Quarantine=really clean beer, right?

...at least that is what I am telling myself as I seek to brew my first batch of beer in about a year and a half. I have been in possession of some ingredients for 2.5 gal "half" batches for a little while now, but I just haven't had the time to *really* get my Madaket home ready for a good, clean brew day. After many weeks of quarantine, I am happy to say that the house is reaching a promising level of squeakiness, and I am ready to go. Here's what is on deck:

brACKfast stout: a coffee cream oatmeal stout. Notes of dry cocoa and coffee roast derived from dark malts and actual coffee from my favorite roaster, Armeno Coffee in Northboro, MA. Creamy mouthfeel thanks to the oats. Perfect for brunching. I know it's not exactly "dark beer season" but convention be damned...think cold brew coffee on a bright summer morning that's also a comforting warmer on those stormy days in June-uary.

Blonde Bees Have More Fun: tried and true, this is my house recipe Belgian-style blonde ale, to be brewed with local Nantucket honey (apiary citation needed). Target ABV 6-7%, with what you would expect from a Belgian, lots of banana/clove character from the yeast, reasonably effervescent, very dry finish. Good for literally anytime.

Huzzah. I've loved all my quarantine sourdough experiments, but it's definitely beer time.

Pumpkin Party

Hi y'all. As I write this, I am still recovering from a long brew day that consisted of much craziness, both expected and unexpected, but there are now FOUR unique pumpkin beers fermenting away in my living room in Tom Nevers. Since moving to Nantucket, I have downsized my system a bit to optimize portability and start to focus on brewing more, smaller batches, thus allowing myself more experimentation. Knowing myself and the amount of crazy mad-scientist ambition I tend to possess, of course my first batch out here had to be a project that was complex, maybe even a little insane, and derived of a full 5-gallon batch.

Here is what I did: I produced a full, 5-gallon size batch of what I will call the "base wort" for this experiment. My base wort was a ~1.050 SG (fermenting out to 4.5-5% ABV) amber colored mash bearing a lot of similarity to an American amber ale or an English Bitter. In true autumnal fashion, the fermentables in the mash included the roasted meat of a decent sized culinary pumpkin squash. For the brewers out there, here is what went in that mash:

• 7 lbs Maris Otter Malt (my all-time favorite base malt)
• 1 lbs 60°L Crystal Malt (caramel, baked cookie notes)
• 1 lbs dark (20°L) Munich Malt (for chewy, biscuity notes)
• 1 lbs flaked unmalted wheat (creaminess, mouthfeel, head retention)
• 3-4 lbs meat of one whole roasted pumpkin squash

And here is how one makes four different pumpkin beers from one base pumpkin beer:

• Pumpkin Spice Latte Stout
• Transferred ~1.5 gallons into another kettle
• Steeped 4 oz roasted unmalted barley for 30 minutes to add color and roastiness
• this is similar to what you would do if you were brewing an extract beer
• I did this while bringing the other two batches to a boil to offset the finish times
• Added ~3 oz lactose (milk sugar) to beer--this is the "cream" or "milk" in the pumpkin spice latte and will add some residual sweetness and increased body/mouthfeel
• Added slightly more bittering hops than other pumpkin beers
• Fermented with Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire ale 1214 Belgian Abbey 
• In my tired state, I accidentally pitched Belgian yeast into this beer instead of the more neutral English yeast strain. This won't "ruin" the beer but it will add a fruity/spicy Belgian quality that I wasn't exactly looking for in a milk stout with so much else going on
• Fruity and spicy yeast characteristics might actually compliment a pumpkin spice beer rather nicely, as long as they don't muddy things up...I'll try to keep the beer nice and cool so those characteristics are subdued and we'll see how it goes at tasting time
• Coffee and pie spices added to beer via "spice potion" at bottling time
• Pumpkin Braggot
• Transferred ~1.5 gallons into yet another kettle
• Added a small amount of bittering hops for very low bitterness but still some balance
• Added 1 pound of wildflower honey to batch after cooling slightly
• This is a very large percentage of honey (more than 30%, less than 50%) in the fermentables, which means there is "too much honey" for it to be considered beer, yet not quite enough for it to be considered mead, hence braggot
• Honey has a lot of simple sugars, so it will ferment out very clean and dry but add lots of delicate floral characteristics to the beer
• Fermented with Wyeast 1214 Belgian Abbey 1469 West Yorkshire ale
• This was the other beer that got mixed up, but I was on the fence about yeast selection for this one anyway. Wy 1469 only has an alcohol tolerance of 9%, but the braggot should be closer to 8%
• Because there will be fewer spice/fruit notes from the yeast, I will be more inclined to add some spices to this beer at bottling now, especially some vanilla and nutmeg...we'll see how she tastes
• Punkass Pie Ale & Saison Potiron:
• Remaining ~3 gallons of beer left in large kettle
• Bittering hops added to the tune of ~25 IBU (enough for balance without astringency)
• Added 3 oz dark brown sugar to wort--this will not add sweetness but actually clean dryness and a hint of molasses character, and Belgian yeasts like some simple sugar
• Saison Potiron:
• Fermented with Wyeast 1214 Belgian Abbey ale
• That's it--this beer's character will come from fruit and spice notes of the Belgian yeast along with some biscuity malt character and squashy pumpkin notes
• Punkass Pie Ale:
• Fermented with Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire ale - beer should be very clear with not many notes from the yeast, with a some residual sweetness
• Pie spices added via spice potion at bottling
• Should taste like a pumpkin pie

