2 year old Kriek finally kegged and ready to drink!

I was hoping to get a chance to homebrew this week, but alas, it wasn't in the cards. I did however get a lager yeast started on a stirplate, and next week I'll brew the first of a series of lagers that I am very excited about.

Since Clarissa's birthday is coming up on Saturday, I decided to take some samples of various things that I've had going so we could decide what to serve for her birthday beer. The first beer I sampled was the amber farmhouse ale we brewed together for her birthday, but it was obvious that it was still not ready. The brett C hasn't done much, and I'm sure it will be good, but it needs a few more months. And it might get some cherries since I still have an ass-pile in the freezer taking up room. The trippel was also pretty good, but what was really, really good was the Flanders red-kriek. So that's what we decided to put on, and when her real birthday beer is done, maybe we will just bottle it.

The kriek started off as a Flanders Red, which I brewed in Brooklyn with Ray in August of 2008. I kegged it before we moved to Portland, and even served some before deciding that it was just a little too lackluster and needed some extra souring. I still had about 4 gallons of beer, which I topped off with a little Belgian Dark Strong and some of the new Flanders red brewed with Al B's bug blend. I added a bunch of fresh cherries and some oak chips almost 3 months ago, and I am finally happy with the flavor.

Once it's carbonated I'll be sure to do a full tasting. I feel like it could use a little more malt background and a touch more sourness, but overall I am very happy with it, and the cherry flavor couldn't be better. The color is amazing, such a bright, clear cherry-red! It is probably the best sour beer I have done so far.

I also kegged up the Rye beer I did 3 weeks ago, and I honestly don't know what I think about it. It only dropped to 1.016, and i was hoping to get it at least 3 points lower. Also the hops were not that pronounced, and there was a tannic tea flavor to the beer, but I usually find that drops out after a week in the keg. So we'll see, I will try to get a tasting of that up in the next week too.

First brew in the new "man-cave": Rye-Amarillo Pale Ale

My friend Ryan came over the other day to check out my new digs and help out with a batch of homebrew. He has a few batches of homebrew under his belt, but he had never seen an all-grain brewday or brewed with anyone else, so I hope he had a good time and learned a bit (and remembers it after all that drinking, man that guy is a lush!)

I'm still in the process of getting moved in and set up at the new house, but in the mean time I thought I would kick things off with a nice, simple beer that will hopefully be very tasty and drinkable. It's a recipe that, if it turns out well, I would like to pitch to Carston and Eric as something we could brew at Alameda. Even though this recipe is pretty straightforward, I just figured my best shot at getting it brewed would be to come to them with a finished product that we could scale up, and make improvements if we think there should be any.

So, this is the new man-cave. It is not attached to the house which unfortunately means that you can't gab a beer in your socks. It is also very uninsulated, and I fear that the kegerator will be quite cold during the coldest winter months, and brewing during that time might be a hand-numbing bitch. But my ultimate goal is to make it into a place where homebrewing can be a fun, relaxing hobby I do on my off days, instead of the labor-intensive brewdays I have done in the past. Including the homebrew, I have gotten in 4 brewdays this week, so when you brew for work you don't really want to be coming home to something that just ends up being a labor-some chore.

I need to put in some kind of basic sink or wash tub, and insulate my small stainless mash tun which used to fit in the oven to stay warm. After that, I might invest a small amount of cash to get my 10 gallon system a little more workable.

Here's Ryan tenderly measuring out some hops...

Rye-Amarillo Pale ale

Brewed on 10/6/10

Recipe is for 6.5 gallons pre-boil, 5.8 gallons post-boil, all grain

O.G. 1.056 F.G. 1.016 ABV 5.3% IBU's 41

9 lb. organic pale malt

10 oz. Munich

10 oz. C-60

1.25 lb. Rye malt

All hops are Amarillo pellets 8.2% AA

24 gr. at 60 min

28 gr. at 15 min

28 gr. at 0 min

34 gr. dry hopped, loose in primary, on 10/11/10

Mash in 4 gallons water + 3 tsp burton salts to 152 for one hour

Efficiency 77%

Boil 60 minutes

Rest 15 minutes after flame out

transfer thru plate chiller over 20 min

pitch Alameda (Scottish ale yeast) at 70 degrees and ferment at 68

Racked to keg on 10/25/10. Initial flavor is OK, but with an annoying tea-like hop flavor. In my experience this usually goes away with a little time. F.G. was definitely higher than I like my pale ales, but I am more used to fermenting with the dryer Cali ale yeast. Let's see in a week when it's carbonated, I'll bet the flavor will be better.

