Tuesday Musings

After doing some thinking, I've decided to put the Scottish Wee Heavy on hold for a bit. Instead, the next brew I make will be an American India Pale Ale.

If you read my first post, you saw that I really love a good hoppy beer. Well, after tasting my Amber and plugging in all the numbers into Beersmith, I've decided that the next two beers I've made probably won't be all that hoppy. At least to me. Like I said earlier, I was kinda brewing blind when it came to hops and how bitter they would make my beer. After I got Brewsmith and got the actual IBU's for my Amber(~27), I learned that 27 IBU's were not enough for me.

Neither the Bachelor Party Pale nor the Irish Red are any higher. So I decided to hold off on the Scotch Ale for a while. Not only that, but Scotch Ales are really more of a Winter beer. They're strong and hearty and wouldn't be very good on a hot summer's eve. I'll wait for the summer to brew that monster. By the time it gets cold, it'll be ready to drink.

So instead, I'll make an IPA. I need me some hops. And that's a real summer brew anyways. So as a new feature, I'm going to post the recipe on here in hopes that anyone with more knowledge may correct my mistakes before I make them! I made this brew at work today while on lunch, using the Beer Calculus feature on Hopville. I hadn't fined tuned this in Brewsmith, so this is just a rough draft of what this brew will be.

Malts:
6lbs 9oz of Light Liquid Malt Extract
1 lb of Caramel/Crystal Malt 10L
1 lb of Caramel/Crystal Malt 40L

Hops:
1 oz of Millenium Pellet hops boiled for 60 minutes.
1 oz of Centennial Pellet hops boiled for 20 minutes.
1 oz of Centennial Pellet hops boiled for 5 minutes.

Yeast:
I'll use Wyeast's American Ale II yeast. It should have a high enough attenuation for this brew to make it have a lower final gravity for the style.

I'll also dry hop this beer in the secondary fermenter. That just means I'll put some hops in a hopbag and place it in the beer in the secondary for about a week. This adds a lot of hop aroma to the beer. It doesn't add any bitterness to it. I'll use another ounce of Centennial Pellets for this.

Now, if I am really feeling adventurous(arrogant) about my beer, then I plan on adding a bit of fruitiness to this. The Centennial hops themselves offer a slight citrusy flavor to the beer, which helps a lot of IPA's balance the bittering effects of the beer. Like I said, if I'm really adventurous, I plan on adding about 1 ounce of orange zest to the boil with about 10 minutes left in the boil. I also plan on throwing about 2 ounces of orange peel into the secondary while I dry hop in the secondary.

I have no clue how this will come out. I have no clue if it will work. I have no clue if I'm just going to ruin a good beer. But it sounds interesting, and it may be a pretty cool beer at the end of it all. We'll see. In about 3 months.

So there we have it. Holding off on the Scottish Wee Heavy for several months, and going ahead with something lighter to drink in the summer months.

Let me know what you think!

Weekend Update

(Cue SNL's Weekend Update music)



So another busy weekend passes us by. Plenty to tell.



First, the Canes seem to be on a roll lately. At least a roll of beating crappier teams than themselves. They've now beaten the Isles, Lightning, and the Avalanche for further muddle the Eastern Conference Playoff race.

Next, the American Amber is finished and ready to drink! So I drank it! It's really not bad. Since it was my first recipe of jut throwing something together, I wasn't thinking it was going to be all that good. First of all, it's really light. In taste that is. I didn't really add enough malt to the brew when I first started with it, so it's kinda weak (maxed at about 3.5% ABV) and I probably could've added more hops to it as well. But since it was my first brew, I really had no where to start. I now know that if I have 28 IBU's (the higher the number the more bitter the beer, and 28 is not high). I think it was calculated out to have only 120 calories or so in each brew. That's what you can call a lite beer! So this can be my Bud Lite of my homebrews. You can pound these and never feel a bit of the alcohol, but it tastes a hell of a lot better than Bud.

I also bought Beersmith this weekend. It is awesome! You can create all of your own brews in this program. It's got pretty much any kind of ingredient you could possibly want. It calculates the expected color, ABV, bitterness, calories, original and final gravities, and a ton of other useful tools. You can send your water off to get tested by your city, plug in the numbers that you receive from them, and it will tell you how to adjust your brew accordingly to make better beer, based on your water. It has about 400 different beer profiles that you can match up to your recipe, so that you know that you are making the correct "style" of beer. It's an awesome tool. I've spent hours on it just messing around with recipes.


Finally, I bottled Tyler's Bachelor Party Pale Ale this weekend. It actually looks identical to the Amber, so thankfully I had some different color bottle caps for it. Hope you like Carolina Blue, Tyler. They didn't have Maple Leaf Blue. With the emptying of the Secondary Fermenter came the refilling of it with my Irish Red. It looks so awesome! You can really see the red coloring in it. It does look as though it may come out a little lighter in color when it's in a pint glass, but we'll wait and see. It's promising to be a very clear beer I believe.

Busy, Busy, Weekend!

So I really need to update the blog more often. Far too much happened over this past weekend and week for me to have not put up a blog update. We'll start with the Canes.


All last week and this past weekend the Canes were on a Western conference road trip. They visited Vancouver, San Jose, and Phoenix. All of which had very late puck drops. I missed the first two and was slightly disappointed we lost to Vancouver (we are streak breaking team! The Canucks had lost 8 straight.) and was amazed that we beat the Sharks in a Shootout. Would have loved to have stayed up till 12:30 to watch that one. We then went on to man-handle the Coyotes. 7-2. Destroyed a crappy team. Hooray! At least we got 4 points out of 6 on a road trip where we easily could have only gotten 1 or 2.


