Obituary: Biere de Marrs

Sad day. We drank the last of the Biere de Marrs, our Biere de Garde that was secondaried on Brett B. There beer did not seem to change that much over the course of it's life, but it was very good to start out with. It was a fairly light beer, but it had a nice sweetness and a nice crisp citrusy, funky, twang thanks to the Brett. It was nicely carbonated and it went very well with a lot of different foods ranging from burritos to pasta to roasted dishes. Overall, I enjoyed this beer very much and will definitely make it again in the future.




Elise received a book on Exposure settings for our camera and as such, has already been taking some cool pictures. The photo below is the Raspberry Imperial Stout (delicious combination with brownies) and I thought I would add the picture becuase I thought it was a neat photo.


More posts to come, I need to take pictures of the super cool oxygenation system as well as the stir plate I am building. Several beers are also planned during my time off: Anniversary Barleywine '12, Belgian Dubbel, and with our neighbor we are going to make a Black IPA and another Double Pale Ale.

Aaaaaaand, we're back

Cooper's settling into a routine and so are we. Thankfully, we stockpiled some brews before he was born because now that 2 people are drinking, things are moving off the shelves a little faster. I'm officially on break from rotations, and should be able to update the blog more now.



We've brewed 2 beers since Cooper's arrival. After the success of the Hoptober pale ale being out best hoppy beer we've ever made, we thought we'd follow that up with an attempt at an IPA. We did a 10 gallon batch with or neighbor a few weeks ago. Hopefully this beer will be a hop monster because after we drop hop, there will be a total of 1 lb of hops in the whole batch. Similar to the Hoptober pale ale, we used amarillo again, but intead of cascade, we paired it with Elise's favorite, centennial. Since both Dave and myself have little ones at home, we got up early on a Saturday and started brewing at 530am to make sure we didnt eat up a chunk of the day and were able to help. It was a cold morning with a light snow, but the snow helped cool the beer down very quickly after the boil was complete. We dry hopped the beer earlier this week and plan on bottling it on January 2nd; we'll wait the customary 1 week for the first tasting, but we are very excited. We've drank all but 6 of the Hoptober pale ales and Elise is having to ration them out to make them last as that is the only hoppy beer we have on hand right now. I'll post some reviews of the IPA when I get a chance.




Today, another cold day (18 when I started) is my first day off for Christmas break, and what better way to spend it than brewing? We're making a beer that I've wanted to make for about 6 months now, but due to scheduling and other factors, we havent been able to make it until now. It is a Rye Saison made with 2 lbs of rye malt to impart a spicy/sharp malt character as well as a small amount of super dark Carafa III and turbinado sugar to make the beer a nice brown color. The yeast we are using is WY3711, French Saison yeast. Saison yeasts are much different than normal ales yeasts as they like temperatures well above 70 (some people push them into the high 80s) and they are also very attenuative. The beer should start around 1047 and finish around 1003. Hopefully the yeast will also impart its nice spicy, floral flavors and make for a very drinkable, dark, spicy brew.

First Snow!

We've gotten our first snow here in Denver. Monday it was 81 degrees here in Denver, and now on Tuesday night, it starts snowing: welcome to Denver. Luckily the roads were still warm from the weekend and despite the ~6-7 inches of snow, the roads are clear. Also, now that it has snowed, Elky can finally come out of the garage and join the rest of the fall decorations and hopefully bring the gator football team some luck against Georgia this weekend.

The beer is very tasty this year (not surpisingly). Not as roasty as last year, but already very very smooth. We used a different yeast strain this year that is more neutral and you can tell compared to last year's brew. We are both very happy with it and after we've finished this pint we'll sample the one that received some oak aging. Hopefully that one will be just as good. I am slightly worried about it as I have learned that less oak for longer periods of time works better to impart a deeper, more rounded oak flavor; we only had the beer on the oak for 10 days or so, and when we bottled it was very oaky. Time will have helped mellow the flavors, but hopefully they are still there.

Cooper had his 6 week checkup today and now weighs 10 lb 9 oz! He went from the 18th percentile in weight at 2 weeks to the 52nd at 6 weeks; mama's got some good milk apparently.

We dont have any brews really planned in the near future, but the next one will be a dark rye saison. We didnt brew a Christmas beer this year, but we will drink last year's Spiced Winter Ale that will have hopefully mellowed out much more over the last 12 months. Until next time,



P.S. Below is a pic of Scrappy so you can get an idea of how much snow we've received over the last 24 hours.

Brown Ale + Oaked Brett Brown Ale

Last weekend we brewed 8 gallons of our brown ale; 5 gallons were treated normally, and the other ~3 gallons are going to be treated quite differently. First, the normal batch should be different than previous brown ales we have made simply because we have stopped using the hop screen and it should therefor seem hoppier than previous versions. Elise is looking forward to this as she says she "likes a true American-style brown ale" which is more hop-forward than British-style ale.

The special 3-gal portion was pitched on top of 100% Brett B yeast as well as an oak spiral. Oak and brett is a very classic combination, especially in Belgian lambic beers. Normally, we have been oaking for about 10 days after fermentation has been complete, but this time we added the oak with the yeast. We added a smaller amount of oak compared to the volume as the oak will sit in the beer for upwards of 8 weeks. Hopefully this one will taste as good as the previous one.


Cooper is finally here, and Elise has been enjoying small samples of beers over the past couple of days. Coop's beer (Raspberry Imperial Stout) is also tasting very very good right now, and I'll hopefully post a formal tasting of that brew later. Right now it's time to hang with Mr Cooper!

Anniversary BW

We finally got around to wax-dipping the barley wine bottles today. Originally, I had hoped to do this much earlier in the year so the wax could do its job of protecting against oxygen seeping into the bottles. But, it is what it is.

Interestingly, or being a cheapskate, I have been saving the wax from previous opened bottles and melting that wax instead of buying new wax. Maybe some day, we'll use a different color, but right now we'll have to figure out a way to differentiate the vintages from each other.



Like last year's batch, we are going to set aside 5 bottles for yearly vertical tastings. This year, Elise will finally be able to try last year's and this year's barley wines and I'm very excited about that. Hopefully this year's batch will have carbonated as we tried a slightly different method of bottle conditioning, but if it doesnt, it will still likely be very very good. Cant wait, only 4 months to go....

10 gallons-o-business

Over our time of brewing, our neighbor has seen us a lot and tasted most of our beers and liked what he has tasted. He and his wife are also pregnant and a couple of months ago we brewed a Barley Wine for him to crack open when his son is born in late-November. Now, after getting the itch, seeing how simple brewing can be, and seeing how much money can be saved homebrewign, he's built his own mash tun, and thus another homebrewer is born. We decided to brew a batch together and split it; "same" amount of work to get twice the results. The picture is of the boil kettly pre-boil with 12 gallons of wort; very, very full. We had some issues with the boil since there was so much liquid in the kettle, my "normal" setting on the burner wouldnt have the same boil off rate. We did some experimenting and tweaking and ended up with about 1/2-1/3 less volume in the end than anticipated. We also ditched the hop screen as well. The first time we brewed the Black 'N Mild it was a stove top batch and thus, we didnt use the hop screen. The beer was very very hoppy, and when we made it again, same recipe just 5 gallons and with a hop screen, it was nowhere near as hoppy. So we decided to ditch it for this batch and just deal with all of the hop trub that would be generated and see what happens.

