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.