JDP1: Jeremy Clarkson and the Five Gallon Carboy

The first Scotch ale test batch is in the books. Happily, it's not only drinkable (if boozy), but it tastes and looks like a Scotch ale (more or less). But given the fact that I way over shot my target alcohol range of 7.5-8.5 percent and landed at 13 percent, there is no future for this batch.
That doesn't mean it's going to waste. As with every batch of beer, I learn a little more. With this batch, I know that 7.5 pounds of malt and a half pound of honey and brown sugar is too much for a 2.5 gallon batch. Good to know. I also know now that I need to be more careful in selecting my yeast. Seeing as the beer will settle in the 7 to 10 percent A.B.V. range, I need a yeast that can deal with that much alcohol and that many sugars. And when I do my next wort, I now know not to cover the pot.
(By the way, shouldn't Charlie Papazian have pointed that out in The Complete Joy of Homebrewing? It's pretty fucking important and it took listening to hours of Brew Strong shows before I heard a passing reference to boiling the wort uncovered. It consentrates the wort, which is great, but it prevents you from infecting the beer with the condensation that can collect on the pot lid and drip back in the wort. I think not infecting the beer is a good thing to address in a homebrewing guide. After learning this tidbit of info, I had to spend a couple hours researching how to compensate for the lose of liquid during the uncovered boil. John Palmer covers the whole subject on his Website, How to Brew.)

Now that JDP1 is complete and decent, I've given it a name: Jeremy Clarkson. Clarkson is the host of the British car show, Top Gear, and whose philosophy can be boiled down to "more." More horsepower, more torque, more speed, more, more. So I thought it would be fitting to name my high-alcohol malt bomb after him. I've also entered Jeremy Clarkson in the inaugural D.C. State Fair's Homebrew contest. I don't expect to win, but I am looking for feedback. Like I said, I think it tastes like a Scotch ale (more or less), but I want some unbiased feedback.
Speaking of names, I've renamed this blog. Gastronomy is now Five Gallon Carboy. It's to reflect the transition of the blog from cooking to homebrewing. (A carboy is the glass vessel that looks like a water-cooler jug that homebrewers ferment their beer in.)
Finally a hop update. The Cascade hops (right) continue to thrive, nearly reaching the end of the nine-foot line. However, the Willamette hops (center) have come on strong in the last couple weeks, overtaking the Centennial hops (left). Now, the latter two hops have a long way to go before they catch up with the Cascade hops, but it's good to see they're still growing.

This being the first year of growth, I won't get any yield to speak of, but I will be wet hopping a beer in a couple weeks. Some folks from D.C. Homebrewers sent out word that Rebel Brewer was taking orders for fresh hops. To get a feel for making a wet hop beer (meaning that I use fresh hops instead of dry hops or pellets) I ordered a pound of Centennial to make a Centennial IPA. In addition to the fresh hops, which will be used for flavor, I picked up some Centennial pellets for bittering and dried Centennial hops for dry hopping.
It should be interesting. Hopefully, it will be good.

JDP1: Yeah, it's a big beer

Just bottled the case of JDP1 and as expected, it's a very big beer. The final gravity came out at 1.035, which means I got about 10 points of attenuation resulting in a 13% A.B.V. beer -- nearly three times the alcohol content of the average beer.

Despite all that alcohol (which you could smell and taste), it didn't taste that bad. Even in its raw state, the flavor was much better than I expected. I dumped a whole bunch of malt, honey and brown sugar in the wort, which resulted in the 13% alcohol content, but the beer wasn't particularly sweet and certainly not cloying. The malt flavor was there, but so was a strong bitter note and a bite, which where were due to the hops and the secret ingredient.

The flavor and final gravity also benefitted from the Scottish Ale yeast I used. Clearly, it was a good call to use twice the amount of yeast I needed for a 2.5 gallon batch, because the yeast thinned out the body of the beer fairly well, giving it a bit of a dry characteristic (well, as dry a characteristic as a 13% malt bomb can have). The color was also good, a real nice dark, dark amber.