We decided to brew a hoppy pale ale that received a lot of late hopping with Cascade and Amarillo hops. After fermentation is complete, we'll each dry hop our portion, mine with Amarillo, his with Cascade, and we'll be able to compare the differences in aroma that each hop provides. We named it Hop-tober Pale ale as that is when it will be ready to drink, and it will be the the newest, most recent beer that Elise will get to sample after Coop arrives. Hopefully it turns out good!

Belgian Pale Ale

We just finished bottling the newest Belgian Pale Ale and it was so nice to have Elise's (and I guess Coop's) help. It not only cuts the time in half, but there is also someone to keep me company during this somewhat boring task. This was the last planned batch of brew before Cooper's arrival, so right now the brewery is empty. The good news is, we have a serious stock pile of beer downstairs that should definitely get us through the hiatus. With nothing else going on, I'll try to post some tasting reviews in the future. Now we're just playing the waiting game for Cooper's arrival

Merry Christmas!! (...in July)

It's Christmas in July, so bust out the Christmas songs, Winter Ales, Spode china, and make the roux!

It has become a tradition to make gumbo on Christmas Eve, and I couldn't go a whole year with getting gumbo only once, so we worked out a compromise where Elise will make another batch on July 24th. We were planning on using okra this time around to compare it to the last batch in which we used file powder to thicken the gumbo. Unfortunately we were unable to find it at the grocery store, so we might try it at Christmas; either way, it is still amazingly delicious. Elise made the gumbo while listening to Christmas internet radio (which we were lucky that it was still available) and we ate off the of Spode china and I sipped on our spiced winter ale after dinner. To cap the night off we watched Elf before bed. Just like Christmas.....except we were in shorts and t-shirts.

Saturday we successfully brewed our Belgian Pale ale, which looking at the calendar, will be the last Belgian brew of the year. This time I changed the recipe slightly by making it a little lighter in color by using a different combination of Caramel malts (10L and 40L instead of only 60L). I also wanted it to be a Belgian beer, not just an American Pale ale with Belgian yeast, so I used Saaz hops at the end of the boil to impart some spicy/earthy notes instead of the citrus-y American hops.



We also bottled the Black 'N Mild and the Two Hearted Ale clone this weekend. I am a little worried about the THA clone as it smelt a little of bubblegum which I think might be a result of fermentation not being complete when I took it out of the fermentation fridge and it sat in our 78F garage. Hopefully, when it is chilled it will dissapear. We also took 1 gallon of the THA and put a small amount of oak to it. For the First Snow, there was ~2 inches of oak/gallon of beer, which resulted in a prominent oak flavor. For this, we wanted to go a lot more sublte with the oak, so we did ~0.5 inches/gallon and tied a string around the oak to be able to remove the spiral when the time comes. This one should be interesting.

Once Cooper arrives we'll likely cut down on the brewing, and looking at the calendar we only have 4 brews planned for the rest of the year. If this holds, we'll brew the 2 more batches than we did in 2010 (21 vs 19).

Session Beers

I found a blog soley devoted to session beer, The Session Beer Project, which trys to creat a buzz about low-grav beers. The blogger also wrote a good article for the Massachusets Beverage Business which I think does a good job describing session beers and the underground session-beer movement in America. Hopefully, our Black 'N Mild will turn out good and then we can start working on another session-type beer to keep in the rotation.

Nothing on the Rowdy front this weekend. On Saturday I'll dry hop the Two Hearted Ale, Sunday we'll cold crash the Belgian Dubbel for bottling the following weekend, and on Wednesday we'll dry hop the Black N Mild.

Black N Mild

Today I got an early start and brewed up 5 gallons of our Black 'N Mild Ale. As you can see from the picture it is pretty dark with, hopefully, a cream-colored head. At fist glance you might think poter or stout, but with this beer all the color comes from de-husked malt (Carafa III, 525 SRM) which adds mostly color and a slight roasty characteristic. We then add a generous amount of hops. In the previous attempt we only added hops at 60 and 5 minutes (+ dry hopping) and although there was a ton of hop flavor and aroma, the transition from the bittering-hop flavors to the late-hop flavors was very choppy; likely because of the large gap in time from the hop additions. So this time we added a small addition at 30 minutes. It was supposed to be 0.25 oz of centennial, but I forgot to bring down something to weigh the hops on so I just tried to guess from the bag of hop pellets. I'm not very good at guessing, and ended up adding 0.5oz's instead of 0.25; oh well, more IBUs. Hopefully this extra addition will make for a smoother flavor and transition from the bitterness hops to the aroma/flavor hops.

The goal OG was 1041, but I boiled off a little more than I thought and eneded up with ~4.8 gallons of beer at 1044. This is a definite "session" beer in which the alcohol is low (hopefully around 4.3%) so you can have several beers in one sitting and still walk away. The term "session beer" is still being defined in the brewing community, but according to some British beer people, a "session" is one in which you drink at least 6-8 beers. Commericial British beers today are very commonly in this range with beers like Mild, Bitter, Pale, even Porter. For our typical 6.5-7% beers, a "session" would be hard to do without getting blasted, so I have been wanting to have some lower alcohol beers on hand. Most people define a session beer as one that is < 4.5-5% alcohol, and our first attempt was 3.8%.

Some people will complain of "wasting" the calories on a low-alcohol beer with out the "happy" effects, but with lower alcohol comes lower calories. Our first 3.8% one was only 175 calories, and this most recetent version will likely be < 200 calories/pint. Compare this to 436 cal/pint for the RIS and a whopping 574 cal/pint in the BW. One of those beers at +10% alcohol will have you feeling it, but you could have 2-3 of the session beers with the same calories. I think it is a good trade-off to have more time to drink more beers and will likely have a session beer on hand at all times in the future.

Stocking Up; Coop's Oaked First Snow

As Cooper is coming soon we are planning on taking a small brewing hiatus after his arrival until things settle down. To prepare for this we are stocking up on beer. We brewed a clone of Bell's Two Hearted Ale (an IPA), next week we'll brew the Black N Mild (hoppy, 4% beer), then bottle the dubbel (which attenuated a lot and is 7.7% alcohol instead of the anticipated 6.7%), then the next week we'll brew our Belgian Pale ale, and a couple weeks later finish with a porter. Above is a photo of our "Beer Store" in the garage. It is a closet that houses the A/C unit and the hot water heater but has a decent amount of floor space which we use for storage space. In the picture out of view on left is another 2 cases as well. In all, there are 13 cases in the closet (including the case of the First Snow we bottled today) and as such, we are running dangerously low on empty bottles. With all the brewing in the near future we'll likely have to buy empty bottles to make it over the hump. We've only had to buy 1 case of bottles in the past, and although they aren't expensive, it still is a pain to have to buy bottles when we usually get them for free from friends.


