Still breathing, still brewing

Has it really been 4 whole years since I wrote a brewing post?

And yet, so much has happened. In 2017, I got a new brewing system, "The Eagle"-- a pair of 15-gallon keggles and other gear from a brewer in Ottawa. I settled into a rhythm of brewing, with a few years of starting with an english pale ale, followed by a cream ale or blonde, and then a hoppy "Warbler" series pale ale, all at 10 gallons that the new system allowed.

The Eagle in the morning sun, ca. 2019

Then in 2018, I built Ferdinand the fermentation chamber, which is an old chest freezer driven by a Brewpi. Room enough for 2 fermenters, with temperature probes driving extremely precise temperature control. It has given me the ability to better control my fermentations, and even do lagers-- though practically speaking, my calendar rarely allows me to give a lager 2 months in the chamber when I have other beers to run.

Brewpi controller and relay box

Ferdinand and his contents

And finally, when COVID descended upon our lives, came a surprising move out of Kitchener, up the road to the little town of Fergus. With it, a complete uprooting of the brewery away from the Mount Hope-Breithaupt neighbourhood that gave the brewery its name.

The new place presents a nice new brewing setup. There's an attached double garage, with room for equipment storage and also the fermentation chamber. Because it's insulated and temperature controlled, I can run consistent fermentations despite garage climate swings. The inner entrance to it is the laundry room, which makes for easier brew day cleaning. All in all, a lot less work to set up and tear down.

At the new place, I've now run three brew days so far. The first two batches have followed my now usual pattern, but with a twist: I tried my first Kveik yeast brews.

The first: Kveiking Voyage, a variation of my Voyage of Discovery English Pale Ale. This one was an attempt to minimize grain-to-glass time, with a ludicruous (to me) 75 degrees F fermentation temperature. It turned out OK, but had a definite stamp of character from the yeast. It was ready to drink less than 2 weeks from brew day, but it took some weeks after that to shed some of this overpowering character to mellow out.

The second, Krispy Kreme, was a cream ale using Escarpment Labs "Krispy" Kveik yeast. This time, no ridiculous fermentation temperature. The goal was to get something as clean as possible and see if this yeast lives up to its reputation to be used as a "quick faux lager yeast". This one came out fairly clear, but still didn't finish low and imparted some fruity character with a slightly lemony edge. Still, the second keg of this beer (which got an effective month of finishing time) is excellent.

So, what's my overall take on these Kveik yeasts? They haven't really given me the results others have bragged about, and I'm not sure why. They both left stamps on their beer that time only improved by diminishing, which defeats the original purpose. There seems to be no replacement for good cold conditioning. Still, they aren't bad-- but unless I'm brewing some kind of IPA that would benefit from them I'll probably stay away in the future. My tastes continue to drift towards clean, clear, drinkable beers... and Kveik hasn't given me a quicker path to that.

Here's to many more brews here, a half hour's drive upriver from the old digs!

Recipes below the cut!

Brewing mystery!

Brewing mystery! And math!

I brewed a Belgian Quadrupel today and it ended up a lot stronger than expected. I haven't worked out why.

A big part of brewing is achieving a certain "gravity": amount of dissolved sugar in wort as measured by density. 1.000 is water, and my target was 1.087. Doesn't seem like much, but that's pretty big.

I use BeerSmith, software which helps me with the math. Its prediction for the wort, pre-boil (and pre candi sugar addition) was 1.064 at 7.6 gallons. I stopped the sparge at around 7.2(ish) gallons at a lower 1.057.

There is no arguing with the fact that there's less sugar in the pot than expected. I expected 486 "points" of sugar (7.6 x 64, for 1.064) and instead got 410.

No matter what I do there will never be more sugar in that pot. Unless I add it. Which I did: a 1.8kg brick of candi sugar I'd made using 1kg of table sugar.

The 7ish gallons was boiled down, and eventually I got 5 gallons of wort in the fermenter. My predicted gravity of that wort (the Original Gravity, or OG, for this beer) was 1.087. Instead I got... 1.107.

Which is a jaw dropping difference.

So where did the extra gravity come from anyway? Well, sugar can't appear out of thin air, but there's some things to cover.

Most interestingly, I realized I'd made a recipe error. Remember that 1kg of sugar? Well, I called it 1kg of candi sugar *syrup* in the recipe. Instead, it was a 1.8kg brick of something denser (800g of which, can you believe it, is water... despite its solidity.)

But I knew it had 1kg of actual sugar in it so I made that switch. And my predicted OG went from 1.087 to... 1.092.

