The Christening

The day could not have started any better. Water tests showed that everything in my new system was working as expected. It all came together better than I could have hoped.

Then my mill rollers wouldn't turn.  I finally have a fully functional brew system and I can't crush the grain. The alarm has already gone off. The water is ready to start the mash, but I don't have grain to add to the water. The new system is waiting on me! With the help of my friend Jamie we were able to quickly take the mill apart and clean the rollers. The rollers had been gummed up with a mixture of machining oil and grain dust that wouldn't allow them to turn. We got the mill put back together and we were back in business!

Moving the water from the hot liquor tank (HLT) to the mash tun was very easy thanks to the pumps. Jamie dumped the grain in while I stirred the mash to break up any dough balls.  Once the mash was ready to go it was time to start recirculating the mash through the coil in the HLT.  Running the mash through the HLT maintains the temperature of the mash.  After the pumps worked well to move the water over to the man tun they decided to give me a harder time with the recirculation.  They just wouldn't start moving the liquid.  After pulling a lot of hoses to check for any clogs (and finding none) the pumps stopped messing with me and started working as expected.

This was the first time I have ever tried fly sparging.  I was concerned about getting the two pumps to work in sync, but that proved to not be difficult.  My estimated efficiency of 85% was dead on and I hit my pre-boil gravity exactly. The boil didn't go exactly as planned, but it is easily remedied for next time.  I didn't get the high evaporation rate I was expecting so my starting gravity was a little low.  Next time I will just start with a lower boil volume and it should be fine.

After the boil I ran the wort through my counter flow chiller for the first time.  I need to work on this step to get the wort to the right temperature for fermentation.  We'll see how it goes next time as I keep adjusting flow rates.

At the end of the day I had 5 gallons of vanilla stout in the fermenter and the day was a success.  All of the problems were minor and easily corrected for the next brew.

Recent Concoctions

I mentioned that I broke my brew ban and made a rye pale ale with my friend.  It was definitely worth it.  We hadn't brewed together in a year.  He also helped me with the brew system so really it just balanced out to my normal procrastination.  We got the base recipe from homebrewtalk.com then made some tweaks based on availability and personal preference.  The recipe is as follows:

Rye Pale Ale (Name TBD)
7.5 lb Pale 2 Row
2.25 lb Rye Malt
1 lb Munich Malt
0.5 lb Victory Malt
0.5 oz Magnum (13.8% AA) - 60 min
1 oz Willamette (4.8% AA) - 30 min
0.5 oz Goldings (4.9% AA) - 20 min
0.5 oz Goldings (4.9% AA) - 10 min
1 oz Cascade (6.8% AA) - 0 min
Wyeast 1968 London ESB

The brew day went smoothly although we ended up overshooting our target gravity by 5 points.  It is probably the last brew on my old equipment because I'll be selling my current mash tun and kettle to help pay for other brewing stuff.  This beer is ready for the keg.  I just need to take another gravity reading and clean a keg.  Hopefully it will all happen this week, but there is no spot for it on the keezer so there is no huge rush in moving it.

The other thing I have bubbling away is a cyser.  A cyser is a mead fermented with apple juice and honey.  This beverage came out of Club Night at the National Homebrewers Conference.  One of my club members was pouring it and it was delicious.  He told me the recipe and this is my best recreation of it given the state I was in when he told me the recipe.  I am just making a small batch of this as that is the fermenter I won't need for awhile.

Apple Jack
2 gal apple juice
4 lb honey
3 cloves
1 allspice berry
2 lb raisins
1 brick of wet bakers yeast
1 lb agave syrup

Everything but the agave syrup is mixed and fermented.  When the raisins all (or mostly) float then I will move it to secondary and sweeten it with the agave syrup.  The syrup will kick off another fermentation but leave behind some residual sweetness.  What you are left with is a very dangerous drink.  It tastes delicious and is very high alcohol (his version was 20% as measured by his vinmeter).

Brewing Randomness

Life has pretty much sucked brewing-wise over the last month.  Work has been crazy and just sucked up a ton of my time.  So over the last month I have been able to randomly get stuff done when time and energy allowed. To kick things off, I managed to keg all 3 beers that were waiting in the fermenters.  This included my ESB, red ale, and the barleywine that has been aging on bourbon soaked oak chips.  The ESB and red ale both taste as they should.   The barleywine smells amazing, but still lacks in the taste department.  I am going to bottle it up (with my awesome new BeerGun) and see how it ages.  I also worked on a new beer marking system, but that will be a post for another day.

