Home brewing adventures

Creme Brulee

Jeff On Saturday, November 26, 2011

My wife came up with her second recipe, a clone of Southern Tiers Creme Brulee Imperial Milk Stout. Its the biggest beer I've made yet and involved some ingredients I was not familiar with. Coming in at a whopping 12% estimated alcohol and a ton of taste. We had a bottle of it a few weeks ago and both loved it.

Target Gravity 1.105 (I hit 1.109ish)
IBU's 42

Grain Bill
17 lbs 8 oz Pale 2 row US
1 lb 8 oz Flaked Barley
1 lb 8 oz Black patent malt
10 oz Lactose
12 oz Cane sugar - Here we have to caramelize the sugar, it involved basically just stirring it constantly for a good 15 minutes until it liquefied at medium heat. At the end it started to bubble a lot and get all foamy. No idea if this was good or bad. Smelled liked marshmallows.

Hops
1.25 Oz Tomahawk (14%) @ 60 min

Yeast - Dry English Ale, WLP007 We made a rather large starter for this considering the gravity of this beer. This morning it was bubbling away pretty decently. I'm fermenting at about 68F.

This was also the first time we've had the ability to do a high grav all grain with the new 10 gallon cooler. It still had plenty of room after 20 lbs of grain and 5 gallons of water were added to it to mash.

Breakfast Stout # 2

Jeff On Sunday, November 20, 2011

So today I am brewing an ale I brewed almost exactly one year ago...its the clone of Founders Breakfast Stout. This beer turned out to be the top beer I ever made, I believe using the raw cacao from Hawaii made a bit of a difference but wow is it good, its aged a year now an I estimate we have a gallon left, its not a beer to drink before bed so it doesn't get drank that much due to the coffee in it.

This also represents my first brew using a 10 Gallon mash run we recently acquired, I am one step away from 10 gallon batches. My biggest hurdle was wondering if I could use the same strike temp, 172 that Ive been using in my 5 gallon. After a bunch of research I finally realized that beersmith has the math for this. I had to raise the strike temp to 177 and will be checking in 5 minutes if I am too high or low now.

Anyway here is the recipe incase you missed in last year.

Target Gravity 1.078
IBU 60
Est Alcohol 7.7%
SRM: 60

Grain:
11.5 lbs Pale 2 Row
1.38 Lb Flaked Corn
1 lb Chocolate Malt
.75 lb Roasted Barley
.56 lb Black Malt
.43 Lb Crystal 120L

Hops:
1.25 Oz Nugget 60 min
1 Oz williamette 30 Min
1 Oz Wiliamette 0 Min

At the end of boil add 2 oz ground Sumatran Coffee, 2.5 Oz Dark, BitterSweet bakers chocolate, 1.5 Oz unsweetened chocolate baking nibs

In secondary add 2 Oz Ground Kona Coffee

Pumpkin Ale!

Jeff On Friday, November 11, 2011

A bit late season but eh

This recipe was MADE BY MY WIFE, her first

OG 1.062

IBU 32

Grain Bill

9 lbs Pale 2 row

1 lb carafoam

1 lb crystal 60L

8 Oz Biscuit Malt

8 Oz Brown Sugar

6 Oz Malto Dextrin (5 min)

Hops:

.50 Oz Magnum 60 min

1 Oz Sterling 10 Min

Spices

.5 Tsp All Spice @ 5 min

1/4 Tsp Clove @ 5 min

Vanilla Extract 1 shot @ 5 min

.5 Tsp Nutmeg @ 5 min

1/8th tsp ground ginger dried @ 5 min

4 cinnamon sticks @ 60 min

Then of course the pumpkin..we used one medium sized from out yard, baked in an inch of water for about 2 hours then added the liquid and the pumpkin to the beer to boil for about 50 minutes before removing it.

For yeast we used wyeast Farmhouse Ale, same as the last brew I did we took a sample from the last brews slurry and created a starter off of it to save money on buying yeast

For this I used Wyeast Farm House Ale,http://www.wyeastlab.com/PC3q2008.cfm

Saison

Jeff On Sunday, October 30, 2011

Decided this weeks brew will be a saison style

Some info on what a saison ale is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saison

Here is the recipe....its fermenting right now VERY vigorously

Grain Bill:

7.16 lbs Pilsener

2.86 Lbs White Wheat

.95 Lbs Aromatic Malt

Hops:

1 Oz Amarillo @ 60 min

For this I used Wyeast Farm House Ale, http://www.wyeastlab.com/PC3q2008.cfm

Wyeast 3726 PC

Farmhouse Ale

Looking forward to sampling it, its at the bottom range of temperature 70 F right now. If fermentation slows down I may move it up stairs to warm it up.

