Heather Ale

The Plan:
Not sure where I heard about Heather Ale's first - Sacred & Herbal Healing Beers, or through my wife's Scottish roots. Either way, I stumbled on Fraoch last fall and really dug it. Was going to brew one last year, but for some reason decided to wait and brew one at the end of this summer to have for the fall... and for the Quechee Scottish Festival! The biggest issue with this beer is sourcing the heather. The Fraoch recipe calls for 1.25# of heather blossoms. I only have access to dried heather tips. I know that the blossoms would probably taste a heck of a lot better... but I decided to go with the dried ones for now until I can source some fresh ones.


Check out this YouTube video about the brewing process of Fraoch:




THE RECIPE:
10# UK Pale Malt
1# Crystal 60L
1# Biscuit
1/2 oz Cascade (6%)(90)
1/2 oz EKG (15)
8 oz Dried Heather Tips
1 oz Sweet Gale
Wyeast 1728 Scottish Ale


8/1 BREWDAY:
Mash - 15 qts @ 153F for 90 min.
(No mashout) Collected
Sparge -
Collected
Pre-boil gravity: Brix 13/1.053
Boil: 90 minutes, with the following additions:
@90 - 4 oz. heather, 1 oz. sweet gale, 1/2 oz. Cascade
@15 - 1oz. heather, 1/2 oz. EKg, 1 tsp Irish moss
@5 - 1 oz. heather
@flameout - steep 1 -oz. heather for 1 hr.
Collected 5.0 gallons
SG = 14.2/1.057

8/22 BOTTLING:
FG: 7/1.010
I was in a bit of a rush to get these ready for the Quechee festival... I really should have transferred this to secondary and let it rest for another week... and I really should have had some more conditioning time under it's belt because it wasn't ready on the 28th like I had hoped.
With some help from Jen, we bottled 24 22 oz bottles and 14 12 oz. bottles.

Brown Bear Ale

The plan: My wife's sister lives out in Omaha Nebraska and every year for Spring Break we'd go there to visit her and her family. One of the first breweries we fell in love with was Empyrean Ales in Lincoln NE. They have some phenomenal beers; some our favorites are Third Stone Brown, Lunasea ESB, and Darkside Vanilla Porter. Every spring, usually around mid-March, I get a wicked craving for these beers since that's when we'd always visit them. They have a very limited distribution, so it's damn near impossible for me to get their beers anymore, so I decided to try to clone them! After some thought and shitty correspondence from the brewery (what a let down), I decided to clone their Third Stone Brown, off of the basic info I had. On our first trip to the brewery, we got their sampler, which came with a paper mat that detailed each of the beers (shown at left). It showed "Stats" (5% ABV, 13.1 OG, 14.5 IBU's), "Ingredients" (Pale 2row, Carastan, Special, Victory, Chocolate, Vienna; Willamette hops (aroma); Ale yeast), and "History of Style" (blah blah blah... Northern England).

This would be my 3rd all grain batch, and so I still really didn't know what the hell I was doing, so I looked at the grain bill and tried to figure out which were base grains and which were specialty grains. I also looked into Clone Formuation on BeerAdvocate.com's Homebrew forum, as well as a sweet article in BYO. I plugged the ingredients into Beersmith, converted the OG, and played around with grain percentages until it looked good. I posted the guesstimate on BA and a couple people concurred, so I went with it. Later I went back to Empyrean Ale's website and realized that they had changed the recipe since I had that sampler... well eff'em, I'm gonna brew the Third Stone I fell in love with!

Recipe:
OG: 13.1 Pluto converted to 1.047
FG: to achieve 5%, FG needs to be 1.012
IBU's: 14.5
6# Pale 2-row (UK)
4# Vienna
1# Crystal 60-L (no Carastan, which could be substituted for Crystal 30L, but no 30L so I just used 60L, which just made it a little darker)
1# Victory
1/4# Special B (no Special, so used Special B, just a little darker)
1/4# Chocolate Malt
1 oz. Willamette 4.4% (45 min)
1 oz. Willamette 4.4% (flame out)
Wyeast 1098 (British Ale), starter 48 hours prior to.

