Hop Experiment: 007 – The Man With the Golden Hop
Author: Jeff Recently, I realized something quite strange about me, how much I love getting bored with brewing. If you’re like me, getting bored just means you need to take a step back and look for something new that will help you reboot. A couple weeks ago, I was daydreaming during work about trying new hops. Pretty normal, right? Just me? Well, ok then. I’ll proceed as if I haven’t said…
While hop standing is not necessarily a new practice, it has been getting a lot of hype from the homebrewing community. For the purposes of this article I am defining and using the terms as follows: Hop Standing/Whirlpooling: The practice of adding a significant portion of late hops at flameout or after flameout potentially at a temperature lower than hop oil flashpoints. Hop Bursting: The…
Process Experiment: Can you Ferment a Sour Beer and a Clean Beer Side by Side?
Process Experiment: Can you Ferment a Sour Beer and a Clean Beer Side by Side?
As previously noted in my sour beer post, I love sour beer. After brewing my first sour, and doing a little sample, I was freaking stoked! I could not believe that I had produced something even remotely similar to the sours I’ve enjoyed over the years. With the knowledge that I wasn’t going to be able to enjoy this beer for another 6-8 months, I figured it was time to brew more sour beers so I…
Hop Experiment: Hallertau Blanc vs HBC 438 vs Mandarina (ECY28 Kellerbier)
Hop Experiment: Hallertau Blanc vs HBC 438 vs Mandarina (ECY28Â Kellerbier)
For as long as I can remember I’ve struggled reading descriptons of hop flavor/aromas. It’s no secret that smell and taste are extremely subjective, but the liberal use of words that many people don’t have a frame of reference for can be downright frustrating when building hops into a recipe. Catpiss, dank, resinous, fruity, piney, lemony, lemongrass stalk, grass, weed, stone fruit, currants, and…
Yeast Experiment: ECY01 Bug Farm vs INIS913 Brett Barrel Yeast III & WLP645 Brettanomyces Clausenii (Belgain Golden Sour #1)
Yeast Experiment: ECY01 Bug Farm vs INIS913 Brett Barrel Yeast III & WLP645 Brettanomyces Clausenii (Belgain Golden Sour #1)
Recently, I was lucky enough to try a beer I had been trying to get my hands on for years, Pliny the Younger. Denver usually receives a couple kegs which are served at events, but I had never been able to make it to one. This year, Parry’s Pizza got a keg, so a friend and I woke up super early and stood in line to ensure we got to try this impossible to find beer. While we were waiting for…
Author: Jeff Early spring in Eastern Washington, as I have recently discovered, is extremely unpredictable. It can get up to almost 70F during the day and drop into the 30s at night. It can be warm and dry one day, while rainy and frigid the next. Because of this quirk of meteorology, when my new friends Aaron and Tevor asked me to brew a beer to buoy our team’s spirits during the…
Process Comparison: Fermenting in a PET Carboy vs Corny Keg
Process Comparison: Fermenting in a PET Carboy vs Corny Keg
Homebrewers go through many steps to eliminate post fermentation oxidation of their beer. One of the ways that’s commonly expounded is to flush kegs/bottles with CO2 prior to racking. While I don’t regularly do this due to sheer laziness, I have recently been looking for ways minimize oxidation post-fermentation in an easy practical manner. One such method that had been intriguing me for some…
Berliner Weisse #1: No Sparge, Almost No Boil, No Couple's Shower! (WLP677 Lactobacillus delbrueckii & WLp036 DĂĽsseldorf Alt)
Berliner Weisse #1: No Sparge, Almost No Boil, No Couple’s Shower! (WLP677 Lactobacillus delbrueckii & WLp036 Düsseldorf Alt)
I have always been, and probably always will be, a fan of high gravity beers. After learning to brew, I only wanted to brew the next great dark lord or sucaba. A lot of homebrewers probably go through the same progression as me: learn to brew beer, decide they will brew the biggest most badass beer ever, compromise that their beer was just ok. After a few home brews on a work night while cooking…
When I started brewing I bottled all of my beer like nearly everyone else, I absolutely hated bottling. Not only is bottling time consuming and annoying, the ending product is highly variable. I switched to kegs fairly quickly and was content to use picnic faucets for quite a while. Recently, I decided that using a freezer for a fermentation chamber was not ideal. Freezers don’t contain a…
Extract Experiment 1: Does Late Addition of Extract Make a Difference?
