A Hipster in Winter Wheat

Grains (mostly malted wheat this time), hops, yeast, plus water, give us beer!

And again it's been a while since my last brew post.  I've brewed, fermented, racked, settled, and bottled my latest batch, a darker wheat, and now I find time to write about it.  Now the only update will be the first tasting by the end of February.  I used the Brooklyn BrewShop's Winter Wheat recipe, with some slight modifications, of course, and I hope it turns out well.  Fermenting conditions went a bit haywire toward the end so who knows how that affected the batch.

I'll Have a PB&J and a Beer, Minus the J

Happy New Year fair readers!  How were your holidays?  Do anything fun for Christmas and/or New Years?  My wife and I went to Poland, and we came back!  Had a local beer there, Zywiec, which is a lager and so wasn't my favorite, but my foray into beers this past year has taught me to respect the styles I don't normally drink, and I enjoyed tasting a local 1/2-L of cold-fermented gold.  But I'm back now and have some time to spend crafting a post about the batch I brewed back in December, before things got crazy trying to tie things up and prepare for our 10 days in Eastern Europe.

Milled grains, hops, PB, and yeast: Together they form yummy beer!

My Church's Unofficial Beer

Time for another beer tastings review.  This time it's St. Peter's IPA, my church's (un)official beer.  That's a joke because I attend St. Peter's Lutheran Church, and Lutherans, being German, have no qualms about (responsible) alcohol consumption.  My friend Whit and I have talked about this beer, wanting to try it just because the name matches our church's name, and when I took a trip into the local grocery store's walk-in beer fridge, I found this and decided to give it a shot.

It came in a green flask-shaped bottle.

Stout & About, Pronounced in the Classical Canadian

I brewed a stout Thanksgiving Eve and I think it will be one even a tsar would enjoy.  As you'll see in the recipe at the end of the post, I inadvertently made up an imperial stout, and cleaned up the mess made from the vigorous primary fermentation to prove it.  This brewing also saw the introduction of more quantitative techniques and measurement, thanks to birthday gifts from my folks.  It wasn't too difficult, and I made a mistake that didn't harm anything but was a pretty bone head move on my part I was barely able to fix, and in the end the yeast actively chomped on sugars, so I think it was successful.

Malted and milled grains, hops, yeast.  Three of the four ingredient for great beer.

I've brewed a porter and it turned out amazing.  Not my words, but those who have tasted it have given it their thumbs up.  I've brewed a brown ale and while it's still maturing the first bottle was promising.  Being late autumn I want to have a stout for the colder weather, and so I combed my two books, poked around online, collected recipes and as I've done for my past two batches I used my brewing knowledge to come up with a recipe I can call my own.  Additionally, I'm ever-incorporating new techniques and technologies into my brewing to get the best beer my kitchen can produce and some birthday gifts came in handy this time in attempting a more precise mash.

Blog Updates and Future Ideas

I wanted to try to post to this blog once a week, but I haven't posted in a month, and the previous post was a month after the one before it.  When I started this blog I was super excited about homebrewing and wanted to share it with everyone.  But I'm also a graduate student and I started writing my thesis early October, so that has taken all my writing mojo to do.  And while I still greatly enjoy homebrewing and brew a batch about once a month, writing about it weekly is a bit more than I'm able to do right now.

That said, I think I will aim for more than once a month, but not as high as once a week.  I want to review the homebrewing books I read, and have received and read another one since my birthday two weeks ago.  I'd like to point out interesting websites I find, and have recently stumbled upon a few web-based calculators that have proved really useful in my brewing.  Of course I'll discuss breweries I visit and beers I try, and I hope to sample one of as many of the craftbrew Christmas Beers as I can this season and write about those.

These are the things I'd like to pursue in this blog in addition to my personal homebrewing.  I personally don't like to state things I want to do and then not follow through with them, but as I'm learning from my wife, it's not a bad thing to say you want to do something and not explicitly carry it out.  I'm trying to get into that mind frame, to be freer about what I want to do and what I actually accomplish.

With that in mind, I can't promise that I'll be posting more than I have, but that I haven't forgotten about this blog and would love to write more if time and energy permitted it.

Until next time friends, happy brewing!

How Now Brown Ale?

Milled grain and hops ready to become beer!

Last week my wonderful wife said to me, "I'm going shopping this Saturday.  Here's money to buy ingredients to brew a batch of beer so you can keep yourself busy while I'm out that afternoon.  Happy Sweetest Day hunny!"  My wife's the greatest :-D

Fall 2012 Beer Review: Special Flavors

fI have been super busy lately with my work and trying to transition into full time thesis writing so haven't taken the time to write a new post.  I want to do a good review of a good homebrewing book I have, but that's for another time.  For now I will share my experience with four interesting beers I've had recently.

Four special beers I recently sampled.  All good, not all great.

As reported in my last post, after purchasing ingredients for the Pumpkin Porter my friend and I walked over to a local beer store that sells by the bottle.  There were at least two beers I wanted to find and I came home with four: Southern Tier's Pumpking (far left above), an imperial pumpkin ale; Dogfish Head's Punkin (far right above), a brown ale with spices and pumpkin; Wells' Banana Bread Beer (middle right above); and Stone's Smoked Porter w/ Vanilla Bean (middle left above).  The first two had been on my short list of reportedly "good" pumpkin beers I wanted to try this season. The banana bread beer was something I saw somewhere else but didn't want to buy a full 6-pack of and grabbed a single bottle of it to give it a try.  The Stone porter was something I had a local bar recently and had to try it again I enjoyed it so much the first time.