Zythos

A nice brew.  Zythos pellets are a proprietary blend from Hop Union.  To me they taste kind of like a mix of cascade and simcoe...but what do I know?


Good beer: try it yourself!

 Mash @ 154

• 4 # 6 row
• 4 # munich
• 2 # acidulated
• 1 # munich 60L
• 1 # aromatic
• .5 # wheat

Boil

• 1.0 oz Zythos - first wort
• 1.0 oz Zythos - flameout
• 3 T Black Peppercorns - flameout

Cool and pitch 1 sachet hydrated SafAle S-04

OG 1.056
FG 1.014

This was a nice beer.  Great flavor, nice mouth feel.


The pellets came saying 10.9% aa..the amounts above had just right bitterness.


I'll make this again, albeit with a simpler mash bill.

Don't try this at home!

Brown Ale.

I wanted to make something with brown malt...something historic-ish. Something like those porters were actually drinking way back when.

The guy from Thomas Fawcett cautioned me that a couple pounds of brown malt would be plenty.  You'd think a guy would listen to the maltster, wouldn't you?






Mash @ 152

• 1 T Gypsum
• 3 # Brown Malt
• 3 # Munich
• 3 # 6 row (to convert the brown)
• 1 # aromatic
• 1 # 40L crystal

Boil

• 0.5 oz Calypso - first wort
• 0.5 oz Calypso - 15 min

Cool and pitch 1 sachet hydrated SafAle S-04
OG 1.070
FG 1.015

Now THIS is a damned serious beer. It's like a rip-your-face-off porter / stout thing...

You know how a triple IPA slams you with hops? Well this is the same concept but slamming you with malt. Brown malt.

my first saison...

This was THREE MONTHS in the primary!!

But now I know where that apricot flavor in Magic Hat 9 comes from

• 5# Rye Malt
• 5# Red Wheat
• 5# Golden Promise
• 0.5 oz Simcoe, first wort
• Wyeast 3724

• OG 1.067 
• FG  1.010
• 7.6% ABV

Started in June, finished in November... I kept reading that this yeast would stall but to just be patient...

It never actually stalled...just slowed incredibly to where it was dropping 1 gravity point a week or so.

First month or so of fermentation was between 80 and 82 F

But it's really nice.  Has that full apricot nose and flavor that you get from Magic Hat...

When I do it again, I might change out the rye...that's the one oddity...rye...apricot...hmmm.

On the other hand, you can taste each of the flavors distinctly...apricot and rye...

Fun.

BrewDay - 2013 - get started!

23 Feb 2013 -> next BrewDay.

This years game -> Calypso Hops.
Make a recipe using

• Single base malt, your choice.
• Calypso hops (only)
• Yeast, your choice
• No more than 2 specialty grains

Bring it to BrewDay to share and sample.

See you there.

Spruce beer - a revolutionary brew

Looks good, doesn't it?

Well let me tell you about it.

First, a bit of history...or, maybe, a bit of myth.  We could use a history buff here...where's Ken McCluskey when you need him?

Anyway, as I heard it, back in the day, before things started getting hinchy with England, american barley was considered inferior...and American hops were pretty much considered weeds.  So there was no brewing infrastructure here...if you wanted beer, like tea, it came from England...and if you wanted malted barley or hops, those came from England too.

Well...the time came when we weren't doing that any more...not bringing stuff in from England...and we had no malting and kilning facilities here....but we needed BEER!

What we did have, in great supply, was molasses from the sugar cane fields down south and we had a king's ransom in pine trees.  So Americans did what they've always done...they improvised.  Spruce beer with molasses as the fermentable and spruce or pine tips as the bittering agent.

So I decided to make some.

Molasses and spruce tips and bread yeast.  And it fermented out.  And it was nasty.  Incredibly nasty.  Like going out an gnawing on a pine tree, but with a big, big kick.

So I refined my recipe.  Less pine and a decent yeast (Nottingham).  Batch 2. 

Still nasty.  Undrinkable.  I've seen grown men that drink after shave (don't ask, it was a long time ago) that wouldn't have touched this stuff.

