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Brewlog - "Cold Ethyl" Lemon Tea Beer III, 3 gal

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Chevette Girl

Chevette Girl

All around BAD EXAMPLE
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Apr 27, 2010
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Ottawa, ON

8 tbsp loose black chai tea (was out of regular black tea but this stuff barely tastes like a chai anyway)
zest from 3 lemons
1/4 oz Fuggles hops
1/4 oz Cascades hops
1/2 kg honey
just over 1/2 kg Munton's light LME

Boiled about a gallon of water, added tea, lidded and steeped for a few hours, brought to a boil, added honey and malt, brought back to just a simmer, turned off the heat, added lemon zest and hops, lidded and let it steep a while longer, adding some boiled and cooled water to make up the volume.

It's still too warm to pitch the Munton's Active Brewing Yeast I have, but I added some yeast energizer (forgot how much, it's written on a post-it note stuck to the fermenter two flights of stairs away), and at around 2.5 gal and too warm, it had a SG around 1.040 so probably by the time it cools and I get the other half gal of water in there the SG should be probably around 1.040, if not I'll add a bit of honey while I'm rehydrating the yeast.

The plan is for this batch to be fermented, primed and bottled PDQ so I still have some summer left for my summer beer.
 
It took all day to get this all done actually... started with digging my way through the empty bottles to get to the freezer... and digging my way through the "we've been working too many hours" mess my kitchen is in to get to a pot...

So after the water addition and temperature balancing, the SG was 1.030. I'm OK with that, I may add a little more honey later depending on where it stops, didn't have time this morning. Or maybe I won't, and I'll put it in bigger bottles...

Yeast was rehydrated and pitched this morning before work, airlock was blooping this evening.

I only started three batches last year, maybe sharing 5 part-time jobs with my husband ate a lot of time??
 
It blooped happily for a few days, when it stopped today I checked the SG, it's below 1.000 so I guess it's done. Still a fair amount of floating stuff though so if it doesn't sink before I rack it I may skim it off first. I'll probably put it in a carboy with a little more honey so it generates some CO2 to protect itself till I can get it bottled. Tastes pretty nice, I can definitely taste the hops and the lemon but I think it's not too bitter like initial tastings suggested it might be.
 
Bottled it today! Got something like 26 bottles, mostly 350 ml beer bottles but a few 500 ml flip tops as well.

I checked the SG when I thiefed some wort to dilute the priming honey with, and it was 1.004 so it should still have a tiny bit of sweetness and not too much alchol.

There was something like 2.5 gallons so I primed it with 1/3 cup of honey after racking it off the gross lees, looks like all the lemon zest and herbaceous bits from the hops all settled out nicely and from what I tasted I'm really liking the flavour this time, I think I got the hops just about right. Although perhaps next time, it could stand a touch more lemon.

I brought all the bottles upstairs because it's stinking hot today and I want them to carb up soon so I can still pretend to have a little summer left to drink it in!
 
Yes, that's what I had intended to do but was out when I went to start the recipe! :)

Oh, and apparently I didn't look at this post and called it "School's Out" instead when I labelled it. Really, it makes more sense that way anyway :p
 
Chevette Girl said:
I brought all the bottles upstairs because it's stinking hot today and I want them to carb up soon so I can still pretend to have a little summer left to drink it in!
Click to expand...
This recipe sounds interesting.

Gah!! I'll share a few months of summer with ya. We got 7 months of Summer last year; looks like this year will probably do the same. We're not even in the Dog Days yet. Too many 95+ days already; my yard looks like a jungle. :-(
 
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