Okay, I decided to brew up a Harry Potter Butterbeer, because my 22 year old step daughter asked me to. She said that she wants to drink it with her best friend over at her house while having a Potter dvd marathon. How could I say no?
So, I took a look at
Cap'n Jewbeard's recipe and I looked at some screenshots from the potter movies. Decided to tweak Jewbeard's recipe so that the color is more close to the brew served in the movie. The brew in the movie is kind of a light colored beer and really hazy, so I went with a lot of wheat malt.
This was my first all-grain ever and only my fourth batch of brew ever. I went with BIAB using my turkey fryer set up with an aluminum kettle for the mash and boil.
11 lbs Wheat Malt
1 lb American 2-row Pale Malt
0.5 lb Crystal 40L
Steeped the grains in a jumbo mesh bag in five gallons of water at 152 for an hour an 15 minutes. I let the bag drain, then took some 140 degree water and poured it through the grain bag until it ran clear. I think it should be 170, but this was my first all-grain, so I forgive myself.
Will go hotter next time...
At this point as I started to bring the wort up to boil, I scooped out 2 quarts of wort and put it on a pot on the stove in the kitchen and boiled that down from 2 quarts to 2 pints and added a pint of this concentrated wort back into the main kettle later on. Kept one pint back to save in the fridge for a concentrated yeast starter for future brews. The point of this little exercise was to try to get some caramely taste into the brew. I couldn't find butterscotch extract, so decided to do this technique in conjunction with some vanilla extract addition to get the butterscotch flavor into the brew.
Hop Schedule:
0.5 oz Brewer's Gold for 60 minutes
0.25 oz Saaz for 20 minutes
0.25 oz Saax for 5 minutes
(all hops were in pellet form)
At flame out, I added:
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
2 tsp ground nutmeg
1 oz sarsaparilla
lactose - 8 oz
¼ tsp imitation butter flavor
¼ tsp vanilla extract
Pitched a large starter of Pacman that I harvested from a Rogue Mocha Porter.
Fermentation kicked off super fast, within just a few hours.
OG is 1.066
Should have seen the look on my LHBS guy's face when I showed him my ingredient list.
He was nice and didn't say WTF. Just asked me if I forgot rice hulls. But, I told him I didn't need any since I was going BIAB.
I have a feeling this will be nasty beer, but the fact that it is a novelty based on a wizard movie makes this experiment very forgiving. Can't wait to see how this turns out!