Two Empty Kegs

I am running a little behind in homebrewed beers, but I will be re-stocked soon. With a summer trip and brewing beers for a few occasions, my home supply has been limited. This was obvious to my friend Kevin when I saw him at the store and he saw store-bought beer in my grocery bag. Not a great sign for a homebrewer (or at least for me).

But fear not, I have two beers on the horizon (both in their secondary fermenters). I have another in my steady line of attempts at a proper English ale, and I have an American Amber (but fermented with the English ale yeast). The bitter was hopped with some UK Challenger and UK Kent Goldings (including a little for dry-hopping), but the main difference was the flaked maize I added this time. Many of the traditional English bitters use maize to round out the taste, so I thought I would try mimicking their technique. I have high hopes for this beer.

The amber ale was inspired by the trip I recently took and the enjoyable amber ales I consumed while traveling. This is my first attempt at this style, so I used a recipe formulated by perusing a number of different standard amber ale recipes for grain concentrations and such. The hops I used were what I had around and amounted to 2 ounces of Northern Brewer for bittering and 1 oz. of Pacific Gem for aroma. Pacific Gem is not a typical aroma hop, so this should be an interesting beer.

In case no one has put 2 and 2 together, I typically prefer the easy-drinking milder beers. I like the occasional bigger, highly hopped, or higher alcohol beer, too, but what I really enjoy is that beer I can drink every day and not grow tired of it.

Oh. And I updated my beers on hand on the sidebar.

The Beer in Trip

I just got back from a 2-week summer vacation. The bulk of the vacation wasn't about beer, but it did play a major part. Here is some of what I saw, tasted, learned, and experienced:

Beers:

• New Belgium Sunshine Wheat - One of my favorites not yet available in middle Tennessee. Incidentally, I asked a New Belgium rep later in the trip about getting some out here, but received the same answer as always: "maybe someday". I think I enjoy it more when it has warmed up some. I never had the patience to wait.
  
  
• Saint Arnold Brewery - I picked up a sixer multipack with six different beers from Houston's craft brewer Saint Arnold. I tried them over the course of 3-4 days while in Colorado. There was a pilsner, a light pilsner, an IPA, a brown Ale, a fruit wheat beer (i think), and maybe a porter. The pilsner was actually decent, and the IPA was pretty good, but none were really that great. None of the beers had an incredible amount of taste overall. It was actually a little disappointing.

• Lizard Head Red from Steamworks Brewing out of Durango CO. It was a lightly-hopped but flavorful (non-irish) red ale. I really enjoyed that one.
  
  
• Stone Ruination IPA - An imperial IPA. I have heard a lot of people rave about this one, but I thought it was over-hopped. I like hops and IPAs a lot, but in this one, the hops were very overpowering so that the malts could not even be tasted. It was an interesting beer to drink, but I wouldn't call it an enjoyable beer to drink.
  
  
• Santa Fe Pale Ale - Sante Fa Brewing Company - Having stopped in Santa Fe for lunch while passing through, I enjoyed a local Pale Ale with my meal. A good pale ale with a pretty standard and predictable flavor.
  
  
• Alaskan Amber - It is an easy drinking beer. Not too heavy. At an elevation of 8500 feet, an afternoon beer prior to a hike need not be.
  
  
• Odell Brewing Company - Fort Collins, CO - I had Odell beers both at a restaurant in southern CO and at the Brewery, with a tour. The taproom is pretty nice. Affordable tasters, many selections. The tour was less than spectacular. The tour guide was an Odell, but neither seemed to know much nor was she very enthusiastic.
  - Cutthroat Porter - I think this is the one I had the first day the at our main destination in Cuchara, CO. This was a good but heavy beer.
  - IPA - I enjoyed this IPA. It had a fresh lively hop flavor and a good underlying malty taste.
  - Levity - This was a good easy-drinking amber ale. I brought some of this beer home with me.
  - 90 Shilling - This is the breweries flagship beer, and for good reason. At the brewery, I had a pint of this on cask and found it very enjoyable. Probably my favorite of their offerings. It is the closest to an English pub ale of their beers.
  - I also had a sampler of their seasonal and "experimental" beers, including a nitro-IPA, a nitro-porter, and a few others I can't now remember.
  
