One of the Belgian Pale Ale bottles decided to blow up on me. Amazingly I seem to always be home when these things explode. My initial thought was that a rock had come through my window but alas, wishful thinking on my part.
I brewed up a couple new batches this weekend. A dubbel and a coffee porter. The dubbel was fairly straight forward, similar to my last dubbel all grain recipe. I’m hope there are no severely off flavors for this one, we’ll see what happens. The second, more interesting, batch I did was a coffee porter. This one I have my doubts on. 1) As usual, I’m a dumb shit and can’t read labels. 2) I was too lazy to go pick up some Kona coffee as I had hoped so used some old Starbucks Ethiopian Sidamo I had in the freezer. I brewed up a pot prior to using and it seemed along the lines with what I was looking for. I’ve read how some brewers cold brew the coffee and then add this to the boil. Sounds complicated. I just added a 1/4 lb of the ground coffee into the mash. Let me tell you, that mash smelled goooooood…… Oh, onto how I probably screwed it up. So I’m going off a couple of recipes I found and from my smoked porter recipe I did awhile back. In my smoked porter, I used 1/4 of black malt so I decided to cut that back to 1/8 lb as it can bitter a beer quite severely if not used in moderation. so I measured out the 1/8th lb, dumped it into my grain mill with the rest of my specialty grains. I then got busy with something else and finally came back to add in my pale chocolate malt, 1/2 lb. I did that, milled all the specialty grains and the bag aside as this would be batch #2 for the day. About an hour later, I noticed my full 1 lb bag of pale chocolate malt sitting off to side…meaning I had over 1/2 of black malt ground up in my grain. Yup, I’m a dumbass. I carefully scooped out as much of the black malt I could from the grain, luckily it’s dark, the rest is not. During the process I dumbed a bunch of my malted oats and crystal malt, so after adding in 1/2 lb of pale chocolate I made up for the crystal/caramel malt with 1/2 of the Special B I had left over from the dubbel. This is going to be interesting… When I tasted the wort through the process, I didn’t get an overwhelming sense of the black malt, but it usually doesn’t come out until after bottling and fermentation when the sugar has been converted and isn’t covering the bitterness. Awesome, what can I say.
I also bottled up my Bay Ridge Beer de Garde and my Drunken Monk #2. I took samples the day before an they both seem promising. The biere de garde may have a little diactel (sp?) to it, I’m hoping it doesn’t get worse.
Now that I’ve punished my liver enough and freed up some bottles, I ordered up some ingredients and brewed my third batch of Drunken Monk and my first attempt at Bier de Garde. The former is my pet recipe I’m trying to hone while the latter is a farmhouse ale a bit like a saison but richer and darker. The first thing I had to do was go online and get the ingredients. As I’ve done a few German styles, I’m getting back to the Belgians for a bit so I decided to get a 55 lb sack o’ Dingemans Pale malt. They don’t ship well by UPS…just putting that out there. One thing I did learn: I though that a 55 lb sack ‘o grain would fit into a 5 gallon bucket so I also purchased another bucket with lid to keep my grain. A bit of some wishful thinking on my part. The sack will actually fit about 2 buckets but since my first two batches were heavy on the base malt, I ended up having just a full bucket after brewday. Having a full bucket of barley is never a bad thing, no?
Having recently picked up a new grain mill, a Barley Crusher ™, this was my first chance to try it out. Here’s what I’m using:
While I meant to pick some a feeler gauge to dial in the gap, I just haven’t had the chance to hit the hardware store so after some trial an error I settled on a 1/4 turn less than the default .04 spacing used by default. Everything seemed to go well when it just started grinding. When I first tried the thing out a couple of weeks ago, the same thing happened but I found that the handle wasn’t on tight enough so I readjusted and tightened the handle but it still just ground the roller and not the malt. Life lesson #1 on the roller mill: rocks and stones are not your friend. Come to find out there was a marble sized stone in my sack ‘o grain grinding the shit out of my roller. Nice. With that out of the way, I finished up the first batch and then I’m off to brewing.
Have you ever had one of those days? This was my day as far as brewing goes. I basically got fucked all day. And not in the good way. The first batch, my Bay Ridge Biere de Garde, was going well until I started to recirculate to prep for the sparge. I opened the spigot and nada came out. Ok, stuck sparge, I say to myself. I took necessary corrective measures like blowing into the valve, stirring up the mash, etc. Nothing. After feeling around with my spoon I realized that the connecting tube from my spigot to the false bottom fell out. Oh, shit. It wouldn’t be a huge deal if the mash wasn’t 175 F at th is point. Being the resourceful lad I am, I figured if I insulated and then waterproofed my hands/arms, I could just reach in and re-attach the false bottom and be good to go. Picture this: I’m wearing gloves, a sweatshirt and wrapped around my hands/arms are garbage bags…no, go ahead, picture it. Ridiculous to say the least with negative results. I resorted to dumping the mash out into my kettle and bucket so I could then re-attach the line, dump everything back in and continue with my sparge. That worked, but not before I had wort/mash all over the place. Just more to clean up.
After I finished up that batch I started on my Drunken Monk. Big beer, 23 lb grain bill that pushes my 10 gallon cooler to the limit. On the mash in, my Pyrex probe thermometer told me 188 F so I added about a gallon of cold water to cool it down. Mixed it up, and it still was at 185 F. Kept adding cold water but the temp didn’t seem to go down. I pulled the probe out and apparently the ambient temperature in my apartment is 195 F. Yeah…so at the time when temperature control is most vital, my thermometer kicks the bucket. It then went to read that the mash was 222 F. Awesome. I grabbed my other thermometer to find my mash was actually at 122 F now and almost to the top of my cooler. I had no choice but to convert my single infusion mash into a triple deccoction mash. I would get about 1.5 gallons at a time off the top, bring it to a boil on the stove and keep repeating until I was up to 154 F. Awesome. Needless to say, this little fucker got a screwdriver through the aorta:
My goal on these batches was to see how the use of the roller mill and the addition of the 52 pH stabilizer would help my efficiency. Both batches were in the 50% range but for obvious reasons, I can’t used either as a good judge. Onward and upward…
I bottled up my latest creation yesterday, a pale ale. This is my first attempt at a lighter beer and from the taste I had it should be good. I saw that New Belgium Brewing Co. was selling their yeast for the Fat Tire beer so I picked up that and checked for a few Fat Tire clone recipes. I took elements from about 5 different recipes and put this together. Another first I did with this beer was to use gelatin finings in secondary to brighten the beer. When I took my SG sample it was unbelievably clear. I’ve found that the increased amounts of Irish Moss help but that gelatin really cleared the beer up nicely.
I also received some of my new gear last week. I saw one of the guys on Youtube was using neat setup for racking so I tried it out this batch and it worked like a charm. I got a stainless racking cane and carboy cap with two holes, one for the racking cane and another to blow air into. I put a hepafilter on the “blow-hole” for lack of a better term. I’m not sure if it’s really necessary, but why not. It seemed to work much better: the larger inner diameter of the racking cane really improved flow. Here’s a pick:
In an effort to branch out, and me wanting to do something other than beer for a change, I picked up my first wine kit today. It is a Spanish Rioja, a Wineexpert Selection International Series. I started it today. It was fairly straight forward, add 15g of bentonite in a 1/2 gallon of hot water, then add the juice, top up to 6 gallons, add the oak sawdust, add the yeast and seal up. In about a week I’ll do the next step of transferring to a 6 gallon carboy. SG was 1.084.
Also, a recent trip to Florida found me the best liquor/beer store I’ve ever seen, Knightly Spirits in Orlando. Besides having the largest Belgian beer selection of any store I’ve been two, they had Everclear so I packed up 4 bottles in my suitcase for the flight home. With this, I started another batch of limoncello. I zested about 20 lemons and added them to 1.5 liters of 151 proof Everclear.
