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!