I also got work done on my brewery control panel.  I am in the process of cleaning up the box and door so I can paint them!  Then it will be on to the fun part of wiring everything.  That will be a pain, but if I take my time I should do alright.  The painting will take a week or so to let everything dry properly, but then I will be back up and running at full speed.

At the National Homebrew Conference in June, I will be taking the Beer Judge Certification Program exam to become an official homebrew judge.  The test will be difficult, but hopefully I can do well enough to pass.  I started watching some online recordings and following along with the tastings to help develop my palate.  I will have more on this later.

I also brewed my last beer ever.  Well at least my last beer on my current set up.  I have decided to focus what is normally my brew time on the brew system to try to make that operational before some friends visit in June so we can brew together on it.  My last beer was a Rogue Dead Guy Ale "clone" that I am calling Not Dead Guy Ale for a friend coming back from deployment.  The name also works on the level that I was forced to sub out some of the grain due to local availability.  The brew day went well.  This was the first time I have ever done a 90 minute boil, but thanks to Beersmith I mashed and boiled with the correct volumes of water to end up with my 5 gallons.  This beer is currently bubbling away in the fermenter.

I feel bad after not posting for the entire month of April, but life just got in the way.  It especially hurts after starting the year so well with regards to posting about my brewing.  Looking ahead, my work schedule seems to be calming down so I will hopefully have more time to play with brewing stuff and post about it.

How To: Brew an Extract Batch

So you've decided you want to homebrew. You've got your equipment and ingredients and you are ready to go. But where do you go from there? I wanted to put together a how to with pictures to help you out. The recipe I am brewing for this example is Programmer's Elbow. The recipe can be found in Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer. This is an excellent book for extract recipes. It has an award winning recipe for every style so no matter what beer you want to make you can find it in this book.

Grab a beer and take a seat.  There are a lot of pictures and wisdom after the break!

24 Hours, 2 Brews

Following a pretty nasty snow/ice storm, I was finally able to get to my local homebrew shop to pick up some ingredients. Within 24 hours I had 2 beers in the fermenter. This was crucial because I am now down to 1 beer on tap, 2 beers carbonating, and nothing in the pipeline.

First up was the next reincarnation of my Guinea Pig IPA. Due to a computer crash and some mismanagement of paper copies I had no record of my previous recipe. So I had to recreate the recipe to the best of my ability then make the changes I thought could help the next version. Unfortunately the homebrew shop did not have the hops I wanted to use so I subbed the zythos (more on this hop in a future post) hop for both amarillo and simcoe. I pitched the yeast before I went to bed and got together what I would need for the brew in the morning.

The second beer I was making was my first attempt at Mike McDole's Janet's Brown Ale recipe. I had a couple friends over who wanted to see the brewing process. It's always nice to have someone else around to mill 14 pounds of grain. This was the first time I had trouble hitting my mash temps. First I was too low then made adjustments to be too high and finally got it close enough. I ended up being slightly low on my starting gravity for this beer but everything else went smoothly. The difference in gravity shouldn't make too much of an impact on the finished beer.

Both of these beers are now bubbling away in the basement closet. The IPA took a little longer than normal to get started. I will be very happy in a few weeks when these beers finish and I can put them on tap after what we have now is drained during our yearly Super Bowl party.

Parti!

Well partigyle at least. My latest brew day encompassed 2 firsts. It was my first attempt at a barleywine and my first partigyle brew session. Partigyle brewing is when you take the first runnings of the mash to make a large beer and then use the second runnings of the mash to make a smaller beer. I made an ESB with the second runnings. The recipe I followed called for 28 pounds of grain in the mash tun. As you can see below, my system tops out at around 23 pounds of grain.

At capacity

Thankfully I was able to get beersmith up and running again for this brew. It was very helpful in making the adjustments to the recipe. Because my mash tun was not large enough to make the beers as called for, my partigyle brew actually used the first and half of the second runnings for the barleywine and the other half of the second runnings and the third runnings for the ESB. In order to give the ESB some additional character I steeped a pound of crystal malt while it was coming to a boil. One issue I ran into during brew day was a place to store all of the wort for the ESB while I was boiling the barleywine. I will need to get another big kettle.

