Tweaking my bru wear

So the title is in reference to the Wu Tang Clan and the Wu Wear they made famous. Though I am am not a crazy Wu fan, I do appreciate their shaolin style, but I digress.

This weekend I spent doing some "fixer uppers" on my brew house. While all this was going on, I kicked the Pumpkin Ale and the Brown Ale. Both will be missed, but the dobblebock is now on tap and that is worth writing about. This post is going to be a mishmash of my projects and drinking so away we go.

Mash Tun

First off, after all of the problems I had with the mash tun, I knew it was time for some adjustments. The way that the false bottom had previously worked was a barbed nut going to a very short piece of rubber hose, from there a small piece of copper slid into a hole in the 1/2in copper tubing that made up the false bottom.

The plan to improve this was to was to create a more permanent connection from the false bottom to the ball lock valve. I started by moving the location of where the liquid exits the false bottom.

As pictured, I relocated the exit point of the runoff from the front of the false bottom to the center. This was to allow me to runner full copper with soldering from the false bottom to the ball valve.

From here, I created a connection from the ball valve to the newly relocated false bottom exit point. For this, I used a 1/2in copper fitting nut and a piece of 1/2in copper pipe. I connected the copper tube to a copper corner piece with solder to create a permanent connection. I did not solder the connection from the corner piece to the false bottom because I wanted to maintain some wiggle room.

In the end, I had a new connection between the ball lock and the false bottom that could still be taken out of the mash tun and properly cleaned.

Sparge Arm...One more time

So after my many, many failed attempts at building a sparge arm that would work, I think I have have something now. In the process of creating a successful sparge arm, I still managed to fail at an attempt to save the previous copper sparge arm that did not work because of the hose. In the long term though, i established that a hanging sparge arm would not work because we are now brewing 10 gallon batches and there is not as much room in the mash tun there once was.

As you can see in the picture below, I attempted to make the copper sparge arm a floating sparge arm instead of the hanging sparge arm it currently is. This was a failed attempt. The foam that I used to make it float was glued on, but the glue did not hold and got all over the copper. There was not saving it.




Starting with a clear slate, I decided to use my bottling bucket for the reservoir, high temp hose to run the water from the reservoir to the sparge arm, and PVC pipe for the actual sparge arm. With the bottling bucket, I had to get a 3/4 ball valve and i used the plastic nut from the bottling setup to secure the ball valve into the bucket. I used 5/8 in inside diameter hot water hose that is rated at boiling temp for the hose. I used barbed nuts for the connection to the ball valve and the connection from the new PVC sparge arm.



Finally I made the sparge arm out of PVC with small holes in it. It's pretty simple, a square with holes in it that goes to a T. PVC is cheaper and easier to work with than copper, I wish I had done this originally. It doesn't float above the water, but it should sit on top of the gain bed without sinking and slowly disburse water. The ball valve is clutch here because you can adjust the flow with relative ease.

In the end, this is what I have:



Beer

So now a quick update on my brewing situation. I have a Kolsch and the Yeti clone both in secondary. The Yeti was way too much on the oak side, this concurs with Nick's opinion that splitting the full pound for the 6 gallon batch was overkill. I would have to say that his opinion that we would be good with an ounce in each primary fermenter was correct.

Because of the overwhelming flavor on the yeti and the fact that I lost some quantity, I decided to top the yeti off in the secondary with about two quarts to a 1/2 gallon of water. Hopefully this take some of the extreme flavor off this brew. Otherwise it is close to undrinkable.

The kolsh is good, but cloudy. There was a lot of stuff still floating around. I topped this one off with water in the secondary as well. Currently it's still bubbling in the carboy so I think that I may need to cold store this one for a while to clear it out.



Finally I have my dopplebock on tap now and my red ale still waiting to fully carbonate. The dopplebock is OUTSTANDING. It's totally smooth. All of the roasty malt flavors are really smoothed over during the lagering process. This makes the whole experience really enjoyable. there is no alcohol burn on this brew at all and it about 7% abv, that's pretty impressive.

As you can see, great color, great head retention. I am very happy with how this turned out. It makes the wait all very worth while.

Since I kicked the pumpkin and the brown ale, I think it's time for a brew day!

Cheers

Hops of wrath

So far I have seen a lot of conversation about the hops shortage and what it is going to mean to brewers, both home and craft. Ted offered up a great post on pricing which spun into an ongoing conversation about how the hops shortage will affect us as homebrewers.

I'll admit, at first I figured that it would only mean a jack up in price and I would suck it up and brew on. However, it's much worse than I could have imagined. LHBS's all over the country are rationing hops to 2oz per kind of hops you buy. I went to my LHBS and the fridge was almost bare! He said he had ordered 800oz of hops and gotten 300 of them in.

Now as homebrewers, we are going to make changes much like our older brothers (and sisters for the sake of being PC) the craft brewers. Recipes that are milder in hops and have a greater malt profile will become the norm and we will brew on. Weak and infant breweries will probably die off and the strong breweries will prevail from this shortage. For homebrewers however, I honestly can’t see it having the kind of impact regarding peoples interest as it would to a small craft brewery.

With all of that said, I would like to offer my take one the hops shortage based on what I have been reading and what I understand:

Background

The hops industry has a turbulent history to say the least. As a cash crop it is heavy on expenses and light on profit. Globally, Germany and the United States supply two thirds of all the hops. In the US, Yakima Valley is chief producer of hops supplying 70% of all domestic hops.

Traditional hops producers such as England and the Czech Republic have decreased their production over the years. England is nearly out of the business all together contributing only 2% of the global hops production.

Why the decrease in production?

In the US there has been a 30% decrease in hops production since 1995 for a verity of reasons. Yakima Valley farmers have been turning in the farms to developers who are building houses and malls due to the high cost of growing hops and the low profit margins. The once rich hops fields are attractive to the booming Yakima Valley housing and development market.

