I’m not exactly sure what a Homebrew Log Jam is but I needed something that sounded even more “backed up” than Homebrew Backlog since I’ve brewed like 7 or 8 beers since my last homebrew related post. I guess I’ll start where I left off.

RIP Strawberry Hefeweizen

I ended up dumping the Strawberry Hefeweizen. It wasn’t getting any better and based on some feedback I got from the very helpful Home Brew Talk forums it was most likely some other strain of wild yeast (or something) that created flavors that just aren’t gonna go away no matter how long I wait. Whatever it was also created a bunch of extra C02 because after a while every one I opened was a gusher (meaning foam gushes out of the bottle after opening as if I had shaken it up). I actually shot a video of me opening a bunch of the bottles in the sink, which turned out to be less exciting than I thought it would be. And now I can’t find it so you’ll just have to watch this video of someone else’s gushers Mine is basically the same except my sink isn’t so fucking stupid looking.

I definitely want to try a strawberry beer again but I’ll probably wait until next year since it’s more of a summer beer.

Petit Saison d’Ete

I’m not sure why I felt the need to do another Saison but I liked the sound of this one:

This session-strength Saison of summer pours tawny-gold and perfumes the air with tangy yeast and pungent hop aromas. The flavor is lightly earthy with spicy, flowery hops and a grain-and-bread malt character; caramel malt dukes it out with Saaz and Styrian Goldings through the middle before a palate-cleansingly dry finish.

OK, so most of these descriptions are cleverly written bullshit but I bought it. Here are the ingredients:

Up until this point I had been using a plastic bucket for primary fermentation, but decided to invest in a 6.5 gallon glass carboy. They’re more fun because you can see what’s going on inside without having to open them up, and they’re way more dangerous, being that they’re heavy and glass and lacking any sort of handle or anything to keep it from slipping out of your wet, soapy hands and smashing into a thousand pieces. Luckily that hasn’t happened yet but it’s more exciting knowing that it could happen.

Now, here’s a photo that probably doesn’t make sense if you know anything about brewing beer:

This was probably my first really dumb thing that I did. I did a couple other dumb things but this one was really dumb. Actually I think it felt dumber than it really was because I ended up having to run out and buy bottled water because, well, first of all, I brought the water to a boil when I was supposed to steep the specialty grains at 170F for like 20-30 minutes. After realizing how dumb I was, I turned off the heat and then realized it would be even dumber to stand there waiting for the water to get down to 170F. So I made a quick cold water bath in the sink to try to speed things up a bit. That’s what’s happening in the photo.

It was at this point I noticed some little white things floating in the kettle. It took a few minutes to figure out what was going on but I eventually deduced that they came from my old ass Brita pitcher that I used to filter the water. I never figured out what the floaty things were but I think it’s sort of irrelevant. Whatever they were I’m pretty sure I didn’t want them in my beer. So I drove to Wawa real quick and picked up some gallon jugs of spring water.

After properly steeping the grains at the right temperature I got the water up to a boil and added the extract. All pretty standard.

Here’s what it looked like before adding the extract:

And after:

For some reason I wasn’t content with just following another recipe. I’m sure the beer would have turned out great and most likely even better that what I ended up with but I needed to express myself. I was 4 beers into my homebrewing career and hadn’t yet made any of my own ingredient choices. Actually that’s not true. I made the decision to add strawberries to a hefeweizen. Apparently that was just the beginning of my brewing genius because with this next one I decided to stray a bit from the recipe and add, not only black peppercorns, coriander and bitter orange peel, but an entire extra pound of raw cane sugar.

The spices and orange sort of make sense (and I had the coriander/orange left over from earlier brews) but I’m not sure what I was thinking with the raw cane sugar. I think I was hoping it would just make the beer stronger, which it probably did, but it probably also made it more dry (which in beer/wine talk is like the opposite of sweet (which seems weird because adding sugar equals more sweet right? But it’s all eaten by the yeast, which produces more alcohol; and the cane sugar is even more fermentable than the sugars in the wort so the yeast will eat all of it)) and had some effect on mouthfeel and/or color that I can’t even begin to understand. But whatever. This is supposed to be fun right? Let’s just throw a bunch of shit in there and see what happens.

Here are the spices and orange peel measured out and still looking like the best idea I’ve ever had:

Those were all added in the final 10 minutes of the boil which is around where you normally want to add things like that. Because, that’s why. Everything else went pretty much according to plan and the wort was happily fermenting away the next day. And, now that it was in glass instead of plastic, I could see what was going on:

I decided to leave this one in the primary fermenter rather than racking to the smaller secondary, like I did with the strawberry beer. In that case it made sense because I was adding fruit and I don’t think it’s a good idea to add it to the primary with the beer sitting on all that yeast. Maybe it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that if I rack it to a secondary carboy (of which I now have several) that frees up the primary so I can do another batch, so it’s kind of a no-brainer now. But at the time it made sense to just leave it.

After 3 weeks it had fermented down to a sort of ridiculous 1.000. Why is that ridiculous? Well that’s basically the same as plain water which I’m assuming means that almost all of the sugar has fermented. Normally some will be left over, in some beers more than others, but still… something. From what I’ve read beers can even finish below 1.000 but it’s pretty much as low as you’re gonna get.

Here’s the yeast taking a nap at the bottom of the primary:

From there I racked to the bottling bucket, added priming sugar (for carbonation) and then filled the bottles. This is about half of a 5 gallon batch (1 case):

I made this batch right before I left the country for 2 weeks so it was ready to drink by the time I got back. But it was also the only thing I had going so it didn’t last long.

The Two Wits

When I got back I decided to try another wheat beer since they’re ready to drink relatively quickly. I had recently picked up the book Beer Craft, which has a bunch of recipes for doing 1 gallon all-grain batches. This is good for me because I don’t have the equipment to do 5 gallon all-grain batches yet, and if I mess something up I’ve wasted less ingredients and less beer.

So I took the basic Wheat Beer recipe and made one of the suggested modifications by adding Flaked Wheat and Aromatic Malt to the mash, along with some orange zest in the boil, to produce a Witbier. This is a similar enough recipe to the first extract batch I did that I could get some idea of what difference going all-grain makes.

Here are the grains all measured out:

At the risk of oversimplifying this for the non-brewers, the main difference between extract and all-grain brewing is the “mash”. This is where you steep the grains in hot (but not boiling) water to convert the starch in them to fermentable sugars. Brewing with extract allows you to skip this step and go straight to the boil. When you buy extract you’re buying a concentrated version of the sugars that get extracted in the mash.

For this particular 1 gallon batch the grains add up to around 2.5 lbs. Having never done a bigger batch I’m not sure if that ratio scales as you go up but typically you’re gonna start with a larger amount of grains (in lbs) than your batch size (in gallons)

When you add that amount of grain to a kettle of hot water it brings the temperature down a bit so you first have to heat the water to what’s called the “strike temperature”. The recipe called for a 1 hour mash at 153F and listed a strike temp of 163F, a whole 10 degrees hotter. So that’s what I did. After adding and stirring the grains though it became clear that this calculation was probably more of a guideline than a rule. The temperature only came down to about 158F and, not having planned for this eventuality, I starting imagining how this beer might taste since I was into the higher range of mash temps that produce more non-fermentable sugars, resulting in a sweeter final product. Then I realized that I could probably just add a bit of cold water to get the mash down to 153F, so I did that and it basically worked. I was getting different readings depending on where I put the thermometer but I figured that has to be normal and that it just needs to be “pretty close”.

Oh yeah — I forgot to mention that I didn’t just add the grains directly to the water. You could do that, and that’s how most all-grain brewers do it, but to make things a little easier, you can also add them in a mesh bag. It’s basically the same idea as a tea bag except a lot bigger.

After the hour was up, I removed the grains from the water and set them on a strainer above the kettle to let some of liquid to drain back in. There’s actually still a lot of fermentable sugar left in the grains so I need to do a “sparge”. It sounds weird and gross but really it just means “rinsing off the grains”. Most breweries do this by sprinkling water on top and allowing it do drain through the bottom but that requires some special equipment that I don’t have.

So for this pseudo-sparge I heated up a second kettle of water to around 165F. For some reason that I don’t completely understand yet you need to sparge with water that’s hotter than what you used in the mash. Once the water is up to 165F I just drop the bag in and let it sit for about 15 minutes. I wasn’t sure how well this would work but I could see the sugars coming out almost immediately after putting the bag in so I guess it works.

After the 15 minutes are up, I did the same draining with the strainer thing (apparently just squeezing the liquid out is a bad idea, so I avoided doing that) and then add the liquid from the second kettle back into the first. I also forgot to mention that both kettles started with 1 gallon of water each so I would end up with 2 gallons. The idea is that a certain amount will be boiled off during the 60 minute boil although I think it ended up being less than what the recipe was predicting. This is another area where everyone’s process will be a little different.

The rest of the process is basically the same as an extract batch: bring the wort to a boil and then add hops and flavorings at specific times during the hour boil. That all went pretty much according to plan. It wasn’t until I got to the point where I’m supposed to transfer the wort into a 1 gallon glass jug that things started to go downhill. I should mention that for whatever reason I added the hop pellets directly to the boil instead of putting them in a muslin bag. So instead of just pouring the cooled wort into the jug I decided that wanted to try to filter out the hops and whatever other sludge might be in the kettle by putting a coffee filter in the funnel.

I know.

So yeah, that didn’t work. And in the process I managed to spill a good cup or two of wort all over the counter, which was actually good because it turns out I didn’t boil off a whole gallon during the 60 minute boil, so it wasn’t all gonna fit anyway. After a quick clean up I managed to get most of the rest of what was left into the jug, including a bunch of hops which made it all look sort of green instead of, well, witbier-colored. Whatever that is.

And here’s the jug with huge blow off hose attached.

With only a little headspace left in the jug, a regular air lock won’t cut it for something like this. I can’t seem to find a photo right now, but, by day 3 there was foam filling up half the blow off hose. So at least I know the yeast was good.

You might be wondering why I called this section “The Two Wits” (although, let’s be honest: you’re probably not). I followed this one up with another 1 gallon batch of the same exact recipe. I had a bunch of grains left over because I could only buy 1 lb bags (I only needed a few ounces of a couple of them). I know that’s really interesting which is why I mentioned it. You’re welcome.

More recently I was able to have one of each, to see how much difference it made that, for the second batch, I got the mash temp right, managed to get all the wort into the jug and ended up using a different strain of yeast. Here they are side by side, first batch on the left, second on the right:

They actually taste pretty much the same although I feel like the second one is a little bit better, probably because I wanted it to be better. I guess I should have done a blind taste test but I don’t really care about being accurate with something like this. It’s more fun to feel like I’m getting better at making beer.

Coming up in the highly anticipated Homebrew Log Jam: Part 2, I’ll continue the trend where I blog about every beer I make even if no one gives a shit.

Just 2 months ago I wrote a hilarious post about how not to keep your blog updated and I’ve obviously been following my own advice.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, I brewed a saison and wrote about it and then kinda dropped the ball. I’ve brewed 3 more beers since then but let’s start back where I left off.

Belgian Saison

Back in April I posted about brewing a Belgian Saison. Well, that one has since been bottled and drank. I think I had the last one a couple weeks ago. The kit I used suggested “cellaring” this one so I saved a six pack for as long as I could, although not in a cellar. I think the last ones probably tasted better but that might have just been in my head.

Here’s a shot of how it turned out from when I still had some:

Strawberry Hefeweizen

After the saison I decided I would try brewing a strawberry beer. I know, it was a dumb idea but I did it anyway. Any experienced homebrewer will probably tell you not to try dealing with fruit until you have more experience and a list of successful brews under your belt. And like most people new to home brewing I said “eff that, I want to try it” and bought a hefeweizen extract kit from Northern Brewer and some fruit extract to add at bottling.

Actually the original idea was a strawberry/banana hefeweizen, so I got both strawberry and banana extract/flavoring. Then I did some reading and found that most people weren’t happy with the taste when using this stuff. Change of plans. I decided to add actual strawberries after the primary fermentation and ferment at higher than normal temps to try to coax some banana flavor from the yeast. That might sound like a weird thing to say, but when you ferment at a higher temperature, some yeasts will actually add a fruity, sometimes banana-like flavor to the beer.

The first step was to brew and ferment the hefeweizen. Here’s the recipe I used:

• 6.3 lbs wheat malt extract
• 1 oz Hersbrucker hops (60 min)
• 0.5 oz crushed coriander (10 min)
• Brewferm Blanche dry yeast
• 7 lb frozen strawberries (secondary)

This photo also shows some bitter orange peel I had left over from previous brews but I ended up not adding it. The coriander was my own addition to the recipe. It’s something you usually see with a Belgian witbier but I had some left over and I like the peppery flavor it adds so I just went with it.

The basic process of heating the water and adding the extract is the same as the other brews I’ve posted. I started with 2.5gal of water this time, mainly because that’s what the recipe called for, but also because I wanted to try something closer to a full boil. The more of the wort you can include in the boil the better. Most extract kits are meant to be used with smaller equipment so they don’t recommend you boil the full amount. With my 5gal kettle I could probably do more than 2.5gal but I figure I would start out here and try a larger volume next time if this one goes well. The main concern is boilovers. If you try to boil 5gal of liquid in a 5gal pot you’re obviously going to be cleaning up a mess.

Once all the extract was added and started to boil I added the 1oz Hersbrucker hops. I decided to just add it to the boil without a muslin bag or anything and right after dropping it in, all the foam turned bright green. It looks pretty gross (anything that color green doesn’t look appetizing) but I had fun looking at it.

With 10 minutes left to go in the boil I added the coriander. This time I decided to give it a couple spins in the coffee grinder to really break it up. Last time I used a mortar and pestle I made out of a ceramic IKEA bowl and a glass. The grinder is much faster and easier. I should probably get a separate one for coffee but I can’t say I’ve noticed any coriander notes in the coffee I made after this so maybe not.

Another thing I didn’t anticipate was that I was going to end up with a lot more hot ass wort that I would need to cool down to 70F as quickly as possible. To make matters worse I forgot to buy ice. I usually pick up a couple bags of ice and use them to make an ice bath in the kitchen sink. Without the bags, I had like half a tray of cubes and one of those blue things for coolers so I filled up the sink with cold water and whatever frozen stuff I had and hoped for the best.

As you can see the ice didn’t last long and after 10 minutes the water in the sink was really hot. I thought about refilling with cold water but quickly realized it was time for plan B.

I quickly moved the pot into the bathtub (luckily it’s right next to the kitchen) and filled it with enough cold water so that all the hot wort was submerged and then tried to keep the cold water moving to draw as much heat out as possible. It took a little longer than I was hoping but I managed to get it down to around 80F in 30-40 minutes. Time to get it in the primary and pitch the yeast.

After dumping the wort into the bucket I decided to try a new method for aerating. The metal whisk (sanitized of course).

Seemed to work pretty well. If you don’t have a more sophisticated method I highly recommend it. At this point I took a sample for a gravity reading. This being an extract brew, it was pretty much right on target: 1.045. The recipe said it would be 1.046, and it probably was. I topped off with water to get it up to 5gal so it probably just wasn’t 100% mixed.

This was my first time using dry yeast. I followed the directions on the packet which seemed simple enough, but I might have benefited from making a yeast starter. I could just be second guessing myself as usual though.

After pitching the yeast, I added the lid and airlock and moved the bucket into the living room where I do all my fermenting. That’s where the AC is so its the room where I have the most control over ambient temperature.

Now we finally get to the part with the strawberries.

After 2 weeks in the primary, fermentation was complete with a final gravity of 1.010. I then dropped 7lbs of frozen strawberries from Acme into the secondary bucket and racked the beer on top of it. A couple days in I started to see some activity in the airlock again. 7lbs of strawberries also added some amount (no idea) of fermentable sugar so the yeast obviously woke up for a bit. That didn’t last long though and after a full week in secondary I decided to rack to another container to get the beer off all those strawberries. I don’t really have a good reason but that’s what I read some other people did and it made sense to me. Leaving it for too long (I would imagine) could bring a little too much out of the berries.

I was a bit surprised after cracking the lid and seeing that all the strawberries were floating on top. I don’t know why I thought they would stay at the bottom but I guess it makes sense that they would eventually float to the top. They also looked pretty gross but I was expecting that. There was a sort of whiteish/pale tinge to them, as if the color had been leeched out (I’m assuming that’s good) and they had taken on some of the color of the beer as well. Here’s what they looked like after racking the beer off:

Here’s a closeup. They look even worse up close so look at your own risk.

I let it sit for another week before bottling. I’m not sure if that was necessary but it didn’t hurt. If anything it allowed some time for any bits of strawberry to settle out. I haven’t brewed this beer without strawberries so I don’t have anything to compare it to, but I’d say it definitely took on some color that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. Oh, and after being on the strawberries for a week I figured why not take another gravity reading. It came out at 1.009 so… something was happening. I’m not sure if I can figure out the ABV at this point since the sugar from the strawberries wasn’t there for the OG reading.

So, now for the bad news.

It’s been over a month since these have been in the bottle and they taste pretty funky. It’s very tart. I was hoping for more sweetness and actual strawberry flavor but so far it’s hard to get any of that. It’s hard to even get any of the beer flavor with how overpowering the tartness is. And I like sour beers. This is more a combination of a tartness and something else. I can’t really place it but it’s definitely kind of unpleasant. It smells even funkier than it tastes. There’s definitely an element of strawberry to it, but it’s almost like rubber or plastic or something – not exactly a flavor most people want in their beer.

