On Ten Gallon Batches

10 gallons batches have opened my eyes to new facts. Obviously, with a mash so large, I have a mash tun large enough to extract at a pretty good rate. (Lautering rates are a direct function of the area of the false bottom.) However, for the continuous sparger like myself, one has to be able to put water in as fast as they take it out. My old phil's lauter-tun system doesn't cut it and my sparge time has shot up to over two hours. Since I've moved to 10 gallon batches because I don't have the time to do 5 gallon batches in quantity, this is pretty unacceptable. If I could get my sparge back to one hour, I could finish a brew session in under six hours.

I've been trying to figure out ways to trim the length of a brew session even more. Currently, my mash-tun and kettle are the same vessel. This increases my session time because, once my sparge is complete, I have to drain and clean my kettle to begin the boil. A further inefficiency in ten gallon boils is the lag from lighting the flame to reaching the boil. It takes about 45 minutes to get 10 gallons to 212 degrees.

I could significantly reduce my brew session time if I had a lauter-tun that wasn't my kettle. First, this would mean that I could light the flame once I'd collected about 75% of the needed wort. The remainder of the runnings will go to the kettle immediately upon collection, but the heating would already have begun. That should save me about 30-40 minutes.

I've been producing beer a little faster than blog entries, but not much. My life has gotten really busy. I have a puppy and a dissertation that demand a lot of my time. The solution, as brewer, has been to increase my batch size to ten gallons. I don't produce in the same volume as before, but this helps to balance the significant reduction in brew days per month.

I have an IPA waiting to go into my cooler, when either my stout or old ale kicks it. That IPA was made form the same wort as the stout. I made one gallon of beer with a half pound of roasted barley, a quarter pound of black pattent, and a pound of light dried malt extract. I dumped some IPA wort on that. It made a stout. I was pleased by those results.

Yesterday I made ten more gallons, all pale ale. The ten gallons of wort were produced with 19 pounds of maris otter malt, half a pound of 40L crystal and half a pound of 120L crystal. The hops schedule was 3 oz. of 6.3%AA Challenger for 90 and 1 oz. same for 30. I split the wort into two fermenters; I pitched White Labs English Ale yeast on one and Safale's American Ale Yeast on the other. For hop aroma, I'm dry hopping with an ounce of Kent Goldings for the english and an ounce of palisade for the american.

Yesterday's mash was 148 for 37 mintues, followed by 20 minutes at 156. That should produce some great fermentability. I have really liked the results of highly fermentable worts paired with low attenuating yeasts like the White Labs English Ale, so that beer should turn out nice.

The safale american ale yeast is good. I've used it a few time lately. It takes longer to clarify than White Labs california ale and the fermentation may be a little less clean, it attenuates similarly, and ultimately makes a good american ale. I've never used palisade hops, but so long as it smells like a hop, I'm sure everything will be fine.

Happy Repeal of Prohibition Day!

I think that my plan for the next beer is to make an IPA and a pale ale from the same wort by diluting a portion of the total. Both will be American representatives of the style. Obviously, this presents a certain challenge to the brewer. I am torn between two appoaches to American IPA. AleSmith's IPA is totally incredible and I've often longed to try making something like that. It's very light in color (probably an SRM 6), great hop aroma, flavor and bitterness but also malt presence. Alternative, I like a caramelly chinook IPA, like Great Divide's Titan IPA. Let me resolve myself to making IPAs modeled after each of these, and describe those recipes. Then I'll fill you in on the proceedure I'm using to dilute it for a pale ale.

Here's the AleSmith-styled IPA:
12.5 lbs. cargill two-row
.5 lbs. 40L crystal

California Ale Yeast

.75 oz. amarillo 60 min*
.75 oz. simcoe 45 min*
.5 oz. simcoe and amarillo 15 min
1 oz. simcoe and 1 oz. cascade dry hops

Target O.G. of 70, I.B.U. of 70

For the caramel and chinook IPA:
11 lbs. cargill 2-row
1 lb. munich
.5 lb. 90L crystal

Dry English Ale Yeast

1 oz. chinook for 60 min.
.5 oz. cascade for 60 min*
1 oz. cascade for 20 min
1.5 oz. cascade dry hopped


Target O.G. 1.069, Target IBU 68

* Adjusted to get right bitterness.

Now, how to get a pale ale from these?--
Scale each recipe to 8.5 gallons. 5 gallons of this, after the boil will produce the IPA. The remaining 3.5 gallons will have total gravity of 3.5*70 = 245. In five gallons that make 1.049--pale ale gravity. All this really needs is 1.5 gallons of water to make it happen. Obviously, the pale ale can be differently dry hopped and can have a different yeast. I'll be mashing the IPA for a high attenuation--probably 150 degrees. I'll use a medium to low attenuator to make sure the pale ale is not too dry. I love white labs pacific ale yeast, and will use that if I can get it. If not, I may try the east coast ale yeast or something else I've never worked with.

However, I don't have to dilute with water. To dilute I'm thinking about steeping some grains to add some character and color to the pale ale. The grains will be steeped in .5 gallons of 155-60 degree water for 30 minutes. I'll make a yeast starter with the liquid from those steeped grains by adding 4oz. light DME and the yeast. I'll brew the in the ferementer, add the IPA wort and top off with a gallon of water.

I kegged 14 gallons of beer today. Among those beers in one intended to be an imperial IPA that ended up just a bit too sweet. It's not an IPA, but it is damned good. The rest was pale ale, same wort, different yeast in two fermenters. Both pale ales will be very good. All of it needs a few days to carbonate.

I probably should have re-pitched the IPA with white labs super high gravity yeast to get some of the sweetness out, but that sounded like a lot of work. I'm fine with it as is.

I'm going to have to make another beer soon. I'm on a quest to get as much variety out of my brew days as possible. There will be two fermenters in every day of brewing. I'm going to do more than mere yeast experiments--there will, for example, be excercises in steeped grain. Stay tuned. I may try to make a stout and a pale ale in one day next week.

In the grand tradition of next week plans that don't get completed, here's the schedule of beer things I want to do in the next couple of weeks:

• One medium-high gravity, well-bittered but not too hoppy pale ale, in an 8-10 gallon batch.
• a raspberry beer.
• a lager of some sort, or an Alt Bier

I could totally hit another alt bier. I remember thinking that beer was awesome. I'll more-or-less copy the last recipe that I used but change the mash schedule. It was a decoction, by the way, and I think I'll do that again.

I'm also seriously considering moving to 8 gallon batches.

Holy shit! In seventy-two hours this Imperial IPA achieved 72% attenuation. I'll have to rack on Thursday.

The Second Anniversary IPA had an explosive start. So explosive that there was a 4a.m trip to the brewery to set up a blow-off hose. There's yeast caked all over the top of the carboy.

That yeast, presently, is my problem. You see, it's all on the top and not in the beer and the fermentation has slowed to the point where I'm doubting that it's not going to stall. I'm about to run a test on it's present level of fermentation. Regardless of the results, I'll probably give the fermenter a good shake (it's all CO2 in there right now, so no worry about oxidation) to get some of the caked yeast back where I want it: in the beer.

In honor of two years of Nextweek Brewery, I made an Imperial IPA today. It was one of my favorite brew sessions in recent memory; I brewed outside, instead of in my brewery-room, which made it much less hot and gave me much mor space to work. In all, I thought it was quite pleasant.

The recipe was 16 lbs. cargill pale mat. I started the mash at 151. It dropped to 146 after thirty minutes, so I bumped it up to 156 for the rest of a 60 minute conversion rest. Then I mashed out to 166 and sparged.

I first wort hopped this beer with 1 oz. East Kent Goldings (4% AA), .5 oz Simcoe (11.9%) and .5 oz. Amarillo (8.9%). These were all pellets, and I used promash to calculate alpha acid degredation. Once the boil started, I added .65 oz. of Amarillo and .75 oz. Simcoe. That's it for kettle hops--I didn't do any aroma additions because I'm going to dry hop with an ounce each of goldings, amarillo and simcoe. I won't be dry hopping anything for awhile, because this beer is going to take awhile to reach terminal gravity and I don't want to leave it on the dry hops too long. (I'm playing with large dry hops additions for short time periods.) This calculates to 64 I.B.U in pro-mash; my experience is that my beers are much bitterer than the promash calculations would suggest, which I attribute to my high boil-off rate--today, for example, my boil began around a gravity of 66.

