Here is the recipe I used for the July 4 saison brewing. I did a full volume boil, starting with about six gallons.
9.5 lbs. Pilsner LME
1.5 lbs. Turbinado sugar
4 oz. Acidulated (steeped)
4 oz. German Carafoam (steeped)
3 oz. Belgian Biscuit (steeped)
3 oz. Belgian Aromatic (steeped)
2 oz. Strisselspalt (60 min)
.75 oz Strisselspalt (15 min)
.25 oz Sweet Orange Peel (15 min)
1 tsp Irish Moss (15 min)
.25 oz Sweet Orange Peel (2 min)
Targets I got from Tastybrew.com calculator:
OG: 1.080
FG: 1.020 or preferably less
IBU: 24
SRM: 6
ABV: 7.7
I don’t have a grain mill, so I think that had an affect on my efficiency with the steeped grains. I just took a hammer to them in a plastic bag and smashed them with a cutting board also. I ended up with an OG of 1.073. There was vigorous primary fermentation, and I’m leaving it in the carboy for at least a month, so I’m hoping it finishes lower than the predicted 1.020. I’m not sure if Tastybrew takes into account the acid malt I used, which tends to help with attenuation as well. I’m hoping the IBUs work out to close the prediction, though I’m thinking it’s going to clock in lower. The hops I got were listed at 2 percent Alpha Acid, the bittering quality of them, and Tasteybrew clocked the average for them to be about 3.5 percent. Hopefully it won’t end up too sweet, either from not enough hops or from finishing at too high a gravity.
I transferred my saison to a secondary fermenter after nine days in the primary. The above rigging resulted because, well, I’m not sure why. The bung to my carboy kept popping out and would not stay in. This is the first time I’ve used this new carboy I picked up off Craigslist, and I’m positive it’s older than mine, but I didn’t think the opening would be a different size. At least that’s what I’m assuming is the issue. But because I don’t have another size of bung this one was going to have to work, so duct tape it was. God, I love that stuff.
That healthy fermentation I mentioned definitely left some evidence. Scientifically speaking, it left a AA battery’s worth of sediment in the bottom of the primary.
When I was racking the beer to secondary, I had to hold the bottom of the siphon up instead of just letting it rest on the bottom. Here’s why:
I really need to start remembering that I’m filming sideways if I turn the camera. The sediment was high enough it was overflowing the little guard on the bottom of the racking cane, hence the cloudiness. I was also not able to get the entire volume of beer out of primary, ending with a little less than the five gallons I put in. I probably could have gotten it all, but it would have been full of yeast and yeast bi-products. YUM!
Now that I have abandoned fermenting in my bottling bucket (because it has an air leak), I realized this was the first time I had ever siphoned from one carboy to another! O.K., not really a big deal, but I wanted a picture and took one. I’ll spare you posting that one. I’ll also spare you the video I took of the secondary fermenter after it started bubbling again, probably because it had been agitated when I moved it. But still, I was impressed that after nine days there was still enough activity in there to produce sufficient gas to bubble the airlock. Still haven’t posted that recipe. Maybe tomorrow? That would be good to get my posting rate up.
What better way to spend Independence Day than brewing up a batch of American homebrew? Not exactly an Ameican style, but hey, it’s a free country.
Myself and a couple of friends avoided the DC crowds and hung around the house yesterday to brew this batch. I got some yeast from the brewers at District Chophouse, so I was expecting this to be one of my more healthy fermentations. I was right. I was wrong, though, to think I could rotate this video to be the right direction.
So I had to make a trip to the hardware store this morning because I woke up to my room smelling like beer, very yeasty beer. When I went in with my spare carboy in hand one of the men working there almost had a heart attack thinking I was going to drop it and shatter glass all over his store. After I assured him that I had a good hold of it I got the tube and came back to put it in the active carboy. Below are some pictures from today. Forgot to take any yesterday during the actual brewing. I’ll post my recipe up here soon.
The title of this post is a little misleading. I didn’t use a homebrew in this bread. It was my first try at baking bread, and I didn’t want to potentially waste one, so I used a bottle of Leinenkugel Sunset Wheat that someone left at my apartment. I wasn’t going to drink it (not a fan personally) and the fruity, esteriness of it seemed like it would be appropriate for bread. It was.
