Octo-owl has been busy brewing now that we’ve acquired the necessary gear. Here are some photos of the brewing process. Its been a while since our last blog update so theres some ground to cover:
Jessica is scooping out the seeds from these pumpkins so we can use them for our first beer in the UK, Pumpkin Head. Pumpkin Head is an imperial pumpkin brown ale with garam masala.
We toasted the pumpkins in the oven to soften them up and add some flavor (or should I say flavour?)
Adding the pumpkin to the mash. In general, its a good idea to add adjuncts like fruit to the secondary fermenter, after primary fermentation had finished. However, I read many sources that claimed that the pumpkin would be better utilized in the mash tun, so we tried it out. I think it turned out well.
Pumpkin in the mash. Mashing Pumpkins? New band name. Gonna be famous.
Pumpkin Head boiling with whole hops. Mmmm…doesn’t that look delicious? Ok ok, the beer process doesn’t always look pretty, but the end result is worth it.
After we were cooling Pumpkin Head and waiting to add it into the fermenter, Jessica had a great idea. Usually when you’re cleaning up, you simply chunk the spent grains. However the beer we made this time was pretty big, so Jessica suggested we make a “small beer”. A small beer is a beer that uses runnings from a big beer, such as a barley wine. So we pulled off some extra runnings, boiled it, added some hops and threw it in a cleaned/sanitized milk jug with a bit of yeast. We also threw in some cocoa powder and cinnamon just to get whacky. We called this evil creation “Shrunken Pumpkin Head”.
Pumpkin Head in the fermenter. What you can’t see is my relief that our job was done. Brewing is fun, but it’s also work. After several hours, you are certainly ready to sit down and drink a pint.
Shrunken Pumpkin Head fermenting. Since the batch was so small, the fermentation kicked off rather quickly. Go yeasties, go!
Jessica is getting ready to rack Pumpkin Head into the bottling bucket for bottling. Its interesting how over the course of us brewing we’ve settled into certain roles. Jessica almost always racks (siphoning between containers) the beer and I tend to cap the bottles. Its interesting to note that when we transferred our first beer to secondary Jessica became quite angry with the process. So much so she swore off brewing ever again because she found it so difficult to rack the beer. Since then she’s become very good at it, so practice makes perfect!
Speaking of roles, I’ve been the one that usually makes the recipes, although with quite a bit of input from Jessica. At one point I was quite prolific. As you can see here there are 81 recipes on my account. Remember we’ve only been brewing for a bit over a year and we’ve probably only actually brewed like 15 or so recipes. Jessica has started making her own recipes too as you can here. I imagine most people just go off other people’s recipes, however ever since our second batch i wanted to brew our own stuff. I just like experimenting and theres alot to explore with brewing.
Not the most exciting picture, but it was a momentous occasion. This was our first bottled beer since we moved to the UK. In the end the beer is a bit too sweet, however the flavors are big and the bit of garam masala we added brings a unique taste to it. I think with some age the beer with be great.
Pumpkin Head bottles! This was a great day. Well, it was better when we could drink them. Its always tough to have the beer in the bottle, but then have to wake 2+ weeks for them to carbonate. I’m so impatient!
Boiling “The Wendigo” which is a rye IPA with 62% rye! This is currently in the bottle carbonating, but we’ve cracked open a couple to test it out. The hops are great in this beer, although the beer is more cloudy than I would like which I attribute to the high percentage of rye in the recipe.
Here we’re racking “The Wendigo” into a secondary fermenter as well as adding a dry hop (for this beer, Apollo hops). Dry hopping is an interesting term because the hops are added to the liquid, which is not dry at all. The hops go in the same to the boil as the do into a secondary fermenter, but the only difference is the temperature of the beer when you add it. Its also interesting to note that those are whole hops, not pellets like we had used before we came to the UK. Interestingly enough, the whole hop selection here is better, although it can be difficult to find US varieties at times.
These are some the apollo hops we used for the Wendigo. I feel sorry for you because you can’t smell them. The aroma was amazing, very orangey and tangerine.
I don’t think you will doubt me when I say that Hops (Humulus Lupulus) are a close relative to Cannabis.
This is the Wendigo before bottling. We had dry hopped quite a bit before in other batches, but never with whole hops. In hindsight we should’ve used hop bags as racking the beer into the bottling bucket was quite difficult. This was never a problem with hop pellets as they tended to disintegrate and were easily filtered out without clogging up the racking cane.
If you made it to the end of this post, congratulations, you’ve earned a free beer! You just need to come hang out to collect your prize. If you live in the states, that may be a rather expensive free beer. Thanks for reading!
