And we have lift off!

It took a few days, but Leafblower is in full blown fermentation mode.  Also, as a side note, updated the blog's settings, which should equal better viewing for those of you on cell phones.  Also, I am updating this from the phone, which should translate into more exposure to beer adventures.

Leafblower 2011: Butternut Squash Nut Brown Ale

Oh, what fun the fall is.  Liz and I took a trip with Ed and Lexi to Butler's Orchard to pick pumpkins.  The second most fun part about fall after brewing up our seasonal Leafblower beer.  My prized pumpkin had the thickest stem I've ever seen in a pumpkin.  We nicknamed it "Girthy" and my hand looks so small around it as you can see.  Innuendos aside though, we had quite the haul.   

The poor pumpkin I got managed to start going rotten a few days after we brought it home, getting two pretty big soft and white moldy splotches on the back and bottom.  It may have been caused by it rolling around in the trunk, or maybe it devoted too much of its resources to growing such a thick stem. I carved it into an elephant, with the stem as a trunk.  I also managed to cut a bit of the non rotten part out for the beer, which is why I digressed from the beer and mentioned the pumpkin trip at all.

The star of Leafblower is the butternut squash, even though we throw in some random squash in there.  This year I threw in an acorn squash into the mix.  Mine came from a farmer's market in Bethesda.  Ed's contribution came from his mother's garden.  Here are mine before I char the heck out of them, and then puree them in the food processor.

Brewing day was here.  We were brewing a "Hex Nut Brown Ale" from Midwest Brewing.  I've never ordered anything online before, but went with it for the sake of timing.  We normally brew this batch for a pre-Thanksgiving meal we share with folks that live on Battery Lane (namesake of our operation), so we had to get rolling on the fermentation.  We did this last year, where we were rushing last minute.  We never learn.  In the end, I ordered online because I couldn't get up to Frederick in time.  I won't do Northern Virginia on a week day, so that was out too.  The place in Frederick also recently switched locations, and I wasn't in the mood for change.

Here Ed is dunking the specialty grains.

There were 8 oz of Caramel, 8 ounces of brown, and 8 ounces of chocolate malt.

In addition to the grain, there were 6 pounds of Amber Liquid Malt Extract.

The milk bottle it comes in is extra fun to squeeze.  Ed narrowly missed a huge bubble with this photography.

Mid-boil, we're adding 1 1/2 ounces of Willamette hops.  Last fall, when Liz and I went to Seattle, we drove by Willamette, along with a bunch of other cities named for hops.  (Hops came first, right?...haha)

Here's about 3 1/2 pounds of squash being added to the boil, about 25 minutes into a 60 minute boil.

After about an hour of the boil, we added 1/2 ounce more of hops for aroma and about a pound more of the squash.  Due to the joy Ed and I were feeling  from tasting 4 different varieties of our Strawberry Kolsches, a Coffee Porter we also made, as well as an Apricot California Copper, not to mention an Heff I made about 3 years ago (pre-meeting Ed), we were a bit sloppy with the additions.  Brewing is about fun though, remember that, so sometimes it is a day of precision and some days it is about 2 guys having some beers and enjoying a Sunday morning.  Here we are finally cooling things down.

Squash is one of the hardest things to filter out, and this batch was no exception.  You can see the dog helping us clean as we go.

I got nervous our sloppiness may have led to some errors when our fermentation didn't start in the first 48 hours.  You start thinking about throwing squash in without having boiled/cooking it thoroughly.  I lost a bit of sleep thinking about it.  But finally, Tuesday morning, there was a trace of yeast life.  By evening, we had a decent amount of foam going on.

Now the most fun I had with this was on my day off.  The beagle and I had some fun.  We used the spent grain to make dog treats.  Since it is a dark beer, the grains look burned (well, they are sort of, given the roastedness.)  They basically have the consistency of cooked oatmeal or brown rice at this point.  Most, if not all, the sugars are gone from it.

The recipe called for 4 cups of  spent grain, 2 cups of flower, 2 eggs, and a cup of peanut butter.  Knowing Bailey (the beagle) doesn't need that much peanut butter flavor, because she'll eat anything, and that the price of peanut butter is on the up and up (thanks to flooding in the south I think) I went with only a 1/2 cup of peanut butter.

