Pumpkin Homebrew Review

Well, its been a long while since I’ve done a beer review, but I had someone ask me to review their Pumpkin Ale Homebrew, so what the hell. One of L Bird’s co-workers’ husband has gotten pretty deep into homebrewing and presented me with two bottles of gold to review and well, who am I to turn down free beer.So here we go ….

Appearance: From the minute I popped the crown on the bottle until the bottle was empty it foamed over. I actually had to quickly get it into my pint glass before I lost the whole bottle to foaming. So it is plenty carbonated. It was a light tan/brown in color and produced a ton of rocky head. It is pretty cloudy with visible sediment floating throughout, which is not necessarily a bad thing. When brewing with pumpkin it can produce a lot of sediment that stays suspended and is harder to remove. In the future if you wanted to clean it up, you could rack to a secondary carboy for 1-2 weeks for more settling before bottling but it is perfectly drinkable the way it is.

Aroma: It has a bit of hop aroma right up front, it is slightly citrusy which could be from the choice of hops. There is also hints of cinnamon and pumpkin, but overall it is clean and bright.

Taste: The hops continue to shine through at the start, it has that bitter hoppiness up front that gives way to a nice pumpkin flavor before the traditional ale flavors come through. I am not sure if he added any spices during the brewing but I can detect a faint spiciness maybe allspice or clove. There is a very slight lingering aftertaste that is reminiscent of bitter citrus peel/oil.

Overall: This is a good foray into pumpkin beers. It has enough pumpkin to be tasty but not so much as to be over the top. I also like the fact that it wasn’t over-spiced, a lot of commercial pumpkin beers try to be liquid pumpkin pie and they tend to go over the top on spice and I find that makes it cloying and makes for bad beer. It could be cleaned up a little by giving it a longer racking time and the after taste may be from leaving the bittering hops in the boil a little too long, but these are very minor faults. Overall, this is a good beer and I would drink a couple of them if I had the chance.

Good job, keep brewing and keep ‘em tippin’!

Baby Steps To A Brewery Of My Own..... Maybe??

Man, it seems like forever since I blogged here, but what can I say life has been crazy. I know, I know who doesn’t have a crazy life, hell maybe I was just being lazy but anyway I’m back. So I know I have kicked around the idea here of owning my own nano/microbrewery and all of the pipe dreaming that goes along with it, but this time I may actually take a step towards realizing part of my dream. Well, maybe I will, right now it’s a semi-firm maybe, but let me explain.


I think that I can really compete with some of the smaller microbreweries even at the homebrew stage I am at. I have entered a few of my beers into local competitions and have won a few awards. A couple of years ago my Porter took 2nd place in that category at the NYS Fair. I taste my beers against what is out in the craft market and I think my beers are close or better than some of those beers. Whenever I brew a batch I typically give half of it away looking for opinions. Now it’s true that this beer goes to most of my friends, but I stress to them that I want their honest opinions, if they don’t like it I want to know why so I can become a better brewer. So far I haven’t had any complaints, unless it was a matter of preference. For example, my Hot Chili Beer was very hot, so to some people it was too hot and they didn’t care for it. Based on that I think that I am just about there when it comes to my recipes, I’m think they will take some more refining and fine tuning but for the most part they are pretty damn good if I do say so myself.

So with that being said why am I not jumping into the brewing world on a small entry-level nanobrewery? The answer is education. Everything I have ever done in my life I have analyzed and learned as much as possible about before I made a decision to pursue it. I hate going at things half-assed. So my biggest problem is I lack the knowledge to go from where I am now to scaling up to a small professional brewery. I just don’t know how it is done, I don’t know how they scale up the recipes, I don’t know how to run the equipment needed for larger batches, I just plain don’t know.

Because I am employed full-time and have a now expanding family I can’t just pull up stakes and enroll in UC Davis’ Master Brewer Program for six months or whatever it is. But I can take a six month brewer’s course with the American Brewer’s Guild in Intensive Brewing Science & Engineering. It is a distance course that will require a lot of reading and studying followed up with a week of hands-on experience in a working brewery. This I can definitely swing and definitely want to do, but here’s the catch. The two classes for 2013 are full and the spring class of 2014 is full, so right now I would have to wait until June 16th, 2014 to start if I get accepted. The other catch and it’s a big catch is it is $7250 for the class.

