Half case of smoked porter on left, port barrel-aged Belgian brown on right
All kinds of homebrew fun this past weekend. But unfortunately, not much of the actual brewing variety. For one reason or another over the past few weeks, I’ve neglected to keep my various beers moving along through the process. So I spent most of Saturday morning handling the tedium that is racking, bottling and kegging.
First up, I bottled my port barrel-aged Belgian brown ale, which smelled and tasted phenomenal coming out of secondary. The lactobacillus I added after primary fermentation definitely gives it a nice sour and acidic characteristic, and the oak comes through very well in the nose. Carbonated, this should be a very unique and interesting beer.
Second was bottling and kegging my smoked porter. I was nervous about this one, considering I’d never used smoked malts before and wasn’t exactly sure how much would be TOO much. Must be a case of beginner’s luck, as the 3 pounds of cherrywood smoked malt I added to the recipe really did the trick. Perfect smoky nose, and nicely balanced with the chocolatey malt. Really looking forward to this one. For the 3 gallons that I kegged, I set the CO2 pressure to about 15 PSI for the first day, then backed it off to about 8 PSI so it’ll saturate at about 1.8 volumes at 45 degrees F.
Third and fourth were racking my raspberry imperial stout and “regular” imperial stout to secondary, as they’d both been in primary for nearly a month. I normally don’t like to let beers sit on the yeast bed that long, but these beers were both so big I knew it was going to take a while to ferment out properly. The raspberry imp stout smelled very nice, as expected. It was the other imperial stout I was concerned about, because as you’ll recall it was the one that literally exploded all over my dining room after I pitched a very healthy yeast population. I left it to ferment in the open for about a week so the krausen could settle down, then I capped the bucket. No visual signs of bacterial infection when I opened it up again, but it did smell just a tiny bit off in some way. Kind of hard to pinpoint, as the alcohol kind of dominates the aroma (the OG on this was 1.150, FG 1.030). So I’m hoping that whatever may be in there subsides over the next several months as I let it condition in secondary. We’ll see.
April 15, 2009 at 8:00 am
That sounds like a fun day…
Are you bottling in 12 ounce bottles? That has to be even more of a pain. I hope you have someone capping for you. At least you keg, so that has to help. I still don’t have a keg system yet, but I definitely need to get around to it. It seems like it would be perfect for session beers and experimental recipes that you plan on turning over quickly.
April 15, 2009 at 9:22 am
Yep, usually 12 oz bottles, but sometimes bombers if I have them on hand. I do all the capping, from start to finish usually takes about 30-45 minutes to bottle two cases. I like to keg half and bottle the rest so I don’t have to wait around for the bottle conditioning. It’s also interesting to compare the draught version to bottle, it is different in some cases.
April 16, 2009 at 8:46 am
The actual bottling and capping is the best part, I get tired of all the sanitizing and racking. I broke down and bottle a couple of cases of bombers from Midwest, but I’m also a diligent collector of them as well. I can’t tell you how much Old Boardhead Barleywine I’ve drank in the last year (local Muni sells it for 3.99 a bomber).
April 16, 2009 at 9:16 am
I went through a phase where I saved all my old bombers for some reason, thought I was going to make a cool display in my beer room to showcase the rarer stuff. But then decided to just use them for my homebrew. People wonder why I crack a bottle of Pliny the Elder and my belgian dubbel comes out.
Are you in the Twin Cities, or elsewhere? Not sure we get Full Sail around here…
April 16, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Yea, I live in the West Metro (Mound). I’m pretty sure we regularly get Full Sail, but with the way our local beer stores work, it’s difficult to get a good idea of what’s readily available.
For example, I can go to 2-3 good-to-great beer stores within driving distance of where I work, and they might have very little overlap on things that aren’t extremely popular.
August 19, 2009 at 4:52 pm
How did the Belgian Brown Port turn out? I’m starting a port beer this weekend. Someone else did a similar recipe as you; they said they wished they added some port to the beer in addition to the soaked oak as the port flavor was weak in contrast to stronger oak flavors.
August 19, 2009 at 7:36 pm
It turned out very well, almost like a nice oaky wine, really.