White House Honey Ale
I’m delighted to discover that Pres. Obama started making his own beer about the same time I did. Having installed the first-ever home brew kit in the White House, and using honey from the first-ever beehive at the White House, his cooks developed recipes for ale and porter and holy boots am I going to try these out.
All right, what are we looking at here? In the first picture are the Bavarian candi sugar crystals. Don’t they look just like beveled gems? It’s astonishing, and I tasted one and it tastes just like regular sugar! Imagine that. Second picture: prime ingredients for the wort, bourbon and sugar. The sugar will contribute to the malt extract (which I did not know I was making until I did) and the bourbon is ‘cos this is a Belgian bourbon dubbel. Or it’s supposed to be, until I prove how badly I’ve screwed this up in two weeks.
In the third picture, I’m sanitizing all the equipment in my bathtub. StarSan is awesome: you soak everything in it for a couple minutes and you don’t even need to rinse it off, just start using it. It’s organic! And the fourth picture reveals how I decided that, if I don’t want to ruin the wort by having it sit in its own gases in a 5 gallon carboy, I had to transfer the mix to a (hastily sanitized) 1 gallon carboy instead. The tube is leading to a small tub of sanitizing liquid, as well, just in case the yeast activates too enthusiastically and foams up and creates a mess. In three days I can place a normal airlock on the lil’ jug and then wait eleven whole days to start bottling. This is the boring part.
OH KIDS! You think you’re so cool with raping indigenous cultures to wear your fancy little male-only Native American headdresses to go out and get drunk, because you’re stupid hipsters who consume everything wrong, but what are you missing? You can’t even perceive it because to you, nothing is cooler than Irony 095 (prereq.).
As for me, I’m making beer. I made an English brown ale, and tonight I’m making a bourbon dubbel. As seen in the photos, I grind my own malt and have a batch of French dark oak chips steeping in Woodford Reserve (you won’t recognize the name because it’s not that shitty PBR you insist on repeating, because “get it?”, but it’s one of the three best Kentucky bourbons available). I’m in the process of steeping the hops even as I write this, and in a couple weeks I will have made, with my own hands, a better beer than anything you have spent your parents’ money on.
I hate hipsters, if that’s not clear. They are stupid and dumb, and they suck.
Also, I love making my own beer.
