galactagogue oatmeal milk stout

Way back on Father's Day in June, Eric brewed this oatmeal milk stout and infused it with herbs that promote lactation - fennel, anise, coriander, fenugreek. Honestly, there are hardly enough herbs in it to counteract the anti-lactation properties of the alcohol. Wah-wah sorry mamas! It makes for a good beer name though, right? Plus it's super tasty!

homebrew #7: sleepytime wit

We started a batch of wit beer that features honey and chamomile!!  I'm pretty excited about its potential!  Check out our recipe over on Hopville.

For my own purposes of record keeping, here's what kinds of beers we've made thus far:
#7 Sleepytime Wit
#6 Barn Owl Saison
#5 Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Stout
#4 Ginger Snap Brown Ale
#3 Walter Cronkite IPA
#2 Christmas Dinner Cranberry Porter
#1 Lost Wisdom Pale Ale

barn owl saison

This marks our 6th homebrew! Yes, I know, we are very leisurely homebrewers. Most people who are into homebrewing seem to have a new batch of beer going at all times. C'est la vie, we do what we want.  An avid homebrewing friend of ours gave us the recipe for this saison (complete with all his notes in the margins). For those who are unfamiliar with this style of beer, it tends to be a little tarter and a little spicier than your average pale ale.  The old timey version was a really low alcohol beer  brewed in the winter for summer farm workers to stay hydrated (think 3% abv compared to bud light which is 4% abv). Boring! Modern home, craft, and mirco brewers aim for saisons with a higher alcohol level (5 - 8% abv).  Cheers to that!

ipa yeastcake bread

We transferred our IPA to a secondary fermenter and I decided to try using the leftover yeast cake to make some bread. I just added some flour and water to the yeastcake to make it into a sponge (I added some bread yeast too), which I fermented until I felt like making bread. It doesn't have much of a hop aroma because this was before dry-hopping, but it is sooo bitter! ...and tasty, especially with marg and honey.

I also saved the hops for future experiments. Got any good recipes for reusing homebrew hops?

homebrew #3 - india pale ale

We started brewing our third homebrew on Friday--an IPA (Dogfish Head 60 min. IPA clone)--perfect for summer! Conveniently, we can use our 16 quart pressure canner pot (aluminum) to boil the wort.

Interesting comparison of stainless steel and aluminum pots: here.

Update: we're calling it the Walter Cronkite IPA.

dandelion rhubarb mead

Once again, the dandelions are saying hello. Modern U.S. society has a funny hatred for dandelions. The truth of the matter is that for a long long time people across the world have found dandelions valuable for their early spring nutrition and for their medicinal values. In fact, European immigrants purposefully brought dandelion seeds to North America. So quit spraying your lawns with herbicides and start being thankful!

This time last year, Eric and I started fermenting dandelion rhubarb mead. It took about a month of going on walks and picking dandelions to gather enough flower petals. It's kind of a process, but its a good excuse to take a walk! It is good to pick right now because people haven't gotten fanatic about their lawns yet. Later in the season you have to pay more attention to who sprays herbicides and who doesn't.

We painstakingly removed all the green sepals from the yellow petals. Some recipes say you should, some say it's not necessary. Next time, we'll try using the whole flower heads, because this was WAY too much work--although it was a nice meditative kind of work (see middle photo below).

Ingredients:
3 qt. rhubarb stalks, chopped and frozen
~1 qt. dandelion flower petals, frozen
2.5 lb. honey

Bring 2 qt water up to almost boiling (180F). Stir in honey and maintain temperature at 160-180F for a while to pasteurize. Higher temperatures are fine, but you will lose honey flavor. Pour the hot honey-water over the rhubarb and dandelion petals in a primary fermentation bucket. You can use an airlock fit in the bucket lid, or do what we did and just cover the bucket with a towel--there should be enough CO2 being belched out that baddies can't get in. After a few weeks, strain out the solids and rack into a secondary fermenter with airlock. Rack it again and bottle when it's done bubbling.

The finished product! It has a nice pink color. Our last rhubarb mead was yellow, strangely--maybe the rhubarb wasn't ripe? At first tasting, the mead was a bit harsh and I would say it needed some aging. But after sitting out for an hour or so, it got pretty good. Maybe this is similar to the effect of decanting wine?

applejack (freeze distillation) and sparkling cider

About eight months ago, we started fermenting two one-gallon batches of hard apple cider.

Batch #1 - Applejack via freeze distillation
I should start out by saying that home distillation of alcohol is illegal in many countries, unless you plan on using it for fuel. Freeze distillation, also known as fractional freezing, has long been used as a way to increase alcohol content of beverages like ice beer (e.g. Icehouse) and making applejack out of hard apple cider. You can't achieve the same alcohol concentration that you can with evaporative distillation, but the freezing method is cheaper and easier. Freeze distillation removes the water from the alcohols (ethanol, methanol, and fusel alcohols) instead of evaporating and condensing out the desired ethanol from everything else, as in conventional distillation. Methanol and fusel alcohols are generally considered undesirable (and hangover-causing) but they are present in undistilled beer and wine, and contribute to the flavor profile of ales and ciders. But at least with freeze distillation you can't accidentally end up condensing high concentrations of fusel alcohols by evaporating at the wrong temperature. I'm intrigued by some of the homemade evaporation stills I've seen, but I'm still intimidated by the need to keep track of the heads and tails of the process.

So, for this first batch, I added 1/2 cup of sugar every month or so until fermentation no longer re-started after adding sugar. In other words, until it was so alcoholic, yeast could no longer survive. This tolerance depends on the strain of yeast, but ranges from 5% for some beer and baking yeasts, to 23% for some "turbo yeast" strains. I forget what type of yeast I pitched--probably wine or champagne yeast, so I'd guess this batch maxed out at around 12-15% abv. When winter came around I put this batch in a 5-gal on the back porch. Repetitive freeze-thaw cycles are supposed to help with separating water from alcohol. I don't think it actually ever got cold enough to freeze though. Luckily, our freezer was able to get it cold enough, so this spring, I froze it in batches, and let the concentrated applejack strain out, as shown in this video:

And so, one gallon of hard apple cider became one half gallon of applejack. I'd estimate a final alcohol content of 20-30% for the applejack. Although I tried lighting it on fire, it didn't burn, but I did accidentally spill some of the fuel in my mouth, and it does taste really good! I even made a digestif of sorts, by soaking a "cinnamon" stick and cloves in a pint of the applejack. It tastes really good too!

Batch #2 - Sparkling Cider

For the other batch, I wanted to emulate ciders like Strongbow or Woodchuck. After the initial cup of sugar, I didn't add any more until we bottled it. We added priming sugar like you would for beer, aiming for 3 volumes of CO₂. The verdict: it is good, but needs some aging to mellow out the flavor.

On a side note, I am super-intrigued by this inexpensive force carbonation method: capturing CO2 from fermentation in a mylar balloon and then force carbonating a mini-keg using a homemade PVC pump!

"lost wisdom" pale ale

This was is our first attempt at making beer. We followed this recipe, but dry-hopped with some chinook hops too. I think it turned out pretty good. It has a little bit of a banana ester thing going on. Half the fun of brewing beer is coming up with a name (and label if you are more ambitious) for your beer. We decided to call our beer and mead making endeavors "Cute Owl Friend" after a drawing I made once. We named this beer "Lost Wisdom" because after watching a friend make the same recipe, we forgot the directions when it came time for us to make it. Also, here are some other things named "Lost Wisdom": link, link and link.