Summer is hot

Batch #105

Apricot Saison

8.5 gallons

5.5 lbs Maris Otter

6 lb White Wheat

8 oz American CaraPils

0.5 oz Columbus (14.9%aa), 60 minutes

1 oz Nelson Sauvin, 1 min

Wyeast 3711 French Saison  - 1.5L starter

Mash in with 20qts to 152F, hold one hour. Batch sparged to collect 10 gallons. One hour boil. Split into two batches.

Batch A - 3.5 gallons. Will go on tap fresh in August. Possibly with apricot puree to bring up to ~4.5% ABV or apricot extract if already close enough in range.
Batch B - 4.5 gallons. For souring. Will get apricot puree and White Labs Belgian Sour Blend. Might have to blend in a small batch of beer with residual sugars. We'll see how it goes.

OG: 1.036

FG: 

ABV: 

IBU: ~20-25

Learning curves

It's been a while. Upgraded to a 60qt kettle and bought a proper heat source. Test driving the new setup with a recent favorite style to brew. 

Batch #103
TBD fruit tart, shooting for 7 gallons total
7 lbs Maris Otter
7 lbs White Wheat Malt
1 lb Acid Malt
0.375 lb Am Crystal 40L

- Day One -

About 1/2 cup grain reserved for lactic acid rest.

Soft water. Built from RO with a little chalk, epsom, and table salt. + gypsum (just shy 3/4 tsp each).

Save a fistful of crushed grain. Mash in targeted at 125F in about 3 gallons water, rest 15 min. Add boiling water to bring to 155F. Rest one hour. Result was 130F and 150F, in about 4.5 gallons total. Did not correct saccharification temp because I had already recombined my sparge water and the hot liquor tank temp was low. 

Lazy, so batch sparged to collect just over 10 gallons. Saved grain added back to wort.

1.2 L starter pulled from sweet wort pitched with Gigayeast Saison II (four months old?! always check the label, especially at an unfamiliar shop...yes I know it's winter) and some ancient Brett Brux that I found in the fridge.
I like the flexibility to have extra water in the kettle going into the mash. I like that my new burner works instead of just coating everything in soot. Running 7-10gal beers is going to take a couple of attempts before I have a smooth operation going.

- Day Two - 

Boil 45 min.
1.5oz Mosaic (11.2%aa) at 10min with whirlfloc.

I don't have a great solution for cooling the new kettle yet. Ambient chill overnight.

- Day Three -

Split into two 4 gallon volumes for fermentation. Pitched the yeast. Fermenting at 68ºF ambient. About 75% grain-to-fermenter volume efficiency (rough estimate)...not bad.

- Day Fifteen - 

Added 1oz Oak cubes and 2oz dried hibiscus to one of the fermenters.

- Day Thirty-one - 

Transferred the beer off of the hibiscus. A few pellicles and a fair amount of other evidence of substantial souring. A few possibilities - unwashed hibiscus and oak, insufficient sanitizing of the bucket, or the glass weight I used to hold the hibiscus bag down carried some sauerkraut bugs with it. Whatever the case... it smells amazing.

- Day What? -
Bottled the regular stuff on 3/3. Bottled the hibiscus on 3/17. Stuff on top was still showing there, reforming after racking in minutes... probably from brettanomyces. SG was still 1.008

OG: 1.052
FG: 1.008
ABV: about 5.8%
IBU: 5-10

Mead again

Update 6/27/14 - Spiked with metabisulfite, backsweetened with 3 oz of buckwheat honey (what I had,...wish it were orange here), added a tannin tincture (over-steeped Peet's Osmanthus Fancy), and bottled. Who wants some?
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Made some more mead. Yaaaaay. I'm still kind of just playing when making mead. One of these days I'll have more time to plan it out and take it more seriously. There was talk of making a pyment (Sauv blanc juice and orange blossom honey? yum) today, but that was more thought than I wanted to put in just now.

Mead Batch #05
Pluot Melomel
-5lbs Orange Blossom honey
-10lbs Macerated Pluots
-Water to 3 gallons
-1tsp pectic enzyme
~3g BA-11 dry yeast, rehydrated with GoFerm
OG: 1.090ish (calculated from honey and estimated sugar content of pluots)
FG: 1.008
ABV: 10.7%

Macerated/pitted pluots, stuck them in the freezer for a month or two. Thawed yesterday. Mixed honey and water, poured pluots into mesh bag, stirred in with must and pectic enzyme. Mixed in rehydrated yeast.

Still my hobby, I swear

12/2 - Bottled
11/28 - SG 1.015-6
11/25 - Zest and juice from 2 mikan boiled in half liter of wort, added to main brew.

