90 Minute: Bottled...

The 90 Minute found its way into bottles this weekend.  22 bottles to be exact.  We bottled it using 16 of our brand new 750mL champagne bottles, and a six-pack of 12oz bottles for either giving away, or drinking alone.

It was a pretty close match to the Dogfish Head 90 Minute that it was cloned after when sampling an uncarbonated sample of beer, and I'm happy for that.

Final stats for the IPA were:
O.G.   = 1.082
F.G.    = 1.021
%ABV = 7.991%

We also racked the honey hibiscus wit to secondary, and purchased most of the ingredients to make our next brew, chocolate covered strawberry stout.

Big Update

Time has flown by since the last update, and I'm well overdue.  A few things have happened since the last post.

1)  Carbomb stout has carbed, and it is glorious...  I've given a few bottles out to beer drinkers with different tastes, and feedback has been overwhelmingly good.  Personally, I think I could do better, but I suppose that's why 'they' say that you're your own harshest critic.  I drank my first bottle of it, looking for the carbomb taste, which I can best describe from memory as a solid stout taste, with a vanilla taste, followed by a chocolate milk aftertaste, and a background hint of the whiskey.  What I experienced was a very good Irish stout, with a subtle hint of something at the end of the taste.  I knew what it was, so I was able to recognize it pretty instantly as the whiskey, but other tasters that I've talked to have told me that if they hadn't known it was whiskey, they wouldn't have been able to place it, but they all could taste 'something else' in there.  I've only had 2 additional people taste the beer, and each one has asked for some of it, if I ever brew it again.  So that's something...

I tried a second bottle, knowing that I wasn't going to get the taste I was looking for, but instead, to just taste the beer, and see if it's good.  It is.  It is very good.  I'm very happy with it, and I'm looking forward to brewing it again.

(Not the greatest pour...)

2)  I'm expanding.  My two brewing friends and I are pitching in together to buy more equipment and recipes, and our first order is on the way.  We are getting 2 additional 5 gallon carboys, expanding fermenting capacity to 20 gallons at a time, as well as two new recipes to fill them with.

The first recipe is a honey-hibiscus wit, which sounds pretty tasty as a Spring seasonal.  The second, which I'm a little intimidated by, but looking forward to at the same time, is a clone of Dogfish Head's 90 Minute IPA.

I've been researching all-grain brewing, and I'm starting to plan for some equipment in the near future, but in the meantime, I'm sticking with extract brewing.

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.