Winter Spiced 90/-

While I often brew bigger, richer beers at the end of the calendar year and have been known to gift a few bottles around Christmas, I’ve never done a “holiday beer”; the few commercial winter warmers I’ve had, often heavily spiced, have usually underwhelmed me.  Given the approaching season and my new attitude on using spices, though, I thought it might be time to give it a shot.

My aim was for something rich and malty without becoming as heavy as an old ale or barleywine, with spices reminiscent of the flavours of the season.  I planned a Scottish 80/-, but between good extraction and boiling down the first runnings, my efficiency jumped enough to put this in the 90/- range (in homebrew terms, of course).  To push the malt-forward nature of this beer, nearly a third of the grist was Vienna, with another fifteen percent being crystal malts.  The aroma in the kitchen on brewday was incredible; the wort smelled like milk chocolate.  After primary, the gravity sat at a respectably medium-bodied 1.016.

Additions to the secondary included ground nutmeg and a cinnamon stick, along with some small oak pieces from the stave I had sitting in my Flanders red that didn’t turn out.  Brought to about a medium toast in the oven, the pieces went with the spices into a container of Jim Beam for better than a month.  This should be a treat to quaff in a bad Christmas sweater this holiday.

Holiday 2011

Batch size: 5.25 gallons
Projected OG: 1.058
Projected SRM: 14.0
Projected IBU: 21.0
Boil time: 60 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 90%

Grains
52.6% - 5 lb 2-row
31.6% - 3 lb Vienna
10.5% - 1 lb C20
5.3% - 8 oz Special B

Hops
1 oz EKG (5.8%) (60 min)

Yeast
1 pkg WY1728 Scottish ale (no starter)

Extras
1 tsp Irish moss (10 min)
1 oz Oak cubes, medium-dark toast, bourbon soaked (secondary)
1 Cinnamon stick, bourbon soaked (secondary)
1/8 tsp Ground nutmeg, bourbon soaked (secondary)

Water additions (mash)
8 qts RO water
1 g Epsom salt
1 g CaCl

Brewday: 29 October 2011
Mash: 156F for 60 minutes
Pre-boil volume: 6 gallons
Pre-boil SG (w/o 1st runnings): 8P (1.032)

First runnings smell (and taste) really chocolatey!

Boiled down first runnings to a thick syrup; added back at end of boil

Fermented in the swamp cooler at 60F ambient

Secondary: 11 November 2011
FG: 1.016
ABV: 5.5%

Bottled: 8 December 2011
Pretty thin taste; cinnamon present as general spiciness
Bottled with 3.6 oz table sugar

Tasting: Unbalanced and underwhelming, unfortunately.  I've learned "empirically" that there's a good reason spiced beers are usually higher in alcohol: that extra ethanol (in addition to residual sugars, I'd imagine) balance the contributions of the spices.  In this beer, the bourbon character became cloying.  In addition, the bottles seemed to foam like nobody's business; no hint of infection, just foam for days.

Chocolate Mint Oatmeal Stout

Ah, back to the colder end of the year.  The leaves have finally started to come down off the trees en masse, and the mountains look incredible covered in snow.  Of course, my personal preference is for shorts weather.  But the chill does bring a marked change to the brewing schedule; it’s now entirely appropriate to make some of my favourite types of beer.  Those of the dark, malty, roasty, full-bodied variety.  And since I’ve started to more fully explore spices in my beer, I might as well bring along some of them for the season.  Ted Danyluk's Mint stout struck me as a tasty possibility when I read about it a couple years ago, and pretty much every year I try to add chocolate to at least one beer.  I felt a plan coming together.

For the base beer, I wanted a smooth, mouth-filling, not-too-roasty oatmeal stout.  I went easy on the heavily roasted grains and included some dark crystal to hopefully impart a little bit of  lasting sweetness and dark fruit character.  Since I’m looking to add mint to this batch, I went with Northdown hops, which reputedly have a woody, minty flavour; that probably won’t come through very much from the bittering addition, but they did give a solid, moderate bitterness.  I went with a significant portion of flaked oats to add a lot of slickness and mouthfeel.  For extra fun, I lightly toasted half of them; much like when I did the same thing with rye malt, the oats in the oven made the house smell incredible.

