I tried the Pumpkin Porter and Chocolate Stout. The pumpkin ale has a good blend of spices and malts, with a roasty and all-spice finish. The all-spice finish might be a little strong, and the beer is still young. It will need a little more time to fully carbonate, but overall it is a very good pumpkin ale.

The Chocolate Stout is thick and rich and creamy with a powerful aroma of chocolate. It has a beautiful head with plenty of carbonation, and the balance of malts is good. There are some hints of bittersweet from the chocolate, so I may reduce the amount used in the next batch. This is still a very drinkable beer.

Overall, I think we’ll have an excellent selection of beers for the party. Head over the to The Beer List to see what’s available.

- Chris

First, let me say that I finally have the website updated and working. I upgraded wordpress on the site, and for the last couple of weeks I have been unable to log in to post anything. So, no onto the beer.

We bottled the beerios, pumpkin ale, and chocolate stout over the last week. So all of those will be ready in time for Halloween. The Beerios is as good as always, and will be better carbonated. The pumpkin ale is wonderful, but it’s rather dark. It’s almost dark enough to be called a pumpkin porter. The beer has the aroma of cinnamon and ginger and tastes like pumpkin pie. I’m expecting the carbonation to enhance the flavor. The Chocolate Stout is rich and dark and creamy. We used a whole pound of chocolate this year, so it is impossible to miss it. I also put some lactose in it to increase the sweetness and make the beer creamy. It’s quite a bit different from most of the Chocolate Stouts on the market and I certainly encourage everyone to try one.

All of that bottling has brought our total bottle count to just a little over 300. I think the official count was 312, but Cindy will probably correct me. That number doesn’t include our supply of Mead either. We have 5 nearly full batches of beer for the party, and a few bottles left from several older batches. Check out the updated Beer List page for details. Be warned, all but the top 5 are in very limited supply.

That’s all for now, I’m just happy to have admin portions of the page working again.

- Chris

I brewed the Pumpkin Ale last night and it made the whole house smell like pie. Unfortunately, there was no pie to eat and I am left wanting Pumpkin Pie. I have some pumpkin leftover, so I’ll probably make a pie this weekend. I think it will be a good beer, but I won’t know until I get a taste of it and determine if the spice balance is correct. A few years ago, our pumpkin ale tasted like a red hot because we used too much cinnamon and crushed it up too much.

I have a brewing dilemma this weekend. As usual, I am a little behind and I need to decide between brewing the Chocolate Stout and the Scotch Ale. If I make the Scotch Ale, I might be able to make the Chocolate Stout the following week and serve them both at the Halloween Party. If everything worked out, they would both be very young (possibly under-carbonated) beers. If I make the Chocolate Stout this weekend, then the Scotch Ale definitely won’t be ready in time, but the Chocolate will have an extra week to mature. The reason the Scotch Ale wouldn’t be finished is because it needs at least a week in a Secondary. I’ll probably make the Chocolate this weekend because even if I made the Scotch Ale this weekend I would be rushing to complete it in time. It really needs at least one more week in the bottle to condition and it should get an extra week or two in a secondary to mature. I had planned to make the Scotch Ale last Sunday, but the power went out just before I started crushing the grain.

I keep getting automated emails from my web provider telling me to update Wordpress, so I am probably going to have to do that soon. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be as simple as unzipping the new version over the old one, and it’s made more complicated because I don’t have telnet access to the site. So if the page goes down for a few days, or looks totally different in a week, that’s why. (I’m pretending that I have readers, isn’t that nice)

- Chris

Just like previous years, we didn’t brew a whole lot this summer. The only real difference is that this year I had planned to brew a couple of batches, and even get a jump start on brewing for the Halloween Party. All the brewing in May kind of burnt me out and just this weekend I bottled the Farmhouse Ale that I had planned to have ready in July. We also brewed a batch of Beerios on Saturday, which is good because I have been out of it since the beginning of Summer.

Given the silence on the site, you might think that nothing beer related had happened this summer, but a few things did. I mentioned some of them in previous posts, but I’ll recap the events. The beer we sent to conference was a big hit. We brewed a Belgian Strong and a Raspberry Wheat with some success. The Raspberry Wheat is good, but doesn’t have the wonderfully strong aroma that last year’s batch had. The Beglian Strong is not so good. It’s certainly not bad, but the finishing gravity was very high and as a result it is very sweet and has a slightly caramel taste. I wanted the caramel, bit I was aiming for a dryer finish with some warmth from the alcohol. Even at almost 8%, the alcohol is barely noticeable.

I had similar trouble with the Belgian Saison that we bottle on Saturday. The finishing gravity on that one was 1.032, a little higher than the 1.024 that I had hoped for. I fermented it for 2 weeks at 80 degrees and 2 weeks at 70, so I’m not sure why the finishing gravity isn’t lower. The yeast I used has a high attenuation and a high temperature tolerance, but this style typically has a lower starting gravity so perhaps I just needs to plan for less alcohol. Even with that extra sweetness I could imaging drinking it all summer with an orange slice, if only I had finished it in time. It’s a lovely beer with citrus and fruity notes and an almost bubblegum aroma. I’m looking forward to trying the fully carbonated product. I’ve decided to call this a Farmhouse Ale, because that’s the typical American name for this style.

One last item before I go. When we bottled the Strong Ale, I put some of it into 750ml Trappist Bottles with corks. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any cages and I foolishly thought that wouldn’t be a problem. I had the bottles on my wine rack and one of them blew the cork and the beer all the way across my storage room. We promptly moved the bottles to a case box and covered them with a towel until I could get champagne cork cages. I still haven’t purchased cages, but only one other bottle has blown and the mess was contained.

- Chris

So, apparently it has been scientifically proven that beer goggles are real. The original study showed folks in bars pictures of other people. They rated them as being more attractive than their non-barfly counterparts. However, it could just mean that people in bars have lower standards or some such thing. The new study gave folks either a NA beverage or an alcoholic one and then made them rate the attractiveness of members of the opposite sex and of the same sex. The folks who were drinking booze rated everyone as being more attractive than the sober folks. The next step, of course, is to see what occurs with higher doses (perhaps they can correlate it to the  lovely gnaw-your-arm-off experience, of course).

– Cindy