Brewing Mead

For a while now, I've been fascinated with the idea of brewing up a mead, which is essentially fermented honey water. I looked up some instructions, and what struck me was how simple it was. In short:

Take 10-18 pounds of honey (depending on how dry or sweet you want your mead to be), and then mix in about 4 gallons of water. I grabbed 10 pounds from Mikolich Honey at the Little Italy Farmer's Market the day before.

Bring the entire concoction to about 190º farenheit and leave it there for at least twenty minutes to pasteurize it. While that's happening, skim off the foam that forms on top, as this is full of nasty junk you don't want in your mead.

Cool your must (the word for unfermented mead. Cue the 'more you know' rainbow!) down to 70-75º so that you can pitch the yeast. Then move the must to the sanitiized carboy. If you look carefully, you might see a wild, bearded 'Groth' assisting with this part of the operation.

Pitch the yeast! Then store in an appropriately cool spot (70º for this particular yeast) for a month before racking to a secondary fermenter. Some folks have suggested racking to a tertiary fermenter after another two months, and then aging it for a year. We'll see if we follow that particular plan, as it seems to be rather a long time to wait for a tasty beverage.

Special thanks to Groth and Ashok for being the brew crew for this one!

Moo Cow Milk Stout

Several months ago, I noticed that my brewing crew, formally known as the Beat Attack Brew Shack, had not brewed anything in ages. Usually one of the other members would whip up a recipe and we'd all get together and brew it up, but since we'd run plumb out of ideas and enthusiasm, I opted to create a recipe of my own. Ever since I had Mackeson's Milk Stout, I'd always wanted to try my hand at a similar beer, as it's quite delicious. So I reviewed a number of recipes and cobbled together my own, as follows:

6.5 lb Two Row Pale Malt
1 lb of Crystal 20L Malt
0.25 lb Flaked Barley
0.75 lb Flaked Oat
1.5 lb Roasted Barley
1 lb Victory Malt
With hop additions of Cascade and Goldings hops at 30 minutes and 45 minutes into the boil, respectively. I also threw in 8 ounces of lactose during bottling, hence making it a milk stout.


It's turned out rather well. There's a bit of chocolate and coffee in the flavor, and while it's not super smooth, the lactose gives it a great deal of body. The hops aren't very pronounced, but I didn't want them to be. In any case, I'm certainly happy with how it turned out, and will definitely be brewing this again.

Project Updates

Hello interblags!

Since last I blogged, I actually managed to achieve my season goal of earning my C rating in foil by taking third at a recent tournament. Huzzah!

Another project I was working on was preparing the guacamole for my friend's Tim and Chelsea's wedding. It took me a little while to figure out how to go about doing it, and I eventually came up with this basic recipe: 6 avocados, 1 mango (diced), 1 jalapeno(diced), 1 clove of garlic (mashed), garlic salt, and the juice of 4 limes, all mashed together. The avocado slicing and pitting was all done by the intrepid wedding crew, and I just had to mash it all together. Good times!


On a less winning note, we finished fermenting and bottling our beer. We named it 'Twue Wuv Wheat' in honor of Tim and Chelsea's wedding, and it was well received at the wedding. It was less enjoyed by the judges at the San Diego County Fair Homebrew Competition, who commented that it was, to quote "not a pleasure to drink". Ah well, win some, lose some.

Return to the kitchen brewery

We named our little brew operation 'Beat Attack Brew Shack' to note our common obsession with a certain sport. At the urging of a certain financial backer of ours, we opted to do a wheat beer for our second attempt, and due to the enthusiasm of several of our members, we opted to go for a whole grain brewing process. This required us to go buy pounds and pounds of grain at our local homebrew mart, which was met with much enthusiasm.


To make a beer from whole grain, you have to make your malt from the grains. To do this, you cook the grains, not boil them, for an hour in order to leach out all of the sugars.


After we cooked it, we had to sparge it, which basically means rinsing the grain with hot water to ensure that all of the sugars wind up in the malt.


Then we just boiled the malt to make the wert like we did last time, and then tried something new. We had a cooling coil with some rubber tubing, and after some fancy taping, we managed to hook it up to the the hose and run reasonably cold water through it, shortening the cooling process to about one hour.


Then we added the yeast, and started the two week waiting process again. Until then!

Adventures in Brewing

First of all, let me apologize, I've left this blog lay fallow for awhile despite my resolution not to do so. I've been pretty busy with fencing this year, and haven't budgeted out a lot of time for this blog.

Myself and several friends have been batting around the idea of brewing some beer for a while now, and we finally got around to buying all the equipment yesterday, at our local homebrew mart, which may now be my favorite retail location ever. After several weeks of hard research, we decided to go with a red ale, because, well, red ales are pretty awesome.

So we went out and got the kit, which consisted of a large stock pot, a six gallon glass carboy to serve as a fermenter, a plastic bucket for use in bottling, an iodine based disinfectant, and all the ingredients we'd require (yeast, malt, sugar and hops).

We schlepped it all over to Dave Eltgroth's place to begin our day of brewing fun. We started by disinfecting everything that might come in contact with the beer.


We then boiled up two gallons of water. It turns out that a lot of brewing is boiling stuff, so there's a lot of time to spend doing other things. Namely drinking beer and playing video games.

After we'd gotten those out of the way, the pot had boiled and it was time for adding ingredients! We poured in the two bags of malt and 1.5 ounces of hops, which had been turned into pellets and looked vaguely like rabbit food, yet smelled amazing.


After that, it was time for more boiling. At the aforementioned homebrew mart, a very helpful guy had mentioned that one thing we wanted to avoid was a boil over, and so when we started the second boil, we made sure to continuously monitor and stir it, keeping the lid off. We kept it boiling for another hour (which translated to a few levels of The Force Unleashed, which is AMAZING), and then poured it into the carboy for fermenting.


Then followed the phase of waiting for it to cool down so we could add the yeast and begin the fermentation process. Let me tell you, waiting for five gallons of hot beer to cool down takes a long time. Which translates to a lot of video games, a visit to best buy, dinner, some more video games, a pretty significant amount of youtube, and then just waiting around. But lo, beer with yeast!


Then we just had to wait around for two weeks for it to ferment! More later!