So, I’ve finally got off my duff and brewed myself an IPA. I followed, but slightly tweaked, a recipe I found on TastyBrew in the vain of my belovedly favorite Bridgeport IPA. First, I converted it to extract and changed the hop bill a bit to get to my desired IBU mark of roughly 50. Here’s what I got:

• 7lb 8oz Pale LME
• 10oz Crystal 40L
• 1.25oz Chinook (60min)
• .75oz East Kent Goldings (though I substituted NZ Styrians due to availability) (15min)
• .75oz Cascade (15min)
• 1/4 tsp Irish Moss (15min)
• 1/4 tsp Yeast Nutrient (I believe this is what got me into trouble later) (15min)
• .5oz Crystal (these were loose leaf) (1min)
• .5oz Cascade (1min)
• .5oz East Kent Goldings (though I substituted Slovenian Styrians due to availability) (1min)
• .5oz Cascade (7-day Dry)
• Wyeast 1056

The trouble? Yet another blow out. I’ve had three now. Not that big of a deal. I always keep a jug of my sanitizing solution handy in case I need to drop a blow off tube in it. I had originally had issues with my fermentations taking ages to start, or feeling like they never quite finished – which is where the nutrient came in. But, I have a feeling it’s totally unnecessary to have at this point. Not sure if it’s the nutrient, the 1056 or something completely different which has been causing the blow outs.

This should be a fun one. Can’t wait for it to be done. I’ll transfer to secondary this weekend and bottle the weekend after that – should be done just in time for the July 4th weekend.

So, I’ve decided to go crazy and grow my own hops. I’ve already acquired a Galena and a Mt. Hood rhizome. All I need now are a couple of Cascades. Oh, yeah, and a trellis or two. I’ve been scouring the Internet, and have found little that I think would work for me. I saw a few mentions of using PVC pipe as the material, but I’ve yet to find any good detailed plans. So, I thought I’d throw some ideas of my own down onto paper. I was thinking of using 4in schedule 40 pipe for hopefully enough strength and secure it with larger sleeves set in buckets o’ concrete buried two feet down. Two large bolts, arranged vertically, passing through the sleeve and the vertical poles would secure the structure and hopefully give it enough rigidity. I wanted to do it that way, partly, so I could take it down easily in the winter, and also so i could upgrade the structure to wood at some point down the road. I’ll put eyebolts along the cross bar and attach the line with a lobster claw, so that I can unclasp the whole bine and bring it to the ground for harvest. I’m not sure what type of line to use yet, and so I need to do some further reading on what hops prefer to cling to. I’d read some folks use those ground screws used to chain a dog in the yard as an anchor for the lines, but I was thinking ground stakes would probably do the trick.

I don’t know, I’m sorta still in the discovery phase of this whole project. If you have had any experience, ideas or luck with hop trellises, please drop me a line. I’m stabbing this in the dark, otherwise.

As soon as I get going, I’ll be sure to post photos. The spring blizzards we’ve had this past week here in Denver have set me back a bit. More time to research, I guess.

I have pretty much decided that I need a new hobby. After all, who can be satisfied with photography, hiking, traveling, MINI Cooper worship and Playstation alone? Exactly! What a boring lifestyle I’ve been leading! So, a couple months ago, Julie and I somehow ended up buying a brewing kit. Actually, we were sold a brewing kit in a moment when neither of us was entirely sober. Nevermind, we allowed our gut to make the exciting decision for us. Brewing would be our kitchen’s new purpose!

Fortunately for Julie, it hasn’t quite been like that. All one needs is a few hours on a Saturday or Sunday in the kitchen to do the actual brewing and the rest of the fermentation and conditioning can happen tucked away out of sight in a closet or bathroom.

We’ve been working our way through the first batch – a concoction which I don’t believe came out exactly as planned. Our original instructions were a bit hazy and, as such, we’ve got a fairly sweet, fairly uncarbonated, light and brown brew which isn’t bad, it’s just not the thick porter we were going for. If we’d been shooting for a flat brown ale, we would have hit the mark dead on.

