Where to Start?

I don't think I have the time to write about everything that has happened in my microcosmos of brewing since the last post, but I'll give a tiny update that covers a lot and then maybe later I'll find time to fill in more.

There were a handful of brews which I can't remember right now, I'll have to go read the labels and see if I managed to record them on my brewing log, but I believe I brewed a stout or 2 and something else that was pale with medium hoppiness. Then came the 3 week brewathon with Mike. We went to the homebrew shop and Mike was determined to fill every possible fermenter we had. We bought ingredients for about 3 pale ales (made up recipes), 1 Elissa Clone, 1 Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale clone, 1 Stone Darth Porter clone (oaked), 1 Rogue Dead Guy Ale clone (my personal favorite), a made up German Imperial Stout recipe (oaked), 1 Stone Ruination IPA clone (oaked) and 2 other brews, which I made from ingredients that I had bought right before the huge trip to the brew store. I believe one was a hoppy Pale Ale and the other was a red ale.

So far we bottled the Sierra Navada clone, a pale ale with Czech hops, a pale ale with Cascades hops, and another pale ale with a variety of hops, and the Dead Guy. The pale ales generally are pretty mild - we intended those to be people pleasers, the Celebration Ale was pretty hoppy, very good but a little overcarbonated, the Dead Guy came out great. It's got such a great malty aroma and medium-strong hoppiness. I don't think it tastes like real Dead Guy buy it's amazing. 5 gallons of the 15 of the mixed hop pale ale we set aside and I added a ton of dry hops to it, so it should be very aromatic with a good IPA hoppiness. I will be bottling that right now - like when I finish typing.

Needless to say my tiny beer fridge is loaded. Believe it or not less than 10% of what's in there is from our brewathon. If anyone wants to come over and have a beer - feel free.

1 Gallon Glass bottles!

Whole Foods is selling natural apple juice in 1 gallon glass jugs. It's really good apple juice and the glass bottles are just like baby carboys. The homebrew shop has bungs and airlocks for cheap, and I've been curious about brewing different kinds of ale in small batches so the glass bottles are perfect. It's a lot easier to brew one gallon at a time for obvious reasons. What's great is that I can pour the hot wort right into the bottle (I preheat the bottle with hot water in the sink first so the glass doesn't break) and then cool it inside the glass. It really reduces the risk of contamination that could normally happen while cooling in the pot or during siphoning. And obviously it's much easier to cool 1 gallon than 5. The darker one on the left is a Christmas stout and the lighter one on the right is cider. I just poured a glass of juice, then shook the juice to aerate it and pitched the yeast and threw on the airlock. Talk about easy. It started bubbling away within 24 hrs and it's been going for about 5 days now. I have no idea how much sugar (fructose) is in there or how long it will take to finish fermenting. If it comes out good, I think I'll be doing it all winter.

Diffusing Beer Bombs

It was an interesting educational experience today. I had bottled some stout that I had recently brewed because I had the time, and there hadn't been any apparent activity in the fermenter for a few days. I normally sample the beer at various points of conditioning to see how carbonated it is, etc.. and just 2 days after bottling it was fully carbonated. Obviously the beer was going to get way too carbonated for safety, so I put all the beers in the fridge to halt fermentation until I figured out what to do next, (and as I mentioned before, I was nervous about bottles blowing up and leaving a black mess and glass shrapnel in the closet. So I asked Callie if I could borrow her welding helmet and leather gloves so that I could open the bottles without risking putting glass in my body. The fridge did a great job of halting fermentation. If anything, the bottles seemed less pressurized than before. The swing-tops that I left in the closet were dangerously pressurized after just a couple days though and they seemed like they were really on the brink of exploding. But it was as easy as popping the tops a few times to vent the pressure. Just so you know, the reason the beer tricked me into thinking it was ready to be bottled was that though there was still a lot of fermentable sugars left in the beer, the oxygen had been completely attenuated, so the yeast growth had simply slowed down to one 20th or so of what it had been. But it was still going, just very slowly. The reason that the oxygen was depleted so soon compared to the sugars this time was because it was such a malty beer (I added 4 pounds on top of the normal 5 pounds of amber liquid malt that would normally make an amber ale similar to a Shiner Bock).
What did we learn? Let your beer have lots and lots of time in the fermenter even if it seems like the activity stopped, especially if it's a big one.