So with providing for my family and another baby on the way I am pretty financially tied down for the next few years. So here is where things could get interesting, surfing the internet about starting up breweries and brewery education I stumbled onto Indiegogo.com. Indiegogo is a funding platform where you promote yourself and people can donate to your cause. It is used for the a variety of things from small business startups to education to some of the best causes (I think) raising money for people who need it the most (i.e. people struggling with medical bills for illness, memorial donations, medical research etc.).

I am tossing around starting a campaign to possibly fund my brewing education. So here is where the big MAYBE from the start of this post comes in. I hate asking people for money, I hate owing anyone anything. I feel very uncomfortable creating a campaign for my own personal benefit when there seem to be so many other more worthy causes out there. Also, one of the things in creating a campaign is to give the donors a “gift” for their donations. Some of the breweries are offering things like personal thanks to pint glasses to placing the donor’s name on the wall at the subsequent brewery. So I look at that and I don’t have much to offer a potential donor other than my heartfelt thanks and maybe some good discussion about beer and brewing. So, I feel foolish saying “give me money and I’ll give you a giant thank you note”.

I mean other people do it all the time, that is why Indiegogo is there and so popular. Maybe I just have to suck it up, get over my own pride and risk it, who knows maybe some investor is looking to help someone like me out just to do it right? Well, one can hope but I’m still on the fence about the whole thing.

What do you think? Do you think I am being selfish/foolish in trying to do this or should I give it a shot to get the first steps to Stubborn Bull Brewing Co. off the ground?

Dogfish Head Namaste Review

Yesterday I knew I was going to be on my own for a little while after A Bird went to bed. L Bird had plans to go out with her coworkers after work for a few drinks, so I thought that would be a perfect opportunity to sit down and quietly do a beer review.

I had a few things to pick up at Wegmans anyway, so I made my way back to the craft beer section. As I went through the aisles, nothing was really grabbing my attention. Finally I found a couple of bottles of Dogfish Head Namaste tucked away behind some of the new Sam Adams beers. I am not a huge fan of Dogfish Head beers, some of their stuff is pretty good, but most of the time they try to get to fancy with their ingredients/adjuncts that it ends up tasting more of whatever they put in it rather than a crisp, cold, delicious beer that it is supposed to be. I read the label and from the description it looks like Namaste is pretty much a standard White Ale, meaning that it is a wheat beer with orange and coriander. They did spice it up a little and threw in some lemongrass. Well, it looked good enough to give it a shot, so on with the review:

Appearance: This beer poured a pale straw color and was very cloudy. The head was bright white with tightly packed small bubbles and it continues to effervesce long after being poured.

Aroma: It smelled like everything on the label. It smelled of coriander, and a mix of citrus aromas. Oranges were prominent but there was also some lemon peel notes. In the background the hops were present but in very low levels.

Taste: It was a very light and sweet with some light orange flavor present. There were some malty notes in the middle and the beer rounded out with some mild bitterness in the finish. It tasted like a much higher end Blue Moon.

Overall, this was a very good beer. It was light enough to enjoy anytime, and the fruit wasn’t overpowering. I would definitely buy this beer again if I was looking for something that was pretty mellow.

Keep ‘em tippin’ !!

Brewing Again………Finally

Well, it has been forever since I last brewed anything. The last thing I brewed was a cream ale that was a Christmas present for L Bird’s uncle. I haven’t heard much back about it, but I’m sure it will get drank. But in the meantime, I’ve had a couple of people ask me if I had any beer ready or to let them know when it was read because they would like to take some to a weekly gathering.

So because tax time has arrived and I have a little more scratch thanks to my refund, I decided I would jump back into brewing. I ordered ingredients for two beers. I decided I would brew one long term beer and one quick to bottle beer. So I am brewing Ol’ Naps Maibock again, because it was such a hit. A lot of people said it has been my best beer. It was quite delicious but required extreme patience as it lagers for 8 weeks in the cellar. I will brew that first and getting going because it takes so long. Then once that has a couple of days of headstart, I will brew my standard Porter.

Hopefully by this plan, I will have Porter ready by mid-march and the Maibock should be ready by my birthday and in time for summer. Hopefully my Fed-Ex package of ingredient goodness will arrive this morning and I’ll be brewing by tonight.

