Barlewine

One of the things I wanted to do this year while I was on vacation was brew up a barleywine to celebrate myself and Julia's anniversary. The idea is that I'll be able to ferment it for a couple months, bottle it, and store it away so that we can open a bottle every year on our anniversary. Since this beer is being made to age, I hopped it up pretty aggressively, and made it out to be a high alcohol content. Since I have my cooler now and can do all-grain, I wanted the beer to be (mostly) all-grain. Of course, there are limits to how much my cooler can handle, so I made my recipe 18 lbs of grain, and 2 lbs of malt extract. I'm also thinking I'll put some maple syrup in there after the initial fermentation calms down to boost it a bit more. The original gravity was supposed to be 1.119, but I ended up at 1.108, so with some of the things that happened today I lost about 2% of my final ABV that I'd like to make up. As it is without any further adjustments, I should end up around 10.5%, but I'm shooting more for 12%. This will make it the strongest beer I've done yet.

Because this is such a big beer, I knew I needed a good yeast and a lot of it. I chose to use WLP001 (California Ale) for it's clean flavors and high alcohol tolerance. Rather than spending a lot of time and effort building up a big starter for the beer, I decided to make a stout for my starter and wash the yeast. The idea was that I would bottle the stout the day before brewing the barleywine, boil and cool some water to sterilize it, mix the water in, and pour the yeast left on the bottom of the fermenter into jars. After sitting a bit, the trub in the jars would settle to the bottom, and I could pour the yeast off the top into a second sterilized jar. I'm not sure how good of a job I really did, but I ended up with a few very full pint jars of yeast, and one not so full jar. You can see two jars in the picture. Using the Mr. Malty pitching rate calculator, I determined that I needed about half a pint jar to properly ferment the beer. Since the jars are just a bit over half full of yeast, I decided to use an entire jar's worth after pouring the clear liquid off the top.

There were a few things that I took away from today since it was my first really big brew. First is to be prepared for my mash. I have some PH strips that I use to measure my mash PH and make sure it's in acceptable ranges. Today my mash was very low, and I found out that one way to raise the PH is with baking soda. Of course, we didn't have any, so 5 minutes into the mash I had to run to the grocery store and buy some. I added a half a teaspoon, mixed up the mash really well, and it took it to a more normal range.

The second thing I discovered is that my pot just isn't big enough to handle that much liquid. One of the reasons I got so much less of an original gravity than I anticipated was that I didn't get nearly the efficiency I was anticipating from my mash. The other was that the pot foamed over when it started boiling, and I ended up getting sugar-concentrated foam all over my stove. My pot was near full when I started the boil, so I'm attributing that to the boil-over. The reason the pot was so full was that I mashed with a full 5 gallons of water, and then had almost another 4 gallons to sparge with (I still think I didn't sparge with enough water to really get most of the fermentable sugars out either.) I got slightly over 2.5 gallons of first runnings out of my mash tun, and with the other 4 gallons that left me with near 7 gallons to boil. My pot's capacity is only 7 gallons, so I ended up having to put one gallon in a separate pot, and slowly feed the extra wort into the boil kettle as I boiled off liquid. I don't know if this is even an acceptable technique, but it's the best I could think of.

Finally I learned that all-grain brewing takes a lot longer than extract or partial mash. In order to boil off enough liquid to end up with about 5 gallons in the fermenter, I ended up boiling for close to 3 hours. Of course, I didn't have enough time to do all of my boil and cool down the beer before the class I had to teach today, so once again improvising, I boiled down to a little over 6 gallons before I had to leave, turned off the heat and covered the pot, and left to go teach my class. When I came back, I brought the pot back to a boil, and started my normal hop additions. Fortunately I wasn't planning on adding even the bittering hops for more than 60 minutes, so I think I was able to do this with minimal impact on the final beer.

We'll have to see how this one turns out, but if all goes well I won't even know for another year or so. If I get to 12%, at roughly 120 IBUs, this is going to be a big, hoppy monster.

- Adam

Old Peculier Clone - One Year Later

It's fairly hard to believe that I've been brewing for over a year. I brewed my first solo batch in August of last year, the first week that Julia moved into our condo. It was actually the first thing I did here, we didn't even have any furniture yet. My first batch here was a clone of Old Peculier from Austin Homebrew Supply. With pretty much every batch I've done here, I've put a bottle aside to see how it stands up a year after it was made. This was the first batch for the time to run out on, and I was definitely anxious to see what had happened.

