3 Dog Brewery

Failed Experiments

2012-01-22T16:02:00.001-06:00

If you have been following this blog at all, you will remember that back in 2010, I built the mother of all fermentation chambers. After using this for two years and having reasonable success with it, I have decommissioned it, broke it down and hauled it out to the trash heap. There are a couple of issues with that assembly that I just couldn’t overcome. First, I had experienced a couple of fermentations that had clogged the airlock and blown yeast slurry allover the inside of the cabinet. Despite my efforts to clean up the mess, there were just so many little specs of goo everywhere that it inevitably started to mold. Having a moldy environment makes the challenge of keeping contaminants out of your yeast and fermenting beer even more daunting. Second, using an air conditioning window unit sounds simple enough, I was even able to figure out a simple temperature probe bypass to attain cooler temperatures than your normal air conditioned room, like 65 degrees. My desire to try fermenting a lager turned into a nightmare when the A/C unit froze the coils a number of times. Add to this disappointment that the insulation between the “sealed” panels was starting to grow mold and turn the wood paneling black from the inside and it was clear. This was an experiment that may work fine in less-humid environments, but this was clearly not going to work for me anymore.

A couple of days casually looking at Craig’s List and a solution was discovered. I found a reasonably-new Whirlpool refrigerator that someone was selling cheap (like $60 cheap). It is getting harder to find a ‘fridge that is not a side-by-side and I needed one with the freezer on top. Found it, picked it up, cleaned it out and stuck a temperature probe in it. My wife is still confused as to why I wanted a refrigerator that is set at 65 degrees, but if you are reading this, I’m sure you know why. The one remaining piece of the old fermentation chamber is the shelf on the bottom of this new one. After some sanding and a new coat of sealer, it’s good as new. I’m using it right now to ferment a couple of ales that I brewed last weekend. This leads me to my second failed experiment.

I am very enamored with the Fullers line of ales. If you live near London, this may seem very odd and silly, but here in “the colonies” the products we get from the Fuller’s brewery are a bit old and oxidized. Apparently a cargo container and the Atlantic Ocean are not favorable to beer, who knew? So, in typical home-brewer style*, I proceeded to try and clone some of these ales. Also, in my typical style, I try and go the full 9 yards with the processes. I was going to brew these beers the same way they do at Fullers and use a parti-gyle system. The linked article is long on description and short on practical application. Being new to this process, I assumed that I would take the grist from beer A and combine that with beer B to make a Master Grist. Then take the first 6 gallons of running in one kettle and the second 6 gallons in another. Easy, right? Of course it is, which is why it is all wrong. So, off I go milling and mashing 2 brews worth of grain and running the resulting wort into kettle A. Great, after about 7.5 gallons are in the kettle, I switch to kettle B and continue on draining. Perfect! Start the boil and add some hops, right? Boil for 50 minutes and add the second set of hops. Both kettles are on the same schedule, what could be easier? What? You’re saying I missed step?

As it turns out, a big step was missed. I take a hydrometer reading from kettle A and whoa! 1.098 SG? This can’t be right. Take a hydrometer reading from kettle B and I get 1.034. It was about this time that I realized that I didn’t take a pre-boil hydrometer reading which would have prevented the catastrophe I was now in the middle of. I stop draining kettle A into the first carboy (1) and start adding it to carboy 2 after about 2/3rds of the wort was drained. Then I blended the worts 2/3rd and 1/3rd to lower the gravity of kettle A and raise the gravity of kettle B. Now my hops and bittering was going to be all screwy but what could I do at this point other than throw them both out and start over. At roughly half a sack of Maris Otter I was not dumping this down the driveway. The correct way to do this is to drain the first runnings (what I had put into kettle A) into a separate container and blend them into the second runnings to get the appropriate gravity. Now, what was supposed to be an ESB clone (SG of 1.058) was at a post blend gravity of 1.082, nearly Barley wine strength and what was supposed to be London pride (SG 1.048) was at 1.056.

Over the past week, I’ve found a couple of parti-gyle calculators, with Tom’s from the Antioch Sud Suckers being my personal favorite. I used way too much grain and didn’t blend them before starting the boil. Other than that these brews fermented just fine, both achieving their original, calculated terminal gravity. I plan to dry hop them both since the London Pride is closer to the ESB and the ESB is way under hopped.

Cleaning and Sanitizing a Brewery

2011-07-24T16:03:00.001-05:00

As I mentioned in a post on Facebook, cleaning seemed to me to be self-explanatory and a “non-topic”. Anyone who has ever made their way around a kitchen, or as I have, worked in a retail food establishment, should know how to clean food preparation equipment. A simple detergent that is biodegradable (because most of it gets dumped on the ground when you’re done) and a Scotch-Brite pad. Use warm water and scrub away the gunk, right?

As it turn out, no. It’s not that simple. Brewery soil is a different concoction of organics with a low pH (meaning mildly acidic). Think about all the different sugar compounds created, maltose, dextrose, sucrose, etc. and then boiling that with hops which are for all intents green flowers. The mess that gets created gets into everything. If you don’t clean at all, you’ll end up with a mold experiment so it’s easy to realize that stuff needs to be washed off. I’ve read many suggestions like using hot Oxiclean or other kitchen type cleanser to let everything soak, and then come back and scrub it. I have always had on hand a container of Powder Brewery Wash (PBW) from Five Star, but compared to something like Oxiclean, PBW is expensive so I only used it when stuff wasn’t coming clean with other products. I used this method for the first ten years of my brewing hobby.

“Why cleaning matters” is a page on the Five Star Chemical page for home brewers and for me I understood that you cannot sanitize something that isn’t clean. Dirt harbors bacteria so if the dirt isn’t removed, a surface cannot be sanitized. I think we all know what “clean” means, but what does “sanitized” mean? We’ve all heard words like “disinfect”, “sterilize” and “sanitize” but what do they really mean? These three words form a progression of remaining bacterial infection. Something that has been sterilized has had all micro-organisms –harmful or not, and their spores killed on a surface. Something that has been disinfected has had all harmful micro-organisms and their spores killed on a surface. Something that has been sanitized has had most of the micro-organisms killed on a surface.

To put it another way, sterilization usually takes more than a single method to achieve the total destruction of all micro-organisms. Chemicals and heat, heat and pressure, pressure and radiation or some combination thereof. Disinfection is usually achieved through the use of a chemicals alone. Rubbing alcohol, iodine and even vodka are all good disinfectants. Sanitization is, at least in my experience, a solution that you can have prolonged skin contact with and it won’t harm you. Take a chemical such as Five Star Star San, to make a sanitizer the directions are to use 1 oz. in 5 gallons of water. This is a no-rinse solution that you just leave it to dry and the surface is good to use. To take that same chemical up to disinfectant levels would require 5-10 times as much, and I believe that it would require rinsing before use. If your water looks like mine, this could be a problem of re-introducing micro-organisms to the surface you just prepared.

After all that, remember that what isn’t clean can’t be sanitized. I thought I understood and was successfully applying these principles in my brewery until hearing a “Brew Strong” podcast from The Brewing Network on sanitization with Jon Herskovitz from Five Star Chemical. While this may sound like Jon is hawking his wares via the Brew Strong show, what I found is that Jon is very conscious of this perception and is reluctant to discuss what makes the Five Star products superior in every respect. The hosts had to drag out these facts from Jon. After listening to this, I ordered a large container of PBW and put the Oxiclean back in the laundry room.

As a test of this “new” knowledge, I filled my brew-kettle with five gallons of water and the properly measured amount of PBW. After heating the water to 130 F (about hot water from your sink temperature), I pumped it through the entire brewery, one piece at a time. The “gunk” that was removed from the pot and equipment was astounding. As you can see from the picture, most of the gunk is hop matter that had adhered to various surfaces, mostly in my plate chiller. I had just boiled the plate chiller in a pot on the stove to get out all the “gunk”. As you may guess, that wasn’t very effective. Knowing what I wrote above, how can this have possible been sanitary? You can also see a line of scale circling the inside of the pot. This is just from the steam of the warm PBW. I did have to scrub at that some the get it off.

Take-away from this? Using a more expensive, no-scrub cleaner isn’t about being lazy and not wanting to scrub; it’s about using the proper product to ensure the brewery is “clean” so that it can be sanitized. I have never had a beer show signs of infection in the bottle or keg but that doesn’t mean I’m good, just lucky. I’d rather be good, that is more reproducible. Good thing all that old beer is gone. Or is it?

