Honey

It's been a busy few weeks so I haven't had much time to brew. I did however discover that a Boston based homebrewer's club exists (www.wort.org), which was a great experience. I learned so much from the people there, including a few out of the ordinary brewing techniques.

However, last night I finally had the chance to brew again; this time with a recipe I've had since President's Day: the White House Honey Porter. In the past I've brewed the White House Honey Ale, which is currently waiting to be bottled.

The interesting thing to me is that both of the White House Recipes contain honey (given they have their own bee farm).

Not from the White House bee farm

However, I'm honestly not too familiar with using honey in beers yet. I've always wanted to try to make mead, which is honey based. However, the only beer recipe I've used it for previously was a Honey Amber, which actually turned out quite well. But, it was surprising that it wasn't particularly sweet, nor would you necessarily realize that there was honey in the recipe from the taste.

After researching it a bit more, the Honey Amber seems to make sense. The boil time makes a big difference in what the honey adds to the beer. Honey naturally contains a lot of living organisms and bacteria, that give it a good amount of flavor and aroma.

You have to boil the honey in the wort for sanitization. However, if you boil it for 20+ minutes, you are likely to kill off many of the things living in the honey resulting in a lack of that aroma and honey flavor in your beer. However, there will be a good amount of highly fermentable sugar left for your yeast to convert to alcohol.

So it depends what exactly you are looking to do. For my two White House Honey recipes, I used variations which boiled it for about 30 mins, so I'm not expecting a huge honey flavor. However, the original White House recipes suggestion boiling for only 5 minutes. Either way, I'll find out soon enough and I'll be drinking like a president regardless! (recipes below)

Today I'm Drinking: The Efficient Czech

I recently found a few bottles of the 'Efficient Czech' lying around. It was actually the first beer recipe I concocted myself back in October. My goal was create an inexpensive pilsner variation with the resources and capabilities I had.

A pilsner is a type of lager which was created in a Czech city called Plzen (actually quite a cool city). Today, numerous beers are based after this style including Pilsner Urquell, Stella Artois, and many American beers.

Now a very important characteristic a pilsner is that it's a lager, not an ale. This is a significant difference in the brewing process. They both use different types of yeast. However, the lager uses a bottom-fermenting yeast and is works at lower temperatures, ~55 degrees for a long period of time (often a number of months). An ale is top fermented at a higher temperature, ~65-70 degrees, and is much quicker process.

For me the implications of this are that I cannot currently create a real lager as I have no consistent location or temperature control around 55 degrees. Since I was also just getting into brewing when I brewed the Efficient Czech, 3 months felt too long to wait for an experiment.

Hence I decided to add all the ingredients of typical Pilsner, but use an Ale yeast. This is where the name 'Efficient Czech' comes into play. The yeast will get the job done much more quickly than a lager yeast. This also plays into many of my experiences in the Czech Republic. If you've ever been there for non-vacation purposes, you will have found that getting even some basic tasks done takes a lot of time. It's a very different pace of life; and although still improving significantly, it's easy to see some of the remnants of the past communist structure. Compared to Boston's fast pace, it seems inefficient, although of course there are tradeoffs.

Anyways, enough about the name, and more about the beer!

The recipe is as follows:
-5 lbs pilsner malt extract
-2 oz Saaz Hops
-Munton's Ale Yeast

It's pretty straight forward. Sticking to one type of malt; the Saaz Hops are grown in the Czech Republic and are used in almost all pilsners. The only wrench I threw in was the ale yeast, which we've already discussed. And all of the ingredients together were quite cheap.

The end result: a pretty tasty and simple beer. It's on the lighter end and very drinkable. The only particularly distinguishing characteristic was the yeasty flavor to it, which a lot of people actually liked. I think I'll actually recreate a variation of this soon so I'm ready for the summer months!