BamfBeer Blog

First, we’re brewing the bitter this coming weekend - on Saturday, July 1st. The recipe will be written by Matt tomorrow. Matt generally writes all of the recipes. We occasionally haggle over minor details, but we haven’t made a beer so disgustingly bad that I have any reason to question Matt’s skills In fact, we both like all of our beers….. Including, I’m happy to say, the Red Ale.

The first bottle of Bamf “Sluttypants Irish Redhead” Ale was opened just a couple of hours ago for the first testing. Once we bottle the beer, it’s kept in my basement - not refrigerated. We’ve never used a yeast that required refrigeration, and my basement generally doesn’t ever get to 75F.

This batch yielded 26 22-ounce bottles from a batch that, after it was racked off to a secondary fermenter, was just barely over 5 gallons (it went all the way up the neck of a 5-gallon carboy). There was more spillage than normal during bottling, partly because it was the first bottling of the season, I was doing it alone, and I didn’t have any kind of shutoff valve - I siphoned straight from the carboy to the bottles without an intermediary. I was also kind of conservative and left a bit of beer in the carboy to avoid having a lot of trub wind up in the bottles. Common calculations say 5-gallons should yield 29 22-ounce bottles. We’re 3 bottles short, but they have almost no sediment on the bottom from what I’ve seen so far, and the beer is pretty clear.

It *is* clear. The clearest we’ve ever made. Of course, the beer, being in the bottle for only about a week, and being warm, was a little fizzy. However, once it calmed down, the head retention was excellent, the beer was crisp and tasty, and it had all the flavor I was hoping for.

More than all of this, though, what shocked me was the incredible, incredible mouth feel. I’m not a professional judge, but I want to go look at the beer judge websites just so I can describe the mouth feel. Matt didn’t think it was a big deal. I, for some reason, was floored.

The color was actually darker than I thought it would be, but was deep reddish-brown. I’ll mention again that I was thrilled with the clarity of the beer, being that we didn’t (and don’t, ever) use any kind of clarifying agents in the beer. All we do is filter it back through the grain bed.

This beer might be less impressive for someone who didn’t go through the process of brewing it. Regardless, I really like it a lot, and I’m going to have another one that’s been sitting in the fridge for about a half an hour now.

‘Til next time.

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I had occasion to spend some time in New England recently, and my father-in-law Mike found this beer called “St. Peter’s”. He had bought their cream stout, porter, and english ale, and we tried all of them.

I liked the english ale the best. It had a hop flavor to it that I liked, but was kind of annoying to me because I couldn’t place the hops to save my life. They certainly weren’t cascade hops (which I wouldn’t really expect from a UK-brewed english ale), but I didn’t think they were fuggles or goldings or any of the more predictable hops either. It still bugs me that I couldn’t figure out what they were, but I’ve never touted my skills as a beer connoiseuer anyway. I can’t even spell the word. I’m a beer enthusiast, and I can pick out certain hops and some of the more popular grain bill ingredients, but that’s it so far.

Anyway, aside from the hoppiness, the beer is marked by a rather long-lasting, somewhat astringent aftertaste. The only way I know to describe it is that it tastes a lot like a brand new tennis ball smells. It wasn’t a strong enough aftertaste to keep me from drinking several 16.9oz bottles of the stuff, but again, it was the fact that I had no idea what accounted for the flavor that bothered me.

The first porter I tried had absolutely zero carbonation and the flavor and mouthfeel both suffered, presumably as a result of the flatness. I concluded that after trying another one, which had not lost its fizz, and it was pretty good. It’s unusual for me to like a beer that has such a small hop presence, and this isn’t a beer I’d seek out in a liquor store, but it’s not bad.

Cream stouts are not my favorite beers, and the St. Peter’s offering is a well made cream stout that I don’t like for no other reason than because it’s a cream stout, and I don’t really like cream stouts. Occasionally, a well-timed cream stout can make for a nice substitute for “death by chocolate mousse”, and the few times where that substitution has been made in my life, I’ve enjoyed it, and would enjoy this beer in that role. Summertime in New England, however, is not the best time for any cream stout.

In short, I think St. Peter’s brewery makes good beers, and I think that the three covered here are not only excellent representatives of their respective styles, I think they all offer something interesting to the beer enthusiast while still managing not to offend.

That said, I’d like to try some of the more interesting brews they have shown on their website (http://www.stpetersbrewery.co.uk). Grapegruit, Lemon Ginger and Spiced Ale sound particularly interesting.

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OK, so I bottled the red ale today. 5 gallons filled 26 22-ounce bottles. There was a little left at the bottom, of course, but 26 bottles is just short of the 29 22-ounce bottles that would spell perfection for a 5-gallon batch.

We were supposed to brew this weekend, but we postponed it due to Father’s Day. We have yet to actually set up a firm date for rescheduling, but that will get done after this weekends festivities are over.

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Ok, so the new March 809 series pump arrived to replace the busted one, and Matt and I tested it last night. It works!

