Colorado Kitchen Brew

With its earliest written references dating back to 1366 AD,  Sahti is a style of beer from Finland that I've been wishing to brew, but was nervous about tackling. Thankfully, I came across Ilkka Sysila's excellent article on brewing the style. It pushed me over the edge, and inspired me to take a stab at brewing this ancient beer. The grain bill for Sahti is quite simple, but also created my first challenge.  Pilsner, Munich and Kaljamallas (Finnish Dark Rye) are the typical grains for this style. Where my challenge lay was in finding Kaljamallas.  This Finnish malt can be purchased online, but isn't exactly inexpensive. The lowest price I could find was $10 per pound before shipping. As a less expensive alternative, several articles I read suggested using Crystal Rye. However, they all admitted that its flavor is sweeter than the Finnish grain. Rye Before and After Since I wanted a malt as close to Kaljamallas as possible, but didn't want to break the bank to do

Kellerbier, which translates Cellar Beer, is a style that doesn't get a lot of press. It's is an unfiltered lager that is served young rather than after a long maturation period. Fermentation can be as short as one month from brew day to glass, and the beer is often not lagered. None of the breweries near me brew one, and commercial examples are hard to come by. So why not brew your own? Another style that I haven't seen locally is Franconian Rotbier, or Red Beer. So why not brew one of those as well?  Since it's Summer, and knowing that my Immersion Pro unfortunately can't get cold enough to lager this time of year anyway, I've decided to combine the two styles into one.  The resulting beer is probably closest to what would be considered an Amber Kellerbier. However, it should have a mild sweetness that a "stylistically correct" Kellerbier wouldn't traditionally have. Thankfully, I have no intention of entering a competition with this, so I won

I'm doing a 4-for-1 with this installment, and will be bundling my finished beers going forward, rather than writing a blog for each.  That should leave me space for more brewing oriented posts. This month, I've got beers I posted the recipes for back in November, December and January. First out of the gate is Enchanted Nightmare Imperial Stout. This beer is an amalgamation of extra grains and hops I had that were combined with some 2-Row and additional hops to create a 9.95% ABV Stout for the depths of Winter. So what if it wasn't actually ready until the Spring Equinox arrived? A beer like this can't be rushed. My beer pours nearly pitch black, and has nice ruby highlights. The head could stand a touch more staying power, but is appropriately dense. In the mouth, the body is a little lighter than I expected. The carbonation is very soft, and feels just about right for this beer style.  When I bottled this beer, I was slightly worried that the whiskey and oak were a li

One of my proudest moments as a homebrewer was having one of my beers selected to be brewed at Mad Jack's Mountain Brewery in Bailey, Colorado. It was the first time one of my beers had been chosen to brew and sell to the public.  The beer was a Quadrupel that I brewed as an excuse to try the new at the time Simpsons DRC malt in place of Special B. Apparently it worked out quite well. The owner and the brew master at Mad Jack's both tried my beer, and the rest is history. For the brewery, my original 5 gallon brew was scaled up from 5 gallons to 3 barrels. The switch was also made to a brewery made Candi Syrup in place of the commercial Candi Syrups from my original brew.  The recipe below is therefore a 5 gallon brew that was modified and scaled up to 90 gallons and then brought back down to 5 gallons again.  If you'd like to forgo making your own Candi Syrup, I've also listed the original syrups. In addition, I've provided two mashing options. At the brewery, we

The older I've gotten, the more I've wanted to make my brew days easier. While I appreciate the exercise I get from lifting heavy wet grain bags, and moving large pots of water or wort back and forth around the kitchen, that doesn't mean I want to work that way forever.  My back, for one, doesn't dig all the weight lifting like it used to. My spine was badly injured quite a few years back, and can only take a certain amount of strain, no matter how much I focus on lifting with my legs. Gravity is our friend, and it would be nice to take advantage of that fact more than I have. Simply having my wife give me a brew pot with a ball valve for Christmas two years ago seemed like a gift from above, since I was no longer tipping a heavy pot to transfer wort to a fermenter.  Brew day has also meant taking over the kitchen for several hours. Or many hours, on the days I decided to perform a multistep mash. That's not exactly fair to the rest of the family, which lead me to p

Back in 2012, I did a post on making your own Candi Sugar for Belgian beers. Nine years later, it's time to make Brewer's Invert Syrup for British beers. While these syrups are available commercially, they're tough to find in the US, as there are only a handful of homebrew shops that carry them. They're also not exactly cheap, so why not make your own? The sugar I prefer to use for making Invert Syrup is Turbinado. Complexity is what I want from these syrups, and I feel that Turbinado, as well as other raw sugars, create more complex flavors than plain white table sugar does. However, table sugar works just fine.  Here's the basic procedure for making one pound of Invert Syrup: Mix one pound of sugar with approximately 1 cup of water to make a thick syrup. Over Medium heat, gently stir the liquid until the sugar is dissolved.  Add 1/4tsp of Cream of Tartar. You can optionally add roughly 2Tbsp of Lyle's Golden Syrup at this step to help avoid crystalizing your s

As promised in Part 1, now that we know how to Cold Mash, it's time to brew some beer! The recipes below are all beers that I've had good luck with. Styles include Oatmeal Stout, Witbier, Dunkelweizen, Mexican Lager and Schwartzbier. I intend to add styles in the IPA realm as I continue experimenting. Hopefully I've provided enough variety to get people started.  Oatmeal Stout Grains: 3lbs Simpsons Golden Promise 12oz Fawcett CaraMalt 12oz Flaked Oats 12oz Simpsons Chocolate Malt 4oz Crisp Roasted Barley Hops: 0.75oz Challenger (6.3% a.a.): 60 min Total Boil Time: 60 min Yeast: White Labs WLP002 - English Ale or Imperial A09 - Pub Mash Schedule: Cold Mash for 12 Hours at 37F  Original Gravity: 1.015 Final Gravity: 1.005 ABV: 1.31% IBU: 30 SRM Color: 28 Fermentation Schedule: 1 Week Primary at 67F 2 Weeks Secondary Witbier Grains: 2.5lbs Castle Pilsen 1.25lbs Weyermann Pale Wheat 1.25lbs Briess Flaked Wheat 8oz Flaked Oats Hops: 0.5oz Styrian Golding (3.5% a.a.): 60 min 1oz

Cold Mashing is a technique I stumbled upon while researching ways to make very low ABV beers. My goal was to see if I could get below 2% ABV without using either microscopic grain bills, or boiling off alcohol post fermentation.  Why would I want to do this? For one, my wife loves the taste of beer, but not the aftereffects of having a couple. That left her drinking the limited array of NA beers that you can get in my neck of the woods. Plus, she's a fan of darker beer styles that aren't exactly well represented in the NA beer landscape.  In addition, low ABV also means you can have a few without getting loopy. If I'm working outside in the garden, I want to plow the fields, not get plowed in the fields.    I've tried both the small grain bill and the boil off techniques. Neither of them produced what I would call good beer. Small grain bills produced thin, beer flavored water. Boiling left behind an aftertaste that's most generously described as different, but mo

Thanks to a gift from my wife, I'm finally able to lager beer.  Not being able to lager has meant that the closest I've ever gotten to making one has been to use the Anchor Steam yeast to make pseudo-lagers. With my new toy, that has finally changed. I brewed this beer back in January, figuring that would be the perfect time to make a Maibock for Spring. After primary fermentation, I'll be giving my beer 7 weeks for the lager yeast to do its thing. I'm very excited to see how this turns out. The five gallon brew is below. Grains: 6.5lbs Weyermann Pilsner 3.5lbs Briess Pilsen 2.5lbs Weyermann Light Munich Hops:  0.5oz Magnum (14.7% a.a.): 60 min 1oz Hallertauer (4.4% a.a.): 30 min Total Boil Time: 120 min Yeast: White Labs WLP833 - German Bock Lager 64oz Starter Hochkurz Double Decoction Mash Schedule: Maltose Rest: 144F for 30 min Decoction 1:      Heat 12 cups of thick mash to 162F and hold for 15 min      Heat Decoction to boiling and boil for 15 min       Return Deco

In late 2015, shortly after this blog went on its long hiatus, I brewed my first Kriek Lambic. Five years and a lot of waiting later, it's bottled and ready to drink.  Just being able to start this beer took awhile. To create my aged hops, I took an ounce of Willamette leaf hops from 2014 and stuck them in a warm furnace room for a year. That hopefully dried them out enough to provide little to no bitterness in my beer. The beer itself follows a pretty straightforward recipe. My grains are a 2:1 mix of Pils malt and Flaked Wheat. The hops are the aforementioned aged Willamette. Cherries are a mix of sweet and tart whole cherries from my local supermarket. Finally, the yeasts are Wyeast's Lambic Blend for fermentation, with Red Star's Premier Blanc champagne yeast added at bottling time.   Before I dive into how the beer came out, here's the full recipe for the five gallon brew. Grains: 6lbs Castle Pilsen  3lbs Briess Flaked Wheat Hops: 1oz Aged Willamette Leaf Hops:

While I've done my best to devote this blog to brewing inexpensively, I'm occasionally given a piece of gear that is a brewing luxury rather than a necessity. In this instance, my wife found an awesome deal on the BrewJacket Immersion Pro. Lo and behold, Christmas came, and one was waiting for me under the tree.   Before the Immersion entered my brewery (a.k.a. the kitchen and a basement storeroom), I had no way to control temps. Mercifully, the temperature in my storeroom stays between 65F(18C) and 70F(21C) all year. This has allowed me to brew ales for a long time without worrying about whether or not my beer was getting too hot or cold. What it also meant was that brewing lagers was out of the question, because there's nowhere in the room I can put a dedicated brewing fridge. That's no longer the case. Now I can brew cold enough to make lagers, and can also be more true to style with my Belgians by upping their fermentation temps. The full setup I was pleasantly surp

While 2020 was easily my worst year ever, all of those weeks cooped up at home meant I had more time than usual to brew. One of my final brew days of 2020 was devoted to this Barleywine.  My beer is loosely based on various takes I found on Great Divide's Old Ruffian , which is a beer that used to be a regular member of their lineup. That's not the case anymore, which is why I decided to tackle my own.  The main area where I've diverged from what I came across online is with the specialty malts. I've bumped them all up just a tad. In addition, my homebrew store doesn't stock Crystal 80, so I went with Crystal 77. I'm fairly certain my hop schedule is different as well. To finish my beer off, I'll be adding an oak spiral toward the end of secondary fermentation. This beer won't be ready until mid April at the earliest, so I have quite the wait ahead. My 5 gallon brew is below: Grains: 17lbs Rahr 2-Row 12oz Crisp Crystal 77 12oz Briess Victory 8oz Briess F