By the way, the final gravity was 1.089!

I fermented 2 quarts of 1.040 gravity wort with a vial of White Labs Dry English Ale yeast, which finished fermenting yesterday. I decanted it and pitched the slurry into my wort. It's already fermenting well. I just hope I don't need a blow off hose.

DMS sucks.

In other news, I've gotten shanks and faucets installed into my cooler. I'm awaiting handles. I'll post some pictures of what's going on soon.

I've got a two quart starter going over in the corner. That's for the imperial IPA that I'm brewing on Saturday.

Awhile back I made a beer that was ladden with DMS after primary fermentation. DMS is a sulfur product, I was told, and yeast can metabolize sulfur compounds, so don't throw it out yet.

The good news is that they were right, and this beer is perfectly drinkable now. There's a lingering, subtle DMS component, but I think that in a week it too will be gone. This beer won't be one of my outstanding successes, but it will pass.

Brewing is not like bicycle ridding; you can't just pick it back up and feel like you never took a break. The hot summer weather, busy schedule and vacations kept me out of the brewery for much of the summer. But fall is approaching and I want to have beer to drink when my birthday and gift of tap handles arrives.

A quick hydrometer read after I'd extracted four gallons caused me to draw the conclusion that my efficiency had been terrible. I decided for some reason that the solution was to stir up the mash and re-circulate again. WTF did I decide that for? I can't even remember except that I had this very bad thought earlier that stirring a mash would improve efficiency. This thought does not, upon reflection, make any sense to me and I'm sure I would have summarily rejected it had I been brewing lately.

The problem, also a lapse brought on by the hiatus, was that I didn't stir the extract before taking the reading. Duh.

By the way, I made a beer on the cusp of norther english brown and london porter. It would have been a pure brown except I accidentally mixed a 1/4 pound of black patent malt into the grist. So now it's on the verge of porter. He's the recipe:

6.25 lbs. of Maris Otter
1.5 lbs. cargill 2-row
1 lb. brown malt
1 lb. 60L british crystal
.25 lb. black patent malt
1 oz. target
White Labs Burton Ale Yeast

Mash the grains at 154 for 60 minutes. Boil hops for 60 minutes.

That quasi-experiment with no control group on the subject of first wort hopping has been filling glasses for almost a week now.

I got moderately high bitterness in this beer, which means, I think, that bitterness from FWH is moderately high. I've read somewhere that one should approximate FWH at 2/3 the bitterness provided by a 60 minute boil; while I can hardly claim to be so precise from my tasting of just one FHW beer, I will say that I think this is probably a good estimator.

The second anniversary of the Next Week Brewery is Sept. 1. That's not tomorrow, but I've started to think about what to brew that Saturday.

A Russian Imperial Stout. 10 pounds Marris Otter and x pounds Cargill pale malt, one pound each brown malt, 80L crystal, 20L crystal, and British roast barley. 1/4 pound black patent malt. Bittered with columbus, warrior, or magnum, with an ounce of cascade at 20 and 1 minute. 70 IBU. Here, x = as many pounds as needed to get 1.100 OG. Mashed for attenuation 10 minutes at 130, 30 minutes at 145, 30 mintues at 155 and mashed out at 167.

A belgian dark strong ale. 13 pounds pils malt, 1/3 pound each caravienna, caramunich and special B. I'm going to follow Mosher's instructions for homemade invert syrup and use one pound, plus a pound of white corn sugar. Noble hops or Styrian Goldings (are those noble?) to 28 IBU. O.G. 85--I might have to adjust the sugar or pils malt to get that right. Mashed for 10 minutes at 130, 20 minutes at 145 and 40 minutes at 155, and mashed out at 167. Trappist ale yeast from White Labs.

An imperial IPA. 15.5 pounds cargill two row, mashed for 10 at 130, 20 at 145, 40 at 155 and mashed out at 167. O.G. 80. The tentative hops schedule, depending on results with FWH in my next few brews, is half an ounce of simcoe, half an ounce of amarillo and one ounce of goldings FWH. I'm going to dry hop it with a blend that's equal parts goldings, simcoe and amarillo, with one ounce of the blend for seven days, one ounce for five and once ounce for just three days. Fermented with white labs dry english ale yeast. Bittering hops: amarillo and simcoe to reach 70 IBU.

After a morning's hard work in the brewery I had collected 7 gallons of wort and about 380 gravity units of sugar, just the amount that I wanted. I ran up to my local home brew store to shoot the shit with the guy directing the all grain class--he only comes in for the class and he knows his shit and loves to talk beer. Around noon I was back in the brewery and ready to get the kettle full and boiling.

I don't know what happened. It just slipped. 5 gallons of wort crashed to the ground just as I was getting ready to pour it into my kettle.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. As a matter of fact, there was still about a gallon in the bucket when I grabbed it from the floor.

After cleaning and alleviating the shock, I decided to attempt a recovery. I went back to my local home brew store, grabbed some crystal and victory malts to steep in a little water. I dosed the remainder of the mornings mash with an ounce of goldings. Once the steeping was finsihed, I put the hopped runnings and the extract into the kettle and boiled it, adding half an ounce of simcoe for 60 and an ounce of goldings for one.

What was going to be a yeast experiment has become an FWH experiment. We'll see just what sort of hop flavor this generates, and whether it contributes much bitterness. I calculated the IBUs contributed by the simcoe at only 21. The upper bound of utilization of the goldings is calculated to be 12. If this beer (O.G. 53) balances slightly bitter or neutral, I think that means that I got fairly high utilization of the alpha acids from the FWH. If it balances in the other direction, then the utilization was lower. Of course, given the unorthodox FWH proceedure, I'm not sure how much weight to give this little data point.

I'm brewing ten gallons of pale ale tomorrow. Here's the recipe:

• 10 lbs. Maris Otter Malt
• 4 lbs. Cargill two row
• 1/2 lb. each Paul's 10-20L, Cargill 30L and Munton's 60L crystal
• 2oz. Simcoe hops @ 11%AA
• 2oz. Goldings hops @ 4%AA
• 3 lb. Briess Pale DME
• Safale US Ale Yeast (2 pkgs.)

Begin by mashing the grains with 5 gallons water for 30 minutes at 145; raise to 155 and rest for 30 mintues; mash-out at 167. Sparge to collect 385 gravity units from the mash--should be about seven total gallons. Add the runnings to the boil kettle, add malt extact. Bring the wort to a boil and add 1 oz. of simcoe hops for a 60 minute boil. With 30 minutes remaining, add one ounce of goldings and half an ounce of simcoe. With one minute remaining, add half an ounce of simcoe and one ounce goldings. Chill wort and split between two fermenters, topping each off with water to get five gallons. This should give two batches of wort with a gravity of 52. Pitch each.

By fermenting one in the cooler and the other at room temperature, I'm going to see what the difference between fermenting at around 80 and at 67 is.

Goddamnit, I just want to brew every fucking day. I am good at this, and in a dream world, I would spend everyday making beer in a super small (i.e. homebrew) sized batch brewery, that was efficient and easy to clean and work it. All the muss and fuss would be taken out, leaving me to craft a new beer almost every day. In an ideal world, there would be a small tap room attached, where the beers would be served to a crowd of excited and loyal patron. The tap room and the brewery would not make money. Instead, it would be a place for beer lovers to congregate for examination of my latest creations.

I love the idea of pricing based on quality. (I'm not imagining this operation to make any money.) The deal is that all good and excellent pints are three dollars; strong ales will be served in half pints for two. If the beer is less than good, it's cost is reduced, and we thank the customer that helps us remove our bad stock, by offering 1.50 okay drafts. Spoiled beers will retail of $.01 a pint, until the end of the night we find it's spoiled, when we throw it out to make room for something good.