OK, so. Next is volume of wort. If you boil off water, the sugar stays behind. So my 5 gallons was actually a little less than my target of 5.25. Let's also say that my kettle loss (amount of wort left behind in the boil pot full of sludge-like "trub"-- the leftover hop residue and protein break- estimated 3/8 gal) was a little less than expected. No more than 1/8 gallon though. So in total, 0.375gal less water.

Running the numbers on that, I get an expected gravity of 1.098-99. Now we're getting closer. But I'm still missing 9 points of gravity after having accounted for the recipe error, boil-off and lossage differences.

But I haven't touched on the low measured pre-boil gravity. If I factor that in, that expected 1.098 becomes 1.084. Versus a measured 1.107. That's a huge discrepancy.

Hrmm.

Let's come at it another way. Using my imperial units, 1kg of sugar is 2.2lb. A pound of sugar contributes 46 sugar points (if dissolved in 1gal water you'd have a 1.046 gravity.)

So 2.2lb sugar is good for 101 points. 410+101=511.

511 points of sugar in 5.25 gal of water (our total fermenter volume plus lossage) is... 1.097. Which doesn't match either reality or adjusted prediction.

So. There's a probable arithmetic error on my part somewhere but not enough to account for the discrepancy between 1.097 and 1.107.

What can account for that? Well, possibly a measurement error. Maybe my pre-boil measurement was off. If I hadn't mixed the wort properly, it's possible. Too late to find out.

Anyway, I did adjust gravity from 1.107 down to 1.092 by adding 0.75gal of boiled, cooled water. It'll still be a potent Quad, without being crazy. And it will have a permanent air of mystery...

BELGIUM ATTACKS

Two beers for today's roundup! Both inspired by Belgium (well... the second one was technically Dutch, but from my perspective here in North America, that's like the difference between southern Ontario and south-western Ontario.)

Unforced Error

The first was a shot at a nice, malty, tasty Belgian Dubbel. No problem, right? My brewing partner, Andrew, got ambitious. Who was I to argue? He cooked up some Belgian candi sugar, using a process like this. What he got was pretty gorgeous:

Three pounds of invert sugar, cooked for three hours.

Well, with colour like that, we figured we should build the beer around it without too much malt to help. Then, two things happened. One, we overshot our gravity with unexpectedly high efficiency from our mash-- resulting in a wort that would reach 9% alcohol after fermentation, instead of the targeted 7%. Two, we got much less flavour and colour contribution than we expected.

What we got, actually, was a beer with a ton of clove notes and a pretty clean profile. What we got was a Tripel.

They have a term for this in baseball, when you accidentally turn a double into a triple. They call it an Unforced Error.

 

"Ra Ra" (working name)

Next on deck (ooh, another baseball reference) was an attempt to clone, or at least get close to, a wonderfully rich, flavourful, no-roast imperial stout by De Molen brewery in the Netherlands, called Rasputin.

Much better beers than the facial expression would express.

The exported Rasputin has an interesting history in the US, being referred to as "Disputin" for a while due to a trademark dispute. What it is, though, is a fantastic, potent imperial stout that bears a very winey, rummy flavour instead of being full of roastiness. And lately I've found roasty beers to be about as appealing as licking a campfire.

And I didn't even realize what I wanted to brew until I tasted a (somewhat past its prime) stout by Russ of Biergotter, and I was reminded of how a stout doesn't have to be all Black Patent and Roasted Barley.

This recipe is an attempt to get close to my memory of Rasputin, which I've had at the brewery in the Netherlands, in the wonderful Gollem's Proeflokaal in Amsterdam, and at Volo in Toronto who sometimes import De Molen. Rasputin is one of my very favourite beers and if I can get close to it, it will be a huge victory.

Gollem's, with a tram casually rolling on by because Europe.

All I know about Rasputin is that it is "pale malt, chocolate and crystal malts" and "premiant and saaz hops". That's not much to go on, but I constructed a recipe designed to load the beer up on rich dark-fruit and malt flavour. The Saaz hops I could do, Premiant I couldn't, but I don't think that matters so much. The yeast is an Abbaye belgian yeast, brought up in a starter to give it a fighting chance in a 1.095 gravity wort.

Brew day wasn't perfect, we undershot our gravity quite badly, but drawing off extra volume and then boiling aggressively ended up giving 4.8 gallons at 1.095, instead of 5.5 at 1.097. Close enough, trading a few bottles of end product for a higher gravity. It occurs to me I had the same problem with Bombe, but after 2 years, I didn't remember the lessons of my last imperial stout. Oh well.

The name for this one is, well, probably temporary. Like Unforced Error, its identity will be revealed in time.

Brew Roundup

Long time no post. So let's round up the last year or so of brewing activity. Brew details first, with the recipes posted below the cut.

