Batter Up - Spring is Here!

This weekend will be the first in quite some time that we're not freezing our butts off for the glory of brewing.  Spring has arrived at Good Scarlett HQ.

At the plate is the Edel-Hell again (A.K.A. Edelicious!).  If we could brew more than 20 gallons of this liquid gold we would because this beer is impossible to keep around.  Not too many people have tasted it yet because, frankly, we've been hoarding it.  We promise to let some of this batch out in to the wild for people to try.

On deck is Shawn's Triple A (American Amber Ale) - another fantastic beer.  I had a pint of it on St. Patrick's Day and was again reminded of how tasty this hoppy ale is.

In the hole, possibly the Four Shepherds Stout although we may put in a pinch hitter as we still have a lot of stout at the moment.  We're also performing some equipment upgrades that will allow us more flexibility in our brewing schedule.  Right now we have to stick to an Ale, Ale, Lager, Lager pattern.  The equipment upgrades will free us from having to follow any pattern at all.  This means that we could brew the Edel here again if we wanted.  Awesome.

The Whitetail Ale has been kegged.  Obviously, we waited a bit too long to brew this "holiday" style beer - I don't think Memorial Day is supposed to count.  We'll do better next year.  This beer is a slugger (for us) at 6.7% ABV.  We don't usually make beer this strong (we like to drink beer, not fall down) but it was a big hit last year.  We recommend drinking it while already in the prone position to save time.

Happy Spring everyone!

What Fresh New Hell Is This?

We've been working on a Helles here for quite a while now and although we have made some great tasting beer, we've never given ourselves a passing grade.

The Helles is a tough beer to make.  It's so light and subtle with no place to hide any mistakes in the recipe or brewing process.

We spent a lot of time over several batches of our beer and several score of our favorite commercial examples of the style.  One big issue was narrowing down the yeast that we preferred and another was fine tuning boil times and the temperatures during fermentation - specifically performing a proper Diacetyl rest.

I actually forgot to do the Diacetyl rest on the last batch.  I'm drinking a pint now and it tastes like I dropped a pat of butter in it.  This makes me sad.

When we started, we began with a recipe that tried to make up for the fact that most homebrewers don't do decoction mashes.  This was fine, because at the time, we were not doing them either.  The recipe was very good and can be found here.

Now, however, we are performing decoction mashes with consistency.  We've also fine tuned our current brewing process so that we are hitting all our numbers within .001 SG and we have good data on fermentation temperatures, boil times, and hopping rates from previous batches of Helles.

So, it's time to start over.

Our next batch will be our all new Edel-Hell.  German breweries use the term "edel" (which means "noble") for their most delicate versions of Helles.  The recipe uses only German Pilsner 2-Row barley and a little bit of Carapils for the head.  It has 3 hop additions with a different type of noble hops each for bittering, flavor, and aroma.

We're excited about brewing this beer and even more excited about drinking it!

Here Come the Kegerators

Some of the boys have wanted to go in on batches with us, so we've started to assemble kegerators for them.  It turns out finding free refrigerators is easy as pie Craigslist.  I've picked up two and delivered them to the guys in the last 10 days.

We're in the process now of collecting the rest of the parts we need (shanks, lines, etc) as well as procuring CO2 bottles and regulators.  All in all these kegerators are going live for less than $150 each which is pretty good.  Plus, the guys get the extra freezer space, etc.  Good deal.

GB&U

A quick update on how the brews have been coming along.

The Good
Four Shepherds Stout - This beer is amazing. We bottled a 12 pack so we can enter it in competitions this summer. People who love stouts love it. People who don't like stouts love it. Epic Win. Too bad it wasn't ready for the Longshot contest.

Watermelon Blonde - This beer not only tasted great, with a big whiff of watermelon on the nose and a nice melon aftertaste after the clean finish, but it looked great too. A nice deep red with a bright white head. Nice. I would have pictures of it, but we drank it too fast.

