Beer Brewing Blog

For me the highlight of NHC this year was the class on BRUTal brewing given by two members of  The Maltose Falcons, Drew Beechum and Kent Fletcher.  In short, this is a method of brewing use almost exclusively by two Belgian breweries in which a beer is fermented in the same manner as champagne which produces a very carbonated, dry and complex beer bottled in champagne style bottles.  Being an ardent fan of Malheurs Brut and Deus, I made sure not to miss Dres and Kent’s demonstration.

Here is a link to a full page the two already put together outlining all of the steps involved:

http://maltosefalcons.com/tech/methode_champenoise/

While in describing the steps involved one may easily be intimidated, in fact it is not hard at all.  The trick is in freezing the yeast plugs settled into the next of the champagne bottles and then topping the bottle off before corking.  Having seen this done first hand and considering my complete Coco puffs love of Malheurs beer, this method is definately in my near future.  As in, I just ordered up ingredients so I can get started riki tik.  The fermentation takes several months so this won’t be served anytime soon, but the thought of popping open my own bottle of brut-style beer is already making me salivate.

Well, the dobbelbock is fermenting so I guess I didn’t completely screw it up.  The fridge is keeping the temp right @ 50F so I should be good to go.

In hindsight, brewing all day inside when it’s 80F out wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had.  Even with the AC on high, I had to take a walk outside just to cool down.  Amazing how much heat two burners put off when on for 8 hours straight.  So be it.

I brewed up a dobbelbock as my first lager attempt and an English brown ale.  After cleaning out my fridge and stuffing everything into the bottom drawers (I don’t really cook, I live a take out lifestyle) there was plenty of room in the fridge for a carboy.

I was a bit unsure of how to treat the yeast on this one.  I was told to pitch big for a lager so I used my 2000ML flask to step up the Bohemian Lager (Wyeast #2124).  I had this on the stir plate for a day in the 1000ML flask and another in the 2000ML flask.  Before I started brewing I put the flask into the fridge to cool it down, thinking I should pitch at the same temp I’m fermenting at.  After I brewed and racked (by rack I mean pour) into the carboy, the temp was about 70F so I let it sit in the fridge to cool before pitching.  After about 4 hours, the carboy was only down to about 60F so I just pitched the 50F or so starter as I’m impatient and didn’t feel like waiting anymore.  I’m hoping I didn’t kill too much yeast with this procedure, we’ll see what transpires.

My fridge when turned all the way down stays about 45-50F so this should suffice for primary.  I’ll see how the clarity is and make a determination if I’ll do a secondary or not.  I’ve been reading and hearing differing opinions on the use of a secondary.  On one hand, it is good to get the beer off of the yeast cake and trub to save any off flavors these may cause with prolonged contact.  But, some think the secondary is unnecessary as it is a few more steps to introduce oxygen and any other baddies that will affect your beer.  While the latter crowd is generally the camp using conicals, I can see the point as there would be much less contact with the trub.  In my situation, laziness takes a bit role.  I tend to leave the primary going to weeks, or a month, maily because I don’t want to rack or bottle.  Letting the beer ferment this long and then transferring to a secondary is just stupid, I’ll admit it.  I know that some beers just need more time, but I’m beginning to think that for most beers, I can just eliminate this step.  I’ll use these two batches as a bit of a test and see what happens.

I’m just making up a couple of starters so I can partake in a bit of brewing this weekend. This will be my first lager and also an English brown.

‘Tis a sad say in the brewery.  Yesterday I finished dumping the last of my last three batches down the drain.  I had a tripel and an Irish red bottled up and a robust porter in the secondary that received ye old boot, as well.   After a week in the bottle, I chilled up a bottle of the tripel and Irish red to see how each was progressing.  I couldn’t even get more than a couple of sips down.  Both had an acrid, distinctive bitterness that masked any taste the beer may or may not have had.  Just to see if the porter was experiencing the same, I racked a bit off and it did, only to a slightly lesser extent.   It’s not the first time I’ve had off flavors, but never anything this severe.  What bothers me the most is that it was all three batches I did over a weekend about a month or so ago.  After I wallowed in my own stupidity for a bit, I remembered what ol’ Chuck always says: “Relax.  Don’t Worry.  Have a Homebrew.”  With that, I’m going to try and figure out what went wrong.

I began to suspect something was amiss when I was bottling.  As usual, I will take a hydrometer reading to see if there was any change in the secondary and for both the tripel and the red there was no change.  Ok, good to go.  As is my usual practice, I then will use the beer sample to taste and see how the uncarbonated beer is progressing.  At the time I thought each seemed a bit bitter but I attributed this to the fact that I was nursing a cold, couldn’t smell and therefore my pallete was a bit off.  Nope, can’t blame Swine flu on this one.  After just a week in the bottle the bitterness had overtaken any other taste.  I can only compare it to leaving an aspirin on your tongue for a few minutes.  Yeah, that bad.   As I was planning on bottling the porter yesterday, I took a sample first and sure enough same thing but to a lesser extent.

