Exciting times at the home brewery!

Mm...beer.

Slainte! Irish Ale Adventures

Irish Ale Yeast for both beers!

I can't wait for St. Patrick's Day...and it's starting to show.  Went to Princeton Homebrew today and picked up not one, but TWO recipes to make, specifically with St. Patrick's day in mind.  The first of these is my lovely Limerick Session Stout from last year, slightly modified:

Target OG: 1.044
Target FG: 1.012
Target IBU: 34

6 lbs Maris Otter
2 lbs Flaked Barley
1 lb Roasted Barley

2 oz Willamette  [whole, 5.6%AA] @60

WLP004 Irish Ale Yeast

The second beer, which I will brew sometime next week and rack onto the existing yeast cake from the stout, is a tasty Irish Red Ale, the first I have ever brewed and definitely a style I've wanted to brew for a while.  I'm pretty proud of this recipe...trying to think of a good name for it, and I'm open to any suggestions.

Target OG: 1.047
Target FG: 1.013
Target IBU: 25

8 lbs Maris Otter
8 oz Crystal 40°L
8 oz Crystal 120°L
4 oz Pale Chocolate 200°L

1.5 oz Willamette [whole, 5.6%AA]@60
.5 oz Willamette @5 min

WLP004 Irish Ale Yeast [cake from LSS]

I know these'll be really tasty, and the guys at Princeton Homebrew gave me props for my foresight...these'll have about a month to get good 'n' ready.

Came in right around 1.046

JuniorSenior RyePA Returns!

Mm...fresHops

Brewed up one of my favorite AG recipes this week, my delicious JuniorSenior rye pale ale, which I first brewed back in July of 2010.  Brewing went really well, and the only real difference in the recipe this time was that I used some whole hops from fresHops.com, and the new Rebel Brewer Pub Ale strain from White Labs.  Brewing went really well, the wort tasted absolutely delicious, and better still, I established a compost set up that made for some really easy and stress-free cleaning of my mash tun.

The recipe is a totally original bit-o-this, bit-o-that, quintessentially homebrewerish kitchen sink recipe that I crafted on the train from Boston back from Andover.  Rather romantic, I suppose.  Here's how it stacks up [5.5 gallons]:

Target OG: 1.052
Target FG: 1.013
Target IBU: ~40

6 lbs American pale malt
2 lbs Rye malt
1 lb wheat malt
1 lb Crystal 60°L
8 oz Aromatic malt

1 oz. Amarillo [10.8%AA]@60
1 oz. Amarillo @5
1 oz. Amarillo @1
1 oz. Amarillo, dry-hopped for 12-14 days.

WLP250 Rebel Brewer American Pub Ale Yeast [woohoo!]

Yay composting!

One of the best things about brew day was that I didn't dread/avoid cleaning my mash tun, thanks to a decent shovel and a new composting set up that I fashioned from a trash can.  It's so great to just be able to scoop up the grain with no messiness, and it's green!  Furthermore, it will make amazing fertilizer for my hop plants this summer.  Circle of life...make-a-the-world-go-round.

Get ready for next week, when I start brewing some Irish beers to stock up for St. Patrick's Day.

Unintentionally soured to intentionally unsour

Alas, alack!  It has been so long since I have updated the blog, but honestly, there hasn't been much to update since I've been both at home in MA on winter break and on tour through the southeast with Westminster Choir.  Here are a few updates:

• Smoked Brown Ale: a strange issue here...all seemed quite well when I checked on it around the first week of January.  Beer looked good and it had previously tasted excellent.  To my dismay, when I returned from tour there was a huge, white pellicle on the beer, pretty as a picture.  I have NO idea how this happened, as my sanitation methods are quite thorough.  Well, the pellicle looked so perfect that maybe it will make this into a nice, "horsey," smoked farmhouse ale of sorts.  I really hope this will be the case.  I feel so gypped though...I really hoped that my first sour/funky beer would be, well, intentional.  At any rate, I'll taste this one and see if it's worth saving.
• Westminster Porter: the beer is beautifully cleared and deliciously dark, and when I tasted it in early January it was awesome, big and roasty with great chocolate/coffee notes.  The only thing I perceived was that it was a tad on the bitter side, but there's a decent chance that that has mellowed out by now.  At any rate, that will probably the first beer that I tap this semester, and it will probably happen soon!
• The Future: Well my most recent intrigue has been to brew up a clean-style rye Kentucky common beer.  While Kentucky common is often a style for which people do a sour mash, this will basically be a clean, amber-colored cream ale with rye, dark caramel malt, and some corn to lighten the body.  The malt bill will be very much inspired by whiskey/moonshiners, hence the rye and corn.  This will be great, because I love session beers and I've been looking for a good way to do a sort of "American mild."  Also, I'll be using the yeast cake of the KY common to do my partigyle brew day of American barleywine/bitter, so that will definitely be awesome.

