done this way because hops get more bitter the longer they boil. You are commited to a timetable as soon as the first hops go in. So for some reason if you wanted to boil down your beer awhile, do it before you add your first hops.
   1. Add 0.25 ounces of Hallertauer here. You now have 60 minutes of boil left.
5. When the boil time is up, cut the heat, put a lid on the pot, and move it to a sink with some cold water in it. Let the pot chill this way, possibly changing the water once. If you have a thin pot you might get away with the initial filling of water. For a thicker pot, you’ll most likely need to change out the sink water once. Do not touch the wort since it’s now cooling into contamination range. Cooling lets some icky proteins settle out–never to become part of the greater beer again even if it gets into the bottles. It also gets the wort down to a safe fermentation temperature quickly.

II. Fermentation

1. Sanitize the water jugs and funnel with the Oxyclean and thoroughly rinse.
   Pour the beer off into the jugs through the funnel, leaving an even amount of space in each.
2. Open your yeast packet(s) and pour roughly even amounts of yeast into each container.
3. Judgement call–you can cover the beer up if you want. Perhaps you’re going to put this all in a dusty closet. You could wrap a paper towel over the top and secure it, or mount the original caps partially.
4. Move the jugs into that cool part of your house. The best temperature for this particular beer lays around 65F. Don’t fuss it though. It should be outside of direct sunlight or else the beer will “skunk.” That’s good for Corona’s but not for this.

After a day, fermentation should be obvious and aggressive. There should be foam and a rush of tiny bubbles up the sides of the jug. Every day, pour some of the fermenting beer back and forth between the jugs to smooth their nuances. The shaking brings yeast back into contact with fermentables, and displaces a lot of the CO2. Let that burp out. Yeast don’t like CO2 as it’s basically their excrement. That and alcohol, surprisingly enough. If you’re very good you can get booze up in the 15% range, but it’s a dark art. If you want significantly more than that, you have to concentrate the alcohol, which will be illegal in its various ways in most places in the Western World.

III. Preparing to serve–bottling.

1. When bubbling stops, cap the bottles. If they bulge or pop off the caps, fermentation is not yet complete. Continue doing this until the jugs stay inert for 12 hours.
2. Sanitize your soda bottles and caps, rinse.
3. Measure off an ounce of sugar and split evenly amongst the bottles to the best of your ability. Note that an ounce of sugar is a little over a quarter of a cup by my math. If you’re unsure if you’re playing with the same volumes as me, go for at most an ounce per gallon of final beer.
4. Pour a little beer from the jugs into each bottle, leaving behind the gunk on the bottom. Screw on the caps.  Contemplate buying a siphon; or use your siphon here if you got it.
5. Move the bottles to a dark place again, but this time it can be warmer. You can try for a heating pad here. Warm fermentation can lead to off-flavors, but all the yeast are now taking on just little bit of sugar, so there’s not much for them to alter. Stop when the bottles are roughly as firm as they were when they had soda.
6. If you want to drop out a lot of the gunk, stick the bottles in the freezer until they turn into ice bricks, then move to the fridge for a few days. Most shit will drop out.
   The beer is now ready. At the least, you should consider chilling them to slow down any bonus yeast activity. Yes they can still explode, and that’s because we didn’t measure if fermentation was likely done using a hydrometer; just staring at it isn’t the best indicator.

They should be ready now, but they’ll do well to age. They should last about 6 months in those types of bottles before they start losing flavor.

A note about pouring: you don’t want the shit on the bottom in your cup. Tilt the cup as you tilt the bottle, and try to pour off everything without having to retilt the bottle back up. In this way you don’t disturb the sediment. This is slightly different from the “proper” pour which will glop out a little bit onto the top at the end to build the head.

The beer isn’t going to knock your socks off, but it’ll readily show you if you’re a bad enough dude for homebrewing. If you made it this far and the beer resembles beer, then you did it right! See Q&A section for some ideas of where to go next, or try other recipes.

Other Recipes:

Hefeweizen from the procedure

This is the most basic to prepare. It comes down to a light hopping regimen and a pound of wheat extract per gallon. You have two choices of flavor that depend entirely on what you do with the yeast. In advance I warn you to sanitize thoroughly if you want that banana flavor that is known in this style; you’re going to pitch less yeast than you normally should to cause the yeast to build up.  The flavors in a Hefeweizen come from the yeast getting it on.

