Eva

Originally I hadn't planned on giving the "Kitchen Sink" beer much interest or discussion here, but when racking into secondary yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised by the flavor, even only 1 week into fermentation. I decided that a beer this surprisingly tasty should be paid its due respects, so welcome Dierksenkougan Eva into the catalogue of beers. She's a brown ale, basically, of significant strength, made with 10 kinds of malt. Definately one of a kind, but luckily, I wrote enough notes on her that if she's a winner (which she's shaping up to be), I'll be able to repeat brew her in the future. A link to her recipe and hopefully a label of sorts will be up in the near future.

Before that, though, I have to bury the hatchet on my search for a new job. Cold Stone is getting boringly out of hand, and I'm compelled to find work that I actually care about. The big news is that I drove out to Galesburg today and visited Bell's brewing facility, and left a cover letter, application, and resume. Among other places, such as Imperial Beverage Distributers, and Gallagher's Pub, I'm setting my sights on some sort of beer/brewing related employment for the summer months, and hopefully beyond. I've procrastinated on this issue far too long, so it's nice to get moving on it. I'll be sure to post the news of those endeavors as soon as I know anything.

As far as the other beers, Ella is still mellowing away in the carboy. Yesterday's taste revealed a great beer that, like most Belgians, does an excellent job of masking it's enormous alcohol content (something like 10.5%, if I can recall). It should be excellent, but this one is a labor of patience. Even if she's drinkable, I'm going to leave her in the carboy as long as I can hold out, then in bottles for even longer. I want to enjoy my first cold, carbonated taste of her at her prime.

Mariah is about ready to be enjoyed from the bottles. I've had a few bottles in the last couple of days to track taste changes and carbonation. Luckily, a lot of the bad, sweet flavors seem to be rapidly disappearing, and I'm not entirely sure why. But I think that a month or more of aging will grant her great improvement.

Anywho, not sure what's next on deck. I might utilize our Whole Foods supplier downtown and get some rye malt and fresh Michigan honey to make some sort of beer, and hopefully use up these raspberries that are taking up room in my freezer. All three might make a good summer spritzer of some sort, and now that the weather is improving, it might just be the perfect timing for it.

Sam

Kitchen Sink

Hey everyone. Just a quick "I'm bored" post...

...the Zeta Psi batch of Hannah is completely finished with a near-perfect yield of one bottle less than two cases. I added an available Hannah from batch two, marked the caps and have stored them away until I can give them away. Woohoo.

Ella is in secondary now, and a preliminary taste concludes that she's going to be awesome! A great alcohol presense that isn't too overwhelming (and will mellow greatly over a few months) and just an exploration of malt complexity. The Belgian candi sugar adds a noticable touch of caramelization and smoke, but just a hint. The bunch of other highly kilned grains make their appearances, but only each subtly. Nothing is too overpowering. I'm excited to see how it will stand up to a few months of aging, then how it will improve when I cellar it over several years.

Mariah should hit the bottle pretty soon. I added some gelatin finings to the fermentor to clear her out. Gelatin in small amounts attaches to large proteins that haze beer and gives it great clarity without attaching to the live yeast in suspension that are required for carbonating the beer after bottling. She's fairly dark (darker than she should be...) so I can't tell if it has been effective. I've never used it before. Regardless, in the next few days (maybe even tonight) I'll bottle her up and stow her away for a few weeks.

Otherwise, I'm still unsure of the next new batch. I may make a kitchen sink beer very soon if I have a free night like I did tonight, using a bunch of my unused ingredients, including about 10 or 11 different grains, some highly bitter Chinook hops (my favorite) and a big sample of hefeweizen yeast I saved from the last Hannah. I'm not promising anything, not even a name, but it will be a lesson in learning, for sure.

Dk

Mariah Label

Twins

Hey, it's been awhile since I've posted an update, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been big news. Actually, if anything, I've been putting more time, thought, and effort into my beers, so there's quite a bit of new information to pass on to you guys.

First and foremost, I introduce two new styles to the Dk family. Mariah, which was brewed about two weeks ago, is lazily sitting in secondary soaking up a lot of East Kent Golding dry hops. Mariah is an English Bitter style, one that's been around a long while. She's a medium to medium-heavy bodied ale with lots of back end bitterness, the kind that lingers on your tongue and throat after drinking a hoppy beer. Bitters are one of my favorite styles, and preliminary tastes of Mariah are looking promising, except that I may have moved her too quickly from primary to secondary, and fermented her at too high a temperature (my thermometers have all been crazy inaccurate lately...), so there are a lot of complex off-flavors, some of which are welcome, but most of which are not typical of the style. Luckily, most of these flavor compounds are easily mellowed with age, as I plan to keep Mariah in the secondary at least another two weeks, then in bottles a good month. After that, more of the simple bitterness and less of the buttery, phenolic off flavors will dissipate as the yeast falls completely out of suspension.

I took some good pictures while brewing Mariah, so I'll put them up...



