Just Dumb...

Last night I cleaned out the beer line that the Guinea Pig IPA was on and hooked up the Haus Pale Ale. Only problem was the pale ale was flat. It turns out that I never turned on the gas when I put the pale ale in the keezer. Looks like having a full tap list is set back again.

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.

Keezer Improvements

It's been awhile since I have posted. That's because I haven't done much brewing. I need to hurry up and do that because I have nothing in the pipeline now. I just stopped in to mention a couple updates I've made to the Keezer.

First up is the new tap handles. My wife gave me these for Christmas. The wooden handles are branded with "Cedar Rose Brewing" across them. Definitely gives the keezer some great character (especially compared to the standard plastic handles). So far I have just had simple print outs to say what beers are on tap, but as I have more time


The other addition to the keezer was a drip tray. I made wooden supports for the drip tray that are attached to the keezer by magnets. The drip tray is then attached to the supports using velcro. I used rare earth magnets for the supports. I have had at least a couple full beers sitting on the drip tray without it moving at all. It is very sturdy.


Stay tuned to the blog. There are a few new gear posts coming. Then back to brewing!

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

Freezer + Kegs = Keezer!

After months of looking at a lot of keezer threads over at Hombrewtalk.com I finally took the plunge and decided to build one of my own. I decided to go with a collar rather than a tower because I didn't want to deal with cutting through the lid of the freezer. I received a lot of inspiration from this design. The addition of a door on the front of the keezer gives the benefits of the tower with the convenience of a collar. The door minimizes the additional height a keg must be lifted in order to get it into the keezer.

I found a killer deal on kegs on Craigslist. Then ordered a custom kit from KegConnections. I have a dual regulator with one leading to a 3-way manifold for the taps. This gives me four CO₂ lines so I can carbonate a keg while having 3 others tapped. This way I will have a keg ready to go when one blows. The freezer is a 9 cubic feet Frigidaire that I got from Lowes. It can hold 6 kegs with plenty of space for the CO₂ tank.

I apparently forgot to take pictures in the beginning of the build so you'll just have to imagine the first few steps. First I built a base collar out of cedar 2x2s. It is probably good that I don't have pictures of this because my cuts were not pretty and required quite a bit of touch up. After I had the base collar, I built 3/4 of the upper collar out of cedar 2x6s. I put the back wall and sides together then glued the base collar and upper collar together with liquid nails.

Once I had the rigid portion of the collar built, I drilled out the holes for the taps and added the door to the collar. I carved out a portion of the side wall to hide the hinge of the door. It gives the keezer a slightly cleaner look.

Door slightly open

The door has a slight sag when fully open, but that is expected. I did have a problem with the door staying shut. I added a latch to keep the door pressed against the foam tape to minimize air leaks. I added the foam tape on both edges of the door to help keep the freezer more efficient.

Door latch

I attached the collar to the top of the freezer with silicone. I then started installing the hardware. This step actually gave me some problems. The faucet on the far right just did not want to sit properly. This resulted in me spraying sanitizer all over the front of the keezer because it was coming out of the sides of the faucet. After taking it apart and putting it together a few times, I finally got it to sit properly.

Starting to look like a keezer.

I reattached the keezer lid by putting the hinges onto the collar. I then installed the temperature controller into the keezer. I cut the main power to the freezer and wired the controller in to turn it on and off in order to keep the freezer above freezing. Surprisingly, this was probably the easiest part of the whole build. I was expecting issues with the controller.

Keezer!

I had two kegs ready to go into the keezer. The Caribou Slobber and vanilla stout. After a few days of waiting I was finally able to pour some beer!

mmm beer...

I had the double brew day to get the keezer filled at full capacity. The pale ale should be a quick finisher. It will be great to have all three taps pouring. Let me know if you have questions or want more pictures of anything!

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.