Basketball Beer
This is a nut brown ale (hence the NBA cap mark) that I brewed during March, so I have unofficially dubbed this one my basketball beer. I probably would not have chosen a nut brown ale, but I was given the kit as a christmas gift, so it was basically free beer, and you can't beat that. The kit was the Smooth Nut Brown extract kit from Midwestern Brewing Supply. The kit I received had the Munton's dry ale yeast in it, which I ended up using to save my Vienna Lager, so I upgraded to a vial of White Labs British Ale Yeast.
The actual brew day on this beer was probably the smoothest one I've had. It was a beautiful day and we had no problems at all. I started out with just over 6 gallons in the brew pot and ended up with just at 5 gallons in the fermenter. Original gravity was 1.041. We pitched the yeast at 70 degrees. I made a yeast starter this time and fermentation took off pretty quickly. I must have had some sort of small leak around the air lock somewhere because I could never see any bubbles in the airlock, but I could see the yeast activity on top of the wort, so I knew it was fermenting. It fermented at about 68 degrees for 14 days and finished up with final gravity of 1.015.
If the brew day on this one went extra smooth, bottling day was extra rough. I was extra stressed out with school and my in-laws were coming for a long weekend visit, so I had to get it bottled before they got here. I kept forgetting to do things and then having to back track. It was sort of a mess. I primed this one with the priming sugar that came in the kit.
I like this beer more than I expected to. It's really not that different from the Vienna lager ale that I made last. They both used the more British and German style hops and I used a British style yeast in both of them. This one is maltier though, and it doesn't have the same kick of bitterness at the end that the Vienna has. One thing that I have noticed is that the priming is real uneven in this one. Some bottles are nicely carbonated and some aren't carbonated enough. The ones that are on the flat side are also a little too sweet. I'm assuming that's due to the fact that there's more priming sugar left in those bottles.
I've had the uneven priming problem before and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I boil the sugar or malt in a couple of cups of water for about 15 minutes and let it cool. Then as I'm siphoning the beer into the bottling bucket, I slowely pour the cooled syrup into the bottling bucket. After the beer is completely siphoned, I stir it gently with a sanitized spoon. Some day I will again live in a real house instead of a townhouse and I will have a basement with a second refrigerator and a couple of cornelius kegs so that I don't have to mess around with this priming and bottling stuff.
Now that the weather is starting to warm up, I'm really feeling the itch to do something like a hefewiezen. Right now though my house literally resembles that old song... 100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, and all of my bottles are filled, so I need to empty some bottles before I can brew again.
