Dog on the Road Brewing

Happy Birthday

2012-02-07T02:42:00.001Z

The first time that Dog On The Road beer was tasted by somebody other than the brewers was during Super Bowl XLV, a year ago today. I think that's as a good a milestone as any worth celebrating and I am officially declaring Dog On The Road to be one year old, or 7 years old in Dog years...

Those of you who have been following the blog (which is to say, both of you) will have noticed that things trailed off. We got behind on our posts for a while, then there was some upheaval and I (Dónall) left the country, leading to Donnelly's "hilarious" post about recruiting a new brewing bitch.

Fear not, though, for the Dog On The Road brewery is not dead. The brewing equipment has been moved from the frozen wastes of North Dublin to the balmy tropics of South Dublin, where Donnelly has purchased a new home for the brewery, which is a sturdy and comfortable looking small building in a patch of garden. As a token of his generosity, Donnelly is even allowing his wife to live in a large house which shares the brewery's garden.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in distant California, a new chapter of Dog On The Road is beginning. Even now, a shiny new stainless steel electric boil kettle is on its way to the new home of Dog On The Road America. It is hoped that the unparalleled craft beer culture of the American west coast will result in new and exciting recipes and ways of brewing beer and our ever-present lofty goal of getting trousered for cheap. With a year's experience, gone are the fears of dying from a poorly sanitised carboy, to be replaced by the fear of dying of a gunshot wound inflicted by a passing motorist.

And so that is the current State of the DOTR Nation. Tune in next year to read the next blog post and to wish Dog On The Road a happy 14th birthday.

Wanted - Brewing Bitch

2011-11-05T22:33:00.000Z

As a result of recent legal proceedings, Dog on the Road Brewing are delighted to announce a new vacancy in the brewing department of their Dublin branch. Applicants must be enthusiastic, willing to learn and have at least 8 years experience of being in awe of a master at work. Applicants must have no desire to move to America and no legal obligation to remain at least 850 meters from schools or playgrounds.

As Brewing Bitch, you will have the opportunity to put your creative stamp on cleaning, moving and tidying almost every element of the brewing process.

Interested candidates should reply to this post with a CV, headshot and details of previous “brew hat” holding experience.

Introducing Ruff (#2) from Dog on the Road Brewing

2011-03-25T16:05:00.003Z

By now, it should be apparent that we are really starting to get the hang of this beer brewing lark. So far in our story, we’ve brewed, kegged, bottled and drank our first batch of Ruff. We’ve spent loads of money, and Dónall owns a 30 Litre pot that he will have no use for after we poison a loved one and give up homebrewing.

But until then, we will continue to churn out awesome beer that we make in a sticky kitchen on the Northside of Dublin (for those keeping count, Dónall’s house has been broken into once so far during the brewing process).

So without further ado, we proudly present Ruff (#2) from Dog on the Road Brewing.

As if our egos weren't large enough already from our previous brewing attempts, this beer is starting to make us believe that we are the second coming of Jesus (in brewing form). The beer is very tasty, much cleaner and crisper than Ruff (#1).

The caramel flavours are out in full force and this batch is a lot less sweeter than #1. The carbonation levels were an ongoing concern with this batch and while we didn’t get the levels spot on, I think we both agree that we were pretty damn close.

Beer Details

ABV	7.3%
Original Gravity	1.078
Specific Gravity	1.022

Tasting Notes

The beer smells delicious and this sets you up for a really enjoyable first taste. Ruff #2 certainly comes closer in alcohol content at 7.3% and is much closer to Kwak than our previous attempts. It has it all, the caramel, the carbonation and the sweetness. Interestingly, on a triangle test with Kwak, both of us struggled to tell which was which and we both ended up selecting Ruff as the version that we preferred. Are we better at brewing beer than the makers of Kwak?

Yes.

Let’s Get Marketing

2011-03-25T15:33:00.002Z

While I wouldn’t consider my four years in UCD studying Business and Legal Studies a complete waste of time, there are elements that I look back on and can’t help but feel like I could have done without them. My marketing course was one such element.

