Completed:
October - The White House's Honey Ale and Honey PorterThanks to Reddit user hotelindia, Mark and I had a good all-grain grain bill for the White House Honey Porter, and put it to the test right in the middle of October. In addition to hotelindia's grain bill, we used .5 oz Nugget hops at (mistake!) 15 minute after heating (but before the boil started), .5 oz Nugget at 30 minutes, 1 oz Hallertau at flame out, and 1 lb clover honey. It smells good, and I tried a taste of the wort before we pitched it - sweet, dark, honey-e. This should turn out to be a good brew.
Notes from before brewing:
"How can you NOT brew the Honey Ale and Honey Porter recipes created by the WHITE HOUSE!? These are extract recipes, so they should be pretty quick, actually. Since Mark doesn't show much interest in them, I may be doing them myself - sounds like a good afternoon of brewing an self-reflection is in order. Zen and Beer courtesy of the First Family and White House Assistant Chef Sam Kass!
"Update: Reddit user hotelindia posted his all-grain conversion of the White House Honey Porter, so I might be trying all-grain rather than extract for that one. Either should be interesting!"
September - Jamil's Evil Twin
Mark loves the hop, so it's not really a surprise that he wanted to go with a strong hoppy beer like Jamil's Evil Twin. It's a pretty popular recipe by that name, so there are a ton of people out there who have tried it and they all say the same thing: great!
We went ahead and brewed this red ale with a few hop substitutions, since Amarillo hops have been kind of hard to come by recently. It was a great brewday on the last day of September, and the weather as perfect. Mark and I tried out the Beersmith software this time, and it was pretty cool. We hit all the temperatures we were shooting for with ease, the gravity was right on, and the built-in timer made keeping track of the hop additions a lot easier. Looking forward to seeing how this one turns out.
NuclearRich's West Indian Pale Ale
My notes before brewing: "NuclearRich, also a HomebrewTalk user, has a recipe for a west indian pale ale I'd like to try as well. It's got a higher IBU than FATC1TY's pale, and being all-grain, tempts me a bit more; I just bought some equipment from a buddy moving out west and can do all-grain batches a little easier now. Perhaps this would be a good one to take up to the New River."
So, as I speculated in the notes, Mark and I hauled our brewing equipment up to the New River and made a batch of NuclearRich's West Indian Pale Ale. The process was pretty straight forward, despite some equipment failures (follow the link for a longer description of the brewing day). The wort ended up being a deep ruby/brown color - much darker than I expected for a pale ale. That's all the Caramel and Rye malt at work there. It's fermenting away happily for a few weeks before we'll dry hop it with a few more ounces of hops. I'm VERY excited to try this one. It's an interesting recipe, and hopefully it turned out OK despite us falling short of 5 gallons and finishing up with just over 3.5 gallons in the carboy.
UPDATE: Kegged the West Indian Pale Ale about a week ago, but left it under low pressure as I was preparing Joseph and Peter's #1 English Porter for bottling. Last night, despite being only carbonated to about 8 psi, I took the first taste. The immediate first pull was - in a word - gross, but there were considerable amounts of hop pieces floating around in there. This happens with each batch, but I was surprised at the amount for this one. I put it down to being the first batch we made without filtering out the hops from the boil, and the only dry-hopped batch we've ever done.
I ended up pulling about three pints and throwing them out, and finally the beer began to clear up. There are still a few floaties in there, but it's getting better. I let the fourth pint settle for a bit and the hop junk fell to the bottom of the glass. Finally, I tried it again. It was good! It's less hoppy than I would have thought (especially given the hop-ness of the first few pulls), and had a good, full taste to it. It's crisp, somewhat hoppy, and the rye gives it a pleasant taste and a slightly ruby brown color. I'm very happy with the result. This might be a good beer to experiment with - I think I might want to make this a house beer.
Without speculating on changes to the recipe just yet, I think I will add two bits of equipment to our setup - a hop spider (Spider? Really? That's the best we could come up with?) and a hop bag - the former to keep hops contained in the boil, and the latter to keep hops contained during dry-hoping.
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August - Joseph and Peter's #1 English Porter
My notes before brewing: "An all-grain recipe of my own devising, Joseph and Peter's #1 English Porter is a small batch English-style porter, intended to be low-gravity, malty and easy-drinking. I'm looking forward to trying more small batch brews. Hopefully the smaller size will make testing new recipes easier, more economical, and fun. Certainly bottling the whole batch in fifteen or so 22oz bottles will be considerably less time consuming."
The process of making this small batch was fun, but ultimately, probably just as much work as a 5 gallon batch. With the small amount of money we saved, and the waste of some of the ingredients (we had to buy in quantities that were a bit larger than actually necessary), it was probably a wash in all. I think in the future we'd be better off making 5 gallon batches anyway.
The whole process was a lot smoother than things have been in the past. We're getting the hang of all-grain. We hit the target temperatures dead on, despite the smaller batch in our regular equipment, and ended up with a 1.040 OG. The wort smells awesome, with some good chocolate aroma, and is a beautiful dark color perfect for the porter family style. I can't wait till fermentation is done and we can see how it tastes prior to aging for a bit longer in the bottles. I'm expecting to need about 4 weeks in the bottles for the flavors to combine and mellow out a bit.
Next weekend: NuclearRich's West Indian Pale Ale, brewed up at my in-laws river place on the banks of the New River, NC!