A little ESB here, a little there...

Because I had to run even more water through the grains to get the amount I needed to boil it made the ESB a little watered down. I was able to do some calculations taking my pre-boil gravity into account and I added some dry malt extract to get the gravity to where I needed it. I managed to hit the expected original gravity exactly and it was definitely a highlight of the day.

Overall, I enjoyed doing the partigyle, but I definitely need some additional equipment to make it go a little smoother (i.e. another kettle). It was very fun to see these beers ferment like crazy after I added the yeast. The barleywine nearly bubbled through the air lock, but the krausen receded just in time. I have a long road ahead with the barleywine. It has a couple months of oak aging ahead of it, but I have a feeling the wait will definitely be worth it.

Tis the Season!

[Apparently I never posted this article. I found it on the my system. It still has the original time stamp so I figured it wouldn't hurt to get it up here.]

Time to brew that pumpkin beer... for Thanksgiving... Ok fine. So it's not the season, but it is a season and that calls for a special beer. This is the first time I have brewed with a non brewing ingredient. This beer called for about 3.5 pounds of pumpkin to be added to the mash. However, after talking with the fine folks at the homebrew store, I was persuaded to just add the pumpkin to the boil. This let me avoid a problem that plagues a lot of pumpkin mashes... a stuck sparge.

This brew went smoothly despite the fact that I didn't hit my numbers. The beer ended up a bit low on starting gravity. This was in part because I just kind of went for it with this recipe. The computer that I had Beersmith running on has died. So I am in the dark with my brewing software. For this recipe I tried to make the adjustments to my system without any software and I didn't do a very good job. Hopefully, it will turn out alright.

Cut Me! I'm Blind!

Yesterday I was tweaking my IPA recipe in preparation to brew today. The next morning our laptop decided to stop working. So I had a decision to make. I could put off my brew day and try to salvage the laptop that has Beersmith installed on it or I could just go for it and make some beer. Beer always wins.

I pretty much guessed at everything involved in today's brew day. The only thing that was right was the amount of ingredients and my hop schedule. I guessed at my mash thickness, mash water temps and sparging water. I nailed my mash temperature. I settled right in at 155 degrees. I was able to do this by drawing on my experience from my first three all grain beers (vanilla stout and pale ale didn't get a write up here because I am lazy). I'm not sure if I messed up my mash thickness or sparge water (or both), but I didn't end up with enough beer in the fermenter.

In the end, the wort looked and smelled amazing. The transition to all grain has gone wonderfully. I expected to take a step back in quality for the first few beers, but I've only had one potential dud (pale ale). I haven't tasted it yet and if it turns out poorly I can always blame it on my friend who brewed with me that day.

Commence All Grain!

Yesterday I did my first all grain brew! This has been the reason for my lack of brewing recently. I have been saving money to make the switch to all grain. This couldn't have come at a better time because I have nearly drained the keezer dry (something I thought wouldn't happen once it was full). For my first all grain brew I decided to get a recipe kit and eliminate one possible source of error with me getting the wrong grains or some other nonsense. The kit I chose was Dawson's Multigrain Red from Northern Brewer. This should be a nice beer for the summer and be a quick addition to the keezer.

The brew day did not start off well. I could not find one of the pieces of the copper manifold I made for my mash tun. After an hour of searching I found the tube and the brewday officially started. I preheated the mash tun with some hot water out of the tap and drained it into my sanitizer bucket to have sanitizer for my fermenter. While the mash tun was preheating, I brought some water up to mash temperature on the stove with a little help from a heatstick. Beersmith proved invaluable to helping me figure out temperatures.

When I had my mash water at the right temperature, I poured it into the mash tun. I then added all of the grain for the recipe and gave it a little stir to make sure I didn't have any dough balls. I checked the temperature of the mash and I hit my mash temp on the first try! I was thrilled and amazed. I put the lid on the cooler and set the timer for 60 minutes. After the timer went off I opened up the mash tun to a wonderful aroma. I stuck my thermometer in the mash and I had only lost 1 degree over the mash.