Firstly, I can’t remember if it was a half year course or a full year course. I can’t remember what was covered on the exam, I can’t remember sitting the exam. I can’t really remember much about our lecturer, and I can’t really remember what form the classes took.

What I want you to take from this introduction isn’t that our homebrew beer has destroyed my memory, its that any marketing skills that I have amassed over the years are more likely to have been taught to me by Don Draper than UCD. And when Don talks, I listen.

Right from the get go we decided that we would do things semi-seriously when it came to brewing our beer. We wouldn’t buy the top of the range equipment, but we would buy equipment that we would be happy to use for a few years at least and we stared a blog, but refrained from buying dogontheroad.com (just about)

So when it came to the matter of the logo, we wanted to pick one that would be distinct, recognisable and somewhat cool; something that we could proudly stand over, and would do us for a couple of months.

So channelling my inner Don, I got good and wasted one night, and by complete fluke, managed to pull the logo together.

And I have to admit, I felt pretty good about myself.

The dog looked playful, the gritty texture looked a little like tarmac, and the words Dog on the Road really stood out. I sent a copy off to Dónall and spent the next few days thinking about how I was quite possibly the worlds best graphic designer. I had guaranteed our inevitable commercial success by coming up with a legendary piece of beer branding. It looked good on the bottles and gave us room to add relevant details when needed. We had started to build the brand!

But I knew it could be better, and clearly I was right. Below is the current Dog on the Road label for our World Famous Ruff Strong Belgian Ale.

Now that’s a god-damn label! Designed by the very talented Will Sharkey, the new label really shines. The dog (somehow) looks even more playful, the colour scheme is epic and I absolutely love the ruffled paper effect on the red circle; and it looks amazing on the bottles

So a very big thank you to Will (who has been paid in beer) and watch this space for future beer bottle labels from Dog on the Road Brewing (well, Sharkey really, but we haven’t asked him yet.) And for anyone considering doing a marketing course in UCD…. don’t, just watch Mad Men.

New Equipment: The Birth Of The Golden Child

2011-03-23T22:25:00.001Z

"If anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess" - Edwin Land

"So when are you going to open a real brewery and start selling to the public?" - Mr. Donnelly

"Dollar, Dollar bill, y'all" - Wyclef Jean

Homebrewing aficionados devote considerable resources to their craft, not merely in terms of hours dedicated to producing beer, but also very often in financial terms. Although the greatest cachet appears to come from constructing one's own brewing equipment from raw materials or repurposing disused items for brewing, the novice homebrewer may find much of the construction process daunting - particularly brewers like ourselves with no experience of welding!

Despite our shortcomings as handymen we do, as fledgling brewers, feel the urge to brew better beer both by improving our method and by using better equipment.

To this end, we acquired two items with a view to improving our beer quality: a large brewing pot and a wort chiller.

The brewing pot is made of stainless steel and has a capacity of 30 litres. Due to its resistance to corrosion and the ease with which it can be cleaned and sanitised, stainless steel is the material of choice for all manner of food preparation, not least of which is brewing.

As for the capacity, a very common yield for beer recipes is 5 gallons, or 19 litres. A 30 litre pot should therefore be more than suitable for our purposes. Although the recipes we are currently following generally call for partial boils (boiling 9-14 litres of wort, then adding 5-10 litres of water to the carboy), this pot should allow us to try full boils in the future. This is desirable because the larger the volume of water boiled, the greater the absorption of sugars, alpha acids, etc. from the ingredients. Of course, the challenge for a full boil is in having a powerful enough heat source to boil 20 litres of water, but that is something we will worry about later.

It's worth noting that when we first began assembling equipment for brewing we made the mistake of buying a (relatively) small 11 litre stainless steel/aluminium stock pot. At the time we naively considered that this would serve our purposes for a while. It soon became apparent that a pot of this volume was woefully inadequate and, although we currently use the pot in the brewing process for heating extra water, it is unnecessary and was an expensive mistake. The lesson we learned, like so many homebrewers before us, is that the cheapest option is not always the cheapest option. It pays, in the long run, to buy equipment suitable for today's brewing that will also allow for some growth and some changes to tomorrow's brewing.

This picture shows the new pot, with the old pot beside it. It's hard to believe that we even entertained the idea that the small pot would be suitable!

