Homebrew Update: Yum

The brown ale has been bottle conditioned for about a month or so now, and its really quite nice. It has good carbonation, small bubbles, and lots of them, but its not over carbonated like a lot of mass produced beer. It’s nice and malty, with some hops, but not overpowering. Its really quite good, and a huge improvement over the Imperial Stout that I made a couple of years ago. I think the 8oz pack of dried whole malted barley that was steeped initially really helped the flavor. It also ended up pretty well clarified from sitting in secondary fermentation for a couple of weeks.

I’m definitely going to do this again.

Spent Grain Bread

When making the beer from the previous post, I looked at the barley after it had been steeped, and thought about the very nice spent grain bread that we used to get at the 75th street brewery in KC when we ate there after fencing practice. I didn’t want the spent grain to go to waste, so I dug around online and found a spent grain bread recipe.

It used:
8 oz. of spent grain (damp)
3 to 5 cups flour
1.5 cups water
3 tsp yeast
1 tsp salt
1/3 cup brown sugar
A little maple syrup, honey, or even liquid malt extract could be added for flavour as well. I used maple syrup, about a teaspoon or so.

Mix the sugar and water, proof the yeast in this, about 100-110 degrees. Once it is foamy (a few minutes) add it to the spent grain. Add the salt, and then start adding in flour and knead until you have a nice soft dough. Let it rise until doubled, punch it down and shape into loaves. I did 4 small round loaves. let them rise until doubled, then bake at 375 about 30 minutes (until done, etc.). This is a really nice, slightly sweet bread with a wonderful malty flavour. It is economical in that it keeps spent grain from going to waste, since there is still a ton of flavour in it.

This isn’t my recipe, its something I found on realbeer.com.

It is definitely a bread I’ll be making in the future. Katie made a second batch of it to serve with Christmas dinner.

Homebrew: Brown Ale

About 10 years ago, I got my dad a basic set of homebrewing equipment. It was essentially a plastic 5 gallon fermentation bucket with lid, bottle capper, caps, bottle brush, airlock, cleanser and so on. Dad never used it, for whatever reason. A couple years ago I dug it out and made a batch of stout from a purely liquid malt extract (pre-hopped) kit. It was…ok, but the yeast packet was weak and fermentation wasn’t near what it should have been. It had a little bit of green-apple flavour from the incomplete fermentation, though that eventually went away in the bottle.

A few weeks ago, I decided to go ahead and make another batch of beer, this time an English Brown Ale.

I used a “Brewer’s Best” kit, which included liquid malt extract (LME) and dry malt extract (DME) plus some crystal malt (malted barley, that is), hops pellets, yeast pack, a steeping sock, and priming sugar for bottle conditioning – that is, carbonation.

Basically, you heat the can of DME syrup, and meanwhile you take the malted barley and steep it in about 155 to 160 degree water for around 30 minutes or so – then, remove the grain and set aside. You’re essentially making malt tea. yum. or something. Then the liquid and dry malt extract is added and brought to a boil. Shortly thereafter you dump one pack of hops pellets in and continue to boil. The total boiling time is about an hour, and just prior to finishing it up, you add more hops for aroma. A standard batch of beer for small scale homebrewing is 5gal (about 53 bottles). Since we’re only boiling about 1gal or so, you need to dilute it down to 5 gallons, and get it out of the bacterial danger range quickly, down to about 75 or so degrees. 75 degrees is also a pretty ok temp to pitch the yeast at. So, following Alton Brown’s controversial method, we used one 7lb bag of ice in a sterilized fermenter bucket, plus 1gal 1pt of water, and then poured the just of the boil concentrated wort over the ice water. This quickly got it down to temp. The yeast was then pitched, the lid put on the bucket, and an airlock inserted. The airlock lets the CO2 build-up from the yeast out, without letting oxygen in. Fermentation took around a week. Once the primary fermentation was done, we racked the beer over into a new glass carboy (think a glass office watercooler bottle), which gets it off of the inch deep layer of dead yeast (called trub) that has sunk to the bottom. It sits in secondary fermentation for 2 weeks, which lets residual yeast settle out, and the yeast gets to clean up those yucky partly fermented things that give weird green-apple or other flavours, and finish converting them into ethanol.

Today was bottling day. We sterilized bottles and bottle caps, and transferred the beer from the carboy to a bucket, in order to get it off of the dead yeast build up in secondary – you really don’t want that in the bottles. This also let us add a little corn sugar (according to the directions in the kit) to the beer so that the remaining live yeast will have something to eat so they can carbonate the beer. We filled 49 bottles and capped them. They’ll sit for somewhere between two weeks and a month before they’re carbonated and ready to drink. I poured off an ounce or so of beer for a smell/taste test. It’s a little one dimensional, and a little sweet from the priming sugar, and of course, totally flat, but it smells and tastes nice enough, and should carbonate nicely. There aren’t any off flavours at all in this batch, so that is a victory, and tells us our sanitization procedures were sufficient.

It’s good fun, and considering the kit cost $35.00, we’re making decent beer for $0.72/bottle.