Fraz Wheat 2.0 has come to fruition
Who would like a tart, raspberry banana bomb of a wheat beer on a summer evening in Minneapolis?
Yes please:
CUJO SPICE v. 2.1 – pumpkin rye beer
V. 2.1 on the left, 2.0 on the right
The weekend after my first pumpkin spice rye beer brew day, I decided to do another batch of the stuff for the following reasons:
- My volume came up a bit lower than expected on the first brew day, maybe 4 gallons if I’m lucky
- I love pumpkin beer in the fall, so why not have more?
- Opportunity to experiment with my brewhouse efficiency – does it REALLY matter which brew shop’s mill I use?
- Opportunity to experiment with different yeast strains with the same malt bill, hops and brew day execution
Like I’d mentioned in my post covering the first pumpkin spice rye beer brew day, I’d heard from a guy in my brew club that the mill at Midwest Supplies (where I prefer to buy my grains) generally isn’t calibrated properly and thus under-mills malt, resulting in decreased efficiency. Since I’d purchased and milled my grains on version 2.0 of this recipe at Midwest, the next weekend I decided to buy and mill my grains for version 2.1 at Northern Brewer in St. Paul in order to discern whether there was any truth to the guy’s claim about attaining greater efficiency when milling at Northern. (more…)
CUJO SPICE v. 2.0 – pumpkin rye beer
Dave attacks the mash tun. Much easier to clean outside during the summer!
Wow, I haven’t clicked the “brewing” category when posting to this blog in so long… Earlier this week, I had thought about all the “work” that goes along with brewing and was a little dismayed by the thought of kicking things into gear again. That all changed when I walked into the grain room at the brew shop and was hit by aroma of malted barley. Mmmmmm. I immediately got excited to be getting back into the swing of things.
Here’s the recipe for my 2011 Halloween brew:
Base: 7.75 lbs. American 2-Row (Rahr), 3.5 lbs. Rye malt (Weyermann), 1.75 lbs. light Munich malt (Weyermann)
Specialty: .29 lbs. Crystal malt 50-60L (Simpson’s), .28 lbs. flaked wheat
Hops: 1.0 oz. Mt. Hood pellets (60″), 1.0 oz. Argentine Cascade pellets (2″)
Yeast: White Labs WLP001 California Ale Yeast (1600 ml yeast starter, 1 c light DME)
Irish moss (15″), yeast nutrient (10″), 1 tsp. nutmeg and 1 tsp. cinnamon (2″)
Unlike last year, this year’s CUJO SPICE recipe is a rye beer with a small addition of pumpkin spice rather than a straight up pumpkin ale. I thought about including actual pumpkin like last year, but worried that in conjunction with the rye would produce a beer so cloudy it would never achieve clarity. I don’t think the actual pumpkin adds a lot of flavor to a pumpkin beer anyway. It’s mostly the spices you end up tasting. I used a bit less spice this year to give the rye flavor the opportunity to mix and meld harmoniously with the pumpkin spices. We’ll see how it turns out. (more…)
What's chillin'?
I’m pretty fortunate in that my house has a cellar that appears to sit at roughly 52-60* depending on the season. I had three batches aging in there earlier this week (along with about 20 gallons of bottled homebrew…). Here’s what I’ve got: (more…)
Razzin' the Fraz'
Reading around online, there seems to be varying degrees of paranoia regarding the importance of sanitizing fruit before adding it to a fruit beer. When considering the challenge that lay ahead of me in turing my bavarian weizen into Fraz(zled) Wheat 2.0 (with REAL raspberries, this time), I decided to err on the side of caution and make a concerted effort to sanitize the raspberries instead of tempting fate.
