What's next for Rowdy Reptile Brew?

Let us know what beer you want! We posted a poll in the right column so you can vote for the beer you would like us to brew next. If none of those beers sound good to you, comment on this post and let us know what type of beer you are craving!

Wee Heavy

Just finished brewing a Wee Heavy today. We had some problems lautering today, but it was OK because the interesting thing about this recipe is the extra carmelization step. There are only 2 grains in the recipe, 17.5 lbs of pale 2 row, and 0.5 lbs of roasted barely. In order to not have to boil for 4+ hours to replicate the caramelization that Scottish breweries get, 1 gallon of the first runnings are taken out and reduced down separately to about 1 pint. The reducing creates a lot of chemical reactions that we would probably not be able to achieve on out set up.

The first picture is at the beginning of the boil with 1 gallon in the pot. The picture below is after ~60 minutes of boiling and there is very little liquid left. A lot of dark foam is created while the liquid is boiling, and the result is a very thick, syrupy, liquid that gets added back to the boil kettle with the rest of the wort.

We ended up with a little more than expected in the carboy, 5.5 gallons instead of 5, so we put a blow off tube on top instead of a normal airlock. The blowoff tube will allow all of the krausen (or foam) created by the fermentation to go through the tube and out into the growler filled with sanitizer solution. If we didn't do this, the krausen would eventually blow the airlock off the top and clog everything up.

Anniversary Monster

We have finally taken a sample from the barelywine, and it clocks in at 12.6% alcohol. We are very happy with the color that it turned out to be, a nice dark copper-reddish, and it tastes delicious. It is very sweet and malty but nicely balanced by the hops. I'm sure in 1 years time when we officially crack one open it is going to be amazing.

Oatmeal Stout

9th all grain batch in the books, Oatmeal Stout. Elise wrote the recipe, it has 8 different kinds of malts including 2 lbs of oats and it should clock in at ~6.5% when all is said and done. It might end up being a little less than that alcohol wise because we mashed at 157 F. The higher mash temperature with yield a beer with more body, but also less fermentatability. In the bowl below the oats is 2 grams of chalk, and 3 grams of baking soda. When you are making really dark beers with a lot of roasted malts, the pH of the beer can become too low and have detrimental effects. Hard water contains high amounts of carbonates which allow darker beers to be brewed by buffering the acidity contributed by the highly kilned dark malts. Soft water on the other hand, is most suited to making beers like pilsner and other lighter colored beers. Our water in Aurora is neither hard nor soft, and therefor is best suited for dark amber to brown colored beers. Baking soda is NaHCO3 and chalk is CaCO3, and by adding small amounts of each to the mash, we increased the "hardness" of the water by adding carbonates and hopefully resulting in a proper mash pH. This is our first attempt at water additions, and in the future I'm sure they will be a lot better. We decided to brew this beer about 14 hours before hand, so we didn't have a lot of time to do enough research on the mineral additions. Hopefully it turns out OK.

Most stouts are supposed to be in the color range of 20-40 SRM. Elise, and myself, like to make our beers stronger and darker than normal. With our brewing software, the estimated SRM based on the recipe was 57 SRM. You can click here to get an idea of what SRM numbers correspond to which color.

We had a busy weekend beer wise. Saturday we bottled our IPA, 8% and then on Sunday we brewed the Oatmeal Stout and bottled the Belgian IPA, also 8%. Both IPA's were the same batch, but were fermented with 2 separate yeast strains. The first taste of the Belgian was very very good, but not as 'funky' as I thought it would be. Usually Belgian yeasts can impart a yeasty, fruity, 'funkyness' to the beer, but I think becuase we fermented the beer at 68 F instead at ~76 F, the yeast imparted a much cleaner overall profile to the beer. I'm sure we will do this again in the future, and hopefully we can warm the fermentation up a bit to get some more yeast characteristics in the beer.

Anniversary Barleywine

To celebrate our anniversary on January 3rd, we have made a barelywine with the plan not to crack one open until our next anniversary. Instead of making a normal batch of 5 gallons, we scaled Denny's Old Stoner recipe down to 3 gallons with an OG of 1.125. If the fermentation is good, that should yield a beer of about 12-13% alcohol, which is strong enough to last a year. A possible problem of beer sitting for one year is oxygen seeping into the bottles through the caps and causing off flavors. To hopefully avoid this, we are going to dip the tops of the bottles in wax to make an oxygen barrier.

Because the barelywine has such a high gravity, a much larger amount of yeast was needed to fully ferment the beer. To make sure we pitched enough yeast, we used the yeast cake from a previous batch of beer. We racked the beer off the yeast cake and poured the barleywine on top. It started to bubble with in a few hours. This was the first time we have tried anything like this, but anytime we need to make a high gravity beer, I think we are going to brew a smaller lower gravity beer and then use the yeast cake for the high gravity ale.

With making such strong beer, we only used the first runnings from the mash to make the barelywine, so we did a partigyle where the second runnings were used to make a "small beer." I added some more malts to the mash when the water for the second runnings was added to make a darker beer. The OG was only 1.040 (much much smaller than the barelywine), but it should make for a good easy drinking session beer. We have no idea what the small beer is going to taste like or what style is resemebles. We basically lightly hopped it with some left over hops we had in the freezer, so it will probably be similar to an English ESB; except it was fermented with an american ale yeast. Hopefully the beer turns out to be drinkable because the only cost for the small beer was 1 oz of willamette hops and 1.5 lbs of speciality grains for a total of about $5.