Today's dinner required a long prep: wine-braised short ribs with gremolata and polenta. Our 9-quart Le Creuset worked its magic on the short ribs, and about 3 hours later we had a fantastic dinner. The flavor of the short ribs was nothing short of what we had tasted at The Forest Grill in Birmingham. We used about 3/4 of a bottle of California 37, a full bodied Cabernet Sauvignon from Save Me, San Francisco Wine Company (from Train-fame), to braise the meat. As we're not wasteful, we finished the remainder with dinner.
I've been using blow off tubes on every single fermentation bottle, but it's only as of late that I understand the importance of using them. Homebrew forums and reddit alike are filled with pictures and stories of beer geysers that would give Old Faithful a run for its money and lids and airlocks exploding off their vessels. The consensus is that you shouldn't use an airlock until the most vigorous part of the fermentation is over. Until yesterday I've only had 2 fermenters going nuts, but both brews from Saturday have now also turned into extremely active CO2 volcanoes. The pictures are a bit dark (fermenting beer is camera shy), but you can see how the Kräusen is filling up the jug all the way to the top and some of the fermenting beer is flowing through the blow off tube. The tube ends are dipped in a growler with water and sanitizer (to prevent critters from crawling into the beer) and this liquid looks like a porter now too. Nevertheless, I wouldn't recommend drinking that! I've had some additional fun with creating labels today in between games of Monopoly with the youngest (he won fair and square) and then having a "movie afternoon". Behold my non-DTP qualities: Waiter there's a cow in my wine! Today's dinner required a long prep: wine-braised short ribs with gremolata and polenta. Our 9-quart Le Creuset worked its magic on the short ribs, and about 3 hours later we had a fantastic dinner. The flavor of the short ribs was nothing short of what we had tasted at The Forest Grill in Birmingham. We used about 3/4 of a bottle of California 37, a full bodied Cabernet Sauvignon from Save Me, San Francisco Wine Company (from Train-fame), to braise the meat. As we're not wasteful, we finished the remainder with dinner.
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Brew Day arrived and it was jam-packed with prepping, brewing and ye olde faithful, cleaning. As mentioned yesterday I had 2 beers planned: a Pumpkin Dubbel and a Chocolate Maple Porter. I decided to start with the porter, given that I had to roast the pie pumpkin in the oven for 1 hour. While the porter malted in my spunky 10-gallon cooler, I prepped the pumpkin. If you would also like to make a pumpkin beer, may I advise you to not cut your finger. My hatred for cutting up pumpkin is reciprocal to how much I like eating pumpkin-flavored food. My finger is still very much attached, but it could have been nasty had I not hit my nail with the knife. I still got 2 gashes (if you've ever tried to make a stone skip on water, then picture a knife doing that on your finger). One hour later, the porter's mash was done (i.e. steeping the grains in hot water) and it was time to take a gravity reading to see if I was on target. The specific gravity of a liquid, or relative density, is largely dependent on and thus an indication of the amount of sugars. Based on the grains and other ingredients used one can estimate what the gravity should be under ideal circumstances. There are many factors influencing this, such as the milling of the grains, temperature, mashing times, etc... I always compare my pre-boil gravity (wort coming out of the mash tun), the original gravity (OG) after the boil and before adding the yeast and then what is known as the final gravity (FG; when the sugar content is no longer dropping - it stabilizes). The difference between FG and OG gives us the alcohol contents by volume. Anyway, using my refractometer the pre-boil gravity measured around 1.029, which I then compared to the theoretical value as calculated by BeerSmith. According to the sheet I printed it was 1.056. Taking a closer look I noticed that the final gravity was something like ... 1.225. Most high gravity beers such as trappists and rye wines for instance don't go much higher than 1.11. The final ABV of this porter would have been more than 25% if 1.225 was correct! I think not. I'm still not sure what BeerSmith did, but a quick reset of the program brought everything back to normal and the estimated gravity was now also 1.029. Spot on! The color is absolutely fantastic: a thick coffee-like liquid. The boil went smoothly and thanks to (very) vigorous stirring during the cooling phase, I was able to get the temperature down to 73 F in 4 minutes (faster is better!). After cleanup and lunch it was time to tackle the pumpkin dubbel. While it was mashing I bottled the ginger beer for the kiddies. I once again hit all the right numbers and