Polar Beer

It's been mighty cold in Dublin recently. Our normally boring looking estate turned into a winter wonderland carpeted with snow. While snowed in writing the crafty plans post I had just put in an order with The Home Brew Company, well the order arrived despite all the ice and snow. I got some free samples of odds and ends of various malts to try out with the order. Excellent stuff. With all the cold weather I decided to take advantage and brew an alt beer.

Alt style beer is made in Düsseldorf using a top fermenting ale yeast and the beer is then lagered at a cold temperature. Traditionally it was probably made in winter when the brewers could take advantage of the cold weather to lager the beer which would mellow out the fruity flavours normally created by ale yeast. My copy of Tasting Beer by Randy Mosher tells me that it should taste of toffee malt but it should be crisp with a blast of fresh herbal noble hops. Luckily The Beer Nut was off doing some field research on alt beer with Barry in Düsseldorf so that was useful for formulating the recipe.

I used lager malt and added a touch of wheat malt to give a good head. The caramunch and munich malt were tossed in with the hope they will give the beer some complexity and a nice toffee taste without being too sweet. I know what I'd like this beer to taste like but really I have no idea if this grain bill will achieve that. Part of the fun of brewing is finding out. I went with german Perle hops for bittering and Hallertau for aroma as they're a classic german hop. Hopefully the hops will balance the malt nicely.  

Recipe:

Grain Bill:
2.5kg Lager malt
Wheat malt: 500g
Munich malt: 500g
Caramunch: 500g
Dark Crystal: 60g

Hops:
60 Minutes: Perle 7.1%AA 40g
15 Minutes: Hallertau Hersbrucker 3%AA 10g
Aroma: Hallertau Hersbrucker 3%AA 25g

Yeast: Safale S04

OG: 1.046

Mashed at 68 deg C for an hour.

There were no big problems with the brewday. I'm still dreaming of how things will be easier when I build myself a boiler, I could see on the day where having one could save me time and effort. The OG came out pretty much where I wanted it for a session strength beer between four and five percent alcohol. Since there was still snow outside I decided to try cooling the wort using the snow. I have read with envy about American home brewers who can dunk the pot in a snow drift to cool it. So we built a snow drift and cooled the pot outdoors. Unfortunately the temperature was taking ages to drop and I wanted to finish the day and clean up so I cheated and finished cooling using the wort chiller. 

I used Safale S04 as it will work at the colder end of the temperature range for ale yeast and it ferments quite cleanly. The beer is finishing the first week of fermentation in my cold downstairs room now. I'll move it out to my shed for a few weeks of lagering. Hopefully during that time the temperature will stay nice and cold. Who knows maybe we'll have more frost and snow to help it along. Though if it drops to minus ten again I might end up making eis beer. 

Cheery Cherry Cupcakes and Fat Bottoms

I recently got Susannah Blake's Cupcakes book and have been making many scrumptious recipes from it. I especially liked these lemon meringue cupcakes which have lemon curd in the middle and are topped with meringue. Needless to say they didn't last very long. I've been reading a lot of Donal Skehan's lovely blog recently with all it's great tasty recipes. He has a recipe for Christmas Cupcakes which I must try before the festive season.

Speaking of which last year the Fat Bottomed Santa made his majestic journey around our house at christmas time. This year with all the cutbacks in the house and the recession I have to say I was worried if he'd show up at all. I needn't have worried because the Fat Bottomed Santa is much more resourceful than that. He showed up for the first time today with some cherry almond cupcakes he'd made. They're very tasty and he even left me a recipe.

Cherry Almond Cupcakes

115g Margarine or Butter

115g Golden Caster Sugar

95g Self Raising Flour

20g Ground Almonds

1tsp Vanilla Essence

1-2 tbsp Milk

2 Eggs

Glace Cherries

Icing Sugar

Lemon Juice

Cream the butter and sugar together until it's light fully mixed. Then mix in the eggs one at a time and add the vanilla essence. Sieve the flour and almonds onto the mix and add the cherries. Fold together the mixture adding the milk if needed.

