Brewing Salts Really Are "Seasonings" For Your Beer

Now not to get ahead of ourselves, the flavors in your beer predominantly come from malt, hops and yeast byproducts. So as I've said before, dial that shit in before you start screwing around with your beer. Otherwise, it's analogous to dumping a full salt shaker onto a well-done steak and expecting that to magically transform it into a perfectly seared, crusty but medium rare and juicy steak. It just doesn't work. Now you're just eating an extra salty piece of crap instead of a piece of crap.

But once you've honed your process and want to think about tweaking the flavors in your beer to really bring out the profile you're looking for, it's time to start thinking about water treatment. (This post is only about the flavor additions - there's a lot more to water treatment. See this other post.)

Sulfate (SO4) and Chloride (Cl-) are the two primary ions which have an impact on beer flavor. The presence and concentration of either ion independently appears to be less important than the actual ratio between them. A ratio which favors a higher Chloride concentration will accentuate malt (bready, toasty, caramelly) flavors where a ratio with a higher Sulfate ratio will highlight hop bitterness and sharpness.

Jeremy and I have only really just started to successfully tweak this ratio of salts in our beers. We've brewed three batches of Russian Imperial Stout over the past year or so, partially out of need to fill a five gallon used whiskey barrel we bought this past winter. The first two batches were brewed last fall and were pretty solid, well executed beers. But something was missing. They lacked the velvety, chocolatey notes which make a big stout the kind of beer you want to slowly nurse out of a snifter, savoring the aroma and pairing with a brick of blue cheese or a cigar.

In hindsight, we totally screwed up the water treatment. We'd been brewing hoppy beers all summer, and without a real insight into the balance necessary in our water, dumped a boatload of gypsum into the beer. Our Chloride to Sulfate ratio was something like 1 : 3, which completely over-accentuated the bitterness and downplayed the malt. On our re-brew we were 1.5 : 1. The third round has those massive chocolate, stone fruit and roast notes that make it characteristic of the style.

Furthering the cooking analogy, the first two stouts were nicely cooked steaks but lacked something almost intangible. We made a tiny adjustment, just like learning to salt the meat and let it warm up to room temperature in order to create that perfectly caramelized crust. The more I brew, the more these little adjustments start to really matter and impact the finished beer.

(Bad choice on the analogy. Now I want to eat a steak and drink one of those stouts at 8 in the morning...)

Barrel Yum Yum

Oh what's that? 5 Gallons of Russian Imperial Stout getting dumped from a used blue corn whiskey barrel? Yup. It is. Round 3 of this recipe, competition bound... 

(Sorry - no useful information here today. Just a little bit of beer porn.)

Water Basics

I had the opportunity to talk about the basics of water as it relates to brewing with the soon to be founder of Panic Brewing at the last Square Kegs meeting. Rather than re-writing the whole talk, I've posted the notes here. Gary took the liberty of adding some of the more technical details based on his education at the American Brewers Guild.

You can check it out here.

A Tale of Two Pales

These are actually the same beer. Same malt bill, same process other than a slightly longer mash on the darker one, different hops in the same quantity, and different carbonation levels. The left beer was hopped with Pacific Gem (13.2% alpha) and Australian Galaxy (13%) and the right was Columbus (13.9%) and Simcoe (13%). Never mind the shitty picture quality - you can still get the point.)

They're all small differences, but this is one of those one of those experiences that continues to blow my mind and preconceived notions about what matters in brewing.

I'm not sure where the dramatic difference stems from, but here are a few possibilities:

• There are a few episodes of Can You Brew It where Jamil talks about how particulate still in solution in the beer can actually make it appear lighter. 
• The actual oil levels in the hop combinations were different. I know that hops and yeast tend to do a little chemical dance at different points of fermentation, so it's possible that the beer on the right flocculated out better because of this.
• The dissolved volumes of CO2 were different (I carbonated the left and Jeremy did the right), which again could affect color
• One of the two beers (I didn't take great notes on the order we brewed them in) was mashed about 15 minutes longer than the other. I don't think that would have a significant impact, but in this case I can't rule it out.

So ultimately I don't really know how two beers with the same malt bill ended up looking so different, but it was an eye opening experience. 

10,000 Hours?

Hey J - you look pretty bored. Oh and Diesel is characteristically
not giving a shit about anything. Except maybe that squirrel.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000 hour rule. His poses the theory that to really reach mastery of any skill or craft you need to spend at least 10,000 hours honing it. He talks about the Beatles spending 10,000 hours over a few years playing in Hamburg Germany and about Bill Gates growing up spending his weeknights and summers in a computer lab starting at a young age.

I'm positive I haven't spent ten thousand hours brewing. Since I started tracking with BeerAlchemy in December of 2010, I have brewed 32 batches (195.75 gallons) either solo or with Jeremy. I started brewing in early 2004 and conservatively did about another 30-40 extract batches in that period of time. That probably works out to a bit under 1000 hours of brewing and cellar maintenance during fermentation. I've listened to most of the programming the brewing network has put out there, read a rather ridiculous volume of books and blogs, and certainly spent many many hours seeking out and trying new beers.

All in all, I really don't know how much time I've spent in the hobby and related activities. But what I do know (and the picture in this post sums it up well) is that it dawned on me this Sunday that there were certain points of the brewing process during which Jeremy and I didn't even need to talk this weekend. We just flowed from one task to the next, having dialed in our process on our equipment. I was laughing about our first all grain effort in which we screwed up royally on the mash temp, didn't quite hit our numbers, spent the whole time freaking out about whether we were screwing it all up and just barely made it through the whole process in 7 or 8 hours. Contrast that with a day which looked a lot like that picture. Mostly we just stay a couple of steps ahead and then sit around and way until it's time for the next burst of activity.

I don't purport to be an expert. We're just barely scratching the surface of making predictably good all grain beer and understanding how the inputs actually affect the finished product. But I think Malcolm's on to something. Maybe in another few years when I actually hit that 10,000 hour mark I'll start taking home some competition medals or even a best in show. Although at this point, I'm not really that worried. I'm having way too much fun along the way.

