Mild Mannered

Probably didn't need to mill those flaked oats...

I'm almost out of dark beer. I recently cleaned my beer lines at home and all I have on tap now (aside from the stouts) are lagers, one of which is a schwarzbier. Consulting the great homebrew calendar, it's about time to make a low-gravity, dark English ale. It's mild time! The last time I brewed a mild, it was an extract batch, and it came out really well. I think I probably drank about two or three pints of it. Most of it wound up on tap at a friend's house, and I think he drank most of it. So I'm going to brew 10 more gallons of it and probably give him five again, since he seemed to like it so much last time.

Backyard Hop Crop Report, May 2015

Mt. Hoods last year

I had a bumper crop of hops last year, especially for first-year plants. I planted four rhizomes last year, two Mt. Hood and two Cascade. The Cascade were a little slow getting off the ground, but the Mt. Hood exploded. This was a little disappointing because Mt. Hood is a variant of German noble hops, not exactly known for being used in large quantities (though we'll see if my Bitter Pils To Swallow turns out well–it has 10 ounces). Cascade, on the other hand, has historically been the darling of the craft brewing industry, being used in massive quantities in late additions and dry hopping for IPAs, pale ales, CDAs, etc. If I was going to get too much of any hop, I'd rather the Cascades. Looks like this year might be more along those lines.

Kurtoberfest

Every year I've been brewing, I've made an Oktoberfest/Märzen. For those who don't know, the style is traditionally called "Märzen" because it is made in March, which you might have noticed is quite a while before Oktoberfest (which is, strangely, in September). This beer is a lager, which means it's fermented slow and cold, and then undergoes an extended period of lagering, which is fancy brewer talk for "cold storage". Lager comes from the German verb lagern meaning "to store". For this beer, the lagering is quite long. I never seem to have my act together in March, and this year I wasn't really ready until early May.

Bitter Pils To Swallow

Homegrown Mt. Hood hops.

It's Pilsner time. In fact, it might be late for Pilsner time. But I made one anyway, because my wife likes 'em, and because I don't know how else to get rid of all these Mt. Hood hops I grew last year. A friend of mine had asked me if I'd ever tried Firestone Walker's Hoppy Pils. I hadn't, but it sounded like fun. I threw together a recipe assuming about 4.5% alpha acids on my homegrown hops. If the beer winds up too bitter, well, I warned you, right? It's in the name. This is a Bitter Pils To Swallow.

Tilapia: A West Coast IPA

The time has come again to brew! I went so many weekends thinking, "I should brew this weekend" only to have it come to naught. Not last weekend! I had the ingredients and I was ready to go this morning. This was a really long brew day with a few interesting twists. So I wound up brewing a slightly different beer from what I had expected to make, I ran into a couple of process issues, and I finished it off by doing a fairly deep clean in my brewery.

Cherry Stout Racking

Today marked 8 weeks of the cherry stout ("Cherry Mama") sitting on the cherries. I figured it might be time to rack it off. I'd opened the fermenter a couple of times to see what was going on and to make sure there wasn't a pellicle or something funky developing on the top, and there was definitely a strong aroma of cherry. I've never left fruit in for that long, but everything looked fine when I opened it up, although there were still bubbles coming from the cherries. I'm not sure what that means, I guess I didn't puree or smash up the cherries, so it is possible that the yeast were still getting to some of the sugars inside. The cherries were frozen, though, which should rupture the cell walls and help with flavor and color extraction.

Tea Beer Phase 4: Tasting

The time has come. It's been a couple of weeks in the bottle, and it's time to taste the tea beers!

Pappy Kurt's Olde Tyme Root Beer

I've always liked root beer. Even as a kid, I (mistakenly) considered myself a bit of a root beer connoisseur. In college, I was introduced to both Henry Weinhard's and Thomas Kemper's root beer, and realized that root beer could be even better. It wasn't long after I started brewing beer that someone asked me when I was going to make root beer. I actually lived with a guy who liked root beer so much that we always had a supply of bottled root beer on hand, because he drank it with every meal. Between my own love of root beer and my desire to make something for my non-beer-drinking, non-cider-drinking friends, I finally caved and bought some root beer extract from the local homebrew shop a couple of weekends ago. Recently, I volunteered to bring some beer in to work for a St. Patrick's day event, and I was going to dye it green. There would definitely be some folks that felt left out, though, so I decided to make the root beer that weekend, and take it in for the work event alongside the green beer. It couldn't have been easier, and the results were great.

Tea Beer Experiment Phase 3: Bottling

We return to the saga of the tea beer. After ten days in secondary, and a quick cold-crash, it was time to bottle the tea beer.  I didn't get much in the way of aroma from any of them, but as noted, they were very cold at the time, and while that did a great job of dropping the tea and other sediment out, it also suppressed any aromas. Bottling is a pain, but fortunately I had a friend over to help, which always makes the process less onerous. Bottling three one-gallon batches is especially annoying, given that you have to clean out the bottling bucket three times, sanitize three times, clean out and sanitize the lines and the bottling wand three times, mix priming sugar three times, and each time through the whole rigmarole only nets you ten bottles of beer. The one fun part is getting to taste the intermediate results, as there is always some lost overhead when bottling.