For a clean flavor that most are used to, use all the yeast. For those of you that want to get some flavor out of your yeast, use only a very little bit of the packet. Say, a pinch (but don’t use your fingers!). A lot of that clove/banana flavor are byproducts of that initial yeast growth. Nobody has a perfect rule for balancing clove against banana. I hear more that cooler=clove and warmer=banana, but I don’t think the jury’s in on that yet. A lot of this depends on yeast, and you really should get a wheat/Hefeweizen yeast.

For two gallons:
1.5 pounds wheat DME (Dried Malt Extract)

Yes I know that’s an odd number. Go ahead and throw the whole rest of the sack in if you want to get crocked. It’s not really to style but nobody’s watching.

Use a wheat beer yeast like Safebrew WB-06. This is a yeasty beer and if you use a yeast made for Hefeweizen then you’ll want to drink it young and cloudy with the yeast still suspended. You can crash chill if you want just to be safe though.

Hopping schedule
0.25 ounce Hallertauer 3.1% AA @ 60 minutes

IPA

Ehhh–what happened to my recipe? I will have to find this one. Sorry guys.

Note I normally don’t like these beers. However, I first tried this with my mother and she wanted something “brown, malty, hoppy, somewhat high alcohol” came out. So there that was. Raw calculations of this recipe show fits the style guidelines for an American Brown Ale, but note that this is being consumed young where the hops still have bite. It’s not really malty though.

This beer should be consumed “cellar temperature.” Say, 50-60F. Let it rest on the counter before pouring. If consumed too cold, it’ll be bitter and grassy. It is best sipped slowly.

Belgian Wit

There are a ton of ways to do this beer. Most of the debate comes into the spicing regimen. I have the basics here but let me defend my instructions. I assume nobody will do a secondary fermentation, where the spices would best impact the beer. I am putting all spices in the boil near the end to quickly sanitize them without driving off the flavor. A Belgian Wit is easy to get into the ballpark, but very hard to master particularly due to the spicing. In order to keep the color light, I use some sugar to get the proper alcohol rating, as well as dump a tablespoon of flour in to get the white, cloudy color characteristic of this style.

For two gallons:
One pound of wheat DME (Dried Malt Extract)
6 ounces of granulated sugar
(consider getting yeast nutrient and add according to directions. If there are no directions, add a teaspoon with less than 5 minutes left on the boil.  Consider nutrient when adding straight sugar because yeast need other products than just sugar to maintain themselves.)

Aggressive Spice mixture
2 tsp coriander
2 tsp bitter orange peel
2 tsp camomile (straight from camomile tea bags if you must. Don’t fret if you can’t get it)
Crush together in mortar in pestle, coffee grinder, or rolling pin (good luck!)
Halve quantities if you want a more subtle spicing regimen.

Hopping/Spicing Schedule
5 pellets of Saaz AA 3.8% @ 60 minutes
1/3 spice mixture @ 20 minutes
0.2oz Saaz AA 3.8% @ 15 minutes
1/3 spice mixture @ 10 minutes
0.2oz Saaz AA 3.8% @ 5 minutes
Remaining 1/3 spice mixture @ 5 minutes

Best dry yeast would be Brewferm Blanche. More like you’ll find Safale S-58 on hand. If you want more spices, boil them with the bottling sugar and add them together.

Light American Lager

You might be surprised that “lawnmower beers” like Bud/Miller/Coors are amongst the hardest beers to homebrew. They are so light in flavor that any flaws cannot hide anyplace; I hear this is a marketing message for some brand of pilsener over in Europe, but it’s essentially true.

A note about lagering, you must ferment it at around 50-55 degrees. Generally, you then want to transfer to another container post-fermentation and cool the whole thing down to 35 degrees for months; that is what lagering is technically. If you wait that long, you risk oxidizing the beer if you use plastic jugs with poor seals. I think you won’t care if the beer is a little cloudy, but it might just clear off with a crash chilling. There is no wheat in this recipe so it’ll naturally want to clear. That and the yeast wants to drop out–it is a bottom fermenting yeast already. You can get clarifiers like gelatin to accelerate this. Check with your religion before you use clarifiers because gelatin or shellfish bladders–isinglass–can be a big turnoff.

