John's Beer Blog

Port errr...

2012-01-08T14:10:00.002-05:00

One of the first things I remember reading when I first started extract brewing 5 years ago was to always use fresh malt extract. I don't fully remember the reasons the books gave for this, but I'm learning first hand some pretty good reasons. My Uncle, a former home brewer just gave me a pilsner extract kit. Now I'm pretty sure he hasn't brewed in the last 15 years, and this theory is helped with the fact that best before 1998 was printed on the can of hopped malt extract. I decided fuck it, I'm going to try it anyway. I didn't hold out hope for the yeast but I tried to activate it anyway. Sure enough it was all dead, so instead I'm using a packet of Safale US-05. The instructions on the can specify that this is to make 5 gallons, and that I should add table sugar to supplement the malt extract. Instead, I'm making 2 gallons using only the malt it came with.
The first thing that hit me when I opened the can was the over powering smell of raisins. The color is much like that of dark molasses. Now that it's all boiled, it smells like a strong port. I'm guessing it will not taste like one.

1772 Porter

2011-11-06T14:31:00.002-05:00

While coming up with a recipe for a Christmas porter this week, I was thinking about old porters as were mentioned in Ray Daniel's, Designing Great Beer. Going solely based on my memory of the chapter, I came up with the following recipe that I will brew next weekend. It will be 3 pounds of brown malt, 3 pounds of amber malt, and 3 pounds of cherry wood smoked pale malt, plus 2 ounces of fuggles added somewhere in the boil. All this will be for 3 gallons of beer. Now here is where it gets fun. Instead of using a boring old store bought yeast, I'm currently growing another wild yeast culture. Last year I brewed using a sour dough starter that I made, but decided to do it a bit differently this time. I just made a one quart starter, added some aged hops, then after a 15 minute boil poured it in a roasting pan and let it sit out all day. At night before bed, I poured it into a sanitized jug, and after 2 days it began showing signs of fermentation. I took a whiff of it yesterday, and boy is it sour smelling. The plan is to ferment my 3 gallons of this old porter recipe using this, let it age for about a year, then next year I will do 6 gallons of the same recipe but ferment with some British ale yeast. Then when it comes time to bottle, I plan to mix 2 gallons of the aged sour porter with 4 of the fresh stuff, and then bottle the remainders of each of them straight unmixed. The mixed bottles should get me something reasonably close to the porters of the 18th century, and the unmixed ones will let me mix them to different proportions for fun.

Oh Racking Day

2011-05-22T10:46:00.002-04:00

I woke up Wednesday thinking about my Belgian golden honey strong ale, and thought, I should add some brettanomyces to this. So I bought a bottle of Orval, made a starter using the dregs from the bottle, and then added that to my BGHSA as I racked it to secondary this morning. The current gravity of the beer is 1.014, so hopefully the brett can get it down to about 1.010, which is what I'm aiming for. Of course I can't take a gravity reading with out taking a taste, and all I could think of was egg fart. If anyone remembers me posting about my Honey Bunches of Oats ale that I made 2 years ago, it had this exact same problem, and the beer was undrinkable for about 2 months. So at least I know this is a flavor that is somehow related to honey, and also that it goes away over time.
I also took a gravity reading of my 2011 dandelion wine, and as of this morning it was at 1.005, which puts it .020 points lower than what last year's batch finished at, and it's also showing clear signs that it's still fermenting. As not to wast any of it, I just dropped a sanitized hydrometer directly into the carboy, so I didn't have a real taste sample, but I did lick the hydrometer afterwards, and already I like it more than last year's batch. It's quite a bit dryer, and a lot more citrus comes out. I will attribute that to the fact that I didn't measure the amount of lemon or lime juice I added this year, so there is a very good chance that there was a lot more than what I added last year. As for why it's attenuating so much higher, I have a few guesses. For one, I think I added more yeast nutrient this year than last year. Secondly, and this is a complete guess, the honey may have more nutrients for the yeast to reproduce than table sugar alone, which may have helped it along. Third, again this is a guess as I didn't record temperatures last year, we have a very warm last couple of weeks, so it may have been fermenting at a higher temperature than last year which should help ferment faster. No matter what the reason, I should have a much stronger drier batch this year. Last years finished at about 13.2% abv, and this years is already at 15.9%, which makes it the highest percentage alcohol of anything I've brewed to date.

National Homebrew Day

2011-05-06T22:54:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow is National Homebrew Day. I'm not sure how I'm suppose to celebrate this event, but it doesn't really matter as if I did what I was suppose to do I wouldn't be much of a home brewer. My plan for the day is to make two beverages. One beer, and my second ever dandelion wine. The beer will be a Belgian golden strong ale. The plan is to use ten pounds of pilsner, one pound of wheat, half a pound of munich, and half a pound of cara hell. Hops will probably depend on what the home brew store has, but my hope is an ounce of styrian golding at sixty minutes, and an ounce of saaz at fifteen. Then at flame out I'll be adding three pounds of clover honey, then pitching with wyeast's abby ale yeast.
Next in the day, will the dandelion wine. I made my first ever batch of this last year and if you want to go back you can find a post about it on May 3rd. I've tasted it a couple of times since then, and am even drinking a glass now. I can't think of anything to compare it to, as it's not like anything I've tasted before, but I enjoy it. It is very sweet, with this indescribable flavor that lingers in your mouth afterwards. This year, I'll be using a similar recipe. I'll collect about 2.5 quarts of dandelion heads again, soak in water, then simmer for about 10 minutes and let steep for a day. Then I plan to add the lemon and lime juice again, I think I'll skip the lime zest that I added last year, and instead of 4 pounds of table sugar, I'll use 1.5 pounds plus 2 pounds of honey. Then I'll add some water and yeast nutrient, boil down to a gallon, chill then pitch champagne yeast again. The way I see it, is it came out pretty well last year fermenting only table sugar, it should be much better using honey as well.

Apple Brandy (sort of)

2011-04-02T10:07:00.006-04:00

I can't remember if I posted about it or not, but last year I tried making my first hard cider. The results were so bad I did not attempt a second one till this month. The process is pretty simple, or at least my process was. I took 2 half gallon jugs of Simply Apply brand unfiltered pasteurized apple juice, and mixed them with one packet of Safale US-05 ale yeast in a sanitized 1 gallon carboy. I fermented this out for about 2 weeks, took a taste and was pretty happy with had I had so far. Then I transfered it back to it's original plastic jugs, froze them, then thawed them upside down over a half gallon growler as pictured above. Then once there is nothing but clear ice left in the top jug, I removed it so that all I had down bottom was the concentrated cider, or as I like to call it, my Apple Brandy (I realize this is not technically an apple brandy, but close enough). I then let this rest another week, at which point about half an inch of yeast sediment had built up on the bottom, so I just racked it to a clean growler. Of course I was also required to take a taste, and my god is this stuff incredible. The problem with last years batch is that it tasted nothing like apples, it was just tangy and dry and horrible. This is wonderfully sweet, is just a bit of tartness, and most importantly, a very strong apple flavor comes through. I didn't take any gravity readings at any point, so I'm completely clueless as to the alcohol content. I can make an educated guess. I've read that natural apple juice will ferment out to around 4% abv, then I concentrated it down to somewhere between a 3rd and a 4th of it's original volume, so I'm guessing it's probably somewhere between 12 to 16% abv. Again though, this is a complete guess. I'm pleased this is tasting this good after such a short amount of time. I'm thinking this year for Christmas I'll be scaling this up to a 5 gallon batch to give out as Christmas presents. I'll probably wait till fall to get the juice as it should be at it's peak around that time of the year. I'm also just amazed at how easy this whole process was to get really excellent results.

Wow

2011-02-12T11:23:00.002-05:00

Ok, so my last two posts where I questioned how good my "all grain" beer was going to be, you can forget that. I racked it into a clean carboy this morning, and the temptation to taste a sample got the better of me. I am blown away by how good this beer is already. When I sampled the worth last week, all I could taste was bitter bland oatmeal. Fermentation has done wonders for this beer. The current and I'm assuming final gravity of the beer is only 1.010, but boy is this a nice and creamy beer. It's got plenty of mouth feel, and kind of lingers on the tongue slightly in a very positive way. The predominant flavor is rye, which is complemented very nicely by the late addition of Tettnanger. I wasn't expecting much flavor from the rye due to the total lack of any rye taste or aroma in the wort last week. I think I'm going to repeat this as a 5 gallon summer beer once I'm able bring my propane burner out again. It's only 4.2 abv, which is probably for the best as I can easily see myself sitting around all day playing video games and drinking this come summer weekends.

Adjunct Update

2011-02-11T08:21:00.003-05:00

The beer I brewed last weekend is starting to at least look like beer. Before I added yeast, I had a horrible gray/beige concoction in my carboy that I was not interested in drinking which is why last week I thought I was going to put it though a second fermentation with various adjunct sugars. Now that primary fermentation is finishing up, and most of the solids are falling out of suspension, it is actually a very pale yellow color. Lighter than just about anything I've brewed before, but it's at least looking like beer, which is making me more comfortable with drinking it as is. I plan to rack it to a secondary fermenter tomorrow, and depending on the taste, I may decide to leave it as is and abandon my last plan due to laziness on my part. We'll see.

All Grain Brew Day

2011-02-05T15:34:00.002-05:00

I'm in the middle of brewing a 3 gallon batch in which I tried to cram as many different types of grain into it as I could. It was 3 pounds of US 6 row barley, 1 pound of malted wheat, 1 pound malted rye, 1 pound corn, and 1 pound of rolled oats. The corn was just raw pop corn kernels that I milled with my corona grain mill at a fairly coarse grind. I then mixed the oats and corn with 1 gallon hot tap water, brought to a boil for about 2 minutes, added another 1.25 gallons of cold water, then brought to strike temperature. Once it hit 166, I mixed it with the rest of the grains in my mash tun to get a mash temperature of 152.
Like I mentioned in my last post, I plan to use this brew for the BYO/BBR mash time experiment, so I took a sample every 5 minutes and used the iodine test to check for starches. If you're not familiar with this, you take a small sample of the mash, less than a tea spoon full will do, put it on a clean white surface, add a drop of iodine, then check to see if it turns black. If it does there are starches left that the enzymes need to break down. If it doesn't change color then your mash is complete. It took a full 65 minutes before the conversion fully complete. I was a bit surprised it was so high as they had recently mentioned on Basic Brewing Radio that the majority of the starches are converted in the first 20 minutes of the mash. I'm guessing mine took so much longer as the majority of the grains I was mashing have no enzymes of their own to convert starches, so it was relying almost entirely on the 6 row.
Color wise, this might be the palest beer I've ever made. The mash is practically white, which is emphasized due to how cloudy it is. Taste wise, at least this early on, not much going on. I haven't taken a taste test since adding the hops, but just the worth coming out of the mash tun mostly just tasted like sweetened plain oatmeal. I'm not holding my breath on this being an amazing beer. My guess is that it's going to resemble Genny Cream Ale, which if you don't live in the central New York area, you are probably luck enough to not know what I'm talking about. Worst case scenario, I know plenty of people that drink PBR and Bud, so I'm sure it wont go to waste.

A True All Grain Batch

2011-02-04T09:37:00.002-05:00

I've started reading Stan Hieronymus' "Brewing with Wheat", the beginning of which he describes various brewing grains and how they have been used through out history. Now I think I'm going to try and use as many different ones in one recipe as I can. So this weekend I'll be making my All Grain Beer, using 3 pounds of six row, one pound of wheat, one pound of rye, one pound of oats, and one pound of corn. I realize there are plenty of grains I am leaving out of this, but I'm not sure where I would find things like sorghum and millet, and I just don't want to use rice. This is also going to double as my submission to the BYO/BBR collaborative mash conversion experiment. If you're not sure what I'm talking about you can check out the newest episode of Basic Brewing Radio. This is their 7th experiment, but the first one that I will actually have the time/money/empty carboy space/motivation to take part in. Well to be fair there were one or two in the past I could have contributed to, but just simply forgot. Either way, results of both this brew, and the experiment should be interesting.

Freezing Point

2010-12-29T09:30:00.002-05:00

I discovered this christmas weekend that the freezing point of beer is somewhere between 10 and 25 degrees Fahrenheit. I learned this by leaving 2 cases of beer in the trunk of my car. It was fine the first 3 nights out there when lows were in the mid 20's, then finally night four it dropped down to 10, and I work up with a trunk of frozen beer bottles. Luckily nothing broke, I slowly warmed them inside, and even tasted a bottle last night and it was fine. If anything, the beer was actually a little better than I remember it being.
More importantly, this has given me an idea for my next big christmas beer. I'll be an ice beer. For those that are unfamiliar with the process, this is simply freezing normal beer, then using some method to remove the ice which concentrates the alcohol and other flavors of the beer as can be seen in this video here:

Tactical Nuclear Penguin from BrewDog on Vimeo.

I'm not going for any world record on this, nor have I finalized the recipe. What I have in mind so far is do a parti-gyle brew day, ferment out both first and second runnings of a large mash, then concentrate the first runnings. I'm also thinking of aging with some bourbon soaked oak chips for a couple of months as well. I haven't decided yet whether or not I'll be carbonating this, I think it depends on how strong it turns out. If I manage to get it over 15% abv, I'll probably just leave it flat, anything lower I'll be pitching fresh yeast at bottling time.

Caribou Slobber

2010-12-11T12:32:00.002-05:00

I'm loving these beer kits. I'm drinking my first bottle of Northern Brewer's Caribou Slobber extract kit, brewed on November 24th. Took me about 3 hours including clean up to brew it, left in primary for about 9 days, bottle conditioned for 7, and now it's just delicious. I wanted something easy that I could have around as a good session beer, and I can easily see myself having more than one of these in a sitting. I'll probably let the rest of the batch age at least one more week, probably two, but already it's pretty well carbonated. With the relative ease of making this kit, as well as the small amount of equipment required to make them, it's shocking not everyone home brews.

Multi-Purpose Beer Kits

2010-12-05T12:52:00.001-05:00

I brewed Northern Brewer's Phat Tyre extract kit today, then after I was finished, I got a second use out of it.

In Which I Shamelessly Promote a Website

2010-11-20T09:32:00.003-05:00

I made my first all grain batch of beer on September 21, 2007. It was basically a kitchen sink vanilla mocha stout. I created the recipe after finishing the Complete Joy of Homebrewing, and was just inspired to go nuts. It was a 3 gallon batch, as at that point my largest pot was only 5 gallons. The malt bill was 5.35 pounds of American 2 row, 1 pound of roasted barley, 1 pound of black patent, .88 pounds of crystal 120, .63 pounds of crystal 60, and .53 pounds of chocolate malt. Then in the boil kettle I also added a pound of dark brown sugar, 1 ounce of East Kent Goldings for 60 minutes, half an ounce of chinook for 60 minutes, half a pound of cocoa powder at 30 minutes, then finally a pound of fresh ground coffee at flame out. I steeped the coffee for about 5 minutes then chilled in the kitchen sink as I didn't have a wort chiller at this point. I fermented for about 9 days, transfered to a secondary, then let it sit in my friend's basement for another 3 weeks. Finally on bottling day, I added some pure vanilla extract in with some dry malt extract for priming. Sadly many of the bottles got contaminated due to my laziness about sanitation that day, but the few that did not were one hell of an amazing beer. After that I decided I wasn't going to follow any recipe any more.
Well now three years have passed, and two weeks ago I had an annoying brew day in which I ran out of propane and had to carry a pot full of 6 gallons of boiling temperature wort form outside to my kitchen stove. I think it's about time I earned some easy brew days. Then Northern Brewer sent out their quarterly catalog. Boy, looking through this, they have some really good looking recipe kits. So I've decided fuck all the extra work I've been making for myself, this winter, I'm going back to extract brewing. I'm not just waiting in the mail for their Caribou Slobber Brown, and Phat Tyre Amber extract kits. I figured with their flat shipping rates I'm best off buying two at once. Drinking a beer that you created from scratch from a recipe that has never been made before is a very rewarding experience, yet letting someone else do all the work and just following instructions has a very liberating feel to me right now. I'm sure once it warms up outside I'll get a new propane tank and go back to all grain, and recipe creation, but for right now, I think I'm going to have a fun winter with Northern Brewer's extract kits.

