Iced Mocha Stout

As mentioned last time, I have had a cream stout, a chocolate stout and an espresso stout. But I have never had all three. In a few short weeks that will all change.



To make the Iced Mocha Stout work I wanted to make sure special attention was paid to the ingredients. I started with a dry irish stout kit from the local beer supply store.


To mocha-tize it, I examined the contents of an Iced Mocha. Ice. Chocolate. Milk. And of course, coffee.



The ice would be supplied from the outside.



The chocolate had some scientific challenges. We couldn’t just drop a chocolate bar into the boil. Chocolate has fat (I know, it turns out those rumors are true), and that does not play well with the yeast. I had tried Hershey’s special dark cocoa during conditioning on the last stout, but it added just a hint to the aroma and was lost in the other flavors.


So this time I decided on 2 Tbps that would be added towards the end of the boil. I’ve also been curious about using cacao nibs. So I decided to add 4 oz.



Neither chocolate is sweet, and I’m not trying to rot anyone’s teeth, but I did want to try to enhance the flavor a little bit. I was going to add ¼ tsp of vanilla extract, however after consulting with the resident pastry chef, I bumped it up to 1Tbps.



For the milk, you can’t just open a quart of Berkeley farms 2% and dump it in, but you can get lactose powder. So I got 4 oz of that for the milk component.



I would need to go all out for the coffee. But what to use? There are so many different varieties of coffee and so many ways to roast it to get so many flavors.



So I made a field trip to the Peet’s Coffee & Tea store in San Ramon, CA. I announced my intentions, and was enthusiastically directed to the barista, who himself was a one-time brewer. The challenge is that you don’t want a coffee that will lend a nutty, fruity, spicy, chocolatey or really any other flavor. The other ingredients will capture other flavors. This coffee should be a straight forward dark roast, and taste like….. well, coffee. The barista recommended either French or Italian roast, and I went for French. Whole bean, of course, so I can grind it right before use.



So I added twice the recommended daily allowance of fresh grinds for a pot of coffee and took 1 liter of the yield for the brew (about 32 oz).



Here’s how I put it all together: I added the lactose and cocoa powder to the last 5 minutes of the brew. I added the Peet’s French roast and the vanilla extract to the carboy, just prior to pitching the yeast.



Then when the brew had fermented for a week, I added my cacao nibs. I did a taste test just prior and so far the results are good. We’ll see what the nibs bring to the party.



This brew will go into the keg on Sunday, and I will give it a week or two to carbonate. I’ll post some pictures and the results of the taste test when it is ready to go.

Next Up: Iced Mocha Stout

There's always that dude that orders iced beverages in the dead of winter so the coffee shops have to keep the ice maker plugged in, damn the blizzard outside. That dude is yours truly.

My favorite coffee beverage is the Iced Mocha at Peet's.

As chronicled earlier, I ran an Espresso Stout and it turned out pretty good (if not a bit too strong on the coffee). That one was done on the fly, so this time i did a little research and pondering, and now I am ready to give it a go.

The premise: I've had a cream stout (Sam Adams has a nice one). I've had an Espresso Stout (Red Hook used to make one. Breakfast on camping trips when i was single and much younger). I've had Chocolate Stouts (Young's is my favorite). But I've never had all three in one beer. With all the brewers out there I'm sure it has been done, but since I've never heard of one, yet alone tried one, I'm on it.

The gist: I am starting with an extract version of a dry Irish stout. To that, I am adding lactose at the end of the boil, double strength Peet's coffee and a touch of vanilla extract to the cooling wort (before pitching the yeast), and cacao nibs in the second week of fermenting.

The plan: I will brew it this weekend, and keg it two weeks later. If it tastes as good as it sounds, I'll brew another batch and bottle it.

More to follow on brew day, including some pics.

45 Million Year Old Beer?

Bottle Washer called my bluff, and as it was near his birthday, and since he made the road trip (with brand new baby in tow, no less) I let him pick the beer we'd brew. His choice, dunkelweisen. Drunken-what? It's like at Hefeweisen, but a bit darker. It's meant to have a sort of banana flavor and be a bit richer than a Hefe.

And so it did. I was a bit worried with the amount of dried malt extract that the recipe called for, and it is a bit sweet, but it actually has a nice rich flavor with a hint of banana.

In fact, my friend David, who fancies himself a beer conniseur proved his mettle and picked out the banana without coaching.

The Espresso Stout turned out pretty good. I had added a liter of strong coffee plus about 5 Tablespoons of coffee grounds as detailed in an earlier post. I would either decrease or leave out the grounds, but otherwise I fully intend to do this one again. Some stouts have a heavy feel to them, but this one was nice and light. The coffee went hand in glove with the dry stout. At this point I find myself craving it, and I'm nearly out.

The chocolate was not dominant. My wife, the resident chocolate expert, said it had a chocolate nose. I had to explain to her that beer does not have facial features. No laughs but I did get the eye roll and almost a smile.

I may try to introduce chocolate next time to the boil, but again, the end result was quite good as it was, so I may just leave it out altogether.

******
More Beer sent me a postcard to notify me of a big event with tastings and discounts, etc. My wife intercepted it, which turned out to be a good thing, as it was handed to me with that look of resignation "I guess I know where you're going on Saturday". No groveling required. Just ingenious marketing right there.

So under the pressure of a 15% off sale, I finally broke, and came home with a Cornelius keg, a CO2 tank, and all the fittings.

However this presented yet another problem. What do I fill it with?

So my friend Rene has been living out of town, and has just moved back to the San Francisco area. We go way back, so I figured I would honor her return by letting her select the next beer to go in the pot.

"I don't know," she says. "I like ales". "And Lagers".

If you are not laughing (or at least chuckling) let me explain...

All beers are either Ales or Lagers. This is largely deliniated by the type of yeast used and fermenting/conditioning temperature. Ales use yeast that ferments on the top and brews at 65-75 degrees. Lager yeasts prefer the bottom of the bottle or bucket for fermenting, as well as a chillier temp- about 55- 65 degrees.

