Raspberry! Boysenberry! Strawberry! That's my Jam!

Infectious Groovalicious!

Stripped some more bottles while cooking up a raspberry wheat. The raspberry is gonna come from a bottle this time. Coupla more kits and we're gonna go off the grid, but we're gonna nail the process first.

These ingredients came from MoreBeer in the form of Berry Beer Kit. Here's a pic of it unboxed:

Pretty much the standard procedure. The kit did include a Whirlfloc tablet, intended to be added 5 minutes before the boil ended. It's meant to clear the brew by causing proteins to coagulate during the "cold break" (when stuff drops loose as you cool from a full boil to yeast-pitching temps.) I trust it did its stuff, as the wort got ugly! OK, more than ugly, extremely gross and disgusting looking. Yeesh!

 Once we got through that bit of ugliness, the Kitchen ended up with 4ish gallons in the fermenter.

 And yes, the fermenter gets to wear my Wingman Brewers T-shirt for the next week or so! I realize that Speidel is opaque, but I'm still paranoid about light-struck brews.

 And here's what's left in the brew kettle after the wort's been drained: ugly muck of a mess!

Cap That! and Stripping Labels

After bottling those last coupla batches, I realized I needed to get busy prepping bottles for the next few. So...it's time to strip some labels. Big tub, bottles needing stripped, enough water to drown a moose, a coupla scoops of Oxyclean and an hour soak. Poof, those labels fall off easier than you forget it was just a two-drink minimum. Some brands use some freaky sticky glue, but most labels fall right off after a good soak. A light pass with a scrubbie to remove any residue, and they'll be ready for rinsing and sanitizing.

 Before I got busy cleaning empties, I made some cap labels for the batches just bottled. I'll make milk labels for them later, but I wanted to get the caps labelled right away--I don't want to get any of the bottles mixed with other batches! Avery 5408 are freaking perfect for this: 24 to a sheet, so you can do a case with each page; and exactly bottle-cap sized. Since I didn't have full cases of either batch just bottled, I used a couple of the extras to tag the boxes before moving them into the pantry.

 Isn't Find and Replace All one of the most useful buttons ever??? Woot! (Completely beside the point for cap labels, but get a cheap little Brother 2200 series if you want to do inexpensive milk labels for the bottles themselves. Laser printer labels won't bleed, and those Brother 22xx series are cheapest cost per page you will find anywhere!)

 Once you have cap labels on your homebrew, you can consolidate cases if you need to conserve some storage space, and still find that bottle.

 Up tomorrow night in the Kitchen: raspberry wheat cook from a kit from MoreBeer. Hopefully spring will actually have sprung about the time this porch swing beer will be ready to rock!

It's gonna be cold and nasty again next week, but by the time this porch swing beer is ready to tap, it should be just the ticket! In the meantime, drive like a maniac and jump like a crocodile!

Bottle Daze

It's Bottle Day for B) Endarkenment 2.0, my second attempt at Chocolate Peanut Butter Brewing Goodness!

All y'all might recall last years attempt ended up being a huge messy muckety mess, that failed to pick up even a hint of peanut butter flavor. And it tasted terrible for the first 6 months! Once it hit it's flavor stride, it kicked ass and was absolutely the best beer I made last year. But I only found one bottle with even a hint of peanut butter! It still had enough potential that I was very willing to give it another shot this year. There were some mishaps in the Kitchen, but it seemed to be working out. The yeast seems to have laid down once the gravity hit 1.035, so instead of adding "priming" sugar to a racking bucket, I'm going to try using Prime Dose Carbonation Capsules. I've never used these before, but they seem tailor made for my intended use: carbonating bottles of a brew where the original yeast has stalled out for whatever unknown reason. (I'm guessing lack of oxygen and/or too high an alcohol content? But what do I know? I'm just mucking about in the kitchen!)

Stopped by Liquor Barn to snag some brews earlier today, and snagged a new bottle filler. I love the 3/8" filler that came with my original "brew kit," but those fancy Speidel fermenters that I've been bragging on come with a 1" spigot. I could stretch out the 3/8" tubing to fit, but then I'd have a leaky mess next time I bottled from anything else. So I'm gonna give this new filler tube a shot. I fill my bottles on the dishwasher door, so if it's not working out, I shouldn't make too big of a mess. (OTH, I usually make a pretty big mess regardless, so we'll see... and no, there likely won't be pictures or video if it gets messy!)

