Yesterday

I was at Pracna with my friends Mark and Dean, having a beer and a bloody mary. I was looking over the drink menu and saw there was a new Surly but when I asked for it they were out. Seems this one went fast. They had a new one on tap, a strong ale called Curmudgeon made by Founders. This bad boy came out in a beautiful snifter glass, dark amber color, with a beautiful head which was a very light shade of amber. I took a long whiff and was pleasantly assaulted by the sweet aroma. To be honest, it immediately brought to mind the braggot I had made and gave me hope that in a few months mine would also be a pleasure to drink. This is the first strong ale I've had in the Minneapolis area. I will definitely go back for it.

I couldn't resist

I couldn't resist pressing down slightly on the top of the fermenter. When it really starts fermenting any pressure sends bubbles into the airlock and so I pressed and *bloop*bloop* there were bubbles coming up. It wasn't a lot but some shows me that fermentation has started, it's not strong but it is way faster than I expected. I was hoping that would be the case, that the yeast was still very much active.

I think rather than racking another brown on this yeast I'll wash it and store it. Maybe make something else with this strain. To be honest i wasn't sure if it was going to work. My greatest concern still is contamination. I tried to keep everything as clean and sanitized as possible. I kept the lid on the fermenter, with the airlock on while I prepped the new batch. I made sure to clean and sanitize all equipment that came into contact with the wort.

I guess I can only do so much and just hope for the best.

I have to remember to post this success on the forum.

Brown Ale recipe

Brown Ale

6# Gold LME
2# DME
1# Crystal Malt 60L
1/2# Chocolate Malt
1oz Nugget pellet hops (12.5% AA) at 60
1oz Willamette leaf hops (4.5%AA) at 30
1oz Willamette lef hops (4.5% AA) at 15
3tsp yeast nutrient (hey couldn't hurt)

OG 1.056 or 058 ( had a hard time reading it), which was a little high for this particular recipe. The range I had was between 1.045-1.055.

Racked onto the yeast at around 72 degrees. Turns out the reason my water pressure was a little low and not as cold, was that my neighbors were watering the yard. I'll have to take that into consideration next time.

The yeast was Wyeast 1028.

Now I just have to wait and hope that this yeast will take. Dang, this is going to be a long 24 hours.

Brown Ale, my version.

I started a new batch of brown ale using the yeast from the previous batch. I didn't use a kit instead I found a recipe, it's still an extract with grains but it uses DME. This was the first time I have used it and I can honestly say that adding DME to a hot wort is absolutely a pain in the ass. I tried the sifting method but the steam rising up from the boil made the powder condense into hard knots that clogged the sifter. I poured it in and spent lots of time breaking up the clumps I only used about 2# of DME instead of the 3# that I had originally planned because I just got too fed up. Experience teaches. I know that cold water doesn't cause the DME to clump up as bad so I think maybe I'll pre dissolve the DME in cool water and add it to the wort instead of trying to add it dry. I'll end up using less water in the initial boil.

I'm also going to add this to the yeast of the previous batch I just racked to the secondary. I read that this can be done. Now I'm just waiting for the wort to cool enough to pitch it into the fermenter, add a little nutrient and see what happens.

Passing the time at work

One thing I've noted about myself and my hobbies, is that I am meticulous in outlining needs, costs, plans. For example, I spent a large chunk of my shift writing out recipes in my beer notebook, then taking post-its and pricing out from my Midwest catalog all the ingredients for each and every item. I also keep a running inventory list of equipment I own and what I need to buy, who I give bottles to and how many. Because I carry both my wine and my beer notebook with me I have taken to dating any changes I make and then cross-checking them with the other. I have a computer inventory of all of my wines, types, yeasts, fermentation and racking dates, and how many bottles each batch yields. I'm going to build a new spreadsheet for beer soon.

I don't keep this good of track for things that go into writing my dissertation. Obviously, I know where my priorities lay.

So I was cruising the internet and reading through various forum posts on the Midwest brew-wine forum, which is my second favorite forum, after winemakingtalk.com. I spent hours reading the online version of the magazine Brew Your Own. I wrote out a few extract recipes and played with the brew calculator and chatted to know one in particular about the greatness of learning to make beer and wine. No one being my co-workers who have gotten used to listening and asking questions periodically. It keeps them on my good side and guarantees that they continue to reap the benefits of my new hobby by getting free bottles of wine and eventually beer.

