Tag: Home Brew

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Stout Success!

Howdy folks,

I have had a very successful brewing start to 2018. I decided to try my hand at an all-grain stout recipe, and now, having finally tasted it, I can truly say that I have brewed a cracking beer! This recipe was a milk and chocolate stout, with a long and complicated grain bill including oats, brown malt, and cara wheat grains. I found it interesting how stouts and porters are truly an expression of the grain profile involved, and the hops take more of a back seat- something which is unusual in today’s day and age of hoppy craft brews.

For the first time I also decided to use my local tap water for the entirety of the brewing liquor. Having ordered a lab test of it late last year, I was confident that it was good enough to brew, and for this batch the only alteration to the liquor was the use of a single Campden tablet to eliminate the chlorine. For the next batches I am planning to use dry mineral salts to alter the composition of the water to better suit the style of beer which I will be brewing, but more on that later…

I am pleased to announce that the stout turned out delicious! I have even received a comment saying that it is better than some of the stouts available commercially- which to a home brewer is one of the highest compliments. The lactose sweetness really comes out, as well as aromas of chocolate and coffee. The level of carbonation is quite low, which I feel compliments the beer perfectly. To finish it all off it has a lovely off-white head which looks really appealing in my opinion.

For the label I have decided to remove the side panel and go with a more graphic approach. The space man was really due to the dark nature of space, much like a stout, and the fact that I loved the illustration as soon as I came across it. Without further ado, here is the final version of the label:

I called the brew “Milky Nibs” as I used cacao nibs as an adjunct during the fermentation, and of course as the brew contains lactose sugar milk had to be involved in the title somehow. Overall I feel the design is quite striking, hopefully the drinkers of my beer will agree! At 4.5% it is also dangerously sessionable, and I for one will be drinking a few of these bad boys in the coming weeks.

I have just finished another brew day, so keep an eye on the blog for the write up of that coming sometime next week.

Cheers!

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New Year, New Brew!

Hi folks,

So it’s been a little while since I posted an update to this blog (since my Summer APA post back in July to be precise) so I thought I would write a little bit about what has happened since then.

I have not lost my passion for brewing- quite the opposite in fact. Since the Summer APA I have brewed a Midsummer Ale, a Harvest Pale Ale, and a single hop wonder called the Amarillo Armadillo. I will be posting a little breakdown of how each brew went and some tasting notes for you soon, but I think they were quite successful brews each in their own right. Since the D’n’Ale I have also made the leap to all-grain brewing, which has been both extremely challenging and rewarding. All grain brewing involved purchasing another piece of equipment needed for this process (a mash tun of course) but now I have complete control over the quality and style of the finished beer. Furthermore, having now brewed two batches using the all grain method, I can safely say that I will not be going back to extract!

We have also had a second successful hop harvest in autumn, with the yields from the hop plants out in the garden being much more impressive than last year!

Exciting times ahead with a lot more brews scheduled. Next up- a milky chocolate stout. Super excited for the next brew and cannot wait to document it on here.

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D’n’Ale- A Summer APA

Hey there readers,

So, as promised in my last update, my next brew (also from extract) was another American Pale Ale (APA). The Spring APA was quite a successful experiment, but for this batch I wanted to amp up the hop content and really get both the hop bitterness and aroma that is characteristic of this style. In order to do this, I once again used Citra as the bittering hop, and my own home grown Cascade hops from last year’s harvest, but this time I amped up the quantity. I had come to the conclusion that my Cascade hops had lost a lot of their potency due to improper storage (they were not frozen originally, although vacuum packed), and thus decided to double the content of Cascade in the recipe, assuming a 50% loss in potency.  The majority of the fermentable sugars for this brew will come from 3kg of light dry spray malt, augmented with a little bit of crushed Crystal Malt, which I steeped in warm water for 30 mins prior to the boil. This “mini mash” is just another way to put a unique spin on the malt base of an extract brew and make it slightly more unique than just using malt extract alone.

