New Homebrew in Primary

It's been a busy spring, with not enough time to write around here, though there has been plenty of beer drinking. I'll get around to reviewing some places we stopped at during travels soon. Until then you'll just have to settle for a recap of my brewday yesterday.

I wanted to do a Belgian style ale, lower gravity, some light hops. Sounds perfect for a Belgian Pale Ale right? Close, I found a DeKoninck clone recipe on BYO.com. The beer is basically a Belgian Amber, with the amber coming from 1/8th of a pound of chocolate malt and dry amber extract. My recipe was:

2.5 lbs of Belgian 2 row (pilsener) malt
1.0 lb of Vienna malt
0.125 lb of Chocolate malt
3 lbs of Amber dry extract
2 oz of 5.8% AA Saaz hops for 60 mins
Wyeast 1214 Belgian Ale
1 tsp Irish Moss for 15 mins

The partial mash was done for 90 mins at 152 degrees with 5.5 qts of water. Sparged at 165 with appx 2 gallons. Then the dry extract had to be added ahead of the 60 min boil with all of the hops.

Minus a little snafu and 'doh moment involving the grain bag and kettle the brew went smoothly. The yeast had not taken off this morning yet, but from research it seems like some of the Belgian strains can take a while to get going. I did hit the target O.G. of 1.046, and the beer came out a nice clear brownish amber. It should ferment out for about a week. I'll probably let it sit a bit in secondary before bottling this one. The recipe recommended 3-4 weeks, but I probably will not go that long.

Holiday Spice Homebrew

I was lucky enough to get the ingredients for a 5 gal batch of homebrew for Christmas. The beer is American Brewmaster's Holiday Spice Ale. I was hoping to brew it a bit sooner than the 3rd week in January, so that it would be ready while we still had some colder weather. The full body and spice additions make this style of beer perfectly suited for cold winter days.

Out of the box, the kit was designed for an all-extract recipe with slightly under a pound of specialty grains to steep. Since the last brewday was our first attempt at a partial mash, I decided to add some 2 row barley to the grains and make my own mini-mash. In some leftovers from previous recipes, I had 10 oz of melanoidin 2-row malt. Melanoidin is typically used in German style lagers, to add malt character and flavor. The kit included a spice bag that was added to the boil for the last 10 minutes. It contained a stick of cinnamon, a small chunk of ginger, and a few cloves. One pound of light clover honey was added after the boil was complete as well.

Everything went smoothly, and it was maybe my cleanest brewday yet. Original gravity was measured at 1.073, slightly higher than the 1.071 target, because of the change I made to add a partial mash to the recipe. The Holiday Spice Ale should stay in the fermentation bucket for a little over a week. Hopefully it will still be cold enough to enjoy this beer after it carbonates.

Slam Dunkel in Secondary

I transferred the Slam Dunkel-weizen into a secondary fermenter on Sunday. Primary fermentation finished up with a gravity of 1.010. The beer was not as dark as anticipated. All the feedback I found from other dunkels said that 1lb of chocolate malt was too much, so I went with 1/2 lb. To attempt and remedy this, I added cocoa powder (mixed and heated with water) to the secondary fermenter. The beer should get some additional color and flavor from aging it with the cocoa, so hopefully it will actually look like a dunkel.

Wolfpack Weizen is Bottled

After a week of primary and a week of secondary fermentation on cherries, our Wolfpack Weizen is now in bottles slowly carbonating. The uncarbonated beer was tasty, we can't wait to try the finished version in a month.

Brew Night

Tonight marks our first of many (hopefully) beers to be brewed for Wolfpack tailgating. We've dubbed it Wolfpack Weizen and it will be a light, refreshing German wheat beer aged with cherries. It might be on the hoppy side for a wheat beer, but we wanted to make sure we had some hop character, and we're doing a small boil so we upped the hops a bit. The recipe is a mix of various weizen and fruit wheat beers I found around the internet.

Wolfpack Weizen
6.6 lbs wheat malt extract (liquid)
.5 lbs Cara-pils
.5 lbs Crystal malt 10L
(grain steeped at appx. 155 for 30 mins and rinsed)
2 oz Hallertau @ 60 mins
1 oz Tettnang @ 5 mins
Wyeast 3068 - Weihenstephan Weizen
1 week primary fermenation
1 week secondary on one can of Oregon Dark Sweet cherry puree

Then we should get 3-4 weeks in the bottles before opening night on September 3rd against South Carolina!!