Bake in the oven at 180 degrees Celsius for about 15-20 minutes until the cupcakes have a golden top and are firm to the touch. Times may vary depending on your oven.

Leave the cupcakes to cool.

I mix icing in a kind of random manner. I usually use about 300g of icing sugar and add a tbsp of lemon juice and a tbsp of warm water. I mix it adding more icing sugar if it is too thin and more water if it's too thick. This icing shouldn't be too thick. Spoon it over the cupcakes, it helps if the cases are those big muffin ones so the icing doesn't spill out. Then top each one with a cherry and enjoy.

Westley's Bog Bounty Heather Ale

I went hiking in Wicklow recently with Dave and a friend of ours Katie. The dog came too, he was delighted with how dirty he was at the end of the walk. The heather has started flowering coating the whole place in a purple carpet. We collected some heather flower tips, 95g in all. I decided to make my own version of Fraoch. I know Fraoch has bog myrtle in it as well, I really like the taste bog myrtle gives to a beer. We didn't get any other herbs that day so it's just heather flavouring in there.
I used some low AA hops to bitter at the start. The heather was added at the end for aroma. The base malt should make it nicely sweet like the Scottish ales.

Grain:
3.5kg Maris Otter Pale Ale Malt
345g Amber Malt
500g Wheat Malt
230g Crystal Malt

Hops and Heather:
60 minutes: 55g Hallertau 2.1%AA
15 minutes: 1 tsp Irish Moss and a small handful of heather flowers
At end of boil: Rest of heather flowers added to the boil.
95g of heather in total

Mash:
Infusion mash at 66-67 deg C. Batch sparged.
Yeast: Safale S04

Volume: About 22-23 Litres

OG: 1.049

I'm really looking forward to seeing how this turns out. Brewing usually takes up most of a day so while I brew I usually cook something nice. This time I went for something completely new involving yeast, homemade pizza. I'd never made pizza from my own dough before. It turned out really well. I'll definitely be making it again.

Brewing Little and Large

First brewing large. Last Saturday I went over to my friend Ed's house to help him out with his first all grain brew day. Ed's been brewing for a while. His wedding present to us was a fridge stocked with bottles of tasty beers in loads of different styles. They went down a treat at our after wedding party. A little too well maybe since Ed ended up promising my uncle he'd brew him beer and the uncle promising Ed fields of barley. He recently did a few extract brews but he thought if he was going to buy extra kit he might as well go the whole hog and go all grain. He'll need the kit if the uncle carries out the threat and lands a bag of grain up to him.

We had a lovely day brewing in the sunshine in Ed's back garden. I have kettle envy now, Ed's boiler is a huge 10 gallon one with two powerful elements in it. It heats up very quickly and boils easily. It makes the brew day so much faster, I may have to think about getting one as it takes my gas ring a good while to bring my wort to a boil. We sprinkle sparged the mash which worked really well. At the end we ended up with 23 litres of wort all flavoured with lovely Nelson Sauvin and Cascade hops. Ed's full recipe is here.



Now for the brewing little. One of things I like about brewing is how varied it is. You can have a big 10 gallon set up like Ed's or a stainless steel automatic micro brewery like some of the guys on Irish Craft Brewer or you can do like me and make tiny batches of beer on your cooker with a minimum of fuss. I have some hops and grain I want to use up before they go out of date and I had just enough extract to make a small brew. I checked my stocks after this brew and I have very little specialty grain or hops left so I will need to do an order soon.
I wrote an article about small scale brewing which goes into the other reasons to brew small batches.

For this brew I wanted to use up some golding and fuggles hops that I had for ages. I decided a mild ale might be nice. But I can never leave things alone and so I put in some crystal malt, chocolate malt and oatmeal to steep before the extract. So I think that sort of makes this a porter. At the end of the boil I put in a cup of nice strong espresso. I've had a few coffee stouts and they're always nice but I think the coffee should add something to the porter. I think I like porter better than stout, I'm not keen on the dry roasty flavour of stout and the sweet ones I find too cloying. Anyway here's the recipe.

