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This weekend I brewed my first all-grain batch of beer. I decided to brew up a pale ale, and after reading plenty of recipes, decided to brew this batch by the seat of my pants, went out in the yard, and started brewing. Six and one-half hours later, I had everything put away and a batch of beer in a fermenter. In the future, I expect it will take less time for a simple batch like the one I did this weekend, but given the complexity of the setup, I felt that that time window was not half-bad.

In the picture below, you can see 2/3 of my all-grain brewing setup. The hot liquor tank is on top of the propane burner on the left, while the mash/lauter tun is in the middle of the frame. The boil kettle isn’t shown, but it looks pretty much identical to the hot liquor tank. There is a pump on the chair below the mash/lauter tun that is recirculating hot wort through a heater on the right side of the tank, and back into the top. On the right side of the bench my counter-flow heat exchanger is visible. If you want to see the picture in greater detail, you can click on it for the original size.

We bottled this mead (technically, a melomel) yesterday. It won’t be completely aged and ready to drink for months but I tried a glassful anyway. It is strong raspberry flavor and a reddish pink color. My sample was still, but the finished product will be carbonated. The recipe is below.

• 7 lbs. honey
• 1 lb. corn sugar
• 1/4 lb. (4 oz.) white sugar
• 1 t. gypsum
• 1/4 t. Irish moss
• 3 t. yeast nutrients
• 1 t. fresh orange zest
• 36 oz. fresh blackberries (crushed)
• 9 oz. frozen raspberries (crushed)
• Wyeast Dry Mead pitchable yeast
• 1/3 c. corn sugar (for bottling)

Add honey, sugars, gypsum, yeast nutrients, and Irish moss to 1.5 gallons of water. Boil for ten minutes.

Turn off heat. Wait until wort is down to 180F. Add berries and orange zest and steep at 160F for twenty minutes (you may need to add heat to get back to or maintain 160F).

Cool. Pour into plastic bucket. Add enough water to make five gallons. Pitch yeast when cool enough. Cover loosely with bucket lid.

Ferment for one week in primary fermenter. Strain out fruit and rack into secondary fermenter. Rack at roughly one month intervals. Once mead clears and specific gravity falls to 0.996 or below, bottle (using corn sugar) like you would beer.

My Starting gravity on 28 Dec 08 – 1.060.

Gravity on 08 Feb 09 = 0.996

Final gravity on 07 Mar 09 (before bottling) = 0.994

Final % alcohol = 8.5

When Sarah’s parents visited us about a month ago, her father, Mike, helped me to bottle this beer that I brewed while on paternity leave. Since then, it has finished carbonating in the bottle and I’ve tried a few. It has a distinct yarrow aroma and taste, with just a hint of piney juniper in the aroma and aftertaste. It isn’t my favorite beer, but is much more palatable than the yarrow-sage beer that I brewed last summer. The recipe is below.

1.2 oz. juniper berries
3.3 lbs. gold malt syrup
1/4 lb. brown sugar
3 oz. yarrow
Wyeast American Ale yeast
3/4 c. corn sugar (for bottling)

Steep berries in 1 gallon water for 1/2 hour at 150-160 degrees.
Add malt, sugar, and 2 oz. yarrow. Boil for 55 minutes.
Add remaining ounce of yarrow and boil for 5 more minutes.

Add to one gallon water in 3 gallon carboy. Top off with water to make three gallons. When cool, pitch yeast. Ferment, prime, and bottle as usual.

Starting gravity – 1.054
Final gravity – unknown (measurement was nonsensical).

This is the recipe for my most recent beer concoction, Mystery Spot Ale. I sampled one bottle a couple of days ago, and it isn’t quite done carbonating yet. Probably by this weekend it will be finished.

