12 Daze brew - Part 3

Bottling. Oh how I hate thee. Seriously. What a pain in the ass to clean, sanitize, fill and cap 52 bottles for a batch. And for this batch I even cheated and bought new bottles instead of recycling commercial bottles and refilling them. Kegging would have taken less than 30 minutes from start to clean up. Bottling? Close to 2 hours.
The East Valley Homebrew group had scheduled Dec 9th as the day to swap all of our brews. This was due to one of the members taking a sample of each brew to Omaha and swapping them for a sample of their brews.
In my haste (laziness) I guess I didn't check the exact time of the swap. I woke up Sunday morning and started cleaning the garage. Finished that around 11 and then cleaned up and went in to bottle. I haven't bottled anything but mead in a few years so finding all the pieces and sanitizing them took much longer than it should have.
After I make a quick lunch while letting the bottles, caps, transfer lines, etc. soak in sanitizer I started to fill bottles with the help of my gorgeous (if not very happy about it) brew wife. We're about half done and my phone buzzes. Text message from a member of the brew group asking where we're at.

"Huh?!?! I'm at home, bottling in preparation for tonights bottle swap. Where are you? "

"At the bottle swap waiting for you. It's 1:30, you were supposed to be here at 1 and people are wanting to leave but need your brew first."

Oh crap! into hyper-mode. Send the wife in to shower, and start capping like crazy. 30 minutes later we're out the door with the label file emailed to myself so I can run into the copy store and print off the labels. Scissors and a glue stick in hand.

Get to the copy store and what a mess. There's 3 employees and they are all working on some sort of project for a customer. They wave me over to the DIY section and tell me that what I'm looking for will be super fast. 15 minutes and 10 copies later (and $9.50 something) I'm out the door with my 10 copies in hand. Brew wife cutting out the labels while we drive.

So, we finally make it to the brew swap with all the bottles, only 2 hours late... with flat, warm beer. Go me!

After sampling all the other brews I'm blown away by the brew skill among the members of our group. From bourbon beers, to wine soaked oak beers, to golden strong ales. All were fantastic and not a bad beer in the bunch.

I'm looking forward to trying the rest of the batch over the coming weeks and to doing something as a group concept again. 

BNektar Zombie Killer Inspired "brew"

I've been doing a lot of reading on this mead/ melomel/ cider (not sure exactly what category this fits in) but haven't been able to get a bottle of my own to try. So I figured I'd mix up a batch and see if I at least make something drinkable.

I've made a bit of mead, some have been good, some I've relegated to cooking with. But one thing I haven't done is made one with such a low ABV. This drink is only 5.5%, which is lower than most of the ciders I've made and all of the melomels and meads I've made. The actual "brew" process was quick. Sanitize everything, pour in 2 gallons of Whole Food brand Organic 365 cider, 64 ounces of 100% Tart Cherry juice, 3 lbs of Orange Blossom honey (I can't find Star Thistle) and a starter pack of Mead yeast I picked up to try.

It's been one week and damn is this tasty, but it needs more cherry flavor. Right now it's all apple. Still yeasty in the taste as well. Will add another 64 ounces of cherry juice this weekend and let that ferment out and then cold crash the whole thing. Hopefully it's a little sweet and has some cherry flavor without over powering the apple and honey. 

12 Daze Brew - Part 2

Day 2 of the 12 Daze Group Brew

Woke up Sunday to a massive blow off from the 1 gallons of wort. I should have known better than to put a little 3 piece airlock on a container that was that full. Nice sticky mess all over the the place to clean up. Lovely.

So the main part of the brew was (I assumed) happily chugging away in Andrews temp controlled chest freezer fermenter. The other gallon was fermenting in my kitchen on the counter (now in a tub using the swamp cool effect to keep the temp down as my kitchen was sitting at 72).

