Octoberfest

10/10/03 - Octoberfest. Well, the Octoberfest is now upon us and that means another chance to decoct. We've pretty much managed to dial in this procedure here (if Dan would only hit those conversion temps!) It's amazing how much color and character comes from even a single decoction, which is what we used this time. With a mixture of Belgian Aromatic and Munich malts making up 30% of the grist, I would expect a gold to copper color, but we ended up with deep orange to amber hues. Nice malty sweetness in the nose which carries over into the flavor quite well. At 28 IBU's there's a nice hop bite from the Northern Brewer's which is perhaps a tad out of style, but dern it, I love hop buds! The beer lingers with a nice blend of hops and malt which is smooth but not cloying.

On a separate note we've finally installed our liquid nitrogen dropper to purge the bottles before filling. This should give us much better shelf life on all our beers, and more confidence in laying down the Big Beers for aging. I'm not sure if the Octoberfest is really suited for this, but as things start cooling off here in New England we'll be rolling out the big boys soon! Cheers!

Malt:
Pilsner Malt
Belgian Aromatic
20L Munich

Hops:
IBU - 28
Northern Brewer Bittering
Northern Brewer - Flavoring

Pumpkin Ale - The First Batch

9/16/03 - Pumpkin Ale. After many years of success of the Portsmouth Brewery's Pumpkin Ale, as well as Kevin Love's petulant insistance that we corner the market, we decided to capitalize and brew our own version of this squash beer. I know what you're thinking: squash!?, in a beer, are you kidding? But, alas, no, I am not kidding. In fact, it turns out the elder Americans would use pumpkin as a starch substitute when grain stores were low. The idea of brewing a traditional New England pompion beer intrigued me and I proposed buying the Champion Pumpkin of New Hampshire and brewing a single batch with this Mother of All Gourds. (Visualize the cover to Eat A Peach. Now imagine an 800 lbs pumpkin being trucked on over to the brewery. Brilliant.) However the limitations of being a production facility require certain practical restraints and so we went with pumpkin puree instead of fresh pumpkin.

The one characteristic I wanted clearly defined was that underneath the pumpkin and spice flavors was truly an interesting beer in its own right. I've had too many spiced and fruit beers that are overdone and enter the realm of soda pop, causing you to have one but not another, let alone several. And let's face it, I gotta sell beer here. So we started with a base beer that is orange in color and fairly hoppy. We knew the spices would need some sweetness for balance so we used a mixture of crystal and carastan malts. To this we added pumpkin pie spices at the end of the boil. We actually found that adding pumpkin into the fermentor at the end of primary gave us the most interesting pumpkin flavor, and so that's when we add the puree. We've gotten a great response to the beer which I think is well desreved. The nose is full of spice, mostly cinnamon, with hints of the Liberty hops. The flavor is full, with a nice bitterness, but definitely balanced by the malt. It lingers off into a nice dry spicy, hoppy finish that stays with you but is never overbearing.

Malt:
Pilsner Malt
Light Carastan
Light Crystal 60 °L

OG 14°P
TG 3.0°P

Hops:
IBU - 35
Cascade Bittering
Cascade Flavoring
Liberty Aroma

Spices
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Clove

Big A IPA - 2003 Edition

6/23/03 - Big A IPA. The Killer Keilbasa has unleashed another fine IPA on us this summer. Nice job, Stash. This beer marks the first full cycle of Big Beers that I've overseen during my tenure here at Smuttynose. Luckily we were able to sample the whole lineup at The Barley Pub, in Dover, NH, thanks to Mr. Scott Mason and staff. I hope ya'll managed to head over there. For the most part I thought the beers have stood up fairly well. I definitely have some changes in mind, but nothing too drastic. As always we welcome your comments, critiques, encouragments, rants, raves, and inebriated babblings.

For this years Big A, Stash ventured away from the European hopping regime of last year and went with a definite West Coast style Imperial IPA. The decission was based on finding a hop combination to use for our upcoming 12-ounce release IPA, due out next spring! The first batch used Cascade, Centennial, and Amarillo, in that order, for bittering, flavor, and aroma. Another difference from last year is we decided to add the flavoring additions is equal amounts every 5 minutes over the last 30 minutes of the boil. And, let's face it friends, it warms a brewer's heart to see that many hops disappear into the kettle. We kept the rest of the beer the same as last year in terms of malt bill, starting gravity, mash temperature, et al. After fermentation we transferred the beer onto about 10 lbs of Amarillo for a dry hop addition. Definitely not enough, but that's as much as we could stuff into our hop bag. The beer has a nice orangy color with a slight haze. The aroma is citrusy with a hint of grapefruit. The flavor is all hops, resinous and dry with just a touch of malt sweetness holding it all together.