13 oz. 2-row malt
10 oz. Briess Pilsen Malt
3.3 lbs. Extra Light malt extract
1.5 oz. Cascade hops
2 lbs. honey
1 t. Irish Moss
1/4 oz. New Zealand Pacific Hallertau hops
Wyeast 1968 London ESB Yeast

Steep 2-row and Pilsen malts for 30 minutes at 160 degrees in 1.5 gallons of water.

Strain out grains. Add malt extract, and Cascade hops. Boil for 45 minutes.
Add honey and Irish Moss. Boil for 13 minutes.
Add Hallertau hops. Boil for 2 minutes.

Sparge, cool, and add to 2.5 gallons of water in fermenter. Add more water to bring total volume to five gallons. When cool enough, pitch yeast. Bottle when fermentation has completed.

My latest batch of beer is ready for drinking. I’ve decided to call this batch, “This Old Mountain Farmhouse Ale.” I found a recipe for a similar beer online that I modified to use different grains and different varieties and amounts of hops. The resulting brew is refreshing, perhaps a bit hoppier than I hoped, but good. I haven’t decided yet if the sour mash is just a subtle component of the overall flavor; if I don’t know what I’m supposed to be tasting; or if the higher-than-hoped-for hoppiness is overpowering the sour flavor. Regardless, it’s good.

Last July I brewed up a batch of kölsch since it is a style of beer that pairs quite well with summer weather, activity, and food.As part of the process, I racked (transferred) the beer from the primary fermenter to a secondary fermenter after a week or two since I wanted to age the beer a bit before bottling it. In the top of the secondary fermenter, I placed a fermentation lock to exclude bacteria and the like and still offer an out for any fermentation gasses that formed in the fermenter. A fermentation lock uses water to accomplish this task. The water keeps air out of the fermenter, but lets gasses bubble out through it to relieve pressure inside the fermentation vessel.

For a variety of reasons, none of them good, I never quite got around to bottling the beer. Sometime in late October or early November, the water evaporated out of the fermentation lock. That meant that the beer was suddenly undergoing open fermentation, exposed to all the wild yeasts, bacterial, fungi and the like that were floating around my basement.

Normally, you want to avoid open fermentation when brewing because it is extremely difficult to control the taste and appearance of the final product when any random beastie floating through the air that can survive an alcoholic environment could take up residence in your brew and multiply rapidly. Faced with this problem, I punted and did nothing.

Time passed and I left for the Pole. In late January I returned and my mystery brew was still waiting for me. My sense of guilt and confusion hadn’t really lessened so I just let the mess fester.

In early March I finally got off my duff and tackled the situation head-on. If the beer was drinkable, I was determined to bottle it. If it was completely unpalatable, I’d pour the $40 of ingredients down the drain and call it an expensive lesson. I dragged the fermenter up to the kitchen, sterilized a siphon, and pulled two ounces out for a test. The beer smelled OK, even though the color was dark brown instead of a pale yellow. It was time for the big test, a taste.

I tipped the glass back and let a swallow of beer enter my mouth. The taste wasn’t bad, but the most interesting part was shortly after I swallowed the beer and my tongue went numb! A normal person might be turned off by a beer that numbs the tongue, but I forged ahead and bottled the whole batch anyway.

After two weeks of finishing in the bottle, I popped open a bottle for the big test. The bouquet was still flowery and hoppy; the appearance was still brown and cloudy. The taste…well, I was a bit letdown when it didn’t numb my tongue or anybody else’s who tried the brew. It’s extremely dry on the tongue and is actually quite an easy drinking brew. Considering all that could or should have gone wrong with the brew, I’m quite pleased that it turned out the way it did.

The brew’s name is 100 Year Kölsch for three reasons:

1. Given a hundred years, I’m not sure that I could reproduce the beer given all that happened to it as it fermented in the open for months.
2. We’re in the midst of a winter with snowfall totals that will likely take a 100 years to top.
3. Madison officially topped the 100″ mark for snowfall in this winter.