It seems to pump at less pressure than I had imagined, but we’ll still need to slow it down if we use it for sparging (which we’d like to do). We have a Phil’s Sparge Arm, and this would put too much water in at too fast a rate. Anyway, the important thing is that it works just fine, and will ease a lot of our processes. Anyone with tips on setting up a March 809 series pump in a homebrewing application, send info or links - we’d love to see your setup!
In other news, we’ve settled on a brew date of June 17th for our next beer… an ESB. We still haven’t settled on a recipe yet, but that’ll probably be more or less settled on this weekend, and then written up and purchased next week.

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So we went out to a place we like to go occasionally, specifically because of the beer selection. It’s called Isaac Newton’s, and it’s in Newtown, PA. The reason we like to go there is not so much the selection of beers, but the selection of beers *on tap*. Every time we go there, we find at least 2 or 3 beers on their tap list that we’ve either never seen, or never seen on tap.

On this last trip, Matt found a new beer friend in a beer called “Ephemere”. It has coloring similar somewhat to a wheat beer, but it had absolutely no head to speak of. The aroma was very strong of green apples, but the flavor seemed to both Matt and I less like a fruity overtone that comes from fruit, and more like a fruit overtone thrown off by yeast. What was odd was that it was very enjoyable, in spite of looking like headless pasta water! Matt had several of these, and it never seemed to get old.

I moved on to a beer that my wife picked out called Avery Karma, which is just an awesome beer. Deep copper in color with a modest head, Karma is a Belgian-style beer brewed in the US. Though I don’t dislike Belgian ales, there generally seem to be too many varied flavors in Belgian ales for me to generalize and say “I like Belgian ales”. I guess maybe I don’t go out of my way to become a Belgian beer snob who knows the flavor profile of every Belgian ever brewed. I like this Belgian-style one a lot, though. It’s described on Avery’s web site as “estery” and “fruity”. I found the aroma to be as spicy as it was fruity, and tasting it, it seemed to have a bit of a warming effect, which seemed unusual to me. I’m no professional beer taster, but in my experience, warming happens when there is either a good bit of alcohol, or a distinct lack of body. This beer has a very nice medium body - excellent mouthfeel overall, I’d say, and it’s only 5.2% alcohol by volume (ABV). I really want to say it has a “bold” body, though I don’t know if that’s a term that’s used. Not heavy, but it makes its presence known.

So, those were our beer adventures for this past weekend.

Last week (I forgot to write and mention), I picked up one of those brewer’s 12 pack sampler cases, where microbreweries put 3 or 4 of their best beers (presumably) into a pack for sampling. I’ve never purchased one of these that I can remember, but this one looked good, and I gave it a shot. It’s from Troegs Brewery in Harrisburg, PA. I’ve tried their Brown Ale, Pale Ale, Wheat, and Amber Ale, and all are good beers that I would drink again. I found the brown just a bit on the ho-hum side, but I’ve had more than one voluntarily, and I wouldn’t call it a bad beer - I just like more bold flavors. The amber ale is very good, as is the wheat. Overall, I honestly can’t say that any of the beers knocked me out like the Avery Karma I had this weekend, but if there was a cooler of any of these Troegs beers at a party or barbecue, I would absolutely not hesitate to grab one. One thing I like a lot about Troegs is that their philosophy is just about exactly the same as ours. To quote their website

“We aren’t concerned with making beer to a particular style, as much as we want to create a quality beer that we like to drink—that’s what is really important.”

Amen, brother.

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Well, we don’t actually have a brew date yet. I’m thinking June 17th, which leaves us only about two weeks to get a bunch of stuff done.

First and foremost, northernbrewer is sending us a new March 809 pump, because the last one was a lemon. This time, the plan is to actually test the pump *before* brew day, so we’re not performing acrobatics to revert to an all-gravity setup before the mash dies on us.

Matt’s been talking about putting together a steam injection system using plans we’ve seen online. I personally don’t care if we use one of these for the next batch (a bitter) but it would be nice to have for batches where we’re using less highly modified malts that would really benefit from or maybe *require* a step mash.

We actually still need to develop a recipe! This one isn’t very difficult, but we need to do it so that we can plan out the day, and put together a grain bill. Don’t forget that we still need to go get the grains at some point.

We want to get the kegs professionally cut by a welder. If you don’t see why, you haven’t seen the pictures of my handy work.

We need to buy a couple more fittings so that some of the hacks we had put in place can be handled a little more smoothly and without having to think much about them on brew day. For example, we were missing a connection for the spigot coming off of the mash tun. In the end, we stuck a hose into a stopper, and stuck the stopper into the spigot, and it worked, but it’s not ideal.

Also, Matt got his hands on a utility cart made of angle iron that we want to use to create a sort of “brewery on wheels”, so we can wheel everything out on the cart, hook up the propane tank, and go to town, and then wheel it all back into the garage at the end of the day. There’s a wee bit of fabrication to take care of, but it’s damn near perfect for what we need, and it was being thrown out, so it’s free, which goes nicely with yet another Bamf motto: “If it’s free, it’s for me!”

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