Pecan Ale

While I was working in Atlanta last summer I discover Southern Pecan Ale.  It's an english style nut ale with pecans.  I brought some home in my suitcase and it was a big hit with many of my friends. The brewery, Lazy Magnolia, does not distribute outside the south.

I found the following copy cat recipe online:

Pale Ale Malt 8.5 lbs

Caramel Malt 1.5 lbs

Carapils Malt 0.5 lbs

Wheat Malt    0.5 lbs

Belgian Special B 0.5

Rosted Pecan 10 oz

Willamette hops 1 oz 1/2 for bittering 30 min 1/2 aroma 1 min 

White labs english ale yeast

This was an all grain recipe which we have not done before.  All of that adds up to 12 lbs of grains. The bag that held all of the grains burned during the boil.  We lost over a gallon of water in the grain bag.   

Fermentation was very active to the point that a few times the lid popped off.   

Tasting the ale while bottling I could taste some of the pecan but not as much as I wanted.  I found two recipes on line.  One said the to include the pecans in the mash, while  the other had a 60 min boil. 

We used dark corn syrup for the priming sugar for bottling because it is one of the main ingredients in pecan pie.

The Pecan ale was named Drunken Squirrel, because that is the best we could come up with.  Here is the label.

Here is the recipe that will be used next time 

Pale Ale Malt  7.5 lbs

Caramel Malt 1.5 lbs

Carapils Malt 0.5 lbs

Wheat Malt    0.5 lbs

Belgian Special B 1.5

Rosted Pecan 20 oz (Boil along with the bittering hops)

Target hops 1 oz 1/2 30 min for bittering 1/2 aroma 1 min

White labs english ale yeast

Lazy Magnolia has Southern gentleman which is basically the pecan nut ale aged in oak bourbon barrels.  So we might try using oak bourbon cubes. 

The beginnings of Porters

We've finally decided to start with a Porter which I have been looking forward to doing for a while now.  Unfortunately, they did not have the basic ingredients for your standard Porter so we had to use a copycat from Heretic Brewing called Shallow Grave.  We'll see how it turns out though.

For those that might be curious as to the reason I title this post "The beginnings of Porters", it's because Porters actually come in different types.  Now, a Porter itself is an Ale, which means it is top fermentation, but a strong Porter is what is commonly known as a Stout.  Then from there you have Imperial Stouts and so on.  So I wanted to try to understand what exactly divides up the different variants so when I start doing more custom brews I can determine what I'll need and why.

While brewing we ran into a snag, however.  When I quickly turned off the temperature once it hit boiling, in order to allow the wort to calm down and not boil over, I didn't realize the flame had not relit like it normally does.  Because of this we lost a lot of heat and had to rush to get the heat back up and fast.  Now, the only real thing we can do to help facilitate this with our setup is putting the lid on and hoping it traps enough heat within.

We did eventually get the heat up and we tried to boil it for longer to make up for the lost time, but it will be hard to know until we get further in the fermentation process.  At this time it has been a week since we brewed and the yeast has been going crazy, so we're hoping that is a good sign.  If worse comes to worse I just remember a story I was told once by someone whose son had taken up homebrewing.  They had brewed a Stout and it had turned out bad, so no one drank it, but they forgot about it for a year then figured what they hey and popped them open.  What they found was that the extra time in the bottle had mellowed out the bad taste and given it a more chocolatey taste which everyone enjoyed.  So just remember, when in doubt, just wait longer.

Extremely delayed post

Man, time flew and I didn't realize I never posted about the Red Kolsch.  Honestly there wasn't much to tell as it's exactly like the Kolsch with some of the malts we saw in the Irish Red.  That being said, we found the Wheat beer was ready way ahead of schedule.

The Wheat seemed to zoom through the fermentation and bottling process and just finish fermenting early.  Because it was fermented in warm temperatures that apparently gives it a banana note, whereas cold would give clove notes.  It's very refreshing and we called it our Scarecrow Wheat.

If we haven't mentioned before, we have been naming all of our beers.  I've convinced Kristi to eventually post about our naming and pictures of the labels.  So hopefully she'll post that soon.  Kristi has said she plans on posting her recipe for the Pecan beer we brewed tonight based on a beer she tried from a microbrew in Mississippi, though she had it while in Georgia.  Because this was Kristi's pick and she was really excited about it she wanted to be the one to post about it so I'll leave that up to her.  But I will note we had to get a large nylon mesh bag for holding all the grains.  Apparently if you use pure grains you then aren't using malt extract, but it's a lot more difficult to handle for brewing as we found.  I'll let Kristi fill you all in on that.

I'm working on a recipe for our next beer to brew that is going to be mine.  This was the beer I was talking about using local ingredients, and I think I'm going to try to make a California Lager as you apparently can brew it like an ale, it just needs to store for a long time (hence lager).