After defending BrewDog achievements of making a 32% and a 41% beer, I have to defend the creation of a  55% beer called The End of History, a reference to Democracy as the high human political achievement (the implication that the human political struggle reaches its terminus in democratic ideals). This is another notable achievement and landmark in the making of a massive beer.  Imagine, 55% ABV.  Wow!  Read about it here.  But the accomplishment of making a 55% beer is where I have to end my applause for BrewDog.  Here's the deal: We live in a time where all of us are more and more sensitive, more and more concerned about political correctness, and more and more readily offended at things like, say, a stuffed, dead animal with a beer running through its body.  I for one am not actually that discomfited with the idea, especially since these animals were already dead.  I've hunted for several years and am not at all uncomfortable with an animal hide.  Let me say, though, that I can see how someone might be bothered about it. Sausage jokes don't bother me either.  Rhetoric can be a fun and absolutely funny vehicle for making a point or, ...

Many of my fellow writers have already posted that we should be expecting Brew Dog's Tactical Nuclear Penguin to hit shelves in the U.S. very soon.  Trust me, getting the beer this way is much cheaper.  The price of buying from overseas and the shipping to do so are pretty hefty.  But actually, I'm not writing about the arrival of the beer so much as I'm writing about something else. I was sent this video link by someone from Newsy with the note that I might benefit from covering the story.  Newsy covered the story of TNP hitting the shelves in the U.S. and thought about some of the stuff that was said in that video (of course, we've covered it a couple times from other angles).  That is the topic about which I wish to expand. Note the immediate shock (or is it incredulity?) in the voice of the Fox narrator when he says that the beer is 32% ABV.  He goes on to mention that it is 6 times stronger than "regular domestic brands"...already the first assumption has been unveiled.  Looks like we're going to see a craft beer measured against a presumed normalcy, which will be the big boys. ...

Hey, everyone— Dark Lord Tickets will, no doubt, be in the mail before too long.  I'm writing this post to get a good idea of who, among the people we know, is coming to Dark Lord Day.  My thought is that we can arrange to meet up and hang out the day of and maybe the night before.  Most of you I have still not met, and I would love to hang out, drink, and talk beer with you folks.  We can also arrange some beer drinking and a few trades while we are there to avoid having to pay shipping. Here (left) are two fellows we met last year (one of them brought a year-old bottle of Dark Lord). Actually, I might even be able find a place or two for some people to stay (I'm an Indiana native).  Anyway, I'd love to experience the day together and meet everyone.  Also, if you have a t-shirt from your website, wear it.   If not, you are more than welcome to pick one up in our web store.  We'd love to see a sea of thankheavenforbeer t-shirts. Please let us know if you are going and want to meet up because I'm going to ...

Even though they knew I was beating their strongest beers, Brew Dog still sent me the beer I ordered.  I just wanted to show you a pic of what I got in the mail today.

Occasionally, I recognize a serious gap in my learning.  For instance, what effect does eisbocking have on the gravity of a beer when I know that I'm not getting 100% water from skimming?  What about the bourbon addition?  What do the changes do to the overall hydrometer measurement of the beer?  I suppose recognizing my gaps is good because it's a chance to look into the process a bit more. This eisbock portion was, by far, the most tedious point in the process of making this beer (you can find my earlier posts on this topic listed at the end of this article).  Freezing a high viscosity beer, which is full of alcohol, in a conventional freezer is a serious pain.  I was able to achieve—maybe—negative 7° Fahrenheit.  By any stretch of the imagination, this is a very cold temp but perhaps not high enough.  I've repeated again and again that my real issue was viscosity; I was able to freeze the beer, but due to the viscosity, I lost some entrenched beer in the process. The eisbocking stage of my beer really helped me to understand why some of these big beers cost so much.  Of course, my process was less efficient ...

