Grain Mill

The grain mill finally arrived! Riley is seen here sniffing it and will give you an idea of the size of the mill. All the metal that you see is basically a vessel (hopper) to hold the unmilled grain while it feeds down onto the rollers. The metal rod sticking out the bottom right of the base area can either be attached to a hand crank to hand-mill the grain or an electric drill at about 500 rpm (guess which we will be doing). The brown particle board is shaped so that the mill can sit on top of a bucket and the milled grain will collect in the bucket below.










This is the view into the grain mill showing the rollers that crush the grain. The space in between is adjustable and the tighter the gap is, the more starches that will be available during the mash and the higher the efficiency will be. However, because the tighter crush will produce more flour from grinding the grain, the chances of having a stuck mash increase. So its a give and take between gap size, efficiency, and lautering ability. Most homebrew stores that have mills in them usually have a wider gap so that when new homebrewers go home and brew for the first time they dont get a stuck mash and are more likely to continue brewing and return to the store to buy more ingredients. Right now our efficiency is about 73% so it will be interesting to see what our efficiency jumps to with the finer crush.







This is a picture of the 50 lb sack of grain that I bought the other day. We will be buying a lot of these in the future and probably 3-4 different types of malt. Our standard American 2-row which we use in American style beers will be used the most. Pilsner malt is used in lagers and some Belgians Ales because of its cripsness and delicate flavor. Marris Otter is used in British style beers (like our First Snow) and in ales in which a "larger" malt presence is wanted; some people use MO in the IPAs, but it is common in porters and stouts as well. I've been looking at our recipes lately and it looks like we use a lot of Crystal 60L, a specialty malt that we use a lot, so we might buy a sack of that to save some money.








This is a picuture of the 5 gallons buckets that we will use to store the grain in instead of the big bag. The buckets are not airtight, but they are close enough and the lids will keep bugs and other things out of the grain. One sack of grain fits into 2 buckets that can be stacked on top of each other and stored easily.

Belgian Pale

Just finished cleaning up from today's brew sesh- 4 gallons of our Gold medal Belgian Pale Ale. The original recipe was written for 8 gallons, so instead of converting to 5 gallons, we just chopped the recipe in half. It was smooth brew day, we hit our volumes and numbers, and from start to finish, including cleanup, it was a 4 hour day.

The fermentation fridge is being used for this batch although I am a little wary. The garage at this time of year is usually around 59-60, and when we arent brewing the fridge will be at that temp after 3 or 4 days. When it gets colder I have seen the fridge get down as low as 53 and the next few days its going to be very cold here in Denver. We are finally going to get some snow, but the overnight lows on Thursday and Friday are below 0. The Belgian yeast we use likes warmer temps, 67-71ish, and to make sure that it doesnt get too cold, I wrapped the fermenter in a blanket in the fridge. If it doesn't stay warm enough in the fridge I will have to bring the fermenter inside, but it will be harder to maintain a constant temperature. Hopefully the beer starts fermenting by this evening and will generate enough heat to keep it warm to last through the weekend.

In other news, we have purchased a grain mill and it should be here on Friday. With the new mill, we will be able to mill our own grain right before we brew. Some people say using fresh grain makes a difference, I dont know about that, but I do know we will be saving a lot of money. I bought a sack (50 lbs) of Pale 2-row which is our base malt thats makes up ~75-90% of a grain bill in most American styles of beer that we brew. Normally, the Pale 2-row is $1.50/lb, but I was able to get the sack for $45.50 or $0.90/lb. $45 is still a little high for a sack of grain, but now that we have a mill we can get in on a group buys with other hombrewers in the Denver area and get sacks for ~$25 ($0.50/lb). The grain mill was fairly expensive, but after a few sacks of grain, the mill will have paid for itself and we can a lot less expensively. Hopefully we will get the mill on Friday and I will post some picks of the mill and the sack of grain that we have right now.

Gold Medal Beer Results

Above are the pages that the judges filled out while judging our Belgian Pale. The first page is mostly a FYI type of page, but the last two are people's thoughts about the beers.

We just entered 4 more beers (Wee Heavy, Belgian Dubbel, Double Vision Barley Wine, and Elkie's First Snow) into another homebrew competition in Colorado. The Big Beers, Belgians, and Barley Wines is a homebrew competition and beer festival held every year in Vail to showcase big beers from around the country. They also have a homebrew competition in the same vain, so our biggest beers are the ones being entered (the Dubbel is the lowest of the bunch at a meager 7.5%). I dont expect to win anything in this competition as it is much much bigger and more competitive than the competition we won, but I do hope to have some high scoring beers and get some good feedback. We'll see what happens,


(You can click on the image to see a larger view)

Rowdy Reptile Brewing: An Award Winning Brewery

Our Belgian Pale Ale took GOLD in a local Belgian/French Ale homebrew competition!!!This was our first entry into any competition, and who would have thought, we take home a Gold Medal. Hopefully, we get a plaque or a medal or something to hang up, but for now, we are just enjoying the win. I noticed the competition when I was picking up the ingredients for the IPA and when I got home I discovered that we only had 3 bottles left and the competition needs 2. Luckily, there was 1 left and we were able to taste our first gold medal beer.


PS If you click on the picture above you'll get a better view of the results page.