Tea Party Porter & Witbier l’Orange

2011-05-29T14:23:00.001-05:00

A very ambitious undertaking I thought, to brew two different beers in a single session in less than 12 hours. Mission accomplished. It wasn’t as hard as I thought since most of the time spent on a brew day is for cleaning up afterwards and putting everything away.

This was a plan that had been conceived the week before and at the last minute, I decided to take the Friday before Memorial Day off to brew. Nobody around to distract me, or come to my rescue if I did anything stupid.

I’ve said this before, but since our county switched from well water to surface water, it has been terrible for brewing. It has no mineral content other than Sodium. That’s all we need is more Sodium in our diets and it tastes horrible to boot. Knowing this, I brew with RO water and add minerals back in. I have a spreadsheet that helps me calculate the additions of CaCO₃ (Chalk), CaSO4 (Gypsum), CaCl₂ (Calcium Chloride), MgSO₄ (Epsom Salt) and NaHCO₃ (Baking Soda). All of these additions are in 1-5 grams for 5 gallons of water and they can change the flavor and mouth-feel of the water dramatically. Without going into an entire treatise on water formulation, there are two factors I am concerned with; the Residual Alkalinity and the Chloride to Sulfate ratio. The Residual Alkalinity is determined by what color of beer I want to brew (higher is better for darker beer) and can be raised by adding Carbonates (CO₃). It has been described as “buffering potential”, but a simpler concept is that Carbonates (like Baking Soda) absorb acid and dark malts are acidic. The more dark malt you use, the more buffering potential you need. This is beyond the basic minerals needed for yeast health like Calcium.

The Chloride to Sulfate ratio affects the perception of hop bitterness or that of “malty-ness” and is adjusted by adding Sulfate to improve bitterness or Chloride to improve malty-ness. I don’t know why I write this pseudo-science stuff, nobody’s going to read it… In the old days, people used to put salt in a beer to reduce the bitterness. Same thing.

My wife thought I was kidding when I said I was getting up at 5am to start my brew day. I had some coffee and breakfast and as soon as she pulled the car out of the garage I was heating the strike water for Tea Party Porter. I received the yeast for the witbier (White Labs WLP 400) the day before, but had the WLP001 California Ale yeast from the batch of Amber Waves that I could re-pitch. Both were in the Fermentation Chamber, getting fed and acclimating to their new environment.

As I described in my Facebook post, the idea of heating the sparge water with the infusion heater just occurred to me and it helped a lot. Given that it is “set and forget” computer controlled, I could set the sparge temperature of 168 and walk away. Very convenient. I batch sparged this, meaning I drained the first runnings from the mash tun before closing the drain valve and filling the tun up with the sparge water. Let that sit for 15 minutes and drain it again. While that batch was set to boil, I emptied the mash tun and refilled it with the strike water for the witbier (mean white beer) and started that heating to the strike temperature.

The mash profile for the witbier is a little more complicated than the simple, single infusion, porter mash. The witbier recipe has 4 mash rests at 102, 122, 152 and 168 (all in F.) so I would have to use the heat infusor to raise the mash temperature instead of heating the sparge water. All of these temperature rests have specific time intervals and my system is not completely automated. I can set the temperature and so long as the pump continues to move liquid through the infusion heater, the computer will control the temperature, but not the time interval. So, while all this was going on, with the Tea Party Porter boiling, and the timer telling me to change the temperature of the mash, I was filtering the dry hop material out of the last batch of Amber Waves. After it had been racked to keg and left to sit at 34F for a week it was ready to filter to another clean, sanitized keg. A little CO₂ pressure and the beer gets pushed out of the old keg, through the plate filter and into the clean keg. Once that was done, the keg was put back in the refrigerator and hooked up to more CO₂ to carbonate. You can see the chill-line on the keg telling you how full it is. The 3rd keg in the picture just has pressurized sanitizer in it for cleaning out the tubing.

I bought a 6 gallon plastic bottle for fermenting in and I keep running into the same problem with it. Every time I use it I dump precious beer down the driveway. If it was 6.5 gallons like my glass (breakable and heavy, see my last entry) carboys, I wouldn’t be so annoyed with them. The Better Bottle brand does the same thing infuriatingly enough. They make bottles in 3 gallon, 5 gallon, and 6 gallon. Why not continue the progression and make a 3, 5 and 7 gallon! I’m tired of dumping out beer. I don’t mind spillage or waste, but to dump perfectly good beer out for the lack of space is very annoying. So as you can see, there is very little air-space at the top of this “fermenter” and I know what is going to happen. I’m going to waste perfectly good yeast by having it overflow into the blow off tank (it’s a 1 gallon cider bottle that has a couple of holes in the lid). Sure there will be yeast left behind when I rack this beer off the trub, but the best fermenting guys are the ones that end up betting blown out the tube. So, if I had more of the Tea Party Porter than I expected, why did I use this bottle instead of the 6.5 gallon? Funny thing, the WLP400 witbier yeast needs even more headspace than the California Ale yeast. Last time I used it I learned that lesson the hard way, with yeasty foam and beer goo all over the floor of my fermentation chiller and pouring out the front doors onto the garage floor. What a mess that was. This time I’m using the bigger 6.5 gallon bottle and a blow-off tube to catch the foamy mess.

This photo is from about 24 hours after pitching the yeast. The “water” in the tank was clean water 24 hours ago and now there is a layer of foam and a ton of yeast blow-off that I kept from making a mess.

I’m not sure how these beers are going to turn out, it is in the high 90’s here this Memorial Day weekend and my chiller is set at 62 but the temperature indicators on the bottles say it’s 68. That is a bit warm for both of these yeasts, but I can’t cool them down once they start. Start cold and let warm, never the other way around. It will be another week or so before the Amber Waves is ready due to the 1 week of dry hop and 1 week of settling before filtering and I’m 2 weeks behind on that batch.

Good thing I don’t have any customers to disappoint

Amber Waves

2011-05-01T15:57:00.001-05:00

It’s been way too long since I’ve written anything here. There are three beers that I’ve brewed since the last entry. The 2011 edition of St. Bernard Christmas Ale that has completely fermented and is aging in the cold storage of the 34 degree F chest freezer. This time, it’s a Belgian Dark Ale instead of the Old Ale that we all enjoyed last year. I still get asked if I have any more of that beer, but I gave it all away at Christmas time.

Next, I made the first attempt at Southern Belle Blonde Ale which is about as close to American style lager as I would be wiling to serve. The fermentation is clean without character. Exactly what I imaging this style is supposed to be. Maybe I should get some of Southern Star’s Bombshell Blonde to compare it to. Lastly, I brewed the first attempt at Doubting Thomas, an American Pale Ale. I don’t care for this at all. The hop character is all wrong. Apparently the combination of German Magnum, Centennial and Columbus doesn’t suit my palate. If I mix 75% Southern Belle and 25% Doubting Thomas, I can make a light pale ale that I can drink all day, but it’s nothing special. I’m going to try a new recipe that is based on Epic Pale Ale from New Zealand. Apparently the kiwis know what the Hell they are doing. The recipe is simple, British pale and crystal malt and all American Cascade hops. The trick is the execution. More on that adventure later. This brew day is about Amber Waves, American Amber style ale. This is part of the American Patriot line that in addition to Amber Waves includes, Tea Party Porter and Paul Revere IPA.

Most brew days have their little problems; a stuck sparge, a missed temperature, a boil over, or the one time you walk away from the kettle, the propane goes empty or a gust of wind blows the flame out. I’ve heard about full on catastrophes that lead to Tim, “The Tool Man”, Taylor style hospital visits, but I’ve been careful. Or lucky. After eleven years of brewing I had a minor catastrophe on this brew day. I got lucky in that I didn’t need to visit the Emergency Room to seek stitches or a burn treatment.

My minor catastrophe was backing into a draining 6 1/2 gallon glass carboy that was balanced precariously on the bottle drain, but sitting cock-eyed due to a carboy handle. In the split second that it took to fall over, I had time to consider many things. “What was that I just bumped into? It was smooth and cool, like glass. What could it be?” It was about this time in the eternity that was the 1.5 to 2 seconds of the event that I realized it was that carboy that I so stupidly left behind me, in the way, and balanced on the carboy drainer, leaning up against a bucket full of iodophor sanitizing solution. I spun around and reached for the falling carboy with all the deft and coordination that a middle-aged, slightly-pudgy non-athlete can and stuck my thumb right into the newly formed joint where the glass had broken. Whoops, that was a mistake. Retracting my hand from the pieces of the fermenter that had been a faithful provider of malty elixirs since my earliest days for brewing, I examined the collateral damage. My thumb started to bleed and as I applied pressure to the wound, there was more sharp pain. Third mistake. There was still glass in my thumb but I couldn’t see it. All told a minor injury that could have been much worse. I’ll be replacing that carboy with a PET Better Bottle.

