The Chocolate Vanilla Stout came out excellent.  It has good chocolatey notes and a smooth vanilla finish.  The carbonation level is a little higher than a normal stout which is a nice compliment to the subtle sweetness we got out of the malto-dextrin.  I think it is one of our best brews so far.  Definitely a recipe I'm going to keep around.  Right now we have no new brews planned.  With Christmas break coming soon hopefully we will come back with a new recipe to try.

So Homie Gnomie light 2 turned out great.  6% ABV and very little taste.  Our friends are all very happy. 

In more interesting news, Dan and I brewed our Chocolate Vanilla Stout.  We just transfered it to secondary and added the vanilla bean.  It is pretty much ready to bottle whenever we find the time now.  I'm really looking forward to having that one as it gets colder here in Blacksburg.

 Dan and I are attending Virginia Tech's most important class this semester: Brewing Science and technology.  Can't wait to learn more about the process of brewing and hopefully improving our beer.

  

The Pliny game plan.
 

Readying the brewing equipment.

Portioned out all ingredients.

Fuel for the session.

 Mashing in at 150 F with Chinook mash hops for 60 mins.

Collect 8 gallons of wort.

Boil 90 minutes adding hops at times indicated in the recipe.

So my summer internship is finished and I'm back from my trip to Ireland.  That means it's brewing time.  Gnomie 2 is our rather colorless concoction that should have about 6% ABV and almost no taste.  It is made of course, only to appease our friends.  More interestingly we are accumulating ingredients for our fall brewing and drawing up some recipes.  After surviving on nothing but Guinness for a week I decided I wanted to make another kind of stout (than our coffee stout).  I bought several varieties from Kroger and got to work.  I have to say while many were good my hands down favorite was Rouge's chocolate stout.  So I think I'm going to make a chocolate vanilla stout, perhaps with oatmeal. Note that the chocolate and vanilla flavors will be very subtle.  Comments are appreciated.  So get ready for some more frequent posts, recipes, and pictures. 

So we bottled our brew for St. Patty's Day.  It is an all grain rasberry wheat, or, as my dad calls it, girl beer.  It was of course, my roommate Andre's choice.  We tasted it before bottling and it is very good, but not really flavorful, and contains only 3.5% ABV.  The real fun part though, was adding green food coloring.  Coloring a wheat beer is kind of strange because you are essentially dying the haze in the beer green.  It came out looking good though.

 Beer before we added the food coloring:

 

And After:

 

Filling the bottles:

Glamour shots:

 

Dan and I just moved the Chimay clone to secondary.  The Mad elf is still bubbling in secondary after two weeks because of the cherry juice extract.  We also made an all-grain rasberry wheat for our other rommate.  Right now the closet is close to capacity but since there is now an empty carboy, we are brewing again this weekend.  We are making an all-grain clone of Hoegaarden for our friend Ben.  this will be our first wit and I'm looking forward to it.  I'll post a detailed description later.  We also upgraded our Mash Tun.  We went ahead and bought all the brass pieces you could possibly want and outfitted our Mash Tun with a proper spigot and upgraded the manifold to make a rectangle of tubes.  I'll put some pictures of it in the next post.

My roommate Dan and I made a Mad Elf Clone last week.  It was a partial mash recipe but we used our new homemade lauter tun instead of a grain bag because there were over 8 lbs of grain.  The recipe is as follows:

 

4 lbs Pilsner Malt

4 lbs Munich Malt

.5 lb Chocolate Malt

3.5 lbs Amber liquid Malt Extract

2 lbs Amber DME

1 lb Honey

4 oz Cherry Juice Concentrate added to secondary

.75 oz Hallertau Hops (50 mins)

.25 oz Saaz Hops (20 mins)

 

We used High Gravity yeast because it was the only one available at our local homebrew store that could handle the 11% ABV.

We had an OG of 1.084 before adding the cherry juice concentrate to secondary.

 My homemade lauter tun consistes of an 8 gallon cooler with a spigot and a stretch of cpvc pipe that I drilled holes in and wedged into the spigot.  We are upgrading soon.

 

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