Eleventh Hour Brewing Company

A living log of my home brewing adventures.

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Brewing season comes to a close

After rearranging my beer stockpile I think its time to put the burner and kettle up for a while.  With the holiday season coming up I hope to have enough friends stop by or go to enough family events to deplete the stock.  I bottled up my Smashing Pumpkin Ale which I think it going to be pretty good after tasting a sample.  I finally finished up my Apple Jack experiment.  Five gallons of hard cider yielded 2ish gallons of Apple Jack.  It ended up pretty sweet but very tasty.  I put a little over half in clear swing tops.  It's hard to estimate the final ABV but my guess is at 25%-30%.  This might become an annual experiment.

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It's been a while tumblr and I've done a little brewing since my last post.  On the 5th of July I did a double brew day.  Up top is a La Petite Orange kit from Norther Brewer. "A Belgian Dubbel without the deep dark chocolate maltiness, the Orangé is rich with caramel sweetness and a full body that hides the 6.1% ABV very well."  I would say their description is pretty spot on.  I've had a couple and it's pretty good.  The yeast came DOA but I had already brewed it up and didn't want to take the time to send it back.  Luckily Beer Crazy had me covered.

In the middle is something I am calling 6th trumpet strong ale.  It's a Belgian quad or "Belgian Dark Strong Ale 18E" for you sticklers out there.  I basically took the grain bill from a Westvleteren 12 clone converted it to Partial Mash and then used hops from a Rochefort 10 clone.  I used the Westy yeast which I can tell you is a pain in the butt.  Even though I aerated the crap out of it and used a 2L starter, and pitch in a bunch of nutrient it was still at 1.038 after 3 weeks.  I pitched more yeast and waited another 2 weeks and at that point it was still 1.028.  I racked it off the cake and it's been sitting in secondary ever since.  I am going to try pitching some danstar cbc-1 cask and bottle conditioning yeast to see if that will dry it out so I can get it bottled.  It will still need to sit in the bottles for 6-12 months before it's ready to drink.  If it all goes well it should taste pretty great and hover around 11.5% ABV.

The last picture is of my first attempt at a full on pumpkin ale.  1lb Caramel 60L, 8oz Biscuit, 2lb 6 row, 8oz Wheat Flake and 60oz of smashed pumpkin went into the mash.  I did a BIAB so the pumpkin stayed out of the bag because I wanted it in the primary.  The 6 row was used just for the extra enzymes to try to break down the pumpkin starches.  The pumpkin was also cooked at 350 for 30 minutes.  Light DME and Kent Goldings rounded it out.  I might add another teaspoon or more of pumpkin pie spice to conditioning depending on what it tastes like and a vanilla bean.

One last thing I have cooking up is some applejack.  No pictures but it's fermenting away.  My hydrometer broke during this experiment and I am not exactly sure where my OG ended up.  I think when it's all done it will be about 17%-19% ABV.  Which is way higher then I wanted.  My hydrometer broke before I started adding sugar and I think my estimates were way off.  Anyway I will then freeze off as much water as I can to concentrate it and see what I end up with.  Hopefully it will end up as a nice liqueur ish apple drink. 

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And now for something completely different.

The Patersbier made it into the bottles.  It conditioned about two weeks primarily because I just didn't get around to bottling it.  It's very clear.  As per usually I did about half in 12oz and half in 22oz.  Not much to see, the beer in the center is the Patersbier and the one on the right is a witbier.

For fathers day I smoked a bunch of meat.  Two brisket flats and three racks of spare ribs.  GRRR meat!

The smaller flat I brined in salt water and corned beef spices.  Smoking turned it into a pastrami of sorts.  It wasn't cured so not a true pastrami but the taste was right on.  I used the corned beef spice mix from penzeys and it brined about 3 days.  For the rub I crushed up the same spices in a coffee mill and added some black pepper and salt.  Next time I wont add the salt. 

The larger flat is a texas style rub (no sugar) and I added some ground coffee to it.

The ribs were cooked using the Johnny Trigg method with a sweet rub I make for pork.  It's a variant of the 3-2-1.  I didn't sauce them though because that's just not right.

Raw brisket.  Left pastrami, right Texas.

In the smoker.  This is the final step for the ribs.  I didn't put them in the rack until after the first step.  My smoker just isn't big enough for all that meat and absolutely no room for sides.  If only it was a little bigger.

Ribs done.

Brisket done.  Pastrami left, Texas right.

All in all one of my most successful smokes.

[eleventhhourbrewingco]

Patersbier - Time to condition

Well it's been a week so I took a gravity reading and lo and behold 1.008.  That's the best attenuation I have ever gotten.  If beersmith is correct I should be at 5% abv.  I didn't take another gravity reading after adding the candi syrup but beersmith should be close.  It was right on for my FG calculation after adding the extra water into my recipe.  

So everything is great right?  Close, I pushed a bung all the way into my carboy.  Luckily it had been sitting in starsan for 10 minutes so there should be no problem other than getting it back out.

It tastes very good.  Sweet and a little caramely with the fruit esters I was expecting from the Belgian Trappist yeast.  Should be a nice light summer beer.  I might have actually succeeded in brewing something my wife will drink.

This is what it looks like.  it should clear up in conditioning.

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Patersbier on Memorial Day

I've been planing on doing a Patersbier and a Belgian Dark Strong for a while.  A duality of beers kind of thing.  I had some free time this Memorial Day and decided to do the easier beer first.  There was no Memorial Day significance the time just fit.

I started with the  Northern Brewer Patersbier extract kit and that was all I was planing on using until "I made a huge mistake".

Ingredients

.5 lbs CaraPils

.5 oz German Tradition Hops (60 min)

1 oz Saaz Hops (.5 60 min .5 10 min)

6 lbs Pilsen LME

Wyeast 3787 Trappist High Gravity yeast

Since this was a dry run of a sort for my Belgian Dark Strong (aka quad) I used some extra steps that I wouldn't normally use

treated the CaraPils as if it needed to be mashed.by trying to get my kettle to hold 160 which wasn't that easy,

Used a large strainer bag instead of a muslin bag

"Sparged" the CaraPils

Used a hop bag instead of just throwing it in.

Irish Moss

Yeast Nutrient

Aerator with stone.

Every thing was going fine until it came time to chill the wort.  Some how I massively misjudged how much wort there was.  I thought I was under 5.5 gallons so I topped off in the kettle and added a little extra to account for the displacement of the chiller.

It turns out I ended up with an extra 1.5 gallons of wort.  What I should have done was to put the wort back in the kettle and boil it until I got back down to about five gallons but  I didn't think about that until after the yeast was pitched.  What I did instead was add a pound of golden belgian candi syrup that I happen to have for my aforementioned quad.

Since a lot of the flavor of this beer comes from the yeast and the candi syrup tastes awesome I'm still pretty optimistic about the beer.  It's still going to come in light at around 4.2% but it could be just the thing for a hot summer day.

A day later and the fermentation is going crazy.  Added some fermcap-s (food grade silicone) to cut down the krausen.  The last thing I need is a bucket explosion.

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First Post

This is the obligatory first post.