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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.