A Carboy of Amontillado

It was brew day, and probably the most experimental one yet. I had set out to brew a sherry/port-style beer from Radical Brewing, a great book by Randy Mosher. For those of you who aren't Victorian aristocrats, which I am assuming is at least 5% of my readership, sherry is a kind of oxidized, fortified dessert wine. The recipe was fairly complicated, and involved a specialized mashing schedule, using cooked sugar, sherry yeast, and aging for up to a year in a warm/hot place. I guess the attic won't just be for weeping quietly to myself anymore.

Brew days are normally a lot of sitting around, punctuated by moments of doing slight work. It's pretty relaxing, to be honest, but the last thirty minutes of the mash turned out to be the most hectic half-hour of my brewing career. Hell, with the exception of my photo assistant days, maybe my life.

Everything started normally enough. I mashed the grains as suggested, which filled me with hope. The recipe called for cooked sugar, which promptly set that hope on fire and filled the kitchen with smoke.

Closely following directions, I mixed sugar and water, and put the whole thing over medium heat. I kept a close eye on the situation, and everything seemed to go as it should have. Once the desired color was reached, I turned off the heat. As soon as the wort got to a boil, it would go straight into the kettle. A few minutes later, the gardener showed up.

The dogs that Lady Bullock and I harbor HATE the gardeners. And before you ask, NO, I do not think they're racist. It was actually a little racist of YOU to assume that the gardeners are Hispanic. They are, but still.

Anyway, one of the dudes shows up, and the dogs just lose it. Maybe the gardener looks like a few dozen squirrels in a trenchcoat to them. Maybe the gardener is a few dozen squirrels in a trenchcoat. I don't feel too bad about the harassment since they cut down all my beautiful hops in their prime. At any rate, bark bark bark bark.

The guy is unflappable by this point, and just ignores them. I, however, cannot. I'm trying to get them calmed down when my phone rings. This was an important call about a freelance thing that I had to take. Fifteen minutes left on the boil. I'm talking on the phone with the sound of a weed eater in one ear, and three dogs yelping in the other. The phone call went about 15 minutes, and after awhile the dogs calmed down a little, and everything seemed fine.

After I hung up, I went downstairs to find the kitchen and hallway inundated with smoke. I could barely see through to the stove, but I could tell the sugar had continued cookng, and was now a crystallized mound of smoking carbon.

This was bad.

I lifted my shirt over my mouth and ran into the kitchen, opening every window I could along the way. The smoke hurt my eyes and made me cough, which is as far as I can tell after all these wildfires around LA, is smoke's modus operandi. I couldn't open the door leading from the kitchen to the backyard, as this would have enabled the dogs to eat the gardener Ving Rhames style, and that's the last thing I need.

After a few minutes, the smoke wafted away, but the house still smelled like flaming marshmallows, and not in a wholesome, campfire way. More like a horror movie, oh no, all the teenagers are dead at the hands of a psychopath, they left their smores on the fire kind of burning marshmallow. The kind of smell that never leaves a man.

I disposed of the carbon candy and the ruined pan, but the recipe still called for cooked sugar. I ended up using half a pound of the dark belgian candy sugar I had, along with half a pound of Indian jaggery sugar (which you'll remember from the Sikander the Great IPA), and just a little bit of muscovado. I ended up hitting gravity, so we'll see if it worked.

In a year.

Yes, folks, it's my second in a row that will take a whole year to be ready. This beer should also be a good candidate for aging, so I think I'll make it every year and always save a few for posterity.

As they say, out of adversity comes triumph (or something), so hopefully this beer/sherry will be the most triumphant Bullock's creation yet.