The mash

I drained the mash tun and did a batch sparge with some water I was heating up during the mash. Once I had collected all the wort I needed (according to Beersmith) I started to bring it to a boil. With the heatstick and the stove I was able to bring almost 7 gallons of wort to a boil. The stove was then able to maintain the boil after I pulled the heatstick out. The boil went smoothly and I transferred into the fermenter with no issues.

Overall, this was a wonderful experience. It was probably my smoothest brew day to date. I was not expecting that to be the case considering I was adding a whole new component to my brew day. I didn't take a pre-boil gravity reading so I am not sure what my efficiency is, but I nailed my original gravity so I am guessing it is near the 75% that Beersmith used to calculate everything.

IPA Recipe Creation

I've started to create my own IPA recipe. I am doing this to create a good beer on my own and to learn more about what flavors the different ingredients impart in the beer. However, I got off to a bad start with this beer by accidentally getting crystal 60 instead of crystal 40. So my IPA is a little darker than it should be, but I don't know enough to understand how that will change the flavor.

The brew was very smooth and I didn't have any issues except with a new hop bag I was trying out. The bag is over a foot long and maybe 2-3 inches wide. It is made of very fine mesh and I thought it would work well for the pellet hops I use. However the bag is not wide enough. The hops just soaked up water and were stuck in the end of the bag. I ended up only putting my bittering hops in the bag and the rest went straight in the boil kettle. I am a little worried that I did not get full utilization of the hops, but I won't know for sure until I drink the finished beer. The gravity sample had a nice bittering to it though so I could be alright.

The first version of my recipe is below. I will be tweaking it as I go forward to try to make a better beer. My LHBS did not have an alpha acid percentage for the Amarillo hops.

8 lb Gold LME

1 lb Crystal 40 60

1 oz Columbus (14.4%) - 60 min

1 oz Amarillo - 45 min

0.5 oz Amarillo - 20 min

0.5 oz Amarillo - 5 min

Wyeast 1056 American Ale

Big Brew Day

Before

Today was a first. The first time I've done a double brew day. I needed to kick start the pipeline to get me through the winter. The day started with a trip to the brew store to pick up a box of supplies.

First up was EdWort's Haus Pale Ale. I've made this beer before so it was supposed to be the easy warm up for the day. However, I messed up when writing my list of things to get at the store and I came home with 1 oz too few of hops. Thankfully, I had a half ounce each of Fuggles and Kent Goldings in the fridge that needed a home. I subbed these in to help with the bittering in order to try to keep the aroma coming from the Cascade hops.

After a quick cleaning turnaround I had the water heating up in the brew kettle to steep the grains for my next beer. I am branching out into a new style and doing a holiday spiced beer. I got the recipe from Brewing Classic Styles. Jamil's Ol' Yule Loggy recipe is by far the biggest beer I've brewed with an expected original gravity of 1.090.

I had a little boil over with this beer. I looked away for a second before I heard the sound of wort hitting the stove. Thankfully I caught it before it got too bad. Only had a minor clean up to do. It was my first boil over in almost a year. I guess I got a little cocky with that part of my process. The only other thing that could be a problem with this beer is the amount of spice added to the beer. The wort smelled like it had a good amount of spice in it when it was going into the fermentor. It will be interesting to see how that translates into the finished beer.

After

The one issue I still need to figure out is my hydrometer. Both of these beers had an original gravity reading of about 20 points too low. After staring at the fermentors for awhile I am beginning to wonder if i am not getting the wort and additional water mixed together well enough. I think it might be a case of the water sitting on top of the wort. This is something I need to pay attention to in my next brew.

New Stove = Fail

After a long brewing hiatus due to moving into our first house, I finally was able to brew this week. Unfortunately, I didn't realize how weak our new stove is. It took me 2.5 hours to get to a boil, and I only managed that after the folks on the HomebrewTalk forums gave me the idea to straddle the brew pot between 2 burners. It is very obvious that I need to invest in a turkey fryer or some other kind of propane burner.

The brew was the Caribou Slobber kit from Northern Brewer. I am guessing it is a clone of Moose Drool which is a great beer. Apart from the stove issues, this brew was very easy. It is also the first 5 gallon batch I have done in almost a year. Everything was 2.5 gallon batches before this one. One of the great features of the new house is a closet beneath the stairs going into the basement that maintains a steady temperature of 65 degrees. The caribou slobber is bubbling happily away in there right now.