Rebrew: Citra IPA

As Jeremy and I have really started to dial in our all-grain process, we've gone back to a couple of beers we brewed last summer and brewed them again. I'm still on enough of a learning curve that we've been able to noticeably improve on those earlier attempts.

In particular, we re-brewed a Russian Imperial Stout early this spring which we'd done in the fall. The original beer was pretty solid, but lacked the velvety, chocolatey notes which really needed to shine for it to be great. We treated the water with a mix of Calcium Choloride (CaCl2) and Gypsum (CaSO4) this time around instead of a single CaSO4 adjustment in the fall. We also pitched onto yeast cakes from ten gallons of Ordinary Bitter brewed the week prior. Between those two small tweaks, we ended up with a far better end product. The aforementioned chocolate and coffee notes were there. Using a substantially larger pitch of yeast got us to a better finishing gravity, and using a slightly different carbonation level produced just the right level of carbonation.

So up next, we're re-brewing our Citra IPA from last summer. It was already a damn good beer, so we wanted to brew it again this year. However, given the opportunity to tweak a few things I wanted to tune up the malt profile a bit and accentuate the unique character Citra brings to the party. Based on the recent process improvements we've made to improve on our hop character, I'm pretty confident we'll get there by using a low temperature whirlpool addition. With the malt character, we're going to use an English Ale yeast (Wyeast 1335) which should accentuate the bread / biscuit character a bit more than a clean american ale yeast. We'll probably also tweak the water adjustments a bit and go with a mix of calcium chloride and gypsum instead of strictly gypsum.

The yeast starter is going and brewday is Sunday. I'll have some results in a couple of weeks!

Wine Yeast Mythbusting

I listened to an episode of The Brewing Network's Sunday Session yesterday which featured an extended talk with Shea Comfort, a consulting winemaker who has adopted the moniker of "The Yeast Whisperer." (For those of you who listen to the BN regularly, there's a brief snippet where JP launches into a Caesar Milan impersonation where he's ranting about how "The yeast need to know that you are in control. You most be dominant over your yeast..." etc which had me rolling!)

Shea knows yeast. He presented a ton of useful information about yeast in general and wine yeast applications in beer in particular. There's a whole separate portion of his talk about using wine yeasts in beer in order to get some very distinct flavors. I'll save that for a separate post since I'm now pretty interested in doing some experiments with it.

He also cleared up some of the misconceptions that seem to be held pretty commonly amongst brewers about wine yeasts.

• Wine yeasts fall into one of three categories: Killer, Neutral, or Susceptible. Yeast, being a living organism with a desire to reproduce, have evolved over time. Some strains within Saccharomyces Cerevisiae (wine and ale) have developed the ability to produce and release a protein which literally stops other susceptible strains of yeast from fermenting. Many of the wine strains fall into this category. All (or most) of the beer strains are susceptible. As such, pitching Champagne yeast into an active beer fermentation will eradicate your beer yeast within about 12 hours.
• Wine yeasts are bad at breaking down maltotriose and other higher-order dextrins produced by mashing malted barley. Beer yeasts are also a little lazy and will start by eating glucose and maltose before moving on to maltotriose. If you're scratching your head, here's the practical application: Pitching Champagne yeast into a stuck fermentation likely will not "dry out" your beer and take it down to the final gravity you're looking for. If you have a stuck fermentation, your beer yeast has probably chewed through most of the lower-order sugars and is getting lazy about eating the higher order sugars. The wine yeast can't eat them and it'll kill your beer yeast once you pitch it. So you'll just have another layer of flocculated yeast in your fermenter at the same gravity. The only situation where this will actually help you is if you've handled your beer yeast poorly and it crapped out for a different reason. (Lack of nutrients, oxygenation, temperature stress, etc.)
• So in the case of a stuck fermentation, Shea recommended using enzymes which replicate the process which takes place in your mash. (He recommended using Convertase.) There are commercial enzymes which exist for use in brewing and distillation which will break down higher order dextrins into more easily fermentable compounds. Dosing stuck fermentations with a very small amount of these enzymes will help your lazy yeast out, and if done properly will help you nail your target final gravity without completely fermenting out. (The enzymes are essentially a protein which gets denatured and has limited capacity to convert higher order sugars, so they will run out of steam after a certain amount of activity.)

I have yet to try any of the techniques he mentioned, but you can be damn sure I will be running some experiments...

Rites of Passage

I was doing some cleanup after our last batch and noticed that one of my Better Bottles had some cracks in the bottom rim. It's not the first piece of equipment I've had to retire. I had another Better Bottle which I've designated for Brett fermentation only, an autosiphon which has visible scrapes and scratches all over the inside of it which I pitched, a few beakers which were process casualties and at least a couple of stir bars which made their way down the drain. And not to mention Jeremy and I have started following Jamil's recommendation and replacing all of our soft plastic tubing every year.

All in all, equipment casualties do seem to be par for the course in order to maintain proper sanitation. Given space to "cellar"beer (at least to the best that my basement can maintain cool temperatures during these Chicago summers) we've seen infection crop up in beers after they sit for a while. I know that there's some wild yeast and bugs floating around in my back yard and basement, but changing out equipment seems to have bought us more stable beer for now.

It's not just equipment that starts to fall by the wayside as you get better. Once we hit the point where our beer started to consistently taste really good, it stopped making sense to stretch ingredients. Old hops which had sat warm or grain which had not been properly stored got pitched, as do anything which doesn't taste or smell right before a brew day. Ultimately it's a little less economical on the front side, but I'd rather spend a few extra bucks on equipment and ingredients than end up dumping a whole batch because of contamination. And I'm pretty sure we're all in this hobby to make good beer, right? 

Late (Aroma) Hop Addition Experiments

Jeremy and I brewed a clone of Epic Pale Ale (recipe from The Brewing Network's Can You Brew It) a few months ago. It was awesome. You can see the recipe here. It's not a standard pale ale.

