Back in May, we talked about my experiment mixing gin with our Tripel, and how wonderfully wonderful it was. We were inspired to try brewing a tripel with juniper and rosemary, and that happened yesterday:

23 August 2009
Ginpel
Extract w/ grains
5 gallons, 60 minute boil, 30 minute steep

5.0 lbs Pilsner Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)
4.0 lbs Pilsner Liquid Malt Extract (15 min)
2.0 lbs Demerara sugar (15 min)

Specialty Grains:
1.0 lbs Crystal Malt 15L
1.0 lbs Carafoam Malt

1.00 oz Sterling Hops [7.0% AA] (60 min)
2.00 oz Sterling Hops [7.0% AA] (5 min)

1.00 oz Crushed coriander seed
1.00 oz Sweet orange peel
1.00 oz Juniper berries
0.50 oz Grains of paradise
0.50 oz Rosemary

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min – clarifier)

White Labs Trappist Ale Yeast (WLP500)

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

—

Create a yeast starter 2-3 days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Bring to boil.

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

Remove grains, turn off heat and add 5.0 lbs malt extract. Bring to a boil. Add bittering hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

At 15 minutes, turn off heat. Add remaining malt extract while stirring. Return to boil.

At 5 minutes, add remaining hops.

At end of boil, remove all hops. Chill wort to 75°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Decant yeast starter and pitch yeast. Aerate thoroughly. Ferment at 70-75°F.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. Add coriander, orange peel, juniper berries, grains of paradise, and rosemary. Age for 1 – 2 weeks.

Rack to bottling bucket. Boil corn sugar with 1 c filtered water and add to beer. Mix well.

Bottle. Age for 2 – 3 weeks.

Definitely one of our odder recipes. I have a feeling the juniper and rosemary will end up being over-emphasized, but nothing ventured! *fingers crossed*

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes 6 Comments »

Barleywine is that odd case of a beer style name making a lot of sense. It’s basically a wine-strength beer, literally a barley wine. Barleywine is fairly sweet and fruity, with just enough hop bitterness to keep it from being cloying. It’s meant to be sipped and savored, but if you want to drink it like a normal beer, by all means, go for it. Just don’t expect me to catch you afterward.

Because of the huge amount of malt that goes into a barleywine, yeast can sometimes struggle for roughly the same reason that one slips into a torpor after a big bag of Skittles. A higher fermentation temperature can help out, and the resulting fruity esters will probably be welcome anyway.

Thanks to the high alcohol content (anywhere from 8-12%), barleywine ages well. Mind you, if you’ve under-bittered your barleywine, no amount of aging is going to fix it, as bitterness will tend to decrease over time, but if you open a fresh bottle of barleywine and it tastes like it could help a Saturn V make low-Earth orbit, there’s a good chance it’ll evolve into something tasty with a few months in the cellar.

18 July 2009
Barleywine
Extract w/ grains
5 gallons, 90 minute boil, 30 minute steep

8.0 lbs Ultralight Liquid Malt Extract (90 min)
4.0 lbs Ultralight Liquid Malt Extract (15 min)

Specialty Grains:
1.0 lbs Crystal Malt 60L
1.0 lbs Victory Malt

3.25 oz Kent Golding Hops [5.4% AA] (90 min)
1.00 oz Kent Golding Hops [4.2% AA] (90 min)
2.00 oz Centennial Hops [8.0% AA] (90 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min – clarifier)

3 vials White Labs Dry English Ale yeast (WLP007)

2 oz corn sugar (bottling)

—

Create a yeast starter 1-2 days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Bring to boil.

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

Remove grains, turn off heat and add 8.0 lbs malt extract. Bring to a boil. Add hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

At 15 minutes, turn off heat. Add remaining malt extract while stirring. Return to boil.

At end of boil, remove all hops. Chill wort to 75°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Decant yeast starter and pitch yeast. Aerate thoroughly. Ferment at 70-75°F.

At approx. 25% attenuation, create a yeast starter. After 24 hours, decant and pitch.

Repeat at approx. 50% attenuation.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. Age for 3 – 4 months.

Rack to bottling bucket. Boil corn sugar with 1 c filtered water and add to beer. Mix well.

Bottle. Age for 6 months to 1 year.