This may seem like a crazy complicated list of how to make these different beers, but let me break it down more simply--we started with a base wort and only added these couple of distinguishing factors to each batch partition to make four wildly different brews:

• PSL Stout (most complicated): specialty grain, lactose, pie spices, coffee
• Braggot: honey
• Saison Potiron: brown sugar
• Punkass Pie: brown sugar, pie spices

ACK Fermentation Station

Hi friends! Once again it has been a while. Through all the craziness of life and moving and more life, I have not updated in a good bit. I have also not brewed in quite some time, but all of that is about to change. I am settling into my new island home of Nantucket and have utterly caught a major bug toward some fermentation projects, including but not limited to beer. The last week has seen the beginning of a couple wonderful projects with the promise of another wonderful one on the horizon. Here's what we have on tap (proverbially, of course--the literal is a coming attraction):

Kombucha - I freaking love this stuff. It is tart, fizzy, refreshing, and makes my gut super happy. It is also pricey, especially when you live 26 miles out to sea and everything has to come over by boat. Enter my long-awaited desire to make some 'booch of my own, build up a SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast), and have all sorts of wonderful flavors of homegrown funk tea. Laine and I are quite partial to turmeric and various gingered varieties, but I also plan to make use of some local Nantucket flavors, particularly the wealth of wonderful fresh cranberries. Should take a couple weeks to build up a nice "mother" and from there on out I will cranking out regular batches.

Sourdough - Who doesn't love bread? While I know there are many folks out there that like to minimize their grain intake, it is hard to resist a slice of fresh baked goodness. Nantucket has inspired in me a new level of love for bread, almost definitely stemming from the widespread availability of incredible Portuguese bread in all shapes and sizes. Those who have read this blog for a while know that I have a modest history of enjoying to make bread, but after many reasonably successful experiments with instant yeast, I knew that it was time to graduate. After a couple of "refresher" batches with traditional yeast, I decided to dive into the wonderful world of homegrown sourdough and make my own starter. Making the sourdough starter was another fun and easy project for this amateur fermentationist, and since then I have had loads of fun experimenting with different recipes and methods using the sourdough culture.

And finally...BEER!
I am about to embark on a project that I have been dying to do for quite some time. I am going to brew a batch of base beer that will be split four ways and transformed into four drastically different beers through the use of different yeast strains, specialty sugars, and other creative additions. The "common denominator" beer is a tawny amber ale with pumpkin in the mash, and here are her four variants:
-"Saison Potiron Part Deux": a reboot of one of my all time favorite recipes, an amber Belgian farmhouse ale with spicy Belgian Yeast notes and golden squashy pumpkin notes
-"Basic AF"--Pumpkin Spice Latte Stout: ridiculous and delicious, this will be a coffee cream stout brewed with pumpkin and autumnal pie spices...but not too much...so many pumpkin beers are overspiced!
-"Punkass Pie Ale": another delicious, spiced, cold weather beer with brown sugar emulating the flavors of pumpkin pie
-Pumpkin Braggot: braggot is a cross between mead and beer, so this brew will involve adding a substantial amount of honey to the base beer and possibly some mild late-addition spices (at most some vanilla and nutmeg)
Stay tuned to see how I accomplish this feat...four beers from one mash in one day!

Prost,
Jeff

The Kid Returns

To everything there is a season (turn, turn, turn...). Sometimes life gets crazy and brewing is low on the priority list. Sometimes when you try to break back into brewing with aplomb, your apartment just isn't clean enough and you infect two batches in a row, and the resulting disappointment temporarily ruins your confidence in something at which you have proven your mettle many times over. Not that I am speaking from experience or anything...

Well now that my little public therapy session is out of the way...as Charlie Papazian would say, "let's cut the shuck and jive and get on with it":

DAMPFBIER. A beautiful and mysterious Bavarian beer style that has been all but lost in the annals of history. These days, even in our utter golden age of craft beer, where almost every imaginable ale and lager varietal can not only be found--but is often even brewed--within mere miles of one's home, Dampfbier ("steam beer" auf Deutsch) remains an elusive but delicious style that only appears in the repertoire of adventurous homebrewers and your most hipster-elite brewpub. To make a Dampfbier, we essentially take the same malt/hop/body/alcohol content of an ordinary Märzen/Oktoberfest, but instead of a traditional lager yeast which ferments out very clean and neutral, this beer is fermented with a Hefeweizen strain and all of its spice/fruit characteristics. A first taste of this beer leaves one with a strong feeling of "why the heck aren't more people doing this?!?" but in terms of flavor, the brew has a complex profile that combines familiar Oktoberfest characteristics--namely a biscuity, nutty amber malt profile with a whisper of earthy, floral noble hop character--but with a yeast character that imparts some serious banana/clove/spice character. Basically, if a traditional Märzen/Oktoberfest is a hamburger, this beer is a spicy, complex and mysterious kefta kebab...the structure looks familiar, but the flavors will take you to another world entirely.

A simple recipe indeed:

8 lbs German Pilsener malt

3.5 lbs dark Munich malt (20°L)

1.25 oz Mount Hood @60 minutes

.75 oz Mount Hood @flameout, 10-15 minute steep

WLP300 Hefeweizen Ale (famous strain of the world-class Weihenstephaner Hefeweizen)

Stay tuned for this beauty.

