Catch Me If You Can has been bottled.

Our attempt at a winter warmer has been bottled. It's a brown ale, spiced with the various ingredients of gingerbread - ginger, clove, cinnamon, molasses. It's called Catch Me If You Can, in reference to both the excellent Tom Hanks / Leo DiCaprio movie and to the fairytale The Gingerbread Man.

Our yield wasn't great, unfortunately; we only came out with about 4.5 gallons. Twenty-three 12oz bottles, thirteen 22oz bottles. Sediment level was very very low. That was a great sign. I do hope that there is sufficient yeast left to carbonate it fully, as this thing was sitting in the fermenters for roughly two weeks each. There was a second yeast pitching, though, so I think it should be alright.

At any rate, it will bottle condition for 10-14 days, then be refrigerated for a week at the very minimum. After that, it'll be drinkable, though I may let it age a bit more than that before I personally crack one open.

Next up, brewing a lager, sometime around the 15th of January. But sometime in the next week, there will be a little contest for all of you who are keeping up with our exploits. Keep your eyes peeled for that.

Cheers!

Another comprehensive brewing update!

This one, sadly, will be sans photos. My camera has died, which, as you may be aware, makes photographing the proceedings pretty difficult.

On with business...

Silver Crown IPA is a delicious number that Dana and I have been enjoying mightily over the last month. We didn't do any of the calculations for IBUs or gravity, but it's a goodly bitter beer, not too overwhelming. Probably around 6% ABV, if I had to guess. In the future, I think we will be better about taking measurements so we can have more quantitative and qualitative notes on our beers.

Over Thanksgiving break, Dana and I (Lauren was in Spain) brewed what we hope will be our next glorious beer. It is a gingerbread ale, with a brown ale as a baseline. We took ratios of ginger, clove, nutmeg, cinnamon and molasses from a number of gingerbread cookies and ramped them up a bit to suit the size of the brew. Unfortunately, we also had not one, but two boilovers - the first was less than 3 minutes into the boil! Things seem to have turned out alright, though. The first fermentation was needed some extra time, and it is now sitting in the secondary, where I think it will stay through the holiday weekend.

2011  looks like an exciting year for us. A local bar has agreed in principal to feature our beer on a test basis. They have asked for a case of It Takes Two to Tangelo, so we'll be whipping up a batch of that soon. We're also looking at brewing some sort of lager in January, so keep an eye out for that (I promise we'll be better about blogging in 2011. Call that our New Year's Resolution).

On the technical side of things, I think we are going to be stepping up our equipment a bit. I think the plan is to expand from 1x5 gallon rig to 2x5 gallon rigs. On top of that, we'll probably be building ourselves a wort chiller at some point between now and the spring. The weather is sufficiently cold that it's not a high priority addition right now, but we'll need it before the warmer weather returns.

There's also some exciting news coming in the near future, and it involves you, so stay tuned!

We are terrible bloggers, but we're doing pretty well as brewers.

We haven't posted often enough at all.

We'll work on that.

Here's what we've been up to lately.

Over Columbus Day weekend, we had a get together with friends. We shared our hobby with them, for the first time, and things were excellent. We got some pretty good feedback, as we have from pretty much everyone who has tasted one of our beers.

We also brewed a new beer. Because Lauren will be away for the Thanksgiving holiday, and because she loathes IPAs, Dana and I decided to brew just that, an India Pale Ale. We boiled our hops for 60 minutes - the recipe called for 45 minutes, I pushed for twice that, to no avail. We added some steamed wood chips onto the wort, and let it ferment for about two weeks.

After two weeks, I transferred it into the carboy. Considerably darker than previous brews, as it should be. Also considerably clearer, which may be the result of the wood chips. Could also be the fact that I was very cautious to not pick up much sediment with the siphon, perhaps more so than usual. After a week in the carboy, Lauren and I bottled it. Twenty-six 22oz bottles and two 12oz bottles. They are now conditioning; they go into the fridge on or around Friday.

Photos from the brew night, more coming as they are collected:

All Purpose Brewing Update

Things have been hectic lately. All three of us are back in school, which makes common time much harder to come across. However, our Belgian Ale, It Takes Two To Tangelo, has been bottled, conditioned, and consumed, and it is fantastic.

Some photos from the bottling and drinking process:

Bare Bones Blond Ale continues to improve as it ages. It keeps getting clearer and more refined, and it's still great tasting. Check this out (compare to the barely-aged Belgian above for clarity)

Nifty, eh?

Our next endeavor will be an IPA, which we are brewing tomorrow. We haven't quite figured out what hops we are going to use, but I think that the plan is to make it a 100 Minute IPA, in the vein of Dogfish Head Brewery's 60, 90 and 120 minute IPAs. Tentative name is Centurion. We're also getting some friends together to try It Takes Two to Tangelo tomorrow during/after our brew. Hopefully the results are as positive as the taste test for Bare Bones Amber.

I think that covers everything for now. More posts and photos as things happen. Check back in a few days.

A slight change in plans...

