#40 Denny Conn's Bourbon Vanilla Porter - Tasting

Recipe     -     Brewday     -     Tasting

ABV: 8.2%-8.7%
IBU: 32
Serving Temp: 40F
Carbonation: <2.4 vol
Grade: A

Wait, wait, no THIS is the best thing I've brewed.  I think I've said that before, but really I'm serious this time.  If I had to choose my favorite style of beer--really I like all beer, but if I HAD to--I would probably pick an imperial stout or porter, a slightly darker black one, with a rich mouthfeel, deep complex malt flavors, maybe a touch of vanilla, coffee, chocolate, oak or bourbon as the mood strikes, and a dry finish.  Well, this beer kind of nailed it.  A compelling recipe and technically solid; it don't get no better than solid.

First off, this beer is black.  Like get arrested for walking on the sidewalk black.  No ifs, ands or buts about it, this thing is dark, and the only hints of mahogany are at the very corners when I shine light through it on purpose--everything you would expect from a robust porter.  However I think the most remarkable aspect to this beer's appearance is the foam--the fine, smooth, persistent foam.  I find this beer somewhat peculiar in that the head is particularly tight, sliding down the sides of the glass without any lacing, to somehow always maintains the same volume.  No matter how hard I pour, I get little more than half an inch (as shown above) of foam.  Yet no matter how slowly I drink, a quarter inch always remains.  I find it astonishing how consistent the it is, so I took this video with my phone as I took a sip.  You can judge for yourself how effective the camera work is.  I don't know what causes this behavior--maybe I should consult Dr. Bamforth--but I really like it.

So on to the important part: what's it like going down?  Awesome.  I am not possessed of the finest olfactory sense, so unless the hops stampede their way through my sinuses, I rarely consciously detect much.  If pressed, I would say I find a trace of the richer end of the spectrum vanilla and maybe chocolate... but only if pressed.

Then once it hits your lips it's so good!  A rich, smooth, chocolatey porter with the vanilla and warm bourbony flavors taking things to the next level.  This is a beer first, not a vanilla-bourbon cocktail, so it depends on what you're looking for, but it perfectly suite my tastes.

Up until this point I've treated this post as a single beer.  However if you remember the recipe post, I split the batch two ways: (A) good old fashioned Chico yeast, and (B) Denny's favorite 50 yeast.  Everything I've said is true for both, but there are some differences in the flavor.  As I learned in the session ale, Denny's has less fruitiness and emphasizes the malt flavor more than Chico.  I particularly like that quality in this beer.  The fruitiness (faint apple is how I usually percieve it) of the Chico sort of balances the roastiness, and mutes it a bit, while tying the whole beer together.  Denny's on the other hand lets the malt flavor run wild.  I like that effect since I'm trying to make a porter and want all the rich, chocolaty malt flavor I can get.

So there you have it.  I love this beer.  If (and/or when) I brew something like this again, I think I would drop the carbonation a little bit.  It tastes great and all, but I feel like the carbonation makes it feel just a tiny bit thinner and crisper than the gravity sample at bottling, and as it warms and loses carbonation it tastes better and better.  A small quibble though, as I think in Denny's yeast I've finally my yeast for dark and malty beers.

#41 Amarillo-Simcoe-Centennial XPA - Tasting

Recipe     -     Brewday     -     Tasting

ABV: 5.2%
IBU: 56
Serving Temp: 38F
Carbonation: 2.6 vol
Grade: B+

It's been awhile since I've written--or brewed--so it's about time I put something up here!  The new brewery is sucking up all my time.  It's slowly starting to take shape, but that's the topic for another post.  I'm here today to talk about the "XPA" I brewed awhile back.

The idea here is something hopped like an IPA, but with lower alcohol content, like a pale ale.  I like my IPA's dry and crisp, without too much heavy malt sweetness to get in the way of the hops, so I assumed the lower gravity would make that easier.  Well I kind of missed on that one.  With the high mash temperature, I ended up with a pretty full bodied pale ale.  This is a classic example of why I can't wait to have the new brewhouse.

Other than that, I'm decently happy with this beer.  I like the way the hops came together--I've been pondering this threesome for awhile now and it's nice to see it turn out as I expected.  Amarillo setts a good fruity .  The Amarillo hops were a little old, the hopback didn't quite give me all the aroma I expected, and I'm still not getting good extraction from my dry hops (the dumb cones always want to float).  These factors all just combine to mute the hops a bit, and with the bigger body produce a "smooth" and "balanced" IPA.  Like with my fresh hop IPA last fall, that's not exactly what I was going for.

