mattkanesbeer

FG: 1.025

That's a little high. I probably should not have racked to secondary at all. Every smells saison-y. There was some stuff floating in the beer. I am wondering if that was just yeast or some other wild organism that made it into the fermenter. I'll know in a little while once I crack open a bottle. I ended up with only about 4.5 gallons total yield, likely due to racking loss.

For an early Christmas, my parents bought me another amber ale kit. I will use this as batch 6 instead of the Free Beer project, since I don't have the equipment to do all-grain brewing.

I did replace my hydrometer; the new one has a built-in thermometer too! I am also receiving a secondhand stir plate for makign yeast starters tomorrow, hopefully.

Last night, m0xiee and I made a super awesome pizza. The dough was made with Mr. Hotel's recipe, using an Ipswich Winter Ale as the beer.

First step was to put 3.5 cups of flour, 1 tablespoon of baking powder, about 1 tsp of salt, and a bottle of beer into the stand mixer bowl. Once the dough was fully mixed, I placed the bowl in the fridge (why? the recipe says so) and started making the topping. I sliced half a package of white mushrooms and sauteed them in olive oil. I then started gradually adding spinach (about 5 oz) until that wilted enough that it all fit in the pan. After that, in went about half a cup of ricotta cheese. Once that liquefied, I took the dough out of the refrigerator. m0xiee pounded it to holy hell and sauced it, then I covered it with the ricotta/spinach/mushroom conglomerate. Baked at 475°F on the bottom of the oven for about 15 minutes, the crust was just about perfect. I think next time I do pizza, I will bump up the temp even higher for more crunch on the bottom.

Tonight I racked the saison to secondary, as the recipe recommended. Those keeping score will notice that I only have a single fermenting vessel. What I did was rack it to the bottling bucket temporarily while I cleaned and sanitized the fermenter, then racked the beer back to the fermenter. The recipe said to get rid of the sediment. I hope I didn't clear all the yeast out of the wort. I need to get the brewing store soon to pick up a new hydrometer so I can test that things are moving along properly.

A few months ago I picked up one of these saison kits from Beer & Wine hobby. Tonight while m0xiee was at work, I did the boil and put it into the fermenter. In 3 to 5 days, I will rack to secondary (meaning I will hold it in the bottling bucket, clean out the fermenter, and rack it back to the primary) to clear out the sediment.

Notes on this batch:
- The wheat it came with was not cracked. I didn't realize this until I got back from the store, so I used the blender to crack it.
- the instructions involved numerous muslin bags. Unfortunately, it came with one too few. In sequence, they were supposed to contain (1) wheat malt (2) Hallertau hops (3) bitter orange peel (4) bitter orange peel, coriander, grains of paradise, cracked peppercorns. Unfortunately, when I tried to add the orange peel to bag #2, I spilled some into the wort. I don't think this will cause a problem as I fished all the peel bits out with a spoon.
- It looked like the wort was supersaturated with malt!
- My cats stole the dust cap for my fermentation lock, just after I had thrown the old one away! I can't find it, so I am using a piece of saran wrap for now. Stupid cats.
- I purchased a Thief for sampling wort and beer for the hydrometer. Unfortunately, I managed to break my hydrometer while putting it back into its case. The bottom fell out and the hydrometer dropped to the stone floor. B&W has them for $8, or one with a built-in thermometer for $15.
- OG was 1.058-1.059, exactly what the kit specified.

What with all the equipment I have to replace, homebrewing is definitely NOT cheaper than buying it in the store, unless you have VERY expensive taste!