This past year has seen a shift in my brewing pattern. I've got some recipes that I'm fine-tuning now. I'm also brewing a little less frequently, but with more ten-gallon batches in the mix. This has been helpful from a life-balance perspective, without sacrificing on the kegerator-pours-beer-when-I-pull-the-tap front.

Ten Gallon Hat Brown

This brown ale has seen some iteration from its previous incarnation. I recreated it with some tweaks in August 2014, and then tuned it further as the inaugural 2015 brew in March. The latest iteration dials back on the Fawcett amber and rounds out the malt profile with some Melanoidin (my new malty friend) and some Honey malt. I also went to Hallertauer hops, not for any specific reason but because of availability.

The end result is rich and complex, with a sweet chocolate-cake finish, but doesn't lose its drinkability. It may be the best beer I've ever brewed, and people seem to like it. It's a favourite of Erin's, and other friends have remarked positively about it.

The recipe included at the bottom is from the third edition. TGH will be back again this fall, I'm sure.

Smoke & Sting Porter

 

It's funny, I don't really remember this one so well anymore. But looking at Untappd, it seems like we all liked it. My tasting comments: "Really hit the target with this one. Smoke character is perfectly balanced. Get a nice roasted note too. Not too heavy either. Happy!"

The most memorable thing about this one is that on brew day, it got a little something extra in the pot: a wasp. I might have to brew this again, see what all the fuss was about. Maybe this time I'll add two wasps.

Campaign Rye Pale Ale

 

In what was a very busy fall, I took a leap of faith and brewed 10 gallons of a style I'd barely tried before. The result was epic. Campaign got us through the winter by being a fantastically well-balanced, drinkable, tasty beer.

Brewing it was a challenge, though. The mash profile was flawed, because it exceeded my mash tun's volume constraints, so I had to adjust on the fly. On top of that, the rye-heavy mash stuck during initial runoff, and I had to re-set it and sparge very slowly.

It also got a couple of random 2-ounce hop packages that I had hanging around. Ahtanum for aroma hops, and Glacier for dry hop. But the Glacier went in "hop tubes" that are designed to fit in a carboy, and that was a complete bust: the pellets expanded and turned into hop concrete. Very poor utilization.

Still, the end result was extremely good. My latest beer (below) is a RPA that is modeled on Campaign, though with enough ingredient substitutions that I'm giving it a different name.

Speaking of names: Campaign got its name by being brewed during the heat of the 2014 municipal election campaign. It was an incredibly busy stretch for me. And fortunately, the good guys won.

Santa's Sweet Stout

I set out with the mission of creating a "sweet" or milk stout, with cocoa nibs, to make it a "chocolate milk stout". If I recall correctly, half of this batch went to Andrew. I bottled my half.

This wasn't a bad beer, but it didn't really hit the mark. It was meant to be sweet and chocolatey, and it ended up being fairly dry without the cocoa nibs contributing much of notice. Which is a shame, because nibs are expensive. I had to hunt around to find some, eventually locating them at a baking goods store.

No Crystal IPA

This past April, it was definitely time to brew an IPA-- it has been too long! An experimental beer, this was a 5 gallon batch only, which I regret.

The name makes reference to the fact that no crystal malts were used. This came out of a conversation with Culum of Together We're Bitter, after I tasted his very delicious IPA. He has this thing against crystal, and formulated his IPA to not need any. At an IPA growler tasting event, his was light and drinkable, while everyone else's was some degree or another of chewy.

So I decided to give it a try. I followed Culum's lead by using some honey malt for balancing sweetness. I also used all Mosaic hops for the beer, which gave it a tropical juicy character.

Somehow I stumbled on a really nice balance. I got to recently try Block Three's Mo Money Mo Problems Mosaic-hopped IPA, which was good, but... I liked mine better.

I will likely try and replicate this beer. Maybe change up the hops a little.

Southern Exposure Cream Ale

This one was fun.

I wanted to brew an "authentic" cream ale. So I came up with a recipe with 3 pounds o' grits as part of the malt bill, as a corn adjunct. But you can't just toss grits in. You have to gelatinize them first.

So I basically boiled the grits along with some malt. The malt is needed to provide a little enzymatic action to break down the gooiest of the starches from the porridge-like mass of grits.

Given the approach, I decided to do a protein rest and some decoction mashing. It turned out to be quite a challenge, as I ended up having to do three decoctions after the adding the boiled grits to the mash.

The end result is just on tap today, and is pretty drinkable. It will probably improve after sitting in the keg fridge for a while. I would have liked to cold-condition it earlier, though. The best I managed was a few weeks of cool-basement-floor conditioning.

Dusty Roads Rye Pale Ale

Another crack at the RPA style, modeled after the Campaign RPA.