The initial smell of the beer was sweet and syrupy. It reminded me of the fact that it was made with a container of Lyle's Golden Syrup, a sugar from the UK. I also noted a bit of fruity smell and some phenolic quality, probably from a warm fermentation since this was before I had any sort of temperature control in place. I didn't detect any hop presence in the aroma.

The appearance of the beer was a reddish brown, very clear after a year of settling. It had about a half finger off white head. The head dissipated fairly quickly though, leaving only a dusting on top.

The taste initially had a caramel sweetness to it. Behind that I was immediately hit with some stale oxidation from sitting in the bottle so long. I guess I wasn't as careful as I could have been to keep post fermentation oxygen out of the beer. I thought I detected a little bit of chocolate flavor to it as well, but no real hop flavor. Despite that, there was still a fairly decent bitterness to the beer.

In the mouth the beer felt medium heavy, with a decent level of tingly carbonation. Since carbonation usually lowers over time, I suppose this means I probably overcarbonated it to start. I felt just a touch of warmth with the beer as well, even though it wasn't terribly strong to start with.

Overall, the flavor was fairly decent, but it didn't seem like it was as good as I remembered it being when it was fresh. Between some of the mistakes seem to have made while brewing it, the things that I have learned about brewing since, and the age of a beer that really wasn't that strong to begin with, I guess it was somewhat inevitable. I'll have to see how some of the other beers I've made since have held up, but I may decide that it's just not worth it to keep a bottle of normal gravity beer around for so long.

- Adam

All Grain Brewings

Today Dan and I started our first all grain batch of beer. Well, technically it's not a beer, we decided to make a saison based gruit. A gruit is a medieval version of ale that uses a blend of spices or plants instead of hops.

In order to make our beer, we had to make ourselves a mash tun. To do this, we got a 10 gallon rubbermade cooler, and replaced the spigot with a stainless steel braid hose attached to a ball valve. What this does is allow the liquid through the hose without letting the grain through.

The next step for us was

heating the strike water. We used beersmith to

determine what temperature water we would need at the specif

ic quantity we wanted for our grains. For this recipe we had 12 pounds of grain, and ended up mashing a bit thin with 5 gallons

of water at 149 degrees. After stirring in the grains, we put on the lid and let it sit for about an hour.

Once the time was up, we started recirculating the wort until it started running clear(ish). Once this was completed, we just had to drain the wort into the pot. We ended up with about 2.5 gallons from the initial 5 gallons we put in. In order to make our full volume for the boil, we batch sparged with an additional 3.5 gallons for a total of 6 gallons in the pot.

The initial bittering addition was a half an ounce of wormwood. This was

the only thing in the beer for our hour long boil, and then we followed up with a mixture of sweet gale, chamomile, rose hips, elderflower, and wormwood. It should be interesting to see how this ends up, since not only is this our first all grain beer, it's also our first attempt at doing anything without hops. All in all things went fairly well though.

The one issue we found after cooling was that we really had no way of telling how much wort we actually collected (we suspect we got more than 6 gallons to start), and how much we had in the pot when we were finished. These are going to be important figures that we'll need to determine at some point so we can hit our target gravities without problems. As it was, we ended up 12 points under our target gravity with an expectation of 75% efficiency. However, since we ended up with about half a gallon more than we expected, it looks like we got close to the right efficiency, at 70%, we just didn't boil off as much as we expected. Once we figure out a way of determining how much wort we collect and how much we end up with, we can more accurately estimate the amount of boil off we have in a normal batch. It should be good.

- Adam

Another random update

Every so often I get the urge to try and cellar something. It hasn't really worked out for me too well so far since I generally like to drink whatever new beers I have in my house. It's difficult to keep them around when I'm running low on new or interesting beers to drink. Now that I'm brewing pretty regularly I haven't run out of beer in a while, so I figured it might be easier. Last night I picked up a few things I'm hoping to keep for a while. To start, I got a bottle of Brewdog's Paradox Islay Batch 009. This beer is already aged a bit, from 2008 or so I believe. I found it collecting dust in State Line. I also picked up a few bottles of 08/09 Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout from Caps & Corks, since they had 2 bottles hidden in the back. Dan and I have decided to check around whatever liquor stores we can find to see if we stumble on anything rare or interesting. So far it hasn't been too intense, these 2 beers aren't particularly old or rare. Of course, they also weren't too expensive. At some point we'll have to check some other good shops so I can build up my collection.

