About

Posts by :

Sticke Düsseldorf Altbier

Recipe , , , , 0 Comment

My brother and I got each other into brewing a few years ago. We somehow discovered it at the same time (while he was living in Kentucky and I was in Oregon) and over a thanksgiving break spent together we decided to brew up a pumpkin sliced ale. It was delicious.

Since then, we’ve staying touch a lot better, often using our mutual homebrewing hobbies as an excuse to chat. Over the years we’ve both brewed dozens of beers at home and have shipped most of them across the country to each other and have brought them to share whenever we meet up during the holidays.

A few months ago he was telling me about his homebrew club in Lexington that has an Iron Chef-like competition once a year. The idea is that you can brew any type of beer but it has to include a certain secret ingredient (okay, not so secret). He said it was anything from a certain type of spice of fruit to type of yeast or malt or even sometimes a wacky ingredient like marshmallows. The point is, each year it was always inspiring to see his club-mates’ imaginations run wild as they did their best to highlight the secret ingredient in a unique recipe.

Then it his us. Why don’t we do that?! The it his us again. Why don’t we do the inverse of that too?!

We both immediately thought of these two brew-off ideas at the same time.

The First: We’d brew both come up with two ingredients each and have to incorporate those four ingredients into our beers. Aside from those ingredients, the recipes could be (and would be) drastically different. While one secret ingredient sounded neat, we figured four would be that much neater.

The Second: We’d brew the same exact recipe. We’d had so many of each other’s brews over the years, we though it’d be cool to find out how our brew systems and methods directly affect a recipe. While it’d be cool if the resulting beers tasted identical, in my opinion it’d be just as interesting if they tasted a bit different, so from now on I could say, “Oh yeah, this definitely tastes like a Jason Helms beer,” and know what I’m talking about (and vice versa).

I’ve brewed both of the beers already, but this post is just about the Sticke Alt.

Back to the beginning. We decided that I would come up with a hop and a vegetable/fruit, and he’d come up with a malt

http://www.germanbeerinstitute.com/Sticke_Alt.html

Get Sticke…

SMaSH CASH Pale Ale

Experiment , , 0 Comment

Citra, Simcoe, and Amarillo

I was listening to an old Basic Brewing Radio podcast interview with Michael Tonsmeire (9/7/06) in which he single-hopped a few small batch brews to better understand some new, popular hops. James Spencer and usual suspects went through each beer one by one and did a 45 minute tasting notes session.

It was remarkable to learn about how each of these hops varieties changes the profile of the same exact base recipe pale ale and how each of them were so different from each other. Flavors like “jolly rancher” & “smarties” were thrown out there, which was surprising to me because I’ve never tasted either of those flavors in any IPA I’ve ever had, and I’d tasted beer with these hops dozens of times.

Inspired and intrigued by Tonsmeire’s experiment, I decided to do a similar one (okay…pretty much the exactly the same one). The reasons I went through with it are as follows:

Screen Shot 2013-04-16 at 3.14.03 PM1) I wanted to taste those bad boys myself! They sounded delicious on that podcast and combined with the fact that I rarely do a simple, pale ale recipe, I wanted to see how a simple SMaSH (single malt and single hop) beer turned out on my system.

2) Also, the podcast was recorded 6 1/2 years ago. That’s a long time. Six or so harvests ago in fact. So I thought it’d also be interesting to see how much those hops flavors (or even just the perception of those hop profiles) have changes over the last few years.

3) I’ve been wanting to do a real experiment ever since I started brewing–especially after listening to all of those BBR/BYO collaborative experiments over the years. So I figured this would be a pretty straightforward, simple experiment to conduct. My biggest point of emphasis will be to control the variables throughout the entire process. I brewed all three of these beers within 36 hours of each other, used all the same milling, mashing, boiling, hopping (other than the type of hops, obviously), pitching, and fermenting methods and measured just about the same exact results from each (gravities, pH, etc.). Very excited about how close these will be, as far as the base beer is concerned, and different they’ll be at the same time.

4) I love hops. I’m not ashamed of it. And yes, I am located on the West Coast and yes, I do love IPAs. Simmer down. I really just wanted to find three hops I knew I liked and see if they’d hold up on their own, so I went with: Citra, Amarillo, and Simcoe hops (CASH).

5) Finally, I hope to blend these beers to make the perfectly flavored hoppy pale ale. I’m brewing up 2.5 gallons of each, and after dry hopping I’m planning on bottling a gallon of each (10 bottles of each), and then taking thorough tasting notes in each type of beer. Then I’ll spend some time doing a bit of blending with the bottled beers. After that, I’ll do a bit of blending with the remaining 1.5 gallons of each beer and then bottle it up. In the end, I’ll have bottled perfection.

…I hope.

I designed each one to have 42 IBUs, even though the alpha acids were drastically different, but I’m hoping to recreate the same bitterness in each, that way I can detect the differences in perceived bitterness between the hops more easily.

Anyway, I tried to keep the recipe as simple as possible: one malt, a little sugar, one hop and a simple, clean yeast (US-05). This one’s all about the results. Can’t wait.

More Experiment Info Here…

Dia De Los Muertos Chocolate Chile Porter

Recipe , , , , 0 Comment

Sugar Skull

For the most part, I brew by myself. I find it really therapeutic to organize all my ingredients and prep my kitchen and then spend the better part of an evening measuring, mashing, boiling, hopping, cooling, racking and pitching. I’ll usually listen or watch something random like fantasy football podcasts, Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart during the work and read something during the waiting periods of the brew day (latest favorites: Ready Player One, World War Z, and of course Stan Hieronymus’ For The Love of Hops).

