Home Brewing « Brews and Blues

20Jan/100

Homebrew – Yellowjacket Hefeweizen

Brewery: Homebrew - Brews and Blues Beer Co.
Where: Hickory, North Carolina
Beer: Yellowjacket Hefeweizen
Style: Hefeweizen
IBU: 12 IBU
ABV: 6.5%

After brewing my Orange Blossom Special wheat beer back in January or February of last year, I knew I wanted to try an all-grain version to improve the color and flavor to something closer to a real Barvarian Hefeweizen, so I set out to do that back in October. Today's sampling is the resulting Yellowjacket Hefeweizen. This beer pours with a rich golden and cloudy color with a foamy head. This pour is immediately followed by the traditional banana/clove aroma created by the hefeweizen yeast. I also used a little orange peel in this recipe to add some citrus bitterness to balance the sweetness of the malted wheat and two-row pilsner malt used to create this beer. A very light bill of hallertauer hops also help balance the malty sweetness without playing a specific role in the flavor or aroma of this beer.

This is the second time I have brewed a hefeweizen, and I believe that this recipe will become a regular after I make one more minor adjustment. In this recipe, I soaked some sweet orange peel in a little vodka and added the resulting extract to the beer before I bottled it. The citrus flavor in this beer is just a tad more obvious than I would prefer, so I'm going to add the orange peel directly to the boil for the last 5 minutes or so the next time I brew this beer....

Filed under: Beer Reviews, Hefeweizen, Home Brewing No Comments

6Jan/100

Homebrew – Vienna Blonde

Brewery: Homebrewed
Where: Hickory, North Carolina
Beer: Vienna Blonde
Style: American Blonde Ale
IBU: 18
ABV: 4.25%

This is a beer that I have been working on for a while. It is version 2 of my ESYFB (Extra Special Yellow Fizzy Beer) that I brewed last summer. This beer has the color profile that I was looking for and since my brewing process is dialed in a little tighter now, everything about this beer came out where I wanted it to. This beer has place and purpose in my home brewery. The Vienna Blonde Ale is built on a grain bill of Pale, Vienna, Crystal, and Carapils malts with a very small addition of flaked oats. The hop bill on this recipe is very light. It starts with some centennial for bittering and then finishes with Cascade for flavor and aroma. This beer is a 'light' beer by homebrewing standards. It has a very nice balance between malts and hops and actually leans towards the side of malty sweetness.

I brew this beer for two reasons. I enjoy drinking it myself, and it's what I consider to be a 'session beer.' A session beer is one that you can consume all afternoon without fears of losing control. It's lower alcohol content makes it less problematic in the area of intoxication. The other reason I brew it is because it's a fantastic beer to have on hand when introducing someone to homebrewed beers. I believe that a lot of beer drinkers get introduced to homebrews in a negative manner. Most homebrewers that I know tend to make two types of beers. One type is the 'let's see how many hops I can stuff in this beer' and the other is 'how high can my alcohol content be' brews. There is also the combination of the two. There are some extremely FANTASTIC beers that come out of these ideas, don't get me wrong, but these beers are harder to use to introduce new people who are used to the BudMillerCoors genre to the idea of drinking homebrewed beer.

The Vienna Blonde is one of the primary beers I hand someone in this situation. I don't think I have had anyone spit one of these out yet. I can't say that much for some of the other beers I have made. Think of it in terms of feeding a baby. We don't feed them chili made with habanero peppers to start with. We let them build up a taste for things by starting them out on mashed cereals that are bland and less flavorful.

I have two more homebrews labeled and ready for the tasting queue. We'll be looking at the Yellowjacket Hefeweizen and the Chocolate Oatmeal Stout in the very near future...

Filed under: American Blonde Ale, Home Brewing No Comments

5Jan/100

Six Pack Brewery Round Two

I fired up the Six Pack Brewery again on Sunday afternoon to work on my first Hop Bomb since I have gotten back into the hobby. Out of the hoppy beers I have sampled in the last year, one of my very favorites has been Stone Brewing's Arrogant Bastard. After a little research, I found out some of what makes Arrogant Bastard what it is and attempted to brew a variety of this beer. My original recipe for this beer is called HopShop 120² because I intended to do a 120 minute boil and have a calculated 120 IBUs to make this a real hop bomb. The 120 minute boil couldn't be performed effectively on my Six Pack Brewery setup so I shortened the boil to 75 minutes, but the hop calculator indicates 167 IBU on this recipe, which is logistically impossible, but it looks good anyway! The grain bill for this recipe consists mainly of american two-row and crystal 80 malts with a dash of carapils.

