Beer in the Bottle

More news on the 2011 Holiday Pumpkin Ale!  It has now been bottled.  

Laverne and Shirley shoulda worked in such an elegant bottling factory.

Science tells us the alcohol content came in right on plan: 4.85%.

Will it be tasty? The preliminary taste test came in A-OK.  The real proof will come with the unbottling on Thanksgiving Day 2011, when the Old Sloshingforth Brewery will toast the opening of the holiday season!

Breaking Holiday Pumpkin Ale News!

Be very, very quiet. The little yeasties are doing their thing:

The Old Sloshingforth Brewery thanks you for your attention.

The 2011 Holiday Pumpkin Ale

It all began with our hops crop:

John started by harvesting the hops:

Katie the Beagle, do you think this will turn out yummy?

Then you need to carve up some Jack O'Lanterns.  And what better way to carve up a bunch of Jack O'Lanterns than to throw a pumpkin carving party for Monique's birthday?

Wait, that Jack O'Lantern isn't a pumpkin! That's a birthday cake!

Now THESE are pumpkins!

Carve 'em up!

Lexi and Anna get to work on their well decorated pumpkins:

The results?

Next up. Roast the leftover Jack O'Lantern trimmings, then trim the skin:

Katie the Beagle continues to help:

Boil up the pumpkin chunks:

After 45 minutes add some hops and some amber malt extract:

Boil, boil, toil and trouble:

Mash the pumpkin. Then add some irish moss (to help clarify the beer later), the remaining hops:

And the spices:

Boil for another 15 minutes, then strain out the pumpkin and hops.  We pulled out the leavings with a course mesh strainer; ran water through the leavings to rinse out the sugars and flavors; poured the runoff back in the brew pot; then poured the wort through a fine mesh strainer and into the brew bucket.  The truly obsessed with clarity could use some cheesecloth, but that seems like a pain in the tuchus. Next time I think we'll add a big strainer to that process for easier sparging and runoff. Thus does the process of industrialization grow:

Add water to make five gallons.  When the wort cools below 80 degrees, pitch your yeast and seal it up.

After the yeasties do their thing, you'll need to bottle, but that's another step yet to come.


2011 Pumpkin Holiday Ale Recipe

Ingredients

• 10-12 lbs. Jack O'Lantern trimmings
• ~5 gallons water
• 2 1.5-kg cans of Thomas Cooper amber malt extract
• ~ 2 ounces mostly dried Golden hops from the plant outside our door
• 1 packet Coopers Ale Yeast (premoisten for 30 minutes before pitching)
• 1/2 cup ground cinnamon
• 1/4 cup ground nutmeg
• 1/4 cup whole cloves, crushed
• 1 tsp. Irish moss

Steps
1) Roast pumpkin in turkey roaster at 375 degrees for 90 minutes. Let cool.

2) Trim skin from pumpkin scraps. Put in pot with a couple gallons of water.

3) Boil pumpkin for 40-45 minutes

4) Add malt extract and 3/4ths of the hops.

5) Boil wort for another 40-45 minutes.

6) Add the spices, the rest of the hops, and the Irish Moss.

7) Boil for another 15 minutes.

8) Strain out the pumpkin and hops.

9) Sparge those leavings: run some water through them a few times and pour the runoff back in the brewpot until it's reasonably clear.  (This will pull out more sugar and flavor)

10) Pour the pot through a fine mesh strainer and into the brew bucket.

11) Let cool to below 80 degrees.

12) Pitch yeast.

13) Seal, and wait for the yeasties to do their thing.

14) Once the yeast is done, bottle.

15) Enjoy with the rest of your holidays!  The last batch of this that we did was pretty raw at Thanksgiving, but had mellowed nicely by Christmas and New Year.  And it was yummy.

Homebrewing Tips

I heard recently from somebody starting out in home brewing who was wondering if I had any tips for beginning homebrewers to pass along that might not be obvious from a book. I reckoned a book would hammer home the first commandment of home brewing -- "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" -- so I thought I'd pass along a few others that might be worth considering for the beginning brewer:

1) Find a brewing buddy or two if you can. Both the brewing and the tasting are more fun with a couple of good friends.

2) It might be worth planting a couple of hops vines this Spring. As you start to move beyond the simplest brews, you'll need some hops, and hop prices have risen a good deal over the past few years, which means that you might fine yourself shelling out $3-$6 per batch for hops.

The vines themselves usually start producing a lot the second year, though you may get a few flowers the first year. Planting them now means they'll be ready when you are. Monique and I planted a couple of hops vines this spring, and got just enough to flavor a batch of stout we made this fall. It was genuinely fun to use our own hops for the flavoring, and I'm really looking forward to hopping most of my beers next year off our own vines.

