Dec 09 2012

Shot In The Dark

With this recipe I’m shooting for some roasty flavours from the chocolate malt combined with the hoppiness of an IPA. The style is sometimes known as Black IPA but that’s a bit of an oxymoron and it’s got bugger all to do with India so I prefer to simply call it a Dark Hoppy Ale (DHA if you prefer acronyms).

In researching this beer I found that there are 2 different schools of thought to making a Black IPA:

  1. use a dark grain such as dehusked carafa to turn an IPA black (in essence primarilly for the colouring effect)
  2. use more roasty dark grains such as chocolate malt whose flavors come though in the final beer

The former approach seems to be more popular as you can get it to taste more like a traditional IPA but I was more drawn to the latter approach as I don’t see much point in making it black in colur only. I was interested in how the hops flavours would combine with the roasty malt flavours. This is my first attempt at a beer like this and I’m not following any tried and tested recipe, hence the name Shot In The Dark.

NOTE: The recipe below is for a half batch (12L)

brew notes and recipe »

Nov 16 2012

Amarillo Ale

On this recipe I went for a very small amount of bittering hops (only 5g at 60 mins and 5g at 30 mins), with fairly high amounts of late hops contributing more IBUs. My goal was a hops dominent beer with low levels of bitterness.

brew notes and recipe »

Aug 23 2012

Freedom Of Information Act Invoked For Obama’s Beer Recipe

Did you know that they brew their own beer at the White House? The beers include White House Honey Ale, White House Honey Porter and White House Honey Blonde Ale. All three use honey from Michelle Obama’s White House garden.

A home brewer has formally requested recipes for the beers made by White House staff under the Freedom Of Information Act. Here’s a copy of the request: Continue reading

Aug 13 2012

First All Grain

I just finished my first attempt at an all-grain brew tonight. The process was similar to my partial mash process except no malt extract was used. Due to the restrictions of brewing on top of my stove and available pots, I went for a smaller batch volume of 13 litres. I think it all went fine but the proof will be in the drinking. It will be very interesting to compare this with my previous partial mash batch which was a similarly hopped pale ale.

I mashed 3kg of grain, which I crushed in my converted pasta maker grain mill, in a bag in my 20L pot with 9 litres of water. I was shooting for a mash temp of 68C but the temp had actually crept up into the low 70s by the end of the mash due to me leaving the inner ring on at the lowest setting. Next time I’ll leave it off and see how well the pot holds the temp wrapped in a towel and ski jacket.

I batch sparged in my 12L pot with 7 litres of water poured over the top of the grain in the bag. Then I mixed the runnings in the 20L pot and got about 14 litres. I split these between 2 pots for the boil. My SG was 1.049, giving me a brewhouse efficiency of around 73% which I believe is quite decent for this type of mashing process.

I had a little bit of trouble getting a good rolling boil in my 20L pot as the bottom of the pot has a concave center which I think makes it much less efficient on the ceramic electric stovetop. Later on in the boil, when the volumes had reduced, I ended up ditching it altogether and putting the extra wort into another 5L pot.

I cooled in ice water. It took 30 minutes to get it down to 16.5C, so I overshot a bit (22C would have been fine) and didn’t actually need to spend quite as long cooling.

I ended up with about 11L in the fermentor after evaporation loss so I topped it up with cold water to my 13L target. After giving it a good shaking to aerate, I pitched the US05 yeast that I had harvested from the previous batch.

Fermentation got off to a quick start – the airlock was bubbling and krausen had formed as soon as I checked it in the morning.

See the recipe and specs here.

Aug 12 2012

Nelmot NZ Pale Ale

This is my first attempt at an all-grain brew. Read about it here.

brew notes and recipe »

Jul 24 2012

Hope Ale

Named after my sister-in-law who helped me brew it.

brew notes and recipe »

Jun 16 2012

Plum Wine Bottled

I’ve just bottled the plum wine that I started making back in January. If you think the waiting in beer making is bad, try making wine! Five months until it’s even bottled, then a minimum recommended aging of at least six months. But as I do when bottling beer, I took the opportunity at bottling time to sample the product. And, well, I’ve got to say I’m pretty impressed at this point. Ok, it’s not the smoothest, finest wine but it’s more than drinkable in it’s current state. And if aging brings significant improvements, it’s going to be bloody good. The problem though is that it’s so drinkable right now that I reckon a lot of it’s going to be gone before the recommended aging period. Continue reading

May 24 2012

Skinny Blonde

This is my attempt at a lower alcohol (3 – 3.5%) blonde ale. I mashed at a higher temp to get more unfermentable sugars.

brew notes and recipe »

May 22 2012

Homebrew Competition

I entered my first homebrew competition on Sunday 20th May. The event, organisesd by SOBA Nelson and held at the Sprig & Fern in Nelson, was relaxed and informal. There were 30 different beers, entered by around 15 home brewers. The beers were judged by the entrants so we each had a chance to try 30 different beers. The overall standard was very good, there were a lot of top notch beers. My personal favorites (apart from my own of course) were Jason Bathgate’s Manuka Black Cofee Porter, Stink Hammer IPA, Smoked Moose Knuckle Brown Ale and Adam Tristram’s American Pale Ale. I was actually more impressed with the standard of beer at this event than what was on offer from the pros at this year’s Marchfest. Also it was a great chance to meet and socialise with other local home brewers.

(Still from Matt’s video)

My beers didn’t place but they seem to have been quite well recieved by most people. I entered two recent batches, batch 13, Double Cascade Pale Ale and batch 15, Digital(ish) IPA. I actually thought the heavily hopped IPA had the best chance of placing but it was the milder Pale Ale that got the more favourible reviews.

The results of the competition are posted here. My entries were nos. 3 and 4. Here’s are the scores and comments I got (as best I could make out from the scrawl on the judging sheets): Continue reading

Apr 23 2012

The pasta maker grain mill

Proper grain mills can be expensive, especially here in New Zealand so when I found out that some home brewers were having success with converting cheap pasta makers into grain mills it seemed like something worth trying and I picked up one on TradeMe for $22. The rollers on a pasta maker are smooth and won’t pull in the grains so the first task is to roughen up the rollers. Reading through online forum discussions on this topic I learned that some people have disassembled the pasta maker, removed the rollers and got them knurled. But I also read about a much quicker and easier approach that also seems to work well and this is what I did. No need to disassemble, simply run a drill back and forth across the rollers and the drill bit will roughen up the surface of the rollers enough to allow them to bite on the grains and pull them through.

The next thing is to construct a hopper to feed the grains into the rollers. I’ve seen some examples online of fancy woodworking or metalworking skills being used to construct hoppers for the pasta grain mill, but again I opted for the path of least resistance – cardboard and duct tape!

And that’s pretty much it. The only other addition was a flat piece of cardboard to direct the crushed grains into a collection container. Here she is in action:

It can be powered with the hand crank that came with it, or by an electric drill.

I milled a few kilos of grain for my latest brew this weekend and I was pretty pleased with the results. I think I got a pretty good crush. The operation started off well but did start to go a bit slow after awhile. I came to the conclusion that my rollers were not quite rough enough so I wasn’t getting a strong bite on the grains and they were coming through quite slowly. I gave up on using the drill after awhile and went back to the hand crank as I found I was just spinning my wheels with the drill bit when I wasn’t getting enough traction and the slower speed of the hand crank was more effective. I got through all the grain that I needed for the recipe but planned on doing some further roughening on the rollers at another time. Here’s an example of the crush: Continue reading

Apr 16 2012

Getting ready to do All Grain on the cheap

I’ll admit it, I’m a frugal home brewer. One of the original attractions to home-brewing for me was the cost savings aspect. But I notice a lot of home brewers get carried away by the hobby and spend a small fortune on all sorts of fancy gear. The home brewing experience for these gear obsessed home brewers turns into another avenue for excessive consumerism and materialism. If you worked out the total costs of some of these elaborate setups, I reckon some homebrewer’s beer ends up costing way more than the best craft beer you could buy. That would be a major ‘off-flavour’ for me. The fact that my beer costs a fraction of what I would have to buy it for is a great incentive for me and perhaps even does more for the perceived flavour of my beer than any fancy equipment could.

To date I’ve been brewing with a bare minimum of equipment: mostly just a 12L pot and and the original plastic fermenter + accessories kit that I first purchased to get into the hobby. With this minimum of equipment I’ve been able to make some pretty decent beer using extract and partial mash brewing methods, beer that I really enjoy making and drinking. Continue reading

Mar 30 2012

Digital(ish) IPA

This is based on the recipe for Digital IPA by Yeastie Boys. I’ve converted the recipe to partial mash and made a few little tweaks on account of ingredients on hand. The original all-grain recipe is here: Digital IPA recipe

brew notes and recipe »

Mar 06 2012

Brewing Software Review – BrewMate

Hey there, this post is a collaboration post with some other home brewing bloggers to review all the different brewing software applications that we use. Links to the other reviews are at the bottom of this post.

