I had some kegs filled with cleaning solution sitting around for a few weeks, so I emptied them out and filled them with a couple Cider batches from last November. I resisted the urge to taste these, but they sure smelled apple-y. Hopefully these will get a bit more age on them than the last batch, which was just starting to taste mature when the keg blew.
That freed up two carboys. I had two that needed to be racked: an orange blossom honey mead from probably last summer (I don't have any record of when I started that), and a maple wine that I started in September 2003, and hadn't touched since early December of 2003.
I had almost given up the maple wine for dead. That would have been a tragedy, since it was about $50 worth of maple syrup. Since I hadn't racked it off most of the yeast for 18 months, and it had been sitting in my pantry at temperatures ranging from the low 50s to the high 80s, and had been left in the sun during clean-ups, and many of other winemaking/brewing sins, I expected an autolyzed oxidized mess that was at best tolerable. So before I racked it, I grabbed a sample.
It was heavenly. Deep brown color, slight smoky/toasty sweetness and huge maple flavor with just a little hot alcoholic bite. My minimal records show this is over 15.5% alcohol by volume. It still has a syrupy feel to it, but a drinkable sweetness. It should make a great dessert wine, whenever I get around to bottling it. I'm torn between doing crown caps and corks with these. Corks are a hassle, but crown caps look cheesy with wine. I could look into screw caps, but I think a wine this powerful should probably be in splits.
Next up, the mead. I don't remember exactly when I made it, but the recipe was roughly 12 pounds of orange blossom honey, 3 pounds of clover honey, a smack pack of Wyeast sweet mead yeast, and a pack of dry Champagne yeast when the sweet mead yeast had died down.
With the two yeast additions, I was trying to make a sweet, stable mead. Normal sweet meads rely on a stuck fermentation. Stuck fermentations can restart without warning, turning a wine rack into an expensive cork broadside (I only lost half of that batch, though :-). I hoped to get some of the flavor profile of the sweet mead yeast, yet have the Champagne yeast mop up the excess sugars to prevent a restarted fermentation.
Additionally, I found a plumped up raisin (Grace's favorite snack at the time) floating in the fermenting bucket at some point. I also didn't sulfite the must, and there's a little scum on top that could be a wild yeast. It hadn't been racked since a couple weeks after I made it, either. It wasn't quite as abused as the maple wine, but I didn't get my hopes up for this one, either.
It wasn't as nice as the maple wine (not much is: I hope I didn't wake anyone jumping for joy), but it was definitely a keeper. It's still a touch sweet, as sweet to the taste as Fetzer's Gewurtztraminer1. If the wild yeast was evident, it was as a phenolic edge reminiscent of some big Belgian beers. Overall, it was very spicy and drinkable with a good orange blossom character (think orange flower water or orange zest), but still slightly cloudy and in need of more age.
1Not an easy variety to spell after the maple wine
and a half glass of barleywine. How'd I do?
So, it seems that my co-worker's cube fridge has killed the pack of Wyeast 3787 (Trappist high gravity ale yeast), or I've forgotten how to smack these things. Either way, it sure put a damper on my last-minute plans to brew today. Maybe next week (my birthday!).
In another odd wrinkle, Northern Brewer has apparently stopped carrying East Kent Goldings hops, one of my favorite varieties. Shucks, I just used the last of my stash in the last batch. In its place they have Yakima Goldings, the same plant grown in the Yakima valley. This can make a big difference in flavor. For example, Styrian Goldings is genetically the same as Fuggle, but grown in (the former) Yugoslavia. The two taste different enough to be considered two distinct varieties.
The only info I've found on Yakima Goldings's flavor (in 5 minutes of googling) is from the late 90s, saying it's much more citrusy then the East Kent stuff, sort of halfway between East Kent Goldings and Cascades. I suppose I'll find out -- I have a pound of the Yakima now...
...
Last week ended with a series of what I now refer to as "Barleywine nights." These come after days so shitty and stressful that I just want to reboot. Since I'm not actually a computer (except in some of my stranger dreams), the closest I can get is to end the night on a pleasant and tipsy note, and start fresh the next day. That means either a half pint of whisky or a pint of Barleywine. The Barleywine is easier on my liver, so I generally go with that.
Too many more of these nights, and I'll have to start replenishing my supply. My standard barleywine target is Thomas Hardy's ale, and I've been giving some more thought to my next attempt at cloning it. If I get around to it, I may brew it in late September or October. Maybe Halloween, I could keep warm by the propane flames while waiting for trick-or-treaters.
Thomas Hardy's ale requires a rather unique brewday: it uses only pale malt, but gets a deep amber color from an extended boil. You need to boil about 8 gallons of 1.080-ish wort down to about 5 gallons at 1.125. I've been doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations to see if I can do this with my system, and it seems I need a little over 15 gallons of mash tun space. I currently have 10, plus my 5 gallon older tun. That's almost enough, but pretty tight.
So, I did a little cooler shopping. My general requirements are:
They did, however, have the mother of all coolers, 30 gallons for $40, about what I spent on my 10 gallon round cooler. The drain looked big, probably big enough to use as-is with a rubber stopper. The only problem is it's maybe too big. The big Thomas Hardy's ale would use half of it for the first runnings. If I wanted to do a 10 gallon second runnings batch, I'd use 2/3 of it. Still, it's tempting just to have something big enough for the occasional really big brew day....
...an alcohol lamp?
I checked out the plates I poured a week ago, and found them still sterile. With luck, one of them will grow some of the Thomas Hardy's yeasties over the next few days. Otherwise, I guess I'll just have to drink another. Strictly for science, of course.
I did a rehash of my successful Historical IPA, trying to be a bit closer to the historical original. I used the older Goldings variety, and a 50-50 mixture of Pale Ale malt and Pilsner malt, which I've heard (forget where) is a decent approximation of the malt used in the early 1800s IPAs.
All went well, except I somehow got only 4 gallons or so, and at a lower gravity than I expected. That's a trick, and not a good one. Oh, well. I told myself I'd be satisfied with anything between 1.050 and 1.100, and I hit 1.068, even though I should have exceeded 1.080 based on my earlier efficiencies.
My standard solid growth media recipe:
Mix it all up, microwave to boil, pour into tubes (about 1/4 full) and a flask, then process in pressure cooker for 15 minutes at 15 PSI. Let cooker cool down on its own, then remove everything. Prop up tubes in a slanted position to solidify. Meanwhile, let the flask of media cool, then pour into (presumably sterile) plastic petri dishes.
The tubes I use are about 1x4 cm vials. The plastic plates are about 10cm in diameter. This recipe made 16 tubes plus 5 plates the first time I tried it. Tonight, I made a half-recipe, yielding two tubes and three plates. The half-recipe probably wasn't worth it...
Other notes:
My last round of yeast culturing was very slant-centric. I only used one plate to clean up the yeast, and propagated it the rest of the way on slants. This time, I'm going to try to plate yeast out more often, and experiment with sterile distilled water storage in addition to slants. It sounds more forgiving from what I've read.
I started this all so I could maintain a supply of WLP022 Essex ale yeast outside of the short season White Labs offers it. This time, I may branch out and try to ranch the yeast from a bottle of Thomas Hardy's ale, and see if I like that for the lower gravity beers. If so, my next crack at cloning TH will most likely use the correct yeast :-)
Everything went smoothly up until the wort went on to boil. I hooked up the garden hose to do a little clean-up, and had practically no water pressure. Odd. I noticed the hose reel had sprung a leak. That could be it. I hooked the hose from the reel directly to the faucet. It was a little better, but not much. I headed down to the basement to check things out, and ACK! there was a huge puddle spreading throughout the whole basement. Apparently we didn't turn off the inside valve in time last winter, and the pipe ruptured. (Also, we somehow made it all the way to Father's day without using the garden hose).
Shit. First, this means cleaning up the basement. Second, it means I have to bring five gallons of boiling hot wort into the house to chill. About this time, the daily naptime meltdown started (neither of our kids believe in sleep, so it's usually a multi-person job to put them down for naps; no idea how Jess does it on weekdays). I turned off the burner under the now-boiling wort, and went inside to help. I spent most of the next half hour in the basement with A in one arm and a broom in the other sweeping water toward the floor drain.
Luckily, our basement floor is far from flat, so the water didn't spread too far, or take out anything we cared to keep. Also, the sound of broom on floor is apparently pretty soothing, and A went to sleep without much fuss.
After this little interruption, I restarted the boil, added hops, and sanitized my chiller and Fermenter. When the boil was done, I even had my chiller all hooked up and ready to go, which is more prepared than I usually am. Then I turned on the chilling water, and was greeted by a spray. One of the hoses had sprung a leak right next to its connector. I didn't have a good wort chilling backup plan, and the leak was just about small enough to manage with a mop and towel, so I just went with it, cursing the plumbing gods for hitting me twice in one day.
The next thing I heared was G crying and Jess yelling upstairs. I had apparently made a little too much noise bringing the full brew kettle inside. Argh.
The beer somehow made it through this all, but the rest of the day just went straight to hell. At least the basement and kitchen are mostly mopped...
Hopefully tomorrow, i.e. later today. I'll probably do a bitter just as something quick, simple, and summery. I just finished cleaning up some of my equipment. Since most of it spent about 5 months in mothballs, I'm glad I sprung for the big jug of PBW. I'm surprised some of the stuff didn't walk away on its own. I'm not sure all of it hasn't.
Operating system not foundAt first I thought the manufacturer had just wiped the disk, but after a couple unsuccessful attempts at installing a new OS, I finally noticed that the hard drive was MIA.
Oh, bother. Did they remove the hard drive? Nah, it could have died on its own, or more likely, a connection shook loose. I hate taking apart laptops. The last one I took apart never really recovered.... Luckily, there's a guy at work who lives for taking apart small electronic devices and, the important part, can actually get them back together again. I brought the laptop over to his cube, he took it mostly apart, explored a bit, re-seated the hard drive cable, put it back together, and it worked. He thanked me for the disassembly opportunity, I thanked him for fixing my laptop, and I went away happy.
As an added bonus, the manufacturer did not wipe the hard disk, so my existing FreeBSD installation was still intact.
I just finished mixing up a keg of root beer for Jess's cousin's wedding this weekend. The guests are staying in a state park, so no real beer. That's OK, because I'm starting to get "low", with only 10 gallons on deck and probably 10-15 gallons on tap. I'm starting to ponder when and what I'll brew next.
Part of the reason I had high hopes for the alt has to do with my latest beer obsession. As I've said before, I really like alts. One of the most sought-after examples of the style is Zum Uerige. It's rather hard to come by in this country unless you know somebody. I've been keeping an eye out for it and asking around for the last year and a half or so, but came up dry. Until Thursday, that is. I got a new beer announcement from the Muddy Pig (one of the best beer bars I've been to), and they had Uerige! I was there in a flash, and, practically shaking with excitement, walked in and ordered one.
Frankly, the beer didn't match the anticipation. That wasn't unexpected, since Uerige's a German easy-drinking beer and my anticipation level was pretty extreme. It's a very rich and flavorful beer, but it's designed for patrons of the Uerige brewpub in Dusseldorf to down it in massive quantities so it can't be a mind-blowing beer like, say, Rochefort 10. When I took the first sip, though, still shaking with excitement, I found the aroma strangely familiar. It was the beer I have on tap back home! Wow! I had come very close to cloning a beer I never had based on second and third-hand descriptions of the beer and accounts of brewery tours. I wasn't completely on the mark. Uerige is actually a sweet beer, and surprisingly cloudy with a smooth yeastiness. Not at all like the "official" alt style, which mine matched better. Mine should do better than the origial would, I thought.
In addition to entering the Mash-out, I signed up to judge and steward (basically be a go-fer for the judges, and you get to sample the beers they're judging). I knew that my alt was being judged early Friday night, and I had entered it in some odd-shaped bottles and would probably recognize it, so I couldn't resist getting a little early information. I finished judging my early flight quickly, and sauntered over to where the alts were. I watched them pop open my bottle, pour it into cups, lift them up to take a sip and ... cringe, turn away... not the reaction I was looking for, to say the least. Ouch. I could write that one off. Dammit. At least I wouldn't need to go to the awards ceremony, unless I'm fishing for door prizes.
It must have been a bad bottle. After judging was over, I tracked down another bottle of my alt and cracked it open. That bottle was good, and the aroma was very similar to Zum Uerige. I shared it with a fellow judge who knows a thing or two about alt, and he agreed.
While further discussing alts and bad luck with him, I mentioned my IPA entry and how I didn't have much hope for it.
Him: "English IPA?" Me: "Yes." Him: "There were only two English IPAs entered, and they came in first and second." Me: "!?!?"I decided I wouldn't skip the awards ceremony after all... I had never gotten better than a bronze medal at the competitions I'd entered, so I was quite excited.
Since I judged both Thursday and Friday night, and also some Saturday lunchtime, I hadn't seen much of Grace this weekend and felt Jess could use a break, so I took Grace along to the awards ceremony at the Summit brewery. Surprisingly, she wasn't the only little one there. We hung out with a couple who brought their 6-month-old daughter, and let the little ones flirt with each other for a while. I didn't bring any toys for Grace, so she "borrowed" a stuffed moose from the other little girl, and talked to me about it for much of the evening.
So, I kept Grace entertained while I waited for the IPA winners to be announced. My IPA took gold! I walked up front with Grace and the moose to collect the medal and my prize, a "Town Hall package": Town hall logo T-shirt and Denim shirt, $25 gift certificate, a logo pint glass, and a couple coupons for a free pint. Most of the other prizes were homebrew ingredients and equipment, but hey, I'll take this :-)
At about this point, I was thinking Grace might be needing a new diaper. She was happy enough, though, so I her continue playing because I had this strange feeling about the Strong Ale category where I had entered my barleywine... It also took gold! Grace, moose, and I went up for another gold medal and prize -- another Town Hall package...
Then, to top it all off, I won one of the many door prize drawings that night. While I was in the bathroom changing Grace's diaper, no less. My pile just expanded while I was gone, adding about a half-pound of hops, a Barley John's logo hat, and a sampler pack of brewery chemicals.
I stuck around until the end of the announcements just on a lark, to see if the string of miracles would continue and one of my beers got best-of-show. The BoS prize is a really sweet hand-turned chalice made of exotic hardwood. That one, I didn't win. I packed up and went home with a should-have-been-sleepy toddler, a big bag full of prizes, two medals around my neck, and a big smile. What a night.
And I think I'll be heading to Town Hall sometime soon. Anyone with me?
I brewed five gallons of a dry stout and another ten gallon batch of Alt. Yes, another ten gallons of Alt. I ran out of alt last year in early summer. That's perfect alt-drinking season, bad alt-brewing season. I had to wait until the dead of winter to get my next batch ready. I don't want to have that happen this year. It probably won't, with 25 gallons of alt on deck :-)
Of course, it wouldn't do for this last brew for a while to go too smoothly. The spigot clogged while draining the stout through the chiller, leaving a bit over a gallon of perfectly good beer behind. I briefly considered just leaving it, and making a sub-4 gallon batch of stout, or topping up with water and making an even lighter batch of stout (it would have been *way* too light). I opted to save that gallon by chilling it in a small pot in a sink full of cold water and pouring it through a sanitized strainer, just like back in my extract days. The things I do for homebrew... Ironically, the whole episode took about as long as a normal chill using my old immersion chiller. Technology rocks!
So now, I get to go a few months without thinking "what am I going to brew this weekend?" OK, it'll probably be replaced by "what am I going to brew in a few months?" but still, it's a change of pace.
I was up until 3:00am last night kegging about 20 gallons of beer. That joined another 15 gallons of kegged beer aging in a cool corner of the basement. I plan to brew another 15 gallons tomorrow. Between what I drink and what I share, 10 gallons seems to last me about a month. If tomorrow's brewing goes well, I'll have about 5 months worth of beer stockpiled, so I shouldn't run low until June or so. Wow. June. It will be, like, warm then. It boggles the mind.
I think that's "enough beer" for me. I might knock out a quickie 5-gallon batch for added variety at some point and a Goldings version of my last IPA is definitely not something I can put off for too long, but other than that I don't see myself brewing much between tomorrow and when the stockpile runs out.
In the meantime, brewing activity will most likely be replaced by either laziness or woodworking. I'm giving 3-1 odds on woodworking, with an over-under of another crufty hack made out of SPF construction lumber and finishing nails :-)
On Wednesday, I brewed up a couple more lagers to use the yeast I collected from the Pilsner. That was a disappointing brewday. I had a few troubles with earlier batches coming out weaker than I had intended, which I thought was due to some inefficiency in my sparging technique. I generally fly sparge, slowly filtering hot water through the grain bed to wash the sugars into the brewpot. This is a somewhat sensitive and tricky procedure, and there are a lot of different ways to screw it up and leave precious sugars behind in the grain. For this brew session, I decided to try out a technique I'd used before called batch sparging, since it's more foolproof, and more efficient than whatever I was doing on the weak batches.
Well, batch sparging is quite foolproof, but it turns out I'm a better fool than I thought. The attempted dopplebock came out at 1.060 instead of the 1.080-ish I wanted, making it weaker than a plain bock. The Munich dunkel came out in the mid 1.040s instead of the mid 1.050s. These were record low for efficiency, which is kind of annoying. Not so much because I really wanted stronger beers (I can enjoy more of the weaker beers, and will generally put them on tap instead of go through the hassle of bottling), but because I used up half a sack of good grain and a bunch of it went to waste. Ironically, this wasted grain was most likely caused by impatience born of frustration with, yes, wasting grain. Oh well, the only solution for a disappointing brewday is to get right back on the horse and brew again, which I planned to do Saturday.
On Friday, I was filling growlers to go to panama777's party, and blew a keg of alt. I still had one keg left, but I also had my first stab at a smoked beer on deck, carbonated, chilled, and ready to tap. I put that on-line Saturday, and snuck a sample or two while brewing. Pure ambrosia. The smokiness is assertive, but not dominant as in a lot of smoked beers. It's balanced, refreshing, interestingly flavored, and absolutely delicious with the Zillman's summer sausage Jess's sister gave me for Christmas. It's also a kitchen sink beer, brewed to use up ingredients I had no other plans for. That's cool, but a bit vexing since I'd rather brew such good beers intentionally :-)
The party went a bit later than I'm used to, so I woke up at about 11:00 on Saturday, still planning to brew. I managed to get the water on to heat at around 11:30 to 12:00, and started to brew up another batch of alt. I really like alts. Can't get enough of them, and they're very rarely available in the U.S., so I have to either travel to Dusseldorf or brew them myself. Brewing's cheaper (I think). I'll probably knock out another batch before spring comes and warms things up too much.
This time, things went much better. I went back to fly sparging, which I find easier if a bit more fiddly. I was more careful with the process this time, and appear to have made my efficiency problems disappear. I designed the recipe to hit 1.045 - 1.055, based on the range of efficiencies I had with fly sparging. Somehow I hit 1.060, a mistake I can live with. This alt will be a bit stronger than I intended, which means it will keep for longer, possibly into summer or even early fall, if they last (hey, a brewer can dream, can't he?).
It's also been a productive week on the beer front:
Of course, the beer wrangling gave me some refreshingly low-tech troubles. While bottling the IPA, I came across an odd-shaped bottle (I think it was either a Frankenheim Alt or a Kulmbacher Eisbock bottle) that didn't work with my normal double-lever capper. I couldn't get the cap crimped, and I didn't want to throw away (or worse, drink) the bottle. I had a bench capper sitting around, which are typically less picky about bottle shapes, so I grabbed the bench capper and tried crimping the cap on the wierd bottle with it. It crimped, but it didn't let go. The bottle is still hanging from the bell of the bench capper. Oh, well. I'm keeping it around in case I ever figure out how to free the bottle. Beer's beer, after all. It's just a little wedged, it's still good, it's still good....
During clean-up for the IPA bottling session, I tried to free a 5/16" hose from my racking cane. It's a very tight fit, so I wound up breaking the racking cane, and just cutting the hose. Damn. That's probably the fourth or fifth one I've broken in my four or so years of brewing. Maybe this time, I'll break down and spend $15 on a stainless steel racking cane instead of the $3 on a plastic one. Live and learn, eventually....
Since I don't want to make the post entirely about beer, I would like to note that, for some godawful reason, I have "Back in the saddle again" running through my head. Oh yeah, it's also in the voice of Kermit the Frog. I don't think I've ever heard Kermit sing this song, which means my brain made it up out of whole cloth. Scary.
Kermie, by the way, edged out Boiled in Lead's cover of "Rasputin" which my brain entertained me with throughout the whole Pilsner kegging session. I'm now listening to the Boney M version (the original, I think), and am positively horrified.... I think that will probably burn the song into my head for a while. I need more background music -- the mix my head makes up to fill the silence is starting to wierd me out.
Or maybe I just need sleep.
Today, I can sympathize. I brewed 10 gallons of pilsner, and, since it hasn't quite set in that I'm on vacation and can also brew on weekdays, 5 gallons of imperial stout.
The one bright side is that the big kettle works a treat on my kitchen stove. It was boiling a mere 40 minutes after I finished sparging. This is comparable to the delay with a 5 gallon batch in the 10 gallon pot on one burner, which is 30-35 minutes.
On the other hand, I had planned to time things so that I would mash in the imperial stout shortly after I finished sparging the pilsner, and have enough hot water to sparge the imperial stout during the pilsner's boil. That way, the imperial stout would add maybe an hour to the brewday, and I could theoretically be finished in time to enjoy the end of the late afternoon football games. But I think I miscalculated the amount of water I would need for that.
You'd think 22-23 gallons of water would be enough for 15 gallons of beer, and that's what I thought this morning when I was (insufficiently) planning all this out. I'd heat up 12-13 gallons in the keg and 10 gallons in the kettle, move it around, combine it with grain, and (magically?) get 15 gallons of beer bubbling away at the end. But after I sparged the pilsner, I only had 3 gallons left. The only losses I didn't take into account were the water remaining in the mash at the end of the sparge, and evaporation. They're apparently more significant than I thought...
So I used those three gallons to warm up a few more gallons, mashed in the stout late in the boil of the pils, sparged after I'd finished cleaning up after the pils, and finished with the stout almost five hours later... At 9 pm. I started the pils at 11:40 am. This has been my longest brewday by far, not counting the couple times I've done a six hour boil for barleywines.
Ugh. I must be stupid.