One of my coworkers clued me in to a recent article in the New York Times that compared various brown ales, and found American craft brews coming out on top in a big way. Eight of the top 10 beers surveyed were American in origin. Just another example of how far craft brewing has come in the US!
One great thing about homebrewing is that it makes you feel like a kid again. No, not like that (although some of my most cherished memories are of my dad, uncles, and grandpa slipping me beer while out fishing).
What I mean is that Christmas has become fun again! If you’re a homebrewer, you’ve probably called your buddies and excitedly asked what equipment they got, and bragged about what “toys” you got. You don’t have to admit it, I know you have.
My Christmas started off pleasantly with two of my wife’s friends giving me Grolsch-style EZ Cap bottles from St. Louis Wine and Beermaking. Can’t go wrong with that!
From my parents, I got Charlie Papazian’s homebrew bible, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. If you’ve never read Papazian, or heard an interview with him, he is an absolute riot. His tone is equally reverent and irreverent, and the book is a blast to read. As a former nuclear engineer-turned-schoolteacher, Papazian has some interesting information on all sorts of beer-related topics. His appendix on mead has me extremely intrigued, although I will need to do some more research. For example, I’ll need to know what type of honey to use, and where to buy up to 30lbs of it! For those interested, the National Honey Board has some of Papazian’s mead info here.
Last but certainly not least, my lovely bride gave me the gift that keeps on giving…a Party Pig! The Party Pig is a neat little 2.5 gallon dispenser that looks like a cute little pig, and also acts as a secondary fermenter. So, no bottling and one less stage of racking. But wait! There’s more!!! The Pig also keeps the beer nice and carbonated, since it has a self-inflating pouch that keeps the beer under pressure, even as beer is dispensed. Can’t wait to try it out!
Yikes! Can it really be three months since my last posting. I’ve been slipping.
Here are some notes on what I’ve brewed since then:
Oatmeal Stout
I brewed this with my father-in-law, who was extremely excited about the brewing process and asked many, many, many questions. So I figured the best way to answer his questions would be to brew while he was in town.
Everything went well, until I goofed and put too much water in the primary fermenter. Mental note: do not listen to the instructions when they say to add wort to water! The beer turned out fine…as long as you don’t mind a watery stout.
All is not lost, however. On the advice of my grandma, I tried making a loaf of beer bread with it, and the loaf turned out great! I managed to find a recipe by a fellow Missourian that is easy and makes delicious bread.
California Steam
Steam, or California Common Beer, is a nearly lost form of American beer. Essentially, it is a lager brewed at ale temperature. A 19th century brew, it is reputed to have earned its name due to its carbonation, which sounded like escaping steam. Either that, or crewman from then-newfangled steamships spent their wages on it. Anchor Brewing Co. in San Francisco is the only commercial brewery still making this style, and has copyrighted the name.
I’m not sure how this style could possibly be forgotten. It’s quite simply a wonderful beer, and my own batch came out great. It seems to improve with a few days in the refrigerator, when it goes from being simply good to being very, very good. My friend Mike stopped by with his wife a few days ago, and thought pretty well of it, too. I could probably drink this all day, it’s that good and that easygoing.
One thing that I would improve on next time is to use two-stage fermentation. I used a plastic bucket for the primary, and not being able to see the fermentation about drove me nuts. Even though the aroma coming from the airlock was very nice, I kind of got spooked and bottled after the bubbling stopped. So I have a pretty good amount of yeast down at the bottoms of my bottles.
Peace Coffee Stout
This was the first beer that I brewed for someone else. My father-in-law is a huge coffee drinker, and he’s big on things like fair trade. This stout recipe from Midwest Supplies includes fair trade coffee beans from Nicaragua, courtesy of Peace Coffee in Minnesota. Plus, I felt kind of bad for botching the batch that we made together.
I chose to add the coffee while racking to the secondary. It was basically just grinding the beans, brewing, and then adding the coffee to the fermenter. I lucked out and had enough of the coffee left over to make myself a cup or two. I’d never before made coffee from freshly-ground beans…it was some damned good coffee!
I did keep about half of the batch to myself, and it is pretty good. Personally, I taste the coffee in it more than the beer. My father-in-law (the coffee drinker) swears he tastes the beer more. My friend Mike (who is starting to become my official taste tester, which I’m sure he doesn’t mind at all) is both a beer and a coffee drinker and proclaimed “I think ya got it!” Works for me.
