I AM NITRO!

March Madness Bar style

LFBNitro — 2008-03-17T05:53:04-07:00

March madness is officially here, and with it marks the bracket of bars. Fill out your favorites and rock along. Click on the image to go to the page.

Beer is good for you

LFBNitro — 2008-03-14T04:26:28-07:00

Beer is good for the body. Often times on tours you�ll hear myself or another tour guide talk a little about the benefits of beer. Here�s an article that showcases a few different kinds of beer and their benefits. Like anything in life, it must be enjoyed in moderation, with a few splurges now and then.

Here�s a high level run down of the great qualities in beer. Beer with a lot of hops like Lakefront IPA or Tyranena Bitter woman have polyphenols which help lower cholesterol, fight cancer and strengthen your body against viruses. Organic beers are made from ingredients that have no pesticides or hormones utilized. Beers like Lakefront ESB or Wolaver�s IPA follow this style. Bottle conditioned beers have yeast added right before the bottle is closed, and since yeast is a source of vitamin B, protein and a few other minerals, it�s a great for the body. Dark beers are rich in antioxidants and are actually better than vitamin pills because of their ability to deal with toxic free radicals. Beers like Lakefront Snake Chaser Stout and Anchor�s Porter and examples of these good beers.

Beer is nutritional, delicious, liquid bread and life. Let us drink a beer to our health!

Click here for the story

Craft beer is in

LFBNitro — 2008-03-12T10:32:10-07:00

Here's a great article talking about how craft beer is in big time right now. The growth of craft beer across all regions is up substantially. This bodes well for the health of the craft-brewing industry. To you and I this means there will be an ample supply of good, fresh clean beer for a long time to come.

Click here for the story

Driving Instructor gets DUI while teaching two students

LFBNitro — 2008-03-06T19:34:40-08:00

DUI�s are nothing to joke about and neither is drinking heavily and then driving, but this is a riot. A driving instructor from Ipswich Massachusetts had a .223 Alcohol level when he blew into the breathalyzer. He was instructing two students at the time. Those students sure got a crash course in what not to do.

Click here for the story

Bock: Part 1

LFBNitro — 2008-03-03T05:55:01-08:00

Monday once more and this weekend was sure a busy one. Tours Friday night and Saturday during the day, dinner with my family Saturday night, and brewing all day Sunday; it was a great weekend. The tours as always were a blast and the family had a good time.

Over the next few weeks while the Bock beer ferments and laagers I�m going to be explaining the home brewing process, how we did it, where our process failed, how we recovered, what went wrong and why the Bock beer will be more like a light bock instead of a traditional Bock.

Part 1: All Grain Brewing

For those who aren�t familiar with home brewing there are generally two ways you can make your wort. You can use a malt extract, which is a liquid or powder that is basically a concentrate. You boil your water (5-7 gallons depending on your loss due to evaporation) and then you add the extract. You stir it in well and then put it back on the stove and bring it to a boil once more. The second way is using grains like most professional breweries use. People argue that when using extracts beer adopts a more metallic taste. It should also be known that too really transition the gap from Homebrewing to professional brewing you would use grains only. It�s kind of the next step in the evolution of a brewery.

Yesterday we made our first beer using all grains and no extract. We used 11 pounds and 8 ounces of grain. We used 8 pounds of Munich Pale Malt, 2 pounds of Crystal Malt, 1 pound of Cara-Munich Malt, 4 ounces of Chocolate Malt and 4 ounces of black patent malt. To use this grain we have to first crack it open, so we can get access to all the good sugars and starches inside. To do this we used a Corona Grain mill. Its design is one of a rotating plate against a fixed plate. We found this grain mill to be highly inconsistent as some grains it would pulverize and other it would leave intact. In the future we�ll be getting a true roller grain mill to increase our efficiency.

The question that comes to mind is were we efficient in our grain readying process and did we have enough grain for our mashing process? The answer to this would be no. Our wort turned out much darker than 8 ounces of Dark barley should have. In the end we should have probably used less of the two dark varieties. The big problem however was that 1/3 to 1/2 of our main barley, the Munich Pale Malt was not cracked at all preventing us from gathering the sugars and starches we needed from those barley seeds. In the end this not only affected our color but also our gravity, as we were well below the intended measure.

Stay tuned for more about how we brewed . . .

