Out of my brewing group, I think I’m the only non-engineer. Numbers? Science? Pshaw … I want ass-kicking flavor and a nose that will tickle the fantasies of your olfactory glands. Sure, you can get that with very precise and measured recipe writing, and honestly that’s admirable. As much as I am a baker (where measurements are important) I’m an experimenter, and I like throwing in a little bit of this and that.

Perhaps I might be taking after entrepreneur and brewer extraordinaire Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head, who in his book Brewing Up a Business recalls his great grandmother during the discussion of his first brew: “…my great grandmother … was known in her town for making the best sausage using only pinches and handfuls to measure. I felt comfortable trusting my judgment and it actually worked well.”

A little less than a month ago, I sat down to write my first recipe, after following many of Ray’s innovative and successful endeavors (I swear, nothing beats that Tripel we brewed!). I knew what I wanted to brew, and I knew the flavors I wanted to bring forth, but how to get to that point took a little time. I started with Charlie Papazian’s The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, reading about the style I was interested in and making notes about a few of the recipes Papazian recommended. Though I wasn’t interested in copying one of his recipes, it was a great place to begin. I also googled the type of beer I wanted to brew — I know I’m being elusive, but I want the recipe to be a surprise — to see if anyone else had attempted it. I had some luck with forums, getting a few ideas for ingredients. Then, it was off to our handy-dandy brewing software, Beer Alchemy.

I find Beer Alchemy to be user-friendly, and quite honestly a whole post could be written about it (Maybe if you ask Ray nicely he’ll write about it.). With MoreBeer.com open, I could search for malts, hops, adjuncts and yeasts, getting an idea of what the site stocked, and then analyze what certain ingredients would do in the recipe. It can be fascinating how an extra ounce or two of malts or hops can make a difference in SRM or IBUs.

Just the other day we received our shipment of the ingredients for my recipe as well as Ray’s next one for January. I’m excited — look for a post on December 8  — and I will try my hardest to not add a pinch of this and a scoop of that. Our digital scale will be my friend.

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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.

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Wait … what the heck is LME you’re asking? “The London Metal Exchange? That doesn’t make any sense. Did she sit down and have some cookies with the exchange? And if she did, then wouldn’t they be called biscuits?”

Ahem, anyway, LME is known as liquid malt extract. Since we are not all-grain brewers, we rely on LME for our beers. We had some leftover after brewing the stout, so I put the leftover away until I could stick it in something. LME is somewhat similar to molasses, so I found a new oatmeal cookie recipe that stems from WWII when brown sugar was rationed and molasses was used more readily in cookies.

I must say, I am really happy with how these cookies turned out. The recipe does not call for spices, so I kept it that way — I have a separate recipe for spiced oatmeal raisin cookies — but in lieu of raisins I decided to use the dried cherries I had leftover from a chocolate cherry stromboli I made ages ago.

You could really smell the LME in the batter, and anyone who has sampled LME before could pick out its distinct flavor in the batter. The cookies are also thick with oatmeal — 2 cups — so as Ray said, it gives you plenty to chaw on.

The finished cookie has a great oatmeal texture, the cherries are a nice substitute for raisins, and the LME worked as a great sweetener/molasses substitute. If you have some leftover LME of your own (or molasses I suppose), then check out the recipe below, I think you’ll dig it!

Ingredients:
2 cups flour
2 cups oatmeal
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup (1.5 sticks) unsalted butter
2 eggs
5 tbsp LME or molasses
2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup dried cherries

Directions:
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F
2. In a medium to large bowl, stir together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and oatmeal.
3. In a large bowl, blend together softened butter and granulated sugar until creamy. Add the vanilla, LME, and eggs. Slowly mix in the dry ingredients.
4. Cover baking sheets with parchment paper. Drop batter onto the paper by the teaspoonful, fitting 12 cookies to a sheet.
5. Bake for 10 minutes. Let the cookies rest for a moment before placing them on a wire rack to cool. Yields roughly 48 cookies.