So this is what I know:  whatever it is, it happened before bottling.  I’ve been going through my entire brewday to try and figure out what it could be.

1) Ingrediants:  I can easily rule this out because all three batches had completely different ingrediants.  The grain bills were all different, albeit from the same online store.  These were the first batches I used my stir plate but I did taste starters just to make sure no severe off flavors formed and each seemed fine.  Two were Cal Ale and one was a London Ale, nothing funky at all.  Hops:  Could I have somehow insanely overhopped?  Absolutely not.  I even make sure my hop scale was calibrated and all seemed fine.  My conclusion is that the issue is consistent on all three batches and this simply rules out ingrediants being the culprit.

2) Equipment (or the cleaning sanitation of equipment):  I’ve been thinking about this long and hard (I said hard…) and I’ve concluded this had got to be it.  It’s the one consistent variable in the equation.  The first thing I thought of was a comment I heard about Oxiclean leaving a bitter taste if not rinsed off thoroughly.  This is a strong possibility.  While I’ve been using Oxiclean for probably 8 months or so, this is the first time I’ve had  any issues with off flavors.  I use the stuff on everything now:  Mash tun, hot liquor tank (but only maybe once every 5 or so brews), brew kettle, immersion chiller, carboys and all the fun little plastic accessories and tubing.  I have my doubts on this theory simply because I heeded the advice give previously and make sure to rinse all parts that soak in Oxiclean excessively thoroughly before I use them.  On the carboys, after soaking/cleaning, they always get sanitized twice before using - once after cleaning and then again before using.  There is no way there could be residue left to effect the tast.  The parts that I would worry about would be the immersion chiller and the mash tun.  Before my last three batches I did a a thorough scour and soak in Oxiclean as I hadn’t done this since I bought it two years ago and had to replace the hoses and clamps anyway.  Either way, I made sure to rinse as well as I could and I still let sit in Starsan fore a few minutes before using inthe brewpot.  I remember the brewpot having a slight whitish film leftover from my last brewday that was likely a bit of leftover Oxiclean but I made sure to rinse and scrubbed a bit before I used it.  At the end of the day, there was no real change to my routine regarding cleaning/sanitation.  I’ve been doing the same thing for about a year and didn’t have any issues so I kept looking around to see what might be the cause.

I think I have the answer.  That mother flippin mash paddle I picked up a couple months ago.  It’s solid maple with a coating of lemon oil.  While I did do a quick rinse before using, I’m wondering if the hot mash ended up leaching some of the “new mash paddle” smell/taste into the mash.  Even with the limited contact time, this actually fits the bitterness profile of the beers.  I brewed the tripel and Irish red on one day and that porter the day after.  This would explain why the first two batches were stronger than the porter.  Maybe… My rationalization of the issue has concluded that this is likely the culprit.

The play it safe, I’m going to do a thorough cleaning of my gear before my next brewday which hopefully will be this weekend.  I’m going to replace all of the ball valves on m gear and I’m going to try out using PBW instead of Oxiclean to see if there is any difference.  While it would make sense to just eliminate the mash paddle to test my theory, I don’t feel like wasting a $100 and hours of my time to find out I was wrong.

May the force be with me.

Having had a more than busy few months, my blog has been neglected but the brewing never stops.  A couple of weeks ago I did an Irish red, a redo of my tripel (actually a Zymurgy recipe) and Jamil’s Vanilla Robust Porter.  The tripel and robust porter are still in the primary, I’ll rack these to the secondary this weekend.  The Irish Red is ready to bottle, I’ll do that this weekend as well.  In addition, I’ve decided to pop my lager cherry (oh wow, that sounds like chick beer, Cherry Lager) and do a dobbelbock.  As my fridge always contains beer, and beer only, it doesn’t really make sense to use my lack of a secondary cooling vessel to keep me from enjoying the cooler side of brewing.  I’ve been testing out temps in the fridge and I can dial in the temp between 32F and 40F without much deviation so I should be ok.  I’m also going to be doing an English brown for a change of pace.

The last few batches were my first chance to use a few new pieces of gear I picked up along my travels through inebriation.  The first is a mash paddle.  Not too much to speak of there, so I’ll let a picture do the talking for me:

Yeah, no real good stories for this one.  It’s just a mash paddle.

The second piece of gear that I have been wanting for awhile is a stir plate and I finally broke down and got a little homebrew specific model because none of my friends in the scientific community deemed pilfering their labs for a kick ass stir plate a low priority.  You know, sometimes you just gots to take matters into your own hands.

