Mike and I brewed up our annual batches of Pumpkin ale on Sunday. Mike picked up some small sugar pumpkins on Saturday (about 6 pounds worth), quartered them, and roasted them in the oven at around 400°. After letting them get nice and soft and letting a bunch of the sugars begin to caramelize, he scooped out the pulp, which we blended up in the food processor just before brewing. We added the pumpkin directly to the mash and it was super tasty going in. Pulled off the mash, which gave off a beautiful deep amber color. Brought to a boil and added our single hop addition. Pretty easy going brew day, as the only thing left was to add a mixture of spices a few minutes before the end of the boil. Chilled and poured into the fermentation buckets and pitched some rehydrated Safale S-04 dry yeast. Headed down to the basement Monday, only to see this -
Pumpkin Ale fermenting
Damn! Guess I forgot the one thing I always remember to do…put the buckets on a towel. Oh well, it’s all cleaned up now and fermenting vigorously. With such an easy brewing session, we took time during the boil to refurbish a few corny kegs (new poppets and o-rings all around). After the refurbish job, we ended up racking Mike’s IPA, my Oktoberfest and my Blonde ale into the fresh kegs. Good times.
Remember, beer and candy are supposedly recession proof…at least I got the first half covered.
Wow, almost 2 months have gone by since the last post, insane. Time to add some air in the tires of this dusty thing. As I’ve said before, most of the time I post is due to getting a moment at work where I can jump online. That becomes much harder to do when you’re stuck in a windowless secure lab for 8 hours a day. Once I’m out of work I end up doing other things than looking at a computer, so I’m behind on posting, behind on reading my newsreader, but not behind on mountain biking through sunsets, brewing kick ass beer, and most certainly not behind in snowboarding into the wee hours of the morning. We’re still living life up here in beautiful New England and while it’s still cold, you can smell Spring all around.
Did my first group mountain bike ride, um, probably more than a month ago now. 5 of us took to the PR to do our part in breaking in the trail after a fresh snow. Good group of guys and girls and I had a lot of fun. Hope to do some more rides with them, especially as we warm up here. I also got in a TNS, while it was on a Monday and it was a solo effort, I’ll still call it a TNS for now. Basically rode out to the bike path and over to the dirt BCT extension and out to Concord. Made it out to Main Streets Cafe, where I had a Smuttynose Old Brown Dog Ale before hopping back on the bike and riding home. The ride was good and the classic American Brown ale was the topping on the cake.
One of my recent night rides with Hog turned out to be an eye opening experience. My lights for biking are old. How old? Old enough that the batteries no longer hold a charge longer than an hour and if the moon is bright I wonder if my lights are actually on or not. So on this night, I just didn’t bring my lights figuring we would ride until dark and then I would get myself out to the road and slum it home. Hog had other ideas and whipped out a NiteRider Minewt X2. This thing is small and bright! An LED light that also comes in around $160 street price and lasts for up to 7 hours…yea, thats a long time, ha. So when it comes time to replace my aging (dying) lights, the Minewt is definitely on the short list.
As most of you know, it’s been a pretty cold and snowy winter. One night Mike and I were taking advantage of a current snowstorm and using our season passes at the mountain and go figure, the mountain has one night a year where they are open for a full 24 hours and that was the night. We stayed out on the snow until about 2:30 AM, riding some uber soft smooth closed trails. Best snowboarding night…ever.
Oh and the beer! I’ve been having some issues with my mash tun lately, so Mike and built a new one out of a 52qt cooler. Figured if we were going to go all out, we should go big time. Just for anyone wondering, a 52qt cooler can hold 33 pounds of grain and around 12 gallons of water…and it’s f’n heavy! We brewed up two IPAs from the one giant mash and seperate smaller mash was used to do up a Belgian Dubbel. 3 batches in a day, not too shabby.
But the biggest announcement on the blog, has to be this:
So we’ve had a couple of big storms here in the last month or two. After today though, I can certainly say I’ve been through a Nor’Easter and survived. The weather forecast for today said 10-15″ of the white stuff. Out to shovel this morning and we had about 7 inches or so already and it’s supposed to keep on snowing clear through the next rush hour. A nice powdery 4 inches on top of a wet and heavy bottom layer. Sure makes shoveling a good workout.
