New Equipment

I picked up a few new items this month to enhance the work I've been doing.

I visited morebeer.com mainly because they have decent prices and free-shipping on most items.  I picked up the following:

Beer Bottling Tree
Sanitizer Injector
4 oz. Star-San No-Rinse
Wort Chiller with tubing

I also visited the local home brew store: beerbrew.com.

I picked up a new Hydrometer (I broke our old one when washing.)

I also picked up the ingredients to brew my Pale Ale, (which I'm making some modifications to and doing some experimentation with different yeasts), ingredients to brew my Hefeweizen (which I'm also tweaking a bit), and 2 3.5 gal. Better Bottle fermenters.


I mainly wanted to pick up the 2 fermenters so I can split up 5 gallon batch of beer and try different yeast strains.  This will allow me to hone in on exactly what I'm trying to produce much quicker and, still be producing the same volume of beer.

I also brewed my new Hefeweizen recipe and had a chance to try out the wort chiller.  It worked great.  15 minutes of running cold water through it brought it down from 200 F to 78 F.

More details on the Hefeweizen brew to come.

Review of my Maple Wheat and Pumpkin Ale

The Maple Wheat took roughly a month to bottle age properly.  Note, I did not add a second dose of yeast prior to bottling, which probably would have helped me here.  Nonetheless, I have beer now and it took a little longer to complete.  

The Maple Wheat beer, which I've dubbed as Maple Madness has a nice Amber brown color to it and is reminiscent of a Hefeweizen.  It is technically of the style weizenbock.  One thing to note is that it is a much stronger beer than a Hefeweizen, and the recipe estimated it would be around an 8% ABV beer.  My final calculation determined it came out to 6.83% ABV, but I suspect it to be possibly a bit higher and in the 7.0-8.0 ABV range.  It is a smooth easy to drink beer, especially if you're a Hefeweizen fan.  It has hints of Maple in the aftertaste, hints of clove in the nose, and holds a good foamy white head.  After two of these guys I'm in a pretty good mood, so be careful.  I would brew this again, but maybe make some of my own modifications to further enhance the recipe.

The Pumpkin Ale I tried came out pretty well also.  It did not have as much Pumpkin Pie spice flavor as I had hoped, so I'll add more next time.  It finished conditioning about 1 1/2 weeks after bottling.

It has a nice dark orange color to it, and a reasonable head.  It is a typical Pumpkin Ale, and is not the best, but not at all a bad beer to sit down and relax with at Thanksgiving.  I plan on bringing a few of these with me November 24 to enjoy with dinner.  It has a nice subtle Pumpkin flavor to it, and is not at all over hopped (just right in my opinion.)  The beer came in with a 5.25% ABV which is right about what I was expecting.  I will try a few different things the next time I brew this one.

Custom Pale Ale - Details

The Pale Ale I put together was aimed at being on the lighter side, and because I happened to have some whole Amarillo/Cascade Hops that were grown locally, I wanted to try and highlight them.  This was the beer I brewed on 8/28/10:

Starter Yeast batch done on 8/25/10:
    4oz.  Golden Light DME
    2cups Water
    1pkg. Safale US-05 Yeast (11.5g)

    Procedure:  
    Boil water and add 4oz. Golden Light DME
    Let dissolve for 20 minutes and then kill the heat.
    Chill down the liquid by submerging the kettle into an icy water bath.
    Pour into a 1000ml Flask and add 11.5g Safale US-05 Yeast.
    Insert porous cover/sponge cork into neck of Flask.
    This should be completed 3-4 days prior to brewing the beer.


Ingredients (5gal. Batch):
1/2lb. Crystal 20
1/4lb. Vienna
1/4lb. Belgian Aromatic
1/4lb. Dextrine
7/8oz. Cascade/Amarillo Hops
1/2oz. Chinook Hops
1oz. Mt. Hood Hops
6lbs. Golden Light DME
1 pinch Irish Moss
Yeast Starter created earlier

Procedure:
Bring 2gal. Water up to 150 degrees Fahrenheit and then kill the heat.
Bag and submerge your Crystal 20, Vienna, Belgian Aromatic, and Dextrine for 30 minutes.
Remove from water (let drip, and do not squeeze.)
Turn the heat back on and bring up to a boil.
When boiling add in the 6lbs. of Golden Light DME and 1/2oz. Chinook Hops.
At 45 Minutes add a pinch of Irish Moss
At 60 Minutes bag and add the 7/8oz. whole Amarillo/Cascade Hops and kill heat.
Begin to Chill. (Done when you can hold your hand on the bottom of the kettle for an extended period of time.)
Siphon the wort into your primary fermenter and fill upto 3 3/4gal.
Measure Original Gravity.
Add Yeast starter.
Cap and water lock for 1 week.
Move to Secondary Fermentation off trub.

