I Don't Believe In New Year's Resolutions

... but this year I'm making some brewing resolutions for the 2014 season. Jeremy and I are good brewers. We win medals in competition. We can generally turn out consistent beers from batch to batch. The number of hours I've devoted and the amount of educational material I've devoured keep mounting.

But we're still not great. We don't often take a category gold, and we've never won a best in show. Hop character is still hit or miss in our beers. The occasional batch is a clunker and I'll dump it or pawn it off on unsuspecting friends during one of our "family" dinners.

And so, I want to get better. So over the winter I've ruminated on and off about our process and what we can change for the positive. Here's the list:

1. Make our starters earlier and bigger. I tend to do most of the yeast management and sometimes those poor little critters only get 24-36 hours of time to warm up and get ready to chew through some sugars. We also only have two 2000mL flasks and one stir plate so they end up splitting time on it. We're going to buy a couple of 4 liter flasks and a second stir plate to really handle the pitches we need for lagers and higher gravity beers.
   
2. Make the same beers until we get them dialed. We've brewed our way through a good number of the recipes in Jamil's Brewing Classic Styles. This has been wonderfully informative on the ways different ingredients play in different styles. But the only beer we've ever scored in the 40's on was the ginger wheat recipe I've brewed over and over and over again through the years. Slowly tweaking the recipe every time has gotten it to the point that it's really balanced, drinkable and has a huge amount of flavor.
   So we're going to make beers we've made before, that we can drink ten gallons of over the course of the summer and not get sick of. And we're going to make them until we get it right.
   
3. Take (even better) notes. I'm a big fan of brewing software. (We use Beer Alchemy. I'm partial to it because it's a well built Mac UI and it's dead simple to use despite having almost all the complexity you could want.) We already take detailed notes and monitor fermentation. But I'm talking about taking it to the next level and having a brewer's log detailed enough to track mash thickness, sparge rates, actual pH vs target pH, mash efficiency, evaporation, target vs actual attenuation, etc.
   There are a lot of little variables which don't lend themselves to tracking easily in the software but can (or at least I think they should) tell us something about the beers that turn out great vs. the ones that don't. (The fact that I'm spending a fair amount of time talking quality assurance with my buddy Gary who is damn close to opening up Panic Brewing just might have something to do with this.

So we'll see if it's made any difference by the end of the summer... It definitely can't hurt.

Nerding Out

There's a lot of beer-related information floating around on the internet. You've got the forums, reddit, blogs ranging in quality from ones like mine up to those of professional brewers which all abound with information that tends to be highly opinionated and often representative of the conventional homebrew wisdom. But it's rare to find genuinely scholarly resources.

Thankfully, courtesy of BeerNews I stumbled upon the online archives of the Journal of the Institute of Brewing, which is a publication of the Institute of Brewing and Distilling. There are 119 years (yes, YEARS) of journals at 4 volumes per year. The articles run the gamut from very technical microbiology to theoretical methods for calculating the properties of finished fermentations to higher level summaries of years and years of research.

It's pretty amazing and generous that someone decided to put this massive cache of knowledge out there for the brewing community. Much of the information is well beyond the scope of what a homebrewer (or frankly anyone without a microbiology degree) can really grok, but there are some extremely informative and practical articles in each volume.

Just some quick tidbits from some of the reading I've done:

- Concrete studies on the viability of different hop strains stored in different temperature, light and oxygen conditions. (Some of the conventional wisdom is that temperature is more important than exposure to oxygen. Their study states quite the opposite. Furthermore, different cultivars showed different decays of alpha and beta acids. )
- A summary of the attributes of finished beer which can inhibit or promote the growth of bacteria (good and bad) and specifics about the conditions under which certain bacteria can thrive. Fresh, unisomerized hops inhibit most strains of lactic acid bacteria, but not all. (I knew that aged hops were traditionally used in lambics, but never really made the connection as to exactly why.)
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