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...
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
homebrewing.
i dabbled in it a few months ago with disastrous results. of course, i couldn't accurately know if the batch was ready to ferment as my girlfriend broke my hydrometer and i could barely get my stockpot up to a boil on my piece-of-shit cook-top and i was using a god knows how old ingredients kit. nah, it couldn't have been any of those things...
well, i'm about to begin again. i still need to replace that hydrometer and i need to purchase a few odds/ends but for the most part i am good to go. picked up a turkey fryer with a large 34 quart, 8.5 gallons to you and me, kettle with a built in spigot/valve this past weekend; that will solve my lack of heat from my cook-top issue and give me a much needed piece of equipment for when i, eventually, switch to all grain.
going through several recipes now as i will need to know that to determine what ingredients i will need. i'm thinking a nice brown ale... something session-able.
Labels: ber, homebrewing