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Prohibition, or “the Noble Experiment,” refers to the period between 1919 and 1933 when the sale, manufacture, and distribution of alcohol were illegal in the United States. Although it may have lasted only 14 years, Prohibition was the culmination of decades of protest and lobbying and has ramifications that are still felt today. It remains the focal point of the ongoing debate surrounding the potential dangers and benefits of alcohol and people’s right to drink as they please.

Saison du Mont, Big Brew 2009

Why don’t more women brew beer?

Women I consider capable of holding national office or even starting a new country have described to me how they stand by and watch men homebrew. I have also run into more than one woman at the homebrew store who was there to pick up the ingredients for the boyfriend’s brew day.

This may be because modern American homebrewing — a hobby that in the U.S. is legally only about thirty years old –  is dominated by men,  with the attendant big-batch, outdoorsy, size-matters, Gawd-you-won’t-believe-how-hard-this-is characteristics of masculinized cooking activities.

It’s not that women are sissies (although, full disclosure, I am strictly apres-ski when it comes to outdoorsy stuff), but that men-brewing-beer has become an incomprehensible cultural habit, like driving in circles to get a really good parking spot at the gym.

Yet once upon a time, it was the good housewife who milled the malted barley and brewed it with hops to make beer (afterwards giving it a good stir with her magic stick that impregnated it with yeast). In the 18^th century, nearly 80 percent of all licensed brewers were women, and many ancient myths “credit the creation of beer to women,” as beer anthropologist Alan Eames noted some years back.

And she didn’t spend hundreds of dollars on fancy equipment, either… nor did she suspend all her other domestic activities to concentrate on her brewing… and she expected her beer to complement her other domestic products, such as the family dinner (if not breakfast and lunch, or even snack breaks for lactating mothers, for whom milk stout was recommended).

So, as a newbie who has nonetheless learned a few things in the past year, here are my insights for the woman who has considered homebrewing when the rainbow was enuff.

First, remember:   homebrewing is only cooking. Not only that,  it’s not particularly complex cooking.  If you can  clean your kitchen, use a measuring spoon, and make a grilled-cheese sandwich, you can make beer, right in the comfort of your kitchen.

If, like me, you like cookbooks, you’ll enjoy learning from the homebrew canon. The beginners’ books are Papazian and Palmer, and the Basic Brewing DVDs are fabulous. Cooking is very much visual technique — I once took a half-day class in cleaning and killing Dungeness crab, acquiring skills I’ll have for life — and seeing James and Steve sparge and vorlauf and lauter is worth the price of admission.

Plus don’t you feel a little happy inside saying “vorlauf” and “sparge”?

Beat the mystique. Many of the magic arts in homebrewing turn out to be simple crafts. I’ve read lengthy instructions for boiling  sugar with water. Cooks in the know call that a simple syrup. Some homebrewers will breathlessly suggest placing your ingredients on the counter to build a visual inventory before you begin brewing. Hello, mise en place?

Speaking of which, think food-friendly brewing. I love the great big India Pale Ales, I truly do.  On its own, or paired with a bold food such as blue cheese, a crisp, sassy, over-the-top-hopped glass of beer is a more interesting experience than just about any wine I could possibly afford.  But living in Germany, and near Belgium, for two years in the 1980s taught me that some beer styles pair beautifully with food. The current fad for hoppiest-brew-evah is fun, but if you’re thinking

By popular request (well… one request, but how can I say no?) here is my recipe for a clone of Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale. I researched just about every THA recipe out there to come up with this.

The decision to stay with Centennial all the way through appears correct, despite the recipes that sneak in a little this or that.  I was quite radical and did not “secondary” the ale (transfer it–known as “racking”–to another container for clearing), simply dry-hopping in primary, though I will the next time so that it is clear enough to enter in the Queen of Beer competition or similar events.

Here’s a link to the XML for this recipe, as well.

Big-Hearted Gal (Half-Batch)

Brew Type: Partial Mash Date: 8/15/2009
Style: American IPA Brewer: K.G. Schneider
Batch Size: 2.50 gal Assistant Brewer: Emma and Dot
Boil Volume: 2.75 gal Boil Time: 60 min
Brewhouse Efficiency: 70.00 % Equipment: PM Half-batch Equipment
Actual Efficiency: 65.83 %

Taste Rating (50 possible points): 45.0
Note: Partial-mash clone of Bell’s wonderful Two-Hearted Ale. Can substitute WLP051.

