Fri Jul 11, 2008 8:04 pm
Before you engineer an electric wand, see my post in the equipment section. You can buy a ranch water bucket heater for $30, all made up for you. I wish I would have known that ahead of time.
Recipes? Hmmmm. Well, I dropped some hints on the frambozen thread. For my smoked porter I smoke my own grain, which I think goes a long way. I usually use alder or mesquite. I used just a little alder smoked grain in my dunkel weizen as well. For my berliner the secret is using the Wyeast Belgian Lambic blend. If it ferments quickly (which it sometimes does in less than four days), you get just a hint of brett along with the sourness. This year's batch took a week, and perhaps that gave it too much and thus it didn't place in the second round. I think my lager recipes aren't anything extraordinary--process is what is important there.
Oh, and I'm one of those people that thinks you should be able to make your own recipes without using ProMash, etc. Sure, I use ProMash, but you should read Designing Great Beers and be able to do it by hand. Of course if you don't want to make recipes, that's fine too. About 90% of the beers I make are from my own recipes. The other 10% are recipes that I find intriguing or just worth trying. I made Charlie's variation on 1554, with a few tweaks of my own; and I regularly make his BYOB. Oh, and there's another book plug, Microbrewed Adventures.
-Eric
Aging: Gotlandsdrickå, Baltic Porter in Bourbon barrel, Olde Ale #2 in whiskey barrel
On Draft: Nothing.
Building a walk-in cooler right now.
