First Beer - NB's Caribou Slobber

Caribou Slobber

Moose Drool

Great names for beer, huh? The first is Northern Brewer's name for a clone of the second, which is Big Sky Brewing's name for their brown ale. I don't normally especially like brown ales, but I knew this to be the beer that the NB gang brews in their instructional video. I was pleasantly surprised by both the beer and the video.

First, the video: I'm no video expert, but it seems to have decent production value, though this is not the part that surprised me. What surprised me is that it was entertaining enough, and informative enough, and brief enough to watch several times. There really is no shortcut to it; it is faster to watch the video than to explain the brewing process.

Second, the beer: I can't get Moose Drool on the east coast, though I will try it as soon as I see the opportunity. I'm not a huge fan of brown ale, though I loved Newcastle in college, that being one of the more exotic beers commonly available in Blacksburg in the mid 90's. Brown ales are known for malty sweetness, and I favor the humulus. Fortunately, Moose Drool has plenty of both.

I've recently moved about an hour away from my old house, and haven't visited with many of my old friends. We're all at the age where we spend more time with work, wives, and family. Brewing is a good excuse to hang out for the afternoon, while doing something productive. I invited one of my old friends over for my inaugural brew, a friend handier than I, fortunately.

The brewing was uneventful. A large pot, that I had purchased from a restaurant supply store, the starter kit, the recipe kit, and a 'smack pack' of yeast, which I smacked the morning of brew day. The highlight of the brew is getting to taste and smell each of the ingredients before they mix. Liquid malt extract is sweet enough for cereal. Hop pellets smell amazing. I'm pretty sure that dried malt extract is what they make Whopper candies with. There aren't really any hard parts to brewing, if you can follow directions and keep focused on one task for about an hour.

The gist of brewing is this: you make a sweet tea from grains, and let yeast (saccharomyces cerevisiae) consume this tea and excrete alchohol and carbon dioxide. Brewers call the grain tea wort. Brewers also stack the deck in the favor of flavorful yeast by pitching a population of desirable yeast cells into the tea, and by using sanitation to exclude undesirable fungi and bacteria. It is said that brewers make wort, yeast makes beer.

[pictured: first glass of home-brewed Caribou Slobber]