I told myself it was a novelty brew....  didn't work.  still nasty.

I gave it a year to bottle condition.  didn't work.  still nasty.

So it's been three years now and I thought that surely it had mellowed so I cracked a bottle over the weekend.

It hasn't mellowed.  Not a bit.

Its easy to believe that this, truly, is the beer that won the Revolutionary War.  Not only will swilling it put you in an ill humor and go looking for someone who needs an ass whuppin...but if that ass whuppin means that there might, possibly, conceivably, be some decent beer coming to town...well anyone worth their salt is going to take up arms.

The only, and I mean ONLY, redeeming feature is that this beer makes outstanding bread.

No.  I don't know why.  Don't have a clue.  You can't drink it, but the bread is legendary.

Vortex! A DIY stirplate

The advantages of being a packrat!

Here's a previously unused 120mm 12v pc fan...two rare earth magnets mounted to the hub...and the whole thing mounted in an old plastic terrarium from when the kids were small.

The stir bar is a couple of small magnets, a couple bits of 1/4 inch dowel, all surrounded with some sugru.

As you can see, above, it works.

Here's a picture without the flask...you can see the magnets and the cool sugru bar.

I used an old 12v supply from something or other that's long, long gone, a potentiometer to control the fan speed and a couple of pc connectors.

I have no idea what this stuff cost originally...but I know it didn't cost me a dime today!

Brewers Friend - software evaluation

I think I'm fairly typical in my recipe design / brewday in that I create recipes using one of the standard software packages...print or scribble some notes on paper, then use my phone and various timers while brewing. These folks at Brewers Friend have a nice package that lets you integrate the whole process.

Go to brewers friend and sign up.  Its free, but you need to register to take advantage of most of the cool features.

The recipe page, shown above, needs no real explanation.  It's drop dead simple to use.  Just design your beer like you would using any software and save the recipe. 

Now's when it gets cool.

First off, click the "my recipes" tab and then pick "edit" for your recipe.  Click the "share" tab.  You get a link you can send your friends and they can use your recipe, too!

Here's mine for a Pliny style thing I brewed over BrewDay




Ok...not cool enough for you?  Try this:  click on the "my brewing" tab.

There's your beer, with all the "stuff" you'd normally scribble for a brewing session...open it....mash schedules, hop additions, etc.  Even some tips / checkoff items for the stuff that I, anyway, have screwed up too often (close the spigots on the mash tun, stuff like that).



Still not cool enough?  Ok...I can understand that....you can do all that with your pencil and paper...get a checkoff sheet, add in your own timings and hop additions...so let's go for really mondo cool -> click the "brew timer" tab.

There's your recipe, converted into a brewsession, with the checkoff sheet, AND the timers for the mash, etc built in.

Work through your schedule, check things off, start the timers when you come to them...all on your phone.

Truly...I'm impressed.  The recipe formulation is solid, the share recipe is nice, the check off sheets, the built in sessions with timers....  Your whole brewing day in one, integrated piece of software.  Very nice.  Kudos to the programmers and kudos to thinking through the process.

I urge you to try it.  It's free, so you've got nothing to lose.

(also...a given, but just to be clear, there's no renumeration, etc passing hands here...I just wandered across these folks and really like the package).

RyePA

A nice brew.

Mash @ 154

• 1 T Gypsum
• 4 # Golden Promise
• 5 # 2 Row Pale
• .5 # Wheat
• 2 # Rye

Boil

• 1.0 oz Northern Brewer - first wort
• 1.0 # cane sugar - 30 min
• 0.5 oz Northern Brewer - 15 min
• 1 T Black Peppercorns - 5 min

Cool and pitch 1 sachet hydrated SafAle S-05
Rack to secondary and dry hop w/ 1 oz Willamette

OG 1.064
FG 1.009

appearance is a bit cloudy, tastes great...will try again with more rye

My cup runneth over

This is my BrewDay pliny AFTER the cleanup.

Shoulda used a blowoff.

BrewDay 2012

BrewDay 2012 has come and gone.

As Grant shows, above, there's always time to take your eye off your HLT and pour a cold one.


