The Brewery

You may remember from an earlier post that we started brewing our own beer this year, after getting the necessary equipment as a Christmas gift from Kate's brother, Mark. It's been really fun so far brewing (and drinking) the three batches of beer, along with the batch of hard cider (that's Kate's favorite). To date, we have made:

• an American Brown Ale (think Newcastle but more delicious)
  
• a Brown Porter (not quite as dark and potent as normal Porters)
• Hard Apple Cider (with a chardonnay yeast)
• a German Honey Hefeweizen

While visiting in April my Dad got to try the first two, although the porter was stubbornly not carbonated yet, even after the normal 2 weeks in the bottle that is standard to get carbonation. Consequently, it wasn't very good. I'm happy to report that the porter is now (finally) carbonated and quite tasty - has a nice toasted aroma and flavor with a healthy amount of coffee taste in it as well. Until they invent scratch and sniff computer screens or Smell-O-Vision makes a comeback, this picture will have to do.


Our latest creation, the hefeweizen, has the opposite problem - it's already carbonated after only 5 days in bottles! I'm hoping I didn't add too much priming sugar (which creates the carbonation in the bottles) - because this wheat beer had a lot of trub in the fermenter, we ended up with less than the expected 5 gallon batch size, so I had to scale down the standard 3/4 cup of priming sugar accordingly on the fly. Hopefully we won't have any future posts describing the exploding bottles in our hall closet. I'm encouraged about the hefe because even after a short time in bottles it has a nice full, smooth flavor with noticeable honey/wheat taste, but none of the banana or citrus that we don't really like in most commercial hefeweizens. Since I can't fully justify drinking two beers tonight just to enhance the multimedia aspect of this blog post, I'll just give you the picture of this one from when we were measuring the alcohol content of the hefe, which turns out to be 5.7% (by vol), incidentally.

The next batch on the docket is a red/amber ale recipe I found online that's received rave reviews from other homebrewers called "Fire in the Hole." I'm not exactly sure how it got that name, but I'm hoping it lives up to its billing! Come visit and we'll treat you to a pint or two.