Right now my pale ale is fermenting away in the cooler that I usually reserve for kegs. Having no full kegs, it seems to me that the time is ripe for fermenting. Once that beer is ready, I want to brew another, but to ferment it, I need a cool space. The solution, naturally, is to ferment the beer in the cooler with the ale that I'm serving: ale serving temperatures are lager fermenting temperatures. I haven't decided yet what the lager will be.

It's motherfuckinghothere. The two thoughts that naturally come to mind are california common ale and a pilsner. The pils would be pretty oridnary: noble hops to bitter, dry hopped during the last week of conditioning, pils malt (9lbs) and carapils (1/2 lb). I might do something with this to emulate decoction effects, but I won't do a proper decoction. No, this would be SIMRed with a brief protein rest and then a 30-30 conversion at 145 and 155. One option for decoction effect is just to replace a small portion of the pils malt with munich. That will boost malt character and be easy as hell. Another thing that I'd considered is taking half a gallon of the first runnings and boiling it for 15-20 minutes--until it was significantly reduced, and, presumably, darkened. I might try that.

But I might not even make a pilsner. The California Common would make a nice summer beer, right? The recipe would probably be maris otter (around 9 pounds) and 6 oz. each 80L and 40L crystal. I might use some american 2-row malt in place of the maris otter. I might also do something weird, like add flaked barley. Domestic Northern Brewer hops, only to about 20-25 IBU, with a flavor addition at thirty minutes and then a small addition of bittering hops just to get the desired IBU level.

My efficiency yesterday blew so badly that I think I may have weighed out less malt than I thought. Anyway, I actually dumped a pound of malt extract in to get it up a few points. This let me hit a gravity of 54.3--14.0 Brix, whatever that works out to be. Of course, given that this was my first SIMRing, that may play an explanatory role. I'm worried that conversion never completed or something, but there's litte to be done about that now.

The grain to water ratio made a pretty thin mash. Could I have fucked up that measurement to the point that it made the mash inefficient? I used my old Phil's Lauter Tun set up to SIMR, and I usually use my keggle.

I'm going to go run a test real quick and I'll be right back.

--back--

Well, the test was to examine the amount of deadspace in the false bottom of my keggle. There was some hypothesis I had which required that the keggle deadspace be fairly large. It is not. In fact, it is smaller than I though--less than a quart.

I have a sudden and strong conviction that I should have mashed longer. I have this sudden worry that I'm mistaken to think that a short 15 minute rest in the 145 range is adequate because gelatinization won't occur until late enough in that stage that it really can't serve as an adequate beta-amylase rest. I think I will try my next beer for 30 minutes in each range because it seems like an easy data point to work with. Of course, given that my next beer will be a lager, I'm not sure how much I should really infer from the results.

Maybe I will do three beers in a row with 30-30 two-stage conversion rests. That would give me a much better basis to work from. After that I could move in either direction for the first rest and see what result I get.

I had another hobgoblin ale the other day. Palate effects are weird. There is a distinct taste of black patent malt in that beer, which gives it a much more brown ale like flavor than I had originally recognized.

Today, I'm SIMRing for the first time. So far, so good. There are kinks in the system that need to be worked out. For one, there's an issue of burner space for water (brewing liquor and sparge water) and the SIMR too. I think next time I will heat the water for the dough-in in a pot and then heat the SIMR for the next step. Alternatively, I could nearly heat for the dough-in, heat the simr and then get the water to strike temperature using the SIMR. The advantage of that comes largely in temperature control, the disadvantage is in time.

SIMRing is a little more intense than regular-old brewing, as the SIMR demands attention, as does step mashing.

Today's brew is all goldings hops with a grist of nine pound maris otter and a half pound each of victory, 30L Cargill crystal and melanoidin. Hops: 2oz at 60, 1oz at 30, 1 oz at one. Fermented with dry english ale yeast from white labs at a cool 67 degrees.

Too damn hot to brew. I've decided to take a holiday from fermenting. It's not really a holiday because I think it sucks. I have one alright and one good beer on tap right now; when those are gone I'm going to brew a batch and ferment it in my beer fridge. There's just no way that I could get a decent fermentation in my brewery right now. It's been over 105 for the last week.

A lip on my cooler is going to enhance the brewery greatly. It will exand my cooler capacity so that I can add a thrid keg or another fermenter--lager! I haven't started construction on this, but it will be great.

Here's my fully contructed SIMR:

And a close up:

I've used it to heat 5 gallon of water 3.2 degrees in 1 minute. I wrote a whole long guide on it thinking that blogger would allow me to post a .pdf on it, but i can't post pdfs here. I'm considering an alternative site to host the pdf.

I just cracked a Hobgoblin English Dark Ale. The first thing that struck me about this beer is that it is almost certainly not a dark ale. Deep copper, but an acceptable color for an english pale ale, me thinks. It's certainly a good looking beer, but it's a shade or two darker than a Sammy Smith OBPA.

The next thing I noticed about this beer is that it smells like goldings hops, lots of them, with just a little caramel. It tastes liket that too. Indeed, my rapid conclusion is that I was drinking an english pale ale, and a pretty damn good one at that. I recommend the beer quite highly. It's a model of english Strong Bitter. Really good carbonation--very little at all--assertive hops, caramel malt. Some english yeast character. Nice body that doesn't let the beer go unnoticed while making it a refreshing session beer.

I checked up ont the oaked ale and it registered 7.4 brix, which should mean somewhere in the 14 range for the gravity. I'm racking it today on some french oak chips. The beer tastes mighty fine, by the way. It will be a shame if the oak doesn't compliment the beer.

I'm also going to look into my c. 18th century porter today. I need three pounds of victory malt, 3 pounds brown malt, 3 pounds 2-row, 1 pound 6-row and one pound of flaked barley. There is, of course, a real tempatation to add some crystal malts because crystal malt tastes great and would be a really nice complement to the other flavors in this beer. Too bad: I'm doing a thing here. I think I'm going to bitter it with magnum or northern brewer.

"Never Use Progress Hops" tastes much more like a fermentation flaw than it used to--I think the hops aren't as much to blame as I thought.


I think I've figured out the design of my SIMR. I need elbow-joint needle valve Male and Female end, a 1/4" hose barb for that fits the female end, 6' of 1/4" I.D. silicone tubing and ~2' of 1/4" diamter copper pipe. I can get everything locally except the silicone tube; it's on order from McMaster Carr. I'm also going to have to figure out a tap to make a threaded hole of the right size and threading. This looks complicated and annoying. I think I'll need a drill bit too, and probably a hand tap-handle for the tap bit.

SIMR, SIMR, SIMR....



The weekend project will be to get this thing working as a steam unit for my Steam Injection Mash Regulator.

There are some people way more into brewing hardware than I am. Those are pictures of a SIMM, Steam Injection Mash Mixer. SIMMs are complex variation on what I'm going to build soon, a SIMU, Steam Injection Mash Unit.

The wallpaper steamer idea is a good one, but I'll be using a modified pressure cooker that has a valve to control steam release. Don't worry, when I start building this mofo, you will see pictures and stuff.

43.2 * 6.5/5 = 56.2...

49 / .75 = 65.3

56/65 = .86...

That's 86% efficiency. That's unbelievable, as in, I don't believe it.

But it's how the math worked out. What was supposed to be a modest gravity pale ale is on the verge of being an IPA. I'm going to adjust the dose of bittering hops just a bit, to .6 oz.

I'm guessing I got a point or two from the base malt, which pro mash assumed to be 1.036 potential extract. It could have been as high as 1.038, I think.

Morning Brew Session.

It's my first Saturday brew session in ages. I usually brew in the morning these days, but when it's Saturday morning it feels different. There are things going on in the house besides brewing, and it makes the feel of brewing more fun.

