Welcome, Bertha

What happens when you give a homebrewer 8 weeks off, plenty of free time, the internet, and the ability to monitor Craig's List via an RSS feed on their iPhone?



























A kegerator.


I knew that I wanted to start kegging beer, but since there can be some considerable up-front costs associated with the equiipment I planned on doing it slowly. I found a way to create an RSS feed from craigslist searching a few basic words: keg, kegerator, co2 tank, and homebrew. I could check on recently added listings on my phone and I planned to just watch for deals and slowly add the necessary equipment when I found very, very, good deals. The second week of doing this I found myself focusing on finding a good deal on a CO2 tank. I was hoping for a 20 lb tank, but would have settled for a 5 lb one. Then I saw a listing for a kegerator for $150 that included the fridge, a keg shell, a keg tap, the beer faucet, a 5 lb CO2 tank AND a 20 lb tank. I picked it up that night and the keg madness was started.



As you can see, the fridge was in pretty decent shape, but I gave it a thorough cleaning and Elise came up with the idea to re-paint the fridge using chalkboard paint and magnetic primer. That way we could write on the fridge what beer was on tap as well as other beer-related info and put cool magnets on the fridge. Added bonus: it looks badass.



This is a picture of all the stuff that came with the fridge; as you can see the #20 Co2 tank is very, very large and will last us a long time before it needs to be filled. A #5 tank can push 6-8 kegs of beer before needing to be refilled, so a #20 tank should last a very long time. I am going to sell the tap and faucet on Craig's List and hopefully get $60 for both. The tap only works for full-size 15.5 gallon kegs (we will be using 5 gallon kegs) and the faucet is a little dirty even after cleaning with CLR and Bar Keeper's Friend. We'll just get a new faucet with a shorter shank that will fit a little better in the fridge door. As for the shell, I have offered it to my neighbor to use as a boil kettle if he wants it. We would need to use a dremel with a metal cutter attachment to cut a hole in the top and then a step drill to drill a hole in the side for a spigot in order to use it, but for about $40 he could have a 15 gallon kettle (buying one that big would easily cost upwards of $300). If he doesnt want to go that route, I'll again sell it on Craigslist for $40-50. If I'm able to sell everything for $100, I'll basically have gotten a fridge, a regulator, a #5 and a #20 C02 tank for $50! The #5 tanks are going for about $50 on Craigslist, and the #20 are about $80; so we got very very good deal.



After cleaning the fridge, we taped it off using painter's tape and applied 2 coats of the magnetic primer. The primer helps the chalkboard paint stick to the fridge, but also makes sure we can still hang magnets anywhere on the fridge.



We did 2 coats of the chalkboard paint the day after the primer was applied, and then after letting it dry overnight, we had a really good looking kegerator. Elise did some art work on the front and side and I'm sure there will be plenty more to come.





I have no idea why we named it Bertha, it just seemed like an good name for an older, slightly worn, less than beautiful fridge..... 'Ol Bertha

Now, our mission is to find some kegs. I have continued monitoring Craig's List and I think we are going to get 2 kegs to start with. One keg will be on tap, and the other will be a back up for when the first one is emptied. The inaugural draft will be our Black IPA, and possibly the greatest thing kegging is that we can drink it about 1 day after rack it to the keg. We will force carbonate it over night and if it all goes smoothly, we'll be drinking it the next day. The fridge will be able to easily hold the 2 kegs and #20 CO2 tank, but we can likely up to to 3-4 if we store the CO2 tank outside the fridge. This is very common and we would only need to drill a small hole through the side of the fridge to the tank on the outside of the fridge. The more I think about this, the more I want to do it, so I'll just have to figure out how/where to drill the hole for the gas line. We can also easily upgrade to more taps by simply drilling another hole in the front of the fridge. I would guess that within the next 6 months we'll have at least 2 taps on the fridge so we can have a little bit of variety.

I have been reading a lot over the past few days about kegs and how to properly dispense, store, and carbonate the beer. It's pretty interesting as there is a lot that goes on "behind the door" in order to deliver a non-foamy, properly carbonated beer. Things like storage PSI, desired carbonation, fridge temperature, height of tap related to keg, and the length/diameter/type of beverage line. All of these components are used to "balance" the draught system to properly dispense the beer. Hopefully with a little trial and error, we'll have a balanced system that pours a nice beer. Since the keg will be sitting at 38 F, it will also "cold-crash" itself and the beer will be very clear. We can also now consider lagering beers as we can just rack a beer to a keg, purge the oxygen out of the headspace in the keg, and just store it in the fridge until we are ready to drink it.