  
• Avery Brewing Company - Boulder, CO - We took the tour and saw one of the smallest almost-fully-automated bottling line I have ever seen. Their line is one of the few in North America that will foil-wrap the top of the bottle, which they take advantage of for their specialty beers. Also notable is that they use 6 different yeast strains in the production of their line of beers. Their taproom was very cool, and the owner made frequent appearances. The tour was very good. The beers were better. I would say the best beers of the trip.
  - Redpoint Amber - This is one of their standard brews, but one I hadn't had before. The kicker was that they had a cask version available in the taproom. I enjoyed it.
  - Reverend Quadruple Ale - We were given tasters of this beer which were quite tasty. At 10% and at our high altitude, the taster was quite enough.
  - Ellie's Brown Ale - We have this one locally, but this was on cask at the taproom and I hd to make a quick decision for a beer to take with me on the tour. A good beer even better from a cask.
  - Maharaja - Imperial IPA - Again, this one is available locally in a bottle (in limited quantities) but they had it on tap at the taproom. An imperial and very hoppy IPA that knocks the socks off the Stone Ruination IPA. I brought a bottle of this one home.
  

• Oskar Blues - This is a brewpub and brewery best known for the canned Dale's Pale Ale. We stopped in for fresh beer and food after the Avery stop. So one beer was enough. I had an Old Chub that tasted great. If only I had gone in more fresh and sober....
  
  
• New Belgium Brewery - This was the main brewery I wanted to visit, and it was nothing short of a spectacular visit. The tour and tasters are free, the brewery impressive, the atmosphere intoxicating, and the experience worth the drive itself. New Belgium has some impressive new brewing technology including Merlin, which heats the wort to boiling at the time it enters the kettle instead of heating to boiling temperature from the bottom, a huge 750 bottle/min bottling line with 98% efficiency (meaning less lost to inaccurate filling, etc.), and their own water treatment plant on the premises to take the water treatment load off of the city. Add to those their total reliance on wind energy, their car-park which rewards fuel-efficient car ownership with closer spots, their comprehensive recycling program that by far trumps any metro efforts, and the bicycle as a central theme to almost all aspect of the company's culture, New Belgium presents an exemplary model of how to respect people and the environment while making great beer.
  - Abbey Ale - One of their original brews, this one isn't available in middle TN because of its alcohol content, but it is a good one which I miss drinking.
  - Dandelion Ale - Flavored with dandelion greens instead of hops, I really liked this beer. Very smooth. I tried to bring some home, but all they could offer me was a growler, so I picked something else.
  - IPA - I find nothing about this on the NB website, but it is an experimental beer that they had available at the taproom on draft only. I chose this one because of the rarity of seeing a NB IPA. It did not disappoint. Don't use the Mighty Arrow as a basis for imagining what this IPA was like. It was less outwardly hoppy than some IPA's, but had a good overall taste.
  - La Folie - This is a sour brown ale. Very sweet, very good. Again, this was one to try because it will likely be a long time before I get another chance.
  
  
• Tralhead Brewery - St Charles, MO. Not my first time here, but we stopped in late for dinner and a couple beers after a long drive. I enjoyed a good pilsner after a sampler to get a good feel for the brewery's tastes. Overall, they make pretty fantastic beers. (I have enjoyed trying pilsners a lot more lately. The big breweries have given the style a bad reputation, but good pilsners from good breweries are out there.)
  