Recipe:
Westley's Breakfast Porter

Boil volume: 10L
End volume:8-9L

Malt:
680g Light dried malt extract
Steeped grains, steeped at 66 deg C for 30 minutes
60g Crystal malt
20g Chocolate malt
20g Oatmeal

Hops:
60 mins: Fuggles and Goldings
30 mins: Fuggles and Goldings
15 mins: Fuggles and Goldings
End: Fuggles and Goldings
Cup of strong espresso

Hop amounts: My accurate scale's batteries died but there's about 5-7g of each hop in each addition. It looked like a lot of hops but they've been there a while so they might be starting to loose flavour anyway.

Yeast: Danstar Nottingham

OG: 1.045

It should yield about eight 500ml bottles. I'll just bottle it straight from the primary better bottle in a bout three weeks time. Thanks to The Beer Nut for his suggestion that this should be a breakfast beer. I think it will be a nice one to sup when the trees start to change colour and thoughts and nights turn that little bit darker.

Westley's Slip From The Hamiltonian Path

I brewed up an extract beer last week. It's an American pale ale hopefully along the lines of Sierra Nevada pale ale. It's fermenting away downstairs with the most wonderful hop aroma coming from it.

Here's the recipe.

Boil Volume: 21L
End Volume:18L

Grain:
150g Crystal Malt
100g Amber Malt
20g Chocolate Malt

2.3kg Light DME

Steep grains at 66 deg C for 30 minutes

Hops:
60 minutes
Pioneer 9.2% AA 30g
Centennial 8.2% AA 10g

45 minutes
Centennial 10g

30 minutes
Centennial 8g
Cascade 4.5% AA 10g

15 minutes
Centennial 20g
Cascade 10g

Flame Out
Cascade 20g
Centennial 10g

OG: 1.044

Yeast:
Safale S04



The name and label may need explanation. We were walking along the Royal canal to see Broome Bridge. The great mathematician Hamilton had a flash of inspiration at this bridge and carved the equation for Quaternion multiplication on the bridge. The modern graffiti didn't seem to contain any such flashes of brilliance but it was cool to see the plaque commemorating the event. Just as we reached the bridge the dog decided to jump in the canal. Maybe he figured out some great doggie mathematical problem, we'll never know. I snapped a photo of the smelly soggy doggie and this became the inspiration for the name of the beer.

Meanwhile I bottled my Molly Bloom's Raspberry White Beer last week. As you can see it turned out to be bright pink in colour which is great. It tastes very unusual, quite dry from the fruit and there's lot of flowery chamomile in there which I think may not be a good thing. A bit of carbonation and aging will help this beer a lot though. It will also benefit from being cold. I might open a test bottle tomorrow in celebration of Bloomsday.

Molly Bloom's Raspberry White Beer

Over at Irish Craft Brewer an all grain brewing challenge was dreamed up by SBillings. As he said

The challenge is to do a 23 litre all grain brew using 3Kg of a single base malt, no speciality malt and only one hop addition.

I signed up for the challenge and got my thinking hat on.

I've been drinking a good few wheat and wit beers recently. I like Hoegaarden a lot but that's probably because it was one of the first different beers I ever tried while living in the dullest town on earth, Eindhoven. I usually find that weiss beers are a bit too sweet and cloying for my taste. I like the spiced Belgian versions much better than the German sweet ones. Although a weiss beer is nice served cold on a hot day. Hot days seem to be in short supply recently though so drinking opportunities are limited. I like the lemon zesty taste from Hoegaarden and it got me to thinking how I could make an altered version of a Belgian wit.

I turned to my always trusty Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher and read a bit about white beers. This seemed to be the base I could build the beer on. As the challenge says you can only use 3kg of base malt and no other I needed some adjunct grain to add to the plain malt to give it some fermentables and taste. An adjunct is an unmalted fermentable grain and things like rice, corn, sorghum, wheat and oats are often used. I haven't tried an adjunct mash before so I decided to try it so I'd learn something from the challenge.