In previous posts we've mentioned oaking the First Snow brew in honor of Cooper. Today we added a medium-plus toast, American Oak spiral to 2 gallons of the beer and botteld the other 3 gallons. We are cutting it close to Coop's arrival in that the package for the spiral says it reaches maximum extraction in 6 weeks, and Coop should be here in about 10 weeks. We're going to taste the beer in ~2 weeks to see how it is progressing to see if we need to add more oak and hopefully we can bottled it in 4 weeks to allow 6 weeks for bottle conditioning and aging. Below is a photo of the spiral posing with Cooper.

Biere de Mars

We just finished bottling the Biere de Mars which was the Biere de Garde that was secondaried on top of the Brett B yeast. From the sample the aroma has a lot of the funky Brett characteristics, but the flavor of the Brett is very subdued; it should make for a very intersting beer.

On a side note, the Biere de Garde is actually pretty good. I have been bashing it for being so "simple" but that is turning out to be a good thing. We sampled another one last night and it was good; nicely sweet and light. On a hot summer day some cold BdG's would go down quite nicely; too bad we only bottled 10 of them........Next year we'll make a whole 5 gallons worth.

Belgian Dubbel

Today we had a smooth brew session and made close to 5 gallons of a Beglian Dubbel. This was one of the rare batches lately that I've done on a weekend and it was nice to have Elise and Cooper around to brew. The gravity came out a little higher than I wanted (1069 instead of 1063) which will mean probably another 0.5% worth of alcohol. We also made some dog treats from the spent grains as we are running low from the batch that was made from the First Snow grains.

On a side note, we tasted the first round of bottles from the Single Hop beers and, like Elise, I prefered the taste of the Centennial beer. I think that the Cascade version's body is a little thinner than the Centennial one because it was made second and therefore the wort sat around for ~2 hours before it came to a boil. Overall, it is a good pale ale, we like the color and clarity and it should be a good summer beer.

The dogs getting their usual ration of spent grains.

The rabbits have been out a lot lately and as it's Spring, the babies have been coming out as well.

Late Spring Update

I'm home from my rotation in Sterling and did a few things beer-related this weekend. We bottled the Single Hop Pale Ales (Cascade and Centennial) and I was suprised how similar the fermentation was for both beers. They both finished at 1012 for 6.4% alcohol, and although I think that's a little too high for an American Pale Ale (I'd prefer something closer to 5.5%) the samples tasted pretty good. We poured the samples into tasting glasses so we could try to smell the difference between the two, and to no one's surprise, we eached preferred different beers. Elise like the Centennial the best (which she said reminded her of her probably favorite beer, Great Divide's Hercules Double IPA) and I liked the Cascade beer.

We racked the First Snow to secondary where it will sit for ~2 weeks at which time we'll bottle 3 gallons of it and then put the other 2 gallons on some medium toast American Oak spirals. I was worried a couple of weeks ago when I took a gravity sample from the beer and it was only at 1040, but the extra couple of weeks allowed th yeast to finish up. It finished at 1022 which is lower than we anticipated, and brings the alcohol to 10.1%! The sample tasted very smooth, so I'm looking foward to drinking them this winter.

Next week we'll brew a Belgian Dubbel, and like our Tripel, we are using Westmalle's yeast. Like their Dubbel, ours is going to be a bit "smaller" than what most people think Dubbels should be. We're going to shoot for ~6.75% alcohol, hopefully a little less. As this was the last of the Belgian yeast we had left from the Belgian Pale Ale we brewed in December, we'll use this yeast cake to get our stores up again.

After that we are going to brew a clone of Bell's Two Hearted Ale, which is technically an IPA. In the last post I was bashing our IPA, but since then it has cleared up a lot and gotten pretty tasty, so it's not as bad as advertised. Irregardless, I still want to do a couple of "other people's" IPAs before we start down the road of making our own again. The interesting thing about the Two Hearted Ale is that it is very low in alcohol for an IPA (~6%) and it is all Centennial hops. Even though we just did an all-Centennial beer, this beer is just too good to pass up.

Tasting: IPA

Big up's to Eric for getting me the custom pint glasses in the picture above. They say "Rowdy Reptile Brewing, Since 2009" which is very cool. I received 2 glasses and a big glass pitcher as groomsman gifts for his wedding. Thanks to Eric and congratulations.

As for the tasting today, I am writing about our second attempt at an IPA.

Brewed: 2/21/2011
OG: 1066
FG: 1011
Alcohol: 7.2%
Hops: Magnum, Centennial, Columbus, Amarillo, Chinook

Aroma: Bright fruity and floral hop aroma, very nice; slight alcohol; some breadiness from the malts.

Appearance: slightly lighter than in the picture, but the color is somewhat "dull" as it's not very bright. The brew is decently clear once it warms up, but I would like it to be clearer. The cloudiness may be due to the dry hopping, and we'll try cold crashing longer next time.

Flavor: Very citrusy but not as bitter as the estimated 85 IBUs would suggest. The bittering hop we used (magnum) is known for being a very "clean" bittering hop, and as a result may not give that "hop bite" that we like. The brew does hide its 7.2% alcohol well as it has a good drinkability, but it does not have the crispness I want.

Overall: This is just a 'meh' beer for me. I dont know if it is because of the magnum hops we used, or our palates being used to super bitter beers, but this one almost tastes like a Pale Ale instead of an IPA. Unfortunately Elise has not been able to try this one so I cant get her input, but after this somewhat disappointing batch, I think I am going to take a break from brewing origonal IPA recipes and instead brew other people's tried and true recipes. We used a lot of hops in this beer (7 oz) and it should be much hoppier/bitter than it is, but again, I dont know if our palates are just ruined. Our neighbor seems to like it though, so that is a plus.


We probably wont brew an IPA for a while as the upcoming list is Dubbel, Schwarzbier, and Doppelbock. The schwarz and doppelbock are lagers and the doppelbock will need to be lagered in our fridge for 6-12 weeks before we bottle it so we are planning on brewing this about a month before Cooper arrives so that it can lager while we are busy adjusting to our new house guest. We might try to squeeze another brew in there somewhere, but if we do it is likely to be either our Black 'N Mild or the porter. We'll see.

