More cookin' with beer: stout cupcakes with malt frosting

The return of the South Side Irish Parade here in Chicago's Beverly neighborhood
means many things to many people, but for us it means lots of parties (four, to be specific). And since each party is being thrown by either a homebrewer or a professional craft brewer, I figured I'd bring something other than beer (which I know will be flowing in abundance anyway) and what I decided on was stout cupcakes with malt frosting.

Now I made these a couple times before, but unfortunately I couldn't find the original recipe I used or the modifications I made to them. However, I found this recipe that Leah sent me in my email inbox so I figured this is probably what I used. And then I remember adding more cocoa the second time around so I upped the cocoa amount. So here's what I ended up with for my recipe:

cupcakes (makes about 2 dozen)

• 1 cup Stout (I used Two Brothers North Wind Imperial Stout)
  
• 1 stick, plus 1 tbsp, unsalted butter
• 1 cup unsweetened cocoa
• 2 cups dark brown sugar
• ¾ cup sour cream
• 2 eggs
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• 2 cups flour
• 2-½ tsp baking soda

glaze

• 8 oz cream cheese
• 1 cups confectioners’ sugar
• malt reduction (see below) to taste (I used 5 tablespoons)

malt reduction

• 1 lb., 2 oz. dark Munich malt
  
• 1 oz. dehusked Carafa III
  

Start with your malt reduction (and I should note that it may be more appropriate for the stout if you use pale malt, a little crystal malt and a touch of roast barley, but I went with what I had on hand with a goal of getting something as malty as possible). Heat 1 quart plus 1 cup water in a large saucepan to roughly 160°F. Fill a grain bag with your crushed grain and place in a large sauce pan. Mash at around 150°F for a half hour. After a half hour, pull out the grain bag and let it sit in a colander to collect the rest of the runnings. What I collected had an O.G. of around 1085. Reduce in the saucepan to roughly one third the volume.

Now, for the cupcake part...

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Butter a muffin tin or use paper cups.

Combine the stout and the butter, chopped into 1-inch chunks, in a large sauce pan, and heat to melt the butter. Remove from heat, and whisk in the cocoa and sugar. In a bowl, whisk the sour cream with the eggs and vanilla, then add to the beer mixture. Sift together the flour and baking soda, and fold into the batter. Pour into muffin molds and bake for 25 minutes, or until inserted cake tester comes out clean. Let stand 10 minutes, remove from muffin tin, and cool completely on a rack.

Finally, to make the frosting mix the cream cheese and confectioners' sugar. Add the malt reduction two tablespoons at a time. The one thing to be careful of is, depending on how thin your reduction is, you want to be careful not to end up with frosting that's too thin. For a nice touch I recommend finely grinding dehusked Carafa III and sprinkling it on top (if you have wheat, you can grind that too for a two-toned effect; I would just avoid husked malts).

So there you have it! I'll update this post if I make any further modifications to the recipe, and invite you to comment with suggested modifications of your own. In the past I made this with a homebrewed Old Ale, so I'd also be curious to hear results with other styles of beer. And now, time to get ready for the parade!

Bratwurstsuppe and Brötchen

In 2007 we went to Germany and had the most delicious soup at Schlenkerla Brewery in Bamberg. Then we came back to the US and poked around online a bit and discovered that apparently the soup doesn't actually exist on the internet. Not sure if it was just an invention of Schlenkerla's or if we just don't know enough German to know what we're looking for.

Today I managed to come fairly close to recreating it, and I found a really good and simple Brötchen recipe - so I had better record what I did or I'll be really annoyed next time I want some and I can't remember what I made.

Keep in mind - I'm a very poor recipe writer. I don't measure things, which drives Russ up the wall and is why he's so much better at the precision aspect of brewing. This is all my best guess on what I did today!

Bratwurstsuppe

2 large yellow onions

1/2 lb of Nuremberg sausage or similar German-style bratwurst (Trader Joe's currently has a good one!)

2 C. good beer

4 C. stock (beef, chicken, or veggie would all work - I used chicken)

4 C. water

1-2 Tbsp beef bouillon

salt and pepper to taste (I used Lawry's seasoned salt and Trader Joe's lemon pepper grinder)

Slice the oinions and caramelize them in a pan as if you were making French Onion Soup. Once they're browned and soft, add the stock and simmer for a while.