The second new item we acquired was the wort chiller. The class of wort chiller we had in mind is characterised by the use of a coil of copper tubing. There are two main schools of thought for this type of chiller and they are differentiated in the liquid that flows through the copper coil.

One method is to submerge the copper coil in an ice bath and siphon the hot wort from the boiling pot into a carboy, passing it through the copper coil. Using this method, the wort is chilled very quickly as it passes through ice-cold copper tubing. In order to do it properly, an outlet tap, with a hop filter, should be added to the base of the boiling pot. This would involve modifying the pot, which we do not currently have the tools or the expertise for.

For that reason, we went with the other method, which is to submerge the copper coil in the hot wort and connect one end to a source of cold water (in our case, the kitchen tap). As the cold water flows through the chiller it cools the wort. The following picture shows this immersion-style chiller cooling hot wort in our boiling pot:

Cooling the wort quickly is an important aspect of brewing for many reasons, the most important of which is that when the wort is no longer boiling it becomes susceptible to contamination, both from bacteria and from sulfur compounds in the wort, and to oxidation (which is a Bad Thing). To cool a pot of wort by letting it sit at room temperature would require hours of potential exposure to contaminants. Another reason to chill the wort quickly is to cause what is referred to as the cold break, which is the term given to the precipitation of certain proteins that would otherwise cause the finished beer to be hazy when chilled.

While the wort chiller didn't involve any welding, this item did involve some assembly. We bought 10 metres of copper tubing from Woodie's. It comes in a coil which happened to be the perfect diameter for our brewing pot. Assembling the chiller then simply involved bending the copper tubing slightly at either end of the coil so that, when submerged, both ends of the tubing protrude over the rim of the pot. Once this was done, we attached some PVC tubing to the "output" end of the coil, in order to draw the cold water away from the pot. Many sources recommend attaching a length of garden hose to the input end and using a special screw-on attachment to connect it to a tap. In our case, we used one of those shower head attachments that have a rubber end that is fitted over the nozzle of a tap. We simply cut off the shower head part and attached it to the copper coil. The end result is a wort chiller that fits snugly in our boiling pot and can be easily attached/detached from any tap.

This picture shows the wort chiller in action:

Strictly speaking, the ends of the copper tubing should be bent downwards to minimise the chance of water leaking into the brew pot. In practice, the input hose is clamped on very tight and leaking isn't a serious concern. Ideally we would bend the copper tubing anyway, but such a bend would require using a bending spring and we can't find one of suitable dimensions!

So, having presented these new toys, you are possibly wondering what the Golden Child is. It is the "production" name we assigned to batch #3 of Ruff. It is so-called for many reasons. Although the recipe is the same as in the first two batches, this is the first batch brewed in a large enough pot and the first time we have chilled the wort quickly enough. In addition, this was our third batch, so we were more confident in what we were doing and the process was a lot more streamlined and relaxed. We had a healthy boil throughout, which is obviously very important and for the first time we actually made a yeast starter, as shown in this picture:

When using a Wyeast "smack pack" it is worth pitching the yeast into a small amount of water + dried malt extract before the beer is brewed. This gives the yeast a chance to return to vitality after being dormant for a while and accelerates the fermentation process.

So for all these reasons, this batch is the Golden Child. It represents our best brew to date (out of only 3!) and, based on the surprisingly good taste of the first finished batch and the preliminary tastings of the second batch, we have high hopes indeed. If nothing else, it had an original gravity of 1.096, so it should be near our target of 8.4% ABV and at least succeed in getting us trousered for cheap.

[the beer discussed in this post was brewed on the 6th of February 2011]

Introducing Ruff from Dog on the Road Brewing

2011-03-23T18:17:00.000Z

Its with great pride and an even greater sense of accomplishment that Dog on the Road Brewing proudly present our very first beer, Ruff.

Rather than have to warn friends and family each time we gave them a beer, we thought it would be best to just come out and admit up front that we, like many homebrewers before us, had probably just brewed up 20 litres of shit beer! With that in mind, and as a tip of the cap to Kwak, the name Ruff was born

The beer itself is very tasty, but a little on the light side when it comes to alcohol levels. This was probably a combination of the equipment we used as well as the many mistakes we made on the first brew. However, with all that in mind, its a flavoursome little beer!