Man, it was hot in Japan this summer. And when I was in the States with my beer toys, I never found time to brew. So finally, in November, it's cool enough that I can keep my apartment the right temp for fermenting, and I've got withdrawal bad enough to pay Japanese prices for ingredients. I feel so much better with this one chilling and waiting for the yeast pitch.

Batch #76

-1.5 kg Dry Malt Extract
-1 lb Aromatic (steeped)
-12.5 g Nugget, 11.4%AA (60min)
-12.5 g Nugget, 11.4%AA (20min)
-25 g Cascade (5min)
-25 g Cascade (1min)
-Fermentis Safale US-05 dry yeast, all 11.5g of it (Probably too much. Thanks, Jamil)
OG: 1.065
FG: 1.016
ABV: 6.4%
IBU:  80ish

Steeped grains in 12 L cool water with heat to 160F for ~45min. Dumped in extract, boiled for 60min. Clarifier at 10min. About 9 L after boil. Chilled, fermenting in 65-68F ambient.

Framboozin'

Update 12/9/08 - SG dropped a bit more, the beer tastes fantastic, and its in the keg.
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Update 12/8/08 - Do you know how hard it is to find unsweetened red raspberries for less than $4/12oz? Safeway has the sweetened stuff. TJ's has BLACK raspberries, which are not the same as red raspberries in color or flavor. Whole Foods has unsweetened red. But I really didn't want to spend $20+ on frozen berries. So I used a big can of Oregon puree (49oz?). Beer's been in secondary on the fruit since the 3rd...I'll give it another few days and then keg it up. SG was at 1.017 at racking, but there's been some more activity (had to stir the puree in, which riled the yeast a bit), so I expect it'll come down to maybe 1.014-1.015. A little lower than I was hoping for, but I guess that's what I get for pitching a healthy starter of WLP001.
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Another brown! This one will receive berries in secondary to make a (hopefully) less-syrupy clone of New Belgium Frambozen.

Batch#26
Framboozin'
--12.5lbs Am. 2-row (RAHR)
--0.5lbs Brit. Chocolate
--0.25lbs Amer. Crystal 60L
--0.25lbs Melanoidin Malt
--0.5lbs Maltodextrin
--1oz Kent Goldings 4.2%AA (60min)
--1oz Willamette 4.3%AA (15min)
--1oz Willamette 4.3%AA (5min)
--1/4tsp Supermoss (10min)
--4lbs frozen raspberries (secondary)
--WLP001 Calif. Ale, ~1.3L starter
OG: 1.067
FG: 1.013
ABV: ~7%
IBU: ~20

Mash at 150F for 60 minutes in 17qts water (~1.25 qts/lbs). Mash-out for 10 minutes at 170F (add 2 gallons boiling water). Fly sparge with 2.9 gallons at 170F. Extract 6.5 gallons for 60 minute boil. Estimated water usage: 8.2 gallons. Assuming grain absorption of 0.12 gal/lb, about 1.6 gallons lost to grain.

Why not?

Update 9/13/08 - Bottled 4.5 gallons. Tart right now, but should mellow over the next month or so. Primed with 4oz corn sugar.
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Update 9/7/08 - Racked to secondary, added 1# frozen berries.
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Update 9/1/08 - Ack! Well, more of a "BOOM" and a soft rattle of the house. I forgot that this one tends to ferment really fast and didn't hook up a blow-off tube. So I instead spent about half an hour cleaning up the closet and am doing laundry to get the blackberry out of everything. At least my fancier clothes that share the closet weren't hit. Smells good, though.
--

Competitions are coming, and just for the hell of it, I decided to submit one of my favorite brews. Changed it up a little this time to enhance the berry flavor. Should be ready in time for the California State Homebrew Competition, and the MoreBeer forum competition, which I will be stewarding to try and get in to the judging thing (at the very least, to refine my tasting skills). I'll probably also submit the GoP Trippel.

In other news, my mash efficiency jumped up today. Turns out the mill I was using didn't grind well enough for all grain. With the other mill in the shop, my efficiency (nothing else significantly different) jumped to around 75%.

Batch #21
Blackberry Stout 3 (All-grain), Irish Ale Yeast (White Labs 004)
--9 lbs Amer. 2-row Pale (RAHR)
--1 lb Crystal 40L
--8 oz Black Roasted
--4 oz Black Patent
--4 oz Chocolate Malt
--1 oz Glacier 6.0%AA (60min)
--1 oz Glacier 6.0%AA (1min)
--4 lbs Frozen blackberries (~10min)
--1 lb Frozen blackberries (secondary)
--1/4 tsp Supermoss (10min)
OG: 1.054+ (right on the money for 75% efficiency!)
FG: 1.011
ABV: ~6%
Calc. IBUs: ~23

Mashed for 1 hour at 154F in 3.5 gallons water. Fly sparge (by the pint) with 170F strike, collected ~ 6.5 gallons wort. Added 4 lbs berries with clarifier to sterilize. One pound of berries will be added to the secondary.

