Rating my Northern Lights Organic IBA/CDA/B-IPA

Aroma: 6 out of 10 Appearance: 5 out of 5 Taste: 7 out of 10 Palate: 5 out of 5 Overall: 17 out of 20 Total Score: 4.0 Thin but persistent dark tan head with minimal lacing. Body is deep dark brown at the edges, but mostly solid black. Aroma is hickory nut and lightly toasted fresh bread and a floral hops. As dark as the body looks, the taste goes in the opposite direction; light, and sparkly Pilsner malt with a bit of grapefruit zest and a hint of walnut wood. Mouthfeel goes on forever - chewy at first, with a slightly smokey, dry finish. This came out almost exactly where I hoped it would, between HUB Secession and Southern Tier Inequity for flavor and body, and a little smoother than Stone Sublimely Self Righteous. In relation to this brew's name, (my first original recipe) I found this amazing time-lapse video of the Northern Lights: The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

Tomme Arthur vs The World Comic

Picked this up from today's blog post by the Mad Fermentationist, and it is a pretty funny web comic.

If the strip has to be explained to you,
then you probably should try
some more expensive beers once and a while.

Nice (Secondary) Rack

Since I aerated the Scottish Ale with heather using the Williams Oxygen aeration system, and pitched with a solid yeast starter, the beer was ready to be racked to secondary after just three days. Trub formed a solid one inch cake, a mixture of spent yeast and some stray heather flowers. Maybe in a case of not leaving well enough alone, I went through with adding three ounces of StaVin smoked American oak cubes, that I've been soaking three months in Kentucky Bourbon. If the brew ends up tasting weird, I will chalk it up as an experiment. But I will begin to learn about the combination of a couple of age old brewing & conditioning techniques the only way I can. By trying them out. If the brew tastes great, it will give me inspiration to find other ingredients I can forage from the local high country.

I'm really feeling my Scottish heritage come forth in this brew. Archeologists have found traces of a fermented beverage containing heather dating to 2,000 BC. More recently, an English law aimed at Scotland from 1711, threatens to  throw anyone brewing with heather into the Tower of London for life, or charging them a fine of 200 Pounds. The law was intended to make citizens of Scotland buy only English hops for making beer. The law still stands.

Here's a background video I first found while looking for inspiration one night searching YouTube on our TV.

Brew Day in Photos: Organic Scottish Ale with Heather

Another kit brew from 7 Bridges Cooperative. This one is a 90 Shilling organic Scottish Ale with Heather. I plan to add American oak cubes that have been soaking in Bourbon for three months to see how closely this approximates one of my favorite local beers, Black Raven's Second Sight Scotch Ale aged in Bourbon barrels.

Brew day starts: bring in the equipment.

I get the yeast starter from the refrigerator, pour off the wort, and bring to room temperature.

Washing the breakfast dishes to make room for brewing.

Overflowing compost has to be emptied to make room for spent grains.

Ack! No oven. Thought we would have the new one installed by now.

Two quart measuring cup is ready on a clean work space.

Insulated wardrobe should hold lautering temperature pretty well.

Steeping pot wrapped in a wool blanket and nearby heating pad should stay near 155 ºF.

Lautering temperature dropped to upper 140 ºF's after 30 minutes. First tried adding two cups of near boiling water, then took pot to the flame for a couple of minutes.

Sanitize glass carboy and other utensils while lautering finishes.

Sparging spent grains through cotton bag and colander with 170 ºF water.

The final mash. Boy, it looks dark.

Spent grains go into compost.

Chickens also like the spent grains.

Washing dishes again. And again. And again.

Just added the liquid barley malt extract.

Time to bring the kettle back to a boil.

Six and a half gallon mix of hot water and mash almost boiling.

Whole New Zealand Hallertaur hops added for bittering. 

The hops settle into the boil.

Phone timer is very handy during all steps of the process.

Lunch break while boil continues - beans and hot dogs. And a homebrew D-IPA.

Wort chiller goes in with fifteen minutes left to the boil for pasteurization.

Eight oz. of heather tips and flowers added with ten minutes remaining in the boil. They smell like an alpine meadow.

Cold water flow begins at end of boil to bring temperature down to 68 ºF.

Pepper laying an egg in the nesting box.

After racking to the primary fermentor, there's still a lot of compostable material in the brew pot.

O.G. came out to 1.066, exactly where it should be.

Sixty seconds of pure oxygen prepares the wort for pitching the yeast starter.

Cold Lagering Begins

After one week in the freezer, the batch of Pre-Prohibition Lager has reached 32 - 33 ºF. Now it just needs to stay at this temperature for six weeks before bottling.

With chest freezer plugged to the digital temperature controller, I stepped down by 4 º F each day. With a 1 ºF range, the fermenter will drop to 32 ºF and cool from 34 º F as needed.

With my 7 Bridges Organic Pre-Prohibition Lager finally settled in at the optimal cold lagering temperature of 32 º F to 33 ºF, now it is just a matter of waiting six weeks for cold conditioning to complete before bottling. The temperature controller is a pricey little piece of hardware, but has performed flawlessly up to this point.You turn the chest freezer to its lowest cooling setting, then plug it into the temperature controller and set the cooling point you want. With a one degree variance, for example, the freezer kicks on whenever the temperature probe reaches 34 ºF, and shuts off the freezer when the probe reaches 32ºF. Very slick. I wish I had two of these.

