Plain ol’ Porter
Monday, December 31, 2007 - 05:59 PM
It’s been a while since I posted any brewing stuff, and since I brewed last night, I thought this would be a good opportunity.
First, I may as well mention the couple of batches that I did over the past couple of months but didn’t talk about at the time. The first was the Holiday Ale - which we called “Crooked Cat Tail Holiday Ale”. It was actually just the Brewer’s Best Holiday Ale kit. It turned out really good, and we gave some away to friends and family for the holidays.
Second was a coffee stout. This was my first attempt at a coffee stout. I used a recipe from the Brew Your Own “150 Classic Clone Recipes” special issue. I started with the Lagunitas Brewing Company Cappuccino Stout clone, but altered the malt extract quantities a little bit to suit my needs. The recipe called for quite a bit of specialty grains, and I ran into an issue because of this - all of the grains barely fit into my steeping bag, and some of the malts in the center of the bag didn’t get wet at all during the steeping. Also, I skipped the dry hopping that the recipe called for. These two things, I think, adversely affected the final outcome. I tried some the other day, and the coffee flavor is way to strong. I think if the grains had properly steeped, and I had done the dry hopping, the flavor would be better balanced.
Oh, well. Live and learn - it’s all part of the process. I’m going to let it age a few more weeks and try it again, to see if it mellows out at all.
On to the Porter!
I had some specialty grains and hops left over from the stout batch, so I threw together a porter recipe based on that. Since the Mystery Ale turned out to be one of my best batches, and that was just thrown together around left over ingredients, I figured “What the heck? Let’s go for it!”
So, this is the recipe I came up with:
Plain ol’ Porter
3 lbs. Amber DME
3 lbs. Amber LME - late addition
1 lb. Crystal 20L
1 lb. Black Patent
1/2 lb. Chocolate
1/2 oz Nugget 12.8% @ 60 min.
1/2 oz Cascade 6.9% @ 60 min.
1 oz Cascade 5.1 % @ 30 min.
.75 oz Willamette 3.8% @ 5 min.
1/4 tsp. yeast nutrient @ 15 min.
1084 Irish Ale yeast
I’m going to wait until after I taste it, but the name may change if it turns out to be really good. Maybe “Perfect Porter”!
Don’t Worry
Monday, November 12, 2007 - 12:53 PM
I had an interesting time brewing over the weekend. I stopped by the LHBS* to pick up the new Brewer’s Best Holiday Ale kit. (It’s a higher gravity spiced ale. If you’ve had any number of micro-brew “Christmas” ales, you know the style.)
So, Saturday afternoon I set about brewing the kit. It was pretty straight forward to begin with, but I ran into some problems later in the process. For some reason, when adding the spices I threw them directly into the boiling wort. I don’t know why I made this mistake, since I have a mesh “hop” bag that I’ve used for spices before. When it came time to transfer the wort into the fermenter, I had a problem. I couldn’t just pour it in, like I normally do, because of the orange peel floating in the wort. I tried pouring it through a colander, but the residue from the hop pellets kept clogging the holes in the colander. I kept having to un-clog the holes, or try pouring the wort gently over the edge so that I could pick out the orange peel bits before they made their way into the ferment (some of them did).
The whole thing was a major pain. Plus, one of the big dangers that brewers face is contaminating the batch. Foreign microbes can do bad things to fermenting beer.
Sunday, when I came back from rehearsal with Call it Karma, I checked on the fermenting batch. The top (plastic lid) of the fermenter was bulging up from pressure inside. The airlock was clogged. I quickly yanked the airlock out to relieve the pressure (although, I wish I had grabbed a towel to hold over it first, as foam from the krausen sprayed out and onto the wall of the closet where I keep the fermenter). After the initial “Phhwhhooshhh!!!” of air and foam, foam continued to slowly come out of the hole. I grabbed my siphon hose (after quickly mixing up some sanitizer and cleaning the hose) and rigged a “blow-off” tube.
The funny thing was, after I all of these problems, I wasn’t the slightest bit worried. A few months ago, things like this would have had me panicking and running to the online forums asking “Did I ruin my beer?”
They have a saying in the forums: “Relax, don’t worry, and have a homebrew.”
Basically, if you follow general cleaning practices, and keep your equipment clean and sanitized, it’s really hard to ruin a batch of beer. I’ve only had a couple of batches not turn out right. One was because the temperature during the fermentation got too high, the other was because I was experimenting with the recipe (although, some people did like that particular batch, I wasn’t that fond of it).
*Local Home Brew Supply
To Be a Beer Writer
Thursday, November 01, 2007 - 03:41 PM
Dare to dream…
If only I had the developed pallet and the writing skills to be a professional beer writer. Oh, well, at least I can still enjoy it!
Anyways, Carrie forwarded this to me, and I thought I’d share:
I’d also like to talk a little bit about that site (http://www.videojug.com). This is really well done. The video quality is way beyond what you would find on YouTube. And I really like how, with this particular video by way of example, they’ve divided the video into chapters. That’s really cool. Browse around the site for a while and you’ll see that, for the most part, the quality of these videos are all really good; not too mention that they (mostly) seem extremely informative.
UPDATE - Some of them are pretty funny, too. Like This One. (My favorite part: “A man’s friends are important to him, as well as his ability to spend time with them; where he will do male activities like: growling, fighting, and measuring things.")
(As a side note, I really want to visit the Fuller’s brewery after seeing the selection behind Jeff Evans in that video!)
Randy’s Restaurant and Funhunter’s Brewery
Thursday, October 04, 2007 - 03:38 PM
It suddenly occurred to me that I never wrote about one particular part of Carrie’s and my trip to Wisconsin last month, and that was our dinner at Randy’s Restaurant and Funhunter’s Brewery (possibly the longest name of any brewpub I’ve been to).
It might seem odd to find a quality brewery/restaurant in rural Wisconsin, but Whitewater holds a campus of The University of Wisconsin, so it’s a bit of a “college town”. But, I digress.
I’ll start with the food, which was very good. We started with the “famous” Colby Curds (fried Colby cheese curds - think of a fried cheese stick, but in a ball) - which were as tasty and addicting as they were most likely detrimental to our health (sometimes you just have to indulge). We also had some beer-battered onion rings, which were good, but nothing special. We waited a while before ordering our entrées, since we wanted to just hang out and enjoy a few of their beers before dinner. When we did eat, I had the Pulled Pork sandwich, which was excellent - the BBQ sauce was very tasty! (I don’t even remember what Carrie had; I think it was one of the burgers. I do remember that she enjoyed it very much.)
Anyways, the reason we’re here, on to the beer. We both tried a few different selections (and, of course, sampled what each other had ordered). All of the beers were good, but nothing really stood out. I don’t even really remember, at this point, what I ordered (I really should start taking notes when I go to places like this). There was one exception to that, however, and that was the Oatmeal Stout. If you’re a stout lover, and you find yourself anywhere near Whitewater, WI, make sure you find your way to Randy’s. That was one of the best Oatmeal Stouts I’ve ever had.
We do plan on staying at Pine Ridge again in the future, and I’ll definitely find my way back to Randy’s for that Oatmeal Stout when we do.
Obligatory Weekly Update
Saturday, September 22, 2007 - 08:31 PM
Well, it seems that I’ve been getting a little lazy in the update department lately.
So, let’s catch up, shall we?
First, I’d like to note that I’ve been uploading photos from Carrie’s and my trip to Wisconsin to Flickr. Some good shots, and there’s more to come.
Second, last weekend I brewed my Vanilla Porter. This time around I used more vanilla. Hopefully I didn’t over do it! I just racked it to the secondary tonight, and I can’t wait to see how it turns out.
Third, I tried the Mystery Ale last night. It turned out pretty good, but it needs a little more time to age.
So, that’s about it for now. I’ll try to be a little more diligent in the future.