Here is a curious thing.  I made a batch of Witte on Friday night.  It was sort of a last minute thing, so I didn’t make a starter the night before.  My plan was to make a starter while I was brewing the beer, let the starter go over night, then pitch the next day. Pitching late would also let me leave the wort I made in the fermentation fridge overnight to continue to chill down to pitching temps.  The ground water here is about 60F so it really takes some time to get an immersion chiller to carry the wort down to 65-68F, which is where I like to pitch.

As I was cleaning up at 1AM after the session, I realized I still hadn’t made a starter.  So I had to chose and stay up later and make a starter wort, or just pitch the yeast and hope for the best.  But as I was draining the kettle into my fermentor I realized I was going to have plenty of wort left over.  So I grabbed my sanitized starter flask and drew a liter of the wort into it.

Conventional starter wisdom advises against this.  First of all, most starter wisdom suggests your starter shouldn’t be above 1.040.  My wort was 1.053.  Second, your starters shouldn’t contain hops.  My wort had a 35IBU bitterness rating.  To top all that off the wort also had a couple ounces of orange peel and some coriander in it.  Definitely not things you typically seen added to starter wort.  Despite these “detriments” I broke from conventional wisdom and said SCREW IT.  I pitched my yeast into that 1L, put it on the stir plate and went to bed.  

The next morning the wort was creamier in color suggesting good yeast growth had happened.  There was even foam on top of the starter, which I never see with normal 1.040 wort on a stir plate… so clearly the yeast were chugging along.  I pitched the whole slurry into the awaiting beer around 11AM.  By 9PM, the beer was starting to chug along.I haven’t tasted the beer yet, but so far things are progressing along normally.

What have I learned here?  I am wondering if I shouldn’t just save my DME dollars and be doing this normally for most starters.  I wonder what the real harm is in using the same beer wort for my starter and pitching the next day. (Hold your concerns over the wort getting infected overnight for a different conversation.)   If the beer comes out great I’ll definitely make my starter this way again, to collect more data.  But it was very easy and cost effective.Only time will tell.

BREW ON!

I am planning on brewing up a handful of quasi-pale ales using only a single hop varietal per batch. The goal is to get a feel for the bittering, flavor ,and aroma of some varieties I want to understand better. I was thinking of a schedule like this:

60min -35 IBU
20min -15 IBU
5min -5 IBU
Dry Hop- (1oz)

I’ll figure the IBUs base upon the Alpha content of each variety I plan to use, which is why I didn’t list it in ounces. Except for the dry hop, which will really contirbute no IBUs and why the 5min is so low in IBUs.

I plan to shoot for a 1.048-1.052 OG beer brewed with 90% 2-row, 5% Crystal 60L, and 5% Victory malt. Of course, American ale yeast to keep it clean and simple.

Here are the questions:
Should I drop the 5 minute and just go with more dryhop?
And should I change the time on the flavor addition?

I was thinking of using these hops:

Nugget, Cascade, Columbus, Citra and Amarillo

My entry into the Sam Adams homebrewing contest is a Pomegranate Cinnamon Red ale. When I racked my Irish Red Ale to a glass carboy for some cold conditioning before bottling, I racked about 3/4 of a gallon to my glass jug that I make my yeast starters in (thoroughly cleaned and sanitized, of course).
From there, I added about 10 fluid ounces of 100% pasteurized pomegranate juice. I left it at room temperature to start a secondary fermentation with the sugars in the juice.
At the same time, I cut up two cinnamon sticks and put them in a cup filled with vodka. I am making my own cinnamon extract with the vodka.

This weekend, I am going to bottle up both beers. I will bottle up the Category 23 first because I am going to play around the flavors before I finally bottle it up.

It will be good to have the Irish Red ready to go in case I need to mix in more of the base beer. The cinnamon will be an interesting challenge since I think the flavor may change with time in the bottle. I guess I will have to keep some good notes on how much I add in.

Sam Adams’ LongShot hombrewing contest was announced fairly recently and this year the contest is focused on beers that fit into the specialty beer category, known as Category 23.  These are beers that don’t fit into any other category.  Either they are brewed with unusual ingredients, following unusual practices, or are just bigger, stronger versions of other styles. 

I talked to Mike about doing something stupid for the contest and he supported the notion.

So, I racked a gallon of my Irish Red into a growler and mixed in another ingredient to start up a specialty beer.

I was going to keep the whole thing a secret but I guess I figured someone will care about this goofy project.