I bought six 12 oz. bags of frozen berries from Rainbow at $4.85 per bag, which has nearly doubled the materials-cost of producing this particular batch of beer. I couldn’t believe how much more expensive raspberries are compared to blueberries! And I actually like blueberries a lot. Got me thinking about ditching the raspberries next time and doing a blueberry wheat…
To sanitize, I poured all the raspberries into a kettle, brought them up to 160* and held them there for 15 minuets. I had to be careful and stir them enough so as to not scorch them on the bottom of the kettle before they melted into liquid form. Then I took a funnel, poured them into another sanitized primary fermenter (rather than a smaller secondary fermenter) so there would be enough headspace for the berries. Syphoned the batch onto the berries and that’s it! (more…)
Fraz(zled) Wheat 2.0
I had my last pre-Euro-trip brew session on Saturday 4/16. This was the fourth straight weekend I had brewed in anticipation of the lengthy self-imposed sabbatical that lay ahead, as I’d prefer to have all of my beers out of fermenters and bottle-conditioning while we’re across the pond. When you factor in my cover band‘s gig schedule into the mix, this effectively means I won’t have another opportunity to brew until MAYBE late June, but more likely not until mid-July. And by then it’ll already be time to start thinking about doing beers for the fall.
I’ve had a lot of fun hanging out with different friends at each of the four brew sessions this past month, and Fraz Wheat 2.0’s brew day was no different. Dave, a work colleague who is very interested in brewing and hop-growing, stopped by to help me through this brew day. We were quite speedy, completing most of everything in under six hours, and correctly at that. A new record. Thanks Dave!
Fraz(zled) Wheat
By far, the most popular beer I did in my first year of brewing was the raspberry wheat I brewed last summer. In response, I wanted to re-brew it for this summer, and a little earlier this time so it could be enjoyed all summer long.
Don’t think this means I’m doing the same recipe, though. I’ve learned so much about brewing and thus refined my process quite a bit over the last year, so I’m expecting this batch to turn out exponentially better than the first version. Where the 2010 batch was an extract brew, the 2011 version is an all-grain. Where the 2010 batch utilized raspberry extract syrup to impart raspberry flavor, 2011 will utilize a few pounds of actual raspberries. I think this will be a substantial improvement, as the raspberry extract syrup mainly just imparted aroma in the 2010 batch and not much actual raspberry flavor. 2011 will be different.
Here’s my recipe: (more…)
Experimental batch(es): amber with kölsch yeast
My dad came over last Saturday to brew an amber ale with me for an upcoming NBA club meeting (we’re all brewing off the same recipe with different yeast strains to taste the effects certain yeast strains have on beer). Though it was good to hang out with him, man was it ever a disaster of a brew day. Why? I think I can break it down to one crucial error: I sparged too quickly. Yes, I’m aware of how gross that sounds. Har har.
Cat pee.
In an effort to shave time off my brew day, I sparged in about 10 min. and while I’ve heard a fast sparge like that can work ok for some, clearly for me it does not. Prior to last weekend, I don’t think I’d ever sparged in under 45 minuets. It was a ballsy move, and I rightfully got kicked in the balls for doing it. My OG post-boil was 1.020 or something horrendously low like that. Without much time to think, I pitched directly onto the Frosty Dog kölsch yeast cake. While fermentation took off right away, it was pretty much done by Sunday morning. Took a sample for a gravity reading. It tasted like cat pee. I’m not sure I’ve ever been more mad at myself after a brew day.
In the spirit of not being defeated, I went back to Midwest that morning and got supplies for a re-do. This time, I planned to sparge for close to an hour. And juuuuuuust to make sure I got my gravity up, I upped the 10 lb. recipe to 14 lbs. while keeping the ratio of pale vs. amber the exact same, percentage-wise (which is like 8.4 lbs. pale, 5.6 lbs. amber) . I upped my 60″ and 30″ hop additions from .25 oz. to .5 oz. to help balance out the increased gravity. My OG came in right around 1.055 (but that’s with 14 lbs. of grain — man my efficiency fukcing sucks…). I just syphoned the cat pee off the kölsch yeast cake (which was pretty big and healthy at that point after having done what essentially amounted to 5 gal. yeast starter with it Saturday) and sent that cat pee straight down the drain. That was a first. (more…)
Frosty Dog
I decided to brew a Kölsch-style beer this past weekend, which was somewhat unplanned. After I learned my wife would be having dinner with a girlfriend Saturday, I figured I might as well get another batch going. I’m going to put a halt on production in a few weeks so I can get all of my beer out of fermenters and into bottles before we go to Europe in May/June, so might as well brew now! The decision to brew this style was based solely off a pint of Lake Superior’s Kayak Kölsch I’d purchased at Pracna during the last NBA meeting. Good stuff.