Moving again: FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU$#($*&K!

Sometimes I really think I am dumb for being a homebrewer. Not just an average beer-obsessed homebrewer, but one that does not own an home and insists on brewing multiple beers that take over a year to age.

All the beers above, except for one carboy, were down in the crawlspace of our home, which meant I had to crawl down to a soot-covered, uneven dirt floor where I can barely crouch, and lift them over my head through a 2x3 foot hole above me. Luckily none of them broke and all my major arteries are still intact.

That was just the stuff in the crawlspace. There was also a large deep-freeze kegerator, a dorm fridge, various bottles both empty and full, and 9 cornies which all had beer in them. And a metro-shelf. And 3 keggles. And the propane burner, and lots of little stuff.

This is my last move in Portland, unless we for some reason buy a house. I'm seriously thinking about pairing down the homebrewing equipment to a single 10 gallon system, and brewing less often. It would seem to fit in better with the fact that I am brewing at work now.

Don't even let me get started on moving out the 3 garden beds and laying down sod! Damn, I need a beer. Right now. Cheers.

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.

Post 100! Collaborator lab results

I just noticed as I was logging in that this is going to be post 100 of my blog! That means, more or less, I've posted about 100 recipes on here too. A lot of posts do not have a recipe, but some have multiple. So let's call it just shy of 100 recipes, give or take a few (I'm not going back to count, are you?).

Anyway, I finally pleaded and begged and bugged the OBC enough to release the Widmer Collaborator lab results which should have been out a long time ago. I think the competition was in May, and the lab testing was done on May 27th. I was really excited to see the lab results come in, since I have never had any scientific QC testing on my beers, and I was curious to see if my measurements would jive with the lab-ometers. Most of them did, gladly. And there was a ton of other stuff which I was hoping they would measure, but unfortunately that did not come with the testing. I was hoping to see dissolved oxygen levels, bacterial count, and carbonation level measurements also. Well, it was all free anyway. Thanks again Widmer.

On to the results. First the Baltic Porter that Paul and I brewed, which was a finalist, but did not get picked as a Collaborator beer. I don't think I ever did a tasting of this for the blog, and I should soon. It was pretty good but not quite malty enough. But still, quite tasty.

Beer Analysis - BALTIC PORTER					LAB RESULTS	MY MEASUREMENTS:
SpecificGravity					1.0143	1.015
Alcohol(%v/v)					8.60	8.06
	(%w/w)				6.70	6.28
Original Gravity in Percent Plato					19.09	18.4
Real Degree of Fermentation					67.7	66.2
Calories					260.1
pH					4.83
Color (in Lovibond)					103.0	37.1 (SRM)
Bitterness Units (International Method)					31.9	30.2

Evaluating the results: The measurements were all quite close here, except for the color. I don't really understand that one honestly. For one thing, from what I quickly read online, SRM is the same as Lovibond. If so, then I'm way off, but color is such an obvious thing in brewing that I don't really care about ever having it checked by a lab.

On to the Saison, which was not a finalist and therefore also not picked as a winner. This was a pretty good beer, but as I mentioned it just didn't have a great aroma profile. It was just a bit subdued and not outstanding.

Beer Analysis - SAISON					Results	MY MEASUREMENTS:
SpecificGravity					1.0035	1.007
Alcohol (%v/v)					6.33	6.2
	(%w/w)				4.99	4.9
Original Gravity in Percent Plato					12.79	12.6
Real Degree of Fermentation					76.5	71
Calories					166.2
pH					4.29
Color (in Lovibond)					3.1	3 (SRM)
Bitterness Units (International Method)					28.3	28.3

Evaluating the results: It looks like I was really dead-on most of my numbers for this beer, except for the final gravity. This could have been a bad measurement by me, but more likely it was from continued fermentation in the bottle. We all know how saison yeasts go slowly but surely through their final stages of fermentation. But if that's the case, I would have expected carbonation levels that were pushing bottle bombs, and I didn't have that problem. The beer tasted as if it were carbed to about 3.5 volumes I'd guess, and that was with a pretty substantial dose of priming sugar that would have equaled 6+ oz. per 5 gallons.

