Category beer

I’m trying a small sample of my beer which I just pulled from the carboy where it is aging…

It’s good. Real good.

Another week of aging then about a month in the bottles and it’ll be good to drink. Mmm.

Hmm, should I add caffeine to my Java Stout?

I found this source of USP caffeine. I’d just need to add 10g to the beer in secondary… Then carefully test a bottle.

I’d also need to borrow a beam balance from somewhere…

Hmm…

[Crossposted to and …]

~5.5 gallons of wort, boiling away.
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So, what did today hold? Well, upon waking up I found out that was en route to my place to hang out during / help out with the beer brewing.

While waiting for her to arrive I did my best to prep ingredients as needed. While I should have started the mash at that time, it still worked out all right… Within a few hours the partial mash (and protein rest) were complete, and it was time to heat the wort for boiling.

Despite working out in the snow and ~20 MPH winds, boiling went pretty well. I had a couple of boilovers, but nothing too bad. I’m not sure why these happened, although it seemed that it may have been tied to whenever the wind would die down. The boilovers did result in some wort getting on the burner but hopefully this won’t be too hard (or necessary) to clean off.

The wort came out with a density (OG) of 1.073 which should make for about a 8% beer or so if my figuring is correct. It is now sitting on a milk crate in my bathtub and producing a bubble of CO₂ through the airlock every 30 seconds or so, which for yeast pitching plus ~2 hours isn’t bad. Although that may be because I had made a nicely active 32oz starter….

Anyway, that’s today’s brewing activity, and hopefully while moving it into secondary in a week or so I’ll also add 15 fluid ounces or so of very strongly brewed Zingerman’s In-The-House Blend made in my recently acquired Aerobie AeroPress.

With any luck, people will like it as much as they did the Vanilla Stout (photo gallery retired).

(Hmm, I guess I don’t know if there is any Java beans in the blend, so I can’t rightly call it a Java Stout… May have to change that… Hmm…)

[Cross posted to and …]

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Yesterday when poking picking up some groceries at Trader Joe’s I noticed some rather interesting bottles labeled ‘Trader Joe’s’ but with a distinctly Unibroue bit of text below the label priced at $4.99. Looking at the cap and the back of the bottle shows that yes indeed, Unibroue makes it. Based on this I picked up a bottle, but I still haven’t given it a try yet.

So I have to ask, have any of you happened to try this rather interesting private label bottling by one of Quebec’s finest breweries?

I should also note that the metal cap covering the top of the cork is identical to the one on a bottle of Unibroue’s 2005, but the bottle is (obviously) different.

On a related note, I added a bunch more photos to the beer section of my photo gallery (photo gallery retired). I’ll point to some of the more notable ones here:

· New Holland Brewing Company’s Dragon’s Milk Ale
· Each of the beers in Bell’s Wheat Project: Wheat Two, Wheat Four, Wheat Six, Wheat Eight, and Wheat Love
· Dogfish Head’s Pangaea
· Lindemans Framboise Lambic

Oh, and there should be a bottle of Dogfish Head‘s Fort in there soon, to hopefully be opened on NYE. I received a call earlier this evening from my favorite local beer shop The Red Wagon Wine Shoppe that it had come in. Woo!

Remember how, when learning Algebra in high school, most people thought that they’d never really need it in day to day life? Well, while I don’t use such things for my job, I need to solve similar problems all the time for brewing beer.

Well, the telltale ring of foam has appeared on the surface of the fermenting cider, indicating the yeast is just about to break the growing vs. eating threshold. I’d expect that when I get home there should be a goodly layer of foam (still not sure if it is called krausen on cider) on the surface. Yay!

Oh, the ring is — I believe — caused by the initial dosing of yeast settling in the lowest point of the carboy, a ring about 2″ in from the outside wall, all along the bottom. Then as it takes just gets going, the most wee bubbles come from this area, producing a ring of foam on the surface of the cider. After that, it’ll become a wholly roiling mass of yeast and CO₂ and juice and other things, as described previously.

Unfortunately with the start of the fermentation comes the inevitable sulfur smell. That makes it smell a bit ass-y in the basement. Literally.

At least it’s expected.

At 1:55pm today I pitched one vial of White Labs English Cider Yeast (WLP775) into about five and one half gallons of juice to be fermented into hard cider. This juice mixture contains the following:

Five Gallons Yates’ Apple Cider (fresh juice, for non-US people)
Three Fourths of One Pound of Lactose
One Cup of (mostly) Dark Amber Grade B Maple Syrup
Two Cups of Unfiltered Honey from Honeyflow Farm in Dryden, MI
Five Teaspoons of Yeast Nutrient
Two and One Half Teaspoons of Yeast Energizer

Yes, this is pretty much the same as before, except I’m not going to add spices to this batch. I figure that since cider is only available fresh this time of the year, making 10 gallons would be smart, as it should keep for a while. This way I’ll also get some variety in flavor. Hopefully it doesn’t suck. :)

For the record, the OG of this batch was right about 1.070. I think that’s because there were less solid bits of sugar in the honey this time.

Mmm. Now to enjoy this Boss Coffee (regular double roast one) and hope that hiking this afternoon pans out.

Hmm, it seems that I can get raw honey for $1.50/lb from Honeyflow Farms. I think I should make some mead…