I’m calling this batch “Frosty Dog” because 1) Kölsch-style beers use ale yeast but are generally fermented much cooler than most ales (55-63*) to prevent any ester production and to help achieve maximum attenuation, and 2) because my wife wants to bring some Barking Dog brews to an upcoming “Frosty Friday” (an afternoon happy hour they have at her company every week — jealous!) and I figured this style of beer would go over very well with both craft beer lovers and those whose palates have yet to be challenged. It’s kind of like a training wheels homebrew. Perfect.
I've been busy! From L to R: Frosty Dog, Chasseur de Bruin, Rabid IBA
This recipe is the first I’ve intentionally formulated on my own. Kölsch-style beers are pretty straightforward as far as the grain bill goes and the hops are downplayed in most recipes I found, as well as in the style guidelines. The one thing that seemed to be very important was the type of yeast to use, as this style gets many of its characteristics from yeast. Here’s the rundown: (more…)
Chasseur de Bruin
The name of this brew translates to “Hunter of the Bear” in some weird perversion of French mixed with the old term for brown bears in Eurasia, where it was common to bring strong ferocious dogs out on bear hunts. “Bruin” also has it’s ties to a style of beer brewed in the Flemish region of Belgium, Oud Bruin. My latest batch is not intended to be a sour beer like Oud Bruin, as I will not be adding brettanomyces bacteria or letting the beer age for extended periods of time. My intent with this batch was just to create a strong, sweet brown ale fermented with a Belgian yeast strain. It may actually come out most closely resembling a Dubbel.
After searching online for a while, I found this recipe, made a few modifications and here we are: (more…)
A couple o' Belgians
I had plenty of time to screw around with brewing stuff this past weekend, as it was “girls weekend” and the wife was up north at a cabin with her girlfriends. After getting home from a happy hour Friday, I apparently hadn’t drank enough (the only tolerable option at LaFonda in Eagan is Summit EPA) because I was able to muster some motivation to transfer the “In the Name of doG” batch from primary – where it had been for the past 11 days – to secondary. While doing so, I took a gravity reading on it for the first time since brew day. 1.008. Wow, I knew I’d had a vigorous and successful fermentation with this batch, but it was very cool to see this 1.074 brew attenuate down to 1.008 in just 11 days.
SOB (left) and In the Name of doG (right) on 3/4/11
Upon tasting the gravity reading sample, it reminded me a lot of Delirium Tremens and Lucifer, the two Belgian beer’s I’ve tasted in this style. Very happy about where this batch is headed. After running the pre- and post-fermentation gravity readings through the ABV formula, I came out with 9.1% ABV. Awesome! This will be the strongest brew I’ve done so far, especially because it has since continued with a slight fermentation even after going to into secondary while at 59* down in my basement at that. I wonder how far down it’ll go…
I harvested the yeast off the trub in primary, (didn’t get greedy and take too much this time) and have 300 ml. or so of it chilling in a beaker in my beer fridge. I’ve heard it’s potentially not good to harvest yeast from a anything with a gravity that starts above 1.070 (according to discussion at the SPHBC meeting I attended this past week) as the yeast may have been too stressed in fermentation to be usable in a second batch. We’ll see. What I have appears viable. I think I”ll take the chance and use it in a few weeks, as I’m currently considering my next batch to be a “Belgian brown ale.” Any recommended recipes out there? Please comment below if so. (more…)
Rabid IBA
9 oz. of hops, 15 lbs. of grain...
