Monday, June 23, 2008

Rain Barrel Brown




So here's my first blog. I hope you enjoy...

I brewed A Bourbon Barrel Brown ale 6/22/08. New experiments on this brew were brewing in the garage. It was awesome because it thunderstormed most of the time and I would have lost my batch if I would have brewed in the yard. I also added DME at different stages during the boil, 4lbs at 60 min and 3 lbs at 30 min. This will be the first time I use oak chips in the secondary and plan to have them in for 7 days.

Here's the recipe I went with:

Steeped for 30 minutes:
4 oz crystal 60L
5 oz crystal 80L
4 oz roasted barley
8 oz choclate malt

Extract:
7 lbs light DME

Hops:
1 oz Galena pellets 60 min
1 oz Sterling pellets 10 min

Yeast:
wyeast 1272 am ale II

Secondary:
1 oz Oak chips steamed and soaking in Maker's Mark for 4 weeks

A picture of brew day:




So I pitched the yeast at 5:00 Sun, by Monday morning it was fermenting well and looked like this:




When I got home after work, I had to scramble to put a blow tube on. That's two batches in a row doing this. I think I'm going to start with blow off tubes from now on.


Transfered from primary to secondary tonight, 07/02/08. The Fermenting was very quick and brutal, it only lasted 3 days, visually. The white moldy looking crap was in there for two days. When I see that I usually transfer. Does anyone know what that's called? It looks undesirable to me, so I usually transfer at 14 days, or when that white crap shows up. So I added the ounce of oak chips that had soaked in Maker's Mark since 06/02/08 along with the Maker's Mark.