Getting Creative In Your Kitchen To Make Prepackaged Homebrew Kits Unique

Pre-packaged beer kits. At one point or another, most homebrewers dabble with using them. I daresay most of us got our start either using such kits or at one of those "brew your own" places.

Even after about six years or so of homebrewing, I still pick up kits every now and then. They're an easy way to get a good, reliable brew without having to build a recipe from scratch. Plus, they're a lot of fun to mess around with, as I've written about before when I talked about homebrew kitbashing. You start off with one beer, you get a little crazy with it after rooting around in the kitchen cabinets for a bit, and the next thing you know you have something you can't find on store shelves.

As I recently wrote on Homebrew Talk:

The great thing about experimenting with your homebrew kits is that getting started is easy. All you need is a homebrew kit of your choice and an idea. The best ideas begin with a specific beer and spring naturally from that beer, so begin there.
I find that entry-level recipe kits for classic styles are best, as they tend to be simple enough to offer a lot of room for creativity while still providing a good base beer. Those old standards may seem boring in today’s world of mango ginger double IPAs, but the point is that they provide an excellent canvas upon which to paint.

It's fun stuff! I've had a great time messing around with kits and turning them into something new and different. To see how, and to get some tips on how you can do the same, check out my newest article on Homebrew Talk, Experimenting With Ingredients In Your Kitchen To Make Prepackaged Kits Unique.

Cheers!

The Ugly Truth About Craft Beer

Craft beer in America is exploding. As of 2013, there were over 2,388 breweries that had or where operating in the United States, with literally hundreds more in the process of opening. (UPDATE: As of 2016, there are now over 4,000 breweries in the United States!)

Craft brewers are making tremendous strides in converting people to the idea that the pursuit of flavor is a damn good thing. While the big beers continue to lose market share, the craft segment is growing. It’s no longer unusual to see excellent craft beers on tap in even the most generic of chain restaurant or dive bars. The fact that I recently had Ommegang’s Fire & Blood at an Applebee’s, of all places, is astonishing.

But craft beer has a dirty little secret: most of it is mediocre at best.

Not only is most of it pretty mediocre, when it comes to the dozens of new breweries we see every week, a lot of it is actually pretty bad.

We don’t like to talk about this truth. We craft beer enthusiasts are focused on spreading the gospel of good beer. On swaying people away from tasteless mass-produced lagers. On finding the next great beer to celebrate.

There is nothing wrong with any of that, either. It’s all a part of what makes getting into better beer so much fun. It’s a joy to explore new beers and introduce others to beers they will come to love.

The fact is, though, most of those thousands of new breweries just aren’t very good. They're being launched by well meaning people who made homebrew their friends loved, and based on that decided they were ready to go pro. They're young guys who are only a few years removed from their Steel Reserve days ready to show the world how it’s done because they have some clever ideas, brewers who saw how Sam Caligione broke the rules and figure they can do it, too, and so on.

It’s not that easy, though. As a homebrewer myself (and a decidedly average one at that), I know the daydream. I know about fantasizing about beer ideas and everyone loving them and all that.

The reality of brewing is much different.

The rah rah rah! your friends give you should never be taken to heart. Just like writers should never take the praise of friends and family too seriously, neither should brewers. If you are not your own worst critic, you are doing something wrong.

Sadly, many of these drinkable-but-not-particularly-good homebrewers are now vying for shelf space in the pro world, making the chase for good new beers a crapshoot for the adventurous drinker.

If you are exploring craft beer and stick to better known names, it’s hard to go wrong. There is so much good beer out there it's impossible to keep up. The folks who have earned a reputation have done so by earning the trust of drinkers over the years. Few big name craft brewers don’t actually deserve their reputation – I’m looking at you, Rogue, and your overpraised, overpriced swill – but what about the thousands of new brewers we have seen spring up in the last five years or so?

There is a reason why few have ended up on your radar, and it ain’t marketing.

It’s because they are bland.

