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Hombrewing

About a month ago, Taylor and I started on the adventure of home brewing. So far, we’ve made three batches of beer. The first was an English bitter which is currently aging in bottles in the attic. The second is an oatmeal stout which is bottle conditioning as well. The third started fermenting yesterday, it’s a medium bodied ale with some spices, orange zest, honey and brown sugar. Our next attempt is going to be an imperial IPA with enough hops to win a land war in Asia. Here are the recipes we’ve tried so far, with thoughts likely to follow.

Henry Kissinger’s Embittered Ale

This was actually made from a kit we purchased from Eugene’s Home Fermenter Center named ‘Monroe Street Bitter’, but we wanted to name it after our departed rabbit (who is in the freezer awaiting stew time). It was easy to make, as it was mostly malt extract with a very small portion of real grain steeped in for character. The kit came with;

5 lb. light malt extract syrup
1 lb. amber malt extract (dry)

3/4 lb. crystal malt

2.5 oz Golding hops for boiling
1 oz Golding hops for finishing

brewing salts (one package, looked like about 1/4 cup or less)
.5 tsp Irish Moss
dry ale yeast
3/4 cup dextrose

We steeped the grains and sparged into the big kettle. Added all the malt, the brewers salt, and the boiling hops, and started the hour long boil. At 45 minutes, we added the Irish Moss. At 55 minutes we added the finishing hops. We let the wort cool enough that it wouldn’t crack the Carboy and poured it in on top of about two and a half gallons of distilled water. Here’s the problem; it then didn’t cool enough to pitch yeast until the next morning. We have solved this problem by force cooling the concentrated wort in an ice bath before racking it to the carboy. Anyway, we pitched the yeast the next morning and within 36 hours the yeasties were super active, bubbling up from the bottom and down from the top in a sort of lavalamp effect much like this;

After 14 days in the carboy, we racked it into a five gallon bucket and siphoned it into 40 bottles to condition. We tasted one after about a week. It wasn’t bad, for a first attempt, but it had rough edges that we think will age out by Thanksgiving. More thoughts on the flavor once we’ve given it a real shot.

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Mantelope Stout

Another kit beer from the Home Fermenter Center. They call it ‘Blackbeard’s Oatmeal Stout’ but we like giving things clever names of our own. A Mantelope is the body of a Manatee and the head of an Antelope. This one was a little more complicated. We ran into a snag with the steeping of the grains, not realizing that there were substantially more in this beer than the previous one and that we would need to use a bigger pot. We ended up just transferring the grains into a bigger pot halfway through the ‘mash’ (okay, not really a mash at all, just a steeping).

6.5 lb dark malt extract syrup
1 lb dry dark malt extract

1/4 lb dark crystal malt
1/4 lb chocolate malt
1/4 lb roasted barley
1/2 lb flaked oatmeal

1 1/4 oz northern brewer hops for bittering

ale yeast
3/4 cup dextrose priming sugar

We did this one about the same way as the last one. The sparge got a bit stuck toward the end because we didn’t have a big enough strainer. We ended up using cheesecloth and sacrificing some of our outer skin cells squishing the malt out. The boil went well, about an hour with the hops all added right at the beginning.

This time, we took good gravity readings. It started at 1.06 and landed at 1.021 after 14 days fermenting. That gives an alcohol content of in the neighborhood of 5.5%.

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Nasty Elf Holiday Ale

This is the first beer that we did our own recipe modifications on. We started with a beer called Married Christmas Ale which I found on some guy’s website and made some pretty major modifications. Here’s what the recipe looked like once we got done with it;

4.5 lb pale malt extract syrup
1 lb dry amber malt extract
1 lb amber crystal malt

1.5 oz Golding hops for bittering
1 oz Fuggles for finishing

8 oz wildflower honey
8 oz dark brown sugar
2 oz grated ginger root
zest from 6 oranges
14 crushed cinnamon sticks
8 pods cardamom, crushed

3/4 cup dextrose
5 1/2 gallons distilled water
Wyeast 1056 American Ale yeast

The boil was pretty much the same as everything else. Since we weren’t working with a kit, we had to crack the grain ourselves. We inherited a hand cranked grain mill from Taylor’s father with the rest of his beer making kit (most of which we’re still using). Once the hour long boil got started, we started the sweet/spicy ingredients boiling. They simmered for 1/2 hour and sat and steeped for the rest of the boil. Once the boil was done, we added the spice mix in before force cooling. We pitched the yeast that evening, but the house was too cool and it stalled, so we moved the carboy into the downstairs office and turned the heater up to ‘Tropical’. The yeast has just started to take, and hopefully there weren’t any free range yeasts (or god forbid, bacteria) that took hold during the cool night. This was the first time we used liquid yeast instead of the less expensive powdered variety. I’m not impressed so far.

So, more on each of these beers as we start to open and drink them. And expect more recipes to come as we continue with these adventures in home-brewing.