An association with a certain chemist has allowed me to trade beers for yeast and bacterial cultures — that’s right, I trade beer for the goods to make beer, isolated in the basement of a DIY lab in suburban New Jersey.  Recently my connection put together a blend of yeasts and bacterias meant to emulate the Rodenbach brewery’s culture that produces their distinctive Flemish Red style of beer, and I decided I had to get my shit together and brew in that style right away.

Having recently acquired a bottle of Lost Abbey Red Poppy, also within the style, I decided it was fate — I always try to drink a beer in the style I’m brewing on brew day.  I grabbed some specialty grains, hit up the “local” home brew shop for flaked maize and oak chips, and made it happen.  I brewed completely outside for the first time as well, which was awesome.  I stacked some milk crates, ran the hose outside, and went for it.  I’m glad I did, as it forced me to hang out outside all day in the yard, and it was a very peaceful and fun experience.  Brew Day is getting shorter and shorter, and I now have the whole process pretty much totally memorized.  I’ll post the recipes and some pictures here, and will also post a review of the (3*IPA)/2 which has been drinking really nicely the past couple of days.

The beer is named after the original, Dutch name for Brooklyn.  I designed the recipe to include some of the base malt I have left over, and added a complex array of high quality crystal malts to compliment everything.  Flaked Maize is a traditional ingredient.

Recipe:

5# Maris Otter

6.5# Vienna

3# Crystal Malt Mix (some English, Belgian, and American, mix of high and low, some red for flavor)

1# Flaked Maize

Hopped to 20 or 25 IBUs with some pretty old Northern Brewer pellets.

Mashed for 75 minutes at 153 or so, boiled for 75 minutes. Chilled down and pitched the yeast vials at 70 degrees. Vigorous fermentation around 36 hours later, it’s really kicking.  The OG came in around 1.090.

After primary, I will rack to a corny keg and drop in some medium toast oak chips, and let it sit for about a year.

Mashing of the Belgian IPA

It seems that Mother Nature has taken pity upon me for my beer failings, however, as today I bottled my first batches of home-brewed Kombucha, and they turned out better than I could have hoped for. I’ve been wanting to get into brewing Kombucha Tea (or KT, as the hippies call it) for a while and never managed to hook up a SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast!) from a friend who brews. As luck would have it, two weekends ago we were walking through Park Slope on our way to Beer Table to pick up some flip-top 33cl bottles for my homebrew from Justin, when we happened upon a table of generous yuppie-hippies giving away SCOBYs from a big jar.

Beautiful, beautiful booch...

Arriving home with my SCOBYs I immediately got to work on two batches, a regular Black Tea and Sugar Kombucha, and one I’ve been wanting to try since I first got hooked on both Kombucha and Yerba Mate, a Mint Mate Kombucha with Honey. I was wary of the Mate and Honey as I wasn’t sure they’d have enough nutrients to feed the SCOBY and ferment properly, but both batches got down to about 3.1pH after two weeks, so i sampled some of each today and they were great! The Black Tea KT I would even say was too sweet compared to the Mate, so for batch 2 I dropped the sugar down about 30%. The recipe is basically 1/4c tea and 1/4c sugar for each quart of water, but i’m working closer to 1/8c of sugar now to see how it turns out. I bottled all 3 quarts and put them back in the pantry to carbonate so I’ll post an update later on.

I was able to get my hands on a pure Fantome Yeast Culture from a friend and I have been looking forward to using it as the Primary yeast strain on a blonde beer, which I finally got around to doing several months later.  I spent a long time stepping this Yeast up in a starter, using some of it for secondary on another beer, and the yeast seemed quite viable when I pitched it.  I took the grain bill from the “Wild Brews” book, which gives a recipe suggested to use when fermenting with 100% Brettanomyces yeast, and adjusted it slightly for what I had laying around Hop and Grain-wise.  I ended up with:

13# Maris Otter / 1# Acid Malt / 2# Wheat

1 oz Centennial at 90 mins / 1 oz Cascade at 10 mins

90 Minute Mash @ 148 degrees / 90 Minute Boil

Pitched 750ml of Brett slurry at 70 degrees

Very smooth brew day in all, came it at around 5.25 hours including a longer mash and boil than I usually do.  Vigorous fermentation with high Krausen at 24 hours, lots of gas being kicked out of this already.  Fermenting nicely in my kitchen next to my Mead that’s been going for about a month.

As usual I’ll try to post results as they come in.  I plan on primarying this for 2 weeks at room temp and then conditioning it a bit colder for 2 more weeks before bottling it with priming sugar and letting it age for a while.  I’m still trying to figure out what to brew next –  I’m thinking of working on my first Lager.

