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

Next venture: Kombucha?

To begin with, I was at the Whole Foods in Nashville so that I could get some preservative-free dried apricots to use in my Belgian Christmas Ale, as well as do some nice casual browsing, something I always like doing.  Right before I left, I saw a fridge case full of kombucha (and a few other chilled items), and I decided that it was high time I tried some.  For those who do not know, kombucha is a mildly fermented tea beverage (with just trace amounts of alcohol basically) believed to be a sort of superfood with amazing health benefits.  Thanks to the wealth of information on HomebrewTalk, I had already developed a genuine interest in making kombucha because it sounded interesting and it is relatively easy to make (not to mention drastically less expensive than buying it).  Well, I am drinking it right now and on top of just being "interesting," it is delicious.  It's very hard to describe the taste...but it's sort of like a tart, mildly sweet, mildly carbonated (no doubt due to fermentation) iced tea with a little bit of vinegar/funk in the nose.  The one I got is ginger flavored, and I think that that lends a wonderful character to it.  Now I'll definitely have to look into making some.  Basically, it's as simple as buying a bottle of commercially made kombucha and building up a "mother" culture from it (ends up looking like a gelatinous rubber pancake that floats on top of your fermenting tea), which is apparently not too difficult.  You can read more about making kombucha here (one of my favorite homebrew blogs), or there are a bunch of good YouTube videos about making it.  Cool!

Brewing up my Belgian Christmas ale tomorrow.  I'm singing in church so I'll set up my mash early in the morning, stabilize the temperature, and then leave it while I'm gone.  This longer mash time will likely result in a good efficiency and is a great option for anyone who wants to brew but has to work or whatever.  I'll update you on how it goes.