Next up, the brew's news!


The Porter has come of age. It's at the point now where it is perfectly carbonated. The flavors have come together and it tastes great. No more flatness. I have read that 3 weeks is the magic number for letting your beers carb. The Porter came in at 19 days. Now, it'll only get better with time. Now, just another week and a half or so for the Amber and it'll be good to drink too.


I also got to brew my next beer on Saturday! A nice Irish Red. Unfortunately I didn't have the foresight to brew this about 3 weeks ago in order for it to be ready for St. Patty's day. Here's the ingredients.

• 6.6 lbs of Light Malt Extract.
• 1 lbs of Crystal 80L Malt.
• 1 oz. Perle hops.
• 1oz. Mt. Hood Hops.
• 1 packet of Wyeast London Ale Yeast.

Here's a picture of the Wort right after I had steeped the 80L malt. It's nice and red, just the color I'm hoping the final product will be.

Along the brew lines, we went and took a tour of the new Brewery in Raleigh, Lonerider Beers. It's a real small micro-brewery that just opened shop a month ago. They've got some good brews on tap already, a Hefeweizen and a real robust Porter. I'm not big on Hefe's or wheat beers, they're too sweet for me, but the Porter was very good. It's very strong and robust, almost a Stout in color and flavor. Definitely go a check them out if you have the chance. Here's a few pictures that the SWMBO took of the brewery.

And finally, Boone, our dog, and I went hiking out at Umstead Park on Sunday. It was overly warm so I decided to get rid of the dog's extra energy and take him for a 3 or so mile hike. Here's some pics from the day.

Taste Test! And Weekend Recap

Twas a very busy weekend around these parts.

First, I bottled the Amber. Some of the bottles I used were old Newcastle glasses. Newcastle uses clear glass bottles for some reason. This normally lets a lot of light onto the beer and can give beer that skunky flavor it sometimes has. Fortunately for me, my beer is hidden away in darkness, so it shouldn't be affected too much by that. However, the clear glass bottles allow me to get a good look on how the beer really looks. It actually looks very light in color. Not quite as amber as I had hoped. More Golden in color.

With the bottling of the Amber, came the racking of Tyler's Pale into the Secondary. This is going to be a fun brew. It's almost yellow in color, mainly because of all the suspended yeast. Once it all settles out, this is going to be a very light beer.

Next came the taste test of the Porter, just prematurely.

I now give you: The Pink Circle Porter!

So, taste results: Well, first, it's not carbonated quite yet. It was still too early to really taste it. It made the nice pssshht sound when I popped the top, but it just hasn't aged long enough for the CO2 to really get pushed back into the liquid and carbonate it. Apart from the lack of carbonation, it tastes just like a porter. It's very malty with a slight roasted malt flavor. It's not overly hoppy but it's got a nice bit of bitterness on the back of the tongue. I plan on opening one every few days or so to see when it ages. Once it gets to the right amount of time being conditioned, it'll be ready for the public.

The Canes also won on Saturday. They came out like a team possessed in the first period and held on through the rest of the game to shut out the Atlanta Thrashers 2-0. It was a very fun game to be at, especially in the 1st period. If the Canes can play like they did in the 1st, there's no reason they couldn't make the playoffs and even make it past the 1st round. I just hope they can put that effort in consistently.

There was also some other game that went on on Sunday night as well. So it was a busy weekend.

Here's some random bird pictures I took while distracted from cleaning.

Changing Winds

So the Canes shutout the Leafs last night 2-0. I'm just glad they ended their losing streak before they meet the Pens tonight.



But the bigger story (at least it's big in these parts), is the snow we received last night and today. About five inches fell on us in total. That's a lot for Raleigh, especially since we haven't had any snow in about four years. It did provide me with some great opportunities to take some good pictures. Let's check some out.





























And lastly, here's an update on the brews. The Amber is in the secondary fermenter, and the Porter is in bottles, actually looking very clear, much more so than I expected.

For the Birds

The Canes (Can'ts?) lost to Buffalo yesterday, to no one's surprise. However Sabres' goaltender Ryan Miller did stand on his head for most of the 3rd period Saturday. It's good that the Hurricanes on are a roadtrip this week. It means they have that much more time to win before I show up at their next home game with a bag over my head.


The last time Carolina had a 5-game losing streak was way back with our old coach. I mean new coach. Our current coach. Back in 2002-03, we had two 5-game losing streaks and one 6-game losing streak to end the season on. It seems like Mo is well on his way back into form.


On a brighter note, I bottled my Porter yesterday. Now, in just 3 weeks I'll have some nice home brew to keep my mind distracted from the Canes. Bottling my Porter made room in the Secondary for my Amber Ale. It's beautimous. Check it out.



I'll leave with some pics of some birds. We got a new bird feeder the other day, mainly just so I can take some pictures around the house if nothing else.

Brew Update!

Porter:

The Porter is currently in its second day in the Secondary Fermenter. Things are going well. The past couple of days I've been able to see little clumps of yeaties and other goodies going up and down as the brew ferments off the last bit of sugars. It's definitely not as exciting to watch as a Primary Ferementaion in a Carboy, but it's still fun.


As you can see in the second picture, there's a nice layer of dead yeast and proteins forming at the bottom of the carboy. This was my main reason for even using the Secondary Fermenter to begin with, just the clearing effects that it will have.


American Amber

My American Amber is coming along nicely as well and is bubbling vigorously. I can't wait to get it out of the bucket and into the Carboy to see it's color. It's promising to be much lighter than the Porter(being almost black), but I'd really like to see through it and see some light. I can't wait for the weekend! Here's a pic of the bubbler on the Primary.