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.

J to L

As mentioned in the previous post, I had prepared a chocolate porter for the first time in my brewing history. I was very pleased with the results and will definitely be using chocolate in future batches and in different combinations. After a success one tends to try and keep going on that path. The past two weeks have seen three different batches brewed using first time ingredients largely from the produce and herbal sections at Organic Planet.

As owner/brewmaster of Dogfishhead Brewery Sam Calagione would say, 'why brew normal beer?' Although he is both older and wiser in the craft, sometimes you also want to make sure you are brewing what people generally refer to as beer, so that you can be reminded that when it comes down to it, you can make a style as intended. So this latest activity in the brewery has produced one creative weizen, one daring schwarzbier and one good old fashion brown ale.

These homebrew concoctions were labeled in the J to L spectrum of the alphabet so in keeping with problematizing linear progression, lets start with L:

Lowbush Vice
- Creative
Made as a hopeful attempt at an untroubled segue from winter to spring; this weiss batch utilized a couple tubs of wheat malt that had been kicking around the brewery for far too long. Lowbush berries - referring to the height of the organic blueberry shrub - were added after a standard boil and allowed to steep for 30 minutes. The longer the steeping lasts the more aromatics the blueberries will produce. Weiss style guidelines call for slight fruity characters in the nose and estery notes in the aroma.

When using fruit such as this in your beer, it is important to prevent the skins from breaking and keeping all amounts of pectin out of the wort. Mind you, the inside of the blueberry is where the flavor is, but if making a mead or fruit wine you would then need to uncomplicate the yeast's job by chemically stabilizing the amount of acids present, and that is far too much chemistry work for this first shot at blueberry beer.

I'm not sure if the originator of this recipe (which I tweaked from homebrew favorites) threw out the blueberries after steeping or not, but it would be ridiculous if they did. These are freakin good blueberries still...having said that I now have a couple bags of frozen blueberries that smell like syrup and are covered in hops so choose wisely how you reuse these.

All in all, this Vice has received good reviews from those who have tried it in the tap room. The remaining 2 gallons are bottle conditioning till that beckoning sunny spring day.

Licorice Lager
-Daring
Unfortunately there are no pictures of this foray into schwarzbier other than one of the secret ingredient in question = Licorice Root.

This batch sums up the creative nature of homebrewing for me. I found a recipe for a dark lager, added licorice root shavings in the last 12 minutes of the boil and an additional can of expired pre-hopped malt extract for a pilsner (I got it in the discount bin at Brewers Direct - which I don't recommend doing unless you are experimenting). Before I go any further, I want to mention that licorice has many great medicinal qualities...it also is used as a laxative. Drink under advisement.

Schwarzbier is a German black lager, meaning it has an srm (standard reference method) count near the porter end of the spectrum but the body of a lager. With any lager, there are particular conditions the brewer has to pay attention to. The biggest problem for me was keeping the lagering temperatures constant. I placed the carboy out into the walkway of my fire-escape when it was still -10C outside. However, the days grew warmer and the nights grew shorter, and the lager was not conditioning as it likes. Anytime you end up with temperature fluctuation you will get your yeast to react poorly. Generally, they release diacetyl which has a buttery taste to it, this batch produced more like a septic tank smell. The flavor is fantastic and made for a very quaffable beer, but the aroma was ungodly. After about 20 minutes of sitting in the glass the odor dissipated. I'm hoping this secondary fermentation stage at room temp will help expel some of that nastiness.

Just a note, lager yeast will ferment at ale temperatures, but the proof of lager yeast is their ability to produce good clearing beer at the near 0 C temp range. Right now, it's a wait and see policy.

Jupiter
-Old Fashion
This all-grain brown ale was inspired by the awesomeness that is the greatest planet (besides our own) in the solar system. Its fantastic and perceptible trip in the night sky during the months of February and March (in conjunction with that of Venus) has been both thought provoking as well as a silent companion on night marches. As seen at left, the brew produced a violent storm as if evoking the gas giant within my kitchen.

My best beers have been variations on Papazian's all-grain recipes from his seminal text, The Joy of Homebrewing. This little gem is no different. Still an issue with all-grain brewing in the apartment, but this time, it was slightly easier as my two brewpots are large enough to contain just over 5 gallons of wort, as opposed to three smaller pots just under.

Step mashing method was used for the bulk 2-row pale malt, black patent malt, chocolate malt, and 120-lovibond crystal malt as the specialty grains. Fuggles for boil and Goldings for aroma make this classic brown ale as good as I have tasted. One new addition to this style which I seem to make better than any others - not saying a whole hell of a lot - was the 1tsp of gypsum to the mash. When making regional styles of beer, the brewer must account for contextual flavors that go beyond the flare notes, in this case its replicating the waters of Burton upon Trent, a historic brewing
region of England. The traditional brewing waters of England have a lower ph level than my tap water or even the Red River can produce. An addition such as this seems to emphasize the desire to meet a standard because not living in England or back in the early 1800s before brewing water was treated is to recognize that this type of beer is historical, and must adhere to historical factors.

And this fun picture is what was left over after the primary transfer. Mmmm...

Sláinte!

