Collabos with a Yard Gnome

My good friend Paul and I brewed a couple batches together recently, and I'm just now catching up to posting those recipes. Once again I have to work (occasionally) which means I don't have as much time to get cracked out on strong coffee and stare at the computer screen. The job is pretty cool so far, helping out at Green Bottling, a truck based bottling line that contract bottles bombers for over 20 breweries in Oregon. It's a cool way to see the inside of a lot of breweries, make connections with the brewers, and work with some cool people. So far I have helped them bottle at Bridgeport, 10 Barrel in Bend, and Lompoc. We are headed to Ashland tomorrow for a 4 day bottling binge.

The first brew we did was a flanders red, using Al B's "Rodenbug" blend on its 2nd generation, or 3rd if you count the starter I made in between batches. The recipe is very close to the parameters set in Jeff Sparrow's Wild Brews book, although we used flaked triticale instead of corn or flaked wheat. The fermentation got a little rambunctious in the primary and blew the tinfoil off one carboy, good thing it's a sour beer.

Flanders Red, Brewed on 1/30/10

Recipe is for 12.9 gallons pre-boil, 11.7 gallons post-boil, all grain

O.G. 1.060 IBU's 16

12.25 lb. Vienna Malt

5 lb. Flaked Triticale

2 lb. Aromatic malt

2 lb. Caravienne

1.5 lb. crystal 15

.75 lb. Special B

.5 lb. crystal 120

.5 lb. crystal 75

52 gr. Willamette whole 4.7% AA 60 min

Mash 7.5 gallons water with the following additions:

5 gr. chalk

1 gr. gyspum

2 gr. calcium chloride

2 gr. baking soda

Mash in to 156

Forgot to put in the triticale! Put in at 20 minutes, dropping the temp to 148.

Pulled .75 gallons of mash liquor and heated to boiling, adding back to mash.

This raised temp back to 158

Total mash time 75 minutes

Sparge with 8.5 gallons at 170

Collect 12.9 gallons at 1.054 = 81% efficiency

Boil 60 minutes

yeast nutrient at 10 minutes

Chilled to 70, aerated by shaking for 2 minutes

pitched a slurry of AlB's Rodenbug blend / cali ale yeast

Fermented in the mid 60's for about 3 weeks, then racked to secondary for aging. Gravity was at 1.020.

The second brew was a baltic porter, a style that we both like a lot, and Paul's first lager. We started off with an intensive baltic porter tasting at Belmont Station, but sadly most of the beers were overly aged and overly oxidized, tasting of nothing but prunes and cardboard. The best one we had is the one I have repeatedly poked fun at Paul for drinking, Black Boss, because I'm of the opinion that there's no way they could sell it for $2 for 16 oz. in the states and actually put quality ingredients in it. But actually it tastes great, striking a similar flavor balance to a Belgian Dark strong, in that the alcohol warmth helps to keep it from being overly sweet or syrupy. I'm pretty sure there are almost no hops in Black Boss , which is probably one way they pinch the pennies in making it. Either that or it's government subsidized!
We tried the Fuller's London Porter too because of a note in the BJCP style guidelines about Baltic Porters sharing some malt similarities to brown porters.

Paul took some nice photos of the brewday and you can see them here. Note the cold steep on the carafa malt. That was a first for both of us.

Unfortunately, the first 2 lagers I made this year seem to have some DMS issues, which has to be from the long time it took me to chill the wort (about 40 minutes with a plate chiller). I'm going to try to alleviate some of the corny DMS aroma by bubbling CO2 through the beer repeatedly. I'll post an update if that process helps at all. We cooled the baltic porter using an immersion chiller to get it to 90 or so to avoid DMS formation, and then ran it through a plate chiller to knock out to pitching temp.

Baltic Thunderbolt!

Recipe is for 13.5 gallons pre-boil, 12 gallons post-boil, all grain

O.G. 1.076 F.G. 1.015 ABV 8.1% IBU's 30

19 lb. Weyermann pilsner malt

6 lb. munich malt

3 lb. caramunich 60

1.5 lb. crystal 120

(2 lb. carafa special 550L, steeped at room temp for 12 hours in .5 gallons water)

37 gr. Yakima Magnum whole 13.5% AA 60 min

Mash:

7.5 gallons plus:

7 gr. chalk

3 gr. calcium chloride

3 gr. baking soda

Mash in all grains except the carafa at 150 for 70 minutes

Add the cold steeped carafa and stir in, rest 10 minutes

Sparge with 8 gallons at 168, recirc 5 qt.

