F F F. My phone decided to stop working yesterday, and so I lost all of the pictures of the latter half of the malting process. I was going to do a step by step on how to malt... anyways, Im going to Best Buy to see if they can help me out. Hopefully they can get my pictures back, if not I might be SOL.

BALLS!

For a while now, I have been malting and toasting my own grains for all my beers. I think the official count is the last eight batches have been made from only home malt. Suck on that, overpriced homebrew shop! The only problem is the fact that I tend to jump into things full-force, like an action star jumping out of the third story window of a burning building while rescuing a baby. Sure, in the end it turns out great, but I don't take the time to think things through and take notes, so when I go to repeat the process, I could end up with a totally different beer. Or using the same analogy, I could end up with a broken leg and a dead baby.

OK, maybe not that bad, but with all of my home malted beers I have been putting in two to four specialty malts, roasted for different lengths of time. This becomes a problem because in the end I don't really know which malt is having the greatest effect on the color and taste of my finished beers. And now that the burning obsession with home malting has died down, its time to get serious and start learning the effects of toasting and roasting on my beers.

So with all that in mind, over the last couple of weeks I made two wheat beers: a dunkleweizen and a hefeweizen. The hefeweizen recipe looked like this:

2.4 lb pale malt
2.4 lb wheat malt
Mt Hood/Goldings to 15 IBU

Easy enough. Mashed in the mid 50's. I racked this one over to "secondary", which basically means I want to free up my buckets and look at my pretty beer in a see through container, and it looks like this:

The dunkleweizen was essentially the same recipe, BUT (and I know I already talked about this in my last post) I roasted half of the wheat malt in the oven @ 400 degrees for 30 minutes. Differnent hop schedule too, but this experiment was more about color, so that doesn't matter. I JUST racked that one over to the OMGlookatmyprettybeerbottle a few minutes ago and it looks like THIS!
Big difference! Also, the sample tasted great. Roasted wheat is something I have never been able to use since it doesn't really exist at a homebrew shop, and it is VERY interesting.

Both beers taste awesome and I am pumped to keg them. Actually, now I think it will be easier for me to continue to let my pumpkin beer age until Thanksgiving, since I know I have these two great beers on deck!

Alright, I gotta go work on getting a keg empty so I can get one of these going... PEACE!

The snow is falling, Buster hates going outside, I have to go find my jacket, and my beers always stay in the perfect fermentation temp... yep, its wintertime again! I never thought I would be the guy to say it, but damn it, I love the winter. Since I have not done a brewing update in a while, I figured now would be a good time to just post my brewing adventures of the last couple of weeks.

The first thing I did when I got home from tour was malt a batch of wheat. It took FOREVER, I assume because of the colder temperatures. The first thing I brewed with that batch of wheat was my hefeweizen recipe. Same recipe that I always make, but this time with HOME MALT! I just pulled a sample of this batch the other day and it tastes great, only a week in.

The second thing I brewed was a dunkelweizen, kinda. What I did was I toasted 1.5 pounds of my wheat malt in the oven @400 degrees for a half hour, and I also used S04 instead of 06, hence the "kinda." Heres a picture of me preparing for my brew day ritual. Isn't that grist pretty?
Today I started a new batch of barley malt
AND tasted my pumpkin ale, which is tasting pretty damn awesome right about now. I'm trying hold out until my mom visits to keg it, but I don't know if I will make it that long!

Other than that, I've just been enjoying the weather and enjoying my beers currently on tap. Right now, its my copper ale (which is the tits), my Chinook IPA (tasting pretty good as well) and apfelwein, which I can't get enough of. Life is great.

With this current batch of barley I will be making a "how to" on how to malt grain. So stay tuned for that, keep warm, and DRINK HOMEBREW!