What? It's really been a month since I last posted? Geez, I'm getting lazy. Two brews have become drinkable since I last posted: the smoked porter and the rye stout. I like the stout more than the porter, and it's still really young. I also attended my first homebrew club meeting with the WIZARDS of Worcester. The meeting consisted of two small workshops. In the first, we learned the basics of judging beer in preparation for the competition that will be happening in April. The second part was about what various off flavors smell and taste like. The guy conducting the session had a 12-pack of generic beer and a bunch of vials of chemicals to put in each one. It was gross tasting all the nasty things that can happen to a brew and motivates me to be ever more vigilant about sanitation procedures. To make up for the lack of real content for this blog, here are some pictures of bottling day:

When I first started bottling, getting the labels off was an extreme pain in the ass.  Sometimes, labels would come off with just a soak in hot water, but most wouldn't come off even with dedicated scrubbing.  Then I discovered the joys of oxygen-based cleaners like B-brite.  (I hear Oxyclean is basically the same thing and is much cheaper than B-brite.)  After an hour's soak in hot water and B-brite, the labels just melt off.  I go over the bottles with a sponge to remove any remaining glue reside, give them a quick rinse, and they're good to go.

In order to sanitize the bottles quickly without spending too much time on each bottle, I pop a bunch of them in the oven.  Just remember to cover the tops with aluminum foil before hand, so the inside of the bottle will stay sanitized.  I leave them in the oven at 350F for an hour or so, which should kill all the little buggies that might want to eat my beer.  Let the bottles cool completely before you try bottling with them.  With the foil on them, I would trust them to remain sanitized for at least a day.  They may be good for longer, but I don't like gambling with my precious beer!

Finally, here's a picture of me transfering the beer from the fermenting bucket to the bottling one.  Nice and quiet does it!

Brew news

The rye stout is a-bubbling away in the primary bucket. It got off to a slow start, I think because it's the highest gravity brew I've made so far. Took the yeast a bit to get up to speed. Also I have trouble with aerating my wort. It's hard to shake a plastic bucket and stirring doesn't do too much. With lower gravity worts and big yeast starters, it's not such a problem. I think when I get back home, I'll figure out how to invest in a aeration system of some sort so I don't have to worry about lag.

The next issue I have to deal with is whether to brew a pale ale or a bock. I've not made either yet, though the bock will be much more difficult. Of course, the Talking Man at the brew store says it's perfect weather for brewing bocks...decisions, decisions...

Valentine's Ale

I was looking at the last few posts and I realized that the pictures aren't helping much.  They all kind of look the same.  This beer was more of a mahogany color than the deep brown that's shown here.  Oh well.  The beer was quite foamy when it poured, but the head quickly dissapated, much to my disappointment.  I originally intended for this to be a winter warmer-style of ale, but winter is now almost over.  What to do with a sweet, spicy ale?  Serve it for Valentine's Day, of course!

The aroma coming off the foam is very malty with strong spice overtones and a little bit of citrus.  The flavor is very well balanced between the sweet, caramel malts, various spices and bitter hops.  Most homebrewers that I've heard who have made spiced ales always complain about the overpowering taste of cloves.  Spiced beers need to sit for a while in order to mellow out.  Mine sat for a long time mostly by accident.  I was trying to finish a draft of my MA paper and organize a trip down south.  I think this thing spent 10 days in a primary and almost a month in the secondary bucket.  It doesn't seem to have suffered at all from the abuse.  Maybe I'll write this down as the Drunk Lover Valentine's Ale.  Haha.

Due to the chaos that was going around at the time of brewing this, I didn't take good notes in my brew journal.  The spice mixture is kind of a guess of what I put in.  This is how much I would use today if I made it again.  This is also the first beer that I used a starter on.  I definitely like the results.

Spice extract (make at least a week before):

1 cup cheap vodka

Zest of one orange

5 cloves, crushed

2 inch piece of cinnamon

1/2 tsp cardamon seeds, crushed

Put all the ingredients into a lidded jar and shake daily.

Yeast starter (2-4 days in advance):

1.5 liters water

5oz DME or priming sugar

(1/2 tsp yeast nutrient, only with priming sugar)

small amount of hops

Boil 2 cups water with the sugar and hops for 15 minutes.  Chill like wort and add to 1/2 gallon jug with remaining water and yeast nutrient. Pitch yeast and shake.  Attach airlock and let ferment for 2-4 days. On brew day I poured off most of the liquid leaving about a pint of liquid and yeast at the bottom.

Valentine's Ale (5 gallon, extract) 

Brewed Dec. 14th, 2008

6.6lbs light liquid malt extract

1lb crystal 60L

.5lb chocolate malt

.5lb brown sugar

1oz amarillo hops (8.0%) 60 minutes

1oz Kent goldings (3.5%) 10 minutes

1 cup Spice Extract (see above)

5oz priming sugar

Whitelabs California ale yeast

Steeped the grains at 150F for half an hour.  Brought the water to a boil and added extract and Amarillo hops.  Boiled 50 minutes and added Kent Goldings.  Boiled for 10 more, cooled, added spice extract and pitched yeast at 70F.  This sat for 10 days in the primary and something like 4 weeks in the secondary before going into bottles to wait for another 2 weeks.