Collect 12.75 gallons at 1.072 = 79% efficiency

Topped up to 13.5 gallons

Boil 90 minutes

yeast nutrient & whirlfloc at 10 minutes

Chill to 52 degrees, using immersion chiller and then plate chiller

Aerate by hand for 4 minutes (ran out of oxygen)

pitched 1/2 yeast cake per carboy of wyeast 2124 from the smoked helles

Fermented at 52ish for 3 weeks, then a D-rest at 62 for 1 week

Racked to keg on 3/24, tastes great and none of the DMS flavors that the previous batches had.

Breakside Test Batches

Ben and Tony getting fired up

On Saturday, the 13th, Tony, Ben and I got together to do some test batches for Breakside Brewing. We decided to start off with a test batch of the Wit, and our Rye ale, the 2 recipes we felt the least confident on how they would turn out. We also wanted to split the Wit 3 ways in order to test some different yeast strains and pick a house Belgian yeast. We don't have the stuff moved into the brewery yet, so we spent a long day hanging out in Tony's garage and doing a double batch.

The Sabco Brewmagic system is pretty awesome. It seems pretty easy to get a handle on. I don't know why they don't stick a pump in between the HLT and the mash tun, since they are at the same height and therefore not easy to gravity feed. Instead of pumping over to the mash tun you have to keep filling the HLT as you go to keep the water level above the level you want in the mash. Mash temp is held by recirculating the wort through a small electrical heating unit, and mash steps are done manually by adding bottom heat while recirculating. The boil is pretty straightforward, and we use a Therminator plate chiller with in-line oxygenation and thermometer to cool the wort.

(Tony recirculating the first runnings, which we found to be unnecessary since the mash is recirculated the whole time.)

The Wit is a pretty standard recipe using about 50% wheat flakes, coriander, dried sweet and bitter orange peel, and chamomile. We split the batch into 3, 4 gallon batches, fermented separately with Wyeast 3787 (Westmalle), Wyeast 1388 (Duvel), and Wyeast 3711 (Theriez). The 3 yeast strains we decided to use were picked for their potential to ferment many different kinds of Belgian ales, although I'm not sure the French saison yeast from Theriez is the best choice for that. Maybe we should have tried the LaChouffe strain in stead, but I thought the saison yeast would be fun to try. The unfermented wort tasted really spot-on for a wit, with the chamomile being very up-front in the aroma, but that will most likely change with time and fermentation.

The Rye recipe uses 30% rye malt, pale malt, and some honey malt. It's designed to be a blond session ale but it came out a little darker than we had expected, more of a pale ale color. We used Perle as a first wort hop and Sterling as a 60 minute addition. It seems like this beer is not really settled in its identity yet, Ben likes the idea of it being like a light English summer ale with a Marris Otter base, while I thought it should be a hoppy blond or kolsch kind of base beer, with significant hop aroma but coming from German or hybrid hops. I kind of think it will be better with some late hop additions but I also think that using only early additions in the first batch will give us a better idea of what the rye malt is doing to the flavor and aroma. We split this batch between the classic Cali ale yeast and the WLP007 "Dry English Ale" yeast. My vote is for Cali as our house "clean" ale yeast, because I think it does way better for hoppy beers and is a little more tolerant to slightly warmer fermentation temperatures.

All these beers are fermenting away in Tony's house and I can't wait to try the beers to see which yeast strains prevail. We might hold off any additional brewing until we move into the building, but I will keep the blog updated on our future brews.

Thirsting for Bamberg: Smoked Helles Redux

This recipe is inspired by a singular beer: Schlenkerla Helles. This is the only non-smoked beer made by the Schlenkerla brewery, but because of the residual smoked malt from the brewing equipment and the yeast pitch, this beer has a pleasant smoky flavor. It's a perfect "entry-level" smoked beer. Many of the smokier beers like Schlenkerla Marzen are an acquired taste (and believe me, I've acquired it).

This batch is my second go around on a smoked helles, with very little changes from the first batch. I added a little munich malt for color and background flavor, and carapils for foam stability. One thing I noticed about the Schlenkerla Helles last time I tried it is a more bitter, firm finish than my homebrew. That bears out when looking at the 30 IBU's they claim. But I like my recipe where it's at, and I'm not trying to make an exact clone. The name of this beer comes from the fact that I first served it last year at my 30th birthday party. 31 is coming up!

