unionrdr

Recipes 

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Everything works if ya let it-Roady(meatloaf)

Nickh08215

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Smoked turkey sounds awesome! I've had it deep fried and it was the juiciest I've ever eaten, but I gotta try smoking it sometime. Minus the flaming smoker hahah.

And honestly, the only dark beer I've ever had we're black and tans or guiness so I have no reference for a English brown. So I don't think I'll be to disappointed even with off favors, unless it just tastes like crap which I highly doubt.

Honestly, I wis there was some way to keep te sweetness of the wort in the final product. It tasted amazing when I tried it before putting it in the fermenter. Talking about its got me curious. TASTE TEST TIME!

Nickh08215

Recipes 

Well... It's beer! Haha. I don't taste any fruity or weird flavors, but I do get a slightly bitter, alcoholic aftertaste which I would assume is the fusels, but it's not very off-putting at all, and of I didn't know any better I would just account that to it being a dark beer, so I think I'm in good shape. I'll call this brew a success!

Wierd though. Fermentation slowed almost to a halt for the past few days (bubbles in airlock every 2-5 minutes, now it's back to having air bubbles about every 30 seconds. There has been no temp change at all. Anybody have any reasons for this?

JonM

Recipes 

Here's what you can look forward to!

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Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

RM-MN

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There was an earthquake that you didn't feel and it stirred up the beer just enough for it to release CO2 or maybe a hurricane is forming nearby and the lower atmospheric pressure caused the beer to bubble or maybe .....

Bubbles are fun to watch but other than that they don't mean a whole lot. While your yeast are actively eating sugars the give off CO2 and part of that escapes through the airlock and part gets dissolved into the beer to be released later. When you think your beer may have had enough time in the fermenter, use your hydrometer to check. It's the only way to be sure.

Nickh08215

Recipes 

That looks great! Did u have anything stuffed in the cavity of it during cooking? If I was you I woulda cut a lemon and an onion in half and shoved it in there with a bunch of thyme and rosemary just for some aromatic flavors, maybe some garlic too. But next year I'm coming to your house! Haha. Did you serve any home brew with it??

And also I don't have a hydrometer yet so I'm gonna let it sit on the yeast for a few weeks just so I know there's no possibility that it's still active.

I still gotta buy bottles so I'm gonna get the mad brewers kit from NB as my next buy for my mini brewery. I'm gonna need it once I start making my melomels.

Like I said ima chef so really mead and melomels seem like they'd peak my creative interest a lot more then beer would just because I feel like there's a lot more I can do as far as flavors and aromatics. I'll brew beer to just do I have something to do while I wait on my melomels to age

I'm actually thinking of adding a small hint of vanilla to my caribou slobber just to enhance the chocolatey/coffee flavors I get as well as giving it a little more depth of flavor

jerrodm

Recipes 

A couple of things:

1--welcome to the fun! Sounds like you jumped right in, which is exactly what you should do. Brewing is nothing but great times*, and I'm sure you'll be hooked before you know it.

2--as others have said, your beer is probably fine. Read about 500 posts in this thread or until you've convinced yourself that this is true.

3--Don't rush to taste/measure/mess with your beer. Go buy some good beer at the store to kill your urge to screw around with the fermenter. Take a walk, or a cold shower. Take up yoga or meditation. Anything, just leave it alone for a couple of weeks. At least. Then leave it for another week. It'll get there all by itself. And it'll be fine.

4--Start brewing another batch. Like now. First off, you'll still be fresh enough to remember the things you did wrong the first time around, so you can start to correct some of your mistakes. Second off, you want to get into the habit of brewing regularly, because that first batch will be gone before you know it, and there's nothing worse than realizing that you've got eight homebrews left and nothing in the pipeline, so there's going to be at least a couple of weeks where you have NO homebrew...it's the worst. Brew early and often, and keep your pipeline full.

Again, welcome to the fun. Cheers!

*This isn't entirely true. Sometimes, like anything else you come to care about deeply, it can be maddeningly frustrating, like when you just can't figure out why you're not hitting your target gravity, or your fridge fails at just the wrong time and you ruin a great beer with high fermentation temps). But it all comes out in the wash. MOST of it is great!

RM-MN

Recipes 

There must be over 20 different malts and perhaps 30 or more hop varieties and a bunch of different yeasts to get creative with plus you can add other things to change the character of the beer. I just heard of a coconut beer that is available in very limited locations that sounds good and racking onto oak chips or vanilla beans or some fruit or...
You can brew every week for the rest of your life and not use up all the possible combinations of beers.

Nickh08215

Recipes 

Well I guess that's just my personal opinion ya know? Like I know you can get all kinds of crazy delicious beers from messing with differant ingredients, brew styles, and even amounts of differant things, but a mead is like a blank canvas to transform into anything you want. Beer to me
Feels like a more exact science that I dont feel I want to dive into this early in my brewing. Eventually I'll probably be making crazy beer recipes too, don't get me wrong, but just not at this stage in the game for me

dadshomebrewing

Recipes 

mead is easier up front, but takes longer before it's ready (up to 6 months in the jug or bottles).

what i'm doing is learning to make a very basic pale ale, and use that as a baseline, and learning how, and when, to add things, and what to add.

much like when i first learned to cook, i learned how to make a few basic pan sauces, and braises, and then over time added and subtracted things to learn how they work.

i'm not a chef, but just an old geezer who likes to eat.

as far as mead vs beer, i make a batch of mead once in a while, and a batch of beer the other weekends, always 1 gallon batches.

and, much like when i was learning how to cook, i vary something up or down, or add something different each time.

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'Tis himself

In the fermenters: nada

In the bottle: Out of Camber Amber Ale / California Cream of 3 Crops / Wize Ole Dunkel

In the fridge(and the glass): Pilsner-Urquell(AG) / Brew Free or Die Pale Ale / Christmas Cranberry / Wizened Hefe / Mead (2) / Full Sail Pale Ale / No Quarter Porter / Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown Ale (on the South Side of Chicago)

On Deck: