HefferBison? (orange honey hefe)

Poured from a 12oz grolsch bottle to a plain pint glass.
Appearance: It's on the orange side of amber and cloudy in the way you expect a weat beer to be. A slightly off white one finger head of little bitty champagne sized bubbles forms and doesn't quite dissapate all the way as you drink.
Aroma: Very orangey, informed by flowery hops smell, but orange deffinately steals the show. Unfortunately missing is the banana and clove smells that you expect from a hefeweizen.
Taste: This is certainly a fruit beer. Orange is the main note along with an herby hop flavor and a subtle wheatyness. Again missing are the banana and clove flavors you expect in a hefe, but i can't say they are necessarilly "missed." The beer is wonderful and bright, delicious and refreshing.
Mouthfeel: Medium/light bodied, and very smooth. Nice and bubbly the way I like a summer beer, but it could be argued that it's overcarbonated.
Drinkability: This brew is entirely quaffable, especially after a day mowing the yard or playing hard. It's good alone and good with desserts.

Notes: Indeed my best beer to date. I like it better that Shocktop, but others don't. You may have noticed that I called it orange honey hefe, but never mentioned honey; if it's there, I can't detect it. I have some ideas about how to rectify that. Also I'll try to get more of the banana/clove taste that is halmark of hefe next time, but all it all this is a great brew. Recipe is a definite keeper with some room for improvement, just the way I like it.

Tasting Notes: Rosemary IPA

I poured the Rosemary IPA from my 12oz. Grolsch bottle to a pint mug.


Appearance: Deep amber in color, if not dark, with a full 3 fingers of slightly off white head (guess we solved that problem). Cloudy all the way through even when held to the light.

Aroma: The smell of rosemary leaps out of the glass. The addition of the herb to the second fermentation could be cut by 75%. There is a spicy hops smell, but the Herb steals the show. After 10 minutes in the glass the rosemary mellows out, and the head dissipates but laces the glass all the way down.

Taste: Again the main mark is the rosemary. The hops taste is pleasantly bitter, spicy and a bit flowery, and the beer itself has a toasted note. It's hard to discern the other flavors that are being masked by the rosemary. Though the ABV is up around 7.5% it isn't boozy at all.

Mouthfeel: Medium/full bodied and perhaps a bit over carbonated (trying to hard to make up for the last one), but it isn't a really big gripe.

Drinkability: This is not a session-er, the Rosemary makes it a GREAT beer with food. But by itself can be daunting, unless you like rosemary as much as me.

Notes: This was, to say the least, an experimental beer. I had never heard of Rosemary in beer before I set out to make it and I have to say that even though it's a bit overpowering I'm considering this a complete success. Next batch will be spot on. The biscuit malt played exactly the way I imagined with the herb, like a little rosemary cracker. I think I need to add a fining agent or learn how to deal with the solids better, I'd like the beer to be clearer. I think it will hang out in my Fridge for a while though, it's not an everyday kind of beer.

Tasting Notes: Irish Red

I poured my Irish Red from it's 12oz. bottle to a Pint Glass.

Appearance: Very Dark, the only way I know it's red is holding it up to bright light. Less than a finger of tan colored head, which dissipates very quickly, but does lace the glass well on it's way to empty.

Aroma: A distinct fruity aroma, and an herbal mark.

Taste: Light Hopps flavor, followed by malty caramel sweetness, finishes with a roasted bite that goes a bit overboard, far enough to say burned. A slightly too bitter aftertaste from the burned flavor.

Mouthfeel: Medium bodied, but under carbonated.

Drinkability: Though the finish is bitter the beer is still very drinkable. It' s been really good with food and for cooking though certainly not quaffable .

