quick brew #7 update

That Nottingham yeast is vigorous stuff indeed. It has not blown the lid off my bucket but it keeps popping the top of the airlock off and foam is coming out. There is 10 litres of dead space too!

Brew day #7 and a couple of beers.

I spent today brewing my Beggars Belief IPA. The recipe got modified slightly giving me a slightly higher IBU.
I managed to hit my OG of 1.062 perfectly. I did lose three litres of wort so I have 20 litres fermenting (I hope).
One mistake I made was with my yeast. I forgot to hydrate it and only remembered as I was transferring into the fermenter. I grabbed two cups and poured warm water from the tap in and in went the yeast for about 30 minutes. I did not sanitise. It should be fine though. The wort looks pretty dark so it will be less like Sierra Nevada or Galway hooker and more like The franciscan Well's Purgatory which is pretty dark.

Beggars Belief Pale Ale

Size: 23.00 L

Calories: 207.9 kcal per 12.0 fl oz

Original Gravity: 1.062 (1.045 - 1.060)

Terminal Gravity: 1.016 (1.010 - 1.015)

Color: 25.71 (9.85 - 27.58)

Alcohol: 6.14% (4.5% - 6.2%)

Bitterness: 48.6 (30.0 - 45.0)

Ingredients:

3000 g Dry Light Extract

500 g Dry Wheat

250 g Maris Otter Pale Ale Malt

500 g Crystal Malt

30 g Fuggle (4.1%) - added during boil, boiled 60 min

20 g First Gold (6.2%) - added during boil, boiled 60 min

15 g Fuggle (4.1%) - added during boil, boiled 30 min

15 g First Gold (6.2%) - added during boil, boiled 30 min

25 g Saaz (2.1%) - added during boil, boiled 15 min

24 g Cascade (Morgans finishing hops) (5.5%) - added during boil, boiled 15 min

1 ea Whirlfloc Tablets (Irish moss) - added during boil, boiled 15 min

25 g East Kent Goldings (4.0%) - added dry to secondary fermenter

1.0 ea Danstar 3767 Nottingham

It was a lovely day today and in between my 60 min and 30 min hop additions I went out to the garden for lunch. I had some frozen chicken satay skewers. Yum!










My drink of choice was this Greene King Strong Suffolk Vintage ale.
This was pretty good, not great but a decent beer. It would not be a patch on the likes of Fullers vintage ale.





sight - Dark ruby, almost black. Large tan head.
smell - fruitcake and some smoke?
taste - Malt, perhaps some oak and a little smoke hiding, Metallic.
sweet - 2/5
bitter - 3/5








Later I tried this Broughtons Old jock ale. As my wife said, it smells and tastes like an old jock. I would not go that far myself but I was not too impressed. It was ok but not my type of beer.



sight - Dark brown/ruby with white head.
smell - Sweet fruit, prunes?
taste - Prune juice, malt, hops, slight roast?
sweet - 2/5
bitter - 3/5

Two beers and a new brew recipe to start

Im sitting here drinking a Duvel from a lovely Duvel glass. I can not say Duvel is a beer I love, its ok but a little odd to me. Recently I picked up a few box sets at an off license in Mullingar. I got them both for the beer and for the glasses. Two of them were out of date by over a year and I got one good Tripel which my wife drank (other 3 were off) and all of the Leute went down the drain. Its a pity but I mainly wanted the glasses, though the Leute glass is a weird one with no stand, instead it sits in a block of wood. I could have obviously brought them back for a refund but I know they have no sets in stock and also, its such a great little place and probably does not get enough people buying its stock of craft beer so I will throw them a little business in the hope they get new stock in.
Anyway on to the beer.




First up is Broughton Border Gold.
I have never had a beer from this brewer before, though I have another one in my collection to try in the coming week.
It appears to be a Scottish Blonde beer.

I have to say I did enjoy it, even though blonde is not a stlye I am too excited about. It was a well balanced beer and my wife also liked it.


sight - Gold, Lager like but not very clear.
smell - Sweet, slight malt.
taste - Honey, hop aroma.
sweet - 3/5
bitter - 3/5




Next up is my last Ayinger beer the Ayinger Ur Weisse. Most of them have been wheat beers of some description. This one is a Dunkelweisse though not as dark as others of this style I have had before.

