The Schitz! Barleywine Tasting

Tuesday was the one year anniversary of our cat, Schitzie's, death.

A little less than a year ago, I posted that I would brew up a big Barleywine in her memory. Well, it was brewed up quite a while ago, and has aged for almost a full year. Tuesday night, it was time to try it out.

I had tried The Schitz! Barleywine before Tuesday night though. However back then, the beer had only bulk aged for about a month in the secondary. It was extremely hot flavored, with a very prominent alcohol flavor. Thankfully, after almost a year the beer has really mellowed out.

The Schitz! turned out to be a pretty strange color. A medium brown color that has some strong red and orange highlights. This bottle, which was a large 16 ouncer, didn't have much head retention or carbonation in it. I'll need further research to see if this is just from this bottle, or for the entire batch of beer (oh no!).

The smell of The Schitz! was very malty and caramelly sweet with some fruity esters fairly prominent. The hop aroma and flavor have either aged out of the beer, or just were never present. There's no real way to know since I hadn't tried one till now. The flavor is very similar to the nose. Very malty with lots of caramel flavor and a bit of fruity esters. Overly not bad, but there should be more hop flavor for this to truly be considered an American Barleywine. It can still pretty much pass for an English Barleywine though.

This is still a very strong ale. At somewhere between 10-11% abv, this beer will kick in with just a quarter of it in you. I'll have to make sure to be careful around The Schitz!, she's definitely going to sneak up on me!

Weekend Recap

Twas a brew-filled weekend! Since there was no hockey this past weekend, it gave me plenty of time to move things around on the old pipeline.

To start things off, I needed to bottle The Schitze! Barleywine Friday night. I tried cold crashing it before bottling. With Cold Crashing, you basically chill the bulk beer down so that more yeast and sediment fall out of it. This supposedly helps clear the beer more effectively, so you'll have a clearer final product. Here's a picture, along with Boone helping out.


Once bottling was done, there was about half of a pint left that couldn't fit into a bottle. So I had my first taste test of The Schitze!! Holy Cow! That stuff will knock your socks off! The initial taste is pure goodness. Smooth, sweet, some hoppiness and velvety. Then the alcohol kicks you right in the mouth. It's harsh. It's like jet fuel. However, this is why this beer is going to be aged for almost a year. It's a super heavy beer. It's going to take some time for that alcohol heat to mellow out. That initial taste though... That is really going to picque my curiosity as this brew ages.


Since the Secondary was now empty, that meant I had room to rack my IPA to the secondary. I couldn't really get my hop bag to work, so I just dumped in my hop pellets. I ended up using an ounce of Cascade, and a quarter ounce of Centennial to dry hop. If nothing else, this brew should smell pretty good. Here's how the IPA looks today.




So, with the IPA out of the Primary Fermenter, it just meant I needed to brew something to fill it up. For a nice simple summer brew I decided to make a Belgian Witbier. Here's the recipe:

• 6.6 lbs of Malted Wheat Liquid Extract
• 4 oz of Flaked Wheat
• The Zest of 3 Oranges
• Some Crushed Coriander (I'm not sure how much, I only had seeds and crushed them by hand)
• .5 oz of Centennial at 60 minutes
• .25 oz. of Centennial at 20 minutes
• Wyeast Belgian Wit Yeast

Presently, the Wit is bubbling away at about 68 degrees F. I plan on trying to keep the temperature as regulated as possible for this brew. This Beer will only be in the Primary for about 2 weeks, and then it goes straight to the bottle. Wits are not clear beers (mostly) and don't stand up to long aging so there will be no reason to rack this beer to the Secondary.

Hockey and Brew

For now, I'm way too excited and nervous to post much on the Canes as they play against New Jersey in the first round. One minute they look great, the next they give the game away. It's too stressing to write about.

Brewing beer however, is not! You can't possibly stress too much about a process that takes weeks, can you? Well yeah, you definitely can, but thankfully I'm not right now. As of yesterday, The Schitz! Barleywine has reached it's Final Gravity of 1.022, and will just sit in the Primary for another week to clean up a bit. It may even drop another thousandth of a point of two. Then it's off to the Secondary for about 6 weeks. That all means that I will have an empty primary in a week. Well now I can't have that!

Jennifer's Cherry Wheat to the rescue! My wife (SWMBO) loves Sam Adams' Cherry Wheat, so I'm going to try to the best of my ability, plus some creative leeway, to clone it for her. This would normally fall under the American Wheat style of beer, but since it will have cherries in it, it's technically a fruit beer.

The recipe is as follows.

• 3.3 lbs of Wheat Liquid Malt Extract
• 3.3 lbs of Extra Pale Dry Malt Extract
• 3 lbs of pureed cherries
• .5 oz. Centennial hops at 60 min
• .25 oz Centennial at 20 min
• .25 oz. Centennial at 7 min
• 1 package of Wyeast 1010 American Wheat Yeast.

Calculating the Starting Gravity, as well as the final Alcohol content will be hard because of the added sugars from the cherries. The color would normally be very light, but with the addition of cherries, it may add some red, along with some darkening to the beer. Plus, as an added bonus, SWMBO will be out of town this weekend, so she won't even have to smell the brew as it's cooked. Yay for her!

Gravity Read

Just a quick update on The Schitze! Barleywine: I took a gravity measurement last night. It's specific gravity after a week and a half in the fermenter is 1.025. That's entirely not bad considering this brew started at a little over 1.100. Beersmith calculated that the target final gravity should be 1.022, so I am really close! There's still activity going on in the fermenter, so it's not done yet.

It really looks like making a starter helped a lot. Plus, the Imperial Blend from Wyeast seems to be getting the job done. Right now it's at 75% attenuation, but I'm betting that I can push this beer down to at least 1.020 and get 80% attenuation if it's in there for another week and a half.

