Brew Time Again.... Again

Well its been way too long. The last thing I brewed was our St. Patrick's Day Savannah Special Green Witbier. Not a bad beer to end on for a while.

A lot has happened since those days of March. A long presidential campaign has recently come to an end and the landscape of American financial institutions has been profoundly altered, just to name a couple.

And what is a graphic designer who services the homebuilding industry to do? Drink heavily...

So in that spirit, I'm getting back to homebrewing in the holiday corridor (Nov 1st - Jan 1st) starting with a hard cider. Five gallons of good, slightly hard cider to act as a festive holiday drink for myself and fiancee and as handmade gifts for friends and family (which will remain a surprise in that I am the only one who reads this blog!)

I have been stocking up on wine bottles and bought tasting corks from the local homebrew supply shop. I am going to start with this basic recipe, making some modifications:

http://www.tastybrew.com/newrcp/detail/257

Thats all for now... I will post once I get actual ingredients.

Garnet's Homemade Beer

To the tune of Barrett's Privateers by Stan Rogers, brother of the featured Garnet Rogers

Oh, the year was nineteen seventy-eight
How I wish I'd never tried it now
When a score of men were turned quite green
By the scummiest ale you've ever seen

Refrain
God damn them all, I was told
This beer was worth its weight in gold
We'd feel no pain, shed no tears
But it's a foolish man who shows no fear
At a glass of Garnet's home-made beer

Oh, Garnet Rogers cried the town / How I wish...
For twenty brave men, all masochists who
Would taste for him his homemade brew

{Refrain}

This motley crew was a sickening sight / How I wish...
There was caveman Dave with his eyes in bags
He'd a hard-boiled liver and the staggers and jags

{Refrain}

Well we hadn't been there but an hour or two / How I wish...
When a voice said: Gimme some homemade brew
And Steeleye Stan hove into view

{Refrain}

Now Steeleye Stan was a frightening man / How I wish...
He was eight feet tall and four feet wide
He said: Pass that jug or I'll tan your hide

{Refrain}

Stan took one sip and pitched on his side / How I wish...
Garnet was smashed with a gut full of dregs
And his breath set fire to both me legs

{Refrain}

So here I lay in me twenty-third beer / How I wish...
It's been ten years since I felt this way
On the night before my wedding day

{Refrain}

Brew Time Again

So it has been quite a bit since I have contributed to this blog, but here goes. I am going to make a simple 5 gallon batch of grape wine from juice concentrate. I found a website that I think has posted a fantastic recipe for just this.

I'm going to the brew shop tomorrow (i have the day off YEAH!!) and I am picking up a hydrometer, wine yeast, pectin and anything else i think might be needed for this batch. I am pretty sure this recipe is legit since this looks exactly like the recipe for wine from welch's juice concentrate i saw in Dr. Holme's lab book. The recipe claims the wine should be ready within about 35 days.

Savannah's brew league has a meeting this February the 6th. Josh and I are going to be going. I will take pics of steps taken with the wine, lookin forward to home brewing again.

Coffee Stout and Hard Cider

Hey guys,
Ok, so last night I got back on the horse and brewed a couple of beverages. Patrick and Tori came over about 7:00pm and we got to brewing basically the exact same stout you got a taste of. The only difference with this brew was that we left out the Acid malt since this adds a lot of sourness to the final product. We wanted this in the last stout because we were trying to clone Guiness, but since this will be a coffee stout, we left it out.

I have read that there are two camps when it comes to adding a coffee flavor to beer. Some brewers use heavily roasted grains which give the beer a toasted coffee flavor. These grains are steeped like tea at the beginning of the brewing process. I actually opted for the second method which is to simply add brewed coffee to the beer.

Then we had options as to when to add the coffee to the mix. You can add it in the initial fermentation, secondary fermentation, or drop it in literally as you go to bottle the whole mess. I will add it in at bottling time. Its the easiest way and you run a much smaller risk of losing the coffee flavors to high yeast activity.

So the stout is laid to rest for a few days. We finished that brew at about 10:30 so I thought I would whip up a test cider. I still had a one-gallon glass apple juice jug that mom gave me a few weeks ago. So I went to Tastybrew.com and looked up this recipe and scaled everything down for a one-gallon batch. This was pretty imperfect and required a good bit of judgement on my part. I added 1/2 teaspoon of ground cloves to the mix for spice. Unfortunately, I had to use baker's yeast because I keep forgetting to buy extra ale yeast packets when I'm at the homebrew shop. I'm not sure that this will be a problem as this brew is supposed to come in at about 4.9% ABV, and baker's yeast can hang out in up to 6%. Heres a quick run-down of my cider brew

Ingredients:
2 cans of frozen 100% apple juice
.5 cup of Sugar in the Raw (turbinado sugar)
1/2 tsp. ground cloves
1/4 tsp bakers yeast

Process:

• Combine frozen juice, sugar, cloves, and 1/2 gallon of water in pot and heat to 165 degrees farenheit for 5 minutes. (This is your wort)


• Remove from heat and cool to 80 degrees.