The most noteworthy and interesting part of the beer was the different ways in which the brewer talked about using hops. (All US Cascade.) The recipe calls for two flame-out additions: a big flame-out addition held for a ten minute whirlpool, and then another big addition in another ten minute whirlpool. It sounded rather odd, but some of the recent reading I'd done emphasized the importance of getting the wort below 170F as quickly as possible to preserve hop aroma. Not to mention it put the whirlpool chiller I put together over the winter to good use.

The end result was awesome. Huge hop nose and a very distinct hop flavor.

Fast forward a few weeks. I found myself listening to a podcast with Stan Hieronymus in which he talked about the volatile compounds in hops. One of the more interesting nuggets of information was that ALL of the volatile aromatics are boiling off above 170f and some volatilise as low as 80f. (There is some far more complex chemistry going on here regarding the rate of volatilization and how other compounds in wort can "grab" onto the hop aromatics, but I don't really understand all of it.)

So with some additional credibility behind this lower temperature whirlpool technique, we decided to put it to the test. One of the brews we had slated for the summer was a pale ale from Brewing Classic Styles. So we tweaked the recipe a bit for this oddly timed addition and brewed two pale ales with the same malt bill but different character hops. One had Simcoe and Columbus, the other Galaxy and Pacific Gem. Both were bitterred with Horizon and each had a five minute addition, a flame-out addition whirlpooled for ten minutes, a 170F ten minute whirlpool addition and were finished with a dry hop addition.

Again - I am sure there is a lot of complicated chemistry at work, but there is absolutely something to this temperature stuff. These beers finished with massive hop aroma and flavor and definitely more so than we've gotten out of just dry hopping. I kept the Pacific batch and am really interested in brewing with both of these hop varieties again. There's a distinct melon / tropical fruit / berry / spice aroma to it

The only thing I'd go back and change is to tone down the bitterness a few IBU's. Rager calculated out in the thirties, bit that seems low for how much bitterness I pick up in the beer. If / when I re-brew I'll drop the horizon down to 14g.

Recipe(s):
5.126kg US 2 Row
340g Victory
340g Munich 10L
227g White Wheat

Mash at 152 for 60m.

27g Horizon @ 60

7g CTZ @ 5m
7g Simcoe @ 5m

7g CTZ @0m / 10m whirlpool
7g Simcoe @0m / 10m whirlpool

7g CTZ @170F / 10m whirpool
7g Simcoe @170F / 10m whirlpool

28g CTZ Dry Hop
28g Simcoe Dry Hop

(We used Galaxy and Pacific Gem in the same amounts.)

Public Service Announcement

(Lifted from Goose's Website.)

Go buy yourself a four pack of Goose Island's Matilda. And don't drink it. Seriously - do yourself a favor and sit on it for at least year.

I live in Chicago and drink a handful of Goose's beers on a semi-regular basis. I've always thought Matilda was a good offering, but never something I'd seek out. Fresh from the brewery it's a bit too sweet and my take was always that Goose was doing a crappy job of trying to produce a Belgian Golden Strong or a Tripel.

I was dead wrong. I hereby apologize to Goose Island for unfairly discrediting them on this effort. Until I really upped the ante on my knowledge of beer styles (through the BJCP and my own brewing) I was sadly unaware of the existence of 'Belgian Specialty Ale', a category created specifically to capture Orval.

As such, I just didn't get this beer. But last summer I got a few four packs and just let it sit in my basement, waiting to offload it onto some family or friends during a special occasion or a gathering at my house. During that year of aging, something magical happened. The brett introduced during barrel aging woke up and went to work. The beer dries out and gains an entirely different dimension of complexity. T distinct barnyard funk and some of the other more distinctive esters from brett become more pronounced and round the beer out.

So maybe it was just my ignorance of this style, the less evolved and less funk-friendly state of my palate, or maybe it was just the fact that I've never had the chance to try a substantially aged sample of this beer. But I was missing out. And if you've never had Matilda after some cellaring, so are you.

California Trip (Part 2) - The Firestone Walker Inaugural Fest

That is 3 Floyds Dark Lord Vanilla Bean. Really. Suck it.

The whole plan for this trip started when Firestone Walker announced that they were planning the Invitation Festival this winter. Ashley (being the loyal Facebook devotee) caught the post the day they put it up. We recruited Eric and bought the regular tickets the first day they went on sale.

And then we planned a trip around the fest and the easiest days to fly from ORD to SFO.

They've gotten a ton of great press about the event already so there's no need for me to go into a ton of detail about it. But I'd be doing the event and those responsible for organizing it a huge disservice if I didn't say that it was simply the best fest I've been to thus far. The selection of beers, the organization of the festival grounds themselves, and the concept behind it were all phenomenal.

I had the chance to revisit some of my favorites, try a ton of beers you just can't get here in Chicago (Russian River, Pizza Port, etc) and to sample more than a few super-rare specialties.

They just announced June 1st, 2013 the date for next year's fest. I'll be shocked if I have any trouble convincing my partners in crime to do a second round... (Well, other than the fact that Ashley and I will likely have just gotten back from our honeymoon.)

Templeton Rye English Barleywine Group Brew

So, I've got some more Instagrammy beer porn for you here. Gary (aka Panic Brewing) from my homebrew club Square Kegs mentioned a few meetings back that he had a couple of Templeton Rye barrels just sitting in his basement. And being a good homebrewer / soon to be pro brewer, he decided that he'd organize a group brew of English Barleywine. Jeremy and I immediately jumped on the chance and brewed up ten gallons even though we had to struggle to figure out fermentation space.

More on the end product in six months or so. I am a little jealous Gary is the one sampling it to gauge how it's aging out...

California Trip (Part 3) - The Toronado

Everyone we talked to along the way said we absolutely needed to go to The Toronado. The San Fran locals we met on the bus to the festival, Justin from The Brewing Network, one of our airline industry friends from Chicago (completely unsolicited), and everyone else.