This was brewed today, with the lessons of the previous RPA in mind. Lautering was still a challenge, but nothing stuck this time.

The ingredients are different enough (I'm low on Vienna and had to do a bunch of hop substitutions) that I decided to rechristen this beer. Currently, our street is a big mess of construction, and I had to take the careful step of closing the garage door to prevent billowing dust from falling in the brew pot as I chilled it.

Speaking of chilling, that was pretty tough too! Our temporary water supply runs above ground for a few hundred feet in a nice blue plastic pipe. That meant the temperature was a fair bit higher than usual, which affects my ability to chill a wort using an immersion coil.

Still, no major problems. Should be a good beer in a few weeks!

Growler!

I interrupt your usual stream of brew-day summary posts to show off a little something...a custom sandblasted growler made by Colour and Light (ie. me).

FULL QUAD

A special brew day yesterday. I should have taken pictures. Yesterday we went FULL QUAD.

Dave and Shawn, a couple of friends, were on hand to assist through the day, which made it a lot easier. This 5 gallon batch of Belgian Quadrupel was a challenge, with some unusual and even unique steps.

Firstly, I used a liquid yeast in a starter I put on Wednesday, to give me the cell count needed to provide a healthy fermentation. I was able to effectively use Erin's stir plate (former research chemists have interesting toys) to get the most bang for my buck.

Secondly, this recipe called for a "magic elixir", a process step suggested by a respected brewing acquaintance. The first 1.5 gallons of runnings off the mash went into a separate pot, the demerara sugar was dissolved in, and it was boiled down by 50% or more to caramelize. Tricky, because it can't scorch or boil over, and the second burner I have is very hard to adjust. But Dave and Shawn handled that part of it well. By the time it was returned to the main pot, it was almost syrupy.

Apart from that, things were actually quite simple. A straightforward single infusion mash with batch sparge. A single hop addition.

A successful brew day. The technicals went well, and the company was welcome. But it'll be a while before we can enjoy the fruits of this labour. This is a beer for the winter, not a beer for now.

Recipe below.

Brazilian Blonde, Awenda Wheat, KWCBC, etc.

So, I've been remiss on posting lately. Slipping!

Brazilian Blonde

Early in June I ran a 10 gallon batch of Blonde Ale. There's not much notable about it. I'll include a recipe below.

It isn't even kegged, because the keg fridge already has a nice yellow beer in it (Windbreaker Pilsner, which has turned out very nice now that it's had a chance to age after I dry hopped it.)

IPEh Growler Event

The US-05 yeast version of Backyard IPEh went to the KW Craft Beer Club's IPEh growler event. It tied for 4th out of 10. I'm happy enough with that, but the event was too competitive (and some of the beers were not, to be honest.) Participants would have got a lot more value out of the event if they had a chance to describe the beer and hear people's responses.

I would have appreciated it, myself. I don't think the Backyard was that great a beer and one lesson I did come away with was that the better performing brewers are thinking tactically about their ingredients and recipe. Something I need to learn.

The next event is a Wheat beer event. Which brings me to:

Awenda Wheat

Sunday, I fired up the 5 gallon system for the first time this year, because this brew is a pair of firsts. One, it's my first wheat beer. Two, it's my first decoction mash. Normally I do infusion mashes (so called because the mash temperature is set and adjusted by the infusion of hot water into the grains). But this time, I decided to follow a simplified version of a traditional German brewing technique.

When you want to adjust the temperature of your mash, you scoop off the thickest part of the mash into a separate pot, so you have a big pile of soggy grain in there (leaving most of the liquid behind) and then you boil it. Once boiled, you return the hot grains and liquid back to the mash and mix it in.

It didn't go quite as smoothly as I wanted: I needed to move from 122F (protein rest) to 153F (sacharification rest, or the main starch-to-sugar conversion process) and what I thought would be one step ended up taking three whole cycles of scooping grain out with a slotted spoon and boiling it. In the end I settled for a mash temperature of 148F. That will change the body of the beer.

Decoction mashing is counter-intuitive for 2 reasons.

• Boiling the mash denatures the enzymes you need to mash (but since most liquids get left behind and the enzymes have dissolved, this doesn't end up being a problem.)
• Brewers are told not to subject their grains to more than 168F because of tannin extraction. But decoction involves boiling the damn things. BYO does an okay job of explaining why this isn't a problem.

There are some upsides to decoction, according to some. It changes the character of the beer, creating body without adding residual sweetness. We'll see.

For a fairly simple Weizen, though, it's completely in place. I even had a package of Weizen yeast on hand, but it was a little too old and didn't look viable, so I used a backup package of dry WB-06 instead.

