Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Playing Catch-up 2: Der Belgian Wit

For my second brew, I wanted something appropriate for the summer and able to handle the increased temperature in the condo (no A/C in western parts of San Diego) . So on the weekend of June 17th, I went back to American Home Brewing Supply looking for a Wheat beer kit of some sort. After talking with the owner for a bit (who is very friendly and helpful) he told me the lack of Wheat beer kits is due to the fact that they are easy to make, and the kits usually turn out badly. He helped me out and I got setup to do a Belgian Wit (much like Blue Moon by Coors).

Ingredients:
Dry Wheat Extract: 6 lbs
Flaked Wheat: 1 lbs
Kent Golding Hops: 1 oz (20 min)
Saaz Hops: 1 oz (5 min)
White Labs Belgian Wit Yeast
Table Sugar: 3/4 cup (carbonation)

Start by boiling the 1.5ish gal. of water and adding the Flaked Wheat in a steeping bag (this will give the beer the cloudiness that is characteristic of wheat beers). Then remove the bag and add the 6 lbs of malt extract to the boiling wort. Once well dissolved, add the Kent Golding hops for a 20 min boil, then the Saaz Hops for the last 5 min. Cool quickly, and add to fermentor along with enought water to get up to 5 gal. Pitch the yeast when the wort is down to about 70° F.
I fermented this for about 3 weeks, used the table sugar as priming sugar (was a little iffy about this, but I didn't have any standard dextrose) and bottled.
Two weeks later I had a delicious wheat beer perfect for summer!


Cheers!

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Playing Catch-up: Porter

Since this will ideally be a blog about my brewing, I figured I should clear some info on my first couple brews and get them out of the way.

I purchased my homebrewing kit from American Home Brewing Supply back in the middle of May. A standard 5 gal. kit with a 6.5 gal glass carboy, along with my first brew kit, the True Brew Porter!

Ingredients:
Unhopped Dark Liquid Extract: (1 can) 3.3 lbs
Dark Dried Extract : 2 lbs
Chocolate Grain Malt: 6 oz
Malto-Dextrin: 4 oz
Cascade Hops (pellet) : 1 oz
Ale Yeast
Priming Sugar: 5 oz

Brought 1.5 gals of water up to a boil, then reduced heat.
Steeped grain in a steeping bag in the hot water for 30 min.
Removed the grains and brought wort back up to a low boil.
While continually stirring, the liquid extract, the dried extract, 4 oz of the Malto-dextrin, and the hops was added to the boiling wort.
Boiled for 30 min.



I cool my wort by sticking the stock pot in the sink and filling the sides with cold water and adding ice. Once it's decently cooled, I added the wort to my carboy with 3-4 gallons of cool water to finish cooling. The yeast was pitched and I placed the carboy in the loft of our wee condo to ferment.
The wort never seemed to cool to a decent temperature for the yeast (ale yeast is generally good between about 65-75° F) upstairs in the loft. So after a few days, I moved it downstairs and it instantly dropped about 5°.
12 days of fermenting later, the priming sugar was added and the beer was bottled.
Original Gravity: 1.038
Final Gravity: 1.021

Which calculates to a whopping ~ 2.9% alcohol [(38-21)*0.14 + 0.50]
I have a feeling that the few days at 75+° might have wiped out the yeast and caused the low conversion. Nonetheless, the beer was good and those who have tried it liked it.
Cheers!


Start

This is Kyle finally getting off his rear and creating a blog. I'm going to try to keep this centered around beer/brewing and physics, but I'm sure I'll tangent into other interests of mine.