So we did. Ash and I drove around for about 30 minutes looking for parking after spending some time at a street fest in the Haight. But we eventually found somewhere to ditch the rental, used Google maps and walked to the bar.

It didn't disappoint. They've got a solid selection of drafts, are unapologetic on their curt service and cash-only policy and after settling in to your table, it slowly becomes apparent that this place has a  certain patina. As in, "We were here before craft beer was called microbrew, you un-enlighted mofo. Glad you finally decided to join the cause."

I love these places. We're lucky enough to have The Map Room and The Hopleaf here in Chicago, and even the relative newcomer in The Local Option. The Palm Tavern (still no website) is where I had my angels and trumpets moment with beer. I'm sure there are more out there and I want to find them.

But if you're in San Fran, do yourself a favor and go here. Seriously.

(Original Photo from Flickr)

California Trip (Part 1)

IllSo our hotel bar in San Fran has Pliny the Elder on tap. Upon noticing this last night I immediately ordered three for Ashley, my buddy Eric, giddy with anticipation.

I don't know if it was an old keg or it hadn't been cellared properly, but it did not change my life. There's so much hype about this beer that I'm not sure it could've lived up to my expectations. Don't get me wrong - it's a damn good beer. But I think all of the hype about it does Vinny a disservice. I'll gladly drink it again, but I wouldn't go out of my way to set up a trade for it when bombers of Double Jack are readily available in Chicago...

English Ordinary Bitter

Well looky look at that - I finally jumped on the Instagram bandwagon and can now take my own faux artsy photos without busting out the DSLR and Gimp. (Although it is pretty nice to just snap a quick shot on the phone and have something that looks reasonably good...)

On to the real subject of the post. Jeremy and I brewed 10 gallons of English Ordinary Bitter (using the recipe in Brewing Classic Styles.) Having previously mentioned my relatively newfound appreciation for truly sessionable beers, I am really happy with how this turned out.

It clocks in at 3.8% and packs a ton of flavor for such a small beer. There's a lot of toasted malt character and a hint of fruity esters from the Wyeast 1968 (London ESB) strain. The hop bitterness is restrained, but definitely present. Even with the relatively low CO2, it still has a nice creamy mouthfeel and a rocky, solid head.

Short of the Ginger Wheat I brew every summer, this is the smallest beer I've made yet and honestly probably one of the best. The recipe is dead simple (Marris Otter, Crystal 120, Special Roast and East Kent Goldings) but the flavors are all in balance and it just works.

We entered it the Two Brothers Hop Juice Competition and I can't wait to get a score sheet back on it...

The Revolution Production Brewery Opening

I've been really, really excited about Revolution opening up their production brewery here in Chicago since I first found out they were in the planning phase of the project. It's a monster facility (for a small-ish brewery anyways) and it's only about two miles from my house.

So when the opportunity to buy tickets for their Grand Opening party at the brewery came up, especially since it was billed as having 30 of their beers on tap I quickly snatched a couple for the lady and I. A few of my college buddies and guys from Square Kegs (my club) also bought tickets, so I was pretty stoked leading up to the event.

The brewery itself is a pretty awesome space. It is, in fact, HUGE. They've got a serious brewhouse and a  pretty significant number of fermentors and tanks in, as well as part of their canning line. There's a ton of space for them to grow and it looks like it's going to crank once it comes on line.

And now for the downer. I'm not sure if my expectations for the event were out of whack, if I'm just getting a little crusty in my old age or if they just totally oversold the event. I was expecting to leave full and having a decent buzz on from tasting a handful of beers they don't normally have at the brewpub. This wasn't the case. The lady and I waited (no exaggeration) 45 minutes in one of the lines criss-crossing and snaking around the space outside of the brewery for one of the food trucks and gave up.

From what I could tell, there were only three to four pouring stations including the tap room and I didn't find any new or different beers. I assume they were in the tap room, which was totally packed. The beer lines took about ten to fifteen minutes for each pass, and they were $4 pours.

I love these guys and their beer. I'm going to chalk this one up to them being unprepared for such a large event in a new, unfamiliar space and having no idea as to the kind of demand they'd face for beer. But the event left both the little lady and I with a bad taste in our mouths (pun intentional.) I'll be back and I hope that they can get their shit together for future events...

Brewing Through the Styles

I've previously posted about how I started brewing through the BJCP styles using recipes in Brewing Classic Styles. (I also got on a soapbox about where styles don't matter. That's a separate topic.) The idea at the outset was to get to know ingredients better and to have a long list of recipes to work through while we're sorting out our process and equipment.

Within the past year, we've brewed a eight recipes out of that book. In no particular order: IPA, Octoberfest, English Ordinary Bitter, English Barleywine, Imperial IPA, Russian Imperial Stout (3x), Saison, and American Brown Ale.

I'm liking the process. These are not complex recipes, but it's amazing to see the different end products. The yeast character and phenolics that we got out of the saison (after fighting with that Belgian strain from Wyeast) are amazing. The fact that it only takes 5% chocolate malt out of a massive grain bill on a Russian Imperial Stout to make the beer completely opaque and have a pronounced, massive chocolate flavor is still pretty amazing to me.

I definitely don't understand anywhere close to all of the chemistry behind it, but I am starting to wrap my head around the fact that the flavors we pick out in food and beer are just specific chemical compounds that can be created or broken down by parts of the fermentation process or occur naturally in our ingredients.

One of the things which really helped to crystalize that notion in my mind was trying a couple of beers with non-traditional ingredients at my last club meeting. One had maple syrup and the other had cocoa powder. Neither beer tasted particularly like the highlighted ingredient. It's totally counterintuitive at first, but adding an ingredient to the beer pre-fermentation will probably not produce the end result you think it will. Which brings me full circle - rather than experimenting with non traditional ingredients, I'd highly recommend learning what the traditional ones contribute.

It's Not A Problem. It's a Hobby.