This combined with "spot buying" of hops (consists of breweries seeking out inexpensive short-term year to year deals with hop farmers instead of the three and four year contracts) has created an environment where a lot of choices are out there for hop farmers and unfortunately at this point all of them are more attractive than dealing with the instability of hops farming. Spot buying was originally a way for small microbreweries to make ends meet, but in recent years many of the larger breweries have joined in and are now paying the price.

To further the shortage there was a fire at a Yakima Valley storage facility the destroyed 110 metric tons of hops (it's a lot). Europe has had two poor harvest years due to weather ranging from severe rains to hail. All of these coupled with normal to sub-par production years in other regions has led to a perfect storm.

How is this going to affect me?

No one knows. At best, we all pay a lot more for hops for the next few years. At worst hops rationing kicks in and homebrewers will have to start scrambling for their supply. Already I have heard multiple reports that LHBS are going to be only allowing brewers to buy 2oz of any one kind of hops.

The situation is still early, but unfortunately as Ed from my LHBS said "we are the low man on the totem pole" referring to homebrewers and the priority to supply us with hops.

What's next?

Rock soup? Packing up the wagon and headed to the rich plush growing fields of California (instead of Okies, maybe they will call us 'hoppies')? Who knows (OK, so I am being a little dramatic). There are a lot of things working that at least from the outside, give the impression that there is no short-term solution to this problem. Yakima Valley has become a popular place to live and prices are going to have to really skyrocket just to keep the growers we have. The price of wheat is up at $10 a bushel now, up from $3 a few years ago and this is a much more inexpensive crop to grow compared to hops. That coupled with the allure of selling out altogether leads me to believe that there is not going to be an end to shortage anytime soon.

Unfortunately the outlook is grim. Things will have to get bad before they get better and it's not going to happen overnight. Even if it does take place and hops is suddenly a very profitable cash crop, the reason that it will be profitable is because we will be paying for it. As one might expect it will have the most noticeable impact on craft brewers as they struggle to make ends meet. This will translate to increased prices on shelves and eventually a retarding of the once booming craft brew industry.

For the last few years craft brew has been the only growth in the beer industry. In the beer production world, the yellow fizz producers have battled over market share, but seen the only growth has gone to the craft brew market (up 12%). However, this could serve as at least an anchor to slow this growth. Is it the end of the world? No, but it will be the end to a lot of breweries unfortunately.

What about us?

Well we will all need to wash the salty tears in our beer down and move on. I would recommend that if you have a LHBS and you have been shopping online for lot of things to save money, you consider going back and keeping your money close to home. After all, it’s better for the environment that mailing things halfway across the country to save a buck. LHBSs are going to have to raise prices and there will be some fall out, suck it up and keep your money close to home. The last thing on Earth you want is your LHBS to close it's doors, that would suck.

Two other important ways that we as homebrewers can help out is brew on and get other people to join! Homebrewing is fun and if there are people with money they want to spend, products and retailers will be around. Are we going to be able to supplant the current craft industries usage? No, but just keep in mind that we want people drinking good beer. Even if they don't brew it, they will buy it. Once you go craft you never go back. This will help the industry work through this turbulent time.

Sorry for the depressing post. Relax and have a homebrew. Cheers

Reference:
http://www.yakima-herald.com/page/dis/290075330547310

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,305638,00.html

http://ezinearticles.com/?Worldwide-Hop-Shortage---Will-Homebrewers-Get-Hopping-Mad-Or-Smile-Over-The-Brew-Kettle?&id=802924

Big brewing weekend

Okay, so this is not going to be a very good post for me explaining all of the ins and outs of our brew day. Instead, this is going to be more of a summary of the vitals and a quick note on the mash tun going on the fritz (for the second weekend in a row!).

So here we go.

We did two batches this weekend, a 10 gallon Kolsch and a 6 gallon Imperial Stout that was a knock off of a Great Divide Yeti clone. First off, the tale of the tape:

Kolsch - 10 gallons

16.75lb Pilsner
2.75lb Wheat Malt
1.75lb Vienna
.25lb flaked barley

Target OG was 1.045
Actual OG was 1.050

Yeast: 1000ml starter Kolsch Yeast (#2565)

Pre-boil gravity was 1.036

The Kolsh went really well, we hit our targets dead on and actually managed better than the efficiency I had made the recipe out for (normal was 59% and with the OG I think it was 68%). Since we did the two recipes in a single brew day, it was a lot of running around and a lot of on the fly scheduling of what to do when. We struck the Yeti clone with about 15min remaining on the mash of the kolsch.

Great Divide Yeti Clone - 6 gallons

16.25lb US Pale Malt
2lb Crystal 120L
1.75lb Black Patent
1.75lb Chocolate
1.60lb Roasted Barley
1.50lb Flaked Rye

Target OG was 1.088
Actual OG was 1.071

Yeast: 1/2 gallon starter of ESB and American Ale mix (there was a little Kolsh in the mix too)

Pre-boil gravity was ~1.050

Now things went a little crazy during the Yeti. The way that we worked this out was while the Kolsch was in the mash tun being sparged, we had the Yeti split up into two different coolers struck in water at 158f. The plan was to, when the kolsch was done sparging, dump the two coolers into the mashtun for mashout and sparge.

Everything went according to plan until we got the yeti grain into the mash tun. Once there, the mashtun developed a clog and would not drain any of the wort. So we did things the old fashioned way. We used a strainer and a jug to run through all the grains. We washed the grains once and were on our way (really it was a CRAZY mess that made brewing look like a monkey fucking a football, but I digress).

As you can see from the pictures below, we have a few boil overs, but we had two new brewers over so it's worth it showing them the full Monty.



How are things now?

Well as you can see from my crappy first video on CNYBrew.com, both the Yeti (on the right) and the kolsh are plugging away.

Special thanks to Taylor and Cooter for coming and allowing us to have a belated "teach a friend to brewday".

More to come this week including a post on the hops shortage.

Cheers!

