Batch #23 - Cream Ale

The award winning Cream Ale had to be brewed again!  This time I bumped it up to a 10 gallon batch.  Other than increasing the ingredients, the recipe followed was Batch #14.  I plan to play with this a little though this time.  I of course split this up into two 5-gallon carboys to ferment.  The tricky thing here with yeast starters is how to evenly split the yeast between the two carboys.  I don't have a great technique right now other than eying it, but I will figure out a good solution soon.  To try and compensate for any variations between the two carboys, I blended the batches when I transferred to secondary.

At this stage the Cream Ale is in its secondary fermenters.  One fermenter I will keep the original recipe, the other I added something a little special which I can't wait to try.  I got a nice vanilla bean, split it in two, scrapped it out the inside, and chopped up the skin.  I then take all of that and drown it in a little bit of vodka to kill anything so I don't contaminate the beer.  After letting it soak for a few hours in the vodka I then dump it all into the secondary.  Since vodka is already pretty flavor neutral, it works out well, plus it is a very small amount.  I will then taste this regularly until I feel I've achieved enough of the vanilla flavor I am looking for.

This vanilla cream ale has a special place in my heart going back to my days living in Nashville.  This was right around the time I turned 21 which was great too.  There was a brewery down there called Market Street on 2nd Ave.  They had this great vanilla cream ale that I could not get enough of.  This beer lives only as a memory in my mind because it is no longer made.  The brewery/pub closed down a few years ago.  Fortunately I think I had enough of it back then to lock that flavor in!  Ideally the vanilla bean will do the trick, I would like to not use extract, but my gut is telling me to get the strong vanilla flavor they used to get, and because they did this on such a large scale, using extract was probably easier for Market Street.  Will see though if I can achieve the flavor profile with the vanilla beans.