Beer Details:

*Original Gravity*	1.048
*Specific Gravity*	1.020
*ABV*	3.6%

Tasting Notes:

Strong Belgian Ale it ‘aint… from an ABV standpoint at least. While the beer doesn’t pack the 8% punch that we were going for, it does deliver on taste. The beer is quite sweet, and has a very distinctive caramel taste. In a triangle test with Kwak, the difference is obvious. Ruff lacks the spicy finish and crisp aftertaste of Kwak. However, as a stand alone beer, its not half bad

Fun Times with Kegs

2011-02-01T21:48:00.009Z

Our first batch is now in a keg, which means that it is officially beer.

The keg in question is a cornelius, or "corny" keg, which is the most commonly used keg type among homebrewers. these kegs are repurposed kegs of the sort you used to see filled with Coke, etc. in bars. This one is ours, as modeled by the lovely Donnelly:

So, first order of business when kegging is to sanitise the keg. The first step in that process is to half fill the keg with sanitiser and slosh it around the place, which explains why Donnelly is holding the keg in his hands and somewhat justifies this picture of me looking like a tool:

To properly sanitise a keg, it must be completely disassembled, which allowed me to pretend to be a real man and use that spanner set that has been gathering dust on a shelf since I bought it.

It's also a good idea to run the sanitiser through the lines to make sure there's nothing nasty lurking there.

Then, once that's done, the sanitiser is dumped out and it can be filled with beer! Sweet, delicious beer...

The method of choice for filling the keg is simply to pop off the lid and siphon straight from the carboy into the keg.

There are two points to consider when siphoning beer. The first is not to disturb the sediment at the bottom of the carboy or the beer will taste yeasty.

The second is to pour "quietly", i.e. without splashing the beer. This minimises the exposure of the beer to oxygen and should help keep it from spoiling. If it's done right, the keg should fill silently and the beer should not end up with a head.

When the keg is filled, the lid goes back on and the keg can be stored in a fridge.

There will not be many groceries bought in the Dónall household for some time! Beer is sufficiently nutritious.

One of the advantages of kegging beer is that one does not have to resort to bottle priming, or adding sugar to the beer just before bottling. Bottling in this way should result in the sugar fermenting in the bottle and the CO2 produced should carbonate the beer. There are issues with this method, however, as it is hard to control the carbonation level (the yeast might not really be in good enough condition to ferment all the sugar, for example) and it results in beer with a sediment at the bottom of the bottle. While a small sediment isn't necessarily a bad thing (some people prefer it that way) it becomes problematic to move the bottle without disturbing the sediment and bottles must be stored upright at all times.

The beer we put in the keg was flat when it went in. However, due to the process of forced carbonation, it should be carbonated by tomorrow. In a nutshell, beer can be force carbonated in a keg by hooking up the gas line to the output post on the keg (which would normally have a tap on it). By doing this, the gas is connected through a pipe to the bottom of the keg, instead of the top. By increasing the pressure in the keg and storing it at low temperature, CO2 bubbles up through the beer and is dissolved, resulting in carbonated beer with no sediment.

Having said all this, the fact that the beer was warm and flat didn't prevent us from having a taste (some people even prefer it that way).

Neither one of us has yet died from the beer, but we only had a small glass each. Tomorrow we will taste the finished product, then at some point we will build a contraption for bottling from the keg, involving pressurising glass bottles with CO2, then filling them with beer. At this point, it's hard to tell whether we will die from food poisoning or glass shards to the eyeballs.

Brew 2 in Secondary

2011-01-30T23:59:00.004Z

This beauty is Brew #2 after fermenting for the last 9 days:

It looks and smells delicious. We made many mistakes in the first batch which we seem to have managed to avoid in this batch. As a result, we came a lot closer to achieving our target original gravity (which was 1.085, we were 1.078). We measured the gravity today and it was 1.022. Using a convenient alcohol calculation formula ((original gravity - final gravity) * 131; (1.078 - 1.022) * 131) we calculate that it's around 7.3% ABV, which is not quite the 8.4% we get with actual Kwak, but it's close and there are still a couple of weeks of secondary fermentation left.

