I just discovered www.homebrewtalk.com. I’m not sure how I missed it given the amount of time I spend reading about brewing on the internet. I like it.
The best part of the site is their home brewing wiki. Home brew forums are always full of people asking the same questions over and over again. It’s one of the things that drive me away from the forums. I can only read so many posts from people asking how to make a kegerator from a Sanyo refrigerator. Forum regulars often get upset and ask people to use the search function instead of starting a new thread, and then things get heated. Isn’t the internet great? So I think the wiki solves those problems. The Home Brew Talk forums seem to be filled with far more interesting discussions about brewing equipment and processes instead of always returning to the basics. It feels like people are talking about advancing the hobby instead of trying to get all the members up to speed or just hanging around for something to do while they avoid work.
Filed under: commercial beer, tasting | Tags: bell's brewery, commercial beer, tasting, two hearted ale
Colin brought me back some Bell’s Two Hearted Ale on his last trip to visit his parents in St. Louis. He’s a genius. I think he told me about the beer sometime around New Years. I picked it up last week. Did I mention that Colin is a genius? You’d think that someone as obsessed with beer as I am would make time to go pick up some free beer that I have been dying to taste — especially since his house is basically on my way home from work. I like to think that at the end of the day I really want to get home to see Stephanie and Jonathan.
He sent me home with some other beer as well, so I have some additional fodder for beer tasting. You’ll see it here soon enough. Stay tuned.
I’ve even been trying to talk Becca and my parents into shipping me beer from Minneapolis and Philadelphia respectively that I can’t get in Nashville. Minneapolis is only a short distance to Wisconsin, where New Glarus is brewed and sold. I’d love to taste any of their beer, but I am especially interested in their sour ales. Philadelphia is home to a number of respected breweries and is the American home of Belgian beer. My parents are going to end up with a list of places they need to visit for me. I should probably just take a trip to visit them and take an extra suitcase. Anyone else out there interested in a beer trade, let me know. I’m definitely game.
Anyway, Bell’s Brewery is located in Michigan and isn’t distributed in Nashville, so I this might be the only Two Hearted Ale I drink in a long time. It’s the first time I’ve tasted it. Two Hearted Ale is Bell’s American IPA. Rate Beer gives Two Hearted Ale a 4.05 out of 5, and stunning score.
Here are my tasting notes. I’m definitely not an expert and I purposefully wrote these without looking at the comments at Rate Beer first. I want my comments to be my own. I’d like to learn about tasting beer as much as I can, and I don’t think it helps to look at a cheat sheet like Rate Beer before I have even tasted the beer. I want to trust my own palate and learn about what I am tasting by comparing my notes over a variety of beers.
Poured a cloudy and tarnished pale brass color, with a substantial head that has a greenish tinge and dropped quickly. A very strong floral hop aroma is apparent, definitely not citrusy like I expected from an American IPA. Two Hearted Ale has a very sharp, crisp opening taste that increases slowly in bitterness to a strong tingling bitterness on the tip of the tongue. This is the most focused bitterness I have tasted in a beer. The bitterness fades quickly after swallowing, leaving a greener taste than other IPAs I have had, which tend to have an earthier, browner bitter aftertaste. I think I can detect the floral aroma in the aftertaste as well, but I’m not really sure how to describe the flavor. I am surprised by the clean aftertaste. The bitterness is focused on the tongue and doesn’t effect the mouth as much as other very bitter beers. IPAs generally leave my mouth feeling puffy or swollen in the tongue and cheeks, sort of cotton-mouthed, but Two Hearted Ale doesn’t produce this sensation. I don’t really know how to grade a beer, but I’d definitely like another one and would certainly buy more were I in the mood for an IPA.
So if anyone out there wants to mail me a 6 pack of Bell’s Two Hearted Ale, feel free.
More Beer just started a deal of the day promotion on their website. Every day at midnight (Pacific time) they put a new item up for sale with a significant discount on their front page. The item is available in limited quantities, so once they’ve all sold the deal is over. Recent items have included: stainless steel disconnects, stainless steel ball valves, a 15 gallon modified brewing kettle, & a stainless steel propane burner. All of the items have been at least 50% off their regular price, so they’ve been great deals. It’s pretty much woot for the home brewing community, which is awesome. Nothing much else to say about it. I’m sure it will create new business for More Beer as people flock to their website every day to see what’s on sale and I’m sure it will make some home brewers happy (and others frustrated they missed out).