So I have a few options here. Then I think of a smart ass way to fill the request. A steam beer, or California Common is a lager brewed at Ale temeratures. I could give her both an Ale AND a Lager!!!

So I had a brew day this past weekend, and it is still nice and active. So next weekend, no bottles to wash (I might bottle a gallon or two to share- I am told that if kept cold and under pressure, the beer should keep about a month. i can't drain 5 gallons myself and the wife will tolerate only so many social gatherings in a week).

*******

Earlier this week I came across an article claiming someone in Northern California is brewing beer with 45 MILLION year old yeast. Turns out it's true- Jurassic Park style, found preserved in Amber. And out of 150 types of yeast, 149 would not be brewers yeast, but this one actually was!

So here is a link to the story from the Contra Costa Times. Check it out!
http://www.contracostatimes.com/ci_12924553?source=most_emailed

What's Good for the Bottle

It's bottling day, and I am waiting for the sanitize cycle of the dishwasher to finish so I can get this stout on to the next step of it's journey through it's short but important life.

The stuff you see on the sides are the coffee grounds, from the post-pitch shake. We are 9 or 10 days into fermentation and this wort is no longer sweet. I usually wait 2 weeks, but since it has more or less stopped bubbling, I declare it beer.

I gave it a taste test yesterday. The original recipe was modeled after dry Irish stouts, like Guiness, however this one won't have the creamyness nor the nitrogen bubbles. At least not this batch. The flavor was indeed reminiscent of a classic Irish stout, malty but dry, and the kick was complimented by the coffee.

So the bottling bucket is soaking in sanitizing solution, along with all the tubes and nozzles. This evening, I will be employing 15 swing-top bottles of various sizes and colors, 4 Martinelli's bottles and 20 or 21 12-ouncers. Yeah, I know, I swore off the Martinelli's bottles, but I had put the rest of my stash in the fridge to extend the life, and as it turns out after a couple days in the arctic, the crispness is back. To that end, I am planning to expedite the purchase of a mini-fridge, rather than wait to buy the whole kegging kit. Better to have more cold beer on hand anyways.

I had mentioned in the last post that I was thinking of it as an ice mocha stout, but the more I think about it (and after my tasting) the more I think that name doesn't fit. I have acquired some dark cocoa blended with dutch cocoa. I will add the cocoa to the conditioning sugar mixture. This is 100% cacao, mind you, so I'm not adding sweetness here. Any sugar I might add would be consumed by the yeast for carbonation, and if I tried to add more it would at best make it over carbonated and at worst send shards of glass through the air at high rates of speed. No lactose was added to the boil either, so it won't really fit. It would be more like a rich dark chocolate espresso. I don't know, how about Dark Chocolate Espresso Stout. I'll know in 3 weeks if it's worth naming.

The bottles just finished their heated dry and are freshly sanitized. They are very hot so they might kill the yeast. I'll let them cool a bit while I tell you about the cream soda.

*******

So I brewed some cream soda a few days ago to bring to my sister's birthday party. To avoid issues with unequal extract portions and the messy bags that come with splitting batches, I decided to brew the whole 5 gallons. I have been collecting the A&W Root Beer bottles that are 20oz and dark brown plastic. They are thicker than normal bottles and the texturing gives them panache strangely reminiscent of the Willie Mays Hayes VW Bug with the Rolls Royce grill.

Anyways, the recipe called for 4lbs sugar and 1lb honey. Again, it called for throwing dry yeast in. Since I was using the ale yeast-- the same ale yeast that ruined the Dr. Cherry when used as directed-- I opted to activate it in a cup of lukewarm water before pitching.

The nice thing about ale yeast is that it goes dormant at fridge temperatures, so you can keep it for quite a while. But it has a bit of a funny taste, for lack of a better term.... well, yeasty. Not great in soda. The champagne yeast has a cleaner taste and smaller bubbles, however it doesn't go completeley dormant. I found a root beer that had slipped behind a shelf in the fridge, and after 3 months, there was a noticable arc to the cap (don't worry, it was in the A&W plastic root beer bottle), and when opened half the contents bubbled out into the sink.

For the pound of honey I experimented a bit. The wife had some orange blossom honey (about 4/10 of a pound) and I added 2/10 of a pound of agave syrup and the rest was standard honey. I would probably go back to champagne yeast for this one and nix the agave. In fact, I liked the whisper of orange so i would go with a full pound of it. The extract I used was Gnome brand, in a silver pouch. It's a good extract, and comes out soda color instead of the usual cream soda beige.

*******

OK, enough vamping, back to the beer at hand. The bottles are cool enough to use, so I am going to go bottle. pardon me for about 45 minutes while I bottle.

*******

Wow, you have the patience of a saint! So I put my chocolate simple syrup into the bottling bucket and started siphoning in the wort. I can smell the chocolate, definately the beer, the coffee is there too. I have to try this. Hold on....

OK I have a small cup of the primed beer. Mind you, this will be a little sweeter than the final product, but here goes..... Wait, I'll smell it first. The aroma is mostly coffee with a subtle hint of chocolate. Now taste. Ok I'm wading through the sweetness, and I am picking up some bitterness. The stout itself has survived it's journey intact, and I can tell we have a pretty good alcohol content. On the second sip, the bitterness subsides, and I have to say, coffee and chocolate are playing great supporting roles. And I'm not talking Val Kilmer in Tombstone stealing the show type of supporting roles. They complement the stout well. Off the cuff, I think I may reduce the cocoa to 2 Tbps (I had added 3 Tbsp).

OK back to bottling. See you in a bit.

********

Another note on the cocoa. A lot of it ended up on the bottom of the bottling bucket. Not sure if that's the best I'm going to get from cocoa, or if it needed to boil a bit longer. The resident pastry chef is off duty and asleep, so I'll ping her tomorrow for advice.

