Nick and I are on a roll now. With the final success of our last beer we are moving on to a new batch, an Amber Ale. Where he came across it is beyond me but I have been informed that it is similar to Fat Tire, MMMMMMM :) Good news indeed.
Now on to other events; now that summer is here and my classes are over( well till august anyways) road trips are in order. The First on our adjenda is "Boulevard Brewing Company" as well as a stop by "The Dead Canary". Both are in Kansas city Missouri and I have been wanting to check out the Dead Canary ever since I first seen the blog. After that there is a place called "Vino's" in Little Rock Arkansas and "The Diamond Bear Brewery" to see as well. If anyone one else knows of someplace that they think we need to check out just post a comment, any suggestions are welcome. Much excitement and beer ahead.
-Rhyan
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
Tasting batch 3.5
So initial impressions of this beer were quite horrid. Honestly this beer had become the bane of our beer making existence. After ruining batch 3 (thus $40 down the drain), I was really hoping batch 3.5 would taste good. The first taste was awful. It left one of the bitterest aftertastes in my mouth. Everyone who tried it agreed. This beer is no good. Not wanting to completely give up on it, we cold aged it for a little while longer. What wonders time will do. A second tasting of the beer changed my world around. It was good!! The aftertaste was gone, and the beer didn't have the same bite to it. It was smooth. The roasted flavor definitely stands out, much to my pleasure. It has a nice balance between the hops and malt, though the hop flavor does stand out more. All in all this story has a happy ending. We made a good beer, and this week we will begin batch #4.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Batch 3.5 part 2
Bottling!!! Yes! Today we finally got off our asses and finished beer 3.5. It is now carbonating on my bookcase awaiting for the sweet day when we indulge ourselves in it's malty goodness. Okay and as it may possibly turn out we may have actually made a batch of actual beer with batch #3, but we may will never as it stank to high sourness and we opted to just toss it out.
And as you may well notice we have acquired another fermentor. Which coincides with a new way of making our beer. Most people make batches of beer in five or seven gallon batches. This makes sense if your the only one that is enjoying such a brew, but we have to be different. We are essentially researching how to make different brews, which while we do enjoy our beverages at their completion we are in this to learn. We have figured out that by taking these recipes and scaling them down to one-gallon we can experiment and learn with a quicker turnaround. Thus allowing us to try more five different beers for the same cost as making a single five gallon batch.
- Rhyan
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Okay so it has been a while since i last posted here, my bad still getting into the groove and all of blogger. So we finally got mashing to work, still not sure where we went wrong with the last batch but oh well. So just to finish out this update the next beer is a one gallon batch of london robust porter.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Batch #3 1/2: A Revision
Hey guys. It's been awhile again, but we've been doing a lot of troubleshooting lately. So as I mentioned in our post about Batch #3, we were forced to do the mash on one day and the boil a couple days later. This proved to be a terrible idea. Here we are a couple weeks later and our wort is still not fermenting. We've tried pitching new yeast, and yeast activator, but nothing is making it ferment. Rhyan took a pH reading the other day, and our beer is pretty acidic. I'm guessing this is due to letting the wort rest before going to the boil. As I'm sure most of you know, lots of bad bacteria can grow in wort if left alone too long. Boo for us, but as always we try to take this loss as a lesson for future brews.
We had enough ingredients left over from that batch to go ahead and make a smaller batch of the same beer. I am determined to get a porter off the ground even if it kills me. We just finished the boil about thirty minutes ago, and I have my fingers crossed on this one. We did the mash and boil one right after the other, so I think we should be good. I'll be sure to let you all know if it turned out.
In the meantime, it's been a time of learning and discussing our plans for the future. I've begun reading Microbrew Adventures (which Rhyan did a review of a few posts ago), and I have found it to be quite inspiring. Knowing that so many of my favorite beers came from a handful of people brewing in their basements gives me hope for our own enterprises. The key to success is passion for the craft, and I think we have just that (at least I certainly have a passion for beer).
As those of you who have been following our blog know, we like to make our own equipment whenever possible. Rhyan has a very keen mind for mechanical matters. He has so far been able to design and create both our wort chiller and our mash tun. We don't want to let our plans out too soon, but we have a few more projects we'll be working on (a bit more high tech than our last engineering endeavours). So in awhile expect to hear about the new equipment we'll be working on.