I'm holding off on brewing again until I get the new system up and running, so hopefully no more of these "well it could have been good but..." posts.  With proper processes and controls, each of these mistakes was easily avoidable.  I fully expect the next IPA to finally be something I can be proud of.

Going Semi-Pro

So this is not exactly news, but I'm in the process of opening a nano-brewery.  I've been working on this for a couple months now, preparing the space and getting all our paperwork in order.  Despite the fact that it's a rather small undertaking, it's still no small undertaking.

You can see the space we're working with above.  It's going to be a nice upgrade from working in the driveway, but certainly smaller than your local brewpub.  In the next couple weeks, we'll be building the 1 bbl brewhouse, based around kettles and fermenters from Stout Tanks and assembling the control and automation systems myself.

With all that equipment squeezed in here, there won't be room for a tasting room.  If you've ever looked at brewery business models, you know that you either have to have a busy taproom or produce orders of magnitude more beer than this to have any hope of turning a profit.

So why bother?  Well to start off I can't keep brewing beer the way I've been doing it for the last two years.  You may have noticed that I'm constantly wrestling with my equipment (and also wasting tons of time), praying that the mishaps don't completely ruin my beer.  Now only a shoddy craftsman blames his shoddy tools, but I think in this case it's on the craftsman to just scrap that way of doing things and invest in better tools.

With that decision made, I might as well get some top of the line equipment and start selling some beer to pay it off.  The system is designed to make it as easy as possible to brew two or three batches in a single brewday, with volumes ranging from 5 gal to 35 gal.  That way I can continue to brew experiments with new ingredients and processes, with only marginally more effort required to brew production batches.  Which is a good thing, because I don't have a single recipe ready to sell yet.

This whole thing will require some significant changes in the way I do things--improved recordkeeping, more precise brewing practices, and a thorough QC program--but these are all good things anyway.  This nano-brewery will be a great way to get my feet wet, understanding all the ins and outs of running a brewery, without a million dollars in start-up capital or having to quit my day job.  Either it will go well and I'll learn what I need to open a larger brewery, or I'll get over this obsession and move onto something worthwhile!

#41 Amarillo-Simcoe-Centennial XPA - Brewday

Recipe     -     Brewday     -     Tasting

This brewday was pretty ambitious.  I tried to brew the dark mild at the same time, plus I opened up the HopRocket, trying to fit that into the cold-side plumbing without having inspected it before hand to see how it works.  Well as you probably guessed, it was a bit of a mess.

To start things off, the mash temperature was way off.  I had some friends helping with the brewday which is the only reason we even got this thing off the ground, but I also should have inspected their work more closely.  It's hard to hit the strike temperature just right using a propane burner and aluminum pot as the pot continues to transmit heat to the water well after the flange is shut off.  Because of this, our strike water was likely well above the target temperature, bringing the mash to 160F instead of 150F.

Next we set to work on the hop back.  The HopRocket has 1/2" threaded fittings--the rest of the system is 3/8" hose barbs--so we had to rush to Home Depot for adapters.  Then there wasn't enough pressure to drain from the brew kettle through the hop back, the chiller, and into the fermenter, so we had to hook up the pump (also a first) and of course find out we didn't have fittings for that either.  Once that was all ready, we circulated oxi clean (haven't mixed up any home made PBW yet), water, and Star San to clean and sanitize the whole post-boil assembly.

After all those hurdles, we finally got the beer knocked out.  It flowed through the HopRocket without a hitch, though we'll see how much flavor and aroma comes through.  My initial impression was not as much as I expected.

Fermentation:

Wort cooled to 68F, 45 sec oxygen.  Yeast pitched from smack-pack and placed in fridge at 65F.

1 Day:  Yeast is already throwing up a healthy krausen, unlike the mild...

3 Days:  Temp bumped to 70F.  Looks like there has been a bit of blowoff.  No surprise with an aggressive yeast like Chico and such little headspace.

5 Days:  Looks like there was a problem with the temperature controller (I'm getting real sick of this...) and the heater wasn't coming on.  Thankfully the yeast heated themselves up to 70F anyway (67F ambient).  I added the dry hops here as I'll be out of town for the next week.

15 Days:  Racked to keg.  Normally I would have cold crashed after 5 days to minimize extraction of unwanted flavors (not as much a concern with leaf hops) and drop any yeast still in suspension, but ... I forgot.  I was out of town and definitely not thinking about minimizing polyphenol load.