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.

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).

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.

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 - gravity...the basics

Again, a background, a 10,000 foot view...

You hear it all the time, "high gravity beer" or "the OG was 1.072!", etc.  But what's it mean?  Its really cool and really easy science and it will all make great sense in just a minute.

Ok, before we start with the brewing specifics, some background.

"gravity" is short for "specific gravity" and it is the measure of density.  In our case, the density of a fluid, but solid objects are also measured with specific gravity.  Heavier things have a bigger "specific gravity" number than lighter things...and I'll show you, down below, why this is important to you.

The whole concept was invented / discovered by Archimedes back about 200 B.C. You probably  remember, from sixth grade science class, the story of the guy that jumped out of the tub and started running down the street naked yelling "Eureka! Eureka!". That was Archimedes and buoyance / density what what he was shouting about.

Brewers use a device called a hydrometer to measure the specific gravity of their wort and beer (wort is nothing more than the fluid that hasn't fermented yet but is going to be beer in a week or so when the yeast get done doing their thing).

The hydrometer, as far as we know, was invented by Hypatia of Alexandria somewhere around 400 A.D.  She was an early scientist / physicist (they called them "philosophers" in those days) that was finally killed by a Christian mob in one of those periodic science versus religion things that humans seem to go through from time to time.

It works like this:

• The specific gravity of water is 1.000.  
• As you dissolve sugar in water, it gets denser and the specific gravity rises.
• Then, as the yeast turn the sugary water into alcohol, the gravity lowers.  

Just to give you some quick frame of reference.  A medium strength beer might start fermentation with an OG (original gravity) of 1.050 and might end, after fermentation is complete, with an FG (final gravity) of 1.008.

As a brewer, you measure your gravity while the wort is fermenting into beer and you see the gravity get lower and lower as the days go by.  When the gravity stops getting lower, that means the yeast are done and you can bottle your beer.

Another quick aside here...sometimes your gravity stops getting lower way too soon...that's called a "stuck fermentation"...after brewing a few batches, you'll get a feel for when the fermentation is done and when it's stuck.

Just for some extra jargon, how much the gravity drops is known as attentuation and different yeasts attenuate differently.  In the example above, a low attenuation yeast might be completely finished when the FG is 1.014, but a high attenuation yeast might drop it as far as 1.004.

So there's two things going on here you need to think about...a low attenuation yeast, all other things being equal, makes a sweeter, less-alcoholic beer (because it stops turning sugar into alcohol while there's relatively more sugar left in the fluid). Conversely, a higher attenuating yeast will make a drier, more alcoholic beer, all other things being equal.

One more term and then we'll be ready to take on a specific example.  "Gravity points".  To keep things simple, we're going to use LME (liquid malt extract - the thick syrup you get at the homebrew store to make your beer).  A basic LME might have 36 gravity points.  What that means is that, if you dissolve 1 pound of LME in 1 gallon of water, the gravity will be 1.036.

We typically brew in 5 gallon batches, so 1 pound of LME in 5 gallons of water will make an OG of about 1.007 (36 points per gallon spread out amongst five gallons is about 7 points per gallon...or put arithmetically, 36 divided by 5 is about 7).

So here we go with an example:

We want to brew a beer and we buy 6 pounds of LME.  We boil 5 gallons of water and stir in the LME, boil for an hour, cool and use our hydrometer to measure the OG.  We expect to see somewhere around 1.043 (6 pounds of LME times 36 gravity points is 216 gravity points in ONE gallon....so we divide that by 5 because we used FIVE gallons.)

We write down the date and the OG because we are, after all, master brewers keeping accurate records.

We pitch our yeast, put on the airlock, put the bucket or carboy into a place where it doesn't get too cold and it doesn't get too hot, lets say 64-68F, and we just let the yeast work for a couple days.  Then we measure again...and we wait a few more days and measure again...wash, rinse, repeat.

Eventually, usually about a week or two, depending on a ton of variables, the gravity will stop getting lower.  When the gravity stays the same for 3-4 days, the yeast have done all they can.