I still didn't have any caramel flavor in my Turtle Dove brew. Time to fix that, so I dug out recipe books on how to make caramel, and looked up what makes caramel flavor instead of just burnt sugar. An hour of reading later and 3lbs of white table sugar, 1 tsp of baking powder, 1 cup water, and 1 stick of butter (butter? in a beer? Yeah, I know - we'll see) are into a 4 quart pan and bubbling away. Up to a boil and follow the recipe for "super soft and gooey" caramel. The only difference was I wasn't letting this batch set out to dry, I was mixing it back into the partially fermented 1 gallon's of wort. I transferred the liquid from the  small container into a 2 gallon glass jug, poured in the caramel, and put the 2 gallon jug into the rubbermaid bucket full of iced water and let that get back to fermenting.

The small batch with caramel fermented SUPER quick, I didn't measure the gravity on it but it doesn't smell solventy or fusely so we'll see.

Picked up the fermented large batch from Andrew's house the other day, and brought that home so I can transfer to a 2ndary and blend with the smaller caramel batch. It smells a little hoppier than I was thinking it would turn out, hopefully the higher OG and malt bill balances it out as this is supposed to make one think of Turtle Dove Candy. 

12 Daze Brew (2 Turtle Doves) - Part 1

Brewed a group brew on 10/27 - We're doing a "12 Days of Christmas" brew and everyone picks a number and designs a beer that represents what they interpret that number to be. Then we're all swapping bottles amongst our group, as well as swapping with another homebrew group based out of Omaha. I'm looking forward to trying everyone's brew.

I picked "2 Turtle Doves" which immediately made me think of the Turtle Dove chocolate covered caramel candies. So I designed a recipe that I hoped would make people think of that.

We're trading bottles with the Omaha club right around the 1st weekend in Christmas, so brewing anything too big was out of the question as it wouldn't have time to mellow and come together.

Recipe; 2 Turtle Doves Brew - 12 Daze Group Brew

9 lbs - 2 Row
3 lbs - Caramalized table sugar
1 lbs Pale Chocolate Malt
1 lbs Chocolate Malt
.5 lbs Carafoam
.5 lbs Crystal 40
.5 lbs Crystal 80
.25 lbs Milk Sugar/ Lactose added in secondary as part of this will have no lactose so our vegan friends can partake
1 oz Newport for 90 min
1 oz Pecan extract (starting much smaller will have to taste to determine correct amount for a 5 gallon batch)

Planned OG 1.062 - and 33 IBU's, which brings this in at about 6.6% ABV with a finishing gravity somewhere around 1.010

The brew day went great. I brewed over at Andrew's house and "helped" remove stuff from his garage while he takes it all out, cleans it, and turns it into a brew house. (See HERE)

My current system is a hobbled together, gravity fed, 3 tier system I pieced together from stuff lying around the house and trying to spend as little as possible. I'm used to ghetto rigged, I'm used to having a brew day go bad and spending more time fixing and salvaging than I do actually brewing. But today I used Andrew's not quite as ghetto brew set up. And it REALLY threw all my numbers off.
I normally get about 78-80% efficiency and had planned the recipe above accordingly. I'm not sure what went "wrong" but I ended up boiling for 90 minutes instead of 60 in order to evaporate more water. His system doesn't boil off nearly as much as mine does, possibly due to his boil pot (Blichmann 10 gallon gorgeous lady affectionately known as Megan Fox) being a little taller and skinnier than my pot. So instead of 6 gallons left at 60 minutes I had 6.75, so back to the boil for another 30 minutes trying to get it down to 6. After 30 minutes I was down to 6.5 and called it good.
And that's when I took my 1st gravity reading and noticed I was WAY high. So I have 1 gallon more water, and I'm still a full 20 points higher than planned. Not sure at all what happened except after asking Andrew he says he normally gets upwards of 90% efficiency, and I had milled the grains a little smaller than normal to see if it made a difference. The combination worked great - IF I had planned for it.
So 5 gallons into the 5.5 gallon fermenter and a nice 1 liter healthy starter of US05 that was cleaned and decanted from a brew done 2 weeks earlier of Pale Ale.
The extra gallon of wort got put into a growler to take home and ferment there.

(continued)

Tracking the Brewing

I've been brewing for close to 3 years, but besides making recipes in Beersmith I have no idea what (or when) I've actually brewed. So....  This is going to be a running log of what and when I brew and my tasting notes. And, all my brewing related mishaps and adventures.