IPA, Dawnie Style
September 30th, 2007 by Dawn
I bottled the IPA at the end of August, after tossing an ounce of Amarillo hops into the secondary to dry-hop it. (It was all bitterness, and I wanted to round out the flavor).
Two weeks after I bottled, I was heading to Michigan for an off-road relay race. I figured I’d bring some of my homebrew, guessed the IPA was ready, and packed a sixer of that as well as a six of the hefeweizen. There were people there that would appreciate it, so why not? Except, when we cracked open the first bottle on Saturday night, it was flat. Completely. No refreshing “fsssshhhh” when we opened the bottle, and no head of bubbly foam when it was poured into glasses.
Shiiiiiiiit. Given all of the other trouble this beer had given me (and I didn’t even tell you about the messy clusterfuck that bottling was - I managed to break a bottle with the capper), this would just so figure. It was showing some tasty promise, so of course it was going to refuse to carbonate on me. This beer had an attitude problem, and I was so over it.
I made a mental note to try it later, and then sort of forgot about it. I was going to try it last week, except I was busy working my way through a growler of Kuhnhenn’s Creme Brulee Java Stout that I picked up last weekend while visiting the parents. (Verdict: Just as good as I remembered. I totally *heart* that beer.) (And twenty bucks says that’s the first time the phrase “I heard it” has been used in reference to a craft beer.) So, tonight, I pulled a bottle of my IPA out of the fridge, took a deep breath, and opened it.
Fsssshhhhhh.
Woohoo! A huge step in the right direction. I started pouring it into a glass and had instant confirmation that it was no longer flat.
Now that it’s carbonated, it’s delicious. Maybe a little too citrusy, but I like it. I might try ratcheting down the dry-hopping a smidge next time, but I’d definitely like to brew this beer again. (Although maybe I’ll experiment with liquid extract instead of DME…)
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GTMW
August 14th, 2007 by Dawn
This past weekend, I headed up to Madison with The Boy for the Great Taste of the Midwest. I almost didn’t go, since I didn’t buy a ticket when they first went on sale, but by stalking eBay and Craigslist I was able to find one for the low, low price of double face value.
Was I pleased about that? Not necessarily. Was it still worth it? You bet. The Boy and I headed up there Friday afternoon, and then spend Friday night at Maduro which had 18 different Bell’s beers on tap. This was exciting as I’d heard Bell’s makes good beer, but I’d only ever tried their Oberon before the whole distribution snafu went down and they pulled out of Chicago. Having the chance to sample more of their stuff? Awesome. Favorites were the Two-Hearted (on cask!) and the Wedding Ale, although the Double-Cream Stout was also pretty tasty. I also had the chance to try Batches 6000, 7000, and 8000, as well as a couple of the “test runs” for batch 8000. We hit a few more bars on Friday night, as different breweries had events set up around town. Highlights were the Dark Horse Double Crooked Tree and Oatmeal Stout, as well as the Founder’s Kentucky Breakfast Stout. I was surprised I liked this one as much as I did, since bourbon barrel beers aren’t normally my thing. However, this one didn’t taste overly boozy, and was just plain delicious. Be warned, though: it’s a big, huge beer. The Boy and I split a pint, and that was plenty.
The event itself was Saturday afternoon, and it was fantastic. I tried a vast number of beers, enjoyed myself, and woke up the next morning feeling perfectly fine. Standouts were the Kuhnhenn Creme Brulee Java Stout (on cask at the Real Ale tent) and the Three Floyds Fantabulous Resplendence. The Boy actually pointed me to the Fantabulous - I was making a restroom run, so I gave him my empty glass, told him I’d meet him in a few minutes and to get me something I’d like. He did good.
My only wee complaint was that most of the beers there were either double IPAs or imperial stouts. There were a lot of other beers, but it seemed like those two styles were everywhere. Since imperial stouts aren’t really my thing, I drank a lot of different IPAs. I did try some of the imperial stouts, although it just confirmed that I’m not a huge fan of them, and I even tried a few of the barrel-aged ones, just to see what they were like. I’m discovering that in some cases? Barrel aging can be a good thing, as long as the beer doesn’t wind up too boozy tasting.