IPA

After waking from our food coma this morning we brewed another IPA. Compared to previous batches of IPA, this recipe was much simpler and had only 2 other malts. Other recipes have had up to 5 different types of grain and as a result the beers were too malty and sweet and the hop flavor was not as prominent as it should have been. I did make a slight mistake when I was shopping for the grains and switched one of the caramel malts with the amount for the biscuit malt. The beer will probably be a little sweeter and darker than originally planned but it shouldn't be too bad. This will probably be the last batch of beer before we make a lager at the very end of December/early January. When making lagers, after primary fermentation has been completed at ~49F, you raise the temperature of the beer to ~60-65 to perform a diacetyl rest. The rest allows the yeast to clean up off-flavors (diacetyl, which is a butterscotch type flavor) and then the beer will be lagered at 37F for 4 weeks. We are going to take advantage of the d-rest and brew a porter and ferment it in the fridge while the lager is sitting out. After that we will probably make a doppelbock that wont be ready to drink for ~6 months.


Side note, in 2010 to date we have brewed 94.5 gallons of beer. Legally, as a two-person household we can brew 200 gallons/year for personal conusmption, so we are under that but it is still a lot of beer.

First Snow

Its that time of the year, it has finally snowed here in Denver. Usually, we get snow much earlier than this, but better now than never. The reason that the first snow is important to us is becuase we brewed a beer on July 31st and bottled it on September 14th that was not to be opened until the first time it snows. The style of beer is an English Old Ale, a 8.4% dark malty beer perfect for dark, cold winter nights. After tasting this one, it is very good. It's sweet, thick, and the alcohol warms on the way down. Unfortunately, being 8.4% alcohol, it is not quite as carbonated as we would like after only 2 months in the bottle, but another 3-4 weeks and it will be fine. I am also guessing that in about 4-5 months when it mellows a little bit more that this beer is going to be really really good.

Also, when the first snow comes, we bring out Elky (for whom the beer is named) and he stays until the first rain storm in the spring.

Back in the game

Finally brewed again, this time we did a repeat batch, Bailey's Brown Ale. Same recipe as last, but a decrease in the chocolate malt from 8oz to 4oz. It is a good beer, but it is big, dark, and pretty strong; almost bordering on a porter. So, to take it a bit more towards a brown ale we dropped the chocolate a bit. We also treated the water with brewing salts. By making the Cl:SO4 ratio favor the Cl, the malt flavors will be more forward than the hop flavors in this beer. We'll see what effects that has on this batch and hopefully we will still have a couple of the old ones around to compare it too.

Also, this is the maiden voyage of the temperature controller we bought. The temp controller is used to set the fridge to whatever temperature we want. In the pic above you can see that it says 63. There is a sensor that goes into the fridge that we insulate against the side of the fermentor. Whenever the beer heats up during fermentation, the fridge will turn on and cool everything down to the desired temp. When the temp stabilzes, the fridge will turn off, and the cycle continues. By controller the temperature, we can control what kind of yeast characteristics we want. Lower temperatures will be very clean and neutral and almost lager-like, while higher temps will impart more fruity flavors.
This will also allow us to finally attempt to make some lagers. Lagers normally ferment in the high 40s/low 50s, and then require 2-6 weeks at 34 degrees to "lager." When the brown is complete and ready to bottle (around Thanksgiving) we are going to brew a schwarzbier (black lager). Schwarzbiers are kind of like "black pilsner" in that they are not very roasty or heavy like a stout, but are dark in color and generally lower in alcohol, ~5%. Here is a link to description of a schwarzbier. The main reason we are also making a lower alcohol lager is so we can use that yeast to make a high alcohol doppelbock. Lagers normally require 2x the amount of yeast ales do, and for just the schwarz we will have to make 2 different starters to get enough yeast. It would probably take us a month of making starters to make enough yeast for the doppelbock. Instead of making a bunch of small starters, we are essentially makaing a 5 gallon starter that we get to drink later. The doppelbock will probably be brewed right around Janurary 1st and we are thinking of using that as our First Snow beer for next winter. That way it will have about 2 months of lagering, and about 6 months in the bottle to age before we crack one open.
The only problem now with having the fridge and making lagers, is that there will be a lot longer time between batches if we want to use the fridge becuase lagers require such a long time.....Best solution= new fridge and temp controller :)

Summer Beer Look Back

We have finally bottled the last beer that was made during the summer-brewing bonanza. To get a good idea of how much we were spending on brewing and how many bottles of beer were actually made, we made a spread sheet at the beginnng of the summer. We tracked ingredient price/batch and bottles/batch, as well as other costs related to making/updating equipement, propane, or other purchases. Results:

Beers Made: 10
Ingredient Costs: $449.57
Bottles Made: 482
Cost/bottle: $0.93

Not a bad price (~$1/beer) when you consider that we make pretty high alcohol and highly hopped beers. The most expensive batch was the Beglian Wit at $73.80, but that was for 8 gallons of beer (~$9.22/gallon). The most expensive beer per gallon was the First Snow Old Ale at $65.45 ($13.09/gallon). The cheapest beer was the Red Ale at $22.33 ($4.46/gal) followed by Bailey's Brown at $26.56 ($5.13/gal).

School as been pretty busy, so we havent had any time to brew yet, but next week is an off week for the Gators (thankfully) and we might brew then. I have also just purchased a temperature controller to convert our mini-fridge into a fermentation chamber, but more on that later when we actually use it. Until next time,

Rowdy Reptile Brewing

Tasting Notes

With a down night tonight, I thought I would give an update about how some of the beers we have made this summer are tasting.

Red Ale: First off, for only $20, we weren't expecting this beer to be a "wow" beer, and it's not, but that doesn't mean that it isn't any good. At the beginning of August the malt presence in the beer was really starting to come forward as the hop flavors mellowed with age. Now, it is much of the same, some caramel flavors, and then if you concentrate really hard, you can pick up the small amount of chocolate that was used to make the red color. Overall, I think this is a pretty good, easy drinking beer, that should serve well during the Fall season as well.

