On Sunday, then, I sprang out of bed at my customary time of 6:00am. It was like Christmas morning. I threw on a jacket, jumped in my car, and sped over to the Powderhorn Brewery.
The place was silent when I arrived. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The mice would arrive later. I made myself some coffee, brought the Times in from outside, and waited for the shuffling from upstairs.
After working through Week in Review, I brought up the brewing equipment and opened the Porter kit. Like a Christmas present. Below are the contents.
6lbs Dark LME
8oz Carapils
8oz Black Malt
1oz tradition hops
1oz Glacier hops
Muntons dry yeast [this is the same yeast we'd been using]
Now I got to the brewing journal transcription, which, somehow, fails to correspond with my memory. I don't know what we did for this whole day (we probably spent most of it arguing about something inane) but we didn't start brewing until the early evening. Some Christmas.
Onto the journal --
6:40pm
Begin to heat 1.5 gal water and specialty grain
7:20pm
Begin boiling malt extract in 3.25 gal water
8:28pm
Hot break? Added hops (Traditional) [did we brew this one inside? We definitely brewed indoors once during the fall, and the boil is never quite as energetic inside as it is on the turkey-frying burner, and so the question mark makes me think we brewed inside...]
9:13pm
Added finishing hops (Glacier); no hot break. [Must have been indoors...]
Sometime later in the pm
Pitched yeast, added cold water. OSG 1.039 [Jesus Christ, that's not much sugar. We also sucked at reading the hydrometer]
10/16
9:00am
Bubbling away
8:00pm
Still bubbling -- basement temp 62 degs
10/20
No bubbling -- stirred it up. Temp 52 degs. SG = 1.025
10/21
Moved beer upstairs (near heater) -- downstairs temp 55 degs
10/23
Reading all fucked up. Stirred a second time. Reading (before stirring) 1.028
10/25
Racked into carboy. 1.020
10/30
Reading 1.018
Tastes like flat porter, NOT too malty like previous batches [we were getting ahead of ourselves with this note]
10/31
Reading 1.018. Ready to bottle
11/1
Bottling results in 25 22-oz bottles and one 12-oz. Stored batch under kitchen table until ready.
Discovered that 5 oz priming sugar [the amount that comes in the kit] does NOT equal 3/4 cup, or what most books recommend for bottling.
[End Notes]
After letting it age for three weeks, we carried this beer to Thanksgiving, where the reviews were mixed. It wasn't as malty as previous batches (we settled on having used too much priming sugar in the bottling process as the reason for the extra sweetness), but it also wasn't as rick in flavor as most porters tend to be. Nonetheless, with 15 friends sitting around a bonfire in the cold northern Wisconsin night, it was pretty popular. We managed to bring 8-10 bombers back home with us, where they have remained, being consumed very slowly, until this day.
There is one final note in the brewing journal: January 18th -- Tastes goddamn delicious.
A couple of months of aging, apparently, does wonders...
Saturday, January 24, 2009
October 14th, 2008 -- The Trip to Midwest Brewing Supply
After working through two lackluster ales that we generated in August -- both of which tasted vaguely like fresh (but cold) bread and gave us headaches -- we decided that a consultation with the experts was in order. On this sunny, warm Saturday, then, we hopped in the car, each of us armed with his pet theory about the underlying cause of our unsuccessful beer, and drove to St. Louis Park, the home of Midwest Brewing Supply.
One of us (and it's hard at this juncture to recall which one) blamed the age of the dry yeast we were using. It was his theory that the yeast quit on its sugar-eating early and went dormant too soon, leaving tons of fermentable sugar in the finished product. The other of us obviously thought something different, though at the moment, as we steep grains for another ESB, we can't remember what the other theory was. Either way, we had a lot riding on the advice of the brewing experts at the supply shop.
At the store, we got the following advice: the yeast is likely to blame, but probably not because it's old. It's more likely that the yeast just lies down a little early for no particular reason. If we shake the brew up after the initial burst of fermentation, get that yeast back in suspension, things might go a little better for us. We bought a basic Porter kit and a "Hop Head Double IPA" kit, and, possessed of our new knowledge and full of hope, returned to start the porter.
One of us (and it's hard at this juncture to recall which one) blamed the age of the dry yeast we were using. It was his theory that the yeast quit on its sugar-eating early and went dormant too soon, leaving tons of fermentable sugar in the finished product. The other of us obviously thought something different, though at the moment, as we steep grains for another ESB, we can't remember what the other theory was. Either way, we had a lot riding on the advice of the brewing experts at the supply shop.
