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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.