6 Guys Brewing

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!

Today was the last push to get things ‘wet tested’ before we dumped some real cash into grains and screwed that up. The goals for this day were simple:

• Sand and finish the table
• Finish plumbing the sink
• Brew an extract beer to test the heating element

We started around 11am and sanded the table. This actually went extremely quickly (thanks Scott) and we were able to put a finish on the table by 1pm. This also gave us time to finish up the plumbing and by about 1:30 I was boiling water for the 5 gallon extract. The good news is that the heating elements and temperature were placed low enough in the pot that 5 gallons of water cover it nicely. The bad: I forgot to put in the dip tube and screen in the boil kettle before it got up to 170 degrees. So, out comes the water and the whole processes is started over again.

The boil actually went pretty well. The heating element (a 4500W ultra low density model) worked amazingly well and cleanup was almost easier than expected. I say ‘almost’ because I was dragging around this ridiculously long 10AWG power cable that was hard wired to the pot. I kept tripping over the damn thing and nearly falling on my face. This inspired me to go look for a water proof connector that would meet our application. Anderson Power to the rescue again. The SPEC Pak connectors are just what we need. They aren’t cheap, but they are completely water proof and use the existing power pole connectors we had come to know and love.

All-in-all, this brew day went off without a hitch. I kegged the American Amber yesterday and it’s good, but not remarkable. The OG was a little low, and the FG is a little high. 4.1%, if I recall correctly. I’ll give it another week or two to see if I really like it.

Sometimes you get an idea and build a recipe and brew a beer, and you really don’t know if it’s going to be terrible or awesome! And I’m not talking about conventional recipes with suspect execution, I’m talking about something a little bit more… Xtreme. This past weekend we made up a batch of Throwback Mountain Brew. I took a simple pale ale recipe, used the lightest malt I could find, and added 4 liters of Throwback Mountain Dew (recipe).

We started by reducing 4L of Dew down to about 2 pints worth. It was amazing how quickly this reduced. It made the entire kitchen smell like Mountain Dew!

Assembling the rest of the ingredients.

It was a cold day; ~5F. Even with the propane burner, a small electric heater, and the garage door almost shut, it barely made a dent in the heat. I’m hoping we get the electric brewery built up in the basement before too much longer!

Initial impressions of the day are very positive. Everything seemed to go very smoothly, we hit our target OG pretty spot on, and we had a pretty short lag time of about 6 hours. I, for one, am pretty excited to find out how this will taste!

Glen got the ingredients for a Blueberry Chocolate Stout and so we brewed again on Sunday.  As winter approaches we’re all starting to crave darker, heavier, beers just a little bit more; and this should fit the bill quite nicely! Now that we have the equipment this too was a ten gallon, unmilled all-grain, batch.  This is quickly becoming our standard operation.  The recipe also called for toasted oats, so that was a nice change of pace, and something I have never used in beer before.  However, the big change this time around, and the theme of the day, was preparedness!

Something we’ve been trying to do as we really dive into this craft is that we constantly want to push ourselves and learn new things about the brewing process with each batch of beer that we make. We are always trying to improve.  Typically this has meant trying something new each time we brew; from starting out with mashing and our first all-grain batch, using a plate wort chiller, 10 gallon batches, using electric pumps to move liquid around, to grinding our own grains.  There are definitely learning curves here to all these things, and many times we just flew by the seat of our pants and figured it out as we went along. Sure, this Blueberry Chocolate Stout had some new and interesting ingredients like toasted oats, real chocolate, and blueberry extract flavorings, but nothing crazy.  No, on Sunday, the biggest change to our brew-day operation was preparedness and note taking.

Ok, ok, I’ve mentioned it twice already, get on it with it! What is this preparedness mumbo jumbo you keep talking about? I’m so glad I asked!  What I really mean by preparedness is setting yourself up to take really detailed notes about the whole brewing process.  If you want to take good notes you’ll have to start by setting up and getting ready before hand.  I liken it to keeping a good follow-through in a golf swing or a basketball shot; you can’t have a good follow-through unless you start before hitting/releasing the ball.

