Our friends, Erin and Jim came to visit our farm today and did an impromptu maize beer tasting. It is interesting to see other people’s perspectives and they thought that it was a pleasant tasting sour beer, much akin to “Lambic” with the taste of fermented apples. We were very pleased to hear that it was compared to a well-known traditional beer! We now wish that we didn’t gave away so many bottles of the beer earlier on when we thought that it was a failure. We live and learn…we will hoard every single drop next time…that is the Scottish coming out in me!
Pumpkins Galore!
On another note, we are harvesting pumpkins so, we will mostly be eating pumpkins. Aaaahhhh, what a gloriously uncomplicated life we live!
Gnome brewed a New Year’s Eve Maize Beer and tonight we have decided to do a formal tasting:
Maize Beer.
Colour is dark amber and very effervescent; small sized bubbles with excessive fizz. Clear with good head.
Smells like the first whiff when you open up a can of sweetcorn. Also, reminiscent of fermenting apples and it definitely smells sour.
With the first sip, there is an immediate sweetness then a sourness; it is foamy like champagne. It tastes like a sour beer; unusual tasting and not your typical beer-like taste.
We squeezed the juice of a fresh lemon into it to see if this would improve the taste; we found that it gave it an overall smoother and well-rounded taste. It helped to balance the sweet and sour components. More drinkable with lemon juice.
It feels like it needs a fruity taste to round off the sourness..like pineapple, peach or strawberry. Next time, Gnome will add fruit to the maize beer.
This beer was in fact tasted unofficially at Day 7 and it was a disappointment at this stage as it tasted sour and “vomit-like.” With age, it seems to have mellowed out and even although it has a sharp sourness, it has become palatable and drinkable. We can see that it would benefit from waiting a full 12 months before consuming.
Overall, we are very pleased with this tasting because we did not feel that it was up to our drinking standards at an early stage but there has been considerable improvement over time.
It takes about two whole days to recover from an Elixir Tasting night hence the reason why you have not heard from us for a while. Entertaining people is energy intensive…
The Elixir Tasting was a success and we had the pleasure of the company of Dandelion Chocolate from San Francisco. As I had mentioned before, we changed some things around. Gnome added a bit about the various stages of the aging process of wine and passed exhibits around. We also let everyone taste a Gnome’s New Year’s Eve Maize Beer; for all intents and purposes, it was perfect with clarity, colour, one inch head with good head retention. The only problem was that corn beer actually tasted revolting! No wonder nobody makes maize beer! It has a distinctive sour and “vomity” smell which puts you off before it even touches your lips! Everyone had a good laugh about it.
In previous Elixir Tastings, a lot of the time was spent waiting for glasses to be cleaned and bussed back after each tasting. This time we put bowls on the tables with jugs of water so that people could rinse out their glasses. Gnome’s mother had mentioned to us that traditionally, Italians do not like to waste a drop of alcohol, so the taster is suppose to rinse their glass and swig down the rest of the diluted alcohol. Everyone involved was quite happy to comply with the new rule.
Everyone loved the Lemongrass Elixir as per usual. And, the next favourite seemed to be the Roselle which has a mature, well-bodied taste. Of course, everyone enjoyed the Chocolate Velvet which is always the last tasting of the evening.
Anyway, we are almost back to normal so expect to hear from us soon. Unfortunately, I have not got a photo of the Elixir Tasting to show you but, Cotton Tree Lodge has promised to furnish me with one of their photos at some point. So, I will insert a picture in the near future…hopefully!
As a follow up from my previous post about Corn Cous Cous, I have yet another recipe for you to read about. This one is cooked with onions, pastrami, olives and fresh tomatoes.
Corn Cous Cous Italian Style.
This delicious recipe is really simple to cook. It is gluten-free so it makes a great alternative to wheat cous cous. For more details click on my link to Corn Cous Cous Italian Style.
As a continuation of the Corn Cous Cous theme, which I wrote about 2 days ago, here is another recipe.
Sausage Corn Cous Cous.
This is a variation of the original recipe; this one contains Chinese Sausage and Chinese Cabbage. I suppose you could call this one “Corn Cous Cous – Chinese Style”.
If you are in Belize, you need to befriend a Chinese person to find Chinese sausage. I have no idea where they get it from but this is a favourite one for a local chinese person to stash in their personal pantry. For everybody else, you can probably get it at your Chinese Grocery.
Today, I want to talk about how to cook Corn Grits in a different way. This involves grinding whole corn and steaming it with a minimal amount of water which results in a cooked, gritty meal which behaves just like ordinary wheat cous cous. This is great because it is gluten-free and you are not eating the usual gloopy consistency associated with cooked corn (hominy/polenta).
For those interested, corn is one of the cheapest carbohydrates which you can buy in Belize. A 100lb bag of Mayan Corn (GMO-free, I might add) costs only $35 Belize Dollars (USD 17.50).
Corn Cous Cous.
The trick is to thoroughly wash the starch out of coarsely ground corn. If you want to know how to prepare this click on Corn Cous Cous.
Today was supposed to be a day of hard outside work, the coconuts still need more cleaning and weeding but…the plans of mice and men aften go astray…so the rain and cold weather decreed. The next best thing, I guess, is to bottle some of that New Year’s Eve Brown Ale I made.