Ingredients Amount Item Type % or IBU

2.25 lb Pale Liquid Extract (8.0 SRM) Extract 40.91 % [note: late extract addition, at 15 min.]
1.50 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain 27.27 %
1.25 lb Vienna Malt (3.5 SRM) Grain 22.73 %
0.25 lb Caramel Pils Malt (3.0 SRM) Grain 4.55 %
0.25 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt – 20L (20.0 SRM) Grain 4.55 %
0.66 oz Centennial [8.00 %] (60 min) Hops 30.1 IBU
0.33 oz Centennial [8.00 %] (Dry Hop 3 days) Hops -
0.33 oz Centennial [8.00 %] (15 min) Hops 7.5 IBU
0.33 oz Centennial [8.00 %] (5 min) Hops 3.0 IBU
0.33 oz Centennial [8.00 %] (1 min) Hops 0.6 IBU
1 Pkgs California Ale (White Labs #WLP001) [Starter 35 ml] Yeast-Ale

Beer Profile Estimated Original Gravity: 1.065 SG (1.056-1.075 SG) Measured Original Gravity: 1.063 SG
Estimated Final Gravity: 1.015 SG (1.010-1.018 SG) Measured Final Gravity: 1.011 SG
Estimated Color: 8.4 SRM (6.0-15.0 SRM) Color [Color]
Bitterness: 41.3 IBU (40.0-70.0 IBU) Alpha Acid Units: 7.9 AAU [believe the IBUs are higher, due to late extract addition not noted by Beersmith]
Estimated Alcohol by Volume: 6.58 % (5.50-7.50 %) Actual Alcohol by Volume: 6.79 %
Actual Calories: 281 cal/pint

Mash Profile Name: Temperature Mash, 1 Step, Full Body Mash Tun Weight: 4.50 lb
Mash Grain Weight: 3.25 lb Mash PH: 5.4 PH
Grain Temperature: 72.0 F Sparge Temperature: 168.0 F
Sparge Water: 0.67 gal Adjust Temp for Equipment: FALSE

Name Description Step Temp Step Time
Saccharification Add 4.88 qt of water at 159.5 F 150.0 F 40 min
Mash Out Heat to 168.0 F over 10 min 168.0 F 10 min [didn't actually do this]

Notes
Due to accident (tipped LME all over floor) went slightly beyond 60 min and am a little unsure how much LME is in there. However, I had boiled off enough that I was well over target, so I brought it up to about 2 gallons. 9/7/09: bottled. Delicious flat, warm, and green! 9/21/09: hazy, but delicious. Fresh hops flavor, no off-flavors, great mouthfeel–not quite a dead ringer, but very close, with lovely color. Had to force myself not to go back for “seconds”!

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When I noted that I had been busy with conference planning, one angle to that I had left out is my crash education in DocBook XML, a markup language used for technical documentation.

I’ve spent close to a year circling around the question of documentation for an open source software project. Documentation is one of those maturational issues for open source software (and before we get too far, I will add that there’s no shortage of lame documentation in the proprietary software world — but that’s not the problem I’m trying to solve).

I know what doesn’t work, such as assuming documentation will naturally bubble up from the gift economy (the kind of woo-woo philosophizing up there with assuming an unregulated market will police itself). That approach yields at best a smattering of notes in a hodgepodge of formats. You also can’t just point contractors toward the project and say “write this.” I mean, you can, but it won’t work.

In the end, you need focus and direction — or as I put it in a talk a couple weeks back, some people, a plan, and a pickaxe.

The kewl thing about Evergreen is that the project is now approaching the critical mass required to support almost anything the community wants to do, including establishing a documentation project. (I don’t kid myself that a community documentation project could necessarily handle all documentation needs for an open source community, but without a project, we’ll never know what those needs are to begin with — and a community can bite off some chunks of the problem.)

Evergreen’s now got the people, and they are ready and willing to plan. But to give this project direction, it also needed the pickaxe, which is where DocBook XML comes in.

When you look at all the options for formatting documentation, and then look at the basic documentation needs of any project, you work your way to DocBook XML by process of elimination.  Assuming your project needs a single-source, standards-based, non-binary documentation format that supports translation, reuse, and other requirements, with an active user community, and strong fee-or-free toolsets, you end up with DocBook XML or DITA. The ramp-up for DocBook XML is much less daunting than DITA (though not without plenty of daunt on its own), in part due to a couple of excellent books (and though they are freely available online, it’s much easier to buy the print books and have them parked near your keyboard for ready reference).

DocBook XML is a lot like democracy (to paraphrase some pundit): it doesn’t look so great until you compare the alternatives. Nobody thinks writing XML is a walk in the park, and after you’ve produced lengthy XML documents, you still have to transform them into HTML (or PDF), and even at that you need to style the pages so they’re all purty, because plain HTML looks so 1993. But again, after close to a year of banging my head on the wall, I get it. DocBook. All righty.

