Crème Brûlée from Southern Tier

Y'all know, a LOT of beers get poured in the Kitchen. Many good ones, a few complete stinkers every so often, and occasionally, very occasionally a truly outstanding beer crosses the table. I've never taken a time out from babbling about the general events in the Kitchen to babble about a beer that arrived fully formed (as opposed to all the babbling I've done about those beers that arrived "some assembly required,") but this particular brew needs some extry freakin' babbling. #fmj-tasty and then some!!!

Gorgeous, ever so tasty goodness!

Stovepipe Crow Update

Moved the big chocolate stout base into the secondary today, on top of 5 oz. of dried smoked serrano peppers and a couple cinnamon sticks, as well as 1/4 cup of raw cacao powder and 4 oz. of cacao nibs. I was a little worried about stray yeast on the peppers (no idea if I needed to be, but whatever!) so I soaked the peppers and cinnamon sticks in some vodka for a couple days. All this mess went into a nylon hops bag before the infusion...gotta remember to drop a couple whiskey stones in there to weight the bag down next time. Yeah, you could just go find some nice rocks on your own. LOL

FG came out at 1.022 (from an OG of 1.090,) so this is gonna sit down just under 9% ABV. My test sample is pretty tasty, so if I hit the proper amounts of those smoked serranos and cinnamon sticks, this one is gonna come out great!

And that's it for the kitchen this week. Hopefully the weather will stay nice and I can start thinking about a little bit of BBQ'n. In the meantime, drink like a chimney and jump like a crocodile!

Stovepipe Crow

Tonight, we cooked up another stout: A dark chocolate mole stout that I'm gonna call Stovepipe Crow. Took the name from a line in a Ray Wylie Hubbard song: "Tornado Ripe" has a line about crows on a chimney being a sign someone's gonna die. Don't know this brew will be quite that hot, but the line was irresistible. And wouldn't that be one helluva band name?

I'm using the same base ingredients kit from Midwest Supplies as B) Endarkenment, that Chocolate Peanut Butter Stout I cooked up a coupla month's ago. The cook is identical: same ingredients, times, etc. The difference will be when I move the brew from my primary fermenter to my secondary after a week of happy fermentation. Instead of peanut butter powder, I'm going to have a hops bag full of smoked serrano peppers and some cinnamon sticks. I'll still add some cocoa powder and cocoa nibs (also in the hops bag, at least the nibs!) for a deep bitter chocolate flavor. And yeah, there are plenty of mole recipes that call for peanuts, but none in mine, thank you. (At least not for this batch! Mebbe next time...) I'm hoping for something in between Country Boy's Jalapeno Smoked Porter and New Holland's El Mole Ocho, except a touch hotter and a little heartier than either.

I'm anxious to see how much of the smoked flavor the brew picks up from the smoked serranos.

That's all that's been happening in the Kitchen tonight. Late start what with trivia night at Patchens Pub (best spot for Sunday night trivia in Lexington!) and the tail end of the Jimbo Mathus show at the Green Lantern, Lexington. Kick ASS show! Visit Jimbo's Facebook page and definitely make the effort if he's gonna show up near your town! Great show!!!

For what that's worth, the Green Lantern is a great place to catch a show. Exactly the sorta place you'd want to be on a warm Sunday night. To give you an idea of the atmosphere, as closing time approached, tunes ranged from David Alan Coe's "You Don't Have to Call Me Darlin'" to John Prine's "Illegal Smile" and they all seemed appropriate.

The wort chiller is runnin' and I'm outta here. Drink like a chimney; jump like a crocodile!
 

Red Dress, Bottled Up to Go

Bottled up that raspberry wheat that's been sitting in my big Speidel, and so have recovered my Wingman Brewers t-shirt for human adornment.

Decided to call this one Red Dress Raspberry Wheat. The taste from the hydrometer was pretty dmn tasty, soI have high hopes for this one! This is gonna be a fine brew to sip on while watching the temps the Brinkmann upright is hitting while doing 12 hour ribs. :-) Summer, get here soon!

Sorta broke protocol and named this one after a McMurtry song instead of one of Ray Wylie's.

Short update this week! Till next time, drink like a chimney and jump like a crocodile!

Milk Labels for the Milk Stout!!!

Ok, so I've had this site bookmarked in Chrome for a year, but I've never really monkeyed with it much. For what it's worth, I hadn't played with it enough to even realize there was a pay option/free design choice to make. The Beer Labelizer is just an incredibly cool website for creating appropriately sized labels for your homebrew! They have a number of free designs, and a boatload of "premium" members-only designs. Membership is only $5 through PayPal (not sure how long that membership is for...will update when I hear back from the owner.)

Anywhos, very easy to edit the most common sections of a beer label: Beer Name, Beer Type/Style, two separate "tag lines" with recommended fills of Brewery Name and Brewed By, but easily filled elsewise if that suits your needs better (such as "occassion/event name" for anniversary/wedding brews, etc.) There's also spots to fill in ABV and bottle size. Any and all lines can be left blank for a "cleaner" label, though none of the designs are "clean" enough for satisfactory black&white printing. You will likely want to have any labels created through the Beer Labelizer printed at a professional copy house, like Kinkos or your local equivalent. (Pony up for color laser printing, though plain paper is fine. Do the milk label thing to get them stuck to your bottles. Plus, your local copy house likely has a paper cutter of convenient size to cut the pages  down for you...)

If the membership thing seems worthwhile, you can even add .jpg images to your labels. Freakin' uptown and guaranteed to impress the neighbors and in-laws! :-) (Can you say "engagement photos for those wedding brews? Wedding photos for those anniversary party brews? Name the occasion, I'm sure you have a picture for it! A picture is worth a thousand words, but a good brew can make you forget half the words you've read.

Once printed and cut to size, just pour a little skim milk on a plate, dip each label to moisten and slap those puppies on! They'll hold through refrigerator condensation, but will still rinse right off with some hot water once you've shared your great-tasting and great-looking homebrew!

All in all, very cool stuff to make your homebrew look as good as it tastes! :-)