Quick update
I’ve been away for a few days… OK, so, my computer took a child-induced vacation. It is still acting flaky and I am slowly preparing myself for the eventual hard drive replacement. First, I have five years worth of brewing recipes and seven years of kid photos to back up.
The local homebrew competition was this past weekend (March 23rd). The results are posted here: http://www.unyha.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/UNYHA2010RESULTS.pdf
Long story short, I placed 1st in the Light Hybrid ales with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and also took a 2nd in “lighter stouts” for the dry stout which we brewed here: http://wp.me/sPKrL-failte
Our club meeting is in 2 weeks, at which time we will find out the scoring for our entries. At that time, I will update our previous competition announcement post.
’til then, brew well and drink better
Goin’ Wild, Baby!!!
I have been bitten by the “wild” beer bug. That is, I have come to love sour and otherwise funky beers. I almost think that this is a natural progression for beer geeks. We get into it all with the quaint stout or brown ale (most likely Guiness or Newcastle on special at the random pub or dive bar). We quickly realize that “Wow, beer can have flavor, unlike that straw-yellow piss water I have consumed en masse for the past X years”….
Then, stouts and browns and porters don’t “do it” for us anymore. We want more flavor. Our sights turn to Pale Ales, and IPAs and Double IPAs (I will NOT call them Imperial IPAs… they were never brewed for any imperial court in Russia). With which we imaple our tastebuds with lupulin and alpha acids, destroying any further attempt at tasting for the remainder of the evening.
THEN, we decide that hops are not enough. We need ALCOHOL!!!!, and we will demand more of it. Because we are American. And we need everything BIGGER!!!! MORE, MORE MORE!!!!! More hops, more malt, more ALCOHOL!!!! oh, wait, we just made a barleywine. Personally, I prefer the English style, which is much more malt-forward than is its American counterpart. I think that the higher alcohol content (7-12% ABV) mixed with the insane levels of hops used in American barleywines clash in an unpleasant, unbalanced manner that creates a harsh outcome.. unless you age them so long that the hop bitterness recedes to English levels. Oh yeah, Imperial Stouts (yes, orginally brewed for Catherine’s court in imperial Russia way back in the before time), Baltic Porters and a variety of Belgian beers also fall into this realm.
Speaking of Belgian beers… Their often smooth flavor profile and higher alcohol contents lead them to being both a session beer, and unintended night-enders. Dubbels, Tripels, Quads. As the monks would say, these beers are “digestible”. Thinking of the current season, these are the perfect Lenten beer. Full bodied, lots of carbs. When the monks were fasting, they would want these beers in their coffers (specifically the Dubbels and also Doppelbocks in the lagering ages). They would fast and not eat, so they needed nutrition from something, and beer fit the bill.
I digress, though. This is primarily about going Wild. Embracing the unintended and natural fauna that surrounds us. Brettanomyces, Pediococcus, Lactobacillus… Acetobacter. Lambics, Flander’s Reds, Oud Bruin, Kriek, Geuze. These are what I feel represent teh culmination of the beer journey. Once you can appreciate these beers, you can appreciate pretty much any beer. The range of natural wild yeasts used can provide a multitude of flavor and aroma sensations. From the very tart and sour to the downright funky and musty.
My goal is to brew a Flander’s style Red Ale. I’ve just about narrowed in on the recipe. I’ve go the majority of ingredients, most important being the yeast strain (Roselare Blend). I love, love, love the beer Duschesse de Bourgogne as well as Rodenbach Grand Cru. I want to make one of these. The major downside to this project is the fact that I will be losing a fermenter for at the very least, 2 years. Even after this 2 year period if finished, I am likely to relegate the equipment used to brew only sour beers. Many of the wild yeasts mentioned above are known to be difficult to clean with traditional methods.
It will be safest if I simply dedicate a full set of fermenters to wild beers. Recipe an dbrewday notes are to follow once i narrow in on the ingredient list. Stay tuned, same beery time, same beery channel.
and yes, I just used the word beer in an adjective form.
Competition time!
