New Brew Planned: Bitches Brew

This Saturday Nov. 28th will be brew #10. For the 10th beer brewed at Robot Monkey Brewery it will be another crazy one. A possible 10% abv Barleywine. The est SG=1.100, with est IBU=57.6. The grain bill on this beast is 18.75lbs for a 5 gal batch! Crossing my fingers to not get a stuck mash. It will also require extra mash and boil time. This new beast of a brew will be called Bitches Brew in honor of 40th anniversary of Miles Davis's crazy awesome album, which was released in April of 1970. When this beer is done in the secondary after a month or so, I will keg half to drink through the winter, and throw the second half in a tertiary fermenter with some oak and "release" that beer in April.

Also on Saturday, I will keg the Goatmeal Stout and get the final measurements etc. A good day for beer.

Goatmeal Stout update

This time was my first attempt with dry yeast, since they were out of the regular. After a week nothing had even started, so I gave up on that and bought a regular Irish ale yeast, and things got kickin! I also decided at that point to make a heavier beer for the winter, so I added 2 lbs of light brown sugar right to the primary fermenter. It was bubbling there for almost 2 weeks! A quick estimate brought the OG up to 1.061, which is a nice start. Friday night I put it into a secondary, just so I could add some oak chips. I measured it to be 1.012 at this point, so a good finish as well. I wonder how the brown sugar in fermenter will affect the flavor. I also soaked a bag of oakchips in bourbon and threw them in, so that should be a nice experiment as well.

I have noticed a theme as well. The beers that I brew with grains from one brew store always seem to have a much lower OG than expected. The color is usually fine, as well as taste. And this specific brew shop, all the specialty grains are crushed on site, but the pale malt comes pre-crushed in big bags. If their crush isn't up to snuff, that would give me a much lower yield. I wonder if this is throwing me off. I'm going to do the same steps next brew with same temps/times, etc, and see how my yield is with grains from the other brew shop.

Speaking of which, this coming Saturday right after Thanksgiving should be the next brew. Not sure what will be brewin, but an announcement should come later.

Goatmeal Stout

So I was bored this weekend, and decided to whip together some beer. I needed something that would hold up to winter, and fill out my kegger for a while. "How about an oatmeal stout," I thought to myself. So here it is. A lighter version. OG was 1.045. Brewing went well, although the color could have been a little darker. It's in the fermenter now. And when I grabbed the ingredients, he only had dry yeast for Irish Ale, so this will be my first experiment with dry yeast. I'll see how it goes.