At approximately 3 1/2gal-3 3/4gal the Original Gravity was: 1.074
The wort was moved to Secondary Fermentation on 9/2/10 (5 days later.)
Added approximately 1.5gal. water to Secondary Fermenter.
I should have taken a final gravity reading before adding more water, but I goofed up.
2oz. Priming Sugar (Corn Sugar) was added to wort and bottled 9/20/10.

I'll let you know how it tastes in a few weeks!

Bottling Day! - Custom Pale Ale

After much anticipation, the time came last night to finally bottle up the Pale Ale that has been sitting in secondary fermentation for about 2 weeks.  It will be nice to have a taste of the what I hope to be a lighter style Pale Ale soon.  When I was creating the brew, I was hoping to get something similar to a BBC Steel Rail Ultra-Pale Ale.  I'm not sure I will even get close, but it will still be interesting to taste what I've ended up with.  The good thing is, I will have a baseline to continue to work from and attempt to perfect.

Seeing that this blog has just recently started, I will post the details of this particular brew later when I have our hand-written notes in front of me.  

The batch yielded 24 22oz. Bottles, and 11 12oz. bottles of Pale Ale.  

Two New Brews This Week

With Summer coming to an end, I thought it would be fun to try out a few beers that I felt would fit the season nicely.  We recently received the latest edition of "Clone Brews" by Tess and Mark Szamatulski from a friend.  It being a quiet Saturday afternoon I started poking through it a bit.  After scanning several of the recipes, I came across one that sounded delicious and what called out to me as an interesting fit for the fall.  The beer is a Maple Wheat Ale, originally crafted by Niagara Falls Brewing Company, Ontario, Canada.

I'm assuming this beer it typically brewed in the Spring, but for some reason the smell of the leaves falling to the ground this time of year reminds me of Maple.  It could also be due to the plentiful amounts of Maple Trees in New England and the colorful display they give us during the Fall Season.

I also decided I wanted to try a Pumpkin Ale.  For obvious reasons, this style has become a popular Fall brew.  Sadly enough, I found that many recipes for this style do not even contain Pumpkin!  I knew that my one requirement for the style would be that it be brewed with Pumpkin.  After looking at some different online sources, I found a recipe that sounded excellent from homebrewtalk.com.

So today I went down to the local brewing supply shop and picked up all the ingredients required:

Maple Wheat Ale
7lb.      Wheat DME
1.75lb. Wheat Malt
1.5lb.   US 2-Row Pale Malt (recipe called for Canadian 2-Row, it being a Canadian Recipe)
12oz  . Maple Syrup (4oz. for bottling)
2oz.     Willamette Hop Pellets (1.5oz for bittering)
1tsp.    Irish Moss
1pkg.   Wyeast's 3056 Bavarian Wheat Blend Yeast
1/2cup Corn Sugar for bottling

Pumpkin Ale
6.25lbs. Light DME
1lbs.      Crystal Malt - 60L
8oz.       Belgian Biscuit Malt
4oz.       Flaked Wheat
.75oz.    Goldings Hop Pellets (
1/4tsp.   Irish Moss
1pkg.    English Ale Yeast(White Labs #WLP002)
1 Pumpkin (Cut and skin to obtain 60oz. for recipe)

The original recipe calls for canned Pumpkin, but I'm planning on baking the Pumpkin for at least an hour prior to using it in the brew (maybe even doing it the night before would be the way to go here.)

I also got around to setting up some yeast starters for these beers later in the evening.  I plan to brew one beer Wednesday and one Thursday this week, and haven't decided which I'll do first.  Most likely it will be the Maple Wheat Ale, just so I can begin baking the Pumpkin and save some time Thursday.

For the yeast starters, I sanitized my 1000ml. viles with 1tbsp. bleach and 1tbsp. distilled white vinegar (not adding the chemicals until the vile was filled with water.)  I brought 2 mid-sized pans to a boil with 1000ml. of water each.  I added in 3.5oz. of Wheat DME for the Maple Wheat Ale batch, and 3.5oz. of the Light DME for the Pumpkin Ale batch.

I let these boil for approximately 10 minutes before killing the heat.  I then used a sanitized funnel and poured each batch into their respective vile, making sure to rinse the funnel and sanitize in between.  I also put a sanitized sponge stopper in the neck of both viles.  These chilled down for roughly 30 minutes in some cool water.  Once they were cool enough I added the Wyeast 3056 Bavarian Blend Yeast to the Wheat Malt mixture, and added the WLP002 Yeast to the Light Malt mixture.  Then I put the sponges back into the necks of the viles, and will be waiting for them to start activating for the brews later this week.

Tomorrow I will be bottling up a Pale Ale that I created a few weeks back and probably drinking a Heffeweizen that I also brewed while completing all of that hard work.