We had to improvise a bit on the hops. The hops that arrived in our Morebeer order were much lower alpha than what was listed on Morebeer’s website, so we had to find a way to make up for the missing IBU. Fortunately, we had some extra hops that were going to go unused in a future brew day. This is why the hop amounts listed in the recipe aren’t round and why there are two of the same hope variety listed with two different alpha acidities.

I’ll be honest here: I am not wholly optimistic about how this will turn out. Our original gravity came out to 1.093, exactly what we wanted, but an awful lot for yeast to handle. Theoretically, we’re looking for 75% attenuation, for a final gravity of 1.020-1.022, which would equate to about 9.5% ABV, but that’s feel-good optimism. In practice, there’s a lot that can go wrong, chiefly of which being severe underattenuation. An incomplete fermentation would leave us with a cloyingly sweet barleywine, but that’s the least of our problems. If the yeast should somehow decide to wait until they’re in the bottles to finish eating all of our maltose, we could find ourselves wading in a sea of beer and broken glass. Explosions are bad. Pointy explosions are worse.

That’s why we’re going to be pitching three separate yeast starters over the course of the fermentation. If the beasts that are already in there get burned out, then one hopes a fresh batch of fungus can start a new shift. Fingers are crossed. I’ll be content with 60-65% attenuation after four weeks. Worst case, we can always drop in a vial of champagne yeast.

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes 2 Comments »

During the 60s and early 70s, my Uncle Larry was in a real rockin’ band called Snake that was active during the anti-war movement. In 1970 they played to a packed crowd in Cornell University’s Barton Hall at the America Is Hard to Find Peace Festival.

According to whichever bandmate who does the most posting to the Snake Facebook fan page, “… this festival promised a venue for the Berrigan Brothers … Catholic priests who were wanted by the FBI for counseling draft dodgers. They actually showed up in biker attire with helmets and managed to make it on stage and off without getting caught.” Snake even was adopted by the East Coast motorcycle gang BREED and opened for a number of great artists like Janis Joplin.

Yeah. My Uncle was in a freakin’ kick-ass band (and still is, just a different one).

So, um, what does this have to do with beer? Well, one bandmate’s name was Simmi Slovacek, and I remember hearing that name on and off as a teenager. And you know what? Simmi sounds a lot like “Simcoe” … so in naming this brew, I pay tribute to my Uncle’s band with “Simie the SNAKE.”

14 June 2009
Simie the Snake Simcoe IPA
5 gallons, 60 minute boil

7.0 lbs Pilsen Light Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)
1.0 lb Wildflower Honey (15 min)

Specialty Grains:
1.5 lbs Crystal 15L
0.5 lbs Caravienne
0.5 lbs Special Roast

1.50 oz Simcoe Hops [11.9% AA] (60 min)
1.00 oz Simcoe Hops [11.9% AA] (15 min)
1.00 oz Simcoe Hops [11.9% AA] (5 min)
1.50 oz Simcoe Hops [11.9% AA] (dry hop)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min – clarifier)

White Labs California Ale yeast (WLP001)

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

—

Create a yeast starter 2-3 days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Bring to boil.

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

Remove grains, turn off heat and add malt extract. Bring back to a boil. Add 60 minute hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

At 15 minutes, turn off heat. Add wildflower honey. Stir until dissolved. Return to boil. Add 15 minute hops.

At 5 minute, add 5 minute hops.

At end of boil, remove all hops. Chill wort to 75°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion at 60-65°F in bathtub full of cold water with a wet-towel wrap.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. Add dry hops. Age for 1 – 2 weeks.

Rack to bottling bucket. Boil corn sugar with 1 c filtered water and add to beer. Mix well.

Bottle. Age for 2 weeks.

Though we were a bit off with our gravity (it’s been a reoccurring issue that is quite frankly pissing us off), the wort tasted great, and the other samples we’ve taken have also been delicious. I’m excited to get this brew into the bottle, and most definitely into my uncle’s hands.

Homebrewing, Miscellany, Our Brew Days, Recipes 2 Comments »

Hefeweizen was one of the first styles I was exposed to when I first started exploring good beer at the Iron Hill in Newark, Delaware. It’s a sweet German wheat beer brewed with a strain of yeast that produces lots of banana and clove flavors. This particular strain does not readily settle out of suspension, and the beer is served unfiltered, giving hefeweizen a cloudy appearance and a thick, bready body. It’s a great springtime beer, but the big body and above-average alcohol (depending on the brewer) make it less suitable for hot summer days, making it more appropriate at sunset. Or, well, sunrise, too. I’m not here to judge.

