Beer: X IPA 1 – 36/50
Tasting Date: 1/4/2010

Appearance [max 5] : 3

Solid head that keeps its form, and slowly settles into a 1/4″ blanket  on the surface that slowly gets consumed through the beer.

Deep copper color.  Definitely darker than what I remember West    Coast IPA would have.  Going to need to do a side-by-side comparison (good thing I have another couple of bottles).

Aroma [max 10] : 8

The Centennial aroma on top of Cascade finishing on top of CTZ/Simcoe backbone is definitely a pleasing hop chord.  With this hop schedule it’s feint but pleasantly floral, then piny, and even a bit summer fruity?

Palate [max 5] : 4

Medium to full body, rich creamy texture, soft carbonation, clean finish

Flavor [max 10] : 7

Nice duration, with a uniform flavor curve that works from the back of the throat towards the front and sides of the tongue, then finishing in back of the mouth with a nice, bitter.  Absolutely love balance of sweet to bitter.

There’s a noticeable light tart finish.  Similar to light lacto in the Boulevard brewing Saison-Brett.  Not really what I want on the end of this beer.  Will need to investigate the underlying cause of that.  It’s definitely a subtle off flavor, so not too distracting from the otherwise very pleasant beer.

The caramels from the Carastan and Cara-pils on the two row are really tasty.  I feel the malt and backbone is just a hair too much.

Overall [max 20] : 14

This is a very solid IPA.  I’d like to turn up the aroma, reduce the mouthfeel (maybe OG just a touch too), and clean up the tart finish.  Once those items are addressed, I can turn my attention to manipulating the IPA’s crowning feature … the hop aroma and flavor.

This was the first brew session with the new equipment, so I thought I would document some of the issues that came up.  Here are my brew notes.

11/23: First run with the 1 gallon immersion “mash tun”.
Added 1/4 tsp gypsum to 2 gallons of Bend, OR tap water
Mashed in, and think I hit target 152 degree mash temp deep in the mash, not sure about the top though … 147 with digi. therm.

When I pulled the mash out, the floating thermometer was around 146, so it would appear there’s a problem with holding temperatures.

Recirculated the wort over the mash, and the gravity was way low (around a 54% efficiency). Adjusted the recipe, and
Put mash in the kettle (kept it in a grain bag), and added rest of water. Still low gravity.
Added DME to hit target grav.

New kettle: boil-off rate significantly higher than expected. Added somewhere around 1.5 quarts extra water throughout the boil.

Didn’t take OG measurement (way too tired) to get out sample for hydrometer … yeah … that lame.

12/7: No visible activity. Then I swirled the bucket like I used to when I’d make a starter in a belgian bottle … percolation nation!!!

12/8: Nasty top of the bucket from lots of activity … awesome to see this thing cranking.

12/15: Added dry hops

12/22: Bottling day.  Added half a pack of dry yeast … way too much … and calculated amount of corn sugar to add to hit around 2.4 volumes of CO2. FG was measured at 9.1 brix … don’t think it was complete in retrospect. Taste: clean bitter, peach, slight grapefruit. Light caramel malt. Very very pleasant.

Takeaways … I didn’t follow any of my own advice on this brew day … so lessons learned:

• Overheat your strike water so you hit your target infusion mash temperature.  Think that it was way too low.
• Take a gravity reading
• Know your equipment.  This initial brew is going a long way to try and do so, but I need to really measure my boil off rate.

Hopefully I’ll have a better run next time when I formulate the adjustments to the recipe.

Cheers.

Arctic Alchemy

“Arctic Alchemy, discoveries of the Red Hand ……”, a discussion on the Homebrewers Association forum kicked off by Chris Bowen talking about a documentary project he’s embarked on.

In July 2010, I am departing from Bethlehem with two friends on a 3 week journey about 2000 miles north to the Canadian Arctic. The purpose is to recreate a historic and somewhat mysterious ale that was originally commissioned by Queen Victoria in 1851 to ensure health and nutritional value to a team of Arctic Explorers.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f14/arctic-alchemy-153577/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Arctic-Alchemy/197637538644

New Year, New Beer, New Hop

In BeerAdvocate magazine, Issue #35, Drew Beechum discusses a process of hop exploration by brewing not an IPA, but an Extra Pale Ale (a really-hopped-up pale ale).  He argues it avoids the alcohol and malt complexities of the IPA you’d initially reach for, and allows the hop flavors and aromas to shine.  In the article he’s focusing on the new, as he puts it, “it hop – Citra”.  Great experimentation approach for those of us really focusing on hops in our recipe formulation right now.

10 Homebrew Gadgets

Every now and then someone parades out a new list of brewing equipment and process innovations from the homebrew community that have made the brew day easier.  The new issue of Zymurgy has a new list, and it inspired me to go out and look for several cheap solutions for what I’m currently focused on (hopping, and improving my X Brew equipment).

• Hop Filter – a device for screening out hop debris while pulling wort from the kettle
• Sanitizer – a simple PVC pipe filled with sanitizer for racking canes and other long-stemmed items
• Mash Tun bulkhead – create hole and bulkhead for cooler mash tun (for my 1 gallon X Brew coolers)

What about you?

Over the holidays I had the distinct pleasure of getting my hands on Boulevard Brewing’s Saison-Brett from their Smokestack Series.  This beer was rated pretty high on BA and RB, so I didn’t mind dropping the cash on it.  It was the holidays, and I had been working my way through many imperials, stouts, and porters.  I was looking for something on the brighter side to shock my taste buds out from the dark roasted barley, wood, and bourbon shellacking they had been taking. I was a little worried about how much Brett “twang” was going to be in there, but this delicious Saison was definitely the beer I was looking for.

I originally poured the beer into a shaker pint, but the head was so gaseous that it took up over half the glass.  I changed over to an Orval glass, and was really gentle, resulting in a better pour (below).  The aroma is clean Saison … a bit of spice, with light fruit aromas.

I have to admit that I thought I hated this beer on the first sip.  It wasn’t the Brettanomyces, but it had more to do with a palate that was not quite ready.  I was hit up front with musty flavors and an astringency that I was not expecting.  I decided to have an unsalted cracker to cleanse and try again.  Oh my!

The carbonation was heavy, but not too much.  The flavors were the spicy esters and (pleasant this time) just-musty flavors you’d expect in a farmhouse Saison.  The flavor has hints of peaches and tangerines with a solid bitterness that hits next.  The clean finish is just underscored by the Brett tang.  I was wondering when I was going to pick up the Brett, and I absolutely love the subtle use of it.  There’s not much sweetness here.  Just a great balance between Brett, spice, clean malt, and solid bitterness.

I’m sure that this beer will develop more Brett character over time, so the balance may not be where it currently is for much longer.  That being said, what an enjoyable beer.  If you want to treat yourself to something a bit off the beaten path, check this one out!

BeerAdvocate: A
RateBeer: 99

When I first began learning about mashing from a friend, we used his setup which employed a plastic bucket and a thick, insulated sleeve slipped over the bucket. We rarely had problems hitting our target mash temperature. Like many others making the transition to all-grain brewing, when I purchased my own equipment, I chose a cylindrical Igloo/Rubbermaid/Gott cooler for my mash tun. In my new cooler-based system, however, I found myself struggling to achieve the same consistency. Most brew days I found myself adjusting the mash with cold or hot water, both of which I had to have prepared, because my mash ended up too high or too low after the initial infusion.

Even after many attempts at recalibrating my equipment and brewing software, I have still found myself missing my mash temperature more times than hitting it. Usually the obvious candidate for the problem’s source was the mash tun temperature. My brew day starts with me pulling my equipment out of the garage as I begin heating up my strike water. At the time of this writing, snow has been on the ground for over a week, and my mash tun is really cold. If I grab my mash tun as soon as the strike water is ready (or even soon before starting to heat up my strike water), the temperature in the cavity of the cooler will be different than that in the cooler walls. If I then rely on the calculated temperature from my brewing software, when I dough-in, the cooler will suck heat out of the finite amount held by the strike water and will decrease the amount available to be absorbed by the grain.

Brewing software does a good job with computing the temperature of your strike water, but requires accurate data across many variables including grain temperature, total grain mass, grain moisture content, mash tun temperature, mash tun weight, and mash tun material (e.g. plastic, stainless steel). If inaccurate information is used in the calculation, the computed results won’t do you any good. Most homebrewers I’ve spoken with do not adjust all the low-level information once they get their software set up, and as the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out.

I have encountered several popular approaches homebrewers use to address this issue:

1. Pre-heat your mash tun with hot water so the mash tun does not suck energy from your strike water.
2. Bring your mash tun to your brew location the night before so the entire mash tun has enough time to come to rest at the ambient temperature of your brew location.
3. Heat the strike water to temperatures slightly higher than the computed value, allowing the extra heat to warm up the walls of the cooler. Then stir the water vigorously until it reaches the calculated dough-in temperature.