I got the recipe from the most recent podcast of Basic Brewing Video. It was sent in by a listener and sounded so simple it lured me to try. I would thank the listener if I could remember his name.
Here’s the deal:
3 cups flour
1/3 cup sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
12 oz of beer
The recipe actually calls for “sifted” flour, but I don’t have a flour sifter and it worked just fine. You mix the dry ingredients and beer together and then bake it somewhere between 325 and 350 degrees (I think I did it at about 335) for about an hour.
I hear this is referred to as a “quickbread” because you don’t need to let it rise or add yeast. The baking powder pretty much does the work. At about 55 minutes in, I pulled it out and spread some butter over the top and put it back in for about 10 minutes. It got a pretty good color but the consistency on the inside was slighty, and I mean very slightly, doughy. It maybe could have used another five minutes or so in the oven.
The end result was tasty, and you can kind of taste the estery, spiciness of the beer. It gave me enough confidence to use a homebrew in the next loaf. Will probably do one with a Hefeweizen and then in a week or so make one with an Irish Stout when it’s ready. Comparing how the two differ in taste might become a post in the near future.
I forget how I became aware of Tastybrew.com, but it’s a pretty sweet Web site for the amateur brewer. Now that I think about it, I came across it via a poll question on The Mad Fermentationist. The MF said he sometimes uses the site when he doesn’t have access to Pro Mash. I trust that guy because he’s in my homebrew club here in DC, and he makes really great stuff.
Pause. The Cavs and Magic are now tied with 33.4 seconds remaining. Will resume blogging momentarily………..oh yeah, save draft………..
Oh. My. God. I just found out where amazing happens this year. LeBron is truly an MVP.
Anyway, the calculators available on Tastybrew are really fun to play around with and I get to tinkering on them trying to come up with recipes. I did this Double IPA tonight. If any of you readers (or with my blog it’s more likely “people who stumbled across this”) out there have some suggestions that might help me with this, I’d greatly appreciate it. I’ve had the most trouble in my lengthy one an a half years or so as an extract brewer with IPAs so if you have any tips on IPAs in general that would also be helpful.
Here’s the recipe draft. I usually do a full volume boil, starting with about six gallons of water, and I set the calculator to 75 percent efficiency, which I think is how Tastybrew refers to apparent attenuation. (Not sure at which percentage I normally operate, but I figured that was pretty close.)
Double IPA
5 gallons
12 lbs. Light (or extra light) Liquid Malt Extract
1 lb. Crystal 60 L (steeped)
1.5 oz Centennial Pellets (60 min)
1 oz Simcoe Pellets (30 min)
1 oz. Simcoe Pellets (5 min)
½ oz Centennial Pellets (5 min)
1-2 oz Amarillo, Cascade, Simcoe or Centennial dry hops for secondary
Like I posted earlier, I had some extra wort left after I transferred my Irish Stout to secondary, weird that I ended up with more than five gallons, but whatever. I froze it in a two-liter plastic bottle and then let it drip into a sanitized growler.
That’s the cup of dry yeast rehydrating next to it. I used a package of Safale – 04, and just poured about half of it in the growler when I was done letting the extra wort drip. I left it melting for about two hours and 45 minutes and decided that it wasn’t gaining anything if I left it longer.
The reason I re-pitched new yeast was because I procured the wort when it was still supposed to be finishing. I figured it probably killed the yeast still in the wort when I froze it so for the sake of science the two bucks or so I spent on some dry yeast was worth it.
The stout started with an OG of about 1.040 on on brewing day before I pitched any yeast. It’s a very rough estimate, but I’m hoping that I separated about half of the volume that was in the two liter and doubled the gravity of the wort that resulted in the growler. So because the final beer will be about four percent abv, I’m hoping the two or three bottles I get from the growler turn out to be about eight percent. Not really sure what will happen, but it’s an experiment so that’s the point.
