Begin Brewing!

I've made a couple of attempts at Christmas ales that just didn't come close to what I wanted. The hops would be overwhelming everything, the spices undetectable, or the spice balance not quite what I was looking for. I decided it was time to try a kit, and the Label Peelers kit had great reviews. It's an extract kit, which I don't typically brew, so that meant a shift from my usual process. Ingredients 9 pounds Amber DME 1 pound Dark Candi Sugar (rocks) 1 pound Crystal 80L 8 ounces Chocolate Malt 2 tsp. Allspice 1 tsp. Cardamom Seeds 1 ounce Cinnamon Stick 1 ounce Sweet Orange Peel 0.50 ounces Ginger Root 0.25 ounces Magnum hops @ 12.3% AA (dropped from 1 ounce in the kit/recipe) 0.50 ounces Cascade hops @ 6.3% AA (dropped from 1 ounce in the kit) 0.75 ounces Cascade hops @ 6.3% AA (dropped from 1 ounce in the kit) 0.50 teaspoons Yeast Nutrient 1/2 Whirlfloc tablet 1 vial White Labs Clarity Ferm 1 packet Safbrew S-33 yeast The kit included 3 ...

The actual beer described in this post I'm a big fan of Belgian Trappist beers, and Trappistes Rochefort 10 is one of my favorites. Some time ago I came across a recipe that claimed to be "very much a Trappistes Rochefort 10 clone" and brewed it.  The creator of the recipe was correct, it was quite close to the original. The clone seemed to be missing the head and a caramel note in the original beer, so I tweaked the recipe to include Melanoidin malt and Carapils malt, which in combination seem to me to produce a very creamy, long-lasting Belgian-like head.  Unfortunately in the second version I also added a high-alpha hop to help with head generation and that ruined the beer for me. In this version, I'm going back to the original roots. I'm using just Styrian Goldings to bitter it and Hallertau Mittelfrueh for flavor and aroma.  I'm adding Belgian Cara 45 malt to try to capture the caramel note that was missing from the first version.  I'm also us...

Some time ago, perhaps more than a year back, I purchased a Great Pumpkin Ale kit from Adventures in Homebrewing.  The kit's been sitting in my basement in the original double-bagged container ever since.  This weekend, I decided to brew it, though I held out little hope that it will taste very good - not because I think Adventures in Homebrew didn't make a good recipe, but because it has to be at least a year old. There's a good chance the grain has oxidized and gone bad. But rather than throw it out, I decided to brew it anyway. The worst case scenario is that I'll have to dump it later. The original recipe made for a very weak beer compared to most pumpkin ales I've had. It was estimated to have an ABV of 4.3%.  I'm not sure I've ever seen a pumpkin beer that low. I was also concerned that given the age of the grain it might not yield much sugar. I decided to put my own spin on the recipe. If it turns out to be terrible, it won't be Adventures in Ho...

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, 3...

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 eve...

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...