Fruits Of My Labor

Fall is right around the corner

2011-08-31T09:22:00.000-07:00

I just got the news that I will have to move from the house I love.

I will miss you basement that holds all my carboybies. I will miss the covered back deck that sheltered me from rain, snow, wind (ok not so much the wind) and other stuff that falls from the sky. I will miss the chickens most of all. I don't think I can go back to store bought eggs.

I'm spending the week packing up my books, clothes, and beer equipment and racking beer into kegs and less fragile carboys. I'm going to keg and then cold condition the the American lager I was making in Joe's fridge. Among the list of other things I have to do in the coming month besides find at least a part-time job, is plan a more consistent brewing schedule, beyond the brewing I do at Coalition.

I did manage before I moved to rack my first ever lager and put it in the fridge. I'm hoping it will settle out a bit more and clear up. I can drink a little of it but I get that itchy throat afterwards. So this will be strictly a giveaway beer.

Haitus: A needed break or just plain lazy?

2011-08-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

The last time I checked my blog I had just finished the Pineapple Kolsch and was getting ready to send it in for the Collaborator and the Fruit Beer competitions. Since then I brewed the Pineapple Kolsch at Coalition and it was a great hit and have steadily been working my way through some other beer styles. I brewed a braggot with rose hips and hibiscus that made leather-clad bikers smile and say "Cheers!" I helped design and brew up the LOLA Hibiscus Pale Ale for the event at Saraveza on July 23rd and pleased as punch when the piece in Brewpublic came out and I was quoted. Here it is!

I did a demo brew at the Oregon Brewers Festival at the Oregon Brew Crew booth and was pleased by the McGuyvering that I managed to accomplish with the help of strangers and my brewing partner, Joe. Joe spent a good portion of the time blowing bubbles and repeatedly trying to steer people to me, the point brewer on the batch. He thought it was great fun to tell each person who asked him what he was brewing, a different beer style.

I've been organizing the Coalator program at Coalition and brewing up some amazing beers with homebrewers. Coupling that with all the festivals and beer tastings around Portland and I can forgive myself for not being more diligent about writing in my blog. Time to turn over a new leaf before they all fall off the tree. The procrastinator in me wants to wait until September 1st and then start fresh but honestly, we (all the voices inside and outside my head) all know that I'll just blow that deadline off when it rolls around. So I will just play it by ear and bookmark the webpage on my browser and try to be more intentional in my goal to write more.

Fruit Beer. Who knew I'd make a good one?

2011-06-06T11:05:00.000-07:00

I certainly had no idea that I would craft probably my best beer yet, and that it would be a fruit beer at that.

In anticipation of the upcoming Fruit Beer Festival at Burnside Brewing, I brewed an entry for the fruit beer homebrew competition. At first I wanted to brew something with dates, something dark strong and earthy, but then I found out that dates aren't in season right now and I didn't want to spend a lot of money. While crafting a kolsch recipe for the LOLA brew day at Lucky Lab, it hit me that I should brew a kolsch, and use pineapple as my fruit. I pretty much envisioned a light fruity beer with bright color and tartness, something refreshing and effervescent. I wasn't sure how much pineapple flavor I would get so I decided to dry hop with centennial to give it some citrus aroma, so that it would have the hint of pineapple even if I didn't get full on pineapple flavor.

I was super surprised to find that the pineapple worked amazingly well with the kolsch yeast and the Northern Brewer hops. Joe even asked if I had used any acidulated malt because of the tartness of it. Not only was there pineapple aroma there was huge pineapple flavor as well and the tartness made for easy drinking. I'm making this one instead of the shandy for summer drinking. The lightness of the beer itself is deceptive in that it is at least 7% alcohol and though much more heavily hopped than a true kolsch (which it isn't) everything worked well.

I was surprised to not hear any comment from my brewing partner Joe, who usually always has a little bit of advice on improvement. For this beer he literally said that for him he could detect no flaw in the beer. High praise, indeed, coming from a man who can tell the difference in malts and hops in a lot of beers. I submitted this with no aspirations of even placing. I think it was a solid beer but palates are subjective. I am going to submit this to the Collaborator competition though. It is an excellent beer.

A Kolsch By Any Other Name

2011-05-03T15:37:00.001-07:00

I brewed a Kolsch once before.

It is a beer that does well at the lower end of the temperature range, 50-62, but can tolerate up to 70 degrees, though it gives you a different texture. I had been searching for a base beer for my entry into the Fruit beer competition. I wanted something that could carry a fruit fruit flavor in both taste and scent, or at least something that I could invoke with other means. then I had to decide what fruits I wanted to consider.

Dates.
Cherries.
Plums.
Marionberry.
Peach.
Pear.
Lemons.

For each of these I considered a style that would highlight the fruit. Given time and equipment I needed to make sure would be able to brew this with time to spare for a taste. The most awesome group of women beer drinkers, the LOLAs (Ladies of Lagers and Ales) were able to secure a brewing date with Ben Flerchinger from Lucky Lab to brew a beer for Lucky Lab. One of the styles considered was a Kolsch. I imagined something light, aromatic, fruity and tart. Just right for summer. While we developed the recipe for the brewery, I worked out a scaled down version. We are also planning on taking a bit from the main batch and making a fruit beer for the competition as well.

Well this beer is not a traditional Kolsch, more like a kolsch-inspired beer. I've chosen my fruit and I'm hoping it will complement the style. I resist the urge to tamper too much with the recipe and avoid adding to many extras to the secondary because I think I need a more layered flavor. I can always make it again and try something different.

Though I've been brewing I haven't been blogging.

2011-04-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

I'd like to see that change in the upcoming weeks but I think that will depend on whether or not I find a job and can cultivate a bit more stability in my life. While I'm figuring out whether or not the goal I'd been working toward for the last eight years is one I really want or if it's time to focus on my passion I thought I'd post a few of my better recipes.

This is by far my favorite beer. I made this one for Coalition Brewery's Coalator Program. Not too hoppy, color was spot on with a rosy red hue. The only critique given was about the carbonation level, which I agree does effect how the flavors sit on the tongue.

People's Amber

14# Pale malt (2 row)
2# crystal 60
2# crystal 75
1# flaked wheat

1/2 tsp gypsum

1.82oz Centennial (10.5% aa) @60
1.25oz Mt. Hood (5.9% aa) @30
1oz Willamette (5.2% aa) @ 10

wyeast 1332

OG range 1.052-1.054

I had a lot of leftover grains and I wanted to use them before they got old. I kind of threw together this one and used some dry yeast I had sitting around. I was really pleased with how well this beer turned out. I'll probably make something similar for the Collaborator competition, but using all grains instead of extract.

Pant(r)y Sweeper

3.5oz CaraAroma
3.5oz Belgium Debittered Black
2oz Extra Dark Crystal
4oz flaked wheat
14.6oz Light DME
4# LME
1.6oz Malto dextrin

.5oz Centennial (10.6%aa) @fwh
1oz Cascade (6.1% aa) @ 60
.6 oz cascade @30
.4oz cascade @10

safale us-05

OG 1.061

Zwickelmania. Finally some down time.

2011-03-01T09:32:00.000-08:00

February 19th marked my attendance at my first ever Zwickelmania. For folks who don't know what that is, in a nutshell it's the most important beer holiday in February. When all breweries are open and giving tours and tastings of their wares in all the land. It's pretty amazing actually. Here in Portland, where if you throw a rock you'll hit a brewery/brewpub/homebrewer there is no shortage of places to visit. The hardest decision my fellow homebrewer Joe and I had to make was where we wanted to go and whether or not we could hit over 5 breweries in one day if we weren't driving. We meticulously mapped out our route and come 1030am on Saturday we were in front of Breakside, patiently waiting for them to let us in and dazzle us with their creations.

I have to say that my initial visit to Breakside in January wasn't great. I wasn't terribly impressed with their selections and I thought that their concoctions were a little to out there and at times seemed like they hit you over the head with the flavors rather than take the subtle route. I was more interested in their 3 barrel system more than their beer, but at Zwickelmania they blew me away with their imperial brown poured through a randall filled with cherries and vanilla beans. They also had a gruit on tap that I made me want to go right out and try making that for some summer drinking.

Next up Joe and I took the bus to Upright and got there before the crowd hit the place. I tasted everything but the rye beer and the IPA, since I am still in the no hoppy beers part of the year and I just dislike rye. My favorite was the Saison. I could drink that everyday and still find something to love about it.

The rest of the day was pretty much a blur sadly. I don't think I had eaten enough to counter the serious amount of alcohol that I was imbibing. I know we went Widmer, Green Dragon, Beer Mongers and for some reason the Jolly Roger.

I can't wait for next year.

PCTBB

2011-02-06T21:36:00.000-08:00

Finally, got around to brewing my entry for the Cheers to Belgium Beers in April. At the dart toss, I got low and light and having never brewed a Belgium before I am a little nervous. Joe offered up his Biere de Garde recipe for me but in my stubborness I decided to go it alone and brew my own recipe.

It is styled as a Belgium Pale and I hope with the fruit and spice addition in the secondary it will end up pretty tasty. Today was also the first time I had a chance to brew with my new kettle. My efficiency was off, a lot lower than I would like. I ended up with an efficiency of 69% but I was shooting for 75%. I manage to have exactly the right amount of water for the mash and the sparge, so no wasting water this time.

I did have Joe helping me today. Thankfully, he takes direction well and curbed his numerous urges to offer "suggestions" when I was brewing. I duct taped the airlock on the carboy and I'm hoping that helps it not blow out when it takes off fermenting.

I was tweet-worthy

2011-01-12T13:34:00.000-08:00

@Beervana Jeff Alworth
Just had a righteous amber ale @CoalitionBrewin for their Coalator project. Mashinda Hedgmon was the homebrewer, & it was a perfect session.
7 Jan via web

Jeff Alworth of Beervana tweeted about my beer on Friday. How freakin' cool is that!

I have to say that the moment it was all over on Friday my mind immediately moved to new recipes, upgrading brewing stuff, and working on that chapter of my dissertation on women of color pedagogy. I really need to get that finished and off my back, then I'll feel better about writing that business plan and doing more research on People's Brewing. I've been thinking about writing a grant to see if I can get someone to pay me to do research on them. Unfortunately, I really need to finish up all these other projects before I jump into something new.

The elderberry IPA is coming along nicely. I do like the fact that the closet in the apartment stays really cool, mid 60s, and all my fermentations are taking longer but I think the results will be a better beer. I'm only slightly pressed for time on this one, but I think what I envisioned it to be will be right on. It'll spend a little time on oak and elderberries, before force carbonating. The aroma of elderberries was really prominent in the boil and when I changed to airlock from blow-off. Another 6 days in primary, I hope.

People's Amber Debut

2011-01-11T11:53:00.000-08:00

I'm breathing easier today.

My beer was released on Friday, January 7 at Coalition. I was over the moon thrilled with the number of people who came out to try it and it made my heart swell to see that many brought friends with them. When I walked in Ben, the bartender, leaned over the bar to tell me that he had already sold 2 of my beers. The couple at the end of the bar specifically asked for my Amber. I later met them and it turns out they'd seen the announcement that my friend Joe had posted on the Oregon Brew Crew listserve.

I am happy to say that I didn't have to kill the kegs myself, an endeavor which would most certainly have sent my ass to the hospital and being uninsured that would have ended badly. I was blessed to have really supportive and thirsty friends who came out and ordered not only 1 pint but in many cases pitcher after pitcher of my beer. I got the first announcement that we'd blown the first keg at around 6:40pm and to say that I was a little floored would be an understatement. I was hard pressed to not guzzle down my beer and order another, but I was bound and determined not to be drunk that night.

Best intentions. I forget what a little booze and a gush of adrenaline will do to me. Couple that with no solid food in my stomach and I was doomed before I even made it halfway through my first pint. I'm going to go on record and say that I don't even think anyone noticed how drunk I was, and that is a testament to my ability to hold my alcohol and my father's genes. I'd like to think he would have been proud of me, considering he used to take me into bars with him when I was just a baby.

There's a slew of people I want to thank for making Peoples' Amber such a success. I know I won't get them all but my heart remembers you even if my head doesn't.

The women from my 30+ lesbian social group meetup, especially Trina, Kari, Diana, Laura, Nancy, Shi, Tana, Carmen, and the folks I didn't get a chance to meet.

My happy hour cronies, who have given me many happy hours, Sandra (special thanks for inviting your friend Jeff), Mark, Chris, Megan, Lysa, Levi, Sarah, Jen, Krishna, Will, and Elizabeth.

My mom, my sister Qiana, and my good friends Doneena and Sarah R., it was great to have my family there with me. My mother tasted it and said it tastes like beer, well as long as my beer continues to taste like beer I'm going to be pleased about that.

Thank you Joe, my brewing buddy, for sending out an announcement out to the Oregon Brew Crew listserve.

I wish I could say it was a night I'll never forget but honestly around 9:30pm I was so drunk, a lot of the evening became a haze. I do remember Holman's and a bus ride at midnight but after that it's a blur.

People's Amber and Other Coalition Goodies

2010-12-18T13:16:00.001-08:00

So Thursday I managed to drag my very tired and achy butt out of bed and hauled it up to Coalition to rack the Amber into secondary and clean out the carboys. We thought it might be ready to go on tap next week but they're only going to be open for two days, so we decided against it and instead will put it on the week after.

I was asked to make a batch of beer for an anniversary party in February and hopefully the law will have been changed by then, otherwise...I was thinking of making a belgium but that's kind of out of season, but I have it in my head that I really want to make something with elderberries and so I'm thinking I'll make an Elderberry IPA because I really want something purplish. I think I'll call this one Heart of Darkness.