I used 3kg of Maris Otter pale ale malt, 1kg unmalted Flaked Wheat and 500g Flaked Oats. I used about 240g which was 8% of the total malt in the adjunct mash. I brought about 4 litres of water to 60 degrees celsius and then put in the grains. I gave it a stir and checked it was at 50 degrees. I left it for about 15 minutes. The stuff looked like very gluey porridge. I then raised the temperature to 65.5 degrees and left it for another 15 minutes. After this I boiled it for a few minutes. The series of temperature rests is used to break down the starches in the un-malted grains to make them more easily accessible to the enzymes in the main mash. While I was doing this I brought the rest of the mash to 50 degrees. I then dumped the contents of the adjunct mash pot into the main mash tun. It splashed a bit and that stuff burns. I stirred it up, checked the temperature was 67 degrees and left it all to mash away for 45 minutes.

I took off the first runnings and then sparged with about 14 litres of water at 77 degrees. I topped up with about 5 litres of water and the gravity of the wort at this stage was 1.039.

I boiled for an hour and the only hop addition was 40g of 4.8%AA tettnang hops at the 60 minute mark. Since this was a challenge brew it would be pretty boring if I left it at that. I decided to throw a load of spices and herbs into this brew.
Spices:
10g of chamomile flowers
1 star anise
1 tsp crushed cardamon pods
1/2 tsp ground cumin seeds
5-10g crushed coriander seeds
Zest of one lemon

In Radical Brewing Mr. Mosher reckons that chamomile is a secret spice used in Belgian white beers. I also added the other stuff just in case. I hope the cardamon comes out as not too overpowering. I find it has a washing up liquid taste when there's too much of it in a curry. It'll be interesting to see what character comes from them.

I cooled and pitched the beer with Brewferm Blanche wheat beer yeast. It's fermenting away with a lot of foam. I'm keeping the temperature fairly low as I want some yeast character but nothing too bubblegum which you can get with white beer yeasts.

Now the astute amongst you will notice raspberry mentioned in the title. Well they come later, I plan to secondary this beer over about 1.2kg of raspberries. I'm hoping the spices, yeast and raspberries will all combine to make a frothy summer beer with a nice blurry fruity spiciness to it.

This challenge was a great idea. I made a new style of beer and learned to do an adjunct mash. I also got to play with different fruits and spices. I think it's nice to make unusual beer that you can't get in the shops. I loved the raspberry lambic Rose de Gambrinus from Cantillon so this is inspired by that though this will be much sweeter and probably less fruity.

I've named it Molly Bloom. I can't wait to have a lot of fun making the label for it. Sandymount will feature, hopefully on Bloomsday.

Black Abbey Dubbel

Next month I'm going to Brussels, Belgium for a long weekend. A conversation at a home brew tasting session led to a crew from Irish Craft Brewer deciding to go to Cantillon's public brew day on March the 7th. The flights are booked and I'm very excited. I've only passed through Belgium before and I can't wait to sample all the wonderful beers in Brussels. For a brewing nerd like me a day watching a traditional brewery like Cantillon do it's thing sounds great.

So to celebrate I decided my next brew would be a Belgian style Dubbel.



There's lots of malt character in a Dubbel so this would have to be an all grain brew to get the taste I want. I had some Belgian trappist style ale yeast and some Caramunch malt. So I was actually able to use the right ingredients and not substitute some of them for once.

Recipe:

Grain:
3.4kg Maris Otter Malt
500g Caramunch Malt
450g Crystal Malt
450g Light Brown Sugar (added at end of boil)

Hops:
60 minutes: 30g Perle 7.1%AA
15 minutes: Rind of 1/2 an orange
2 tsp Coriander Seed
1 tsp Irish Moss

Yeast: Safbrew S33 (2 packs rehydrated before pitching)

Mashed at 67 degrees celsius for an hour



The wort volume was about 20 liters with a mash run off gravity of 1.052. My brewing calculator says that is what I should get if I have an efficiency of about 75% which seems reasonable to me. After the boil I had about 18 liters but the gravity seemed pretty high so I topped it up to about 20 liters. The original gravity was 1.060 so it should turn out nice and strong.