"30 Rauch"

Recipe is for 7 gallons pre-boil, 6 gallons post-boil, all grain

1.051 O.G. 22 IBU's

6.75 lb. Weyermann Pils malt

1.75 lb. Rauchmalt

.5 lb. munich malt

.25 lb. aromatic malt

.25 lb. cara-pils malt

39 gr. Halltertau pellets 3.9% AA 60 minutes

Mash: 4.5 gallons H20 + 2 gr. gypsum + 2 gr. calcium chloride

153 for 60 minutes

Sparge with 4.5 gallons + 2 gr. gypsum + 2 gr. calcium chloride at 168

Collect 7 gallons at 1.044 = 86% efficiency

Boil 90 minutes

Wyeast nutrient and whirlfloc at 10 minutes

Chill to 50 using plate chiller over 40 minutes

Oxygen for 2 minutes

Pitch .75 cups thick slurry of Wyeast 2124 from Pilsner

Ferment at 50-52 degrees

Saison Dupont "Clone", Blackeyed Blonde tasting

I'm getting a little behind in posting my recipes so I'm just going to put this up with very little introduction. I've done a lot of saisons but I've never tried to clone Saison Dupont exactly. Even this is just close in the malt (they use 100% Dingemans Pilsner) and yeast (this is some sort of isolate from the Dupont culture, but I truly believe they are using a multi-strain yeast. Saison Dupont is one of my favorite beers on the planet, if not my ultimate "desert island" beer. The first time I had it, early on in my homebrewing days, was truly a life changing event.

When this beer is done, it will be fun to a side by side comparison with a bottle of Saison Dupont, even though I doubt it will be close enough to truly call a "clone". I'm going to try and bottle condition at least a six pack of this beer to see if it makes a better saison. I suspect it might, not because of the "increased complexity" from re-fermentation that a lot of people claim, but because the presence of yeast and unfiltered proteins add a lot of mouthfeel to very dry beers. When I keg saisons and they are almost crystal clear after a few weeks, they can be very "unforgiving", with little mouthfeel to bring the other elements together.

Saison DuPont "clone"

Recipe is for 7 gallons pre-boil, 5.9 gallons post-boil, all grain

O.G. 1.051 F.G. 1.007 ABV 5.8% (6.2% after bottling sugar)

28 IBU's (this would be a low estimate as the large flame out addition is not included))

7.5 lb. Great Western Pilsner malt

2 lb. Belgian pale malt

(All hops were 1 year old pellets, in sealed mylar packaging. I did not adjust AA% down)

14 gr. Styrian Goldings 3.5% AA First Wort Hop

28 gr. East Kent Goldings 4.8% AA 90 min

28 gr. East Kent Goldings 4.8% AA 0 min

14 gr. Styrian Goldings 3.5% AA 0 min

Mash: 4.5 gallons water + 4 gr. gypsum + 2 gr. Calcium Chloride

Step mash using bottom heat on stove, total 90 minutes:

126 for 15 minutes

Bring up to 148 over 10 minutes and rest 30 minutes

Bring up to 157 over 10 minutes and rest 10 minutes

Bring up to 170 over 10 minutes and rest 5 minutes, then start lauter.

Sparge with 4.5 gallons at 165

Collect 7 gallons at 1.043 = 84% efficiency

Boil 90 minutes, hops as noted. Wyeast nutrient at 10 minutes

Whirlpool 1 min

Rest 6 minutes while setting up heat exchanger

rack to carboy over 6 minutes, cool to 76

Oxygen for 60 seconds

Pitched a slurry of WLP 566 at 76, ramping to 84 over 5 days. Held steady at 80 until finished.

Bottled / kegged on 2/17/10

Dosed each 12 oz. bottle with 1 tsp priming sugar, each 22 oz bottle with 1.75 tsp.

Blackeyed Blonde Tasting:

As part of my "liquid resume" for my job search, I've been dropping off a lot of homebrew samples to the local breweries. As you can see above, I put the whole recipe on the beer label as well as my contact information. The other night I was very pleased to get an email from one of the brewers at Laurelwood that they were very impressed with the "Blackeyed Blonde", which is a Belgian Blond ale. Not only was I happy that the brewers liked it a lot, but I was touched that they actually made it a point to email me and let me know. Thanks, Hans. Ben Love from Hopworks also said he liked it, picking out a nice spicy phenol profile and very subtle alcochol.