I put some of the nectar in the freezer while I bottled to get a sense for the cold taste, and it did clear up a bit. So there is definately some complexity there, a roasty-ness that comes from the grains (black roasted, black patent and chocolate) and the..... enhancements.

I will check it again in two weeks. In the meantime I intend to brew again Father's day weekend. Perhaps if Bottle Washer reads the blog regularly as he says he does, he can come over for a brew day....

A Stout Challenge

My friend Frank is visiting again from Mexico, and so I thought I'd take him by the local brew store. We checked 0ut the kegging systems, and talked about different types of beer that we could brew.

Being the good host that I am, I gave Frank the option, and he chose stout. To be specific, he took the standard Irish dry stout as opposed to an Imperial stout.

As we got the boil going, my wife came in and made a request for coffee. So as we were brewing a pot of coffee, it clicked. I used to enjoy the Red Hook Espresso Stout; why not bring it back in an un-official capacity.

I do a partial boil, so once that was in the carboy, I added a liter of freshly brewed strong coffee, and then the rest of the water. Then I added about 5 tablespoons of coffee grounds into the carboy before adding the yeast.

I got this crazy idea about brewing an iced mocha stout, and had ground up some cocoa nibs, but we had a change of heart. As it turns out, adding chocolate to the primary fermentation inhibits the yeast and could spoil the beer. Luckily, Frank has culinary expertise and was there to keep me grounded. So what I might do is add cocoa powder to the priming sugar, and introduce the chocolate in the conditioning phase.

Frank and I did the brew on Sunday (yesterday), and as of this evening the yeast are exuberant. They seem to be sharing the top with the coffee grounds without complaint so far.

I'll do another post to detail the conditioning and provide measurements if I decide to go for the Ice Mocha Stout.

As my eldest son is turning 7 and having a lego party at the house, I will also brew some cream soda this weekend.

Cheers!

Keg Is King

As time goes on, I am noticing that home brew loses it's hoppiness. No preservatives, and over time, I guess, even beer gets old.

Some observations.

I spent some time collecting bottles. First it was getting larger bottles to reduce the amount of work for bottling. Then it was swing tops. I found some clear 33.8 oz bottles. I found brown 33 oz bottles. I even found a half-gallon bottle that held some German winterbrew.

I have come to the conclusion that when it comes to bottling, size counts. against you. I posted earlier that the flavor in the 25.4oz Martinelli's bottles was not crisp. My theory was that the green glass was letting in light that was spoiling the beer.

So what happens when you use the larger brown bottles? Same thing. The taste is just not there like it is in the smaller bottles.

Conclusion: Go with 12- 20 oz bottles. The crisp flavor is worth the extra cleaning bottling and capping.

****

My neighbor down the street brews as well, and he came by and invited me over the following Sunday. He and his buddies were gathering for the opening day of the Formula One series in Australia, and they were kicking things off with their first attempt at kegging.

I like the idea of kegging, but my concerns are: (1) How long will the beer keep once you've cracked the seal, (2) It's spendy for the gear and (3) It can be hard to keep track of how much you drink.

Sunday came around, and I swung by. We exchanged some brewing experiences and best practices. It was nice to know I shared some common challenges with other brewers.

As I tried to glean what knowledge I could about F1 racing before the start of the race, they cracked open the keg. What came out of the tap was a resolution to keg.

My neighbor had brewed an IPA with a full fruity body behind it. But equally impressive was the freshness. You really can't beat draft beer. I tried the same beer in a 12 oz bottle, and it still had all the flavor, but that draft freshness really elevated the experience.

So apparently you can keep the beer in decent shape for about a month. But of course, I will have to research it myself, before posting it as ipso facto on "My Brewed".

I am in the process of pulling coins out of the furniture and my wife is amazed at my sudden interest in laundry. I will slowly amass my fortune in spare change and turn it into pure amber gold.

I have resolved to keg.

It will cost me about $185 plus cooling to start. This will give me the refurbished soda keg (5 gallons), regulator, Co2 tank, tubing and spigot. For cooling, the plan is to get a mini-fridge I can use to keep kegs cold (no room in the fridge without massive reconfigs, and I actually do eat more than just beer). Should be able to find one on the cheap on Craig's List. And then when the time comes, with a few more bucks, I can convert it into a full kegerator. With two towers.

Three Batches Later

Where do I start?

I guess the first question is whatever happened with the Bass? First the pour. Still darker than Bass, aroma was right. Then the taste. Yeasty, but in a fresh bread kind of way. A bit of a bite. Nice malty...sweetness. Adequate. Clean finish. Need another sip. The sweetness is not the caramel flavor, and kind of subltle. Very adequate!

As it turns out, it wasn't as good as the ESB. But it was very drinkable. It seemed to take on more of the caramel flavor you get with Bass when the temperature rose. So it could be consumed either way.

In the meantime, I made another venture outside the world of kits and used a recipe from Food Network's Alton Brown. In his show "Good Eats", Alton Brown features an episode called "Amber Waves". After watching this initially around 3 years ago, I was left with the feeling that I could brew beer. My wife got me a mini kit from Bed Bath & Beyond. In 4 short weeks I would have a six pack of beer!!

I made my wort per the instructions, cooled it, added my powdered yeast and..... nothing. No bubbling, no fermenting. It actually took a month or two before I came to the realization that it probably wasn't going to happen. The "I can do it" feeling subsided, and the idea faded with time.

Thank God for TiVo. A couple years later I got the bug again when I reviewed "Amber Waves" from the DVR (you think I'm a packrat with the shows, you should see my garage). This time, I hinted Santa might look at a big boy brew kit, and I even stopped by my local beer store and picked up a brochure to help clarify the hint. And I circled the kit in the brochure. Then brought it to her attention. Twice.