Belgian Wit: This was supposed to be a larger (8 gallon) batch, but still figuring out the difference in boiling rates during the summer (its now up to 2 gallons lost in 1 hour of boiling) coupled with the longer 90 minute boil time, we only ended up with about 7 gallons. Because the volume was less, the gravity came out higher than anticipated and maybe be the reason the beer was not as ready as soon as we thought it should be. Belgian Wits have very similar grain bills as German Hefeweizens, just with a different yeast. Our Wit was 26% white wheat malt and 14% flaked wheat and you can definitely pick up those flavors in the beer. The odd thing about the beer though, was while it was still young we were not picking up any of the normal Belgian yeast characteristics. Instead, it was tasting like a Hefeweizen, wheaty and crisp, but without the clove/banana flavors typical of most hefe's. As the beer has aged though, the yeast flavors are starting to come through like they should and it is turning out to be a pretty good attempt at our first Belgian Wit. I should also mention that normal wits have spices added, and ours was no different. We added 1.5 oz of coriander seed, however, I neglected to find out that you are supposed to add crushed coriander, and we just added the whole seeds themselves. As a result we have not been able to pick up any of the spice characteristics yet; but that is any easy fix for next time. Overall, it was a good beer for summer (now that it has had time age), and we will definitely makes adjustments and brew it again for next spring.


Brown Ale: This is turning out to be a very very good beer. Early on, you could really taste the alcohol presence over the malt backbone. Although 6.4% isn't that high, you could definitely notice in. Now that it has aged, that alcohol has faded, and what is left is a chocolately, sweet, dark beer that is very good, and perfect for the shorter days of Fall. There are also hints of what I like to describe as "ice cream cone" flavor in this beer that I have only noticed of late. If anyone has had the white ice cream cones that come in a box from the grocery store, there is a slight flavor that reminds me of the smell of opening a box of those cones. A commercial example of a beer that I think has similar flavors is Rogue Hazelnut Brown Nectar. We didn't add any hazelnut to the beer (...this time, probably next time though) there are some similar flavors between our two beers. Originally, we were attempting to recreate Brooklyn Brewery's Brown Ale, which has a very nice hop presence both in the nose and the flavor. Ours, while only at ~35 IBUs, could use another 1-1.5 oz of hops if we want to make it like Brooklyn's, but I am liking it the way it is right now.

American Pale Ale: This was a split batch (the other half received Belgian yeast) that was meant to be a pale that was a little (by our standards) less bitter and lower in alcohol. The latter turned out to be true, 5.5%, but as of late the beer is starting to have a surprisingly bitter nature about it. In our customary, way too early, 1 week after bottling tasting, the 1 oz of dry-hopped Cascade was the dominating aroma. The beer was still to young, but it smelled really nice. Since then, the nose has faded somewhat, although there is still some hop aromas left, and the bitterness of the beer is starting to come through. We have talked about making some "core" beers that we will try to have on hand most of the year, and this will be one of those styles; we are also thinking IPA, Belgian Pale, brown, and possible a porter or stout. So this recipe was a good starting off point, but it served the Belgian style much better.

Belgian Pale Ale: This so far has to be the best beer we have made this summer. The yeast did a really good job, and there is the nice characteristic Belgian "funk" to the beer, but it is not overwhelming. Its is not too hopppy which is ideal in any beer that has Belgian yeast on it, and the malt complements that very well. We used a little bit of melanoiden malt in this batch and I think that it served its purpose much better in the Beglian Pale than it did in the American Pale. I think that the color of this beer, 10 SRM is perfectly suited for a Belgian, but we are starting to think that we want our American pales/IPAs to be a little bit lighter than we have been making them. I would say, that this will be the first time Elise wrote a recipe that will not change at all the next time we brew it. Unfortunately, we are starting to run out of the Beglian and only have about 1 case left, so we need to brew some more so there isn't a long lag time between running out and drinking the new ones.

IPA: We are somewhat disappointed with this beer so far. We have come to realize that our grain bills on our hoppy beers have been too complex. As a result, the malt flavor are dominating, instead of complementing, the hop profile in the beer. There is 10% crystal, and 7% carapils malt in this beer, and I think that the next time we make an IPA we will keep the base malt the same (a combination between pale 2-row and vienna malt) and halve the specialty grains. I like our hop scheduling, it was a mix between Centennial and Cascade with some extra Northern Brewer thrown in there because we had some extra hops laying around. Next time, because we wont have the Northern Brewer, we will use either Columbus or Chinook. This beer was supposed to have over 100 IBUs in it, and while it might be that high, we think that the malts are not letting the hops shine through. IPAs are not so much about balance anymore, and although some balance is necessary, American versions are supposed to be dominated in flavor and aroma by American hops. Our neighbor has had the beer (he liked it) and said it reminded him of Stone's Arrogant Bastard. I guess if I tried this beer and was told it was an Extra Pale Ale or a hoppy English Bitter I would have thought it was better; but calling it an IPA right now only does justice to the alcohol percentage at 7.5%. The beer does taste good, and it is getting better with age and us knowing that this probably isn't an "IPA."

Most of the rest of the beer we have brewed have been higher in alcohol and brewed with the intention of sitting for a good period of time before trying; but of course we have tried a couple too soon.

