Coffee Chocolate Porter, Homemade Coffee, Mead

Starting a new job can be stressful but can also be fun. I can assure you that I have been having fun these past two years even though I haven't brewed beer nearly as often as I have in the past. The pictures in my past posts have all been at my parent's villa where I have a storage shed filled with my brewing equipment. My parents let me keep my stuff there, and in exchange I keep it organized, brew occasionally, and leave the beers hooked up to the kegerator for my dad to drink after a round of golf or some sweaty yardwork. My dad is my biggest fan, I don't think he has ever disliked any beer I made (and he has tried every one).
I can at least do an info-dump of a few projects that I worked on since November of 2012 (my last post) which includes beer, coffee and cooking.

Coffee and Coffee Porter Projects

Raw Rwanda Dukunde Kawa Musasa coffee beans

Roasting session

Roasted and fanned

Fresh brewed. Cooled after a short steep.

The coffee project was fun. I was able to make some beans and bring them into work for people to try, I also made a batch for a friend's birthday. But the pictures above (excluding the action shot of a roast) were intended for a Coffee Porter I made from the Jamil's Chocolate Porter recipe I have done before. Here are some of the working shots from that day

Cleaning the keg

The freshly brewed and cooled coffee was added to the sanitized keg.
The porter was racked directly on top

I get a kick out of sanitary foam displacement!

MaxfieldMead Bottling Wax

Mead was the first alcohol I learned to brew; it's easy and it used to be cheap. Honey prices have doubled at least since I started my first Mead project in an empty Smirnoff bottle with a hand-squeezed pomegranate and local Arcata blueberry honey. That was in 2005 when I was a dishwasher hoping to get good tips from the waiting staff so I could make more Mead.
In 2015 I have at least 10 bottles of aged meads I have crafted over the years and managed to store safely, in hopes they mellow out in flavor and clear up naturally. It works pretty well as I can always bring out for a special occasion or give one away as a gift.

Red on the left is real bottle wax from More Beer.
The others are crayon-glue mixtures

Old meets new. I've given a lot of these away

The wax is made from Crayola brand crayons and hot gue sticks from the 99cent store
Crayola were the best, they seem to have the most wax like consistency

A sticker and a clear label for a simple brand

Brewing and Building

(Coming Soon)
Here are some randos of exploits in the past year.

Mead and Reddit

I frequently browse www.reddit.com for cute pictures of animals, video game news and brewing tips. I am working on converting some of my posts to those forums into this blog, but I still encourage people to check out reddit and become a part of the community. A sub-reddit is a sub-community hosted by reddit.com but populated by its user base. You get some great people, advice and information.

Some background on the following post: reddit user Toasty_Party started a mead exchange in /r/mead where we all brew a clover honey and juniper berry mead. Some buddies and I got together and here is what we came up with:

Juniper Berries crushed in a mortar and pestle.

MEAD EXCHANGE

Our initial feeling was that we did not use enough of the expensive, hard-to-find spice known as Dried Juniper Berries. However, mead accepts ingredients once fermentation is underway, so we will be upping the ante when the time comes. In the meantime, check out the rustic recipes we whipped up!
We cooked these 24 grams of berries with the total volume of 6 gallons. Juniper was in at 160°F for 10 minutes, during cooling, and left in for fermentation. We will be doubling the Juniper during secondary.

From left to right: 

3 gal carboy - 3 oz fresh local sweet orange peel, 3 pods dried Star Anise. 

2.5 gal carboy - 3 oz dried bergamont peels, .25 oz fresh local rosemary. 

5 gal carboy - 2 cups fresh local Kumquats, 2 oz fresh local lemongrass.

Fresh Sweet Orange Peel and Star Anise Pods

Dried Bergamont Peel and Fresh Rosemary

Fresh Kumquats and Lemongrass

As for the honey, we used 12 lbs of raw clover, 5 lbs of filtered clover (kirkland brand), 4 lbs of raw unfiltered Buckwheat, 1 lb of raw unfiltered carrot. I forgot to take a gravity reading from the must right out of the pot, but got some from the kumquat/lemongrass after pitching the yeast. OG was a whopping 1.135.


A note on using dried spices: my good friend, who bore the brunt of the recipe design, had us heat the dried spices over a low flame before using them. Specifically, the juniper berries and Star Anise pods were 'loosened up' in a pan prior to their respective uses.
A note on yeasts: we made two 4-gram, 500ml starters using the dry D47. For the starters, I used DME, Fermaid-K and Go-Ferm yeast nutrients. I started the starters on Thursday night and we pitched them (after mixing them together) on Sunday evening. We also put DAP, Fermaid-K and Go-Ferm into the must while dissolving the honey and steeping the Juniper. Cheers!




Well, there you have it. I changed the formatting a little from the original post but I think this looks nicer.