Filed under: brew day, equipment, process | Tags: brew day, equipment, milk stout, stout, sweet stout, technique
I never drink stout and I’m lactose intolerant, so I figured the first beer I would brew on the new brewing plan should be a milk stout with loads of black patent malt and lactose. All that lactose sugar will make the final beer pretty sweet. It should be a sweet, malty beer; totally different than all those APAs and IPAs I’ve brewed in my illustrious brewing career.
I bought some Maris Otter LME from William’s Brewing for the base malt. Maris Otter is a British pale malt. It has what people call a ‘biscuity’ character to it compared to American grown malted barley. William’s was the only place I could find Maris Otter LME for sale. Everyone has those cans of John Bull Maris Otter LME, but I am pretty suspicious of canned LME shipped from overseas. I don’t see how it couldn’t be overheated on the ship voyage. It’s just got to be stale.
I was going to use regular light LME, but Jamil strongly favors Maris Otter, especially so for English style beers like stouts. Who am I to argue? It certainly can’t hurt to try it out either, especially on a beer that is malt focused.
For specialty malts I’ve got some black patent, crystal 80L, and some pale chocolate, all darker than what I normally use and in larger quantity. I’m pretty excited about it even though they all smell like coffee – something I never drink.
I made a 2L starter of Wyeast 1099 Whitbread Ale on Friday morning while Jonathan napped and Stephanie went shopping. I actually put 2 packs of yeast in the starter. The original yeast I bought had been accidentally frozen, so I bought a second package as a backup. I don’t think I really needed it since both of the packs inflated at about the same rate after I activated them, but it certainly didn’t hurt.
I did a couple of new things with the starter this time. First, I added 5 drops of foam control before boiling. I had switched to boiling my starters in a regular kitchen pot and then transferring them to the flask for cooling in order to stop boil overs. It’s nearly impossible to boil something in those full Erlenmeyer flasks without it boiling over. The neck is so small that even a little foam quickly rises over the top. I hate boil overs. It smells bad, gets the flask really sticky and dirty, and makes a huge mess of the stove. The separate pot worked, but I had to sanitize the flask and figured it would be more sanitary and easier to clean to have everything occur in one pot. Well, the foam control worked fairly well, but not perfectly. It definitely didn’t foam up, but the liquid still rose in the flask from the bubbles caused by the boiling. So it boiled over again, but just a little and was definitely my fault. I turned up the burner to speed things along towards boiling. I was impatient. Leaving the burner on low got the wort to boil and keep things safe on the boil over front. Next time I’ll be more patient waiting for the boil to start.
I cooled the starter wort down to pitching temperature in the sink in an ice bath and pitched the 2 packs of yeast. The second new starter improvement was pure oxygen aeration. After I pitched the yeast, I aerated the wort with oxygen through a .5 micron stone attached to the end of some sanitized tubing. I let the oxygen run for about a minute. There was some foaming, but the foam control was again very helpful. The oxygen tank is from the welding section of Home Depot and the regulator and stone are from More Beer.
I was home all weekend and swirled the yeast starter religiously. Jonathan watched.
Sunday was brew day. I put the starter, which had slowed down considerably, into the refrigerator around 6am when I woke up in order to get the yeast to drop to the bottom of the flask for later pitching.
I set up the outside portion of the brewery and put 6 gallons of water into the brew pot for boiling. I filled the pot with tap water from a white potable house attached behind my house. I fill up two empty one gallon water jugs from Kroger three times and pour them into the brew pot.
While the water is heating, I also heated up one gallon of filtered tap water to 155F on the stove in a stainless steel stock pot we normally use for spaghetti or soup. I used filtered water from the refrigerator for this gallon, but I’m too lazy to do it for the other 6 gallons. I steeped the specialty grains in a grain bag in the 150F water for 30 minutes. I was sure to mash the grains around with a spoon while immersing them to guarantee that there were no dry stops in the grain ball. After 30 minutes the temperature had dropped to around 138F; not great. The temperature is supposed to stay around 148-150F for the entire 30 minutes. It was the first time I had steeped my grains in the appropriate amount of water. Normally I just steep the grains in the full 7 gallons of water in my brew pot, but after reading up on steeping I decided it was better to do it with less water on the stove top. I’ll have to find a better way to keep the temperature stable during steeping. My current plan is to use a small drink cooler we have at the house for steeping. Anyway, the water was pretty much jet black when I was done.
I added the wort from the kitchen to the brew pot outside, stirred in the LME, and cranked up the fire. The temperature was about 180F. Pre-boil gravity was 1.054; target pre-boil gravity was 1.051. I had a bit of a hard time getting the wort to boil. It was a windy day and the flame kept jumping out one side of the brew pot. I added the EKG pellet hops in a nylon hop bag clipped to the handle of the brew pot at the start of boiling. I’m normally not a fan of English hops like EKGs. They are too ‘earthly’ tasting and I prefer the crisper taste of American hops. There is only a bittering hop addition for this recipe, so there wasn’t much else to do except wait the 60 minutes for the boil to be over. I continued to have trouble keeping the boil going strong due to the wind. I ended up letting about 65 or 70 minutes for the boil because of this, which turned out to be fine.
With 15 minutes remaining in the boil I added a Whirlfloc tablet, a Servomyces caplet, and my immersion chiller to the boiling wort.
Chilling was very easy as the tap water is still pretty cold. I cooled the wort to 64F before transferring to a sanitized 6.5 gallon carboy. Original gravity was 1.063; a little over the target gravity of 1.060. I poured the liquid off the yeast cake in the chilled yeast starter and pitched the yeast into the wort. I meant to use my new oxygen tank and stone to aerate the wort with some oxygen, but I totally forgot until I was at work the next day (today). There’s always next time. Noticeable fermentation started within about 2.5 hours of pitching. Even without the oxygen aeration, I think I had some good yeast this time from a good starter. At least the yeast had oxygen then. I’ve got the carboy sitting out in the living room, which is 66F. I assume it’s a little warmer in the fermenting wort. I wish I was able to use my refrigerator for fermentation, but it’s full of other things at the moment. My living room is a stable temperature I have found with some testing, and 66F is reasonable. We’ll find out soon enough.
One of the reasons I started this blog was to track my brewing so I could look back and see how I have improved, record how my beer turned out, and whatever I happen to be planning. I want to brew a beer from each of the BJCP categories so I get some experience brewing and drinking a variety of beers. So I think it will be interesting to track my progress.
When I first started brewing, I made a couple of batches of APA followed by a couple of batches of IPA. I think a lot of new brewers do this sort of thing. I brewed a style of beer I like and then I brewed the most extreme version of that beer I could. That’s part of the appeal of brewing — make what you like, make something you probably couldn’t buy (and if you did it would cost way more and be less fun). Once I had a few kegs of Rogue inspired IPA around the house, I realized I didn’t want to drink double IPA all the time. It’s good, but I wanted a session beer too.
I set out to brew more drinkable beer. I also wanted to try something that required a colder fermentation. I made a couple of batches of California Common Ale and a batch of Kolsch; they seemed to fit with my general preference in beer. Both tasted great and were very popular. I think we went through the 2 5 gallon kegs of California Common Ale in 2 weekends. The California Common was definitely my most successful beer.
About this time my son Jonathan was born and brewing took a break. We moved into a new house and I moved my brewery into the backyard.
I brewed an very good IPA for my friend Stuart’s bachelor party. I made an Irish ale that I over-hopped trying to use my some spare hops for which I had no plans. I decided again I needed something more easy drinking, especially when I was brewing so infrequently. A few weeks back I brewed an English bitter. I just kegged it yesterday, so we’ll see how it turned out soon enough.
Anyway, with limited brewing time I decided I needed to have a better plan for my brewing. That Irish ale was just so random and took so much work and baby wrangling that I knew I needed to really like all the beer I made. I couldn’t just throw some stuff together and see what happened if I wanted to be happy with my brewing. Like Alison said, I was having low beer self-esteem serving that Irish ale. I also knew that I had to keep it interesting for me. I didn’t want to brew the same kind of thing all the time.
I’ll be generally following the recipes and suggestions in Brewing Classic Styles. You can buy a copy from Amazon or your LHBS. I’ll start with the easier recipes, styles I haven’t made before, and things I want to try. We’ll see how it goes.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I’ve decided I need another outlet for my brewing thoughts and plans. My wife is always encouraging of my brewing (or anything I decide to actually do), but I am sure that she gets tired of listening to my latest beer scheme sometimes. I also want a place where I can more easily track my brewing and keep my thoughts. So here it is. Welcome to the Koehler Brewery Online.
