Things just ain't what they used to be

Photo: KFC Denmark (I think. Me no speak Danish)

Just like KFC when you're not hungover, kebabs when you aren't on your way home from the pub and my fitness levels, time has a weird way of telling your memory that things were AMAZING "that time then", which leads to far too much disappointment at a later date. And this always seems to only happen to the good things in life. After all, who is going to hate bad things from a year or so ago actually getting good? But I digress.

Beer is what this all about, specifically in relation to Renaissance Craftsman. A seasonal offering from the Blenheim brewer, I had my first taste of it last year. I still remember that first sniff - I swear it was like putting my nose in a bag of freshly made, ultra-savory Milo powder. It all got a bit Tony Montana for a few seconds before I actually drank some.

It was like the best hot chocolate I had ever had, but gone cold. I was hooked. I wanted more. I was ready to run cocoa across the Gulf of Mexico if it meant more of this beer.

Fast-forward about a year and I have a glass of the 2012 edition in front of me as what was the dessert to a good night's dinner of chicken, mushroom, olive and caper risotto.

Photo: Me (yup, I need better backgrounds)

On the nose there is a huge difference already. Instead of snorting cocoa powder, I get more soy sauce/umami with a rich warm chocolate note. Upon drinking, it's far less sweet and much more balanced. It's all a bit underwhelming after last year really. It even manages to get pretty bad when my girlfriend says she gets a cigarette butt note, which nearly kills this beer for me in the same way Yeastie Boy Stu McKinlay killed my love of Three Boys Wheat when he compared it to dish-washing liquid.

 All in all, it was a bit of a let down. BUT - and a big but at that, we're talking Texas big - I'll still give it another few tries before I'm convinced it's not as good.

Because while nostalgia is a bitch, no one likes a hater.

In other news, Little Beer Quarter in Wellington is playing host to a pre-launch of the 2012 edition of Her Majesty tomorrow night. I'm going to try get there for it, but I also have to catch up with the old man. Hopefully I can squeeze in both, but the magnum of wine I need to crack as a celebration of me graduating may prevent me from making it to LBQ. But do head down if you can! It's a cracker of a bar which just oozes charm from every inch.

If you want to check out the place before you go, this interactive interior tour is the way to go.

Oh what shall I brew?

So until construction of my brew kit (which currently does not have a name - suggestions welcome) is complete, I have a heck of a lot of planning to do. Most of which will centre around what exactly I will end up brewing once I get my kit.

This, of course means "research" - in other words, drinking lots of different beers and thinking about what to use as an "influence" (also known as copying other brewers). Because let's be honest, I'm hardly going to create a beer from a recipe created from the analysis of a 2,700-year-old jar found in the tomb of King Midas. So instead, the game plan is to think of what I like to drink and go from there.

At the moment, it has been bloody freezing where I am. It's managed to hit under zero degrees Celsius already. C'mon Mother Nature, it's only May! Cut me a break!

Photo: beerforayear.wordpress.com

However, being cold enough to freeze the ball off a brass monkey means I've been drinking a heck of a lot of stout, mainly Three Boys' fantastic Oyster Stout. The Celtic Inn - which has quickly transformed into my local - stocks the entire Three Boys range, and charges grin-inducing Palmerston North prices. For example, this goes for about $15 a bottle in Wellington bars. Coming from that environment, $10.50 looks like a bargain - which it really is for something this good.

There's something deliciously moreish about this drop. After pouring it into a glass and letting it warm up, it has that typical roasty stout flavour with just that little something different. If that something different is simply brine or a not-so-subtle aphrodisiac taint, I'll leave up to you and your imagination and/or tastebuds.

But while I like stout, I love things just that little bit - how else is there to put it - BIGGER! I'm a huuuuge fan of imperial/Russian imperial stouts. It doesn't matter if you give me the sweeter, condensed-milk-and-coffee flavour of The Twisted Hop's Nokabollokov or the fruitier, slightly more bitter hit of Moa's Imperial Stout, I'll lap it up. In fact, I love Moa's so much I once had an imperial pint of it, after a shift at work, on an empty stomach, probably with a pint of something mildly more mellow beforehand. Let's just say that made the usual trot home just that bit more interesting.

Photo: simplyrecipes.com

I definitely want to brew an imperial stout at once stage, if only to have an easily available stash with which to make this cake with (also pictured). While the recipe calls for Guinness, using an imperial stout just gives it a bit more punch.

I and my girlfriend are both fans of Belgians. Not the people - bugger knows if I've met one ever before, but I'm sure they're lovely - but the delicious beers they make.

The first beer she ever fell in love with was Chimay Blue, and I tend to love anything funky - James Brown, composting, my fugly brown jacket - so it would make sense to brew some up. She also makes a wicked elderflower fizz which has a great yeastie character to it. It relies on the wild yeasts on the flowers to get fermentation going, so the funky flavour is not much of a shock.

I'm also a fan of IPAs - like most these days - and love the fact I can get a recipe for Yeastie Boys' Digital IPA and for the NZ Collaboration/Epic Mash Up. But I have no idea what any of it means, or how to dry hop. It also gives me a firm reminder that I'm starting this whole brewing journey from scratch.

However, I think making crazy 10%-plus brews or trying to mess with the huge flavours of Belgians in my first foray into fermented fluids may be a bit ambitious. So instead, I think I'll start with something a bit more simple. I figured that would be a good idea for the follow reasons:

1) If I screw up, it won't be as expensive a mistake
2) If I screw up, I should be able to tell what is wrong and work out what to do differently next time
3) You gotta walk before you can run

However, this is where I get a bit stuck. What is an easy beer to brew? Should I start with a hoppy IPA, a lush golden ale or a warming porter or stout? Or am I just being silly, and it is actually just as easy to brew a crazy 18.2% imperial stout as it is anything else?