Recipes and more updates coming really soon!  Hoping to get some brewing/kegging done this weekend.

1839 Westminster Porter

Westminster Porter FTW!

Smoky the brown is doing very well right now, and I'm pretty set on "darkening" that one when I keg it, as I can't really see any issue with that.  I set my sights now on the next brew day, in which I will be brewing my first ever historic recipe.  I was fumbling around on the internet for a historical porter recipe and I came upon one that looked rather accessible and completely do-able with modern ingredients and processes.  Turns out the one that really struck me was discovered in the 1839 records of the town of Westminster (now a borough of London) in England.  I took this as a sign of divine intervention, that I must brew this beer.  It's not the expected 1/2 pale malt 1/2 brown malt historical porter recipe, which makes it much more reasonable for modern use.  I scaled down the gravity a teensy bit, but kept with the overall recipe.  Here's what I plan on using:

8 lbs Maris Otter
2 lbs Brown Malt
.5 lbs Black Patent Malt

2.5 oz Fuggles @60 min
1.5 oz Fuggles @5 min

Wyeast 1275 Thames Valley Ale

Simple enough, right?  We'll see how this goes.  I'm pretty excited for it, particularly after seeing how easily I could make a wonderful stout with a super simple recipe last winter.  Continuing with the "experimental" nature of my current homebrews, which is pretty fun.  Cheers!

PS I acquired some amazing stuff to expand my system to four taps, and in doing so saved a lot of money.  So excited!  All I need is a cheap used fridge now, which should be quite easy to find.

Cherry wood-smoked...erm...amber?

Well folks, I'm a couple days late with my update, but I brewed up my latest batch of beer this past Friday night.  I recently posted the recipe, and as I said, this was intended to be a smoky brown ale.  I finally got a new probe thermometer as my previous one had malfunctioned, and everything went great with the mash.  I hit the temperature dead on and only lost about two degree over the course of the hour, even with the cold weather.  The only weirdness came when I collected the runnings, and saw what appeared to be a rather light-colored wort.  I didn't think much of it, but after I ran the boil and tried to make it nice and vigorous to get some extra caramelization/color, the wort was still very light colored.  Beginning to get somewhat suspicious, I went into BrewPal on my phone and calculated what the recipe would be without the half pound of chocolate malt that I planned to have in there.  Welp, turns out that without it, I would end up with a beer of only about 11° Lovibond, almost exactly the light amber color that my beer appeared to be.  Methinks that Joe from Princeton Homebrew accidentally left out the chocolate malt, which incidentally was the last ingredient listed on my malt bill.  Oh well, it should still be really tasty, particularly given the rest of the malts in there, the lovely EKGs, and the WLP002 yeast, which has a great profile.

Dark picture, but nice big trub pyramid!

Mulling things over, I got a sort of crazy idea.  I thought to myself, "Gee, if I carbonate this beer naturally with malt extract, I'm just making a small amount of wort...why couldn't that wort be colored, flavorful wort?"  Well, I won't be kegging this one until after Thanksgiving, so I have time to think about it.  I do, however, really want this to be a brown ale, and I also have about 9-10 ounces of Carafa I in my stock right now.  I'm kinda leaning towards using that when I carb the beer.  If you are a homebrewer and have any knowledge from other folks/your own experience doing this, let me know your thoughts.  I really don't see how it would affect the beer negatively, seems like it would just be along the lines of carbing the beer with really dark DME.  Well, we'll see!  In the meantime, the beer is fermenting at a happy 66° [at 64° ambient], and it should come out great no matter what I decide to do with it...part of the joy of being a homebrewer is in the process and the unknown.

It's nice to have plenty of garage space for winter brewing!

A shoutout...

...to Geography in a Glass and The Mad Fermentationist.  We all posted about Cherrywood-smoked beers in the same 24 hour period.  Hopefully we'll be trendsetters to a world of smoky excellence in homebrew.  Hope your brews come out great, fellas!