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When eating with some friends at a local establishment, Belly Shack, I had brought some of my American Red in a growler since it's a BYO. Belly Shack has communal seating, so being the friendly guy that I am, I shared some of my brew with our table-mates.

It turned out that one of our table mates was a famous local-Chicago food blogger, there to review the restaurant! She even mentioned my beer in her review! I quote:

"Sweet, spicy, addicting, it was a suggestion from our communal dining partners, who were also kind enough to offer us a sample of the house-brewed beer (a damn jug of it) they had BYOB’d. Their brew was a red ale (unnamed) and tasted to us like a darker, richer Leinenkugal’s Red. (I can’t recall the brewer’s name, but I won’t forget his beer blog name) Finally a communal seating situation that involves table sharing of home-brewed beer! The dark rich ale held up to the parade of flavors on our palate and happily filled us up. And as nice as it would be to hang at a communal table shared by home-brewers at Belly Shack again, I’ll be happy just to try the rest of the menu including the highly-acclaimed tostones with chimichurri sauce, the roasted squash and the belly hot dog with kimchi salsa and egg noodles. Communal beer or not, I’ll be back to belly up."

And the best thing is that she plugged the blog too! Do you know what that means? That means that now 3 people in total have looked at this site! Fun!

Check out Elizabites for all of the best eating around Chi-city.

Peanut Butter Ale

I knew that there would be a lot of sugars left in the grains after a big beer like the double IPA. I decided to borrow a page from the "party guile" book and threw in the crystallized malts that I had around, let it soak in 4 gallons of water for a little bit then ran it off.

I did a 60 minute boil with 1 ounce of Cascade (again, what I had on hand) for bittering. At 15 minutes I put in 6 ounces of Peter Pan Reduced Fat Creamy (guess what? - on hand) for the rest of the boil as well as 3/4 lb of lactose for a bit of sweetness.

When I racked to glass carboys (3 1-gallon) for fermentation I made sure to try to leave behind as much of the oils as possible. They mostly form at the top of the water. I also tried to leave the peanut particulate at the bottom. The idea here is that you want the taste, but the oils will destroy head retention, and still probably will.

I just tried one tonight after a week of aging and while not amazing, it's drinkable. I mixed a little bit with the sour raspberry for a PB&J type of beer as well. Good times. I'll report back on how it ends up with some more aging.

 

Peanut Butter Ale

Peanut Butter Ale and Sour Raspberry Blend (a.k.a. PB&J)

Double Valent-IPA

I made this recipe on Valentines day (no, I'm not a bad husband - at least not because of this - my wife was working that Sunday). I decided to make her this as a Valen-times present.

I'd had my eye on this recipe at HomeBrewTalk.com for a while:

Crosseyed PA (Double IPA)

Grains
14.75 lbs 2 Row (US)
1.00 lbs Munich
.25 lbs Crystal 20L

Adjuncts
1.00 lbs Corn Sugar added at boil start
Whirlfloc tablet added @ 15 min

Hops
2 oz Centennial (10% Alpha) @ 60 min
2 oz Chinook (13% Alpha) @ 60 min
1 oz Centennial (10% Alpha) @ 15 min
1 oz Galena (13% Alpha) @ 5 min
* 2 oz Galena (13% Alpha) Dry hopped for 7 days
All my hops were in pellet form

Yeast
1000mL starter of #WLP001 California Ale

I used 1 tbs of 5.2 Mash Stabilizer in my strike water

Mash in with 5 gallons of water at 167.1F and hold mash @ 155F for 90 minutes
Drain Mash Tun and sparge with 3.67 gallons of water @ 168F
Boil volume should be 6.50 gallons
Flame on and boil for 60 min to get a final volume of 5 gallons into primary.


I had a bunch of BMC drinkers, and "I don't like hoppy beer" drinkers destroy a keg of this in no time at a BBQ in my backyard. It destroyed them in return, with an ABV of about 9%

I had to sub Caramel 10L for the Crystal 20L because that's what I had. I also had to sub Nugget in place of the Galena in the 5 minute addition due to availability at the homebrew store.

I know that as grain bills get bigger, efficiency gets worse, but this was terrible. I got 4 gallons at 1.090, which is 80% of the 5 gallons at 1.090 that the recipe calls for. I'm assuming that's at an assumed 70% efficiency. I haven't done my own efficiency calculations yet, but that's only because I know it's going to be abysmal.

I changed some things up for this brew. I tried a fly sparge with a hot liquor tank and a cPVC manifold I built. I also built a cPVC manifold for the mash tun and this was the maiden voyage. Those all surely affected things - possibly for good and for bad.

