Early in 1990, Andy Frahm and Roger Glaser decided to brew an adjunct beer and settled on a maple stout. A friend of Andy's, Bill Lanctot, was invited over to satisfy his desire to see how the "pros" did it, as he was interested in picking up this fascinating hobby for himself. The brew, which called for 3 quarts of maple syrup and about eight pounds of malt extract, was tentatively dubbed "Mystic Maple Stout". In retrospect, the beer should have been called "Tragic Maple Stout" as is evidenced by the following reminiscence.

Andy had just purchased a brand new gas stove, so naturally Andy wanted to see how it would work for homebrewing. The brew was coming around nicely when Roger noticed a boilover taking place. Not fearing for his personal safety he quickly stuck his hand onto the hot wort covered oven knob and switched off the heat. Most of the liquid stayed in the brewpot, but enough of the thick black maple concoction ran down the front of the stove to make it to the floor. Andy's wife, in the next room, questioned whether all was o.k. and Roger answered that everything was under control, that she didn't need to come into the kitchen and by the way where's the mop? The stove was never the same, it took Andy a week to remove enough hardened black goo from the inner workings of the stove to get the knobs to turn free again; and the floor kept it's unique sticky sound through 3 scrubbings. Bill was told not to worry, the beer was still salvageable and the time to cool the wort and pitch the yeast had come.

As we siphoned the beer through an ice bath into the fermenter, we soon learned that the copper wort cooler had been the recent home of an earwig. To our mutual horror, we discovered that the earwig had now made its way into the primary fermenter. We gazed in wonderment as the little fellow danced about like a water spider on the wort-skin. It was about an inch long and had the girth of a cocktail straw, not counting the legs (we grow 'em big in Wisconsin). It's little antennae moved slowly back and forth and its legs moved about with synchronicity that reminded us of an Olympic rowing team. Happy or not, it had no place in the brew. Our first impulse should have been to siphon the unfermented brew into another primary, but our senses were dulled, both from the aforementioned boiling tragedy and the dozen or so beers we had knocked-off during the brewing session.

The turkey baster was Andy's brainchild. After mustering enough courage to face his wife he went back upstairs and returned with the baster. With one eye closed and his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth, Andy attempted to suck the earwig directly off of the surface of the brew. The earwig, however, craftily eluded each attempt at this "direct suck" method. Undaunted by failure, Roger, then trying the "wort stream" method, sucked up small quantities of wort and sprayed them near the insect in an attempt to force him to crawl up the side of the fermenter. We abandoned this method after an awkward moment when we actually hit the earwig with the wort stream an lost it in the brew for several anxious seconds. Finally, Roger tried to create a vortex in the fermenter with the baster, thus pushing the earwig to the side where we could easily suck it up. It was during this process (the "indirect suck" method) that the stem of the baster slipped out of the bulb and into the fermenter. We were now faced with removing two foreign objects from the brew. At this point, Bill's remark on Roger and Andy's obvious expertise in the field of homebrewing was met with a measured amount of grumbling.

Eventually our random firing marinated brain cells sequenced properly, and we employed a rolled-up piece of paper and on the first try wicked the critter off of the surface of the wort. We retrieved the baster stem during the inevitable re-transfer process and, after a final insect check, placed the primary in a cool corner of the basement.

The beer fermented quite vigorously, leaving us with a beverage which more resembled a maple barley wine/liquor (at around 12.5% alcohol by volume) than maple stout. So after 8 hours, $25 dollars worth of maple syrup, compromised kitchen appliances and immeasurable lost pride the end result was a beer more suitable for marinating wild game than drinking. The final chapter on this story was written when after enjoying several thick and dangerous Earwig Stouts, John Zarling, passed out during the Fall Foliage Tavern Tour and upon waking asked "What was in that beer?!!".

Now you know.