6 Guys Brewing

There is a sugar bush on the family farm. Growing up we would tap the maple trees, collect the sap, boil it and make our own maple syrup every spring. I’ve moved away, but I still make the trip back every year to help out. The last couple years I’ve also convinced a few of my friends to go up and help out too. Not only is it a great chance to get out of the city and enjoy some nature and  good physical labor, we also get to take home some of the best maple syrup around.

You are probably wondering what all this has to do with beer. Well last year I made an effort to grab some of the last runnings specifically to put into a beer.  I wanted some of the last runnings because the sap starts to get more impurities and the syrup becomes darker. This should be good for beer because it should result in more ‘maple’ flavor shining through into the end product.

After getting the syrup, the next part was coming up with a beer recipe that would be worthy to add it to. I knew it had to be something more than just a maple brown or porter. This was when my girlfriend came up with the fantastic idea for ‘French Toast Beer’! We spent several weeks defining and tweaking the recipe, and yesterday we brewed it. The base could probably best be described as a lightly hopped, light brown ale, with bready/toasty malts. To that we added some cinnamon, a little nutmeg, and some vanilla. We used Wyeast British Ale yeast to ferment, and we’re waiting until after primary fermentation completes before adding the syrup.

I’m really hoping this beer is good, for several reasons. 1, it’s the first beer I’m making with maple syrup, stuff that I helped make myself, and something I’ve been doing since I was a kid. B, this is first beer that I’ve made together with my girlfriend, it was a fun brew day. And third, my brother is also making a maple syrup beer, for a little good-natured competition.

You can check out the recipe here: 6GB – French Toast Beer

Cheers!

I was kegging a batch of Honey Brown yesterday and I noticed this white, bubbly, film sitting on the top of the beer. It wasn’t fuzzy or hairy, and it didn’t smell like mold. But it was white and slimey. Tasting the beer after getting into the keg I didn’t taste anything really bad, but there was maybe a bit of a stale flavor. I’ll taste it again in a few days after it carbonates a bit.

This is the first I’ve ever experienced this, anybody know what it is? Here is a picture:

Oak? Bourbon? Stout? Yeah… an oaked bourbon stout… that sounds good.

But I don’t want a whole bourbon barrel (as cool as that might be), so how am I going to do this?

Not exactly sure just yet, but I got a small package of Hungarian Oak chips from my local homebrew shop, and a bottle of Knob Creek Bourbon from the local liquor store. So far the plan is I’m gonna let the oak chips age in the bourbon for about a year. Then I’ll brew a stout, and I’ll add the oak chips to the secondary and let them age in the fermenter for about 6 months.

So come back and check out the blog sometime around February of 2013 and hopefully find out how this goes!

Cheers.

Woah, it’s been a while since anybody has posted anything here! We may have forgotten a bit about the blog, but luckily we haven’t forgotten about brewing. We’ve actually been very busy in that respect over the past year. Recently we brewed with fruit for the first time, brewing up a batch of Strawberry Hefeweizen. A lot of things that I read about using fruit in beer really cautioned against using strawberries. If they aren’t fresh in season you don’t get much flavor out apparently, and it’s also delicate that the beer needs to be drunk while it’s still young or the flavors can age out completely. Lucky for us we hit the peak of the strawberry season 2 months ago, and the beer was so good that it didn’t last long at all!

Here is the recipe for a 10 gallon batch:

• 10.5 lbs 2-row American Malt
• 7 lbs White Wheat
• Infusion Mash, 60m @ 152F
• 1 oz Chinook Hops 60m BKO
• 1 oz Mt. Hood Hops 5m BKO
• WYeast 3068 Weihenstephan Weizen Yeast
• OG Target – 1.051
• FG Target – 1.014

We then added 6 lbs of Dole Frozen Strawberries to the secondary fermenter. We used frozen strawberries here for a couple reasons. 1- they were cheaper and easier to obtain, but B- they were already pre cut and cleaned, with stems and leaves removed, and III- we brewed in early June, and local strawberries were still a few weeks from being in season.  Before adding them to the fermenter we pasteurized them by placing the fruit in a 16 quart stock pot and covering with 160F water for about 20 minutes. The whole pot, including the water, was cooled and added to the fermenter.

At kegging time I tried a little experiment. Since we brew 10 gallons at a time, and then keg into 2, 5 gallon corny kegs, this let us put more fresh fruit in 1 keg, while leaving the other keg without.  So, to the first keg we added 2 quarts of the freshest, ripest, locally grown strawberries we could get. We hit the peak strawberry season at exactly the right time for kegging. I had to cut and clean these fresh strawberries, and then I added them to a grain bag and tied it to the top of the dip tube inside the keg. (This proved to be more difficult than I had imagined, those openings are only big enough for 1 hand!) I wanted it suspended so that the fruit wouldn’t sink to the bottom and plug up the dip straw.

