Back in the swing of things

It has been awhile since we really brewed. I've had some sake going for a little bit, but the last time we brewed beer was in March. Now that we're home for the weekends for awhile, we've finally picked it back up.

As of this afternoon, we have fermenting:

Strawberry sake
Peach sake
Blackberry sake
Hard apple cider
Pale ale
Wheat ale
Blueberry soda
Wheat beer on wine yeast
Blueberry wheat beer on wine yeast

Not bad, eh?

From the Cellar

It's the first weekend we've been in La Crosse with nothing really scheduled in a very long time.

So we played it by ear, cleaned the house, tried to fix the frozen rain barrel situation, and ended up hanging out with friends for both lunch and dinner.

Dinner involved a visit to our friend's cellar for some special beers. Of the four, the last was the best. Let me absolutely recommend the Les Trois Mousquetaires Dopplebock.

Brew day has arrived

So we made it to brew day!  It's our first since March, and boy do we need it.  I am quite tired of buying beer.

We're brewing two beers today, a porter and a pale ale.  The porter we've done many times before and pretty much have done pat.  It's delicious.

The pale is more experimental with a new yeast and some experimental hop additions.  So glad to be brewing again!

day 18: gallons and gallons

Today we brewed two batches of beer.  Sam reminds me that we have now brewed twenty gallons of beer in eight days.  This is what we do when Ultimate is not in season.

Our beer menu for this year so far:

Black IPA
Amber
Rainy Day Pale
K2 Porter
Veterans Day Pale
Imperial Oatmeal Stout
Mock Dubbel

Today's workout:
Running up and down the stairs to get brewing supplies.
Scrubbing lots of pots.

television debut

Guess who's on TV about homebrewing?  That's right.  We are.

brew days

But of course, just because I've been occupied with sake for awhile doesn't mean I've forgotten beer.  Two weeks ago we brewed a Pale Ale and a Brown Porter.  Today we brewed a Red Rye and an Oatmeal Stout.  Within two months, we'll again have well-stocked beer shelves.

DAY 13
Stir twice, 12 hrs apart
Bubbly, foamy, and sweet smelling (48 deg)

beer vs sake

Last night I went to a release party for Bell's Hopslam, an incredibly delicious beer that we wait for every year. A group of homebrewers all sat together, and naturally, talk turned to what everyone was brewing at the moment.  Of course, I said I was brewing sake.

The thing with homebrewers is that many of them are engineers (at least in La Crosse), and many of them like to know all of the intricate things about brewing anything.  So when I have to talk to a homebrewing engineer about brewing sake,  I should know what I'm talking about.  I am not that detail-oriented, however, and I still have a very rudimentary knowledge of how the processes work for brewing sake.  So this is what I say.

"Basically, when you brew beer, you throw together the wort, yeast, and water all together.  The yeast works aerobically for a day or so building itself up, and then switches to anaerobic action for the rest of the ferment to produce alcohol.  When you brew sake, you buildup the yeast (aerobic), use koji to pop open the rice and make the starches and enzymes available, and the yeast then uses the starches and enzymes to make alcohol (anaerobic).  This is done is a cycle: yeast buildup, koji addition, rice addition, and repeat three times."

This never satisfies them, but I hope to be able to speak a little more in-depth about it by the time I bring my sake to a meeting.  I have two months to figure it out...

DAY 11 (Nakazoe - middle addition)
Wash 6 cups of rice in tap water for 15 min
Soak rice for 1 hr
Drain rice for 1 hr
Steam rice for 1hr
Fluff and cool rice for 15 min
Mix rice and 4.25 cups cold water from DAY 10
Add cooled rice to mash (55 deg)
Stir and place in cold, dark place

Prep for Tomezoe
Add 3.5 cups koji to mash
Add 10 cups R-O water to mash
Put 6 cups R-O water in fridge
Rinse 10 cups rice in tap water for 30 min
Soak rice overnight

Mash smells like bananas and is very bubbly.

brew day rundown

Today I am going to live blog the brewing process, for all of you who have been curious about exactly how a brew day goes. I'm making a very light American wheat beer to use as a base for three flavored beers - cranberry, chamomile, and rhubarb. Here goes:

