Carmelized Sugar and Witches Brew.

On Wednesday I went ahead and had a brew day, but I didn't end up making The Kitchen Sink like I had planned. I had a call to work early wednesday for the rest of the week up till the minute I was leaving for the holidays, leaving me only the afternoon to get a brew going before I was gone. So I decided not to take on the ambitious beast because it used too many ingredients I didn't have prior experience with.

So I pulled out the next brew I was planning to do a little early. I had been cultivating some Wyeast Abbey Ale I yeast in a growler, and it was ready to go. So here it is.

Witches Brew Dark Strong Abbey Ale.

Id had some success a few batches ago with a hoppy belgian strong, and wanted to mess around more in the style. I had also been meaning to do a trappist style beer too. So I bought the Abbey Ale yeast and then attacked my grain bill like I was making a Dark Strong. We have some Special B malt in there, some CaraVienna and CaraMunich, Crystal 40L, 6lbs of Pilsner malt and 5lb of 2-row.

While that was going on, I decided to use a technique I was going to do on the Kitchen sink as a sort of test run....Caramelized Sugar!

It went pretty well. You can see in the picture above 1lb of sugar early in the process. You heat plain granulated sugar in a pot and keep stirring. It starts clumping up, and then slowly turns into a brown syrup, no water added. At this point its REALLY HOT. hotter than the boiling wort, so learn from my mistake and let it cool down a bit before adding it to your boil. Otherwise you get lots of steam and noise and not fun stuff.

I also split up one of my Papua New Guinea Vanilla beans and started soaking it in vodka. Ill dump that in after high krausen. Im going to be gone for almost 2 weeks from the brew date, when I get back Ill check on it and see whats up. I might throw some oak on this bitch too.