This is what we did; I have a chalkboard in my garage where we brew, and before we turned on any burners or ground any barley, I took the recipe and I transferred it to the chalkboard.  I wrote out every step that we needed to do, along with important details like how much water to use, what the target strike temperature of the water should be, the flow rate to sparge at, how long a task should take, every last detail I could think of.  And guess what? I still forgot some steps and we had to scramble and squeeze them in when we actually did remember during the day.  I also got a notebook and wrote everything down there as well so that we could go back and refer to it later if/when the chalkboard is erased.  When we completed each step, I wrote down the time of day next to it instead of just checking it off.  Here are the notes I took on Sunday to give you an example:

6 Guys Brewing; Blueberry Chocolate Stout; 12/13/2009

• 2:00 – Mill Grains: 16.5 lbs.
• 2:55 – Toast Oats (15 min @ 325°)
• 2:50 – Preheat Mash Tun
• 2:59 – Heat Water for mash: 6.6g @ 165°     Actual: 170°
• – Add 2 tbps. Ph Stabalizer
• 3:00 – Mash (add grains) for 60 minutes @ 150°  Actual: 154°
  • Started recirculation immediately with pumps
  • Stir top 1/3rd half way through
• 3:55 – Sparge: 9.8g @ 177°
• 4:05 – Sparge rate of 6min/gal – total sparge time of 60min.
• 5:00 – Total Wort Volume: 12.5g
• 5:21 – Boil: Hot Break Occurred
• 5:21 – Add 2 oz. Target Hops (60min)
• - Add Clarifier (whirlfloc) (20min)
• 6:18 – Add 2 oz. PA Cocoa (5min)
• 6:30 – Cool wort and fill carboys
• 6:59 – Pitch Yeast – Carboy Coozie = White Labs; T-shirt = WYeast
• Gravity Readings: Pre-boil 1.050 ; Post-boil 1.038

Note: Italicized steps/notes indicate forgotten steps or actual results that differed from our intended target goals.

Having a detailed plan ready that was written out where we could glance at it during the brewing process I really think was a big help.  This was a very relaxed brew day, we even had some time to watch a little football!  I also believe that this should help us be more consistent in the future.

A couple ending thoughts/notes…  It is a little interesting/strange that the gravity reading we took after the boil was less than before the boil. The target original gravity was 1.053, so we are little low, and I’m not quite sure how that happened.  We split our 10 gallon batches into two 6.5 gallon carboys for fermentation.  This time we decided to try a little experiment and use a different brand of yeast in each one.  So the first carboy got a White Labs Burton Ale 023 yeast, and the second got some Wyeast Ringwood Ale 1187 yeast.

I have high hopes for this beer, and I think it will turn out to be another successful day of brewing.  There is always room for improvement, but being prepared and note-taking are here to stay for us 6 Guys.

Introduction

It is the day before Thanksgiving and Jeremy, Travis, Glen, and I decided to brew. We are doing our first 10 gallon batch and the recipe we’re making is our excellent Livonia IPA.  The difference this time is that we are using bought hop pellets instead of the whole leaf homegrown hops from Jason’s.  The idea is that we can compare between the grown hops and pellets to get a better understanding of how the differences play out in the final flavor of the beer.  My personal prediction is that this batch will be significantly hoppier than the homegrown leaf hop batch.  Specifically because I suspect that we over “cooked” the leaf hops after harvesting in the dehydrating stage, but again, this is just speculation on my part.

Observations/Notes

Mashing:  When cleaning the mash tun we noticed some burnt wort.  The strike temperature of the water from the HLT was 165°, but once we added the grains the final mash temperature was about 4° too low (148°) so we added some heat. The problem was that it must’ve been too much for too long, because we mashed a little hot and apparently burnt something.

Lessons for next time:

1. Increase the strike temp of the water by 5° to 170°.  This should get the final mash temperature to be right where we want it, and we won’t need to add any additional heat.
2. Pump the water for mashing into the bottom of the kettle and start adding the grains as soon as we have enough water to float them.
3. Start re-circulating the mash as soon as all the mash water has been added. This is intended to keep the temp consistent through-out the mash, and should help if we do need to add some heat.

