This article was originally posted on Oct. 18, 2011, on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.
We racked one gallon of AW #1 on top of cinnamon sticks that had been boiled in water. The taste is pleasant, mildly like Christmas. However, it doesn’t appear to heat well. We’ve bottled it still and it’s sitting in a 12-pack in our newly reorganized work room.
This article was originally posted on Oct. 14, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.
October 14 was a cider day.
Leo came over with six gallons of apple juice. We got our measurements ready, realized that we didn’t have the needed two pounds of corn sugar and made up the extra six ounces with brown sugar.
We boiled the brown and corn sugar and added them to the bucket. We poured the apple juice in. Bryce and Leo crossed streams.
The brown sugar colored the water something intense.
We rehydrated the yeast, pitched it, brought the bucket down stairs, cleaned up and called it a day.
The recipe isn’t hard. It’s the same Apfelwein (AW) recipe as it ever was, except this time we’re using the ale yeast again and breaking up the dextrose with brown sugar.
Ingredients:
5 gallons apple juice
2 pounds sugar (26 ounces corn sugar, 6 ounces brown sugar)Directions:
Boil sugars in water for five minutes.
Put sugar water into fermenter.
Pour apple juice into fermenter.
Pitch yeast.
It’s that easy.
As always, check for the tag “AW Batch #3” (http://brew.wheelerc.org/tag/aw-batch-3/) to see what happens.
It’ll be done and ready for testing a month from Oct. 14, when it was made.
In the mean time, have a home brew! Except none of ours are ready to drink . . . Damn.
This article was originally posted on Oct. 11, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.
We did two things on October 14, 2011.
We made a 5-gallon batch of Apfelwein with ale yeast (Nottingham) and we made a 1-gallon batch of Apfelwein with ale yeast in a carboy, exclusively with brown sugar. The 5-gallon batch was mixed with a majority corn sugar and a little brown sugar to finish out the measurements.
Here’s what we did:
5 oz. brown sugar, boiled in 1 cup water for about 5 minutes.
1 gallon Great Value apple juice.
Pour into carboy.
Pitch yeast.
Wait.
As always, check its progress under the tag AW Batch #3C (http://brew.wheelerc.org/tag/aw-batch-3c/)
The brown sugar appears to be giving the AW a darker color than normal.
This article was originally posted on Oct. 4, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.
Leo and I went to two places, before the massive bottling and brewing that is tomorrow.
The first place we went, making a dent in our collective wallets, was the brew store. We got all we needed, and then some, for a clone of 8-Ball Stout. It’s one of Leo’s favorites. Unfortunately, we miscalculated the projected cost.
Nevertheless, we also picked up stoppers and fermentation locks. Hurrah, I say, hurrah!
For, tomorrow is brew day.
And brew day is a good day.
The fancy new thermometer. We plan to use it for brewing tomorrow.
The second place we went was Wally World where we managed to find a digital meat thermometer that can have its probe set separately from the body. Meaning, I won’t have to stick my hand into horrible steaming wort, that burns.
Burns!
And so, tomorrow, we experiment. Tonight, we sleep.
This article was originally posted on Oct. 4, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.
Our very first cider, according to Ed Wort’s Apfelwein recipe, took awhile.
This carboy of Cider #1 got bumped up two days because of a missing airlock.
And when we (Bryce, Leo and myself) found ourselves lacking an airlock (the bobber on the one we were supposed to use was missing) it was decided to steal one from one of the four Carlo Rossi carboys downstairs. Besides, we figured, the Apfelwein was supposed to come out on Wednesday — taking it out on Monday wouldn’t be that big of a deal.
So, we stole the airlock and resealed it with a normal cap.
And today, Bryce and I primed and bottled the first 1/5 of Cider #1.
That is to say, prime and bottle the first 1/5 of Fat Grey Tom’s Blitzkrieg Apfelwein.
So, transferred it from the carboy to the bottling bucket, scooped up two glasses, primed it and tasted.
The raspberry liqueur changed the color from a weird golden to reddish-gold.
And man, did it kick. Going down, it gave us the same warm feeling one gets from a shot of schnapps.
