Subsistence Brewing put to the Test!

You may have noticed that I've been catching up on posts this morning. That's because I was hanging at the house waiting on a roofing contractor to get here.  Welp, he came, he saw, and he's promised a rather large quote to keep my family dry. Look to see more recipes on the subsistence/economizing end of the spectrum!

Tasting the Ordinary Bitter

Gone, but not forgotten. At its peak,
right about a week out of the fermentor.  

So, the idea behind my "brewing the..." and "tasting the.." posts is that I'll have a record of ingredients and techniques and my thoughts on the beers so I can tweak and improve recipes going forward. Unfortunately, time got away from me on this ordinary bitter I brewed to build up some yeast. I took a couple of pictures to track how it went from hazy to clear as the gelatin did its work. Finishing out dryer than expected at 3.8% abv, this was pleasantly malty, hoppy in that herbal EKG way, wonderfully dry, totally crushable, and gone fast. I share beer, and everyone who had one pint went ahead and had two (or three). This was brewed the first weekend in November and we kicked the keg the day after Thanksgiving.

My thoughts at the time were that I would like to back off the mineral content (or go for a more balanced profile), as it was a bit harsh in the first few days and maybe too bitter for how dry it got. Once it cleared that was less of an issue, so it may be that the gelatin pulled out some polyphenols in the haze. I'm sad to see it go, but considering it took all of ten days from grain to crystal clear pints, it won't be long before I have it on tap again. I might also play with the hops. My wife is also not a huge fan of the batch of EKG I've been using, so I'd like to try the same recipe with all fuggles and all cascade.

First pint. This was one day out of the fermentor. 

Top-Cropping, Open Fermentors, and Heritage Homebrewing

It would be a lie to say that I don't pay attention to the firehose of information available to homebrewers today. I am an avid reader of the various Brulosophy experiments, have listened to every episode of Brewing with Style, and long ago worked my way through Noonan, Strong, Zainasheff, and the rest. I've incorporated the current gospel that temperature control is key in my practices (although I think a steady temperature and a rise at the end is more important than a particular temperature), but I long ago decided that many of the practices that seem so important to homebrewers today (I'm looking at you, people who own RO machines, stainless steel conicals, and glycol chillers) are overkill for me. As much as I enjoy the information and equipment available today, I'll always be more Charlie Papazian than Gordon Strong.

A good example of this is my current fermentation set up. I'm fermenting 5.5 gallon batches in a 7.5 gallon PET carboy with a wide mouth with aluminum foil across the top for the first several days. I purposefully bought this fermentor so I could do open fermentations and top crop certain yeast strains (my understanding is that top cropping really only "works" for "true" top cropping strains, whatever that means). The headspace is overkill for most (not all) yeasts, and I'm almost certainly introducing oxygen, dust, and bacteria into the beer when I'm stirring it around and fishing out yeast (that itself is not perfectly clean and will be pitched into another beer under similarly-non-perfect conditions).

But this is where all that information comes in handy. You have to be super careful and pick a lot of nits to make beer that will keep for 4 months on a warm shelf and still taste good. You have to be very careful with oxygen issues when you're making a delicate lager or a hop bomb. I respect folks who aim for those goals (sometimes, I am one of those people). But you can be a lot more relaxed if your beer goes from fermentor to a cold keg that is empty less than a month after brew day. I'm not a commercial brewer, or even a competitive homebrewer. I'm a subsistence brewer. I'm using my yeast up to a couple of generations because shipping is a pain and it saves a couple of bucks. I also like to play with a process with a long tradition of beer that is roused in the fermentor and served out of casks that let in plenty of night air.

Now, I'll pay reasonable attention to cold-side oxidation when aiming for a hoppy IPA, I don't dip into anything german with a spoon mid-ferment, and I certainly go through a fair amount of Star San and Oxiclean. In fact, I'm thinking of getting a separate, smaller PET carboy with a standard opening just for those styles to limit oxygen uptake (it's getting pretty cold in the house, so maybe its time to start looking at lagers). But for an English style ale using a yeast that was born, bred, and conditioned to life in a Yorkshire Square? I think it's okay to RDWHAHB.

Restarting a Sourdough Starter

I tend to bake in waves of a few months (usually the colder ones) and then end up letting that habit lie during other months (usually the warmer months). While a sourdough starter is a pretty resilient thing, and can easily be revived after a month in the fridge, half a year is often just too much. At some point this Summer, last winter's starter lost its mojo and found myself the proud owner of a canning jar of mold. Not tasty. Of course, I could have easily fed it once every few weeks, but things get away from you, right?

Ready to Leaven! 

Luckily, making a starter is super easy.  There are tons of online instructions (nothing original to see here, folks) involving careful measuring, and I encourage you to try one of those (this one is my favorite). But here's the gist of the thing, which has worked for thousands of years, even before the invention of an accurate kitchen scale. Mix wholegrain flour with water until it looks like too-thick pancake batter, occasionally swap out some of the mix for fresh water and flour, and let it sit out until it's bubbly and smells nice.  

Okay, it's a bit more complicated than that.  Here's my process:

• The starter should be made with equal parts by weight of water and flour. That's 100% hydration in the parlance of our times). I do eyeball it, but you might want to weigh it out until you get a handle on how that looks. 

• Store the starter in a jar with a lid that isn't airtight (unless you fancy glass shrapnel), and leave it for a day (in hot weather) or two (in cold weather) on that first day you make it. 

• After you start to notice some activity, you feed it daily (in cold weather) or twice daily (in warm weather) by discarding 2/3 and adding back in equal weights of flour and water (or just eyeball it until it looks like thick pancake batter). 

• Sometime between a week and a month (10 days seems to be my sweet spot), the yeast and lactic bacteria that are naturally present on whole grains will develop a stable culture that smells good and reliably raises the starter when it's fed. After that, you can be a little more cavalier and keep it for up to a week in the fridge between feedings. 

A couple of miscellaneous points that I think really help:

• Your water needs to be filtered or otherwise free of chlorine. You're trying to grow up exactly what your municipal water authority is trying to kill. 

• Use whole grains to build the starter. It's just easier. I've had good luck with whole wheat and whole rye. Rye is easiest to work with because it doesn't develop a lot of gluten, so it's easy to spoon out.  Later on you can up the percentage of white flour (so inexpensive!), but it's much more of a struggle in the beginning. 

• Don't fiddle with dropping fruit (unwashed grapes, figs, etc.) into the starter to harvest the yeast. It's messy and unnecessary. While it's true that fruit is covered with yeast, so is everything else on the planet. The yeast present on whole grains have evolved the ability to break down the complex starches and proteins in grains, so those are the ones we want to build up, and they'll eventually outcompete anything else you add anyway (except commercial yeasts, which are essentially domesticated versions of the same).  

• Make the starter tiny to avoid throwing away 10 pounds of delicious and expensive whole grain flour in this process. The recipes that call for a cup at every feeding time are from commercial bakers who buy flour by the sack. My starter is a teensy 30 grams each of flour and water, kept in a 1/2 pint canning jar. 

• Days 1 through 7 can be...well...gross. While lactic acid bacteria and various yeasts will win the marathon (by poisoning their competition with acid and alcohol), the starter will begin as a rough neighborhood that smells like a dumpster in August. Give it time and regular feeds, and gentrification will happen. When it starts to smell pleasantly sour and rises regularly, you've got a safe food product. 

  

  Day 3. Looks good. Smells awful. 

• Acid food is safe food. A freshly fed to 24-hour old starter that smells nice and sour is a safe food. Don't even taste the thing if it smells like hot garbage (duh) or has any fuzzy mold growing on it. When it doubt, throw it out and start over again (or borrow some from a friend). 

• Finally, you can short-cut this entire process by finding a friend with a starter. They have to discard 2/3 of their starter every time they feed it (unless they are baking that day), so most folks are pretty free with samples. 

Homemade Gravlax

This was so, so easy. There are plenty of good recipes for cured salmon to be found online, from super simple to more-complex, to building-a-smoker-level complicated (mine is an amalgam of what I found, although I lean towards the more-minimalist preparations). 

Can't be bothered to pull together a nice picture, as I was busy eating after this. 

Decently fresh salmon.
Equal amounts by weight of kosher salt and light brown sugar (4 oz of each was enough for my filet)
A good bit of crushed black pepper
I also added some lightly crushed fennel seeds, but that's optional. I think dill anything else that tastes good in aquavit would also be fine. 

Cover the fish with the cure, wrap in plastic wrap, leaving the ends open for the fluid the salt will pull out to drain. Put the whole thing on a sheet pan, add another pan with some cans on top, and stick in the fridge for 2-3 days.  Rinse, pat dry, slice thin, and enjoy. 

Do it for the Yeast! Brewing an Ordinary Bitter.

New fermentor, just after pitching.
Basically open fermenting this batch

I brewed this beer on National Learn to Homebrew Day and invited some friends over. As such, this ended up being a more-social affair than brewing typically is for me, so there's no photo evidence of the actual brewing.

As I've written before, the whole point of this beer was to grow up a pack of Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire to be able to reuse the yeast in a number of beers. The general consensus is that a smack pack doesn't have the yeast needed to properly ferment 5 gallons of most beers, so a lot of people make yeast starters. I've done that in the past, but I broke my e flask and sold my stirplate a few years ago. I don't usually mind using dry yeast--they've gotten really good--but sometimes you want something different. One lazy-ish solution is to brew a low-OG beer (this one was aiming for 1.038) and pitch the yeast from that. It's still technically under-pitching, but the yeast isn't very stressed by the experience and the beer turns out just fine in a way a bigger beer might not. Basically, you drink your starter.

The good news is that this works. As of right now, I've harvested about 200 ml of vigorous, top-cropped yeast that I'll pitch into the next beer. The krausen on this thing came back with a vengeance, even after harvesting that yeast, letting it grow back and swirling the fermenter to beat that krausen back into suspension. And, all this is with using Fermcap S. I'll probably harvest a bit more to see how much I can get, and then let it finish up. We'll see whether I've taken too much out too early, but I bet it'll be fine. My only concern is whether, in using Fermcap S instead of just letting the giant krausen from this yeast run rampant, I am selecting for a population of the yeast that is more or less floculant than I want. I'll find out in the next beer, I guess. For now, I'm happy to not have to clean out my fermentor. My last experience with this strain involved a huge mess.

Top-cropped 1469.
This compacted down to about 150 ml of clean yeast slurry.

This was my second brew using the new mashtun and improved volume tracking, and I'm very happy with how it's going.  Beersmith appears to have a cooler mashtun's number, and the beer came out right where it should have. I ended up with a bit more extract than expected (this seems to happen with little beers), so the OG was 1.039 instead of 1.038, pretty inconsequential even assuming my hydrometer is that accurate.

Third Krausen? Fourth? I've lost track. 

BeerSmith 2 Recipe Printout - http://www.beersmith.com
Recipe: Ordinary Bitter (growing up yeast)
Brewer: VAD
Asst Brewer:
Style: Standard/Ordinary Bitter
TYPE: All Grain
Taste: (30.0)

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Boil Size: 7.77 gal
Post Boil Volume: 6.77 gal
Batch Size (fermenter): 5.50 gal 
Bottling Volume: 5.00 gal
Estimated OG: 1.038 SG
Estimated Color: 6.4 SRM
Estimated IBU: 30.9 IBUs
Brewhouse Efficiency: 70.00 %
Est Mash Efficiency: 82.7 %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
Amt                   Name                                                               Type          #        %/IBU       
5.00 g                Gypsum (Calcium Sulfate) (Mash 60.0 mins Water Agent   2        -         
2.00 g                Epsom Salt (MgSO4) (Mash 60.0 mins)        Water Agent   3        -           
1.00 g                Calcium Chloride (Mash 60.0 mins)              Water Agent   4        -           
8 lbs                 Pale Malt (2 Row) UK (3.0 SRM)                    Grain         5        97.0 %     
4.0 oz                Caramel/Crystal Malt -120L (120.0 SRM)     Grain         6        3.0 %       
43 g                  Goldings, East Kent [5.00 %] - Boil 60.0        Hop           7        28.4 IBUs   
14 g                  Goldings, East Kent [5.00 %] - Boil 15.0        Hop           8        2.5 IBUs   
28 g                  Goldings, East Kent [5.00 %] - Boil 0.0          Hop           9        0.0 IBUs   
1.0 pkg               1469 West Yorkshire (Wyeast #)                    Yeast         10       -           


Mash Schedule: Single Infusion, Medium Body, Batch Sparge
Total Grain Weight: 8 lbs 4.0 oz
----------------------------
Name              Description                             Step Temperat Step Time   
Mash In           Add 3.4 gal of water at 161.3 F         152.0 F       60 min     

Sparge: Batch sparge with 2 steps (1.74gal, 4.14gal) of 168.0 F water
Notes:
------


Created with BeerSmith 2 - http://www.beersmith.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tasting Broke Okra IPA

This one is going fast, so I think I need to get the tasting notes down before it's too late. As much as I profess to be an acolyte of malt, there is something about a well-done IPA that is undeniable. My plan on the brew day was to make an APA, but when I overshot the gravity and went into IPA territory, the only reasonable thing to do was load up on the hops.

It's possible I need to work on my beer photography skills. 

Appearance -  Okay, this I'm truly proud of. Despite 4 ounces of dry hops, this beer turned out to be absolutely crystal clear. To the point that I ended up texting pictures to people of text through the glass. Nothing darker than victory malt (around 8%) so it turned out a nice pale gold.  The head on this thing is just silly, persistent, meringue-like. 

Aroma - This smells great!  There's a citrus fruity floral thing with undertones of pine and danky funk that I can't help but ascribe to the Cascade and Chinook, respectively.  That said, one of the fruitiest hop notes I've ever gotten was from a 100% Chinook beer where the dry hops went in at high krausen, much like this beer. There's also a just-there bit of maltiness that I imagine comes from the biscuit and victory malts.

Mouthfeel and Flavor - Despite finishing dry (certainly dryer than Beersmith expected), this beer has a substantial mouthfeel. The first flavor on tasting is straight citrusy hops with a bracing bitterness. The bitterness is lingering and would be too much, except for a malty sweet backbone that doesn't quite balance it out, but makes it pleasant.  

Still life with microwave warranty through IPA.

Notes - A nicely-done, west-coast-style IPA in the mold of a lot of what we were (or at least I was) drinking ca. 2010, when the likes of Pliny and Firestone Walker filtered in to my consciousness. It finished super dry and clean, so it drinks very easy, which is a little scary at 6.8% abv. My only thought is that I might want to make it dryer and scarier with a touch of sugar to dry it out. The hop combo is classic early microbrew (in a good way). One thing I love about Chinook and Cascade is that you can make a beer with a ton of hops, and it doesn't cost a fortune. That said, it might be worth it to play around with varieties that have come out in the last 20 years (the Mrs., hophead that she is, is partial to Simcoe).

More considerations on Recipe Formulation

First-generation top-cropped Wyeast 1469.
This is about 8 ounces. So fresh and so clean!

In my last post on formulation, I gave a recipe for the next beer I'd planned, a standard-strength bitter that I was brewing, at least in part, to grow up some yeast. I'd ordered a 10 lb bag of Golden Promise, but that was going to make just too big a beer, both for what I wanted on tap and for the purpose of growing up a big batch of really healthy yeast without the need for a starter.

In the interim, I thought about the issue and did a little research. I saw that Amazon had a vacuum sealer on sale for less than $20, saw that at least one online homebrew retailer will sell you grain by the ounce and milled and packaged by recipe, and read an interesting Brulosophy experiment showing most folks can't tell whether beer is made from grain milled months before brewing (my own experience bears this out as well, as I restarted my recent brewing kick by using 2-year old milled malt to make a decent ESB).

So, I bought that vacuum sealer and made a lovely bitter at the gravity I wanted, for both chugging and yeast-farming reasons. I sealed up the spare grain in a bag and have ordered ingredients for the next five (free shipping, y'all!) batches, all with non-standard amounts of base malt. 

Lancaster County, PA

I recently spent a week up in Lancaster, County PA for my thirteenth anniversary, where the Mrs. and I managed a couple of pints. We stayed in a nice little B&B in Ephreta that had a small brewery attached, spent Saturday in Lititz before coming back to Ephreta for the evening, and then spent the morning and had lunch in Lancaster on Sunday before heading home to pick up the kids and rejoin the rat race.  Here's a quick review of the pubs and breweries, in order of the amount of time we spent in each (a rough proxy of quality).

Regulars at Black Forest. This was unexpected.

Black Forest Brewery
We got in to Ephreta just before closing time, so we slipped into the brewery attached to our B&B before checking in (the number one reason we spent so much time here). It's a super-cosy bar, supposedly modeled on a Bavarian hunting lodge, that always seemed to have a couple of regulars (good sign in my mind). While the I found the beer quality variable, I didn't mind too much given the convenience to our room and the fact that their best beers were some of our favorite styles. The Mrs. enjoyed their solid APA, while I enjoyed the excellent brown ale. A pint of each was a nice introduction to the property, and we went to bed early.  The next evening we were back and tried some more, including getting a tasting flight.  The very popular NEIPA wasn't bad. I thought the amber and kolsch were good, but not enough to forego getting the brown for my full pint after the flight. The standard IPA didn't have much going on (I'm guessing age or oxidation or both knocked out the aroma and flavor).

Honesty compels me to state that, at one point they put on an Octoberfest that was...well, something was wrong with that one. So, some good beer, some decent beer, some not-so-great beer, one dumpster fire, and a very excellent brown. There would be worse fates than to have this as your local.  You could pretend you were at a microbrewery in 2005 and enjoy the well-made beer while avoiding the bad ones, but you'd hope they'd get their quality control in hand before they went under. 

Bull's Head Public House

Like a moth to flame.

If I'd known about this place, I might have gone out of my way to spend so much of our only completely free day there. As it was, Providence ensured that we ended up doing just that. Super cozy with a legitimate pub setup, complete with separate rooms, from rough and ready at the bar, to chintz-and-carpet, to some place that focused on wine that I didn't mess with.  With all the tasting rooms stapled onto the side of industrial spaces these days, the atmosphere was strikingly pleasant. If I were in the area again, and wanted to stay in a smaller town, the attached General Sutton Hotel would be a top choice. Sure, it was contrived, but at some point if contrived is done well enough, it's just well done.

Amazing Cricket Hill APA in cask was the best pint of the trip. One of only a few Cask Marque pubs in the country (a visit here gets you 33% of Cask Marque pubs in the states, I think). Also had Timmermans Oud Gueze, which was perfectly kept, and a few tastes besides.

They have two casks and about a dozen rotating taps, organized by style. That's small for the amount of volume they are doing, so the kegs are fresh. They actually kicked a couple of kegs and changed the list while we were there on more than one of the taps, so I wonder if they weren't using sixtels for the less-popular styles to keep things from going stale. There's a wall of cicerone certs and the staff  is obsessed with beer. Amazing. Not joking, I signed up for a Yelp account to give them five stars. I found out when I looked them up to write this that I'm not the only one to think this.

Best, most-knowledgeable service of the trip. Wonder why?

Besides the beer, I had a solid helping of bangers and mash. The gravy was perfect, and the sausages were very well made, clearly not just some cheap sausages thrown on instant potatoes (not that I would turn my nose up at cheap sausages, but instant potatoes are the devil's work). My wife has several food allergies, and they went out of their way to find something that would work for her (turns out, pork pies are dairy and egg free). 

Simply amazing experience. My only complaint is that it's a 3-hour drive from my front door, so it'll have to be a seasonal experience.

Lancaster Brewing Company
So, peanut butter pale ale shouldn't taste good, right? Right? Why...what...why is this so good? The Shoofly Porter (presumably that buttery taste was molasses, as in the classic Shoofly Pie) was also...damn it all...excellent. If you don't spend your time wallowing in the homebrew-style experimental beers that are so well-balanced they make you question your otherwise firmly-held prejudices, you can also enjoy some quality American bar food and more-classic styles. Oh, and unless you specify something smaller, you're getting a 20 ounce Imperial Pint, like the good Lord intended.

I sorely wish I'd had a full day to spend here.  This was the last place we hit, and I was surprised to find Lancaster to be city-like, rather than small town, and I wished we'd had more time to explore. If I were to visit the area again and wanted a city vibe, a hotel nearby would be in top contention. Google maps tells me there are a number of smaller breweries that appear to all be in walking distance of downtown....hmmmmm.

St. Boniface.
So, a number of folks recommended this brewery in Ephreta, but I'm not going to. I enjoyed the Wynfred, a very tasty dark mild clocking in at 3.2% abv that's a year-round offering. So many more places need to have a well-done, roasty sub-4% crusher on hand at all times that I want to say "go there," but the spot just lacks charm.  Packed to the gills tasting room in an industrial spot, one cashier, no table service. The big pretzels were good, too. Shame. Didn't stick around for any more beer, but I hear they're quite good. To be fair, we were coming back from the Bulls Head, so the difference was shocking and I was on an anniversary trip where ambiance mattered. Romance is important, damn it. If it were more comfortable, I'd have stuck around, as the beer was good. Instead, I sucked back my Wynfred and shoveled in the pretzels as fast as possible and went back to the Black Forest to drink more of their brown and American Pale in comfort.

JoBoys
Whoa boy. Service here was ... not great. I walked up to the bar after seeing they had a cask of dark mild, and the bartender's response was "want to try it? I don't know what that is." What it was was completely flat. I don't mean American-who-expects-keg-beer-and-thinks-cask-beer-is-flat-flat. I mean completely still.  It's a shame, as I could tell the beer had promise, otherwise. After that, I got taster portions of the stout (thin and tart), porter (meh), and baltic porter (also thin...overcarbonated and cold, but also just not that well done). I'm glad I didn't try the barbecue, because there are only so many traditions a man can see butchered in one, 20-minute sitting. The only good thing about this place was that my lovely wife suggested we go to that pub with the Bull's Head sign down the way afterwards. 

Considerations on Recipe Formulation: House Bitter

The beers I brew the most are English Bitters. Looking back, I summed up my feelings about these beers in an earlier post:

To me, English pales (or British bitters, whatever) are the platonic ideal of beer.  This is my white-can-with-the-word-beer-stenciled-in-black-spray-paint beer, the beer that weaned me off the macro-lagers of my misbegotten youth, the house beer at my house beer.  There's not much better—doesn't matter if it's hot, cold, wet, dry, with food, or just a lonely pint—than an easy-drinking, well-balanced English Pale (although its Irish, Scots, and American cousins all come pretty darned close).

Platonic ideal.  As such, I've played around with my house bitter a lot. I've enjoyed the more-complicated recipes, such as the one in Jamil Z's classic styles book, but not as much as simpler recipes: base malt, crystal malt, nice hops, nice yeast. Real talk: I don't think I like the flavor of special roast. I think I like a beer that tastes like the one (good) malt and, often, the one hop and the one yeast. I'm intrigued by Rob Pattinson's recipes--especially that 1945 Tetley's bitter recipe--and I appreciate that some sugar can keep thinks drinkable, but I really can't be bothered to make invert no. 2 at the moment (it's totally on the list--maybe when it's hot out again). As much as I enjoy getting deep into the process, part of the joy of a bitter is that it can be as simple to brew as it is to drink.

Now that I no longer live around the corner from an excellent, or any, homebrew shop, I also need to take provisioning into consideration.  MoreBeer sells 10 pound sacks of pre-crushed base malts with free shipping, including Golden Promise and Maris Otter.  They also sell one-pound packs of EKG, Fuggles, and Willamette pellets and one-pound packs of pre-crushed UK crystal malts.  And the ingredients for four batches are generally enough to carry you across the free-shipping line.  So, I tend to brew all beers with about 10 pounds of base malt and 4 oz of crystal and 2-4 oz of hops--on my systems, that's generally right at the line of a big best bitter, or smallish ESB, which is just fine by me. I'm also fine with this method of determining my OG--who wants to have an odd bit of grain in a bag going slack, when they could just have a bigger beer?  I know for a fact that a number of great breweries never vary from 55 lb increments for the same reason. Given this situation, I know it makes sense to get a mill and start buying sacks (and that's in the plans) but for now it works.

With no LHBS, I've also been relying on dry yeast, like S04, but it's not my favorite. In fact, I prefer US-05, even in an "English"beer, as there's just something about S04 that I don't like. But now it's winter, when yeasts can better survive their travels through the mails, so I can start using liquid yeasts  again, and this year I'm planning to re-pitch more from prior batches (and maybe even do some yeast banking). I want to have my favorites on hand, and I'm deeply intrigued by the idea of brewing an English-style pale with some of these Norweigian Kveik strains during the warm, summer months.  For the moment, I've got a smack-pack of Wyeast 1469, their excellent Timothy Taylor strain that I've really enjoyed in the past (so long as there's enough head space in your fermenter).

So there it is. My ode to a subsistence brewer. My next beer. A recipe based at least as much on household economy (if not laziness) as on any notion of what the beer should be: 10 lbs of Golden Promise. 4 oz of Baird's dark crystal. Two or three boil additions of EKG. Pitch the smack pack, and accept that it's underpitching for the sake of using the cake going forward for the next three batches. I'm expecting Boltmaker writ large.

And it will be beer. 

Tasting the Ryed Irish Stout

Goodness, but I do love a good stout. I like them intense and heavy and sweet and even barrel-aged as much as anyone does, but I LOVE them dry and roasty and sessionable.  

A few weeks ago, I brewed what will probably be my last BIAB batch for a while, using a recipe for a Ryed Irish Stout adapted from Michael Dawson's Mashmaker book. It's a fun book, and Dawson has given a lot to us for free over the years, so get the book for the details and some decent writing (this fanboy got the signed copy!).  But, it's not giving away too much to say that the recipe is a classic dry Irish stout with flaked rye subbed in for the flaked barley (my percentages worked out to about 70% MCI Stout Malt, 20% Flaked Rye, and 10% Roasted Barley,  aiming for 1.044 OG, bittered to about 40 IBU with a single charge of East Kent Goldings, and pitched some rehydrated US-05 fermented at the cooler end of its range). 

Still life with stout on
Scandinavian-Themed Countertop.

Appearance - Black. Opaque. Like one of the more-famous marks for the style, you can tell in a strong light at the edges of the glass that it's actually a sort of intense reddish brown, but anything more than a quarter inch, it's black.  The head on this thing is also silly, with a thick beta-glucan-inspired meringue that reminds me of the ice-cream-and-soda foam on top of a rootbeer float.  

Aroma - It's got a nice clean, beery aroma that...wait, what is that? Just at the edge of perception, there's just the barest hint of that elusive-but-unmistakeable rye aroma (can something be elusive and unmistakable? Is that a thing? Is this beer gaslighting me?).  Once it warms up, the smell is definitely there, but still hard for me to describe, like an earthy, well-baked loaf of bread.  

Mouthfeel and Flavor - When straight out of the tap (where I've got the pressure too high and the temperature too low), this is pleasantly dry and roasty, with just the barest hint that something is different from the standard Guinness clone.  When it warms up  and the carbonation has dissipated, the slick, smooth mouthfeel from all that flaked rye really comes through, and the roast becomes a little less coffee and more chocolate.  Oh, and you really start to get the rye flavor. How do you describe rye in a beer?  I've heard "spicy" but to me it's earthy, tending to almost herbal.  Definitely reminds me of bread I've made with a lot of rye, but also with a flavor that reminds me of both mint and wintergreen, but without really being minty, if that makes sense. I guess it tastes like rye?  It's been years since my last rye stout, and I don't have the best palate, but the flavor was immediately familiar.  

Notes - Love this, especially when I manage to serve it at decent cellar temps, where it comes out chocolately and earthy and complex, with a satisfying creamy mouthfeel, but still dry enough to put down quite a few pints in a sitting. I like how the US-05 let the malt come through on its own terms, but in future I would definitely consider a more expressive yeast. While I'm at it, perhaps a more-complex malt bill and hopping schedule...but would it really be a dry Irish stout at that point?

Brewing Broke Okra APA...er...IPA?

I brewed the first batch of beer on my new cooler MLT, and it was a complete joy.  Batch sparging came back to me like riding a bicycle (a bit wobbly, but got there!), and I believe my efficiency woes may be over.  While my plan was to brew an American pale ale, based on an expected efficiency of around 65%, I ended up well in IPA range with 74% efficiency. The upshot is that my 1.056 APA ended up being a 1.063 IPA. Honestly, I don't think the beer will be so very different, as it was a bit strong for an APA and it's low to middlin' for an IPA, but I'm thrilled that it's once again a snap to get my extract.

Used the stove for my strike water to save on propane. 

One thing I used to hate about batch sparging before was cleaning the mash tun, but that was for 10-gallon batches.  The grist for a 5-gallon batch isn't that heavy. I even moved it around during the mash without much trouble. Dumping the spent grain on the compost heap and spraying it out took less than 5 minutes.

Now, there may be a few other explanations for this high efficiency.  One is that I used double-milled grain meant for a BIAB batch, so I may not be able to expect above 70% with regular milled grain.  That would be fine, as I had a bit of a slow, if not quite stuck, sparge.  Two is that this recipe is for a very pale beer, and the only pale beer I made using the BIAB setup had a similar efficiency.  My water is very soft, so this may be a chemistry issue.  I'm looking forward to brewing a few more times to see if I can get a predictable efficiency from this system.

This is also my first time using a hop stand.  Most of the hops went in at flameout, and then I let them sit for 30 minutes without chilling.  I'm hoping I got some bitterness and good aroma out of that addition, or this may be a fairly boring beer.

UPDATE: I went ahead and dry hopped this with 2 ounces each of Cascade and Chinook. It turned out lovely. Recipe below. Tasting notes here.

BeerSmith 2 Recipe Printout - http://www.beersmith.com
Recipe: Broke Okra APA...er...IPA
Brewer: V.A. Dongarra
Asst Brewer:
Style: American IPA
TYPE: All Grain
Taste: (30.0)

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Boil Size: 7.77 gal
Post Boil Volume: 6.77 gal
Batch Size (fermenter): 5.50 gal 
Bottling Volume: 5.00 gal
Estimated OG: 1.062 SG
Estimated Color: 6.5 SRM
Estimated IBU: 51.3 IBUs
Brewhouse Efficiency: 73.00 %
Est Mash Efficiency: 86.3 %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
Amt                   Name                                     Type          #        %/IBU       
5.00 g               Gypsum (Calcium Sulfate)     
2.00 g               Calcium Chloride           
11 lbs               Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM)            Grain         4        84.6 %     
1 lbs                 Munich Malt (9.0 SRM)                           Grain         5        7.7 %       
1 lbs                 Victory Malt (25.0 SRM)                         Grain         6        7.7 %       
14 g                  Cascade [5.50 %] - Boil 60.0 min            Hop           7        10.3 IBUs   
14 g                  Chinook [11.60 %] - Boil 60.0 min          Hop           8        21.7 IBUs   
0.50 Items        Whirlfloc Tablet (Boil 15.0 mins)            Fining        9        -           
43 g                  Cascade [5.50 %] - Boil 10.0 min            Hop           10       6.2 IBUs   
43 g                  Chinook [11.60 %] - Boil 10.0 min          Hop           11       13.0 IBUs   
1.0 pkg             Safale American  (DCL/Fermentis #US-05)  Yeast         12       -           
56 g                  Cascade [5.50 %] - Dry Hop 7 Days        Hop           13       0.0 IBUs   
56 g                  Chinook [13.00 %] - Dry Hop 7 Days     Hop           14       0.0 IBUs   


Mash Schedule: Single Infusion, Medium Body, Batch Sparge
Total Grain Weight: 13 lbs
----------------------------
Name              Description                             Step Temperat Step Time   
Mash In           Add 4.6 gal of water at 162.4 F         152.0 F       60 min     

Sparge: Batch sparge with 2 steps (1.13gal, 4.14gal) of 168.0 F water
Notes:
------
Decided to move all of the late hops to the end for a hop stand.  Just to see.  Dropped in everything but the first addition at flameout, propped the lid on-ish (tilted up to let steam out and bugs in, I guess, and set a timer for 25 minutes to see how this works. Stirred once about half way through to get a whirlpool rolling.

Used double crushed grain meant for BIAB in my new cooler MLT.  First runnings were 4 gallons of 1.070. Second runnings were 3.5 gallons of 1.030.  Ended up getting 1.046 starting runnings, which was about what my OG was supposed to be.  Calculated at 65%, but got around 73% efficiency.  Just going to go from calling it an APA and call it an IPA.  Hope there are enough hops in there!

Dry hopped onto a gigantic, clean looking krausen at 4 days into fermentation.  Left it for the remaining time. Cold crashed after 12 days, kegged right at two weeks from brew day.

Fined with 1/2 tsp of gelatin, came out crystal, read-the-paper-though-it clear.

Created with BeerSmith 2 - http://www.beersmith.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

New MLT build

I've gone ahead and built my new mash/lauter tun.  The first one that I ever built was made from a 48-quart cooler with the flag of the Republic of Texas on the side. For some reason, potentially government subsidies, the cooler with the flag was cheaper in the Plano Walmart than the plain cooler.  It was a good size for a 5-gallon batch, but it didn't hold temperatures that well. When I sized up to a 10-gallon setup, I went with a 70-Quart Coleman Xtreme. This did a great job of holding temperatures, but it was a great, unwieldy beast. Both found homes in the Richmond homebrew scene when I moved back to the Eastern Shore a couple of years ago.

With ingredients for a 5-gallon APA.
NASCAR-style stickers courtesy of Chop & Brew.

Happily, I found a 52-quart Coleman Xtreme on Amazon.  You can see it with a sack of grain for a 5-gallon batch of APA for scale. The cooler is pretty bulky because of all the insulation in the walls, but it's nicely sized. I used to dread the need to move the 70-quart model, especially to empty the spent grain from a 10-gallon batch of high gravity beer.  I expect this version to be easier on my back.

As for details of the build, it's essentially the same MLT build you can find all over the internet, I believe originally popularized by Denny Conn during the great batch-sparge revolution of the early Oughts, and which I originally found on Don Osborne's page.  If you want a detailed build plan with a parts list and step-by-step instructions, check out this Brulosophy post.

Fiddly Bits

I went with brass fittings that I picked up from Lowe's, along with some random plumbing parts I've had laying about from brewing and general home-ownership (why are there always extra parts?). One thing I liked about the Brulosphy build was putting a weight at the end of the stainless steel braid.  I'm not sure it if matters for sparging, but that thing does get in the way when it floats about.  I clamped part of an old brass compression fitting I had laying around to the end of mine.

Action End

The other thing I really like about the Brulosophy build is the use of washers to take up space between the fittings and the side walls.  My first build had the fittings directly up against the cooler with only an o-ring in between.  turning the valve on and off caused significant flex in the cooler as the valve structure would push against the plastic. The big washers spread the torque out over a wider area, and it feels less like turning a valve will pull the entire structure out from the wall.  Using a thick-walled cooler also helps here.

Perhaps unwisely, I plan to have the first run of this cooler using grain I had double milled for the BIAB setup.  I'm a bit worried that the finer crush will end up in a stuck sparge, but if worse comes to worse, the grist is small enough that I'll be able to pour the entire thing into the brew bag. Yet another benefit of the smaller brew length.

2018 Easton Beer Festival

I spent a couple of hours yesterday at the 2018 Easton Beer Festival, where I had the opportunity to taste beers from breweries from the Mid-Atlantic, mostly from Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland, but all within a half day's drive.

My goal was to leave in a reasonable state of mind and to be able to enjoy today, so I had a lot of half pours in my tiny tasting glass, poured quite a bit out into the buckets that were all over the venue, and skipped anything I could get fresh and local (so, I didn't try the offerings from the two excellent breweries one-town-over from my house, RAR and Eastern Shore Brewing--I'll see those guys in their tasting rooms with full pints, thanks).

Beer Fest Selfie

I didn't get to try everything, but there were a few standouts.

EVO had their always-excellent Lot 3 IPA in cask and dry hopped with Citra. As far as I'm concerned, this beer was best in show. EVO must spend a lot of time paying attention to their packaging, because it's always on point, and this was just super fresh and delicious.  Dry, clean, bitter and incredibly aromatic.  Just lovely.  Their Day Crush Session Sour was also good.

Cult Classic is the newest brewery in my neck of the woods, and just a bit too far for an easy drive, so I haven't had a chance to check them out.  They brought a perfectly crafted Munich-style helles lager that made me wish I were in a bier garden. Clean, fresh malt, with the barest hint of hops to balance it out. The perfect palate cleanser between the more extreme offerings at most other booths. My only complaints were that it should have come in liters and been offered with soft pretzels and bratwurst. They also brought a very well-made Irish red.

Stone. Here's the thing. I love a small brewery and the exiting stuff that comes out of so many of them. But there's something to be said for 20 years of experience in the craft, and the Stone Totalitarian Imperial Russian Stout was just. on. point.  10.6% abv, but not in the least bit hot. Cocoa and coffee, rich but terrifyingly quaffable, deep dark fruits. Just excellent.  Bonus that I got to chat with the guy about what a great town Richmond is. Shame we moved right before they opened.

Monument City Brewing brought the second best cask I had in the form of their 51 Rye, dry hopped and with orange in the cask.  I'm not usually a fruited IPA guy, but this was on point. The bitter peel from the orange melded perfectly with the fruity hops to the point where you'd just ask "does this have oranges in it?" I AM a cask guy, and the pin was on point with the perfect carbonation and cellar temp (not bad for just sitting out...I must have gotten there at the right time).

Reading the above, it's clear I'm a crotchety old man. I tried the occasional NEIPA and kettle sour, but they didn't really blow my skirt up. Not that I don't love IPAs made with expressive yeasts or sour beers...I'm just less excited by the beers riding those trends. I prefer a bracing bitterness in an IPA and a bit more complexity in a sour than is typical right now.  But I'm still very excited by cask beer and crazy stouts, which were the exciting new trend...well...I don't remember, but I'm sure they were at some point.

Another thing I noticed in trying some beers is how very different some beers are on tap from when I've had them in the can or bottle. You expect the freshest keg at a festival, but some of these beers are completely different animals. One english-style beer that shall remain un-named, in particular, read as having a ton of caramel and a heavy, over-sweet character in the can, but was fresher, dryer and brighter at the festival with a notable hop bite. My thought in trying the beer in cans a few weeks ago was that it was heavily oxidized (and only really good for braising beans) and this confirmed it. I hadn't planned to ever drink that beer again, based on my poor experience of the packaged product, and only got a sample to confirm. I see how much of a shame that is based on the fresh product.

There's a lot talk about how we've got nearly 7,000 breweries today, that it's a bubble, and that we're going to see a shakeout like the great brew-pub purge of the late 90s.  I hope it's not as bad as all that, but I have to say that some of these folks need to get their packaging ducks in a row if they want to compete against the breweries noted above, which can provide me a similar beer whether I get it fresh at a festival or in a can off the shelf. Now get off my lawn. 

UPDATE/CONFIRMATION: A Double IPA won best of show. I...didn't try any double IPAs.

Sensory Evaluation Session: Off Flavors

As much as I really enjoy living in my little town on the Eastern Shore, I do miss the beer culture of a city. It's not that there aren't great cities with great beer cultures nearby, but most of the things I'm interested in--mostly homebrewing club meetings, seem to take place on a weekday night when a three hour round trip won't really work for me.  So I was THRILLED when I saw a guy post a sensory evaluation session on a WEEKEND when I didn't have any real plans. I dropped the guy a line a few weeks ahead of time, got a seat, and was ready for a road trip today.

If you're not familiar with a sensory evaluation, it's a bit of a tune up for your palate. When you taste a beer, it's almost always an amalgam of flavors, yeast, hops, malt, process all mixed up and hard to untangle. So a sensory evaluation is a series of concentrated flavors added to nearly-flavorless beer (miller high life light, in this case) that highlights the flavor in question. You get the flavor by itself, in isolation, and writ very large. That way, you're better able to recognize the flavor in a more complex beer. It's a bit like hearing a symphony and being told there's a oboe involved, but you don't know what an oboe is so you can't pick it out. But then you hear the oboe solo, and you can't help but hear the oboe for the rest of the piece.  It's been more than six years since I've done a sensory evaluation, so it was about time for a tune-up. 

Unfortunately, it's especially useful for off-flavors...flavors that aren't supposed to be in the beer in the first place, often because they are awful. Some of those flavors are appropriate in some beers, but some are inappropriate in any situation except black-site interrogations that shouldn't be allowed at all.

Being a huge dork, I brought a notebook, and thought I'd expand on the entries while it's still fresh.  One interesting thing to me is that some flavors are highly objectionable to some people, while other people barely notice it, or even enjoy it.

Grainy - This is essentially excess tannins, usually from oversparging.  There's not really an aroma, or even a flavor, component to this, but you do end up with the drying sensation you get from overbrewed tea on your tongue and the inside of your cheeks. I have definitely had this in a few beers, most notably in some beers I've made with second runnings off the mash from a high-gravity beer.  I remember this over-brewed tea character made those beers seem drier than they would have been, and thinking it wasn't totally unpleasant.  This was very different from my reaction to....

Papery - This is the wet-cardboard flavor from an oxidized/stale beer.  For me, nothing was worse than this flavor. According to our flavor guide, this was supposed to be similar to grainy, but I had diametrically-opposed reactions.  My stomach did a backflip just smelling this one, something that didn't even happen for the infamous baby-vomit (see below).

Earthy - You ever get some garden soil in your mouth? That's pretty much what this tasted like.  No real aroma here, but the flavor is soil, worm castings, beets, fresh bag of compost, etc.  I can see this being an attribute to some beer, but not at this concentration. Usually the result of overly mineral brewing water.

Metallic - About what it sounds like and usually resulting from too much iron in your water, not passivating your stainless brewing gear, and other situations where you've basically managed to get rust in your beer.  On tasting, my thought was to decide whether this reminded me more of drinking blood or licking a nail...not my favorite flavor.

Lactic Acid  - This was pretty straight forward. Lactic acid is produced by a number  of bacteria, known as LAB (get it?) and, interestingly, by certain yeast strains (previously a controversial statement, but now pretty much confirmed?).  In any event, at first it's not bad--like lemon juice, but there's a sour milk flavor that I find really unpleasant in this situation. That's interesting to me because 1) I actually like a number of beers produced with LAB and 2) I drink buttermilk straight.  Clearly, I don't usually mind lactic acid, but there was an afternote here that turned my stomach.

Acetaldehyde - The classic "green" beer, apple jolly rancher flavor of a fermentation that hasn't been allowed to complete and/or stressed yeast.  I feel like I taste this in Budweiser. Not the most objectionable flavor here, but unpleasant and, apparently, a potent carcinogen.  Wish I'd heard that last bit before drinking most of my sample.

Dimethyl Sulfide (DMS) - The product of beers made from low-kilned malt that have either 1) not been boiled properly or 2) not been cooled quickly enough.  Lots has been written about how it's produced and how to avoid it, but the interesting thing to me is that I don't experience the creamed/canned corn flavor that a lot of folks got. To me, it tasted like the air in a house where cabbage was cooked the day before, or a beer made with a portion of water from cooked cabbage. 

Diacetyl - Accent on the "ass." This is the buttery compound that's important, in small amounts, to some style, but was extremely unpleasant at this concentration.  Several yeasts/processes result in the yeast dropping out before they can process this, and so the way to cure is to raise the temperature at the end of such fermentations for a few days to keep the yeast active until the beer is clear.  At one point, early in my brewing career, I was in the habit of brewing stouts and porters without this step, and I actually enjoy a bit of buttery in the nose. But, again, it wasn't fun at this concentration.

Combined lactic acid with Diacetyl  - I think of this flavor as "there's nothing wrong with our tap lines, dude."  Gross. 

Spicy - This was a subtle, palate cleanser of a flavor. Described as clovey, I thought of it as one of the main components of some saison yeasts. This is definitely one of those off-flavor-in-some-but-not-in-others flavors. Things got worse from here.

Cheesy - This is the flavor of old, degraded hops.  Smelled like a ripe cheese.  Not the end of the world on a cracker, but unpleasant in Miller High Life.

Light Struck - Skunk. And strong, too.  This is the reason beer bottles are brown (or should be). But, it's also the flavor a hoppy lager gets pretty much the moment you take it out to sit in a sunny biergarden (or your back yard).  This one is bad in a beer out of the tap, but I can't help but have positive feelings about it, as it reminds me so much of days when I had the time and money to hang out in the sun with a beer.

Butyric Acid - Awful.  Baby vomit. Breast milk, digested for 20 minutes, and then projectile-vomited across the room by an infant with a fever.  Enteric bacteria, inappropriate in most styles, but an important precursor compound to some fruity esters in lambics, apparently. You learn something every day.  Only Papery was worse than this, though.

Mercaptan - Another infection flavor. This one smells like the end of a shift working at a dive bar as a prep cook. The smell of trash liners and the juice at the bottom of the cans.  Still not as bad as baby vomit or Papery, but pretty bad. 

I'll be derned

Looks like my old beer blog is still out there.

I've imported those old posts, although I'll need to update the links at some point.

Playing with Beersmith: House APA

I'm playing around with the ability to share recipes from Beersmith (2.0...haven't upgraded to the new version).

Here's what's on deck for the next brew day. Mostly. I'll probably fool around with it a bit and move all but the bittering charge to a post-boil hop stand.  In any event, not thrilled with that ingredient-table formatting, but life is short.  

BeerSmith 2 Recipe Printout - http://www.beersmith.com

Recipe: House Pale Ale (1.1)

Brewer: Ekspert Amator

Asst Brewer: 

Style: American Pale Ale

TYPE: All Grain

Taste: (30.0) 

Recipe Specifications

--------------------------

Boil Size: 7.77 gal

Post Boil Volume: 6.77 gal

Batch Size (fermenter): 5.50 gal   

Bottling Volume: 5.00 gal

Estimated OG: 1.051 SG

Estimated Color: 6.5 SRM

Estimated IBU: 44.4 IBUs

Brewhouse Efficiency: 60.00 %

Est Mash Efficiency: 70.9 %

Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients:

------------

Amt                   Name                                     Type          #        %/IBU         

5.00 g                Gypsum (Calcium Sulfate) (Mash 60.0 mins Water Agent   1        -             

2.00 g                Calcium Chloride (Mash 60.0 mins)        Water Agent   2        -             

0.55 Items            Camden Tablet (Mash 60.0 mins)           Water Agent   3        -             

11 lbs                Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM)           Grain         4        84.6 %        

1 lbs                 Munich Malt (9.0 SRM)                    Grain         5        7.7 %         

1 lbs                 Victory Malt (25.0 SRM)                  Grain         6        7.7 %         

14 g                  Cascade [5.50 %] - Boil 60.0 min         Hop           7        10.4 IBUs     

14 g                  Chinook [13.00 %] - Boil 60.0 min        Hop           8        24.6 IBUs     

0.50 Items            Whirlfloc Tablet (Boil 15.0 mins)        Fining        9        -             

14 g                  Cascade [5.50 %] - Boil 15.0 min         Hop           10       2.8 IBUs      

14 g                  Chinook [13.00 %] - Boil 15.0 min        Hop           11       6.6 IBUs      

28 g                  Cascade [5.50 %] - Boil 0.0 min          Hop           12       0.0 IBUs      

28 g                  Chinook [13.00 %] - Boil 0.0 min         Hop           13       0.0 IBUs      

1.0 pkg               Safale American  (DCL/Fermentis #US-05)  Yeast         14       -             

Mash Schedule: BIAB, Light Body

Total Grain Weight: 13 lbs

----------------------------

Name              Description                             Step Temperat Step Time     

Saccharification  Add 8.7 gal of water at 154.6 F         147.9 F       90 min        

Mash Out          Heat to 168.0 F over 7 min              168.0 F       10 min        

Sparge: If steeping, remove grains, and prepare to boil wort

Notes:

------

Created with BeerSmith 2 - http://www.beersmith.com

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Update on the Sessionfest

Clean beer, dirty glass. 

So, this beer didn't turn out too bad.  This was meant to be an Oktoberfest but, due to a failure to properly measure volumes, I ended up brewing approximately 8 gallons of beer with ingredients meant for 5 gallons.  As a result, I ended up with a 3.5% festbier, a session-strength marzen if you will.

It's actually not that bad.  In fact, it's excellent and I'd be thrilled to have brewed it if this was the style I was aiming for.  It's also an amazing proof of concept beer, as it's the first lager I've ever made, and I did it using somewhat quick-production techniques, and using a dry yeast (34/70, the Weihenstephan lager strain).

One thing I'd like this blog to be is a tasting/brewing log.  I've got a fair number of notes in Beersmith and one or two composition books (including one with notes back to 2004!), but I'd like to do a better job of tracking my beer or my brewing over time.

It turned out pretty amazing for something I wasn't trying to brew.

Appearance - Delightfully clear. If it weren't such a deep amber color, it would be pretty easy to read a paper through this (I may need to work on my photography, as that's not showing in the picture here).  Pours with a thick, off-white head that sticks around (at least in a clean glass), and leaves nice lacing down the glass as you drink it.

Aroma - Very clean, lager-like aroma, with a touch of yeasty, maybe apple aroma that may be the slightest touch of acetaldehyde, but it's hard to tell. .

Taste - Again, quite clean, very malty, just bitter enough to balance the malt and with no appreciable hop character (unless you take it into the sun, in which case you get the classic green-bottle, sun-struck taste pretty quickly--not going to lie, I kind of like that flavor when it's fresh and limited). The slight yeasty flavor is at the back, and with the malt gives this just a hint of fresh dough. The munich malt comes through on the aftertaste with flavors like dark toast.

Mouthfeel - Nice and full when properly carbonated. I let it get a bit too spritzy at one point, and it thinned out and became surprisingly tannic and drying, with the hop bitterness coming through more.  It's nicer at a lower carbonation level, when it smooths out and has a surprisingly satisfying mouthfeel.

Notes - Overall, I'm as pleased as I could be for what amounts to a mistake. If I were aiming for a sessionable amber lager, I think there is room for improvement. I purposely left out any flavor or aroma additions when I was aiming for an oktoberfest, but as a sessionfest I think this would be better a bit more bitter and with some subtle noble hop character. I might also focus on getting a bit more dry, perhaps by adding more gypsum (there's a fair amount of calcium chloride in the brewing liquor this time). While I'm thrilled with it as a first attempt, the full mouthfeel (and finishing gravity) for such a small beer, coupled with the yeasty, just-ever-so-slightly apple flavor, makes me think the yeast may have dropped out too early.

More efficiency navel-gazing

Two weekends ago, I brewed again on the old BIAB setup with a few changes to see if I could brew predictably.

I started with a recipe from Michael Dawson's excellent book Mashmaker (signed copy not required, but highly recommended...it doesn't cost any more!) for a Ryed Irish Stout. It's a classic dry Irish Stout with the flaked barley replaced with flaked rye. The resulting brew day is pretty amazing on the aromatic front. 

The changes I made included actually measuring my volumes (nice), and aiming for 60% efficiency on a smaller (5.5 gallons vs. 6 gallons into the fermentor) batch, as well as a number of other extract-centered tricks I had up my sleeve.  

The good news is that I totally hit my numbers. The bad news is that it required using a famously-high-extract malt, a 90-minute mash with a mash out step, and a partial sparge step wherein I moved the back to another kettle with a colander inside.  I also had to bring the mash back up to temp at about 40 minutes. 

While I would be happy with the 62.4% efficiency I measured on this brew day, the whole point of BIAB simplicity is defeated when you have to have a second vessel for sparging and spend significant portions of the brew day raising the temp and stirring constantly to avoid melting the bag.  I'm definitely switching back to a cooler MLT. In my last cooler MLT setup, I routinely hit 70% batch sparging and never lost more than 5 degrees over an hour (and that outside in winter).  Raising the temp is as easy as adding boiling water or pulling a decoction (which, really, is easy on a homebrew scale). As a bonus, I never had to pull the entire dripping, 170 degree grain bill out of a kettle and cover my arms in near-boiling wort. 

I am looking forward to this beer, though.  

A Follow Up on Efficiency

Following up on my last post, some new kegs arrived yesterday, so I spent my evening doing some housecleaning, including kegging up my Oktoberfest.  Welp, in addition to the nearly 2 gallons of wort I had left in the kettle, I ended up with nearly a gallon after topping up the keg! In summary, watered a recipe aiming to make 5 gallons of beer down to nearly 8. Based on the gravity measurements, the beer I made is approximately 3.5% abv, so I'm calling it a Sessionfest. Although it tastes amazing, I would have preferred to make the beer I was aiming for.

May be time to put the old girl out to pasture.

I'm a little concerned about the finishing gravity of 1.012. I would have been happy at that FG if I'd hit my original gravity, but that seems high in such a small beer.  I'm pleased to have it on one level, because the beer is not watery. But I'd like to make sure I'm doing my part to give the yeast a fermentable wort, as I generally prefer a dry finish.

This leads me to another thread in my investigation into efficiency, with is temperature control during the mash.  I've been using the thermometer on my kettle, which I long ago melted during a vigorous boil. It's also cracked and dented and has a very short probe, so I'm thinking I'll retire it, and stick with a handheld instant read (which I'll need if/when I switch back to a cooler MLT anyway. I'd love to have one of those fancy, $100 thermapens, but that's awfully hard to justify in a world where I can pick up a pretty decent instant-read thermometer for $10. After reading this review, I picked up a Lavatools Javelin for around $25. I like the idea of something that has 90% of the functionality at 25% of the cost. In any event, it's a lot nicer than the $5 meat thermometer that I used to use, which worked perfectly well excepting that it would literally fall apart if you held it too tightly.

UPDATE 9/25/2018: There's nothing wrong with either thermometer. Despite being melted and cracked, the kettle thermometer gave me the same temps as my new Javelin (to the extent you can read it through the scorched, crazed, and bubble-filled melted plastic lens).  Given how hard it is to read the kettle thermometer, I ended up using the handheld more often. 

How do it know?

"How do it know?"

Beats eyeballing it.

A great question, asked often by, between, and amongst my in-laws, usually in response to some amazing mechanism or process with good results. I can't tell if these normally grammatical folks are making fun of their shore-born ancestors or reveling in a shared wonder with their roots.

But for me, I'm asking the question to make a point, mostly to myself, about some of my assumptions. In my last post, I bemoaned my poor efficiency in brewing lately. But even while doing so, I understood that I was making an error.

You see, I have assumed that my efficiency has been in the low 50% range, but I don't really know. That's because I haven't really had a way of measuring out strike water. I got really good at eyeballing strike water in my old system, such that I managed to hit my original gravities and in-the-fermentor volumes, but that skill has left me as I've adopted my new BIAB regime. I've tried using a bucket with gallon marks, but it's become very clear indeed that the marks on that bucket are more guidelines than accurate representations of the amount of water in the bucket. As a result, in the last two batches alone, I've ended up both with an extra two gallons (I think. probably. It looked about like two gallons) of wort after overfilling my fermenter (no wonder my gravity was a bit low) AND having a batch that put only about 4 gallons (again, probably) of beer into the fermenter.

High-tech acid-etching kit. 

Clearly, I'm not doing a great job of measuring my strike water.  It's entirely possible, at least in that batch of watered down...well...I guess it's a session-strength Oktoberfest now...that I got amazing efficiency, but just made too much beer with too little grain.

To combat this, I've acid etched the inside of my brew kettle.  This was a cool process that involved weighing out gallons of water, marking off the top of each gallon (15 times), and then using the magic of chemistry to dissolve just enough surface steel to make a pretty mark. It's not as nice as some I've seen, but I am more than pleased with the result.

Generally, volumetric marks etched on the inside of a kettle is a pretty high-end feature, so I'm especially pleased given that I did this with some electrical tape, q-tips, a 9-volt battery, and a bowl of salted vinegar. I found the technique in an online forum, where I was searching for some alternative to the stick-with-gallon-marks-cut-in-the-side method, which works for plenty of folks, but lacks the Mr. Wizard joy of inhaling vaporized chromium (probably not enough to be a problem, right?).

System choices

Right now, I'm brewing beer via BIAB (that's "brew in a bag") mashing in a 15-gallon kettle. I'm doing 5 gallon batches and there isn't much that's ideal about the system except that BIAB is much, much (much) easier to clean up than having a dedicated mash/lauter tun (that's an MLT, btw).  The kettle is a holdover from a larger system I used to brew 10-12 gallon batches, but most of that system is gone (given away before a big move) and it was actually a bit broader and shorter than was ideal, even for a 10-gallon batch, so it's positively wide for a 5-gallon batch. Not the end of the world, but I end up with higher boil-off rates than are ideal, and I've had one or two beers with what seem like excessive melanoidin (burned toast) character that may not entirely be the result of the grain bill.

I'm very excited to be making beer again, and I've fallen in love with the time efficiency of a 5-gallon BIAB batch. That said, I've not been thrilled with the low efficiencies (low 50%ish) I've gotten doing BIAB batches, so I'd like to move back to having an MLT, and batch sparging. I get that a lot of people like mashing in a kettle so they can goose the temps, but in my experience with a cooler-based MLT (using one of those fancy keeps-ice-for-five-days coolers), losing temp was never an issue in the first place. Step mashing is fun in a kettle-based MLT, but why not go full-German and do a decoction if you want to step mash?

So, I'm at a crossroads where I want to expand back into multi-vessel brewing, but I'm not sure where to go.  Do I double down on BIAB by getting a grain mill and a nicer bag, spending my energy on chasing down efficiency with tighter milling and control?  Do I go back to a variation on my old system, but with a smaller cooler, given that I plan to stick with 5-gallon batches?  Use my current kettle as the hot liquor tank on a full-on three-vessel system? Do I stick with only 5-gallon batches, or size equipment to give me the option for 10-gallon batches?  Bite the bullet and get another boil kettle more appropriate to brewing? 

I think it really boils down to the two paths I see folks taking most:

First and most-common (or most-commonly bragged about in online forums) is the brewer who steadily expands his brewing setup through acquisition of ever larger and shiner kettles until they've replaced their living room with a single-tier all-electric HERMS system, brewing 1bbl batches fermented in a row of stainless-steel conicals sited where the couch used to be. These guys spend more money than I'd spend on a car on their gear, but they do have systems that let them brew easily (my back was always in a bad way after a big batch...there's something to having a pump over using buckets when you're moving 100 lbs of near-boiling fluid).

Second, are the guys like Don Osborn or Denny Conn, who brew constantly over the decades using the same mash tun and turkey-fryer kettle, winning awards for beers fermented in plastic buckets in the coldest closets available.  These guys still expand their systems (I see DonO is using a stainless kettle these days), but tend to spend most of their time/money on ingredients and actually brewing. 

I think I like the second path, especially if there's room there for an erlenmyer flask or two, but it wouldn't hurt to take note from the first path and choose items that make a brew day easier on the body where it counts.

I hope no one was expecting an answer to this tonight.