spring - a time for bock

so it's been about 8months since i posted last - whoops.... since then i've switched over to all-grain and have brewed several batches. i plan to post on them all eventually for the sake of good record keeping, but for now i thought i'd post some video of me getting ready to enjoy the beer i currently have kegged. a munich dunkel style bock.

i lagered this beer back in february and have been enjoying it since tapping the keg on the first day of spring. online research indicates that germans would often make bock beers to be enjoyed in the spring time on special occasions such as easter. bockfests are prevalent, and apparently a tradition at these events is to "poke" your beer. poking a beer consists of heating a iron poker red-hot on wood coals and sticking it in your beer.

what happens is the heat from the poker caramelizes the beer, causing it to fizz up. the video doesn't look like much, but if you listen closely you can hear the beer churning in the glass. the foam is warm and the beer is cool and sweet. poked or unpoked, this is easily the best beer i've made.

Happy National Homebrew Day

Actually, I should say Happy Belated National Homebrew Day - it was last saturday the 2nd. To celebrate I devoted pretty much my whole weekend to homebrew. Saturday I made a double batch (technically 2 separate batches). My brother-in-law is getting married in June and I am providing a wheat and a brown ale for the festivities.

Sunday I built a trellis for my outdoor hops. Basically it consists of two 4"x4" posts (6' and 12'). I sorta went overboard on this one - so much so that I'm going wait to describe its construction for another post.

office hops

So I decided to try out yet another experiment in gardening. Hopefully this one turns out better than last years'.

The experiment: grow some hops at my office.

I've actually been thinking about this ever since I moved into my current office space last June, which has 10'+ high windows. The one thing holding me back until now was obtaining the hop rhizome, which are only for sale in the springtime. April 4th I stopped by Kirk's Brew and he had just gotten some in. Some articles in the latest online issue of BYO gave me the information and motivation to pursue the project. Stopped by Westlake where I bought a pot and some soil and finally got around to planting it today.

Last year I bought a mt. hood rhizome in May and planted it in the backyard. It did ok, but the combination of the late start and not properly pruning the bines caused it to fizzle out by mid summer after growing just a couple of feet. I purchased two different rhizomes this year. Kirk recommended cascade and nugget hops as varieties that do well in Nebraska (last year I didn't have a choice).


I decided to put them both in containers. Lack of space and the potential for a little more control sold me on the idea. BYO recommends a 20" diameter pot, which is frickin huge yet apparently necessary as they have large root systems. I filled up the pot with 2 cu-ft of soil -> shook it to settle it down making sure not to compact the soil -> dug a ~2.5" deep trench -> dropped in the rhizome -> covered and added about 3 gallons of water. And so the experiment begins.

night brew

Made some dunkelweizen last night or at least that is what the box said. I did make some additions to the recipe -> 0.5lb crushed wheat grain for the partial mash and some spices (corriander and orange peel). I'm going for a dark wit-beer, which really makes no sense, but I figured why not. The big burner on my stove is still on the fritz so I opted to do a night brew. It was fun.... cold, but fun. This batch is intended for the Belgian American Society's Heritage Night in 2 weeks, which means I am going to have to keg it for sure. Fortunately it was bubbling like a champ this morning, so I have high hopes that it will finish on time.

This batch does come with a note of disappointment. I've been working on a mash-tun, which I had hoped to inagurate with this batches' partial mash. Sadly the false bottom I had hand crafted was destroyed. Lets just say poor judgement and dishwashers was involved. Next time...

looking back

I've seen several robins now; therefore with spring coming soonish I feel safe reminiscing about the holidays. I recently realized I never got around to posting about my holiday homebrews - post drinking - so here we go.

Holiday Ale: Pictured in Das Boot above, this beer turned out better than expected. It was thick and spicy, in a good holiday way. Personally I think it kicked Old Fezziwig's ass. The alcohol content was noticeably higher than anything else I've brewed. The cinnamon, cardamom and orange peel were very noticeable, but I think the beer was still balanced. A good session beer, I'm sure I'll try it again next year.