Fermentation is definitely slowing down in the primary fermenter, as you can see in this image:
I haven’t decided whether I am going to rack (brewing lingo for siphoning) this into a secondary fermenter or not. The purpose of racking is to get the beer off of the sediment, or trub (pronounced “troob”) that has settled at the bottom of the carboy. If the beer is left on the sediment for too long, it can produce off flavors.
From what I understand, this is not strictly necessary for ales. One of the dangers of racking is that you can inadvertantly oxygenate the beer and encourage an infection. It’s probably a small risk, though, so I’m not sure it’s worth worrying about. One benefit of doing this would be freeing up the 6.5 gallon carboy for another batch of beer!
One interesting tidbit that I heard on Basic Brewing Radio (10/27/05, at about 32:00) was a suggestion by Dave Logsdon of Wyeast Labs to chill the beer after the fermentation ended, about five to six days into the process. The purpose of cooling is to make the beer clearer. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear Dave mention what the appropriate temperature to chill ale would be.
With all of these choices and more, I’m continually amazed at how complex brewing is. It really is a craft and an art form.
I came across Basic Brewing Radio today while searching for homebrewing info on the web, and was pretty impressed after listening to a few podcasts. Click here to add the podcast to iTunes. If you’ve got time to listen, check it out.
While I’m waiting for the yeast to do its magic, I’ve been thinking about how the brew went. Specifically, I’m thinking all of the things I forgot to do, and things that I need to do a better job of for the next time.
One of the main things I forgot to do was to keep notes of times, temperatures, etc. Ideally, I’d like to keep a journal of everything, to help me figure out what might have gone wrong. And also, on the bright side, to help recreate a batch in case things turn out spectacular.
For sanitization, I’ll need to be better organized and keep a better eye on everything. I used a no-rinse sanitizer, which was a little disconcerting, since there was nothing that obviously made things clean.
During the boiling stage, I’ll have to be a little more conservative on how high to keep the flame. I severely overshot my intended temperature and nearly pushed the water into boil. I’m not sure what sort of an effect it would have had on the final product, but still, it’s probably best not to mess up on the very first step.
I read in William Moore’s Home Beermaking book that the wort is less likely to boil over if you have 5 or 6 gallons of water in the pot, as opposed to the 3 that I was using. I may try using more water for my next batch and seeing how it goes.
Finally, I’d like to thank my wife for taking most of the pictures and Photoshopping them, putting up with my beer talk (”Honey! Did you know that we share 23% of our genes with S. cerevisiae?!?”), and humoring me when it’s “time to go check on the beer.”
I checked in on the fermenter after about ten hours, and was rewarded with the sight of obvious biological activity:
About two hours later, there was even more goings-on:
The next morning, about twenty hours after pitching, there was a nice kraeusen (”kroy-sen”) that had formed. CO2 bubbles were escaping the airlock about once every other second. A few hours later, the krauesen was a bit thicker and the rate of CO2 bubbles had increased to one per second. The escaping gas even smells like beer…
This weekend I brewed my first batch by myself, with my new equipment.
The recipe I used was Liberty Cream Ale, from Midwest Supplies. I chose to be adventurous and try using liquid yeast (American Ale Yeast #1056 from Wyeast Labs).
Since this is the first brewing post, I’ll step through the process and describe what I’m doing and trying to accomplish at each step.
Activating the yeast
The night before brewing, I prepared the yeast for its big day tomorrow. The liquid yeast had been hanging out in the refrigerator for the last few weeks, dormant due to the cold. Wyeast Labs packs its yeast in what they call a “smack pack,” in which a second package of yeast nutrients floats in the yeast. When you’re ready to activate the yeast, you take it out of the fridge, and give the package a good smack (hence the name). This ruptures the package of nutrients and lets the yeast feed. This, combined with a temperature in the 70s, gets the yeast primed for making beer.