Traditionally there isn't much hop aroma in a Dubbel so there are only bittering hops in this recipe. It felt a bit odd not to put hops in at the end so I decided some spices might be good. It put in a little grated orange rind and some coriander. These shouldn't be noticeable in the final brew but should add something in the background.

I used Safbrew S33 yeast which according to the website is good for trappist style beers. I'm fermenting it in a warm room upstairs with a sleeping bag around it so that hopefully it'll have a nice fruity estery taste.

I'm going to call this one Black Abbey Dubbel. As I mentioned before I lived beside the Black Abbey in Kilkenny and since many of the beers in Belgium are still traditionally made my monks I thought it suited. I can always dream of running the Black Abbey Brewery one day.

The brew day was about 6 hours from start to finish which was quicker than the last time. I think I'm really getting the hang of the all grain brewing. The results are worth it too.

Cold Weather Kolsch, Better Bottles and A Suspect Yeast Choice

More brewing! It's the season for beer after all. Ed, a friend of mine wanted to see an extract brew in action before he does one. He's been very successfully brewing kits for a while now so he knows a lot of it anyway. I ordered some stuff from the Homebrew Company which as always are great to deal with.

I thought Ed was brewing his own beer with me supervising but it turned out I was brewing for me. Since it's been so cold I thought I could make a lager. But I had no lager yeast, if I'd known I'd have got some. So in the absence of lager yeast I decided to use ale yeast and ferment cold to make a kolsch or blonde ale style beer. I raided the freezer and came up with some german hops.

Recipe:

10 Liter batch

Muntons Light Dried Extract 1kg

Hops:
60 minutes - 17g Hallertauer (2.1%AA)
20 minutes - 20g Tettnang (4.5%AA) and 18g Halltertauer
5 minutes - 9g Hallertauer and 6g Tettnang

Yeast: Danstar Nottingham

OG: 1.040
The alcohol should turn out at about 4% ABV



During the boil the lads disappeared upstairs to watch the rugby leaving me to the brewing. I did manage to get them into the kitchen for the last bits where the wort was chilled and transferred. The yeast was pitched and Ed took a well earned break with a nice Clotworthy Dobbin.



I'm fermenting this brew in a Better Bottle. I got three of these for fermenting beer and mead in. I'm very pleased with them so far. They are light which when you're a weakling like me is a big advantage over heavy glass carboys. I am prone to dropping things that are heavy. Dropping a heavy plastic bottle of beer is annoying but dropping a glass carboy would probably mean a trip to accident and emergency.

This evening I transferred Westley's Winter Warmer to secondary. The better bottle made this very easy. I just attached a hose and opened the tap, also the clever valve means you can get the last of the beer out and not lose so much. I checked the gravity, it's down to 1.014 which gives it an alcohol of 5.7% ABV. This should rise a little in secondary. It should be ready to bottle just before christmas. The better bottle was very easy to clean too.

Of course we had a taste of the beer. It's shaping up nicely, spicy with oranges and stronger than I normally brew. There's a hint of spiciness but I would have liked more fruity yeast character with it. I think I should have used a belgian yeast like Safbrew S33 which I had in the fridge. It would have been more complex and fruity like Westmalle or something. Instead I used Nottingham as in theory it wouldn't interfere with the spices. Maybe I should have went mad and used the S33. Though when it's bottled and carbonated it might be a different story. I might be saying I'm glad I used the Nottingham.

Westley's Winter Warmer

It's pretty cold here for the start of december. Our new dog is settling in well and we brought him for a few walks in the frost over the weekend. He's so wooly that he didn't seem to mind the cold as much as we did. We decided to call him Westley. For the nerds among you yes that is Westley from The Princess Bride. For those who don't know it, it's the best film and book ever. He's a good dog apart from a tendency to dig up and eat everything in the garden. There goes my growing hops idea.

