Karley's Stout

It's certainly been awhile since we've updated our website. For that, I apologize. Since our last post we've all been busy traveling, running half marathons, marathons, and visiting our brewery that we just opened in the DC area. One of the two batches that we have brewed recently was a Rhubarb Ale. A full grain amber ale that we added as much frozen rhubarb that we could. My word is it delectable. Once we can procure some more ingredients we will be brewing this again.

Aside from that and the primary reason for this post is our work up of Karley's Stout. We've brewed this twice before straight from a kit but this time we decided to work up a full grain batch. Brewmaster McGurk came up with the grain bill and the other ingredients on this recipe. Ground coffee beans and chocolate were added right at the end of the boil. When we transferred into the secondary we added some extra strong coffee to it. Finally, on the first day of 2013 we kegged the brew and are eagerly awaiting New Beer's Day. The most wonderful holiday of the year!

Brewmaster Skidmore

The grain bed

Clean bottles for bottling the Rhubarb Ale

The Rhubarb Ale

Our Brewhouse

Apprentice Amos learning how to brew

Karley's Stout Wort

The keg for Wild Dog has been kicked with this pint. Room for kegging Karley's Stout.

Blackberry Dunkel

Today we revisit an old favorite, the Blackberry Dunkelweizen.  A dunkelweizen is a dark wheat beer; weizen, which indicates the wheat beer is the same as the weizen in hefeweizen and dunkel, a prefix that literally means dark.  Our first batch of this beer was done with blackberry extract.  The result was a very tasty, very popular (among our followers, a.k.a., us and our friends) brew; however, it did have a distinctive, vacant blackberry extract flavor.  We vowed to re-brew with actual berries.  Today, we have prepared 26.3 ounces (over a pound and a half) of blackberry juice, pressed from locally sourced berries.  That's just the juice, we removed the pulp for fear of making our beer too bitter.

Music for today's brewing is the Tabasco Donkeys (http://www.larrymclaughlin.net/tobasco-donkeys) original album, Sawin' on the Strings.

Original gravity: 1.062.  Bon voyage, Blackberry Dunkel!

Glass that Gives

New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, CO is helping out Save the Colorado, Organic Farming Research Foundation, Waterkeeper Alliance, and People for Bikes.  New Belgium Brewery will donate $1 to these charities for each photo posted on, "what's in your glass."

http://www.facebook.com/newbelgium

Karley and I... and a Snow Day.

The Physics of Beer

That's right, it's not just chemistry and biology, there is a significant amount of fluid mechanics going on in beer.  This is a fascinating monologue on some of the physics:

 And for those who are looking for more details, check out the article on the bubbles in Guinness.

Captains Log: Brewdate 11-8-11

Today we brewed our first full grain beer. We procured the following barley from Bull City Homebrew:

• 6 lbs. American two-row,
• 6 oz. English Crystal (55L),
• 2.5 oz. Roasted Barley.

Now this is our first foray into full grain brewing and it quickly became evident we hadn't given this issue out full consideration. As such there was a few issues. First, the amount of equipment that it takes to do this properly. Second, given we didn't have some specialized equipment, how we were going to achieve a full grain brew with what we had.

First things first. Brewing a good full grain beer involves a 3-step process called lautering. Lautering involves mash out, recirculation and sparging and is usually done with a Lauter tun. A Lauter tun basically has a false bottom allowing the grains to be mixed directly into the warm water and also aides recirculation - the process of removing the water from the bottom of the Lauter tun and returning it back into the pot at the top. Well, we don't have a Lauter Tun so we improvised.

The improvisation involves keeping the grains held in a permeable bag and adding them into our boil pot which we'd pre-heated to 150F. This means that our recirculation was going to consist of us stirring this bag with a metal spoon in an attempt to keep the temperature and concentration of the mash constant.

We also didn't have a fancy gravity-fed hot water reservoir to do a proper sparging. So, improvising again, we had a separate smaller boil pot (our sparging pot) which we heated the water to 170F. After an hour of the grains in the mash tun we removed the grain bag and placed it into the sparging pot and rinsed the grains until the liquid from the grain bag ran relatively clear.

From here we then used the sparging water (now wort) to give the grain bag one final rinse as we transferred the the wort into our boil pot (the original mash tun).

Then, everything runs back to how we're used to doing things when we use a kit. Add our bittering, flavor, and aroma hops over the next hour before chilling the wort and transferring to the primary fermenter. What will become of this "MacGyver Ale"? We'll know in a few weeks time.

All and all, we're excited by the move to full grain, as it allows us more control over our malt profile compared to using a kit. There are several improvements on the equipment side that we'll need to fix before trying this again but nothing insurmountable.

For our hops, we tried to keep things tame (by our hop-head standards).  We started with 1.25 oz of Centennial hops (alpha acid = 9.2%) at the start of the boil for bittering, and a mixture of Cascade (alpha acid = 6.4%) and Amarillo (alpha acid = 8.2%) hops at 50 and 55 minutes for flavor and aroma.  Initial gravity = 1.052.  In the carboy, there is a lot of sediment, but the color looks good and it smells amazing.

Hooray beer.