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.

Playing with recipe tools online.

I think I like Promash better but Beertools works for when
I'm just messing around on the computer.

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CD 2.3
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General
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                  Category: Specialty Beer
               Subcategory: Specialty Beer
               Recipe Type: All Grain
                Batch Size: 5 gal.
             Volume Boiled: 6 gal.
           Mash Efficiency: 72 %
       Total Grain/Extract: 14.36 lbs.
                Total Hops: 2.75 oz.
     Calories (12 fl. oz.): 285.9
          

Ingredients
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       5.99 lbs. Golden Promise Pale
       5.94 lbs. Pale Ale Malt
       0.34 lbs. 2-Row Chocolate Malt
       0.14 lbs. De-Bittered Black Malt (Mout Roost 1400)
       1.95 lbs. Caramel Malt 120L
       1 oz. Centennial boiled 60 minutes.
       0.75 oz. Simcoe boiled 45 minutes.
       0.5 oz. Cascade boiled 30 minutes.
       0.5 oz. Cascade boiled 10 minutes.
          Yeast: WYeast 1272 American Ale II

Notes: 4oz Oak chips in secondary for 2 weeks, No plans to dry hop.
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BW Beer in Secondary

This morning I racked the BW into a the secondary. I kept putting if off because the krausen hadn't fallen away. It was like this burger of yeast, a layer on the top and bottom and the relatively clear beer in between. I figured a little time in secondary, then a crash cool, then bottled. I tasted it. It was still a little thin but it tasted light and refreshing and the hop flavor was pretty mild, which is a good thing for such a light beer.

Racking 3B to secondary

Today the weather is making me feel tired and productive at the same time. I'm tired in body but my mind is working overtime. I woke up with the goal of getting some writing done. Writing in general not necessarily on my dissertation, but on a few different things like this blog post for example. The posting is important because Barnaby is out of the country and I'd at least like to keep him abreast of the Buckwheat happenings.

I let it go a little longer in primary than I had initially planned, mostly because what I'd read of buckwheat beer and dry yeast is that it tended to be slow to get going and slow to ferment. So a few extra days in primary isn't a bad thing. I'm going to move it to a 3 gallon carboy to do a bit more bulk aging and then then crash cool it and bottle.

I have forty five more minutes of writing to do today and then I'm going to head home and get some cleaning done and read and move some files to my little laptop from my external hard drive, wash out carboys and jugs and stoppers and airlocks and get them ready to fill with beer tomorrow after I come back from my two hours of writing at the library. I will get into a routine. I will finish what I started 7 years ago and I will get a beer brewed in the coming weeks.

I'm on the RADIO!!!

So a few weeks ago while working a gig with extrasonly on the set for Leverage I met this guy. This sounds do "blah!" but what happened was that I had taken out my book Designing Great Beers and my knitting and then got up to go talk to the makeup artist to make sure I looked ok. I came back and this guy in the seat next to me asks if that book belonged to me. I said yes, and then he asked if I brewed, again I said yes. If you've spent any time talking to me, you know that I will talk for hours about beer.

Well it turns out he has a radio show on beer. It's an internet radio show and usually they interview folks in the profession but they've wanted to do a show with homebrewers. I believe it was fate, or at least good fortune. After a few weeks of getting our schedules to mesh we came up with a day. I bottled up some of the IPA and toddled on downtown.

I was really nervous and friends who've heard the show remark that I sound more reserve than they are used to but that I do sound like that in real life. I thought my voice sounded weird but that's just me.

I think 32 will be a lucky number for me, that's the episode for BrewHappy I'm in.

Colour on the Vine!

I meant to put this picture up after I got back from the vineyard in Wilsonville but I completely forgot in my exhaustion. We'd spent two days covering all the plants with netting so the birds and deer can't get to them. Both early days but not terribly long days but all the bending and squatting (thank goodness for knee pads!) and a few moments of crawling really left me hurting. I think I came home and went to bed pretty early both days. This vineyard has color gathering, and the one in Alsea didn't. I wonder what that means for production overall?