What’s In Your Jeans?
Posted: Wed Jun 26, 2013 3:54 pm
…or is that genes. My spelling is atrocious! Do you brewers come from a long line of beer makers? Do you have any heirloom beers or beer making techniques that have been passed through the generations? Did your parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts make beer, and was it good stuff, or bad stuff?
My mother has known Jonathan Guinness, baron and heir to the Guinness fortune, for most of her life. She made beer when I was a kid. My parents had 5 gallon drums of liquid malt kicking around, hops from the garden, and she had a friend at the St Austell brewery who gave her yeast. My parents were poor bohemians, living in a cottage, down a muddy lane. We lived off the land, subsidized by my mother’s part time waitressing job. They had no fancy gear, no electricity, no car, no TV. My father read us books by the fire. They met lots of other interesting and famous people in Paris and London during their earlier life before they moved down the muddy lane, and I remember a steady stream of them coming to visit, mud up to their knees, and drinking the beer with much merriment.
To make the beer, my mother used to boil water in a pot on a primus stove. Then she would pour the boiling water onto hops from the garden, LME and honey from my bees in a plastic bucket. She would wait for that to cool to what she called “blood heat”. She tested the temperature with her elbow as she didn’t have a thermometer. When it was at “blood heat” she would add the yeast.
I think there’s a bit of fermentation on my mother’s side.
Edit: picture of the cottage "down the muddy lane" as it is today.
My mother has known Jonathan Guinness, baron and heir to the Guinness fortune, for most of her life. She made beer when I was a kid. My parents had 5 gallon drums of liquid malt kicking around, hops from the garden, and she had a friend at the St Austell brewery who gave her yeast. My parents were poor bohemians, living in a cottage, down a muddy lane. We lived off the land, subsidized by my mother’s part time waitressing job. They had no fancy gear, no electricity, no car, no TV. My father read us books by the fire. They met lots of other interesting and famous people in Paris and London during their earlier life before they moved down the muddy lane, and I remember a steady stream of them coming to visit, mud up to their knees, and drinking the beer with much merriment.
To make the beer, my mother used to boil water in a pot on a primus stove. Then she would pour the boiling water onto hops from the garden, LME and honey from my bees in a plastic bucket. She would wait for that to cool to what she called “blood heat”. She tested the temperature with her elbow as she didn’t have a thermometer. When it was at “blood heat” she would add the yeast.
I think there’s a bit of fermentation on my mother’s side.
Edit: picture of the cottage "down the muddy lane" as it is today.