Chocolate Peanut Butter Stout

The brew life has been pretty slow lately and thus so has this blog.  I doubt it is going to speed up soon but you never know - with warmer weather may come more brewing.

Logo by my daughter

Sometime in the last quarter of last year I bought the Midwest Supplies extract kit for "Chocolate Covered Beavr Nutz" and a couple jars of peanut butter powder (the kit doesn't include the peanut butter).  Then the kit and powder sat around in my garage until early last month where we finally busted out the equipment and brewed.

Peanut Butter Powder in the Carboy

The recipe was pretty simple.  Basically you make the beer like any extract kit but when you go to secondary just add the peanut butter powder.  Then, a few days later you add the cocoa nibs.  After that let it ferment for another week or so and voila' you're done.

I however let it sit in secondary for a few weeks longer than called for because I was being lazy about the time to prep the fridge for the keg.  It had been keg-less for so long I had put shelves back in it and the shelves all contained store bought beer.  Thankfully, kickball season started so the beer bottles disappeared and I finally found the motivation to fully clean the keg lines and get this beer in on tap about 10 days ago.

My garage is a jam packed mess.

Interestingly when I brought the beer up from the basement and into the warm garage it almost instantly started to bubble in the airlock.  The yeast had been re-awoken and it started to go crazy so I left the beer sitting in the carboy in the garage for a few hours.  Eventually, however, I got it in the keg and into the fridge.  The fridge was sitting at about 42F so I set the CO2 at 11 PSI and left it for this past Sunday (June 21, 2015).  It was hot out and I was in the mood for a drink so I poured a glass a day earlier than I planned but, fortunately, it was fully carbonated and ready to go.

The first pint

The beer has a nice head but it doesn't keep it for long.  It also has a pretty strong peanut butter aroma but a nice mild peanut butter flavor.  In fact, the entire beer, with an IBU of 68, is really mild and smooth.  It has a bit of a watery mouthfeel for a stout but I found that to be refreshing in the summer heat so I don't mind.  Overall I'm really happy with how it turned out and I can see myself making this kit again.  My wife also really likes it so that gives me further motivation to keep this on the keg rotation.

Up next I'll probably make another IPA or a Hefe or maybe some kind of Belgian.    Until then I look forward to drinking the rest of this keg of Chocolate Covered Beavr Nutz

Double Brewday Afternoon

This past saturday the Hops Alchemy gang got together for a double brew day!  We are still learning a lot so we are still using liquid malt extract (LME) kits.  This brew event featured a Red Ale by Brewers Best and a Brown Ale by Midwset.

The day started out in a pretty haphazard way.  I couldn't find the lid to my fermentation bucket.  I searched all over the garage but couldn't find it until I went to the basement to get my kettle and I saw the last batch we bottled patiently carbonating on the shelves.  We had potentially overfilled four bottles and I had put them in a second bucket with my fermentation lid on it just in case they blew.  The bottles were fine so I took them and the lid upstairs along with the kettle.

Once upstairs Mike and his cousin Jason showed up with the Brown Ale kit, some tools, and a case of assorted beer along with a collection of bottles from the Fat Tire clone (Flat Tire) we had recently made.  They did not, however, bring a kettle or their burner.  I noticed the missing burner so sent them back around the blocks to Mikes to get it.  I searched all over for my second kettle but couldn't find it so then they had to go back again to get their kettle.  At least I had a nice new full propane tank for them to use!

The next arrival was Derrick and his family along with some really high gravity beers for us to drink while we brewed.  Derrick is a biochemist and he has offered to measure our IBUs in the future.  I'm pretty stoked to discover this capability in the group!  Our final arrivals were Jason and his girlfriend Lindsay and we were ready to get to brewing.

We setup both boiling stations in the garage close to the door.  I normally would brew in my backyard when the weather is as nice as it was on Saturday but my patio (that I installed) isn't that level and I really only have on great place to put a boiler out there so we set up in the garage and just kept the door open through the day.

We started drinking right away which, honestly, wasn't the smartest plan.  We were sharing each bottle so we can each sample all of the beers we had brought or that I already had there.  By the end of the day we had each sampled just about 19 beers.  We tracked them all on untappd so if you're curious here is my profile.  This quick dive into drinking led us to not read the instructions.  We totally missed the fact that we were supposed to let the water get to roughly 160 and then maintain that temp after adding our grain.  We brought both kettles to boil.  We tossed the brown ale grain bag in the water and then realized what we had done.  We let the red ale water cool down to about 170 before adding that grain bag in.   According to the instructions letting the grains steep at the 200+ temp means we will leach more tannins into the beer so we've jokingly decided to call the Brown an Imperial Brown.

From there on everything went really well.  We put some of the Sloppy Lion King Belgian and some of the Knotty Octopus Alt Bier in the red ale during the boil.  We do this to carry some of all of the old batches forward through every new batch.  We had forgot to put the Alt into the Belgian's boil so we had to put a bit of each into this one so that none of the ancestry is lost.  I'm not a huge fan of how the Alt came out so I put a bit more of the Belgian in than I did the Alt.

Not only were we making beer but we also were making custom pizzas.  We like to make sure everyone gets plenty of food while over for brew time so we had the bread machine working overtime all morning cranking out pizza dough.  We then took turns rotating through the kitchen crafting our own custom pizzas with the smorgasbord of toppings everyone provided.  It was a great meal and it really went well with the copious amounts of beer we were drinking.

Eventually the brewing was done so we moved into the kitchen to transfer to the fermentation buckets.  After siphoning the red ale into it's bucket I quickly sealed it up and put the air lock on the top.  As I started to carry it away I was reminded that I still need to add enough water to reach the five gallon mark.  The brown ale was topped off and they were able to read their original gravity (OG) without a problem and it seemed to be right where it was supposed to be.  I had a ton of trouble reading the gauge on the red (too many bubbles in the brew) so I'm really not sure what the OG is on it.  Hopefully it was in the right range.  If not who knows what we will end up with?

Finally I carted the buckets down to the basement where they get to sit for a bit before they will move to secondary. The red will be moving this Thursday evening right before I attend a home brewers social at a local pizza joint.  That should be a fun and educational night.

Flat Tire is carbonating.

I bottled the Flat Tire Ale this past weekend. After racking from secondary back in to the fermenting bucket everything went rather smoothly. I have to say that the bottle rinser and drying tree are worth their weight in gold. My total yield was 8-32oz bottles and 21-16oz bottles, from a little over 4.5 gallons. I am a big fan of the swing top bottles even though they cost a lot more. I have been trying to get Grolsch bottles when I can. I'm not a big fan of Grolsch though so my first few batches were from purchased EZ-Cap bottles at about $100 per batch.