So the bag of hops was one that Elan gave me as a thank you for coming in and racking and cleaning up after myself, which I thought was really nice of him. It's a 1# bag of Perle, and I think I'm going to use that one this spring to make some belgiums and give a bunch away because there is no way I'm going to go through a bag of Perle with just a few batches of beer.

The Pant(r)y Sweeper will be ready to rack onto oak this coming week and I'm planning on making something stronger this week to rack onto the yeast cake. Might as well try to get on a more regular brewing cycle. I'm really looking forward to getting a mash/lauter tun in a couple months so I can move to all grain, instead of these partial mashes.

People's Amber Update

2010-12-07T10:29:00.001-08:00

This morning promised to be productive and fun, though I'm pretty sure those will be two separate occasions.

I knew I needed to get up and head over to Coalition Brewery to check on my Peeps, the Amber, before I got the rest of my day started. Today is going to be busy with job searching and writing back at the house but for the few brief moments of peace I was going to enjoy checking my beer and updating my blog and revising a couple of recipes.

The photo on the left are the babies with fresh airlocks on them instead of blow-off tubes. The photo on the right is after I'd taken a hydrometer reading and was tasting my sample. After only 7 days we had dropped to about 1.030 from the initial 1.054. I attribute the slow ferment to the much cooler temp of the space and the much cooler temp of the initial wort. When I had made this at home, getting the temperature down to 78 was difficult enough and even mixing the wort with cool water still didn't drop the temp to as low as I would have liked. It would ferment in the laundry room at around 68 degrees but I think the initial getting the temp to that might have made a bigger difference. My beers tend to ferment in pretty warm spaces.

Tasting the sample is had more esters than I had tasted in previous samples. I could smell the fruity notes in this and figure this should fade as it settles and ages. The hop flavor at the moment is really understated, though it's noticable. Even less than the other batch I'd made.

People's Amber (AG)

14# American 2 row
2# Crystal 60L
2# Crystal 75L
1# Flaked Wheat
.30oz Centennial @ FWH
1.81oz Centennial @ 60
1.25 Mt. Hood @ 30
1oz Willamette @ 10

For water treatment we added 1 heaping teaspoon of gypsum in the mash. Strike water was heated to 165 and our mash ended up being around 154 degrees for one hour. I was shooting for the lower end of it anyway because if I remember correctly that brings out more maltier flavors. This particular recipe is hoppier than the previous batch I'd made and I'm happy to say that it's not terribly noticeable. I figure I'll take another reading in about 4 days and see where I'm at.

Forever and a Day

2010-12-01T09:30:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted since I was thinking of brewing that CDA, which I did and it turned out fantastic. I took it to Chris and Megan's Halloween Party where it was a huge success. That beer was the last beer I was going to brew until I moved into my new apartment. My new roomie and I had a checklist of things that our new place had to have and mine was that it had to have either a patio, basement, or garage. We have a patio.

So many things have happened since I last posted but the biggest one was hearing back from Elan of Coalition Brewing and setting up a day and time to brew a beer for their Coalator Program, where they invite a homebrewer to brew on their pilot system any beer they desire and then they serve it in their pub. Brewer gets to name it and everything. I applied sometime mid summer and heard from them in like late October and we'd set the date for November 29th. I had originally planned to do the CDA but settled on an Amber that I liked when I found out they have never had an Amber on tap and no one had made one.

This is the same Amber I'd made this spring, the AG one.

Brewing day was great! It went super smoothly, we were out of there in 4 hours not 5. I hit right in the range of my target gravity and the color was fantastic. I did a first wort hopping (Thank you, Chris Oslin for turning me on to that!). I totally fell in love with the Blichmann and want one or two of those bad boys. I also definitely need a cooler mashtun. Recipe was pretty simple and the plan is to ferment for 7-8 days then rack to a secondary and toss it into a cooler for a couple days and then carbonate and serve. I'm pairing this beer with something warm and tasty, my second favorite dessert, bread pudding with bourbon caramel sauce. I'm going to see if the chef can do a slightly hop infused bourbon for the sauce.

As for the naming of the beer I decided to call it Peoples' Amber, in honor of People's Brewing the first Black-owned brewery in the United States. It only lasted 2 years and considering it was from '70-'72 and in Wisconsin, I think that deserves a lot of credit. They had a lot to contend with, breaking into a very popular endeavor, which a strong, european and white american history, in a very racist time and place, and from every thing I have been able to get my hands on they did the best they could with the situation they were dealt.

As an African American woman homebrewer I can definitely see where there might be some issues, and I'm truly grateful to the great brewers I've encountered who after their initial shock, take me seriously. Though I will say it would be nice to see a few more faces of color at events and club meetings, there are certainly more than there were 10 years ago. That said I think there needs to be a hell of a lot more.

Here's to the successful brewing of People's Amber at Coalition Brewery. It should never be the color of a person's skin that is important but the quality of the beer.

Playing with recipe tools online.

2010-09-13T13:18:00.000-07:00

I think I like Promash better but Beertools works for when
I'm just messing around on the computer.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
CD 2.3
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

General
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
                  Category: Specialty Beer
               Subcategory: Specialty Beer
               Recipe Type: All Grain
                Batch Size: 5 gal.
             Volume Boiled: 6 gal.
           Mash Efficiency: 72 %
       Total Grain/Extract: 14.36 lbs.
                Total Hops: 2.75 oz.
     Calories (12 fl. oz.): 285.9
          

Ingredients
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
       5.99 lbs. Golden Promise Pale
       5.94 lbs. Pale Ale Malt
       0.34 lbs. 2-Row Chocolate Malt
       0.14 lbs. De-Bittered Black Malt (Mout Roost 1400)
       1.95 lbs. Caramel Malt 120L
       1 oz. Centennial boiled 60 minutes.
       0.75 oz. Simcoe boiled 45 minutes.
       0.5 oz. Cascade boiled 30 minutes.
       0.5 oz. Cascade boiled 10 minutes.
          Yeast: WYeast 1272 American Ale II

Notes: 4oz Oak chips in secondary for 2 weeks, No plans to dry hop.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

BW Beer in Secondary

2010-09-13T10:01:00.000-07:00

This morning I racked the BW into a the secondary. I kept putting if off because the krausen hadn't fallen away. It was like this burger of yeast, a layer on the top and bottom and the relatively clear beer in between. I figured a little time in secondary, then a crash cool, then bottled. I tasted it. It was still a little thin but it tasted light and refreshing and the hop flavor was pretty mild, which is a good thing for such a light beer.

Racking 3B to secondary

2010-09-07T11:49:00.000-07:00

Today the weather is making me feel tired and productive at the same time. I'm tired in body but my mind is working overtime. I woke up with the goal of getting some writing done. Writing in general not necessarily on my dissertation, but on a few different things like this blog post for example. The posting is important because Barnaby is out of the country and I'd at least like to keep him abreast of the Buckwheat happenings.

I let it go a little longer in primary than I had initially planned, mostly because what I'd read of buckwheat beer and dry yeast is that it tended to be slow to get going and slow to ferment. So a few extra days in primary isn't a bad thing. I'm going to move it to a 3 gallon carboy to do a bit more bulk aging and then then crash cool it and bottle.

I have forty five more minutes of writing to do today and then I'm going to head home and get some cleaning done and read and move some files to my little laptop from my external hard drive, wash out carboys and jugs and stoppers and airlocks and get them ready to fill with beer tomorrow after I come back from my two hours of writing at the library. I will get into a routine. I will finish what I started 7 years ago and I will get a beer brewed in the coming weeks.

I'm on the RADIO!!!

2010-09-05T09:38:00.000-07:00

So a few weeks ago while working a gig with extrasonly on the set for Leverage I met this guy. This sounds do "blah!" but what happened was that I had taken out my book Designing Great Beers and my knitting and then got up to go talk to the makeup artist to make sure I looked ok. I came back and this guy in the seat next to me asks if that book belonged to me. I said yes, and then he asked if I brewed, again I said yes. If you've spent any time talking to me, you know that I will talk for hours about beer.

Well it turns out he has a radio show on beer. It's an internet radio show and usually they interview folks in the profession but they've wanted to do a show with homebrewers. I believe it was fate, or at least good fortune. After a few weeks of getting our schedules to mesh we came up with a day. I bottled up some of the IPA and toddled on downtown.

I was really nervous and friends who've heard the show remark that I sound more reserve than they are used to but that I do sound like that in real life. I thought my voice sounded weird but that's just me.

I think 32 will be a lucky number for me, that's the episode for BrewHappy I'm in.

Colour on the Vine!

2010-09-02T12:08:00.000-07:00

I meant to put this picture up after I got back from the vineyard in Wilsonville but I completely forgot in my exhaustion. We'd spent two days covering all the plants with netting so the birds and deer can't get to them. Both early days but not terribly long days but all the bending and squatting (thank goodness for knee pads!) and a few moments of crawling really left me hurting. I think I came home and went to bed pretty early both days. This vineyard has color gathering, and the one in Alsea didn't. I wonder what that means for production overall?

3B recipe

2010-08-30T22:42:00.000-07:00

3.8# Malted Buckwheat
1.5# corn sugar
1# rice solids extract
1.5# Buckwheat honey
2oz Hallertaur @ 45
10z Willamette @ 10
1oz Styrian Goldings @ 30
.2 oz Amylase enzyme added to mash at 148 degrees for 1 hour.
Nottingham dry yeast

Mash in at 110, protein rest for 30 min, 1.5 gallons
Raised temp to 150 held temp between 140-149 with the added amylase for 1.5 hours.

OG 1.041/ 4 gallons

I ended up with a much lower gravity than expected and not a full 5 gallons, so we decided to not add more water and leave it at 4 gallons. I may decide to add more rice extract dissolved in a little water to see if i can get the yeast ferment further when I move it to the secondary.

Krausen!!!

2010-08-26T13:52:00.000-07:00

Well the panic has been thwarted! I was worried yesterday when I didn't see more activity. Apparently the little beasties have gotten over their shock of being moved from a small glass container or warm water to a gigantic container of food. I might have to do a bit of feeding this batch with some honey and water in a week. I'm going to be doing some reading up on adding body to gluten-free beers that are not lagers.

This little baby is sitting in the laundry room where it stays in the mid 60s. I think at the tail end of the fermentation I'm going to crash cool it in the fridge for a few days and try to get as much yeast to fall out as possible. I think I might also do a secondary aging for a few weeks to a month or so depending on how it tastes.

Cool down in record Time!

2010-08-24T17:49:00.001-07:00

This deserves its very own post. I did not check the weather before I started brewing today. Imagine how not happy I was to realize that we were going to be in the 90+ weather and I was going to have to cool the wort down to under 80 quickly.

I had that chiller prepped and running and sanitizer before I brought the pot out. I dunked it in and then ran in the house and started to rehydrate the dry yeast. I was desperately hoping that I could get it down to under 80 in like 20-25 minutes. I guess the brew goddess was with me today because I got it to 78 in like 20 minutes, which was better than I hoped for. I had to do this in the yard close to bushes because that is where the shade was at 3pm.

Brought it in the house and poured it into the carboy with the waiting 1.5 gallons of cold water. It seemed to take longer because I had to clear the funnel screen of all the irish moss that clogged it. Barnaby had come over to see how things were going and get a taste of the wort and he said it was a little thin. That's what we were afraid of...well that and a super low gravity. If necessary I can add some water and honey later to during the fermentation process but right now I'm not terribly concerned. We ended up with about 4 gallons of wort and a gravity of 1.041.

With this information I can tweak the next batch of buckwheat and not make it gluten free, but I think I'll look online and see if there are other ingredients we can add to it to build body. This would explain why GF free beers are lagers, they tend to the thin side in comparison to ales in my opinion.

The Mashout and the Boil

2010-08-24T17:33:00.001-07:00

Oh so heavy! I really need to think about rigging something to hold the grains suspended over the pot so I don't physically have to do it. My delts got quite the workout. On the right is the bag of BW in a strainer over a pot to drain. On the left is the wort on the verge of boiling. I decided to only do 45 minute boil because I wasn't looking to have a lot of hop flavor just enough. Not to mention that I was using really low Alpha hops, aroma hops to be specific. I'm sure there's a reason that you don't use aroma for bittering, besides the obvious.

This went relatively well, especially because this time I put the hops in a bag and not let them run willynilly all through the pot, like grade schoolers. I was always a firm believer that children should be confined, and now I think the same should go for leaf hops. Once I got the boil going on I could do the extract additions whenever I wanted, except for the honey I added that at the 10 minute mark.

The Mash

2010-08-24T12:39:00.000-07:00

Ok so now we've moved into the official letting it sit for 45 minutes until conversion. I added the enzymes and soon will be heating up the sparge water and then it's off to a boil and extract additions. This GF is done without any sorghum extract, which I believe is somewhat unusual.

Barnaby wants a low alcohol, lightly hopped, fairly dry beer. I'm hoping I can make that happen. I took a reading of the decoction and I had 0 brix. I had a 0 brix in the mash. Now I'm about 30 minutes into it after adding the amylase at under 150 degrees and I took a reading and I got a brix of 5. A significant jump which tells me that there is conversion happening. I don't expect the efficiency to be high on this at all.

The picture to the right is a sample I took. It would be awesome if the end resulting color was that but I think it might end up a little darker. To the right is the decoction. I think it went ok. It definitely raised my temperature and I was mashing at temps between 140-149 because I was adding amylase enzymes.

BW Brew Day!

2010-08-24T10:55:00.000-07:00

So today I woke up at 845am and knew in my bones that I just had to brew today. I've put it off and put it off for about a week. I know the reason. I haven't wanted to undertake a task as big as partial-mashing because not only am I PMing I'm also doing so with BW, an ingredient I have never worked with. My notorious procrastination tool is to read, read, read about a subject in the hopes of circumventing any problems that come my way.

