The first time I made this beer, it ended up being bigger and better than I expected. This time around, I wanted to tweak it a bit and enter it into the National Organic Homebrew Challenge. The requirements of the contest are strict regarding organic ingredients, as they should be, but it required me to change up the recipe a slight bit.Essentially everything but yeast and clarifiers such as Irish Moss have to be organic. In my original recipe I had used .25 lbs of black patent malt, which I couldn't find organic. This time around, I ordered Carafa II, which is listed as an organic substitute for black malt as well as organic roasted barley.
I liked how the fruitness came out in the last batch, but wanted to up the presence, so I bought organic orange marmalade and organic mango preserve. In the previous recipe I used dried orange peels, but the organic ones I had were quite old and lacked any aroma. Since I've had a great deal of success with marmalade in the past, I'm hoping that the addition of both of these will play nicely off the roastiness.
Here's the recipe:
Steeping grains:
.50 lbs crystal 120
.25 lbs chocolate
.25 lbs carafa II
1.6 oz roasted barley
9.15 lbs light liquid malt extract @60
1.5 lbs brown sugar @ 30
2 T orange marmalade @ 3
1 T mango preserve @ 1
Hops: Organic Admrial (14.7 % AAU) .75 oz @ 60, .25 oz @ 20
Yeast: Dry Safale US-O5 (2 packs)
In less than 4 hours, it was already active, so I have high hopes. The deadline for the contest is Oct. 10, but I'm mostly excited for the beer to consume myself. It was one of my better beers recently and my wife (not a dark beer fan) and some friends are eager to have it again.
Also, the Burning Beard is tasting fantastic, so I'll be reviewing that in the next post.
Salud!
Bearded Brewer
9 comments:
Sounds like a good beer. Where can you find organic ingredients online? I'm brewing a beer for a friends wedding and he and his wife are very into then green movement, so I'd like to be able to use as much organic ingredients as possible.
Cheers,
Jason
Jason,
Glad you're interested. On my blogroll, Northern Brewer and Seven Bridges are the only two I know of. Seven Bridges only carries organic ingredients and has a lot of stuff.
Good luck!
Great...I'll check out Seven Bridges. Thanks for your help!
Cheers,
Jason
Hey, one more thing....do you design all your labels yourself? They are awesome!! I need to find out how to make some better labels.
Thanks Jason! I do design my labels. If I could ever figure out photoshop (or afford it) I could probably make some more intricate ones, but I'm happy with what I've been making. Have you ever checked out the winners from the BYO homebrew contest? Those are awesome!
Yeah, some of those labels are very cool. I made one and it looked like a 5th grader could have done it so I stopped making them. My sister-in-law is a graphic desinger but she's too busy to take time to help with my labels and I can't afford to pay her for them. I might try and save up enough to get photoshop. I've used it in the past for other things and was failry proficient with it, but that was a long time ago.
What do you use to make them?
I use an old program called Microsoft Picture It. Its not too fancy, but I've used it enough to feel comfortable and know what I'm doing. A friend of mine told me about a free program called Gimpy that is essentially Photoshop but free. Its pretty cool, but it can do so much and I just haven't spent the time because I'm much more proficient with the older program.
the labels are awesome!
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