Beer Report: Honey Nut Brown Ale Tasting

I tasted the "Honey Nut Brown Ale" last night - and well... I think I may have accidentally made "Malt Liquor" and not beer. What I'm trying to say is that I've very much exceeded the 4% of alcohol content that legally defines the word "Beer" here in the US. Oh well. I already have a few people chomping at the bit for me to bring a couple of liters to their parties - this could get VERY amusing. I think I need to bring along that little water cooler of mine when I do this.

About the Ale:
Dark in the glass, GREAT fizz and head (I was so surprised and exclaimed "OMG!!!! That looks like REAL BEER!!!!"), dark nutty base flavor with a serious honey presence, crisp honey tang in the top notes as well. Serious buzz sets in QUICKLY. Only serve well chilled - otherwise the honey bite can get out of hand. The wildflower honey is from a local apiary, Horace Bell in DeLand. Watch out Boddington's!

I'll be doing a specific gravity reading soon and will post the actual alcohol content - right now we're theorizing it is as high as 7-9%, or similar to a Lenten Beer such as Spaten Optimator.

A friend I graduated with from Stetson has expressed some interest in the whole homebrew thing, I'm thinking we may have to start a little "Young Lady's Beginning Homebrew Club" or something... because between Jenn (who did a REALLY good job with a light bodied beer that had orange peel hints) and I, our friends are starting to take notice. Watch out boys...

Oops!

I need to get better about this - from 3/6/06:
Last night I bottled my beer. The Honey Nut Brown Ale that I mentioned a few entries back. I used 1 Liter (yah party!) blue bottles with the latch type caps. They look really cool, and after a quick taste-test, this stuff will be really good in about 16 days (conditioning and clearing time). It came out darker than I expected, so much so that my bf joyfully exclaimed "OH you accidentally made a STOUT!". I can't wait to give my Dad a bottle of this for his next bar-b-que. Glad this stuff came out well, because there's now 18 1-liter bottles of it chilling in the kitchen. Start planning parties now so I can bring some over to share... please...

Also - last night my bf and his friend (Also into homebrew) tried a liter of this new beer - apparently it was great! I'll give it a go tonight and post a "review" unbiased of course...

Homebrew Update!

Sorry I didn't get around to posting the moderately hilarious events surrounding the first batch of mead (who KNEW specific gravity would read differently at different temperatures... oops - its been several years since Chemistry 101). Right now its awaiting its first racking (which may occur tonight or tommorrow afternoon).

In the mean time, I racked (meaning siphoned out of the fermination vessel) my wine that I started about a month and a half ago. Its now starting the 2nd part of clarifying - it looks (and tastes) really good! I'm kinda surprised because well... the original recipe was for 1 gallon of wine, and since I had only a 5 gallon setup, I multiplied the recipe by five - this apparently added WAAAY more sugar than intended, but since yeast feed on sugar to create alcohol, this isn't necessarily a bad thing - its just that my wine will be WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE strong. BTW if you're wondering, its a "country wine" meaning that it isn't made from grapes, but rather fruit and the like. The wine is a ginger/banana/Reisling concentrate concoction. The original recipe was for a dry ginger wine, but it'll be more of a medium sweet strong as hell ginger wine when its done.

Well, I figured, since I have all the equipment out and sanitized, why not start the 5 gallon batch of beer my boyfriend and I got the ingredients for last weekend? He was happily repairing/modding X-boxes (don't ask... he likes soldering things to their boards better than actually playing any games on them), so I took the opportunity to try my hand at beer. So far beer making seems to be a little simpler (at least it CAN be, you can make it as complicated as you want) than wine or mead. Basically I start with this can of malt extract, boil some water, and add the two - then add sugar. I chose to add a mixture of sugar and honey. We had about 2.5 lbs of local wildflower honey left over from the mead so I used it. The can of malt extract that I used was a Nut Brown Ale variety from the UK (Munton's). So we're choosing to call the beer a Honey Nut Brown Ale - I hope it turns out as good as it sounds. Actually, I'm pretty excited about it - if its tasty I'll be really proud to present my parents with a 6 pack of it with crazy little labels. They do enjoy a tasty beer on occasion.

