We are both huge Game of Thrones fan.  I love this t-shirt:

Personally I think it should be an ice bock and not a winter ale.

Irish Red in time for St. Patrick's Day

On Thursday, Kristi and I brewed our Irish Red beer in the hopes that we could have it ready before St. Patrick's Day.  For the most part, the brewing process was exactly the same as the Kolsch but with some minor differences.  This time, there were 5 different grains to add to the beer with there being a net total of grains being more than the amount of grains we used for the Kolsch.  The grains used were:

1 lb Crystal 120L

8 oz Abbey

8 oz Caramunich

2 oz Black Roasted

2 oz Special B

The Black Roasted in particular were very dark and I suspect had a lot to do with the near instant darkening of the brew as it warmed up with the grains within.  The hops were, of course, different as we used Northern Brewer hops for bittering and Willamette hops for aroma, still boiling aroma hops for only a minute.

I think we are getting the brewing down better as we actually saw a good wort develop at one point into the brewing.  This was a bit exciting for me (Kristi was out getting some more supplies so she missed it) as we never really got a good look at the wort with the Kolsch.  We then chilled it in an ice bath in the sink (though we are looking into making our own wort chiller so we don't have to worry about carrying a steaming hot 5 gallons of liquid).  We then placed the beer into the fermenter when we were done.

Kristi wanted to try doing a starter batch for the yeast (her background is in Biology so this was easy for her, but I imagine this should be rather simple to anyone that reads the basics of how this works).  What Kristi did was take about a gallon of the beer and place it in our small carboy and placed the yeast into this container and sealed it and the fermenter.  She let the yeast do its job and the next day she place that batch into the fermenter.  The reason she did this was for several reasons.  One, the beer in the fermenter was still very hot and we were worried the yeast had been out too long and not enough yeast would survive to do its job properly.  Two, the smaller volume means there would be "faster communication between the yeast" as Kristi put it.  What this means I'm still not entirely certain, but essentially the yeast grows faster when it has a more dense population.  Because of this, the smaller carboy means a whole lot more yeast to introduce to the fermenter when we added it the next night.  At this time it wasn't showing a whole lot of activity, but we were also informed we may have to wait until next week before we see a great deal more activity.

While getting supplies, Kristi also found out it is best to get a second fermenter to transfer to at one point as it helps with minimizing how much dead yeast you have in your batch.  So at this point we have two fermenters and a bottling bucket to switch between, all before we get to the actual bottling process.  The bottling bucket has a spigot at the bottom so that all we have to do is turn it on and keep the container as unexposed as possible to oxidation and anything falling into our batch.

Tonight we will be finally starting our Belgian Blonde Kristi got for her birthday to make and that should make enough for the carboy itself, so we will not need to worry about doubling up on equipment.  Kristi and I are hoping to use this as an opportunity to play with adding other flavorings to the beer and we'll add more on that when we get to that point.  As the brewing process will not likely be that involved we will probably skip it this time.

Taking time to thank other Breweries for their bottles

So, while Kristi and I prepare for our brewing tonight I thought I would post about our bottling of the Kolsch beer.  While preparing for bottling we found it is considered better if you transfer the beer to another bucket for bottling.  From what we could tell this was done to minimize the amount of dead yeast you might be transferring to the bottles.  Fortunately, we already had a giant bucket that we were using for sanitizing items so it was mostly cleaned anyways and Kristi finished cleaning it up.  We then moved the beer from the fermenter to the bottling bucket, but keeping in mind that the instructions pointed out how important time was as a factor as we wanted to keep its exposure to oxygen down to a minimum.

Before we could start the bottling process, however, we needed to prepare the corn sugar we were using to add carbonation to the beer.  You may recall in a previous post that we were using sugar pellets before for carbonation, but this batch had a pouch of corn sugar instead.  In this case, we had to prepare the sugar ahead of time by boiling it in 2 cups of water for 5 minutes.  Kristi pointed out we should wait until the water is boiling before adding the sugar so as to ensure we do not accidentally caremelize the sugar and therefor make it useless.  After we were done preparing it and we transferred enough beer from the fermenter to the bottling bucket until it filled about 2 inches from the bottom, at which point we mixed in the sugar mixture, then continued filling up more.  The reason for this sugar is that it creates a second fermentation in the bottle with what yeast is still alive, breaking down more sugars into alcohol, but the byproduct to fermentation is CO2, which is where we get our carbonation from.  I have been finding it interesting every time we observe some part of the process and consider how they must have brewed beer long ago to gain any of these traits.  I imagine they kept the fermenting beer in a closed container and it naturally became carbonated and they didn't understand why.  In any case, we moved on from this point to getting ready for the bottling itself.

We started bottling by pumping all of the beer into the bottles and found placing the tube all the way in worked best as that meant it would continue pumping more beer in within and keep foaming down to a minimum.  We tried to move quickly to keep the oxidation to a minimum, but we quickly discovered as we neared the end of our bottles that we didn't have nearly enough bottles to hold the 5 gallons of beer.  Our solution was to use the many growlers and bottles we had kept from other breweries, though mostly Speakeasy, in order to make up the difference.  So Kristi quickly rinsed them out and used sanitizer on them so that we could use them.  This ended up saving the day, but we also had to move quickly to cap all the beers we had bottled.  This is where having a third person would really come in handy, especially considering a Kolsch especially doesn't do well with oxidation.

For those who are not aware, a Kolsch is typically served in a smaller glass than you traditionally find with other German beers.  The exact reasons as to why this is are not clear to Kristi or myself, but we suspect it has to do with the use of lager yeast in an ale process, which means yeast that generally works best in colder temperatures being exposed to warmer temperatures and therefore something involving the yeast may be more unstable and susceptible to breaking down.  Hopefully I can find some information on the subject, but so far I have not.  Now we just have to wait about 2 weeks until we can try the beer and see how it went.

First batch of IPA a success

While at a friend's house for a celebration, we took out our bottles of IPA for everyone to try.  Everyone opened them up and tried them (I put mine in a glass because I can be a bit of a snob at times).  We had previously apologized to everyone for our IPA as we expected it to be bad the first time around, but much to our surprise everyone liked it.

The beer was not too hoppy, but as the kit we had used previously from the Brooklyn Brewing Company did not have a clarifier tablet so the beer came out unfiltered.  I am not aware if this is always how you unfilter a beer or whether most brewing companies use a different process and it's something Kristi and I will need to look into.

Next up we're looking into making an Irish Red in preparation for St. Patrick's Day in our 5 gal fermenter, but Kristi wanted to use the 1 gal carboy to ferment a Belgian with her own recipe.  Now, the Belgian is actually using a kit that was given to her for her birthday, but she is planning on adding other ingredients to use it to experiment with diverging from the norm.  We'll probably be starting this on Sunday, but next Tuesday we start bottling our Kolsch and may be able to brew our Irish Red that very night as well.