I picked up some supplies from myLHBS today: some bottle caps, some tubing and some SAFALE 04 yeast. I use liquid yeast for all my major batches but this is going to be used for a small (very small) batch of an experimental ice stout. I had some leftover wort when I racked to secondary, as I guess I had more than five gallons, and I froze it. I plan on removing as much water from the wort as possible and then re-yeasting it in a growler for a week or so before bottling it. I might only get two or three bottles worth, but hopefully what will result it about a 9% stout from a 4% stout’s wort.
This is not breaking news about a Stone Brewing tasting in the DC area. It’s about the private one that will take place in my apartment this afternoon. My college roommate, Steve, is coming to town, and I have in my possession two vintages of Stone’s Old Guardian barleywine, the 2008 and 2009. I plan to do a side-by-side this evening with them. As well as try my Hefe from Hell for the first time.
Although I’ve been brewing for a year and consider myself to be somewhat experienced, this batch proved that I am, among other things, amateur.
It all started fine, no boilovers, and other than the extreme amount of time it took my tiny apartment’s stove to get five gallons up to a boil, everything was running very smoothly.
Then it all started to go downhill.
I miscalculated how well my brewpot fit in my sink. I did not realize it would not sit in the bottom of it and only got about halfway down. So when it came time to take the pot off the stove and cool it, the ice bath I provided ended relatively quickly (45 minutes or so) and hadn’t done the job I wanted it to. What’s more, we managed to lose any sink stopper that might have existed, and my makeshift clogging device wasn’t doing the trick. I was losing most of the cold water through the drain. After all the ice had melted, and I was using ice packs like mom used to put in your lunchbox, it was midnight, and I decided that 80-degree wort was cool enough for me. Turns out it wasn’t cool enough for the yeast, but more on that later.
Now to that yeast-pitching temp. I knew that I was supposed to get it down to 70, I really did. But I also knew that 80 wouldn’t kill it, and I was tired. So in my temporary deliriousness, I thought it would make no difference. Wrong. Sure enough, it started bubbling away by the next morning, which was only about seven hours later. Then by the time I got home from work that day, it stopped. Weird, right? Two days later and the airlock was sitting level. At that point I knew something was wrong and consulted “How to Brew” by John Palmer, a very good book that I find myself referring to more than my other brewing books. Mr. Palmer suggested that my beer might have stopped fermenting because the high pitch temperature more or less sent the yeast into a frenzy, and they gobbled and gobbled those sugars until they died prematurely. Yeast are a lot like vampires when they are exposed to higher temperatures. At least that’s what I can figure because I was forced to watch Twilight.
So my solution? In my infinite knowledge I decided to rack the wort to secondary and re-pitch. There was a big ol’ pile of trub in the primary, which lead me to believe that Mr. Palmer had been right, and the yeast had dug into that wort faster than Al Roaker at a Red Lobster.
So after I racked it, it bubbled slowly for a day or two and calmed, all I could ask for really. “How to Brew” said I could correct some of the off-flavors that might occur from pitching too high by conditioning, which I took to mean “leave it in the secondary for a while.” It probably means in the bottle, too.
So that brought me to last night. My bottling partner fell through, and I found myself ….by myself. But, as things had been going haywire with this batch, what the hell, why not bottle by myself? Some photos of my solo work:
This was my first time using the dishwasher to sanitize bottles. Getting the labels off proved to be the hardest part. Sam Adams and Brooklyn Brewery bottles are a B%*#@! Sierra Nevada and Great Divide, however, are made de-labeling. My dishwasher sucks though. It took over two hours for it to wash the bottles on high heat, so the solo-job started about 10:30 p.m.
There was an issue with a leaky bottle filler, but other than that, no real complications arose until I tried to cap an Amstel Light bottle. (Some friends left them over here, I promise!) The things won’t crimp all the way! They start to, but then the capper kind of pops up and you realize it’s not working. I tried to use a hammer to bang down the sides of the caps, but that didn’t work.
Because I had counted six Amstel bottles in my total bottle count, then had to subtract all six, I didn’t have enough to bottle all my beer. I came up one full bottle short. So thanks to those damn Dutch, I had to dump one out for the homies.
All in all though, the uncarbonated version of this hefe was pretty good. I don’t think it will be bad whenever it’s ready.
And I do actually like the Dutch, just not their beer bottles.