That's my double boil system going on, which I'm about to phase out. The problem is that the brewpot to the right has a five gallon capacity...to the very rim. To get a good rolling boil without risking boilovers (which happen anyway; note the burn marks on the stovetop), I can only fit about 3.5 to 4 gallons of wort in there. I like to have a full boil--meaning I don't dilute once the boil is done to reach my 5 gallon batch size mark--so as to have a better tasting, fuller bodied beer that doesn't taste watered down. I recently took a trip to Meijer and bought a 7.5 gallon aluminum turkey fryer for super cheap, which I'll be using from now on as a single boiling vessel. No picture of that, but it's a beauty.



There's the 6.5 gallon primary fermenting carboy, which leaves airspace for a 5 gallon batch to foam up when fermenting. In the case that 1.5 gallons isn't enough headspace, we use the vinyl tubing off of our beer bong to form what they call a "blow off tube," which creates an airtight tunnel into another vessel for foam collection. Haven't had to do that yet.

The other little jug is a yeast starter. I'm starting to make these a day or two ahead of brew day for every batch now. Basically you're making a mini beer and getting the tired, otherwise refrigerated yeast active over 24 to 48 hours before brewing, so by the time you pitch them into your beer, they've already begun to get into fermentation mode, multiplying your initial pitching volume by up to 10000% percent. This is absolutely essential for high-alcohol beers, so that the yeast can get it's job done before the resident alcohol in the beer weakens and kills them over a short period of time. Insufficient pitching volumes of yeast will create a semi-fermented beer which will taste half like real beer and half like malt syrup, which basically tastes sticky sweet like tree sap or unsweetened maple syrup.



Another new piece of equipment I've recently built is this Immersion Wort Chiller. It has a really simple purpose: to cool the boiled beer (actually wort, which is beer that has not yet fermented) to room temperature, so that you can pitch the yeast without killing them. This can be done in an ice bath (which has what we've always done), but the quicker the cooling process, the lower the chance of an infection in your finished beer, since unfermented beer is a great place for bacteria to thrive--full of sugars and, before cooled, warm and moist. The trick is using this chiller, which uses the great conductive properties of thin, soft copper tubing to run cold tap water through the beer, acting like a big ice cube that won't melt. That vinyl tubing attaches to the copper, and a garden hose fitting fits to our sink adapter so that we are able to get the boiled wort down to room temperature in just under 15 minutes. Better than our previous 40 or 45. Plus it saves us money on getting ice every brew day just to waste in less than an hour.



There's me holding some East Kent Golding hop pellets. Hops usually look like tiny green pinecones, but these are ground and processed into what looks like rabbit poop. The freshness suffers minimally, and the efficiency and surface area of the bittering hops is greatly improved. Ounce for ounce, these pellets are pretty heavy. To get an idea of how packed they are, know that when added to water and blended, they grow to about 10 times (probably more) their own size in this big green hop-smelling foam. Cool.

Anywho, expect Mariah (whose name is a derivitive of "Mary," meaning bitter) to be ready in another month and a half.

The other addition to the family is getting brewed this week (probably Tuesday). Her name is Ella, and, like Annabelle, she's a beast of a beer. At over 10% alcohol, Ella is our biggest beer yet, and she should expect, between fermenting, aging, and conditioning, about 8 months to fully mature as a drinkable beer. After that, she can be cellered for more than 2 years, probably up to 5 or 10 with good sanitary brewing procedures, where she will improve greatly with mellowing and aging. Ella is meant as an Anniversary Ale for my girlfriend Molly (it's her favorite girls' name), so we'll crack open the first bottle around our one-year in November of 2006.

I'll be bottling much of Ella (which is an English-style Old Ale, named for it's cellaring qualities--very malty, not too bitter, and alcoholically warming; to be enjoyed in small amounts) in cappable champagne bottles, where I'll dip the capped tops in wax (think Maker's Mark whiskey) which will ensure a complete vaccuum in the bottle, label them and set them aside for a long long long long time. Label for Ella (and Mariah) to come...

As for our other beers, Annabelle is disappearing quickly, since I seem to drink one of her just about every day to wind down at night. She's excellent, so I suggest that you try some before it's all gone (but don't worry, I'll brew her up again very soon, for my own sake). Hannah #3 for Zeta Psi at University of Michigan is ready to be bottled, but an accidental addition of Irish Moss (a natural clarifier) during the brewing process meant that Hannah is now crystal clear, instead of hazy like most wheat beers should be. Not that that in itself is a problem, but a lot of the character of wheat beers like Hannah comes from yeast and wheat haziness in suspension. Her flavor is excellent, but I've lost most of the citrus which makes her so tasty, so before bottling, I'll be adding some extra coriander and orange peel to the secondary for a week or so to try to make her as close to the old Hannah as possible. But ultimately, no worries.

That, I must say, about covers it. If you've read this far, then you must really care, so thanks. On deck after Ella I'll probably be brewing up a raspberry wheat or something since I have a giant bag of frozen raspberries I don't know what to do with. Aging wheat beers being mostly unneccessary, she'll be done about the time that the hot summer weather rolls around. I invite you to join us and crack one open when the time comes. Until then, I'll leave you with this picture of a half-drunk Annabelle, and this bit of brewing knowledge: in current and historical brewing practice, if a beer produces dried bubbles on the side of the pint after drinking, it is considered to have been expertly brewed. The bubbles are called "Belgian Lace." Here's Dierksenkougan's example:



Cheers,
Sam