What The . . . Ferment (AKA Bad Santa Update)

Saturday was not a good brew day.  But it is long past, and my angst has receded.  This years Bad Santa brew session did not go as planned...but there are hopeful signs that things may have worked out - perhaps even for the better.  A short-list of the issues I had:

1. Mash tun developed a new leak - I jury-rigged a washer to fix the seal, but I'm going to need to re-visit my design to find a permanent fix.
2. I brewed in my garage, with doors open, on a cold-and-windy day.  Turns out hurricane-force 5C winds will cool even a well insulated mash tun (66.5C -> 58C in ~40min).
3. To fix issue #2 I had to decoct (remove some grain and bring to a boil) a couple of times to get temps back to 66.5C.
4. Dropped & broke my good thermometer, meaning I had to use my poorly-calibrated one while preparing my sparge water.
5. I got a stuck sparge while batch sparging - something which is supposedly impossible.
6. Collected ~2L less wort from the sparge than expected
7. Had a massive boil-over; we're talking at least a litre of the good stuff on the floor.
8. Melted my wine thief while trying to grab a sample of wort for a SG measurement.

Despite that, somehow, I managed to hit a S.G. of 1.085 - instead of the expected 1.067.  The difference means, assuming a normal FG, the beer will be an extra 1% in alcohol concentration - 8.6% instead of 7.5%.

Just goes to show that even mistakes may produce desirable brews...assuming it tastes good.

Video on Yeast

A must-watch video on yeast and yeast management.  Lecture provided by Wyeast.

Bad Santa Holiday Ale

It's a little late, but I'm finally brewing a holiday ale for the Christmas season. This is an old recipe - named and brewed a decade before BYO magazine stole my name for what appears to be a inferior beer (I jest, it looks pretty good).  My Bad Santa is a great winter beer - strong (~7.5%), medium-bodied, with cinnamon, honey and ginger adding to the already great dynamic provided by hallertauer and cascade hops, aromatic malt, and wheat. Assuming this one replicates previous batches, it'll be ready for the holiday season and well into 2013.

Not your usual brew - honey, ginger and cinnamon round out a strong ale brewed with wheat, roasted barley, caramel malt and hallertauer/cascade hops.

Recipe below the fold...

EDIT: and update on a miserable day brewing this beer can be found here...

Simple Time-Saver

Measuring out beer volumes is not always easy - 18.7L of water = 19 measures with our 1L measuring cup. A simple way to deal with this is to mark your bucket - carefully measure out set volumes, let the water stop sloshing around, and pen it in.  It'll save you valuable time in preparing your beer.

Crepuscular Porter

Fall is here - time to do away with the lighter summer beers and start brewing rich, dark, beers that warm the soul on cold winters nights.  Dark beers - browns, porters, stouts, olde ales & Scottish exports - are among my favourite beers.  Of these, porters top the list.

Porters are not a commonly encountered style - at least, not here in Canada.  It is too bad - aside from being important historically, porters stand as one of the most diverse styles of beer out there.  On one extreme porters are medium-brown in colour, differing from brown ales in their extra hoppiness.  On the other extreme are dark porters - would-be stouts but for a bit more dark malt bitterness.  Between those two extremes is a huge range of beers - sweet to dry, mild to hoppy, some with toasty nuttiness, others with the coffee-like flavour of roasted malts.  Swap out the ale yeast, substitute a lager yeast and lager fermentation conditions, and you get a baltic porter - every bit as diverse as the ale version, but with the mellower nature of a larger replacing the flamboyance of ale yeasts.  For the brave soul, one can take a sweet porter, subtract the hops, add in some/all of vanilla, wintergreen, licorice root, sarsaparilla root, nutmeg, anise, molasses, cinnamon, clove, or honey - and you have a real rootbeer.  Alcoholic, richly flavoured, sweet and spicy.  Its the great-grandpa of the soda enjoyed by so many.

Today's brew is a middle-of-the-road Porter.  Crepuscular Porter is named after crepuscular animals - animals active at twilight and at the dawn.  Accordingly, this beer lacks the midnight blackness of darker porters and stouts, bearing a medium-brown colour (30SRM).  With a hoppiness on the higher-end for the style (32IBU), 5% alcohol, and with a rich nuttiness imparted by a rarer adjunct grain - pale chocolate malt - this beer will be a nice brew to enjoy while racking leaves or while warming up after a chilly bike ride home from work.

More Below the Fold...

A Bit of Bitter

The Vestigial Bitter, brewed a few weeks ago, is done.  It is an excellent beer - the best beer brewed since I started this blog.  It is a light beer, coming in at 3.7% alcohol (it was planned to be 3.5%).  It is thin-bodied, with its flavour dominated by hop bitterness with hints of hop flavour and crystal malt.  It is lightly coloured - just a tad lighter than an American-style lager (i.e. Bud).  Its effervescent and light - great after a hard days work, or a good beer to use to convert a friend from the generic mass-produced lagers that dominate the market to homebrew and craft beers.

Because of its low alcohol content, it won't age too long, but the low content also means that many pints can be quaffed without suffering for it the next AM.  This style is traditionally served with minimal carbonation; I'm not a fan of that, and as such have carb'd it to a level common for most beers (2.4 volumes).  The extra carbonation gives this beer a lighter feeling than usual, and in combination with the flaked barley, creates a fine, long-lasting head that lasts the whole pint.

My sole disappointment is the absence of colour and relatively weak crystal character.  This beer will be brewed again (and again, and again).  But next time I'll double the crystal to give it a bit of a red colour and a bit more of that sweet crystal character.

Überschuss = Übergood

So the Überschuss European Ale is in the keg.  It turned out very well, especially considering I essentially pulled the recipe out of my ass.

The beer stayed in the primary for 3 weeks - AKA the time from brew-day to the return from my holiday.  After transferring to the keg I added 1 package of "bloomed" gelatin to help clear the beer, and put it in the fridge under ~13 PSI of CO₂.  One week later it was cleared and carbed.

The beer itself was darker than expected, and pours with a bubbly head that collapses over a few minutes into a thin, but creamy, lace that lasts the whole pint.  As you can see, my keggerator woes were not completely fixed by my modification to my kegging setup, meaning I still have a bit of building to do.

Taste-wise, it is a pleasant surprise.  Before you sip, you're hit by a bit of maltyness with a hint of floral hops.  Those characteristics continue on into the taste - a sweet, but not overpowering maltyness, with a nice balancing (but not strong) bitterness.  The flavour and aroma of noble hops is present, but again, not overpowering and nicely balanced with the maltyness of the brew.  At first it finished with an almost-unpleasant lingering bitterness.  That is already beginning to fade, and should be gone within a couple of weeks - likely about the same time I empty the keg.

This one will, without a doubt, be brewed again.