The annual Upstate New York Homebrewers Association is hosting their annual home brewing competition next week (March 27th), and Rock Your World Brewing is fully represented. After the competition results are in, this post will be updated with scores. This is what we’ve entered:
Joel entered
- Pumpkin Ale (cat. 21a, base recipe was an American Amber)
Tony entered
- Oatmeal Porter (cat 12b, Robust Porter)
- Cream Ale (cat 6a, Cream Ale)
- Pale Ale (Cat 10a, American Pale Ale)
- Wedding Stout (Cat 13c, Oatmeal Stout)
- Java Porter (made with Finger Lakes Coffee Roasters coffee) (Cat 12b, Robust Porter)
- Dampfbier (California Common) (Cat 7b, California Common Beer)
Jeremy entered:
- Gentlemen Prefer a Blonde (Cat 6b, American Blonde Ale) Score was 33.5 out of 50. Placed 1st in category out of 16 entries
- Failte (cat 13a, Dry Stout)…see prior post for brewday writeup Score was 38 / 50. Placed 2nd in category out of 17 entries
- Romanoff Family Portrait (Cat 13f, Russian Imperial Stout) Score was 26.5 / 50 with 10 entries in category
- Potato Famine Ale (Cat 9d, Irish Red Ale) Scored a 32.5 / 50 with 17 entries in category
- Perle-y Gates (Cat 14b, American IPA)..see prior post for brewday writeup Scored a basement burning 21.6 / 50 with 21 entries in category
- Dandelion Mead (Cat 26c, Open category mead, Mead with dandelion must added) Scored a 27.5 / 50 with 12 entries in category
- Gruit (Cat 23, Specialty beer, scotch ale brewed with yarrow, mugwort, thistle, nettle, lavender and wormwood) Scored a 28.67 / 50 with 12 entries in category
- Olde Saggy Ass 2008 (Cat 19b, English Barleywine) Scored a 30 / 50 with 12 entries in category
- Olde Sour Puss 2009 (Cat 19a, Old Ale… old ale with Bret C. yeast added) Scored a 31.5 / 50 with 12 entries in category
- And entered for a visiting brewer friend, Al Drozdowski:
- The Big Brown Buzz (Cat 13f, Russian Imperial Stout)
What we will most likely do, is any of these beers that were entered in the same style as another RYWBC brewer will become, or be tweaked to become a standard recipe in the future. Depending on what, if any place or win, we might decide to collaborate and enter the State Fair competition. I know that the UNYHA competition is the only one I planned to submit to this year (which is why I went the “go big or go home approach with 9 entries), however, if I/we have a good showing it will not take much persuading to get me to enter the State Fair.
Quick updates
I’m just about recovered from the newly reinstated Sudsfest Birthday Bash in honor of our great brewing sage, John (is Suds), that got us all into this brewing nonsense in the first place. Many a good beer was consumed, and I was able to walk away from the weekend with a good bit of new or re-acquainted brewing knowledge. We brewed a British Bitter on Suds’ three tier system, hit all the numbers and suffered no burns or other major brewing related injuries…. and we were mostly still sober when all was said and done. Thank you to John and Ann for opening their house to the special brand of madness and chaos that the Radfords and Belairs bring to the party.
Also coming up in the next week is the local homebrew club’s annual homebrew competition. This year marks the 32nd annual UNYHA (Upstate NY Homebrewer’s Association) competition. Look for a new posting with updates after judging for how our three brewers fared. Also, the most difficult part of the competition is that yours truly will be judging Thursday in a pre-competition session as well as both the morning and afternoon sessions on Saturday. It is a tough, arduous job, but someone has to buck up and take one for the team. Luckily, I was smart enough to enter beers in all of the high alcohol categories, which disqualifies me from judging them for a full 8 hours… last year was an exercise in restraint and liver control.
Peace, brew and drink well
Jeremy
The Great Potato Famine
The great potato famine was a tragedy for the Irish people, though it gave many of them the opportunity to come to the US in order to make a better life. Unfortunately, many of them found poverty and discrimination in this melting pot nation of ours.
Luckily, the Potato Famine also brought my wife’s family across the big pond to settle in upstate NY. So, in honor of her Emerald Isle heritage, and the fact that I have a sick sense of humor, I brewed an Irish Red called Potato Famine Ale.. .and no, there are no potatoes used in the recipe. In keeping with the name, all of the potatoes in our house were forcible blighted and thrown out prior to brewing.
The recipe, for 5.25 gallons (brewed on 1/17/2010):
- 10lbs Maris Otter
- 1lb British Mild Malt
- 1lb Cara-Amber
- 1/2lb Weyerman smoked malt
- 1/2lb Medium Crystal (about 55* Lovibond)
- 1/8 lb Black Patent
- 1/2oz Fuggles (4.7%AA) as First Wort Hops
- 1 oz Fuggles (4.7%AA) added at 60 minutes
- 1/2oz Fuggles (4.7%AA) added at 5 minutes
- WYeast 1084 Irish Ale yeast
OG was 1.054 with 5.5 galls in primary (calculated OG was 1.064 at 5.75 gals, efficiency = 62%)
IBU was 30
color was 17-ish SRM
FG ended up at 1.013
Mashed at 154*F for an hour and sparged with 180*F water until we had about 6 3/4 gallons in the boil kettle. During the sparge, we added 1/2 oz Fuggles (4.7%AA) whole hops as a First Wort Hopping
We brought it up to a slow boil. This was brewed once again inside in January, and the stovetop really is getting tired of bringing 6+ gallons to a rolling boil. At the start of the boil, 1 oz Fuggles was added as the main bittering charge. We did a 60 minute boil, and the next hop addition of was made at 5 minutes left.
The entire brewday went pretty smoothly. This was the first beer that i adjusted the gap on our Barleycrusher (c) grain mill, but for some reason, we saw a drop in our overall efficiency. It ended up working out for us in the end, as the lower efficiency actually brought the beer more in-line with the style guidelines.
