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 ] <---

Pumking Bottling

Tonight we bottled our Pumking clone and got a little glimpse of how the taste is progressing with all the stuff we added in the secondary. Start to finish, the whole bottling only took an hour which is great. This is our first time bottling with bombers too - from our two gallon batch we ended up with five 22oz bombers and 11 regular bottles.

In order to get a final gravity reading, we siphoned a little bit of the beer off to a cup before it hit the bottling bucket. That way the gravity reading isn't affected by the priming sugar. Reading came out to 1.015, which means we didn't get any extra points during secondary fermentation.

The taste was pretty good so far. It's not quite as strong as Southern Tier Pumking, which may get back to getting less malt into the wort than we intended. But, I think you can actually tell that it's Pumking we were shooting for. If the same holds true for the final beer, we'll consider it a success.

[ Pumking Racking ] <--- | ---> [ Pumqueen Tasting ]

Bug Juice Tasting

It's been just over two weeks since we bottled our "Bug Juice" dunkelweizen. Having our brewing buddies over again was the perfect excuse to crack open a couple bottles and see how they're doing. As soon as we broke the seal on the bottle cap, it was a good sign - that characteristic psshhh of a carbonated bottle. Then with the pour, plenty of foamy head! We finally produced a carbonated beer!

We've had very little carbonation in our El Jefe or Tumbler Clone after a month or more of bottle conditioning, and after just two weeks we have great carbonation with Bug Juice. The best theory we can come up with so far is that the krausen hadn't fallen with the first two beers when we racked, but it had with Bug Juice. Maybe with the krausen not fallen yet, we lost a lot of yeast when we racked to the secondary with those first two beers. Luckily the krausen had fallen with the pumking clone, so there's hope we'll get good carbonation from that beer too.

As for the taste - it was a little on the sweet side and maybe slightly acidic. Not great, but certainly drinkable. I'm thinking another week or two in the bottle might round out some of the rough edges. We're still making steps in the right direction with our home brewing though, and hopefully we have better and better beers ahead of us.

Oh, and the Bug Juice name? Well, if you don't know, you'll just have to poke around the blog until you figure it out! :-)

[ Dunkelweizen Bottling ] <--- | ---> [ Bug Juice Tasting - Part 2 ]

Pumking Racking

Monday night we racked our Pumking clone and got our first taste of how it's going. This is our first beer where the recipe calls for adding ingredients to the secondary. One of the ingredients was a spice extract we made ourselves with vodka and a mix of spices. Apparently we should have used more vodka, because there was very little liquid sitting atop a bunch of spice sludge. Measuring the right amounts was already a little hard because we had to divide all the ingredients between the two carboys. The spice sludge just made measuring the amounts that much harder.

After we got the ingredients added to the carboys, the rest of racking went very well. We ended up with two cups of liquid left over after filling the carboys, so the 2.4 gallon batch volume seems to be just about right. I feel like we're gradually getting the beersmith settings dialed in.

The gravity after primary fermentation is down to 1.015, which puts us at about 6.2% ABV. It's less than our original target of over 8%, but I think that's mostly because of the boil volumes and all the sugars that ended up all over our stove. :-) Considering this was our first attempt at mashing, just the fact that we produced enough fermentable sugars in the mash to get from 1.062 down to 1.015 is a success.

The taste at this stage had a mild pumpkin and spice flavor to it. With all the great-smelling things we added to the secondary, it seems like it could really come out well.

[ Pumking Clone Brew Day ] <--- | ---> [ Pumking Bottling ]