All of the Ayingers have been very carbonated and produced a massive head and this was no exception. It was a tasty beer, though not my favourite wheat beer by any means.
I would certainly drink more of it though. It was nice and spicy.

sight - Cloudy, dark amber, large fluffy white head.
smell - Typical wheat, spicy, banana.
taste - malty, slightly light in body?
sweet - 2/5
bitter - 2/5

So thats it for the beer reviews. tomorrow I start brewing another beer. This time I am brewing an IPA and again I did up the recipe myself in beer tools pro.
I am also planning a strawberry beer like Fruli for my wife and these two will be my last extract brews before going All Grain. I might get both brews done tomorrow, or I can do the second one on Monday.

Beggars Belief Pale Ale

10-A American Pale Ale

Author: Reuben (Saruman)

Size: 23.00 L

Efficiency: 75.0%

Attenuation: 75.0%

Calories: 207.9 kcal per 12.0 fl oz

Original Gravity: 1.062 (1.045 - 1.060)

|==========================#=====|

Terminal Gravity: 1.016 (1.010 - 1.015)

|=========================#======|

Color: 25.71 (9.85 - 27.58)

|======================#=========|

Alcohol: 6.14% (4.5% - 6.2%)

|=======================#========|

Bitterness: 45.8 (30.0 - 45.0)

|========================#=======|

Ingredients:

3000 g Dry Light Extract

500 g Dry Wheat

250 g Maris Otter Pale Ale Malt

500 g Crystal Malt

30 g Fuggle (4.1%) - added during boil, boiled 60 min

20 g First Gold (6.2%) - added during boil, boiled 60 min

15 g Fuggle (4.1%) - added during boil, boiled 30 min

15 g First Gold (6.2%) - added during boil, boiled 30 min

25 g Saaz (2.1%) - added during boil, boiled 15 min

25 g Cascade (7.6%) - added during boil, boiled 5 min

25 g East Kent Goldings (4.0%) - added dry to secondary fermenter

1.0 ea Danstar 3767 Nottingham

Results generated by BeerTools Pro 1.5.3

Chocoholic Stout tasting & some Ayinger beers

First up I decided to try my Chocoholic Stout yesterday. It had been 7 days since I bottled so it was time for a try. I will not open any more for another week.

This was lovely, as good if not better than I expected. If I have one criticism its that it felt just the tiniest bit thin. Perhaps another week conditioning will fill it out a little and if not it is still a lovely chocolate stout. The head stayed with the beer the whole way down to the bottom. Not as thick as the picture but it stayed with the beer. The real test will be next week when I will try one alongside a bottle of Youngs double chocolate stout and then the ultimate test will be at the next ICB meet up.

sight - Black with large tan head.
smell - Strong chocolate and slight roast coffee.
taste - As above but with a background sweetness as well as a nice bitterness.
sweet - 2/5
bitter - 3/5

Tonight I tried some of the beers I picked up at the old stand. Last night, before my stout I let my wife have a Trippel as I figured she would like it and she did. I only briefly tasted it but will try it properly some other time. I opted for a Leute Bokbier and while the smell was very fruity and interesting, the taste was awful. I am 100% certain the beer was off, it was like drinking orange juice that is out of date. In fact the beer was over a year out of date, not a bad thing if its bottle conditioned but I do not think this was and it did not age well. I poured them down the drain but at least I got the weird glass with no bottom that sits in the wooden base. Not very stable but interesting all the same.

Anyway tonight I decided to try some of the other beers I picked up. It turns out these are all out of date also, most dating back to 2008 but thankfuly this had no negative impact on any of them. I stuck with the one brewery tonight and that was Ayinger.





I started off with the Ayinger Weizenbock.
It was pretty much like a sweet wheat beer but with a little more of everything. Its a pretty big beer, even thoufh it came in a small 330ml bottle unlike most of the other Ayingers I bought. I enjoyed this but it was a little too sweet for my taste.

• sight - Large head, dirty amber.
  
• smell - wheat, banana, yesat, fruity (peach or apricot?).
  
• taste - Typical wheat beer, Banana, sweet, spicy.
  
• sweet - 3/5
  
• bitter - 1/5

Next up is the Ayinger Jahrhundert. I had no idea what to expect, no idea if Jahrhundert was the name of the beer or the style. The bottle is all German. It appears to be a Lager of some description but not a typical stlye of Lager. It reminded me more of a Blonde beer actually.
Just one note, I asked my wife to smell it and she said it reminded her of Oatmeal? Never having smelled oatmeal I can not confirm or deny if this is true or not.

