Brew Day!

Last Sunday was again Brew Day at the Smitty household.  Joined by a few of our beer buddies from this blog, we took care of my "world famous" Maple Syrup Porter.

I had intended to do 2 brews simultaneously, but due to a small error (I didn't have the right ball vales and barbed fittings for my smaller set of mash/lauter tuns), we had to skip the American Wheat Ale and stick with the Porter.  Oh well...gives me an excuse to brew again!

My top-secret recipe, for those of you wishing to try my favorite brew:
9 lb Maris Otter
1 lb English Brown Malt
1 lb Crystal 40L
10 oz. English Chocolate Malt
1.25 oz English Fuggles (60 min)
0.5 oz. English Fuggles (10 min)
32 oz Grade B maple syrup (end of boil)
1 smackpack White Labs London Ale (WLP013)

Mash 18 Q water for 60 min at 154 degrees (water in tun @ 166 degrees)
Mashout 6Q at 175 degrees for 10 minutes
Sparge 23.25 Q water at 170 degrees

1 week primary, 2 weeks secondary.

Force carbonate 10.2 psi at 45 degrees for 1-2 weeks; desired volumes:  2.1.

And here, less than a day later, is some beautifully active fermentation!

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NY Times Brews and Reviews White House Honey Ale

As you may have read, a few of us gathered a week or so ago to help Smitty brew his own, all-grain version of the White House Honey Porter, which is to be followed up by an extract version of the White House Honey Ale.

The New York Times has beat us to it, enlisting the help of a Brooklyn, New York brewer who brewed the Ale.  The NYT followed up with a positive review.  




I look forward to Smitty's improved, all-grain version made with his favorite grain, hops and the sweat and love of ATK.

UPDATE:  Over at Streak's Place, our friend is also brewing and bottling the Porter.  Too bad we live a half-country away and cannot do a back-to-back taste test.

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Patriotic Brew Day

Having put this off long enough, I have finally pulled the trigger on a brew day for the Presidential beers! This Sunday, October 7, starting after breakfast and before kickoffs, I'll be firing-up the burners, mashing grains and boiling wort!

Northern Brewer offers the recipe kits for the White House Honey Ale and the White House Honey Porter for a decent price. The problem is this: the kits are extract-with-specialty-grain kits, and this blog has gone all-grain for some time now. A conundrum.

Problem solved, however! There are enough people interested in being a part of this "Presidential Beer" moment - and enough people who haven't brewed yet but want to learn - that I can kill 2 birds with one stone! I purchased the Northern Brewer Honey Ale kit, and plan to introduce the n00bs who will be joining us to the ease and joy of homebrewing by doing that beer the beginner's way: stovetop kettle, steep specialty grains in a little bag, add water to the fermenter. Easy, done in 2-2 1/2 hours! I hope to urge some folks to take-on this fine craft, and may even be willing to part with my old stovetop boil kettle and bottling bucket to an interested party.

Then, I took about an hour, consulted some resources and pros, and converted - to the best of my and our collective ability - the Honey Porter extract kit to an all-grain recipe. While the stovetop crowd knocks the Honey Ale out, some of us can do the all-grain on the big burner.

I am actually really looking forward to Sunday. We'll move a TV into the garage and show some football while we brew. People are bringing kids over and Mrs. Smitty is preparing a "hotdog party" for the families that come over (tons of hotdogs, gobs of options for toppings, from sophisticated to ballpark). This isn't just a brew day...it's a brew party!

I have timed it so these two beers will be ready to be tapped on election night. So...follow-up party on November 6!

For the real geeks in the crowd, the original Northern Brewer White House Honey Porter Kit calls for:

• 6.3 lb Gold malt syrup
• 1 lb honey
• 1 lb Briess Caramel 20
• .75 lb Briess Munich Malt
• .625 English Black Malt
• .188 English Chocolate Malt
• 1 oz Nugget (.5 @ 45 min, .5 @ 30 min)
• 1/2 oz Halertau (end of boil)
• Wyeast #1056 - American Ale

I converted it thusly:

• 7.75 lb Maris Otter Pale Malt (base-grain, to simulate Gold malt syrup)
• 1 lb Crystal Malt 60L (base-grain, to simulate Gold malt syrup)
• all other specialty grains and honey remain the same, as is the hop schedule

I feel good about the conversion, and I am so in love with Maris Otter as a base grain for Brit-originated beers (thanks Sopor!) that I get all tickly just thinking about it.  It imparts just the perfect balance of biscuity-sweet that it really mellows and rounds-out a beer the way I remember them from my trip to the UK.  Its worth the extra pennies it costs per pound than any other pale malt base grain, and even more worth the extra-extra pennies to purchase the old-school floor-malted stuff that brewers over there have preferred for 200 years.

