6 Guys Brewing

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

The very first beer I ever made came out great. It was a Honey Porter from morebeer.com. CO2 levels were perfect, it had a great flavor and awesome body. 5 gallons lasted 3 hours. I thought I knew everything about brewing. The second brew was pretty good too, though certainly not of the same caliber as the first. I think I got a little lazy and wasn’t as careful with all the instructions the second time around. The third beer was horrible, or so I thought. The flavor was pretty good, but I could not get the stupid thing to carbonate.

I have always forced carbonated in a keg. I think it’s easier, more consistent and faster. Kegging also requires a lot fewer bottles to clean, and the one thing I hate about brewing is cleaning, so kegging just makes sense. I read a bunch of different things on the best way to force carbonate a beer and believed that setting the CO2 to 12psi for a couple weeks would get the job done (and it usually does). However, this can take a long, long time. You see, in order to effectively carbonate a beer, you have to expose as much of the beer to the CO2 as possible so that it can be absorbed into the beer. Think of it this way: if you want to mop up a spill on the floor, it works most effectively if you use the entire towel versus just a small portion. Sure, the liquid will eventually migrate to cover the entire toweling, but it might take a long, long time.

The first thing you should do when carbonating a beer is to purge the air out of the keg. To do this, set the pressure to about 30 psi, fill the keg. Wait til it is done filling, turn off the CO2 and pull the bleeder valve. Repeat this step 3 times, and all that should be left in the keg is CO2 and beer. To get the CO2 into solution, hook up the CO2 at 30 psi to the OUTPUT of the keg. The pin lock quick connects are different sizes for input and output on the keg, but you might be able to get the gray quick connect to fit on the output. I dedicated a black quick connect (output sized) for the CO2 and use that for carbonation. Turn the CO2 and you’ll hear the CO2 working it’s way through the beer and up to the top. Wait for the bubbling to stop and the pressure to equalize in the keg. Disconnect the CO2 and find a towel to put on your lap (the beer is cold) and a place to sit. Put the keg on your knees and roll it around until you can no longer hear the beer sloshing around. While you are doing this, make sure you have nothing attached to the keg. If you do, you’ll end up with beer in places that it shouldn’t be. Take a bleeder valve (available from Northern Brewer) and measure the pressure in the keg (on the input side of the keg). It should be around 10-12 psi. I like my beer around 12 psi, but the carbonation chart will give you an idea of what your pressure should read depending on the serving temperature of your beer. If your beer is not at the desired pressure after your first roll in your lap, reconnect the 30psi CO2 to the output and put just a little bit more CO2 into the beer. Roll it around in your lap again (this time, it may not stop sloshing). Remeasure the CO2 with the bleeder valve. When it gets to the desired pressure, you’re ready to serve!

It has been my experience that this method works equally well for cold and warm beer in the keg. However, cold beer does tend to carbonate faster and will be a little less rolling around in your lap. Either way though, using this method, your beer can go from the carboy to read-to-serve in about 15 minutes.

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.