Wegmans Announces Voluntary Recall of 18 oz. (6-roll pack) Wegmans Food You Feel Good About Country Wheat Rolls

Yeah, that’s food I feel good about, alright. As a co-worker said, “That’s food you feel good about being recalled.”

Last year when I was out picking wild black raspberries, I had Dalla with me and I fed her a couple. It didn’t take long for her to figure out that she could pick her own black raspberries right off the vines if she was careful. Of course, her selections weren’t always the best because she didn’t know to only pick the black ones, but that didn’t seem to bother her. It meant that I had to pick a little faster because I was competing against a voracious eater, however.Our raspberries at home are getting ripe enough to eat, so last night we pulled a handful off the vines and sampled them. At the same time, we shared a couple with Dalla. Again, she realized that she could go straight to the source, so she started trying to eat the raspberries right off the vines. Sarah said, "Looks like we’ll have a browse line on our raspberries this year." Normally, I associate a browse line with herbivores like deer, but she’s right. Dalla’s not likely to forget where the tasty raspberries can be found.

Fortunately, the vines are up on the new supports we built this year so most of the crop is well above her greedy snout.

We’re not sure what made the difference this year, but we have a bountiful crop of raspberries on the vines. Many, many more raspberries than last year. We’re not sure if it is the supports, the fertilizer, or the weather, but something has really kicked the plants into overdrive. Now that strawberry season is fading a bit, we’re looking forward to eating our raspberries.

Before I left for the Pole, I brewed up a batch of wheat beer. However, I had to leave before it finished so I didn’t really get to sample it until I got back in late January. The whole time I was gone, I wondered how my beer would turn out.Despite a color more appropriate for an amber, the beer was actually quite good. Not every bottle was equally good; some bottles were merely adequate while others were very, very good. In general, I enjoyed the end result so much that I decided to keep brewing.

The biggest headache of the first batch was letting the wort chill before I could pitch the yeast into the fermenter. Letting the wort cool took about six hours which meant that I could never brew on a weeknight and that all sorts of undesirable little nasties could get into the beer while it was in a vulnerable state. So, I investigated how to cool the next batch faster, and ended up building a wort chiller out of some copper piping I bought at Home Depot, a few feet of vinyl tubing and a double-handful of plumbing bits from a local hardware story. Earlier this week I put the whole mess together and it all seemed to work. However, the real test was going to be how the apparatus performed the next time I brewed.

While we were in New Zealand and Australia, I drank more than my fair share of English-style bitters. Unlike the name might imply, bitters are not really bitter. Rather, bitters are usually amber in color, full-bodied, somewhat malty, often with a hint of floral scent, and perhaps even a bit of sweet flavor. There aren’t many English-style bitters brewed in the US, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to take advantage of my home brewing equipment.

This morning I spent three hours brewing up five-gallons of beer that is now fermenting. The wort chiller worked as advertised; the wort cooled down to roughly 70° F (from boiling) in a bit less than twenty minutes.

Of course, I won’t know how I did with this batch until I can drink it roughly three weeks from now. I have seven bottles of my wheat beer left to tide me over until then.

Dalla and I went hiking last Monday evening after work along a segment of the Ice Age Trail relatively near our house. While Dalla was busy making life miserable for squirrels, chipmunks, and rabbits, I discovered that the wild blackberries along the trail were in season. Since it seems that wild blackberries are in season for approximately fifteen minutes every summer, I took advantage of the fact by picking a pint or so. While I was picking them, I occasionally popped a couple into my mouth and enjoyed the taste of fruit taken off the vine and popped directly into my mouth.

Dalla eventually noticed the fact that I was feeding myself and she naturally wanted to try what I was eating. So, after I tossed her a blackberry. After a careful and deliberate inspection the blackberry was deemed Food, and hence, worthy of consumption. After that, if I didn’t regularly throw her one or two, she would pick the blackberries off the vines herself. Of course, dog snouts aren’t really set up for berry picking, so she would often get a couple of ripe berries, a couple of nearly ripe berries, and one or two quite green berries. The flavor of those less ripe berries would then dissuade her from picking more berries herself for a few minutes.