Extract Experiment 1: Does Late Addition of Extract Make a Difference?
When I first began brewing, I brewed steeped grain/extract beers they never quite tasted like I thought beer should taste. Many online forums attribute this to the “extract twang.” While I don’t necessarily prescribe to this school of thought, given that fact that Ray Daniels book gives many examples of award winning extract beer, I quickly made the switch to all grain. I can unequivocally state…
Yeast Experiment: The Yeast Bay Midwestern Ale Yeast vs WLP002 English Ale Yeast
Yeast Experiment: The Yeast Bay Midwestern Ale Yeast vs WLP002 English Ale Yeast
Having been to both England and the Midwest of America one can’t help but notice many striking similarities between the two. Outside of London, most of England feels fairly blue collar. They love their footbal teams, and enjoy a great pint after work. I also tend to think that beer culture in both countries is actually much more similar than we as Americans like to admit. In England, beer…
Yeast Experiment: WLP300 Hefeweizen vs WLP029 German Ale
Yeast Experiment: WLP300 Hefeweizen vs WLP029 German Ale
When I first started brewing I made overly complex grain bills and hopping schedules. I would find myself regularly perusing forums for tips on how to make the perfect grain bill and which hops would go best with that. Though this may be something that was unique to me, I am guessing that quite a few home brewers start out this way. The thinking is probably “well great beer has so many favors so…
As I’m sure most people are sick of hearing, growing up in Wisconsin I LOVE New Glarus. To me Dan Carey is the best, most innovative, brewer in the country. Moving to Colorado was one of the best decisions of my life, however, it left me without consistent access to my favorite beer (prior to discovering Prost!). Once I learned to homebrew it was a forgone conclusion that I would spend every…
Yeast Comparison: Conan vs Hopslam (The Yeast Bay)
Yeast Comparison: Conan vs Hopslam (The Yeast Bay)
Recently The Yeast Bay, a small artisanal yeast company out of San Fran (also headed up by a fellow Badger!), started marketing a strain called Midwestern Ale yeast. Being a lover of all things New Glarus, and, having undergone multiple iterations of trying clone Spotted Cow, I was extremely excited at the possibility that this could be Dan’s famous kolsch strain. After a few back and forth…
For years I have sought to expand my beer palate and enjoy great examples of every beer style. There exists a style however, that will nearly always trump any other beer regardless of how great it is. That is the imperial stout. Regardless of the season, the city, the company, or the mood, an imperial stout offers so much to me that I’m transported from the moment and wrapped up in the melange…
I've never really been one to go into things half assed. When I started brewing I probably did three or four steeped grain/extract batches before building a mash tun to brew all-grain. The one step in the progression that I skipped over was partial mash/BIAB. Recently I was lamenting my inability to brew as often as I would like. Sitting in my office at work a thought came to me: When I was brewing extract batches, the start to finish time was probably two hours max (excluding cleanup this was prior to discovering fermcap-s). With all grain brewing I can maybe knock out a brew day in four hours, and that isn't including clean up time.
I was faced with a conundrum, how could I brew more often, without adding time to my life? After browsing my LHBS I found a couple cheap three gallon carboys, i figured I would do an extract brew here or there in my old brewing stockpot and clock it in at 2.5 gallons. After two such brews (a mild and an English brown, neither will appear on this site), I remembered why I moved from extract to all grain. Chatting with some workers at my LHBS I remembered that BIAB was a thing! I pulled out my phone and calculated the water required to brew a 2.5 gallon batch in the mash, about 1-1.5 gallons for a 1.040-1.070 beer. This could work! I purchased a mesh bag that would fit in my 22 quart original brew kettle, and some ingredients for a beer I had actually been meaning to try for a while, a helles recipe.
In the  excitement to brew this beer I didn't really take many pictures. I mashed in, hit 5.2 ph, sparged by dunking the grains in the sparge water for 10 min, then boiled for 60 min adding the necessary hops. After the brew I chilled the 2.5 gallon wort in a record four minutes.
