Every Fiber of my Being - Cortni Frecha

Monday, February 20, 2012

kombucha

Not just black tea and sugar, this batch of cultured beverage has pau d’arco and rose petals, and it’s almost ready to pour off and I can start another batch.

Sunday, February 05, 2012

first mash beer notes

Here’s the airlock, bubbling 12 hours after we cast the yeast.

5 lbs. ground malt
2.5 gallons water
3.3.lb. can extra light malt syrup
.5 lb. smoked malt barley
.35 lb. chocolate malt barley
3/4 tsp. smoked paprika
Hallertauer hops 1 oz. boiling, 1 oz. aroma
Cascade 3/4 of one .5 oz. pellet - finishing

Mash the 5 lbs. of grain in 2.5 gallons water:
This required two pots, as we don’t have one big enough. With grains we must have had a volume of three-plus gallons. Bring to 120º and hold for 30 minutes; raise to 150º and hold for 10 minutes; raise again to 158º and hold an additional 15 minutes. Sparge (strain and rinse) into a container, or actually into a pot to be boiled. This is the “sweet wort.”

From here I adjusted the liquid: instead of having 1.5 gallons to start with I had almost double that. I extracted the chocolate and smoked malts separately in a saucepan and poured the resulting dark liquid into the wort pots. I put all the boiling hops in one pot so I could sparge only that into the fermenter, keeping the other cooking vessel separate to cool and add to the fermenter before casting yeast.

Boiled the first bunch of hops flowers (from Mountain Rose Herbs) for 40 minutes, then added the aroma hops and boiled for 18 minutes; adding finally the finishing hops for 2 minutes at end, then sparging immediately.

We are using the yeast from the previous batch in this one, so we have a quart of beer & yeast reserved to add to the cooled wort.

Original gravity 1.050
70º. We cast a quart of yeast sediment/beer dregs from our previous batch, bottled today.

Beer brewing 201

We have embarked on a new phase of brewing. Today with a fair bit of effort and a HUGE mess in the kitchen, we made a batch of beer that is 1/2 grain mash and 1/2 ingredients that were pre-processed.

By pre-processed I mean that before I’ve made beer with 3.3lb or 4 lb. cans of barley malt syrup, which is reduced from a mash such as the one we made today. The cans are easier because you just open, pour into a big pot with lots of water, add other flavoring adjuncts as desired, boil with hops, cool, add yeast, ferment and bottle. It’s already a bit of a production.

So the difference today, using many of the kitchen’s large vessels, was to slowly heat milled barley to release sugars and dextrins - fermentables and unfermentables - which then being boiled, make the sugars converted to alcohol by the yeast.

We started with 5lbs. of barley, from the brew store, and had to put it in two pots with a total of 2.5 gallons of water.

And we had a batch of beer from 2 weeks ago that needed bottling, and was occupying the bucket destined to hold today’s new batch of beer.

There’s a lot of cleaning and sanitizing of equipment and bottles to avoid random contamination in the beer. We haven’t been brewing for a while, probably a year or two. So everything was dirty!

We bottled 5 gallons of Porter with chocolate, coffee and licorice for flavoring in addition to black patent and crystal malts. It’s a decent brew, not stellar, but may improve with clearing and carbonation.