With a bit of sugar, it tasted OK, with a very light cider taste. However, the brew is still young and unconditioned.
Have a homebrew . . . Except that we have no home brew left. Damn and blast!
Alas.
We will have homebrew, soon enough. I hope.
I sincerely hope.
This Cider Batch:
Cider: Batch 1
Cider Batch 1: Update
Tag: http://brew.wheelerc.org/tag/AW-batch-1/
This article was originally posted on Oct. 3, 2011, on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.
Not to say that we’re totally screwed, but, we may very well be.
You see, it was a long night of brewing, marked by blunders.
It started with a good dinner — vegetarian red curry. It was good.
The Belgian Red — not sure if it will ferment.
We started brewing by boiling 3.5 gallons (we thought it was only 3.) We boiled it all in the huge pot, which turned out to be a good idea.
We put the 3.5 to boil, walked down to the convenience store to buy a package of ice, came back and the water still wasn’t boiling. We waited, it boiled, we added the Amber Malt Extract and Crushed Special B Roast and half the Styrian Goldings Hops.
(Recipe at bottom of the post)
We boiled it all for an hour, took it off the heat and put it into the fermenting bucket.
And then I realized, the recipe called for adding the other half of the hops at the last ten minutes of the boil.
Woops.
So, I put the other hops in 1 gallon of water and boiled it for ten minutes. The recipe, however, called for the 1 oz of hops to be steeped in the off-heat wort.
Once it was boiling, we put all the ice we had in the house into the wort, which didn’t cool it down much.
And then we added the extra boiling 1 gallon of hops-water.
And were way over five gallons.
So, we took it down stairs to the garage (to get out of the kitchen, so my roomie who lives below could sleep) and put the lid on.
Around midnight, as I was falling asleep, I realized I hadn’t pitched the yeast yet.
I got dressed, tested the temp and found it to be somewhere really hot. Estimated around 90 degrees.
I pitched the yeast and went to bed. “Screw it,” I said to myself.
And so, now, the next day, no bubbles are coming from the brew and the brew store is closed on Mondays.
Damn and blast.
Alas, we have no ready home-brew. We cannot relax and have a home brew. Which is sad.
Next time, we relax.
Recipe:
Belgian Red
Ingredients:
6 lbs. Amber Malt Extract
1/2 lb. Crushed Special B Roast
2 oz. Styrian Goldings Hops
Priming:
3/4 cup Corn SugarDirections:
Bring water to boil. Add Malt Extract, 1 oz. Hops and Crushed Special B Roast.
Boil for an hour.
Turn off heat, steep the other 1 oz. Hops in wort for ten minutes.
Bring water up to five gallons.
Bring wort temperature down to yeast’s directions. Pitch yeast.
Ferment for one week, about until fermentation is complete.
Bottle, cap, let sit for two weeks.
Drink.
UPDATE, April 6, 2013: The original premise was correct. The beer has, so far, continued to be terrible. A 12-pack is still ageing, but the ageing only seems to mellow it, not make it taste less horrible.
This article was originally posted on Sept. 30, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.
After having successfully brewed our first beer, a “basic dark” and both wanting to move on to a greater challenge and something with a more complex flavor, we decided to brew a stout.
And brew a stout we did!
“If we’re bottling when the sun’s setting, meaning its beaming directly at the beer, isn’t that bad?” Bryce asked.
“Yes it is,” I replied.
And so, we used what we had to protect our bottling from harmful sunlight.
From the front:
From the front
From behind:
Yes, we did protect the beer with pizza boxes.
We weren’t, apparently, all there:
After I had filled the first bottle, I realized that we hadn’t yet put the priming sugar in the beer. So, we put the sugar in, stirred it up and filled the rest of the bottles and drank the first, flat bottle of stout.
And, it was good! And tasty! And so now, we wait. We wait to crack open the first brew.
Crossing our fingers.
Hurrah.
