Homebrew Adventures: A Retrospective

Note: This is part two of a look at two homebrew recipes I’ve made. Click here for part one.

While the watermelon wheat I made this summer was great for that time of year, it’s only natural that fall brings about the perfect seasonal pairing of an apple-based beer. I talked to a friend about the idea this summer, thinking another form of “harvest” style beer might be good once the temperature drops and leaves start changing colors.

That was the goal when I set out to make a beer-cider hybrid, combining the malt and hops of extract brewing with the base of a homebrewed cider – apple juice. It’s a super-easy recipe that I’d argue is great for beginner homebrewers, like myself. It’s also been a hit with friends – and even The Missus – so it’s got that going for it.

So how did this mixture of ingredients turn out? Hit the jump to see.

Homebrew Adventures: A retrospective

Note: This is part one of two.

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for some time, discussing two of my (somewhat) recent homebrews to point out how a couple experiments have turned out. This month marks my one-year anniversary (brewiversary?) since I started homebrewing and through the first year I created a dozen batches. I’m currently on hiatus as I try to clear out space from all the bottles I’ve saved up, but there are lots of great recipes I have in mind on the horizon.

In the coming days, I want to share details on two of my brews, one perfect for summer and one ideal for the fall:

• Watermelon wheat
• Beer-cider hybrid

Do these pique your interest? Hit the jump to find out some general details that should interest homebrewers and non-homebrewers alike.

A Few Words on … reusing homebrew ingredients

Reusing grain? The power is yours!

Note: While this post may seem solely for homebrewers, don’t be shy about trying this yourself. Or just start homebrewing. Either way is good by me.

I am not an all-grain brewer. Extract is the name of my game. Half the effort and some still pretty damned good homebrew.

But, like my time-consumed all-grain brethren, I still use grains to help provide starches/sugar and body to my brews. I usually end up using somewhere around a pound of grain, give or take, and sadly I have no use for them after my beer. Being a somewhat sustainable person – but not one who lives on a farm – I don’t have an easy way to get rid of my spent grain aside from chucking it in the garbage. (The Missus doesn’t like it in our compost pile because it attracts too many ants near our home)

“Reduce, reuse, recycle, y’all!”

So I was very excited to find the Spent Grain Chef over on The Brooklyn Brew Shop‘s blog, The Mash. There are 24 recipes for a variety of foods where – you guessed it – that soggy mashed grain turns into something rather useful. Why do I think this is a great idea, aside from reducing, reusing and recycling? Not only do you get really great-tasting options, but all these recipes can be altered by the type of grain you decide to use. A quick glance at the sheer volume of grain used in homebrewing offers a glimpse into how creative you can get in the kitchen.

Hit the jump to see some great recipes you may be interested in. Mouth watering is optional.

Homebrew adventures: Blueberry Wheat (final product)

Sadly out of focus, it’s still blue(ish)

Another in my fruit-wheat beer series (apricot, watermelon and now this) my blueberry wheat beer turned out to be such a hit even The Missus likes it.

That’s probably because I wanted to make this homebrew sweet, but not bursting with berry flavor. While some like to use fruit extract to pour into heir beer, I felt using he real thing would offer a more authentic flavor. Luckily enough, I caught a great episode of Basic Brewing Radio about a blueberry addition experiment as I was planning this beer that compared the use of the two, with the authentic berry characteristics shown to come from muddled/crushed real fruit.

So … In the secondary I used 4.5 pounds of blueberries, which I froze, thawed and crushed slightly to get the berry guts and juices flowing, and froze again (and thawed again) before adding to my beer. Everything I read about using berries specifically suggested using a 2:1 berry-to-gallon ratio for big blueberry characteristics, but I was about 1:1 in mine. To make sure some sweetness came through, I added about a half-pound of honey right at the end of my boil to be safe. The last thing I wanted was more tart than sweet.

Hit the jump for more notes…

Homebrew Adventures – Blueberry Wheat

What you see here are the remnants of blueberries and trub at the bottom of my secondary fermenter after bottling a blueberry wheat ale over the weekend. It’s my second fruit-based wheat beer – the watermelon wheat turned out great.

I used a basic wheat beer base for the beer and added 4.5 pounds of blueberries when I moved the beer over to secondary. I bought the blueberries fresh during a sale at my local Whole Foods and froze them to break down the cell walls, making it easier for flavor extraction while the blueberries sat in the fermenting beer. A week before I used them I defrosted them a bit and smashed them up to make sure more juice would be available to seep into the beer. I refroze them and defrosted them again before adding them to the beer.