Today's recipes is an amber/pale ale that I plan to oak in the secondary fermenter. I had this idea for a cedar ale, but cedar is poisonous, so I scratched that idea and I'm doing what everyone does: oak. I hear french oak is It, so great, there will be some french oak in the beer. That will make this the frenchest beer I've ever made.

Here's the recipe:
8 lbs. Cargill 2-row pale malt
1 lb. Brit. Crystal 60L
1/4 lb. special B
1/2 lb. wheat malt
1/4 lb. victory malt

Mashed at 154 with a mash out to 167.

Simcoe hops: .5 oz at 60, 30 and 1 minute remaining in the 90 minute boil.

White Labs California Ale Yeast

2 oz. french oak chips, in secondary for 1-2 weeks.

I spend a significant part of yesterday cleaning and rearranging Next Week Brewery.

I feel as though the nextweek brewery has gotten tired and stagnant. A conservatism about beer and brewing has set in. When I open the recipe book to brew, it feels as though the question is whether the only question is: English or American, and how dark? While I think that this is a great question, it's not the only question. Brewing is--or at least should be--as much about discovery as success. I've spent too much time trying to brew outstanding paradigmatic beers and not enough trying to make something new. Innovation is not to be valued for it's sake, but for the sake of discovering something good.

It's time to make four beers unlike the beers I've made before, in hope of discovering something good.

Here are the four beers that I'm going to make, probably interspersed with some more traditional beers:

Cedar Amber Ale: an amber ale on the malty side of balance, probably actually without significant hop aroma or flavor, moderate bitterness (25 IBU) and a blend of crystal malt. Racked to secondary with 3 oz. of cedar chips. Hence, cedar amber ale. Cedar is poisonous. I'm not really sure how poisonous. On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is non-toxic and 1 is as toxic as ethyl alcohol, I don't want anything that's a 2 or higher in my beer.

A sour ale. I don't want it to be too sour, but I'm thinking some sourness for the balance will be fun. I haven't decided what kind of sour ale I'm going to do, but I'm going to do one. I'll mash and sparge and then chill the wort to around 100 degrees. To that I will add half a pound of crushed grain and let it rest over night. I'll boil and pitch the next day. Papazian and some others I like have recommended this for making sour ale.

A fruit beer. Probably, raspberry and wheat.

Industrial Revolution porter. 1/3 base malt, 1/3 amber malt, 1/3 brown malt. O.G. 60. 40-50 I.B.U. (maybe and ounce of German Northern Brewer), but not much hop aroma or flavor.

I racked these two beers today:

I'm going to start naming my beers again. The one on the left is called "IPA Prime", because it is the second IPA that follows more-or-less a model that I liked earlier this year. The one on the right is called "Never Use Progress Hops" after the fucking awful flavor that the progess hops, upon racking, appear to have put in the beer. It tastes like hell and I think I'm brewing this week to make up for it.

Also worth mentioning is that IPA Prime is the underattenuated beer that I struggled with so much. It finally hit a gravity of 17, which isn't so bad, but it's nowhere near the level of attenuation I'd hoped for. The beer will be fine, but merely fine.

On the lighter side, the blond and the pale ale that I kegged yesterday at 100% promising. I'm naming them Firefly Blond and Early Summer Pale. Firefly I won't go into; Early Summer because of the time and the hops, Chinook, which is a word for a weird warm wind that sometimes appears in winter and spring in the rocky mountain states like montana.

A little while ago I linked to a nice discussion of session beer on a blog that is obvious a better beer blog than this one is. Continuing in the tradition of better blogs: here's one. Well, that's actually a link to his article on nearly puking some bad danish lager into which he put some spoiled hop extract. Well, he thinks it might have been hop extract. I'm not sure from what he says that he's confident that it was really hop extract. The blog, anyway, appears far more worth reading than this one.

The recent pale ale blasted its way through fermentation and it ready to keg. I'm leaving town early tomorrow for my mother's 60th birthday and won't have time to keg it until I return, which is too bad because it would be nice to come home to some ready-to-drink pale ale. (What I tasted when I racked this beer was incredible.--More on making incredible beer in a moment.)

The blond will also be ready to keg soon, likely I will keg that along with the pale ale on Tuesday. I'm looking forward to the blond, but I can't say too much about it yet because when I rack it has some sulfur flavors that will no doubt dissipate during conditioning. (Sulfur smells and tastes, I have found, unlike all the other undesirable smells and tastes I've accidentally brewed up, actually disspate during conditioning.)

There's that IPA that underattenuated and I got going again. I'm sorta worried about that beer because I dumped so much yeast on it to get it to continue fermenting. The future of that beer: probably re-rack it, dry-hop it and add some fining to remove the yeast. I wasn't planning originally to dry hop it, but since I'll have two other beers ready around the time I return, I think I will.

And there's that damned old ale that I haven't done anything about since I racked it, except move it to a keg so that i can beer-gun it into bottles.

In case your counting, that makes 25 gallons--5 batches--of beer sitting around and waiting to be packaged...

Back to the topic of making incredible beer. If what I've tasted while racking is any indication, I've been rewarded for having made two funny-yeast beers in a row. The Old Ale that I moved to a corney keg has amazing potential. And the recent Pale Ale may be the best pale ale I've ever made. I suspect that carastan malt is the secret to great pale. The IPA, though underattenuated, was full of promise. The amber ferments and when I get back I'll find out how good it is.

Remember my amber ale project?

Well, I'm finally actually making another amber ale.

Here's the recipe:

7 lbs. maris otter
1.5 lbs Cargil 2-row
.5 lb. wheat
.5 lb. 10L crystal
.38 lb. 80L crystal
.25 lb. special B

mashed at... I haven't decided for sure, though I think well-attenuated is what I want, especially given that I'll be pitching Pacific Ale yeast, which doesn't attenuate greatly. I may try a tiny step mash, like 20 minutes at 145 followed by 30 at 155 or something like that. I have a thought on how to make such a thing happen that I'm pretty fond of: heat additional water for the initial infusion, remove additional water and heat to a temperature good for the infusion.

For hops, I'm using half an ounce of Chinook, (up to) 1 oz. fuggles for flavor and (up to) one ounce cascade for aroma. I'll probably use a full ounce for each. Fuggles is not a strong hop and I like the smell of cascade hops.

Pacific Ale yeast.

Now, if you read the old plans regard this amber ale project, you can look at this an conclude that it's not really a part of the project. There's some similarity in the grain bill (dark crystals) and that about it.

I know what I'm doing today.

Later, an update:

Or not. Turns out cheap pressure cookers are more than I imagined.

This would certainly get me back on a step mashing kick, and I'm especially fond of the method as it seems much less apt to caramelize sugars than, for example, direct heat.

I hate it when I run out of homebrew. This happens every now and then and it drives me nuts. I'm not actually out right now, but I like to have an english or american ale on hand pretty much at all times. and right now I have only hefe.

I made that IPA, which would have been nearly ready by today if the fermentation hadn't stalled out at 1.024. Argh! I tried putting two packets of Fermentis Safale US Ale yeast in and nothing happened. Then I split a vial of WLP001 into two starters, one of which went into an american pale that I made yesterday (more on that in a moment) and one of which went into the IPA. This kicked it back up and I had a bubble every 15 seconds in the airlock yesterday. Today is slower: every 40 seconds, but I got at least 24 hours of fermentation from the Cali ale yeast, so that should have moved the gravity down a fair bit. I'm sure that will help, even if I don't get the well attenuated IPA I had hoped for.

There's another ale ready to be racked right now. It's a blond ale the recipe for which is basically a pils, but fermented with california V ale yeast. I'm hoping that vial of california yeast did a bettter job than the one in my IPA. If not, I won't be doing cali V ale yeast again for awhile. I should rack that today, but it's very cloudy, so I can't be sure how long it will be before I keg it.

Yesterday's pale ale was maris otter and carastan, 9lbs and 1lb. respectively, mashed at 152 for an hour; Bittered with .75 oz. chinook for 60, .25 oz. chinook for 30 and an ounce of atanhum at knockout. The other half of that california ale yeast mentioned above went into that fermenter. I bollocksed everything up by forgetting the pH stabilizer and so I added some of that at the end of an hour and bumped the temp to 155 for 20 to make sure that it got all converted. It's a tornado inside that fermenter, so something happened right.