Brewday started off with a cereal mash for the oats, and moved forward in uncomplicated fashion from there.  Our new friends Craig and Cait came over for a bit while I ran around like an idiot trying to remember what needed to happen next for the brew (which anyone who’s brewed with me can attest is par for the course); the

four of us have a lot of fun hanging out, even when I’m making myself manic on a brewday.  When transferring to secondary, I really liked the muted roastiness the beer had.  It finished drier than I’d hoped, though I don’t think it’s a terribly big issue; if that’s my goal, though, perhaps next time I’ll wisely use a lower attenuating yeast.

Chocolate in beer, particularly stout, I’ve done before.  It’s never quite turned out how I wanted, though; I’ve ended up with much more roast and coffee than the cocoa flavour I wanted.  I’ve added cocoa powder to the boil and cacao nibs (unroasted, I believe, which may have been part of the problem there) to secondary; this time I’m going with cocoa powder, made into a paste with hot water and added to secondary.  Upon tasting the cocoa paste that wouldn’t get off the spoon at transfer time, I may add some vanilla extract at bottling to balance the roast.  Next time I may just try a high-quality commercial chocolate extract; if it works for Rogue, it’ll probably be all right for me.

Adding mint...that’s uncharted territory for me.  From my incredibly exhaustive research, it sounded like it could get overpowering quickly, so instead of adding anything to the boil or secondary, I made a tincture of fresh spearmint leaves (which I crushed by hand to encourage extraction) and dried peppermint that I’ll add to taste at bottling.  The concoction looks kind of hideous in the container, as the leaves are extremely wilted; the aroma, though is very intense, kind of like putting an entire pack of spearmint gum in your mouth.  I’m curious to see how this flavour and aroma will play with the roast.  I can taste the holidays already.

CMO Stout - chocolate, mint & oatmeal

Batch size: 5 gallons
Projected OG: 1.057
Projected SRM: 26.1
Projected IBU: 25.3
Boil time: 60 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 78%

Grains
58.5% - 6 lb 2-row
29.3% - 3 lb Flaked oats, 1.5 lb lightly toasted
4.9% - 8 oz C120
4.9% - 8 oz Pale chocolate
2.4% - 4 oz Roasted barley

Hops
1 oz Northdown (7.2%) (60 min)

Yeast
WLP 007 Dry English Ale (slurry)

Extras
10 oz Ghirardelli cocoa powder paste (w/ hot water) (secondary)
Vanilla extract, to taste (bottling)
2/3 oz Fresh spearmint leaves, vodka soaked (bottling, to taste)
3 g Dried peppermint leaf, vodka soaked (bottling, to taste)

Water additions (mash)
7 qts RO water

Brewday: 28 October 2011
Cereal mash: 1 lb 2-row with oats @ 135F for 15 minutes; boil for 20 minutes
Mash-in: 154F for 60 minutes
Pre-boil volume: 6 gallons

Fermented in swamp cooler at 60F once visible fermentation started; took a few days before the slurry took off

Secondary: 11 November 2011
FG: 1.012
ABV: 5.9%

Tasting: The cocoa powder and alcohol-free peppermint extract destroyed this batch; the beer is chunky and cloudy, and it smells like the sunflower oil has gone rancid in the bottles.  Dumped the batch.

Sinebrychoff Porter Tasting - 2-year, 3-year, 1.5-year clone with recipe

I’ve promised a tasting of the rye 70/-, and it’ll make its merry way here soon enough.  Beating it to the punch, though, are tasting notes about a year in the making.  Sinebrychoff Porter, a vinous Baltic beast out of Finland, was an early introduction for me into the worlds of both porter and craft beer, and has always been a favourite.  Many a night late in undergrad was wiled away at Bukowski’s over a bottle or two of Koff with a good friend and/or roommate; at the time it was offered both regular and aged 3 years, which was also my introduction to vertical tasting.

When we moved back to Chicago in 2008, I found a couple bottles on sale, which I quickly snatched up to squirrel away for a while.  In late 2009, at a hang with friends Joe, Ted, and Michael (and respective girlfriends), we did a vertical tasting of a “fresh” bottle and one of the bottles from the previous year.  The results were pretty stunning; while the fresh bottle was excellent, the smoothness of the aged bottle went above and beyond.

The other 2008 bottle, along with one from 2009, have been hanging out in my reserve collection ever since, along with a bottle of a clone I made in early 2010.  We meant to do another tasting that winter, but it never worked out; we did do a great vertical tasting of 4 years’ worth of Bourbon County Stout in the late summer before the move west, though.  We’re past due on this, though.  DeAunn loves dark beers and has never said no to a bottle of the real thing or my clone.  Her palate is also much better than mine, and I feel woefully inadequate evaluating beer on my own at this point (the vast majority of my beer would all have the descriptors “bready, crackery, tasty”).  So earlier this week together we did the deed; here are our notes.