Double IPA: We brewed this 8.5%, 130 IBU beer for Elise's birthday in July. We have tried two bottles (one of them last week) and so far it is pretty strong. It is certainly a strong beer, and it tastes much stronger than 8.5%. It was not carbonated, so the hop flavors are harder to pick up. Right now though, the beer is tasting like a Barley Wine. It is strong, and with the high hopping rate, the sweetness is cut down making a nicely balanced brew. Hopefully, in the next month or two the beer will carbonate and we will be able to taste the 8 oz's of hops in the beer.

Belgian Dubbel: I have only had two bottles of this beer so far and the last one was about 2 weeks ago. The first thing I noticed was that, again like the Belgian Wit, the yeast characteristics were not coming through. I suspsect that since we were using the same yeast all summer that we might have stressed it too much and it was not performing as it should. Hopefully, as it ages the yeast characteristics will come foward yielding a more traditional Dubbel. The malt flavor was very good when I had the sample and it was very smooth tasting. It will be interesting to taste this beer again within the next 4-6 weeks.

First Snow: This was brewed on July 31st and still has not been bottled. I have been lazy, and it has been sitting in the fridge in the garage conditioning for the last 2.5 weeks. Hopefully, with the long weekend coming up, we will get that thing bottled so it can carbonate in time to be opened the first time it snows in Denver.

Christmas Ale: This has been the most interesting fermentation we have had yet. We pitched Beglian yeast on this batch, and normally, Belgian yeast form a very thick, large, sticky yeast layer on top the beer while it is fermenting. This time however, I don't know if the beer got too hot or what, but about 1 day after fermentation had started, it slowed and when I opened the lid, I saw no yeast on top, and the ring that the yeast leaves on the sides of the bucket was only about 1 inch high. I also smelled a sour/vinegary like aroma coming from the bucket and worried that we had an infected batch. I decided to just let it go for another few days and see what happened, and when I took a gravity reading, the yeast had done about 50% of the work it should have done in that same time, but at least when I tasted the sample I did not notice anything out of the ordinary that would indicate an infection. Hopefully, over the next couple of weeks, the yeast that is left will do work on the remaining sugars and drop the gravity down to a more manageable level. If that does not happen, we have two choices. First, we can just pitch more new yeast into the beer with the hope that those yeast will be able to eat the rest of the sugar the first crew left behind. Second, we could pitch a bacteria commonly used to make sour ales, Brettanomyces, into the bucket and let those guys go for about 4-6 months. People have made really really good beers with brett, but also some less than stellar beers. This would be a very risky thing to do with 5 gallons. We might do a little bit of option 1 and 2, and take 1-2 gallons off the beer and pitch some brett and just let that go as an experiment. Hopefully, we won't have to do anything and this beer will turn out as good as we had hoped.

Now that school has started, the brewing will go down, but hopefully not to the standstill that it did last Spring semester. We are also going to get a temperature control gadget for the fridge in the garage so we can just "set it and forget it" when we brew making it a lot easier. We will also be able to make lagers, as they require fermentation temperatures of around 45-55 F (which is much less than the ~62-67 that ales require) and have discussed doing a German Maibock that if we brew soon enough will be ready for the Spring time.

Old Ale

Last weekend we successfully brewed our Old Ale. We did mess up a couple of small things like our post-boil volume was supposed to be about 5.5 gallons, but instead the boil was a little too rigorous and we finished at 5 gallons. Our efficiency was low, ~61%, but that is about normal for a beer with that high an original gravity. We also were able to almost completely drain the mash tun, so no complaints there. The gravity came in at 1.094 and will hopefully end up being about 9% alcohol. We are also trying a new strain of yeast, Wyeast 1968 London ESB yeast. This yeast is supposed to be very good with malty beers and is a very versitle yeast that is supposed to good in everything from low gravity bitters to English barley wines. The yeast is very flocculant which means that it will drop out to the bottom of the fermentor into a very tight yeast cake. It is so flocculant that people have had trouble getting some of their higher gravity beers to attenuate out because the yeast will floc out too early into the fermentation process and not fully finish eating all of the sugars. To combat this, I have been rousing the yeast twice a day. In the morning and evening when I change out the ice packs for the swamp cooler I will pick up the carboy and swirl the yeast around to make sure everything is back into suspension. Hopefully the beer will finish in the low 1020s so we can get above 9% alcohol.

Old Ales are an English style of ale that are dark, malty, and strong; the perfect winter warmer. We are brewing this one in the middle of the summer for our winter warmer that we are calling First Snow Ale. We are going to let the beer age and will not open the first bottle until it snows for the first time in Denver. Usually this is around Halloween time, so once the beer is bottled it should have at least 9 weeks of aging in the bottle to mellow out before the snow comes. We are taking next weekend off from brewing because of San Fransisco trip, but the week after that will be a Belgian Tripel, and then to finish out the brewing this summer we will make our Christmas Ale, a spiced Belgian strong ale.

Shark Week

Well, Shark Week is finally here, and sadly to say, we could not wait to until today to crack open the first Red Ale, but it is finally starting to turn into a decent beer. At first, it was sort of 'blah' in taste/aroma. But after aging for a while, the malt is starting to take over and we are viewing this as more of a malt foward beer instead of a hoppy red ale. Right now: Ultimate Air Jaws...good start to the week

Efficiency Rant

Efficiency Rant

Ever since we started fiddling with the mash tun and trying to make improvements to it, things have gotten worse. We tried fixing a leak in the ball valve by getting new ball valve that had a smaller connector piece that would hopefully fit more flush against the side of the mash tun wall. It did. But, I tightened everything too tight, and now the walls on the outside and inside of the mash tun are concave, which caused some more leaking. The next idea was to take a spigot out of an old cooler and try to put it into the new one. I tried to retrofit the regular spigot into our cooler and attach the ball valve on the output side and the stainless braid on the inside. It seemed to work and not leak when we tried it out before making the RIPA. However, we still had problems with the rye ipa and had bad efficiency numbers, but at least the cooler didn’t leak.