While milling the grain for Doubting Thomas, I walked out of the immediate area to get the mail. When I came back the garage was full of smoke and smelled of burnt rubber. Apparently, I had conditioned my malt too wet and gummed up the grain mill which seized and the motor kept right on churning, abrading a big divot in the drive belt. No I need to find the instructions so I know what size belt to replace it with. It still works for now, but It needs to be replaced.

Another, recent modification to the mash tun includes an all copper manifold that replaced the stainless inverted sieve that is supposed to be better. I also stopped continuous mash circulation. Rather than draining the mash water, running it through the heat infuser and back to the top of the grain bed, I’m just heating up the water, stopping the pump and dumping in the grain. The mash tun holds the temperature amazingly well and I’ve had much more relaxed brew days without fooling with falling grain beds, stuck recirculation pumps and all that mess. If I add one more fitting to my hot liquor tank, I can use the heat infuser to heat up step infusion or mash-out water instead of trying to recirculate the mash. I get just as clear a wort without recirculation and it’s much less of a headache. Anyone can follow a recipe. The masterful part of being a brew-master is nailing the process down to being repeatable and within guidelines. I missed my target gravity by 3 points, but this time I was on the low side instead of overshooting the target. I think this was due to my attempt at fly-sparging, which is simply refilling the mash tun with 168 degree water from the top while draining the wort from the bottom. Most times I batch sparge which is draining the mash tun of sugary water and then refilling with warmer water and draining a second time. At some point I will need to brew the same beer twice, once fly-sparged and once batch sparged to see if I can tell a difference.

Another issue with my current process is that I have an in-line oxygen stone aerates the wort as it goes from the chiller to the fermenter. My pea-brain insists that gases bubble up through liquids, so the oxygen stone is below the outlet to the fermenter. The problem is that since I do not need to aerate the entire batch (only about 25%), while there is no pressure to the oxygen stone I get wort into my hepa-filter that filters the oxygen. If I was using medical grade oxygen this may not be an issue, but I’m using welding/brazing grade that you can buy at the hardware store. The beer still turns out fine, but if I start growing mold in my hepa-filter, it kind of defeats the purpose. I guess I could invert the assembly and have the oxygen stone above the outlet, but I have no idea how, or if that would work.

I pulled the yeast slurry from Doubting Thomas and warmed it up to room temperature the day before brewing. In order to make sure that my little friends were still healthy, I boiled another liter and 100 grams of malt extract. After cooling, it was dumped into the flask and put on the stir plate. I now had 2.5 liters of WLP 001 California Ale Yeast slurry and it was very healthy. Thinking that this was too much and remembering that Jamil and Tasty keep telling me that too much yeast is just as bad as not enough, I used the Mr. Malty (aka Jamil) yeast pitching calculator iPhone app to tell me that I only needed 1.1 liters or repitched slurry. Measured that into my 1000ml Erlenmeyer flask and put in the 62 degree (F.) fermentation chamber to acclimate from the 80 degrees of the house.

One thing about brewing in Texas is that the ground water is close to 80 degrees, so even with the ultra-efficient Blichmann Therminator, I can’t get my wort much below 80. I could rig up an ice bath for the Therminator inlet water, but man, just one more piece of equipment to worry about. I’d rather brew than build stuff (I haven’t always said that!). So my Amber Waves wort had to sit in the cool changer overnight. By 10am, Sunday, it was still at 65 degrees. I pitched anyway, planning on holding that temperature until Monday night and letting it slowly climb to 68 over the next 3 days.

I’ll post tasting notes when I brew the next batch which should be Tea Party Porter.

English Pedigree

2010-11-14T11:54:00.001-06:00

Saturday, November 13th, Shawn and I made English Pedigree Porter. I chose this recipe so we could re-pitch the yeast from the Strapping Numpty. In hindsight, I did this backwards since the gravity of English Pedigree is lower than Strapping Numpty. I should have started with the “smallest” beer and worked up to Strapping Numpty which is the “biggest” beer. Biggest would be the beer that is the most malty, highest alcohol beer. Purposely, several of my beers use the same yeast so I can re-pitch without having to buy new yeast packs (or tubes).

Shawn helped me mill the grain and dough in the English Pedigree while we racked 5 gallons of Strapping Numpty into a sanitized keg. I racked the last gallon into a 1 gallon glass carboy to be bottled later. Both got loaded into the Keezer (a chest freezer with a refrigerator thermostat that one stores kegs in) at 4 degrees C (39F) to chill down. I put the keg under 12 psi of CO2, then lowered that to 4 psi in the morning. Using the Brew Tools software I wrote, (which you can get for free by clicking the link) the calculations for the keg pressure say <1 psi. I didn’t believe it so I put the same parameters into Beer Smith. I got the same results.

Coincidentally, this was an English Pedigree weekend given that I helped my friend to digitize his coat of arms. This is the real deal, created by and listed in the registry of the College of Arms in London, listing Russell’s English pedigree. His father was Knighted and now goes by Sir. George. Russ explained what all the colors and images mean, but the only one I recall is the shooting stars refer to Information Technology. This is a reduced version of the image I cleaned up.

Meanwhile, the mash water is heated, we added some minerals to the mash (gypsum, Epsom salt and Calcium Sulfate) to adjust the pH. I tried to use my new Milwaukee pH56 pH/Temp Meter but it became obvious to both of us that this was more complicated and required a re-reading of the instructions. I added 2 tsp. of lactic acid to reduce the pH and “guessed” that it would be enough. We quit messing with the pH at this point.

We take a sample for the refractometer and since for the first time I actually had to explain what I was doing, I realized that I was not getting the sugar density that I expected. So the question of “why” entertained us for a number of minutes until we figured out that this is an older model refractometer and doesn’t automatically adjust for temperature. It is only accurate at 20C (68F) which is a long way from 200+F that that wort was at as we neared our boil. In reading about that further today, I realize that I’m supposed to calibrate the meter at ambient temperature and then let the sample cool to “ambient” temperature before taking a reading. Simple, once you understand that.

Mash-out and a couple of hop additions to the boil later and we’re whirl-pooling and chilling the wort. Our target gravity is 10.51 and the hydrometer reads 1.056 (I know how to correct that reading for temperature). Since switching from the copper hard-line to the silicone hose, my efficiency has gone from (a very poor) 65% to 70-73%. Meaning that of the available sugars in the grain, I’m getting 70+% of them out. We get the wort cooled down from 212F to 72F in about 20 minutes. Once the 6 gallon carboy (23L) was full we still had some in the kettle that we fed to the snails (dumped on the driveway. No actual snails were fed). That’s when it struck me that something was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what. We put the carboy in the fermentation chamber and pitched the washed yeast into the Pedigree Porter. Cleanup takes another hour and everything is put away.

The next morning I go and check on the fermentation and the yeast are going to town. It’s a good thing I’m using a blow off tube because an airlock would have been clogged full of yeasty foam. This is dangerous because the fementer starts building up pressure and it’s nasty because mold and bacteria can now migrate through the foam to the beer. A blow-off tube prevents this by running a piece of tubing to a secondary container where the end of the tubing is submerged in water. I had to put the second container inside of a third pan because it was blowing foam (or Krausen) out of the top. Messy. That’s about the time I realize that what was missing yesterday in the whirlpool was the Whirlfloc or Irish Moss. That explains why we didn’t get much of a cold-break in the kettle. I’ve since modified all of my recipes to include Whirlfloc when there’s 10 minutes left in the boil. No more forgetting that magic ingredient.

I’m sampling some of the St. Bernard Christmas Ale I brewed in February as I write this. It did finally develop some carbonation in the bottle and the 12oz pour formed a thick, off-white head. I’ve been sipping on this for some time now as I’ve been writing, editing pictures, helping the offspring with “How to Train Your Dragon” on the Wii and it’s definite “winter warmer” at over 10% ABV. 6oz. would be enough for a single serving. After that it just makes you silly. Good thing it’s cold outside and I’ve nowhere to go.

I know I said I wouldn’t change my equipment or my recipes until I improved the process of brewing but… while cleaning the kettle I realized that my whirlpool arm could be at a better angle and while I thought that reducing the diameter from 3/8” to 1/4” would increase the velocity, the pump just deals with the added backpressure and reduces the volume (the velocity stays the same). Also, if I figure out how to form cold-break in the kettle, I need to move the pickup point of the kettle drain so that it stays in the kettle and out of the fermenter.

