Begin Brewing!

This recipe started out as an attempt to replicate the no-longer-made Stevens Point Brewery Cascade Pale Ale. A good friend of mine was a huge fan of the beer and was disappointed when it was no longer being made.  My first attempt was a drinkable beer but bore little resemblance to the real thing. My second attempt was much better, and my friend (who may have been being nice) said he preferred it to the real beer.  Still, even that version was a little light on hop flavor and a bit darker than the actual beer. For this version, I'm going with a plain 2-row malt base instead of a Pale Ale malt. This should lighten the color of the beer.  I'm increasing the amount of Caramel and Munich malts to get closer to the original beer's sweetness level, and adding some Cara-Pils to give it a longer-lasting head.  I'm also going to hop the beer every 5 minutes, kind of a balance between minute-by-minute continual hopping and using the typical addition timings (i.e., 60, 30,

A long time ago, I began to notice that when I brewed beers over 9-10% alcohol by volume (ABV) that they tended not to carbonate in the bottle.  It became a rule of thumb for me to always include bottle conditioning yeast (either CBC-1 or champagne yeast ) any time I brewed a beer over 9%.  I forgot to do that with a beer that came out at 10.9%, and it failed to carbonate.  I learned with that beer that by  inverting the bottles daily for a week  to rouse the yeast inside, I could achieve carbonation. When I brewed a batch of beer intended to replicate  Dogfish Head's Palo Santo Marron , I decided to take a chance and not dose it with bottle conditioning yeast either.  After weeks in a warm location, there was virtually no carbonation, even using the bottle-inversion trick. For another two weeks, I increased the temp to 80F and did a daily inversion of the bottles, while also rotating them around the space inside the cooler to ensure that every bottle spent time in every tempe

The finished Autumn Brown Ale My wife and I enjoy the various Christmas Ales on the market.  I'm personally a fan of Hoppin' Frog's Frosted Frog, Scaldis Noel, Thirsty Dog's 12 Dogs of Christmas, and a few others.  Oddly, I've never brewed a Christmas Ale myself. I decided to give it a shot this year. What I came up with for a recipe is a bit of a "kitchen sink" kind of beer in terms of the malt portion of the recipe.  I had a number of malts that might have been getting stale sitting on the shelf, and which also might be good in a Christmas beer, so I assembled a recipe to use them.  If I was doing this again, with an agenda that didn't include getting rid of some possibly-older malts, I'd probably have a much simpler recipe.  Regardless, below is what I wound up putting together. Ingredients 4 pounds of Maris Otter malt 4 pounds of Belgian Pale Ale malt 1.5 pounds of Aromatic Malt 1 pound of Caramel 60L 1 pound of Caramel 80L 1

I like a good English beer from time to time, and am fond of the Extra Special Bitter (ESB) style.  After surveying a number of recipes out there, I decided to formulate one of my own.  I made a 1-gallon test batch a few months back and it turned out great. It disappeared quickly. One thing I didn't love about it was the flavor of the East Kent Goldings hops.  There is something in that hop variety that disagrees with my tastebuds, so I decided to shake things up a little in version 1.1.  Specifically, I am going to replace East Kent Goldings with Styrian Goldings and instead of using 60, 30, and 15 minute hop additions I will continuously hop this one.  Will it turn out like a traditional ESB or will it seem more like an "Imperial ESB" or "American ESB"... I don't know. We'll find out. Ingredients 6.25 pounds Maris Otter Malt 1.25 pounds Caramel/Crystal 40L Malt 14 ounces Caramel/Crystal 60L Malt 10 ounces Caramel/Crystal 10L Malt 10 ounce