Stock Ale

So here's the good and bad about Sunday's day of brewing:

The Good: Efficiency was better than expected, which was even more surprising given the gravity of the beer. Typically, efficiency suffers with bigger beers. But patience wins: I extracted about 8 to 9 gallons of wort from my grain and had to boil it down over three hours to 5 gallons (actually 4.5), which meant a lot of caramelization of the wort (a good thing for this style) and a lot of propane...

The Bad: It was a windy and cold afternoon, so I gave my propane burner stand a good wrap with tin foil to protect from the wind. Turns out I turned it into a Dutch oven, and scorched a good square foot of our back deck. Nah, not scorched. Burned. In fact, it's a rapidly widening black hole. Dangerous. Whoops.

But of course, all is worth it for a good final product. You won't hear much about this one for awhile; at 11% alcohol by volume, it will need significant aging in order to taste smooth. A primary fermentation on a small addition of steamed and toasted oak chips will emulate that cask-conditioned character in a bourbon barrel. If you forgot, this batch is a single-malt, single-hop lesson in simplicity. Cool fermentation temperatures will minimize yeast character (of my already neutral and beautiful house yeast) and let the malt (Light German Munich) and hops (British Challenger) prevail, with simple secondary flavors of oak and alcohol. It should end up a deep red, crystal clear beer, with a floral and fruity dry-hopped aroma that effectively covers up the immediate presense of alcohol, which should appear as warming in the finish, like whiskey.

And hopefully the burning treated pine boards of our deck won't add too much smokiness to the beer.