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Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Barley Bombs, Hops Hanging In There
Well, my idea to grow and malt my own barley will have to be put off at least another growing season as all my barley has died. I planted two blocks of barley and one block of wheat in my garden this year. The wheat developed fine, but the barley never developed its heads. (If you know anything about barley development, it looks like it got to the "boot" stage and then died.) I suspect it was the Texas heat.
Although I kept the barley watered, the high temperature here has been hovering around 100 °F (38 °C) for weeks now, without any cool days to break up the monotony. (On the other hand, blazing heat plus no rain means that I don't have to worry about any sort of fungus in the garden.) I am going to try to plant this variety again as a winter barley and see how that goes.
My hop plants, in contrast, are doing well. A few weeks ago, most of the plants growing on the side of my house suffered some insect damage. The growing tips of the vines got eaten and this stopped the plants from growing temporarily. However, new tips sprouted from nodes along the vine and now they are climbing again.
The hops I have been growing in containers are doing even better. They have, for the most part, escaped insect damage. I also think they get a more tolerable regimen of sunlight and shade. My older hop bines have cones on them and most of the plants I started this year have flowered. One or two of the older plants will probably yield enough hops for a few 5.0-gallon (19-L) batches of beer.
A long-term "beer gardening" plan of mine is creeping slowly to fruition. A few years ago, I got the idea to grow a large watermelon and ferment a summer beer inside the melon. (Someone in the mag did this in a pumpkin once and thought it was a cool stunt.)
I decided on Black Diamond watermelons because I liked their flavor and they will grow fairly big -- ~70 lbs. (30 kg), given the right conditions. These aren't the monster big melons, like Carolina Cross 183, but I don't have that kind of space to devote to melons. The first few years I tried to grow them, they always ended up with blossom end rot. This year, however, I have been ensuring that they get more even watering and they are doing fine. No end rot and they are getting bigger everyday. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
I'm also trying to grow some big pumkins (a variety called Big Max). I had two plants that were doing great until they very suddenly went into decline. Turns out they had squash vine borers. I took a knife and a tweezers and excised all the grubs, but one plant died. The other is now healthy, but there's no growing tip to it's vine and it doesn't seem to be sprouting a new one.Labels: barley, hops, pumpkin, watermelon, wheat
Posted by Chris Colby @ 12:33 PM Link This
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Monday, June 09, 2008
Easy Brewday
My homebrewing is fairly episodic. I go fairly long periods without brewing, then knock out a bunch of batches in row. I average around 20 batches of beer a year, but they are not spread out evenly across the calendar; most are probably produced in a two or three month timespan. Right now, I'm trying to get some beers brewed in time for the Austin ZEALOTS Homebrew Inquisition and also before the time of year when BYO goes monthly and I'm very bust at work.
So, last week -- before I brewed the pale ale mentioned a couple blog entries ago -- I brewed one of my favorite beers . . . the Cranberry Zinger. However, saying I brewed it might be an overstatement. It's an insanely easy beer to put together. (I'll tack the recipe onto the end of this blog entry.) I basically heat a gallon and a half of water to 170 °F, stir in some LME and let it sit for 15 minutes, then I add some honey, rack it to a bucket fermenter, add water and sprinkle on some dried yeast. My "brewday" for the start of this beer is literally like 45 minutes (not including cleaning, etc.).
Once the base beer has fermented, I make cranberry relish, put it in a big bucket and rack the beer onto it. The relish consists of cranberries, Granny Smith apples and whole oranges (fruit, rind, zest and all). This year I also added peaches to the mix, just to see what would happen.
The base beer tasted great. This time around, I used Huajillo honey and you could really taste the honey's varietal characteristic (although it will probably get buried by the cranberries). This time around, I also added peaches because my grandmother used to make a side dish called peaches and oranges (which was just peaches and oranges cut up in a light sugar syrup), so I knew the two went together well. Like the honey notes, the peaches will probably be buried.
I'll keg this in a week or so, and it conditions fast -- it's usually ready to drink once carbonated. It tastes more like cranberry Champagne than a beer, but it's very thirst quenching and I usually "brew" it every year for Thanksgiving. I'm brewing it this year in the summer because I suspect it will be a great beer to drink after a day of gardening in the heat. Here's the recipe and procedures I used this year:
Cranberry Zinger
(5 gallons)
Ingredients
3.75 lbs. Coopers Wheat Beer kit (hopped liquid malt extract)
2.0 lbs. Huajillo honey (you can use any decent honey for this; I usually use orange blossom)
cranberry relish (*)
* 4.5 lbs. cranberries (whole)
* 2 Granny Smith apples (cored)
* 3 small navel oranges (whole - pulp, rind and zest)
* 4 medium peaches (pits removed)
1/2 tsp. yeast nutrients
2 pkgs. Fermentis US-05 yeast (I've also used Danstar Nottingham yeast in the past)
Step by Step
Dissolve malt extract and yeast nutrients in 1.5 gallons of water heated to around 170 °F. Let wort steep for 15 minutes over 160 °F. Stir honey into hot wort then cool brewpot in sink. Rack wort to fermenter and top up to 5 gallons with water. Aerate and sprinkle dried yeast on top of wort. (Alternately, you can rehydrate the yeast first; this is what I did.) Let ferment at 70 °F until signs of fermentation stop. Grind ingredients for cranberry relish coarsely in a food processor and put in a sanitized bucket (preferably, one over 6 gallons in volume). Rack base beer onto relish. Let beer contact fruit for 7-10 days. Rack to keg. Carbonate beer so it is very fizzy.Labels: cranberry zinger
Posted by Chris Colby @ 3:53 PM Link This
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Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Red Racked
Back in March of 2007, my wife Jennifer and I brewed a batch of beer at the house of some friends of ours. (See my blog entry at the time for more.) The beer was a Flander's red -- a sour beer -- and it had been sitting in a bucket for over a year now. A few months ago, I poked my head in the room where the bucket was sitting and saw that the airlock was completely dry. I filled it, but had no idea how long the beer was exposed to air. Last weekend, I finally got around to racking it to a keg and . . . it tasted awesome! It had a very "clean" sour aroma (as opposed to a sour aroma with lots of acetic, "barnyard" or other off characters) and was tart, but not over-the-top puckering sour.
How could this be? Any normal beer would be awful after sitting that long, in a bucket, on the yeast and trub from primary and exposed to air (both from the diffusion of oxygen through the plastic and from letting the airlock dry out).
First off, sour beers actually do better with a little exposure to oxygen while they condition. Buckets "breathe" more than actual barrels do but, obviously, not so much that a sour beer will be ruined. Also, the yeast and trub from primary fermentation can help slowly feed the souring microorganisms as the beer conditions. In a "regular" beer, the gunk at the bottom of the fermenter eventually starts tainting the beer with "nutty" and other off flavors.
Still, given that the airlock dried out, I was expecting the beer to be overly acetic. Exposure to air allows aerobic microorganisms, such as Acetobacter, to grow on the surface of the beer, giving it a vinegar-like flavor and aroma. (I honestly expected the keg to be a temporary holding vessel until I poured the beer down the drain.) The only thing I can think of is that the thick pellicle protected the beer from oxygen. That and the amount of time the airlock was dried out must have been short.
So basically, I was very lucky and turned some shameful neglect into a great sour beer.
I also racked over a Vienna lager that had been sitting in my conical "forever." Long story short; not all beers benefit from long periods of inattention. It's drinkable, but not good by any stretch of the imagination.Labels: Flanders red, Vienna lager
Posted by Chris Colby @ 9:56 PM Link This
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Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Pale Ale Permutation
This is a brewing blog . . . and finally, I have some brewing to blog about!
