In the picture below, you can see 2/3 of my all-grain brewing setup. The hot liquor tank is on top of the propane burner on the left, while the mash/lauter tun is in the middle of the frame. The boil kettle isn’t shown, but it looks pretty much identical to the hot liquor tank. There is a pump on the chair below the mash/lauter tun that is recirculating hot wort through a heater on the right side of the tank, and back into the top. On the right side of the bench my counter-flow heat exchanger is visible. If you want to see the picture in greater detail, you can click on it for the original size.

• 7 lbs. honey
• 1 lb. corn sugar
• 1/4 lb. (4 oz.) white sugar
• 1 t. gypsum
• 1/4 t. Irish moss
• 3 t. yeast nutrients
• 1 t. fresh orange zest
• 36 oz. fresh blackberries (crushed)
• 9 oz. frozen raspberries (crushed)
• Wyeast Dry Mead pitchable yeast
• 1/3 c. corn sugar (for bottling)

Add honey, sugars, gypsum, yeast nutrients, and Irish moss to 1.5 gallons of water. Boil for ten minutes.

Turn off heat. Wait until wort is down to 180F. Add berries and orange zest and steep at 160F for twenty minutes (you may need to add heat to get back to or maintain 160F).

Cool. Pour into plastic bucket. Add enough water to make five gallons. Pitch yeast when cool enough. Cover loosely with bucket lid.

Ferment for one week in primary fermenter. Strain out fruit and rack into secondary fermenter. Rack at roughly one month intervals. Once mead clears and specific gravity falls to 0.996 or below, bottle (using corn sugar) like you would beer.

My Starting gravity on 28 Dec 08 – 1.060.

Gravity on 08 Feb 09 = 0.996

Final gravity on 07 Mar 09 (before bottling) = 0.994

Final % alcohol = 8.5

1.2 oz. juniper berries
3.3 lbs. gold malt syrup
1/4 lb. brown sugar
3 oz. yarrow
Wyeast American Ale yeast
3/4 c. corn sugar (for bottling)

Steep berries in 1 gallon water for 1/2 hour at 150-160 degrees.
Add malt, sugar, and 2 oz. yarrow. Boil for 55 minutes.
Add remaining ounce of yarrow and boil for 5 more minutes.

Add to one gallon water in 3 gallon carboy. Top off with water to make three gallons. When cool, pitch yeast. Ferment, prime, and bottle as usual.

Starting gravity – 1.054
Final gravity – unknown (measurement was nonsensical).

13 oz. 2-row malt
10 oz. Briess Pilsen Malt
3.3 lbs. Extra Light malt extract
1.5 oz. Cascade hops
2 lbs. honey
1 t. Irish Moss
1/4 oz. New Zealand Pacific Hallertau hops
Wyeast 1968 London ESB Yeast

Steep 2-row and Pilsen malts for 30 minutes at 160 degrees in 1.5 gallons of water.

Strain out grains. Add malt extract, and Cascade hops. Boil for 45 minutes.
Add honey and Irish Moss. Boil for 13 minutes.
Add Hallertau hops. Boil for 2 minutes.

Sparge, cool, and add to 2.5 gallons of water in fermenter. Add more water to bring total volume to five gallons. When cool enough, pitch yeast. Bottle when fermentation has completed.

For a variety of reasons, none of them good, I never quite got around to bottling the beer. Sometime in late October or early November, the water evaporated out of the fermentation lock. That meant that the beer was suddenly undergoing open fermentation, exposed to all the wild yeasts, bacterial, fungi and the like that were floating around my basement.

Normally, you want to avoid open fermentation when brewing because it is extremely difficult to control the taste and appearance of the final product when any random beastie floating through the air that can survive an alcoholic environment could take up residence in your brew and multiply rapidly. Faced with this problem, I punted and did nothing.

Time passed and I left for the Pole. In late January I returned and my mystery brew was still waiting for me. My sense of guilt and confusion hadn’t really lessened so I just let the mess fester.