  
• Schlafly Brewery - St Louis, MO - We went for a Sunday afternoon tour and were joined on the tour by one other couple, also from Nashville, TN. Random. The tour was ok, though the tour guide didn't know much and was actually wrong in some cases(about some concepts basic to brewing beer). The free beer samples at the end, though, were generous, and all of the beers tried were good. Schlafly may not know how to pick tour guides, but they know how to make beer.
  - Raspberry Hefeweizen - I have never been much for fruit beers, but this was decent. Tasted like they had poured Raspberry extract into the finished beer, as one would expect.
  - Kolsch - This was a good transition from the Raspberry. Not heavy and very drinkable.
  - Export IPA - This was an English IPA. Very good. A strong, malty IPA. I liked it, but I am a fan of the traditional English maltiness and hops.
  - Oatmeal Stout - This was good. The oatmeal seemed to make it a little smoother. This would have been good on Nitro.
  - No. 15 - This was a fantastic amber-colored ale that had a fruitiness to its flavor. I just got to try this, but if given another opportunity, I probably would have ordered this. I liked it a lot.
  - Hot Liquor Lager - This was a lager with extra hops added and was a taproom special brew by the brewers. Named after a musical group consisting of a couple of the brewery workers, this was a different and good tasting lager.
  

So that was the vacation in terms of beer. I tried a few others, but typically didn't mention beers I only had sips of. But overall, I tried over 40 different new beers over the course of my vacation. Now that I am back home, I am ready to get back to my own beers and brewing. I wasn't exactly lacking in inspiration, but I do now have ideas for new beers to brew and new techniques to try.

Cheers.

my Process (in a nutshell) for extract brewing

This is more or less for a couple of friends that are considering jumping into brewing their own beer. This was essentially my process for extract brewing. I am now doing all-grain brewing, which I have found produces even better beer, but it also requires more time and technique. Kegging is another (probably even more) worthwhile upgrade because it removes much of the time and effort from the process.. and kegged beer seems to taste better. I still occasionally bottle, but only special batches that I want to last longer.

As with most things, finding a technique that works for you while making good beer will aid in the enjoyment and satisfaction of homebrewing. This was my technique and is pretty standard. So check it out and modify it for your facilities and preferences. I still use several books to aid in my own brew planning, and am always on the lookout for others that I may find useful.

Firstly, as the craft beer commercials on TV will claim, quality ingredients are the foundation of a good beer. This sounds like a cliche, but it is easy to overlook this part of it, and this is one area I never skimp. Specifically:

• Good water. I used to always use reverse osmosis water purchased at the grocery. I have a few 5-gallon jugs that I would get filled up at the store. These days, I have a water filter at home that I use to filter water from the spiggot outside. I still fill up my 5-gallon jugs for measurement purposes. The moral of this story is that good clean water is paramount. Get good water. (There is a lot more science to it that I would only worry about if I didn't like my beer. But this, like most other things in my brewing, I try to minimize the efforts if the improvements are small or negligible.)
• Buy the expensive liquid ready-to-pitch yeast. Again, there are $1 packets of dried yeast that some people use and say it does fine. But I buy the $7 vial of liquid yeast from the fridge at the homebrew store and my yeast does great. Different yeasts produce different flavors, so I buy the yeast that is made for the style closest to what I am using. (If I really want to lower the cost of the yeast, I will brew two batches back-to-back and dump my second on top of the yeast cake left by the first in the primary fermenter.) I only use the White Labs yeast. Others are probably fine, but again, I like my beer.

Some helpful stuff:

• An auto-siphon. This is a mechanism that will aid in moving beer out of a carboy with little to no disruption (like stirring or whatnot). Makes siphoning a piece of cake. Make sure you add a good 4-5 feet of tubing to the end of it so it can reach from a counter-top carboy to another carboy on the floor.
• A beer thief: This is a handy tool for taking a sample of beer out of your carboy. I drop my hydrometer right into it after getting my beer to check the gravity.
• A bucket dedicated to sanitizing and a bucket dedicated to cleaning solution. For cleaning, I use PBW.
• A 6.5 gallon glass carboy for primary fermentation. This provides space for the fermentation to balloon up some without overflowing. Most kits come with a bucket primary fermenter, but it is best to go with a glass carboy one for cleaning purposes and because the smaller hole lowers the risk of airborne bacterias getting in.
  
• Hops/grain bags for adding whole hops. These make it much easier to clean and filter the beer after the boil.
• A long spoon for stirring.

Other helpful tips before starting:

• Mark on your carboys where certain amount levels are; like where the 2-gallon and 5-gallon levels are in the carboy. This is only really needed in the primary. I use strips of masking tape.
  