History Repeats Itself: Or I'm retarded, the story of John Enkosky

2010-11-07T13:38:00.003-05:00

Last year, when I decided to brew a stout for the winter, I remember sitting outside mid November in front of my propane burner on a chilly yet sunny Autumn day questioning how many batches of beer I could get off a single propane tank. Then with in a minute of this thought, my burner went out as I ran out of gas. I had to lift my wort into the kitchen to attempt a boil on my stove, never quite reaching a rigorous boil. Well today, as I was brewing my 2010 winter stout, sitting outside on a chilly yet sunny mid November Sunday, I was thinking boy, I got a lot more batches of beer out of this propane tank than I did last year, I wonder how much is left. Then with in a minute of this though the flame when out as I ran out of gas. So again, I had to bring six and a half gallons of wort into my kitchen, and attempt a boil on my stove where again it will not become the raging boil I'm used to.
The lesson I learned from all of this is that when I start to question if I need more propane, then I need more propane. If anyone out there has a good method of checking how much is left in their tank, please let me know as obviously I'm flying stupid here. Oh, and I already thought of getting a second tank, but my budget currently doesn't allow that so don't even bother mentioning it.

Chiminey Christmas

2010-11-06T14:53:00.004-04:00

I was going to brew a basic stout this weekend, something like 8 pounds pale malt, a pound of roasted barley, some dark crystal, and a touch of black patent. Then last week I was given a 6 pack of miscellaneous German beers which made me decide my stout recipe was a little too boring. So I decided let's lose the pale malt and instead use 4 pounds of German smoked malt, and 4 pounds of Munich malt. I was planing to use some safale S-58 that I have in the fridge, but thinking about the beer while I was at the beer store, I thought this deserves better than that, so I garbed some dry lager yeast in the hopes of doing a California common type beer, only with a stout instead of an amber beer. Should be a fun brew day, and probably my last out door one till spring.

Yeast Gone Wile

2010-10-30T09:45:00.002-04:00

I tried another bottle of my wild fermentation ale which used a sourdough starter as it's only yeast source. I think I learned why this practice is not widely used. Some of you may remember me raving about the first bottle I tried as it was delicious. This bottle not so much. It was a lot more bready (I don't care if it's not a word) than the last bottle, and a bit more funky but not in a fun Belgian sort of way, but in a I can't believe I have to keep drinking this sort of way. It's amazing how much it's changed over the last few months, and not for the better. The thing I'm most disappointed in is that it's not even getting sour as it ages, it's just getting bad. I was planning on harvesting the dregs from a bottle to make a 5 gallon batch of this, but after last night I've decided not to. I'm just shocked how rapidly this beer went bad. I still have a couple more bottles, maybe I'll let them age for a year and hope the go back to being good again.
I also had a bottle of my blueberry beer last night. In spite of the roughly 4 pounds of blueberries added to secondary, I can't taste even slight hints of the fruit in the final product. It's no wonder so many brewers take the easy road and add extract. Admittedly, the beer I brewed was a pretty flavorful beer to begin with, so there was already a lot that the berries had to compete with. I'm sure they would have been a little more pronounced had this instead been an American wheat. Don't get me wrong, the beer is delicious, it's just not a fruit beer. The only thing I think the blueberries really imparted into the beer was some wild yeast as I just added the fresh berries straight into the secondary fermentation. It's not so much that it taste anything close to the first beer I described, but enough that I can taste hints of something else going on. If I try this again, I think for one, I'll use even more blueberries, and two, I think I'll cook them down to a syrup first, then add that to eliminate the possibility of wild yeast, and hopefully break the skins more to get more flavor into the beer. Also, I'd probably use Maine blueberries instead, as they seem to be more flavorful than the random assortment that I did use.

Hind Sight is 20/20

2010-09-26T07:51:00.002-04:00

About an hour ago I asleep in bed, but was woken up by a full bladder. I got up to use the bathroom, and in my half sleep state thought, do I smell something? I ignored this, and went to the bathroom. My brain is slowly waking up, and half way though my business I realize that the smell is yeast. It's been my experience as a brewer that if I'm not making bread, yeast tends to be a bad smell. I finish up in the bathroom, go to the room with my carboy, and reluctantly turn on the light expecting to see some beer overflowing the air lock. Oh I could only be so lucky. Instead, I found the airlock about 4 feet away form the carboy, yeast and trube flowing down the side of the carboy like a river, and the walls, ceiling, and a big blue chair all covered in this beer shit. As a result, I just had to spend the last hour of my Sunday morning cleaning up the beer room before Claire wakes up. Not my favorite 7 AM activity.
I'm am actually pretty surprised this happened. I have not needed a blow off tube in quite sometime. I found that if I either used a bunch of wheat, or if I boil my wort on the stove top for some reason, I typically will need one, or if I go too close to the 6 gallon mark on the carboy I'll need one. But usually if I boil with my propane burner I'm fine and it never comes close to overflowing. I have no idea why this is the case, it's just something I've observed with today's explosion being the exception. Well time for coffee.

End To a Good Brewing Year

2010-09-16T08:56:00.002-04:00

It would seem that Syracuse has two seasons, cold and miserable, and hot and miserable. This past week we made the jump back to cold. It's not quite winter yet, but the fact that it rains 5 days a week is making me realize my opportunities to brew out side this year are coming to an end. I plan to fit in one more brew day this Saturday assuming the weather cooperates with the forecast, but that will probably have to be it. This seems as good a time as any to reflect on what I brewed this year and learn from it.
It's clear that most everything I made was inspired by the book Brew Like a Monk which my mother in law gave to me as a Christmas present. Not everything actually fit into a Belgian style set by the BJCP, but most everything was at least inspired by their way of thinking about brewing. Also most every beer used some combination of a Belgian yeast strain and some amount of sugar. Sugar was certainly an interesting ingredient to play around with. The only times I've used it before was by adding either a bit of brown sugar to a stout, and 4.5% of the fermentables of my Belgian mystery were the clear rock candy you get at a brew shop called Candi Sugar.
I learned this year that using over 15% plain table sugar in a tripel might be a bit too much, especially considering the only other fermentable involved was pilsner malt. I did strike an amazing balance with my League of Nations, which was 10% homemade candy syrup, and the rest were some interesting German malts, like smoked malt. That was easily the best and most interesting thing I made this year.
I did learn that it is easy to over do the amount of sugar you add, and also the darker the beer, the more forgiving it will be for larger amounts of sugar. I've never been a strict follower of the reinheitsgebot, as is evident by my root beer stout, but I was reminded this year of why it existed. It is almost impossible to make a bad beer in a sanitary brewery when following these purity laws, but once you stray things, can easily go awry. Many of my favorite beers are those made by artists knowing what they are doing, and choosing to use what ever ingredients they want, but, I think it really needs to be emphasized that they know what they are doing. This year has given me a new respect for the Trappist brewers.

Borken Computer

2010-08-22T17:33:00.001-04:00

We had a power outage this week, then when power came back on, it fried my computer's power supply. Apple in their infinite wisdom decided to use a non standard power supply in their old G4 power macs, and they also stopped making them. So I have the option to either buy a replacement off ebay for about 125 or I can replace the whole computer. Since my computer in working condition would only go for about 150 on ebay, and the fact that most software manufactures are phasing out power pc processor support, I'm building a new computer.
You may be wondering how this is beer related, and I'm about to make the connection. I have every beer recipe I've made in the last 3 years stored on that computer by means of beer tools. So till I can get a new mac up and running I have no access to any of my beer recipes. Today I bottled my spiced Christmas dubel, and normally I would record the final gravity in Beer Tools, but today I can not, so I'm posting this so that I don't forget the final gravity is 1.013. That's right, I just wasted a lot of time with an uninteresting story just so that I could write down a single number. I'll try to do better in the future.

Imperial Porter

2010-08-07T11:22:00.002-04:00

I've decided that I should ramp up the starting gravity of the Christmas porter by both adding another pound of maris otter to the mash, and adding a pound of brown sugar to the kettle. Now, depending on my mash efficiency, it should bring my starting gravity to about 1.090, or hopefully in that ball park. Sure, this is more of an imperial stout recipe at this point, but I'm still calling it a porter simply because I like to make porters for Christmas.
This sudden gravity increase will probably require a larger yeast starter than the single packet of Safale S-04 that I have in my fridge. Sure, I could just take the easy road and make a starter to build up the population, but more fun than that is to make another beer than repitch the yeast.
There are so many possibilities of good beers to make using the British ale yeast, and I was considering a few of them like an ESB or a brown ale. Today was the first day in more than a month and a half where the temperature outside is has gone a step beyond bearable, and well into the comfortable range. To celebrate the reminder than a change in seasons is just around the corner, I'm going to make a stout to enjoy this fall. I realize stouts don't really scream of foliage and rain, but it'll really just be a big departure from the pale ale's and lighter beers I've been drinking all summer. Also I haven't made a stout since my oatmeal cream stout that I made last winter, and would like to have another one around the house. I don't want it to turn to a kitchen sink beer, so what I'm thinking right now is 9 pounds pale malt, 1 pound roasted barley, 12 ounces some type of crystal, and 4 ounces of black patent. I'm adding the black patent mostly because I happen to have an extra 4 ounces lying around. I'll use just an ounce of some high alpha hop for 60 minutes, chinook if they have it in stock. As with all beers that I buy ingredients locally instead of online, the recipe is subject to changed based on inventory.

Spiced Beer

2010-07-31T11:13:00.002-04:00

I'm now on to batch number two of my Christmas beers. This one is a spiced dubbel. I'm using 10 pounds Belgian pale malt, 2 pounds dark munich, 1 pound crystal 60, and two cups of rolled oats. Follow this up with 1 ounce of northern brewer for 60 minutes, as well as a pound of dark brown sugar. Then in the last 3 minutes of the boil, I will be adding a teaspoon of ground ginger, a table spoon of ground black pepper, and lastly half a teaspoon of garlic. I'm not sure how much of a difference these spices are going to make, but I'm very interested to find out. I have not used any spices in brewing before, as I tend to hate any beer where you can taste the spices, but I'm thinking these three choices should all be mild enough to sit in the background, especially since I'm using Wyeast's Abby Ale Yeast I to ferment it with. This could easily be a disaster waiting to happen, but time will tell.

A Pleasantly Uneventful Brew Day

2010-07-25T20:53:00.002-04:00

I made my Blueberry Bitter today, and was very surprised to find that everything actually went according to plan. For instance, I didn't accidentally run out of propane, there were no boil overs, no sudden rain storms preventing me from boiling outside, I remembered to put my false bottom in my mash tun before adding water and grains, my yeast was alive and healthy, I remembered to buy hops, even my mash efficiency was right on target at 75%. I feel like my carboy is bound to explode in the middle of the night or I'm going to accidentally drop poison in the bottling bucket. It really doesn't feel like a true brew day when everything goes right.
I kept the beer recipe the same as what I posted two days ago, but I have decided that on top of the two pints of fresh blueberries that I'll add to secondary, I'll also add a pound and a half of frozen blueberries, so a total of roughly 3.2 pounds of fruit. Still far below the Ray Daniels recommended amount in designing great beer, but hopefully enough to get the subtle impact on flavor that I'm going for. Well no matter what, it should be a far cry from the blueberry wheat beers that you get in Maine.

Blueberry Bitter

2010-07-23T07:44:00.002-04:00

Ok, so it's not actually going to be a bitter, but it's a good sounding name. And there will be hops in it so it'll be bitter. But I have finalized my blueberry beer recipe, 8 pounds of English 2 row, and 1 pound of caramunich, mashed at 154. I want this to be to be a littler under attenuated and have a sweet malty finish to compliment what will probably be a very subtle blueberry flavor. In the boil kettle, I will add 6 ounces of molasses, and 1 ounce of 7.5% A.A. cascade for 60 minutes, then pitch with Wyeast's 1214 Belgian Abby yeast. Ferment this to completion, which I think will be about a week, then rack to a secondary (I plan to reuse this yeast in my next batch) and add 2 pints of blueberries. I said two pounds in the last post forgetting that blueberries are sold by volume, and not by weight. I reread the section of Ray Daniels book, Designing Great Beers, about fruit beers last night. In it he recommends for mildly flavored fruit like blueberries that you use two pounds per gallon of beer. Now if you trust the wikianswers numbers I just found, there are .85 ounces in a fluid ounce of blueberries of I'll be using 1.7 pounds of fruit in 5 gallons of beer, or 17% of what is recommended by Ray Daniels. I'm ok with this. Despite calling it a Blueberry Bitter, I really just want to made a good beer where the fruit adds a subtle extra layer of complexity to the over all beer taste, I don't really want it to taste like I'm drinking a blueberry muffin. I probably should change the name and not tell people what's in it as I think it's going to give them certain expectations about what they are about to drink, but then again fuck it, I like the sound of the name.
Me making this beer is also to erase the memory of the last blueberry beer I made as well. It was my second batch ever, it was using an extract kit, and we just added a bottle of blueberry extract to it. We went very heavy on the blueberry syrup, and it was pretty tasty, but it was more of a blueberry soda type beer, than a beer with blueberry flavor to it. I'm trying to do the exact opposite this time, and still make something tasty, but something that is much more respectable as a beer.

Christmas Time Already?

2010-07-21T08:07:00.002-04:00

Ok, so it's not even close to Christmas time, however, it is time to start brewing Christmas beers. I think this year, I'll bee making 3 batches. Last year I made a peanut butter porter, and an apple cider heffeweizen, or as I liked to call it, a ciderweizen. The year before I made a cranberry amber ale, and a hazelnut porter. I intended these to be one time creations that would be something special you drink a bottle of at a time. What I was forgetting about both years is that Christmas at the Enkosky house is more of a day and a half of binge drinking. My beers worked for getting a buzz on, but this year I want to do more subtle flavored beers.
The first one I have planed I will probably start this weekend, a blueberry Belgian pale ale. The not in anyway finalized recipe is as follows, 8 pounds of Marris Otter, 1 pound of cara munich, 1 ounce of cascade for 60 minutes, half a pound of molasses added some where in the middle of the boil, and two pounds of fresh blueberries. I have decided on the yeast yet, since I know I will be at the mercy of what ever Belgian yeast is currently in stock at the local homebrew shop. For the same reason, the grain bill and hops may change as well.
Second up, will be a ginger dubble. This one is a little further away, so I'll be buying ingredients online. This will be 10 pounds of Belgian pale malt, 2 pounds of munich, 1 pound of crystal 40, and currently an undetermined amount of fresh ginger added to the boil. Also haven't picked the hops yet, and the yeast will just be what ever I use for the blueberry pale since I plan to repitch. Oh, also I'll be adding a pound of brown sugar to the boil, probably at 60 minutes in hopes of getting it to caramelize in the kettle to a small degree.
Lastly, I'm just going to make a straight up porter using my self proclaimed famous Eli Porter recipe. Well it wont be the original recipe, but a close reproduction, so 12 pounds of Marris Otter, 3 pounds of dark crystal malt, a pound of chocolate malt, 4 ounces of black patent, and between 2 and 3 ounces of fuggles added though out the boil. This porter has always gone over well in the past, and should be a nice alternative for those that are either not into Belgian beers, or flavored beers.