The Fermentation Chamber Finale, the fruits of labor

2010-11-04T20:35:00.001-05:00

After countless hours of test-fitting, cutting, sanding, bending and tweaking the Fermentation Chiller Phase IV is complete. When I last wrote about this, I showed the internal construction and what it looked like with no front on it.

I calculated what I ~~wanted~~ needed for door sizes and built the internal bracing to hold the doors first. This was purposely left as hollow channels for running power and signal cables. After running power to two outlet boxes that face the inside of the chamber, I also wired a light switch that controls the internal lighting. The bracing is constructed of 3/4” plywood that is 3 1/2” wide so that it is the same dimensions as the 2x4 construction of the outer walls with half of the thickness to allow more internal space in the channels. Everything was still a tight fit.

The next step was to add door frames to improve the sealing edge around the doors. I can’t afford to cool my entire garage in the summer. I used pine 1x2 to frame around all the door openings. The first piece can be seen in the photo below, lower left corner. This was then coated in spar varnish just in case something sprayed liquid all over the inside. I hope this never happens, but best to be prepared.

The doors were each constructed to fit each opening (inside the 1x2 frames) as there were slight variances in each opening. Even though the two top doors were intended to be the same size, when you are trying to keep tolerances as low as possible to keep the cold air in the box, a 32nd of an inch (1 mm) matters. The doors were framed from the same 3/4” x 3 1/2” plywood strips intended to keep all framing to the same dimensions (a 2x4 isn’t really 2” x 4”, it’s 1 1/2” x 3 1/2”). Then I used the same pine 1x2 to provide a mating edge to the door frames built previously. The frames were then skinned using the 5mm plywood that covers the rest of the box, but not before filling them with insulation. In hind sight I should have built better door handles into the doors and I may have to come up with an alternative solution. Once each of the doors was fitted, I added foam rubber insulation to the mating surfaces of the door frames.

With the doors fitted and functional I was ready to fire the box up and see if I could chill it down to the magical 65 degrees F that I needed for fermenting ales. After it ran for several hours it had dropped from an internal temperature of 88 degrees to 86 degrees. Hmm, not what I was hoping for. I realized that the compressor for the mini-fridge I had cannibalized to cool this thing was going into thermal overload and shutting down. The compressor was heating up because it couldn’t exchange enough heat from inside the box to outside. It was the little engine that couldn’t. I even spent several hours building an elaborate heat exchanger with a box fan for the external coils. They were no longer hot to the touch and the low pressure line was building up frost on it. The chiller coils were even building up ice on them, but it just wasn’t enough. Either the box had to shrink or the cooling engine had to get bigger. I certainly was not going to start over on the box. I knew I would quickly run out of space inside it and I had built it as big as I could for the space I had available. There was only one option. I drove to Home Depot and bought a $99 window air conditioning unit, ripped out the mini-fridge compressor and elaborate exchanger coil with $100 of copper soldered to it and resized the opening in the back to fit the window unit. Less than 4 hours of work, start to finish. The cheezy framing around it will have to do for now. I had to compromise between and exact fit and trying to work through framed door openings now. This picture (at left) doesn’t show the capabilities too well as the difference in temperature from inside to outside is minimal. This one at right is more dramatic in that the temperature in the garage is 94.7 and the temperature in the box is 62. With the season changing in November, I had to do some rewiring and add a space heater to ensure that the temperature doesn’t drop below 65 F. I have another Johnson Controls A419 on the way to manage the heating more precisely. For now the “temp” knob on the heater is a failsafe. The recently written about Strapping Numpty is currently fermenting away at a nice even 68 degrees and the not so written about Amber Waves American Wheat was just fermented and conditioned in there so the box has been in service for at least 6 weeks as of today. I have an old laptop with a webcam in the box as well connected to my home network and publishing images every 15 seconds to a web page. Unfortunately, the wireless doesn’t work very reliably to the inside of the box so I’m not publishing that for anyone else to see yet. I have a spool of cat-5 cable in the garage so may wire it to the network to improve the reliability. Just in case you want to watch stuff ferment. I had put it in there so I could remotely monitor the temperature, but the resolution isn’t high enough to see the numbers on the thermometer. This was a long, 6 month project that if I was independently wealthy, I would have just bought a commercial, glass front, display cooler. But, I’m relegated to the do it yourself cheap way. I’m just happy with the results.

Strapping Numpty

2010-10-30T23:05:00.001-05:00

I asked for a recipe review on HomebrewTalk for my Special/Best Bitter (an English Pale Ale) and posted the recipe I had been using. I got a few comments, but there are some brewers on that list that just know their stuff. Through my vague description of not being able to pick out any real flaw, but that I wasn’t happy with the results, they were able to determine that I had too much “variety” in my recipe. I was using too many types of grain and the resulting beer was “muddy”, meaning all the flavors were at the same levels and nothing “stood out”.

Realizing I had fallen into the common home-brewing mistake of “more is better”, I was going for layered complexity and got bland beer instead. Taking their advice, I simplified my recipe greatly. Instead of using 6 different grains, I mashed 2.

Quick sidebar: Mashing is where the complex carbohydrates are broken down by the naturally occurring enzymes in the grain. The best visual image I can give you is from John Palmer who likened it to cutting large limbs off a tree and breaking them down into small enough pieces to fit in the the trash can. This happens naturally if the brewer provides a couple of things. First, the grains must be cracked. Not made into flour, just cracked open. Second, just enough water to make a cereal gruel must be added. Not too much, but enough to cover the grain. This gruel needs to be a just the right temperature for the enzymes to work on those carbs. This just takes some time now, up to an hour to break down all those carbs into simple sugars that yeast like. Drain out the sugary water and rinse the grains with some more hot water. That sugar water is soon to be beer.

Given that my municipal water sucks and has way too much sodium in it, I have to “make my own” water. I collect water from the RO unit and store it in three 5 gallon water bottles. Since this water has no minerals in it, I have to add some back, or the water will taste bland, the grain will change the pH of the water too much and the enzymes will have a hard time with those carbohydrates. The minerals I generally add are Calcium Carbonate, Calcium Sulfate (gypsum), and magnesium sulfate (Epsom salt). These are similar minerals to what Primo adds to their brand of bottled water. Some are for taste, some act as buffers, preventing the grain from changing the pH too much. Today, I have added Lactic acid to my water to set my pH at optimum which is around 5.2. This allowed me to add fewer minerals.

This was also the first time I have brewed using the silicone tubing rather than the copper labyrinth I had first built. Another first was using nylon hop bags for my hop additions. A major frustration for me was not being able to whirlpool at the end of the boil because the hop material kept clogging everything up. I tied these small nylon bags up with the measured amount of hops in them and tossed them in the kettle at the prescribed time. One last change was that I switched from Irish Moss to Whirfloc tablets as kettle finings. All these changes made a huge difference in the stress level and ease of my brew day. I wasn’t fooling around with pumps that wouldn’t prime or air in the lines. I wasn't trying to unplug the kettle drain to start the whirlpool and get out of the danger zone (wort, or unfermented beer, is very susceptible to contamination after the boil and before being cooled to below 140F.).

As a result of all this I exceeded all of my yield targets. I was calculating for a Starting Gravity of 1.054 and hit 1.060 and not by lowering my volume either. My target volume was 20L and I hit 22.7L + some I had to dump out because the fermenter was completely full. Using the Whirlfloc tablet, I got cold break like I’ve never had before and the new whirlpool arm I built had my wort down below 80F in 10 minutes. I run out of the boil kettle, through the plate chiller and back into the boil kettle, but at an angle so that the wort in the kettle gets stirred around and all of it ends up getting cooled. This is supposed to allow the cold break to form and avoid dumping it in the fermenter. I guess I should turn off the pump and let it rest for a few minutes after it’s cooled. Since all the cold break wound up in my fermenter, I’ll rack to another carboy tomorrow before pitching the yeast. The color is perfect and this simplified recipe came out amazing so far. This is the first time I’ve actually enjoyed the taste of the wort before it was fermented. I can’t wait for the first batch of Strapping Numpty to be done! What’s a Numpty you say? Let Wikipedia be your guide.

Dixie Cup Homebrew contest results

2010-10-27T19:38:00.001-05:00

The Dixie Cup XXVII is history and the results are in. I was admittedly very disappointed that I didn’t even receive an honorable mention for any of the ten entries I submitted. I was so upset that for about a day I even considered hanging up the mash paddle and having a homebrew garage sale. Well, unfortunately for you, I don’t give up that easily. I just get belligerent, defiant and extremely competitive.

