BREWDAY: When life drops your butternut, make BUTTERNUT ALE!

Upon the kitchen table that is a family heirloom from when my parents were first married, I had placed two pie pumpkins, and a butternut squash.

I had every intention of making a pumpkin beer in a couple weeks, after pipelining some simple, small SMaSH Pale Ales to feature Cluster and Styrian Celeja hops in two otherwise identical brews. I had even toasted up 8 ounces of malt to a nice, nutty, medium toast, to be divided up between the two pale ales. I had even made up 8 ounces of a home-roasted caramel malt, made from soaking grain and caramelizing it in the oven and then roasting it to dry it out. I had done these things for Pale Ales.

The gods of homebrew hurled my butternut squash upon the ground. It cracked at the top, splitting evenly down the center, and halfway down the fruit.

Immediately, I roasted the squash to make some use out of it. If I had left it alone, it would have just rotted like that.

So... That was not part of our dinner plans, just yet.

Beer gods demanded Butternut Squash Beer.

Interesting fact: Most homebrewers who make pumpkin beer are probably already making butternut squash beer, because most commercial cans of pumpkin puree are actually a type of butternut squash, or a hybrid variety of squash/pumpkin called Dickenson Field Squash. Actual pumpkin, if you made it into a pie, would be a golden yellow color, not the orange we know and assume means pumpkin. Butternut Squash is what people are really thinking about, when they're imagining the flavor of pumpkin in their mind. It's richer, deeper, with a bright orange color, and it's a perfect thing to make beer with on an early autumn day!

I cobbled together a recipe with what I had lying around. Fortunately, I did have some more interesting malts in the brewcloset. (Plus some fresh spices straight from Grenada courtesy of my wife, whose family harvest cocoa, cinnamon, and amazing nutmeg and send it to us from their farm. Nutmeg and cinnamon were both from Grenada!)

This batch turned into a 3 gallon brew when I lost track of how much water I was pouring into the darn brew kettle... The end result was around 3 gallons, right?

I pulled up my edition of iBrewmaster...

BUTTERNUT STOUT!
3 gallons, thereabouts
OG: 1.062
FG: 1.017
30 SRM
(estimated mash efficiency of 86%)

3 pounds of Rahr 2-Row Pale
1 pound of Munich Malt
8 ounces of home-toasted malt
8 ounces of home-made caramel malt, est. at 100L-140L
6 ounces of Caraffa I
6 ounces of Dark Brown Sugar, added to the boil
half of a roasted butternut Squash for about 1.5 pounds, pureed
@60 minutes use 1 ounce of Cluster hops for about 40 IBU
@15 minutes, add one small cinnamon stick, 1/2 tsp of fresh-ground Nutmeg, .25 ounces of grated, fresh Ginger
Include in the full Primary (or secondary instead, if you plan to use one) with 1/4 of the cooked, pureed butternut squash
Pitch 1 full packet of Safale S-04

With Brew-in-a-bag, and a very fine grind, I'm expecting a super efficiency. I also did another overnight mash. In fact, my overnight mash went long because I got pulled away for some stuff for work in the morning, and could not get to the wort after eight hours. It was a thirteen-hour mash, then. I set the oven to 180 degrees when my wort, on the stovetop, was protein resting at 122 degrees for twenty minutes. By the time I got the wort to 154 degrees, the oven had reached 180 degrees. I put my kettle inside to mash overnight, and flipped the oven off. When I woke up, before I got an e-mail from work, I had flipped the oven back on to buy someself some more time, to 200 degrees. I had started the mash at ten o'clock, and didn't mash-out until almost eleven-fifteen.

And, my grind was very small, too. I was really aiming to pulverize this stuff, because I wanted to give BIAB a real go of it with a finer grind.

Anyway, woot for butternut squash! There's still a quarter of the squash sitting in the fridge for my wife.

Of note:

The squash that I put into the primary fermenter was microwaved just before putting it into the primary good and long, to make sure it was completely cooked and to make sure it was completely sanitary. It seemed like the easiest way to sanitize something that likes being cooked in a microwave, right?

Of note: Pictures of a brewday that was messy and spontaneous and fun.

The smell in the primary, just before pitching, was stunning. A milder dark roast, with Caraffa I instead of chocolate and medium-toasted malts instead of dark roasted malts, may not be the "perfect to style" stout, but it does ease into the stout flavors, allowing the butternut pie flavor with the sweetness of the caramel malts, to shine over the top of the dark, thick brew!

It's the sort of thing that makes me want to use exclamation points. Because the squash fell! I can make it into beer! The beer smells really good! Everything is working!

BUTTERNUT STOUT!

Pictures:

BREWDAY: Red River Dunkelweizen

I have named this beer "Red River" in honor of my family's move to Texas. Also, I am hoping it will be red. My process is still working out the kinks, and there's just no way to be sure that I'm going to nail the color red. The name is hopeful. I am placing the name upon the beer, as if it might cast the spell upon it that encourages the color red to appear. (A brewer's mantra: A red river flows through you... A red river flows through you... A red river flows through you...?)