• sight - Mostly clear but a little cloudy. Golden colour.
  
• smell - Lemon, honey.
  
• taste - Definate sweetness, tastes like honey. There is also a balance of bitterness
  
• sweet - 2/5
  
• bitter - 3/5

Last up for tonight was Ayinger Bräu Weisse. This is more of a typic German wheat beer. I liked it but I have had better. My wife (I agree) thought it just a little thin but that did not detract very mugh from it.

• sight - Cloudy, yellow, big white head
  
• smell - wheat, banana, yeast, clove.
  
• taste - Typical wheat beer, spicy and banana and yeasty
  
• sweet - 2/5
  
• bitter - 2/5

Well thats it for tonight. I have more Ayinger beers to try tomorrow as well as a bunch of others. I am fairly impressed so far with their beers.

A beer sanctuary in Mullingar!

In February I wrote about An old mans off license I found in Mullingar called The old stand. I had been disappointed that the adjoining pub of the same name did not have any craft beer. Well having gone there yesterday I can tell you I was very wrong.

I myself had a Ruddles county. This was a tasty English Bitter. I had no camera or notebook but it was a well balanced bitter with some fruit flavours, like Orange for instance.
This is one Greene King beer I would try again. My only criticism is the clear glass. My wife smelled it and she said it smelled skunked but it was fine to me and I think she was mistaking the hops for skunkiness as she says the same about Boston Lager which is very hoppy.
Anyway after dinner in an Italian restaurant I went back to the off license and bought all the beer in the picture. Most of which was available in the pub by the way.
I wrote a review on the pub here.

Lovibonds part deux - Henley Dark

I had been looking forward to the Henley Dark. Jeff put this in my order of the three Gold reserves. I was looking forward to it because I love dark beers. I love stouts and porters. There are many porters out there that are more like a stout but this one is what I imagine a real porter to be like but then again the line between the two is still very hazy.

• sight - Dark Amber, Large fluffy head.
  
• smell - Chocolate!! Slight hint of smoke.
  
• taste - Wonderful, roast coffee, burnt toffee, background smoke, bitter.
  
• sweet - 2/5
  
• bitter - 4/5

I absolutely loved this beer, It was fantastic. There are no less than 7 types of grain in this and one of them is hand smoked using local Beech wood from the Chilterns.
I loved the bitterness (IBU of 40) in this beer also and even though I finished it about 25 minutes ago I can still taste it.
When I opened this it was straight from the fridge and was too cold tough still a shock to the senses. As it warmed up, more of its character became known.
My only criticism is one I have of many beers. The bottle is only 330ml and not the 500ml bottle I love to drink from. Its only a minor gripe but to me one worth griping about.
Since Lovibonds is not available in Ireland, this will be the only one I get to try for a while. With luck I will get to try some more in August when I am in London. At the very least I will try get the Amber.

Lovibonds Gold Reserve

Firstly can I just say thank you to the Lovibonds brewer Jeff. They do not ordinarily ship to Ireland but on contacting Jeff he said he would ship it for me. He also threw in a few goodies. I got a box with Henley Dark and Henley Gold. Perhaps best of all was the beautiful Lovibonds glass. Blogging about beer has some advantages sometimes. I did not use the Lovibonds glass for the Gold reserve though, I used large wine glasses instead.



Anyway on to the Gold Reserve. Only 500 bottles of this were made and I ordered 3 of them. One dissapeared last night. I will open the second in September with my brother in law when he comes in from the states. The third I will let age for a while.

I had no idea what to expect here to be honest. It is called a wheat wine and this is a pretty new style. It is the only one I have heard of on this side of the Atlantic but I know from research there are a good few examples in the US.
I did a quick Cyclops last night while watching the final two episodes of 24.

• sight - Clear, Dark amber.
  
• smell - Sweet honey, very faint banana and clove, yeast.
  
• taste - Sweet, fruity, alcohol, reminds me of plum sake.
  
• sweet - 4/5
  
• bitter - 1/5

Unfortunatly (or maybe fortunatly) my wife did not like it, so I did the heroic thing and forced myself to drink hers too. Thankfuly this was good news for me. I am surprised that I liked this, I have never tasted anything quite like it and I am not too gone on sweet beer or wine. This just worked. It is obviously not a beer you can drink a lot of, apart from the style you simply can not because there were only 500 made. Perhaps another version will come out next year and they could make yearly limited batches like Fullers Vintage Ale.