Here's my tasting assesment:

Aroma: Big bubblegum / banana character at first, jumping out of the glass. Clove, mixed with a sweet grainy malt. Apple esters, and some warming alcohol is noticeable but not fuselly. Hardly any hop aroma. A discernible "flinty" mineral character in the finish which I think is from the beer, but might possibly be from the glass.

Appearance: Deep gold, crystal clear, medium-high carbonation. Head retention is not very good. Pretty much went away within the first minute.

Flavor: Big mouthful of sweet malt character, bubblegum esters, slight toasty & grainy pils malt quality. Clean bitterness on the end cuts away any sweetness and leaves a subtle noble hop flavor (this is pretty subtle as this beer is 4+ months old and was not incredibly hoppy to begin with). Combo of bitterness, alcohol warmth and CO2 dryness really help to dry out & clean up the finish.

Mouthfeel: Big, round gentle body with mouth expanding CO2 levels. The beer actually expands in your mouth as the CO2 comes out. Some prickly Co2 bite as can be expected. finishes dry and clean with lingering warming alcohols, not hot or harsh.

Overall: The few months keg conditioning and bottle aging have been kind to this beer, cleaning up the burst of sulphur that was apparent when I first kegged it (probably too early as I needed the yeast cake). I'm not a huge fan of the big banana character that the Wyeast 1214 throws off, and I can't say I'm a big fan of that yeast for both performance issues and the incredible amount of banana it creates. Overall this beer has a lot of complexity, and a definitive trappist signature flavor. It's also getting me a bit tipsy and it's not even 1 pm! I hope I can stay productive today...

Seanywonton's Brewing Blog is 2 years old!

I was recently looking through some of my old brew logs and came upon my first post, written on January 30th, 2008, and I realized I should probably write a little something special for this blog's second birthday! I'm going to celebrate with a little tasting of some recent beers I've brewed, and also make a special announcement: I've been hired on as a brewer at a soon-to-be-open brewpub called Breakside Brewing, which means I'M GOING TO GET PAID TO BREW BEER!!! The location will be in Northeast Portland. We should be opening in April if all goes well. There are going to be 3 of us brewing our butts off on a 15 gallon Sabco Brewmagic system until the owners can upgrade to a full-size brewhouse, hopefully in the first 6-9 months. I'll be working there part-time, a 2-3 days a week at least, and I might pick up some extra work at another brewery until something becomes a full-time gig.

I'm really excited about this new opportunity. Yes, I would probably prefer to be working on a full-scale brewhouse, but I think we will get there before too long. Plus, I've already been a part of deciding what kind of beers we will have on tap, and designing recipes with the 2 other brewers, Tony and Ben. I don't think I would really get that opportunity for at least a year or two if I was working for a bigger established brewery.

If you are in the Portland area, it would be great if you could come by and support us when we open. I'll announce our opening day on the blog at some point. I'm not sure how this blog will be effected by the shift in my brewing towards the professional side, but I'll probably keep it going with mainly my homebrewing stuff and some occasional stuff about what we do at the brewery.

So to celebrate here's a tasting of 3 recent beers:

Dale's Mild Ale

Aroma: Caramel, dark fruit, grainy and toasty with a noticeable tobacco note. Characteristic English maltiness with very low esters, yeast is very restrained for an English ale. Hardly noticeable hops - OK for style.

Appearance: Very low carbonation, low to no head, OK for style but maybe I should just pour more vigorously for better head. Great clarity, pretty much crystal clear auburn color appropriate for a dark mild or brown ale.

Flavor: Full maltyness up front, with some moderate sweetness, followed by a toasty, dry, grainy finish. Very low bitterness, ester, and alcohol presence. Very quaffable.

Mouthfeel: Full bodied, low carbonation but some prickly sensation mid-swallow. Might actually be a bit over-carbonated for a mild. Dry, grainy finish.