Anyways, here is the recipe:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/good-brew-recipe/index.html

Some of the user reviews are a bit rough, regarding his process, but the important thing he impresses on you is the necessity for being fanatical about sanitation.

So I used his recipe. I meant to get light liquid malt extract, but I accidentally got extra light. Also the recipe called for Crystal Malt but was not more specific. I used 40L.

Fast forward 2 weeks, and one of my friends, Marcos, is flying in from Alaska for his birthday (for accuracy's sake, his birthday is the day after Christmas, however he has rejected this and replaces it with the Oakland A's season home opener). He has requested IPA. "It's all I drink" he writes.

So Saturday I bottle the Alton and on Sunday I brew the IPA. I could have gone two directions. There was a Brittish IPA, that is brewed using oak chips, and there is an American IPA that has a nice full flavor with a fruity finish. I like the idea of the oak chips, but I have kicked this thing off with 3 consecutive Brittish recipes, so I decide to go with the American IPA.

After brewing and cleaning up, I am feeling brewer's fatigue, and decide to take a break from brewing. I decide I may try the Brittish IPA or something completely different. In a few weeks.

Two weeks later, the Alton Amber is ready. First taste, very hoppy. A bit bitter, and kind of a watery finish. Company is coming over Friday with expectations (that I set) of fresh home brew. That Thursday, it is the same way. There is a bitterness and still a lack of body.

In the meantime, I have discovered that the few bottles of ESB that I had hid away, had lost some of their hoppyness, and there was kind of an odd taste that I could only classify as "old". I had been saving these for special occasions, and now they were stale and past their prime.

Strike Two. It's Friday.

I open the Alton, and it's simply a different beer. The hoppy bitterness has blended into a nice sharp bite and a very flavorful malty finish. Smooth, and body is well provided by the equilibrium of malt and hops. Day saved. The lesson learned is that 3 weeks in the bottle is better than two. A beer is just not ready until it is ready. I recommend this recipe.

The larger Martinelli's bottles are lagging behind. In fact with both the Bass and the Alton, the flavor is a little different in these dark green bottles. Not as crisp. I decide they are good for bottling soda, but not beer. I vow to replace them and never to use them again.

I make a run to BevMo looking for brown swing tops, find that Groelsh is bottling beer again, and find a few other swing's to bottle with.

But for the IPA it is too late. I have a wife and two kids, no longer in college, no longer young, and am unable to consume enough beer before bottling day. So the Martinelli's bottles go back into service.

Next post will cover a discussion with a neighbor that turned into a resolution, and Marcos arrives from Alaska. Will the IPA be ready? Will it turn out OK? Will he be thawed out enough to drink it??? You'll just have to wait. It'll be shorter that 3 months this time, though.

The Root of my problem

Bottling went well with the Bass-clone. The yield was 1 clear 33oz bottle with swing top, 12 25.4oz crown top (re-purposed Martinelli's bottles), 3 22oz. brown swing top bottles, 1 16.9oz crown, and two six packs of standard 12oz. bottles.

The following day I decided to brew the rest of the root beer. If you recall my post from a few weeks ago, I wished I had added more honey instead of sugar. I vowed to adjust the recipe to add honey. And I did. But this time, the root beer flavor was not as strong. Diagnosis: uneven split of the extract from last time to this time.

I actually measured it on a digital scale the first time, but assumed the remainder would be equal. It wasn't. The flavor otherwise was pretty good, but not totally root beer. So my conclusion is that I will brew the entire 5 gallons of soda at once.

I tried it with all sugar; I tried it with honey. Now I aim to sample some different types of sugars.

My wife is into food product development, so I am exposed to different varieties of sugars. I get sent on these missions to Whole Foods with wacky shopping lists. I usually have to drag one of the clerks into my obscure food puzzle. I once walked in with a shopping list that included Evaporated Cane Juice.

I started in the juices aisle, then by the evaporated milk, confused at least two clerks until it occured to one of us (probably not me) that it might be in the sugar aisle. For those not already laughing at me, evaporated cane juice is evaporated. Not like the milk. Definately not like juice. Like sugar. Granulated. Except the crystals are bigger.

There is also turbinado sugar, which is slightly browner and with even bigger crystals. There is also Agave syrup, which is like honey but thinner and not as sweet. I will have to sit down (with supervision, of course) and sample different sugars and figure out what might be added to the soda's to give them some unique flavors.

But back to the root beer cause analysis... If I don't split batches and brew 5 gallons at a time, then I have a new challenge. I will end up with 45 bottles that need refrigerating within 2 or 3 days. So I will have to find volunteers up front who will take soda home to their fridges. I'll also continue to use more plastic containers to mitigate risk of shards of glass appearing suddenly.

The next batch won't be for a while, but it will be cream soda. Get your orders in now....

Next time, the great boil from this past weekend, using Alton Brown's English Ale recipe.

Bottling Day - Bass 1

The pictures to the left are the start and the end of the brew day for Bass 1. Above left is the fermented brew awaiting bottle sanitation. Below left is the beginning of the mash for the grain portion of the boil, done on Superbowl Sunday.

Dark Bass aint that bad

The condensation turned out to be nothing to be concerned about. A neighbor of mine, who has a two year head start on me has been kind enough to answer such questions as they come up.

The color was concerning, but even if it didn't come out tasting anything like the brew it was inspired by, it would probably be good in it's own right.

Earlier tonight, I got the specific gravity meter out and gave it a test.

Color still dark, aroma not bad. I marked the reading as 1.009, and poured the contents into a drinking glass. Better get this over with.

OK It's a little hoppier than Bass at first taste, but definately mellow after that. Missing the caramel flavor in between. I believe by overcooking the sugar it not only turned the beer darker than it was meant to be (through carmelization) but it also dulled the sweetness a little. It's still got the sweetness you don't find in a brown, though. Not that bad, but not as good as the first batch.