Black "Lager"

Another cool day, some flurries of snow, and a black "lager." This is our attempt at a German Schwarzbier, but with a twist. Instead of using a traditional lager yeast, we are using California Lager yeast which produces clean lager-like characteristics at higher temperatures. Our garage has been in the mid-50's lately and by using a swamp cooler, my goal is to keep the beer at 52 throughout fermentation which is cooler than ale temperatures (~65) and warmer than lager temps (~44). We'll also try to age this beer in the coldest part of the garage for a month or so before we start drinking it to help smooth things out.

This was also the first time acidifying the mash. Optimal mash pH's are between 5.1-5.4 and when you are out of this range the mash is not as efficient and you can extract some off flavors from the grains. Our water has a lot of carbonates resulting in "hard" water. The only way to get them out would be to dilute with distilled water or use something like pickling lime. Other options include adding calcium ions to the water to help lower the pH, but we would need a lot of calcium (likely too much) to accomplish this. Previously, I have just been trying to get "close" to the pH range by adding salts as needed and hoping for the best. Now, by simply adding an acid to the mash I can lower the pH into an optimal range and not have to go overboard on the salts. This batch required 2.7 mL of lactic acid to give an estimated pH of 5.3, and I noticed a small 3% bump in our efficiency.

I hope that the acids will really help in our lighter colored beers because they contain little, if any, dark malts (dark malts are more acidic than less kilned malts). Our IPAs especially could use some water adjustments.

We've started drinking the newest one and it is pretty good; not as good as the double pale ale, but still decent. It could use a little more bitterness, but the aroma and flavors are good. The biggest flaw in my opinion, is the finish. The beer is not crisp and dry like commercial IPAs and could result from a variety of issues. One is water: either we need more sulfates (to accentuate the hops) or less carbonates (we'll likely cut the next batch with distilled water to try that) or our mash pH is off (we'll definitely use lactic acid in that batch). Another problem could be the grain bill, but ours is pretty simple, but we might make some minor tweaks for the next attempt.

I also racked the barleywine to secondary today and took a gravity reading. It went from 1100 to 1024 for 10% alcohol. We'll secondary it for a while probably bottle it in March.

Upcoming events:

We'll be dryhopping the black IPA on Friday and bottling 10 days after that. Next scheduled brew is our First Snow Winter Ale (which will use the same yeast as the Schwarzbier). After that we'll bottle the Dubbel and possibly brew an American Stout followed by an Anchor Steam-type beer.

Belgian Dubbel

Yesterday was a cold day of busy Rowdy Reptile activity. It's been a very warm winter with the average highs seeming to always be in the 50's, but whenever I decide to brew we always seem to cool down and get snow the day of or day before. This time was no exception. I actually had to wear socks inside my mocasin-like shoes along with my heavy winter coat instead of my normal liner to stay comfortable yesterday.

We made our 2nd attempt at a Belgian Dubbel with a slight change from last time. Instead of using turbinado sugar we used a pound of homemade candi sugar that will hopefully add some dark fruit flavors and additional caramel notes that the turbinado would not add. This dubbel is a little lower in gravity than the previous one (OG of 1060 vs 1069) as I thought 7.3% alcohol was too much for a dubbel. This one should be about 6.5% which I think will make it a little more drinkable.

On another note, I was also able to bottle the Rye Saison while the Dubbel was boiling. Unfortunately, I am nervous about this beer after tasting a sample during the bottling. It has an off-flavor that I think tastes like bubblegum. The likely source is the yeast creating esters as a result of too high of fermentation temperatures. However, with this saison strain, that should not have happened. We fermented the beer for about 8-9 days at 71, and then it finished in Cooper's bathroom at ~77 for the next two weeks. I have read of people pushing this yeast into the high 80s and not have complaints of these off-flavors. Hopefully, they'll go down a bit while in the bottle, or a I fear it will end up sitting in the garage for an extended period of time before we eventually dump it. The tripel, while having the same off-flavors, is dwindling, but only because we use it to cook with in place of white wine. The saison likely wont't be as good a cooking beer, so if it isn't drinkable, then it might have to be dumped.

