2014 Xmas Beer Racking

Tonight we racked our Christmas beer and got our first chance to see how it's progressing. It was a smooth home brew night - no stuck stoppers or broken carboys at all! The only minor glitch was that we almost forgot to put in the cinnamon sticks and vanilla bean to "dry spice" the secondary. Amy saved the day by remembering!

We got to use our refractometer again to measure the brix, and with some handy calculations and conversions with BeerSmith, it looks like we're at a gravity of 1.026 for an ABV of 8.1%. This was a relief since I was worried the fluctuations in temperature during primary fermentation would cause some problems. If they are, they don't seem to be showing in the form of reduced attenuation. I guess it still remains to be seen if the temperature changes produce any off flavors in the finished beer.

So far the beer tastes pretty good. You can taste the cherries but they're not overpowering. We're excited to see what it tastes like with the cinnamon and vanilla in there.

[ 2014 Christmas Beer Brew Day ] <--- | ---> [ Christmas Miracle 2014 Tasting ]

2014 Christmas Beer Brew Day

On Friday we brewed our first Christmas beer! With about seven weeks until Thanksgiving and the start of the holiday season, we definitely had to get it brewed so that it will be ready in time to enjoy during the holidays. It's been since the start of September since we brewed a beer, and it was great getting back into it.

The beer we chose for our first Christmas beer is "Bad Santa" from https://byo.com/stories/item/2258-winter-seasonal-beers. It has cherries, vanilla, cinnamon, and an 8%+ ABV. We achieved a little brewing milestone with this beer - our first trip to the home brew store where we only bought ingredients!

The brewing was a pretty straightforward extract beer with specialty grains. The one interesting step in the recipe was taking out some of the wort and soaking the dried cherries, then adding that liquid back in at the end of the boil.

This brew day was also the first time we got to try our new wort chiller from Northern Brewer. It did cool the beer a lot quicker than an ice bath would have, especially for a batch as big as three gallons. It still seemed to take a while though. I'm wondering if it would cool even faster if we ran the water piping through an ice bath before it reached the wort chiller to really get it super cooled though. Maybe time to invest in a second wort chiller and then run the two in series.

We used an Irish Ale yeast according to the recipe, but the recipe calls for a 62-64 degree fermentation temperature which we've had a little bit of a hard time hitting. We've been keeping the fermenting beer in the laundry room with the vents and door closed, then opening the outside door as needed to drop the temperature down. It's staying relatively cool but I have a bad feeling the temperature fluctuations are more than what the yeast would like.

If everything goes well, hopefully our first Christmas beer will be ready in late November. Can't wait to see how it turns out!

--> [ 2014 Xmas Beer Racking ]

Black Mo Tasting

We bottled our Tumbler clone over a month ago and it's finally ready to drink! We tried it a couple weeks after bottling, but (frustratingly) it still wasn't carbonated yet. Since then though, we finally got carbonation. Plus, the smokiness mellowed out a lot just in the last couple weeks.

We may be biased since it's our beer, but I think this one really is genuinely tasty. It's got some brown maltiness, noticeable smoke presence, and a hint of chocolate. We have a couple bottles of Sierra Nevada Tumbler from a "fall sampler pack," so I'm looking forward to a side-by-side comparison just to see how close our beer is to Tumbler. I'm so glad we made three gallons of it, so we have lots of bottles to enjoy and share.

The name is a reference to Black Moshannon State Park in Pennsylvania, where Amy's family loves to camp and has had several family reunions. What better name for our smokey dark beer?

[ Tumbler Bottling ] <---

Bug Juice Tasting - Part 2

Paul's brother was in town this weekend for the Orioles game, so we decided to try a few of the home brews. We tried the Bug Juice dunkelweizen first. The last time we tried it, it was carbonated but still pretty rough around the edges taste-wise. I was hoping the taste would improve with more time, as the yeast cleans up the byproducts of fermenting the priming sugar.

As it turns out, the last two weeks in the bottle actually did help! The harshness and acidity from the last tasting seems to have gone away. The result is a nice dunkelweizen - some caramel malty sweetness and plenty of banana notes from the yeast. We're finally ending up with some home brewed beers that are enjoyable to drink!

[ Bug Juice Tasting ] <---