2/6 BREW DAY: Using my old cooler, this time sealed with the right, food safe, water sealant. :-) Worked great. I heated 15.65 quarts of water to 170, added to cooler, let sit for 5 minutes then doughed in. Stirred and broke up clumps (something I didn't do before) and hit 154. Closed it up, wrapped with 2 blankets, and let'er simmer. 60 minutes later, checked temp - 152. Sweet! I had heated up 2.33 quarts to boil, then added it to the cooler for mash out. Stirred it up, temp = 168. Let it settle for 10 minutes, collected vorlof, then collected first runnings. ~4 gallons, Brix = 15/1.059. I had been heating up 2 gallons of water, so I added 1 more and heated it all up to 185, then added to cooler. Stirred up good, let sit for 10 minutes, and then collected second runnings. 6.5 total gallons, total Brix = 12/1.047. Threw the kettle on the burner, took about 1/2 hour to get to boiling, added 1 oz. Willamette @ 45 min, then 1 oz. @ flame out. I decided to try to use the washing machine water source to pump through my chiller. Worked great... except I forgot to check it and the damn thing overflowed! So I had to halt it, drain the washer, then restart the chilling. What a mess. It just barely filled up a second time by the time I hit ~65F. I stopped it, ran it out the spigot through a sanitized hose, into a sanitized funnel w/ filter, and into sanitized carboy. Got about 5.25 gallons, Brix = 14/1.055. I had my yeast slurry ready to go, it was at about 64/66F, I swirled it up and pitched it all in, about 1000mL worth. Capped it with a blow off tube, and proceeded to clean up. Total time... 8 AM started to heat water, doughed in about 9/9:30, pitched yeast @ 2PM. Not bad!

2/13 RACK TO SECONDARY: Racked the brown ale over to secondary after bottling the Dunkelweizen. I almost filled the 5 gallon carboy, I had to stop short. I took a sample to check gravity, Brix=7, I used BeerSmith first and it said I had a 1.026 which seemed pretty high. I used the morebeer refractometer tool and it says I was at 1.011. I decided it was time to bust out the old hydrometer to see who the hell was right (and I was hoping it'd be the morebeer sheet). Hydrometer reading = 1.018. Not great. I bet I'll go down a point or two in secondary and priming, hopefully. Regardless, it has a nice color, smell and taste were a little hard because of a bad cold I had... had faint tastes of sweet, nutty, malty, carmely flavors. This is gonna be good, can't wait :-)

3/10 BOTTLED: I got around to bottling this much later than I wanted, no big deal though. I've been saving up Sierra Nevada bottles for a while now, since they're the closest things to Emyprean Ales bottles. I was able to 1 &3/4 cases of 12 oz bottles, plus 6 22oz bottles. I'm hoping to be able to drink these by the time my sister-in-law and niece & nephew show up the week of March 21st. We shall see.

3/20 TASTING!: 10 days in, why not give it a shot. First bottle, flat flat flat. Tried another on Wednesday the 24th, still flat. Ruh roh. I'll try another in a week. Hoping that they're not all flat.

4/19 SECOND TASTING: Pulled another bottle out when Dave & Megan came over for dinner. This time it poured with carbonation. Phew! I think what happened is that the bottles I had priming upstairs turned out fine, they primed at around 65F. The ones in the basement I think went dormant because the temp down there was around 50-55F. I pulled them all upstairs and hopefully they'll kick in.

5/1 HOMEBREW COMPETITION: Upon the suggestion of two beer judges I'm acquainted with, I decided to submit this to my local homebrew comp. I was a little worried because still only half of the bottles were opening up with carbonation. This was tasting better with time, but I was still getting a little bit of that astringency like I found in the stout and dunkelweizen. Below are the score sheets..
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Dunkelweizen

The plan: I wanted to do a winter wheat, and I thought I'd try an all grain clone of Weihenstephaner Dunkelweizen. If you haven't tried it, do yourself a favor and go get some! Later, I think I wished I would have cloned the old Magic Hat St. Gootz... that stuff was so good, it's a shame they stopped making it.

