I was looking through my Northern Brewer catalog and was studying up on base malts. I saw this kind offered by the Fawcett Maltsters named Optic.

It is made from a single barley variety grown in the UK.  It seems to be a newer variety than Maris Otter, and it is a spring variety.  Fawcett follows the traditional floor malting procedure when making Optic malt.

A few forums noted that the kernel size may be a little smaller than other base malts.   As with any new base malt you’re trying out, you may need to adjust your mill to get the crush you need for your usual mashing experience.

Flavor:  Very aromatic.  Adds a good amount of biscuit flavor to your beer.

Color: 2.3- 3.0°L

Body: N/A

Use:  Base malt for English pale ales – IPAs.

We’ll be entering beers into the 2012 Boston Homebrew Competition again this year.  I think I have at least four I want to submit, plus I can send in a bottle of cider and/or mead.

I don’t think I am going to subject the judges to the Belgian Wit I brewed in the summer.  I poured the contents of the remaining bottles down the sink this weekend and redemption for the sins of the recent past will be the subject of my next brew log.

There is a couple of updates to this year’s competition.  All entries must be submitted online and only entries with the official labels attached to them will be accepted.

Entries must be received by February 17th, 2012.  Good luck to all who enter.

This is an update to the epic multi-flavored stout project. I started to bottle some of the flavored sweet stouts.

1. Vanilla stout – we took a gallon of sweet stout and let it sit on a whole split vanilla bean for two weeks.  Initial tastes at bottling revealed a prominent but not overwhelming vanilla taste.  I liked it – it wasn’t in the background at all.
2. Chocolate stout – for this one, we took a gallon of the same sweet stout and let it sit on 1.5 ounces of cocoa powder for 2 weeks.  The few tastes I took at bottling revealed some bitter cocoa flavor.  This one may be a miss but we won’t know for sure until it’s ready.
3. Cherry stout – I haven’t bottled this one yet, but I did take a sample from it a week ago.  The tart cherries were detectable in the beer but it seemed unfinished.  If it mellows out, this beer could be the best of the bunch.

So all of these different stouts should be ready to drink in two weeks.  Let’s have a tasting then, shall we?

I came to the decision that I need to submit my mead to the Mazer Cup to get some helpful feedback about the raspberry melomel I made.  I haven’t had many meads to know if I made a good one or not.

This competition is the one for meadmakers.  If I want to get someone who knows what a good mead taste like, then I need to send some bottles to Colorado.

Right now, I am not sure if I want to make more meads in the future.  If I get some good feedback and enough information to make a better one, then maybe I will try again.

Entries need to be received by February 17th.  I think I have a box that can be used to deliver 3 bottles of mead.

Last night I bottled up the harvest ale.  This is the beer that I dry hopped using the hops I grew last summer.  Racking it from the carboy to the bottling bucket was easy.  I thought that maybe the whole hops would clog the siphon, but it was clog free.

As for cleaning the carboy with all the whole hop flowers sitting in the bottom of it, I was able to remove them all fairly easily.  I filled the spent carboy with water, about a 1/4 of the way up. I swirled this mixture around and was able to get the majority of them out on the first try.  I repeated this process 2 more times and got them all out.

The color of the beer was lighter than I expected.  I thought I would get away with submitting it as an American Amber but it appears more like a Pale ale to me.

I poured a glass to see if I could smell any hops aroma, which was the reason that I dry hopped in the first place.  There may have been a hint of hops aroma but I think I will wait until the beer carbonates before I make a judgment on the aroma.

I didn’t taste any yeast tartness as described by other brewers who used this yeast strain (WLP008).  It was still a little cloudy but much clearer than when I racked it from primary.

There was some “funny” malt sweetness that I tasted.  I picked it up in a few swigs but all the tastes ended with refined hop bitterness.  Definitely lots of hops flavor in this one.

In two weeks, we’ll taste it again and report the findings.  Until then, brew on.

Yesterday, I bottled up the raspberry mead or melomel which brings this 3.5 month long brew log to a close.  After following directions to keep the primary fermentation humming along and racking 3 or 4 times to gain clarity and add flavor, I finally got around to bottling this sucker for submission into competitions and aging.

We sampled this mead on New Year’s Eve where the resident honey expert gave it good marks.  For a first try, it was pretty good.  I don’t know how it matches up to good mead so that’s where the competition submissions will come in handy.

One point to note, I did not add any priming sugar to the mead.  I planned for it to be  a still mead.

I am pretty happy that this brew log is over for now.  Now, I can focus my time back on beer and getting the lager project started up.

Some other posts about the mead making…

Raspberry Melomel Recipe

Plans for Mead Making

Mead Fermentation Update

Here is my Cherry Wheat Recipe with some more details:  You can read more about the brew day here.

