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.