2015: A Year of Brewing

As I mentioned before, while I was quiet here on the blog I was not absent in my brewery, I mean kitchen. I plowed forward, re-brewing previous batches and attempting new recipes while making my own. I also joined the Bay Area Mashers homebrewing club in the summer, and they run a quarterly in-house brewing competition, so some of my batches were to compete in that, and will be in the foreseeable future. Additionally, I've been doing my own sampling of the pros, and continue to seek out neighborhood breweries and brewpubs wherever I travel.
That's all to say that I haven't been lax in my homebrewing. I'm starting with my last brew of 2014 because it's brewday was December 26. 2015 is not yet over, and I have one or two brews left for this year before I embark on a yearlong experiment in brewing.

Can't Catch Me I'm the Gingerbread Ale (Dec 26, 2014)

I thought I was clever with this name. Turns out, many
people think to use  this storybook line in a ginger beer.

Straight out of the Brooklyn BrewShop Beer Making Book, this is a classic winter warmer spiced with whole cinnamon sticks, cloves, fresh ground nutmeg, and candied ginger. My parents were visiting at Christmas so instead of baking gingerbread cookies with them I opted to brew gingerbread beer ;-D I let this one ferment and bottle condition for a while, so my Christmasy beer wasn't first enjoyed until February. I have to say, it was pretty good! I adjusted the hops and spice additions, as I do with every recipe from this book, and enjoyed it into the Spring. I would definitely brew this one again.

Herr Doktor's Western Elixir (Feb 24, 2015)

The few survivors.

My first beer of this calendar year. It met with disaster, and yet turned out great! Going into this brewday I had a lot of partial bags of hops, some of which were the hops this recipe calls for, so instead of buying more Northern Brewer hops to make this recipe "traditionally," I figured out how to use the hops I had in hand. Overall, I think it turned out well, and when I first attended the Bay Area Mashers in July I brought a bottle of this and it was well received. But what about the disaster I mentioned??? Well, I learned another lesson in bottling with this batch. To bottle I transfer from the carboy to a bucket with valve near the bottom. Into this bucket I've poured my priming solution, so as the baby beer syphons out of the carboy it mixes with the priming sugar. The valve is removed, cleaned, and dried separately from the bucket, and every time I use it I sanitize it and reassemble it onto the bucket. I always make sure to double check that the valve is closed before starting the syphon, but this one instance I mistook what handle position means "closed", and ended up pouring out nearly half of my beer before I caught it and closed the valve. I ended up with 11 bottles, which is a bummer considering the work and time that goes into getting 2 gallons of final product. However, what I did get turned out well, and I learned to quadruple check the bottling bucket valve state before transferring into it. This is a recipe I want to brew regularly and really make my own.

Piwo Laurenka Burztynowa (April 11, 2015)

My wife does not drink beer. She likes for wine and liquor, the latter usually in cocktails, but does smell and sip at my beer, especially my homebrew. I can't fault her for that, but it does mean there's only one of us drinking my small batch production. I wanted to brew on her birthday this year… Don't worry! She was in seminary class all day, we went to dinner after, and had a big picnic party planned for the next day, so my brewing on her birthday was fine as I was going to be home alone all day, anyway. That said, because it was her birthday, I wanted to brew something she might like. When asked, she said she liked the amber ales we sampled at Napa Smith Brewing Company on Valentine's Day, so I made an amber ale recipe from scratch. Again, I used what hops I had on hand, and it turned out pretty good. I asked my wife to help me name it, but this time I especially wanted her help since it was her birthday beer. What we came up with, with help from Polish friends, is Polish for "Lauren's Amber Beer", since my wife is of Polish heritage.

Thanks for Polish help, Michal!

Now, I don't care for amber ales. I do drink them, but they rarely wow me. It might be the grain bill, but I just don't go for them regularly. I've had great ambers, but am usually left shrugging my shoulders at what I drink. But I liked what I made here. It wasn't the best and doesn't match the few amazing ambers I've had, but it wasn't bad, and I'm willing to tweak this recipe until it matches my tastes.

Spicy Jalapeño Saison (June 6, 2015)

All those special ingredients
for this special brew.

Not much to say about this one. Fourth year in a row I've brewed it. It's one of my favorites. Thanks, Brooklyn BrewShop, for at least one awesome fruit/pepper/vegetable beer (their recipes of those styles are hit and miss for me, mostly miss). If and when I get Dr. Bradley's Brewing Co. up and running I want to make this part of the flagship line. It's always turned out light, crisp, tasty, and with enough bite. Part of my basic beers experiment for 2016 will be to brew a straight saison with no additions, just to see what it's like.

Black-Eyed Pea A (July 5, 2015)

Another re-brew, this one from a recipe I got from my college roommate-turned-beer-writer Sean Lewis. I liked it so much I wanted brew it again, this time following the hop schedule exactly and not playing "what do I have in my freezer" like I had the first time I brewed this and for the previous two brews. The dry-hopped, roasty IPA is of the "Black IPA" (BIPA) style, or that's what it was called two years ago when I first brewed it (and it's named as it is). The style is also called "Cascadian Dark Ale" after the Cascade hops and from supposedly finding popularity in the Pacific Northwest. It's even simply called "Indian Black Ale (IBA)". Whatever moniker is used, it's an interesting style that I've found in my experience to sometimes veer too hoppy, which then clashes with the roastiness in the malts. This BIPA is just right, and as the hop aromas fade over time, other flavors opened up and took place of the vine-cone goodness.

S'More Of What? (July 26, 2015)

Such promise in these ingredients, such
disappointment with the outcome...

