Happy Repeal Day!

Hopefully you're all drinking right now, or did sometime today. December 5, 2008 is the 75th anniversary of the ratification of the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, thus ending our nation's stupid experiment called Prohibition. So drink up!

To celebrate, I had a Widmer Brrr, a Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale, a 21st Amendment watermelon wheat (how appropriate), and my own Wee Heavy. I also broke down all of my kegs and replaced the o-rings, then kegged my RedHook Late Harvest clone and my Ahtanum APA. All in all, a good day.

Sunday I'll be brewing Jamil's Evil Twin with a few modifications. I'll be partial mashing the specialty grains and adding an extra pound of Munich, then I'm subbing Simcoe and Amarillo for the late hops. I'm excited! The recipe is here: http://www.mrmalty.com/late_hopping.htm.

Cheers!

My First Partial Mash

I broke in the mini mashtun today with the Late Harvest Autumn Ale clone I've been working on. The recipe is in the previous post. I used 5 quarts of water and 4 pounds of grain. I think I could do 5 pounds of grain but I would definitely have to do a thicker mash to fit it in there, probably 1 quart/pound instead of 1.25. I did make a few mistakes though. First, my strike water was a little too warm - about 168 after I added it to the mash, so I had to stir for a while to bring it down to 158, which I now realize is still probably too warm. Next time I'll just heat the strike water to 160. My next mistake was getting worried about the mash being too hot. About halfway through the mash I opened up the cooler and stirred some more to drop the temp. I ended up losing more heat after this because after an hour it had dropped to 148. As a result of these, the OG was 1.050, but I was shooting for 1.059. Oh well, lessons learned. Hopefully it's still drinkable. If I get motivated I'll post some pictures.

The "pilsner" has dropped to 1.012 and is golden and tasty. I put it in the garage to cold crash it before I keg tomorrow or the next day. The Centennial IPA is tasting pretty good too, but it's well on it's way to being kicked. I am having a really rough time keeping 2 beers on tap! Any of you have that problem? I'm going to have to crank out a quick APA next weekend to rebuild the stash, I'm thinking Nugget to bitter and Ahtanum for flavor and aroma to get a feel for what it can do.

Why does my blond ale taste like a hefe?

I'm sure all of my readers are concerned about what I've been doing in the month and a half since last time I blogged. Oh wait, I don't have any readers. Ha!

Since last blog entry I kicked the Brown and Mild ales, brewed a blond that I'm drinking right now, got an IPA with 4 ounces of Centennial during the boil sitting on 2 ounces of Centennial dryhops in the secondary, got a primary full of Bohemian Pilsner brewed with 5 ounces of homegrown Saaz but fermented with US05 at 62 degrees since I can't lager yet. I've also smoked about 25 pounds of pork on my new smoker. Good times! The Pils was brewed at RAZE's (Rochester Area Zymurgy Enthusiasts) Teach a Friend to Homebrew event on Saturday.

If you've been following this blog you probably know that about 14 of the last 15 batches I've brewed I've pitched US05 dry yeast. I have not had a problem until this blond ale I brewed up at the beginning of October. I've brewed something like 18 batches in the last year and really have my system and process dialed so the problem that's developed with this beer is driving me absolutely crazy. It tastes like a frickin wheat beer. It's got the same kind of esters that you'd taste in a hefe! What the hell? I pitched the yeast at 65 degrees and temps never got above that, they actually went lower, and it was a long and slow fermentation. The thing is, I've pitched US05 lower than that and fermented as low as 60 and never had a problem and still get the FG down below 1.015 every time. I think it has something to do with the sluggish fermentation but it's really weird how the flavors developed into a wheaty mess. It has been getting better in the keg and it's totally drinkable, but it just doesn't taste like it should.

