Brewing Jamil's Evil Twin, A Hoppy Red Ale

Mash, sweet mash.  Smells like Grape Nuts, but it's destined for something even better.  BEER!

Mark came over - heck, two weeks ago now...  I've got to get these brew posts up quicker than I have been - for a good brewing session.  The weather had been poor the day before, but Sunday dawned true to it's name - warm and sunny.  A great day to brew some beer.

Heating the water in our HLT

Mark decided to pass on the imperial stout recipe for this batch and instead made a snap decision to try a batch of Jamil's Evil Twin, a pretty hoppy red ale.  It's a relatively popular recipe, so you can find a bunch of variation online, but they all tend toward nicely hopped, sweet-ish red ales, and that's what we were shooting for.

We skipped the grain-cracking step this time, despite me enjoying it as much as I did when we made the West Indian Pale Ale up at the river.  Partly because the mill was broken by some curious, but less than gentile, friends that weekend, and partly because, hey, they'll do it for you at the homebrew shop.

Mashing in with a real manifold

After heating our strike water to the calculated temp (assisting us in this was Beersmith, a homebrewing software Mark purchased between this brew and our last - and let me tell you, it was worth it.  Check it out sometime...) we poured a little bit into the mash tun to pre-warm it, then dumped in the big sack of crushed grain followed by the rest of the water.

This was the first time we'd tried pre-warming the mash tun, and I think it really helped.  We lost less heat to the cold sides of the mash tun than we'd seemed to have lost in previous attempts.

Hitting the temps right on

Oh, featured at left is the REAL manifold for our mash tun, you know, when I don't leave it in Durham when hauling all our stuff up to the mountains for a brew session next to the river.  Despite Mark's quickly-rigged replacement manifold working so well last time, we decided to go ahead and use the real one this time.

Anyway, we hit the desired 152 deg. right on and settled in for a nice long mash while the grain and hot water did it's thing in the mash tun.

On pretty much every brew day, Mark and I take the opportunity to sample some new beers obtained from our local supplier, Sam's Quik Shop.  It gives us something to do while we're waiting on the mash, and we both enjoy trying out new types of beer, or new releases from breweries all over the place.

We tried four new ones this time.  First up was the Traquair House Ale.  I liked it, but I don't think it was worth the price ($7/bottle).  It's not what I'd come to think of Scottish ale, but I've had only a few, so I don't know, really, if I am 100% sure of the style.  It was fine thought, and I'd liked it enough try perhaps try a clone, since homebrewing is considerably cheaper than $7 a bottle.

We followed that with Avery Brewing's Hog Heaven.  Tasty.  The hops balanced the barley wine flavor well.  I would definitely get it again, but that said, it was a solid middle of the road beer.  It wasn't surprising, but it was good.

Ah, next though: Clown Shoes Clementine 1.5.  Clown Shoes can make some weird beers, and they can make some good beers.  Well, this one is EXCELLENT.  You should try it. Citrus-y and very tasty.  I really enjoyed it, and would like to drink it again, in quantity.

The final beer of the day was Antigoon by the Three Musketeers Brewery (and Rober Wiedmaier, apparently).   Good, tasty Belgian-style.  Certainly worth drinking again.  The label is where it's at, though, featuring a drawing of a tiny dude CUTTING THE HAND OFF A GIANT.  10/10 for style!

Sparging

Checking the second
sparge temperature

Right, so , we drank a few beers (not all four - had to save some for the boil, right?) and then the mashing was complete and it was time to sparge.  Sparging is a place where I think we could improve our technique.  Right now, we batch sparge, drain the wort right out into the kettle, and drop some more sparge water in for 10 minutes or so, before draining again.  I know this nets us a much less efficient batch.  I'm not really sure how we could improve it at the moment.  Our current equipment is designed for batch sparging.  However, with two keggles (keg-kettles), I think we're approaching the possibility of setting up a rudimentary recirculating infusion mashing system (RIMS).  I need to acquire a pump from somewhere, and do a little drilling, but I think we're pretty close.

A rolling boil to release all the hoppy goodness from the hops

My biggest worry is about how to best heat the wort as it recirculates.  I'm not entirely sure how folks do this part.  Adding heat directly to the mash tun seems to be the way, but I keep reading about potentially scorching the mash bed - bad bad bad.  So perhaps putting the heat to a copper line and running the beer through it is the way to go?  Who knows.  I see more research in my future.

After the sparge we moved on to a 90 minute boil.  This long boil was combined with a lot (a LOT) of hops, both for bittering at the beginning and for aroma at the end.  Doing a 5 gallon batch in a 15 gallon keggle is great for removing any worry of a boil-over.  The only drawback comes in during chilling - the chiller is smaller than the keggle, so our in and out lines were bent at a weird angle.  I don't think it effects function much, but it gives the OCD in me a chance to just ... *shudder*.

What followed was the standard chilling, transfer to a carboy, and yeast pitching, all of which I failed to capture for posterity, but at the end of the day we have the image at left - beautiful, beautiful wort and yeast, slowly becoming what I hope to be a really nice, tasty beer.  We've got a few weeks of fermenting ahead of us, then it's in to the keg with this batch, for (a little) aging.

As always, we ended up with a TON of spent grain, but I'm getting tired of this.  The green (giant - yes yes...I'm tall.  Get your laughs out now.) in me twitches every time I dump 12lb of grain out into the garden.  Despite being good plant food, I can't help but think I could come up with a better use for it.  An attitude which lead to this:

Saving the Spent Grain for a
TOP SECRET SPECIAL PROJECT

What's this, you ask?  Stay tuned for details!