But it’s one thing to suggest using DocBook XML — and building an entire project around it — and another to actually demonstrate it in action. So about six weeks ago I realized that if I was going to make a convincing, project-energizing argument for DocBook XML — an argument first made two years ago by others in the community and repeated several times  hence, with no objection but also no action — I was going to have to get serious about learning DocBook XML, if not to the level of expertise, at least to a minimal competence.

(It helped that I had been reviewing an intern’s beginning DocBook projects for a couple of months; as is often the case with teaching, I quietly absorbed more than I realized during the process of evaluating the student’s work.)

So in addition to working on the conference planning stuff, I got up at the butt-crack of dawn for weeks on end to review, validate, revise, tweak, experiment with, and otherwise produce real DocBook XML examples. After experiencing the pain of working at a DOS prompt with some free tools, I moved to a nice editor, oXygen, and that helped somewhat — but there was still much to learn (and I repeated all my examples with the free tools just to be sure they could be produced that way as well).

And then, of course, there’s the beer connection

When I started writing this blog post I saw a clear link between this and homebrewing. Circling back to that idea, I still see the similarities.

In both cases I have been learning a fairly arcane skill through books, websites, discussion groups, and iterative practice. There’s a geek level to both I enjoy; I’m not ever going to be a truly yee-haw XML/XSL cowgirl any more than I am going to open my own brewery, but I admit that the first time I got a reasonably long document to not only transform but to get styled with CSS, I did feel a wee spark of pride — similar to the first beer batch I made where I actually, and successfully, “mashed” (that is, converted malted barley into wort, the liquid that when boiled with hops and activated with yeast, eventually becomes beer).

Plus in both cases, by mastering some fundamental skills (and a domain vocabulary), I can now communicate within their respective communities. I understand terms such as single-source, transform, validate, XSL, stylesheet, FO, FOP; sparge, pitch, vorlauf, lauter, rack, mash, tun. (And to my delight, there is an XML schema for beer called, of course, BeerXML, proving that all roads lead to London.)

The ability to communicate is key; getting past that initial hurdle is crucial for learning. (Remember Helen Keller, spelling out “water”?) I may not understand every question that flies past me, but my feet have some purchase in the loam of their fields.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just in it for the language. But these processes happening in parallel have me marveling at our capacity to keep learning, sometimes when we least expect to.

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I offer this lagniappe since I am busy this weekend on personal writing and work-related projects (I try not to take work into the weekend, but there is a conference steaming my way).

I’ll follow up with another, more thoughtful post in the vein of “Brewing David,” but hey, take a looky-loo at this yeast activity from my second batch of “Dave” (Saison du Mont), brewed for the May 2 Big Brew of the National Homebrew Association! I adjusted the recipe, prepared a kick-ass yeast starter two days earlier, and vavoom! Is homebrewing fun or what? (A week later, the beer has hit its final gravity on the nose, and though young and flat, is a gorgeous gold and quite delish.)

The video is sideways not because we live in the Big Bend and are therefore skewed 90 degrees, but because I took this with my camera video and wanted to get the airlock-plus-yeasty-snowglobe-action in there.

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As soon as I know I am all alone, I quickly creep up into the attic crawlspace and spend a few stolen minutes with David. I make sure he’s all right, check his temperature, then tell him I love him and that I’ll be back soon. Then I slip back down the ladder and push it up into the ceiling before anyone’s home to ask questions.

David’s not a love interest — I already have one of those — but a 3-gallon carboy filled almost to the brim with a persimmon-colored liquid that in the past month, as David has gently chugged through a fermentation process, has changed from an impenetrable haze (think foggy day on Mars) to a seawater-like translucence. 

I haven’t always thought of David as David. For the first several weeks of his existence, I thought of him as a half-batch of Saison du Mont, a type of Belgian beer. I decided to create David when I read about the Big Brew, an annual event for homebrewers sponsored by the American Homebrewing Association.

The AHA listed two suggested recipes for the Big Brew. One was a mild brown beer, and since at this stage in my homebrewing career almost everything I make turns out dark whether I want it to or not, that didn’t seem fun.

But the recipe for Saison du Mont was a little different. It had an author, a title, a story. There was a man named David Levonian; he was a husband, father, and homebrewer; he loved to brew Saisons; he created Saison du Mont; people liked him; he died far too young. This recipe — one of his creation — was offered in his honor.

I knew nothing of Saisons — I have possibly tasted one or two — but I knew this was the beer I would create, and I decided I would start early, well in advance of May 2, the day of the Big Brew, so I could try it several times.

The recipe itself was also alluring, with its interesting ingredients, such as honey, and grains of paradise — who knew paradise had a grain? — and its pre-European-Union flair. I lived near Belgium for two years in the 1980s, when Uncle Sam sent me to an airbase in Germany, and what I remember of Belgium is rakishly good food, mouth-filling beer, and highways flanked by tall yellow lights that gilded my Friday evening drives to Liege and Bruge and the Benalux. 