Designated Hitter Pilsner - With another batch heading towards kegs soon, we cracked a bottle that we saved from the last batch to revisit our first lager. Clean, flavorful, and a crisp dry finish. A very good beer.

The Munich Helles - I'm drinking the first glass right now and it is good. Not perfect yet however. We will continue to work on this beer until it can bring a tear to a Bavarian's eye.


The Bad
Cream Ale (AKA Ice Cream Ale, AKA Flava No Flav) - I screwed this brew day up six ways to Sunday. With no flavor to speak of and a low alcohol content, I can't give it away. I'm praying Shawn can, or we're going to have to have a Beer Pong party.

That Bottle of Batch #3 I found in the Fridge - Holy god was that beer bad. What was I doing...?


The Ugly
Strawberry Blonde - Not a bad beer, but very cloudy and a bit too much strawberry tangy-ness. Not an attractive color either, as it came out kind of pinkish orange.

Pear Ale - We didn't add enough fruit to this, so its really just a very boring blonde. Don't worry, we'll drink it.

And a Longshot it Was

We entered Sam Adam's Longshot Homebrewing contest this year. We're not real big on contests, but the chance to have SA brew a batch of your beer (and, yes, you get to help) was just too great a prize to pass up.

We entered three beers - two Pilsners and one Belgian White.

Did we win?

No.

I found posts online talking about the four finalists and none of them were our style of entry. Apparently, the four finalists beers were a Maibock, an Old Ale, an American-style Barley Wine, and a Lambic.

Sigh. I'll hold my tounge for now, but do you see a pattern there?

We should receive our score sheets back from SA by September so we can see how we did.

Batch #32 - Bloody I.P.A.

Since Aric was visiting, we wanted to do an all grain batch. He chose a British style I.P.A. and we brewed it up on Friday.

With an O.G. of 1.069 and nearly an ounce of high AAU hops per gallon, this beer would surely have weathered the trip from Britain to India on a tall ship.

In addition, we will secondary on to oak chips for that authentic "shipped to the colonies" flavor.

I need to check my records, but I think this is, by happy coincidence, basically an all-grain version of Uncle Tyler's Reddy's I.P.A. which we made last year and was delicious.

We named it "Bloody" for several reasons (British slang word, colonial violence, etc), but mainly because during the brew session we spilled a glass of Bloody Mary all over the hop bags. Jess likes to inquire about the status of the "Bloody I.P.A." in her over-the-top British accent which always cracks me up.

One Year of Homebrewing

What a fun year it has been for us! Homebrew aside, just the journey of learning about and sampling all the different styles of beer in the world has been an incredible one. Our taste buds will never be the same.

Jess has recently taken to exploring American Pale Ales, which is quite a leap from her 8 IBU Coors Light days.

Shawn, our good friend and brewing partner has gone from being rather indifferent to beer in general to a borderline obsession with Irish Stouts.

All of us have become enamored with the German Helles and Pils styles which, in my opinion, are the pinnacle result of thousands of years of accumulated brewing knowledge. (If all the breweries in the world were going to close and it was my choice to save just one, I would choose Spaten-Franziskaner and everyone would thank me for it as they quaffed glass boots of liquid Munich gold.)

If you're reading this, you already know this, but drinking bud/miller/coors everyday is the same as eating McDonald's for every meal. Stop it. You're depriving yourself of one of life's pleasures.

The homebrewing itself has been another incredibly fun adventure which really took off when Shawn joined us as a brewing partner and we went to all grain. We've churned out a bunch of good brew, and a few great ones as well - over 250 gallons so far. The satisfaction of draining a pint of excellent beer that you made in your basement is second to none. I think that this adventure will continue for some time...

Thanks goes out to our friends and family for helping us drink good (and occasionaly not-so-good) homebrew and for putting up with my endless talk of brewing related issues.

Thanks to Shawn for joining us and for your unending supply of enthusiasm.

Thanks to Rod, Ty, and Aric for your help and advice over the last year, especially in the early days (Relax, Don't Worry, Have a Homebrew).

Thanks to Dad and Mary for my first set of buckets and all the support.

