I was on Twitter the other day and saw an interesting idea. It's called The Session, and it is a way to have a conversation across several independent blogs. Apparently, there are a lot of beer bloggers who try to come up with a themed post each month to post on the same day. This month’s theme caught my eye. It’s all about A Christmas Carol – the theme of past, present and future as it relates to beer. Look for the tag #TheSession to see other posts. Since this is a brewing blog (when I have time to brew), I’ll limit mine to beers I’ve brewed. Each of these was or will be consumed at Christmas time, so we’ll call them the Ghosts of Beermas Past, Present, and Future.
The Ghosts of Beermas Past:
Let’s be honest. Most of us have several ghosts of our past. In my brewing history, I’ve tried to do at least one truly special beer per year that stands out as a sort of “Anniversary Ale.” As my Ghosts of Beermas Past, we’ll focus on them.
Barley Wine from a kit - One of the first of these was a barley wine brewed from a kit from The Homebrewery. It’s an easy-to-use kit with everything you need, and it makes a truly excellent barley wine that aged very well. It’s got an excellent malt backbone and is well balanced by the hops. Make sure you allow enough room in your kettle for the HUGE amount of malt extract you have to put in, and make sure you stir, stir, stir. Once it’s brewed, it should be given some serious time in the bottle if you can stand it. Six months is good, a year is better. Want to add a little extra to it? Age it on medium-toasted oak cubes for part or all of that time. Morebeer.com has an excellent tutorial on using oak in homebrewed beers.
Tart Cherry Blonde– A light, effervescent ale, this beer was like champagne when Christmas came around. It was brewed in the summer, and was in the bottles for a long time after, so I was able to enjoy it for a few years. It was a special beer, so I kept it as long as I could. I highly recommend using fresh tart cherries which have been deep-frozen and then thawed, but using cherry puree or already-frozen cherries will work, too. Add the cherries in secondary fermentation, and let the beer sit on them and their pits for a good amount of time. I’m pretty sure I left mine in secondary for at least a month. I hear that some brewers will let them sit on the fruit until the only thing left of the fruit is the pits, which can impart a woody flavor. At any rate, the recipe for this beer is available here, and you should give it a shot sometime if you want to brew something special for Christmas next year.
My own barley wine recipe – I never posted this online, and I don’t seem to have my original recipe anywhere, which makes this barley wine I made impossible to reproduce. In retrospect, I kind of like that I can’t reproduce it, since it was brewed for a specific purpose. The original idea was to create a special oak-aged beer to celebrate my son’s birth last year. I brewed it when I found out we were having a baby, and bottled it in the spring after aging it on medium-toasted American oak cubes. I didn’t check the flavor as often as I should have, and over-oaked it a bit, so I blended the beer with a pale ale which used the same hops (all centennial for both beers). The result was an exceptionally smooth, well-balanced barley wine which was still pretty high in alcohol. I still have a few bottles left, but only a few.
The Dark Wheat – This is the dunkelweiss recipe I brewed for my Dad, who is a huge fan of Aventinus. Two years ago, we had a bunch ready for Christmas, but with one problem: The carbonation was inconsistent. I had neglected to stir the beer after adding the priming sugar, so some bottles had a lot of carbonation, and some had almost none. To fix it, I poured half of the bottles into a keg and force-carbonated them. The beer was always delicious, but the kegged version ended up aging for a year and a half until my Dad built himself a kegerator in his shop this year. That beer went into the kegerator about 6 or 7 months ago, and is still pouring strong. The flavor has changed a bit, and the beer has mellowed in some ways. It’s starting to get a few more cidery alcohols in it, so it’s pretty much past its prime, but it’s an 8% beast that aged well for a long time.
The Ghost of Beermas Present:
This is where I’ll be giving you a recipe. It’s a big Christmas Ale. My efficiency is a bit higher than that assumed in the recipe formulation, so the beer in my fermenter right now is a 10% ABV spiced strong ale. It should be ready for Christmas this year, which means a lot of merry family and friends. The recipe is based on one for “Colonial Strong Ale found in the September/October 2011 issue of Zymurgy, but with a few changes for my own tastes. I added a small amount of pumpkin pie spice, too, since I doubt I’ll be making flip with it any time soon.
Originally, I planned on oak-aging half of this, but I think now I’ll just bottle it all. If I like it, I can oak age a batch next year for Christmas.
Without further ado, here’s the recipe:
Colonial Christmas Ale – All Grain
Recipe type: All Grain
Batch Size – 5 gallons
Volume boiled – 6 gallons
Original gravity – 1.086
Final Gravity – 1.019
Color – 16.5 L
Bitterness – 59 IBUs
Alcohol – 8.7% ABV
Ingredients
14 lbs Maris Otter Malt
.5 lb Crystal Malt – 90 L
.5 lb Crystal Malt – 120 L
1 lb Dark Brown Sugar
11.8 HBU East Kent Goldings (2 oz @5.9% AA for 60 minutes)
1 oz East Kent Goldings (1 oz @5.9% AA for 30 minutes)
1 tsp Irish Moss (added 15 minutes to end of boil)
½ tsp Pumpkin Pie Spice (store-bought or make your own) (added 5 minutes to end of boil)
2 packages Danstar Nottingham Ale Yeast
Procedure:
Mash at 154F for an hour or until starches have converted. Mash out at 170F and sparge with 180F water to make 6 gallons. Heat to boiling and add 1st hop addition. Boil 30 minutes and add second hop addition. Boil 15 more minutes, add Irish Moss. Boil 10 minutes and add 1 lb dark brown sugar and ½ tsp pumpkin pie spice (you can always add more in secondary or at bottling if it is not enough). Boil 5 minutes and turn off heat. Cool the beer to 70F as quickly as possible and pitch the yeast. Ferment at 55-70F until fermentation stops (about 10 days, may be longer). After fermentation ceases, rack to secondary and age on oak or bottle as-is.
Extract with grain variation:
Replace 14 lbs Maris Otter malt with 8.4 lbs Dry Light Malt Extract. Steep the crystal malt in water at 154 degrees for 30 minutes, then pull out the grains, add the extract, and stir well. Heat to boiling, and proceed with instructions above.
Ghost of Beermas Future:
I hope to continue making my annual ale and enjoying it on Beermas. In the future, I will plan on these ales always being a challenge to my brewing skills. For instance, the original barley wine was the strongest beer I’d ever made. The Cherry Blonde was the first with real fruit. The oak-aged barleywine was the first with oak, and the Colonial Christmas Ale was the first I’ve made using pumpkin pie spices, which are notoriously easy to overdo. It’s also the first time I’ve tried to turn such a strong ale around in such a short period of time. Whether it is good is yet to be decided, but I have faith.
Possible future Christmas Ales are an oak-aged version of this Colonial Ale, which is planned for next year right now. I also may try a bourbon-oak aged beer or a sour beer before next Christmas. Of course, any beer that I brew is potentially a Christmas Ale if it makes it that long.
Looking for a good Christmas Ale recipe? I’ve thought of doing a Black Christmas, based on my Dark Forest Black IPA recipe found here.
Anyway, Happy Holidays to all of you. Thanks for reading and listening.
By the way, the images used in this post are from The Muppets Christmas Carol, which is a great version of the story.
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