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
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
posted by Sam Reese at 5:17 PM
2 Comments:
Reading this makes me love you even more: a previously thought to be impossible accomplishment. One of the first things that drew me to you was how evidently passionate you are about this, and it shines through in this post above all. It is truly inspiring. Ella will be such an accomplishment, and so hugely cherished by you and I both. I'm so honored to be a part of something you care about so deeply, and something that I now care about so deeply.
I love you the most.
I just have to say your label designs are awesome! I think coming up with a decent label is THE hardest part of homebrewing.
Congrats on the job at Bells.
I am planning on my first all-grain batch next week will probably be a cream ale, as most every batch so far has been relatively dark.
Prost!
Fahrphrompuken in Schoolcraft
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