Recipe:
5# Pilsner 2row (Ger)
5# Wheat Malt (Ger)
1# Honey Malt
1/2# Special B
1/2# Rice Hulls
1oz Mt Hood (in place of Hallertau)
Wyeast 3068 - Weihenstephaner Weizen

1/17 BREW DAY: This was my 2nd all grain batch, 1st in the cooler, and we were gonna have some company over while I was brewing, not optimal, but oh well. Heated up 15 quarts of tap water to 170F, added to cooler, then doughed in. Hit my mash temp of 153, covered with 2 blankets and let sit for an hour. I did open it up a few times to check the temp since it was the first time I had used the new cooler mash tun. By 60 min, I only had lost 2 degrees, so this thing rocked! I heated up about 8.5 quarts of water to almost boiling, added it to the mash for mash out, stirred the shit out of the mash, then let sit for 10 minutes. Vorlof'd back in, then collected first runnings. Brix = 11.5/1.045... hmmmmm, that's not that great. Estimated pre-boil gravity was 1.051.. and the first runnings didn't even hit that... eesh. (I later realized that I didn't stir it enough and I think there were some pretty big clumps in there). After first collection, I had about 3.5 gallons, and I want 6.5 total so I heated up 3 more gallons to 190 and added that to the grains. Hit my 168 temp, vorlof on top, collected second runnings, total Brix now = 9.75/1.038. Shit! Ended up with 6.5, threw on the fire and brought to a boil. Added my hops when boil started... let the boil go for 1 hour. It was actually warm enough (high 30's maybe 40) that I was able to use the outdoor hose, so I used the IWC and got it down to 65 in about 15/20 mins. SG BRix=10.5/1.042... target was 1.059 for 75% efficiency, so I came in low, around 53%... oh well, what can ya do... it was only batch #2. Pitched the yeast slurry started a day before, and called it a day (aside from cleanup).

It started a pretty vigorous fermentation the next day, to the point that it looked pretty crazy. You could actually see it swirling around in the main body of the carboy. I may have seen that once before, can't really recall.

1/29 RACK TO SECONDARY: I got a bit weirded out while transferring to secondary. Some unknown substance got into the batch and there was a huge "thing" on the inside wall of the carboy (see pic). Freaked-me-the-eff-out. I took a sample, Brix=6/1.014 which hit my target, and I tasted the sample. Hmmm, not sure about this one. I took this pic in to my LHBS, and they were a little weirded out by it too, BUT she suggested that I keep moving forward with it and see how it turns out. Oooookay! I will try.

2/13 BOTTLED: Ehhh.... this still has a weird taste to it... although I can smell the banana of the yeast, which is cool.

2/23 TASTING: No carbonation at all... which makes me wonder. Plus it really did not taste good. I'm so ready to pitch this into the garden and start over. I'll wait it out a little bit longer, but there should have been some sort of carbonation in there by now.

4/4 TASTING (AGAIN): Took pic at top of post, carbonated just fine, but it did take a while. Still has this strange aftertaste. I've looked into it a bit and it sounds like its an astringent taste. Like having paper towel on the back of your tongue. I don't like it. It does look and smell great though. I have a feeling I messed up with the mashing somewhere and got some unwanted tannins... and speaking of, I had a nice chat on Beer Advocate Homebrew Forum about it - Unwanted Tannins

5/1 HOMEBREW COMPETITION: Upon the suggestion of two friends and certified beer judges, I submitted this one to the local homebrew competition. It faired better than I thought, but still not great. My astringency suspicions were supported by both judges that tried it. I'm thinking it was a combination of using crappy city tap water along with a sloppy sparge. I will definitely make this again, but I do want to tweak some stuff, and make it more like the Magic Hat St. Gootz. Below are the two score sheets.