My First DIY

After brewing the Kolsch, I realized that I desperately needed a wort chiller.  After shopping around on homebrew supply websites, I decided that it didn't look too hard, and necessity due to my self-imposed timeline dictated that I go the DIY route, rather than purchasing and waiting for a pre-made chiller to arrive.  $70, a trip to Lowes, and a realization that copper has gotten very expensive later, I had a pretty convincing looking wort chiller in my hands.

Friday I brewed the Guinness draught which will be the base of my Irish Car Bomb Stout, and I put my new tool into action.  I must say, I was very impressed with how quickly I could cool the wort to manageable temperatures.  If I were to guess, I'd say about 5 minutes from when I turned the stove off to when I was pouring the wort into the primary fermenter.

In other news, I had my first experience bottling tonight.  I finally bottled the Kolsch.  It was pretty involved, but after watching some YouTube videos, I pretty painlessly siphoned my beer from secondary into the bottling bucket.  I was three bottles short of two complete cases of 12oz. bottles, but I think for my first 5 gallon batch, netting 540oz. out of a 640oz. brew isn't too terrible I guess.  There were a few withdrawals for hydrometer measurements, and some spillage from both siphoning to secondary, and bottling splashing, which would account for most of the losses.  It tastes pretty good, I'm sure chilled and carbed it'll taste even better, but I'll know that for sure in a fortnight...

Final stats for the Kolsch were as follows:

OG - 1.039
FG - 1.005
ABV - 4.454%
IBUs - 26.68

Meanwhile, the Guinness clone is bubbling away in primary.

This Stout Will be the Bomb

More specifically, an Irish car bomb.  Hopefully that is.  I found a recipe online for an Irish car bomb stout, but it was pretty advanced.  I have no idea if it would taste right, especially with my limited knowledge.  So I browsed Austin Homebrew's website, and stumbled on a clone recipe for Guinness draught.  Bingo, I had my base for the carbomb stout.  The recipe online called for two whole vanilla beans, sliced in half lengthwise, then halved to be soaked in 1-2 cups of Jameson whiskey all throughout primary fermentation, and to be introduced into the mix for secondary.  Sounded easy enough, so I purchased the ingredient kit, and now it's at my house.

My plans are set for Friday, and the weekend can't get here soon enough.

Here's the recipe as I think I'm going to follow it.  The only difference may be to add a small amount of cocoa powder to the Jameson/vanilla mixture to get more of the chocolate milk flavor from a car bomb, as well as possibly a bit of vanilla extract since I'll only be soaking the beans for a week, as opposed to two weeks per the online recipe.  I'll have to taste it as it moves along to see what I think.

Per my planning, the bottles should be ready to crack open on the day of the Final Four.

The Big Time

I brewed my first extract beer about a week ago.

It's a Brewers's Best Kolsch, and it's currently in secondary fermentation.  There's a lot of debate around saying that secondary isn't needed anymore, but I went ahead with it.  I wanted to see what all aspects there were to brewing more advanced stuff.  It's a nice color, and seems to be moving along nicely.  There was a significant amount of blowoff at first, and it popped an airlock off of my carboy.  I had to attach a tube to the carboy, rather than the airlock for a few days to keep it under control without spilling all over.

A friend and I are going to attempt to brew an Irish car bomb stout in time for the March Madness final.  It's going to be a clone of Guinness draught, and Jameson and vanilla introduced in the secondary fermentation.  It sounds pretty tasty, and I'm looking forward to it.