bottled the ginger brown

We bottled our ginger brown ale that we started back in November. The recipe is on hopville, a nice calculator tool and way to keep track of recipes.

We now have a big enough collection of flip-top bottles to fit a 5-gallon batch of beer, without needing to use wine bottles (too big) or crown-top bottles (requires borrowing the capping tool). Conveniently, all of the bottles fit (just barely) in our dishwasher for sanitizing.

For a little experiment, we used three different priming sugar recipes (priming sugar is added just before bottling to create carbonation). One gallon was primed with blackstrap molasses, one gallon was primed with cane sugar boiled with 1 oz. ginger root for extra ginger flavor, and the remaining three gallons got half molasses half cane sugar for priming.

make something day: ginger brown ale

The day after Thanksgiving is Black Friday, a day in which stores hype up the x-mas shopping season and crazy shoppers wake up super early to stand in long lines and catch some "deals". Eric and I do not participate. In fact, we are so good at breaking traditions that it is nice to sometimes create new traditions. Established alternatives to Black Friday include Buy Nothing Day and Make Something Day so we decided to make something!

For our first annual beer brewing extravaganza on Make Something Day, we made a ginger brown ale which includes cinnamon, cloves and orange peel. Mmmmm... Looking forward to this one!