I will bottle it on Sunday (tomorrow is Valentines Day; the wife likes beer, but not that much). We'll see what it tastes like after conditioning, carbonating and cooling down. More to come on that.

I may also try for the root beer on Sunday as well, using the honey and dissolving the yeast in warm water first.

I'm Back!

Alright already, I'm back.

So much has happened, but life has taken precedence until now. The latest happenings: Dr. Cherry, ESB (if the pictures didn't let the cat out of the bag), brewed some cola, and started a second batch of beer.

At least one person was waiting with baited breath to find out what happened with Dr. Cherry. My final analysis was 1) Not properly activating yeast before adding to the soda mix and 2) It was January. I tested the activation theory by using the same yeast in a batch of cola, but activating it in warm water for 5 minutes first. I also placed the case of bottled soda under a heater vent for good measure. It was ready in 3 days, but more on that later.

The Dr. Cherry suffered from the long carbonation period, and came out tasting like cough syrup. Live and learn; no need to dwell on that.

Now for the ESB. The tasting I did before bottling was spot on, but with carbonation. I found it sharp and flavorful on the front, and nice and smooth going down. If anything it needed a little more on the back nine, so the next time I brew it I will use more malt.

I decided to have a Superbowl party to release it to the public (although I gave my wife, the pastry chef, an advance tasting and made sure she didn't turn green first). It seemed to go over well.

Once I decided to have the Superbowl party, I figured I needed to have some soda there for the drivers, kids, and those not daring enough to try something that sat in my closet for a month. So I used a pre-packaged soda from Homebrew. The 2 oz bottle boasted a 4 gallon yield, and I opted for a half batch. In addition to activating the yeast at precisely 89 degrees for 5 minutes, I decided to vary my sugars.

The recipe called for 4 cups of sugar, so I used half sugar and half honey. For the honey I went with good ol' Sue Bee as a baseline. A pre-bottling taste left me wishing I had not included so much honey, but after carbonating and cooling down for a couple days it almost tasted exactly like Pepsi. For the next batch I will use 2 1/2 cups of sugar and 1 1/2 cups honey to see how it works out.

The nice thing about the honey is that it lingers longer than the sugar, which is dominant at first taste. The sugar blends nicely into the honey. I am interested in trying other sugars, but will aim to nail this down first. Overall, I was very pleased with the soda. I will continute to tune this one.
Another thing that occurred to me in pondering Superbowl Sunday was that most (if not all) of my first brew would be cashed out by my guests, and that I would need more beer. The challenge with home brew is that a beer run is a 28-day process.

So I went back out to More Beer (http://www.morebeer.com/) and started poking around. I had a Newcastle clone in hand and got talking to the guy about keggerators. My ideal keggerator has two spigots; one for a bass clone and one for a guiness clone. I am limited with present gear to carbonated beers (not nitrogenated ones like Guiness), and ales at that, since I don't have the temperature control for lagers, and.... wait.... Bass is an ale, right?

So they don't have an off the shelf Bass clone, but they had enough staff to where they guy could help me throw one together. So he pulls a recipe off the web, and we go in the back room. For the first time, I feel like a real brewer; I have entered the hallowed "back room".

I see bins filled with different types of grains. He takes 3 different types and weighs them out. Then they go in the miller, where the grains are cracked. We pick up some malt, some sugars. Now I am brewing Bass.

My first mistake was to do it the morning before Superbowl. I figured I'd have my brother over to help with the brew. I learned about all the different prop bets one could make. Somehow, he walked into a casino in Vegas after the first week of the season and took the Arizona Cardinals as a 50-1 to win the Superbowl. He also had James Harrison as 35-1 to win the MVP (who was the lineman who intercepted a pass in the end zone and rambled all the way for a touchdown just before half).

So needless to say I got a little distracted. The core problem was that I was sure I had kept the instructions from the first batch, but I never double checked. And I didn't have them. And since this was a custom batch there were no instructions. But I remembered the process with enough detail I felt I would be fine.

Start with cold water, steep the grain in a grain bag as the water gets to 170 degrees in 30 minutes, take the grain out, bring to a boil, turn off heat, add malt extract, bring to boil, add bittering hops, then add other hopping steps per the specific beer requirements. After an hour boil, put the pot in an ice water bath to cool it down, and keep the lid on to keep away vermin, then pour through funnel into fermenter, take temp, add yeast at the proper temp (<90 degrees), shake vigorously, and put in closet.

I would have been fine, but the Bass came with Dried Malt Extract (DME) and corn sugars (no, not including the priming sugar), and I wasn't prepared to deal with that, since it wasn't part of the ESB.

Issue #1: Bass is not as dark as soda. I've tried it, and it has a caramel color. My version is not. I suspect I put the sugar in too early (I decided to put it in with the malt extract) and/or it took too long to get back to a boil. One "upgrade" I tried was starting the boil with 3 gallons of water instead of 2 1/2; it took longer to get to a boil, so I may have had the stuff on the stove too long.

Issue #2: Why is there condensation in my carboy? The temp seemed OK, and it is definately fermenting so the yeasties are happy. Maybe something in the vigorous shake I gave it vs. last time, or maybe something with the sugar. Or, gulp, contamination? Not sure what to make of it.

Issue #3: I squeezed the grain bag on the way out. My mum was english, and you put the tea bag on a spoon, and tied the string around it to squeeze out a bit more flavor. But given that I repeated a mistake of not using high enough heat for the steeping, I may have squeezed bitter tannans into my brew.

Issue #4: I failed to sterilize a tasting spoon or utensil for gathering the specific gravity sample ahead of time, so I couldn't take the reading or a taste test. I won't know for a few more days until I take a baseline gravity sample to make sure it's safe to bottle. I can only wonder until then.


Thanks to all who tasted and enjoyed the first attempt at brewing. All the bottles have been enjoyed or spoken for, so I will have to wait 3 more weeks.

