BYO Blogs

Another year has come and gone, and I didn't get much brewing done this last year. Last night, I did pull out my brewing notebooks in an effort to get ideas for beers I might want to rebrew and refine in 2013 and I discovered one thing -- my brewing has been a lot more episodic than I thought. I discovered that I've had a few years like 2012, years when I didn't brew very many batches. In most cases, these were followed by years in which I brewed quite a lot. This year, I'm definitely going to brew more, and I've already figured out how.

First off, my normal procedure is to make a yeast starter 2 or 3 days before I brew, and only brew if the yeast is in good shape. This year I plan to get a few packets of dried yeast and, if the opportunity arises, brew that day and just use dried yeast. I've used Fermentis US-05 before with good results. 

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, a new brewpub opened up about a block from me. Bastrop Brewhouse has been open for a couple months now, serving guest beers from Austin brewers (including Live Oak, (512), Circle and Independence). But now they are on the cusp of serving their own creations.

Last week, they brewed their first beer on their 3.5-barrel system. Getting there took awhile. Originally, the burners the brewer (Ed Peters) ordered didn’t seem like they were doing the job. He was worried that they didn’t have enough gas pressure to generate a sufficient amount of heat to boil the wort. As it turns out, the company had sent the wrong burners and once that error got straightened out, he had plenty of BTUs. Also, the glycol system (that circulates around the fermenters and cools them) was leaky and Ed had to charge the system with water and track and down all the leaks before they could start brewing. 

Last Friday, my wife and I attended the 29th annual Dixie Cup, the homebrew contest and conference of Houston’s Foam Rangers. We’ve attended several Dixie Cups before and always had fun, and this year’s conference was no exception. 

Every Dixie Cup has a theme. This year’s theme was Beermagedon, based on the supposed Mayan prediction of the end of the world. Every year, the Dixie Cup also has a special category to their contest. This year, it was called The Last Beer on Earth. Entries for this category were actually due at last year’s Dixie Cup and they were stored outside in a shed for a year — including through a hot Texas summer — before being judged. (A brewer named Mark Todd won that category.) 

Last year at this time, my club (the Austin ZEALOTS) was flying high. One of our members (Mark Schoppe) won the Templeton Award (most individual points at the Dixie Cup), our club won the Dixie Cup (most points by a homebrew club) and our showing at the Dixie Cup cemented our lead for the Lone Star Circuit (the combined points in all the BJCP contests in Texas). 

This year we didn’t do as well. A Foam Ranger (Jeff Reilly) won the Templeton award and the Foam Rangers won the Dixie Cup. For some reason, the winner of the Lone Star Circuit hasn’t been announced, but the Rangers may have surged ahead at the Cup and won this, too. Oh, well. 

I love biology. One of my undergraduate majors was biology and I have a PhD in biology. If you really understand the subject, it gives you a perspective on life different from most people’s. For example, most biology majors end up taking either a parasitology or an epidemiology course for their undergrad degree. And slowly, as the semester progresses, you are transformed from a happy, well-adjusted human into a Howard Hughes-like recluse, afraid that all your food is teeming with worms and every door handle is a germ-smeared death sentence. (Ah, the memories!) 

But eventually you get over it, rediscover sushi and get on your life. And if your life includes brewing, you have some absorbed some information that can help you become a better brewer. I believe one of the biggest benefits of having a biology background is a simple thing — understanding how small bacteria are. 

Bacteria are small. Most are just a couple microns across. Brewers yeast cells, which are also small enough to be microscopic, are about 10 times larger than all the standard wort-spoiling or beer-spoiling bacteria. With 40X magnification, you can see yeast cells fairly well with a light microscope. (If the cells are not stained, turn the back lighting way down.) With 100X magnification (the next highest power on most light microscopes), most (stained) bacteria look only slightly bigger than a dot. 