Grant's mashing BIAB Honey Brown lager.  Greg went with Three Hearted Ale, also BIAB.  Jed, a RyePA, all grain batch sparge and I did a kind of a pliny thing, batch sparge.

I demonstrated, conclusively (again!), no matter what you do, 9 ounces of hops in the boil does not go well with a plate chiller.  Hopblocker, whirlpool, whatever....9 ounces of pellets and a plate chiller are not going to get along.

We sampled the Dragon Milk (all three styles), Summer Ale, Bitter Bastards, a Choco-Porter, a breakfast stout, a Golden Nugget, a Pumpkin Ale, 3 different Ciders, a Strawberry wine and a Maple Nut Brown.

The carnivores attending had pulled pork, they seemed to like it and that's probably enough said about that.

Good times.

Carboy cleaning

I think we all use the same tricks to clean carboys.  A little soapy water, a dishrag stuffed down the bung and agitate the hell out of it.  Take a carboy brush to the more stubborn parts, swirl and curse, swirl and curse...

Some krausen just seems to stick to the top of the carboy, no matter what you do.

Now's the time for power tools.

You assemble your parts...a steel rod, a green scrubby pad and a hunk of sugru.

Sugru the scrubby pad to the steel rod and wait 24 hours for the whole thing to cure.

1 scrubby pad, sugrued to a 1/4 inch steel rod and rolled up will just fit in the mouthpiece of a carboy.

Chuck the other end into your cordless drill and watch that krausen disappear.

Now look at that shiny clean carboy! 

Power tools!  Sugru!  What's not to love about that?

Prosperity - all in how you measure it.

No, I don't have a yacht or a plane.


But I DO have 4 full carboys going.

From left to right:

• 6 gallons of Squeak Mead, made when my granddaughter was born, to be put away until she's 21.
• 4.5 gallons of APA, currently dry hopping with an ounce of Willamette.
• 6 gallons of straight mead, will break into 2 - 3 gallon batches, one a roasted jalapeno mead, the other to be determined.
• 6 gallons of a big cider.

Yep.  It's good to be rich!

101 - Digital Thermometer Calibration

First off, let me say that I don't care for digital thermometer calibration.  Or maybe I just don't care to calibrate mine.  And, truly, you don't have to calibrate these digitals very often...they work well.

I have a CDN DTQ450...which I believe is a pretty common model.  The problem, though, is that they don't calibrate at boiling.  You have to calibrate them at freezing.

And, while it's not really obvious, a couple minutes thought and you'll realize that's damned hard to do.  If you have a drink filled with 32F ice cubes, the fluid is a mix of the 32 degree ice cubes and the ambient air temperature...it's hard to get a real, solid (pun?) 32F reference source.

The best you can do is to fill something with crushed ice and the minimal amount of water.  Crushed ice...little water.

See below....mostly crushed ice and you can see that the temperature appears to be just a bit off.  I think it's safe to assume that my reference source (the bowl of crushed ice water) isn't below freezing or it'd be solid, right?

So, anyway, use your crushed ice and a little fluid and try to get as near to 32F as you can...then hold the CAL button for a couple seconds.  The thermometer will display 'CAL' and then show 32F, like below.

And, as in the previous write up, I like to test it against the other end....boiling.

So get a pot of water with a good boil, insert the thermometer, don't touch the sides or bottom.  Give it a few seconds to calm down and it should show 212F.

Anyway, on brew day I like to have an analog and a digital both calibrated and ready to go.  I'm not sure why.  It just comforts me.  That's all I need to know about it.

101 - thermometer calibration

Prior to Brew Day I like to calibrate my gear.

You don't want to tell the guy that can BIAB 20 pounds of dry grain, and get it soaking wet, out of the pot, without a block and tackle, that you might have been a wee bit off on the mash temp.

(lets see...20 pounds dry grain...I usually get about 2/3 qt water loss per pound...40/3rds....13 quarts...thats 3+ gallons, that's 25 pounds...plus the original 20 for the grain....hmmm...yeah...the guy that can hold 45 pounds of steaming grain at arms length, draining over a pot of 150 degree water....yeah....that's the guy we want to get the temp right for...)

