I Got Berried!: Strawberry Kolsch

First off, apologies, it has been too long since my last post.  Ed and I both moved, so we've been spending more time transporting beer and equipment than using it.  I did get married though, and we made beer for it, so have I got a post for you!

What to make, what to make, what to make?  Liz and I have a handful of Battery Brewing beers that are important to us. One of our first dates was to pick strawberries so that I could brew with them.  Our first kiss was after a homebrew release party for a Blood Orange American Wheat Ale.  The list goes on, but I'll spare you the mushy stuff.  But this presents a quandary for any homebrewer, when you're brewing for a special event, how do you decide?  What's on your mind?

Do you do something new and bold?

Do you do something you've done a bunch before and are fairly confident in?

Will you get bottle blowups from over-carbonation with everyone in their nice clothes?

What happens if it doesn't turn out?  

Should I brew separate batches to plan for the worse?

What if people don't like it?

Do I need to provide cups so people don't get the yeasties?

What if I get floaters in there?

Am I giving myself enough time for it to mature?

Fruity, dark, hoppy, bitter?

No one's going to touch it, right?

I worry a lot.  I should have it checked out.  Does anyone else secretly dread a big event they're sharing a beer or do you embrace it fully?

We chose a Strawberry Kolsch that I've been brewing with Ed every year since I've met Liz.  It is very drinkable when it works.  It is reasonably drinkable when it doesn't.  It is light and refreshing, so it transcends even inexperienced pallets.  And it is a brew I'm particularly proud of.

It also means we get to go on a You Pick 'Em Adventure!  Ed and Lex joined us.  (We actually pit-stopped at the Flying Barrel to pick up homebrew supplies on the way...or out of the way, depending if you're Ed/Kevin or Liz/Lex)

Liz and I en route to berries...Tip #1, wear red, so you don't stain your shirt
Tip #2, Wear your Flying Dog T-Shirt, and you get compliments on it all day.  

Ed and Lex on the hay ride to the berries

Still happy with each other, even after the field work

Our first foray with this brew, we used a Weizenbier kit with Kolsch Yeast.  The next year we experimented (full on Kolsch kit, speciality grains, timing of strawberry addition, secondaries), but we found that the first year we got it mostly right, so we tried to recreate it.  We've been trying to move beyond traditional kits lately, to both be more adventurous and save coin, and the homebrew store doesn't always have the kit you need!  We used a Kolsch yeast,  3.3 pounds of LME, 1 pounds Pilsen DME, and 2 pounds wheat DME.  We used about 1 pound of strawberries at about 40 minutes, then 2 pounds at about 50 minutes of a 60 minute boil.  We used a mix of both sliced and pureed berries.  We also boiled with sliced/juiced lemon to give it a bit more sour flavor, and in our experience the lemon brings out the flavor of the strawberries.  At 35 minutes we used a 1/2 ounce of German Magnum hops at 50 minutes for bittering, and 1/2 an ounce of US Perle hops at 55 minutes for aroma.

Ignore my awesome hair

Lemon peels dropped into the boil



We used sliced and pureed, surface area
and strainability in mind

 

Since they're being added late in the boil,
we cook the berries to get rid of any bacteria

If you haven't built a wort chiller for cheap yet, do it now!

Filtering out the pulp

 

We let it ferment, which started in about a day and half and completed after about 5 days.  On day 6 we added about a pound of pureed berries in for the secondary, and let it sit for another 3 days.  Then we bottled, using a mixture of honey and priming sugar, let it do its magic for a week, then started doing the nervous taste testing.

Pureed berries boiled for the secondary addition

It was pleasant after a week, and even better after 2 weeks.  I was very excited it appeared to have turned out!

Now for the presentation!  Of course, this is for a celebration!  Check back next week for some great information on how we made labels, attached them to bottles, and decided on the beer selection for the wedding.  I never labeled my beers before, so the designing was fun.

Mango Wheat!

In an effort to try something new and unheard of Alexa and I got to brainstorming on what kind of twist we could do on a wheat beer.  Kevin and I have had success with our Strawberry Kolsch/Wheats in the past, so this was old hat.  What else could we do that would make for a nice refreshing summer brew?

What is in season??  (besides strawberries).

Mangos are!  Just not local.  But hell they have been tasting great and are only a buck a pop at the local grocery.  Bring on the mangos I say.  Bring on....six mangos....for a nice small 2.5 gallon batch of all grain wheat and hops nectar.

