Porter update

The Porter finished up nice and clean. The final gravity is still a few days away from truly being final so I think I will let it rest for another week or two before I keg it up.

I plan to use Gelatin with this keg to try to drop out and flocculate out a lot of the sediment that is leftover. I have seen very good results from other home brewers so I figure I will give it a whirl. Porters are dark so you won't see a ton of clearing but it will clear it up some.

Next on the docket will be another American Wheat. It happens to be a crowd pleaser around here so I need to make some more of it. Possibly a quick brew in a bag black Friday or Saturday. 

November Update - new beers, time to brew again

What the heck has been going on?

I seem to say this a lot but it's been quite a long time since I have updated a blog post around here so I guess it's high time I do so. Brewing hasn't happened mcuh for me lately but mostly due to other responsibilities and just general life. To some degree I wish I was able to brew more but the things that take up my time are more important and that's alright. I'm still finding time to brew and now that I am nestled fairly well in the brewin a bag (BIAG) practice, brewing has become a nice easy task and not a chore anymore.

Back when I used to use a cooler for a mash tun I had to deal with multiple infusions of water and seemed to always be doing something while the mash was going. There's measuring water, timing the heating of your sparge and infusion water if you use it, and then just general maintenance of the all of the pots and equipment. With brew in a bag I drag out my burner, my kettle, chiller, and a bottling bucket (more on that later). That's it. Plain and simple. Brewing this way has made the 4 hour stretch easier, less stressful, and not complicated at all. I want to step through the brew day when using brew in a bag so that others can see just how easy it is to make great beer. If you currently are an extract brewer, you can use the same equipment for the most part, you just need the bag. Mine was made out of Voile material found at a local Joann Fabrics. The total cost even with the ribbon we used for handles was about $14.

Below is a picture parade of my brew day the other day.

I made a porter, so this is the bottling bucket mentioned above with the milled grains. Yum!

 

Quick shot of my kettle. It's a Blichmann.......ohhh yeah.

 

One of the more important shots in the series. You can see I use binder clips to keep the bag in place when i am stirring or when I pour the grains in at the beginning of the mash. Note: I do not have the bag in when I am heating the water up. I add it when I am ready to mash.

 

A shot after I lift the bag out. I usually hold the bag for a couple of minutes to let the sweet wort drain out. I then put the bag in the bottling bucket and let it sit and it collects some more wort I pour in before the boil.

 

 

Nice boil going here. I use Paint strainer bags for hops so that I don't need to worry about a false bottom or a filter at the bottom where the valve is. I just tie the bags off with a binder clip so they are easy to open and add more hops.

 

Boil is over and what I end up doing is just moving the pot and burner up to the picnic table so that gravity can feed the plate chiller. This setup works nicely, just make sure to have a strong enough table to put the kettle on. I get good flow rates here, usually takes about 7 minutes to fill the 5 gallon carboy and the wort comes out mid 60's in temps. I keep the flow on about half with the cold water side of the chiller. Too fast and it won't be as efficient in my experience.

 

 

mmmnnnn....Porter.......

 

Can't forget the last step, adding the yeast. I make a 1 liter starter the night before brew day and I pour off most of the liquid and pitch the slurry. This batch took about 8 hours to start bubbling away.

 

 

Final Notes:

 

As you can see, the process is relatively easy. If you extract brew now and have a big enough pot then I'd say you can do brew in a bag with little investment. You just really need the bag. My pot is 10 gallons if anyone is curious. I fill to about 8 gallons before I heat water for the mash. I've been using that number for the past few batches and I seem to get about 6 gallons of nice wort out of it.

 

Until next time..........

 

 

Dogfishhead 90 Minute IPA

So I came home today and there in the fridge was a 4 pack of Dogfish head 90 minute IPA. I have had this beer before but wanted to get a review up for it. This beer is a slightly hoppier and maltier version of the 60 minute IPA made by Dogfishhead. I usually find reasons to pick up the 60 minute as often as I can so it was a pleasant surprise to come home to a pack of the 90 the other day. With the increased hops and malt sweetness comes an increase in the alcohol warmth that you start to feel with higher octane beers. This beer is blended well though so no one feature overpowers another. I wouldn't consider this any sort of session beer as it's pretty aggressive. I had two in one night and that was enough. I hope to try the 120 Minute here shortly to see the full range of this beer. I am almost wondering if the 90 is its own beer it a blend of the 60 and 120. Probably the former if I had to wager. This beer gets a 7/10 for me. Drinkable, smooth, but a tad sweet for my taste buds.