On top of all this, we've discovered a bar in the area I had never been too. Brewski's of Fayetteville offers 71 beers on tap, and over 200 in bottles. I've often complained that we don't have much access to different beer varieties in Norwest Arkansas (which is part of the reason I'm excited to be homebrewing). This bar has offered us a great way to expand our palet and our minds. Finally I can drink beer all day and call it research! So far my favorite from there has been Old Scratch.
That's all for now. Happy Brewing, and we'll see you all later.
We had enough ingredients left over from that batch to go ahead and make a smaller batch of the same beer. I am determined to get a porter off the ground even if it kills me. We just finished the boil about thirty minutes ago, and I have my fingers crossed on this one. We did the mash and boil one right after the other, so I think we should be good. I'll be sure to let you all know if it turned out.
In the meantime, it's been a time of learning and discussing our plans for the future. I've begun reading Microbrew Adventures (which Rhyan did a review of a few posts ago), and I have found it to be quite inspiring. Knowing that so many of my favorite beers came from a handful of people brewing in their basements gives me hope for our own enterprises. The key to success is passion for the craft, and I think we have just that (at least I certainly have a passion for beer).
As those of you who have been following our blog know, we like to make our own equipment whenever possible. Rhyan has a very keen mind for mechanical matters. He has so far been able to design and create both our wort chiller and our mash tun. We don't want to let our plans out too soon, but we have a few more projects we'll be working on (a bit more high tech than our last engineering endeavours). So in awhile expect to hear about the new equipment we'll be working on.
On top of all this, we've discovered a bar in the area I had never been too. Brewski's of Fayetteville offers 71 beers on tap, and over 200 in bottles. I've often complained that we don't have much access to different beer varieties in Norwest Arkansas (which is part of the reason I'm excited to be homebrewing). This bar has offered us a great way to expand our palet and our minds. Finally I can drink beer all day and call it research! So far my favorite from there has been Old Scratch.
That's all for now. Happy Brewing, and we'll see you all later.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Batch #3: An Introduction into All Grain Recipes
So it's been a long time since our last post, but believe me a lot has been going on since then. Rhyan has been very busy with school, and I finally secured a day job in order to pay for my post-college projects. My days off have mostly been used for car shopping, since it has been a hassle not having a car. So we've only had a limited time to devote to the beer business. But that doesn't mean that we haven't accomplished a lot.
We decided awhile ago that we wanted our next brew to be a Porter. I've always been a big fan of dark, roasty Porters, so I was certainly eager to try one out. I found a recipe online called ColdCuppaJoe Porter. The end result was supposed to taste like a cold cup of coffee. About a week ago, Rhyan and I took the recipe into to our local home brew shop to gather the ingredients and start out third batch. We got there, and lo and behold we were bombarded with questions involving terminology we had never heard before. Mashing? Sparge Water? What on Earth is all this? We had stumbled onto an all grain recipe.
Now we'd heard of this before, but we were never quite sure on the process. Our local home brew shop provided us with an excellent DVD made my some Northwest Arkansas natives on the process. It was quite informative, and told us all we needed to know about all grain brewing. If any of you don't know, I'll give my best rundown of the process.
Brewing with malt extracts usually involves steeping grain in water for a certain amount of time at a certain temperature. Once the water starts boiling, malt extract and hops are added, and the wort is boiled for an hour (sometimes longer). All grain brewing is much more time consuming and involved, but it is also a hell of a lot cheaper. Malt extracts are quite expensive compared to grain, so my wallet was definitely happier about this batch.
In all grain brewing, water is heated to a certain temperature (usually around 150 degrees, give or take) and poured into an insulated container (in our case an ordinary water cooler). Grains are added and the mixture sits for some time. After that the water is drained out through a filtration system that leaves the grains inside. More water is run through the grains. After that the mixture is boiled, and hops are added much like in a regular batch.
In order to do this, we needed a mash ton. This is the insulated container with the filtration system. Always wanting to save money on supplies, we made our own. It consists of an ordinary water cooler with a faucet attached on the side. Inside the container, hooked up to the faucet, are three PVC pipes with holes drilled on the bottom. The water comes up through the holes leaving the grain bed undisturbed (we'll post pictures of all this in another post).
The brew process, however, did not go so smoothly. Much like with our very first batch (which some of you will remember as our American Lager) being new to the process lead to many complications. First off, we had no idea how long this process would take. By the time our mixture was ready to start boiling we noted the time at after midnight. The longest step in our process was waiting for all this water to boil. We don't exactly have a good burner for this, so waiting for something to boil could take two hours or more (we'll work on that for future brews). Knowing that we could be looking at another three hours of work, we decided to hold off on the boil. We checked many forums online, and they all seemed to say that it was generally okay to store the mash for a day or two before boil. We knew doing this would increase the risk of making a bad batch, but damn we were tired.
