I’m a poor excuse for a blogger, but a pretty good brewer.

Right, so I am not an awesome blogger. Two and a half months since my last post. Shame on me. However, in that time I have made some pretty good beer!

Let’s see, we started with that IPA and then moved to the Pale Ale.The IPA was great. The Pale Ale was fine – not a favorite, but definitely drinkable.  Since those two we have started actually naming our beers. That has been a lot of fun and my husband, Bill is excellent at this. Here’s the list of what we’ve brewed so far:

• Three Helens Irish Stout (named for our daughter Helen and her two great-grandmothers, one of which was born on St. Pat’s Day) Wow this was a great Irish Stout. It was definitely the hit of our St. Patrick’s Day party.
• Fear & Doubt – a totally fabulous Honey Oatmeal Stout that we worried about the entire time this beer was brewing, fermenting, and bottle conditioning. It was so different from the other beers we had made up to that point we were certain it was going to be terrible. We almost threw it away at one point. This is an excellent lesson – there is no harm in finishing making a beer you think might be awful. It very well may turn out alright, even delicious. Thanks to Uncle Kevin who told us that “oatmeal stouts are different”. I’m glad we listened to you!
• Walking Uncle – a slightly hoppy Brown Ale that is named in honor of a little neighborhood joke. Again, another great beer.
• Strange Bedfellow – a smoked porter we brewed specifically for Bill to take on a fishing trip. This one is still bottle conditioning. To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of the smokey flavor in this. I’m hoping that will mellow a bit as it ages.

Today, I brewed a Belgian White. There are a few interesting points about this beer. First, I brewed this one alone as Bill was working on his motorcycle in the driveway and we didn’t have our normal slew of visitors while brewing. It is definitely easier and more fun to brew with others, but it was a good experience doing it alone today. I even schlepped the full fermenting bucket into the closet in spite of my sprained ankle. I have yet to come up with a name for this beer. Maybe something having to do with brewing alone or maybe just something Belgian-wheat-ish. Second, this is the first beer I have brewed that didn’t have any grains to steep. This was an all liquid and dry malt extract recipe. I kinda missed the wonderful smell of the grains steeping…

In my last post I mentioned I was hoping to take some pictures during our brew day. Here they are:

Crushed grains for the Three Helen’s Irish Stout.

Steeping the grains

The wort during the boil

My Helen adding the hops into the Three Helens

 

Until next time!

 

 

Getting into the swing of things

Since my last post I have brewed and racked another beer (an English Pale Ale) and bottled the IPA. The IPA should be ready to taste next weekend and I can hardly wait! Tomorrow I am brewing an Irish Stout – getting ready for St. Patrick’s Day! I also bought a brewing recipe book which just arrived in the mail. Ooh there are so many things I want to try. It’s too bad it takes so long between brew day and tasting day.

Now that I am no longer a nervous wreck while brewing, I’m hoping to take some pictures tomorrow.

Bubbles in the Airlock

Yesterday Helen and I made our first batch of beer – a HopNog 2010 IPA recipe kit by Brewer’s Best. I was really quite anxious about it before we began. I read the book that came with my brew kit, searched through tons of websites about home brewing, and watched endless YouTube videos on all things home brew. Even with all of that research, I still felt quite unprepared to actually do it. As I mentioned before, I really enjoy cooking. I cook different and interesting things on a regular basis. I never follow the rule “try making something first before serving it for company” because I always feel quite confident that it will turn out exactly as I plan. I can bake too – cakes, cookies, even crème brûlée. Once I even made tiny chocolate boxes and served the crème brûlée in that. I know my way around the kitchen.

But, there was something about the idea of brewing that has had me freaked out. Bill and I decided to do a dry run first and practice using the wort chiller (I bought one and it is awesome), hydrometer, siphoning, and setting up the airlock on the fermentation bucket. I’m so glad we did. The other day when I first brought the wort chiller home it was immediately clear that my sink tap was not set up for attaching the wort chiller. Bill took care of finding the correct attachment so that we could hook it up. When we began our dry run I realized quite quickly that somehow I did not have a thermometer with my kit. I’ve got thermometers around my kitchen, but not quite what I was looking for. Interestingly, it is hard to find a candy thermometer in the store the week before Christmas. I purchased a digital probe thermometer instead and I’m really glad I went that route. It has a timer on it and a digital temperature reading that I can keep right over my brew pot. It was great to have all of that information right there during the boiling process.