I also have a big project coming up that will greatly improve moral around the house. Stay tuned for details.

EdWort's Haus Pale Ale

After a brewless May, I got back to it tonight with Edwort's Haus Pale Ale. At least it was close to Edwort's creation. I tweaked things due to the amount I could buy at the LHBS. For example, I tweaked the hops to use the whole ounce I bought so I didn't have to hold on to a quarter of an ounce. Here is what I ended up with for my 2.5 gallon batch:

• 3 lb golden light LME
• 1 lb munich LME
• 6 oz crystal 10 - steeped
• 0.5 oz Cascade - 60 min.
• 0.3 oz Cascade - 30 min.
• 0.1 oz Cascade - 15 min.
• 0.1 oz Cascade - 5 min.
• Nottingham yeast

I'm pretty sure that keeping the last two hop addition separate was pointless given how small they were. I have high hopes for this beer though. All told it only cost about $13 for the ingredients so it would be a welcome addition to the steady lineup. The low cost of this brew should let me get another one in this month.

Overall, the brew went very smoothly. I did forget to take an OG reading. I am really bad about that. I get so focused on having the fermenter sanitized and everything clean that I don't remember until a couple hours later. I need to mark on my fermenters to remind me to take the reading.

Hop Hammer!

Finally back to brewing tonight! I brewed Jamil's Hop Hammer from Brewing Classic Styles. His recipe is essentially a clone recipe for Russian River's Pliny the Elder. After a couple months of searching I got my hands on a pint of Pliny and it was amazing. That basically made the decision of my next brew for me.

Steeping the grains

The brew was pretty uneventful. I am very happy that I am not having issues with process anymore. The only real issues for this brew occurred while picking up my ingredients. I couldn't get the amber malt extract that I needed. After talking it over with the folks at the LHBS I picked up some pilsner malt extract and added some crystal 40 to make up the difference. I also couldn't get simcoe hops. I substituted chinook for these.

Boiling away

I also had a couple of firsts for this beer. I finally was able to use my wort chiller. I got the correct adapter for my kitchen faucet today. I also sliced up my hands pretty badly on the threads. Somehow I had no blood though. It did speed up my cooling! I went from boiling to pitching temps in about 20 minutes. I think next time I am going to use the water to create an ice bath with the frozen 20 oz pop bottles I made. That should speed it up even more, and I won't feel like I am wasting as much water. I also did a 90 minute boil for the first time. I managed to get my water levels correct to make up for the extra evaporation. I did overshoot my gravity slightly, but I think this is due in part to just making up the crystal 40 fix for the malt extract.

patience.... patience....

I am really looking forward to this beer. I need to dry hop this beer in a few days. I tasted the wort after the boil for the first time. It was interesting. My mouth was filled with incredible sweetness followed by an intense bitterness. I am very curious to see the changes in the taste. Hopefully I can remember what it was like at this stage.

Finally Stout!

I finally got around to brewing the stout that has been on my list for a couple months. It was the best brew day I've ever had. Everything went smoothly and I didn't forget anything! I overshot my gravity slightly, but that was due to my scaling of the recipe. It was only 3 points so it shouldn't be a big deal. I am really looking forward to this beer. The wort smelled so very delicious.

I also made my first yeast starter for this beer. Figured I would try it out since I could only get a propagator pack of the yeast I needed from the LHBS. I was nervous that I would somehow mess it up, but my fears were washed away when I woke up this morning and the stout was bubbling away intensely.

I'll have updates on this one when it is time to rack onto the vanilla.

Brew Day - 1/9/10

I had my first brew day of the new year on Saturday. Everything went well except I forgot to take the original gravity measurement. This brew was my first original recipe. I am trying to make a special bitter. The recipe I created is very simple to start. I wanted to have a base that I would be able to specialize. I already have a couple ideas on how to improve it after reading more about the style. The recipe is for a 2.5 gallon batch.

Special Bitter Variation #1
3 lb Gold LME
.75 oz Kent Goldings (4.6%) - 60 min
.25 oz Kent Goldings (4.6%) - 15 min
Wyeast 1098 British Ale Yeast

I also had a friend over and taught him how to homebrew. It went really well and he was really excited about the process. I may have found a brew partner!