The first and last words on the subject, I took a while off from brewing, but I’m back at it. Here’s what I’ve been up to, since being back brewing. Replacing my keggerator lines and cleaning taps. Initially built it … Continue reading
I’ve found I want to replace my aging wing capper with bench capper, I’m wondering what you use to cap, and if you like it. Please comment with type of capper if you are a big fan of it, … Continue reading
Quite a few brew days have passed since my last update, 10 brew sessions to be precise. I’ve not had a ton of time to blog and brew, I chose brewing. I’ve brewed 4 Berliner weisses and one Gose, 2 IPAs (one smoked english, one hoppy american North east style), 2 milds, and a saison. I’m up to batch 49, and thinking about what should be batch 50. I’ve made good progress on Berliners, with 1/2 of my batch 6 being almost exactly what I have wanted. Batch 7 is effectively a rebrew, if it’s where I want it, I’ll consider that beer conquered. I’m waiting a few more days for to taste the beer, to ensure it’s where it should be sour wise. IMG 4368 f it is, I’ll write it up, and finally include the results of my Berliner survey. My Gose, Down Gose Frazier, is also in a similar situation. It’s waiting on final souring / fruit before I can write that up. They are really that different from each other, I’m hoping the recipe changes are sufficient to distinguish them more than just a salty Berliner. Continue reading
I brewed this a while back, kicked the keg tonight while bottling for homebrewing club night. I said I’d share my notes / recipe. The Recipe is based on the BYO Clones from cans recipes. https://byo.com/stories/issue/itemlist/category/52-mar-apr-2012 (no recipe here). I’ve been making … Continue reading
I’m trying to gather some data about how folks brew their Berliner Weisses if you wouldn’t mind taking the survey, and passing it along to your friends who brew them that may not read my blog I’d appreciate it. I’ll … Continue reading
I’ve struggled getting proper carbonation on some of my bottles, specifically my sour saison. When I finished reading the chapter on packaging in American Sour beers, and it didn’t have any better advise than test and see. I then realized … Continue reading
With the new year and the height of brew season ahead of us, now’s a good time to do a few things you might have ignored the rest of the year. Here’s my list of things you should probably do, … Continue reading
In my 2013 wrap up and goals referred this year to the year of calibration. I wanted to get down to brewing good beer, and I felt the best way to achieve that was to start by making sure everything … Continue reading
With the winter chill setting into the air, it was time to visit Mike up in Bow to brew another partigyle imperial stout. We were happy with both beers from the last time. Last year I might have over planned the brewing process. This year I took a bit of a less detailed approach in designing the parti-gyle, and I went crazy figuring out the base recipe. I did some analysis of the imperial stout recipes I could find. I started with the 13F (Imperial stout) category of the NHC recipe breakdown written up by GatorBeer, which he compiled from here. I then added all the recipes I could find, Katethe great, Jami’s recipe, BYO’s Stone RIS clone, and a few others. You can see the Imperial Stout Grain ratio spreadsheet here. We both liked the imperial stout from last time, but the reviews I got elsewhere indicated it wasn’t complex enough, and didn’t have enough stout character. With the spread sheet I could see the grain percentages to validate a recipe of our design. This past year a few ingredients have really stuck in my head. Chocolate wheat we used in the Janet’s Baby, golden naked oats I keep hearing about, and brown malt has been on my mind since reading Ron Pattinson’s Vintage Beers. The first two are somewhat new, and bring something unique to the recipe. The chocolate wheat brings a nice chocolaty note, while not being acrid or overly bitter like normal chocolate malt, and it adds some head retention from wheat. The Golden naked oats are a Crystal oat, bringing both the silky mouth feel of oats, but with crystal sweetness. Both of these are like two for one malts in my opinion. The brown malt seems like a throwback traditional malt to use, it’s what these beers used to be made mostly of. Inspire of these additions, we tried to simplify the grain bill from last years KTG kitchen sink recipe. This is a much more simplified recipe:
http://beersmithrecipes.com/viewrecipe/591843/we-are-stout-ltrepeatablegt
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I’m a tech geek this is not a surprise to any of you, recently I decided I wanted to take advantage of BeerSmith* to automate some repetitive tasks. Not that it hasn’t been helpful for designing recipes, logging my brewing, etc. However, I’ve been hand writing out brew day todo lists since I started brewing. At first just it was a list of things to get and high level instructions. But it’s evolved into a detailed process for ever step, with timings and measurements. I’d also take notes on the sheets and plug it back into beersmith. Eventually I’d use those notes to write up brewing logs. Before the next brew day, I’d recycle the last plan for the next next batch. It’s has been effective at evolving my process, but it’s also time consuming manual process. I decided I wanted to automate it. Continue reading