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.

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!

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.

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.

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.