Brew Day October 2010, and Bochet

While I’ve been lax in updating this blog, I’ve been (reasonably) active with some experimentation.  My last brew day, one week ago today, saw one modified “normal” batch and one experimental, and I’ll be whipping up two more experimental batches tomorrow evening.

The modified batch was a version of my (quite popular) Kolsch recipe, but with the volume turned up to 11.  I believe it will end more like a pale ale than anything else.  I was down to basically dregs on my current base malt stash, and decided to use it all; this bumped the starting gravity up about 25-30 points.  I increased the bitterness by a similar amount, keeping the BU:GU ratio roughly the same…  It will still be quite pale, I believe–something in the golden range–but with a firm bittering, and a solid malt backbone.

The experimental batch was based on the idea of caramelizing honey for a mead.  Several folks have done so-called “bochet”, or “burnt” meads, with the results being described as different, if not entirely to their liking.  I was going for a slightly less “cooked” flavor, and hoping for an improved color.  (Not that a straw-gold mead is a bad thing, but it’s just a bit… well, overdone.)  I took my “spare” pot (7.5 gallons) and emptied 10lbs of wildflower honey into it.  With a touch of water to rinse the honey containers, the total volume was right about 1 gallon.

1 gallon honey in a 7 gallon pot
Honey, before the boil

All accounts that I’ve read regarding boiling/caramelizing honey when making bochet indicate that it foams up quite a lot.  I had planned on simply stirring like mad to keep it from boiling over; let me recommend instead using a very low flame.  The stuff literally tried to crawl out of the pot.

Honey boiling for bochet
45 minutes into the boil; still climbing the pot, but a lovely color.

I boiled for about an hour, all told; the honey turned a lovely deep amber, and even my kids commented on the “caramel” smell.  A second word of warning for those who would follow in my footsteps:  bees can smell the honey cooking.  They will come to try to “rescue” it.  Lots of them will.  At the end of the hour, there were about 6 big bumblebees and maybe 15-20 honeybees swarming the pot.  At least three of the honeybees gave their lives trying to grab some of the honey–they got “caught” by bursting bubbles, and fell into the pot.  I don’t think they’ll throw the flavor off by much, though.  At any rate, the end result is quite pretty, and is (still) fizzing away happily.

Bochet and Kolsch
The mead and the Kolsch; the mead is the dark one just left of center.

As for tomorrow’s adventures, I’ll be throwing together some more meads–a few folks over on the GotMead forums have some “quick” meads, supposedly ready-to-drink in 3-5 weeks.  We shall see.  I’ll try to document those here, with pics.

University, October 2008

Yesterday was Atlantian University, and I taught my long-awaited Intro to All-Grain Brewing class. (Well, long-awaited by me, anyway.) Things seemed to go pretty well. I think that I’ll stretch the class out to 2 hours next time, as that’s really a *lot* of information to go through in an hour; I felt a little rushed for parts of it. 2 hours would also give me the opportunity to bring in a bit of equipment to help describe what’s going on for the brew.

One thing that the class was good for was creating a number of new contacts. It seems that there are a number of folks both (relatively) locally and within a reasonable driving distance who want to learn to brew. Everyone who was in my class now has the URL for this site, as well as for my webpage; by extension, this means they have my email address, and we can arrange further hands-on classes at a later date. [2018 Edit: Those were my old blog and webpage; everything is here, now. -M]

Also, I let everyone there know about my upcoming Brew Day, a week from today. I believe I’ll try for ‘take two’ of the Kolsch that practically disappeared last weekend. I’ll have to use the Golden Promise malt, rather than the American Pale 2-Row that I used last time, but that should only improve the brew, I would think. Regardless, it’s more beer, which is always a good thing, right?