The Speise must flow

I wanted to wait a bit before doing this post as the American Bitter brew was a little more involved time wise than most brews.  This is because while the brew itself was very basic, a week later we had to do a technique called "dry hopping".  Dry hopping is actually extremely easy and only means you threw hops into the fermenter after it had been fermenting for a bit.  Specifically, we still used hops during the brew, but a week later we took two of the hops packets, listed below, and put those in a nylon mesh bag to place into the fermenter.  We've never done this before so we did a bit of reading ahead of time to make sure we did it right.  The act of placing it is obviously not difficult, but we wanted to make sure we got the timing down, as well as determining whether we should move to a 2nd fermenter yet.  We have determined that we will be moving it to a 2nd fermenter next weekend.  The ingredients for this brew were:

Grains:

1lb Munich

8oz Crystal 15L

8oz Crystal 40L

Hops:

1oz Cascade (Bittering Hops boiled for 90 minutes)

1oz Liberty (Flavoring Hops boiled the last 15 minutes)

1oz Cascade (Aroma Hops boiled the last 1 minute)

1oz Cascade and 1oz Willamette (Both hops added to fermenter after 7 days.  Transfer after 3-7 days of Dry Hopping)

We have also bottled our Porter, which we have now labeled Night Porter.  The label we made is down below using an image I really liked that someone drew of a zombie doorman.

Now, the thing I have been most excited about, we finally brewed a traditional German Hefeweizen.  The guy at the homebrewing shop was about to sell us a kit which was not traditional at all and used extract even.  Fortunately, Kristi knew to get the grains specifically.  The guy at the shop knew exactly what we needed and helped Kristi put together the grains bag filled with traditional Bavarian Wheat.  Now, a traditional Hefeweizen is apparently 50% wheat and 50% barley, these seemed to be indicated by the 6lb White Wheat and the 4lb 2-Row.  For the hops we used German hops (named such), and we used a large bag for the grains again.  This time we used clips to keep the bag leveled high enough so the bottom of the bag did not touch the bottom of the pot, thereby burning it and causing it to rip open like had happened to us previously.  This worked out well and when we took the grains out it was not too much of a hassle, and we placed the hops in when it returned to a boil.  Here is where things actually differ from your average brew.

When I was researching a traditional German Hefeweizen, I wanted to make sure we used a traditional priming sugar.  What I discovered was something called Speise.  Speise, German for food, is the sweet wort from the brew itself.  What we did was, after taking the grains out and before turning the heat back on and placing the hops in, we drained out the appropriate volume of liquid using a hose attached at the base of the pot.  This container is now being stored in our freezer (once it cooled off enough that it wouldn't burst from the temperature difference).  The reason to use Speise, and one of the reasons I was so interested in using it, is that you are using the brew itself before the sugars were converted into alcohol (not to mention before adding hops) and you are not changing the flavor profile of your beer by using the same sugars that made it in the first place.  To calculate how much Speise you should keep, we found this equation: (12*number of gallons)/((Specific Gravity - 1)*1000).  Now, generally speaking, we always use 5 gallons so our numerator will be 60.  We were not clear which Specific Gravity they wanted, but they seemed to indicate the wort itself, however that would be difficult with how hot it was and we wanted to know how much to take at that given moment so I looked up the average expected Specific Gravity and found it is 1.046.  With these numbers we ended up with 1.3 quarts of Speise drained.

Question about kits and how I learned to love Cider

First off, we were at a party last night and a friend was asking about the kits we keep referring to.  While there are kits that contain all the equipment you need from companies like the Brooklyn Brewing Company, the kits we are usually referring to only contain the ingredients meant for that style of beer.  What happens is we go to the homebrewing store and tell them what style of beer we are hoping to make, and they go and find the appropriate "kit" which is a plastic baggy filled with all of the ingredients anyone making a classic style of that beer would use and prepackage it.

In that same store it is possible to get however much you want of any grain, hops, or yeast, but the kits are meant to make it easier for you so you don't have to do all that work for the same effect.  That being said, we are planning out our first experimental recipe in which I have been looking up where to get local barley and hops.  Our plan is to make a beer using 100% local ingredients, though we're still figuring out what sort of beer style it will be.

Now, last week we brewed an American Wheat beer.  We specify that because Hefeweizen requires specific breed of wheat and yeast apparently to be considered a true Hefeweizen.  The wheat was very strange as it was ONLY the wheat and some hops.  The wheat itself is unlike the barley we've used in the past as the wheat is crushed into a powder which we dumped into the water directly.  We put hops in for bittering but there were no aroma hops to add so it was a very simple brew.  After placing it in the fermenter, a few days later, we discovered the yeast was having high production of CO2 so Kristi had to do damage control for the beer to ensure the sanitizer didn't get blasted out of the plug and cause the beer to get infected.

This week we transferred the wheat beer to a secondary fermenter, but we also bottled our Cider.  I did my usual tasting for both beers.  The wheat was interesting and Kristi and I are excited to see what it's like in a few weeks after it's been bottled for a bit.  The Cider, however, blew me away.  I'm not generally a fan of Ciders, mainly because they're generally very sweet and I'm not fond of most sweet things.  What Kristi did to convince me to make this Cider was to inform me that a traditional English Cider is more dry than sweet, so I was interested to see what it was like.  The Cider has been fermenting for a few weeks now and it's already tasting great, with a hint of tart that I find pleasing.  I can only imagine what it's going to taste like when it's all done.  The most important detail is that it should be completely ready by the end of May when friends from out of town show up.  Most of those friends don't like beer, but love cider so we think this should be popular.  Tomorrow we look to brew a Red Kolsch, and as I've never had one before I'm interested to see how that turns out.

Edit: Forgot to mention we used local honey instead of sugar for bottling the cider.  We think it will give an interesting after taste as we've found using honey doesn't make what you brewed sweeter, but gives it an interesting character instead.