In early March I finally got off my duff and tackled the situation head-on. If the beer was drinkable, I was determined to bottle it. If it was completely unpalatable, I’d pour the $40 of ingredients down the drain and call it an expensive lesson. I dragged the fermenter up to the kitchen, sterilized a siphon, and pulled two ounces out for a test. The beer smelled OK, even though the color was dark brown instead of a pale yellow. It was time for the big test, a taste.

I tipped the glass back and let a swallow of beer enter my mouth. The taste wasn’t bad, but the most interesting part was shortly after I swallowed the beer and my tongue went numb! A normal person might be turned off by a beer that numbs the tongue, but I forged ahead and bottled the whole batch anyway.

After two weeks of finishing in the bottle, I popped open a bottle for the big test. The bouquet was still flowery and hoppy; the appearance was still brown and cloudy. The taste…well, I was a bit letdown when it didn’t numb my tongue or anybody else’s who tried the brew. It’s extremely dry on the tongue and is actually quite an easy drinking brew. Considering all that could or should have gone wrong with the brew, I’m quite pleased that it turned out the way it did.

The brew’s name is 100 Year Kölsch for three reasons:

1. Given a hundred years, I’m not sure that I could reproduce the beer given all that happened to it as it fermented in the open for months.
2. We’re in the midst of a winter with snowfall totals that will likely take a 100 years to top.
3. Madison officially topped the 100″ mark for snowfall in this winter.

Yeah, that’s food I feel good about, alright. As a co-worker said, “That’s food you feel good about being recalled.”

Fortunately, the vines are up on the new supports we built this year so most of the crop is well above her greedy snout.

We’re not sure what made the difference this year, but we have a bountiful crop of raspberries on the vines. Many, many more raspberries than last year. We’re not sure if it is the supports, the fertilizer, or the weather, but something has really kicked the plants into overdrive. Now that strawberry season is fading a bit, we’re looking forward to eating our raspberries.

The biggest headache of the first batch was letting the wort chill before I could pitch the yeast into the fermenter. Letting the wort cool took about six hours which meant that I could never brew on a weeknight and that all sorts of undesirable little nasties could get into the beer while it was in a vulnerable state. So, I investigated how to cool the next batch faster, and ended up building a wort chiller out of some copper piping I bought at Home Depot, a few feet of vinyl tubing and a double-handful of plumbing bits from a local hardware story. Earlier this week I put the whole mess together and it all seemed to work. However, the real test was going to be how the apparatus performed the next time I brewed.

While we were in New Zealand and Australia, I drank more than my fair share of English-style bitters. Unlike the name might imply, bitters are not really bitter. Rather, bitters are usually amber in color, full-bodied, somewhat malty, often with a hint of floral scent, and perhaps even a bit of sweet flavor. There aren’t many English-style bitters brewed in the US, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to take advantage of my home brewing equipment.

This morning I spent three hours brewing up five-gallons of beer that is now fermenting. The wort chiller worked as advertised; the wort cooled down to roughly 70° F (from boiling) in a bit less than twenty minutes.

Of course, I won’t know how I did with this batch until I can drink it roughly three weeks from now. I have seven bottles of my wheat beer left to tide me over until then.

Dalla eventually noticed the fact that I was feeding myself and she naturally wanted to try what I was eating. So, after I tossed her a blackberry. After a careful and deliberate inspection the blackberry was deemed Food, and hence, worthy of consumption. After that, if I didn’t regularly throw her one or two, she would pick the blackberries off the vines herself. Of course, dog snouts aren’t really set up for berry picking, so she would often get a couple of ripe berries, a couple of nearly ripe berries, and one or two quite green berries. The flavor of those less ripe berries would then dissuade her from picking more berries herself for a few minutes.

Eventually, we picked enough to have with yogurt and on cereal, so we came home. Since our raspberry patch has yet to produce berries this year, the surprise harvest of the wild blackberries was even better.