Thursday, February 11, 2010

Blueberry Oatmeal Stout and a New Gadget


I’m doing a Red, White and Blue brew series for this upcoming world cup. First up is the blueberry oatmeal stout. It won’t actually turn out blue probably more purple, but you get the point. The book Clone Brews was one of my xmas gifts this year. It has a recipe for Sam Smiths Oatmeal Stout. This should be the perfect base to add the blueberries to. I love Sammy Smiths stouts. Hopefully mine will come close.

Recipe
8oz.-Flaked Oats
8oz-55L British Crystal Malt
3oz-Roasted Barley
5.75lb-Light Malt Extract
2oz-East Kent Goldings (I used American Goldings. That’s what the LHBS had on hand)
1tsp-Irish Moss
3.5 oz-Wyeast Scottish Ale yeast slurry (The yeast was saved over from another batch. I actually pitched more like 4.5oz just to be safe)
1-Roast the Oats in the oven for 75 minutes on 325. Stir every 15 min or so.
2-After the oats are done, add them to the other grains and steep in one gallon of 150 degree water for 20 minutes.
3-Sparge the grains/oats with half a gallon of 150 degree water.
4-Add the wort to your brew pot. I do full boils so I already had 4.5 gallons of water heating up during the steeping time. Add the LME now too. Make sure to have the pot off the burner when doing this. Don’t want any burnt LME on the bottom of the pot.
5-Bring to a boil and add the hops. Start the timer for 60 minutes.
6-With 15 minutes left add 1tsp irish moss and toss in the pot to sanitize it.
7-Cool wort and pitch yeast.

This is the second time that I have used my new submersible pond pump for the chiller. I had to figure out something now that I can’t use the garden hose in the winter. Plus wasting all of the water for the chiller was pretty lame. The pump is great. Only $30 at Ace. It’s not very powerful at all. The water is pushed through the chiller nice and slow. I froze the ice blocks over a few days time in tuber-ware containers. You need at least 6-10 big blocks to chill a 5 gallon batch. The chill time has gone down to around 25-30 minutes too. I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner.

Monday, February 8, 2010

No Knead Beer Bread

I stumbled across this recipe on Mark Bittman’s NY times blog. He made a New York baker named Jim Lahey an internet sensation. I for one am damn glad he did. Making bread from scratch always seemed like a daunting task not worth my time. I’m a much better cook than baker. Plus I don’t have one of those fancy Kitchenaid mixers that I drool over. What Jim is let science do all of the work for you. All you need is 18-24 hours. All you need to do is mix together flour (3 cups all purpose), water (1 5/8th cups), and yeast (1/4 tsp dry instant baking yeast). Let that sit for 10-18 hours in a relatively warm place. 18 hours seems to be better that 10. The dough will rise and become bubbly on top. Flour a work surface and your hands. The dough is really sticky at this point. Fold the dough a few times to create a ball of dough. A bench scraper helps out greatly with this. Place the ball on a tea towel that has been liberally coated with flour, cornmeal, ect. Cover the loaf with the same stuff you used for the bottom and put another towel on top. Set you timer for an hour and half. Once the timer has gone off turn your oven on to 450 and place a dutch oven in the oven to warm up. I use a 4.5 quart enamel cast iron one. This should take about 30 min depending on your oven. Once heated flop the ball o dough in the dutch oven, cover and bake for 30 min. Then bake for another 5-15min without the cover on. The top will turn golden brown during the time with the cover off. Take the bread out of the dutch oven and let cool for around 10 min. After making this a few times, I figured the recipe needed beer. So I just did a straight swap, beer in place of water. This time I used a scotch ale that I had brewed. Poured it into a measuring cup and let it sit for a few hours to let the carbonation go away. Then I mixed (whole wheat flour), waited, and baked as normal. The bread came out good. It was just too much beer. You could really taste the bitterness of the beer. With a little of butter and honey it was perfect. I am going to experiment more over the coming weeks. I’m hoping to come up with a nice whole wheat beer bread. You all need to try making this bread it’s just way too easy and good not to.

Friday, February 5, 2010

My first BA Trade

My first BA trade. It all started when I saw a post that someone was looking for New Glarus flute glasses. I had two of them in a lambic gift pack that I never gifted to someone. So I posted that we should trade. Well that started a title wave of beer mails about the gift pack. Within 30 min I had 8 messages wanting to trade me for it. Eventually I post to stop mailing me about it. I waited for the original guy to get back to me, which he never did. So I contacted the first guy that messaged me. We setup a straight $ for $ swap. I received 2 6pks and a bomber out of the deal. Not bad right. This started me thinking. It’s all nice and good that I got some cool beer out of this, but is it really necessary? I know that being from the Midwest I am relatively lucky with the selection at my fingertips, but so is the guy from the east coast. I try to eat locally produced foods as much as possible and am trying to source all of my home brew ingredients locally too. So as much as I will dig the new brews I get to try this will probably be my last trade. It just doesn’t make sense to get caught up in the hype of a beer that probably has an equivalent in your market. We should be eating and drinking locally. Now I know that when you got to the liquor store there are choices from all over the country. But what if we all drank beer that was from a 100 mile radius? That would dramatically cut down on emissions and keep/create jobs for people in your region of the country. Now I’m not saying I don’t or won’t drink non local beer. Just something to ponder when making you next purchase.