American megabrewers tend to use adjuncts–unmalted, nonbarley grain that can provide extra sugars from the enzymes in the barley–because they don’t contribute color. It wasn’t necessarily done to be cheaper. From what I hear, Bud uses a lot of rice, and Coors uses a lot of corn. This recipe uses neither because I couldn’t match up a pound of extract either properly. However, table sugar is something people tend to have laying around and can measure off into odd quantities. As is the case with the Belgian Wit, add some nutrient if you can because yeast need more than sugar to thrive.

Consider getting an auto-siphon so you can pull the beer off the sediment more consistently. If you are making this for people I imagine they expect a clearer beer, so you should have an eye on that.

For two gallons:
One pound of Light DME (Dried Malt Extract). Extra-light might be overkill; you don’t want it to look like Sprite.
6 ounces of granulated sugar

Hopping Schedule
0.5 ounce Vintage Saaz @ 60 minutes (nobody will give you an alpha acid percentage for vintage saaz, but it’ll probably be < 1%)

The story is that Bud buys hops and then deliberately tells the growers to stash them away to age out. Vintage hops have lost their bittering power but retain their preservative effect and a very light flavor. You might even do without hops entirely, but you’ll probably notice it–particularly in the burp. Old hops can smell cheesy so they have to be in the boil for awhile or else that’ll show up in your beer.

Use a clean, dry lager yeast such as Saflager S23. If you want the beer to have the sulfury characteristic of a Corona before they got so popular, expose the bottled beer to sunlight for about an hour before putting in your regular refrigerator. If you’ve been following closely, this is deliberately skunking beer. Just don’t forget about them. If you don’t know what I mean, Corona’s come in clear bottles and used to get skunked out in the displays due to poor handling. Maybe they still do.

Primary fermentation should be at 45-55 degrees Fahranheit.  You might have to do this in the basement, by an A/C vent, or a warm spot in your fridge.

“BUT I CAN’T LAGER/FERMENT COLD:” A very clean ale yeast will fool most people. Try Safale US-56. You will still need to ferment around 65F or lower. Don’t use a lager yeast at these higher temperatures.

Q&A

Q: Is this legal?
A: In the US, people 21 years or older can produce up to 50 gallons a year for themselves, or 100 gallons if they are in a household of two or more. I don’t have the legal definition for “household” in this case–a guy and a baby? I am unsure of the details in other countries. I believe they frown on it in Japan, but it’s OK in Anglo countries. New Zealand even allows home distillation! I learned how to malt from New Zealand sites for making whiskey.  UPDATE: I think it’s now 100 gallons/year for themselves and 200 gallons/year for a household of two or more.

Q: I am a college kid that wants to get knocked off my rocker for pennies. What can I do?
A: I was never into this in college nor was I drinker in college, but here’s what I would try. Pull gallon jugs and soda bottles out of your recycleables, full the jugs with tap water, and use potassium metabisulphite (the homebrew store will have it) in light amounts in each in a well-ventilated place. Good God open the packet briefly and hide it away to see if somebody has a reaction to it — that shit can put some people in the ER. It’s like MSG in a way in that 1 in 100 can get whacked from it. However, the chance of a severe reaction is rarer still. However (again), I saw an internet post in a winemaking thread about this happening to somebody’s roommate. Just the slightest hint of a pinch of that stuff will remove chloramine from a gallon. A campden tablet, the little, puny, pill form of potassium metabisulphite, can clear up to 20 gallons. For a recipe, try pre-hopped dry extract–don’t boil it long–or whatever extract is on sale, and cut it 50:50 with sugar. You should use a neutral ale yeast at least to get started, and then pitch distiller’s yeast or champagne yeast to get up to 12%. Beware that it will be tough to carbonate when you get that high. You’ll have to wait longer for it to prime.

Q: When ordering the dried malt extract, the store asked “which brand?” What do you recommend?
A: I have no recommendation. They’re pretty close to each other IMO. If you can get Hefeweizen extract, use that for the Hefeweizen. Outside of that, ask them what’s cheaper. If neither is cheaper (that should be a hint there it doesn’t matter), ask what they recommend. If they won’t recommend any (another hint there), ask for the list and pick one in the middle just to fuck with them.