Recipes below the fold.

Backyard I.P.EH?

WHOAH. HANG ON A MOMENT. WE CAN'T TALK ABOUT THE LATEST BREW DAY YET. WE HAVE TO CHECK OUT THIS AMAZING LABEL THAT ERIN DID UP FOR SPRING IS A TOUGH NUT.

I SAID IT SHOULD PROBABLY HAVE A SQUIRREL. SHE DID THE REST. LOOK UPON IT AND WEEP IN ITS BEAUTY AND I PROMISE I'LL KILL THE ALL CAPS FOR THE REST OF THE POST.

OH MY GOD

WE NOW RETURN YOU TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED BREW DAY BLOG POST ALREADY IN PROGRESS.

 

Karma? Kismet? Or simple good timing?

I was planning to brew a pale ale on Saturday. But then I learned about the Kitchener Waterloo Craft Beer Club's "Homebrew I.P.EH? Get Together" in mid-June: bring a growler of your finest IPA offering to share just a block or two away.

The twist is that the recipe has to include some ingredient from the local area. Theoretically that could include "water from the Grand River" according to them, but really, honest ground water pumped from a deep well to a KW tap, loaded with so much calcium that drinking it would bone-spur your teeth into a solid rocky mass, would be more "local" than some foreign liquid that just happened to tumble through Waterloo region by following the so-called path of least resistance.

In the brewery, resistance is futile when you have a pump.

I will not take that path of least resistance. Not when I have a pound and a half* of "Cascade backyard mix" sitting in the freezer. With six weeks to the event, the stars aligned, and I threw caution to the wind that filled my sails.

With a book value of 85 IBU (though I've had a history of low utilization from my backyard hops, so I don't trust that), and so much hop mass in the kettle that I had trouble stirring the brew during chilling, this should be a real hop-forward IPA. Even better, if I walk the growler down to Guelph St., then none of the hops in this beer will have ever been transported by vehicle. How local is that, hmm?

Pretty goddamn local, I'd say.

I admit: while formulating this recipe, I read this blog post that talked about how if you're doing an IPA, you just can't shy off the hops. It made me revisit it and increase the hop schedule. And then increase it again. 10 gallon batches sometimes have some scary numbers that come with doubling every ingredient, but 25 ounces of hops is pretty terrifying to someone who came into homebrewing during the great hop shortage of  '07-08, paying $3-5 per precious ounce.

Estimated wort loss from hop absorption: 3/4 of a case of beer(!)

As with the Spring is a Tough Nut, Backyard I.P.EH? is being fermented separately with different yeasts. English ale yeast S-04 in one (my experience with Tough Nut is that the S-04 version was fantastically better and the Bertus Brewery blog post above suggested it as an interesting IPA yeast option despite its seemingly incompatible heritage) and WLP-001 California yeast in the other.

Hang on a moment...

YOU REMEMBER SPRING IS A TOUGH NUT?

Ahem. Here, have a picture of some innocent squirrel-free fermenters:

Anyway, the WLP yeast is a liquid yeast, something I've never tried before, but the good folks at OBK have made liquid yeast a viable and economical choice now! The immensely wide range of liquid yeast varieties beckons: while there are 6-8 useful and accessible dry yeasts around, there are dozens to choose from in liquid form. They just don't keep as easily.

As of this writing, the WLP fermenter has kicked off nicely. The S-04 is still lagging, but that seems to be its lot. The fermentation temperature is still fairly low thanks to lingering cold ground chilling our basement... the fermenters are at about 62-64F, which slows the yeast activity down, but I do like the clean fermentation that results.

* So it turns out I didn't have a pound and a half of the Cascade. I ran out. I had to do some late substitution of 2012 harvest Zeus (last featured here) which is unfortunate because... it's best used as a bittering hop and has a distinct character. Even after 18 months in the freezer, it packs a powerful nose. The beer will be different because of it. But, you know, roll with it!

As always, recipe below.

Windbreaker Bohemian Pilsner

A Mount Breithaupt Brewmance partnership!

Andrew and I set out to try a much more challenging brew: a (relatively) authentic Pilsner. But it drifted into less authenticky territory as (a) we decided against a decoction mash and instead decided on a simple recirculating step mash in Andrew's 10 gallon Blichmann mash tun and (b) I got a series of messages the night before where Andrew exclaimed that the plentiful supply of Pilsner malt he thought he had was, in fact, Canadian 2-row pale ale malt.

Preparing a starter for the yeast

But it's cool, man. Lots of people brew pilsners with 2-row. The character will be a little different, but we need to focus on execution.