We finished the boil last night. Everything else went rather smoothly except we had to change our hop total. The recipe we had was for a 6.5 gallon batch, so we calculated everything for a 5 gallon batch. We ended up realizing that we initially added too many hops, so we cut back on some of the later hop additions.
All in all, I'm not sure what all of this will do to our beer. It looks and smells fine, but the next couple weeks will let us know if it tastes fine. But no matter what, we will always learn from our mistakes in order to procure an even better batch next time.
We decided awhile ago that we wanted our next brew to be a Porter. I've always been a big fan of dark, roasty Porters, so I was certainly eager to try one out. I found a recipe online called ColdCuppaJoe Porter. The end result was supposed to taste like a cold cup of coffee. About a week ago, Rhyan and I took the recipe into to our local home brew shop to gather the ingredients and start out third batch. We got there, and lo and behold we were bombarded with questions involving terminology we had never heard before. Mashing? Sparge Water? What on Earth is all this? We had stumbled onto an all grain recipe.
Now we'd heard of this before, but we were never quite sure on the process. Our local home brew shop provided us with an excellent DVD made my some Northwest Arkansas natives on the process. It was quite informative, and told us all we needed to know about all grain brewing. If any of you don't know, I'll give my best rundown of the process.
Brewing with malt extracts usually involves steeping grain in water for a certain amount of time at a certain temperature. Once the water starts boiling, malt extract and hops are added, and the wort is boiled for an hour (sometimes longer). All grain brewing is much more time consuming and involved, but it is also a hell of a lot cheaper. Malt extracts are quite expensive compared to grain, so my wallet was definitely happier about this batch.
In all grain brewing, water is heated to a certain temperature (usually around 150 degrees, give or take) and poured into an insulated container (in our case an ordinary water cooler). Grains are added and the mixture sits for some time. After that the water is drained out through a filtration system that leaves the grains inside. More water is run through the grains. After that the mixture is boiled, and hops are added much like in a regular batch.
In order to do this, we needed a mash ton. This is the insulated container with the filtration system. Always wanting to save money on supplies, we made our own. It consists of an ordinary water cooler with a faucet attached on the side. Inside the container, hooked up to the faucet, are three PVC pipes with holes drilled on the bottom. The water comes up through the holes leaving the grain bed undisturbed (we'll post pictures of all this in another post).
The brew process, however, did not go so smoothly. Much like with our very first batch (which some of you will remember as our American Lager) being new to the process lead to many complications. First off, we had no idea how long this process would take. By the time our mixture was ready to start boiling we noted the time at after midnight. The longest step in our process was waiting for all this water to boil. We don't exactly have a good burner for this, so waiting for something to boil could take two hours or more (we'll work on that for future brews). Knowing that we could be looking at another three hours of work, we decided to hold off on the boil. We checked many forums online, and they all seemed to say that it was generally okay to store the mash for a day or two before boil. We knew doing this would increase the risk of making a bad batch, but damn we were tired.
We finished the boil last night. Everything else went rather smoothly except we had to change our hop total. The recipe we had was for a 6.5 gallon batch, so we calculated everything for a 5 gallon batch. We ended up realizing that we initially added too many hops, so we cut back on some of the later hop additions.
All in all, I'm not sure what all of this will do to our beer. It looks and smells fine, but the next couple weeks will let us know if it tastes fine. But no matter what, we will always learn from our mistakes in order to procure an even better batch next time.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
2nd Batch Tasting
So we've been spreading our second batch around to get some responses, and comments seem to be better than last time. Personally I don't think we got the apple flavor that should have been in this beer. Perhaps we'll try something different next time. It's a little more bitter than our last beer, and it is a bit creamier in texture. As one of our friends described it, "It starts off bitter, then becomes smooth before leading out with bitter again. A hint of honey comes through before leading to a rich wood smoked taste, that..." uh something else I'm sure. I kind of drifted off as she was talking. The other reviews weren't as detailed (nor was mine for that matter), but I've never been able to describe something in such a nuanced fashion. I just thought it was good beer. As another friend put it, not so eloquently, but even more prominently, "I think I will cry when I run out of this beer." That says enough for me.
-Nick-
-Nick-
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