Roundup of Brewery activities

It's been a while since a post so I thought I'd blog a little about what's been happening with my latest concoctions. At the end of last week I kegged up the Chinook IPA. The sample tasted great, it was nice and hoppy and really did what I think I wanted - to test our a single hop beer. I hope to tap it sometime this weekend and share with some neighbors. The porter I made a few months back just keeps getting better and better as it ages a little bit. I've had a few of the Kolsch beers so far and while tasty it just didn't hit the mark for me. I was hoping to get a nice crisp clear beer. This beer is a fantastic tasting brew but it looks like something out of Back River. It's cloudy, hazy, and just generally yellow in color. I think next time it gets brewed I need to remember to use the Irish Moss and maybe some other fining agent to clear it up.

My next batch will most likely be either a wheat beer or a brown ale. I have both in stock and am ready to brew however my pot is currently on hiatus getting fitted with a nice bag so I can do a BIAB brew this time around. I have a few other things I will be introducing this time as well. I will start to use paint strainer bags for my hops so that I can keep the sediment down for the chiller. I really want the plate chiller to work but I need to address the hop gunk and I think using the bags along with the Hopblock should do me well. I will also be making yeast starters from now on as I bought a stir plate from Stir Starters. Dan Jeska really does a great job making the stir plates and even puts a label on the bag of the plate that says "Built for the Home Brewery of" and gives your name. Here is a picture of the setup:

Notice the stir bar inside nicely stirring up the water I did as a test. This should help make my fermentations a lot more active and get the beer started a little sooner. I hope to get my final gravities down a bit also as lately I have been ending in the upper teens on most of my fermentations.

Chinook IPA Brew Day 4/1/12

This is no April Fools, the Trompeter Brewery cooked up a nice recipe on Sunday morning. This time around it was time for a nice house IPA. I am trying out a new recipe I concocted. I want to start making some IPA's using a single hop variety each. This way I can better adjust and taste the flavorings of each hop which in turn will make me be a better creator of recipes in the future. I chose Chinook this time because it is heavily used in Arrogant Bastard and since I think that works well in that particular beer I decided to go with it.

The brew day started off with a little hiccup with the mill. The drill I use to motorize it seems to want to not catch the shaft properly all the time which means the shaft starts to slip here or there. I have to stop the drill, tighten, and then go back and mill. I am wondering if this is part of my issue lately with efficiency (more on that later). I used to double crush grains and I think I may start going back to that shortly.

Mash in was great, the temps I was looking for hit dead on at 153 degrees Fahrenheit. I used a paper towel to cover the front opening of the cooler where I could see steam coming out and I attributed to my major heat loss last time. Happy to report that I only lost 2 degrees in the hour mash this time. Below are some pics of the first runnings. The coloring of the runoff was great, a really nice burnt orange. The second runnings were obviously lighter but the mixture should get me the exact SRM I was looking for. I decided to use a darker Crystal this time and use less, so I went with Crystal 120L.

Once the runoff was done I went ahead and got the kettle boiling, did my hop additions, etc. It was a typical boil with no real issues at all. This round I really wanted to try out the plate chiller that I have been testing and plumbing up to the rig. I hooked up the plate chiller inline with all of the fittings when the boil was over. I had sanitized it earlier with starsan using gravity from a bucket so I know it was clean inside. I also baked it a week or two earlier to sterilize it at 350 degrees for a few hours. I started the runoff and within about 3-4 seconds it stopped. I knew this could only be one thing: CLOG. I tried a few different things to get it going but in the end it wasn't successful. Luckily I was prepared and I had my immersion chiller ready to go. I submerged it in starsan and let it sit a few minutes and then put it in the pot and chilled the wort to 68 degrees. 

Here are some more pics of the failed chiller and the rest of brew day. I was a bit low on gravity and I think that is attributed to the milling issue potentially. I hit 1.060 instead of 1.068 which was what was expected. I have been doing a lot of reading on no sparge brewing, Mash in a Bag, Brew in a Bag, whatever people want to call it. The premise is that you line your kettle with a bag, heat a full water boil plus water to account for absorption, and then put the milled grain in. You basically mash in your kettle. I like this because there is time savings involved and the ability to use a lot less gear. The only rub is you need to use a little more grain in your grain bills and figure out your efficiency. You also need to get the right bag. Check back in a few weeks for what may be my first Brew in a Bag or Mash in a Bag brew!

