First up: an update on the IPA. After opening a (lot) more bottles of our hop-tastic creation, we've determined that only the first few bottles we opened were super over-carbonated! I'm not sure whether we just got antsy and cracked the first few before they were really ready or what the chemical/yeast explanation for the rest of the bottles being carbonated correctly is, but I'm very happy to report that the beer is pretty close to exactly how I envisioned it, now.
Right before I left, we racked the Boont Amber clone to the secondary fermenter. We will bottle it later this week and it will be ready to drink a few weeks later. Look for tasting notes on this beer (hopefully with a real Boont Amber for comparison) in a few weeks!
The day before yesterday, we went into San Francisco for some delicious dim sum with family friends and hit up San Francisco Brewcraft afterwards to buy more ingredients. The poll got only ONE vote since I put it up and that vote was for a chocolate or coffee stout. Upon reflection, I realized I wanted to do a chocolate AND coffee stout. So we purchased ingredients for a mocha stout and for a clone of one of my dad's favorite British ales, Bass Ale. We also bought a new digital thermometer because the $19 we purchased from Amazon crapped out during the last few brews and we wound up using the glass floater again.
The mocha stout will be flavored by racking in into the secondary on top of a 1/2 pound of beautiful, rich chocolate nibs and by a pot of cold-brewed, extra strength coffee in the secondary fermenter. Hopefully, the proportions we use will be in line with what I'm imagining and the chocolate and coffee will balance each other. This brew also utilized a more all-grain like method of steeping the grains that involves a process called 'sparging' in which hot water is poured slowly over the grain after steeping to drain the rest of the sugars. This being new to us, we probably messed it up in some way but we'll see at the end of the brew whether our bumbling affects the final product. Lactose, milk sugar, was also incorporated into the brew to give it some the creaminess the palate associates with chocolate, coffee, and stout ales, for that matter. Lactose is not fermentable by the yeast and so will act to sweeten the beer and add to a familiar creamy mouthfeel.
We brewed the mocha stout the day before yesterday. There were some intense biochemical reactions last night, with the airlock bubbling more than once a second, and a nice krausen had formed. By this afternoon, the bubbling had receded to one every 10 seconds or so and the krausen had actually fallen.
The Bass Ale clone will be brewed some time next week after the Boont clone is in bottles and the stout is racked to the secondary.
Cheers and thanks for reading! Don't forget to vote for what we should brew after the bass clone!
