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.

The Pumpkin Porter Cometh

Left: Roasted pumpkin cooling on the stove.  

Right: Pumpkin Porter after a night of vigorous fermenting

On September 10 I brewed my sixth 1-gallon batch of beer.  As I wrote in an earlier post, Pumpkin Beers are Coming, I wanted to brew a pumpkin beer for the fall, but I was also feeling a porter coming on as I've recently allowed myself to become reintroduced to the darker styles.  A friend moved this summer and left me the beer contents of his fridge which consisted of porters and stouts, and I'm thankful for free those darker brews.  Coming out of college I was a porter, stout, and lager guy.  I think it was the low hoppiness in those styles that lead me that way because you couldn't get me to drink Stone's Arrogant Bastard if you paid me (well, maybe if you paid me, but I wouldn't have enjoyed it).  My wife recently told me that she watched me become the pale ale and IPA man I've been for the past 5 years.  I thought I had transitioned into those hoppy styles before I met her, but I guess I was still hankering for a dark coffee stout when we first met.  And I find myself with those yearnings again.  In addition to this, I've been growing weary of IPAs.  Don't get me wrong, I love a hopped up ale more than most, but I've noticed that that's mostly what American craft breweries offer and a recent request for a porter at a favorite local bar coughed up only one: Stone's Smoked Porter w/ Vanilla, an amazing drink to be sure.  Those events lead me to the path to brew my own darker beer, but I still wanted to crank out something with America's favorite gourd-like squash, PUMPKIN!  As detailed in my earlier post, I stumbled upon a recipe for a 1-gallon batch of spiced pumpkin porter and was in heaven: exactly what I wanted in one recipe!

A Blast Through My Homebrewing Past!

I brewed the Pumpkin Porter last night, the brew I talked about in my second post, and it was a blast.  I'll have a fuller entry about that later, but first I want to post links to the FB photo galleries of my previous five batches.  My brewing experiences range from "chicken with his head cut off" (during my first brew), to "I got this, this ain't nothin'!" (the two most recent), I've had varying success in bottling (better now that I've gotten used to syphoning), and I'm learning about environmental control during fermentation.  Since I'm kind of blogging through photos and comments on FB, but now have this separate blog, I do want those who aren't on FB to experience what I share there.

I Went to Milwaukee for a Wedding and Visited a Brewery, Imagine That!

Milwaukee Brewing Company variety banners.

This past weekend my wife Lauren and I drove to Milwaukee for a wedding.  Arriving Friday evening, with the wedding Saturday evening at the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center, we had Saturday morning and day to entertain ourselves in that great Midwestern City.  And great it is!  Our day started with a walk to Lake Michigan with our host and their dogs.  Then we had lunch and coffee and a brief Bible study at an Alterra Coffee on the Lake near the Milwaukee Art Museum.  We wanted to visit the museum but time constraints and the idea of spending the little time we then had indoors in an art museum when that's all we'd be able to do in Milwaukee pushed us to do something a little more authentic: visit a brewery!  After a driving tour of downtown Milwaukee, UW Milwaukee, and the adjoining neighbourhoods, we headed to the Third Ward, a revitalized warehouse district, to the Milwaukee Brewing Company (abbreviated MKE).

Hipster Beer: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love to Brew

I've been into quality beer since I started college.  Unlike most college freshmen who have their friend with a fake ID get them 30 packs of Keystone Light or Natural Ice, I asked for a 12-pack of Samuel Adams (brewer, patriot) Boston Lager, with no experience of that beer whatsoever.  What drew me to a quality craft beer and not a mass produced Budweiser, Miller, or Coors?  I have no idea.  But that was the first of many purchases of quality beer during my college years; I even spent the extra money for a keg of Sam Adams for my 21st birthday!

And toward the end of my undergraduate career I met guys who brewed their own beer.

Their own beer!

Brewed at home!

Pumpkin Beers Are Coming!

Fall is fast approaching, only one month of summer left, and with that come pumpkin beer.  In my experience pumpkin beers fall on a continuum where one end is watery nutmeg "ale" and pumpkin pie (my favorite pie) in alcoholic liquid form is the other, with more at the weaker end.  With this being my first autumn brewing I'd like to brew something with pumpkin, and a fellow homebrewer gave me a recipe he found in the WSJ.  I've been looking forward to it but upon reading it closely this weekend (I start thinking about my next brew the moment after I pitch the yeast and put on the blow-off tube) I found it lacking.  One, it uses dry malt extract (DME).  Now, I'm not against the use of DME in homebrewing.  I'm a 1-gallon brewer, or nanobrewer as the aforementioned friend calls me and my labmate who also homebrews in 1-gallon batches, and have been brewing all grain since my first batch.  I can see in the more traditional 5-gallon homebrewing DME is easier with the larger volumes of grain and water, but I'm going to stick to all grain in my single gallon brewing.

Back to the WSJ pumpkin recipe.  In addition to the use of DME, the recipe overall seems very ad hoc, which is fine, and I think my experience will allow me to create an all grain version of this recipe, but for my first pumpkin beer I'd like it to be from an all grain recipe with a little more structure.  Also, I've been interested in brewing a porter.  

My doorway into nanobrewing is the Brooklyn Brew Shop's Beer Making Book:

 (available here)

Written by two Brooklyn hipsters who have all of what NYC has to offer, I've found their recipes easy to follow but a little fancy, and that's OK!  This book has a peanut butter porter I was thinking of brewing when I found the WSJ recipe lacking, but of course Google came to the rescue with this recipe.

A Pumpkin Porter!  The two things I wanted to brew next in one recipe!  Stoked, I can't stop reading and reading the recipe, mulling over and think of minor changes I'll make to the grain bill, spice additions, mashing and sparging, etc...

So if you're in Cleveland around Halloween I should have this bottled, gassed, and ready to drink by then.

Happy Brewing!