Brew Day - Feb 5, 2011

The fermenter full of finished beer

February 5, 2011 saw a couple of firsts for us.  We finished the first use of our conical fermenter, and we did both a bottling and a brew in a single day.  Greg and I were there, as always.  Keizo came by to help with the bottling and milling grain.  And Gordon helped out a little.  Having 4 people really helped things go smoothly.

Honey IPA

We were bottling the Stone IPA clone we brewed on January 15.  We tried to make the recipe as close to Stone IPA as we could reasonably work out, but we added our own little twist:  honey malt.  It finished with 6.4% ABV and a nice hoppy aroma with a faint honey flavour.  We were very impressed with the fermenter, although the beer was not as clear as we're used to.  There was a bit of suspended matter in the beer, but we're attributing that to the fact that we didn't use any irish moss (because we were out).  Overall, we were very pleased with the beer and, of course, with the fermenter.

Boiling during a snow storm

The gravity reading for our Oat Loaf Stout

For the brew, we wanted to use up some of the darker malt that was getting a bit old.  It has been a chilly winter and we felt like making a good full-bodied beer.  An Oat Loaf Stout was the obvious choice.  We started with a chocolate stout and tossed in some flaked oats from the grocery store.  I'm a little concerned with the amount of chocolate malt that we added.  It will be chocolatey.  The mash went perfectly smoothly.  During the boil we were treated to a snow storm in which about 15 cm of snow fell in the 90 minutes for which we had the propane burner running.  The starting gravity turned out to be 1.054, so we're expecting about a 5.5% ABV beer with a rich chocolatey flavour and a smooth finish.  We shall see how it goes.  The fermenter claims it "may cause death" if over-filled.  We may have over-filled it slightly.  Hopefully Gordon survives his next laundry day.

The Oat Loaf Stout, ready to ferment