Over the Thanksgiving weekend I tried out my first custom beer recipe – a spiced Christmas ale.  It is not any type of established style, but pulled from a number of recipes.  We’ll see how it turns out.

Here’s what I used:

• Grains (soaked 30 min. at about 160 F):
  • 1 lb. Crystal 40L
  • 1 lb. Cara Amber
• Extracts/Sugars (added just before the boil):
  • 2 qt (6 lb.) Pale Malt Liquid Extract
  • 0.5 qt (1.5 lb.) Wheat Liquid Extract
  • 1lb. Brown Sugar
  • 1lb. Light Candy Sugar
• Hops:
  • 1 2/3 oz. Fuggles (Bittering – added just after the boil)
  • 1 2/3 oz. Kent Goldings (Finishing -  added 45 minutes into the 60 minute boil)
• Spices (added 45 minutes into the boil):
  • 3 Cinnamon Sticks
  • 0.5 oz. Nutmeg
  • 0.25 oz. Allspice
  • 0.25 oz. Cloves
  • 1 oz. Benedictine
• Yeast:
  • White Labs Burton Ale Yeast

I’m not sure if it was the spices, but the original gravity was really high, coming in at 1.078.  This may end up being a strong beer.  Also, it took almost 24 hours for the fermentation to start.  Hopefully it will all turn out OK.

Unfortunately, since I started so late I won’t be able to condition the beer in a secondary fermenter, and if I bottle in 2 weeks, the bottles will be less than 2 weeks old on Christmas.  I’ll have to remember to start earlier next year – maybe around Halloween.

Micro-Post 3

So my idea of posting everyday isn’t quite working out – I’ll have to see where my natural schedule of micro-posting ends up.

I just wanted to let everyone know that I bottled my second annual pumpkin ale yesterday, and put a bit into my mini-draft system for instant gratification.  I made it a little lighter than normal, and I may have gone too light.  But I think it’s pretty clean tasting, so hopefully the bottles will age well.

In the hopper now is a blue-moon style white ale that I may have ruined.  More on that as the story progresses.

Boing Boing posted an article about a pub inside a living tree in South Africa.  This would be the perfect place to drink a beer brewed to the sounds of Jethro Tull.

Over at The Mad Fermentationist, Mike Tonsmeire provides instructions on how he created Bourbon and Cognac infused barleywines.  I found that pretty interesting, since I also put liquor in the two barleywines I made.  I am not sure why, but I think it really affected the flavor, even though I only included 1 ounce per 5 gallon batch.  The first one, bottled on December 1, 2007, included an ounce of Benedictine.  The second, bottled on June 22, 2008, included an ounce of LaChouffe’s Coffee Liqueur.  Each tastes a little different.

There is one difference between how I did this and how Mike did it.  It looks like he added the liquor during fermentation, while I added this at the end of the boil, like finishing hops.  I’m not sure if this would make a difference, though I guess the alcohol would have been burned off.