Late, Ill-Advised Brewday before Euro-Vacay Baybay

This brewday was a bit ill-advised if I don't say so myself! I was planning on the brewery/homebrew shop down the street from me, Black Sands, to re-open their homebrew shop back up after some cool sounding renovations for this brew but they still weren't open. So I sat around my house until about 3PM when I finally decided "I really want to get one more brew in" to go to SF Brewcraft.

Of course tomorrow (9/17) I leave for Europe for 3 weeks! The first two weeks with my friends are to Barcelona, Munich (for Oktoberfest!), and Prague. Then I'm meeting up with my girlfriend in Madrid for a weekend followed by some work in Cambridge, England for a week or so, and finally London with Linds for one last weekend! I originally brewed a saison with the Mad Fermentationist blend as my "last brew" so that I could keg it once I got back from Europe at which point it'd be sitting for a solid month.. but on thinking about it, I decided I'd prefer to let that batch sit longer and I'd rather bottle it. I want to see how that beer changes over time in bottles and I love drinking saison from bottles. Having beer on keg is one experience and having an aged beer from bottles in another experience, both of which I enjoy. I'm also running out of homebrew in bottles; I have just a few bottles left of everything so it would be nice to get another 20+ bottles to sit around. The only logical recourse was that I had to brew another beer!

I decided on a dunkelweiss. I've always wanted to brew one of these; I love the banana flavors of hefeweizens and the dark, nutty flavors of Munich malt in dunkels always makes me think of delicious banana bread with chocolate chips.

I spent the morning investigating how to make a dunkel with a 22oz bottle of a beer I bottled just over a month ago, a saison made with White Labs Brett Brux. Unfortunately I don't have notes on the primary fermentor, I know it was a Gigayeast saison. I believe it's GY027, although it could have been one of the blends. All I know is that the original beer was HEAVY with THP. 

It aged for 3-4 months with the Brett in a secondary fermentor (I don't have exact notes unfortunately) and then aged in bottles for a month (so far). I had one 12oz bottle after two weeks which was very good; the THP was nearly gone and it had a young, fruity sort of Brett taste. This bottle had a much more pronounced hay, rustic flavor. No real leather/extreme funk, but if this is how the beer is going I'm happy! As per my previous decision on rating system, I would rate this beer: pilot for full size batch. If I had a brewery this would be a beer I would totally put on sale once I got all the variables right. However it is totally a beer I enjoy; I'll proudly share this with my friends and I'm looking forward to seeing how it changes and how I can improve it for a subsequent attempt. I just may not want to serve this as is to paying customers without refining it just a little more.

Back to the dunkel, I decided to keep it simple as I always like to do; I went with a roughly 2/3 to 1/3 split between wheat and Munich malt. Then I added some specialty malts to get the color where I wanted it in Brewtoad.



Grain
7lbs Wheat
4lbs Munich
0.5lbs CaraMunich
0.25lbs Special B
0.125lbs Carafa II

Hops
1oz Mittelfruh @ 60
0.25oz Hallertau @ 60
0.75oz Hallertau @ 10

Yeast
White Labs 320 American Hef Yeast

I would have preferred some other yeast, but this was all SF Brewcraft had.

Expected OG (@ 65% eff): 1.053
Actual OG: 1.047
Expected IBU: 21

The other thing of note is that I didn't have my normal grain bag for brewing. Instead I went with 4 muslin bags for 3lbs each of grain which turned out to be a HUGE pain. I'm never doing that again. Ripped bags and spilled grain EVERYWHERE.

I mashed in with 4.5 gallons of SF tap water at 167 degrees F for an expected mash temp of 155. I did not check the temperature. I got about 2.75 gallons of first runnings. I sparged with 4 gallons of warm to hot tap water. I ran off another 4 gallons for about 6.75 gallons in the boil. The boil was pretty uneventful, but I felt like I started with less than I did last time and my boil wasn't as vigorous.

I finally knocked out into my new Fermonster with a ported spigot that I got from MoreBeer in a flash deal for $28 each (I picked up two). I bought it yesterday; luckily they're just down the bay so it was delivered before I even finally decided to brew!


After I finished up with both the brew, my laundry, and packing, I decided to relax with The Libertine's Heaven is Expensive. Their description:

"A blend of some of our favorite golden and amber barrels that have been aged from three months to three years in our cellar. A truly one of a kind blend, an extremely complex amber wild with notes of plum, pear, and citrus mixed with spice notes from the rye malt used in the base"



And it is delicious! I'm a huge fan of The Libertine. I decided to join their bottle club this year after being an "Ambassador of Sour" for the Rare Barrel for the past year which was very rewarding indeed. I love passing by SLO where I went to college and love their beers; they're all coolshipped, wild, and barrel fermented with the terroir of the central coast. I think at times their beers all have almost the same taste, but that doesn't bother me because their sour and dry farmhouse style is just what I love.


Bonus: I brought the chalk board from my old apartment into my storage space!

Now it's to get some sleep before a long day of traveling ahead! I'm looking forward to drinking a ton of good beer, seeing some new sights, and taking some well-deserved time off.

Prost and L'Chaim!

Timeline 

9/16/2017: Brewed
10/10/2017: Got back from Europe, saw a pellicle because the airlock ran dry :( Didn't taste bad so I pitched BB Funk Weapon #3
11/9/2017: Not much different. Stop checking so often!
12/6/2017: Split this batch half into a keg, half into a carboy.
1/2/2018: Added dregs from Drie Fonteinen Armand & Gaston Cuvee into the carboy. That's going to be the soured half which will be bottled one day, the other half is going to be straight and will sit in the keg for a while.
1/29/2018: Purged the headspace from the kegged portion a few times by putting 3 PSI into the keg until I stopped hearing the gas hiss as much, burping it, and repeating about 3x. Tasted a small amount from the keg, it's definitely starting to develop some interesting flavors but it's only been 3.5 months. Plan is going to be to bottle in a month or two off the keg and let it develop in bottles. Left the keg sealed under pressure (~5 PSI as before but without burping).