The upped hop content worked out great, having tasted the APA a week ago I can safely say that the bitterness which I intended has come through. The hop aroma was also present, but still not quite to the quantity which I had hoped. For the next iteration of the brew, I think I will increase the amount of hops used for dry hopping. Furthermore, since I am dry hopping in a muslin bag to prevent too much of the hop pieces from making it to the final brew, I believe this may be limiting the amount of hop aroma imparted.

The label for this brew followed the structure of the Spring Pale Ale, but altered the colour scheme a bit, as well as the logo:

I’ve added a side label with a short description of the beer as well as instructions to pour it carefully, as most people are so used to filtered beer that they do not really know how to pour a live beer with a yeast sediment at the bottom.

Overall I am very pleased with this batch, and look forward to tasting how the flavour profile develops as I continue storing it for a little while. Next up- a Midsummer Ale!

 

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Homebrewing Update, May 2017

Howdy folks,

I thought I would take the time to give a quick update on where I am on my homebrewing journey. I am please to announce that my first ever extract brew was a huge success. At first it contained a slight unpleasant bitterness on the finish, but after aging for a few weeks in the cellar this has completely disappeared. It is now a lovely pale ale, light malty backbone with a good hop presence and quite a dry finish. Very palpable indeed. The one thing I would say is that it ended up being closer to an English pale ale rather than a hoppy American one. This is probably due to the degradation of the hops used in the brewing process- I used my own hops from the garden, harvested last September. I stored these hops in vacuum packed bags, but not in the freezer. I believe that this may have led to the loss of some of the aromatic qualities of the Cascade hops. For my next batch, I plan to use close to double the amount (if following the same recipe), as the Cascade variety can lose up to 50% of its potency during storage.

The brewing itself stalled for a while as I had a faulty gas tap on the burner I had purchased. However, Amazon were amazing at giving me a full refund despite the fact that I did not even retain the original packaging. Love those guys. I have now bought a replacement burner which I have just finished setting up, so the next brew should be coming very soon! Future plans currently include two more extract batches- another APA/IPA, and a more traditional English session bitter for those summer barbecues. Needless to say I will be using mainly American hop varieties for my APA/IPA (as well as Cascades from the garden) and English hop varieties from my garden (Fuggles and Prima Donna) for the English ale. As always, I will post the results of future brew days here, as well as anything else interesting I come across on my journey.

Stay tuned!

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Admiral’s Reserve, labeling and bottling update

Hi folks,

So last Friday I finally got round to bottling my latest batch of home brew, courtesy of an Admiral’s Reserve kit I got for my birthday back in November. The brew was in the fermentation vessel (FV) for just over two weeks. After the first week of fermentation I had suspected a stuck fermentation, and moved the FV to a warmer room, where the temperature of the wort increased from 18 degrees to 22 degrees Celsius. I believe that this really helped, as there was seemingly much more activity, and the fermentation was able to be completed. After just over two weeks in the FV the beer smelled absolutely amazing, and I am really looking forward to trying it once it finishes conditioning in the bottles. One of the things I noticed when bottling the batch is that research and preparation in this area really helped the process of bottling go extremely smoothly. For example, I had researched and bought the necessary gear to make my life easier- a secondary bottling vessel to which I can rack the beer from the fermenter, complete with a tap and a little bottler attachment, the right amount of bottles and caps, a bottle washer and drying rack, and of course one of my favourite pieces of equipment for homebrewing; the easy siphon. I have attached links to all of these products so that you can get them for yourself, trust me, they make life a lot easier, especially if working on your own!