• When you are boiling your wort, don't put a top on the pot. It needs to release stuff that can cause bad flavors.
• Much is said about the importance of sanitation, but keep in mind that sanitation only becomes important in the steps after the boil. If you get a good no-rinse one-step sanitizer like Star San, then it is mostly carefree. Anytime anything comes into contact with post-boil beer, I just put it in the sanitizer first. Not a big deal.
• After the beer is ready and is at the carbonation level you enjoy, put all of the beer in the fridge to stop further conditioning. If left to its own devices, it will likely over-carbonate. This was a problem that plagued me for most of my extract brewing. Refridgeration is the solution.
  

When first getting started, it is usually best to buy an ingredient kit. I like the Brewer's Best kits. But again, buy your own liquid yeast, even though the kit comes with some yeast. Those kits typically do it right and step you through the process. The process in a nutshell is:

• Take the yeast vial out of the fridge and put it somewhere out of the direct sunlight. It needs time to warm up and get ready to start working.
  
• Heat up about 2-3 gallons of water (your pot needs to be large enough to have some decent boil room - and you will be adding quite a bit of liquid extract). Steep your specialty grains. The kit should tell you what temperature and for how long. Don't boil, though. I typically put the grains (in the grain bag) in with the cold water but start timing it when it hits the target temperature. While steeping, if the extract is in liquid form, put the cans in some hot tap water. This will loosen up the extract, making it easier to pour.
  
• Remove the specialty grains and turn up the heat to boil the water. When it hits boil, remove the pot from heat and add the extract by stirring it in. (You are trying to avoid the overflow as well as a caramelizing of extract on the bottom of the pot.) When you put it back on the heat, turn the heat down to bring back to boil slowly. Keep an eye on it as it starts boiling again.. it will foam up a lot. Blow on the foam and stir to keep it from overflowing.
• Once the extract is added and you are boiling again, add the hops according to schedule. You probably want about a 45-60 minute boil (that's actual boiling time - not time on the burner), so add the hops accordingly. (hops to add at 10 minutes means 10 minutes from the end of your boil).
• Everything that contacts the beer at this point (after the boil) forward needs to be sanitized. I use the star san no-rinse sanitizer and love how easy it it. I keep a bucket around just to use for sanitizing purposes. So sanitize your carboy, funnel, funnel filter, beer thief, and air lock with the sanitizer. I typically pour some sanitizer in the carboy and shake it up a bit. The rest of the items I leave in the sanitizer bucket until I am ready to use them. (I typically make about 2.5 gallons of sanitizer water at a time to use. Requires one fluid ounce of star san (i think).)
  
• After the boil, pour your hot wort into the carboy that should already have 2 gallons of cool water. The cool water should protect the carboy from the shock of the heat from the hot wort. Pour it through a filter in a funnel; this will filter out the trub as well as help aerate the beer for the yeast.
• Add enough water to bring the total amount of beer to about 5-5.5 gallons. Take a sample to use for a hydrometer reading. Taste the beer from the reading and then throw it out. If the beer feels close to room temperature, then add the yeast directly from the vial. If it still feels pretty warm then wait until it cools to about room temperature, then add yeast. Either way, the air lock needs to be used to seal the top of the carboy at all times (except for when adding the yeast).
• Now put the beer in a cool dark place. Keep an eye on it to make sure the airlock has sufficient water in it. It should start fermenting within 24 hours or so. It can sometimes take longer to get started.
  

Probably 5-6 days later.....

• When the foam and top layer of fermenting activity subsides and the airlock has essentially stopped bubbling, it is ready to move to the secondary. (It could also be bottled/kegged at this point and there are many arguments about the value of this, but I always move to the secondary, even if just for a few days. I think it smooths out the beer some.) For me, the secondary is a 5-gallon carboy. I just sanitize it and use the auto-siphon to move my beer across, leaving the sediment at the bottom of the primary fermenter.

When you are ready to bottle....

