Our cherry stout, also known as our Red-nose Stout, is pretty self explanatory. It’s black as any stout, and it smells that way as well (like a stout, not black). You can smell the cherries somewhat, and you can taste them up front. Then you taste the stout. It’s a pretty heavy beer. We added extra malt to hike up the alcohol content (which came out around 8% or so), and we primed it with dry malt extract. I wouldn’t call Guinness a thick beer, although many people would, but this stout is thick. It has a strong, thick body and taste.

Even though I’m a documented non-fan of fruity beers, this beer I like. The cherry flavor takes a backseat to the strong stout taste, and that’s good in my book.

(I got no pictures because our digital camera (my other camera’s an old-school film kind) killed the batteries as soon as I turned it on to take some pictures of the process. Imagine pots and brown/black liquid. Smiling faces on two medium handsome men.)

This might be the darkest beer yet. Like dark as in black hole with chocolate milk froth as the event horizon dark. You can’t even see this beer–it’s that dark. Also, we listened to Maiden’s The Number of the Beast record and a Replacements’ B-side record while it was cooking (what’s more atmospheric music for making beer than the Replacements and Maiden?). We’ll say that helped. Here’s how we did it:

The software:

0.5 lbs. dark crystal (grain)

0.5 lbs. roasted barley (grain)

0.5 lbs. black malt (grain)

3 lbs dry dark malt extract

6.3 lbs liquid dark extract

1 oz. Perle hop pellets

Safbrew S-33 dry yeast

We steeped the grains at about 150 F for half an hour. Then we took out the grains–toss ‘em in the compost–and added the Perle hops, dry extract, and half of the liquid extract. Boiled it for an hour. Smelled good (seriously, if you haven’t tried making your own beer yet, you should–in addition to all the other benefits, it’ll make your house smell fucking good (and not like beer, surprisingly)). Flipped over the Maiden record. (Also, we watched some Sunny in Philadelphia on DVR. There’s a lot of waiting in beer making.) Around 45 minutes into the boil, we added the other 3.15 lbs of liquid extract to the boil. Fifteen minutes later, we put the pot in an ice bath to cool it down–I’ve got to get some kind of wort chiller to shorten this process–, and when the temp. got down down to 80 F, I pitched the yeast. Simple, easy,–beer is made.

Our starting gravity is a tree-trunk sturdy 1.080. I’ll let you guys know how the fermentation goes.