I haven't brewed since I made my all grain stout. I bottled some of the stout and the rest is in a barrel where it's supposed to be waiting until it's nearer christmas before it gets drank. This hasn't happened, myself and Dave are supping away on the stout. It's lovely, it's roasty and it has a lovely chocolate taste to it as well. It's not quite fizzy enough so I may have to carbonate it a little with some CO2 if I ever get round to buying the attachment for the barrel. It might be gone before then.

I wanted to make a warming spicy winter beer. I pulled out my recently purchased Complete Joy of Homebrewing and found a likely recipe. Then I set to work modifying it. I don't think I've ever made a beer exactly as it was in the book. This isn't because I haven't wanted to but because the ingredients are hard to get so I usually modify the recipe to suit what I actually have.

Westley's Winter Warmer

15 Litre Batch.

Grain:
180g Crystal Malt (Steeped in 6L of water at 67 Degress Celsius for 30 minutes)
1.052g Light DME
1 kg Medium DME
About 450g Honey

Hops:
12g Centennial Hops @ 60 minutes from end of boil
10g Cascade Hops @ 5 minutes from end of boil

Spices:
10 minutes from end of boil
Rind of two oranges
10g grated ginger root
cinnamon stick
1 star anise
1/4 of a nutmeg grated
1 tsp liqurice root powder
4 whole cloves

Sachet of Danstar Nottingham Yeast

OG: 1.060



I wanted a high alcohol beer to give a bit of warmth to all those spices. As well the hops should add more citrus to the beer. I have no idea if it will be nice but that's the fun of homebrewing, making beer you'd never be able to buy. Hopefully it'll come out as a spicy warm beer.



As always I got some knitting done while waiting for the pot to boil. This is the Darkside Cowl I'm making for my Mum for christmas. I love the pattern and it's knitting up fairly quickly. The silk is so beautiful, photos don't do it justice.



I know this photo is blurred but the dog wouldn't stay still. They never do. This is Westley with his batch of beer, he tried eating the hops when I emptied the pot but he didn't seem so impressed with them. Maybe he'd prefer malt? That's one of my better bottles which I hope will make fermentation a bit easier. They have a tap on the bottom which you can adjust so it's just above the sediment so that should make racking to secondary and bottling the beer so much easier. The airlock is a dry trap which is pretty clever.

Black Freren Gate Stout

There I am hard at work to make another all grain brew. Last saturday I was supposed to go hill walking but then it got called off which I happy about as I wasn't feeling great. I decided to brew up the stout I had been planning. The recipe started as a Beamish/Dry Irish stout clone from Brew Your Own Magazine. I added in some other bits of malt I had about. I wanted a bit of nice malt character to beef it up a bit. I think a lot of stouts just have a roast barley taste with nothing else going on. This is going to be my winter warming stout.

Recipe:

Grain:
Pale Ale Malt 2.7kg
Roast Barley 500g
Chocolate Malt 265g
Medium Crystal 530g

Hops:
Perle 7.1%AA 30g @ 60 minutes from end of boil
Goldings 4.5%AA 14g @ 15 minutes from end of boil

Yeast: Safale US 05

Mashed 66-67 degrees celsius for an hour.

The gravity was about 1.037 so it should turn out at about 4% ABV. I think I have been taking the gravity of my beers at too high a temperature. The hygrometer works at 20 degrees but my wort would usually be at 25-28 degrees before I pitch the yeast. This might explain my wheat beer. I thought it had an ABV of about 5% but on tasting it was much stronger. I would have one bottle and feel pretty woozy. So maybe I've been underestimating the gravity. In future I'll take the sample and let it cool down and then read the gravity.

The name is taken from the Black Freren Gate in Kilkenny city near the Black Abbey Church. I used to live between the gate and the abbey. On a cold foggy night you always wondered if maybe the past and present would collide and you might glimpse a monk wandering the old cobbled streets. Hopefully some day I will get back to living in Kilkenny.

