Bombe!

"I do not like this word 'bomb'. It is not a bomb. It is a device which is exploding." 

       - Jacques Le Blanc, French ambassador to New Zealand, 

on France's 1995 nuclear tests in the Pacific

Take your pick:

All bombs, or bombes. Some are more chocolate than others.

The reality is more like:

The rig above is a blow-off hose into a large plastic jar with water that serves as the airlock. While I've seen foam pushed through before, this blow-off rig has never been defeated. Until now.

In action:





And really, that's just the fermentation. I had a wonderful picture of the surprise boilover that occurred during brewing, but managed to lose it.

I'm glad I didn't name this beer beforehand! This was to be a self-indulgent brew day. An imperial stout is self-indulgent enough, but this one will see the addition of some booze-soaked cacao nibs and vanilla bean to make it a chocolatey. It already has the barley flakes to make it smooth and rich, and that's why it's so prone to explodiness-- it's almost viscous. And I think I've lost about 4 or 5 bottles' worth already to boilover and fermentation foaming.

Assuming it doesn't foam itself entirely out of the fermenter, this beer will get its cacao and vanilla additions in a few weeks, see some further aging, and be bottled in November. It will then get some nice shelf time, probably requiring until at least January before it's ready to be cracked open and enjoyed as a mid-winter treat.

Self-indulgent indeed, and self-named, too."Bombe" it is. Chocolatey and explodey.

The recipe below doesn't include the cacao or vanilla additions. Also, because of the boilover I mentioned, the hopping is... unknown. I don't know how much hops were lost when the pot turned into a mad, frothy god and whether replacement additions were less, more or about the same.

The Grumpy Urbanist

If a recipe is new, sometimes the name I give it when formulating it ends up being temporary. In this case, I had in mind something like "Dead Greek God", on account of the fact that I was using hops from the now deceased Zeus hop vine (it inhabited a large pot next to the driveway and unlike the ground-planted hops, was the victim of winter kill this year.)

The larger bowls are Zeus leaf, and the smaller bowls Palisade pellet.

But, I was feeling a bit grumpy and stressed out in the morning as I got the mash going, and depressed upon reading things like a bake sale with a drive-through. So anger-tweeting got me through the mash, and so too has it provided a new name for this beer.

Brew day went well, with a brief visit from our friends J and C. C has an interest in homebrewing and I routinely offer her an invite to see how an all-grain process goes. Oh, and J happens to be the namesake of the previous batch, which didn't get a brew-day post:

It's an "in" joke.

But back to the Grumpy Urbanist. For once, some accuracy in my numbers. Pre-boil gravity came out at 1.051 (vs a target of 1.050) with an Original Gravity of 1.060 (target 1.057). Much better than the terrible undershoots of the last few batches. Not that I've seen any meaningful efficiency improvements, mind. I've just dialed my expected efficiency down to a weepingly low 65%. Clearly, Chris needs a new mash tun.

This recipe is a little wacky. Brew with what ya gots. And I gots:

• The aforementioned Zeus hops - pungent, obnoxious, good for bittering
• "Palisade" pellet hops - similar to Willamette. Mixing pellet and leaf is a pain on my system, too.
• T-58 yeast - kind of a specialty yeast that produces some estery and peppery flavours
• 5lb of rye malt to go along with the last 5lb of pale, and a few more pounds of pilsner to round out the malt bill.

I figured that this beer could be a mess, in terms of flavour. Sometimes, though, you got to get a little freaky. But what I didn't expect was that this beer would quickly be a mess in the brewery, as well:

Airlock = insufficient.

Mad kreusen.

I've never seen a fermentation take off like this. These pictures are from ~20 hours into fermentation. I was already seeing strong gassing off at 6 hours! I should have known this might happen, since it's typically not until the next day that I see any activity.

So, cleanup on aisle three, change out the lid, and then back to the blow-off tube for the rest of fermentation.

Fortunately, at high kreusen like this, a fermenting beer is actually quite robust even in the event of a containment breach of the warp core. The overpressure means there's very little opportunity for outside air or microbes to get into the fermenter, let alone through the thick layer of CO2 foam. But I'm glad I caught it, because the sweet wort would also attract insects, and that would be that.

The recipe is below. I've also included the Golden Pockets, which turned out to be remarkably close to Dirty Fawcett that it's almost indistinguishable. It is slightly superior to it, though, so I'll regard it as a successful refinement of DF instead of a failed attempt to produce a different beer.

Brew day: Lawnmower Man Blonde

I like names that work on multiple angles. A "lawnmower beer" is something cold, fizzy, refreshing on a hot day after chores (like lawn-mowing) are done. It's not meant to be high-brow, just pleasantly drinkable. Then, as well, there is the fact that during this brew, I actually did mow the lawn. So I was a lawnmower man... or perhaps, a lawnmowing man.

And of course there is this:

SCIENCE MADE HIM A GOD.

