Our most recent beer was a Belgian Tripel for a homebrew competition. This will be a strong Belgian pale ale. We've brewed a Belgian Quadrupel a couple times with great results, so I am looking forward to this one. We're also bottling the wit we brewed last time.
The recipe we're following is from one of the many homebrewing books we have (meaning I don't remember what it's called). If I get a chance I'll post the name of it. We have tweaked ours a bit, mainly because our initial gravity has been low. We added more of the malt than it calls for. The ingredients are:
21 lbs Belgian Pilsner Malt
7 oz. Belgian Aromatic
2 oz. Crystal hops (60 min & 30 min)
1 oz. Tettnang hops (0 min)
2 lbs Light candy sugar
2 vials of Trappist Ale Yeast (WLP500) - this is one for tonight, and one after secondary fermenting since sometimes the yeast gets tired on these bigger beers.
The beer will ferment in primary for 2 weeks, then we'll secondary for another 2 weeks before bottling. We used the Fermcap to keep the blowoff under control, and also burton water salts to harden the water, feed the yeast, and increase the hop flavor.
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Thursday, January 10, 2013
New Years Resolution
To update this blog more often! We are still brewing, just getting lazy writing about it :/. Some good news: we've discovered a way to curb the extreme beer blowoff. There is this super nifty liquid stuff called Fermcap which is used to keep the boil under control as well as over foaming during fermentation. It's amazing how well it works. And it doesn't seem to produce any off tastes or anything either.
For today, we are brewing a Belgian Wit recipe we got from a homebrew website called El Segundo Grado Witbier. It calls for orange marmalade and grapefruit rind among other things, which is new for us! Should be fun!
The brewing went off without a hitch. I did spill a little of the yeast at the end; good thing they reproduce! The beer was set to ferment in the shower in case of any blowoffs, even with the Fermcap. After a week and a couple days we secondary fermented. And in another week it should be ready to bottle! We'll see what the gravity is, but our original was a little lower than target for some reason. That has become a frequent occurrence the last few times we brewed. Hopefully a fix for that will be found soon!
Next we'll be brewing a Belgian Tripel for a home brewing competition. So we will need to find a way to make a recipe our own! Good thing we have a few Belgian brewing books lying around to use as reference. My next post will be about that brew (fingers crossed). Hopefully this week!
For today, we are brewing a Belgian Wit recipe we got from a homebrew website called El Segundo Grado Witbier. It calls for orange marmalade and grapefruit rind among other things, which is new for us! Should be fun!
The brewing went off without a hitch. I did spill a little of the yeast at the end; good thing they reproduce! The beer was set to ferment in the shower in case of any blowoffs, even with the Fermcap. After a week and a couple days we secondary fermented. And in another week it should be ready to bottle! We'll see what the gravity is, but our original was a little lower than target for some reason. That has become a frequent occurrence the last few times we brewed. Hopefully a fix for that will be found soon!
Next we'll be brewing a Belgian Tripel for a home brewing competition. So we will need to find a way to make a recipe our own! Good thing we have a few Belgian brewing books lying around to use as reference. My next post will be about that brew (fingers crossed). Hopefully this week!
Monday, January 23, 2012
Golden Ale has liftoff!!
This is getting to be a growing trend in our brewing escapades... These blurry pics are what happens when the yeast gets too antsy and our carboy can't handle it. Even with the blowoff tube in a separate large bucket, the opening wasn't big enough to keep the top from blowing off. In the picture I had put the cover back on, it was blown onto the floor.
It even reached the ceiling! BTW, that stuff is incredibly hard to scrape off. And tiring. Our house smelled like beer for 3 days. It might be smart for us to put the fermenting beer somewhere not over carpet :P
When I found the fermenter the towel had draped over the top of it, so I'm hoping we didn't get any bacteria in it. When this has happened before, the beer got infected and the bottles can explode. Not to mention it doesn't taste as good. And the beer is really foamy and spews out of the bottle when you open it. Lots of fun stuff ;)
So we will be bottling this one soon, and we'll be brewing a Belgian-style Ale this week based on our new book Brew Like a Monk that we got from my sister and brother-in-law. We are also growing to 10 gallon batches!! We got some new pots and new burners from a flea market. I will try to get some more pictures to post of the brewing process and our setup.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Merry Christmas!