Ending Thoughts

At the end of the day this looks like it will be a successful batch of homebrew.  The original gravity after boil was 1.062, and our target was 1.063, so pretty good. Doing a 10 gallon batch is a little different, but not significantly so, you just have more volume.  My only worry now is that we will become victims of our own success, currently all of our carboys and kegs are in use! Lucky for us, drinking is the best part

We made some more cider this weekend. And just like the beer operation we ramp up quickly. This time we did it all from scratch, we harvested and pressed our own apples.  Jason has some apple trees on his property, and I acquired a cider press. So it was obvious that we would need to put them together; and then really, whats the point of making cider if you don’t at least ferment some of it?

Jason harvested (and I’m guessing a little) about 8 bushels of apples, 3 bushels of Red Delicious and 5 bushels of 20oz apples. We pressed 16 gallons of fresh cider from the apples, so that means each bushel yielded about 2 gallons.

It took three of us (Jason, James, and me) about 3-4 hours to press all those apples. The fresh pressed cider was simply amazing. The Red Delicious cider was quite sweet and very good, but surprisingly it was the 20oz apples that really shined. This is a variety that I had never heard of. The NY Apple Association describes it as having a pale yellow flesh, and that it is firm, juicy, and tart.  This apple was very close to the way they described, except it was much sweeter than I think we were expecting. This might have something to do with how late in the season they were harvested, after a few frosts. The resulting cider was very smooth, had an excellent mouth-feel, and had a superb balance between sweetness and tartness.

We saved off 2 gallons each of the Red Delicious and 20oz fresh cider. This still left us with over 12 gallons of cider to ferment into hard cider.

Using our 20 gallon brew kettle we boiled the cider down and reduced it to about 9-10 gallons of cider. I had contemplated adding some malto-dextrine (that I had leftover from a beer kit that I forgot to use it in) into the boil. The thought was that this would add some body to the cider and a little more sweetness, since it is unfermentable sugar. In the end we decided not to, for a couple reasons I think: 1. the cider itself was just so good on its own already, we decided it didn’t need any more sweetness; and 2. this was our first time making fresh-pressed hard cider, we don’t know if it will even need more body. I think we made the right decision not to include it.

However, we did decide to experiment a little with the yeasts. The 9-10 gallons of cider got put into 2 6.5 gallon carboys, and we used a different yeast in each. The first carboy got WYeast Cider yeast, this came in a sealed foil pouch of sorts that you agitated, left on the counter for a couple hours, and it puffs up. This seemed to work really well as there was noticeable active fermentation of the cider by the next morning.  The second carboy got dried L-1118 Champagne yeast. Travis used Champagne yeast in his batch of cider several weeks ago. Its not done yet, but preliminary tastings indicate that it will be quite strong and very dry.

We’ll be calling it the Livonian Cider, trying to build on our Livonian line, the hope being that it will turn out as good as our Livonian IPA did!

I think everybody involved in the cider activities would say that it was an enjoyable afternoon. Making cider turns out to be a fun and easy affair, I encourage people to give it a try!

When you are in college saving some coin here and there helps a lot. Since I am the young-in of the group and still in college, I want to try some money saving techniques for brewing. The first thing I want to try is simply reusing yeast, and second is to see if I can’t brew one cheap ass beer, that doesn’t make me cringe when I drink it.

So the big question here is: “How do you farm yeast, and can it be done easily on a home brew size scale?” The answer: we don’t know, and the internet isn’t really helping us out at all. There seems to be this big rumor out there that it can’t be done easily, and if you do succeed your yeast will only last three generations before it starts mutating and tasting weird. This begs the question: “How the hell do commercial beers get consistent strains of yeast if they are that susceptible to mutation?” The yeast can’t be that hard to keep from mutating, otherwise consistent brewing would be nigh impossible with the rate at which yeast multiply and the rate at brewing beer goes through yeast.

Some sources on the internet claim that yeast farming isn’t difficult, hard or even a very touchy process. The major problem with reusing yeast, is separating it from your trub in your last brew. Trub is the nasty yeast byproducts left after fermentation that settle to the bottom, and can really screw up the taste of your next beer. “They” say that you can basically take your beer out of the carboy, pour in the sterile water, mix up the yest (and trub) pour it into a jar and let the yeast settle out from the trub. This is the approach I will take, when I try to yeast farm.

