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Nutcase Maple Brown Ale

The fine looking people over at HomeBrew Digest have a recipe calculator which I used to generate these stats on the next brew I’m planning on doing. We’re going to do the boil on New Years Day, which means it will be ready to drink around Valentine’s day. Here’s the recipe;

Brewer:	Samuel Rutledge		Email:	-
Beer:	Nutcase Maple Brown Ale		Style:	American Brown
Type:	Partial mash		Size:	5 gallons
Color:	51 HCU (~22 SRM)		Bitterness:	21 IBU
OG:	1.061		FG:	1.020
Alcohol:	5.2% v/v (4.1% w/w)
Grain:	8 oz. American 2-row 4 oz. American crystal 90L 4 oz. British chocolate
Mash:	70% efficiency
Boil:	minutes	SG 1.101	3 gallons
	6.3 lb. Amber malt extract 1 lb. Amber dry malt extract
Hops:	2 oz. Fuggles (4.75% AA, 60 min.)

Some thoughts on the brewing of this beer; First, I’m using the WYeast 1968 London ESB Ale™ which needs to have a diacetyl rest done. I’m stoked because I just got a second, 7 gallon carboy to use for primary fermenting which means that I can now do both primary and secondary fermentation in glass. I have been foregoing the secondary (with pretty decent luck, all told) up to this point because I can’t see fermenting in plastic.

The other interesting thing about this beer is that I intend to use Maple Syrup rather than dextrose for the priming sugar. I’m hoping that this will be a sweet, malty, toasty, maple-o-riffic tummy warmer of a beer. The only thing I worry is that I’m undershooting the hops. I’m only using a very small serving of a very low alpha variety for the whole batch. I don’t want to overwhelm the malt, but I do want some balance. We’ll have to see as at this point I’m not going back to the brewshop before brewing on new years’ day.

To leave you, here is a picture of Arthur and I putting spring water into the carboy to get the total volume up to 5 gallons for the Nasty Elf holiday ale we made.

Beer, The Holidays, and Election 2008

As much as I castigate myself, it seems that infrequent, omnibus updates are a fact of life.

The Chrisolstikwanukkah blitz is beginning to melt toward the New Year. The stats?

Nearly 15 gallons of homebrew have been consumed by family and friends since Thanksgiving.
Arthur has learned gobs of new words.
Taylor and I have begun an ongoing game of scrabble that may continue into the next decade and beyond.
Obama pulled ahead briefly in Iowa only to fall behind again in the most recent polls. He’s looking better in New Hampshire.
We read A Child’s Christmas in Wales on (and as we do every) Christmas night.

How was that for an introductory paragraph?

The Chest Check IIPA, which was our variation on the Punishment IIPA I linked to in this post turned out spectacular. Most of it is gone, but I laid down a twelve pack to age for a while in the “beer cellar” (actually the eaves of the house). We’ll check it out in a year and see how it’s come along.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an accurate judgment of what the % alcohol by volume turned out to be because I got a bad original gravity reading. What happened was, I left about a gallon’s worth of headroom at the top of the carboy when I went to shake it for aeration. Then I poured another gallon of clean water in, and without stirring took the gravity reading*. Of course, the reading was much lower than I expected because the water I had just poured in was floating on top of the extremely dense wort bellow. So I don’t know what the OG actually was.

The terminal gravity was in the 1.02 range, and the expected OG was going to be up around 1.095, which leads me to believe that the alcohol content was probably approaching 10% by volume.

According to the Beer Tools calculator, the beer should have around 300 IBUs, which seems more than my tastebuds were perceiving but it was certainly a lot. I think we proved what we set out to prove, which was that one truly can not have too many hops.

Not everyone agreed.

The next recipe to talk about is the Nasty Elf, which I gave in a prior post. It turned out well, even without a secondary fermentation which we elected to forgo in the interest of time. Next year, though, I think I’ll make it close to Halloween and let it sit a while and think about what it’s done before sticking it in bottles. Also, I think I’ll use Irish Moss next time. This batch just had too much sediment for me. Part of that was that I wasn’t as careful as I should have been when racking into the bottling bucket. Nothing was ruined, and the Nasty Elf was a favorite. Not as sweet as I’d expected, which was nice.

Sometime around the New Year we’re planning on brewing again. My intention is to design a recipe for a nut brown ale, and to use maple syrup for the priming sugar in hopes of making a maple flavored nut brown ale. I’m not sure whether I’ll add a small amount of Dextrose as well as well as the maple, I have to do some research as to how fermentable the sugars in maple syrup are.

As for the election, like I said in the introduction to this post it looks less and less like Mrs. Clinton is a sure thing for the Democratic nomination (which makes me happy as cake). I like John Edwards a lot. I like what he says about Poverty, and I like that he’s been willing to set definite goals and make clear promises about his priorities more than the other Democrats. He wants to withdraw troops from Iraq within 18 months. Neither of the other Democratic front runners has been as forthright about a timetable. He wants to raise fuel economy to 40 MPG by 2016. These specific numbers mean something. They are election year promises, which means that they should be taken with a grain of salt, but they are at least clear promises which is more than the other contenders are giving us.

The truth is that I like John Edwards, though, not so much for his particular issues or political identity. I like him because he looks like JFK and talks like FDR. To a Democrat with a sense of historical gravitas, there can be no more pious combination of traits. So the secret is out. I vote with my heuristic gut most of the time. I always think carefully and weigh the pros and cons, but in the end I come back to my gut and my gut says Edwards is my guy.

Anyway, by the time the primary train rolls out here the Democrats will have picked their winner anyway. My primary vote doesn’t amount to a hill of Iowa corn or New Hampshire maple syrup.

I think Oregon should hold our Primary for the 2012 election in April of 2010. That way we might have some impact.

That’s all (except for a footnote). Until the next time I find a few moments, I hope y’all internet people find yourselves warm and toasty. Happy New Year and all that cheer.

*what this means is that I sucked some of the wort out of the carboy with my trusty turkey baster and used an instrument called a hydrometer to measure the density of the liquid, which shows how much sugar is in suspension and therefore how much potential alcohol you might end up with.