We also practiced with the auto siphon tool which was also quite helpful and then worked on sealing up the fermenting bucket with the lid and installing the airlock. You would think that putting on the lid would be the easy part. In fact, it took us quite a while. It seems that a bit of water around the edge of the lip of the bucket makes it seal right up.

The dry run made me feel a lot better about brewing for real. Helen and I started by filling our brew pot with water and letting it come to a simmer. We filled our mesh bag with the grains and let it steep. Helen was really interested in watching the temperature rise and helped me make sure the water did not get over 170 degrees. At 170 the tannins are released from the grains resulting in not yummy beer. The steeping grains smelled fabulous in my kitchen. Next it was time to remove the grain bag. Hooray! We  have wort! It took quite a while for the wort to begin to boil. This was when Helen started to get bored. We decided to have some snacks – a Schlafly Coffee Stout for me and a Shandy Soda for Helen. It seems only natural to drink a nice beer while brewing a nice beer. Finally it was time to start adding ingredients. We poured in the Liquid Malt Extract and Helen did the all important constant stirring to make sure none of the malt burned on the bottom of the pot. From this point on we used the digital timer quite a bit, as every 15 or 30 minutes we needed to add the Bittering Hops, Flavoring Hops, and Dry Malt Extract. It smelled amazing, although it looked kind of icky. Helen said it looked like a swamp from the hops.

Once our boil was complete we moved the pot into an ice bath in the sink and started up the wort chiller. It is important to chill down the wort as quickly as possible to avoid any nasty bacteria from growing, and therefore, totally messing up my fabulous beer. The wort chiller also made it possible for us to attend my sister-in-law’s graduation party on time. Without it we would have spent a lot of time making ice baths while waiting for the temperature to drop. We siphoned our wort into the fermenting bucket (careful of course to avoid any of the icky swamp like material on the bottom of the pot), added water, and took a reading with the hydrometer. The hydrometer tells you the wort’s specific gravity, the amount of dissolved sugars – which eventually becomes alcohol. It’s important to start off the fermenting process at the correct starting gravity to get the correct final gravity (measured at the end of fermentation) which determines the amount of alcohol in the beer. Ok, so to be honest here this whole math/science thing going on at this point is what made me most nervous about brewing beer. You might be able to tell that from my somewhat convoluted explanation above. All that I completely understand at this point is that the recipe told me what the hydrometer reading should be and I should add water until I got that reading. Got it.

We all took a little sip of the wort to give it a little test. It certainly wasn’t a drinkable beverage at this point, but it was clear what the final beer was going to taste like. It has a really lovely citrus hoppy flavor (just as it should!). Helen sprinkled the yeast into the wort, we stirred it up, stuck the lid and airlock on and put it in the closet. The airlock is a little device that sticks inside a hole in the lid of the bucket. It lets the carbon dioxide escape from the fermenting bucket without letting icky-beer-ruining bacteria inside. It bubbles until the fermentation is complete.

As I cleaned up the kitchen from our beer adventure, I thought about what I learned: The digital thermometer/timer setup was awesome. However, I did not love my big, giant spoon. I think I would prefer a paddle over the spoon. My spoon has kind of a pointy edge and I think the paddle would be better for making sure the malt does not burn on the bottom of the pot. I also learned that seven year olds get bored early on while waiting for the initial boil and require snacks and a Diary of a Wimpy Kid book to get them through it. Thirty-seven year olds get a little bored when it is clear that the initial boil is going to happen in the next 5 minutes or so. Coffee Stout and the Kindle app on my phone helped pass the time. Finally, I learned that it is a little stressful to have a snotty two-year old running around during the siphoning stage.