First outing with Chimay

I have often meant to try Chimay beers but two things put me off. Size of the bottle and price. OK so I have bought far more expensive beers than this but mostly they come in either 500ml or 750ml bottles where as Chimay comes in little 330ml bottles and cost about €3 each. Yesterday though I popped in to the off license by the Silver Granite in Palmerstown on the way to my parents house. The last time I was in there they had a few interesting beers including a Christmas ale from Whychwood.
Yesterday though they had very little apart from Chimay (blue and red). So I grabbed one of each as well as two Black Sheep Ales. I also grabbed a 12 year old Redbreast Whiskey as its only €33 as opposed to €45 everywhere else I see it.



First up I had the stronger of the two at 9%. Chimay blue was carbonated very nicely and poured into a large wine glass as it is the closest I had to the stlye. It was a very dark brown and there were dark bits floating at the bottom. It reminded me of homebrew wine actually with the exception of the head.

The aroma had an obvious fruitiness which to me reminded me of plum. There was also a nice alcoholic nose and this was very evident while drinking.

• sight - Dark brown, floaty bits in the bottom, foamy.
  
• smell - Something sweet like plum and definate alcohol on the nose. Yeast
  
• taste - A little sweet but not overly so. Alcohol lingers and warms.
  
• sweet - 3/5
  
• bitter - 1/5

I quite enjoyed this actually, more so than I thought I would. I am not sure about getting it again, perhaps one bottle every now and again but I just hate buying beer in 330ml bottles. I hope Brewdog take note.



Next up was the red label. This one is only 7% though that is still a pretty impressive ABV.
I am going to be honest here, I could not tell much of a difference between this and the blue in most respects.
Sure the blue tasted a little better, had the nice alcohol feeling. The thing is, the red is supposed to be a different style and I just did not get what the difference was apart from the fact it was less impressive than the blue. It reminds me of trying to tell the difference between a stout and a porter.
There was less fruit to the red and an explosive carbonation which had me putting the bottle into the glass while it foamed out of the top before I could pour it. I lost a bit of beer which I wiped up before the photo. After so much foam I found there was little head or carbonation left. Might have just got a shake while in the car.

• sight - Dark brown/red, floaty bits in the bottom, foamy.
  
• smell - Slightly fruity, Plum and a hint of banana? Yeasty
  
• taste - A little sweet and fruity, no bitterness, slightly metallic?
  
• sweet - 2/5
  
• bitter - 1/5

Out of the two I think you can guess that the Blue was my favourite, that is not to say I did not enjoy the Red though. I would certainly try both again and I will have to try a bottle of the White. I have never seen these in the larger 750ml bottles, I wonder do they represent better value?

Announcing Beggars Bridge Brewery and the first brew: Chocoholic Stout

Since my first extract brew is conditioning at the moment, I thought I would put a little more effort into my beer presentation. I have not named my previous beers and the only labelling I did was with a hand held label printer.
I called my stout, Chocoholic Stout.
This time I have made up a brewery name and named my chocolate stout.
So look out world, the Beggars Bridge Brewery has arrived. The name comes from the town in which I live, Rochfortbridge in Westmeath (Ireland). The original name of the town was Beggars Bridge. I believe it was so called as it was a crossing point during the famine for people from the west to the richer east coast and Dublin. It also may have been called that because it (the bridge) was designed by a beggar. I think it was a toll bridge too.
Anyway I have printed up some labels for my beer so I will have a more professional look at the next ICB meet up next month.

Chocolate stout is now bottled (brew #6)

Just a quick update on the status of the stout. I bottled it earlier. I only got 26 bottles. With the exception of one 750ml bottle (possibly 660ml) they are all the usual 500ml bottles.
There was enough left over in my bottling bucket to to fill a pint glass two thirds of the way up. I did not bother trying to bottle this as it was the leftovers. Instead I took a few mouthfuls and it tastes lovely. It is more a foreign extra or possibly an Imperial stout as it is sweeter than a standard Dry Irish stout. There is a lot of chocolate in this. There were some bits floating around in my sample but if there is any in the rest of the bottles then conditioning should force most of it to the bottom. It does not detract from the taste though.

