Our Homebrewing Experiment

Hi everyone,

Hope the new year has been treating you well. We’ve got a heck of a lot to catch up on, so let’s backtrack a bit to the lovely autumn season. We’re based in New York and have recently experienced #snowmageddon Jonas, followed by single-digit temperatures. Today was the first day since well, oddly enough December, that we’ve had temperatures in the 60s, so it’s making me reflect on my much-preferred mild weather months.

That, and the fact that we actually made our own beer in October and it’s taking until freaking February to talk about it. But I digress…

After a few months of marital bliss/living together and tossing around the idea a number of times, John and I finally decided to brew our first batch of beer together. We wanted to do something seasonally appropriate, so we hopped on the pumpkin trend. Though, for two October/Halloween enthusiasts like ourselves (John’s birthday is on Halloween!), it came as no surprise that we’d tackle a pumpkin beer first. The key was making it unique. With a little inspiration, we came up with our twist on the autumnal ale: we were going to do a charred pumpkin porter.

Now, I’ll let John take it away with the step-by-step process of creating the Jack on Fire porter…

Grinding malts by hand. Never doing that again.

Prepping water for the mash.

Our grain mix. Roasted chocolate and smoked malts.

Getting the water to temperature.

Doing the monster mash.

Look at that beautiful mash.

Adding some grilled pumpkin bits into the mash.

Getting all of the lovely sugars out of the whiskey carmelized pumpkin.

Lautering and moving on to sparging with some crisp, clean water.

A nice shot of our hops. We went with fuggles hops to impart a bit of a classic English Porter/Dry Stout kinda vibe.

Adding dark malt extract for a bit more body.

Our lovely wort boiling away, like witches brew in a cauldron. (Note the Count Chocula in the background.)

We divided the hops in half on this one. The first half went in 15 minutes into the boil and the other half went in with 15 minutes left.

We decided to add a bit of Hudson Double Charred whiskey in right at the end of the boil to impart some more of the flavor notes we got grilled into the pumpkin.

And a little more…

To add some more roasty and deep flavors into the beer, we decided to infuse our brew Death Wish Cauldron Aged Pumpkin coffee.

Some lovely coffee grounds in a hop sack were added right after it was pulled off the burner so we wouldn’t get too much of the bitter notes from the coffee in the finished product.

Aerating our 1 gallon fermenter.

Adding in the yeast. For this brew, we went with an English Ale yeast from White Labs. We added about 5 gallons worth of yeast into our one gallon brew. While it sped up fermentation and made for a very effervescent beer, we do not recommend trying this at home.

Adding the blow off tube.

Locked away in a dark cabinet to let the little yeasties do their dirty work.

Recycling some bottles as containers for our Frankenstein’s Monster of a homebrew.

Syphoning the beer into a pot and adding the priming sugar.

We read a lot about siphon filling bottles and how it can sometimes take a while to get used to doing. It really is. We definitely lost some valuable beer to our kitchen floor that night.

The almost empty fermenter.

Capping our bottles and getting them ready to carbonate.

Bottles of all shapes and sizes going back into the previously mentioned dark cabinet to carbonate.

The finished product. Our first homebrew together, Jack On Fire. A heavily carbonated Porter with slight smokeyness and strong chocolate flavors reinforced with robust coffee and an assertive yeastiness. We’re very happy with how it came out.

 

We’d say for our first attempt, we done pretty dang good! Now, it’s time to brainstorm ideas for our second brew. Your lovely lady beer guide here has given up alcohol for Lent–so we’re thinking of doing a celebratory Easter beer, something we can start up now that will be ready just in time for the end of Lent. Something appropriate for spring, with a special twist. Any suggestions? Shoot us a line in the comments!

Thanks for reading, and expect a new post soon. (Just because I can’t drink the beer doesn’t mean I won’t write about it!)

–Jamie and John