OG: 1.052

FG: 1.014

ABV: 4.9%

IBU: 25

I am now brewing beer by adding in my extract in the last 15 minutes.  This allows for better hop utilization.  I think it's ok with this beer that the IBUs were around 25 and not in the 40s.  That would have made this brew too bitter.  Everything that I read says spiced beers need plenty of time to mellow out, so I will pass that recomendation on.  It's certainly worked well with this one.  My lesson for next year is to start on my winter warmer before winter arrives.  That way I'll have plenty of spicey brew to tide me over during the cold northern months!

Stone Smoked Porter

This is a wonderful offering from Stone Brewing Company.  I first tried it over at the Highland Brewing Company in Sturbridge, MA.  Highland was suffering from the hop shortage at the time, so instead of offering their own beers (of which they were out) they had a selection of craft brews on tap.  I picked up this one up at K J Baron's in a 22oz bomber.  It's a solid porter, though I really don't get much smoky flavor from it.  Harpoon's Rauchefetzen has set the standard for smoked beers for me, and since I really like the flavor I was hoping this beer would emphasize the smoke more.  But it is a solid porter, nonetheless.  

It pours a rich ebony color with a touch of mahogany around the edges.  The head is tan, airy and thick.  It dissipates quickly, but leaves nice lacing throughout drinking.  The aroma is pretty tame and consists mostly of a roasted malt smell with a hint of vanilla.  The flavor is much better: strong bitter chocolate and coffee flavors, a touch of sweet caramel and plenty of hop bitterness.  The smoke flavor was noticable as an aftertaste.  Pleasant, but like I said, they could up the smoke with no complaints from me.  It is lightly carbonated and very drinkable.  This porter emphasises the bitterness of the dark malts and is a great contrast to the sweet, malty flavor of the Baltic porter I tried last night.  Both are good, but they are definitely quite different!    

Harpoon Leviathan Series Baltic Porter

This has become one of my new favorites.  I'm totally pleased that I picked it up.  I decided randomly to go see what kind of beer selection KJ Baron's has, since I drive past them often and they have a flashy store front.  They have a lot of booze in that place, but only a small section with craft brews in it.  What they do carry is quality, so the quantity can be forgiven.

I was unfamiliar with the baltic porter style and admittedly chose this beer solely for the picture on the carrying case.  I mean, if you name your beer the "Leviathan Series" it's got to be good.  Otherwise, said sea beast will come devour you.  At least, that's how it should work...A little research on the internet revealed that Baltic porters are closely related to Russian imperial stouts, in that they are very dark and have high alcohol contents.  Porters and stouts were originally made in London and exported across Europe.  In order to survive the shipping process, the beers were generally high in alcohol and heavily hopped to prevent spoilage.  Porters actually died out in London, but because the style was so well loved, it continued to be brewed throughout the Baltic region.

Harpoon's Baltic Porter pours a very dark brown, with a touch of amber when it's held up to light.  Unfortunately, the beer has only a small, tan head that quickly disappears.  The aroma is heavy with bittersweet chocolate, molassas and dark fruits.  The flavor lives up to the aroma: dark chocolate, plum, roasted malt, and bourbon oak with a licorice and bitter hop finish.  This is a very smooth beer with the malt flavors very well balanced with the hop bitterness.  There is no hop flavor in this brew, and that is totally fine in this case.  I can taste the alcohol in this beer (9.5%), with the syrupy, warm mouthfeel.  This beer is like drinking a complex symphony: lots of different things going on, but it all works together beautifully.  I plan on buying more of this beer soon!

***

I've had a lot of beers since I last posted, but I haven't been keeping track of them. :(  But I'm back in the Woo and things are settling down.  I didn't get the Fulbright grant I applied for, so Josh and I have decided to go to Italy.  Best consolation trip ever!  

My spiced winter ale is ready for drinking and I'll post about it soon.  Today I bottled my smoked porter and I can't wait to taste how it turns out.  It already has a great flavor, which should just improve with age.  Yum!

Wild Fermentation - The Soda Chronicals

Sandor Ellix Katz's book, Wild Fermentation, is quite possibly one of my most favorite books.  He takes such a relaxed approach to fermentation, which is quite a contrast to most of the brewing sites I read.  Despite what Charlie Papazian says, it's really hard to just relax and stop worrying, even with the aid of a homebrew.  If I have to pin down a moment when I decided to embark on this homebrewing adventure, it would be right after I read through this book for the first time.  The guy is inspirational, what can I say.  I've been meaning to try out his gingerbeer recipe for a while now, but have been too lazy to care for a starter.  My imminent trip to the South Land on Christmas day spurred me to finally whip up a wild starter last week.

