6 Guys Brewing

First off, this is my inaugural post; so let me start by introducing myself. Hi, I’m Bill. I started out brewing using the Mr. Beer kit 2-3 years ago, and while I don’t think this is a bad kit for beginners I do think that you grow out of it very quickly. I’ve made about half a dozen or so batches with that kit, most of them good (at least I was happy with them), but I’ve also had 2 batches that went bad (but in no way was this attributable to the kit).

Specifically, what went wrong with those beers is that they developed an undesired flavor that tasted like Green Apple. The first time I was making a Pale Ale, and I mistakenly thought that it was a fruity flavor imparted from the Hops that I used. The second time was with a Vanilla Porter, and by this time I realized that something wasn’t right. Some research determined that the likely culprit was a chemical called Acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde is produced naturally by yeast during the process of fermentation as an intermediary step on its way to becoming ethanol (alcohol). It can also be produced as a by-product of acetic acid bacteria, but this will usually result in more of a vinegar flavor. Since my beer only had a slight green apple flavor, I think the most likely cause was that I might have pitched the yeast while the wort was too hot, or I didn’t let the beer completely ferment, or some combination of the two.

The lessons to learn are:

1. Measure the temperature of the wort before pitching yeast; it should be less than 75º F.
2. Learn how to watch your beer fermenting, and to know when it is done.
3. Lastly, and this is important to remember, this will NOT harm you if you drink it! I had many friends that sampled my first Pale Ale batch, and nobody got even remotely sick or suffered any ill effects.

So, now that you are armed with this knowledge, go forth. Good luck and happy home-brewing!

Every once in a while, we get a question from the twitter universe that we don’t know the answer to.  Truth is, we get an occasional question, and we often don’t know the answer.  The fun part with this is it gives us a chance to find out about something we haven’t yet tried, and we add it to our list of things to do.  One such question came in a couple of days ago related to wood chips, so herein lies some answers, or at least insightful comments.

For years, people have been fermenting their beer in barrels, usually oak barrels that previously contained bourbon, whiskey, or other sweet distilled liqueurs.  These liqueurs impart their aroma, taste and character onto the beer.  Many times, people who decide to ferment in such vessels acquire them from a distiller and recondition them, to make them water tight again.  Unfortunately for the homebrewer, the cost of such barrels is usually prohibitively expensive, and quite honestly, a 55g barrel in your garage/basement/brew shed takes up a lot of space.  Even if you are doing 10g batches, the container is only 1/5th full, and the fermenting gods won’t like that very much.

How then, do we get around this issue?  There are a couple solutions.  A quick search on the internet turned up several choices for pre-conditioned 5g barrels that run between $140 and $170, plus shipping.  This would be a very nice choice for those who have the cash to spend on such a fine piece of craftsmanship.  The barrel should easily last close to 10 years, which will give you many flavorful homebrews.

If a barrel isn’t your style, or you aren’t sure if a barrel is your style, there is the option of wood chips.  You can use any number or types of wood, but oak seems to be quite popular.  Wood chips inside your secondary fermenter can have very much the same effect as using a barrel as a secondary fermenter (You should avoid using a barrel as a primary due to lack of head space, and inability to easily see what’s going on inside).  The first question is, how much?  Much like hops, the wood imparts a flavor on the beer relative to its surface area.  Many small piece of wood have more surface area than one large piece, thus it will be smarter to go with several smaller pieces, but how much?  The first thought would probably be, “a 5g barrel weighs 20lbs, I should use 20lbs of wood chips.”  This is a bad idea.  A barrel’s surface area is only one side of the wood to the beer.  The barrel’s weight also contains metal, and 20lbs of wood in a fermenter will fill it.  Your best bet is to think of wood chips like hops.  Go on the heavy side of what you would dry hop – 2-4oz.

You have your wood chips, your beer has been transferred to a secondary fermenter, and you realize, the wood chips aren’t sanitary!  This is quite easily fixed.  The first thing you should do is bake the wood chips in your oven for 30 minutes, or until dried out.  This will ensure that they are sanitary, but will also get rid of much of the flavor.  The next step is to soak the wood chips in your favorite liquor for a day (this doesn’t need to be done every time, but definitely the first time).  I prefer a bourbon or whiskey – don’t go too cheap.  The next step is simply to be patient. Your beer will slowly take on the taste of the wood chips in the secondary fermenter.  When you rack your beer to the keg (or bottle), save the wood chips.  You can reuse them if you bake them and store them in an airtight container.  Soak them in water to rehydrate them before using them in another beer (or throw them in another beer right away).

At this point, if all goes well, you should have the knowledge to create an oak fermented style of beer, with or without an actual barrel.  This is definitely something we’re likely to try with a winter warmer, because, quite frankly, a little bit of bourbon flavor in a nice homebrew is the perfect way to spend a cold February afternoon.

It was last evening that we had the Homebrewer’s of Rochester meeting, and it was the last chance to sample the Livonian IPA, that Travis had saved 1/2 the growler of for the meeting.  I was thankfully at this meeting, and it was one of the first beers the group got to sample.  All I can say about this beer is that it’ll be missed.  It was an off the cuff recipe that has really come into its own in the last 2 weeks.  The citrus flavor is exactly what I look for in an IPA, but it was also well balanced.  While many IPAs tend to be bitter for the sake of being bitter, the Livonian IPA was not.  There was no doubt it was an IPA, but boy was it good.  If we ever make it to be any sort of commercial brewery, this will be on our short list recipes.  I’m not sure if the homegrown hops did it, the water, or just dumb luck, but there is one thing for sure, the only thing we’re complaining about is that it’s gone.

This weekend was a very busy one for brewing. In 30 hours, we brewed 3 separate 5 gallon batches of beer and it’s ilk. Saturday morning we made a hard cider and Saturday we made a Christmas beer and a Hefeweisen. We also receiver our new wort chiller on Friday and experimented with that quite a bit.

The cider was pretty easy to make, and we are very much looking forward to the results in several weeks. We started off by picking up 7 gallons of freshly pressed cider from Shutts Cider Mill in Webster, NY. This cider is pasteurized, but that’s ok because we are going to boil the cider anyway. It is important that your cider does not contain any preservatives. If it does, it will prevent the yeast from doing their thing. What was most remarkable about this cider was its clarity. It looked more like apple juice than apple cider. The 7 gallons of cider was boiled and reduced down to 5 gallons to increase the apple flavor and increase the amount of fermentable sugars. If you are just using standard ale yeast, this step is not required, but will result in a sweeter finished product. For this adventure though we decided to use champagne yeast. This will make an extremely dry cider, but the carbonation should help offset some of that dryness.

A word about the wort chiller: This thing is a heavy little piece of metal. Currently we are gravity feeding from the brew kettle, to the wort chiller and into the carboy. It took us a little while to get the hang of this, as the wort would happily flow from the kettle to the chiller, but would trickle out of the wort chiller into the carboy. The top of the carboy was below the bottom of the brew kettle, and the wort chiller was on the ground. Gravity should have been all that we needed to get a good flow into the carboy, but it wasn’t. In order to get good flow, we had to let the wort chiller fill up, and then lift the wort chiller above the top of the carboy. This created a nice siphon and we were off to the races. We chilled 5 gallons of wort from 210°F to 68°F in 5 minutes. The other really important thing was to keep the hose from the kettle to the wort chiller as short as possible with no superfluous dips. By the time we got around to the Hefe on Sunday afternoon, we were pros with this thing.

We received a question several days ago asking about spices to add to a spiced brown ale.  This is something we’ve never done, but is definitely on our todo list now.  I did quite a bit of research on what goes into a spiced brown before realizing the fairly mundane answer, which is… drum roll… the same things that go into any spiced beer.  Naturally, the base grains will make the big difference, and the spices should be adding a forward aroma and a finishing flavor to the already existing drink.  This of course begs the question, what goes into most spices beers?

There are 3-4 basic ingredients in a spiced beer, and the amounts of each will vary on personal tastes, the grains used, the batch size, and times, the same rules that apply to pretty much every addition.  What then are we going to add?  I, like most people, go with Cloves, Nutmeg, and Cinnamon.  If you are feeling dangerous, and depending on the type of beer, orange peel, orange zest, or even a whole orange, can be a nice addition.   Personally, I would do the orange (peel) in a brown, but not in a light ale.  The orange might be a bit much for a lighter beer.

