Notes from the beer book

Since job hunting is not really all that exciting to blog about until you get good news, I'm pushing myself to do other blog worthy activities. This weekend, Matt and I decided to start another homebrew. It's been a LONG time since we've done this, but there is a homebrew bash coming up (organized by someone else this year, yeah!), and we are inclined to participate. It's been long enough that we've basically put a rosy sheen on the whole process, as you'll see when I describe how this all went down.

We pulled out the old books (The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing is classic) and tried to get some recipe ideas. Matt wanted to try an India Pale Ale (IPA), which is light in color and strongly hopped, to serve as a preservative on the long trip from England to India. But, since he has just bought a Double IPA, this modest ambition somehow got upgraded to an Imperial IPA- meaning 3X sugar, 2X alcohol, and 9X hops (by my estimation). I'll just add this narrative by way of an excuse. In the Joy of Homebrewing, there is a giant table of all the various hop varieties and characters. We started thinking it would be really nice with Citra, and a strong Cascade flavor- hmm, we should add some more sugar for that- and if there is more sugar we should definitely dry hop it with Tettnang hops, and how about Columbus for aroma, and those a pretty bitter, we should add more sugar just in case...

What we ended up with is a beer recipe that has 4 kinds of malts, 9 pounds of malt extract, 5 kinds of hops- which we continuously added during the brewing- and a high tolerance yeast. It took two of us just to walk that stuff out of the brew store! Fortunately, we spent time planning, for once. I've got a brewing notebook to make notes about how we wanted it to work, and how it actually worked. What actually happened, is I neglected to bring the 1.5 gal sparge water up from 150F to a boil before adding the 9 lbs of malt extract- which is basically bread flavored sugar. It floated on top, and became hard, sticky balls of malty mess until the temp rose enough, when it turned into a thick, impenetrable foam that expanded dramatically at boiling temp. Our 1.5 gal of water with 9 lbs of sugary extract in it was approaching the capacity of our 4 gal stock pot, until the foam died down. The rest of the brewing went well, but the stuff in the pot was a disgusting beer syrup. This got diluted with another ~4 gal of water which, thanks to our planning, was actually cold, and dropped the temp a lot. From there, we waited patiently until the temp came down from ~85F to ~77F to drop the yeast in. The whole process took ~4 hours, we pitched the yeast just after midnight.

Matt spent some time hunting for the coziest place in our house to house the yeast. He finally decided on a building a shelf from 2x4 to set over the heating vent. The cat is jealous that he's been outed from this hot spot. Hopefully the yeast will kick up in a couple days and then this process will continue for several weeks before bottling. We're excited to see how it turns out- and hopefully will get some motivation to start another beer soon.