• First, move the secondary fermenter to the location where you want to transfer the beer from the carboy to the bottling bucket. This allows the sediment to settle at the bottom while you do other preparations.
• Boil about a cup of clean filtered water and add about 1/3 cup of priming sugar. Most kits come with a half cup, but I prefer a little less carbonation. Once the sugar water dissolves completely and boils a few minutes, remove from heat and cover and allow to cool some.
• Wash and sanitize your bottles. I just create an assembly line and wash, rinse, and sanitize them, lining them up for use (or putting on the rinse rack).
• Put the caps you will use in some sanitizer water. (Add a few extras)
• Sanitize you auto-siphon, bottling wand, beer thief, and bottling bucket.
• Take a sample of the beer and measure the Final Gravity.
  
• Pour the sugar water in the bottom of the bottling bucket.
• Transfer the beer to the bottling bucket with the auto-siphon.
• Attach the bottling wand and fill your bottles up to about an inch from the top. Too much space and too much pressure can build up. Go ahead and fill all the bottles.
• After filling all of the bottles, set caps on then and then clamp all of the caps down.
• Put the bottles in a dark closet for 1.5-2 weeks. I usually try one after 10-12 days. 2 weeks is the standard time-period for bottle conditioning.

One of these days I will go into my all-grain technique. The first step in that process is to acquire more equipment....

Last night I brewed again, this one was for Beth and Ivan's wedding. I'll be kind of proud to have my own keg sitting alongside a couple kegs from Ivan (brewer for Yazoo) as well as a Yazoo keg. Last night's beer was another of my bitters but, yet again, with a little variation. This time I added some biscuit malt which had the effect of lightening the beer a little, it seems. My perspective may have to do with it being dark outside, but we'll see what the end product looks like and how it tastes. I would prefer, however, to get a deeper, richer color. It sure tastes good, though. I used a British combination of Kent Goldings hops for bittering and some Challenger for aroma. I also went back to my favorite English Ale yeast. This should be a good one.

I like having 15 gallons of beer in fermenters at the house. Last night I cleaned out both of my kegs and cleaned my keg lines in preparation for kegging on Sunday or Monday. New, fresh beer is always something to look forward to.

Beer Wars
I don't really have much to say about the Beer Wars movie I went to. It was less than spectacular, and wasn't as focused in direction as I had hoped. Actually, it ended up being more about one person's struggle to get her idea/product to market than anything else. There is more to it, but let's just say it all made sense when it was revealed that the movie director comes from the same segment of the beer market as this other lady (with the new idea). They work on fringe products that are less accurately craft beers than fringe beer(malt) products that are trying to get some market share. (The director's brand was Mike's Hard Lemonade. The other lady was trying to sell a caffeinated beer called Moonshot.)

If you are interested in a perspective from someone who is more knowledgeable of the industry, check out this blog. I appreciate most of what he has to say. I think his argument that craft brewers actually "own" more retail space than their actual marketshare would dictate is accurate, at least in the stores where I frequent. A full half of the Harris Teeter beer section, for one, is devoted to craft brewers, as well as a couple endcaps and free-standing displays. I know this isn't anywhere near the case in rural groceries I have been in, but then again, if they had so many craft beers, they would probably just sit on the shelves. I may be wrong, but I think that distributors and retailers will usually stock what has the best chance of selling to their market....

Anyway... I think it is a great time to be a beer drinker with so many options.

Today I brewed (and more).

Today I brewed beer. Today it was my favorite English style bitter recipe, sometimes referred to as an ESB. I call mine the "daily bitter" because it is a beer I could be happy drinking everyday (as long as I get the occasional highly hopped beer to satisfy that craving). The Fuller's ESB is one of my favorite beers and the one that other ESB's are based on. Well, I had been looking for it to be carried locally so I could make it a standard beer to keep around, and this weekend, I finally saw it while at the whole foods buying some brewing water. The irony of this beer's arrival to my local shelves, and the reason I didn't make that purchase, was that each six pack cost $12.99. Crazy. I did contemplate it for a few minutes. Then I looked down at my real reason for heading to whole foods. Brewing water. (The whole foods is the only place I know of around here to get jugs filled with filtered water.) The water in my cart was intended for my own ESB. And I can tailor my own ESB to however I want it to taste. I haven't disappointed myself yet. So I skipped the Fullers and went home to drink some of my own. One batch costs me close to $50 and that takes into account the energy to brew, the cost of water, and any consumables that I use in my brewing process. From each batch, I get 5 gallons of beer, which is a little more than 2 cases. 2 cases of ESB would cost, without tax, about $104. So I am getting my beer at half the price, and it is always fresh from the tap. So if you were looking for a good reason to start homebrewing....