Scouring the internet came up with a lot of different choices for how much of each to add, and for how long.  One problem that exists for many spiced beer is that they are too spiced.  We’re drinking beer, not liking the top of a spice jar.  Of course, too little spice will just result in a funny flavor overall, as you won’t be able to tell what was in the beer anyway.

I haven’t actually tried this yet, but this seems to be a nice compromise for a medium bodied brown ale:

With 30 minutes left, in a 5g batch, add the following:

• ~5 cloves
• 5 cinnamon sticks
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• zest from 4 oranges

Some people recommend boiling this mixture in water before adding it to the wort.  I don’t see the point, seeing how the wort should be boiling when you add it.  The flavors should have no problem being extracted.

One of our twitter followers is trying this in a couple days and will be sure to let us know how it turns out.  Remember though, the only bad beer is the one you don’t try to make.

The next three weeks have us brewing a lot of beers, or similar.  Some of these are from kits, some all grain, and some are just plain for fun.  Why so many?  Simply put, there are 6 of us, and we go through beer pretty quick, especially given that 5g batches usually end up slightly less.  We’re not even convinced the pumpkin ale, which is now on tap along with the Livonian IPA will last through Halloween.  So, what do we have on tap, and how are we going to pull it all of?

The first item to be brewed isn’t beer at all, but hard apple cider.  We are still contemplating whether we are going to press the apples ourselves, or just get pasteurized cider (since unpasteurized cider is not available in New York), and work from there.  Due to time constraints, we’ll probably go with the pre-pressed stuff, and save the press for un-fermented cider.  We should have the champagne yeast for this arriving in the next couple of days, which will lead to a nice dry cider.

Sunday will be a busy day as well, as we plan to brew a two beers, a Delerium Noel clone, from http://austinhomebrew.com and a Heffeweizen from http://morebeer.com.  Both of these are extract kits, due primarily to the high original gravities.  The Noel Clone has an OG of 1.090.  To get that, we would need 18lbs of grain, and quite frankly, our mash tun isn’t big enough for that… yet.  The Hefe comes in at 1.062, which is about 11-12lbs of grain.  This would be possible, though very tight with the current mash setup.  As a side note, we have a 15g mash tun on the way, which should allow us to do 10g batches if we need.

The Noel is expected to be in the primary fermenter for 2-3 weeks, and then 4 weeks in the secondary after that.  Sadly, that won’t be ready until the middle of December, and I’d really like to have it ready for Thanksgiving.  I’ll know for next year.  To counter this, we are brewing a spiced ale the 1st of November.  That should be ready shortly after Thanksgiving (possibly on Thanksgiving), due to its significantly lower alcohol content.  More on this beer as we get closer to brewing it.

Also on schedule for brewing is a Red Ale, so be completed by Bill, and an, as yet, unknown selection from James.  He hasn’t yet kegged his Broadway Ale, but boy is he ready for a new challenge.  By the first week in November, we should have 5 beers (if you count the cider), bubbling away in the basement.  With 6+ guys (and girls) to drink them, it won’t be long before we move to 10g batches.  Lots of new equipment is on the way to support this, and it’s times like this when we realize 6 guys brewing (and paying for cool stuff), is better than 1.

It has been approximately one week since my first brew, and it is about time to share what I learned on my first brew day and post the results of my kegerator experiment.

When you get a couple guys together who like beer (Bill, Jeremy, Travis and I), give them a place to hang out (around the beer kettle), give them something to talk about (beer), give them something tasty to drink (Rohrboch’s Scotch Ale), and food (Papa John’s… hey they delivered), you have a pretty good recipe for a fun time hanging out. All in all,  I will count the beer brewing process as a success even if it ends up tasting like butt, because I learned a lot and had a great time.

The things I learned:

• You can’t tell how cold it is out, when sitting next to a propane burner
• Apparently I need to listen to more country
• Brewing beer is a lot like making tea, and then letting it ferment
• Jeremy and Travis have fun toys for brewing
• Brewing beer is a slow process
• The grains are rather bland tasting after being boiled
• Cleaning all the equipment is a form of hazing
• Travis gets rather annoyed if you accidentally shoot dirty water at him while cleaning

Thanks Bill, Travis, and Jeremy for helping me brew my first batch it was fun.