Bacchanalia and Lisztomania

One bill, two beers, and a very full mash tun

Cheers, friends! Last weekend, I had a wonderful time brewing up my two Belgian beauties--beers whose inspiration (and names) literally came to me in a dream--Bacchanalia and Lisztomania. After making a nice starter of Wyeast 1214 on a stir plate, the big beer took off like a shot and fermented quite completely in only about four days. On Saturday evening, I brewed up the first, big beer by utterly filling my mash tun to the brim, then I re-sparged to collect the volume for the second batch and finished the second batch on Sunday afternoon. Here is what the two beers will look like, and the grain and hopping that I used for these beautiful batches:

Bacchanalia, a big dark Belgian strong ale:
Original specific gravity (measured by refractometer!): 1.096 (Target ABV: ~10%)
Bitterness: 32 IBU
Color: 15°L (deep amber)

18 lbs Belgian Pilsener malt
6 lbs white wheat malt
2 lbs dark Munich malt

Mash at 153° for 60 minutes

1 lbs Belgian dark candi syrup (90° L)

1 oz Phoenix hops (pellets 8.4% AA) @60 minutes
1 oz Phoenix hops (8.4% AA) @30 minutes

1 oz Hallertauer Hersbrucker (whole cone 4.5% AA) dry hop, 14 days

Wyeast 1214 Belgian Abbey yeast, 1.5 L starter

Aged on medium-toasted French oak (perhaps soaked in red wine) for 1 month

This should be a big, dark, complex beer with lots of dark fruit and spicy notes from the Belgian yeast and some real vanilla smoothness and light tannins from the French oak aging. As we found with my Sea Symphony Barleywine, whose last bottles we tasted on my birthday (mid April) this year, a good high-alcohol beer will age beautifully and improve in subtle complexity for years if you have the patience/willpower to let it do so. My plan for Bacchanalia is to try and be patient and taste a couple bottles per year, with a few careful tastes in the first year to gauge the potential of the brew. Luckily, we won't have to wait nearly as long for Bacchanalia's virtuosic little brother, my "small" second-runnings beer, Lisztomania:

Lisztomania, a virtuosic Belgian mini-IPA:
Original specific gravity: 1.036 (Target ABV: ~3.7%)
Bitterness: 32 IBU (but the bitterness balance will be very different in a smaller beer)
Color: 13°L (amber)

Same grain bill as above! Second runnings collected after first batch by sparging with ~180° water.

5 oz Belgian extra-dark candi syrup (180°L)

First-wort hop: 1 oz Belma (9.7%AA, notes of citrus, pineapple, strawberry, melon)
1 oz Citra (9.4%, notes of citrus, papayal, tropical fruit) @ 5 minutes left in boil
1 oz Belma @ flameout
1 oz Citra @ flameout

1 oz Belma dry-hop 7-10 days
1 oz Citra dry-hop 7-10 days

Wyeast 1214 Belgian Abbey yeast

This beer should be drinkable as soon as carbonated, with a bright, juicy, fruity hop character and a little bit of extra fruitiness/spice from the Belgian yeast. A virtuosic fresh, flavorful session beer with under 4% ABV, and in the ballpark of 115 calories (about the same caloric content as a BudLight, with about 50 times the flavor). I designed this beer to be a sort of mini Belgian-IPA, inspired in flavor profile by big Belgian IPAs like Green Flash Le Freak or Houblon Chouffe but with half the ABV.

We'll have the best of both worlds with these two dream-beers...a deep, complex dark Belgian strong ale that well likely age well for years to come, and a fruity mini/session-IPA that will be delicious, bright, and flavorful right out of the bottle once it's all carbonated. I will miss the speed and ease of my kegerator, but it'll still be great to make some tasty bottled beers in the meantime. I'll be tasting both soon to see how they are doing, and then we'll enjoy Lisztomania nice and fresh and savor Bacchanalia over the years...early tasting notes and a delicious coffee cream stout yet to come from the new setup here in MA!

The stuff on which dreams are made...literally

Greetings and cheers, readers! This entry finds me back in the commonwealth of Massachusetts, back where my wonderful journey with this hobby all began. As stated via Twitter earlier in the year, I have been sitting on ingredients for a couple of batches for a little while now. Since then, life happened and all of a sudden I found myself traveling, moving, and finally setting up shop back in my old stomping grounds. I am now finally in a place where I can actually get to brewing again. First up is a highly exciting project, one that literally came to me in a dream...

...Bacchanalia/Lisztomania--one grain bill, two beers. As previously seen with my Sea Symphony Barleywine, the last of which we drank on my birthday this year (nectar of the gods at 4 years old and around 10-11% ABV), I will do another go of one of the coolest and more historic brewing practices in existence--partigyle brewing. For the brewing novice, this is where we take one gigantic grain bill, this particular one involves 27 lbs of grain, and make two glorious batches from it. It is highly common in a home system to lose efficiency when brewing a super high gravity beer, so this process involves WAY overshooting the grain bill, making a large 10-12% beer from the first runnings with no sparge, then resparging and making a 3-4% small beer with the leftover sugars. This is great because we will end up with a delicious session beer that can be drunk right away and big ol' strong ale that will get better literally for years to come. But enough of the technical nonsense, let's get onto the beer.