My upcoming projects:
As I am regaining a good supply of bottles, I think I will have another run at root beer. As noted earlier, I will include honey. recipe and outcome will be posted.

I have to have IPA brewed in April for a specific visitor from Alaska, who has made it clear he will drink nothing but (I will slip him an ESB and see if he notices). I think that leaves me one more batch between. I think I will revisit the Newcastle. It had quite a lot of malt, so it should be a nice change of pace. For the IPA, I am toying with the thought of some apricot flavoring- just a hint to enhance the bitterness of the hops. Maybe a drop or two of malt to feed the yeast.

More to follow! Until next time, cheers!

And Another

Another

First pic's

Soda Anyone?

So after getting the beer into bottles and into the closet for a couple weeks, I decided to have a crack at making a Dr. Pepper type soda, as mentioned earlier, that I got from Hoptech.

The scent of the extract was like a mix between Dr. Pepper and cherry, which is probably why it was called Dr. Cherry. The recipe calls for 4lbs of sugar, about 15 grams of ale yeast, water and the 4 oz bottle of extract.

This would yeild 5 gallons (roughly 2 cases) but I only had one case of beer bottles. The thing to keep in mind here, is even if I have enough bottles, you can't just leave soda out. With such a rich supply of sugar, the yeast will continue to chow, making more C02 and the bottles will burst. So I need to make sure I have enough room in the fridge for 48 bottles of soda, as I also use my fridge for storing food. So I'm halving all the ingredients.

So I need the bottling bucket, spigot, tubing, thermometer, bottling wand; all sanitized. Then I get my pre-measured ingredients. I'll be making 2 1/2 gallons, and will need a cool-down, so I stashed a one gallon bottle of spring water in the freezer before sanitizing.

I got the kitchen facuet running nice and hot and then filled a gallon and a half of water in. I put in 4 cups of sugar (2lbs) and stirred. Then I stirred in the extract. Once everything was nicely mixed, I grabbed the bottle of water out of the freezer and dumped it into the bucket (for you literalists, I opened the bottle and poured the contents into the bucket). I also dropped the thermometer in the mix.

Once we were below 80 degrees, I added the yeast and mixed thoroughly.

I got the bottles together, connected the tubing and bottling wand to the spigot, cranked it up, and started filling.

This was 5 days ago, and I still do not have carbonated soda. So I have to work out what went wrong.

I was pretty good about sanitation, so I don't think that's it. I used ale yeast instead of champagne yeast, at the recommendation of Hoptech. At first I thought it just took longer to get going. I also thought it might be dead yeast, but I am getting a little bit of firmness on my plastic bottles, so they are going, but going slow.

Yeast also have a hard time breaking down table sugar. Perhaps I never got the sugar hot enough to break it down to a monosaccharide, therefore essentially teasing the yeast and getting them very angry.

Ale yeast are also more sensitive to cold. One benefit of using ale yeast over champagne is that when you put it in the fridge it goes inactive right away. In the interest of being able to make mortgage payments without eating dry cat food, we keep the house at a consistent 68 degrees. OK for beer, not so good for soda maybe.

The latter is my best guess, although the sugar could be another reason. I have a blanket on the soda now to see if that will warm the hearts of the little yeast, and wake them up again.

To test these suspicions and for due dilligence, I plan to brew the rest of the root beer with the ale yeast and make a batch of dr cherry with the champagne yeast. I will also try brewing in the dr cherry with ale yeast in the summer months.

Oh the joys of life.....

Bottled Up

Pictured at left: Beer, just before bottling, in blue sweatshirt, next to bucket.

Saturday was bottling day.

Ragtag collection of beer bottles was sanitized and dried. Tubes, caps, funnels, spigots, bottling wand, filter... all sanitized.

The first task was to get the beer out of the glass carboy, and into the bottling bucket. For this, I needed to cap the carboy with the racking (siphoning) tube and filter. I simply needed to start the siphon, simple except for the filter I was supposed to blow on to create pressure to get the beer up the racking tube, is not supposed to be soaked in water. I could not get air through the filter, and therefore I could not get pressure into the carboy. Beer no go.

I ended up having to blow directly into the hole for pressure, so again, I am concerned that the beer will be contaminated.

I was able to get the golden nectar into the bottling bucket (the one above in the white) and from there used a section of clear tubing to connect the spigot and the bottling wand, and brought out the bottles.

The bottling wand was kinda fun. It has a spring loaded stopper, and when pressed against the bottom of the bottle, allows liquid to flow freely. The liquid displacement is just enough to leave about an inch of headroom in the bottle when the wand bottle is filled to the top and then the wand pulled out.

I did this with the big bottles first, and then got about 21 12oz bottles filled. The smaller bottles were in a standard beer case with a divider, very handy for storage. But not so good for filling and capping. It was easy to let a few drips go over the side when filling, and when extracting the wand. Also, the bottles are difficult at best to cap when inside the box.

An upgrade for next time will be to place the bottles in a plastic storage container for bottling and then transfer to boxes after capping.

Two more weeks til testing time. Should be ready for the Superbowl!!

Beer Bottles

The carboy, which has been in the brew cellars of the Morrison Brewery (between Tickle Me Elmo and a humidifier) made it's trek to the kitchen a few moments ago, where it will spend it's last 18 hours before being drained of it's precious nectar.

Before it's journey started, my friend Frank returned from Mexico without warning, and a celebration ensued at my brother's house. Courtesy of that celebration, I had two cases of 12 oz beer bottles on hand. I decided to go hunting for larger containers, possibly with swing tops, to offload some of the bottling work. The show that initially planted the seed in my mind for trying my hand at home brewing was an episode of Good Eats called Amber Waves. Host Alton Brown's bottle of choice was a cobalt blue 22 oz. swing top bottle. The larger bottle size is a more appropriate beer size, and the swing tops were re-useable, minus the occasional rubber washer replacement.