First Snow

I am off from school for about 2 weeks until I start rotations and with nothing to do anymore, I decided today would be a good day to brew our First Snow Winter Ale. This one will be aged and will not be opened until the first time it snows in Denver; usually sometime around Halloween-ish. Another spin we are going to put on it will be oaking some of it, probably ~2 gallons, in honor of Cooper. Back in the day, people were named for their profession. Smith's were generally blacksmiths for example, and Cooper's were (and still are) barrel makers. In honor of his cool name, and because we dont have a barrel, we are going to add oak chips to this beer. The beer will sit on the oak for about 2 weeks before bottling and will add another dimension to the beer. The beer is going to be pretty strong as indicated by the OG (pic above) of ~1.099. If everything goes well it should end up at ~9.7% alcohol. Different from last year will be the yeast we use. Last year we used a British strain of yeast that is pretty fruity, but does not attenuate as well. It did a good job last year and the beer was very tasty, but I thought this year we would change it up a littel bit. We are using a California Lager yeast (think Anchor Steam) that ferments very clean like lager yeasts, but can be used at warmer temperatures (58-60 instead of 45). By doing this we will be making something closer to a Baltic Porter which is very similar to a Russian Imperial Stout but made with lager yeast. They were made origonally made in Northern Europe and were strong beers made to last trips through the Baltic Sea. Hopefully ours turns out well



This was the first batch of beer in a while that has had a significant amount of specialty grains; the Tripel was only base malt for example. As a result, the mash smelled very very good this morning. I was trying to mash in before Elise left so she could smell it on her way out, but the water wasnt warm enough yet, so I missed her by about 20 minutes. This batch also had 1.63 lbs of oats in it which should impart an nice creamy mouthfeel; some of the other specialty grains included chocolate, vienna, caramel, buiscit, special roast, and brown malt.




The beer had a nice deep brown color as can be seen here in the first runnings from the mash tun.

This is a picture of what they dogs typically are doing during the brew day. Riley is looking into the grass for rabbits and Bailey is usually just lounging around. You can click on the photo to get a better look at Bailey side-eying me

The dogs usually get a small amount of the spent grain to munch on while we are brewing as well.

Recently, we found a recipe online for dog treats made from the spent grain. Its 4 cups of grain, 2 cups of flour, 2 eggs, and 1 cup of peanut butter. They are kind of like drop cookies and will spend a few hours in the oven on a low temp to dry out. We made some from the grain of the Tripel and the dogs seemed to like them, but I think they will like these ones more as the specialty grains will provide more sweetness to the cookies.

Single Hop Pale Ale: Centennial v Cascade

Today while I was off from school for a day I brewed 5 gallons of pale ale in which it was split into two batches. The first one was made with only centennial hops and the second was with only cascade hops. To try to make everything else the same except for the hops, I only did one mash. After all of the worst was drained, I split it 50/50 and made each of the beers 1 at a time.

I usually dont do a mash out which is raising the grain temperature to above 170 with your sparge water which denatures all of the mash enzymes to "lock in" your fermentability. I did this today because the wort for the cascade brew sat for ~90 minutes while I was brewing the centennial batch. Hopeully, during this time, there wasnt any more conversion because it would make the beer more fermentable and different from the centennial version.

Each beer got ~30 IBUs of bittering at 60 minutes, then 0.33oz at 10 minutes and 0.66oz at 5 min; each will also get 0.5 oz worth of dry hops. Each beer should be about the same IBUs (~50) which will allow us to compare the flavor/aroma of the hops to eachother without having differing levels of bitterness. Whenever we get around to the next series of Single Hops we are probably going to do Columbus and Chinook followed then by Simcoe and Amarillo.

Joey's Tripel

We bottled Joey's Tripel today, and although it's kind of hard to tell in the photo, it is very very clear. We cold crashed it for a total of 7 days (instead of our normal 3 days) to make sure it was very clear. Because it is so light in color any cloudiness would be very noticable, and while I think we'll have some haziness, it should be clear otherwise. I think we fermented it a little warm as I am noticing some bubblegum-y type aromas, but it tastes pretty good so far. We'll see how it turns out in the Fall.

Brewed: 3/29/11
OG: 1090
FG: 1012
Alcohol: 10.23%

Biere de Garde and Biere de Brett

After tasting the Biere de Garde (BdG) a couple of weeks ago and not being happy with it we only bottled 1 gallon (10 bottles) of the 5 today. We then bottled the 2 gallons of 100% Brett B beer and added the remaining 4 gallons of BdG on top of the Brett yeast cake. Hopefully after 2-3 months the Brett will "funk" it up a little bit so that it isn't so 1-dimensional and boring. Ideally, we are shooting for something similar to New Belgium's Biere de Mars which is bottle conditioned with Brett yeast.


Brewed 3/21/2011
Biere de Garde
OG 1060
FG 1016
Alcohol: 5.75%

Biere de Brett
OG 1060
FG 1012
Alcohol: 6.3%

Tasting: Anniversary Barleywine '10

In honor of finding out about Cooper today, I thought I'd crack another BW to sip on tonight. Here are some previous posts about the beer: anniversary and brewing in case anyone wants to look back on where the beer came from.

Brewed: 1/3/2010
OG: 1125
FG: 1030
Alcohol: 12.54%

Appearance: no carbonation, no head; very red and dense looking

Aroma: very sweet, some alcohol, fruity esters but a very "smooth" overall aroma

Taste: a lot of body, pretty sweet, nice and malty, some fruity esters, strong bitterness which balances the malt very nicely and is classic for an American BW. It hides the 12.6% alcohol very well, making it suprisingly easy to drink.

Overall: I dont think the flavor is that much different from the last time I had one, but that was about 2 months ago and in the overall age of the beer (~15 months), 2 months isnt that much. This is a very good BW in my opinion. We've got about 10 bottles left (including the 4 that are saved for 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015) and since I dont like drinking it by myself very much, hopefully there will be a good amount left for Elise and I to enjoy together. I wish it would have carbonated, but hopefully we can figure that out with the next batch.

Tasting: Belgian Pale Ale

Tasting notes for our second attempt at the Belgian Pale Ale.
Brewed 12/29/10
OG 1056
FG 1011
5.9% ABV

Appearance: nice golden color, good head retention, very clear. Color is a little ligher than in the picture.

Aroma: malty sweet, some clove and esters

Flavor: sweet, clove, low esters, some hop bitterness

Overall: OK attempt, not as good as the origonal. Higher fermentation temperatures needed to impart more yeast characteristics. Next time we might sub some of the base malt for some sugar to try it out a little bit more.

Tasting: Batch #3, Winter Spiced Strong Ale

After bottling the RIS today I had to make some room in the beer closet in the garage. I found some old Winter Spiced Ales in the back and since we brewed an all-grain version of the same recipe last fall, I decided to pour out the 14 bottles we had left. This was the 3rd overall batch we have ever made and it contained brown sugar, honey, sweet orange peel, and a spice mixture made of cinnamon, ginger, clove, and nutmeg. It was bottled on 10/5/2009 and finished at 8% alcohol. We can remember when we tried drinking the beer around Christmas time that the beer was so sweet we couldn't drink it cold. We had to let it warm up a little bit to be able to get it down. This is the oldest beer we have in the house, and the 18 months have done it well. From the picture you can see how clear it is and the mouth-feel is greatly improved since we last had it over a year ago.