Well now, that was a bit beer-nerdy and unpleasantly math-flavoured. So Here is a cool picture of a carboy being cleaned:

Still here? Good.

We also made a much better job of the siphoning this time around. Stupid as it sounds, we placed both carboys side by side the last time and ended up pumping the beer from one into the other, resulting in a stirred up, yeasty beer with a foamy head. This is not a good thing.

This time around, we used a more sensible arrangement, with the primary carboy on a table and the secondary below:

We were very careful not to disturb the sediment and we siphoned with no splashing, resulting in no head and a much clearer beer.

It will sit in the secondary carboy for two or three weeks, during which we hope it will ferment a bit more and it should clear quicker and to a greater extent than the previous batch. We will then keg it and drink it - unless we have died after drinking the first batch, in which case somebody else will keg it and drink it in our memories. I can only assume they will wear our hats while doing so, with black feathers as a sign of mourning.

Brew No.2...Sort of like Mambo No.5

2011-01-25T18:44:00.006Z

So we’ve spent a lot of money, put in a good bit of time and we still haven’t tasted a single drop of homebrew. We feel somewhat limited by our equipment and the batch that we are fermenting seems pretty goddamn lifeless. The mood was low in Dónall’s filthy kitchen when I called over on Friday night to boil our second batch, and the fact that he had left me waiting in the cold for a half hour outside Martins didn’t help. Even the arrival of the awesome new keg and cylinder didn’t get me going as much as it should have.

The reason for the gloom was that I was starting to come to the realisation that our first batch (which is still sitting in secondary as I type this) was going to taste nothing like Kwak, and maybe even nothing like beer. I don’t have all that much to base that on; in fact I’m really only basing it on the mistakes that we made during our first boil, but for some reason I just can’t shake the feeling that we killed off some of the yeast by using the chlorine sanitizer.

But the mood picked up pretty quickly after we got going and I honestly think it has a lot to do with this little beauty!

Not me (although if truth be told I am the life and soul of the party), it was the sanitizer. We bought a StarSan knock off from our friendly internet homebrew store, and it seems to be freaking awesome! The last time we brewed we used this beast to sanitise our equipment

It seemed pretty awesome at the time, but it took ages to fill, we used the wrong type of sanitizer and as a result the kitchen stank of chlorine and all of the equipment had a slight grainy residue. Filling this massive vat by hand meant that the floor was covered in water and it made moving around the kitchen a massive pain the ass.

Now compare it to this bad boy!

Smaller, less mess and no need to spend ages filling it with water. It was an absolute pleasure, and it wasn’t a two man job to empty it.

“But Donnelly” I hear you call, with a smug glint in your eye and your half filled notepad perched on your lap “a few paragraphs ago you said that, and I quote “I honestly think it has a lot to do with this little beauty!” Surely had you used the same volume of water for the first batch of sanitizer, the type of sanitiser wouldn’t have mattered. The benefits you got were by way of the fact you used less water.”

You sit back in your chair smile to your gaggle of friends, and if it was an 80’s movie, high five the jock from the football team, who for some reason appreciates an excellent counter argument, especially if its at a nerds expense.

Sure I’d be taken aback, I’d stall, maybe shuffle my notes and clear my throat. But its all an act. I’m waiting for you to say “well Donnelly, didn’t think about that did you” and then BAM.

In hindsight I would lose this argument as merely showing a picture of the product doesn’t hammer home the sheer joy that comes from using it. This is the SaniClean solution that we used to sanitise and the cap on the left is filled by squeezing the bottle. When it is full it contains 1oz of saniclean. Very handy for figuring out how much to use in a bin, but or vat of water. We did use way too much water last time….bitch.

The squeezy feature was a strange thing to cheer us up, but it did, so we got going. Big lesson learned from last time ….. get organised. All too often on our last boil did we have an alarm go off letting know it was time for the next set of ingredients and we would stare blankly at each other, run to the book and franticly measure out the ingredients.

Well not this time bucko. Before we even started to boil the water we measured out each ingredient into bowls and added them to muslin bags so that when the time came, we were ready to dunk those bad boys in.