3) Don't be afraid to experiment. Feel like dropping a quart of maple syrup in your stout? Go for it! Want to try adding some vanilla to an ale? Why not? (I can now tell you from personal experience that if you do try some vanilla, the beer really does need to age a couple of months afterwards.) The point is that whatever you do, the end product is likely to contain alcohol and to be something interesting.

And drinking the mistakes can still lead to a fun evening!

4) Most importantly, have fun! Some bits of brewing can get pretty technical, especially if you're just starting or if you're trying something complicated. But at its heart it's not much trickier than baking a cake or a pie, and you'll figure out the tricky bits as you keep trying. Once you've known the joy of drinking the fruit of your labors, no other beer tastes quite as satisfying.

Looking for a gift idea? How 'bout the gift of beer!

A friend of a friend (I shan't say more, for fear of giving away surprises) was directed to me for some advice on the beermaking kits on amazon.com as a Christmas present. Since I wrote it up, I reckoned I'd pass it along for anybody else looking for advice.

When I started brewing again a couple of years ago it was with a Mr. Beer kit, which is one of the ones listed at the top of the listings on Amazon. It's really pretty easy and fun. The regular kit just comes with enough mix to make one batch, so adding in one of those three-mix variety packs is kind of a good idea.

It's a good idea to pick up a good book to go with it. The Mr. Beer pamphlet is pretty short on detail, history, and theory of beer. But a great book for a beginning home brewer is Charlie Papazian's Complete Joy of Homebrewing.

In the long run, the best thing to do is to hook up with a local home brewing supply store, especially if you want to start building a kit around some existing pieces like your glass carboy. Those sorts of stores a great source of expertise and advice, as well as a handy place to pick up some of the little do-dads that make it all a bit easier. If you don't know of one nearby and can't find one in the Yellow Pages, there's a pretty good listing of local stores here: Cryptobrewology.com. (It's set to Michigan as the default, but you can change states.)

Happy brewing!

Home-Hop Stout

And now a little photo-documentary of our most recent adventure in homebrewing, The Home-Hop Stout. The dream of The Home-Hop Stout began with a trip to the Sunshine Herb Farm in Commerce this Spring when we saw that they had some Cascade hop plants for sale. We took two little hoplings home and planted them by our door. First-year hop plants don't usually produce much in the way of hops, but ours put out a little crop that we thought just might do nicely to flavor a batch of stout.


We began with a pound of chocolate barley malt in the big vat. After it had been soaked and sparged we added a couple of large (1.5 kg) cans of dark barley malt.


Boil, boil, toil and trouble
Brew a stout with darkness double!

The next step was to add the bittering hops. These weren't actually from our home plant, but were instead pellets that I bought from a local homebrew supply shop. We boiled them in the wort for about an hour.

Homebrewing involves lots and lots of cleanup, here demonstrated by our lovely model with her lovely sponge.

Here we see our home hops. We divided them into two batches, one of which we added with about 15 minutes left in the boil, then added another batch just before the end, so as to infuse lots of delicate aromatics to our mix.

Into the pot they go! I have no idea why I look as if I'm trying to tame lions here. I usually don't look like that until after I drink the beer.

After the lovely home-hoppiness was properly infused, into the cooling tub went the wort vat. Once it was cool enough...

... we put all 5.5 gallons of wort in our brewing bucket, pitched the yeast, added the top and airlock, and set it aside, so that the little yeasties could work their magic.

Then John got to contribute his share to the cleanup.

About a week later, the little yeasties had indeed done their work. We were ready to bottle!

Monique is the true hero of the bottling. She cleaned and sterilized all the bottles while John was off running errands (among which, in my defense, was fetching more bottle caps.)

We added a bit of corn sugar to prime the beer, so that it would carbonate in the bottles. Then we racked the brew out of our fermentation bucket and into Mr. Beer. Mr. Beer is our little 2-1/2 gallon brewing vat, but it's handy for bottling because it has a spigot on the bottom.

Monique filled the bottles with some help from Katie the Beagle.

John capped the bottles ...

... and the next thing you know, slightly more than two cases of stout were bottled and ready for just a smidge more aging until they're ready to drink.

The preliminary uncapping comes Thursday night when we carve pumpkins for Halloween, though we expect to save most of it up for Thanksgiving week. The preliminary sampling was extremely yummy, so waiting until then might be the biggest challenge of the whole process.

Hopes are high for the home-hopped hooch!