Barbera Pyment

Barbera Pyment

brewed on: 7/4/12
OG: 1.128

5 gallon batch

ingredients
2 48 oz cans - Alexanders Barbera grape concentrate
1 gallon (12 lbs) - California Orange Blossom honey (Northern Brewer)

yeast:
2 packages - EC1118 yeast

5g yeast nutrient per day, first 4 days
2.5g DAP per day, first 4 days 

Muscat Pyment

Muscat Pyment

brewed on: 4/12/12
OG: 1.120

Fermentables:
12 lbs California Orange Blossom Honey
2 48oz cans of Muscat grape juice concentrate (68 Brix)



Yeast:
15g Lalvin EC-1118


Nutrient schedule:
Days 1-4
5g Wine yeast Nutrient
2.5g DAP


Fermented at basement temp (~68F)

Rum Barrel Aged Black Currant Melomel

My first attempt at an oak aged mead turned out great when I put it in my peach brandy barrel this past spring. On the heels of that tasty batch, I decided to try another melomel in the 5 gallon rum barrel I recently acquired. I've been curious about black currants in mead since watching the Brew TV episode where Curt Stock is interviewed. Apparently that is a favorite fruit addition of his. Here is my recipe:

Rum Barrel Aged Black Currant Melomel

brewed on: 8/6/11
Batch size: 5 gallons


honey:
15 lbs Wildflower honey

Fruit:
96oz. black currant juice (Vintner's Harvest)

Yeast:
25g - 71B Narbonne dry yeast, rehydrated and fed using the Minnesota Speed Mead method.

11/28/11 - bottled

Rhubarb-Berry Melomel

I've yet to try an oaked mead, but it's something I've been curious about since I first read Ken Schramm's Compleat Meadmaker. He raves about the character oak can add to an already good mead. Now that I've got my 10-gallon Peach Brandy barrel this is my chance to find out!

I looked at some of the St. Paul homebrew club's info on staggered nutrient additions, pH adjustment, etc for meadmaking. Kristen England has a powerpoint online from a mead presentation he gave, and there is a good interview (w/ 2 recipes) from Curt Stock on Brew TV as well. With info in hand, I got some KOH from one of the guys in the Milwaukee Beer Barons club while taking my BJCP exam earlier this month and set out to make a big Stock-inspired melomel.

We have around 20 lbs of rhubarb in the chest freezer from my grandma's garden last year. I saved the really thick stalks for mead/beer since they are too big and stringy to work well in pies. (My grandma makes the best rhubarb pie ever, just for the record!) I also went out and bought a bunch of strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, and 2 containers of Blueberry-Pomegranate juice concentrate. Along with 40 lbs of honey from 3 different sources, I split this all up into 2 buckets and did my thang. . .

Peach Brandy Barrel Aged Rhubarb-Berry Melomel

brewed on: 3/30/11
OG: 1.120
FG (bucket 1): 1.033
FG (bucket 2): 1.012

 Honey:
18 lbs - Wildflower (Sean's dad's apiary, Fall '10 harvest)
6 lbs - Wildflower (DP. Wigley, funky/earthy smelling & crystallized)
16 lbs - Wildflower (Jim Payne, older honey, crystallized, but very clean tasting)


Fruit:
8 lbs - rhubarb
7.5 lbs - strawberries
5 lbs - blueberries
3.5 lbs - blackberries
2 cans - blueberry-pomegranate juice concentrate

Yeast:
25g Lalvin Narbonne 71B (split 12.5g/bucket)


Nutrients & pH adjustment schedule:
Day 1 (per 5 gallon bucket)
4.5g Wine yeast Nutrient
12.5g 71B yeast, rehydrated
28g GoFerm
2g DAP

Days 1, 3, 5, 7
stir to degas

Days 2, 4, 6 (per 5 gallon bucket)
stir to degas
4.5g Fermaid K
2g DAP
50ppm KOH (10 ml, 2M solution) 


Fermented at 63F ambient temp

Added to Peach brandy barrel after 2 weeks. Average FG of 1.022.

5/17/11 - blended FG in barrel 1.017. Picked up just a hint of the oak & brandy barrel character. Also deepened the color to a deep orange. Cleared Nicely. Bottling tonight. Refilling barrel with RIS.

Barrel of Monkeys Brewers (B.O.M.B!)

Sometime last year, the availability of used bourbon barrels from Sprecher Brewery's beers was brought up at one of our local homebrew club meetings. It was suggested that we put together a recipe and do a group brew to age in the barrel. Then we went on to the next order of business.