I also picked up four bottles of Flaio (two each Primitivo and Negroamaro), an Ayinger Celebrator (Doppelbock), an Aventinus (Wheat Doppelbock), an Anventinus Weizen-Eisbock, a Cisco Baggywrinkle Barleywine, and a St. Amand French Bière de Garde. That last one isn't very wintery, but the rest should last me until spring 8)

- pizza stone suitable for the grill
- grill basket
- big pepper mill
- big salt mill
- flour mill
- coffee grinder for spices
- food processor

- New fermentation lock. Mine snapped off a piece last batch. $5
- My bottle filler stopped working during bottling of last batch, probably. it no longer stops when lifted out of the bottle, thus spraying beer all over the floor! Boooo! $1.15
- Strainer! $30 :(

Bottled the gruit ale last night. FG was around 1.010 before priming. Wish I had the OG! Oops! I couldn't find my priming sugar, so I used KreamyX from the Saison kit in my basement instead! I hope that turns out well.

The herbs were added directly to the boil. This is not a problem except that I also failed to sparge before adding the wort to the fermenter. With hops this isn't a big problem, as they settle to the bottom of the container, but heather tips and yarrow float! This clogged my racking cane and also got stuck in the bottle filler valve. When your bottle filler is stuck open you end up spilling beer!

Also, on lazysun's suggestion, I sanitized all the bottles in the dishwasher, on the high heat wash and high heat rinse cycle. I had 37 bottles after discarding quite a few that wouldn't come clean, in both 12oz and 16oz sizes. This was exactly enough for the 5 gallon batch minus the sediment.

Southern Tier was nice enough to put all the ingredients for their Imperial Pumking Ale right on the side of the bottle. I will give this a shot for next fall. Let's call it batch 8.

In the meantime, after the saison kit I have is done, my next projects will be FREE BEER (if I can find guarana berries). I looked into the Flying Dog Open Source Beer, but unfortunately it's a lager, and I'm not set up for cold-fermenting or lagering. (YET! See previous entry)

This morning we are heading to brunch with forced_nature and his wife Shannon, who have just moved to Salem from Rhode Island. On the menu is a goat cheese and tomato frittata, peanut butter waffles, and bacon. (He works at Strega) After we come home, I am going to make a freaking sweet pork roast on the grill. The recipe is based on one from How to Cook Meat as per usual: Apricot-Sausage Stuffed Pork Loin. I will be making the following substitutions: apricots are replaced by apples (because we have apples and apple preserves), I am using a rack of pork instead of boneless pork loin (because I don't have any pork loin, but I have a rack of pork!), and I may tone down the garlic.

- immersion wort chiller (make this myself)
- hydrometer thermometer combo
- hydrometer testing vessel
- carboy (glass or PET) with carrier + stopper
- bottle corker
- construct temperature control device for lagering
- lautering setup
- drink cooler for step-mashing
- floating thermometer
- bottle tree

I counted up all my bottles. I currently have nearly 11 gallons of empties! If I drink all the rest of the beer in my house, I will have over 12! So, don't go hoarding your empties for me anymore. I don't need them.

I finally got all the ingredients necessary to make my Gruit Ale experiment. I based it on this recipe, but I had to make a couple changes based on the ingredients I could obtain.

• The malt powder is Munton's Dark. This is what it said in the recipe, although now that I look at the photo closer, I should have gotten amber instead. Oh well.
• I used light candi sugar instead of homemade invert sugar, whatever that is.
• The yeast is a White Labs Hefe-Weizen Yeast instead of the Wyeast 3068 because that is what the store had.
• I couldn't find anywhere that carried the specified Marsh rosemary, or its recommended replacement in North America, Labrador tea, at a price that was reasonable. Instead, I found Heather tips, sweet gale, and mugwort at Modern Brewer, and Yarrow root at The Herb Store. This gave me an herb profile closer to this ale, so I am using those timings for adding the herbs.
• I wasn't as picky about the honey. I jsut got a two pound honey bear squeezer when I picked up everything at Beer & Wine.
• I bought malto-dextrin but completely forgot to use it! Oops.

So, to recap everything I did:

1. Steep the grains in a cloth bag in 2 gallons of water until the water is about to boil.
2. Once boiling, add the malt and sugars.
3. After 15 minutes, add half the yarrow and all the mugwort.
4. After an additional 15 minutes, add the gale.
5. 15 minutes later, add the remaining yarrow.
6. 10 minutes later, add the heather.