• Add cooled wort to primary fermenter and add cool spring water until the fermenter is full (NOTE: I left some space at the top of the jar so fermentation doesn't clog the neck.)


• Secure the airlock and place in a warm, dark place (NOTE: I wrapped a towel around the clear glass jug...fermentation hates light.)

I am expecting this fermentation to take much longer mainly because of the preservatives in the apple juice concentrate... I checked both brews this morning and the beer is rocking and rolling while the cider seems unchanged. The recipe that I based this brew off of says that the primary fermentation takes about 2 weeks and then he put it into secondary fermentation for another two weeks... So I'll probably report back on the state of the brew in about 2 weeks when I move it to secondary. I am hopeful.. I checked the original gravity (OG) and its right in line with the OG from the original recipe. If all goes well, the cider will turn out to be around 4.5 - 4.9% ABV

I will detail how I cobbled together the airlock for the cider in another post.

Below are some pictures of the cider once it was all laid to rest... I always forget to take in-progress pictures.

Update on the Stout

Hey Guys,
Well, after trying a beer each night starting at about three days out from bottling, it's official. Stouts take much longer to condition and build carbonation that other beers. Some websites have said that it will take maybe 2 months. Bad news... I was hoping to be drinking a good stout by now.

The good news is that the flavor has been getting better each day, so I think I will let this one sit for a month or so. My next beer, I think, will be an Oktoberfest. This will need less time conditioning before its ready to drink.

In other news, I will be going to the November meeting of the Savannah Brewer's League on Wednesday. I'm really looking forward to it. I was hoping by now to have something good enough to take a few beers in for the after meeting tasting. But, unfortunately I think my end products have actually gone down since we brewed that Witbier. I'm not sure what the deal is... whether my tastes have become more discriminating, or I'm not keeping my eqipment clean enough. I'm going to try to get some advice from the guys at the Brewer's League.

I also looked into doing an all-grain brew (basically, soaking and creating my own batch of fermentables from crushed grains instaed of using the extract that I buy from the Brew store). It looks like more equipment and a greater investment of time in the brew, but you have more control and you avoid the cost of the extract which is the vast majority of the cost of ingredients per batch.

Well, I'll be in beer touch. Be well guys... talk to you later

Rack Idea

OK,
So I do all of my fermentation and storing of bottled beer in a cabinet under my kitchen counter. Its dimensions are roughly a cube 22" on all sides. Usually, the bottles are all stood up next to each other. This is pretty inefficient as I lose the ability to use vertical space which would allow me to store all the brewing equipment when the beer is conditioning in the bottle. It would also allow me to store the bottles when they are not in use. So I have designed a rack that I will be able to set in the back of the cabinet to hold the bottles so they are lined up on their sides left to right with the cap facing the door. The illustration to the right is a rough sketch.

I will let you know how it turns out. It only requires about $5 dollars worth of wood. I'll put it together one of the days this week before we bottle on Friday.

Sigh of relief

Well,
I just racked the beer to secondary and laid it to rest under the cabinet until Friday. It looks like a good brew. The final gravity measurement came in at 1.020 with our original gravity being around 1.050. So that gives us an ABV of around 4%. If any more fermentation takes place in secondary (which it certainly did with the witbier) we'll get somewhere around 4.5% or 5% ABV which is right in line with the Irish Stout style definition (anywhere between 4-5%).

And, as always, in the course of the siphoning, I got just a tiny taste of the beer and it definitely tastes like a Guiness-type Stout.

This wort left a HUGE amount of trub (pronounced "troob", I have found out). Not only was there a lot at the bottom, but there was a thick, green paste in a rim stuck to the side of the fermenter about 2-3 inches above the top of the beer itself. I think this was the result of the Irish Moss being present in the fermentation vessel. Judging from the aforementioned taste, it seems there were no ill effects from the inclusion of the hops and moss during fermentation

It does seem that all the hops and irish moss particulate matter fell out of the beer because it went into the secondary fermenter clean and clear.

So, it seems like a success so far.