Continue reading]]> Bottled up the batch of beer I made with the wild hops I received for free.  Sampling it, it had a real mild floral aroma and a light amount of bitterness, which I expected.  The malt finish on it was nice.  It’s going to be a much better beer than I first thought.

Final gravity was 1.008, initial gravity was 1.025.  Subtract the two gives us .017, multiplied by 105 gives us 1.785, which is the percent alcohol by weight.  Alcohol by volume is 2.23%.  So, another light alcohol content beer, which again demonstrated the low extraction yeild I’m getting from my grains.  If I decide to do all grains in the future, I’m going to build a mash system using a cooler.

We got 45 bottles out of this batch.  Not great, but not bad.  I’m still trying to decide what to name it.  Maybe something like “The Wild Hop Brew” or “Fat Guy Generic Ale” or something along those lines.  Any suggestions would be helpful!

Now, the next three batches I’m going to brew have been planned out by my beer sponsor and myself.  The next batch is Papazian’s “Righteous American Real Ale,” then “Palilalia India Pale Ale,” which we plan on doing a hop substitution for, and then “Freemont Plopper American Lite.”  So, batches 14, 15, and 16 are already planned out.

We talked about creating an IPA that we plan on naming “Boom-Chicka-Boom.”  The goal will be super hoppy and super malty.  You think “Boom” when you drink it.  Then the follow up to that will be “Booma-Chicka-Rock,” which would be a more mellow IPA.  I’ll work out the recipies for those soon and let you all know.

Continue reading]]> Not really 6 months in the making, it’s just been that long since I’ve brewed.

I’m dead broke.  So, one day a friend approaches me with an offer:  He’ll buy the ingredients, I brew the beer, he takes a portion as payoff for his investment.  Sounds good to me!

So, I scoured my Joy of Home Brewing book, and came across a recipe that I wanted to try.  Good Life Pale Ale.  Papazian says he brews it 3 to 4 times a year to guarantee the good life.  If he loves it that much, it must be good.

So, first thing I do is figure out what hops I’m substituting, as the recipe calls for Fuggles and Kent Goldings (neither of which I have, nor do I want to buy any, given I have almost 3 lbs of hops in my freezer.)  So, I chose Hallertauer for the Fuggles replacement (bittering hops) and Willamette for the Goldings (30 minutes into it, plus aroma hops.) 

My first problem is that I don’t have a brew pot big enough.  I have a 3 gallon pot and a 4 gallon pot.  So, what I did is did the protien rest in the 4 gallon and a standard generic 1 gallon pot, then used the 3 gallon to boil water for stage two.

Once I reached stage two I had a problem.  I needed to add 5 quarts of boiling water to the 4 gallon pot.  It was full.  I needed to add 2 quarts of water to the 1 gallon pot.  It was full.  So, what I did was dumped the boiling water in a plastic bucket and use my 3 gallon pot in conjunction with the 4 gallon to do the conversion.  I added 3 quarts of boiling water to each (a bit more than called for, but what the heck.)  The temperature steadied around 150, a little lower than what Papazian recommends, but everyone else at the beer store recommends doing your conversion at 148, so what the heck, I thought I’d give it a shot.

45 minutes later and conversion is done.  I upped the temp on both to 158 for 20 minutes, then to 168, then time to sparge.  During the whole conversion, I was taking the gallon pot, boiling water in it, and adding it to my plastic bucket.  That way I had over 6 gallons of water at high temperatures, which made it far easier to get it up to my sparging temp of 170. 

I dumped the grains into my zap-a-pap lauder tun, and began to sparge.  My first attempt I didn’t look at the levels of the water, and I had actually put too much in.  It spilled out the back.  After draining the water I had to clean up my mess and keep sparging.

Now, I decided to follow my friend Jared’s advice:  sparge till the water starts looking clear.  Unfortunately, after doing this, I had over 9 gallons of wort. 

9 Gallons of Wort

 I began reducing it down at 12 noon.  At about 4PM I was able to empty the extra bucket of wort into the other two buckets.  By 8PM it was reduced enough to begin the boil.

I added 2oz of Hallertauer hops to the boil and let it go for 1/2 hour.  Then I added 1oz of Willamette hops.  When it had 3 minutes left I added another ounce of Willamette hops into the wort.  Once said and done I had a little less than 4 gallons of wort.  I poured it into my fermentation bucket (which was soaking in sanitizer solution during the entire boil) and topped it off to 6 gallons.

