Interesting things to do with yeast

I am sure there are a very wide range of things to do with yeast. The two main uses I make of this product are baking bread (basic simple stuff in a bread machine) and brewing beer. However for the sake of completeness this post will also note some other people's efforts in the latter direction.

Vey little more will be said about the former. I use one of Lauke's mixes (usually the German grains one) for the bread and do not muck about adding fruit etc. As we live some 22kms from the nearest shop it is really good to have a fresh loaf available in the kitchen whenever we want one (and remember to fire the machine up the previous night). Although I am not greatly into 'sensory' things the smell of the baking bread is also quite pleasant on a cold winter morning.

Beer making
There are a couple of ways of beer making. The first is to delegate the task to someone else and just drink the stuff. This will be covered by commentary on various ales I have purchased and sampled. For the purists, it will also cover stouts and wheat beers, but rarely lager or pilseners because they are generally blander than I wish to drink. The second way is to make it yourself, which is my usual source of fermented product.

Commercial Brews
I generally don't use these too much since they are either expensive or uninteresting (or in some cases - often Irish-themed pubs - both). However I usually have a few cans of VB somewhere around for guests and will acquire some of the expensive stuff as a treat from time to time.

The local shops don't really seem to carry a wide range of brews: some Matilda Bay or James Squire is about the extent of interesting stuff. It is interesting to compare this with the situation in New York City where our local supermarket (a Coles-equivalent) carried about 50 brands of beer ranging from Bud Light (who does drink that gnat exudate?) to several of the great Belgian Trappist ales. They had obviously absorbed the Chuck Hahn philosophy of getting "people to drink more beers" rather than getting "people to drink more beer".

A comment about beer in New York must be followed by a reference to the Brooklyn Brewery. Not only do they do a very good lager (almost an oxymoron) style but they have some very robust ales. We got a six pack of Monster (about 10% from memory) and it was genuinely excellent, although approached with caution. They also have an excellent, albeit very high decibel, Happy Hour on friday nights.

An apparently reliable source of expensive but very good stuff in Australia is a stall (http://www.swordsselect.com.au/) in the Victoria Markets in Melbourne. They have a reasonable range of imported and microbrewery lines and appear fairly knowledgeable about their product. Recent acquisions from there have included:

• Weihenstephaner Korbinian: A brew from Bavaria, running at 7.4% alcohol. Pure nectar. One of the best beers I have ever drunk.
• Purrumbete Brewing Company Red Duck Porter. 6.4% alcohol. tastes more like an old ale than a stout. Not bad but while the comment on the label that "Does not include any real ducks" makes it worth an investment, it is nowhere near the appeal of the other two brews covered here.
• Red Hill Imperial Stout. At 8.1% they can justify the "Imperial" tag. This is an offshoot of a winery of the same name who run a tasting venue along with the brewery. Its on the Mornington Peninsula so easy to visit when we are next in Melbourne. It has now been sampled and is rated "magnificent" (Martin) and "very nice" (Frances). It is full bodied and tastes like a good stout should. I could quite imagine sinking about 6 of these and being very willing to go and fight at Borodino! The tasting venue will be definitely be on the itinerary when we next visit Melbourne!

In Canberra - near where we live - the facilities of Dan Murphy's have been recommended as a venue worthy of exploration. This was backed up by offering a bottle of Velkopopovicky Kozel from Plzen (yes, folks, the home of pilsener) in the Czech Republic. This however is a dark beer which runs in at a surprisingly light 3.8% and had a very pronounced malty taste. Worthy of further testing.

Home brewing
Most of the beer that I make is created in a 23 litre fermenter acquired many years ago. I gave up bottling into glass when one shattered as I was capping it and required a fairly brisk visit to hospital: fortunately at that time we were living 400m from the second biggest hospital in the ACT! So now I use PET soda bottles which a) are free and b) work completely well as long as the filled bottles are kept in the dark. The one way I do use bottles is when I am able to get some swing-tops (typically Grolsch, but we did return from a trip to Europe with several empty Fischer bottles in our luggage). However I did find recently that a brew of Thomas Cooper's Stout (see below) blew the bottom out of one of them.

The unusual thing about my brewing technique is that I have found it to be a pain in the rectum to use sodium metabisulphite as a steriliser. A good swill of hot water from the tap seems to work just as well. I did try the metbisulphite once recently and for some reason the brew hardly had a secondary fermentation. To paraphrase John Wayne in Fort Apache "It was better than no beer, but only just."

A useful discovery for any readers in the vicinity of Canberra is that Butts and Booze now appeart to exist in Queanbeyan and offer quite a good range of product. The have shuffled around Canberra for years trying to find the balance between reasonable rents and accessibility and like many residents (including us) have found that the answer is to get into NSW!

Recent brews have included:

• Thomas Cooper Stout: Generally like a stout should be. Dark and sweet with a good long lasting head. Probably not the best thing for Summer so some of it might get left a bit until next Winter.
• Thomas Cooper Wheat beer: I like the taste of Wheat beers as much as anything in the fermented products area. Following the example of Matilda Bay "Beez Kneez" I use honey as the additional carbohydrate when brewing this and it makes for a very refreshing slurp.
• Morgan's Yukon Brown Smoked Ale. Thrown on 25 October. I have tried this one in the past and rated it as pretty good. This time I have used Brigalow Extra Malt Brewing Sugar rather than the basic CSR sucrose. I bottled it on about 6 November and had a first bottle on 25 November: it is truly excellent and will be brewed again. The smokiness reminds me a bit of some of the nicer malt whiskies!.
• Morgan's Ironbark Dark Ale. Thrown 20 November. I have a memory that this was an ingredient of our (so far only) attempt at Imperial Russian Stout: hint to self, must do that again to get ready for next Winter. Bottled on 4 December as covered in "http://franmart.blogspot.com/2007/12/beer-gets-skittled.html"