Remarkably, we are not brewing a pumpkin beer this year.

The weather is getting cold (not to mention characteristically unpredictable) over here in South Jersey, and it won’t be long before we’re all huddled under blankets in front of our open ovens. It’s time to brew something warm!

This month, we’ve put together an apple beer loaded with spices and sweetness. We don’t expect it to be especially alcoholic, but the 6.5% ABV that we’re shooting for should still be pleasantly warming. Factor in the 40% cider wort, mix in a little luck, and we should end up with something like a nice, hot apple pie to get us through Jersey’s bitter January. Except it’s beer and it’s cold.

One unique thing about this recipe is that it doesn’t really fit into a specific style. We based the recipe loosely on the Red Ale style, but there are also elements of Scotch Ale. That and it’s obviously also a fruit beer, which is what it’d be entered under in a competition. Basically, this beer is a monstrosity and a perversion of nature. And here’s how to make it:

30 October 2008
Winter Red Apple Ale
5 gallons, 30 minute steep, 60 minute boil

5.0 lbs Ultralight Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)

Specialty Grains:
1.0 lbs Crystal Malt 120L
1.0 lbs CaraRed Malt
0.5 lbs CaraFoam Malt
0.25 lbs Chocolate Malt

1 lb 8 oz Wildflower Honey (15 min)

2.0 oz Willamette Hops [3.9% AA] (60 min)

2 gal Apple Cider
3.0 lbs Granny Smith Apples, peeled and cut into 1/2 inch pieces
2.0 lbs Gala Apples, peeled and cut into 1/2 inch pieces
3 Whole Cinnamon Sticks
1 Whole Nutmeg, chopped
1 oz Ginger Root, peeled and chopped
1 oz Coriander Seed, crushed

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 cider and 1 gallon 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.

At 15 minutes, turn off heat. Add honey while stirring. Add apples, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger root, and coriander.

Return to boil for remaining 15 minutes.

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.

One important note: Do not use apple cider that has preservatives in it. The preservatives will either kill or severely inhibit the yeast. You’ll most likely have to go to either Wholefoods or a farmer’s market to get un-preserved cider. Get an extra gallon while you’re there, to prepare for the eventuality of you drinking a lot of it before you can get to brewing.

For the apples, we were shooting for a slightly tart apple character, so we used more Granny Smiths than Galas. Taste your cider beforehand and adjust your apple selections to your liking. You may want to use many different apples to give the beer lots of apple complexity. My style, personally, is to focus on one or two flavors and really showcase them (which is also why I tend to write recipes with only one breed of hop). Some people like to mix it up. Do what makes you happy. Pet a kitty. Give hugs.

Honeywise, your best bet is to take a ride to your local farmer’s market. The honey you can get at the supermarket is perfectly valid, but you’ll probably find that you get higher quality stuff from local farmers. Ours came from the agricultural prodigies at Griggstown Quail Farm.

A couple more tips: Instead of trying to chop the nutmeg, wrap it in paper towel and hit it with a mallet. Try to resist the urge to stuff your nose in the freshly smashed nutmeg. You won’t be able to. It’s intoxicating, I tell you. For the coriander, pulse it in a coffee grinder for a few seconds.

Something we’re trying differently this time: All of our beers so far have come out with a lot of fruity esters. It’s yummy in most cases, but in the stout, for example, it was completely out of place. These esters are the result of the temperature in our bathroom where we keep our fermenters; warmer fermentations produce more esters. To try to contain this, at my brother-in-law Tim’s, recommendation, we filled the bathtub up with a few inches of water, set the fermenter in the water, and covered it with a wet towel. Tim says this should lower our fermentation temperature by a good 10 degrees. He’s smart.

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes 2 Comments »

Tripels usually take forever to get to the point where they’re ready to drink. At first, we expected to have to wait as long as two or three months for our Belgian style Tripel to age out to perfection. Imagine how surprised we were when we discovered that, other than the obviously missing carbonation, our Tripel was ready to drink right out of the primary fermenter, a mere two weeks after pitching. Nevertheless, we kept it in secondary for two more weeks to clear it out a bit, and it took a while longer to carbonate than our other beers since Trappist yeast is a little lazy. But still, a month-and-a-half to come up with a finished Tripel is pretty freaking fast.

So, let us dissect. Warning: S-words.