Also, we also managed to score River Horse’s latest Brewer’s Reserve, the Imperial Cherry Amber Ale. I found that sipping it after tasting the batter left a hoppy taste in my mouth; however, sipping the beer after a nibble of cookie did not do the same thing. Weird. Nonetheless, the cookie and beer pair well.

The great texture and balanced chewyness make these cookies addicting!

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Jerk is weird and wonderful. On its own, the word Jerk traditionally refers to the style of Jamaican cooking in which meats are given a dry-rub of Jamaican Jerk Spice, a hot-as-all-hell mixture of allspice and Scotch bonnet peppers (a breed of habanero, the most feared pepper in the world), and then dried over smoke. In the North, Jerk is usually cooked, instead of dried, over a hot grill. The mixture of the cinnamony, nutmegy, clovey allspice with the eye-watering heat of the Scotch bonnet creates a fantastic and unique contrast between dessert spice and hot spice.

All of that heat makes Jerk a perfect summertime style (sweating = cooling off), and also an ideal pairing with a roasty stout or a well-hopped Imperial IPA. For this recipe, I used my version Jerk seasoning in a grilled chicken pizza. Steph also had the crazy idea of substituting pureed roasted red peppers in place of pizza sauce, which turned out to be delicious.

I am just now remembering that I forgot to take a picture of the final results, which makes me sad and remorseful. If I make this again and I remember to take a picture, I’ll update this post.

So, recipe time:

1lb pizza dough

Pizza sauce:
12 oz jar of roasted red peppers, drained
1 Scotch bonnet pepper (substitute a jalapeño if you don’t want to chance an encounter with a habanero)
2 tbsp skim milk
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp ground black pepper
1/2 tbsp garlic powder
1 tbsp dried basil

Toppings:
1 lb chicken breast
1 c lime juice
1 c apple cider vinegar
3 tbsp Tabasco sauce
3/4 c chopped scallions
12 oz mozzarella cheese, grated

Jerk seasoning:
1 tbsp onion powder
1 tbsp dried thyme
2 tbsp allspice
1 tbsp ground black pepper
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp salt

———

Mix the lime juice, vinegar, and Tabasco. Marinate the chicken for at least 8 hours, preferably 24 - 48 hours.

In a grill, prepare a searing hot flame. You should not be able to hold your hand over it for more than two or three seconds.

Remove the chicken from the marinade and grill for about 5 minutes per side, until charred on both sides. If it takes any longer than a few minutes to char a side, do not continue trying or the meat will become overcooked. Set chicken aside to cool.

Preheat oven to 500°F.

While the chicken cools, prepare the sauce: Drain the red peppers. Slice and seed the Scotch bonnet (wear gloves). In a food processor, blend the peppers together with the skim milk and spices until smooth.

Spread the pizza dough over a 16″ pizza pan. Spread a thin, even layer of sauce over the dough.

Prepare the Jerk seasoning: Mix together onion powder, thyme, allspice, black pepper, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, and salt.

Roughly cut the chicken (use a steak knife and tongs) into 1/2″ pieces. Toss well in a mixing bowl with the Jerk seasoning. Spread evenly over the sauce along with the scallions. Finally, spread the grated mozzarella cheese over the pizza.

Bake at 500°F for 5 - 10 minutes, until crust is golden brown.

Serves 4.

I went ahead and substituted in the jalapeño for the habanero. Surprisingly, I think I could actually take the heat, but I have sensitive skin and didn’t want to risk exposing it to the inside of the habanero. Maybe I’ll try it next time if I remember to get a glove.

The roasted red pepper sauce proved to be a perfect mix of bitterness and mellow sweetness to counter the heat of the Jerk seasoning. We also mixed the leftover sauce into a tomato sauce the next day. I’d like to find more uses for this.

I personally felt that the seasoning was a little too hot, so you might consider toning down the cayenne just a little bit, or omitting the habanero/jalapeño. Everyone else who tried the pizza thought it was good as it was, though, so you might also consider leaving everything as is. Basically, this paragraph was not worth writing. Oopsie!