I am not so much concerned with the low efficiency number (we are back to about 65% instead of ~75%) but it is the inconsistency we are getting from batch to batch. Previously, we had been able to completely drain the wort from the mash tun and knew, within about two percentage points, what our efficiency was going to be. Lately though, we have left a lot of wort in the cooler because we cannot drain it out and our efficiency has suffered.

Efficiency can be broken up into several types. Conversion and lauter efficiency are what we are able to manipulate, while brewhouse efficiency (or efficiency into the fermentor) is mostly related to loss of wort due to hop/break absorption and the inability to completely transfer all of the wort from the kettle into the fermentation vessel. The efficiency into the fermentor is not very important to us, because it all depends on what happens after the boil and is usually constant.

Conversion efficiency happens during the mash. This is the ability to completely convert all of the sugars inside the grain into fermentable sugars that are dissolved in solution in the mash tun. Based on the amount of grain and the amount of water added, the first runnings should be at a specific gravity if you have 100% conversion. This is not our problem; the last 3 batches when we have been measuring conversion we have been averaging about 97% or better. Our loss in efficiency comes from bad lautering.

Lautering efficiency is the ability to lauter (or drain) all of the soluble sugars in solution from the mash tun into the boil kettle. Lots of things can have effects on the latuering efficiency like dead space. Dead space is a constant volume of wort that cannot be drained from a mash tun due to the way it is built. It is different for everyone based on their system. Basically, if the spigot to drain out the water is an inch above the bottom of the cooler, then when the water is below that spigot, no more is able to be run off, and the volume that is left is the dead space volume. This can be compensated for by making the tubes inside the cooler that drain the liquid touch the bottom, or by simply tilting the cooler at the end to make sure as much liquid is drained off as possible.

Another thing that can affect lauter efficiency is grain absorption. Grain absorbs both water (~1 quart of water per pound of grain) and sugar. The more grain that you have in a grist (10 lbs vs 20 lbs for high alcohol beers) the more water, and ultimately sugar, is absorbed by the grain. Because the preboil volume is always the same when doing a 60 minute boil (it will be larger if the boil time is longer), you have to use less water compared to grain in high alcohol beers to get out all of your sugar. As such, as the weight of the grain goes up, the efficiency will go down because you are leaving sugars behind. We are OK with this, we make a lot of high alcohol beers, and as such, the efficiency should go down so, but it should be consistent.

Lautering ability is different from deadspace, in the fact that lautering ability is the ability to drain as much wort as possible out of the mash tun. Lately, we have been leaving upwards of 1 gallon of wort in the mash tun (which is much much more than the dead space volume in our cooler) and this is where our problem lies. As of right now, now that the cooler isn’t leaking, am I out of ideas on how to increase this ability. I am hoping that the rye was the culprit last batch, and if so, this next batch should run a lot smoother. After 20 batches now, I know what to expect from out mash tun in the fact that I can calculate based on how much water goes onto the grain, about how much we should be able to drain out. If on this next batch, if I again miss those numbers and leave a decent amount of wort in the cooler, we are probably going to have to start from scratch again and buy a new cooler and build it from there. Hopefully, this does not happen, and our new mash tun will be working just fine.

Braukaiser.com is a website made by a homebrewer who explains all of this much better than I do, so you can go to his website if what I said sounds like French-Chinese. Sorry for the rant, but that has basically been what I have been researching and trying to fix for the last 2 weeks and why I haven’t been posting as much.

Dubbel and Rye IPA

I thought I would give an update as to what we have been up to lately. 2 weeks ago, we did our second Belgian brew of the summer, a Dubbel. Elise again wrote the recipe for this one, and it’s a strong dark beer that has lots of dark fruit notes. The brew day went OK, but our efficiency was not as high as usual, so we will probably end up with a beer at 7.5-8% ABV.
Next was a Rye IPA that was the epitome of a bad brew day. The rye malt apparently was clogging up the grain bed not allowing us to lauter all of the wort into the kettle. So instead of having about 7 gallons pre-boil, we only ended up with 6. As a result, we only finished with 4 gallons of 1080 beer. The gravity is fine, as this was supposed to be a strong IPA, and both of us agreed that at this point, hitting the target gravity (for that beer was 1079) was more important than volume, as we would rather have fewer stronger beers, than more "weak" beers. Next up will be or winter beer, which we will not be able to open until the first time is snows in Denver. It will be a strong dark beer, about 9.5% alcohol if everything goes according to plan, and the long aging time until it snows will help the beer mellow out. Colorado has crazy weather, so it is hard to predict when we will be cracking the first one open, but it will probably be around Halloween.

That's Fridge-tastic

We have finally gotten a dedicated brewing fridge. Thanks to Amie, I was able to get a free "mini" fridge. This is much larger than a normal minifridge as we are able to fit a fermenting bucket inside. As of right now, we are going to be using the fridge to cold crash beer right before bottling. Cold crashing is when a beer is done fermenting and you lower the temperature to about 40 F. Because it is so cold, everything in the beer falls out of suspesion (yeast, hops, etc) and will leave the finished product much clearer.


Eventually, we will purchase a temperature controller and we will be able to set the fridge at whatever temperature is best for a certain yeast, and we will finally be able to make lagers. Lagers need to ferment in the mid 50's, but they then require a process where they sit at about 40 F for 6 weeks. We will now be able to do this since we have the fridge, but as of right now we have no plans on making any lagers any time soon. In the pic, you can also see several glass jars. These are full of yeasts we have saved from previous batches. Elise is now very happy because there arent 8 jars taking up almost a whole shelf in the fridge. We are also going to decorate the fridge with brewing stickers. As of now, it is kind of weak, but hopefully we can fill it up with cool stickers to remind us of where we have been and what we drank.

