People's Amber and Other Coalition Goodies

So Thursday I managed to drag my very tired and achy butt out of bed and hauled it up to Coalition to rack the Amber into secondary and clean out the carboys. We thought it might be ready to go on tap next week but they're only going to be open for two days, so we decided against it and instead will put it on the week after.

I was asked to make a batch of beer for an anniversary party in February and hopefully the law will have been changed by then, otherwise...I was thinking of making a belgium but that's kind of out of season, but I have it in my head that I really want to make something with elderberries and so I'm thinking I'll make an Elderberry IPA because I really want something purplish. I think I'll call this one Heart of Darkness.

So the bag of hops was one that Elan gave me as a thank you for coming in and racking and cleaning up after myself, which I thought was really nice of him. It's a 1# bag of Perle, and I think I'm going to use that one this spring to make some belgiums and give a bunch away because there is no way I'm going to go through a bag of Perle with just a few batches of beer.

The Pant(r)y Sweeper will be ready to rack onto oak this coming week and I'm planning on making something stronger this week to rack onto the yeast cake. Might as well try to get on a more regular brewing cycle. I'm really looking forward to getting a mash/lauter tun in a couple months so I can move to all grain, instead of these partial mashes.

People's Amber Update

This morning promised to be productive and fun, though I'm pretty sure those will be two separate occasions.

I knew I needed to get up and head over to Coalition Brewery to check on my Peeps, the Amber, before I got the rest of my day started. Today is going to be busy with job searching and writing back at the house but for the few brief moments of peace I was going to enjoy checking my beer and updating my blog and revising a couple of recipes.

The photo on the left are the babies with fresh airlocks on them instead of blow-off tubes. The photo on the right is after I'd taken a hydrometer reading and was tasting my sample. After only 7 days we had dropped to about 1.030 from the initial 1.054. I attribute the slow ferment to the much cooler temp of the space and the much cooler temp of the initial wort. When I had made this at home, getting the temperature down to 78 was difficult enough and even mixing the wort with cool water still didn't drop the temp to as low as I would have liked. It would ferment in the laundry room at around 68 degrees but I think the initial getting the temp to that might have made a bigger difference. My beers tend to ferment in pretty warm spaces.

Tasting the sample is had more esters than I had tasted in previous samples. I could smell the fruity notes in this and figure this should fade as it settles and ages. The hop flavor at the moment is really understated, though it's noticable. Even less than the other batch I'd made.

People's Amber (AG)

14# American 2 row
2# Crystal 60L
2# Crystal 75L
1# Flaked Wheat
.30oz Centennial @ FWH
1.81oz Centennial @ 60
1.25 Mt. Hood @ 30
1oz Willamette @ 10

For water treatment we added 1 heaping teaspoon of gypsum in the mash. Strike water was heated to 165 and our mash ended up being around 154 degrees for one hour. I was shooting for the lower end of it anyway because if I remember correctly that brings out more maltier flavors. This particular recipe is hoppier than the previous batch I'd made and I'm happy to say that it's not terribly noticeable. I figure I'll take another reading in about 4 days and see where I'm at.

Forever and a Day

I haven't posted since I was thinking of brewing that CDA, which I did and it turned out fantastic. I took it to Chris and Megan's Halloween Party where it was a huge success. That beer was the last beer I was going to brew until I moved into my new apartment. My new roomie and I had a checklist of things that our new place had to have and mine was that it had to have either a patio, basement, or garage. We have a patio.

So many things have happened since I last posted but the biggest one was hearing back from Elan of Coalition Brewing and setting up a day and time to brew a beer for their Coalator Program, where they invite a homebrewer to brew on their pilot system any beer they desire and then they serve it in their pub. Brewer gets to name it and everything. I applied sometime mid summer and heard from them in like late October and we'd set the date for November 29th. I had originally planned to do the CDA but settled on an Amber that I liked when I found out they have never had an Amber on tap and no one had made one.

This is the same Amber I'd made this spring, the AG one.

Brewing day was great! It went super smoothly, we were out of there in 4 hours not 5. I hit right in the range of my target gravity and the color was fantastic. I did a first wort hopping (Thank you, Chris Oslin for turning me on to that!). I totally fell in love with the Blichmann and want one or two of those bad boys. I also definitely need a cooler mashtun. Recipe was pretty simple and the plan is to ferment for 7-8 days then rack to a secondary and toss it into a cooler for a couple days and then carbonate and serve. I'm pairing this beer with something warm and tasty, my second favorite dessert, bread pudding with bourbon caramel sauce. I'm going to see if the chef can do a slightly hop infused bourbon for the sauce.

As for the naming of the beer I decided to call it Peoples' Amber, in honor of People's Brewing the first Black-owned brewery in the United States. It only lasted 2 years and considering it was from '70-'72 and in Wisconsin, I think that deserves a lot of credit. They had a lot to contend with, breaking into a very popular endeavor, which a strong, european and white american history, in a very racist time and place, and from every thing I have been able to get my hands on they did the best they could with the situation they were dealt.

As an African American woman homebrewer I can definitely see where there might be some issues, and I'm truly grateful to the great brewers I've encountered who after their initial shock, take me seriously. Though I will say it would be nice to see a few more faces of color at events and club meetings, there are certainly more than there were 10 years ago. That said I think there needs to be a hell of a lot more.

Here's to the successful brewing of People's Amber at Coalition Brewery. It should never be the color of a person's skin that is important but the quality of the beer.