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.

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? 

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Brewing and Engineering

My post from yesterday referenced the strong correlation I've noticed over time, but here are some more concrete examples of a very strong correlation between brewing and engineering. (I picked up Brewing Better Beer last week and started reading it in earnest today. Turns out Gordon Strong is a software engineer by training as well.)

Jamil Zainisheff (Software Engineering) : Author, Ninkasi Award Winner, Brewery Owner, Radio Host
John Palmer (Metallurgical Engineering) : Author, Radio Host
Gordon Strong (Software Engineering) : Author, 3x Ninkasi Award Winner, BJCP Grand Master Judge, BJCP President
Matt Brynildson (Chemistry) : The most award-winning brewmaster in America

I'm a software engineer by training, as is Jeremy and the other guy I brew with on a semi-regular basis. Anyone else out there happen to notice this or have other good examples from the commercial world?

*As an engineer I'm clearly obligated to acknowledge that this is far too small of a sample to be statistically significant. However, these are all guys who are at the absolute top of their game and all happen to have a math / science background.

Back to the Basics : The Extract Experiments (pt 1.)

So, after a summer of intense brewing I'm going to test a hypothesis this winter. Since I'm in Chicago and it gets way too damn cold and snowy to brew outside, I'm going back to extract with steeped grains. This might seem a bit odd, even given the environmental constraints of the midwest, but there's a purpose. Jamil often talks on The Brewing Network about how important good fermentation is to the end result of a beer. I want to put this to the test and see if we can brew some amazing extract beers this winter using a stovetop, a ten gallon megapot, a wort chiller (which I need to add a garden hose fitting somewhere indoors for), and proper fermentation technique.

The hot side process will be dramatically less complex than what we've been doing all summer, but the fermentation side will stay exactly where it's at now. (Yeast starters with proper pitching rates, oxygenation, temperature control, finished up with cold-crashing and 1-2 weeks of lagering depending on the beer.)

We're starting off with an Imperial IPA and a Mexican Hot-Chocolate infused stout. (Foreign Extra.) Results on these beers and a few more will follow soon...

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...)