All Grain Brew, Lightening Bolt Ale

I have a shiny new mash-tun. I decided to brew up a simple english ale style beer, it would be a bit hoppier than the average ale.

From All Grain Brewing

Recipe:
Grist:
Pale ale malt: 3.6kg
Medium crystal malt: 400g
Hops:
Pioneer (9.2%AA): 19g @ 60 minutes
Centennial (8.2%AA): 16g @ 20 minutes
16g @ 10 minutes
16g @ turn off

Safale S04 yeast

Mashed at 66 degrees celsius for one hour.
OG: 1.034
Volume: 20 Litres

The mashing wasn't so difficult but it did take time. Good excuse to get some knitting done. I brought 11 litres of water to 76 degrees celsius. I poured this into the (pre-warmed) mash tun and added the grain. I stirred it in using the mash paddle and checked the temperature was 66 degrees celsius throughout.

From All Grain Brewing

From All Grain Brewing

I left it at it for an hour. During this time I heated up another 11 litres of water to 76 degrees. I then recirculated some of the wort. I ran off about 6 litres of wort. I used about 10 litres of water to batch sparge the grains. After that I used another 10 litres to batch sparge again. I got about 20 litres of wort in all.

From All Grain Brewing

After the mashing it was the same as any other extract brew. The OG came out at 1.034 which was close to the target. I've been trialling Beer Alchemy brewing software for my Mac. It seems pretty good and takes a lot of work out of calculating amounts and ingredients for recipes.
Mashing certainly adds time to the brew day but hopefully it'll turn out to be a tasty beer. While making this beer I was watching the olympics and saw Usain Bolt's incredible 200 metre run. So in honour of him I called the beer Lightening Bolt.

I wanted to use the spent grain for something. I couldn't just throw out all that grain without using it for something. I found a thread about making spent grain bread so I decided to give it a go.

Spent Grain Bread Recipe:
1.5 cups white flour
2 cups spent grain
1.75 cups of milk
2 tablespoons mixed seeds
1 teaspoon bread soda

Oven: 190 degrees celsius for 50 minutes

I was skeptical that this would be nice. The next day I went hiking and had the bread with butter and mature cheddar cheese. It was totally delicious. Lovely and moist. I'd recommend pumpkin seeds as they seemed to really add something to the bread. I only made one loaf but next time I do an all grain brew I'll make loads of the bread. It would be nice to have a beer and cheese evening where I brewed the beer and made the bread to go with some fine cheeses.

Bavarian Wheat Beer

Today I brewed up a summer beer in the hope that the Irish summer will live up to the beer, so far it hasn't been a great summer but here's hoping. I brewed a Bavarian style wheat beer.

Recipe:
11 Litres

Muntons dry wheat malt extract: 1kg
Light dry malt extract: 240g

Tettnang hops 4.8%AA
60 minutes: 5g
30 minutes: 10g
End Aroma: 12g
1 tsp irish moss

Safbrew S-06 yeast

This brew was the first time I used my wort chiller and it went really well. It took only twenty minutes to chill the wort to pitching temperature of 25 degrees celcius. I was very impressed. What a great piece of kit, it's a pity it took so long for me to get one.



I had a bit of debate as to what yeast to use in this beer. I had some Brewferm Blanche yeast which is suitable for wheat beers and wit beers. I also had Safbrew S-06 which is good in wheat beers especially Bavarian styles. I am also thinking of putting raspberries into the secondary and I've been told that a nice clean neutral yeast like Danstar Nottingham would interfere less with the fruit flavours.
In the end I went for the Safbrew S-06 to see if I can make a nice Bavarian style Weiss. If the beer tastes good at the end of primary fermentation I might not put the raspberries into it after all. Or maybe I'll split the brew in secondary and do half with fruit half without to see what the difference is. I'll post back here what the results are.

