Adventures of a Beginning Home Brewer - Time for Something Completely Different

It seems a bit early, but the other day a good friend of mine and I were talking about Thanksgiving. It’s got to be the best holiday. Great food, great drinks, football, no holiday shopping; you just can’t beat it.

 

I think we all know the basics of what food will be served, but what about the beer? Many first thoughts are pumpkin beers, but truth be told I can’t stand them. Never found one I liked. Stouts and porters might be a bit heavy for the type of eating that is going to go down. How about a hard cider? Fall flavors are what Thanksgiving is all about, and what is more fall than apples?

I know, I know. Hard cider isn’t a beer. But this is Adventures of a Beginning Home Brewer. Beer isn’t even in the title… ok, so maybe it is implied since this blog is part of Beerploma, but bear with me just for one post.

 

It became apparent that it's time to make a tasty hard cider. But of course, I am a beginner and have no clue how to make a hard cider. Ahhhh… Isn’t the internet great? I did some research and found out some basics.

 

The first tip I found is that there is no boil for hard cider as there is in beer. If you boil apple juice it can take on a bit of an astringent flavor. But no boil = potential contamination of the cider. I found two ways to combat this.

 
The first way is to purchase unpasteurized juice (or buy apples and juice them) and heat the juice, but not boil it. This can make things sterile, but you must be careful. Over do it and you have an off taste in your cider. Under do it and you may get some contaminated cider. Nether sound good to me!
 
The second way is the way chosen for this experiment. Purchase pasteurized apple juice. This makes it free from contaminants while keeping the juice in its same tasty condition. Be sure to purchase a good pasteurized cider that contains no chemical preservatives like potassium sulfate or sodium benzoate. These things prevent bacteria and mold growth, but also prevent yeast growth. In other words, your yeast won’t work with juice containing chemical preservatives. And if the yeast doesn’t work, you don’t have hard cider.
 

For the yeast, most will work. The guy at Northern Brewer suggested champagne yeast. It will eat a ton of sugar and carbonates well in the end. And it won’t deliver an overly yeasty flavor that may be tasty in some beers, but probably wouldn’t be too great in a hard cider.

 

After figuring that stuff out making hard cider, at least to the primary stage, is a piece of cake! Pour pasteurized apple juice into a fermenter, add yeast, and seal! The part that took the longest was sanitizing. But since I was also firing up a raspberry rhubarb wheat and bottling an EPA, it really took no extra time to sanitize a bucket, top, and airlock.

As of this morning it was bubbling away in the primary, so that’s a good sign things are headed in the right direction. I will follow up on this cider later down the road as developments come about. Have you brewed a hard cider, and if so how did it go? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Adventures of a Beginning Home Brewer

Double Vision

A couple months ago I upgraded my brewery. I got the equipment so that I can brew two batches of beer at the same time. I like beer a lot, which means I need a lot of beer!

 

I started things off by brewing a raspberry wheat and an english brown ale. Things were going great; I was excited about the fact that I would soon have a boatload of beer… And then came an obstacle.

 

I realized after racking the beer into the secondary fermenters that I had a small problem; I never labeled the beers when I first started them and put them into the fermenters. Duh! Normally you would think that these beers would have a distinctively different color from each other, but that isn’t completely the case. When you have about 5 gallons of beer in a big glass vessel the color is pretty much just “dark.”

 

The raspberry is put in during the bottling, which complicated things two fold. First, there isn’t the obvious clue of the beer tasting or smelling like raspberries. Secondly, it left the door open that I could very well end up with a raspberry english brown ale and a plain wheat beer.

 

My friend and I had to taste the flat beer, smell it, and examine it in a smaller taster glass… And then we had to make our best guest. We racked what we thought was the brown ale and bottled it and then racked what we thought was the raspberry wheat, poured in the raspberry extract, and bottled that. Then the long two week wait until we could find out if we guessed right started.

 

The result? We guessed right! Whew! And they are both pretty good beers. Lesson learned: LABEL YOUR BEERS!

Beer Night in the 612

 

 

Wednesday seems like a pretty boring day. Too far removed from last weekend to fondly look back and relive the fun that was had and too far away from the up coming weekend to get excited about it. I found out last night though that Wednesday is the perfect night for some local beer fun!

 

 

I heard about 612Brew opening their new tap room, so after a long day at work I jumped in my car and headed to Northeast Minneapolis to check it out. The place is awesome! It was a mix of industrial, modern, and hipster. There is a huge beautiful mural painted on one wall and a good sized bar on another. Everything else was pretty much nice wood tables and brewery. They played some good tunes in the background instead of the usual elevator music b.s. some places force you to suffer through. It is a great place to have a beer with a great vibe to it.

 

 

There were four different beers on tap. Pints were 5 bucks and flights of the four were 11 bucks. I wanted to try them all, but since I had plans to go to another beer event after this one, I just went for a pint of 612’s Zero Hour. It was a hoppy black ale that was very tasty. One thing that I liked about it is how clean the mouth feel is on this beer. It seems like lots of times aggressively hopped beers have this thick lingering mouth coating feel. This one didn’t have that, but yet still had a good hoppy aftertaste that lingered for a while. I thought this was a pretty cool attribute to this beer that helped create a refreshing drinkability.

 

 

After finishing my pint of Zero Hour I headed over to the Nomad for Midweek Beer Geek. If you haven’t been, you should try to make it sometime. It is a weekly event put on by Andrew Schmitt, the MN Beer Activist, where one certain beer is spotlighted each week.

 

 

This week’s beer was Weyerbacher’s Insanity. It is their barley wine that they aged in oak bourbon casks. It was malty, boozy, and super cloudy with absolutely no clarity to it. After the bartender shook up the keg a little that did improve a bit. The cloudiness was attributed to the beer aging since 2011. Some settling has to be expected when a beer is sitting there for 2 years. All in all it was a good beer, but at 11.1% A.B.V. you should approach this beer with some caution.

 

 

No more middle of the week blahs. We live in a great area for great craft beer. You don’t have to break the bank or stay out too late on a work night to have fun. Just head out for a pint in a great setting or head to the Nomad to try something you have probably never had before.