First we must gather supplies!  Field trip to lovely Frederick, MD!

http://www.flyingbarrel.com/

 

Recipe:

4 lbs of wheat grain

1 lb of light crystal grain

dash of Munich 

1/2oz Tettnang Hops

1/2oz Czech Saaz Hops

1 Whole mango diced during last 10 minutes of boil

1 Week in Primary fermentation

1 Week in Secondary racking on top of 5 additional mangos

The Boil

Diligently Filtering

Stay tuned for part two...the grand reveal and first consumption in 2 weeks.

Cheers!

Example of a terrible pour

Just got this GIF app on my phone and tried it out.  Shouldn't have used it on the first pour of a new keg.

All's Fair in Grain and War: Rosemary Me Wheat Beer

For my birthday, back in December, Liz got me a $75 gift certificate to Flying Barrel, a homebrew store up in Frederick.  We finally got up that way when we weren't preoccupied with breweries, and I got to spending.  I was like a kid in a candy shop, having extreme trouble picking out what I wanted to buy and what I wanted to brew.

Rosemary and Paradise Seeds

I ended up getting a lot of goodies, like paradise seeds, star anise, irish moss, oak chips, and a bottle cleaner faucet attachment.  We've wanted to get more experimental with some of our ingredients, and a shopping spree's gotten us some fun tools, and to start it rolling, I grabbed some grain.

I had planned out some light wheat recipes, but that all went out the window in the heat of the moment.  I sort of picked and chose adventurously (or haphazardly might be a better word).  I'm still coming into my own with all-grain brewing, and haven't tried designing my own recipes, so it was a fun experience to go on my own.  This is what I ended up with in terms of materials for a 2.5 gallon brew.

2 lbs of wheat
1.25 lb of Carapils
.25 lb of British Crystal 55
.25 lb of Caramel British Crystal 120
.25 lb of flaked maze
Fermentis Dry Wheat Beer Yeast (Safbrew WB-06) (1/2 bag)
4 branches of rosemary
1 ounce of crushed paradise seeds
6 thin slices of ginger
1 teaspoon of Irish Moss
.25 ounce of Amarillo hops

Our Grain

Steeping grains in a bag

We put 2 gallons of water on high heat, and began putting the grain in at 153 degrees using a grain bag.  After steeping the grain, we sparged it using a metal colander.  We maintained the heat within 5 degrees of the 153.  After we felt we got the sugars sufficiently out through sparging, we went ahead and brought the water to a rolling boil for 60 minutes.  We threw the hops in at about the 30 minute mark.  At the 50 minute mark, we added both the rosemary, the paradise seeds, and the Irish Moss.  After we pulled it at 60 minutes, we ran the wart chiller, and brought the temperature down to 72 degrees.



Have to watch the splash back.
You can see to the right of my mouth, my "flavor saver"
caught a good chunk of spent grain.  The dog helped clean me off.



The Ginger and Crushed Paradise Seeds

Irish Moss

After the boil, we cooled it down to 75 degrees using our wort chiller.



It is nice having folks who can run the wort chiller,
so I can prep some other things while its cooling


We pitched the yeast, put it all in the carboy, and topped off the wort to about 2.5 gallons.  Then we played the waiting game.  Some friends of our's, outside of the normal brewing crew of a mix of Liz, Lexi, and Sam, showed up.  You can see Ev and Rach below, and Hillary showed up too.  We had a beer tasting, as is the norm.

Fermenting started with 24 hours.  We let it sit 9 days in total, then bottled using honey and maple syrup.  The one thing I couldn't get over while bottling was how aromatic it was after transferring it to the bottling bucket.  It smelled like roast chicken.

After 2 weeks, Liz and I had a bottle of it with a chicken dinner, and after 3 weeks, Ed and I shared a big bottle.  We both agreed that it was bold, and very aromatic, but the rosemary taste isn't as overpowering as the smell would lead you to believe.  The paradise grains provided a spiciness to it that paired well with the rosemary flavor.  The body could have stood to have been a bit stronger, which would likely be solved by using more grains in the brew.  This was our first time using Irish Moss as well, so we're not sure how much of the clarity is related to it or just a blip in the brewing.  The beer is definitely clearer compared to our previous all-grains, so we'll be sure to use it again.  I'm really happy with how this brew turned out considering it was sort of by the seat of our pants.

Special Thanks to our friend Sam, who essentially has a rosemary plant at this house that's tree sized, who generously provided the rosemary for the brew.

My Kegerator

All guys have wishlists.  Some pine for a 400hp rear wheel drive sports car.  Some lust over 80inch home theater setups.  Maybe you or your guy wants that 20megapixel DSLR or a sweet cordless drill.  Some more attainable than others given where you are in your life and what you will actually be able to enjoy.  Ever since my then 21 year old buddy Ken bought me and my then under 21 friends our first couple of kegs for a college party I wanted a kegerator.  I wanted to have draft beer in my own home and not just out at the bar.

