ziebart-stout
Latest
WoW Brewmaster: Uncorking Ziebart Stout
Welcome back to WoW Brewmaster, in which we talk about the fine Mists of Pandaria art of brewing beer. Take those critical skills you learn in-game and apply it to the real world! What's better than that? But first, a reader question: How much space does it take to brew beer? A few commenters answered the question, but I want to reiterate: it takes about as much room as it takes to store 6 cases of beer. Most of your supplies get tucked away in storage when not in active use. The bulkiest supplies are the two 5-gallon buckets and whatever bottles you use for you beer. If you have multiple batches going at once, then I guess you should double that. You'll have a big pot (probably 3 gallons) for the actual cooking, and the rest is just tubes and such that easily fits in the buckets. So you'll need room for 2 5-gallon buckets and 6 cases of beer. That's the answer. I will caution though: it's possible to have a beersplosion take place. Rather than rampant alementals, though, a beersplosion takes place when your fermenting beer is producing extra gases. If those cases can't escape through an airlock, your bucket pops open, spewing foamy beer everywhere. While hilarious, it does cause a mess. I've never actually had it happen, though, since I'm a stickler for airlocks. Any beer kit you buy will have it included.
WoW Brewmaster: Dumping Ziebart into a glass bottle
Work Warning: No cursing or nudity or sex or anything like that. But this is a column about beer and brewing, so that's somewhat an adult theme. When last we left our noble brew, I'd just talked a bit off the top about how I was making Ziebart Stout. Long story made short: I was brewing a relatively basic oatmeal stout but putting some Scotch in it. The Basics Let's talk first to the totally new folks. The ones who know WoW Insider is writing about brewing beer, and wants to get involved in their own Pandaren hijinks. After all, if we can do it... so can you! (I'm not being snarky. Seriously, trusting me around open flame is a little like trusting your lasagna to Garfield.) How tough is extract brewing? It's not. If you can navigate a canned soup recipe, you can handle extract brewing. Assuming you arm up with the basic supplies, all of which can be had relatively inexpensively, the entire process is mostly about thoroughly cleaning and watching a timer. The step-by-step works something like this.
WoW Brewmaster: Brewing our Ziebart Stout
Work warning: We're talking about beer and the making of it herein. That's innately an adult theme. No cursing or such; just good old fashioned beer brewing. We've been fermenting this feature for a while. (Get it? Fermenting?) The debut brew was intended to be a fall-themed Panda Pumpkin Porter, since pumpkin spice everything is awesome. That's the pictured beer above. Using an extract kit, your loyal WoW Brewmaster (that's me) put together a pumpkin-spiced porter. Sadly, it didn't turn out after being racked. The carbonation didn't finish super well, so I didn't want to use that as our debut brew. One generally doesn't share epic failures as a debut beer so I waited for the next round, which I'll call the Ziebart Stout. So what is WoW Brewmaster? Inspired by the Brewmasters of Pandaria, we're branching out into a bit of hobbyist extract brewing and sharing our adventures with you, our beloved readers. I've been brewing for a few years now. I got into it because it's much less expensive than buying retail beer. I mostly do extract kits in the interest of time and ease, though I've done raw materials a few times as well. In general, we'll talk about extract kits in this column. While hardcore brewers prefer raw materials, perhaps even going so far as to grow grains... I think that level of involvement is beyond what we can do in an occasional 1,000 word column. So we'll buy kits and go from there. As a disclosure note, I'm not a professional brewer; we're calling it Brewmaster because that's what it's called in game. The stuff I'm talking about is just an introduction and a bit of fun.