It is a fair bit of work, to be honest, especially this first time that we had to wash, clean and sterilize the bottles we got from town. They were filled with old napkins, cigarette butts and I hate to think what else…
Here two cases have been cleaned, washed and filled with some sanitizing solution.
After a few hours, they have to drip dry before they can be used…
Drip drying the bottles.
In the mean time, the maize beer needs to be siphoned into a bottling bin…
Maize beer and the bottling bin/bucket.
…and the priming sugar needs to be boiled…
Boiling the priming sugar.
It is only after all this is done that we can start filling the bottles and placing the caps on them.
The bottles are filled and the caps are resting on top of them.
Now we can finally use the capper to seal everything up. As a side note: A big thank you to Speedo for bequeathing his bottle capper to us…I would have hated to do this job by hand…
Capping away…almost done…
And here is the finished project!!
Yey, finished!
I’ll let you know what it tastes like in a few weeks…in the mean time…may all your beer be cold and bubbly!!
I’ve had to postpone brewing until today…it is amazing and unfortunate that people get sick around New Year and interfere with our best laid brewing plans…but such is life and I am always a doctor first. Better late than never and I get to call today’s brew New Year’s Eve Jackass Bitters Brown Ale!
As I mentioned previously, maize has a higher gelatinization temperature than barley; so high, in fact, that the active enzymes for starch conversion are denatured. This means that the usual temperature steps in mashing have to be altered so as to both keep the enzymes and gelatinize the maize starch.
The way to get around this then, is to start mashing in the usual way with the normal Beta-glucan and protein rests and then siphoning off the wort that is there, keep it somewhere safe and clean while more water is added to the grains. The grains and water are then boiled for five or ten minutes, cooled to mashing temperatures and the liquid that was taken off is added back in (hopefully with all the enzymes still intact); the conversion then is finished in the normal way.
I would continue on the theme of brewing maize beer today: As I mentioned before, home-brew shops, barley and hops are unavailable here so, I have had to go about things a bit differently. One of my previous posts was about malting corn (maize); having done this and having kilned some of it into the maize equivalent of Chocolate, Crystal and Munich malt, I am ready to proceed to the next step…getting everything ready physically and psychologically (I have never done whole grain brewing using firstly, my own malted grains and secondly, those grains being maize and thirdly, replacing hops with a different bittering agent).
So here are my kilned malts, Chocolate, Crystal and Munich…
Chocolate, Crystal and Munich Maize Malt.
Maize has a higher gelatinization temperature compared to barley which means some playing around with temperature is going to be necessary in order to make the starch do what it is supposed to and at the same time not denature the necessary enzymes prematurely before conversion has taken place. The other issue is that maize does not have a hull and I am going to use rice hulls from the rice mill during sparging. Since I am doing this, I decided to grind the maize malt very finely…
Malts Before Grinding.Malted Maize After Grinding.
Doing this by hand took a ridiculously long time and that is why I have needed a whole day just for preparation! The rice hulls also needed a lot of cleaning since “getting rice hulls from the rice mill” does not mean buying a packet from them, it means going out the back with a sack where the mountain waste pile is out in the open and finding the freshest hulls next to outlet. It further means soaking them, bleaching them, drying them, sieving the sand, bugs and crap out of them…it took about two weeks of work…
Lautering Tun with Rice Hulls.
In terms of hops, I have decided to go with Jackass Bitters. I was thinking of Serosi or Bitter Gourd but Jackass Bitters won out simply because to be able to say, “I made beer with Jackass Bitters!” sounds way cooler than “I made beer with Bitter Gourd,” I’m sure everybody would agree. I decided to extract some Jackass Bitters into a tincture just to be able to standardize the bitterness; again, I’ve never done this before and I have to start somewhere in order to get some sort of reproducibility for future batches.
Ground Jackass Bitters.
Okay, all the ingredients have been prepared and everything is getting sanitized today, let’s see if tomorrow is a nice day for the actual brewing…
Like most foreigners that have come to Belize, we wasted a lot of money buying (really crappy, cheap, screw-top wine priced like fine, premium) wine in an attempt to have a taste of home and feel sophisticated. In addition to the price, the heat and humidity, the higher alcohol content of wine was sure to make us uncomfortable for the whole night, the fuzziness continuing to the next day and making work difficult. Now, after having lived here a while and given up all pretense at being sophisticated, we just want some good, honest-to-God, alcohol that doesn’t burn a hole in our pocket or our stomachs.
Having had some experience while at University with brewing, the obvious answer is to brew some beer. How to do this, though? There is no friendly brew-shop down the road to get all the essential ingredients…no barley, no hops, no nothing!
Well, we do have plenty of maize, grown by the bushel by our friendly Mayan neighbours (I’ve tried growing corn and I just haven’t managed yet…go figure!), GMO free and cheap. What do you do with it, though?
The first step is this…
Sprouting Maize for Malting.
After the maize has sprouted it needs to be dried before it can be turned into the different types of malt we are all familiar with…like, pale malt, chocolate malt, Munich malt, crystal malt, etc. Here it is dried…
Dried Malted Maize.
And this is the basis for my maize, gluten-free beer.
For a more detailed discussion on the malting process have a look in our Bored-in-Belize section for Malting Maize.
Tune in next time for Part II, Brewing with Maize.