1.086 OG; 1.020 FG; 8.9% ABV; 13 IBU

Appearance: Hazy, honey amber color, with subtle red tones. Big, creamy (for a Belgian style), off-white head takes its time settling down, giving you all the time in the world to enjoy it.

Nose: Sweet, banana esters explode out during the pour. They’re backed by a subtle, alcoholic dryness and a generous but controlled helping of floral hops. A barely detectable hint of spice shows up if someone has already told you to expect it.

Taste: Slightly dry, semi-sweet, with lots of banana esters, balanced by a slight hop bitterness. Lots of orange sweetness completely shrouds any alcohol taste. There is a slight suggestion of coriander.

Mouthfeel: Medium-to-light bodied, and surprisingly crisp and refreshing. Finishes dry, with a subtle hop bitterness that lingers on the middle and back of the tongue and begs you to take another sip.

Overall: When Mel and I do a tasting, we each pour a glass, take an index card, and silently take notes. We do this to keep from influencing each other’s impressions. Keeps things objective. In this case, we each independently wrote the words “holy shit” on our respective cards. Gotta love parity. We both agree that it needs more coriander, and I feel like it’s a bit dark, but apart from that, it’s impossibly refreshing, and the orange, banana, and floral hop flavors completely mask the substantial alcohol, making this an extremely dangerous beer. We might have to warn our friends about it. I’ve gotten buzzy just while writing this post.

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We took our sweet time getting to this tasting. We’ve actually been sampling our attempt at Steph and Tim’s Tropical Foreign Extra Stout recipe every now and then for a little while. The first bottle screamed very loudly, “Age me, please,” which we obliged to do. And now here we are, several weeks later, and we’re ready to call the stout done. Here are our combined thoughts:

Appearance: Deep, dark, just barely translucent brownish black with red highlights. Huge, foamy, latte colored head that makes the beer sound like Pepsi.

Nose: Floral and roasty with some fruity esters, but nothing really jumps out.

Taste: Very sweet, almost cloying. Banana and vanilla notes. Some roastiness manages to peek out once the sweetness makes it off of the palate.

Mouthfeel: Medium to medium-light bodied, yet creamy. Coats the tongue and lingers on the roof of the mouth, which helps to conceal a late-game alcohol bite. Overcarbonated.

Overall: We’re kind of disappointed with this one. It came out much too sweet, and the fruity esters are out of place. It’s also not as chocolatey as we think it should have been, but the vanilla notes were a nice surprise. What surprises us the most is the fact that the recipe comes out a lot better when Steph and Tim execute it. Perhaps there is some fundamental incompatibility between their recipes and our process. Our fermentation temperature is the first thing that comes to mind — our bathroom tends to be fairly warm, leading to increased ester output by the yeast. I believe the yeast we used was English Ale; using a higher-attenuating Irish yeast instead might help the sweetness and ester problems.

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Yep, finally hurt myself brewing.

As one of my first exposures to craft beer, India Pale Ale is a style that I hold in my heart with deep regard. The style lends itself to massive complexity in flavor and aroma. Some make it intensely bitter, some like it with big body and lots of sweet malt — depends on which side of the Atlantic you live on, really.

As the legend goes, India Pale Ale originated during the mid-17th century during England’s control of India. At the time, the only way to ship supplies to the garrisoned troops there was to sail all the way around Europe and Africa into the Indian Ocean. The journey took many months, during which time beer destined for India would often spoil before arrival.

In response, George Hodgson began to brew a high-alcohol and generously hopped pale ale for export to India. The extra alcohol preserved the beer from spoilage during the trip, and the extra hops balanced out the heavy malt character of the beer. Hodgson dominated beer exports to India until the 1820s, and is now credited with the creation of what had already come to be known at that time as India Pale Ale.

American and English brewers create two very different India Pale Ales. Americans favor heavy amounts of hops, creating crisp, medium bodied, refreshingly floral and bitter IPAs without which no summer can be considered remotely complete. The English, on the other hand, craft a maltier IPA with more subtle (but still pronounced) hop character that meshes well with lots of nutty, biscuity malt notes. I’m a devout lover of English beer, so you can guess which style I prefer. Hint: it’s the one I can never seem to find anywhere. Sad face. Guess we’ll have to make our own!

With this recipe, we’re aiming to create a very English IPA. To drive that point home, in addition to using lots of different specialty malts, we’ve focused the recipe’s hop additions on British Kent Goldings hops, a mild hop that excels at complimenting malt character, while still asserting a soothing, floral overtone to the concoction. Hands down one of my favorite hops. You can never use enough of these guys. It’s physically impossible. If you managed it, your skin would turn inside out and you’d be swallowed by a black hole. A flowery, delicious black hole.

