Month: April 2012

Homebrewing Beer 101: The Finale

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For the past two months, almost two cases of beer were in my front hall closet going thru a process of fermentation, carbonation, and conditioning. If you’ve followed along with us so far, then you’ve seen the background of how we got to this point and why. You might have even seen the second batch we bottled.  Weeks of waiting and holding and damn near torture and we’ve arrived at Judgement Day…we’re going to uncork.

This beer is a clone of Tire Biter Bitter Ale. We used a blonde malt…

And steeped hops for 90 minutes:

This creates a “wort”. The wort is the beer before it starts beerifying itself. We left the beer in a primary fermenter for a month. NOW…we should have pulled this after the first 7 days and then moved into a secondary fermenter, but we didn’t. Also, we realized when we went to bottle that we left out a couple pounds of sugar on the recipe, so we added it posto facto. It couldn’t be that great of an idea, but it worked out pretty good, all things considered. The wort went for a second fermentation with the added sugar. Then we pulled it, bottled it, and let it sit for 3.5 weeks to condition perfectly.

And here we are.

We keep a stocked kegerator that has a freezer on top, perfect for keeping frosty mugs and p’s for the beer. Four friends, four frosty pubbers, four bottles of beer.

Let’s do this…

The immediate pop is a HUGE relief to us. You never know if the carbonation is going to really take place. As long as the sugars stay fermenting and the cap stays airtight, then we should be good on bubbles. If not…well, let’s not discuss the ‘if nots’ right now.

The pour is perfect…lots of air, lots of foam. Good head forms on the top of the golden elixir and tiny bubbles work their way up thru the now completed beer.

Tasting notes: I’ll admit…I expected this to kinda suck. The homebrews I’ve had in the past have sucked harder than anyone has ever sucked before. This got off on the right foot in the glass. It looked like beer. It smelled like beer. And by gawd, it TASTED LIKE BEER. And not just homemade beer…this tasted DAMN GOOD. Tons of hoppy flavor and bite, a very citrusy finish that didn’t linger as much as the hops. We didn’t take measurements on this one, but from the buzz we got right afterwards, we are guessing that the abv is quite high.

This was a really good beer. Not to brag, but we KILLED it the first time out. We all sat in awe of the process and the work we did, still not really sure if one or all but one of us got together and filled the glasses with real beer as a joke on one person. It was a very good beer, to the point that I’d take it over most commercially made beers. The body was deep; lots of character to it. The bubbles made a perfect head with creamy froth for your lips.

We call this one “Made In Voyage”.  It’s a play on words from “maiden voyage”, or our first time thru the process.  But mainly because we changed things up from the original recipe as we went, so we were literally making this in the voyage and making it up as we went.  We are still learning the rules, but so far our little maverick ways have paid off.

And after all this time, all it took was a little homebrew. I’m hooked. Can’t wait to get right back in and try another batch.

Homebrewing Beer 101: Editor’s Note – Big Jim’s Double Dark

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As a quick aside from our beer chronicles, we went ahead and purchased the ingredients for a Double Bock (or a “Doppel Bock” as the purist say) the last time we were in the brewstore. This is made with DARK malts and dark roasted grains. The recipe is meant to be a clone of the delicious Paulaner Salvator Doppel. I’ll add more pictures down the road at some point, but this actually is worth a quick post just to tell the story of our first ‘big’ beer. We wanted one that would be ready in a couple months and a fun one. This one takes 6 months to finish off. That sounds long to the novice, but the masters will brew then cask in bourbon oak casks for a year at a time to mellow their wort.

We’re not waiting that long, at least not at first when we are still learning how to do this. Here’s the fun part, though….when we were bottling the bitter ale, we realized that we LEFT THE SUGAR OUT OF THE DOUBLE BOCK. That’s an issue. Without enough sugar, the yeasts can create enough alcohol and the flavor will be really weak. After some deliberation and a commercial beer or two, we decided to go ahead and mix in the sugar AFTER the initial fermentation to restart the yeasts for another fermentation before we bottled. The process would last 3days to a week until the sugar was devoured.

Now…was this a smart idea? Probably not. The risk of picking up mold spores or dust or anything bad in the transfer is really not something we want to do. However, spending 6 months on a beer that ends up tasting like something they sell in Oklahoma where they limit the beer abv to 3.9% is not something we’d rather do. So we mixed up the sugar with some of the wort we siphoned out of the carboy then funneled it back in. After a full week, the bubbles stopped and the beer was ready to bottle. We left it in an extra week. Why? Well, we were busy. That’s probably not that smart either, but hey…we are new to this.

Bottles, disinfected and dried

The glass carboy with the delicious double bock waiting inside. Notice the ring of yeast around the top. That’s where the wort was when we first put it in. The yeast ate it down that far.

The color is like cappuccino. Dark brown with a foamy crema on top.

I’m fast forwarding a bit, but this is what the carboy looks like after it’s drained. The bottom looks like saturated river bottom sand. Doesn’t smell like it, though…this smells like warm yeasty bread with a PUNGENT alcohol punch to it. Smells incredible.

This is the brew in the secondary fermenter that we are using for bottling b/c it’s the only bucket we have with a spigot. Forgive me for the heaven photo effect, but it’s the only one I could find that highlighted the brew and the crema without picking up any other colors. The texture is similar to a dark soy sauce. It’s a sweet flavor that’s definitely young and needs some time in the bottle. In a pinch, though, you could drink this right now. It would need to be in a pinch, though, because this needs some bottle lovin’ for a few months.

We used a couple oversized bottles that Runnin’ Buddy has been saving for a few years in case he ever picked up homebrewing. It’s almost destiny.

Some random shots of the bottles, filled with the sweet nectar of the double bock.

And there we have it…forty bottles of our double bock that we lovingly named Big Jim’s Double Dark. Check back in August when we get to open these.