Next beer on deck is going to be a clone of RedHook's Late Harvest Autumn Ale. Kristen and I went through a 12er of this while camping 2 weeks ago so I'm trying to clone it. I got the OG, IBU, SRM, and malt and hop varieties (but not quantities) off their website, so I used the TastyBrew calculator to come up with this for my first partial mash brew in my 2 gallon mash tun:

• 2 lbs Rahr 2 row
• 1 lb Weyerman rauchmalt (smoked malt)
• .5 lb Caramel 60
• .25 lb Caramel 120
• .25 lb roasted barley
• 4 lbs Briess pilsen DME
• 1 oz Northern Brewer @ 60 minutes
• 1 oz Saaz @ 10 minutes

Have any of you had this beer? How does the recipe look to you? I hit the stats that RedHook provided but we'll see. I'm not sure about the rauch malt, so I went with just a pound to start. If this all works out I can always try again. It was a nice malty and slightly smoky beer, perfect for cold weather.

I actually just ordered a bunch of stuff from Midwest Supplies too: Golden Promise, Maris Otter, more 2 row, and some yeast. I'm planning on doing a partial mash brew here and there. I might use the Maris Otter in an Oatmeal Stout and the Golden Promise in a big IPA. We'll see though. Anybody else brewing or drinking anything interesting?

Here's what the little mash tun I made looks like. These aren't my pics but mine looks exactly like this:

Brewing News

Well, it's been awhile since I've blogged about the brewing news. Since the last post, I've blown through the Columbus APA keg. The latest of my single hop APA/IPA series of the summer, I was pretty happy with the results, but I think Columbus, for my taste anyway, needs to be blended with other American hops. Just a little too rough around the edges for beers following the Bush Doctrine of go it alone.

I also buckled down and made my first wine, a Chilean Pinot Noir, that is in secondary right now. Wine kits are a little pricey, but they are ridiculously simple. It took about a half hour to make the thing! From what I hear, they are pretty hard to mess up, so I'm hoping that around Christmas time I'll be sipping some good wine that cost about 4 bucks a bottle.

Right now I'm drinking my Big Bill's Brown ale and will be kegging Jamil's Mild sometime tomorrow. The brown is a little on the young side, only 2.5 weeks since brewing, but it's nice and clear and has a nice sweet chocolate malt backbone with a good hop punch to balance things out.

I picked up ingredients to brew another blonde ale this weekend, as well as the 50 pound sack of DME I ordered. For the blonde I'll be using my hop harvest as well as a bunch of huge Cascade cones that I harvested from the hop yard of a guy in my homebrew club. Last Sunday another club member and I went to his house to help him get rid of his crop. When I saw the trellis I almost cried. It was like a wall of hops reaching to the heavens. After 3 or 4 hours of picking, I got about 3 pounds of Cascade and about a pound each of Saaz and Fuggles. Some of the Saaz will be going into a Czech Pilsner that will be dumbed down with ale yeast since I can't lager yet and the Fuggles will be going into a Stout or Porter of some sort. Seeing this hopyard really got me thinking hard about making a major expansion to my yard next year.

Finally, I picked up all the parts for a partial mash tun so that I can start experimenting with some different base malts like Golden Promise and Maris Otter, but I don't have any solid plans for what I'm going to brew for my first partial mash brew. I'm leaning towards an Oatmeal Stout or maybe a Smoked Porter, but that may change. Any suggestions?

Union Brew - Big Bill's Brown Ale

With my last weekend of the summer I decided to spend Labor Day brewing and drinking homebrew and decided a big American style brown ale was in order. Being Labor Day and a union man, I just had to name it after Big Bill Haywood, labor organizer and one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World. This batch is a second shot at the Bourbon Barrel Brown, but without the bourbon or oak. I envisioned this as having a little more chocolate but also some more residual sweetness than the first attempt, so I added a little more caramel malts in 3 different lovibonds for complexity, more chocolate for flavor and color, and some pale chocolate for a little toastiness. I kept the hop varieties (Galena for bittering, Ahtanum for flavor/aroma) and schedule the same, but IBUs decreased just a little. Just like I did with the Columbus APA, I brewed with 6 gallons of unsoftened and untreated tap water from outside that I treated with a campden tablet to remove chlorine and chloramine. Big Bill's Brown came in at 1.066 OG and 52 IBUs. I'll leave this in the primary for 3 or 4 weeks and then it's going straight to keg.