In doing loads of reading and online research, I think I’ve pretty much figured out where I went wrong, and with past mistakes in mind, I set out to make a second batch over the weekend. This time I used a recipe and purchased all the ingredients separately (as opposed to the kit we had last time) from our local home brew shop (a place full of, perhaps, the most knowledgeable stoners I’ve ever met). The recipe I pulled was a Black Butte Porter clone. (If you’ve never tried the Deschutes black gold, go out and grab a six pack – you won’t be let down.) I have no idea how it’ll work out, but early indications suggest I have the right color and sugar content to end up with something in the neighborhood.

As for mistakes this time? Well, I can say that I think I went wrong in a couple of places. For one, I had a hard time holding my mashing temperature at 158 oF on the stovetop. I fluctuated between 150 oF and 164 oF. I think, for the most part, it’ll be fine – but I’m not entirely sure what the temperature threshold is for steeping these grains. That being said, this is a partial mash recipe, so I don’t think I’ll be that short on sugars (7lbs total of dry and syrup extracts!).

But, the one thing I was a bit worried about was that I filled the fermenter (the bucket that the beer ferments in) with the boiled wort first, and then toped off with 1 gal of chilled tap water and the rest of the way with cold tap water from the sink hose. That seems to have placed all the hot wort at the bottom and all the cool water at the top. (The way I’d seen it in instructions was to add the cold water first, then ladle in the hot wort on top of it. My problem this time, though, was I had no clue what the volume of my wort was and I didn’t want to prefill the fermenter with too much cold water at the expense of reaching the bucket’s volume limit and leaving me with excess hot wort.)

So, I dipped in off the top and grabbed an 8oz sample of the wort to test gravity levels throughout the fermentation and found a starting gravity of 1.013 (which is close to what my FINAL gravity should be!).  So, that had me quite nervous. But, I couldn’t understand why. There’s tons of sugar in there, so there’s no way that my starting gravity could be that close to zero. Julie informed me that it’s most likely that all the good stuff ended up at the bottom and didn’t mix with the water at the top. That was kind of a “duh” moment for me, and I was thankful she had pointed that out – otherwise I would have spent the next hour scratching my head and trying to think of ways to salvage the beer.

But, what it does mean is that I have no idea what my true starting gravity was, and thusly will never know the alcohol content of the beer when it’s done doin its thing. But, it’s all about taste, feel and look (mostly taste). So, if I get even remotely close to the Black Butte style, I’ll consider myself exceptionally happy. And I shall celebrate with a pint or two.

Now’s the waiting part. The fermentation started this past Saturday night. Next Saturday, most likely, will be the bottling, and 2 weeks after that will ‘be the drinking. I’ll fill you in then on how it turns out!

Guy Purdy’s Recipe (found here):

Ingredients:

• 6 oz. chocolate malt
• 6 oz. black patent malt
• 8 oz. honey malt
• 8 oz. 10L crystal malt [ended up with 15L]
• 4 oz. toasted barley (buy it pre-toasted, or DIY @ 350 deg./10minutes) [no toasted barley on hand, so I subbed biscuit]
• 8 oz. malto-dextrin
• 6 lbs. Light malt extract syrup
• 1 lb. Light dry malt extract [I used subbed Pilsen Light dry extract]
• 1 1/2 oz. Galena hops (60 min. bittering)
• 1 oz. Cascade hops (1/2 hour bittering/finishing)
• 1 oz. Tettnanger hops (5 min. aroma)
• Wyeast #1338 European Ale yeast [I used, I believe, 1098 British Ale]
• 2 tsp. each Gypsum and Burton Water Salts (We have very soft H2O) [my water's hard, so I skipped the salts, but I did add Irish Moss for clarification]

Procedure:

Add salts, gypsum to 1 1/2 gal. H2O. Steep grains for 1/2 hour @ 158 deg. Sparge with 1/2 gal. 170 deg. H2O, and strain out any loose grain. Mix in extract and malto-dextrin, and top off with H2O to desired optimum level for your brew pot. Bring to a boil, and boil for 10 minutes before adding Galena hops. After 30 more min., add Cascade hops. Last 5 min. add Tettnanger hops. Cool wort with hops in it. Remove hops at pitching temp., and pitch yeast. Ferment to completion according to your desired method.