Beer 1 - "Bacchanalia": a 10-12% dark Belgian strong ale with some oak aging (perhaps some wine-soaked oak aging). Expect lots of dark fruit, spicy complexity, and warming alcohol that will mellow over time.

Beer 2 - "Lisztomania": a virtuosic 3-4% pale ale with Belgian yeast, this experimental guy will be a sort of "mini-IPA" with Belma and Citra hop varieties, which carry lots of juicy, tropical fruit notes and a soft, mellow bitterness. I have a feeling this one will be gone in a flash.

More info to come once I get brewing. Until then, Prost!

Sir Reginald's SMaSHing IPA (and a new cider experiment!)

First wort hoping kept this full pot from boiling over!

Hey all! Those of you that keep up with my twitter feed (@cuttshomebrew) have probably seen some of the updates from the last couple of brews, but I thought it was time to log them officially and give a little more information about these upcoming beauties. First of all, my new technique of yeast harvesting worked wonderfully well, and the WLP002 culture from the Husky Lad Mild Porter stayed clean, made a good starter, and is now fermenting vigorously away at the beautiful English IPA I cooked up. I am very excited to have such an easy and reliable new method for harvesting (and reharvesting) yeast, because I definitely have zeroed in on my favorite "house" strains for English (WLP002) and Belgian (WLP500) ales, and it's really nice to save some money on batches, as yeast is one of the more expensive elements of homebrewing.

I had a lot of fun brewing up this beer. I did a long (~2 hours) mash at 152°F, and then, instead of the usual bittering addition, I did some first wort hopping. This is a technique I've used in other beers to nice effect, where you add the hops to the hot wort in the boil kettle as you collect the runoff. Because the wort is hot but not boiling at this stage, certain volatile hop oils and compounds are extracted more effectively, resulting not only in an effective bittering component after boiling, but also more complexity in the flavor and aroma of the finished product. Additionally, this also helped to prevent a boil over in a very full pot. First wort hopping was one of the Top 10 Tips for a Super Hoppy Beer that I followed for this recipe. I also followed Callahan's advice of adding the aroma (flameout) addition once the beer cooled below 180°F and then doing a relatively long (~15 minute) steep of the aroma hops before chilling. I must say, whenever I smelled the hops hitting the hot wort, I got really excited for an EKG hop bomb of a beer. The starter made with the harvested yeast from the porter got the batch going really nicely, and it has been happily and vigorously fermenting for the last several days. Here is the simple yet specific recipe:

Sir Reginald's SMaSHing English IPA:
Projected ABV: 7%
Projected SRM: 7.6°L (a deep golden color)
Projected IBU: 46

14 lbs Maris Otter

WLP002

3 oz East Kent Goldings @FWH
1 oz EKG @20 minutes
1 oz EKG @15
1 oz EKG @10
1 oz EKG 15 minute steep @180°

1 oz EKG dry hop 7 days
1 oz EKG dry hop 5 days
1 oz EKG dry hop 3 days

Awww yeah.

Prior to my brew day, I was really catching the fever while waiting for the starter to reach its full potential, so I finally whipped up a batch of graff, a type of cider that uses malt to achieve a desirable level of body and residual sweetness. I used the very popular Brandon O recipe on Homebrewtalk.com, combining 1 oz torrefied wheat, 1 lbs crystal 60, and 2 lbs of malt extract with 4 gallons of apple juice to make 5 gallons of delicious homegrown alchemy. I threw in some dry Nottingham yeast that took off like a shot and fermented like crazy for quite a few days, kicking off some really nice apple aromas. The other key with graff is that it is supposed to be very drinkable very quickly, so I should be enjoying it soon. I am very excited about this project, because while I have had some decent success making homebrewed ciders, I have never done more than a gallon or two at a time, and they've never come out quite exactly right. I really enjoy cider, and I know that many others do as well, so it will be nice to have a good, reliable recipe for draught cider.

The graff cider bubbles away

More updates to come soon! Prost!

Husky Lad Mild Porter

Hey there readers! As you already know, I was right in the middle of another brew day when I last posted, so obviously it's time to post about the next beer! I am very excited about this one, as it is a sort of concept beer. I find that concept beers help creativity by giving brewers different parameters to explore in each recipe. This is why I love doing things like single-malt and single-hop (SMaSH) beers, hybrid styles like Belgian IPA and Belgian mild, and high-quality session (less than 5%--in many cases less than 4%) versions of beers. Thusly, drawing inspiration from one of my favorite recipes, the Westminster Porter, as well as one of my favorite and oft-revisited styles, English mild, I formulated a recipe for a flavorful low-abv dark beer that will be quick to mature and perfect for early fall. Here's the husky lad, then:

Target OG: 1.039

Target FG: 1.013

Target ABV: 3.5%

Target SRM: 27 L

6 lbs Maris Otter

1 lb brown malt

8 oz Special B malt

8 oz black patent malt

Mashed trains at 154, then I realized that I had about 

5 oz coconut palm sugar

So I added it to the wort. It has a great flavor and should help the beer to have a nice dry, roasty finish.