Thanks especially to Jess - this wouldn't be any fun with out you!

Hops: Up, Up, and Away

We planted East Kent Goldings this year and so far they are doing great. The vine on the right is almost half way to the top of the post so soon I will need to run the string from the top of the post to the roof of the house to give it somewhere to grow. Even though we know not to expect much in the way of harvest the first year, it still very exciting.

Fruit Beers

We racked our Blonde on to fruit this weekend. Five gallons each on to Strawberries, Pears, and Watermelon. They will be ready to drink in about five weeks - just in time for the hot weather!

Das Boot

Have I mentioned that we like Spaten? We're brewing our first Munich Helles this weekend, so we thought it would be a good idea to sample the style one more time...

Slow It On Down - Batch #28

A few months ago, I read a few articles that proposed that 60 - 90 minute mash times were a hold over from days gone by. They proposed that modern modified malts don't need anything like that amount of time to convert in the mash. More on the order of 30 minutes was the claim.

You may notice I haven't bothered to link these articles.

That's because they are crap.

At least for us. As we dropped our mash times, our efficiency dropped right along with it. We went from our usual 85%+ down in to the 70s. We could, of course, compensate for this by adjusting our recipes but our Mash Tun is already packed to the gills and it seems like a waste anyway.

For this batch of Irish Stout, we went back to a 60 minute mash and our old numbers returned with an 86.7% mash efficiency. We also beefed up the recipe slightly to push the ABV up a little.

I expect this to be the best batch of the stout so far.

Jess also came up with a great name for this beer. It invokes images of sheep grazing in the green fields of Éire and also sounds vaguely religious which always works for beer. In actuality, it is named after Scarlett, Duchess, Holly, and Junior - the dogs that play frisbee with us all day while we brew. From now on, we'll be calling this beer Four Shepherds Irish Stout.

Better Bottle?

We picked up a ported Better Bottle and are giving it a test run this week. If we are happy with it, we plan to replace all our glass carboys with them.

The fact that they are much lighter and ported are big pluses, but the primary reason for the change is this collection of horror stories about serious injuries resulting from exploding carboys. The chance of something like this happening may be remote, but if there is a safer alternative that works, we're going to go with it.

They are about the same cost as glass, but the ported version ends up much more expensive as the valve is quite pricey. Overall the cost for these things is a bit ridiculous, but with no competition they only have to compete with the price of glass carboys (which all come from either Mexico or Italy.)

If your thinking about buying carboys, I would definitely consider getting a un-ported BB instead. Just the weight difference is worth it. They don't quite have the romance of the glass, but being lacerated to the bone isn't very romantic either.

Imagine doing this with a glass carboy...

New Kegs

Some new arrivals at the brewery including our new soon-to-be keggle #2. Like the Shamwow it was made in Germany which gives it extra cool-points.

Two keggles will allow us more flexibility, more efficiency on brew day, and the ability to brew 20 gallon batches if we desire. And we do desire.

Homebrew + BBQ = Win

Many of the homebrewers I have met are also in to BBQ. That's real BBQ, as in low and slow in a smoker.

I'm guessing this is because making great BBQ requires many of the same traits as making great homebrew - primarily the ability to slave over something for a long period of time while resisting the urge to consume it all as fast as possible.

I got in to smoking BBQ a few years ago. I didn't have a real smoker, but I modified my existing gas grill (a 10 year old hand-me-down Colman) and produced some pretty good results including a few Thanksgiving turkeys.

Today we retired that old grill (it was nearly impossible to cook on anymore it was so inconsistent) and replaced it with the beauty in the picture.

This is the grill I have been waiting for forever. Whoever designed it is a genius and I hope he or she is rich and happy. The left side is a very nice gas grill. The right side is a charcoal grill and a smoker with a side-firebox. It's every kind of grill you can have in one unit and it did NOT cost a fortune. Awesome.

Tonight I seasoned it for a few hours. Tomorrow we'll be smoking a pork shoulder (and drinking homebrew of course!)