Hazelnut. Extra. Special. Bitter.

Looking back at some of my recent blog posts, it appears the last time I brewed was late February, about a 2 month hiatus from homebrewing! That's a lot for me, but I've been busy. I was working 6 days a week for a while, brewing and cellaring for Alameda and Cascade, and believe me, when you do that, the last thing you want to do is spend your only day off huddling over a propane burner in a cold garage while it's raining outside.

Before I get on to posting a recipe, I should get this out of the way: This month, I made the full transition to brewing full-time for Cascade Brewing. It's a bittersweet change for me, because I have really loved my time brewing for Alameda. Working with Carston, Eric, and the rest of the crew has been great, and it will always have a special place in my heart as my first job as a professional brewer. But as a 3/4 time employee, and with Cascade offering a full-time position, I had on opportunity that I just couldn't pass up. I am very excited to work with the Cascade crew, and learn in a production environment that regularly works with barrel-aged sour beers. I feel this will really make me into a strong and confident brewer who is ready to start their own brewery some day in the not-too-distant future.

This recipe that I'm about to post comes about from a few influences: First, I think I will be concentrating more on making 10 gallon batches, less frequently, of beers that are more sessionable in nature. I'm not painting myself into a corner on that one, but I feel like this is more the kind of beer I want to have on tap. I'm not into bottling or creating a lot of extra work for myself, and I can still play with variations on batches after the primary fermentation is complete. Second: I found what I think will be a really cool product that may be available to homebrewers soon. It's a hazelnut product, and I actually want to keep the nature of the product a bit of a secret for now while I am playing with methods of infusing the beer, but rest assured, it's not a bottle of hazelnut extract. It's real nuts. Of course, the problem with nuts is mainly the fact that they have a high oil content, which destroys beer head and can have an effect on flavor and mouthfeel too. This product should provide a way around the oil content problem.

So, half of this batch of a slightly maltier/less hoppy E.S.B. will get a hazelnut infusion post-fermentation, and I will reveal the product & process, whether it works well or not, when I post a recipe tasting in about a month. Since it's something that I think has potential on a pro level, it's important that I try a process that will work on a pro scale. It can't be something that, say, clogs up or detroys a heat exchanger with hazelnut bits, or requires 25 gallons of vodka to extract the flavor and aroma.

This recipe is truly based off what I already had on hand, and I wouldn't necessarily formulate a recipe for an E.S.B. like this if I were to buy everything at a homebrew shop. It's a new yeast for me too, I don't think I have used the Wyeast 1968 (Fuller's) yeast since my early days of homebrewing, if ever. Anyway, enough blabbering, here's the recipe.

Base Beer: Extra Special Bitter

Brewed on 4/20/11

12.9 gallons pre-boil, 11.6 gallons post-boil

O.G. 1.051 F.G. 1.016 ABV 4.7% IBU's 30

7.5 lb. Hugh Baird Marris Otter malt

6 lb. Great Western 2-row organic pale malt

3 lb. Crisp Crystal 35

1 lb. Munich

.5 lb. Aromatic

.25 lb. Pale chocolate

35 gr. Perle pellets 8.5% AA 60 min

24 gr. Perle pellets 8.5% AA 15 min

18 gr. Northern Brewer pellets 7.8% AA 15 min

14 gr. Styrian Goldings pellets 3.4% AA 15 min

56 gr. Styrian Goldings pellets 3.4% AA 0 min

Mash in 5 gallons H2O + 3 tsp "Burton salts", 151 degrees for 60 minutes

Add 2 gallons 200 degree water to bring up to 157

Recirc immediately and sparge with 7.5 gallons H2O + 1 tsp "Burton salts" at 170

Collect 12.9 gallons at 1.046 = 89% efficiency

Boil 65 minutes

Wyeast nutrient and Whirlfloc at 10 min

whirlpool, rest 10 min

chill to 70 with plate chiller over 15 minutes

oxygen 2 minutes

pitch 2.5 liter stirplate starter of Wyeast 1968

Ferment at 68

Clean half was racked straight to keg after primary. For details on the hazelnut process, go here.

