Reusing Star San

I switched to Star-San earlier this year and have been pretty happy with the product overall. However, having just recently bottled up ten gallons of Russian Imperial Stout, and looking at bottling a five gallon batch of lambic and a few assorted other brews, I stand to keep using the stuff at a pretty quick rate. I'm on my second large bottle this year and it definitely adds up. 

I'd read in a few places that one can re-use it as long as the pH stays below 4 (although 3 seems better if you can store that strong of an acid) and it's clear.

So here's my plan to start doing so:

• Buy some pH test strips which read down into the 2.x range
• Mix it with distilled water instead of tap water
• Store it in an unused, PBW'd corny keg or a heavy duty plastic bucket with a lid
• Test the pH before each use and either add more concentrated Star San if it's still clear or dump and start over if the liquid is cloudy

Anyone else out there had experience with this? I'll follow up on how it works for me.

Extract Process (Revisited)

Faced with a Chicago winter (albeit an unseasonably warm and dry one - knock on wood) I've moved my brewing inside for the winter and switched back to extract as an experiment. Having developed a solid all-grain process, I'm going to try to incorporate what I've learned into a better extract / stovetop process. If you're just starting out, this should provide a good outline for a regular brew day. Just ignore the steps you don't know anything about or don't have equipment before.

So without further explanation, here's a first crack at it:

1. [24 hours ahead of brew day] Prepare my yeast starter
2. [24 hours ahead of brew day] Freeze the chill stick (I work in the restaurant industry at my day job...)
3. Get all of my ingredients and necessary equipment together
4. Fill the fermentor with sanitizer and sanitize the transfer hose, airlock, carboy bung, and oxygenation rig
5. Get my instruction sheet out (seriously)
6. Fire up the ten gallon kettle with a spigot and fill with 6.5 gallons of distilled or reverse osmosis water
7. Treat with Gypsum or Calcium Chloride only to accentuate bitterness or malt flavor, not to adjust pH. (Extract removes the need to worry about this.)
8. Steep the specialty grains while heating the brewing water up to a boil. (140F for 10-20 minutes. Although exact time and temp don't matter that much from what I understand.)
9. Ramp up to boil with my weak-ass gas range (It take two of the burners to get the ten gallon pot rolling.)
10. Add fermcap
11. Add the extract and hops per my recipe, making sure to add whirlfloc at 15 minutes
12. Kill the heat and whirlpool with the chill stick for about 15 minutes
13. Take a gravity reading and adjust for wort temperature
14. Transfer 5.5 gallons to the fermentor
15. Add more fermcap
16. Oxygenate for 15-30s, depending on the gravity of the beer
17. Pitch the starter once the wort has cooled to roughly 64F
18. Seal it up and drop it in the fermentation fridge, racking a small sample into a test jar with a hydrometer in it for watching the gravity.
19. Keep the temperature steady for the first 72 hours and then ramp up the temperature up 4-6 degrees F during the last 25% of fermentation. If the recipe calls for dry hopping, this is the time to do it.
20. Once fermentation is complete, let the beer sit for a few days at the final temperature, then cold crash in the fermentor to 34F. 
21. Let the beer sit for another 1-2 weeks on the yeast to let them do some further diacetyl cleanup and the other good work they do.
22. Rack 5 gallons of "bright" beer to a corny keg and force carbonate with CO2 to get to an appropriate level for the style.

Some Thoughts on Brewing to Style

In one of my earlier posts, I talked about my plan to brew a handful of extract recipes from Brewing Classic Styles this winter. Part of the reason the "classic styles" the BJCP recognizes evolved was the water supplies in different brewing cities. (This is a logical extension of my post yesterday.)

It's an example of human ingenuity allowing our predecessors to adapt to their surroundings. I'm pretty sure that some Irishman way back in the day didn't say to himself "Hmmm. I'd really like to make a jet-black, roasty but balanced beer." or "I bet if I throw a bunch of this malt that I accidentally burned the crap out of while trying to dry it out into my standard recipe it'll taste better." Someone just did it by accident or out of necessity and noticed that it tasted better than the way they were brewing before. I haven't done extensive research on the topic, but my guess is that the styles evolved out of necessity.