As you can see I'm using that nifty partial mash technique I found on HBT where I mash in the pot on the stove and use the mesh bag to teabag the grains (though technically BW isn't a grain it's a fruit).

My various pots on the stove. The really large one in the back is the brew kettle but I'm mashing in this smaller one. I'm really hoping I get some fermentable sugars from the BW and not just a nice dark color.

BW didn't take as long as I expected

2010-08-17T12:42:00.000-07:00

Other than it being 90 degrees outside the roasting didn't take as long as I thought, only close to 4 hours total. I didn't need to have them in as long as I expected. I'm not sure if that is because they were wet or because the oven was a convection oven.

To the right is cooked BW and the left is the raw laid out on a cookie sheet. Cooked it tasted nutty, and reminded me a little of caramel malt. I toasted the second batch lighter than the first to hopefully give it some balance. The plan is too do a test batch of 5 gallons this week.

2010-08-16T12:18:00.000-07:00

This is after the first hour! I was really surprised at how brown they were getting in what I thought was amount of time. I took them out and moved them around to get the more cooked ones into the middle and the less cooked out towards the side. It looks like the top rack is less than stellar place to be in the oven so I put the more done looking tray on that one when I put the BW back in for it's next stage. I upped the temp to about 225 and set the timer for 30 minutes. It smells really nutty here in the kitchen. The pungent sprouty smell is almost gone and now it smells almost meaty and nutty in here. There's no way I could have just set these in the oven and walked away until the timer went off. I believe there will be a small window between well roasted and done and completely fucked. I'm hoping to not sail through the window headfirst and fall screaming to my death.

So my friend comes by after walking the dog and walks in and the first words out of her mouth are, "God, that smells awful!" I kind of laughed. After the sprouty smell I think it smells fine. I'm tempted to taste a few when they come out.

During the course of this post I've made a temp adjustment to 250 and put the clock back to 30 minutes. It's roasting out nicely. Some are truly getting charred and toasty (the smaller ones) and others are in the mid range.

Sprouts are finding their way to the oven

2010-08-16T11:05:00.000-07:00

Today was a good morning to do the BW. It's cool outside so I can have the kitchen door open and
nice breeze is blowing in. The whole place smells like bean sprouts, it's going to get pretty cloying really quick I have a feeling.

Ok so back to the roasting. I decided not to do the roasting at the house I"m living in,even though it's only 2 doors away, because I didn't want to carry cookie sheets of sprouts, and I realized after I'd filled the fourth cookie sheet and hadn't even gotten the rest out of the bowl that this was going to be more involved than planned. It would be better to take up more space in the house I started the project in than try and move everything and realize what I need is back at the first place. So I had to make sure that my notes said where I was doing this, so that I didn't try to duplicate the process. Barnaby and Olga of Teutonic Wines have a convection oven so I'm hoping I can get at least 2 racks at a time done in there and cut down on needing to be at this all damn day. Thankfully, they're both out and about today so I'm not in anyone's way.

I read that you could roast BW wet or dry so that solved the problem of waiting to long to roast. I worried that the little sprouts would get too long and the BW would lose viability. It seems like they've doubled in length overnight. I was pleasantly surprised when I came in and saw them. this picture doesn't really do them justice, I just wanted to show them on the cookie sheets.

I preheated the oven to 300 degrees on regular bake for a half hour, per instructions from the owner of said tempermental oven, and then dropped the temp down to 200 and switched it to convection. There was room in the oven for three cookie sheets evenly spaced so I put them all in. I'll keep checking and if needed I can take one out and rearrange so there's more even heat distribution. It'll bake for 1 hour at 200 and then you bring up the temp 25 degrees at a time for 30 minute intervals until you reach the color you want.

I'm resisting the urge to check on it constantly since I know that drops the temperature and causes longer cooking time. There's still at least another 2.5# to roast today.

Success!

2010-08-15T10:21:00.000-07:00

It was touch and go for awhile but I woke to this. The buckwheat, from here on out to be known as BW, had started sprouting little rootlets. Not all, but a good many. I'm planning on talking with a friend who is food science teacher about the process, including what kinds of container would be best so I don't weigh down the seeds.

The next time I do this I'm going to do less than the four pounds I initially dumped into a bowl and I don't have to let them soak for 2 days. Maybe a few hours and then put them in a colander. The rinsing is the key I think because these babies get really slimy and seem to be constantly oozing starch. We've had weather here in Portland that has been over 95 degrees and I was a little concerned that it was a little too hot but the kitchen is pretty comfortable. I had initially put them in Barnaby's wine work area but changed my mind and brought them up because I was worried about mold and bacteria and what those would do to the BW. I'm really sensitive to mold and I always get stuffy and sneezy when I spend to much time in their basement. Besides I was being over-protective as usual and wanted the BW where I could keep a constant eye on it.

The next step is drying and roasting the BW.

Fresh Buckwheat Hell

2010-08-14T21:47:00.000-07:00

Buckwheat is a pain in the ass. Right up there with pellet hops.

I had to separate the buckwheat into two colanders because we'd just put too much into the first pan. Those little suckers swelled like fat ticks and now I have two aired containers oozing gelatinous goo. They better spout or I'm going to be really disappointed...and then pissed, moving straight into frustrated anger. I do have a plan for what to do with the remaining 4# in case this attempt is a bust.

I would have taken pictures of the process but I would need someone to hold up the colander so I could get a picture of the greyish goo dripping from the container. I'll have to wake up through the night and check to make sure goo doesn't over flow all over the table.

2010-08-14T14:42:00.000-07:00

From Food Matters

How to Sprout Buckwheat: Place 1 1/2 Cups of buckwheat groats into a bowl and cover it with 2- 3 times as much room temperature water. Mix the seeds up so that none are floating on the top. Allow the seeds to soak for about an hour. Drain the water in a colander and let them stand, rinsing 3 times per day with cool water for 2 days. You will notice a gooey substance on the buckwheat, which is starch. Make sure that you wash this off thoroughly. Spouts will form after a day or two.

So because this was my first effort every little thing appears to be the tip of the failure iceberg. After soaking and rinsing the buckwheat in water for two days my friend Barnaby, whose house we're doing all this in, calls me this morning and says it's possible that the buckwheat was already processed and not going to sprout. Both of us were thinking that it was a good thing we picked up amylase enzyme to put in the mash. Before I totally threw in the towel I searched online and found this food website which gave clearer directions than any of the entries written by the brewers that malted. I have to remind myself to write a better entry when I post my recipe.

Nature at its finest

2010-08-07T11:07:00.000-07:00

These are chardonney grapes (I think) from Barnaby's backyard vineyard. I took this picture and many more pictures a few weeks ago when I dog-sat for Sophie and Sabrina. I had just visited a couple of days ago and it was amazing how much growth there was in the span of a couple of days. I can't imagine what it will look like when I head over later today.

Today's weather was a nice reminder of the Portland that I love and missed. The cool, overcast and grey days that seem to stretch on for weeks. The days of endless sun just seem to make me pissy and introverted. Of course, it could be the lack of any brewing happening in my life that is making me pretty unhappy. The lack of space to work and money to get some last minute equipment is disheartening. I know it's important to prioritize and basic necessities always trump everything else, but it's really starting to wear on me.

My plan for today is to walk over to the library and drop of some books. Walk around the neighborhood and take some pictures and come back to the house and do a little writing this afternoon, then head over to the neighbors house to socialize.

Writing a resume and looking at 7bbl brewing systems

2010-08-02T11:50:00.000-07:00

I feel torn about my life goals (note the plural).

On the one hand I'm determined to finish my dissertation whether or not I really want to continue on as a traditional academic or not. I just feel if I'm in for a penny I might as well be in for the nearly 90, 000, as it currently stands. Don't get me wrong I love teaching, I even like my students for the most part, and I find teaching does in some ways feed parts of my soul...the parts that demand a high fiber, low caloric and no processed sugars diet. Beer and wine making on the other hand are definitely my fats, carbs, juicy fruits and roasted veggies diet. I believe I need both in order to survive and be happy but both in moderation and a few at excess at least twice a month.

So currently I'm sitting at Fuel Cafe writing out a resume to take to the job fair tomorrow morning. I'm also waiting for my friend Levi to have coffee and give him the cabbage I have so he can make Kimchi. Let me first say that the day started out a little sketchy withthe clouds and the coolness and I initially dressed for warm weather but almost changed at the last minute. Glad I maintained my faith that the sun would come out TODAY. I think a hoodie and jeans would have been absolutely miserable for me.

Fire Dancers, Hot Cake House, and Peach Jalapeno Wine

2010-07-17T19:06:00.000-07:00

I am sometimes at a loss for words to explain the way that crafting beer and wine make me feel. It's not just a hobby, it's a calling, in the sense that we all have something which turns the light on in there heads and hearts through which we channel feelings and thoughts. If nothing else I've learned that ignoring the demands of tending to my beer has often had detrimental effects on my state of mind. I can always depend on having a clear head after I've worked with my wines or worked on some beer recipe I want to try. When I lived in Minneapolis my kitchen was a closeted rainbow factory, with all my beer and wines in cupboards or under blankets. When I brought them out on bright days the sun shining on them made my kitchen light up and spirit even more so. I think that's what so heartbreaking about not really having a place to live that's my own space is that I feel like my happiness is confined to a dark cupboard but with no chance to come out and shine. It's hard to remain cheerful and even harder to be motivated to create.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I dream. I dreamed last night about a wine made of peaches and jalapenos. I know from experience that if I didn't write it out and try to figure the proportions I would continue to dream about it in some way or another this wine would haunt even my waking hours.

It began with Beer and Boobies night with friends with whom I usually do happy hours with on Fridays. I posted that I was looking for a ride to the festivities and the person who would usually let me tag along with them couldn't, so I had originally planned to just go to the one stripclub and head home after. Then I got an email from a friend that he was going because he didn't have to work and he would be willing to drive and even pick me up.

So the first place we met up at was our standby Union Jacks but it was really slow, even the dancers looked a little bored. After an hour we left and went to Devil's Point because rumor had it there was a fire dancer there...and there was. She was no joke, really impressive.

There is a point to this story, the wine comes in soon I promise.

So at around 11:00pm there was only 3 of us. Well chris called it a night and left but to be honest I was having such a good time talking with my driving buddy that we decided to not call it a night. Instead we went for breakfast at the Hot Cake House on Powell. We must have talked non-stop for over and hour about lots of weird things about the world and ourselves. Well it turns out he doesn't really drink a lot and doesn't really like beer. I know I should have just walked away from such blasphemy but I was seriously intrigued by the notion of not liking beer. He was quick to point out that he liked Framboise, which is a beer. He's a fan of Mike's hard lemonades. He mentioned that he liked the peach margarita, which I do as well and I mentioned that I had once made a jalepeno wine.

I got home around 1:30am and fell asleep a couple hours later. I dreamt about peaches and jalapenos last night and woke up thinking about them. I spent a couple hours looking through my wine forum to get insights on making wines from peppers and fruit together. I imagine something light and a little on the sweet side with a bit of jalapeno undertone and spiciness. I don't want the heat so much, though if it was a darker wine and had the right balance of sweet and tart that might carry the heat a little better than a light wine.

Anyway to make a long story a little longer I mapped out a tentative peach jalapeno recipe and think I'll get started on that sometime this fall.

Summer Gose Way Too Fast

2010-07-12T15:05:00.000-07:00

Monday in mid-July has snuck up on me and I haven't even tasted a 1/4 of the beers I've wanted too. Sadly, during the hottest days of the summer I've experienced here in the last few years I was not drinking beer, mostly water to stay hydrated. Today the weather is overcast with decent unexpected sun breaks to remind us that it is still summer, but a whole lot cooler than last week.

I'm sitting in my favorite pub and in keeping with my usual luck the first beer I toss out to my favorite server, is out. She just hadn't had a chance to cross it off the beer list, the Ninkasi Radiant which is their summer ale. I've never been disappointed with Ninkasi and their Total Domination IPA is a crowd-pleasing standby I like to keep around the house. So no, Ninkasi for me today. Instead I pick the Cascade Gose. I needed a brief reminder on the description of the beer style. My mind remembered it was a wheat beer but the odd flavor characteristics I wasn't sure of. What stands out is the salty aftertaste. At first I thought it was just a bad food choice, because of my bad habit of choosing foods that don't sit well with the beers I am drinking. Today's choices were mac and cheese and plain chicken wings. I'm in a bland mood today.

I wanted salt in my mac and cheese not my beer but after a few sips of beer and bites of pasta I'm enjoying the beer more. The Gose is a beautiful golden color, cloudy (it's a wheat beer after all) with hardly any head, though there are constant streams of bubbles I can see. I can taste the sharpness of the coriander in the back of my mouth, and the saltiness is a little over powering. If I was eating some thing that didn't actually need salt, I don't think I would like this beer, but because most of the food I'm eating is in desperate need of salt I'm ok with this. This beer actually makes the cheese taste creamier. It's not a favorite. I think I would need to be considerably more desperate from the heat and activity on a summer's day to order this again. I can see it's appeal as a refreshing beer and one that many would find tasty. Just not me and not today.

It's off my beer bucket list so I feel proud of myself with that one. Nice spur to get me thinking about my next brew day though. The plan is to make the braggot this month and the brown ale next month and somewhere in there get a couple gallons of apfelwein made and maybe one made from a seasonal fruit.

Taste of Bliss

2010-07-09T15:36:00.000-07:00

I have to pat myself on the back for this one. I finally got the beer cooled down enough to pour a glass. The last few days have been super hot and I have to admit I was hoping that the beer would be slightly less than stellar so I wouldn't have to share it. Unfortunately, this beer was as much a winner as the first one, so I guess I'll have to give it up.

