Beer Updates

Today I’d like to take the time to give some updates on my recent beers:

Strawberry Wheat

I don’t think that I’ve had a real bad batch yet, but I was honestly worried about the Strawberry Wheat beer when I was bottling.  I’m not quite sure if it was because it was strong for a wheat beer (especially a fruit flavored one) or if it just had a smell that I didn’t think belonged.  One thing it had going for it early on was that it was an easy drinking beer that had a decent amount of alcohol in it.

Now that it has been about a month since I bottled this batch, the flavors are evening out nicely and the strawberry flavor, which started out as just a hint at the very back end, has a nice, full strawberry taste.  It isn’t as powerful as the Abita strawberry beer, but I wasn’t going for anything like that.  The carbonation is higher than usual, but I like that in my wheat beers.  I’d say this beer is a keeper.  There is definitely a confusing note in the aroma that takes away from my first impression when I bring it up for the first sip, but I’m not sure what it is.  Luckily, if I let the beer stand in the pint glass for a couple minutes before drinking, the aroma bets much better.  I’m probably entering this beer into the preliminary round of the Brooklyn Wort Homebrew Competition.  This will be the first time I have entered a competition and i think this brew is my most unique.

 

Spruce Brown Ale

This beer has been bottled, and conditioned for a couple weeks now.  I took an early taste after about a week’s conditioning and got some early thoughts.  This beer is much darker than I was expecting…  I’m not sure why I was expecting something lighter with the C120 and Dark LME I used, but this is approaching black in the pint glass.  The head foams a light brown, but obviously there isn’t that much of it right now since it hasn’t had time to fully condition.  The aroma is strong, raisiny, and burnt caramel.  There isn’t really any spruce notes to be seen unless I’m not certain what I should be looking for.  The taste right now is similar, sweet, plum or raisin, some burnt caramel, and not too much roasty flavor, which I’m just fine with.  There’s not a lot of hop flavor, just some balancing.  I’m rather sure this will turn out to be a solid american brown ale, but I’m not sure the spruce flavor will ever come out.  Even if there is no spruce flavor in this beer, the spruce still serves a purpose.  Spruce is high in Vitamin C and that helps to keep the beer stable over a longer period of time.  The jury’s still out on this one but the early feeling is that this one is going to be a solid brown ale.  Speaking of brown ales, two that I’d recommend getting your hands on would be Smuttynose Old Brown Dog Ale and Avery Brewing Co.’s Ellie’s Brown Ale.  Smuttynose’s is a bit more sweet, very complex, and at 6.7% ABV it is strong.  Ellie’s Brown is more roasty and has tastes of vanilla and nut that Old Brown Dog doesn’t have.  Either way, you can’t really go wrong with either.

 

I have a (hopefully) improved ESB in a secondary right now and I hope that the hot weather around here didn’t do anything to harm this batch.  I’m also getting ready to brew a Belgian Wit this weekend.  Belgian yeast strains can tolerate higher temperatures so this one was chosen more out of necessity than choice.  Updates on both of these to follow soon.

Spruce Beer into Secondary

Today was the rerack day.  Everything went smoothly and I have about 2.5 gallons of beer in the secondary right now.  I can’t detect any spruce aroma at all but I’m trying to stay positive.  Either way, this beer smells good and should be a treat to drink regardless of the levels of spruce in it.

Time to clean the primary fermenter

Spruce Beer

Ever since I came across the spruce beer recipe in The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing by Charlie Papazian I’ve wanted to try to make a batch.  Every time I go to the home brew shop, I notice the little bottles of spruce essence that they have for sale.  I admit that I was tempted to just by the essence and use that, but I decided that it was probably a better idea to just get the real thing and go from there.

Spring here in the Northeast has been cold and, living in the middle of a huge city, it would be hard to run across spruce in general, let alone the spruce tips that were what I was really after.  Luckily for me, I walk through Central Park quite a bit and there are two Norway Spruce trees that I walk past frequently.  I’ve been waiting for the new growth to show, and last week the spruce tips looked ready to harvest on one of the trees.  I didn’t want to be greedy so I made sure to only lightly pick around and not to take too much from one area.  I would guess that I got about two ounces of super-fresh spruce tips to add to my next brew!

I was trying to stay pretty close to the recipe in the Joy of Home Brewing but the recipe was for a 5 gallon batch and was extract only.  I decided to tweak it a bit and make a mini mash so that I could get the gravity I wanted and bring it up to a 2.75 gallon batch with only one can of extract.  My favorite beer lately has been Smuttynose’s Old Brown Dog, so I tried to put a bit of that character into this recipe as well although this one is going to have a decent amount more IBU’s than that.  If you haven’t tries Old Brown Dog and you’re a fan of American Brown Ales, I would highly recommend finding some.  As a side note, I added some leftover UK bittering hops to the first hop addition to bring up the IBU’s.  I probably wouldn’t do this again since I’m trying to make and American Brown Ale but I will see how it turns out.

• 3.3 Lbs of Briess Traditional Dark Liquid Malt Extract (1.035 specific gravity per pound per gallon)
• 1 Lb US Two-Row
• .25 Lb Crystal 120L
• .25 Lb Munich 10L
• .25oz Challenger 7% AA & .5oz Willamette 4.5% AA @ 60 minutes
• 2oz Spruce Tips and 1/2 Whirlfloc tablet @ 15 minutes
• .25oz Willamette @ 7 minutes
• .25oz Willamette @ 1 minute
• US-05 dry yeast

I mini mashed the grains in half a gallon of water @152 F for 60 minutes.  I added the full amount of LME at the beginning of the boil since I was doing a full volume boil.  It turned out darker than I expected, but I’m excited for this one.  The spruce however wasn’t very fragrant and I’m worried that maybe the flavor and aroma will be lost in the final product.  Next time I will either have to find more fragrant spruce, or add a bunch more.  Cleaning out the bottom of the boil pot after racking the wort to the fermenter was pretty nasty.  It looked like someone ripped up a christmas tree and ground the pieces into the mud.  SG was 1.055.

The smell coming out of the fermenter is great and I can’t wait to taste this one.  Two and a half days later and the primary fermentation is done.  Tomorrow I’ll rack it to a secondary and let it sit for another 10-15 days.