So, apparently it has been scientifically proven that beer goggles are real. The original study showed folks in bars pictures of other people. They rated them as being more attractive than their non-barfly counterparts. However, it could just mean that people in bars have lower standards or some such thing. The new study gave folks either a NA beverage or an alcoholic one and then made them rate the attractiveness of members of the opposite sex and of the same sex. The folks who were drinking booze rated everyone as being more attractive than the sober folks. The next step, of course, is to see what occurs with higher doses (perhaps they can correlate it to the  lovely gnaw-your-arm-off experience, of course).

– Cindy

As always, summer brought a slew of activities which have led to a short break in all brewing activity. Well, we finally got back to brewing this weekend.

On Saturday we bottled the Belgian strong ale, which is still incredibly sweet. The champagne yeast never really took off and I was too engrossed in making the other beers to give the proper amount of attention to the stuck fermentation problem. We bottled it at 1.054, which is a good starting gravity for most beer. Even so, it has an alcohol level of almost 8%. Hopefully it carbonates well but doesn’t continue to ferment and break bottles. I think we’ll be watching this one closely

On Sunday we brewed a Raspberry Wheat, which has been officially dubbed the grrrl beer.We liked this one last year, so we are using the same recipe except for substituting Cascade Hops for the Streisselspalt because of the availability.

While were were shelving the Belgian, Cindy noticed that a couple bottles of Swill were leaking from their caps. When we opened them they foamed like champagne, which is never good. A few months ago I transferred several bottles of the swill from corked wine bottles to capped champagne bottles because I wanted the wine bottles for mead. I am fairly certain that is when the problems began. The Swill was still good at the time, but I wasn’t very gentle with it and I let a lot of air get in. We decided to pour out all six of the capped bottles and 4 had obviously gone bad. I still have 4 corked bottles of Swill and none of them show any signs of contamination.

This week, I plan to order ingredients for Beerios and a Farmhouse Ale. After that I will start putting together a list of beers to brew for Halloween. If my two readers have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them. Right now I am considering a subset of the following beers which have been popular in the past: Scotch Ale, Chocolate Stout, Pumpkin Ale, and IPA. I probably won’t have the time or the bottles to make them all before Halloween.

- Chris

The conference went really well. We supplied 168 bottles (beerio, rye beer, porter, munich lager, and IPA). The beer was served on Monday night (the second day of the conference) during a poster session. After the session there were evening talks. Once these were done, I went back to the poster area to put away the beers that were leftover– despite that 60+ bottles were leftover before the talks began only 1 bottle was left on the counter and only another 10 or so were in the fridge. I found out later in the week that some folks grabbed 6packs and took them back to their suites for later use during the week. Now, while I don’t approve of hoarding– the fact that our beer was worth hoarding was a HUGE compliment. In addition the folks hoarding the beers were not graduate students, but rather, professors. We got some amazing compliments on the beer, in fact, folks were debatable more interested in our beer than in my science.

(I am going to take a minute of shameless self promotion– If you are looking at this web address because you got it off of a bottle at the conference and if you really liked the beer and if you happen to be looking for post-docs– I assure you that I do some amazingly cool work (cv available upon request) and that if you hire me, in addition to some fantastic work, I will slip you the occasional 6-pack in return for your kindness.)

Ah….now that is done.

More later folks! Time for me to get back to work.

– Cindy

We bottled the Rye Beer last night. It’s a good beer, rather plain and light in flavor with a dry finish and a hint of rye. I was hoping for something a little bolder, but I’m not sure that can be accomplish with extract brewing. I think I am going to call it Seven Seas and use this image in the label. We’ll see if that sticks, and we might not need a label for this one.

We now have 370 bottles of beer in the basement. That’s far more than we have ever had on hand before. Usually our stock tops out around 250 bottles just before our Halloween party. At the moment, we are only sending 144 bottle to the conference, so we’ll still have more than 200 bottles of beer. On top of all that, we still have to bottle the Belgian Strong Ale and we’ll be starting on the Raspberry Wheat and the other two beers that I would like to brew this summer.

- Chris

The party on Saturday went well, and we collected about 60 bottles between donations and drinking. I think everyone enjoyed the BBQ Pulled Pork and there was plenty of food to go around.

We printed several of the labels that we are working on, and applied them to bottles to that everyone could see them. The amount of text is a lot less overwhelming on a bottle because you can’t see the whole thing at once.

As Cindy mentioned below, we still need naming ideas for some of our beers. One of the names that came out of the party was Liquid Love, which we’ll probably call the Chocolate Stout. Now I just need a good label idea for that one.

Here is another of our labels, the Raspberry Wheat beer. I really like this label , but I still need to fill in the flavor description, add the ABV, and switch the bottom text. Also, someone at the party pointed out that the ‘about us’ text has a typo. I’ll fix that soon.

- Chris