Now, some heather ale recipes call for two separate additions of the tips, but they aren't gruit ales. They're hopped! Not that I'm enough of an expert to know exactly what I'm doing yet :)

Oops, I just pitched the yeast and forgot to take a hydrometer reading.

I just got back from the brewing store with my father-in-law. I got most of the supplies needed to make my gruit ale. I'll be using this recipe with the following modifications:
- I'm not going to be that picky about the honey.
- Using light candi sugar instead of homemade medium.
- Will probably need Labrador Tea instead of Marsh rosemary.
- I have twice as much of the specialty grains as I need.
- I have a White Labs Hefe-Weizen yeast instead of the Wyeast Weienstephan Weizen.

I still need to find the herbs, as the brewing store didn't have any, plus brown sugar and blackstrap molasses.

I also picked up their recipe of the month kit: Bill's Farmhouse Ale. It's a Saison, which I dig. As such, I wish I had a bunch of the big 22 oz bottles that Saisons usually come in, but the corkers for these are so expensive! Upwards of $100! Obviously you can get bottles that are cappable as well, so I will be going after these. I'll need to drink that Stone barleywine soon!

As far as equipment goes, I snagged a bottle washer at the store. I think I have a capable thermometer for mashing, but I still need a proper strainer and funnel for sparging!

My wife and I cracked open a couple of the chocolate stouts just now. It's not a disaster but not a complete success.

1.) Some of the bottles are WAY too heady. Too much priming sugar?
2.) There is some off-flavor in there. It might be because I had to stick my arm in there before fermentation to retrieve the fermentation lock gasket. It might be because I let it sit in the fermenter for too long before bottling.
3.) NONE of the chocolate comes out! Next time I try this, I'll add more than 8 tablespoons. Some brewers I've read recommend the whole package!

Total yield: 1 64oz growler, plus 38 12oz longnecks, making 4 gallons of beer out of 5 gallons in the fermenter.

So the stout was progably ready to bottle on Tuesday, but I hadn't had a chance to even check until tonight. Unfortunately, I am an idiot and forgot to check to see if I had enough bottle caps before getting ready to start bottling. Every brewing store in the area was already closed for the night, and I only had enough caps to fill my growler plus 12 longnecks. LAter this morning we are heading up to New Hampshire until Sunday, but for some reason, I decided against closing everything back up until then and bottling what I could tonight.

After filling the bottles, I cleaned out my primary fermenter and filled it from the bottling bucket, reset the airlock, and sealed the bucket. Hopefully this won't screw the whole thing up. But you know, don't worry.

FG: 1.018

I had bought an Irish stout kit a few weeks ago and decided to try making it into a chocolate stout. (at my wife's request!) The numerous recipes I found online mentioned adding Hershey's cocoa powder to the boil for 10 minutes, so I did just that (8 tbsp).

Some notes so far:
- OG was 1.034, but the wort was pretty warm, so it's likely higher in reality.
- fermentation took a while to start, probably because the wort was still warm. I need a wort chiller.
- The stupid rubber grommet for the fermentation lock popped out as I was putting the lock in, so I had to fish t out of the bottom of the fermenter. Argh! I should buy a pile so if that happens again, I can just pop in a new one and dig the old out of the sediment (and throw it away).
- The only hops used were at the very beginning of the boil!

I didn't take measurements of these two, but here's a little history on my brewing:
- batch 1 was an Irish Red Ale from a kit put together by Blackstone Valley Brewing Supply. It had 3.3 pounds of liquid Malt Extract (unhopped), 1 pound of wheat malt extract, Cascade hops as both bittering hops and aroma hops, Irish moss as a clarifying agent. No idea what the OG and FG were, as I didn't write them down :(
- batch 2 was an amber ale, which was basically the same as the Irish red above, except for an additional set of barley grains that were steeped before the boil. Cluster hops were the bittering hops and Green Mountain hops were aroma hops. Same deal on the gravity. I think the malt extracts were different types, but still unhopped.