So this is my first post to the blog. Up until now, if you’ve been reading this at all you’ve been reading Michelle’s writing. She’s the better writer so I leave most of the blogging to her. She’s also the better cook so she has more to say, too. But today’s post is about beer. And I am a big fan of beer. I like to drink beer, sure. But I also like to talk about beer, read about beer, write about beer, think about beer and, of course, brew beer.

I’d like to start by saying that I’m not the greatest homebrewer in the world. Or even the country or state. Maybe not even the surrounding few blocks but I don’t actually know if anyone around here brews beer so I can’t really speak to that. I’ll just say that I’m still new at this whole homebrew thing. I started less than a year ago and have made only 11 batches in that time. And three of those batches were such dismal failures that they went down the drain rather than down my gullet. That’s a fact.

So Saturday was my twelfth attempt at making my own beer. And it was inspired by a co-worker of Michelle’s who comes from Louisiana. This co-worker gave Michelle a two ounce bottle of cane syrup for some reason. Apparently, the people down in Louisiana put this stuff on pancakes and waffles and stuff where normal people would use maple syrup. Go figure. The point is that we have no intention of using it on waffles so I thought I could use it in beer. I’ve been wanting to try to make an old ale and have heard that old ale often use additions of molasses or brown sugar so it seemed like a perfect fit. And since I usually make very small batches of beer, the two ounce bottle seemed like it would work.

So I threw together a recipe and got to work on Saturday afternoon. Unlike our usual dinner posts, I’m going to give the recipe right up front so you can all see how this went down. It wasn’t always pretty. In fact, if you ask Michelle, it is typically not pretty at all. But I disagree. Either way, here’s what I was doing:

2.75 lbs Domestic 2-Row Barley
2 oz British Crystal 135-165
2 oz Cane Syrup
Hops: 0.25 oz Target @ 60 minutes
0.0833 oz Target @ 5 minutes

This should have a starting gravity of about 1.083.

Nothing too complicated. Except that I usually brew in 2.5 gallon batches and this was for a 3.5 quart (0.875 gallon) batch. So I was using a different mash tun than I normally use and had to work with smaller additions of water. But no big deal, right?

I ground up the grain with the hand crank Corona mill that I always use that was probably never intended to crush grain for brewing. I think it was made in Mexico to grind up corn for corn meal. Close enough, I say. Usually it works just fine, but this time I noticed the crush was a little too fine – too much flour coming out. I opened it up a little, but I didn’t want too coarse a crush or I wouldn’t get enough sugar out of it. What’s the worst that could happen? A stuck mash. Which happened. It took an extra half hour to run the sparge water through. (Isn’t sparge a weird word? Brewing is full of weird words. Like sparge and vorlauf and krausen. Probably not so weird in German, but they definitely sound funny to me. I probably shouldn’t make fun of the way other people talk. I’m from New Jersey, after all.)

Well, I finally got all the sweet wort I wanted out of my tiny mash tun. I wanted to get a little extra and boil down a little longer than usual to increase my efficiency and darken the beer a touch. Everything seemed to be going pretty smoothly so I didn’t even bother to check the gravity of the wort before putting on the boil. I’m clever, eh?

The boil seemed to go off without a hitch. It was going for 75 minutes with hops going in at 60 and 5 and some cane syrup going in with the last hops. I think it smelled pretty good, too. But I kept all the windows open so Michelle wouldn’t complain about the “grapenut smell” that usually lingers for a day or so.

Anyway, the boil finished and I used my handy-dandy home-made wort chiller (15 dollars in parts at Lowes) to get the wort down to 65F in about 25 minutes. I was pretty damn happy with myself. Then I took a quick gravity reading…

I don’t know if you can see the picture clearly enough, but the gravity reads 1.060. That’s really far from the 1.083 I was expecting. Here’s the other thing, I ended up with an extra quart or more of wort. Basically, I should have kept the boil going long enough to get that quart or so to evaporate down to get me to my target gravity. Sucks for me.

Might as well pitch some yeast. This particular yeast is some White Labs California Ale yeast slurry that I saved from the last batch of oatmeal stout I made a few weeks ago. Beautiful AND economical.

So there’s my “old” ale. I guess it’s still technically an old ale at 1.060, just at the very low side of the spectrum. And lighter in color than what I had wanted. Whatever. It’ll be beer, right? I’ll let you know how that turns out. By the way, if anyone happens to be reading this and is confused by any of the terminology you can go to the Homebrewing Guide page for more in-depth (read as: boring) information. Michelle thinks it’s tedious and mostly involves cleaning, but it’s a ton of fun and the results are usually delicious (8 times out of 11 for me).

Score: Us-0, Food-0 (Judging will have to wait until a bottle is cracked open. Be patient.)