I’ve been meaning to blog more about my beer making and haven’t done a good job. This week Adam Litke was in town for the Linux Plumber’s Conference and I brought some homebrews into lunch one day for him to try. He’s got a pumpkin ale I’m really curious to try and he (as have many) really liked the Scotch Ale we made.
It’s a fairly hard to find brew but quite tasty. We’ve found it at Pelican (hour away) as well as Max‘s (only 5 minutes away), but there isn’t really anything available to just grab at the grocery store and have on hand at home for a meal that matches. So we decided to try our own. And it was winner.
We’ll have to make a second batch soon and make sure it wasn’t a fluke. But I intend to go with the same recipe I did the first time:
- 11lbs light malt extract
- 1lbs crystal
- 0.25lbs chocolate
- 2oz Willamette hops (in for the full 60min)
- White Labs Edinburgh Ale Yeast
I did a primary and secondary fermentation at the yeast’s suggested temperatute. Our favorite supplier and experts at Main Brew suggested we’d want to let it age a while and we did. Also because of that I carefully syphoned the beer from the secondary back into one of my plastic fermenters and let it settle a bit before bottling to leave as much yeast sediment behind as possible…didn’t want it to sit in the bottles conditioning and come out with a really yeasty flavor.
We tried a bottle after two months and decided to let it condition a bit longer. We ended up letting it wait almost 5 months after bottling. And at that point it was quite exceptional. At this point it’s been another 4 months or so and I think it’s slowly getting past its prime, so it’s about time to finish off the last couple bottles and make another batch!