I have a lot of grain in my basement. Probably around 100lbs or so remaining from the bulk buy I did back in the summer. I have decided to try home roasting malts based off this fellow home brewers excellent how-to. I decided to start small, roasting 0.5lbs of 2-row and 0.5lbs of pilsner malt together at 375F for 45 minutes. I stirred it constantly to keep it from burning and now have it cooling in a bowl that I am stirring every 20 minutes or so. It should give the equivalent colour that of a 60L specialty malt I can buy the LHBS.

The reference I used recommends allowing the roasted malt to rest for 2 or more weeks, but I am going to be using it in a few days from now. Hopefully it does not impart too many off flavours, but I am hopeful I won’t even notice.

I am also going to be making up the mead I was dreaming up a few weeks ago. I got 7KG (15.7lbs) of honey for Christmas which is enough to make up a 5 gallon batch of potent mead. My brother and I went to the Chinook honey farm and meadery where we bought the honey, sampled some of their prize winning meads and even talked mead making with their head brewer. I took away some useful tips on mead making and an immense amount of honey for the honey wine I am planning.

I will probably tackle both of these home brews the same day, making the mead during the mash stage of the beer brewing.

I just spent the last two hours racking, bottling and cleaning two more of my home brews. One is the last all grain beer I will make for the year, bottled just in time for the holiday season; The Jolly Christmas Manticore Ale. This is a Christmas spiced golden ale made using Pilsner Malt, Tettnang hops and a variety of spices including cinnamon, allspice and coriander. It finished a bit lower than I was expecting, 1.007, making it 4.6% ABV. I primed with 3.6oz of dextrose and I managed to get exactly 34 pints of this ale, setting the cost at around $0.27 a bottle. I did not get a sample taste of it but it is one very clear, very golden ale. I can’t wait to try one in a couple weeks!

I also bottled the Skeeter Pee Plum, which I also primed with 2.0oz of dextrose. I got 30 pints of this cider,which has a final gravity of 0.998. I believe the ABV is around 5.5%-6.0% but it is impossible to tell because I dumped about 1/2 gallon of the wine must the left over from the Shiraz kit I am making for a friend. I took a sample taste of this concoction and can safely say it is not gross.

Once again almost every bottle I own is used. Now its time to start enjoying the holiday season. By getting liberally drunk.

Way back when I started my journey into home brewing one of the very first things I made was a mead. I split it into two different 1 gallon batches based of HBT’s Joe’s Ancient Orange Mead and Malkores Not-so-Ancient Orange Mead. I got around 12 355ml bottles of the mead’s and I very slowly over the period of a year drank them, one per month. Where the first bottle was best described as honey flavoured rocket fuel, the last bottle was something entirely divine.

Fast forward several months I found myself (unbeknownst) making my very first Braggot built from home brew left overs. Not unlike its mead cousin, my Braggot benefited from aging greatly.

My friends brought me a bottle of mead from a Meadery just outside of town a few months ago and I found myself once again thinking about mead making. Brewing mead is way easier then brewing a beer and is in my opinion much better than any wine or cider. My two major gripes about making mead is that it takes over a year to become good and the insanely high cost of honey. Even buying honey directly from the bee farm it costs almost double that of an extract batch of beer of the same gravity.

So for Christmas I asked for honey, lots and lots of honey. At least enough to make a 5 gallon batch of strong mead. I am planning to brew a batch of traditional mead sometime during the Christmas holidays and bulk age it for several months. I will probably split it up into different varieties around bottling time, making some into metheglin’s (spiced mead), some into sparkling and others left as just plain old mead. I want to have these around for celebrating my new born sons birthdays and maybe, if I can keep my grubby alcoholic mitt’s off of them, have a bottle for him on his 18th birthday.

Historical fact: If you told a Viking that he was drinking a girly honey drink he would split your head open with an axe and use your skull as a cup. Thats how extreme they were about mead. Note: May not be historically accurate.

I actually took this yesterday. The wine I am making for my friend was moved to the secondary as per its instructions and a gravity reading was taken at 1.000. The wine has a bit more to go before its finished, but I am still hopeful I will have it in bottles in the first weeks of the new year. I also found my secondary did not have enough room to hold all the wine must so I racked that last bit right on top of the Skeeter Pee Plum I am fermenting. It was most oak and yeast trub but considering the Skeeter Pee Plum is more of an experiment I am not overly concerned.

I also took a reading for the Christmas ale I am making, which is already down to 1.010, which means its ‘finished’. I mashed with a pretty high temperature for a more full bodied beer so it should not go any lower, but its going to need at least two more weeks before I can bottle it. I am probably not going to have time for the next couple of weeks to do much more with all my home brews with Christmas sneaking up. Except maybe drink them…