Clonebrew: Pinkus Munster Alt Bier

My youngest son just turned 21 and while he isn't much of a drinker, he's fascinated by the process of brewing beer. As a sort of rite of passage of turning 21, he wanted to brew up a batch of beer rather than go hit the bars, and his choice of beer was a German Alt Bier.

Turning once again to my Clonebrew book, I found a recipe for Pinkus Munster Alt Bier which didn't seem exceedingly difficult. Like my Bitburger and Pilsner Urquell batches, this would be a small 2 ga. batch brewed in a Mr. Beer brewing keg.

TYPE: Ale

STYLE: Alt Bier (German)

Brew Date: 12 October 2010

Ingredients

Whole Grains

Munich Malt (2 oz.)

Malt Extract

Extra-light dry malt extract (0.6 lbs.)

Wheat dry malt extract (1.75 lbs.)

Hops

Bittering: Saaz (0.8 oz.)

Flavoring: Saaz (0.1 oz.)

Yeast

Wyeast #2007 German Ale Yeast

Procedure

Cracked whole grains by running over them several times with a rolling pin (not hard...you want them cracked, not crushed!) while about a quart of water was heating to 150F on the stove. Put the cracked grains in a grain bag and put in the hot water to steep and while that was steeping I got another pot with a quart of water to heat to 150F.

After 20 minutes of steeping, I put the grain water (now a nice amber color) into the brew pot and sparged the grain bag with the other quart of water. Added a couple more quarts of water to the brew pot and dumped all the DME into it, stirring while heating to a boil to get all the DME dissolved.

Added the bittering hops when the wort started to boil, and at 45 minutes into the boil added the flavoring hops.

Stopped the boil at 60 minutes and started adding ice and cold water to cool. Poured the wort into the fermenting keg and topped up with more cold water to the 2 gallon mark.

Pitched the yeast when temperature dropped below 80F.

Bottled the beer on 10/31, so I guess we'll call this the Halloween brew. Primed with 1/2 cup of the wheat DME dissolved in 1/2 cup of warm water. Drew a tiny sample into a clear glass and the color looks about right, although very cloudy (expected). Will give this about 10 days to condition in the bottle before first taste, on or about 11/11.

Update: Oddly enough, Wegman's grocery store here in town carries Pinkus Munster Alt Bier, so I picked up a couple bottles to compare against this batch. We put a couple of bottles in the fridge overnight and took our first taste as planned on 11/11. While not an exact duplicate of the real thing, it came surprisingly close, and was VERY tasty. The Pinkus beer has more of a banana note to it than ours, but who knows what ours will taste like if we let a couple bottles lager a bit longer. We'll call this one a win, and will likely brew it again.

Brewing, not blogging

Haven't done a lot of brewing and even less blogging about it since my last post over a year ago, but I did brew a couple batches in the intervening months with my old brewing buddy Rick. Our first run was an epic failure, attempting a double batch of the mini brew kegs which we seemed to have bottled way too early.

Before that one even bit the dust, we'd brewed another batch of our old standby, an Oktoberfest recipe which never failed us in the past. We timed the batch to be ready for my annual 4th of July bash, so we kegged it rather than bottling it. Our bottle supply was set aside for the batch which would ultimately fail, anyway.

The Oktoberfest batch came out good if not great, and I think it's because we primed with DME instead of the usual priming sugar. Will stick with priming sugar for that recipe from now on.

New post coming up with details on most recent batch.