Batch Size 5 gallons (usually 6 but scaled down to account for cherry puree addition later)
OG 1.052
IBUs 32 (tinseth method)
Efficiency (~70%)
Mash Temp 152F
Mash Length 60 mins (mash out to 168F held for 10 minutes, wort transferred to kettle then left overnight, ~9hours)
Boil Length 75 mins

5 lbs German Pilsner Malt
5 lbs American Wheat Malt
2 lbs German Munich (10L)
0.5 lbs Rice Hulls (Lautering Insurance)
2.0 oz Tettnanger Pellets 3.5AA 60 mins (13IBU)
1.0 oz EKG Pellets 4.5AA 60 mins (21IBU)
1 Whirfloc tablet
WLP001 California Ale Yeast, (2L starter volume, grown for 4 days at 72F with occasional shaking, chilled for 2 days, decant pitched ~300ml slurry)
2 cans Cherry Puree

Methodology Notes:

1. This was the second brew session using my new equipment set up.  My new set up employs the use of a March pump to recirc wort through the mash during the entire mash, over a direct fired mash tun.  Maintaining temps has been excellent and ramping to mash out temps after 40mins of mashing at target temps has been a breeze.  I also use the wort to assist with cooling post boil.
2. I am still trying to learn and dial in the liquid losses to the new system however.  Losing some wort to the tubing and the false bottom still needs to be better calculated.  Hence the slightly less than 5 gallons in fermentor.
3. The entire brew was performed in one fermentor.  I used a 7 gallon glass carboy.  I collected just under 5 gallons of wort into the carboy in anticipation of the volume that 2 cans of puree would take up, while also accounting for any blow off that may occur…or at least to attempt to not have a blow off.  Which was a failure as seen here.
4. I also resurrected my oxygenation system for this brew.  I think that even despite using a good starter my last beer did nto attenuate as fully as desired do to this aspect of yeast/fermentation management.
5. Lastly, I maintained the temp of the ferment at 65-70F using a FermWrap heater.  Very please with the results as far as monitoring temperature goes.  A future post will be required to really discuss the ups and downs of the FermWrap.
6. Ok really Lastly, I also split the brew day into two parts.  I mashed in at 7PM at night, performed a mash out (168F), sparged and collected my wort in the kettle.  I shut down the brewery at that point and went to bed, with the kettle covered with a lid. (Although I used a keg as a kettle and the handle holes don’t really let you seal it fully).  The next morning the wort tasted fine, with now sourness or something weird.  Again tasting notes will need to be recorded to see if I am correct there.  I proceeded to boil and add the hops as normal the next day.

After two weeks in the primary, the sweet stout was ready for bottling and some experimental flavor additions.

I split the 5 gallon batch 4 ways:

1. 2 gallons for bottling
2. 1 gallon for cherry flavor addition
3. 1 gallon for vanilla flavor addition
4. 1 gallon for chocolate flavor addition

The first split I bottled pretty much the same as I usually would.  The only thing I did differently was using some fuzzy math in terms of the amount of priming sugar I needed to carbonate 2 gallons of beer to 1.5 volumes.  I came out to 1.25 ounces of corn sugar.  Hopefully that is enough.

The second split I added pasteurized, canned tart cherries to the bottom of the secondary along with some black cherry juice.  I added enough to get an inch of liquid/cherries from the bottom of the one gallon bottle.  I filled the rest with unprimed sweet stout.

The third split I added one vanilla bean that I cut down the middle using a sanitized knife and cutting board.  I put the bean in the bottle and filled it to near the top.

The fourth split I added 1.5 ounces of cocoa powder to the one gallon bottle.  I thought about using cacoa nibs but I had cocoa powder on hand.  I poured the sweet stout on top of it and had to give the bottle a few gentle swishes so the powder would sink into the beer rather than float on top of it.

Right now, these three bottles are sitting and waiting in my basement.   My plan is to bottle them in a couple of weeks and schedule one a night for three nights so I can clean and sanitize my equipment in between bottling sessions.  It will be fun to see which of these flavor additions worked out best.

I don’t use a secondary very often as I tend to ferment in primary for at least two weeks then I cold crash and rack to a keg. Mainly I just like not taking the time to clean a secondary and then rack the beer. I prefer to just let it ferment out in primary and the next move is to the serving vessel. However, a secondary does have a practical applications occasionally, one being the addition of fruit.

AAAAAnd you won’t see that here. The few times I’ve done fruit beer in the past I have added fruit to secondary, then racked the beer on top of the fruit. This time I wanted to experiment with something different and keep with my simple one fermentor process I outlined above. In the case of my Cherry Wheat brew, I chose pureed cherry from a can. This cherry source is pasteurized at canning, so the fruit is ready to go. All I needed to do was sanitize the can, and pour it in the fermentor. Of course, I used a sanitized funnel to help get the red cherry goodness into the glass carboy I was using.

Going along with my easy as possible steps, I left a bucket of sanitizer next to the fermentor with my small funnel in it after the last brew session. All I did was to pull the airlock and bung out of the carboy, add the puree and replace the airlock.

No worries right?

Well, I did add the fruit 5 days into the ferment as I had planned. Thinking that the majority of fermentation should have been passed I hoped that by adding fruit to the primary would prevent a vicious blow-off. Well that part of the experiment was a failure. I ended up coming home the next day to an airlock dislodged from the carboy and it was full of fermentation goo. Not a problem though because I still had a bucket of sanitizer and an airlock already in there ready to go. The fermentation had already gone through its blow off phase apparently, because the fresh airlock hasn’t gotten gummed up yet.

I’ll have to edit this post with a link to tasting notes after the beer is done (in another week) to decide if the fruiting in the primary is as good as doing it in secondary.

BREW ON!

For the harvest ale, I dry hopped it using my home grown hop cones. I know using whole cones are going to make it difficult to clean out the carboy, but not impossible. For this brew, I wanted to stay true to the concept of the harvest and only use hops that were grown by me.

I transferred the beer from my primary fermentor to a secondary carboy. I kept it in the primary for two weeks. I probably could have dry hopped a week ago but I didn’t get to it until last night.

Anyway, I put the hops in the bottom of my sanitized carboy and I racked the beer on top of them. Here are some photos of the process: