Finally Bottling the Brew

Spruce Tip Ale Recipe

Spruce Tip Ale

The spruce trees are starting to put out new growth, and that means a chance to try making a new homebrew.

I haven't tried a spruce tip ale (either brewing it or drinking it), but I have read good things about them. It's supposed to be a very flavorful beer. It's also nice knowing that at least one ingredient came from near my house and was picked the day before it was used.

Here's the recipe used for a 5 gallon batch. I worked with an employee at Homebrew Exchange to create this recipe. It's a variation on a Pale Ale.

7 lb Light Malt Extract
8.0 oz Cystal Malt 20L
4.0 oz Roasted Barley
1.0 oz Cascade Hops (bittering)
1.0 oz Fuggles Hops (aromatic)
3.o oz Spruce Tips
Wyeast 1098 (British Ale)


Steep the grains at 160F for 30 minutes.
Remove grains and rinse with 2 qt hot water.
Add malt extract.
Bring to boil and add bittering hops and spruce tips.
Add aroma hops at last 2 minutes of boil.
Cool wort to around 75 F.
Add wort and water to fermenter to total 5 gallons.
Pitch yeast.

Beer!

My friends Nick and Courtney have been encouraging me to get into home brewing for a while. For my birthday they gave me a not-so-subtle hint/gift. It was a book on home brewing and a gift certificate to a Hombrew Exchange. So I took the hint and last month I went to the home brew shop, got a starter kit and ingredients to make a brown ale.

For my first batch, I wanted to do something easy. I worked with one of the employees at Homebrew Exchange to get the ingredients for "Naked Sunday Brown Ale." It's a recipe from The Joy of Homebrewing. I used a hopped malt extract, so I didn't have to worry about boiling hops or finishing hops. It came out great!

Cider: Part II

Part I

Part II:  The cider has been fermenting in the basement for a few weeks now and a couple of nights ago, Courtney and Nick came over to bottle it up!  We now test our patience and wait up to 6 months.

cider press blues.

willis has been talking about re-blogging for awhile now.  it's been over a year since our last posting at treestarmansion.  we're hoping to share stories about our experiences in home-ownership, experiments in the kitchen, and expeditions in the great outdoors.

i'm dedicating this first post to courtney and nick (our good friends who recently moved to portland from north carolina) and to making hard cider.

it all started a few weeks ago when nick and courtney invited us over for dinner.  while touring their new home and garden, we noticed some...ok a lot of apples in the alleyway behind their home.  we decided to gather some after dinner.  after dinner turned into after dinner plus hours of talking.  we ended up in the dark alley with flashlights picking whatever ones we could salvage off the ground and we brainstormed about making hard cider.

within a week, willis and i had gathered more apples from my oldest sister's backyard and courtney and nick gathered whatever they could find from trees they noticed around their neighborhood.  they purchased a few supplemental apples and we rented a cider press from let's brew. 

last saturday, we met at our house and got to work:

we started by washing, chopping and pureeing all the apples. this took forever.  we also realized we needed more than the 50 lbs. we had already gathered, so courtney went to gather more apples from around our neighborhood (and pick up some pizza and beer to keep us going through the evening). after several ours, we finally got through all the apples and began to press.

we ended up with 4.5 gallons of cider.

next, we moved inside to heat the juice, add in the yeast, and secure the airlock.  

the cider is patiently waiting in the basement for the next few weeks...