I'm also going to keg my old ale today. If it tastes good. There's mold in the airlock.

There are many better beer blogs out there. Lew Bryson has one of them that I discovered today while cruising the nearest thing the NYTimes has to a beer blog. Bryson's is better than the times, and I especially like his session beer discussions.

He defended session beer against the claim that they're the least common demominator is a recent article--he's dead right in a really outstanding bit of blogging there.

I'm going to throw in my two cents on this subject with a rather different analogy than the one he uses, an analogy which is meant to shed light on why a joys is session beer are a mark of true beer aficionado, in a way that I think extreme beer just isn't. It goes like this: what some people like about baseball is to watch slugger crush a ball 495 feet long past the centerfield wall. Some people love to watch a pitcher throw seven without letting a man on base. And if you're watching the game, no one misses that no-doubter as flies from the field of play. But it takes an awareness to relish the perfect innings, because no single pitch will draw your attention the event of which they are a part--a near perfect game. To see that requires an attention to whole, an awareness of the how all the parts compose it, that is an activity of the spectator impossible in passivity.

Thus is session beer. Unlike much extreme beer, it requires the attention of the drinker, beutdoes not demand it. The joys in session beer require awareness on the part of the drinker which cannot be achieved in passivity. And, like appreciating a perfect seven innings of baseball, it also requires the cultivation of appreciation.

A recent pale ale that I made was a sort of hybrid of american and british pale ale, and I think it illustrated the beauty of session beer well. I finished the beer with kent goldings hops and fermented it with white labs pacific ale yeast, which is more of an english-type ale yeast than an american one. The grain bill was maris otter with a blend of two light-side crystal malts an just a bit of wheat malt, the O.G. was about 11.5 plato. I bittered it with chinook hops, which is most of where the hybridness comes in, though I mashed for high attenuation and kept it more carbonated than a british ale would ordinarily be.

That beer was outstanding. Like an opitcal illusion in which is which you can see either a vase or two silhouettes simply by directing your attention to one aspect or the other, you could change this beer simiply by directing your attention to it's bitterness, or it's malt, or it's hops. But unlike the illusion (where you can perceive just one, even though you know the other is there) you could never completely loose the rest of the beer in the aspect to which you'd directed your attention. (And the coupling of a sublte dose of piney chinook hops with an otherwise rather british beer is splendid.)

Having praised session beer and it's merits, let me, with Bryson, say that I have nothing against extreme beers. But let me, with Bryson, register my complaint against extreme beers that are boring, that demand and restrict my attention to their bigness--an artless gnashing of heavy metal guitar with the amp cranked to eleven. The experience is boring, and often even pleasant. I'm stealing the spinal tap metaphor from Bryson. The best big beers, like the best session beers, deliver their drinker an experience which is not demanded but permitted; they open a teritory of the brewer's art, but leave the drinker to experience, explore and discover. And of course, when done right, what one discovers is great.

Today was finally IPA day. I used 3 oz. of rice hulls to spectacular effect. ('Spectacular' is an overstament as there's nothing that's ever a spectacle about a sparge.) I'm pretty much committed to rice hulls in everything from now on. I did a thin mash of 1.7 quarts/pound, mashed at 149, and everything went nicely. In the future I'll try 1.6 qts/pound as 1.7 seemed unnecessarily thin, and I should keep in mind the quart that lives under my false bottom.

I chnged the hop profile: 1 oz each cascade and amarillo for 60, 1 oz. amarillo for 15 and 1.5 oz. cascade at knockout, with 5 minutes before I started the chiller.

Well, yesterday's indecision is over. Thursday's session will be an IPA. I'll mash 11 lbs. Warminster Maris Otter, .5 lbs. each german wheat malt, Dingemann's caravienne and Paul's 10-20L crystal with 5 1/4 gallons of water at 148 degrees for 2 hours and mash-out at 167. What?! Oh yes, I said it and I meant it. I have a theory that maris otter, because of it's low enzyme content, needs longer to convert. Moreover, I'm fermenting with California V ale yeast, so I'm going to push attenuation from this mass. (The Cali V ale yeast attenuates 70-75%, and I would like to acheive at least the upper end of that range.)

The hops will be a blend of cascade and amarillo: 1 oz. each at 60 min, .5 oz. amarillo at 30, .5 each at 15, and dry hopped with one ounce of cascade; that, anyway, is the plan, but I may well revoke it and do some first wort hopping with an ounce of amarillo and half an ounce of cascade.

Processes...

My mash process is a little clumsy. This derives mostly for issues of heat loss. Presently I mash in a keggle and use direct heat to bump the temperature from the sachrification to the mash out temp. I loose 3-7 degrees during the sachrification rest. There are sudden jumps in temperature during the interval from the sach rest to mash out, and I often detect pockets of heat. This is related to using direct heat to keep the mash at temperature: there again I find sudden temperature jumps, which could mean accidentally denaturing beta-amylase by adding heat to keep temperature.

To eliminate these problems I'm going to try using a mash over 1.6 qts/pound--much thinner that I have been mashing. The hope is that this will improve the transfer of heat through the mash because mixing the grainy fluid will be easier. I will be able to test the hypothesis that a thinner mash will reduce temperature jumps during my next mash by taking regular temperature checks to see how the temp rises as I mash out. If my hypothesis is confirmed (i.e. if the mash temperature rises uniformly during the test mash-out), this will indicate that I can use direct heat to raise the temperature of the mash during the mash without risking over heating and spoiling the beta-amylase.

Wish me luck.

Time to brew another beer. I've had a few house guests recently and for the first time in awhile have only one keg of beer in the refrigerator (the beligan thingy I did awhile back.) The Weizen should find it's way to a keg soon.

Still, it's time to brew another, and I don't know what to make. I have a big bag of maris otter which suggests a british style beer or an american interpretation thereof. I think I prefer an american version thereof as I find a nice american hop profile quite summery. An alternative is to go with platinum ale: pilsne reciper, substitute ale yeast. If I were to do an american interpretation of english ale, I would consider going the following: amber ale, IPA, light-colored american pale ale. Here're sketches of each recipe:
Amber 9lbs. maris otter, .5 lb. carapils, .75 lb. 80L crystal, 3 oz. special B--mashed at 151 for 90 minutes; Willamette first wort hopped and aroma hopped, bittered with cascade to about 35 IBU. With california ale yeast.
IPA 12 lbs. maris otter, 1 lb. brit. 10-20L crystal, .5 lb. wheat malt (head retention)--mashed at 148 for 90 minutes; chinook and cascade to bitter, with amarillo and cascade all the way through for flavor and aroma, 70 IBU or so. With cali ale yeast.
Pale Pale Ale 9.5 lbs. maris otter, .75 lb. 10-20L crystal, .25 lb. each wheat malt and carapils--mashed at 151 for 75 minutes; ahtanum and willamette hops, or some cascade.
Those are the ideas I have. I'll probably decide what to do tomorrow.

I'm brewing a very traditional bavarian weizen today. 6 lbs. wheat malt, 4lbs. german pils malt, 1.5 oz. hallertau hops (approx. 2.7%AA), and bavarian weizen yeast from white labs.

I have never made a bad hefe weizen, except one that spoiled.

I went up to the beer store with what i was going to call Platinum Blonde Ale. The recipe was 9 pounds of german pils malt and half a pound of carapils, mashed for 60 minutes at 151 in purified drinking water, with saaz or similar hops to acheive 25 IBU and gentle hop aroma and flavor, fermented with california v ale yeast from white labs. I was looking for the lightest possible ale, near kolsch, soft, mild fruitiness, gentle hops, balanced bitterness.

I scooped four pounds of german pils malt in the scale at my beer store and then went to add the half pound of carapils. (The scale won't hold the full ten pounds, so I usually do half the recipe, mill it, and then the other half.) I was chatting with the guy at the store about my plans. Right on top of the pils malt, I scooped half a bound of victory in by mistake.

