Batch #1-23: Mexican Corn Beer
| Style | Mexican Corn Beer |
| Ingredients | click here for recipe (Hearts Home Brew.com) |
| Brewing Date: | Saturday, May 27, 2023 |
| Primary Fermentation: | Saturday, May 27, 2023 |
| Original Gravity: | 1.032 |
| Secondary Fermentation: | n/a |
| Bottling Date: | Sunday, June 4, 2023 |
| Final Gravity: | 1.014 |
| Release Date: | Saturday, July 1-4, 2023 (Independence Day Holiday) |
| Alcohol by volume: | 2.36% |
| Brand: | The Barrels of Loxley |
| Release Name: | Razing the Maize |
Summary:
A big thanks to my daughter-in-law Alyssa, who motivated me to do at least one more year of home brews.
This is the first batch I will have brewed in eight years, scheduled for release on the American Independence Day weekend.
This is a low risk, very light summer-style beer which I have made before. It’s an easy brew recipe; therefore a great way to revive the muscle memory of the brewing process. This is like Corona, but a much better quality of wort.
Progress:
Saturday 26 May 2023: Visited Hearts Home Brew in Orlando and met Dave (the owner) again after 10 years. Has it really been that long? I picked up two new 7.9 gallon fermentation and bottling buckets to replace my existing 10+ year old ones, and the other supplies and partial mash recipe. I got home and realized that I forget to buy some dry malt extract for a yeast starter. Oops. That muscle memory thing will get some well-needed exercise with this batch. The yeast starter is normally something I use for batches trying to produce an ABV of 3.3 or greater. This beer doesn’t really need that, so I decided to forego the starter. This batch uses San Francisco Lager yeast from White Labs, and should do fine without a dry malt jump start. I have everything to start brewing tomorrow afternoon.
There are two things I thought about for this batch. First, I now live in an area with a fair amount of limestone in the city water supply. My wife and I regularly use Brita filters for the drinking water. The limestone is visible on these containers after a number of cycles filtering water, but also on the aeration caps of the spigets in the sinks. Still, it is common to add a 1/4 teaspoon of gypsum (the material inside drywall) to 2-3 gallons of water before boiling the wort when making porters, which simulates the water quality around London where the Beer was first made. Doing more research on limestone effects on beer, but leaving it in there is a distinct option.
The second thing I thought about is that I am making a summer beer. I have previously made a lager where I added a sliver of Jalapeno pepper to the each bottle when bottling. This tasted quite well, with the pepper adding some very complementary afterbite on the palate. Since this is Mexican corn beer, I decided that I will divide the bottling into 3 groups: 50% plain beer, 25% with a sliver of Jalapeno pepper, and the remaining 25% with a sliver of Poblano pepper. The peppers are simply inserted raw, with the outer skin and any seeds removed. Conditioning is 4 weeks, allowing the peppers plenty of time to infuse into the wort.
26 May 9PM: I rethought the yeast starter, so 12 hours ahead of starting, I simply used corn sugar as the food for the yeast.
27 May: There was adequate yeast activity in the starter when I began the brewing cycle around noon, but not as strong as with using dry malt extract for the yeast food.
I encountered two muscle memory issues: I didn’t add the first set of hops at the beginning of the brew. It was something I overlooked in the recipe. I was able to cool the wort down using an ice bath, but I couldn’t get an accurate temperature reading with my thermometer. I am hoping the temperature was OK when the yeast went in. I’m using two new 7.9 gallon barrels for fermentation and bottling. They have a cloudy white plastic, so I put the fermentation bucket into a larger bin with 1 inch of water for wick cooling. The barrel is wrapped in a wet towel whose end sites in the water. It is in a closet to block light, and I always put the corner of a black plastic lawn trash bag over the top of the airlock very loosely, so the yeast odor doesn’t permeate the closet. It also aids in blocking the light on the wort from the plastic cover,
Initial gravity for this batch is 1.032, the recipe target says it should be 1.038.
28 May 2PM: I checked the fermentation barrel, and bubbles were three bursts every two seconds after 12 hours. That’s a decent start.
29 May 12 PM: I checked the bubbles and they were near idle. This is not a good sign. I gave the barrel a good spin and shaking to mix the wort back together, and I plan on checking it in six hours to see if it’s revived itself. This causes me concern that the wort may not have been cool enough (under 80F) when the yeast was pitched. It may not kill the yeast outright, but can be cause the yeast not to fully engage the sugars as it should.
30 May 12PM: The yeast appears dormant, but there is still positive pressure showing in the airlock. I will bottle this batch one way or the other, even if it fails and it is just a dry run to get the muscle memory back. I had another batch which behaved like this earlier, and I was ready to declare it a lost cause. In the end, that beer was weak on ABV, but had a good taste. We will see.
4 June 10PM: Bottling time. I spent a lot of time cleaning and prepping the bottles, which were of varying sizes. I had to exclude a few larger 32oz and 64oz containers, due to signs of black mold or other spots which were not washing off. Part of the problem was that I could not find a bottle brush similar to the ones I had used before. There was no local store which carried them in stock, so I had to resort to Amazon to find them–but they did not make it in time for the bottling. No matter. It turns out that I had enough containers which were properly cleaned and sanitized for this batch without them.
Final gravity was 1.014, which gives the batch a lower alcohol content: 2.36%. I expected this due to the lackluster yeast performance as measured by the S-airlock having slow and inconsistent movement. As I bottled the last two bottles, I put some of the wort into a glass to try it, There is clearly alcohol detectable, and the wort is very smooth.
Yield was:
- 4x 32oz containers (growler w/cap)
- 2x 64oz containers (growler w/cap)
- 5x 1oz bottles with snap tops
- 8x Grolsch green glass snap top containers (20oz)
- 3x (classic capped bottles):
- 1x 20oz
- 1x 16oz
- 1x 20oz
In addition to most having the beer itself, I added small slices of either Jalapeno or Pablano pepper, and in some bottles both, to add some bite for people who like peppers. This is a trick I learned from a Lager produced in Arizona which adds thin slivers of jalapeno peppers to the bottle to one of their brews. Over time, the pepper infuses with the brew. This is new for me to add peppers to Mexican Corn Beer (not lager), so the results will be interesting.
I plan to crack open the first bottle for a try at the two week point (June 18), but I won’t crack open any with peppers until the Forth of July weekend when it is release. That’s when it is ok for the fireworks to go off.
9 June 11PM: A cursory visual check of the bottles in the plastic bin show no sign of bad seals or breakage.
1 July 2023 8PM: Release day. The beer has a good taste. The bottles with pepper came out with a nice bite, and I was suprised to find the pablano peppers had infused a stronger bite in their bottles than the jalapeno peppers did in their bottles. All in all, a good lawnmower beer. I was happy with the outcome, although the lack of hop flavor from the second addition (which I missed) was noticeable.
I am happy with this being the outcome after an 8 year break.
3 August 2023 8PM: Had two bottles over the last two days: one with jalapeno, and one with no peppers. The extra month has really brought out the extra flavor from the esters, which makes homebrew have that really smooth, natural flavor. The amazing thing is that the Jalapeno peppers are even more infused, and have a mellow spike compared to the first 30 days of bottle time. This batch turned out very nice indeed.
