All posts by escowles

Unstuck

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carboy next behind computerIt’s been a couple of weeks since we put the dubbel in second fermentation, so I checked the gravity yesterday expecting it to be about ready to keg.  Alas, the gravity was still way too high, only about halfway down to where the recipe calls for final gravity.  We hadn’t seen any bubbling at all recently, so I did some googling on stuck fermentation, and I think the problem is one I never expected in Florida: my beer got too cold!  We’ve had a few chilly nights recently, and it’s possible the beer got down to 60° or so, which can apparently make the yeast go dormant and settle.

So I moved it to the hottest part of the house — right behind my computer.  Our home office is reliably the hottest room of the house, several degrees warmer than other rooms, and we keep our aquarium in there for the same reason.  I gave the carboy a good swirl to stir up the yeast again (above and beyond the sloshing involved in getting it to the other end of the house).  24 hours later, it’s still bubbling every few seconds, but not going nuts like the initial multiplication stage of fermentation.  So I’m feeling good that the fermentation is back on track, and we’ll be able to keg it next weekend.

Pumpkin Beer Tasting

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Pumpkin Tasting LineupWe’ve had a couple of pumpkin beers this fall, and picked up a few more in Asheville last weekend, so we had a little side-by-side tasting.

  • Thirsty Dog’s Pumpkin Ale.  This surprised me at how light-bodied it was, since I generally expect fall seasonal beers to be malty, dark, or both.  But this was almost like a pilsner, with a little twang.  The pumpkin taste was very subdued.  But overall, I’d say this is nice, and easy-drinking.
  • Southern Tier’s Pumking.  This brew had a definite pumpkin aroma, but the flavor was overwhelmed by vanilla and spice.  In fact, I had a hard time picking up anything else.  Wind likes this much more than I do, and the ratings online are pretty high, but I find it just barely drinkable, and not very pumpkiny at all.
  • Cigar City’s Good Gourd.  This is my idea of what a pumpkin beer should be, with definite spice and vanilla notes, but not overwhelming the pumpkin flavor.  This beer has a little more sweetness and body, and has the highest ABV at 9.5%.
  • Starr Hill Boxcar Pumpkin Porter.  A decent porter, if a little thin.  Unfortunately, the pumpkin is drowned out by over-strong smoke and coffee.  Finishes a little too bitter, but with more pumpkin at least.

Overall, I’m a little disappointed.  I expected beers with pumpkin in the name to have a more pronounced pumpkin flavor.  Only the Good Gourd met my expectations on that score, and is definitely my favorite of the bunch.  The Thirsty Dog Pumpkin Ale would be the runner up, and I’m definitely glad I picked up a bottle when I had the chance.

Just Got Back From Asheville

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Local Beer Sampler at Luella'sWe just got back from a trip to Asheville, NC.  I first visited a few years ago for a conference, and liked it so much I dragged the family up the next Fall.  Now we think of it as visiting Autumn each year, as the 80° temperatures in Gainesville grind on through October and November.  It was nice to enjoy cooler temperatures, mountain vistas with the fall colors, and of course sample several new beers and a few old favorites.

There are a bunch of great restaurants to choose from — like Tupelo Honey Cafe, Mayfel’s, Jack of the Wood, 12 Bones, and Luella’s.  The barbeque in particular is divine, and typically comes with just a little dry-rub, fantastically tender and flavorful without sauce.  All the restaurants have a ton of local beer on tap.  Even the Biltmore has their own house beer now (though I suspect it’s contract-brewed since their website carefully avoids saying they brew it themselves).

The best new discovery was probably Pisgah’s Pale Ale.  As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a big hop fan, and I find even most non-IPA pale ales to be over-hopped.  But this brew was nicely gentle, with a little sweetness like a cream ale.  Though I also enjoyed having Green Man ESB both at 12 Bones, and the cask version at Jack of the Wood — it’s always great to taste a beer both before and after cask treatment.  Though the cask version is dry-hopped and was right at my resiny bitterness tolerance, it definitely gave the beer some extra character.

Unfortunately, I failed on my attempt to not have the same beer twice — I broke down and had a second pint of French Broad’s Wee Heavy-er (definitely my favorite Asheville beer).  I also picked up a couple French Broad bottles at Bruisin’ Ales — along with a few of the beers I’d been trying to find for my Belgian Research Project, but hadn’t been able to find locally yet.

Mead in Bottles and Dubbel in the Carboy

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We bottled our first batch of mead this weekend, after being in secondary fermentation for about 5 weeks.  The advice I found online about how long to leave it fermenting was all over the place, but mostly ranged up to 6 months to a year.  But we’re impatient and didn’t want to wait 6 months to see if it came out or not.