Malt:
2 Row Pale Malt
60° L Caramel

OG 18°P
TG 3.5°P

Hops:
IBU - 80
Cascade Bittering
Centennial Flavoring
Amarillo Aroma & dry-hop

Maibock

5/8/03 - Maibock. Ah, May (or mid-May), time for the Maibock, or as I like to refer to it, The Decoction Redemption. If you peer back into the foggy mists of last fall, you may or may not remember our last attempt at mashing in the Teutonic method: the Octoberfest. We couldn't get a good temperature mix after the first decoction, made some bad choices to compensate, and, dern it, the whole thing ended up goin' awry.

The Maibock went a whole lot smoother, in fact we were able to do a double decoction (man, that's cool). We mashed in around 125°F, with the first decoction raising it up into the mid-140's and the second bringing the whole thing to the high 150's. It's always interesting to hear people talk about highly modified malts and that decoctions are unneccesary, but, considering our malt bill was a mixture of Pale and Munich, the huge malt nose and nice color we ended up with will really have to make me think otherwise.

Overall I'm really pleased with this product. Nice orangy color, malty nose, sweet without being cloyingly so, and a nice bitterness that's perhaps a tad too much, but certainly not unpleasant. I look forward to perfecting our lager techniques with the Octoberfest next fall, but for now, enjoy. (back to top of page)

Malt:
2 Row Pale Malt
Crisp Pale Ale Malt
Munich Malt

OG 17.8°P
TG 3.8°P

Hops:
IBU - 35
Liberty Bittering
Liberty Whirlpool

Barleywine

2/18/03 - Barleywine. Ya gotta love brewing at a time and place in beer history when you can say, "Man, those 80 IBU's just weren't enough!" I'll take all the blame - on the first batch of the Barleywine I wimped out. However, for the second batch we did bump the hopping up to a respectable Big Beer level of 100 IBU's. The grain bill (except for the 2-row pale malt) was all done with Belgian specialty malts. We recently switched to Dingeman's for our Belgian malts and they really seemed to shine in this beer.

Wanting to hit a starting gravity of 25°P or higher we took steps to ensure the beer would finish dry enough to avoid being over satiating. This was achieved both by mash temperature profile and adding 200 lbs of brown sugar into the boil. We mashed in at 148 °F and rested for 20 minutes and then raised the temp to 158 °F and again rested for 20 minutes. The other things we changed from a regular brew were a quick sparge of only 100 gallons and extending the boil to 2.5 hours.

Both batches began around 26°P (our more accurate hydrometers only go up to 25.) and finished around 5 °P. At over 10% alcohol this beer is a pleasure to drink on the cold snowy days of winter. The nose is ripe with alcohol, raisins, and a hint of port. The dry hop character doesn't come through as well as we'd like, but dern it, we're working on solutions. The body is sweet as you'd expect but the hopping does add a nice citrusy touch to the flavor profile. The tail is where the hopping comes through the best with a nice dry finish. This beer is certainly young right now but in a few months should start to reveal itself as a fine product. (back to top of page)

Malt:
2-Row Pale Malt
Pale Ale Malt
Caramunich
Aromatic
Special B.
Brown Sugar

OG 26° P
TG 5.0° P

Hops:
Magnum Bittering
Magnum Flavoring
Cascade Flavoring
Amarillo Dryhop

Imperial Stout

12/17/02 - Imperial Stout. Oh, man, the name alone gets me salivating. The big daddy, the high muckity-muck of dark beers. Visions of how brewers get their skewed views from too many late nights dipping tasters and testers into cauldrons of this black addiction. Lucky for me making these beers isn't nearly as difficult as waking up after drinking a few. I had the pleasure of working with Chris Sheehan at The Twenty Tank where he always made awe inspiring stouts (still does at Chelsea Brewing in NY.) His thoughts were to really build up the base of the beer with tons of character malts before the addition of your roasted grains. I always figure a stout can't be too dark so load up on those caramel malts. All that sweetness needs to be balanced with a healty portion of bittering hops, we went with 75 IBU's. The most interesting part of this recipe was the use of Magnum hops for our bittering addition. This was my first time using them and at 14.8% AA and, or so I'm told, low cohumulone levels I was excited to check 'em out.

The brewing was fairly straight forward. We added a small percentage of oats directly to the mash and rested at 152°F. The lauter for this took an extremely long time (partly due to the oats but we've been having grain issues of late.) I ditched the oats in the second batch and it'll be interesting to taste the difference. Hop additions were made at the beginning of the boil, ten minutes before the end of the boil, and at the whirlpool. We fermented at a cool 64°F and allowed it a good month of fermentation / aging time.