Oh oh! He just finished with 2 x-boxes and is getting curious... lucky for him I went ahead and cleaned and sanitized all the homebrew stuff necessary for him to rack off his mead tonight, or tommorrow - whenever!

Observing Mead

Mead, eh? The first time I ever hear of, much less tried mead was as a teenager on a visit to Wales. My parents and I were staying in Ruthin Castle. and attended one of their spiffy "Mediaeval Banquets". Mead of course was served and Mom discreetly offered me a taste. Honestly, at the time I wasn't sure what to think of the complex flavor - given, my prior experiences with alcohol were confined to bananas foster, and minute amounts of Godiva chocolate liquour served over ice cream with rasberries. This was mainly due to lack of interest with alcohol on my part: I was an unusual teenager. I'll have to visit Ruthin Castle again, as a hotel with such acomodating amenities as a "whipping pit" and "drowning pool" is not to be discounted. Seriously though, its a very nice place and more than a little spooky at night. And the food is very tasty.

I read the bf's main mead book, The Compleat Meadmaker by Ken Schramm from cover to cover and found out that it takes A LOT of honey to make mead. He wanted to start with a 5 gallon batch since that is what he was acustomed to making with SCA. I remembered that Horace Bell Apiary in DeLand is conveniently close to my company's warehouse. We purchased almost 20 lbs of gallberry, orange blossom, and wildflower honey. 15 lbs was gallberry and orange blossom - and that was earmarked for the first batch. He wanted to just start with the basic recipe in the book for a "medium sweet mead". Another trip to Heart's Home Brew assured we had everything we needed. That is, except a GIGANTIC stock pot - which was purchased at a restaurant supply store. Make sure you get a stainless steel stock pot and not an aluminum one, since the aluminum can adversely affect whatever it is you're going to brew. This massive 16 quart stockpot was not inexpensive - but it will last forever. We then picked a date for meadmaking.

It all started with my bf's SCA past - apparently he used to brew up a fair amount of mead back in the day. Since we finally got our own place he asked if it would be ok if he started a batch of mead. OK????? Of course it would be ok! After a few visits and book purchases from Heart's Home Brew, I became intrigued. Granted, I'm one of those people who jumps at the opportunity to learn something new - especially something that I knew ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about. I started reading the books here and there and gradually got up to speed on the terminology of brewing.
The next time we went to Heart's I finally knew what questions to ask and before I knew it, had purchased my own brewing toolkit - a primary fermenter (ie 5 gallon food-grade plastic bucket with a special lid that accepts a rubber stopper and fermentation lock), secondary fermenter called a "carboy" (glass 5 gallon bottle basically), a rubber stopper to hold the fermentation lock, a fermentation lock (fill with a liquid so that CO2 can come out, but nothing can come in), pectic enzyme, campden tablets, Reisling grape concentrate, wine yeast (Red Star Premier Curve), and of course more books. I'm borrowing the following items from my bf, who had already purchased them - large bottle of amberdyne sterilizing solution, yeast nutient (Fermax), racking cane (stiff bit of tubing that makes siphoning your brew out of a fermenter easier), tubing, long stirring rod, funnel with screen.
I decided to start with a recipe for "Dry Ginger Wine" from Making Wild Wines and Meads by Pattie Vargas & Rich Gulling. This called for fresh ginger root, white grape juice concentrate (the reisling stuff I got from Heart's), bananas, yeast, pectic enzyme (helps break down the fruit pectins so you have a less-cloudy wine), yeast nutrient (fermax), orange juice and sugar.

Before this however, I wanted to observe and help out with my bf's mead. Just so I knew what to expect and how to prepare for it.