The 1-gallon glass growler that I'm using as a primary fermenter for my six pack brewery isn't really large enough to ferment 1 gallon of beer. I always have to set up a blow-off rig as you can see here. I went to Home Depot this morning and purchased two 2-gallon plastic buckets for future brewing in this quantity. I'll have enough head space in those where a blow-off won't be an issue.

The good news with round two on the Six Pack Brewery is that my water volume issues were dialed in a LOT more precisely than on my first venture. I was still a little off, but not enough to worry about. I ended up with a little more than one gallon of wort and my gravity was 1.078 instead of the targeted 1.088 (yes, this is a big beer.)

Round #3 on the Six Pack Brewery will be another attempt at the original Helles Bock that I tried on the first round... I hope to brew that soon, but I need to get a 5-gallon batch of red ale brewed before that...

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21Dec/090

Six Pack Brewery Debut

I fired up the "Six Pack Brewery" yesterday afternoon and brewed one gallon of a Helles Bock. The video above shows what the fermentation looked like after about 16 hours. The photo below shows the fermenter blowing off after about 20 hours.

This experimental one-gallon batch of beer was both a success and a failure. The success is that I believe I can effectively make one-gallon batches. The failure is that my volumes and gravities on this first attempt did not fall where I would have liked. I believe I had two specific problems during this brew.

#1 - I don't believe my mash produced the full volume I expected. I don't know for sure because I didn't bother to measure that volume and I should have. Beersmith calculated that I should have had 1.14 gallons into my boiler. I believe I had less, but as stated, I'm not sure. I will be sure of that number next time.

#2 - I believe that I lost a lot more than expected to boil-off evaporation during my one-hour boil cycle. I had estimated about 10% per hour, which is fairly consistent with what I get on my larger 5-gallon brewing setup. I'm not exactly sure, once again, because I didn't measure volumes at each step, and I WILL next time around.

At any rate, I expected to get approximately 1 gallon in my fermenter at 1.071 gravity. I ended up with about 2.5 quarts at 1.090 gravity. I added some top off water, and added too much, so my gravity at nearly 1 gallon turned out to be 1.054.

I'm going to make this exact same recipe again and make some adjustments in my volumes and techniques to see if I can hit everything right on target with my next attempt...

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22Nov/090

Brewing the House Blonde

My schedule is rather full for the next week or two, so I wanted to get a brew day in, and today turned out to be that day. I had the ingredients sitting around to brew another blonde ale. My previous "ESYFB" was my first attempt at a blonde. It was an excellent beer, but I wanted to make some adjustments to the recipe and try it again.

The blonde ale is a beer that I like to brew mainly for sharing with friends. This beer is a fantastic home brewed beer to give someone who is used to drinking beers in the BudMillerCoors family. It's a light colored and lower alcohol brew with a fantastic malt flavor that you will never find in football tailgater coolers. It has a rather small 7.75 lb grain bill and the hops are present, but subdued and not overpowering in any way.

I ran a 75-minute mash and then double batch sparged to collect a total volume of 6.75 gallons of wort that went into the boil kettle.

This is one of my favorite parts of brew day... dumping the hops in the kettle. The aroma created at this point in the process is simply fantastic. Today's beer took advantage of Centennial and Cascade hops. I can't wait to try it. I stopped making photos at this point because Mike and Chris stopped by. We had a few beers and chit chat. This beer will ferment for 14 days and then bottle condition for 21 days before we pop the top on any around the weekend of Christmas or shortly thereafter...

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5Oct/090

Carolina Blonde

Tonya and I went to the World Market in Mooresville yesterday afternoon, so I picked up another obligatory mixed sixer (plus a bomber of Coney Island Freaktoberfest that we will get to shortly) for the tasting regimen.

Today's sample is the Blonde Ale from Carolina Beer Company in Mooresville, North Carolina. As you can see from the photo, this beer poured with a beautiful golden blonde color with a nice thick head on top. The aroma that followed had a light sweetness of malt and a faint floral presence, but not overpowering. It definitely has a crisp bite on the tougue, and it serves well right out of the refrigerator. I think this beer has one of the more perfect hop and malt balances for a beer of this style as well. It's a fantastic brew for a summertime cooler. It rings in at 5% ABV, which is only slightly higher than I would personally prefer a beer in this style, but it's definitely a keeper. I find this beer on tap occasionally at my local brew pub as well, which is nice!

This is beer #99 in the quest to 100. #100 is staring me in the face, so I'll toss it in the fridge and we'll crack it open sometime in the next couple days. After we hit the 100 mark, I'm planning to make a top 10 list of my 10 favorites from the first 100 beers. We'll see how that goes as well...