Howdy!
I’ve added a new section called “Definitions and explanations”. The purpose of this is to try and keep things accessible. As Mikey and I learn more and more about the brewing process, we’ll discuss it and write it up. Where possible, we’ll explain things in the article, but sometimes it doesn’t fit into the article, or if it’s been explained in a previous post we may not go into too much.
Feel free to refer to the new section.
-Chas
Thomas Coopers Selection Heritage Lager 1
Just over a month ago we did Chas’s first brew. It was a full 23L batch of Thomas Coopers Selection Heritage Lager.
Fermentation was only eight days, a fair bit quicker than the ones in the carboys. That’s more to do with the ability to be able to take samples easy and do gravity readings. While the brew is in the carboys you just need to wait long enough to be sure.
Original gravity was 1.038 and final gravity was 1.006. So that should be 4.2% which is a bit on the lighter side for a lager. That said I don’t think it made much of a difference.
So how was this first lager? Okay is the short answer. Not necessarily a good lager as it was just the hop malt can and a heap of dextrose.
There’s some alright aroma. But overall it’s a bit rough and ordinary. Some good flavours but no real body. Gets dry at the middle that keeps getting stronger, which isn’t great. Bitterness builds but it’s nothing special. A pretty basic but drinkable beer.
BUT, then we allowed the beer to condition for another week. That made a noticeable improvement. The whole lot started working better. Hop flavour wasn’t as harsh, malt felt more a part of the beer than on the side, and some of that roughness dropped away.
By no means did this go from okay to great, but more from okay to nice. And that’s really all we wanted from the first big batch beer.
Updated 29 May 2013: Added in the photo and the gravity readings.
-Mikey
Hi everyone,
So as I mentioned in my last few posts, I have a juicer, and I have a bit of extra malt. So why not try throwing some malt into some apple juice and see what happens?
I went down to my local market and found a pretty good deal on organic juicing apples, i.e. apples that aren’t pretty enough to sell as eating apples. I bought a hell of a lot – about 7 kilograms!
I had read in various places that you get about 1 litre of juice from 1-2 kilograms of apples, so I thought that this would be enough for about 4 or 5 litres of juice. Unfortunately I was pretty wrong and only got about 2 litres. I’ve since found out that this ratio works better for apple pressing, which is a much more efficient method of extracting juice. Using a juicer like I have tends to lose a lot of juice to the pulp it creates.
I’m not going to go out and buy a juice press, but next time I may try squeezing out the pulp. We’ll see.
Anyway, after cutting up a whole bunch of apples and juicing them, I wasn’t left with the amount of juice I thought I’d get. So from there, things began to turn into an un-hopped apple beer rather than a malted cider.
I set my 2 litres of juice to boil and added a cup of golden light liquid malt extract. The hot break was huge on this one; the pot was only about a third full, and it still nearly boiled over! Once that was under control, I let it boil for 15 minutes while I did some cleaning.
After the boil, I let the bottle sit in a sink full of ice water for 10 minutes, emptied the sink, and then filled it up again for another 10 minute bath.
Once this wort was in the carboy, I topped it up with about 2 litres of water – so this batch is going to be 4 litres in total.
Two litres juice, one cup malt, two litres water
The yeast i used was an SN9 wine yeast. It’s what I had on hand, but, considering there’s malt in there, I probably should have gone and used an ale yeast. That’s something to experiment with later.
The wort was tasty. It wasn’t overwhelmingly apple-y or beer-y, but had good hints of each. So I’m confident I’ll get something interesting out this.
The OSG was 1.028, which is a little lower than I would have liked. As a lot of that sugar is fructose, I should be able to get a final gravity pretty close to 1, so that’s promising. Alcohol content should be around 4% after bottling.
I’d like to see if I can push the alcohol content a bit higher, so I might add some dextrose next time. Of course the other option is adding more malt or juice, but, assuming the mixture of flavours is good, I don’t want to upset this balance. Dextrose won’t alter the flavour.
Assuming this turns out tasty, I’ll also look at hopping it, which will make it a proper beer.
So we’ll give this a week and see what happens!
-Chas
Choc coffee porter
Since the first brew I did back in January this year I’ve been thinking about changes to the recipes of the kits. The most appealing was to have a coffee porter. That dream has come true.
The base is the Brew Smith Chocolate Paradise Porter. But there is a fair amount of coffee in it. So, I’ve dubbed the beer “Chocolate Paradise OMG The Coffee!! Porter”.
We made this on Sunday 28 April. As a result I can’t remember exact details on where we did the following steps. Hopefully Chas can clear up a few points.
Even without changing the porter base, a change was made. For the grain pot we used a grain bag. This meant no grain all over the place when adding in or pouring into the carboy. Plus it meant we could squeeze the liquid out of the grain a lot better. And get more of the flavour into the beer.