The past 6 months in the Brewery

Over the past 6 months, I managed to see a few things and brew a few things. Most brews were standard and uninspiring. When I look back and see the lack of photos taken, I am reminded that the everyday brewing processes were once so new that they required documentation at every turn. Now the process is just part of the everyday. I blame the kegging for this. You begin to fill the need to just fill the thing and have something on hand. Meanwhile the bottling process is greatly decreased (for the good) but the ratios of bottling sugars begin to vary due to the different amounts of young beer left from a 3gal keg.

The image above is not the result of beer (or at least i'm not ready to admit so), but the solution involved beer!

Winter brings cold, and when its cold, the brewer brings out the darkness to counter the white. Bock's are high powered lagers with dark characters but often more on the brown to red side. This batch to the left is the fixins for Mr. Spock, an ale version of a bock. After trying to cultivate a lager strain that died on me before it hit the yeast starter, I had to use what was on hand. After three different strains of yeast, it started to bubble. Rapidly, music to the ears.

Although using multiple types of yeast can start a small war in your fermenter, when you have nothing else to lose with a batch, just go for it. Indicators that other strains are dead will help cut down on this conflict which results in off flavors in the batch. Pointers such as no activity in the bubbler, sandy to muddy textured sediment at the bottom of the carboy, and a lack of colored layering in the sediment. White layers are healthy and chunky sediment is a good sign as well.

This is a concoction based loosely on a recipe in Papazian's Joy of Homebrewing. His Sparrow Hawk Porter was the adequate base for what I am calling Dark Port Hawk. Combining the darkness of Black Patent Malt, Dark LME, Unsweetened Bakers Chocolate and Mayordomo Vanilla Hot Chocolate Cubes from Oaxaca Mexico, I am expecting great things.



This is the first time for me using chocolate and after reading several suggestions to use cocoa powder, im assuming the chocolate will melt and dissolve and not stick to the pot. Heres to experimenting.









Update! As of May 26th, the Dark Port Hawk took 1st Place at the Do-It-Yourself Brew-It-Yourself Fest!

Hot Stuff! Chili Beer

I had heard of people making chili pepper beer before and thought it would be fun just to say I've done it and to grasp what that flavor would impart to beer. My local liquor stores are quite bad when it comes to getting a diverse range of craft brews, particularly those that are common place throughout the US. Only this summer did they receive Rogue's Chipotle Ale

However what I was going for was not just to impart the roasty quality of that particularly daring ale, but to also see what sort of firepower I could add. My recipe research said that Serrano peppers or small chili peppers would be best. However, as mentioned elsewhere - I will take what I can get - my local organic grocer only had Anaheim peppers. Honkin huge ones!

The brew itself was a recipe for an Extra Special Bitter as something about a good English hop with dry bitterness combined with a subtle heat seemed to make sense for my brain and palate. The peppers were added to the secondary fermentation after about 5 days of rigorous primary fermentation. As shown above, I took 5 large Anaheim peppers and removed the stems. I roasted them in the toaster oven for 12 minutes until the kitchen started to smell roasty. The skin was soft and starting to brown slightly. The purpose of the baking is to both kill any unwanted organism that could be on them as well as to impart that roasted flavor. Once cooled I cut them in half and dropped them into the carboy. Racking on top was the easy part, racking off after 9 days however was very hard as seeds and skin had come off and were sticking to the siphon.

As expected, I had to hold the carboy upside down while cleaning it and use a knife to try and spear the peppers individually to then pull them through the opening. It was...a lot of work.

This beer is quite good actually just as a beer. But like many of my beers that have an unusual theme to them, you wouldn't want to drink Hot Stuff back to back. It is a nice sipping ale that has an obvious burn to it on the way down, and for those who suffer from heartburn, I wouldn't greet pint after pint with anything other than milk of magnesia.

Lemon Coriander Weiss and Keg Time

I had been wanting to make a batch that was going to be refreshing and light in honor of summer's arrival. I also wanted something that would be quaff-able enough to put into my kegerator and have a picnic outside with. This was the beer I chose - a Lemon Coriander Weiss. The kit was from Midwest, and it offered a twist with the additions of coriander in the boil and lemon zest in the secondary. The boil went well, no surprises. After having 20+ batches u
nder my belt, my concerns are generally in the cold side of the brewing - yeast getting finicky is far more hazardous than boiling wort at 5 degrees higher than recommended.

When applying fruit or vegetables to the carboy, one should always try and keep as few outside contaminants from getting in. This includes anything from cat hair to drool to pesticides. Similar to the damages to your body, chemicals that are intended to kill bugs should not be included in your beer as they will kill your yeast. Always buy organic, or better yet, grow it yourself! Zesting far more lemon than called for the in the recipe, I wanted this beer to be as crisp and citrusy as possible. The other hazard in adding fruit, vegetables, hops, etc. to the secondary is the risk of clogging your siphon. Small particulate matter or large chunks of food can really be annoying when trying to get the beer into its next receptacle. That includes from bottle to glass and tap to glass. Many brewers have debated the strategies of dry-hopping their ales with as minimal interference to the segues as possible. The last thing you want is a dip-tube or keg-line clogged with a cluster of bitter hops, unless your into that sort of thing.