Also, I can't remember if I've talked about my new fermenter on the blog yet? Check it out. This was actually an old yeast brink that had been sitting unused at Alameda for quite a while. It's exactly what it looks like: A full-sized keg that has been converted with a corny lid, a gas-in post, liquid-out dip tube, and a manual pressure relief. I cut off the dip tube to leave a gallon of liquid underneath. We'll see how it goes for racking the beer to secondary/keg through the dip tube this time, and if I got the height right to not pull too much yeast through and not leave too much precious beer behind. In the photo, it's sitting in our cold back room with a heating pad strapped on the outside to keep it up to 68 degrees. It's wired in through a Ranco digital thermostat to keep it right at temp.

Rest In Peace - Chick Chick Chick: 2009-2011

Our little kitty passed away on Valentine's day, and we are really very sad. She was hit by a car and it looks like she went instantly, so at least she didn't suffer too much. We had to bury the poor little thing in the yard, and we only had her for one year. I wish we had had a way to keep her out of that busy street, but I don't think cats should be held hostage indoors. She was such a friendly, playful outdoor cat, hanging out in the neighbors' yards and even sneaking in their houses sometimes. She would hang out with me in the garage while I was brewing and beg to be petted or played with, which was annoying because I didn't want to get a bunch of cat hair in the sanitizer. My point is that we knew the busy road was a risk, but I believe cats should be allowed outdoors. It's just part of their nature to play outside and have adventures. So I guess we need to figure out some kind of invisible fence for the next cat if we decide to have one here, or we could just wait until we live somewhere farther off from a busy street. Damn, life sucks sometimes. I will miss her so much, she was really a great cat and she gave us a lot of joy. The house feels lonely today without her around.

Anyway, I haven't posted any brewing stuff here lately because I've been really busy, in a good way. I have brewed 2 beers: a Belgian Dubbel that I'm planning on splitting some off of and doing some experimentation with (adding quince), and I also brewed a 10 gallon batch of Flanders red that is destined for a wine barrel. I have been wanting to do a barrel-aged sour ale for a while now, and my friend Walker offered up his basement to host the project. We have 6 brewers who are in on the project, the beers are brewed, and now we need to pick up a barrel. So I'll post these recipes later when the dubbel is on tap and when the barrel is full.

Other than that, the reason I really haven't posted is I've been working 6 days a week. I'm still brewing at Alameda 4 days, and I also picked up a couple days at Cascade Brewing, which so far has been a lot of keg washing and filling, but it should be a lot of fun as we get to the more interesting things like working with barrels and all the other fun beers that they do.

So, with this much work I think I'll be slowing down on homebrewing a bit, maybe brewing once a month or something like that. I'll try to keep this blog updated, but if I really end up working my butt off, it might become fairly sporadic. Time will tell... I have decided I really want to keep this blog mainly about homebrewing and leave the pro brewing stuff at work mostly.

Anyway, happy brewing to you all. I'll try to catch up on a few tastings soon. I have the rauchbier that is tasting really nice and I need to go back and do a tasting of the gold lager, and the recently kegged IPA. Catch ya soon.

Alameda's Hop Harvest brew 2010

Due to being busy with brewing at Alameda and preparing for a move to Northeast Portland, among other things, I haven't really found a lot of time to homebrew recently. I thought I'd snap a few photos on my cell phone of our fresh-hop brew at Alameda and do a quick post about that. Please excuse the low-quality photos. If you can't tell here, the hops were actually a quite vibrant green color.

Our head brewer, Carston Haney, has a bunch of hop vines growing in his front yard, with an assortment of varieties. The easiest way for us to deal with fresh whole hops at the brewery is to turn the mash tun into an insanely oversized hop-back, since we don't have a trub dam in the boil kettle to keep them from clogging up our heat exchanger. Below is Eric, dumping about 20 pounds of fresh hops into the mash/lauter tun.

Here's what they looked like before the wort went in: Very nice looking cones.

After a short whirlpool, we pumped the wort over onto the fresh hop bed. The transfer took about 15 minutes and then we sent it right to the fermenter (through the heat exchanger of course).

