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.

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.

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.

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!