Pics and Facebook/Twitter-posting madness to ensue in a few days.  And if you're in the neighborhood around 11:00 this Sunday....come over.  There's beer to be had while there's brewing to be done.

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Experimental Beer 1

I've got these tried-and-true recipes that keep my taps flowing and keep my wife happy (the most important):  Scottish 80 shilling, maple syrup porter, nut brown ale, to name a few.  I've got a few I like and am working a few minor bugs out of, like a smoked Scottish Wee Heavy, chocolate milk stout and American wheat ale.  I've got some standard beers I want to add to me repertoire:  American pale, IPA, saison, doppelbock.  So many beers, so little time.

But I also want to try to come up with a really catchy, kitschy beer.  Something that pushes the envelope just a little.  Something that stands out from the crowd and challenges my personal creativity.  FSM-knows I can't draw or paint.  Woodworking is out.  But come the Zombiepocalypse, I can make the Funny Juice.  That's how I know I'm still human.

So here's where the stage is set.  Sunday afternoon last week was a bright, beautiful day.  The snow was wet as the temp hovered just below freezing; with the sun beating on it, suspended in a liquid-blue sky, it was perfect packing snow.  I took the boys to the woods near our house.  We played Star Wars (they each had light sabers), threw snowballs, worked on a fort, and built a snowman once we walked back home (which they promptly beat to the ground with their lightsabers).  And what do you do after a fun winter afternoon outdoors?  Drink hot chocolate.

Bear with me.  I'm getting to the beer part.

The boys don't really want anything more sophisticated than a Swiss Miss packet and some marshmallows, so a few minutes in the microwave had three happy boys sipping merrily away, complete with chocolate mustaches and sticky fingers from fishing the marshmallows out of their mugs.

But me?  I wanted more.  Hmm...Girardelli dark chocolate mix?  Mmm, nah.  Oh, hey, Girardelli dark chocolate hazelnut mix?  Hey...mmm, nah.  But wait.  What's this?  Near the back?

Xocolatl.

Hot chocolate like I had in the Yucatan.

Cacao powder, bits of ground pure dark chocolate, cane sugar, chili (cayenne), and cinnamon.  This cup of hot chocolate was bliss.  Dark, bitter-rich, with that spicy cinnamon that goes so well with those velvety chocolates dominates the taste.  Sweet, lucious, slightly complex.  Then the cayenne hits and bites the tongue and back of the throat just a little; just a touch so the next sip carries that much more flavor.  That much more punch.  This hot chocolate is alive.

And then I started thinking.

There are chocolate beers.  There are chili beers.  There are holiday beers spiced with (among other things) cinnamon.  I think there's even a chocolate chili beer on the market somewhere.  But I want to make a chocolate beer spiced the way the Mayans do.  Xocolatl.

This is not a unique idea, I found to my dismay.  A few beers were even named Xocolatl; one a porter, the other a barleywine.  But I do want to experiment based not only on the "Mayan" aspect of the spices - cinnamon, cacao, and chili - but also on the experience I had drinking the hot chocolate I had.  Hence, the story.  I had to get myself there, in that place: happily worn-out, frothy mug of spicy-sweet xocolatl that woke me right back up again on top of being just damn comfortable.  That.  That's what I want to recreate.

I consulted the brewers' tome of unimaginably weird stuff for beer (Randy Mosher's Radical Brewing) and found some sage advice about when to add spices, non-hop bitterers (like cacao) and sweeteners (like chocolate).  The question now is how much.

I am going to start with Northern Brewer's Chocolate Milk Stout as a base.  It has received some smashing reviews, especially after they replaced the artificial chocolate sweetener with real cacao nibs, and I have brewed it here before.  The keg was drained in a week.  Starting with a tried-and-true base recipe gives me the beginning foundation I am after:  dark, slightly bitter chocolate with a milky sweetness and creaminess (from the addition of lactose).  I don't have to tinker with that.  What I have left now is the interesting stuff:  cinnamon and chili.  Perhaps I'll boost the chocolate flavor and add some shaved dark chocolate (60% cacao), perhaps not.

So the base recipe:

• 8 lbs Rahr pale malt
• .75 lbs of Fawcett pale chocolate malt
• .25 lbs English extra dark crystal
• .75 lbs Weyermann DeHucked Carafa II
• .75 oz Cluster hops (60 minutes)
• 1 lb lactose (60 minutes)
• .5 oz Cluster hops (30 minutes)
• 4 oz. cacao nibs - secondary fermenter
• Wyeast 1332 Northwest Ale Yeast

Like I said, maybe I add some more cacao, like 1 or 2 oz more, maybe I add some shaved dark chocolate, maybe not.  This base recipe is good stuff, but given the emotion I am trying to recapture relies on a heavy chocolate flavor, maybe I will.