For 2 weeks I have been thinking that these judges had been consuming way too much barley-wine before judging and that some of them had permanent brain damage from higher alcohols. I received my feedback forms today and I have to say that everything I’ve read makes sense. Dammit, I hate being wrong. On the brighter side, 3 of my entries made it to second round judging. On the flip side of that, they were none of the entries I expected. These judges picked up on stuff that I thought I could cover up or compensate for and they were right on the money.

The entries that made it to the second round were:

Shaggy Dog Oatmeal Stout. This is cool because it is the beer I brewed with my dad. I thought this was a “throw away” entry because it was 12 months old. So color me surprised. Compressed feedback would be to tone down the hops and increase the body. I agree. Good feedback.

Nottingham Nectar Sweet Mead. This is a surprise because it was an experiment. Most “experts” say you need to use a wine yeast or a dedicated mead yeast for mead making. After some discussion with some other “meaders” we reasoned that mead had been made since the dark ages and they didn’t have “wine yeast”. I used a packet of dehydrated Nottingham Ale yeast, reasoning that the fruity esters of the English Ale yeast and low alcohol tolerance might make a nice sweet mead. Feedback would be that this was better categorized as a Hydromel (or light mead). This was fermented at room temperature which in my house is the high 70’s (F.).

Applewine: Uh, this was fermented Tree Top apple juice from Costco with extra corn sugar to boost the alcohol per EdWort on Homebrewtalk.com I didn’t even know there was a category for applewine, but there it is in the BJCP style guide. Considering the amount of actual effort (or lack thereof) that went into making this, I’m somewhat insulted.

Entries that I thought were sure winners that got poor feedback:

Figgy Mead: This was made with fresh local grown figs and orange blossom honey that I had shipped from Timbuktu. Feedback on this entry was that there was an astringency to the finish. Now that I read that, I agree that this is the flavor I couldn’t put my finger on and why I can only drink one glass of the stuff. The suggestion was that it could have been fermented too warm and they were right. I fermented this in the wet bar instead of the fermentation chiller. Good call. They did say it had promise and that it could be “dialed in”. Cooler fermentation temps could make a huge difference. I hope so since I planted my own fig tree.

Ginger Zingamel Metheglin: I had given up on this entry until my “friends” convinced me that this was the best thing they had ever tasted. I thought it was too acidic and that it didn’t have enough ginger or honey up front. So, I doctored it by adding sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) to increase the pH. Once the “salts” had precipitated out I blended in some fresh honey and lemon zest along with some candied ginger. It’s quite drinkable, but… So onto the feedback. “Sharp and moldy” What does that mean? Other comments were that it was “wimpy” or “flaccid”, probably from all the “additives” to reduce the acidity. “Perhaps wine tannin will fix this?” No, it won’t. This is a crap recipe.

Blackberry Melomel: I thought that this entry would do quite well. The judges, however, somehow picked up on the fact that this mead was still very young and there was still some yeast in suspension. Another factor that I hadn’t considered was that with yeast still in suspension this mead came out with a petillant carbonation level. (check the box, not to style, move on.) This carbonation completely masked the berry flavor and I got “needs more berries” and “kill the yeast with sorbate next time”. I still haven’t bottled the rest of this so there’s still hope.

Stuff that didn’t surprise me:

Mayan Porter is a stupid idea: But, it was entertaining to read the feedback. I knew it was a bit “peppery”, but I think those poor judges are permanently damaged. Way too much heat in them chipotles. Suggestions are “have a good porter recipe first”, (ouch!) and maybe you should stick to one spice addition instead of three. I’ve found a couple of flaws with this recipe since brewing it, so I’m okay with this. For one, I entered it as a “robust porter” when it was a “brown porter”. Sounds like they should be “close enough”, but brown is an English style and robust is an American style and they are very different.

Old Ale shouldn’t come spraying out of the bottle when you open it: Yeah. I had no idea since I never opened one until they had been sent to the contest. Way too much carbonation which completely ruins the flavors. Feedback “Carbonation saturation ruined you entry”, “beef up your malt and decrease the fizz”, “astringent finish”, “oxidized” (I thought that was to style?)

Christmas Ale doesn’t mean “Treacle and Clove Bomb”: Yeah, they picked out the black treacle in this. I can’t taste it, but what do I know. Basically, the feedback was that I have no clue how to ferment a “big beer” like this. I got a lot of suggestions about building a bigger starter yeast culture and using more spices and more malt. If I use more malt, doesn’t that make an already hard to ferment beer more difficult? They also picked out a diacetyl flavor, which I thought was an “artificial butter” flavor, but according to the score-sheet it can be toffee or butterscotch. Then after telling me how much my beer sucked, I got “Overall a pleasant, warming beer that is reasonably appropriate to style, but the complexity of the spice is lost” and “Treacle is not a spice! Boost spices! and lower fermentation temperatures to clean up flavor”

Onwards and upwards:

So some of that feedback I found very enlightening and some was just confusing. Consider that I made the Christmas Ale in January or February and the smaller Oatmeal Stout last October (2009). Since then I’ve finished the gigantic fermentation chamber and I am dialing in my basic recipes which are kept up to date here. I’m encouraged and can’t wait to brew some more.

The Fermentation Chamber Update

2010-08-23T21:56:00.001-05:00

The construction phase… I started with the base frame of 2x4’s on 1/2” plywood with casters. At this stage it doesn’t look very imposing at 4 feet wide and 3 feet deep. Filled with R13 insulation and covered with 5mm fascia board. From there I added part of the back with two 6 inch holes for the squirrel-cage fan motors. The holes are lined with stovepipe duct to prevent the motors from sucking in insulation and burning up. The picture are right shows the wall at 48 inches high where the compressor motor will sit so that this area can be reinforced. It will be continued later to the full 72 inches. Some trial and error in this area caused me to have to use a hand saw to remove the center of the top 2x4 and replace it with a 2x6 to fit the depth of the compressor.

The side walls go up in much the same fashion with 2x4 frame secured with drywall screws, the inside fascia board installed, the insulation cut and inserted and finally the outer fascia board. The frames were pre-built at the same time and then fastened to the base with 4 inch deck screws before using a pneumatic stapler to secure the fascia board. This 5mm plywood from China isn’t exactly structural material, but it is fairly easy to work with and although lacks some of the depth and warms of true hardwoods or birch, it doesn’t look bad.

This next image requires some explanation. This is what the inside of the chamber looks like without the front on it. Two 5 gallon water bottles are shown sitting in the bottom to give some perspective on the scale. The compressor “hump” can be seen 2/3rds the way up the back wall with the chiller plate fastened to the top with a machine screw and a spacer. The air is handled by the two squirrel-cage fans and using 2x3 plastic downspout for rain gutters. Very inexpensive and because the air never travels outside the box, I only used friction fit to secure the downspout. If a little air leaks at the joints it isn’t big deal. I designed the air movement to pull from the bottom and push to the top assuming that the cold air will fall if nothing moves it around. The concept is to have one fan on all the time and the other turn on when the compressor kicks on.

The 2x4 box sitting on three 2x4 legs is a mock-up of a 14 gallon Blichmann Fermenator, which I plan to purchase next year. The rails fastened to the side walls are supports for the shelf. The chamber is designed to accommodate a 14 gallon Fermenator, two 6.5 gallon carboys on the bottom and four, 5 gallon carboys or Corney kegs on the top shelf. I also wanted to be able to put cases of bottled beer on the top shelf. The bottom being for fermenting and top being for controlled temperature ageing.

The shelf, shown at left is constructed of 2x4 pine ripped to 1.5x1.5 square lengths with 1.5x1.5x1.5 square spacers to allow for airflow from top to bottom. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t have to worry about putting 200lbs or more of fermented liquid on it and not having a catastrophe. The shelf weighs over 20lbs once finished with spar varnish. The entire inside of the cabinet is finished with spar varnish to prevent moisture from wreaking havoc on the wood. Almost a gallon of varnish was used in the construction of the cabinet. Notice the space left at the front of the shelf, this is for the front which at the time of this picture had not even been designed yet. This was as far as I got with the “on paper” design phase of this project. Wait till you see what happens next…

Still brewing!

2010-08-07T22:49:00.001-05:00

In my last post I wrote about the Fermentation Chiller Phase IV. I may not have been too clear on this, but the old chamber (Phase III) has been trashed to make way for the new one. I did try and give it away to any local home brewer that may need such a device but found no takers. Without any temperature control what’s an industrious home brewer to do? Make cider and mead, that’s what. I could also make Ginger Beer, (Ginger Ale, with low alcohol), but haven’t had a lot of luck with this venture.

