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Showing posts from June, 2019

Strawberry Mead (Melomel) 1.0

While shopping in a Wal-Mart a couple of months ago, I decided it might be fun to try making a strawberry mead.  I picked two items off the shelf to combine with water, yeast nutrient, and yeast to produce the mead. After the mead finished fermenting, the strawberry flavor became minimal or non-existent. This may be in part due to the high attenuation of the yeast used, which dried the mead out completely.  If I did this again, I would use a less attenuative yeast and more of the strawberry preserves.  That is not to say this isn't a good mead. It's just dried to the point that any strawberry character is imperceptible, at least to me.  It finishes more like a dry white wine. Ingredients 1.5 gallons of tap water 5 pounds of Generic Honey 27 ounce jar of Welch's All-Natural Strawberry Preserves 2 tsp. DAP 2 tsp. Wyeast Yeast Nutrient 2 packages Crossmyloof Mead Yeast Just these, water, yeast, and nutrients... Characteristics of this batch: Batch Volume:

Bender's Olde Fortran Malt Liquor 1.0

The Matt Groening television series Futurama has long been one of my favorites.  On that show, the robot named Bender was frequently seen chugging bottles of a beer called Olde Fortran Malt Liquor.  There's no way to guess how a fictional beer on an animated television show might taste. We can guess from the label, which is a parody of Olde English Malt Liquor, that it might be something like that. The American Home Brewing Association web site listed a clone recipe for Olde English. I started there. Since Bender belches fire after drinking Olde Fortran, I figure it has to be a strong beer. Since it's implied in several episodes that Bender has no taste buds (though this is sometimes contradicted), it's probably a cheap lowest-common-denominator kind of mash. I'm going with 6-row malt and a fair amount of flaked corn for the grist.  Since I want it to have at least some flavor, I'm going to add Mandarina Bavaria hops at the 15 and 5 minute marks to impart some

Oslo Doppelbock 1.0

Early bottle before carbonation I know what you're thinking... "Oslo is in Norway. The Doppelbock style is German. What in the world is an Oslo Doppelbock?"  Am I right?  I'll assume I am. The German Doppelbock style is one of my favorites, and I've never brewed one.  At first, that was because I didn't have the equipment to properly lager a beer.  Now, it's because it's summer in Ohio and the temperatures are way outside the range you'd want to brew a Doppelbock in. There's been a fair amount of buzz lately about the various Kveik yeast strains. Bootleg Biology's Osl o strain is described as producing "beautifully clean, lager-like beers at temperatures as high as 98F without noticeable off flavors. At the high end, beers can finish attenuating in as little as three days! This culture's versatility and neutral flavor profile allows you to effortlessly produce most beer styles."  Now you see where Doppelbock combines

Brewing High-Gravity Beers

After enjoying some of the high-gravity beers available in Ohio (and in Colorado during a visit), I began wondering how brewers were able to coax yeast beyond the range I had managed up to that point. I'd gotten a beer as high as 14% ABV without much trouble, but I'd never tried going beyond that.  I wondered how high I could get it.  I succeeded beyond my expectations , pushing the beer in question beyond 20% ABV.  That's higher than one of the professional brewers I spoke with, who regularly brews high-gravity ales and has done so for several years. Below is a condensed series of tips I've collected. These have come from the White Labs WLP099 product listing, online forums, other articles on the Internet, and verbal conversations with other brewers. Grist and Mash Realize that you're probably going to get a lower brew house efficiency on these high gravity beers than you get on lower-gravity batches. You'll have to compensate for that with more grain