You might remember that we brewed this IPA back in September. The name came from dropping the yeast vial into the carboy while pitching the yeast.  Drunk + foaming vial = bad hand coordination. There are only about 18 bottles left, which makes me very very sad as this is definitely the best homebrew to date.

Aroma: Hops, hops, hops.  There’s a gentle citrusy smell, but it carries some of the malt up with it.  A little bit of bananas, which is also in the taste–probably fermented a bit hot as we had some oddly warm days those weeks of September. There’s a bit of toasted caramel around the edges.

Appearance: This beer was my first attempt at using irish moss as a fining agent at ~10min during the boil. There was a tremendous amount of precipitate in the carboy, but this beer is still fairly cloudy.  I’m willing to chalk it up to not being able to do a full boil, adding LME sporadically during the boil, and not having any cooling apparatus to facilitate a rapid cold break.  Carbonation is also somewhat inconsistent.  Some bottles pour with an excessive amount of foaming, while some pour “normally.”  Generally the head settles to just a dusting across the surface of the beer.  The color of the beer itself is a beautiful mahogany; probably well within the high twenties on an SRM chart.  It’s decently clear, but nothing beyond the glass is readable like a commercial brew might be.

Flavor: Bitter grapefruit is the predominant flavor.  There’s a deep, deep bitterness to this beer that I feel is almost balanced by toasty malt flavor. Some estery flavor.

Mouthfeel: The IPA starts with a refreshing crisp, citrus flavor that we had in the aroma.  The crispness broadens to a full bitterness with toasty malt notes that lingers long after you swallow.  Carbonation levels are great, even in the bottles that pour with an excessive amount of head. For being about 8%, there’s very little alcohol bite.

Overall Impression: This is by far the best beer I’ve brewed to date.  There are obvious areas for improvement.  I’d like for the finish to be a little more dry.  I might also back off the initial bittering addition a tad if I come back to brew this again.  I think the aftertaste can be a little much.  These two things would really improve the beer.  I’m looking forward to getting my fermentation temperatures under control and procuring a wort chiller (leaning heavily towards a plate chiller at the moment…) to help with my off flavors and clarity.  When tasted side-by-side with a 60min IPA (that this was supposed to be a clone of) the DFH tastes almost smokey and extraordinarily clean.

score: 28

This was the first opportunity I had to use the pot I bought from Joel of Smoke ‘n’ Bubbles.  It’s a beautiful 9 gallon stainless steel pot with ball valve and a gorgeous thermometer and sight glass from Bobby M of BrewHardware.com.  (all weldless) Fairly intense looking, but it proved to be a much better experience than brewing inside with our 3 gallon pasta pot.

Finally getting to try my new pot

I’m hoping to secure a plate chiller and some piping so that I can take full advantage of the ball valve and run my hot wort directly through the plate chiller into my primary.  We’ll see… I’m also debating the merits of a plate chiller vs. a counterflow or immersion chiller.  It seems like the risk of infection is much higher, but the form factor might be a big selling point in our current housing situation (tiny apartment).

Anyway, back to the holiday brown ale!  To turn Northern Brewer’s Emma’s Brown Ale into a more festive offering I zested 8 clementines (.75oz) and soaked them in vodka overnight.  I added this mixture, 2 cinnamon sticks, .5 tsp of cardamom, .5 tsp of coriander and a dash of ground cinnamon to the final hop addition (.25oz of Styrian Goldings).  I was concerned about the aromas not sticking around, but the smell was divine as I was siphoning into the primary.  I’m planning on “dry hopping” with a few whole all spice to refresh the aroma before we drop this into bottles and hand it out for Christmas.  If all goes according to schedule it should have exactly 3 weeks in the bottle.

Elena and I took advantage of the time we would be sitting around watching bready-sugar-water boil and picked up a six pack of Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA to taste alongside my clone.  The differences were apparent.  There is some fruity off-flavor in my IPA that tastes slightly of bananas.  The DFH clearly had higher attenuation as it was much drier than mine.  That said, I enjoyed mine more.

Dogfish Head 60min IPA (background) and my clone (foreground)

I promise that I will sit down with a bottle this week and do a formal tasting with notes and everything!