A month later, it was mentioned that there were barrels available if anyone was interested in doing a barrel brew still. A few people thought it was a good idea. Then we went on to the next order of business.

A month later. . . you get the idea. Eventually the idea just died.

However, it was in the back of my head and I decided to eventually do something about it. So, I went to people individually who I thought might be interested in brewing a sour beer to put into a barrel. We got a nice group of good brewers together.

We were hoping for a wine barrel, but couldn't find one available in our area. We settled on an easier to obtain bourbon barrel since that's what we could get. That being the case, I suggested we do a strong, dark beer to stand up to the still relatively fresh oak character and any residual bourbon alcohol. Last winter I brewed an Imperial Stout recipe using the Bugfarm3 blend I had gotten via AlB from the babblebelt.com web forum. It is still aging, but is shaping up to be among my best beers. We eventually decided on that recipe, although we scaled the OG down a bit from my 1.105. We've all been shooting for 1.085, although a few people overshot that. No big deal in this case.

Over the last few months of planning we've added a few people, including one or 2 guys I hadn't met before that some of the other guys knew. We also found out that one of the main suppliers of used barrels to micros all over the US is within 2 hours of us here in Wisconsin! He has wine barrels, brandy barrels, and all sorts of good stuff available! Since we'd settled on a recipe already, we stuck with that and went with a brandy barrel. Apparently it is a 23 year old barrel. It shouldn't have much oak character left at this point, but we're really using it more as a vessel to inoculate with bugs for future brews.

My hope is that we'll put a couple long term batches through it, and then start using it solera style, where we draw off a portion of the beer every 6-12 months and replace it with new beer. After awhile it settles into an average age of a couple years or so, depending on the frequency and amount of beer pulled out & replaced.

One of the guys supposedly picked up the barrel yesterday and our fill date is coming up soon! Things are shaping up with this fun project and I'm happy I could get some people together to share ideas, homebrew, and have a good time playing mad scientists!

It is my hope that we can get a wine barrel this spring to house in my basement (or elsewhere if someone really wants to.) That way we could have a couple projects going at once. One with darker beers, and one with farmhouse type stuff and maybe eventually a lambic-inspired beer or sour ale like a Flanders.

Our recipe was based off of the Jolly Pumpkin Dark Dawn clone done on the BN awhile back. We raised our gravity to around 1.085, as mentioned above.


B.O.M.B. Sour Imperial Stout

brewed on: 10/11/10
OG: 1.086
IBUs: 34 IBUs
mash temp: 152F

mash:
7 lb 4 oz Belgian Pils malt
1 lb 10 oz Roasted Barley
1 lb 10 oz US 2-row
1 lb 3 oz German Munich
1 lb Wheat malt
8 oz Crystal 80L
4 oz Black malt

boil:
10 oz Turbinado sugar
8 oz Table Sugar
6 oz Honey

Hops:
.5 oz US Nugget @ 13.7% - 60 minutes
1 oz Fuggle @ 5% - 30 minutes

Yeast/bugs:
Split batch -
1) 3rd generation Roselare cake
2) Dirty Dozen bug blend


The rest of the guys brewing for this fermented their batches with the Wyeast Ardennes strain. I'll be adding my 5 gallons shortly thereafter to provide the bugs to inoculate this batch and the barrel.

For sugar, we decided that, rather than getting super picky, we would go with 3 different additions. One would be corn sugar or table sugar, one would be an unrefined sugar, whether it be turbinado, jaggery, piloncillo, etc. The third would be honey. While most of the guys went with table sugar, I think there was a bit of variation in the unrefined sugar used. I know several batches were done with jaggery, but I also saw bags of turbinado and piloncillo around at various brew sessions as well.

Grand Cru w/ honey & Roselare

As I get closer to brewing a 5 gallon bug starter for the barrel project I have planned with my Barrel of Monkey Brewers (or BOMB) friends, I brewed a medium strength Belgian today for the second generation of my Roselare slurry. The blend was originally pitched into a Grisette wort. Although Ive heard that Roselare blend takes a couple generations to get sour, I have to admit I was hoping for at least a little something. I tasted a hydrometer sample while racking the Grisette to secondary and it tasted mostly malty so far. I guess I got spoiled by AlB's (of the Burgundian Babble Belt) Bugfarm blend I used last winter. Luckily I have 2 vials of his Bugfarm4 belnd waiting to be used! Anyway, I'm hoping this latest batch gets a bit more character quicker from the bugs. We'll see!