At around 3 weeks I had one that seemed like it was getting better. It didn’t get as much of the tartness up front and it almost had a “creaminess” to it. More of a mouthfeel thing, but I was started to be a little optimistic. Then a week later I tried another one and it was worse than where it started. This one as in the fridge over night, where the one at three weeks was in just long enough to cool down, so I’m not sure if that was a factor.

I’m keeping it around to see if it ever mellows out but I’m not holding out hope after my last taste. It was the first of my own beers that I couldn’t finish. Sad face. Well it was bound to happen at some point (and probably will again) so I’m just gonna roll with it. On to the next one…

I was planning on writing about the other 2 beers I brewed after this one, but this post is already pretty long and it’s pretty late so I’ll save that for the next post. If you just can’t wait, you should check out my Flickr, which is more up to date than this site.

I swear the idea for having my own site was to have a place to write about web design, music and other things I’ve been doing for a long time but not really writing about. So far it’s looking like a beer blog. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I’m just saying I realize it’s probably not what you were expecting. It’s not what I was expecting either. Anyway…

An update on the Belgian Wit: It tastes good! It’s been over a month now since bottling and I think it’s finally settled into being a real beer. It’s definitely a bit over-carbonated but not bad for a first try. If you want some, let me know. It probably won’t last long, which is why I already started on beer number two.

After another trip to Keystone Homebrew I had all the ingredients needed for a Belgian Saison which I brewed up several weeks ago. The process was very similar to the Belgian Wit, so I won’t go into the details again, but there were a few notable differences, mainly the use of specialty grains and the combination of both liquid and dry malt extract.

The specialty grains are basically the same type of grains you would use to make an all-grain brew (all commercial beers are all-grain), but they are just “steeped” rather than “mashed” before you start the boil. This recipe called for 1/2 lb of Weyermann Carahelles (crushed), which are placed in a muslin bag and steeped in 1.5 gal of hot water (145-160 degrees) for about 30 minutes. This adds some grain flavor and color that you otherwise wouldn’t get with an all extract brew.

The steep went pretty smoothly other than the fact that I didn’t have whatever thermometer you’re supposed to use for a pot this big (I guess a candy thermometer) and had to use an instant read thermometer attached to the side of the pot with a long twist tie and clip magnet from my fridge. Shit worked.

For extract I used 6.6lbs of light liquid malt extract (LME) rather than wheat and added an extra lb of wheat dry malt extract (DME), not because I know what I’m doing but because that’s what the recipe said to do. This recipe also called for 1lb of light candi sugar which came in a bag and looked basically like rock candy. I guess since this beer has a higher ABV% it needs more sugar to start with. Or maybe there’s some other reason I don’t know about.

“The light malt extract is much lighter than the wheat.”

— Captain Obvious

Another difference in this boil was the use of bittering (Sterling), flavoring (Kent Golding) and finishing (Kent Golding and Czech Saaz) hops. By comparison, for the Belgian Wit I just used bittering hops and then used coriander and orange peel for the flavoring. If you don’t know (or care) what difference that makes, don’t worry about it. Or read this. The beer will still taste good either way.

This one has been fermenting for 3 weeks now. Actually the fermentation doesn’t really last that long but it’s been in a fermenter for 3 weeks. For the first 2 weeks it was in the same 5 gal bucket I used last time (the “primary”) and last weekend I “racked” it to a 5 gal glass carboy I bought for doing secondary fermentation.

The first thing I noticed after cracking the lid of the bucket was that it smelled really good. I took a sample for a hydrometer reading, which was actually sort of pointless because the original reading I took was way off where it was supposed to be. I don’t think it was actually that far off, I just hadn’t mixed it enough after topping off the bucket with clean water, so the heavier stuff was all at the bottom. But it gave me an excuse to have a taste and even though it’s basically flat at this point, it tasted really good. I can’t wait to see how this one turns out.

The secondary fermentation is optional but it’s nice because it frees up the primary (the bucket, or a 6 gal glass carboy if I decide to get one, which I probably will because it’s better because you can see through glass) for yet another batch and supposedly helps the beer to settle out some more because the transfer leaves behind all the dead yeast cells at the bottom of the primary.

The process for transferring the wort to the carboy is the same that I used to get it into the bottling bucket: auto-siphon, rubber tubing and some patience.

So far I’ve been brewing faster than I can drink it all but I don’t see a problem with that. It would actually be more of a problem if I was keeping up with the drinking. This just means I have more to give away, at least until I get a business plan together and start doing this for real (which may or may not ever happen).

As usual I’m already thinking about what to do next. Whatever it is I’m pretty sure I’m gonna do something non-Belgian. Maybe a double IPA. Something that will melt your palate in half.