And it's easy.

So this'll be one of a couple calibration posts....this time, analog thermometers.

Get a fairly large pot of water and bring it to a roiling boil.

Put your thermometer in...get it as deep as you can without actually touching the sides or bottom of the pot.  Check the temp.  As you can see, below, this one was reading about 215F.

Now look on the back of the thermometer...there'll be a little adjustment nut.  See it?

Put a wrench on it and turn it just a little.  Just a little means, really, a little...like 1/16th of a turn or less...maybe 1/32nd.

Put the thermometer back in the boiling water...same as before, deep, not touching the bottom or sides...wait a full 30 seconds...check the temp...

Repeat, as necessary, until the thermometer is dead on....like below...212F is what I read.

You can do this same adjustment with ice water and 32F...but it always seemed to me that 212 was closer to mash temperatures than 32...so I'll usually check the thing in some ice water, but not really pay much attention.

Anyway, that's it....after the water's boiling you've got 2-3 minutes, start to finish.

Recipe - Summer Ale, a variant

I love the summer ale base recipe: 4 pounds maris otter, 4 pounds pale 2 row, 1 pound crystal, 1/2 pound wheat, 1 pound cane sugar...and then experiment.

I always make it as an american style ale...american hops, SafAle S-05.

Between the cane sugar and the S-05, it's always crisp and dry.  A favorite at the lake.

Here's this variant:
5 gallons

Mash @ 154F overnight mash

• 4.0 # pale 2 row
• 4.0 # maris otter
• 2.0 # 20L crystal
• 1.0 # carapils
• 0.5 # wheat 

Boil

• 1 oz citra, first wort
• 1 # cane sugar 60 minutes
• 1 oz citra, 15 minutes
• 2 T black pepper, 5 minutes

Cool and pitch 1 sachet hydrated SafAle S-05.

That easy.  First taste (during bottling) is great.

Update - Dragon Milk

Just an update on the Dragon Milk experiment.  Bottled yesterday.  Tastes a tinch thin.  Flavor's good, but not much mouthfeel.

Looking forward to what you other guys did with this come brew day.

My new tun.

I'm, exclusively, a no sparge and batch sparge  brewer, so my setup has always been pretty simple.

The new setup starts with a 50 quart MaxCold cooler Rox picked up for me.

I'm using the same spigot I use for the 5 gallon tun.  I just popped out the drain fitting that came with the cooler.  This uses the same baby  bottle washers discussed in the kettle mod post.

I'm using the standard plumbing supply stainless braid fitting I made...I think every homebrewer in the world uses this trick.  That's a stainless hose clamp holding it to the brass fitting.

Here's the inside with everything hooked up...like I said, pretty simple.

Works great!  In a 40 degree garage I lost 1 degree in a 60 minute mash. 

Sometimes you got no pot

I believe the two things that discourage most beginning homebrewers are poor sanitation (so the beer gets spoiled) and a crummy pot (so the frustration gets high).

But a good pot for a 5 gallon batch of beer is expensive!  Even a generic stainless steel pot with a good thick bottom and decent handles, 8 gallons or so, no bells and whistles, can run $100.

Who wants to drop that kind of money on a hobby you don't even know if you're going to enjoy?

But you can make great, even outstanding beer without that kind of investment if you just do it kind of backwards. You're going to need a spaghetti or canning or stock pot...something 10 or 12 quarts...if you don't have one in the house, borrow it from your grandmother....offer her a beer to rent it or something...or a neighbor.

Here's an extract recipe for an American IPA.

Go to your local homebrew store and get

• 9 pounds of liquid malt extract (unhopped), something with a little color like a northern brewer gold.
• 3 ounces of amarillo hops.  they should be somewhere around 9% alpha acids.  If you don't know what that means, roll back to the hops 101 post
• 1 sachet of SafAle S-05 yeast.

Should run you about $30-35 and it's going to make 50 bottles of really good beer.