On Sunday, I brewed 10 gallons of pale ale. I decided to make 10 gallons, instead of my usual 5, because I was low on homebrew. Also, I had just bought a 15-gallon demijohn and two 10-gallon Corny kegs last year, and I wanted to use them.
The brew was basically my usual pale ale. I called it Patrick Henry Pale Ale in the March-April 2006 issue of BYO, where the 5-gallon recipe appeared. It won a medal in the balanced beer category of my club's competition (the Austin ZEALOTS Homebrew Inquisition) last year. That time around, I called it Pretzel vs. President Pale Ale. This time around, since I've been watching the cartoon Metalocalypse -- the cartoon about the death metal band Dëthkløk -- quite a bit recently, I decided to call it "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Deth." I'll list the recipe, as I brewed it this time, at the end of this entry.
I squeezed the grains for the mash into my 10-gallon mash tun, but didn't have room to add boiling water for a mash-out. So I sparged with 190 °F water until the grain bed temperature rose to 170 °F, then dropped the temp of the sparge water to 170 °F. I ran the whole wort off in a little over an hour - a bit faster than I usually go. I boiled for 75 minutes in my 15-gallon converted keg and chilled the wort with my immersion chiller. I used six bags of ice in my two "pre-chillers" as my tap water is around 75 °F.
I am using my 15-gallon demijohn as the fermenter. Once the wort was cool, I rehydrated the dried yeast, aerated with oxygen for 2 minutes and the beer was fermenting the next morning. My temperature control is just a wet T-shirt, and I may be running a bit hot, but the "California ale" strain is, in my experience, a good yeast strain that still produces fairly clean beer at higher temps provided your pitching rate and aeration were sufficient.
The beer is bubbling away happily right now. Here's the recipe.
Give Me Liberty or Give Me Deth
(10 gallons, all-grain)
Ingredients
20 lbs. 2-row pale malt (Briess)
1.0 lb. crystal malt (40 °L)
4.0 oz. crystal malt (60 °L)
12 AAU Chinook hops (60 mins)
(1.0 oz. at 12% alpha acids)
12 AAU Simcoe hops (60 mins)
(1.0 oz. at 12% alpha acids)
18 AAU Centennial hops (15 mins)
(2.0 oz. at 8.8% alpha acids)
1.0 oz. Cascade hops (0 mins)
1.0 oz. Amarillo hops (0 mins)
2 pkgs Fermentis US-05 dried yeast
dry hops yet to be decided
Mash
Combined 15 gallons distilled water with 4 gallons of tap water (ran through my carbon filter) and 9 tsp of gypsum. 153 °F for 60 minutes. Boil 75 minutes. Ferment at 72 °F.Labels: 10 gallons, pale ale
Posted by Chris Colby @ 9:31 AM Link This
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Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Beer Gardening II, the Sequel
Most sequels aren't as good as the original. There are, of course, a couple exceptions. Aliens, the 1986 sequel, was at least as good as the original 1979 movie, Alien. With that in mind, I'll try to make this blog entry at least as interesting as the first "Beer Gardening" entry. The previous one dealt with me watching the (barley) grass grow, so I think I've got a good shot here.
My hops are doing well. The Mt. Hood and Cascade plants have both grown to around four feet (1.2 m) tall, and the others are right behind them. The Mt. Hood and Cascade are in the best position to catch the most sun, which probably explains most of the difference in growth. I trellised the hops by sinking hook and eyes into the side of my house, right up near the roof line. I ran two lines down from each hook and eye and, when possible, trained two shoots to each line. (A couple of the rhizomes only sent up a few shoots, so I may plant some pole beans to run up the few empty lines.)
The hops I have growing in containers are also coming along well, although I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them next year. They get better sun than the one's planted at the side of the house, but I haven't found a good way to trellis them in their location. I have found a few mediocre ways.
The barley and wheat are coming along nicely. In both crops, there are a few leaves extending from the central stalk and the plants are about 12 in. (30 cm) tall. There may also be a tiller on some of the plants. (A tiller is a stalk other than the central stalk. In barley, one seed may produce a plant that forms more than one seed head -- one at the end of the central stalk and others at the end of tillers.)
