Gose

Last night I brewed our first attempt at a Gose. You can see the run down here of the brew day. We used 2 lbs of acidulated malt to "sour" the beer without having to use lactobacillus, but it wasn't easy. The mash didn't go as well as I had thought because my efficiency wasn't great. I had to resort to 6ml of lactic acid to get the mash pH down to an acceptable range because I didn't dilute our water with RO and didn't want do overdo it with the calcium additions. Needless to say, we mashed the wheat and pilsner malt for an hour, then added the acid malt for another hour. I think the idea is to get as much extraction as possible from the wheat and pils prior to adding that large of a quantity of acid malt.

The brew it self went relatively smoothly, but it's still very hot here in Florida. It may be hard to read, but near the bottom in green on the board above, we added 0.75oz ground coriander and 0.5oz sea salt with 10 min left in the boil. I had originally planned for 1oz of coriander and 0.75oz of salt, but ended up trimming it back a bit as I didn't want to overdue it. If we need to, we can always add some additional spices to the keg. It should ferment out in about a week and we'll hopefully be drinking it in 2-3 weeks from now.

Next up will either be a Black IPA, or since I just bought my first pack of lager yeast, we might do a Marzen/Oktoberfest followed by either a dunkel or schwarzbier (maybe the other way around too).

Full Kegerator

Finally. We have a full kegerator. We kegged the porter earlier this week and it is slowly carbonating now. We usually force carbonate and I can get a beer pretty close to all the way carbonated in about 36 hours. This time though, since all the taps are full, we'll slowly carbonate over 10-14 days. The Not Oberon is the closest beer to being empty, so as soon as that one is out, we'll hook up the porter.

The porter finished at 6%, but the samples tasted a little boozier than that. Hopefully when it's carbonated it will mellow out a bit. The English yeast did a good job though, and the samples were nice and malty. Looking forward to tapping it. We'll brew the Gose in the next couple of weeks hopefully, and since we are at capacity now, maybe we'll do some experimenting with Brett in that batch. We'll see

Porter Beer

Now that we've got several light beers on tap, I thought we would mix it up and brew something dark. I love porters, and I found an interesting looking recipe in BYO from Icicle brewing in Leavenworth Washington called Priebe Porter.

My gravity was a little lower than expected (likely from not get my mash pH high enough) but we need up with a little over 5 gallons at 1064. I decided to use an English Ale yeast despite the recipe being for an American Porter as I had such good results with the first porter I made using the London Ale III strain. It's a good attenuating, high flocculating strain which should help showcase the malty flavors. It was brewed about 12 days ago and I just started cold crashing it down today. Hopefully we'll keg it in a few days and start carbonating.

This will be the first time we've had a beer "on deck" in the aspect that as soon as one keg kicks, we'll be able to hook up another carbonated keg right away and not have any empty tap. I haven't felt many of the kegs lately, but I bet the Not Oberon or the American Pale will the next one to kick. Hopefully it's soon, or I'll have to attach the picnic tap to try some porter beer.

Next up will be a Gose. Gose is an old German style of beer that is slightly sour and salty. Yes salty. It was originally brewed in the early 16th century in Goslar, Germany, which had a higher than average salt content in their water supply. Its light, refreshing, and the tart acidity will make for a great summer beer. We've had a few examples of the style and I am very excited to try and make one myself.