Yesterday, I started rinsing off bottles and set up my sanitizer bottle tree. I wanted time to get everything sanitized AND time for the bottles to air-dry. And I do love the little sanitizer bottle tree. I might want to add to it's height/bottle capacity, but it's built to expand. and the "spray top" is just too handy for making sure all my bottles are completely sanitized.

Yep, that 5 gallon speidel with the blankets lovingly wrapped around it is the one getting dropped to bottles tonight. The blanket wasn't so much for love or to keep it warm...mostly to keep the light out. Smaller fermenters just get a borrowed T-shirt. (They are happy, and well-cared for. No emails about them not receiving equal treatment, please. Besides, the one in the T-shirt looks soo much cooler.)

I thought I was gonna skip the usual routine of the Leadbelly's classic cover of "Bottle Up and Go," but I can't bring myself to ignore my ridiculous superstition. Dmn you, Huddie Ledbetter, for being such a fine musician! Or dmn you, Shriekback, for making me think such discordant thoughts on Bottle Night! This is scientifical cooking Magic, with which mortals should not fere. (If I did have to change bottling tunes, Shreikback would definitely be the go-to.)

Nearly three cases run through the sanitizer, so I should be plenty good to go. Caps sanitized also. Fillers and tubing sanitized. We're just freaking golden here, I hope!

Well, that 1/2 inch tubing is fine for dropping wort from one container to a lower receptacle with those Speidel spigots, but the back-pressure from a closed filler tube was enough to sprew brew everywhere! Yeesh! Ended up heating the 3/8 inch tubing with hot water enough to stretch-fit it. Lots of beery, chocolately mess! Ended up with 36 bottles capped and happy. BTW, putting the cocoa nibs in a mesh "hops" bag before adding them to the secondary fermenter was an awesome idea, and saved a boatload of cleanup. (Took days to get those damn things out of the filler tube last year!)

Now, since the yeast seems to have stalled a little early (1.035 sg) I thought it a perfect  opportunity to try out my Prime Dose Carbonation Capsules. Little pills of yeast and yeast nutrient:  add two to each bottle, and consider it good. Easy to use, but a little pricey--on the other hand, much less pricey than a batch that didn't carbonate! I'll update once these bottles get opened. Ended up with only 36 bottles out of 4.5 gallons...the rest was left soaking in peanut butter sludge.

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Fast-forward a week, and it's now Bottling Day for the chocolate milk stout that's been in my 7.5 gallon Speidel for two weeks now. No activity in the airlock for a week, and it's dropped from 1.060 OG to 1.025 (that's with the 8 oz. of lactose that was added.) With a net 4.5 gallons in the primary, I'm OK with the numbers. Normal routine of boil the priming sugar, drop the simple syrup into the priming bucket and add a bottle of chocolate extract flavor.

 Couldn't resist another pic of my happy sanitized bottle caps!

Here's the Priming Bucket with the filler tube attached and beer runnin thtough it. On the left of the pic, you see my 7.5 gallon primary. Its just been emptied, so it was promptly filled with Oxyclean to soak the grunge off the insides.

Here's a pic of my two current bottle cappers. The one on the left is the more recent addition of a red baron  bottle capper. It has a magnet in the center that makes it much easier to cap individual bottles, very smooth and well-built. On the right is the capper that came with my original equipointment. A little more unwieldy than the red baron, but it works...and at times where the newer fancier cappier can't! I had several Abita bottles in my mix of washed and ready, but the Red Baron couldn't cap those puppies! Yikes!!! The old standby scrunched lids on those bottles, no problem. (I'm still thinking, "Don't bother saving Abita bottles. Bummer, since they use those cute little stubby 12s.)

Chocolate Stout ended up at 43 bottles, capped and waiting. The taste I had while testing the final gravity was pretty decent, so I'm going to try one of these fairly soon! (Mebbe in a month?)