It's getting super close to Christmas, and difficult to stay focused at work :P. We will be brewing our next beer tonight. It'll be a vanilla cream stout. The recipe is mostly from DeFalco's, but the store we went to for the ingredients was out of a lot of stuff.
We are starting with a base DeFalco's recipe for an American Porter, but we will add lactose (milk sugar) and vanilla beans. That is hoping we can find those ingredients at Whole Foods.
We will also be bottling the beer we brewed a couple weeks ago. We ordered it online based on a DeFalco's recipe. This turned out to be more difficult than it sounds. Since we wanted specific things, we had to search for each item. We didn't want to order from different online stores, so this single store didn't have everything in stock (seems like a growing trend). Each grain/ malt had to be bought separately, and some didn't come in the quantity we needed, crushed, and so forth. Plus we don't really know good substitutes yet, so we had to research that also.
In the end we got our ingredients in the mail in what seemed like an impossibly small package. (I don't know how they did that!) Everything seemed like good quality and we were happy. The price wasn't much different than our neighborhood store though, maybe a little more expensive actually, so we're paying for convenience. A little hard to justify, but we'll see if we decide to do it again.
For today's brew we had to substitute Pilsen malt for two-row malt, basically the same thing only lighter. But we have the chocolate malt, crystal malt, et al that will darken it up nicely. They also didn't have the Centennial, Chinook, or Mt. Hood hops we needed, so we had to substitute that as well. *Groan* Well, at least we'll have something unique!
We are starting with a base DeFalco's recipe for an American Porter, but we will add lactose (milk sugar) and vanilla beans. That is hoping we can find those ingredients at Whole Foods.
We will also be bottling the beer we brewed a couple weeks ago. We ordered it online based on a DeFalco's recipe. This turned out to be more difficult than it sounds. Since we wanted specific things, we had to search for each item. We didn't want to order from different online stores, so this single store didn't have everything in stock (seems like a growing trend). Each grain/ malt had to be bought separately, and some didn't come in the quantity we needed, crushed, and so forth. Plus we don't really know good substitutes yet, so we had to research that also.
In the end we got our ingredients in the mail in what seemed like an impossibly small package. (I don't know how they did that!) Everything seemed like good quality and we were happy. The price wasn't much different than our neighborhood store though, maybe a little more expensive actually, so we're paying for convenience. A little hard to justify, but we'll see if we decide to do it again.
For today's brew we had to substitute Pilsen malt for two-row malt, basically the same thing only lighter. But we have the chocolate malt, crystal malt, et al that will darken it up nicely. They also didn't have the Centennial, Chinook, or Mt. Hood hops we needed, so we had to substitute that as well. *Groan* Well, at least we'll have something unique!
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
At Least it's Getting Cooler!
After the breakfast stout, we waited almost a month to brew again! So we did an easy peasy Christmas Ale recipe. Can't mess it up, just go to the brew store, measure it out, and follow the recipe! We have yet to fix the gas line to the burner, so it was still pretty short. Kids: it's not safe to have a propane tank less than 2 feet from the burner, especially when the burner is getting all rusted out and spouting a lot of orange flame. Do as I say, not as I do.
Carrying on... fortunately we didn't have any mishaps this time. The wort barely boiled over, and it chilled nicely due to the fine weather. There's not a whole lot more to say about it actually. Since we didn't tweak it. The original gravity was 1.062, and the recipe estimates 1.065, so that's pretty close. I promise next time we'll do something more fun to write about. :)
Carrying on... fortunately we didn't have any mishaps this time. The wort barely boiled over, and it chilled nicely due to the fine weather. There's not a whole lot more to say about it actually. Since we didn't tweak it. The original gravity was 1.062, and the recipe estimates 1.065, so that's pretty close. I promise next time we'll do something more fun to write about. :)
The Texas Breakfast Stout
The hard part is over! We secondary fermented, adding the oak chips and more yeast. It sat in the fermenter about 2 more weeks before we bottled. Now it's been conditioning in the bottles for almost 3 weeks. We tasted it last Sunday... oh my gosh it's good. There's a ton of chocolate flavor and you can smell the oaky rum but not taste it. It's thick... it reminds me of the Oak Aged Yeti Imperial Stout.