This past weekend I decided to brew what is arguably the most currently discussed and controversial “style” in the homebrewing community. The style I’m talking about became popular within the last few years amongst homebrewers and select microbreweries and was just officially deemed “American-Style India Black Ale” in 2010 (style guidelines can be found here). Since it took a while for an official name for the style to be determined by the Brewers’ Association, brewers and drinkers alike took to calling it by a variety of monikers, such as “Black IPA,” “Cascadian Dark Ale” and “India Black Ale.” If you read around on various homebrew forums, you’ll notice many people seem to have a passionate opinion about the style’s naming convention as well as whether or not it deserves to be officially named a “style” at all.
All I can say is that I sure do like how it tastes. I’ve tried one commercial and one homebrewed example of the style and have found they both tasted like a combination of a strong IPA hop profile with some of the roast notes of a stout or porter. Very cool, unique brew. I’d call it the schwartzbier of the ale world (schwartzbier is a style of dark lager). (more…)
In the name of doG
Had a nice little brew session this past Presidents’ Day. Great use of a day off work especially because Minneapolis got hit with a big snow storm (13 inches) the day before. Fortunately I’d purchased all my supplies to get my yeast starter going the day before the storm.
Boil additions, in order
Holed-up in the house and brewing on my day off? Sounds good to me. I did a Belgian honey ale, calling it “In the Name of doG” as a play on the common religious phrase and the fact that many strong Belgian beers like this one are often brewed by monks.
After discussing sparging methods with another brewer at the recent Nordeast Homebrewers Alliance meeting I attended, I decided to move things along a bit quicker during this brew day, so I only fly-sparged for about an hour as opposed to 2+ hr. sparges I’d done on previous all-grain brew days. I also researched a little during the boil on how to calculate efficiency in sugar extraction, and… bah, that’s too complicated for me to care about yet.
Here’s the recipe:
Base: 7lbs Rahr domestic 2 row, 4 lbs. wheat malt
Specialty: 8 oz. Cara II (was supposed to be Caravienne but Midwest was out of that malt), 8 oz. Carapils
Hops: 1 oz. Liberty (60″), 1 oz. Liberty (50″), 1 oz. Styrian Goldings (2″)
Adjuncts: 1 lb. Clover honey (25″), 2 or 3 cups light DME (20″), 1 lb. Clover honey (10″), 1-2 tsp Wyeast yeast nutrient (8″), 1 lb. Belgian Candi sugar (8″), .5 oz bitter orange (5″), .5 oz. coriander (5″), 1-2 tsp Wyeast yeast nutrient (8″)
Yeast: White Labs Belgian Ale WLP550 (2000 ml yeast starter with 1 cup light DME at 1.038, 36 hrs. prior to pitch)
Bottling the Scottie and Mutt Lite
I got the batch of Scootin’ Scottie Ale and the Mutt batch bottled back on Saturday 2/12. Finally getting around to posting some pics below.
I taste tested and took the gravity of each batch. The Scottie finished within target, at about 7.1 brix or 1.012. This means that since the Scottie’s specific gravity started at 1.057, the ABV comes to just about 6.1%. I’d been taste-testing it along the way as it fermented down, and it really finished off crisp but full-bodied compared to where it started. I’m very, very pleased, even just tasting it before it was carbonated. I might like this batch more than my Off-leash Coffee Stout (which got some great verbal feedback at a recent homebrew club meeting recently, by the way — more on that in a future post).
After tasting the Mutt, I’ve decided to re-christen it “Mutt Lite.” Man, did it ever taste like warm Bud Lite! Yuck!! I mean, maybe friends who don’t like good beer will like it. It started at 1.032 and finished at 1.005, making it 3.5% ABV.
Finally, at the very bottom you’ll find some pics of my ever-growing beer cellar.
Cheers! (more…)
Cold-crashing the Scottie
Fermentation finally cooled off on the Scottie this past weekend. It had been almost three solid weeks since brew
day. I guess this is just a characteristic of the Edinburgh Scottish yeast strain? Anyone else out there experience long fermentations with this yeast? Is it because they recommend fermenting with this yeast at 60-65* (as I did)? Somebody clue me in please.
