Brewing the Spiced Christmas Ale

Yesterday was brew day for our spiced Christmas ale. Just like every other beer of ours we don't really have a name for it other than the descriptor of what type of beer it is. Suggestions anyone? (Does anyone really read this?) This was B Brewer's recipe and was based on the very first beer we ever brewed, a fitting tribute as it was this time one year ago that we first started brewing. That first beer was a Red Ale (also nameless) that I wasn't really too fond of until about a month after it had been bottled. This was the first homebrewing lesson in patience though personally I still haven't taken it to heart.

Originally the Red Ale was a mixture of extract and grain, with a complete mess of the kitchen made in what could maybe be described as a mash using a grain bag. Oh the memories. It was then that we used a rolling pin and a cutting board to try to crush our meager few pounds of grain for the mash. In fact the background of the banner is from that attempt. Do you have any idea how long it takes to crush even a few pounds of barley with such a setup? Think hours. Grueling grueling hours. That was the experience that made us invest in a grain grinder (The Barley Crusher which I swear by) which has saved countless hours of frustration, especially when we transitioned to all grain several beers down the road.

In any case, the base malt for this batch was 2 row pale malt combined with roasted barley, and dark crystal malt (I think, I don't have the recipe in front of me) for the specialty grains. We also held some dry malt extract (DME) in reserve for the boil in order to really bring up the potential alcohol. Of course a spiced ale is nothing without spices. We used a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, orange peel, cardamom and something else that I just can't quite remember (will update later). For hops we used Northern Brewer (pellet), Cascade (whole) and Willamette (pellet). Originally Willamette wasn't going to be in there but apparently we were overdue for a boilover because as soon as I added the first Northern Brewer our kettle immediately frothed furiously and boiled all over the deck taking a lot of the hops with it. Some could say this was an amateur mistake and I should have paid closer attention as the person adding the hops but I would rather say shouldn't someone have been watching me watch the boil... So the Willamette hops were added to account for this act of god that removed our other hops from the boil and we moved on. Since the goal was to get not just the flavor of the spices but also that powerful aroma, and what an aroma it was, half of the spices were added at 15 minutes to the end of the boil and the rest were added at 5 minutes.

Cooling took us about an hour with the wort chiller running. I think we can get better cooling if we can keep the coils from bunching up in the kettle. At the moment even if we spread out the coils before immersing them in the kettle, in the end they all end up settling in a bunch at the bottom. We are going to try using some heavy duty copper wire to weave in and out of the coils vertically to try and keep them spread out more. With all of the coils bunched at the bottom a half hour of running cold water through cools the bottom of the kettle so it is safe to touch but the middle and top are still too hot.

We took a reading just before pitching our yeast and the result was a SG of 1.092. Too high you say? Well lets hope it ends up at that high holiday beer level that warms you up but not so high that you can't taste the spices. Going to take a reading next weekend and then rack it and let it sit for another week or so. So check back later but in the meantime you too should be drinking a homebrew.