Month: March 2012

Nutty for nutter!

Courtesy of Butter, we brewed up another batch of the Black Squirrel Nutter. The first one was such a hit and it was gone far too soon. Everyone agreed that we needed to do that again.

So after sufficient recovery from the previous night’s festivities had happened (and thanks, Jeremy, it was awesome to be included in your birthday festivities) we all trucked down to LHBS and picked up some essentials.

Butter grabbed another nut brown ale kit. I grabbed some C-Brite and 5/16″ tubing. Elizabeth tried to grab the mayorship, but I’m still a few steps ahead on that count. The high point of the trip being when I was presented a “key” to the store in honor of my Foursquare mayorship!

I love that place.

So on to brewing. My notes are pretty sparse, so it was probably a good time. Dan was great on the regulator button–we only flamed out once and that was due to him being pulled in several directions. Doug was appointed to the waterboy position and did yeoman’s work with the wort chiller.

Oh, yes, it was the debut of the wort chiller. 25′ of 5/16″ copper tubing with sweated connectors for garden hoses. PHENOMENAL! We went from full boil to 70˚F in less than 15 minutes. Yeast was pitched and it was burbling away when I peeked in this morning.

For completeness sake:

Fermentables

  • 1/2 lb UK Dark Crystal
  • 3/8 lb US Dark Chocolate
  • 1/8 lb Crisp Roaster 2-Row
  • 3.3 lb Hopped LME
  • 1 lb Light DME
  • 1 lb Amber DME
  • 1 lb Muscovado (Dark Brown Sugar)

Hops

  • 2 oz UK Fuggle

Mash Schedule

Put specialty grains into the muslin bag and added to 7 gallons water. Heated to 160˚F and then rested for 30 minutes. Removed specialty grains and squeezed bag for maximum extraction. Flame on to near boil then added can of LME, both pounds of DME, and the sugar.

Brought to boil and started timer for 45 minutes. At 45 minutes, put the wort chiller into the kettle to sanitize. Always smart to connect the chiller to the hoses before dropping into the kettle. That bastard gets hot quickly.

With the chiller in the boil, boil another 15 minutes. Add hops and continue boil for another 2 minutes.

Cranked on the faucet and watched the temp of the wort drop to 70˚F in less than 15 minutes. AWESOME!

Drained chilled wort into sanitized bucket and pitched Cooper’s Ale yeast–1 packet dry yeast. Covered and put in the coal room. Looks like almost 6 gallons of beer (whatever happened to my 1.5 gal/hr boiloff?) with an OG of 1.048. This is a few points lower than the predicted 1.050, but we’re also a bit higher on the volume. I think this will all work out wonderfully in the end.

So…like I mentioned, we all want to fast forward about five weeks from now which is when this should be chilled and served. Thanks again Dan and Doug for the help.

The difficult thing…

…is going to be leaving it in the bottle long enough to properly age.

We bottled the gooseberry wine last night and, per tradition, left a little in the bottling bucket to sample. And sample we did. And, well, it is a sweet (in every sense of the word) dessert wine. The gooseberry comes through nicely and we successfully avoided the cidery taste I had feared when we over-sugared it.

So there are 25 bottles of gooseberry wine sitting in the coal room now. They should sit there unmolested for at least two months but it was so much smoother than the Riesling that it’s going to be hard to not cheat a bottle here and there.

Thanks Dan and Doug for pitching in on this one. Many hands turns Nick into a supervisor. 😉

Slightly disappointing

McBee’s Blonde Ale was the first all-grain BIAB I attempted, and only the third overall brew day. There is much to learn judging by the result.

I carbed to 2.5 volumes per the style guide. Instead of corn sugar I used DME which was boiled for five minutes and then racked on top of. I believe I used 5.6 ounces per BeerAlchemy’s suggestion. After 17 days of room temperature carbing the beer is still only moderately–like milk stout levels–carbed. Revy over at HBT shouts in nearly every thread on the question that 21 days is the minimum wait time for carbing at room temperature but the Nutter hit it at a mere 13 days.

Head retention is for crap which is definitely against style. A vigorous pour nets only about a finger of head that dissipates to a mere film after half a minute or so. It does bubble and there were ribbons for the entire time I had it in the glass–nursed it for almost half a hour, so I think it is moderately carbed and I’m not sure it’s going to get any better.

The head retention is kind of surprising given I mashed this one pretty hot–post strike temps were about 157˚/158˚F and after an hour it had drifted down to 152˚F or so. This should have left us with a whole mess of unfermentable sugars and a heavy body–both are factors in head retention. Neither of these things are really to style either but I was still pretty clueless about mashing temps at the time. If I were to do this again I’d try mashing at about 151˚F and hold steady for 90 minutes. I’d also stir every 15 minutes, not something I did with this batch. Finally, I mashed out at 170˚F like you’re supposed to but I didn’t rest at that temp for 10 minutes like you’re supposed to.

The short of the mash is that I didn’t mash at an appropriate temp for the style and I didn’t mash out properly. Both of these are fixable in the future. I’d also go back to using corn sugar for carbing–it’s faster and flavorless.

The beer itself is drinkable but nowhere near as exciting as the Black Squirrel Nutter. It has some hoppy overtones that strike me as a little odd, but I’m also not a huge hophead. In my darker moments I swear there is some DMS lurking at the back of the flavor profile but I’m also hypersensitive to this. I’ve brewed four times and chucked half of the batches due to DMS issues. I think increased boil times–we’re doing 90 instead of 60 from here on out–and throwing the new immersion chiller into the mix should address this. The Toasted Otis batch smelled wonderful until I tried to pry the lid off the bucket. At that time a whole mess of condensate dripped into the beer and since then it has reeked of DMS. Pretty sure it was pitched kind of hot so adequate chilling should definitely help here.

It’s not the clearest beer but it isn’t a lager so a little cloudy just comes with the territory. With the last batch I introduced a paint strainer bag between the kettle and the fermenter to help strain out hops and trub. This should help clarity moving forward. As for the recipe, I think I’d use less biscuit malt and use more honey malt, add some carapils, and boil for longer just to be sure there aren’t any hidden DSM tones creeping in the background. Chances are I’d use a little less bittering hops and a more citrus/floral flavoring hops addition.

I’ll probably label these in the next few days, put a sixer in the fridge and let the rest age out a little more in the basement. I also need to get another beer in the pipeline shortly as the Toasted Otis was ruined. Pour pictures and special deliveries to the crew to come.

Anecdata on PC vs. Apple

So I’m in line for an upgrade on my workstation at $EMPLOYER. It’s a negotiated company buy so definitely not retail. Yet the same spec’ed laptop at the Apple store comes in at $6.00 less than the PC laptop that could be coming my way.

So, yes, you can get cheap-ass PCs any day and twice on Sunday. However, when you’re buying workstation-quality PCs, Apple is way more competitive than it gets credit for. Either that or our purchasing department is horrible at negotiations.