Kölsch.

Madison.

The holidays are over, and life has settled back into something resembling a comfortable rhythm, so it's time for: yet another batch of homebrew. This time around, it's a Kölsch-style¹ ale, a light, mild, lager-like from the days before lagering - and the effective use of Saccharomyces uvarum - took hold. Cooler temperatures, lighter malts, and the right strain of yeast combine to produce a smooth brew not all that different from a good Pilsner. As the BJCP's² Style Guide puts it:

Overall Impression: A clean, crisp, delicately balanced beer usually with very subtle fruit flavors and aromas. Subdued maltiness throughout leads to a pleasantly refreshing tang in the finish. To the untrained taster easily mistaken for a light lager, a somewhat subtle pilsner, or perhaps a blonde ale.

History: Kölsch is an appellation protected by the Kölsch Konvention, and is restricted to the 20 or so breweries in and around Cologne (Köln). The Konvention simply defines the beer as a “light, highly attenuated, hop-accentuated, clear top-fermenting Vollbier.”

The last time I made a batch of Kölsch, it was too dark, too malty. It was a fine beer, but not quite right, stylistically. So I had to give it another shot.

So here - featuring a test run of photos from my new camera - is the homebrew process:³

1. Gather the necessary ingredients.
   
   
   
   
   • Malt extract - 3 lbs. extra-pale dried extract, 2 lbs. pale dried extract. This is the bulk of the beer, in the form of dried, powdered malt sugars. Hopefully this combination will result in a light, golden beer.
     
     
   • Crystal malt (20L)⁴ - 1 lb. To give the beer more body, or mouthfeel. Crystal malts, which are full of sugars that yeast can't digest, lend certain flavors - caramel, toffee, etc. - with the soluble but nonfermentable sugar makeup. Those extra molecule floating about in the beer counteract the thinness that would occur with just malt extract.
     
     
   • Hops - 0.75 oz. Challenger pellet hops, 2 oz. Hallertau leaf hops. The Challenger hops are to give the beer its backbone of bitterness, while the Hallertau will, in two separate additions, give some bitterness and their own distinct aroma. Hallertau is a noble hop variety from Germany, and so ought to be about right for a German brew.
     
     
   • Yeast - 1 "smack pack" of Wyeast 2565 Kölsch. Although the malts used will give the overall base flavor to a beer, the yeast is what primarily sets the flavor profile and generates most of the aroma.
   
   
2. Steep the grains. Boiling crystal malts imparts a wealth of harsh flavors into the beer, including tannins leached from the grain husks. To get around this, the cracked grains steep in a gallon of hot - approximately 156°F - water for twenty minutes. The grains are then discarded, and the remaining liquid added to the brew kettle.
   
   
   
   
3. Dissolve the malt extract in the brew kettle. The more wort that can be boiled at once, the better, because higher concentrations of malt complicate the brewing process. My stove can handle five gallons at once, but I get a better - and quicker - boil with four gallons, which makes things much easier. Hop extraction is still pretty good, and I'm able to keep a gallon or more of cool or cold sanitized water for reducing the wort temperature and diluting afterwards.
   
   
   
   
4. Boil the wort. This takes at least an hour, sometimes more in the case of high-gravity beers or certain styles. I added the Challenger hops - for bittering - at the start of the boil. Longer boiling times convert more of the hops' alpha acid to bitterness, and drive off more aroma.
   
   
   
   
5. Sanitize the fermentor. Sterilization's too difficult to achieve, especially in a home kitchen. Instead, the goal is to sanitize the equipment - anything that will come in contact with the wort after it's cooled from the boil - so that the yeast can take over before any other microorganisms do. I use an oxygen-based cleanser, rather than bleach, because it's more forgiving if it's not rinsed well enough, and it's probably much more environmentally friendly.
   
   
   
   
6. Add the wort chiller. Since a big coil of copper tubing wouldn't respond terribly well to sanitizing chemicals - and wouldn't be terribly fun to fight with, either - it simply gets added to the boiling wort for the last fifteen or twenty minutes. Around this time, I've also added in the second batch of hops, an ounce of the Hallertau. With twenty minutes, it'll lend both some bitterness and some hop flavor.
   
   
   
   
7. Add some seaweed. It's called Irish Moss, or sometimes carageenan, and it's a seaweed that grows in rocky shorelines on both sides of the northern Atlantic. It also has a strong ionic charge, which helps attract haze-causing proteins that might otherwise produce a cloudy beer. It all settles to the bottom, to be filtered out of the beer later. The leaf hops - as opposed to the pellets - also help eliminate haze by acting as floating filters.
   
   
   
   
8. Add the aroma hops. With just five minutes left in the boil, it's time to add the last of the Hallertau hops, which will give their aroma, but virtually no bitterness, to the final beer.
   