The trifecta is achieved: Meaning, circumstance, pop culture reference. A name is born!

As for the brew, a few different things with this one. Instead of my traditional 50/50 split of super-hard tap water with super-soft RO water, this beer was put together with 100% RO with small mineral additions (1gr chalk, 1gr epsom salt, a tiny amount of table salt) to achieve a water profile similar to Pilsen, Czech republic. Of course, I have no idea if I actually hit those precise sub-gram measurements, or how mineral-free my RO supplier's water is, but I'm interested to see what effect this will have.

Also, I now have a kegging system, so this will go into keg once it's done. Hurrah kegerator!

I present: Lawnmower Man Blonde.

Brew Day: Wolfshark FACE 90XL

This beer is inspired by Dogfish Head 90, only.. awesomer. I present: WolfShark FACE 90XL!!!!

Actually, it didn't quite go entirely as planned. Gravity undershot, so it won't be as awesome as DFH (were that even possible to begin with.) But still, the name must live on, because I can't wait to see what Erin does with the label design.

The recipe is below. And yes, you read that right: hop additions every ten minutes, to get something like a continuous hopping over a 90 minute boil. All the hops went into a single bowl and I measured out about .4oz every ten minutes. To match predicted IBU I entered all the additions laboriously into BeerSmith. (Would it kill him to add a cut/paste function?)

The real DFH90 is Amarillo, Simcoe and Warrior. This beer is Amarillo, Galena and Northern Brewer. The malt bill is pretty comparable though, especially the Thomas Fawcett Amber (yes, that stuff again.)

Some stuff in the recipe notes about other difficulties I had today, including stuck sparge. It's a good bet that this won't be the clearest beer I've ever brewed.

Brew day: Dirty Fawcett amber ale

I should mention before I start: the Banquo's Pilsner is bottled, and hopefully will be ready to drink in a couple of weeks. Also, I'm sipping on the Garbage Pail ale (it had a much shorter turnaround) and it has turned into a very nice hoppy IPA.

I did have something different while brewing. Erin and I went through Niagara region yesterday, and stopped at Silversmith Brewing to pick up some of their fantastic Black Lager (it has become one of E's favourite beers-- apart from the fine products out of Mount Breithaupt, of course.) On a whim I also got a pair of growlers (at $5 deposit per.. ouch), one of which contained their Bavarian Breakfast Wheat.

So: Dirty Fawcett Amber Ale: a simple beer, Canadian 2-row with two full pounds of this Thomas Fawcett Amber malt that I recently acquired. Modest additions of Willamette hops and a clean-fermenting yeast. This will be a very malt-characteristic beer, and I need that. Need to learn what I'm dealing with since I've got SO MUCH OF THE DAMN STUFF. Likely I will give some away, because I don't expect to be able to stuff 2lb of it into every batch, and I have... 38lb more of the stuff.

Canadian 2-row and the dirty Fawcett.

Milling the malt with a Canadian Tire special.

Milled malt, prior to mash.

The same malt, spent after mash.

Recipe below the cut.

Brew day Sunday!

It's a brew day on Sunday! Coming up, a "Dirty Fawcett" amber.

On Friday, I stopped in at Gilbertson & Page, a malt distributor near Fergus. I had an interesting chat with a new member of the team there, Shelley, who is interested in setting up that homebrew supply presence that G&P has been saying they want to do for the last two years now.

Along with the full 55lb bag of Canadian 2-row I went there for, I ended up impulse-buying a 3/4 bag of Thomas Fawcett Amber. Turns out, this amber has no diastatic power, and has a fairly strong flavour, so it's not suitable as a base grain (contrary to what I thought.) But now I have rather a lot of TF Amber.

So, I plan on dirtying up a rather straightforward ale tomorrow with the stuff. As far as recipes go, this is a simple one. 9lb of Canadian 2-row pale malt, a full 2lb of the Amber, and the last of my Willamette pellet hops.

If nothing else, we'll find out what this Fawcett tastes like.

Brew Day: Garbage Pail Ale

"Garbage pail" ale: something to help me clean out some older ingredients.

I had a few pounds of Maris Otter (an English pale ale malt) and a lot of pellet hops that are getting to be almost two years old-- even sealed and frozen, they won't last forever. So I whipped up an IPA recipe, with the Maris O bolstered by some pilsner malt, and a lot of Amarillo hops.

Beersmith says this will be very high on the bitterness scale, but it's quite likely the degraded hops won't take it so far.

Brew day went pretty well, with no headaches apart from the weather. Unlike that wonderful January brew day, today was minus a handful, grey, and breezy. But the mash went great, so did the boil, and it only took one kettle's worth of boiling water to restore flowing water to the outside tap.

Recipe Link

In other news, the January Pilsner is still around, quietly conditioning in a corner of the basement, a spot that hovers around 55 F during the winter. I may end up bottling it at the same time as this one, in a couple of weeks.