Final gravity was 1.024, though it may be more like 1.023 but I will settle on 1.024. Since the original was 1.074 giving it an ABV of 6.6% which is a little lower than I was going for but close enough.

Should be an interesting sweet chocolate stout.

On a slightly different note, I have one bottle of drinkable homebrew left and then that is all the beer I have. I do have 2 bottles of each of my last three which I will be bringing to the ICB meet-up tomorrow night.

Once all the beer is gone, I will have none until the stout is ready. I will see if I can lose a little weight and drink Whiskey instead.

3 monts with my Paella

I decided to cook a Paella last night. The comment from my wife was it was the best Paella she has ever had? Not bad, I thought I had made better and I certainly have put more effort into others before. For one thing I had no Spanish rice left so Basmati had to do. I did not use chicken this time, just a pack of frozen seafood mix from Tesco. Anyway it turned out real nice and I think the reason is that I used plenty of Spanish smoked Pimiento Paprika which I have had for a while and put it in the odd Chilli but this was a much better use for it.

Anyway I opened a bottle of 3 monts which is the last of the beers I got last week. It comes in a 750ml corked bottle.

• sight - Very light in colour, clear crisp and immensly foamy.
  
• smell - Something sweet and definate alcohol on the nose.
  
• taste - A little sweet and juicy, some Cider qualities. Champaign feel. Alcohol lingers.
  
• sweet - 2/5
  
• bitter - 1/5

This was a very interesting beer. At first I was not too sure of it as it is not a style I am familiar with and not something I could see myself drinking but I warmed to it, or perhaps the alcohol made me warm to it. I certainly grew to like it. I do not think I would go out of my way to have it again as I prefer different stlyes to this but as something to have every now and again I certainly would enjoy it.

Just a quick update on the Chocolate Stout

I racked my stout to my secondary (glass carboy) today. I will either leave it for 4 days and bottle on Tuesday (off work) or leave it till next weekend. My reason for the secondary is simply to clear out a lot of the sediment such as cocoa etc floating around.
At my last gravity reading the other day, I was at between 1.022 and 1.024. It may drop a little in secondary but its not too far off my expected FG and since my SG was a few points higher, it evens it out almost. The taste of my sample was a very chocolaty dry an bitter stout but with an obvious sweetness mixed in. It tasted pretty good for an unfinished beer.

Finally got some neew beers to try

This is a beer I have wanted to try for a while and I finally picked some up along with the rest I will be mentioning this week. I got them at the Carry Out off license by the Ashtown train station in Dublin. The Wells Banana bread beer is like a tin of Ronseal. It does exactly what it says on the tin. In this case it delivers exactly what it says on the bottle. A beer that tastes like banana. Not the banana notes you get off a wheat beer (they do not have banana in them) but a full blown banana experience. In fact there is little to remind you that you are drinking a beer. It is like a banana drink with alcohol. It is pretty drinkable and my wife loved it of course but it is not something I would bother with myself. I was very dissapointed to read that as well as actual bananas they add banana flavourings to the beer. I would like to see a natural version of this with less banana and more bitterness.


I picked up a couple of Baltikas. This is the Baltika 6 Porter which I had with Al from Fuggled when I was over last month. I decided to give it another go. The one word I think sums this beer up perfectly is oily. This seems to be the Castrol GTX of beers. It is oily, coats everything it touches and the lack of carbonation enhances this feeling. It is pretty sweet and to be honest is not something I enjoyed too much.







Last night when I got home from work I started to cook a Chilli. I had stopped off at Tesco to do some shopping. While there I picked up 6 bottles of O' Haras stout and two Fullers honey Dew for my wife. I had no intention of drinking the O' Haras though as I had other things to try like this Masrtons Pedigree.
This is a typical English style ale, I enjoy these a lot. I am not going to say I did not enjoy this, the opposite is true but it was simply uninteresting. I could just about get a touch of oak from it and on reading the bottle I discovered it is oak aged. The only other Marstons I have had was Old Empire and I was not too impressed by that either. I did enjoy the old empire but it was very weak for an IPA. I wonder what this says for the rest of their range? Anyway I enjoyed the Pedigree and it is very drinkable, just like the Old Empire so perhaps this is the way they brew their beer? Session beers? This is worth drinking and I might get another some time.