The high points of this beer is the how the hop favor comes through. Initial taste has some hoppiness but the overall sweetness of the malt and caramel taste are really more forward. Midway through is when the hops come in and it's definitely a "WOW" I can taste them. What I like about this is that the hop flavor lingers long after you've swallowed and it's not the bitter aftertaste though there is quite a lot of bitterness. Aroma is the other aspect of this beer that I like. The aroma lasts throughout most of the drinking and becomes more fragrant as the beer gets warmer. Flaws for this beer is that it's really cloudy w lots of yeast in suspension. I'm hoping that as it ages it will clear up, because that is what happened with the amber. I think there's more flaws but I don't know what they are. I'll have to have someone with more experience tasting beers give me their opinion.

My recipe for braggot is on hold until next month but I like the recipe I have for it.

With everything going on in this world: The execution of an unarmed black man and the officer getting off with a measly manslaughter charge in LA. It seems silly to be focused on beer, but honestly, the other doesn't surprise me. The unfairness and cruelty acted on people of color by whites in power doesn't surprise me. That's just another day in the life. But something I can effect, my beer, well that keeps me sane.

Wedded Bliss 2010 IPA

2010-07-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

I just popped the IPA that I had carbonating for two weeks into the fridge to get cold. I did a quick test to see how it would pour and it had a nice bit of foam which makes me think that I was successful in carbonating it the old-fashioned way. I need a new hose faucet, especially when I have more than one keg that's filled. Soon I'll have two kegs occupied.

I think I'm going to try using kegs for long term storage instead of carboy secondaries. They block out light, I fill it with CO2 to push out the air and fill it and then top it off with CO2 and that keeps it from oxidizing. They don't break. They're smaller and easier to store. All of these are good reasons for using kegs for my long term beer and braggot storage and aging.

I'm expecting my new burner in the next couple of days, so I can start the braggot when the weather cools down. At least I'll have that going and in a keg and out of my way until the fall. I do want another beer on tap for drinking after this Amber that's in the keg is gone. The keg is feeling pretty light, so it should be soon.

Suddenly everything just spiraled out of control

2010-07-08T09:46:00.000-07:00

The last two weeks have been filled with activities and news. I'll briefly mention the big one hitting the homebrewing community of Oregon and that is the reinterpretation of the ORS 471.403, which states:

"No person shall brew, ferment, distill, blend or rectify any alcoholic liquor unless licensed so to do by the Oregon Liquor Control Commission. However, the Liquor Control Act does not apply to the making or keeping of naturally fermented wines and fruit juices or beer in the home, for home consumption and not for sale.”

This has ultimately meant that the homebrew and wine-making competitions have been cancelled because OLCC has interpreted that judges are considered "public" and removing alcohol from the home is illegal. Needless to say this has caused a flurry of worried emails, calls for civil disobedience, push to write our state representatives to put forward a new law to amend the current and, suggestions for circumventing the current law until a solution is reached. In the meantime brew clubs have said that members cannot bring their homebrew to meetings. All competitions have been canceled for the foreseeable future.

Personally, I think that this whole thing came down because someone kept asking the OLCC what if questions until finally the OLCC had to come down with a definitive answer, after 30 years. Just me speculating, not substantiated in any way. What has been really funny is reading the string of emails from the two camps: the let's make change in a way that works with the system, write your rep, be proactive in working with our government; and the camp that tosses out ideas to hold underground competitions, who to complain or blame, devising ways to have judging that involves way more effort than is reasonable to expect of anyone.

I'm hopeful that the next year will resolve this in time for me to be able to submit to competitions next year.

Racking the IPA to the keg

2010-06-24T14:01:00.001-07:00

I'm right on schedule. I'm racking the IPA off of the oak and into the keg. The environment is not ideal, but hopefully for this it shouldn't take too much time and the risk of beer coming into contact will be minimal. Currently I'm waiting for my priming sugar to cool down enough to add to the keg.

3pm- I just finished racking the beer into the keg with the priming sugar. I took a final reading and came out to a FG of around 1.009 which gives me a final ABV of around 6%.

I gave it a little taste and smell and I have to say that I am impressed. It has a noticable hop aroma even uncarbed. I could taste the hoppiness. I believe I might be totally in love with this beer. We'll see how it tastes in a few weeks.

WIPA update

2010-06-20T15:21:00.000-07:00

This is WIPA with the blow-off attached a few days ago before I racked into a secondary onto oak chips for a week. I'll be racking it into a keg to carbonate with priming sugar on Thursday. It should give me a good two weeks of carbonation time and ready just in time for the reception. I'm only oaking the IPA for a week instead of the longer time suggested because I wasn't sure what kind of flavor it would give. I'm going to bottle a few for aging a couple months.

Dead Bunny Braggot revisted

2010-06-11T10:17:00.001-07:00

This was my very first attempt at a braggot. What could go wrong did. Mostly in part to my lack of brewing experience and knowing that hop utilization was dependent on heat. That mess there was when I put the hops in with the wort and the yeast and hoped for the best. This was a batch that fermented out at 10% abv and then I added champagne yeast to see about getting the abv up just a little higher, because better judgement seems to fly out the window when experimentation with alcoholic beverage comes into play. I managed to get 18 bottles out of the 2 gallons. I also learned a very important lesson about priming sugar...boil it. For some reason that little bit of information slipped my mind. Do you know what happens when you just dump priming sugar into a bottling bucket, add braggot, then bottle.

Nothing.

I never gave any of these away because after a month I opened a bottle and surprise surprise, no carbonation. I had a perfectly still braggot, which is no big deal because they can be still. It wasn't the stillness that was a problem, it was the fact that it had so much alcohol my mouth burned. Thankfully, there was enough residual sweetness to make that bearable. I drank the whole bottle and was pretty well feeling the same intoxication level I would feel had I drank 4 beers.

Why this trip down memory lane? Well I was flipping through my recipe book and thinking I would like to try this again with a little more experience under my belt.

My original recipe:

3.3# Wheat Malt
3# Honey
1oz Cascade
1tsp Acid Blend
2tsp yeast nutrient
London Ale yeast

This new recipe will be a little less aggressive on the wanting to have a high alcohol. I'm not even shooting for 6% I'll be happy to have a session level alcohol, with nice flavor and drinkability.

I'm thinking something like this:
4 lbs. Wheat Liquid
1 lbs. Oats Flaked
6 lbs. Honey
1 oz. Cascade (Whole, 5.50 %AA) boiled 60 minutes.
1 oz. Willamette (Whole, 5.00 %AA) boiled 30 minutes.
.5 oz. Willamette (Whole, 5.00 %AA) boiled 10 minutes.
2 tsp Yeast Nutrient (AKA Fermax) (not included in calculations)
Yeast: WYeast 1028 London Ale

The AA% is a general estimation from the recipe program I use. This one would be a 5 gallon batch. I'm posting my recipe on a homebrew site for some advice from more experienced mead makers.

Beer-Mom Moment

2010-06-10T16:51:00.000-07:00

So my widdle Wedding IPA is was tucked away in the back of the laundry room and at first I had a regular s-lock on it. I wasn't expecting it to burst into a really active fermentation but as the night wore on I realized there was only a few inches from the bottom of the neck of the carboy to the beer. My first batch was only about 4.5 gallons so there was more room for a krausen to form, but on this batch I was well over 5 gallons. I really need to invest in some 1 gallon jugs for overflow.

Wednesday evening was spent cleaning and pondering what I should do about the airlock system. Just as a precaution I rigged up some large tubing to a regular bubbler airlock and put it aside. My sleep was a series of regularly timed (every hour) bolts out of bed to check on the WIPA. Finally, around 2am I broke down and mixed up sanitizing solution and replaced the S-lock with this lovely contraption you see here. I know that if I hadn't I would have been looking at a huge mess and considering how closely packed the laundry room is, cleaning up sticky wort would have been an impossible task.

I've changed out the sanitizer because it starts to look gross and sadly I know that it is lost beer. I'm confident that it should ferment out in 7-9 days though I might let it go for a full 10. I plan on dry hopping it for 2 weeks and and oaking it for about a week. The recipe calls for oak, which completely blew me away. I didn't know that IPA's could be oaked. I had to decide on boiling the extra 1oz of Willamette I had in the fridge or dry hopping it. I went for dry hopping because I definitely wanted something that when it poured it would waft up and over your nose.

Brewing with Love

2010-06-09T15:05:00.000-07:00

Today was the day I brewed the IPA for my step-daughter's upcoming wedding. Though they cannot have alcohol at the actual wedding and reception because it is in a state park, they will be drinking it at the after the wedding party we plan on having at her mother's house. The original plan was to brew 3 beers but instead I'm only going to brew 2.

Brewing is not just about the mechanics of it all but about the connection between what is going on with us as people and how that effects what we cook. I am reminded of that saying that "something is made with love." The idea that what we are thinking and feeling infuses what we are making. Though I do not cook for pleasure, I do believe that my mood effects what I make when it comes to beer and wine. For example, after the break up of my last relationship I made a mead. I knew I wasn't going to be drinking it for at least a year...I named it Dissolution. I'm hoping that a year will be enough heal time so that by the time I do open it, it will not taste of the bitterness and pain that went into making it.

These latest beers were made with love and enthusiasm. I listen to happy music, I chat with my cat and there were a few moments in the kitchen where I busted a move or two. Even though I felt slightly apprehensive about how these batches would turn out I still went in with good feelings. The beer I started today is for the wedding of my ex-partner's daughter. I wanted to make them something that was unique but would be something they could share with everyone. I am also short on funds but long on spare time, so all of these factors make for a thoughtful and practical gift. Granted choosing a hoppier beer in no way is a reflection on my own personal feelings about marriage as an institution that reinscribes oppressive patriarchal patterns of dominance. I'm going to make a another batch which is more malty with subtle hop flavor and strong aroma.

But back to the love. I know that great globs of happy feelings were rolling about in the boil. I was listening to "Falling in Love at a Coffee shop" by Landon Pigg and I think the beer was definitely infused with that whimsy of love at first sight.

Mother's Little Helper Amber Ale

2010-06-08T09:08:00.000-07:00

Update: With a little over 4 finished gallons in a keg in the basement fridge I was worried that my beer only tasted good to me. You know that idea that ugly children are beautiful only to their mother kind of thing. So I'd hesitantly been giving out bottles of beer to friends to try and so far it's been a hit. I believe one person actually said they'd buy it. That made me feel really good about my first attempt at AG brewing. I took a good look at it last night and it has a really nice deep amber color to it. It wasn't as clear as I would have liked it to be. It doesn't have good head retention but that is probably due to my carbonation process. One person noted the distinct floral aroma after she'd poured it and that it was a nice balance of sweet and hoppy.

I'm going to be back to partial mash or extract brewing for a while until I can get my hands on better equipment. The next beer will be an IPA.

Monday in a Vinyard

2010-06-08T08:16:00.001-07:00

Right now, the weather is dreary, my eyes hurt like hell and my whole body feels sore. I'm sitting my classroom, waiting while my students take their final exams and wondering what I'm going to do with the rest of life. Originally the plan was to play World of Warcraft while they are taking the exam but I forgot that Tuesdays are generally the day when they upgradeso all the realms are down all morning. That put quite a crimp in my otherwise smooth plans for the morning.

The alternative is now to quietly write whatever comes to mind while my eyes burn under the flourescent lights. They burn for a good reason. Sunburn. Well that wasn't the good part of the reason. The good part is that they burned because I was outside all day helping my neighbor prune is vineyard. I'd never done anything like that before. Most of my experience winemaking as you know involved science experiments in 2 gallon buckets in my kitchen in Minneapolis or opening large kit wine containers for large batches. It never involved the actual grape itself, unless you count the time I used grapes from target to make wine that was barely tolerable.

Back to a lovely Monday spent toiling in a vineyard pulling vines. It was back-breaking work and not just because I am out of shape. I think the work would have made anyone hurt after a while. The wonderful part of the day was the shared conversations and listening to Barnaby talk about grapes. In the humid heat we discussed the what possibilities may lie in men's studies, not the assumption that it is reasserting men as the center but really looking at how society constructs masculinity from the perspective that it disadvantages them because the archetype of masculinity is one that is unattainable. We talked about how to raise or talk to the men in our lives in ways that bring them to an understanding of how they both collude and are harmed by the oppression that women face. It was day of light and weighty issues, the humming of bees provided a soundtrack that cannot be duplicated and honestly I don't think could ever be shared with others in way that the impact could be felt. I think the vines took it all in and who knows what they think of all of the mundane humanity they were privy too.

We started around 930am and finished around 630pm. By the time I got home my legs were cramping and my lower back was screaming for a hot shower and some chocolate cake. OK possibly only my stomach was screaming for cake, but the hot shower my whole body could agree on. Sleep didn't come easy for me, I was thinking about what I should be doing with y life and how it was all going to work itself out eventually but possibley not in the way I wanted it too because I wasn't working at anything just letting the world work around me. What did I want to do in this life before I leave it. What contributions can I make that leave a lasting mark. My teaching I suppose, even though it doesn't make me as happy as the hobbies in my life do. I pondered how I could link my loves together and still be able to do the things I need and want to do. If money were no object this would be a no-brainer, but it is and so I must use my brain to figure out a solution.

Barnaby and I tossed about ideas for building my beer label, getting my beer out to the masses but staying small and contained. I don't know the first thing about running a business or about financing an endeavor or about the kinds of equipment I would need to make large batches of beer. I guess I would be happy to be able to supply a few local bars with my beer on an as needed basis. All of these ideas and many more blanket his vineyard, like the pruned vines we left on the ground.

