brew-your-own.
i hate sticking to standard recipes. why do something that every tom/dick/harry has done as well when you can make a few simple modifications and get something completely different? my spiced brown ale from a few months back was me going through several brown ale recipes, picking out some of the things that tend to stand out over them all then adding a few tweaks and extra ingredients to the party.
this last time i brewed up a double ipa based on the surly furious. i even bought the recipe kit - i swore i woudn't buy a recipe kit after that first disastrous failure back in sept 2010 - though this time i had a bit more faith in the ingredients as it was a new addition to their catalog and the brewery itself devised it. of course, being me, i had to tweak some things. recipe called for 2.5gal boil and i changed it to 3.5gal; this increased the hop utilization giving me a bit higher ibu. i also decided to add 1lb of local honey at about 10minutes from end of boil to up the abv a tad, dry it out a bit and hopefully give it a touch more sweetness to balance out the higher ibus. of course, all of my rationals behind my tweaks were strictly theoretical and pulled out of my ass, though i did perform some perfunctory reading to lead me to those ideas... none of it was from experience, yet it gained me exactly what i had lacked; experience.
brew day went well enough, even if a touch time compressed due to a event we had to leave for, and i left wort cooling on my counter for 6-7+ hours till we arrived back home that night to transfer to primary. i have to admit i had that slight nagging feeling i was setting myself up for diacetyl issues by not cooling it quickly but only time would tell in the long run. a couple of weeks later and i'm getting a little antsy about racking to secondary to dry-hop. gravity seemed to have stalled for over a week at 1.030 which is kind of high... had my hydrometer broken? after a few more days (3 weeks in primary) the gravity had fallen 1.020 and i knew it was readyish to transfer as calculations said it would finish at about 1.017. moved it to my glass carboy and added the almost 9ounces of hops. god damn the smell of hops is insatiable! could i wait the 7-10 days needed till bottling?
racking to the bottling bucket i quickly learned a few things: 1)do not dry-hop again by simply throwing quantities of pellets willynilly in the fermenter, 2)use a fine strainer bag instead of a mesh bag for filtration, 3)hops suck up and absorb a ridiculous amount of liquid and 4)the siphon and bottling wand will get clogged with hop debris. i ended up with maybe 3.5gals of beer with more than a few bottles with more than wanted floating debris: 27 12oz bottles and 2x 32oz growlers.
i am confident my next attempt at dry-hopping will result in a much larger final yield... thanks experience!
i have now tried it twice and will be taking a growler to the homebrew meeting tomorrow. the spiced brown went over well with 1 of the club leaders even trying to convince me to enter it into a competition in a few months (i cant due to submission requirements at the competition).
hopefully i can save at least a 12 for the phish shows early june...
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unless you are completely unplugged you heard about the new radiohead release, the king of limbs. i saw the notice, added it to my what cue for the ratio boost, watched the lotus flower video and fb/tweeted about thoms wiggle/dance before i left for work.
who didn't?
did you listen to it during the day or did you wait/try for a proper listening environment after work? try a must, tempting links/streams were everywhere. i was the recipient of timing this weekend - an empty house - and wanted to take full advantage. i even completely avoided all talk of it and saved it all for tonight. get home, change clothes, walk/feed shadow, crack open a nice bottle and settle down in my favorite listening chair. ahhhh....
i've had a few listens and my general thoughts from the first time through appear validated so far. little by little is the only track that will not be going into my "must play" playlist, but i still like that track. ed had said this was going to be departure and you wonder how much less guitar con they do but this harkens back to elements of the kid a/amnesiac era recordings and then goes beyond. it evolvs to a point during the give up the ghost/separator ending that just completely bubbles over and explooges in your lap.
a friend of mine described it:
One thing that strikes me as very unique about how Radiohead mixes their recent albums is how heavy/thick they sound. Basically saying "we don't care if your speakers can't handle all that low end and low mid-range. ours can.". They mix it how they think it should sound and doing a fantastic job at doing so.
generally the producer/mastering goes the route of lcd (lowest common denominator) as you want it to sound acceptable on as many types of devices as possible. i'm glad i waited and didn't listen to this at work as tracks such as feral and give up the ghost would have been rattling around cheap plastic! anyone remember some of those cure cd/album covers in late 80s/90s "this is mixed to be played loud" things?
that. crank it.
i wish my first listen had been over headphones...
Labels: radiohead
ber.
last sunday i brewed a batch of spiced brown ale. it will either become the liquid form of a gingersnap crossed with a snickerdoodle or it will be absolute garbage. who knows which... yet. i need to take another hydrometer reading to see if my fermentation is complete, though honestly, i don't think it is as it is still bubbling slightly.
maintaining a constant fermentation temperature is harder than you may think.
Labels: homebrewing