After the Marstons and before I sat down to eat my Chilli i opened this bad boy up. To be honest I had no idea what this was. I knew it was brewed by Schneider & Sohn GmbH of which I have only had their Hopfen Weisse which I found a little sweet. This is called Aventinus and on the back it said it was a doppelbock so imagine my surprise when I poured it and caught the strong wheaty/banana aromas one would expect from a wheat beer. It turns out that this is a weizenbock. This was pretty sweet but not in a bad way and it was absolute magic. My wife liked it too as I expected she would.
The Aventinus pours like a cola, a very dark brown. I could see chunks of yeast pouring through the bottle and settling down at the bottom of my glass. This is a pretty strong beer at 8.2% but you do not feel it, not until it is gone. I am pretty happy that I got two of them and have one left to drink.


This is my second Baltika and since I had just finished a wheat I decided to stick with it so I had the Baltika 8. It is a perfectly respectable wheat beer that happens to be brewed in Russia. As you can see from the picture it is very carbonated. It took a few pours to get it in the glass and reminded me of my own wheat beer. It tastes a lot better than my own wheat beer though. I do not think this is as good as many German wheat beers I have had but it is certainly a very nice beer. At 5% it is not overly strong so you can drink a good many if you like. It was the cheapest beer I got at €2.19 so certainly worth buying as that makes it one of the cheapest wheat beers I have seen so it provides excellent value for money.

I have some other beers to try this weekend from the same store. I got two bottles of Youngs double chocolate stout. One I will be drinking and the other I will be keeping to compare to my own chocolate stout when that is ready in a few weeks.

Extract Brewing - my first attempt

My first five brews were made using modified kits where I either changed the yeast, changed the sugar for malt extract or even combined two different kit styles as well as add in flavour enhancing grains and hops but these were kit enhancing packs and I do not know what grains/hops were in them. There are three agreed upon levels of homebrew. Kit was the first. The next level is extract brewing and lastly is All Grain. Bank holiday Monday was the day I picked, It was a lot of fun and both thebeernut and Laura from aranbrew were brewing at the same time and we were updating Twitter (I signed up that morning) as we went along.

Extract brewing involves the use of grains and hops to create the wort. The sugar still comes from malt extract and is usually of the dry kind as opposed to the liquid kind you get in kits. There is a little extra equipment needed for Extract, the main one being a boiler or at least a very big pot. You can get away with using a smaller pot and adding water later but that is not advised as you really want to boil the full amount of wort you will be fermenting. In the picture above you can see my 5 gallon boiler which is an inexpensive plastic bucket with a kettle element in it, It also contains a hop strainer connected to the tap on the front.

The first thing you do once you have your recipe and have measured out your ingredients it to steep your grains. I used a large pot, put them in a large nylon muslin bag which I put in 3 litres of boiling water and put on the lid for 30 minutes. In the meantime I started about 15 litres of water heating away in my boiler. I was aiming for 18.93 litres of Wort so 15 litres in the boiler and 3 litres in the grain pot as well as an addition of about two litres of sparge water.



Once the 30 minutes were up I simply filled the kettle and boiled some water to sparge with. Sparging is simple pouring hot water through the grain bag to wash out as much of the good stuff as you can. More advanced home brewers and commercial brewers use a rotating sparging arm that does this but small scale like this, a kettle is fine. I filled the kettle twice for this. The grain bag is held in place in the pot by a pasta drainer.


Once I have as much grain liquer as I think I will get I add this into my boiler and bring it up to a boil. I then stir in my Dry malt extract and once the boul starts to break (foam has broken and moved to the sides) I start my timer for a standard 60 minute boil and start my first hop addition. The hop additions at different times during the 60 minutes will be part of your recipe. In my case I put together the recipe myself based on the ingredients I had and what I thought would make a good stout. See the recipe from a few days ago. At 15 minutes to go put in your Wort chiller if you have one to sterilise it in the boiling wort.

After the 60 minutes are up and the boiler is switched off, start your wort chiller which should bring the temperuature of the wort down to 25c in about 20 minutes. You want this to happen as quickly as possible to avoid infection.