Now here's the deal -> the malt extract is sterile...so you don't have to do the whole hour boil for the extract.  If you DO try to do the whole boil with the extract and you're using less than 5 gallons of water, then the wort is too thick and you won't get good bitterness and flavor from you hops.

So we're going to boil the hops (only) for an hour, get a really good extraction of alpha acids and flavors and we're only going to add the extract for the last 10 minutes, just to make sure the whole mess gets a good solid boil and sanitized.

Here's the 1, 2, 3 of the process:

1. put 1 ounce of hops and 2 gallons of water in your pot. maybe only 1.5 gallons if you only have a 10 quart pot
2. bring it to a boil and start your timer.  and we mean a good roiling boil.
3. after 40 minutes (20 minutes remaining) add another ounce of hops
4. in 10 more minutes, stir in the extract.  keep stirring and, from here on out, don't leave the room...you have to keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't boil over...if it starts to, remove from the heat and just manage it, so you have a good boil for 10 minutes.
5. after the extract has come back to a boil and isn't threatening to make a huge sugary mess, add the last ounce of hops and boil for 5 more minutes.
6. turn off the heat.
7. add water or ice to bring to 5 gallons in your fermentation vessel, bucket, carboy, whatever

chill, pitch and ferment; each of those are a entire book in their own right and we're not going into that today....so scour the web or read a book or ask me a specific question if you need help.

But that's it.  How to make a great beer when you got no pot.

Note:  a slight variation of this is to put, roughly, 1/3 of the extract in at the beginning and save 2/3 for the last 10 minutes.  There are a couple good reasons to consider this, namely getting some carmelization out of the wort and, when following a recipe to get a more accurate hops extract to what the original creator intended.  

How Beer Saved the World

A discovery channel special.  You know it's true, but now you can see all the details.

     see the IMDB writeup

     $15 for the dvd

     Stream it on NetFlix

     Or watch online

101 - extract, all grain...conversions

First a word about my own prejudices:

1. I think most beers benefit from, at least, the addition of specialty grains (i.e. not entirely extract) and 
2. I don't really think there's that much difference between all grain and extract in terms of the quality of the finished product.  I thing other factors like sanitation, fermentation temperature, etc play a much bigger role.

That being said, I am, myself, 90% of the time, an all grain brewer...but I think it's probably more the tweaking, gear building part that makes me hassle with it rather than thinking my beer tastes demonstrably better for it.

So, that being said, we only want to use LME (liquid malt extract) or DME (dried malt extract) to substitute for the pale malts in the recipe...we want to keep the special grains as they are and perform a partial mash or steep them.

Conversions:

Converting an all grain recipe to an extract recipe

• pale malt X 0.75 = LME
• pale malt X 0.60 = DME

Example:  if the all grain recipe calls for 10 pounds of pale malt, you need 7.5 pounds of Liquid Malt Extract or 6 pounds of Dried Malt Extract as a substitution.

Conversely, converting extract to all grain

• LME / 0.75 = pale malt
• DME / 0.60 = pale malt

Again, all pretty simple.

Here's the "grain bill" (the list of grains/fermentables in the recipe) for a simple recipe I like a lot, Summer Ale.  We'll convert this to an LME recipe
Original

• 4.0 pounds pale 2 row malt
• 4.0 pounds maris otter malt
• 1.0 pound 45L crystal malt
• 0.5 pounds wheat malt

Converted to LME

• 6.0 pounds LME (3 pounds for the 2 row and 3 pounds for the maris otter)
• 1.0 pound 45L crystal
• 0.5 pounds wheat malt 

There are plenty of sources to tell you how to steep your grains and boil your LME so we won't go into that here.

If you're converting from an extract recipe TO an all grain recipe, you have a ton of choices.  Maris Otter, Golden Promise, Pilsners...all kinds of things to play with.  Just make sure that you're using "base malts" instead of the crystals and roasteds for the converted LME/DME.

The Summer Ale recipe is simple and clean and works really well for variations.  One of the full recipes is a couple posts back but don't stick to it...change it up, play a little...it does well with all kinds of hops, bitterness levels, other specialty grains added to it...just don't go dark with it...it is, after all, SUMMER ale.