First All-Grain Batch

2010-05-10T10:38:00.001-07:00

Saturday I did my first batch of All-grain.

I woke excited at 6am, ready to face the long day. I had planned on starting to brew at noon, which turned out to bea good decision because while getting dressed I remembered that I didn't have any Irish Moss or a thermometer. Mind you I had just made a Steinbart's run on Friday, but I still forgot those 2 things. So after getting dressed I hopped on the bus and headed out to get them. The store didn't open until 9am which gave me plenty of time.

My plan was to start brewing at noon. I got everything setup and ready and was lighting the burning at 11:55am. Right on schedule. The setup was a little heavy but manageable I just had to arrange everything so that I wasn't doing a lot of unnecessary lifting and carrying. I had to plan how I was going to get the hot liquor to the brew kettle in a short amount of time.

My friend Allan came by to just as I was getting ready to mash in. I unfortunately didn't hit my strike temperature and i ended up mashing in at 150 instead of 155. It may not make that much of a difference but I'm not sure.

Excited!

2010-02-14T10:53:00.001-08:00

So not enthused about the whole Valentine's Day thing but love knowing that in 5 days I'll be racking the finished beer into bottles when our AG class meets again. I wish I had some of my own to share but I'm confident that soon I will able too.

My pictures are ready I just have to go and pick them up.

Monday After

2010-02-08T15:20:00.000-08:00

A long brewing weekend is over and I'm finally in a space to take the time to mull it over. I have done more in the 2 days with brewing than I have in 4 months. I miss my equipment. Now begins the search for cheap burners and fixtures for my keggle. I took plenty of pictures which hopefully will be up on the site by next weekend. I had to do it the old-fashioned way and use a disposable camera. I considered using my cell but sometimes the pictures come out smaller than I like, in order to see details of some equipment.

Currently, I am sitting at the Concordia Ale House drinking the Caldera Pilot Rock Porter by Caldera Brewing. It is the perfect first drink of the day for me. Some times it is a hit or miss, but this porter is not too heavy, has a good body and I don't have this urge to just keep drinking it, it's a good sipping beer. Goes good with the chili I'm eating.

Moving towards AG brewing

2010-01-21T14:54:00.000-08:00

Just registered for an All-Grain brewing class. I'm really excited about it. It made sense to check out what great minds are already out there doing instead of trying to muddle through it myself. I
had gone to the meeting for the Oregon Brew Crew on January 14th. I was astonished by the turn out. There had to have been at least 50 people there, maybe even more. It was a potluck, with the theme of comfort food and not prepared to do anything but shyly sit in a corner some place, I was too nervous to eat or drink the homebrew going around.

I know I must have looked like a deer in headlights and I appreciated the gesture made by this really nice guy named Craig who was the first person to come up and speak to me. If that was an indication of the level of friendliness I could expect I was off to a better start than anything I had witnessed in Minneapolis. People were cacrrying around cupware and bottles and everyone was urged to try a little of this, while the brewer would proudly regale you stories of its origins, the mishaps and triumphs as well as the ingredients. That is what I love most about this culture of homebrewing, every beer has a story and even if some sound similar you can always see the ways that their differences make them unique to the creator...kind of like kids...only waaaay better than children.

I met another first-timer, a chiropractor by the name of Ryan, who was wanting to get back into brewing. Not knowing anyone there we kin of glommed onto each other. I believe we shared more than just our experiences with beer, we ended up talking about his teaching and mine and why he moved out here and I moved back. I probably shared more with a stranger that night than I had with any other at any time. If I thought that among 50+ people I could disappear I was wrong.

They had a portion of the meeting where they take the sign-in sheet and asked that new members come on up to the front and introduce themselves. Yeah, not fun because I stand out enough, I don't need to be pointed out in a crowd. At the end of the meeting I was stopped by another man, whose son lived in Minneapolis.

Highlights: The first person to greet me was Julie, who it turns out handles volunteering for the spring beer and wine fest. She also does AG and likes to do as much of the work herself as she can even though she has problem with her hands. I was not the only person of color there, which was awesome. I was certainly not one of a handful of women either. Though of course men outnumbered the women, the number of women I did see was significant, out of 50 I'd say that there were at least 15 to 20 women. These are good signs for me.

Announcement

2010-01-21T14:52:00.000-08:00

I know it's a long way off but I figured if I didn't put it on my blog now and then delete it from my inbox it might get lost in the next few months.

April 2 & 3, 2010
Friday & Saturday from 12:00 noon till 11:00pm
$5.00 admission
Volunteers wanted

Oregon Convention Center
777 NE MLK Jr. Blvd.
Portland, Oregon

• Hop aboard the Tour de Cheese
• Mingle with artisan brewers, vintners, distillers & cheese makers
• Nibble on tasty gourmet delights
• Get schooled at the Chefs Stage - and eat your homework
• Groove to tunes from hot NW bands

While you're sipping on fine craft beer, wine, spirits and cocktails, do a little shopping! Our arts and craft vendors and exhibitors offer unique treasures and interesting items. Or chill out in the attached heated outdoor smoker's tent, a comfortable lounge area offering additional beer selections and a cigar vendor purveying fine tobacco items. And don't forget: Admission is free the first two hours each day.

The Spring Beer & Wine Fest may be about education, but school has never been this much fun!
http://www.springbeerfest.com

I moved!

2010-01-07T12:06:00.000-08:00

I hadn't realized the lull between posts had been months. Months of not brewing or wine making and I though I noticed it, I don't think it registered how much I miss the process of preparing a recipe, gathering my ingredients and actually doing the work.

I just moved back to Portland, Oregon in order to finish my dissertation and have the space to really brew more seriously. I'm going to be a little space challenged so I'm looking into using the basement space of a friend. Both he and his wife are big beer drinkers and he's pretty handy with the building of things so I figure between the three of us we have a good team of drinkers and makers.

The new computer

2009-08-17T00:27:00.000-07:00

The awesomeness of my new computer cannot be put into mere words. Yes, it's tiny, and I have a hard time relearning where all my fingers should go, but the space-saving properties and the mobility this baby will offer me just can't be denied. It's well worth the ten pages of writing I had to do just to earn it. A reward to myself.

A few updates on the beer and wine front. I didn't submit the braggot to the state fair, for the reason of consistency. OUt of 3 drank bottles, 2 were good the 3rd was a little iffy. They tasted fine and a lot like the Curmudgeon, except way darker in color and astringent in texture. It looks more like coke. I think I might just submit it to the Renaissance Faire instead. I have to bottle 1 batch of beer this week and another next week and start that partial mash sometime this week as well. I'm not sure how long the grains are going to hold up, but the scale arrived even if the 5 gallon pot didn't.

I had to start a dispute with paypal for non-delivery from brewsterbrown.com and I'm not pleased because not only am i out money I also don't have a pot to brew in. I'm hoping the notice from paypal will push this guy to contact me and let me know one way or another what is going on. I most likely will not buy from him again but I won't bad mouth him publicly either.

Monday! Beer day!

2009-08-10T10:57:00.001-07:00

I woke up this morning knowing that I was going to have to get up and head to Northern Brewer and pick up a new fermenter and some odds and ends. I kind of have to make the beer today because I left the yeast out Sunday morning and so had to smack it because it had already begun to swell. By this morning it was a huge tight ball of yeasty goodness and it needed to be put into something yummy.

I've got the AC cranked to avoid the really high humid temperatures we've been having. I have 2 beers going. One is the honey bee ale from midwest, which I'm keeping my fingers crossed will be ready in time for the wedding. At least if it isn't completely ready I have enough boxes to mail the beer to folks in the wedding party.

I put aside the spent grains from the steep in order to try my hand at making those dog biscuits that folks on the homebrew forum have posted. I don't have a dog but my neighbors do and it's not like I haven't already eaten some of the grains. I don't want to make something and feed it to a living creature without making sure that it is perfectly safe.

I forgot to post the MW Honey Bee Ale Recipe
here it is:

8oz Carapils
1oz Glacier @ 6% (60min)
1oz Argentinian Cascade (5min)
3.3# Gold Malt
3# Clover Honey
Wyeast #1056 American Ale

Gettng a jump on my day.

2009-08-06T07:49:00.000-07:00

I can't decide if I need to go to get a new fermenter bucket or just wait for the one I ordered to come in the mail. I'm running a little behind on the making of the Honey Bee Ale I planned for a friend's wedding on September 4. I planned on making this as gifts to give to her and her new husband and the wedding party. I don't want to hurry it but if I don't then no one will have anything to take home.

I have a lunch date this afternoon with my friend Brian, who really got me started on wine. Roundtrip to Northern Brewer in St. Paul by bus should take me about 1.5-2 hours which won't get me home in time to start any beer today before I have to do lunch then work my shifts at the fringe festival and then see a couple of shows tonight.

But if I go today and prepare to make the beer on friday morning then I'll still have a few hours until before I work again. Three weeks in primary and then bottle, no secondary should make it just in time to get it to the folks. Of course, they couldn't drink it for another 2 weeks, and considering everyone I don't think the beer will last.

Talk about fast service

2009-08-01T14:11:00.000-07:00

I ordered grains from NOrthern Brewer Thursday and boom I opened my door this afternoon as I was leaving and found a box sitting at the door. I hurriedly grabbed it and put the yeast in the fridge and checked the grains. I was on www.brewtools.com and was playing around with the recipe creator. I made one for a belgian ale that looked relatively easy and was partial mash recipe. I found an easy to follow tutorial for partial mash on a stovetop on the brew forum, called www.homebrewtalk.com and I'm looking forward to trying it out.

I am hoping to get to it some time this week, like Wednesday or Thursday. I've got to volunteer at the Fringe Festival in the afternoons, and I'm writing but that's all. I am hoping that the new brew kettle I ordered will be here by then, and then I think I'm done with buying equipment for a few months. What I have should see me through making two batches at a time for the next few months.

I definitely want to try as many easy recipes in as many styles as possible.

Belgian Ale

2.5# Belgian Pale
1# german 2-row Pils
1# Belgian Caramunich
3# Light LME
1.85 Alexanders wheat malt
1oz Styrian Goldings @ 60 (4.5% AA)
.5 oz East Kent Goldings @ 15
Wyeast 3944 Belgian Witbier

Yesterday

2009-07-31T05:05:00.001-07:00

I was at Pracna with my friends Mark and Dean, having a beer and a bloody mary. I was looking over the drink menu and saw there was a new Surly but when I asked for it they were out. Seems this one went fast. They had a new one on tap, a strong ale called Curmudgeon made by Founders. This bad boy came out in a beautiful snifter glass, dark amber color, with a beautiful head which was a very light shade of amber. I took a long whiff and was pleasantly assaulted by the sweet aroma. To be honest, it immediately brought to mind the braggot I had made and gave me hope that in a few months mine would also be a pleasure to drink. This is the first strong ale I've had in the Minneapolis area. I will definitely go back for it.

I couldn't resist

2009-07-29T17:45:00.001-07:00

I couldn't resist pressing down slightly on the top of the fermenter. When it really starts fermenting any pressure sends bubbles into the airlock and so I pressed and *bloop*bloop* there were bubbles coming up. It wasn't a lot but some shows me that fermentation has started, it's not strong but it is way faster than I expected. I was hoping that would be the case, that the yeast was still very much active.

I think rather than racking another brown on this yeast I'll wash it and store it. Maybe make something else with this strain. To be honest i wasn't sure if it was going to work. My greatest concern still is contamination. I tried to keep everything as clean and sanitized as possible. I kept the lid on the fermenter, with the airlock on while I prepped the new batch. I made sure to clean and sanitize all equipment that came into contact with the wort.

I guess I can only do so much and just hope for the best.

I have to remember to post this success on the forum.

Brown Ale recipe

2009-07-29T11:12:00.000-07:00

Brown Ale

6# Gold LME
2# DME
1# Crystal Malt 60L
1/2# Chocolate Malt
1oz Nugget pellet hops (12.5% AA) at 60
1oz Willamette leaf hops (4.5%AA) at 30
1oz Willamette lef hops (4.5% AA) at 15
3tsp yeast nutrient (hey couldn't hurt)

OG 1.056 or 058 ( had a hard time reading it), which was a little high for this particular recipe. The range I had was between 1.045-1.055.

Racked onto the yeast at around 72 degrees. Turns out the reason my water pressure was a little low and not as cold, was that my neighbors were watering the yard. I'll have to take that into consideration next time.

The yeast was Wyeast 1028.

Now I just have to wait and hope that this yeast will take. Dang, this is going to be a long 24 hours.

Brown Ale, my version.

2009-07-29T09:03:00.000-07:00

I started a new batch of brown ale using the yeast from the previous batch. I didn't use a kit instead I found a recipe, it's still an extract with grains but it uses DME. This was the first time I have used it and I can honestly say that adding DME to a hot wort is absolutely a pain in the ass. I tried the sifting method but the steam rising up from the boil made the powder condense into hard knots that clogged the sifter. I poured it in and spent lots of time breaking up the clumps I only used about 2# of DME instead of the 3# that I had originally planned because I just got too fed up. Experience teaches. I know that cold water doesn't cause the DME to clump up as bad so I think maybe I'll pre dissolve the DME in cool water and add it to the wort instead of trying to add it dry. I'll end up using less water in the initial boil.

I'm also going to add this to the yeast of the previous batch I just racked to the secondary. I read that this can be done. Now I'm just waiting for the wort to cool enough to pitch it into the fermenter, add a little nutrient and see what happens.