Q: I asked for all this stuff in the homebrew store and they started to shit on me. What can I do?
A: Bring in the list and say you’re getting it for a friend. They’ll stop preaching. Either that or use mail order. Note that in-store prices are sometimes cheaper. Remember that making beer in such a crude way as this is beyond the imagination of a lot of homebrewers. They kind of forget that the word “homebrew” often implies McGuyver-like resourcefulness and a tolerance in quality. Stand your ground and turn down the $70 starter kit. If you are feeling frisky, buy an auto-siphon since that’ll help you leave the sediment (trub) behind.

And if they really have their heads up their asses then go somewhere else. You don’t need to be starting a rapport with that kind of crowd.

NQ (Not Question): You really need to get <this or this> and do <that or that> or it won’t come out right. This is a real “high risk brew.”
A: Talk to the hand. I’ve done this fine and dandy a few times already. BTW if you just got randomly offended by that then and don’t think you’re one of those types, then why did you get offended? <wink>

Q: Can I use liquid yeast? Why would I use this?
A: I normally use liquid yeast for my batches. For this simplified method, I felt dry yeast was easier to handle, and more likely to survive shipping if somebody has to order from pretty far away (weather considerations). Dry yeast doesn’t need to come with some nutrients and a suspension solution, although it comes with some activation chemicals.

So why do I normally use liquid yeast? There is a much wider inventory of them specific to what I do. They also used to be much more pure, but the story now is that has improved. Purer yeasts let me reuse that yeast over and over. I have reused a batch of yeast three times by skimming the trub out of my primary fermenter. After that it gets risky too. It’s the variety that is a bigger deal. You can get a yeast that is very much the one for your style. For example, White Lab’s Czech Budejovice is rumored to be the yeast Budweiser uses–I believe this less and less as time goes on but whatever. The lower viable yeast counts in liquid yeast can be offset by producing a starter. Conventional homebrewing culture recommends starters for a lot of stuff, but you know me… you don’t need it unless you’re going for the big booze stuff really anymore. Even most lagers don’t need it.

On top of that, if you want something like Hefeweizen then you might even consider adding even less yeast. The good flavors come from the yeast reproducing–ewww.

Q: I just made my batch and it came out peachy keen. I’m hooked and want to get into the hobby further. What is next?
A: Most people brew in the 5 gallon range. You should consider a food grade 6.5 gallon fermentation bucket for primary fermentation, and a 5 to 5.5 gallon glass carboy for secondary. You’ll need a larger pot, even if you plan to do a partial boil and dilute with the rest of the water later. Most importantly, you should get an auto-siphon so that you can transfer everything around without a fuss. In fact, that’s the first thing you should get because you can use that to leave all the “trub” (the shit on the bottom) behind. Also get a hydrometer so you can more accurately gauge how fermentation is going; staring at the fermentation really isn’t a good method. Finally, you’ll want to start bottling in glass if you get that far along.

Homebrew stores sell “starter” kits just for people like you. They’re generally pretty good. Before going in, you should know if you plan to have two batches going at once, if you think you might try wine, and if you think you’d get into kegging. These will influence the kit in some stores.

Somebody’s going to tell me I shouldn’t recommend a bucket because it’s not glass and blablablabla. Chris White (of White Labs’ fame) complains how American brewers seal up everything in primary fermentation. He recommends open fermentation because
1. It most easily lets the CO2 escape and
2. It lets in oxygen which yeast actually need in fermentation (egads!).

This is why I don’t force anybody to use airlocks in my procedure. For a secondary fermentation, it is fine to use an airlock, and it gives you some protection. You can do open fermentation in glass too but you can also spend a lot of money on this hobby. Most people are fine with the buckets as long as they don’t scruff them up when cleaning them.

At the next step, many people get a thin nylon or cloth bag to steep real, milled grains with their beer in order to adjust flavor. This is known as a “mini mash” to many and some would even consider it a “partial mash.” There is some pedantry over whether it’s really a partial mash, but that’s homebrewers for you.

I tend to do all-grain, which means no extracts whatsoever. That’s a much more complex procedure with a lot more time before you even get to the boil. It also gives me the most sources for evil mischief. Don’t act surprised.

You might be surprised to hear people agree that the single best equipment purchase they made was a kegerator or converted fridge for doing fermentation.  Temperature control has an immensely positive impact on flavor.

Q: Do you have a recipe for [such and such]?
A: No but I’m familiar with a lot of styles and can scribble one up quick. Just ask. You can go online and look for recipes, but note most are making 5 gallon (and some more) batches; scale down accordingly. Extracts scale down linearly, but hops are a rough science. If you’re drinking these young, perhaps quarter the hopping schedule.

