kreusening

So Chris Choukalas, S.F. based former Gustie M.D., mentioned kreusening on Facebook the other day and it reminded me of the conversation we had on the subject a few years ago. We were in STL or Chicago where somebody or other was drinking an Old Style and I don't think any of us recalled having noticed the can's reassurance that the product had been "Fully Kreuzened." In any case nobody there knew what it meant and we wondered whether, it being Old Style, kreusening was just some B.S. thing that every beer does or if we should be outraged that other breweries were offering incompletely kreuzened beer. I've been on a few brewery tours and I've never heard the process mentioned, but either way I kind of spaced on calling my congressmen to demand legislation requiring that it be completed once started. Chris' status update on it reminded me again so I did a little wikipediaing.

Turns out kreusening is the same thing as bottle conditioning, adding a little active wort to the finished product which allows the fermentation process to continue after bottling and supposedly cleans up the flavor of the beer by reducing levels of diacetyl and acetaldehyde. I've never been on the G. Heileman tour so I don't know what what they mean by "fully." Kinda makes you wonder what Old Style would taste like normal. Apparently worse than mediocre.

On the home front, we had a new addition to our back yard menagerie. An opossum. Big one. It walked outside our office window the other evening and went under our deck. I went out and bravely confronted it and which apparently caused it to die of terror. I didn't want to examine the body too closely due to the fact that they can carry rabies, so I left it for the raccoons, confident that the problem was solved.