Brew Day!! - Chocolate Hazelnut Porter

I've been wanting for a while to brew a "desert" beer with chocolate or something equally delicious. After some searching for recipes, I settled on one from my Brewing Classic Styles book (Zainasheff, Palmer).

Here's the basic recipe:

11.4 lbs. American 2-row
1.5 lbs. Munich malt
1.0 lbs. Crystal 40L
1.0 lbs. Crystal 80L
.75 lbs. Chocolate malt
.50 lbs. Black Patent malt

.5 lbs. Cocoa Powder (unsweetened); 0 min.
.5 oz. Hazelnut Extract (to taste); at bottling

1.25 oz U.S. Goldings 4.5% AA, 60 min.
0.80 oz Willamette 5% AA, 30 min.
0.80 oz Willamette 5% AA, 15 min.

Wyeast 1056 - American Ale

So there you have it. Here's some photos of the brew day.

I do not yet have my own grain mill. I borrow one from my dad (a fellow homebrewer). It's a Barley Crusher brand mill. As you can see, the 16+ pounds of crushed grain fills about 3/4 of the 7.5 gallon bucket.

I took a closeup of the grain to show the quality of the crush. As you can see, the husks are mostly intact. Additionally, the inside of the grain is crushed into a variety of sizes. There's some powder, some medium sized chunks, some smaller chunks.

Here's the inside of my mash-tun.

I'm heating the infusion water to mash in.

7 gallons of sweet wort!

I had hoped to document this entire brew-day. Unfortunately, my memory crapped out and only the above pictures were not corrupted on the memory card.

All in all, the brew session went pretty smoothly. It was a wet, rainy evening and it was very relaxing.

1st Competition!

I recently decided to dive into the realm of homebrew competitions. My initial desire was to get some un-biased feedback on my beers, so that I can improve them. So, I took the plunge and entered three different beers into a local competition, the Puget Sound Pro-Am. I dropped off my entries last week, and the competition took place this weekend.

As I was driving home from dropping off my entries... a strange thing began to happen. Grandiose dreams of homebrewing fame began to fill my head, uninvited. Before I knew it, I was secretly hoping that a couple of my beers might be good enough to place in the competition.

Well, today I received my preliminary results via e-mail. And boy, was it a reality check... We all like to romanticize our own beers, and overlook or outright accept any flaws they might have. Apparently, I think too highly of my own beers! Here's the results I got (remember the scores are out of a possible 50 points):

So I do not have any of the detailed score-sheets yet (those will arrive in the mail). Needless to say, I'm really interested to see the judges' comments.

In other happenings, I brewed up a 6-gallon batch of Chocolate Hazelnut Porter yesterday! Generally it went well, I hope to post about it sometime tomorrow.

Bottling Process

Well, today I bottled a 6 gallon batch of IPA. This was my 14th batch, 9th All-Grain. It was the recipe from Brewing Classic Styles (a great book, by the way!):

OG: 1.063

FG: 1.009

IBU: 64

Color: 7 SRM

Grain:

American 2-row 12.75 lb.

Crystal 20L 1.0 lb.

Munich Malt .75 lb.

Crystal 40L .25 lb.

Hops:

Columbus 13.2% AA 1 oz. 60 min.

Centennial 9.1% AA 1 oz. 10 min.

Cascade 5.4% AA 1 oz. 5 min.

Amarillo 9.1% AA 1 oz. 0 min.

Yeast:

Wyeast 1056 American Ale (Repitch 2nd generation)

Ferment @ 67 degrees F

Mash @ 149 degrees F for 90 min.

I decided to finally take some photos of my bottling process today. The basic goals of my bottling day are twofold: (1) Sanitation and (2) Avoiding Oxidation.

My process is this:

1. Rinse bottles immediately after use (this is not done bottling day, but rather after I pour the beer).

2. Run the dishwasher to clean it.

3. Sanitize the dishwasher after washing using a spray-bottle filled with Star-San (a no-rinse sanitizer).

4. Put bottles in the dishwasher and run it.

a. Make sure to cover the hole for the drying-agent with duct-tape since this can coat the bottles and reduce head retention.

5. While dishwasher is running, measure priming sugar.

a. I use table (cane) sugar, and use John Palmer's nomograph (here) to calculate the amount I need.

6. Boil priming sugar in a quart of water for 5 minutes.

7. Sanitize Priming bucket (and lid) with Star-San.

8. Pour priming sugar mixture (boiling hot) into Priming bucket & cover with lid.

9. Once the dishwasher is finished, I transfer the beer from the Fermenter to the Priming Bucket.

a. Make sure to avoid oxidation by running the siphon hose all the way to the bottom of the Priming Bucket, and submerging the end of the hose under the beer as soon as possible. This minimizes splashing.

10. Stir the primed beer with a sanitized spoon.

11. Bottle it up!

That's it in a nutshell. Here's some photographs:

The Primary Fermenter

My StarSan: a bucket and spray bottle!

The all-powerful nomograph.

Boiling my sugar.

Transferring from the primary fermenter to the bottling bucket.

The bottling station :)

Let It Begin

Greetings...

Welcome to Stupid Brewing! I have long wanted to blog about my homebrewing experiences, and share what I've learned along the way. I find homebrewing to be a relaxing hobby, one that can be as simple or complex as you want it to be.

Although I have no experience blogging, I write quite a bit in my line of work, and enjoy it very much. I hope to write about techniques, brewing science, product reviews, and my experiences along the way.

Mostly... I am doing this for my own enjoyment, but I hope that if you find your way here it will be informative as well.

Cheers,

Stupid Brewer