While I was brewing this I poured the last pint of my Raspberry Wheat. It's pretty depressing to have a kegging setup with no beer to put in it :( For the first time since June (aside from beer for camping, which doesn't count) I had to buy beer that somebody else made. Bummer. This brew shortage got me motivated so I'm brewing again Saturday morning. On deck I've got Jamil Zainasheff's Mild ale from his book "Brewing Classic Styles." If you don't have this book already, go get it. Now. 80 award winning recipes (1 or 2 for each BJCP category) that have all won ribbons for one of the best homebrewers in the country. So far I've done the IPA and American Amber and they've been 2 of my best beers, so I've got high hopes for this one. It's a very small beer - the OG is only 1.036 - so it will be kind of weird to brew this, but I've heard good things about the recipe and it should be done fast so I'll be able to go right to keg quickly and start drinking a nice session beer for football season.

In other homebrew news, I picked up some more hops (Simcoe and Argentina Cascade) and a spare keg on a recent trip to Midwest Supplies. I just saw today that Freshops has some of the 08 hop crop in and they've got some varieties for pretty cheap, so I'm deciding if I should pull the trigger or not. One thing that complicates the decision is I just dropped a big chunk of change on a 50 pound bag of dry malt extract. I'm a little concerned about how I'm going to store it without it getting chunky, but buying in bulk will save me about 8 bucks a batch for a standard 1.056 beer with 6 pounds of DME in it, so if it works out I figure it's worth it.

Hop Harvest

Well, I just got back from the hopyard and picked about half of the cones I had that felt papery, started to brown at the tips, or where lupulin was obvious. I wasn't expecting much, and for once I fulfilled my expectations....I didn't get much. See that picture over there-->? I got about twice that, weighing a measly 2 ounces. Wet. Even after picking the rest, I'm guessing I'm only going to get an ounce dry, if that. I'm a little disappointed that I need to scale down my "Homegrown IPA" into a "Homegrown Blonde". C'est la vie. Kristen really liked the AHA's "Fill in the Hop Blonde" that I brewed, so I'll probably brew that again, grains and bittering hop the same but just add whatever homegrowns I get at 10 minutes or flameout or whatever.

Last Saturday I brewed up an all Columbus APA:

• 7 ounces Caramel 40
• 8 ounces Carapils
• 6 pounds Briess Pilsen DME
• .5 oz Columbus - 60 minutes
• 1 oz Columbus - 10 minutes
• 1.5 oz Columbus - flameout
• OG: 1.056, 41 IBU, 5.4% ABV
• US-05 yeast pitched at 65, held at 65

This batch I decided to experiment with water a little since I had been tasting a little harsh bitterness and hop flavor until my hoppier beers aged for a couple of weeks, with the exception being the Simcoe IPA I just blew through, which might be simply because that beer was bitter but also had tons of hop flavor and aroma which might have masked it. Since I already had a busted carbon filter, I decided to try to just use hard city water from my outdoor faucet (not through a hose). For no particular reason, I decided to use 4.5 gallons of hard water (including a half gallon for steeping my grains), then 1.5 gallons of softened tap water. I crushed one campden tablet, stirred to dissolve, then let sit in my brewpot for 15 minutes before I started to boil water. I did not treat the steep water unfortunately, so we’ll see if there’s anything from the chloramine or chlorine. Hopefully not.