While those are simmering, put a soup pot on, turn to med-high heat, slice the bratwurst into thin medallions, and brown them up. Once they're nice and browned, deglaze the pan with the beer, simmer for a bit, and then add the stock from the onions. Depending on your taste, you may want to leave the onions in - they weren't included when we were in Bamberg, but I tried it both ways tonight and liked it better with them included.

Then add beef bouillon, salt, and pepper to taste and simmer for a bit. Serve it with the above-linked Brötchen recipe.

Brew day: Blanche Devereaux Witbier

I've brewed a gluten-free Witbier and a "black Witbier" (my reaction to people complaining that "black IPA" is an oxymoron), but never a regular ol' Witbier. Well, a good friend of mine who I haven't seen in years is coming to town in April, and I promised to brew a beer for her. She said she likes wheats, so I decided now is the time to brew a traditional Belgian Wit. And since many Wits have "Blanche" in their name ("Bière Blanche" being the French name for the style), I decided to go with the obvious when designing a label:


My buddy Ryan just ordered a homebrew starter kit, so he was excited to come over and help out and see the brewing process in action. Unfortunately, the temperature never got above 19°F yesterday. And also unfortunately, we ran into a couple minor issues (as is always the case when I brew), but overall I think it came out just fine. And Ryan stuck it out the whole day (despite forgetting his thermal boots) so I think he has a fine brewing future ahead of him.

For the recipe, I was a little worried about a stuck sparge but didn't want to use too many rice hulls so I went with a combination of malted wheat and flaked wheat rather than just flaked wheat for the wheat portion of the grain bill. The rest was pilsner malt and a half pound of flaked oats. Ordinarily I'd go with a short beta-glucan rest when using wheat (~120°F) but due to the cold I just went with a simple infusion at 151°F. Of course, given the extreme cold, we came in way low (~144°F) so I did a quick 1.5-gallon decoction--returning the mash as soon as it reached boil--and brought the mash up to 151.

The next issue we ran into was a stuck mash with my small tun (I have a big chest-type cooler I use for most of my batches, but the grain bed can get too shallow when brewing 5 gallons of beer at 1050 or under so I have a small round Igloo-style cooler I use for mashing small batches). Despite having a false bottom, the out valve was clogged with grain so I dumped the mash out into my large mash tun, at which point we were able to sparge without issue.

We collected 6.5 gallons and boiled for 90 minutes. The next issue? I could only find half an ounce of coriander and my recipe called for an ounce. Oh well; if necessary I'll make a tea and add it to the keg. We added sweet and bitter orange peel at 15 minutes and another addition of sweet orange peel, as well as coriander and a small late-hop addition, at 5 minutes.

The final issue we ran into was while getting ready to chill. Because it was so cold, I had to use channel locks to get the hose hooked up to the spigot, and I over-tightened it and the hose broke. Fortunately, a quick trip to Ace Hardware scored me a new hose, and with the frigid temps I actually ended up chilling around 50°F instead of the 60 I was shooting for. Oh, and apparently when it's crazy cold I get a higher evaporation rate, because I ended up with 4.5 gallons instead of the expected 5.5, and a gravity of 1.059 instead of 1.048. Fortunately, adding an extra gallon of water brought the gravity and volume right to where they're supposed to be.

After giving it a couple hours to warm up some I oxygenated and chilled. This morning I'm seeing signs of fermentation. I'll be curious to see how the orange peel and coriander come through; I'd really prefer not to mess around with a tea after the fact, because I'm a lazy, lazy man. And of course the most difficult thing is gonna be waiting until April to drink it. Why again did I decide to brew on the coldest day of the year?

Whisky: is there anything it CAN'T do?

So I forgot to mention it here on the blog, but Burns' Night (the birthday of Scottish cultural icon, poet laureate and hero Robert Burns) was a couple weeks ago and Leah and I celebrated it by enjoying a wee dram from each of the four bottles of Scotch I currently own. Sticking with the theme, I also decided to make a hot toffee sauce with Scotch to serve on top of vanilla ice cream for dessert. It came out so well that I figured I would post the recipe here (which I adapted from this recipe I found at gourmetsleuth.com):

Ingredients
3/4 cup dark brown sugar, packed
5 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/3 cup half and half
3 tablespoons Scotch whisky
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

Instructions
Combine the brown sugar and butter in a medium saucepan. Cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, until the butter is melted and the sugar is dissolved, about 5-6 minutes. Increase the heat to medium-high and bring to a full boil.

