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?