On the Badassitude of Chico Ale Yeast and Madness & Mayhem

A few months back I brewed up my first Estate Beer (see previous post). When it finished, I had a massive yeast cake that I felt should be used for something else. I considered my options the whole time the Estate Beer was fermenting. I knew that it would be overkill to put a small beer onto the cake, so I decided to do something I never make and almost never drink, and IPA. It wasn't the yeast alone that made me want to make an IPA, any big beer would have done well on that cake. The final factor was the abundance of midlife hops I had sitting in the freezer. Being that they are good only for a couple years, and they were approaching 1.5 years of age, I decided to find a way to cram them all into a beer. The result will probably be catastrophic.

Here is the recipe:
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Madness & Mayhem IPA

Size: 5.0 gal
Efficiency: 71%
Attenuation: 81.5%
Calories: 232.43 kcal per 12.0 fl oz

Ingredients:
13.0 lb 2-Row Brewers Malt (Organic)
.5 lb German Light Munich
.5 lb White Wheat Malt
1.0 oz Cascade (8.0%) - added first wort, boiled 20.0 min
.5 oz Warrior (16.0%) - added during boil, boiled 60 min
.2 oz Chinook (11.5%) - added during boil, boiled 20 min
.25 oz Columbus (12.2%) - added during boil, boiled 20 min
.25 oz Summit (18.0%) - added during boil, boiled 20 min
.75 oz Columbus (12.2%) - added during boil, boiled 0.0 min
.75 oz Summit (18.0%) - added during boil, boiled 0.0 min
.5 oz Warrior (16.0%) - added during boil, boiled 0.0 min
.8 oz Chinook (11.5%) - added during boil, boiled 0.0 min
6.0 ea White Labs WLP001 California Ale


00:03:00 Mash In - Liquor: 4.37 gal; Strike: 163.27 °F; Target: 151.0 °F
01:03:00 sacc rest - Rest: 60 min; Final: 150.8 °F
01:13:00 sparge - Untitled Sparge: 3.54 gal sparge @ 185 °F, 10 min; Total Runoff: 6.42 gal

Notes
Adjust mash with 2g CaCl2 and 2g CaSO4. This will create a balaced Cl:SO4 for a more balanced beer.
Used http://www.brewersfriend.com/water-chemistry/ with London water to start with.

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I don't like really bitter IPAs. Don't get me wrong, I love a bitter beer, but in IPAs, I prefer that they have stronger hop flavor and aroma than bitterness. So that is what I aimed for.

The beer completed with 4 gallons into the fermenter, and I should be glad that it was only 4 and not 5. In the picture above, you can see the beer line, and the yeast krausen expanded all the way to the top and into the airlock. I went into the basement on the second day after brewing to find yeast flowing freely from the airlock. I slowly peeled back the lid and released the pressure. For the rest of the day, I let the lid sit on the bucket, but not sealed. It took a good four days before the krausen started to fall back. It took three weeks for it to fall completely. The picture above was taken after four weeks, just before bottling.

I think next time, I'll pour some of the yeast cake off.

Estate Beer '09

I believe that the greatest part of homebrewing is that it gives me the chance to create something entirely new. If you walk into a liquor store, you will encounter perhaps hundreds of different beer from all around the world. Rarely though, do you find a beer from right around the corner, and almost certainly not one from your backyard. Homebrewing allows you to just that.

This year, to commemorate my second anniversary as a homebrewer I decided to start a new tradition. I've finally reached a point where people and myself consistently agree that my beer are pretty damn good. They aren't ready to go commercial yet, but they are getting closer, or at least a few of them are.

Being that we have single tree on our property, and that this tree just so happens to be a sugar maple, Amy industriously pulled a few pints of some magnificent maple syrup from its core. Man this stuff is good. It almost tastes like vanilla syrup was blended into it. It makes me drool just thinking about it.

But I digress. In addition to this liquid gold we have, this year was also the first year I got a decent harvest from my hop plants. As luck would have it, my East Urbana Goldings (as to be compared with East Kent Goldings, the notorious English hop) produced a solid two ounces this year.

So to start a new tradition, I took my hops and maple syrup and combined them into a malty fermented elixir that I call Estate Beer '09. Here are some pics.





It was brewed on August 30th. I cracked open the fermenter this last Sunday to check the gravity and to sample it. Sweet malty beverage gods, you have blessed me.

Table Stout

I brewed up some stout this weekend. Originally I was aiming for a traditional English stout or dry Irish stout, but then as I looked over the ingredient I had on hand, I decided to mix and match.

Dry Irish stouts are typically made with only a few ingredients: malted barley, roasted barley, flaked barley, hops, water and yeast. The trick to this style is keeping it simple, and avoiding caramelized malts. As the name implies, there should be little residual sweetness in the beer. The classic example is Guinness Stout. Black, roasted, low alcohol, and smooth. Those are the things to expect in a dry stout.

Roasted barley is raw barley that has been put through a process very similar to roasting coffee beans. This produces a product that is a dark brown and surprisingly similar to coffee in flavor. In fact, Amy tells me that roasted barley is commonly used as a coffee substitute for people that can't have caffeine. In order to extract as much flavor from the grains as possible, I put the roasted barley into the coffee grinder and grind on a course setting. Hopefully this won't have the negative effect of leaving lots of suspended solids. That makes the beer cloudy and gritty.

Since this beer is low in alcohol, the flaked barley will help add some body to the beer. The flaked barley will largely contribute large sugars called dextrins. These are not fermentable and so they stay in the finished beer making it denser and feel like a more substantial beer than it really is.

We'll see how it turns out. The nice thing about these beers is that they require relatively little in terms of ingredients. That makes them cheap to make. If it isn't what I want, I'll just adjust the recipe and try again.

I didn't take any pictures of the brewing process, but once it is bottle and conditioned, I'll get a picture of it in the glass