That's it for now, folks--drink like a chimney, and jump like a crocodile! :-)

Cookie Shot Fail and Milk Stout Brew Night

Didn't get around to posting this last weekend, but here's what was happened in the Kitchen:

The weekend started with my first attempt at Chocolate Chip Cookie Shot Glasses. Heard about these on the internets, and thought "surely I could do that in the Kitchen." So I ordered a Fred Cool Shooters Shot Glass Mold from Amzn, and stopped for cookie dough on the way home from work.

 Unfortunately, I ended up with a very nice cookie on top, and some very warm, but totally gooey and uncooked dough in the mold itself. Back to the drawing board on this one! (And no, there are no pics of the cookie dough going into the shot glass mold. Cookie dough is sticky stuff, and not conducive to step-by-step pics during the process!)

          Next up in the kitchen was my Milk Stout brew night. I'm using Midwest Supplies Cream Stout Extract Kit, but I'm going to add some chocolate flavor before bottling. I opted for a Wyeast 1028 London Ale yeast smack pack for this one. It's a pretty simple kit so brew night went fairly smoothly.

Once the brewing is done, it's time to cool things off in a hurry. I just love my copper coil wort chiller--plunk it in your kettle 15 minutes before your boil is done to sanitize it, then just run cold tap water through it. 30 minutes later, your boiling kettle is down to 70ish temps and ready to move to your fermenter. Huge time and effort saver. Being made of copper, the wort chiller being added to the boil for the last fifteen minutes supposedly affords a similar beneficial reaction with the wort as would using a copper boil kettle, but much less expensively. Most importantly, it saves me having to try to move the boiling kettle off the stove and into a tub of ice.

     After it was cooled, dropped the wort into my 7.5 gallon Speidel fermenter, added the smack pack of yeast and capped it off. Then I added some cheap vodka to the airlock* and drug the whole thing out to the living room. Normally, I'd leave the fermenter in the closet with the water heater, or the pantry by the garage door, but it's been a little chilly in both places. I was getting a little nervous about the yeast, since I didn't see any activity until Wednesday, but once it got active, it stayed pretty busy for a bit. It's still active enough that I won't be able to bottle this weekend, but that's ok--I have the second stab at my B) Endarkenment Chocolate Peanut Butter Stout to bottle this weekend. Though I outsmarted the cacao nibs this year by enclosing them in a hops bag before adding them to the secondary fermenter, the peanut butter powder was enough of a mess last year that I know I will appreciate the lack of anything else needing my attention this weekend!

*I love my Speidel fermenters. They're kinda pricey, but they're built extremely well, have great spigots so I don't have to use an auto-siphon, super easy to move with their sturdy handles and easy to clean with their wide-mouth openings. I'm not terribly fond of the airlock that comes with them, and will likely start using my standard 3 piece airlocks with them instead. (They work fine, just they are very, very large...so more cheap vodka, and a little bit more difficult to see activity. Just me being a bitchy fuss-budget, mostly.)

     So...that's what happened in the Kitchen last weekend...not sure if anything much is gonna go on this weekend or not. If there is any shit happenin' in the kitchen this weekend, all y'all will hear about it ... sooner or later. In the meantime, drink like a chimney and jump like a crocodile!

Chocolate Peanut Butter Kitchen Adventures

Ok, folks...Sorry I didn't get the start of this nonsense up last week, but activities in the kitchen got a little more exciting than I'd hoped. Anywhos...I posted the unbox of ingredient kits a couple weeks ago, and last week it was definitely time to get one of those kits brewed up! Since this is my first post regarding the actual brewing that happened in my kitchen, I'm going to go into way more detail for this one than I ever will again. If you're familiar with home-brewing and don't want to see where my process might differ from yours, you might wish to skip through fairly quickly. (And mebbe the next few too? I skipped a lot of photo ops!)