Congratulations.  It's now beer.

101 - hops...creating a recipe

This is for those of us that haven't been brewing very long and want to make their own recipe or tweak an existing recipe.  As in pretty much all of life, nothing described in something this short can be completely true and accurate...but it'll do for the 10,000 foot view.

Hops are used for three things in brewing: bitterness, flavor and aroma...and this is the cool part -> YOU get to decide how you're using the hops simply by choosing WHEN you put them in your kettle.

There are only three things to remember:

• Hops boiled a long time contribute a lot of bitterness, a bit of flavor, and no aroma.
• Hops boiled a short time contribute a little bitterness, a lot of flavor, and some aroma.
• Hops boiled for a very short time or not boiled at all add no bitterness, some flavor, and a lot of aroma.

So imagine this...you're going to boil your wort for 60 minutes.

1. At 60 minutes, you add hops for bitterness.
2. After 40 minutes (what we call 20 minutes left to boil) you add the hops for flavor
3. At flameout, you add the hops for aroma.

At it's simplest, it's pretty much just that easy.

Now...a little jargon (but, trust me, cool jargon).

Malt makes the beer sweet, hops make the beer bitter.  Every style is, among other things, a balancing act between the malt and the hops (and the yeast, but that's another subject entirely).  An AIPA (American India Pale Ale) has, relatively speaking, a lot of bitterness.  An Irish red, comparatively, has a lot of sweetness.  You're going to control the bitterness AND the balance of your beer by choosing and using hops appropriately.

When you buy hops, they'll be labeled with an AA%.  This stands for the percent of the hops that are alpha acids...the primary source of bitterness.  When you boil the hops for 60 minutes, you're going to release all that bitterness into your beer.

Different hop varieties have different tastes AND different amounts of alpha acids. Crystal hops, for example, usually have between 2 and 4% AA...and I have some Warrior hops in the fridge that are 18% AA.

So think about this...if you want a beer that's as bitter as 1 ounce of Warrior hops would make it...but you're using 3% AA Crystal hops...then it stands to reason that you'd need 6 ounces, right?  1 ounce of 18%AA = 6 ounces of 3%AA...make sense?

The amount of bitterness in the beer is known as IBU...the International Bitterness Units.  The amount of perceived bitterness in your beer is the BR...the Bitterness Ratio (the balance thing we were talking about above).  We'll discuss BR another time.

Just to give you an idea, the American Lagers that everyone knows have, maybe 10 IBUs...and an Imperial IPA might have 100 IBU.

Calculating IBUs with a pencil and paper is pretty complicated, but for the mathematical masochists among us, here are a couple formulas from the homebrew wiki.  In practice, we don't do that.  We go online or to our phones and pull up an IBU calculator from someone like Brewer's Friend.

An Example: a nice Scottish or Irish Ale.

(follow along with me here...pop open another window on the IBU calculator and use it in the recipe below...it's easy)

You just went into the Nine Brothers Irish Pub and had a Smithwicks...and you loved it....an outstanding beer!  Someone tells you itś an Irish Ale....you can hardly wait to make your own Irish Ale....so lets go!

We know for this style that we're looking for 20-30 IBU and little hops flavor (check any beer style guide for that info).  We have some nice Kent Goldings hops at the local home brew store and the package says 5.0% AA.

So we plug into the calculator an average wort density (what we call OG, original gravity, but more on this in a subsequent investigation)...let's say 1.050 and 2 ounces of hops boiled 60 minutes....the calculator says 42 IBU...WOAH...too much!  That'll be way too bitter for what we're trying to make...dial it back a bit...put in 1 ounce...says 21 IBU...ok, just right.

So when we make our beer, we'll use one hop addition...60 minutes before the end of the boil and we'll add 1 ounce of Kent Goldings.

Now, we could stop right there and be just fine....but why not fancy it up bit?  Just to show off.

We'll give it just a bit more hops flavor but no bitterness (remember our rule? that means short boil)......go to the calculator....let's try 1/4 ounce for the last 20 minutes....calculator says that'll add 2.9 IBUs....21 IBUs (from the 1 ounce at 60 minutes) + 2.9 IBUs is about 24 IBU...still well in the range of our desired style.

