Beer Around Town

I’ve been behind on writing about my homebrewing adventures. Two… well three new beers are in progress and thought I should jot down some info on them. First up is a beer I’ve dubbed “The Woodsman” and will hopefully live up to the rugged imagery that may spring to mind unless your only experience with the woods was watching The Great Outdoors. Loosely the idea behind this beer was to mate Hair of the Dog Adam and Schlenkerla Rauchbier and birth a beast of a winter warmer. For the base malts I went 50/50 with pale and rauch malt, although I might go heavier on the rauch next time, we’ll see after this gets bottled. The color ended up lighter then Adam, so next time I may step up the specialty malts a bit, maybe a bit more black malt. The original gravity was 1.094, and a hearty dosage of Scottish Ale yeast and a weeks worth of time the yeast devoured this down to 1.012, yah, a whopping 11% ABV. The 1.012 final gravity was lower then I was hoping for, I mashed high to hope to leave the beer sweeter with more body, oh well.

Primary is now finished on this beer and initial tastes are very positive… meaning this doesn’t taste like rocket fuel. I’ll probably let this sit in the carboys another week or two before bottling. I’m going to age half on American oak that I’ve had aging in Port for the last 5 years and leave the other half as is.

Also, since there was still quite a bit of sugar left after collecting the volume on the main beer, I decided to continue to collect an extra gallon and produce a small beer of sorts. The Woodsman’s second runnings could have probably made a decent 4% small beer, light and smokey, sessionable but interesting, but that wasn’t going to happen. Instead I might be in possession of the world most hideous beer… or most interesting? The extra gallon was left to ambient ferment in the cool Oregon City air. I know this isn’t the best time of year to do this stuff, waiting till winter would have probably been better.  I woke up early the next morning, brought the jug inside and dropped a airlock on it… three days later a good krausen had formed. I’m not sure if I’m going to  name this beer yet, maybe I have to wait to see how it develops to find a name that suits it. As it sits right now “Grandpa” might fit best as it sort of smells like an old person. No not medicinal like an old-folks home, just more musty and leathery.  I’ll keep checking in on this as it goes. What ever happens I have it far from my other beers as reduce any chance of contamination.

Last up on the homebrew front was a beer brewed yesterday with my Friends Josh and Sean. They have built a new electric 15 gallon system using none other then steam and magic to bring the mash up to it’s different rests. I’m not going to try to explain it since I don’t understand it all, but if it had a steam-whistle and wheels you could probably drag race this thing. Using the collected yeast from The Woodsman we brewed up a Wee Heavy/Scotch ale in record time. We slightly undershot our starting gravity hitting 1.086 instead of 1.090, but no biggie there, this should still be up in the 8-9% range.

Now to just get all this beer into bottles, the house is quickly filling up with carboys and I don’t really have room for them. I guess even if I did have room I’d just fill it up with more beer, so thanks small house!