Bottling from the Keg

[ No Comments ] Posted on 03.04.10 under Bottle Conditioning, Bottling, Kegging

Over a year ago I started kegging my beer, forgoing bottling forever. Or so I thought.

It wasn’t long before I wanted to be able to bottle off some brews to share with friends. So I bottled a batch or two, just to be able to share it, or when my original keg fridge was at capacity with two kegs in it.

This did the job for every now and then, but eventually I wanted to be able to bottle beer from a keg at any time, or to carbonate with CO2 in the keg and then bottle after that (such as for a very strong beer that could pose problems bottle conditioning).

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Ultimate Efficiency

[ No Comments ] Posted on 02.24.10 under All-Grain, Brewing

As a brewer, extract efficiency is a key metric. Each grain you use in your brew has a certain amount of potential sugar stored in there. Due to our limitations as humans in the real world, we can’t really get all that sugar out. So extract efficiency measures the percentage that we do manage to run off into our kettles.

Maximizing this number gives you the ability to get the most out of your grains. This saves money and expands the possibilities of what you can make without needing to add sugar or malt extract. Consistent efficiency allows you to craft more precise and repeatable recipes.

Efficiency relates to many variables, including how you crush the grains, mash filter arrangement, possibly mash thickness and duration, and so on. Most of these are pretty constant from batch to batch. But my efficiency has been hovering around a meager 65-70%. This is not where I want it. It’s OK, but it seems to leave a lot on the table (or in the tun, so to speak).

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Ice Ice Baby

[ No Comments ] Posted on 02.17.10 under Alcohol, Fun, News

Once again Brew Dog has done it. They’ve gone and raised the ire of all wings of the beer and political communities. Not complacent to be second best, it’s time to make the world’s strongest beer… again!

First off, Sam Adams Utopias is the strongest beer, when it comes down to it. By American legal definition, a beer can not be fortified by any method, including “ice distillation”. Sam Adams is cooked as normal wort and fermented as such by yeast all the way to its nearly unnatural 27% ABV. All others higher than that, to my knowledge, are done by ice distilling.

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Questioning the Wisdom

[ No Comments ] Posted on 02.14.10 under Brewing, Tasting

My Glass of Anchor Christmas 2007Maybe I have become too confident. Maybe it’s boredom… I just don’t know what inspired me to try to copy a beer that I don’t even really like all that much. I mean Anchor’s Our Special Ale is a true American classic, released once a year in time for the holidays, and somewhat different each year. Time after time it’s basically a black beer with trees added to it. I’ve written about it before, and I’ve liked it, but these days, this is not exactly my kind of thing. However, it is a classic, so I always get at least one sixer, just to have it.

One time, I think it was December of 2008, approaching the start of my third year of brewing, I got the idea that OSA was really pretty similar to what you’d get if you took a porter and used a Bavarian wheat beer yeast to ferment it.

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That’s Cold

[ No Comments ] Posted on 02.08.10 under Uncategorized

The downside to watching football on TV:
Coors Light. Of course it’s aged cold! Of course it’s filtered cold!!

Select 55

[ No Comments ] Posted on 02.07.10 under Uncategorized

Watching the Super Bowl, I have become aware of Bud Select 55. BeerAdvocate.com claims that this beer is 4.0% ABV. So how does that work? BeerSmith tells me it would have to have a starting gravity of 1.020 and finishing gravity of 0.989 to meet those stats. I couldn’t do it without dropping below 1 for the finishing gravity. WTF? Must be the effect of alcohol on the gravity reading. But still. 1.020. That’s low.

Writing Beer Recipes

[ No Comments ] Posted on 02.04.10 under Brewing

In the world of homebrewing, there’s a common progression. First, one starts with kits. Premade recipes in little cardboard boxes all packaged with instructions. Brewer’s Best, for example. Then one moves on to the recipes of others, like clones of famous beers or just highly regarded tried and true homebrewer favorites. Now it’s on to the SNPA clone or Denny’s RyePA. Finally one day, the intrepid homebrewer decides it is time to stray from the beaten path and derive a novel recipe for an intended flavor profile.

The culmination of brewing experience gives the knowledge of the influence of each ingredient on the finished product. But at the same time, there are hints of apprehension around the unknown. I mean, it’s hard to tell what exactly will happen as a result of the addition of an ounce of Cascades at 15 minutes.

Here are a few rules for making your own recipes followed by an idea.

  1. Keep it simple: Making a recipe doesn’t have to be tough. In the end, a bunch of extract and a few ounces of hops will make a perfectly agreeable beer. Pick some stats: color, gravity, IBU. Then put together some ingredients to meet those stats. And there you go. Your very own beer.
  2. Leverage the past: Look at the recipes you’ve already brewed. Think about how the beers came out. Consider taking one of your old favorites, and modify one thing. Voila! Your own recipe! With minimum risk. Then build from there.
  3. Just do it: In the end, you can read all you want, but you just have to try something. The more you make the more you get to know how it all works. Consider it an iterative process. You get an idea of what you want to make. You come up with a recipe. It is off by a little bit in some certain way. You adjust the recipe to address that deficiency. It is off in a different way. You adjust. It is not perfect. You adjust. And so on.

Now: here is the idea. Imagine if you could pick your beer style and there was a computer program to make the recipe for you. What do you think? Have you ever seen anything like that? Could it even work?

Dundee Mix Pack

[ No Comments ] Posted on 01.22.10 under Tasting

When you’re value shopping, you come across tough choices.

I ended up with a Dundee mixer 12-pack for $10.99. One dollar cheaper than the Red Hoook $11.99 special (I already used the $5 rebate, so that doesn’t count any more). Worth a shot for the Dundee.

Plus it’s a mix pack, two each of six different beer styles. IPA, Pale Ale, Porter, Wheat, Pale Bock, and the immortal Honey Brown. At least it’s a variety, and if one is terrible, little is lost. Besides, who could predict which would be the best? Mix packs like this satisfy the ticker in me.

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Joy and Pain

[ No Comments ] Posted on 01.15.10 under Brewing, Kegging

Kegging is such a joy. It is always so exciting to be packaging the results of brewing and fermenting. It is the last time-consuming step in the process. From there on out it’s all enjoyment with no more work. You get to measure your final gravity, determine your ABV, see how you hit your marks, and most importantly, get a preview taste of the beer you’ve just made.

Furthermore, kegging is so quick and easy, it takes around a half an hour at most, and you’re done. It’s all so wonderful. I am euphoric every time I complete a kegging run. It is just so satisfying and a great symbol of many weeks of drinking pleasure to come in the future.

But kegging has a dark side that I’m experiencing this week.

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Getting Out The Trub

[ No Comments ] Posted on 01.05.10 under All-Grain, Brewing, Hops, IPA, Lambic, Stories, Zok

I am lucky enough to be able to enjoy over a week of paid time off between Christmas and New Year’s. With such an extended stay at home, it’s almost a given that there should be a time to brew somewhere in there. As it turns out, the holidays are busy times full of seeing family and stuff like that. But in the end, I managed to carve out a perfect brewing day – January 1st. I still haven’t decided if it was Brew Year’s Day or New Beer’s Day, but either way the pun is bad.

I have had these bacterial cultures in my fridge for a while, and I decided to finally put them to work. I made a lambic. Half malted wheat and half pale malt, with a handful of what we dubbed “bunny hops” boiled for 60 minutes. I skipped the whole raw wheat turbid mash four hour boil thing, and went pretty standard with an infusion mash around 148°F for this one.

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