2 Abbeys: So this experiment in brewing was a little goofy. I made it last spring, however it never carbonated properly. So I let it sit all summer and kegged it at the onset of winter. Turned out great. This beer was also noticeably strong and took on that Belgian yeast flavor. I was expecting a little more body given the candy beet-sugar addition and how much malt was in it, but I'm not complaining. Good until the last drop, it didn't last as long as I had hoped.

On a side note -if you like peanut brittle you've got to try spicy beer brittle.

Winter Lagering

I took some time off between batches. It was completely unintentional. I had a surpluss of beer over the holidays, but then waited too long to brew and now find myself without. My last batch, the Holiday Ale, was made at the end of November. I kept 12 for myself, which didn't last long, and gifted the rest away. Recently I finished off my keg of Dubbel. This holdover from last spring simply allowed me to procrastinate longer. The kicker was likely my recent tiptoeing towards all-grain brewing (bought a grain mill / still looking at mash-tuns). Feeling like I should be making the transition, but not quite ready to dive in, my internal struggle continued while I ran out of beer...

I brewed last weekend, Saturday to be exact. Still feeling like I should try something new - I did - Lager. After surveying my basement, I found that the winter time temperature holds anywhere from 45F in the coal room to mid/upper 50s in the main room. While this is way too cold for ales, it's perfect for lagers. So I figured why not take advantage and put this cold weather to some good use. I bought a Marzen kit at Kirks (Oktoberfest) and some dry lager yeast. Usually Oktoberfests are brewed in March - drank in October, but I decided to go the other way.


Single digit temperature, light snow, no-wind, combined with lots of beer makes for great brewing weather. I think the snow should make a nice addition to the beer. Couldn't see the wort with all the steam, aside from when it almost boiled over.


I'm sort of learning about bottom fermentation as I go. Everything I read says something different. From what I can tell, the primary fermentation is going to take a little longer -> 1-2weeks vs. 3-7days for ales. Then, you're supposed to do a 1-2month secondary, whether in the carboy or bottles. Then you wait another month or so to drink it. At somepoint after the primary and before drinking, you are officially lagering, but I'm still a little fuzzy on that.

I'm using my outdoor thermometer to monitor the temperature in my basement. The first couple of days I had the fermentor in the back-room (49-51F). According to the packet, the particular yeast I bought works best at a range of 50-59F. It seemed a bit sluggish so I moved it into the main-room (54-55F), and it started moving along nicely. At day 5, with the recent warm-up, my basement is now 56-57F. It's still bubbling strong, but if it gets any warmer I think I'll move it back to the back-room.

Holiday Ale

After sitting in the fermentor for roughly 2wks, I bottled my Holiday Ale. I'm excited - I think it's really going to turn out. The shot below is after siphoning from the fermentor. There was so much foaming during respiration that a thick layer stuck to the sidewalls and is still soaking off in my kitchen. I only got 45 bottles from the batch, which puts the volume of lost beer closer to 2 quarts - oh well.

Of course, the volume of lost beer should easily be made up by the alcohol content. I'd put this one near 7% abv. and you could smell it. Initial taste test suggests it is going to be a very flavorful beer - could definitely taste the spices. Cleared up suprisingly well too. Should be ready just in time for christmas.

Blowing Off

Brewed a new brew sunday. In anticipation of the holiday season I went for a holiday ale kit from Kirks. Basic recipe - throw in a ton of malt, add extra hops and toss in some spices for good measure. This stuff was thick. Like syrup. Everything went great through the boil - I even chilled it in record time. Then came the siphoning - which sucked. For some reason none of the trub settled out during the cool down, which greatly increased the viscosity and slowed the siphon way down. This effect combined with chunks of floating orange peel getting stuck in my racking cane meant I had to restart my siphon about 10 times before giving up and pouring the wort through a strainer.



The recent cold weather has dropped the temp in our basement to ~60F. I decided to leave the carboy upstairs where it is a little warmer (upper 60s). Unfortunately we don't have a real dark place upstairs as even the closet has a window, therefore I wrapped the carboy in a blanket and stuck it the back hallway.

So far so good. Last night I had to go to the blow-off tube as foam started jetting through my airlock. Apparently 1gal of head space was not enough for this beer. The incessant gurgling was quite nice to fall asleep to. The foaming continued through the night and was still going yet this morning, which really suprised me. I'm guessing I've lost half a quart of beer. I probably could have moved to the airlock this morning, but opted to leave on the blow-off tube just in case. Hopefully it is done by this evening, as I don't want to loose any more beer.

