Gingerbread Monk Ale

So Hannah and I decided to brew up a beer together. My idea was to do a seasonal brew that we could enjoy with friends (and ourselves) this Christmas season, so we went with a gingerbread beer idea from the awesome book, Radical Brewing. One thing I like about this book is that a lot of the brew ideas/recipes leave a lot of room for you to come up with your own parts... Like for this one, really, you were only told a specific mixture of spices to add at the end of the boil, those you would use for a gingerbread cookie: ginger, clove, cinnamon and allspice.

Though it said to compliment this with a lightly hopped brown ale, I decided to fill out the rest of the recipe with a more caramel malty version of the Trappe Door, hence the Monk part of the recipe. Here is the wort after mashing the grains and adding the malt extract, waiting for boil...

Boiling...

Only did one hop addition (since the spices are supposed to be a large part of the profile) at the begin of the boil (1 oz of Fuggles and 1/2 oz of Hallertauer). Also, channeling my inner monk, added 1/2 lb. of turbinado sugar.

Midway through the brew, it was looking nice. Added more of the sugar.

Gingerbread spices were added around 5 minutes and then after the boil, started cooling it down asap with Pete's wort chiller (thanks Pete!!!). We had it down to around 78 within about 15 minutes.

Warning: Before yeasting, always make sure that no babies have crawled into the fermenter.

Here you see Hannah pitching a vial of White Labs Trappist yeast before we shut the lid. Before yeasting, I took a sample for the hydrometer. Around 1.070 OG. Let it ferment around 9 days, now reading 1.014. This brings it to 7.2%. All exactly the same as the Trappe Door. About to rack it into the carboy now, weather outside cooling down...

Brewed on Sun, Nov 9
Racked on Tue, Nov 18
Bottled on Wed, Dec 10 (half batch went into Party Pig)