Beer, Not Just for Breakfast Anymore (or This isn't your Father's Budweiser)

I thought that it was fitting to begin with a couple of commercials that you may or may not remember, depending on your age. The title is a parody of the old Florida Orange Juice commercials by Anita Bryant (I believe she was Miss America, from Florida, back in the late 60's or early 70's), and the alternate is a parody of the Oldsmobile commercials in the 90's.

Anyway surprisingly enough this posting is about beer. Not so much the drinking of it, but the brewing. I do however need to provide you with a little background to get you up to pace with me. I am a registered beer judge and I enjoy the opportunity to help out my fellow brewers by examining their wares and providing helpful tips whenever possible. I was scheduled to do just that on this past Saturday, at a local competition that I like to attend annually. However, sometime during this past week my beloved Lightnin some how broke her foot (again, possibly the subject of a series of posts in the future). Not bad and just above the toes but painful just the same, so I decided that I should saty home to make sure she kept her foot elevated. This was no real problem, as I had already secured my official judging points for the year that are required to keep my license. So I was happy to stay at home and "be of use" to my spouse. Aha, I thought to myself, I can stay home and brew while keeping an eye on her. This is where the real story begins!

I am what you might refer to as a contemporary brewer. I have brewed the classic styles and have awards to attest that I do this very well, but I like to work out in the fringes of what is possible. This time of the year is a good time to brew a hearty drink, a stout for instance, so that is what I decided to do. Not just an ordinary Irish variety that you can find on tap at any respectable pub, but a Chocolate Cranberry Oatmeal Stout. An Oatmeal stout is typically a bit smoother than the standard dry stout that one might be used to and going a bit heavier on the chocolate malt (not the kind that is served at the soda fountain) would give it a nice flavor to go with the berries. This would go well with a Thanksgiving meal and should be ready to serve by then. So I searched through my records, aha I brewed one back in 2001 I'll use that recipe, but make a double batch (one for actual Thanksgiving, and the other to have on hand when people drop by)!

Now, to step back again for a minute, I should explain that my brewing equipment is about as manual as you can get and yet perform an all-grain process. And I have doubled up on recipes before with great success. I did however forget the physical characteristics of one, make that two, of the ingredients in this recipe. I typically use flaked barely in my stouts, to add some body and head retention (foaming). In this particular recipe I used both flaked barely and flaked oats (basically oat meal), to get a really nice creamy rich texture. Worked great on a single batch!

"Aw man, a stuck sparge!" Some brewing terminology: Sparge is to rinse the grains, keeping the run-off to be boiled and eventually becomes beer. A lautertun is used to set the mash (grains steeped in warm water to convert starches to sugars) in to perfrom the sparge. Well, my lautertun was definitey plugged and there was no sparge occuring! It seems that when you double the amount of flaked grains the percentage of oatmeal (the glumpy looking breakfast food) to cracked grains (usually form a natural filter bed and allows liquids to flow), was high enough to form a rather gelatenous structure that could be used to stop the flow of the Ohio River!

What do I do now? I've got over 20lbs of grain that was mashed in a little over 6 gallons of water, and I have my 10gal of sparge water ready to go. Well, nothing to do but go back to the oldest method of filtering the grains that I could think of. I pulled out the wire mesh straininer and started rinsing sparging the grains by hand. Thereby turning what should have been an enjoyable 6hr brewing session into a 13hr labor intensive mess! So about five hours later I have a brew pot full of good wort (the runn-off from the "sparge"), and a kitchen that looks like a tornado hit it (normally the kitchen is left in tact because I brew all grain outside).

Well from there the rest went according to plans, sort of. There was the extra 4 gallons of wort that was created because sparging through the hand held stainer was less efficient and required more sparge water. This of course had to be boiled down on the stove while the rest of the wort was boiling in my real brew pot. The boiling wort smelled wonderful, especially when the hops are added. Thank goodness Lightnin likes brewing too, she actually appreciated the aroma of the boiling wort and hop mixture in the house, of course she hadn't seen the kitchen yet because she was laying in the other room with her foot elevated (at least for now).

"Oh man, look at the time!" It's already 7:00PM, I've got another couple of hours to go before I'm done. "I hope lightnin isn't starving yet!" Too late! I hear the step-drag, step-drag of an approaching orthopedic damage control boot wearer! Luckily I had thought ahead and grilled out both lunch and dinner meats earlier in the day, but the side dishes would still need to be prepared. She enters the kitchen, smiles and asks "When do you think dinner will be ready?" I responded with "Weeelll, I've got a couple of more hours of brewing,and then theres this mess. Your'e not starving are you?" Then it happened, the worst blow of the day. She says "No, but it looks like you could use some help!" (probably thinking: in more ways then one). She continues "Really, I don't mind getting some of these pots rinsed out and then starting on the vegetables". "After laying around all day with my foot up I was getting a little bit of cabin fever, and needed to get up and move around for awhile".

So admitting defeat, I finished the brewing, Lightnin finished the dinner (and cleaned up part of my mess), and I failed to do what I had originally set out to do! Well , not completely, the beer is fermenting just fine and should be ready for the cranberries by next Saturday. If everything goes as planned the beer should be ready for Thanksgiving.

Sorry there weren't any photos of the operation on this posting, but next weekend I'm planning to brew a Rauchbier (a traditional Bavarian style smoked malt lager) and I'll try to get some pictures of that! It should be more colorful, and possibly more interesting!