Next we sanitised the carboy using the new SaniClean solution and the awesome power of gravity. (Seriously, neither of us copped when we moved to secondary last time that putting one carboy higher than the other would help the auto-siphon out. Idiots!)

We were ready to go. It was around now that the beer I had been drinking started to kick in and two things happened:

(1) I became very aware of the importance of getting off the ingredients measured out early

(2) I started to wonder if Dónall’s dad was proud of me

After some awkward conversation we moved on to bigger matters. Namely the issue of the rolling boil. Last time, we really messed up the boiling process, for a number of reasons, but one of the big ones was that we never really got the water up to a vigorous rolling boil. I was determined this time to get that part at least right.

After conditioning the malt and sparing to the brew pot we were ready to get the show on the road. We gave it the old college try with the lid off, but the oven just didn’t have the power to reach a rolling boil. We discussed propane, turkey fryers and Frenchmen while we waited and I could feel that heavy heartedness that accompanied the first boil start to return. In fact we had sort of both reached an agreement that this rolling boil lark would never work. We had been at a low boil for about 10mins and just for completeness I stuck the lid on the pot, just to see if it would make a difference and then, like a fat man after a curry, the shit got going.

I have to say that this rolling boil was probably the first real success that we had with the brewing process so far. Everything else was measuring and cleaning, and for some reason getting that water to boil like a mo-fo was an incredibly satisfying feeling.

After the boil there were two main priorities, cool the beer as fast as we could, and find a pizza deal that we could both agree on. While there are many, many blog posts about cooling beer, I wouldn’t say there are many about two drunk idiots arguing about pizza toppings. And with good reason too. The latter is incredibly frustrating.

While the beer did this:

We did this:

Had a few more beers and watched some family guy. When the beer was cool we moved it to the carboy using our newly found gravity powers. Then things took a turn for the racial and Dónall substituted his brewing hat for this.

And pointed out the similarities between attaching a brew belt and arming a bomb.

So, I’m going to go ahead and call this boil a massive success. The end product from this boil looks a hell of a lot better than it did after the first boil and it was a much calmer, enjoyable experience.

What we did differently this time

Used much less water for sanitising

Used a much funner sanitiser

Used tap water instead of bottled water

Used muslin bags (I forgive you for reading muslim after the last few pictures) for the hops

Achieved a rolling boil

Racking

2011-01-09T21:54:00.004Z

Last night we racked the beer to the secondary fermenter. For all you non-beer nerd types out there (I'm looking at you, Mrs. Donnelly) that means we transferred it from the glass carboy its been fermenting in for the last week into a second glass carboy. The idea is to move just the beer and leave behind all the sediment and gunk produced during the initial fermentation stage. Here are some pictures of the gunk:

When we opened the primary carboy, we were pleasantly surprised that it actually smelled like Kwak (which is the sort of beer we're aiming for). We don't expect the final product to be an exact replica - we will, in fact, be happy if neither of us goes blind or dies of food poisoning - but we are quite pleased with the results so far.

The only downside to date is that the specific gravity isn't quite what we would like it to be, but we never expected to hit our targets spot on. Accuracy in this area will come from experience.

Having measured the specific gravity, we decided to taste it, although at this stage it has not finished fermenting and still has a lot of yeast in suspension. I poured the contents into two glasses:

Donnelly, however, had other ideas!

This is the beer as it now looks:

It will sit like that for another couple of weeks, then we will keg it and bottle it and, finally, drink it. With any luck, we will only have to taste it on the way down.

Water, water everywhere and not a drop to....brew with?

2011-01-03T00:17:00.001Z

It’s worth pointing out at this very early stage that what you have stumbled upon is not a comprehensive guide to home brewing, but rather a rambling, disjointed account of two novice home brewers. What you will find here is atrocious grammar, private jokes and drunken literary one-upmanship.

But take heart. The content of this blog is catered just for you. I can say with a high degree of certainty that you are more than likely 1 of 3 people:

1. One of our mothers (Hi Mam!)
2. Someone looking for this Dog on the Road
3. Me in 15 years

In all instances, this blog will provide, at the very least, a documented record of our brewing triumphs and failures, our diminishing hairlines and our undying commitment to getting blasted on something potentially toxic that we made in our own kitchens.

