As I’ve spoken about before, I’m doing homebrewing with a few friends of mine, and yesterday was quite a fun day with our homebrew stuff.

Our first pale ale is complete and ready to drink. I have two six-packs here at home and drank one last night. The aroma is great, but we need to work on the finishing and bittering hops. This is our second batch of beer (the first being a porter) and I am very pleased with our progress. It is the last kit beer that we are going to make. We no longer need to pick up a kit, and instead we will just be picking up ingredients and making our own recipes. The ABV of this beer is estimated to be around 4.5%, but our future beers are generally going to be stronger than that.

We transferred Dan’s irish red from primary fermenter to secondary fermenter, as well. This Irish red was our first non kit recipe, and was based off of a recipe we found at Vegas Homebrew, our local homebrew store. We spiked this recipe to increase the alcohol to an estimated 5.5%. We also tasted a bit as we did the transfer and it tastes great. It has the smoothest finish of any of our beers thus far. It is also the only beer that we didn’t dry hop, so the aroma is very mild, which is befitting of an Irish red. It is also the first beer that we used Irish moss to clear up the haze. The Irish moss definitely reduced the sediment floating in the primary fermenter (but that could be due to it sitting for three weeks in the primary), and hopefully it will continue to do it’s job and give us a clear beer.

The most interesting part of the day was brewing Will’s insane imperial India pale ale. This IPA is our first attempt at a true high gravity beer, and it is using fresh hops harvest just last week from Northern California. Will got the recipe set up and we got the ingredients together and this thing will be a beast. 9 lbs of malt and 10 oz of hops went into this batch, and the estimated ABV is over 8%. The idea behind this beer was to make something similar to Stone’s Ruination IPA – crazy bitter and crazy strong. I have high hopes that we did this batch properly and it will come out great.

The next batch is going to be my cherry stout. I want to create something like Sierra Nevada’s stout, only with a ton of cherry flavor. We will be brewing that in three weeks, and I will try to remember to take some pictures of this process to post for everyone.

Last night, I recorded episode 16 of Jarate Sandvich (although I’m wondering why 14 and 15 aren’t on winehousefactory.com yet, and in the RSS feed, 15 isn’t up) and the episode got interesting as the four of us got increasingly drunk. Our choice of beers may have been a bad call, since 3 of the 4 were strong drinks – Stone Ruination IPA, Samuel Adam’s Double Bock and Dogfish Head Ancient Ale. The fourth, and the only reasonable drink, was Samuel Adam’s Cherry Wheat. The Ruination was surprisingly delicious. I guess my palate is finally starting to accept the taste of an IPA. I didn’t much enjoy the Ancient Ale,  but the Double Bock was amazing.The Cherry Wheat was also quite good, although by the time we got to that beer, we were well trashed.

The Double Bock is to malt what Mighty Arrow is to hops – the bottle says 1/2 lb of malt per bottle. In comparison, the Porter being brewed by Will, Dan and myself will have 1/10 lb of malt per bottle. This Sunday, when we bottle the porter, I plan to bring over some ice cream and a pack of Double Bock to make some Double Bock floats – just like a root beer float, but better and with alcohol.

Also during the episode, we talked about the Team Fortress 2 classless update, Madden 10 and the Steam Indie Games Pack.

On Friday, Will and I transferred the porter from fermentation bucket to carboy. This was the first transfer we had done and it went pretty well.  The siphon was pretty easy to use and filtered out a ton of the yeast (I was shocked how much yeast was in that bucket). The carboy is now pretty clear, and this second round of settling should filter it even further. We will be bottling the porter this weekend. We sampled a bit of the beer and it’s coming out a lot better than any of us had hoped. Our initial goal was just to make something drinkable that had alcohol, but this exceeded that by quite a bit, and it’s not even done.

We were also surprised at the temperature of the beer. Due to the conditions we are brewing in, we figured that we would be fermentinging a bit hot – around 76 F. The wet towel trick worked wonders – the beer was fermenting at 68 F, which is perfect for an ale like this.

Then on Sunday, Dan, Will and I brewed our second beer – a pale ale. This brewing went much more smoothly and we fixed the mistakes that were made during the porter brewing. The biggest mistake that we made with the porter was pouring the hot wort into warm water, so it took a long time to cool to 90 F, and during this time the yeast was just sitting out and the bucket was open. This was a lot of time for infection to incur, and wasn’t good on the yeast. This time, we poured the hot wort into cold water, and it was almost immediately at 70 F and ready for the yeast to be pitched.

I’m looking forward to the bottling this weekend. We will see just how clear the beer is, and get another taste to find out how it is doing. Of course, until it has been in the bottle for a few days, it is still flat beer, and warm to boot, but it is still a good indicator of how it will taste in the end.