Here she is eye-ing it up.  I mixed it all up, then pressed it pretty flat on a cookie sheet, and attempted to use a cookie cutter to get star shapes.  The cuter and more detailed shapes didn't pan out in the thick and haphazard "dough".  I cooked it for an hour on 350, then broke out the shapes and then the larger non-shapes into bit size pieces.  I then cooked it another 4 hours at 250.  Here's Bailey looking in eager anticipation.  She doesn't realize they are dog treats yet, just that she loves anything human food related.

I got 3 bags full of the treats.  You cook them so long on low in an effort to get the moisture out and keep mold from growing.  Even though I had chocolate malt in this batch, there isn't actually any chocolate in it, so it is still safe for dogs.  Just make sure there weren't any hops in it, since dogs don't take well to those either.

Milk Stout: Misadventures in All Grain

As we're gearing up to make another batch of Leaf Blower, our fall seasonal of a Butternut Squash Nut Brown Ale, I'm looking back at the second beer we made at this same time last year, the Milk Stout.  I'm currently nursing over a hangover brought on by a Maryland tailgate coupled with friends and $3 Rocktoberfest's at Rock Bottom.  I finally brought myself to want to be near beer again, now that I had to open a bottle of Dogfish Head Punkin' to simmer some meatballs in.

The Milk Stout was our first foray into an all-grain batch of beer.  I think Milk Stout ranks pretty highly for Liz and I as our favorite type of beer, so I'm surprised it took us this long to try ouhr hand on it.  Our favorites being the one Duck Rabbit makes, as well as Lefthand's and Terrapin's "Moo-Hoo."  I'm surprised it isn't a more accessible type of beer, but it can be hard to find them.  I found a recipe that claimed it was close in nature to "Snow Plow" a winter seasonal by Widmer.  Liz and I had just been to their brewery in August of 2010 for my best friend from high school's rehearsal dinner.  We did not get a chance to taste that beer at the time, but did get a chance to heavily sample some of their more regular ones.  We really enjoyed what they made, so we thought the recipe would find us well.

Liz and I ventured up to the Flying Barrel in Frederick to pick up some grain.  They were absolutely wonderful with the help they provided me.  They pulled some one aside to assist me in locating what I needed and teach me through the weighing and gathering process.  They even gave us some free beer of some kegged Home Brew they had in a fridge keggerator on the premise.  I must admit, the coolest part of the whole process is when Liz and I got to mill the grain we pulled together for the recipe.  It made us feel closer to the end product that we had ever experienced before.  It was also uncanny how much grain you need for 5 gallons of beer, needing nearly 14 pounds of grain.

Now that grains are involved, temperature becomes a little more important.  So where we sometimes go more on "feel" we were using the thermometer more religiously.

Bailey, our beagle, went nuts for this spent grain mash once we finished sparging it.

This smelled soooooooooooo delicious and actually tasted pretty good.  It basically tasted like really sweet and rich oatmeal.

The picture below show just how unprepared we were for the all-grain process.  We did not have the outside space or the proper equipment.  We ended up needing 3 pots to hold all the grain.  It got messy pretty quickly, and our building's AC was not quite the best at the time, so it also got swelteringly hot with all the burners going.

The color is pretty interesting.  It is hard to believe such a color was coming from basically a grain-tea.

So this is where the lack of proper equipment comes into play.  We couldn't really sparge (basically running water through the spent grain to make sure all the sugars are drawn out) our grain properly, so I'm basically burning my hands here trying to get it done.  There actually some video circulating of me that Ed took of this goose-like sound I was screaming every time I squeezed the hot bags of grain.

Ed got in on it too, though opting for a shirtless operation.  I stripped down eventually too, because of the heat.  Also, man-sweat is a necessary ingredient in any proper beer.

What a mess.  Beer's a weird process where you clean the kitchen better than it has ever been cleaned, only to mess it up immediately with sticky dark goop.

Ed, who had to eventually call it quits to work on homework, abandoned the kitchen to do discussion board posts in the living room.  I was left to finish on my own.  I do not blame Ed for his decision, and actually regretted having all my grad school work done heading into this day.  The whole process hear took about 7 hours, so it was more time intensive than the 3 or 4 that we were used to.