Passing the time at work

2009-07-14T08:46:00.000-07:00

One thing I've noted about myself and my hobbies, is that I am meticulous in outlining needs, costs, plans. For example, I spent a large chunk of my shift writing out recipes in my beer notebook, then taking post-its and pricing out from my Midwest catalog all the ingredients for each and every item. I also keep a running inventory list of equipment I own and what I need to buy, who I give bottles to and how many. Because I carry both my wine and my beer notebook with me I have taken to dating any changes I make and then cross-checking them with the other. I have a computer inventory of all of my wines, types, yeasts, fermentation and racking dates, and how many bottles each batch yields. I'm going to build a new spreadsheet for beer soon.

I don't keep this good of track for things that go into writing my dissertation. Obviously, I know where my priorities lay.

So I was cruising the internet and reading through various forum posts on the Midwest brew-wine forum, which is my second favorite forum, after winemakingtalk.com. I spent hours reading the online version of the magazine Brew Your Own. I wrote out a few extract recipes and played with the brew calculator and chatted to know one in particular about the greatness of learning to make beer and wine. No one being my co-workers who have gotten used to listening and asking questions periodically. It keeps them on my good side and guarantees that they continue to reap the benefits of my new hobby by getting free bottles of wine and eventually beer.

While making an inventory list for a brown ale I found on the Brew Your Own site, it occured to me that I should really consider upping my budget for the month from 50.00 to 75.00. I would love to have it at 100.00 but I don't make enough at my job and I really can't justify spending that much on a hobby right now. I might reconsider in the fall when I'm teaching again and have a little extra cash. I priced out how the brown ale not made from a kit would cost me around 30.00. That is not a bad deal. I guess when I get enough beer made the cost will even out because I'll be entertaining more at home instead of going out.

I wonder if I could exchange beer for meals by inviting my friends over for potluck?

The kit I just brewed was from Northern Brewer called Nut Brown Ale. Those are the pictures from various points during the preparation. I think next time I brew I'm going to have a friend come over and take pictures of me working so I can post them in a step-by-step blog post.

2009-07-12T20:42:00.001-07:00

Just moved fermenter to the bathtub while i'm at work...a precaution.

2009-07-12T08:42:00.000-07:00

After adding the hops and setting the timer for 60 minutes I settled down to do some cleaning up and preparing the fermenter. I chilled about 2 gallons of water in the fridge, because the sink was going to be a little busy with chilling the wort down and I didn't want to chill it, then risk bacteria while I was trying to fill the fermenter up with cold water.

This was the first chance to use the wort chiller I bought from BrewsterBrown. I wasn't sure how well it was going to work since it was pretty small diameter and didn't have a large number of coils. I have budget and I know i can't afford a bigger wortchiller. Plus, I didn't want to go all out to early in this hobby. After an hour, I plopped the pot into the sink, put the chiller in and hooked it up and turned it on. I could immediately feel warm water coming out of the hose. I set a sanitized thermometer in it and prepped the water, fermenter, airlock, and yeast while I was waiting. It cooled to under 100F in under 15 minutes.

I poured the wort in, making sure to splash , used a large spoon to stir it up, added more cold water and took a SG reading. Since I had sanitized the hydrometer I just twirled it and left it in the pail. I use the refractometer to my wines anyway. The reading was around 1.042 and the Brix was 10. I added the London Ale yeast and set it in the living room. Hopefully it won't have crazy fermentation but I might just prepare a blow-off tube just in case. Unfortunately, I leave for work at 10:30pm and if it's going to go nuts I'd rather it do it while I'm home and not while I'm at work.

This should sit for about a week then I rack it to the secondary until it clears or two weeks I think. Then bottle and wait 2 weeks. It should be just in time for the BBQ I'm wanting to have in late August.

NB continued

2009-07-12T08:27:00.000-07:00

Next I added the grains to the cool water and turned on the heat. They needed to steep for 15 minutes or until the water started to boil (or reach 170F) which ever came first. I set the timer for 15 minutes then started prepping the cold water for the fermenter and the gold malt that needed to go in to the pot after it started to boil. I put the malt in a pail and ran some hot water to soften it up. After 15 minutes I took the grains out and then let it boil. After it started boiling I removed it from the heat and added the malt and put it back on to boil before I add hops.

Nut Brown Ale

2009-07-12T08:15:00.001-07:00

I got off work this morning, came home to a big puffy bag of yeast. I pulled out the kit and read through the ingredients and instructions at least a dozen times. First I straightened up a bit and mixed up a sanitizing solution. I use StarSan. I sanitized the buckets and fermenter and washed out the pot.

I then crushed the grains and and put them into a mesh bag, tying the top up. I really need to get bigger ziploc bags, I had to crush the grains in two batches, so I could use the ziploc they cam in.

Everything is clearing up nicely.

2009-07-11T10:54:00.000-07:00

I checked on the wines I have going so far and did a little adding of KMeta to the muscat since I had forgotten to do that when I racked it a couple of days ago. The sack mead is looking mighty clear now. I was a little hesitant to use the bentonite and I think in the future it will not be my go to way of clearing but I really want to get this into bottles and down to the basement and out of my mind as soon as possible. It's about 4 months old at this point.

The muscat directly to the right is looking beautiful and clearer than I expected since I topped up with the leftover muscat that had added sugar to it. I still have even more left which is currently in an airlocked bottle I think I might have to rack this a fourth time in a couple of months. I'm not sure about bulk aging this in my kitchen over the winter. I would rather get it as clear as possible and bottle age it in the basement over the winter in preparation for my graduation next May.

The red is the 2nd attempt at grape wine and that cleared better than the first one.

I just need to get on the ball and get these bottled and labeled (at least working labels, not presentation labels) and stored away.

I see two kit wines in my future, a red and a white, for an event in October, so I guess i should take a look at the new Midwest catalog and start picking stuff out.

Today is also Brew Day! I'm planning on starting that Nut Brown Ale I smacked the yeast activator and hopefully I'll see some activity in a couple of hours and can get this started before I have to go to bed this afternoon. Otherwise I could do it in the morning after work and before I go to the Farmers Market.

What constitutes blog worthy

2009-07-10T23:02:00.000-07:00

I guess that I'm sitting on my porch at 1am with my laptop and drinking from a bottle of my own wine fits the criteria of what I put on a blog about wine-making. I just got home from a night of dancing and hanging out with friends. I walked in the house and didn't feel like going to bed or watching tv or sitting in the living room with my computer. The weather is so beautiful out and I'm not really tired or intoxicated and this seemed like the perfect wind-down activity. I opted not to grab a glass since there's only about a glass worth in the bottle, so I'm drinking straight from the bottle.

It's good wine and quiet night and my worries and people are left in a club somewhere.

These musings are in fact blogworthy because I took the time out of m very fast moving life and just stopped to drink the wine.

What I'm growing to hate about being the lone..

2009-07-09T18:09:00.000-07:00

Granted I am not as skilled as others who have jumped into the whole wine/beer brewing thing, but I'm not an idiot. I do my research and ask questions that make sense. I do not just buy random items and jerryrig a setup and then ask questions in forums and expect that I should get answers, having not done my homework. So I think I get to be a bit of a bitch when I think someone is being condescending towards me.

What brought on this little rant?

Braggots. Not well documented and pretty much not as widely made as beer or mead. So my decision to focus on making braggots with a definable beer styles and with discernable mead characteristics and not call it a 'honey' beer is not just pulled out of my ass. I read what I could find and what was out there on all available forums. I'm not a rocket scientist, but I'm not some guy who does this because his buddies or his grandpa did it. I grew up with good beer, I've had an interest in making beer, and I have the time to learn how to make it...right.

So treat me like I know generally what contributions alpha and beta acids make to beer. I may not completel understand the whys and the hows but I know enough to make educated guesses and to know how to best proceed, whether it be jumping in with a trial and error and just make the batch and see how it goes or asking more questions of individuals who I know have more knowledge than myself. I also am very much aware that it will be years before I will be anything other than an amatuer and honestly I'm fine with that. I mean I do have a career and beer and wine making in no way reflects my capabilities as an academic.

Course my knitting, well that's a different story.

Feels like forever

2009-07-08T01:08:00.000-07:00

Since I last posted, though it was only a week ago. My new job keeps me busy and exhausted and to be honest I've been too tired to try and tend to my wine more than I already do. Thankfully, it's a very hands-off kind of hobby and less is more is better.

Last week the Muscat had cleared up but I hadn't gotten around to racking it a third time. So today I decided to head over to Northern Brewer to pick up a faucet adapter. While there I bought a Nut Brown Ale kit and then kicked myself when I got home and realized that the yeast I had was the Belgium Abby not the London Ale I thought. So now I have to go back to Northern Brewer and get the right yeast in order to start the Ale. I hate making more than one trip in a week. I'm pretty sure that my kit would last a week if I get home and decide that I'm just too tired to go to St. Paul.

I racked the Muscat to a new 3gallon carboy and topped it off with what I had in the 1 gallon and managed to get an extra bottles-worth into a 750ml. Of course even as I write this I remember that I forgot to put some campden tablets into it. Oh well, I'll do that tomorrow. No worries I'm generally ok with as little sulphiting as possible. I'm down to a few bottles of the Pinot Blanc left. I have to remember to give some away to key folks. I suppose I should see how the rest of my 1 gallon batches are doing.

I had most awful scare this afternoon while racking. I needed a bottle for the leftover and so I went to the box of empties I keep for just such an occasion and I saw a green one upside down so I stuck my hand on it, placing my thumb in the depression and went to pull it out. I felt something soft and squishy and I FREAKED I dropped the bottle faster than greased spit and as it fell something dark fell out of the depression. I'm pretty sure it was a spider. It was HUGE. I kept checking my thumb to see if there were fang marks in it. I later picked it up with a damp paper towel (damp with sanitizing solution, just in case) and a leather mitten and threw it away. Spiders creep my shit out.

That said I look forward to a cool apartment and some beer-making maybe Thursday or Friday. I still have to move that Dead Bunny Braggot to the basement. I've been playing with ideas for another braggot made in a strong ale style using that Belgium Abby or in an American Barleywine Ale style. Both styles use the Abby yeast and since I don't know enough about them I figure I should follow the suggestion of yeast styles from Wyeast. I'm not seeing nearly as many braggot yeast recipes, which cements the idea that most people don't make them.

It's nearly been a week

2009-06-28T07:46:00.000-07:00

So much has been happening. Last week was crappy and I really only had one day off. I've been feeling run down have been having trouble going to sleep. Which has put my body in the 'preparing for illness mode' and I hate that. I tended to my wines last week, adding KMS tablets to all my 1 gallons. Better safe than sorry. After I clean the kitchen up a bit and put in the AC, I'll rack all the wines into new jugs. The muscat is clearing up nicely. I was worried about what the heat was doing to it but i managed to keep the temp to 74 in the house for a good chunk of the time. Once the AC is going I'll be able to maintain more constant temperature.

This week I opened up a bottle of the Pinot Blanc. Not bad. I moved it into the office (much cooler than the kitchen/dining area. I was a little concerned with the cranberry-raspberry because they stayed upright a day longer than I had wanted and I didn't have an empty bottle box so they are scattered under the cupboards in the kitchen until I can get labels made. Might to that tonight at work.

2009-06-23T23:10:00.000-07:00

Today I opened up a bottle of the first braggot I made. I know it's not really ready but I just couldn't wait the required two weeks for a first taste...I should have waited.

I was hopeful that the sweetness would mellow out the harshness of a highly alcoholic drink (this baby clocks in between 11-12% ABV) but that hope was short lived. Granted it does taste pretty good for being really, really young but after half a glass and the slightly woozy feeling that accompanied it, I know that it won't be ready for the fair. It'll definitely take at least a year to age out.

I will not be making anything with that much alcohol my next batch. I think something with an alcohol range between 6-8 would be good. I think anything higher I will have to make sure I have the room to store it for a year. This case will make it's way to the basement after I get home from work. I'll leave them inthe plastic containers until I'm sure there's no chance of exploding bottles.

My hopes for a showing at the fair have been dashed but that's ok because even from this early taste I can tell that in a year this will turn out wonderful.

No Mango but I did get the cranberry raspberry bottled

2009-06-20T12:22:00.000-07:00

I ended up doing many things I hadn't planned on today. The first was getting up to go to the backyard and pick mulberries. Of course, there were no ripe ones. Those damn squirrels eat them and knock others to the ground. I hate squirrels.

The second was I ended up bottling the cranberry-raspberry because after i racked the muscat into the secondary 3 gallon I couldn't find a bung to fit. I had a universal bung but that didn't work. It kept popping out. So I had to scrounge up bottles, and then open up my new box of bordeaux bottles (I was saving those for something special, or at least a kit wine and not a fruit one). I had to get those washed and sanitized. In the end, I had about 14 bottles. the leftover I tried and it was much better than I expected it to be. The wine conditioner really helped. It's not drinkable right now but in about 6 months I'll try a bottle. I really need to get an accurate inventory, decent shelving for my work area, and bottle rack. Everything is so cluttered in the kitchen. If I just got off my butt and cleared out the dark cubby in my office I could store everything in there. It's cooler and out of the way.

I decided against starting the mango melomel until I bought a faucet adapter and picked up a few more pounds of mangoes from the market tomorrow. I'm going to try and go when my friend Katie goes so I can buy more and get a ride home. She's also interested in going berry picking but not for raspberries but since I want to try a chocolate blueberry port we might go do that later in the summer.

So far everything I have are all in secondary or bottled. Nothing on the horizon except a mead for Danielle and Jason's Wedding, another Braggot, and a beer kit. I'm still trying to decide what that will be.

And the bonehead Award of the year...

2009-06-18T08:45:00.000-07:00

OK so even though I was pretty sure I was on top of my game, my current bottling experience has pretty much guaranteed that I will never miss a step like this one again.

