The Weekly Pint and The Session: Beer People and Mesquito Brewing's Pilsner
Posted by Roger the Beerist at 4/4/2008 8:00 AM 
Categories: The Session,Pilsner,Beer review,Weekly Pint
Categories: The Session,Pilsner,Beer review,Weekly Pint
The Session is a monthly melee of beer writing. Writers from all over blog about a certain theme on the first Friday of each month. The theme for this month was selected by Stonch, April's host. He wanted us to write about people. Super. I took up drinking and writing to avoid the bipedal anthropoids that inhabit this planet with me; now I'm being forced to spew out reasons why I like some of them and what that has to do with beer. Spiffy. On with it, then.
I picked my beer swilling pals Royal and Erick to write about. Royal is the other half of Bottled Llama Brewing. He and I have been friends for as long as I can remember. He didn't always like beer. But it didn't take much to convert him: a little peer pressure and a night of 'evaluating' real beer. Afterwards, Royal understood that there was much more to beer than the standard American lager. He began to appreciate stouts, especially. Erick, on the other hand, was a lush long before I knew him. He liked Budweiser (a subject we shan't discuss here) and Sam Adams. All the other people he and I knew didn't understand beer; thus, we took to hanging out together since we could relax as we drank our lagers.
It was only a matter of time before we hit on the idea of homebrewing. The three of us had a dinner one night and decided to start the hobby. We spent long hours brainstorming (our wives, to this day, call it 'drinking and blabbing', but I swear to you it was brainstorming!) and eventually we came up with the kind of beers we'd try to make and a name: Mesquito Brewing. Two weeks later, when I finally got 'round to ordering the materials, we could remember our "brewery" name, we'd forgotten the beers, ordered the kit and brewed the pilsner that came with the kit.
Roles appeared quickly after that. Royal was the technical guy or mechanical guy or however you want to put it. He liked the burners and wort chillers and pumps and dry ice and all that jazz. He took to reading up on homebrew do-it-yourself projects. After a little prompting, he even looked up how to make a still. Alas, while he is proficient in understanding and visualizing these dandy projects and improvements he lacks the time to actually build them. At least I know that he could do it, though. Gambrinus knows I can't!
Erick is an electrician and he's just as technically competent as Royal, if not more. The two of them could figure out anything. For our purposes, though, Erick was really the ... Head of the "Research" Department. As Royal built things in his mind, Erick was trying beers. He always brought a good twelver of Sam Adams or something decent to brew sessions. I think he liked the idea of brewing, to be sure, but he was more interested in just hanging out and tossing back a couple of beers. Now that I think about it, maybe he understood what beer is really all about. During the boil, he and I would drink and talk and Royal would peruse catalogs. It was all great fun.
We really applied Papazian's mantra "Relax, don't worry" during that first homebrew session. (We couldn't apply the rest of the chant, "have a homebrew" because, well, it was our first time and, you know, we didn't have any homebrew). We bottled a week or so later; two or three weeks later we drank our pilsner, a gorgeous lager created by our own hands. The beer was superb. At least, from what I can remember. It tasted clean; it had more body than any of the Budweiser's we'd ever drank. It was a deep yellow, with a fairly thin head. It was the smoothest beer I'd ever had.
We tried brewing it again but it didn't work out so well the second time. We moved on to other beers. We made a stout, during which we nearly burned down my house and managed to get wort all over my kitchen. We did a barleywine, which is still one of my favorite brews. There were others, too, but I remember the pilsner the most.
During this same time the three of us were in a band together. So, we'd brew, we'd jam, we'd have a few beers. Weekends rocked. But "nothing lasts forever" as Guns N Roses sang. The band broke up, the brewing slowed down, life took over. But, at least "the memory remains." (If I gotta tell you who sang that, well, I'm very disappointed).
However, my kids like brewing. We've done a few batches together and that's been a lot of fun. My wife deals with the smells and mess of brew day quite well; she even goes to beer festivals with me. Thus, brewing continues, just not at the same pace.
Now that I've written this I can't help but think of the Blues Brothers. Perhaps the Session is some kind of cathedral of beer and this entry is a ray of light spearing me from on high. Maybe it's time to "put the band back together."
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