Over the weekend, I did my first run at home brewing. Along with Will and Dan, I brewed a porter and got it into fermentation. We picked up the supplies from Vegas Homebrew & Winemaking, which is a fantastic store for Las Vegas homebrewers. The owner, Steve, was incredibly helpful and spent 30 minutes with us, going over all the details of what we would need and how to get everything done. He also threw in some free supplies – higher quality yeast, extra bottle caps, some carbtabs and iodine for sanitizing.If you are interested in brewing in Las Vegas, I can’t recommend a better way to start off than with his help.

Once we had all of our supplies, we headed back to Will’s place and got our gear setup. We sanitized the brew pot and spoon and started boiling water. Prior to this brewing, I didn’t have a really good understanding of the brew process, but I sure understand it now. We mashed some chocolate roasted malted barley, mixed in the liquid malt extract, dried malt extract and UK Kent Goldings hops and then transferred to the bucket and pitched the yeast. It was a standard process, but quite exciting to be doing for the first time.

The fermentation has all but stopped and it is starting to settle. On Friday, Will and I are going to transfer the beer to a carboy for further settling, and do some dry hopping with more of the UK Kent Goldings hops. Next Sunday, we will bottle and the following Sunday we can drink. August 23 will be the first taste of my first beer. I think it will turn out quite well.

We bought a brewkit for this first beer, and I’ve already picked up a pale ale brewkit for the second beer that we will be brewing on Sunday. After this, we will move to clone brew recipes and then we will try our hand at making our own recipe. I really want to make a dark chocolate stout with lots of cherry. I want the taste of Sierra Nevada Stout with a huge amount of cherry. I think we can try making it before the end of the year.

I also calculated the costs of homebrewing, and it is significantly cheaper than buying, with a chance for much higher quality. It will come out to around 75¢ per bottle, compared to $1.44 per bottle of the usual stuff we buy ($7.99 / 6-pack). This is a hobby that I could really get into, and Will is the same, so I think I’ll be doing this for awhile longer. In the Winter, we will switch to brewing lagers at my place, since I can get colder temperatures for the lager yeast to ferment properly.

Tonight, I decided to pick up two beers that, in my mind, are very bizarre opposites to each other. I got the Sierra Nevada Stout and the Flying Dog Pale Ale – and I’m sure to many people, these aren’t weird opposites, but they are to me. In the past, I’ve had some awesome beers from both of these brewers, but typically I have Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and Flying Dog Porter, so it seems like an odd reversal of roles. Well… both are delicious. The Flying Dog is a bit more dark roasted than a normal pale ale and the Sierra Nevada has a much more complex finish than most stouts. This is easily the best stout I’ve ever drank.

I will be sure to pick up both of these beers for the Jarate Sandvich podcast when we do a Pale Ale night or another Stout night.

Last night, we recorded Jarate Sandvich, episode 8. We talked about inFAMOUS, Left 4 Dead 2, OSX/Windows/Linux and beer. Beer was a pretty prominent subject due to some of the beers being simply awful. I truly feel this was the worst batch we had yet gotten. The only redeeming beer for me was the Pyramid Audacious Apricot Ale. That was slightly sweet with a good taste to it. The three horrible beers were Drake’s Zatec Pilsner, Goose Island Bourbon County Stout and Buckbean Original Orange Blossom Ale.

I couldn’t even tell how Drake’s tasted – the carbonation level on it was insane. It was like someone vigorously shook up the beers before we opened them, but that same carbonation level remained the whole time. Every time I took a swig, it would foam in my mouth like crazy, completely shocking my taste buds and making it impossible to find out how it tastes. That was the first beer dumped on Jarate Sandvich. We each got through about 1/3 of the bottle before deciding it was simply not drinkable, and I took it to the kitchen sink. While pouring, it filled up half of the sink with foam. I’ve read some reviews of this beer and I’m growing increasingly convinced we got a bad batch. The reviews talk about a “thin white head with patchy lacing”  and “This cloudy yellow beer poured with a thin white head.” ‘Thin’ is not a word I would use to describe that head. I might give it another shot someday, and hope this batch was just missed by quality control.

The Bourbon Stout was just awful in so many ways. It tasted like a random experiment at brewing beer with whiskey instead of water. I once thought about brewing a pot of coffee with cream instead of water, just to see what it would taste like. The difference between that thought and this beer is that I would never try to market and sell my experiment. It was simply not pleasant. At 13% ABV, it is about as strong of a beer I’m ever likely to see, but it tasted like slightly carbonated bourbon mixed with teriyaki sauce. I don’t know how that taste got in there, but I sure tasted something like that. This is a beer that I will never give another try. If I want bourbon, I’ll drink bourbon, not some freaky hybrid crap.

I hate speaking ill of the Buckbean Original Orange Blossom Ale – they are a Nevada brewery, and I’m a proud Nevadan, but I can’t give them any credit for that ale. It was flat and flavorless. I don’t mean flavorless, as in a good, crisp, clean lager, but flavorless like watered down cough syrup. It really tasted like orange cough syrup, blended with soda water, and thrown in a fridge for an hour. I’ll try other Buckbean beers, but I’m not going to drink this stuff again.

At least the Pyramid Audacious Apricot Ale was drinkable.