Getting ready to bottle the beer, I was struck by the amount of trub that settled in the bottom of the carboy. I haven't produced that much gunk in the 5 gallon batches I've made, including the 7% IPA I recently finished. It just shows you how much malt and yeast went into the 2.5 gallon batch of beer.

So now it goes into the closet to bottle ferment for the next seven weeks (or so). I'll probably pop open a bottle toward the end of August to see how it tastes. Based on some recommendations I've gotten from other homebrewers, I may let a few of the bottles age for up to a year or more just to see what happens. If the beer is as good as I think it may be in a month, it will be absolutely fantastic in a year.

Regardless of how good it was, though, the alcohol level was way too high. I'll name this batch when it's ready and try again in a couple weeks. I need to get the recipe worked out by the end of the year, so I was happy to land somewhere in the ballpark of a Scotch ale. It's not perfect, but it ain't bad.

SR4: At least it's hoppier

So I need to dial back on the amber malt.

One of the main things I wanted to do with SR4 was lighten the color. As you can see, though, it looks exactly like SR3 (SR3 is on the left, SR4 is on the right). In fact, when I asked my wife to pick between them based on color, she thought SR3 was the lighter one.

Well, shit.

I reduced the toast on the crystal malt to try and lighten the color some for SR4, but obviously that wasn't enough. For the next batch, SR5, I'll swap a couple pounds of amber malt for a couple pounds of plain, or light, malt. I'll also go back to the darker toast on the crystal malt. Now that I know it doesn't really effect the color of the beer (at least not much), I'll go with the darker toast because I prefer the flavor.

The dry hopping worked better this time and I like the flavor of the beer a bit better. For this batch, I dry hopped three ounces of whole Cascade hops for two weeks. The result is obvious. Close your eyes and stick your nose in the glass and you can smell the difference between SR3 and SR4. However, it could be better.

Listening to an old Brew Strong show the other day, I learned that I've been dry hopping too early. Rather than adding the hops at the start of primary fermentation, I should be adding them toward the end of primary fermentation. Apparently, I can also be even more aggressive with my hopping. Three ounces for a five gallon batch is about the minimum I should be using. So for SR5, I'll be dry hopping with at least five ounces of whole hops after about 10 days.

So SR4 isn't a bad batch, it's just not as polished as I wanted it to be. Hopefully with SR5, I'll be able to work out the color and dry hop kinks, slap a name on the beer and move on to the next recipe.

JDP1: It's a malt monster

1.130.

I looked again. After all, it was 5:20 in the morning. There it was, though, 1.130 at 64 degrees. I'd made a malt monster.

To clarify, my original gravity of SR3 was 1.070, which eventually resulted in 6.7 percent alcohol by volume. So an O.G. of 1.130 puts me in double digit A.B.V. territory, when I was shooting for around 8 percent, or an O.G. of 1.075 to 1.085.

This is my first crack at making a Scotch ale, so I knew I wouldn't get everything exactly right. However, I didn't expect to produce a barleywine. The problem is, I added way too much malt, and the more malt you have the higher the gravity. So for JDP 2, I'll probably cut about two pounds of malt and see where the I end up. Hopefully at a more reasonable gravity.

As for this batch, because I'm still in the testing phase, I only made two and a half gallons, but used a full package of yeast. Given how much malt and sugars are in that carboy, those yeast have plenty to eat. And with some luck, all that yeast will help the beer attenuate down to something a bit drier and drinkable. We'll see.

Man, can you imagine the alcohol bomb this beer would be if I aged a 10 or 11 percent beer in my bourbon barrel? The guys at Brewdog might recruit me.

So that's might first obvious problem. There were some bright spots, though. The wort tasted pretty good. Understandably malty, of course, but not cloyingly sweet, and the bitterness of the hops and bite of the secret ingredient came though (a small miracle, really).