Chili and cinnamon are left.  You could taste those ingredients in the hot chocolate.  They were present individually, but not overpowered; they were definitely part of the total, working in conjunction with each other flavor, not as some dominant stratification.  But I've had enough baaaad chili beers to know that one misstep gives a beer that makes you quite literally choke.

Advice?  Ideas?  Shut up and trust myself?

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If It's Not Scottish...

Just a quick note:  I fired-up another batch of beer for The Highest Holy Day of Most Extreme Magnitude.  I have 2 taps on my kegerator, after all, and The High Holy Day is on a Saturday this year, so I do anticipate a good deal of beer consumption at this year's annual Smitty St. Patrick's Day Celebration!

Allow me to digress; for those of you closest to Clan Smitty - namely, most of the contributors here - the annual feast of beer and authentically-Irish-themed food is Saturday March 17 (of course) from 5:00 on.  Email invitations being sent shortly.  For our extended ATK family, you're welcome to come.  I just can't cover your airfare.

Where was I...oh, right.  Beer.

I brewed a Scottish "80 shilling" ale.  Sure, it's not an Irish Red or a Guinness clone (I would never defile Guinness by trying to clone it), but hey...the Scots are kindered spirits right?  It is Jennifer's current favorite in my repertoire, so it pleases me to keep an ample supply on-hand for her enjoyment.  It tends to be malty-sweet and grainy with ne'er a hint a hops.

This brew day, I had to fly solo.  It doesn't add much time to my brew day - maybe just an additional half hour or so - but it does get lonely.  During the mash and part of the boil, I have time to play with the kids.  They also really enjoy helping me crack the grains in the grain crusher, but I still have a total of about 2 1/2 where I am tied-up cleaning, rinsing, sanitizing, sparging, dumping, boiling, adding stuff, cooling and pitching.  Lots of busywork, but Mrs. Smitty doesn't mind if I give her ample warning and the kids are OK for a couple hours playing amongst themselves.  I don't need to be up their asses every minute.

Scottish 80 Shilling:
-- 9 lbs British Golden Promise
-- 1 lb. English Medium Crystal
-- 1 oz U.S. Fuggle (60 minutes)
-- Wyeast 1728:  Scottish Ale

Sacch' Rest:  153 degrees for 60 minutes
Mashout:  170 degrees for 10 minutes

That's it, people.  This recipe is that simple, and it is really quite malty-tasty with a tad of grain for character.  This is a massively sessionable beer, coming in right around 5% abv.  No hops to dry the tongue, not so malty it's cloying.  It is everybeer in everypub in Scotland.  And it's on tap at Smitty's Pub on March 17!

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Maple Syrup Porter

With my kegs at home dangerously low or otherwise depleted, I came to the stark realization that I have fallen-out of my brew cycle that assures at least 1 operational keg in my kegerator at all times.

Coupled with the facts that:

1. The High Holy Day is a mere 7 weeks away;
2. The ales I wish to brew for the High Holy Day are 6-week ferment and force-carb; and
3. The Smitty family has an annual St. Patrick's Day party,

I realized I better get on the ball.  FSM-forbid I have empty kegs for the Highest Holy day of Most Extreme Magnitude.


This weekend started the 1st of the 2 beers I will have on tap:  the Maple Syrup Porter for which I have become famous:*

• 9lb Maris Otter
• 1 lb Briess caramel 40L
• 1 lb English Brown Malt
• 10 oz. English Chocolate Malt
• 32 oz. pure maple syrup
• 1.5 oz Fuggle (60 min)
• 0.5 oz Fuggle (5 min)
• Wyeast London Ale 1028

1. Sacch' Rest:  154 degrees F for 60 minutes
2. Mashout:  170 degrees F for 10 minutes
3. 2 hour boil** (but add hops with 1 hour left and 5 minutes left)
4. Add maple syrup at end of boil (cut heat, pour syrup)

Add a few friends and some beers in the garage, and it's a Brew Day Social Event!  This beer is ready to serve on March 10.  If I brew the other beer by this coming Saturday, it'll be ready on...March 17!

*Well, as famous as one gets with the lot that reads this blog and the handful of people who drink all my beer...

**The grain bill in this recipe is such that the amount of water needed for each step yields about 8 gallons.  You lose 1.5 G/hour during the boil, and I want to pitch yeast into 5 gallons.  Thus:  2 hours.  So you wait an hour, then add the 60 minute hops, etc.

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