Monday – A Fine Day For Brewing
Today was a nice day for homebrewing. I took half the day off work and spent the time cooking up some homebrew with a buddy of mine Chris. He brought over his cooker, kettle, ingredients and of course his dog Turkish. Since we had two propane cookers we staggered our batches about fifteen minutes apart so that we would have enough time to process each one. We did extract recipes today and were able to get three five gallon batches completed between lunch time and 5:30. Not too shabby for a Monday afternoon!
Chris started off with a coffee stout. He started with a simple stout recipe and then we scavenged hops from my freezer. (I had quite a bit more in there then I thought). I think he grabbed about 2oz of Cascade and 3oz of Centennial. Then at the last 5mins of the boil he added in a pot of French roast that he had made earlier. It smelled very nice.
While the stout was boiling away, I started on the double IPA. Not sure why I never made a double IPA before considering it is one of my favorite styles of beer. Also, I did not have an exact recipe for this so I had to piece meal it together from a few others. We started with 1/2lbs of crystal 90 for flavor and color. Then went with 10lbs of light extract for the fermentables. Once again to the freezer for hops. We dug out 3oz of Amarillo, 4oz of Centennial and 5oz of Simcoe. That should be about 105 HBUs. Without using much precision, we divided each of the hops into quarters and added that portion of each hop type at 15 minute intervals.Hopefully this one will be a good trial, and not an error.
So while the double ipa was boiling away we decided to do a third batch. I had a tub of wheat malt extract hogging space up in my fridge, so I figured why not. A very basic wheat recipe 7lbs of malt and 4oz of Saaz. That’s pretty much it. We did decided to flavor it at the end with some corriander seeds and the zest from one lemon. It is a bit out of season, but it should still taste good.
Chris and I were talking a little bit about “slow starts”, meaning the time it takes for the yeast to reach their most active point is slower then expected. I tried to get him to place a wager on which one would be the first to become active. My thought was the Hefe yeast since I did a yeast starter for it yesterday afternoon so that has a 24hr head start on the other two wich were pitched straight from thier packing tube. Tune in next time for an update on the yeast activity.