Some Reviews of Past Brews

STL Brown Town Ale:
Appearance: Brown and over carbonated. Tall billowing head, overly thin brown/reddish color

Smell: effervescent hops-bomb. The scent was one of citrus passion fruit, and citrus grape fruit. Dominant hop nose; what malts? no malt here.

Taste: the sweet malt provided a nice back bone for for the hops flavor which wasn't nearly as dominant as it was in the nose, I may back some of the additions of hops or accept a bit higher ibu and add more flavor hops.

Mouth Feel: Thin, over carbonated

Thoughts: I told Kyle what volume of sugar to use for a 5 gallon batch, we ended up with about 2.5 gallons of beer post boil, post kettle hops, and post dry hops. So it was 2x carbonated, oops. Totally my bad, but it was still a good beer. Even over carbonated once we bled off some CO2 it was better than some commercial hoppy browns I've had.

(read more after the break)

Smoked, Oaked, and Mapled, a Porter

This beer started within seconds of smelling the cherry wood smoked malt from Briess. This malt hadn't been at my local home brew store before, but this day was different. The tub of grain almost opened itself for me to reveal its hidden secret; an unbelievable aroma permeated the room as if I was standing inside of a smoker. The smells of cherry wood, and cherry smoke instantly reminded me of carpentry, grilling, and being a man; this malt was all of that. Briess recommends that this malt can comprise up to 60% of the grist in the mash for darker styles of beers. I immediately began formulating a recipe in my head. The recipe would be for a bark colored beer with a billowing head rising from the glass as a portion of crystal malts uninhibited by its modest alcohol content gives the beer body and head retention. A traditionally flavored porter with a few twists as twisted as the surprise that was waiting for me inside that tub of malt.

To cut the smoked base malt I wanted to use maris otter for a more traditional English porter flavor and nuttier base. To layer in other toasted flavors I decided to add Victory, Special Roast, Black Patent, and Crystal 120 malts to emphasize the woody nature of this beer. Oak aging is appropriate for the style and will add another dimension to the beer. I also resolved to integrate maple syrup, for the sweetness, as well as the earthy flavor. Hopping a beer like this is an interesting challenge because the sweetness from the malt could easily get out of control but certain hop flavors would be out of place among the sweet malty tones and smoke. I've selected nugget because I believe it to have smooth earthy bittering that helps malts come forward as the dominant flavor.

(read more after the break)

Kegging (part 2)

What's next? Cleaning and loading a keg; duh. This could be as straight forward as cleaning a keg with hot hot water, sanitizing, and racking your beer into the keg. I don't roll like that. If I am going to be kegging I am going to make the full effort to keep oxygen out of my beer.  I am going to do everything I can to achieve that goal.

Keg cleaning

To clean the kegs I opened them and inspected them, as anticipated they'd been cleaned by Midwest. Their first time care instructions suggested rinsing them with boiling water to remove caustic residue from the cleaning agent they use to remove the soda. After that I filled each keg with PBW and 100 degree water and let them have a good soak, turning them over after a few hours to ensure all parts got cleansed. Then after pumping that through the taps I mixed up some Star San in each keg, flipping again after a few hours, and pumping the Star San out through the taps. This gave me a sanitized environment that was pressurized with CO2.

Keg Filling

(DISCLAIMER: Pressurizing a vessel can be extremely dangerous, even life threatening (think exploding glass carboy). Using this method should be done at your own risk, with safty glasses, and all other proper precautions.)

I didn't invent this setup, but I do use it. The idea is that you put an air lock on the gas tap for the keg, preventing air from re entering the keg, then you purge the line with CO2, and use pressure to push the beer from the carboy into the keg. This purges most of the oxygen from the whole system and hopefully preserves the hop flavor better. I couldn't find a prefabricated system so I had to make my own. I purchased 2 soft rubber carboy caps, a racking cane, 4 feet of 3/8 inch ID hosing, several hose clamps, 1 gas ball lock keg coupler, 1 liquid ball lock keg coupler, and an air lock. It assembles like the picture, The CO2 goes in through the small hole in the carboy cap, the racking cane goes in the big one, the liquid goes into the liquid connection, and the gas excapes out through the gas connect. You have to be careful not to suck up crap with the racking cane because that's all going into your keg. I ended up leaving a bit of beer I might have siphoned and figured would settle out in the bottle. This could have been avoided by secondary fermentation; with additional crap settled out it'd go even smoother. To attach 1/4 keg hardware to a 3/8 inch tube I simply slid 1/4 ID 3/8 OD tube inside of my 3/8 ID tube. (I'll amend this with real pictures after the next time I do it. I didn't have a helper so no action photos were taken.) I dialed my regularor so that it was barely on. It takes very low pressure to push the beer out of the carboy. When showing my girlfriend the concept I could do it with my lungs, so it must not be alot of psi. I would not clamp any connections on the rubber carboy cap, or clamp the cap to the carboy. The only connections I clamped were on the keg hardware and to keep the air lock in the hose.

Kegerator

This is my new mini fridge loaded with 1 keg. All modifications will be detailed in an upcoming post about making this fridge into a kegerator including all parts, processes, and unavoidable errors.

STL Brown or The Red That Wasn't

I had a vision of a deep amber ale, red hues on an amber base; a tame appearance but surprising flavors. I copied Jamil's recipe for Evil Twin, tweaked it to my liking and modified the hop schedule to include citra, a whole lot of citra.

The miss adventures of this beer started way before brewing. When we purchased ingredients they didn't have pale chocolate malt, no problem 1/3 the chocolate malt should have done. We had to buy malt in individual bags of 1,5, or 10 pounds. They were nice enough to reseal the bags we only needed ounces of. Once all of the ingredients were measured out we set about milling our grain, only after struggling for about 10 minutes did the store clerk tell us the mill was broken, and that we were going to have to hand grind the grain with a rolling pin and some gumption. So we packaged all the malt in the provided 1 thin cheap garbage bag they had for lining the bucket. once we got to the car the inevitable bag rupture happened and so we made the most of it, put the plastic bag inside of a paper bag and rolled home.

Kyle in a well meaning effort began opening the bags of grain and adding them instead of going with the premeasured grain. After I finished measuring out the hops by sight because kyle didn't have a scale and I didn't think to bring mine, I caught his error and adjusted the recipe. This made it solidly into the brown ale category by virtue of SRM. American Brown Ale w/ west coast hops I guess.




(read more after the jump)