After I was done bottling I tasted a few of the berries, which didn’t seem to have any of their natural flavor left. They mostly tasted like beer. I took this as a good thing that as much blueberry flavor was taken out as possible.

The one downside to this was during my research for the beer a common theme was how hard it was to get good blueberry flavor by using real blueberries. Most homebrewers seemed to suggest you’d need a 2:1 ratio of berries to beer, meaning I would’ve needed almost 10 pounds of blueberries in my batch to get the best taste. Mine was about 1:1. I think the beer will turn out fine, but the blueberry flavor may just take a backseat to the wheat. We’ll see.

Sam Adams Five Crown Imperial Stout

In the battle between chocolate and booze, neither is a victor but everybody wins.

Such is the theme of Sam Adams Five Crown Imperial Stout, an excellent entry into the beer company’s Longshot homebrew competition line. It’s got an 85 on Beer Advocate.

This beer may kick your ass, but that’s a good thing. From the start, you have a great idea of what you’re getting with it. Five Crown pours midnight black with next to no head. A lighthouse isn’t sufficient to see through this beer.

Take a whiff and you find a wide range of aromas, including chocolate, raisin, fig and vanilla cream. And the booze. At 8.9 percent, this beer is nothing to sneeze at, but don’t let that number fool you. My impression was that this high-alcohol beer doesn’t smell like one, thanks to its heavy malt characteristic. The roasted grain gives Five Crown a great sweet counterbalance to the alcohol that even varied from one smell/sip to the next. You can have you cake and eat it too.

Which is a perfect segue into the flavor, which I found to be just as complex. Just like the beer’s aroma, the chocolate of the malt and alcohol flavor end up in a tango on your tongue, dancing around and leaving you with just a touch of bitter as it goes down. (That was dramatic, wasn’t it?) What surprised me the most was a trick played on my taste buds – some kind of remnant of berry. Is it the blend of chocolate and sweet malt? I don’t know, but it’s delicious.

I want to say there were some coffee-like aspects to this beer, but none that stood out worth noting. It’s just chocolate and booze slugging away at each other.

Hit the jump for my “Rate That Beer” sheet.

Homebrew Adventures – Watermelon Wheat

Above is an image of the bottom of my carboy after I bottled a batch of a watermelon wheat ale. That slurry-looking stuff is the trub, the layer of sediment that appears at the bottom of the fermenter after yeast has completed the bulk of the fermentation. As you can tell, it’s taken on a nice watermelon haze from the color of the juice and pulp that I included in the fermenter. The beer itself wasn’t hued red or pink – it was a regular-old clear golden color.

I have no idea how this beer is going to turn out. I made some newbie homebrewer mistakes during the brewday process, but I’ll withhold judgment until that first properly carbonated bottle is opened. All I want is a beer that is fit to be poured down my gullet and not the drain.

#HomebrewProblems (but not really)

I’m overdue for a homebrew post. Long overdue, actually. I’ve currently got a honey basil ale fermenting – my ninth solo homebrew – there are a bunch I’m slowly working through sitting in my closet. I’ve got well over 100 bottles waiting to be had (#HomebrewProblems) varying from a few final bottles of my honey double IPA to a chocolate-vanilla porter.

This week I’m starting in earnest to drink my latest India pale ale – a single-hop Cascade IPA. I used only Cascade hops for this batch, six ounces in total. I brewed the beer with four ounces and dry-hopped with two for 10 days. It was the first recipe I made up myself, although IPAs tend to be easier to create, I suppose. I referenced Ray Daniels’ Designing Great Beers for the hop count. According to him, just over three ounces is an award-winning amount of hops to use for the entire recipe.

My single-hop Cascade IPA and (fake) bacon cheeseburger

This week I paired it with a (vegetarian) bacon cheeseburger. I think it would also go well with any dish made or topped with bleu cheese. I also have a strong opinion that IPAs pair wonderfully with uber-cheap, store-brand, dry chocolate chip cookies. Just sayin’.

If you’re familiar with Cascade, you’ll have an idea of what this beer offers. As a good, American hop, Cascade is a bit floral, but mostly citrus-like smell and flavor. To me, it can also be a little sweet if used in high amounts. I think my beer almost gets to that point, but not quite.

The Cascade smell is VERY pronounced on the nose thanks to the two ounces of leaf hops I used, but the taste is a bit more subdued. My thought is it could be because the alpha acid amount was just over 5 percent, which is about middling for Cascade. It gives the IPA a nice bitterness, but because the smell of hops is so heavy – something I like – it might be harder to get the hop flavor from the beer.