Tea Beer Experiment Phase 2: Adding The Tea

The base beer I made almost two weeks ago is done with primary fermentation. It started at 1.044 and finished at 1.008, one point above the target FG. That gives 4.7% ABV. As expected, there is still a fair amount of residual sweetness from the honey and crystal malts. The Cascade hops didn't impart a ton of bitterness (as intended), but you can definitely smell them. The beer has a subtle citrusy note and aroma. The predominant flavor is really just the grainy malt flavor. This should be a really nice base to let these tea flavors shine. Let's add some tea!

Cidermania

I'm going to ferment you all!

I mentioned in an earlier post that the first batch of homebrew I ever made was an apricot wheat beer. The second batch was a lager, specifically a clone of Shiner Bock. One of the hardest parts of brewing is the waiting. In order to pass the time while I was waiting for those beers to be ready, I decided to try my hand at making some cider. I had been perusing the HomeBrewTalk forums and encountered what might just be the most popular cider recipe in the homebrewing community: EdWort's Apfelwein. Apfelwein is a German style of cider and it is very dry. Bone dry. It usually has a final gravity below 1.000, meaning it is less dense than water. It is also very strong, usually around 8.5% ABV. There is a thread on HomeBrewTalk that is attempting to track how many gallons of the stuff has been made. Only including the people who self-report on that thread, it's already at 28,383 gallons. I'm sure the actual figure is much larger.

This stuff has started to grow in popularity at my house. More of my guests are getting a taste for it, and I realized I only had one batch left, which I made last June. I have a batch that I bottled in champagne bottles (it can be fun to carbonate it like champagne), but when my current keg kicks, I will only have 5 more gallons to put on tap. Given that it takes months for the stuff to mature, I decided something needed to be done.

Tea Beer Experiment

I like beer. I like tea. A while back I watched this episode of Chop & Brew, in which a 10-gallon batch of Belgian Dark Strong Ale is split 4-ways, and each portion gets a different treatment. The favorite seemed to be the third part, which was "dry hopped" with an ounce of Wu Ling Mountain

Three teas, each with very distinct flavors.

black tea for 10 days. I was intrigued. I've toyed with the idea of doing a green tea pale ale, or attempting to clone Elysian's Avatar Jasmine IPA, but it's tough to pull the trigger because I don't know when the best time to add the tea is. During the boil? In secondary? Actually make tea and mix it before packaging? Make a tincture with neutral spirits? There are so many possibilities. I don't want 10 gallons of beer that's painfully astringent or completely absent any tea flavor. I also found several other possible teas I'd like to infuse into beer, specifically Thai tea and Earl Grey. With Thai tea, I'm not trying to recreate Thai iced tea the way some others have. With Earl Grey, I'm just curious what the Bergamot flavor will do. So I'm going to do an experiment, and I'm going to do it in a bag.

Boil Kettle Upgrade: Whirlpool Port

During a recent brew day, I discovered what a big difference recirculating hot wort through my chiller and back into the boil kettle could make, on both chilling time and making sure my chiller was properly sanitized. While it's not a huge concern, just dropping the hose in the top of the boil kettle does leave me open to accidentally spraying wort everywhere if the hose falls out, or I trip over it, or whatever. Additionally, if I'm going to recirculate, I might as well get the benefits of whirlpooling too, right? So I decided to add a whirlpool port to my boil kettle.

Cherry Mama

It's been 3 weeks since I brewed Your Mom, the dry Irish stout. I have ten gallons of the stuff. This is where the two halves of the batch diverge. One half I kegged as is (hit a FG of 1.012, expected 1.013). That will go into the Nitrog-inator once I get the nitrogen cylinder filled. It should be ready to drink well before St. Patty's day. But the other half's destiny lies elsewhere.

Cherries, meet stout.

One of the benefits of doing a ten gallon batch is that you can get two full kegs of beer in one slightly longer brew day. Since the wort goes into two separate fermentors (for me at least, I don't yet have a fermentor that can do all ten gallons at once), once it's out of the boil kettle, they don't even have to wind up being the same beer. Ferment one as an ale and one as a lager. Use two slightly different yeasts to see how they differ. Dry hop one of them. Two beers for the price of one!

In this case, I had a 3 pound bag of dark tart cherries in my freezer that I bought at Costco with some sort of beer plan in mind. I had thought maybe a cherry Berliner Weisse, but I haven't yet worked up the nerve to do a sour. I figured it was time they got used. So they're going in the stout.

Speckled Heifer Mark II

Strike water!

You may have noticed that the Nitrog-inator has two taps. It's also the case that my wife is going through the Speckled Heifer pretty quickly. Can you see where I'm going with this one? Superbowl Sunday I was having a party, but that didn't start until the afternoon. I had a whole morning to work with!