Last Friday I ended up getting a bum foot somehow. The muscle on top of the foot just below the ankle area is really swollen and red and the tendons or ligaments or whatever the cables are that run down through the middle of your ankle and into your foot are tender to the touch. Tender meaning it hurts like F when you simply touch it. So I got a bit of a limp and I look a little gimpy, but other than that I’m hoping it will fade away fast. Hoping it was just from doing a lot of walking in my trainers (British enough for you Fletcher!) that are pretty old and used up.
Mounted up Aretha this morning and made a beeline for work. Only a few cars out there, which was nice. With some heavy snow still coming down I got to work with that nice covered in white look, but luckily I remembered the sun glasses to keep it out of my eyes and the scarf was a nice touch. Too bad that after I got to work I found out that both of the labs I needed to do some work in were off-line and closed until further notice. Right….nobody could send an email about that before this morning?
Hm, if I can figure out how to duct tape the camera to my head, maybe I’ll get some commuting video, ha.
Kristin’s parents made it into town this weekend. We had planned on heading over to Walden Pond and checking it out, since neither of us has been there yet. Instead we ended up playing Wii most of the day. It would have been nice to get outside, but it’s really hard to pull people away from the Wii the first time they end up playing. Bet they were sore yesterday!
I did manage to get two starters going. A smackpack of Wyeast 3787 Trappist ale yeast I had smacked a few days ago was now nice and swollen, figured I should step it up a little more, so it’s in the flask and showing signs of fermentation this morning. Hopefully I can quadruple the yeast by the end of the week. Also made a starter of Brettanomyces Bruxellensis. This is supposed to be a more mellow strain of Brett and it’s supposedly what is used in Orval. Hoping to do some experimenting as I also have a tube of Brettanomyces Lambicus, which is supposed to be much more funky. As the name says, this is the strain most often found in Lambic beers and is much more intense. I think it will be interesting to try and make two of the same beers and only change up the Brett strain that I use. Guess I’ll see if Brett can be stepped up in a starter like a regular packet of yeast…hope so!
Scrape and cut beans and add to secondary for one week
Recipe Notes
Based off Denny Conn's BVIP recipe. Mike enjoyed this one so much that he wanted to brew up another batch. The homebrew shop out near Mike doesn't carry everything and they also aren't very good at making substitution recommendations, so we had to improvise on the day of brewing. No Brown malt was available, so we cobbled together a mixture of Special B malt, Pale Chocolate malt, Crystal 60 L, and Crystal 120 L. Who knows if it's anything like Brown malt, but it sure smelled good going into the bucket! They also didn't have any Magnum hops and the shop suggested using Northern Brewer instead. Problem was they gave him 1 oz. of 6% AA Northern Brewer to use in place of 1 oz. of 12% AA Magnum…um yea. So we did 1 oz. of Galena instead, since I've found Galena to be a good clean bittering hop.
Batch Notes
12/29/2007 :: This was Mike's first time brewing on the picnic cooler mash tun I made him. I'm grasping at temperatures here, because I didn't write them down, but I think we hit 155º for the mash and 167º for the sparge. We collected a total of 7 gallons of wort. Boil went as planned with no surprises. Cooled wort down 75º before putting in a carboy adding two packets of US-05 dry yeast and aerating with the wine degasser drill bit.
12/31/2007 :: Fermentation was strong enough to blow the airlock out of the carboy. Luckily towel on floor and towel wrapped around carboy contained most of the mess - nothing on the walls or ceiling.
01/02/2008 :: Waitied for fermentation to calm down a little before cleaning up the carboy and replacing the airlock. Still bubbling good.
Lost my original dark strong recipe, so I pulled up Jamil's recipe since I used it as the base for mine last time. This time I dropped the pilsner base malt to 12 pounds for a little less alcohol. Also used a full bottle of Belgian Dark Candi Syrup, instead of corn sugar. Used a little less hops (didn't actually weigh them out), since the Hallertaur I had came in at 4.7% AA.
