Rantings by Nick Buraglio

It’s been quite a while since I did a beer review and I’ve had SO many unique brews since the last one, but the most recent beverage I had worth writing about was the Schlafly Imperial Stout. I was able to enjoy this the other night thanks to my brother-in-law Rob. I would highly recommend this big brew to anyone that has $ to drop in one big, dark, powerful beer. It’s got some good undertones of bourbon with a little bite, but overall pretty silky.
I like the Schlafly brewery and, since I’m only about 2 and a half hours from St. Louis, I like to try their stuff and support a [kinda] local brewery.

Overall I’d probably give it an A-/B+. I’m not a huge imperial stout fan (and I’m certainly too cheap to buy a bottle myself unless I’d had a few beers first) but overall I really liked this brew.

* Stock photo, this was not the one I drank.

As I have done every year (save one) since its inception, I headed over to the annual Urbana Beer and Chili cook off in Downtown Urbana. My expectations are never really high because of the usual things that go along with running such an event in a college town. It is promoted by Jay Goldberg Events, the owners of the canopy club if I understand correctly. It is more or less worked by volunteers who know little to nothing about the beverages they are serving, but there is a decent selection (I believe all coming from Premium Brands distributor). It has been held in the parking garage in downtown Urbana for the last few years and, although it was a beautiful day, I got fairly sunburned waiting in line, which brings me to one of my major gripes about this event.
I like to buy tickets in advance. One has to pay a “convenience fee” if they purchase online. The fee plus the ticket amounts to more than if I were to buy the tickets at the door. Fine. They need to cover some kind of costs for providing stuff online. I can accept that. I can also accept that every year I get there early and STILL never get the tasting glass that they offer to the first N people that arrive. The tasting glass issue was remedied this year, I got my first one ever. I was pleased about that.
The other fairly significant issue is that they either
A. Don’t have many chili options
B. The chili runs out before everyone gets inside
or
C. both

This year that was surprisingly different. Actually, this year the chili was more satisfying than the beer for me. Don’t ge tme wring, the beer was great but there were only a few things that I’d never had before. Most notably, there was a pretty good pear cider that I’d never had and several other belgian ales that I’d always been too cheap to buy a bottle of myself. Other than that everything else was either old hat for me or just not my style.
Overall I’d have to say that even though the organization and execution of the event is criminally inefficient, it’s still a “should do” in and around the Champaign-Urbana area.
A few things that you can expect if you’ve never been before:
A very long line to get in if you get there early.
They won’t let you in on time. Expect to get in at the earliest 20 minutes after the flyers say it will start.
Chili has been hit or miss in the past (although I’d give them an A for chili this year (2008)
Chili will run out way before the beer
All of the beers on the list will not be available
It’ll be crowded
It’ll likely be fun if you like to taste beer.
It’s the only event of its kind in the area so you might as well at least check it out.

Urbana beer and Chili 2008

Some things to look out for:
MAKE SURE to hit up the local home brew club table. It’s probably going to be the best beer at the place.
Hit up the tables with the “$1″ or “two ticket” tastings. They have the more unique and, in my opinion, better tastings.

I decided it was finally time to brew one of my favorite styles for myself. I jumped in with both feet on this one, what I hope to be a VERY hoppy Pale Ale, which I’ve so creatively titled “Buraglio’s Pale Ale”.
The recipe can be found on Google Documents here.
Here is an image of it fermenting after 2 days. This was my first batch ever that actually needed a blow off tube rather than a simple airlock.

From the recipe you one can see that I added a lot of not only high IBU hops, but just a lot of hops in general.
As an aside, I’ve never used whole hop cones before (thanks to Kat Wefel for the hookup of her home grown Nugget hops). They’re a little different to deal with, needing to be strained before the move can be made to the primary fermentation vessel.
I’m still undecided regarding the dry hopping. I may wait for version 2 to give that a try or maybe I’ll get ambitious, only time will tell.