Two years ago I somewhat impulsively surfed onto my local Maryland Craigslist and found a very nice kegerator for $300.  Hours later my buddy Matty helped me retrieve it and load it into my hatchback for the trip to it's new home.  At this time in my life my apartment was somewhat of the spot to be.  My roomie Scott and I would frequently host Jersey Shore parties, pregames, and full blown ragers.  We were a couple years outta college and still routinely regressed to our Penn State partying ways (still do but it is less often).  A kegerator made fiscal sense.  Plus it's just cool.  Typically loaded with a $60 keg of Natural, Keystone, or $90 Yuengling when we were feeling frisky we didn't feel so bad about shelling out to host since we had the power of the kegerator, pouring beers for our friends for pennies. 

 Here's the old girl  

In the past two years we have been hosting less and it takes much longer for a keg to runneth dry.  Light lagers are no longer on the shopping list and Yuengling rarely makes the cut these days (why does Yuengling make you so hungover anyway?  Huh, Dick?!).  We've upgraded to Blue Moon, Harpoon, Dogfish, and Dominion but we still procure the big bad 1/2 kegs and while draft beer will probably never lose its luster on me I do get antsy for more frequent rotation as it seems to take about 3 months to go through a keg.  So now, 1/6 kegs will be my target so I can get more variety while still having that unbeatable value and taste from a keg.  One day I will dive into the world of home kegging but probably not until my square footage goes up a bit (damn you dc-metro prices).  

There isn't a huge point to this post other than to kind of show how my kegerator is growing along with me as I get older.   

Next on draft you ask?  Southampton Double White.  A 1/6 keg of course.  I'll let ya know how it turns out.  

Cheers!

Flying Dog Brewery Tour

Ugh I'm the worst.  Meant to make this post timely, had the greatest of intentions but then....FAIL.

Because of this I'm going to keep things short.

The Bethesda crew here organized a trip up to the Flying Dog Brewery in Frederick, MD some weeks ago.  I've been on a number of brewery trips in my time, Dogfish, Fullers, DC Brau, Dogfish.  Ok so not that many but of those this was the most enjoyable.  The tour guide was just a beer bro and wanted everyone to have a good time.  There was ample sampling during the tour and more than ample sampling afterwards in their kickass tasting room.  Here are some photo highlights (as usual all credit to Alexa):

Our slightly punk slightly hipster and thorougly awesome tour guide.  Kyle I think?

Mmm.  Huge brewing vessels.  I like this pic. 

Inventory!  Flying Dog also reaches capacity by contract brewing other beers.

Industrial revolution.

Me climbing on top of a huge stack of pallets after the tour changed locations.

The beautiful tap lineup in the tasting room.

Cheers!

BTW: Black, Tan, and White - Vanilla Bean and Cocoa Nib Milk Stout

For anyone who's read this blog closely, they'll probably know that Milk Stout is my favorite type of beer.  They'll probably also know that my previous foray it left something to be desired.  It was important to me to get this one right.   To make it more fun, my buddy Sam joined Ed, Liz, and I.

I'll start off detailing a little project we've worked on recently...an Immersion Wort Chiller.  We've noticed a distinct homebrew taste lately in our darker beers, and we wanted to address that.  From our research, it seemed like the cool down process was the likeliest culprit, so we figured it was a good gadget to target in the hopes to sort of right the ship after some brew we wish we were prouder of.  I mulled a lot of do-it-yourself blogs on building an immersion chiller, and to be honest, I found a lot of different directions to go in, which ended up confusing me.  They also approached the job differently, with some being more high tech or evolved than others.  I just wanted something that was cheap and worked, so I just used them for knowledge gathering purposes, and went at it.  I knew I needed copper, and just about everyone agreed I needed 3/8".  After that, I knew I needed a way to curl it, and then attach it to the sink.  I also wanted to keep the price at about $30, which is far less than pre-built ones. The copper was easy, a Home Depot trip solved that pretty quickly.  I'm only do small 5 gallon batches, so I didn't need anything huge.  The standard coil they sold was 20 feet.  That worked perfectly for me, and left me not needing to figure out any welding or coil connections.  For coiling, I found a 1 gallon carboy worked perfectly given the size of my brew kettle.  I was worried about kinks, but by being cautious, I didn't have any problems.  (Honestly, I almost just used the pre-coiled wrapping that it came packaged in, but just stretching it a bit.)

The real problems came when I got over confident and attempted to curve the pipe inwards for an exit point, rather than the easier up and outward.  That was the first kink, and I found that once you kink once, the kinks keep coming.    My lesson learned here was not to be fancy if you are aiming for something cheap and strictly basic functional.  I blew a mouthful of water through it, and was still good, thankfully so.  It is important to keep in mind as you are bending, that you want the cold water to flow in and into the coils, and the exit point to be from the bottom of your new coil.