7:20am: Sam gets out of bed to turn the heat on seven gallons of water, comes back to bed.
8:35am: Get up and shower.
9:15am: Make omelets and toast for breakfast.
9:30am: Bring up mash tun (converted cooler) and grain from the basement.
9:40am: Rinse out mash tun.
9:45am: Sanitize mash tun.
9:55am: Mash in - add 5 gallons of 170degree water to 11 lbs of grain, hold at 152degrees for 45 min.
10:05am: Start doing some work in the downtime.
10:50am: Mash out - add 2 gallons of 180degree water to mash, hold at 157degrees for 10 min.
11:00am: Drain off the wort into the boil kettle.
11:05am: Start making pizza.
11:10am: Welcome friends and start serving beverages.
11:40am: Sparge - add 2 gallons of 168degree water to the grain, hold for 5 min.
11:45am: Drain off the sparge wort.
11:50am: Put pizza in the oven. Starting making tortilla chips.
12:00pm: Take a gravity reading (1.046), and start the wort boiling.
12:05pm: Eat pizza.
12:15pm: Empty spent grains, rinse out mash tun.
12:20pm: Wort boiling. Add 1oz Sorachi hops.
12:30pm: Welcome more friends. Eat tortilla chips and salsa. Listen to music.
1:00pm: Add 0.25oz Williamette hops.
1:05pm: Check out the Breeder's Cup status on TV.
1:10pm: Add 0.25oz Williamette hops, 0.5oz Irish moss, 0.5oz yeast nutrient.
1:11pm: Wash dishes.
1:15pm: Add 0.25oz Williamette hops.
1:20pm: Turn off boil, add 0.25oz Williamette hops.
1:25pm: Start setting up chill plate.
1:28pm: Answer door and assure solicitors I will indeed be voting, most likely for the Democrat, on Tuesday.
1:30pm: Sanitize primary fermenting vessel.
1:35pm: Beginning transferring wort to fermenting vessel through the chill plate.
1:40pm: Oxygenate wort.
1:47pm: Add yeast.
1:50pm: Finishing transferring wort, and seal up with bung and airlock.
1:52pm: Put fermenting vessel in study to ferment.
1:54pm: Measure starting gravity (1.047).
1: 55pm: Cleanup.
2:20pm: Grab a homebrew and watch the Breeders' Cup.

And that's a brewday. In two weeks, we'll transfer the beer to three or four secondaries so I can add the flavors I want. And then we'll do it all again for Sam's Belgian IPA!

fall brewing season begins

We took a few months off from brewing beer due to the hot weather, but we're back at it again with two new beers brewed up today.

The first was a harvest ale. Thanks to Beth, Erik, and their hop plants, we were able to wet hop, which means we added freshly picked hops to our beer. We picked these hops last night, and when we opened the bag this morning, our kitchen smelled magical.

The second was a pumpkin porter. As I was researching this kind of beer, I learned that a decent number of pumpkin beers do not actually include pumpkin because the fruit is so bland as to not lend any flavor; most people just associate the pumpkin pie spices with a pumpkin beer. I wanted to include some fruit, but I also wanted to try to get some flavor from it. So I actually used butternut squash. I don't know yet whether any of its flavor will get through, but at least the spices and molasses I added give me hope for a really tasty beer.

mostly michigan beer tour

It's been a couple weeks now, but we took a vacation of sorts driving in a loop from Wisconsin to Michigan, Toronto, Niagara, Cleveland, Indiana, Ohio, and home. There were all sorts of stops, but let me start with the first set - the beer.

Mostly Michigan Beer Tour
Tasting List

1. Three Floyds Brewing, Munster, IN
Ragnarok: Aesir robust porter
Pride and Joy: American mild
Black Heart: English-style IPA

2. New Holland Brewing Company, Holland, MI
Imperial Hatter: Imperial IPA
el Mole Ocho: Mole beer

3. Brewery Vivant, Grand Rapids, MI
Farm Hand: French Farmhouse Ale
Triomphe: Belgian IPA
Solitude: Belgian Amber
Rye Porter
Barrel Aged Raspberry Porter

4. Founders Brewing Company, Grand Rapids, MI
Empire Strikes Bitter: ESB
All Day IPA

5. Bell's Brewery, Kalamazoo, MI
Lager of the Lakes: Pilsner
Mild Ale: British
Oarsman: Sour Mash Wheat
Sparkling: American Triple
Hole in the Bucket: Experimental ale with 3-6-9 hops
Oracle: Double IPA
Wedding Ale: Honey Wheat

