Brain Enema of a Savage Mind

There had been a delay in bottling any of our homebrew that was caused by great laziness.  Sanitizing bottles is slow, messy, and really annoying.  I’m not a fan of the whole bottling.  Though I will admit once I actually get underway with it, it’s not as bad.  Getting the motivation to start the process is the difficult part.  Tonight we managed to get a little bit of motivation to take care of bottling one of the three beers readied to be bottled.  The other two will get bottled this week which will then free me up for making the next beer.  I’m thinking the Maple Porter is the next beer on the docket.

Last night we finally bottled the barley wine.  At least with this style letting it condition in the secondary isn’t a bad thing.  Tasted some out of the jar I took the hydrometer reading from.  Pretty yummy.  You can feel the heat from the alcohol though - I’m hoping that’s going to mellow after a nice long time conditioning in the bottles.  I’m sure I’ll try some after a month or so, but with a beer like this you want it to age for several months in the bottle first.

Tomorrow I head to Ellictoville, NY for the Rites of Spring Beer and Wine fest.  I’m going to be representing Ithaca Beer.  I’m especially excited because they’re having a Real Ale competition.  I’ve never actually had any cask conditioned beer before so I’m really anxious to try these.  I’m bringing a cask conditioned version of our Flower Power.  It should be damn good.  But I certainly want to try a little bit of everything.  It’ll also be good to meet some people from other breweries around the state and maybe make a few contacts.  It’s nice to make the New York brewing community a more friendly place.  Working together I think we can make the New York beer scene one of the best out there - at the very least we can give it our best shot.  Also, hell, I just like talking about beer.

On Sunday I decided to make a barley wine since that’s a style of beer I had yet to experiment with.  The idea snaked its way in to my head thanks to Chief’s blog post about the barley wine he’s going to be doing for the Excelsior series of beers here at the brewery.  After doing a little reading on the subject I decided to go with a fairly simple partial  mash for it.  Even with using some malt extract (a recipe to be posted a little later since I don’t have it in front of me at the moment) I still ended up using 13 lbs of grain.  In the past I had issues getting decent extraction from my grain but I had been working on that as well and I was absolutely thrilled with the type of efficiency I was getting with this mash (a little over 70%).  I also switched to doing a 90 minute boil (likely inspired by working in a brewery that does) and the wort had a very rich aroma and sweet sticky flavor to it.

I pitched the yeast in late Sunday night and woke up the next morning to… nothing at all.  The yeast (WLP550) was a little on the old side for what they reccomend so I wasn’t too concerned until it became Tuesday morning and still no visible signs of fermentation had occured.   I knew there was more than enough sugars for that yeast to get going so I picked up a package of Safale (S-04) from work and did a quick and dirty starter for that, pitched it in, and went out drinking.  When I got home the airlock bubbled infrequently, but I was happy to see it had started.  The next morning I woke to it bubbling at a decent clip.  When I checked it Wednesday night it was like a foamy volcano went off.  Fortunatelty it didn’t blow the lid off, it was just foam spraying out the top of the airlock.  I battled back against the foam, and after several attempts I managed to get a blow off tube in to it.  Just to be safe I covered it up with a towel in case something popped loose.  This morning it was bubbling in its pot of beer and foam filled water pretty steadily.  This is without a doubt the most active fermentation I’ve ever had at home.  It’s really making me want to make this a big brew year.  There’s going to be a lot of homebrew to go around.

My friend Steph really wanted to see homebrewing in action which prompted me to get an early start on my first beer of 2007. 2006 saw an early flurry of beers, a long slow down, then a couple again right at the end (both of which will be ready for consumption in this month, but since the brewing began in 2006 they aren’t 2007 batches).

I’ve been doing a lot more crazier beers lately so I felt it was time to take a step back and return to something nice and simple. To start out the new year I made a very simple pale ale recipe. It’s primarily a grain recipe, but there is some extract in it to bulk it up.

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