A little more on the money side of it... I recognize that getting "up to speed" costs money, and a decent amount at that, but as long as I keep brewing for, say, 5 years, and I brew 20 batches per year (that's 100 gallons of beer per year ;-) ), that cost spread over that 100 batches approaches negligible (in my mind anyway). And the cost of batches can vary widely. As one would expect, though, the beers that typically cost more to make at home also tend to be the more expensive beers in the grocery. So a high-gravity beer costs more for everyone to make, as do highly hopped beers and beers with premium malts. One area that I tend to spend more money on than some others is yeast. I always purchase liquid yeast vials from White Labs that I can just pitch into my wort after a brew. A vial typically costs about $7, which is a premium when you consider a packet of dried yeast can be purchased for a buck. But I am convinced that the gain is definitely worth the extra money. For this reason, though, it is also handy to time batches in such a way that you can re-use that yeast in a safe (from contamination) manner. I could go further to cultivate and re-use yeast, but then the stress level goes up and the amount of work goes up and to me, that's just not worth it.... I am rambling, but the moral of the story is that I believe that the yeast is one ingredient that should never be sacrificed in the name of the mighty greenback.

The batch I brewed today was an example of re-used yeast. A week ago, I brewed what was supposed to be a California Red Ale (with some interesting hopping). It turned out great, but is less red than I expected. I think it is more of a pale ale, but it is a great tasting beer. I usually do not wait a full week before racking my beer to a secondary fermenter, but this week I was unable to do it any earlier; it all worked out for the best, though. While I was waiting for the mash to finish, I racked that CA Red (pale) ale and immediately sealed up the primary as soon as the siphon was finished. What was left at the bottom was a mess of yeast just ripe to eat on some malt sugars. Upon finishing my boil and cooling my wort (which is even more important when pouring on live yeast) I dumped my new beer on top of the yeast, sealed it and shook it a little to make sure it was mixed up well. One of the best things about this technique is that my new beer started fermenting within an hour. And not just a little, but a full accelerated fermentation. And my house smells great now.

So, back to the money... by using the yeast for 2 batches, the price paid for each just went down.

Note that to re-use yeast, it is a good idea to add some yeast nutrients to the boil in order to keep the yeast healthy.

And now for a few pictures....

I recently moved, so now all of my brewing has moved outside. It is sooo much nicer... but I haven't had to brew in the summer heat yet. Maybe with thoughtful planning, I can avoid it... So here is my new brewery.


This is that California Red Ale that isn't so red. Maybe I should call it a Tennessee Pale Ale?


And this is a nice big 4oz bag of Goldings hops I used in my daily bitter today. Mmm mmm.

Beer Wars

Most people who read this personal forum probably already know about this upcoming beer event, but I will mention it anyway....

Beer Wars is apparently a documentary about craft beers and their fight for a place in beer drinkers' fridges. Honestly, it seems kind of silly to me since it is as much of a war as any small business faces against the larger, established conglomerates, but I think will try to support it anyway, and I am interested in what they have to say. They will be showing this film one night, April 16, all around the nation. Here in Nashville, we have two venue options, Opry Mills and Green Hills.

Something tells me I won't be the only person attempting to sneak beer in for the movie.


Cheers.

American Beer

On my iGoogle page, which I use as my personal home page for my own web use, I have a gadget that tells me how to do things. Some of the descriptions are useful, some entertaining, and others don't deserve a second look. One of today's entries I found particularly interesting. How to Know if Beer is American Made. It didn't have much that was new or surprised me, but there were a few choice bits of information I was not aware of (Like that Bridgeport and Shiner are owned by the same parent company.) Maybe you will find it interesting, too.

Cheers.