While the wort was bubbling away, after the hot break, coffee was added. I used my 8 cup percolator to brew the coffee. Was a mix of coffee grains, so don’t ask what coffee. Given this is a small batch of beer, that’s a lot of coffee.
While wanting to make a coffee porter I also wanted to up the alcohol. So a full cup of soft brown sugar was also thrown into the mix. That was about 100 or 150 grams of sugar. Will confirm later.
So, added coffee and added sugar. Petty bold. Because we had the grain bag we might have not used the mesh sieve when pouring the wort into the carboy. That means we forgot to remove the hops. Hopeful Chas remembers if we did or not. If not, this might be a very hoppy, and cloudy, beer.
The brew sat fermenting for two weeks at about 22 degrees Celsius. That’s probably too warm for this type of ale. But I’m pretty sure the fermentation process was done.
Gravity reading was a high 1.080 for original and dropped to a final reading of 1.020 when bottled, on Saturday 11 May.
The sample we took at bottling was very rich in coffee flavour. Plus the typical dark sweetness of the brown sugar was there. This beer is going to get a minimum of four weeks conditioning, some maybe twice as long. That should allow the porter to really come back up while the coffee mellows out.
I’m hoping the brown sugar fully fermented in the carboy. I really don’t want any exploding bottles. Time will tell if this is a success or not.
So I ordered a home brew kit from Australian Home Brewing. I love ordering stuff online. I don’t get much mail apart from bills, so it’s great to come home to a package on the doorstep; this is even better when the package contains home brew supplies!
Anyway, with much excitement, I opened my package, and, to my horror, found that the liquid malt container had broken in transit! There was malt everywhere throughout the box, a total sticky mess.
Liquid malt everywhere!
Thankfully malt cleans up pretty easily with hot water (there’s a tip), so the other contents cleaned up pretty well. Unfortunately much of the malt extract was lost.
These things happen I suppose, but of course it’s disappointing to open a fresh box of home brew supplies to find your malt all over the place, and the rest of your ingredients all sticky. When I moved it, some of the extract managed to drip through the box as well, getting malt throughout the house. The dogs were quite pleased with this and helped with the clean up though.
Well, I sent a quick email off to Australian Home Brewing and they sent me a replacement malt right away. They also threw in some liquor mix for the trouble, which was extra nice of them. I would have been happy with just a replacement malt extract!
To make things even better, I managed to recover a little bit of the malt, probably just enough to throw into a small experimental batch in my 5 litre carboy. It’s not enough for a full 23 litre batch, but enough to play with.
Moral of the story? When God gives you ruptured malt packages, make beer out of it!
Oh, and course the replacement was mailed to me as well, so I had the pleasure of coming home to another package.
– Chas
So we finally got to taste the Hoppy Heart IPA from Brewsmith that we brewed a few weeks ago. You can check out the post on the brew here.
The only problem with brewing is that it requires patience, which is something I don’t have. You make your brew, wait while it sits in the fermenter, bottle it, then wait again!
Why not just go to the bottle shop and get something that’s already been made for you? Well, that’s a whole lot less fun and you wouldn’t have the satisfaction of knowing it was something you’ve made yourself. Also, home brew is tasty, and this IPA was no exception.
Hoppy Heart IPA #1
Firstly, I want to make a very loud shout out to the guys at Brewsmith. It seems they stumbled upon this humble blog and posted an earlier review on their Facebook page. I suppose it’s good for them to be showing potential customers that they make good beer, but it’s nice to be getting extra readers too, so everybody wins! I know we refer to Brewsmith quite a bit around here, but just in case we forgot to give a link, here it is: http://brewsmith.com.au/ – that’s for all y’all who don’t know how to use search engines…
So the first exciting part of the weekend was getting some extra readers. The second exciting part was trying the IPA while making some beer.
Well first of all, the colour was great: fairly dark with lots of body and head. Mikey was doing a bit of a “yay we get to taste the IPA dance” prior to opening the first bottle, which made it get shaken up, so after dealing with that mess, we got to try the beer.
Getting ahead a little, but talking about the body of the beer, it seemed to have a bit of a creamy or oiliness about it. It was a pleasant feeling, and I can only imagine that it may have come from the oils that come from the hops, but that is only a guess. All in all, it added to the body of the beer.
In regards to smell, it was exactly like an IPA should smell like, fruity, hoppy, just generally nice. When drinking, I really got all the different levels of hops: aroma hops, taste hops, and bitterness hops. The flavours were distinct, but together at the same time. It was quite nice.
IPAs are most famous for their hoppy/bitter flavour, and this was no exception. That being said, I’ve had some very bitter IPAs. While I love lots of hops, this can be a little overpowering at times, and I can often only have one or two of these before I move on. This was not one of those, rather, it was a bit more balanced and much easier to drink.
Adding to this was the fruitiness, which counteracted the bittering hops very well. Sometimes one wins out, the fruit or the bitter, but this IPA had both at neither extreme.
