More Vanilla/Licorice Porter: Original date: 13-JUN-1998

Home in Utica.
More Vanilla/Licorice Porter!
Flying solo. Angela out with Sarah (Rigg). Cat doin' his thing.

1. Materials-
-Same as last time except got Absopure "Steam Distilled" water at Hollywood Market. Total cost-$41.00 (or close to it) between the water & ingredients at Shelby Homebrew Supply.
2. Process

• Put 4 gallons of water in fridge


• Cut vanilla bean into 3 equal parts after scoring it lengthwise down the middle


• Put licorice stick into two ziplock bags and bashed the hell out of it with a ball-peen hammer


• Put vanilla bean, licorice smashings, 1 gal of water into the stock pot and brought to a boil. After it started to boil, set timer for an hour.


• While the water was boiling, dug out the beer-making stuff:
  
  
  
  • Cleaned carboy with hot soapy water & rinsed with power washer
  
  
  • Filled with a mixture of bleach & hot water (135F out of tap!)
  
  
  • Set up a dishpan with hot water & bleach to sanitize the other beer-making goodies
  
  
  • Filed sink with hot water & put cans of malt extract in to soften
  
  


• Ate lunch. Leftover pizza. Yum!


• Started writing these notes


• Added the malt extract & 2lbs dextrose


• Boiled for 35-40 minutes. Had two minor boilovers.


• Filled carboy with 2 jugs of water


• Drew wort out of stock pot with a sanitized pitcher & put into carboy.


• Measured specific gravity of 1.052@82F


• Woke up yeast in the distilled water for 10 minutes & pitched into carboy.


• Topped off, corked, and cleaned up

--4 1/2 hours--

6/29/98
F.G. 1.010 @ 77F
Bottled.

Contemporary Notes -- August 2004

This was the last time I would brew beer for over two years. In the meantime, we bought our first house, and Savannah was born, all within the five months following this date. To be honest, I don't remember much about how this batch turned out--or if it even did turn out. Obviously, the first batch from the previous November was a success, and I was trying to make more, but life got crazy after this, and I just didn't have any time to brew again.

Vanilla/Licorice Porter: Original date 15-NOV-1997

-- At Dugland --
1. Materials:

• 1 Vanilla bean, scored lengthwise then cut into 3 parts


• 1 Muntons Gold Docklands Porter Kit (2 cans plus ale yeast)


• 1 Stick Italian licorice, pulverized with a hammer


• 5 gallons distilled spring water


• 2 pounds dextrose

1. Placed licorice powder & vanilla bean into 1 gallon of water & boiled for 1 hour. Water turned dark almost immediately.


2. (Before boil)
   
   
   
   • Placed remaining 4 gallons into snowbank for 2-3 hours. Temp=44F
   
   
   • Sterilized fermenter (glass)
   
   


3. (During boil) Softened up the two cans of hopped malt extract in hot water for 30 minutes


4. Added contents of the two cans + 2lbs of dextrose to the brewpot & brought to a vigorous boil for ~ 45 minutes.


5. Placed 3 gallons of cold distilled water into the fermenter & emptied brewpot into the fermenter. Added final gallon of cold water to fill to the middle of the bottleneck. Temperature worked out to exactly 70F!


6. 
   
   • Heated a small pan of water to 165F, then chilled to 70F in snowbank.
   
   
   • Woke up yeast for 10 minutes
   
   


7. Took Hygrometer reading of 1.040 at 70F = ~1.043 adjusted to 60F


8. Pitched yeast, attached cork & blow-off hose to fermenter


9. Placed in Dug's basement (65F ambient temp) with hose in water.

Contemporary notes -- August 2004

This was the first of two batches of Vanilla/Licorice porter I made from directions I got from Shelby Beer & Wine Supply. At the time I visited the store to get the ingredients for this batch, a fellow by the name of Bob -- another customer -- was in there drinking it up with the store's owner, whose name was Doug Hawley, if I remember correctly. They were also smoking pot, as I recall, so I guess it wasn't a really big surprise when the place went under a year or so later. I went in there a few times, and I don't think I ever saw Mr. Hawley sober, although he was an entertaining man. Anyway, this guy named Bob told me that if I had any questions about how to brew the beer to call his number, which I wrote down in the original version of my notes as (248)651-0123. He also claimed he would buy the stuff from me if I didn't like the beer! An AnyWho lookup of that number this evening turned up a listing for a Robert Klinkhamer in Shelby, MI, so that's probably the same guy!

Anyway, I never felt the need to call Bob, the beer turned out great, and I brewed more during my next brewing session.
At any rate, Dug and I spent a fine fall day brewing this beer in his upper Hamtramck flat, and we enjoyed ourselves a great deal.

Cherry Wheat - Original date: 8/23/97

Me & Rob


Ingredients

• 4lb Ironmaster Wheat Beer Kit (from Shelby Beer & Wine Supply)


• 1oz Slovenian Styrian Golding Hops (Alpha Acid: 5.2%)


• 60oz Frozen "Big Valley" dark sweet cherries (5-12oz packages)

What We Did

• Started around 2PM on a bright sunny Saturday


• Brought 2 gallons of filtered tap water to a boil


• Added the hopped malt extract and the hops (in a strainer mesh bag)


• Had a beer


• Boiled for 1 hour


• Had a PB&J or two


• Washed out the plastic fermenter and sanitized


• Added the thawed cherries and steeped for 20 minutes (water actually started to boil again and I turned it off)


• Put 3 gallons of filtered cold water in the fermenter


• Poured the wort and cherries into the fermenter


• Put the lid loosely on the fermenter & set it on the floor


• Put a wet t-shirt around the fermenter and directed a fan toward it - temp 110F


• Several hours immersed in ice water - 9:03PM - Temp 80F


• Specific gravity - 1.030


• Woke up yeast for 10 minutes in boiled then cooled water (used microwave, then immersed the Pyrex measuring cup in water


• Pitched yeast

8/24/97

• 10:30AM - Bubbling like crazy!

8/26/97

• Bubbling stopped. Attached airlock.

9/4/97

• Bottled


• 74F - 1.004Hg

Contemporary notes -- August 2004

This beer was something of a disappointment to us because the cherry flavor wasn't very strong. It was a decent enough wheat beer, but we should have probably used three or four times as much fruit. We were trying to duplicate the level of 'cherryness' in Samuel Adams Cherry Wheat, and failed miserably.

This, incidently, is the first brewing session I recorded in my notes. There had probably been half a dozen or so sessions prior to this one when I got started sometime around 1995 in my bachelor pad apartment on Nicke St in Clinton Township, MI. None of those very first beers were particularly memorable, except for one that was brewed sometime in late 1996 or early 1997--a Guinness knock-off found in one of Charlie Papazian's books called 'Toad Spit Stout'. That beer was an unqualified success, and I think that it came at a time when I was almost ready to give up on homebrewing because I hadn't been terribly successful until that point. Unfortunately, I have only the vaguest recollections of the brewing of that beer...Angela's cousin April came with me (she was staying with us for a couple of weeks that summer) to pick up a plastic fermenter -- really a used pickle bucket from a restaurant on Gratiot Avenue! Despite its humble origins, that old bucket brewed some pretty decent beer until I replaced it a few years later with a store-bought fermenter.