Scratch all that. I have no idea what I'm doing now and I don't care. I grabbed 3.75 pounds of american two row, .25 lbs. of carapils, .5 lbs. of 60L british crystal and a pounds of munich and milled it all together. 1 oz sterling (6.2% AA for 60), .5 oz each mt. hood and libtery (4.0 and 3.6% AA for 30) and .5 oz each mt. hood and libtery for 2. Fermented with white labs Belgian Ale Yeast.

We'll see what the results are.

Shake it up?

I read somewhere that int he 19th century brewers would agitate their casks of barleywine in order to get more fermentation going. The old ale never really showed the level of active fermentation that one would expect from a beer that size; it has fermented but didn't really seem to have fermented enough to me. So I bunged it up with a solid bung and shook the heck out of it today. What do you know: bubbles in the airlock (once I replaced the solid bung.) I'm not sure that this activity will persists, but I hope so. Anyway, the theory behind all this seems like a reasonable one to me: yeast that would be fermenting can floculate prematurely because of yeast in the neighborhood that are at the floculation stage. Shaking releases some of this healthy yeast.

I'll let you know whether the airlock starts moving at a renewed rate or not.

I got round to kegging the IPA this morning. It's delicious. Remember the previous report on the gravity? Well, it was off. I only got about 75% attenuation according to today's measurements. This seems weird to me, so I'll hit it with a hydrometer to see double check it. (I'm pretty skeptical that a 149 degree, 75 minutes mash would give me only 75% AA with WLP001...)

Here's a picture of my alt bier. I really need a better camera (camera phones are a lot more phone than camera...) This beer is gorgously clear and the color of rubies.

I brewed my Old Ale today. I ended with a gravity of 66 and it should attenuate well--6.5%+ abv. That's exactly what I was shooting for, which is great. I should bottle it around the end of the month.

I was kicking my self this evening for not having the sense to transfer my IPA from a month ago into a keg to keep it in waiting for when one of my beers in the cooler blows--so as soon as I can I can get it in and start chilling it for carbonation. I decided that I will do that tomorrow, and checked the keg to see whether it needed an over night treatment. It looked good. I went to the oatmeal stout, to pour myself a beer. Half a glass--pop, foam, the keg blew.

Belgian beers are insidious. Start with a recipe for a delcious beer of 5.5% abv, then add enough sugar to make it 7%. The result is the most drinkable 7% abv in the universe. The truth is that I'll probably never be impressed by Belgian beers as a style any more than I'm impressed by any other style. What really impresses from a brewer is the skill of making the same great beer over and over, not the skill of assembling good ingredients and knowing what you're doing with them to have, once finished, a good beer.

Here's the scheme for a belgian beer: take some pils malt and (if desired) add judicious amounts of crystal, aromatic and some darker base malts and (for the darker varieties) conservative amounts of chocolate malt to make a beer of gravity 10 to 20 less than your desired final gravity. Add sugars (light for light, dark for darker) to make up the gravity. Bitter gently, about 4 IBU for every 10 points of gravity. Ferment with belgian yeast. To ensure that the yeast doesn't go too wild, keep the fermentation around 70 the whole time.

That's it.

My suspicion is that making belgian beer really well at home is more difficult than making other styles because fermentation character is what the beer is all about and controling fermentation requires knowlege and aparatus that the homebrewer doesn't use for other beers. On the other hand, we probably should use such knowledge for brewing other beers, and the aparatus for controling it wouldn't be a bad addition. In an ideal world, I'd live in a place that had an average daily temperature below that of ale fermentation and I'd use that to my advantage in beer after beer.

I'm reading Brew Like a Monk, which is a nice read. A little on the dry side as the author writes without ardor, but a nice read.

Still, there's a claim in this book that I want a theoretical underpinning for: adding sugar makes beer dry. The book quotes a dude named Phil Markowski, author of Farmhouse Ales:

"...there is still a fairly prevalent anti-adjunct bias among many American brewers, both amerature and professional, that makes them hold back from using enough sugar to achieve the same level of dryness that the classic Belgian examples exhibit."

and the author insinuates or asserts much the same, that sugar promotes dryness, in several places.

I'll buy that for a beer of a given gravity, the use of sugar promotes a dry beer. I'm not buying that the use of sugar makes a beer drier than a beer from the same wort without the sugar would have been. Now, I'm not buying it, but I could be convinced, given a sampling of appropriate beers or a theoretical account. But I'm thinking it's really only the first assertion that's true. (And the theoretical justification is simple: sugars are more fermentable than wort, so wort of a given gravity attenuates better if it contains sugar, and hence has less residual sugar, than an all-malt beer.)

One distinct theoretical possibility is that sugar, by increasing gravity, alters fermentation characteristics that will enhance the perceived dryness of the beer. Increasing gravity does increase ester production, so, well, theres a possibility here. But I'm not yet sold.

Thursdays are brew days on my current schedule, and there's always a Thursday fast approaching. I'm deciding between two beers I might do, a straw-colored blond ale and an old ale that's meant for the holidays of 2007.

The blond will follow a pilsner like grain bill and be fermented with Cali V Ale yeast from white labs. I will probably stick to noble hops for bittering and target around 25 IBU, with no aroma and only mild flavor hop additions, probably also with noble hops. The grain bill be be 8-9lbs. pils malt and 1/4-1/2 pound each carapils and wheat malt, mashed around 151 degrees.

The old ale will be a parade of crystal malts. I'm going to use several varieties from the whole color spectrum, probably around 2 lbs. total, in a 12lbs recipe (O.G. around 15 Plato.) I will also use about an ounce of black patent for clarity and to help dry the finish. I'm thinking 45-50 IBU. Small amounts of finishing hops, which won't be very noticable after 10 months in the bottle. I'm considering making this beer all Target hops. Fermented with dry english ale yeast.

The consdieration for the old ale is that I should make it soon if I want to to have time to age and all that before Thanksgiving. I have two beers that await kegging right now, so there's no special need to ferment a session beer like the blond now. On the other hand, I'm anticipating the blond slightly more, perhaps ony because I like the name "Platinum Ale", perhaps because I would actually get to see what it was like before, say, the next time I hear a Christmas carol.

I just found a cool bit of advice here: a racking cane tip on the dip tube in a keg will reduce getting yeast from the keg.

Pacific ESB...

I got home to discover that this beer wants to come gushing out of the ferementer.

I wrapped the top in plastic wrap, which should allow air to escape without risking any exposions if it gets stuck.

I'm getting good at this. I like an early start on my brew day; today I mashed-in at 7:42am. I was done just six hours later. I'm getting good at this. If pro-mash is to be believed, I hit 80% efficiency today. 5.5 gallons of 1.0485 gravity wort with 8 lbs. maris otter, 1/4 pound wheat malt and a pound of crystal. I'm getting good at this.

I forgot the irish moss. I'm pretty good at this.

Here's a picture of the Pacific Ale:


Okay, that's more like a picture of the shirt I was wearing in 2005 when UNC won the national championship, but I promise there's beer underneath. The shirt needed to be retired, so I'm using it as a carboy jacket starting today.

Thursday's brew is a beer I'm calling Pacific ESB. It's styled after some pale ales I've had that come fromt the Pacific Northwest, like this. I'm going for fruity yeast, assertive bitterness but enough malt to say that it's balanced. I have an idea in my mind about this beer and I'm almost certain that I won't succeed in making it. Nonetheless,
8 pounds Maris Otter,
.25 pounds wheat malt,
.75 pounds of Cargil 20L crystal, and
.25 pounds of Cargil 40L crystal
mashed at 150 for 60 minutes.
.5 oz E.K.G. for 30 mintes,
.5 oz E.K.G. for 2 minutes, and
and enough chinook raise the bitterness the beer to 30 IBU, I'm guessing about .40 oz.
White Labs Pacific Ale Yeast, from a starter.