At least that's what I told myself today when Jeremy and I were surveying the basement and realized that we have 37.5 gallons of fermenting beer right now. Ten gallons of Russian Imperial Stout (to be aged in a used blue corn whiskey barrel), ten gallons of massively hopped pale ale, ten gallons of English Barleywine (part of a group brew / club effort to fill a Templeton Rye barrel), five gallons of mild from Barleywine's second runnings and two and half gallons of saison we pitched with Wyeast's Roselaire blend.

So it's official. We're hooked.

Now we just have to figure out who to pawn a lot of this beer off on. I can only drink so much...

It's Already Old News, But...

Tony Magee's announcement that Lagunitas is planning to open up a production brewery right here in Chicago is big news for both Chicago's burgeoning craft beer scene and particularly for the long list of brewery startups seem to be in various early stages of getting beer onto retailers' shelves.

I recently put faces and names to two of the startups on that list at the last Square Kegs meetings I attended - Gary of Panic Brewing and Jerry of Uné Anee Brewery. I'd met both guys at prior meetings and found their breweries on the internet independently of talking to them. They're both pretty experienced brewers, both have invested in professional brewing education, and both seem like pretty genuinely good guys. I'm rooting for both of them to succeed.

And I think that Lagunitas coming here is going to make it just a bit easier on them. Sure, they'll be competing for taps and shelf space with a really well-established player in the market who can produce more beer in a single brew cycle than some of the nano / startup breweries will in a month or a year. But that doesn't really matter all that much compared to what Lagunitas could and hopefully will do for the supply chain and other related businesses that a production brewery relies on.

For example, one of the biggest cost factors in running a brewery is freight. Tony gave that as his singular cost justification to build this massive brewery. Grain has to get from a farmer to a supplier and ultimately to a brewery. That takes a lot of diesel. The same goes for bottles and then for finished beer it's basically the opposite process. The raw materials are cheap, but the freight adds a lot of cost in to the equation. (To put it on a homebrew scale, it costs ~$15 to ship a $50 sack of grain from Northern Brewer to my office in Northbrook.)

Having some big production breweries based right here is going to make it far more attractive for those grain suppliers to throw a single pallet of malt on the back of a full truck or to open facilities closer. It's going to make it easier for Windy City Distribution or Glunz Beer to buy more trucks, pay more sales reps and pick up the new startups with that extra capacity. Every successful (and particularly large and successful) brewery that opens has a positive impact of the ecosystem that supports the industry.

So I'm really excited about this announcement. Not only because I'll be able to go buy growlers of some of my favorite beer, but also because this is a huge leap in Chicago becoming a world class beer city with amazing local breweries dominating our tap handles. Hopefully in five or six years, Jeremy and I will be able to buy a used 15 barrel system off of somebody local who's outgrown it, take advantage of the great infrastructure that's grown to support our local beer industry and have a little bit easier of a time launching a dream because of the people who paved the way for us.

Advanced Extract Brewing

So Jeremy and I had a couple of extract recipes we'd planned on brewing indoors, but the weather here in Chicago has been so unseasonably warm that we ended up being able to brew them outside this past weekend with our all-grain gear.

After doing exclusively all grain last summer and then dicking around in my kitchen with a couple of extract batches this winter, brewing an extract kit literally felt like cheating. (The extract recipe out of Brewing Classic Styles was only slightly less so.) It felt like last summer was really about dialing in our process and getting acclimated to the new equipment we inherited, bought or built along the way. With the exception of adding a whirlpool return to the immersion chiller, everything else that we use in brewing is familiar at this point.

Jeremy had a "Dead Ringer" kit from Northern Brewer which didn't get brewed last summer and we'd gone in on the ingredients to brew an extract version of Janet's Brown. (The hops and yeast from the original kit were tossed and replaced. Buying cascade and centennial by the pound makes it a far less painful decision to consciously throw away 6 ounces of hops after opening a bag and getting some of that barely present cheesy aroma.)

But back to the process - getting starters ripping 24 hours in advance and being able to use our gear outside made cranking these batches out wickedly efficient. From starting setup to having pitched the yeast and getting the carboys situated with blowoff tubes in the chest freezer was about four and a half hours. (And we probably lost about 30 minutes troubleshooting the propane burner putting out low heat.) The actual process of starting the water, crushing the specialty grains, steeping them, getting to boil, adding hops and extract per a schedule, and then chilling back down just flies by.

Not to mention the fact that the only variable which affects whether you hit your numbers in this process is if your evaporation rate in your software is correct or not. OG was dead on in both beers.

So after a largely painless brewday, I'm excited for the summer. We've got an ambitious plan for some awesome all grain batches. And I'm excited to taste the end product of these batches, bring it to club night, and enter it into competition in a couple of months. If these taste good to Jeremy, me, the club and fare well in competition, it'll be a great sign that we're starting to actually understand the inputs which matter to making great beer.

A Night at Local Option

I met one of my buddies for a few beers at The Local Option after a pretty rough couple of days at work last week. After a couple of prior visits with some mixed impressions of the place, I've come around on it. 


That said, I'm pretty sure that it's not the place for everyone. It's loud, they rotate their taps all of the time, and have one of the most eclectic selections in the city. They also don't go out of their way to make you feel particularly welcome or special. Apparently the owner loves to come back to the bar and blare metal on the weekends.


But there's something about the place that you just have to respect. It takes balls to run a place like these guys do. They contract brew three or four of their own recipes at regionally local brewers and run a list of mostly beers you wouldn't have heard of elsewhere. 


I had their "Anthony of Bourdania", a Vienna Lager brewed at Against the Grain down in Kentucky. A little kitschy in name and concept unless they've actually met Tony, in which case it'd rock. For a contract beer, it was solid. Highly drinkable, well brewed, definitely to style. 


And then on to the reason I like this place. I had a Lost Abbey Devotion and a Jolly Pumpkin Madrugada Obscura as the night went on. I'm not going to delve into why each of them was awesome, which they were, but the fact that they always have beers like these on tap is even more awesome. Neither are on tap at more than a couple of other places in Chicago and they're both awesome beers from breweries which do great work.


