Black Christmas Update

I've still got the Black Christmas brew chilling in the basement. Alot of additional sediment appears to have fallen out of it. I hoped to get it bottled in the next couple of days.

So on 11/23/08 I started a new beer that I'm calling New Years on Mars. It's based off of another Charlie Papazien recipe called Winky Dinky Marzen. Here are the ingredients:

• 7lbs German Bierkeller Premium canned malt extract, unhopped light.
• 1/2lbs dark amber crystal malt
• 1/2 c. chocolate malt
• 1 1/4 oz Hallertauer Hops (boiling) 6 HBU (120 MBU)
• 1/2 oz Hallertauer Hops (aroma)
• White Labs Oktoberfest Lager Yeast WLP820
• 3/4 cup corn sugar.

So I started out by boiling 3 1/2 gallons of water for 15 minutes. I took the crushed malts and added them to a boiling sock and tossed them in for 30 minutes. The temperature when I dropped it in was 188 degrees and I kept it on little or no heat for the 30 minutes. When 30 minutes was up I removed the bag. See below

Next I brought the wert (can I call it wert yet?) back to a boil, turned off the heat, and added the canned malt extract. After that was stirred in I brought the whole deal back to a boil. I then added roughly 1 1/4 oz of the Hallertauer Hops to a boiling back and threw it in for the boil for 60 minutes. With 15 minutes left I threw in the wert chiller to the boil to sanitize it. At the last 3 minutes of the boil I threw in the rest of the hops in another boiling bag.

Then I took it outside to the deck and chilled it with a wert chiller seen below:

After the wert had chilled to around 80 degress I took it inside and added it to 2 more gallons of store bought spring water. I topped it off to 5 gallons. Dumped in the hops and agitated it for about 5 minutes.

The starting gravity was around 1.045. I'm posting this a week later and there is vigourous frementation going on.

Racking Black Christmas Ale

Last night I racked the Black Christmas Ale to the secondary fermenter, a glass carbouy. The beer had a little bit of a scum on the top of it still. The gravity reading I got was about 1.005, but, it was hard to see a clear reading because of the scum.

I used a racking wand to go from the bucket to the carbouy. Everything was sanitized using One Step.

The beer isn't quite as dark as I had expected. Probably because I went with the Light Malt Extract, by the Beer Nut's recommendation.