Here are a couple random facts about barley:
Barley is the fourth most widely grown crop in the world. Most of it is used as animal feed.
Barley (Hordeum vulgare) and it's wild progenitor Hordeum spontaneum are both diploid and can freely interbreed. The biggest difference in the two species (some sources call them subspecies) is that the rachis holds the seeds together in modern barley, even after maturity. In wild barley, the rachis shatters when the plant is mature, scattering the seeds. (The rachis is basically the structure surrounding the seeds in the spike.)
I'll have more Beer Gardening blog entries as the season progresses, but I also hope to brew something soon.Labels: barley, garden, hops
Posted by Chris Colby @ 8:39 AM Link This
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Monday, March 31, 2008
Beer Gardening
In my last blog, I mentioned growing and malting my own barley as a project for 2008. And, thanks to a run of nice weather, I had the time to plant two 5' by 9' (1.5 x 2.7 m) blocks of barley. I also got one 5' by 9' block of spring wheat planted. I planted the first blocks of barley and wheat on Thursday and the second block of barley on Saturday -- and the first two blocks are already up! (Yes, I am excited about watching grass grow.)
I also planted a row of hops next to my house. I planted a big Mt Hood rhizome, two big Cascade rhizomes and "regular-sized" Centennial, Chinook, Zeus and Newport rhizomes. These sprouted within a few days and I now need to get the trellis strings to them in the next couple days. I also have my hops in containers that I've had for a few years now.
I'll update my blog regularly to update you on my progress through growing, harvesting, winnowing, malting and mashing the grains I grow. And, hopefully, by this fall I'll have a beer brewed "from scratch" (although I will be using commercial yeast).Labels: barley, garden, hops, wheat
Posted by Chris Colby @ 8:51 AM Link This
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Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Resolutions and Resolve
I don't make New Year's resolutions. As with most people, when I do, I end up dropping them before February. However, many times during the year I will make plans, or what I call "overplans." An overplan is a purposely overly-ambitious plan, meant to inspire me to get the core of my plan done. For example, back when I was in graduate school, I injured my knee. Once I was up and walking again, I set a goal to run in the next Boston Marathon. I never did run the marathon, but I did log a lot of time on the jogging trails that year. As a consequence, I lost some weight and generally got into pretty good shape, which was my "real" goal.
Here's my 2008 Overplan:
Develop the "Beer-GUT" — the Grand Unified Theory of Brewing. Or at least, read as much as I can about brewing science and get one solid homebrew experiment finished.
Form the metal band Böiled Wört and rock the known world. Or at least, pick up my guitar often enough to be able to play a few of my favorite rock anthems proficiently.
Solve the problem of making insanely malty beers at home. I think it has something to do with water chemistry (along with, of course, proper malt selection). At a minimum, do some important "research" (glug, glug) with some tasty German lagers and Scottish ales.
Write the Great American Novel, or at least a Pretty Good American Short Story. Maybe the homebrewing protagonist saves the world when he finds out that his Amarillo IPA kills the space virus causing the zombie plague. (Each your heart out Cormac McCarthy.)
Forget the hop crisis and brew some serious hop monsters.
Figure out how to grow big watermelons that don't develop blossom end rot.
Grow and malt my own barley. Brew beer with this homemade malt and some of my homegrown hops. (This is left over from last year's overplan. However, I now have some Robust barley seed — and also some spring wheat — and am looking at a big home food dehydrator to dry, and maybe even kiln, the grain.)
Run in the Boston . . . OK, just eat better, exercise regularly and lose a little weight.
Brew the biggest, lightest-colored all-grain beer in history. Oh wait, I did that last year. (See my article on reiterated mashing in the December '07 issue of BYO for more.)
Posted by Chris Colby @ 2:52 PM Link This
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