After trying all of the methods above, overheating the strike water provides me with the most consistent ability to hit my target mash temperatures at the expense of about 20 minutes added to my brew day. Allowing your cooler to warm up to the measurable ambient temperature of your brewing area got me closer to consistently hitting my target, but I still found myself missing my target temperatures. This may be due to not having the correct value in place for my mash tun’s thermal mass (the capacity of a body to store heat) or some other setting. However, by using the last method, I ensure the entire mash tun (water and all) is at the target temperature and ready to give it’s heat up to the grain I introduce when I dough in.

Being able to reliably hit your mash temperature is a cornerstone for achieving the beer envisioned when your recipe was created.  Find a method that works for you and use it every time you brew.

X Brew Lessons Learned

Sometimes it can be a challenge to “Relax, Don’t Worry, etc…”.  It has been a while since I have broken in a new mash tun, and man did I forget how frustrating that can be.  Yesterday was one of those brew days where you are constantly maneuvering trying to stay on course.  No matter what adjustments I made, I couldn’t get back on track.  Because mistakes provide the opportunity to learn, I decided to push off my X Brew Session Review until I get the bugs in the new system worked out. In its place, I’m going to go over some of the things I learned … or re-learned as it may be.

I fell short on my projected mash temp
Description: This is something I learned on my larger cooler-based system, but failed to remember for this brew session.  I ended up a few degrees shy of the target 152 F mash temp.  I’m going to go into it in more detail in a new section of the site called Brewing Tips, but the short story is that I was wrong about the cooler was actually colder than what registered on my thermometer.  While I brought it in an hour or so before doughing in, this was not enough time for the internal walls of the cooler to completely warm up to the room temperature of the house.

Fix: Bring in the cooler the night before brew day.

I completely missed target gravity (added DME, adjusted recipe)
Description: Pretty sure this is due to being shy of my already-low target mash temperature.

Fix: See above.

Problems lautering
Description: I think that missing my target gravity also had something to do with my lack of ability to adequately regulate my lautering speed.  I have not converted my cooler yet to have an outlet valve, so my process was going to be based on batch sparging.  Multiple batches of a one gallon mash volume would theoretically yield a pre-boil volume of around 1.25 gallons.  I doughed in with a grain bag, and just slowly pulled it up to let it drain.  The results yielded only around 53% efficiency, which was far too low even for batch sparging.  I had to add DME to bring the OG up to be in line with my recipe’s hopping rate.  My working theory is that this method drained too fast to adequately rinse the grains of their sugars.

Fix: Convert the cooler by drilling a hole through the cooler wall, and do one the typical conversions (outlet valve + bulkhead + manifold, plumbing hose, etc.) to give me more control over the draining of the mash.

I will need to get to the point where I can accurately predict my brewing if this X Brew series is going to go where I expect it to.  More to come.

Cheers.

Today I am embarking on the first in a (hopefully) long-running series of experimental brew days, which I plan on sharing here on brewerman.com. The inspiration for my approach is a combination of the recent revisiting of some Brew Your Own articles, and a lay-off that has given me more free time.  I have been thinking for a while about how I can really zero in on my own ideal recipe.

I’ve been performing my own recipe formulation for my own well-received beers for a while now (thank you Ray Daniels’ Designing Great Beers!), but there are only a few beers that I’ve been really tweaking over the years. To really zero in on what’s in my head, I would need to brew far more often than I currently do, and to do so would require far more money and liver tissue than I have to give.

Enter the Brewerman X Brew series.  I am going to give brewing super-small batches a shot.  Inspired by Brew Your Own’s articles on small-scale brewing, I will be brewing one gallon batches from infusion mashes performed in a Coleman One Gallon Cooler.  Because the volume is so small, I can run multiple brews at one time, and do so in my kitchen … all very convenient, with a minimal hit on resources.

The only way I can realistically pull this off is to:

• Continue to be faithful to keeping accurate records on metrics and observations
• Keep as tight control over brew variables as realistically possible (e.g. temps, volumes, time, etc)
• Keep extremely organized on brew day (multiple hopping schedules at once … ugh)
• Close the loop: sample, make recipe adjustments, repeat experimentation

The only pitfalls I see are:

• I may have to get a more-precise digital scale.
• Fermentation variables of one gallon batch may not transfer to a five-gallon batch (e.g. time sitting on yeast to scrub beer relative to the yeast health after they finish fermenting the beer)
• Having to return to bottling

Still, I’m very excited.  The first run will be a single batch this time (a calibration run) targeting one of my favorites: Green Flash’s West Coast IPA.  This recipe was largely taken from the awesome Jamil Show episode where they got a recipe straight from Chuck Silva from Green Flash!

I’ll be posting pictures and run-down of the brew session tomorrow.