Fermentation is well underway.  She started at 1.050; exactly where we wanted to be.  I’m using dry yeast for the first time in this brew.  I was really surprised how much it smelled as it was rehydrating.  I put it in a bowl with approximately 4oz of warm water to rehydrate the yeast and then “tempered” it with small amounts of wort until it was as close to the temperature of the wort as I could get it. The yeast smelled strongly of overripe fruit. I woke up in the middle of the night and the primary was already bubbling away.

Blowoff by dan_hoerr

Aroma: The cherry is full, but gentle on the nose. There’s a belgian yeastiness and some delicious dark maltiness. After a few sniffs what was originally discernable as cherry devolves into a deep generically fruity aroma.

Appearance: Mad Elf pours a beautiful coppery red. A short-lived white head formed nary a fourth of a finger thick during my pour. (insert obligatory comment about my inability to generate head here). As the “short-lived” would imply the head faded quickly and there wasn’t much at all during the rest of the glass.

Flavor:Mad Elf is a fruity Belgian Strong Ale at heart and it shows. Classic belgian yeast character is well-balanced with the fruitiness and cherry flavors. The caramel malt is evident, but definitely playing second-fiddle to the other flavors. There’s little to no hop bitterness.

Mouthfeel:Mildly syrupy. The carbonation is present, but not overwhelming. The fruit and yeast lingers in the mouth but evaporates to a mildly bitter finish.

Overall Impression: If you poured me this beer in a lineup and asked me to pick the “holiday” ale it probably wouldn’t be my first choice. The cherry flavor comes through as advertised, but it’s so in line with the Strong Ale style as to be nondescript. It’s a good example of the style (apart from the head, which may or may not be my own fault), but doesn’t bring the holiday flavors I’m looking for. This would be a good winter offering for nights curled up with some shortbread, a nice little blaze going in the fireplace, and a classic movie.

score: 37

That’s really all there was to it, Elena was on corking/capping duties again and I was star-sanning the bottlest and filling them. One major change to the operation this time around was that I cut the piping between my bottling bucket and bottling wand down to about 2 inches. This is well illustrated here. What this accomplishes is keeping the pin within the wand in an upright position which prevents the valve from free-flowing in the event that it gets stuck sideways while you’re waving it about. This worked phenomenally well and I’ll never go back to the other way.

It’s been about 2.5 weeks since we bottled so I pulled a six pack out of the basement this weekend for a little get together. Since Elena is a food blogger Thanksgiving comes early so she can get the recipes up and we had some friends over to help us eat the 12lbs of fried turkey. After a few hours in the fridge I cracked open the first one to make sure it was carbonated enough to be worth serving, and boy was it ever. Hands down the best thing I’ve brewed to date, and one of the more well-balanced IPAs I’ve had. It’s darker, richer, and hoppier than the 60min we were trying to copy, but not as malty as the 90minute.

So what’s up next? The carboy is sitting empty at the moment, but never fear because I’ve got two kits on their way from Northern Brewer. The first is the Dark Cherry Stout which I’ll be brewing this weekend. The other is a kit for a great cause, and I’d encourage anyone who homebrews to pick it up. I’m going to be starting with Emma’s Ale as a base for my holiday brown ale. I haven’t totally decided what I’m going to do to it to “holiday-ify” it, but I think it will probably get some spices thrown into the boil and maybe some into the carboy just to be thorough. Much more research to do before that one.

As a part of that research I picked up some Troegs Mad Elf the other day so you can look for a review of that going up this weekend. I’m also hoping to catch up with my homebrew evaluations and get some formal stuff up for everything to date. Hopefully there will be a lot of beer and stuff next week. Til then.

7pm rolled around and we started in on the dogfish offerings with 2 glasses of Bitches Brew (the tribute to Miles Davis and his album of the same name) As the night wore on we tried Red & White, Black & Blue, and then decided to try the 18% ABV fort and head home. The fort was supposed to be served in 6oz servings, but we got full 12oz glasses. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I sipped at mine until it was gone and then finished Elena’s. I fully intended to leave at this point, but got sucked into conversations with folks I knew from the Baltimore Beer community on Twitter and ended up having a glass of My Antonia courtesy of Alewife’s foursquare mayor. (I owe you one, good sir.) All in all it was an awesome night filled with great beer and terrific people.

