Rebrewing old recipes

stoutmaker1 Comment

I’ve had this blog now for over a decade now. Brewed and posted a lot of beers. But sadly in the few times that I have moved servers and locations, I’ve lost some of the first few years.

Since I’ve been brewing much much longer than when internet was easily accessed, I have some notes scribbled here and there in notebooks as well.

I think I’ll start doing some rebrews of my old beers. I’ll throw in one of those old old recipes now and then, but they are almost all the same stout over and over.

I didn’t really start branching out into different brews until around the 2000’s and that’s where a lot of my notes started going going on to floppies. I seen no reason to keep 5.25 disks.. so they got chucked.

The earliest posts I have that survived are from 2010 so there is more than enough brews to choose from.

So to start out with, I’ll give the Laceration a go. It’s a Scottish 60 that I brewed first back in the extract days and moved it up to all grain… Plus I believe this was my first 10 gallon batch. And did a split ferment with 2 different yeasts.

I’ll get it re written for a 5 gallon batch this weekend and will do a brew day report. I did a lot of spur of the moment things so an accurate rebrews may not be so easy. But check out the original post to see what I mean.

Stay Tuned

Yeast problem

stoutmakerLeave a comment

This past Saturday I stirred up a cider. Just the normal store bought juice that I use all the time, and a bit of the raspberry wine base. Pretty standard stuff.

Usually I use Nottingham yeast for my ciders. Finishes a bit sweeter and has the apple-ish esters that go great in a cider. But this time I used new yeast.

The Brewer’s Best Cider House Select. This is the yeast that comes with those fantastic cider kits. And while I couldn’t find much info on the yeast it’s self, I have had the ciders made with those kits many times and it was great.

There isn’t much to do in cider when starting with bottled juice, except to add some nutrient, stir and put in the 67F chamber.

I do a staggard nutrient, meaning add some at pitch, some on the third day with a good stir to release some Co2. This helps the yeast out, and really keeps the fusels down.

Day 2. No signs of life from this yeast. If this would have been my normal Notty yeast I would have been worried. But this stuff is new to me so maybe it’s a slow starter.

Day 3. Still nothing. Now I’m worried. But it’s also nutrient day, so I’ll be opening it up to see whats going on. Maybe my lid just wasn’t on right.

Nope. Nothing going on in there at all. Even stirring got no push of bubbles from Co2 escaping like it normally would if there was activity. Some yeasts are slow starters, but after 3 days…time to do something.

Well I gave it another dose, and threw in the Nottingham. Next day, blam! We got the normal Notty heavy action.

I don’t know what was up with that cider yeast. Dont know if it has a super lag. But 3 days is a looong time with nothing. But from the stir it didn’t look like anything bad took over. So we should be good.. I hope

Raspberry

stoutmakerLeave a comment

About a month I picked up this raspberry wine base. Gonna use it twice today.

1/2 of it is going into a cider. So nothing fancy. Just store bought apple juice, and some cider yeast.

Gravity on the cider going in was 1.084. With no added sugar, that was a bit surprising.

Next up I threw all my left over grains together and came out somewhere in between a dunkle and a bock. OG of the beer was 1.058. with the rest of the Raspberry base it hit 1.080

Kinda worried though about the amount of raspberry in the beer. That’s only about 2 qts in the carboy. Buy when I used some hot wort to rinse the jug out and poured it back into the kettle,, I could already taste raspberry just from the rinsed out bit in the full batch.

Well we will see.