Racking the IPA to the keg

I'm right on schedule. I'm racking the IPA off of the oak and into the keg. The environment is not ideal, but hopefully for this it shouldn't take too much time and the risk of beer coming into contact will be minimal. Currently I'm waiting for my priming sugar to cool down enough to add to the keg.

3pm- I just finished racking the beer into the keg with the priming sugar. I took a final reading and came out to a FG of around 1.009 which gives me a final ABV of around 6%.

I gave it a little taste and smell and I have to say that I am impressed. It has a noticable hop aroma even uncarbed. I could taste the hoppiness. I believe I might be totally in love with this beer. We'll see how it tastes in a few weeks.

WIPA update

This is WIPA with the blow-off attached a few days ago before I racked into a secondary onto oak chips for a week. I'll be racking it into a keg to carbonate with priming sugar on Thursday. It should give me a good two weeks of carbonation time and ready just in time for the reception. I'm only oaking the IPA for a week instead of the longer time suggested because I wasn't sure what kind of flavor it would give. I'm going to bottle a few for aging a couple months.

Dead Bunny Braggot revisted

This was my very first attempt at a braggot. What could go wrong did. Mostly in part to my lack of brewing experience and knowing that hop utilization was dependent on heat. That mess there was when I put the hops in with the wort and the yeast and hoped for the best. This was a batch that fermented out at 10% abv and then I added champagne yeast to see about getting the abv up just a little higher, because better judgement seems to fly out the window when experimentation with alcoholic beverage comes into play. I managed to get 18 bottles out of the 2 gallons. I also learned a very important lesson about priming sugar...boil it. For some reason that little bit of information slipped my mind. Do you know what happens when you just dump priming sugar into a bottling bucket, add braggot, then bottle.

Nothing.

I never gave any of these away because after a month I opened a bottle and surprise surprise, no carbonation. I had a perfectly still braggot, which is no big deal because they can be still. It wasn't the stillness that was a problem, it was the fact that it had so much alcohol my mouth burned. Thankfully, there was enough residual sweetness to make that bearable. I drank the whole bottle and was pretty well feeling the same intoxication level I would feel had I drank 4 beers.

Why this trip down memory lane? Well I was flipping through my recipe book and thinking I would like to try this again with a little more experience under my belt.

My original recipe:

3.3# Wheat Malt
3# Honey
1oz Cascade
1tsp Acid Blend
2tsp yeast nutrient
London Ale yeast

This new recipe will be a little less aggressive on the wanting to have a high alcohol. I'm not even shooting for 6% I'll be happy to have a session level alcohol, with nice flavor and drinkability.

I'm thinking something like this:
4 lbs. Wheat Liquid
1 lbs. Oats Flaked
6 lbs. Honey
1 oz. Cascade (Whole, 5.50 %AA) boiled 60 minutes.
1 oz. Willamette (Whole, 5.00 %AA) boiled 30 minutes.
.5 oz. Willamette (Whole, 5.00 %AA) boiled 10 minutes.
2 tsp Yeast Nutrient (AKA Fermax) (not included in calculations)
Yeast: WYeast 1028 London Ale

The AA% is a general estimation from the recipe program I use. This one would be a 5 gallon batch. I'm posting my recipe on a homebrew site for some advice from more experienced mead makers.

Beer-Mom Moment

So my widdle Wedding IPA is was tucked away in the back of the laundry room and at first I had a regular s-lock on it. I wasn't expecting it to burst into a really active fermentation but as the night wore on I realized there was only a few inches from the bottom of the neck of the carboy to the beer. My first batch was only about 4.5 gallons so there was more room for a krausen to form, but on this batch I was well over 5 gallons. I really need to invest in some 1 gallon jugs for overflow.

Wednesday evening was spent cleaning and pondering what I should do about the airlock system. Just as a precaution I rigged up some large tubing to a regular bubbler airlock and put it aside. My sleep was a series of regularly timed (every hour) bolts out of bed to check on the WIPA. Finally, around 2am I broke down and mixed up sanitizing solution and replaced the S-lock with this lovely contraption you see here. I know that if I hadn't I would have been looking at a huge mess and considering how closely packed the laundry room is, cleaning up sticky wort would have been an impossible task.

I've changed out the sanitizer because it starts to look gross and sadly I know that it is lost beer. I'm confident that it should ferment out in 7-9 days though I might let it go for a full 10. I plan on dry hopping it for 2 weeks and and oaking it for about a week. The recipe calls for oak, which completely blew me away. I didn't know that IPA's could be oaked. I had to decide on boiling the extra 1oz of Willamette I had in the fridge or dry hopping it. I went for dry hopping because I definitely wanted something that when it poured it would waft up and over your nose.

Brewing with Love

Today was the day I brewed the IPA for my step-daughter's upcoming wedding. Though they cannot have alcohol at the actual wedding and reception because it is in a state park, they will be drinking it at the after the wedding party we plan on having at her mother's house. The original plan was to brew 3 beers but instead I'm only going to brew 2.

