Brews you can use

On “Brews you can use”? How strange.

I never thought flat, warm, un-aged beer could taste so good.

Yep, I actually got around to racking last week’s brew to the serving keg. It tasted a touch sweet, probably just enough to make it fizz up in the keg. No gravity readings, no notes, no stress…. (Rough Recipe, for posteritythe curious: quarter pound each of Simpson’s extra dark crystal, medium crystal, black malt, and Crisp Amber malt, twelve pounds of Rahr 2-row, 2 oz Fuggle in the boil, Wyeast 1028 yeast.)

While I was down there, I also tasted the ciders I started last October or November, and never touched. They’re still in their primary fermenters. That’s supposed to be a big no-no, but the ciders are still definitely drinkable. I may toss a few oak cubes in when I keg them, to complete the “rough and ready rustic” effect.

I think I may actually get some entries to the Upper Mississippi Mash-out this year. More entries than ever before, in fact. I almost feel like I have a hobby again!

Of course, competitions means bottling (with the exception of Beer and Sweat keg-only competition, with two drawbacks: location, and insanity), and I keg. Enter the Beer Gun. Quite cool, very easy to use. I’ll be sold on the concept unless/until all the beers I sent to the mash-out get dinged for oxidation.

So, I’m planning to send:

• The steam beer and pale ale I brewed two posts ago. They aged well….
• My 2005 wild-yeast-fermented cider. I tried both the natural and the pitched yeast versions side-by-side before deciding. The natural cider basically screamed apple!, while the pitched version was much more subtle with honey notes and a crisp, dry finish. In beer, at least, subtlety does not seem to do well at competitions, so the natural cider goes.
• The Dubbel I tossed together last summer. This is turning out to be a wonderful beer. Unfortunately, not the beer I’m in the mood for most of the time. I may have to work my way back into liking the Belgian styles again…
• The Rochefort 8° clone I brewed two summers ago with a friend. Since I haven’t been in a Belgian mood, and when I am, I want to save this stuff rather than drink it, I have most of my case left. It’s quite excellent, and I’m sending some.

The Rochefort 8° clone was a tough choice to send vs. keep all to myself. I’m currently drinking another tough choice, an Imperial Stout I brewed back in 2004 (<boggle>, was it really that long ago?), and is developing very nicely. I have somewhat more than a case left, and it did really well in the 2005 State fair competition (high score, no medal — Imperial stouts are a popular style among homebrewers). This one will be a gametime decision….

… and I still need to work tomorrow. Feh. Me sleep now.

Yeah, 20 gallons is a lot of cider.

Our homebrew club’s cider enabler organizes an annual bulk cider buy and a cider pressing, the only sources of unpasteurized, preservative-free cider I’ve found. The purchased cider was delivered last Saturday, and the pressing was on Sunday. I bought 15 gallons and got another 5-6 at the pressing.

The pressing (pics) was a blast, even/especially for the kids. We had a pretty good assembly line going; a couple parties picking apples, washing, grinding, pressing, and collecting. The kids had lots of apples to munch on, and the adults had a lot of hard cider to sample during the day. Motivation!

Of the purchased cider, 5 gallons each are getting White Labs Cider yeast, Lalvin D-47, and natural yeast (still waiting for this one to ferment… might have to intervene…). I wanted to do the pressing juice natural also, but found some spots of mold on it the other day, so I skimmed them and pitched some Champagne yeast. Of course, the champagne yeast caused it to instantly foam, so it was probably about ready to start a raging ferment on its own. Oh, well…

Also, I recently discovered one of my co-workers keeps bees, and happily shared about a gallon and a half of “the girls’” output. Some of that will go into the cider as a little accent, and the rest will be a mead when I get around to it. Unless I get motivated again on the brewing front, I’ll actually have done more mead and cider than beer this year, a first for me.

I’ve been lazy.

In the last couple weeks, I finally got around to:

• Racking 10 gallons last fall’s cider into kegs, mostly to empty the carboys so I could:
• Get my latest two batches out of their (open) primary fermenters

which couldn’t have been timed better; I blew two kegs about a week later, and:

• Put 10 gallons of cider on tap

(here’s where the laziness gets really inexcusable)

• updated the mini-whiteboard over my taps so the taps are (gasp) labeled correctly. No more getting the mild from the double IPA tap.
• HTMLized the notes from my latest batch, and
• did the same for the other beers I’ve brewed this year. It’s not too many…
• updated the site.

The ciders are spectacular. One of them is naturally fermented, and has noticeable residual sweetness and great apple character. The other got some White Labs English Cider yeast, and came out a bit dryer. Because I procrastinated getting them into kegs, they got the benefit of extra aging, and I’ll be drinking them during this year’s cider season. Motivation!

The wine/mead/cider world is probably more suited to my available time and motivation — in general, beer can only be ignored for a month or so, but wines &c. can be, no need to be ignored for most of a year to get really good.

I think I’ll stick to beer though. Beer’s tasty, bottling’s fiddly, and mead on tap would be very, very dangerous.

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I’ve been putting off the hobby stuff for way too long. Since my last update, I’ve brewed once (November 27, nearly three weeks ago) and have neither HTMLized the notes nor racked the beer. All I’ve done since pitching the yeast has been to move the bucket to the basement, where it’s currently sitting on top of another bucket saying “rack me!” everytime I walk by. I’ve meant to do it every day for the last week, but just can’t tear myself away from the computer, TV, kids, and Jess (not necessarily in that order) to get it done. I suppose this is what I get from a sealed primary fermenter. When I do open fermentation, I have an incentive to rack before the bugs get to the beer first…

Also, since last update, I’ve written off one of the batches of preservative-contaminated cider (there’s something growing in it, not yeast — I’m still debating whether it warrants a picture before I dump it). So, I’m batting about .500 on ciders this year. I still look for preservative-free cider everytime I go through a grocery store, just in case I get as lucky as with my first cider 2 years ago.

And, of course, I’ve been really busy procrastinating. Since last time, I’ve not:

• Bottled my maple wine,
• Bottled raspberry melomel (I even sprang for the fancy floor corker so I could package these in style, but haven’t gotten around to buying or gathering bottles and corks.)
• Racked/fined Orange blossom mead
• Racked my latest brew (a moderately-strong Scottish ale) to keg
• Bottled anything for the Upper Mississippi Mash-out. I’ve previously dug out whatever I had sitting in bottles, but now all of my bottled beer is the scarce, precious, well-aged stuff, or young stuff I eventually want to be precious and well-aged but not scarce

And, of course, the TOBREW list:

• Rehash some of that “old and precious” stuff, especially the barleywine and Imperial stout
• Oh, and more of the Rochefort 8 clone couldn’t hurt, either
• Attempt cloning Leinenkugel’s Apple Spice beer. (Jess loves the stuff, and I’m pretty fond of it too — very cider-like)