I got my keg order in and it looks like I can fit 2 kegs plus a co2 dispenser in the beer fridge. The local homebrew club got such a great deal on the kegs that I decided to put off switching to all grain and spend the money on a kegging system. I was able to get five used 5 gallon kegs plus new seals for $80 through our local club (we did a huge order).

I’m pretty excited. I think I’ll put my oktoberfest in there if I can get the co2 in time.

Let the kegging begin!

In the last few weeks I’ve been in what can only be described as a mission to taste as much good beer as I can.  On the short list, all of the stuff at the the Morgan St. Brewery in STL
(the dark wheat was excellent, as was the altbier).

I’ve also been on a Belgian Ale kick, having just bottled mine a few days ago. The Hoppin’ Frog Belgian Strong ale is a favorite of mine.

It’s also Oktoberfest season, always my favorite time of year. My Oktoberfest was made late so it won’t really be ready until December but it should be good as well.
I’d like to get my 15 Gallon kettle going so I can make some double batches and get my kegs going as well but that will likely come a little later.

Since many folks have asked for this recipe, I decided that I should actually go and copy it from my notes to my Google Docs archhive of recipes.

This beer was a bit of a surprise, I made it with some pretty old ingredients a little last minute and didn’t expect much from it.  I pitched it onto an existing yeast cake from my vanilla porter and just let it go.  It was the 3rd batch I’d ever done and, boy, it turned out GREAT.  I still think this is the best brew I’ve ever made.  I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to *truly* recreate it’s uniqueness in origin but I will certainly be making another batch of this in the next few months.

A link to the Google Document can be foundhere, or a local copy can be found here in my brew archive.

This is a good one. If you like a good sweet stout then by all means make a batch of this.

I made a Belgian ale this weekend, I had most of the ingredients here already, including a good WL Belgian Ale Yeast blend. It’s currently fermenting away nicely

The recipe can be found here or here for the google document version (it will update as I add notes).

I spent some time making my Oktoberfest (yeah, I know I’m like months late) and decided it might be fun to try and film it to show others that it’s actually pretty easy and economical to make a 5 gallon batch of home brewed beer. Well, after about an hour and a half of editing and a realization that my camera work for this one really kinda stunk, I was done and had a 30 minute “documentary”. It’s not the greatest and I have found a few places that I don’t like the editing, but it’s already uploaded to Google video (it was too big for YouTube). It’s about 30 minutes long, so if you wanna watch it, be aware of that:

I went to a SCinet meeting last week in Reno, NV to which I’d never been. I’ve also never been to Las Vegas, but Rebecca told me basically waht it was like, something that isn’t really my style. I don’t smoke and I don’t gamble, both of which are abundant in Reno. The hotel/casino we stayed in and had our meetings in reminded me of the movie Casino, everyone looking out of style and place. Most were almost Zombie-ish. I did manage to gamble a grand total of $2 in the 3 days I was there; I don’t see the draw. Since supercomputing will be there in 2007 we figured we should find at least *something* to do. We happpened across a _nice_ brewpub. By nice I mean that they had a fairly comprehensive selection of beers that they make there. I managed to sample almost alll of the varieties, including the porter, stout, IPA and several of the what beers. All were very good, highly recommended in fact. The name of the place is the Great Basin Brewing Company, and so far it’s the best thing I’ve seen in Reno. They also had a fried dill pickly, which we managed to try. It was ……interesting. Not too bad actually. I’d eat one again.

We had to fly back the day after the brits foiled the terrorist thing on the 10th, it made for an interesting day at the airports. All the time on the plane aggrivated my back again…..fun.

A very tasty english black ale, the Moorehouse Black Cat is a dark malty ale. Full flavored with a little hoppy after taste. It is surprisingly refreshing, not overly filling, not overly hoppy. I don’t know the alcohol content, it’s not terribly strong, i’d estimate mayby a 6 or 7%. I picked this up at the local friar tuck for $3.99. I’d recommend this for anyone that likes dark brews.