Roscoe Simcoe, a red IPA

I dusted off my Amarillo Red recipe and decided to change it up a little for a fall brew. I have an abundance of Simcoe hops at the moment and a relatively small amount of Amarillo pellets, so I’me going to tweak the recipe for this brew.

Grain bill

  • 15 lbs. domestic 2-row
  • 5 lbs German Pilsner malt
  • 1.5 lbs Crystal 60L
  • 1 lbs Crystal 120L
  • 1  lbs malted wheat

Hops

  • 2oz Simcoe (whole cone) @ 60 minutes
  • 2oz Simcoe @ 10 minutes
  • 2oz Amarillo pellets @ 5 min
  • 1oz Amarillo @ flameout
  • 1oz Simcoe @ flameout
  • 1oz Simcoe dry hopped

Yeast

  • Safale S-05 (1st carboy)
  • Wyeast British Ale Yeast (2nd carboy)

Instructions?

You know the drill, right? Get up at 6am on a Sunday, start heating the water in the HLT, go back and get some more coffee, etc. The SRM should come out around 13-14L. f

Danzig Baltic Porter

Yesterday, as rain poured down outside the open garage, a Baltic porter was born. A few friends joined to get a refresher in partial mash brewing (extract plus steeping grains). We started the morning with a quick recipe, a trip to Homebrew Exchange (which is open Sundays thankyouverymuch), and got the water heating. I had to do some reading again to remind myself how to do an extract batch, but the savings in setup, time, and cleanup were a nice change of pace. To mix things up, and to get beer a little sooner, we decided to split the beer in two carboys and pitch one with british ale yeast and the other with California lager yeast (2 packs on a recommendation from the shopkeeper). Brew day was easy, and the extra hands around meant that cleanup (and carrying the 6+ gallons for beer to the basement) was much easier.

Anyway, here’s the recipe:

Grains:

  • 23 lbs light malt extract
  • 1.25 lbs chocolate malt
  • 1 lbs Munich
  • 1 lbs Vienna
  • 1 lbs Crystal 60L
  • 1 lbs Crystal 80L
  • 0.5 lbs black patent

Hops

  • 3oz Palisades @ 60min
  • 3.5 oz Glacier @ 10min

Other

  • British Ale Yeast
  • California Lager Yeast x2
  • Irish Moss

OG came in at 1.087. Get to work yeast!

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Avocado Leaf Pale Ale

I was recently given a homebrew from a coworker. Not an entirely unique thing, but when she said it was brewed with avocado leaves, I was intrigued. It’s a partial-mash beer. The carbonation is great, the beer is a nice hazy pale, and the aroma is predominantly malt but with an earthy sweetness that I’m not familiar with. The taste is great – I’m actually surprised by the beer – for an extract beer it’s very clean and there’s not too much sweetness or anything. It’s really good – and there’s just something different about it that is intriguing. I’ve never had avocado leaves in anything so I have nothing to compare it to.

There’s not much hop to it, but I understand why. The leaves apparently came from a friend in Hawaii, and were steeped and added to the wort. It’s definitely a recipe worth brewing again.

Banquet draft tower – for all your office party needs

I built this banquet tap tower for Michelle’s office christmas party in December. It’s a simple block of CVG Douglas fir with a hole straight-thru for a beer spigot and a partial groove in the bottom that allows it to be attached to a desktop with a C-clap. It started out as a part of a jockey-box, but after reading a fair amount, I decided that for the purposes of a party (or a wedding), the 5-gallon kegs usually get finished before they can cool down, and having the keg under the desk in a bucket of ice would be cheaper and less foamy than trying to get a jockey box dialed in.

Anyway, it worked well, looked nice, and was fun to make with some scrap I had laying around. I re-sawed some of the CVG fir to glue to the sides so that it would be CVG all the way around. It seemed a shame to have only 2 pretty sides. I didn’t finish it – and I probably should given the wet nature of beer – but unfinished fir just looks so lovely. Personally, I like it better with the short tap-handle. Next step will be to make a matching handle.

