So the good folks over at Make Magazine have a special episode of their Make: Live series devoted to brewing beer. Kinda neat, plus they’ve got a bunch of other stuff that’s pretty fun. I like the idea of having a brewing space for newbies quite a bit, too. Sounds like a fantastic way to sucker more folks into the cult of craft brew. Check it all out.
When it comes time to bottle the sweet nectar that is your homebrewed beer, the last thing you want to do is ruin it by breaking your bottles.
Well, we at FuzzyBrew have run into this problem. It came in the form of the metal bottle capper below. (You may find it online at places like this or this. Do not buy it.)
Bad capper: This beer bottle capper does not work very well.
One bottling night I managed to break two bottles, while Grant broke at least one. The capper just didn’t have any “give.” Too much pressure when capping the beer snapped the top right off the bottles, forcing us to pour the beer down the sink. This made us sad.
So I was in the market for a new capper when my friend Ian happened to find one at his house that he wasn’t using anymore and kindly left it on my desk at work. (Thanks, Ian!)
She’s called Red Head Emily. She looks kinda like a crab. (See below.)
Good capper: Red Head Emily works very well.
Emily’s a spring-loaded, high-quality capper made with rigid plastic. She has a magnet to hold the cap in place and has just the right amount of “give.”
Red Head Emily is easy to use, hasn’t broken any of our bottles and gets our recommendation.
If we only knew...
When I moved from an apartment to a house, I finally had the storage and work space to go from extract brewing to all-grain. With a designated area to brew (i.e., the garage), that meant that I would no longer be getting my water from the kitchen sink. No big deal, I thought. I’ll just hook up the garden hose and run it right into my kettles.
Well, the first beer we brewed at the new house was a robust porter we did with a partial mash. It was our first time actually trying to mash and hit a mash temperature. Needless to say, we missed our temps and ended up adding way too much water in an effort to get our mash temp up. The beer ended up tasting insanely acrid, harsh and plastic-like. After looking into it, we thought because we added so much water that maybe we extracted the tannins from the roasted grains, resulting in a nasty, throat-clawing beer.
Our next beer was a special bitter that marked our first attempt at all grain. The brew day went remarkably smooth, but when we cracked that first beer a few weeks later, the room filled with the smell of a plastic swimming pool. When we drank it, it tasted the same way and left an awful taste in the back of your throat.
At this point, we started to go a little crazy before discovering the culprit — a garden hose.
Apparently, it is common knowledge that the typical garden hose is not safe, or tasty, to drink from. (I don’t remember minding it as a kid, though).
In all my reading and preparation not once did anybody ever mention the need for a food-grade or RV hose when you plan on brewing outside.
So I’m here to tell you, don’t even think about using your garden hose to supply the water you need for brewing. It was completely wishful thinking that the swimming-pool-plastic aroma and taste would dissipate if we let it age. I just gave up hope last week — after a year — and had to dump my remaining bottles.
While we were thinking about water I also went ahead and got a carbon filter that I could attach to the new potable hose to make sure there wasn’t any chlorine in the water. I followed the steps from this thread over at homebrewtalk.com to get it all together.
Traditions are valued here at FuzzyBrew. Last year, I brewed a 10/10/10 Old Ale with the local homebrewers. So this year, it was decided that we would brew an 11/11/11 Wee Heavy. The idea being the same as last year: brew a high-alcohol, malty beer that will age gracefully over a year, and we’ll wait to drink it.
Originally, we were going to do this with a group from the Bluff City Brewers & Connoisseurs, but trying to get 10 people to commit to the same date and time proved too difficult. We took it upon ourselves to tackle this beast of a beer. (Plus, we already spend $40 on the grain, so we really had no choice.)
As a group we came up with the following recipe for 5.5 gallons:
16lbs Marris Otter
4lbs Munich malt
1lb Crystal 20
1lb Crystal 80
1lb Caravienne malt
2 oz East Kent Golding @ 60 min
1.5L of Scottish Ale yeast (1728)
1L Old Ale Blend yeast (9097)
Our mash tun, filled to the brim.
When you brew high-alcohol beers, there are a host of potential problems that you need to think about beforehand. For one, you absolutely have to pitch enough yeast. So Grant and I both made a stater with two different yeasts. This happened to be Grant’s first time making a starter, and it was a major league fail (at least click on the link and look at the pic of Grant having a boil-over on the stove).
Another problem is not having enough space in your mash tun for all the grain. Typically, the beers we brew have 12 to 15 pounds of grain in the recipe and take up half of our mash tun (Gatorade cooler). When we saw that this recipe had 23 pounds of grain, we started asking other brewers if this would fit and we were told no problem. Well, it fit, but it was insanely close to overflowing.
Luckily, we didn’t lose too much grain and were able to hit our mash temps spot on. We took about one gallon of the first runnings of this and boiled it down for an hour on the stove inside. Hopefully, it will add a nice caramel complexity to the beer.
First runnings were boiled to add caramel notes.
Then we added it to our wort, which was then boiled and fed some hops. Our numbers were a little off. The OG for the recipe was 1.109 and we came in at 1.098. We brewed this back in November so my memory is a little suspect, but I remember at one point adding water toward the end of the boil because we thought we were going to be way over and somehow we ended up low. I guess we should have taken better notes, because I can’t explain it.
Anyway, it’s still a monster of a beer and within the style guidelines, so I think we will be alright.
A benefit of brewing a big beer like this is you can get tw0 batches of beer out it due to the fact there are still enough residual sugars in your mash tun after you sparge for your big beer. So we made what we called our “Wee Light.” The OG ended up being 1.036. This turned out to be a great low-alcohol, easy-drinking beer. It was so tasty that we are thinking about scaling the 11/11/11 recipe down to recreate it.
Wee Light
After the Wee Heavy fermented out, we transferred it to secondary and kept it at 40 degrees for two months to cold condition. Supposedly, this will intensify the malt characteristics.
When it came time to bottle the beer, we re-hydrated two grams of dry yeast and added it to the beer prior to bottling. After spending two months at that cold of a temperature, we were pretty sure our yeasty friends were lulled to sleep and dropped out of suspension.
Now, the waiting game begins. We have talked about testing one bottle per month for the six months leading up to November, just to understand how it develops and changes over that time. If that happens, we will be sure to provide an update.
Be on the lookout for our “Wee Heavy night” post. So far we have three commercial examples that we hope to ruminate over.