Belgish Bottling Notes

2010-07-11T07:59:00.002-04:00

I bottled my Belgish beer yesterday. For those who don't remember, this was 15 lbs pale ale malt, 2 lbs Munich, 1 pound oatmeal, half a pound of black patent malt, a pound of white table sugar, a pound of brown sugar, and a pound of homemade candi sugar. I severely messed up mashing on this, which you may read about in an older post, got a starting gravity of 1.084. It finished at 1.010, and tasted pretty damn good. It is fairly light in body and despite being warm and flat was still pretty easy to drink. It's between a dark brown and black in color.

I also want to point out what a difference carbonation can make. So I have not been nuts about my tripel and so have been slowly working thought it. It's not terrible, it's just not my favorite beer. The carbonation in mine is far lower than an actual Belgian tripel due to my fear of bottle bombs. I did however have about 5 Belgian bottles around, the think glass kind, so for those, I also added a sugar tab into it to give those more carbonation. I drank one of those bottles two days ago, and it was amazing. It seemed that the higher carbonation level really muted the higher alcohol flavors which was what was off putting to me about this beer to begin with. I feel much better about that recipe after tasting that, and I can understand why they are suppose to be so highly carbonated now.

League of Awsome, and Dandelion Crap

2010-06-13T11:17:00.002-04:00

I should start off with the good news, which is that my League of Nations beer rocks. It is a very pale yellow, highly carbonated brew that pours a bit cloudy. There are just faint hints of smoke, and a moderate amount of malt that is perfectly balanced with the hop flavor and bitterness. The hops lend a slight grassy flavor to this, with just hints of funk from the Belgian yeast. It's nice and dry, and from drinking it, I would never guess that it's 7.9% abv, that is until I finish off a pint.
Now that I have the good news out of the way, time to talk about my dandelion wine. I have about a gallon of it fermenting in one vessel, and half a gallon fermenting in a second vessel. The half gallon I have already racked once about 3 weeks ago because I needed the growler it was in to bottle my League of Nations. Today, I re-racked that half, and racked the other half for the first time. I wanted a gravity reading of both, and also made the mistake of tasting each sample. From what I've read, this is not suppose to be ready for about a year, and so I hope it'll improve, but if it doesn't, then I have made the most vile liquid ever. The only way to describe it, is if Kool-Aid made an apple-rubber band flavor. It is way too sweet, and all that sweetness is just complimenting other flavors that I don't want in my mouth. Let's just hope time fixes the taste a bit. The starting gravity was 1.124. As of today, the gravity of the half gallon half is 1.025, and the gravity of the 1 gallon half is 1.028, which means when I combine the two, it should be a gravity of 1.027, or 12.96% abv. I'll probably rack this again in another month or two in the hopes of getting the gravity down a bit more, and I'm considering adding some oak chips at some point and hopefully that help give is some positive flavors. Here's hoping the internet is correct when telling me that'll it'll take at least a year before it tastes good.

League of Nations Update

2010-05-23T14:04:00.002-04:00

Today was bottling day for the League of Nations of Beer. I typically use a strainer to filter out as much of the hops and rube as I can, but when siphoning the wort out of my brew pot on this batch, my sanitized strainer fell on the ground so I just decided to let it all into the fermenter. At the time I thought I could just rack it to a secondary fermenter, but then two days later I broke my hand and could no longer lift a full carboy. As a result, the beer just sat on all that hop trube for three week. My broken hand is finally starting to be a little more useful since it was taken out o the splint it was in this week, so to celebrate I bottled this beer. The final gravity is 1.010, giving it an alcohol by volume content of 7.9% which is right where I was shooting for. My sample today was a bit cidery, with a harsh bitterness, but, I'm hoping with age both will mellow a bit. I also used a full cup of corn suger to prime the 5 gallon batch, so I think the higher carbonation will also help mask the harsh bitterness.
I nearly had a minor catastrophe on my hands because I forgot to buy bottle caps yesterday, and I only had 38 on hand. Luckily, after searching my basement for a while, I was able to come up with enough swing top, and large bottles (including a half gallon growler) that 38 caps was more than enough. Also I lost about half a gallon in the bottom of my carboy from all the crap I wasn't able to filter out to begin with.
To sum up, I was certainly not impressed with what I tasted today, but I still have hope that it'll improve with age.

Perfect Pale

2010-05-15T21:05:00.002-04:00

I broke my hand two weeks ago and had to have surgery on it this week. I'm not suppose to have any alcohol while on the pain meds so I had been with out a single beer for the last two weeks. The original break happened the day after I bottled a highly hopped pale ale. I left the last bottle I filled out on my dresser because it was only three quarters full, and so my plan was to drink that one first as a test bottle. So for the last two weeks of not being able to drink, I have been staring at this bottle of beer just reminding me that I can't drink.
Today was my first full day off the pain meds, so to celebrate, I chilled and cracked open that bottle that had been taunting me. That first sip reminded me of why I go through all the work of home brewing. Even before the first sip, I was hit in the nose with the wonderfully pungent cascades I dry hopped with. The bitterness is pretty much at the upper edge of what the malt can support before it just goes too far. It's a very citrusy beer. It had a nice thick creamy head that never dissipated. Lastly, at 6.8% abv, the one glass put me in exactly the right mood I needed after this week. The only place for improvement I saw, was that the body was a little thinner than I wanted. God I love this beer.

Dandelion Wine

2010-05-03T08:17:00.002-04:00

So far my past attempts to ferment non-beer beverages have not been stellar. I've done two things, a half gallon mead experiment, and a half gallon hard cider. While both of them technically contained alcohol, both, were at least in my opinion, undrinkable (fortunately, Claire found a home for the cider). Motivated by these past failures, I'm trying again, this time a dandelion wine. The name dandelion wine is a little misleading, as dandelions themselves contain no fermentable sugars, and so you are actually fermenting lain table sugar, but flavoring it with dandelions. Now there are a lot of instructions to make this stuff online, and Basic Brewing Radio even had an episode about the drink, so I read the instructions, and listened to the episode, then just sort of did my own thing anyway.
Everything I was reading recommended removing as much if not all of the green matter from the heads, but being the lazy man that I am, I cut off a lot of it but not all of it. I then soaked the heads in about a quart of room temperature water for about 2 hours, then brought it up to just before a boil and shut off the heat. I let this sit over night, then added more water to get it to about 2 gallons, added some lime zest, lime juice, lemon juice, yeast nutrient, and 4 pounds of sugar, then boiled for an hour. I let the whole thing sit and slowly cool off for about 5 hours before straining out the solid matter, and putting the still very hot liquid, which is not 1.5 gallons, in the fridge for an hour to get it down to about 80 degrees. I pitched a packet of champagne yeast, then had to divide it into a gallon growler, and a half gallon growler. It seemed silly to use one of my 5 gallon carboys for 1.5 gallons of this, and I don't have a 3 gallon one, so this was the best I could do. With in hours it was already visibly fermenting, which is what it is currently doing. I'm told this has to age for a minimum of a year before it's really drinkable, so let's see.
I should also point out that the sweet dandelion mixture really just smells like honey, so I'm looking forward to this.

WTF 1214

2010-05-02T11:56:00.002-04:00

So when I was first brewing my Belgian/American Pale ale a month ago, I thought my Trappist yeast was dead, so I had Claire go get me a smack pack of the 1214 Abby yeast, which she smacked on the way home with it. By the time she got home, I noticed the Trappist yeast had come alive so I threw the abby yeast in the fridge for later use. Much to my surprise, the smack pack of the abby yeast still managed to balloon up in the fridge, which I assumed it would be too cold for it to do. Well I was finally ready to use it yesterday, and so I just assumed taking it from a cold temperature that it's not nuts about, and throwing it into a 75 degree wort, it would explode with activity. I think in reality I ended up shocking it and killing off a lot of the yeast. I woke up this morning to no activity what so ever. In fact the air lock was starting to suck in since it had cooled off in the room over night. I thought it was completely dead, and there are no brew shops open on Sunday in the greater Syracuse area (that's right, Bangor is better for brewing than Syracuse). I was getting ready to harvest the dregs off one of the bottles from my sour dough beer when finally I noticed a very thin white head starting to form on the wort. So I guess it wasn't totally dead, and I don't plan to treat yeast like that again, or if I do I'll make a starter before pitching it into a full batch.

Brew Day

2010-05-01T12:07:00.003-04:00

I racked my Belgian inspired brown ale this morning, a beer that I have decided to call Belgish, and after 2 weeks of primary fermentation it's down to 1.013. I'm guessing it'll drop another point or two before I bottle it, as it's in the 80's today, and the air lock started bubbling up again after racking. Its currently 9.4% abv, but I'm guessing it'll finish around 9.8%. I'm already pretty pleased with the 85% attenuation I've gotten so far. The egg fart smell is still pretty heavy in the beer, and it tastes a lot like my honey bunches of oats did in this stage as well, which is to say not great. I still have faith that it'll age out of the beer, I'll probably leave it in secondary for about a month before bottling, then bottle condition for about 2 months.
My League of nations beer is coming along pretty nicely with only one minor hick-up so far. I planning on doing a single infusion mash, and mash at 146 for 90 minutes, but I undershot that by a lot. It ended up being 138 degrees, so I pulled 3 quarts out and did a little decoction. I let the 3 quarts rest at 150 for 15 minutes, then brought it to a boil, but only boiled for about 2 minutes. I returned it to the mash tun and then hit a temp of about 150, a bit higher than I wanted but I'll live with it. I'm not mid sparge, and I assume the rest of the day should be fairly uneventful.

League of Nations of Beer

2010-04-24T13:12:00.003-04:00

Ok, so the last recipe I posted for a Belgian Stout, scratch that completely. Instead, I'm making what I'm calling the League of Beer Nations. I'm incorporating ingredients from the most influential brewing countries, Germany, England, the US, and Belgium. I'm using all German malts, all US hops, however they are clones of English hops, and lastly a Belgian yeast, and some home made candy sugar syrup. I was originally planning on using a combination of Fuggles and Goldings, but the home brew store had a sale on Willamette so I decided to go with 3 ounces of that instead. The new recipe is as follows:
Malts:
8 lbs Pilsner Malt
1 lb Munich
1 lb Wheat
1 lb German Smoked
Adjuncts:
1 lb White table sugar boiled into a syrup
Hops:
1 oz Willamette 5.8% AA 60 min.
.5 oz Willamette 5.8% AA 30 min
.5 oz Willamette 5.8% AA 15 min
.5 oz Willamette 5.8% AA 5 min
.5 oz Willamette 5.8% AA flame out

Yeast
Wyeast Belgian Abby Ale Yeast 1214

Now I just have to hope for sun tomorrow.

B.S. Beer

2010-04-21T09:40:00.004-04:00

When I was brewing my Belgian style American pale ale, I had smack pack of Wyeast 3787 Trappist yeast that I had planned to use. After 5 hours, the pouch had not really expanded at all, and I noticed it was past the expiration date, which lead me to believe it was dead. So mid boil, I sent Claire out to buy a smack pack of 1214 Abby yeast and smack it on her way home. Once I was ready to pitch, I noticed that the Trappist did finally balloon up, and so I decided to go with it after all, and put the Abby yeast in the fridge hoping that would stop the activator from doing it's thing. It didn't, and so now I have had this yeast pouch slowly expanding in my fridge for the last three weeks, and so now feel obliged to do another Belgian style beer this week. As a result, my BS beer, aka, a Belgian Stout. This recipe is subject to change based on supply of ingredients at the store, but right now here is my plan:

8 lbs Marris Otter
1 lb Munich
1 lb Wheat Malt
.75 lbs Chocolate
.25 lbs Roasted Barley
.5 lbs Rolled Oats
.75 lbs Home Made Candy Syrup
.25 lbs Brown Sugar
1 oz Chinook for 45 minutes

Rotten Egg Farts

2010-04-20T23:59:00.002-04:00

As I was browsing the internet tonight, I thought I smelled something that was most certainly off. I didn't think too much of it as I keep my computer in the same room as my fish tank, and the litter box. Also the cats have been eating a lot of ham and mayonnaise recently, so feline flatulence was another possibility. I had to plug in my printer, which involved me leaning over my carboy containing my Belgianish ale that I brewed on Saturday, when I felt like I was being punched in the face by a rotten egg fart. Sadly, this was not the first time I had smelled this odor, it was also exactly what my honey bunches of oats ale smelled like last year. On the plus side, the smell did not last for ever in that beer, and after 3 weeks fermentation, then a month bottle conditioning, it was gone completely and the beer was fantastic. It was actually one of the biggest hits of my wedding beers. I still have a lot of hope for this guy, so we'll see how it smells in two months from now.

Brewsaster

2010-04-17T10:44:00.003-04:00

So today may not have been the best day for me to decide to brew. The Trappist yeast from my pale ale last week is at it's prime to reuse, however it is very cloudy outside, cold, and they are predicting on and off rain. I thought fuck it, hopefully I'll get lucky with a 2 hour spot of no rain when I need to boil, and I'm still hoping on that. The problem is that my mind was so preoccupied with the rain, that I forgot to put the false bottom into my mash tun. I did not think about this till I had added half my grains. So now, once it's done mashing, I'm going to have to scoop about 20 pounds of wet grains into my brew pot so that I can install the false bottom in order to scoop it all back to the mash tun. Yay fun.
On the plus side, I made my very first candy syrup today using a pound of table sugar and some water. It smells really good, but it's not that dark. I probably could have let it go a bit longer, but what ever, there should be enough going on in this beer that it wont matter if I don't get too much flavor from the sugar. I will also be adding a pound of plain table sugar, and a pound of brown sugar to the brew pot. If all goes to plan, this beer should finish between 11 to 13% abv. Now let's just hope the rain gods are with me in the upcoming hours.

**Edit**
Ok, so it is raining, making my hopes of an out door boil impossible. Also, after finally getting the mash out of the mash tun and installing the false bottom, and putting the mash back in, I had my first ever stuck sparge today. The problem is I didn't fully empty the mash tun when installing the false bottom, I just mostly emptied it, and and a lot more grains got stuck underneath the false bottom than should have, and so I had to empty it again, rinse the false bottom, flush out the faucet, reinstall everything, make sure it was fully flowing, put the mash back in then at that point, I had added so much extra water to the mash in the process of trying to get it unstuck, that there was no point in rinsing the grains, so I just did one running. I'm sure my efficiency will take a hit on this, but there is so much extra sugar added to the kettle that it should still be fairly high gravity. Let's just hope it is drinkable after all this.

Side By Side

2010-04-10T16:44:00.003-04:00

This is the final showdown, and probably my last post about these two beers. Now that both batches are fully finished, I did a side by side tasting of the two. I should point that that the US-05 beer is on the left in that picture, and the sourdough beer is on the right. This is not the best picture of the two, but you can still sort of see that the sourdough half is a bit darker than the other. I also held both glasses side by side up to a light to verify this. What also surprised me, and again you can sort of see it in this picture, the sourdough beer had better head retention. The creamy head you see in this picture stayed on the top pretty much till the glass was empty, yet the US-05 one the tiny head it started with was gone really once I started drinking it.
I will say that time has been kind to the US-05 half, and it tastes much better than I remember it, but still not a beer I would ever buy or make again. It really just doesn't have much going on to make it stand out. The sourdough beer on the other hand is really just nice and fruity, and it really rounds out the beer very nicely. My plan is to harvest some of the yeast from the bottom of one of the bottles and grow up a starter out of it and brew a 5 gallon all grain version of this beer at some point this summer. It should be interesting to see how the beer turns out with a warmer fermentation.

What a Difference a Yeast Makes

2010-04-07T22:49:00.002-04:00

The beer fermented with my sourdough starter is fully finished, chilled, and awesome. Since both this and the one fermented with US-05 are each 7% abv, I'm going to save my side by side comparison for this weekend when I don't work the next day, but I'm so excited about this one I just wanted to write about it. As much as I raved about the sample on bottling day, this final beer is incredible. It's nice and dry, and very fruity. I was half expecting this to taste similar to a lambic due to the fact that it's all wild yeast to ferment it, but really I'd say it's closer to a doubbel. There is a lot less carbonation than a doubbel, but that is due to my fear of bottle bombs. Other than that, it does fit all the other bjcp guidelines for a doubbel. It's pretty dry with a whole lot of funk to it. I'm guessing if I let it sit considerably longer it would probably turn more sour over time, but really I think this beer is perfect where it is. I was really assuming I would want to blend it with the other half of this batch, but that would be such a bastardization of this beautiful beer.

Not An Over Whealming Success

2010-04-07T09:33:00.002-04:00

I got antsy and cracked open a bottle of my tripel last night. It's only been bottle conditioning for about 9 days as of yesterday, but I figured with the fresh yeast I added at bottling, combined with the fact that it's been in the 80's here for the last week and a half it should be carbonated by now. It is carbonated, however, I'm not ready to call this beer finished just yet. At least I hope it's not finished just yet. The cidery taste that was big at bottling time is a bit subdued now. It has minimal aroma, and there is just a bit of fruityness to it when it first hits the tongue. That is followed by a big alcohol bite. In fact I would almost say that alcohol is the dominant flavor in this beer right now. That should not really be surprising considering it's 9% abv, and it's current gravity is just barley above water at 1.006. I'm not getting as many of the interesting characteristics from the yeast as I had hoped, mostly because I think it fermented too cold. If I had waited about a month to brew this I think it would have been perfect. Also, as I mentioned in a previous post, I used champagne yeast to dry it out after the Belgian strong ale yeast had kicked out, and again, had it been warmer, I think the Belgian yeast could have finished the job by itself. I will say though, the beer does have a very nice finish. I do have hope that as it ages a bit longer, the alcohol will mellow out a bit, and it'll be much more enjoyable to drink.
If I were to redo this recipe, first off, I would brew it when it's warmer in my apartment as previously stated. Also, I would boil the wort down longer to concentrate it more to give it a bit more body. Lastly, I would either switch to corn sugar, or I would reduce the amount of table sugar by about half a pound.
In conclusion, I'm glad I attempted my first tripel, I'm not upset with my results, and I feel as though I learned a lot from doing this that will make future attempts much better.

Comming Up

2010-03-29T09:24:00.002-04:00

I didn't brew this past weekend as yesterday sucked weather wise, and I forgot to go to the brew store while they were open. And since this store has the worst hours in the world (there is only a 5 hour window on Saturdays that they are open when I'm not working), I decided to order ingredients for my next two batches online today.
Up next, I will be brewing an American style pale ale, with Cascade, Amarillo, and Simcoe, but I will be fermenting it with Wyeast's Trappist 3787. The reason for this choice is that I'm in the mood for a hoppy pale ale, and after this batch I plan to make a high gravity Belgian style strong ale, that I want a lot of yeast for. So I will be using this pale ale to build up a big yeast cake that I will put the Belgian style wort on.
The pale ale will be basic, 10 lbs of American 2-Row, 1 lb of caramel 40, plus the above mentioned hops. The hop schedule has not yet been finalized, but I bough an ounce of each of those three, and will be using some combination of them for both beers.
The Belgian style strong ale will be a bit more complex. For that I bough 15 lbs of Belgian pale malt, 2 lbs of dark Munich, .5 lbs of black pattent, plus 3 lbs of white table sugar. I will probably add a third of the sugar straight from the bag, and I'm going to try to make my own candy sugar syrup with the other two pounds. Brew Like a Monk gives one recipe for doing this, and there was an entire episode of Basic Brewing Radio dedicated to the subject, and so between the two sources, I think I can do it. That's what's coming up on the horizon.

Tripple Update

2010-03-27T11:32:00.002-04:00

My tripel was ready to bottle today. Those that recall my first post about this beer, I was aiming for a terminal gravity of 1.010, and it looks like I over shot that a bit. It ended it at 1.006, giving me an apparent attenuation of about 92%, and an abv of about 9%. A week into primary fermentation it looked like my wyeast 1388 was quitting, so to reach this dryness I added half a packet of dry champagne yeast. My sample was a bit on the cidery side, but it still tasted pretty good. I was not able to get my fermentation as hot as I wanted it, so I didn't get as many of the interesting characteristics out of the yeast as I had hoped I would, but it still tastes in the ball park of a tripel. I think this would have been better if I had boiled it down longer and reached a higher original gravity, but it was still a pretty tasty sample. I added the remaining fermentis US-05 that I had saved from my psuedo-bock into the bottling bucket and half a cup of corn sugar. This beer should be ready to drink come the nice parts of spring, and should last me into the middle of summer. I look forward to this refreshing beer that is still strong enough to put me flat on my ass if I'm not careful.

I'm going to the homebrew store today, and weather permitting will be brewing a full 5 gallon batch tomorrow. Of what, I haven't totally decided. It'll be some sort of pale ale, I'm just not sure how strong or hoppy I want to go with it just yet. My last pale ale was terrific, and I'm considering repeating that recipe to have a nice session beer, but the temptation to make a strong hop monster is always there. We'll see what hop prices are, and what they have for a selection at the store before I finalize a recipe.

Yeast Gone Wild

2010-03-21T11:59:00.002-04:00

The small batch I fermented using a sourdough starter I made was finally ready to be bottled today. The terminal gravity is identical to the one fermented with US-05, which is 1.013. I am actually very surprised by that, I expected this one to come in lower than that. That is probably the only thing these two beers have in common. Now admittedly, I have not yet done a side by side comparison of the two beers yet, and it was about 3 weeks ago when I last tasted the US-05 version, and my sampling today was obviously warm and flat, but man oh man was this one so much better. Despite having the same terminal gravity, this one seems to have much more body and mouth feel. It also seems to have better head retention. If my memory is serving me correctly, this one is also darker than the US-05.
As far as taste goes, I can't believe these came from the same wort. This one some how tastes both more malty and hopy. There is some fruitiness to this as well, but nothing close to a heffeweizen or lambic or any like that. There was no banana or clove character, and I didn't pick up on any sourness which surprised me most. I am pretty sure it's going to be a while before the beer is carbonated as I didn't pitch any fresh yeast into the bottles, and it took for ever for the original yeast to ferment the beer in the first place. Perhaps it'll pick up more sourness with time, but if this beer didn't change a bit from what I tasted today, I would be a very happy man. It's not even that I like it compared to the half with a cultured yeast, it was just a good beer. I would be happy to scale this recipe up to a 5 gallon batch.
After today, I think I will definitely be making another beer from a sourdough culture. Also, if I ever use as much wheat and sugar in a worth again, I will need to either make sure I use an interesting yeast or add a lot more hops.

Not So Wild Yeast

2010-02-28T17:05:00.002-05:00

For my small batch of beer that was half fermented with sourdough starter, and half with Safale US-05, the Safale half is finally fully bottle conditioned. I'm drinking a glass of this stuff straight, and boy oh boy what a shitty beer. I really wanted the yeast to shine through in the beer, so it's very lightly hopped, just a bittering addition at 60 minutes of Tettnanger, and the malt bill was largely wheat based. I also over pitched the shit out of the US-05 half, all of this adds up to the worst beer I've ever made. It's as if I made a 7% abv version of bud lite. I taste no hops, virtually no malt, it's just yellow fizzy stuff.
I still haven't bottled the other half of this experiment yet, as the sourdough half has not finished fermenting yet. I have not taken a gravity sample of it as I only have a gallon of the stuff, and I don't want to waste any of it till I'm ready to bottle. I'm convinced that it'll have to be better than this half, and hopefully blending the two will create something enjoyable.

Anccidetnt Brewing

2010-02-24T08:35:00.003-05:00

In the Complete Joy of Homebrewing, Papazian describes a situation in which beer brewing might have been discovered. His theory is that someone left a bushel of grain out side, it got rained on, then dried out in the sun, then got rained on again, then while wet early farmers noticed it bubbling on top, and beer was discovered. I'm not sure I ever fully believed this tale till last night. After brewing my triple, I left the 8 pounds of spent pilsner malt in a plastic bag on my kitchen floor. One of the cats ripped open the plastic bag while I was at work, and what I came home to was the very familiar smell of yeast fermentation of beer. I've smelled this same exact smell when ever I would come home to discover I had a bottle bomb, or when I had 5 bottle bomb in the trunk of my car. It's also the same smell you smell when you walk into Middle Ages Brewery here in Syracuse.
It just make me think that if in 2 days, wet barley, that has had between 68.6% to 76.74% of it's fermentables removed, will start fermenting all by itself then I can believe this same thing could have happened in ancient times. This also helps my theory that barley really wants to become beer.

Brew Software Randomness

2010-02-22T10:33:00.002-05:00

Out of curiosity, I just entered the same exact recipe for my triple into four different brewing software applications, to get very different results. The recipe again:
8 lbs German Pilsner
1.5 lbs White Table Sugar
.5 oz Saaz 90 mins
.5 oz Hallertau 90 mins
.5 oz Saaz 17 mins
.5 oz Hallertau 17 mins
Wyeast Belgian Stong Ale Yeast (1388)

The four programs I used are Homebrew Formulator, BeerTools Pro, Brewtarget, and lastly beercalculus from hopville.com. I expect the IBUs to be very different for them, and sure enough they were. Beercalculus and Brewtarget are both about the same at 20.7 and 20.8 respectively, while Beertools has me at 24% and homebrew formulator is up at 30. Color is another one I expected some variance in, but didn't have too much. Both beer tools and beercalculus have me at 4srm, brewtarget at 6, and homebrew formulator was not able to calculate it, but the color box it gives me is the same color as their box for 4. One thing that surprised me is how vastly different they claim my mash efficiency is. Beertools gives me 76.74%, brew target is exactly 75%, beercalculus is down to 72%, while homebrew formulator is only 68.6%. I don't know if each one is calculating the efficiency differently, or if they are just using different numbers for potential extract from the pilsner malt, or maybe some of the are for some reason calculating the sugar addition into it.

What I take away from this is to always take your own measurements and trust those above anything else. It also seems that due to the high variance in software, your best bet is to just pick the one you like using most, and use it consistently, and just analyze the data it gives you based on your previous batches. My personal favorite of the ones I used is beer tools, but my choice may be biased as that is the only one I had to pay for, so maybe I'm just telling myself it's the best so that I don't feel like I wasted money on it.

I will just leave off here as I plan to now watch my triple fermenting, a sight that I don't think can ever get old.

How Low Can I Go

2010-02-21T15:02:00.003-05:00

I wasn't planning on brewing this weekend, but I just got a copy of Brew Like a Monk, and I think it's impossible to not brew while reading this book. I decided to go with simplicity and do a triple. I was shooting for 3 gallons, but ended up with 3.75 after a 90 minute boil. I would have let it go even longer, but I'm brewing inside, and if it got any more humid in here I'd kill myself. For fermentables, I used 8 pounds of pilsner malt and 1.5 pounds white table sugar. I was planning on using corn sugar only to discover this morning that I did not quite have 1.5 pounds of it. Hops, I used half an ounce of Saaz, and half an ounce of Hallertau at 90 minutes, then another half an ounce of each at 17 minutes.
I was again planning on using Wyeast Trappist ale yeast, but the home brew store didn't have any, so instead I went with Belgian Strong Ale yeast (1388). My starting gravity is 1.074, and my goal is to get it down to 1.010, which would be 86% attenuation, and make the beer 8.4% abv. To help reach this goal, I mashed low at 147 degrees for 90 minutes, then sparged with out a mash out in the hops of getting a highly fermentable wort. Also, once the yeast starts going in a day or two, I plan to keep the carboy covered with a thick jacket, and put my heating pad in side to get the fermentation temperature up.
I also have plans for the yeast after this beer is done, but nothing is quite set in stone just yet.

Small Batch Yeast Expirment Update

2010-02-14T15:12:00.002-05:00

I bottled the small batch of beer that I pitched with US-05 today. I wanted to bottle the sourdough batch as well but it looks as though that one is actually still fermenting.
I didn't bother taking an original gravity reading since I was using mostly extracts for my fermentables, and I was lazy that day. Also, this experiment is more to compare the differences in the two yeast types, and so I figured final gravity readings are far more important.
This one finished at 1.013, which based on my original gravity estimate of 1.066, give this beer an apperent attenuation of 80% and abv of 7%.
The only hop addition in the two gallon boil was half an ounce of tettnanger for 60 minutes. The sample I tasted was very uninteresting. Had little to no body, and very little flavor. It did taste very clean, and I'm hoping some carbonation will bring some life into the finished beer, but at this point I'm not expecting much out of it. I will not be scaling this up to a 5 gallon batch in it's current form. Maybe with some more hops, and some crystal, and a different yeast strain it could be good, but not as it currently stands.
On the plus side, it is a very clean beer, so, if the sourdough half comes out way too sour, I think it'll be the perfect beer to mix it with.

Cider Time

2010-02-06T16:04:00.003-05:00

After tasting Woodchuck hard cider for the first time, the wife fell in love. As a result, I'm not trying my first batch of hard cider. Well, I did make my ciderweizen last fall, but that was one gallon of apple juice added to 4 gallons of wort, so hard counts. I have no idea how this will turn out, but it's half a gallon of unfiltered apple juice, I don't remember the brand but it's just 100% pure apple juice with no preservatives, a third of a pouch of champagne yeast, and about an 1/8th of a teaspoon of yeast nutrient. So this is on an even smaller scale than my small batches of beer. Before trying this, I looked at a lot of different recipes and methods, and being the lazy man that I am went with the simplest. Took about 3 minutes to sanitize everything with iodophore, then I mixed everything together cold, added air lock, and done. Now I'll just have to wait and see if it's drinkable.

Fermentation Station

2010-01-26T11:07:00.002-05:00

I think I probably over pitched my small batch that used the left over US-05. I collected all of the yeast from the bottom of a 3 gallon batch, I filled one 12 ounce mason jar with some of it, then the rest went into a one gallon batch. The fermentation exploded out of the jug in less than 3 hours. I had to let it sit in a bucket for 2 days and it has finally settled down.

The sourdough batch on the other had had about a 6 ounce starter, and didn't really show any signs of fermentation till last night, so about 24 hours later. It's now going quite happily.

We're All About the Small Batches

2010-01-24T14:13:00.002-05:00

Today I finally brewed the small batch that I thought up two weeks ago. I never really realized just how much less time is involved in a batch this size. It also helps that it was only a partial mash and not an all grain batch. Either way, I started to crush a pound of British pale malt around 10:30 AM, and I had two gallons of wort at pitching temperature at 2:00 PM. As I mentioned in the original post, one gallon of the wort was pitched with some left over Safale US-05 that I reused from my pseudo-bock, and the other gallon was pitched using a sourdough culture that I started last Saturday.

I plan to let both ferment to completion, but I haven't yet decided what I'm going to do with them after that. I have a pretty good feeling that the sourdough beer is going to be way too much on it's own, and would probably be best mixed with some amount of the clean version of the beer, but the problem is at what point do I mix them.
I could bottle both separately, then mix them when I'm drinking the finished beers, which would be nice as it would also let me taste each one on it's own. Or I can do a 50/50 mix of the two and bottle them both together, which would be the easiest solution as it means only mixing up one priming solution, and one bottling session. Third option would be to taste both before bottling, and try to come up with the perfect mixture of the two, bottle that, like 75% clean beer, 25% sour beer, then bottle what ever remains of the extra beer by itself.
Now each of these options have obvious advantages and draw backs, so I will probably just wait till the time comes before deciding what to do.

Last note, since I bottled my pseudo-bock last week, but wasn't ready to use the yeast till this week I was just keeping it in the fridge. I was afraid it might not survive. Forty minutes after pitching that beer, it is already overflowing the air lock so I think I can safely say it survived.

It's Like a Bucket of Malt in My Mouth

2010-01-23T17:42:00.002-05:00

Due to the fact that I keep my apartment about about 57 degrees, combined with high gravity of thee beer (1.080), my pseudo-bock was pretty actively fermenting for about 13 days straight. It took about 10 days of fermentation before the foam on top started to drop back down. I bottled it a week ago, and amazing the first bottle I'm drinking is already carbonated. Granted this paticular bottle was only 3/4ths full because I ran out of beer, and I have noticed that less full bottles do seem to carbonate faster, but still. The beer is extremely clear, and tastes very clean. There is almost no hop presence at all, but a big maltly punch in the face. The grain bill was about a third Munich malt, and it really shines though on this. This is certainly a recipe worth repeating.

Feeding Time

2010-01-21T10:38:00.002-05:00

The day I first saw fermentation happening in my sourdough starter, I split it in half between two jars, then fed both of them more all purpose flour and water to double to volume in each jar. It was time to feed my starters again today, as from what I've ready you should be doubling the volume of the starter every couple of days to group up a bigger culture. I just added more flour and water to one of the jars, the one which I plan to make bread with, but then I thought, I don't really want all that flour sitting in my carboy, so the other one I fed with a table spoon of raw cane sugar.
Now the strange part, the one that I fed with flour is already showing that fermentation has picked right back up, but the one that I added pure sugar to looks totally dormant. Perhaps it's because I added raw sugar as opposed to refined sugar, or maybe the sugar just isn't dissolving. It was just very counter intuitive.

And We're Off!

2010-01-19T08:26:00.002-05:00

So my second attempt at a sourdough starter has succeeded. I checked my jar this morning to see flour and water going crazy. Since I have this in a mason jar with a sealed lid I've just been opening it daily to vent it and today was the first day it actually needed it. I figure I have 6 fluid ounces of starter in a 12 ounce jar, so opening it one a day is more than ample to keep the jar from exploding.
I also smelled the jar when I was venting it today, and it smells pretty awesome. I wasn't planning on making bread with this, but after smelling it, I think I may split it in half, and grow up a bigger starter for a sourdough loaf.

Wild Yeast Fail

2010-01-16T13:52:00.002-05:00

Turns out the bubble I saw a couple of days ago in my raisin water were actually just bubbles that were trapped in the raisins rising to the top, not fermentation. I say this because as of this morning there were still no signs of fermentation what so ever. I then thought fuck it I want to brew with this tonight, I'll add a teaspoon of bread yeast in as well, and a table spoon of sugar. That should get some action going. Two hours later still nothing.
I then though to check the ingredients of the raisins. First ingredient raisins, no surprises there. Second ingredient, sulfur dioxide. Now, I know little about wine making, sulfur dioxide did sound familiar to me as a chemical used to stop wine fermentation. Turns out it's very good at this.
So I had to throw that out, and now I'm starting from scratch with a different sour dough starter recipe that I also found on youtube and modified slightly. This is just all purpose flour water, and suppose to use some rye flour, but instead I used some torrified wheat that I had lying around. So time to wait a week and see how this goes.

Raisin Yeast Update

2010-01-13T08:30:00.002-05:00

Well it took four days, but I'm finally seeing some signs of fermentation in my raisin water. As you can tell from the picture, the raisins have swelled up considerably, and the water has turned yellow. You can't see it in the picture, but if I hold it up to the light, I can finally see tiny bubbles rising to the top. I'm hoping by the time I'm ready to use it on Sunday I have some sediment built up on the bottom. More updates to come.

This Might Be a Disaster

2010-01-09T12:58:00.003-05:00

You may be asking yourself, why is John posting a picture of a mason jar full of raisins? Well the answer is youtube has inspired me to try another bad idea. This week I was watching a video of an Asian woman showing people how to "make" their own yeast using fruit and water. The process is quite simple. You mix fruit and water, then let it sit till it begins to ferment. Then eventually you will have yeast at the bottom of the jar. Now anyone who is not an idiot knows that you are not actually making yeast by doing this, but rather allowing air born yeast to reproduce and feast on the sugars found in fruit. The woman was also claiming that it produces a much healthier yeast that is better for you blah blah blah. Again, if you are not an idiot, you will also realize this is bull shit, and you are really just making a sour dough bread when you make bread with this yeast.

Well, I recently came into possession of two empty one gallon wine jugs, and I have just been itching to make a small batch of something. I figure what better way to initiate these jugs into the world of beer than to make something that has a better than average chance of being terrible.
I'm actually going to be making 2 gallons of beer, then splitting it in half between the two growlers. In one of them I will use my raisin water yeast, and in the other one I will repitch some Fermentis US-05 that is currently fermenting my pseudobock.
The recipe I'll be making for two gallons is going to be a pound of dry amber extract, a pound of dry wheat extract, and a cup of brown sugar. Hops are going to be very simple, half an ounce of Tettnanger for 60 minutes simply because that is what I have in my fridge currently. I'll probably have another post about this experiment on brew day, for now I will just leave you with another picture of my raisin water:

Oatmeal Cream Stout

2010-01-06T21:27:00.002-05:00

It occurs to me as I'm sitting here enjoying a pint of my oatmeal cream stout that I never posted a follow up on this beer after posting the original recipe. It has become my night time go-to beer so I feel like I owe it to this beer to just take a moment to talk about how good this turned out. Let me start with the original gravity, was 1.064 and finished at 1.023, and for those that don't want to do the math, that gives it an abv of 5.4%. When I first started brewing with Tony, I feel like every other beer we made was some kind of stout, and as a result, I got bored of brewing them, and it has been over a year since the last one I made, unless you count the root beer stout, which I'm willing to not count.
Drinking this finished beer, I can't understand why I ever got bored of brewing stouts. It is simply fantastic. I was a lot more subtle with the roasted malts than I typically am, and as a result this is such an easy beer to drink. It has a good body, and tons of sweetness. This is the perfect beer to come home to after a long day at work. It's very easy to forget that you've gone though a couple bottle of this.

Small Batch Pseudobock

2010-01-01T13:04:00.002-05:00

In honor of the new year, and the fact that it's too cold to use my propane burner, I'm making a small batch on my stove top. It's a bock recipe, but I'll be fermenting it with US-05 ale yeast instead of a lager yeast, so it wont be a true bock, but I think it'll taste pretty close anyway.

Despite the fact that I said fuck it to lagering this beer, I'm still using a decoction mash on this, just because I'm a glutton for punishment. Also I have nothing else I'm doing today. I'm doing a double decoction, which I'm already regretting as my arm feels like it's going to fall off, and I haven't even started the second decoction yet.

It's a pretty basic recipe, it's a 3 gallon batch, 6.7 pounds German pale malt, 2.9 pounds light Munich, and .6 pounds carahell. Half an ounce Tettnanger for bittering, half an ounce of saaz for flavor and half an ounce for aroma. It should be a nice change up for the pale ales and porters that I've mostly been brewing lately. It's also been a while since I last did a high gravity beer. Any who, brews away.

PB Bliss

2009-12-21T21:21:00.004-05:00

Right now my mouth is in peanut butter ecstasy. In my last post, I said that the peanut butter was very muted in this beer. Well someone hit the unmute button. This is surely a glass of happiness. The dominant flavor is clearly peanut butter, with hits of chocolate to back it up. I'm almost wishing I had brewed this earlier to give away as a Halloween beer rather than a Christmas beer, but then again the neighbors might frown upon me giving their kids beer for trick or treating.
In other home brew news, my Ciderweizen has also aged out pretty nicely. It's one of the few beers I've made that the misses has also liked. Very low bitterness in this beer. The only home brew that she had that she liked more was my friend Tony's single hopped Zeus IPA, so there is just no telling what she will like in beer as far as I'm concerned. It mostly tastes like a hard cider with some body. I typically hate hard ciders, but there is just enough going on to keep this interesting. If I do it again, I think I'm going to use a lot more smoked malt, in fact probably replace all the base malt with smoked malt, and I might use an even funkier yeast strain. I know it sounds odd, but having tasted this, I think that would be a nice improvement.
Well, I just finished off my glass of Peanut Butter Cup Porter, which means I've been posting for long enough.

Peanut Butter Porter Update

2009-12-09T08:04:00.002-05:00

I may have pre-judged this beer. I had a second bottle, served at a warmer temperature, and this one I could taste the peanut butter. It was subtle, and I'm not sure I would be able to blindly identity it, but it's there, and it does add a very nice touch to this beer. I still think there has got to be a better way to get more peanut butter flavor in a beer, but for now this will do.

It Seemed Like Such a Good Idea

2009-11-29T14:19:00.002-05:00

Last night I finally tasted a finished, fully carbonated, chilled bottle of my peanut butter cup porter, and I have to say, not worth the effort. I don't get it, before fermentation it tasted like peanut butter. When I racked it into secondary it tasted like peanut butter, when I bottled it it tasted like peanut butter. Two weeks ago, when I tried a premature bottle that was only partially carbonated it tasted like peanut butter.
Last night however, it did not taste like peanut butter. Don't get me wrong, it was a decent porter, not the best I've ever made, but decent. There was just no perceivable peanut butter taste left. What I think happened is all the remaining peanut butter left in it probably settled out in the bottle with the yeast.
I'm pretty disappointed by this as the beer was kind of a pain in the ass to make. My siphon kept dieing when transferring it into my carboy from the brew pot. I lost over a gallon of wort as sludge at the bottom of my brew pot, close to another gallon as sludge at the bottom of my carboy, plus I had to leave some off the top to avoid getting any peanut oil in the beer.
Now what I am left with is 30 bottles of a porter that was a pain in the ass to make, and will probably not be that memorable to the people that drink it. If anyone has successfully gotten a beer to taste like peanuts, I'd like to hear what you did.

Fuck

2009-11-15T13:24:00.002-05:00

I was outside with my propane burner bringing my Oatmeal Cream Stout up to a boil and was wondering how many batches I would be able to get off the one propane tank I had. Not long after that, about 5 minutes into the boil I noticed it had stopped boiling. Turns out I can get 3 batches and the sparge water for a fourth batch out of one propane tank.

I repeat, fuck.

Oatmeal Cream Stout

2009-11-15T09:30:00.002-05:00

In celebration of being able to brew high gravity beers again, today I'm brewing another low gravity beer. Well really I had already bought all the ingredients before figuring out that I can use my big mash tun again.

Right now I'm in the middle of making an oatmeal cream stout. The grain bill is as follows:

8 lbs British Pale Malt
1 lb Chocolate Malt
.75 lbs Rolled Oats
.75 lbs 64L Crystal Malt
.5 lbs Roasted Barley
.25 lbs Toasted Rolled Oats
.25 lbs Torrified Wheat

Hops:
1 oz East Kent Goldings 5% for 60 minutes
.5 oz Fuggles 4.5% for 45 minutes
.5 oz Fuggles 4.5% for 30 minutes

Misc:
1 lb Lactose

The reason for this recipe is simple. I bought a pound of lactose last spring to use in my root beer stout, then decided not to use it so I have had that sitting around since April. Also I had an oatmeal phase last year where I made oatmeal every day for lunch for a couple of months, then I got sick of it while I still had an almost completely full container of rolled oats sitting on the shelf. So in an effort to use up some of those and all the lactose, I have this oatmeal cream stout.

Last night I toasted the 4oz of oats myself in my oven at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes. I'm guessing on the 20 minutes, really I just kept them in there till they smelled the way I wanted my beer to taste.

Now with out a scale, the only good way I have to measure out the oats is by volume, so last night I had to google how many cups of oats there were in a pound. The good answer I found is there are 4.75 cups in a pound of oatmeal, the bad answer that I found on every wiki and yahoo answer page is that there are two cups in a pound. This is because people don't seem to realize in this country that a fluid ounce is not the same thing as an ounce, and they know that there are 16 ounces in a pound, and 2 fluid ounces in a cup, so they think there are two cups in a pound. By this logic, two cups of gold would weigh the same as two cups of pop corn. When I read things like that online it makes me think we should really switch over to the metric system. Any who, enough with my non-beer related rant, time to raise the temperature of my mash.

I Can Go Big Again

2009-11-14T19:36:00.002-05:00

After making my root beer stout back in April, I could not get the smell of root beer out of my 11 gallon igloo chest cooler. I didn't want to use it as a mash tun while it smelled like root beer, so I stored some bottle of my heffeweizen in it to conserve space. Well many of those bottles exploded in the cooler, so I just filled it with ice and drank the beer as fast as I could to prevent future explosions. What I did not do in my hast was clean up beer from the bottles that exploded. As a result the cooler got filled with mold. Now I really didn't want to use a moldy root beer cooler for a mash tun as I did not want all my beers to taste like sour root beer. It wasn't then end of the world, I bleached it out and got rid of the mold but it still smelled liked mold and root beer so I just set it aside for the last seven months and decided it was the end of that cooler. Since then, I have been using my 5 gallon beverage cooler as a mash tun, which gives me an absolute maximum grain capacity of about 13 pounds, so I have just been formulating all my recipes to to accommodate this and just be moderate gravity beers.

Well I was just down in the basement yesterday, saw the cooler lifted the lid and somehow all the smell was gone. There were no new growths. I had left the drain valve open all this time and I guess that was enough to get rid of all the smells. Just to be cautious I bleached it out one more time, and the thing is good as new. This bring my max grain capacity back up to about 31 pounds and allows me to brew just about any gravity beer I want again. It's truly a Thanksgiving miracle.

Peanut Buter Cup Porter Follow Up

2009-10-31T13:23:00.002-04:00

Today was racking day for my peanut butter cup porter. I have to say, first off, I enjoy knowing that I've created a beer that could kill my sister who is allergic to peanuts. Second off, the beer has cleared up to a nice black color. It was a milky brown before fermentation began, but as all the peanut butter settled to the bottom, it's looking more like a black porter. I took a gravity reading, and after a week of fermentation it's down to 1.020, which makes it's currently alcohol by volume content 5.7%. That is respectable and around what I was shooting for. I'm sure it'll drop a little more in final gravity before I bottle, which should make it about equal to my ciderweizen at around 6.1% abv.
Now I don't normally take a gravity reading at this step since the number it not that meaning full, but I was so excited to taste this I figure I might as well take a gravity reading see where I'm at. This leads me to the most important part of the beer, the taste. It is everything I had hoped for. It tastes very much like a peanut butter cup. It has a lot of malty sweetness that compliments the peanuts wonderfully. I just hope I don't lose too much of the peanut flavor as this beer clears up in secondary.
I am also relieved as I was really not sure how this beer would turn out. All week I've been fearing that I was flying too close to the sun, and spitting in the eye of the beer god Beerus. The beer was a pain in the ass to separate from the trub, the fermentation looked all wrong. I feared that left over peanut oil would kill all head in the final beer. But today I think I successfully siphoned the beer away from the last of the oil, and I think I will have one amazing beer.

