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Brew 8 & 9 - Big Brews: Barley Wine & Wee Heavy

Having little kids around can make it difficult to get to the local hombrew shop so I devised a plan to have my wife pick up ingredients for me while she runs errands.  The first time  I kept it simple and asked for some yeast, hops and an airlock and she succeeded.  The second time I threw in a grain bill for my Export Stout and and a Witbier.  When she arrived home I asked why she only had one small bag (remember these are 1 gallon batches) of grain, she said the other was to big to carry.  This had me worried since it contained only slightly more than a pound of grain. When I went to the car there was a huge (five gallon batch size) bag of milled grain.  I checked the receipt and found that she purchased 13 lbs of base malt instead of 13 oz for the Witbier.  Since the goal for this year is to experiment I figured this was chance to brew some really big beers. The big sack of grain included: 13 lbs Two Row Malt 10 oz Flaked Wheat 7 oz   White Wheat 1 oz   Acidulated malt F
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Brew #6: Pale Stout

Back in around August '13 I began thinking of finding new ways to extract flavor from brewing ingredients.  An interesting thought came to me and I was obsessed with finding a way to get the flavor from something without taking its color.  Immediately the thought of a pale stout was bouncing excitedly in my skull. After some internet research about pale stouts it appeared that it wasn't a new thing but it seemed like nobody had done one using the same ingredients as a true dark stout.  It looked as if everybody was using coffee as a substitute for the roasted grain.  This led me to start looking for ways to clarify coffee.  I figured if coffee could be clarified then grains could be too, especially since the process of steeping grains is similar to brewing coffee.  This blog post from super barista James Hoffman about clarifying coffee using iced gelatin filtration made me believe that a pale roasted stout could happen. For my first attempt I used the recipe for the milk s

Brew #5: Meyer Lemon Berliner Weisse

My body craves whatever is not in season so it led me to a nice refreshing Berliner Weisse in the middle of winter. After a previous attempt I did some internet research and talked to some other homebrewers that have had success with the style.  It seemed that the quickest way to get a nice balance of sour was to sour mash.  The problem with sour mashing is that introducing oxygen into the mash can result in some unappetizing vomit flavors.  I read that someone had great success mashing in a corny keg and purging with carbon dioxide but I didn't want to introduce any bacteria in my kegs (not yet at least!). It struck me one night while reading a cookbook that I should mash in a sous vide sort of way.  After brainstorming I figured out that I could get a big ziploc bag (5 gallon) and put the wort in it at 110 degrees F with a handful of unmilled pilsner malt to introduce the Lactobacillus.  I put the ziploc bag into an igloo cooler filled with 110F water (filled from my tankless w

Brew #4: Milk & Donuts

Growing up five houses from a donut shop has impacted me in ways I’ve never expected.  It’s made me completely biased towards my local donut shop, its made me crave donuts every weekend for the last 30 years and it’s made me want to put donuts in all sorts of recipes.   A few years back I made a batch of donut ice cream with glazed and cake donuts steeped in warm milk then strained.  The donut milk was delicious and was just like biting into a donut.  The donut milk was just the base of the ice cream and I decided to take it to the next level and make a donut and coffee ice cream.  Turned out to be one of my best ice cream recipes yet.  This gave me an idea, what if I steeped donuts into wort?  Would it provide the same donut flavor as it did in milk?  Would the oil affect the beer in a negative way?  I needed answers to these questions so I set out to brew a donut brown ale. For the brew I wanted to keep it simple to see  how adding donuts at  different times  would aff

Brew #3: Semi-Sweet Mead

Mead is one of those things that everyone knows about but only a few have tried.  The local homebrew club has an award winning mead maker who brings his good stuff to some of our functions.  Tasting his a couple of times completes the catalog of my mead experience (not including a bad experience with Ethiopian Honey Wine).  At the club holiday party my friend and I tasted a sweet mead that was really enjoyable and we figured why not give it a try. If this mead turns out well we will go through it quickly and if its bad we can probably dose our tea with it (3 gallons of mead would dose quite a bit of tea!).  Without doing much research I went and bought some honey, 6 lbs of the orange blossom variety.  The man at the farmers market told me that most mead makers are using his orange blossom or his avocado honey, but orange blossom sounded safer. After taking the honey home I conducted some research and realized that my local homebrew shops don't  carry any mead specific nutrients

Brew #2: Toasty Olive Oil Ale

This Christmas was the first in a awhile where I didn't receive any gifts that were beer or homebrew related but like any good homebrewer I made something from nothing.  My wife thought it would be fun to get me a giant tub of Tapioca Maltodextrin so I could play around with making different powders at dinner time.  This sparked an idea, what if I added one of these powders to beer?  There's already some good ways of adding chocolate and peanut butter so I figured that I'd try adding some olive oil.  It's fruity and bitter and at least it would help with oxygenation of the wort if all else fails.  Adding oil to beer is disgusting and has many negative effects such as poor head retention and increased rate of spoilage but maybe the maltodextrin will help in some way.  For this recipe I wanted to create something toasty for the olive oil to complement.  Using some biscuit malt for a some light toasty biscuit flavor, a fair amount of wheat to help with head reten

Brew #1: Crabapple Lambicky Ale

The first batch of beer I decided to brew in 2014 is Randy Mosher's Crabapple Lambicky Ale.  Mosher's book Radical Brewing  blew my mind when I read it so it seemed right to pay homage to him to start off the adventure.  His twelve beers of Christmas is also something that always seems to draw me in.  Since I'm brewing fifty two batches why not brew all twelve this year. The recipe for this brew is available here  on the AHA website.  There are a few things that seemed strange to me but I followed them anyways.  Mosher mashes this at 145 for two hours which seems really low for a beer that will have Roselare added to it.  I'm thinking it's because he wanted this beer ready quick and/or maybe the wheat provides more for the bugs to munch on than the O.G. shows. I made a couple ingredient substitutions since I'm trying to clear out my hop stash in the freezer.  I subbed out the Cascade at bittering for some Warrior and subbed out the Tettnang for El Dorado (th