This beer is in secondary as I write this post. It'll be in the keg (and a few bottles so I can hand it out to my hophead friends) in a few weeks. I'll update about the outcome.

In the secondary with the Galena.  This was a plug instead of pellets and, as you'd expect, the particulate is larger.  That should make racking that much easier later on.

Update: I kegged this the other day.  It finished out at 1.018, which should give it an ABV of about 9.5%.

Raspberry Hard Lemonade

The Hard Lemonade recipe from HomeBrewTalk.com was used again, but this time I tried using frozen raspberry lemonade for a two gallon batch.

The end result was good, but in the end the raspberry was pretty much imperceptible unless I told people about it. The value-add over regular lemonade was minimal.

I'm going to skip the raspberry next time around. In fact, I think I'm going to skip the lemonade all around. The limeade just works so much better in this. With spring around the corner, I'd love to have 5 gallons on hand for the nice weather.

Did this one in a 2 gallon water jug again.

Hard Cider (5 gallons)

After the first run of hard cider, I wanted to make more. I stocked up on 5 1-gallon jugs of cider of the same variety in October, when it was cider season. This stuff made a great product before.

This time, I wanted to try to stay away from the sulfur-sanitation method. Rather than try to heat sanitize, I opted to rely on the sanitation from the company that bottled it. This product was pure apples, sanitized and bottled to be shelf stable.

I also wanted to add a kick to the end product. I included some additional fermentables to the must to boost the alcohol. The only heating that happened to any of the cider was to bring 1 gallon up to 120 degrees to help facilitate the dissolving of sugars.

This was the recipe I concocted:

Ingredients:
5 gallons of cider
2 sticks of Cinnamon
5 tsp yeast nutrient
2.5 tsp yeast energiser
1 lb honey
2 lbs light brown sugar
2 lbs table sugar

Directions:
Warm 1 gallon of cider to 120 degrees with the cinnamon sticks. Dissolve the sugars. Mix with the rest of the cider and add the dry ingredients.

At 4 weeks, fermentation was totally done, but the cider was still cloudy. There were no bubbles coming from the airlock so with enough time I could be sure it wasn't yeast in suspension. The only culprit left was pectin.

I hadn't used pectic enzyme when I started, but at the same time I didn't heat it to the point that would set the pectins. I tried adding pectic enzyme three different times after fermentation but I saw little improvement in clarity.

I ended up stabilizing, kegging, force-carbonating, and back-sweetening the cider with3 cans of frozen apple juice. The end result tastes good - a hint of sweetness, a hit of champagne, some dryness from the carbonation, but looks just as cloudy with the same color as the day it started.

The cloudiness is really just a cosmetic problem, but I disliked it to the point that I didn't give any away. We just finished it and at 10% ABV without the taste, this stuff is dangerous. Hope I can get the next batch to clear out.

Joe's Ancient Orange Mead (5 gallons)

I've been looking around at mead recipes and it seems that the "Orange Clove" mead that I'd been making is more conventionally called "Joe's Ancient Orange", after the guy who formulated the recipe (recipe for 1 gallon batch at HomeBrewTalk.com).

After the first 1 gallon batch, we were hooked on this stuff. My wife wanted to make a 5 gallon batch, so we scaled up, bought a 6 gallon carboy, and started it off. It's been in there about 2 months now.

At larger scales the previous timelines seem to fall apart, though. The fruit hasn't really started to fall at all and some clearing is happening, but there is still plenty of cloud. Looks like this will need at least another month and one or more rackings.

After 2 months

Dry Mint Mead

My dad's garden was coming to the end of the season when I was visiting. He had a ton of mint growing in there that he wasn't going to use. So, I grabbed about a handful of it to try to brew with. I thought a mead would be interesting to infuse with the flavor.

After thinking about it a bit, I decided to try a dry mead with this one (also, I hadn't made a dry mead yet - but had definitely made a sweet and semi-sweet)

The recipe is an adaptation of the dry mead recipe at Storm the Castle:

Dry Mead

• 3 lbs. of Honey
• 1 gallon of water
• 1 teaspoon of yeast nutrient
• 1 teaspoon of yeast energizer
• 1 packet of champagne yeast

I made a tea by simmering the water and dropping in the mint for about 5 minutes. I then used that with the rest of the ingredients for the mead.

After one racking, I bottled. The taste of the champagne yeast is dominant. This is a yeast that naturally delivers a significant flavor and dryness and that is dominant here. My wife said she can taste the mint, but I really kept focusing on the flavor that the yeast imparts.

In working with champagne yeast I've found that it's intense at first but it will back off with aging, letting other flavors come to the front. I'm optimistic that with a few months of aging this will turn into something subtle and good.