With this half-assed approach to documentation in mind, I’d like to take you on a whistle stop tour of our first brew day.

Brewing Lesson Number 1: Turning up at an emergency water relief centre with 2x20L carboys is bound to attract media attention.

I learned very quickly that you need a hell of a lot of water to brew beer. What luck then that the day we decide to brew is the day that the Dublin water works has a shit fit and leaves all of the north side without water for most of the day.

Queue media frenzy and national coverage of me struggling with a carboy.

Dear man in the queue behind me who didn’t get water because I took the last 40 litres to wash brewing utensils; I’m sorry. At least you got your picture in the paper. I hope you didn’t need the water for a sick relative.

Brewing Lesson Number 2: Dress for success
Much like our brewing name “Dog on the Road”, these hats will mean nothing to you and to explain it would take too much time and not yield much comedy payoff.

Just accept that they are awesome and are dearer to me than my future first born.

Brewing Lesson Number 3: Brew beer with Beer
One of the main things that I took away from our first brew day was that at some point on every brew, you’re bound to make a mistake. For us these ranged from not putting the pot on the hob properly to potentially poisoning ourselves by using the wrong sanitizer on all our equipment. At each of these moments it pays to have a beer on hand. Now, it goes without saying that the more beer on hand greater the potential for making mistakes, but you’re not at work in a commercial brewery, you’re pursuing a hobby. Brewing should be as enjoyable and relaxing as possible, and what better way to do this than by having a beer (ideally from a needlessly fiddly glass).

Brewing Lesson Number 4: Get your shit together.
We made two basic errors early on. Firstly we went to Ikea and bought a 10L pot for brewing. We really should have gotten a larger capacity pot as we had to fiddle with the recipe to ensure we could brew in one pot. While in Ikea we bought a €3 breakfast which I can still feel in my lower intestine – mistake number 1 : cheap scrambled eggs are always a bad idea, even if they are served to you in an incredibly efficient way.

Second, we used the chlorine based sanitizer for the brew pot on all of our equipment. This would have been fine if we thoroughly rinsed the equipment afterwards, but as we thought this was no rinse, we probably have some level of chlorine in the beer – mistake number 2 : spending too much time on the internet, reading snippets of information, gradually reducing my attention span resulting in neither of us READING THE FECKING LABEL.

So all in all it was quite a good first attempt. We both tried the beer before moving it to the primary fermenter and it was simply delicious. A very hoppy, sweet taste.

So there you have it. A completely non-technical, broad brush overview of our first brew day, and what follows is a random assortment of some snaps from the day that cover the various elements of the boil.

Introduction

2011-01-02T19:24:00.000Z

Dog on the Road Brewing is not a serious brewery, but you might have worked that much out already. Like countless others, we decided to enter the world of homebrewing and, like countless of said countless others, we couldn't resist the temptation to name our newly-formed "brewery". Nor, it seems, could we resist the temptation to create a logo and a blog. I'd like to make a joke about watching this space for t-shirts, but it might come back to bite me on the ass...

Dog on the Road brewing was "founded" in late 2010 by Donnelly and Dónall (me). Here is a picture of us looking silly:

Donnelly and I are recent converts to the church of craft brewing (despite the fact that we own shares in Heineken). Unfortunately there just aren't that many really interesting beers to be had in Dublin; most places only stock offerings from large brewing corporations (with a few notable exceptions). With this in mind, we decided to brew our own beer to better understand the intricacies of this venerable beverage and to get us trousered for cheap.

The name "Dog on the Road" is an in-joke. It refers to an incident that took place when we were teenagers in Wicklow and which offers absolutely no entertainment value to anybody who wasn't present at the time. The fact that many breweries seem to involve canine references is merely serendipitous (check out that last link - you won't be disappointed).

And so that is who we are and what we are doing. This blog will be a record of our brewing adventures, recording every step of the brewing process; the hospital visits; Donnelly's inevitable divorce proceedings and our eventual deaths due to a poorly sanitised carboy.

Stay tuned.