Within a few short hours, I could tell that my yeast was healthy and enjoying the food. Note the swelled package:
Cleaning and Prep
Although homebrewing is fun, there is a fair amount of work that needs to be done to ensure a successful brew. An essential part of this is keeping everything that will come into contact with the unfinished beer, or wort (pronounced “wert”), clean and sanitary. Since making beer is essentially the process of making a perfect home for the right kind of yeast, a big part of the job is making sure that other, opportunistic microorganisms, such as wild yeasts and bacteria, don’t ruin your beer (and waste your time).
Necessary equipment includes (in no particular order):
Steeping the grain
The first step is to steep your grain in about three gallons of hot wate. The recipe from Midwest Supplies recommended a temperature of about 155 degrees for about 10 minutes; since I had never used the turkey fryer before, I struggled to keep it below 190. Luckily, it never boiled.
For steeping, I poured my grain into a cheesecloth-type bag and set it in the hot water. The grain should be removed after steeping.
Boiling the malt
The malt, or malt extract like I used, provides the sugars that the yeast will feed on during fermenation. In order to get the malt just as we (or more accurately, the yeast) want it, it will be boiled for about an hour. This allows proteins to coagulate and precipate out, among other things. Pay special attention during this step, as the malt can easily boil over, being messy at best, and dangerous at worst.
Adding hops
Once the malt begins to boil, the bittering hops are tossed in. Hops add alpa acids, and provide antibacterial properties to the wort. As you can see in the image, the hops I’m using are pelletized. This makes them easier to handle and measure. Some brewers prefer to use whole hops, but easy sounds good to me!
Since all of this hard work makes you thirsty, and you have roughly an hour to kill while watching the boil, all homebrewers recommend that you (and any assistants) take a break and have something to drink. For obvious reasons, a homebrewed beer from a previous patch is heartily recommended. This particular beer is a “Big Bend Pale Ale” that I made with a good friend in August. My wife was just glad that I was doing this in the back yard, since having a bubbling pot going and drinking beer “looks pretty hoosier*.” It’s a risk I’ll take.
An hour after adding the bittering hops, aroma hops are added. For the cream ale, the recipe calls for another ounce of the Cascade hops. Why add the same hops again, you ask? From what I understand, the previous 60 minutes of boiling have depleted the aromatic properties of the first batch of hops.
Cooling the wort
About two minutes after adding the final hops, the boil phase will be complete. Before you can add the yeast to the wort, the wort needs to be cooled down. This is because anything too hot will kill the yeast, obviously not something you want to do.
There are a few ways you can accomplish the cooldown. The simplest way is to let the wort sit and cool off. It’s not a good idea, though, since the wort has lots of sugars and is sterile. In other words, it is perfect for a wild yeast or bacteria to colonize and ruin your beer.
A better way is to have your tub or sink filled with ice, and place the pot into the ice. An even better way is to use a wort chiller. A wort chiller, as seen in the following pictures, is a coil of copper tubing. Cold water is run through the coil, picks up heat from the wort, and removes it. My recipe recommended getting it down to 80 degrees, but my thermometer only got down to 105. Seeing as I had 3.5 gallons of cold water that I was going to mix with the wort, I figured this was good enough.
Transferring the wort
The wort is now ready to be transferred to the fermenter. To do this, I placed the pot above the fermenter and used a siphon. Remember, since everything needs to be sterile, don’t use your mouth to begin the siphon! My equipment kit came with a very nice autosiphon that just requires one pump to begin the transfer. As I mentioned above, the carboy (ie, the glass fermenter) already contains about 3.5 gallons of cold water.
Pitching the Yeast
With the wort now in the fermenter, it’s time to add (”pitch”) the yeast. I simply used a sanitized funnel and poured the very-yeasty-smelling liquid yeast into the carboy. Once it was added, I stoppered the carboy with a water-filled airlock. Note the colored layers of the yeast mixture and the wort.
Fermentation
Almost done! After having everything ready to go, I lifted the carboy and gave it a really good shake. The reason for this is that for the first stage of fermentation, the yeast will use an aerobic (ie, needs oxygen) process. After that, they will switch to anaerobic (w/o oxygen) processes. So it helps them to have a nice, oxygenated enviornment to start off in. And the yeast are my friends, so I give them what they need! After that, it’s off to a dark place in the basement where they can eat and multiply in peace!
On this site, we’ll be blogging about homebrewing beer. We’ll let you know what works, what doesn’t, and hopefully have some fun along the way. We hope to hear about your experiences as well!