So I have to ask the question - what's with the obsession with style? I get that having a common framework to talk about our beers makes sense. Hell, I've been brewing a handful of the styles lately to get a better sense for what works in a recipe. I want to know what flavors a single grain, hop variety or yeast strain contribute to a beer. It's really helpful to know what ingredients or process make two beers that look very similar on paper taste completely different. That makes me a better brewer.

But when it comes to designing new recipes or classifying some of my absolute favorite commercial beers, the importance of style starts to fade. The Citra IPA Jeremy and I recently brewed was amazing and did fit into the IPA guidelines, but it wasn't quite bitter enough for his tastes. Firestone's Double Barrel Ale is an amazingly executed "English Pale Ale", but it doesn't come close to fitting any of the classic English Pale Styles. Lagunitas's Little Sumpin Sumpin is an undeniably delicious beer that doesn't come close to anything in the BJCP.

There's even a budding category that the BJCP is going to have to recognize soon - the Black IPA (or cascadian dark ale, the heavily pacific hopped robust porter, or whatever it is you want to call it.) And that's my point. The collective knowledge of brewing science has evolved far beyond what the Bavarians knew in the 1500's when they developed some of the styles that have made their way into what we recognize today or what the monks in Belgium understood. We have universities studying fermentation science. We have better malts, new hop varieties and a far greater understanding of the chemistry involved in the brewing process. We have the ability to brew beers that simply couldn't have existed a hundred or five hundred years ago. So brew like a homebrewer and don't be afraid to experiment. Throw some Pacific coast hops into your German Pilsner or use that Belgian yeast in your porter. Let your palate tell you whether the end result is great or not so good. Use the styles as a framework, but don't be constrained by them.

(Image used under the creative commons license. Original is here. You have to love Flickr.)

Things I Wish I'd Known

I've been listening to some back episodes of Brew Strong during my commutes this past week and particularly those about brewing water. There's a ton of useful information in them about how water chemistry makes a difference and some pretty advanced information about how to adjust your brewing water for different styles based on the grain bill you're using and your local water. I'll save that for a future post.

However, there are some really simple take-aways which I wish someone had told me early on:

• There's a historical reason that certain cities brewed different styles of beer. More alkaline water supplies need to be balanced with roasted, darker malts. They contribute a lower pH to the mash and brewing process overall, which gets the mash pH and final beer pH into the optimal range. Likewise, cities with more neutral water supplies brewed lighter colored beers because they didn't need the acidic contribution of the roasted malts.

• If you're an extract brewer, use distilled water. The malt extract you're using already has an appropriate mineral content, acidity and hardness for the malts used to make it. Don't bother with anything else.

(Image used under the creative commons license. The original is here.)

A Little Bit of Beer Porn

Happy Hannukah to me.

(Sorry about the slight blurriness in the picture - I took it on my phone because I wanted to get all of this properly stashed away in the fridge.)

Brettanomyces

I brewed a dark cherry lambic back in June and it's been aging in a carboy since. I'd only made one prior attempt at a lambic much earlier on in my brewing career, which I ended up dumping. Thankfully I've learned enough about yeast, bugs, and sanitation that I understand what I did wrong the first time around. This batch looks and smells like it's supposed to, although I haven't tasted it yet to be sure how it's coming along. I thought everything was good. I was wrong.

It seems like I either have brett lurking somewhere in my equipment or I have a natural source of wild yeast in my back yard or basement. Since then, I've had one batch I tossed because of contamination and traces of it show up elsewhere.

The first hint that something was up was a ten gallon batch of Firestone Double Barrel Ale clone which was split into two fermentors and pitched with two different yeasts. One of the batches turned out amazing, and the other was infected. The process for both was literally identical up to the point of pitching. The results couldn't have been more dissimilar. The aroma, taste, and even then color of the two beers was distinctly different.

So after a bit of research, I tossed all of my old plastic tubing, and brewed a batch of my ginger wheat which I fermented in a V-Vessel. (Separate post on that at some point.) I racked a gallon off into the sanitized, but possibly contaminated better bottle and let it sit for a couple of weeks. The test was inconclusive, and in hindsight I probably should've bottled up the results and done a "forced" conditioning at high temperatures to see if there really was anything at work.

