Blackberry Mead . . . The Madness Has Begun

I started the blackberry mead two days ago. In the process of making it, I think I forgot just about everything I have learned in 7 years of making beer and wine. The following are the key things I foolishly forgot:

• Time. For some silly reason, I forgot that brewing always takes a LOT longer than you think it does. The mead recipe I was using was pretty simple. Boil 20 pounds of honey for 15 minutes, then pull off the burner. Toss in the blackberries for 15 minutes to pasteurize them. Add to the primary fermenter, cool, and pitch your yeast. I allotted 90 minutes for this process and had something to do at the end of that period. Boy, I was wrong. It took a LOT longer and I ended up trying to rush things, which is never good.


• Follow the recipe. The recipe called for boiling one gallon of water with the 20 pounds of honey. I thought, that is too little, so I made it two gallons. This meant that things took longer to boil. It also meant that my brewpot was overflowing when all the honey was added to the pot and I had a boil over. It also meant that I had to pasteurize the blackberries in the primary fermenter because there was no more room in the brew pot. Thus, I had to pour boiling hot honey-water through a funnel . . . more on that later.


• Test your equipment, FIRST. This was the first time I used a new large funnel I purchased while visiting my brother. The funnel is supposed to prevent splashing, but I did not test it. Well, the funnel actually splashes more, it seems, especially with HOT liquids. My wife was holding the funnel when it "burped" and honey water splashed all over her arm and burned her. I felt really bad about that. Plus, it spilled onto the floor and honey water is incredibly sticky. What a mess . . .


• Cool Concentrated Liquids. Given that I could not pasteurize the blackberries in the brew pot because I added too much water, I could not cool the brew pot before putting in the glass fermenter. This meant that even after topping off the carboy with cold water, the honey water was much to hot to pitch the yeast. In fact, I ended up having to let the mead sit over night before adding my yeast, as it would not cool down. I pitched the first thing the next morning, and now it is bubbling away happily, but I obviously wanted to pitch sooner.

With all the crazy things that happened during the brew day, I am tempted to name this one "Black Madness." However, the mead is fermenting fine now and has a beautiful color. We will see how it turns out, as this mead will need to age for nine months to a year before drinking. Hopefully, I will be out of the dog house by then, having burned my wife's arm while she was trying to help.

But then again, as often as I put myself in the dog house, I doubt it . . .

"HI," How are you?

My wife and I are going to be headed to Hawaii soon for our 10 year wedding anniversary. We will be spending time both on Maui and near Honolulu. Besides using this trip to relax, re-energize, and spend quality time with my wife, I hope to find GREAT Hawaiian beer! I will be sure to report any findings on this subject for the benefit of the rest of you.

Hopefully, I can sample some beer and come up with a homebrewing method to reproduce it. If not, perhaps some stranger ideas may ferment in my head. I am already coming up with some homebrewing ideas on the subject, such as a nice espresso porter, brewed with kona coffee beans. Or perhaps a pineapple wheat wine. We shall see . . .

I may have CRABS . . .

Well, we are trying to organize. The beer establishment has got us down and we want our voices heard! We want quality beer, decent prices, good advice, and good wages . . . well, who does not want good wages. So, it is time to organize a local homebrewing club.

My friend Jamey and I have been talking about starting a homebrewing club in the Charlottesville area for a while now. The last time I went digging for one, I found some references to a club called "The Back Door Brewers" on several homebrewing sites. I sent an email to the address listed and got a quick response back saying the club was no longer meeting. Basically, they wished they had not been listed on the brewing sites because the organizer still gets emails about it years after the club disbanded.

This gives me hope . . . as there may be other people interested in homebrewing in Charlottesville and we just have to find them. I am hopeful that with a simple website and some meetings at local pubs, we might find a cool group of people that like to make beer, have fun, and exchange ideas. Thus, the Charlottesville Radical Ale Brewing Society (CRABS) will soon be born.

So, I fired the idea off to my art-talented brother, who, while pursuing a career in engineering, is still an awesome artist. I was expecting some general ideas, but he sent back several draft designs within an hour. I have included a couple of them here. I thought he just modified some things he found on the web, but no, he just free-hand designed them using Illustrator. Simply amazing!