Maibock

Jeff On Sunday, October 9, 2011

Today I'm brewing up a lager yeast starter for my first maibock, I am taking the recipe from Brew Your Own magazine. The reason and sole reason is as I was reading through it I found the entire recipe called for nothing more than magnum hops...which I just happened to have bought a big bag of from some local grower at eastern market. Unfortunately it calls for 14.5 lbs of grain and I cant only mash about 13 so this is a partial extract recipe for me.

Grain Bill:
9.3 lbs German Pilsner
3.3 Lbs Breiss Munich extract OR 5.1 lbs Munich
5.85 AAU Magnum Hops - I have no idea what the acidity of the hops I bought is..so its gonna be a hops surprise beer.

I am using a German Bock Lager yeast from White Labs.

A follow up to the oktoberfest...damn was it good. So good I am in fact making a second copy of it also. Brewing two yeast starters right now...glad to be back in the lager game again.

Oktoberfest

Jeff On Sunday, July 24, 2011

Well this year I've decided to try and get an Oktoberfest ready for...October..

This round our RO filter is no functional so I'm using municipal water with some RO water I bought at the store for topping off after the boil to 5 gal. I do this because there is less chance for infection since I am not introducing the stuff that exists in the tap after the boil. I try and be as anal about sanitation as I can with lagers. I've had bad luck with them and can't find a reason for it. This is the first lager I've tried in over a year I think.

Target Gravity 1.050 - 1.056

Grain bill:

7 lbs pilsner

1 lb Vienna

.5 lb CaraMunich

1 lb Munich

Target IBU's 21

All pellet hops

1 oz Hallertauer 60 min

.5 oz Hallertauer select 15 min

.5 oz Hallertauer select 5 min

Nothing too fancy here, seems pretty standard. I picked up the recipe at my homebrew store. Not sure who made it. I will be using white labs oktoberfest lager yeast with this, I'll give it one day to get fermenting then throw it in my freezer at about 40-45 F to ferment for two weeks then Ill secondary at this temp until October whenever the feeling of fall kicks in and it cools off.

The Amber Lager is bubbling away in the basement, yeast looks pretty happy.

Amber Lager 3

Jeff On Saturday, July 23, 2011

Been a long while since I properly recorded a beer, here is the third iteration of the Amber Lager

This time I am adding more hops and using a cream ale yeast instead of an actual lager yeast. I've become quite fond of the cream ale yeast...real clean taste.

So here is version 3

7.50 LBS Pale Malt 2 Row
12 OZ Crystal 80L
12 OZ carafoam

All hops are pellet
1 OZ Northern Brewer 60 min
1/2 OZ Fresh Saaz 60 min
.50 Oz Cascade 15 Min
1 Oz Fresh Saaz 10 Min

.5 Oz Fresh Saaz 5 min

They were out of saaz pellets at the brew store so I ended up with 2 OZ bag of leaf saaz. Notice I switched to add some carafoam also...more head...no ones ever complained about that.

So I heated up 5 gallons of filtered water to 171 F. Added 9 quarts to the grain in my igloo mash tun.

Final temp after 1 hr 45 min was 152F...seems pretty accurate.

Drew out the liquid into my 9 gal pot

Added 2.5 gallons of 200 F water for 10 min

Drew out liquid

Added 2.5 gallons of 200F water for 10 min

Drew out liquid

Time to boil

Gravity pre boil was 1.040 with a temp of 145F and 4 gallon of wart. Temp different makes this 1.057 at 4 gallons. Add a gallon of water and you end up with 1.043. (((1.057 - 1)(4))/5) + 1

1/4 TBSP Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate)

1/4 TBSP CaCo3

1 TBSP Gypsum

I am using RO filtered water and this removed the metals/etc from it. This is the reason for adding these.

I will hopefully update FG and tasting notes once its all done.