Blood orange isn't in season in America, and no place had the non-American varieties. As a result, we have changed our current brew to feature Tangelo. It is in the carboy now (we forgot to take photos, augh!), and will be bottled in roughly a week.

Brew Day - Belgian Ale with Blood Orange

While we were waiting for our Bare Bones Amber Ale to condition to the point where it would be practical to brew a second batch, we threw around ideas regarding what we might want to make. We came to the conclusion that, to properly see the summer to a close, we should brew something wheat-based with fruit. But not just any fruit. Something exotic. The shortlist, as you may assume, is how we got the result for the poll we have had running.for the past couple of weeks. It came down to Dragonfruit, Gooseberry, Blood Orange, Asian Pear, and Starfruit. Blood Orange was the runaway winner, and thus it was decided.

Gooooop.

On Friday the 13th, we three brewers congregated for the first time. Previous endeavors had been either myself and Dana or myself and Lauren, whether it was brewing, bottling, or shopping for supplies, and it was nice to have the entire core group together in the same place. Lauren and I picked up the ingredients during the afternoon, and Dana came over when he got out of work, and it was brew time.

Would you look at those!

We got things boiling, and first steeped our grains. Next we poured our liquid malt extract, and our various dry malts into the boiling water and began the relatively uninteresting process of stirring it all together and removing from heat as necessary. We nearly had a boilover, but Lauren noticed and we kept things under control. We added our three hops as necessary, and had ourselves a big pot of green-yellow wort. It didn't look or smell all that pretty, but then again, neither did the last one.

We got ourselves a stew.

As with the Bare Bones Amber, we lacked an immersion chiller for the wort, so we again positioned the bucket squarely in front of the air conditioner. This time, however, we placed it so that it was essentially touching the vent, and it proved to be much more effective at cooling it. We pitched our yeast, and threw a lid on it. It now rests comfortably in the basement, where it will stay until we infuse the blood oranges, in a fanciful glass carboy, this Friday. Then it's another week and we bottle.

While we sat and watched the Red Sox, Dana, on a whim, called his dad, who has brewed in the past, to talk about the beer. Somehow the topic of the Amber Ale came up, and Dana's dad said that it's probably been conditioning long enough for us to try it. "The worst that's gonna happen is you drinking some flat beer," he told us.

The very first Bare Bones Amber Ale.

So we grabbed ourselves a bottle of our Amber Ale and cracked it open. What did we find? Carbonation! The one worry I had had since we bottled was instantly made baseless and irrelevant. We took three iced glasses from the freezer, and split the 12 oz bottle three ways. Enough to get a taste, but not enough to waste much if it wasn't ready. It poured quite nicely, with a nice solid head and a relatively amber taste. It wasn't particularly clear, but from my understanding, most homebrews aren't, unless they incorporate some kind of finings.

All in all, it looked great, very encouraging. The real question of course, was the taste. Did it taste like a quality brew, or had we made five gallons of piss? We clinked our glasses together, took a sniff, and then sipped... And hot damn, was it good. A wonderful beer, in my estimation. A real full beer flavor, but nothing overwhelming in any direction. Incredibly smooth. Didn't bite at all. It was so good, in fact, that we went and grabbed one of the 22oz bottles and split that three ways as well.

Delicious.

Our Amber Ale is bottled! And it has a name...

Please. Read the warning.

Last night, Dana and I bottled our Amber Ale. Lauren and I gave it its name, though in a strange fashion. When I was texting her about our preliminary brew, I described it as a "bare-bones Amber", because that's what it was. We weren't dicking around with the recipe in the least. It was a stock ale. In trying to come up with a name for the beer, she recalled that I had used an interesting adjective to describe it in a text message, but neither of us could recall what it was. I dug through my phone and found the sent message in question, and thus Bare Bones Amber was named.

Keep it safe.

We had heard, going in, that bottling was the most tedious and unfun part of the brewing process. Dana came over around 5:30 and we got to work sanitizing all our bottles -- two dozen 22oz bottles and two dozen 12oz bottles. In the bathtub. We used the absurdly dangerous sounding cleanser that came with the equipment, and while we were pretty sure that it was deluded enough to not be harmful, we still wore protective eyewear. Then we did the bottling bucket and the bottling equipment, which was a considerably quicker endeavor than the bottles. We set everything out to dry, and we put the priming sugar on the stove to boil.

Straight outta the prohibition.

We hoisted the fermenting bucket onto the counter, and set the bottling bucket beneath it. We peeled off the lid to the fermenting bucket and were greeted with a very delicious, beery smell. We started the siphon and into the bottling bucket that beer did go. We lost a few ounces of beer in the process, not due to spillage, but rather to the spigot on the bottling bucket being open. Oops. The beer flowing into the bottling bucket was a nice healthy yellow-copper color, just as it was supposed to be. Once the fermenter was empty, we moved the bottling bucket to the countertop and attached the bottling equipment. Stationed on the floor, Dana filled and I capped. It took us perhaps 45 minutes to finish the job, and it was, to our surprise, a very delightful period of time. We used all twenty-four 22oz bottles and eight 12oz bottles, putting us somewhere in the range of 620oz of beer. The sense of accomplishment when we were finished was quite excellent.

