Rye Wheat Stout

On March 28, I changed up an Oatmeal Stout recipe to see how it would taste with flaked rye instead of oatmeal, and using 1/2 wheat DME.
Here is the recipe, for a 5 gallon extract:
3 lb. light DME
3 lb. wheat DME
3/4 lb. roasted barley
1/4 lb. Crystal 60
1/4 lb. Caramunich
1/4 lb. Chocolate Malt
1/2 lb. rye flakes
1 oz. Northern Brewer @ 60
1 oz. Fuggle @ 30
1 oz. Cascade @ 5
Yeast: Piggy-backed Cal 001 from Vernal Black IPA.

Above: making sense of my brewing notes.

Timeline:
10:30ish- attempted to weigh grains and calculate the grams to ounces despite the after-effects of the wine tasting show I went to last night, where I tasted approx. 40 different wines, 5 beers and a little gin and lemon cello. Followed by a couple bottles of wine (shared w/ others).
Not a good time to do math. Made a few mistakes that were fixed. After 3 cups of coffee, functioning much better and ready to brew....
10:55 am- grains & water in kettle on high heat.
11:20 am- temp. at 155, took off heat.
12:20 pm- checked temp, 152. Hooray- perfect! Then calobrated with new scientific thermometer... it was actually about 10 degrees off. Sad.
Turned burner back on, scooped out and strained grains.
Composted grains. This would have been excellent for spent grain bread, but I wasn't in the bread-baking mood.
1:00 added DME to wort, temp around 180.
1:30 boil! Added NB Hops.
2:00- added Fuggle Hops. From 2007. Looking more brown than green.
2:15- added Irish Moss & Yeast Nutrient. Sanitized the wort chiller.
2:25- added Cascade Hops. (All hops are leaf, not pellet. I'm anti-pellet.)
2:30- started wort chillin'.
3:00- wort chill temp. at 98. Poured wort into carboy through a strainer, added filtered water. Shook it. Temp: about 77. Will add yeast when I rack IPA tonight.
3:30- cleaning up. It didn't boil over, but the stove top is still covered in brown sticky stuff.
OG: 1.058

Vernal Black IPA

When we went to Oregon last month, Black IPA was the new hot thing for all the west coast breweries! So I decided to give it a try.
We found a Black IPA in Minneapolis after our Oregon trip, but it was falsely labeled- it was dark and roasty and not hoppy at all. As a knowledgeable traveler, I felt obliged to present my friends and fellow homebrew club members with what I believe is a true west-coast Black IPA.
Northern Brewer has a Black IPA kit for sale, so I looked at their recipe and combined it with one of mine, making a few substitutions to what I had at home.
Here is the recipe (extract, 5 gallons)
6 lbs. light DME
1 lb. crystal 60
2 oz. Roasted Barley
4 oz. Black Malt
1 oz. Zeus @ 60
1 oz. Simcoe @ 30
1 oz. Centennial @ 15
1 oz. Cascade @ 5
1 oz. Simcoe @ 0
1 oz. Simcoe (I'm pretty sure) to dry hop.
Yeast- white labs california 001





The hops were pretty much based on Northern Brewer's hop schedule, with one or two substitutions. The Northern Brewer recipe called for chocolate malt instead of roasted barley and black malt. I wanted to do the black malt for sure, with a hint of roastiness, so I based my grains off my "Hoppin' Sweet Color" ale which calls for roasted barley.
This was brewed on the vernal equinox, hence the name, and the OG was 1.057. The taste seemed right on, so I'm excited for the end result!

Update: This brew was racked to the secondary and dry hopped (I'm pretty sure with Simcoe, although I failed to write it down) on 3/28. We kegged it on 4/29 at a final gravity of 1014. The color was too brown and the flavor was too roasty. It's not bad, it just doesn't taste like a black IPA should. I will definitely be altering the recipe for attempt #2, and I'm open to suggestions!

Intro and Explanation

I’m a flexitarian. I didn’t learn that word until recently, but I feel it describes me. I have had a lot of vegetarian and vegan friends, but I don’t feel I could ever be either. And I definitely couldn’t be a raw foodist!
I like to mix my raw food, vegan and vegetarian food with some good local meat and call it a meal. I refuse to eat meat or milk from animals that have lived inhumanely with hormones injected into them. I like my meat to come from those happy little local farms we all picture in our minds- except I really do get meat from those farmers directly, and I’ve had to learn how to re-make recipes using meat on the bone rather than the perfectly de-skinned and de-boned meat you get at the store. The meat I buy might be more expensive, but it becomes affordable when you don’t put it in every meal.
This blog isn’t all about meat, though. Or even about all the vegetarian meals we create. It’s about cooking experiences, eating experiences, and drinking experiences. (Not drunken experiences, that would be a whole ‘nother blog…. these drinking experiences would be from drinking our homemade beer, wine, mead, kahlua, and other crazy concoctions).
I’m going to start this blog by working my way through a book my husband got me for the holidays: “All Cakes Considered” by Melissa Gray. I felt like I knew how to make cakes, but when glancing through this book (which you are supposed to tackle from beginning to end, one cake at a time, rather than skipping around like you would in a normal cookbook) I realized I had only really made one cake, many many times: My husband’s favorite carrot cake.
Almost ten years ago, I started experimenting with substituting unsweetened applesauce for butter and oil in cakes, and that carrot cake recipe was one of my success stories. I held a taste-test contest at my husband’s college graduation party in 2004, where I had one applesauce cake and one oil cake (the recipe called for 1 ½ CUPS OF OIL!) I had the guests try a little from each cake and tell me which one was better- and the result was overwhelmingly the applesauce cake! They were happy to find out that the better tasting cake was also much, much healthier. But it isn’t a health food- it still contains a shitload of sugar.
So here comes my on-going attempts to make a whole bunch of cake.