Aroma: Spices, "christmas," cinnamon, , warm sugar, slight alcohol

Flavor: dry, slightly sweet (much less than before), no longer cloying sweet, some spicey-ness but much less than before. Fairly dry considering the higher FG (1023), medium carbonation; finish lasts well in mouth after swallowing

Overall: this one has really grown up since we first started drinking it. It is very similar to the AG version we brewed last fall, but it is very spice foward still. On a cold dark winter night a pint of this would be good, but the spice-foward flavors make it somewhat difficult to drink all night.

Bottling Month

We bottled the Raspberry Russian Imperial Stout today and yielded a full 2-cases. We lef the raspberries on the beer for 7 days and then cold-crashed (instead of the initial plan of 10 days) as I wanted to make sure the raspberry flavor didnt become too intense. I did not get a chance to taste the beer today, but it did smell really really good. We wont be drinking this beer until at the earliest September, but likely later when Elise can enjoy one with everyone else.

On Saturday we'll bottle the Anniversary BW which of course will not be opened until Jan 3 2012. We plan on wax-dipping the bottles again and hopefully this will be done sooner than we did last year. We havent decided what to do about the wax color. We still have plenty of the red on hand, but then it will be hard to differntiate between vintages if they are all red unless we make some more marks on them. We'll see.

The following week we will be bottling the Biere de Garde. I tasted it early last week and was not very pleased with the beer. It is pretty boring, just kinda sweet and light. Because of this we are only going to bottle 1 gallon of the 5, and then bottle 1 gallon (of the 2) of the 100% Brett B beer. The remaining 4 gallons of Biere de Garde will then be added to the 1 gallon of Brett B to blend them. We'll let that sit for 2-3 months so the brett can work on the Biere de Garde and then we will bottle. I'm very excited about this blend as it should taste like New Belgium's Biere de Marrs which is a Biere de Garde that has some very nice funky brett characteristics to it.

The last week of the month we will bottle the Tripel. As of last week it was at 9.97% alcohol and hopefully during the next couple of weeks it will drop a little a few more points so the beer is nice and dry. This once again, will require several months in the bottle before it is ready to drink. We have a decent amount of beer on hand right now and we are making a pale ale next month, so hopefully we dont run out of beer to drink while all the big brews are aging.

I am going to start trying to post tasting reviews along with pictures of the finished brews as I realize once the beer is bottled, no one really hears from it again. Our newest versions of the brown ale and IPA are ready, so those, along with our porter, will likely be first.

Top Cropping

Above is the picture of the krausen on top of the tripel right now. The foam that you see is all yeast and top cropping is a method utilized by commercial(especially Belgian) and homebrewers alike. The yeast in the krausen is very healthy, active yeast and brewers will skim the krausen off the fermenting batches and use that for the next batch. Since we only have 1 batch going at a time, we will save the yeast and make a starter with it later to grow it a little more and then use it again. By doing this we are saving money by not having to spend $7.75 per vial of yeast, and maybe more importantly (depending on how cheap you are) you are ensuring that you have very healthy viable yeast for the next batch of beer. The picture below is the jar of yeast, and overtime it will settle into a small layer on the bottom. It may look small, but there is probably 100 billion or more yeast cells in the jar which is the amount that comes in the vials from the homebrew store. Not enough for a typical brew we make (the Tripel required 300 billion cells) but enough to make a simple starter from.

In the previous post about the tripel, specifically Westmalle, I just found out that the Belgian yeast strain we use is actually the Westmalle strain. Hopefully our brews will be very similar to the originals, but if they are close, I know they'll be good. We are also planning on making a Dubbel in the beginning of June, so we should have a decent amount of Belgian beers ready by the Fall time.

Raspberry Time

Today we added the canned raspberries to the imperial stout and decided to taste a small tasting as well. The beer finished at 10% alcohol and the sample was very very good. It has a good body and a nice roasty finish but hides the alcohol well.

We had to use the hydrometer to push the raspberries through the funnel as the raspberries would clog the neck. In between cans, the hydrometer was sitting in sample, so when we tasted the sample after we were finished we were able to get a taste of the beer with some raspberry in it. The raspberry, right now, was very understated but noticeable in the finish and very pleasant. We plan on aging the beer for 10 days on the raspberries but will taste it at 7 and 10 days to see how it is progressing to make sure we dont over do it.

Joey's Tripel

We all know Joey likes 2 things about her beer. 1) Alcohol >7%- without even knowing the alcohol percentage, she will taste a beer and if she doesn't like it, there is a 90% chance that it is <7% alcohol. 2) Belgian Flavor. Put a Belgian beer in front of her and she'll like it; almost guaranteed.

Tripel is her favorite style, with Tripel Karmeliet being her favorite. We thought we would try our hand at making this classic style of beer but taking a more traditional approach to the style. The Belgian Trappist brewery Westmalle is credited with inventing the style and is considered as the benchmark by which other Tripels are measured. They use a very simple recipe, only base malt, sugar, and hops. Elise wrote this recipe a while ago and it contains Belgian Pilsner malt, a very small amount of American 2-row, 2 lbs of sugar and hops.

Now that we have the fridge set up to heat if needed, we should have a much better beer compared to the Belgian Pale Ale (which was fermented too cold). We will start at 68 degrees for 2 days and then ramp it up to 75 to finish fermentation. By increasing the temperature after 2 days we will eliminate the chance of yeast throwing off flavors resulting from the high temperature and we will also ensure good attenuation. Belgian breweries very commonly get +85% attenuation which is very high. For comparison most of our beers attenuate 75-80%. The warmer temperature will deter the yeast from flocculating and dropping out early so they will be fermenting longer. That, combined with the 2 lbs of sugar should leave a very dry, high alcohol beer.

The picture is of the gravity sample taken and as you can see it is at 1.090 (click on the picture to make it bigger). If it attenuates to what we are expecting we could end up close to, if not over, 10% alcohol. The beer is ligher in color than it appears in the picture and should be a nice golden color. Due to the high alcohol content, this beer probably wont be drinkable for about 4-6 months, but will hopefully make a nice Late Summer/Fall brew.

We were planning on making 7 gallons of beer and fermenting the other 2 gallons with Brett L, but since we only have 1 brett bucket we decided to scratch that plan. In about 4-6 weeks we will bottle the Brett B beer and then use the Brett L in another batch. We are planning on blending a small portion of the Brett B beer with the Biere de Garde and age that for 6 months or so to impart some Brett characters into the beer. Hopefully that will turn out well, and if it does we might do a whole batch that gets some Brett in secondary.

