Butterbeer

I have a goal of making a "Butterbeer" from Harry Potter, but I want it to be an actual beer and not an ice cream mix drink like there are a lot of examples of online.

My thought was to take my Brown Ale recipe that I've brewed a couple of times and works really well for adding flavors too. It works well as a Pumpkin beer, all 5 gallons were drunk at a beer festival a few years ago. The base beer also won "Crowd Favorite" at the Cream City Homebrew competition at Gathering Place Brewing Co. in 2019.

Here is the base recipe:

5gal - OG 1.064 - Est ABV. 6.9% - IBU 26

Fermentables:

• 10 lbs Marris Otter
• 2 lbs Munich Malt
• 12 oz Maple Syrup (Late Kettle Addition)
• .5 lbs Chocolate Malt

Hops/Other Ingredients:

• 1 oz Northern Brewer @ 60min
• 2 tsp. Vanilla Extract @ flameout

Yeast:

• 2 Packets of US-05

Mash for 1 hour at 148 F then sparge

To get the butter flavor, I plan on adding 1 tsp. of Butterscotch Extract @ flameout along with the Vanilla Extract. Also debating on upping mash temp to 150 and subbing a pound of Marris Otter for Carapils to help with head retention to get the look of the butterbeer in the movie.

The planned brew day is this weekend. Let's see how it turns out!

Coming Back

Wow, it's been a long time since I decided to blog about brewing. Oh well, I have a project idea that I want to work on, and this seems like the best place to publish and keep up with what I plan on working on. 

A little update. I've still been brewing this whole time, I'm now up to 80 batches in the 7 years I've been brewing. In my current job, as a Customer Success Engineer, in industrial analytics, I've been using an application called Seeq, and it gave me the idea to see what information I can gather in my Homebrewing.

The project plan is to build out or buy sensors to collect as much data as I can from the whole brewing process. I'm going to use a RasberryPi as a web server and database to receive all the data and store it. Using the ESP8266 Sparkfun Thing Dev to connect with the sensors and then send the data to the RaspberryPi over WiFi. I will also probably buy a Tilt or other devices like this to help collect data. My goal with the project is to get the data not to build out electronics. I'll post the code and semantics that I build, but please remember that they will just be built to work, not to be pushed out to production for other people to use without alterations. 

I do still plan on posting about batches of beer as well, don't worry! I want to get back to posting about beer. This will be a great beer journal for me, and to help with my writing which I need to get better at. So this blog is really for me, but hey if you are enjoying it bonus points!