Terrible Lizard Brewing: Honey Amber & 5 Day Cider

Good Afternoon Ladies & Gentlemen,

Well, we had a busy little Saturday with regards to making alcoholic beverages! And some of it was pretty impromptu too!!! Hehe... tutu...

Winter Warmer Tasting

Anyway, I guess it would be to start with the tasting of our Winter Warmer. Now, as you remember, we didn't do a particular good sparge with this batch, being one of our first with the mash tun... but we also didn't dilute it with water towards the end fearing that it would produce a pretty weak ass little beer when it's supposed to be towards the stronger end... and it's a Winter Warmer, so it's supposed to be a heartier beer... so we just made less of it (3 gallons as opposed to 5 gallons).

We tried our first bottle Friday night and... wow... it's REALLY f**king good... and seems pretty f**king strong too. Unfortunately we didn't take the gravities with this one but... it's probably 8% at least. It's almost like a barleywine flavor, but obviously a good hearty Christmas time kind of beer. I'm REALLY impressed with it... and now just a little sad that we only have 3 gallons of it... but oh well, the lessons from that sparge will serve us well in the future. Here are some pictures of it... though I'll admit, I've probably got to get a better way to photograph the beer. It's very... in the moment, fluorescent lights of the kitchen or using a lamp in the bedroom, in a glass that has a little streaking going on that REALLY shows with a flash but... yeah, here you go... you get the idea...

Honey Amber Ale

Saturday, we started our first beer that'll be part of a competition in about two months - The Honey Amber Ale! This recipe is original in that I looked at a bunch of amber ale recipes (including our pumpkin ale back in September) and did a little research on incorporating honey to give it a little distinctive flavor... and this was what we came up with. Yes, it's a malt extract recipe which... is a little lame, I'll admit... but we figure that it'll be good experience to see how such a recipe goes in competitions, get some feedback from professional judges, and then to make it all grain, it's really just a conversion of the amount of extract to the amount of grains & then sparging. We're still novice when it comes to that, but a few months down the road we'll have some good experience (and possible better equipment for it) so that's the goal... and getting a medal or ribbon or whatever would be pretty f**king sweet too. Anyway, we start with getting the proper ingredients from our local homebrew supply shops...

Then we teabag the specialty grains to release some desired flavors... but most the coloring that we're going for. Along with the Amber malt extract, we used some Crystal 60 grains, which is right in the middle of the coloring spectrum for grains, so it should give a good amber brown that with a few additives & proper procedures, should produce a beautiful color with the honey added as well. Anyway, check out how in only a few minutes the specialty grains color the water that we're going to turn into wort...

Then we add the malt extract & honey and bring the wort back up to a boil...

Then we add the hops and everything else strategically during the boil. During this first part, I had to make an ice run so I didn't get a lot of pictures... but basically we only added half of the malt extract before the boil began, added some hops at the beginning of the boil, and then added more along with the rest of malt extract towards the end of the boil...

This is also our first time using a Whirfloc tablet. These tablets are added when there's about ten minutes left in the boil and acts as a way of pulling some of the impurities, various husks and materials from the grains, dead yeasts, and other things out of the wort before & during fermenting... and takes them to the bottom of the fermentor so that it's just cleared out during the transferring to secondary & bottling... or makes it easier to filter them out before bottling a beautiful crystal clear beer. We haven't used anything like this before and it has shown with our previous beers where people are like "Is it supposed to be cloudy?" Well, since we're going to enter this in a competition, there's no time like the present to start using it & seeing how it works. I'm excited about it... but we'll see how it goes. It already appears to be getting a lot of extra things out of there, especially given that this is a malt extract recipe and there was already this much stuff in the bottle when we were doing the initial transfer...

Oh... and our first time using liquid yeast... California Ale

Also, while the wort was chilling, we did a quick transfer of our Oktoberfest lager from the primary fermentor to the secondary fermenter, thus freeing the primary for our Honey Amber...

5 Day Cider

While checking a few things on the web, Dizzy came across a recipe for 5 Day Cider that sounded pretty intriguing... it was a 4 gallon recipe... and we had an empty 5 gallon carboy, so yeah... we headed over to find ingredients, mainly 4 gallons on unfiltered apple juice. Yes, if you go to a grocery store like Safeway, you'll basically pay about $40 and buy them out of it... but if this turns out well, probably well worth it as the drinks would come to about a dollar a bottle. Here's what 4 gallons of unfiltered apple juice looks like in it's semi-natural state...