Brain Enema of a Savage Mind

The Art of the Brew

Since the completion of my new mash tun my desire to homebrew has been back on the rise.  Over the years it’s come and gone.  There have been periods where I was making a couple beers every month.  Then suddenly I’d go half a year without brewing.  I’m sure there were any number of factors involved, but I know that my last falling out with homebrewing had to do with the fact I was really tired of doing extract batches, and my previous couple of all-grain batches had been absolute failures.  Those failures were not procedural in nature, but were due to poor equipment and setup.  So I sort of shelved the whole homebrew thing for a bit.  Last month I got all the pieces to put together a new mash tun, and my first brew with it had pretty damn great efficiency - creeping up towards 80% which is more than I could have hoped for.

I’ve already gotten in on the recent group buy for bulk grains.  Now that I can do reliable all grain mashes and no longer just mini-mashes, 55lbs sacks of my base malt are going to be essential.  For now I think I’ll be going with Maris Otter, but that may change later down the road.  I’ve always liked Maris Otter – it’s a very clean grain with good extraction.  I’ll also have to start picking up some 10ish pound bags of speciality malt so I can give my beers all the character that they deserve.

My first all grain batch with the mash tun was an IPA primarily using Ahtanum hops.  I’d been wanting to try these for awhile so I figured an IPA was the best way to showcase them.  I also decided to try and get a little bit fancy with this IPA and put about 8 ounces of Gambrinus honey malt in to it. I’ve heard people saying the honey malt barely adds any honey flavor, to people saying that even a tiny amount imparts a huge taste.  I guess a lot of it is a matter of perspective and soon enough I’ll find out how I feel about 8 ounces of the malt.

The IPA just went in to the keg today so now it’s chilling down and carbonating.  Come this weekend I’ll get to taste test my first all grain batch that actually fermented like a mad demon.  It smells great, it looks great, and I can’t wait to find out this weekend if it tastes great!

Big Orange Mash Tun

All the parts arrived over the weekend for my new mash tun.  My old setup was a five gallon cooler with a half-assed home made false bottom and some plastic fitting.  Not at all an ideal setup, but did a decent enough job for partial-mash stuff.  Still I had been itching to get back to all grain brewing, but knew I needed a better setup if I was to get decent enough efficiency.  Plus with only a five gallon cooler I could really only do about 10 or 11 lbs of grain in a single mash.  A lot of my all grain recipes are over that amount, or else right around it so all grain had always been a pain in the past.

With this new setup I should be able to do approximately 24 pounds of grain in a single bash.  That means I can pump out some high gravity monsters of five gallon batches.  I’ve got all the ingredients lined up today for making an IPA.  14 pounds of grain are all crushed and ready to go in to the mash in just a little bit.  This will only be my second brew since Gabriel was born, and my first all grain batch in I can’t remember how long.

Bottles of beer.

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.

Beer and more beer.

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.

Mighty Fine Barley Wine

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.