Oatmeal Stout Racking to Secondary

This morning we racked the oatmeal stout into the two 1-gallon carboys. There didn't seem to be much activity in the airlock after the first few days, so I was nervous about what we'd find when we opened up the primary. Good sign #1: a nice rim of gunk above the beer, showing that the krausen was there at one point and had fallen back into the beer - both good things.

Before racking, we took the oak spiral that had been soaking in bourbon for the last week and dropped it into one of the carboys. When we first put the oak in the bourbon, it floated on top. By now, it was fully submerged in the bourbon so it must have really soaked up a lot!

Siphoning the beer into the secondaries was nice and straight forward. We had enough to fill both carboys and had a little left over to try a sample. It seems to be tasting nice so far. My brother wasn't here to rack with us, but we bottled a little bit of the leftover beer so he can try it when he's down for Thanksgiving.

Good sign #2 for the beer: the refractometer reading was 8.25 brix (equating to 1.017 specific gravity), down from 15 brix on brew day. That equates to an ABV of 5.4%. Right on target! I was worried with so little bubbling in the airlock that we'd have low attenuation, so it was a relief seeing the gravity drop to the right level.

If the beer sits for just shy of a couple weeks in the secondary, then we can bottle exactly three weeks prior to Christmas. Hopefully we'll have a carbonated tasty beer when we all get together for Christmas. Looking forward to seeing how it turns out!

[ Barney Flats Oatmeal Stout Brew Day ] <--- | ---> [ Oatmeal Stout Bottling ]

Barney Flats Oatmeal Stout Brew Day

Saturday I got to brew a beer with my brother for the first time! He had never brewed beer before, so last time he was down he checked out our books of clone recipes and landed on Barney Flats Oatmeal Stout by Anderson Valley Brewing Company. The recipe is in North American Clone Brews.

Craig was on a limited time schedule and ran into traffic on the way down from New York, so he missed the start of the brew day. The only thing he missed was putting the specialty grains in the 150 degree water to steep them for 45 minutes. He arrived in time to help pull out the grain bag, add the DME, and start bringing the wort up to a boil.

It was a pretty standard brew day. Just two hop additions (90 mins and 15 mins) and compared to the Xmas Beer and Pumqueen we made lately, it seemed really straightforward. We brewed a 2-gallon batch, and between the smaller amount of liquid and the colder water from the tap, the wort chiller worked nice and fast. The one very minor hiccup was that the 90 minute boil time resulted in more boil-off than our usual 60-minute boil. We had enough to reach the target batch size, but not enough extra to actually get a taste. Good thing we have the refractometer to get a gravity reading with only a few drops! We came it at 1.060 OG, with is actually a few points higher than we planned, but that's never a bad thing.

Since we're only doing a 2-gallon batch, we'll be putting it into two 1-gallon carboys for secondary fermentation. For one of the carboys, we're going to try a "bourbon barrel" flavor. We bought a medium toasted oak spiral (like a column with lots of surface area) and put it in Knob Creek bourbon to soak for the next week. When we rack to the secondaries, we'll put the bourbon oak spiral in one of them. I can't wait to compare the two side by side to compare the effect of bourbon-soaked oak.

If we give one week for the primary and two weeks for the secondary, then that only leaves 2.5 weeks in the bottle before we're all together again at Christmas. Hopefully the beer is carbonated by then, but it could easily be another week or two (or more!) before the beer is really coming into its prime. I'm still not sure if we should just go with that or if we should try to compress the primary and secondary schedules a little bit in order to have longer in the bottle by Christmas.

It was really fun doing a beer with my brother. It's too bad that the schedule for racking and bottling won't line up with him being in town again, but hopefully just over a month from now we're enjoying a delicious oatmeal stout together that we brewed ourselves!

---> [ Oatmeal Stout Racking to Secondary ]

Pumqueen Tasting

After nearly 5 weeks in the bottle, we tasted our Southern Tier Pumking clone (dubbed Pumqueen) at the end of October. It definitely has some good pumpkin spice flavors and a buttery taste reminiscent of Pumking. It's lacking a little bit of the alcohol bite of Pumking due to the lower ABV. Also, in my opinion, there's a tiny bit of an apple-like off flavor, but Amy disagrees. The Untappd check-ins from the few people who have tried it have varied from 2.5 to 4 stars (out of 5), so I guess some people think it's pretty tasty. All in all, it's not a bad first pumpkin beer for us. It was certainly fun to brew with how involved it was - the roasting pumpkin, creating our own spice extract, etc. And ending up with a pumpkin-flavored drinkable result makes it that much more fun.

[ Pumking Bottling ] <---

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 ] <---