Holy Crap am I Behind!

Wow. Have I ever been negligent. It's been 2 weeks since I've posted, and I still hadn't even covered the Toronto Trip. Lazy!

So here's how things went in Toronto. Tyler, here's your porn:

POW!

I like to call this one, "Get more bars in more places - AT&T"

Now, for other, non-Tyler porn pictures from the trip.

Here's the asshole of America, Buffalo, NY!

Back to better places.

Whew! All in all it was a legendary trip. Many memories were made, and I'm sure forgotten as soon as they happened!

Now onto the beer! The Schitze! Barleywine is now brewed and fermenting! Holy cow what a task. Here's the final recipe for The Schitze!

That's a ton of ingredients!

11 pounds of Dry Malt extract. 3 lbs were added at the beginning and 8 for a late extract addition for higher hop utilization.

2 pounds of Melanoiden Malt.

1 pound of Crystal 60L Malt.

1 pound of CaraMunich Malt.

1 pound of Dextrine.

8 oz of Hops.

Here's the hop schedule.

90 minutes: 2 oz of Cluster

30 minutes: .5 oz Cascade

20 minutes: .5 oz Cascade

15 minutes: .5 oz Cascade

10 minutes: .5 oz Cascade 1 oz Centennial

5 minutes: .5 oz Cascade

1 minute: .5 oz Cascade

The original gravity was around 1.100.

I've gotta say, I'm not a big fan of Dry Extract during the brewing process. I hadn't used it before yesterday, and I was not impressed. It clumps up and takes forever to dissolve into the water. That being said, I was brewing an extremely high gravity beer, and only using about 3.75 gallons of water to boil in, so it may have just reached its limit on how much extract it could hold. I'll try a few more lower-gravity brews with Dry extract before I give up on it.

Another addition I used yesterday was FermCaps. FermCaps is used to prevent boilovers in your boil, and blowoffs when you ferment. It worked great in the boil, and as far as I can tell it did its job in fermentation. However, this is what I came home to this afternoon.

There was actually beer coming out of the airlock. This is it cleaned up a bit. Since this was such a monster brew with a high gravity, and since I used a yeast starter, the Krausen almost caused a blowout. The high amount of activity in the fermenter also raised the temperature of the cooler I had it in. It fermented at about 70 degrees during the day today. About 5 degrees warmer than I wanted it to. However, I've got the temperature back down, so hopefully there won't be too many esters or perhaps off-flavors getting in there.

Tomorrow, if I have time, I'll try to post about the Canes' awesome success as of late.

Till then, Cheers eh!

Schitz Maritz!

Just a bit over three years ago, Schitzie (skit-zy) came into our lives as a very hungry and very skinny stray cat. We had seen her for about a week howling for anyone to give her some food. So we would put out food at night to help her gain some trust in us and give her some strength. Eventually, she adventured into the house, and decided she didn't ever want to leave.

Unfortunately, we lost her this past Monday due to a tumor on her large intestine. For about a month, she had been losing weight from not eating enough, so we took her to the Vet and found a pretty sizeable tumor in her abdomen. Two days later she was in surgery to remove the tumor and make sure it hadn't spread. When they opened her up everything looked like it should be easy; the tumor hadn't spread and was localized in one region, although it was pretty big. They successfully removed the tumor, however, Schitzie was too weak to keep up her fight, and her heart soon stopped.

The Schitz got her name because she loved people, but couldn't stand other cats. Unfortunately for her we have two others, and they loved to be around her. One would annoy the crap out of her just to make her mad, the other just liked being close. She also seemed to grow into her name and showed some neurotic behaviors.

This picture (Spacegirl Schitz!) was taken after she licked a few holes in her own thigh due to us being away for 4 days. She's also doing one of her favorite things, laying in a box.

When she first came to us, this is how she looked:

Not exactly the prettiest cat. She looked pretty rough around the edges and had some weird markings. Within six months she looked like this:

So she had gained a little weight (just a little). She loved to eat. She'd graze all day, try to eat any people food she could, and sleep as much as possible. That's just a recipe for a happy cat. Here's a few more from her time.

So to celebrate Schitzie's life I plan to put off the Citrus IPA, and brew a monster. I plan on brewing an American Barleywine. These beers are not easy undertakings. They are gigantic brews. Tons of Malt are required for these as they are very high in alcohol. They also have a ton of hops. Very strong bitterness and pretty strong on the aroma and flavor. Here's the recipe I've been throwing around now.

Malts:

15 lbs of Pale LME.

1 lb of Crystal 40L Malt.

1lb of Melanoiden Malt.

8 oz. of Crystal 60L Malt.

4 oz. of Carapils Malt.

4 oz. of Special Roast Malt.

I'll add 1 oz of Cluster and Centennial hops at 60 min. Then add .75 oz Cluster hops at 30, 1.25 oz Cluster at 20 min, 1 oz Cluster at 10 min, and 1 oz Centennial at 1 min.

I plan on using 2 packs of Wyeast Imperial Blend. I don't have the equipment to make a yeast starter yet, but it's on my shopping list.

When it's all said and done, this brew will cost over a hundred bucks, but will be worth it. If all goes to plan, it should be over 11% ABV and have over 80 IBU's. It will be aged for a long time. Almost a year. Yep. This brew is not going to be opened until March 9th 2010. It normally take barleywines at least that long to mellow out and get to their best in terms of taste. I plan on maybe sampling some here and there to see how it ages, but The Schitz! won't be tasted by anyone else until March 9th of next year.

Here's to you Schitzie! You're my girl. You're a good Schitz; you're the best Schitz in the world! Schitz Maritz!