Grand Cru

brewed on: 10/4/2010
OG: 1.061 (I was shooting for 1.064, but subbed in an equal amount of honey for table sugar, and didn't boil down quite as far as I expected.)
IBUs: 23 IBUs
mash temp: 150F

mash:
11 lbs. Belgian pale malt
5 oz. Carastan
3 oz. pale chocolate malt

other fermentables:
1 lb. honey (dissolved in 1 c. of boiling water on the stove, then added at 30 minutes.)

Hops:
2 oz Styrian Goldings @ 3.5% - 60 minutes
0.7 oz. UK Kent Goldings @ 5% - 2 minutes

Yeast:
2nd generation Roselare


This slurry was seriously ready to go. After pitching, the airlock was showing bubbles in under an hour and now, 5 hours later it is some of the most intense airlock activity I've seen!

10/19/10 - Racked to secondary. SG: 1.010

Pomegranate Melomel

I recently found out that one of my friend's dads is a beekeeper. (Yay!) Of course, I immediately jumped on the opportunity and got 3.25 gallons of honey just after his final extraction for the year, at a good price I might add. Now the question has been what to do with it all!

In a separate discovery, I was browsing through the local Indian grocery store down the street and came across bottles of pomegranate juice containing just pomegranate & water. No preservatives. Of course, when these two things present themselves to you within a week of each other, what else can you do but make a pomegranate melomel!

Pomegranate Melomel

brewed on: 9/4/10

4.5 gallons. (Will top better bottle to 5 once primary fermentation slows a bit.)
OG 1.162

18 lbs (1.5 gallons) honey
2.5 gallons pomegranate juice
0.5 gallon water
aerated extremely well, added 1/2 tsp wine yeast nutrient & 1/4 tsp yeast energizer

yeast: D47

I'm a bit worried about the OG. It is higher than I was shooting for. I plan to add another 1/2 gallon of water once the bulk of primary fermentation has died down a bit to ensure the better bottle doesn't spew its contents all over the basement. If the gravity stays too high I may split a portion into a smaller carboy and dilute both with water down to a more reasonable gravity.

10/11/10 - Racked to secondary. SG 1.050. Still mild fermentation taking place. (abv ~ 15.5% and rising.)

Sour Cherry Melomel

I've gotten in the habit of putting together a few batches of mead each year and this is the first for 2010. At one or two years age before they are really good in most cases, I feel like I should continue doing this so as to eventually have a nice turnaround. My first attempt was last July (2009) and I bottled it early. I did several things wrong with it including pitching a weak yeast just before leaving on vacation so I couldn't feed it during the first few days. We also moved over the winter and the carboy got shook up more than I'd like on the car ride even though I was extremely careful with it. I also didn't rack it enough times and the bottles have sediment. It ended up with a very yeasty flavor to it which I'm hoping will mellow out a little with more time. For now, it's not great, but it's not something I would dump either. It's just below average in my opinion for now.

My second batch was started in early September of 2009 using cranberry blossom honey delivered by a friend from a beekeeper in Tomah, WI. I haven't tasted it recently, but I have high hopes that although it also didn't get the best treatment while moving, it will hopefully turn out better.


Now that I've done this a couple times and have some experience under my belt, I set out to make what I hope will be a much better end product. I pciked up 2 gallons of sour Montmorency cherry juice from a local store, 12 lbs of Wildflower honey from Northern Brewer, augmented with 4 more lbs of Basswood honey from our local homebrewing store in Racine.


Sour Cherry Melomel

brewed on: 6/13/10

12 lbs (1 gallon) Wildflower honey (northern brewer)
3 gallons water
2 gallons sour cherry juice (SG 1.051)
4 lbs Basswood honey (added later once yeast krausened)
aerated extremely well, added 2 tsp wine yeast nutrient & 1 tsp yeast energizer

yeast: BM45

More yeast energizer & nutrient added once per day for the next 2 days.
Re-aerated around 1.5 days later with addition of Basswood honey.



I'm shooting for something on the sweet side to balance the sour cherries, thus adding more honey. I was originally planning on 5 gallons, but it ended up being 6 with the addition of the Basswood honey. Possibility of topping up down the road with more cherry juice after racking.

I need to sit down and figure out the approximate OG on this one due to the late honey addition and cherry juice.

I didn't get to take an OG reading since the fermentables were not added together. However, I've calculated the gravity roughly as follows:

expected OG - 1.098
FG - 1.020
ABV - ~10.5%

7/13 - Transferred to secondary. SG @ 1.020. Alcohol a bit harsh. Still very cloudy. (Need to add a handful of raisins soon.)

12/10/10 - bottled. FG 1.020