 Here's all the crap I drug into the kitchen a couple days before I got started. My big ass 40 qt. brewpot, the two smaller pots for misc. uses (holding my copper coil wort-chiller doohickie being one of those uses.) My 7.5 gallon Speidel primary fermenter (that big opaque bucket-like thing with the orange cap.) The Speidel is new, and I do love it. There's a plastic carboy back behind the Speidel that is back out in the garage now, and is definitely going to be relegated to "the Speidel's full" backup status. The plastic tub with the blue lid holds a bunch of misc. items, some of which will be used soon, some not. (Grabbed a second tub at Wally World to seperate items into Brew Day items and Bottling Day items...mostly to make the tubs easier to dig through.)

So after everything got rinsed off, the pots moved to the stove. The smaller two aren't planned to be used for much other than rinse buckets, but it's good to have some pots sitting about...as I was soon to find out. :-)

Everything is rinsed off, clean and sparkly...some of it is still going to need to be sanitized. We don't want free-floating nasties making weird flavors in this kitchen! The boil is going to sanitize our brew pot and the copper wort-chiller, but most everything else will need some Star San treatment. There are plenty of alternatives, but I love working with Star San--it's a "rinse-free" sanitizer, which means once it dries off, you don't need to worry about leftover flavors. Just use it, let everything air dry and you're golden. And I love the easy-measure bottle, just take the second cap off and squeeze till the measure is where you want it. 1 oz. per 5 gallon and it's marked for 1/2 oz if you're a cheap skate like me! Actually, I usually do 1/2 oz in 2.5 gallons just to make it easier to deal with--you can dip a rag or fill a spritz bottle for items too large to dunk. (Oooh, I need to remember to snag a spritz bottle soon! LOL) Anyway, Star San is great stuff for making sure you're equipment is sanitized and that you won't be adding unexpected flavors from leftover bacteria.

 I posted this pic of the two Wyeast packets from both kits unboxed last week. The Smack Pack on the left is the Wyeast American Ale 1056 that I will be using with my Chocolate Peanut Butter Stout kit. You can see it's starting to expand a little bit already. This is a very active yeast, and it's not at all uncommon for the pack to expand a good bit before you "smack" it. It makes the nutrient pack slightly more difficult than usual to properly smack, but your yeast is going to be just fine. (It completely freaked me out the first time I used this yeast, though--I was certain the yeast would be all worn out or something!)

 I tossed that pic back in again so you'd have a good comparison with what a "ready to go" smack pack looks like. I got the pack out of the fridge Saturday evening and let it sit out for a few hours, squished the inner "nutrient pack" down into a corner of the big pack to smack the dickens out of it. In a few hours, it looked like this:

Fully expanded, feels like it could burst if you gave it a good squeeze. I decided not to start brewing until the next evening. It's good to sit like this for a bit. Once I start sanitizing equipment, this pack of yeast will get swished around in the sanitizer also. 

This is not a great pic, but it's most of the stuff that got sanitized. Along with all kinds of crap piled on my kitchen table that doesn't have anything to do with anything. The yeast packet, the orange lid and air lock for the Speidel fermenter, a siphon tube with a siphon sprayer doohickie :-) to help increase the oxegenation when transferring your wort from the brew pot to the fermenter. (This is the only time you ever want to add any oxygen--once the wort has cooled, and just before you pitch your yeast. The yeast need enough to get started, but adding any later just adds off flavors. This little plastic doohickie doesn't do much, but it was only a couple of bucks, and certainly doesn't hurt anything!)

So, I had everything sanitized Sunday afternoon, just needed to let it all air dry before I got started.

Several hours later it was time to get down to business. I skipped a lot of photo opportunities from this point out...I'll try to do a better job with the next batch. Specialty grains were all bagged up, 6 gallons of water measured into the brew pot, and things got started. I do have an electric stove, so to help bring things up to temp more quickly, and to raise the brew pot off the surface of the stove a little higher, I added what's typically called a "canning element" to my stove last year. Designed for home canning on electric stoves, they're just the ticket for home brewing on an electric stove!

Here is the start of the boil. It's gonna take my poor little electric stove more than an hour to bring that big pot to a full boil.