Brewing seems to be going well still. I'm sipping an interesting brew I came up with, an attempt at a marshmallow stout. There's no actual marshmallow in it, just lactose and vanilla with a smoky stout base. It's not quite what I was hoping since there's not a lot of sweetness to it, but it does have a nice smooth & easy to drink quality. I could see myself making this again with a few tweaks. It didn't have much head, so upping the carbonation level and adding some carafoam would be a good start. I think it could probably use some more vanilla as well. I'm not even sure how much I ended up using, it was something in the realm of 1 tsp at 10 minutes in the boil and another 2/3 tbsp at bottling. Adding it earlier on was definitely a good idea since it was extremely strong tasting after bottling until it blended in a bit, then it practically disappeared. I'm not sure if more lactose would be a good idea or not. It may also be a bit too bitter on the back end. I could probably stand to take out the chocolate malt, but if I did I think some more special roast or smoked malt would need to take it's place. Well.. we'll see.

- Adam

Random home brewing updates

There's nothing like being snowed in all day to get a person thinking about beer. We're having a bit of a blizzard in Delaware, so my day was spent inside with Julia watching TV and making beer out of leftovers from previous batches. Today's brew was 5 gallons of English Mild, which I chose because it's a easy to drink, low alcohol brew that would work well with the extra Fuggles and East Kent Goldings hops I had. It also shouldn't take long to get ready since it's such a low ABV style. I probably should have done some more research before making up the recipe, as I'm thinking the chocolate malt I used wasn't the best choice. It's got a strong coffee roast smell even in low quantities (I only used 1/4 lbs in the whole batch), and I really was only going for the color. Maybe next time I'll try some debittered black. We'll see how it turns out, I'm not too worried that it won't be easily drinkable.

The smoke beer Julia got me for Christmas is coming along. It's been in the fridge fermenting for the past month and a half. It's a lager so it needed to ferment at lower temperatures, but the fridge was probably too low. It's warming up right now for a diacetyl rest for a few days before I bottle it and stick it back in the fridge for a few months. Diacetyl is a compound that is generally present in all beers, but normally in low quantities. If the content in a beer gets too high, the beer starts to develop buttery characteristics. Letting the beer sit on the yeast for a few days at warmer temperatures allows the yeast to clear up this compound and get rid of the flavors.

Dan and I got to watch Beer Wars last night, a documentary about craft breweries and their competition with the big 3 brewers in the US. It was an interesting look at the industry and the differences in goals between the average craft brewery and the big guys. At one point they mentioned that between the 3 companies, Bud, Miller, and Coors spent 1.5 billion dollars on advertising in a single year. I couldn't help but think what would have happened if they had spent that money trying to make their beer actually taste good instead of trying to maximize profits.

- Adam

Home brewing goodness

One of the things that I really love about the home brew community is just how friendly everyone is of each other. I had a great experience last night that I just felt like sharing.

A few days ago I was browsing craigslist, and stumbled across an ad for a guy trying to get rid of some fresh Cascade hops about 30 minutes away from my house. Not only that, but his price for them was $1 per ziplock baggy. He said normally you can get about 3 oz of fresh hops in one. With how much hops are at the LHBS per ounce, this was a great deal. I contacted the guy and we set up a time for me and Dan to come down and pick the hops.

So last night we leave to pick the hops, and bring him a couple of our most recent home brews. Of course it starts raining while we're on our way over. When we get there we meet the guy, and he's pretty cool. He showed us around his back yard, and told us some guy came earlier from hours away and completely cleaned out over half his vines. Still he had plenty left though, and after chatting with him for a bit, we set to work on the vines. He showed us how to trim the vines back to make it easier to get the hops without killing the plant, and we stood out there in the rain for a about an hour picking hops and talking home brewing with this guy that's at least twice our age. We ended up with a little over 20 ounces of hops... for $6. And today we get to brew a wet-hopped IPA! Awesome.

Learning experiences Part 2

For those following our adventures in home brewing, you probably know that we had an issue with the fermentation of the stout we've been brewing. The specific gravity of the beer was too high, meaning there were still a bunch of sugars in the beer that the yeast weren't fermenting. The danger with this is that if we went ahead and bottled this beer, the yeast should resume fermentation of the additional sugars in the bottle, and since there would be more sugar than normal, the bottles could explode. These are called "bottle bombs" in the home brewing world, and can be extremely dangerous. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not have hundreds of glass shards flying at me when I go to get a beer out of the fridge.

Originally we had tried adding a new yeast packet and some yeast nutrient to the beer. This was the advice given to us by the owner of the home brew store, so we figured it was probably pretty sound. Well, turns out it had no effect. To be fair, we're still not sure that the issue was just that the yeast gave up, it could also have been that there wasn't enough oxygen in the beer for them to reproduce properly and get to the level where they could ferment all the sugars. I'm actually leaning towards this explanation.