A couple of weeks ago I went on a brewing binge and did up three batches. As I’ve got four carboys now, I wanted to do some of the beers that will sit in my closet for several months. I did a lambic, a barley wine and then an altbier for consumption in the foreseeable near future. I transferred all three to the secondary yesterday. I also picked up a new sanitizer, BTF which is a iodine based liquid sanitizer. I’ve learned that the One Step is good, but gets really expensive, especially for bottling. The BTF is $11 per bottle, and only takes about a teaspoon for a carboy. I’ll stick with the BTF for glass and just use the one step for everything else.
Two days ago I brewed up my second attempt at a pumpkin ale and today I brewed up a Dunkelweizen all grain kit from Northern Brewer.
For the pumpkin ale, I read all I could on the methods of other homebrewers and put together my recipe and method from various sources. When I tried this last year, I basically took half of the raw pumpkin and put it in the boil with the other half half baked in the oven first and then into the primary fermenter. The resulting brew was almost undrinkable as it just had this overwhelming raw pumpkin taste and I ended up dumping most of the batch. This year, I took a three pronged approach.
Since I am doing all grain now, I decided to place a third in the mash, a third in the boil and the remainder inthe primary. I took a nice 16 inch pumpkin, cleaned it, and cut it into one inch cubes and tossing the skins. First of all, have you ever tried to cut an entire pumpkin into 1 inch cubes? It’s a bitch and luckily I started a couple of nights before. From there, I took a third of the raw pumpkin and ziploc’d it up in the freezer to keep for the boil. I then backed another third and boiled the final third. When I baked the one batch, I noticed that the pumpkin lost alot of mass with all of the evaporating water. However, this time I made sure to bake it at 375 for 2 hours when it came out, there was no raw pumpkin left. The third I boiled was really out of necessity as I just didn’t have enough time to bake it up that night. On brew day, I took the boiled up pumpkin and baked it about an hour, enough for the pieces to just start caramelizing a bit. This batch I put in the mash. The rest of the brew day was straightforward with the thawed raw pumpkin going into the boil and the baked batch from the first night being boiled for 15 minutes, cooled down in the fermenter and then adding the wort into the fermenter on top.
For spices I used one fresh nutmeg and cinamon in the mash and then two nutmegs and a bunch of cinnamon in the boil. When I tasted the wort going into the carboy I saw that I used way too much cinnamon, hopefully most of this comes out when I filter going to the secondary. I’m also going to add more fresh nutmeg in the secondary and just a hair of ground ginger.
We’ll see what happens with this batch. I brewed a bit late in the season for this style, but hopefully there is a nice pumpkin ale to go with Thanksgiving dinner ready.
Today I racked the Drunken Deacon, Scottish Wee Heavy and Belgian Dubbel to the secondary. The Drunken Deacon and Scottish Wee Heavy just did not have the SG I was looking for, the Belgian Dubbel is more than what Beersmith called for. I really need to work on efficiency more, it seems to be a major issue since I’ve started all grain.
I went on a brewing binge over the weekend and brewed up two all grain batches. Both were all grain kits from Northern Brewer. The first was the Scottish Wee Heavy Ale, similar to the previous Scottish Ale I did but with only 1/4 lb chocolate malt in this batch. I felt this beer deserved a second chance as I just wasn’t thinking the first time around and put too much chocolate malt into the mash. The second batch is a Belgian Dubbel. The kit didn’t include the 1 lb of dark candi sugar so I ended up using just the 1/4 lb I had left and supplemented this with a bottle of dark molasses. I completed both batches in about 10 hours. I think I like doubling up batchs as it saves some time and cleaning, both on the brewing and bottling.
Did I mention? I guess not. I had my first true beer explosion a couple of weeks ago. I was a bit worried about my Saison as the second yeast addtion didn’t seem to be fully utilized when I bottled as there was still a thick coat of the white yeast cake at the bottom. To furthur my worries, after just a week I opened a bottle and it was completely over carbonated, not a good sign.
So a week later, I’m sitting in the living room and hear a loud explosion followed by a hissing coming from my bedroom (where the case of Saison was being stored in the 32 oz Grolsh style bottles. Sure enough, one had exploded so I knew I needed to bite the bullet and open the rest. Here is what came of that:
Gotta love it.