 We're getting close here.
When I hit a full boil, all hell broke loose...I was going to pull that big grain bag out and let it sit in a strainer over one of my smaller pots while I added the Dried Malt Extract and Liquid Malt Extract to the brew pot. But when I went to pull the grain bag, the grains didn't all come with! I originally thought it had burst a seam, but I think I just didn't have one corner tied tightly enough to hold up to all the stirring about it received. Regardless, it was ONE HOT MESS!!! A good deal of scooping and mucking about with very, very hot liquid, all while trying desparately to NOT stir things about any more than absolutely necessary. (Stirring and adding oxygen to the wort at this point is not going to add anything pleasant to the end result!) Anyhow, after recovering as well as possible, I cranked the heat back up. Once it hit a full boil, I added a hops bag with the 1 oz. Chinook and 3/4 oz. Spaltz. At that point, it's just a matter of watching the clock...while watching the pot to make sure nothing boils over. About 40 minutes later, I added another small hops bag with 1/2 oz of Spalt aroma hops. A few minutes after that, I dropped my copper coil wort chiller in the pot, so it can be boiled sterile. (I need to take a picture of that amazing item doing it's stuff--it's freaking awesome!)

Anyhow, once the boil was done, I started the cold water through the coils, and half an hour later everything was cooled down enough to transfer to that Speidel primary fermenter. Before moving the wort to the fermenter, I did pull out enough wort to test for specific gravity. By floating a glass hydrometer, this will tell me how much sugar is in the original wort; when I test it later, I can tell how much sugar has been converted to alcohol. By comparing this "Original Gravity" to results of the same test later, I'll be able to determine when it is safe to bottle this brew up, if there have been any problems with the yeast (i.e., if more sugars remain than expected, perhaps something has gone wrong with my yeast, etc.,) and I will also be able to determine the alcohol content of the final product.

I woulda swore I took a pic of the test tube full of goodness!?!

So my Original Gravity came out at 1.015 (which seems really high for what I was working with...part of the mash still floating about?) I moved the cooled wort into that Speidel, and pitched my yeast. Capped everything off, topped off the air lock with some cheap vodka, threw a t-shirt over the Speidel to keep off the drafts in the corner of my pantry, and called it a night.

The day after, everything was doing it's stuff..bubbling away as the yeast created CO2 and alcohol. I was glad to have that 7.5 gallon Speidel--last time I made this recipe, it blew the airlock out the top of the fermenter and made a huge freakin' mess! This batch might not have gotten quite that active, but the foamy krausen did climb halfway up the side

Fermentation settled down a little bit earlier than last time I brewed this kit also...so a week after brew day, I sanitized my smaller 5 galllon Speidel, a siphon tube and my turkey baster (to snag some wort out of the fermenter and test that gravity again.) Gravity came out at 1.035, so it seemed reasonable to transfer everything to that secondary. (Don't put the wort from the tester back in the fermenter--that's just asking for a secondary infection. But don't dump it down the drain, either! It's not gonna taste great, but it will give you an idea of where things are headed.) I'd already sanitized the 5 gallon secondary Speidel and a siphon tube and given them time to dry. So I dropped 1/4 cup of cacoa powder and two jars of powdered peanut butter into the secondary, and transferred my wort in on top of that.

This is where I was loving the Speidels. Aside from being reasonably opaque and thereby (hopefully?) reducing the amount the wort will be light struck during transfer, you just gotta luv those spigots. My first brew kit came with a 6.5 gallon plastic carboy; it worked fine, and isn't hard to clean if you don't leave crap sit in it drying out, but auto-siphons are a pain in the ass, no matter how well they work! Gravity is always going to be easier.

Once I had all 5 gallons transferred, I "carefully" stirred the cacao and peanut butter powder into the wort, trying to be as gentle as I could. (hey, you be gentle with a 3 foot spoon swishing round in a 5 gallon bucket!) Anyhow, once I had it stirred as well I could without getting things too excited (at this point, you don't want to add any oxygen, if you can help it) I tightened up the lid, add some whisky to the air lock (the bottle was nearby, and the whisky can be dumped into the brew on bottling day.

After all that mucking about, I'm going to let it sit for a few days. Recipe calls for cacao nibs to be added a few days after moving the brew to the secondary, so we'll give it a good look then. And those cacao nibs are going into a hops bag before being added to the secondary. Took forever to remove those nasty little things from my auto-siphon and bottling wand last year!