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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.

IIPA

Imperial India Pale Ale is a style of beer that doesn’t mess around. We’re making some beer the day after thanksgiving from this recipe I found on ratebeer.com. This beer has 17 oz of hops (including some very high alpha varieties) and over 10 lbs of dry malt extract. I expect it to be well nigh painful to drink. Boy am I looking forward to it.

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.