Batch Notes
12/29/2007 :: Mike came over for the brew session and brewed the BVIP. He also brought his power drill, so we didn't have to mill the grain by hand, which saved a lot of time. I managed to clean and sanitize everything the night before. Milled up the grains, dropped them in the mash tun, heated the strike water to 163 and hit a mash temp of 152. Let it sit for an hour while we ate lunch, then pulled off about 4 gallons of wort. Sparged with 180 degree water to pull off the remaining 3 gallons. Wasn't paying attention while draining the mash into the boil pot and ended up collecting too much wort. Boil pot (7.5 gallons) started to overflow. Stopped the flow and used a measuring cup to lower the collected wort level down to 7 gallons. This probably is the reason I ended up with an OG of 1080 instead of 1090.
Brought to a boil, added bittering hops. Boiled for 45 minutes and then added the Belgian Dark Candi syrup, then boiled another 15 minutes. After hour long boil was over, cooled wort over a 10 minute period. Poured into bucket, strained excess hops, aerated, and pitched one smackpack of yeast (no starter). Yeast was bought at least 6 months ago and is having a slow start, might have to repitch some fresh yeast.
12/31/2007 :: Pulled my 6 month old smackpack of Trappist ale yeast out of the fridge, let it warm up and smacked it to see how bad it was. No sign of fermentation yet.
01/02/2008 :: Smackpack has finally showed signs of being alive. It's not super puffy, but enough to know there are still some live cells in there kicking out CO2. Doesn't really matter though, as the bucket finally started bubbling yesterday, 01/01/2008. Not a super fast bubbling, but it's steady and getting stronger.
Holidays are almost over. We had a nice whirlwind trip, Boston to Killadelphia, where my brother and his wife took us to Monk’s Cafe. Our first time there and it was definitely impressive. The moules and frites were just as they should be and the Belgian beer selection was spectacular. It was a good night for sour beers! Next day we stopped off to visit with Kristin’s family, since they were all holed up in Philly this year. Then it was off to Ocean City, MD for the next few days. We got back late Wednesday night and took the next couple of days to get the house in order. We needed to caulk the bathroom and fix the fan so it actually pulled air, not to mention we needed to get out on the roof and break up the ice dams that had formed on the edges. All in vain though, as it’s snowing again right now and we’ve got another storm on the horizon.
Anyway, we took a break on Saturday from all the house stuff and set in for a full day of brewing action. Friday night I finished up making a second mash tun out of an old rectangular Igloo cooler, a ball valve kit, and an 18″ stainless steel washer hose with the vinyl tubing removed. A little caulk on the outside and it was water tight. So Mike came over on Saturday and we did two different batches. He wanted to do another Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter and I was feeling the Belgian Dark Strong. We made a couple of changes to his recipe since the shop was out of certain grains and hops. I also dropped the amount of base malt in mine to make a beer at the lower end of the Belgian Dark Strong category, instead of the very top of the category like I did last year. Last year’s recipe went on to the second round of the National Homebrew Competition and received a few comments of having a lot of alcohol, um yea, it’s supposed to! Brewing session went well, no major hitches. We ended up with some extra wort from both batches, so we put about 3 gallons of blended imperial porter and Belgian dark strong into a bucket and dropped a packet of T-58 yeast in it. Started bubbling about 2 minutes later and hasn’t stopped yet. Mike filled his carboy up to the tip top and as expected got enough blow off to put the air lock on the floor, check it:
At least everything stayed on the towels. Next we put our two batches of single hopped IPAs down in the basement to hopefully cool down and drop some crap out of suspension. We’ll probably keg/bottle them tomorrow. Finally, we took a sour starter I had been working on, a mixture of Roeselare and the dregs from a bottle of Orval, decanted and pitched into a carboy of double IPA.