The overall winner of the logos was this one. It is my favorite and is based off of one of my brother's hobbies, geocaching (http://www.geocaching.com/). He had a travel bug called Steamey the Crab and liked how it looked. Thus, the CRABS mascot will be "Steamey" as well. He even drew an anchor tattoo on Steamey's claw. Simply great.

I hope to have more information about CRABS soon, as several of us are meeting next week to start the group off. What better way to do it than meeting at a local brewpub to sample cask-conditioned ales . . . Yum!

7th of July Party

My friend hosts an annual crab and clam party every year on the first Saturday after the 4th of July. I have attended several events and it is always a good time. Then, starting in 2006, my friend found an old coke dispensing fountain in a friend's attic and was surprised to find it still worked. The machine takes room temperature liquid (think old-fashioned kegged soda) and quickly super-chills it and dispenses it from one of five taps. My friend's immediate thought, now I can request some Wallace homebrew to serve at the party.

So, in 2006 we tried the system out. My friend found some 5-gallon corny kegs on sale cheap on eBay and together we brewed a red ale and an English pale ale. Both recipes were extract-based. Then we hooked them up to the coke machine and started fiddling with carbonation. Several problems became evident. Unlike bars and most homebrew kegging systems which keep their kegs at serving temperature, the coke machine takes room temperature beer and super-chills it. Given that gases dissolve in liquid at different rates for different temperatures, this proved to be problematic. We eventually got it right, after drinking half a keg of beer over a month or so, and things were great. The party went off well and people liked the beer, especially the English pale ale.

So, 2007 rolls around and my friend wants to up the ante. This year we made four kegs of beer (that's right, 20 gallons). We kept the English pale ale from last year, and added a West Coast pale ale for comparison. I also suggested two of my favorite recipes, a clone of Samuel Smith's oatmeal stout and a smoke amber ale. Again, we had the same problems of adjusting the CO2, or that was my friend excuse for drinking a third of the smoke amber (I am pretty sure that was his favorite, so I don't buy the excuse for a second). An impromptu survey conducted of party beer drinkers revealed the following facts/opinions:

1) The oatmeal stout was great, which surprised many people because it is a dark beer on a hot day. This was my favorite of the bunch, and the first keg to be drained completely.

2) People thought the smoked amber was very different, but really liked it, and several were surprised at how quickly the keg drained (it was finished second, most likely due to my friends CO2 "tests").

3) People rated the West Coast pale ale much higher than I thought they would. The beer, while clean tasting, seemed a bit plain to me. But, several people said the hops cut through the Old Bay seasoning on the crabs very well, which made it an ideal complement to the meal.

4) The English pale ale was enjoyed too, but it seemed the least favorite of the homebrews.

In addition, my friend bought a bunch of bottles of Amstel Light and dumped them into a keg and pressurized it. This was the last tap of the coke machine. Not surprisingly, this was the only beer left at the end of the party, with the English pale ale keg draining just after the fireworks show. My friends comment, "Next year I will tell those light beer drinking friends to bring their own and WE will brew another beer; one that has TASTE."

I look forward to it . . .

Dark and Wheaty with a Nutty Aftertaste . . .

I bottled the dunkleweizen last night, with the help of my lovely wife. It looks and tastes great, with a dark malty flavor and a nutty aftertaste (perhaps of almonds). I am very excited to see how it turns out. If it holds up to the carbonation process, the beer should be quite good.

Last night marked the first time we used my new "auto siphon." This is a neat device that is basically two racking tubes inside each other. The inner one is fitted with a gasket and you and pull it in and out like a syringe. You submerse the whole siphon in water then draw the inner tube up and out. Then you push the inner tube down and the pressure from this action pushes the liquid up and out the middle racking tube and, PRESTO, you have a siphon (works very similar to a syringe). It as the easiest thing in the world and I did not have to try to start the siphon by mouth, which is always dicey and may not be totally "germ-free" (though I have heard of some who "rinse" their mouths with scotch or vodka before starting the siphon. If that is not an excuse to drink booze, I have never heard one). You can find out more about the auto siphon here on the Northern Brewer site (http://www.northernbrewer.com/siphon.html). Just scroll part way down to the Fermatech Auto Siphon entry.