My passion for brewing is not so intense that I can find new things to write about with any respectable frequency. But my interest in brewing is part of a larger passion for being a minor homesteading demi-goddess, and I can write about that weekly at least. Maybe daily.

In order to make this topic expansion and have it make sense, I’ve changed the blog title and moved it. From now on, you can find me and my rambling at The Suburban Homestead. I hope to see you there.

My footsies on the beach in Avon-by-the-Sea

This past weekend was a busy one for me. The start of our summer season always is! We started with breakfast on the beach (muffins and coffee from Cravings in Allenhurst). This summer Saturday morning ritual is one my kids have been looking forward to for weeks, and it’s finally warm enough in the morning to enjoy it.

After a nice breakfast and my weekly guitar lesson, we headed out to pick Strawberries at Battleview Orchards in Freehold. This is another summer ritual that my kids enjoy–not because they like the hot sun and dirt in their shoes, but because it means Mom is going to make homemade jam, and they love my jam. We picked 12 pounds of strawberries, which was enough for 2 batched of strawberry jam and one batch of strawberry lemon marmelade. I’ll post in a few days about the process of making and canning jam–it basically uses the same skills as brewing, and I figure if you’re cool enough to be interested in brewing, you’ll also probably get a kick out of making your own jams.

This weekend also included making a ganache covered Chocolate Stout birthday cake for my sister and father, who share a birthday. I found the recipe in King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking, and it requires a cup of stout. I used the Bad JuJu Cream Stout, and the cake was awesone. I mean awesome as in really tasty as well as inspiring awe for how heavy and dense it was. I don’t think anyone managed to finish a whole slice. It was good enough to justify the heavy tummies, though. On Monday I made the Western donuts form the same cookbook for breakfast, which was a wonderful treat.

Another treat this weekend was tasting the first bottles of the Chardonnay my father made. He’s been making wine while I’ve been making beer. The Chard was pretty good, on the dry side. The consensus was that I needed to age a bit longer, though I enjoyed it as it was. It sure beat his first effort, a red which had to age 30 years before it was drinkable!

We have opened the County Cork Stout, which came out perfectly. The brew is refreshing, a little bitter, and has a hint of root beer in it. It reminds me of the stouts I had in Dublin, which was exactly what I was hoping for when I brewed it. I think this one is my favorite that I have made to date. It is the perfect brew to have with grilled burgers (well, boca burgers for me, anyway).

In the next few days I’ll begin the Honey Apple Ale. I had been waiting until I had enough empty bottles on hand to bottle it, and after this weekend I am ready for launch.

Here’s a quick run down of where things stand with my various brewing projects:

Bab JuJu Cream Stout: this brew is aging well, and is my favorite so far.

Beerstache Irish Red (the brew formerly known as Ginger’s Beer): this brew is ready to drink. Bill and I opened one bottle weeks ago and tried it. It’s on the bitter side, and I think it needed to age a little more. Half of this brew was consumed by my sister and her MBA classmates at a homebrew tasting contest. Regrettably, we did not win. But I did make some kick-fanny labels, though they did not survive when the bottles were immersed in a bucket of ice.

Irish Stout: This brew was hastily bottled on April 18. It will be ready to taste Saturday.

Soda: I purchased some root beer extract, and we will give it a try this weekend. I think I’m going to use bread yeast, since I know my bread yeast is alive.

Up Next: I have ready and waiting a brew kit for Apple Honey Ale, which sounded like a nice beer to have on hand for the summer. If it rains this weekend (which would keep me from working in the yard), I’ll start this up.

In other news: I have registered to ride in the Coast the Coast MS Bike ride, which is two weeks away. I’m going to ride for 50 miles with my sister Shannon (see above) in our mother’s name. If anyone would like to make a donation to our team, you can read about the cause here and make a donation to our team here.

Possible label design for the Bad JuJu. The brew was a bit stronger than expected.

The Bad JuJu is still young, so the first few sips had a decidedly yeasty taste and the head was a bit wanting. But the flavor was outstandingly creamy. It tasted like a Guinness (the stuff they serve in pubs in Ireland, not the stuff in a bottle here) with the aftertaste of whipped cream. Heavenly.

But I think I may have miscalculated the alcohol volume by quite a bit. This brew feels more like it’s in the 10% range–or maybe the new eating plan I’m following is too restrictive on the calories! The pint went straight to my head.

Any typos found here shoud be proof that I am BUI (blogging under the influence).

So today I decided to try again–sort of. I mixed up a 1/2 batch of cream-ish soda ( I mixed almond, rose, and vanilla extract with a sugar base) and added the full amount of yeast. With all that yeast I expect some results in a day or so.  I also added a little bit of yeast and water to one of the remaining Han Soda bottle to see if I could get ‘er going again.

In other news, the Irish Stout is fermenting away nicely now. It looks like 1 hour on the counter was enough time to get the liquid yeast going, thank goodness. And so far, there’s no sign of explosion.

The various fermentable sugars for this brew, including pale malt powder, a bag of white stuff, and liquid stout malt.

The first difference was the variety of fermentable sugars. The previous brews I have made each had one type of liquid malt. This brew included 4 sugars.

Then there were the hops. The bittering hops were the familiar green pellets that look like rabbit food, but the finishing hops were Irish Moss. Also, there were no cheesecloth socks to hold the hops (which makes hauling them out at the end easy), so I used a funnel with a built in filter to remove the sediment. This took a good deal of extra time, though I hope it will be worth it.

The final new surprise was the liquid yeast. My other brews featured powdered yeast, so using liquid is new. I hope it works well–I was supposed to take it out of the fridge 3-6 hours before using, but I didn’t read the label closely until about an hour before I would be adding it. Hopefully just an hour at room temperature will be enough. If not, I win 5 gallons of fail.

