Turkey Beer and Slack-Asses

Slack Asses:
It's been a long time since we've posted.  And I'd say, that as Emperor of Brewtherville Labs Brew Club (which is self-appointed, not assumed to be the leader of the bunch and anyone can name their own title) that it is my responsibility to make sure the blog gets updated.  But it's not.  And I don't want to be a bitch nag about it.  That said, let he who said, "I'll write the blog because that's what I do", write your fucking blog.  That blog is two beers overdue.  So, I'm skipping over that beer and moving on to the Turkey Thyme beer.

Turkey Beer:
I have very fond memories of going to my great Grandparent's house for Thanksgiving.  My Grandmother has this amazing secret stuffing recipe (a requisite for all Grandmothers) and a bowl full of butter with some succotash in it.  I wanted to brew a beer that embodied Thanksgiving.  I wanted Rosemary, Thyme and Sage in the beer.  The first issue was what type of beer to make.  After a research sabbatical evening at Alewife it was suggested by beer connoisseur and one time homebrewer Jon C.  He suggested a Dunkel or Marzen.  I came home with a mixer of malty beer threw in some fresh rosemary from the garden and tried them out.  The winner was a brown ale.  The maltiness and lack of hop aroma and bitterness really went well with the rosemary.  And, at the same time I got ambitious and wanted to do an all grain brew.
There are basically three ways to make homebrew and it has to do with the malt you use.  The basic level is the syrup malt. This is malted barley that has had the sugars extracted and boiled down into a syrup.  The next level up is dry malt extract (or DME).  This is similar to syrup, but instead of a liquid, it is powdered.  The next step up is a big step which requires additional equipment, namely a mash/lauter tun,and you need to be able to boil large volumes of water. See the previous post for the all-grain description

Recipe:
10.5 lbs of Crystal malt
0.28 lbs of Chocolate malt.
2 oz. Williamette whole hops, 60 min
1 oz. Kent Goldings pellet hops, 2 min
Two large sprigs of rosemary at 15 min,
1 Tbs of ground sage at 15 min,
1 Tbs of ground thyme at 15 min.

4 Gal of strike water at 163DegC for 1 hour.
4 Gal of Sparge water at 170DegC for 20 min.

Boil it all down, add hops at hop schedule, add spices.

Cool, ferment, bottle.

First of all the initial gravity (amount of alcohol-able sugar) was really low (like 1.024).  After a week, it wasn't fermenting.  I went to The Thirsty Brewer and asked guru Tom, what the deal was.  He took one look at the recipe and declared, "This recipe is horrible".  Horrible!  Horrible?
Let me take this opportunity to educate you.  Malted barley can be separated into two groups.  Base malts and specialty malts. Base malts are malted and dried.  They have a bunch of alcohol-izable sugars in them and have the special enzymes to break down bigger non-alcohol-izable sugars into alcohol-izable sugars. Specialty grains are malted kilned so that the sugars caramelize and are not broken down into alcohol-izable sugars we well, PLUS, the awesome enzymes are toast.  So basically that meant that I didn't have many alcohol-izable sugars in my beer.  Tom suggested that I add 4.5 lbs of DME to the beer.  So I did.

The end result was a very interesting beer.  Not good per se, but interesting.  It had an aroma of tomato paste, but you could taste the rosemary on the tongue, and the sage and thyme as an afterthought.  Really, you'd have one bottle and think, this sucks.  Then the next, "Oh.  It's not that bad".  But really it was.  Next year will be better. The best thing about it was the label.