Now to properly test this I will have to brew the same brew two or three times and see if the taste changes dramatically from brew to brew. If these tests succeed it means that we can invest in some fancy yeast strains, and use they for a large number of brews. This is an exciting idea so I hope it works.

If we can successfully reuse yeast the next experiment for me to try after this is to see how cheap of a brew I can make. Just to give an idea of how cheap this can get I did some simple math. For a comparator I am using AHS Southern Brown Ale.

• Extract Liquid Yeast = $.86 a glass
• Extract DryYeast = $.72 a glass
• Extract Farmed Yeast = $.66 a glass
• All Grain Farmed Yeast = $.49 a glass

Now the last one will be the hardest because I want to estimate what if we bought bulk or just grains. So according to the Brown ale recipe there are 6.5lbs base grains and 1.75lbs specialty grains. So I am just going to price out a random base grain and a random specialty grain accordingly and see how much it costs. I will also guess 3 ounces of Kent Golding hops

• Non-bulk = $.61 a glass
• Bulk = $.49 a glass

This is an interesting result, to know that kits are about the same price as bulk.

An interesting thing happened yesterday when Bill and I decided we were both going to do all grain batches at the same time.  Actually, a lot of interesting things happened, but I’m going to focus on one thing.  Typically when doing an all grain batch, 3 vessels are needed, a hot liquor tank (used for sparging, mashing in and cleaning of various items).  Doing two all-grain at the same time should require 6 vessels.  Through a little hard work and planning, we came up with 6 vessels, at which point, everything went haywire.  You see, we only have one real mash tun (capable of water in on the top, and water out on the bottom, whilst maintaining temperature.  We, for some reason, decided to not use said vessel for either batch, and got into a bind when it came to mashing out (sparge) time.

For every all-grain batch we’ve done in the past, we’ve done fly sparging.  This is the method that is most familiar to all-grain brewers where you spend 45-60 minutes sprinkling ~176°F water on the top of the mash, while slowly draining out the bottom, until you get ~6.25g of wort.  This method is tried and true and gives good efficiency on the grain, and is easy to do, if you have 3 vessels.

As the mash time came to an end, we realized that we had selected the wrong equipment and would need to find a new way of sparging.  After scouring the internet for information about batch sparging, we decided to give it a whirl.  My first inclination was to take all my sparge water, dump it into the mash tun and drain the mash tun as quickly as possible.  THIS IS NOT THE CORRECT METHOD.  Batch sparging, when done correctly, will take about the same time as fly sparging, but requires less overall equipment, and allows for a shared hot liquor tank without complicated plumbing.

Now that we know how to not do batch sparging, and what some of the advantages are, let’s talk about how to do it.  One our particular recipes, we were supposed to have 6 gallons of sparge water for a 5g recipe.  The first thing we did was to open the mash tun about 1/2 open and let it drain into the boil kettle (after recirculating the same way as fly sparging).  This process should take 10-15 minutes and will garner about 2g of wort, depending on the recipe.  At this point, we added 1/2 of our sparge water (3g) to the mash tun, stirred it up, and let it sit for 5 minutes.  We then recirculated the wort until it ran clear and drained off the mash tun into the boil kettle over 10 minutes.  We repeated this process for the last 3g of sparge water and ran off enough liquid to give 6.25-6.5g in the boil kettle.

As you can probably see, it took almost an hour to sparge via the batch sparging method, and other than being able to share a HLT, and not requiring a fancy mash tun, it didn’t do a whole lot for us.  Some people even claim that the efficiency is lower by ~10%.  I’m not sure I agree with this, if you take your time with batch sparging, as one of our brews was well within the expected range (though the other was a little low).  We likely won’t do batch sparging again, so future evidence of efficiency may be lacking.

Without a doubt, batch sparging does work, and is a real alternative for people with less room, or who are lacking in equipment.  The lack of need for a 3-tiered system (when gravity feeding) is a real bonus for those who are attempting to try all-grain is a confined location.  Before we get out of here, I’ll list some advantages and disadvantages of fly and batch sparging, so you can make the best choice.