Good Life Pale Ale

Tomorrow I’ll pitch the yeast, next week I’ll bottle, and in two weeks I’ll be enjoying the good life!

Batch 13 is ready to brew as well.  I have some wild hops I got for free, so I’m planning on making a beer with 10 lbs of 2 row and 1 lb of crystal malt and adding the wild hops to see what I get.  Should be interesting.

Continue reading]]> Forgot to post about the results of my batch 11 brew, good old Papazian’s Humpty Dumpty English Bitter.  As I suspected, the alcohol content is weak (about 1%), there is a lack of maltiness in the finish that I love.  But, the hops have a beautiful aroma and a great start.  During the hot weather last week, this beer hit the spot.

So, lesson learned:  Sparge the heck out of your grains.  Even if I ended up with 8 gallons of water to boil down, it’s better to do that then to under-sparge as I did.  My friend Jared did a Belgian wit beer, and ended up with over 7 gallons for his wort, which he had to reduce down to 5 gallons.  He sparged until the water was coming out clear.  So, next time I’ll follow suit.  Of course, with the chaos in my life right now it will be a while until I get to brew again.

Continue reading]]> Saturday I brewed what I affectionately called “The $10 beer.”  Papazian has a recipe called “Humpty Dumpty’s Original Bitter” which I was able to buy ingredients for for around $10.  To help me out, my brother in law Jeremy met me at my in-laws house where we did our brewing.

The recipe calls for 6lbs of two row, 1/3 lb of crystal malt, and 1/4 lb of aromatic malt.  Now, this is less than 7lbs of grain, for a 5 gallon batch.  I was extremely generous with my measurements when I bought the grains, giving me a bit more than what was called for.  Now, the recipe also describes this as a very light beer with a good malty body, but very light in alcohol content.  Ok, going with less than 2 lbs of grains per gallon is definitely going to give you a light alcohol content.  I did replace the hops it called for, as I wasn’t about to buy some hops when I have 4lbs of hop pellets at home, as well as leftovers from my oatmeal stout.  I believe the recipe called for Northdown or Fuggles for bittering hops along with Kent Goldings for aroma.  I used Cascades for bittering and Chinook for aroma.  I also got to use my new lauder tun.

Now, I was debating about using a brew pot to make my wort or just mash it all in my new lauder tun.  I decided on the brew pot, as I don’t want to introduce too many variables into a new brew at once.  I did the three stage extraction, as per Papazian’s directions, but for the second stage I kept the temp a little lower than normal (145-150) at the suggestion of the guys at the beer store.  When this was done I dumped the whole thing into my new lauder tun and sparged it with 3 gallons of 170 degree water.  My 5 gallon brew pot was up to the rim with sweet wort.  Then it was time to boil the wort and add the hops.

My cascade hops were leftovers from my oatmeal stout, and I thought I had stored them properly, but when my brother in law dumped them in the brew pot I noticed that many of the hop flowers were brown.  Grr…. So to compensate for the crappy hops I added a touch of Chinook’s to the batch for bittering.  Once the wort got going everyone left the house.  They didn’t care too much for the hop aroma.  Strangely, I love it.  It smells like good memories.

We decided to use a colander with cheese cloth in it to filter the hops out at the end of the brew.  This worked out fine as the colander fit nicely into the top of my lauder tun.  So, we poured the beer into our poor boy filtration system, not thinking to remove the larger hop flowers out before doing this.  It filtered it all right, just went slow as the hop flowers and the what not’s clogged up the colander.  I then took some beer out to test in my hydrometer and sealed up the fermentation vessel.

Ok, this is supposed to be a light beer with good malty tones.  So, I took the initial gravity reading:  1.012, potential alcohol rating of 2.2 percent.   What?  Holy crap!  Either I didn’t get all the sugars extracted from the grains or this thing is meant to be this weak.

Fermentation lasted exactly 2 days.  Now, I get to bottle it.  I’m hoping to do it tonight.  I’ll post what the final gravity is and the final alcohol content.  Hopefully, it will turn out tasting good, as I will be disappointed if it doesn’t.   But, it should.  This is a Papazian recipe after all.