We also used quite a bit of pelletized hops in the boil: Columbus for bittering and Perle for flavor & aroma. According to my crude math skills, the 20 pounds of fresh hops we used in 5.5 barrels of beer would be about the same as a 9.7 ounce addition in 5 gallons of homebrew. That's pretty good, but obviously it wasn't enough to provide the full IBU contribution for this beer, even if we could have used them in the boil kettle.

The beer came in at 1.065 O.G., and the simple grainbill of Golden Promise and a smidge of flaked oats should give the hops a ton of room to shine. I'm pretty excited to try this beer as soon as humanly possible, most likely straight off the side of the fermenter after 6-7 days of fermentation.

As far as my own progess at Alameda, I have been feeling really good about getting the brewdays down. I brewed a double batch of pale ale this weekend with no help, and I feel pretty confident with my technique. Mashing in to the proper temperature was one of the more daunting parts of the learning process, but I have that locked down now. I have had some screw ups too of course, for instance one day I accidentally left the cold water valve open during mash in, and by the time I caught it, the best I could get the mash up to was about 140 (we normally mash in at 154). I'm not sure how that mash managed to convert properly, but it did. Luckily this brew was half of a double batch of IPA, so it was blended with another beer and it only came in a few points lower in final gravity than it normally does.

I could tell you about more near fuck-ups that I have done, but it might be more fun just to let you use your imagination. It can be tough; there are so many things to keep your mind on at once, and so many things that could possibly go wrong. It's just part of the learning process to make some mistakes here and there. Of course I want to be perfect all the time but that's just how it goes. The beers are turning out great, I'm learning a ton from some great teachers, and my sanitation regime has been impeccable! That's about the best anyone can ask for.

Sour Cherries!

Today I brewed what I hope will be a very interesting beer: a saison with 100% Pilsner malt and 100% Northern Brewer hops. I have never tried these hops exclusively in a beer, in fact I've hardly used them at all. But more on that beer later when I get time to post the recipe. For now I'd like to catch up on a couple things that I've been doing to other beers.

I'm pretty proud to say that I brewed Alameda's second batch of Black IPA [Cascadian Dark Ale for those Cascadians with fragile egos ; ) ] with just a little help from Eric. It's probably my 4th or 5th batch I've brewed there with a little backup support, and I think pretty soon I'll be ready to brew on my own. In fact that's the plan, during the GABF I'll be the one sticking around to care for the brewery while Carston and Eric are gone. As for the beer itself, I think it's going to be a big improvement over batch one. We undershot our target gravity on the 1st batch, leaving an extremely hop-forward beer with a really spicy Zeus profile, but lacking in malt to back it up. It kind of tastes like a dry robust porter with a shitload of bitterness and pungent/spicy hops. Not bad actually, but not really what we wanted.

Batch 2 was pretty much completely reformulated. The base is Rahr 2-row malt, and we added to that small portions of Munich, Crisp C-77, Carafa, chocolate, roasted barley, and flaked oats. We got the O.G. up to a solid 1.072. The hops were Simcoe, Cascade, and Amarillo with a pretty large flameout addition, and we are going to dry hop it. Flavor samples of the fermenting beer are promising!

On the homebrew front, I picked up 25 lbs. of pitted Montmorency sour pie cherries from a processing place in Yamhill for $50. It's called Fruihill Inc, if anyone is looking for sour pie cherries. It's a pretty good deal, and although I really like the flavor my last sour cherry beer got from the pits, it would have actually cost more to get them with pits.

I pulled a flavor / gravity sample of the Flanders Red that Ray and I brewed 2 years ago, and it tastes like it is begging for some cherries. I also opened a bottle of Upright "Six" for inspiration, which has been sitting in my garage, not even refrigerated, since at least December. I wasn't sure what to expect but it actually tastes incredible with that amount of age on it, even when not handled ideally. It's good fresh, but it really comes into its own after 6 months with a very dry spicy mouthfeel, huge carbonation, and some Belgian esters blending with caramel malt and cherry-like flavors. Go try it and grab a bottle to age while you're at it.