I took a hydrometer reading Saturday and it came in at 7.25-7.5 brix, which equates to 1.012-1.014 FG, the target FG for this recipe. Once I transferred to secondary, I decided to experiment with the practice of “cold-crashing.” Cold-crashing is where you bring the recently fermented beer down to near-freezing temperatures in the secondary fermenter in order to cause a greater amount of yeast cells to shutdown and drop out of solution. The more yeast you can get to flocculate and drop to the bottom of the fermenter, the clearer your finished-product will be.
Though “clear” isn’t necessarily a defining characteristic of a dark beer, it should be clear to the extent you could see through it when you hold it up to the light. What I mean by this is that dark beer shouldn’t necessarily be hazy. A lack of haze is what I’m going for here. (more…)
Explosive fermentation on the SOB batch
I woke up to go to the bathroom at about 5:30am the morning after the SaiSon of a Bitch brew day. Naturally, I went into the office just to check and see if fermentation had started yet. BAM!
Well, not exactly “bam” but maybe earlier in the night some sort of audible sound had occurred when the airlock popped off the carboy. Son of a bitch! Now you know exactly how this batch helped earn it’s name.
Check out the pics below showing the SOB before fermentation began, what I awoke to find and what it looked like after I spent the early hours of Sunday morning cleaning up little drops of crusty beer from all over the office, including the ceiling. I’ve learned my lesson: always attach blow-off tubing for the first 24 hrs. after pitch.
Mutt on the left, SOB on the right -- pre-fermentation
Mutt and the parti gyle
As I was reaching my initial wort volume in the boil kettle last weekend for the SaiSon of a Bitch batch, I realized
there was a substantial amount of liquid left in the mash tun (which I now sort of regret not bringing into the main kettle, as I came up short volume-wise after the main boil, but with an OG of 1.068 or something high like that). Since I thought I had maybe 7 gal. in the main kettle, I decided to do a parti gyle and get a second batch out of this brew day. A party gyle is an old English brewing practice where, after the wort volume for a strong beer was collected, additional water was circulated through the grain bed to obtain a weaker version of the wort for the production of what could be described as a “table beer” or a beer for local peasants. Here’s a more detailed analysis of the practice.
Since the opportunity was presenting itself to make another batch (and since I had open fermenters I could use) I went for it. I’m going to call this brew “Mutt” because it’s just a mix of some random stuff and kind of an experiment. Here’s what I ended up doing:
Base, Specialty: Last runnings from SaiSon of a Bitch’s grist plus 1.5 C Pilzen DME I had on hand for making yeast starters
Extras: 1 C Brown Sugar for good luck
Hops: 1/2 oz. Challenger hops (7%) unused from the Scootin’ Scottie brew day last month
Yeast: Fermentis SafAle S-04 dry yeast that came free with some previous batch
My pre-boil OG = 1.032
My post-boil OG = 1.022 (5.5 Brix) (more…)
SaiSon of a Bitch
Recent tastings of Harriet Brewing’s first Belgian IPA batch and Lift Bridge’s Farm Girl Saison (also a Belgo-French style) inspired me to follow suit on brew day Saturday and go Belgian as well. Here’s the Saison recipe I went with as well a few pictures:
Base: 6 lbs domestic pilsner, 5 lbs white wheat malt
Specialty: 8 oz cara-20, 8 oz unmalted wheat
Hops: 1 oz Saaz (60″), 2 oz domestic Goldings (30″ and 2″)
Extras: 1 lb clear candi sugar (60″), 1/4 tsp grains of paradise mixed with 1/2 oz whole coriander (15″), 1 oz bitter orange peel (15″)
Yeast = White Labs Belgian Wit Ale Yeast WLP400
Target OG = 1.055-1.058
My pre-boil OG = 1.050 (12.5 Brix)
My post-boil OG = 1.048 (12 Brix) after adding 1.5 gal. of spring water to bring the wort volume up
Scootin' Scottie Ale update
I checked the gravity of my Scootin’ Scottie Ale (Scottish 80 /- Export) this past weekend. After two straight weeks,
fermentation had finally calmed down. The airlock was bubbling once every 7 to 9 seconds (the airlock had been bubbling once every 4 to 5 seconds for the first 10 days), so I figured it might be time to transfer the batch to secondary. I took a refractometer reading this past Sunday 1/30 that came in at about 9 brix or a little over what I’m shooting for. That equates to a gravity reading of roughly 1.024 – 1.020, where I’m actually looking for 1.014 to 1.012 for this style.