In the above photo you can see me siphoning the beer into the secondary vessel/ bottling bucket. The easy siphon makes the job super simple, and no risk of contamination as long as it is sanitized properly. The final volume of bottled beer came out to 20L, exactly 40 bottles. One crucial point is to make sure you clean and sterilize all of your bottles to prevent infection and promote a healthy beer which will stay fresh for months! Here you can see my set-up for sterilizing and drying all of my bottles:

The label design was also an interesting process, as it was my first time doing any sort of graphic design. I designed my label on Adobe Illustrator, but also used Photoshop for colour correction and cropping/ resizing. This was the final design I settled on, and I am pretty proud of it:


After the label design and bottling processes were complete, all that was left was to print off the labels, which I did on a standard laserjet printer and regular paper, cut them out, and stick them on to the bottles using a little bit of milk and a clean brush (a tip I picked up from Greg Hughes’ wonderful book). The milk will make the labels easy to soak off when re-using the bottles, and it does not stink like glue does! Here is what the final bottles looked like with the labels attached:

Really happy with the results overall, and I truly cannot wait to try this beer in a couple of weeks. As always, thank you for reading, and happy brewing!

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New Year, New Brew

Hi folks,

Happy New Year! I know we are well into February, but I still have not had a chance to wish you all the best, and hope that everyone has had a good start to 2017. While most people will decide to exercise more, or eat healthier for their New Years resolutions, I have decided to commit myself more to brewing and learning about the art of making beer. This blog has been somewhat neglected, but as you can see it has had a bit of a re-vamp as well as a new domain here at danbrews.com. I hope you will enjoy reading new posts, and I promise that I will be posting at least every week if not more frequently going forward. So, with that being said, let’s dive right into it, shall we?

Last week I finally managed to set up my new brew space. Being fortunate enough to have a space which I can dedicate to my brewing has really motivated me to do more of it, and this space comes with everything a brewer could want- a source of heat, running water, electricity, and even central heating to keep the brewer warm! Absolute luxury. Having set everything up I have finally made use of the beer kit a good friend of mine bought me for my birthday last November, the Woodforde’s Admiral’s Reserve Real Ale Kit.

The kit came with a small sachet of “hop enhancer”, a white powder with a very hoppy aroma which the kit instructed to be sprinkled into the wort before adding the yeast, which I did. I have never encountered this before in a kit, so it was a rather curious sight. The water I used was Sainsbury’s basic mineral bottled water, which was 20p per 2litre bottle, costing me around £2 for the water to make this kit. I am still not at a stage where I feel comfortable using tap water for my brewing- it does not taste good and would definitely need treatment before being used for brewing. I also replaced the yeast which came with the kit with Danstar Nottingham Yeast– a dry English Ale yeast which will no doubt provide better results. Before pitching the yeast, I re-hydrated the sachet of dry yeast in my new Erlenmeyer 2000ml Flask, which I would recommend any homebrewer to have both for re-hydrating and storing Yeast. The shape allows plenty of oxygen to be absorbed into the liquid, giving the yeast fuel to wake up and begin respiration, which is exactly want we want it to do. The shape also makes it easy to swirl around water, to mix it with oxygen or make sure the dried yeast has properly dissolved.

Once the yeast was re-hydrating, it was simply a matter of mixing the two cans of syrup from the kit with the store-bought water (taking note of the original gravity) before adding the hop enhancer and finally the re-hydrated yeast, and letting the fermentation begin. I have also purchased a “bubbler-type” airlock since losing the one which came with my starter kit originally. The OG on this kit was 1.044, so I am expecting an alcohol content of around 4% for the final brew. Here you can see the wort sitting in the fermentation bucket:

It was put in the FV on the 1st, so I am expecting to bottle it around the 15th Feb, and drinking it sometime in March. I will post an update on how the bottling process went, as it will be my first time bottling a batch. Exciting times ahead!

As always, thank you for reading and come back again to follow my homebrew journey!