Well, the end result of all this work with the fruit really paid off, I think this was one of the best beers 6GB has ever made. The fresh strawberry flavor really worked well with the banana and clove flavors from the hefe yeast, and the white wheat gave the whole beer a bit of a nice creamy mouthfeel. My girlfriend said it tasted like a Strawberry Banana smoothie, or Strawberry Banana yogurt, yum!

As for the experiment with putting more fresh fruit in the keg vs. not, I’m a little torn. BOTH beers were supremely delicious and I think it’s probably down to personal preference. The keg with the extra fresh berries definitely had more strawberry flavor, and a more pinkish color. While the control keg the beer, i.e. the malt and yeast, were allowed to shine through a little more. That second “control” keg was brought out on the 4th of July and we nearly kicked it that day, that’s how quaffable it was!

Brewing with strawberries turned out to be a really simple addition and really gave great results. This definitely won’t be the last time we brew with fruit (I have an idea for an Orange Chocolate Stout that I’m hoping should be wonderful for spicing up cold winter nights)!

Cheers!

So it’s brew day again here. Lately we’ve been spending more time building up our equipment than actually brewing so this is a little bit of treat for us.  Even so, we did still have some equipment tasks to do before we could start brewing.  We recently added in some tri-clover disconnects to our plumbing around our pumps and needed to do a quick wet test before we started brewing. It’s a good thing too, because there were some leaks!

We all took the day off to brew, and the plan going in was to do 2 batches back to back.  We spent a good hour or so fixing the leaks in the plumbing so we got started a little late. And while it’s a little bit of a debbie downer that this is the first time we’ve brewed in a month, it’s been worth it! This setup using the brewtrowller 2.0 controlling the heating elements, pumps, and valves is really amazing.

First up is a Honey Stout. Since we are doing 10 gallon batches we start with about 16-17 gallons of water in the HLT, and it takes a little over an hour to get it heated to our initial strike temperature of 170ºF.  We’ve been having a little bit of trouble with our yeast starters, for some reason they just don’t seem to be catching. Leading theories are a sanitization problem, too much yeast nutrients, or not enough aeration before pitching the yeast. So, while we waited for water to heat up, Travis and Jeremy went out to buy a couple WYeast smack packs.  After mash in and adding the grains our starting mash temp was only about 133ºF. This is partly because we had some cool water left in the lines from the wet test, but we’ve also decided that it will be a good idea to have primed the pumps before hand too.  Next time we’ll make the initial strike temp a little hotter, 175ºF, to try to better correct for the heat loss.  An hour later and we’re sparging. The past couple batches we’ve had a lot of trouble with our sparge/lauter rate, it’s been way to quick, finishing in about 20-30 minutes.  This time we managed to get it right though, taking about 60-70 minutes to complete. Glen had a genius moment and made a mark on the valve so that we’d know what to do next time! Another hour and the boil is over, wort chilling and filling the conical time.

We wrapped batch 1 up at about 4:30, and the debate turns to whether we should try to do number 2. Nobodies sure when the next free day would be to brew it, so we decided to go for it.

So next up is a Pumpkin Ale. To save some time we decided to start with only 10 gallons in the HLT, exactly what we’d need for the mash. The plan is to add more water and heat it in parallel with the mash for sparge. Well, things are looking good, we had just started the mash, recirculating through the RIMS, when bam! the breaker blows. Well shit, we had forgot that we ran the HLT dry and the brewtroller  turned the heating element back on. It’s bad to run those elements dry, what happens is that it overheats and the resistance basically goes to 0, and it shorts. So at this point our HLT heating element is completely blown. Luckily we have a spare element and Travis and Glen started swapping it out while Jeremy and myself tend the mash. However, it just wasn’t our day and things went from bad to worse. I noticed that our pump was having a hard time recirculating, and when I put the mash paddle in to stir the mash it felt really solid. Something about the pumpkin must have really clogged things up. This is the first time we’ve dealt with a stuck mash before, and so we didn’t really know what best to do. Stirring the mash worked a little, but after another 5 minutes it was stuck again, and no amount of stirring seemed to help. It’s about this point that we all started to notice the burning smell, it’s been stuck long enough now that the RIMS heating element has burnt the wort that is no longer recirculating. On any other brew day I’m sure we’d have had enough energy and motivation to try to attempt to save the batch, but this time it wasn’t happening. The late day plus the blown HLT heating element plus the stuck and burnt mash proved to be too much and we abandoned the batch. It really stinks to have lost the brew, but we did learn some things and we now know we have some homework to do regarding unsticking mashes.

At the end of the day we had some good and some bad, but at least we got to brew. The biggest lesson of the day I think is that we still have a lot of learning to do on the new setup.