All of this isn’t a bad thing, exactly. I rather like the beer and I think aside from the smell, it might be a good IPA starter beer. Then again, my palette is a bit different than those who don’t like IPAs. I used an online calculator to determine the IBU amount, which was 60. Most brewers consider around 100 to be around the highest you can go.

I also pulled a bottle of an English pale ale, which is probably the most balanced, easy drinking beer I’ve made. It’s one that I think anyone can drink and enjoy. Hooray me!

English pale ale

The recipe was from a pretty simple kit and used a total of three ounces of hops -Kent Golding and Fuggle. It’s OK to giggle if you want.

What I like about this beer is its balance – the hops are pretty mild and the malt bill evens everything out nicely. It’s a good non-beer lover beer, but I’ve also gotten positive reviews from fellow homebrewers on it. Hooray me!

On the bright side, I’ve just returned from a trip to my local beer store where I splurged and picked up a couple new brews, as if I needed any more. Tonight I’m cracking open a 21st Amendment Hell or High Watermelon and I’m stashing a Widmer Brothers Kill Devil brown ale.

Hooray me!

Homebrew – chocolate-vanilla porter

Sitting in my downstairs closet is this carboy, full of what I hope to be a good dessert-ish beer. Or just a good beer in general.

It’s the first stage of what I hope to be a delicious chocolate-vanilla porter. The beer is currently going through its first fermentation stage and when I rack over to my secondary carboy, I’ll be adding two or three Madagascar vanilla beans to see what kind of vanilla flavor I can infuse into the beer. This was my first use of a “True Brew” recipe kit – I needed to stop by my local homebrew store and wanted to pick something up and figured I’d give it a try.

The kit is a little different than other porter kits I found online, mostly because of the small grain bill. It only came with six ounces of chocolate grain malt, which I soaked during the brew process for 30 minutes to try and get as much out of the grain as possible. Otherwise, this is pretty much a straight malt beer – about three pounds of liquid extract and two pounds of dried malt extract.

To get the chocolate flavor, I used three ounces of semisweet baker’s chocolate at the very start of the boil. I really didn’t know how much would be a good amount, but I knew I wanted to get a chocolate flavor out of it, aside from what I’d be able to glean from the grains. By letting the chocolate essentially act as a “bittering hop” (full 60 minutes in the boil) my hope was to break up any potential oils that would make the beer go funky. During the boil time, the wort very much had a chocolate smell to it, so I’m anxious to see what it tastes like when I try a sample prior to the secondary.

I also tried to up the ABV slightly in the beer by melting leftover Cooper’s carbonation drops (essentially straight sugar) in the boil. According to the kit, the gravity of the beer should be around 4 percent ABV, but with my addition of the chocolate and carbonation drops, I should be able to hit 5 percent.

Homebrew: jalapeno ale

I’m proud of this one. After the somewhat failure of my honey IPA, I had high hopes for my “Hot Blonde” jalapeno ale. They came through.

This beer was pretty simple – I used a base of an Austin Homebrew blonde ale and added jalapenos and one habanero during the fermentation process. I didn’t want the beer to have some kind of firehouse hotness, but I think I was able to strike an ideal mix between the flavor aspects of the peppers and the heat people associate with them.

Not a lot of hops went into this one, just an ounce of cascade at the start of the brew for bittering and then an ounce of willamette at the end for aroma. I did add about a pound of honey with 15 minutes left in the boil, but any of that sweetness doesn’t come through. It was mostly just to jack up the ABV by a percent or so. I also added a pound of sugars for an alcohol boost. Overall, the beer came out at about 7 percent ABV. I feel like there’s a slight taste of the alcohol in each bottle, but it’s handled pretty well by the pepper and heat.

During the fermentation process I was worried about the flavor of the beer, as the jalapenos really took over. I started by roasting six “cored” jalapenos – I took out the white flesh and seeds to avoid the most spicy parts – and one habanero, also cleaned out. Those imparted a very strong pepper smell and taste, but not much heat at all. So I added a half roasted jalapeno with all flesh and seeds left attached. That really helped give it a little kick. I really like how the spiciness and heat ended up in this beer. It’s enough that you know you’re drinking a jalapeno ale, but not offensive to more milder tastes. The heat will stick with you throughout a bottle, but never overpower. It leaves a little on the tongue each time.

The smell and taste as still very much pepper, but not as bad as I thought it would be through the fermentation process. I think the carbonating really helped that move along. It still smells like a jalapeno, but the spiciness helps to mitigate some of the pepper flavor.

The only disappointing part of the beer is the color, which is a little darker than I wanted it to be. Although, I suspect adding the honey had something to do with that.