Anyhow, after spending all weekend sampling a wide variety of IPAs, I came home and checked on the one I had sitting in secondary. My initial plan was to bottle it yesterday, but I decided to taste it first. It was OK, but the aroma was seriously lacking. So I went ahead and dry hopped it, adding an ounce of Amarillo hop pellets. My sort-of-plan is to let it sit for a week or two, and then bottle it - it’ll mostly depend on what my schedule looks like and how things progress. I’m hoping it’ll be just what the beer needed.
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BOOM!
July 30th, 2007 by Dawn
Saturday afternoon, we had some excitement around Chez Dawnie. I was sitting on the couch, watching Tour coverage, thinking really hard about doing some cleaning, and generally minding my own business when I heard a pop and a tinkle of broken glass come from the corner of the room.
My first thought was that the carboy holding the IPA had popped, and I was afraid to look because, man, that would just suck. However, when I went to investigate, the carboy was still intact and sealed. Whew. I noticed, however, a pool of liquid forming underneath one of the cases holding bottled beer.
Turns out it had gotten a bit too warm in my apartment for the hefeweizen, and one of them had decided to protest. After assuring myself that the remaining bottles weren’t going to explode in my face, I evacuated them to the fridge where they would be safe.
Moral of the story: keep bottled beer INSIDE some sort of box and/or container with a lid. As it was, I had small pieces of broken glass scattered pretty impressively around the dining area. If it hadn’t been contained? I don’t even want to think about it. I’m just thankful I wasn’t cleaning beer off my ceiling.
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Ask and Ye Shall Receive
July 18th, 2007 by Dawn
So remember how I was saying I was going to bite the bullet and just buy a damn immersion chiller already?
Well, it’s a good thing I decided to wait and do it with my next ingredient order rather than getting it right away. Today an e-mail went out on the local beer society list from someone who is moving away and looking to unload their extra equipment. For what I was expecting to pay for just the chiller, I am now getting the following:
- Immersion chiller
- 6-gallon carboy and cap (no more fighting with the bucket lid - WOO!) (although I’ll need to buy a funnel now, but that’s fine)
- Bottle tree
- Bottle washer
This excites me greatly.
Update: The stuff has arrived! Brewing equipment is slowly taking over my apartment.
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Whew
July 18th, 2007 by Dawn
I racked the IPA to secondary on Monday night, and I’m happy to report that it’s not quite the disaster I feared it would be. The alcohol has balanced out the hops somewhat, although it’s still nice and bitter. It’s low on the body, which I’m thinking is partially due to the lower-than-intended OG. However, it’s going to be a perfectly drinkable beer so I’m pretty happy.
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All Hail the Power of OxiClean!
July 6th, 2007 by Dawn
After hearing about the condition of my stove, both Leah and Marta said the same thing: Get thee some OxiClean!
So I did. I mixed up a solution and soaked an old hand towel in it, and then let it sit on the mess for 10 minutes or so. Then I mixed up another solution and tossed the burner cover thingys in there to soak. Then I started with the scrubbing.
30 minutes later, my stove looked like this:
I could. not. believe. it. My stove! Nearly clean! Clean enough that one would never guess the magnitude of disaster that had recently occurred on it! I am a much happier camper. Over the weekend I’ll pick up some Magic Erasers (as recommended by both Leah and Sir Martini and then I’m thinking we will be good. as. new.
I love OxiClean. It truly is a brewer’s best friend.
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Clean-Up on Aisle Twelve
July 5th, 2007 by Dawn
Yesterday, to celebrate our country’s independence, I decided to brew up a batch of delicious IPA. My original plan had been to brew last weekend, but due to a mailroom snafu at work, I didn’t get my hands on my beer ingredients until Monday. I figured, hey, I’ve got the day off, I’ll spend half of it getting some beer together.
Then I found myself with a nasty cold. At noon I said, “I’m not brewing today. No way.” Then I had a nice long nap and decided that, hey, I’m up for brewing after all! Things started out OK. Sure, the new digital thermometer that I picked up turned out to not be of the instant-read variety and thusly pretty much useless, but that’s workable. And, sure, mixing in an obscene amount of DME into the wort was a freaking 30-minute project, but, hey, we got there eventually. We had the wort coming to a boil, all was good and happy.