Double IPA

We have just finished brewing the last hoppy beer of the summer, a double IPA. The OG was 1092, and if the yeast does well, we should have a beer that finishes at around 9.5% alcohol. As a comparison of prices on some recent batches, it only cost us $40 to brew 8 gallons of Pale Ale, and $41 for 5 gallons of IPA. This DIPA cost $55 for only 5 gallons. The differences in price are mostly related to the amount of hops that are needed in each batch, and this DIPA will have 8 ounces total, 6 in the boil, and another 2 ounces for dry hopping. Elise made this beer somewhat darker than normal to try and have it look like one of her favorite beers, Great Divide's Hercules Double IPA. With the high alcohol content, we probably wont be trying this beer for about 2 months, hopefully we can wait that long.

As mentioned, this was the last hoppy beer we have planned. Next up is a Belgian Dubbel followed by a Belgian Dark Strong Ale that we are going to split in half and age some of the beer on some figs or dates. After that is one of our winter beers, and then an Imperial Stout, a porter, and a Belgian Tripel, and our Christmas beer.

This summer to date we have brewed 6 batches (36 gallons), and of the four batches that have been bottled, we have 216 bottles of beer. We have tried the Red and the Wit, although they both need some more time. The Wit was not tasting as "witty" as we would like right now, but as time passes the taste is getting better. As for the Red, all we can really say is 'meh.' Hopefully it gets better with time, but as of right now, it is an easy drinking light-bodied beer, and at $22 for 5 gallons, we cant complain too much.

Busy Busy Weekend

Probably the busiest brewing weekend we will have all summer. It started Saturday with the bottling of 103 bottles of beer; 42 bottles of the Shark Week Red ale that was hopped with 1 oz of East Kent Golding hops, and 61 bottles of Two Bits Wit. We bottled the red during the mash for Saturday’s brew, and did the wit during the boil. Elise made stickers for the tops of the caps that have the name of the beer on them, and they look really good.

As for the 8 gallons of pale ale that we made, everything did not go as smoothly as planned. First off, we have been having a little bit of trouble with the spigot on the end of our mash tun that is used to drain off the wort. In the last batch (brown ale) the spigot was new, and we thought was working fine, but we soon discovered that there was a small leak in the seal around spigot. We attempted to fix it for this week, but the new addition did not drain the wort out of tun very well. Instead of leaving the grain bed dry, there was about 1 gallon of wort left in the cooler that we could not get out because of the position of the spigot on the inside of the cooler. Because of this our efficiency was down to about 70% this week compared to 75% last week. I will be making yet another trip to Home Depot’s plumbing section, about the 4th in the last 2 weeks, and can hopefully solve the problem for good.

The 8 gallons of pale ale was hopped with Amarillo and Cascade hops, and will get another dry hop addition of Cascade next week. The 8 gallons were split evenly and we pitched a Belgian yeast strain and an American strain. The American strain is now on its third batch of beer, and had just come off the red ale. The Beglian yeast strain was last used in January of 2010, and we were a little skeptical about it still being viable, but a large starter was made last week, and the fermentation started about 6 hours after we pitched the yeast. As mentioned earlier, with the efficiency down, we had a slightly lower original gravity of 1052 than we were expecting, but the beer should finish at around 5.5% alcohol.

As for next week, the hoppy beer trend continues with an IPA (followed after that by a Double IPA). We are still selecting with recipe to brew, either Elise’s or a clone recipe of Bell’s Two Hearted Ale. But we might actually end up brewing both depending on how our week!

Brown Ale

The brown is now quietly fermenting away in its new home in the garage: a swamp cooler. With the summer heat comes much higher temperatures in our garage, and anything over 70 degrees is too hot for beer. During the winter, our garage is usually in the low to mid 50’s which is too cold for ales, but just inside the door to our house, it is in the low 60’s which is perfect for fermenting ales. To deal with these warm temperatures in the summer we have to make a swamp cooler, basically a large bucket of water that the beer sits in. We add ice packs to the water and drape a t-shirt over the bucket to take advantage of evaporative cooling. We can usually bring the ambient temperature down about 10 degrees which isn’t as cold as I would ideally have it, but close enough. Some day we will be getting a refrigerator to put in the garage specifically for fermentation, but sadly, it won’t be soon enough.


As for the brown ale, it was one of the easiest, least stressful brew days that either one of us can remember. After doing the 8 gallon 90 minute boil Wit last week, this 5 gallon 60 minute boil seemed to go very smoothly and quickly. The OG was 1064, and this beer should be about 6% alcohol. This is our first time using an American strain of yeast on a brown ale, last time we used an Irish ale yeast, and this actual yeast will be used again and again throughout the summer. In 2 weeks we will use most of the yeast on an Imperial Stout, and then the rest will be used later for an IPA and a porter. Next week’s pale ale is going to be a split between American and Belgian yeast. The American yeast will come from the red ale that will be bottled on Saturday, and the Belgian is a strain that we have had in the fridge for a few months now that was taken from a previous Belgian IPA batch. That same barch of yeast is also going to be used a lot this summer in our Belgian Dark Strong Ale, Belgian Dubbel, Belgian Tripel, and we are going to try throwing Belgian yeast onto our spiced Christmas ale this summer.

