Brewerman

Worth Reading – 12/30/09

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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?

Hitting your target infusion mash temperature

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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.

First X Brew Lessons Learned

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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.

X Brew Inauguration Day

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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.

<a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001MGZU5Q?ie=UTF8&tag=brewerman-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B001MGZU5Q”>Coleman One Gallon Jug</a><img src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=brewerman-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B001MGZU5Q” width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=”” style=”border:none !important; margin:0px !important;” />

Bells Best Brown – BYO Clone recipe

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Another clone from Brew Your Own.  This time it’s Bell’s Best Brown from Bells in Kalamazoo, MI.  I have loved Bell’s ever since a buddy first brought home some of their Expedition Stout.  Those guys just crank out excellent beers, and lots of them.  They remind me of Rogue in that way.  When another friend brought me a bottle of their Bell’s Best Brown, I thought that it would be a perfect beer to have on hand as winter drew to a close.  Turns out I was right!

This was not my best-managed brew session by a long shot, but the beer still turned out good.  Malty, nutty, not-too-sweet.  This is one tasty Brown ale.

Here’s a pointer to the recipe.