Happy Brewing, Cheers!

Yesterday afternoon was hop harvest day.  Early to mid-September seems to be about the right time of year for harvesting in Western New York, and amazingly we found a free weekend with cooperating weather to do just that. What you are looking for when determining if it’s harvest time, is for the hop flowers to just start opening up but before they turn brown and start wilting. Although we planted 16 new hop plants this year, they didn’t get in the ground until late and they didn’t produce much. However we still had good production from our Cascade plant, about a bushels worth.  We also found a bunch of wild hop plants, so we decided heck with it and harvested those too. We aren’t sure what variety they are, or if they’ll be any good, but a little bit of experimentation with a wild hopped ale sounds fun.

So once the hops are picked they need to be dried. Last year we used a commercial dehydrator, and the heat wilted them out a little too much we thought.  So this year we had the bright idea to try and build our own, heatless, dehydrator using a box fan, furnace filters, and bungee cords. The idea is to sandwich the hops between the furnace filters and then strap them to the box fan such that we push air through the filters and dry out the hops. We also made sure to keep a layer of paper towels between the hops and filters.

We expect this drying process to take about 24 hours. If it works well the plan is to build a second one so that we can dry all the hops we picked more efficiently.

Let us know how you dry your hops, we’d love to hear your ideas, Cheers!

We have some friends who do an annual music and beer fest in November and have, in years past, bought a couple of cylinders from a local beer brewer.  This year, we volunteered to brew some custom beers for the music fest.  Why?  We like brewing!  Of course, it also can’t hurt to get our names out there, and since there are a couple hundred people who attend, it may lead to something.  Probably not, but we have fun pretending.  Granted, this isn’t a done deal, but we’ll be brewing like it is!

This begs the question, first and formost, what to brew?  My first inclination is a honey porter.  It’s a good fall/winter beer, sweet enough for the casual beer drinkers and dark enough for the avid beer drinkers.  It’s not so low in alcohol that you wonder why you are drinking it, but not high enough that you will be done after 2.

What then to do for the 2nd beer?  Something lighter would be good, but it needs to appeal to the masses, so Pumpkin Ale is probably out.  An OctoberFest would be good, but we are a bit late to start that.  There are so many choices to go with.  Kit, from scratch, clone or original?  These questions will be pondered for the coming weeks, and when we finally figure it out, we’ll be sure to let you know.

We have been brewing 5 gallon batches pretty extensively for the last couple of years.  We will occasionally brew 10g batches when the need arises, and will be moving toward 10g batches now that the brewery is mostly complete.   Pretty much any kit you can mail order is a 5g batch, and there is certainly nothing wrong with them, except for the fact that they don’t last…

I recently brewed a 5g batch of a Black IPA that was a kit from http://austinhomebrew.com, and while the kit wasn’t exactly what I was looking for (more on that in another post), it was super delicious.  I’ve been super busy with home renovations recently, which has prevented me from brewing too much, but I have 5 excellent friends, who helped me out by putting the beer in the keg when it was ready, and “storing it for me.”  Of course, a couple of pints had to be sampled during this storage, probably to the tune of 1/2 a gallon.  My 5g batch was 4.5g before I even got to take it home.

A few weeks later, a friend is throwing a party, and I am told to bring beer.  My choices are my homebrew or some off the shelf thing.  I like to think my homebrew is tasty, so I take that.  It’s a hit.  The 1/2g I took over on Friday night to sample turns into 2 more growler’s worth on Sunday when we have a smaller get together.  My 5g is now down to 3g.  Still plenty of beer left, right?

Whenever anyone comes over, I give them a pint of my homebrew.  Again, I’m happy with it, and want to show that home brewed beers can taste as good as commercial beers.  For every pint I give my friends, I need to partake in one as well.  If I have only 5 friends come over, I have gone through yet another gallon.  I like to think I have more than 5 friends, and those friends will like my beer enough to drink more than one pint, so we’ll call it 2g for friend visits.

This leaves me with 1g of beer for myself, to drink with dinner, or after mowing the lawn, or whenever I want to enjoy a homebrew.  I usually use imperial pint glasses, which means I have 8 glasses of beer to enjoy.  Those 8 glasses spaced out over 6 weeks is insignificant, though each one is incredibly enjoyable, I just wish I had more.

Keep in mind, this problem only exists for the ones you like.  I’ve brewed some beers that I can’t give away to people, and it just sits, and sits, and sits.  The 5g batch feels like an entire 1/2 keg and something you can never get through.  Come to think of it, maybe the 5g batch isn’t such a bad choice.