Also, the color is spot on. The dark caramel amber is exactly what I wanted. It's a result of the very dark toast on the crystal malt and probably the honey. Yeah, and the use of honey and light brown sugar seemed to go well. I expected those flavors to be too sweet in the wort, but they didn't dominate the flavor at all. And because they're fully fermentable sugars, the yeast will make short and compete work of them.

As for the yeast, I used a Scottish Ale yeast from Wyeast that came in this crazy pouch. There was a small yeast packet suspended in a solution within the pouch that I had to pop the day before. A few hours before pitching, I pulled the yeast out of the fridge, shook it and the pouch swelled until it looked like a brand new Capri Sun. Pretty cool. Bob at the homebrew store said the yeast were hearty and would attenuate well in the beer (yes, attenuation is the word of the day). I hope he's right. There's a lot of sugars to process.

Bob and the homebrew store are in Frederick. I had to run by the Flying Dog brewery on Friday to pick up some T-shirts, so I decided to hit the Flying Barrel and save myself a trip to Columbia or Falls Church (lot of flying shit in Frederick, no?). It's a nice little shop a couple blocks off Market Street, the main drag through the historic district. And when I say little shop, I mean little shop. I was standing across the street and it still took me a minute to spot the place. That said, it's probably a little bigger than myLocal-Home-Brew-Shop in Falls Church, but it just disappears in the warehouse building it's located in. Nevertheless, Bob had everything I needed, so no complaints.

JDP: Bourbon in the barrel

Start the clock.

Ten liters of Early Times Kentucky bourbon are in the barrel. That whiskey won't see the light of day for the next seven months, which is a long time to wait for a drink.

Although I'm aging the Early Times in order to make a bourbon-barrel aged American Scotch ale, I'm very curious to see how the whiskey will turn out. Early Times is good as is, so seven additional months of aging should (hopefully) do good things.

It is interesting what you learn when you have your own whiskey barrel. For one, you can't fully appreciate how much of bourbon's aroma comes from the wood it's aged in until you're sniffing an empty barrel and smelling whisky. When I was prepping the barrel by filling it with hot water to swell the wood and check for leaks, the kitchen was filled with the scent of bourbon. Of course, it was filled with the scent of wet white oak, but the scent of white oak is clearly the scent of American whisky.

Also, a 10 liter barrel doesn't look that big until you set it next to the six 1.75 liter bottles you need to fill it. There's a lot of bourbon in a 1.75 liter bottle, so there's an awful lot of bourbon in a barrel that consumes five and a half of those bottles.

I don't know if it was serendipity or JD doing some work from above, but while I was out buying the bourbon, I came across a few bottles of AleSmith Wee Heavy Scotch Ale. AleSmith is a San Diego craft brewery that I've been itching to try for some time. Boston is the only place they distribute to on the East Coast, so I've been trying to talk my friend Xiaoyi into bringing me a bottle back from her trip to San Francisco. Needless to say, I was stunned to find a few bottles at my favorite D.C. liquor store. Add to that the fact that one of the bottles they had was a wee heavy -- the style of beer I'm making for the JD Project -- and you have some fantastically odd coincidences going on.

The AleSmith Wee Heavy, by the way, didn't disappoint. It's a 10 percent malt bomb, but smooth to the point of being creamy. It's a very well made beer and a good target to shoot for with my own recipe.

Next weekend I'm heading up to Frederick, Md., for some business at the Flying Dog Brewery. Afterward, I'll be picking up the ingredients for my first batch of Scotch ale and brewing during the Independence Day weekend. That means my first batch will be ready to drink in August, an odd month for malty Scotch ales. Somehow, though, I think I'll be able to choke a few down.

SR4: Bottles of bitter

SR4, my tweaked version of SR3, is in the bottle. I think I'm in good shape, but I'm not certain.

After bottling and taking the final gravity measurement for SR3, I tasted the fermented wort (I'm sure there's a name for beer in this state, and it might just be beer.), and it tasted surprisingly good. That's not to say it tasted good the same way a finished beer tastes, but for a concoction that was still four weeks for being ready, it was kind of sweet and slightly bitter. Two dimensional, but it gave me enough to get me excited. Sure enough, the finished product was good.