**one quick note, we treated the stout with 2tbs of gypsum and 1/2tbs of baking soda. Now the bad news is that we were not able to observe any of the potential efficiency benefits because our cluster-fuck of a brewing pretty much threw efficiency out the window. The good news is that we were homebrewing, not preforming brain surgery so it's all going to be OK.

Beer Geeks Anonymous

[CNYBrew] Hi, my name is Travis and I am a beer geek

[Beer Blogosphere]Hi Travis

OK, so the first step is admitting so here I am, giving myself up.

So a while back I decided I wanted to start treating my mash for pH and taking measurements. I started to, but felt like I was not really doing anything and have since fallen off the wagon.

Now despite an outstanding explanation by Ted on pH and mash, it didn't get through my thick skull so I bailed. Today though, I woke up on a mission. I wanted to understand how and why I wanted to treat my water.

So I took a look at Ted's entry one more time, I listened to a podcast James with an interview by John Palmer on pH which he also covers in greater detail in the links I have associated with his name. I also looked back at an email I exchanged with James from Basic Brewing Radio. After all of that beer geekeyness, this is where I am:

First off, a brief overview of what is going on and why it's good to treat your mash; different regions have different water chemistry. John Palmer uses the Pilsen and Dublin regions as examples of two different water profiles. In Dublin, where stout is king, they have a highly alkaline water source.

A stout uses a lot of very dark grains that are acidic and help to counterbalance the natural alkaline water. Why are dark grains acidic? Who knows, they just are. With that said, every grain has a relative acidity or alkaline value that will contribute to the pH of the mash so a recipe combined with your water's profile will create the pH of the mash.

According to Palmer, you want to be at 5.4 to 5.8 mash pH at room temp, 5.1-5.5 mash pH at mash temp in order for optimum beta amylase conversion into fermentable sugars, thus your efficiency suffers. If the pH falls a half pH value, 5.4 at room temp to 4.9, beta amylase activity, conversion will suffer.

Brewing a stout, in water that is acidic, with the dark malts that are very acidic, it will effect your efficiency. The sugars in the wort will not be as fermentable because the pH was not in the correct range for beta amylase conversion. Also, in some cases the stout will take on a very acrid taste.

With all of that said, the long and short is that one reason for pH monitoring and adjustment is efficiency.

The second reason for pH tracking and treatment is based on the concept that the beer pH follows the mash pH. Why is that important?

Well the second example of the Pilsen region which has a much more acidic water profile, adding the grain profile of something like a stout would give you a low pH reading. This will cause you to get very dull flavor, soapy tastes, or tannin extraction depending on how high the pH is, however, it does not sound like your efficiency will be adversely effected by this.

So now that we have established that there is a reason to treat your wart and to track your pH, what do you do?

First off, get your local water report. In this there are three main parts to watch out for; calcium, magnesium, and bicarbonate concentration. I will use my Syracuse water as an example of what you are looking for:

Ontario - Calcium 31, Magnesium n/a, Sodium 17, Sulfate 27, Chloride 27, Bicarbonate n/a
Otisco - Calcium 42, Magnesium 11, Sodium 18, Sulfate 16, Chloride 36 , Bicarbonate n/a

According to the Water board, my water could be either one of these or a combination of the two. The important things to note on this is that there is moderate calcium, low magnesium and no bicarbonate. This profile would complement a pale ale pretty well. For a stout though, I am going to want to add some things to make the water more alkaline.

So now the question is what to add and how much of it do I add?

There are several additives that you can add to your mash to help balance your pH for the style brew that you are making. All of this info is available in MUCH greater detail on John Palmer's site, this is just what I took away from it.

Gypsum or Calcium- pretty universal additive for most water's -this will lower your PH

Calcium Carbonate - though there is calcium in this, the carbonate wins out and the net effect is raising your PH

Acids - They will lower the PH of your your wort-
Sulfate is supposed to be really good, but be aware of sulfate is corrosive and dangerous.
Hydrochloric Acid is good because you can get it at a pool store and most people are accustomed to using it.

OK, almost there. We have established that we want to balance the pH of the wort and we know what things other people put into their wort to achieve this balance, the question is now, how do I know how much of which stuff to put into my wort?

Well based on what I got from John's interview with James, the way to determine how much of any of the adjuncts you will need to calculate the residual alkalinity by taking the total alkalinity and subtract your effective hardness. So from here you will take the calcium concentration and divide by 3.5, magnesium concentration and divide it by 7. From here you take that quantity of effective hardness and subtract that from the alkalinity and this is your residual alkalinity.

Now I am not going to lie, I don't understand the last paragraph that I just wrote. This was based on the notes I took during the interview with John Palmer and it's a little above my pay grade.

So in a more practical sense, you can use one of the Excel spreadsheets from the links listed below that I got from Palmers website. You just punch in your amounts and it will adjust your wort accordingly. listed below that are all of the water profiles for some of the notable brew cities.

John Palmer's Excel spread sheet that makes all these calculations for you here and in metric here.

Water chemistry of classic brewing cities

Pilsen - Calcium 7, Magnesium 2, Sodium 2, Chloride 5, Sulfate 5, Alkalinity 14
Dortmund - Calcium 225, Magnesium 40, Sodium 60, Chloride 60, Sulfate 120, Alkalinity 180
Munich - Calcium 75, Magnesium 18, Sodium, 7, Chloride 10, Sulfate 10, Alkalinity 152
Vienna - Calcium 200, Magnesium 60, Sodium 8, Chloride 12, Sulfate 125, Alkalinity 120
London - Calcium 52, Magnesium 16, Sodium 99, Chloride 60, Sulfate 77, Alkalinity 156
Burton - Calcium 268, Magnesium 62, Sodium 54, Chloride 36, Sulfate 638, Alkalinity 200
Dublin - Calcium 118 , Magnesium 4, Sodium 12, Chloride 19, Sulfate 54, Alkalinity 319

Please keep in mind (assuming you took the time to read all of this) that this is my understanding of pH and it's relation to the brew process. I welcome any input from folks that know more than me (Ted I am looking in your direction) so please feel free to provide feedback.

Cheers!

Fun with beer

So Saturday morning we got up bright and early and had ourselves a great brew day. I had the water on the flame by 6:30am! Nick showed up at 7 with some Mcd's treats and we were off.

We struck the water at about 174f because we were not paying attention. Now my beer smith is always saying 170 to strike at 158f, but we are usually closer to 152 when we strike at 170. When we took the striking water off of the heat, we were climbing above 174 and just put it on. We were able to strike at exactly 158.

Beer smith also called for 9.62gal of water to strike the 26lbs+ of grain we had. This is where we ran into a problem that we have been having for a while now, the Igloo Ice Cube Cooler we have is 12 gallons and does not handle the 10 gallon batches very well. So we were only able to strike 8 1/2 gallons.

We held it for 60 min and the temp kept at between 158 and 157 for the whole time despite the cool temps on Saturday morning. That's the little mash tun that could!

After 60min, we took the last gallon that we were going to add and got it up to a boil so that we could get the temp up for mash out. We ran some of the wort off into the brew pot to make room for the mash out and added the boiling water being sure to stir pretty aggressively to avoid hot spots. Once the grain bed had a steady temp of 168-170, we let it hold for 10 min and started up our batch sparge water.

We did two batch sparges, the first was 5 gallons and the second was 3 and both were at 170f. We were planning on a 90 min boil so we wanted to have 13 gallons to start with and we got that and then some.

Our pre-boil gravity 1.035, which was lower than the 1.041 beer smith told us we should have, but as the intrepid brewers we are, we brewed on!

After getting a few close calls on boil overs, we were able to get a healthy rolling boil and started the 90 min boil process. I was glad we got started early because there was no rush and we were able to wait the full 1/2 hr before adding the first hops. We added the 4oz of Golding's (5%) into the hop bag and let it dangle.

Our final hops addition was 1 oz at 5 min and some irish moss for good luck.

We separated the wort into two buckets and split the 1000ml starter between the two. We ended up using London Ale (1028) for the brew as Ed was out of 1335. It's an interesting yeast. After using the ESB and American Ale for the last few brews, it's noticeable that the London is a lot slower out of the gates that the other two. But it's chugging away now.

Our OG would up at 1.054 which was exactly what we were looking for, so I am assuming the additional time we used in the boil helped. We dry hopped it with an OZ each of Cascade leaf hops (5%) and the airlock has a very hoppy smell coming out of it.

Ted sent me a message on the previous post concerned with our dangerously low aroma hops rate and I have to thank him. If a fellow brewer gives you an excuse to add more hops, take it! I think I am going to pick up another OZ of the same leaf hops to add to the secondary and maybe a third to hop to the keg! Who knows.

Anyway, all is well at the brew house.

Cheers!

PS- The brew is going to be called "Red Face Ale" after the guy passed out in the picture.

Back at it with a red ale

So after an election week break (I hope everyone went out and voted!) we are back in business. We decided that this week we were going to brew up a nice hoppy American Red Ale. We were going for something along the lines of a fat tire red ale and a few others we saw.

Listed below is the 10 gallon recipe we came up with:

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Batch Size: 10.00 gal
Boil Size: 12.55 gal
Estimated OG: 1.054 SG
Estimated Color: 12.3 SRM
Estimated IBU: 38.6 IBU
Brewhouse Efficiency: 59.0 %
Boil Time: 90 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------

18.50 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain 72.1 %
3.50 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 10L (10.0 SRM) Grain 13.6 %
3.50 lb Munich Malt - 20L (20.0 SRM) Grain 13.6 %
0.15 lb Black (Patent) Malt (500.0 SRM) Grain 0.6 %
4.00 oz Goldings, B.C. [5.00%] (60 min) Hops 36.6 IBU
1.00 oz Cascade [5.50%] (5 min) Hops 2.0 IBU
1.00 oz Centenial [5.00%] (Dry Hop 8 days) Hops -
1 Pkgs London Ale (Wyeast Labs #1028) Yeast-Ale


Mash Schedule: My Mash
Total Grain Weight: 25.65 lb
----------------------------
Name Description Step Temp Step Time
Step Add 9.62 gal of water at 168.4 F158.0 F 70 min
Mashout Heat to 168.0 F over 2 min 168.0 F 10 min

This should come together nicely. It seems as though it's going to be a pretty hoppy red ale, obviously not like Cascazilla (Ithaca Brewing) or anything, but it should have a nice hop profile.

Nick made this recipe and this is his first stab at playing around with the creation of recipes. I will hopefully have a few more posts in the next few days to catch up on a few things that happened while I was running around including a cider update, new kegs and a keg system I built with Nick.

Cheers!

PS- I also entered the old balls into a brewing contest based out in Saratoga.

5 gallons of cider brewing

So as I said before, I want to provide some details about brewing cider. Nick picked up 13 gallons of UV pasteurized cider from a cider mill north of us (I will spare sharing their name because according to NYS law, they are not supposed to sell us unpasteurized cider, stupid NY laws).

The plan was to make 10 gallons of cider that would have an OG of 1.060 and finish at around 1.011 using an American Ale yeast. We brewed the 10 gallons together by adding Camden tablets to both of the 4 gallon buckets. There was 2 gallons left over for the cider and another 3 gallons that Nick was using for another project. With the 2 gallons we put it on the stove and got the temperature up to 170 and added 6 cups of cane sugar, 6 cups of brown sugar, and the zest and juice of 2 lemons.

We held the two gallons at 170 for about 20 min and added a gallon each into the 4 gallon batches. Because Nick is much better at math than me, we hit our OG dead on!

So far it has been bubbling away for about 8 days and it's still at 1.030. It's making it's way down to 1.011 so I am just going to let it run for a while. After it's done with the primary, I am going to let it sit in secondary for a while, maybe a month or so, and I am going to bottle it carbonated in my growlers.

I would like to age some of this because I am not ape shit about cider as a whole. With that said, I am excited to try this and I think it will be a really fun drink to break out with my friends. I don't think it's going to be my "coming home from a long day of work" brew, but that's okay.

Cheers!

Something smells like sulfur!

This past weekend I went over to Nick's place and we worked on our pumpkin ale. We also did a cyder that I will write a post about as soon as I get the details from Nick on what we used and what we did.

What I am writing about today though was the pumpkin ale. To bring you up to speed, it was racked twice after the primary to help get rid of some of the traub that developed and in the end, we both had a full 5 gal batch because we planned ahead.

However, when I went to rack my beer from the carboy to the keg, I noticed a distinct surfer smell that permeated the spices. Nick had said that there sulfur smells coming out of the primary fermenters when I was gone, but on our first racking, I had not noticed anything.

This time though, I definitely tasted a distinct sulfur flavor.

After some consulting, Nick advised adding some yeast nutrient to the brew to help get rid of the flavor. He said that he had done some reading and that was one of the suggestions. When I got home, before I pressurized the keg, I added 2tbs of yeast nutrient and then pressurized the keg at serving pressure and let it sit until tonight.

Tonight was going to be my big night of tasting the brew and immediately I noticed something was not right. The brew had a distinct salt water flavor that threw everything off. I decided to take the keg off the tap it was on, shake it around and try it out of my party tap. The flavor was gone (for the most part anyway).

What I think happened was that the yeast nutrient settled at the bottom and when I was drawing off the keg, I was getting a very concentrated amount of that nutrient. The plan is now to shake it around some more and let it sit for a while longer to get fully carbonated.

In the end, I am sure it's going to be great, but it was hard to judge because I cannot get the salt water flavor out of my mouth. It kind of feels like it coats the tongue.

More to come on this!!!

**The story behind the picture was that I have had a few brown ales and I was looking for a "pumpkin carving of Nixon" because I thought with the election season in full swing, it would be fun. However, with little luck on that, I remembered these pictures and decided to include them just the same. That's a little window into how my mind works, scary.

Pumpkin Ale

A few weekends ago, Nick and I brewed up a pumpkin ale. I will make an update on where we are to date with the pumpkin ale but for now, I want to give some input on the brew day that was:

First off, Nick was good enough to volunteer for "pumpkin prep". This consisted of buying, gutting and scooping 8-10 pumpkins. Nick bought 20, because he was not sure what the weight would be after they were all gutted. In the end, we has 12lbs of pumpkin, so 8-10 pumpkins make for 12-14lbs of finished pumpkin product.

To prep, Nick carved the pumpkins in to 6-8" chunks. He placed these chunks on a cookie sheet at 350f for 1 hour (of until beginning to brown). After this he peeled the skin off and was left with the orange mass of the pumpkin. Nick took care of this a few days before our brew day and had it in the fridge. This was good because the process would have been a brew day in it's self.

One the day of brewing, Nick came over with the 12lbs of pumpkin and put it into my 5 gallon bucket and cooked it on the grill. We added enough water to cover the pumpkin chunks and stirred pretty aggressively to prevent burning. This took an hour and in the end, the pumpkin was a chunky orange paste.

We added the pumpkin to the mash tun just after we struck the mash. This got a little complicated because the pumpkin held a lot of heat and made a lot of "hot spots" in the mash. With a little ice and some aggressive stirring, it worked out in the end. However, for people looking to brew this, take into consideration the temp of your pumpkin because there is enough of it there to throw off your reading.



We let the mash sit for 1 hour. We were not able to add water to the mash for a mash out because the mash tun was too full so we pulled some off and did a quick decoction to elevate the temp.





In the end, we hit our 154f for the mash and had it up to 170 for the mashout. We batch sparged and had a little over 13 gallons in the pre boil (the brew kettle was REALLY full). Our goal was to have 12 gallons in the end because of traub loss.

Regarding the spices, we did not have "pumpkin pie" spice so we used my wife's Betty Crocker Cookbook and increased the amount as we saw fit. We were concerned initially because the amount of spice versus the amount of wort seemed as though you would not taste the spice. However, once we added it, we realized that a little spice goes a long way.

We used a London ESB for both brews because my American Ale yeast that I was going to use did not take the way that I had hoped.

Currently, both 5 gallon batches have been been racked over twice. There was a lot of traub from the primary to the secondary, and from the secondary to the third vessel, it was much less. We had both seen a lot of input from folks saying that the starch from the pumpkin caused a lot of yield losses that we didn't want. In the racking from primary to secondary, Nick took the extra and put it in a 3 gallon carboy he had and topped it off with some DME wort he threw together.

We did that Sunday and we are considering bottling/kegging this Sunday while we brew a cider (cyder?).

In racking it over I had a few little sips, this is a damn fine brew. It's pretty dark for the style, but not too crazy.

The OG was 1.048 and the FG was 1.011.

More to come...

1 Week hiatus

I know that I have not written anything about the pumpkin ale brew day, I am going to post pictures and details in the very near future. I was out of town for the last week in Jamaica enjoying the fine local lager Red Stripe. I have to admit, I was kind of a hater on this beer before going to Jamaica, but after having some both out of the tap and out of the bottle, it's a pretty damn fine brew.

Anyway, while I was out, Nick racked over both his and my Pumpkin Ale's into secondary. He said that there was quite a bit of traub (slurry?) at the bottom, so it was good that we brewed extra. We are going to rack it a second time Sunday to help clear it up before we bottle/keg it.

There were some good questions and comments on the original Pumpkin Ale recipe so here goes on answers:

Adam said...
Good luck! Never did brew one a them there
punkin' ales. (Not sure why I'm slipping into country bumpkin' speak.) Sounds
interesting.I like the idea of using two different yeasts. I've done that and I
couldn't believe the difference between the California Ale yeast and a German
Ale yeast. Worlds apart.

Adam - Unfortunately I was not real confident in the American Ale yeast I tried to get out of the secondary from my Brown Ale because I dry hopped with leaf hops. there was so much lost that I thought I would not get a good, usable yeast. They were both pitched with the London ESB. Another experiment for another day.

Brian said...
Really looking forward to hearing about how
yours turns out. I actually hit up the local homebrew shop yesterday and picked
up my grain/hop bill for my first pumpkin beer as well, should be brewing this
Sunday.Cheers!

Brian -Yea it's nice when there are a bunch of brewers all working on the same thing. It's great to read about how people do things differently.

Ted Danyluk said...
Hi Travis,I've been wanting to do a
pumpkin ale for 2 years now. Still haven't gotten around to it. Perhaps next
year. I did find a recipe and procedure that's pretty detailed that includes the
pre-roasted pumpkin in the mash.It is very important to use the right kind of
pumpkin. I noticed in your photos some big carving pumpkins. Did you use those
in your brew? My manager at TJ's confirmed that those aren't grown for cooking,
and that they will simply turn to water if cooked. Not much flavor at all from
those.The small "pie pumpkins" are grown for culinary applications. They have
lots of flavor and texture. Did you use these in the brew, and then carve some
pumpkins on the side? Just curious? Please let us know how this one turns
out.

Ted - As always you have some good observations. The picture that is associated with the recipe is just something that came up when I Googled "Pumpkin Ale" on Google Images. I thought it was pretty funny.

Anyway, I will have to ask Nick, but I am assuming we used the regular carving pumpkins. I am not positive though. I am also going to ask him to detail how he treated the pumpkin before we brewed.

It actually made for a longer brew day than normal, but if Nick had not prepared the pumpkin ahead of time it would have been 12hrs (no exaggeration).

Nick is a food buff so he very well may have gotten cooking pumpkins, but I am not sure. One thing I can tell you is that once we started the runoff into the brew pot, there was not much to smell. It was not really much of anything. However, once we added the spices it was CRAZY how much it smelled.

Adam said...
Mmmmm...pumpkin. I think most pumpkin ales are mostly spices
and not much pumpkin. I'd love to taste one that was fermented pumpkin.Does
anybody really know what pumpkin tastes like or is it all nutmeg, cinnamon, et.
?

Adam - I would say it's 80/20 at least (80% spices, 20% pumpkin). Like I said in the previous response, the pumpkin didn't seem to lend much to the brew until we added the spices. With that said, you could smell it in the mash a lot and the smell became more pronounced as the boil went on. With that said, the spices really took over once added.

After making this brew, I totally understand how people can make a pumpkin ale using spices alone. As much as the pumpkin adds character and a good story, it's natural flavor is like any other gorde.

That's it for now, more to come once I get my self back on track!

Cheers

Smashed Pumpkin Ale

Tis the season for a nice harvest pumpkin ale! This weekend Nick and I are going to be brewing our first vegetable beer.

Nick is in charge of preparing the pumpkin. He is going to cook chunks of 15 lbs of pumpkin for a while, peel the skin off and make it all into a chunky, loosely held together pumpkin mash.

Saturday, we will break out the pumpkin and add it to the mash like an adjunct. I have added rice hulls to the mash to hopefully prevent a stuck mash because I guess the pumpkin is pretty thick. Nick said that he has heard that brewers loose a lot of volume in traub with these beers, but I am assuming that must be when it's added to the boil because if it's in the mash, it shouldn't change the traub volume dramatically (at least I think, any input would be greatly appreciated).

So here is the recipe as we have it now:

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Batch Size: 12.00 gal
Boil Size: 14.84 gal
Estimated OG: 1.041 SG
Estimated Color: 17.9 SRM
Estimated IBU: 24.0 IBU
Brewhouse Efficiency: 59.0 %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
0.50 lb Rice Hulls
12.50 lb Pilsner
5.40 lb Wheat Malt, Ger
2.20 lb Munich Malt
0.75 lb Roasted Barley
0.40 lb Cara-Pils/Dextrine
0.25 lb Carafa III
2.00 oz Mt. Hood
1.00 oz Hallertauer
0.36 lb Brown Sugar, Dark
0.25 lb Maple Syrup (pure)
**1 Pkgs American Ale (Wyeast Labs #1056) and London ESB


Mash Schedule: Single Infusion, Full Body
Total Grain Weight: 22.00 lb
----------------------------
Name Description Step Temp Step Time
Mash In Add 6.88 gal of water at 170.5 F158.0 F 45 min
Mash Out Add 2.75 gal of water at 196.6 F168.0 F 10 min


Notes:
------
The .36 lbs of brown sugar is 1cup. 1/2 cup of maple syrup. 1 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice mix (cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, mace)

**I have proposed that since we have two yeasts that we are considering reusing, one of us use the ESB and the other the American Ale. Then, since they are both from the same batch, we can observe the characteristics of the two yeasts head to head.

We are using a pretty basic single infusion so this should not be a big deal. Since Nick is preparing the pumpkin, we should be able to brew in our normal time.

Sounds like a fun one, cheers!

Loose Change

So since we are not brewing this weekend and I don't foresee myself doing any fun beer projects, I figured I would do a single post about a bunch of random odds and ends. Later this week I will post up the final recipe for the Pumpkin Ale Nick and I are going to brew up this weekend.

So here we go:

First, I have probably mentioned this in a previous post, but the Old Balls Ale is going strong. The pictures below are from when I took it from secondary into the keg. As you will note, there was some really odd "stuff" on the bottle that had me a little concerned at first, but in the end the beer was fine so it must just be traub or something.

The Old Balls Ale is hands down one of the best beers I have ever brewed. You will note that I used a double decoction on this brew as a way of dealing with raising the temperature in the process. I think the decoct gave the beer a very distinct, but complete malt profile. You can definitely tell that some of the malts were caramelized during the decoct and it made for a great beer.


I bottled up a couple of bottles of this to take to a competition because I think this one will do well and I am interested to hear what the judges will have to say.

This brings me to the second point of loose change, my first beer judging came back!!! Though I didn't place or get any awards (except the participation ribbon pictured below) I did get some really valuable feedback.

The beer that was judged was the California Common I brewed called Californication. All of the feedback I got said that the recipe was kind of bland and lacked character. Both judges recommended stepping up the hops and putting some more punch in the grain bill.

After getting the forms back, I revisited my recipe and noticed how simple it really was. It probably could use some spicing up. Although I have to say I really enjoyed it and I think it's a great session beer.


Finally, today I made some adjustments to my kegging setup. When Nick was over, he mentioned that I might get better cooling if I piped something directly from the coolest place in the fridge (the freezer) to the fan. We made some minor adjustments at the time, but I decided to go all the way and duct tape it all into place. This is what I have now.

You will also notice that I filled the fridge with foam insulation. This was also one of Nick's suggestions. He said that it would help keep the temperature where I want it if I fill the empty space. Ben from Ben's Homebrew has suggested this as well. We will see if all these changes work.

That's it for now, cheers!

Sunday, Brown Ale Sunday

Well it was really Saturday, but who's keeping track?

So today we brewed a 10 gallon batch of American Brown Ale. I am leaning towards doo doo brown ale, but we will see if that will end up as the name. We started this morning at 7am and pitched at 12:30 making it a 6 hour brew day (with cleanup). Not too bad.

This was the first time I have had a fellow brewer so I was pretty fired up. With a 10 gallon batch it's a must. There was no way I would have been able to lift the kettle on my own. For the second time we hit all the vitals for this recipe (1.041 pre-boil OG, 1.051 pitching OG) and got through all the heat infusions without a problem.

One thing that caused a problem was that the sparge arm I just made had some "technical" and engineering issues. First off, because of the way that the sparge sat under the water reservoir, the hose kinked causing a pretty light flow. The engineering issue was caused by the fact that I used a chunk of garden hose that could leave funky flavors in my brew. Not the end of the world, just some tweaking.

Now for this brew we used American Ale yeast from Nick's last IPA batch that he just bottled last night. To increase the volume that we were working with, Nick boiled up some corn sugar and made a little starter. We split the starter this morning into our buckets are we are hoping that it works out.



This is the largest batch that I have done with this larger brew kettle and we had a boil over early on in the brewing. This was something I never would have imagined, because the kettle is so big, but it did. No big deal though a little time to rest and some cleaning of the propane burner and we were as good as new.

This was an American Brown Ale recipe I made up:

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Batch Size: 10.50 gal
Boil Size: 13.12 gal
Estimated OG: 1.051 SG
Estimated Color: 25.8 SRM
Estimated IBU: 37.8 IBU
Brewhouse Efficiency: 59.0 %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
20.50 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain 80.4 %
4.00 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 60L (60.0 SRM) Grain 15.7 %
0.75 lb Chocolate Malt (350.0 SRM) Grain 2.9 %
0.25 lb Black (Patent) Malt (500.0 SRM) Grain 1.0 %
2.00 oz Northern Brewer [8.50%] (60 min) Hops 30.3 IBU
1.00 oz Cascade [5.50%] (30 min) Hops 7.5 IBU
1.00 oz Cascade [5.50%] (15 min) (Aroma Hop-Steep) Hops -
1.00 oz Fuggles [4.50%] (Dry Hop 7 days) Hops -
American Ale Wyeast


Mash Schedule: Single Infusion, Full Body
Total Grain Weight: 25.50 lb
----------------------------

Mash In Add 7.97 gal of water at 170.5 F154.0 F 45 min
Mash Out Add 3.19 gal of water at 196.6 F168.0 F 10 min
----------------------------

Overall I was quite pleased with the brew day. We hit all of our times and temps as well as gravity readings. Other than the boil over it was a pretty flawless brew session.

This was Nick's first shot at all-grain brewing. He is kind of new to brewing in general, but as a science teacher, he should take to it quickly.

Good stuff. Cheers!

Box and Tap (the final chapter)

So with out revisiting the background of all this, first there was a box and then there was a tap, and now there will be a box and tap together.

This idea is all the result of a great post I saw from my friend Ben at Ben's Homebrew. I have to thank him as always for the awesome innovation that I get to fuck all up in my upstate half ass way.

Here we go.

First off, I had to cut two hole in the bottom of my fridge to have the cold air flow two and from in. Ben used a tool that he said does this very early. I couldn't find anything like this and (considering the holes had to have 3" PVC pieces in it) I could not find something to drill a hole that big. So I did the next best thing. Tin snips. They worked great. I drilled a hole big enough to get the tin snips in and never looked back. It was a much easier process than I anticipated.



After getting the holes in the metal cut out, I had to get the foam insulation and the plastic from the inside the fridge cut. Initially I was using a box cutter for this, but it was a real pain so I used the sawzall, much easier. In the end, I had two holes with PVC coming through them.



After those hole were drilled I had to drill the same sized holes in the top of my box. This was a lot harder than I thought, it was not easy to line up (but I am not known for 'exact measurement' so I probably made my own problems). But in the end, it wasn't anything a little insulation from the basement couldn't fix.

You will note below, on the right is a computer fan that I am using to circulate the air from the mini fridge into the box with. The other picture is below the mini fridge what the view is from the box to the mini fridge.






Finally I had to get CO2 into the box. I also had to get a manifold for the CO2 distribution. I did this with yet another visit to harbor freight. I picked up a 4way splitter for a air compressor and some brass barbs. I picked up three ball lock valves and was ready to go.

This is a very simple manifold that does the trick. The manifold gets fed from the CO2 tank and has three ball locks that connect to the barbed fittings. Everything is 1/4". I used the thread sealing tape that I also used for the ball lock on the mash tun.




Once I had CO2 going into the box and a line going out to a tap, it was imperative that I test it to make sure that it was going to pour a glass of brew. As you can see here, the test was successful.

When it was all said and done, two of the three taps are ready to go, I need to work out some logistical issues with the cold plate and how the external keg is going to work, but I am in no rush with that until I get another couple kegs.

Upon Ben's advice, I placed a fan to blow on the back of the fridge. It's really working hard to get down to an equilibrium temp so it's important that I make sure there is plenty of air circulating.






It's not cooling all that quickly, but it's going. In a few days it's gone from 65f down to 56f. Ideally I would love to have it at a steady 52f, but I am questioning if that's going to be possible. it's not bad now though.






If you click on the image below you can see a drawing I did of how the finished product would work. Though it is wacky, I have to say I am pretty fired up that a) it's functional and b) it was a lot easier than I anticipated.

I think in my old age I have started to do a little more planning and a little less "I have 3 hours free, I should totally re-vamp my system" which has produced some better products. Either way I am always looking towards the next step in my gadget empire. I was reading some of Adam's posts about chest fridges and couldn't help but dream. I think I am going to stop and smell the flowers for a little while with this on though, plus the wife is quickly noticing my many beer projects and starting to ask questions. It's time to come out of the basement, for a few weeks anyway.

Cheers!

Mash Tun 2.0 - Sparge Arm

So now that I have a nice new false bottom for my mash tun, it's time to go ahead and make a sparge arm that works. No more shower heads, no more hoses with holes in them. It's time for the real deal.

After working with the copper on my false bottom, I decided to go ahead and make a sparge arm out of copper. It was pretty easy to work with and only took me an hour or so to get all put together. The supplies were actually quite reasonable as well. The copper was only like $3.99 and all the little parts were $.59 a piece. Total I would say it was about $10.

As you can see from the pictures above, it's a pretty simple design. There are 3 T's all in the middle and 4 corners. Everything is 1/2 inch again. the square is 6" x 6". This makes two 6" long pieces on the sides pictured and 6 2 3/4" pieces (something like that) that fit the T's together.

As you can see from the pictures, I used a 3-way connector to make a PVC support bracket for the sparge arm. It's pretty much that simple. Cut 3 chunks of 1/2" PKC and connect them via a 3way connector. The sparge arm is pictured with rope holding it in place, but I wound up using a coat hanger. If I get a butane torch and some solder, I will make the end of the sparge arm into a hook shape so it will attach to the PVC, but this will work for now.

If you reference back to the picture at the top, you will notice that I put 1/2" rubber hose over the copper. I did this via bruit force and hot water. I am not all that confident in this aspect of the setup, but as I type this, I remembered that there is a chunk of garden hos I have been planning on using for something that might work AWESOME for this. We will see.

either way, I ran water through it, works fine. I did the vinegar thing I had reference in the previous post. Things should be pretty good. Here is the shopping list:

2' Copper 1/2" tube (should have gotten more, luckily I had some left over) $3.99
4 Corner pieces $2.20
3 T's $1.79
PVC 3 way $.20
3' 1/2" PVC (Had it, but it ain't expensive)

Total - Umm, ~$7

Feel free to shoot me a note if you have any questions.

Mash Tun 2.0 - False Bottom

So as always, as soon as I have something all dialed in, I get the itch. In this case, it was to build a copper false bottom like the ones I have seen online.

Now as much as my "bazooka screen el chepo" is working, there are obvious limitations and I can't help but feel like I am leaving something back in the mash tun at the end of the day. This little project is hopefully going to change all of that.

Now to start, I am going to review the tools and the costs that are associated with this project. This is actually a great little project for new home owners (me) and apartment folks. the reason that I say that is while this project does require some random tools, they are all inexpensive and are good to have (assuming you don't already). I say this because when I moved into our new house, I had no tools. So every time I would go and work on my beer projects, I was usually buying parts and tools. This is why with every project I try and say "do I need this?" and make something that makes sense for me. In this case, it was easy:

Tools

Hacksaw $2.50 (harbor freight)

Extra blades $4
Pipe cutter $5

Parts

5' of 1/2" copper $8.50

4 copper corners $2

4 copper T's $2.80

Cooler - Had it, but anywhere from $18-$25

Ball valve or hose nozzle - $5

So, for this project, I was making a 10" by 10" false bottom for my mash tun. So I cut the 5' copper into 4 10" pieces. After doing this, I would put the copper tube into my vice and put one of the T's on the end (so I knew where to start cutting). Next I hack sawed 1/3 to 1/2 of the way through the tube with the cuts being 1/4 to 1/2 inches apart. I actually started doing 1/4" apart (below right) and moved to 1/2" (below left) because it was needlessly time consuming with a hacksaw to do all this.

After making the slices in my long tubes, I cut 6 more pieces 2 3/4" long. These will be the pieces between the T's. I made three hacksaw cuts in all but one of them and pieced it together.

Next I had to come up with a way to connect this to my spout from before. To do this, I used a very small piece of hose (I think it was from my racking cane, but I don't recall the exact size). This connects to a smaller piece of copper coming out of a hole in the side of one of the 2 3/4" pieces I cut (the one without the slices). These are all held in place with screw tight rings.

Finally to get the whole thing up to snuff I spent a lot of time cleaning it. Obviously you don't want copper in your beer, though it will improve your Hugh, it's going to hurt coming out the other side. With my immersion chiller, the directions I found said to soak it in vinegar, so since this is copper, I did the same. Better safe than sorry.

Now I considered doing the soldering, but noticed that a few of the people I saw on the new did not do this. the more I thought about it, I realized that it was not really necessary. You see, it's sucking in liquid and not grain. That's what you want right? Why make it water tight then if you want liquid to get in? Makes sense to me. If anyone has experience in this, I am open to suggestion, but I am going to at least try it this way.

In the end, this is it. I tested it and it's tighter than a dolphin's butt-hole so we are a go!!!

When I started to drain it, the flow was slower than with my bazooka screen knockoff, but I have a feeling that the flow will be consistent and pull from a broader area of the mash. that's the hope anyway.

Next up, a real deal, no holds bard sparge arm!!! This is a long time coming and this one is hear to stay.