So for the record, I'm just fine with blaring metal, reasonably disinterested service and pulling up beermenus.com on my phone instead of staring at a list of beers without prices or descriptions knowing that every time I come here I'm going to find a well-curated list and be guaranteed to find something new I love.

The Evolution of a Palate (Continued)

I was out last night with a few friends and ordered a bottle of Firestone Walker's Union Jack IPA. This is definitely one of my favorite beers and one that I'd say I know well. Unfortunately, this one tasted a bit off. The hop aromatics had largely dropped out, leaving a sharp bitterness and some yeast / malt character behind without the balancing notes which make the beer so good.

I don't fault Firestone for this one - I'm guessing that the offender was the bar which served the beer and that they sat on their inventory for a while prior to serving it and may not have stored it properly. (We had multiple bottles and they all exhibited the same characteristics.)

But the fact that I noticed this and neither the fiance nor the other person drinking the beer did is just the latest example of a somewhat disturbing trend that both Jeremy and I have noticed lately. After making the jump up to all grain, getting really critical of our own beers and starting to really notice the contributions of different ingredients in finished beers, I'm starting to pick out off-flavors and imperfections in commercial beers in a way which I haven't previously.

And I'm not saying this as a "beer snob" or to say that I have some freakishly evolved palette which is capable of picking out every flavor in every beer. I'm saying this as someone who loves to drink beer who is now finding it more difficult to genuinely enjoy a really wide spectrum of commercial beers despite their imperfections which I just never noticed before. This isn't necessarily a good thing. (Outside of the Cicerone or BJCP courses of study, which I have been thinking about pursuing. But I know that I can easily get caught up in being esoteric and I don't want to indulge that here...)

Anybody else out there notice this?

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks Chicago's beer scene really is awesome...

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/02/chicagos-booming-beer-scene-explained/1356/

Holy F#*@ing Citra Ice Cream

I had dinner at Revolution Brewing here in Chicago a week or so ago for one of my buddy's birthdays. I'm not sure whether I'm just a sucker for good marketing, but I signed up for their mug club after the first time I ate dinner there and find myself going back on a pretty regular basis at this point.

In any case, on this occasion I had some of the standards I've grown to love and tried a few new things. Their Eugene (robust) Porter is a consistently quality beer. My wheelhouse tends to be IPAs and shockingly, I pass over their IPA to drink the Eugene instead. Their Institutionalized Barleywine was up on draft, so I opted for a small pour of it with dessert. It poured a deep, clear red and simply blew me away on the first sip. It was rich, complex and remarkably drinkable for a 9.5% beer.

But the real highlight of the evening was the Citra ice cream. I have no idea what process they used to extract the hop "essence" of citra and get it into that ice cream, but it worked. Phenomenally well. The mango, pineapple, tropical-fruity, slightly catty flavor came through and worked perfectly with the basic vanilla ice cream. I detected some bitterness, but it was largely the aroma / flavor you'd get from the volatile oils and not isomerized alpha acids that came through.

Being somewhat of a food nerd as well, I am absolutely going to try to recreate this so I can consume it in massive quantities.

If you live in Chicago, go try it. If you don't live in Chicago, go try it the next time you visit. And if you don't visit Chicago and you're enough of a beer nerd to be reading this, you should give it a second thought. The craft beer and food scene here is worth it.

Happy Barrel Day!

Yep. Jeremy and I got our hands on one of these bad boys. We'll be making a Russian Imperial Stout quite a bit earlier than originally planned this year. I am really, really excited.

Oh and coincidentally, a pound each of Simcoe and Citra showed up at the same time today.

Seriously happy day today.

Mexican Hot Chocolate Stout (Scoresheet review)

As per my previous post, I'm going to taste each beer Jeremy and entered in competition this winter against the score sheets we got back. Hopefully paying attention to the feedback from the bjcp judges and making some tweaks will help us to get better.

Since the Mexican Hot Chocolate Stout is still on my main tap handle downstairs I decided to lead off with it.

The score sheet I got back on this one is online here.

My notes:

Aroma
Judges' Notes: Malty, slightly spicy, lightly roasted malt in the background, lack of carbonation hurts

My Notes: Bready, sweet, slightly peppery / yeasty, some very slight green apple

Appearance
Judges' Notes: No carbonation, clear, mahogany
My Notes: Jet black / opaque with tan, lingering head

Flavor
Judges' Notes: Munich breadiness, minimal hop flavor, no hot chocolate flavor, phenolic, minimal spiciness from peppers 
My Notes: Sweet, green apple flavor persists, finishes with some roast bitterness and lingering sweetness (presumably from the lactose in the mexican hot chocolate used)

Mouthfeel 
Judges' Notes: No carbonation, light body, minimal astringency
My Notes: Light, moderate carbonation, slightly "slick" (I'm guessing from the lactose or milkfat)

Overall
Judges' Notes: Lack of carbonation really hurt the beer, malt bill was not quite stout-like, more pepper would have been desirable.
My Notes: I missed the mark on this one. The underlying recipe was good, but I think next time around I'll use more of the hot chocolate spices (chile, cinnamon, cacao nib) and skip the actual hot chocolate. I also get a distinct, but not overpowering acetaldehyde flavor from this one. It'll get more time in the fermentor with a temperature bump next time around.

Score: 21

One of the things which stood out in all of the results from this competition was that our carbonation was off. The Blichmann beer gun is an awesome device, but I don't think we quite have the process dialed in with it. I'm going to experiment with it on the next couple of batches we do in order to get an appropriate level of carbonation. It's good in the keg, but it seems like some is getting lost in the bottling process.

The other changes I'll make on this one are upping the chocolate and roasted malts and using a spice blend instead of actual Mexican Hot Chocolate.

Equipment Notes : Fermentation Heater / Brew Belt

Chicago winters are cold. This one hasn't been as bad as they usually are, but it's still cold. And since I chose to live in an old two flat built in the 1920's (before the advent of modern insulation) that means my basement is cold. I keep the thermostat down there set to 65, but based on the little temperature recording thermometer I keep with the "cellar" beer, the air temp at ground level can get as low as 45F.