Now, just for some scale, let’s compare this to a speck of dust. We’ve all been in a room with a ray of sunshine coming in from a window and we’ve all seen specks of dust floating in the air. The size of dust particles depends on what the dust is made of, but if they are big enough to be visible, but small enough to stay aloft in a mostly still room, they are probably between 50 and a 100 microns — i.e. 10 to 20 times larger than bacteria. 

Summer is here and . . . hey, what happened to summer? How is it almost fall already?

For lots of people, summer is beer season. It's hot and beer is widely viewed as a thirst-quenching beverage. (We homebrewers, of course, know that there is a beer for every season.) And this summer, in Texas, I had some good thirst-quenching beers. The Austin ZEALOTS picnic, in particular, was one day that I had some good beers. Held again this year at Emma Long Municipal Park, the ZEALOTS (the homebrew club from Austin I belong to) threw a great bash featuring somewhere in the neighborhood of forty 5-gallon Corny kegs of homebrew, a 68-lb. roasted pig (thanks to Roger Kovalcheck for roasting that) and plenty of ribs that were entered in our second annual rib cook off.

There were too many good beers to mention, so I'll mention one beverage I had a hand in instead. As I detailed in an earlier blog entry, Joe White, Dave Ebel and I brewed a Four Loko clone awhile back -- not because we view Four Loko as a distinguished beverage, but for the technical challenges (of which there were a few). It was our "horizontal Everest," as we put it. Well, Dave brought his portion that he flavored with watermelon-flavored Jolly Ranchers and pushed it through a watermelon Randall. As it turned out, it succeeded at being what it was supposed to be -- sweet, fruity tasting and alcoholic (about 12% ABV) without tasting hot. (Or, as one of us -- I forget who -- put it, "Oh man, if I were in Junior High, I'd love this.") Challenge met, now let's never speak of it again. 

In other local news, someone opened a brewpub about a block from my house. The Bastrop Brewhouse just opened, with guest beers from local Austin breweries on tap while the on site 3-barrel brewhouse is being assembled. For the grand opening, the two brewers -- my friends Ed Peters and Kevin Glenn -- brewed six days straight on two homebrew rigs to have enough beer for the festivities, highlighted by a concert by Kinky Freidman (a Texas legend). Hopefully, their brewhouse will be up and running in late September. 

When I moved to Boston, for graduate school in 1991, I remember seeing Sam Adams T-shirts saying, “I am a revolting beer drinker.” I thought the shirts were clever and was intrigued by the idea of trying a locally-made beer. The only other locally-made beer I’d had to that point was drinking Schell’s while visiting a friend in New Ulm, Minnesota in the late 80’s (before Schell’s started making craft beers). 

When I first tried it, I didn’t know what to think. It was very different from any beer that I had ever had, but different in a way I liked. A couple of weeks later I knew all about craft beer. (There was much less to know at that point.) Beer came in many styles and flavors, and many small American brewers were brewing beer rivaling the best imports, which I was also discovering at the time. 

Back in the day, the Rolling Stones recorded a song called "Time is on my Side," and the first lyrics from the song are "Time is on my side/yes it is." If anything makes me hate the 60's more than I already do, it's the idea that people actually had time on their hands back then. Here in 2012, nobody I know has much free time for anything, including me. 

Which brings me to this blog entry. Do I have a lot of wonderful and interesting new things to report. No, sadly, I don't. 

I brewed a tripel not too long ago. Where is it? Languishing in the primary fermenter.

I brewed a Four Loko clone shortly after that after that. Where is it? Also still in it's primary fermenter. 

James Spencer and I "recently" announced our newest experiment in our BYO/BBR Collaborative series, so I will describe that here. 

Our latest experiment seeks to test if conducting a secondary fermentation is worth while. About a decade ago, standard homebrewing advice was to rack your beer to secondary after primary fermentation was finished, to let it settle. More recently, many homebrewers have suggested this is un-necessary and subjects the beer to possible oxidation.

