Couldn't wait ... had to get this thing filled. Read about these Toasted Coconut Porter's in Zymurgy and had to give it a go. 1.5 pounds of flaked coconut and lots of Black Patent and Chocolate malt. Recipe called for White Labs Cry Havoc yeast... which is a lager that ferments at ale temps... should be interesting. Oh... and tried my own yeast starter for a change. And with the conical should be able to collect and save it!
Well things have been warming up here in SoCal so instead of brewing fruity beers in the winter like we've done in the past (i.e. our Passion Modelo) we decided to do it the right way and do it in the springtime. Cousin Joe told me about a Honey Wheat he had at a mortgage conference in Texas so Wheat became the base for our next brew. Following our traditional split bath approach we decided to go for a Honey Chamomile Wheat and a Raspberry Wheat. I found a local buckwheat honey from Aliso Canyon Honey and chamomile at Jimbo's. The raspberries were a little more difficult. They sell raspberry purees in large cans at the home brew stores, but that seemed a little unauthentic to me. Fresh raspberries would have been crazy expensive, but I read good reviews on using frozen berries because they are picked at the peak of the season. Pureeing them can't be that hard right? Trials and Tribulations: Still having some issues keeping our temperatures accurate during our mash. It seems to happen about midway through the mash the wort just skyrockets in temperature. We can get in under control but it is a bit concerning. And we don't know how it is affecting our efficiency. When we tested our OG about half way through our boil we were a bit off ... so we added a pound of corn sugar... forgetting we were going to add a pound and half of honey ... which is basically pure sugar. As a result our OG ended up at 1.074!! It is only supposed to be at 1.061 ... which means we are looking at a ~6.5 - 7.0% ABV!! Guess this is going to by a high octane honey wheat! We did a stop motion video this time around with John's GoPro ... check it out below ... kind of cool... Centennial Blonde & FrankensteInPAWell we couldn't wait any longer... still unable to get our PID's working properly we went ahead and fired up the Brutus today. There were a couple hiccups of course but we managed to brew 2 batches. A Centennial Blonde and an IPA built by Kamron over at Mother Earth Brew Co.
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