Why red? Because with the hint of chinese five spice and bay leaf, I'm really hoping to get a little taste of autumn in the glass.

Recipe:

2 lbs and 11 ounces of Rahr Red Wheat

1 lb of 2-row pale

4 ounces of homemade caramel/crystal malt

2 ounces of homemade chocolate wheat malt

.2 ounces of Styrian Celeja at 60 minutes for 8.81 IBU

.2 ounces of Styrian Celeja at 15 minutes for 4.37

1 bay leaf at 15 minutes

.5 tsp homemade Chinese Five Spice Blend at 15 minutes

.2 ounces of Cluster at 5 minutes for 2.73 IBU

Mashing this, I put all the grain in to room temperature water, and brought it up gently to 120-125 degrees, and held it there for ten minutes, stirring and allowing to settle. I thought it might help with the haziness of the last brew, even though such things are to style. After that, I brought it up to mash temp for medium body at 154, and then threw it into the pre-heated oven. 

Concerned about my conversion last time, and still sans refractometer, I went the other extreme. I did an overnight mash, in the oven. After about an hour, I flipped the oven off, and left it closed. I let the grain and water rest until the next day in the warm oven, hopefully converting everything. (My PH and water chemistry research continues, naturally, but I'm trying simple solutions first.)

In the morning, I put it all out on the stove and it was 144 degrees! (I'm sure I got about as much conversion as possible when it stayed successfully warm for so long!)

From there, I brought up the temperature to mash-out at 170, and then drained out the grains. (With those grains, I brewed up some bread to go with the beer. See prior post!)

This was the easy boil I had heard about in a biab, with no boilovers and not even a moment's unrest over such things. Additions were added. Coffee was enjoyed. Cooling off in the sink was simple.

Breaking up the brewday process with an overnight mash was very nice. It gave me something to look forward to in the morning, and spreads the time spent brewing out a while.

Once the wort cooled to pitching temps, I put this straight down onto the yeastcake from the Golden Cloud Ale, and it seems to have made beer. I hit it with lots of ice during the week, and kept it down. The smell out of the fermentor has a lot more balance of banana against the clove. I'll be bottling soon. Hopefully, I'll be drinking soon, too!

Pictures:

 <-filtering out the hops and escaped grains before the primary! In small batch brewing, I want all the beer I can get, and I don't want to lose any to trub and crud like this!

Man, I need to get me one of these:

BREAD DAY: What to do with those leftover brewing grains?

I don't like waste. We compost in our house. We make use of old things. We don't waste. When I look upon my spent brewing grains, I see excellent compost for our garden, and I also see an excellent ingredient for delicious bread. The first time I made bread with spent brewing grains, I dumped nearly a pound of dark, roasty steeping grains from an extract batch out onto the counter and added flour until it became bread like. Man, it was thick. Two giant loaves of dark, malty, chewy, grainy breads was too much! With my current BIAB set-up, I can use a finer crush of grain. This is a good thing for breadmaking. Also, I don't know if I would ever use that much caraffa in a bread recipe, again, because, like, WHOA - too roasty! But, with my recent brew completed (which will be coming soon), I dug my spoon into the spent brewing grains after mash-out, and snagged about half a cup of them.

I mash in the oven. When mashing in the oven and making beer, think about this: You just pulled the converted grains out of the oven and the beer is rising to boil while you are making the dough. The bread rises in the (already warm) oven while you do your additions and stir the kettle. Finally, when you're cooling the wort, you lay the bread out and send it back into the oven. By the time your cleanup is complete, you have fresh bread!

The process is synergistic.

Then, I dropped them into the food processor (dough blade attached!) with three cups of King Arther brand Whole Grain Flour, a pinch or two of bread yeast, some salt, a tablespoon of olive oil, honey, and 1/2-3/4 cup of water. (While processing, I adjusted the water to get the consistency of good bread dough.)

I let it rise for an hour or two. It rose. I spread it out flat on a greased cookie sheet, and sprinkled the top with onion powder and carraway seeds, with more olive oil!

Bake at 375 degrees for about half an hour and voila!

My sister said it was the best thing I'd made, to date.

Next bread-making plans involve some of that rahr red wheat, my handy-dandy grinder, and no beer, at all! 

Get good flour, people. Get the good flour.

Fermentation Station

Danstar Munich is cooking right now. It took a while for it to wake up, possibly because I underpitched, possibly because I did a pretty rough and basic mash - no protein rest, etc. - and possibly because I used San Antonio tap water that was boiled in an open container to clear off the chemistry, leaving behind a lot of the minerals in our hard, limey water.

The spare room/office is still pretty crowded from our recent move. We're slowly settling in. In the mean time, this room is the perfect place for the beer. The ambient temperature is 74 degrees, and I'm throwing water bottles in and out of the freezer every few hours to get a fermentation range in an un-measured temperature that's probably about eight to ten degrees cooler. (As I unpack more, my thermometer might appear out of a box, and I could really know for sure!)

I'm hoping for most of the flavor out of the Danstar Munich yeast, and along those lines, I'm not aiming for a clean fermentation. I underpitched on purpose to stress the yeast a little, and I'm letting it go on the warm side of its range to up the yeast's distinctive characteristics away from a super traditional weizen.

For me, one of the reasons I love the system of a fermentation bucket inside of a larger water bucket with ice bottles, is that it will make every batch just a little bit different, even with the same ingredients. I will never perfectly nail any one temperature, and every batch will be an adventure. I will never know exactly what will come out each time. I only know that when I'm close, it will be good. How good? The excitement of not really knowing exactly how good it will be fuels my excitement for the batch to ferment.

There's an excitement in a more manual and less-machine-like process. There's an adventure to it. Also, it's a lot cheaper than running a second fridge just for buckets of beer, and it gives me something to do to stay close to my beer, interacting with it and helping it along.

Swamp coolers are recommended for busy bodies like me that like to feel like they're always doing something!

Next Entry: More Roasting of Malts!

Home Toast Your Own Malt to Combat the Madness

Madness, I tell you! Sheer madness! Specialty grains, I've noticed, cast about a buck fifty to two bucks per pound. They are uniform. They are reliable. They are easily scale-able because of their uniformity. This is the route to madness. Where's the magic? Where's the touch of trickery and process mystery that can only happen from hands - human hands - touching small batches of grains and experimenting upon them for delicious beer? With my bulk bags of base malts, one of my plans for these huge sacks of grains involves messing around with them. Someday, I'd like to make my own caramel malts. Why not? John Palmer is convinced it can be done; ergo, I am convinced, too. I know I'd prefer to roast my own roasted barley and chocolate malt, because it can be done from home in exactly the amount needed per batch, utilizing these bulk-bought grains I have sitting in storage, which cost 35 bucks for 50 pounds.

And, more importantly, it is madness to create the same thing, the same way, every single time. It's a trivial pursuit of perfection, when most of the joy of life and cuisine comes from the surprise of the inevitable variation of each moment, ingredient, and process. McDonald's and their ilk pride themselves on uniformity, reproducible outcomes, and machine-like, chemical-laden "food" that is only praise-able, if anything, for it's ability to taste the same in rural China as it does in metro America and every where else in between. This is nothing to be proud of! That's something to be ashamed of, in food and in life! If you are living the same in China as you would in America, process by process, day and night, you are not leading the sort of life I would ever want to live, where my physical location matters not, and I have no connection to what is here, right in front of me, in this moment, variable and mutable and joyful and playful. To celebrate this idea of non-conformity even in the simplest of ingredients, and to celebrate my new all-grain system of brewing, I made one of the ingredients new, by creating my own specialty grain, in my own particular way.

Uniformity is madness.

Toasting malts, for me, was a celebration of the touch of magic that comes from doing things by hand, without the perfect tools, and still producing excellent results that will never, ever be exactly the same time and again.

For my first all-grain recipe, Golden Cloud Ale, I knew I wanted to take a basic Hefeweizen-style of beer to a level I could not achieve with mere extracts. I wanted to do something that had a human touch and a new process, for me, that would take my game to a new level of awesome.

Four ounces of Rahr Red Wheat, and four ounces of Rahr 2-Row were placed in a bowl of filtered water and covered for an hour, not long enough to thoroughly soak them through, but enough to create a lot of moisture in the husk and outer shell. More water meant more sweetness, and lighter-bodied wheat beers shouldn't be too weighed down by sweetness, in my opinion. Still, a little might be nice.

The soaked grains were drained and rinsed. Then, they were spread about an inch thick on a foil-covered baking sheet. The oven was running at 375 degrees to cook some potatoes. When we put the grains in, we turned down the heat to 350. I set the timer for one hour and fifteen minutes...

Ooh, and the house began to smell like good cereal. Like the kind of cereal you'd beg your mom for when you were a kid. I pulled it out occasionally to stir, and attempt to turn over the grains and move them around. I wasn't concerned about uniformity, but I was concerned about burning the bottom and under-toasting the top. The warm, bread-like, sweet smell was something marvelous. Then, I suspect the grains dried out because the smell turned acrid at about the forty-five minute mark. 

At this moment, I added more water straight to the pan, pouring it all over the grains, until the grains were all wet again. I stirred them up as the steam rose from the pan, and added a little more water. I put it back in to toast.

In the end, I pulled it out one last time, moments before my timer would go off.

The water added a sweetness to the acrid roast, but not an overwhelming one. The maillard reaction is the primary aroma, and at one hour and fifteen, it was right on the edge of burning. However, I placed them in a paper bag and let them rest for 24 hours. I still wanted some of the funky acrid-ness, but not too much, so I didn't wait a week, like it said in the book. I waited a day before grinding them up. I let them rest in a paper bag on the counter, quietly becoming my own specialty grains. How often can you find, in your homebrew shop, roasted barley and wheat together for the same level of toastiness and sweetness from both grains? Hooray for non-uniformity! Hooray for experimentation! Hooray for a DiY approach and breaking the rules!

Hooray for instructions from John Palmer's excellent book!

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We shall see if I produce good beer as a result. Next entry: Golden Cloud Ale Brewday.