Funny story about the double IPA. It’s a recipe I came up with more than a year ago for Mike. He brewed it, but ended up having too much unfermentable sugars (I think it finished at over 1030) and the bottled beers just never carbonated. So flash to a year later (he bottled this on 10/1/2006) and he still has an entire case of Hop Dog that is cloyingly sweet and fairly undrinkable. So we proceed to open all the bottles and pour them into a carboy. Out of the entire case, one bottle had carbonated and was at the perfect level. We split that one with dinner and damn was it a fine IPA! Glad at least one bottle turned out great, but it’s sad to know what the entire case could have tasted like. Instead we poured the sour starter into the carboy and we wait to see if the brettanomyces will take hold and chomp through the remaining sugars, yielding us a sour IPA…fingers crossed. Now we also wait to see if everything I brew from this point on ends up infected, ha.
Grains were actually doubled and mashed at the same time in order to pull off enough wort for two 6 gallon batches. The idea being we would have the same wort and only change the type of hop for a single hop batch.
Batch Notes
Brewed Saturday, December 15, 2007. Drill died while milling grains, had to go it by hand. Mashed in basement. Started with 8 gallons of 168 degree water, poured grains into mash tun, losing a pound or two on the ground. Mash temperature was 155 degrees. Mashed for 60 minutes, then ran off a little over 5 gallons of wort. Batch sparged with an additional 8 gallons of 180 degree water. Stirred up mash and pulled off remaining wort, so each boiling pot had a total of 7 gallons of wort.
Brought wort to a boil (45 minute boil), added 45 minute hop addition, 2 ounces of Palisades at 9.7% AA. Boiled for 30 minutes and then added 15 minute hop addition, 1 ounce of Palisade. Boiled for 15 more minutes, cut the flame, and added final zero minute aroma hop addition, 1 ounce of Palisade.
Cooled wort in about 15 minutes. Poured into bucket through a mesh bowl. Pitched 1 packet of US-05 American ale dry yeast and stirred with spoon to distribute yeast and oxygenate. Placed bucket on towel on first floor, which is usually kept at 60 degrees at 8:00 PM. Fermentation had begun by 8:00 AM.
Grains were actually doubled and mashed at the same time in order to pull off enough wort for two 6 gallon batches. The idea being we would have the same wort and only change the type of hop for a single hop batch.
Batch Notes
Brewed Saturday, December 15, 2007. Drill died while milling grains, had to go it by hand. Mashed in basement. Started with 8 gallons of 168 degree water, poured grains into mash tun, losing a pound or two on the ground. Mash temperature was 155 degrees. Mashed for 60 minutes, then ran off a little over 5 gallons of wort. Batch sparged with an additional 8 gallons of 180 degree water. Stirred up mash and pulled off remaining wort, so each boiling pot had a total of 7 gallons of wort.
Brought wort to a boil (45 minute boil), added 45 minute hop addition, 1 ounce of Summit at 18.1% AA. Boiled for 30 minutes and then added 15 minute hop addition, 1 ounce of Summit. Boiled for 15 more minutes, cut the flame, and added final zero minute aroma hop addition, 1 ounce of Summit.
Cooled wort in about 15 minutes. Poured into carboy using a funnel and filter. Pitched 1 packet of US-05 American ale dry yeast and used a wine degasser to distribute yeast and oxygenate. Placed carboy on towel on first floor, which is usually kept at 60 degrees at 8:00 PM. Fermentation had begun by 8:00 AM.
Last Saturday was a good brewing day. Mike came over after lunch and we decided to mash enough grain so we could end up with two 6 gallon batches. This would give both batches the same wort as a starting point for doing two single hopped beers. Mike would be using Palisade hops and I was going with Summit. For the most part, the recipes were exactly the same, with the exception that the Palisade hops were only 9.7% AA and the Summit were 18.1% AA. So Mike used two ounces instead of one at 45 minutes for bittering to get an IBU count closer to the Summit hopped beer.
We hit a speed bump as soon as we got underway. My drill is only 7.2V’s and it just doesn’t have the juice to power through and mill all the grain. About a third of the grain was milled before the drill just gave up the ghost, then we had to go in and do the rest by hand. Check done, 25 pounds of grain milled.