Here’s the recipe, from our local home brew store:
Ingredients:
6 lbs. Amber Malt Extract
1 lb. Roasted Barley
1 lb. Amber Dry Malt Extract (DME)
1 lb. Flaked Barley
2 oz. Goldings, Willamette or Fuggles Hops (We used Fuggles.)Directions:
Bring water to a boil, add malt extract, roasted barley, DME, flaked barley and hops. Stir until extract is completely dissolved. Boil for 1 hour.
Strain wort into fermenter. Bring water up to 5 gallons.
Aerate and pitch yeast.
Let beer ferment, between 60 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit, for two weeks/when fermentation is complete.
Bottle, cap, let sit for two weeks. Enjoy.
As soon as we open, I’ll write about it. Until then, we’re still trying to figure out a name and a bottle design.
This stout:
This article was originally posted on Sept. 30, 2011, on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.
As I continue to seek work and search for things to do, I come to realize that a well-organized bottling system would be a nice addition to our brewing set-up.
With that end in mind, I organized all of the bottles based on type.
But, allow me to back up a few steps. The first thing I did was to put all of the bottles in an Oxyclean and water solution and wipe their residual label glue off.
To my surprise, the lion’s share of the bottles are exactly the same. These bottles, I call normal:
These normal bottles have been, so far, from domestic beers.
We do have a few exceptions to the domestic-bottle rule, the most prominent for this house being Kona Longboard.
Kona, left. Normal, right.
The Konas are still nice for a couple of reasons. Although the bottle is different than the majority, the bottles themselves have no brewery-specific markings.
This is a marked difference from Widmer (W design stamped at the top,) Fat Tire (New Belgium stamped on the top,) Sam Adams (stamped at the top) and Deschutes (hops stamped at the top.)
But we don’t just brew beer here. We brew cider too and cider and beer need different bottles, easily distinguished at first glance. We want to not have to rely on labeling to tell what’s in the refrigerator. So, we decided, cider would be bottled in stumpy and odd-colored bottles.
Newcastle, left. Sierra Nevada, right.
The major stumpy bottle in this area is the Sierra Nevada. The other major is New Castle, both its brown “Werewolf” bottles and its normal, clear bottles.
After we brewed and bottled our first batches, we realized how important it is, or can be, to have clean, standardized bottles. Bottles that are same for the same brew.
Next step: Labels!
We’re looking for a label designer.
“Fat Grey Tom’s Blitzkrieg Cider”
This article was originally posted on Sept. 21, 2011, on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.
The cider has begun to clear. How cool is that?
Look!:
This Cider Batch:
Cider: Batch 1
Cider #1 (1/5): Bottled — Raspberry Liqueur Primer
Tag: http://brew.wheelerc.org/tag/AW-batch-1/
This article was originally posted on Sept. 15, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.
Cider caught my attention because of the seeming ease. But really, this isn’t what grabbed me.
What grabbed me was and is and will remain cliché.
European ciders grabbed me.
A small brewery in Germany grabbed me with its local ciders and its deposit-required grolsch-tops.
All manner of ciders in Eastern Europe, in Western Europe, in all my travels, grabbed me. They said, “Listen to us! Pay attention to us! We’re awesome and worth drinking!”
And so I drank.
When it came time to brew our first batch of beer, we brewed. And it turned out well. But I wanted cider.
So, we managed to procure and re-purpose four Carlo Rossi containers and one Mr. Beer keg and began to brew. Such is our first brew, from the Ed Wort’s Apfelwein recipe.
We followed the recipe but broke the recipe up into five 1-gallon batches.
When we originally went to Wally World to buy the juice, we had to go for a bastardization of juices. Two gallons of Mott’s, three gallons off Great Value.
One gallon of pure Mott’s, one gallon of pure GV, three gallons of mixed.
The original recipe calls for a yeast that was not easily available to us so instead we went with another, equivalent wine yeast: Lalvin 71B-1122.
And so, we wait. In the mean time, pictures.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wcowperthwaite/sets/72157627553002865/
Updates:
Cider Batch 1: Update
Cider #1 (1/5): Bottled — Raspberry Liqueur Primer
Tag: http://brew.wheelerc.org/tag/AW-Batch-1/