I hate to say it, because I LOVE supporting the new guy, the little guy, the local guy. I tried to champion them in my Year of Beer series for the Philadelphia Weekly. Thing is, most of the stuff I explore from the newer breweries just isn’t very good. It's drinkable, and that's it.

That's the truth.

And it’s a truth too few of us craft beer enthusiasts are talking about. We’re so intent on carrying the anti-big brewer flag we forget that being a cheerleader for craft is not enough. We have to demand that these new brewers make a quality product. These small breweries need to be good if the craft movement is going to grow beyond a mere niche (and rest assured, it's still a niche), and we need to be willing to call them out when they're producing mediocre product.

Because too many of them are.

PS -- if it seems like I pointedly avoided naming names in this post, it's true, I did. I don't want to trash anyone in particular, though I did have a number of newer craft breweries in mind when writing this.

HOMEBREWING: Looking fancy, Mr. Carboy!

When the wife doesn't want to see a carboy sitting around the house, try this...

KitBashing a Midwest Oatmeal Stout

Whether you’re a new brewer or an experienced brewer, “kitbashing” can be a fun and easy way to get wild and creative while brewing.

But first, let’s get this out of the way: For many, I’m using the term “kitbashing” incorrectly. Kitbashing is model aficionado lingo for taking pieces of existing models – tanks, planes, etc. – and building something new with them. To me, though, taking a beer kit and mixing and matching to create something new is in the same spirit, so let me coin it now for homebrewers.

The idea is simple. You take a beer kit from your local homebrew shop or a retailer like Midwest Supplies, you tweak it with other ingredients, adjustments, and your own creativity, and the end result is a new beer.

This is homebrew kitbashing! And this is a kit:

I LOVE to kitbash. I’ve done it since my earliest homebrew batches, and feel like it’s a big part of the fun of brewing. The great thing about it is, it’s EASY. You just have to be willing to have fun, take inspiration from beers you like, and to think outside the box.

Most recently, I tweaked two intro kits from Midwest. I generally find that basic, stripped down recipe kits make for great kitbashing fodder, because the recipes tend to be simple, clean, easy-to-brew, and wide open for creative possibilities. That means you have a great canvas to paint upon.

The first Midwest kit I played with was their oatmeal stout. Bashing up this kit into something new was easy. I’ve played with oatmeal stout kits in the past, using them as a base for my Old Kicker, a beer I look at as a session version of Founder’s Breakfast Stout. I took inspiration from a favorite beer, and it's what I suggest you do, too

For their oatmeal stout, my adjustments were easy. At flameout (the time when you stop the heat on your boil), add two packets of Swiss Miss milk chocolate mix.

Yep, that’s it. I’ve used baker’s chocolate powder and other variations on the theme in previous versions, but simple hot chocolate mix will do. The basic idea is, add enough chocolate mix, no matter the source, to make yourself 2-5 cups of hot cocoa, depending on strong you want the chocolate to be.

When you are ready to bottle – no less than three weeks later, in my opinion – brew roughly one cup (8 oz) of coffee. I have done the brewing many ways, from simply making a cup in our Keurig to cold-brewing a robust cup over the course of a few days. Results WILL vary depending on how you do it and your taste for coffee, so feel free to experiment (I’ll offer coffee advice in another post), but however you do it, make the coffee and add it at the same time you add your priming sugar or, if you keg, right to the keg.

And that’s it. That’s all you do. It's simple!

The result is a low-gravity, i.e. low alcohol, beer with rich, complex taste you won't expect from a simple, run-of-the-mill extract kit. I’ve done many variations on this over the years (including one with bourbon and oak chips, another with orange peel, and others), but the end result is almost always a pleasant, drinkable beer that emulates many of the flavors I want at a low, manageable ABV.

Consider doing this at home – and it works with almost ANY standard oatmeal stout. I first did it with my local homebrew shop’s recipes, and here applied it to Midwest’s. The results are similar.