6. Dark Horse Brewing Company, Marshall, MI
Raspberry Ale
Reserve Special Black Bier

7. Canadian Randomness
Mill Street Tankhouse: Red Ale
Alexander Keith: Pale
Wellington Pale
Wellington Lager
Rickard's Red

8. Great Lakes Brewing Company, Cleveland, OH
Dortmunder Gold: Alt beer
Eliot Ness: Amber lager
Lake Erie Monster: Imperial IPA

And for those of you who think this is a lot of beer, it is. But it took us fourteen days to get through them all, and most were taster glasses. I even did a bit of beer-snobbery and wrote down tasting notes, which I have already put on a shelf and forgotten...

brew days

It's been a busy spring for us, especially as we've been devoting a significant amount of time to brewing beer. Saturday we spent the day brewing two batches, which we found took only two hours longer than brewing just one batch. We've gotten the system down pat.

Our latest endeavors are listed below:

5. Oatmeal Chicory Stout: This was in the primary when I last updated about beer, but we got creative with it in the secondary and added coffee, roasted chicory, and licorice root. We bottled it last week, and I'm pretty happy with the roasted aftertaste. Sam thinks it's too much.

6. Weizen: This one was a little too warm in the primary, so it has a very banana aroma, but it'll make a nice summer beer.

7. Ordinary Bitter
8. Dunkelweizen
9. Extra Special Bitter

Our next brews will be a Rhubarb Weizenbock for fun, and a Pale Ale for Leslie's wedding!

gold medal winner

Sam and I began brewing beer at the end of January. Since then, we've brewed five different beers:

1. Pale Ale
2. IPA
3. Red Rye Ale
4. Brown Porter
5. Oatmeal Stout

The last two are still fermenting, which is why when the deadline for the Between the Bluffs Beer, Wine, and Cheese Festival Homebrew Competition came up, we entered what we thought were our two best of the three that were ready to drink: the Pale and the Red Rye.

This weekend we helped out at the judging of the Homebrew Contest, and were therefore immediately aware when our Red Rye won its division. That's right. Our Colonial Uprising Red Rye Ale won a Gold Medal!

We are very excited.

assistant brewer

Twice this week I've had friends ask me what I've been doing lately. My instant response is "nothing new." This is a fairly accurate assessment, because what I have been doing that has been keeping me busy is the usual ongoing things, like choir, curling, working, knitting, and yoga.

That being said, yesterday Sam and I brewed a batch of all-grain beer. It is currently sitting a few feet away from me bubbling away as the yeast does its thing.

Sam had brewed an English ale with an extract kit a few months ago. It turned out good flavor-wise, but was flat. He did a lot of research, talked to the brew club guys, and decided that as a holiday gift to ourselves, we were going to invest in home-brewing equipment to brew all-grain beer with recipes we make up ourselves. And so we did.

Now we have five gallons of Pale Ale and a gallon of experimental malt wine (even though I said I was going to give up on wine to help with beer, there's still a bit of me that wants to keep trying). I'll let you know how it turns out.

winter beer makes me warmer

In the past, I made quite a bit of wine. Lately, I have been in the mood for beer.

My favorite beers are dark with roasted malts and hints of coffee and vanilla, and winter is the season for these porters and stouts. The Bodega has started to bring in the seasonal beers, and I'm well into sampling them, but this weekend I came across one of the best "Christmas" beers I've ever had.

Gouden Carolus Christmas by Het Anker (Belgium) is a Belgian Strong Dark Ale that smells like black licorice. In fact, it tastes like black licorice. If I were to have even considered making a beer flavored with anise, it would be this beer. I don't think it is overpoweringly sweet, like many of the reviewers say. I think it is a perfect balance of malts, anise, and other spices with a sweet, but not sticky sweet, finish.

I would drink the Gouden Carolus Christmas beer every day of winter if it weren't 10.5% and eleven dollars a pint. So in its stead, I often turn to the ever-tasty Dogfish Head Chicory Stout. Another seasonal beer, I wait in anticipation and then buy up a couple of six-packs to last me through the season.

Interestingly, Wikipedia just told me that chicory is one of the little blue wildflowers that pop up along the side of the highway in the summer. Next year, I am going to see what I can do with it!