#10 - If it's not Scottish, it's CRAP!

The empty beer bottles are piling up, so it's time to lay up a new batch. I was wanting a to try for a Wee Heavy, but I'm not sure whether this recipe qualifies or not.  We'll see when it's done!

This recipe is based on a Scottish Ale recipe in The Brewmaster's Bible. That recipe called for a darker malt grain, but I had to go with the darkest I could get from my supply store. It still came out with a good color, so I have high hopes for it!

Scottish Ale
10 oz dark crystal malt 90°
3 lb crushed pale ale malt
4.5 lb dry light malt extract
2 oz 4% AA Fuggles hops
Wyeast scottish ale liquid yeast packet

Mash the grains in 1 gallon of 150° water for 45 minutes. Sparge with cold water to get 4 gallons of wort. Boil the wort for 90 minutes, adding 1 3/4 oz hops at 60 minutes to end, and the other 1/4 oz at 15 minutes to the end.

Add 1 more gallon of cold water during cooling. Pitch yeast when wort has cooled to 75°.

A beer is a just a beer, but a stout is more like a meal!

Yesterday (with some trepidation) I chilled and tasted the stout that I recently made. Part of the trepidation is the "recently" part -- the recipe I followed calls for a single ferment stage of two weeks, and then two weeks bottle conditioning.  I really doubted that a stout would come out with such a short rack.  The other part of the trepidation was that when I took the specific gravity reading at bottling time, I ended up with a net expected alcohol content of only 3%.  If true, what I ended up with was definitely not going to be "stout". But I bullied on, bottled it up, and let it sit.

When I opened the bottle, I was greeted with a good stout aroma, which gave me hope.  I poured it into a pint glass and LO! A lovely stout head formed, and stuck around for a pretty good time for a non-nitrogen pour. My heart lifted as I took a sip -- and was rewarded with a lovely flavor.  Feeling much better about it, I sat down to enjoy the glass.  By the end, I decided that I must have made a mistake on one of the readings, because there was definitely more than 3% alcohol in that glass. Joy!

The recipe is "Ms Bessy's Moo-Moo Milk Stout" from The Brewmaster's Bible, a marvelous book with a load of information for the aspiring brewer and a ton of beer recipes for every style of beer. The name is an intentionally silly reference to the addition of lactose to the brew to give it a creamy mouth feel. I think it also does a nice job of arresting some of the sharp roastiness (that coffee-like flavor) of many stouts. The only variation I made to the recipe was because I couldn't get unhopped dark malt extract, so I used hopped extract and reduced the additional hops down to 1 oz.

So now my beverage fridge is filled with the brown ale from last month plus this stout.  In another two weeks there will be a new batch of cider to chill as well. It's going to get a bit crowded in there!

Adventures in Brewing - Hard Apple Cider

My first attempt at a hard apple cider was actually a surprising success; the only issue I had with it was that it ended up a bit drier than I would have preferred. We're about out of that batch, so today I set up a new batch with a couple of changes -- one intentional and the other not.  The intentional change was to add 4oz of lactose, which is a non-fermenting sugar used in porters and stouts to add residual sweetness.  The unintentional change was in the juice: before I had three gallons of unfiltered apple cider. This time of year it's harder to get that, so instead I used half filtered apple juice (not from concentrate) and half unfiltered natural apple juice (partially from concentrate).  We'll see how it turns out.

1.5 gallons filtered apple juice
1.5 gallons unfiltered apple juice
1.5 c sugar
1.5 c light brown sugar
4 oz lactose
1 11g packet Nottingham brewing yeast, started in 1c water for 15 min

Dissolv the sugars in 1/2 gallon of juice and bring to a boil, then pour into the rest of the juice. When it cools, add the yeast and seal it up to ferment.

In two weeks I'll bottle it, and in another couple of weeks we'll see how it turned out, and report back!