I bottled the braggot. I got 18 bottles out of it. I added priming sugar...guess what i forgot to do with said priming sugar..oh yeah, boil it. That one HUGE important step...Dissolving said sugar in water...so I can pretty much kiss the chances of carbonation good-bye. Oh might get a little because it was still fermenting and had a 14 brix last time I checked but not beer worthy. I could have sworn my mind was in the game this morning. Did you know that priming sugar is non-fermentable when not dissolved in water first. Yeah, go figure.

I woke up. I ate breakfast. I even got a little work done. I did all this before I went into the kitchen and decided to bottle and stabilize my passion wine. Then I thought while I'm at it I should just stop doinking around and just do the braggot. I think I'm going to call it Dead Hoppy Foo Foo Braggot.

Mango Melomel

2009-06-17T01:39:00.001-07:00

I am not a big fan of mangoes.

I am a little obsessed about making wine.

I have a problem with buying over 5lbs of fruit from a store.

I do not drive.

These and a few others are reasons why making wine from fruit poses a bit of a problem for me. I know that it's cheaper to pick your own fruit, but by me not being able to drive, I'm kind of at the mercy of friends who may or may not want to get up at 8am and drive to a farm in rural minnesota to spend a few hours picking fruit that will see no immediate gratification.

That said I found a deal on what looks to be about 4 pounds of mangoes, which are now currently sitting on my counter waiting for me to chop em up and put them in a nylon bad and soak them in hot honey water. Ok, well maybe they aren't dreaming about that. I'm sure the idea of some woman approaching them with a large knife and slicing them into small bits, isn't the goal of every mango.

Why mangoes, if I don't particularly like them? Because they were a good deal and fruit is fruit and by the time the process of making them taste like sweet alcoholic goodness rolls around, they really don't taste like mangoes at all. I can live with that.

The other thing is that I have a hard time having empty primaries sitting around. Though my 6.5 gallon one is currently the home of my muscat, I have 3 one gallon primaries that are begging to be filled with something other than sanitizing solution.

Mango Mango Mango Melomel
4lbs of ripe mangoes
3lbs of honey
1tsp pectic enzyme
1.5 tsp acid blend
1 tsp yeast nutrient
1tsp yeast energizer
1/2 tsp tannin
Montrachet or CHampagne yeast
1 tsp pectic enzyme

I feel like once everything has cleared

2009-06-16T00:16:00.001-07:00

I can go ahead and start bottling that one grape wine and maybe think about stabilizing the passion tea wine and back sweetening it. I did add a little tannin. I'm torn between wanting to bulk age some of the wine and free up a jug or two for that 4 gallon of Muscat that's going. I've yet to have a finished bottle of wine (non kit wine) because everything is still in carboys or jugs waiting to hit their stages. The good thing about this is that I'll have plenty of wine come the fall and winter but really nothing but kit wines for this summer.

Considering, I don't know where I will be next year, it isn't a good idea to have a lot of wine just sitting around because then I'll have to move it when I move it.

No Port in a Storm

2009-06-14T12:10:00.000-07:00

Well I won't be making that elderberry into a port style wine. It didn't have enough umph from the get go to do well. I should have started out with a high brix of about 32 and I wasn't close to that. Then arrested the fermentation with the addition of brandy before it went to dry, to keep some residual sweetness. I know this now so I will try again as soon as I have a free carboy and jug.

Guess that will have to be a Christmas gift for the special folks in my life and not a birthday gift for Brian. I broke down and bought a that brew kit from Brewster Brown that guy who makes and sells immersion wortchillers. All of his stuff is really affordable, so I'll probably be buying from him more. I mean the wort chiller doesn't look nearly as professional and lightly coiled as the ones I see on Midwest or other sites but it's a hell of a lot less expensive and I'm more for the affordable right now. I'm doing this for fun and out of my own apartment, so it's not like I can invest lots of money and time into this.

What sucks most about this particular hobby of mine is that I feel like I'm the only black woman out there who makes wine and that can feel isolating. Of course I should be used to the feeling of isolation, I am one of a handful of black women in my Ph.D. program. Luckily, as a whole there are more women of color in my program. I went ahead and joined the MN HOmebrewers guild and will probably have to gear myself up to go to the meetings where I will most likely be the only person of color there. Yeah. I wish any of my other wines that weren't kits were ready to drink, so I could at least feel good about that accomplishment.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed on the braggot being bottle ready soon.

Eruption!

2009-06-14T10:41:00.000-07:00

So I was reading how bentonite can be used to clear mead on the Joy of Mead website. So I took out the sack mead I was working on and added 1/4 tsp of bentonite and stirred. All of a sudden it just erupted into a fizzing mess,barely contained by the kitchen sink. I barely had enough time to pick it up by the neck and move it. I only lost about an inch worth of space, but it did tell me one thing: Something is alive and still kicking in this mead. Hopefully, there's enough life that won't be stunted by the addition, and I can go ahead and prime/bottle ferment this next week. Who knows I might get more life out of this one than I expect to get out of the braggot. I'm going to have to try the ol flashlight through the jug to test how clear it is because it's hard to tell because it's so dark.

The muscat (pictured above) is fermenting nicely. I stirred it just a bit today and probably won't stir it again until I think it's almost done fermenting. A good week should be enough if the weather holds like it is.

I went to the farmers market this morning and picked up a box of large mangoes for like 6 bucks, there were like 8 in the box. I don't know if that's a good deal or not, but I think because mangoes are kind of expensive, it must be a good deal. Anyway, I have to swing by the store tomorrow morning and get some freezer bags and the mangoes aren't completely ripe, so I popped them in the fridge. I'll cut them up and add them to the bags and toss them in the freezer and next week when I go back t the market I'll pick up some more. I also found a place that had 12# of basswood honey for 35.00. I was all set to buy it but I was a little suspicious. I had just been to the vendor from Ames Farms, and they said they didn't have basswood yet and what they did have was from last year, and that 12# was going to be pretty expensive. Plus when I looked at the honey, it looked just like the picture from the Honey.com website. The honey from this other place had a kind of reddish hue not a milky white. I wasn't going to spend 35.00 on something I wasn't absolutely sure was basswood.

Today is suppose to be 85 and I think it might have already reached by the time I'd left work at 7am. Well at least when I wake up again tonight to go to work it'll a lot cooler. I debated on taking my pappa-san chair onto the porch, grabbing a trashy novel or one of my wine books, cracking open a beer, New Glarus' 'Organic Revolution' and just kicking back until 4pm when it's time to go to sleep. Instead, I'm in my office with the lights off, because it's damn cooler that way, looking up books for school, updating my wine notes and blog. Sounds like a productive afternoon for an aspiring academic.

2009-06-13T10:02:00.000-07:00

Today as an act of procrastination (and the fact that I have two computer screens) I wasted a bit of my morning going from the one screen that had my dissertation on it to the other screen which had open windows forFacebook, MyYahoo, and my wine forum. Thank goodness I'm good at multitaksing or this would not be a workable setup. Anyway....back to procrastination. I decided that I wasn't going to get anything done after reaching a wall. I have a three page goal for the day. They don't have to be quality but they do have to be 3 full pages of something written. I hopped off my pilates ball and trudged to the kitchen where I grabbed my 6.5 fermenter and started a cleaner and some sanitizer.

I grabbed the cans of Alexanders concentrates and thgouth maybe I'll try that fortified wine idea.

I did not know that a Muscat was not a red grape variety. It is a white. I played with the idea of trying to make a fortified white wine and promptly threw that idea out of the window...cause I just don't have the courage to screw up semi-expensive concentrates. At 3 gallons I had a brix of
25 but added more water to get it to 4 gallons and sugar to get a brix of about 21. So I"m looking at a wine with a potential alcohol of about 12%. Most of the wines I've made have all been around the 11-13% alcohol range.

Dissertation Libation
2-46oz cans Alexanders Muscat
4tsp bentonite
3tsp yeast nutrient
2tsp acid blend
Lalvin EC-1118
Water for 4 gallons
OG is 1.088/Brix 21

Pinot Blanc! Bottle!

2009-06-10T18:21:00.001-07:00

today we bottled the Pinot Blanc. I really shouldn't be trying to update my blog after I've been drinking. We bottled about 26 bottles...28 bottles worth because I had like 2 pony's filled (1.5 liters) as well as 24 regular wine bottles and one weirdly shaped 375ml bottle. We ended up with about a glass worth of wine left in the bucket after we were all done.

My friend aimee put the labels on the bottles. As you can see on the right, I had to resort using the clear bottles.

Currently, I'm sitting in my living room a little intoxicated because I started mixing the merlot wth the strawberry soda and find that it's really good. I've made it through half a bottle of wine on my own. I'm thinking about moving onto the pizza and ice cream. Who thought that this post would devolve into an intoxicated rambling.

We went to Midwest today and I picked up a few airlocks, some wyeast to make another braggot but I need more malt because I think I'll make a larger batch. I'm fine tuning the recipe in my head but I don't want to put it into play until after I bottle the cranberry-raspberry so I can have an extra carboy available to rack and bulk age. It looks like time is the only thing that helps meads and I'm afraid to start these amazing meads because I'm not sure what or where I will be in a year.

I have 12 pounds of clover honey waiting to be made into a nice sweet mead. I want to use a basswood honey for this braggot and a lighter malt but I think I'll wait until I get a big brew kettle and wortchiller.

Feeling a little antsy

2009-06-07T11:06:00.000-07:00

Wednesday I'm suppose to do some major bottling with my friend Aimee of the Pinot Blanc. I also need to get some supplies from Midwest, that are just too heavy to try to lug on a bus from NOrthern Brewer and which I don't want to pay shipping. So many things have reached the point where I can do a lot of stuff with them all in one day if I had another pair of hands. Luckily, my other friend Brian said he could spare a few hours to come over and bottle some of the smaller stuff.

The sack mead is finally fermented to dry but it hasn't cleared andI think I'm going to rack it again in hopes that will help with the clearing before I add any fining agents. I gave it a taste and it's not too sweet but it tastes highly alcoholic, which it is. So that bad boy will probably have to sit for a year, but I should be able to bottle it sooner than that.

The elderberry fermented to dry as well and I'm going to double check through some of my books and online whether or not it needs to age a couple months before I try to port it with brandy. I've been studying the Pearson's Square to make sure I understood it before I tried to test it out. I'll have to sorbate and metabisulphite it and backsweeten before adding the brandy.
I'm thinking of giving a bottle to a friend for his birthday since he holds homemade wine in such high regard. One other bottle was already claimed by friend Ilene before it had even finished in the primary. I'm keeping the last 2 for myself.

I might need to invest in small 375ml bottles for leftover wine that doesn't fill a full 750ml bottle and then I can give them away as gifts or take them some place and let folks try my wine but not feel like they have to drink a whole bottle.

Mental list: More wine books. Upgrade my kits to include stuff for wine (that'll be in my July budget since I can't afford it for June. Bottle Pinot Blanc, rack and let clear the sack mead and the elderberry. Make a batch of simple syrup. That sounds like enough for this week.

Steel CAge: 3 Yeasts Enter...1 is Victorious!

2009-06-03T16:07:00.000-07:00

This is the racked elderberr/pyment/grape concoction I threw together from the leftover wines, all with different yeasts. As you can see I have some serious fermentation going on here.

Once this settles down I will rack it again into something else and maybe add some oak chips to it. I figure with the way it's going I won't need to think about it for at least a week. I'm planning on a marathon bottling session with some friends next week as well. I want to get that cran-raspberry bottled and cellared for the summer before the weather starts to get too warm for extended periods of time.

I have a growing book list...I'm sure that I with the writing of my dissertation and the reading of new material I won't have time to read for pleasure about wine. That really does suck because I've had no luck with any responses about starting a home winemakers group here in the Twin Cities and I've posted on both Northern Brewer's site and the Midwest site.

I wish I had time to start going to the MN HOme brewer's meetings this summer but with all the work I have to get done I just can't justify the outside time. So it's kit wines for the summer and hopefully some cider when the apples are ripe and ready.

OH.

2009-05-31T10:22:00.001-07:00

So a couple of days ago I racked the Elderberry, the 2nd run pyment, and the grape part deux into gallon jugs and some aging. After doing this for all three I ended up with alot of extra wine and not enough airlocks to put the remaining into bottles for topping up later. So in a moment of madness I just dumped all the wines into a bucket...the pyment and the elderberry went in with the grape part deux. I popped a bit of sanitized towel into the hole and decided to see what happened.

I checked on the wine this morning and saw a layer of yeast on top. It was a yeast steel cage match and I'm not sure which one won. All of the wines had a different yeast: EC-1118, Montrachet, and Red Pastuer.

I'm planning on racking it into a carboy and taking the airlock on the braggot and capping the braggot with a solid cap until I move it or bottle it.

Elderberry is done fermenting

2009-05-25T08:19:00.000-07:00

DANG! That's FAST!

I posted the picture of the elderberry on Thursday and I had just pitched the yeast. I checked it last night (Sunday) and it had fermented to dry. I am a little surprised by how quickly that happened. I'm heading home after work to add more honey to the must and up the gravity. I figure I could get the alcohol up to 16-18% percent with gradual feeding.

The 2nd run pyment is fermenting nicely and I'll be adding more honey to that one for sure. The recipe I had called for 2.5 pounds of honey and I only put in 2 pounds. At first I was a little uneasy about whether or not the color would be the sickly greenish it looked when I put it together, but it's not. Now it's a slightly lighter rose color than the grape wine part deux that's fermenting next to it.

Pinot Blanc has slowed down I hope to rack it into a new carboy by Thursday.

Cranberry-Raspberry will get degassed and stabilized today and finally racked into bottles next week. I"m going to add glycerine to this one because it has a very weak body.