First, I made a one gallon batch of basic mead. Three pounds of local wildflower honey, three quarts of RO water, some minerals to improve the taste of the water, a small amount of wine tannin, some yeast vitamins and a packet of Lalvin Narbonne (71B-1122) yeast. Wait three days and cold crash (put it in the fridge) to get the yeast to go to sleep and sink to the bottom. Wait four days and rack it off the lees and sleeping yeast. The bottle on the left contains the basic mead.

I used the now empty one gallon bottle to make cider. One gallon of Tree-Top ®, Unpasteurized apple juice and about one quarter packet of Nottingham Ale yeast. Throw in some yeast vitamins and wait. The Nottingham yeast shouldn’t ferment as dry as a wine yeast would so there should be some apple sweetness left. We’ll see, this is the first time I’ve tried this. I saved the plastic jug that the juice came in with the intention of putting the fermented cider back in it. This is the rightmost bottle in the picture.

Lastly, I made a one gallon batch of blackberry melomel (fruit mead). Four pounds of organic frozen blackberries from Costco, three pounds of local wildflower honey a small amount of grape tannin and three quarts of RO water. I reused the lees and sleeping yeast from the basic mead. They woke up hungry and the berries and honey started fermenting right away. I can hear the airlock bubbling away as I type this. You do not want to try and get berries in, or worse, out of the small neck of one of those one gallon glass jugs and I didn’t want to use a five gallon bucket for this. Lowes just happens to have two-gallon plastic paint buckets with gasket lined lids for around $6. Drill a 1 inch hole for a rubber stopper and airlock, clean and sanitize it and I’m ready to make small batch fruit mead (melomel is the official name).

Mead’s and ciders are easy to make and don’t require a lot of elaborate equipment or space if you keep to one gallon batches. I don’t know about cider, but I’ve made meads that taste like sweetened Everclear until they’ve had some time to mature and mellow. The amount of time is dependent on many variables, but usually the stronger the mead the longer it takes to be drinkable. I’m hoping smaller batches mature more quickly, but I’m not holding my breath.

I’ve got a few more meads up my sleeve to try out as soon as these batches are done. I want to try making a bochet mead, which as this article explains is a “burnt honey” mead. I would also like to try making a mango melomel as I can’t find where anyone has tried that before and lastly, I have a large bag of star anise, a fortune in saffron threads and a bourbon vanilla bean. A mead made with spices like this would be called a metheglin.

The Fermentation Chamber Phase IV

2010-08-01T21:40:00.001-05:00

Most home brewers realize at some point that in order to have properly aged homebrew ready to drink they must develop a pipeline, just like a professional brewer. If you wait until you are out of beer to brew a new batch, you’ll be waiting for a number of weeks before the new batch is ready too drink. I am no different.

An issue arises when you consistently make beer from a region of the world with very different climate from your own. There are two areas of the world that produce the beer I enjoy drinking and neither are where I live. The first being London style ales, and secondly Northwest American style Pale Ales. Given these preferences and that I live in the Gulf-Coast of Texas, I find that I must artificially create the climates of these regions to ferment and age beverages native to those areas. Yeast are funny things and if you take them out of their native environment they don’t behave the same. This means that they don’t produce the same flavors either. San Francisco sourdough bread is the same way. You can make sourdough anywhere but nowhere else can you duplicate the complex flavor of San Francisco sourdough. This is why I need to have a fermentation chamber.

As described on my website at 3DogBrew.com, I have 3 previous versions of the Fermentation Chiller. The first being the “Son of Fermentation Chiller” that Ken Schwartz designed. The second version eliminated the constant ice rotation by using a pump to move glycol from the freezer to the chamber. The third was a hardened version of second with hardboard laminated to the inside and outside of the box to make it sturdier and nicer looking. All of these were designed to hold two 6.5 gallon carboys with airlocks. This year, since I was fermenting in January and February, I added a heater as well.

I began having problems with the glycol picking up moisture and the moisture freezing in the lines. Then I started having trouble getting all the air out of the lines. Either way, if the glycol won’t move from freezer to fermentation chiller, the thing doesn’t work. This hatched the justification for Phase IV.

Back to the pipeline I mentioned earlier, the other issue I had is that with space for only 2 6.5 gallon carboys, I could not bulk age bottles or kegs and carboy cannot be pressurized. So, in order to accommodate a pipeline, Phase IV would have to be bigger than Phase III. A lot bigger. So much space was I wanting that I considered buying a walk-in cooler to put in my garage. After a 5 minute web search those hopes were dashed due to the $6 to $10 thousand dollar price tag of a walk-in. Oh well, plan “B”.

Plan “Bravo” would include the compressor and heat exchanger from a dorm fridge. The goal is to maintain between 55 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit (12 to 15C) inside the box and the compressor is designed to maintain cooler temperatures than that. I found a used small fridge for $30 on Craigslist and proceeded to dismantle it. I ran into a snag when I realized the compression lines (hot side) ran all through the walls of the unit. After many hours of pulling the fridge walls off, I was able to remove the Freon system intact.

I bought two surplus squirrel cage fans to move the air around the box. I picked these units because the square outlets are roughly the same size as 3 inch downspout (rain gutter material). They were offered with the run capacitors which made them even more appealing. I didn’t want to have to source other unknown parts.

Construction is under way and I’ll submit another article soon with details on the construction.

Mel

Mayan Porter Tasting

2010-05-31T14:04:00.001-05:00

Happy Memorial Day and thank you to all those brave men and women who gave their lives for our country.

This is the second bottle of the Mayan Porter I blogged about here. The first bottle I tried was way over carbonated and filled up a 16oz glass with foam and I had barely poured 6oz out of the bottle. So this time I was cautious. A little too cautious as can be seen from the lack of head after the pour. I improvised pouring the last 2-3 ounces straight in the middle of the glass and from a height of 8 or so inches.

I used a BJCP Score sheet as a guide for this tasting so that I remember to cover all aspects. The judges at the Sam Adams Long Shot certainly will be. Just so we are on the same page, I have only been a Steward at a genuine BJCP beer judging and do not have any qualifications. I am “winging it” based on observation and study.

Bottle Inspection: Residue in the bottle is minimal and obviously yeast. The picture is slightly out of focus, but pretty good for a camera phone (I love my iPhone!).

Aroma: No discernable hop aroma, but some malt comes through. Definite aroma of chocolate. I didn’t expect the chocolate to be part of the aroma of this beer, but it is unmistakable to me. The secondary aroma is the chipotle, especially if the glass is agitated to produce a secondary head. To me it is a pleasant, reminds me of smoked Texas style barbeque, ribs or brisket.

Appearance: The head is tan to off-white, about the perfect color for the base style (porter). The head retention is short lived, probably due to the cocoa butter and other oils, but it should be downgraded for this flaw. The beer is slightly cloudy, but not a “yeasty” cloudy. To me it appears like the cocoa that is still in suspension creating that chocolate milk haze to the beer. This beer is completely opaque and a deep chocolate brown (as I would expect).

Flavor: I’m actually surprised at how drinkable this beer is. Smoke beers and spiced beers I can usually only take one-at-a-time, but this is surprisingly easy to drink. The up-front flavor is chocolate that quickly gives way to a common porter malty goodness. Finally, the chipotle provides the “take-down” assault with a low, slow smoky burn that starts at the back of the throat and goes down, coating as it goes. Lastly the smoke sensation backfills the senses reminding me of barbequed delectable's. If you are prone to reflux disease, take your meds before drinking!

Mouthfeel: Body is medium-light; heavy enough to be considered a porter, but not too heavy. Attenuation is good without a lot of residual sugar. Carbonation is good to light. The beer is fizzy on the tongue as the mouth warms it, but not carbonated enough to produce bubbles while sitting idle. No astringency or other palate sensations other than the “heat” from the chipotle spices described above.

Overall Impressions: This is a very good beer that is, in all honesty, probably not “improved” by the additional spices. The porter recipe stands on its own or it wouldn’t be in my “most brewed” recipes in Beer Smith. I wanted to try an experiment and although it didn’t go horribly wrong, it isn’t great either. As has been proven for thousands of years in the production of beer, simple is best. I would not say that this is a complete waste of time, but I will change a couple of things when I do this again. First, I would use chocolate extract instead of cocoa powder. Cocoa powder is a mess and nearly impossible to know when it is done falling out of suspension. Second, I would use much less chipotle. The flavor combination is very good, but it could be improved by being more subtle.

The telling part will be the comments from the two Guinea Pigs I gave samples to for this long weekend. They will be able to add comments below. Let’s see what they say.

