Brewing Weekend 9/21 Edition

Already got the blonde kegged! Killed it at work today, and decided to come home, and keg the blonde. Talking myself into going back down there and getting some dry hops into the IPA, but I'm not feeling like pulling out the scale and the hops at the moment. HA!

 

going to try using that danstar belle saison yeast for the first time, doing a simple extract brew and using kohatu hops to see how they turn out. might use a small bit of magnum for bittering as well.

 

Doing a Dubbel to give away at Xmas.

 

Dry hopped my Harvest Ale with Homegrown Chinook, Zeus and Cascade tonight.

I am going to rack either my lambic or my flanders red on top of 10 pounds of tart cherries at some point this weekend. I will be tasting both to see which one could be improved more by the cherries.

 

Welp, got the ESB brewed and in the ferm chamber. Came out pretty well, I decided to double crush half the MO to see if that affected efficiency...and it did. I was sitting at 75% where my previous brews were around 65-68%. I think Midwest has their grain mills set too wide, and my guess is that they're doing it to extend the life of the mill. Unfortunately, this means you need to double crush all the grain. So, if anyone orders from Midwest, ask them to double crush it (not that they will), because otherwise you may be disappointed.

Anyway, had a good brew day, good luck to those brewing later on this weekend!

 

A rye table beer with 1/2# of hops in it

 

Back when I crushed at MW I always doubled it. But, consistency was still an issue. I bought a mill and have been 75% consistently since then. The mill pays for itself after two full sacks of base grain. Food for thought.

 

Absolutely buying my own down the road, I just have a limited budget, and other equipment is higher on the list. For instance, the next buy is an oxygenation "system".

I absolutely hate waiting in line to crush my grain...would be so much better to grab and go.

 

Oxygen system is a definite...I got my mill first, but wish I got the oxygen system earlier.

 

Got grains steeping for an Oktoberfest right now.

 

Went with the American Brown. Here's a picture of the freshly picked (during the mash) Cascades ready to go into today's wort.

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Brewing two batches today. First was a tweaked version of my honey brown ale, this time to get maple syrup in secondary.

Second beer which has taken longer is an imperial sweet potato pecan brown ale. It's been a lot of work today roasting and peeling 5 lbs of sweet potatoes and toasting and crushing a pound of pecans, then dealing with well over an hour of lautering that mess of a mash. Smells fantastic though.

 

Managed to get my PVW RIS kegged, and oh my goodness is it tasty. You can't tell it's 100 IBU's. 16 weeks old between brewing, fermentation and aging on some Pappy Van Winkle.. I can't wait to get it in the kegerator and carbed up to bottle it.

Kegged my single hop Mosaic Blonde on Friday, and man.. thats a pretty tasty beer. Simple and easy.

Checked my IPA in there too, and can't wait to kick a keg to get this online and dry hopped. It's absolutely delicious.. By far my best hopping schedule to date, and I consider myself pretty good and getting a hop schedule together that works well.

 

I just brewed up another batch of saison on tuesday using belle saison, I liked the results the first time around and I'm looking forward to this batch.

( ps , this yeast eats everything in its path. )

Cheers!

 

Could I get some more details on the recipe please? There are local sweet potatos here that are only grown in this region and I would like to try them in a holiday beer....

 

Basically treated it like a typical pumpkin ale. For a six-ish gal batch, took five pounds raw sweet potatoes, baked them pretty hot for a long time until they were a little overcooked so that they would start to caramelize, then perled and mashed them up to throw into the mash. Weight of the mashed potatoes after cooking and peeling was a little over 3 lbs. We then toasted a pound of raw pecans, soaked on paper to get out some oils, and crushed the pecans and threw those in mash too.

Half this batch (3 gals) we bottled plain. This is a big beer, came out about 9.5% alcohol, it's sweet despite attenuating very low. Mouthfeel is great and the sweet potato and pecan flavor is there but is subtle. The malts show through a lot more than the adjuncts except for the effect on mouthfeel. (Also used a pound of wheat in recipe to counteract effect of pecan oils on head retention). Good beer but I wish I'd used a bit more chocolate malt (I used 1.5-2 percent or something) to make it more like a porter and less like a malty brown ale.

The other 3 gals I added a vanilla bean, two cinnamon sticks, and a tiny amount of nutmeg (like 1/16 tbsp maybe) to. It's bottle conditioning but at bottling time it tasted great, better than the unsliced version. My recommendation would be to definitely use the sweet potatoes in a darker beer (porter/stout) where they can best contribute to mouthfeel or use them with spices to bring out the flavor.