Goat Scrotum Ale

About 10 years ago when I was still in college, I attended a Saturday afternoon party at a friend’s house in Oakland featuring a game of vicious urban croquet. At this party, one of my friend’s roommates passed out unlabeled brown bottles of beer, urging us to try it but not waste it as he only had enough for one bottle per person. Up to this point, Henry Weinhard’s and the occasional Guinness were my two favorite beers. Always willing to try something new, I flipped open the cap and took a swig. It was MAGNIFICENT! The taste was very sweet, almost like a soda, but with a distinct grainy and hoppy background that assured me it was still a beer. I sought out the generous roommate to ask him what the brew was and where I could buy it.

“It’s called Goat Scrotum Ale,” he told me with an impish giggle.

After being reassured that the name was only fanciful and the brew did not, indeed, contain any farm animal genitalia, I asked him where he bought it and why he took the labels off.

“It never had any labels. You can’t buy this beer anywhere - I made it.”

Before this moment I had never really considered that one could make his own beer. I had heard of folks making their own beer and wine in the past, sure, but I also heard tales of exploding bottles, sour tastes and general disarray in the process. That something this amazing could be produced at home by a stoner college student amazed me.

Thus started my long (and I mean looooong) descent into the world of homebrewing. As I do with all new ideas, I ventured to the bookstore to read up on the process. I even bought a kit from the Barnes and Noble bookstore (where else would you buy a beer kit?) that came with a can of pre-hopped pale malt extract, a small packet of yeast and a book with recipes and instructions. I learned, however, that I would also need a fermentor, bottles, a capper, sanitizer, tubing and on and on… this would be a daunting project. So I shelved it.

Almost 10 years would pass before I finally brewed my first beer. During that time I revisited the idea again and again, but never took the plunge. It took a massive life change that sparked a desire to stop waffling and start doing all those things I’ve always wanted to do, plus the fortuitous winning of a raffle prize for one free brewing lesson, to finally get me to boil up my first wort.

I now have several beers under my belt. This past weekend, during a brew-in for the Delta Brewing club, I decided to re-live that first experience that changed the way I looked at beer forever. I never had the chance to speak with the brewer at that party again so I never got the recipe for what I assumed was his own creation. When I found a recipe with the same name and containing ingredients that would lend the same flavor as what I had on that day in Charles Papazian’s The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, I knew I had to brew it up. You should have seen the looks on my fellow homebrewers faces as I added all of the wild ingredients to my boil - chocolate, licorice root, juniper berries, freshly grated ginger… Mmmmm…

It may take a full month before I’m able to completely enjoy my tribute to the joy of homebrewing, but it will be well worth the wait. The recipe that follows is a slight variation on Papazian’s recipe taking into account both availability of ingrediants and some of my own homebrewing experience.

Goat Scrotum Ale (A variation)

5lbs liquid dark malt extract
1lb. 120L crystal malt
1/4lb. black patent malt
1/4lb. roasted barley
1 1/2oz. Northern Brewer hops (60 min)
1/4 oz. Kent Goldings hops (2 min)
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup dark molasses
2 tsp. gypsum
1 lb. honey
4oz. freshly grated ginger
1oz. licorice root
1/4 cup slightly crushed juniper berries
6oz. Hershey’s baking chocolate
1 Whirlfloc tablet

1 vial White Labs WLP002 English Ale Yeast, increased to about 2 quarts using a starter.

O.G. About 1065
F.G. Not sure yet

Steep the grains at 150-170 deg. for half an hour. Pull out the grains, then bring the water to a boil. Add the Northern Brewer hops and gypsum and start the timer for an hour. At the half hour mark, add the brown sugar, molasses, licorice root, juniper berries and chocolate. With 20 minutes left in the boil, add the Whirlfloc tablet. Just before flameout, add both the Kent Goldings hops and the honey. Cool the wort, place in the fermentor, oxygenate and pitch the yeast. I’ll be letting my wort sit on the yeast cake for about two weeks before bottling to ensure a complete fermentation.