David probably isn’t a good choice for a new homebrewer.  Saisons are fussy and complex, with counter-intuitive fermentation temperatures and delicate spicing, and David was only my fourth brew. My previous efforts at fairly modest beers — bitters, red ale, and porter — had their share of quality-assurance issues. My first beer would be undrinkable by most standards, with its mild malts overwhelmed by tannins extracted through clumsy timing and poor temperature control (though it does look pretty in the glass — a lovely amber with a creamy head).  With these clownish efforts, how could I possibly pretend to be ready for David? 

My beginners’ beers have been somewhat of a lark, but I feel obligated to David. It bothers me that I can’t get his gravity reading (measured through a simple glass hydrometer dropped into a narrow flask of liquid) pushed low enough to be  a classic Saison. It makes me quite sad and worried that I cannot convince the yeast I fed him to make a lively enough presence to burn through the sugars in his wort until he is respectably dry, as a Saison should be. 

“You don’t have to worry about that as long as you like the beer,” says my local homebrew store. I understand their point, but it bothers me that someone could live and die and leave a recipe, and now that he is gone and his recipe remains, I cannot enthuse a batch of yeast into recreating his beer.

I understand this has more to do with me than Dave Levonian; I realize this means I am worried that someday I will die and take all of myself with me, with nothing left to remember me by. 

But I’d still really like to get this beer right. 

So into the attic I creep. “I am trying to be my best for you,” I tell David, and adjust a crocheted afghan around him. The blanket keeps him warm; the blanket keeps him dark. The blanket reminds me I am not done.

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I apparently had a thread plonked on homebrewtalk.com, a website for homebrewers.

The previous day, a member had encouraged me to pony up for premium or lifetime membership (respectively, $25 a year or $100 for life). I understand websites need resources to survive, but I’m a careful shopper, so I checked the FAQ to see what the two fee memberships offered.

One of the perks is access to “Brew Babes.” Hmmm, I thought. So I asked:

I see “Brew Babes” listed as a perk for Premium/Lifetime membership, but in searching HBT, the FAQ, etc. I can’t find a clear description of “Brew Babes.”

A member responded,

And you won’t unless you pony up for a membership either, some things we just don’t talk about on this side of the wall….But I bet you can guess…

To which I responded,

That’s what I was afraid of… so in other words my $100 would be better spent on a donation to the National Organization for Women. It’s not my call how this forum is run but as a consumer I have no interest in subsidizing that stuff — or having friends/colleagues seeing me identified with it, either.

I’m not at all a prude, and it’s the site’s business decision to scope its services to its target market, but now the thread about how few women are on this forum makes a lot more sense. Call it the beer-glass
ceiling.

Followed by other comments in the manner of,

It’s just pictures of beer drinking babies fighting in a club. Nothing to get excited about.

kgs there are many other perks available to premium supporters. brewbabes is just a bonus that guys(and some ladies) really enjoy. I find less advertising and the private forums to be the real value.

To which I responded:

Whatever, and nothing I’m paying for, either. /me sighs

I went out, shopped, came home… and the thread was gone. No note to me, just whooosh! No longer there; tracing my own post history, it is no longer listed.

Entirely their prerogative, of course. It’s a private website, so on and so forth.

I am sure they are thinking “humorless bitch.” You know, the broad who’s no fun (and there are always women who are only too happy to go along with the “fun”).

Fine, whatever. But more and more I’m voting with my pocketbook. No, I will not shop at WalMart, I will not eat at Chick-fil-A (which has been known to harass gay employees), I am eating almost no factory-farmed meat, and I’m not underwriting sexist trash.  But this incident has completely emptied the fun out of participating on that website, and that’s too bad — though it’s a good reminder that private forums are just that: privately owned, whimsically managed.

(Librarianesque observation: thank goodness for books!)

The site comments, “Becoming a moderator for a specific forum is usually rewarded to users who are particularly helpful and knowledgeable in the subject of the forum they are moderating.” If they ever want someone to represent sensitivity to diverse groups, they know where they can find me.

Meanwhile, I’ve met other brewing librarians, and I keep running into other local homebrewers, and I’ll meet more.  It’s a growing craft and a nice skill to have, and there are many nice homebrewers, including at my local home brew store, Home Brew Den, where today at my request they carefully measured out a half-recipe of Plutonian Porter.

Today I’m going to write for six hours, so I will have to save the story of wrassling with nearly fifty pounds of flat beer, aka “How I Bottled My First Batch,” which also explains in part why I’m moving to half-batches. (Short version: I won, and it was fun, but we’re in a small house!)

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