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.

First All Grain Batch

We have finally made our first all grain batch of beer. This picture is the inside of our mash tun which is holding all of the grain and about 4.5 gallons of water. The water is at a specific temperature for about an hour to extract the fermentable sugars from the grain. Differences in temperatures will effect the body of the wort and the overall alcohol potential. Higher temperature mashes will produce beers with a fuller body from increased amounts of unfermanatble sugars. Lower temperature mashes produce more fermentables sugars and an increased alcohol potential; but as a result, the body of the beer will be comparitively less. We brewed a brown ale, and chose a mash temp of 153 F, which is about the middle of the road. Mash temperatures can range from 146 F to 165 F. Low=146-150, mid=150-155, high =156-165. The specific mash temperature is picked based on the type of beer being brewed, but you can do experiement "outside the box" which I am sure we will do in the future.

After the mash is completed, the wort is run out of the cooler in the boil kettle. Since we want to have a preboil of volume of 6.75 gallons, a sparging step is needed to obtain enough wort.

The volume of water that is needed to reach our target volume is heated to about 180 F and then poured into the mash tun on the grains. It is stirred once more and then wort is drained into the boil kettle. Since this was our first attempt, everything did not proceed as smoothy as planned. We had some mashing issues in which all of the wort could not be drained from the mash tun into the boil kettle as efficiently as possible. As a result, a decent amount of wort was left in the mash tun and never made it into the kettle. So instead of having 5 gallons of finished beer, we only ended up with 3.5 gallons. Hopefully we can get a better handle on our system and not have this problem next time.

For our next batch we are going to start experimenting with belgian yeast strains. We are going to make a batch of IPA and split it in half. One half will be fermeneted with a traditional california ale yeast, and on the other half we are going to pitch a beglian strain of yeast to make a belgian IPA. It will be interesting to see how much the overall flavor of the beer is a reslut from the yeast alone.

Going All Grain

We have finally made the jump to all grain brewing. Previously, we have been using liquid malt extract (LME) to get our fermentable sugars and specialty grains to get flavor and color. LME is made by taking malted barely and soaking the grains in water. After a period of time, sugar has been extractd from the malt and the water is then dehydrated into a thick syrup. All grain brewing does not use LME, instead, we will be the ones soaking the malted barley and specialty grains in warm water for about an hour (it will be done in the red cooler from the picture above) and then lautering, or draining, the sweet wort into the boil kettle. A large part of our step to AG was buying a new boil kettle. Our previous kettle had only a 5 gallon (20 quart) capacity. We could only start with about 4.5 gallons of water and after an hour of boiling only 3-3.5 gallons of wort would remain. To reach our target volume of 5 gallon, additional water would have to be added, much to the detriment of the overall flavor of the beer. Now, we have a 12.5 gall (60qt) boil kettle. We will be able to drain about 7 gallons of sweet wort from the cooler and after the 60-90 minute boil, will have the 5 gallons we need. Being able to do full boils will help with the flavor and body of the beer.

AG is a little more complicated than extract brewing because temperature control of the mashing stage is crucial. The usual temperature range is 148-158; the higher the temperature the more body and less alochol the beer will have, the lower the temp, the more potential for alochol but you lose some body with it. Mash temperatures are then selected based on the style of beer being brewed. A good diagram of the mashing process can be seen if you click here.

The first few batches will proably not be our best beer, but it will still be good. But now, we have much more control over the flavor and body of the beer, and eventually will be making beer as good as commerical breweries. With the giant boil kettle we also have the possibility of making 10 gallon batches in the future.

We were able to buy the boil kettle and mash tun used from a local homebrewer for $40 and 2 beers at a brewpub. We want to thank Dennis for helping us out and selling us his old equipment for such a good deal.

Before we can brew our first beer we have to make an immersion chiller to be able to cool 5 gallons of beer from 200 F to 60 F as quickly as possible. This is done by running cool water through copper tubing immersed in the beer; here is a picture of what one looks like. Cold water is fed into one side and cylces through the tubing and the heat is transferred from the beer to the water and the hot water comes out and is drained away. We are going to attempt to build it ourselves which should be intersting to say the least. This is an exciting step for us and we cant wait to brew our first AG batch.