Next week we will be adding the Raspberries to the RIS and will bottle that as well as the Anniversary Barley Wine at the end of the month. After we are done bottling the BW we will have 2- 3 gallon carboys that we will use for a series of Pale Ales utilizing only 1 hop. Both 3 gallon bottles will fit into the fermentation fridge at the same time, so we are planning on doing 2 differnent 2.5 gallon batches at the same time. The grain bill will be the same for all of the beers, so after mashing we will split the wort into 2 kettles and make 2 different beers. We hopefully will do single hop beers with Amarillo, Centennial, Chinook, Columbus, Simcoe, and Cascade hops. By doing single hop beers we will be able to learn what each hops smells and tastes like and can formulate future recipes to which hop flavors/smells we like best.

We've got the funk

Today we brewed 7 gallons of Biere de Garde. Biere de Garde is a French style of beer that originates from the French part of Belgium. They were usually brewed in the winter months and then cellared to drink during the summer months (bieredegarde.com). We are making 5 gallons of traditional Biere de Garde using California Lager Yeast which is capable of producing clean lager flavors at ~58F. Hopefully this will turn into a nice summer beer, but we mostly made this style of beer because we want to use this yeast in a Schwarzbier (black lager) and then make a Elkie's First Snow with it to make it into a Baltic Porter style of beer. The other 2 gallons are being spiked with Brettanomyces B.

Brettanomyces comes in 3 strains, bruxellensis (B), lambicus (L), and claussenii (C). Brettanomyces is very common in Belgian beers like lambic and gueze and contribute "funky" flavors to the beer. Each strain is slightly different and has different flavors imparted. Below are some bits of info from yeast manufacturing websites:

Clussenii: low-intensitiy brett character, more sublte flavors than Brett B or Brett L; more aroma than flavor contributions, aromas of pineapple and fruit are common.

Lambicus: High intensity brett character; horsey, smokey, and spicy flavors. Produces a pie cherry-like flavor and sourness with distinct brett character.

Bruxellensis: Medium intensity brett character. Produces the classic "sweaty horse blanket" flavors distinct to brett

We have both brett B and brett L in the house right now and in two weeks will make 7 gallons of Tripel, of which 2 gallons will be inocculated with brett L. This way we will try to determine which strain of brett we like and we may also consider blending strains of brett in the same beer. We plan on almost always having some sort of brett beer going as we now have a "brett-specific" fermentation bucket. Brett is harder to clean off of equipment than normal brewers yeast as small amounts of uncleaned brett can ruin future batches of beer; therefore they get their own bucket. We really enjoy the complexities of brett beers and hopefully we can make some good examples.

We made a starter last week with the brett B and it smelled like dirty grape juice. Elise and I wondered why we would want to drink a beer that is described as "dirty," leathery," and our personal favorite "wet dog in a phone booth?" You just have to try your first funk beer to know. These descriptions are not the dominant flavors, but there are hints of them in the beer but not to overpowering levels which would make them undrinkable. Brettanomyces yeast can also eat a lot more sugars than can normal brewer's yeast so these beers will be much drier and higher in alcohol than normal. Brett yeast works very slowly so we will probably not bottle these beer for 2-3 months and can then hopefully drink them 2 months after that.

Last week we bottled our brown ale, and 10 bottles received varying amounts of hazelnut extract. Hopefully those turn out well enough to repeat again in the future. We also bottled the IPA today during the brewing session. It smelled very hoppy and is ligher than previous attempts so hopefully we can finally make an IPA that we are proud of.

Info

Several beers in primary and secondary at this point, so I thought I would provide an update on some of the stuff that is going on as well as some plans for the near future.

Imperial Stout: We racked the beer to secondary and are still planning on adding raspberries to the secondary for about 3-5 weeks. Oregon Fruit Puree makes fruits, usually used in pies/desserts, that many homebrewers use for their beers. We were having trouble finding the fruit at the grocery stores that we normally go to, but today I was finally able to score 3 cans from a nearby store. We might bottle a couple of bombers before we add the raspberries so we can do a taste comparison with- and without raspberries. Fermentation was good and we finished at 10% alcohol. The hydrometer sample tasted very good and looked very dark. Should be good.


Brown Ale: The last batch of brown ale finished at 1015 which is a little higher than the previous batch of 1011. The higher final gravity is attributable to the higher mash temp and more long-chain sugars which are not fermentable by brewers yeast. Hopefully, the higher gravity will result in a matlier tasting beer. We dry hopped it today and will bottle it in 2 weeks.

Experimental Batch: I havent said much about this beer, as I dont really want Elise to know what is going on before she tries it (swish and spit of course) but we did do a few things we havent done before. First, we used a malt called Carafa. Darker malts are made by kilning them and essentially controlling the "burn" on the husk creating a darker husk (darker the longer it is kilned) and different flavors. Color of malts is measured in degrees Lovibond (L), and for a comparison brown sugar is 50L, chocolate malt is 350L, and Carafa III is 525L. We used a decent amount in the beer, so it is a very dark color. Longer kilning can also lead to a harsher/bitter flavor which is common in a malt called black patent. However, Carafa malts are de-husked, so that the bitter flavor and some of the roasty flavor is removed resulting in mostly color additions with a slight amount of roast. This was also a 2.5 gallon batch (that I boiled on the stove) just in case it doesnt taste very good, I wouldnt be as mad about wasting the money, and time to drink, on a full 5 gallons. We are dryhopping with a full ounce of hops, which by 5 gallon standards would be fairly high. This is more dry hopping than we have done with any beer at this point and we are also going to let the hops sit for ~10 days before we cold crash. At best, the beer will turn into a sort of "black IPA"-type deal with a twist. The twist I wont reveal now, but when I am able to finally taste the bottled version I will share the info.

IPA: while my parents were in town, we were able to brew together so they could see the process. We made an IPA and based the recipe on our previous attempt. The first time we tried to write our IPA recipe it was way to complicated. We were trying to get a beer that had some body along with some malt complexity. To make the beer "complex" we tried using several differnt specialty malts that added up to being a decent portion of the grist. The result? Partly due to underattenuation, but mostly from the amount of malts, was a beer that was way too sweet. The sweetness masked all of the hop bitterness resulting in a very bad example of an IPA. The color was nice looking and if you were to tell people it was a hoppy Red Ale, then it might be good.
For this batch, we only had a total of 5% crystal malts (compared to 8.5% previously) and a little bit of CaraPils for head retention. The beer attenuated very well and ended up at 7.1% alcohol. I think this is just a little too high, but that is an easy fix for next time. The picture above is the gravity sample we took a few minutes ago. It looks darker in the picture than it acutally is, which is a good thing as we though previous attempts were too dark. The sample tasted pretty good with a decent citrus twang from the amarillo, centennial, and cascade hops.
We also "built" the water for this beer instead of using our tap water. The chloride:sulfate ratio helps either accenuate malts (high chloride) or hops (high sulfate) in a beer. Carbonate ions are good pH buffers that are helpful in dark beers as the darker malts are more acidic and can lower the mash pH too low. Carbonates help buffer against this and are therefore commonly seen in local water where dark beers are traditionally made (think Dublin and Guinness). Aurora water is very high in carbonates and has an average chloride:sulfate ratio. To deal with this, we only use 30% of our home water and the other 70% was distilled water which has no ions in it. We then used some brewing salts and stuff from the house (kosher salt and baking soda) to build our water to the specifications we wanted. Hopefully, this combined with the better recipe results in a much better IPA that we can then start to make small tweaks to for our House IPA.