Pale Ale continued

So I kegged / bottled my pale ale last week. As I hinted I had some special post fermenation plans for this beer and boy howdy I implemented those plans. For starters I decided to split the batch into 5 separate containters. One was my new keg into which 3 gallons of the beer went. The other four were 2liter plastic containers. I decided to force carbonate the keg to make sure it was ready for this coming weekend, therefore I made sure to only use 2oz of priming suger for the 2 gallons going into the 2liter bottles.

My tests - I decided to try two very different styles for my pale ale. An IPA (or at least close to it) and a Chilli Beer.

IPA - I haven't done my research so I don't know if this would qualify as an IPA, but it tastes similar to one. I decided to dry hop my pale ale. This means I added hops to the secondary fermentation, i.e. the keg. I took 0.67 oz of willamete pelleted hops, put them in a tea ball and dropped it in. The tea ball was probably unnecessary, but I didn't want an undissolve chunk of pellet to clog my draw tube. So far tastes good. Definitely has a noticible, but not overpowering hop flavor.


Chilli Beer - My goal was to create something that resembles Devil's Spit - Hoppy and Spicy. I decided to add peppers. Since I had 4 different vessles, I decided to try 4 different kinds of peppers - jalepeno, fresno and serrano and smoked serrano. I washed and boiled each pepper for 30 seconds. The smoked serranos i did on the grill with some mesquite chips, which mainly ended up burning most of the peppers. I salvaged as many as I could and that is why I did 4 different kinds of peppers. As for the number of peppers to add to each 2liter, I totally had to guess. I decided to do 1 pepper per 12 oz beer. Since the jalepeno's were so big I only did 1/2. The bottles were bloated one day later, so hopefully that means I didn't screw up. Hopefully they'll be ready to go this weekend.

old brew - new techniques

So about 2 months ago I broke out an old recipe to try out some new equipment / techniques. The recipe is for a brown ale, which was the first beer I ever brewed. I went with the brown because 1) I haven’t made one in at least a year and 2) I had some leftover ingredients I wanted to use up. The latter reason caused me to substitute in some Belgian specialty grains rather than the typical crystal malt, which was an experiment in of itself. I also wanted to try partial mashing again, which I tried for the first time with the hefeweizen. The real thing I wanted to do, however, was test some new equipment I have.


Partial Mash - So after being reasonably please with the hefe, I decided to try the partial mash again. The process I used was to I hold the wert at set temperatures for a specified amount of time on the stove at low or no heat with the lid on. I stirred and checked the temps every 5 minutes. The tempurature ranges and times were 130 - 135F for 30min, 145 - 149F for 45min and 155F for 10min. The process seemed to work well with temps varying only a couple of degrees over the entire time period. One thing I noticed was that by holding the grains in the wert for almost three times longer that just steeping is that more grains tend to escape the grain-sock. To combat this I started straining the wert before boiling.




Turkey friar – I purchased this puppy during the last holiday season when it was on sale at target for $20. I bought it for one main reason. Eventually I want to at least try all-grain brewing. To all-grain brew, you need a stock pot that will hold all 5 gallons of wert because you have to boil it all at once. That means I need something bigger than my 5 gal pot, and the 7.5 gal kettle that came with the turkey friar is the perfect size. I hooked the friar up to my propane tank outside, filled it up, fired it up, cracked open a beer and enjoyed the show. Brewing beer outdoors is something everyone should try - there is just something strangely natural about it. The friar worked great. It produced great rolling boil and didn’t scorch the kettle.




Carboy – I got a new carboy for my birthday from noel’s folks. It’s a 6gal glass carboy, which leaves plenty of head room for respiration. Getting the beer in was no problem. My airlock / stopper I got when I borrowed brian’s carboy worked fine with it. Watching the respiration and fermentation was awesome. The first day the yeast activity was churning the beer causing huge chunks of trub to zooming up and down. The second and third days things slowed down but there was still visible movement, with little eruptions occurring from the bottom. After that the stratification began as all the suspended trub began to settle out. It was quite entertaining. Getting the beer out was a bit harder than getting it in, so I’ll have to rethink my siphoning, but all in all it was a great experiment and I think I’ll be using the carboy generally from here on out.



