Mindbreaker
[ No Comments ] Posted on 05.07.08 under Brewing, Tasting, Yeast
Just a quick note on Mindbreaker. I sampled one a few days ago, and it was not ready yet. It was still too hot and boozy, in that very young beer way.
I had one tonight, and it has come a long way. I think it’s about conditioned, maybe just another few days for the final warm settling action to take place. Then I’ll put most of them in the fridge. They’ll get a bit of chill haze (guess I haven’t solved that problem!) and I want to give them time to settle as clear as they can.
I just had a Great Divide Hercules Double IPA last night, so I’ve got that impression fresh in my mind. I could not help but compare Mindbreaker to Hercules. Hercules has a harsh (in a good way) hop edge to it that hits you right away, and lasts nicely. In contrast, Mindbreaker starts with a sweetness, which eventually gives way to a deep hop bitterness. Mindbreaker is a bit on the subtle side for an IIPA, which wasn’t exactly what I was going for, but I’m sure I’ll enjoy drinking them. Funny how nearly a half pound of hops in a five gallon batch could ever be called subtle.
There is one issue that I have with Mindbreaker, and I think I know how to fix it. It is the sweetness. This sweetness is not so much underattenuation (although that’s part of it). It is more of an estery sweetness. This has combined with a ton of Willamette at flameout and a week of Centennial dry hopping to add a lot of sweet flowery flavor to the beer. This aids initial drinkability, but can work its way towards cloying by the end of the glass. I believe that this is the result of underpitching yeast to the beer. I used one pack of US-05. A few days later, I was on Jamil’s yeast pitching calculator, and found that I should have used more like 1.5 packs of yeast.
Lesson learned. Next time, check Jamil’s calculator first, and pitch the right amount of yeast. I probably would have had better luck with two packs than I did with one. I could have even tried to split a pack, since the Mindbender really only needed a half a pack of yeast.
The more I think about it, the more I think that perhaps underpitching is responsible for a wide array of homebrewing problems.
Brew on!
Session 15: Where It All Begins
[ 2 Comments ] Posted on 05.02.08 under Stories, The Session
Welcome to The Session. See our fine hosts Boak and Bailey for the full roundup of other posts on the same topic. Tonight’s post is about where the love of great beer began for me.
I am not like a lot of other people. I never drank beer in high school. All I ever seemed to see was yellow fizz, and it was gross. Even in college, beer wasn’t really high on my list. I was always too scared to try to use a fake ID before I was 21, and I wasn’t really too motivated to pursue what I thought beer was at the time.
My roommate in my Junior year tried to get me to like beer. He tried with some of the right stuff, too. He was a big fan of Bass. He tried with Sam Adams. He tried a few others. None really hit the spot for me. But I kept trying. Here’s where it gets fuzzy… but then suddenly one day it’s nickel night at the college bar and I’m getting drafts of Red Hook ESB for a nickel apiece and loving it. Come to think of it, they had a pretty decent beer selection in the late 90s at the Civic Pub.
So that would seem to be the end of it. I started on good beer and never looked back. But that wasn’t the case.
High Gravity Brewing
[ 1 Comment ] Posted on 05.01.08 under Alcohol, All-Grain, Bottle Conditioning, Brewing, Extract, Troubleshooting, Yeast
I wrote a post a while back about calories in beer. It was really fun to write, and even more exciting when Bob Skilnik called me out on a few ambiguous and incorrect statements I made. But just having Bob Skilnik reading my site was cool!
The other day, I got a new comment on there, with a commentor named Kiwi asking the following question:
So my question is, your 10%ABV russian stout (sounds most excellent) got to that % by the recipe…which has more… sugars? and a better yeast? I am trying to up my alcohol %, but not ruin my homebrew.
Such a great question deserves front page answers, not some answer hidden in the comments of an old post. So, Kiwi, this one’s for you!
Mindbender
[ No Comments ] Posted on 04.30.08 under Bottle Conditioning, Brewery In Planning, Brewing, Hops, IPA, Tasting
A few weeks ago, I started working on brewing recipes which I intend to use in my real brewery. My first one was the IPA family of beers. Mindbender is a small 3% ABV IPA, and Mindbreaker is a big 9% ABV IPA. These are the beers I made as a partigyle, with two mashes of about 9 lbs each, first three gallons of wort from each going to Mindbreaker, and second three gallons of wort going to Mindbender.
I bottled Mindbender and Mindbreaker on Saturday. Mindbender is predictably conditioning quicker. Since it has a lower alcohol content, the yeast are a lot more zealous attacking that priming sugar I added. Mindbreaker is coming along nicely, just at a more measured pace. What do you expect, I know I move slower when I have more alcohol in me.
Mindbender is moving along so nicely, that it’s almost ready already. My barometer plastic bottles are showing that Mindbender is quite firm, and Mindbreaker is still a day or two behind. This morning before I headed out, I put a bottle of Mindbender in the cold fridge so it would be ready for me when I got home.
Diacetyl
[ 4 Comments ] Posted on 04.29.08 under Tasting
At the Craft Brewer’s Conference, I had my first ever Fat Tire from New Belgium. I had been drinking San Diego IPA all day, and I was really C-hopped/dry-hopped out, so I sought respite in a malty brown ale. But I immediately was struck by this weird sweetish sort of grainy flavor. I made my way through the full glass, and was just left scratching my head. What was that strange taste?