According to Katz's book, all you need to start is
2 teaspoons grated ginger (skin and all)
2 teaspoons sugar
1 cup of water
Stir together and leave in a warm spot, covered with some plastic wrap

Just like a sourdough starter (or a pet), you have to feed the thing every day with more ginger and sugar. I have a notoriously bad time with sourdough starters in this apartment. Something about the air just isn't friendly for the wee beasties to flourish. It took a while for this starter to start bubbling, and I think the activity I did get was a direct result of the yeast nutrient I added. I guess the lack of wild yeast in my apartment is ultimately good for my homebrews, but it's bad for any kind of wild fermentation process. The starter never looked particularly vigorous, so I really hope than when I crack open a ginger beer when I return, it will be carbonated.

When your starter is active, mix together:

2-6 inches grated ginger root
1.5 cups sugar
2 quarts water

Juice 2 lemons and reserve liquid.

Boil for 15 minutes. Cool and strain (if it's above 80 degrees, you risk killing the yeast in your starter). Add the juice of 2 lemons and the strained ginger bug. Add enough water to make 1 gallon of liquid. Bottle in sealable bottles (I used beer bottles and capped them, because I have the equipment to do so). Leave the bottles in a warm place to ferment for 2 weeks. Chill before opening and be prepared for carbonation!

I can only hope the last bit is true for me. Also, I was a little lax on sanitation with this brew. I mean, the starter sat out on top of my fridge for a week and barely showed signs of yeast habitation, let alone bacteria or mold. I think I should do a test with a bowl of weak wort and see how long that takes to become infected. The point of sanitation is to prevent infection with wild beasties, bacteria and mold. If they wouldn't go after my starter, I suspect the sanitation issue in the bottles might not be a big deal. (I'll give you all the gory details if this does go terribly wrong.)

IC Stout

This is a homebrew blog, but most of my posts so far have been about other people's beers.  I'm working on a small scale, so I can only turn out a new beer every 2-4 weeks.  This one is good but was not what I was shooting for.  The 'IC' stands for Identity Crisis.  I intended for this to be a chocolate stout, but when I went to the brew store, I was talked into buying the ingredients for their oatmeal stout.  The first brew store I checked out in the central MA area was the West Boylston Homebrew Emporium. I bought some yeast from them and all was good. Later, a friend and fellow homebrewer told me that the prices were lower at the Strange Brew shop in Marlborough. They are nice folks at Strange Brew, but their prices are definitely not lower and the drive out there is almost 3 times as long. Also, instead of letting me follow my own recipe, the woman at the counter insisted I use their house recipe for oatmeal stout.  I will be sticking with the Homebrew Emporium in the future, mostly because it is closer.  

Back to the stout.  It pours a very dark brown color with a thick tan head.  The head is probably the nicest of my homebrews yet.  It disappears quickly, but leaves lacing down the side of the glass throughout the drinking.  The smell is chocolately with a floral, hoppy character to it.  The taste progresses from sweet and malty to chocolate to bitter.  The finish  more like eating a bar of very dark chocolate than it is bitter from the hops.  That's a good qualit

y, since I'm fond of bitter chocolate.  The body is...quite light.  I was expecting the oatmeal to add more oomph to it, and I'm disappointed with that.  The taste definitely has improved over the bottles I opened earlier, and I suspect this will only continue to be true.  

Recipe, 5 gallons

13 November 2008

Oatmeal Stout

6.6lbs Muntons Dark Liquid Malt

4oz Malto-dextrin

3oz Dark Crystal

3oz Roast Barley

8oz Chocolate malt

7oz Flaked oats

1oz Centenial Hops (bittering)

1oz Cascade (aroma)

Wyeast liquid #1084 Irish Ale

1 tsp irish moss

5oz priming sugar

Soaked grains at 158 degrees for 20 minutes in 2 gallons of water.  Removed and added the malt and malto-dextrin.  Brought to a boil while stirring and added bittering hops.  Boiled for 50 minutes.  Added Irish moss for 10 minutes and finished with aroma hops.  Strained the wort into the bucket and added water and ice to fill up to 5 gallons.  The ice was a solid chunk, which dropped the wort down to 52 degrees when I pitched the yeast.  I really need to use smaller chunks of ice next time.  The yeast got off to a slow start.  Racked to a secondary after 8 days and bottled after 9 more days with 5oz of priming sugar.

OG: 1.052, FG: 1.018 which gives me an ABV of 4.6%

I'm pretty sure that the oatmeal and roasted barley actually needed to be mashed, which I didn't know enough about at the time to do.  I've done some reading since then, and I think I can handle it from now on.  I think I will move up a bit on the homebrew scale and start with partial mashing 2-4 lbs of grain with my brews.  For things like the smoked ales and that really, really awesome looking rye ale in the last issue of BYO magazine, partial mashing is a must.  Gah.  I've got a long list of beers I want to brew and only a limited space to do them in.  

***

We have our first winter storm of the year going full blast outside.  I think I'm going to brave the weather and treat myself to a bowl of pho at the Vietnamese restaurant down the street.  After that, it might be time to bake some gingerbread cookies.  Yum!