The last beer I brewed before taking a thesis break was one from The Beer Making Book. It was described as a beer form of peach cobbler, and I had to wait for peach season this past summer to brew it. I haven't had great success with the brews from that book, but they've all turned out drinkable. The last fruit-infused beer I brewed from it was a red ale with blueberries, and it was one of my least favorite homebrews. That said, I wanted to give this one a try since peaches were in season in late summer and I like peach cobbler. I peeled and roasted fresh peaches to go in the boil, and was excited for this once I bottled it after a couple weeks fermenting. That excitement was stifled with the first bottle, and will be discussed at the end of this entry. On to the peaches!
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| Grains, oats, hops and yeast... |
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| ... Plus peeled and roasted peaches. |
Since this brew is now a few months old, I won't go into great detail in the brewing, but these few pictures tell the story. Nothing went amiss, and overall the brew was straight forward aside from the peach roasting and boil addition.
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| First (right) and second (left) runnings after the mash. |
The mash went well, using the oven as usual to hold it in the 150-160°F range. The first and second runnings were strained out and were mixed together and brought to boil. After the oven was no longer needed for the mash its temperature was increased to roast the peaches while the pre-wort was heating to boil. At boil the hops were added according to their schedule. This was the first time I used Czech Saaz hops, traditionally used in pilsners with its crisp, spicy flavor. I'm not sure if I notice them in the final product as other flavors possibly mask the Saaz hops, so maybe a future batch will utilize them to their full potential.
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| Hoppity hops for the boil! |
To prepare the five peaches I cleaned and peeled them, roasted them at 350°F on a cookie sheet covered in aluminum foil for 40 minutes. After 20 minutes I turned them over so the underside of each slice would have exposure to the hot air in the oven, and when they were done I had 0.62 lbs of roasted peach slices to go into the wort with 1/2 C of brown sugar at flameout.
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| Five roasted peaches and 1/2 C of brown sugar for the boil. |
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| Wort cooled, yeast pitched, and hydrometer reading taken. |
The wort was chilled and the peach slices were removed from the wort with a sanitized slotted spoon before a hydrometer sample was taken and the hydrated yeast was pitched. The OG came to 1.050, a little lower than I expected, especially with the added brown sugar, but not bad. With the blow-off tube and bottle in place, the fermenter was placed in the brew bin. Primary fermentation came and went, and as temperatures rose in late August the fermenter was placed in a small cooler with water and covered with a towel, with ice added everyday to keep the wort temperature close to 70°F.
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| Beer after primary fermentation ended. |
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| FG reading at bottling. |
Bottling time came three weeks after brewing. It's final gravity was measured to be 1.015, giving a 4.7% ABV. Bottling was not an easy activity for this batch. I don't know what the problem was, but I had to restart the syphon several times. This was annoying, to say the least, and I ended up sanitizing my 4-C measuring cup to carefully fill each bottle. But in the end I got eight bottles of Peachy Keen Cobbler Ale. I might have gotten nine if I didn't take a hydrometer reading and hadn't had to restart the syphon so many times.
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| Eight bottles for drinking! |
I tried the first bottles more than three weeks after bottling. I wasn't intending to do so that night, but when moving the beer case box I use to store bottles of conditioning beer to get a bottle of another beer to share with my friend Pete one of the Peachy Ale bottles fell over and I heard the tell-tale hiss of escaping carbonation. I looked at the eight bottles of Peachy Ale, and of the few that fell over one had some liquid down its neck. Additionally, all caps were bulging out, which is something I've never seen from my homebrewing. I had over-carbonated my beer. The recipe called for 3 tbsp of honey to bottle condition the beer, and I used that much for my less than 1 gallon of beer. When using honey for past batches I was not careful to get exactly 3 tbsp into the bottling, but for this batch I made sure to have exactly 3 tbsp of honey (don't ask why). This honey was mixed into boiling water and cooled before using. I guess this was too much honey for the beer and produced to many bubbles by the leftover yeast. I opened that one possibly opened beer, warm, at my dining table after my wife and I sat down to dinner. If you want to know how to entertain yourself with a beer fountain at dinner, this is the way to do it. I wanted to drink it since it was likely already opened a bit, but this was a bad idea. A little carbonation was released, but the bottle wasn't opened and when I did open it the rest of the dissolved carbon dioxide came out, rather strongly so because it was warm and gas effusion out of liquid is temperature dependent. Little beer was left so I didn't get a good taste of this batch. I refrigerated the other seven bottles and when I opened the next one I did so in a flexible bowl with another bowl held over it upside-down to catch another possible fountain. The second bowl was not needed, but the bottles are still over-carbonated and produce foam that flows out of the bottle upon opening so a bowl is needed to capture it all so as not to make a mess. This is how I have to drink every bottle of this batch. I now know to think closely about bottling sugar for all subsequent batches, and found a priming calculator to do just this.
And now the recipe:
Peachy Keen Cobbler Ale
Grain Bill:
0.75 lb Marris Otter Malt
0.65 lb Biscuit Malt
0.25 lb Crystal 10L Malt
0.25 lb Crystal 20L Malt
0.15 lb flaked oats
0.2 oz Centennial hops 8.7 AA% @ 60 min
0.2 oz Saaz hops 3.0 AA% @ 30 min
1/4 tsp Irish Moss @ 15 min
0.2 oz Saaz hops 3.0 AA% @ 59 min
0.62 lb roasted peach slices @ flameout
1/2 C brown sugar @ flameout
The full gallery of this batch can be found here.
The final product is... ok. The remainder I got to drink from the explosive first bottle was not impressive, and so I thought I had a bad batch of over-carbonated beer. I didn't touch it for a few weeks, put the rest of the bottles in the fridge, and the subsequent bottles have tasted better. Once again, time has come to the rescue. It's still a bit of an ordeal to open and drink a bottle, but I learned something from this batch and know not to make that mistake again.
What's a nearly fatal mistake you've made in your homebrewing?
Until next time friends, happy brewing!
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