Eventually, we picked enough to have with yogurt and on cereal, so we came home. Since our raspberry patch has yet to produce berries this year, the surprise harvest of the wild blackberries was even better.

Sarah and I are about to place another order for bison. We’re buying a 1/4 of a bison for ourselves from a Wisconsin bison rancher, and are willing to try and organize people to purchase another 1/4 or so collectively. The going price is $3.00/lb and a share of a 1/4 consists of roughly thirty pounds of meat. The shares should be roughly 3-2 ground/ribs/roasts/stew meant/soupbones to steaks.

There are five shares of the size we’re selling in a 1/4 bison. Before we’ll sell shares six-nine, share ten also has to be sold. That means we’re only selling shares in a 1/4 if we can sell the whole quarter. We’re not interested in more bison for ourselves since we’re already buying a whole 1/4 just for us.

Caveats: The bison are raised near Princeton, WI and are processed by a small butcher near Oshkosh. The meat is shrink-wrapped in plastic and it holds up very well to long-term freezing. All of the meat is frozen when it is picked up from the processor. When the meat will be available is unknown since the rancher does not (yet) have a butcher date. Based on past experience with this rancher and processor, I expect 01 June 2006 will be earliest the meat will be available. Because these are obvious natural products, and no one really knows how much meat is on an animal until it has been processed, all the weights are estimates.

If you’re interested in buying a share, contact either myself or Sarah for more details.

Mr. President:

We have never had the pleasure of meeting, nor would you likely recognize my name should it come up in conversation, casual or otherwise. Our politics could not be more different. In short, we have little in common, except one unfortunate fact.

We both like peanut butter and honey sandwiches.Ever since I found out that the gooey, nutty, and sweet concoction that is a peanut butter and honey sandwich is one of your favorite sandwiches, I think about you every time I make one for myself.

This morning, for instance, as I smeared the peanut butter on a slice of sourdough bread, I wondered if you had enjoyed a similar sandwich in the recent past. As I drizzled the honey on another slice of bread, I pondered whether you were planning on having a similar sandwich after some sort of formal state dinner. Do you get the White House kitchen to whip up a plate of the sandwiches for Cabinet meetings? Is that what you spent the month of August eating while you were at your ranch?

Ordinarily, it wouldn’t bother me to learn that someone in the media spotlight liked one of the same foods as I do. In fact, chances are good that the information wouldn’t even stick around in my head very long.

However, because you and I have so little in common, that little tidbit really stuck with me. We have almost nothing in common beyond the fact that we are both Americans and male. I cannot advocate or tolerate most of your policies. You probably could not tolerate or advocate most of my policies were our positions reversed. And yet, we both like PB and H sandwiches.

Quite frankly, I’m tired of thinking about you every time I cobble together a sandwich.

There are so many foods I don’t like in the world. Why couldn’t you like one of them? Ever thought of taking up rabid pickle consumption? I really don’t like pickles so it wouldn’t bother me if you developed a real jonesing for them. How about a difficult and time-consuming food? You’re much richer than I am, and currently you have the White House kitchen at your disposal, so choosing a food that required extensive lists of ingredients and lots of preparation time shouldn’t be problem for you. If I woke up tomorrow and decided that Peking Duck was my new favorite food, I’d be in trouble. If you woke up tomorrow and decided the same thing, a simple phone call to any one of your numerous attendants would solve your problem.

While I can’t exactlly ask you to change your favorite food, I can ask that you keep your food preferences out of the media from now on. That should keep everyone happy and avoid similar situations from arising.

Sincerely,

Davd Bogen

If you’ve seen the movie Spanglish then perhaps you saw the deluxe BLT that Adam Sandler’s character makes during the course of the movie.The DVD extras reveal that Thomas Keller, renowned chef of French Laundry fame, was brought in to create a sandwich that Sandler’s character (a renowned chef) might make for a snack at night.