Slide the pan from the heat, add the half and half, Scotch, and salt, and whisk until well blended. Give the sauce a taste and add a pinch or two more of salt, if needed. If you're serving immediately, add vanilla. If you're preparing to use later, add vanilla after reheating.

Refrigerate whatever you have left over. To serve leftovers, reheat gently in a double boiler or in the microwave. The original recipe warns, "Do not overheat, or the sauce will separate," but we haven't run into that problem.

So anyway, there you go... an absolutely delicious recipe for when you can't decide between a cocktail or dessert--and if you're into the whole presentation thing you can serve it in a martini glass like I did above. Leah thinks it's gotten better each time we used it (I think we got four servings out of it). And, for the record, I'm guessing that you could substitute bourbon or some other kind of whiskey for Scotch and it would still be delicious. Sláinte!

He's Misstra Know It Alt

Tracy Hurst at Metropolitan Brewing has called me both an Alt Savant and a Düsseldork. I'm pretty sure it's not so much a reflection of my knowledge of Altbier as it is my passion for the style. I think most brewers pick a style or two that they really want to perfect. In my case, Düsseldorf-style Altbier is definitely my white whale.

Part of my motivation for pursuing the perfect Altbier is that I fell in love with the style the first time I tried a Diebels Alt as a college student studying abroad (I was sitting in a basement jazz club in Reutlingen, Germany, trying to summon the courage to jump on stage during their jam session, when my buddy Joon--a German-Korean saxophone player from Düsseldorf--bought me a bottle). Part of my motivation is that hardly anybody (with the exception of Metropolitan) brews a Düsseldorf-style Altbier in the U.S., so when I started brewing my only options for drinking an authentic Alt were traveling to Düsseldorf or brewing one myself.

At any rate, I'm far from an expert on the style, though I'll cop to knowing more about Alts than most American brewers. I've had the pleasure of visiting Düsseldorf twice (in 2007 and 2011) and can't wait until I go back again. I want to say the second beer I brewed was an Alt, and since then I've brewed more batches than I can remember... certainly more than any other style. I even had the pleasure of taking a day off of work to help Doug and Tracy at Metro brew their I-Beam Alt, the predecessor to their Iron Works Alt (which you all should go out and buy NOW).

All that being said, my homebrewed Alts have been inconsistent to say the least. I would go from dry and bitter to sweet and not-so-bitter and back again, always having trouble dialing in that perfect combination of maltiness, but with a dry finish, and a crisp bitter hop foundation that isn't TOO bitter. It's hard, especially at the homebrew scale where mash temps, alpha acid percentages and hop utilization can all have large margins of error.

So what have I learned? Well, first and foremost, I'm a big believer that German-style beers should get their maltiness primarily from Pilsner and Munich malts (which give a rich, bready sweetness) rather than crystal malts (which give a sugary sweetness). So I think the first thing you have to nail down is your Munich to Pilsner ratio for your grain bill. You can add a little CaraMunich (and I do add a pound of Caramunich III per ten gallons) but that shouldn't be your primary source of maltiness. (The exception is Uerige, which is all Pilsner plus a small amount of specialty malts, but it's the least traditional of the Altstadt Alts and in my opinion is too thin and thus unbalanced in its bitterness.)

Now an early mistake I made was trying to make my Alt maltier (to stand up to the hop bitterness) by upping the temperature of my saccharification rest. But I quickly learned that upping your mash temp leaves you with a fuller, sweeter maltiness, and an Alt needs a dry finish. As such, I do a protein rest at 122°F and a sacc rest at 151°F. If you want your Alt to be maltier, up the Munich; don't up the mash temp.

The final part of the equation is obviously the hoppiness. Your level of hops will be dependent on both the maltiness of your beer and your personal preference for bitterness. Nearly every American Alt I've had is too low in bitterness* (Metro's Iron Works is to style, though even that is on the low end of the spectrum by Düsseldorf standards). Our last Alt came in at an estimated 45 IBU's with an O.G. of 1051 and it just won first place in its category at the inaugural Chicago Winter Brew Fest, so I guess it strikes a nice balance.