Candi Sugar for Belgian Dubbel

For this batch of our Belgian Dubbel I made a batch of candi syrup at home instead of using Turbinado (like last time) or buying special syrup from the homebrew store. The mixture was made up of 1 lb of sugar, 0.5 cups of water, and 1.5 tsp of yeast nutrient. The yeast nutrient has diammonium phosphate in it which donates Nitrogen allowing for the non-enzymatic process of browning known as a Malliard Reaction. This is different than carmelizing (which requires higher temperatures) or making invert sugar (which requires the addition of an acid like citric acid). The browing takes place below 300 degrees and was made in two steps.

The initial mixture is a milky-white color as we slowly heated it on the stove:



The next two pictures are at ~220 and 255 degrees and you can see that not a lot of color change has occured yet:










The next picture is at ~290-ish when I added another 0.5 cups of water. When comparing this to some other people's pictures, I think my thermometer is off because it looks closer to ~270:



The addition of water brought the temperature down to about 210 at which point I continued to heat it back up to 290 for a second time. This second temperature increase helps develop and intensify the flavors of the candi sugar, and luckily for me, helped darken it some more. This is at ~250-255 ish and you can see the definite color difference compared to previous pictures:



Once the temperature got up to around 290, I added another 0.5 cups of water and stirred bringing the temperature down again. Next, I raised the temperature to 240 (also known as hard ball to candy makers) to improve the stability of the sugar and try to protect against crystallization. This next picture is to show the difference between the two different sugar colors at the 290 peak temps. I wish is it was a bit darker, but I think for the dubbel it will work out well as I would rather bit a bit lighter than too dark. In the future when we make a Belgian Dark Strong, we will definitely want it darker to not only provide more color, but also a different set of flavors.



The original write up of this process described the flavors at different temperatures along with a photo of his colors at different temperatures:

Light Amber (270F)
-Apricot to light amber in color with some red tones developing. Mild caramel flavors with some soft sweet fruit characters developing. Mellow flat vanilla flavor with some warm cardamom tones. Maybe plums and dried apricots in the distant background.

Medium Amber (280F)
-Amber colored. Strong caramels and intensifying cardamom and plum flavors. Some roasted flavor developing but not bitter.

Deep Amber (290F)
-Deep amber with full red colors. Raisins and plums are the dominant flavors with a hint of toast and coffee. Some rummy and mildly woody flavors. Strong complex caramels are present. It is a sophisticated sweetness with a robust, full characteristic.



As you can see, my first peak temp was much too low, probably around 260-270 and I blame this on the thermometer I was using. Next time I think I will just go based on color at first knowing that the second temperature increase will darken the color more so that the initial color is more important than the temperature. Flavor contributions are just as important as color contributions and hopefully for the dubbel the sugar will impart some dark fruit flavors. We plan on brewing the Dubbel on 1/17 and will hopefully be tasting it 5-6 weeks after that. I will post some pictures of that brewday when the time comes.

Black IPA

On Saturday we brewed our first Black IPA: a clone of Stone's Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale. A traditional "IPA" in the sense that there is a strong bitterness (104 IBUS) along with ample flavor/aroma hops. However, the "black" comes from the addition of de-husked Carafa malt to give a dark color and subtle roasty flavors that will also meld nicely with the hops.

When Elise and I first had this beer, we knew nothing about it. We ordered a taster off of the menu at Rackhouse and when it arrived, Elise took a sniff and did a double take. We had this dark beer in our hands and were not expecting to smell such a hoppy beer. It is a very, very good beer and now one of the most popular commerical black IPA's available. Below is a blurb off of Stone's site about the brew:

"First brewed in 2007 as the Stone 11th Anniversary Ale, this ale was an instant hit. With us. Other folks with great taste loved it too, but we were focused on how much we liked it, and we felt it was truly sublime. That euphoria didn't last long though, as it was soon replaced with the grim reality that when we sold out of it there wouldn't be any more. For us. And that was simply unacceptable. So, we are now blessing ourselves, and you the enlightened, with this ale. Thusly, you may now revel in your own self-righteousness as you see fit with this glorious example of ours. You are genuinely welcome, as it is our pleasure."

Believe the hype. This beer is good.

I hope our "clone" attempt is close to the original and I'm pretty confident that we'll do pretty well. To make this beer a double batch, we had to use 2 mash tuns as the grain bill was so large. The previous max grain weight for one beer was ~24 lbs for our RIS (5 gallon batch). That mash was just about overflowing the mashtun and as such, I did not think we could fit the 26 lbs of grain for the black IPA in one cooler. Fortunately, Dave, along with brewing with me has started collecting gear to make beer on his own. As such, we basically did 2 five gallon batches side-by-side and then drained into the same boil kettle. We were shooting for an OG of about 1.075, but were a little less efficient and ended up at 1.070. If we get good attenuation from the yeast we should end up a little over 7% alcohol.

This beer has the largest bittering charge of any beer we've ever made, a total of 4.5 oz's of Chinook at 60 min. Comparatively, the Hoptober Pale Ale had only 1 oz at 60 min. The rest of the hops came at 5 min (4 oz mix of Simcoe and Amarillo plus the left over 0.5 oz of Chinook) and each batch will get another 3 oz mix of Simceo/Amarillo as a dry hop.

Tentatively, we are planning on bottling on February 9th which means the beer will be ready about the 23rd. I know us, and I know that we'll crack the first one open after a week to see how things are progressing. When that happens I'll post some tasting notes and hopefully a glorious review.

On another front, we sampled the week old IPA last night. First impression: pretty good, but not amazing. The nose is nice, with floral and citrus aromas dominating, but the bitterness is somewhat "restrained." The estimated IBUS for the IPA were ~80, and for the 10 gallon batch, the first bittering charge was 2 oz of Chinook. The beer is good, but not a good IPA. Elise said it was a Pale Ale and needs to be more bitter to be an IPA. For the next IPA I think we'll do something similar to the black IPA and have a very large (at least 3-4 oz's) initial bittering charge and then a normal hop schedule after that. We can also try to increase the sulfates in the water to try to accentuate the bitterness next time. All in all, I think the beer will be decent. More of a pale ale type beer, but still a good beer nonetheless.

Updates

Here is a picture of the stir plate in action. Interestingly, the 5V power source was not strong enough because of the increased liquid/viscosity of the starter compared to the ~1 L of water I was testing it on earlier this week. I had also added 2 small "button" magnets to the fan and put the hard drive magnets on top to make a stronger electromagnetic field. The stronger field and more resistance has now allowed me to switch back to the 9V power source and I'm happy to report that the stir plate is working well.

An update on the BW: some people have commented on seeing longer lag times on oxygenated brews compared to batches in which they were aerated by other methods. I have definitely seen this as I pitched the yeast at ~12 noon on Tuesday, and finally this AM I did see some activity inside the fermenter. Normally, since the yeast was fresh from the cake of the IPA bottled on 1/2, I would expect fermentation to begin within 12 hours of so, but I guess the extra oxygen has promoted a lot of yeast growth instead of fermetnation up until now. Yesterday morning I also gave the BW an extra shot of oxygen as bigger beers greatly benefit from a second dose of oxygen 12-24 hours after pitching.

Although I havent mentioned anything about it, when we made our Brown Ale we experimented with ~2 gallons of wort by using Brett Brux and an oak spiral. I finally got around to bottling it about 1 week ago and it has been infected. It smells and tastes like vinegar and we will subsequently be dumping the rest of the bottles. I think that it sat too long and that is likely how it got infected since it sat in the garage for about 2 months with me opening it up a few times to see how things were progressing. Next time, if there is a next time, I think I will add the oak after primary fermentation has been completed as I think some of the oaky flavors (if there were any) got lost during that time. Also, Brett doesnt like hops, and our brown was hopped pretty significantly, which could have also provided an opportunity for other, unintentional, bugs to get into the beer.

Black IPA on Saturday, cant wait to try that one.

Anniversary Barleywine 2012

Today we brewed the 3rd vintage of our Anniversary Barleywine. I tried to change things up a little bit this year with the mash schedule. Previously, we would use all of the water we needed for the whole batch (i.e., no-sparge brewing). Some say the beer is "fuller and more malty" when you dont sparge, but you lose a lot of efficiency by not rinsing the grains. This year, to increase the efficiency, I not only sparged, but I also boiled in our larger kettle which has a larger boil-off rate. All of this allowed me to use more water and potentially increase the efficiency.

The first photo is a picture of the technique known as First Wort Hoping (FWH) in which hops are added before the boil. Normally, boiling liberates the the flavor and aroma compounds in hops, but hot temperatures can do this as well. By adding the hops before the boil, FWH gives a smooth bitterness and although they are boiled for the length of the boil time, they only contribute bitterness comparable to 20 min hop additions.