Now we know we're going to throw an ounce of Kent Goldings in when the boil starts, boil it for 40 minutes, throw in 1/4 ounce of Kent Goldings and boil 20 more minutes.

So - that's how that's done...pretty easy actually...a couple times through and it'll be second nature.

Hop Spider

my newest device.

not my idea...I stole the entire thing from John Brooke's article in the December Brew Your Own magazine.

Thats a regular grain bag / hop bag attached to it...full of hop pellets.

Notice how the heads of the carriage bolts hang over the lip of the pot so the thing doesn't fall in.

Note...I had to trim the hop bag.  I was afraid that, if it's too big, as the pot comes to a boil, it would inhibit that great roiling boil you need to make sure to drive off all the DMS stuff.

Worked great.

Between this thing and the hop blocker...I punched in six ounces of hops and had very little in the primary and the chiller didn't get clogged.

The whole thing cost me less than $10.

milk - the best glue for labels

I enjoy making labels for my beer, but I don't enjoy trying to clean bottles of the glue that avery and others use for their labels.

Somehow, I found out or figured out that milk does a much better job.

The labels stick nicely to the bottles, but come off easily, too.

Get a saucer of milk and float each end of the label like in the picture below

Don't immerse it, just float it to dampen the back of the paper.

Then smooth it on to the bottle and let it dry.  It's that easy.

Today's game: Dragon Milk

Today's brewing game.

We each use the same recipe but brew in our various styles and mashes, all grain, extract, BIAB, lauter, batch sparge, single infusion, decoction whatever.  Then we get together and cross taste on BrewDay.

Single malt, single hops.  Here's the recipe:

• Any water treatments you need
• 14 #Maris Otter or similar DME / LME
• mash - your choice.
• 3 oz East Kent Goldings - first wort
• 2 oz East Kent Goldings - 20 minutes
• 1 oz East Kent Goldings - flameout.
• irish moss or whatever fining agents you prefer...or not.
• SafAle S-04

I know I'm doing all grain with my new setup, Jed's doing extract, Greg's doing BIAB...plenty of room left for variants / mash styles.

Bombshell Blonde - pale ale

5 gallons.  A pale ale, this is the beer that got the new roof on the house.

mash @ 155F

• 4.0 # pale 2 row
• 2.0 # maris otter
• 0.5 # biscuit
• 0.5 # 10L crystal
• 0.5 # 40L crystal
• 0.5 # wheat

Boil

• 0.5 oz warrior - first wort
• 2.0 # light brown sugar - 60 minutes
• 0.5 oz cascade - 15 minutes
• 1 t black peppercorns - 5 minutes
• 1.0 oz willamette - 5 minutes

cool and pitch 1 sachet SafAle S-05

• OG 1.056
• FG 1.010

Interesting note: after 2 weeks in the bottle, a slight vegetal aftertaste...assumed DMS...but 2 weeks later the strange taste was gone and the beer was delicious..and literature suggests DMS won't fade, so I don't know what it was.


Completely consumed during the  big roofing weekend.

Kettle Mod - hopblocker

I had a great 8g pot, but no valve and found siphoning with the plate chiller awkward (and that's the nice way of phrasing it...in use, siphoning to the chiller involved obscenities...)

I bought a hopblocker from the finest, most friendly homebrew shop in Indiana, Kennywood, in Crown Point, and contacted the folks at Bargain Fittings to fab the fittings for the pot.

I didn't really know what I needed, but they took great care of me via an email exchange and fabbed an all stainless ball valve and related fittings to modify the pot for the hopblocker.

I used a step bit and really didn't have any trouble at all drilling the pot...kept it cool with a soaking wet paper towel.

Figuring that baby bottle nipples must be food safe and have to stand up to, at least, boiling temperatures, I cut the nipple part off, kept the "flat" part that goes into the bottle and had three food safe, high temp gaskets for less than a buck.

Works perfectly