You can go look for Strangebrew, a beer recipe formulation program. There’s a lot of crazy stuff in that for a newbie though, but that never stopped anybody.

Note that there isn’t a lot of flexibility in extract brewing so it can be hard to hit some styles. For example, a nut brown beer won’t have any nut character at all, and it’s generally tough to make the lightest and darkest beers. If you really want Guiness, we’ll have to get into minimash so you can introduce roasted grain.

Q: But I really want to make Guiness…
A: I don’t have a real recipe, but I scribble up something yet to be tested. Sorry. But you’ll find plenty online. Something to consider–Guiness as we see it is a pretty sweet stout as stouts go. So the question is “Do you want Guiness, or just a stout?” You’ll never get the texture right due to the pouring system used with Guiness, but you can generally get the flavor.

I’m walking into a minefield here. Cloning any specific beer is trouble and I haven’t put any effort into cloning Guiness. I’ve done stouts in general, and I felt mine were generally dryer–except for my breakfast stout (bwahahaha). IMO a proper stout with extract requires steeping some roasted grain. Welcome to the world of the minimash. You will probably find the color of this beer more a dark, dark red than black. Honestly, all stouts are dark red if you look at it with good lighting. I am being conservative with the roasted grains since they need some time to age out properly. Meanwhile you’ll want to dig right in. This is an attempt at the base American Guiness, not the “extra stout.”

Minimash:
[You will need a mesh bag like a nylon bag; you can acquire this from your homebrew story]
1 oz Roasted Barley, milled
1 oz Black Patent, milled
3 oz Marris Otter, milled [Experienced brewers: It's just for enzyme conversion of whatever comes out of the roast grains, if anything]
Bonus to add during minimash: 1 tsp gypsum (a lot of Irish water is hard or something).

Main Fermentables:
2 pounds amber LIQUID malt extract. 1 pound of dry is not enough, and 1 pound of liquid is too much. Liquid extract fits in between somewhere.

For a minimash, you will need that bag and a kitchen thermometer. You will steep that grains in that bag for 30 minutes in one gallon of the water at about 155 degrees Fahrenheit. Let them circulate from time to time. After the time is up, pull the bag out and rinse with the remaining gallon of water. You can then shove that leftover grain up your butt or whatever you want to do with it (such as throw it in bread).

Hopping schedule
1/2 oz Fuggles 4.5% AA @ 60 minutes

Ferment with a dry English Ale yeast such as Munton’s Ale Yeast or Danstar’s Windsor Ale yeast. Reminder: No creamy head without nitrogen. No nitrogen without a nitrogen tank and some stuff that will cost more than all the ingredients you have bought. That’s a ways down the road in steps here. Don’t try to throw liquid nitrogen into the bottles–it doesn’t work that way.

Don’t come yelling to me if it doesn’t taste exactly like Guiness. I’ll augment the recipe though if it was way off.

Q: My beer tastes bad, did I mess it up?
A: Depends on the taste:

• Jet fuel. Fusel alcohol caused by too warm a fermentation. Dissipates a little over time; let it age a bit. It’ll never go away completely. can induce headaches and hangovers, and also get you drunk faster. I have a book here on moonshining and they actually like them there fusel oils “beading” on top of their shine.
• Hops are circulating in the beer. Let it settle more. If you hopped too much it’s going to stick around awhile.
• Vinegar. Infected with a wild vinegar microbe. Toss–if you don’t like it. Well it could be a wild critter that leaves a flavor like vinegar that isn’t vinegar, but good luck with that. I’d be surprised if you ever have this problem.
• Yeasty/rubbery. Let it settle some more. If you used bread yeast now you can kick yourself.
• Bandaids. Can be bacteria, but more likely chlorine. Didn’t rinse enough after using bleach, or brewed with tap water. Toss if you can’t stand it.
• Barn/horse/straw. Probably the wild yeast brettanomyces. It’s the uncle of brewing yeasts. It’s your call but it won’t get any more normal.
• Poop. Aerobic bacteria contamination. Toss–you probably didn’t need to ask.
• Wet Cardboard or olives. Went stale due to oxidation. This shouldn’t have happened even with the open fermenters unless you let the CO2 layer dissipate for a long time (CO2 is denser than air and wants to hang out in that jug). Either that or you waited months before bottling. What little exposure from pouring from one to another shouldn’t cause this. Some talk about “hot side aeration” that’s caused from the boil and afterwards, but that’s being really fussy (you know it’s bad when the homebrewing community thinks it’s fussy).
• Astringent/husky taste. Many things could happen. One could be bacterial contamination. Another is you extracted tannins from the grain husks. But wait–you weren’t brewing with grains. So that leaves the bacteria. You should probably toss. Another rare off-flavor to get from bacteria.