The sandwich that Keller creates is a BLT with crusty artisan bread, bacon, lettuce, tomato, Monterey Jack cheese, and an over-easy egg. As Keller makes the sandwich during the extras, and as Sandler makes the sandwich during the feature, both Sarah and I got really hungry to try that sandwich for ourselves.

So, last week, we got all the necessary ingredients and produced a pair of these deluxe BLTs.

How were they? Not bad. In fact, they were really good. Not the best food I’ve ever had, but good. However, I’ve had a sandwich the last couple of days that might be better.

Last Saturday, Sarah and I picked just about thirty pounds of strawberries from a local pick-your-own farm. We spent most of Saturday picking, washing, hulling and freezing the vast majority of the berries. We also made a good sized supply of freezer jam and some cooked jam that we canned.

We also make our own peanut butter now. If you haven’t tried it, and if you have a food processor, I would encourage you to try it yourself. The junk you get from the store in a bottle has maybe half the flavor and texture of homemade peanut butter. In addition, we’ve been trying to wear out our bread machine by making our own bread for the last year or so. Again, store bought bread has nothing on homemade bread; regardless of whether or not the homemade bread is made by a bread machine or not.

If you combine that homemade bread, peanut butter, and strawberry jam with some butter, you get one fantastic peanut butter and jelly sandwich. In fact, I like those sandwiches better than I liked Keller’s Spanglish sandwich.

But, maybe you want to run your own experiment at home and see which you like better. I’ve linked to the Spanglish sandwich recipe above. if you want my peanut butter recipe, I’m happy to share it, just ask. You’ll have to find your own source of homemade strawberry jam, however.

A couple of hours ago, we finished our Thanksgiving dinner with some of our friends. Rather than having the traditional Thanksgiving fare, we had a meal I labeled Pan Asian Thanksgiving.A few weeks ago, I decided that I was not really interested in cooking a turkey for Thanksgiving this year. It isn’t that cooking a turkey is particularly difficult or time consuming. Rather, the act of cooking a turkey is tedious and the net result is often uninspiring. The best part of turkey is the left overs the next day.

In addition to my relative indifference to turkey, most of the traditional Thanksgiving side dishes are not very high on my favorite foods list. Mashed potatoes have a history of literally making me gag. Homemade cranberry sauce: good. Cranberry “sauce” from a can: very, very bad. Sweet potatoes: better than starvation. Stuffing: Usually best stuffed somewhere other than my plate.

So, at the time we decided to have Thanksgiving at our house, I started vaguely looking around for something more interesting to have for dinner. Soon, I stumbled upon a recipe for Pho Ga, a Vietnamese chicken soup with wide rice noodles. So, I decided to make that for Thanksgiving instead of a turkey. After that, it just a matter of picking complementary dishes.

Thai fried rice was next on the menu, followed shortly by vegetable dumplings. However, Sheri and Bryan decided to make pork dumplings, so we canned the idea of vegetable dumplings. In addition, Sheri and Bryan brought over some good teriyaki steak.

So, our menu today was the following:

• Pho ga
• Thai fried rice
• Teriyaki Steak
• Stir-fried vegetables and seeds (another Thai dice Sarah made)
• Pork dumplings
• Cookies and ice cream (both supplied by Sheri and Bryan)

We all agreed that it was really refreshing to have a change from the traditional Thanksgiving routine.

Last night we had okra with our dinner. Sarah came up with by far the most colorful description of that unfortunate food: “vegetable mucus.”

This is the recipe we use when we make fresh salsa. Most people prefer it when we use poblano or jalapeno peppers. If you really like hot food, try using one or two habanero peppers, instead.Ingredients:

• 1 large tomato or two medium sized tomatoes, cored (we use big, organic brandywines)
• 1/2 medium yellow onion
• 1 T. oregano (use fresh, if possible)
• 1/4 t. salt (we use sea or kosher salt, but table salt is fine)
• 3 medium-sized garlic cloves
• 1/4 c. fresh cilantro leaves, risned
• 1 or more hot peppers (just cut off the top; leave seeds and veins inside) See Note below.