Then I made the mistake of adding hops to the wort. Just a 1/2 ounce, but enough to cause a volcanic eruption in the kettle. An eruption that I wasn’t fast enough on dialing down the heat to prevent. An eruption that doused my stove’s pilot and covered it in a sticky DME solution. I mopped up as much as I could and got the kettle going again, but it was then that I hit the wall. I was getting tired, hitting the limit on how long I could be awake and on my feet, and this was not helping. At all. But I perservered. I got the kettle back to a boil, and put the rest of the hops in on schedule and without further incident.
Then it came to cool and which point I realized something: I really, really need to suck it up and get an immersion chiller. I’ve spent an obscene amount of money on triathlon gear in the past month or so, but I can’t drop $40 on an immersion chiller? No more. Cooling it in the sink works, but I just did not have the patience for it last night. Eventually, however, things cooled down enough that the wort was ready to strain into the fermenter, and the wheels came off again.
For straining, I’ve been using one of these guys. It’s nice and stable over the bucket (between the handle and the little lip on the other side), but it’s small and so it fills up with hop residue pretty quickly. When I was at the store picking up my new (and ultimately annoyingly useless thermometer), I saw this and picked it up. Not only would the largest one hold a lot more hops, but it looked like it would fit perfectly over the bucket. I was pumped. Until I actually tried to do that, and found it was just a wee bit too small to be really stable. But, it looked like it might work, so I figured it was worth a shot.
Now, here’s where a sensible person would have done one of two things. Either they would have enlisted someone’s help to hold the strainer steady, or they would have gone with the tried-and-true-won’t-fall-into-the-bucket-even-if-it-is-wee-and-tiny strainer. However, I was not so sensible. I was determined to make my new purchase work. And it did, for a few minutes until the strainer shifted and dropped down into the fermenter, splashing wort and hops all over the damn place. I was covered in wort. My kitchen/dining room floor was covered in wort. I was covered in wort. I was displeased. And sticky.
I did eventually get everything strained into the fermenter (even though I had to empty the strainer of hops about 4 times) and get the water added. I took a sample to check the gravity and then added the yeast. Now, here’s what you need to know about the yeast: I was mildly concerned about it. My order shipped out on Tuesday and arrived at my office late Thursday afternoon. I expected to have it in my hands on Friday, but the mailroom guys were apparently on vacation because I never saw them. I wasn’t sure how the yeast would like sitting out of the fridge for the weekend, but I figured that since it was in a climate-controlled building it would be OK. When I finally got it home Tuesday afternoon, I saw that it had been packed with a cold pack, which was still pretty chilly. I totally wanted to make out with the folks at Northern Brewer when I saw that. I was still mildly concerned, but even in the worst-case scenario where my yeast was toast, I could just buy another one from one of the local homebrew stores. No problem.
I shook the yeast up to get it all in suspension, and saw that the vial was quite bubbly inside. And seemed to contain more yeast than usual. Clearly, the yeast was fine. It was happy yeast! Yay! In fact, it was so happy that it damn near exploded when I opened it up. At least I was standing over the fermenter when I did that, so the mess was contained and all went where it needed to go: in the bucket. Whew.
Once I got the fermenter all sealed up, I checked the gravity: 1.056. Somewhat lower than my target of 1.066. Shiiiiiiit. But, alas, nothing I can do about it now. I’m totally blaming my conversion work, since the original recipe was for a 6-gallon all-grain batch and I made a 5-gallon extract/partial mash. I tasted it, and dude. It’s hoppy. And bitter. It’s going to put hair on your chest, for sure. I’m hoping that it’ll mellow out a bit in the fermentation, but with the low gravity? I’m not so sure. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
It was then that I surveyed the damage:
I have no idea how I’m going to clean this up. None.
The stove. Which will never be the same again, and whose pilot is still out.
I mopped up the wort from the floor, but as of this morning it was still sticky. It’s going to take multiple moppings to fix.
