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).

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.

Learning with Cider

This is a rather brief post as Ciders apparently don't have much to them.  Kristi spoke to some of the guys at the homebrewing store and they informed her that for a cider you really only need to get Frozen concentrate apple juice as it won't make a difference.  She got 6 containers and put it into the pot, and we put the normal amount of water in.  As a note, we usually put in 6 gallons to account for evaporation, but with ciders you aren't quite boiling so we ended up with too much cider at the end but we're making due.  We heated the cider to 185 degrees Fahrenheit for 45 minutes.  Once we were done we cooled it down and put it into the fermentor with the yeast.

That's it, that's all there is to a cider.  The major part is that it takes FOREVER to ferment.  So much so that Kristi and I were getting worried it wasn't quite working as we didn't see much activity.  I stopped by the homebrewing shop and they said it's a slow fermentation and gave me some nutrients to use to help the yeast feed more as they don't get much out of a cider apparently.  It should take a few months of fermenting and then bottling and fermenting that in the bottle for a few months more.  I'm still trying to get a straight answer about how long it takes as Kristi was told quick fermentation in the fermentor and months in the bottles, and someone else told me months in the fermentor and months more in the bottle.  So we'll see, but it probably won't be as good as we were hoping for since we were having this confusion.  Still, those that enjoy ciders will likely still enjoy them, but I'm going to keep some to the side to ferment longer as I really prefer a dry cider.

Long Break, Quick Update

We've been rather busy lately so it's been hard to get around to actually updating the blog.  At this point Kristi has already brewed her 1gal Belgian Ale, added the Orange zest (the outer part of an orange peel) and we've now bottled the Belgian Ale AND Irish Red both.  We've learned a lot from previous experiences and made some improvements.

For bottling the Irish Red in particular we used two fermenters, moving from a first to a second after some time, then for bottling we moved to the bottling bucket which has a spigot at the bottom.  One of the differences this time around is that Kristi found out about a "bottling wand" and got us one.  Basically, it's a wand you attach to a tube which is attached to the spigot but it does not let any beer out until it presses against a surface.  This is useful because it means we can place it in the bottles directly at the bottom, it makes it so it doesn't really foam at all, we get a consistent amount with every bottle because of stopping when it reaches the top, and it speeds up the process since we don't have to turn the spigot on or off or have anyone pumping.

This made the bottling process so much easier to the point that having a third person no longer feels necessary.  Kristi was able to pump out the filled bottles while I capped them and placed them to the side.  We've found it does a better job of keeping a lot of the useless dead yeast out of the bottles as well, though we ensured keeping some live yeast so it could continue to ferment properly in the bottle.  Which brings me to the next point.

We found with the Kolsch's that we had an inconsistency in the amount of final carbonation that had occurred.  Much of this had to do with how we mixed the sugar in before the bottling process, which we corrected with the Irish Reds by slowly pouring it in as we filled the bucket with beer.  This meant some Kolsch's were very carbonated by the end, and some were not very carbonated.  Fortunately, it seems time has solved that problem for the rest of the Kolsch's after we put them aside for a few weeks before having more.  Now the bottles seem to be better fermented.  But back to the Irish Red and Belgian Ale bottlings.

When we were bottling the Irish Red I tried a taste in my tasting glass and found that it had a strange, yet pleasing, oak taste.  According to Kristi, that oak taste is actually a specific trait to the Irish yeast we had used and is commonly used by homebrewers for just that reason.  I'm keeping it in mind for an experiment I may do in the future.  As for the Belgian Ale, when tasting I found the zest was extremely strong in it, but Kristi has learned that fermenting beers with fruit and ciders both require some aging in the bottle to mellow out the flavors.  Because of this we are waiting about a month after bottling the Belgian Ale to actually try it, but this is also good to know as tonight we plan on brewing our first cider.  I'll try to post an update tomorrow as to the process for Ciders, but what I will tell you is that you keep it in the fermenter for about a week before bottling it.  We've been told it's best to keep it in there for months so we are hoping to have it ready by late May when we expect to see a bunch of friends from out of town.  Wish us luck.

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.