Hop schedule is as follows:

1 oz East Kent Goldings (4.5% AA) @60 min

1 oz EKG @30 min

1 oz EKG dry hop (because why not...I love dry hopping beers even when it is minimal and the beer is malt-forward. The EKG character should make for a beautiful, balanced beer)

Then I pitched WLP002 English Ale yeast

I had another excellent brew day, and ended up with beautiful wort the color of chocolate sauce that smelled and tasted of toasted bread crusts, coffee and sweet toffee. Fermentation is still going, but starting to slow down. WLP002 is very floccullent, and I cleared the beer with a whirlfloc tablet, so this should be a very clear, beautiful dark beer with those signature brown porter garnet hues. I can't wait to taste this one. I think it will be a recipe worthy of repeating, especially because of the low cost and sessionability. Anyway, we shall see! Until next time...cheers!

Autumnal Equinox Beehive (Belgian) Blonde

Well, I have just pitched the yeast for beer number two in Ewing, so I better get to posting about beer number one! My first brew day in the new apartment went great. The stove far exceeded my expectations in functionality (it is electric), and I ended up with a gorgeous, big golden Belgian beer. I brewed the beer on the autumnal equinox, and something about that just felt right. Here is the recipe I used:

9 lbs Belgian Pilsner malt

2 lbs flaked wheat

1 lb Belgian biscuit malt

Mash @152 for 90 min, mashout for 10 min @168

1 oz East Kent Goldings hops @60 min

1 oz EKG @10 min

At the end of the boil add 1 lb clover honey and steep for 15 min

WLP500 Trappist Ale yeast with 1 L starter on stir plate (which took off like a shot!)

Mash temp started a little high, so I added some ice and brought it down to target. My stove heated things up very quickly during mash and sparge, and even brought a full volume of wort to a rolling boil relatively quickly with no signs of scorching, so I'm very pleasantly surprised with my setup in the new apartment. At flameout, I added the pound of honey and let it steep before chilling the golden wort down to 68 degrees and pitching the WLP500 starter. Fermentation has been healthy and vigorous, and has slowed a bit but is still going along steadily. I'm hoping the beer will dry out appropriately with lots of spicy/fruity yeast character, and the honey should help with that while adding a nice floral subtlety to the beer. I also think the EKG character will be beautiful in this big, flavorful blonde ale.

Can't wait to see how it turns out...Prost!

Post-move return to the game

Greetings, readers! It has been quite a while. After a couple of wonderful summer brews, including several repeatable highlights, a few factors led to a temporary hiatus, including lots of time away from home and a move to a new apartment (more about that in a second). While I have missed brewing a great deal, I am supremely excited for my next reboot. With the new apartment, I have enough room again for my homemade four-tap kegerator! Naturally, I had to plan out four brilliant batches to go on it first. 

I wanted to do a few simple-but-wonderful explorations, with one really wild "homebrew"-style beer. As such, it's now time to play "One of these things is not like the others":

Belgian Honey Blonde: a classic exploration of a 6-7% abv flavorful Belgian blonde, but instead of the classic candi sugar, I will use honey. Honey is awesome and I love the floral subtleties it adds to beer.

"Mild Porter": a porter-inspired English mild, so named because it will straddle the line between robust mild and low-abv porter 

SMaSH English IPA: a big ol' English IPA using only Maris Otter (my all-time favorite base malt) and East Kent Goldings. I bought my first-ever 1-pound bag of hops, because I will be using a great deal of EKG in the IPA, and I will also be using them in ALL FOUR OF THESE BEERS, so it will be a total EKG party.

PSL Stout: make fun if you want, but I love pumpkin beers, and I do crave a pumpkin spice latte from time to time when the air gets colder and crisper and the leaves start changing colors. This beer will be a coffee milk stout brewed with pumpkin and a potion of pie spices. I haven't been into making many crazy flavored things lately, mostly because I like the classic ingredients speak for themselves, but this idea just seemed too delicious to pass up.

Return of the four-tapper! Woohoo!

One-Gallon Dampfbier and Classic Hefeweizen

First batch in the new Big Mouth Bubbler!

I know this one is coming a bit late, but the last two Fridays have been terrific brew days that have involved the exploration of a beautiful, forgotten style of beer and the replication of a classic and beloved style. The first of these, my one-gallon yeast starter experimental batch, was a Dampfbier (German for "steam beer"), a style that finds its origins in the forests of Bavaria. The beer has a malt bill similar to a Märzen/Oktoberfest, but it is fermented with a German wheat beer strain of yeast, known for its banana/clove notes. I am very excited to see how this one turns out. The first taste of it was delicious, and since I was feeling adventurous, I dry-hopped the small batch with a little amount of Kent Goldings hops just for fun, thus influencing the eventual name of the recipe. I think this will be a delicious beer. When it had had a good week in the fermenter, I used the yeast cake to brew the second of these Bavarian beauties, a classic 50/50 wheat/pilsner Hefeweizen. For this 5-gallon batch, I got to use my new Big Mouth Bubbler, which worked great! Going to be very easy to take samples, rack, and clean later on, too.

It is worth noting, as well, that the brew store was in between shipments and out of WLP300 and Wy 3068, so I tried WLP380 Hefeweizen IV Ale on these beers. It supposedly creates a more pronounced banana/clove profile, and so far, showings have been excellent.