Overall: A super-sessionable mild ale. I think that it would be more to style if the toasty, grainy flavors were reduced somewhat (maybe taking out the brown malt), and it's slightly above spec in both starting and finishing gravity, which probably make the mouthfeel a bit "big" for style. I'm very happy with the results, although in the future I might adjust the grain bill a bit, potentially playing with adding a traditional brewing syrup. I would also switch to a yeast like Fuller's that kicks off a lot of esters for a little extra aroma and English character. This yeast is too clean.

"Svenska Kotbullar" Saison (reserve strength saison at 7.5% ABV)

Aroma: Moderate esters, pear is distinguishable along with a "mystery fruit" quality. Low banana, some spice. Vanilla character from malt. Moderate alcohol is noticeable but well integrated with a grainy finish. Clean, not funky.

Appearance: Crystal clear, light gold with a 3-finger white head that dies down somewhat but sticks around at 1/4 inch (bottle version has more carbonation and longer lasting head). Sticklers might say it's too clear for a saison.

Flavor: Smooth malts with vanilla, grainy and bready, flavors, but very dry. Well integrated bitterness and a grassy, lightly spicy hop flavor mid-palate to finish. Very smooth finish, especially for the fairly high alcohol level.

Mouthfeel: Medium-high carbonation, fuller in mouthfeel than very low F.G. would suggest. Somewhat creamy and smooth, with light warming alcohol.

Overall: I'm really happy with this beer. It reminds me quite a bit of Hennepin in its malt profile and fairly smooth character for a farmhouse ale. There is a similar yeast character somehow. It is so dry, it almost seems like a golden strong ale with a more grainy finish. When this beer was young it seemed to have a rough grainy edge that faded over a couple of months. I think this is just because it's so dry. Possible improvements would be to cut down on the vienna/aromatic malt to avoid the weird grainyness that was unpleasant when the beer was young. Other possibilities could be to use some spicier hop variety in the finish, and optionally raise the IBU's a tad, but not necessarily.

Robust Porter:

Aroma: Cherry cola-like note from black malt, moderate caramel, bitter chocolate, some alcohol. Light hop aroma, fairly neutral.

Appearance: Black from afar but reddish when held to light, great clarity. Tan head with good resilience.

Flavor: Full flavored maltiness including caramel, dark fruit, grainy/toasty notes, and an excellent bitter chocolate finish. Roast is on the high side for a porter, but within style. Hops have faded since this beer was brewed. It was quite hoppy when young, and there is still a pleasant bitterness in the finish that lingers nicely, but less hop flavor.

Mouthfeel: Medium-low carbonation, creamy with a wonderful roasty bite at the end.

Overall: This is about as stout of a beer you can get and still call it a porter, if you ask me. I really like it, but I'm thinking of reducing the IBU's a bit to emphasize the maltiness and keep it away from stout territory. I kind of like the mouthfeel that the flaked barley gave it but I'm not sure if it's necessary. Another possibility is to leave the recipe alone but just brew it to a lower gravity, and IBU accordingly (i.e. leave all the ingredients the same but make a slightly bigger batch to get it to 1.059 - 1.060)

Here's a parting shot of my current Belgian / sour ales situation. Not bad, eh? The one fermenting in front is a Saison Dupont "clone" that I brewed up yesterday and I'll post about soon. Although I'm not trying to make an exact clone, I'd like to try this side-by-side with a bottle of my favorite beer in the world to see how it measures up.

Cheers, happy brewing, and thanks for reading!

Sean

Berliner Weisse- "No-Boil" Method

(Hold the goofy syrups, please.)

Clarissa has been bugging me to make another Berliner Weisse for about 2 years now, since she really liked the last one (if you homebrew a lot it's important to keep your significant other happy, so they don't mind the mess and assortment of brewing gear around the house). Although it was a very nice beer, the last batch was not as sour as I had wanted. I had used the Wyeast 3191 Berliner Weisse blend, which was supposed to be a pre-balanced blend of ale yeast, lactic bacteria, and brett, but most people that used the blend had less sourness in their finished beer than is really proper for the style. I participated in a Berliner Weisse trade and online tasting with other members of the Babbblebelt homebrew forum, and this seemed to be the consensus on the Wyeast 3191. The Wyeast berliner blend is not currently available. It was a limited release and I'm not sure if they plan to re-release it.

I've been tempted to try another Berlinner, but I've been waffling on which technique to use to get it properly sour. The choices were anything from pitching a commercial lactobacillus culture before the ale yeast, to doing a sour mash, or even doing a no boil method where the lactobacillus that malted barley contains is not killed off and survives into the fermentation, producing lactic acid.

