The Honey Bourbon "Oak Royale", in time for the Holidays!

Hello everyone, yes it has been a while, too long!

Life just gets busier and busier at the end of the year, this tends to happen with you work with commodities, and have to spend a whole month travelling right before you need to complete tons of goals for your annual evaluation. But that still didn't take my mind away from my main objective of the holidays, get the Oak Royale finished in time for Christmas and NYE celebrations with my friends. In the end, after much hard work and a touch of improvisation, everything paid off, as I now get that feeling of standing on top of giant air craft carrier and speaking the words proudly: Mission Accomplished!

It all started on November 1st, when we began very professional brewing session by grinding 6kg of malt on top of an ironing board using our super "automatic" grinder. I enable the automatic mode by pressing the button "set your girlfriend here to rotate lever":

This was the first time I got to use my new Easy Brew 30, and boy did it deliver! The set up was easy, we only had to screw in the handle on the mesh filter, and everything else would fit either by sliding in or by clamp. Initially I thought the machine was capable of 30l of final product, but soon I realize that this is very difficult considering the amount of malt it would require during mashing and the fact that the boiler's limit is pretty much 30l. Good thing my kit was for 20l of product, however, as a first time on the machine, I probably overshot the original gravity a bit since in the end of the boil we had around 19l and after transferring to second stage, our fermenter had just 17l during maturation. It turns out I also forgot to check the OG to being with, which is retarded, I know, but shit happens.
Density after 5 days of fermentation was 1.028, but it took another 5 days to reach around 1.017, our final gravity. We estimated that the OG was around 1.070 given the volume, which means an abv content of around 6.9-7.3%, who knows... All I can tell you is that after consuming about 2 or 3 bottles, I felt it.

Check out some pictures of the production:

Easy Brew ready for the mashing stage.

The display on the Easy Brew shows our mash out temperature, the efficiency is very high at 2500W and temperature control is very decent. This thing is leagues beyond your typical home brew stove kettle.

Brewmaster Tales isn't afraid to get physical with the machine when its time to filer. Next time I will probably set it up on top of a lower table or on the floor.

It took no time before reaching boiling point, where we got our first beautiful foam. A good sign.

As the wort vigorously boiled, we introduced the first hop bag at 5 min. The second went in at 15 min and the final aroma hop at 70 min. Total boil time was 75 min.

You probably wonder what I do during the many hours this brewing takes, well, as I am a Brazilian, the answer to that question is BARBECUE - every single time. Even if one must do it in the kitchen.

In the end we got a great batch of malt grain, and nearly all of the sweetness to it was gone, another good sign. Since I don't heard cows, I had to throw it all away, but I would like to find out some useful things to do with this for next time...

After finishing our brewing at precisely 5:00 AM, we had work at 9:00AM and although I was a zombie, needless to say that it was totally worth it. After 5 days I had to travel to Brazil for a month, since the fermentation took 10 days, Tales was in charge of moving the final batch from the fermenter to our maturation bucket. In order to do this on my tiny ass fridge, he had to remove everything inside and improvise an air lock with plastic film and aluminium foil - don't ask me how this was done, but know that it worked! Our maturation process involved medium roast oak chips, which were soaked in Jack Daniels Honey. I don't like this particular drink on its own for being too sweet, but the aroma and the extra sweetness would work very well for the beer, so I took a shot, and it came out as a perfect match! After 30 days maturing, our beer was finally ready for bottling, which was once again my job as Tales was traveling this time. It was my first time bottling, and I think I didn't add as much malt sugar as I should have had, since I would have liked it to be a bit more gassy, but the foam turned out beautiful and the delicious oak + honey bourbon aroma are amazing.

Check our the bottling pictures:

We soaked the oak chips on Jack Daniels Honey for about 3 days, this bourbon harmonized perfectly with our beer.

The beautiful burr + oak chips were sitting at the bottom of the maturation bucket at the end. The smell = f'ing amazing!

And finally, yours truly getting some bottling action. I have grown to like this process quite a lot.

End Result? One delicious beer!
Next Step? Making more delicious beer!

Till next time, cheers!