Since brewing I have kegged and tasted product and plan to serve it at the Halloween product. After letting others sample I will post how I think my experiments worked out.

new brew - pale ale

Brewed a new batch Monday night. This one's a pale ale that I hope to have ready for Halloween. I bought a "american pale ale" kit from Kirk's, which is supposed to be comparable to a Sierra Nevada.

I have two post-fermentation plans for this beer, neither of which have I tried before. I am going to show some restraint and wait to unveil my plans until after fermentation so that I can have some pictures to share when detailing said plans. For now I'll just show this picture of my latest attempt to better aerate my wort before fermentation.

Batchin it with Hefe

Travis's party was a success and so was the beer. I made a keg of Hefeweizen for the party and it turned out well. The beer came from a kit at Kirk's and I added some wit ingredients including orange peel and corriander. I tried something new with this beer - PARTIAL MASHING.

Basically instead of steeping the grains at 150 degrees for 0.5 an hour, I steeped the grains for 1.5 hours at various temperatures. This is supposed to help round out the flavor by fully converting the starch in the specialty grains into sugar. Seemed to work. I did it all on the stove and the temps held fairly well. Afterwards I pulled the grains, which looked kinda like puffed up rice. They gave the impression of well utilization. On the other hand the gravities were the same as other wheat beers I've done without partial mashing so who knows.

The other new thing I tried was force carbonation. I cranked the pressure in the keg to 32 psi and let it set for a week. Halfway through I move the keg from my basement to my fridge after reading that it should have been in the fridge all along.

The beer was good. Well but not over carbonated. Great flavor but heavier than expected. Likely cause was that I had to cut short it's time in the fermentor. The malt flavor overpowered the citrus, but that makes sense cause I was kinda light on the wit ingredients. All in all a good beer.

bottled at last

At long last, I finally got around to bottling my 2 Abbeys dubbel style ale. This beer sat in the primary fermentor for 2wks and the secondary for 1mo, which is probably way too long. All the same - I'm really looking forward to it, although I do have some reservations.

Things I'm afraid of: 1) the yeast died off - how long can yeast stay dormant before they die? I guess if it doesn't carbonate I can always dump all the bottles in the keg; and 2) something bad happened in the fermentor - for as long as that stuff was in there plus with the extra transfer, I can't but be nervous that some sort of contamination might have gotten in there and gone awry.

Things I have going for me: 1) it was fairly cool in the basement at 70f the whole time; 2) it tasted good - bitter up front / smooth on the back; 3) it was still sealed really tight; and 4) it was super clear - I've never realized how cloudy my other beers were until I made this one.

Good or bad - first tasting will come this weekend.

New Brew - 2 Abbeys

Finally got around to doing some brewing last night. This batch will hopefully taste like a Dubbel, which is a Belgian style Abbey Ale. For this beer I pretty much copied a recipe I found on ratebeer.com with ingredients purchased at Kirk's. Exceptions were that I doubled the amount of special B grains and used amber liquid malt extract instead of gold.

This recipe called for 2 things that were new to me: Belgian Candi Sugar and pitchable liquid yeast. The sugar is extracted from sugar beets and looks a lot like rock candy (although I didn't try any raw). Basically you add this during the boil and it is supposed to add to the beer's body along with providing some sweet-fruity flavors. The pitchable liquid yeast is a strain that is specifically made for Abbey Ale's and is supposed to add to the flavor profile. Until now I've used the dry stuff, which has always worked fine for me; although I must say that this stuff is pretty slick. All you do is pull the vial out of the fridge when you start, allow it to get to room temperature while you brew, shake it up and dump it in at the end.


So far so good. I would describe the color as almost a mahogany. My starting gravity was 1.064, which means that with any luck the alcohol content will be near 7%. The wort tasted really sweet, but I imagine that will mellow as it ferments. This one was definitely the most expensive recipe I've tried, so hopefully it pays off.