   
   
   
9. Cool the wort. Quickly. This is where the wort chiller comes in handy. Connected to a cold tap, it pumps cool water through the wort, extracting heat far more efficiently than a cold water bath would. At this point, the hot wort is very sensitive to oxidation, which can result in charming flavors, such as wet cardboard. The longer it takes to cool - so it's at a safe temperature to add the yeast - the more of a worry that becomes. A wort chiller cools down four or five gallons from a boil to room temperature in fifteen to twenty minutes.
   
   
   
   
10. Test the specific gravity. Measuring the specific gravity of the wort gives a very good approximation of the amount of fermentable sugars and the potential alcohol level of the beer. The tool is a hydrometer, a calibrated glass cylinder of a specific density. The OG here is about 1.047, meaning that the final beer will be somewhere near 4.5% alcohol.
    
    
    
    
11. Pitch the yeast. After filtering out the hops and aerating the wort, the yeast goes in. Closed tightly, but for an airlock to let out the massive amounts of carbon dioxide they yeast will produce during fermentation, it's time to wait and see what happens.
    
    

Updates to come: transferring the partially-fermented beer to a secondary fermentor; bottling; labeling; and consumption (assuming it all goes well).

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¹"Kölsch-style" because you can only get real Kölsch in Köln. That said, when I get around to devising a label, it'll probably skip over that distinction.

²Beer Judge Certification Program.

³For extract-based brewing. I don't currently have an all-grain brewing system set up, mostly due to space limitations.

⁴The 'L' refers to the Lovibond scale, which refers to how dark the malt roast is, and roughly corresponds to how heavily roasted it is. (Also sometimes used is the SRM, or Standard Research Method, scale.) Higher numbers mean darker, with the palest malts at 1 - 2L, up to 450L for a dark chocolate malt; these various different roast levels carry different flavors.

East Meets West.

Remember that scene, at the end of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, where Blondie says to Tuco:

"There are two types of people in this world: those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig."

Damn, but we do love a good Spaghetti Western, especially if it's Sergio Leone. The juxtaposition of wide, panoramic desert vistas with super-tight closeups; the cross, double-cross, triple-cross cribbed from detective noir; the weatherbeaten, sunworn faces you'd never see in a today's mainstream Hollywood; Clint Eastwood's short, black cigars. Style.

Same goes for Zhang Yimou, with his beautifully shot films, like Hero and House of Flying Daggers, or Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Martial arts and wire acrobatics with amazing cinematography. And choreography.

So we got to thinking. It's not long until the Lunar New Year, which qualifies as a good enough excuse for a party if we ever heard of one. And we started thinking about movies.

In particular, Shanghai Noon. The Jackie Chan / Owen Wilson Hong Kong cinema-meets-Western cliche movie. You know, the one where Jackie Chan kicks ass with a horseshoe on a rope? And Owen Wilson plays, well, that character he plays in every comedy? (It's not the movie with the sweet "Singin' In The Rain" bit. That's the sequel.)

Being indecisive, we've decided to just mash it all together into one grand East Meets West Party. Far East. Wild West. It's not like it hasn't been tried before. It's a cocktail party, a costume party, and a general excuse for a mass get-together.

We're asking everyone to please bring along something 'east' or something 'west'. Food or drink. Whatever. Creativity's a bonus. If you know what you're bringing, leave a comment so we don't end up with a dozen plates of egg rolls.

Unless, of course, you really, really want to bring a dozen plates of egg rolls.

We're insisting that everyone show up in costume. No costume, no soup for you. Again, either 'east' or 'west'. And a great costume means you get a gold star!

To get it started, we'll have some food and drinks along the lines of:

• Vegetarian stuffed wontons
  
• Bison chili
  
• Cornbread muffins
  
• Sake
  
• Ginger iced tea
  
• Bourbon
  
• Sarsaparilla

Stir Crazy.

Madison.

They're calling it Stir Crazy. Following in the footsteps of other, bigger cities around the nation - originally San Diego, but also including Chicago and New York City, among others - Madison has decided to have its own restaurant week.¹

It works like this: A group of restaurants offer up three-course prix fixe menus to best show themselves off for one set price: $25. The details vary a bit between each restaurant - while Harvest's offering is what you'd expect restaurant week to be about, even the Nitty Gritty's gotten in on the act by putting together a special two-person menu. A $25 burger seems like a stretch, even if it is made with Fountain Prairie beef, but I'm glad to see that the Madison Originals are putting forth every effort to make this an all-around success.

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¹And, of course, it turns out that I'll be out of town for, oh, all of it.

Night lights.

Madison.

I flew in from DC last night, via Detroit, and witnessed something absolutely fascinating I'd never had the opportunity to see before. Nearing eight at night, with cloudy skies, I hadn't expected to see much of anything through the window. Lake Michigan, which accounted for a significant portion of the flight, was nothing more than an endless expanse of vaguely discernable cloud cover. It was only when we crossed over the shoreline that things became interesting.