Notes: It tastes like a red but looks like a brown lest held up to the light, where you can see its red tint. Entirely too dark to fit the style and the head retention is nothing short of failure, though the way it laces a glass is nice. Also disappointed in the markedly burnt taste, otherwise it would be right on.
I believe I have diagnosed the two major issues with the beer and will correct them in future brews. First the burnt taste comes from adding my extract while my brewpot is still on the heat. The syrup falls straight to the bottom and scorches, easily correctable and won't be a problem again. Second the carbonation and head retention problem. I sterilize my bottles in the dishwasher and as we know dish detergents contain surfactants so that water doesn't spot. This chemical works in direct opposition to head formation and retention. So in the future I will run the dishwasher empty to make sure none of the detergent is left behind, then sterilize the bottles.

Blessed are the Beermakers pt. 3 - Fermentation and Bottling

So 5 days in the bucket and I measure the Gravity (very simply put, the amount of sugar in a solution) of the beer. By measuring the wort when I pitch yeast and measuring again after a few days I can tell how much sugar is gone therefore how much alcohol is in my beer, and there fore when the Primary Fermentation is finished. I should have taken a picture of my Hydrometer, the tool that measure such things, but I didn't think of it. Any way we measured 1.058 degrees Plato at the start and 1.017 degrees at the end, I was shooting for 1.015 so this was pretty close and gave me about 5.3% ABV. Time to start the secondary fermentation.
See during Primary (read: when most of the alcohol is made) the yeast flocculate and fall out of suspension and make a 1.5 inch thick cake at the bottom of your ferment-er. This is called the "trub," and it can produce some off flavors if you let the beer set atop it too long. So, most brewers run the Secondary Fermentation in a secondary container. In my case a 6 gallon Carboy (one of those bottles you turn upside down on top of a water dispenser.) So I racked it over and it looks like this:

So this is secondary fermentation. During the week or so that the beer is in this container it will be conditioning. That is to say developing flavor while the yeasts clean op some of the waste products that they left behind when they were swimming in sugar water. This part of the process is a tasters game that I don't fully understand yet. The length of time that it takes is not only as varied as the types of beer that you can make, but as numerous as the amount of brewers making those beers. At any rate I left it be for a week and moved on to the bottling phase.
To sanitize I wash my bottles in the dishwasher on hot wash/hot dry, and am ready to bottle the second they come out. So after I get them started I have a few things to do. After the secondary fermentation there isn't much left for the yeast to eat, but I need them to keep working because I want another one of the products they produce. CO2. To get CO2 I have to give them more to eat. I, and most homebrewers, give them Corn Sugar. Why not Table Sugar? Brewers use corn sugar for its non-effect on taste. Table Sugar can leave cider-y tastes in the beer because it is not 100% ferment-able, corn sugar is. So I dump about a cup of corn sugar in the original plastic bucket, which I have cleaned and sanitized, and rack the beer over to it in preparation for bottling. I dump the sugar in first so that the beer mixes while it racks over rather than mixing with a utensil and adding a bunch of oxygen to the mix. Oxygen is bad.

After it's in the bucket it goes into the bottles with a bottling wand. Which is a plastic tube with a spring-loaded stopper at the end, as you push it down on the bottom of the bottle it opens and allows the bottle to fill without adding oxygen. Oxygen is bad. Then after all my bottles are full I start capping. Which looks like this:

Then we get everything cleaned up and put it all back in the tub so we can wait for that wonderful carbonation. Now that the solution is under pressure, as the CO2 produced increases the pressure even more it squeezes itself into the solution. After a about 10 days I'll open one to see how well carbonated it is. If it's good they go into the fridge where the cold temp stops the yeasts from working. I bottled em up a couple of days ago, I should be popping the top on the First Cold Irish Red on St. Patty's day. Poetic, don't you think?

The Ice Cream Beer Float

Last night we went to the Flying Saucer and had a few beers with Russ, my brother-in-law. Kayla started off with the European flight, a collection of 5 euro-beers in 50z glasses, I had a Murphy's red since I'm currently making one and Russ had, well I can't recall. Second round russ like my Red so much he went with it and I wanted Kayla to try a the Young's Double Chocolate Stout, so I ordered one since she was still working on the flight. About half way through the Stout I started contemplating out loud whether or not we should try the Ice Cream Beer Float that the saucer offers with the Stout. Well, Kayla said she could see how it would taste good so she called our waitress and we ordered one.