The wrong place to rob

LFBNitro — 2008-02-28T08:49:16-08:00

So in my daily reading of new sites I came across this article, which is pretty darn funny. Two guys in Australia thought they would rob a bar, so they put on sky masks, grabbed their machetes and proceeded to walk into the bar, completely missing the warning signs outside. Inside the bar after they had yelled out there demands, noises came from one of the side rooms. As the robbers turned in that direction the doors to the side room flew open and 50 men armed with chairs, tables and anything else that wasn�t bolted to the floor came running out at them. One robber got thrown threw a plate glass door and jumped off a balcony to escape the mob. Another robber ran out the back only to be tackled by several bikers and hogtied with electrical wires until the police finally came. I guess the robbers picked the wrong bar to hold up.

Click here for the article

Man dies from eating too many "Fairy" cakes

LFBNitro — 2008-02-25T07:49:21-08:00

Alright, I have to share this because I got a good laugh when I read it this morning. I didn't laugh because a guy died, but the circumstances to his death are comical. A guy from Birmingham UK died after a contest to see who could eat the most cake. The contest was to raise money for an art exhibit. Now a cake eating contest is firstly kind of light, I mean when you�ve got burger eating contests and hot dog contests and all sorts of crazy crawfish and wings contests cake seems like a wimpy thing to eat. What gets me is that it was �Fairy� cake. It's a bummer he died but come on; I imagine his head stone would read "Died eating 'Fairy' Cake".

Click here for the story

Monday, once more.

LFBNitro — 2008-02-25T07:37:45-08:00

So the academy awards were last night, and the European actors/actresses walked away with the coveted four awards. I haven�t had a chance to see �There will be Blood� but I�ve heard it�s fantastic. I did see �No Country for Old Men� and it�s an excellent movie. The Coen brothers have a knack for making out of the ordinary great movies; their vision in film making is breathtaking. Just look at �The Big Lebowski� which is dynamite.

My Bock Beer:

I went shopping over the weekend for a refrigerator to ferment and laager my Bock Beer. Laager yeasts have to ferment at usually a colder temperature and some recipes call for a very cold laagering stage (I�ve seen some recipes call for a laager at 34 degrees F). I�ve found several candidates for refrigerators but the price range is pretty wide. There are really three options.

The first is to buy an old refrigerator from someone else (don�t spend more than 50 dollars) and then buy a temperature gage. Johnson controls makes one and there are several other inexpensive ones as well. Basically you plug the refrigerator into the temperature monitor, put the temp sensor in the fridge and when it gets warmer than the set temp it turns the refrigerator on and cools it to 3 degrees cooler than the set temp. The most inexpensive temp gauge is around 30 bucks, with an old fridge totaling 80-100 dollars give or take taxes, shipping etc.

The second option is to just buy a new fridge that is large enough to house a carboy, use an internal temp sensor and adjust it myself. The problem here is accuracy. I�m not sure with the 1-7 scale inside common fridges that I can accurately produce the temperature I would need to keep the yeast producing well.

The third option, and probably the one I will go with is buying a beverage cooler. I found a beverage cooler that would fit a carboy and has a temperature gauge already built into it. The temperature goes from 39 F to 64 F which is a prime range for laagering and fermenting. While it�s a little more expensive it has a five year warranty and it can double as a wine cooler in a few years if I want it to.

More on my Bock beer in the days to come with pictures of the actual complete brew process!

Lunar Eclipse and Bock Beer

LFBNitro — 2008-02-22T10:37:33-08:00

For those who didn�t get to see the Lunar Eclipse Wednesday here is a picture of it, taken where a filter was a Applied to bring out the vibrant colors. Enjoy your weekends and have a blast!

On a side note I am gearing up to make a bock style of beer for entry into the �Blessing of the Bock� contest for May 11. More on that to come in a few days so stay tuned.

A tasty IPA is a glorious thing

LFBNitro — 2008-02-21T06:56:25-08:00

Last night was Lakefront Brewery�s IPA launch party. While the IPA has been brewed at LFB for several years this is the first year it�s been bottled. The party encompassed three bars over six hours and was a blast. There were cool prizes, great friends, rocking tunes, some MCing Nitro style and fresh clean delicious beer. Three lucky people even won private tours with the owner of LFB Russ Klisch. Overall I think it was a great success. People are interested in a refreshing not overly bitter IPA and the LFB one delivers.