We all paired this with Heavy Seas’ Red Sky At Night Saison, an unusually — and pleasantly — sweet and citrusy Saison, with almost none of the funk that one usually associates with the style (which I almost see as a strike against it, actually). It was great to have in between bites of the pizza — the citrus did a lot to help extinguish the heat, even despite the heat-exacerbating carbonation. I’d like to try this again against either a Hefeweizen or a big IPA.

Pairings, Recipes 1 Comment »

Time to kick things off! For our inaugural brew day, we purchased an ESB kit from Morebeer.com. Even from the get-go, we already felt like we could easily follow a recipe on our own without a kit, having done so much reading and having watched Steph and Tim brew, but just to be really sure that we know what we’re doing, we decided to use kits for our first two brews, allowing us to concentrate on the process without being burdened picking ingredients.

ESB, or Extra Special Bitter, is a sub-style of Bitter, a British session beer that is slightly sweet, slightly bitter, and generally just very unassuming and subtle while still being capable of some interesting complexities. It is traditionally served at room temperature from a cask, but naturally, ours will be bottled. Extra Special Bitter tends to be a little bit more alcoholic (above 4.8% ABV), with a bit more malt and hop complexity than the standard bitter. Done right, this should be the sort of thing you can spend all day sipping. Great for a summer afternoon!

Here is the recipe:

7 June, 2008
Extra Special Bitter
5 gallons

7 lbs Ultralight Malt Extract

8 oz Crystal Malt 40L
8 oz Honey Malt
4 oz Special Roast

1 oz Magnum Hops (60 min)
2 oz Kent Goldings Hops (5 min)
2 oz Kent Goldings Hops (1 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

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

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

Chill wort to ~70°F. Pitch yeast. Allow to ferment to completion at ~72°F.

With this blog, we’re trying to target inexperienced homebrewers, and so to those of you who have never brewed before and might not understand all of that, apologies. We’ll address you in depth soon. Suffice it to say, those few lines are basically all that you need to know once you know the process.

In future posts, we probably won’t have much more to say after the recipe, but because this was our first brew, we felt the need to chronicle the day in photos! Here are some highlights from the gallery:

Keeping the water at 155°F while we were steeping would have been a ton of trouble were it not for our gas stove. Electric is a pain to deal with.

We had a bad hop bag. It was either already ripped, or it ripped while we were handling it (probably the former). Either way, we ended up with a lot of Kent Goldings hop pellet goo left in the wort at the end. At least it settled out during fermentation.

Hello! We thought it would take longer, but not even 18 hours later, the yeast had gotten to work in full force!

There are a dozen-odd more shots in our Picasa Gallery.

We had accomplished homebrewers Steph and Tim supervise us. By the time we were finished, all four of us (myself, Mel, Steph, and Tim) agreed that Mel and I could have managed the process on our own, but it was good to have had my sister and her husband nearby, especially since they did so well keeping a couple of neighbors who dropped by distracted during the more intricate tasks. We’ll definitely be able to handle our next brew day solo.

We actually did this several weeks ago. We just didn’t get around to getting the blog running until today. The yeast was pitched on June 7th with an Original Gravity of 1.054, and primary fermentation was done by the 12th. We racked the beer to a secondary fermenter on the 15th, finding the Final Gravity to be 1.017, giving us an ABV of about 4.9%. Perfect (enough)!

We’ve tried the uncarbonated beer a few times now, and it is delicious. It fits the ESB style quite nicely, but with a slight American touch to it (a little more hoppy than one would find in England). There is also a slight fruitiness to it, from the slightly warm fermentation (about 75°F, when it should have been 70-72°F) that we really dig. We’re not ready to pass judgment just yet, but if we were to make any changes, we’d add just a little more late-boil hops to tick the nose up a notch or two. We’ll wait until it’s carbonated before we decide, though.

We’re bottling this beer today. We’ll try one bottle every weekend until we’re satisfied with the carbonation, but at this point, I think we can easily declare Brew Day #1 a rousing success!

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