Colorado Kitchen Brew

My anti-wintertime Brown Ale finished up right on time and is ready review. Let's see how things turned out. Unlike my heavier Winter brews, my Brown Ale clocks in at an easy drinking 4.9% ABV. It pours with the expected brown hue and sports a dense cream head. The head sticks around well and leaves a fair amount of lace behind. Although my grain-bill was built around nutty and toasted malt flavors, there's a distinct fruitiness at work balancing them. The yeast has to be the reason and I like the result. Bitterness is low; as intended, and brings an earthy black tea bite. The toasted and black tea flavors linger nicely through the finish. The beer's body is light, dry and perhaps a touch too fizzy for the style. Overall, this beer is a nice change of pace when I don't feel like popping open something strong. If I were to change anything, it would be dialing back the amount of Brown Malt I used. Other than that, I'm pretty happy with this one.

I've been doing some research on everyone's favorite Trappist beer: Westvleteren XII (a.k.a. Westy 12). Rumor has it that the beer's grain-bill is fairly simple. No specialty grains, just a couple of Belgian base malts. The real key fermentable is the Candi Sugar the monks use. It apparently provides much of the beer's complex dark fruit, chocolate and coffee flavors. This provides the perfect opportunity to experiment some more with Candi Sugar making . Since I'm using the Westvleteren beers as inspiration, rather than trying to clone them, no one can tell me I'm doing it wrong. Instead, I'm going to have some fun and hope that the end results are worthy of sharing with friends. The experimental part here is that you're not simply boiling sugar and water for a set time and calling it good. Instead, you get to rely upon your senses to tell you when the desired sugar is achieved. Since my senses aren't the same as everyone else, my idea of th

The Leftovers It's time for a cleanup of leftover grains and partially used packets of hops from 2012. With the exception of the 2-Row base malt, everything in the recipe below has been sitting on the shelf, or in the fridge waiting to be used. I had several open hop packages, some leftover toasted malts and a half-full bottle of malt extract too. I also had yeast cultured from my White House Honey Porter . My decision was to use almost all of my leftovers and make a partial-mash Barleywine. The finished beer will be quite strong and quite bitter. A toasted malt backbone should nicely complement pine, spice and citrus hop flavors. Because of the beer's strength, it will not be ready for at least three months and should improve with age. The recipe has been scaled up to five gallons from the 2.5 gallons I actually brewed: Grains: 9 lbs Rahr 2-Row 8.5 oz Victory 7.5 oz Brown Hops: Bittering: 0.75 oz Chinook (11.1% a.a.): 60 min 0.5 oz Colum

Up until now, I've employed a simple single-infusion mash for my stove-top brews. It's the technique I demonstrated in Part 2 of this series. I heat the water to a set temp, add the grains, stir things up and let the mash perform a Saccharification Rest for 60-90 minutes. Outside of the occasional stir and temperature check, that's pretty much it. For many beers, this works really well, especially with English and American Ales. However, I was getting poor extraction rates from wheat malts. My efficiency on wheat beers was dropping around 10% versus my all barley brews. What to do? Take a shot at a multi-step mash and see what happens. The only real difference between my multi-step mash and a single-infusion one is the introduction of a Protein Rest at the beginning of the mash. For the Protein Rest, I heat my water to around 130F. I then mash in the grains, which drops the temperature to around 124F. After mashing in, I pull the pot from the stove, cover it and wrap