Taking the Mash Temperature

There are a lot of attractive reasons to brew a Porter.  Besides the obvious ones like how cool it would be to brew a beer people might actually want to drink more than one of, Porter gives you the chance to work on your maltiness while staying within the comfort zone of Ales,  giving a homebrewer the opportunity to branch out from more yeast and hop dominated flavor profiles.  Porter is one of my favorite styles of beer, from the simple British Style Porter to the heavier Baltic versions. A gift from my wife of a 3lb can of Oregon Cherry Purree coupled with a desire to explore Porter brewing cemented the idea in my head — a Cherry Robust Porter — a beer that could mix the aroma and flavor of cherries with the chocolatey, somewhat roasty qualities of Porters that I love.  Sounded like a good challenge.

I purchased a 55lb bag of Maris Otter for my base malt, and was able to locally source all of the other specialty malts (as in buy them locally, not find them in a locally produced form).  The cherries I already had, and for a nice neutral ale yeast, I chose to culture from a bottle of Bell’s, which I plan to reuse if this batch goes well.  I started a starter with the yeast from a bottle of Bell’s Pale Ale, and stirred it and shook it for about a week before I brewed.  A nice thick layer of yeast sediment built up in the flask, and I knew I was ready to go.

Mash Tun, Hot Liquor Tank, Boil Kettle

I still haven’t been able to test my outdoor brewing setup because of windy days and extreme cold, so I was back to the stovetop.  I started the day in a leisurely way, heating my mash water while I did some other cleaning.  All told, this was my smoothest brew session yet, again mostly a solo mission, and I feel like I really know my setup and procedure.

Here’s the full recipe:

Cherry Robust Porter for 5 Gallons

12# Maris Otter Pale Malt / 2# Munich Malt / 1# Black Patent / 1# Chocolate Malt / 1# Honey Malt

1.75oz Sterling Hops @ 60 mins

Mashed at 151 f (was aiming for 154), sparged with 6 gallons of 170 f water for 45 minutes.  60 minute boil.

Cooled down to 90 f in about 20 minutes due to some weirdness with hoses (fix this!), then covered and pitched the next morning at 64 degrees after a lot of shaking for aeration.  Moved back up to kitchen which is consistently 64 during the day (it’s cold) and vigiorous fermentation within 12 hours.  Smells very roasty and looks very dark so far — very excited.  Will move to secondary on the cherries when attenuation is about 65% or 70% complete.

OG 1.080, Target FG 1.015, Target ABV 8.5%

Hard Cider is one of the fermented beverages in which more people are going back to traditional methods, relying on yeasts and bacteria present on the skins of the apples to ferment the sugary juice into a dry, delicious alcoholic Cider.  That’s why I searched so long for unpasteurized apple juice — I wanted the microbes and yeasts to be alive, not boiled or “cold” pasteurized out with UV light.  So I let the natural yeasts take over at basement temperatures (mid 60s) for 5 days before sprinkling a little bit of magic dust into the juice – a bit of “house” yeast and some yeast nutrient to help combat sulphur smells.  The ferment took off rapidly after that, kicking out massive amounts of rotten egg sulphur smells for the first couple days, which is calming down.  The juice really cleared up in the beginning, but got churned up again during the heavy ferment.  The blowoff tube is still bubbling, and the OG of 1.050 has come down to 1.028, so things are going smoothly.  I will rack this off into a keg in about a week or so hopefully, and we’ll see how it tastes after that.  The carbonation level is already quite pleasant, so I might not force carbonate it.

As I mentioned before, I also have had the good fortune to put together a small kegging system, which can accomidate three 5 gallon cornelius kegs.  I grabbed a free refrigerator off of Craiglist in good condition, which has enabled me to take a bunch of beer out of our regular refrigerator, and to store my kegs and co2 tank.  I have the Belgian Dark Strong and Belgian Pale ale on tap right now, with simple picnic or “cobra” style taps, and it is a lot of fun.  I force carbonated both batches to high belgian pressure levels, and I’m really pleased with how they’re pouring.  Setting everything up wasn’t too bad, and the convenience of racking into a keg can’t be beat.  I’ll be “counter-pressure” filling some bottles on the cheap, and I’ve collected and cleaned a couple cases worth of Belgian “stubby” bottles that I’ve collected from drinking or from friends and local bars.  I’ll have a lot of gifts to give in return.

I’m almost ready to post some tasting results from my first three beers, the two mentioned above, plus the Rye Saison that was my first batch.  It’s aging…strangely, but I’m enjoying it, and there’s only more good stuff to come.  Thanks for checking out my setup.

The Dark Strong is an interesting style, and many people’s favorite beers, or the beers they vote “THE BEST IN THE WORLD” are Dark Strongs — they are also sometimes known as Trappist Style ales, usually of 12 degrees or higher by older naming conventions (click here for the BJCP guidelines on the Dark Strong).  I’ve enjoyed a number of beers from this category immensely, and as I was looking for a beer to help me get through the cold Brooklyn winter, this seemed like a perfect choice.