As a final touch, we’re using White Labs Burton Ale yeast, straight from the town of Burton, England, where the IPA was born.

To the recipe:

28 September, 2008
Goldings Shower India Pale Ale
5 gallons

8.0 lbs Ultralight Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)

1.0 lbs Victory Malt
0.5 lbs CaraPils Malt
0.5 lbs Special Roast
0.375 lbs Crystal Malt 40L
0.375 lbs Cyrstal Malt 75L

2.0 oz British Kent Goldings Hops [5.7% AA] (60 min)
2.0 oz British Kent Goldings Hops [5.7% AA] (30 min)
2.0 oz British Kent Goldings Hops [5.7% AA] (15 min)
2.0 oz British Kent Goldings Hops [5.7% AA] (5 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

White Labs Burton Ale Yeast WLP023

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Create a yeast starter two days in advance.

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

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

Bring to a boil. Add remaining ingredients as indicated above.

Chill wort to below 80°F. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion at 70 - 75°F.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. Age for two weeks.

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

Bottle. Age for two weeks.

Fun story: I was making the yeast starter on Friday. Everything was going normally. No boilovers, no accidental burns. Smooth as buttered silk.

With 2 minutes to go before it was time to stop the heat, I put a work glove on my left hand, lifted the starter flask off of the stove, waited for the wort to stop boiling, and added 4 grams of yeast nutrient, which caused the wort to erupt like a geyser from the flask. Swearing is so much funnier when you’re not thinking about it.

I reflexively hurled the flask away from me, wort still spurting from the opening as if heaving from the throat of a sorority sister at 2 AM, creating the spectacular mess you see here:

Remarkably, the stove still works. By the way, boiling wort hurts very, very badly when you put it on your hand, so don’t put boiling wort on your hand. Also, hooray for safety.

I spent the next hour cleaning up, and as if to indicate how badly I wanted to hurt myself again, I got straight to work on a new starter. It did not try to kill me.

Our Brew Days Add Comment »

I’m sure some of you are waiting to hear about how our take on Steph and Tim’s Foreign Extra Stout has played out — I can tell you that Ray and I have tried a couple, and they have carbonated, but they need to mellow a bit.

But if you also remember that post at all, you should remember our mention that I was going to put my own spin on the recipe, and I did. Except it didn’t quite work.

Inspired by my Orange Chocolate Chip cookies, I wanted to add an orange flavor to the stout; however, foresight was in my favor and I decided I didn’t want to chance the entire 5 gallons. So Ray and I prepped 2 carboys when it came to secondary fermentation: one for 2.5 gallons of untouched stout (the control) and one for 2.5 gallons of stout with 1.5 ounces of McCormick orange extract added (the variable).

We thought the grocery-store extract would be fine, and we eagerly awaited the orangey-goodness seeping through the stout, infusing the roasty beer with a nice citrus nose and flavor. We didn’t get that lucky.

While the control batch carbonated fine — just needs a little more aging — the orange-flavored stout never carbonated. So it’s flat, and quite honestly, it reminds me of orange-scented cleaning supplies in the taste and nose department. A bit of a disappointment, BUT it’s not as if we wasted 5 gallons. So far we used a majority of a 12 ounce bottle to create a beer and brown sugar reduction that was paired with sauteed apple slices over french toast. It was pretty neat. We’ve also read plenty of blog posts about using “bad beer” for marinades and such, which we will most likely do over the coming months. I wanted to feed it to my plants, but Ray dissuaded me.

So, you might be asking, “What happened?” We’re not 100% sure; I know I properly added the priming sugar to the bottling bucket — and the regular stout fermented fine — so I think it’s safe to rule that out. The only thing we can think of is that your typical baking extract does not rock yeast’s world. That, or maybe I didn’t do my good luck dance well enough that day.

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days 3 Comments »

I wrote this month’s recipe myself. It’s only our fourth brew day, and our experience in homebrewing is negligible compared to some people we know. Am I crazy to be creating a recipe from scratch already? I must be crazy. Crazy crazy.

