Red Dress Raspberry Wheat Unbottled! Stovepipe Crow Bottled! Celebrations in the Kitchen!

First bottle of Red Dress Raspberry Wheat got opened tonight. It was bottled up 4/7, so close enough to a full month gone by in the bottle. It looks great, but the raspberry isn't coming through near as much as I'd like, either in aroma or taste. I'd rather have raspberry overkill than "just barely there." Lesson noted for next time out with a similar batch. Still, it's very drinkable.

We'll keep a bottle in the fridge and test it week by week to see if it hits a higher stride shortly. Being a fairly light tasting wheat, it's not going to handle sitting around for too long! (For those who care, this was my first and only brew that strayed from pulling it's name from a Ray Wylie Hubbard song. The name for this one was inspired by the James McMurtry song!)

Speaking of sitting around awhile, B) Endarkenment 2.0 (the chocolate peanut butter stout) should be up for tasting soon. I'm not gonna expect much from the first couple tastings--it took six months for first batch Endarkenment to really start hitting its stride. I still have a six-pack of 1.0 in the back of the fridge to do some comparison tastings once 2.0 hits, but it might be apples to oranges--the peanut butter just didn't hit at all in v1.0, and I'm pretty sure it's going to come out much stronger this time around.

Choctaw Bingo (my milk chocolate stout) will hopefully be ready even sooner than B) Endarkenment 2.0, being a much simpler and more straightforward brew. We'll toss a couple bottles in the fridge for next weekend to see what's going on with it, too!

The mole stout I've been working on is going in bottles shortly. Here's a short view of the gravity test sample:

Dropped enough in my hydrometer test tube to see if the final gravity had changed since moving the brew into the secondary fermenter. I didn't expect any change, since I'd only added the dried peppers, some raw cacao powder (no additives) and a couple cinnamon sticks. Still best to check! Gave the test sample a taste at bottling time to see if the chocolate, smoked serrano peppers and the cinnamon stick flavors came through as strongly as I'd hoped. I would have liked a little more cinnamon and its inherent sweetness, but the smoky pepper and chocolate is spot on. Fresh from the secondary, this is definitely the best beer I've ever made. A couple months in the bottles to let it carbonate properly and let the flavors meld and this is gonna be one of the best beers I've ever tasted! Woot! The smokiness and heat from those smoked serranos just hits all my buttons! It might be a little too hot for many folk, but it's gonna hit ALL my buttons!

A quick shout out to my friends at Midwest Supplies: I work nights, so it's often difficult for me to get out and purchase supplies locally...so I buy a LOT of stuff online. I recently received a shipment of yeast from Midwest, but there was a slight mixup with the shipment: they'd forgotten the ice packs I ordered with the liquid yeast. I realize yeast is a little more resilient than we sometimes give it credit for, but I also work at Amzn and know how freaking hot those trucks get sitting in the sun, so I always kick in the extry 79¢ for an ice-pack. A quick phone call the next morning, and they rushed replacements out the door with two-day shipping. Their customer service couldn't have been more courteous nor more successful at quickly resolving my problem! A+ job all around!!! Outstanding and really sold me on ordering from them again!

And Bluegrass residents, don't forget to mark your calendars for the upcoming Alltech Brews and Food Fest!!! $35 ticket gets you a 3 oz. commemorative tasting glass, 15 beer tickets to trade for fills, free samples of all sorts of food and boatloads of live music! (Coralee and the Townies will be there--6:30 pm?--there's half your ticket's worth right there!) There are some really exciting big name breweries attending, so your biggest problem will be deciding which awesome brew to try next! Make a list of must-haves ahead of time! Bring your friends and expect a fantastic time...y'all can taste different beers and compare notes to hone in on your favorites! (Special ticket prices are available for designated drivers, too!) And yeah, I know...their own website has all this information and more. I'm just really super excited about this event, and hope to see you all there! (Yes! all 5 of you who ever read this far into my silly babblings!)

Drink like a chimney and jump like a crocodile, folks! til next time...

random kitchen babbles

Another week of random babbling:

Stovepipe Crow (that mole stout that's been cookin' for a coupla weeks) is getting bottled tomorrow night. Bottles, priming bucket, caps and bottle filler all sanitized and drying; small pot set out with the bottling sugar; cap labels made...all set!

Redneck Mother Imperial Red is gonna sit for another week...

We did get some new glassware in the Kitchen over the last week. We snagged some Dogfishhead IPA glasses and some Rogue Stout glasses! (Both pics are of the Spiegelau/Dogfish IPA glasses. The Spiegelau Stout glasses are very similar, but without the ripples in the base and a slightly larger, deeper bowl to the main body of the glass. I'll post some side-by-side pics soon.)

My palate may not be delicate or accurate enough to truly benefit from the science behind these lovely containers, but they do make your brews look absolutely scrumptious! Great looking glassware, and makes you look very uptown while tossing back a few cold ones! :-)

We also added a few new openers to the collection. A couple of interesting ones from Dogfish Head

 

A new mini-carabiner type multi-tool doohickey from Nite-Eyes

 And Sir Perky! He's pretty excited about the opportunity to help us open a few brews tonight!

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! :-)