I was able to increase my efficiency from 56% last year to 69% this year. However, there was some issues that I cant figure out that caused me to have a final volume of 4 gallons instead of 3 gallons. The gravity on this batch was the lowest yet, 1.100 (last year 1.119) which should give a beer ~10%. Lower than we want, as we would like something at least above 11%, but at least the efficiency was better. We'll see how it tastes next year to see if we will continue to sparge or return to no-sparging.



This was also the first time we were able to use our new oxygenation kit. Instead of shaking, we pumped pure oxygen for about 30 seconds into the beer (the red can is oxgyen bought from Home Depot). We also re-used yeast from the IPA, so hopefully with the newly harvested yeast and the dose of pure oxgyen we'll get a really good fermentation.

I'm very excited about the oxygen kit as many people who have been brewing for a long time say they brewed 'better' tasting beer once they started using the oxygen. Most of them could not pin what was better about the beer, but they noticed a positive difference. Hopefully we'll see these benefits too.

On Saturday, Dave, our neighbor, and I are going to make another 10 gallon batch to split of a black IPA. The recipe is a clone recipe of Stone's Sublimely Self-righteouss, our favorite commercial black IPA. This is another beer with a ton of hops, Simcoe and Amarillo, and we are very excited about trying this one in a month or so.

DIY Stir Plate

While I am bored over Christmas break I thought I would add to the brewery by making a stir plate. Earlier I think I have posted something about making starters in which the goal is to grow yeast. Higher alcohol beers require more yeast (>300 billion cells) compared to lower alcohol beers (~150 bill), but yeast is only sold in packs with 100 billion cells. When we make starters we would constantly have to agitate, swirl, and shake the solution up while it was going to increase oxygen concentrations in the starter. Yeast can create energy both aerobically and anaerobically (i.e., with and without oxgen). As a brewer, we like the anaerobic phase as the by products created are alcohol and CO2. However, intitially into a fermentation, the yeast are aerobic and use the oxygen to reproduce which is why we oxygenate before fermentation has started (e.g., shaking, or injecting pure oxygen, more on that later). Starters are no different and we want high oxygen levels to promote maximal yeast growth. By using a stir plate, the solution is in constant agitation and with the vortex created, a constant supply of oxygen is provided to the yeast. The end result: smaller volume starters that create more yeast. Instead of making 3.5 L starters, we'll be closer to 1.75-2 L. Commercial stir plates sell for ~$160, so I decided to make one myself.



I went to Radio Shack and bought a nob, a rheostat, and a switch. The rheostat is a device that used to toggle the amount of resistance through an electrical circuit, in our case the fan.


The fan was taken from our old desktop hard drive as well as the curved magnet. I wired everything together and suprisingly, the fan spun the first time I turned the swtich. By spinning the fan, and the magnet on top, the magnetic field will turn a stir bar in our starter flask. The stir bar is basically another plastic-coated magnet that when spun in a liquid will constantly stir the liquid and create a vortex down into the solution. The rheostat can control the speed of the fan and in turn the speed of the stir bar.



I used a cigar box for the base of the stir plate and mounted the knob and switch to the front. The hardest part encountered was getting the stir bar to spin constantly. Initially, it would spin momentarily and then would be "thrown" off the magents below and jitterbug around in the flask. We figured out we were spinning the fan too fast for the power of the magnet and after digging through the house were able to find a smaller (5V compared to 9V AC/DC power cord) that effectively slowed the fan enough to allow the sitr bar to remain in place.


Here is a close up of our 2L flask with the stir bar (white pill). You can see that the stir bar is spinning quickly enough to pull the vortex from the surface down. Although I think a 6V power supply would work a little better as the vortex is not constantly this far down with the current set up, a vortex is created nonetheless. When we do actually have a starter going, there will be more resistance as the solution is more viscous due the yeast and sugar in suspension. Hopefully this stir plate will be strong enough to maintain a vortex similar to this, but in the very least a small one will be created to provide enough oxygen for the yeast. All in all I spent about $26 making this stir plate and another $23 on the 2L flask; much cheaper than from the store, and cooler because it is totally unique.

I write this as I'm brewing our Anniversary Barleywine 2012, and I'll post later on that.