It was nicely clear, and apart from smelling strongly of yeast, was very nice.  The final gravity was down to 1.006, for a final ABV of 8%.  We used the same honey we brewed with for priming sugar (thanks again, Uncle John!).  We’ll let the bottles carbonate a couple weeks, and probably have the first bottle at Thanksgiving.

As long as we had the all the gear out and sterilized, we also pulled the Dubbel into the carboy for second fermentation.  It looked and smelled fantastic, so we’ve got high hopes.

Belgian “Research” Project: Second Round

Beer,

I continue to make progress on my project to sample a wide variety of Belgian beers.  Here’s another set of notes:

Orval Trappist Ale

Interesting Trappist beer in cute glass bottles with dolphin heraldry. Very luxurious head, took a while to pour a small bottle (11.2oz) into a pint glass. Very light and sour, with a bit of resin in the finish, from dry hopping.

Chimay Grande Réserve (Blue)

Probably the first Belgian beer I ever had was some Chimay Tripel a friend brought to a party many years ago — I found it very strange and unpleasant.  My tastes have changed over the years, and I knew that I’d like the Chimay Blue much better than their tripel.  I was not disappointed: this beer if very sweet and smooth, with a hint of dryness and mild earthy hops.

Girardin Gueuze 1882 (Black Label)

Intensely sour, with a little fruitiness and funkiness.  More like Champagne than an average ale, both because of the effervescence and because of the rich layering of flavor and aroma.  Definitely confirming my intention to find more gueuze to try.

St. Bernardus Wit

Delicious — a perfect hefeweizen. Just a little touch of honey adding sweetness but not overpowering.  I want to see if I can find any of the other St. Bernardus beers around town.

Delirium Tremens

I avoided trying this beer for a long time — I didn’t take it seriously because of the silly pink elephants on the label.  What lager should be: sweet and light, with a little sour reediness that almost reminds me of a pilsner.  The overall effect is closer to a cream ale than your typical tripel.

Delirium Nocturnum

If you’re going to have one beer with pink elephants on the label, you may as well have another…  This is the sister beer to Delirium Tremens — this time a dark, strong ale. Very fruity, with a strong similarity to DT (same pilsner/cream ale taste, which is a little incongruous in a darker ale). But sweet and malty, too.

Recipe: Beer Bread

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This is my favorite bread recipe at the moment: it doesn’t get any easier or faster, and it makes a nice dense rustic bread that everybody in the family likes.  And if by some chance you have a batch of homebrew that didn’t turn out perfectly or just some spare beer you’d rather eat than drink, this is a great way to put it to good use and free up the bottles for the next batch.

Ingredients:

3½ cups flour
3 Tbsp. sugar
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1½ tsp. salt
12 oz. beer

Directions

  1. Mix dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl.  Add beer and mix until just combined.
  2. Knead in the bowl.  For a smoother consistency, turn out onto a floured board and knead.
  3. Form into loaf and turn out into bread pan, or onto a baking sheet.  For a crisper crust, brush with an egg beaten with 1 Tbsp. of water.
  4. Bake for 50 minutes at 375°F.

Source: Slightly adapted from USA Weekend “Recipe: Homemade bread in under an hour“.  The original recipe says to bake “about 45 minutes”, but every time I’ve sliced a loaf after 45 minutes, it has had a pocket of uncooked dough in the middle.

First All-Grain Brew (Belgian Dubbel)

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We had one of the first cool days of Fall yesterday, cool enough to justify real shoes — with socks!  It probably won’t last, but we’ve been pining for cooler weather and the darker, heavier beers that go with them.  Beers that could plausibly go with shepherd’s pie.  So we took advantage of the nice weather and spent the whole day inside slaving over a hot stove, brewing a batch of abbey ale, using a recipe based on Westmalle Dubbel.

We had (almost) all of our equipment ready, and took the plunge and did our first all-grain batch.  This was also our first liquid yeast, and between those two things, it went about as well as could be expected:

  • Apparently, liquid yeast needs to come out of the fridge 3-6 hours before you can pitch it.  Luckily, I remembered to check just in time.
  • 5 gallons of sparge water took a long time to bring up to temp — roughly an hour.  And I thought I was being clever when I remembered to start heating it 20 minutes before the mash was supposed to be done…
  • It took roughly 8½ hours from starting to heat the water for the mash, to getting the fermenter tucked away in the pantry.  Mashing, collecting wort and the boil combined took 4½ hours, so the other 4 hours was spent waiting for water to heat up (or cool down), filtering wort into the fermenter, etc.
  • Our fancy new kitchen faucets don’t have a standard tap that the wort chiller can screw into.  So I ran a garden hose into the kitchen and hooked it up.  Of course, the hose had a leak and sprayed water everywhere.  Even with copious duct-taping, it still leaked a trickle.  Eventually, I had the hose angled down into a dish pan, collecting the runoff.  But that took a surprisingly long time to get right.

