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 (ECY28 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…
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 Düsseldorf 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…
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.
Cheers!
Check out my blog at https://processbrewing.wordpress.com/