Anyway, as a last ditch effort, we decided to make what's called a starter. Basically, it's a concoction you put together to get yeast going, that you then throw in the beer. We got some water boiling, added about half a cup of dry malt extract to it, boiled for a few minutes, and then got it cooled down. Basically following the same procedure as when we make beer, just with a lot less time and no hops. We then put it in a bottle and shook the crap out of it, to make sure there would be plenty of oxygen in the wort. We added a packet of yeast to that, once again using Nottingham yeast. We loosely covered it with foil to keep any nasty bacteria out, and left it overnight to start fermentation. The next day, Dan took the mixture and shook it up again to get oxygen in it once more, then dumped it in our beer.

Sure enough, not long afterwards he told me we were getting bubbles in our airlock once more. In fact it continued to increase over the next few hours, to the point where he had to take the airlock apart and put in a blow off tube instead. 48 hour later, the bubbling is still going and we've had krausen form, so we're pretty sure it's going to finish fermenting just fine. If this ever happens again, I'm sure we're going to make a starter right away instead of using it as a last resort.

Learning experiences

This week has been a crazy learning experience when it comes to brewing.  We decided to bottle our Cherry Wheat in the same week that we transferred our stout to the secondary.  We ran into a number of problems with both.

Apparently chopped up fruit is small enough to get into the siphoning tube.  It's also small enough to get through the bottling wand.  Anyone seeing the problem yet?  It's not terribly bad, only a few pieces made it into the bottles.  Still, we like to keep thing light hearted, so we've named it the Chewy Cherry Wheat.  The advice we've been given is to put a nylon bag over the end of the siphon in the future so stuff can't get into the bottling bucket.

And the stout... it hasn't finished fermenting properly.  Our Munton's yeast apparently comes in a smaller quantity than other dry yeast packets, and has a tendency to give out early on fermentation.  Consequently, we had a beer that stopped fermenting while it was still only at about 2.6% alcohol.  So aside from spending way too much time reading everything I could find on yeast, we got some Nottingham yeast and yeast nutrient from our local home brew store, How Do You Brew?  It looks like it did some more fermentation after adding the additional yeast and nutrient, although we won't be able to check for a while to see if it's gotten anywhere close to where we need it to be.  I guess in the future we'll know to either use 2 packets of their yeast or make a starter first to build up the cell count.

Bathroom Brown Ale

The name started out entirely as a joke.  The brewing setup that Dan and I have is basic to say the least, and we haven't gotten into the temperature controlled areas and such that some more experienced brewers use.  Consequently, when we needed a temperature stable area to ferment our beer in that was out of direct sunlight, but still close to the kitchen, Dan's bathroom seemed like the best option.  It actually turned out to be a pretty good place to ferment the beer.  Somehow the name just popped up while thinking about what to call it and it stuck.

In any case, we ended up with a pretty good beer for our first attempt.  It poured a nice reddish brown color, although with almost no head.  With a vigorous enough pour there's an almost one finger head with a light creamy caramel color.  Of course the head dissipated pretty quickly and left no lacing on the glass.  It seems like there are certain types of grains that promote head renention, so in the future we may try using that.  It's also a bit cloudy from being bottled with the yeast, but it wasn't unattractive and there weren't any large clumps.

The aroma wasn't terribly strong.  You actually have to get pretty close to it to notice the smell at all.  What there is had a floral quality, reminiscent of wildflowers or clover.  It's a pleasant and sweet smell, but there's not really a lot going on with it.

The taste was tangy and sweet, with a slight rounded bitterness in the back of the mouth.  It's not the strongest flavor ever but it's pretty smooth.  The one thing we didn't like was the hop choice.  They included Williamette hops because the normal hop for the kit was out due to the recent hop shortage.  Despite the fact that they said it was a suitable hop for the style, we really didn't think it fit as well as it could have.

The body of the beer was moderately light.  It had a tingly carbonation that wasn't strong at all, just a bit of prickling on the tongue.  I personally thought it was a good level of carbonation for the beer but Dan wanted it to be a little more carbonated.  There was just a little bit of coating on the mouth from the beer.

Overall the beer was incredibly drinkable.  We went through most of the 47 bottles we made very quickly.  It was very easy to get down, in fact one of the most drinkable beers I think we've ever had.  We got a lot of compliments for the beer even though it was from a kit, so we were pretty happy.

I'm a bit more excited to see how our next 2 batches are going to work out.  The cherry wheat is in the secondary now, and about ready to go to bottles, and we just made a fairly substantial looking stout that's in the fermenter right now.  Neither one is from a kit, so who knows what it will end up tasting like.