But in any case, here are the steps I took / have taken since.

I bought a new better bottle and hardware for it.
I replaced all of my tubing and hoses used on the cold side of the process.
Instead of using a brush and mild detergent, I upgraded to PBW for cleaning the Better Bottle.
My keg cleaning regimen now involves a soak in PBW, scrubbing, a rinse and then a soak in star san instead of just a water rinse / scrub and a sanitizing cycle.
I've started buying fresh, clean bottles for anything which is going to need to age and only using recycled bottles for short term transportation.
As much as my limited space permits, I keep all of my aging beer cold.

After all that, I can't definitively say that I've beaten or contained that troublesome but wonderful bacteria lurking in my brewery somewhere, but I do brew with more confidence that I won't have to pitch any more batches soon.

Anything I missed?

Drinking Locally and Learning to Love Small Beers

One of the local options here in Chicago I've really come to appreciate over the past six months or so is Half Acre Beer Company. I tried some of their beer early on when they were still contract brewing up in Wisconsin and wasn't really impressed.


However, I came back to Daisy Cutter and Gossamer earlier this year and had a totally different impression than that of the Lager. They're both smaller beers, with the Daisy Cutter as a pale ale coming in at 5.3% and the Gossamer as a golden ale coming in at just over 4%. They're both great examples of their respective styles, although I think that there's a significant difference between canned and draft Daisy Cutter.

In any case, one of the things I really enjoy about both of these beers is that they really work as session beers. The Daisy Cutter has a nice hop presence which makes it a good option to substitute in for an IPA and the Gossamer is just a well-executed, very drinkable beer. There were a few years where I was all about big beers with big flavor and big alcohol, but the more that I've brewed the more I realize that it takes a very particular type of skill to brew a smaller beer that still tastes incredible.

So my hat's off to the brewers at Half Acre. They turn out some great products and it just feels good to know that my beer dollars are going back to a business that is literally three miles from my house.

Now about that four pack of Over Ale in my fridge...

Oak Aging Experiment (Setup)

At some point while I was sitting at the Bears game and freezing my ass off last weekend, my thoughts drifted to how nice it would be to have a flask of something strong and brown to warm me up. Naturally I then drifted on over to beer and how it'd be nice to oak-age some of the Russian Imperial Stout we've got left after the angriest fermentation I've ever witnessed...

Thankfully, I had some medium toast American oak cubes left over from the Firestone Double Barrel Ale clone Jeremy and I brewed towards the end of the summer. So after a bit of researching proper oak handling and the appropriate quantities to use for aging on a homebrew scale, here's what I did.

• The consensus seems to be that 1-2oz of cubes per 5 gallon batch is about right. Since I'm going to be aging in 1/2 gallon growlers, I measured out 4 x .2oz (6g) portions of oak cubes. (The thought here is also that cubes give a more complex, layered flavor than chips. Since this is already a big, complicated beer I wanted that complexity instead of just straight oak flavor.)
• I boiled some water and poured enough over each portion to cover the cubes and monitored the temperature to make sure it stayed over 180F for 20 minutes to pasteurize the cubes
• At the same time, I sanitized the jar which would hold half of the cubes and a generous measure of bourbon.
• While the chips were pasteurizing, I sanitized two growlers, complete with stoppers and airlocks.
• I also sanitized the shiny new beer gun Jeremy and I went in on...
• Back upstairs, I transferred half the cubes into each of two sanitized jars and added some Maker's to one set to soak for a few days.
• Set up the beer gun and filled the two growlers, adding 6g of cubes to each.

And now we let them age for a couple of months. It's going to be difficult to stare at those growlers and wonder what delicious chemical magic is going on inside of them, but I'm sure that the end result will absolutely be worth the wait.

I'll repeat with the bourbon soaked cubes this weekend when we bottle off the rest of the batch. More to come on the Blichmann Beer Gun, but my initial take is that it f'ing rocks.

My Local Homebrew Shop

As far as I know, there are three homebrew shops in the city of Chicago proper. (One of them has a handful of locations, so technically there are six or seven actual "storefronts".)