Future
We wont be brewing for a few weeks until my Spring Break. During which we plan to brew our Gatorbait Pale Ale (~5.8% and 60 IBUs) as we have not made that in a long time and are completely out. The following week I have a test on Monday and Thursday, so I am off Tuesday so we are going to try our hand at another strong Belgian ale, the Tripel. Tripels are insidious little beers as they look and taste tame from their golden appearance and drinkability, but they pack a punch at about 9% alcohol. Now that we have a temperature controlled fridge we will be able to keep the beer nice and warm which is needed to get the nice Belgiany yeast characteristics that makes Belgian beers famous. This was the problem with the latest batch of Belgain Pale ale in which I think we feremented it too cold, ~68, as that was the hottest I could get the beer in the house.
Future brews may include a series of beers using a yeast called California Lager, which is used to make the beer Anchor Steam. It is a lager yeast that can be feremented warmer (58-60) instead of normal lager temps (46) but is still very clean. We would make an Anchor-type beer, a schwarzbier, and a Batlic Porter.
We are also tinkering with the idea of doing single hop beers. We would make 2.5 gallons of pale ale hopped to the same IBU rate, but use only 1 kind of hop in each beer. This will help us identify what each type of hop brings in terms of flavor and aroma and should be fun to see how different hops really are.

Brown Again

I had a test on Monday, and another on Thursday, so I was off today and decided to brew our Brown ale again. After dropping the chocolate in half for the last batch I thought it was a pretty good beer. It was a little drier than I wanted and therefore lacked the malty-ness that I want in the brown. So today, same recipe, and we just mashed higher (154 instead of 151)so hopefully it isnt as dry as the previous batch. We normally dry hop, but this time I am going to dry hop for 7 days (we used to only do 3-4 days)to hopefully get more out of the dry hops and increase the aroma. This batch should only be slightly different from the previous batch, but hopefully the changes will make it better.

When we eventually do get a house we are going to start kegging our beer. We will probably end up with 6 taps at a time since we like such variety of beer. Because of this we are going to have several "house" beers in which there is usually always one on tap. I was thinking that there will be be about 4 house beers so that we have 2 taps that can be rotated out as seasonals, special occasion beers, etc. The 4 house beers that I am thinking of will probably be a brown ale, IPA, porter, and then either an American pale ale or the Belgian pale. We are going to brew these beers a lot between now and then so that we can perfect the recipes to our tastes. This is the 3rd batch of brown ale, and over Spring break I am going to brew the 2nd attempt at our IPA as well as the American Pale ale.


On another note, I racked the barley wine to secondary and while I think it will still ferment a few points more, we are currently at 11.5% alcohol. Less than last years 12.6%, but still high. The gravity sample also tasted very good, so hopefully next January this batch will be as good as the first one. It will sit in secondary to bulk age until the very end of April when we will bottle and wax dip it.

Russian Imperial Stout

In honor of the coming baby we brewed a Russian Imperial Stout (RIS) today. We had some issues initially with mash temp being too low and then the mash not draining properly. But after those were fixed the day went pretty smoothly and the OG was 1093; hopefully we'll end up at a little over 9% alcohol. We are planning on aging the beer on top of raspberries in attempts to make a beer that is similar to chocolate raspberry soufle. This beer has a lot of dark malts (Crystal 120L, roasted barley, black patent, and chocolate) that will hopefully lend a big-bodied, roasty/chocolately flavor that will be balanced by the sweet acidity of the raspberries. As you can see in the picture from the mash, the foam on top already has a nice creamy-brown color, and hopefully that will stay into the beer as well. We dont plan on drinking this beer until about next February/March when Elise can start drinking again. The age will help mellow the beer and blend all the flavors together as well as tone down the alcohol. Hopefully it turns out as good as it sounds.





This other picture is of our fermentation fridge. In the winter our garage is about 54 degress which is too cold for ale fermentation, and the fridge will usually be within about 1-2 degrees of the garage temp. Our temperature controller has heating and cooling settings on it, unlike some others which only have a "cold" setting. With the barley wine we tried using a heating pad to keep the fridge warm enough, but the heating pad has an auto-shutoff, so that didnt work as well for fermentation. The next idea was to get a lightbulb to heat up the chamber and so far, that has been working out pretty well. Whenever the fridge gets below 63, the light will turn on and heat the chamber back up again, and then turn off. Eventually when fermenatation ramps up, the beer will raise the temp by 3-8 degrees, so we might have to switch back to the cold setting and have the fridge on to make sure it doesnt get too hot in there.

Fermentation

For the Small Beer I thought I would take some pictures to show what fermentation looks like. The top layer of "foam" is called krausen and is basically all yeast. Top cropping is a process that many homebrewers and some commercial brewers (especiall Belgian Trappist ones) do by skimming the top layer to collect very healthy yeast that will be used in the next batch of beer. Its a good way to get viable, healthy yeast and it also saves money by reusing the $7.75 yeast multiple times instead of just once.

18 Hours:



26 Hours:



40 Hours:


72 Hours:



You can see the progression of the fermentation by the rise in the krausen, after about 72 hours most of the time fermentation will slow down and the kruasen will slowly fall back into the beer. Now that we have a dedicated brewing fridge we will then put the beer in the fridge at about 38 F for 4-5 days to make sure everything in suspension will drop to the bottom. Then, when we move the beer off the yeast cake we can make sure to leave everything behind resulting in a clearer beer.

Long Busy Day

Today was a long, super busy day that started at 6 am and ended at ~230pm. First thing this morning was the 75 minute mash for the Anniversary Barleywine. We normally mash for about 45 minutes for normal strength beers (6%-ish, gravity about 1.060) but when you are brewing super high gravity beers (today's BW was 1.119) you want the wort to be more attenuative. By mashing lower at 149-150 (instead of the normal 153-154) different enzymes are more active at that temperature and break up long-chain proteins found in beer. These proteins are what give the sense of "body" in the beer, so by changing the mash temp we can essentially control the body of the final product. By mashing higher (>156) we would have more long-chain proteins in the wort that are not metabolized by the yeast because the short-chain proteins are easier for them to eat. There will be more of these long-chain proteins left after fermentation, a higher final gravity, and more body in the beer. Mashing lower (less than 153) creates more short-chain proteins in the mash which the yeast will metablize easier leaving a higher alcohol beer that is drier because of the lower final gravity.