Koff (clone, bottled 1.5 years ago)

Appearance - Opaque black with red around the edges when held to the light.  Tight head of fine espresso-coloured bubbles that dissipates after a few minutes.

Aroma - Caramel, sweet, alcohol.

Taste - Mellow, warm roastiness; burnt sugar with a muted bitterness in an aftertaste that really lasts; alcohol is present without being oppressive; very round overall; “yummy”.

Mouthfeel - Light-medium carbonation, medium body.  Fits the mellow flavour well.

Overall - Incredibly satisfying, this has aged very well.  It has a warm mellowness that goes perfectly with the cooling weather.

Sinebrychoff (2-year)

Appearance - Same opaque black, but with less red at the edges.  Head is lighter, more of a dark tan; bubbles are coarse.

Aroma - Winey, grape juice, cola.

Taste - Hop bitterness, sharp alcohol and sweet cola up front, with light roast at the end; kind of a reverse of the clone.  Doesn’t linger.  Definitely complex.

Mouthfeel - Medium carbonation, resulting in a medium-light body.

Overall - Excellent, though very different from the clone.  The extra effervescence works with the sweet cola flavour.

Sinebrychoff (3-year)

Aroma - Same colour as the 2-year.  Low carbonation evident in small, quickly dissipating head.

Appearance - A whole lot of cola, very winey, grapey.

Taste - Exceptionally round, very sweet and malty; lots of dark fruit (plums, prunes); syrupy, but with a firm bitterness in the middle; longer aftertaste than the 2-year.

Mouthfeel - Low carbonation, medium body.

Overall - An easy sipper, definitely an improvement over the 2-year; complex, with lots to savor.

Koff (Sinebrychoff Porter clone)

Batch size: 5 gallons
Projected OG: 1.086
Projected SRM: 54.8
Projected IBU: 27.0
Boil time: 60 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 77%

Grains
65.1% - 10.25 lb Munich
19.0% - 3 lb Vienna
9.5% - 1.5 lb Carafa III
6.4% - 1 lb Caramunich III

Hops
.5 oz Tradition (4.6%) (60 min)
.5 oz Brewer’s Gold (9.7%) (60 min)
.5 oz Saaz (3.5%) (30 min)

Yeast
WY2124 Bohemian Lager - cake

Water additions (mash)
1 1/8 tsp    Baking soda
½ tsp        Salt

Brewday: 3 March 2010
Mash in: 154F for 60 minutes
Pre-boil volume: 6.75 gallons
Pre-boil SG: 15̊P (1.061)

Pitched onto yeast cake at around 40̊F

6 March 2010
Happily fermenting away in the swamp cooler; ambient temp kept 45-50̊F

15 March 2010
Fermentation slowed, brought upstairs for d-rest

Secondary/lagering: 28 March 2010
FG: 1.022
8.25% ABV

Bottled: 9 May 2010
Bottled with 3.5 oz table sugar

Scotch Rye - FAIL

There are times when no matter what you do, the brewday goes horribly awry.  Then there are times when it’s flawed from the earliest planning stages.  This was one of the latter.

I’ve waxed poetic here about my experiences brewing with rye, with all the hassles and pleasures inherent in doing so.  My recent all-rye 70/- has actually turned out to be a wonderful beer; I’ll post a tasting on its murky goodness soon.  After having success with session-strength beers in this vein, I wanted to go after a big one: a Scotch ale, aka wee heavy.  Brewing a big nearly-all-wheat beer last winter went well; the failure on that batch was getting it to carbonate.  So I had high hopes for this one.

The recipe was about as simple as it gets: Weyermann rye malt to an OG of 1.075, English hops for bittering to 25 IBUs, and a big slurry of Wyeast 1728.  To further increase the maltiness, boil down the first runnings to a thick syrup during the rest of the sparge and boil.  If only it was simple in execution.

Trouble started early.  As difficult as rye can be to lauter, it’s equally difficult to mill.  My faithful drill peters out when I put it to work on wheat and rye, so it means it’s back to the hand crank for those beers.  This grist made for a LOT of time spent sweating over my mill.  I broke it up into four separate conditioning and milling sessions so I could actually get through it.