I swore I wouldn't get excited like an adolescent girl at a justin beiber concert, but i did.

What does this have to do with a beer from a completely different brewery?  Well, if you’ve ever had a DFH you know that the flavors can be a bit… intense.  I was in the store the next day picking out a beer to review this week and looking at all the dark and rich fall offerings made me want to review a bottle of Heineken. Then I spotted this lovely.

Stillwater Artisanal Ales is a local brewery whose name I’ve seen popping up in the events for Baltimore Beer Week and have been meaning to try.  I was familiar with the saison style, having brewed one for my first homebrew batch and rejoiced.  A lighter beer I could enjoy while nursing my exhausted taste-buds back to health.  Saison is style 16C.

Aroma: The yeast shines through notes of grass and a bit of citrus.  There are some hints of saison-esque spice (black pepper and allspice to my untrained nose)

Appearance: Stateside Saison pours a beautiful, cloudy, coppery amber.  The head started thick, but diminished to a thin layer.  There was no lacing left behind on my glass. (though like last time, I’m not totally willing to chalk this up to anything but my innate ability to kill head. [there's a "that's what she said" joke in there for someone] )

Flavor: Much like the aroma, the yeast is the prominent flavor I’m getting.  There’s a bit more pepper in the mouth, and the hops kick in as the yeast flavor fades leaving a bitter, dry finish.  The hop flavor is light.  Malt character is light and toasty.  There are fruity notes like cantaloupe or melon somewhere in the middle of the sip.

Mouthfeel: I taste the malt initially and briefly, followed by an intense yeast/fruit flavor.  The beer finishes clean and dry with some hop bitterness.  Medium to high carbonation.  The carbonation level makes me sad I can’t get good a good head or lacing on the glass.

Overall Impression: I really enjoy this beer.  I think it’s a much better saison than the Saison Dupont I tried alongside my own. (though the bottle handling was in question there…) There’s a fullness to the yeast flavor that I haven’t experienced in anything but a tripel yet. I’m slightly put off by the bitter finish, but the main flavors keep me sipping.  I don’t see anything here outside of the style guidelines.  Without a doubt, I’ll be looking for this Saison to share with friends next summer.

score: 42

in other news, we bottled up our 118IBU IPA this week. Pictures of that and a formal review of my coriander-wheat beer to come mid-week.

I figured a great place to start would be a beer friends and family have described as “the best [pumpkin] beer they’ve ever tasted.” Southern Tier’s Pumking.

Aroma: the beer smells like a pumpkin spice latte, or a pumpkin pie with whipped cream on top. It’s the sort of smell that takes you back to watching your mother bake pies. There is no subtlety here.

Appearance: Pumking pours a beautiful coppery orange; appropriately akin to the pumpkin rind. The clarity is superb, photos and posters on the wall are clearly visible through the glass. The head was thin and quickly dissipated. (note: I have a terrible time retaining head in my pours regardless of glass type, hand-washing, pouring styles, etc.)

Flavor: One sip and the creamy pumpkin pie is overwhelming your senses. The nutmeg and allspice are seriously intense. Where most pumpkin beers use the spices and pumpkin to accentuate the malt, Southern Tier is letting the malt accentuate the spices… where you can find it. Not necessarily a bad thing.

Mouthfeel: The beer starts fairly full and creamy, but as the flavor subsides the alcohol (9%) starts to come through. On a second tasting, I was surprised how short-lived the full-bodied flavors were. I wonder if some maltodextrine, carapils, or lactose would help bring the body in line with the flavor.

Overall Impression: This is a beer I’m going to be on the lookout for every fall. I don’t know that it’s necessarily “quaffable,” but is amazing as a little digestif. I’ve read over the style guidelines for 21 (spice/herb/vegetable beer) and this beer might lose some points on “The SHV character should be pleasant and supportive, not artificial and overpowering.” for both aroma and flavor. That certainly doesn’t detract from my experience which is one I’m going to be happy to repeat.

score: 44

I caught word on twitter about this event at alewife (a new bar in baltimore) that Stone and its owner Greg Koch were coming into town with 40 of their beers to offer on tap.  I’ve never really had a lot of Stone since it’s not the most common thing to find on draft in this area, but Aaron and I headed out to take in the experience.  And what an experience it was…

I started the night with the beer I’d been hearing about on twitter from those fortunate enough to be able to sneak out of work at 3pm: #5, the Stone 07.07.07 Vertical Epic Ale aged in red wine.  It really kicked the night off right, the nose was amazing, full-bodied, complex and a perfect introduction to both Stone and Alewife.

