Category beer

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Well, as of a week ago I had been making hard cider. Now I think I’ve realized that I’ve made a whole different beast… For I tried a sip of it when I was racking it, just to see how it was coming along, and despite being extremely tasty, it made me a bit light headed.

So with racking the cider into the secondary fermenter I added spices. To the five gallons of cider which were put to ferment with two cups of honey and one cup of grade ‘b’ maple syrup I added the following:

· 11g cinnamon sticks, broken
· 3g nutmeg (one whole, crushed)
· 4g whole cloves
· 3g whole allspice
· 11g dried orange peel

Hopefully those spices will polish off the cider and make it oh-so-wonderful. We’ll just have to see… Oh, I’ve also got two photos of the spices floating up into the neck of the carboy here and here. I’m not sure which I liked more, so I just uploaded them both.

If you’d like to see the rest of the photos, they can all be seen here or you can look at the (recently updated) recipe here.

Ahh, I just pitched the yeast into the cider and gave the carboy a shake. I hope it starts fermenting before I get home…

(This is mostly a note for my own timestamping purposes.)

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Well, despite my original plans to get the hard cider started today, I actually did it last night. It (and I imagine wine) is surprisingly easy. Much easier than making beer…

So what did I actually do last night? In short, I heated one gallon of cider to 100°F, stirred in a bunch of things (honey, yeast energizer, yeast nutrient, lactose, and maple syrup), dumped that cider in the carboy, added a chemical called potassium metabisulfite (used to sanitize liquids) and left it to sit. Monday after I get home from work I’ll be adding the yeast, and hopefully things will begin fermenting then. Woo!

If anyone is interested in the recipe I put together for this, it can be found here. It’s a bit of a take-off from the recipe I originally got from . It’s also likely to change… I may be replacing the orange zest with dried orange peel and adjusting some of the spices a bit more. I’m still not sure on the spices yet, but I should have plenty of time to figure it out.

Anyway, if you’re interested in seeing more of the pictures from the getting-cider-ready session, just click here (photo gallery retired) or on the photo up above.

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Maybe it’s just weird to me, but something strange seems to be happening with my vanilla stout. I just walked downstairs to take a look at it, and as you can see from the above photo which is taken looking down at the carboy from the top, the krausen is *gone*. The surface of the beer is sparkling like spilled hot soda, and the surface is swirling as if there is an impeller at the bottom of the carboy, but there is absolutely *no* krausen left.

Have any of you seen anything like this before? It strikes me as very odd.

That said, I haven’t used this yeast before (WLP023) so I’m not sure what to expect. However, no other batch of beer I’ve made has behaved in this manner…

Is it possible that due to the quantity of yeast energizer and yeast nutrient used in the batch (2 tsp and 4 tsp, respectively, per directions on the packaging) that the beer is simply fermenting extremely quickly? Temperature down where the carboy sits is right around 70°F on this wonderfully cool Michigan evening…

So, after getting home from work today I decided to fire up the turkey fryer I had purchased back in December but never put to use. Now that summer is getting a bit cooler, I figure it’ll be fine for me to use it to boil some beer. Well, I calibrated it (at 5, 5.5, 6, and 6.5 gallons) and then picked a spot to do the boiling at. It turns out that the best spot will be just off of my front porch on the sidewalk. I had initially fired it up in the garage, but at maximum flame it kicks out a ton of heat, and I’m also worried about carbon monoxide. I’m probably just being paranoid, but it seems better this way.

So, if things go as I hope, come Saturday or Sunday (it’ll be cooler Sunday… Hmm…) I’ll make up a batch of something I’m currently calling Random Vanilla Stout. suggested that I make a vanilla porter, but I’m wishing to go even darker, so a stout it is. I hope he still likes it. Hell, I hope I like it… I’ve only been shooting about 60% with my beers thus far.

Anyway…

I’ve also started to use a piece of software called Promash for my brewing calculations. It really makes everything very, very easy. Also, playing with the numbers in a piece of software really gives one a better understanding of how things fit together behind the scenes.

After creating the recipe I went ahead and exported it. So, if you’d like to see the recipe, take a look here.

Thus far it’s planned to be a 52.8 SRM beer and 45 IBU. This will be extremely dark, somewhat bitter, and will hopefully, thanks to the addition of two vanilla beans in bulk conditioning, have a nice underlying vanilla flavor.

So, yeah… That’s it. Hopefully it’ll go well. My attempt to buy the ingredients today didn’t go so hot, but that’s because I had forgotten that today is the one weekday I can remember which Cap’N’Cork is closed. This was so they could attend some sort of event or festival… Ah well. I’ll go tomorrow.

Well, now that the wheat berry ale is bottled, I’m starting to think about making another beer. I probably shouldn’t, as I have six cases of beer actively aging. That said, I’m really wanting to make something else… I’m thinking a stout or vanilla porter. Hrm.

So, I think tonight I’ll bottle the wheat berry ale. The bottles are at home soaking in Oxyclean (they are clean already, I’m just being certain there’s nothing left on them), the carboy has been moved to the kitchen counter, and I’m pretty certain I know how much priming sugar I’ll need (166g).

Now to wrap up the day at work…