Making our annual cherry stout today. Matt got some California dark red cherries a couple of months ago and froze them.

As usual, we’re using our typical stout recipe and adding 5 lbs of the stemmed and pitted cherries to the primary.

https://share.brewfather.app/dCAhvYxEmv0B1f

Using the Brewer’s Friend mash temp calculator, we heated the strike water to 168° and added 3.5 gallons for a target mash temp of 152° for a single hour-long rest.

After the mash, added 3 more gallons of boiling water for a total of 6.5 gallons. Draining the wort, we ended up with about 6 gallons pre boil.

Only managed to get the wort down to 80° with tap water.

We decided to add the cherries after the beer has had a few days to ferment. We’re thinking that adding the cherries after the beer has some alcohol will make it less likely the cherries will contaminate the beer with whatever might be on them.

Kegging

Kegged the cherry stout. Forgot to take the final gravity.

Is tart the right word? What’s the word for tasting like too many pennies? There’s just an overwhelming taste I can’t put my finger on. Maybe the tannins are too strong and will reduce over time. Maybe adding the cherries raw introduced some bugs. We’ll wait a couple of weeks then revisit this one.

Today is rice lager day! We’ve never brewed a rice lager before. Now that I think about it, we’ve never brewed with any grain besides barley. So this is a new adventure. While learning about rice lagers, we primarily referenced the following pages:

• Japanese Lager (Brewfather)
• Cereal Mashing (Milk the Funk)

We followed the cereal mashing process described on Milk the Funk, and we followed the recipe for a “Japanese Lager” clone of Asahi by Brewdyssey on the Brewfather app.

We decided to use the barley and rice we had on hand, so our usual two-row pale malt from Skagit Valley Malting (RIP) and some regular rice Matt had in the kitchen. Is it jasmine? Is it basamati? It is rice.

Recipe

We used a slightly modified version of the recipe from Brewdyssy.

https://share.brewfather.app/3jA3AsGP2URAxe

We started with crushing the rice on the finest setting on the grain mill. Rice is harder than barley, so we had to crank up the torque on the drill we usually use for driving the mill. We cooked the rice with about twice as much water as rice. Temp maxed out at around 165°. The rice absorbed the water pretty quickly, so it never had a chance to boil.

We left the rice on the stove while we heated up the strike water, and the temp was about 158° when we came back to it before adding to the mash tub. Might have sat on the stove for ~30 minutes.

We milled the barley as usual, at the medium setting in the grain mill.

Using an online calculator from Brewer’s Friend, we mashed in at 165° with 12.5 liters of water with a target temp of 152° for a single 60 minute rest.

Held the mash at 152° for about an hour. Maybe 15 minutes longer while we were heating up the remaining water. Dropped down to 150°. Added 3 more gallons of boiling water to the mash for a total of 7 gallons.

Got about 5.5 gallons of wort before the passive flow ran out. Pressed down on the grain with a dinner plate to get out an extra 0.5 gallons for a total of 6 gallons for the boil.

Cooled the wort down with an immersion chiller to 80°, which is as cool as we could get with the tap water coming out at 72°.

Transferred to a carboy without straining. Added the two packages of yeast along with 6g of glucoamylase (didn’t add any glucoamylase during mash). Put the carboy in a fermentation fridge, currently reading 46° but set to a target of 54°. Hopefully the warmer wort will balance with the cooler fridge to arrive at the target temp in a couple of hours.

So, that wraps up the first brew day writing a blog post along the way. We’ll update the post when we keg and then again when we pour and taste.

Fermentation update

The following Sunday, August 27th, active fermentation has slowed down. There’s some interesting stuff coagulating in the carboy. I wonder if that’s because of the rice.

Kegging

On kegging day after a quick carbonation, rice lager tasted fruity. Not necessarily bad, but I had expected it to be more crisp. I’ll post an update after the beer has had some time to settle and clarify.