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The Porter Meltdown

Hi folks,

So as I mentioned in my last home brewing post, I had bought a kit for an American Mocha Porter, as well as the gear I needed to bottle that batch (bottling for the first time). However, something went a little wrong… I ended up getting very busy with other stuff, and as a result that porter has now been in the fermentation vessel for well over two months… uh oh. I am almost too afraid to check up on it, in case it has become a large living organism and strangles me to death with its yeasty tendrils for neglecting it. But alas, I need the vessel for new brews, so I think it may be time for me to man-boy up and throw my first batch away. It’s always an emotional time for a home-brewer when he must throw away a batch of deliciousness which has somehow gone awry. However, it is a little more comforting knowing that this is only a kit brew, and so required significantly less work than if it was an extract or even all grain creation. Onwards and upwards, eh?

I have now hit a new wave of eagerness when it comes to my home brewing, so am planning to convert a shed in the garden into a full-time purpose-built home for all of my future homebrewing. And don’t worry, I will make sure to document every step of the way and post it to this blog so all of you lovely eager readers will feel like you are on this journey with me… or something like that.

Anyway, as always thanks for checking in, and you’ll be hearing from me again very soon! The adventure continues…

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Home Brewing Update!

Hey guys,

So I’ve been a little busy lately. Between attending Glastonbury and having a couple of friends visit me from Norway, I have slowed down on the home brewing front. But that is about to change. So without further ado, let me give you all an update on where I am on my home brew adventure.

I kegged my second kit, the American IPA, a few weeks ago and so it is ready to drink. I gave it a little tasting session a couple of weeks ago, but have not touched it since then. I must say, the extra weeks spent in the cellar have certainly not gone unnoticed. The flavour has become a lot smoother, although some of the hop aroma from dry-hopping has disappeared. It is very drinkable indeed, although being an unfiltered beer it lies somewhere between a Weissbier and an IPA. There is a slight yeast sediment, I am hoping to eliminate some more of this in later brews through filtration- using a small hop straining bag and attaching it to the end of the racking tube.

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My third kit, an American Pale Ale kit from Young’s has now finished fermenting and is ready to be kegged. I was originally going to bottle this one, but I had not purchased the necessary kit on time, and don’t think I can leave the beer in the fermentation vessel for much longer. But, good news- last night I splashed out one all the gear needed to produce my own bottled brew! I also bought a fourth kit, An American Mocha Porter, so am looking forward to making and then bottling it in the coming weeks. The dream of owning a micro brewery is slowly coming into fruition. This Porter will be my last kit brew, after which I will be moving on to extract brewing, and hopefully all-grain once Autumn comes around. If you want to learn more about the different types of home-brewing, there is a very well-explained and simple to understand guide here.

As always, thanks for reading, more updates coming soon!

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American IPA Barreled

Howdy folks,

So last night I barreled my second brew from a kit, the Cooper’s American Beer’s IPA (see previous post for details). It was in the fermentation vessel for a good 17 days; I think the fermentation was finished after 14, then I dry hopped it with the hop pellets included in the kit for a further 3 days before barreling. The concern at the moment is that there was quite a lot of hop sediment suspended in the brew, I’m hoping this will sink to the bottom during conditioning or else I am in for another cloudy beer…

This is also the first time I am using the King Keg, and am pretty pleased with it so far. The larger top opening meant that cleaning it was a breeze (not looking forward to cleaning my other keg, which is a very basic plastic pressure barrel), and it seems to be a much sturdier build than the basic plastic pressure barrel included in my starter set. I have also upgraded the tap to a sparkler tap, which should hopefully give a much nicer head when the brew is finally ready to drink (which I imagine will be in 3 weeks or so). For now, its time for the secondary fermentation. I like my American IPAs to have a decent level of carbonation, so I injected a barrel of CO2 straight into the keg after racking and sealing. This, alongside the decent amount of priming sugar used, should ensure a good level of fizz. It has another week or so to ferment and then Mr King Keg is taking an extended vacation in my cellar to condition and clear. Looking forward to trying this one.

More updates coming soon, thanks for reading!