On Tuesday night 2/1, I snagged another sample out of the carboy and the brix reading came in at 8.0-8.5, which is 1.017-1.020. It’s arguably moved down a bit, but the airlock is bubbling once every 9-11 seconds now, so I’m concerned fermentation is stalling right near the end. The fact that it just got a bit colder outside again (and colder in the house) didn’t help either, as the batch got down to about 58*, a few too low for this yeast strain. (more…)
Bottling the Cliffred Lager
Bottling day! Ok, so I got a little anxious/bored and decided to bottle my red lager this past Sunday, six weeks after
transferring to secondary to lager out in the garage at about 38 degrees. I had originally planned (in a prior post) to wait a eight weeks to bottle my first lager, but I might be busy on Saturday, 2/12 so I ended up going for it this past weekend.
While bottling, I tasted a bit to see how it had matured. Of course, I couldn’t really tell because I didn’t try it until after adding in the sugar and dry yeast for carbonating this lager. My bad. I would be amiss for judging the batch on this pre-bottle conditioned tasting. It will sit bottled in our office (hottest room in our not so hot house) for the next two or three weeks now as at carbonates. I don’t plan to drink too much of this crisp lager until it gets warmer out. (more…)
Cliffred Lager Update, February Brewing Plans
Cliffred Lager chillin' in the closet by the garage at about 41 degrees F on a cold January day in Minnesota.
Last weekend was the 4 week mark from when I transferred the red lager batch from primary into the secondary fermenter. I’m starting to strategize about when I’ll be able to bottle this beer. The recipe said to let it lager in secondary for 3 to 12 weeks. I feel like I’ve exercised commendable patience thus far, in part because I forgot to use Irish moss (a natural clarifying agent) in the boil of this batch. Since longer, colder lagering of a batch contributes to the final beer’s clarity and since I have plenty of other homebrew to drink, I’m going to try and hold off on bottling this beer for as long as possible (also considering that I’m using ambient Minnesota temps to lager this batch in my garage and/or in a closet next to the garage when it consistently gets too close to zero degrees (F) outside (so it’s not like I can rely on having proper lagering temps available past mid-March… hopefully!!).
In doing a little research about what to do once you’re ready to bottle a lager, I stumbled upon this homebrew forum conversation that essentially tells me I’m going to need to add about 1/4 of a package of rehydrated dry yeast to the batch, as most of the yeast from fermentation will have dropped out of suspension and died during the lagering process. Glad I accidentally found this. (more…)
Cracked Open the First Off-leash Coffee Stout Last Weekend
Hey – just a follow-up here to the Off-leash Coffee Stout post. It’s been over two weeks since bottling now and I was able
to test out one of the brews last weekend. It turned out awesome! The coffee flavor is present, but not as much as you’d expect given there is a full pot of coffee in this 5.5 gal. of beer.