All in all, I'm very happy to see I've hit my numbers on these beers. At least at the 30 IBU range, my IBU calculations are pretty close to the actuals. I would guess that they start to skew quite a bit as the IBU's go up though.

Clarissa's 30th Birthday beer: quick-sour amber farmhouse ale

Clarissa and I were talking about what to brew for her 30th birthday beer recently. I really wanted to include her more on the beer recipe formulation than in past years, so we started by just talking about what kind of beer she would like. She likes sour beers a lot. They don't have to be extremely sour, but beers with less hops, a slight tartness, and high drinkability are really what she prefers. I have to be honest and say that I really wasn't that big on either of the last two beers I have brewed for her birthday. One was an imperial wit, and the other was a squash saison. Both were interesting beers, but not really beers that I was terribly proud of. So, we are keeping our fingers crossed on this year, and I think it will be at least a very interesting beer, and hopefully very complex and tasty.

We started with the idea of an amber colored beer, to evoke the feeling of fall, since her birthday is on Halloween. We quickly ruled out the idea of using squash, since I did that last year and it was a real pain in the ass to mash (and it's kind of cliche). The idea of a slightly sour farmhouse ale quickly came up, so I had to start thinking about how to get that sourness in a short amount of time. She also mentioned wanting a lemony quality to the beer, and that she really liked the spices I used in the Belgian summer ale recently.

So, I had to take all this info and figure out a recipe and technique. I hope it ends up with a flavor that is very evocative of a Fantome Automne farmhouse ale. I don't even know if I've ever even tried Fantome Automne before, but I would like to get close to the house flavor they have, with a nice tinge of lactobacillus sourness and some brett. Also, I have to credit Paul for a bit of inspiration with the technique, he had a phenomenal funky saison with lacto and brett C, so I used some of his ideas for this beer.

One more thing: Thanks for the help on the brewday Clarissa!

(Nameless beer for now...any thoughts?)

Recipe is for 6.7 gallons pre-boil, 5.6 gallons, post boil, all grain

O.G. 1.054 F.G. ABV IBU's 23

3 lb. 2-row organic pale malt (1 lb. is used in the sour mash)

3 lb. Weyermann Pilsner malt

1 lb. Munich malt

1 lb. Caramunich 60 L

1 lb. aromatic malt

1 lb. wheat malt

4 oz. Munton's crystal 180-200 L

12 gr. Magnum pellets (2008) 13.6% AA 70 min

16 gr. Styrian Golding pellets 3.5% AA 0 min

11 gr. Sterling pellets 7% AA 0 min

6 gr. Amarillo pellets 8.6% AA 0 min

3 gr. fresh lemon verbena, sliced thin 0 min

2 gr. grains of paradise, crushed 0 min

Sour Mash:

24 hours before brewday, mash 1 lb. pale malt in 1 qt. water to 105 degrees in a small pot.

covered grain surface in plastic wrap, and let sit out warm overnight. By 24 hours it was VERY sour, but not too funky or garbagy. The layer of plastic wrap really helps keep the fink down!

Main Mash:

4 gallons water, mash in to 153, rest 30 minutes

Add sour mash to main mash after 30 minutes

Heat entire mash to 158 over 10 minutes, rest 20 minutes

Sparge with 4.75 gallons at 170 over 30 minutes

Collect 6.8 gallons at 1.044 = 80% efficiency

Boil 85 minutes, hops/spices as noted

whirlfloc & wyeast nutrient at 10 minutes

Whirlpool and rest for 15 minutes before chilling

Chill with plate chiller to 68 over 20 minutes

Oxygen for 60 seconds

Pitched 1 liter stirplate starter of Wyeast 1010 American Wheat yeast

(I know this is probably not an obvious choice, but I had a few packs of free yeast laying around and since we're using a sour mash & brett, the primary yeast strain is almost a non-issue. I was looking for a subtle yeast.)