Our big leap into recipe writing is made all the ballsier by our choice of style. This month, we’re making a Belgian Tripel. Possibly my single favorite style — hence my burning desire to make one — Tripel is a sweet, golden, light bodied, yet ferociously alcoholic beer. Hop bitterness is typically subdued but noteworthy, ceding the floor to sweet, pale malts and spices. Belgian candi sugar lightens the body while creating complex alcohol aromas, and Trappist-style yeast produces warm, banana-like esters that burst forth from a dense, creamy white head.

High alcohol content (ours will be around 8.5% or 9% ABV, but I’ve seen as high as 12%) is disguised by the ample sweetness. When it’s aged properly, it’s not uncommon to mistake this for a lighter session beer before falling out of your chair after half of a pint… which is one of the reasons why it is typically only served in a 10 oz tulip glass.

For a beer as big as this, it is very important that one create a yeast starter two or three days in advance. Creating a yeast starter gives your yeast extra time to wake up and reproduce in a light wort before getting dumped into the heavy wort that this recipe produces. The end result is a faster fermentation that starts sooner. We’ll go into detail on how this is done soon. In the mean time, however, my brother-in-law has an excellent yeast starter tutorial in his Picasa gallery here. He doesn’t do it quite the same way that I do starters (I don’t use an airlock, for example), but you won’t ever go wrong following Tim’s advice. The guy knows brewing better than anyone I’ve ever met.

Note that you could certainly try to do this without a yeast starter, but even with the starter, ours took two days to get up to full speed. Without the starter, we could have gone a week without seeing anything happen. By that time, one could only guess what other kind of microbes will have taken up shelter in all of that sweet, delicious wort.

But enough worrying. Here’s how we did it:

30 August, 2008
Belgian Tripel
5 gallons

3 lbs Light Dry Malt Extract (60 min)
6 lbs Pilsner Light Liquid Malt Extract (15 min)

8 oz CaraVienne Malt (Steeping)
8 oz CaraFoam Malt (Steeping)

1 lb Belgian Candi Sugar (60 min)

1 oz Vanguard Hops [4.4% AA] (60 min)
1 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (15 min)
1 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (1 min)

1 oz Crushed Whole Coriander Seed (15 min)
2 oz Sweet Orange Peel (15 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

White Labs Trappist Yeast WLP500

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

The boil will be for 60 minutes. Remove grains, turn off heat, and add dry malt extract while stirring. Add candi sugar and stir until dissolved. DO NOT add liquid malt extract yet!

Bring to a boil. Add Vanguard hops.

With 20 minutes remaining, add Whirlfloc tablet.

With 15 minutes remaining, turn off heat. Remove Vanguard hops and add liquid malt extract while stirring.

Return to a boil. Return Vanguard hops to the boil. Add 1 oz Sterling hops, along with crushed coriander seed and orange peel.

With 1 minute remaining, add 1 oz Sterling hops.

Chill wort to ~80°F. Pitch yeast. Allow to ferment to completion at ~70°F.

Rack to secondary fermenter. Age for at least two weeks before bottling.

Definitely a more complex recipe than we’ve brewed so far, and I confess that I did at times fail to relax, insisted on worrying, and did not have a homebrew. Make a checklist. Plan out every detail ahead of time and just follow your list. You’ll have a much less stressful brew day if you do.

This took twice as long as we expected to begin fermenting, but it did start eventually. Just be prepared for a couple days of worrying, followed by a moment of elation when your fiancée spots the first suggestion of krausen on the surface of your wort. Phew…

Also, keep in mind that this is going to be a fairly long and slow fermentation. I won’t be especially surprised if primary fermentation takes more than two weeks to complete. Let it do its thing. Good beer takes time.

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days 1 Comment »

Yeah, we realize we took this past week off from blogging, but between our fresh engagement and my overload of freelance assignments, we needed a mini break.

We’ll be back in full force on Wednesday, but for today we figured we’d share a few pictures from our recent brew day, which was this past Saturday.

As you can tell, we have a very involved executive brewer. His name is Apollo, and he rocks the malt extract.

Apollo’s watching the brew kettle for boil-overs.

He’s also busy contemplating at what point he wants to add the adjuncts.

Ray checks on the steeping grains as Apollo looks on.

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We started drinking Nuts About Coffee in full force this past weekend. It came out great! Here are our notes:

1.064 OG; 1.020 FG; 5.9% ABV; 13 IBU

Appearance: Super dark brown, hazy, and barely translucent, with a tall, thick, rich, frothy, and almost stout-like latte-colored head.

Nose: Sweet and nutty. Coffee is mellow and smooth, but still the first thing that you notice. Slight hint of chocolate.

