Femme Fatale Brewing

We finally got around to bottle the Angry Kitty Amble Ale and had ourselves a taste.

It’s good.

It’s damn good.

The hops comes out clearly in both the smell and the taste. The flavor is rich with malt, caramel, rye, and a nice hint of chocolate at the end. The balance is spot on. I can’t wait to see how this one is when it conditions.

For the next batch, I will probably use more hops, possibly in the middle or end of the process.

As an extra treat, I have included a video of how the priming sugar is added for bottling. It is pretty neat to watch.

primingsugar

The video was captured using my cell phone at very low res.

Spray some cleaner into the dirty bottle. Take a small piece of paper towel and roll it into a little cylinder. Push the small piece of paper towel into the bottle using a long wooden stick (skinny enough so it fits easily in the bottle and long enough so you can move it). Push the now wet small piece of paper towel around the bottle in a scrubbing motion, trying to cover the entire bottom of the bottle a few times. Remove small piece of paper towel and reuse until dirty or destroyed (I tipped the bottle upside down and used needle nose pliers to get the paper out). Cheap, easy, and not too messy.

Argh so much cleaning. I really need to start kegging. All well, the bottles were free.

Not the dance, the steak. Lindsey got me a wonderful present, a full top loin primal (primals are the butcher cuts of beef from where smaller commercial cuts come from). She orginally was going to get me a full short loin primal (my favorite cut of steak, porterhouse, comes from it) but Costco didn’t have any. A top loin primal is one part of a short loin primal. The other part, tenderloin, is where filet cuts come from.

The top loin is typically cut into strip steaks and that is exactly what I did with it. I cut them into 1 inch thick steaks, pretty much what you would expect in a restaurant. The job was made much easier by using a high quality large and sharp chef’s knife. For my first time doing it they turned out very good. A few slip up here and there at the bottom of the cuts but the meat was so tender I just shaved off any mistakes. We gave some of the shave offs and trimmings to the dog and some we made into some awesome carne asade.

Ended up with 14 steaks which isn’t bad at all. You can see my scrap pile on the side.

Lindsey then took the cut steaks and vacuum packed them so they would last for a while. Some of the steaks we vacuum packed preseasoned with kosher salt and pepper. That should give the steaks some nice flavoring. We rubbed 2 of the steaks with a little olive oil for dinner later in the week. Vacuum sealing the meat makes the meat marinate much faster so they should be nice and juicy by the time we cook them (not that the meat needs it ).

Overall, great experience. Thanks go out to my wife for helping and giving me the chance to finally try my hands at some butchering. Should be a great 4th of July!

The Femme Fatale Agave Cerveza recipe is starting to come together. Looks like it is going to be a really sweet beer with fruity, spicy, hop character.

I got a new header up. Huzzah for having Photoshop installed again!

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A few days late but we racked the angry kitty amber ale into the secondary Carboy. We snagged a quick taste before we put in the airlock.The nose is very sweet, not too malty, just very sugary and sweet. The taste was a pleasant surprise. We were expecting a very sweet tasting beer but instead the first flavor we got was hops.The bitterness seemed right on the money, as well as the hop selection. Besides the hops, the sweetness from the specialty grains came out very well. So far, it seems the beer is pretty well balanced.

The beer still is a little cloudy but the secondary should help with that along with a clearing agent at bottling. This time we are using Polyclar which is typically used in wine production (it clears out tannins in addition to clearing out the other junk). Originally, we were going to use Irish moss as a clarifier but some sources state that it isn’t ideal for extract brew making (it removes too many proteins). The package says to add it right before bottling but most beer brewing sources recommending adding it at least a day before (so it can settle out).

So far so good for the first version of Angry Kitty Amber Ale. Next one should be even better.

Brewing blog over at Warpstorm was getting large so I thought I might as well install a blog here on the Femme Fatale Domain.

So we will see how this goes verse the Warpstorm blog. I will probably keep updating both, at least for a while.

I need to tweak the site more, add back in the Femme Fatale header, maybe add in some widgets, maybe a different/tweak the theme, etc. For now though this is fine.