I'm planning on getting this in the keg fast, probably 2 weeks in primary and then straight to the keg, since we blew through the Simcoe IPA in less than 2 weeks so now I've just got a Raspberry Wheat on tap. That Simcoe IPA (recipe in the previous post), was probably the best beer I've brewed so far. Clean, bitter, dry, malty, HUGE hop aroma, super fresh. If you haven't used Simcoe yet, I strongly suggest you pick some up. I think Surly Furious has Simcoe in it, so if you can find that try it. Actually, I think this beer did turn out to be similar to Furious, which is what I was hoping for. Nice malt backbone, almost amber color, higher gravity but still sessionable, and big hop aroma and flavor. Did I mention the aroma? When I got the recipe from the Jamil Show podcast (American IPA show, Mike McDole's recipe) they suggested after 2 weeks in primary, transfer to secondary, dry hop, and then rouse the hops every day to keep the aromatics in suspension. I don't know how much of an effect this had, but 2 ounces for 10 days left tons of aroma, totally sniffable from a few feet away. I'm not trying to brag, but this beer was so awesome I went to the brewshop and picked up enough Simcoe for 2 more batches and will brew it the same way both times without changing anything, a first for me.

While I'm waiting for the Columbus APA to get drinkable I'm drinking my Raspberry Wheat. If we didn't have tons of raspberries in the garden this year I don't think I would have brewed this because I don't even really like fruit or wheat beers all that much, but it sounded good at the time. I am pleasantly surprised by this beer. It's nice because it's got that graininess of the wheat and refreshing since it's lightly hopped and fairly dry, with a little tartness from the raspberries, but it still has a small amount of an interesting hop flavor from the Argentina Cascades. I'm pretty happy that this turned out to be so balanced, I was really afraid of making a too-fruity beer.

Ahhh, Summer

Woke up early this morning and brewed myself an all Simcoe IPA. I used Mike McDole's IPA recipe from the Jamil Show, changing only the Munich malt to Vienna (I have a bunch on hand), and the hop variety but not the schedule. Here's what it looks like:

• 7 lbs Briess Pilsen DME
• .5 lbs Crystal 60
• .5 lbs CaraPils
• .25 Crystal 120
• .25 Vienna
  
• .75 oz Simcoe (60 minutes)
• 1.5 oz Simcoe (15 minutes)
• 2 oz Simcoe (5 minutes)
• 2 oz Simcoe (dryhop)

You math whizzes might have noticed that the hop amounts came to 6.25 oz, and you're probably thinking, "hey, where did that extra quarter ounce come from?" Fat sack, dude. A very nice surprise at 6 am in the morning. A quarter ounce isn't much, but I'll take it in these desperate times we live in. McDole's recipe calls for dryhopping with something crazy like 6 ounces of hops, but I can't afford that, so I'm going with the 2 ounces but I will shake the fermenter every day to keep extracting those aromatics like he suggests. I'm looking very forward to drinking this one.

I've got both kegs filled and carbed. Why the heck did I wait this long to start kegging? The Amber is awesome, although I wish I would have dryhopped with 2 ounces of Centennial instead of just one, and the Blonde is quite good also. The blonde is on the high side of the guidelines for gravity in the style, so it's a tad heavy for a summer beer, but it tastes pretty good nonetheless. It's pretty weird to be drinking a beer with only 25 ibus though; everything else I've been drinking and brewing lately is at least twice that. I think I'll brew another blonde this summer but with Argentina Cascades instead of Northern Brewer.

As far as my hopyard goes, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that they're all growing, but there's quite a bit of bad news. I don't have enough sun where I planted them so none of them are taller than chest high right now. Unfortunately I broke the tip off the tallest bine on my Cascade, and the tallest bine on my Centennial was broken off at the ground. The Zeus is pretty small, but still growing. Hopefully the other bines start shooting up to compensate!

Aside from homebrew, I've also had the opportunity to sample some brews I've been waiting to try for a very long time. Brian hooked me up with 2 bottles of Stone Ruination (I owe you bigtime!) and I was impressed. On the way home from Milwaukee I also picked up Bear Republic's XP Pale Ale, Racer 5 IPA, Red Rocket, and Hop Rod Rye. The XP was a very nice APA with an awesome Cascade/Centennial aroma. Racer 5 was also very good, just a hair under Ruination on my top 5 list. One of these days I'll do a side by side with Red Rocket and my Amber. I picked up the rye for research. If I like that will push me faster into partial mash. My battery is dying and my glass is empty, I'm out.