Crescent Moon (Blue Moon Clone) Extract Recipe

I'm attempting to craft my own Blue Moon clone.  Everyone has a clone of it, but Blue Moon is a notoriously difficult one to pin down.  Apparently, it's difficult to get the malty Belgian flavor without going much darker than Blue Moon.  After reading many suggestions and recipes, I've decided to give it a try.

Here's the ingredient list I used:

3.3 lbs Coopers Wheat LME
3 lbs Extra Light DME
1 lb Crystal 10L Malt
1 lb Orange Blossom Honey
2oz Hallertau Hops (4.1% AAU)
1oz Coriander Seeds
1oz Sweet Orange Peel


The first thing you'll notice is that I don't add all of the extract at the beginning.  I'll be holding the LME and honey until 30M to reduce the caramelized sugars (hopefully making it look and taste a bit lighter).  For the yeast, I used a belgian ale yeast from White Labs.  WLP400 if I'm remembering correctly.

The steps I took:

Steep Crystal Malt at 155F for 45M.
Bring to boil, start 60M timer, add DME and 1.5oz hops.
Add LME @30M
Add Honey @30M
Add 0.5oz Coriander @15M
Add 0.5oz Coriander @5M
Add 1oz Orange Peel @5M
Add 0.5oz Hops @5M


The Coriander I used was "Whole Coriander Seeds".  I crushed them thoroughly as I waited for the wort to boil.  The smell of freshly crushed Coriander is amazing.  I wish my kitchen could always smell like that.

My OG was about 1.064.  I transferred this to secondary two weeks ago and samples tasted great.  This is another brew I can't wait to get bottled.

Vanilla Bean Cream Ale recipe

Vanilla beans.

Since I had some vanilla beans left over from this brew, I decided to make use of them.  I really enjoy the Sam Adams Cream Stout and wanted to shoot for something sweet like that, but with more of a vanilla kick.  After browsing around and seeing some posts on the HBT forums, I settled on a "Caramel Cream Ale" recipe posted by a user named "Cheesefood".  The ingredients were expensive, running up a steep tab of over $60 at the Beer Nut.

I ended up modifying the recipe a bit (doesn't everyone?) to suit my tastes and to accommodate the vanilla beans instead of vanilla extract.  Here's what I brewed:

Malt
3 pounds extra light DME
3 pounds light wheat DME
1 pound caramel 60L malt (steep 50M at 155F before boil)

Hops
1oz Cascade hops @ 60M
.5oz Saaz hops @ 13M
.5oz Tettnang hops @ 3M

Yeast
Wyeast German Ale

Extras
1/2c Lactose @ 13M
5.5G spring water
2 Vanilla Beans added to secondary



Priming
1c Lactose
1.5c light DME


I listed Lactose in the priming section, only because I'm adding it to the bottling bucket.  I'm well aware that Lactose is non-fermentable and not a priming sugar.

My measured OG was 1.070 (seems a bit high), and my SG when racking to secondary was 1.014.  To be fair about the measurements, I added the 1/2c lactose before measuring OG, so that may have artificially drove the OG up a point or two.

My procedure for adding vanilla beans to the secondary:
I cut the whole beans lengthwise down the center to split them open.  I then sprayed them with a little bit of water, wrapped them in tin foil, and tossed them into the oven for 8 minutes at 400F.  I then sprayed them with starsan before dropping them directly into the secondary fermenter with the beer.

I've also created some homemade vanilla extract that I'll add to the bottling bucket (a bit at a time) if the 2 beans aren't enough.  The extract was made by soaking two sliced beans in a mixture of 2oz Everclear and 8oz spiced rum for 2 months.

One note that I'd recommend if you try this recipe (since I read this comment repeatedly on the forums):  If you use vanilla extract instead of vanilla beans, make sure it is Real vanilla extract.  If you use imitation vanilla extract you'll kick yourself for it later.  Also, the forum posts suggested somewhere between 3oz and 6oz of extract if you go that route.  Though some people recommended less, with 6oz being too heavy on the vanilla side.