More Beer was where the kit came from, so I figured I'd pick some up there. As it turns out, they had 24 oz long necks at a very reasonable price, but no swing tops. Hoptech had some collectibles out, but nothting for sale. Both purveyors echoed that they are getting too expensive to carry.

So I thought I'd give the old www a shot. I found many examples, most in the $40+/case range. The best deal I found was these http://www.home-brew.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=EMP3373&Product_Code=16ozbluflex12&Category_Code=BBTLS for $31.95 for a case of 12. 16oz bottles, cobalt blue. Craigs list wasn't much better.

The other challenge I had was paying for what others considered trash. You finish a beer, you roll down the window and chuck the bottle in the median as you drive by (just kidding folks). The thought of paying for that gave me a lot of trouble. Wouldn't it be better to just buy it filled with something, say, like beer, and drink that something, and then re-use the bottle?

The first obvious choice was Groelsch. BevMo had a 4-pack for $6.99 on their website. When I hit the store, I couldn't find it on the shelf. The guy at the counter saw it in inventory, but couldn't locate it either. Then the beer guru comes out and says that Groelsch was purchased by Miller a few months ago, and ever since, supplies have stopped. Supposedly they will work their way into Miller's distribution channels, but if swing tops are getting pricey everywhere else...

So I picked up 4 22 oz. Amber Ales with swing tops at $3.99 a pop (pun intended) and cut my losses there. It was Fisher, and for a French beer it was pretty good. The beer had a head that hung on to the inside of the glass as you drank it, similar to an English pub beer.

A co-worker keyed me on to these fancy sparkling lemondades. The bottles were 33.8 0z and clear, but had that swing top. I will have to store these in paper bags to shield them from the light. I only got two of those, as they were still $4 each.

Later, as I was addressing an urgent request from my 4-year old for some apple cider, I noticed the cap on the Martinelli's was a crown cap. The bottle was 25.4 oz, not too far from the ideal 22 oz. size, and with the label off, more or less looks like a wine bottle or fancy beer bottle. Costco had a 4-pack on sale for about $8, so I got a couple of those to add to my collection.

So at the moment, my rag-tag collection of odd beer bottles is soaking in a bleach solution, in preparation for their big moment tomorrow afternoon....

This one is well struck... it's got a chance....

First for the soda. The rootbeer project is complete. I tried it yesterday morning and it had a good amount of fizz. When you're staring at an 18, you know it could get better, but you could bust. No blackjack, but as I understand it, yeast carbonation yields less head than forced carbonation. There was only so much fizz I was going to get.

Next time I will let it ride a bit longer instead of the in-out, in-out of the fridge action. Probably shocked the yeast. I will trust the plastic bottles more next time since I know what to look for now.

On to the beer.

So I just took the specific gravity reading on the beer for the first time. We are sitting at 1.011, so it should be close to done. I will check it again on Saturday to see if it has changed. If not, then the beer is safe to condition and bottle.

Conditioning will be accomplished with a small package of corn sugar, a siphon and the bottling bucket. I mentioned earlier that I was having trouble with connecting the spigot to the bucket. I was feeling a bit discouraged that I was not clever enough to figure out why the hole and the end of the threads on the spigot were exactly flush, instead of stopping at the hole.

The folks at More Beer (www.morebeer.com) were quick to point out that they had mis-drilled holes in some of the buckets, and suddenly I was no longer stupid. They provided a corrected bucket, with apologies, and a new spigot, and I was on my way.

So if the reading on the hydrometer is still 1.011, then I will siphon the flat beer out of the glass carboy, and into the bottling bucket, leaving as much debris, or trub, at the bottom of the glass as I can. To augment my success here, and to minimize oxidization, I will transport the carboy to the counter where I will siphon it ahead of time. This way the trub has time to settle to the bottom.

Once transfered to the bottling bucket, I'll add the corn sugar and let it dissolve.

The yeast will eat the sugar and produce enough sugar to carbonate the beer, but not enough to create excessive pressure.

Now, after the measurement has been taken, I have this tall slender beaker of flat beer, and I'm thinking that I've been wondering if the beer made it through OK or was tainted by bacteria. So I look at the beaker. I give it a whiff. Smells OK. It's flat.... but it's still beer...

What the hell, I gave it a taste....

WOW! It wasn't my recipe, so I can only take credit for the execution (along with Frank) but damn that tastes pretty good.

It has more of a hoppy taste than malty, but I can taste the malt. The hoppyness was like an IPA, but there was a mellowness underneath it, remeniscent of Buffalo Bill's (http://www.buffalobillsbrewery.com/brewery.asp) Tasmanian Devil.

It will be interesting to see what it tastes like after 2 or 3 weeks in the bottle. I was careful to soak the tubing I used to extract the sample for the hydrometer in a bleach solution, and to cap the carboy again once it was done. Would hate to contaminate the beer now that I've come this far.

Tomorrow I will discuss the search for bottles....

Still A Bit Flat

This evening, we popped open another root beer. There was hiss as I peeled back the cap, there was the C02 emerging, there was even the sparkly acoustic accoutrement. A pour into the glass, a bit of fizz and then the head was gone.

So we will take the chance and let the bottles go overnight.

In the meantime, I made a field trip to another brew store during lunch today. It was a place called Hoptech, http://www.hoptech.com/cart/.

I was looking for swing top bottles and some more soda varieties. The bottles he had were only display, and we had some discussion about the cost of the swing tops getting too high, and so we shifted gears to the sodas.

I picked up a pre-packaged cola extract from Homebrew, but as it turns out, the Hoptech guy mixes up his own batches of extracts. He has 3 root beers, cream soda and a Dr Pepper type flavor he calls Dr Cherry (among others). The scent of the Dr. Cherry was amazing, and I like Dr. Pepper, so I went for it, along with the cola.

I will probably try the Dr Cherry first and go from there.

I think i will try to collect some 1 litre plastic bottles for further soda bottling.