Directions:

Put the all ingrediants into some sort of food processor and process/chop until the pieces are small enough to pass for salsa. We use a hand cranked processor, so I’m guessing at what sort of setting one might use on an electrically driven food processor or blender.

Note: The best way to control the heat of the salsa is to start with one
half of a hot pepper and test the salsa. Keep adding more hot pepper (including the seeds and the veins) and chopping/processing until the heat gets to where you like it.

Last night at the grocery store, I noticed a cereal made by Kellogs named Frosted Mini-Wheats Big Bite. The premise seems to be that the cereal in question is larger than the Bite Size version of Frosted Mini-Wheats.

Exactly when does a product stop being “mini” if it is also “big”?The whole premise behind frosted mini-wheats is that they are smaller than regular shredded wheat. For whatever reason, shredded wheat’s native size seems to be that of a small paperback book. It’s not clear to me what culinary and marketing genius decided to make a cereal that was ten times larger than the average spoon. Predictably, such a cereal turned off that portion of the American population that didn’t see the point in saving the manufacturer money by spending the time to break cereal into bite size chunks.

So, Post came out with spoon size shredded wheat. This was an improvement as it allowed Americans to pour the shredded wheat into a bowl, cover it with milk, and start eating without that messy deconstruction step.

What market research showed, however, was that shredded wheat tasted like wood mulch, and since Americans generally don’t eat wood mulch for any meal, much less breakfast, it was back to the drawing board for Post.

Finally, the food scientists figured out that if they made shredded wheat in a size that fit the average spoon, and if that shredded wheat was covered in an incredibly sweet, hard, white frosting (just like Frosted Flakes….Hmm…wonder where they got the idea for this frosting coating…Hmmm…) Americans just might buy it. Hence, Frosted Spoon Size Shredded Wheat was born.

Somewhere along the line, Kelloggs jumped into the action with corporate predictability by copying its rival’s product, creating the Frosted Mini-Wheat. It is clear, however, that Kelloggs has learned nothing from the past.

Frosted Mini-Wheats Big Bite, translated into English from Marketer Speak, is literally “big little sugary whole wheat cereal.” Doesn’t that make the whole issue clearer?

My favorite beer, Solstice Weiss, is a seasonal beer produced by my favorite local brewery. Unfortunately, it had yet to appear in stores. I was getting really worried that, for some reason, I had missed it or that none of the stores at which I regularly shopped were carrying it.So, I did the logical thing and called the brewery.

A pleasant woman (not an automated system) answered the phone on the second ring. I asked her if, through some series of unfortunate coincidences, I had missed my chance to score some Solstice Weiss.

The womand responded quite pleasantly that they had been getting “lots of calls” about the Solstice Weiss, but not to worry, it was just late this year because the brewery was under construction. She said that I should start seeing it in stores during the first week in July.

The lesson here? You wouldn’t get that sort of pleasant, informative response from one of the big brewers. After wading through automated telephone hell, you might get to talk to a so-called customer service representative. That person would take your name and listen to what you had to say before most likely saying something like, “Well, we’re glad you called us. I’ll be more than happy to pass along your question/request/complaint/etc.” and that would be the end of it. You might as well have spent the time complaining to the contents of your refridgerator’s crisper drawer for all the good it would do you.

As I revealed in a previous post, in the past I’ve been unfortunate enough to find glass in my food.

Yesterday, I found glass in my food again.

UPDATED: 04 Jun 04It was a typical (of late) Madison morning, with steady rain and a temperature approaching the south side of fifty degrees.