So all of this produces great conditions for making lagers (duly noted for next year's brew calendar), but Jeremy and I decided to brew a saison so it'd be ready right as the first signs of spring are appearing. And saison yeast likes it hot. I'd initially thought fermenting at 67 - 68 for the first 48 hours and then turning the fridge controller all the way up to 80 would result in a decent free rise and get the 80-85% attenuation appropriate for a saison.

OG: 1.072
Target FG: 1.010
Original Volume: 5.5 US Gallons

Reality: at 72 hours from pitching, the beer was around 1.036 and 61 degrees F. Damn lazy yeast!

Since brew belts are only about $20 from Brew Camp (my awesome local homebrew store), it seemed like a reasonable piece of equipment to experiment with. Particularly since Saison yeast are tolerant of high fermentation temperatures and I only have a controller suitable for cooling which means the brew belt is just going to be on without a controller.

So this past Wednesday night I bought one and wrapped it around my better bottle per the instructions.

In about twelve hours, it raised the temperature up to 70F and by this morning (36 hours later) it was up to 81F. These bad boys actually work really well. If I were to use it on anything besides a Belgain yeast strain that can handle the heat, it'd be necessary to get a digital controller to prevent it from overheating the beer.

I'll post some stats on the finish beer as well as some tasting notes when it's ready.

First Competition Results

After eagerly checking my physical mailbox like a little kid waiting for something fun for the past two weeks, the score sheets from the first competition Jeremy and I entered our beer into showed up in my gmail inbox Monday night.

Original on Flickr here

I was bummed that we didn't place in any of the categories we entered, but after reading through the sheets I was pretty pleased with the feedback we received. We definitely need to dial in the carbonation process when using the BeerGun and to pay even more attention to getting proper attenuation on our beers.

The Beer Judge Certification Program (www.bjcp.org) uses the following scoring guidelines:
Outstanding : 45 - 50
Excellent : 38 - 44
Very Good : 30 - 37
Good : 21 - 29
Fair : 14 - 20
Flawed : 0 - 13

Here are the scores we ended up with:

Octoberfest (03B) : 27
Russian Imperial Stout #1 (13F) : 24
Russian Imperial Stout #2 (13F) : 26
Citra IPA (14B) : 37 (Booyah!)
Extract Double IPA : 25
Extract Mexican Hot Chocolate Stout : 21

All in all, I think we did reasonably well for a first competition. We're going to sit down with each beer and the score sheet to review the feedback with the actual beers over the next couple of weeks. (More posts to follow...)

Firestone Invitational Beer Fest

I just bought tickets for the first Firestone Invitational Beer Fest for the fiance, a buddy (who lived in San Luis Obispo and introduced me to their beer) and myself. I'm stoked.

Depending on how the flights work out we might hit up some of the other breweries in the northern California / San Fran area. Russian River and 21st amendment are on the list. More details to follow.

Wort Chiller Test

My march pump showed up on this past Monday and I finally got a chance to put it all together tonight. Apparently my limited DIY soldering experience did me pretty well. It didn't leak and fired up a pretty vigorous whirlpool! (It's tough to see in this short video, but there were little flecks of crap in the kettle which all started to settle in the center.)

I can't wait to see this thing in action with real wort and the chiller on!

DIY : Adding A Whirlpool Return To An Immersion Chiller

What better to do over the winter when it's just too damn cold to brew outside than build some shit to make brewing this summer better?

I inherited an immersion chiller at the beginning of last summer and loved the step out to it from my ghetto-built homemade version. It's pretty effective at dropping the wort from boil to about 140 in a pretty short period of time.

However, after reading about Jamil's whirlflow immersion chiller and the impact it has on both late hop character and DMS reduction, I decided to go for it. (The fact that the fiance and her mom gave me a Northern Brewer gift card to cover a march pump definitely helped...)

The design of the whirlpool arm is actually simple. It's all 1/2" copper with a 1/2" hose barb for the output from the march pump and a curved return section which runs along the inside of the coils.

Parts List:

• ~ 5' of 1/2" type L copper tubing
• 2x 90 degree 1/2" elbows
• 1x 45 degree 1/2" elbow
• 1x 1/2" tubing to 1/2" NPT female adaptor
• 1x 1/2" NPT to 1/2" barb

Assembly:

1. Use a standard conduit bender to create the gentle 90 degree curve which roughly matches the inside of the existing coils. Putting a 3/8" spring inside of it while bending helped to prevent kinks
2. Cut the rest of the pipe to size and dry fit everything together. Following the direction of water flow: 1/2" tubing to 1/2" NPT female adaptor <=> ~2" of pipe <=> 45 degree elbow <=> ~4" of pipe <=> 90 degree elbow <=> ~30" of pipe <=> 90 degree elbox <=> curved return
3. Test fit it in the existing chiller
4. Solder it all up
5. (TBD) Test it with the pump to ensure there aren't any leaks
6. (TBD) Solder it all together (or use hose clamps)
7. Make better beer!

The (almost) finished product is pictured here. The tape is just holding it all together until I can test it next week with my new pump...

The whole unit

The top of the return and the bend profile inside.

Inlet / Outlet detail

First Competition

Square Kegs (my local homebrew club) is running a startup competition later this month. I've never entered beer in one before, but was definitely inspired to do so by listening to Jamil Zainisheff talk about getting better by doing so on many episodes of brew strong. I also happen to think that some of the recent batches I've done with Jeremy are the best I've ever made, and absolutely would stand up against other homebrew.

So yesterday I stopped by BrewCamp to drop off six entries in total:

1. West Texas Crude (Russian Imperial Stout, collaboration)
2. Light Sweet Crude (Russian Imperial Stout, collaboration)
3. Citra IPA (American IPA, collaboration)
4. Beer Wench Lager (Oktoberfest, collaboration)
5. Yet Another Imperial IPA (Imperial IPA, collaboration, extract experiment)
6. Mexican Hot Chocolate Stout (Spice Beer, solo venture, extract experiment)

I'm pretty stoked to get some BJCP-certified feedback on all of the beers and potentially win a couple of categories!