This could be the best IPA ever to come from Nextweek Brewery. It's wearing a shirt to keep it from gettting light struck. It will probably sit in that carboy for over a week. I had originally planned to dry hop it, but the aroma is so good right now, I'm not seeing the need.

It's still fermenting and it has attenuated 85% already--70.5% RDF! F.G. 1.009 or lower... 7.35% A.B.V. so far. That' bigger than I wanted. What the hell can you do?

I'm planning a Pacific Northwest styled bitter for Thursday brewing.

I'm getting near capacity in my brewery. The oatmeal stout is in a keg, the altbier could go into a keg at anytime (though I think I'll let it condition a bit longer), and I have an IPA to rack in a couple of days for about two weeks conditioning and dry hopping. Once I keg the altbier I will have over eight gallons in kegs, with an IPA waiting in the wings.

When my brewery gets close to capacity, I start to think in kinds of styles rather than styles of beer. Certain things can be fit into the brewery schedule while other things cannot, and some things are convenient in the schedule at that time, because you don't feel like you need to brew just to keep the kegs full. So that has me thinking in terms of kinds of styles. I want to make some strong ales that I bottle and hold a few months before drinking. I want to get some summer ales going for when the weather warms up. I want some standards for when my kegs get low.

The strong ales that interest me are a barley wine, a dubbel and the beer I'm calling my 2007 Christmas Old Ale. The last I plan to open around Thanksgiving. The barley wine I will hold for about a year. The dubbel will probably be the last one I brew and the first one I drink. For all three of these beers, there will be no priming sugar in the bottle. I'm just going to bottle 'em up and let them rest a few months. If they never really carbonate, no big deal. Well, I might prime the dubbel just a little, because I do want that pretty bubbly.

The summer beers I should wait just a bit to make. They are, if you're wondering, a bavarian weizen, a wit and a blonde ale. Each should have pleasing interesting yeast character, gentle bitterness and a soft but tasty malt character.

And the standards I will get in the rotation as I see fit. They are, if you're wondering, a bitter, a brown and an amber. Right now, and this is not a prediction about what I will do, I want to make the amber next.

I love statistics. From beertown.org:
Forty percent of beer sales happen during 7 key weeks leading up to Super Bowl, Memorial Day (Indy 500), Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's. 40 percent of beers sales is roughly 81 million barrels. Divided by 7 key weeks equals 11.6 million barrels per key week.
Roughly 5.7 percent of annual U.S. beer sales happens during each key week. With 330.67 12-oz beer equivalents per barrel, each key week would include sales of the equivalent of 3,835,772,000 12-oz beer servings or roughly 19 beers per U.S. adult during the sales week leading to Memorial Day.

Last Thursday found me making an IPA. With a few experimental excepetions, I say of every beer I make that it is going to be good. Nevertheless, this one is going to be good. The recipe was .75 lbs. 10-20L british crystal, .38 lbs. Carastan (35L), and 11 lbs. Maris Otter hopped with .5 oz. Chinook (60 min), .5 oz. each cascade and amarillo (30 min), .25 oz. each cascade and amarillo for 15 min, 1 oz. each cascade and amarillo for 1 minute. I'll dry hop it when I rack it. The mash was at 149 degrees for 75 minutes. I went over temp for a period of the mash, but i'm not too worried. We shall see what results I get. 78% attenuation will be enough, and it's California Ale yeast, so there's a good chance I get it.

Perhaps the most interesting portion of this beer is the water treatment. I skipped the pH stabilizer and used gypsum to get my target pH--that means I was brewing with Burtonized water, a first for me.

Obviously, I was seeking an American IPA but not too extreme. I look for high attenuation to give it a dry finish, lots of citrusy hop character backed by solid malt. About 55 IBU and an O.G. of 1.065. To repeat, I was seeking an American IPA.

Could some one please explain the following to me:

There are two sub-styles of (genuine) pils: German Pilsner and Bohemian Pilsener. Notice the spellings, pilsner and pilsener. I'd be less inclinded to say "Please explain" if it weren't for the classic czech beer, Pilsner Urquell.

(There are lots of lagers that imitate the Bohemian original, however, I don't count all those lagers as pilsner. I don't even count classic american "pilsner" as pilsner.)

I'm working on my beer tasting skills. I taste a lot of beer, and I think I've gotten very good at it. However, I don't feel that I've gotten my tasting skills well-regimented. I'm going to try to improve that by actually completing BJCP Score Sheets for some professional and homebrewed beers. A big part of this is to get myself reporting about beer in a standard way and in a way that is informative at least to me, and I hope to the reader.

The BJCP rates beer in the usual four plus one categories: mouthfeel, appearance, aroma and flavor plus overall impression. I'm going to use their weights of 5, 3, 12, 20 plus 10 for my rating. Points in the first four categories are scored for being stylistically accurate while interesting and good, while points for overall impression are mostly about interesting and good and less about stylistic accuracy.

But there's still a question of what the points mean. The BJCP says that 50-45 points are for outstanding beers, 44-38 for excellent beers, 30-37 for very good beers, 29-21 for good beers and 20-14 for fair beers. What would I mean if I said a beer met those standards:

• Outstanding means mind blowing, a knock-out, if you never stopped experience this beer it would be premature
• Excellent This beer exemplifies the style, and is exciting and good, whether because of the right balance, subtlty, or assertiveness. A beer that shows off the style.
• Very Good Measures up to the better portion of commercial representatives of the style. Does well with the important features of the style without any detracting characteristics.
• Good Meets the style specifications but in pedestrian ways or with flaws that detract from accomplishments. The sort of beer that you would tell your friend "Yeah, that's a beer of style x" if he didn't know any quality representatives.
• Fair A beer with flaws enough that you would deny that it really exemplified anything of the style, or perhaps simply bland and flacid in some or most respects. You wouldn't drink or purchase this beer. May exhibit noticable technical flaws.
• Poor Truly bad.

For appearace, I will score a beer 3 if it is outstanding, excellent, 2 if very good or good, 1 if fair and 0 if poor.
For mouthfeel, I will score a beer 5 is it is outstanding or excellent, 4 if very good, 3 if good, 2 if fair, 1 or 0 if poor. (For a style that has very particular mouthfeel characteristics, I would make 5 only for the outstand, 4 for the excellent, etc.)
For aroma, 12 is outsanding, 11 and 10 are excellent, 9 and 8 very good, 7 and 6 are good, 5 is borderline on fair, 4 and 3 are fair. The rest are poor.
For flavor, 20 and 19 are outstanding, 18, 17, and 16 are Excellent, 15, 14,13 and 12 are very good, 11, 10, and 9 are good, 8, 7, and 6 are fair, the rest are problematic.
I think I will discuss overall impression in another post..

Decoction mashing is great. Well, at least it's fun. I shall see whether it produces any special results.

My plan was to dough-in at 150, rest for 20 minutes, pull 6 quarts, raise that to 158 for ten and then to boil it for thirty.

That's basically what I did. There was some pertty significant temperature loss in the main mash, but I'm not terribly concerned. What I wanted was a long low temp mash for good attenuation; I got long and low temp. The decoction didn't even come close to a mash out temp--I hit only 158 when it was returned to the mash. But that's fine; if anything, given the cool mash, it's good because it rested at that temp about ten minutes before the sparge, which ensures that any unconverted starch from the cool mash was alpha-amylased out at 158.

Nextweek brewery managed to aquire some white labs dusseldorf alt yeast for the manufacture of an alt bier! Brewing to commence on Thursday.

On Conditioning

It's a lovely thing that a beer improves with age. This is, I'm told, only true of beers with active yeast in them; don't bother aging run of the mill commercial beers. The benefits of aging are most notable in beers of exceptional strength, in which the residual sweetness and alcoholic hotness reduce as the beer matures. Hop flavors also mellow. Sharp, even astringent, hops can become smooth and pleasing with some time in the bottle. Perhaps unfortunately, hop aromas will not survive a long process of conditioning.