As we cleaned up, we realized that we should label the first beer we bottled. We had set it aside immediately after capping it, and I quickly grabbed a piece of paper, a sharpie, and a pair of scissors. In lieu of a fancy-schmancy label, I traced my phone on the paper in pencil, wrote "Bare Bones Amber #1 7/23/2010" and then cut it out. At this point, I went in the fridge and took out the bottle of milk, which confused Dana a bit. I put a bit of milk on the back of the makeshift label and stuck it, albeit crookedly, on the bottle. And with that, our first brew was complete. We are giving it roughly 3 weeks to condition, which means it will be served on or around August 20th.

Preliminary Brew - Amber Ale - Brew Day

Thursday night, Dana and I went by a local hobby shop that has a substore in it called Boston Brewin'. Yes, that's really the name. We talked for a fair bit with the purveyor of the establishment, and we purchased a basic kit, a True Brew kit.While it is a pretty basic kit, it came with everything we needed aside from bottles and ingredients. We picked up a set of ingredients for an Amber Ale, based on its simplicity and its relatively low price. All told, including taxes, we got our basic equipment and the ingredients for our first batch for $120. Split three ways, that's pretty damn reasonable. 

We put it in the back of my car, brought it to Dana's, where we opened it. We spent a good solid hour, maybe an hour and a half checking out the various bits and pieces. We made sure everything was seaworthy, and sure enough, everything was sound as a pound. Upon reading up on the process, we realized we needed roughly 3-4 weeks before the first brew was ready to drink. We did some quick math and realized that if we waited too long, Dana would be off to grad school before it was finished. So we decided to brew the next day. We packed it all back into the box, and I brought it back to my house.

 Late the next afternoon, Dana and I found ourselves in my kitchen, preparing to brew. Lauren, regrettably, was unable to be present, due to prior obligations. We decided to go 100% by the book, in order to really get the gist of the process down. We heated the can of malt extract, put the brew kettle on to boil, and got going. Once the water came to a boil, we cracked open the can of malt extract and hoo boy, what a smell. Not a bad smell exactly, but a very pungent aroma. For those of you who have been in Baltimore harbor, it smells very much like the Domino Sugar factory, but in your kitchen. We poured it in, and Dana stirred vigorously. We added in the dry malt and the hop pellets as the boil continued, and what we ended up with cooking on the stove looked something like this:

Not the most appetizing thing to see stewing on your stove, but we continued onwards with the assumption that we hadn't fucked anything up. Unfortunately, "continuing onwards" was simply letting the wort boil for roughly half an hour. So we sat and let it boil. We checked it to see how high it was foaming up every now and then, but there was never any risk of a boil-over. I think, again assuming that we didn't screw anything up, that the pot was simply too large for it to be a genuine worry. After all, being New Englanders, we were using a lobster pot. Towards the end of the boil, we filled the fermenting bucket with about 3 gallons of cold water. As the boil wrapped up, we grabbed a beach towel, put it on the floor, and put the fermenting bucket on it, in case of spillage. Dana took the pot holders, picked up the brew pot, and poured the wort into the bucket with all the gentleness and ease of a mother rocking her child to sleep. Now we had to let it cool to about 90 degrees before adding the yeast. How did we cool it? The same way we would cool ourselves -- by sitting it in front of the air conditioner.

After a fair amount of time, the wort got down into the 90-degree range, and we pitched the yeast. After letting it sit for about ten minutes, we put the lid on the bucket and sealed our baby up tighter than a drum. Lastly, we filled our nifty three-piece airlock with some water, and inserted it into the hole in the lid. I brought it down to the basement, where the temperature is a very stable 65-70 degrees, and I am proud to report that as of this posting, the airlock is bubbling, which means that the beer has started to ferment!

We plan on bottling the beer on Friday, July 23rd, then letting it condition in the bottles for about three weeks, so our estimated drink date is somewhere at the end of the second week of August. Huzzah!

About Us

Brewmaster Coco - That's me. I came up with this hare-brained scheme to homebrew beer. Why? Well, the shortest and easiest answer is what you would expect: I like beer. But more than that, I have always had a mind for creating, whether it was building with Legos or sketching out borderline crazy schemes. Combining the two seemed like a logical step to make, but I couldn't pull it off on my own. Fortunately, I knew just the people to ask.

Brewmaster Dana - Dana has been one of my best friends since... sometime in middle school. We are pushing a good solid decade of the most absurd, inside joke-laden friendship this side of Scrubs' JD and Turk, but thankfully without the uncomfortable bromance. He has a scientific mind that is perhaps unparalleled in my circle of friends, however I sometimes suspect he forfeited a considerable amount of common sense to make up for it.

Brewmistress Lauren - Lauren and I have been together for a bit more than seven months. We met at a Pixies concert late in 2009. I was immediately drawn to three things about her. The first was how attractive she is. The second was that she was at a Pixies concert. The third was that she was drinking Sam Adams Oktoberfest. Need I say more?