The morning after brew day, I worked on finishing up my kegerator.  When I first decided to get involved in brewing, bottling was my first choice.  After doing some legwork, finding out I had an extra mini-fridge, and realizing the convenience of kegging, I decided to convert said mini fridge into a kegerator.  What surprised me was how simple it was.

Step one:  Remove the shelving on the door. The shelving on the door takes up a decent amount of room in the fridge, so to fit a keg inside it has to go.  There is no real need for it in a kegerator either.

*Note: Removing the shelving on the door opens up a lot of space. I actually did just this step to my other mini fridge so we can fit more beer in it.

Step two: Bend the freezer portion of the mini-fridge upwards. In many mini-fridges there is a metal freezer portion at the top, if you don’t have one, cool. If you do have one however, it will get in the way of the keg.   You can’t remove the freezer portion completely because this is the main cooler unit for the fridge. My solution was to simply bend the bottom upwards. To do this I unplugged the fridge and let it warm up and then slowly bent it upwards. It worked like a charm.

Step Three:  This is  the fun / iffy step. At this point I had a fridge that could hold a corny keg. I decided I wanted a draft tower on top, as there would be less chance of coiling coils on the top of a front opening fridge.  Additionally, a tap handle on the door of a mini fridge would be a little awkward.  The draft tower necessitated a hole in the the top, and while chance of cooling coils in the top is small, it better safe than sorry.  I just grabbed a utility knife, and a laundry detergent cap, and made a hole. The hole I made was not very circular, but by using a utility knife I was able to probe for piping, and thus not puncture a pipe.  The fact that the whole wasn’t round would be of little consequence once the tower was on.

Step Four:  Add the draft tower. I picked mine up from http://kegworks.com, as it was the cheapest I could find, and since they are located in Buffalo, NY,  my 3 day shipping only took 1 day!  I just dropped the tubing down the hole I already cut, and screwed down the tower. My kegerator was finished.

Of course, I wanted to really finish off the kegerator, so I needed some real tap handles.  I searched high and low for good tap handles that wouldn’t cost me an arm and a leg, and boy did I get a good deal. If you ever want a tap handle, and are local to Rochester, NY, hit up Kevin at The Old Toad. This was one cool experience, as I got to go into the storage room of The Old Toad, and go through all of the tap handles.  Of course, there were some restriction on what I could take; I couldn’t take something if he couldn’t easily replace it, and if he only had one of that tap handle. I was like a kid in a candy store.  After going through the massive collection, I walked away with a Stone Ruination, Sam Adams seasonal, Kronenbourg 1664, Beamish, London Porter Label (I can swap this on and off with the Magners label), and Magners tap handles. The Sam Adam’s and the Magner’s taps were particularly cool since I can easily add my own labels to the handles.  The important thing to get out of this is this: if you have a local pub that frequently switches beers out, give them a call.  The distributor likely gives them new tap handles every time they get something ‘new’ in.

To truly polish off my kegerator I need to get my brew into it.  Another 10 days, and we should be good to go.

The pumpkin ale went into the keg on Friday, and we experimented with forced one hour carbonation.  We had limited success, and Travis will be doing a writeup on it later this week.  We tested it that night though, it is has a very nice pumpkin flavor.  All in all, very good, though we can’t seem to find the original gravity recording, so it’s very difficult to know what the alcohol content is.  There is one thing for sure though, the pumpkin flavor masks any sort of alcohol flavor that would come through.

We’ll have a picture of a glass of the pumpkin ale coming up shortly, but there is one thing worth noting about the pumpkin ale, and that is the clarity, almost like a commercial beer.  This is a distinct difference from the Livonian IPA, which is very tasty, but not very clear.  We did a couple things different with the pumpkin ale though, starting on brew day.  This was the first beer in a while that we added warflock, which seems to have helped a lot.  3 weeks after the fermenting began (and it was a vicious ferment), we moved the pumpkin ale to the secondary fermenter.  This had the effect of getting most of the trub out of the beer, which, no matter how hard you try when racking, some seems to come along.  The pumpkin also had a high sugar content, and getting the pumpkin pieces out of the beer was a good idea.  Finally, 24 hours before we racked the beer from the secondary fermenter to the keg, we threw the carboy into the fridge.  This neat little trick gets the yeast to settle out of the beer (if it’s an ale) and sit on the bottom.  When siphoning out, we can avoid most of the bottom and get nice clear beer.  There three steps were simple to do, but managed to create a much more commercial looking beer with little effort.