With the left over grains from the BW we added more water to the mash to make a second beer. This techinique is called "partigyle" in which multiple beers are made from one mash. Historically, this was how all beer was made, and the first runnings (or first "gyle") was the strongest beer that went to the Royals, the second gyle went to the commoners, and the last gyle went to the slaves/workers. Our second beer came in around 1058, which will make about a 5.5% beer. I was hoping to have a little smaller beer of around 4.5%, but since I added some more grains (for color and body) to the mash before the second round of water was added, the gravity came out a little higher than anticapted. Hopefully it will turn out OK, and even if it doesnt, it only cost an extra $3 for a little less than 3 gallons of beer.





Third item on the agenda today was bottling the Porter we that brewed 2 weeks ago. I forgot to buy more bottle caps, so I only had 31 caps available and filled about 42 bottles before I realized I wouldnt have enough caps. We were saving a bunch of bombers (22 oz) for the BW, but I had to use about 12 of them to be able have enough caps to bottle all of our beer. So we will be drinking a lot of porter in the next few months so we can get the bombers back for the BW bottling sometime in May. This batch of porter came in at about 5.5% and the yeast cake was split 3 ways. About 150 mL of it went to the BW and ~60 mL went to the Small Beer. The rest (~500 mL) was saved in a glass jar and will be used in some future batches of beer.



I finally took some pictures of the grain mill in action,





Step 1. Measure grains

Step 2. Hook up a drill and mill the grains

Milled grain:

2010 In Review

Just finished bottling our Belgian Pale Ale, the last batch of beer brewed in 2010. Here are some of the final stats from 2010:

Batches: 19
Volume: 98.5 gallons
Bottles: 859
Overall Cost/bottle: $0.90

Aging Barleywine

Making sure we save some bottles to age. Since we are going to make this beer every year, in 2015 we will be able to do a vertical tasting in which we taste batches that are 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 years old; should be cool.

Porter

Today was the first brew with the new grain mill and everything went pretty smoothly. I anticipated having an increase in efficiency because of the grain mill so I tried to control my boil off and have a higher final volume to decrease the gravity. Our normal efficiency was ~73% and today it was 80% all thanks to the grain mill. This batch of porter is mostly acting as a starter so that we can use the yeast for the barleywine we are going to make in about 2 weeks. Because of the very high gravity of the barleywine it takes about double the amount of yeast to ferment. Instead of having to make a starter essentially twice, we just make a batch of beer, use the yeast, and get another beer out of it. I was wanting a lower gravity ale this time and the OG was 1054, so the beer should finish at about 5-5.2% alcohol. We have been making a lot of +7% beers lately, so I wanted something that you could drink more than one and a half of before getting crazy.

With the barleywine just using the first runnings we are going to again make a "small beer" from the second runnings. I am planning on making this similar to a British bitter because the OG is going to be around 1045ish. We are going to add some flaked barley to increase the body, lightly hop it to around 40 IBUs and use a British yeast strain. The British yeast is from a batch we made back in August, so to make sure the yeast is OK and healthy we are making a starter today. After draining all the wort from the mash tun, I added another gallon of water, drained that, and boiled it down so the gravity was about 1030, which is ideal for starters. The starter is too large for the 3 gallon small beer, but we are going to save the extra healthy yeast for another batch in the future.

Since we bought our base grain in bulk, this 4.5 gallon batch of porter only cost $22 including the $7.75 pack of new yeast. We usually dont have to buy yeast, so if that were the case this beer would have only been $15. We are going to use this pack of yeast for this beer, the BW, an imperial stout we are planning, and will hopefully have enough left over from porter to use in another beer after that. Last year, the barleywine cost about $50 for the 3 gallons, but this year it will only cost $29.15 for the 3 gallons, and then the small beer will only be $4 for the extra grains we are adding and the hops are free because we are going to use small amounts of extras left over from other batches.

Happy Anniversary: Barley Wine

Happy 2 year anniversary! Its been two great years that have gone by very quickly, but as they say: "Time flies when you're having fun." I'm lucky to have meet Elise while we were young so that we have an even longer life together to have fun together.

On to the beer! As you can see in the pictures were were successful in wax dipping the tops of the bottles, and since we only made 3 gallons, we only have 13- 22oz bombers and 1- 12oz bottle. This beer was brewed on 1/3/2010 and bottled on 4/17/2010 and we were finally able to crack one open and taste it last night. We opened the 12oz bottle to try so we wouldn't have to drink 22oz's of 12.54% alcohol beer on a Monday night. Unfortunately, this bottle was not carbonated at all. When making high alcohol beers, the alcohol generated during fermentation by the yeast ultimately harms the yeast when the alcohol gets over ~10%. Since the BW (barley wine) finished at 12.54% we essentially murdered any yeast that would be available to bottle-carbonate so we added some new yeast at bottling. Hopefully, this non-carbonated bottle was just a fluke and the rest of the bottles are carbonated appropriately. Even though the beer was not carbonated, it still tasted delicious. It's very dangerous because its does not taste like 12.5% alcohol as the 1 year of aging has tremendously mellowed the alcohol flavor. The hop bitterness is still apparent and complements the malty-sweetness of the brew well. Overall, this is an almost too-easy drinking beer that is very strong and makes for a good sipping beer during these cold winter nights.

I wished we would have gotten around to waxing earlier (instead of yesterday) to keep oxygen out and potentially causing off-flavors as we plan to age this beer for several years. We have 13 bottles now, and are going to save 5 of those to taste 1 per year every year for the next 5 years. That will leave us with 8 bottles to enjoy at our leisure this year. Over the years the flavors will continue to increase in complexity as well as mellow harshers flavors in the beer, and the 6 year old should be amazing. In the top right picture you can see a wax blot that has been stamped with a "D." This was very hard to do as the hot wax did not want to stay on the round bottle long enough to cool and allow me to stamp it. We then made round stamps on wax paper and have been trying different ways to attach those to the bottles. Wax doesn't work very well as an adhesive when applied first to the bottle or the stamp, nor does super glue. Our next option will be a hot-glue gun, but if that doesn't work, then I don't think we will be able to attach the "D stamps" to the bottles.

We kind of dropped the ball with making another batch of this Anniversary Barley Wine with the holidays and everything that was going on, but we plan on making another small batch before school starts. We were initially undecided whether or not our Anniversary beer was going to be the same beer every year, or if we were going to change it up every year. After talking and tasting this beer though, we have decided that we are going to continue brewing this beer every year because it is so good and a proven recipe that makes good beer. Right now, I don't think we are going to scale the recipe up to 5 gallons because of the cost and the large volume of beer that it would make. This is not an everyday beer, and if we drink 2 bottles a month, it will take 4 months to drink all it, which I think is appropriate. This is a special beer not only because it commemorates a special day in our lives, but also because of the scarcity. If it were to be around all the time, then it wouldn't seem as special, so for now, 3 gallons it is. Next year we will have to figure out a way to differentiate between vintages of our BW by either dipping in a different color of wax or making some markings/labels on the bottles.