Steamy WASP ale:
Target OG: 1.050
Target FG: 1.011
Target ABV: 5%
Target IBU: 21
Projected SRM: 7°L (light amber)

1 lb Pilsner malt
10 oz light Munich malt
6 oz Vienna malt

.25 oz Hallertauer @60 min
.25 oz East Kent Goldings dry-hop for 7 days

WLP 380 Hefeweizen IV

El Jefe Bavarian Hefeweizen:
Target OG: 1.052
Target FG: 1.012
Target ABV: 5.2%
Target IBU: 12
Projected SRM: 3.2°L (straw/golden colored)

5 lbs German Pilsner malt
5 lbs German Wheat malt

,75 oz Hallertauer @60 min

WLP 380 Hefeweizen IV cake from Steamy WASP ale

I am very excited to taste both of these beers. I will probably bottle the Dampfbier on Friday, and I will keg the Hefeweizen a few days after that. Next up will be a 2-gallon experimental Nelson Sauvin/Vienna malt SMaSH Belgian IPA as the starter for Sarah and Evan's Nuptiale!

Westminster 1839 Porter Brew Day & Ordinary People Bottling

Tuesday morning, I went outside to grab my mash tun for some cleaning, and I knew that day had to be brew day. I prepped everything, got my mash going, and did a bunch of cleaning and sanitizing during the mash. During the boil, I racked Ordinary People to secondary, because I needed the yeast for the porter but there was still a little ferm action in the jug. I bottled it today, as FG was on point and fermentation had clearly died down. Ended up with 9 bottles of what should be a very tasty session beer.

Brew day of the porter went really well. I was very conscientious about sanitation, wort chilling was fast and efficient, the whirlpool/trub removal went really well, and I pitched a nice large volume of healthy yeast. Additionally, I collected a heaping volume of wort that I ended up boiling down for about an hour before adding my first hop addition, and the extra kettle caramelization should result in a really nice malt profile. My efficiency was 69%, which is a little low for my system (I usually get somewhere between 70-75%), but I still got an OG of 1.051, which should still give me a really nice ~5% ABV beer. I am really looking forward to this one, as the original version of this recipe (everything the same, but fermented with a different yeast strain) was my single favorite batch I've ever brewed. Here are a couple shots from brew day:

Blanket-insulated mash tun:

Siphoning Ordinary People to secondary to finish fermentation:

Siphoning clear, trub-free wort after the whirlpool:

Prost!

Ordinary People Brew Day

Oh man, what a treat this was! When you are used to the sweaty, exhausting, and at times cumbersome act of brewing 5-gallon batches, with all that grain and water, brewing 1-gallon batches is a welcome change to the routine. I found that my brew day on Tuesday evening went much faster, as I was able to bring the wort to a boil and cool it to pitching temps much faster with the smaller quantity, plus cleanup was much easier and faster. I also found that certain elements, like the mash, were more accurate and easy, though the monitored brewpot method requires much more vigilance than the cooler method. In terms of efficiency, I hit my target OG on the money. At the end of the day, I was very happy and satisfied, and in many ways reminded of why I love brewing in the first place. Fermentation was off like a shot by this morning, and still trucking along vigorously now more than 24 hours later! I did a bit of live tweeting during the brew day, which was quite fun. And now...some pictures from the day!

A bamboo spatula makes for a perfect tiny mash paddle

Mash accuracy

Even had time to enjoy a barleywine

Vigorous fermentation by the next morning

Cheers!

My return to the game

For those of you that have been faithful readers of this blog in the past, you are well aware of the fact I haven't been brewing much in the last couple of years, as well as my propensity for lengthy (sometimes involuntary) hiatuses. Frankly, this makes me sad. I have plenty of free time, a little disposable income, and a fiery passion for beer. I would like to return to the days when I was brewing more consistently, firstly because I miss having homebrew in the house. Secondly--and perhaps most importantly--beer is a creative outlet for me. I'm starting to feel like a bedridden Keith Jarrett with all of these ideas whirring around in my head and nowhere to exercise them, and at this point I feel like I owe it to myself to get things rolling again. I'm hoping these upcoming batches will serve as my very own The Melody at Night, with You. 

Recently, I read an article (which I of course can't relocate at the moment, but for which I will post a link when I do find it) about brewing one-gallon batches of in lieu of making yeast starters (small batches of unhopped beer meant solely to stimulate yeast growth and get a proper volume of yeast to pitch into a 5-gallon batch). I don't always make starters, but in an attempt to hone my methods a bit and take my beer to the next level, I'm going to try and avoid underpitching from hear on out. To save my more casual beer fans from too much jargon, this way the yeast will do what it's supposed to, and the beer will taste better and be the correct ABV.

I have planned a simple but classic 1-gallon ordinary bitter to build up a nice yeast cake for my all-time favorite recipe, the Westminster 1839 Porter. Here are the two recipes:

Ordinary People:

Target OG: 1.038

Target FG: 1.012

Target ABV: 3.3%

Target IBU: 29

Projected SRM: 12°L (copper/amber)

1 lb Maris Otter

4 oz Crystal 60L

1 oz brown sugar

12 g (for accuracy) East Kent Goldings @30 min

7 g East Kent Goldings @flameout

WLP002 English Ale yeast

Westminster 1839 Porter:

Target OG: 1.057

Target FG: 1.019

Target ABV: 5%

Target IBU: 45

Projected SRM: 32°L (VERY dark, almost opaque)

8 lbs Maris Otter

2 lbs Brown malt

8 oz Black patent malt

2.5 oz Fuggles @60 minutes

1.5 oz Fuggles @5 minutes

WLP002 English Ale yeast cake from Ordinary People

I'm very excited about these. The porter was really tasty last time, and I just love a good, quaffable English bitter. If the porter comes out as well as last time, I've got my eye on a May competition in Philly...but more on that later.