However, there's one which very recently opened up and definitely stands out from the rest. Brew Camp (in the Lincoln Square neighborhood, which happens to be really close to my neighborhood) does some things differently from the other options and does them well.

They engage with their customers on both Facebook and Twitter and actually respond to questions and comments that people post. I'm still not entirely sold on the overall impact social media has on a business, but the guys here are definitely using it to their benefit.

They teach brewing classes for beginners at their space. This has to be one of the best ways to get people over the initial learning curve and into the hobby.

They are working with my local homebrew club to put on a competition this January and hosted the last meeting in their space.

In short, they're engaging with the brewing community here in Chicago in ways other than simply letting people come in to their store and ask for advice. In a small niche business like this one, it absolutely sets them apart from their competition. I'd much rather shop somewhere that I know my dollars are going to support people who are ambassadors for the brewing community and truly passionate about beer.

(I don't have any connection to Brewcamp, nor do I have any commercial interest in writing this post. I'm simply someone who's been really impressed with them thus far and thought they deserved another positive mention.)

Firestone Union Jack in Chicago!

I've been a huge fan of the Firestone Walker beers for a while now. One of my best friends was out in San Luis Obispo for a few years for work and turned me on to their products while you could still only get them in California, Nevada and Utah. I'm pretty sure that in my nascent appreciation for craft beer I read an article in one of GQ or Esquire which named it the best beer in America as well.

In any case, my buddy was nice enough enough to smuggle some bottles home every time he was back in Chicago and then continue to do so when he swung back through California after relocating back to Chicago. So up until last January, I only had occasion to drink their beers on very rare occasions. Thankfully, they released the proprietor's reserve series here and made the Double Jack and Walker's Reserve available here in 22's and on draft.

And now as of a month or so ago, they've released Union Jack in both six packs and on draft. I am a happy Firestone fanboy. It's definitely my go-to house IPA when I don't have one of my own on tap.

After the homebrew club meeting last week, a handful of us ended up at the Bad Apple which happened to have Union Jack on draft. Most of the guys hadn't tasted it previously, but by the time the little lady and I left the better portion of our group was drinking it.

Well done Firestone crew. Now you guys just need to figure out how to get the Double Barrel Ale out here!

Epic Blowoff (Part 2)

Believe it or not, these two better bottles each started with the same amount of beer in them. I posted a picture earlier of the mess the one on the right made all over the bottom of the fermentation freezer. I'm not totally sure, but I think it managed to blow off about a gallon and a half. I honestly can't even believe that this fermentation produced enough CO2 to turn all of that wort into foam and then push it out through a 1/2" blowoff tube and out of a growler. Totally ridiculous.

The batch on the left had a lower OG (although still a big beer at 1.095) and tasted pretty delicious when I took a sample transferring it to a keg for pre-bottling carbonation. The batch on the right started at 1.106 and definitely needs some substantial time to mellow out. It still has some really strong coffe / astringent notes which dominate the taste of the beer. I'll follow up on it in about 3 months...

My Local Homebrew Club

After a summer of intense learning and brewing, joining a club stood out as one of the things which I hadn't started to do yet. It just so happens that there's a club literally in my neighborhood and one of the guys who started it owns a small (non-beer related) store which I frequent on a regular basis.

Last night I finally made it to a meeting and even convinced the fiance to come with. (Luckily for me, she not only tolerates the massive amount of brewing stuff at the house but she actually is a huge craft and homebrew fan who has pretty extensive knowledge at this point. Subject for another post.) I was pleasantly surprised at the number of brewers in attendance, the range of skill levels, and that they're holding a competition in January.

There was a short presentation by a BJCP judge on the different style categories and what to expect when entering your beer in competition, followed by a hour and change of socializing and trying other brewers' beers. This is definitely the fun part. It's awesome to talk to so many other brewers in a concentrated, in person setting and to try so many other home-brewed beers and listen to the brewers talk about how they made them.

I'll definitely be entering the last of the Octoberfest we brewed in September, a lambic that's been aging since June and possibly the double IPA Jeremy and I are about to brew in the competition.