The cloud cover was low, a thin yet opaque veil of cottony puffs that stretched to the horizon. With the ground covered in several inches of freshly fallen snow, all of the nighttime lighting reflected off of the ground, diffusing through the clouds to create patches of light. Milwaukee, off to the south, was brightly orange from the high-pressure sodium lamps; other patches were smaller, isolated spots of cold, metal halide white, sodium orange, or some blend of the two. It was, in essence, a distilled map of nighttime life throughout Wisconsin.

The light barely managed to fight through the cloud cover, revealing a veining of pale light through the dips and valleys. Each spot looked like a snapshot of lightning buried inside the cloud, with an eerie inversion of the usual light and shadow that gave it impression of a film negative: instantly recognizable, but somehow feeling wrong.

I could begin to read the map as we flew home. Milwaukee, far brighter than anyplace else, with distant sparks arcing into the sky as the night's last flights took to the air. Scattered patches heading west, of little towns and shopping centers. And finally Madison, so much larger than anything else around it, with two dimples of shadow over Mendota and Monona.

Geneseo.

Geneseo, NY.

(It's here, for those who've never been.)

Fortunately, our flight in was rather uneventful - a one-third-full plane, open seats with an extra five inches of legroom,¹ and a tailwind that brought us into Rochester ten minutes early. The weather's crummy - intermittent cold drizzle and overcast skies - but I suppose that one can't ask for too much in the northern US in January.

Sharon was kind, and willing to humor me immediately after our arrival by accompanying me to the Rochester Public Market. We had a minor whirlwind tour of downtown Rochester on the way there - inasmuch as the map from the rental counter was, uh, sketchy at best. It was a distinct shock from what we're used to in Madison.

For one, it's outside, which must be an interesting experience once the western New York winter sets in.² We also knew it was more of the flea market persuasion after spotting bananas and pineapples at one of the first stands. All in all, there wasn't a whole lot of local produce available - and a lot of random stuff, too.³ (Not that you'd expect that now, but I wonder how different it is during the summer.) There did appear to be some local apples, honey, and one guy selling his own grass-fed beef and pork. And I know that there are a bunch of other, seasonal markets around in several of the surrounding towns that may be a better shopping experience.

What it did remind me of, very much, was the market I shopped at in Brighton, from time to time. I remember that market having more or less fixed stalls - essentially a covered shopping mall consisting of produce vendors, butchers, fishmongers, etc. It's been too long - with too much evolution in cooking skills and expectations - to pretend that I can remember the quality of it. (I do recall being pleased with the fish I got there, if for no other reason than it was clearly fresh.)

Rochester, despite having a population about the same as Madison, is a taller, more compact city. It also has a faint air of economic depression about it. Nothing too severe, but an evident fray about the edges. Whereas Madison's been growing steadily through the recent past, Rochester looks as though things have more or less remained steady. Still, there appears to be a lot of architectural character, as though the tiniest thread remains to connect it to its past in the Industrial Revolution.

Geneseo, though, is quite a different beast altogether. It took us just over half an hour to make the drive from downtown Rochester, mostly on four-lane, high-speed highway. Just minutes from downtown Rochester, and you're surrounded by trees and farmland. And hills! Hills! I love hills, for reasons I can't even begin to figure out. My legs shudder at the notion of even attempting to bike around the area.

The village of Geneseo is a tiny blip, a mere ten thousand people. Half of them are students at the university. Main Street, with most of the shops, is about three very small blocks. Quite charming, though. It's surrounded by farmland, rolling hills, and trees, and it's quite a short distance to the westernmost of the Finger Lakes, Lake Conesus. At seven miles long - though quite narrow along its length - it's small by Finger Lakes standards.

It's funny, the sorts of things you check out when you're trying to determine the livability of a place. We stopped into the local Wegman's, just to see what the local grocery store setup was like. Smaller than the one in Downingtown - anything has to be smaller than that - but still quite sizable, with a pleasant, cozier feeling. A far cry, for sure, from the Super Wal-Mart horning in across the way.

We were quite pleased to hear that the Geneseo folks are fighting hard against the expansion of big box stores and other development in the air. I can only hope they can dig their heels in deep enough.

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¹Normally, United wants to charge an additional $24 for this. When the plane's nowhere near full, though, those of us in the back get the roomier seats for free.

²There's a large, permanent canopy structure, to which the vendors back up their trucks. It's quite narrow, though, especially with two-way traffic trying to squeeze past shoppers purchasing stuff.

³Such as super-cheap t-shirts, duct tape, purses only a twelve-year-old would think stylish, etc. But we did find honest-to-goodness cheese curds, which I'd never expected to see outside of Wisconsin.