Chainline Brewing Co.

A few months ago I was looking around for local breweries to check out. Some friends of mine and I had visited Black Raven, Bushnell, and HiFi in Redmond, and I wanted to see if there was anything closer to home, here in Kirkland. Two things came up. The first was Flycaster, up near Totem Lake. The second was Chainline Brewing Company, which was... wait a minute... right on my walk to work? The following Monday, on my walk to work, I peered into the address where this brewery supposedly was located, but there wasn't really anything going on. It just looked like an empty building. I did some more searching around online, and they were still trying to get the required licenses and so forth to start building out their brewery. It turned out that the ballet school next door was putting up a big fuss about it, thinking that basically a bar was moving in next door. I made sure to write my local representatives and express my support. I mean, a brewery blocks from work? How awesome would that be?

That Budweiser Ad

You probably saw the Budweiser ad, if not during the Superbowl, then online. For the purposes of making this post stand on its own, or in case you've been living under a rock, here it is:

Aside from the fact that it smacks of desperation, it also shows that the folks over at Anheuser-Busch InBev really just aren't paying attention.

The Nitrog-inator

I may not be Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, but I've been known to whip up an -inator from time to time. No, I don't mean a doppelbock, though I'd like to at some point. I mean a contraption. A thingee that does something. None of them ever conquered the tri-state area, and not all of them have been particularly successful, but when it comes to homebrewing, most of them have worked out pretty well. I attribute this to the wealth of knowledge out there on the various homebrewing forums as well as the YouTubes. So far, I've built two kegerators, one based on a cheap fridge that was living in my house when I moved in, and one based on a Danby DAR125SLDD mini-fridge I bought online. I've also wired up a Control Products TC-9102D-HV high voltage dual-stage digital temperature controller, and assembled my all-electric brewery, including soldering together temperature sensors, adding twist-lock plugs to pump cords, modifying kettles, re-sweating a leaking chiller joint, and so forth. It's been a journey, with a lot of learning.

So when I was casually browsing Craigslist one day and saw a used mini fridge (a Kenmore 564.95499400) with no freezer for not very much money, and remembered that I was planning on brewing a Dry Irish Stout for St. Patrick's Day, I jumped at the opportunity. I want to put that stout on nitro!

Your Mom: A DIS

I seem to be on a dark beer kick. It's not intentional—at least I don't think it is—but my kegerator at work has a brown ale, a milk chocolate stout, and a schwarzbier on tap. Last year around this time, I found myself watching the "All About Stout" episode of BrewingTV (one of my favorites), but I hesitated to pull the trigger. Not this year. This year I will brew a Dry Irish Stout, and I will brew it in time for St. Patrick's day.

Super Lazy Ice Cider: An Experiment

In November of last year, I was reading the November/December 2014 issue of Zymurgy and I ran across an article named "Frozen: Making Ice Cider" by Nathan Williams (I also read an article in BYO). I've had ice wine before, I guess it had never occurred to me that one could also make ice cider. Ice wine is made by leaving grapes on the vine until they freeze, which does two things. First, it allows the fruit to develop more sugars (essentially becoming overripe). Second, it freezes the juice of the fruit, so that when pressed, much of the water is left behind as ice, yielding a very concentrated must. There's nothing particularly special about grapes in this case, and the same can be done with apples. As of December  2008, to be designated as cidre de glace (it originated in Quebec), a beverage must obey the following rules:

May The Schwarzbier With You

I was dismayed to find out that I was the fourth person on Brewtoad to name a recipe "May The Schwarzbier With You". But not dismayed enough to change it. I brewed this back on November 9, because I was going to be out of town for all of December and wanted to take advantage of the time away to do some lagerin'. Lagerin' always goes better when you can't go check on the beer, or you forget about it (or both!).

In developing the recipe I consulted a couple of sources, but mainly went with splitting the difference between two of Jamil Zainasheff's recipes from Brewing Classic Styles. One he admitted was far too roasty, but still seemed to do well in competitions. The other was basically just a black pilsner. I've never been one for "It's just like this other thing, only a different color!", so I combined the two, in the hopes of taming the roastiness of the first recipe. Here's what I wound up with:

Speckled Heifer

A couple of months ago, a friend of mine from Minnesota was over at my house, and we were digging into some beers another friend of mine from Wisconsin had brought back. Most of them were from New Glarus, a renowned brewery that only distributes their beer within Wisconsin. I had seen a bunch of their stuff before, as well as the episode of BrewingTV about them. Needless to say, I was intrigued. He brought back a bunch of stuff, including some of the more exotic offerings, but he also brought back their flagship beer, Spotted Cow. Upon sampling this beer, my Minnesotan friend remarked that he really missed Spotted Cow, and lamented its scarcity and lack of availability out here. So I said, "Why don't we try to brew a clone?"

He took me up on it.