Brew #1: Breakfast Brown Ale

Welcome to my blog featuring all the musings and mishaps that go into making beer at home! Brewing is something my friend Scott introduced me to. He's been making beer for more than ten years! He's constructing a site for his brand called "Ugly Mug" at this site: www.skatemonk.com, check it out! I've made three batches of beer so far, two of which were, well, a bit ambitious. The first was the infamous "64K" (64 for the batch number in Scott's system, K for Kate), which might fall into the category of Christmas beer. It was pretty malty and heavily spiced. I had made this moroccan dish the week before containing ginger, cinnamon, and cardamom, and thought, hmmm--those might go well in a beer! Scott thought I was nuts! The final beer turned out to be somewhat drinkable, highly explosive (it fermented too much after bottling), and great in chili.

The second beer I made was, again, somewhat complex. I wanted to make a fruit beer, specifically a cherry stout. When researching the quantity of cherries to add, I decided (based on my VAST experience), to go with the amount normally used in Belgian lambics. So, I ended up thawing ten 1-pound bags of frozen black cherries for this 5 gallon batch of beer! It actually tasted pretty good, if a bit heavy on the cherry flavor, for about one month after bottling. Then--this weird flavor emerged that I would describe as "rubber hose". Perhaps the cherries added a sugar that was processed differently by the yeast than malt sugar, yielding an off-tasting byproduct? In any case, we drank a few, gave a few away, and the rest went down the sink!

Now, THIS time I made a very basic brown ale. This will officially become batch Numero Uno of my own line (yet to be named). It's called "Breakfast Brown". Recipe follows:

INGREDIENTS:

8 lb British Amber malt (extract)
4 oz British Chocolate malt (whole grain)
4 oz Carafe Black malt (whole grain)
16 oz Belgian Special B malt (whole grain)

2 oz Fuggles (4.0% aa) for bittering
0.75 oz Kent Golding (6.3% aa) for aroma

125 ml #1338 European Ale yeast (smack pack)

PROCEDURE:

1. Place bag of crushed whole grain malts in large pot of water. Bring to a boil.
2. Once boiling, remove whole grains and add malt extract, stirring to dissolve.
3. Add bag of bittering hops. Boil for 45 min.
4. In the meantime, enjoy some beer.
5. Remove bittering hops and add aroma hops. Boil 15 min.
6. Remove aroma hops, cover and cool until you can touch the pot without yanking your hand away.
7. Dump pot contents into carboy, add additional sterile water to make 5 gallons. If cool enough add yeast.

MUSINGS, MISHAPS:

At some point the large airlock had to be exchanged for a smaller one. The beer was still very active and kicked some malty suds up into the small airlock. We had to switch back to the large one for a while longer, hope we didn't introduce contaminants.

TASTING COMMENTS:

1/10/06 Bottling day! Drank a small glass of this fully fermented wort and hurray, no contamination! Tastes like a typical brown--toffee up front, mild hoppiness. Has a little burnt toast flavor, probably from the Carafe malt. Doesn't have a heap of character but, eh, it's my first drinkable beer! We added 2 cups water + 1/2 cup honey for bottling. Should be carbonated in about 2 weeks.

2/1/06 Had my first taste of a fully fermented, bottle-aged beer. It's either still quite active or I added too much bottling sugar, because half the beer leaped out of the bottle as foam! Looks like we'll have to drink these quickly, otherwise we'll have to deal with exploding bottles and a sticky mess in the garage. The beer didn't taste quite like a classic brown. A lot of that nice toffee flavor doesn't come through anymore. The most apparent flavor comes from the Carafe black malt, I think--sort of a lightly burnt toast flavor. I wonder if jump-starting the yeast at bottling caused them to ferment not only the bottling sugar but also some of the residual sugars left after primary fermentation... ???