Begin Brewing!

Way back when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were married, I read that their wedding cake was going to be a lemon and elderflower flavored one.  Having not tasted elderflower infused foods before, I wondered how that flavor might work in a beer or mead.  A good friend picked up two containers of Ikea's elderflower drink concentrate for me, so I would be able to try the flavor in both a mead and a beer.  With the Brewie+ still down for repair (almost 6 weeks now), I decided to create an elderflower mead first. Ingredients 6 pounds of Wildflower honey 1 bottle of Ikea Elderflower drink concentrate 1 gallon bottled spring water (see note below) 1 packet Lalvin K1V 1116 wine yeast (plus yeast nutrient mix, described next) Note: Enough bottled spring water was added so that after the honey was dissolved and the drink concentrate added, the total volume of liquid was 1.5 gallons in the fermenter.  When this resulted in too high a starting gravity, additional wat...

You'll notice that I'm doing meads this summer, though it might not be for the reason you'd expect.  It's not because the warm weather impacts my fermentations or that I'm trying to avoid raising the temperature and humidity in the house.  Bottom line... my Brewie+ stopped working in July and I am (still) waiting for a repair part to arrive from... somewhere. The inspiration for this mead was a trip to Ikea some months ago. I saw Lingonberry drink mix for sale and thought this might be interesting in a beer or mead, so I bought a bottle.  With the Brewie+ down for the count, I decided to try it in a mead. Ingredients 40 ounces of Wildflower honey, plus enough more to raise gravity to 1.127 SG 1 bottle of Ikea Lingonberry Juice Concentrate (16.9 ounces) 4 grams Fermaid O 3 grams DAP 1 packet of Lalvin 71B yeast Bottled spring water Original Gravity: 1.127 SG actual Final Gravity:   TBD (expected around 1.020 SG) Batch Size:   Approx 1.6 gallons ...

We have a lot of mint growing outside our house.  I always wondered if you could make a mint julep style beer with it.  I had envisioned a beer that was basically amber colored, with mint added late in the boil, and aged on some bourbon-soaked oak chips.  Then I visited the now-defunct Fate Brewing in Boulder, Colorado, and tasted their Mint Julep Ale. It was quite good, which convinced me to brew my own.  Theirs included rye malt in the grist, which worked well with the mint, but didn't feature any actual bourbon.  I decided to add rye to the recipe I'd been considering, and to soak the mint in some bourbon apart from the oak chips, then blend in the mint-soaked bourbon at bottling time. Since corn is a big part of bourbon and I happened to have 3 ounces lying around I didn't want to go bad, I added that in last-minute. Ingredients 6 pounds 2-row Pale Ale Malt 1 pound Crystal 60L Malt 4 ounces Rye Malt 3 ounces Flaked Corn 1 ounce Acid Malt 0.42 ounce...

Although I was pretty happy with my original Dark Mild recipe , it unfortunately picked up a bacterial infection and had to be dumped.  A second Dark Mild suffered the same fate. In my notes on the original version, I mentioned that I wanted a little more crystal malt and more body.  Toward that end, I've shifted the mash temp upward for most of the mash and added another ounce of Medium English Crystal malt. I've also added some flaked corn, which the BJCP notes is a common ingredient in the style. Ingredients 3 pounds Munton's Pale Ale Malt 6 ounces Medium English Crystal Malt 4 ounces Flaked Corn 4 ounces Crystal 120L Malt 2 ounces English Pale Chocolate Malt 1 ounce English Black Malt 1 ounce Acid Malt 0.35 ounces East Kent Goldings hops @ 6.1% AA (60 min.) 1 large pellet East Kent Goldings hops @ 6.1% AA (15 min.) 1/8 tsp. Brewtan B in the mash 1.5 tsp. pH 5.2 Stabilizer in the mash 1/4 tsp. Brewtan B in the boil (20 min.) 1/4 tsp. Irish Moss (15...

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 V...

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 ...

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 ...