Teach a Friend to Homebrew Day

Sorry that I'm way behind on the blog. No shortage of content in my head; just a lack of time to get it posted. For example, I've been meaning to write for a while now about the "Teach a Friend to Homebrew" gathering I had at my house on Nov. 7—also known as Learn to Homebrew Day. I had planned to be brewing all-grain batches by then, but I decided to brew one more extract batch with some folks more fledgling than me at this event.

We brewed a recipe from the book Beer Captured. The recipe was based on Anchor Brewing's "Our Special Ale"—more specifically the 1995 iteration of their constantly changing holiday beer. None of us involved had ever had the original beer, but we were looking for something with a holiday flavor and a shorter turnaround time than the bigger holiday ales in the book. Here's the description from the book (p. 158):

The 1995 version arrives with a reddish tan whipped cream head that poses on an attractive dark mahogany brown beer. The aroma takes you back to Grandma's kitchen when she was baking spice cake. Sweet spices coat the tongue along with a malty palate. The finish is malty and redolent of vanilla.

With a handful of helpers and a dozen or so onlookers, we brewed on the stove top. While teaching friends to brew is a great concept, in reality the amount of activity and distractions took their toll. The first mistake occurred during the steeping of the specialty grains. The goal was to hold the grains in 150-degree water for 30 minutes, but my new-to-me probe thermometer, which was inserted through a vent in the brew pot's lid,  wasn't submerged. It was reading air temp in the pot, not the liquid temp. As a result, the grains steeped in the 170- and 180-degree range for 10 minutes or more. Steeping this hot is known to strip tannins from the grains and give the beer an astringent off-flavor. So we're not even past the steeping stage and I'm already keeping my fingers crossed.

The second error came with the addition of three spices that the recipe called for. Two of the spices—vanilla bean and anise—needed to be chopped before being added to the boil. The third spice, nutmeg, needed no preparation. When cleaning up after the event, I realized that we had focused on the vanilla bean and anise to the exclusion of the nutmeg. We simply forgot to add it, even though it had been set out. Fortunately this recipe is billed in the book as one that can host a mix-and-match array of spices. So while I considered adding the requested 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg to the fermenter, I figured we should just let the beer ride as-is and see what happens.

The rest of the process, from the boil to the ice-bath cool down, went well. But when we measured the original gravity of the wort before adding the yeast, we learned we had also missed our target original gravity by a few points. The recipe calls for an O.G. of 1.068-1.069 and our wort came in at 1.065. Since I have taken so long to post a recap of this brew day, the beer has finished fermenting and I can tell you that we also missed the final gravity by an even wider margin. The recipe indicates a final gravity of 1.017-1.018 and our fermentation ended several points short at 1.026. As a result, the beer's alcohol-by-volume (ABV) measurement is 5.1%—considerably lower than the 6.5% ABV that we targeted in the recipe.

The beer is now kegged and in my keg refrigerator, and as of tomorrow night it will have been under CO2 pressure for one week. I adhere to the "set it and forget it" method of force carbonating beer, which basically means you apply CO2 to the keg at the intended serving pressure and come back in two weeks. The "Our Special Ale" recipe states the beer will be ready to drink one month after carbonation and that it will peak within two to six months. So we wait.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all the friends who came over for the event. They came with helping hands, patience and lots of great questions. I definitely plan to hold another "Learn to Brew" gathering to mark next year's homebrewer holiday—and probably sooner than that.