This is an update to the epic multi-flavored stout project. I started to bottle some of the flavored sweet stouts.

1. Vanilla stout – we took a gallon of sweet stout and let it sit on a whole split vanilla bean for two weeks.  Initial tastes at bottling revealed a prominent but not overwhelming vanilla taste.  I liked it – it wasn’t in the background at all.
2. Chocolate stout – for this one, we took a gallon of the same sweet stout and let it sit on 1.5 ounces of cocoa powder for 2 weeks.  The few tastes I took at bottling revealed some bitter cocoa flavor.  This one may be a miss but we won’t know for sure until it’s ready.
3. Cherry stout – I haven’t bottled this one yet, but I did take a sample from it a week ago.  The tart cherries were detectable in the beer but it seemed unfinished.  If it mellows out, this beer could be the best of the bunch.

So all of these different stouts should be ready to drink in two weeks.  Let’s have a tasting then, shall we?

I came to the decision that I need to submit my mead to the Mazer Cup to get some helpful feedback about the raspberry melomel I made.  I haven’t had many meads to know if I made a good one or not.

This competition is the one for meadmakers.  If I want to get someone who knows what a good mead taste like, then I need to send some bottles to Colorado.

Right now, I am not sure if I want to make more meads in the future.  If I get some good feedback and enough information to make a better one, then maybe I will try again.

Entries need to be received by February 17th.  I think I have a box that can be used to deliver 3 bottles of mead.

Last night I bottled up the harvest ale.  This is the beer that I dry hopped using the hops I grew last summer.  Racking it from the carboy to the bottling bucket was easy.  I thought that maybe the whole hops would clog the siphon, but it was clog free.

As for cleaning the carboy with all the whole hop flowers sitting in the bottom of it, I was able to remove them all fairly easily.  I filled the spent carboy with water, about a 1/4 of the way up. I swirled this mixture around and was able to get the majority of them out on the first try.  I repeated this process 2 more times and got them all out.

The color of the beer was lighter than I expected.  I thought I would get away with submitting it as an American Amber but it appears more like a Pale ale to me.

I poured a glass to see if I could smell any hops aroma, which was the reason that I dry hopped in the first place.  There may have been a hint of hops aroma but I think I will wait until the beer carbonates before I make a judgment on the aroma.

I didn’t taste any yeast tartness as described by other brewers who used this yeast strain (WLP008).  It was still a little cloudy but much clearer than when I racked it from primary.

There was some “funny” malt sweetness that I tasted.  I picked it up in a few swigs but all the tastes ended with refined hop bitterness.  Definitely lots of hops flavor in this one.

In two weeks, we’ll taste it again and report the findings.  Until then, brew on.

Yesterday, I bottled up the raspberry mead or melomel which brings this 3.5 month long brew log to a close.  After following directions to keep the primary fermentation humming along and racking 3 or 4 times to gain clarity and add flavor, I finally got around to bottling this sucker for submission into competitions and aging.

We sampled this mead on New Year’s Eve where the resident honey expert gave it good marks.  For a first try, it was pretty good.  I don’t know how it matches up to good mead so that’s where the competition submissions will come in handy.

One point to note, I did not add any priming sugar to the mead.  I planned for it to be  a still mead.

I am pretty happy that this brew log is over for now.  Now, I can focus my time back on beer and getting the lager project started up.

Some other posts about the mead making…

Raspberry Melomel Recipe

Plans for Mead Making

Mead Fermentation Update

After two weeks in the primary, the sweet stout was ready for bottling and some experimental flavor additions.

I split the 5 gallon batch 4 ways:

1. 2 gallons for bottling
2. 1 gallon for cherry flavor addition
3. 1 gallon for vanilla flavor addition
4. 1 gallon for chocolate flavor addition

The first split I bottled pretty much the same as I usually would.  The only thing I did differently was using some fuzzy math in terms of the amount of priming sugar I needed to carbonate 2 gallons of beer to 1.5 volumes.  I came out to 1.25 ounces of corn sugar.  Hopefully that is enough.

The second split I added pasteurized, canned tart cherries to the bottom of the secondary along with some black cherry juice.  I added enough to get an inch of liquid/cherries from the bottom of the one gallon bottle.  I filled the rest with unprimed sweet stout.

The third split I added one vanilla bean that I cut down the middle using a sanitized knife and cutting board.  I put the bean in the bottle and filled it to near the top.

The fourth split I added 1.5 ounces of cocoa powder to the one gallon bottle.  I thought about using cacoa nibs but I had cocoa powder on hand.  I poured the sweet stout on top of it and had to give the bottle a few gentle swishes so the powder would sink into the beer rather than float on top of it.

Right now, these three bottles are sitting and waiting in my basement.   My plan is to bottle them in a couple of weeks and schedule one a night for three nights so I can clean and sanitize my equipment in between bottling sessions.  It will be fun to see which of these flavor additions worked out best.

For the harvest ale, I dry hopped it using my home grown hop cones. I know using whole cones are going to make it difficult to clean out the carboy, but not impossible. For this brew, I wanted to stay true to the concept of the harvest and only use hops that were grown by me.

I transferred the beer from my primary fermentor to a secondary carboy. I kept it in the primary for two weeks. I probably could have dry hopped a week ago but I didn’t get to it until last night.

Anyway, I put the hops in the bottom of my sanitized carboy and I racked the beer on top of them. Here are some photos of the process:

I am getting an early start to the new brew calender… or a late finish depending on your perspective (or a previous post).

On New Years day I started my first brew of 2012, a Cherry Wheat.  My plan to squeeze this one in was to perform the mash the night before, do an actual mash out to “lock in” my mash profile and I’d finish with the boil in the morning.  I had done a couple overnight mashes in the cooler in the past with decent results.  But I have been upgrading my equipment during the later past of 2011, as a result I no longer mash in my cooler.  Hence the mash out rather than letting it sit overnight. (If you’re curious about my equipment upgrades I’ll highlight them here with a couple pics, but I’ll write up some posts in the near future). Overall, I hit my numbers pretty well.  I as a little short on my volume in the fermentor, but its primarily because I am still dialing in my equipment for volume losses and performance.  I only wanted 5 gallons in the fermentor (I usually shoot for 5.5 gal) because I’ll be adding two 3lb cans of cherry puree after 3 days of fermentation.  If the fruit addition kicks up fermentation I wanted the extra head space to avoid a big messy blow off.

Here’s the recipe:
Est OG 1.052
Est IBUs 32

5lbs Pilsner
5lbs Malted Wheat
2lbs Munich (10L)
0.5lb Rice Hulls

2.0oz Tettnanger 3.5 AA 60min
1.0oz EKG 4.5AA 60min

WLP001 from 2L starter

Here is my overall setup.  In this shot the wort is being pumped from the Mash Tun on the left to the kettle on the right.

Yeast Starter

Fermentor set up in a bin with FermWrap heater and towel/blanket insulation.

Sweet Cherry Puree Cans