Dandelion mixed fermentation saison recipe and brewday
Brain Sparging on Brewing
by Adam Kielich
1y ago
Dandelions have a long history with the making of alcoholic beverages from all sorts of beers to wines, spirits, meads and mumms. Most people think of dandelions as pesky weeds but their aggressive proliferation and growth are exactly why they served as a food and beverage ingredient for so much of human history. Dandelions seems to have fallen out of favor as an ingredient in beer and other alcoholic beverages sometime in the nineteenth century as industrial beer and wine production ramped up and the breadth of beer and wine styles narrowed considerably. Today dandelions barely exist as an in ..read more
Visit website
Witbier with spruce and grains of paradise
Brain Sparging on Brewing
by Adam Kielich
1y ago
Belgian witbier is an underrepresented beer style on this blog and in craft beer in general. It is one of the few Belgian beer styles I've never brewed despite being one of my favorite beer styles to drink. There is a lot of overlap between the many low ABV saisons I like to brew (and drink) and witbier that have pushed witbier to the side in my brewing. Nevertheless, I drink a lot of it. Here in Colorado I am spoiled to have easy access to Funkwerks White which is an early beer from the brewery discontinued and brought into regular production again. I also Senior Discount by Funkwerks's siste ..read more
Visit website
Fresh Hop Red Lager Recipe & Brewday
Brain Sparging on Brewing
by Adam Kielich
2y ago
After years of unsuccessful hop growing in Texas my hop plants are settling in to Colorado and starting to produce large crops. So far the cascade, chinook and mount hood hops are in full swing with my sterling just starting to produce. I expect within the next two years the cascade, chinook and mount hood will be at full production with the sterling hopefully getting there a year or so behind. Like last year I've taken the opportunity of having hops growing in my backyard to brew a fresh hop beer. Also like last year, I've opted to brew a fresh hop lager instead of a more typical pale ale or ..read more
Visit website
Making ice beer out of leftover ingredients--recipe and brewday
Brain Sparging on Brewing
by Adam Kielich
2y ago
Eis beer, ice beer, eisbier--whatever you want to call it. These beers bring up two types of beers. One, the refined eisbocks that turn doppelbocks into concentrated maltbombs. (For example, the sought after eisbocks made by Kuhnhenn.) Two, those industrial lagers floated in the 1990s with a little more alcohol with Ice in the name. (E.g. Bud Ice.) In both cases the beers are made using freeze concentration--often referred to as freeze distillation--by removing some of the water content to concentrate the alcohol and other compounds in the beer. Homebrewers often limit themselves to the more r ..read more
Visit website
Hopfenweizen Recipe and Brewday plus some general musings on brewing hefeweizen
Brain Sparging on Brewing
by Adam Kielich
2y ago
Hefeweizen is one of my favorite beer styles although you wouldn't imagine that to be true given its almost complete absence from this blog. It's the first craft beer style I fell in love with after trying it way back in the very early 2000s at a brewpub and being blown away by how different it was from the light lagers I generally drank in volume. It set me down the path of loving yeast expressive beer which is very obvious to this blog. Living in Texas through my twenties I had the fortune of easy access to Live Oak Hefeweizen which is easily one of the best hefeweizens produced outside of G ..read more
Visit website
Barrel aged Americanized Oud Bruin Batch 7 Recipe &
Brain Sparging on Brewing
by Adam Kielich
2y ago
It's well past time for another rebrew of this Americanized oud bruin that I have been barreling in my tiny two gallon barrel. I'm trying to find the goldilocks time and process so this sour beer can gain positive aging in the barrel but not pick up an acetic edge. I'm not quite there yet. My past experiences with this beer (add links to prior batches) suggest this barrel has no problem overoaking but does have problems with these thin staves and losing beer to angel's share. Waxing the barrel seemed to do little or had a positive effect but the evaporation rate on this small whisky barrel wou ..read more
Visit website
Oak Smoked Lager Recipe & Brewday
Brain Sparging on Brewing
by Adam Kielich
2y ago
Smoked beer. Is any class of beer more despised than smoked beer? Even sour beer has risen from an isolated corner of beer geekdom into the mainstream. Plenty of people still don't enjoy sour beer but at least we've most past the this-batch-is-infected-we-brew-sour-beer-now era of brewing. Smoked beer, however, remains an isolated class of beers deeply beloved by a small sect of beer drinkers and the target of ridicule for virtually everybody else. Count me among the fans. Most people think of smoked beer as the bacon-y, densely smokey beers from Schlenkerla but that is too narrow. Smoked beer ..read more
Visit website
Fresh hop lager recipe & notes
Brain Sparging on Brewing
by Adam Kielich
2y ago
It's hop harvest time which for me means it's time to use up my meager hop harvest to make another fresh hop beer. I know fresh hop beers can be polarizing and their brief early 2010s moment in the spotlight has long since passed but I enjoy these beers, even if they are a loving reminder that not all hoppy beers have to be haze bombs. Fresh hop beers continue to have a stronghold in the Pacific northwest but there's no reason why us homebrewers cannot share in the delight of these delicate hopped beers.  Note: I wrote this post last September when it actually was hop harvest time a ..read more
Visit website
One Gallon Spontaneous Sour Beer Batch 6 and The Board of Lambicky Mysteries
Brain Sparging on Brewing
by Adam Kielich
3y ago
Here comes another small batch of lambic inspired spontaneous beer in my long, long running effort to turn my home into a lambic/gueuze homebrewery. In my last installment I looked at reducing the volume of aged hops while trying to chase down my unusual problem of not getting anything in the way of sourness in my prior five renditions under the theory that perhaps the wort simply had too much antibacterial power. I'll talk a little about where that beer is right now, about a year old, and then get into one change to this recipe and a piece of equipment that will test a second theory. Well tha ..read more
Visit website
Mesquite Chocolate Rye Porter Recipe & Brewday
Brain Sparging on Brewing
by Adam Kielich
3y ago
I've been thinking about this beer for about eight years--not because it has taken me five years to shape the recipe but because like a lot of homebrewers I have more ideas than time to brew. Back in 2012 I acquired a pile of mesquite pods and set out to brew with them. The result was a decent porter using a syrup made from toasted mesquite pods. Of the handful of people who tasted this beer almost everybody remarked that the beer was crying out for a chocolate addition. I agreed and put it on the ever growing list of beers I intended to brew some day. While shopping in my local Asian grocery ..read more
Visit website

Follow Brain Sparging on Brewing on FeedSpot

Continue with Google
Continue with Apple
OR