Of course, I decided to mess with the recipe. Hoping to increase the hops flavors and aroma, I added more Simcoe and dry hopped with a lot more Cascade, but I didn't change the amount of bittering hops. And aside from going with a lighter toast on the crystal malt, I didn't change the malt bill. So when I tasted the fermented wort after taking the F.G. on SR4 (1.018 = 7.1 A.B.V.), I was surprised by how bitter it was. Not undrinkably bitter, just more bitter than SR3's fermented wort. I'm sure it's just a result of the additional Simcoe and that the beer will be fine. It actually reminded me of flavor I got from SR2, the first IPA I made, which is a good sign (the beer was pretty good). And considering the additional malt extract I added for bottle fermentation, the beer should round out nicely.

The lighter crystal malt I used this time did give me the color I was looking for. SR3 was a bit too amber, but SR4 looks like it's going to be a nice burnt orange.

I can't say that dry hopping with three times as much Cascade hops made my kitchen three times as hop stinky (still a good name) during bottling, but if I get a nice big hop aroma in the finished beer, it'll be worth it. If not, I'll dial it back to an ounce per batch.

Because of all those hops, I racked (transferred) the beer from the fermentor to the carboy a day before bottling so I could remove all the hops and let everything settle. I think that resulted in losing some of the beer. Although I always start with a five gallon batch, I seem to end up with various amounts. With SR3, I had several ounces left over after bottling 48 beers. With SR1, Sr2 and SR4, I didn't quite get two cases (47 beers with SR4). Odd, but I'll sacrifice some beer to avoid getting too much hops residue and dead yeast in my beer.

And finally, a hop update. My Cascade hops are kicking ass, having climbed up half the guide wire, while my Willamette are doing OK, and the lone Centennial hop plant in the middle is taking its sweet ass time. I'm not expecting much out of any of them this year, so the slow growth rates for the Centennial and Willamette hops isn't a big deal. It is curious, though. They were all planted in the same rich soil, and all get the same amount of light and water. But the Cascade is clearly the alpha hop. (Get it? Yeah, I'm a dork.)

The JD Project

I had an idea.
A couple weeks ago, I came across Copper Fox Distillery's Website. In addition to making and selling Wasmund's whiskey, the Sperryville, Va., distillery produces whiskey barrels for enthusists who want to age their own bourbon at home. I wasn't all that interested in aging my own bourbon, but the bourbon barrel gave me an idea.
JD Hembree, my step-father, passed away last year. After fighting in the Pacific and Korea as a Marine Corps pilot, JD came home, raised a family and went into the building business. Well, that's not quite right. JD was an entrepreneur who spent most of his years in the building and land development business. He and my mother met, both divorcees, and at an age when most people begin looking at retirement, JD helped my mother raise me. Maj. JD Hembree, USMC (Ret.), was a tough man, a complicated man, but a good man.
To know JD was to know the man loved Early Times bourbon. Born and raised in North Alabama, his service in the military and his various business ventures took him around the world. Yet, his tastes never strayed from that simple Kentucy whiskey he grew up drinking. When he passed away last year, his son Stephen sent a note to the folks at the Brown-Forman Distillery to let them know their sales would be down from then on out.
So when I discovered that Copper Fox sold newly charred white oak barrels in sizes ranging from 2 liters to 194 liters, I decided to produce a tribute beer: a bourbon-barrel-aged American Scotch Ale.

I'm calling it the JD Project.

Fittingly, the 10 liter barrel I got for the project was my first Father's Day gift from Trish and Savannah. I plan to fill it with Early Times and let it age for seven months. During that time, I'll work on crafting an American Scotch Ale, a nod to the Hembree clan's roots.

When the beer is ready and the bourbon aged, I'll replace the whiskey with ale for a month or so (still figuring that out). With any luck, I'll have a finished product by next March.

We can never repay our parents for what they do for us, but we can take time to remember them when they're gone.