That being said, I had a chance to try my latest Alt side-by-side with a bottle of Füchschen Alt and I've decided I want to cut my Munich down from 14 lbs. to 12 (for the record, I use Best Malz Munich II, which is a dark Munich) and up my Pilsner from 4 to 6 lbs. and then drop the IBU's closer to 40. The idea is to drop the maltiness a little (to make it slightly lighter) and then reduce the bitterness accordingly. Unfortunately there's no easy way to calculate how fewer IBU's I need to compensate for the decreased Munich, so I'm just guessing. But the result should be a slightly lighter but equally-well-balanced Altbier.

So, I guess that concludes my rambling about Alt. Let me stress once again that this isn't authoritative. It's simply what I've learned based on some reading, some tasting, and lots of trial and error. If anybody else has thoughts, I'd love to hear them. Here's to building a better Altbier!

* I should clarify that most Alts from production breweries are under-hopped. I've had several great Alts from American brewpubs, but unfortunately those tend to be one-off brews and are almost always only available on draft.

Hello, hello, it's good to be back (and I brought Glühapfelwein)

Happy New Year! I was never the most prolific blogger on the planet, but I was always really good about keeping track of my brew days . . . until this fall, that is. That's when I learned something: apparently blogging is a lot like exercising--the longer you go without doing it, the harder it is to get back into the swing of things.

See, despite not having posted since September, I've been brewing just as regularly as I always have. I've brewed another Düsseldorf Altbier, a Doppelbock for the holidays (a portion of which had maple syrup added to the secondary) and, just last week, a Munich Helles. I also fermented a hard cider. The problem is, once I got behind on the blogging, I felt like my next post had to cover everything I had done in the meantime. So the task of getting back on the blogging horse seemed to grow larger and larger with each passing day.

But enough with the excuses... Rather than go back and cover everything over the past three months, I'm going to start quasi-fresh just to get going again. I hope to fill in the gaps here and there, but for now I'll get 2012 started by sharing a recipe I came up with that I think is pretty sweet: Glühapfelwein.

To explain what Glühapfelwein is, let's start with something you might be more familiar with: Glühwein. Similar to Gløgg, Glühwein is a German mulled wine that many Chicagoans know as the stuff you can get served in a little ceramic boot if you visit the Christkindlmarket (Chicago's German Christmas market). It translates roughly as "burning wine," and it's essentially wine that's simmered with various spices popular at the holidays. It's also generally sweetened with sugar.

Now, a few weeks ago the kids and I were watching the Claymation Christmas Special (the most underrated Christmas special in the history of television) and they had a running joke about wassailing. This led me to look up some wassail recipes, and I was surprised to find that many were cider-based. Well, by pure coincidence Leah and I made five gallons of cider earlier in the fall, so this gave me an idea: what if I made Glühwein, but instead of wine I used our cider as the base?

The end result is something I call Glühapfelwein (Apfelwein, literally "apple wine," being German for "cider"), and it came out awesome. I based it off of a fairly simple Glühwein recipe I found online which only uses two spices most people already have in their kitchen--cinnamon and clove--so it can make a good jumping-off point for those who want to experiment with other spices, but I found it to be pretty awesome as-is. It also would be lower in alcohol because our cider, at around 6.5% ABV, is significantly lower than a typical red wine, so I added enough brandy to boost it up to typical Glühwein levels. And without further ado, here's the recipe:

Pour 3/4 c. of hard cider into a sauce pan; throw in one cinnamon stick. Add 1/2 c. sugar and simmer until dissolved. At this point squeeze the juice of one orange into the pot. Spear ten cloves into the peel that's left and throw that into the pot too. Bring to a low simmer for 20 minutes to a half hour. After then, take out cinnamon stick and orange peel and add 750mL or 3 c. of cider. Heat for another ten minutes or until warm and carbonation is mostly gone. Just before serving, add 1/2 c. of brandy and stir well. Makes roughly 4 6-oz. servings.

One final note I should add... Our cider is fairly dry (I fermented 4 gallons of cider until completely dry and then back-sweetened with 1/2 gallon fresh cider) so if you use a commercial cider, or if your hard cider is sweeter, you may want to start with less sugar and then add to taste. Enjoy, and happy 2012!

