4 Months Later...

So I figured my lack of posting would happen fast but I wasn't aware it had been this long with out an update.

I've pretty much moved completely over to partial mashing. I tried out a new system of bottling and didn't have the best results. It was, however, a learning experience. The beer turned out very well. I ended up drinking a large quantity of it the last night of my camping trip. I think I have the system figured out and it is a convenient way to dispense beer in the home. It's called Tap-A-Draft. It consists of 6 liter bottles with an apparatus that dispenses with small CO2 cartridges.

So the last beer I brewed was a Chocolate Cream/Milk/Sweet Stout. Sweet stouts are like normal stouts in appearance but they have a lot of residual sweetness and very heavy bodied. The recipe uses copious amounts of dark grains to achieve the desired sweet coffee and bitter chocolate flavors. At the end of the boil I added an entire can of Hershey's Unsweetened Cocoa Powder for a more pronounced chocolate flavor. Most books recommend letting the beer sit on the chocolate sludge for at least 10 days. Due the the extremely slowly attenuating yeast strain I used its been over a month on the chocolate. I expect a ridiculous amount of chocolate flavor. Sweet stout is usually reminiscent of an iced coffee. A bit sweet bit still roasty. It is also a heavy beer because it is brewed with a lot of sugars that yeast won't ferment. These left over sugars increase the body because they don't turn into alcohol which usually makes the solution thinner. I think I will hit the mark on this one I just wish it would have been done sooner. I like to name my beers after Electric Six songs and this one is aptly named Chocolate Pope.

My next beer is going to be a Belgian pale ale. Which I will probably brew Tuesday. They are usually spicy and fruity with lower hop bitterness and low hop character but still finishes dry enough to stay well balanced. I've named it Kukuxumushu. The next after that will be Formula 409, an American Wheat and my fourth wheat beer to date. The cider is still aging nicely and I have decided to dump the pumpkin spice ale. I am also planning a weekly or bi-weekly beer review/tasting.

Cider and Pumpkin Spice Ale

So I made a pumpkin spice ale as I had planned. Going into the fermentor/throughout fermentation it smelled wonderful. When I bottled it, the beer smelled fine not the original pumpkin crazy smell as it was before fermenting but it still smelled good. I decided to taste my hydrometer sample to see how the beer was coming along and I wasn't happy. I don't know if I just don't like it or if I made a bad tasting batch of beer. It has a really funky taste that I can't figure out the cause of. I think it could be a couple of things: 1) not balanced enough, or 2) spicing was wrong/out of proportion or something. I might not have used enough bittering hops making it cloyingly sweet. I don't know what the deal is but I am going to let it age for a couple more months tasting a bottle every couple of weeks to see if it gets any better if its not good by 6 months I'll just dump it.

The cider however is a different story. It tastes smells and tastes good. Not overwhelmingly appley but more like a dry white wine. I enjoy it, but it still needs time to carbonate more thoroughly. The yeast I used seems to attenuate well but it still needs time to get the carbonation up to where it should be. Meanwhile I will be drinking the remaining case and a half of Dunkelweizen so I can make room for another batch. I do not know however what I will be brewing. I think I'm going to go with a kit to keep it simple and not mess with tweaking recipes.

Good News!

I decided to bottle that possibly contaminated beer today and when I opened my fermentor all I smelled were the telltale banana esters created during fermentation. As it turns out the yeast strain I used produces a significant amount of sulfur when fermented at low temperatures. I came out a bit low on the final volume of beer. I only ended up with about 4.25-4.5 gallons of beer after loss to trub, sedimented yeast and hop sludge. I could have probably siphoned more off the stuff but I'd rather have less, cleaner beer than more, dirty-ish beer. With that bottled I have room for another batch...or two.