Primary Secondary Kegging

Once you enter the realm of gauges and explosive materials, lookout. Things seem much more complicated and impractical for something as simple as beer. But then the luxury of technology can do many things, including cutting down your bottle conditioning by about 2 weeks! Im in. Not to mention ridding yourself of the pain in the ass of washing, rinsing, sanitizing, storaging all those bottles. But theres also nothing quite like bringing a bottle of your own somewhere. My mini-keg lets me bottle about a third of the batch and rest goes to the keg. Because it was my first kegging experience, I rushed it. I wanted that beer to be ready sooner than it should have been. The sugars were not completely dissolved, and both the few bottles I stored and the kegged beer lacked overall carbonation. The sweetness was ever present and the beer was cloudier than I had hoped. The lemon and coriander were great, but not enough yeast knocked down and not enough time for the fermentation.

Vagabond Gingered Ale

After having a bad result with Spruce some eight batches ago, i thought it was time to get back to the weird stuff. Also, after having brewed several pale and brown ales, i needed a dark companion for my Oatmeal Stout that could be opted for by the time winter rolls around. Ginger was the decided ingredient and Dried Malt Extract was the selected coloring agent. At this point I hadn't tasted any of my previous batches that had been either all-grain or brewed with the well water, so i went back to an extract batch and culligan distilled water. Shaved two average size ginger roots, more or less, and hoped for the best.

Not being a huge ginger root fan, I tried to be as conservative as i could in the boil by adding the hops at the appropriate schedule so that hops would temper the harsh taste of ginger. I allowed the American Ale yeast packet to fully swell before pitching it as I have had mixed fermentation results with the culligan water (definitely doesn't have the kick that the well water does). However as can be seen at the right a very nice kreusen line can be seen in the carboy. Foamy goodness on top of a yeasty-frappe that will hopefully smack you in the mouth when it passes your lips.

Everything went swell with this batch, from the brew day, to the pitching of the yeast, to the fermentation, to the... Bottling. This was the only monumentally foreseeable problem which was completely avoidable had proper planning been carried out. But no, things have to be done precariously by the seat-of-my-pants. So I needed bottles in a hurry in order to prepare my first 8-pack sampler for the fam. This arriving at the tail end of two previous weekends in which bottling was undergone both times. Leaving me with brew and nothing to secure it in for transnational migration. 24-grolsch were purchased (because the price of buying empties through EZ cap was way more expensive). I enlisted the help of a fellow beer drinker, we had three days to get through them and whatever else we could find to come close to a grand total of 36 swing-top bottles. Over the course of a beautiful weekend with full sunshine, barbecuing, soccer golf, and magic the gathering: we endured and came out victorious. The final product is this take no prisoners wanderlust oddity, now you taste it, now you don't.

Spruce Beer

This was the other beer brewed before my summer vacay. This one deserves the same salvo I give in person - The historical origins of this beer, for me, lie in the colonial United States pre-revolutionary war of 1776. Most of the founding fathers, commoners, townsfolk, blacksmiths, town cryer and many other stations of people, brewed their own beer. England having a longer and richer history of ale, had progressed in their hop growing moreso than the scant wild hops that mostly grow in wetter climates of northwestern North America not yet colonized. In rebellion to the hegemonic taxation without representation of the british empire imposed on colonial markets, hops included, the brewers said Basta! to the leafy green flower and venceremos! to the needly green pine. Spring growth of the white spruce tree was harvested and functioned as both a preservative (as hops is) and a flavoring agent. In my attempts to utilize the natural surroundings of a northwestern Ontario hobby farm, I decided to don this rebellious spirit and brew a Spruce beer.

The process was quite rewarding as most new experiences in homebrewing are. The smells, the colors of the wort, the additions to the boil making the process more engaging all the time. This recipe called for no specialty grains and about 6 bags of 500gram dark DME (dry malt extract) which was fairly costly as my brew shop doesn't sell the cheaper dark LME. Hallertauer hops were added for finishing aroma to help even out the spruce. Perhaps I will do full spruce and no hops next time. The brewing produced a very rich gingerbread smell that I haven't smelled since, with other recipes.

Like the Anchor Steem, this beer sat for about 2 months. At the right, you can see the mild trube that built at the top, but also, the trub settled around the ridges in the Italian made carboy. I prefer the Mexican glass carboys for this very reason. The wort was left on its trub for the entire 2 months. This batch is the only one to date that has not "worked" and this leaving on the trub could be one of many things that resulted in it failing. The beer was mixed with 1 1/2 cups of dextrose (the recommended for regular ales is 3/4 cup) before bottling as my homebrew store indicates on their dextrose packages. Even with this much priming sugar, the beer had absolutely no head. It tasted like sweet tea with a bit of sourness, almost as if it was still wort and no fermentation had occurred.

As hard as it was, the lot of it ended up in this garbage can shortly after. I was not pleased with the 2 week outcome, even with only a few batches under my belt I know when something is not beer or completely lacks all beer elements - this did. I saved two bottles and have tried adding dried yeast to them and will wait and see if the sugar gets eaten.