about 2.5 hours later it was final clean up time. Now we're going to have to wait 1 month before we can actually taste any of it, but the pumpkin ale made the house smell wonderfully! The tradition amongst homebrewers is to have a homebrew while brewing, but I don't particularly like drinking beer at 8:00 in the morning, so I waited until dinner. My wife made an excellent Mexican dish, which you can see here being accompanied by a Jalapeño Saison. But the labels are! On the right (green label) is the beer that was sitting in the primary fermenter only, while the left (blue) bottles were racked into the secondary vessel. These were formerly known as Jalapeño Saison 1 and 2. And here are the actual labels, which I've "glued" on with ... milk. Let me dispel a few myths here: brewing beer doesn't necessarily smell up the house (making the apple crisp ale made the house smell like apples (imagine that...) and using milk to adhere the labels won't make it stink either. It's a tried and trusted method and it beats using actual glue time and again: easy to peel them back off and there's no residue! Also, no cows were harmed in the making of these labels. Last night we tried 2 bottles of the Jalapeño Saison. I had made a double batch (i.e. 2 gallons) to verify whether racking the beer into a secondary vessel would have any effect on various parameters: color, flavor, ... It took only a few days after transferring one of the fermenters for the difference to be apparent. The secondary's beer was much clearer. Two weeks ago we bottled both, but alas, I made a mistake then. I used agave nectar for priming (so that the beer would carbonate inside the bottles) and added that to the priming bucket. In went the beer that was in the secondary vessel and then I bottled. There's a step missing here though: stirring. I completely forgot to mix the agave nectar and beer resulting in what I think will be under- and over-carbonated beer. Here's a picture of the saison from the primary vessel only: Nice foamy head, a very nice amount of bubbles and a subtle scent of jalapeños wafted out of the glass. I'll be honest here, when I first brewed the beer and tasted the boiled wort I wasn't much of a fan. When I tasted the now fermented beer again during the bottling process I still wasn't sold. My wife liked it, but to me it tasted too much like raw vegetables (think smell/taste of green peppers). It's worth noting that the jalapeños would only impart their pepper flavoring and not the spiciness. This would have required a different architecture. Before going on about the taste of the beer, here's a picture of the 2 bottles poured into tulip glasses. On the left (JP 1) is the beer that had been sitting in the primary fermenter only and on the right (JP 2) we have the one that came from our much clearer secondary fermentation vessel. Noticeable differences: the head on JP2 was nearly non-existent and the bubbling was definitely nowhere near as active as in JP1's glass. Surely enough, JP2 also had a more pronounced jalapeño scent. Still, after sampling it was clear that the vegetable pepper flavor had mellowed out, probably because of the bottle conditioning. The clear winner here, in my opinion, was JP1, but of course the comparison is not completely fair given that I botched the experiment during priming. We liked them both and they nicely complemented a snack of tortilla chips and salsa. In the end, that's what really matters! It's not all about beer here! My wife made a second batch of ice cream yesterday afternoon. The day before she had made an adult version of chocolate ice cream: a mixture of chocolate, de-seeded raspberries (with a minimal amount of sugar) and some Chambord. Here's an action shot of her making the custard for strawberry chocolate ice cream for the kiddies: What you see here is the result of yeast washing. Liquid yeast is fairly expensive, about $8 per vial. So it makes sense to reuse yeast multiple times. What I've done here is washing yeast, i.e. collecting the yeast from a primary fermenter after racking to a secondary fermenter or after bottling. Basically, you rinse the yeast cake in the bottom of the fermenter with water (pre-boiled and brought back to room temperature) and then separate the trub (the dead yeast cells and other unwanted particles) and living yeast cells by decanting into jars. You can see the yeast cells on the bottom of the jar. There might be as many as 100 billion cells in that slurry! What I've learned from Brülosophy is that there's a far easier method: make a yeast starter with the liquid yeast and add an additional 500 ml of starter. Before pitching the yeast in the fermenter with the wort, collect the 500 ml in a separate jar. The yeast collect here is Trappist WLP500, ideal for making tripel-style beers! |
The Alchemist
A Belgian living in Michigan interested in all things fermenting (and food in general). Brewing
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