What can I say about this beer? The quarterly in-house brewing competition in the Bay Area Mashers called for the use of smoked malt in the 2015 third-quarter competition, and since I've brewed with it before, the first time I brewed this recipe from Brooklyn BrewShop two years ago, I figured I'd give it another go. The first time I brewed this it came out plasticky at first, with plenty of time fermenting and bottle conditioning, so I looked into issues using smoked malt and thought I solved it when reformulating this recipe. I was wrong. It came out plasticky again! I submitted it anyways since I had nothing to lose and specifically brewed this for competition. I did not score well, but that's ok. I still have a few bottles left, and both bombers of it, so hopefully it will mellow nicely and be drinkable over the winter, when a beer like this is wanted. I bought a bomber of High Water's "Campfire Stout" to do a taste comparison, and I already know the results...

Wil Wheaton's #w00tstout (Aug 15, 2015)

Four months later, all this will be drinkable goodness.

I've been following Wil Wheaton's blog since college (even when it was at the "temporary" site for few years), and now I follow him on social media. When he got into homebrewing a few years ago it was another kick in my pants to finally dive into this hobby. His beers have become ingredient kits from Northern Brewer, and when they released this one I found the PDF of the recipe at the site and set out to make my own version of it. This beer is professionally made by Stone Brewing Company, as formulated by "Whil Wheaton" himself, Greg Koch of Stone, and Drew Curtis of fark.com. It's a bourbon-barrel aged thick-as-oil imperial stout with pecans and chocolate. I had to do a bit of research to figure out what exactly some of the ingredients were and how to prepare others, and it called for one month in primary and then two months racked to secondary sitting on bourbon-soaked toasted American oak cubes. As of publication this has been in bottles for only two days. I brewed it mid-August hoping it would be ready by Christmas, and we'll see how it turns out in a month. I tasted the hydrometer sample I took when racking onto the oak cubes, and it was good. It was the best boozy, spirit-aged imperial beer I've had, and I can only imagine what the past two months on bourbon-y oak and a month in bottles will do. This was my first attempt at long-term aging and conditioning, and I can't wait to see how it cellars.

Grapes & Grain: Muscadine & Scuppernong (Sept 28, 2015)

Two beers, similar but different.

We met a nice lady on our flight to Michigan for summer vacation in June. We got talking and when I mentioned that I make my own beer she told me about Georgia's own Muscadine and Scuppernong wine grapes. She promised to send us some when she got back to Atlanta, and after some email correspondence I no longer heard from her. A couple months later she emailed me again, saying my last response went to her spam folder, and when she found it she emailed me asking if we were still interested in the grapes. I affirmed that we were and a week later got them in the mail. Like most wine grapes, they're not the most edible, so I decided to use them in a recipe from the Beer Making Book. Since I had two different grapes but not two available 3-gal carboys, I made a 2-gal batch of that recipe and split it at the end into two warmed pots, added the irish moss, final hops, and both grapes separately, steeped them for the called-for 20 minutes, cooled them and transferred them to the two 1-gal jugs I still had from my first 2 years of homebrewing. This was also the first time I used liquid yeast since my local shop didn't have a dry yeast variety of what I was wanting. Since I was only brewing 2 gallons I didn't make a starter and simply poured half of the warmed-up yeast into each jug and set them to ferment. They fermented well and didn't blow off into the blow-off bottle, so as much as I somewhat unevenly split into the two jugs remained and I got 8 bottles of the Scuppernong beer and 9 of the Muscadine beer. At bottling both batches had a voilet-ish hue and grape-like aroma. Can't wait to try it, and as they were bottled Nov 1, I'll open the first one Thanksgiving week.

Zorba's OPA! (Oct 10, 2015)

I love my new syphon.
Makes it so easy!

Have you ever heard of an Oat Pale Ale? Or a Pale Oat Ale? I hadn't until earlier this year when I greatly enjoyed one of New Belgiums's Hop Kitchen collaborations. Since then, I've had the style on my mind and so I researched and developed this recipe. Again, I used what hops I had on hand, and kept it simple. Some recipes only had three hop additions during the boil, some had several dry hoppings, so I kept it to just boil additions. I also kept it fairly pale, adding only some Crystal 20L malt for color and sweetening. I bottled it Nov 8, so it will also be ready by Thanksgiving for first tasting. I hope it's good! If so, I might enter it into a competition in early December.

Jason's Almost Gold Medal IPA (Nov 11, 2015)

Another use of liquid yeast, this time from a smack pack!

The Bay Area Mashers' fourth style of the quarter competition this year is to brew from recipe a member's multi-gold medal winning IPA recipe, found here. I had to buy the Mosaic hops at the MoreBeer! San Leandro location, as Oak Barrel doesn't normally stock them, and to even the playing field a bit one member offered Drake's 001 yeast for everyone's use. However, to follow the recipe's fermentation schedule I had to brew before the yeast was available, so at the suggestion of the Oak Barrel's knowledgeable employees I used liquid yeast, this time a smack pack of Wyeast 1056. I like not having to hydrate, and with my smaller batches, I don't even have to make a starter! I'll be cutting it close with the fermentation schedule getting it bottled and carbonated before the December 12 Christmas party, where all entries will be judged by popular vote. It's supposed to be drunk fresh, and I think I'll be bottling Nov 30, so it will be fairly fresh, indeed! Fingers crossed!

These are all the beers I've brewed in 2015. Of course, the year isn't over yet, and I'll likely do one more in December. I'm not sure what I'll do, and it won't be ready to drink until 2016, so I'll discuss it in another post. After that I'm starting my 2016 brewing experiment series.

What have you brewed this year? What was your favorite? Did you experience any disasters? What batch do you think you could have done better on?

Until next time friends, happy brewing!