Robust Espresso Porter tapped

Last night I woke up sweaty, anxious, and my heart was racing. I wasn’t sure what I was forgetting, but I was given some productive night thought time. It wasn’t until tonight that I realized that last night I had tapped my robust espresso porter and consumed a pint and a half. It contains a fair amount of cold press coffee, and I’m susceptible to caffeine at night. So to those who get sweaty and nervous at night from caffeine, you might want to skip this one. It’s good though.

Holiday Brews – Two takes on a robust porter

This year’s holiday ale is based on a Robust Porter recipe, but one the two halves of the 10 gallons were halved, each faces a different fate. The first half was inoculated with my regular Fermentis dry ale yeast. It will be infused with cold-press espresso roast coffee during secondary, and will likely get quite a kick from it. The second half was pitched with Wyeast British Ale yeast, and will be put in to secondary with bourbon soaked oak chips. Both will have some pretty strong constituents, so I hope that this base recipe will be robust enough to support such big flavors.

Malt

  • 18 lbs 2-row
  • 1.5 lbs chocolate malt
  • 1 lbs Crystal 60L
  • 1 lbs Munich
  • 0.5 lbs roast barley

Hops

  • 1.5 oz Glacier @ 60min (4.6% alpha)
  • 2 (ish) oz Glacier @ 10min

Misc.

  • Irish moss @ 50min
  • Safale S05 in one
  • Wyeast British Ale Yeast in the other
  • lightly toasted oak chips soaked in Maker’s Mark
  • TBD amount of Portland Roasting’s Espresso roast

I’m still working out the details on how much coffee to add. Talked to a brewer and have been reading about other home brewers’ experiences. Plus, there’s a lovely step-by-step to cold-press coffee on America’s Test Kitchen.

As an FYI, the O.G was 1.062, and no less than 10 people stopped by to comment how good the the wort smelled.

Hoptoberfest 2011

This is an amalgam of beer styles. Malt profile should be similar to a Märzen/Oktoberfest style beer, yeast is an ale yeast, and the hops are mostly from my neighbor’s and my hop plants. It’s an homage to our harvest season. This is for a 10 gallon batch.

Grains

  • 9 lbs. 2-row
  • 8 lbs. German pilsner
  • 2 lbs. Munich
  • 1 lbs. CaraPils
  • 1 lbs. Vienna

Hops

  • 2 oz Glacier @ 60
  • unknown addition of unknown hop @ 45
  • unknown addition of unknown hop @ 20
  • unknown addition of unknown hop @ 15
  • unknown addition of unknown hop @ 10
  • unknown addition of wet centennials @ 5

I used Fermentis Safale S-05 yeast again, one per carboy. Someone recently told me that they were bored with this strain. I’m not yet. I plan to cold-crash the carboys right before bottling to clear it up a little more like a true Oktoberfest.

Jasmine IPA

Today I’m brewing a Jasmine IPA loosely based on Elysian’s Avatar. Avatar (the name greatly pre-date the movie hype) is one of my wife’s favorite beers, so I thought I’d give it a try. I picked up some jasmine via the web from a local reseller on Etsy. The bag arrived yesterday. I’m not entirely convinced by the experiment, and since this is a double batch (10 gallons), I’ll probably only do 5 gallons as the jasmine brew and the other as a dry hopped IPA using Simcoe hops. Here’s the base recipe. We’ll see if I go through with the split or just decide to do 10 gallons of Jasmine.

Malt

  • 17 lbs domestic 2-Row
  • 5 lbs Weyermann Pilsner
  • 1 lb domestic Munich
  • 1 lb Crystal 40L

Hops

  • 2 oz Simcoe @ 60 min
  • 2 oz Simcoe @ 10 min
  • 1 oz Simcoe @ 2 min
  • 1 oz Simcoe @ dryhop for 1/2 of the batch

Adjunct

  • 2 oz dried Jasmine @ 10 min
  • 2 oz @ flameout
  • 1-2 oz dryhop (is that a verb?)
  • Safale S-05 American Ale yeast x 2