I will keep the type of beer under wraps until I bottle it, which will be next week.  Then, all will be revealed and we can have a good laugh. 

Or, I could surprise myself and have it turn out well. 

On Saturday afternoon, we put the old apple press to work.

Our target was 3 gallons of cider for this first attempt.  I read somewhere online that one would need 12.5 lbs of apples to make 1 gallon of cider.  We picked about 40 pounds from the orchard down the street and felt like we had enough.

We started chopping the apples in half and then french fry cutting the halves to get them ready for the press.

After pressing with all our might, we learned that the apples needed to be process even further to get more juice.

We employed a 3 three pronged attack (food processor, stick blender, and regular blender) to prep the apples for more productive pressing! 

The regular blender didn’t work all that well, so we stuck with the food processor and the stick blender.  We turned the 40 lbs of apple fries into mush in no time.

We put them all back into the press and watched the huge flow of cider spill down into the kettle.

I added 2 cups of sugar to the cider and pasteurized it by heating it to 170°F for 20 minutes.  We felt it was our best option to kill any unwanted critters. 

We cooled it in a kiddie pool ice bath, added some pectic enzyme, some yeast nutrient, and two packages of proofed Champagne yeast.    

Sunday morning, it was fermenting like crazy.  We’ll see how it turns out.

Lessons Learned:

Need an apple grinder or some kind of way to mill apples into a nice mush quickly and easily.

Need to fix the bottom of the old press.  There are a few leaks - we had a temporary fix with plastic wrap…but that’s not ideal.

We were only able to press 2.75 gallons of cider.  We may have a larger yield next time, but maybe we should pick a few more pounds of apples.

Some photos:

So I brewed up a honey wheat ale about a month ago and somehow made two different beers from it.  I bottled up half of the batch as one normally would and the other half was introduced to a gallon of a honey solution for a secondary fermentation.

Both beers are ready to be imbibed and analyzed.  Here are my notes from a side by side tasting:

Honey Wheat Ale

Appearance: Light amber, cloudy like a wheat beer should be.  Foamy off white head.

Aroma: Sweet caramel, like the center of a Rollo.  Some floral honey, I guess.

Taste: Spicy wheat.  Medium bitterness from the hop.  Some hotness from some fusel alcohols, but I wonder about  that.  The flavors have mellowed a bit, so I am not sure where this spiciness is coming from.

Mouthfeel: Medium body, some pleasant graininess.

Overall:  High fermentation temps have left its mark on this beer.  It may mellow out further, but I am not betting on it.  There are some good sweet and wheat flavors here.  Good head lacing.

If I brew this one in the winter, it’s a different beer.

Honey Wheat Ale with honey addition

Appearance:  Lighter in color than the original brew.  Head is not as strong.  I suppose we should expect these differences.

Aroma:  Some of that honey malt aroma is still coming through, especially as it warms up.

Taste:  Smooth - mild.  A little bit of the wheat flavor at the end.    The craziness??  It appears that all crappy flavors from the primary fermentation have been scrubbed out.  Any graininess and hotness is gone.  Just gone.  Hop flavors are muted.  I am not sure this is beer, but it’s going down very easy.  Very clean aftertaste.  It seems to have picked up a tangy fruity characteristic that I can’t put my finger on…

Mouthfeel:  Much thinner and lighter than the original brew.

Overall:  Not sure what I created here.  It is certainly drinkable.  Very drinkable as I am on my third sample as I type this sentence, but not sure what a beer judge would say about it.  I am feeling good about the second half of the brew.  I am thinking of presenting this beer at the pseudo-Oktoberfest we are putting on.

As more of a proof of concept than a true beer enhancing exercise, I am cold conditioning my honey wheat ale MACH II for 72 hours before bottling.  It’s going to help get some of that yeast to settle out more…but I don’t think it’s going to clarify it much since it is a wheat beer.

I wanted to see how cool I could get my glass fermenter in the styrofoam box using water and frozen water bottles.  By freezing eight .5 liter bottles of spring water (the spring water consumed…I filled them with tap water for freezing) and rotating 4 every 12 hours, I was able to get it down 25 degrees below the air temperature in my basement. 

Knowing that my basement sits around 55F in the winter, I feel I can bring my fermenter’s temperature down to near freezing using this set up.  Nice!  This winter may be the season of lagers.

Some photos:

The lowest temperature I was able to hit was 46F…  Again, if I really tried I could probably get it colder but I was just playing around.

I am going to let the beer come to room temperature before bottling to try to wake up the yeast for bottling/carbonation.