The mash went fine, and I was able to run off about a gallon of first runnings to boil down on the stove.  And then everything ground to a halt.  The mash set, and there was no unsticking it.  I decocted several times and infused with the sparge water at a boil to thin the mash and raise the temperature to 170F and higher, but to no effect; only a trickle would come out of the mash tun, and that little bit would stop altogether after a short time.  The wort in the mashtun was incredibly viscous, almost like room-temperature molasses; I should’ve photographed it for posterity.  My best guess is that especially at its high gravity, the rye wort’s viscosity was just too much for my bazooka screen to handle.

In the end, I ended up scooping out the mashtun, running the mash through a colander to salvage what I could of the batch; plenty of extra particulate ended up in the kettle.  After laboriously collecting 5 gallons of wort this way, I went ahead with the boil.  After an ugly 75 minutes, it was even thicker than before; the

refractometer sample was almost comically gooey, and the kettle contents were so viscous they wouldn’t pass through my funnel strainer, so I eventually removed it and dumped everything into the primary.  On top of this, the first runnings cooked down far enough that they scorched the bottom of the stovetop kettle, so crusty black flecks from that also ended up in the carboy.

After all this, I ended up with 3 ½ gallons of post-boil wort, along with all the stuff I would’ve preferred to leave behind, in a 6-gallon carboy.  This didn’t stop this monster from going crazy once the yeast cake it sat atop got to work.  I came home a couple days later to find the fermentation temperature had spiked enough to bring the swamp cooler temp to nearly 70F and blow off the airlock.  Let me repeat this: 3 ½ gallons of wort blew off the airlock on a 6-gallon carboy.  Intense.  It had made it this far, so it only seemed fair to clean up carboy, sanitize the opening, and recover it to let the yeast finish out whatever they could still do this thing.

When it came time to transfer to secondary, less than half of what was in the carboy was beer; the larger portion was trub.  Even after primary, the viscosity was so great I couldn’t get it through the racking cane.  I had to just dump the top layer of beer from the carboy into secondary, a 4-liter wine jug, the only helpful

utensil being the funnel.  I didn’t even bother taking a gravity reading; I pitched some rehydrated champagne yeast to hopefully lower the gravity further and thin out this beast.  If that doesn’t do it, I may resort to a pedio/brett regimen.

This has been a serious learning experience for me.  Possibly barring my experiences with infections, it’s also been my most frustrating batch.  I still have about a third of a sack of Weyermann rye to go; what all I’ll make with it I’m not sure, but it won’t be another beer like this.  I’ve had success with all-rye beers as well as with high-gravity beers; I plan to brew more of both, but I probably won’t combine these two concepts again.  Every batch has something to teach; some just deliver their messages more indelibly than others.  For the record, I do NOT recommend this recipe; it's here for posterity.  It definitely deserves a "brewer beware" mark of some type; if I come up with a good one, it'll appear here.

Scotch Rye

Batch size: 3.5 gallons
Projected OG: 1.091
Projected SRM: 14.3 (not accounting for boiled-down first runnings)
Projected IBU: 39.3
Boil time: 75 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 55%

Grains
 100% - 20 lb Rye

Hops
1 oz Progress (6.2%) (75 min)
.5 oz Northdown (7.2%) (75 min)

Yeast
WY1728 Scottish Ale yeast - cake from Toasted Rye

Extras
1 tsp Irish moss (30 min)
1 tsp Yeast nutrient (10 min)

Water additions (mash)
 15 qts RO water
1 g Gypsum
1 g Salt

Brewday: 16 October 2011
Mash-in: 152F for 60 minutes
Pre-boil volume: 5 gallons
Pre-boil SG: 19P (1.079)

First gallon of first runnings reduced to a thick syrup on the stove, charring to a degree; added back before boil

HELLACIOUS LAUTER FAIL.  Multiple decoctions & infusions did little.  Eventually scooped & crudely strained through a colander to 5 gallons before starting boil; refractometer sample was unbelievably viscous.  Was so thick it wouldn’t even go through strainer, so everything went into the fermenter

Fermented in swamp cooler at 55-60F ambient



18 October 2011: Even though the beer only filled about half the carboy, it blew off the airlock and spiked the swamp cooler temp to 68F.  Cleaned up and replaced airlock with tin foil, back in swamp cooler at 55-60F

22 October 2011: Massive amount of particulate matter finally settling out; rye keeps beer from clearing, but there’s now liquid separate from the break, hops, and other junk in the carboy.  Out of swamp cooler at 65F ambient

Bottled: 17 February 2012
FG: unmeasured
Still incredibly thick; couldn’t start a siphon and ended up pouring it into the bottles.
Bottled 3/4 gallon with .6 oz table sugar and rehydrated champagne yeast.