The great thing is, kitbashing is fun and easy and CHEAP. I could make a list a mile long of kits I’ve “bashed” into something else. I took Midwest Supples’ Boundary Waters Wheat and added lemon peel, coriander, and sea salt to create a refreshing summer beer. I added some of my favorite hops to their Amber Ale and did it Dogfish Head 60 minute IPA style (additions staged over an hour) to make a hoppy amber. I’ve racked my local homebrew shop’s witbier onto cherries and raspberries and blackberries to create fruit beers. And so on

The ideas are endless. I have “bashed” countless kits and come up with many great beers. Some duds, sure, but that is part of experimenting. It’s part of the fun. So DO it!

For ideas and inspiration, I recommend Extreme Brewing by Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head fame, Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher, and your own creativity. These things + a disregard for the rules will result in awesome beers you have never tasted before!

HOMEBREWING: Summer weiss, one year later

In March 2011, I brewed a hefty summer weiss, a high(ish) gravity wheat beer fermented with Belgian yeast inspired by a recipe by Brewer's Apprentice. It was a beer intended for the summer months, something delicious and enjoyable for the warm weather, perfect for a fat slice of orange. And indeed, it was. I had brewed this beer two other times before to good results -- goes GREAT with an orange slice -- and looked forward to another batch.

Unfortunately, the beer was a dud. It never fully fermented out, leaving it overly thick and sweet, like a carbonated beer syrup. The coriander and orange peel I brewed it with were buried in all that sweetness. The result was that it was a beer I rarely opened because I just plain didn't like it.

That's why, some 15 months after I first brewed it, I still had a few bottles left. And amazingly, they were better more than a year after brewing than they were when fresh. Look how pretty it was:

This will not surprise some. One common theme you hear in homebrewing is, "Time heals all wounds."

That's not entirely true, of course. A bad beer is a bad beer. I've had lousy batches that stayed lousy. But the idea is, be PATIENT. Don't rush to judgement, and if you're not sure about your homebrew, don't drink it all right away.

With this beer, it was a much different beer than it was when fresh, so it's not as if it turned out the way I intended. It was far from the refreshing beer it was meant to be, but what it turned out to be was still good. It was an interesting, malty sipper with some compelling complexities from the Belgian yeast used.

Had I dumped this or given it away or rushed through drinking it just to be done with it, I'd never have known that the seeming dud I had would eventually turn out to be really good. And it's not the first time I brewed something that was ugly at first but that got tasty with time.

Homebrewers, be patient. Time doesn't actually heal ALL wounds, but it sure as hell heals a lot of them.

HOMEBREWING: Whiskey Barrel Imperial Stout

Last year, a friend and I put the whiskey barrel I bought to good use and brewed an imperial stout designed to be aged in said barrel. The recipe was, to say the least, intense. Easily the most expensive beer I have done to date, using a TON of specialty malts and in the end (thankfully) tasting comparable to Firestone Walker's Parabola, but here's the thing: It might also be the most delicious beer I've ever done. It's certainly the prettiest:

Looks wonderful, doesn't it? That's my co-brewer in the photo, and the beer is just a few weeks old (after a long primary and then secondary in the barrel). If you want the recipe, just ask. It's extract with specialty grains, so anyone can make it.

After the imperial stout, I did a honey porter in it, and the barrel currently contains a lambic, which will stay in the barrel for about a year or more. My plan is to blend small parts of that batch into future lambic and sour batches. (I currently have seven vessels with various sour beers, so the blending opportunities are endless!)

So here's the thing: Barrel-aging your beers is easy.

1) Buy a barrel! Just Google various phrases, there are TONS of sources. Spend between $70 and $120 (before shipping) for a 5-gallon barrel or you're getting ripped off.

2) Don't worry about cleaning it out. All that booze will keep it sterile. Just brew a big beer and put it in the barrel!

3) How long to age it? Keep the beer in it from two weeks to two years, depending on the beer. A weeks to two weeks is great for IPAs and Double IPAs, two to four weeks is ideal for traditional stouts and porters, four to eight weeks for barleywines and strong Belgian styles, and a month to two years for lambics.

4) Bottle, age, open, enjoy!