Peanut Butter Cup Porter

2009-10-25T17:47:00.012-04:00

While in Germany drinking some of the worlds best beers which all brag that they still follow the Reinheitsgebot, I was inspired to make a beer that basically shits on it. The idea was for a peanut butter cup porter. My first thought was to just throw the popular candy into the boiling worth, but then got terrified as to what sort of preservatives might actually be in one of those which might fuck up fermentation. So I then had the next best idea, use peanut butter and chocolate.
The recipe:

Grains:
10 lbs Marris Otter
2 lbs British Dark Crystal
1 lb British Chocolate Malt

Hops:
2 oz Fuggles (4%)

Yeast
Fermentis Safale S-04

Special:

16 oz Wegmans Brand All Natural Peanut Butter (the only ingredient in this brand peanut butter is peanuts)
8 oz Hershey's Cocoa Power
2 oz Unsweetened Bakers Chocolate
Irish Moss

Step 1:
Queue up the newest episode of Basic Brewing Radio.

Step 2:
Heat up 3.75 gallons of water to 168 degrees so that mash will settle down to 155 degrees.

Step 3:
Pour water and grains into mash turn mix and let sit for an hour.

Step 4:
Sparge with 4.5 gallons of water at 170 degrees. I don't have a picture for it, but I use a fly sparge keeping the sparge water in a cooler identical to my mash tun.

Step 5:
Bring wort to a boil.

Cautionary note, if using a propane burner like this, use caution when lighting it. I recommend using one of the long fireplace lighters so that you may safely keep your distance. I do not have one of those, and I was using a standard BIC lighter. As a result, I accidentally set my hair on fire and singed off a little bit of it.

Step 6:
Once boiling add all of the hops, and the chocolate. Drain off the oil from the top of the peanut butter as best as you can, then scoop the rest into the kettle.

Side note, I was not sure if the 8 oz of cocoa powder would be enough chocolate so I added 2 oz of baker's chocolate, but if I were to do this again, I would stick just with cocoa powder. Also I began to drain off the peanut oil about a week before brewing to try and remove as much as possible to minimize it's effect on head retention. I still had plenty floating on top of the wort in the kettle after I chilled it.

Step 7:
Forty five minutes into the boil add a pinch of Irish moss, as well as any metal items that will touch wort after it cools off. In my case that is my immersion wort chiller and a metal strainer.

Step 8:
Fifteen minutes later, shut off the heat, connect wort chiller, and begin cooling the wort.

Step 9:
While wort is chilling, rehydrate yeast in a cup of preboiled water at 100 degrees. Sanitize your carboy, funnel, racking cane, vinyl tubbing, a metal spoon, air lock, drilled stopper, and a non-drilled stopper. I recommend an auto siphon.

Step 10:
Once wort is below 80 degrees, use the racking cane to stir wort vigorously to create a whirl pool. Let settle for 15 minutes while placing funnel in neck of carboy, and rest strainer inside funnel. Then begin racking wort into carboy though the strainer. This batch had a considerably greater amount of sediment than I have ever had before. Also peanuts kept clogging the racking cane and I lost the siphon many times. This is why I recommend the auto siphon. It got so bad at one point that I was just pumping the wort into the carboy with the auto siphon.

Step 11:
Once wort is fully transfered into carboy, plug it up with the non-drilled stopper, put carboy on it's side on a carpeted floor, then roll back it forth as fast as you can to properly aerate the wort. Put right side up again, remove stopper, add yeast and put the drilled stopper in with the air lock inside that.

Step 12:
Wait for beer.

More notes:
Like I mentioned this beer had sediment left in the bottom of the pot than I ever had before. At the end of the boil I had about 5.5 gallons of wort in my kettle, yet I was only able to get 4.5 gallons into my carboy. Then I checked the carboy after it had been sitting for a while to see that quite a bit more sediment had settled out since then. If I ever remake this batch, or if anyone else is thinking about copying this, then one thing I would really do differently is instead of putting the peanut butter into the boil, I would add it to the mash. I leave you with this picture of the beer just begging it's life.

Monster Energy Drink the Beer

2009-10-18T10:17:00.005-04:00

I just found out from Blog About Beer that the makers of monster energy drink filed a cease and desist against Rock Art Brewery out of Vermont. They have a beer called the Vermonster, and the mental midgets that make that really shitty energy drink think that consumers might be as retarded as they are and confuse the two products. Now personally I've had the energy drink, and it really sucks, and I've never had any beers from Rock Art Brewery as they were not available up in Bangor. I have no emotional attachment to this brewery. I do however have a lot of faith in free market capitalism, and it's bullshit like this that is actually a bigger threat to capitalism in the US than the Soviet Union was (I'll admit I probably would not make statements like this if I was older than 4 then when the cold war ended but regardless I stick by my comment). When one company can destroy another company just by having more money, we all suffer. It eliminates competition, or in this case it wasn't even competition. It allows those with money to control our choices. Also, if they are allowed to go after a company that is not even a rival, what next? Are they going to sue Bobby Pickett and the Crypt Keepers for the Monster Mash? Maybe they will sue the estate of Fred Gwynne for his portrayal of Herman Munster. If they really want to get creative they can sue Frankenberry as his comical depictions of monsters conflicts the the image of monster being a high intensity in your face energy drink.

In honor of this pending law suit, I'm naming the pale ale I brewed last weekend, "Monster Energy Drink the Beer". Also if I still hung out with 13 year olds I would would encourage them not to buy any more of the caffeinated piss drink the big guys sell, and I encourage everyone to buy something from Rock Art brewery if available in your area.

Hazelnut Coffee Porter

2009-10-12T09:09:00.002-04:00

Ok, so I've received multiple emails asking for the recipe for this beer, and I just went back to check the original post to notice there were some comments left that I never replied to, so I figured I should just post the full recipe.

5 Gallons of Hazelnut Coffee Porter
10 lb Marris Otter
3 lb American 2 row
2 lb Brittish Dark Crystal
1 lb Chocolate

Hops
2 oz East Kent Goldings 5% AA for 60 Minutes

Yeast Fermentis US-05 Dry ale yeast

Brew and ferment out normally. After fermentation is complete, in my case 7 days, rack to secondary. Same day that you rack take 1 pound crushed hazelnuts, put them in a pot and fill pot just barely to the top of the nuts with water. Bring to a boil, then remove from heat once reaches boil. Let sit for 15 minutes then cool off and add to secondary with freshly racked beer. Wait 5 days before adding coffee. On the 5th day, take 1 12oz bag of medium roast whole bean coffee (I used Seattle's Best Henry's Blend), pour in in a food processor. Add whiskey (I used Jameson) to food processor till it reaches about a third to half the height of the coffee beans. Run the food processor till you have a coarse crush. Think a bit bigger than what you would use in a french press. The whiskey is just to sanitize the beans, and I found that blades whirling is enough to get it in full contact with all the coffee. Now add this whiskey coffee mixture into the secondary fermenter now 5 days in. Let sit two more days, then carefully rack off into a bottling bucket being sure not to disturb any sediment. The racking alone was enough for me and I did not have any nuts or coffee grounds in the final beer.

I bottle with dme, but I'm sure it would probably be just as good with corn sugar. Also, I normally prefer a darker either french or espresso roast when drinking coffee, but was afraid the oils on the beans might kill my head retention. That is why I went with a lighter roast for this. I had no problems with head retention. If anyone tries this with a darker roast coffee, I would like to hear the results to see if it really did affect head retention or not.
Also if anyone wanted to try this as an extract recipe, all you would really need to do is replace the marris otter and 2-row with about 6 pounds light DME or about 8 pounds malt extract syrup, or some combination of the two, then steep the remaining grains.

The result of this is what I consider the best coffee beer I have ever tasted. You get all of the wonderful roasiness of the coffee, and very little bitterness out of it. I have no idea what the caffeine level of the beer is but I have personally never felt any effects from it.
When I made it, the hazelnuts I used were already de-shelled and stored in a large open bin at the grocery store. That was all I could find in January when I brewed this, and as a result the hazelnut flavor was totally overwhelmed by the coffee. A year before, when I made a hazelnut porter with out coffee in November, I was able to find hazelnuts that were still in the shells. That beer I used a pound of them as well, except that pound included shell weight, so a lot less nuts went into the actual beer. Also I did the same boiling method only I also boiled the shells in with the nuts, and also added the shells into the secondary with the nuts. Despite having less nuts in that beer, it had a much more pronounced hazelnut flavor, and I might recommend either trying that, or even try using a hazelnut flavored coffee, and skip the hassle of real nuts all together.

This is one of my all time favorite beers that I've made, and if anyone tries the recipe, I would love to hear your results.

Black Beer's Ghost

2009-10-11T20:53:00.003-04:00

Today was racking day for Black Beer's Ghost. I took a gravity reading and it's now at 1.014 which makes this beer 3.8% abv. This is one hell of a tasty beer already. Not quite the flavor I want just yet but very close, and I'm sure with time this beer will become everything I want it to be. It was the first one I made with my propane burner, and I can really taste a difference in the bitterness level. I'm getting quite a bit more out of the hops with this system. I'm calling it a brown ale simply because that's what color it is, but really, I don't know what category the beer belongs in taste wise. It's an ale made with German malts, American clones of German hops, but is not anything like a German beer. Really good though, and I'm sure this is one I will be making again for years to come.
Last night I tried a bottle of the ciderweizen. It has been conditioning for a week, and was surprisingly pretty much fully carbonated. There was something just not quite right about it however. I used a pound of smoked malt and a tablespoon of cinnamon in it, yet sadly neither of those flavors really comes though at all. I think if I were to duplicate I might use some more cinnamon, some cloves and coriander, possibly orange rind, and make it closer to a white ale. Also I'd probably replace all the pilsner malt with smoked malt. The problem is I under estimated the effect the apple cider would have on this. I only used one gallon of it in a 5 gallon batch, so it was 4 parts wheat beer to 1 part cider, but really all you taste is the apple. The bottle I had yesterday was pretty good, just not amazing. I will say, the longer I kept drinking it the more it grew on me. Well I don't need to hand it out for two more months, so hopefully it improves in that time.
Lastly, today I made a very basic pale ale. Ten pounds marris otter, one pound crystal, an ounce of amarillo and an ounce of cascade. I reused the yeast cake from Black Beer's Ghost, since the brew shop here in Syracuse charge 4 bucks for a packet of dry yeast, and I want to get the most for my money at that rate. The owner of the store is really friendly, which is annoying because I hate their prices and they do a terrible job at crushing grains, so I would like to boycott them, but he's a really nice guy. Looks like I'll just have to live with getting ripped off and having poor mash efficiencies.

Christmas Beer and John Beer

2009-10-04T15:19:00.003-04:00

I finally got around to bottling my Ciderweizen yesterday, and it tasted about as good as I had hoped. The apple really shines though as the strongest flavor. The cinnamon is very subtle but once you realize it's there, it adds as a very nice compliment to the apple. Last Christmas I made a batch of wassail loosely based on a recipe given on Basic Brewing Video, which involved some heffeweizen, apples, wine, and various spices then served warm. This was very similar to that, I'm curious how its going to taste once it's cold and carbonated. I have a lot of hope for this beer.
Now on to what I did today. As a wedding present, Tony and Pattie got me a propane burner. Up until now I had been using my electric stove to do full batch boils, heating mash water and sparge water, and pretty much anything else that needed to be heated. As a result a typical brew day for me would start at 9 am and go to about 5 pm more or less. Today I started brewing a little after 10 am and was pitched my yeast at 2 pm. Now I still mashed, sparged, and boiled for the same amount of time, and I actually spent more time chilling the wort since the ground water here is not as cold as the ground water in Maine so my wort chiller is less effective. This means before I was spending over 4 hours more just waiting for water to heat up. I remember waiting a while in the past, but I just never really realized how long it actually was. I can never go back to stove top brews again.
Just a side note, the beer I made today was a modified version of my light black beer that I made two years ago. The first batch was a 3.5% abv black session beer with a lot of hops and a light body. This version will be a little bit strong but still way under 5% abv, and a little bit lighter in color. The first go round was black, while this one is a medium brown. I'm calling it Black Beer's Ghost.

Christmas Beer Is Just Around the Corner

2009-09-11T10:35:00.003-04:00

I made my first of two Christmas beers last weekend. I went with the ciderweizen. I used 5lbs of pils malt, 5lbs wheat malt, 1lb of German smoked malt, and 4oz of torrified wheat. I also added a teaspoon of ground cinnamon into the boil. For the apple, I first caramelized about half a cup of apple cider, added that into the boil for 60 minutes, then at flame out, I added the remaining gallon of cider and turned on my wort chiller at the same time. I figure the time it takes the chiller to get the wort below 165 will be enough to make sure the cider is pasteurized. I used a heffeweizen yeast, so it should be a very fruity beer, offset by a little spiciness and smokiness. Also I did not realize this apartment is much hotter than my place in Bangor, so it fermented much hotter than I am used to. Hopefully this doesn't kill the finished beer. The smell coming from the air lock is delightful.

New City

2009-08-21T10:13:00.002-04:00

Ok, we have not been in Syracuse for a week after our big move, and now that we are a bit more settled in, I'm checking out the local home brew shops. I'm not too impressed with what I saw online that is actually in city limits, but I did find this place that is just under an hour away:
http://www.foothillhops.com/Index.html
It's a hop farm that also runs a home brew shop. Most of the shops closer seem to specialize in wine, and offer beer supplies as an after thought, but obviously since this is a hop farm, beer is their central focus. Once I start receiving pay checks again, I plan to make a trip down there to stock up for my two Christmas beers. I've decided it will be a Ciderweizen, and Peanut Butter Cup Porter. The first, I'm going to take my Enkoskaweizen recipe, replace a pound of the pale malt with German Rauch Malt, also scale it down by a gallon, then add a gallon of fresh apple cider to bring it up to volume at flame out.
The second beer, I'm going to make a modified version of the Eli Porter, add some chocolate and some peanut butter and hope for the best. I expect to have great results on both but time will tell.
Sadly neither of these will be very hop heavy beers, so getting the locally grown hops from this place will be kind of pointless to the end result, but I like the idea of supporting a farm that grows hops.
Any who, off to my first job interview here.

End of an Era

2009-07-19T09:23:00.002-04:00

Now I know that it is often recommended that you use a stainless steel spoon in your brew kettle as it's the the easiest to sanitize, and it's recommended that you don't use a wooden spoon as they are impossible to sanitize, but I always thought that was just a bunch of hog wash. I have been using a wooden spoon in all of my beers since I first started brewing with Tony. More specifically, I have been using the same exact wooden spoon since I first started brewing with Tony. That includes the 30 beers I've brewed alone, plus the roughly dozen or so that I made with Tony (we were drinking too much to keep records or even recipes for that matter). Well after my last brew, I washed the spoon, then had to pack it away with all my other beer equipment in the basement to make my apartment look nice for the wedding. Most everything was inside my rectangular igloo cooler that was my former mash tun. I needed the cooler yesterday so I brought it up, opened it to one quite horrible smell. I pulled everything out and discovered the root of the smell was my spoon which at this point was completely covered in a fuzzy layer of yellow mold. Despite the fact that I think people are just being over cautious when they refuse to put wood into a boiling wort, even I will not put a mold stick into my wort. Good bye wooden spoon, you were more than just a stirring device to me, you also had notches I made to denote 5 and 6.5 gallons of wort in my brew pot. You will be missed.