Stormtrooper is conditioning well. The hop aromas are still present and the residual sugars have diminished. I carbonated in the keg and then moved that to bottles, but it has gained carbonation since then. The head stands really nicely. The hops flavors has become a little more subtle, though I'd still say the beer tastes like hops. The carbonation thing was a bit of a surprise to me. That beer sat in fermenters for over a month, so I was surprised to find continuted fermentation.

I'm planning a barley wine, which I will ferment even longer than the IPA, probably a total of two months before bottling. I'm considering bottling with no priming sugar to let the beer get what carbonation it will from continued fermentation. I'm thinking about how I will get the barley wine to clarify, as I would really like that beer to be clear.

I mentioned a dusseldorf alt earlier today. I'm decided that that's what my next beer will be.

This beer will be an almost alt. I'm not going to engage in the traditional conditioning process for the beer. In place of that, I will do an extended room temperature conditioning where the beer will be held between 60 and 70 degrees. I hope to keep it in the cooler range of this range, but we'll see what's really feasible. I'm undecided between using White Labs European Ale yeast and German Ale yeast. Anyway, I'll decide on one soon enough.

The grist will be approximately 5% melanoidin, 10% dark munich, 10% light munich, 74% pilsener malt and 1% caraffe, in quantity for a target gravity of 50. This should produce a complex maltiness that the style requires. To enhance the malt character, I'm going to use a decoction to raise the mash from the sachrification rest to the mash out. The conversion rest will be at 150 degrees. I'm going to remove approximately one gallon of the mash after 20 minutes of this rest. That gallon will be raised to 158 degrees for ten minutes to complete it's conversion and then boiled for 30 minutes, after which time it will be returned to the mash for the mash out.

I'll use traditional spalt hops for bittering, enough to achieve a about 40-45 IBU. That is a substantial level of bitterness, but I believe that the robust malt character of this beer will stand to it well.

Right now, I'm excited about brewing. I'm always pretty excited about brewing, but this is special. I'm looking for repsonsible beer adventures. I want to brew styles I haven't brewed before, some of which I've never even tasted. Here are a few things that I'm considering: a barley wine, a dubbel, a wit, an almost altbier. The "almost" in the altbier comes from the fact that I may not be able to give it the traditional conditioning.

Barley wine requires different sorts of preparation and planning than my usual brew because of it's strength. As I was first considering this brew, I was thinking that I would use extract if the gravity did not attain 110. Now I'm thinking that I should insist on making this all-grain for the extra-challenge that that involves. I will probably try to make a more english style barley wine than american style one--high bitterness, but with smaller late hop additions than one would find in the U.S. and I will probably use East Kent Goldings for all the finishing. I was thinking about doing two ounces of warrior hops (~17% AA) for bittering.

Dubbel is a lot of fun. With a Dubbel, one wants complexity. Half the complexity comes from the yeast (I will probably use White Labs Abbey Ale yeast), the other half from the choice of grain--hops to bitter only, and only mildly--which will be somthing like carapils, caravienna, caramunich, special B, aromatic and belgian pils.

Did I say wit? Oh yeah, that will probably be later than the others as it is a warmer weather beer. I will probably not add any spice etc. to this myself. Instead, I will depend on yeast and (slightly irresponisbly) a small measure of american citrusy hops.

The Almost Altbier may be the first of these responsible adventures that I make for this simple reason that it sounds like a winter time beer to me. The classic recipe for this style is 90% pils malt, 10% munich, bittered with spalt hops and having moderate to very low hop aroma, but little or no hop flavor. Since I really want complex malt, I'm going to use more munich malt (20%) and probably add some melanoidin malt as well. SRMs for altbier range from 13-17, so I may need to add something for color. I was thinking about an ounce of de-bittered black malt (caraffe) for this, but I'd rather have a low SRM and no roast character and a roasty altbier. I'm going to do a decoction mash with this beer, so it should be fun to make. I haven't planned exactly how the decoction will go. I want a low mash temperature (149 or 150) so that I hit 78%-80% attenuation and I want to use the decoction to mash-out. And I want to boil the decoction itself for about 30 minutes to get Maillard reactions. It seems rather complicated to make all this come out right.

I should be racking the oatmeal stout today.

Having little to do the last few days, but no real space to fit more beer, I wrote an eleven page (single spaced) guide to all-grain brewing. It was pretty fun. I think it's not really finished yet but I want to give myself a day before I revisit it so that I don't overlook anything important.

This was actually a seguey into something that I wanted to say... what was it? Ah, while working on this, I was consulting John Palmer's How to Brew on the subject of decoction mashing. I've never actually decoction mashed, but I wanted to at least mention to the process in my guide, so I thought I should read up on the process. I read and I thought, "fucking hell, I could totally do a single decoction to mash out. This stuff about maliard reactions totally makes sense and I bet it works like a charm. Actually, I bet it beats the shit out of superstition crap like charms."

I spent some time working though Palmer's equations for decoction calculations and discovered, to some delight, that it would take only about 1.25 gallons of the mash to move from 151 degrees to 167 degrees (for a mash of 10 pounds). The decotion math was only approximate. But I realized that all the complication of it doesn't quite register--my nacient theory of specific heat denies that it should be so complex--so I'm going to try a decoction math simplification, if I ever get to decocting. Since the only rest the decoction will be used for is the mash out, I'm not super concerned that the calculations be precise.

Here's the simplification. If you remove a fraction of the mash equal to x/y then to add one degree to the total temperature of the mash (when you add the fraction back in) you have to increase the temperature of the faction by y/x. E.g. if you remove one fifth of the mash, you have to increase the temperature of that fraction by five degrees to net a 1 degree increase in the temperature of all of it.

I own a scale, which is pretty much all that I need to figure out how much to remove (along with the mass of the mash.)

The question, of course, is on what beer to do a decoction? Maybe on a brown ale...

I awoke early yesterday morning to get started on an oatmeal stout. I started around eight am and I was done by 2pm. The recipe was just as reported. I think it might have been .8 oz. of N.B. for 60.

I had just about the best sparge ever. I crushed a little coarser than usual, and I'm going to crush just a little coarser yet next time I brew. By the way, the next brew will probably be a brown ale. However, since I just wrote up an IPA recipe, I'm not going to be surprised if I end up making one of those instead.

Tasting Notes:

The Pilsner

Staw colored with a moderate head that's retained fairly well. High carbonation. Large, consistent bubbles. Nearly clear. Aroma is mildly hoppy and fruity with soft malt. Fruity flavor with soft malt characteristics, some banana or clove flavor. Hops and bitterness dominate the sweetness up front but the sweetness rises in the finish. Mouthfeel is light, crisp and bubbly. Overall: a very good beer but not a good representative of the pilsner style--too soft, fruity and sweet. (As the brewer, I know that the boil off was lower than expected which no doubt contributed to the low intensity of hops and the bouancy of the beer. Still, it needed at least another half an ounce of saaz in the bittering addition and probably more for flavor and aroma as well. A dryer and less fruity yeast would also be advisable.)

I'm not going to get to that stout until this weekend. I didn't get up to the store to get the yeast to make a starter and consequently don't want to do it today. Instead of brewing today, I will probably head to the beer store and get my ingredients.

The pilsner is carbonated and ready to drink. I like the beer, though it isn't very characterisitically pilsner. I'm going to sit down with a glass and give it a proper tasting with notes this afternoon. I'll post them here.

Well, there will be a brown ale at some point, but my next beer (probably to be brewed on Thursday) is an oatmeal stout.

Here's the recipe that I've decided upon:

6.25 lbs. Baird's Maris Otter Malt
1.25 lbs. Briess 2-row
1 lb. flaked oats
.5 lb. roasted barley
.5 lb. Munton's 60L crystal
.25 lb. Breiss 120L crystal
.5 lb. breiss Victory malt

Mashed at 154 for 1 hour with a 167 degree mash out.

.75 oz. German Northern Brewer (9.2% AA) 60 min
.5 oz. Fuggles (4.0% AA) for 60 min
.25 oz. Fuggles for 20 min
.25 oz. Fuggles for 1 min

39 IBU

White Labs British Ale Yeast