I have a sour ale strain going, the same one I used for the Flanders Pale Ale, and I thought this would be a great way to get a lot of brett into the fermentation as well as some bacteria to sour it, but I thought this would not be enough on it's own to produce the proper lactic sourness. The best Berliner of the tasting group, and the most sour, was brewed with the no-boil method. This was what I finally decided on. I thought of doing a sour mash over 24-48 hours, but the risk of getting garbagey, vomitty flavors from butyric acid producing bacteria just didn't sound good.

No-boil (well, really, part of the mash was boiled as a decoction step) is how Berliner Weisse was traditionally made in Germany. The brewing method is radically different from any beer I have ever made before. I have some ideas on how this technique could be used on a commercial system fairly easily, although you could infect your entire brewhouse if you do not sanitize your equipment properly afterwards. I used a simplified version of the old-school double decocted Berliner Weisse technique, which I will give details on in the recipe below. basically the most important point is to not let the grains ever get so hot that you kill off the lactic acid bacteria. I tried to keep everything at or under 160, and also get some extra grain dust into the wort after the mash was done.

Recipe is for 11.75 gallons, all grain diluted with water (see details)

O.G. 1.034 IBU's around 5

6 lb. Great Western Superior Pilsner malt

6 lb. Great Western wheat malt

.5 lb. rice hulls

56 gr. of hops at about 4.5% AA ( I used New Zealand Hallertau pellets & whole Willamette)

Mash: 4.5 gallons water + 3 gr. Calcium Chloride + 3 gr. gypsum

Mash in to 156, rest 45 minutes

After 45 minutes I ran off 5 quarts of mash liquor only, not a grain and liquor mix, to boil with the hops (see picture below).

I boiled this with the hops for 20 minutes. The whole step took about 30 minutes.

Then I added this back to the main mash, which brought it up to 160.

I sparged with 4.5 gallons at 160 degrees. I used my grain bucket, below, to collect the wort. I intentionally left some extra grain dust in the bucket so I could pick up some more lacto.

Here's the wort running off into the grain bucket:

I added the wort into my keggle, which contained 4.5 gallons of pre-boiled water, cooled back down to 140 degrees. This gave me my final volume of 11.75 gallons (4.5 gallons water + 7.25 gallons wort). I mixed this well and took a gravity reading, which came in at 1.034, which means my efficiency on this batch was about 85%.

I ran the wort through the plate chiller and collected 2 carboys full, at 68 degrees. The rest of the remaining wort was boiled and used for a starter for a different beer. Both carboys were aerated by shaking for 2 minutes each, and I pitched about 1/3 cup of slurry per carboy of the Rodenbug blend, which I had used for the Flanders Pale Ale I brewed over a month ago.

I used a heating pad to get the fermentation warmish. The big carboy stuck out fermentation at aobut 70 and the small carboy got up to 74. I will be very interested to see if the smaller, warmer fermented carboy comes out any more sour.

Here are the beers, pre-fermentation, hanging out with my other wild ales. From left to right, that's the batch of Flanders red from over a year ago keg-conditioning, then the 2 carboys of Berliner Weisse, then the brett saison in the orange shirt, and the Flanders Pale ale in back in the tan shirt. It's very exciting to look at these beers right now because both the brett saison and the Flanders Pale are showing visible, slow fermentation. I am trying to be patient and not sample these beers!

Only time will tell how these beers turn out. I hope they will be spectacular!

I gotta say it was a good day: Hoppy Pilsner and Carbonnade Flammande

I did some brewing on Thursday, and some cooking too, and it occurred to me while enjoying some well-earned vittles after the brew session that hey, today was a good day. Just like that classic rap song from 1993, except I guess instead of playing dominoes and not having to use my AK, I just brewed a nice pilsner, and instead of getting the Fatburger at 2 in the morning, I made a fancy beef stew from Belgium. But sentimentally, it was very much the same.

I'm pretty psyched to have finally gotten lager season rolling. I usually get to do at least a couple of lagers each winter, but I got a late start this year since I had a few other yeast strains already in action. I'm planning on doing at least another batch of the smoked helles (pretty much a Schlenkerla Helles clone) and a Baltic Porter with Paul Key.