Christmas Beer

2009-07-15T06:56:00.002-04:00

What good is Christmas if you can't get your family drunk. It's getting to be that time of year to start thinking of Christmas beers. I right now have three recipes in mind, but will probably only end up making two of them, or maybe one. First off, I was thinking of making a Cherry Cordial beer, or rather a chocolate cherry beer. I'd probably do something like a pale ale grain bill, maybe with some wheat, just a bit of bittering hops, some chocolate thrown in at the end of boil, and then a pound or so of frozen cherries into secondary.
The second beer I have in mind would be a Peanut Butter Porter. I would just make a porter, take some all natural peanut butter, dump out the oil on top, then add it to the end of boil. I may or may not add chocolate to it as well, I'm not sure yet.
The last idea I have would be for a Ciderweizen. Basically, I would make a wheat beer, then add a gallon of apple cider to it. For an extra kick, I was thinking of caramelizing some cider to give it a nice sweetness.
Since I'm not that nuts about cherries, that will probably be the first to go, and since I think the cider beer will be most drinkable, I will almost certainly be doing that one. I just may also do the porter to give some variety. If you are lucky enough to be on my christmas list, you may find out what I did this december.

Beertastic

2009-07-14T07:36:00.002-04:00

Well, the honey moon is over. The wedding beers went over well. The Belgian Mystery was a crowd favorite, I suspect due to it's high alcohol content. My personal favorites were the hops on rye, whiskey brown, and the enkosky smoked bitter. Had I not bottled the heffeweizen too early it could have made the cut as well, but the fact that it takes 10 minutes to pour, and the bottle might explode on you means it just doesn't get that status.

Speaking of heffeweizens, German beer is fantastic. Three weeks in the country has made me decide to make the jump into lagers this winter once we move. I think I can manage it with out a freezer. I will just use the wet towel/fan trick to keep it cool during fermentation, then I figure I could but some styrofoam sheets and make a make shift ice box to lager the beer after. I'm not sure how well it will work, but after tasting some of those beers over there, I need to at least give it a try. As I look to the future, I'm also starting to plan some christmas beers, but those will get their own post in the near future.

Real Ale

2009-05-09T10:26:00.002-04:00

So my real ale is far and away the simplest recipe beer that I've ever made. I used 7 pounds of marris oter, and 3 oz of East Kent goldings. One malt, one hop, and a lot of flavor. Since I knew this would be a lower gravity beer, I wanted to keep a lot of body in it, so I mashed at 160. This led to 66% attenuation, and a whole lot of awesome flavor. I racked into my "cask" today, and I love the taste of this. I doubt I will do this as a cask ale again, but this is a cheap, quick, and delicious recipe that I'm certain I will make for years to come. Right now I'm making the priming sugar by doing a mash of .6 pounds of english pale malt. I know it would be a lot easier, and give me essentially the same, if not better results to just use some dry malt extract to prime, but since I'm making a point of making a real ale, I didn't want to use any extracts in this at all. I did use S-04 dry english ale yeast for this, but that's because the pouch of liquid London Ale yeast I bought ended up being dead. This beer fermented and cleared very fast. Now I just hope my igloo beverage cooler is going to be good enough to hold pressure when I attempt to carbonate this. We'll see.

I've Done It

2009-05-03T11:05:00.002-04:00

As of yesterday, at about 4:30 PM, I reached the legal limit that I can brew for the year, well at least until the end of this month when there will be a second person in my house hold. I rounded off the 100 gallons with an ESB which I plan to cask condition. I'm calling it the John Enkosky Real Ale. It was by far the simplest recipe I have ever done, and was quite fun to make. It was nothing but Maris Otter malt, and East Kent Goldings hops. I was planning to use 7 pounds of malt. When I was dividing up a 10 pound bag, I was using my bathroom scale, sine that is the only scale I own. As a result, I think I actually used 7.5 pounds of malt, which when mixed with the high efficiency I got from the mash, instead of making the ordinary bitter I was planning on, I am making an extra special bitter. I don't foresee anyone complaining that the beer has too much alcohol in the beer.
For a cask, I'm using a 5 gallon rubbermaid beverage cooler, which I'm also going to dry hop in with an ounce of goldings from fresh hops. Now, let's just hope this cooler is able to hold pressure.

Root Beer Stout

2009-05-02T09:33:00.002-04:00

It's bottling day for the root beer stout, and I have to say, not bad. It's got a pretty good body. I'm using 3/4ths a cup of corn sugar, and 1/4th a cup of white table sugar to prime so that it'll be highly carbonated, more soda like. I think that'll work really well for this beer. Chilled and carbonation are going to help this beer immensely, but as of right now, I think it's actually pretty good.

Belgian Carbonation

2009-05-01T23:32:00.000-04:00

So, I have been tasting my belgian mystery pretty regularly since bottling this batch, and while it has been good just about every tasting it always seemed under carbonated. When I bottled it, the air lock in the carboy was still very slowly bubbling, but I knew I had to bottle right away for it to be done by the wedding, so I decided to just use very little priming sugar. If I recall correctly, I ended up with about 3 table spoons of molasses. I just assumed that I didn't use enough every time I tasted a bottle that did not have any where near the carbonation levels I was aiming for. Well tonight I just opened another bottle for the first time in a month, and I have to say it was practically exploding with carbonation. It maintained a wonderful head the whole time, and has really just turned into a fantastic beer. Today was the first time that I felt like I actually made what I was originally trying to make. Even at the points where I was satisfied with the beer, I still felt like I missed the mark till tonight. I was dead on, and once I am in a more permanent location, I will be redoing this recipe, only with the incredibly long aging time in mind. Next time around, I will not even consider tasting the beer till it is at least a year old, an age this batch has still not reached. There are some things to improve. I will aim for a higher mash efficiency next time, and I will also pitch a larger starter. I will probably aerate longer, and wait longer before bottling to be sure that the beer is fully fermented. Beyond that, I like the taste a lot, I will probably use the same recipe, just improve the technique a bit. I'm going to be pleased to serve this 10% abv beer at my wedding.

It's Like Dry Liquid Bread

2009-04-26T11:34:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I brewed my Enkoskaweisen, I used a triple decoction mash, and the grain bill is as follows:

7.2lbs German Wheat Malt
5lbs German Pilsner Malt
.25lbs Torrified Wheat

Turns out a decoction mash really helps with efficiency, and I ended up getting around 90%, which basically turned the beer from a weizen to a weizenbock. That's a different matter. To deal with the spent grains, or at least some of them, I also made some bread, which I have to say is really some of the best bread I have ever made, and decided the recipe should really be posted, so here goes:

Enkoskaweisenbock Bread:
3 cups wet spent grains from recipe above
5 cups bread flour (approximate)
1 cup last runnings from mash above
1 table spoon white sugar
1 tea spoon dry bread yeast
1 table spoon canola oil
1 tea spoon salt

Add sugar to the malt liquid from the end of mash, let cool to around 100 degrees, add yeast and let sit till yeast activity is noticeable. Mean while, mix 3 cups flour with the spent grains and salt. I should note here, after sparging, the mash had a gelatinized brown gluten layer on top. I scraped this aside and took three cups of clean grains from underneath. Once yeast starter is ready, mix with dry ingredients add oil, begin to stir, adding more flour till it becomes a dough. You will need to abandon the spoon eventually and start kneading by hand. You will easily figure out exactly when this point is. Keep adding more flour till you get to a texture that looks and feels like dough (I assume you have come into contact with bread dough before in your life), then continue to knead for about 10 minutes, or until you decide your arms will fall off. Form dough into a ball, place in center of large bowl, cover with clean towel and let sit in warm place till it has about doubled in size. Uncover, knead again for about 5 minutes, then divide in half, and place each half in a loaf pan. Cover each loaf pan with a towel, and again let rise till each loaf has about doubled it's size. Bake at about 350 for half an hour, or until you have a golden brown crust. Bread is delicious fresh out of the oven.

Root Beer Stout Lesson

2009-04-25T16:25:00.002-04:00

So it turns out when any quantity of root beer extract touches anything plastic, that plastic will smell like root beer forever. I discovered this because every time I opened my mash tun today as I was making my weisen, all I could smell was root beer. I hope to god that this beer doesn't end up tasting like root beer. The boil smelled nothing like root beer, so I think I'll probably be fine. On a side note, I did a very long complicated decoction mash today, and am feeling quite proud of it.

Overly Complicated Priming Day

2009-04-25T08:27:00.002-04:00

The last batch of beer I'm making for the wedding is going to be my cask conditioned ordinary bitter, or the John Enkosky Real Ale. It's going to be pure and simple, marris otter, East Kent goldings, and a S-04 British ale yeast from Fermentis. Since I'm going though all this effort of making a true real ale, I wanted to do something special to prime it, rather than just DME or corn sugar. Originally I was going to save out a pint or so of the original wort, bottle it, and refrigerate it, then add it back on the day I rack it into my cask. Since I came up with this plan, I listened to an interview with Charlie Papazian on Basic Brewing Radio in which he went over all the steps he goes though in order to ensure sterile wort kept in this fashion for the purpose of yeast cultivation, and it really seems like a lot more effort than I want to put into this. It would also suck tremendously if this batch got contaminated with something, but I still don't want to resort to extracts at all in this batch. Instead I've decided to do a very mini-mash on casking day, in which I will mash half a pound of English Pale malt to make a quart of wort in which to prime. This does increase the length of that brew session from about 30 minutes to about 3 hours, however, it'll also be the last day I work on any of the wedding beers, and so it'll be a nice way to end this brewing season, with a ridiculous way to carbonate. All for REAL ALE!!!

Scottish Success and Irish Failure

2009-04-24T20:12:00.002-04:00

Tonight I tasted both a bottle of my Scottish ale, which has been bottle conditioning for two weeks, and my Irish red, which has been bottle conditioning for three weeks. The Irish red seems to be taking it's damn sweet time to carbonate. It was not flat, but certainly did not have the right amount of carbonation, and practically no head. The Scottish on the other hand was exactly what I was shooting for. It was perfectly malty, just a bit smokey, great head, just all around a winner. In recipe formulation, I was reading up on the style guidelines, and read that smoked malts should be avoided, and the smokey flavor should come from the yeast. I was dubious about this actually happening, but I used no smoke malts, and I used Wyeat's 1728 Scottish ale yeast, and sure enough, that smokey character is present. This beer also hammers home how much I love maris otter malt. Many of the best beers I've made have used this as the base, which includes my hazelnut coffee porter, my brown, and now this as well. I'm also looking foreword to my real ale, which is going to be nothing but maris otter and east kent goldings. It will easily be my simplest recipe to date, and I'm quite excited about doing low key bitter.

ESB: The Story of Little Beer

2009-04-22T12:13:00.002-04:00

I bottle the little beer from my parti-gyle batch last weekend. I was originally calling it an ESB since I used British hops in it, and didn't really have a better style for it. After tasting this, I'm going to keep calling it an ESB, but now it stands for Enkosky Smoked Bitter. It's amazing, tasting the beer beer one day previous, the smoked notes were totally in the background, and very mild and subtle. This one from the second running of the same mash, all I can taste is the smoked. It totally over shadows all the hops and bitterness. It's very tasty, just not what I was expecting. Either way, it'll be nice to serve a smoked beer at the wedding, as I'm sure most of the guests there will have never tasted one before.

Root Beer Stout

2009-04-18T17:30:00.002-04:00

So today I brewed my much anticipated root beer stout. As I mentioned in a previous post, I added the root beer extract to the mash water, so from the get go, my house smelled like root beer. Once I mixed the unsweetened root beer flavored water with my grains, my apartment them smelled something like vomit, in a bad way. Determined to never give up on a beer, I kept going with the recipe as planned. The grain bill was mostly some English pale malt, obviously some roasted barley, some dark crystal, black patent, and a bit of chocolate. No part of the mashing process reminded me of anything that I would want to consume, but on to the boil regardless. I just used an ounce of centennial to bitter, and not other hops were added. I also threw in roughly a pound of brown sugar, since I've pretty much already said fuck you to the Reinheitsgebot. As it boiled, the smell started to improve a bit, however there seemed to be some black sludge on top for the duration of the boil. I pitched some Safale S-04 English dry yeast.

Despite the extremely fowl smell, I took a taste of my hydrometer sample, and it was actually delicious, and not delicious for an unfermented wort delicious, but like great malty root beer delicious. It's almost too bad I have to ferment this, if I could just carbonate and package this I'd be golden. Now I am just hoping the final product will be remotely drinkable, but if not, it's getting served anyway.

Partigyle Success

2009-04-18T10:03:00.002-04:00

What's that you ask, why are you drunk at 10 am on a Saturday? Well, I'll tell you. I woke up and racked the big beer that I'm making for Tony and Pattie's as a wedding present, and took a hydrometer reading in doing so. It now clocks in at 1.024, which I'm not sure if I posted this or not, but it started at 1.103, and so those of you with out a calculator on hand, that means it's currently at 10.52abv. Since it's a sin to waste, I of course had to taste the hydrometer sample, and this is with out a doubt the best hydrometer sample I have ever had in my life. It was 8oz of pure heaven. It is so wonderfully malty, greatly sweet, and finishes slightly smokey. Now I wont typically drink the entire hydrometer sample, since typically even the best beers don't taste that good at 60 degrees and flat, but that was just not the case with this one. I am tempted to buy some champagne bottles and a corker to package the final product, since this clearly deserves something special, but due to finical reasons, I will probably just settle for 22oz capable bottles. I have not doubt that is one beer that will age very well for years to come, as I'm sure Tony and Pattie's marriage will as well.

End Results: All Grain Wins

2009-04-17T21:45:00.003-04:00

So the extract pale ale I made to compare the results of extract brewing to all grain brewing is finally carbonated. This batch did take about 2 weeks longer than the all grain batch to carbonate than the other, which may have been the result of different pitching rates or temperature, but either way, I've now tasted the finished product on both.
Now as I had mentioned in previous posts, there were many many variables that could have affected the results of both brews, and so this test can't really be used for definitive data, however at least from my poor test, I feel confident in saying that all grain wins hands down.
The flavor hops seem to have a greater presence in the extract batch, which seems odd to me since I used identical hops in both, and had an identical hop schedule, but I suppose the all grain batch was a higher gravity beer. Over all though, the all grain had a better body, better head retention, and was just over all an incredible pale ale, where as this extract batch is certainly good, but nothing special. I think this would be an interesting experiment to repeat in a more controlled environment using multiple brands of extract to compare to the all grain process. In the end, I'll admit you can make very good beer from extracts, however, I have personally the results from the all grain batch make me feel it is totally worth all the extra time, effort, and equipment involved, but the again the difference in my results probably have more to do with different pitching rates than they did with the process, but what ever.

Shocking News

2009-04-15T12:28:00.002-04:00

I'm drinking a bottle of Michelob's porter from the craft beer variety pack that I got on sale at Tim's, and amazingly, it's not very good. Now admittedly, this is probably the style of beer I'm most judgmental over, but this is just like a watered down porter with out much flavor. They boast it as a full body beer with roasted malt roundness. I do not pick up any of the roasted roundness, and the bigger problem is not enough body. Based on the O.G. gravity given on the package, and the abv found on the web site, I calculated the final gravity to be about 1.010, which is something you might shoot for for a lighter beer, but I don't think that can really be classified as a full body beer. Any who, three posts in a day is enough, time to enjoy the weather.

