National Homebrew Day 2016, Part 1 – Brewing the Frog and Gnome

Saturday, May 7 is National Homebrew Day, which the American Homebrewers Association celebrates with its annual Big Brew. Homebrewers across the USA will head to their patios and garages to fire up their systems on the same day, like some coast-to-coast hive mind straight out of the pages of Arthur C. Clarke’s seminal science fiction novel Childhood’s End (but with beards and cargo pants); linked by social media and a common tipsy feeling. What better way to celebrate the fact that being a homebrewer has never been cooler in this country, that the brotherhood (and sisterhood) is growing faster day by day?

Unless you’re like me, and you won’t be homebrewing that day.

Now, before you scroll straight to the bottom of this page to post hasty invective against my not showing solidarity with my homebrewing brothers and sisters, let me explain my two very good reasons:

1. I have no room to ferment another batch of beer until I keg the session IPA waiting in the closet, and I can’t keg that batch until my deceased kegerator “Chill Bill” is replaced; and
2. It’s my son’s birthday party.

If #1 made you feel sorry for me, good. If #2 made you think I’m an awesome dad, great. Never mind the fact that my son’s birthday was almost a month ago and that this party is just a small affair to allow a few friends to celebrate with him, given that we were at Walt Frigging Disney World on his actual birthday. (See? Awesome dad.)

So I won’t be brewing. But that won’t stop me from enjoying a tasty homebrew, right?

Oh, right. The broken kegerator. So drinking draft is out of the question.

Fortunately, I do have a couple of bottled homebrews at the ready. For the past few years, I only bottle commemorative beers for cellaring, but I just happen to have a bottle each in the fridge of the barleywine I brewed to celebrate my son’s birth in 2013 (and bottled for sampling at future special occasions, such as his birthday … it seems almost like I planned this all along, doesn’t it? I didn’t), and the wheatwine I brewed to celebrate my daughter’s birth in 2014.

So in honor of National Homebrew Day, I have decided to drink both of these big beers after the kids go to bed. Rest assured that two bottles of 11-12% ABV homebrew in a row should have me nice and tipsy like the rest of you. Solidarity, brothers and sisters.

I wrote about Old Froglegs Barleywine back in 2013, and the recipe is posted here. Gnome Brew Wheatwine, on the other hand, has not yet made an appearance on this blog. So I’m posting the recipe below and a little bit of the story behind it.

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Gnome Brew Wheatwine

Story: I set a high bar for myself by brewing an American barleywine as my first homebrew after my first child was born. So when the second came along, I had to do something similar. And since I still had most of the barleywine in my cellar, I decided to do something “similar but different”, and brewed a wheatwine.

Wheatwine isn’t exactly a style that’s littering the shelves at the local bottle shop. I first heard of the style when I picked up a bottle of Boulevard Brewing’s Harvest Dance, and found it lighter and brighter than a syrupy, boozy barleywine. So a wheatwine seemed like an excellent thematic companion and a flavorful counterpoint to the barleywine I already had a stock of.

The BJCP Style Guidelines don’t even have a category for wheatwine, and there aren’t many recipes out there. So beyond the bulk of advice I read online that said “make a barleywine with up to 50% wheat,” it seemed like I had free rein. I went back to the recipe for Old Froglegs, and modified it with the goal of using almost half wheat and making an end product that was lighter and fruitier. Here’s what I ended up with:

Grist:

• 10 lbs White Wheat Malt
• 9 lbs 8 oz American Pale Malt
• 3 lbs Vienna Malt
• 8 oz Crystal 40L
• 8 oz Caravienne Malt

Hops:

• 2.5 oz Chinook (13% AA) at 60 minutes

Other:

• 1 lb Agave Nectar, light

Yeast: Safale US-05 (28.75 grams)

Comparing it to the above-linked recipe for Old Froglegs, I split the base malt nearly in half with slightly more wheat than barley, and replaced the body malts with lighter versions (Munich with Vienna, Crystal 60 and 150 with Crystal 40 and Caravienne). Chinook was simply the highest alpha hop I had on hand, for maximum bitterness and no real flavor contribution. And I really liked the added fermentability from the pound of piloncillo I added in the boil to Old Froglegs, so I added simple sugar to the kettle here in the form of light agave nectar. I mashed at 149°F for 90 minutes, collected 9.5 gallons at 1.069 and then boiled for about 2 hours to achieve an OG of 1.101.

The beer fermented for 4 weeks before it was racked to secondary to age for another eight months. When it had smoothed out to my satisfaction, I bottled it with a half-pack of Danstar CBC-1. This is an incredible yeast for bottle conditioning. I highly recommend it when bottling beers with high ABV, after long aging, or both. It’s made specifically for bottle conditioning, but it’s not always easy to find, so in a pinch one can use champagne yeast.

The FG was 1.016, yielding a final ABV of 11.3%. I designed a label and named the beer Gnome Brew Wheatwine in honor of our daughter Vesper (Confused? Let’s just say that nicknames given to newborns before they’re discharged from the hospital have a habit of sticking around in my family).

So how did it come out? To be honest, it’s been in the bottle for less time than it was in the carboy, so it’s still mellowing, showing rapid improvement month to month. I’ll know for sure how it is this month when I open a bottle on National Homebrew Day for a side-by-side tasting against my 3-year-old barleywine. So watch this space, because I’ll be back next week with tasting notes for both beers.

Thoughts or questions about the recipe in the meantime? Comment below, or find me on Facebook. Happy National Homebrew Day a few days early … and until next week, cheers from myBrewHome to yours.