When I design a recipe, whether it's "to style" or free-style, I like to think a lot about how I want to final beer to taste, smell, and look like. I like to keep a couple of commercial examples in mind if there is anything close to what I am looking to target. For example, if you are talking about German Pilsner, you have anything from Bitburger or Radeberger pils (very light, clean, and somewhat hoppy but pretty much a lawnmower beer), to something pretty radically hoppy and aromatic like Victory Prima Pils. More often than not, there's a huge range within the style to work with. Less so for German beers for sure, but still there's a range. This is why I think it's funny that some brewers make a point to say it's below them to brew to style. It's as if they think you can't make a creative expression if you stick pretty much within a recognized style. If you think about that for more than a second, you realize that's just not true. It's like saying that a cubist or a surrealist isn't really a painter. Not that beer is fine art, or that it has to be taken so seriously, but I guess art works as a good analogy. Maybe a food analogy would work even better: Do all cheeseburgers taste the same? Of course not!

Anyway (end of rant), I wanted my beer to be more on the hoppy, full-flavored end of the spectrum, like Victory, Jever and even Sly Fox Pils. I wanted to really push the hop flavor and bitterness, and have some residual body to counter the bitterness. I had a lot of noble hops still in the mylar package from 2008, and they were smelling great. I didn't adjust the alpha acids down for time on any of the hops still in the mylar.

One issue I had with this recipe is an extremely long time to go from the boil pot through the heat exchanger. I think there was a little too much hop matter and I just had to wait 40 minutes to knock out into the carboy, but when I did, the wort was at a great pitching temperature: 50 degrees. That's the lowest I've ever pitched a lager yeast, which should make for a really clean fermentation.

The Recipe:

7 gallons pre-boil, 5.5 gallons post boil, all grain

O.G. 1.055 F.G. 1.012 ABV 5.7% IBU's 45

9 lb. Weyermann Pils malt

.5 lb. carafoam

13 gr. Hallertau (1 plug) FWH

14 gr. Perle pellets 6.5% 60 min

8 gr. Magnum whole 12% 60 min

56 gr. Czech Saaz pellets 3% 20 min

28 gr. Czech Saaz pellets 3% 0 min

28 gr. Hallertau pellets 4% 0 min

Mash: 4 gallons + 5 gr. gypsum, 2 gr. calcium chloride

152 for 60 minutes

Sparge with 5 gallons at 166

Collect 7 gallons at 1.043 = 84% efficiency

Boil 90 minutes

wyeast nutrient & whirlfloc at 15 minutes

Whirlpool, rest 10 miuntes. Chill to 50 degrees, took 40 minutes to run through heat exchanger! Ground water was run though a copper pre-chiller in an ice water bath.

Collected 5.1 gallons at 1.055, pitched Wyeast 2124 Bohemian lager yeast at 50 degrees.

Fermented at 52 degrees for 12 days.

Pulled into the house on 1/26/10 for a D-rest for 4 days

Pulled back out in the garage to chill to 50 and racked to a keg on 2/2/10

OK, now here are some cooking pics of the Carbonnade Flammande, and this is the recipe that I based it loosely off of. The carrots are not traditional, I just felt like adding some vegetables. I used my flanders red homebrew as the stew base, which is still a little lacking in acidity. After I pulled a sample for cooking, I added some more bugs to the keg to help sour it up, and a couple of bottle of the Belgian Dark Strong to give it a little more maltiness and sugars for the bugs to eat.

The prep...the meat is browned. Use a well marbled meat, unless you like dry stew meat.

Most of the online recipes do not specifically call for Flanders red ale, but it's best to use a sour malty ale. If you can't find that, you can probably fake it with a Belgian Dubbel and a dash of vinegar and sugar.

The end product was excellent. I think it's traditionally served with noodles or pommes frites. I used some leftover garlicky mashed potatoes.

Here's another cooking project that Clarissa and I have been getting into: the no-knead bread technique that is very popular and turns out a great loaf.

Our first loaf, above was made with all bread flour and baked at 500 degrees. It was OK but it was not entirely done when we took it out of the oven. The crust was getting very dark but the inside was a bit moist. So it steamed out the crust and made it a bit chewy, but it was still pretty good.

Here's the second loaf, where we used 1/3 whole wheat flour and 2/3 bread flour. It tasted every bit as awesome as it looks here. We turned our oven temp down to 450 so it had plenty of time to finish cooking before the crust got too dark.