Yeah, seriously, it's that easy. I recommend bottling a few smaller sampler bottles so you can taste it over time -- barrel-aged beers tend to need some time to age into perfection, about six months to a year in my experience -- and going easy until it has aged into your taste. After that?

Cheers!

HOMEBREWING: The fate of my empty beer bottles

When you start homebrewing, empty beer bottles become a commodity not unlike rupees or pesos. You hoard them. After all, they will soon contain your precious gold. Here is what happens to my empty beer bottles:



That stuff on them is Oxiclean, and dammit, Billy Mays was right, this stuff is a miracle. Hot water + Oxyclean and in 15 minutes beer labels are floating at the top of the tub, fully intact, looking great, and your bottles get all sorts of clean.

The bad news is that homebrewing is a hobby that causes you to start keeping beer bottles. And no, significant others don't like that. The good news? Homebrewers are environmentally friendly!

So save your bottles, clean 'em, drink up, and be glad you're saving the world.

HOMEBREWING: How I brew beer (badly)

I can't claim to be a great homebrewer. I'm not. I love experimenting, I think I sometimes have good ideas, but aspects of my process suck and my technique is still very much that of a beginner. With about 16 batches and maybe 24 different beers (due to split batches) under my belt I think I'm getting better, and I do work to improve with every batch, but I'm certainly not immune to brewing up some garbage.

Anyway, for those interested, today I thought I'd show folks a bit about how I make beer at home. Beer is a lot like cooking a big stew. You boil some water, add ingredients, and in the end have something (hopefully) delicious. My process takes about 6-8 weeks between brewing and drinking, though many people do it in much less.

This little photo journey chronicles the making of a summer ale made in the summer of 2011. The recipe was not my own; it came courtesy of the Brewer's Apprentice.

First, I had to set up what they call "specialty grains." You steep them like a tea to provide some flavor and body to the beer. What you see below are the grains I'm about to add to a grain bag.

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The grains go into a "grain sock," a porous bag that lets water through but keeps solids in. You steep it for 30 minutes and have to maintain a steady temperature.

At this point you need to pour yourself a beer, because you can't make beer without drinking beer. So this is what I drank while I made this beer:

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That's a Quelque Chose from Unibroue. It's utterly unique, very elegant, and quite delicious.

But I digress. Once the grains have been steeped, they go into a big ass pot of water that is now about boiling. "Big ass pot" is a technical term; most people call it a brew pot:

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I steep the grains in a separate pot in order to save time, transferring the "tea" to the main pot as it begins to boil. At the time I first started to write this post I brewed on a stove top, on an electric stove. (I've since moved on to an outdoor burner not unlike a turkey fryer.) It takes a long time to bring several gallons of water up to a boil on my stovetop, so while the grains steep I'm also heating up the big pot. This cuts upwards of 30-45 minutes off my brew day.

Okay, next I add some malt extract. Extract comes in the form of a syrup and is essentially all the barley and such pre-prepared to the point that you just need to boil it. I'm an extract brewer, which means I don't mess with milling grain and all that other stuff that the hardcore homebrewers do. You get more control and the potential for a greater variety of beer if you do all grain, but you know what? Forget that! You can make great beer as an extract brewer; you can design hundreds of awesome beers; and your brew days will be hours shorter. Plus, I'm just not yet equipped to brew all grain, nor do I have the space. One day, but for now, in goes the extract.

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Now here's the good stuff. Beer has hops, a vine related to cannabis. (Really!) Hops are the 'spice' of beer. They contribute flavor -- you'd be surprised at how much different hops can change the taste of your beer -- and more importantly, they contribute bitterness to counteract all the sugars that make up the beer. Without hops, beer would be sickly sweet. Though you can use the actual buds from the hop plant, these days most hops come in the form of pellets, as you can see here:

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The first hops to go into the pot are the bittering hops. They need to be boiled for an hour to extract all the bitter goodness from them, so you dump, and stir stir stir stir for the next hour. Fun!