Recipe: Mendocino Weekend Ale

It’s entirely probable that I’ve become a wee bit too obsessed with this hobby. A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary by taking a little weekend trip to Mendocino, where we stayed at the wonderful MacCallum House. The cost of breakfast was included in the room, so we ate at their Grey Whale Cafe every morning. Unlike most hotels, where the fare is rather paltry or seems like it was put together in a rush, the Grey Whale serves nothing but high quality gourmet meals using local, mostly organic, produce and meats. It was an incredible way to start each day. When we had dinner there, I ate venison for the first time in my life. Bambi’s mother tasted far better than I expected.

Every meal somehow involved huckleberries. I can only assume the chef got an amazing deal on a batch somewhere and was dying to find ways to use them. If they weren’t part of a syrah reduction sauce for the venison or grilled into buckwheat pancakes, they were served on the side as part of the fruit garnish.

While in Mendocino, I got the bug in my head to make a beer based on our trip. I purchased some local wildflower honey (bees know what’s good in an area better than anyone else), cherry fruit preserves from a local church craft fair and some candied ginger. I had planned on taking these three items and turning them into my Mendocino Weekend Ale, but as I began formulating the recipe in my head, I decided that these ingredients really didn’t do the weekend justice. After all, the huckleberries were what stood out most food-wise to us and they quickly became an inside joke.

On the way home from Mendocino, we stopped off at one of my favorite breweries, the Anderson Valley Brewing Company, where they were still serving one of my new favotire beers, Summer Solstice Cerveza Crema. It’s a standard light ale, but with a strong amount of vanilla which makes it taste incredibly creamy. It was the perfect capper to a great weekend.

When I finally sat down at ProMash to come up with my recipe, I took all of these things into consideration. I would still use the honey for its local flavor (it wound up being the only ingredient to actually come from Mendocino) and add a couple of vanilla beans to the secondary in homage to the Summer Solstice. Instead of the cherry preserves, however, I decided to try and get some huckleberries. I looked for hucklberries - fresh or frozen - at all of my local markets, including Whole Foods and Trader Joes, all to no avail. A quick Google search showed that a company called Oregon Coast Jams was selling a 1-gallon tub of Huckleberries through Amazon - to the tune of $40.00. After hemming and hawing, I decided it was worth it and placed the order, which with express shipping (required since they were frozen) came out to around $70. This was no cheap brew.

One gallon of huckleberries is roughly seven pounds or so. I decided to use six pounds for the brew so that I could use the remaining pound in some other food recipes. I based my recipe on an American pale ale and added the two pounds of honey at flameout. After the primary fermentation settled, I cooked the six pounds of huckleberries in about a quart of water or so to both pasteurize them as well as bring out the flavors a bit. I put both my huckleberries and two cut, scraped vanilla beans into my secondary and racked my beer under it. The huckleberries added no points to the gravity, so the fermentation did not restart.

After about five days, I racked the beer into a keg and force carbonated. The berries lent a gorgeous reddish/purple color to the beer. The taste is excellent - a very strong berry flavor with just a hint of vanilla. The foamy head tastes like berry cream. The hop character is a bit more assertive than I’d have liked - I wish I had pulled back a bit on the IBUs for this one. Still, it’s very drinkable and very enjoyable. My wife the non-beer drinker has not yet had the opportunity to sample it, but I’m willing to bet this is one brew of mine I’ll be able to get her to drink. At roughly 5% ABV, this should age reasonably well, provided I can keep enough of it around.

Mendocino Weekend Ale

6lbs. Ultralight LME
1 lb. Crystal Malt 10L
0.5 lb. Cara-Pils Dextrine Malt
1.5 lb. Wildflower Honey

1 oz. Cascade Hops (60 min.)
1 oz. Cascade Hops (30 min.)
1 oz. Amarillo Gold (2 min.)