Ok this is my stout that I just brewed. I have never even read a recipe for a stout, but on a whim I got some dark malt when I was at the homebrew shop. I used 5lbs amber liquid malt, which on its own would make something like Shiner Bock, then 2lbs Crystal Dark malt and 2lbs Chocolate Malt Pearls (almost the darkest malt they had - with the husk removed). I used 1lb liquid light for bottle conditioning instead of dextrose. 2 days after bottling, I tried it to see how it tasted before the liquid light was fully fermented, but it seemed like it was fully carbonated. Out of fear of exploding bottles, I put the rest of the batch in the fridge to slow the fermentation. I've never exploded bottles before, but this stuff is sooo dark - darker than any stout you have ever seen - darker than espresso - I didn't want to stain the closet walls and carpet if the bottles exploded. The beer in the picture is a 1 liter - it was actually most of the stout I opened mixed with an IPA. It wasn't bitter at all (as far as my homebrew goes). It's crazy how the smooth creamy body of the British Chocolate Malt Pearls smooths out the bitterness of hops and tannins. And it's like eating a meal. I was just enjoying it without giving it too much thought, and it took me 2 hours to finish it (24 ounces total). This picture to the right is after an hour. I don't drink a lot of stout so I didn't realize how filling it can be. Also I pulled about a 6-pack worth of the stout aside and I'm using a food-quality small plastic bucket to Franken-brew a killer BIG and hoppy version of it (inspired by Stone's Sublimely Self-righteous Ale - only twice as dark and meaty).

The brewing has been crazy fun lately. Here's the last week:

90 minute Extra Pale Ale (bottled)

90 minute IPA with extra Malt (Mike's Batch)

Koelsch Ale (also Mike's)

Crazy Awesome Strong Stout (don't know what to call it yet - maybe Toothkicker)

and hopefully tomorrow:

Crazy Malty 30 minute big'n'sweet IPA

I hope to elaborate later

Brown India Ale Followup

So this brew was educational for me, in that I found out what it tastes like when you over-extract your roasted grains during the mash stage. I know all about over-extraction and tannins because of my coffee roasting experience, but I wasn't very careful and I started the malt at 175 and it took it quite a while to get back down to 160 and then I sparged the heck out of it - trying to get all the carbs and sugars I could out of it. Because it just seems like so much of the malt gets wasted. I guess it's a common rookie mistake. What happened was the over-extraction of the malt (which was medium-dark British Crystal malt) brought out too much of the bitter/sour/astringent qualities of the tannins, which kind of conflicted with the bitterness of the hops. If it weren't for the tannins, the bitterness of the hops would be a much more pleasant taste. I've had people tell me they loved this one, and others said it was way too much. I guess it's a matter of taste, but next time I'll be much gentler with the mash.

http://wooga.drbacchus.com/bible/alcohol.html

I don't know who Dr. Bacchus is or what wooga is, but I found this article on alcohol and the Bible that is very straightforward with all the facts, and I find it tells us in a very detailed and non-biased way, what the Bible tells us about drinking alcohol.

So many churches (i.e. the famous example of Southern Baptists) have taught that drinking alcohol is a sinful practice, but I have never found that in the Bible. I looked for anything I could find on what the Bible says on drinking, and I came up with exactly the same conclusions these people did. That is, the Bible supports drinking alcoholic drinks (as a blessing from God) with a caution against over-indulging.

People or chuches who teach anything else simply don't have a biblical world-view concerning alcohol use. They need to consider ALL of what the Bible has to say about it.

If you want more info, click on the above link.