While making an inventory list for a brown ale I found on the Brew Your Own site, it occured to me that I should really consider upping my budget for the month from 50.00 to 75.00. I would love to have it at 100.00 but I don't make enough at my job and I really can't justify spending that much on a hobby right now. I might reconsider in the fall when I'm teaching again and have a little extra cash. I priced out how the brown ale not made from a kit would cost me around 30.00. That is not a bad deal. I guess when I get enough beer made the cost will even out because I'll be entertaining more at home instead of going out.

I wonder if I could exchange beer for meals by inviting my friends over for potluck?

The kit I just brewed was from Northern Brewer called Nut Brown Ale. Those are the pictures from various points during the preparation. I think next time I brew I'm going to have a friend come over and take pictures of me working so I can post them in a step-by-step blog post.

Just moved fermenter to the bathtub while i'm at work...a precaution.

After adding the hops and setting the timer for 60 minutes I settled down to do some cleaning up and preparing the fermenter. I chilled about 2 gallons of water in the fridge, because the sink was going to be a little busy with chilling the wort down and I didn't want to chill it, then risk bacteria while I was trying to fill the fermenter up with cold water.















This was the first chance to use the wort chiller I bought from BrewsterBrown. I wasn't sure how well it was going to work since it was pretty small diameter and didn't have a large number of coils. I have budget and I know i can't afford a bigger wortchiller. Plus, I didn't want to go all out to early in this hobby. After an hour, I plopped the pot into the sink, put the chiller in and hooked it up and turned it on. I could immediately feel warm water coming out of the hose. I set a sanitized thermometer in it and prepped the water, fermenter, airlock, and yeast while I was waiting. It cooled to under 100F in under 15 minutes.

I poured the wort in, making sure to splash , used a large spoon to stir it up, added more cold water and took a SG reading. Since I had sanitized the hydrometer I just twirled it and left it in the pail. I use the refractometer to my wines anyway. The reading was around 1.042 and the Brix was 10. I added the London Ale yeast and set it in the living room. Hopefully it won't have crazy fermentation but I might just prepare a blow-off tube just in case. Unfortunately, I leave for work at 10:30pm and if it's going to go nuts I'd rather it do it while I'm home and not while I'm at work.

This should sit for about a week then I rack it to the secondary until it clears or two weeks I think. Then bottle and wait 2 weeks. It should be just in time for the BBQ I'm wanting to have in late August.

NB continued

Next I added the grains to the cool water and turned on the heat. They needed to steep for 15 minutes or until the water started to boil (or reach 170F) which ever came first. I set the timer for 15 minutes then started prepping the cold water for the fermenter and the gold malt that needed to go in to the pot after it started to boil. I put the malt in a pail and ran some hot water to soften it up. After 15 minutes I took the grains out and then let it boil. After it started boiling I removed it from the heat and added the malt and put it back on to boil before I add hops.

Nut Brown Ale

I got off work this morning, came home to a big puffy bag of yeast. I pulled out the kit and read through the ingredients and instructions at least a dozen times. First I straightened up a bit and mixed up a sanitizing solution. I use StarSan. I sanitized the buckets and fermenter and washed out the pot.












I then crushed the grains and and put them into a mesh bag, tying the top up. I really need to get bigger ziploc bags, I had to crush the grains in two batches, so I could use the ziploc they cam in.

Everything is clearing up nicely.

I checked on the wines I have going so far and did a little adding of KMeta to the muscat since I had forgotten to do that when I racked it a couple of days ago. The sack mead is looking mighty clear now. I was a little hesitant to use the bentonite and I think in the future it will not be my go to way of clearing but I really want to get this into bottles and down to the basement and out of my mind as soon as possible. It's about 4 months old at this point.

The muscat directly to the right is looking beautiful and clearer than I expected since I topped up with the leftover muscat that had added sugar to it. I still have even more left which is currently in an airlocked bottle I think I might have to rack this a fourth time in a couple of months. I'm not sure about bulk aging this in my kitchen over the winter. I would rather get it as clear as possible and bottle age it in the basement over the winter in preparation for my graduation next May.

The red is the 2nd attempt at grape wine and that cleared better than the first one.

I just need to get on the ball and get these bottled and labeled (at least working labels, not presentation labels) and stored away.

I see two kit wines in my future, a red and a white, for an event in October, so I guess i should take a look at the new Midwest catalog and start picking stuff out.