Update

Well, my laptop died while I was working on the post about sharing recipes. Good a time as any to see how well I can write a post on mobile. I’d like to use my phone to do a lot of the documentation on brew day anyway. I especially want to try adding links to recipes from Brewfather and adding photos.

Photos

Let’s try adding some photos.

Cool, I was able to add a photo from my library. I added a picture of a Dark Mild from Machine House, ABV 3.7%. That was really easy. Now I’ll see if I can take a picture directly through the WP app.

Wow, it was quite easy to take a picture directly with the WordPress app. I like that it has space to add a caption to the photo by default. The beer I took a picture of was a Dark Lager (ABV 4.6%).

So far, I’m quite happy with the potential of WordPress to be a functional part of my brew day.

Links

Now let’s see if I can switch between the Brewfather app and here to share a link to the recipe.

https://share.brewfather.app/DgxE64RBeYb0Ge

So, there we go. There’s a link.

Now that I’ve done that, I’ll try to take long screenshot of the recipe from my phone.

Alright, that took some work. As was the problem on my laptop, I had trouble taking a screenshot that was larger than my screen. But there are apps that will let you join multiple images into one. I used Stitch It, and that’s the output of the image below. Stitch It requires purchase for $2.99 otherwise it shows ads between actions. But for a once-a-month brew day, it may be worth sitting through 30 seconds of ads to be able to include an image of the recipe in the article.

Before publishing, the recipe looks decent. Image text is smaller than the body text, and the image isn’t super clear, but it’s readable enough. Not ideal but fits my basic needs.

Overall, I’d say the mobile app of WordPress lets me do all of the basic things I want to do. It’s not all ideal, but it definitely gets the job done, even if it required some minor hacks.

Thanks to feedback from members of the Cascade Brewer’s Guild, I’ve got two options for sharing recipes.

• Share a screenshot of the recipe
• Share a link to Brewfather

Let’s see how they work.

Screenshot

Here’s a screenshot from Brewfather.

To get the entire recipe in this screenshot, I had to zoom out to about 50% on my laptop. Then I used cmd + shift + 4 to take a screenshot of a screen selection.

Whatever formatting template I’m using right now, the image is aligned quite far left of the left edge of the text, so that doesn’t look great. The text in the image is also a lot smaller than the body text. I’ll have to check after I publish the post, but I’m thinking the image text will look quite small and will be tough to read.

I looking into options for taking screenshots larger than the size of the screen, but all I found was how to take video captures of the screen. I’ll have to explore the possibility of taking a larger screen capture more.

UPDATE: After publishing the article, I checked the output on my phone. The image quality is pretty bad. I had tried to shrink the image so it fit on the screen better, but that resulted in squishing the image. So I’ll still need to work on the process for getting a nice image in here.

Link to Brewfather

How about sharing a link from Brewfather. To get the link, I went to the Brewfather app via my laptop browser, picked a recipe, then clicked the “Share” button on the top-right menu bar. Pasted the link below.

https://share.brewfather.app/nJuu959NuizNhL

Alright, there is a link. It’s a link. You can click on it.

I’ll have to check if someone without a Brewfather account can access the recipe.

UPDATE: After publishing the article, I tested the link on my laptop and on my phone. Link works well, takes me straight to a minimalist and functional site from Brewfather that presents the recipe.

Now I want to see if I can add a recipe from BrewFather. Let’s see how it goes.

My First Heading

My first paragraph.

Spruce Beer Spruce Beer 1 All Grain Unknown 1 All Grain Brewfather 23 28 60 72 1.054 1.013 5.38 %

Okay, so that wasn’t ideal. It’s just a bunch of raw text and numbers. I tried to figure out an easy way to convert the beerXML to a more readable HTML. There’s a plugin for WordPress here, but apparently WP requires an expensive upgrade to a more professional version in order to use plugins.

It shouldn’t be too hard to write a script to format the beerXML into a standard HTML output. Problem is, it’s another manual step to process the file, and it might be the difference between actually writing a blog post about a batch and not.