A bunch has happened since the Autumn Festival of Ales, with regards to beer, and we’ll have some more detailed posts on a couple of the events… eventually.  James managed to brew his first beer ever, with just a little guidance from Bill, Travis and myself.  Everything went quite well, and it appears to be fermenting nicely now.

Broadway Ale Fermenting

Since Saturday was definitely a beer day, with the festival and all, we decided to rack the pumpkin ale from the primary fermenter to the secondary.  I’m glad we did, because the pumpkin additive (and brown sugar) made it ferment like crazy, and the yeast were actually smelling pretty bad.  The beer itself smelled good though, and the secondary fermenter should help to ensure it stays that way.  The pumpkin ale is a nice, deep red color, and is better than I’d expect from a pumpkin.  Can’t wait to try it.  It will be ready for Halloween!  The original gravity measured a little low though, so it’ll be interesting to see how it turns out.

Also of note, and something we’ll be covering more later is force carbonation.  We have, for quite some time been kegging our beer, but once it’s in the corny keg, we shake it up for 30 seconds and let it sit for 3-4 days.  I personally think that it takes 4 days to get good carbonation, though many people say 3, when using the ‘patient’ method.  The part that intrigues me is the theory that it is possible to force carbonate in as little as 4 hours.  I’m not sure it gives a good flavor to the beer, as a lot of the carbonation process is also letting it sit and come into its own.  We will be doing some experiments over the next couple of beer to figure out, is it really possible to do a 1 day carbonation and still have it taste good.  Stay tuned!

And we’re back from the Custom Brewcrafters Autumn Festival of Ales.  Overall, it was an absolutely gorgeous day out for the autumn with sunny 55F weather and no rain (despite pretty much raining for the last 24 hours).  We showed up at 1:10pm which was 10 minutes after the gates opened and arrived to find out that there was a really long line.  We got in the long line before noticing a much shorter line to out right… we moved to the short line to realize that the short line was for people who hadn’t already bought their tickets.  Really, people hadn’t bought their tickets?  We moved to the back of the long line again and waited.  The line actually went quite quickly, and we entered the firemen’s field after being ID’d and we got our tasting glasses.

The line on the left here is the line for people with tickets.  The line nicely wraps off camera and then back on.  There were about 100 people in front of us when I took this picture.  The line to the right is for those without tickets.  They paid $5 more to buy their ticket on the day of the event.

The first tent we hit was the Custom Brewcrafters signature tent and tried a couple of the beers we expected to run out within the first hour.  We tried “Angus” which was an oak aged Wee Heavy and it was delicious.

Welcome to the Festival of Ales

I was quite happy to get a taste of that before they ran out, but was slightly more happy when they ran out, as they put a 2008 Wee Heavy 0n tap after running out of Angus, and it was marvelous.  I am personally not a fan of Wee Heavy most of the time, but the 2008 was super smooth – it had very little hop characteristic but was super smooth.  Highly recommended.

A couple other beers of note were the Old Toad’s Old Toadly Pumpkin Ale available on draft and cask.  The cask version was infused with cinnamon and was remarkably not terribly different from the draft version.  What came after the Pumpkin Ale on Cask was the most remarkable beer of the day, however.  The Old Toad did a Maple Nut Brown on cask, and it was by far, the most memorable beer of the day.  A lovely nut brown infused with a maple flavor was sweet, but had a nice maple undertone with it.  Hands down, many of our favorites.

Sadly, it was a little crowded to get a picture of the cask

There were numerous other beers available today though not as many in years past.  Many of the beers available were ones that should be familiar to frequenters of Custom Brewcrafters, but it was nice to be able to sample many of the beers in one place on one day, especially given the special beers that we got to try.  The beers started running out around 3:00, which was a little earlier than expected, though due to the lower number of breweries present, not too surprising.  Overall, I’d consider the festival a resounding success.