Overall, I'm excited to get this stuff into bottles and try it out.  I've read that Market Street Brewery in Tennessee (now closed?) made a great Vanilla Cream Ale.  I've seen a clone recipe for it in BYO, so maybe I'll give that one a try too.  If anyone else has tried it out, let me know how it went.  Also, if anyone tries out the recipe I've posted here, let me know how that one goes too.

How the pepper beer turned out...

I turned the American Wheat brew into a pepper beer, as mentioned in this post.  I ended up priming and bottling it about three weeks ago.

It tastes like flowers.  No, not like hops, the good kind of flowers.  The bad kind like your grandmother's house.  When I blogged about adding cinnamon and vanilla beans to the mixture, I had thought they would impart little if any flavor to the beer.  To the contrary, they were way too much and ended up mixing with the peppers in such a way that the beer smells and tastes like a fresh bouquet of flowers.

On the bright side, some people apparently like that taste.  I brought some over to family members and they liked it, so I left my entire supply there!  As a future brewing note, test any spice combinations before adding them to your brew.

There's a snake in mah boot

Well, replace 'snake' with 'pepper' and replace 'boot' with 'beer' and you'll have the correct topic. :)

I turned my American Wheat into American Pepper Wheat.  Or is it Peppy-wheat?  I ordered a variety of mild peppers, cinnamon, and vanilla beans to put in a mildly spicy holiday beer for Thanksgiving.  I used 4 vanilla beans, 4 cinnamon sticks, and 5 peppers (2 new mexico peppers, 2 chipotle morita peppers, and 1 guajillo pepper).  I wrapped them in tin foil with a few drops of olive oil and water.  I then heated them all up in the oven at 350 to help sanitize and bring out the flavors.  After several minutes of 'baking' I racked the American Wheat to a secondary, and dropped the goodies in.  I know I didn't add much in the way of vanilla and cinnamon, but hopefully the flavors they impart will at least be detectable.  The aroma coming from this mixture as I opened the tin foil, was amazing.

I'm curious how this will all turn out with a light beer like American Wheat.  Maybe I should have used a darker ale like a Scottish Ale, or a Porter?

American Wheat, and the coming Strawberry Breeze experiment

The current brew

So I've cooked up the American Wheat kit and thrown it in a primary fermenter.  I've moved away from using a plastic bucket as my primary fermenter, to a 6.5gal carboy for three good reasons:

1. I can watch the fermentation process to see how it's progressing.
2. When racking to secondary I can more easily see when the yeast cake has settled, and it's easier to avoid racking it.
3. The plastic buckets absorb some of the odor from previous brews.  Good for wines and 'alcopops', bad for beers.

Admittedly, I doubt #3 actually has an impact on the beer, but I'd rather my equipment smelled fruity than malty.



And on the subject of fruity...

Strawberry Breeze concentrate

I'm going to attempt to brew Welch's Strawberry Breeze into a drinkable chick beer for the girlfriend.  Looking at the ingredients, there's apparently a whole lot more "breeze" (and corn syrup) than "strawberry" in this thing.  Strawberry is what she wants though, and this is the only frozen concentrate with strawberry that Walmart had to offer.

Previous experiments with mango and pineapple have given me a good idea how to proceed.  However, I'm still looking to tweak the process/recipe.  Pineapple Experiment #2 had a strange off flavor that I've narrowed down to either the yeast (brown ale yeast), or the cooking/sterilizing process.  Probably a side effect from being caramelized during cooking, but now I'm curious... can you get DMS from cooking fruit juice?  Maybe I should avoid the cooking process this time and hope for the best?

Another small problem that turned up with Pineapple Experiment #2 was some unwanted post-fermentation.  I used potassium sorbate at the end of the process, but there must have been some yeast still active, because the brew was quite pressurized and dry after a couple of weeks in storage.  So as a foot note, make absolutely sure your yeast is dormant before back-sweetening your chick beer!