Throw Another Squash on the Barbie

So it appears Battery Brewing has seasonal brews now.  This year marked the third time we've made both the Strawberry Kolsch and now the Butternut Nut Brown Ale.  

How great this is, right?  We've had three beers successful enough that we've wanted to make them three times?  Right?  Uhhhhh, not so much.  You must not remember 2011.  This was the beer that drove me to make the wort chiller.  It was gross.  I don't like abusing my beer knowledge, but I'll admit,  we rid ourselves of it by telling novices how good it was and then watching them gagging it down as they tried to tell themselves it was good.  A clear abuse of power, I know.  I'm not proud of it.

So now, with wort chiller in hand, we tried our hands at it a third time.  

Ed, apparently a glutton for punishment, wanted to push the boundaries of brewing and try our hands with outside brewing since we have a backyard now.  Where we'd love to have a propane burner with significant btu's, we're on a budget, and we workable burner on the grill.  It was really nice to brew outside in nice weather, but it didn't heat the water up fast enough and it left me convinced nasty critters (bacteria, wild yeast, bugs) were getting in the brew.  Nothing ventured, nothing "grained".  (<--...hrrrm, just thought of that, so don't steal it, and we will be making shirts that say that.  Posted here 11/11/13, so dibs on that phrase)

Let me backtrack a bit, we had a homebrew store adventure where we picked up some grain for the brew.

Smoked malt speciality grain?  Don't mind if I do.  This should be good a good flavor in our butternut brown ale, right?  I'll get to that later.

We picked up:
2 lbs 2 row malt
1.5 lbs Munich
4 oz Crystal 60
3 oz Chocolate Malt
1 oz Black Patent
.5 oz Roasted Barley
1 oz Smoked Malt
2 lbs lightly hopped LME
.8 oz of Willamette Hops
London Ale 1028 Wyeast


You can see from the shopping list that it is a partial mash.

Before we started we roasted 2 butternut squash and some odds and ends from pumpkin carving.  The trickiest part of this is cutting up the squash.  I have no good advice from this other than watching out for your fingers.  Please leave a comment if you know the secret to cutting up butternut squash.

We sparged the specialty grains at 165 degrees after bringing the water to a rolling boil.  We let them sit for about 20 minutes, with off and on dunking.  We did our best to rinse them out and squeeze out the sugars, until it ran mostly clear.

From there, we brought it back up to a rolling boil and covered it back up.  10 minutes into the boil we added our liquid malt extract and the about half of the squash.

At about 50 minutes we added in the hops and the other half of the squash.

We let it finish to about 65 minutes, then went about prepping the yeast and setting it up in the carboy.

It took a while to get started fermenting, which had me nervous.  I attribute this to having it in the basement, which is sort of cold.  Much to my wife's dismay, I moved the carboy up to the kitchen for about 10 days for it to do it's business.  In all, we bottled two weeks after setting it in the carboy.  I would have let it sit longer (as my experience is the longer dark beers sit in the primary/secondary, the better flavor you get), but we had a hard deadline of our yearly Battery Lane Family Thanksgiving in about 10 days, that we needed getting ready for.  We bottled with a split between maple syrup and priming sugar, which gave a good carbonation.

The beer ended up with a bit of a burned smell, and we contribute this.  I don't think it was the grill.  I think it was the smoked malt.  The taste is there though.  I know smell is a major part of a beer experience this, but I can move past it once I taste the butternut.  One friend called it an "ash tray" smell, but he's a bit obtuse and I think that's over-stating the smell.  Overall, the beer turned out pretty solid and none of the homebrew taste from last year.

Now for something a bit more refreshing.

 And just to whet our whistles during the boil, we enjoyed vintage Saison du Buff's.  I know, I know, light colored, low abv herbed beer should be enjoyed currently, not 2 years after the release, but we all know I have a beer hoarding issue.  It took me about 6 months to allocate all 3 of the series of Stone, Victory, and Dogfish, but I found them that year.  The Stone one was the first I found, but it cost me 6.99 for the bottle in Joppatowne, which historically has very cheap beers.  The other two were Total Wine finds for like 1.99 and 2.99 a bottle respectively.  The flavors actually held up awesomely.  This was the beer that inspired us to make the Rosemary Wheat Ale.  Our's actually holds up to the professionals for once, I think.  Anyways, clearly you can see my awesome pours below, but Ed, Liz, and I enjoyed this treat during the brew.