My LHBS was gracious enough to replace the out-of-date yeast that I purchased there last week. No questions, no hassle, just a clean trade for healthy working yeast.
Now the pale ale is happy and so am I.
Let cry the yeasts of war!
Bought Cry Havoc for the first time to pitch in a pale ale I brewed on Sunday. Made a one liter stirred starter. Cooled the wort to 60F and pitched the whole starter.
No activity in the airlock. No movement in the liquid visible in the carboy. No krausen.
Took a hydrometer sample tonight, no fermentation.
Looked at the vial the yeast came in, best by date was eleven days before I bought it. This yeast was fifteen days past its ‘best by’ date when I pitched it.
I wouldn’t have been too worried about that even if I had noticed it before using it. But obviously, I’m not getting any action from these cells.
The other beer I brewed same day is fermenting quite well with WLP London Ale yeast. (Date on that vial is four months from now.)
I keep a brown paper bag with packets of dried yeast in the fridge for emergencies. Fifty hours without fermentation qualifies, so I dug out the bag.
Turns out that bag of yeast has been hanging out waiting for today for some time now. The dry yeast packs expired over a year ago.
I have two packets of Lavlin D-47 in there as well. Considered using them. Rejected the idea.
I have a couple of quart-sized jars packed full of peanut-butter-thick yeast sludge. Most likely WLP001. Most likely been in the fridge as long as the expired dry yeasts.
Guess I’m going to the LHBS tomorrow. Hopefully the wort feels like waiting another day.
I had the chance to brew this oatmeal brown ale this past weekend.
In the limited time I spent researching this recipe, I came across several unique ideas that ultimately laid a path to this beer. I wanted something malty and flavorful for this year’s #pajamaup party. I had never brewed a brown ale before and decided this was a good opportunity to try my hand at one.
I looked through a few online recipes for brown ales and found one brewer who had used piloncillo, a form of unprocessed brown sugar commonly found in Latin America. Using this type of sugar could lend my beer a dark brown sugar/molasses flavor.
My research also turned up this recipe from Charlie Papazian which uses elements of a decoction mash. Boiling a portion of the grist might result in an improved complexity in the perceived malt aroma/flavor of the final product.
The idea for using a high proportion of oats as well as flaked barley in the grain bill mine. Most resources that I’ve seen recommend using oats up to 10% of the total grain bill. This recipe uses 20% oats as well as 10% flaked barley. I wanted to push the limits on adjuncts typically used to promote smoothness in the body of a beer. While the numbers I used for this recipe certainly aren’t extreme by any means, they are outside of the generally recommended values.
My initial inspiration for this beer came from the fact that I had just purchased some high-quality vanilla powder and wanted a beer to try it out in. As I brewed this, I started to think that I might skip adding the vanilla. Having never used the powder before, I began to worry that the flavors from it would mask or conflict with what the base beer was turning out to be. Ultimately, I decided to use what I hope was a small amount of vanilla, one that would add a layer to the beer but not overpower it.
After deciding to brew a “Vanilla Oatmeal Brown Ale,” I took a look at the BJCP style guidelines for brown ales. I quickly determined that I wanted to start with the Southern English Brown sub-style with its rich and complex malt characteristics. What I kind of didn’t want was the somewhat subdued low gravity and subsequent lower alcohol levels that define the style. So it became apparent that in further bastardization of a classic English beer style, I would be brewing an “Imperial Vanilla Oatmeal Brown Ale.” While a hefty in-style Southern English Brown tops out at 4% alcohol, mine is 6%.
I wasn’t able to secure any piloncillo sugar before brewday, but a friend was kind enough to gift me a one pound block of Colombian-made panela which I used in its place.
I toasted two pounds of oats and added one pound directly to the mash. The other pound I boiled with a cup of crushed grain and added to the mash after the protein rest. The resulting runoff was extremely slow due to the stickiness and lack of hulls from the oats and flaked barley. I should have definitely included rice hulls in this mash to make a better grain bed and smoother sparge.
The final wort going into the fermenter was viscous and sweet. Smooth and rich and complex. Can’t wait to see how this one comes out.
Brown ales are new territory for me as a brewer. I’ve brewed malt-centered styles before, and plenty of flavored beers, but this marks my first attempt at brown ale. I’m excited by the hydrometer sample and the thought of how the London Ale yeast will do with this wort. I’ll post a follow up with tasting notes when this is ready.
I used to have a website at this address which chronicled my homebrewing adventures. Then one day, that old site died. In its wake, I made a short-lived attempt at a blog, that never really took root.
Eventually my documenting and sharing about beer found a new home on Twitter. Tweeting about homebrewing has been great, but the beer posts very quickly get mixed in and swallowed up by the cacophony of the rest of my timeline.
I want something with more permanence. More focus and structure. A place to talk about making beer and drinking beer. A more organized home for my notes about recipes and projects. About equipment and techniques. About experiences with beer and the knowledge that comes from them.
Twitter has been an excellent venue for finding and making friends from all around the word who are dedicated to the culture of beer and brewing. Additionally, I found the excellent brewing software and collaboration site Hopville. I now use this site exclusively for formulating and storing my beer recipes.
Happy with the networking and recipe building aspects of these sites, I still miss the things that a dedicated Blue Water Beer site has to offer. The ability to post longer descriptions of projects, keep a library of brewing photographs and interact with other brewers in a less fleeting way. Inspired this week by a visit to Jamey Barlow’s site, I have decided to resurrect bluewaterbeer.com. My hope is that this site will be an extension of my activity on Twitter and Hopville.
I don’t know how much time I will have to actually update and maintain this site but I’m game for giving it another spin. Thanks for taking the time to check it out.
Cheers.