Home Brew Mart

Home Brew in Full Swing for Spring!

Welcome to our first newsletter of 1997 and our new expanded format so that we can bring you more tips, recipes and updates. Spring is here and the weather is perfect for making great homebrew. Its also time to plant hop rhizomes. These are sections of the hop plant’s roots that can be planted to produce hop vines. We will be carrying over a dozen varieties of aroma and bittering hop rhizomes. Complete growing instructions are available at both stores.

Ballast Point Brewing Company, our own microbrewery, continues to grow. We now have almost 50 accounts around San Diego. In our tasting room we have our Special, White, Kolsch and Porter. Our popular barleywine should be back on tap in about a month. Look for the new Copper Ale debuting in April!

We have the results to this year’s America’s Finest City Homebrew Competition posted at both stores. Congratulations to the 23 Home Brew Mart customers that won! If you missed it, don’t worry. The annual Del Mar Fair competition will be coming up at the end of June so start brewing those entries.

LOOK AT THIS !

* Ballast Point Tasting Room With Beer To Go!
* New Web Site! Check: http://www.homebrewmart.com
* New Grains! New Hops! More Specials!
* Grow Your Own Hops: Hop Rhizomes Are In!
* Brewing Tips And Three Great Recipes!
* Beginner, All-Grain and Meadmaking Classes!

Fruit Beers: Fresh Fruit or Fruit Extract?

When brewing fruit beers, many people are unsure whether they should use fresh fruit or a fruit extract. Each has advantages, and they both give off different flavors. Some commercial breweries will use extracts giving the beer a sweeter flavor. Fresh fruit gives the beer more color and more tartness. Fresh fruit can be used three different ways. The first is to just steep the fruit in your wort after the boil at 170F for 15 minutes. You can then strain the fruit or throw it into the fermentor.

The other approach to using fresh fruit is to transfer the beer from your first fermentor into a secondary fermentor with the fruit in it. The alcohol in the beer helps prevent from wild yeast infecting it. This is the most traditional method of brewing with fruit and is still used by the Lambic breweries of Belgium.

WELCOME TO COLOGNE

Cologne is a bustling city on the Rhine river is known for its huge Gothic cathedral, Roman ruins, Carnival celebration (rivaling New Orleans’ Mardi Gras), and most importantly, K�lsch. K�lsch is Cologne’s own beer styleand it is brewed by 21 different breweries. This makes Cologne the city with the most breweries in the world! (although Denver and Portland are catching up fast) What is unusual about this is that all of these breweries brew the same style of beer.

K�lsch is a pale colored ale of normal alcohol strength. It may contain some wheat, and has from 22 to 28 I.B.U.s of bitterness. German Tettnang or Sp�lt hops are typically used for aroma. It is made very much like a pilsner, except that it is fermented at warm temperatures with ale yeast. It is then lagered like a pilsner. It tastes very much like a pils, except for the subdued fruitiness of the ale yeast, the tang of the wheat (in some), and the lack of lager-like sulfur aromas.

It is customarily served in small (6.5 oz) tall cylindrical glasses. This makes it very easy to order another one, and hard to keep count. The waiter (known as a kurbis, and clad in traditional white shirt and blue apron) keeps count by marking your coaster for each one you drink. Traditional foods to have with a K�lsch are K�lsch caviar (a roll with butter), A halve hahn (a roll with cheese), sauerbraten, and potato pancakes with apple sauce (Wednesdays only).

Why should there be 21 K�lsch breweries? At first all the beers seem very similar. After spending some time in Cologne you start to pick up on big differences. Malzm�hle (my favorite) is the maltiest, P�ffgen has a big hop nose. Fr�h, by the Cathedral, is extremely delicate. Sion is soft and S�nner has a perfect hop balance.

So where can you taste a K�lsch? There are no K�lsches being imported into the United States. So you could fly to Cologne. A better idea is to come to Ballast Point Brewing Company and try our California K�lsch. We make it with 10% Wheat, finish hop it with Perle and Tettnanger, and ferment it with our Ballast Point ale yeast. It is unfiltered, unlike most K�lsches. So come on in and enjoy a taste of the Rhineland!!