I decided to start out as simply as I could.  I bought a 1 gallon home brew kit with ingredients from the Brooklyn Brew Shop.  They specialize in small kits that can be made in small apartments in NYC.  Because it’s only a one gallon kit, I had everything that I needed to brew it.   I actually bought two kits, I bought the special Black and Tan kit that they have available.  This past weekend, I brewed the dry stout.

With extract brewing, the malt extract is already made and ready to be used.  Most kits come with some specialty grains that you steep in the brew pot to add some flavor to the wort but that isn’t where most of the fermentable sugars come from.  Most of that comes from the malt extract.  If you don’t already know, the wort is the liquid that is created from the water, malt and hops to which you eventually add yeast to turn it into beer.   When you are brewing with all grains, there is no extract and you are creating all of the sugars that the yeast needs to eat, grow and create alcohol.

The first step is to bring your water up to temperature (160 degrees) and add the grains to your brew pot.  This step is called mashing in.  I have heard this term before and read about what it is but I learn much better by actually doing so a lot of things became clear to me this past weekend.  The mash turns into an oatmeal consistency and stays in the brew pot for an hour.  You have to stay on top of it and make sure it stays in the proper temperature range.  I am assuming this is the step where the enzymes are doing their work but I don’t really know.  After an hour, you raise the temperature to 170 degrees.  This is called mashing out.

Here is a pic of my brew pot after this step

The next step is the sparge.  During this step, you pour water through the grains in an attempt to extract all those wonderful flavors and sugars that you created with your mash.  You do this by using a lauter tun.  In this case, the lauter tun was simply a strainer put over another pot.  I poured the contents of the brew pot into the strainer and was surprised at how little liquid there was.  I hope I didn’t do anything wrong as there was only a trickle of wort that poured through the strainer at this point.

The next step was the actual sparge.  In this step I poured 1 gallon of water through the lauter tun in an effort to extract more of the precious flavors and sugars that I worked so hard to create.   You want to end up with 1.2 gallons of wort when you are done because you need to overcompensate to make up for what you will lose during the boil.  Unfortunately, I don’t think I was at the 1.2 gallon mark.  Not sure what I did wrong but I was barely over 1 gallon.  After the sparge, I ran the wort through the grains one more time.

Here is what it looked like

After this step, it’s back to what I was used to doing and that’s the boil.  You boil the wort for 60 minutes, adding hops along the way at specific times.  The hops add both aroma and flavor to your beer.  After the boil, the wort is cooled down as rapidly as possible and added to the fermentor.  I was way off on quantity of wort, I only had 2/3 of a gallon, I had to add more water to the fermentor to get it up to the gallon mark.  Once I did that, I pitched the yeast which just means I put the yeast in and shook the fermentor to get the yeast going.

So far, I haven’t seen a lot of activity.  I hope I did everything correctly.  I don’t know why I didn’t have more liquid after the sparge and I hope I did the right thing by adding more water to the fermentor.  I am going to take a hydrometer reading this weekend to see where we are at.

I placed my order with them over the weekend and received my kits two days later.  They were running a Black and Tan Special.  You got two full home brew kits and ingredients to make a Dry Stout and an ESB.  The kit was supposed to include a pouring spoon as well but they forgot to include that in my shipment.  I will have to wait a few days for that piece of the kit.

The double kit I purchased includes two 1 gallon fermentors, a racking cane, tubing, sanitizer, rubber stopper, 2 airlocks and the ingredients to make the two beers.  I have never made an all-grain beer.  All of the beer I have made up to this point has been with extract kits.  I am hoping that doing a smaller 1 gallon batch for my first all-grain batch will be easier than jumping in and doing a 5 gallon all-grain batch.  I am going to brew this weekend so we will find out.  I will blog more about it after my brew session this weekend.

Fort Collins Brewery Chocolate Stout

A friend of mine bought a case of this beer over the weekend and since he knew I was doing my Year of Beer he brought me a bottle.  I had never heard of Fort Collins Brewery but that shouldn’t be a reflection of the the brewery, there is a lot about beer that I don’t know.  That is the whole point of doing a Year of Beer!

Fort Collins Brewery is located in Fort Collins Colorado.  I wonder how they came up with that name?  Hmmm….

I poured the beer into a pint glass and was a very dark brown, almost pitch black with a nice creamy light brown head.  The head was a little more than a finger in height and left a nice lacing on the glass.  It has a really nice malty and chocolaty aroma.  Not real strong but strong enough that you know it’s there.

The mouth feel is nice, it’s velvety and smooth, exactly how a stout should be.   I feel like it tasted a little too carbonated for me.  I am only just learning how to train my palette so I am not sure if that is what I am tasting or not.

The flavor is nice and smooth, the aroma holds up and there is a nice dark chocolate and roasted malts taste with each sip.  It finishes with a slight hop bitterness that leave the mouth slightly dry and begging for more beer.

All in all, I think it’s a really good chocolate stout, not as full of flavor as some other chocolate stouts I have tried but still a beer I would be happy to drink.

Long Trail Brewmaster Series Coffee Stout

This is another beer that my wife bought me when she was in New York.  It’s from a Vermont brewery called Long Trail Brewing Company.  This beer is a coffee stout and it’s from their Brewmaster series.  The coffee they used when they brewed it was from Vermont Coffee Company so you are truly getting a taste of Vermont from this company.

