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Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Memories of Beer
I had a beer-intensive extended Memorial Day weekend. (Is there any other kind?) On Thursday, I made two yeast starters (for an IPA and a porter) and a gallon of kräusen beer. Friday morning, I added the fermenting kräusen beer to my Vienna lager. That beer should be just about ready to keg and I hope to get that done later this week.
On Saturday, I went to Austin Homebrew Supply and picked up ingredients for two batches of beer (pale ale and stout). While there, my wife and I heard that some of the Austin ZEALOTS were checking out the new brewpub in Austin (Uncle Billy's BBQ) that evening. So, we headed there after we ran all our errands.
Brian Peters, who formerly brewed for the Bitter End (the Austin brewpub that burned down last year), is Billy's brewer and he had five beers on tap — a blonde ale, a pale ale, an amber ale, an IPA and a hefe-weizen. My favorites were the blonde (nice grainy taste and good balance), the pale ale (good hop bitterness, flavor and aroma — from Simcoe hops, I think — nicely balanced with some crystal malt) and the hefe-weizen (yummy German wheat beer flavor, aroma and "zip"). Brian was there and gave a tour of the brewhouse and dispensing room. He said he was smoking some malt soon to make a smoked beer to go with the barbecue. I'll definitely want to check that out.
I had planned to brew my IPA on Sunday and my porter on Monday, but I pushed that back by one day. So, on Monday I brewed the IPA (which appeared as Roswell IPA in the May-June 2007 issue of BYO). I bitter this beer with big dose of Magnum hops, then add Centennial and Cascade hops near the end of the boil. (I'll dry hop it with Cascade and Amarillo in the keg.) I got big, fluffy hot-break during the boil and that made me happy. (Yeah, I'm a simpleton.) I pitched the yeast around midnight and the beer was fermenting the next morning when I got up. You can smell the hops coming out of the fermentation lock.
On Tuesday, I brewed my porter (a partial-mash version of which appeared in the October 2006 issue of BYO). For me, one nice thing about brewing a dark beer is that I don't have to dilute my water — which is very carbonate-rich — with distilled water. Since I have been brewing frequently, my brewday went very smoothly. The only hitch was that a thunderstorm blew through midway through wort collection. I brew out on my carport and for 20 minutes or so, the wind was blowing fairly hard and — even though I was in the middle of the carport, under the roof — I was getting misted by rain. But soon enough, the sun came out and the rest of the day went by smoothly — so smoothly that I kept wondering if I had forgotten something. This one is fermenting nicely, side-by-side with the IPA.
So, now I have a bunch of different batches of beer in progress, but only one on tap — the "speed brew." It's maturing very nicely, and — of course — the keg is almost gone. I brought this beer to the ZEALOTS meeting six days after I brewed it and it tasted pretty good. It did show some diacetyl then, but this matured out in the next few days. Overall, it was a very thirst-quenching summer bitter with a nice malt presence (from a 2-row pale ale malt made from Maris Otter barley) and just enough hops for balance.
Later this week, I need to add my reserved kräusen beer to my high-gravity lager, keg my Vienna lagers, make two yeast starters and brew my pale ale and stout. (Oh yeah, I also have an "oddball" beer I'm going to brew. More on that later.) My club (the Austin ZEALOTS) has a booth at the upcoming club night at the NHC and hopefully one or two of the beers I have been blathering about will be on tap there.Labels: IPA, porter
Posted by Chris Colby @ 1:19 PM Link This
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Thursday, May 10, 2007
Big Brew Time Two
On Tuesday, I made my second attempt at brewing a "super lager" (like the one I blogged about in March) by using wort from one mash as mash liquor and sparge water for another.
I reviewed my notes from the last big brew, thought about it for a little while and made a few changes. For this beer, I made the weight of the two grain bills equal. I also took a "no sparge" approach to the mashing. I added my full pre-boil volume of water to the first mash, ran it off and used this wort as mash liquor for a second "no sparge" mash. (I had to make a few minor volume corrections on the fly as the grains in each mash absorbed some liquid.)
The big advantages of this method are you can collect high gravity wort, all from grains, and not have to boil forever to get a very high gravity wort. (I hit the same original gravity on this beer as with my first try, but I only boiled the wort for one hour, as opposed to the 2.5 hours it took before.) Shorter boil times means you can make lighter colored beers, or at least control the color of your beer more through ingredient choice than color pickup during the boil. The method is also fairly efficient in terms of how much extract you get from your grains (unlike some other all-grain methods of big beer production). The downside, of course, is that it takes time to do an extra mash in a brew session (but not really that much, as I found.)
I pitched the wort with German Bock Yeast (White Labs WLP833), aerated it heavily with oxygen and it's fermenting away right now. (Last time I used an Octoberfest strain and it didn't get very far in the primary fermentation.) As I did last time, I reserved 1 L of wort for kräusen, to pitch with White Labs Zurich Lager yeast (WLP885) and add to the main batch once primary fermentation winds down.
I took good notes and expect to write about this method of wort collection in the December issue of BYO. But first, I'll be brewing one more big beer - this time with three mashes. Just think, I'll be mashing the third grain bed with barleywine-strength wort as mash liquor.
In smaller beer news, I racked my "speed brew" to a keg and started force carbonating it today. It smelled and tasted promising -- a nice hop aroma (from First Gold hops), restrained fruitiness from the yeast (Safale S-04 dried) and a decent amount of malt character, given the strength of the beer. It looks like it will be a nice "summer bitter."
So, now I've got two "super lagers" fermenting, two Vienna lagers fermenting, a sour red ale conditioning and a "summer bitter/speed brew" carbonating. Next up on the brewing schedule (probably Sunday), an IPA. Mmmmm . . . IPA.Labels: "speed brew", "super lager"
Posted by Chris Colby @ 3:57 PM Link This
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Monday, May 07, 2007
Back in Black
I've been fairly busy for the first few months of this year, but my schedule for the next few months looks like it should be pretty normal. So, of course, I've decided to fill my "extra" time with brewing.
On Thursday of last week, I brewed a double batch of Vienna lager -- one carboy pitched with White Labs WLP920 (Old Bavarian Lager) yeast and the other pitched with Wyeast 2124 (Bohemian Lager) yeast. I tried 2124 on another Vienna lager I made recently and liked it, so I thought I'd try it on my "standard" Vienna recipe (which appeared in the January 2006 issue of BYO under the name Red Ball Express).
I bought a refractometer recently and the Vienna lager was the first full batch of beer that I got to use it on. Using the refractometer was very simple and I could get gravity readings in a couple seconds from a couple drops of wort -- a very cool brewing tool. I wish I had gotten one years ago.
At the last Austin ZEALOTS homebrew club meeting, we talked about doing a "speed brew." The idea was, I would post a beer recipe to our Yahoo email group the Friday before the meeting. Interested club members would brew it and bring it to the next meeting, just 8 days away. The recipe I posted on Friday was a low-gravity English ale, very similar to the Bonneville Flats Bitter recipe of mine in the May 2006 issue of BYO. The new recipe was a little lower in original gravity (1.036) and had a little dab of biscuit malt thrown in; otherwise, it was pretty much the same thing.
So Sunday night (6 days before the meeting), I brewed my batch of "speed brew," It's bubbling along nicely now. I'm hoping that it finishes fermenting by Wednesday. If so, I'll rack it to a keg on Thursday and carbonate it until Saturday, then bottle off a couple bottles and take it to the meeting. (I'm letting the beer force carbonate under pressure for three days rather than "shake carbonating" it at the last minute because I think you lose foam when you shake up a keg to carbonate it.)
So, in the not-too-distant future, I should have some homebrew ready to drink. My first "super lager" should be ready one of these weeks. The sour Flanders red is conditioning happily (I hope). The Viennas are doing nicely and the "speed brew" is sitting right behind me right now and I can hear the airlock blurping away. In the next few weeks, I should be brewing at least a beer a week and I'll keep this blog updated as I go.Labels: "speed brew", refractometer, Vienna lager
Posted by Chris Colby @ 8:24 PM Link This
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