So, suggest away! Remember, I'll have a brew kit made of 50L kegs so I'll probably be making a fair wack of beer. I also won't make wheat beer. I'm saving that for later.

Postscript:

Next week is an exciting time for me. I'm heading to Wellington for my graduation, which means drinking some great beers. I'm annoyed I can't get Flying Dog's Gonzo (a non-grey import version anyway) as it would be the best beer for the occasion (once again, suggestions welcome). But while that's exciting, it's a date further down the track I'm looking forward to the most.

Hashigo Zake beertender and all-around great guy Shiggy Takagi sent me a message via the Twitters earlier this week, letting me know him and the rest of the Funk Estate crew will be brewing at Massey University in Palmerston North sometime soon. I'm looking forward to hanging with them and learning a bit from some semi-professional brewers. So, expect a post where I actually take some pictures for once!


Post-postscript

Earlier I said Funk Estate would be in my town on June 3. Turns out it isn't happening. Which, while making me sad, gives me something semi-unexpected to look forward to.

In the beginning...

There was me. A 20-something young-ish professional who has started a ridiculous amount of blogs in the past, which are currently cluttering up some black hole of cyberspace forsaken by most of humanity.

But this one will be different, because I plan to use it to chronicle my journey from drinking beer to actually making the delicious stuff. But first, I'm going to talk about me, and how I got to this situation I am now in.

I would have to say I've been spoiled on my trip from beer-drinker to beer-nerd. You see, when I first started drinking beer, I lived in Palmerston North.

AKA "The Swamp" - seriously, the place was built on a swamp. Place be stuffed if Christchurch Earthquake 2.0 hit it.
Photo: Destination Manawatu

When I turned 18 - the legal purchase age for booze here in New Zealand - I was most likely to be buying a box/slab/crate of Tui, for the sole purpose of getting as sloshed as possible. Hey, I was 18 and a university student. While I know that is hardly a good excuse for both my drinking and social behaviors over my undergraduate days, it's a pretty easy one to fall back on.

After finishing up my degree and working for a year in a cafe - at time when I decided I could afford "good beer" like Stella Artois - I decided to take off to the big smoke of Wellington.

I once again worked in hospitality - working for Fuel Espresso on Warring Taylor St - and lived in what I swear was the coldest flat in all of Mt Victoria. While my rent instantly doubled and I had to walk to work at 6am for at least 30 minutes with the southerly blast off Antarctica at my back, there was one big bonus to life - the local bottle shop.

Photo: Regional Wines

Every day on my walk home from work - which I finished at noon every other day - I would stroll/trudge/drag myself past Regional, more often than not without going in. I was still in the frame of mind that a fizzy, over-marketed lager was the drink of choice. A shop without beer in its name will probably not be the place to go for a good tipple.

But one uncharacteristically hot Wellington day, as I dragged myself home after a stupidly busy shift, I knew I had to have something cold to drink. So, in I went to Regional...

To say I was overawed at the sheer range of product they had in there would be an understatement of gargantuan proportions. Plenty of beers I didn't know about, a range of beer taps on the wall to fill your own plastic riggers - not that I knew that at the time - and not a drop of Tui, Export Gold or any other mass-produced beer in sight. Which presented me with a big problem - what the hell was I going to buy? I had already walked in and I couldn't leave without buying something - after all, they may think I'm shoplifting.

So I perused through the labels and found one that instantly popped out - Epic Pale Ale. "Oh, just like Tui," I thought.

Well thank fuck it didn't taste like Tui. I remember that first whiff after opening the bottle. Fruit and spice and sweetness and that first sip opened up an absolute overabundance of scrumdiddlyumptiousness.

Photo: epicbeer.com

So, Regional opened up a whole new world for me. And - if I felt particularly flush on payday - I would pop into The Malthouse on my way home and spoil myself with a pint of something random.

After my year at Fuel, I went back to uni to - finally - finish training for my current vocation. Probably the most intense year of learning in my life was ahead of me, but I still needed to pay rent. So I decided bar work was the way to go. Lucky for me, I managed to land a job at The Malthouse where I managed to learn a shit-ton about beer from some of the coolest people I've had the pleasure to work with and serve.

I also got to drink beer - lots of beer. Plenty of limited releases or beers you would never find on tap anywhere else. I drank at plenty of different bars around Wellington.

But alas, all good things come to an end. And I was offered a job back in Palmerston North.

To but it bluntly, the beer scene here sucks. There is one good bottle store and one bar which stocks a decent range of bottles, but there's nothing on tap. No limited releases hit town, no fellow beer nerds to chat to, no big new release parties. It makes me one sad beer-nerd.

So what can a poor boy do? Well, I can make my own damn beer! Plenty of beer nerds make their own beer, why can't I?! This is despite the fact I've never brewed beer in my life. But I can bake, and Stu McKinlay from Yeastie Boys once called brewing "baking for men", so I should be sweet.

Since deciding to get into brewing, I've done a couple all-grain brews with a friend here in Palmerston North. But he has made most of his gear himself and is quite sick of having to constantly repair it. I'm not good with fixing stuff; I still have to sort out fixing my electric guitar and some drum gear. So screw it, I'm going to buy a brew kit.

After some advice from Jo Wood of Liberty Brewing Co, I got in touch with Chris Banks of Banks Brewing Hardware. He's currently making me a three-tier gravity system out of ex-brewery kegs. I'm looking forward to getting that call/email saying they're all ready to go so I can drop my first brew.

So, until then, I'll post about my beer drinking. There will be nice things, probably a few rants and maybe a lot of stuff you won't really care about. But I guess that's all part of the fun.