William's Wort Oxygenation System

You can get 1.5 oz. oxygen tanks from most hardware stores to go with the William's Oxygen Aeration System.

An in-line 2 micron filter will keep contaminants out.

Watching my first lager batch enter its 10th day of primary fermentation and still going strong makes me wonder about ways to improve the happiness of the yeast in my care. Proper oxygenation, just before pitching the yeast seems like one more way to help the yeast along to the destiny I have chosen for them. Most of the literature recommends complete aeration of the wort once it cools to room temp. The simple way is to rock the carboy/fermenter around and around for a minute or two so that oxygen from the air inside gets mixed with the wort. This is the only time in the brewing process when oxygenation of the beer is a good thing.

William's Brewing carries two different beer aeration systems, one that filters air and requires a mid-range aquarium pump, and one that uses a standard home supply store oxygen tank to directly inject oxygen where it is needed. Both systems promise the yeast will get 80% of the oxygen it needs for a thorough sugar to alcohol conversion.

Northern Lights IBA Bottled

I decided to bottle the organic India Black Ale from 10:00 pm to 1:00 am last night/this morning, since, appropriately, the brew is as black as midnight. Final Gravity came out exactly where it should be, at 1.018. Shocking, really, for my first custom recipe. I had done so many last minute adjustments with the cold steep on the black malts and cane sugar I was concerned that the result would land outside the guidelines for an IBA. Another unusual coincidence is how the final bottle filled exactly to the top. Usually I end up with a partially filled bottle I have to then . . . ahem . . . drink so that it doesn't go to waste.

The beer has a delicious not-quite-roasty flavor in the non-carbonated, non-conditioned state, with a rich black color that stains the sides of the glass, and a hearty pine & citrus hop nose. And despite the dense black appearance, the beer is light on the tongue with very little apparent alcohol.

Dry-hopping seemed to work much better on this batch than on previous attempts. I used 1/2 oz. of New Zealand Cascade whole hops, and 1 oz. of American Summit whole hops, placing them in two separate dry hop bags with about 1/2 pound of round river rocks anchoring the bags well down into the  beer. Getting the dry-hops back out of the glass carboy required a small spoon and about 5 minutes of digging for each one.

Rating my la Nina Organic ESB

la Nina Organic ESB

Aroma: 6 out of 10
Appearance: 4 out of 5
Taste: 6 out of 10
Palate: 4 out of 5
Overall: 16 out of 20
Total Score: 3.6

Fresh biscuit, mountain honey, and ripe cantaloupe aroma, with faint piney hop notes. Light golden coper alloy body with a two finger, quickly fading, slightly off white head. Almost nonexistent lacing, but long-lasting body carbonation tickles the tongue. Smooth and very quaffable, with flavors of light caramel, citrus, and honey richness, minus the sweetness. Short-lived dry finish leaves you wanting more. Very good.

A Better Lager Cooling Belt

The sliced tee-shirt cooling belt had one point of failure, no elasticity. By the second round of gel packs, the cotton fiber had stretched so much that the cold packs just were not staying in contact with the fermenter's sides.

Bumped the temp down a whole 2º F below the cellar's ambient, to a cool 52º F.

So, as I sat in the cellar on an orange Home Depot bucket, pondering the situation, I remembered the drugstore hot & cold pack - lower-back healing belt we've had in the medicine cabinet since I pulled something in my back years ago. Both the cold and hot packs' fluid contents have mysteriously seeped out into the environment. The belt's material is a stretchy gauze with velcro at the end to pull it tight. Within two hours of applying this solution, the temperature reading had dropped to 52º F from 54º F. Experience shows that the stable temperature environment of the cellar should hold the temperature drop for several days.

Bubbles are popping through the lager's airlock in an uninterrupted parade, two at a time. I can't wait to taste how this batch comes out, in about 10 weeks. (If nothing else, home brewing beer teaches you patience.)

Lager Yeasts Doing Their Thing

54 hours in and the yeast is bubbling the airlock every 5 seconds.

As described in all the literature, the lager fermentation seems to run in slow-motion compared to the typical ale yeasts' running. Temperature is stable at about 54º F, the cellar's ambient temp, but I expect the beer will begin to generate a couple degrees of its own heat over the next few days as activity increases.

Tip of the week: Make a Cooling Belt for Cellar Cold Fermenting

Out of fear for an overheated fermentation, I have Macgyvered a simple makeshift cooling belt for the carboy. I took an old Motor City Brew Works tee shirt that has mysteriously "shrunk" to the point where it doesn't quite fit my waist, and trimmed it into a stylish new crop top. The trimmed off belly part of the tee shirt, when folded in, slips on snugly as a belt around the 6 1/2 gallon carboy. In between this belt and the carboy I packed five blue gel packs that've been collecting in our freezer. By morning I hope to see at least a couple of degrees of overall temperature decrease. Then, the cool cellar air should make it easier to keep the yeast at a happier temperature for the duration of the primary fermentation cycle.