This weekend I wasn’t due to be home, but I was ill all week, and decided to stay home. As a back up plan I ordered more beer ingredients, hoping to make more beer, but sadly the delivery haven’t arrived, so I had no ingredients to make any, and so no brew day report.
The plan was to try for the first time BIAB (Beer In A Bag) – a one pot process of making beer from grains only (aka, All-Grain). After a long research in forgotten forums a decade old, and more reading into John Palmer’s book, I managed to find a conversion to Coopers Dark Malt Extract, so I ordered grains to make my Black Ale from All Grain. I will go over the process and the recipe next week, hoping to have all I need to make the Black Ale.
I also have yet to find a descent fridge to house my beers, so at the moment half our refrigerator is full of beers, which led to a “must try” of all kind of older and newer brews that are just cold and inviting in the fridge – the cost of making beer at home!
For the older ones I had the Black Ale and the Coffee Porter again, after some maturing, and they are both much better. The Porter had a weakening point a couple of weeks ago when I tried it, with the malt flavour and the coffee aromas being mellow, but today they both popped back out. This means the recipe needs a good long priming session (2 weeks fermentation, 2 weeks priming and 2 weeks cold carbonation in the fridge) to get a more desired result. The Black Ale went through the same process as the Porter, and matured very nicely, giving a fuller and robust flavour, and I will also aim to give it that long priming time from now on.
The latest beer to be had, after a good week of cold priming (post 2 weeks of warm priming), was the Cranberry Ale and the results are just great. The carbonation level is higher then what I usually go for, around 2.8 CO2 levels, but I think it really brings the beer out and making it very light. My wife said the CO2 is slightly too high so maybe it will 2.5 next time, but still high enough to deal with the sweetness. The flavour is great, having a malty earth bitter flavour, but sweeter with a nice fruity finish. The best description i heard for it so far is that it “tastes of autumn”, making it a perfect Thanksgiving accompany. My wife already made me promise to make it every year.
That is for now from me, I’m sorry for being absent for a couple of weeks, but lack of brewing and illness just kept me away. I’m hoping the next couple of weeks will be exciting in terms of beer making with my venture into BIAB!