Don’t get me wrong, I love brewing with other people too, especially when they’re interested in learning about all the nerdy science that goes into it. But I’ve also had some negative experiences brewing with others. This usually happens when they either want to do things their way (and ONLY their way), or they start out interested and after 30 minutes they get distracted by some shiny object and start texting or something while I finish up our brew day and end up cleaning everything by myself. Fun times.

So when my wife said she wanted to design a beer with me, I was a little hesitant. We were reading in our living room when out of the blue she said she wanted to make a Dia De Los Muertos-inspired beer. In was surprised, but didn’t let on as I asked her to continue.

She then went into a long speech about the history of the holiday and how we might successfully create a beer in celebration of the day.

Before I could walk her through my hesitations of brewing together, she already started going into the different ingredients and methods she wanted to use to brew the best beer possible.

I decided right there and then I’d get out of both our way and just do my best to provide her with the resources to make this dream beer of hers a reality. We sat down, I opened up some brewing software, and we designed our Dia De Los20130303-211118.jpg Muertos Chocolate Chile Porter recipe.

We (she) knew we wanted to incorporate a mole sauce-type flavor into it, which means chile peppers, chocolate, nuts and a LOT of spices. In fact, most mole sauces include 30+ ingredients. No joke. We also knew we wanted it to be a big beer (high ABV) for two reasons: 1) So it would age well and we could start drinking it around late October (when Dia De Los Muertos is usually celebrated in the US), and 2) Because we wanted to design it to be shared amongst friends and family during all of the fall/winter holidays.

Honestly, by the end of that evening, I was more excited about that beer than I was about any of the other beers I already had fermenting. Two days later, not only had we bought all of the ingredients already, but we’d already finished brewing.

That was fast. I’ve had beers I’d dreamed about, planned out and didn’t brew for months. This one went from the drawing board to the fermenter in two days. Wow.

Long story short: brewing with others can be even more rewarding than brewing by yourself. Even if you love your alone time and love brewing alone, people can sometimes surprise you.

Thanks, Hannah.

Check out the recipe here…

Cascade IPA Tasting

Tasting , , , , 0 Comment

20130303-185116.jpg

 

I created this beer as a simple experiment. I wanted to find out how good my year-old grains were, as well as find out how bigger/tasty my this trash bag full of hops my friend Tyler gave me was.

Turns out: both were delicious.

———-

Appearance: Deep orange-auburn color. Quite clear. Decent head retention-thick at first dissipates slowly throughout. (Remembering that I didn’t stir the priming sugar very well. Could be that I won’t have very consistent carbonation or I just need to let these continue bottle conditioning for a bit.)

Aroma: Light and floral. Sweet fruits; vague cherry notes as it begins to warm. Not a hop bomb on the nose at least. Sweet and citrusy. Mainly grapefruit.

Flavor: Lotta classic hop flavors with a very fruity edge. Orange, lemon, grapefruit with some grassy notes in there that move into a pleasant pine-y flavor. “A very light, smooth evergreen flavor.” -SWMBO. Surprisingly complex hop profile for a single-hop beer. Very bitter, but not overwhelmingly so. Almost tart in the bitterness profile. Slightly astringent aftertaste, possibly due too high fermentation temps.

20130303-185147.jpgMouthfeel: Light and dry. Very smooth. Not carbonated enough. (Again, could just be the lack of stirring around the priming sugar in the bottling bucket enough.)

Overall: A crisp, dark, refreshing IPA. Happy with how this turned out, especially since I had not idea what to expect with these hops and very old malts. Not exactly my most favorite IPA ever, but I’d be more than happy to pay $5 for this at a brewpub. I’ll stick most of these in the fridge and see how well they age. The astringency might mellow out after awhile.

 

 

 

 

Bag End Bitter

Recipe , , , 0 Comment

Bag End Bitter LabelI love having a 50 lb bag of American 2-row around. Got one during the holidays from my in-laws (luckiest man alive, I know), and it’s been such a blessing to be able to just brew whenever I want to, rather than having to make my whole recipe, and order all of the ingredients online, or drive an hour to pick them up. Living in the mountains is great, but not exactly the most convenient for brewing small batches as home.

This was a beer I’d been wanting to brew for a while, but it was also a test-batch type brew. I’ve been loving pale ales most and more as of late, and English pale ales even more. The subtle hops, the malty flavor; they’re just so balanced. Love ‘em. (However, to be completely honest, I didn’t realize Extra Special/Strong Bitter was a type of English Pale Ale until I started researching this brew. Go me.)

Mt. Shasta herself!So I wanted four things out of this brew: 1) to brew a simple, balanced ESB, 2) to put my new bag of 2-row to the test by designing a recipe that was almost entirely composed of it, 3) to test out my new corona-type grain mill, and 4) to brew with my friend, Jorge, who was in town for the weekend and had never brewed before.

A multifaceted brew day, I know.

I got my ingredients in order, and decided that even though I wanted a simple ale, I didn’t quite want a SMaSH brew (single malt and single hop), so I threw in a small amount of Belgian Aromatic malt, to give it a maltier taste, darker look. And two things regarding the hops (a brew of lists apparently: 1) I overestimated the IBU’s and finishing hops a little because I was using some of my older hops and while they’d been in the freezer for a few months, it’d still been a few months, and 2) I was thinking about dry-hopping this guy, but from most ESBs I’ve had, they’re not exceptionally aromatic, so I went simple on it and skipped the dry-hopping.

And after the majority of a day spent romping around on a frozen lake (see notes section for pic), we went to work on the brew.

[I also use grams to measure hops, instead of ounces because they're much more accurate. I'll probably keep doing that with small batches like this.]

See That Recipe…

1 2 3 4 5 6