Carolina Reaper IPA Brew Day

On Sunday we brewed an IPA that we're planning as a base for some delicious chili heat. A friend at work has been growing Carolina Reapers (the hottest pepper in the world!) for another friend who loves spicy food. I enjoy spicy beer anyway, such as the Ballast Point Habanero Sculpin, and so brewing a chili beer has been on my radar since we started brewing again.

I found some good info and a recipe at http://www.homebrewing.com/articles/chile-beer.php, so all the brewing was pretty straightforward.  One of the particularly fun parts of the brew day this time was live-tweeting everything from our desert penguin twitter account. Since this beer is a bit tied in with my buddies at work due to the chili peppers, it was fun including more people in the brew day.

The other particularly interesting and fun part of this brew day was creating the chili extract from the Carolina Reaper. We cut the pepper in half and are making two different extracts - one with all the seeds and ribbing intact for full heat, and one with the ribbing and seeds removed to try to get a bit more flavor. The peppers will soak in vodka for the next week extracting the flavor and heat, and I'm really curious to see what that vodka is like in a week when it's time to add it to the beer.

Our plan is to rack the beer into three 1-gallon carboys in order to try three different levels of heat - one with the seedless extract, one with the seedy extract at a normal heat level, and one that is borderline melt-your-mouth for the true hot-heads. That said, I'm a bit worried about our ability to get the spice and heat level just right in the final beers. If we manage to get one batch out of the three that's squarely between "way too mild" and "undrinkably spicy," then I'll consider it a success.

---> [ Carolina Reaper IPA Racking ]

Die Bier, Die Tasting

This weekend we opened the first bottles of our oktoberfest and we're happy to say that our first lager is a success! This time for the tasting we did a blind taste test comparing our beer to Ayinger Oktoberfest-Marzen. It was amazing how similar they were. They were virtually the same color. The head in particular was almost identical - starting out pretty tall with very dense bubbles and eventually dissipating to just a little bit of lacing on top. Even the mouthfeel was pretty similar.

They did have noticeably (though not drastically) different flavors. The Ayinger has a little bit of an almost fruitiness to it, which I had previously thought was just a characteristic of its maltiness. The Ayinger was also a touch more bitter than our home brew.

Two of the three of us doing the tasting did prefer the Ayinger and also correctly identified which one was the home brew. Still, the fact that it wasn't blindingly (excuse the pun) obvious from the first sip, and that one of us even preferred the home brew over the Ayinger, I consider a huge success.

I could still detect a hint of acetaldehyde which may just mean the beer needs another month or two of conditioning time. I'm not sure if there's anything we're doing wrong in our process that keeps giving us this flavor, or if we just need to be brewing with enough lead time that the beer can condition for longer in the bottle before we start drinking it.

And as for the name, it's German for "The Beer, The" and is a reference to Sideshow Bob in the Simpsons episode "Cape Feare." But you already knew that.  ;-)

[ Oktoberfest Bottling ] <---

Doppelbock Brew Day

Today we brewed our second lager - a doppelbock we're hoping to have ready in time for Christmas. Amy found the recipe in a recent issue of Zymurgy and she's been wanting to brew a doppelbock since all the way back in our Flying Barrel brew-on-premises days.

As with the oktoberfest, Annapolis Home Brew didn't have our primary choice for yeast. Instead of rolling with an alternative, this time we went to Maryland Home Brew to pick up a vial of White Labs WLP833 German Bock Lager yeast. As it turns out - I actually should have bought two. Lager ideal pitch rates are a lot higher than ales, and with this being a big lager (target starting gravity of 1.096), we would have needed a 2.5L starter to get the 443B cells we wanted. With only a 2L Erlenmeyer flask and one vial of yeast, we had to boost the starter gravity to 1.046 to have the calculations point to the right number of yeast from the starter. The small starter also led to me accidentally letting the starter boil over, despite using fermcap. We're definitely planning to get a 5L Erlenmeyer flask for next time.

For whatever reason, the starter didn't attenuate as much as it should have. It only reached a final gravity of 1.025 when I would have expected it to reach something more like 1.013. Unfortunately, we don't know whether this was a problem with the yeast or something we did with the starter. It could have been something as simple as not giving it enough time or not having the stir plate set up correctly. Since we were brewing on a Sunday morning too, we couldn't just go to the home brew store and pick up a fresh vial of the same strain of yeast. We decided to just roll with the yeast from the starter, but we're going to be closely monitoring the primary fermentation to make sure the yeast is doing okay.

During the brew day, we encountered a few minor issues but nothing serious. The volume of water after the mash was only about 4.8G instead of 5, indicating there was more grain absorption than BeerSmith had calculated. We also ended up only at 1.086 original gravity instead - not sure if there was an issue with the efficiency of the mash or if it was just down to differences in the ingredients compared to BeerSmith's numbers.

Despite those issues though, we're still excited to have finally brewed a doppelbock. Eight hours after brew day and happily we already have good krausen and the airlock is bubbling. Plus with our first lager seeming to turn out well so far, we're very optimistic for another delicious beer!