Q: I’m allergic to gluten but I want to brew. What can I do?
A: They tend to use rice, sorghum, and things like that to dodge gluten. They claim it turns out all right and I believe them. The problem is you need quite a setup to try that, and those ingredients can be tough to use–it might not be milled, for example. There’s some movement towards getting these grains in syrups; I’ll have to see how far that has come along. You could make a beer from corn syrup and rice solids, but there wouldn’t be any color.

Update: sorphum syrup has become more common, and I can get “rice solids” too.  I suppose for darker beers you can always caramelize the syrup for a long time.  Good luck with that.

Q: My yeast packets say they’re good for 5 gallons. Why am I using the whole thing for less than 2?
A: Overwhelming the wort with yeast causes two big things to happen. First, the yeast rapidly will outcompete any wild organisms and prevent them from infecting it. Second, they show fermentation activity much faster than a regular dosage. The biggest question I get from first-timers is “I don’t see any bubbles and foam, did I mess it up?” This gets things moving in just a few hours and saves you that paranoia.

NQ: Alton Brown “Good Eats” Homebrewing Episode! Alton Brown “Good Eats” Homebrewing Episode! Alton Brown “Good Eats” Homebrewing Episode!  He threw ice in the wort!
A: Most people speak against throwing ice in the beer. I don’t see that stuff advertised as being sanitized. More important, I don’t see it claiming to be free of chlorine! Much of his advice is kosher but we’re following a procedure that doesn’t require any special equipment like he did. Didn’t he also use bleach in that episode? It was a good guide, but you’re reading this far since you are seduced about making beer with nothing but the particular ingredients.

Q: Can I use bread yeast? Can I use the brewer’s yeast in the bulk food isle?
A: Don’t use that brewer’s yeast. The cells aren’t intact, and it’s provided only for nutrition. The bulk brewer’s yeast should really be labelled “brewer’s yeast body parts.” Think of it being like Vegemite. Bread yeast will almost work but they don’t settle out, and bread yeast doesn’t come to such a sanitary standard as those packets of yeast. It also cannot hit too high an alcohol level. You will probably get a beer with a rubbery taste from bread yeast and find it difficult to settle out. It will, but you will want to drink it now rather than wait for the yeast. With all that bread yeast in suspension, you’ll probably fart like a siren.

Q: I have a batch going but now I have to go out/to feed my cat/on vacation/away for a few weeks/off to basic training. What should I do?
A: Plastic milk jugs weren’t mean for long term storage. Beer is pretty merciful though and you might get away without oxidizing the beer. I would say you can let those go for a month or two before starting to worry. For longer times, you can fit a bung and airlock on if you have time to get that, but you probably would be better off retrying this later. The whole idea was you’d have the beer done and all in your belly in two weeks at most.

Note: don’t drain the rehydrated beans after boiling. You need that broth. Hence, be very precise how you add water.

I am quite partial to Diana Kennedy’s mexican recipes (the following are from, I think, “Recipes from the Regional Cooks of Mexico” — I don’t have the book handy, but I generally transcribe recipes when I’m doing a big dinner, so I don’t have to be juggling multiple books in the kitchen). I don’t know how well these would can, nor whether a BWB would be adequate (versus pressure canner); I’m sure they’d freeze well, though.

Personally, I’ve kind of like the beans unfried best, but the spousal unit prefers refried soooo …

Frijoles de Olla (Pot Beans)
1 pound dried beans
10-12 cups cold water
1/4 medium onion, roughly sliced
2 tbsp pork lard
1 tbsp salt, or to taste
(jalapeno chile)

Rinse the beans in cold water and let them run through your hands to make sure that there are no small stones or pieces of earth among them. Put them into a pot and cover with cold water. Add the onion and lard (and jalapeno, if using) and bring to a boil, then lower the flame and let the beans simmer, covered, until they are just soft and the skins are breaking open - about 2 hours for black beans and 1-1/2 for other varieties, although it is very difficult to be precise. Add the salt and continue cooking over a low flame for another hour, until the beans and completely soft and the broth thickish and soupy.

