The world needs heroes

Sometimes, just when you need someone to look up to, someone to give you a path, one lands in your inbox:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/10/only-in-portland-beer-keg-carrying-party-bike/

I may have spent enough money there to finance this, but I don’t regret a single cent. Hopworks rules.

Bottled Pumpkin

With the kind of hangover that accompanies a birthday, I manage to get batch 004 into bottles today.

It was pretty sweet and I think it will be really good after a few weeks in bottles. I would’ve liked it to come out more spicy and a little more pumpkin flavored, but I think that it will be a crowd pleaser.

I didn’t transfer it into the priming bucket before bottling, I just went straight from the carboy to bottles. I don’t know if that will have an effect, but I dis it that way for batch 001, so I am not too worried about it.

OG: 1.020 @ 80F, so 1.026 at 60.

Recipe 004

• 1lb. Breiss Carapils
• 1lb. Rahr Red Wheat
• 1lb. Munich
• 2lb. Gold Dry Malt Extract
• 3lb. Amber Dry Malt Extract
• 2 medium pumpkins
• 1oz. Mt. Hood hops (5.5% AA)
• 1tsp. Pumpkin Spice
• 1tsp. Vanilla
• WyEast 1056

1. Roast pumpkin at 350F for 1hr. in 1in. of water, remove shell.
2. Heat water to 150-170, add grains and pumpkin meat, let stand 1 hr.
3. Remove grains and pumpkin and bring to boil.
4. Add hops and malt, boil 60 min.
5. Add 1 tsp. Irish Moss with 15 left in boil.
6. Add Pumpkin Spice & vanilla at flameout.
7. Cool to 75, add to carboy with yeast and a little water to make 5gal.

OG: 1.062 @ 80F = 1.068 @ 60F

I think everything today went pretty smoothly. The beer smells awesome. I think it could use more hops, but the other hops that I had were 16% AA, which would’ve been way too hoppy, I think. So 1oz. will have to be enough. The beer at this point tastes fantastic – sweet & spicy.

I don’t think that I messed anything up, and I think I did a pretty good job of not contaminating anything. I probably could’ve used more Red Wheat to make the beer more colorful, but it looks pretty good as is.

I am really looking forward to this one.

Also, per someone’s advice, I froze the pumpkin after I removed it from the brew, so when the beer is ready I will make beer flavored pumpkin pie to go with it.

Planning 004 (Pumpkin Ale)

Normally it would be about mid-October and I’d start thinking “Man, I wish I’d started brewing a pumpkin beer about six weeks ago!”

This year, somehow, I thought to do it with time enough to do it.

So Batch 004 is going to be a pumpkin ale – one of my favorite beers. If you’ve never had it, I highly suggest trying either Dogfish Head’s Punkin’ or one that’s just called “Pumpkin Ale”. I think the recipe is from Buffalo Bill’s in Montana, but it’s brewed and bottled locally in lots of regions.

I am, again, not specifically following any recipe, but found these two that look pretty good:

• http://beerrecipes.blogspot.com/2007/09/pumpkin-ale.html
• http://www.thebrewsite.com/2004/10/11/pumpkin_ale_recipe.php

I’ll post the exact recipe when I do it, but this time I’m noting the recipes I’m looking at before I lose them.

Brew Not Bombs

Bottling 003

Because I dry hopped this one, getting the beer from the carboy and into bottles without bottling hop leaves posed a bit of difficulty.

Here’s what I did (for better or worse):

• boil 1 cup extra light malt w/ 2 cups water
• pour that into plastic fermenting pail
• add some filtered water (to cool it)
• siphon beer from carboy and through mesh bag into plastic pail
• bottle from there

I don’t know how this will have affected anything, and one of my big concerns with this entire batch has been that I filtered out too much yeast each time I transferred it. I’m kinda afraid that this has meant not enough fermentation, or not fast enough fermentation, resulting in low alcohol content. Which (see below) seems true.

It is, however, delicious. It has a very hoppy aroma, but the taste is not at all bitter. I think that it would best be described as an aromatic Pale Ale. Which is what I was going for, so I’m not disappointed at all. I think it’s going to be very good in three weeks and will be great when it’s hot in September.