I rolled out of bed, took a shower, got the dog ready, put on my rain gear, and headed out for a little strip mall a mile or so away from home. I was heading for the little strip mall because it has a branch of the local library (I wanted to return some items I had checked out) and it contains our favorite bakery, La Brioche. Dalla and I walked through the rain, got to the mall, deposited items in the library’s after-hours deposit box, and headed to the bakery.

At the bakery, I purchased two cut-out cookies (sugar cookies cut in shapes and covered with an oh-so-delicious frosting) and two day-old morning buns (cinnamon rolls, but without the noxious white frosting).

Another walk through the rain back home, and breakfast could begin.

After some fruit and cereal, I had coffee (with chicory, of course) and a morning bun. About two thirds of the way through the morning bun, my back teeth crunched down on something hard that felt like it shattered in my mouth. Of course, I wasn’t about to swallow anything that was:

1. The consistency of sand or stone
2. Freshly shattered, and probably sharp

So, when I finally removed the freshly chewed bun from my mouth, I found several bits of glass in amongst the bun’s leavings. That was very disappointing.

So, once again I’ve found glass in my food. Perhaps this is the universe striking back at me for ruining a particularly irreplacable piece of glassware in a previous life. Perhaps this is just a string of bad luck. Regardless, if I went the rest of my life and didn’t find another piece of glass in food I was eating, I could die happy.

Update: La Brioche was completely not at fault for the above. As it turns out, the glass came from our butter dish, and not the Morning Bun. A small chip came out of the butter dish and must have stuck to the butter. When I applied the butter to the Bun, the glass transferred to the food.

I’m glad I discovered that the glass came from the butter dish rather than from the Morning Bun. I’d hate to stop eating baked goods from my favorite bakery due to something that wasn’t their fault.

Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend have special meaning around our house, and not just because there is a holiday involved.

No, both weekends are BratFest weekends.BratFest is put on by one of the local supermarkets. One dollar gets you a bratwurst and a soda. Fifty-cents gets you a hot dog and a soda. There are plenty of condiments (the annual usage of condiments for BratFest is measured in gallons) and napkins to go around.

Local celebrities man the cash registers. Local groups and organizations volunteer to cook the food, police the tables, and generally keep the place sanitary. In return, they get all the proceeds of the Fest.

To give you some idea of the volume of food served at BratFest, try these stats on for size (all of which apply to just one of the two weekends per year):

• Brats served per minute (average): 77
• Gallons of mustard used: 153
• Gallons of ketchup used: 201
• Pounds of sauerkraut consumed: 5,580 Lbs. That’s over two tons!

We’d been to three BratFests before this year. Two last year, and one the year before that.

The first one had the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, tables, chairs, umbrellas, and a local radio station van pumping out classic rock.

The next two had the Weinermobile and whatnot, but they also added the Johnsonville Big Taste Grill, which is a semi tractor-trailer rig that is nothing more than a giant, mobile, gas grill. It can cook 2500 bratwurst per hour and it is quite a sight to see.

2500 bph (brats per hour) sounds like quite a few, but even the Big Taste Grill isn’t enough to satisfy the BratFest hordes. There are only thirty-two hours of BratFest per Fest (eight hours per day for four days). The current record is over 148,000 brats consumed in four days, so that means that over 4625 bph (on average) were cooked and consumed last Memorial Day weekend when the record was set.

This year, they finally dumped the lame radio station van and installed a small stage. Local bands and singers get to play the stage, which is a nice change from hearing the same old classic rock tunes yet again.

For the first two hours of BratFest today, it rained, so there was only six sunny hours of Brat consumption. And yet, they still managed to sell 49,302 brats today alone. That’s just a bit over 6,162 bph!

I’m really fascinated by how many brats are eaten at this affair, if you haven’t noticed. The premise is so simple: cook brats, serve them cheaply, watch the crowds appear. There is no stuffiness about the affair. There is no hidden agenda. It’s just people eating bratwurst in prodigious quantities.