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.