I came across BrewMate when I was looking for a free recipe calculator application. In the past I had played with the BeerSmith free trial version and then settled down on an Excel spreadsheet application called Kit & Extract Beer Designer which served my needs well until I started doing partial mashes. At that point I was considering buying a copy of the popular BeerSmith but first decided to have a look at some of the free brewing software apps available. Two of the apps that I looked at were QBrew and BrewMate. I found that either of those apps would have met my needs but I settled on BrewMate as it had more features, a nicer interface and has been updated more recently. Continue reading

Feb 22 2012

Working my way through a 28kg bucket of malt extract!

I found a local guy in Nelson that sells home brewing ingredients, Bill Fennell (website – ThatBeerPlace.com). I had a look through is his lists of supplies and the bulk malt extract caught my attention because it cost a fraction of what I usually pay for malt. The only snag was that it came in such large quantities, 28kg of malt extract is a lot of homebrewing! And liquid malt extract needs to be used up while it’s fresh so it’s not ideal to leave it hanging about for many months. Too much malt for me to handle in a short timeframe I thought.

Then some friends of mine decided to get into home brewing after tasting some of my beer. So I figured if we split a bucket between us it would be doable to use it up while it’s still fresh. Four batches each would see it all used up. So we ordered a bucket of Maltexo All Malt Light. I have 2 new batches in the fermentors now so I’m half way through my half. Here’s what I have brewing: Continue reading

Feb 21 2012

Common Room ESB

This is based on a popular ESB recipe on the HomeBrewTalk forum called Common Room ESB which I tweaked it a bit and converted to extract.

brew notes and recipe »

Feb 12 2012

Double Cascade APA

This a reprise of my first extract batch, the All Cascade APA, but with double the amount of cascade hops, 200g instead of 100g. It also features double dry hopping, 40g at ferment temp and another 40g at cold crash temp. I got that idea from reading about an Epic Pale Ale clone but I haven’t gone with quite as much hops as the Epic. Still it’s about double the hops that I typically add to a batch so it should be pretty intense.

brew notes and recipe »

Jan 20 2012

Plum Wine

In addition to brewing beer I’ve also made a feijoa wine and distilled some spirits last April and now I’ve just started a batch of plum wine. I made a small batch of feijoa wine as we have a feijoa tree that produces lots of fruit. It turned out fairly good, a bit like a white wine with distinct feijoa flavour, but to be honest I would prefer a good Chardonnay, although I have to say it went particularly well with Thai food. We drunk it after about 3-4 months and now that I’ve done some more reading up on wine making, I’m thinking it would probably have benefited from significantly more aging. Maybe I’ll try some more this year when the feijoas are ripe. Also in April last year I distilled some spirits. I got the loan of a small air still from a friend and fermented up a batch of sugar wash and distilled it out. This resulted in a neutral spirit with which I made into gin, rum and feijoa liquor and I’m also currently making some limoncello with the last of the alcohol from that batch. The rum was simply made by adding Still Spirits rum essence. It was OK but tasted a bit artificial to me. The gin was made by infusion of juniper berries and various other spices and was really good, better than standard commercial gin in my opinion. The feijoa liquor was really good too and I’m looking forward to seeing how the limoncello turns out.

Now on to the Plum wine. Our plum tree was loaded with plums this year and after asking myself what am I going to do with all these plums the obvious answer came quickly. After looking at some plum wine recipes online this is what I came up with: Continue reading

Jan 17 2012

Time for a Toucan

A toucan brew is simply one done with 2 cans of pre-hopped extract. The Coopers Stout that I brewed last year tasted nice but I felt it lacked head and body. It was a bit on the light side and I reckoned it could benefit from more concentration. So it seemed an ideal candidate for a toucan. I did the toucan with a can of Coopers Stout and a can of Coopers Dark Ale and 500g of brown sugar as it seems like a popular toucan recipe on the AussieHomeBrewer.com forum, and it’s very simple – no steeping grains, no boiling hops. I was a wee bit concerned about the amount of bitterness which I calculated to be around 70 IBUs using the Kit & Extract Beer Designer, but was reassured on the forum that it doesn’t taste overly bitter especially when aged for awhile.

A Cunning Plan To Prevent A Messy Blow-over Continue reading

Jan 14 2012

Getting All Fancy!

For some reason or other I’ve resisted putting labels on my home-brew beer bottles until now as frankly I thought it was just getting a bit silly. Instead I just marked each bottle with the batch number written on a piece of masking tape so that I could tell what’s in each bottle. But after 7 or 8 batches I started forgetting which beer matched each batch number, so finally I’ve come to see the usefulness of properly labeling the bottles. Last night I bottled batch no. 11, my second go at Slutty Red, and I added some fancy labels, well not overly fancy (and just black and white because my printer is out of colour cartridge), didn’t let myself get too carried away! Continue reading

Jan 14 2012

Toucan Stout

brew notes and recipe »