Thanks for reading, and PROST!

Friar Tuck Belgian Mild - Brew Day

Swirling first wort hops - Styrian Goldings and Saaz

Today I had my first brew day in almost a year and brewed up an experimental Belgian mild ale, which I am calling Friar Tuck.  Brew day was fun and went pretty smoothly.  I had some cleaning to do, which required my jumping into the shower with my mash tun before I began, but after I got all set, everything went very smoothly.  I undershot my target OG just a bit, I was going for 1.040 and got 1.038, which just means that my efficiency was about 71% instead of my usual 75ish.  I am well within the OG range of an English mild, which is exactly what I was going for with this beer.  I think it will be a perfect session/table beer.  For the hopping, I had some leftover Saaz in the freezer that still smelled great, so I threw in half an oz. with the Styrian Golding pellets during the first wort hopping (a method whereby I steeped the hops in the wort before bringing it to the boil).  The Styrian Goldings were of a lower alpha acid percentage than I originally calculated, so I used the Saaz to bump up the IBU just a tad and add some extra hop complexity to the beer.  I am looking forward to seeing how the first wort hopping affects the flavor of the beer, as it is supposed to add some unique flavor and aroma as well as bitterness.

In other news, I also got some critical keg cleaning done today and discovered that my kegerator and the beer inside it had completely frozen solid.  This was probably because I did not open the fridge very often, so I'm now defrosting the kegerator and the poor, lost, frozen keg so we can get the kegerator functioning and get some tasty Belgian mild flowing in a couple of weeks.

Planning my triumphant return

Having not brewed in almost a year, I am finally making plans for my return-to-the-game batch. I am actually planning two brother batches, one session strength beer and one high ABV beer, using the same yeast strain.  I hope to brew one and possibly both in the first week of August, as it is my first truly free week of the summer. The plan is to brew two very exciting original Belgian hybrids, two brand new recipes that I've never done before.  Here is what we have to look forward to:

Friar Tuck Belgian Mild:
Target OG: 1.040
Target FG: 1.009
Target ABV: 4.1%
Target IBU: 13
Projected SRM: 23°L (brown)

6 lbs Maris Otter
1 lb flaked wheat
8 oz Special 'B'
4 oz Midnight Wheat (or Carafa III)

Single Infusion Mash @154°

8 oz Dark Belgian Candi Syrup

1 oz Styrian Goldings (pellet)  @First wort hop (so I can get some smooth bittering qualities as well as some late addition character)

WLP500 Trappist Ale


Belgocalifornication IPA:
Target OG: 1.075
Target FG: 1.017
Target ABV: 7.7%
Target Bitterness: 53 IBU
Projected Color: 14 °L (amber)

12 lbs Maris Otter
3 lbs flaked wheat
8 oz Special 'B'

Single Infusion Mash - 152°

8 oz Dark Belgian Candi Syrup

1 oz Columbus (pellet) @60

1 oz Amarillo (leaf) @10
1 oz Centennial (pellet) @10
1 oz Citra (leaf) @10

1 oz Amarillo (leaf) @flame out
1 oz Centennial (pellet)@flame out
1 oz Citra (leaf) @flame out

1 oz Centennial (pellet) dry-hop 14 days
1 oz Citra (leaf) dry-hop 7 days
1 oz Amarillo (leaf) dry-hop 5 days

WLP500 yeast cake from Friar Tuck Belgian Mild

I am super excited for these.  I love Belgian ales as much as I love breaking the rules, and these recipes satisfy both of those criteria.  I am also a big fan of reusing yeast as it saves a bunch of money per batch and doesn't require a starter.  More updates to come in a week or so.

Great first showings--Sea Symphony Strong Ale and Saison de Potiron

This weekend, I sampled both the recently-bottled Sea Symphony Strong Ale (or Barleywine, but it's a little outside of style guidelines...and deliciously so!) and the young Saison de Potiron, and they were both wonderful and wonderfully surprising.  On Friday night, I tasted my 11.6%ABV behemoth of a beer, the Sea Symphony Strong Ale, hopped with Chinook, Falconer's Flight, and the Falconer's Flight Seven Seas (Cs) blend.  It was very lightly carbonated at this stage, but the taste was wonderful.  The beer had notes of honey, pine, burnt sugar, citrus, flora, apricot, with lots of warming and a beautifully sticky mouthfeel.  I am so excited to enjoy that wonderful beast of a beer over time.  It is probably my favorite beer I've ever brewed.

The Saison de Potiron is showing amazing promise.  The WLP568 yeast RIPPED through this beer.  It is already deliciously dry, in the proper farmhouse ale fashion.  The yeast profile will develop over time, but I am already getting the wonderful peppery notes, with fruity esters in the background.  It already has a delightfully "Belgian" taste to it, so that has me very excited.  There's a nice nutty caramel malt background, with the proper light, spritzy farmhouse ale body.  The pumpkin made it just about the most wonderful color I've ever seen.  Tawny, autumnal orange-amber.  Mmm...just delovely.  The pumpkin added that delightfully earthy, squashy note to the beer as well.

Wow, it is so exciting to be back in the game.  Scarlett the Galway Girl on tap right now...used it to make some ale grilled onions to put on a buffalo chicken pizza tonight...freaking delicious.

Prost!