Sunday was a very warm day that started off nice, and turned into a windy, blustery affair that forced the garage door closed. (Lest you think we were setting ourselves up for CO poisoning, the front door was not completely closed and the side door and back window were both opened.) Regardless, a very pleasant day to be outside!

As nice as that Blichmann pot is (it has a false bottom, a nice siphon, a temperature probe and even a sight gauge), it has always proved to be a temperamental and this time was no different. Drawing liquid from the bottom and pumping it to the top while the pot sits on the burner is the general idea: the mash bed "sets" well, filtering the wort and also gets more evenly heated. Unlike my Coleman cooler, this kind of mash tun can adjust temperature on the fly.

That's if the pump will stay primed, though. Pumps like Andrew's March and my Chugger can't run dry, and don't do well if they're fighting against air in the line. And for reasons not completely understood yet, this is very easy to cause.

But Andrew doggedly worked with the pot and though we may have wandered a bit with our ability to control the mash temperature, we still got a good mash out of it, and some extremely clear wort that very efficiently drew off sugars. In fact, our final runnings measured 1.010 gravity, right around the lower cut-off point beyond which you risk drawing tannins out of the mash instead of sugar.

Wort gathering in the boil kettle

The wort didn't stay clear, though.

When you boil the wort, you get a certain amount of "break"-- proteins that coagulate and clump together. (Specifically, this is called "hot break". "Cold break", on the other hand, are the proteins that precipitate when you cool the boiled wort.)

Well, there's lots of hot break, and then there's Egg Drop Soup. This beer managed to look like the latter. But, the nice part is that it's easy to make sure this break doesn't end up in the fermenter (most of it, at least) and it will all settle out nicely anyway.

So, between the weather and the wort, we get Windbreaker.

The Coleman serves as Hot Liquor Tank for sparge water going into the notorious Blichmann.

Undershot volume a bit this time but gravity was a little over. What that meant is we could top up the fermenters to hit both volume and gravity targets pretty much on the nose. That took a bit more time, of course-- more boiled water, subsequently chilled. I believe we got something like 4.6gal in each fermenter, and topped up with another half a gallon each for just over 5 gallons at 1.050.

Now, it ferments for a while on lager yeast, at as cool a temperature I can manage in my basement. I'll likely have to move it into keg to let it cold condition, as it's the only way to fit in a fridge. But if it turns out, it'll make a great beer in June or so.

Speaking of great beer...

Recipe below.

Spring is a Tough Nut

Welcome to brewing season 2014!

With sunny weather and temperatures forecast to hit six whole degrees I knew it was time. We've had a long hard winter (and we still are having one, according to the inestimable Spring Indicator) but on this sunny Sunday, seeping tendrils of warmth would penetrate into Mount Breithaupt's deep, dark hibernation cocoon, and quicken the slow pulse of a sleeping dream.

In other words, let's brew something already!

MBB is still transitioning to 10 gallon batches, and today was my first solo 10 gallon brew day. So, there was very little routine about it. I also have a new pump, pretty much a necessity when it comes to moving up to hundred pounds of boiling hot liquid.

Old 8 gallon brew pot is now on mash water heating duty.

And that pump only sprayed me a little bit in the face with acid sanitizer when I was doing an ill-advised sanitation/diagnostic run. It's a tricky beast. The worst part of it is that it cannot run dry, so the pump must always be located below everything, so it can be gravity fed before starting up. Of course, that places an electrical appliance closest to a potentially wet floor and underneath all the vessels full of liquid. At least the power source is GFI.

10 gallon batches really push this Coleman cooler mash tun to the limit.

Still, I avoided real problems, and I now have some hard-learned SOPs that should ensure that I don't  face the risk of groping my way towards the garden hose to flush my burning eyes in the future. (Okay. Maybe not burning, but I'm pretty sure Star San solution stings pretty bad, and I got a hint of that today.)

After all that, what I had was a pretty routine brew day, with a lot of head scratching moments when it came to logistics. And I learned I can't really stretch almost-empty propane tanks, as the burner output makes boiling 12 gallons really a long wait if I'm not getting a strong flame.

Today's brew is an Amber Ale recipe adapted from Dirty Fawcett to fit with available ingredients. It's designed for simplicity, and for quick turnaround. After all, I have an empty keg fridge, and now is not the time to lay down a long-aging beer. Oh no. I want something quaffable by the time the deck is habitable.

And the beauty of it? A 10 gallon batch means I get two kegs for the price (well, the effort) of one. Check out these beautiful twins.

Different yeasts for each. Should make an interesting contrast!

Still underestimating my system's efficiency. Pegged 77% and ended up with about 85%. As a result, this beer will be closer to 6% than 5%. I'd consider watering it down, but I have precisely the volume I wanted, and any more means I'd have to bottle the excess.