I went with a simple recipe instead of the complex grain bills that have been winning the homebrew competitions in this style category.  Since I wanted my beer to be somewhat monk-like, the inimitable Brew Like a Monk by Stan Hieronymus was invaluable.  I decided on a 50% Pils and 50% Pale ale recipe for the grain, plus 3lbs of Belgian Dark Candi Syrup.  With around 80% efficiency, this brought my OG up to 1.13, which really surprised me.  My mash tun was very full, and the stirring was pretty difficult, but I’m a big believer in how efficient my fly-sparging procedure is, so that must have had quite a lot to do with it.

After around 18 hours, the beer was blowing off an insane amount of trub and gross black grease, which didn’t cease for about 4 days.  The airlock is on in place of the blowoff tube now, and as of 5 days of fermentaiton, the SG was down to 1.06, which is right on target for 2 weeks bringing me down to 1.02 or so, according to my amazingly crude calculations.  Temperature fluctuations in Brooklyn have been a bit rough, and even though the wort got down to about 62 in the carboy, fermentation hasn’t ceased, and the production of esthers from the White Labs Trappist Ale Yeast seems all but unaffected.  I used a nice hop schedule which included Warrior, Northern Brewer, and Saaz pellets to bring me to around 50 or 60 IBUs as well, and with little hop aroma and the right amount of bitterness, this shoudl bring me about to where I want to be.

I’m not going to be spicing any of my Belgians on the first round, because I want to get the base recipes on lockdown.  Then I’ll add spices and other flourishes as necessary or desired.  In other homebrewing news, I have pruchased a small system for kegging with cornelius kegs, and I’ll post that info and experience along as it comes.

Since I could get my hands on a bunch of fresh, ideally stored pellet hops, I went for some very bitter, high alpha acid varieties, cementing my desire to make a slightly sour, extremely bitter pale strong beer with the Belgian yeasts, bugs and critters, and a mixture of Pils and Wheat malts, in an 85/15 ratio.  Didn’t have too many problems with this batch, my OG was even a little bit higher than I was aiming for, coming in at 1.062.  I also threw in 1 pound of Turbinado Sugar at the beginning of the boil, and Stinky concocted a massive hopping schedule that left a very thick layer of hot pellet sludge at the bottom of my brewpot.  I also added 2oz of Whole Leaf Cascade hops at flameout, and when the primary fermentation has calmed down, I’ll rack the beer onto 2 more ounces of whole leaf Cascade hops.  The beer came out straight up green from all the hop sludge but now is clearing up and showing itself to be more golden, right as I was aiming for.

My Rye Saison is bottled and has just over one week before it will be bottled for 2 weeks, and I’m dying to crack one open and try it.  I’m showing some restraint and haven’t cracked any yet.  Whew.  This was also the first time that I ground my own grain, thanks to a friend with a lot of gear and space and a generous spirit (I plied him with some Three Floyds and New Glarus beers, as well), and this was an awesome experience.  The grain smells so great passing through the mill, and the extra step adds something to the process.  I’ve also been taking good notes on these two batches, and working with Maya on label designs.  Labels for home brew? Duh! Another fun part of the process that I can’t deny.  If you’re surprised, you obviously don’t know much about my other hobbies.  More beer reviews to come, I’m behind!

For my first beer I wanted something that would be tasty, refreshing, hoppy, and weird.  I wanted to brew a beer in a style that is forgiving, and one that would be appopriate to ferment in my basement in the summer.  All signs pointed to Saison, basically, which is great because if Saisons isn’t my absolute favorite beer style, it’s certainly in the top 3.  Hoppier than most Belgian beers, generous in terms of its wide range of styles, and potentially infectable without complete destruction, a Saison is just a wonderful kind of beer.  So I gave it a shot.

I formulated a recipe after an enormous amount of research (both reading and drinking) and came up with a 60/20/20 Pils/Wheat/Rye blend for my mash, Cascade Hops for bitterness and aroma, and Wyeast’s Farmhouse Ale yeast which I made a starter for and pitched the dregs of a bottle of Jolly Pumpkin’s Calabaza Blanca, a funky wheat beer.  Mashing schedule was a single step for an hour at around 150 (a few degrees higher than hoped), and the boil was for an hour, with three hop additions plus a flameout addition, all of Cascade.  Yeah, it’s original, weird, and

idiosyncratic — just like a Saison should be.  Right now the beer is in Primary fermentation, and though I haven’t taken a gravity reading yet (the beer’s OG was around 1.058, a little lower than I was aiming for), the massive amounts of activity makes me think that it’s well on its way to drying out.  The beer gets lighter everyday, smells great, and more and more trub is collecting at the bottom of the carboy.

Here’s a couple pictures of the brewing process plus the beer in its current state.  Stay tuned for more recipes, experiences, and hopefully homebrew enjoyment.  I’m going to also post a roundup of good web and print homebrewing resources and post them here.