Transatlantique Kriek

2010-04-23T21:29:00.001-05:00

This is really part two of the Lips of Faith posting I did on the 9th which is two weeks ago today. As I wrote last time, I’ve been following and reading The Mad Fermentationist for a few months now and that has lead me to seek out some Sour Beer. I had never tried a sour beer before this.

Another of the ales produced by New Belgium Brewery I found at the local Specs is the Tranatlantique Kreik. According to the New Belgium website

“This authentic kriek beer began life in the oaken vessels at Frank Boon's brewery in the Lembeek region of Belgium. After more than two years aging, Boon's offering shipped across the Atlantic and found its way to the intuitive palate of New Belgium's Brewmaster Peter Bouckaert. After much sampling and internal consultation, Peter and his brew staff created a full-bodied golden lager to round out the light-bodied kriek.”

This ale poured out a light red and the aroma of cherries was wonderful. As you can see from the photo the pale white head formed thick and lasted for a quite a while.

I found this ale from New Belgium to be very enjoyable. The flavor of cherries was up front and not hidden in layers of other complex and indescribable flavors. I finished the 22oz bottle without the level of effort I put into the La Folie Sour Brown ale and I would definitely purchase this again.

The one thing I do not know about these ales is if they will lie down and keep for any period of time. considering that they are already more than two years old, I would imagine that they keep fine, I just don’t know if they change/improve with age.

This weekend I plan to bottle the Mayan Porter so look for an update on that.

La Folie Sour Brown Ale

2010-04-09T21:40:00.001-05:00

I’ve been following and reading The Mad Fermentationist for a few months now and that has lead me to seek out some Sour Beer. I have never tried a sour beer before this.

Venturing to a local Specs I browsed what the average Joe-six-pack would consider to be the “beer oddity” isle. I looked for something like “gueuze”, “lambic”, “Flanders”, etc. There wasn’t much to choose from. What I found were some ales produced by New Belgium Brewery.

La Folie Sour Brown Ale is one of the Lips of Faith series of ales by New Belgium Brewery in Colorado. The description is that it is a Spontaneous fermented ale in the Flanders style. I’m assuming this is meaning to emulate a Flanders Brown and not a Flanders Red. It states on the bottle “Seriously Sour…”. Hmmm…

Rate Beer rates the La Folie Sour Brown an Overall 100 and a 98 on Style. Most reviews that I read spoke of dark cherries and sour candy with the occasional comment of over-ripened fruit. Last I checked there were 792 ratings that went into this assessment.

Beer Advocate rates this an “A” Outstanding with 506 reviewers. The average rating is 4.26 out of a 5.

Sounds like I picked a winner here, an ale that was rated very high by both Beer Advocate and Rate Beer with plenty of favorable reviews.

It poured out a ruby red/brown with a thin off-white head that dissipated quickly to appear to my untrained eye like the effervescence from a freshly poured Coca-Cola or Dr. Pepper. so far, so good, product is “as advertised” and living up to my expectations. Sorry, I took no pictures of this event and didn’t think of it until later.

The aroma was wonderful, much like a combined cherry pie, dark fruit like prunes or dates, with a foundation of malty beer. There was already some acidic bite to it, enough to start the salivary glands going with that feeling of pressure in the floor of the mouth on either side of the tongue all in anticipation of that first sip.

The first sip was a shock to my mouth. I am obviously not used to sour beer in any way and for a millisecond the thought raced through my head that this bottle had gone bad. The shock subsided, and the mellowness of well aged, and cared for, no. The French/Belgian term of guarded as in “Bier De Garde” was more appropriate. This was a very good beer, and I longed for a second sip to confirm the perceptions of the first. Had I been fooled? The second sip was less eventful, but I was still struggling with the sour aspect of this beer. It seemed so wrong, so out of place to me. Then the sourness fades and the other delightful flavors come through.

Maybe I’m just not a sour beer guy, I don’t know. I poured some more from the bottle into my glass and began to enjoy it less and less as I got through it. I was only able to finish roughly 16 of the 22 oz bottle before it was no longer appealing to me. Would I buy it again? Probably not. Maybe I need to train my palate on some more plebian sour beers before coming back to this one. It did say “Seriously Sour” right on the bottle and they weren’t kidding.

Old Ale

2010-04-06T13:07:00.001-05:00

Last December I brewed an Old Ale for 2010, knowing that it would need some time before it was ready to share. It just got it into the bottles a couple of weeks ago and hasn’t made it to the cooler yet.

Along the same lines is the St. Bernard Christmas Ale that is currently relaxing in an oak whiskey barrel, but soon ready to be bottled. To keep me from mixing up the bottles (and to make more appealing gifts) I have usually, created labels for each batch.

This is the label I came up with:

This is vastly different from the old label that I had been using for previous batches:

This was a generic image scrounged from the internet with some added embellishments. I had originally named this “Old Dog Old Ale”, which sort of worked. Don’t ask how I thought Belgian candi sugar and Irish ale yeast were appropriate for an old ale. Brew and learn I guess.

Mayan Porter Brew Session

2010-03-27T15:57:00.000-05:00

Today (Saturday) I brewed the Mayan Porter I have been posting about. I started at roughly 11am and completed all cleanup at 9pm. It was a long day. I changed a few steps in my usual process to try and get a better feel for the extract efficiency my system was capable of.

Mayan Porter

Recipe Specifics:
--------------------------
Batch Size: 5 gallons
Total Grain: 12lbs 14oz
Starting Gravity Estimate: 1.061
Anticipated SRM: 31
Anticipated IBUs: 43
Final Gravity Estimate: 1.016
Brewhouse Efficiency: 65%
Wort Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Grain Bill:
--------------------------
9lbs Maris Otter Pale Malt (3 SRM)
1lb Brown Malt (65 SRM)
1lb Crystal 60L Malt (UK 55L)
1lb Victory Malt
8oz British Chocolate Malt (450L) *see note 1
4oz Carafoam
2oz Crystal 120L Malt

Hops, etc.
--------------------------
1 oz Wye Challenger (60 min boil)
0.5 oz Columbus (30 min boil)
1 tsp Irish Moss (15 min boil)
0.5 oz Amarillo gold (10 min boil)
125 gm Cocoa Powder (Dutch process 15% cocoa butter)(5 min boil)
12 gm Cinnamon, ground (1 min boil)
12 gm Chipotle Chili, ground (1 min boil)
Yeast
--------------------------
White Labs WLP002 (1000ml starter)

Water Profile
--------------------------
RO water *see note 2
To 4 gallon mash water added:
3 gm Chalk
1 gm Gypsum
3 gm Calcium Chloride
2 gm Epsom Salt
7 gm Baking Soda

To 5 gallon sparge water added:
4 gm Chalk
1 gm Gypsum
4 gm Calcium Chloride
3 gm Epsom Salt
9 gm Baking Soda

Mash Schedule
--------------------------
90 min Saccharification rest at 154 F
mash out at 168 F

My usual process is to add the mash water to the mash tun and start circulating it through the heat infuser to obtain the desired mash temperature. Once the temperature is achieved the milled grain is added, and the circulation continues as the grain becomes submerged and the heat infuser cycles on and off to maintain the proper mash temp. I also conditioned the malt prior to milling which is how 12 lbs of grain looks more like 18 lbs. I also added the mash water minerals to the milled grain and not the water. I use these minerals as flavor adjustments and still use Five Star 5.2 pH Mash Stabilizer to ensure proper pH for enzymatic action.

Today, once the grain was completely submerged and the mash tun had stabilized at 154 F, I shut the circulation pump off and closed the valves on the mash tun. For 90 minutes I watched the temperature of the mash remain stable at 154, maybe dipping to 153 by the end of the 90 minutes.

After 90 minutes, I restarted the pump and set the temperature objective to 168 F for “mash out”. Realizing that part of my objective was to reduce any scorching of the wort by the heating element, I also limited the high output of the PID to 75% (it has always been set to 100%). At the same time, I am heating the sparge water (5 gallons) to 168 F. After achieving the 168 F in the mash tun, the first running of sugary wort are trickled slowly into the kettle. I had been doing this at the limit of the grain bed, emptying whatever had arrived at the grant. After some reading I re-discovered that draining the grain bed quickly can significantly reduce efficiency.

Based on my not-so-scientific observations, the combination of conditioning the malt, paying close attention to temperatures and the speed of runoff and by the observation of some of the remaining grain husks, It appears as though all of the starch was converted. The husks shown here in my hand appear completely intact. In reality they are completely empty with only the small kernel of germinated barley left in the tip of the grain husk. This means a better filter bed and more complete conversion of starches to sugars (I hope).

