How's Your Beer, Toots? (Brew Day)

This is beer before it's beer. I have my iBrewmaster app up on my iPad next to my various ingredients for this brew. I used flaked oats, chocolate, caramel/crystal, light dry extract, tootsie rolls, Crystal hops (not pictured), unsweetened cocoa (also, not pictured), and Nottingham dry yeast. 

The grains (chocolate, oats, caramel/crystal) begin to steep as I ramp up the temperature from the tap to 150 degrees. 

The wort begins to boil after the Light DME and tootsie roll additions. It looks nothing like any wort I've made before, just looks (and smells) exactly like chocolate.

Before pitching the Notty yeast, the wort needs to cool down to about 60 degrees. Luckily I got it down to about 57 before transferring to the carboy and letting it come back up to the optimum temp for Notty.

After transferring and pitching the yeast all that's left to do is wait. 

In about a week, I'll transfer it off the yeast cake and into another carboy to allow it to settle a bit. On transfer day next week I will be brewing my next batch. If my calculations are correct this beer is going to come out to about 9% ABV. The chocolate smell is awesome and the addition of crystal hops really works well with the smell and taste of it all. Hopefully this one ends up as good as it started.

A little background on September Storm Brewing...

I started to homebrew about a year ago when my old college roommate Justin told me he had started. I drove all the way to my "local" homebrew store, which is about 45 minutes away, and picked up what would be my first brew. I told the gentleman that I liked Heineken and he pointed me in the direction of Dutch Light Lager which is an imitation of Heineken. For those of you that aren't sure how beer brewing works, lagers are typically fermented at 55 degrees or less. So I left the store ready to start brewing my own beer. (I had to go back because I forgot the bottles I purchased). Instead of fermenting at 55 degrees or less I fermented up around 68-70 degrees (which is a quantum leap for yeast). But I dove right in and made a somewhat drinkable beer. Naturally it wasn't in the right style and it wasn't the right flavor. It was truly a miracle that it was even tolerable based on all the mistakes I made throughout the brewing process.

Fast forward to two months and one batch of homebrew later, I foolishly volunteered to make a Pumpkin Ale for my sister's wedding of 130 guests. It turned out that this brew came out slightly better than just drinkable but still not the best due to my inexperience. Now that I'm a year and 8 batches in I feel like I really have a grasp on what I'm doing. I didn't brew much over the winter to save up some money for extra batches this summer. I just brewed my first batch of the year today which I will describe further in my next post. I spent the winter formulating different recipes from a Sweet Stout with Cinnamon and Honey (Chocolate Bumble Bee Stout) to an IPA with 113 IBUs (Room 113, which is a reference to my freshman year dorm room) to a beer made with Tootsie Rolls (How's Your Beer, Toots). This blog will also serve as a place for me to review different beers that I try throughout the summer.

I'm open for challenges...If you come up with a flavor or ingredient that you want in a beer I'll be more than happy to brew it for you.