Black hearts

I spent a sunny Easter afternoon brewing a very dark beer.

My family was working on their ongoing marathon of movie musicals I would rather gnaw my own arm off than watch so I was left with the options of doing a longdelayed cleaning out the refrigerator or brewing beer.

Cleaning out our refrigerator is one of my family’s least enjoyed tasks and one that oddly often falls to me. I think this is largely because I am far less grossed out by “stuff” as others in my household.

I trace this back to my first paying job working in the dish room at a very large catering hall. My oldest brother, Tom, had started in the dish room there and had moved up to helping prepare meals and eventually recruiting my brother Mike and me as they needed people.

This was a large catering facility able to seat several hundred people at one time across multiple banquet halls. As you can imagine this made for a lot of dishes and a lot of disgusting messes.

I have a lingering dislike bordering on intense hatred for people who feel the need to put out cigarettes in either their food or beverages. At that time, having a smoke free establishment was unheard of. Other than just being crass, the truly gross part for the dish room crew is that while the food waste could be dumped down the disposer, cigarette butts would clog it up and so had to be fished out by hand. You can guess whose job that was.

I remember going home after an eight-hour shift feeling like I was covered in slime and not wanting to touch anything.

So yeah, I am the one in my household who often gets stuck with the gross jobs like cleaning out the hair in the shower drain or unplugging the bathroom.

An important life hack I learned early on in parenthood was that no matter how much you want to mouth breath to avoid the smell, it is always best to keep your mouth firmly shut whenever you are around gross stuff. The other important life lesson to remember is that when dealing with small children it is never mustard.

Sorry for getting side tracked and grossing you out there.

Getting back to Easter Sunday, I decided against spending my afternoon playing “guess what is living in the back of the fridge” and decided it would be better to take advantage of the rare nice day to brew my first batch of beer of the season.

For Christmas this year, my family got me a spiffy new 10-gallon brew kettle with a built in thermometer and spigot to make it less death-defying to transfer the hot wort from the pot to the carboy.

My beer of choice is a dark porter made with maple sap in place of water. Last year I wasn’t able to get ahold of any sap, but this year a friend hooked me up with enough to make two batches of it. After the primary fermentation is completed in a few weeks I will transfer the beer and leave it sit in a dark and cool corner of my basement until next fall before I keg it and serve it. The extra time allows it to mellow out a bit while still maintaining a pitch black color.

For me coming up with names for beers is almost as much fun as making them. This particular recipe I call “Black Heart Ale” and it is named after a friend’s ex-wife who I carry more of a grudge against than he does.

As it is getting nicer to be outside, I have laid out an ambitious brewing schedule with the plan to make sure that all of my kegs are kept full all summer long. After all, what kind of closet prepper would I be without maintaining a stockpile of beverages to see me through if things go sidewise.

The bigger challenge I find is when my beer making habit far outpaces the amount of actual beer drinking I do. This is especially true with the darker beers which lend themselves to be savored rather than the proverbial porch-pounder varieties.

If anyone has some cool beer recipe ideas, I would love to try my hand at them. You can drop me at line at The Star News office at 715-748-2626 or email me at brianwilson@ centralwinews.com.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.