UPDATE: I kegged old Joseph and Peter's #1 English Porter after 4 weeks in the primary, and it spent a week at 25psi and a final two days at 10psi in the keg. Finally, 5 weeks after brew day, we tried it. Well, HOLY BEERMUGS BATMAN! This turned out to be everything I was going for with my first porter recipe. It was flavorful, but not so roasty or chocolatly or bitter that it wasn't what I like to call "quaffable". It's basically a round, fully session porter. Not only that, but it's probably one of our best beers to date. I'm not sure if it's that we're brewing all-grain now, that we're just getting better at it, or if I just happened to make a really good recipe, but wow. Just. Wow.
Now I'm kicking myself for only making 2 gallons. And I'm questioning whether or not I needed to try to refine the recipe with Joseph and Peter's #2 English Porter. I might have hit the nail on the head with good 'ol #1.
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May - Bee Cave Brewery's Bavarian Hefeweizen
The second all-grain batch for Mark and me. We went with the Bavarian hefeweizen recipe courtesy of Bee Cave Brewery's EdWort. As I mentioned before brewing this batch, hefeweizen is how I bribe my wife into allowing all the homebrew equipment that's scattered around the house.
This was probably the most prepared-for brewday we've done. Previously, I always seemed to feel like things were rushed when the boil was over, and something always got lost in the shuffle; "forgot to sanitize this or that - quick run and do that", or "hey, where's the filter for the hop residue!" This time I made sure everything was cleaned and laid out in order of necessity. All the steps were written down, all the volumes and times calculated ahead of time. It was a good change of pace.
The actual act of brewing was fine. We're still getting some experience with all-grain under our belt, so Mark and I are trying out different tactics with this stuff. Mark read somewhere that batch sparging was just as good, or better, than fly sparging for a variety of reasons, so we did it that way. At one point we did get a stuck runoff, and had to stir things up to fix it, but it worked fine after that.
The whole process ended up taking us about six hours, though. Too much time, but I think we'll get that down some as we get better at this. At least, that's my hope. I'm not really complaining too much, though. All you can do is wait for most of it, and for most of that we spent the time trying out new beer from the local beer depot.
It's due out of the carboy tomorrow, day 10. There was a ton of crazy fermentation early on, but things have settled down a bit. It's still pretty cloudy, even for a hefeweizen, so I'm going to rack it into a secondary to get rid of some of the sediment, and hopefully it'll clear up after a bit in the keg. I'm sure it'll taste good, though.
UPDATE: Well, this recipe turned out to be one of our best! The guys at Bee Cave really know their stuff. It turned out to be really comparable to some of our favorite craft brew hefeweizens - not quite up to the same standard, but really close. I'm sure we can refine our fermentation process a bit and it'll come out even closer.
This recipe is definitely a keeper!
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February - Pale Ale
Our first all-grain batch, this pale ale was the result of Mark's own extensive research for the style and a recipe of his own devising. Sadly, I didn't remember to get a copy of the recipe for this post, but I'll update later if I can find it.
Brew day went well. Our buddy Drew came to help out and lend his experience with all-grain brewing. We didn't have any real trouble, and everything went very smoothly. I was surprised by the extra time it takes to make all-grain batches, but hey, a couple of extra hours to sit on the porch enjoying the company of friends and some good beers is never a bad thing.
Unfortunately, the wort didn't perform so well after brew day. There was fermentation, but not a lot of it. I'm not sure if it was due to the somewhat chilly house - though it was probably right around 64F, so that shouldn't have mattered, but the amount of activity was well short of wild fermentation we've come to expect out of other batches. Perhaps it was the use of dry yeast this time. We've used liquid yeast for the last year or so, and the difference between this batch and the last half-dozen was significant. All said, the beer ended up maltier than we expected. Had I not broken my hydrometer, we would have more positive proof of activity or lack thereof. As it is, we assume, based on taste and yeast activity, that we didn't get a full conversion of sugars in this batch.
Another letdown was the retained hop flavors and aroma. Despite using a very healthy dose of hops throughout the process, the pale ale wasn't nearly as hoppy as expected. With some perspective over the whole process, I'd say we still ended up on the low end of the pale ale family style, but that's not what Mark's recipe was aiming for at all. I have a feeling the incomplete conversion left the beer with more malt flavor than anticipated, and it's balancing out the hop bitterness.
Despite the above, it's still a decent brew, though. It's not in line with the intended style, but in the end, the result is still beer. That just reaffirms one of Charlie Papazian's great quotes of homebrewing (I'm paraphrasing from memory here): No matter what you do, you're still going to end up with beer.
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January - German Alt
An extract kit with specialty grains from Northern Brewer, we were not prepared for the bitterness of the style. Neither Mark nor I had experience with German Alt beers before and we really didn't know what to expect. This batch turned out to be a flavorful, but extremely bitter, brown-in-color ale. Not in a bad way, mind you, and it's fantastic with a good meat and potatoes meal.
I need to get a couple of different commercially produced Alt beers to get a handle on what this is supposed to taste like. As it is, I don't have a way of confirming if this turned out to be on target for it's style. It did match up pretty well with the description provided by Northern Brewer, though even that is a relatively vague description (and clearly intended to be):
Alts are a bit difficult to explain to the uninitiated - you'll just have to try a glass of coppery-brown, rich, caramelly, and bitter ale to get the idea.This did mellow out a little with age, with some of the sharpest bitter flavors tuning down some, but it's still a strongly flavored beer, even a month or two after the first tasting.
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