Making a Winter Warmer

With the weather getting colder we decided we would take our first crack at making a Winter Warmer. Having never made one of these, we turned to the internet for inspiration. Of course, the style Winter Warmer is pretty loosely defined, so we quickly ran into information overload. It seemed the easiest way to make a Winter Warmer was to is take a recipe you already have and make it slightly darker, more alcoholic, and spice it. Unfortunately, the recipes we have developed and tested so far are either for hoppy beers (don't combine well with spices) or stouts (hard to make a darker version of those). So this is a brand new beer for us, using lessons learned from some of our earlier, less refined beers. What we ended up with was Marris Otter for the base malt, some chocolate and crystal malt for some flavor, and CaraPils to add to the body. This should give us a nice malty base to add spices to.  For spicing we kept it pretty tame and went with some of the standard winter spices, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and all-spice.  We added the spices right before flame out and then they were filtered out going into the fermentor.

We were a little worried that this method of spicing was ineffective as we didn't smell the spices in the beer in the fermentor or taste it in the gravity sample we took.  So two weeks later when we tried the beer for the first time, we were pleasantly surprised by how the beer turned out.  There was a subtle but effective spice nose and flavor, that went well with a somewhat chocolaty flavor in the beer.  We still think the recipe needs some tinkering, but its a great start.  We were happy enough with it (and disappointed enough with one of our other batches) that we brought the beer to a Holiday Party hosted by my parents, and it was well received.

Whats on Tap:

• Svarog # 01 Russian Imperial Stout
• Manitou # 03 New England IPA
• Dog Bone # 03 American Pale Ale
• St. Bernard # 01 Winter Warmer

Hop Experimentation Series (Ahtanum)

Manitou is our New England IPA dry hopped with Galaxy Hops. Over the course of many batches we have tweaked our recipe and process to get an IPA we are really happy with. We are big fans of this beer, and plan on brewing it often. However, a big part of our brewing is a desire to learn about brewing. Thus, we don’t want to just brew the exact same beer over and over again and learn little from it (except that we can repeat it, which is also important). So we have decided to use the Manitou as the basis for a hop series. Each time we brew the Manitou, we will take one gallon of the wort and put it in a separate fermentor and dry hop it with a different hop.  The rest will be dry hopped with Galaxy like normal. This will provided us with a control to compare each hop to, and will allow us to make sure that any differences we taste each batch are due to the hop and not some mistake we made on our brew day.

For the first batch of this experiment we went with Ahtanum hop (Alphabetical Order).  Ahtanum is describes as having aroma descriptors of citrus, grapefruit, and geranium.  Compared with passionfruit and clean citrus aroma descriptors for Galaxy. No on to the fun part, the tasting.

Given the similarities between the description of both hops I was a little concerned that I would have trouble picking out a lot of differences between the two beers, but I was wrong, they were distinctly different. The beer dry hopped with Ahtanum seemed sweeter and gentler.  Both beers had citrus flavors, but they were much more pronounced in the beer dry hopped with Galaxy.  Overall I like both beers, but preferred the beer with Galaxy.

Our First Experiment with Peppers in Beer

With winter on the horizon we decided to make our Imperial Stout again. It has been a long time since we brewed this so we tweaked the recipe a little bit and gave it a new GODDOG themed name, Svarog. But instead of just making a plain Russian Imperial Stout, we decided to spice things up a little, and added some Chipotle Peppers. We didn't jump in with both feet though, because I'm sure all of you have had a pepper beer that was almost undrinkable because overpowering spiciness. So we scaled our recipe up to 7 gallons and pulled off 2 gallons of beer into 2 one-gallon jars for fermentation.

We put a tea ball with 1/3rd oz of chopped up Chipotle peppers in one of the jars and a tea ball with 1/6th oz in the other jar for fermentation.  The 1/3rd and 1/6th was more based on the size of the tea ball than any careful planning on our part.  Three weeks later (2 weeks in fermentation, 1 week carbonating) we found out the tea ball increments worked out well.  Pepper flavor was apparent in both batches, with some of our test subjects preferring the 1/6th oz batch and some preferring the 1/3rd oz batch. Neither batch was overpowering which was goal number 1, so we considered the experiment a success. There was very little heat from the Chipotle pepper so I think next time we experiment on the Svarog, we will try a spicier pepper (maybe Ancho) or a little more Chipotle.

Whats on Tap:

• Svarog Batch # 01 Russian Imperial Stout
• Svarog Dry Hopped w/ Dried Chipotle Peppers
• Manitou # 03 IPA (Tapped Today)
• Manitou Dry Hopped w/ Ahtanum
• Dog Bone # 03 American Pale Ale (Kegged Today)

Who What Where and Why: An Introduction to GODDOG Brewing

Welcome to the very first post of GODDOG Brewing! This is just the next logical step in our home brewing adventures as we seek to make better beer and document it for our records and hopefully your pleasure. We hope to share our lessons with you and learn from our mistakes with input from other home brewers who may find this blog. Hopefully over the next coming weeks and months

Who are we?
Drew, Ian, and John. Three guys who have been home brewing off and on for the past 4 years and have been friends much longer. We recently started to take this hobby of ours a little more seriously and needed a place to document our brew days and techniques. We are joined by faithful companions, Apollo and Freyja who are our inspiration for our little experiment.

What are we doing?
Hopefully we will figure this out sooner than later. We have made some good brews with some great feedback from friends and family but would like that to transition into great feedback at competitions and other home brewers. At the end, it is all about improving our knowledge and ability of the craft.

Where?
Boston, Massachusetts. Word has it, the reason the pilgrims stopped here was because they were running low on beer.

Why are we doing this?
We like beer. We come from creative and industrious backgrounds. We like to know how things work and we like to know how we can do it better. Ian and Drew are mechanical engineers. That is like having a degree in tinkering in the pursuit that there is always a better way. John is an architect where experimentation usually leads to failure and occasionally something turns out pretty awesome. We also want to share our experiences. Show the home brewing and beer enthusiast communities what we have learned, and how we have gone wrong. It also will help us document, for our own good, what we are doing and allows the few people who find this blog the ability to give their feed back.

Whats on Tap: 

• Dog Bone # 02 American Pale Ale
• Bitch Wanted a Belgian Batch # 01 Belgian Trippel w/ Cherries
• Daghdha Batch # 02 Irish Stout
• Svarog Batch # 01 Russian Imperial Stout
• Svarog Dry Hopped w/ Dried Chipotle Peppers 
• Svarog Dry Hopped w/ MORE Dried Chipotle Peppers