Taste: Big hazelnut coffee taste asserts itself from word one, lingering on the back of the tongue and begging you to take another sip. More sweet, general nuttiness and chocolatiness wait beneath the coffee.

Mouthfeel: Medium, slightly dry, and creamy. Very smooth. Surprisingly crisp and clean.

Overall:
My thoughts: Best yet! The coffee was a great idea. I’m glad we used it. I was worried at first that it might have been too much, but it turns out we used just enough to make it the centerpiece without overwhelming with it. I can’t imagine how we could improve on this.
Mel’s thoughts: Did we just brew a porter? Hot damn, this was a great experiment. This would make an excellent dessert beer!

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Tasting Add Comment »

We are thieves. Dirty, filthy, rotten thieves are we. To call us unseemly would be an insult to all of the unseemly folk you’re likely to see around town. Same goes for the dishonest, unscrupulous, unwashed, crooked, amoral— Would that I could list these delicious adjectives all night, but we’re on a schedule here, people. Everyone on the bus… the bus to Lyingbastardville.

For you see, we brewed with a stolen recipe on Saturday. Steph and Tim were kind enough to offer us the recipe for their Foreign Extra Stout, and we accepted it… right from under their noses.

Steph asked us to refrain from listing the detailed recipe here, but I can at least give you their description of the beer:

Just as its appearance suggests, this beer is malty, roasty, and chocolatey. However, this style of stout is actually intended to be enjoyed in tropical climates. Smooth and refreshing, with a substantial alcohol kick, our Foreign Extra Stout will make you feel like you’re on the beach in Cancun…
OG: 1.074, 7.2% ABV, 30 IBU

This was one of the five beers that Steph and Tim brewed for their wedding back in April, and Mel and I have been wanting to try putting our own spin on the recipe for a while. We’ll fill you in on just what that spin is in a couple weeks, as long as it doesn’t fail in an epic manner, but, for now, you may rest assured that it will be awesome.

And now I’ve spent 246 words telling you that I have nothing to tell you. In place of the usual recipe listing, here is the first chapter of Moby Dick:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses…

Yeah, all right, I can’t keep that up.

I can’t believe Ray did that … anyway, you guys are going to love this beer once I put my little twist on it. Though I can note that I goofed and did not order the correct amount of hops. We had a half ounce too little from what the original recipe called for, but since the average alpha acid was for this particular hop from this particular supplier was higher by roughly 0.7 percent, we were okay. C’est la vie!

Well damn, now I gotta write a post about why what she just said makes so much sense…

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days 1 Comment »

We opened a bottle of our ESB back on the 28th of June, but found that the carbonation wasn’t quite there yet. This past weekend, we tried again, and the beer is definitely ready for consumption, evidenced by the fact that we have consumed quite a bit of it by now.

Here are my notes. I believe Mel is going to be chiming in on this, as well.

Appearance: Hazy, reddish orangeish brown. Thick, cream-colored head that gradually coalesces into a few thin islands of foam that never go away completely.

Nose: Bitter, flowery, and subtley fruity.

Taste: A bit bitter for the style. The nutty and caramel notes are there, though they’re a little bit harder to pick out than I would like. Still, very drinkable.

Mouthfeel: Crisp. Coats the tongue. A bit of a hop bite going down.

Overall: I’m thrilled with how well our first homebrew came out. I can’t be honest with myself and call this a true ESB at the same time, though. The hop profile is just too pronounced. If we brew another ESB down the road, I would probably want to cut the late[Ed: Duh] early-addition hops in half and spruce up the specialty grain bill a bit. Nevertheless, the knowledge that we still have three gallons of the stuff left to drink sends warm tingly feelings down my legs.

Here are my notes:

When poured, the beer produces a nice head and a subtle fruity aroma (no fruit salad here!)

Medium to light mouthfeel.

The hops bitter sits on your tongue, but not in a grease-coating way.

A slight crispness to the end. Also, the beer gets fruitier as it warms.

Overall, the beer is very drinkable; what I would consider a perfect session beer for me, unlike Old Rasputin (a personal favorite of mine, nevertheless), which is A. too filling and B. too expensive to drink for an entire summer afternoon. I also have to agree with Ray on the hoppiness of our ESB. Perhaps we should call it an AESB (American Extra Special Bitter), since we all know us Yanks like to hop it up a bit!

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Tasting 3 Comments »