The brew has just been placed in the fermenter, which itself is in the bathtub. (The last stout I brewed exploded wonderfully, though I don’t hope to repeat that experience.) I took a reading with the hydrometer which indicated a potential alcohol content of 5%. This time I used a was pencil to note the start date and potential alcohol reading on the fermenter lid. I feel quite pleased with myself for coming up with that little trick!

Tomorrow we will finally get to try the soda (I say finally not because a week is too long for me to wait, but a week of “Mommy, can we try it NOOOOOOWWWW???” is too much for me to handle.)

To brew soda, you need soda extract and champagne yeast (which we got at The Brewer’s Apprentice) sugar, water, a gallon jug, and sterilized gallon jug and soda bottles. I used four bottles from 1 litler flavored seltzer. You can use plastic or glass…but plastic is much less likely to explode in a violent shower of glass chunks. So I went with plastic.

Making soda is a simple as soaking the yeast in warm water, dissolving the sugar in more water, then shaking the whole lot together with syrup and enough water to make a gallon. Then you put the soda in the bottles and leave them on the counter until they feel as firm as store soda (3-4 days). After that, stick them in the fridge for another few days to let the yeast settle out, then drink.

There will be a little alcohol in the soda, but it’s less than 1% by volume. You’ll flip out on the sugar long before you feel even a little buzzed from the alcohol.

Last night we bottled up the Ginger’s Ale. I thought it tasted a bitter too bitter, but Bill said it’s fine and I must be coming down with something.

The final reading on the hydrometer was 1%. Since the pre-ferment reading was 7%, that would make this brew about 6% alcohol, give or take.

Bill and I used some of the free 22 oz. bottles we were given at The Brewer’s Apprentice. Some other customer had used the bottles once, then didn’t feel like cleaning them out, so they brought them back to the store and left them there. It took a little time soaking in sterilizing solution to clean the sediment out, but it was worth the effort to get two cases of bottles for free.

The next brew will be an Irish Stout, which I’m told is comparable to Murphy’s. Oh please, let it be.

The place is pretty good. I got my bottles, and I also picked up a brush to clean the carboy, soda extra and champagne yeast for making homebrew cola, a wall mounted bottle opener with “Homebrew” emblazoned on it, and a kit for making Irish Stout, which they say is akin to Murphy’s. They also gave me two cases of used 22oz. bottles that need a little scrubbing, but are otherwise fine.

In addition to beer, wine, and soda brewing supplies, they also offer onsite brewing by the batch, which could be a good way for someone who doesn’t want to repaint their bathroom ceiling to learn the art of the brew.

We also bottled the Bad JuJu Cream Stout today. It appears to have survivied exploding, and it smells just like a stout should. I tasted it after we added the priming sugar and lactose, and it tasted like proper beer candy. In two weeks or so, we’ll crack the first bottle. (Jay, mark your calendar.)

Boiling Red Beer Wort

The process for the Irish red beer is the same as the other beer’s we’ve tried. This time I stuck with the big fermentation bucket because I fear another bathroom explosion would mar the near-perfect stout splatter already gracing the ceiling. This beer will be fermenting in a quiet corner in the kitchen (yes, I do have a quiet corner somewhere), because we want to be able to scrub out the bathtub when we bottle the cream stout Wednesday.

The potential alcohol reading for this brew was 7%. I know you don’t really care, but I’m putting it here so that I don’t have to write it down anywhere else. I can be lazy that way.

Oh–the First Born Nut Brown Ale just keeps getting better as it ages. We had some tonight with chili quesadillas, and it’s now far better than any store bought beer I’ve ever had. It sure is inspiring me to keep brewing.

It started well. I got out the ingredients and took a photo for you all.

Cream Stout ingredients

What you see there is the dark malt extract, two kinds of hops, lactose, steeping grains, and muslin bags. What you do not see there is yeast. I did not notice this until we were past the point of no return, with the steeping grains having a good soak in the near-boiling pot of water.

There was a little panic. But then I remembered that I had just gotten the kit for making Irish Red Ale, so we (myself, Bill, and Jay) decided to take a risk and use the red ale yeast for the Stout. It might even be the same yeast that should have been in that photo to the left. It’s ale yeast, and using any ale yeast should still work here. I hope.

We decided to use the carboy that came with the beer kit. It’s a 5 gallon carboy…we’re making 5 gallons of beer. After filling it up and jamming in the airlock, I was a little worried that there wasn’t much head space at the top of the carboy for bubbles, but that’s what the airlock is for, right???? Instinct is a powerful force, and I ignored mine this time foolishly.

The constellation Stout Splatter now seen on my bathroom ceiling.

Just in case, we put it in the bathtub again. The second day, it exploded a little bit. The airlock hit the ceiling, and beer foam spewed out of the carboy like some terribly sad stout volcano. There is beer bits splattered all over the inside of the shower.

The good news is that despite the mess, most of the beer stayed in the carboy. We lost at most 2 quarts. I am hoping that the brief time without an airlock will not have allowed anything nasty to get into the beer and that it will still be drinkable. It is still fermenting away happily, though now the airlock is filled with beer rather than water.

I don’t think we’ll be using that carboy for beer again. I wanted to use it so that I could get soe cool photos of beer as it ferments, and instead I earned a cautionary tale for you all and photos that look like this:

Beer foaming up through the airlock and into the bathtub.

Brew and learn. As long as we can still drink it, it’s all good. And if we can’t, then at least I’ll have learned how to get beer stains off the ceiling.

This coming weekend I’ll be brewing Irish red ale with my sister, which will hopefully be far less dramatic.