BREW DAY: Oaked Date-Wheat Ale

(Clever name TBD.)

Yet another disaster!  If I didn't drink so much I might start to get discouraged.

Actually, today wasn't so bad really, the usual spills and so on, but I did manage to break my hydrometer (this happens to every home brewer eventually), so I have:

1. No way to confirm the starting gravity of my beer, and:
2. Tiny pieces pieces of very thin broken glass in the bottom of my shower.

I also managed to cut my thumb, but I don't know if it was on the glass from the hydrometer or not.

Anyway, the beer itself!  I picked up a 450ml jar of pure concentrated date juice from the Italian Center little while ago, and I decided to combine it with a Brewhouse Prairie Wheat kit.  Based on some pretty much unfounded estimates of the extract value of the date juice, I calculated a starting gravity of about 1.052, not that much higher than the ~1.046 expected from the unaltered kit.  With the Safale US-05 yeast, I'm expecting to wind up with something around 5.2% which isn't bad for a nice drinkable summer beer, and I think the date flavour will be subtle but detectable.

Once it's fermented about a week or so, I'm planning to rack it on top of the very dark-roasted Hungarian oak chips I mentioned in a previous entry and give it a month or so on those.  So my nice summery beer should be ready just in time for fall.

I'll rewrite this post with pictures, once again, after I get the technology to get them off my camera.

RACKING: Sarcastic Doorman (Juniper)

Wow.  That didn't work at all.

Juniper Berries

Technically, they're not berries. They're more closely related to pine cones -
if you look very, very closely at one you may be able to see the scales.

It's not easy to find good information about brewing with juniper berries. You'll find some vague, folklorish stories about sahti (a Finnish beer made with rye, juniper, and bread yeast), and quite a lot of people saying they've done it and either liked or hated it, but little in the way of hard and fast data about what they did.  Google the subject, and you'll find a lot of message board threads where people recommend googling it.

I based the juniper addition to Sarcastic Doorman on the most substantive Internet folklore and guesswork I could find, but I'm starting to think I was misled. Further research turned up... Well, very little, but I did find this recipe for a juniper porter that makes me think, after doing some hasty conversions and a bit more guesswork (it's just stupid that there are two totally different "gallons"), I could have used a little more.

I'm going to be splitting the batch in half for the secondary, just for reasons of capacity.  I'm thinking "dry hopping" with another couple of grams in each, at least, wouldn't be a bad idea.  It's not going into secondary for a couple of weeks, though, probably, so I'm writing this post as a reminder note to myself.

HIGH KRAUSEN: Sarcastic Doorman (Juniper)

It's a nice, big, healthy looking krausen (the biggest I've yet had in fact), so despite any irregularities yesterday, the yeast appears to have taken off.  You can see some bits of juniper berry that have been lifted up on top of the krausen there; as I do not skim my krausen off, these will fall back into the fermenting beer eventually and hopefully a little further flavour or aroma may be extracted once there's a bit of ethanol present.

It's a good sign!

EDIT 2011/07/12: If you expand that picture, you can see the 20 liter mark on the scale on the bucket.  The top of the krausen is about four lines below that (it's actually higher in the middle, but hard to measure how much), putting it around the 16 liter mark, while the top of the wort only came up to the 12 liter mark.  That means something over 4 liters of krausen on a 12 liter batch.  Like I said, the biggest I've had yet.

BREW DAY: Sarcastic Doorman (Juniper Edition)

July 10, 2011

This was an interesting brew day, but it was also a long one and this will be a long post.