Formerly I had not been able to wrap my mind around what this might be like. I mean I've had the stout before, and I've had vanilla ice cream before, but combining the two was giving my imagination nothing but brick walls. Kayla started in on it by getting a big spoon full of ice cream and sort of dipping it down in the beer. I followed her lead making sure to grab a bit more of the beer part of the equation. I thought, if this is gonna work it has to work on it's own merits, not because I drowned one taste with the other. I could immediately tell that my tasted didn't have enough beer. I could hardly taste it, but I think this might be the best way for a first timer to ease into this particular concoction, also I was intrigued. Since I wasn't disgusted by the combo I started drinking from the straw while Kayla kept eating the ice cream. My theory was that since this was a float it would do that thing that all floats do when the Ice Cream to Root Beer ratio hits a magical number and the drink transcends to a place of joy and merriment. And, to my immense surprise, I. Was. Right. About half way down on the glass there were 3 or 4 drinks that were little gulps of taste heaven. After those swigs the ratio tipped to much toward the Ice Cream for me, as all floats do, and I watched for Kayla to get to her own heavenly ratio. She like the scale tipped much further to ice cream than me, but the little gulps of taste heaven were there for her too.

So, if you find yourself close to a Flying Saucer of have so Young's Double Chocolate around, give this a try. I was skeptical, but we were bold, and fortune favors that I hear.

RKW out

Blessed are the Beermakers pt. 2 - Brew Day

Most of the beer brewing process is a passive experience, but the first day, dubbed "Brew Day," requires constant activity for the better part of 5 hours. This is how my Brew Day went:

Got home with the supplies (Honey Nut Scooters are not part of this particular brewing session) and started a couple of gallons of water heating up. I would heat that water to 150-155 degrees in order to steep my specialty grains into what brewers call a "Grain Tea." So I dumped all of my milled grain into a grain sock, turned the heat down, and let my grain steep for about 30 minutes. Meanwhile I filled my 7 Gallon Brewer's Bucket with water and sterilization chemical, and put every thing that would eventually touch my beer in that water. Bacterial infection is a big deal in beer making; present and active bacteria make bad tastes and can completely spoil a wort. After 30 minutes I grabbed up my grain sock and let it drain as much as possible. This is what the spent grain looks like.

So now I had a couple of gallons of grain tea to add my extract to. Remember I said it was like really thick syrup, well that syrup has to be diluted down to less viscous consistency so that it can be boiled. I got the syrup diluted down and added enough water to get me up to 6.5 gallons in the biol pot, brought it up to a boil and sat back for a bit. After 30 minutes of boiling it was time to add the Hops. I'm sure you heard of these in a Sam Adam's commercial, but mine are a bit different. Some home brewers opt for the whole hops that you see in beer commercials but the more cost effective version of hops look like this:

Those little pellets break up inside a cheese cloth sock and impart the same sort of bitterness that you would get from whole hops. Now as with almost anything the more fresh and unprocessed your ingredients are the better, and any brewer will tell you to move to whole hops when you can, but for me the cheapness wins for now. So I add those hops with an hour left in the total boil time that is required by my recipe and I wait for that hour to pass. When it's done boiling, I have a true blue Wort, just waiting for a bit of yeast to turn this into a party.

But before pitching yeast I need to do two things. First the wort is much to hot for yeast to survive so I must bring the temp down to an acceptable level for them to live, and the goal is to hit a level at which they do their work the best (more on this later). Second, is to activate the yeast, as my yeast comes dry, like baker's yeast. So a get a bit of warm water and mix in the dry yeast which makes a smelly little paste and I dump about a pound of sterile ice into my wort. I tried power cooling in my fridge and also ice bathing my bucket but nothing was getting the temp down fast enough so I resorted to diluting my wort a bit for the sake of shortening the amount of time the Wort would be in the "Danger Zone." Once it was in the correct range I transferred it over to my Brewer's Bucket and shook the heck out of it to aerate it. The purpose behind aeration is that yeast will reproduce when Oxygen is available, and since I don't necessarily have enough yeast to ferment the entire wort I want some reproduction to happen right off the bat. Also this process allows the Yeast to overrun and rogue bacteria or wild yeast that may have floated in. So after aeration I pitch the yeast in and slosh it around to disperse and clap on the lid and affix my CO2 lock. Which looks like this:

This device is a vertical tube with another bigger tube around it and another around the whole thing. When filled with water, or in my case Vodka because it's sterile, It allows gasses to escape a closed system with out letting gasses back in. But, didn't I just say that we need oxygen? For the very beginning of the fermentation this is true, but after there are enough yeast cells present you want them to stop reproducing and start eating sugars. As long as Oxygen is present they will continue to reproduce and break down the sugars way farther that the alcohol we are looking for. So as their CO2 pushes the oxygen out we want to keep it out. This valve also prevents pressure build up, since yeast make a LOT of CO2 when they are fermenting. At this point the passive part of the brewing process begins. Depending on the Beer the fermentation can take from a few days up to a week. We'll be checking on this one in 5 days.

Blessed are the Beermakers pt. 1 - The Recipe

This is the first part of a several part series covering my second attempt at home-brewing beer. Not that my first attempt was unsuccessful, it was quite successful in my mind, as I made a serviceable Brown Ale. I didn't document my first go and regretted that. From now on I'll be documenting each subsequent attempt.

Preface -
My first batch of beer was made from a canned extract, which means that I opened a can of a concentrated wort syrup (very simply, a wort is the solution of grain, hops and water that is the basis for the future beer, companies concentrate them into syrups for the homebrewer's market) and boiled it with a few gallons of water to make my own wort. I then cooled that wort and moved it to a special fermentation bucket and added yeast for fermentation.

After my first go I do not consider myself by any means an expert in the field, or even all that proficient, but I did feel like I was ready to up the challenge ante a bit. So I moved from the full extract "wort in a can" approach to what is called the "Extract with Grains" method. The "Extract with Grains" method means that I would be using a Malt Extract base and choosing a few grains of my own choosing to build the flavor profile.I think of it like this: if you are building a house you have a few options for foundation. You can have concrete, pier and beam, stilted, etc. Less than 10 choices total, let's say. Virtually every house on the planet is built on one of these types of foundations, and beers are very similar to that. The "Malt" is the foundational base of the beer and what ever kind of beer you are making starts with one of a few types of Malt bases. Many homebrewers buy the malt in extract form because it's difficult to make and doesn't offer a whole lot of customization options, a concrete foundation is a concrete foundation. "Real" beermakers will make their own malt so that they are in control of the flavor profile from start to finish. So I'm not making my own malt, I trust the malt extract available to me and add my own profile of grains. Which brings us to...

Step 1: The Recipe -
As I stated, while I feel comfortable with the process, I'm not by any means expert, so I did not write a recipe for the beer I would make. I went to the homebrew store with two goals in mind: 1. Up the ante with the "Extract with Grains" method 2. Move to a "Two Stage Fermentation Process (more detail later)" The only thing I knew about the recipe was that I wanted to make an Irish Red Ale. So Kayla and I drove down to Homebrew Headquarters in Richardson, propped my elbows up on the counter and told the Shopkeep about my plan for my second go at the process. I told him I did not however have a recipe in mind and that I would trust his judgment for a good recipe for Irish Red. He pulled the following for me:

6.25 lbs Pale Ale Malt extract
3oz. Crystal Malt Grain
7oz. Roasted Barley
1lb 6oz. Pail Ale Malt Grain
8 AAU (Acid Alpha Units) of UK Target Hop Pellets
11g. Nottingham Brewer's Yeast (saccharomyces cerevisiae)
1 cup Corn Sugar for Priming

He also milled the grain for me and grabbed me some new equipment (Grain Sock, Glass Carboy, and Hop Sock ) for the more complicated process. With my bucket of syrup and bag of milled grain, and new hardware, I headed home to start the fun.

Part 2 Coming Soon.