Recipe below.

Brew Day: Ten Gallon Hat

Lots of pictures this time, thanks to assistant brewer Andrew's camera. (I'd call him "co-head brewer" but usually one or the other of us is in charge with a recipe. Yesterday, it was me.)

This means I get to realize how much I sometimes look like a hillbilly.

And it's great that we have some photographic evidence, because this brew was a trial run of a bigger 10-gallon batch size (hence the name!) with some new equipment thrown in. The brew day took a lot longer because of unfamiliarity and heating times on the larger volumes of liquid, but generally the surprises were pleasant ones.

Extracting wort from the mash into the kettle

The weather was unseasonably warm for November, with some glorious morning sunlight that turned to cloud but we still enjoyed 11-degree weather that made life a lot easier on everyone.

BELGIUM

The true title of this blog post is what we kept looking at each other, Mrs. Mountbreithaupt and I, while we were there:

"Mother****ing Belgium, man!"

I'd make that the real title, but I'd feel bad if someone shares this out and gets dirty words all over their URL. But it's a word necessary to express that deep and fundamental amazement about being in mother****ing Belgium and drinking its fabulous beer.

We planned this trip a long time back-- and after some delay, it finally happened. The centrepiece of our foray across the water was a week-long tour hosted from a river barge (the good ship Fiep) by Ruth and Mike who together make up Bon Beer Voyage.

Mike and Ruth, in the middle, along with the good folks at 't Waagstuk in Antwerp

The Fiep, our home for a week, resting in Amsterdam

The trip started in Bruges, with a foray into the nearby countryside to visit the Westvleteren abbey and see the monks chant. Only, the monks were sick, and there was no chanting. Fortunately, we had a plan B.

and plan C and plan D

I don't need to say much more about Westvleteren, except we shepherded a 6-pack of Westie 12's back from Belgium without casualty. No, you cannot have one. Westvleteren 12 is the highest ranked beer in the world at Ratebeer, and also in the top 10 at Beeradvocate. It is a simply superb Belgian quad by any measure, and it sets the standard. What a way to start!

In comparison, De Dolle Brouwers was much more quirky, a small but well-established brewery near Esen, Belgium. But no less worth the visit.

Literally, "The Mad Brewers"

Who doesn't like a cheery yellow keg of oerbier?

Bottling Dalek

After Bruges, our stop in Ghent proved to be very interesting, and not just because of beer. Ghent reminds me of KW: 250,000 people, of whom 65,000 are students. While the town has lots of history, it is energetic and seemingly always reinventing itself. It is also the home to Gruut, a brewery specializing in beers without hops. While the herb mixes used to balance each beer's sweetness left me finding some fault with their thin-tasting Wit and pale ales, their malt-forward dubbels and darker beers were simply fantastic.

After Ghent was a grueling (or at least challenging) 3-brewery day. Bosteels, home of the Pauwel Kwak:

A traditional Kwak glass. The beer inside is a nice malty golden ale.

The stainless steel halls of brewing

Bosteels' recently retired owner pours a champagne-style beer for Erin.

The giant Duvel, which despite their size have some fantastic beer.

Also, Hop Straat.

And another small brewery, Malheur, in the wonderfully named town of Buggenhout.

Got to catch the brewer recovering yeast from one batch to start the next.

Tripels a la Malheur

That's a paddlin'.

Our last brewery in Belgium proper (before heading into the Netherlands) was maybe our favourite. Brouwerij De Dochter van de Korenaar, whose name translates literally to "Daughter of the ear of the corn", an old Belgian reference to beer. This operation was the closest thing to a home brewery (in fact, speaking technically, it is a home brewery) and also hosts its own retail shop on premises with the brewer's family home.

Goes to show what's possible in Europe and not in heavily over-regulated North America: In Belgium, the brewer installs a condensation chamber on his vent hood so he doesn't bother his neighbours with lots of steam. In North America, you're just not allowed to run a commercial brewery at home, you criminal, now go back to your desk job.

The head brewer alongside the equipment he custom built: insulated mash/lauter tun and kettle.

What's that? It's a recirculated hot oil kettle! The oil is heated to 130 celsius and run through these tubes to boil the wort.

In addition to being a wonderful example of why North America suck with its hyperprescriptive zoning and puritan attitudes towards alcohol, the Dochter brewery also makes some amazing products. In particular, their barrel series:

Yes, they have both Laphroaig-barrel and Lagavulin-barrel aged beers.

The Charbon pictured in the corner above was also a standout smoked porter. And we got a few sips of something special: some Eisenbock ice-distilled beer, clocking in around 30% alcohol, served from a plastic iced tea bottle.

