Second Floor Brewing

First brew back was this weekend, Honey Brown we hardly knew you.  No original recipe this time.  I used a recipe from a wonderful homebrew recipe book (can’t remember the name) that I got for Christmas.  Two pounds of honey into the pot.  Very little specialty grain into the pot.  I felt kinda sad about this but at least it was less labor intensive than the 11 pounds of grain that we used for the Oatmeal Stout.  We also used Safale dry yeast this time instead of the activator packs that we have been using.

The wort tasted like sweet tea.  I don’t know how I feel about that.  As long as it doesn’t come out tasting like one of those sweet tea vodkas (are people still drinking those?) I think I’ll be ok. 

Speaking of the Oatmeal stout, it was pretty delicious.  I believe we have solved some of our problems, strangly enough, without creating any others.

Back to the brew.  It went something like this: Mahaffeys, Hudson Street Stack House, boil, rip the seat of my pants, cool, and pitch the yeast.  Into the closet she goes and kabaaam it explodes.  This is our first explosion (read EXPLOSION!!).  The airlock was cleaned and replaced.  I wonder if it was the honey or the yeast or the combination of both.  Based on this explosion, I think the beer will turn out as one of our best.

The only activity in the SFB brewhouse this weekend was the racking of our Oatmeal Stout to another carboy for aging / conditioning / secondary fermentation / whatever the hockey sticks you want to call it.  There was also some activity in the beer closet this week.  A few brews, put into used wine bottles popped their corks, scaring all manner of dog, baby, sister, and wife.  We recorked and reinforced with those gold twisty cap things that come on champagne.  I guess we will have enough carbonation in this set of red.

Next beer? No effing clue.  Best idea I’ve heard so far is an actual nut beer, as in brewed with pistachios.

I’m working on a recipe for my Cranbeery Sauce concept beer that I thought up over Thanksgiving.  I’m going to submit something to the So Yeah Dood recipe contest.  It will most likely be horrible.  I want the beer to be full of body and opaque like a Guinness but instead of being black, I want it to be red.  That’s it (see picture for further clarification).  So simple except no body on the entire Internet can tell me how much fermentable sugar or how much additional gravity putting cranberries into the boil would add.  I need that so I can concoct an amazing recipe. If anyone out there can tell me the extract potential of cranberries or how adding cranberries to the boil will affect the gravity of the wort, please emailme EEEEE-mmediately. I would like to win so that I can see how someone else brews. I like our system however I am curious as to what all these other people do. There are probably some deep, dark secrets that could benefit SFB in some deep and dark ways.