- Adam

Bottling Day

Again I apologize for the lack of updates.  My computer is now fixed, our beer has been bottled, and I'm now engaged.  Basically it's been a busy few weeks.  Last thursday we bottled our first brew, and it's now conditioning in the bottles to build up carbonation.  We tasted a little bit and the hop profile was a lot more dominant this time, so we'll see how it turns out after carbonating and chilling.  It was still tasty.

The bottling process is fairly simple.  After sanitizing all your equipment, you just boil some water and add the proper amount of sugar, mix it all in the bottling bucket, and siphon the beer onto it.  After that's complete and all the sugar is mixed throughout the beer evenly, you use a bottling wand to get the beer into the bottle.  It's basically just a tube with a stopper at the bottom that is held down by the pressure of the beer on top of it.  When you put it in the bottle, the stopper raises, and the beer can flow out.  Then it's just a matter of filling the bottle, capping it, and putting everything away.  Three weeks or so later, the beer is ready to enjoy!  We'll be sure to let everyone know how it turns out, but we're pretty excited about it.

- Adam

Secondary Transfer

Yesterday was the second big day in the brewing cycle. We transfered the beer from the primary fermenter to what's called a secondary. The majority of the beer's fermentation is done now, but in the primary it was sitting on all sorts of nasty stuff, such as yeast and excess proteins that are created during the process. The beer tends to stay cloudy unless it is removed from all this gunk, and so although not necessary, it's generally considered good practice to move it to a secondary. This is a large (5 gallon) glass bottle, in which the beer sit for two weeks to clear up and allow the flavors to smooth out more. From this container, the beer will be transfered to a bucket for bottling, and immediately put in the bottles, where it will carbonate over a period of 3 weeks.

In order to get the beer from one container to the other without disturbing it too much or exposing it to much oxygen, we use a siphon. The beer flows smoothly and slowly through the siphon tube to the other container, without stirring it up much and causing oxidation. If the beer was overexposed to oxygen, it would cause bad flavors to develop. In addition we made sure to sanitize the bottle and everything that would come in contact with our beer, as infections can still take hold and ruin our work thus far.

We also sanitized a shot glass, and snuck a small drink of the beer to taste test. It was rough, and a little on the bitter side, but definitely drinkable, even warm and uncarbonated. We took this as a good sign... if we can see ourselves being able to drink the stuff at it's worst, it should be pretty tasty when it finishes. A lot can happen in 2 weeks, so hopefully the flavors will smooth out, the bitterness will subside some, and we'll have a killer beer.

- Adam

Brew Day

First off I would like to apologize for the lack of reviews in the past couple of weeks.  My computer's video card has died and so right now I have limited access until I can get it repaired.  However, it's been a busy time on the beer front.  Friday of this past week was Brew Day.  Dan and I split the cost of a home brewing kit, and spent this weekend making our first batch of beer.  As such I thought I would talk a little about the brewing process.

We bought an extract kit, which is pretty much the simplest way to brew beer short of the kits where you drop in a carbonation tablet or a Mr. Beer kit.  We wanted to actually experience the process, and have good tasting results, so we went with something a little closer to the full brewing experience.  The kit contained dry malt extract (DME), a can of liquid malt extract (LME), ale yeast, bittering and finishing hops, steeping grains, and priming sugar.  The generic process consisted of cleaning and sanitizing the equipment, boiling 3 gallons of water and setting it aside to cool, rehydrating the yeast, bringing another 3 gallons to 170 degrees and steeping the grains for 20 minutes, bringing the pot to a boil, adding the malt extract, bringing to a boil again, boiling the bittering hops for 60 minutes, adding the finishing hops for the last 10 minutes, cooling the liquid to 80ish degrees, straining into the fermenter, pouring in the yeast, and adding our boiled water until we hit our target gravity for the beer.  All in all, it doesn't sound all that complicated.  Without knowing how it's going to turn out, I'd say almost anyone could handle going through the process.  It gets more complicated as you start developing your own recipes, or move into making the malt from grain yourself rather than using malt extract.

The hard part for us now is the waiting.  The beer is going to spend at least a week in the primary fermenter, then we will transfer it over to the glass carboy for another 2 weeks to settle.  Finally we will mix our priming sugar with the beer in a bottling bucket, and bottle it to sit for 3 weeks while carbonation builds up in the bottles.  In total it will be 6 weeks from the day we brewed our beer until it's finally ready to drink.  We might sneak a taste along the way between now and then, but chances are it will be a little nasty at any point before the time is up.

I'll continue to update on the brewing process as we continue our journey into home brewing, as well as posting reviews of what we try.  I still have quite a list of beers to get through!

- Adam