Unlike some previous batches, I actually remembered to take gravity readings at several points.  With the help of a handy little tool for temperature-correcting gravity readings, we got exactly the gravity called for in the recipe.  So we’ve got high hopes.

Just Tapped A Keg of Big Nose IPA

Beer

We knew our last keg was going to kick soon, so I called our local beer store to see what kegs they had in stock.  They were out of our first choice, so I found myself talking my wife into getting a keg of Big Nose IPA.

Now, saying that I’m not an IPA fan is a bit of an understatement.  I generally compare IPAs to sandpaper, bleach, or some kind of tongue-stripping assault.  But for whatever reason, I really like Big Nose.  It’s not really pale (more of an amber, in fact), so maybe there’s enough malt in it that I don’t mind the hops so much.  And I think, as the name suggests, that they’ve focused on the aromatic hops, not so much the tongue-violence-bittering hops.

Anyway, in goes the new keg, and the hissing sound I normally expect when tapping a new keg doesn’t stop — it just tapers off to a steady hiss.  So I turned everything off, pulled the release valve on the keg, and turned the gas back on — still hissing.  I’d loosened the CO2 line on the keg coupler, so I retightened that, retapped the keg and turned the gas back on — still hissing.  It was dinnertime by now, so I let it sit, rechecked everything and turned the CO2 back on — still hissing.

By now, I was getting pretty frustrated and starting to worry that my regulator was broken.  So I ran my fingers around all the seals in the regulator, and found the problem: the regulator wasn’t screwed in to the CO2 cylinder securely (maybe it got bumped?).  So I tightened that and the hissing stopped.  So, score one for the check-everything-twice school of troubleshooting.

Surprisingly Like Mead

Mead, ,

We pulled the mead to second fermentation yesterday.  Since we only have one 1-gallon growler, we siphoned it to a 6-quart pot, washed the growler, and siphoned it back.  It all went pretty smoothly.

We actually remembered to check the gravity when we brewed and when we moved to second fermentation.  It started at 1.064, and was down to 1.010 (with a bunch of yeast messing up the sample) and 1.004 (with a clean sample).  By my math, that’s in the 7.5% – 8% ABV range.  Of course we sipped at the sample after checking the gravity, and it was surprisingly mead-like.  Definitely unfinished, just like beer coming out of the first week of fermentation.  But definitely promising.

Belgian “Research” Project: First Round

Beer,

Between my local beer shop and a few other sources, I’ve managed to find several of the beers on my list.  Here are my impressions of the first batch:

Affligem Dubbel

I picked this up at the beer shop when I went without my list.  It’s wasn’t on a lot of top beer lists, but it does have a good rating on BeerAdvocate.  This beer is a lot like an English brown ale, with earthy overtones and a nice mild sweetness. It started out a little bland and underwhelming, but quickly grew on me. It’s sweet, but not cloying, with some fruitiness.  Solid.

Westmalle Dubbel

Giant sticky malt with lots of fruit, sugar, biscuit, etc. — much sweeter than the other abbey ales I’ve sampled.  A nutty body and a little darkness in the finish.  Didn’t like this as much as the Affligem.

La Trappe Quadrupel

This is the only Trappist brewery in the Netherlands.  Definitely one of the better heavy abbey beers I’ve had. Not too sickly or overwhelming. Definite subtleties with spiciness and nuttiness.

Rochefort 6/8/10

We picked up one bottle each of the 6, 8 and 10, and tasted them back-to-back. In a word, disappointing.  The 6 was very mild, with a lot of carbonation, and some mild earthy flavor, a little sweetness, but not much else.  The 8 and 10 definitely had a bigger alcohol kick, and a little more malt, but were pretty similar.  These are all very highly rated online, but we didn’t find much to justify that.

St. Bernardus Abt 12

Sweet and highly carbonated, with some caramel, toffee and light mineral notes. Very smooth and complex, with the typical fruitiness and spiciness.  Better than Affligem.  Made in a small town not far from Westvleteren, so maybe a day trip is in order.

DeuS (Brut des Flandres)

Sweet and very effervescent.  Lots of champagne flavor, but not dry like brut champagne (despite the name), more like a demi-sec.  Everything about this beer made me ready to love it.  It was definitely packaged and promoted as a special, one-of-a-kind experience.  But it managed to be just OK.  It was good, but not fantastic.  Not enough to justify the hefty price tag.

Westvleteren 12

Quite hard to get (the monks only make enough to support themselves and only sell it in limited quantities at the abbey), so I was hoping it wouldn’t live up to the hype. Alas, it was fantastic.  Lives up to the “best beer in the world” moniker quite well.

The Platonic ideal every other abbey ale I’ve had has been clustered around. Rich and earthy malt with fruity and spicy notes, plus some creamy chocolate and biscuit too. A little dry bitterness in the finish. Packs a decent kick at 10% ABV.  Exceptionally smooth and textured.