The beer came out tasting great. The nose has a nice balance of chocolate and coffee with hints of sweetness / alcohol underneath. The body is big and velvety with the hopping present as an underlying spiciness. It tails off into chocolate milk shake. I'll try and dry out the second batch, but right now everyone here seems happy with the results.

As a side bar, we've opened up some bottles of our Big A IPA recently and, closing in on six months old, they've been tasting awesome. The huge hop and alcohol flavors have rounded off and a real pleasant orange character is coming through. Definitely a departure from the West Coast style of IPA's, which is what we were shooting for. If you were lucky or smart enough to have some aging try one out soon. Cheers!. (back to top of page)

Malt:
2 Row Pale
10° L Munich
120° L Crystal
17° L Carastan
Chocolate Malt
Roasted Barley

OG 20° P
TG 6.1° P

Hops:
Magnum -  Bittering
Cascade - Flavoring
Cascade -  Flavoring
Fuggle - Aroma

Scotch Ale

10/28/02 - We're bottling our Scotch Ale today and I'm real pleased not only with how it turned out, but with brewing a beer associated with a country that developed a Wee Heavy. I honestly don't have a lot of experience with this style of beer, but I've always wanted to brew a smoked beer and figured this was my chance. When I worked at the Twenty Tank Brewery in San Francisco, we brewed a smoked porter that tasted like a barbecue gone horribly wrong, so I shied away from using peat smoked malt in favor of a German hardwood rauch malt. At 1% of the malt bill this added a real subtle smoky / whiskey character, especially in the nose, which nicely accentuates the 7% alcohol.

The flavor is malty and sweet with a hint of root beer which then tails into a lingering smokiness. The color is deep amber, almost brown, which I lightened up in the second batch, now fermenting. The only other difference between the two batches is the addition of the chocolate malt into the lauter tub during the sparge instead of in the mash. The goal of this was to add the color of this malt without the astringency.

Overall the brewing of this beer was pretty straight forward. We mashed in at 154°F to keep some residual sweetness in the beer (without having to resort to creative means like, say, adding Nutra Sweet®) The hopping was done in a single addition of Willamette hops at the beginning of the boil. We fermented at 65°F to keep the ester and alcohol character low. I'm proud to offer it to ya'll and hope you find it pleasurable. (back to top of page)

Malt:
2 Row Pilsner
10° L Munich
35° L Carastan
Chocolate Malt
Smoked Malt

OG 18° P
TG 3.9° P

Hops:
Willamette Bittering
Tettnanger Aroma

Octoberfest

9/9/02 - Octoberfest- First of all I'd like to apologize about not updating the site with information on the final two batches of our IPA. We were just flat out trying to keep up with demand this summer (thank you kind Smutty drinkers!) The changes were subtle and had to do with hopping ratios and fermentation temperatures. If you have questions please feel free to email me.


And so we move forward to our next selection in the Big Beer Series, the Smuttynose Octoberfest. Last fall we had made some modifications to our brewhouse and I noticed that we'd now be able to perform decoction mashes. Having never played on a system that could do this, I was itching to boil some grain. Not quite sure how it would turn out we decided to go for it and see what would happen. (We just ain't scared of these things here at the 'nose.) Our grist was simple and consisted of 55% pale malt and 45% Munich malt. I was hoping to do a double decoction but once we transferred the boiled grain our mixed temperature was a tad high (in some spots the thermometer was reading 180°F!)


We proceeded to lauter the mash instead of doing a second decoction and began the boil at around 14°P. I was looking for a starting gravity of 16°P and extended the boil to achieve this. The thought was to add some caramelization to the character of the beer without adding crystal malt (and its sometimes cloying sweetness).


The hopping was bumped up from my original plan of 28 IBU's to the mid 30's, thinking that we may not have achieved full conversion during the decoction and would end up with a lot of residual sweetness. We boiled with 100% Northern Brewer for the full boil and added 11 lbs of Tetenanger ten minutes before the whirlpool.


We ended up pitching our ale yeast, having run out of the lager strain. We still fermented at 55°F and were able to drop right on down to 3.4°P (go Chico!) I'd definitely like to give this recipe another shot and do the double decoction as well as ferment with the lager yeast, but we still ended up with a real nice beer. The color is a bright orange with a big malty nose touched with a hint of alcohol. There's some toffee in the body and that big hop character finishing it out. Enjoy!

Malt:
2 Row Pilsner
10° L Munich

OG 15.7° P
TG 3.4° P

Hops:
Northern Brewer Bittering
Tettnanger Aroma