3 posts tagged “homebrewing”
This is a belgium wit beer kit from midwest brewing supply that we've flavored with raspberry-orange marmalade from my favorate marmalade maker, Sarabeth's. In retrospect, we should probably have gone with another style of wheat beer for this one. The raspberry flavor has gotten lost in the banana and clove flavors that go along with this yeast. It's still a good beer, and the perfect summer beer. One of the other grad students and I made this to drink and ease the pain of teaching summer classes. I got very lazy and didn't keep very good records on this one, but I'm pretty sure that ABV was around 4.7%, so it's a good session beer. I have to admit that as the summer session has dragged on, I've made a pretty good dent in my supply of it. I'm thinking about trying to talk K. into making another summer beer to get us through the rest of the summer. That's all I got in me to say about this one. Summer teaching is taking it out of me right now.
This is the most recent homebrew and it was a bit of an experiment. It's based on the Cardamom Stout from The Homebrewer's Recipe Guide, but I didn't have all of the appropriate ingredients, so I just sort of cobbled it together from the leftover ingredients that I had sitting around the house and what I could buy here in town. It's worth noting that there is only one store that I know of in at least a 60 mile radius of me that sells homebrewing ingredients and this store is a natural foods grocery rather than a dedicated brewing supply store, so their selection is meager at best. The ingredients that I was lacking were the darker roasted grains, which is why I wouldn't call what I've made here a stout. What interested me in this recipe was the use of cardamom to flavor the beer.
Now I like cardamom, but cardamom is definitely a strong spice and this beer does have a strong cardamom flavor. In retrospect, I think part of the strength of the cardamom flavor is that the beer itself is less strongly flavored since I was lacking some of the darker roasted grains, so I probably should have cut back on the amount of cardamom in the recipe to account for that. The cardamom is added to this beer in two different ways, first, you add some to the boil on brew day and second, after a week in primary fermentation, you rack the beer to a secondary fermenter and let the beer sit in the secondary fermenter with some added cardamom for another week or so. This was the first beer that I've ever racked to a secondary fermenter. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to take all the yeast sediment over to the secondary with the beer or not. I didn't and the nice thing about that was then on bottling day, I just added the priming sugar and bottled directly out of the secondary fermenter instead of transfering to a bottling bucket.
The other interesting thing about this beer to me was the priming sugar used. This recipe called for this beer to be primed with brown sugar, so that's what I did. This confused me because it is my understanding that brown sugar is simply granulated sugar with some molasses added to it and that the reason one would normally prime with either corn sugar or malt rather than granulated sugar is that granulated sugar will add off flavors to the beer. The brown sugar didn't seem to add any off flavors to the beer, but I'm little unclear on why that is.
Since I was viewing this beer as a total experiment that I figured I might end up dumping a lot of, I didn't take any gravity readings or keep track of other stats on it, so I have no idea what estimated ABV is. Honestly, at this point, I haven't decided whether I like the beer or not. I've only drank one so far, and after I finished it, D. asked me if I thought it was good or not, and I truely couldn't say. It didn't taste bad and at first, I even thought it tasted sort of good, but towards the end, the strong cardamom flavor began to wear on me. It's definitely not one that I could drink more than one glass of in a sitting. I'm kind of wondering if it wouldn't be a good beer to drink with food, especially strong flavored food, to kind of offset that cardamom taste. I don't know. It is once again cold and snowy here and I'm planning on making chili for dinner, so maybe I'll test that theory tonight.
I have been meaning to try to the milk stout all week to see if it was ready to drink, but earlier in the week I had some sort of cold thing and everything I ate or drank had a funky taste to it, so I didn't think that would be a good time to try the new homebrew. I finally seem to have my taste buds back so after proctoring an evening exam last night, I finally opened up the bottle that has been sitting in my fridge all week.
This was the Jim Baumann's Milk Stout extract kit from MoreBeer. It ended up being a really dark beer. I poured it in my "frogged" pint glass and it's so dark that I couldn't see the black writing on the glass. You can just barely see the top of the "f" sticking up over the beer in the picture. I was a little concerned about the amount of hops in this kit. It seemed like a lot of hops, so I was worried that the kit was constructed by someone from the "every beer style can be made better by adding a huge hop presence" school of thought. I shouldn't have worried. The beer ended up with no overt hop presence, which I like in a stout. It's also silky smooth, which I understand is a function of the lactose that is added to milk stouts. I was very pleased with the kit and am very pleased with the resulting beer. I used White Labs Pitchable Irish Ale Yeast with no starter, and I had lost the bag of corn sugar that came with the kit by bottling time, so I primed with some dry light malt extract that I had laying around the house.
The only problem that I had with this beer is that I brewed on such a cold day that I had a huge amount of evaporation and a hard time controlling boil overs, so even though I started out with 6.5 gallons in the boil, I only ended up with 4.5 gallons in the fermenter.
I also had a slight issue with pitching temperature for the yeast. We cooled the wort down to about 75F with the wort chiller, but then it was so cold outside that it was well under 70F by the time we got it poured it into the fermenter and ready for the yeast. There doesn't seem to have been any negative effect on the beer though. Fermentation still took off within 12-24 hours. The original gravity on this was 1.063 which was right on the estimated original gravity for this kit. The final gravity was 1.020, which puts ABV at around 5.6%.
I bottled the other beer that was in the fermenter last weekend, so it should be ready to go here in the next week or so. I'm not optimistic that I'll like it anywhere near as much as I like this one though.