Though this is technically the second all-grain batch I’ve brewed, it’s the first completed all-grain beer of mine I’ve consumed (still lagering the first all-grain batch). I don’t want to toot my own horn too much (Ok, ok, I do. Why else would I have this blog?) but to me it tasted exactly like anything you’d be able to purchase commercially. With extract batches, I can always tell there is a certain thinness to them that makes them seem kinda fake. They don’t taste “bad” at all, but just not… “real.” One year after starting to brew, I’m really really happy with the direction my homebrews are heading. (more…)
Scootin' Scottie Ale
Have you ever seen a Scottie dog scoot? Pretty funny… or gross, depending on if you’re the owner of the carpet. Anyway, while looking around at options for my next batch of beer, I had originally intended to do a sweeter style brown ale,
as I’d had a few really good exemplars of the style over the holidays. I got distracted by a slightly different style though after reading around a bit. I’m not a HUGE fan of lagers (I find ales more flavorful, generally) and I already have one lager “lagering,” but I also would like to still try and take advantage of the ambient temps I can find in my Minnesota home in the dead of winter. Solution? A Scottish 80/- Export (the 80/- means 80 shillings, which is how much a beer of this style and alcoholic strength was taxed when it was popular a few hundred years ago — 80 shillings). This strength of Scottish Ale was often the strength sold to other countries, hence “export” in the name.
The yeast used by this style of ale is a perfect match to the ambient temps in my house right now. Primary needs 60-65*, which I can easily find in my basement, and secondary needs 35-45* which I can easily find in the closet next to my garage.
I knew I liked this type of beer because I bought a six pack of Odell’s 90 Shilling last summer and the taste has stuck in my mind ever since. Big fan of how smooth and flavorful it was. A nice alternative to IPA’s in my opinion. Completely different… but so completely different that it’s as interesting (even for a fan of IPAs) to try.
Base malt: 11 lbs domestic 2-row
Specialty: 4 oz Biscuit, 8 oz Caramel 40L, 8 oz Chocolate Malt, 2 oz Special B, 1 oz Peat malt (pre-mixed)
Hops: 1/2 oz Challenger, 1 oz. Fuggles (U.S.)
Yeast: White Labs Edinburgh Ale Yeast WLP028
Making a Yeast Starter
Making a yeast starter is essentially like making a mini-un-hopped batch of basic beer and inoculating it with the
yeast you’ve purchased so they can begin to eat the sugars in the mini-batch of beer and reproduce. When you finally pitch this mini-batch of beer with all the additional yeast cells into the actual batch of beer you’re brewing, fermentation will begin much sooner and with much more vigor than it otherwise would if you’d just pitched the yeast you purchased directly into your batch of beer. There are many advantages to a vigorous and timely fermentation.
I’ve made yeast starters for my last two batches of beer, so I thought I’d photo-document the process the third time around. I’ll be brewing a Scottish 80/- Export Ale tomorrow (the 80/- means 80 shillings, which is how much a beer of this style and alcoholic strength was taxed when it was popular a few hundred years ago). I had a lot of success with the last yeast starter I did. Fermentation on that batch of coffee stout took off like a rocket, so I’d like to give every batch I brew that opportunity to succeed going forward. Nobody likes a sluggish fermentation. (more…)
Off-leash Coffee Stout
Friday night ALL GRAIN brew day? This could take a while. I ain’t scurrrrrd.
Jim transfers the cooled wort to the primary fermenter
My buddy Jim came over for a Friday night brew day (12/10) with a six’r of Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale. Delicious, big bold malty IPA. Good pick Jim!
We brewed a Java Stout recipe from Midwest Supplies. I had done a yeast starter (4 cups water, 1 cup dark DME) on Tuesday evening – a day further away from brew day this time – and I think that helped. A lot.
Base malt: 9 lbs domestic 2-row
Specialty: 14 oz Chocolate Malt, 4 oz Flaked Barley, 4 0z Caramel 60L, 16 oz. roasted Barley (pre-mixed)
Hops: 1/2 oz Challenger, 1 oz. Tettnang
Coffee: 4 oz Peace Coffee Nicaraguan Blend
Yeast: White Labs Burton Ale WLP023 (did a yeast starter)
Brew Day Notes (12/10)
- After a long (close to 120 min.) sparge, we ended up with about 7 gallons of wort
- 60 min. boil
- Challenger in at 60″
- Tettnang in at 5″
- OG = 1.048 (11.8 brix) with a target of 1.042-1.046