First Brew: Dithyrambic Roasted Brown Ale

Emptying our carboy.

Our first real attempt at a brew was this recipe straight from The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, which has served as our guide into this world thus far. This is an Intermediate level recipe in the book, but does not call for any actual grain, instead favoring dark liquid malt extract.

Since Chris had been picking up the supplies at our LBS: The Brooklyn Kitchen; he was lucky enough to catch their in-house home brew expert who talked him into modifying the recipe into a partial mash (a step in brewing between using only malt extracts to going all grain, for those new out there). Unfortunately since we started this blog after this beer was already brewed, I can’t recall the exact recipe (we’re bad brewmasters, but we’re trying!). I do know that our grain mix featured black malt and non-malted roasted barley. We used a mix of both liquid and dry malt extracts.

The brew process was pretty straight-forward. Within 24 hours our carboy was full of activity. We had a blow-off tube for the first five days and then later switched to a three-chamber airlock. After fermenting in our primary container for just over two weeks, we bottled. The photo above is the transfer from our carboy to our bottling bucket. We primed with corn sugar and bottled everything, leaving just enough to sample.

We were both pleased with our first brew. First of all, it tasted like beer. Huge success! No other weird smells, tastes, or anything funky like that. Secondly, it tasted like good beer. The recipe is basically a well-hopped brown ale. My first impression was that it had similar characteristic to Rogue’s Dead Guy Ale. Finally, it had an amazing color. In the carboy it looked pitch black, but when passing it through a tube to the bottling bucket it had more of a translucent brown, like a Coca-Cola on ice. It also seems to have a nice alcoholic content, but we did not have a hydrometer yet to take any readings, so that will remain a mystery for now.

We plan on stopping by the Brooklyn Kitchen this weekend for the first Home Brew Salon. There will be other home brew enthusiasts bringing in samples and maybe even some legit local brewers there. Personally, I’m a little nervous to bring our very first creation to this type of thing, especially because it should really prime for another week, but I’m hoping to gain some insight from the more seasoned brewers there and will bring few by to sample.

We will come back to this beer in the future and report on it’s taste after it’s fully primed. We also have a new brew on the way and this time we fully documented the entire process. Stay tuned.