We got adventurous again with this recipe. We’d wanted to explore dried fruit for a while, so we’ll be adding raisins and dried cranberries to the beer during a two-week secondary fermentation. We’ll then transfer the beer to a tertiary fermenter, wringing the raisins and cranberries out to reclaim all of the beer that gets absorbed into them, and age it with orange peel and a lot of coriander. There’s going to be a big danger of oversweetening the beer with all of that fruit, so we’re using a bit more bittering hops than you’d normally see in a hefe (actually, we’re doubling it).

3 May 2009
Hefe the ORC
5 gallons, 60 minute boil

4.0 lbs Pilsen Light Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)
4.0 lbs Wheat Malt Extract (60 min)
2.o lbs Orange Blossom Honey (15 min)

0.50 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (60 min)
0.50 oz Amarillo Hops [8.4% AA] (60 min)
0.50 oz Vanguard Hops [4.4% AA] (60 min)
0.50 oz Chinook Hops [11.1% AA] (15 min)
0.50 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (1 min)
0.50 oz Amarillo Hops [8.4% AA] (1 min)
0.50 oz Vanguard Hops [4.4% AA] (1 min)
0.50 oz Chinook Hops [11.1% AA] (1 min)

1.0 lbs Raisins
1.0 lbs Dried cranberries

2.0 oz Sweet orange peel
2.0 oz Crushed coriander

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min – clarifier)

White Labs Hefeweizen Ale yeast (WLP380)

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

—

Create a yeast starter 2-3 days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Bring to boil.

Turn off heat, add malt extract. Bring back to a boil. Add 60 minute hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

At 15 minutes, turn off heat. Add orange blossom honey. Stir until dissolved. Return to boil. Add 15 minute hops.

At 1 minute, add 1 minute hops.

At end of boil, remove all hops. Chill wort to below 70°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion at 60-65°F.

Rack fermented beer over raisins and dried cranberries to secondary fermenter. Age for 2 weeks.

Rack to tertiary fermenter. Recover raisins and cranberries from secondary fermenter and squeeze absorbed beer into tertiary fermenter. Add orange peel and coriander. Age for 2 weeks.

Rack to bottling bucket. Boil corn sugar with 1 c filtered water and add to beer. Mix well.

Bottle. Age for 2 weeks.

The hopping schedule is needlessly complicated because we had a bunch of leftover hops that we just wanted to use up. Normally you’d just use something neutral like Sterling for all of your hopping.

We weren’t able to find dried cranberries that did not have added sugar. You may have better luck, but after consulting with our adviser, we concluded that the small amount of sugar on the cranberries would have no significant impact.

You might be wondering why we’re adding the coriander after fermentation is complete instead of during the boil. We’ve boiled it in the past, but the flavor has always been nonexistent in the final result. We’re guessing that the coriander flavors are volatile enough to be carried away by the CO2 released during primary fermentation, so we’re going to wait until all of that destructive effervescence is done first.

This will be a HUGE morale boost for us if it’s successful. Our previous attempts at getting a little trippy with our recipes have been a bit disappointing, but we have a really good feeling about this one. Neither one of us is especially crazy about adhering too strictly to the established styles, though we certainly understand how important it is to know them to give you a metric to hone your skills against. I guess this is just what happens when you put two creatives together and tell them to have fun. We could fart out a Reinheitsgebotized hefe if we wanted to, because proven recipes are so easy to come by, but isn’t it a bigger test of skill if you can make a train cross the continent without even touching the rail?

Regardless, we’ve got a pound of crow ready to roast if this does end up exploding in our faces.

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes Comments Off

I’m sure a number of you do not have fond childhood memories of bee stings. In fact, I’m pretty sure most of them are horrifying, or at least they were when you were 5.

Nevertheless, I have come to terms with bees — in spite of being stung numerous times. I don’t plan on going all “Lil’Kim Queen Bee” anytime soon, but the reality is that my name — Melissa — is Greek for “honeybee.”

