Homebrewin' thread

I don't have the refrigeration necessary to lager a beer, which irked me to no end until I had the realization one day that none of my favorite beers to drink is a lager. I suddenly wondered why I was getting so worked up about something I had been subconsciously avoiding anyway.

One exception: my favorite non-craft beer, Shiner Bock, is a lager, and when I got into the homebrewing one of my goals was to reproduce the flavor of Shiner while giving the gravity a kick in the tuckus. There are clone recipes out there, but they're lager recipes. I could still do it at ale temps, I guess, but I feel like I'd be missing the point.

Question: why now after almost 15 years? What inspired you?

not harder, but the fermentation is around 40°F for 2 months or so (instead of room temp. for a week or two) and uses a different species of yeast.

good luck with the fruit beer, sounds yummy.

You guys, I'm going to be joining the Homebrew Club soon!  My brother did very well at buying Christmas presents off the list I provided for him, and now I have a kit from Brooklyn Brewery for making jalapeno saison.  The box says it's a perfect summer beer, so it should be great for this surprisingly cold New Jersey winter.  Heh.  I'm not sure when I'm going to get it started, but the instructions on the box seem simple enough...

Yay! Wilford Brimley Explosion!!!!! got a Chocolate Maple Porter kit from Brooklyn Brewery, as well as a book of beer recipes, so I think our output is going to increase this coming year.

You can do eeet!

Ladies and germs, let's make beer.

Belgian Tripel IPA. Here's the recipe.

It's inspired by the Green Flash Le Freak, but it's not a clone recipe.

Brew day went pretty well. I had one boil over, so that made a mess but didn't really hurt anything. Everything else went fine.

Just brewed a stout over the weekend, recipe is as follows (pardon the cut and paste formatting):

Ingredients Amt Name Type # %/IBU
13 lbs Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain 1 81.2 %
1 lbs Brown Malt (65.0 SRM) Grain 2 6.2 %
1 lbs Roasted Barley (300.0 SRM) Grain 3 6.2 %
8.0 oz Oats, Flaked (1.0 SRM) Grain 4 3.1 %
8.0 oz White Wheat Malt (2.4 SRM) Grain 5 3.1 %
2.00 oz Sterling [8.00 %] - Boil 60.0 min Hop 6 51.5 IBUs
1.0 pkg Safale American (DCL/Fermentis #US-05) [50.28 ml] Yeast 7 -

My measured OG came in a little under at 1.064, I have to figure out where my efficiency fall off is, but I'm still estimating that it will be about 7.1% ABV when all is said and done.  Also, the color is more of a dark brown rather than black, I should have entered the recipe in Beersmith before buying the grains to adjust that, but oh well.

I'm considering adding a bit of cold brewed coffee at bottling time to go for that Founder's Breakfast Stout style, we'll see if I actually follow through with that.

Finally found time to bottle my Belgian Tripel IPA. I sampled it and liked it. Very citrusy and bitter, as expected. First real taste in 2-3 weeks.

My buckets are lonely again, and I've got a $75 gift certificate to the local brew shop burning a hole in my pocket. I definitely want to do another stout, but I loved my last one so much that I need to find a different angle on it. I see a lot of cherry stouts kicking around Brewtoad which sound just fabulous to me. Maybe I can pick a good one.

In our case, they came with the bottles. I didn't buy them, but the person who did was looking for more of those brown 750ml bottles on Trade Me (the NZ version of Ebay), and bought them off somebody. Typically in this country, you'd acquire the crates with those bottles.

Basically, there is a (probably diminishing) tradition in this country of being able to buy a crate of a dozen 750ml brown bottles of certain basic beer (so think the NZ equivalent, at least price and availability-wise, of Bud, and local versions of the same) from the pub or bottlestore (so, the liquor store, but as for a long time, you could not purchase any alcohol in a supermarket, there were many that served the local populations beer rather than spirit needs). Then, when you were finished, you could take the crate and empty bottles back and exchange it for another crate of beer at a now somewhat lower price. So  you could acquire the crates and bottles here by just buying the beer and not returning the crate when you've emptied all the bottles, which is why they're around enough for someone to sell them (but it's obviously more cost-effective to buy empties if you can). 

Ba dum'

Seriously though, sounds pretty good. I usually don't go for the lighter fruit beers, but I do love blood orange.

Another brew day in the bucket. Settled on a partial mash clone of the Southern Tier Choklat, a beer I tried for the first time last month and really loved. Intensely chocolatey.

Brew day proceeded without mishap, and now I will focus on the anxiety of getting this big ass beer to ferment. OG at 1.102. Hoping to land around 1.020.

The Bestie Blood Orange Ale that Wilford Brimley Explosion!!!!! and his bff made (with tiny bits of help from me) has turned out very well. It's a lot more hop-forward than the last two, but the hops don't linger, and there's some nice citrusy notes at the end. I will try and snap a picture on the next bottle I have. Unfortunately we only netted 9 and one cracked weirdly while bottle-aging and leaked everywhere.

Planning on bottling my Southern Tier Choklat clone sometime this week. I tried to push the gravity as best I could, but couldn't get the damn thing higher than 9.2% ABV (no slouch, but considering it's based on a 10.5% beer, and a 10.7% clone recipe, a little disappointed).

I really wanted to try some fruit in there, but I still wanted to taste the original concoction as well, so I ended up buying another bucket and splitting the batch. Now it's half chocolate stout, half raspberry chocolate stout. In the bottles this week, first taste in 2-3 weeks after that.

I just bought a homebrew kit. I am intimidated, yet excited!