Props to the competition's organizers - they had over 500 entries yesterday. I'm looking forward to the actual event.

I'll post the score sheets once I get them back.

Big, Medium and Small Porters at Revolution

The fiance and I went to dinner at Revolution last night with a couple of friends. I've been a big fan of their whole operation since trying their beer at a festival early on and the first time I ate there.

I'm a big fan of their Eugene Porter and it just so happened that they had two additional versions of it available last night. "Hugene" and "Weegene", first and second runnings off of the standard Eugene recipe. Eugene is a substantial beer already at 7%, so the Hugene was in fact "huge" at 10.6% and the Weegene was still a 4.7% beer.

We ordered a couple 4oz pours of Hugene after we'd finished with dinner and our server was nice enough to bring us some small samples of the Weegene as well. (And I still had a half glass or so of the standard Eugene.) It was definitely a unique opportunity to try a vertical sampling of different beers all created with the same grain bill.

The Hugene definitely had the hallmarks of a first running-only beer. Massive chocolate, raisin and roast flavors were supported by an appropriate amount of residual sweetness without any hot alcohols or heavy astringency. The Weegene had some of the some chocolate notes, but definitely showed more of the roast / astringency character to be expected from a sparge. Both were well-made beers, but the big version was excellent. I haven't had an Imperial Porter in the recent past, so I also appreciated the difference between that and an Imperial Stout. The highly roasted and grain bitterness character of the stout takes a back seat to the chocolate and dark fruit flavors in the porter, making for a very drinkable beer...

I love the Chicago beer scene.

Growlers Doing Double Duty

Both of those growlers were full of beer on New Year's Eve. Having been emptied, they were put to work containing blow off for the two batches brewed on the next two days... Local love to Half Acre.

Lakefront Brewery Tour

I'm a pretty lucky guy. I recently got engaged, and not only is my fiance fully supportive of my passion for brewing - one of the locations we're considering for our wedding is Lakefront Brewery up in Milwaukee. We'd heard a lot of great things from my family up there about both the tours and about a couple of weddings they'd gone to there.

So we headed up yesterday to both check it out, ask a few questions about the venue and go on the tour. We'll see how it plays out as a venue, but the tour itself is more appropriate for this post. I've only been on a couple of tours (Dogfish Head a.k.a. mecca and Goose Island) previously. This one was pretty standard fare in terms of walking through the brewery, seeing the pro gear and having a downright hilarious guide.

Now my fiance might call me a snob for this next comment, but the actual content of the tour was definitely geared towards the casual beer enthusiast. Don't get me wrong - it was still fun and pretty cool to see how they run their operation. I know I'm in a marginally tiny percentage of the overall population as far as brewing knowledge, but I love to learn more. (I definitely learned a few new things about Dogfish on their tour.)

If / when I bring the pipe dream of starting up a brewery to fruition, I think it'd be awesome to set up a small percentage of tours geared towards homebrewers or other enthusiasts who already have a decent understanding of the process and are interested in really learning about some of the differences in a pro setup.

Better Bottle Hack

After listening to many, many episodes of Can You Brew It on the brewing network, the standard volumes they use are a part of my process.

For a 60 minute boil:

• Mash and sparge to 7.2 gallons
• Boil down to 6 gallons
• Transfer 5.5 to the fermentor
• Finish with 5 gallons of clear, drinkable beer

Since none of my boil kettles have a sight glass on them, I decided to do something I'd been thinking about for a while. I measured out a half gallon of water, put the better bottle on a flat, level surface and started marking. After the first half gallon, I did full gallons up to 5.5. (It's actually a bit higher up in the Better Bottle than I thought it would've been. Regardless, after the massive blow-out I had earlier this year in a Russian Imperial Stout, I've started adding fermcap to my fermentation now as well.)

Here's the end result. It made it a whole lot easier to top a partial boil extract batch up to the correct volume at the end of the process and should make it a hell of a lot easier to transfer out exactly five gallons of finished beer.

I could've gone with the fancy vinyl stickers I've seen elsewhere, but a sharpie seems to have worked just fine this time around.

Extract Process (Revisited) Part II

So what better way to ring in the new year than by brewing a couple batches of beer?

As I mentioned in a prior post, I had been planning on doing a couple of extract batches this winter to try to stay out of the bitter Chicago cold but keep up on brewing.

I wrote up my process here ahead of time, which ended up working relatively well. Unfortunately, it's been quite a while since I brewed inside and I ran in to a couple of trouble spots on the first batch. (Imperial IPA from Brewing Classic Styles)

Firstly, I did a full 6.5 gallon boil instead of the 3 gallon boils I used to do on the stove. I remember reading somewhere that natural gas has significantly less heat energy than propane, but didn't really take that to heart. It took almost two hours to get it up to boiling, with two burners on my stove at full blast. That sucked.

Secondly, the cooling stick I bought ended up barely having any effect on the temperature of the wort at all... I probably should have thought out the physics on that one. 1 gallon of frozen water really doesn't have much of an impact on 6 gallons of boiling hot, sugar laden wort. It got the wort down to about 165 in 30 minutes. Not so good either.

All in all, six hours start to finish on an extract batch is pretty weak in my opinion.

So, I adjusted for those issues on the second batch of the long weekend. (Mexican Hot Chocolate Stout - recipe to follow.)

I did a 3 gallon boil, which made an enormous difference in the time to get the water up to temp. After finishing my boil, I used an old trick Alton Brown recommended on his episode of Good Eats about brewing. Dump a 7lb bag of ice plus a gallon of near-freezing distilled water into your wort as soon as you kill the heat. That alone dropped the three gallons of wort to 115F in about 3 minutes.

Three hours start to finish on the second batch. That's more like what I expect from extract brewing!