Yesterday’s post brought an absolutely unexpected surprise, a package emblazoned with the line, "You may have already won!". Of course I tore into it immediately and found that I had in fact won The Great Grand E2 Cookie Lotto. Crunchy chocolate chip oatmeal walnut cookies courtesy of qousqous! And they arrived the day before my two-year Noder Anniversary! Somehow it all contributes to the spirit of the project I had set aside this special day for . . .
Irregular Zymurgy is pleased to present Sneffelicious Dark Ale - batch number 02-7
Rumor has it that our very own chef d’cuisine used to be quite the homebrewer. After a few conversations with him on some of my previous brews, we decided to attempt
the First Ever E2 Intercontinental Brewing Happenstance
You can be a part of this too!
Read the Node by Mad Dog Fargo
Brew the Ale with sneff and ouro
Drink the Resultant Goodness
This morning, as on every episode, we take our five gallon stockpot and set
- 2½ gal filtered water to boil with
- 1 tsp baking soda.
In a separate medium-sized pot, we dump
- ¾ lb crystal 60L malt,
- 1/4 lb chocolate malt, and
- 1/4 lb black patent malt into
- ½ gal filtered water
and bring them to about 180 deg F. Hold this temperature for about 30-45 minutes. What we are doing is pretending to mash the malted barley ourselves by soaking the crushed malt to bring out the starches and the enzymes that the germination produces that would convert that starch to sugar. Once the larger pot is at a boil, strain the contents of the smaller pot into the larger. Sparge with about a pint of water. Add to the large pot,
- ½ cup molasses and
- 5¾ lbs amber malt extract,
stirring all the while so that it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pot. After the pot returns to boiling and has been allowed to boil about 20 minutes, we add
- 2 oz Fuggles hops.
After 30 minutes of boiling to let those hops flavor the wort, we turn off the stove and throw in
- 1 oz Cascade hops
to steep 15 minutes to add aroma. We strain out the hops, pouring the wort over ice to speed its cooling. In a couple of hours we decant the bucket of wort into a carboy and pitch in Wyeast strain #1024 “London Ale”.
Update Tue Sept 10 2002
Sometimes the yeast just doesn’t take. The darker ales sometimes take longer to begin to ferment, but it’s been 48 hours and there is no action in the carboy, neither flocculation on the surface of the wort nor any carbon dioxide venting off through the air valve. I fear that the wort was perhaps too warm when I pitched the yeast and the high temperature killed some or all of it. This has happened to me once before. I keep a packet of champagne yeast on hand against this very situation. The 5g of dry yeast go into a couple of mils of water (suddenly we’re in metric!) and after 5 minutes it gets poured into the wort. If this doesn’t kick off fermentation, the whole five gallons will have to get boiled again to kill anything that might have grown in it, and then more hops to replace the aromas that would get changed by the boiling. I hope it doesn’t come to that.
Update Mon Sept 16 2002
The ale seems done with its fermentation. I decant it into three bottles and a keg. The bottles are for tasting the ale as it conditions. The keg is going to Portland.
Update Sat Oct 12 2002
Noders are thirsty following teh nodeslam. This keg doesn't stand a chance of seeing the morrow.