Batch 020: Hoppy Braggot

Our first braggot! It’s based based on one of Ken Schramm’s braggot recipes: not his Spargentina, but rather his Hefty Braggot recipe, adapted into a malt-extract recipe, from pp. 169–70 of The Compleat Meadmaker. Schramm says that hop lovers can double the amount of hops in his recipe, so I did. I think I may try dry-hopping this with various hops after primary is done. The honey consisted of various amounts of things that we had available. I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

Ingredients in this batch

2016-09-16_19_18_14_HDR — Ingredients for batch 020.

Brew day: 11 August 2016

6 lb Briess CBW® Sparkling Amber dry malt extract.
6.4 oz. avocado varietal honey from San Marcos Farms.
2 lb., 15.6 oz. Hawaiian wildflower honey from Bennett's Honey Farm.
1 lb. carrot varietal honey from Flying Bee Ranch.
3 lb., 13.9 oz. Sun Harvest Simply Honey wildflower honey.
1.4 oz. Kirkland clover honey.
6 oz. Cascade hop pellets at 60 minutes.
2 oz. Cascade hop pellets at 30 minutes.
2 oz. Cascade hop pellets at 2 minutes.
2 tsp. Valley Brewers yeast nutrient.
2 tsp. Valley Brewers yeast energizer.
8 g. Lalvin D-47 wine yeast, rehydrated.
Water to total brew size of 5 gallons. (Goleta tap water, filtered with a Brita pitcher.)

BeerXML for this recipe, generated by BrewTarget.

Yield:

15 x 500 mL bottles
11 x 22 oz bottles
1 x 12 oz bottles
one hydrometer tube (approx ⅔ cup)
Total: Approx. 4 gallons.

Santized, sanitized, sanitized. Filtered three gallons of water and boiled it, then dissolved the malt extract in the boiling water, stirring. While waiting for the boil, filtered more water. When the wort boiled, started the timer and tossed in the first six ounces of Cascade hops. Kept stirring, adding another 2 oz. of hops at 30 and at 2 minutes. At flame-out, mixed in the honey, yeast energizer, and yeast nutrient, then cooled the wort with an immersion chiller. While it was chilling, I rehydrated the yeast. When the wort hit the target temperature, it went into a fermentation bucket, was topped off to five gallons, and got an airlock. (In retrospect, it should have had a blowoff hose from the first: Schramm wasn't kidding when he said [t]his ferment will be vigorous, and will generate LOTS of krausen.)

Original gravity: 1.096.
Final gravity: 1.030
Estimated ABV: 8%

Observations

2016-08-15_00_02_56_HDR — Blowoff hose with hop trub on 15 August 2016, after initial fermentation slowed.

2016-08-12T10:17: No fermentation yet visible in the bucket.
2016-08-12T15:03: Oh wow. Schramm wasn't kidding when he said this would generate a lot of krausen in the bucket. This has foamed up into the airlock, which has overflowed, in the last few hours. Replaced the airlock with a blowoff hose, and it's really pushing foam and air four feet higher into a covered bowl full of water.
2016-08-15T16:30: Fermentation having apparently slowed, I traded the hose for an airlock. Hojeez, is there a lot of hop trub left over in that hose. Cleaning the entire length is going to be interesting.
2016-09-10: Added ⅔ cup priming sugar and bottled.
2016-09-16: Oh wow. This is going to be delicious. (Actually, it already is, but it will be amazing when the hop bitterness get integrated into the taste of the braggot a bit more.)
2017-01-10: Virtually all of the hop character aside from the bitterness has been closed off by now. It's still strongly malty and sweet, and tastes quite good; but some of the remaining bottles are quite yeasty, probably because our siphon was oxygenating the beer at bottling time. It's still pretty tasty, though.

Lessons learned so far

No, really, be more careful about filtering out hop trub when transferring to a fermenting vessel. (I could not believe how much got blown into the blowoff hose.)
Trust Schramm.