Couple my newfound interest in bees with the recent March/April BYO article I read — “Club Profile: Barossa Brewers Club” — I came across Barossa Valley Brewing’s Bee Sting, which is a honey wheat beer. The name inspired me, and I wanted to make my own Bee Sting Ale, not a clone. I came up with the idea of focusing on the “bee” and the “sting.” For the bee, I wanted to use honey to bring about a dry sweetness, and for the sting, I wanted something with zip — leading me to choose the peppery, earthy seeds of paradise. And there you have it!

12 April 2009
Bee Sting Ale
5 gallons, 60 minute boil

5.0 lbs Pilsen Light Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)
2.0 lbs Orange Blossom Honey (15 min)

Specialty Grains:
0.5 lbs Crystal Malt 15L

1.0 oz Chinook Hops [11.1% AA] (60 min)
1.0 oz Amarillo Hops [8.2% AA] (15 min)
3.0 g Seeds of Paradise, crushed (5 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

White Labs California Ale Yeast WLP001

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Create a yeast starter 2-3 days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Heat to 155°F.

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

Remove grains, turn off heat, add malt extract. Bring back to a boil. Add Chinook hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

At 15 minutes, turn off heat. Add orange blossom honey. Stir until dissolved. Return to boil. Add Amarillo hops.

At 5 minutes, add seeds of paradise

Chill wort to below 70°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion at 60-65°F.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. Age for 1 – 2 weeks.

Rack to bottling bucket. Boil corn sugar with 1 c filtered water and add to beer. Mix well.

Bottle. Age for two weeks.

So far the beer has a wonderful flavor, with Chinook’s grapefruit coming out to play with the Amarillo’s citrus notes. When we racked the beer we noticed that the zip of the seeds of paradise wasn’t quite there yet, so we created a seeds of paradise extract to be added when we bottle (We’ll update the recipe here once we know how much extract is needed). Honestly, I’m happy with the sample I had after racking, but it’s not a true representation of my idea of a bee sting — it’s all bee, and not enough sting. I think the extract will help us bring up the sting, while still being refreshing.

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes 4 Comments »

Northern Table is hosting this month’s Fermentation Friday, a last-Friday-of-the-month blogging event specially made for homebrew bloggers. This month’s topic: “Beer and Liquor”

One of the easier ways to add spice flavors to a beer is to steep the spices in vodka for a week or two and then add a measured amount of the resultant “potion” (as Randy Mosher likes to call it in Radical Brewing) to the beer at bottling time.

The advantage of this technique is that the recipe for the spice extract is easy to reproduce with precision, and it’s easy to make sure you’re adding the exact amount of spice flavor that you want. We’ll go over the details of this process in a future post.

The biggest disadvantage is the potential increase in alcohol content in the final beer, unless your personal philosophies dictate that this is not, in fact, a disadvantage. If alcohol content is a significant factor for you, it will pay off to learn how the addition of liquor to your beer will affect the final %ABV.

Get ready. This is gonna be mathy. Skip to the end if you’re not interested in the derivation.

Before mixing the liquor into the beer, we know the following quantities (note that percentages must be expressed as decimals, i.e. 35% is equivalent to 0.35):

, the %ABV in the beer
, the %ABV in the liquor
, the volume of beer
, the volume of liquor

From these quantities, we can derive the following:

The volume of alcohol in the beer: (1)
The volume of alcohol in the liquor: (2)

We can now derive our final equation. The final %ABV is equal to the total volume of alcohol in the beer and the liquor divided by the total volume of the beer and liquor:

Final %ABV:

Substituting in our equations for volumes of alcohol in the beer and liquor (equations (1) and (2), respectively), we get the final equation:

(3)

Now for an example. Suppose we add 8 fluid ounces of 80 proof vodka (40% ABV) to a 5 gallon batch of beer at 6% ABV. We need to be working in the same units for each volume, so let’s convert the volume of beer to ounces:

Plugging all of our numbers into (3), we get the final %ABV:

So the final %ABV will be 6.4%. As you can see, the difference will be small (though not insignificant) for even a half-pint of vodka. In reality, assuming you make a concentrated spice extract, you’re likely to need much less liquor than that, so in most cases, the change in alcohol content should not matter very much.