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The wort -- that's what the unfermented concoction you're making is called -- must boil for a while not just to extract the bitterness from the hops, but also to sterilize the malt. You don't want funky stuff in your beer. Because I currently brew on an electric stovetop (I hope to convert to an outdoor propane burner later this year), it's very difficult for me to keep several gallons at a rolling boil. (UPDATE: I no longer brew on a stove; I'm brewing on a propane burner now.) Because it's so hard to keep a boil on my stove, I keep the pot lid partially on. Only partially because you need to boil off some components of the wort. It's a chemical thing I won't bother to go into here:

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You boil this bad boy for an hour. In the last 15 minutes or so you usually add another dose of hops. These are "finishing hops," and they contribute flavor and aroma to your beer. If you've ever noticed the floral pine smell or citrus aroma of a hefty India Pale Ale (IPA), what you're smelling is the finishing hops. I also add the second half of my malt extract at this stage:

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So after about an hour, you're done cooking the slop that will become beer. Now you need to cool all that not-yet-beer down as fast as you can. I do a combo ice bath and wort chiller. Below I'll explain what a wort chiller is. For now, it looks sort of like this:

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All those tubes and cooper, that's the wort chiller. It goes into your wort. You pump cold water through the copper. As the water passes through the copper tubing, it picks up heat from the wort and draws it out. Cold water goes into the tubes, hot water comes out, cooling your wort the entire time. Pretty cool, and one of the best investments a homebrewer can make. Used to take me more than an hour to cool the wort down to the proper temperature. Now I can accomplish the same in 20 to 30 minutes -- and that's a good thing, because rapid cooling makes for a better, more stable product.

Once the not-quite-beer (wort) is cooled to the proper temperature, you move it to your fermentation vessel. This can be giant steel conical fermenters, large glass carboys, or in the case of many homebrewers, food grade plastic buckets. That's what I use:

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After that you do some science on your beer (while having another beer):

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That tube thingee filled with not-quite-beer (wort) and a thermometer looking thingee sticking out is a hydrometer. It measures the "gravity" of liquid, or in layman's terms, how much "stuff" is in your wort. You measure now to determine how much fermentable sugar is in your beer and to see if your wort is the appropriate gravity reading for the kind of beer you're brewing. When the beer is done fermenting, you take gravity readings again to see if it's truly done fermenting and how well it fermented. Using those two figures you can also calculate the alcohol content of your beer. (This one was a fairly light summer ale, and based on my records came in at about 4% ABV. A light beer, essentially.)

After that you shake the hell out of the wort to get oxygen into it -- yeast like oxygen in the same way I like tacos -- then you add your yeast. The yeast will eat up all the sugars, burping out carbon dioxide (the dodad on top of the bucket is an airlock, which lets the CO2 escape) and converting that liquid to alcohol. So this bad boy sits around your house for a few weeks:

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Sometimes those things can blow, but if you're careful it's not a danger. You come back a few weeks later for your bottling process, which results in a pretty row of freshly-bottled homebrew like so, roughly two cases per five-gallon batch:

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It will be swell. Usually. Sometimes.

And that's how Eric makes beer.

Narrowly avoided DISASTER

I've mentioned before that in addition to liking craft beer, I also brew my own.

Well, near disaster on that front this morning.

On Monday I brewed a cranberry witbier. (Sadly, probably too late for it to be ready for Christmas.)

For those who don't brew, the basics of the process go like this: you brew your unfermented beer, put it in a fermentation vessel, toss in your yeast, and it ferments. A week to several weeks later, you have beer. During the process it kicks out loads of carbon dioxide. The vessel will have an airlock or some other means by which the CO2 gases can escape. It generally looks like this (note the CO2 escaping via the tube and jar of water):



So I get up this morning and before I get in the shower my wife says, "You might want to check on your beer. It's hissing and the top of the bucket is bulging."

Oh shit. This could be bad.

And sure enough, the lid of this super-sturdy, mega-hardy, thick-as-hell bucket is bulging out at an incredible curve. Never saw anything like it. The fermentation had gotten so active overnight, it pushed gunk into the airlock and clogged it. All that CO2 being churned out by the fermentation had nowhere to go. It was now building up pressure inside the bucket.

Left unchecked, this is pretty much a bomb.

I only exaggerate a little when I say that. I ferment in buckets. With them, the lid will blow off and gunk will splash out as high as the ceiling. Messy as hell, but not dangerous unless your face is over the bucket when the lid blows off. However, many people ferment in glass carboys. If this happens with one of them, they can explode with tremendous force, force enough to push glass through sheetrock walls.

In my case, because of the location of my fermentation bucket, a blown lid would have ruined our living room furniture, possibly doused several bookcases in gunk, and scared our cat.

Oh, and it would really, really annoy my wife. Here is what a bucket disaster can look like. Avert your eyes if you hate a mess:



So yeah, I didn't want that. Problem is, there is already a lot of pressure built up inside this thing. I can't just pop off the airlock to relieve it without risking muck shooting out. I slide the bucket under a table to catch any spray, form a shield around it with towels, and take off the airlock, preparing for a gusher.

PffffffsssssssssSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSTTTTT!!

Huge expenditure of gases as if opening a gigantic bottle of shaken cola, but thankfully no gusher. Disaster avoided!

But it was close. If that hadn't been spotted before the family left for school and work, BOOM, a living room doused in half fermented beer and yeast!!!

Remember, folks, beer is only a little less dangerous than war.

Thank you, Beer Labelizer

You don't need to be a homebrewer to appreciate this handy web tool. Fun to mess with and ridiculously easy to use, you can crank out great looking labels in no time. My son and I have also used it to label sodas we've made at home. (Strawberry vanilla cream soda = yummy.) There are multiple templates, and it's easy to do further adjustments in your image editing software of choice. Check out how nice they look from this recent batch o' homebrews I brought on a weekend trip:

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(For those curious, from left to right that is Hophurst, a double IPA; The White, a Belgian witbier; Summer Slices, a heavy wheat beer with orange peel and coriander; Old Kicker, an oatmeal stout with chocolate and coffee; Summer Ale, an ale brewed with key lime; and The White With Cherries, a Belgian witbier with sour cherries.)

Do you need to label your homebrew? Of course not. Some markings on the cap are all you need to identify your beer. But it sure is a lot more fun to share with people when you've got them dressed up in spiffy labels. Take a gander at my Colonial Maple, a colonial porter/spruce beer brewed in fresh maple sap. Looks much classier than it tastes:

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Creating a Christmas beer for the ages

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What do you suppose the above has to do with brewing a Christmas beer? Let me tell you.

Seasonal beers and Christmas beers in particular are an annual traditional in the world of good beer. Better breweries put out seasonal beers a few times a year, and Christmas beers are a major part of that.

With that in mind, I set out to make a beer for the holiday season. Something to drink and enjoy when the weather is cold, holly hangs from the eaves, and pumpkin pie tastes best. I also wanted something that would LAST. Something that could be enjoyed both this holiday season and next holiday season ... and the one after that, and maybe the one after that.

I settled on a Belgian dark style, which, as anyone who reads this blog knows, I love.

The base of my recipe was the Raisonette Trappist (PDF warning) recipe courtesy of Brewer's Apprentice in New Jersey. It's based on Raison D'Etre by Dogfish Head.

I added a small amount of brown sugar to slightly boost the alcohol content, then added cinnamon and freshly ground nutmeg to the mix to give it some winter spicing. The beer fermented for one month, then I let it mature for another month in a big glass vessel ... cleverly disguised so Mr. Eric would let me keep it in the living room:

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This process started in June. Yes, I was planning out my Christmas beer that far in advance.

So, after two months of letting this big bastard age, it came time to get it into bottles. The first goal was to get it into something special. If it's going to be a long-term beer, after all, why not make sure the bottles are long-term, too? So, I bought some gorgeous bottles that will help say, "This is a special beer."

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Cool bottles, and the sort of thing that will look great when you break 'em out at the holidays -- which is the point. But out of the five gallons typical with a homebrew batch, I only put three gallons into bottles. The other two gallons became the subject of a pair of beer experiments. Those experiments started like this:

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Golden raisins to your left, sour cherries to your right, plus a little bit of oak for good measure. (The oak is meant to simulate aging in an oak barrel.)

I racked one gallon of this Belgian dark onto 6 oz of golden raisins. I can't imagine how that will turn out, since the Dogfish Head "Extreme Brewing" book recommends that amount for a full batch! The other gallon was racked onto 6 oz of tart cherries. Both got doses of nutmeg and cinnamon again, too.

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However they turn out, I'm excited about the possibilities. They could each be very offbeat, very special, very delicious beers. Or both variations could turn out horrible. It's possible, but hey, they're experiments. And isn't being creative part of why we home brew in the first place?

Fresh from my fermenter, an oatmeal stout

I've posted about homebrewing before. Here's a brew that I think turned out pretty good and should turn out even better after a few adjustments for my second batch. Introducing Old Kicker Oatmeal Stout, brewed with cocoa and coffee:



Old Kicker has a lively carbonation like Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout, with a taste of cocoa in the middle and then the lingering bitterness of coffee.

I can't take full credit for it, though. The recipe isn't fully my own concoction. It began with an oatmeal stout recipe from the fine folks at Brewer's Apprentice. I then added two scoops of cocoa during the boil, one with about 30 minutes left in the boil and another in the last five minutes. For my second batch I'll be adjusting that upwards, adding one to two more scoops of cocoa so the taste is more pronounced. Both will come in the last five minutes; I'm afraid that early dose may have boiled away some desirable cocoa aroma.

My other addition was coffee. For those who don't homebrew, here's how it works: When you bottle your beer you add something called finishing sugar as you bottle it. The yeast wakes up and eats it, producing CO2. Since the beer is now in a bottle, the CO2 has nowhere to go, and this stays inside the bottle. That's how your beer carbonates. (And YES, if you add too much sugar the yeast will generate too much CO2 and your bottles will literally explode. It can be dangerous.) Generally you boil the finishing sugar with a small amount of water before adding it to the fermented beer.

But with Old Kicker, I used coffee instead of water. Amazingly, I only used about 3/4 a cup of coffee for a five-gallon batch, yet you can still clearly taste it in the beer. It's a touch on the astringently bitter side for my taste, so next time I'll be cold brewing the coffee to provide a smoother coffee flavor without the bitterness.

Finally, I'll be adding a small amount of lactose sugar. Lactose is a sugar that beer yeast can not ferment. Adding it will do one thing: add body, making the beer taste and feel "fuller" and heavier.

The results will be, I hope, a delicious chocolate oatmeal stout with coffee. The first batch was pretty tasty (and there is still plenty left). Hoping the second will be delicious.

For those interested in trying to brew Old Kicker, start with this stout recipe (PDF warning) and adjust as per this post. Experiment a bit to make it your own.

What's in the fermenter this week

I dabble a little in homebrewing. I'm far from an expert, but it's an enjoyable hobby and I have a good time experimenting with going off-recipe. One of the fun things about exploring beer -- and making it -- is trying something a little offbeat. So with that in mind, last week I bottled three gallons of the stuff inside this bad boy:



You wouldn't be able to tell by looking at the color, but that's a Belgian witbier, aka white beer, similar in characteristics to Hoegaarden. It doesn't look like Hoegaarden, however, because it's been sitting with a few pounds of tart cherries. That's what all the jellyfish looking stuff is. Cherries having their sugars eaten up by the yeast inside the carboy.

I wanted to use fresh cherries but they weren't in season. My second choice was fresh frozen, but our local grocery store carried every frozen fruit imaginable but tart/sour cherries. Plenty of sweet, no sour. So I settled on a few cans of these:



How does it taste? I have no idea. Only just got it in the bottle and am unlikely to try a taste for at least two weeks. But I think tart cherries will go well with the spiced, tart taste of a Hoegaarden clone, especially when the weather is warm.

I'll give a taste report in a few weeks and, if the experiment was a success, the full recipe. Cheers!