Once you are ready, transfer your wort into your fermenting bucket or carboy. In my case I used the tap on the front and had the bucket beneath it. Now here is were my only problem came during this brew. The boiler is designed to put the hops in loose as there is a hop strainer inside it. What you are supposed to do is create a whirlpool in the boiler and then let it settle for 15 minutes and the hops should settle on the bottom. Of course I was a little impatient and only gave it a few minutes but its also possible that I had so many hops that it covered my hop strainer. In the end I had to sanitise a bug brewing padel and keep pushing the hops out of the way. I had not accounted for the ammount of wastage at the bottom so I only ended up with about 16 litres of Wort, maybe a little more. It was just under 4 UK gallons. It took about 45 minutes to transfer the wort. Next time I think I will use a muslin bag for my largest hop addition at the beginning and leave the smaller ammounts free.
Anyway once transferred I shook my yeast vial and poured it in, I used liquid yeast which is usually better and easier to use but a lot more expensive. After putting on my lid and airlock I shook the bucket a little but not too much as it got plenty of oxygen in the transfer. 24 hours later I had a nice bubbling airlock.

So lets hope no nasty infections get in and that it will ferment down to the final gravity I want. This will be a strong stout, about 7% if it does.

For more detailed instructions on extract brewing then go to the Irish Craft Brewers website and look at these instructions.

The Beer Nuts Cherry got popped

I met up with The Beer Nut on Saturday along with Pam and Michael from Connecticut. They were visiting Dublin and had made contact with thebeernut on twitter. Pam is a beer rep and sells a lot of beers including O' Haras which she had never tried until she arrived here.

I had a bottle of Primator Wheat (did not survive the trip) and a bottle of Velkyals Limelight for thebeernut from VelkyAl in Prague and I got a bottle of his first (virgin) brew and the reason for the name of Cherry Pop as there are no cherries in it.

I have to say that I thought this was an excellent beer. It was dark, I could only see about half a millemeter of light at the very bottom of the glass when I held it up to the light.
There was a lovely aroma of roast coffee and a hint of chocolate thanks to the chocolate malt. In classic stout style it was not carbonated very much and it was just about what you would expect.
It was very tasty indeed as a beer and as homebrew it was fantastic stuff.
My wife is not a stout/porter fan but I gave her some and she thought it was sweet which I did not get. She also tried it alongside my BitterBock and she prefferred the bitterbock for some reason which to me is far more malty and sweet. I love the roasted quality of Cherry Pop so for me I would rather drink it than my own.

It was a simple recipe he used and its amazing how effective it was. That is the difference in kit brewing and extract brewing. Extract can achieve much better results. All grain is more precise again but time consuming and can easily take 8 hours where as I can be done inless than 3 using extract.
I better go get started.

Plans for Brew # 6 A slightly chocolate stout?

I purchased Beer tools Pro and spent the morning playing around with a recipe for my stout after adding all my ingredients to my inventory I started my recipe and it ended up as below. I am not sure what it will taste like until I drink it of course as I am not familiar enough with Beer tools to take a guess but I am hoping it will be a nice stout with some chocolate and roast coffee, a little malty and a little bitter.

I would love it to taste like O'Haras but I doubt that will happen. I will probably start brewing after lunch. This will be my first pure extract brew.

Chocolate Stout

13-A Dry Stout

Author: Reuben (Saruman)

Size: 18.93 L

Efficiency: 75.0%

Attenuation: 75.0%

Calories: 233.04 kcal per 12.0 fl oz

Original Gravity: 1.070 (1.036 - 1.050)

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Terminal Gravity: 1.017 (1.007 - 1.011)

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Color: 56.72 (49.25 - 78.8)

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Alcohol: 6.89% (4.0% - 5.0%)

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Bitterness: 40.8 (30.0 - 45.0)

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Ingredients:

170.0 g Black Malt

400 g Chocolate Malt (pale)

270 g Crystal Malt

250 g Munich Malt

2500 g Dry Light

500 g Dry Dark

40.0 g East Kent Goldings (4.0%) - added during boil, boiled 60 min

25 g East Kent Goldings (4.0%) - added during boil, boiled 30 min

12 g Cascade (Morgans finishing hops) (5.5%) - added during boil, boiled 15 min

19 g Fuggle (4.1%) - added during boil, boiled 15 min

1 ea Whirlfloc Tablets (Irish moss) - added during boil, boiled 15 min

19 g Saaz (2.1%) - added during boil, boiled 5 min

114 g Cocoa Powder - added during boil, boiled 2 min

1.0 ea WYeast 1084 Irish Ale

Results generated by BeerTools Pro 1.5.3