St. Patty's Beer

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

So my Irish Red turned out a little more red than I thought (that's it on the left). It also tasted a little different from what I thought it would as well. Don't get me wrong - it tastes great just different. It was rather light but smooth with an almost sweet flavor. As I haven't made this style before it's hard to assess how my little additions affected the recipe, but here's a go:

1) The toasted malt. This beer had a little something extra to it. The flavor was nice and round so I'm going to say the added specialty grains helped out.
2) The added hops. I'm not sure about this one. I think the extra hops might have pushed it slightly out of balance. I noticed this more on the fresher beer, so maybe it's ok now. Still it's no copper ale so further thought is needed.

3) The food coloring. Total success! The beer had a nice dark green color with green foam (middle picture). Next time it might be worth trying 1 drop of blue food coloring to get it a little lighter.

We had a fun St. Patty's party! Saturday we had people down for green beer, kegged stout, faux ruebens, shots of whiskey (thanks to tito) and irish cream, and other snacks and what not that Noel put together. Plus we finally got to break in our new bar stools and outdoor fireplace.

Last night we were pretty low key. Had ruebens again and watched Darby O'Gill and the Little People. I tried mixing the irish red and stout to make a black and tan (top right pic), which didn't look great but tasted awesome. Noel cracked into the wine Jason and Corrie brought over saturday that we, as crappy hosts, forgot to open.

When Will Winter End? At Least There's Stout

I took this pic as a response to brunoswims post a week ago tuesday. That day I promptly went home from work and poured a pitcher of creamy stout from the keg. After forgetting to post the pic the next day, I opted against it. After the snow we got last night I rethought it appropriate.

New Batch - Irish Red

I bottled a new batch the other day - an Irish Red. This recipe is a modified Brewer's Best kit for a Red Ale, purchased at Kirk's. In an attempt to make the red ale more Irish I added three extra ingredients.

1) Toasted malt (crushed grains). I read about toasted malts in the homebrewer's bible, where it was listed as a key ingredient for Irish Reds. The process of toasting malt is to take whole grain malts - stick them in the oven for 10minutes @350F and then crush them with a grain mill (I used a rolling pin). You can buy a specialty grain called Victory Malt, which is basically the same thing, but I thought it would be fun to try making it - and it was....

2) More hops. I had some extra fuggle hops laying around, so I decided to add them in. I don't know if this will make the beer any more Irish, but I like my reds with a little bit of bite. According to my calcs, this addition should raise the IBU's by about 10 for a total around 40.

3) Food coloring. It wouldn't be St. Patty's day without green beer. A couple drops of blue food coloring in each bottle will hopefully give this beer a nice green glow. I only did this to a third of the batch because of the after-effects.

As you can see, my Irish Red isn't very red. The tinge of red that is there comes from the toasted malt and the little bit of black patent malt that came with the recipe. This recipe used pale malt extract which attributed most to the paler color. This time I let it slide as the pale color allowed for an easier dye job. Unless I am floored by the flavor, I'll probably use amber malt extract next time around.

The Keg Floweth

The keg is up and running! As I still have yet to get a beer fridge, I set the keg up in the coal room in the basement. This winter the room has been holding at a steady 50F, which is a great temp for winter ales. When hooking it up I blew off the excess natural carbonation and set the regulator to 8psi. I think this worked out great as it poured nice and steady creating an 1inch thick head before settling down.

This batch is a Classic Dry Stout, which came from a kit I got at Kirk's Brew. It turned out better than I was expecting. The texture was smooth and very drinkable with a thicker body than the porters I've made, but a lot thinner than the stouts you have to chew. It did turn out dry, but not overly - just enough to offset the smoothness of the beer and linger in the mouth without making you pucker.

Let the Kegging Commence

I filled my first keg last night. The beer is a Classic Dry Stout from a recipe I got at Kirk's Brew here in Lincoln.

It's going to be tuff to go back to bottles after this. I'm letting it carbonate naturally, so all I had to do last night was add the priming suger and siphon it in over. I did have to do a little extra cleaning of the keg this first time to get all the pepsi residue out. The brunt of it was soaking it for 24hrs. I had to take the intake / outtake off (which were rusted on) and apart to get all the residue off, but again that was just a matter of soaking it. After replacing the o-rings on the dip tube and ball locks, I was good to go.

The beer turned out nice and dark. I'm curious to find out how dry it is. I forgot to give it the precarbonation taste test, so I guess I'll have to wait for it to be done to find out.