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 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.

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: