Colorado Kitchen Brew

My Sweet/Oatmeal Stout hybrid is ready to go. This beer gets a bonus round, because I bottled both a regular and N/A version of it. This is a nice chance to see what kind of a difference removing the alcohol makes. The beer itself is intentionally light, but not insubstantial in body. The regular beer's ABV barely cracks the 5.0% barrier. I'm not super happy with how the flavors blended to together. You can sense some sweetness from the milk sugar. It sits across the room from the roasted grains as an odd counterpoint. I definitely need to play with balance next time around. Bitterness is light and bolstered by the roasted grains. The nose has a touch of fruitiness to it. The N/A version is very close. The roasted flavors are slightly more pronounced. There's less fruitiness in nose too. The rest is pretty much the same. This includes my questionable balance of lactose and roasted grains. So, this definitely isn't the best beer I've ever brewed. The flavor...

Mine My Red Chair clone attempt is ready to go. It's time to see just how close I got. A report on the outcome of a clone-brew wouldn't be complete without popping open a bottle of the real deal. With that in mind, I grabbed some Red Chair from the store to drink side-by-side with my beer. Let's start with appearances. My beer is a bit lighter than the Deschutes brew. Both have dense caps that stick around nicely and leave good bits of lace behind. Moving onto what really matters, there are a surprising number of similarities between the two brews. Most noticeable is the bitterness profile. Although the Deschutes brew has a touch more grapefruit to it, the level of bitterness between the two beers is almost identical. Citrus is the overarching theme, with a touch of pine in the background. The bitterness of both beers lingers through the finish, where they get a little peppery. Their's In other areas, things veer off course. My beer is more malty and c...

It's high time a wrote some more brewing advice, so here's the start of a new series of blogs. This series is inspired by Brad Smith's "Multiplying Your Beer" blog on BeerSmith . In his blog, Brad talks about various ways to get multiple beers out of one brewing session. His work is long on details, but short on examples, so it seems fitting that I try his ideas out and see what happens. These articles are also an extension of a couple of previous experiments. One base beer resulted in three Abbey Beers back in the Spring. My Session Saison and Dark Saison sprang from the same base as well. The difference here, is that with Split-Batch brewing, you get different beers from a single brew day. The simplest form of batch splitting is to take finished wort, put it into multiple fermentors and then pitch different yeasts, or perhaps add differing additional ingredients into the fermentor of each beer. In this instance, I'm working with oak ag...

I was asking around on Twitter about what beer style I should brew with some of my lingering grains, hops and yeast from 2013. The finalists came down to a Mild or an Ordinary Bitter . I've decided to combine both into a brew with the flavor of a Bitter, but the low ABV session beer goodness of a Mild. Since my goal was to brew without taking a trip to a Homebrew store, everything in the beer below was already on hand at home. My hop quantities are a little odd, because I was trying to use up open Challenger and EKG packages. The finished beer should have a nice sweet/bitter balance and an alcohol content of around 3.5%. Here's the 5-gallon recipe: Grains: 5 lbs Fawcett Optic Malt 8 oz Briess Caramel 80L 8 oz Fawcett Amber Malt Hops: 1 oz Challenger (6.9% a.a.): 60 min 0.5 oz Challenger (6.9% a.a.): 20 min 0.75 oz East Kent Goldings (4.5% a.a.): 0 min Total Boil Time: 90 min Yeast: White Labs WLP002 - English Ale Mash Schedule: Saccharification Rest: 1...

2013 was a good and busy year. I did a lot of new things that really expanded my brewing knowledge and techniques. Hopefully some of them helped people who've stumbled upon this site. I brewed my first SMaSH Beer, Sour and Wheatwine . New stove-top Mashing techniques were introduced. 2012 beers were revisited after time in the Cellar. Non-Alcoholic beer was also tackled. I even threw in a Clone for good measure. Oh, and I went auto racing , which has little to do with beer (or does it?), but it is my blog, so I can write about what I want to. That's a lot of ground covered in just one year. So where do I go from here? How do I keep things fresh? Thankfully, there are still lots of new things I want to try. More Sours are definitely in order, with a proper Lambic at the top of the list. With that in mind, Turbid Mashing will join my list of stove-top Mashing techniques. More wood aged beers are also in the pipeline. Since my desire to brew Big Beer has waned, ...

This year's Winter Warmer is ready just in time for the holidays. Rather than make 2012's beer again, I went with a Burton Ale. Let's see how things turned out.   T he beer pours with a slightly hazy mahogany hue. A dense nougat cap is slow to form, but generous once it gets going. Head retention is quite good and a nice amount of lace is left in the beer’s wake.   When I bottled this beer, it possessed a generous stone fruit aroma from the yeast. That fruitiness has dialed back a bit with some time conditioning in the bottle. Hops are now further out front with flowers and spice. A light roasted edge from the chocolate malt is also present. In the mouth, the beer starts out with a dry baking chocolate edge. The bitterness comes on quick with an earthy tea-like bite that’s not too heavy. While subtle, you can tell there’s molasses in my beer. It adds the light mineral profile I find desirable in this style. A touch of astringency shows up late. A body that’s not...

2013 My 2012 Quad is a year old and ready to revisit. Things have changed quite a bit in a year. A beer that leaned toward dark fruit flavors is now warm and very spicy. The yeast has taken over and really bumped up the coriander and pepper components. The prunes and raisins are still there, albeit subdued. There's also a light toffee note that I don't remember from last year. An alcohol warmth permeates the system and is a little more prevalent than before. 2012   The beer's body is still a little syrupy, but also extremely dry. A soft, yet vigorous carbonation lends a nice tingle on the tongue. A heavy sheet of lace follows in the beer's wake. I asked myself last year if a 12 week wait for the beer to finish was worth it. My answer was an emphatic yes. So, was waiting an extra 12 months also worth it? Absolutely.