Brewsci.com

What is it the makes a stout a stout? In my opinion, it’s that dark rich color, the bitter taste that lingers like the first swallow of coffee in the morning or the darkness of cacao beans in great dark chocolate, and a well balanced finish that pulls it all together and makes you want to lean back in your chair and just say damn. But where does all this complexity come from? Just like any great beer, it’s all about the grains.

We threw caution to the wind with our last batch and went all grains. This time we moved from the subtlety of the pale ale to the dark complexity of our Zeke Choco Stout (named after our friend’s new lab puppy, who I still think should have been named Porter) We combined 5 different types of barley (11 pounds of grains) which produced our sweetest wort yet. I gotta say I can’t wait for primary fermentation to end to get another taste.

The best part of homebrewing: taking raw ingredients and turning them into one of the oldest beverages in the world that you can share with your friends. Second best thing, its cheap. I haven’t actually done the math, but my gut tells me it must be cheaper. Something about removing the middle man.

Last night we tasted our Mystery Recipe Pale Ale. It is still very young, having only been in the bottle 6 days, but it has that nice crisp carbonation sound when you pop the top,  which is what we were really checking on. Anyway, as expected from the low starting gravity (meaning not a lot of sugars to begin with) it feels a little on the watery side. It has a nice malty sent with a surprisingly strong hoppy aftertaste.

The point is we now 50 49 bottles of our very own beer.

As the sun set on another day of brewing in Oakland, CA, Joe and I had bottled 50 bottles of gold that we are calling our Mystery Recipe Pale Ale.  With our first attempt at all grain brewing appearing to have been a non-failure, our heads have inflated just a bit more .  All we can do now is wait two weeks for the yeast to do one last bit of work and carbonate each bottle.

According to our hydrometer readings, our pre-fermented wort had a OG of 1.036 and the beer we bottled yesterday a FG of 1.010.  What does this mean?  It means we have an alcohol content of roughly 3.2%, making it legal for sale in Utah!  Well, except for our utter lack of any sort of license.

I really should have gotten into cognitive science. I can only imagine walking into your PIs office and saying hey let’s study beer goggles. The crazy thing is this is only after one drink.

Weighing out our carefully blended mix of malted barley (or lets just mix them all together and let the Yeast sort it out)

Today is a pretty big day for us here. Despite our over inflated egos from our first batch of beer (made from a predesigned malt extract from our local brew shop) leading us to jump directly to all grain brewing (i.e chapter 19) and necessitating the acquisition of a lot of new equipment and the design of our own mash tun, we seem to have had success. We even overcame the disaster of a broken thermometer during our wort chilling (we are pretty sure the mercury contamination was kept to a minimum thanks to previous training). In a few hours, we will be bottling this first all grain batch. It’s a not quite so pale pale ale of our own design (i.e. we know what we were supposed to add, but that may not be what we added).