Brewing is not just about the mechanics of it all but about the connection between what is going on with us as people and how that effects what we cook. I am reminded of that saying that "something is made with love." The idea that what we are thinking and feeling infuses what we are making. Though I do not cook for pleasure, I do believe that my mood effects what I make when it comes to beer and wine. For example, after the break up of my last relationship I made a mead. I knew I wasn't going to be drinking it for at least a year...I named it Dissolution. I'm hoping that a year will be enough heal time so that by the time I do open it, it will not taste of the bitterness and pain that went into making it.

These latest beers were made with love and enthusiasm. I listen to happy music, I chat with my cat and there were a few moments in the kitchen where I busted a move or two. Even though I felt slightly apprehensive about how these batches would turn out I still went in with good feelings. The beer I started today is for the wedding of my ex-partner's daughter. I wanted to make them something that was unique but would be something they could share with everyone. I am also short on funds but long on spare time, so all of these factors make for a thoughtful and practical gift. Granted choosing a hoppier beer in no way is a reflection on my own personal feelings about marriage as an institution that reinscribes oppressive patriarchal patterns of dominance. I'm going to make a another batch which is more malty with subtle hop flavor and strong aroma.

But back to the love. I know that great globs of happy feelings were rolling about in the boil. I was listening to "Falling in Love at a Coffee shop" by Landon Pigg and I think the beer was definitely infused with that whimsy of love at first sight.

Mother's Little Helper Amber Ale

Update: With a little over 4 finished gallons in a keg in the basement fridge I was worried that my beer only tasted good to me. You know that idea that ugly children are beautiful only to their mother kind of thing. So I'd hesitantly been giving out bottles of beer to friends to try and so far it's been a hit. I believe one person actually said they'd buy it. That made me feel really good about my first attempt at AG brewing. I took a good look at it last night and it has a really nice deep amber color to it. It wasn't as clear as I would have liked it to be. It doesn't have good head retention but that is probably due to my carbonation process. One person noted the distinct floral aroma after she'd poured it and that it was a nice balance of sweet and hoppy.

I'm going to be back to partial mash or extract brewing for a while until I can get my hands on better equipment. The next beer will be an IPA.

Monday in a Vinyard

Right now, the weather is dreary, my eyes hurt like hell and my whole body feels sore. I'm sitting my classroom, waiting while my students take their final exams and wondering what I'm going to do with the rest of life. Originally the plan was to play World of Warcraft while they are taking the exam but I forgot that Tuesdays are generally the day when they upgradeso all the realms are down all morning. That put quite a crimp in my otherwise smooth plans for the morning.

The alternative is now to quietly write whatever comes to mind while my eyes burn under the flourescent lights. They burn for a good reason. Sunburn. Well that wasn't the good part of the reason. The good part is that they burned because I was outside all day helping my neighbor prune is vineyard. I'd never done anything like that before. Most of my experience winemaking as you know involved science experiments in 2 gallon buckets in my kitchen in Minneapolis or opening large kit wine containers for large batches. It never involved the actual grape itself, unless you count the time I used grapes from target to make wine that was barely tolerable.

Back to a lovely Monday spent toiling in a vineyard pulling vines. It was back-breaking work and not just because I am out of shape. I think the work would have made anyone hurt after a while. The wonderful part of the day was the shared conversations and listening to Barnaby talk about grapes. In the humid heat we discussed the what possibilities may lie in men's studies, not the assumption that it is reasserting men as the center but really looking at how society constructs masculinity from the perspective that it disadvantages them because the archetype of masculinity is one that is unattainable. We talked about how to raise or talk to the men in our lives in ways that bring them to an understanding of how they both collude and are harmed by the oppression that women face. It was day of light and weighty issues, the humming of bees provided a soundtrack that cannot be duplicated and honestly I don't think could ever be shared with others in way that the impact could be felt. I think the vines took it all in and who knows what they think of all of the mundane humanity they were privy too.

We started around 930am and finished around 630pm. By the time I got home my legs were cramping and my lower back was screaming for a hot shower and some chocolate cake. OK possibly only my stomach was screaming for cake, but the hot shower my whole body could agree on. Sleep didn't come easy for me, I was thinking about what I should be doing with y life and how it was all going to work itself out eventually but possibley not in the way I wanted it too because I wasn't working at anything just letting the world work around me. What did I want to do in this life before I leave it. What contributions can I make that leave a lasting mark. My teaching I suppose, even though it doesn't make me as happy as the hobbies in my life do. I pondered how I could link my loves together and still be able to do the things I need and want to do. If money were no object this would be a no-brainer, but it is and so I must use my brain to figure out a solution.

Barnaby and I tossed about ideas for building my beer label, getting my beer out to the masses but staying small and contained. I don't know the first thing about running a business or about financing an endeavor or about the kinds of equipment I would need to make large batches of beer. I guess I would be happy to be able to supply a few local bars with my beer on an as needed basis. All of these ideas and many more blanket his vineyard, like the pruned vines we left on the ground.