Last time, I mentioned that I had two stages left in my process.  The next to last stage was bourbon barreling the beer.  I didn't have a bourbon barrel.  I did have bourbon, and I did have oak chips.  That was enough for me.  I took some of the oak chips and decided to let them soak in some of the bourbon.  While that was happening, I did some calculations to figure out what sort of effect I would get by adding bourbon.  Through a ratio field test (the lay way of saying that I made some extreme boilermakers to see how the bourbon would come through), I settled on an appropriate level of bourbon. My beer gravity was 1.092, meaning the the beer was 20.37 (and some)% ABV after the difference from the initial gravity.  The bourbon I had was hot.  It was 65.05% ABV.  So, I took the amount of 20.37 and multiplied it by 84 ounces of beer.  Then I took 65.05 bourbon and multiplied it by my ounces of bourbon (14 ounces, in this case).  I added the two products of the multiplication and divided by the total ounces.  It looked a bit like this: 20.3762%ABV*84 ounces=1711.6008 65.05% ABV*14 ...

There's a reason I called this brew "Chocolate Death" in earlier posts.  As a stout, the beer had plenty of roasted barley and black patent malt. Yet I decided early on in the process to make sure that I used a ton of chocolate malt.  It's not as coffee tasting as the black patent and roasted barley, and I love it.  Mission accomplished.  The beer was already very layered and complex.  The bitter bite of the malts, coffee, and roasted quality were very pronounced from the roasted barley and black patent malt.  At the same time, there was a velvety smoothness from the chocolate malt, which was absurdly good.  However, I wanted to emphasize the chocolate more. Vanilla and cocoa beans seemed to be the obvious solution.  I wrote a post about the process of roasting the cocoa beans a while back, along with some notes about my experiment.  At any rate, I ended up adding the vanilla beans early on while opting to wait for the cocoa beans (I knew that would be a more involved process).  The vanilla beans were added as is; this was a point in the process when I was concerned very little about bacterial contamination. ...

Last time, I left off by noting that my beer was chugging along nicely.  However, I had reached the upper limits of the yeast type that I used, so what was I to do?  Did you know that WLP 1099 has a fermentation potential of 25% ABV?  That's crazy.  I didn't add this at first because I wanted to really focus on normal yeasts as the backbone of the beer.  However, as I mentioned before, I realized that I would not reach that goal because of wort viscosity (i.e., it was too thick).  However, I knew that I could get it higher than it was, so I embarked on making the alcohol climb to a higher percent.  What else could I do? After making a big starter, I added my yeast to the hostile 15% ABV, thick, and uninhabitable environment of my beer.  Unfortunately, my direct pitching didn't have the effects that I wanted, and I only gained a percent or so.  This was my second error. Then it struck me. Why didn't I use a continuous feeding method instead?  What I mean is this: if I had a high yeast to solution ratio, I could raise my ABV in a small ...

A big ass Imperial Stout by any other name is just as huge.  I set out over three months ago to beat Tactical Nuclear Penguin, thinking it would be the strongest beer in the world for a little while.  Boy, was I wrong.  But I've learned a lot in the process and am determined to scratch the surface of beating the new champion...I've got a few ways to improve my process next time around.  As for now, I'm writing an account of how I made my huge Imperial Stout and letting you know how the great experiment turned out.  Here's the first post for anyone who is interested. Let me provide a caveat to the whole story by telling you that the small beer I made from this brew was 9.5% ABV.  What's that mean?  It means I collected a lot of sugar from the second runnings, which means I only took the sweetest stuff from the mashes.  Also, let me inform you that I have a capacity limit of 15 pounds of grain in my mash ton and that I had 45 pounds of grain for the brew.  What's that mean?  3 mashes+ 3 second runnings+ 2 beers= a 16 ...

It's funny how quickly things change in the beer world.  Just 3 months ago (or thereabouts), Brewdog was releasing Tactical Nuclear Penguin.  I wrote an article against Roger Protz to defend the achievement, and we talked a bit about the brew. Now, just a couple months later, the record of 32% has been surpassed twice, and a third record is on the way. I thought I had more time.  What do I mean?  When Brewdog released their beer, I thought to myself, "Why can't I, as a homebrewer, go after the record?  Even if I don't beat it, it will be fun to try."  So, I embarked on the arduous task of making a huge Chocolate Vanilla Bourbon Imperial Stout and vacillated between the two names above as a fun tongue-in-cheek reference to taking down a Tactical Nuclear Penguin. Go for the gold, right? Well, where did I end up?  The answer is still in the wings.  I didn't get quite the yeast performance I wanted, but I'm still in the process of finding out.  I suppose the record seems a little moot at this point because a German company is about to release a 45% beer.  However, I had fun and ...