I ended up with 39 12oz bottles and about 4.9 22oz bottles. (12 * 39) + (4.9 * 22) = 468 +107.8 = 575.8 oz = ~48 12oz bottles. That’s just a little short of what I wanted. I figure that I could’ve added water to the pail before bottling to get more, but this one was a pretty light, golden color, and I didn’t want to have to boil a bunch of water and let it cool before adding it.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to enjoying this one. Abby, Ben, Bean and Talia all enjoyed the warm, flat, unfinished version.

1.010 @ 80F = 1.016 @ 60F.

(1.038 – 1.016) * 105 = 2.31% ABV

Whoa. That’s low. Bummer.

Uh…at least it’s organic?

Dry hopping

I’m dry hopping this batch in the second fermenter. It’s basically just adding hops for the second fermentation and gives the beer a hoppier aroma.

I tasted it while I was transferring and it’s not as hoppy as I was expecting. Which is good. I actually think this one will be a crowd pleaser, but a lot can change between now and Brew Not Bombs.

OG 1.010@80F

Yeast

So, I was wrong about the yeast packet being activated in transit. In fact, it had not been activated at all.

The way this particular yeast packet works is this: about four hours before you’re ready to pitch the yeast, you break this inner pouch to release nutrients into the yeast and allow them to activate. Only I could NOT get the inner pocket to burst. So I ended up cutting the bag open, then cutting the inner pouch open and dumping it all into the fermenter.

So…we’ll see how that goes.

Batch 003

As I said before, I’m going to attempt a Celebration Ale clone for this years Brew Not Bombs. This one is going to be pretty hoppy,

I think.

Here’s the recipe I’m using:

• 1lb Great Western Crystal 60L Malt
• 1/2lb Breiss Carapils Malt
• 1/2lb Great Western Munich Malt
• 5lb Briess Pale Extract (liquid barley malt)
• 2oz. Belgian Admiral AAU14.78%
• 2oz. New Zealand Cascade AAU8.9%
• Wyeast 1056 American Yeast
• 1/4tsp Irish Moss

Process:

1. Bring water to boil, let cool to 170-190. Add grains and steep 30 min.
2. Remove grains, and bring back to boil. Add malt extract & 1oz Belgian Admiral hops
3. After 45 min. add 1oz. Belgian Admiral hops and Irish Moss
4. After another 10 min, add 1oz New Zealand Cascade hops
5. After another 8 min, add 1oz. New Zealand Cascade and turn off heat
6. Chill in ice bath for 30 min., then pour into primary fermenter. For this step, I got a strainer that fit over the top of my primary fermentation bucket, put my bags of hops down and poured the wort over that. The bags of hops were very effective in filtering out a lot of the sediment.
7. Add 2 gal cool water to make 5 gal total.
8. Wait for it to reach 70-80F and then add yeast.
9. Seal and wait.

OG: 1.030 @ 86 = 1.038 @ 60

Since I ordered the yeast from Colorado, when it arrived it was already room temperature and seemed to have (possibly) been activated. I know last time I used this yeast packet, once I activated it, the bag got very pumped up with activity. This time, not so much. Hopefully the yeast just went dormant and adding it will still work. If not, I’m going to be kinda pissed.

I don’t really like fermenting in the plastic bucket. A large part of that is that the plastic swells as the yeast becomes active, so the bubbler doesn’t really do a good job of reflecting what’s going on. Also, I don’t really trust plastic. But I am going to dry hop this one as it goes into the second fermenter. I haven’t done that before and I’m curious to try it out.

Picking the Recipe

This could get messy. This time I am trying to make something similar to Sierra Nevada’s Celebration Ale. Again, I found what I thought to be a good recipe online, but lost it. After I ordered the ingredients. So, of course, I have all these ingredients but don’t remember how to put them all together.

Now, normally, I’d just go with it, throw ‘em all in and see what happens. I like brewing for that reason – it’s much more like cooking than baking.

This time, however, I seem to have ordered ingredients to make both an all-grain version and an extract version. Or I ordered enough ingredients to make 10 gallons of beer. I have WAY too much grain.

So now I’m trying to find the recipe again. Is it this one? Or this one? How much will this one make? Damn.

I did, however, decide to go organic for this one, which means no matter which recipe I chose, I don’t have the right ingredients ’cause they weren’t available in organic varieties. So I can’t even figure it out by looking at my invoice and comparing it to the recipes.