Not to mention the sink full of brewing dishes that I didn’t wash last night because I just. couldn’t. deal.
Ugh. At least this wasn’t my first foray into the beer-making world. If it was? I’m not sure I’d do it ever again.
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Plotting the Next Brew…
June 15th, 2007 by Dawn
For those of you wondering what happened to Ye Olde Feline Nunnery Brewery, we had a wee bit of a hiatus recently. Shortly after bottling the Not-So-Bitter Ale, I did the following:
- Went to Cincinnati for a weekend to run a marathon
- Moved
- Had a friend come visit
- Ran from Madison to Chicago via Milwaukee, then spent two days recovering because GOOD LORD was I tired
Then there’s been the regular working and the unpacking (which is almost done) and furniture assembly and, naturally, I figured this would be a good time to start dating someone new because, clearly, I had all sort of spare time!
Damn. I knew I’d had a busy month or so, but when I put it all in writing like that? It explains my excitement over the fact that my biggest plan for this weekend is going to the zoo. Maybe. If it’s not too hot.
Anyhow, this week I realized that my supply of Beer I Would Actually Serve Other People (i.e., the hefeweizen) has dwindled down to a handful of bottles. That, and I knew exactly what I wanted to make next. It was just a matter of finding a recipe, which would take some time. Which I finally found this week! Woo hoo!
So, what am I brewing up next? It’s going to be an American Pale Ale - I’ve found a base recipe that looks good, and I’m working out a few tweaks (changing from all-grain to extract/partial-mash, changing the batch size, maybe something else). I also spent the morning researching hop varieties to make sure I was going to wind up with the sort of Pale Ale I’ve been envisioning. It’ll be good. I figure I’ll finish working out the details this weekend, get the ingredients next week, and I’ll have something fermenting away by the end of the month!
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The Better Bitter…
May 3rd, 2007 by Dawn
…could be better. It’s not bad, mind you - it’s perfectly drinkable. It’s just not all that great, though. Let’s go back a bit, though, shall we?
When we last left the beer, it was bubbling away after getting good & sloshed (hee). It bubbled pretty steadily for about 3-4 more days, and once it stopped I racked that bad boy into secondary. I gave it a taste then and was somewhat unimpressed. It was OK, it tasted beery (not assy), but it just didn’t seem very flavorful. Of course, at this point I’d spent the past couple of weeks sucking down IPA like it was going out of style so perhaps my palate was a bit off. I took comfort in the fact that nothing was horribly wrong with it and then left it to hang out for a while.
When I bottled it, I tasted it again. Again, I was underwhelmed, but it tasted OK so I went ahead with the bottling. Then this past weekend, two weeks after it went into the bottles, I poured myself a bottle to try it.
The first thing I noticed was a distinct lack of carbonation. Option 1 was that it just wasn’t fully carbonated yet, but I’m thinking it was the total brain fart I had while bottling: about 2/3 of the beer was racked into the bottling bucket when I realized I hadn’t added the priming sugar. Oops. I put it in, sort of stirred, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it wasn’t 100% blended equally with the beer. Oops.
Thing two: It had a lovely malty taste….. that halfway through the glass turned into “damn, yo, that’s pretty sweet. Jeeez.” I know exactly what happened here: the beer is just underhopped for two reasons: 1) I put a little extra DME in the wort and 2) it’s actually underhopped. Let’s take a look at these individually, shall we?
#1: Extra DME. The recipe called for 2.25 lbs of DME. I had a 3 lb bag. I weighed out 3/4 of a pound and set it aside, planning to dump the rest in the wort when time came. Time came. I added some DME to the wort. I stirred. I added some more. At one point, I set the bag on the counter so I could stir the wort in between DME additions and… it fell. On the floor. And since the top of the bag was totally open, onto the floor all of the DME went. Oh shit. I eyeballed the pile on the floor. I eyeballed the pile I’d set aside that wasn’t going to get used. I determined them to be the same and added all of the “extra” DME into the brew. It wasn’t until I took the OG reading right before pitching the yeast that I realized I might have added a wee bit extra malt: it was 1.050, whereas it should have been 1.045. Oops, but, eh, whatever. It’ll be fine!