Here's hoping for a silent night. Just in case, the root beer is boxed up.

*****

The ESB is at 39 seconds between gurgles. Did not get a chance to take a hydrometer reading. The guy at More Beer said with this particular brew I should expect to see a finishing gravity of 1.010 or so.

Brewer's log, star date 1-5-2009

We tried the rootbeer in the morning, and it was not quite ready. The taste was pretty good, but it finished a bit on the watery side. Next time, i will replace some of the sugar with honey and see what that does. I am also curious to see what agave syrup would do to the flavor.

We let it carbonate at room temp for the morning, but we were very concerned about the bottles breaking, so my wife put them in the fridge at 11 a.m. Yeast eat sugar and produce Co2 as a by-product. With a capped and sealed bottle, the Co2 has nowhere to go. The resulting pressure forces the gas into the root beer, and now you have carbonation. In beer, the yeast have just enough sugar to produce just enough Co2 to carbonate the beer. But root beer is heavy on the sugar. Left to it's own devices, the yeast would keep eating and making Co2, until the pressure was too great for the glass to hold. The glass would give way, in spectacular fashion, leaving my kitchen full of sharp and sticky shrapnel.

I had taken a few bottles to work for some alternate opinions, and as it turned out, it was still on the flat side. We made the best of it. I got some ice cream- a vanilla honey bee flavor- and made root beer floats; screw Monday....

My wife took the bottles back out at my request, and at 9pm they were a little better, but not quite done. I'm not going to leave them out over night (see above), but I think they will need a little more time on the counter during the day tomorrow to reach their peak.

*****

The beer is gurgling at 36 second intervals. i was expecting it to slow down more quickly than that. I will have to go into the beer shop again to ask about the spigot on the bottling bucket, so I'll ask if there are any leading indicators that the batch may be contaminated. I mean, it's at least theoretically possible to have a successful batch the first time out of the chute, right?

I have added two more bottles to the collection; these with the rubber sealed pop-tops. They came from some fancy French sparkling lemonade. They are 33 oz, so I don't want too many of them, but I do like the feel of pushing the little hinges with both thumbs, and hearing the loud pop and seeing the little cloud of gas rise from the mouth of the bottle. I don't know if I can wait 3-4 more weeks.

Quick update

Tried the root beer after the first 24 hours. There was a whisper but no hiss upon popping the cap, and just a hint of fizz. I will wait until tomorrow evening to try again. Once they are carbonated I will have to make some room in the fridge for the 24 bottles...

We're up to 35 seconds between gurgles on the ESB.

On the first day, there barely a few bubbles, by late morning of the second day there were lots of bubbles; the carboy looked like one giant bottle of beer with about 3/8" of head. Days 3-4 the brew was churning well and gurgling often. By day 5, the gurgling had slowed to about 25- 26 seconds, and the foam settled to a thin film, dotted with brown dead yeast.

At the moment, that is where we are. I plan to bottle on Saturday, although now that I know how to use the hydrometer, I may start taking readings.

First Brewed

So I thought I would ask Santa for a home brewing kit. So my wife, um, I mean Santa came through with a kit from a place called More Beer.

The kit included a glass fermenter and a plastic bottling bucket. My biggest complaint so far (other than the kit showing up under the tree sans glass fermenter, or carboy) was the lack of instructions on how things go together.

I headed down to the store on the day after Christmas to collect the carboy, and selected an ESB as my first attempt at brewing. I have been enjoying Fuller's ESB, and the yeast they carry comes from Fullers. At this point if it doesn't taste like urine, I'll be happy.

As chance would have it, my friend Frank was visiting from Mexico for the first time in a couple of years or so, and so he agreed to stop in and assist with the intitial boil. I enjoyed the aroma eminating from the malted barley as the color of the water changed to a light and then darker caramel. Then the hops. Strong, but floral.

Finally, we got the wort into the fermenter, cooled it down and added the yeasties to the mix. This is my third attempt. The first was a brew-in-bag, done with Frank, who is a chef. That was surprisingly good. The second attempt was with a mini brew kit, and the yeast did not show up for the party. For this attempt, I managed to destroy my wife's fancy thermometer during the boil, rendering it useless when trying to measure the temp of the cooled wort. So for the first day or so, I was in a panic, sure that I had killed the little workers.

But after a day, the top was bubbling and the brew was roiling. The party was on. Again, with the lack of instructions, I had the wrong top on the carboy. But a quick trip to the shop, for supplies for a root beer bottling practice run, yielded the correct stopper. The airlock was bubbling almost right away.

The main concern at this point was that we failed to put the lid on the kettle while the wort was cooling, which opens the door for airborne nasties to crash the party. I won't know for sure if we are OK until the beer is ready to taste.

I am a week into it, and have about a week to go before bottling. Two days ago I was 26 seconds between airlock gurgles, then 30 seconds, and 33 today. I also did not know how to use the gravity tester to get a starting gravity reading, as we were not bright enough to figure out how it works on brew day. I have it down now, so I will take a reading in a day or two when the length between gurgles slows down. Aiming to bottle next weekend.

In the meantime, I thought it might be fun to get the boys (6, 4) involved, so we all brewed a batch of root beer. I stuck with the recipe for a baseline, and will then experiment with different sugars (agave syrup, turbinado, evaporated cane juice).

I also got to practice washing bottles and learned the joy of siponing without the agony of gas.

So I have 26 bottles of root beer on the counter, waiting to test (or explode if I forget). I will check them tomorrow evening for carbonation, however they will probably not be ready until Monday. Rather than create labels that I will then have to soak and wash off later, I am just coding the bottle caps. So the first batch of rootbeer will be lableled with: "RB1". 2 1/2 gallons, with 5 cups sugar, 1 T vanilla extract, 2 oz root beer extract and 2.5 gallons of water. Used Champagne yeast at the recommendation of the More Beer guy.

I will post the results for the root beer as well as the status of the ESB as I go along...