Holy Carp Yes! It’s only taken the first batch creating and using a yeast starter to convince me that it’s worth doing.  If you’ve been reading this blog you’ll know that we’ve had some (minor) issues trying to get good fermentations going with shorter lag times.  We tried using different yeast strains, SafeAle Dry vs. WYeast smack packs vs. White Labs vials.  We tried getting an aeration pump to aerate the wort before pitching.  These things helped, and I don’t think we’ll stop using these techniques, but nothing so far has had the same impact that using a yeast starter has.

The plan: Brew a 10g all-grain batch, but buy only a single vial of White Labs yeast and build it up using a starter.

The brew date was set for Sunday, so we gathered Thursday night to make starter.  This gave us a 3 day lead time to build up the cell count.  To make our starter, we boiled 2.5 pints of water in a 4qt. saucepan.  Then we added 1 cup of Extra Light Pale DME and a few Cascade hop pellets.  The mini-wort boiled for 20 minutes, and then we added a teaspoon of yeast nutrients, and let it sit for another 10 minutes.  At this point the mini-wort was transfered to a 2000ml flask, covered loosely with tinfoil, and dunked in a sink of icy water to chill it.  Once it cooled to about 70°F we put it on a stir-plate and added the vial of yeast, put the tinfoil hat back on, and let it sit.  A note on the tinfoil hat: we actually did get a stopper+airlock for the flask, but everything we read about building yeast starters was that you could use those, but it really was overkill.  The tinfoil, or plastic wrap held loosely with a rubber band, works just as well.  Since it’s only a few days and the fermentation should start quickly and be fairly active you are practically assured to always have positive pressure from the flask, so risk of contamination is low.

When I checked in on it Friday morning, it was coming along nicely, becoming thicker, creamier even, and looked to be developing a good fermentation.  By Saturday morning it had thickened up enough to stop the stir-plate.  I tried to restart the stir plate, but wasn’t successful, I don’t think it hurt anything. By Sunday it seemed pretty clear that the active fermentation was slowing down a little, things were just beginning to settle out.  When it came time to pitch, we swirled it all up and split it (as evenly as we could eye-ball it) into two carboys of Hoppy Brown Ale wort.  Four hours later there was noticeable, active, fermentation going, and bubbling could be seen from the blow-offs.  That is definitely a 6 Guys record low for lag time!

The biggest advantage to using a Yeast Starter technique is that it boosts the cell-counts ahead of time.  That means it doesn’t need to do that step in your beer!  And if you’ve been brewing for a while, they aren’t complicated to do, just follow the same basic steps your used to, and make sure to keep things sanitary and you’ll be fine.  Probably the hardest part is planning ahead and making the starter a few days before hand!

So if you aren’t making yeast starters for your beers now, I encourage you to give it a try, I think you’ll be pleased with the results.  Cheers!

Update 5-26-2010: Because the beaker we use for starters is graduated, it’s easier to use that as a measurement basis. So the new formula is 1200mL of water and 1.5 cups (360mL) of DME.  This also has the benefit of giving us a slightly larger starter culture!

Once we had the extract test done, the next step was to move forward with a full blown all grain kit. We have done 10 gallon all grain kits before, but never with the electric brewery and never with the brewtroller. We elected to use the brewtroller in Brew Monitor mode so that we wouldn’t be fighting with unknowns on our first all grain/electric endeavor.

First: It takes a LONG time to heat 18 gallons of water from 55°F to 170°F. If we say we are going to start at 11am, we should immediately start boiling water before we do anything else. If we wait to start heating the water until 12:30, the water won’t be hot until 1:30.

The SPEC Pak connectors worked very well. They provided a nice water proof connection and are easy to wire up. I highly recommend them.

1-wire is a great interface, but it does not respond well to certain network topologies. The star topology we were using did not effectively support more than 2 temperature probes simultaneously. This is not a difficult problem to solve, but it is not a problem you want to be solving on brew day. Essentially, we either need to make our topology serial, or add 100 Ohm resistors on the 1-wire signal line to reduce reflections. Moral of the story: Do a full dry run test before you do a wet run test.

Mashing in went really well, until the recirculating pump seized. Initially, we thought it was a stuck sparge, but cycling the pump on and off a few times got it going again. Moral of the story: Get a standby pump that you can swap out in an emergency.

The last major problem we had was the heating element on the boil kettle. Even though we were applying power to the element, it was not getting hot. This is a 240V element, and each leg of the element was reading 120V to ground. However, when measured against each other, it read 0V. This seemed to imply that the 120V legs were in phase, but once I disconnected the heater, I read 240V across those leads. To confuse things even more, the heater did provide 10 Ohms of resistance. After disconnecting and reconnecting it about a dozen times, it finally started working. Moral of the story: before you put wort into you boil kettle, test the heating element.

Despite these setback, we actually had a good brew day. The OG came in at 1.049 vs an expected 1.047. The color of the wort looked awesome and we had a sub-4 hour lag time.