Brew Day--Saison de Potiron

Saison de Potiron
As the weather grows colder and leaves change to their autumnal reds and oranges, we beer lovers need a tasty brew that can reflect the change in the season.  The Franco-Belgian style known as "Saison" (French for "season") is a relatively free-form style from the farmhouses of Belgium known for its spicy, complex, almost peppery yeast character.  The most common versions (Saison Dupont is the most popular) are around 6% ABV, dry and very light in color, with lemon and pepper notes.  However, it is now widely accepted that in the Franco-Belgian farmhouse ale tradition, the saison beer would literally change with the season, with the Saison Dupont style most prominent in the spring.  Summer meant brighter, more wheat-forward, lower alcohol saisons, while wintertime saw a hearty, darker, high gravity saison.  An ideal autumnal saison would be slightly higher in alcohol content, copper/amber in color, malt forward, and perhaps containing some beautiful fall pumpkin (potiron) meat.  As a homebrewer, I certainly couldn't ignore my inner mad scientist, and of course I had to go with the pumpkin option.  Thusly, I have named the beer "Saison de Potiron," which plays on the fact that it is indeed a pumpkin saison beer but also the fact that "saison de potiron" translated literally means "pumpkin season."

The recipe follows a grain bill relatively similar to a scotch ale.  I used Maris Otter, a base malt that I have been borderline obsessed with ever since I started brewing all-grain beer.  A Belgian brewer probably would not use MO (Pilsner malt is the most common base grain for Belgian beers), but I wanted that extra maltiness and depth for the beer, given the cooling weather.  The wort poured out a beautiful amber with bright orange hues in the background...ergo, this beer will be autumn in a glass.  Here is my recipe:

OG: 1.068 (depending on how much the yeast attenuates, should be somewhere between 6.5-7% ABV)

9 lbs Maris Otter
8 oz Belgian Biscuit malt
8 oz Special 'B' malt
8 oz Red Wheat malt
1.75 lbs roasted pumpkin meat

1 lb dark brown sugar

.75 oz Czech Saaz hops @60 min
1.25 oz Saaz @5 min

WLP568 Belgian Saison Blend

Normally, I would use the Saison Dupont strain to get the proper complexity going, but that yeast thrives between 80-90°F, and I just don't have those kinds of temperatures to work with anymore, now that it's September.  WLP568 yeast is said to have the traditional characteristics of the Dupont strain without the finicky nature and need for high temperatures.  This will be perfect for this time of year, and depending on how things work out, I may harvest the yeast and make it one of my "house" strains.  I have had such great luck harvesting and reusing yeast in the past, I definitely want to get into it again.  It saves a lot of money (about $7/batch) and gives me some consistency.  Also, there are a couple of strains (especially WLP002/Wy1968 for English ales, WLP300/Wy3068 for wheat beers, now a huge fan of WLP250 for American/clean ales) that are amazing for some of my favorite styles of beer.  I will use my next two batches of beer, this saison and my Belgian mild, to test Belgian strains and see what I want to have in house for brewing those tasty Belgian styles.  And now...brew day pics!

BrewPal is a wonderful brewing app!  I use it for every batch!

Beautiful whole-leaf Czech Saaz cones boiling away

Relax, don't worry, have a homebrew(ed stout)!

Ralph (Pronounced "Raif")

Ralph, or "Son of Sea Symphony"

Wow, now here is a beer that I kegged right as my CO2 was running out a year ago, and I never ever got to taste it!  If you remember from this entry, Ralph was an "American Bitter" that I made from the second runnings of the Sea Symphony Barleywine and hopped with Chinook and Falconer's Flight hops, fermented with a second generation pitching of the Rebel Brewer American Pub Ale yeast.  Now I will admit that a year later, I did not have high hopes for this one.  Hoppy beers are best enjoyed young, so that the fresh hop aromas are at their most potent.  This process, however, can be prolonged if the beer is put on CO2, which this one fortunately was.  I tapped the keg this evening, and out poured a beautiful golden/light amber hazy delight with a brilliant white head.  The aroma still held a citrusy, floral quality to it, with sweet malts in the background.  The flavor is bitter grapefruit and tangerine, pine, with an unprecedented malt sweetness and light esters.  Mouthfeel was medium body, spritzy, and surprisingly creamy. Overall impression of the beer is "How the hell is this only 4% ABV??" Tastes like a very smooth IPA with a solid malt backbone to it.  I think collecting the runnings of a bigger beer added some depth to this beer's maltiness.  I will definitely be doing partigyle brewing again.  You get so much bang for your buck and you end up with TWO amazing beers.  This makes me VERY excited to try the Sea Symphony Barleywine, which I will be bottling this weekend.  The bottles are currently in their sanitize cycle in the dishwasher, and I am really excited about not having to wash them by hand.

In the other kegs are the Limerick Session Stout (which I tasted and is also still delicious), Scarlett, the Galway Girl and the JuniorSenior RyePA, so we'll be rotating those into the kegerator as well.  Come by for a taste!

Prost!

Be back soon!

I'll be back in full swing once the school year starts and I get a few paychecks coming in, but in the meantime, I wanted to give a shoutout to HomebrewStuff.com and their fantastic products.  They're currently doing a raffling off of two tickets to GABF, so I'll keep my fingers crossed!

What I think I'll be brewing when I get up and going again:

• Steam beer
• Autumnal saison
• Ordinary bitter/EPA
• Westminster Porter #2

Those may change, but just thinking about some possibilities gets me looking forward to getting back in the game.  Until then!