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.

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.

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!

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!