Oatmeal Cookie... Beer

Heidi has been asking about an oatmeal cookie beer ever since we heard about one on a podcast. Today I got around to making this one for her, not that she will end up drinking much of it, LOL.

In order to brew this up though I had to get the blonde ale off the cal ale yeast in the fermenter. At 8:30 this morning I started bottling up that batch. I was very pleased with how my sample tasted. I ended up with 52 bottles of 5% ABV blond ale and a very nice cake of yeast.

I had done a little research, formulated a recipe and then figured out workarounds for what I had onhand. So I came up with this recipe:

7# Maris Otter
.5# Crystal 90
.5# Special B
.5# Biscuit Malt
1# Rolled Oats toasted at 300F
1# Brown Sugar

.5 oz Spalt
.25 oz Perle

I was going to do a traditional mash for this one. Once I looked at how fine my grind was, I was worried about getting a stuck sparge though, so I broke out my brewing bag and did a brew in a bag session.

I must be getting better at this because I got around 85% efficiency this time from my mash. I did go lower with the temperature and tried to mash between 150F and 153F. I don't know my exact temp though because I have broken my good thermometer.

Everything was going good until about half way through the mash. This is when I realized I had not bought any hops for this brew. I started rummaging through my brew box and found the hops I listed above. They are left over from the hefeweisen I brewed, last summer that is. I am not looking for a lot of hops character, just a little bittering, so hopefully it will work out well. It tasted pretty good before I pitched the yeast. I was originally at 1.060 so I added some water to bring the OG down to 1.054. After I pitched the yeast slurry it was 1.050. I hope the lower temperature will make this ferment out a bit more than my last two brews did.

It was a very good day. I started at 8:30 bottling and finished cleaning everything up at 15:00. That makes it only 6.5 hours for everything and about 3/4 the time it normally takes me to do both operations. Yehaw.

Blonde Ale

I did another brew in a bag session today. This time it was a blonde ale that I made. Overall I am happy with the process, but I have decided that my kettles are too small and my boil is too vigorous perhaps for this method, so I will use my mash/lauter tun on my next brew day.

Recipe:

5 gallon batch
6 gallon mash

9# Maris Otter
1# Cara-pils
.75# Wheat Malt

1oz EKG @ 60min
~.5oz home grown cascade @10 minutes

After the mash there was under 5 gallons in the brewpot, so I added enough water to get back up to 6-6.5 gallons. This dropped my gravity too low, so I threw in .5# of pilsner DME.

After the boil I had about 4.5 gallons of wort, so once again I added some water, this took me from 1.051 to 1.048. Not too bad, but I was gunning for 1.054. I think I will get some foam control too so I can start my boil closer to 7 gallons from now on. I had one small boil over today that wasted some wort...

My starter looked and smelled great, so I threw the whole thing in to the fermenter and it is down in the basement now and should be fermenting at around 63F.

I really like the time savings that brew in a bag offers, but I just do not have a big enough set up to effectively brew above 1.050 with this method. Since most of my beers tend to run 1.050-1.065 I think I will go back to my cooler mash tun.

I have had the heather ale in the fridge in the garage cold-crashing for the last day and a half and look forward to bottling it tomorrow.

ttfn

April Fool's Day

My son picked today to miss the bus, so I got up and drove him to school. Since I was out and about early and it is payday, I decided to get my errands run early this morning. By the time I got back home it was over an hour from when I left.

Heidi was wondering what took me so long at the school. I grumbled a bit and then started into a story about how I had been pulled over by the police. I told her that when they looked up my address that the database had our old neighbor that was arrested a few weeks ago as our address and had alerted them that it was a suspected drug activity area and that they had detained me for suspected drug activity and I had to wait while they searched my truck from top to bottom. Then they had let me go after they found nothing. She was looking at me with a very worried look on her face and before she could ask too many questions I told her, "Happy April Fool's Day hon."

Judging by her comments I am apparently still an asshole.

Happy April Fool's Day to you all.

Brewing notes to follow later.

Quotable Rogue:

“There must be some kind of way out of here,”
Said the joker to the thief.
- Bob Dylan