Brother John's Abbey Ale

A couple months back, John E and I discussed putting together a nice winter ale. While what we experience in North Carolina doesn't really resemble winter, I was up to the challenge.

The "Winter Ale" is not actually a recognized beer category. In fact winter ales generally conform to a few specific characteristics, and can conform to many different particular syles. Winter ales get their name because of their ability to keep the drinker warm when the weather gets cold. They do this with a stronger alchohol content. Winter ales are generally considered more of a sweeter malty beer with lower bitterness. I believe this sweetness will actually add to the warming effect of the beer.

The style I chose to go with is 18C - Belgian Trippel. The term dubbel, trippel, and quadruple are referring to the amount of malt in the brew. Trippel for example will generally see trippel the amount of fermentable sugars then your regular ale.

The problem with doing a trippel is that I can only fit about 12lbs of malt into my 5 gal mash tun... so unfortunately I'll have to make up the rest of the sugars using some dried malt extract. Oh well... at least this is reasoning for a larger mash tun down the road! :-) I put together a pretty basic recipe. From what I was gathering online, it seems trippels are at their best when they're simple. As in 2 or 3 types of malts, a few hop additions, and let the yeast do the rest. I decided to just go with pale and munich malts. Munich should add that nice malty flavor I like. I also wanted to up the sugar content using some Belgian candy sugar. Here's the recipe

Amount    Item Type                                   % or IBU 
2.00 lb   Light Dry Extract (8 SRM) Dry Extract       12.90 % 
10.00 lb  Pilsner (2 Row) Bel (2 SRM) Grain           64.52 % 
2.00 lb   Munich Malt (9 SRM) Grain                   12.90 % 
1.00 lb   Candi Sugar (Soft), Blonde (5 SRM) Sugar     6.45 % 
0.50 lb   Candi Sugar (Soft), Brown (40 SRM) Sugar     3.23 %

1.00 oz   Tradition [5.70 %] (60 min) Hops           14.7 IBU 
1.00 oz   Goldings, East Kent [4.80 %] (30 min) Hops  9.5 IBU 
1.00 oz   Saaz [3.40 %] (7 min) Hops                  2.4 IBU

1.00 cup  Malto-Dextrine (Boil 5.0 min)                 -
2 Pkgs    Trappist Ale (White Labs #WLP500)         Yeast-Ale 

Original Gravity: 1.080 (missed target by -.002)
Bitterness: 26.6 IBU
Est Color: 9.3 SRM
Calories: 368 cal/pint

This guy had been bubbling strong every day last week. It finally slowed down a bit, but it's definitely the strongest fermentation I've had on a beer yet. The #WLP500 has been known for it's banana/clove esters. I tried to keep the fermentation temps low, however even with the house at 66 degrees, the ferementation was releasing so much heat that the temperature of the beer was mid 70s!!

I'll be out in Kansas City for the beginning of Feb, but when I get home I'll be bottling up the HCSP from last month.

Honey Chocolate Smoked Porter

So after hearing the Basic Brewing Radio podcast on "Smoked Beers" on my way up to visit some DC friends last month, I decided I wanted to try producing a smoked beer.

While I like a nice smokey taste, I figured too much smoke can easily over power the beer, and perhaps not allow the taste buds to find anything else. I decided to try to go with 30% of the grist as Rauchmalt (Smoked Malt) as a baseline, and adjust up or down from there depending on how this turned out. I wanted a good flavor in the beer to compliment the smoke. Searching for recent smokey tasting experiences, I remember getting a Mo's Bacon Bar produced by Vosges chocolate awhile back. One wouldn't figure bacon and chocolate to go hand in hand, however the salty smokiness of the bacon meshed really well with the smooth sweetness of the chocolate.

So my smokey concoction was starting to take shape! I figured since I'd be using a chocolate malt, obviously I would have to be brewing a dark style. I decided to go with Porter

Here is what the Campaign for Real Ale has for the history of the Porter (and its brother Stout):

Porter was a London style that turned the brewing industry upside down early in the 18th century. It was a dark brown beer - 19th-century versions became jet black - that was originally a blend of brown ale, pale ale and ‘stale' or well-matured ale. It acquired the name Porter as a result of its popularity among London's street-market workers. At the time, a generic term for the strongest or stoutest beer in a brewery was stout.

The strongest versions of Porter were known as Stout Porter, reduced over the years to simply Stout. Such vast quantities of Porter and Stout flooded into Ireland from London and Bristol that a Dublin brewer named Arthur Guinness decided to fashion his own interpretation of the style. The beers were strong - 6% for Porter, 7% or 8% for Stout. Guinness in Dublin blended some unmalted roasted barley and in so doing produced a style known as Dry Irish Stout. Restrictions on making roasted malts in Britain during World War One led to the demise of Porter and Stout and left the market to the Irish.

So back to the chocolate.... The Earth Day Ale was a great beer! And I really liked the flavor that came out of the brew. There was definite chocolate/coffee flavors. However for this beer, I wanted more of a smoother cocoa flavor to shine through. This brought about the idea of boiling and "dry-cocoaing" with baking chocolate. I also wanted to up the ABV of the brew, so I went with 2 lbs of honey. It will be interesting to see if the honey can actually shine through both the smoke and the chocolate. I may have just been better off using corn sugar. We shall see.

Amount      Item Type                            % or IBU 
5.00 lb     Mild Malt (4 SRM) Grain              37.04 % 
4.00 lb     Smoked Malt (5 SRM) Grain            29.63 % 
1.00 lb     Biscuit Malt (23 SRM) Grain           7.41 % 
1.00 lb     Chocolate Malt (350 SRM) Grain        7.41 % 
0.50 lb     Caramel/Crystal Malt (80 SRM) Grain   3.70 % 
2.00 lb     Honey (1.0 SRM) Sugar                14.81 % 

0.75 oz     Chinook [13.00 %] (60 min) Hops     31.2 IBU 
0.25 oz     Chinook [13.00 %] (7 min) Hops       2.8 IBU 

1.50 cup    Malto-Dextrine (Boil 5.0 min) 
2.00 oz     Cocoa (Boil 10.0 min) 
2.00 oz     Cocoa (Secondary 2.0 weeks) 

1 Pkgs      British Ale (White Labs #WLP005) Yeast-Ale 

Original Gravity: 1.063 (missed target by -.002)
Bitterness: 34.0 IBU
Est Color: 30.8 SRM
Calories: 274 cal/pint

We brewed her two weeks ago. The inital tasting on first racking was a very nice chocolate flavor, however there was definitely some astringent tannings in there as well. Suprisingly even with as little as 30% rauchmalt the smoke flavor was going strong! I want to bulk age this baby for a bit longer then normal, but I'm guessing she'll be ready to bottle when I get back from my trip to KC in mid February.

I'll post an update when I have some tasting notes and a final gravity