Frijoles Refritos (Well-Fried or “refried” Beans)
6 tbsp pork lard
1/4 medium onion, finely chopped
1/2 pound beans cooked as above

In a very heavy frying pan - preferably 10 inches in diameter - heat the lard and fry the onion, without browning, until soft. Add 1 cup of the beans and their broth and mash well as you cook them over a very high flame. Gradually add the rest of the beans, little by little, mashing them all the time until you have a coarse puree. As the puree begins to dry out and sizzle at the edges, it is ready to be used.

Ingredients

• 2 cups milk
• 2 packages active dry yeast
• 1/2 cup warm water (110 to 115 degrees)
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 6 tablespoons shortening
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1 cup sifted flour plus 5 to 6 cups of flour
• 2 eggs, well beaten

Preparation

Scald the milk. Dissolve the yeast in the water and let stand 5 minutes. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, add the sugar, shortening and salt. Immediately pour scalded milk over ingredients in bowl and stir until shortening is melted. When lukewarm, blend in, beating until smooth, 1 cup of sifted flour. Stir in yeast mixture, mixing well. Measure out 5 to 6 cups of flour. Add about half to the yeast mixture and beat until very smooth. Beat in the eggs, then beat in enough remaining flour to make a soft dough.

Turn dough onto a lightly floured surface and let stand 5 to 10 minutes. Knead dough into a large ball and place it into a greased, deep bowl. Turn dough to bring greased surface to top. Cover with waxed paper and towel and let stand in warm place (about 80 degrees) until dough is doubled. Punch down with fist; pull edges of dough into center and turn dough completely over in bowl. Cover and let rise again until nearly doubled. Punch down and turn dough out onto lightly floured surface.

My preferred method for baking: grease muffin tins. For each roll, pull off a piece that could fit in the tin with decent riseover before and during baking. Roll the dough and then stretch the dough out by repeatedly folding the dough into itself. Think of how you roll up socks from the fresh laundry. Brush with melted butter or margarine and sprinkle with poppy seeds if desired. Cover with a towel and let rise again, 15 or 25 minutes. Bake at 425 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes.

freezes well; based on a recipe from WINNERS - More Recipes From The Best Of Bridge

Ingredients

• 1½ lbs dried navy beans (yields about 2 litres cooked beans)
• 1 large onion, sliced
• 3 tsp cider vinegar
• 1½ tsp Dijon mustard (recipe for mustard)
• 1½ Tbsp brown sugar
• 3 Tbsp molasses
• a few squirts worcestershire sauce
• ¾ c chili sauce (or ketchup - we prefer Heinz)
• 1½ tsp salt
• ½ tsp pepper (or more)
• ½ lb bacon, sliced and chopped in bite size pieces (optional)
• 1 small onion, finely chopped for garnish

According to The Brilliant Bean by Sally and Martin Stone, most dried beans double in volume and weight after being soaked and cooked. But they say that soybeans and chickpeas can triple and as a general rule, 1 cup (8oz) of dried beans increases to 2 to 2½ c (1 to 1¼ lb) of cooked beans. One cup of dried beans is usually enough to serve four as a side dish.
(1 lb = 453.6 gm)

Preparation

1. The day before you are going to make the beans, sort (to remove stones) and wash navy beans well. Soak them in cold water overnight. The next day, remove any beans that are floating. Drain and rinse the beans. Put in a big pot and cover with fresh cold water. (DO NOT ADD SALT!!!) Bring to a boil. Immediately turn down to a low simmer.
2. Cover and simmer gently for 1 hour. Check to see if beans are the consistancy (in terms of softness) you like. If not, simmer a little longer.
3. In a small bowl, mix cider vinegar, mustard (recipe for mustard), brown sugar, molasses, worcestershire sauce, chili sauce and spices. (The salt will stop the beans from getting softer.)
4. Place onion slices in the bottom of a large casserole. Pour spice mixture over top.
5. Pour the beans and their liquid over the onion slices. Lay the bacon on top of the beans. Cover the casserole and bake at 250F for 4 hours.
6. Carefully remove 1½ c of beans. Mash well and carefully stir them back into the beans. Cover and continue cooking for 2 more hours. Make sure that the beans are always covered with liquid.
7. Garnish with finely chopped onion when serving.