As I finished the beer, I really began to notice the bitterness staying in my mouth, which is a lovely side effect of an IPA. So the taste really stayed, which is great.
All in all, we were quite pleased with how this came out. As with the Brewsmith porter we made a while ago, this beer was very easy drinking.
And finally, since the last review requested that I recommend food… My first instinct would be to just enjoy this beer on its own. It was very refreshing and good just for its own sake. The bitterness in an IPA can push out other flavours, so it may not go well with something that’s less than bold. So if you must drink it with food, drink it with something that will hit you just as hard. Keep in mind that the beer also has fruit flavours as well. A dry curry would go well, or perhaps something Mexican is what I’d go for.
– Chas
P.S. and since this was an article about an IPA, here is a short list of hops related puns I wanted to include, but felt would be inappropriate in the main review:
Summer Citrus Blond Ale #1 in fermenter. Just before yeast added.
Didn’t look like we were going to be able to do a brew last weekend. But shuffled a few things around and did a brew on Saturday. Another Brew Smith kit, this time the Summer Citrus Blonde Ale.
Was expecting another partial boil with grain, needing two pots. Not the case. This was a simple one with malt, hops and extras added straight into the wort. Two lots of malt, three hop additions, coriander seeds and lemon rind. Yeah, I was thinking the last two were a bit odd. But hey, it is a citrus blond.
Did add in a bit more water than meant to at a couple of stages. For example washing out the malt bags to get all the powder out, and into the wort. For this one had to grate lemon rind in. We did it directly over the pot and used some boiled water to rinse the bits off the grater. Anyway, as a result we didn’t need to do any extra top up of water into the glass carboy fermenter. A side effect was that the wort was about 29 degrees Celsius. Plastic wrap went over the top of the carboy until the temperature could be dropped. The photo above was taken at this point. Extra cooling was done, but after another 20 minutes we could only get it down to 27 C. Not ideal, but needed to get the yeast in. Airlock went on and stored away to brew.
This is the second time we got a proper gravity reading on these small batches. Came out at 1.054 which is more or less in the range I was expecting. Means the beer will be around 5% to 5.5% alcohol, if all goes well.
We’ve done a few of these Brew Smith kits now and this was the easiest by far. Bottling will be in about two weeks, just after good beer week (www.goodbeerweek.com.au). Then another two weeks in the bottle before tasting and review.
So I bought a juicer by mistake.
As you may be aware, juicers make juice. If one pours this juice into a container, pitches some yeast, and then seals it with an airlock, one has a lovely cider. This is why I bought a juicer. According to the instructions, I also have the option of drinking the juice before I ferment it, but I don’t see a reason why I would do such a thing…
My new juicer!
So this thing is hardly top of the line, but it will get the job done. I’ve opted for the model that can fit a whole apple down the chute, just in case I want to do that. I’ve done some research on juicing – maybe if I really get into this whole cider thing I’ll discuss juicing methods at length.
I’ve looked into cider making and the process is pretty simple:
The whole purpose of this cider endeavor is to just play around with different fruits and see what happens, so I’ll keep you updated. I’ve already got a small batch of apple and rhubarb going in my new 5 litre carboy. I’m not going to do a full report on this one though as it was all really haphazard. If it turns out remotely OK, I’ll do a proper batch of it and give the full recipe.
I have already learned a few things:
I want to do some brewing this weekend. If Mikey is available, we may do a lager similar to the big batch we did a few weeks ago, but tweaking the recipe slightly. Alternatively, if I’m able to get enough apples, I might have a play.
Then again, I haven’t discussed the prospect of Random Cider with Mikey – he may love or hate this idea, but if he loves it, we may end up making cider together.
Regardless, I’m going to start experimenting with Random Cider as time goes by.
-Chas
Today being Sunday means it’s Brew Day!
But, in the spirit of self control and ‘oh we really do have a lot of beer already’, there is no brewing today. Chas bottled the Lager back on Monday and my new porter is still sitting in the fermenter.
Next Sunday is Mothers Day. So, not sure what we’re going to do. The porter could be bottled, but chance that it might be worth waiting another week. The IPA will be ready to drink, and I’m pretty excited about that.
Keeping it short. Have a good one, and have a good beer.
-Mikey
So I got an interesting story from my grandmother recently…
According to her, my great grandparents brewed their own beer and spirits during prohibition times way back when! Unfortunately my grandmother couldn’t remember too many specifics – I doubt my grandmother would have been born yet by this point either.
Supposedly, my great grandparents were brewing in their apartment’s bathtub, which was relatively common during prohibition days
Everything was going well until their brew started leaking into their downstairs neighbours, which I imagined put at least a temporary stop to things. What lucky neighbours though to be getting free beer dripping from their ceiling!
Anyway, things finally stopped once prohibition laws were repealed. Oh well! At least I can say I have tradition of brewing in my family.
-Chas
We make home brew 