At the store, we got the following advice: the yeast is likely to blame, but probably not because it's old. It's more likely that the yeast just lies down a little early for no particular reason. If we shake the brew up after the initial burst of fermentation, get that yeast back in suspension, things might go a little better for us. We bought a basic Porter kit and a "Hop Head Double IPA" kit, and, possessed of our new knowledge and full of hope, returned to start the porter.
Friday, January 23, 2009
The Pale Ale, first iteration
On August 23rd, the day we bottled the Amber ale, we brewed up a pale ale kit -- we didn't trust our knowledge enough to buy our ingredients separately, and anyway, Swoboda had been carrying the kit around for years, from Seattle to Pittsburgh to Minneapolis. And canned liquid malt extract doesn't go bad, right? Probably not. What follows is a transcription of the brewing journal.
8/23 -- 6:33pm
Starting Pale Ale Kit
6:58
Steeping grains in .5 gal water: 12oz crystal malt [no degrees specified]
7:06
Grain at 175 degrees
7:20
[this is what the journal says. Can't figure out exactly what it means] Started 1.5 gal w/ 6.6 lbs of Cooper's Light Malt [Extract]
7:27
Added .5 gal grain-steeped water
7:40
Malt and grain mixture begins boil
7:43
Hot break: added 1.5 oz Northern Brewer Bittering Hops (6.8%) [wish we knew what kind...]
8:25
Added finishing hops (1.5oz Willamette 4.1%)
8:30
Removed mixture from heat
10:00pm
OSG at room temp: 1.047
10:20
Pitch yeast [important side-note: we did not document the yeast variety because we didn't know shit about what we were doing. Tragic results. We'll get to that later.]
8/24 -- 5:00pm
Bubbling going strong
8/25 -- 1:00pm
Bubbling slows
8/28
Racked to secondary (SG 1.022)
9/9
Bottling (FG 1.019)
Interesting note: nothing in the journal indicates that we ever tasted this beer. Obviously that's not the case. In fact, we drank the hell out of it. But, as I recall, largely in order to free up bottles for more (hopefully) successful brews. As the SG readings indicate, the alcohol content of this beer was extremely low. We theorized like wild men about potential causes -- old malt extract? old yeast? wrong fermentation temp? -- but the taste was way off. Like the Amber Ale, this beer tasted super sweet -- unfermented fermentable sugar obviously remained. We were drinking, then, syrupy 3.2 beer. If we even managed 3.2% ABV. We fixed it eventually, but I'll leave that for another post.
8/23 -- 6:33pm
Starting Pale Ale Kit
6:58
Steeping grains in .5 gal water: 12oz crystal malt [no degrees specified]
7:06
Grain at 175 degrees
7:20
[this is what the journal says. Can't figure out exactly what it means] Started 1.5 gal w/ 6.6 lbs of Cooper's Light Malt [Extract]
7:27
Added .5 gal grain-steeped water
7:40
Malt and grain mixture begins boil
7:43
Hot break: added 1.5 oz Northern Brewer Bittering Hops (6.8%) [wish we knew what kind...]
8:25
Added finishing hops (1.5oz Willamette 4.1%)
8:30
Removed mixture from heat
10:00pm
OSG at room temp: 1.047
10:20
Pitch yeast [important side-note: we did not document the yeast variety because we didn't know shit about what we were doing. Tragic results. We'll get to that later.]
8/24 -- 5:00pm
Bubbling going strong
8/25 -- 1:00pm
Bubbling slows
8/28
Racked to secondary (SG 1.022)
9/9
Bottling (FG 1.019)
Interesting note: nothing in the journal indicates that we ever tasted this beer. Obviously that's not the case. In fact, we drank the hell out of it. But, as I recall, largely in order to free up bottles for more (hopefully) successful brews. As the SG readings indicate, the alcohol content of this beer was extremely low. We theorized like wild men about potential causes -- old malt extract? old yeast? wrong fermentation temp? -- but the taste was way off. Like the Amber Ale, this beer tasted super sweet -- unfermented fermentable sugar obviously remained. We were drinking, then, syrupy 3.2 beer. If we even managed 3.2% ABV. We fixed it eventually, but I'll leave that for another post.
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