This is where I messed up this brew, I attribute this to my lack of familiarity with my specific BIAB setup at this point. I took gravity for the first time post chilling only to find I had overshoot the expected gravity of 1.048 by reaching 1.064 yikes! If only I had taken the gravity at sparge I could have increased volume to compensate. Oh well, I transferred the beer to a carboy, oxygenated, and pitched the appropriate amount of WLP029 from a premade starter.
The beer fermented at 62 for two weeks and was bottled at 1.012 FG.
I've tasted this beer a handful of times now and am quite pleased with it. It is certainly not a helles, but also not quite a maibock. Regardless of how the beer ended up I learned a lot about my BIAB system which will be valuable going forward. My next brew in BIAB will be a California Common recipe that I'm looking to perfect for competition this spring. Results of that brew day will include more pictures than this post, sorry!
Results:
I'm very confident that I've found a new way to increase the number of my brew days without sacrificing as much family time as a normal brew day. The whole BIAB day took me 2.5 hours and most of that time I was able to do other things around the house. While I certainly need to dial in my BIAB efficiency, I will be brewing many more BIAB test batches to hone in recipes for competition.
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Cheers!
Check out my blog at https://processbrewing.wordpress.com/
Ever since my first taste of a sour beer I've been hooked on this tart nectar. My first experience with a sour was a New Glarus Belgain Red, this beer is a fantastic sour brown ale with tons of cherry flavor. As a typical home brewer I've been mortified of introducing bacteria and brett into my process. That being said I recently had a bottle of New Glarus Raspberry Tart with thanksgiving and decided it was time to put my cleaning and sanitation to the test. Plus I recently opened up my oak barrel, and decide it's time to inoculate it with bugs!
The idea behind this beer is something that straddles the line between a Flanders brown and red. I added a decent amount of caramunich to give the bugs some residual sugars to chew on over the next year.
Ouder:
5.5 US Gallons
O.G. - 1.064
F.G. - 1.013 (as calculated)
IBU - 15
SRM - 17
Malt:
9.5# - Avangard Pilsner
2# - Weyermann CaraMunich II
2# - Briess Red Wheat
0.5# - Special B
Hops:
0.88 oz - Northern Brewer - FWH
Yeast:
WLP655 Belgian Sour Mix I
Mash 150 for 60 minutes
Boil for 60 minutes
The Brew
I purchased water and malt the evening before my brew day. Using the Bru'n Water spreadsheet I modified the water profile to be similar to the Flanders profile. The next morning I heated my strike water and mashed in hitting my target mash temp within one degree.
For the next 60 minutes I weighed out my hop additions, made a pot of coffee and eggs, wished my wife a great day at work, and fed my dogs. By the end of the 60 minutes my mash PH was 5.2 and the temperature had dropped two degrees to 148. I collected the sweet wort which smelled amazing with the addition of a tiny amount of NB hops. I brought the kettle to a boil, set my timer and walked away. Since adding fermcap-s to my routine I've never had anything resembling a boil over.
During the boil I prepped for thanksgiving dinner which we were hosting this year! I baked a pie, made tom and Jerry mix, and brined a turkey.
Once the boil was over I chilled the wort down to pitching temp (80 degrees) within ten minutes thanks to my great immersion chiller, and put the fermenter in my chamber set at 80 degrees. Next up, I opened Pandora's box!
Fermentation began so quickly and was one of the most vigorous I've ever experienced.
10 hours post pitch.
24 hours post pitch.
After the beer had fermented for a week I pulled a sample to test the S.G. No surprise, based on the vigorous fermentation, the Gravity was already down to 1.010. We had some friends over and we tasted the sample. At this time the abbey ale, which I'm guessing is the main yeast strain in this mix, dominated the flavor. From White Labs site
WLP655 Belgian Sour Mix 1
"A unique blend perfect for Belgian style beers. Includes Brettanomyces, Saccharomyces, and the bacterial strains Lactobacillus and Pediococcus."
We all agreed there were hints of tartness but nothing like the flavor I hope this will eventually attain.
With primary fermentation complete I plan on moving this carboy to a closet in my house for the next six months while the Brett and bacteria start to do their thing.
I will certainly update this post as the result roll in (pictures too!).
Results:
No cross contamination! Yay I survived my first foray into sour beers. I plan on brewing another soon using the Yeast Bay's melange blend.
Check out my blog at https://processbrewing.wordpress.com/
