Monday, August 8, 2011

Ahtanum the hoppy

Since the last post the "SkateRat Brown Ale" has been bottled and is well on its way to being completely gone.  It is probably the best beer I have made in the last year.  I ended up dry-hopping it with an ounce of Columbus hops as well, and I am very glad I did.  What started out as a mostly traditional English brown is anything but that now.  It pours nice, has a head that sits around for a very, VERY long time, and is (in my oh so humble opinion) a perfect balance of malty, sweet, and hoppy. This will be made again, and soon.
 

Next we have "Ahtanum."  Ahtanum is well, weird.  I haven't had a chance to taste it yet but this is how it came into being.  I couldn't sleep one night and decided to formulate a beer that embodied my girlfriend.  In retrospect; that is possibly a bad idea if it turns out bad, but we will just hope that it doesn't for now.  The recipe is as follows:

8 lb Vienna Malt
2 lb Munich Malt
1 lb Flaked Rye Malt
0.5 lb Briess Special Roast
0.25 lb CaraRed Malt
0.25 lb Smoked Malt
1 tsp gypsum in start of boil
1 oz Ahtanum Hops (60 min)
1 oz Northern Brewer Hops (45 min)
1 oz Ahtanum Hops (30 min)
0.5 oz Northern Brewer Hops (15 min)
0.5 oz Ahtanum Hops (10 min)
0.5 oz Northern Brewer Hops (5 min)
0.5 oz Ahtanum Hops (1 min)
DRY HOPS - 1 oz Ahtanum (7 days)
                      1 oz Northern Brewer  (7 days)

Wyeast Scottish Ale Yeast (1728)

This is a very strange beer but everything has its reason and purpose.  It is even bipolar in a sense in that it doesn't know whether to be hoppy or smoky/malty.  It should come out fairly red for her red hair.  Scottish yeast for her Scottish ancestry.  so on, so on, blah blah...

Brewing Ahtanum
I also designed a cool logo for this one's label.  She has raven wings tattoed on her back, so I turned some feathers into hops and this is how it came out.

Label on bottle

Actual artwork
Flock of Ahtanum!
That does it for the beers.  But I also made my first soda yesterday morning. I made 5 gallons of root beer!  I took the easy route and made it from an extract, but this was not meant to be a very arduous endeavor.  Recipe is very simple:

4 oz Root Beer extract
2 lb Brown Sugar
1.5 lb Sugar
1 cup Molasses

Root Beer ingredients
After mixing it all up in a warm pot, I transferred it all into my 5 gal keg and hooked it up to the CO2.  After having done this and tasted it, the next batch will be better.  The next batch won't have any molasses and I'll move up to 6 ounces of extract.  It is really good though, and tastes most like a root beer from an old soda fountain.  The PSI of the CO2 is also a bit hard to judge, I currently have it at about 30psi.  I started much lower, but didn't get the carbonation that I wanted.  So I keep creeping up on it and have settled at 30 for now.  I don't know the math for how many volumes of CO2 or carbonation, so any fellow beer geeks can just deal.  This root beer has been dubbed "Maximum Possibility Root Beer."  It is named after a sign a friend had in my photobooth recently saying "Maximum Possibility Zone."

Maximum Possibility Root Beer
As usual comment with any thoughts, questions, suggestions etc.  After checking the "hits" this blog has had recently I find it pretty awesome that it has readers from 6 continents... so man up Antarctica!

1 comment:

Satan said...

damn dude... you REALLY thought hard about this beer, eh!
a flock of Ahtanum. snort!

well, it definitely suits my personality, that's for sure! and since it's "my" beer, and *i* like it....all's well that ends well.