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Posted by Chris Colby on Wednesday, 12 September 2012 in BYO Brew Blog

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.

If many beer drinkers view summer as beer drinking season, many homebrewers view fall as the start of homebrewing season. Temperatures fall into the range in which ales can be brewed without temperature control and brewers start dreaming of what beers they will produce for the winter and holiday season. This year, I have been really crunched for time and haven't been able to brew as much as I'd like. So what am I going to do about it? Whine about it on my blog like a little girl? Well, maybe just a little, but in a practical sense, I think I'm going to crank out some partial mash brews. Partial mash brewdays are little shorter than a full all-grain brewday, and I can do everything in my kitchen (since it's still hotter than Hades here in Texas, even if fall is approaching). I'm going to start with partial mah adaptations of my pale ale and porter recipes -- which I've brewed over 20 times each in their all-grain versions -- just to get a couple Corny kegs worth of beer in my beer fridge, then I'll see what comes next. I didn't brew my cranberry beer for Thanksgiving last year, so I definitely want to do that. I'd also like to take another crack at a Vienna lager and also make some kind of hop bomb, like maybe a rye IPA.

While summer was passing me by, I had a lot of great ideas for blog entries. Did I write them? No, of course not. But hopefully I'll get around to them this fall. I learned how to make "solid beer" (AKA bread, and I have a couple beer bread recipes that are awesome) and I also now have the equipment to make hard cheese, which I'm going to try soon. In addition, along with all the "normal" beers I hope to get brewed, I'd like to try one experimental idea -- malting beans and making a "beer" from them. I'll start, however, with the partial mash brews and see how things go.

Last modified on Friday, 08 March 2013

Chris Colby

I learned to brew beer right around the same time that I discovered good beer. I started graduate school at Boston University in 1990 and quickly began enjoying the local brews — particularly Harpoon Ale, Sam Adams Boston Ale and Dock Street Amber (from Philadelphia) — that were popping up. There was even a brewpub, Commonwealth Brewing, with three or four regular brews and a new “seasonal” beer every other month or so. I also tried out imported beers, whenever possible. Coming from South Dakota, where Beck’s was an exotic import, this was an eye-opening experience.

A couple of graduate students in my department brewed beer and I was immediately intrigued. I learned the basic extract brewing method from them, but was hampered for a long time by substandard equipment — especially the lack of decent-sized brewpot — and having to brew in a small Boston apartment.

My early brewing efforts were also hampered by my lack of knowledge. As a graduate student in biology, I could have easily dug into the advanced homebrew literature at the time, but I figured I had enough things to study and just wanted a nice, easy hobby that ended up with me drinking beer. And, even though the stuff I made wasn’t great, it did get drunk on poker night with no complaints.

I got a nudge in the right direction from a friend of mine, John Weerts. I went to college with John and would see him over the holidays as my folks had moved to Kansas City, where he lived. I taught him how to brew on one of those occasions, but then he struck out on his own. He joined is local brewclub (Kansas City Bier Meisters), stepped up to all-grain brewing and started making some really good beer. Years later, he visited me in Boston and brought along a keg of rye beer, which was fantastic. I immediately knew I was missing out on something.

On my next stop at my local homebrewshop (The Modern Brewer), I bought every book they had, including George Fix’s “Principles of Brewing Science” and Greg Noonans “Brewing Lager Beer.” Armed with the knowledge from these books, a new brewpot, and a ridiculously cobbled together all-grain set-up, I brewed a mini-mash version of a porter recipe of mine. It was the best beer I had made so far.

Fast forward to today, and I still think that gaining the right knowledge is the most important step to brewing great beer. (My brewing set-up is still almost comically jury-rigged, but it works.) I have read a number of professional brewing texts (and recommend the two volume “Malting and Brewing Science” set by Briggs, Hough, Stevens and Young), keep track of many of the great homebrewing forums out there, and am a member of the Austin ZEALOTS homebrew club.

The best way to gain brewing knowledge, however, is to brew. And, I normally brew about 20 batches per year. In the 15 or so years I’ve been a homebrewer, I have brewed ales, lagers and sour beers. I have tried most of the common traditional brewing techniques and experimented with new techniques (including my reiterated mashing techniques). Although primarily an all-grain brewer, my interest in extract brewing has been rekindled due to new techniques (such as the extract late procedure) and I have recently experimented with ways to improve partial mashing (especially making dark beers with a partial mash procedure).