My basic process is to make a 1000ml starter (actually about 700ml of wort) and put that on the stir plate for a day.  After that, I’ll take it off and let it sit for a few hours, main to see if the yeast will settle our so I can decant most of the wort off before stepping it up to a 2000ml flask with about 1.5L of wort and put that on the stir plate for a day.  As carful as I am witht the sanitation, this is one area where I lose sleep over whether or not I’m going it correctly.  I covering the flask on the stir plate with some aluminum foil that I’ve sanitized and use my spray bottle of StarSan solution for just spot treatment.  I hope it’s enough but I’m not going to get a clearer picture of if this is helping me or not until I get these last few batches bottled and try it.  I’ll keep you updated.

Another little miracle in a bottle I discovered from a BN podcost was the Fermcap-S foam control.  I’m not sure what it is, but what is does is prevent the starter from foaming over.  Neat shit.

As we all need a good laugh from time to time, I thought it fitting, nay appropriate, to provide a shining example of my riduculous Photoshop skillz:

I know, awesome, right?

Actually I was bored on this rainy evening and felt my neglected blog needed a post.  The “collage” above is a few pics of my lambic and Flanders red that I have stuffed in the back of a closet.  The bugs seem to show cyclical signs that they are doing their job: making beer goooooood.   The lambic is going on about a year and a half and I’m planning on racking half to some cherries once they come into season and I’ll leave the rest to work even longer.  The Flanders red is about a year and seems more inclinded to form a nice white pellicle until is just falls to the bottom of the carboy.

Which wild yeast straings did I use?  Not to get too technical to you non-science types, I used all of them.  Meaning, all the “wild” cultivated yeast strains one can purchase from the local, or online, homebrew shop.   Both batches each have an oak spiral, as well for a little flavor, but mostly so I can plop one in my next funky batch.  I’ve found with the oak spirals it helps to boil them for 15-20 minutes before using to 1) sanitize but 2) to soak out some of the oak harshness for a more subdued flavor profile at the end of the day.

It’s been a few months but I’m back in the saddle and ready to brew.  I ordered up my ingredients last week and have three batches I’m brewing up this weekend…hopefully.  I’m doing an irish read, tripel and robust porter.  The tripel is a do-over from the last batch that didn’t attenuate well enough in the carboy and I bottled too early.  Read:  the beer exploded.

One item that has transformed my brewing procedures more than anything is Oxiclean.  If you have not use this on your brewing equipment yet, go out and get a tub.  While there is a industry product, PBW, that is about the same thing, this stuff is available at any local grocery or drug store.

The reason this really changed how I brew is that it saves massive amounts of time cleaning your equipment.  Before I started using this stuff I would spend so much time scrubbing out my kettle and carboys but could never get them quite clean.  With my kettle, it kept developing scorch marks on the inside and I just could not get rid of them.  I used steel wool and every cleaner I could find and it just couldn’t get clean.  After seeing a few fellow brewers use this and having it mentioned on the BN I decided to give it a try.  After soaking my kettle for just one day, it took off all of the build up crude and made the kettle look like new.  For carboys, all you need to do is rinse it out as normal and then just add half a scoop of Oxiclean with the hottest water you can get from the tap.  Let it sit for 1-2 days and all you need to do is rinse it out well and the glass is brilliantly clean.  I didn’t realize how bad of a job I was doing before hand with just scrubbing and dish detergent until I saw how clean the carboy was with the Oxiclean.

So, in short, if you’re not using Oxiclean, start now.  I consider this one of the best brewing tools you can have.

I haven’t brewed in a couple of months now as I’m pretty much overflowing with beer at the moment plus I just haven’t had time to devote a weekend to brewing.  During my last bottle day(s) I had a bottle of the tripel I did a few month back explode on me so I ended up dumping the whole batch as it was way overcarbonated.  This wasn’t entirely unanticipated as I bottle it @ 1.040 when I should have bottle @ 1.015 or so.  The tripel was good a month after bottling, but then just took a turn to the dark side so I cut my loses and dumped it.

I think once I empty a couple of cases and get some more bottles available I’ll brew a couple of more batches.  I’m still looking for a kickass dubbel and porter recipe as these are two beer I have yet to master in any sense of the word.

One item I did want to bring up is my recent experiment with yeast harvesting.  I picked up a stirplate and new 2000ML erlemeyer (sp?) flask a few months ago so I thought I would get creative and see if I could step up some yeast from a Chimay bottle.  After about week and 4 step ups, I ended up with a good amount of yeast.  Since my sanitation during the process was a bit questionable at times, I ended up dumping the yeast but I did prove that it is possible.  If my next beer(s) are Belgian, which they likely will be, I’ll likely try this again with an appropriate yeast for what I’m brewing.