Fermentation Friday, Homebrewing, Technical 2 Comments »

After trying to summon my inner Dogfish Head and it not quite working (not Sam’s fault … just mine and my inability to differentiate between 8 oz by weight and 8 oz by volume), I decided that my next recipe would be a little simpler and more classic.

15 March 2009
Sweetheart Kölsch
5 gallons, 60 minute boil

4.0 lbs Pilsen Light Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)
2.0 lbs Wheat Dried Malt Extract (60 min)

2.0 oz Vanguard Hops [54.4% AA] (60 min)
1.0 oz Sterling Hops [6% AA] (5 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

White Labs German Ale/Kölsch Yeast WLP029

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Create a yeast starter two days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Bring to a boil. Turn off heat and add liquid and dry malt extracts while stirring.

Bring back to a boil. Add Vanguard hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

At 5 minutes, add Sterling hops

Chill wort to below 70°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion at 60-65°F.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. Age for 1 – 2 weeks.

Rack to bottling bucket. Boil corn sugar with 1 c filtered water and add to beer. Mix well.

Bottle. Age for two weeks.

Originally, since I like being witty and giving things weird names, I wanted to come up with an alliterative name for the kölsch. I had already come across one named Kölnnel Klink Kölsch, which I thought was pretty darn klever (ha! I crack myself up). The closest I came was calling my brew the Kurnitz Kölsch, after Grandma Kurnitz, the character I played in Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers. However, Grandma Kurnitz is extremely bitter and harsh, and that’s not what I was going for in my kölsch, so I renamed it the Sweetheart Kölsch, under the guise that you would share a bottle or two with your sweetheart. Collective “Aw!” on the count of 3 … 2 … 1 … oh nevermind. Back to the beer.

We just recently bottled this beer, so a tasting post should be around the bend in a week or two. My hope is that this beer is balanced and refreshing. Sure, it might not make you fall off your seat with a burst of flavor, but at least you’ll stay seated with no beer spilled.

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes 5 Comments »

Y’know, maybe this simple recipe malarkey is overrated. Let’s get creative again.

I am (in)famous within our social circle for my love of all beers Belgian — quite a shame, I’m sure you can agree, thanks to the vulgarity of it.

Belgian-style Dubbel is a dark amber ale, a bit on the strong side (up to 7.5% ABV), and usually sweet and fruity, often sporting subtle plum and dried fruit notes, with just a touch of roasted malt to round the whole thing out. Hop character is generally subdued, providing a careful balance against the malt.

Sass that, I thought to myself when I started to write this recipe. Spring would be arriving by the time this beer was ready, so I knew we were going to be in the mood for a nice hoppy quaff. Bearing that in mind, I decided it might be fun to take the plummy sweetness and hints of chocolate found in a Dubbel and see how they would play against a bit more hop bitterness and some pronounced spicy hop flavor and aroma. On the same vein, with the weather warming up, a high gravity beer would become less and less satisfying with each passing day, so we targeted a lower starting gravity of about 1.050 instead of the usual 1.060 – 1.070 range.

Vanguard and Sterling both impart a pleasant hop spice to a beer, so those were our first choices. Our goal with the hops was to have a fairly pronounced flavor and aroma, but without too much bitterness, so you’ll notice our early hop additions are pretty light.

As for malt, pilsner malt extract tends to result in a very light body and color with a bit of residual sweetness. Some candi sugar should dry that out. Meanwhile, we’ll also add some Caravienne for its caramel, Special Roast for its nutty biscuit flavors and deep orange color, and Chocolate for its roasty cocoa character and a bit more color. In the end, we should end up with a lot of malt complexity for such a light bodied beer, backing up some strong hop notes.

This was also our first dry hopped beer. Dry hopping involves adding hops to a finished beer and letting them steep cold for a week or two. This adds a very distinct hop aroma. “Dry Hop” is also the name of my Rock Band band.

31 January 2009
Hoppy Dubbel
5 gallons, 30 minute steep, 60 minute boil

5.00 lbs Pilsner Malt Extract (60 min)
1.00 lbs Belgian Candi Sugar Amber (60 min)

Specialty Grains:
0.50 lbs Caravienne Malt
0.50 lbs Special Roast
0.25 lbs Chocolate Malt

0.50 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (60 min)
0.50 oz Vanguard Hops [4.4% AA] (60 min)
0.75 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (15 min)
0.75 oz Vanguard Hops [4.4% AA] (15 min)
0.75 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (dry hop)
0.75 oz Vanguard Hops [4.4% AA] (dry hop)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

White Labs Belgian Style Saison Ale Yeast Blend (WLP 568)

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Create a yeast starter at least three days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Heat to 155°F.