2 Vanilla Beans, split and scraped (Add to secondary)
6 lbs. Frozen Huckleberries (prepared as mentioned above; Add to secondary)

White Labs WLP001 California Ale Yeast

OG: 1.064
FG: 1.024

Recipe: Santa’s Sack Winter Warmer

I’ve now cracked at least three bottles of the holiday ale I brewed and passed on about four more to friends. I am very pleased with how it turned out. It has a nice mahogany color and gorgeous spicy, malty scent. And the taste? Mmmmm… warm and spicy. I think I went a little too heavy on the orange peel, but other than that I am thrilled.

As promised, here’s the recipe. It’s based on the guidelines out of Papazian’s “The Complete Joy of Homebrewing” for an old ale:

Santa’s Sack Winter Warmer

1 lb. Crystal 40L Malt
.25 lb. Chocolate Malt
9 lbs Ultralight LME

2 oz Northern Brewer Hops (60 Min.)
.5 oz Cascade Hopes (5 Min.)

Spices
(Crushed, placed in grain bag and boiled in wort for 35 minutes):
1/2 tsp whole cloves
1/2 tbs whole allspice
15 cardamon pods
4 3″ cinnamon sticks
1/2 tbs anise
1/2 tbs dried orange peel

White Labs English Ale Yeast WLP002

Make sure you aerate this one very well, maybe even use a yeast starter. I let it ferment for about 13 days, until the activity stopped, then racked it to a secondary for two weeks before bottling. The high alcohol will let this baby mature and age a bit, so don’t forget to set a couple of bottles aside for next year. You may want to pull back a bit on the orange peel - maybe 1/4 tbs - but your mileage may vary.

Recipe: Thanksgiving Pumpkin Ale

Beer, Beer and More Beer had a special on their Thanksgiving and Christmas Ale kits recently, so I scooped up one of each. I had intended on brewing the Thanksgiving Ale at the November brew-in for the Delta Brewing Club, but it got cancelled on account of weather. I made the best of the situation and decided to brew anyway.

The Thanksgiving Ale kit came with a couple of packets of spices labeled “pumpkin”. I’m guessing this is the standard pumpkin pie blend you’d find in the baking section of your local grocery - some nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, etc. - but I’m not sure. What I did know for sure was there was no actual pumpkin in this recipe. Since I now had some extra time and access to my oven on brew day, I took a trip to the super market and bought about 6 lbs of fresh sugar pumpkin. I scooped out the innards (and made baked pumpkin seeds - yum!), cubed the flesh and roasted it in the broiler for about 10-15 minutes to get it soft and sort of caramelized. I then took the pumpkin, put it in a grain bag and let it steep at about 150 degrees along with my steeping grains in the vain hope that I;d get something resembling a mini mash. In all honesty, I don’t think the specialty grains I used had enough enzymes to really do the trick. I then followed the kit instructions the rest of the way.

This is the first beer I’ve put into my new kegging kit. It’s… interesting. I’m afraid I may have gotten some kind of brett infection as it’s a shade on the sour side, but it smells and looks just fine. It’s also the first beer I created using a yeast starter, based on directions from Jamil’s site, which may have been the source of such an infection (though I thought my sanitation was solid). I’m still planning on serving it at our Christmas party. Let’s see what the guests think.

Thanksgiving Pumpkin Ale

6 lbs fresh sugar pumpkin, cubed and roasted for about 10-15 min.
12 oz 40L Crystal malt
8 oz CaraVienne malt
2 oz Chocolate malt

1 oz Hallertauer hops (60 min.)
1 oz Cascade hops (1 min.)

2 tsp “pumpkin spice” (2 min.)

California Ale Yeast (White Labs WLP001)

Steep the cubed and roasted pumpkin along with your steeping grains at about 150 degrees for 30 minutes. Remove both the grains and pumpkin, add your extract and begin the boil as normal. I racked the beer to a secondary for about 10 days, but it still experienced a bit of a haze.