My other samples from the night included:

2. DDH Stone 14th Anniversary Emperial IPA (this one smelled like BO, and I never really got over it.)
3. Stone Imperial Russian Stout Aged in Bourbon Barrels
4. Stone IRS 10th Anniversary GK’s MadMan Mix
5. 21st Amendment/Firestone Walker/Stone/El Camino [un]Real Black Ale
6. Double Bastard Ale Aged in Brandy Barrels [2006]
7. DDH Stone IPA (at the recommendation of the couple sitting next to us.)
8. Stone Old Guardian Barley Wine aged in wine barrels [2009]
9. Stone Smoked Porter w. Vanilla Beans
10.  Stone Old Guardian Barley Wine aged in Bourbon Barrels [2006]
11. Ballast Point/Kelsey McNair/Stone San Diego County Session Ale
12. Stone 12th Anniversary Bitter Chocolate Oatmeal Stout

The whole event was set up extraordinarily effectively- you bought tokens at the door and exchanged them for 4 or 5 oz samples.  The beer list was numbered so getting what you wanted was as easy as holding up a few fingers or trying to shout a number over the roar of the crowd.  There were copious bar tenders and I never waited longer than a minute or two for a beer.

We’ll be back to alewife (especially if they’ll be showing Flyers games.) and I’m looking forward to seeing more of Stone in the future.

Bottling this one made me really appreciative of all the help I had last time.   I was trying to sanitize, drain and fill and Elena was operating the capper/corker.  I managed to get the pin in the bottling wand stuck in the open position and sprayed delicious beer all over the floor while I tried to fix it…  The beer made it into the bottles though and it was a good learning experience.  For instance we learned that Elena is amazing at corking the 750ml bottles.

Ok, let’s talk about last Sunday.  I set out to make a Dogfish Head 60 minute IPA clone.  This is the first brew I’ve made that didn’t come in a kit and I must say that I had a lot of fun going shopping for the ingredients individually.  We almost forgot the yeast, but thankfully I was paying attention during my check out and ran to grab some.  The guys at Maryland Homebrew were really helpful, and I’m sure I’ll be headed back there.

I set up like normal with our 12qt pot (exciting news on that front, more later) and invited my buddy Nick over to have some beers and brew some… er, beers. Things started well, the steeping grains went in, came out and we started to crank up the stove to get the water up to boil temp.  I don’t know why I compulsively measure the temperature of my water at this stage-it doesn’t really matter since I’m headed all the way up to 212… but I do.  At one point I left the thermometer hanging over the edge of the counter where it was exposed to the burner.  It didn’t like that too much and exploded. It smelled a lot like lighter fluid, but didn’t seem to be overly flammable.

I have a floating thermometer, but the pot I boil in is so shallow that it doesn’t have enough liquid to float on.  I pulled out Elena’s fancy digital thermometer and dropped the probe in the pot.  This worked well for a little bit, but suddenly the display read something like “273″ which our water was clearly not.  I pulled out the probe and immediately realized my mistake: the metal stick part of the thermometer was hollow and water/wort had seeped in and messed things up.  I was pretty distraught at this, but when I opened the drawer to find a new probe realized that I had been using the probe to the incorrect digital thermometer and I was safe.  No idea if it will work in the right base unit, but it doesn’t really matter since we don’t use that one anymore.

I stuck in the proper probe and dangled it over the edge of the pot so that the open end was safe.  We pressed on, reminding ourselves that this is exactly the reason you’re not supposed to brew without a beer in hand.  Things progressed normally through the rest of the night (or so I thought) until we were ready to add the yeast.  This is the first time I’ve used a White Labs vial and the instructions say to shake it before you add it to the chilled wort.  I got it mixed pretty well and then opened the tube and it started spilling everywhere.  I rushed it over to the carboy and started pouring and then it wasn’t in my hand anymore.  Nick was laughing hysterically and pointed out that it had fallen right into the beer.  I laughed it off and we got things cleaned up and situated for fermentation and called it a night.

