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

As always, summer brought a slew of activities which have led to a short break in all brewing activity. Well, we finally got back to brewing this weekend.

On Saturday we bottled the Belgian strong ale, which is still incredibly sweet. The champagne yeast never really took off and I was too engrossed in making the other beers to give the proper amount of attention to the stuck fermentation problem. We bottled it at 1.054, which is a good starting gravity for most beer. Even so, it has an alcohol level of almost 8%. Hopefully it carbonates well but doesn’t continue to ferment and break bottles. I think we’ll be watching this one closely

On Sunday we brewed a Raspberry Wheat, which has been officially dubbed the grrrl beer.We liked this one last year, so we are using the same recipe except for substituting Cascade Hops for the Streisselspalt because of the availability.

While were were shelving the Belgian, Cindy noticed that a couple bottles of Swill were leaking from their caps. When we opened them they foamed like champagne, which is never good. A few months ago I transferred several bottles of the swill from corked wine bottles to capped champagne bottles because I wanted the wine bottles for mead. I am fairly certain that is when the problems began. The Swill was still good at the time, but I wasn’t very gentle with it and I let a lot of air get in. We decided to pour out all six of the capped bottles and 4 had obviously gone bad. I still have 4 corked bottles of Swill and none of them show any signs of contamination.

This week, I plan to order ingredients for Beerios and a Farmhouse Ale. After that I will start putting together a list of beers to brew for Halloween. If my two readers have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them. Right now I am considering a subset of the following beers which have been popular in the past: Scotch Ale, Chocolate Stout, Pumpkin Ale, and IPA. I probably won’t have the time or the bottles to make them all before Halloween.

- Chris

The conference went really well. We supplied 168 bottles (beerio, rye beer, porter, munich lager, and IPA). The beer was served on Monday night (the second day of the conference) during a poster session. After the session there were evening talks. Once these were done, I went back to the poster area to put away the beers that were leftover– despite that 60+ bottles were leftover before the talks began only 1 bottle was left on the counter and only another 10 or so were in the fridge. I found out later in the week that some folks grabbed 6packs and took them back to their suites for later use during the week. Now, while I don’t approve of hoarding– the fact that our beer was worth hoarding was a HUGE compliment. In addition the folks hoarding the beers were not graduate students, but rather, professors. We got some amazing compliments on the beer, in fact, folks were debatable more interested in our beer than in my science.

(I am going to take a minute of shameless self promotion– If you are looking at this web address because you got it off of a bottle at the conference and if you really liked the beer and if you happen to be looking for post-docs– I assure you that I do some amazingly cool work (cv available upon request) and that if you hire me, in addition to some fantastic work, I will slip you the occasional 6-pack in return for your kindness.)

Ah….now that is done.

More later folks! Time for me to get back to work.

– Cindy