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RE: #BEERSATURDAY Beer Review: Dry Irish Holiday Stout, Aged on Oak With Dark Rum and Rubidoux Fig Leaves
Mate, great post. I'm impressed with your creation. I've only recently started to brew my own beer and I really love the creativity that it encourages. Using fig leaves is genius.
I'm going to follow your posts very closely for ideas for future brews. I hope you don't mind me stealing inspiration from you.
Hey, thank you for the love! I'll start putting some posts together about brewing and I would be honored if you used some of my ideas. FYI, I think I didn't get onto the last beer saturday contest somehow. Not really sure what I did wrong...
That’s fantastic. I bought another kit to practice with today. I’ll be doing a post about it for Beer Saturday this week. I’m pretty sure your entry went in however you mustn’t have received a winning ticket.
I’m going to try and create my own recipe after this kit brew that I do this week. I think I’ll tire of these kits pretty quick and will want my own unique beers instead.
I somehow pulled the winning ticket this week for my insane cocktail post. :)
Congrats on the win! You can do a single pot all grain brew with a filter bag for super cheap. I usually look at a few grain bills from some brewers I like such as the mad fermentationist Michael Tonsmere and pick/choose my ingredients based on their input. They key is usually simplicity. Trying to learn what flavors a malt imparts to the beer and relative sweetness/bitterness of each style is a great place to focus. Actually eat the malts before and after you mash with them and taste the wort before boiling, after, and multiple times during the fermentation to understand what is happening along the way. I would also recommend focusing on only a few yeasts to get comfortable with. Some of my favorites are US04 for English styles, the Dupont Saison yeast, and Hef 4 for my hefeweizens.
Thanks. :) That’s incredibly helpful. It sounds like cooking. Try everything during the process so you know what you’re doing.
Yes, it is a LOT like cooking except your actions reverberate over weeks and years and it is tough to gain the context needed to understand what effect they have. Do everyting you can to understand how the process affects what you are tasting along the way. For instance: carbonation. Opening bottles as they are conditioning is OK, but being able to taste things in a keg is superior because it happens so much faster and without yeast activity. FYI, I've found that using those premeasured tablets for conditioning bottles is way easier than measuring out sugar. I used to just eyeball white sugar with a teaspoon but opening a bottle that is flat is such a waste of time and effort (though you can just recondition it).