Jump Up, Hop Back IPA

Jump Up Hop Back IPA
Extract plus Partial Mash

The Recipe:

Partial Mash Grain Bill:
485g Pale ale malt
65g Amber malt
Mashed in 4.5L of water at 70deg for 40 minutes
Sprinkle sparged with 4L of water at 82deg

2.5kg Pale Dried Malt Extract

Hop Schedule:
45 minutes: 14g Cascade
10 minutes: 14g Cascade
5 minutes: 7g Hallertauer
At end of boil 5g Cascade
15L Boil Volume

Final volume 20L
Starting Gravity: 1.040

Pitched with Safale S04

For this beer I decided to do a partial mash plus extract. Now that sounds pretty complicated but look at the picture. Does that look complicated? Or does that look like a pot with the grains mentioned above plus 4.5L of water at 70 degrees celcius stirred around and covered with a lid and a sleeping bag? Well that's what it is and that's partial mashing. It's pretty simple and it hopefully will make the beer taste better.

So while I left the pot to mash for 40 minutes I weighed out the hops and this being an IPA there were plenty of them. Cascade hops are the ones you find in most of the american IPA's that are so tasty so hopefully that flavour will come out here.




So after the grains had mashed I poured them through a strainer into my larger brew pot. I heated up 4L of water to 82 degrees celcius and poured this very slowly over the grains imitating the process of sparging. After this I increased the volume in the brew pot to 15L and noted the volume.



While all this was going on I made a yeast starter using some malt extract boiled up to sterilise it all. When it cooled I added a packet of safale s04 being careful to keep it all sterile.





I added 2.5kg of pale malt extract.
I added the hops in four additions.
45 minutes: 14g Cascade
10 minutes: 14g Cascade
5 minutes: 7g Hallertauer
At end of boil 5g Cascade




The starting gravity was 1.040. It took this a long time to cool down as the volume was bigger than my usual small 5L batches. I put the pot in the sink with icy water but still it took ages to cool. My next investment is a wort chiller so I get a good cold break. So I fretted about the formation of off flavours while it cooled down. I then poured the wort into the fermenter and increased the volume to 20L. When it eventually cooled down I pitched the yeast.
Six days later the gravity had dropped to 1.016 so I'll put into a secondary barrel soon. It was very tasty at this early stage so hopefully it'll improve even more with time. I'm thinking about dry hopping it with some cascade in the secondary to give it a real IPA taste.

Convalescent Porter

Style: Porter
Volume: 4 Litres or 1 gallon. Just multiply to get amounts for larger volumes.

Ingredients:
560g Dry malt extract (Extra Light Muntons)
50g Crystal malt
50g Chocolate malt
12g Fuggles hops
Safale S04 yeast

Mash\Steeping Schedule:
Steep chocolate malt and crystal malt for 30 minutes @ 66 deg c

Boil Schedule:
Bring to rolling boil
60 minutes: 6g Fuggles hops
30 minutes: 3g Fuggles hops
Add DME
5 minutes: 4g Fuggles hops

Yeast\Fermentation\dry hopping:
Cool and ferment with Safale S04 yeast in 5L demi-john.

Other Notes:
I brewed up this beer as a celebration of being well again. Hopefully beer is good for you and this will help with recovery! I'm looking forward to tasting this to see what the crystal and chocolate malt character will be like.

Sweetness and Light Honey Ale

Ingredients:
450g dried malt extract
270g honey
11g coriander
6g orange rind
11g Hallertau hops
60min 5g
30 min 3g
5 min 3g
1 sachet Danstar Windsor Yeast

This was a light honey ale I brewed up in a small five litre batch. I got a big tub of honey from a farmer in Wexford who keeps bees. A batch of mead was made with some of the honey. This ale was made with some of the rest. I wasn't happy with the yeast as it didn't settle out well. A combination of bottling too early and using varying amounts of honey in the bottles meant this was very fizzy. The fizz meant the yeast rose up and made the beer very cloudy. If I was doing this again I'd use a better flocculating yeast. Apart from that it was a tasty brew and the spices and orange were tasty.