I finally got around to brewing again about a month ago. This time I sort of made a beer by the seat of my pants. I like dark beers, and I don't like too much hops so I got a 2 cans of John Bull English Dark Malt Extract, one hopped and one unhopped. I figured together it would make for a mildly hopped dark beer. Also, since we keep it so cold in our house during the winter (57° when we're home, 53° when we're gone or asleep) I obviously had to make a lager since ale yeast won't function at those temps.

It turns out that there are a few styles of beer that are similar to what my taste and situation demanded (not a big surprise really). German Dunkel beers are dark, mildly hopped lagers, however they are also made with German malt and a process called triple decoction that's done during mashing. Since I'm just working from English extract and I doubt there was any decoction, never mind triple, going on in the making of the malt extract, this isn't really a Dunkel. There is also another style of German beer called Schwarzbier literally translated: "Black Beer" which does fit the bill for what I've created.

It really is quite black, as you can see in the photos, which is why I decided on the name Black Dog Lager. It also tastes really good to me already, I'm looking forward to completing this beer and having a glass. This weekend I plan on bottling it and it should be ready to drink by mid-late April. Of course I'll have to make a new label for this new beer as well.

More photos

Mute Dog, as most of my regular readers will know, is the label under which I bottle all of my homebrew beer and wine. We have recently released our first beer, an American Wheat which turned out quite well, if I do say so myself.

Last weekend I bottled my first batch of beer, an American Wheat. The beer had finally finished fermenting with a final gravity of 1.012. The original gravity was 1.040 a difference of 0.028! That means the beer is about 3.5% alcohol so not too strong. The beer tasted like beer, except it was flat.

I made the priming solution, which is just hot water with dissolved corn sugar, and added it to the priming chamber (really just a bucket) and then drained the beer into the priming chamber as well making sure it was well mixed. The priming sugar is added to carbonate the beer. After the beer is bottled the remaining yeast in the beer ferments this sugar producing more alcohol and CO2. Since the bottle is sealed the CO2 has nowhere to go except to dissolve into the beer. And there's your carbonation.

Bottling the beer was very easy due to a little device that came in the box full of wine making supplies I got as an extra from a guy selling carboys. Basically it's a hollow plastic wand with a little metal rod sticking out the tip. The rob is secured by a spring, when you press the rod into the wand, liquid can flow through. When you aren't pressing, it can't. So it makes it pretty hard to let liquid out without intending to do so.

You're supposed to fill beer bottles until there's an inch of space between the beer and the cap. This is accomplished by sticking the rod all the way into the bottle and pushing on the bottom to release the beer and filling it to the rim. When you remove the wand the liquid displaced by it leaves it at just the right height.

Capping beer bottles is also quite easy. You simply place the bottle cap on top of the bottle, set the capper over the top of both and push the levers down until you feel it give. Removing the capper is actually a bit more difficult.

I ended up with 46 12oz bottles and 1 pint bottle full of beer. The challenge now is keeping the beer warm enough for the yeast to be able to carbonate the beer. As most of my readers know, we keep it crazy cold in our house during the winter; too cold for Ale yeast to be very active (which is why my next beer is going to be a lager). I stacked the beer in front of the heat vent in our bedroom and placed a blanket over it to hold in the warmth, hopefully that should do it.

In addition to the beer, I also bottled the cherry wine and the ghetto apple-raspberry wine. As an aside. I'm thinking of renaming the ghetto wine line to “Snob’s Nightmare” and just doing a completely separate label design.

I had finished degassing the Nightmare wine about a week or so ago. I had been storing it in two magnums (1.5 litre wine bottles) and used our wine pump to pull dissolved CO2 out of the wine. I poured both magnums of wine into a large stainless steel bowl to blend them together. I added sorbate (to kill any residual yeast) and added a little bit of sugar to bump up the sweetness just a little bit. I then siphoned the Nightmare into four standard wine bottles and corked them.

The semi-cold stabilization of the cherry wine in the fridge seemed to help it, it wasn't quite as sour as before it also cleared fairly well so I racked it off the fine lees and added sorbate. I then added sugar until it tasted good, three tablespoons was all it took. I poured it into a bottle and corked it. I only got one bottle of cherry wine but then I only started with about a pound of cherries.

Since I've been making wine, it's only logical that I try my hand at beer as well. Making beer is a lot faster than making wine, generally you can go from fermentation to bottling and ready to drink in about 6 weeks with beer. With most wines you want to let them age for at least about a year.

Making beer is also a lot more work, in my opinion, than making wine. Beer is made from fermented malted barley (or wheat) and hops. Malted barley is sprouted barley. Once the barley seed sprouts it's sugar content increases and we all know that you need sugar to make alcohol. So to make beer, you have to get a bunch of barley (or wheat) and get it to sprout by keeping it wet or something. Then you have to boil your malted barley or wheat along with a flavoring/bittering agent in the form of hop flowers. Basically you make a sort of tea out of it which is called wort (pronounced wert). After boiling for about an hour you then need to cool down your wort as fast as you can, apparently this helps preserve flavors vs letting it cool slowly. Once you have your wort sufficiently cool you have to add oxygen otherwise your yeast won't be able to reproduce and your fermentation won't start (boiling removes most of the O2 so you have to add it back). Finally you can add your yeast and let it ferment for a few weeks before bottling and aging for an additional couple of weeks before it's ready to drink.

Fortunately in this day and age the home beer brewer does not need to start by malting their own barley or wheat. You can buy malted barley and wheat extract syrup, essentially skipping the biggest pain in the ass step of the process. A few weeks ago I brewed up a big pot of water, added malted wheat and barley extract syrup, and hops. Boiled it for about an hour, cooled it in the sink poured it into my fermentation bucket added sufficient water to increase the volume to 5 gallons, stirred it up to add in some oxygen, pitched the yeast, put the lid on with a ferm lock and let it sit.

After about a day it hadn't started vigorously fermenting, I'm pretty sure this was due to how cold it had been and how that subsequently made our house rather cold as well. Yeast doesn't die when it gets too cold but it does go dormant. So to get my fermentation off the ground I employed a wool coat and applied a small space heater for about an hour. Soon after the ferm lock was bubbling away merrily.

The Original Gravity (OG) of the wort was 1.042, I checked it a few days ago and it was down to 1.020 so it still has a little ways to go to finish fermentation. It's been a slow fermentation probably due to the initial coolness of the house though thankfully it's warmed up recently. It tried it when I checked the gravity and it was pretty good; tasted like beer so that was encouraging.