It needs some time to age, I think we'll try it again in another week. It'll be awesome when we enter it into the contest in January. We have to come up with a name for our team!
Our next brew is a Christmas Ale, modeled after the recipe by our oldest craft brewery in Texas: Saint Arnold Brewing Company.
It needs some time to age, I think we'll try it again in another week. It'll be awesome when we enter it into the contest in January. We have to come up with a name for our team!
Our next brew is a Christmas Ale, modeled after the recipe by our oldest craft brewery in Texas: Saint Arnold Brewing Company.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
On to the Next Brew
A local beer bar posted on their Facebook page that they are going to host a home brew competition in January. So naturally we had to oblige. The entry has to be a stout. We researched (googled) different stout styles to figure out what we wanted to make and how to tweak it to our liking. One style that stuck out to us was a breakfast stout. We've brewed a coffee stout and a chocolate stout, and breakfast stout sorta combines the two. But the recipe is pretty intense, we had to go all over town looking for cocoa nibs. BTW I don't recommend eating them alone... it's basically raw unsweetened chocolate. Take my word for it ;)
In order to make it OUR recipe, we are calling it a Texas Breakfast Stout. We got locally roasted coffee that we cold-brewed (this is supposed to take some of the bitterness out of the coffee as well as cut down on the oils present). We are also aging it in "oak Texas rum barrels". That is, soaking oak wood chips in rum and adding them to the fermenter. We bought Treaty Oak Rum distilled in Austin Tx.
We went to our good 'ole home brew store to get our grains, hops, and yeast. Our recipe called for over 20 pounds of grain; they had to put it in a burlap bag instead of the normal clear plastic bag since it was so heavy. They didn't have the hops we needed (Mt Hood and Nugget) so we had to improvise.
During the brew we had a setback: the hose from the propane tank to the burner was too close and actually CAUGHT ON FIRE. Fortunately my husband was talking to our neighbor outside nearby and she alerted him saying, "oooh it's on fire!" It turned out that most of the tube was salvageable and the destroyed part was cut off. Then after the mash soaked for an hour and we were draining the wort out the tube fell out of the pot and we lost who knows how much on the ground... Luck was not on our side. But that was the last adversity and we joyfully finished our brew, which ended 1 1/2 hours later than usual.
For the first time in a while, the weather was nice and cool and the wort cooled down much more quickly than when it's 95 degrees at 9pm. So the yeast was happy and we had good strong fermentation. We will be secondary fermenting after 5 days and adding more yeast as well as the oak chips. I will keep you updated in the coming weeks!
In order to make it OUR recipe, we are calling it a Texas Breakfast Stout. We got locally roasted coffee that we cold-brewed (this is supposed to take some of the bitterness out of the coffee as well as cut down on the oils present). We are also aging it in "oak Texas rum barrels". That is, soaking oak wood chips in rum and adding them to the fermenter. We bought Treaty Oak Rum distilled in Austin Tx.
We went to our good 'ole home brew store to get our grains, hops, and yeast. Our recipe called for over 20 pounds of grain; they had to put it in a burlap bag instead of the normal clear plastic bag since it was so heavy. They didn't have the hops we needed (Mt Hood and Nugget) so we had to improvise.
During the brew we had a setback: the hose from the propane tank to the burner was too close and actually CAUGHT ON FIRE. Fortunately my husband was talking to our neighbor outside nearby and she alerted him saying, "oooh it's on fire!" It turned out that most of the tube was salvageable and the destroyed part was cut off. Then after the mash soaked for an hour and we were draining the wort out the tube fell out of the pot and we lost who knows how much on the ground... Luck was not on our side. But that was the last adversity and we joyfully finished our brew, which ended 1 1/2 hours later than usual.
For the first time in a while, the weather was nice and cool and the wort cooled down much more quickly than when it's 95 degrees at 9pm. So the yeast was happy and we had good strong fermentation. We will be secondary fermenting after 5 days and adding more yeast as well as the oak chips. I will keep you updated in the coming weeks!
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