Today is also Brew Day! I'm planning on starting that Nut Brown Ale I smacked the yeast activator and hopefully I'll see some activity in a couple of hours and can get this started before I have to go to bed this afternoon. Otherwise I could do it in the morning after work and before I go to the Farmers Market.

What constitutes blog worthy

I guess that I'm sitting on my porch at 1am with my laptop and drinking from a bottle of my own wine fits the criteria of what I put on a blog about wine-making. I just got home from a night of dancing and hanging out with friends. I walked in the house and didn't feel like going to bed or watching tv or sitting in the living room with my computer. The weather is so beautiful out and I'm not really tired or intoxicated and this seemed like the perfect wind-down activity. I opted not to grab a glass since there's only about a glass worth in the bottle, so I'm drinking straight from the bottle.

It's good wine and quiet night and my worries and people are left in a club somewhere.

These musings are in fact blogworthy because I took the time out of m very fast moving life and just stopped to drink the wine.

What I'm growing to hate about being the lone..

Granted I am not as skilled as others who have jumped into the whole wine/beer brewing thing, but I'm not an idiot. I do my research and ask questions that make sense. I do not just buy random items and jerryrig a setup and then ask questions in forums and expect that I should get answers, having not done my homework. So I think I get to be a bit of a bitch when I think someone is being condescending towards me.

What brought on this little rant?

Braggots. Not well documented and pretty much not as widely made as beer or mead. So my decision to focus on making braggots with a definable beer styles and with discernable mead characteristics and not call it a 'honey' beer is not just pulled out of my ass. I read what I could find and what was out there on all available forums. I'm not a rocket scientist, but I'm not some guy who does this because his buddies or his grandpa did it. I grew up with good beer, I've had an interest in making beer, and I have the time to learn how to make it...right.

So treat me like I know generally what contributions alpha and beta acids make to beer. I may not completel understand the whys and the hows but I know enough to make educated guesses and to know how to best proceed, whether it be jumping in with a trial and error and just make the batch and see how it goes or asking more questions of individuals who I know have more knowledge than myself. I also am very much aware that it will be years before I will be anything other than an amatuer and honestly I'm fine with that. I mean I do have a career and beer and wine making in no way reflects my capabilities as an academic.

Course my knitting, well that's a different story.

Feels like forever

Since I last posted, though it was only a week ago. My new job keeps me busy and exhausted and to be honest I've been too tired to try and tend to my wine more than I already do. Thankfully, it's a very hands-off kind of hobby and less is more is better.

Last week the Muscat had cleared up but I hadn't gotten around to racking it a third time. So today I decided to head over to Northern Brewer to pick up a faucet adapter. While there I bought a Nut Brown Ale kit and then kicked myself when I got home and realized that the yeast I had was the Belgium Abby not the London Ale I thought. So now I have to go back to Northern Brewer and get the right yeast in order to start the Ale. I hate making more than one trip in a week. I'm pretty sure that my kit would last a week if I get home and decide that I'm just too tired to go to St. Paul.

I racked the Muscat to a new 3gallon carboy and topped it off with what I had in the 1 gallon and managed to get an extra bottles-worth into a 750ml. Of course even as I write this I remember that I forgot to put some campden tablets into it. Oh well, I'll do that tomorrow. No worries I'm generally ok with as little sulphiting as possible. I'm down to a few bottles of the Pinot Blanc left. I have to remember to give some away to key folks. I suppose I should see how the rest of my 1 gallon batches are doing.

I had most awful scare this afternoon while racking. I needed a bottle for the leftover and so I went to the box of empties I keep for just such an occasion and I saw a green one upside down so I stuck my hand on it, placing my thumb in the depression and went to pull it out. I felt something soft and squishy and I FREAKED I dropped the bottle faster than greased spit and as it fell something dark fell out of the depression. I'm pretty sure it was a spider. It was HUGE. I kept checking my thumb to see if there were fang marks in it. I later picked it up with a damp paper towel (damp with sanitizing solution, just in case) and a leather mitten and threw it away. Spiders creep my shit out.

That said I look forward to a cool apartment and some beer-making maybe Thursday or Friday. I still have to move that Dead Bunny Braggot to the basement. I've been playing with ideas for another braggot made in a strong ale style using that Belgium Abby or in an American Barleywine Ale style. Both styles use the Abby yeast and since I don't know enough about them I figure I should follow the suggestion of yeast styles from Wyeast. I'm not seeing nearly as many braggot yeast recipes, which cements the idea that most people don't make them.