Disclaimer: I’m an admitted Deschutes fan-boy.

Mirror Mirror is about to see a  re-release.  Mirror Mirror is a barley wine that kicked off Deschutes’  Reserve series (see Abyss, Dissident, Black Butte XX) back in 2006.  It  is a personal favorite that has seen rare reappearances at the Deschutes pubs  and at special tasting events. I’m really excited that I’m going to have  an opportunity to stock up on another release of it and do a vertical with one  of my few remaining bottles.   It’s been a long while since I’ve cracked  one, so it should be interesting.

Last Wednesday afternoon, I was given an opportunity to go volunteer at the Deschutes Brewery by helping them hand-dip the Mirror Mirror bottles in wax (an aesthetic touch that helps prevent oxygen from getting under the cap  and spoiling the beer as it ages).  They had multiple dipping stations  going, and everyone was in a groove.  Make no mistake … this  is some hard work, and it drove home how out of shape I really am when I  couldn’t straighten my arm all the way the next morning.  They’ve got a  great assembly line put together for this labor of love, and should have no  problem getting this stuff out in time for the April 29th release  date.

During my time there, I picked up a few scraps of information about significant dates for Deschutes products/events.

Mirror Mirror and Red Chair release party
As DeschutesBeer tweeted the other day, the release party for Mirror Mirror will be at the Bend and Portland pubs next Wednesday, April 29th  at 5:00 PM.  Getcha some tastiness!

Red Chair should make it to Austin area
For my Texas family, I was told that there will be an allotment of Red Chair IPA headed to the Austin area.  Keep on the lookout for this special Bond Street  release in 22’s at your finer bottle shops after April 29th.  Get on top  of it, because once it’s gone, it’s gone.  It will most-definitely please your inner hop lover.

New X Taps at the pub
Currently the Bend pub has a  single special tap called the X Tap.  It is there for some of the bolder one-offs or special kegs they’ve set aside (like the occasional unannounced  Mirror Mirror kegs that have popped up every once in a while).  There are  plans for the addition of two more X Taps at the Bend pub.  One will be  reserved for a Portland-brewed beer (will be so glad to finally have easier  access to their stuff), and one will be reserved for a Reserve Series beer …  Reserve series beer available year-round!  If they can pull that off,  there will be beer geeks applauding all over Bend.

Black Butte XXI for the 21st Anniversary Release
The second release of a ramped up, cocoa-infused, coffee-laden version of Black Butte is going to be the special 21st Anniversary release.  The first  release was the Black Butte XX which was originally a Reserve Series release  around the time of their 20th anniversary.  I’m still fighting with  myself to keep from mowing through the remaining bottles in my stash.  It  is my understanding that we’re in for a more-pronounced coffee dimension of  the overall flavor this time, which I think is going to be absolutely  delicious. BRING IT!!!

Additional Beer Geekery
Pics of beers aging in various  barrels!  See the Super Jubel?!?! Yummmmmmmmm!

Thankfully Deschutes Brewery has finally said that Red Chair IPA will be bottled as a Bond Street release.  This has been a huge local’s favorite through its development and testing here at the Bend pub.  I have been hearing for a while that it was going to be bottled, but I couldn’t get anyone to say when and how.  Six Packs?  Bond Street?  I just received the following pointer to their blog post about Red Chair, answering my question.  Their desciption:

Red Chair is a bright copper beauty (think freshly minted penny) with a solid head and perfect lacing that typifies Deschutes ales. It has a plush body with satiny caramel flavors derived from seven varieties of malt including British crystals, German pilsner, and domestic versions of cara-pils and Munich. Despite all of this, Red Chair is still a hop forward ale, but not in the way many have gotten used to. You will find no cloying, mouth puckering bitterness here. In its place a straight up succulent citrus punch to the nose. This is due to the experimental nature of some of the hops, as well as, how late in the process they were added.

Keep your eyes peeled.  This was great at the pub.

Cheers!

Beer Wars, an independent documentary on the state of craft beer in relation to the established “big three”, will be having a live event held in movie theaters across the country on April 16th.  If the online clips are any indication, it appears to be a pretty well-done movie.

In America, size matters. The bigger you are, the more power you have, especially in the business world. Director Anat Baron takes you on a no holds barred exploration of the U.S. beer industry that ultimately reveals the truth behind the label of your favorite beer. Told from an insiders perspective, the film goes behind the scenes of the daily battles and all out wars that dominate one of Americas favorite industries.

Be sure to check out the trailer and clips, and visit the Beer Wars web site.

Thanks to Matt Theus for the head’s up!