Elderberry Must

2009-05-21T12:16:00.000-07:00

Here is the elderberry with the montrachet yeast. OG is around 1.080. I think I might be happy with just letting this go because i've never made elderberry wine before and I don't want to try and do something new until I've had a chance to see what a unadulterated recipe looks like.

Elderberry Wine or Port?

2009-05-20T22:16:00.000-07:00

I couldn't resist. I came home and immediately rushed into the kitchen and started pulling out stuff in order to start up a batch of elderberry wine. I cracked open the dried berries I had bought and prepped them for yeast innoculation tomorrow.

I'm happy with a medium or light bodied wine since I didn't use the full 8oz of dried berries. It makes a serious purple color. I might decided to port it later but I have time. It' s only a gallon.

Recipe:

60z of dried elderberries
2oz golden raisins
2lbs of sugar
1 gallon of water
1tsp acid blend
1tsp pectic enzyme
1 campden tablet (KMeta)

i'll probably need to add more but since I'm going to gradually feed the wine to up the alcohol, I'm not worried about having so few raisins. Actually I don't like raisins.

Well I have one empty Secondary

2009-05-20T06:53:00.000-07:00

I added the yeast last night to the grape must. I checked it out this morning because I couldn't see any noticable airlock activity. Opening the lid I saw a layer of foam on the top, so the yeast is going at it. The last time I made this, it had to sit for close to 3 weeks in the primary. Well I have to push down the ferment bag at some point.

The problem is that I wanted to start the elderberry wine from the dried elderberries I bought yesterday, but I don't have a free gallon fermenter until I bottle the passion or the first batch of grape wine, neither have cleared yet. Both are still as yet unnamed.

New Recipe

2009-05-19T20:43:00.000-07:00

I picked up a few items from northern brewer this afternoon and got some information about homewine making clubs in the area.

8oz of dried elderberries
Unhopped malt 60 wheat/40 barley
Yeasts
airlocks

I have an idea for a different batch of braggot. This one with more honey and using a wine yeast instead of an ale yeast. No hops this time. I'm shooting for a lighter mead than the braggot.

I definitely want to start a batch of elderberry wine.

2009-05-18T17:32:00.000-07:00

I started another grape wine with the last remaining four pounds of grapes I had in the freezer. This time I got wise and decided to put the grapes into the nylon bag instead of leaving them to float free. The last time I made this wine and tried to rack from the loose the grapes floating i had to stop so many times to try and clear the seeds and pulp that was clogging the tube.

This picture is of the must. It's too hot to add the pectic enzyme and the campden tablet so I put it into the fridge to cool it down. then tomorrow I pitch the yeast. I need to make a run to northern brewer and pick up a few more airlocks and maybe a different yeast. I have EC-1118 and Pastuer champagne and the EC would work but I may see about grabbing a montrachet.

recipe:

4lbs red and black grapes
2lbs of sugar
1 gallon of water
1tsp acid blend
1tsp tannin
1tsp yeast nutrient
1tsp pectic enzyme
1 campden tablet
Pasteur red yeast

Brix reading of 21, roughly 11.75% PA.

2009-05-18T10:26:00.001-07:00

I racked one of the braggots off of its lees in hopes of stimulating ferment by getting just a smidge of air in. It looks like it's working. Airlock is bubbling. This was a really successful rack, only the lees were left, about an inch.

I"m drawing a (Pinot) Blanc

2009-05-16T07:19:00.000-07:00

Vitner's Reserve's Pinot Blanc is on deck and bubbling away. This was the first time I've made a white wine and I was taken back by having to add bentonite in the very beginning. I asked the wine experts on my online forum and it turns out by adding it in the beginning the wine will clear faster and will be drinkable sooner. Which I guess is a good thing and one of the reasons why people buy kits. I did this kit with my friend Aimee so she could get the feel of making wine without having to cough up a few hundred dollars in start up. Besides she's willing to let me store bottles in her cellar, with its constant temperature and easy access.

The OG was 1.070 with the corresponding brix reading of 16, giving me a PA of about 9%. I'm torn between adding about 2lbs of sugar or just letting it be. I suppose if I'm going to make that addition I should do it now while it's fermenting really well.

We're due to rack it to the secondary on Monday but if the reading haven't gone down I'm not sure if that wise.

Successful Bottling

2009-05-12T14:52:00.001-07:00

I finally bottled the Joe's Ancient Orange mead today. I was only able to get 4 bottles, due to sediment and floating oranges. It's really sweet though. The FG was 1.030. I think I might do this again without the whole orange and just use fresh squeezed OJ.

This one is a quick drinker and with age it'll taste better but I don't plan on letting it sit too long. I want to do another one maybe not with the bread yeast though.

Love this hobby.

Taste Update

2009-05-09T08:28:00.000-07:00

Ok so after racking the Passionfruit to a gallon jug and setting it aside in a cabinet with the grape, I took a few pipet samples of the braggot and passionfruit to taste and measure the SG.

I'm totally impressed with the flavors I can already taste in the braggot. It's very hoppy at first but settles to a nice carmel sweet and the end note is slightly bitter, like the hop flavor is trying to make its way back. The end result will probably be sweet, which would be best, I think. I decided to bulk age this ( I can spare a few jugs) because I didn't want to chance uneven aging by bottling too soon. So hopefully by the end of summer I will bottle. The passionfruit on the other hand will end up being sweet are fermentation. Both batches are slowing down so I suspect that after a couple months I should check it again.

2009-05-09T04:48:00.001-07:00

i wish i had taken pics of the passionfruit must after I had racked. SG dropped but didn't ferment to dry. I'm not even sure it will.

Home

2009-05-08T10:07:00.000-07:00

Well I'm back in the Twin Cities after going home for a week.

Lots of updates on the wine front:

To the right is the grape wine I racked into a gallon jug and it's sitting in a nice dark cabinet in my kitchen. I still have about 4 pounds of grapes and a 1/2 pound of ripe bananas in my freezer. I suppose I should get started with those but I don't have any empty secondaries at the moment, or dry yeast at the moment.

Passionfruit- cleared and looks beautiful. I will be racking that into a gallon jug later today. It looks a lot like this grape wine but rosier in color and not as deep.

Braggot- That's the beauty pictured on the side, still looks fantastic. I haven't the courage to taste it though. I'll probably do that today as well after I take care of the other wines. It'll eventually need to be racked again but I want to wait until I've practiced the art of creating a siphon, without the auto-siphon.

Cran-raspberry- that 3 gallons has been sitting for over a month and I should check it to see how it's doing.

It's an addiction

2009-04-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

New recipe using the passionfruit tea I had in the cupboard.

4 bags of TAZO Passionfruit teabags, tied up but with the metal removed.
2lbs clover honey
2 cups sugar
Montrachet yeast
2 tsps yeast nutrient
1/2 tsp acid blend
1 campden tablet
OG 1.100

So now I have 3 primaries going in the living room, of course they're staggered so that it I'm not going to be racking them all on the same day. I think I'm going to be racking the braggot to gallon jugs either later this afternoon or tomorrow afternoon when I get home from work.

The readings I've gotten from the refractometer and the hyrometer have been consistent so far.

2009-04-15T05:53:00.000-07:00

I just checked on my package. It is now on a truck and out for delivery and hopefully I will be seeing that snazzily dressed fedex person putting a box on my door step. I am also hoping that my package of longer pipets will be arriving to day as well, so I can check SG of my meads in the jugs.

I hadn't checked the SG of the grape must yet because I added pectic enzyme yesterday because I forgot to do that when I put the grapes in because I just wasn't thinking that grapes needed it. I knew that other fruits especially apples really need the enzyme to break down the pectin; I assumed I need to add it to the other fruit wines but didn't occure to me that grapes needed it.

Oh a funnier but kind disappointing note. Remember I added the hops to the fermenter and I posted my recipe on my forum. Turns out I should have boiled the hops with the honey or at least boiled them separately and added the water and the hops to the fermenter. So besides smelling great a few folks figured that the hops wouldn't apart too much flavor at all. So next batch I will boil the hops before hand and add that water to the fermenter.

The must is fermenting much faster than I expected. It must be because of the malt and ale yeast because I think honey is slow to ferment down.

update on the braggot

2009-04-14T07:51:00.000-07:00

I held off from pushing down the must yesterday and waited until this morning to check the SG and check on the fermentation. It has a really strong hoppy aroma and though I really wanted a sweet hoppy mead I am not sure if the smell is an indicator of the level of flavor. Only time and experience will tell me what I need to know. I still can't tell a whole lot from jsut tasting as I go. partially because it usually just tastes awful but I know I have to keep tasting in order to identify the kinds of flavors at the various stages. I'm debating about racking it into gallon jugs to finish fermenting to get it off the hops.

The SG of the must as of today is around 1.050 and I'm hoping it'll drop to under 1.000, fermenting to dy, which would mean the yeast went above it's alcohol tolerance of 10% .

I woke to the pleasant surprise of a bubbling airlock on the grape must. It still have a few more days in the primary maybe more and I was going to check the SG reading. I was dreaming of wine last night. I think I was more worried about it than I needed to be and this hobby is an exercise in patience.

I'm still waiting on my shipment of new jugs and I want to get this pinot grigio in the fermenter before I leave town so I can rack it when I get back.

On a front not directly related to the wines I have going, one of the forums I'm on the administrator posted a picture of himself so we could put a name and a face. This prompted a bunch of the regulars to post their pictures. No one looks like what I expected, though I had assumed they were all white and older. I think I was the biggest surprise. One of the guys said he pictured me as this long haired girl with a cowboy hat and on a horse. I thought it was funny.

Ancient Orange Mead

2009-04-13T09:27:00.000-07:00

It's been a month and I looked at the mead and it was suddenly very clear, with this golden honey hue. it's not as golden in this picture as it is in real life. The comparison between that first picture(the one in the bucket list and this one) is like night and day. I was thinking I was going to use EC-1118 yeast and try to referment the yeast to get it a bit drier, but instead I think I will just make a new batch with this same recipe with the only change being the yeast. This still has another month to sit before I should rack it.

The Sack mead is still lemony and I added 1 tsp of energizer in order to jump start the yeast and continue fermenting. I know that honey is slow to ferment out and I've read that it could be at least 6 months for fermentation to stop and then you have a year before it's drinkable.

Grape update!

2009-04-12T14:58:00.001-07:00

Notice how purple my must looks! It's fizzing but not bubbling so I know it's fermenting just not in the same crazy way the braggot is going. I pushed down the cap of must, I'll take a SG reading at the end of the week and hopefully I will be racking this bad boy into gallon carboys.

I am not a killer...

2009-04-11T06:37:00.000-07:00

Of yeasty beasties.

I woke up this morning to the sweet sounds of a bubbling airlock, the sign of fermentation coming from the braggot.

So looking at the recipe I realize that the only difference between this as a beer and it as a honey wine with beer accents is the honey and the fact that I don't use grains and it won't be carbonated. I could have done it without the hops and I think the next one will be less malt, honey heavier with hops but with a mead yeast.

There are recipes which use ale yeast and some with mead or wine yeasts. I think it's too early. This recipe is one I found on Gotmead.com and I had to modify it from 5 gal to my 1 gal and even then I ended up with a 2 gal recipe because I don't like really sweet meads and the PA was off the charts.

The Grapes

2009-04-10T18:38:00.000-07:00

Just as I finished punching down my must and snapped on the lid I thought "I should have taken a picture." Well, the good news is that this one looks pretty good for being my first attempt at making wine from grapes, and not even good grapes. There's way more color than when I first put them in and there's bubbling and a nice smell. I figure a good 7-10 days in primary and then I'll check the SG and rack it.

Chela my official wine kitty has taken to laying in front of the fermenters like they are going to do something interesting but she doesn't bother them. I've blocked the cabinets in the kitchen that have bottles of wine in them, since she thinks hanging in cupboards is cool.

The latest bottled batch, teh IRC was a bit of a bust, it tastes really alcoholic and thin and turns out I run the risk of oxidation if I try to open them, add glycerine and rebottle. So these might just be sangria wine or wine spritzers for the summer. The advice I got on my wine forum was that fruit wines from purees are tempermental and that I need to use more than what they suggest because they often aren't sweet enough and the acid levels are high. I'm going to start reading up on acid levels to go along with trying to figure out how to read the dang ph test strips I have and how to adjust based on those readings.

I kind of wish I had paid more attention to highschool chemistry. Well there's an idea, maybe if students were making some thing interesting that they could apply their knowledge to, maybe they would pay more attention. Useful knowledge and all.

I'm a murderer

2009-04-10T17:25:00.000-07:00

I think I killed the yeast I pitched into the must. In my impatience I might have not waited until the must was cool enough to put the yeast in and it hit me like 3 hours later. I have to wait a couple days to make sure it hasn't taken hold and then buy more yeast. The must should be fine for a few days, especially if I throw in a couple campden tablets if nothing starts by Sunday.

BRAGGOT!

2009-04-10T15:13:00.000-07:00

Well I prepared the yeast yesterday so I didn't really have a choice but to push forward and start the braggot. I put it all together in a 2 gal fermenter and the Brix measurement was sky high, upwards of 36 (20.7), which would have been too much for the yeast to handle and would make the drink much too alcoholic. I added water to it before I moved it to a much larger fermenter it was at 30 (17.25) and ended up with a brix of 24 (13.8 PA).

It looks a little weird but that's all the hops floating on top.

Braggot

3lbs Wheat Malt
3lbs Clover Honey
1oz Cascade hops
Wyeast London Ale
2 tsp yeast nutrient

No acid blend because of the hops. I boiled the honey and the malt so I didn't add campden tablets because I had skimmed as much of the impurities as I could. It smells really hoppy, which is good because I like hoppy beer.