The beer came in a 750 ml bottle and I poured it into a pint glass.  It poured a pitch black color with only a hint brown in it and had a nice coffee brown head.   The head didn’t last long and there wasn’t a lot of when I poured it.

It has a nice roasted malt smell along with the expected coffee scent.   It smells sweeter than I would have expected it to smell but not in a bad way, it’s a very pleasant aroma.

The beer tastes as good as it smells, it’s a nice and smooth stout with noticeable coffee and dark chocolate flavors.  It has a thinner mouthfeel than I would have liked and not a lot of carbonation but all in all, a very good flavor.

The beer has an 8.0% ABV but you would never know it by the taste it of.  The strong flavors of the beer mask any noticeable taste of alcohol.   It made it a very drinkable beer.

It’s the first beer I have ever had from Long Trail Brewing Company.  Up until last week when my wife brought the beer home, I had never even heard of them before but am happy I found them and am looking forward to try some more beer from Long Trail.

Southern Tier Creme Brulee Stout

My wife travels a lot for work and when she goes away, she has been stopping at liquor/beer/grocery stores and picking up random beers she thinks I might want to try.  This was one of those beers.  It’s from Southern Tier Brewing Company based in Lakewood New York.   This beer is apparently part of their Blackwater Series.  I only know that because it says it on the bottle

The label is pretty nice and I really like that they put the important facts and figures right on the bottle.  It tells you that the alcohol is 10% by volume which isn’t surprising but it also tells you that it is 25 degrees Plato and made with 2-row pale malt, dark caramel malt, vanilla bean, lactose sugar, kettle hops: columbus and aroma hops: horizon.  I haven’t see that kind of information on a label before and I thought that was pretty cool.

I had a 650 ml bottle of this beer and poured it into a pint glass.  On my initial pour I didn’t get much head but in subsequent pours I got a nice creamy light brown head.  I don’t know if it’s because it had a chance to warm up a bit or I simply did a bad job of pouring it the first time around.   The color of the beer is a nice dark chocolate brown

The aroma is strong and is mostly vanilla, I get a little bit of custard in addition to the vanilla but beyond that I don’t get any real beer smell.

It’s an Imperial style so I knew going into it that the flavors would be intense and much stronger than a typical stout.  With such an overwhelmingly vanilla aroma I was a little worried that that was all I was going to taste but was pleasantly surprised to find the flavors to be more balanced than that.   The vanilla and custard flavors are still there but you also get a roast malt and a little bit of coffee flavor. The main thing that stands out is how sweet it is.  I know it’s supposed to be recreating the taste of a sweet desert but I found the beer to be too sweet for me.  There is a real bitterness to it, especially after the swallow but it’s a nice bitterness.  It offsets the sweetness of the desert taste a bit.

Stouts are very dark and usually black or pretty close to it.  They are ale’s which means they are fermented with ale yeast which is a top fermenting yeast.  Stouts get there dark color from the roasted barley that is used.  The longer the  barley is roasted  the darker it is.  The flavor they give changes dramatically based on the length of time they are roasted.  It’s one of the many ways that brewers can play with the flavor of the beer they produce.

The flavor and character of stout beers come from the  roasted barley and the high hop rate.  People assume that because the beer is dark it must be thick, heavy and loaded with alcohol but that isn’t the case.  They certainly can be all of those things but more often than not, stout beers on draft are surprisingly low in alcohol.

There are multiple styles of stouts, they share a lot of commonalities but also offer a pretty wide range of flavors and experiences.  I have read some resources that claim there are only 3 styles of stout, some that claim 5 and some that claim even more.   I am only learning about all this stuff myself so I can’t claim to be an expert.  I will do my best to identify the styles that make the most sense to me.

Dry Stout – This is probably the most well known type of stout beer as this is the style that Guinness would fall under.  I can’t think of any stout more well known that Guinness and it was probably my first introduction to good beer.   The level of sweetness and dryness varies dramatically among dry stouts but they will all have that characteristic roasted barley flavor.  On draft, these beers are typically served using a nitro delivery system which helps to give it that wild look and thick and creamy head.

Imperial Stout – Whenever you see an imperial version of any beer style it usually means that it’s an extreme take on a particular style.  You can expect very strong or exaggerated flavors to come through and they are typically pretty high in alcohol.

Sweet Stout – This is not a style that is seen very often and is apparently quite difficult for the home brewer to reproduce.   It lacks much of the hop and roasted barley flavor that is characteristic of stouts and has added sugar to make it sweeter.  The difficulty for the home brewer is the process in which it is made.  You need to pasteurize the beer at some point to stop the fermentation because of all the sugar or the alcohol content will be too high for the style.

Oatmeal Stout – This is a sweeter style of stout that has oats added to it.  Originally oats were added because it was believed to be an import part of the diet.  Whatever the reason, I am glad they added it, I love oatmeal stouts.  I just did a review of Samuel Smith’s Oatmeal Stout and can’t wait to get some more.  Oatmeal stouts typically have a stronger flavor but are very smooth.

Other styles that I have heard of are milk stout, chocolate stout, coffee stout and even oyster stout.  I am not sure if those are actual stout styles in and of themselves or if they fall under one of the above styles.

I have much to learn this year and I encourage any corrections, comments or contributions to any article I write.  So, please, if you have something to say, leave a comment.