Us college kids love our beer. We drink the stuff by the tons. In fact, we often drink so much of it that we have to puke it all up and start over again. One of the effects of drinking so much beer is that we come to take it for granted. We think beer is like water: always abundant, always cheap, always available. (Unfortunately, the beer most of us drink is like water in other ways too.) Some UNC students, however, refuse to take beer for granted. By brewing their own beer at home, they learn the hard way that real beer is a labor of love. We here at the Brew Ha Ha agree, and we’ve decided to make profiles of student home brewers a regular part of our coverage of beer in the Chapel Hill area, beginning this week.
On that account, I present to you Eric Boren, a junior music and computer science major from Charlotte. Eric is something of an amateur renaissance man when it comes to beer palates. We’ve been drinking together for a fairly long time, during which I’ve realized that Eric’s tastes are almost perfectly rounded. He knows the virtues of craft-brewed beers by their flavor (as opposed to those who can only identify them by their name), but he also appreciates the unsung qualities of some of the cheaper things in life. Whether it’s PBR or oatmeal stout (his favorite), he knows what he likes and why he likes it.
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Not content with sitting in the back seat of the Beer Mobile his whole drink-sodden life, Eric recently started home brewing. After test-driving a number of different batches, ranging from India pale ale to altbier, he finally settled down with an oatmeal stout and a Belgian wheat that he thought good enough to enter into this year’s Brew Fest, which is being held this Saturday in Carrboro. (See below for details). I sat down with Eric last weekend to sample his two beer selections and to get some insight into his brewing process.
First of all, Eric informed me, he uses all grains when he brews, instead of brewing kits. Using all grains can give you more control over theprocess, but it can also make it easier to screw everything up. Greater risks mean greater rewards.
Belgian wheats and oatmeal stouts are both beers with very distinct flavors, but not lots of hops. To get the fruity citrus taste in his Belgian, Eric informed me that he used coriander and orange peel, a tried-and-true method for the style. For his oatmeal stout he used rolled oats, in order to give it “a silky mouth feel.”
Neither beer had much of a head, and both seemed pretty lowly carbonated to me. But they spent a week in their respective kegs, so they were definitely fresh and bubbly enough. The Belgian poured a cloudy, unfiltered yellow-gold. It was low on aroma but the coriander came out strongly in the taste, which is a big plus. I find citric wheat beers very refreshing, and Eric’s didn’t disappoint.
His oatmeal stout was much lighter than I expected, and lighter than most stouts generally, a fact that Eric attributed to the yield he got out of the boiled mash. (He’s still perfecting his process. Aren’t we all?) It had a toasty aroma but not a toasty taste. And unlike many other popular stouts, it didn’t have a heavier coffee-flavor. Truth be told, if I had blind taste-tested it, I might not have identified it as a stout at all, but probably rather as a porter. However one would classify it, it was still smooth and drinkable, and I would gladly have another pint of thestuff.
With an IPA still fermenting and plans for a chocolate espresso stout working out in his head, Eric is clearly not finished. (He also brews an apple wine that is pictured above.) Look for him and his beer at the inappropriately named World Home Brew Fest Saturday in Carrboro. This event should be a blast, and it’s free to boot. Just print a ticket and RSVP online at their website. You can also check out Eric’s homebrew blog.
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