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This year, dad’s apple tree started really producing apples. It’s a Norland Apple tree (mom thinks), probably ten or fifteen years old. They were going to make jelly out of the apples. I asked him to save me some, because a friend of mine has just acquired a press. He thought that was a good idea, so we decided to use all his apples for cider.

He picked them in late September and brought them over to my place one Sunday afternoon to press them. My friend Marlene, who let me borrow the press, had hammered her apples prior to pressing them, with so-so results. So, we tried quartering the apples before loading the press. It was hard work and didn’t work well. So, we brought out the food processor and ran them food the “coleslaw” blade. That mash pressed great!

In the end we got over fourteen litres from about three bushels of apples. We fermented it with some Lavalin 1116 fruit wine yeast, racked it a couple weeks later and bottled it. For half the cider, we primed it to add some carbonation in the bottle, making a sparkling cider. The carbonation worked great to offset the tartness of the cider. It was a lot of fun, a nice way to produce our own local cider and a good time with the family.

This past weekend, I brewed my first partial mash beer. It’s not quite the mini version of what actually goes on in a brewery, but it’s one step closer from the extract kits I’ve done in the past. To make this Belgian Dubbel I first had to mash (or steep) six and a half pounds of crushed specialty grains for and hour and fifteen minutes. It looked like I was making a massive batch of porridge, and it smelled so good.

After all the goodness was steeped out of the grains, I got to sparge for the first time. Sparging is rinsing all the sugars and flavours off the mashed grains and collecting it in a pot. This is the basis of my wert. From that point, I added almost a pound of candi sugar and spiced fruit (instead of straight sugar) and a small jug of dark liquid malt extract.

I brought the wert to a boil and added Hallertau hops for flavouring and let it boil for an hour. Five minutes before the boil was over I added some more hops to increase the bitterness. At this point I had beer. It smelled great and tasted better than anything I had brewed before (and it was still warm from the boil.)

Before I could add my liquid yeast, I had to bring the temperature down from the boil, and I thought that adding really cold tap water would easily take care of it. But it didn’t, so I took my beer, in the primary fermentation vessel, and put it in my laundry room utility sink and filled the sink up with cold water. I also added more cold water to the brew. I didn’t read my recipe correctly and thought I was making 23l of beer instead of 19l. So I topped up the wert with extra water. This cooled it some, but also diluted the beer a bit. The gravity reading was right at the  bottom end of what I expected, so, not a disaster, but slightly less than optimal.

As the temperature came down under 25C in about two hours. I added the liquid yeast, set the airlock in place and tucked my beer away in the corner of the dining room to ferment.

In a week, I’ll rack to my secondary and let it continue to ferment away until the yeast have done all they’re going to do. Then it’s bottling time and after two weeks, I’ll give it a try, but I’ll probably let most of it sit until around Christmas before sharing it with folks.

This was a lot of fun, and I don’t know if I’ll want to go back to plain extract brewing now that I’ve tried a partial mash.

Started a new batch of beer last night, a wheat beer, augmented with a few cardamom pods. It should be a tasty brew, if the rubber stopper from the air-lock doesn’t impart off flavours. Yeah, that’s right, I pushed the stopper all the way in.

If only that name wasn’t already taken! I think maybe I could turn my blog into a half and half blog. One half would be theology and everyone could get all worked up about my sloppy terminology and heresy (don’t forget my heresy.) The other half would be about homebrew and everyone could just kick back and relax with a brew. What do you think?

So, you probably know that I brew my own beer. My last batch was (is) a stout. Guinness is a stout. What goes with a stout better than nothing? Nothing. But something that goes with stout less than better than nothing is cider. You may have heard it called a Black and Tan. Well, when I was away last weekend, I popped by a homebrew supply shop and got myself a nice little one gallon carboy and stopper and came home with the plan to brew my own cider! It’s actually very simple, from what I’ve been able to deduce. All you need is some apple juice and some brewer’s yeast. I’m going to use champagne yeast to make it extra sparkly – cause that’s how I roll. I’m sure I’ll have a video up soon of the process. In the mean time, cider cocktails.