For one I am going to make a pumpkin ale or an ale with spices to give the flavor usually associated with pumpkin. My other thought is a Belgian beer of some type. As I've said before my mind is always subject to change when it comes to brewing. I am definitely going to brew the pumpkin style ale for Thanksgiving. I guess I'll do some research and figure out the best way to do a pumpkin beer for the holiday.

Dunkelweizen Part 2

Well last Saturday I brewed a Dunkelweizen, partial mash and I think it may have been contaminated. I have an immersion wort chiller which is basically a copper tube that is coiled and you run cold water through it to cool your wort down really quickly. Well mine sprung a leak and shot some water into my cooling wort. Clean tap water has a low chance of contamination but it was going through tubes that probably had some mold or other funk in them due the impossibility of getting all of the water out of the coils. My fermentor was giving of heavy sulfuric odors once it really started bubbling. In about another week when I will normally bottle I am going to give it a good smell and taste and if its fine I will bottle as usual if not...I will dump it. It may not sound like a big deal but thats like flushing $30 and 6 hours of work down the toilet. On the other hand it will give me an excuse to brew a regular weizen instead or maybe pumpkin ale.

Also on Saturday I racked my cider into secondary. Most of the sugar fermented out leaving a final gravity of 1.000 which means it has the same density of water which means there is no apparent sugar left. I also tasted it. It was very tart but still tasted like apples. I plan to bottle it in about 2 months and let it carb up and age another month before I taste the final product.

Cider!

Well I've decided to make the leap into making hard cider. As I have found out from research its a remarkably simple process. Basically put the cider in the fermentor, add yeast and ferment. You cannot just buy regular apple juice and throw in some yeast though. The cider needs to be preservative free. I will be starting out with a sparkling dry cider, since sweet cider involves stopping fermentation early so there are enough residual sugars left behind to have a nice sweet flavor. It will just be way easier to start with dry. The hardest part about cider is letting it age long enough. I plan this taking a good six months to finish. A huge reason as to why I am starting now. I hope it will be good by the time Christmas rolls around. I will probably do another batch in October when the local apple festival is in full swing and I can get cheaper, fresh, and, most importantly, preservative free cider. Thanks for reading!

The Next Step...

So I've decided to take the next step on my journey to all grain: Partial Mash. I've been wanting to get a bit more customization in my brewing lately and this is the only way how to do that with out some how going all grain. A partial mash is done by replacing a portion of your extract with grains. I've decided to make a Belgian Witbier, because of its quick turn around and it will be a good summer beer.

My recipe is as follows:

Ingredients:
3.3# Pils Extract
4# White Wheat Malt
.5# American 6 Row malt
.5# Carapils
.75oz Sterling (6.0%AA) pellets @60 minutes
.64oz Sterling (6.0%AA) pellets flame-out
Wyeast 3942 Belgian Wheat

Spices:
Bitter Orange Peel 1oz 5 minutes
Coriander Seed, crushed 15 minutes

First of all mashing is the process of converting starches from grain into fermentable sugars. To mash you bring 1-1.5 quarts of water per pound of grain you have to a temperature of 170°F then add the grain you wish to mash. Adding the grain drops the temperature of the water significantly. Once you have the grain in you want the mash temp to be between 154 and 158 depending on the recipe. With a partial mash you can adjust the temp if it gets too low. It takes about an hour to convert the starches to sugars. After the mash you have to drain the water from the grain, which can be done using a mesh grain bag or stainer. Once separated you need to sparge, or rinse the left over sugars off the grains with hot water. The amount of water used for sparging doesn't seem to matter as much with a partial mash than it does with all grain. How much sparge water I will use I will figure out later. All of the runnings are collected in the brewpot and then you add extract then bring to a boil as normal with extract brewing.

Cannibalism

Well I took my Amber Ale and cannibalized it to make a full on brown ale. Basically I uppped the Special B to the full 8 oz thus resulting in a darker beer. I am brewing it for my best friend's birthday. Hopefully he will enjoy it. It will be sufficiently malty, but it should have good balance.