A Trip to Flying Barrel!

Hi there,

As much as we are excited to start brewing beer in the comfort of home, we decided to get some tips from the experts...

So we drove up to Frederick, MD to brew some beer on the premises.  If you live in the DC/MD/VA area, I would highly recommend heading up there one afternoon.  Their friendly and knowledgable staff can either hold your hand through each step of the process of leave you alone to do your own thing.  The best part?  They have everything you need on hand to make a large variety of beer and you don't have to do the dishes! (That's what I call a win-win)

Our first step was to choose which beer we were going to brew.  My boyfriend and I went up to The Flying Barrel about a year ago and brewed a German-style Hefeweizen.  This time we were going to brew an oatmeal stout.  No creative name was given to the Hef, but this time around, we are hoping "Oats and Hoes" will be a new favorite.

Next, we measured out our ingredients.  Chocolate malt and roasted barely were added to the grain mill, and the oats were added after the fact, to prevent them from getting mushy.

The Selection of Grains

Flaked Oats

The Chocolate Malt Grains

Weighing our ingredients

Next, we put the grains in a grain bag, and steeped them in our copper kettle like tea.  Then it was time to sparge.  At The Flying Barrel, they take the grain bag out of the kettle, and hot liquid is poured over the grain bag.

Now for my favorite part...adding the malt extract.  For those of you playing at home, liquid malt extract is the beer caramel candy-like stuff I described in a previous post.  Seen here:

Mid-Pour

Liquid Delicious-ness

Time to bring things up to a boil and add the hops.

After all of our ingredients were all happy in the kettle, we poured them into the bucket.

Then it was time to cool things down with the wort chiller in order to add the yeast.

It was at about this point in the afternoon we stumbled upon a recipe that was impossible to resist.  The name of the beer was called...and I'm not making this up..."Vanilla Goat Scrotum".  It was a combination of black patent and 55L crystal grains, light and dark malt extract and of course vanilla.  Another ingredient that was new to me was something called Maltodextrin, which adds sweetness to the beer without being fermentable (because if it ferments, those sugars turn into alcohol...not that that would be the worst thing in the world...)

So, after learning that all the necessary ingredients were on hand, goat scrotum was born....

Because who DOESN'T want to know what THAT tastes like

The boiling goat beer

Or perhaps I'm alone in that thought

Anyway, we made two 5-Gallon batches of beer that afternoon.  We return in 3 weeks (it would normally be 2, but that's Thanksgiving weekend) to bottle!

The Wort Chiller in Action

To be continued...