 
 

   

Kegging a Kolsch and new Beer Gun?

Today was a good rainy day outside so that's usually a good time to do inside brewing work. I had originally planned on making my all Chinook IPA this weekend but the weather was quite prohibitive with that dealing us 2 days of rain. This afternoon has cleared slightly but I really don't like starting batches so late in the day as it interferes with dinner and bedtime with the kids. I had plenty to keep me busy today though.

First up was kegging up the Kolsch. It's been a few weeks in primary and after some consistant gravity readings around 1.015/1/014 it was surely finished. Sitting in the cold fridge will do it some good over the coming weeks. The color came out fine as expected and there is some slight hop bitterness I didn't expect. It's not overpowering or really detracting from the beer but it's there which is nice. I think once carbonated this will be a crowd pleaser and will go quickly. Here is a pic of the finished beer kegging up. It looks muddy but some lagering in the fridge will clear it right up and drop most of that yeast out of suspension.

There is the Duclaw Brewing Company HERO contest upcoming in a few weeks so I am starting to get these beers ready for bottling. I was reading on the Northern Brewer Homebrew Forum that you can take a bottling wand (cheap plastic one) and shove it into the end of a picnic tap and that works as a cheap and easy beer gun. Thought I'd give it a try today since I have a picnic tap sitting around doing nothing. I have to say, it works really.....really....really well. I tested just with sanitizer from a keg and ran it into a glass growler. It filled quickly and had little to no foam. I relieved the pressure valve on the keg and turned the gas to about 2 psi which is just enough to push the beer out. I will be using this shortly on the porter and will bottle that up. Entries are due in under a month here so I wanted to let it age in the leg as much as possible. Problem is, people keep drinking it and liking the beer so I need to bottle it up now before that keg is gone! 

Mountain State Brewing beers - Deep Creek Lake, MD

I went with the family up to the western part of Maryland to Deep Creek Lake. This spot was a childhood favorite of mine and I am happy I get to expose my children to this wonderful place. Ski season is over due to the unseasonably warm temperatures here in Maryland. Typically up in the mountains in March you are talking 30 degrees and a foot or two of fresh powder on the ground. No so this year in 2012, temps were in the mid 70's up there this week and the snow was all melting on the slopes. The place we stayed was a ghost land, we were the only people in the restaurant for breakfast and it was very quiet - all good things for us.

Wednesday night we were looking for some grub and encountered Mountain State Brewing Company. It's located right down the road from the resort we stayed in so it was very convenient. They lay claim to really good wood fired pizzas and they did not disappoint on that front at all. The beers on the other hand leave a little to be desired.

I sampled two brews the other night, one was an IPA and the other an oatmeal stout. I left highly disappointed because I felt both beers lacked character and while drinkable were really nothing special. The brewery itself is somewhere in West Virginia and this is just a pub which serves the beer and their wood fired pizzas. I first had the Oatmeal Stout. It was thin and lightly carbonated. Color was spot on looking jet black and it poured with a decent brownish head. There wasn't much hop character to speak of and it didn't have a lot of alcohol taste. I understand it's no imperial stout but i expect a certain level of alcohol warmth. Overall, it wasn't a terrible beer or anything but not something I really cared to have another of.

The second beer I tried was the IPA. It wasn't high in bitterness, it had some slight citrus notes in the nose and poured with a nice white head. It tasted like it had a lot of C hops like maybe Cascade, Chinook, or Centennial. I am used to having an IPA that is 6+% or even 7+% as a normal rule of thumb. Their menu said this beer was something like 5.4%. I was really irked by this and couldn't figure out why. None of their beers were over 6% ABV. That seemed really strange to me and I set out on a quest to figure out why.

In the good state of West Virginia they apparently have a law still that limits beers brewed within state lines to be less than 6% ABV. It also limited the sales of beers that were over 6%. So no Loose Canon, no Digfishhead beers? What gives West Virginians? Luckily in 2009 they changed the law and now they can go up to 12% safely. That begs the questions though......it's been 4 years since that law was changed, so why is Mountain State Brewing still brewing up sub 6% beers? I suppose it could be the sales and not having enough folks buying the stronger beers but I'd think in this day and age craft beer aficionados are more and more plentiful around the country. I am hoping next time I head up there that the IPA is more like 7% and maybe a little over 6 for the oatmeal stout. I think both beers would improve by improving that malt bill just a little bit.