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

Remove grains, turn off heat, add malt extract and candi sugar while stirring. Continue stirring until candi sugar is dissolved.

Bring to a boil. Add bittering hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

At 15 minutes, add flavor hops.

Chill wort to below 70°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion, starting at 65 – 70°F and allowing the temperature to rise to 80 – 85°F over two to three weeks.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. Add dry hops. Age for 1 – 2 weeks.

Rack to bottling bucket. Boil corn sugar with 1 c filtered water and add to beer. Mix well.

Bottle. Age for two weeks.

The yeast in this recipe is notoriously fickle. Saison yeast tends to take several days to start working, and will sometimes stop dead in its tracks after a week only to start up again another week later. The key with these idiots is patience. I’m not talking long red light patience here, either. More like airport security line the Friday after Thanksgiving patience. Take gravity readings every day after the first week. If the fermentation stops before it should, leave it be. It should wake up again. You might try pointing a space heater at the fermenter to get the yeast riled back up. If there’s a lot of sediment, it also can’t hurt to gently stir the beer with the handle of your (sanitized!) brewing spoon, but be careful to avoid splashing so you don’t introduce any oxygen into the beer (there should be a blanket of CO2 over the beer anyway, so don’t worry if a little bit of splashing occurs).

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes Comments Off

Our last three or four brews were a bit… out there. Successful, mind you, but generally inspired by muses who like their jobs too much.

And so, we dialed it back a notch for our January brew session, creating a recipe for a low alcohol dry Irish stout.

4 January 2009
Dry Irish Stout
5 gallons, 30 minute steep, 60 minute boil

4.0 lbs Ultralight Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)

Specialty Grains:
1.0 lbs Black Roasted Barley
0.5 lbs Black Patent Malt
1.0 lbs English Brown Malt
0.5 lbs Crystal Malt 75L

2.0 oz British Kent Goldings Hops [5.7% AA] (60 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

White Labs Irish Ale Yeast WLP004

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Create a yeast starter two days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Heat to 155°F.

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

Remove grains, turn off heat, add malt extract while stirring.

Bring to a boil. Add hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

Chill wort to below 80°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion at 65 – 70°F.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. Age for 1 – 2 weeks.

Rack to bottling bucket. Boil corn sugar with 1 c filtered water and add to beer. Mix well.

Bottle. Age for two weeks.

Easy, hands-off boils like this one are so refreshing.

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HomeBrewBeer.net is hosting this month’s Fermentation Friday, a last-Friday-of-the-month blogging event specially made for homebrew bloggers. This month’s topic: “How will you grow or change as a homebrewer this Spring? How will you embrace your Spring fever and channel it toward your homebrewing endeavors?”

In a way, this topic reminds me a bit of January’s Fermentation Friday topic of Brew Year’s Resolutions, but at the same time, I see the difference. The changing of the seasons can really have an impact on people, as well as every other living thing on this planet. For me, I know when the days become consistently sunny, the weather warms up — but isn’t sweat-drenchingly hot — I become crazily optimistic and happy-go-lucky. Springtime for me means evenings after work at the park, lunchtime walks to Whole Foods, and shoving my coats to the back of the closet. It’s amazing what an effect winter can have on our bodies and attitudes!

So, how does this relate to brewing? Bryon at HomeBrewBeer.net asked how we’ll embrace this newfound optimism charged from sunlight and channel it into homebrewing. I think for Ray and I, that means our beers will lighten up with the sun — I may love stouts, but nothing beats a delicious, thirst-quenching hefe on a warm day. We want to brew beers that we can sip on our balcony in the evening after dinner. And so far, we’ve already begun.

We just bottled a lovely hoppy dubbel and brewed a simple kolsch-style beer (more info on those brews to come!). On the docket for the coming months, we have brews that will tend toward slightly lower ABVs, lower SRM units, and lighter on the palette — all while remaining flavorful, of course! No “triple hops brewing” Miller Lite crap here.

Fermentation Friday, Homebrewing Comments Off