So, our experiment is this. Brew a batch of beer and split the wort into two fermenters (ideally, identical fermenters). Let them ferment. At the end of primary fermentation, rack one of the batches to secondary (preferably to a vessel with little headspace). Leave the other beer be. After both beers have been given time to settle, package both of them at the same time. See the file at Basic Brewing Radio (www.basicbrewing.com) for the data to record -- it's mostly how clear the beer is at various stages. Then, send us your results. (Even if you're late for the podcast deadline, you'll likely be in time for the BYO writeup.) 

You've probably gotten the look. That look you sometimes get when you tell someone you're a homebrewer -- and you know they view that as someone who makes a lot of booze, cheap. If you're unfortunate, you've had to explain that homebrew is not the equivalent of bathtub gin and you don't have a still hidden in the woods. If you're fortunate, you were regaled with the "funny" tale of Uncle So-and-So, who used to make homebrew and stored the bottles under the porch (for some reason, it's always under the porch), but then one day they all exploded. 

I'm always amused at the difference between the perception of homebrewers and the reality. This was drawn into sharp focus last weekend when I gave a talk on water chemistry for the Austin ZEALOTS. Keith Bradley, a longtime ZEALOT and award-winning competitive homebrewer, discussed hosting a water seminar for club members on our Yahoo (email) group and got several positive responses. Debbie Cerda, another ZEALOT, until recently worked at a water treatment facility and volunteered to discuss how our local water is treated. As a former chemistry major, I volunteered to explain a little bit about pH and buffers. 

We ended up holding the event at NXNW (an Austin brewpub) at 11 pm on Saturday, and it was "sold out" -- we didn't charge, but the room only held 40 people and we had that many register before hand. Debbie, Keith and I discussed water for 3 hours to a room full of homebrewers who not only stayed awake, but had lots of good questions. Imagine that, 40 homebrewers willing to spend 3 hours of their Saturday learning about water. 

Debbie started us off and discussed water treatment in the Austin area and how this affects our water. One part of this was how and why chloramines are used, and how to deal with these as a brewer. I took the second leg and talked about pH and buffers. The take home message of my segment was that you should measure the pH of your mash, your wort as you are running it off and your boiling wort (cool the sample down first), but you don't need to bother to take (or adjust) the pH of your strike water or sparge water. Because wort is much more heavily buffered, the pH of your strike or sparge water doesn't give you any information about what your mash or wort pH is going to be, unless you have worked out a correlation by trial and error (and if so, that information only applies to you). Keith finished things off with a hypothetical look at three beers -- a pale beer, an amber and a dark beer -- and what mineral adjustments you'd need to make to turn Austin water into a suitable brewing liquor. His presentation used John Palmer's spreadsheet to calculate all the possible options. 

So a couple weeks ago, as I detailed in my previous blog entry, I brewed a tripel. Last weekend, I brewed a quad . . . of sorts. OK, in reality, it was a clone of Four Loko. Yes, the sweet, obnoxiously artificially flavored “malternative” beverage that also contained caffeine, taurine and guanine until it got banned and the company changed the formula. 

A great question at this point might be, why the hell would you do such a thing? It’s a long story, but it starts -- where many very, very bad ideas (bacon Randall anyone?) start -- at a ZEALOTS meeting. (The Austin ZEALOTS are my local homebrew club.) 

I was talking with a couple fellow ZEALOTS, Dave Ebel and Joe White, and we were wondering if it would be possible to make something like that at home, hypothetically. After discussing it awhile and realizing the technical challenges it would entail, we decided to actually give it a shot. It was a little like seeing a mountain -- we wanted to try it because of the technical challenge. So, in short, making a Four Loko clone became our Everest . . . or, as a friend of mine put it, our horizontal Everest. 

I brewed a Belgian-style tripel on Friday and had a great time for at least three reasons: 1.) My friend Dan Dewberry came over and brewed with me. 2.) This was my first brewday of 2012 and 3.) Everything went extremely well.