We love to have these beans with broccoli and crusty bread and/or Molasses Fennel Bread and/or cider (or beer) cheese bread and barbecued ribs if we are being very extravagant.

This looks like a good place to re-post this:

Doris Muscatine, in her book: A Cooks Tour of Rome (Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1964) devotes three and one half pages to Fettuccine All’Alfredo, that most famous of Roman dishes. The original recipe has always been a secret but she does give what may be the definitive published version. It is as follows:

1 lb. fresh egg fettucine
4 handfuls grated Parmesan cheese, plus more cheese to sprinkle on
1/4 lb. butter
1/2 pt. whipping cream

Boil pasta in salted water until they rise to the surface and quickly remove and drain. Place on a pre-heated platter on top of a large scoop of the following butter mixture.

This is pre-prepared before cooking the pasta.

Melt the butter, add the 4 handfuls cheese, and the cream, slightly whipped, and beat together. Add the rest in lumps as you toss the fettuccine rapidly. Add large sprinkles of cheese as you mix.

My father ate at the original Alfredo in the Via della Scrofa in 1931. He reminisced about that meal many times. I think I recall him mentioning that just before tossing the waiter would scrape a little fresh nutmeg on to the platter.

D.M.

In a small glass, mix a small amount of milk with alcohol. Rubbing alcohol would do, but I was out so I used vodka. Swirl the contact len in it for awhile, remove, rinse with saline, and put it in.

The nasties in the peppers are alcohol soluable, and the enzymes in meat react to the chemicals. You might be able to just use milk, but I’m not about to experiment.

Come to think of it, washing your hands in rubbing alcohol before putting in the contact lenses would have dodged the whole problem.

So there’s two ways to do this: the easy way, and the hard way. The hard way reflects a big leveling up of my cook-fu, and it’s hot as all hell, but it’s damn tasty. It is less precise, and is more of a method for making sauce than a precise recipe.

Easy Way: Precise Recipe with a Roux

Ingredients

• 2 tbsp shortening
• 3 tbsp flour
• 2 tbsp red chile powder (not cayenne pepper oh God!)
• 1 tsp cumin
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 2 c water
• salt to taste

Preparation

Heat together shortening and flour. Gradually add remaining ingredients. Stir constantly until well blended. Cook 2 or 3 more minutes.

Hard Way: Mole Base

Rough Ingredients

Note that this recipe is very imprecise because it is cooked with love. You will need a food processor.

Mole

• 3T of a fat in descending order of preference: bacon fat, beef tallow, other rendered fats, lard, unsalted butter, shortening, non-infused cooking oil
• Half to full head of garlic, peeled. Don’t bother chopping
• One onion, roughly cut up.
• 8 Chipotle peppers. If you’re a weenie, scale back and substitute with raisins and red chiles, or scale back to super weenie-tude and use raisins and sun-dried tomatoes for a most mild taste.
• Fistful of pine nuts
• Fistful of crackers or bread
• 2T paprika
• 1T cumin powder
• salt to taste

Liquid

One quart of broth in order: pork, beef, chicken, vegetable.

Instructions

In big pot–might as well do this in one pot and make less of a mess:

• Melt 1T fat and sweat onion and garlic. You will use a small amount of salt here, but don’t overdo it. You have to balance this against the salt of your broth. Put in food processor.
• Increase heat while melting 1T more of fat. Brown pine nuts and crackers/bread. Go for a nice nuttiness, because this is a nutty recipe (hurrr). Put in food processor.
• Drop back heat while melting last 1T of fat. Add chipotles and chipotle substitutions. Give a quick crackle in the fat before throwing in all spices. Wait about 10 seconds and then add in about half a cup of the broth. Let raise up to a simmer again for 3 minutes, then shut down the stove, and decant into food processor.
• Run the food processor until you have a paste
• Bring up the heat on the pot, plop in the paste, and spread it all across the pot to brown along the bottom (just a few seconds) before gently whisking in the broth.
• continue stirring to break up the lumps. Unlike gravies and other things with a roux base, these lumps will break up since they’re not starch clumps.
• Let simmer for 10 minutes and then use. Halfway through, test for taste and add salt as desired.

The sauce should be relatively thin. When cooked with enchiladas, it will thicken more.

Mole is what God gave the Mexicans for their devout Catholicism.