My pre-boil gravity (measured in Brix using a refractometer) was approximately 1.044 and I had roughly 6.5 gallons of wort. I’m sure somebody has a way to calculate evaporation rates by measuring pre and post boil gravity, but I haven’t looked yet. All this measuring and calculating are not part of my normal brew day, but I am trying to understand where the inefficiencies in my PAWS brewery are. Once I know what they are, I can attempt to remedy them or compensate for them if they are not financially feasible.

The boil schedule went as expected with a minor flaw; my kitchen timer got wet and died. I had to improvise by using the kitchen’s kitchen timer which was not partially melted from propane burners and hadn’t had wort splashed all over it so it wasn’t sticky.

After the boil is where the latest addition to the brewery is utilized. I added that new temperature probe I mentioned previously and installed a T-fitting after that. One side of the T is for the Oxygen stone and the other goes to a whirlpool arm (see copper pipe in picture at left) that I fabricated out of some copper pipe. So, whirl-pooling the wort as it chills through the Blichman Therminator serves two proposes; to eliminate cold-break from my fermenter and to ensure that the wort is uniformly cooled as much as I can. Once the wort was chilled to 73 degrees F, I cracked the valve on the Oxygen cylinder, through a HEPA filter and into the whirlpool. After a few minutes, the line was switched to the 6.5 Gallon glass fermenter.

Keeping this close an eye on the entire process was painstaking work and basically proved nothing. I still hit very close to the predicted 65% extract efficiency with an Original Gravity of 1.060 (from calculated 1.061) which is very close to predictions. If I was satisfied with achieving 65%... Although this is common extract efficiency for home brewing, it would never be financially viable on a commercial scale and in my narrow minded view, if 90-100% is an “A”, 65% is still a “D” grade. At least it’s not an “F”, right?

Remember from the Manchester Ale Yeast post that I had to invoke Plan B and use White Labs WLP002 yeast. The good news is that I had almost 2 weeks to propagate the yeast colony to a full liter of starter solution. After using a Neodymium magnet to fish out my stir bar, I poured the entire liter into the fermenter (I did not think to let the yeast settle out in time). Within 12 hours, I had a minor (1/4 inch) krausen going and by 6pm on Sunday, a full inch of foam with little volcanoes of cocoa/chili/cinnamon coming through the top. I’ll have to post later on any tasting notes for this experimental batch.

Note 1:

I have just realized in writing this entry that the elusiveness of the original Pedigree Porter recipe, that I have been trying to recreate for 3 years may be in the differences between British Chocolate Malt and American Chocolate Malt. The main difference is that British Chocolate is 100 degrees L darker than American and the flavor profile is different. American Chocolate is listed as:

Chocolate malt will give your beer a warm, nutty, chocolate-like flavor. Just a few ounces in a batch will impart a slight brown color. Use up to a pound in porters and stouts and dark lagers.

While British Chocolate is listed as:

British chocolate malt offers deep colors without the roasted edge, roasted with premium British malts.

I will have to explore this as a possible solution to the problem of not being able to replicate this recipe.

Note 2:

Since all of Harris County has switched from well water to treated surface water, the flavor is inconsistent at best and just awful at worst. The water profile also tends to be very high in Sodium, which in addition to raising blood pressure, is bad for Hop flavor, making it harshly bitter. To make consistently good tasting beer, I start with RO water and add mineral to it to get the desired profile I want. the objective is usually to increase the amount of Calcium and Carbonate, but to get there I must add a balance of baking soda (Sodium Bicarbonate) and Calcium Chloride. I tend to use the EZ Water Adjustment Spreadsheet to calculate what additions I need and use a European postal scale to weigh my minerals. The scale is not very good and has a resolution of near 2 grams so it ends up being a best guess anyway.

So I lied

2010-03-23T07:15:00.000-05:00

I made some comment on my last post that I would be brewing a Mayan Porter "Tomorrow". Well, for the first time ever, I have called off a brewing day due to weather.

It wasn't that the temperature was preventing me from brewing, it was cold, but not below 40 deg. F, it was the 20+ MPH winds and the damage it would do to my flame.

I will post when I finally get to brew the Mayan Porter.

The Auber PID and Manchester Ale Yeast

2010-03-20T22:34:00.000-05:00

Before taking a week off for Spring Break, I had determined that the Auber PID I wrote about in The First Post had a defect and sent it back to Auber Instruments for repair (see what’s a PID if you have no idea what I’m talking about). Auber was very helpful once it had been determined that I was not the problem. I got an email while I was gone indicating that they had found a cold solder joint , that it had been fixed and shipped back to me.

Upon returning home, I reinstalled the PID in the control panel of the PAWS brewery and calibrated the platinum temperature sensor (see RTD). This PID is used for the whirlpool and cold break step where the just boiled wort (unfermented beer) is pumped through a plate chiller and back into the boil kettle so that it spins the liquid around so that any solids like hop material and cold break gathers in the center of the pot. Once the wort temperature has been reduced to below 80 degrees F, it can be transferred to the fermenter.

Sorry about all the techno-babble, but I wanted to keep this section short, because unless you are really into automation and control, you are not going to care.

I had planned on brewing a Mayan Porter today but my yeast is not cooperating with me. Once a year White Labs and Wyeast both produce some “upscale” yeast. My current leaning is to White Labs, but I have used Wyeast many times with great success. So I purchased some of White Labs “Platinum” yeast for this Porter recipe that I plan on spicing up with Chocolate, Cinnamon and Chipotle. Of the two platinum yeasts I purchased, I planned on using the Manchester Ale yeast (WLP038) since it was cleaner yeast (meaning it didn’t provide a lot of additional flavors to the beer).

I made a starter solution and after reading that other brewers had been having trouble with this yeast, I added several yeast nutrients to the starter that I usually reserve for mead or very high gravity brewing. After 36 hours of riding the stir plate, nothing… The gravity of the starter had dropped a paltry 12 points and it looked very much the same as before I dumped the vial of yeast in. Following the directions on White Labs website, I emailed them with the particulars and the lot number of the yeast I was using. They recommended I execute Plan B, which in my case was to wake up a jar of yeast I had sleeping in the fridge in the garage. They were very helpful and will be sending me a coupon for a free vial of yeast as a replacement. So the Mayan Porter will be using White Labs WLP002 which is one of my favorite English Ale yeasts (which is why I try and keep some on hand).

Tomorrow, when I plan on brewing the Mayan Porter, I post about how that went and the actual recipe used.

The First Post

2010-03-06T13:55:00.000-06:00

Here we go:
So, I decided to start writing down in a more public forum, all the activities of the 3 Dog Brewery. I know, another useless blog, right? I hope I don't bore you to tears. I hope you'll stick with me for a bit, while I try and figure out how to best utilize this format.

What for?:
Unless you've been to my house, you really have no idea the volume of notes I take for a given beverage. Wines tend to require a lot less information because all I know how to do is follow the instructions of a kit and maybe improvise some. With my mead and beer, I have gotten very creative and tend to take a lot more notes since, on the off chance one of my creative inspirations actually turns out worth making a second time. If this sounds strange, let me tell you that I'm still trying (unsuccessfully) to repeat the London style porter I made in 2006.

Where's the beef:
Today I made a lot of progress in some areas and neglected others. I racked the Old Ale I made in November from the oak barrel to the bottling bucket and bottles two cases of 12oz bottles. I dumped the trub out of the barrel and racked the Christmas Ale into the barrel. This is my first oak barrel and I've been trying to keep it full since I got it. It had Baby Blue Whiskey in it and was emptied only days before I got it from UPS. The last thing I did was to rack the lemon/ginger Metheglin (a spiced mead) from a 5 gallon bottle and a 1 gallon bottle back together into a 6 gallon bottle. I made this in November '09 and it has been fermenting until now. The fermentation stalled in December, I believe due to the low pH from the lemon juice. To remedy this, I mixed a half cup of baking soda into the bottle in January.

The one thing I forgot was my high school chemistry. When you mix baking soda into something very acidic it unleashes a large quantity of CO2. Add this to the CO2 present from fermentation that was looking for a way to escape the solution and my mead exploded out the top of the bottle like dumping mentos into diet coke.

What I've neglected:
I need to finish my keezer collar. Which is essentially a wood collar that fits between the lid and the body of a chest freezer to allow my CO2 lines entry without making a hole in my chest freezer. I also need to figure out why my Auber PID controller won't read the temperature from the new platinum RTD sensor I purchased. It keeps giving me "EEEE" on the display.

That's all for now, my kid wants to play Mario Bros. on the Wii.