Blackberry Stout the Second

Update: So tasty. So very, very tasty. Roasty toasty malt flavor with just enough berry flavor for it to be recognizable but not overpowering. Will definitely go for round 3 on this one.
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The old blackberry stout was such a hit after it aged for a couple months that I thought I'd try it again. This time, instead of spending nye $30 to have the berry puree shipped from Maryland (seriously, it's the one berry that MoreBeer doesn't supply), I spent about $10 at Trader Joe's for berries. The stout kit I used as a base last time has changed a little (hop shortage, anyone?), and we left out the gypsum, since that just made the beer chalky and is primarily for mash water adjustment, anyway. The main difficulty of the method I used was that I didn't have a sanitized strainer on hand to scoop my berries out of the wort. This meant that I clogged the spout on my bucket and had to pour from the bucket into a funnel. That actually went surprisingly well with an extra pair of hands to help. The only other issue was the berries clogged the funnel at the end of the pour, and I had to hop (as in a grain hopper, not as in hops) the funnel so the berries would fall through.

Batch #11
Blackberry Stout 2 (extract), Irish Ale Yeast (White Labs 004)
--7+ lbs Ultralight Malt Extract
--1 lb Crystal 40L
--8 oz Black Roasted
--4 oz Black Patent
--4 oz Chocolate Malt
--1 oz Glacier 6.0%AA (60min)
--1 oz Glacier 6.0%AA (1min)
--5 lbs Frozen Blackberries (~10min)
--1 Whirlfloc tab (20min)
OG: 1.054
FG: 1.013
ABV: 5.4%
Calc. IBUs: ~25

Steep grains 30 minutes in 4 gallons water at 160±10ºF, add water to 6 gallons, bring to boil. Add extract and 1 oz Glacier. At 20 minutes, toss in clarifier. At 10 minutes, dunk in chiller and berries. I'd recommend bringing the berries up to at least room temp first, as the cold berries set my boil back about 10 minutes. More hops at 1 minute. Chill. Ferment. Secondary after 1 week to get the beer off the berries. After bottle/keg, give it one month to condition, drink within four months.

Blackberry Stout

Update 12/02/07: We opened up some of the conditioned blackberry stout this weekend, and the verdict is in: it's... OK, I guess. One of my friends thought it had a bitter finish, which I didn't taste. The lady says it's too dry in the finish, which I agree with. In the end, I think it's a good balance between hop and blackberry, and it's the taste I was aiming for, but that the gypsum gave it a little more hardness than needed.
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Update 11/19/07: Bottled. FG and ABV below. The beer is not quite as purple anymore, and tastes pretty good. I'm looking forward to the finished product. Yield was a little low at 4 gallons.
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A brief foray into the world of fruit beers. This recipe was intended to be a mix of two Irish stout extract recipes I found on www.beerrecipes.org, but I settled for the MoreBeer kit as a starting point, since the differences were not too great. I had intended to use 6 lbs dark malt extract and 1/2 lb each of 80L and 120L. I was going to give Fuggles hops a try, as well. I decided to pasteurize the puree, despite claims of it being asceptic, and hope that most of the pulp will settle out before I rack to the secondary fermenter. The calculated IBUs are probably a bit off due to the gravity of my boil at different times, but hey, it's...

Batch #3
Blackberry Stout (tweaked extract kit), Irish Ale Yeast (White Labs)
--7 lbs Ultralight Malt Extract
--1.5 tsp gypsum*
--1 lb Crystal 40L
--8 oz Black Roasted
--4 oz Black Patent
--4 oz Chocolate Malt
--1 oz Northern Brewer 6.8%AA (60min)
--1 oz Cascade (1min)
--3.1 lbs Seedless Blackberry Puree (~10min)*
OG: 1.051-1.052
FG: 1.016
ABV: 4.7%
Calc. IBUs: 28.6

*My additions, the rest (except for the yeast) is MoreBeer's Stout (Kit175). The gypsum (CaSO4) acts to improve clarity and accentuate the hop bitterness. If you've never used it, do like I did: check your water report and figure out the ppm of sulfate to expect after the addition. Too much has toilet-related consequences. Thanks again, John Palmer...really, read his book!

Much like the porter, the baby beer spit up through the airlock. I really need a blow-off rig for the fermenter.