Then we proceeded to max out my 10 gallon mash tun. We spilled a little bit of grain on the floor, so instead of being 25 pounds, it probably ended up something like 24 pounds. It was filled to the brim and we had to simply lay the lid on top and hope for the best. While the grains mashed in, we headed back upstairs for some furniture installation…fun stuff, but at least our new giant cabinet in the dining room won’t be falling over anytime soon.
Back down to the mash, we drained, then batch sparged until we had 14 gallons of wort. 7 gallons went in Mike’s brew pot and 7 gallons went into mine. Brought the batches to a boil, added our 45 minute bittering hops, boiled, added out 15 minute flavor hops, boiled, cut the flame and added our zero minute aroma hops. Cooled the batches down and dumped them into the fermentation containers and added our yeast. Mike used a bucket and I used a big carboy. The batches are fermenting away as we speak and it took less than 12 hours to get underway. We’ll let these go for a few more days, then drop in the dry hops.
Here’s Mike telling us how it is after a good long brew session:
I use a pretty basic program for creating my recipes, QBrew. I like it for a few reasons, mainly because it’s free, they’ve built it for all your major platforms (win, mac, nix), and you can super easily edit the ingredient database. On top of all that, they have export functions and they actually update it, unlike ProMash. Check it out if you come up with your own recipes or you need a way to keep notes on batches. I’ll post up the two IPA recipes here in a bit.
Thanks for all the recipe suggestions, ha. We decided last minute to throw together a regular old blended hop IPA recipe, based loosely on my last couple of SAC blend (Simcoe, Amarillo, Centennial) IPAs. The recipe, like the brew session was literally put together last minute. There were no measurements taken, no records kept, and hops were dolled out a handful of pellets at a time.
One thing is for sure, ingredients are a lot more expensive up here than they were back in VA at Derek’s joint. We’re talking over $30 for just two cans of pale malt extract and an additional $30 in hops and yeast! I’m pretty sure the only recipe that ended up being that expensive was my extract Russian Imperial Stout, which used 4 cans of extract, 4 pounds of grain, and a hell of a lot of hops.
Anyway, we fired up the turkey fryer around 4:30 PM and started to bring our 4 gallons of Princeton, MA water up to temperature in our 5 gallon pot. Added our pound of Crystal 40L and a pound of Honey Malt for about 20 minutes at 160 degrees and dropping. Brought the concoction to a boil and started adding our hops. 6 ounces in total would be used of the SAC blend. It should be in the range of 65-70 IBUs, with a 6.5-7% ABV. We managed to pull off a little over 3 gallons of sweet wort after we filtered out the hop sludge. Topped off to around 5 gallons with more Princeton water (hopefully it’s good water!) and pitched a tube of White Labs California Ale yeast. Being an off the cuff brew session, we didn’t make a starter or even a pint activator. As of today, there is no activity in the air lock. We’re going to give it 72 hours to see if we get anything, then I’m going to pick up a couple packs of dry yeast and let her rip. My first time using White Labs, let’s hope they don’t disappoint.
We also managed to get a Dark Munich Lager in a bucket for fermentation. This was super easy as it was a going away gift from Derek. The BrewHouse Kit is a brewing kit, much like the boxed extract recipes one can get at most homebrew shops, except instead of being extract you are given a box with a plastic bag filled with almost 4 gallons of all grain wort. So there is no boiling, the grain has already been mashed and boiled with the appropriate amount of hops. Then they package it up for you with a packet of dry yeast and some pH balancer. You simply dump the wort into a bucket, add your pH balancer powder, add a little extra water, and then pitch your yeast. We went ahead and rehydrated the yeast with a pint of warm water and it was bubbling and required an air lock cleaning within 12 hours. The site describes the Munich Dark Lager like this:
Colour: dark brown (Deg.Lovibond) - 25.0
Bitterness: 20 IBU
O.G.: 1.055
Malts: Munich malt, Crystal 120L, Wheat and Chocolate
Hops: Perle (bittering and aroma)
Let’s hope it’s an easy drinking and delicious brew! With a little luck, both of these brews will be bottled and ready to drink come mid-August. I’ll be sure to let you know how it all turns out.
Latest Comments
RSS