Stay posted for brewing updates, but until then keep ‘em tippin’

Bottling Up Some Christmas Cheer…

Last night I had to get down to bottling the Cream Ale I brewed as a Christmas gift for someone. It had been fermenting for two weeks and had finally dropped all of the yeast and settled nicely.

I’m not sure how clearly you can see it in the video, but the beer was brilliantly clear and had a nice layer of sediment finely packed on the bottom of the carboy. I racked it to the bottling bucket, added some priming sugar to let the yeast finish up its fermentation in the bottle and nicely carbonate the beer, and then I got to bottling with help from my trusty capper elf A Bird.

This beer smelled so good while I was bottling it, that I’m going to brew a batch for myself now. Until then keep ‘em tippin’!!

Genesee Heritage Pack

So most of the time as I cruise the beer section at Wegmans I always look for craft beer. but every once in awhile I like to buy mass produced/large brewery beer. Today I ran across Genesee’s Heritage Collection bottled in the old fashioned stubby bottles. I just couldn’t pass them up.

As far as mass produced beer from large commercial breweries from the US I like Genesee the best and then probably Old Milwaukee. I detest Budweiser products, the rice adjuncts that they use equal headache in a bottle for me, then Coors tends to taste like piss water to me, so if I’m buying domestic that is not craft I’ll normally reach for Genesee.

Plus I always feel good buying Genesee because I am supporting the local economy, because it is brewed right in Rochester, which is a short hop from our house.

This Heritage Collection has the following great slogan:

“Old Fashioned Beer & Ale Goodness”

Now c’mon that is just awesome. So tonight I will polish off a couple of stubbies and enjoy some local beer.

Just look at that itty bitty bottle, it’s so cute. It’s just begging me to drink it. Well, I hate to see anyone beg, so here we go…

Keep ‘em tippin"’

Christmas Gift Beer…

I’m always proud when people ask me if I can brew some beer for them to give as a present. It has happened every year for about three years. I have brewed beer for a co-worker’s husband’s Christmas gift, and her brother’s birthday, and now I have been asked if I can brew up another Christmas gift beer for an Aunt.

Now I know I am short on time to brew a beer and have it bottle ready for Christmas, but I am up to the challenge. So I asked a few simple questions. First, light or dark? and second what style of beer? My answers were “light” and “we normally drink Coors Light”. I know, I know Coors, don’t judge there is routinely Old Milwaukee in my fridge for L Bird and I in a pinch.

So with those guidelines I set about looking for something that was light and fairly neutral and the final guideline was that the ingredients needed to be in supply at the local homebrew store. I finally settled on a nice “lawnmower beer” of Cream Ale. Now don’t panic, this is a homebrewed cream ale so it won’t taste anything like the delicious but always dangerous Genny Cream Ale.

Here is the simplified recipe, adapted from Northern Brewer’s Cream Ale Kit.:

3 lbs of Extra Pale Dry Malt Extract

3.3 lbs of Munton’s Extra Light Malt Syrup

3/4 lbs of Honey Malt (crushed)

1/4 lb of Belgian Biscuit Malt (crushed)

1 1/2 oz Colombus Hops (Pellets)

Safale US-05 Yeast

Steep the Honey and Biscuit malts at 170 degrees for 20 minutes. Remove the grains, bring to a boil. Once the wort is rolling at the dry malt extract, malt syrup and 1 oz of hops. Boil for 50 minutes, then add 1/2 oz of Colombus hops. Boil wort for 10 more minutes, remove from heat and chill wort. Transfer the wort to the fermenter vessel, pitch yeast and top up with water to 5 1/2 gallons. Ferment to dryness.

So that’s what am I am doing while I am typing this, but I thought I would share this.

Yeah, do you see that? I see a smiling face on a misshapen head. I’m not sure if I’m creeped out or if it is that old Benjamin Franklin saying “Beer is proof God wants us to be happy.” and it’s a happy face. Or who knows as long as we are talking religion if I look again it could be a dove with the olive branch below it. Ah hell, maybe its just a sign this is going to be one great beer.

Yeah, that’s what I’m going with. Well I’m off for my final hops addition, so until then keep ‘em tippin’!