Which is also probably illegal in about 4 different ways here in Nanny Canada.

After Dochter, the famous La Trappe trappist brewery is almost unremarkable despite its size and history. Except when we got a hint of what brewing at that scale means:

Malt delivery, La Trappe style.

But by the time we were at La Trappe we had crossed into the Netherlands. There, we also visited De Molen brewery and Brouwerij 't IJ, two Dutch breweries with one thing in common.

Apart from the fact they both have fermenters...

they both...

...are under windmills.

Thanks to Untappd and a few other notes, I know I tried some 69 kinds of beer (in sample size or larger) during the whole time we were there... including some opportunities outside the tour like our finding one of the only meaningful Parisian beer spots (La Fine Mousse) and discovering a great brasserie in Amsterdam Oud West called Gollem's Proeflokaal.

What this trip has left me with is a new appreciation for Belgian styles I had only sparingly tried and not really grokked... now I want to be able to replicate some of the dubbels and tripels-- and possibly even quads-- in their rich flavours.

It also left me with a hat.

Once a kwak, always a kwak.

Brewery advances!

Brewery advances!

I was up early this morning, which meant I had time to put an order in to OBK before going to work (where the site is annoyingly filtered). A relatively modest order, but an important step in moving to a 10-gallon brewing process. The main item of the order is a 19-gallon 2-port brew pot that will cost about half of what the 8-gallon pot I ordered from Morebeer did. (The quality may not *quite* be the same but functionally, it should be equivalent. And I don't get shanked on shipping costs.)

It is, of course, not the only part of upgrading batch size. Andrew is loaning me some equipment needed to prototype the process-- namely, his pump and counterflow chiller (and swank silicon hose). Moving and cooling a greater mass of scalding hot liquid becomes a real challenge and these tools become a lot less optional above 5 gallons. Hopefully A will also be present for the inaugural brewday next Saturday (as well as the weather staying comfortably above freezing...)

This is only the first step, though. Based on the experience of next Saturday, I'll also be looking at chiller, pump and hose setup so that A and I don't have to do a brewmance divorce. The process will still be fairly low-tech but then I can start to investigate mashing improvements like recirculation (HERMS or RIMS), as well as paying some attention to the fermentation side.

I've also done some work on the mash/lauter tun, after some hands-on experience with Grub of Biergotter. A better lautering manifold, built of copper, to replace the finicky dishwasher hose filter, I hope will buy me a mittful of mash efficiency points as well as removing a serious headache from my brewing process (a flexible filter hose that is pinched or that folds upwards in the mash bed can cause unwelcome variability.)

At the moment, though, my main goal is to just get the batch size up. I want to be able to keep the keg fridge pouring for less time than it currently takes me, so that I have more time for interesting experimental brews (and other things in life.)

Speaking of experimenting, a recent trip to Belgium has me hooked and interested in replicating Belgian beer styles. That will be quite the challenge. My only foray in that direction resulted in the regrettable "Banabel" tripel, and I hadn't had the courage to try since.

Saw a lot of breweries while I was over there, too. Might put together a future post on that.

Bombe!

"I do not like this word 'bomb'. It is not a bomb. It is a device which is exploding." 

       - Jacques Le Blanc, French ambassador to New Zealand, 

on France's 1995 nuclear tests in the Pacific

Take your pick:

All bombs, or bombes. Some are more chocolate than others.

The reality is more like:

The rig above is a blow-off hose into a large plastic jar with water that serves as the airlock. While I've seen foam pushed through before, this blow-off rig has never been defeated. Until now.

In action:





And really, that's just the fermentation. I had a wonderful picture of the surprise boilover that occurred during brewing, but managed to lose it.

I'm glad I didn't name this beer beforehand! This was to be a self-indulgent brew day. An imperial stout is self-indulgent enough, but this one will see the addition of some booze-soaked cacao nibs and vanilla bean to make it a chocolatey. It already has the barley flakes to make it smooth and rich, and that's why it's so prone to explodiness-- it's almost viscous. And I think I've lost about 4 or 5 bottles' worth already to boilover and fermentation foaming.

Assuming it doesn't foam itself entirely out of the fermenter, this beer will get its cacao and vanilla additions in a few weeks, see some further aging, and be bottled in November. It will then get some nice shelf time, probably requiring until at least January before it's ready to be cracked open and enjoyed as a mid-winter treat.

Self-indulgent indeed, and self-named, too."Bombe" it is. Chocolatey and explodey.

The recipe below doesn't include the cacao or vanilla additions. Also, because of the boilover I mentioned, the hopping is... unknown. I don't know how much hops were lost when the pot turned into a mad, frothy god and whether replacement additions were less, more or about the same.