I added 7 lbs. of the sour pie cherries, plus 2 lbs. of sweet dark cherries with pits, to my already almost 2 year old flanders red. It really seems to have improved over the last 6 months, about the time that I added AlB's bugs to the keg and topped it off with some Belgian Dark Strong, and a bit of our latest batch of Flanders. The beer itself tastes good but it could actually be a little maltier. It may turn out less of a flanders and more of a generic sour kriek cherry-bomb, which I can't really say I would be sad about. I also added a bit of French oak to the secondary, and maybe this will all get bottled in 2-3 months time.

The remainder of the cherries were frozen in quart bags. They also make great desserts. Clarissa cooked up a great cobbler last week with them. They have a really nice sourness and also a spicy cinnamon-like flavor.

Here are a couple of cocktails Clarissa and I made recently: This is just "for fun" stuff.

Googly-eyed bloody mary made with home-pickled asparagus (awesome), and some of a hot sauce that Paul made with Chiles de Arbol (in the Red Rocket bottle). We also tried some Mazi's Piri-Piri in one of them, which is a great hot sauce, but I'm not sure if you can get it out here. We got it at Murray's Cheese on a recommendation from one of the Sixpoint brewers.

This is simply fresh, super sweet seedless watermelon, crushed up with ice, mint, and Knob Creek bourbon. Might be nice to try it with Thai Basil in the future instead of mint.

This just in: I'm working for Alameda!

I've got some awesome news. I was recently contacted be Carston Haney, the brewmaster at Alameda Brewhouse, about working part-time in the brewery. This is really, really cool! First off I really like Carston and Eric, the 2 brewers. Second off, it's a first of sorts for me. Not my first paid work for a brewery (I've been paid to help with bottling runs at Upright and Cascade Brewing), but my first "permanent" position in a brewery. I'll be starting off at the bottom, washing a ton of kegs and doing beer transfers, CIP's, and kegging and that sort of thing. All stuff I could use the practice on, except keg washing, but I really don't mind keg washing at all. If you don't like cleaning, don't become a brewer because it's at least 75% of the job, unless you are one of those high-end suit brewers like Garret Oliver (wink).

I had to go through OLCC training, since their brewhouse sits behind the bar. I did the online course, and boy that stuff will scare the bejezus out of you! I had dreams about drunk drivers and state troopers for a couple of nights and when Clarissa went out to a "girl's night" last Wednesday I was like "call me if you can't drive home!!!" Anyway, the online class is super easy, I got a 100% on the test.

Alameda maxes out their 5 bbl system at the brewpub, so they are currently brewing at Roots in addition to meet the demand. It's not a contract brew. Carston brews the Alameda beers on Roots' 10 bbl system.

My first day on the job was spent washing a mountain of kegs at Roots. I think it was 9-10 pallets worth, and the keg washing machine is not super fast. It's a home-made job where you line up the kegs in a daisy chain for the washing cycles. It took me about 15 minutes to do 4 kegs, and I could have done them faster, but I wanted to be thorough

and make sure they were super clean.

Here are some more pics of the keg washer. It's not romantic, but hey, that's what goes into making beer. I didn't screw anything up but there was one minor almost-incident during the day. There is a long exit hose that we snake down the gutter drain to drain out leftover beer, yeast and caustic. We usually keep a keg over the end of the hose because the spray gets a little violent as the last of the liquid and air is pushed out the hose. Well on the last batch of kegs

when I was washing the keg we keep over the hose, I accidentally got the air pressure up to 50-60 psi while pushing out the caustic. I heard a loud noise, and looked over to see a geyser of hot caustic and yeast blowing out of the drain about 8 feet in the air in all directions. Imagine the blowhole of a whale as it surfaces if you are having a hard time picturing this. Well, everything was fine and it didn't make too bad of a mess, but luckily no one was standing over it!

I guess the obvious question to those of you who have been keeping up with my progress into the brewing profession is "What about Breakside?" I'm still planning on working for Breakside too, but we have not received our TTB approval so we cannot legally brew beer yet.

I've been homebrewing too. Just brewed up the 3rd batch of Meetification pale ale last week, and I'm hoping to brew an alt beer tomorrow with the yeast-cake of Cali ale yeast. I'm going to use a proven alt recipe from Brewing Classic Styles, but ferment with Cali at 60-62, and see how that works out.