Ferment at 68 for the bulk of fermentation, then let rise to ambient (72+).

Racked to a keg on 9/13/10. 1.016. Tastes very good already, has a nice amber ale body & flavor, with a very slight tartness and lemony, fruity, peppery finish. Very nice balance on the spices. Pitched 1 pack of Wyeast Brett Clausenni to funk it up.

12/14/10. This beer has not progressed much in the brett flavor, and the Brett C has not even dropped the gravity by a point! It's still at 1.016. There is a nice little pineapple aroma though. So here's what I did: rack it back into a 5 gallon carboy, along with about a quart of the young "E-Z Lambic" for extra funk, and 3/4 ounce medium toast French oaks chips. That should funk it up and give it some of that sour farmhouse character I'm looking for. Obviously this wasn't ready for Clarissa's birthday. Maybe we will bottle condition it and serve some on her birthday in 2011!

Saison De Duas Notas So

Saison season has opened! That's right, we are in the middle of Oregon's mild excuse for a summer (it's currently 63 degrees at 2:30 pm). This would typically warrant only saison homebrewing in many other cities, but here the only difference is the groundwater temp goes up a bit and it's a littler harder to chill the wort properly with your heat exchanger. I was planning on doing another Saison Dupont clone attempt, but when I went to the homebrew store, all they had was $2 an ounce, 2008 crop American Goldings sitting in a refrigerator. No way I am gonna get jacked like that, so I had to come up with a different idea.

Luckily, I had an idea earlier that week to try some Northern Brewer hops in a saison, and they had a good selection of NB from 2009. This is a hop I have hardly used at all, and I want to isolate it by using it as the only hop to try and get a feel for the flavor and aroma potential. I decided to leave everything else very predictable and clean, to really let those hops shine through. So, I went with 100% Pilsner malt and 100% Northern Brewer, and Dupont yeast. If the Northern Brewer proves to be a good hop for this, I might try to substitute some American malts next time to get a real "American" saison.

The name of this recipe comes from a play off an old Samba song called "Samba De Uma Nota So", or "One Note Samba". This is my 2-note saison.

Above: THE MAN, Joao Gilberto!

Saison De Duas Notas So

Recipe is for 7 gallons pre-booil, 6.2 gallons post-boil, all grain

O.G. 1.055 F.G. 1.007 ABV 6.4% IBU's 32

10 lb. Weyermann Pilsner malt

14 gr. Northern Brewer whole 7.8% AA (First Wort Hop)

12 gr. Northern Brewer pellet 9.8% AA 90 min

45 gr. Northern Brewer whole 7.8% AA 0 min

Mash: 4 gallons H2O + 4 gr. gypsum + 4 gr. calcium chloride

Mash in to 128, hold 15 min

Heat to 147 over 10 min, hold 35 min

Heat to 158 over 10 min, hold 10 min

Heat to 170 over 10 min, hold 5 minutes and begin sparging.

Add First Wort Hops to kettle before sparging.

Sparge with 5 gallons H2O at 170, over 40 minutes

Collect 7 gallons at 1.049 = 90% efficiency

(I checked my last runnings which were at about 1.014)

Boil 90 minutes, additions as noted

Wyeast nutrient & Whirlfloc at 10 min

"Topped off" the kettle with some water to 6.2 gallons at the end of the boil.

Whirlpool & rest 15 minutes while setting up heat exchanger.

Ran through plate chiller over 10 minutes, to 76 degrees

oxygen for 60 seconds

Pitched a 1 liter, stirplate starter of Wyeast 3724 Belgian Saison yeast.

Fermentation rose on it's own to 81 over the first 24 hours

Raised to 88 degrees by day 3, left there until day 5, when I lowered the thermostat to 84.

***Racked to secondary after about a week so I could collect the yeast. Kept at above 80 for 6 weeks total, the damn beer was still at 1.020!!!***

Alex from Upright hooked me up with a krausening wort from his fresh hop beer. I pitched about a quart of this into the beer which helped get it going. This was the De Ranke isolate.

Racked to keg on 11/8/10. The sample tastes freakin' awesome. 1.007. I also filled a growler and I am going to bottle condition it. Can't wait to do a tasting of this beer and maybe do a side-by side with keg & the bottle conditioned growler.