Root Beer Stout is Almost Upon Us

2009-04-15T07:15:00.002-04:00

This weekend I will be making my much anticipated root beer stout. I was debating when to add the root beer extract to the mix, thinking I would either put it in at bottling time, or at the end of the boil. In thinking this over, I remembered back to the original recipe that inspired this terrible idea of mine, which was something one of the guests on Basic Brewing Radio talked about, which was using Mountain Dew instead of mash water. Well, why mess with "success", I will add the extract right to the mash water. This way there is no chickening out anywhere, I'll be fully committed to this. I have also heard of people adding coffee beans to the mash to make a more subtle coffee flavor in the final product, and also adding hops to the mash, which makes the hops more subtle. Well subtlety for the root beer flavor is probably what will make this beer fly if it flies at all, so this is probably the best place to do it. As it is anyway, I've been storing the root beer extract in the same bag as the grains anyway, and as a result all the grains now smell like root beer.

Bottle Crisis Nearly Over

2009-04-15T06:51:00.002-04:00

My bottle crisis is nearly over. Thanks to the many bottles donated by Tony, I think I will finally have enough bottles for all the beers I'm brewing provided I have people over to drink at least once in the next three weeks. I need to bottle the second runnings batch from my parti-gyle this weekend which will use about 50 bottles. I currently have about 47, which gives me 3 days to drink 3 beers. If I can't do that then I have no right brewing at all.
After that, I will have two weeks to collect enough bottles for my root beer stout, then one week for 50 more. Though maybe I could single handedly drink 100 beers in three weeks, I think I'm going to have to have people over to assist in this endeavor to protect my liver.
Last night I stopped by Tim's Little Big Store in Old Town, and I realized that buying questionable beer from them is just slightly more expensive than buying empty bottles would be. As a result, I am now the owner of the Michelobe craft beer variety pack. I have a morbid curiosity to try this. Also, in full disclosure, I should admit my dirty secret, I actually think Michelobe Lager is a decent beer, not my favorite, but way better than any of the other mass produced American lagers.

And that's why you always reuse a yeast cake

2009-04-10T21:21:00.002-04:00

When I first decided to make a brown ale for the wedding, I mostly considered it a throw away recipe, and just a way to add one more beer style to the already full beer menu. The recipe was very simple, some maris otter, a bit of dark crystal, and just a touch of biscuit. I used some fuggles for bittering, and a little for flavor and aroma. Now I figured this would probably be a good beer, but nothing special. Three days into primary fermentation however, I had a brilliant moment of inspiration, and thought to make this an oak flavored beer. I bought some oak chips, then when deciding how to sanitize them before adding them to secondary, found a good suggestion online to soak it in vodka for 24 hours to get rid of some of the harsh oak flavor, throw out the vodka and add the oak to the beer. To mix it up more, I soaked the oak in cheap bourbon for 24 hours, threw out the bourbon, then replaced it with some Irish Whiskey and let that soak for 24 hours. I then threw the whole mixture, whiskey and all into the beer for 7 days in secondary.
I am now drinking the first finished bottle from this batch, and I am more impressed with myself than I typically am. I know I'm usually the first to tute my own horn, but this is possibly one of the most earned times that I've done that. It is wonderfully sweet, has an almost creamy body, great head retention, and best of all, perfect oak and whiskey notes to it. This beer easily ranks among the best beers I've made, and is possibly the very best. Considering the fact that this started as a throw away beer, this is one of my crowning achievements of beerdom.

A 4 Gallon Wonder

2009-04-07T15:22:00.003-04:00

I finally checked the level of the carboy, and looks like I'm down to 4 gallons of the big beer left after the loss from the blow off. Now I was semi-drunk when filling the carboy in the first place, but if I recall correctly, I believe I started with 4.5 gallons, which means I lost roughly half a gallon, or rather 64oz of beer to my floor. To put this in a measurement that might make more sense, this is like if I lost 1.6 homies in the streets. A sad loss indeed.

Parti-Gyle Maddness

2009-04-07T07:29:00.002-04:00

My first ever parti-gyle was a success this weekend with the help of Tony. This is when you make one big beer from the first runnings of the mash, then batch sparge to make a small beer with the second runnings. I have never seen my mash-tun filled to max capacity before, and it was great. There were slightly over 30 pounds of various malts, and about 9 gallons of water. I'm going to call the big beer a barley wine, and the little beer and ESB, however due to the malt bill I used, neither one of them really fits into any BJCP styles. In the end, there were 20 pounds of American 2-row, 7 pounds of Maris Otter, 2 pounds of German smoked malt, 1 pound of 10L American caramel, .25 pounds roasted barley, and .5 pounds biscuit. I also added about 2 pounds of molasses to the big beer in the boil kettle. All said and done, the big beer finished at 1.103, and the little beer at 1.045. The big beer was pitched on the yeast cake of Wyeast's Scottish ale yeast that was in the bottom of my carboy from my Scottish export ale, and the little beer was pitched using Safrale's S-04 dry British ale yeast.
Both beers got off to a healthy and fast fermentation, with the big beer starting first. I used a blow off tube for both, and despite the fact that the big beer was only 4.5 gallons sitting in a 6 gallon carboy, it still managed to get so out of control that it caused the half gallon carboy that the blow off tube was leading into to over flow and cause a sticky mess. Either way, both fermentations have settled down, and both are smelling delicious. I can't wait for these.

Retraction

2009-04-04T00:15:00.002-04:00

I would like to officially retract everything I said in my last post about reusing yeast. I wrote that right after tasting the first bottle of my all grain pale ale which used the yeast cake from the extract pale ale I made right before it. I did not enjoy the first bottle from last week, and I was blaming it on the over pitching. I just tried the second bottle from that batch tonight, which is a week after the first tasting, and now that it's fully carbonated, it's a perfect beer. I'm not saying the best beer, or even the best pale ale, but it's perfectly balanced, great body, wonderful head retention, just over everything is good about it. This falls into the category of, if this was the only beer I could drink for the rest of my life, I wouldn't complain. It's just another great example of "relax, don't worry, have a home brew" at work. Either way, I can not at this point imagine the extract version of this recipe coming out nearly this well.

So Maybe Not the Best Way to Reuse Yeast

2009-03-29T00:21:00.002-04:00

So I had heard that one way to reuse yeast is to simply pour the cooled worth right onto the yeast cake from your last batch. Also it is mentioned that this is a great way to get a high pitching rate for high gravity beers. I have now done this method twice, once for my all grain pale ale, and once for my whiskey brown ale. Both of these were moderate gravity beers, 1.060 and 1.051 respectively, and both of them finished at exactly 1.010. I tasted a finished bottle of the pale this morning, and also I bottled the brown ale, and tasted the pre-carbonated version of that as well. Both beers were pretty lacking in body, but the pale ale really just tasted lifeless. Perhaps conditioning it longer will help, however it was more or less a fairly bland beer, and I have no doubt that the extract version of this recipe will be far superior, just since it finished at a higher gravity. Strangely enough, the brown ale was actually rather good despite lacking the sweetness that you would associate with a brown. What really saved this one was the oak. It is a very delightful beer, I'd be happy to drink that one exactly as is, but at the same time, I do wish it had more body and sweetness to it.

In the near future, I only had one more batch that I was planning on reusing the yeast cake for, and it is a high gravity barley wine. I will want really high attenuation on this, since I'm sure it's going to finish at a higher gravity regardless. For future recipes, I've decided I will not reuse the yeast in this fashion for any normal gravity beer, since it seems clear to me that I'm way over pitching, and it's hurting the final product.

Tell Me Rye

2009-03-22T10:48:00.002-04:00

Another brew day. Today I'm making my rye beer. I've never actually tasted one, and that is one of those styles where there are no strict style guidelines. Pretty much as far as I can tell the only one thing that the style guidelines say is that it should be a lighter colored beer. Being me, I saw this then added 4 oz of roasted barley, so I'll have a nice and dark beer. The original mash smelled like any other. I missed my target temp by about 10 degrees however, and I didn't want to add more water, so I decided what the fuck I'm going to do this as a decoction mash. I boiled about .75 gallons, and holy shit, my whole apartment now smells like rye bread. This is great. I'm so happy I'm going to add another decoction to mash out, which I don't typically mash out, but what the hell, I want more of this smell in my beer.

Belgian Success

2009-03-20T20:35:00.002-04:00

While this wont be everyone's favorite beer, I'm sure my Belgian mystery will please at least a few. I'm sampling the first fully finished bottle right now, and am very pleased with my results. The beer was originally fermented with Wyeast's 1388 Belgian Strong Ale yeast. When I tasted the first bottle sometime in December, I had the first blow struck to my beer ego ever. It was clearly not fully fermented, it was really overly sweet, and essentially undrinkable. This was after it had been fully bottled! I stayed awake that night very upset about the beer. It was so bad I had to throw out most of the first glass. Since I knew I couldn't serve it the way it was, I thought what do I have to lose, so I opened up each and every bottle, poured them one by one into a sanitized carboy, pitched some champagne yeast and a little yeast nutrient and let it sit for two more weeks. There was activity in the airlock the whole time. Then i got nervous and thought, what if the champagne yeast kills the belgian yeast characteristics I want, so then I racked it to another carboy and pitched some Wyeast 1214 Belgian Abbey yeast. It then sat here for another three months, slowly bubbling away the whole time. I then decided I can no longer dedicate a carboy to this beer, and it's bottling time. Since the air lock was still going when I made this decision, I knew there were still fermentable sugars left in the beer, but did not think there were enough left to properly carbonate. This of course presented me with the dilemma of what do I prime with and how much do I use. I ultimately decided that this beer was too unusual to prime with DME as I typically do, and too much work had gone into it for simple corn sugar, so I went though my kitchen to see what else would ferment, and decided to go with molasses. There are not guides to priming with molasses, so I estimated the amount to use based on table sugar, and used about half the amount that you would need to get 2.5 atmospheres since I figured there were still plenty of sugars left in it already.
Well that was two weeks ago, and finally for the very first time since October, I am actually happy with this beer. It is much less sweet than it was, and while not being exactly like I wanted it to turn out, it's close enough that I'm going to call it a success. This was just another example of "relax, don't worry, have a homebrew" in action. For the record, if this post got less coherent as it went along, that is because I was drinking this beer as I was typing it. Did I forget to mention that it has 10.4% abv.

OAKS AWAY

2009-03-20T10:30:00.002-04:00

Well pretty much every single batch of beer that I'm making, I pretty much keep modifying the beer in some way until it hits the bottle, or in the case of my Belgian mystery, even after it hits the bottle. I had some free time yesterday morning, so I went to my homebrew store and decided what the hell, my brown ale that's in primary right now, I'm going to add oak chips to it for secondary, and while I'm at it, the barley wine I'll be doing for Tony and Pattie, that's getting oak as well. I've only used oak chips once before on one of my first beers, and at that time I just followed the recommended procedure of steaming the chips before adding them to the carboy. But this time I decided that's no fun, so right now they are soaking in some bourbon to sanitize and flavor them. I plan to dump the bourbon tomorrow, and replace it with a better quality whiskey. This small amount of whiskey is probably going to make it into the carboy along with the chips just to make it more interesting. I'm going to wait and see how this turns out before making the final decision on how to add the oak to the barley wine. Either way should be fun to find out.

Bottle Deficit

2009-03-17T09:45:00.002-04:00

So I finally went though and counted all of the bottles I have, including ones that still contain beer in my fridge (I'm a realist, those will be empty by May). I also figured out roughly how many more bottles I'm going to need to bottle the rest of the beers I'm doing for the wedding. I'm not including the Real Ale, which is going to be cask conditioned and not bottled, nor am I including the Barley Wine for Tony and Pattie, since that will probably not be ready for bottling till after May 30th, at which point I will have a huge abundance of empties. So that leave the 3 beers that are currently in carboys, as well as the other 5 beers I'll be making. Assuming each batch is 5 gallons, that's 50 bottles a batch, so 400 bottles. I have 126 bottles right now. This means I either need to have people over to drink a lot between now and then, I have to collect empties form others, or I need to bite the bullet and buy new bottles at 50 cents a bottle. This is always the hardest option, since for about 75 cents more I can get beer as well as the bottle, but I don't think my liver could handle that. Either way, if you're in Bangor and either want to give me bottles, or drink at my place leaving the bottles, consider this an open invite.

Hazelnut Coffee Porter

2009-03-16T10:07:00.002-04:00

The beer so good, I didn't bother trying to think of a clever name. My hazelnut coffee porter is quite possibly one of the best things I have ever created in my life. Even if I fathered a child, that kid would have to compete pretty damn hard for the number one spot. The beer itself is a slight variation of my Eli Porter recipe. For one, I replaced the pilsner malt with Marris Otter which makes up the majority of the base malts. I use a bit less crystal, so 2 pounds of dark crystal instead of three, still a pound of chocolate malt, and I got rid of the black pattent all together. Also on brew day I could not find any fuggles, so I used East Kent Goldings instead, and all of the hop additions were added at the begging of the boil instead of having one addition at at the beginning and one at 30 minutes to the end. So pretty much, I made it a little less sweet, and I got rid of the flavoring hops.

The real difference comes in the secondary fermentation. I took a pound of fresh de-shelled hazelnuts, crushed them in my food processor, put them in a pot, added just enough water to cover them, boiled for 5 minutes, then let them sit for another 10 to sanitize them, then I added the nuts and water right into secondary where they sat for 7 days. Then for the last two days, I took a pound of Seattle's Best Coffee, Henry's Blend, put it in the food processor, added just a bit of bourbon and ran the processor till most of the beans were broken. The bourbon was used more for sanitation than it was for flavor. This mixture, bourbon included was then added to secondary to steep and cold brew the coffee for two days. I then bottled with some dry malt extract, and the result is heavenly.

The predominant flavor is defiantly the coffee. I know you've probably had a commercial coffee stout in your time, and most of those are delicious, this however is very very different tasting. Most commercial coffee beers will either brew coffee and add brewed coffee to the beer, or they will put the beans into the wort when it is still hot, or some variation, but in most cases, the beans are exposed to hot water and brews the coffee in a traditional manner. By cold brewing the coffee in the fermented beer, I extracted lost of the coffee flavors, but I did not really pull out any coffee bitterness. If any of you have had Seattle's Best Iced Coffee, then you know what I'm talking about.

You may have also noticed that at no point was a paper filter used in the making of this beer. I've read in many places that you should always use one to prevent the coffee oils from killing your head retention. Any of you who are afraid to try this method of making coffee beer for this reason, I just want to tell you that you need not fear. The finished product has no problem forming a nice thick head when you pour it, and it lasts. This is with out question the beer I am most proud of brewing.

Boy That's a Lot of Yeast

2009-03-14T15:09:00.002-04:00

Due to scheduling conflicts, today I am both bottling a batch and brewing a batch. I don't normally do both due to the fact that it takes up an entire day to do so, but that's just the way it worked out today. I had planned to bottle the extract pale ale I made 3 weeks ago, however it has not seemed to reach terminal gravity yet, so instead I bottled the all grain pale ale I made 2 weeks ago, which has reached terminal gravity. These were the two beers made with the same recipe. For those of you who recall from an earlier entry, the all grain was pitched on top of the yeast cake from the extract batch, which was just some wyeast US 1056 ale yeast to begin with. I'm pretty sure this second batch finished so much faster due to the significantly higher pitching rate, and also it cleared up in no time, which is probably because all the yeast that went into it is the yeast that flocculated out first. None of that should really be surprising. What I was surprised by though, was just how well the yeast attenuated. The terminal gravity went down to 1.010, meaning I had an 83% attenuation. Perhaps I mashed just a little bit too cool. I'm expecting the terminal gravity of the extract batch to probably finish around 1.014. Now if any of you recall, the original gravity of that batch was 1.057, where as the all grain batch had an original gravity of 1.060. This means that the all grain batch is probably going to have a full percentage point higher of alcohol as well.

So basically the all grain batch is going to probably be nothing like the extract batch, I'm sure they will both be good beers, and in the same style, how ever I'm going to have to call the experiment officially dead.