2 Days, 2 Beers, 13 Gallons...Welcome Back

The brewing hiatus is officially over and we kicked off the start of the summer by brewing two beers this past weekend, a red ale and a Belgian wit.

The red ale was a normal 5 gallon batch, and Elise wrote the recipe for and designed a label for it which can be seen on our website. It should be ready right around the time Shark Week on the Discovery Channel begins and the beer is aptly named Shark Week Red Ale. This is a “low gravity” beer for us, especially Elise, who has a hard time letting me brew anything under 6% alcohol. This one should clock in at about 5.4-5.6% depending on the attenuation.

It had been awhile since our last brew session and it definitely took a while to get back into the swing of things. We missed our mash temperature by a couple of degrees, but that was not the biggest problem of the day. Our mash tun has a braid on the inside that is supposed to filter and drain the wort from the grain. Usually the braids are made out of stainless steel and come from washing machine hook ups, but I made a mistake and accidentally bought one that was made out of a polymer. This polymer lacked the strength of its stainless steel counterpart, and as a result would collapse under the weight of the grain and not allow efficient flow. Needless to say, it took us almost an hour and some unorthodox methods to lauter our wort into the kettle and we ended up losing about 1/3-1/2 a gallon of beer because of this. The rest of the day went smoothly, and we finished the beer without any problems. We bottled an American pale ale (a neighbor’s beer whom we had shown how to brew a few weeks prior) in the morning during the mash and used the yeast from the pale ale batch to ferment the red ale. Reusing yeast not only saves money (it is about $7 for each “unit” of yeast) but the beer actually prefers used yeast. The yeast are healthier and since they are used immediately the fermentation starts much quicker resulting in a more attenuative fermentation.

When we finished we went to Home Depot to build a new braid for our mash tun. Elise found a stainless steel braid and we changed the inlet on the inside of the cooler to match the braid a little better. We were worried because the Belgian was going to be harder to lauter because of the high percentage of wheat malt and oats in the grist, and we wanted to make sure that it didn’t take us 2 hours to collect our wort.

Sunday morning comes, and we add our strike water, and again we missed our mash temp by a couple of degrees; 2 degrees higher this time, compared to the red where we missed on the low end. This was an 8 gallon batch and we had 21.6 lbs of grain. Our cooler was almost overflowing and we made quite a mess in the garage stirring the mash spilling wort and grains onto the ground. Luckily, Riley has found a new love in eating grain, so she was able to clean most of it up.

This mash smelled and tasted completely different from any beer we had done in the past. Since no caramel malts were added to the beer (the SRM only at 4), this is to date our lightest colored beer by far. Usually the grains are very sweet and sugary, but this mash was quite the opposite. It had the consistency of cereal and was extremely grainy, but not too sweet.



Because of such a light color and lack of roasted malts, the pH of the mash would be much higher if we used our normal water. To combat this, we used distilled water to cut our home water, along with the addition of brewing salts. Out of the total 11 gallons of water that went into the beer, only 40% was actual tap water. Because of the large amount of wheat malt and oats in the beer, we also added rice hulls to help with the lautering process. Rice hulls do not add any flavor, color, or sugar to the beer, but are used simply as an additional filter in the grain bed to prevent a stuck sparge (they don’t taste very good either). When it came time to lauter, we were both very nervous to see if our new braid actually worked, and to our surprise it worked like a champ. We drained about 5.5 gallons of first runnings out of the mash tun in about 10 minutes, and had similar success with the sparge. Having this process run so smoothly should save us about 20 minutes on a brew day compared to ones before we re-did the braid. You can see in the picture below how fast the wort was draining out of the lauter tun.



The boil went smoothly, and we used Hallertauer hops for the first time, along with 1.5 oz’s each of coriander and bitter orange peel. Hallertauer are noble hops from Europe and are not cheap, but are very important ingredients in certain styles of beer. The Hallertauer hops smelled completely different from any of the hops we have used in the past. Usually, the American style hops we buy smell very citrusy, fruity, and/or grassy. Here is a websites take on one of our favorite hops, Centennial. But the Hallertauer smelled quite earthy and spicy (the website’s take on Hallertauer hops).

We had originally planned to have the beer have an original gravity of about 1060ish (about 6% alcohol), but our efficiency was higher than expected and we ended up with about 8 gallons at 1069 (closer to 7% alcohol). I guess we are going to find out what an Imperial Wit tastes like.



Both beers will more than likely be bottled around the 26th, and hopefully ready to drink in about 4 to 6 weeks.

Next up, an American Brown Ale...

Our New Labels!

The Brewing Hiatus is OVER!!

I know it has been forever since we have posted anything. With Scotty being so busy in pharmacy school and me being busy at work, we have really been slacking on our brewing schedule. We actually have been brewing a few batches with some neighbors, teaching them the ropes of brewing but now we are ready to get brewing! We have filled out our brewing calendar and every weekend this summer we will be brewing something new. We will be brewing 12 different batches of beer which is over 70 gallons of beer! We look forward to blogging a lot more and letting you all know what we are up to. Let the summer of brewing begin! Our kick off beer....Belgian Witbier!

Cheers and Go Gators!

Oatmeal + Coffee, Oatmeal + Chipotle Chili Pepper = Beer

We bottled the oatmeal stout, it finished at 1022 for 5.7% alcohol. We decided to fool around with some of the beer by adding some coffee to some and chipotle pepper to others. We added 1/2 tsp of coffee to each of 4 bottles and 1 tsp to each of 2 bottles to get an idea of the power of the coffee in the beer incase we want to add coffee to an entire batch in the future. We then added ~3/4 tsp of chipotle chili pepper to the last of the beer and got 9 bottles of that. So, in about 2-3 weeks we should be able to see how everything tastes, hopefully it turns out good.