Discussing this with fellow CBC attendees throughout the various beer sampling hospitality events during the rest of the week, I was informed that the mysterious character was diacetyl. One person even told me (this is unconfirmed hearsay) that New Belgium took diacetyl out of Fat Tire, and found it resulted in a beer with significantly less character, and people actually didn’t like it without the buttery layers. This person went on to say (uncofirmed hearsay, again) that New Belgium now intentionally doses Fat Tire with diacetyl to retain its signature character. If anyone can confirm or deny this, I’d love to see some more substantive evidence than a conversation over literally 100 taps full of free beer at the Tiki Pavilion.
I was initially relieved to finally have an idea of what diacetyl probably is. The problem is that now I taste it everywhere. Firestone Double Barrel - diacetyl. Magic Hat Roxy Rolles - diacetyl. Harpoon IPA - diacetyl. A Hallertau-only Pilsner from German hopgrowers at the CBC - diacetyl. I’m practically expecting my coffee to taste like diacetyl tomorrow morning!
For the longest time, I wished to know what diacetyl was, and now that I do, I wish I could ignore it. I drank copious amounts of Roxy Rolles a little over a year ago, and never was bothered by any of the dreaded “d-word”. Part of me thinks that my diacetyl detection delirium might be all in my head.
So let’s hear it: what beers do you find to have noticable levels of diacetyl?
Centennial Rhizome Has Broken Ground!
[ 1 Comment ] Posted on 04.24.08 under Hops
I planted three rhizomes over two weeks ago, on April 5th. I got a Centennial, a Willamette, and a Saaz from Freshops. I am excited for all three varieties, each for its own reason. But especially exciting is the Centennial. This is a great hop that makes a rock solid single hop IPA - it is moderately high in alpha acids, with great flavor and aroma characteristics. Of the three roots I planted, the Centennial has broken ground first. May it grow robustly and yield many pounds of hops.
My First CBC
[ 3 Comments ] Posted on 04.23.08 under Brewery In Planning, Events, Hops, IPA
Last week I flew out to San Diego, leaving behind my expanding family, month old son, two year old son, four year old daughter, and brave brave wife for about six days. All for beer.
If you read any beer news outlets, you know that last week was the Craft Brewer’s Conference. This is the trade show for the craft brewing industry. I won’t get into the definition of a craft brewer, but let’s just say that it pretty much includes breweries the size of Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada down to your local brewpub. It’s the breweries that make the great beer that we all love.
I attended this event as a brewery in planning. That’s right. A brewery in planning. Sometime in the next few years, you’ll wake up one day and find Brainard Brewing beer on the shelf at your favorite spot to buy great beer.
Rogue Chocolate Stout Float
[ 1 Comment ] Posted on 04.14.08 under Pairing, Stout, Tasting
I ran into a bottle of Rogue Chocolate Stout the other day. I’d been wanting this around Christmas, so I figured I’d pick it up.
I popped it today, and it’s a hell of a beer! The label says 15°P and 77 IBU, as well as real chocolate used in there. The nose was subtly chocolate at first, with more of a general stout smell to it. But the initial flavor was massively chocolatey, with tons of hops to back it up. An awesome bitter-sweet combination. The aroma really develops as the beer sits in the glass for a while. So much so that it even made my next beer, a porter, smell chocolatey. Cool. And don’t forget that there’s a big hop bitterness punch in there, too.
Correction for Low FG Beer
[ 2 Comments ] Posted on 04.12.08 under Brewing, IPA, Troubleshooting
I made the Post Natal IPA-Style beer a few months ago. A 3.5% ABV beer. It’s hard to make such a small beer. I used like 25% crystal malts, and still got a FG of about 1.006. It’s dry. I like a dry IPA, but this is just too dry sometimes.
I got a neat idea tonight, so I tried it. I put a little packet of Xylitol - one gram - in a single serving of the beer. I had to mix it a lot, so I just put a little beer in there and mixed it well to dissolve all the Xylitol, and then poured the rest of the beer. This had two effects. First, the head was big and fluffy, thanks to a half ounce of beer being whipped into a frenzy - nice lacing, too. Second, the beer is not dry any more. It feels really nice and full, but it still has a great deep bitterness and hop character. I wonder how much nonfermentable sugar (such as dextrine or lactose) I’d need to add to the boil to get this same effect across the entire batch. I guess about 50 grams…
Xylitol is a “dietary supplement”. It’s supposed to be good for your teeth somehow, but it seems to me to be a bit like NutraSweet and similar sugar substitutes. Though they say it doesn’t have Saccharine or Aspartame… But it was a simple convenient small packet to try for this use. I wonder if Xylitol is fermentable? It might be useful to increase beer body for use even during the boil. But I couldn’t see myself cutting open 50 packets of Xylitol on brew day. Maybe I can get it in bulk.
Since I have that Mindbender Jr. “Small IPA” in the fermenter with an OG of 1.030, I expect a super dry beer, too. I just might try this Xylitol trick on that beer, too. I suppose you could probably use a gram of table sugar in the glass and get a similar effect, if you could measure out a gram of table sugar.
Einstein Quote of the day
[ 2 Comments ] Posted on 04.08.08 under Fun
I have a thing on my Google homepage that gives me a different Einstein quote each day. I was never really too into Einstein, but I thought it would be fun to have his quotes each day. Today was awesome.
The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law.
Yes, he’s talking about alcohol prohibition. It goes on to elaborate a bit, but the part I’ve quoted is the kicker.
If you want the Einstein quote of the day, here it is. GWidgets created it. I am not affiliated with Google or GWidgets.