#2: Underhopping: The recipe I used didn’t specify if it used whole hops or pellet hops, so I assumed it was whole hops and converted down for pellets. Because the recipe was in ounces and not grams, it came out to a weird number that my scale didn’t really want to measure, and I wound up rounding it down again. Which…. well, next time we’ll just convert to grams and do the math that way, since my scale has a more exact display for gram measurements than ounce measurements.
Overall, it was a learning experience I think. And, like I said before, the beer is still totally drinkable so it’s not a total disaster. Just filed under “things to remember and/or pay more attention to next time.”
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Bubbles!
March 19th, 2007 by Dawn
The best bitter that’s currently working in my kitchen requires a secondary fermentation. Since I am still new to the Hip, Happenin’ World O’ Brewing, I asked the current boyfriend (who has been brewing for a couple of years now) how I would know when my beer was ready to move out of primary. I didn’t want to leave it in too long, but I didn’t want to move it out before it was ready, either. The recipe said 3-10 days for primary fermentation, which, while sort of helpful, wasn’t exactly all that specific.
Anyhow, his answer? “When it’s done fermenting.”
Right. Got that. But how do I know when it’s done fermenting? I mean, it’s not like a turkey that has one of those little thingys that pop out when it’s done, you know? His answer to that was, “Once it stops bubbling, give it another day or two, and then it’s good to move.”
Ummm…. what if it wasn’t bubbling? As far as I knew, this particular brew had never bubbled, which really hadn’t registered on my radar as an issue. I mean, they can’t all be as crazy active as the hefeweizen was, or else you would hear a lot more stories about carboy fountains and exploding buckets. So, I figured it was doing its thing in there, just in a calmer way than the hefeweizen had. When I told him it had never bubbled, he, well, I don’t think he entirely believed me. We wound up guessing that it might have been bubbling while I wasn’t home, and since I had a few times last week where I was gone for 36 hours or more at a time, well, it wasn’t entirely out of the question that it had bubbled and I’d missed it. Finally, convinced that it had bubbled and I just hadn’t been there to notice (I still had my doubts, but I just kept my mouth shut at this point), he told me to taste it. If it tasted like beer? It was ready. If it tasted sweet and malty? It needed more time. If it tasted like ass? Well, better luck next time.
I wasn’t entirely sure I was happy with that answer, but I let it go. This was all on Friday night, I think, and before going to bed my curiosity got the best of me and I busted open the bucket to see what was going on. At that point, it’d been in primary for 4 days, and if I’d just missed the bubbling, it would be delightfully beery.
Well, it was sort of beery, but still overly sweet and malty. Clearly it was fermenting to some extent, but it still had a ways to go. I sealed everything back up and went to bed, now troubled by my lack of bubbles. Obviously, since it wasn’t anywhere near done yet, I hadn’t missed the bubbles. So…. where were they? I wasn’t overly concerned about it, since the yeast was indeed doing its thing in there. It was just doing it sans bubbles, which…. whither my bubbles?
Saturday morning I woke up with an idea. I had no idea where it had come from, or if it was even remotely correct, but I figured it certainly couldn’t hurt. See, when I’d poured in the water to get my total volume to 5 gallons after the boil, I’d done it very carefully so as to minimize splashing. I’m not a splashy kind of girl, really. Yet, in the notes that Leah sent me on her hefeweizen, it said that splashing was good, since it would get some extra air into the wort. Maybe my lack of splashing had resulted in a less-than-ideal amount of air in there? And that’s why the yeast wasn’t active enough to be bubbly?
Happily, this was a simple enough theory to try out. I grabbed the bucket and, for lack of a better description, sloshed it around a bit. After a few good sloshes, the airlock started bubbling immediately. I sloshed it around a bit more for good measure, and two days later it’s still bubbling steadily and happily.
I have no idea if my reasoning behind why it needed sloshing is correct or not, all I know is that before I had no bubbles, and now I do, so something in there certainly needed it. Plus, now I won’t have to use my psychic beer powers to know when to move it to secondary, since I can now just wait for the bubbling to stop.
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