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.

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.

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.

Hop Utilization (A Geeky Take)

One of the lessons it really took me a while to learn is how different hop additions truly affect the finished beer. I started to really get into craft beer (which at the time was still colloquially referred to as "microbrew") shortly before I started brewing. So by the time that I was really starting to experiment with recipes and deviate from kits, I'd developed a palate for hops. Furthermore, I was in a purely experimental mode and brewing without doing a ton of research and definitely without the aid of brewing software to help me calculate the effects of recipe changes or additions.

As I've researched more, started to use software and take measurements religiously, I've dialed in my understanding on a few parts of recipe formulation. This post is about hops and bitterness. All of the calculations herein are performed using the Rager formula. (Apparently this is less accurate for full-volume boils than Tinseth, but it's what I've been using and it's what the guys at the brewing network use. Since most homebrewers probably aren't using lab equipment to accurately measure IBU's, we're just looking for a consistent way to measure.)

The IBU scale ranges from 0-100. According to most sources, you really can't discern bitterness past 100, but you will pick up additional hop aromas from late boil additions or dry hops once you've hit 100 IBU.

There are five variables in the Rager formula which affect bitternes: wort volume, wort gravity, alpha acid %, hop mass and addition time. I held the wort volume and wort gravity constant and ran some numbers for both this post and my own curiosity. The results were interesting and pointed out a few things I hadn't fully realized before.

(The table I used to create the graph is here.)

The conclusion I'd already come to by using brewing software and digging in to styles is that it doesn't take much of a bittering addition to max out one's taste buds. A 1 oz charge of bittering hops is really all you need for an IPA or any other highly bitter beer. Much beyond that and you're just wasting hops.

One thing I didn't realize is that the utilization (according to Rager) for a 90 minute boil is almost exactly the same as a 60 minute boil. So don't bother extending your boil time for higher bitterness. (Use it for wort concentration on high gravity beers or DMS reduction, but those are two separate posts.)

The other thing which I dug into is the affect of a flame-out addition. Based on some other sources, the extraction of bitterness from hop additions happens at temperatures above 158F. As such, your flame-out or late additions may end up contributing more bitterness than aroma if you're not cooling your beer quickly. (I noticed a substantial difference in the level of hop aroma I got this summer when I incorporated a proper wort chiller into my process.)

Possibly the Single Best Piece of Brewing "Equipment" I Own

... is actually a piece of software. I personally use BeerAlchemy for the Mac although I know other tools are out there. I've briefly played with BeerTools and HopVille but I ended up ponying up for a license of BeerAlchemy for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's done in the Mac school of design and is pretty damn intuitive. Secondly, it's easy to use along the learning curve of brewing. It doesn't make you use the more advanced options right away, so you can delve deeper into the program as you progress as a brewer.

There are a few reasons I think good software is one of the keys to actually moving from a beginning or intermediate brewer to an intermediate / advanced one.

1. Consistency: Some of my early extract batches turned out great, some were so-so, and a couple were bottle bombs. If you asked me what went right or wrong, I simply couldn't have told you. With software (or even a paper-based brew log) I can track my ingredients, my process and any miscellaneous notes along the way. So if I like a batch and want to brew it a second or third time, I can pin down which variables changed and ultimately get to the point where it's possible to make the same exact beer twice.
   
2. Process: Taking and recording readings through the brew process alongside of the process you used for a particular batch dramatically helps you understand whether what you're doing is working properly. If you've ever brewed a batch which turned out way too thick or thin for the style you were shooting for or ended up with a beer which was so sweet your friends couldn't choke it down, chances are something is off in your process. Once you start taking gravity readings at various key steps, you can discern where the problem lies.
   
3. Recipe Design: One of the best parts of actually using software is keying in a recipe and watching the resulting gravity numbers, color and IBU's change based on your ingredients. I think that simply going through this process repeatedly can make an enormous difference in one's understanding of the roles ingredients actually play in a beer.

(All that said, it's also possible that it's entirely possible to brew great beer without software and this just gets the nerdy engineer in me going...)