 I got metal band tighteners, and attached some plastic tubing, and attached those at the end.  Ed and I spent a lot of time figuring out how to attach it to my sink.  There are a lot of connectors out there, but if you live at an apartment complex, sometimes you are faced with non-conventional connectors, because the fixtures are crap.  Ed brilliantly found a way to just use the metal band on the partially deconstructed sink sprayer we have in the sink, and it actually worked quite well.  You just need to make sure there are no leaks, because that can lead to contamination.  It worked greatly with just plain tap water temperature.  We got a drastic drop in temperature during our first use, getting down a hundred degrees in the matter of a couple minutes.  We saw it as a huge success, and not to ruin the rest of the blog, the beer turned out with virtually no hint of homebrew, so even at the lack of more sample sets, we've declared it a win.

Just as a tip too...I've heard you are supposed to wipe it down with vinegar before you go.  I'm not sure the reason for it, but I assume it has to do with cleaning or activating/deactivating things having to do with acids/bases.  I'm not a scientist though, I'm just a financial analyst, so I did it.  If you're reading this and know why the science behind it works, let me know!

Alright, now that I have that over with, let's get on to the brew.  We went with an extract kit.  We had bought it at the same time as the last nut brown kit from Midwest.  It was a Cream Stout kit. We decided to enhance it with Cocoa Nibs and Bourbon Soaked Vanilla Beans.  I'll get into more detail on what kind and how we decided to handle them with the beer.

The ingredients of the kit were:
6 lbs Dark LME
8 oz Black Malt
8 oz Caramel 80 L
1 oz Northern Brewer Hops
1/2 lb lactose
Safale s-04 Dry Ale Yeast

We steeped the grains at 155 degrees for about a 1/2 hour.  We rinsed them thoroughly with some warm water.

We brought it back up to boiling, turned off the heat, and added the lactose and the dark malt extract.  We then used only a 1/2 ounce of the bittering hops.  We also sprinkled in a 1/2 handful of cocoa nibs at this time..  I spent a lot of time researching what to do with the cocoa nibs.  The first problem I made was ordering raw cocoa nibs, where I should have gotten professionally roasted ones.  I got them off of Amazon.com though, if you are looking for cheap and easy obtained ones.  I do think raw ones have less flavor.  They almost taste and smell flavorless when you open the bag.  Making sure not to scorch them, I put them in the oven for about 5-10 minutes in a closely watched oven at 250 degrees.  Toasting them really brought out a chocolate flavor and smell.  I was glad I did.  The reason I'm only throwing in a small bit in now is that, from what I've read, boiling the nibs can be a bad idea.  They bring out a bad bitterness and any chocolate flavor will be lost in the boil.  I threw some in because I wanted some of that bitterness. I did not toss in the vanilla bean in yet because of not wanting to boil away the flavor.

I finished boiling for 60 minutes, threw in about 1/4 of a deconstructed vanilla bean into the boil for the last 5 minutes, used the wort chiller,.and yeasted it up.  Breaking the vanilla bean is as easy as slicing it in 1/2 long ways, and scraping out the beans.

I let fermentation happen.  It started just about a day after I left it sit.  It went hard for about 2 days, and was just about finished after about 5 days.  I left it sit 4 more days before I added the roasted cocoa nibs and vanilla bean.  I roasted about 8 ounces of nibs and sliced up 1 full bourbon soaked vanilla bean.  I had found the beans at Trader Joe's in a package of 2 for $4.  They can be very expensive if you buy them in the spices aisle at the grocery store.  It might be worth buying a big batch of them off the internet for cheap and just storing them well.  48 hours before adding the nibs and vanilla beans to the fermented beer, I soaked them in rum.  You should soak the nibs in rum or vodka prior to adding because it dissolves the chocolate theombromine that can't be dissolved in water.  If you want the rich chocolate flavor, you need to soak it in alcohol.  I just put the scraped bean in there so the flavors could soak together.  After the 48 hours soak was up, I just dumped it directly into the fermented beer.  I've seen some things about weighting down the nibs in a bag, because they float, but I had no problem with them straight into the brew.  I let it sit for about a week, then bottled.

We conditioned it with brown sugar and maple syrup, and let it sit for about 4 weeks in the bottle.  It turned out great!  I did a side by side comparison to a vanilla stout, and it was honestly hard to tell the difference.  It turned out great, and I'd rank it was one of our best brews.  It came in at a healthy 5.4%.  The strawberry kolsch and the blood orange wheat come are its only rivals.  I've been pumped to be drinking this beer.