Brewing for Baby

April 15, 2008

In the old days proud fathers celebrated the birth of their newborn babies by handing out cigars wrapped in plastic and tied with a blue band to announce the arrival of a boy and a pink band to announce the arrival of a girl. Needless to say, with the concerns about the health effects (and overall stigma) of smoking, handing out real cigars has become somewhat  passe. More recently, people have started handing out bubble gum cigars. I have also seen personalized candy bar wrappers which can be slipped over foil wrapped candy bars with your baby’s name, birth date and vital stats.  Instead of saying “Hershey’s” it may say “Hersheis”

Kevin and I have decided to give this tradition a twist of our own. We are going to brew and bottle a beer especially for the arrival of baby Nash. We have a few friends and family members who are graphic designers and will enlist one of them to design a special bottle label. Once the baby is here they will plug in the name, sex and all of the vital info and we will slap the labels on (the bottles not the baby) and then our homemade baby celebration brew will be ready to proudly hand out to family and friends.

The only problem is, we haven’t quite decided what style of beer to brew for the occasion. Originally we were going to slowly and naturally lager a beer in our cool cellar over the late winter early spring months. But time has gotten away from us and it’s pretty much too late (and will soon be too warm) to take that route. We also joked about brewing a Doppelbock just so that we could give it a clever name like ” Impregnator.” (All of you beer geeks out there that are familiar with the naming of Doppelbocks will get that joke. The rest of you will just think we are I’m being crass… Okay, maybe it’s a little of both) Then there’s also the possibility of making a modern day version on the fabled “groaning ale” which was given to women during colonial days to speed up delivery. However, even though it’s mentioned many times on the web I haven’t been able to find anything remotely close to a recipe for it.  I would imagine any kind of strong ale could do for this.

We’re going this weekend to Adventures in Homebrewing to buy our ingredients and were hoping to get some suggestions from you - our readers - about what beer style we should make. Any suggestions, or recipes?  If so, we’d love to hear them.

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