The next morning I realized three things:

1. I forgot to take a starting gravity reading.

2. I hadn’t sanitized the yeast vial before it fell into the wort.

3. We had borked the hop schedule.

Luckily fermentation had already set in and seemed to be going fairly well.  I pulled a gravity sample and got ~1.067.  My target was 1.070.

In my “mildly” inebriated state I had incorrectly interpreted the recipe and added the Warrior hops over the first 35 minutes and the Simcoe/Amarillo over the final 25 minutes.  What should have happened is that the Warrior was added until minute 35, or 25 minutes into the boil, then the others be added over the final 35.  Probably not a big deal.  Especially when you consider that we progressively increased the gravity of the boil by adding LME as we lost water volume and could fit it in the pot without risking boilover.  The lower gravity at the start of the boil should increase the hop utilization/bitterness.  Unless, of course, I’ve got the bittering science backwards which is a total possibility.  3.3 lb of LME was added at 0min (boil start) 20 min and 40 minutes.

It’s all good though, because we’re already fermenting away.  I got paranoid about the carboy exploding and put my blow off tube set up on it.  Turned out this was a wise move as the krausen has been creeping up the neck of the carboy and yesterday I noticed foam in the tubing.   It also makes a terrific bubbling sound which creates a soothing atmosphere in our living room.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the beer smelled exactly like it did in the fermenter in the glass.  There was a crispness to the aroma that probably came from the combination of carbonation and refrigeration.  The color is somewhere around a 5 on the SRM chart, which is within the style guidelines and made me happy.

I went out and got a bottle of Saison Dupont to do a side-by-side tasting.  It wasn’t until this point that I realized just how under-carbonated my beer was.  The Dupont hit your mouth in an explosion of effervescence where as mine simply just sort of limped over your lips.  Hopefully this is simply a symptom of me opening the bottles too soon.  I preferred the aroma of my brew to Dupont’s which had an overtone of a dead skunk that had been sitting in the road a couple of days.  I don’t know if it had been mishandled or if that’s the way it was supposed to be as I’ve never had it before and the store that I usually get my beer from was out of stock or not carrying it and I had to go someplace new.  The smell didn’t carry over into the taste and I very much enjoyed the Dupont, though mine seemed to have a bit more grain character to it.

I’ve been purposefully vague about describing the taste of my beer as I’d like to see how it develops. I’ll put up some formal evaluation in a week or so.

In other news the Honey Coriander Wheat (that needs a better name) is still fermenting.  We’re on the 10th day of krausen.  It has definitely started to flocculate, but the bubbles are still pushing through the airlock about 10 times a minute.  I’ve scheduled to bottle on Sept. 10th which would give it 3 and a half weeks in primary.  I’m starting to think it might need a bit more- we’ll see.  The terrible smell I mentioned before is almost completely gone.

In other news, the under the table swamp cooler (pictured below) seems to be doing pretty well.  I’m swapping out small blocks of ice about 3 times a day (morning, evening, midnight) and it’s been in the high 60s for the last 24 hours.  It could be that we’ve turned the AC down to 70 or that the temperature outside has been steadily dropping as well.  Whatever it is, I’m not going to complain.  I struggled to keep my last batch within the mid 70s using a similar set up in the basement and this is a grand improvement.  Hopefully it lasts long enough to see us through fermentation and into conditioning when I’ll stop adding ice to increase the temperature and prod a few more yeasties into getting back into the business of cleaning up after themselves.

I dropped in on the bottles conditioning in the basement.  The 750ml belgians were beginning to mushroom from the pressure, so it looks like we didn’t manage to mess anything up too badly on Friday.  The bottles were hazy with some sediment already forming on the bottom. I’m planning to pull one or two to refrigerate thursday night so we can taste the fruits of our labors at one week on Friday.  If it’s done carbonating, I’ll probably throw a few more in the fridge for the weekend.