Pretty nice little Saturday

I kicked off my post-Sour Ale Tasting morning with a brunch with the Urban Family group.  Most of them had been at the tasting the night before, but no one looked too worse for the wear, which I guess means scaling the tasting back from 23 brews to 9 brews a night was a very good move.

I had brought along two of my staples (though this makes it sound like I have many staples, these two represent about half my cooking repertoire and each barely involves cooking):

• Onion, tomato, & cheese tart: sautee a sliced sweet onion until tender, throw in the bottom of a pre-made pie crust, slice fresh tomatoes into wedges and throw on top, grate 3+ types of cheese generously over onion & tomato, bake for about an hour.
• Chicken club salad: take meat off the bone of a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store and chop, fry bacon and crumble, seed a tomato and chop, slice an avocado into chunks, mix all of the above with a couple table spoons of mayo.  Eat between bread or on its own.

Both represent my philosophies about food:

• (A) include cheese, bacon, and avocado whenever possible
• (B) cheat whenever possible – it’s ok as long as you admit it’s not actually your pie crust…or chicken

Along with the above I brought my bottle of Allagash Curieux.  Yum!  Now my posts are a bit out of order here, and this brunch actually took place before Five Guys and a Barrel and the Trappist Tasting, so this was my first of many recent tastes of Curieux (the two mentioned above plus the Bar Crudo beer dinner). 

I’m glad this brunch came first since it gave me the chance to tell Rob Tod that I had drunk his beer with breakfast.  I’m not sure if he was appalled or just bemused, but I think it went very well, especially with the French Toast that Justin was serving up.  My tasting notes are in the Trappist Tasting post, linked above. 

From brunch, it was back to (I think this is just what I’ll be calling my apartment for all purposes, not just brewing purposes, for here on out) to get started on my Amber is the Night alt beer.

I had gone to Brewcraft the weekend before, so I was armed with a recipe from Tucker and a tub full of malt extract, and a fragrant bounty of grains. 

My ingredients:

Water treatment

• 1 tsp gypsum (calcium sulfate dihydrate) -drops mash & wort pH to allow enzymes to work

Malts

• 1.50 lbs 2-row barley
• 0.50 lbs 120°L crystal
• 0.50 lbs special ‘B’
• 0.50 lbs aromatic
• 0.25 lbs flakes
• 6.00 lbs malt extract

Hops

• 1.00 oz Challenger
• 1.00 oz E.K. Goldings

Yeast

• Nottingham

Fining agent

• 1 tablet whitfloc

The process:

I put my pot with 3 gallons of water and my gypsum table out on my camp stove.  It was another VERY windy day, but luckily my stove shelter hasn’t blown away/molded away/been confiscated by the fire marshal yet. 

I tied up my 3.25 lbs of specialty grains in my mesh bag and placed them in my pot and raised the temperature to 154°F.  Unfortunately, I had already made my first mistake, though I wasn’t to realize this until later. 

Once the partial mash got to the right temperature, I turned off the heat, put a lid on it, put a towel on the lid to keep the heat in, and let it stand for 40 minutes.  Once the 40 minutes was up, I went to pull the grain bag out of the water and discovered what I had done. 

All I was thinking was “Don’t squeeze the grain bag like last time, just dip it in and out of the water 7 – 10 times to let the sugars drip off,” when all of a sudden the grain bag came apart in my hands.  Turns out, it had been touching the bottom of the pot, part of the bag had been singed, and now all the grains were spilling out of the bag in to the wort.  

I was able to get about 2/3 of it out, still in the grain bag, but I had about a pound of grain floating around in my wort now.  Luckily, I had just bought a colander recently and I used it to scoop up most of the rest of the grain.  

My directions actually came with alternate instructions for what to do if working with more than 2.5 lbs of grain (enough grain that the bag will touch bottom and burn), but I had misread my ingredients list and thought I only had 2.25 lbs, and just used the basic instructions.  Ah well, I’m pretty sure this was just a time-consuming fiasco and not one that will actually affect the beer taste much.

I heated the beer back up to near boiling, then turned off the burner and added my malt extract and the Challenger hops.  I gave it a good stir, turned the heat back on and returned the wort to full boil.  It was touch and go for a bit with a near boil-over.  Though I obviously don’t want to lose precious beer to a boil over, or mess up my proportions, the one good thing about my set-up, is that if I do have a boil over it will drip through the slats of my fire escape onto the downstairs neighbors’ patio. 

After 30 minutes of boiling, I added half of my Goldings hops.  After 45 minutes, I added the rest of my Goldings, and then boiled for 15 minutes.  That was it for the boil!  I put the wort in the sink in an ice bath to chill.  

I put 2.5 gallons of cool water into the fermenter, added a third of my wort, and pitched in my yeast.  I poured in the rest of my wort ‘vigorously’ as instructed, popped on the lid, and filled my airlock.  Done!  It was actually pretty easy aside from the grain bag debacle.  

The next morning Amber Is The Night was bubbling away.

 

I noticed because I bookended my brewing with a second brunch, this time at Magnolia with Felice.  As she ordered a mimosa, I looked longingly at the beer list considering how inappropriate it would be to have one (It was after noon  by the time I opened the Curiuex the day before).  I saw the Gruit and decided to go for it.  It was flavored with rosemary, yarrow flower, mugwort, nettle, and mugwort.  It tasted a bit like a really weird cola, but not as sweet.