Brew day: F3 Münster Altbier and Gust Front Leipzig-style Wheat

Before lagers dominated the German brewing landscape, everything was ale. Over time, most of these German ale styles disappeared as people gravitated towards Pilsner, Helles, Doppelbock and the like. However, ales survived in a couple areas: the south (especially Bavaria) and the north Rhine valley. In the south, the ale of choice is Weizenbier (a/k/a Weissbier), which with its high percentage of wheat malt and its distinct tangy yeast is easily distinguished from lager. In the Rhine valley, however, the ale beer that survived is best described as a hybrid: it's fermented at ale temperatures with a rather clean top-fermenting yeast and then cold-conditioned like a lager. Since these hybrid beers still use the "old" method of ale brewing, they're generally referred to as Altbier (literally "old beer").

Two styles of Altbier are prominent today: Düsseldorf Altbier (Uerige, Metropolitan Iron Works) and North German Altbier (Kutcher Alt, Alaskan Amber). There are plenty of resources out there for folks who want to brew either of these styles. But there are other regional Altbiers that are either dying or extinct (you can read about some of them here). The only other Altbier I've come across in the U.S. is Münster Alt--Pinkus Müller can be found in Chicago at Binny's--so I figured I'd brew one for this year's all-Altbier Novemberfest.

Now, while there's plenty of info on Düsseldorf and North German Alts, there's virtually nothing on Münster Alts. Hell, I've found far more information on Gose than I have Münster Alt. But there are a couple recipes floating around that suggest 50% Pilsner, 40% wheat and 10% Munich. It should also be lightly hopped, somewhere between 15 and 25 IBU's. The biggest key, though, is that it needs to have a slight lactic tang.

As I noted in my last blog post, I brewed a Leipziger Gose a few months ago but due to a combination of neglect and bad luck it got infected and I had to dump it. I wanted to brew another one ASAP, so I decided I could do a split batch with the Münster Alt. The Gose should be at least 50% wheat, so as a compromise I elected to go with 50% wheat, 40% Pils and 10% Munich for my grain bill for both beers. As for the lactic tang, I'll have two options: I can add food-grade lactic acid to taste, or I could blend in a little of the soured Gose. I'm still not sure which I'll go with.

Before I recap the brew day, I should note that I had a couple new toys to play with today. The first is my new Blichmann burner. I initially bristled at the high price tag, but several folks assured me it's worth the money. We'll see how much more efficient it is than my old jet burner, but I can tell you it's definitely more quiet, plus I like that it's low to the ground (less chance of my idiot dog setting his tail on fire--again). I also decided to split my hose that runs from the mash tun to my kettle so that there's a second line that I can runs to a pitcher (as you can see to the left). That way, when I'm done recirculating (or when I want the check the flow rate) I can throw a couple valves and switch from filling the kettle to filling a pitcher or vice versa. It's rather simple, but makes things WAY easier for me.

For the brew day, I went with a 20-minute rest at 125°F (I like to do this with wheat or rye) and then a 45-minute sacc rest at 151°F. I collected for about an hour and a half, brought to a boil for 20 minutes, and then collected 6 gallons at ~100°F for my Gose. I pitched lactobacillus into the carboy and it's currently sitting in a water bath which stays between 100°F and 115°F.

The remainder of the kettle was hopped and boiled for another hour. I went with two additions: Warrior hops at 60 minutes and Saaz at knockout. Then I chilled and racked onto the yeast cake from our Schwarze Alt (which is done fermenting--it dropped all the way to 1.011!). As seems to be a pattern, my gravity was high (1.057 instead of the target 1.050) but my volume was low (4.75 gallons instead of 5.25). I used a half gallon to make a yeast starter for my Gose, so I added a half gallon of water to the remaining 4.25 gallons to drop the gravity down to 1.051. It's currently fermenting away in the basement chest freezer at 60°F.

I'm really curious to see how this turns out. I'll also need to decide how I want to do the lactic thing. Adding food-grade lactic acid would be easiest and most repeatable (unless I want to brew a Gose every time I brew a Münster Alt) but at the same time, if I already have a soured wort, why not take advantage of it? Stay tuned to see what I decide.