Bengal Spice and the BIY

For the 7th annual Do-It-Yourself Brew-It-Yourself competition, I cooked up something unique but also very fast and easy.  I got the recipe from Homebrew Favorites and took a risk on something that was very straight  forward but unique. 10 bags of Bengal Spice tea, produced by Celestial Seasonings, was added at the cutoff boil to basically give all the character it could to an all-grain palest of ales and a single hop addition.  The aroma was dynamic and the body was flat.   It was served out of my kegerator at the event for a start out table beer.  It unofficially took 5th place in the competition, but due to having won a place already with my Dark Port Hawk chocolate porter, the award was passed down.

No images exist of the brewing of the Bengal, but it hit the mark for a simple beer that took one stage of fermentation and then straight to the keg in time for the event.  If event brewing turns out to be a regular affair for me, I will use this gem as a special seasonal ale.     

In total, the event had 15 entries and about 25 tasters in total.  Due to some smaller submissions, liter-age wise, had there been any more drinkers we would not have had enough to go around.  Kevin and I had some tense moments of tallying at the end of the evening. But the event on the whole went off without a hitch.

Anchor "Steem"

Having planned a trip to return home for the 2010 World Cup, I decided to brew a few batches before June so that I could come back having left them to ferment for over a month. One of them was this LME (liquid malt extract) kit beer intentionally named Anchor Steem after the famous, and copyright attentive, Anchor Steam out of San Francisco (one of oldest breweries in America, 1849). Yes, if you can imagine, the beer industry too is heavily protective of its image and capital heavy branding (look no further than to my father and my uncle who have been coming up with "new" ways to get their budmiller into the others glass for the last 30 years).

Anchor Steam itself is a very hoppy beer and light as any pale ale. However, my mild bastardization of the original recipe - be it due to the kit's ingredients, or my adding 1 1/2 cups of priming dextrose to the bottling process - the end result after 3 months has still produced a drastically sweeter beer with little to no hop bitterness. The image to the right is of my hop socks after the boil and the yeast starter on the right. The hop socks have brought mixed results. In this beer, I should not have used them as a fuller flavored boiling hop would have extracted more rigorously had it been loose in the pot. With the sock, it balls the hop pellets as they break down, often leaving the inner core of the ball as green as they were in their package. However beers with less hoppy flavors, like stouts, would do well with hop socks because of the desired subtly of bitterness. This beer in particular tasted as if there was little to no hops added.

Because I was not going to check up on the fermentation for about two months, I transferred the beer from the primary into a secondary, as seen at right. The thick layer of brown on the higher carboy is called trub (pronounced: trube), its a build-up leftover from the Kreusening (pronounced: croy-zun-ing) process where fermentation causes the "blow off" of foam, hop resins and dead yeast. This is why you use a larger primary than your secondary, because of the rising level of the material contained in the carboy. This batch had a very low amount of trub which is an indicator of something, not 100% sure of what. The photo at the right makes the beer look much darker than it is. Up close with a back lighting as seen at left during the racking process, you can see just how light this beer is.

I have received largely positive reviews of this recipe, primarily by girls who like lighter and sweeter styles with absolutely no bitterness. I discovered with this batch, just how badass it feels to walk into a party with a growler and pour out the alcoholic fruits of ones labor.