What's next for Rowdy Reptile Brew?

Let us know what beer you want! We posted a poll in the right column so you can vote for the beer you would like us to brew next. If none of those beers sound good to you, comment on this post and let us know what type of beer you are craving!

Wee Heavy

Just finished brewing a Wee Heavy today. We had some problems lautering today, but it was OK because the interesting thing about this recipe is the extra carmelization step. There are only 2 grains in the recipe, 17.5 lbs of pale 2 row, and 0.5 lbs of roasted barely. In order to not have to boil for 4+ hours to replicate the caramelization that Scottish breweries get, 1 gallon of the first runnings are taken out and reduced down separately to about 1 pint. The reducing creates a lot of chemical reactions that we would probably not be able to achieve on out set up.

The first picture is at the beginning of the boil with 1 gallon in the pot. The picture below is after ~60 minutes of boiling and there is very little liquid left. A lot of dark foam is created while the liquid is boiling, and the result is a very thick, syrupy, liquid that gets added back to the boil kettle with the rest of the wort.

We ended up with a little more than expected in the carboy, 5.5 gallons instead of 5, so we put a blow off tube on top instead of a normal airlock. The blowoff tube will allow all of the krausen (or foam) created by the fermentation to go through the tube and out into the growler filled with sanitizer solution. If we didn't do this, the krausen would eventually blow the airlock off the top and clog everything up.

Anniversary Monster

We have finally taken a sample from the barelywine, and it clocks in at 12.6% alcohol. We are very happy with the color that it turned out to be, a nice dark copper-reddish, and it tastes delicious. It is very sweet and malty but nicely balanced by the hops. I'm sure in 1 years time when we officially crack one open it is going to be amazing.

Oatmeal Stout

9th all grain batch in the books, Oatmeal Stout. Elise wrote the recipe, it has 8 different kinds of malts including 2 lbs of oats and it should clock in at ~6.5% when all is said and done. It might end up being a little less than that alcohol wise because we mashed at 157 F. The higher mash temperature with yield a beer with more body, but also less fermentatability. In the bowl below the oats is 2 grams of chalk, and 3 grams of baking soda. When you are making really dark beers with a lot of roasted malts, the pH of the beer can become too low and have detrimental effects. Hard water contains high amounts of carbonates which allow darker beers to be brewed by buffering the acidity contributed by the highly kilned dark malts. Soft water on the other hand, is most suited to making beers like pilsner and other lighter colored beers. Our water in Aurora is neither hard nor soft, and therefor is best suited for dark amber to brown colored beers. Baking soda is NaHCO3 and chalk is CaCO3, and by adding small amounts of each to the mash, we increased the "hardness" of the water by adding carbonates and hopefully resulting in a proper mash pH. This is our first attempt at water additions, and in the future I'm sure they will be a lot better. We decided to brew this beer about 14 hours before hand, so we didn't have a lot of time to do enough research on the mineral additions. Hopefully it turns out OK.

Most stouts are supposed to be in the color range of 20-40 SRM. Elise, and myself, like to make our beers stronger and darker than normal. With our brewing software, the estimated SRM based on the recipe was 57 SRM. You can click here to get an idea of what SRM numbers correspond to which color.

We had a busy weekend beer wise. Saturday we bottled our IPA, 8% and then on Sunday we brewed the Oatmeal Stout and bottled the Belgian IPA, also 8%. Both IPA's were the same batch, but were fermented with 2 separate yeast strains. The first taste of the Belgian was very very good, but not as 'funky' as I thought it would be. Usually Belgian yeasts can impart a yeasty, fruity, 'funkyness' to the beer, but I think becuase we fermented the beer at 68 F instead at ~76 F, the yeast imparted a much cleaner overall profile to the beer. I'm sure we will do this again in the future, and hopefully we can warm the fermentation up a bit to get some more yeast characteristics in the beer.

Anniversary Barleywine

To celebrate our anniversary on January 3rd, we have made a barelywine with the plan not to crack one open until our next anniversary. Instead of making a normal batch of 5 gallons, we scaled Denny's Old Stoner recipe down to 3 gallons with an OG of 1.125. If the fermentation is good, that should yield a beer of about 12-13% alcohol, which is strong enough to last a year. A possible problem of beer sitting for one year is oxygen seeping into the bottles through the caps and causing off flavors. To hopefully avoid this, we are going to dip the tops of the bottles in wax to make an oxygen barrier.

Because the barelywine has such a high gravity, a much larger amount of yeast was needed to fully ferment the beer. To make sure we pitched enough yeast, we used the yeast cake from a previous batch of beer. We racked the beer off the yeast cake and poured the barleywine on top. It started to bubble with in a few hours. This was the first time we have tried anything like this, but anytime we need to make a high gravity beer, I think we are going to brew a smaller lower gravity beer and then use the yeast cake for the high gravity ale.

With making such strong beer, we only used the first runnings from the mash to make the barelywine, so we did a partigyle where the second runnings were used to make a "small beer." I added some more malts to the mash when the water for the second runnings was added to make a darker beer. The OG was only 1.040 (much much smaller than the barelywine), but it should make for a good easy drinking session beer. We have no idea what the small beer is going to taste like or what style is resemebles. We basically lightly hopped it with some left over hops we had in the freezer, so it will probably be similar to an English ESB; except it was fermented with an american ale yeast. Hopefully the beer turns out to be drinkable because the only cost for the small beer was 1 oz of willamette hops and 1.5 lbs of speciality grains for a total of about $5.