Beer Brewing Blog

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.

Back to brewing.  I had a few weeks off, but I’m back.  Three weeks ago I brewed up an oatmeal stout that is now ready to bottle, I’ll get to that tomorrow.  Today I brewed up what I’m calling my Drunken Deacon.  I upgraded to a 10 gallon mash tun cooler so I thought I would give the Drunken Monk another shot with a proper amount of grain this time.  As luck would have it, or lack of luck, I was at a homebrew store and picked up the ingrediants so I could get this ready in time for Brewtopia in October.  As I assumed, the store didn’t really have what I wanted, so instead of 15 lbs of Belgian Pils malt, I have 10 lbs and 5 lbs of Briess 2 row.  Plus, no Belgian Strong Ale yeast, just a white labs high gravity yeast.  We’ll see what happens, it shouldn’t be too bad.  Oh, and I stopped by the store for some brown sugar but I spied a bag of dememera sugar so I picked up that.  $6 for a pound of sugar, gotta love NYC gourmet stores.  SG on the Drunken Deacon was only 1.072, should have been higher.  It doesn’t look like I’m going to get the efficiency I wanted on this one, I hope the high gravity yeast does some magic.

Today was bottling day.  It was supposed to be brew day for my oatmeal stout but like the dumbass I am, I forgot to add hops to my last order.  After three months, my Port Barrel Aged Belgian Brown ale was ready to bottle as was my Saison.  I’m still a bit miffed by the Saison as the FG was only 1.020.  The FG for the Brown Ale was 1.004 giving it a 7% ABV.

I decided to try a saison for this batch.  I brewed it up about a week ago and just racked it to the secondary.  I was a bit worried about the yeast I ordered from Northern Brewer as it was a Wyeast Activator Belgian Saison (#3724) and by the time it arrived the pouch was already puffed out.  To cover myself, I happen to be near a brew supply store and while they didn’t have a saison yeast, I picked up a White Labs Abbey Yeast.  I made a starter with the saison yeast and it seemed to take well so I used that.  OG was 1.070.  When I racked to the secondary today, it was only 1.040 so I thought, what the hell, lets add in the Abbey yeast and see what happens.  I also added about 1 tspn of vanilla extract as I couldn’t really find any vanilla beans near me.  See my Beersmith page for Beersmith notes.