We all spent a fair amount of time checking on the fermenting bucket in the closet last night. It takes about a day for the bubbles to start rising in the airlock and we were all anxious to see if it would actually happen. No bubbles=no fermenting=no beer. When we checked this morning, every once in a while a bubble would rise. An hour later and bubbles are popping every six seconds or so. Phew.

We are using Secondary Fermentation with this beer, so in about 5 days we will siphon it out of the current fermentation bucket into a carboy to finish fermenting there. This will give the beer better clarity and improve the flavor. From there it will hang out for about 2 more weeks and then it is time to bottle. In the mean time, Helen, Bill, and I are brainstorming ideas for what to call our kitchen brewery. Helen’s ideas all include her name. Bill’s ideas all include made up words that sound like they are in another language. We’ll see where this goes. Who knows, someday that name could be famous…

I Love Beer

I do. I love beer. I feel kind of bad when I say that, though. Like, maybe I sound as if I spend my days sitting on my porch drinking a case of Nat Light while my children run around wildly. I don’t. What I mean when I say “I love beer”, is that I really enjoy finding and drinking interesting, delicious beers. I love when I have a bottle of something that I haven’t had for a really long time. I think I remember what it is going to taste like, and then I take that first drink, and it is better than I remembered. Love that.

My husband and I frequently enjoy a beer in the evenings. We have a pretty wide variety that passes through our refrigerator. I think it is pretty cool that we  both enjoy trying new beers together and have very similar tastes. He even bought me a subscription to Beer Advocate magazine for Mother’s Day. How sweet is that?!

I have not always been a big fan of beer. I remember going to fraternity parties when I was in college and drinking whatever was coming out of the keg. I had no clue about beer. I had never had an IPA or a Stout. I didn’t even know what those things were. Then I would watch my husband and his friends drink Guinness at a local Irish Pub and think “How disgusting! It looks like motor oil!”. I am sure that I tried a sip, but I guess I was happy to drink my Bud Light.

Then somehow I started enjoying lots of different styles of beer. When I was pregnant with my youngest I remember being a little sad that I wouldn’t be able to try new beers for a while. My sweet husband brought me a pack of Old Rasputin Imperial Stout – one of my top 5 favorite beers of all time – after he was born and I remember truly enjoying that first bottle. Although, if I remember correctly, I did not finish it as that 9% ABV was a bit much for my first beer back.

I have known a few people that home brew, but it never occurred to me to give it a try. Truthfully, I’ve had some not awesome home brews in the past and so I kinda figured it must be hard to do. Maybe it is. Maybe it is just easy to mess up. But, I’ve also had some pretty good home brew, so who knows. Right before my birthday my husband started talking about this awesome idea he had for my gift. Hmm, an upgrade to the iPhone 4? An iPad? A new Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L II lens? (I want this lens very much, but I’m fairly sure he doesn’t know that.) I had no idea what it could be. I opened my present to find a case of empty beer bottles and a gift certificate to Dave’s Homebrew. Needless to say, I was surprised. I had no idea that I wanted to brew my own beer. So, we headed off to visit the nice folks at Dave’s and they gave me a quick overview of what I needed to get started. I came home with a bunch of buckets and tubes and all manner of things that I have probably never seen before. I also came home thinking that this was going to be a giant undertaking. I was pretty nervous and quite excited.

I do have a bit of a history with starting out with nearly zero knowledge about some topic, learning a whole bunch on my own, and then putting it into practice. I did that with photography, HTML, and probably some other stuff too. I’m hoping I can do that with brewing beer.

So, the one thing that was missing in the giant stack of stuff I brought home from Dave’s was the great big brew pot. They were out of stock, so I went home to read my book and learn a bit before getting started. It’s probably a good thing. I think I may have stuck the pot on the burner and jumped right in. Unfortunately, it took a bit longer than we all expected for the pot to come in so I had plenty of time to read and learn. Our oldest child, who is 7, is pretty excited to be a part of this. She wants to help and I think that is pretty cool.

The pot was delivered yesterday. Beer making begins on Saturday. Stay tuned.