Equipment was the name of the game here, and where you don't legit equipment if you are going to play around with all-grain brewing, it is important to have some things like a couple huge pots or buckets along with a large metal colander.  I broke a small colander in the process here, and stress fractured a plastic one. The next week I discovered a nice metal strainer in Liz's pot cabinet.  My second go at it was a lot easier when I made an all-grain chai tea beer, because I halved my recipe and used that metal colander.  It was seamless compared to this.

Finally have a more finished wort ready for hop additions.

Then lingering grain was being a pain straining the finished wort into the carboy.  Liz is exercising her wrists here for the greater good of the beer.

The Milk Stout is on the left here, with the Leaf Blower I mentioned being on the right.  What a beautiful sight to see two active carboys at once.

So the beer turned out okay.  It had a weird aftertaste, though our friend Craig swears by it, so I've been funneling him 4 packs through the year since it hasn't been a fast mover.  He's supported Battery Brewing way before it was Battery Brewing, even seeing it through an incident caused by leaving a little bleach in a bottle during the cleaning process (getting an oxygen based cleaner is real easy, even though a bit more expensive, lesson learned).  So I'm happy to give him outstanding inventory for no special occasion.  I'll have one on occasion, but it surely isn't one of my favorites.  I'm definitely going to try it over again in a smaller, more easily managed batch.

Strawberry Kolsch Round 1

I'm trying to go back and document some of the older brews...so this post has us going back to late May 2010...our (Ed, Liz, and I) first go at Strawberry Kolsch. 

Clearly I'm putting some sweat equity into this batch.  The next year when we went strawberry picking, and we had to overhear this guy talk about Freezer Jam for 2 hours...a running joke between Liz and I.

This picture was taken about half way through our haul...we actually went back the next year to remake this in 2 batches. Having so many berries on one another starts the bruising process pretty early, so upon getting home, I was quick to sort out the good from the bad, washed and pureed the worse off ones, and froze them so I'd be ready to go when we brewed the next weekend.

We originally had the intent of making a strawberry  beer using a lighter wheat beer like an American Wheat or even a Pale Ale.  The guy at the homebrew store suggested strawberries might pair well with a Kolsch.  We were at the Falls Church Homebrew store, which is a bit small and claustrophobic, we so eagerly took his advice.  It turns out he gave us a Weizenbier kit with a Kolsch yeast, since there was no Kolsch kit in the store.  This ended up working even better than a traditional Kolsch kit, as we confirmed the next year when we made both a 5 gallon batch of the Weizenbier kit with Kolsch yeast and a traditional Kolsch kit.  It produced a much sweeter product than a spicier tasting Kolsch kit would have produced on its own.  We pureed about 3 pounds of strawberries for the primary.  For the secondary, we used about a pound of halved strawberries boiled with lemon slices.  The lemon is supposed to add some sourness to the strawberry taste, making the taste even stronger.  We started the secondary about 7 days in, and then let that sit about 7 more days before bottling with some honey and priming sugar.

 The picture on the left is soon after fermentation started and the second picture shows the secondary. You can see the reddish tent in the secondary.  This batch was great, and a big hit with our friends.  The next year, we made a double batch, playing around with things a bit more, trying to amp up the alcohol content a bit, varying the ingredients like I mentioned earlier, and just trying to refine the flavor.  We didn't match the original awesomeness of this batch, but we were happy to have 10 gallons of it this time around.

Trappo Chocco

Brewed up a batch of a chocolate Trappist Ale with Ed this week.

Here he is cleaning the carboy, getting his swirl on.  You can see that he's worn his Battery Brewing shirt for the occasion.  You can also see he's real excited about cleaning it.  We took multiple takes to make sure we captured his smile.

I think this is the greenest I've ever seen a mid-boil hop addition.

And Ed goes and ruins it by adding dark brown to it.  He got a hold of some dark cocoa for the batch.

Sugar crystals added in order to pump up the sugar content of the beer.

And we're done...with the exception of the broken hydrometer...I can't believe I broke it...it is partially the blame of a loose cap on its holder and that Ed and I were putting a dent in the Dogfish Head Punkin' keg we acquired the week before.  We at least got the reading before I managed to break it, though I don't have the replacement one yet to check the final gravity.  I guess we'll just have to guess based on how tipsy a 6 pack makes us.