This turned into a nice brew. The addition of the smoked malt was so very subtle that one probably wouldn’t be able to pick it out of a lineup. As is, it provides a slight mustiness to the beer. Once you realize the smoked malt was used, it is easier to place where that flavor is coming from. We will (actually, we already have) brew this with a full pound of the smoked malt next time to try to enhance the actual smoke character a bit.
File this one under: Win
Failte!
Ahh, St. Patrick’s Day….That day that symbolizes the lechery and drunkeness that only Americans can muster.
Actually, it symbolizes the day that St. Patrick drove all of the snakes from Ireland; and in the mother country, it is treated more like the American Thanksgiving, where your time is spent with family, or in Church. (as opposed to the 24 hour drunk-fest that we Americans have whored the day out to be).
Either way, I still brew an Irish Dry Stout for the occasion. Since we are old(er) now and have jobs that do not necessarily allow us to queue up at the bar at 7AM on St. Pat’s, that leaves us to our own devices of drinking what we brew at the end of the day. This was brewed on 23 Jan 2010:
- 8.5 lbs Maris Otter
- 2 lb Flaked Oats
- 1 lb British Mild Malt
- 1 lb Chocolate malt
- 3/4 lb Roasted Barley
- 1/2 lb Medium Crystal
- 1/4 lb Crystal 90
- 2 oz Willamette 5.0%AA whole flower hops (60 minutes) – homegrown
- WYeast 1028 English Ale
Some brew notes:
I tightened the gap on our grain mill before this brew…this combined with the addition of a large portion of flaked oats created a stuck sparge from Hell. See below for further notes on that particular clusterF…
We mashed for 90 minutes at 155*F with 4.5 gallons, then attempted to sparge with 4.8 gallons at 180 *F. A few things went horribly wrong with the sparge. Firstly I got wrapped up in coversation on politics, and did not notice that the sparge water had reached near-boiling temperatures. Luckily, it was January, so I simply had to stick the HLT into a snowbank and stir like mad to bring the temperature down to an acceptable 180*F. Great… everything is hunky-dory… until I tried to actually sparge.
The recirculation went well enough. I ran the normal 2 gallons of wort back through the system, topped off with the obligatory gallon of sparge liquor, opened the valve to a trickle, and ran off nearly 1/2 gallon until I heard gurgling and then nothing ….
zilch…
not a drop…
“We have just lost cabin pressure”, as Tyler Durden would say.
I had never experienced a stuck sparge before, and I was kicking myself in the arse for not adding the rice hulls that Tony had graciously offered. So, we stirred.. and stirred…
and stirred…
…and prayed…
…and finally said “Screw it”…
I have a spare mash tun.. a 60 qt Rubbermaid cooler that I use solely for “big beers”. It was mostly clean, having been in my truck for 4 months. There was nothing in it, it was just being stored in the most convenient place I had available…. So, throwing caution to the wind, and truly testing the theories of Hot Side Aeration, I dumped everything from the bucket lauter tun into the cooler, dumped the rest of the sparge water on top, let it all settle, and opened the valve…
Ahhhh…liquid flow.
I got my required 7.25 gallons into the kettle, and brought it to a boil. Actually, since this brew was done outside, I was able to kick the burner on when we had close to 3 gallon in the kettle. As such, we came to a boil much sooner than I anticipated. Like 10 minutes after running off the required volume.
As a result of the quick boil, I did not add the hops for the first 10 minutes. It’s all good. Irish dry stouts are neither bitter, nor are they hoppy in flavor or aroma.
The boil went on for the next 60 minutes without a hitch. With only one hop addition, it is really kind of difficult to screw up the boil. We kicked off the burner after 60, brought it inside, cooled, and racked to the carboy (newly emptied of the Perle/Simcoe IPA), and pitched our 1/3 gallon starter of English ale yeast (WYeast 1028).
Even with an active starter it still took nearly 12 hours to have visual representation of an active ferment, though I had been hearing the first burps from the airlock since about 6 hours from pitching.
Final numbers:
OG = 1.064 with 5.75 gallons in primary (calculated was 1.064 with 5.5 in primary)
IBU = 43
SRM = dark, as in black
FG = 1.016
The oats certainly provided a creaminess, but I have noticed the head retention is severely lacking, depending on what glass I pour into . This may be a symptom of improper glass hygiene (soap residue is a head killer), or poor water treatment (all other stout characteristics are there, just not the rich, long lasting head). Tastes great, though, and at just about 5.6% abv, this is a nice session beer for St. Pat’s Day.
File this one under : “Further development still needed”
The non-standard IPA
Just over a year ago, I decided I wanted to brew a non-standard IPA. Basically, the idea was to brew an IPA that did not use the common Pacific NW hops (Cascades, Centennial, Amarillo, etc…). As luck would have it, I happened to have at the time, nearly 3 pounds of various high alpha hops in the freezer at the time. I decided for the first batch to pair up Nugget with Perle. Needless to say, those two varieties didn’t play as nicely as i would have preferred.
Enter the new year, 2010, and my overwhelming need to brew after a 2 month downtime. Once again, i had some high alpha hops in the freezer that needed to get used up, and i decided to play with this recipe again. This year, we paired up Simcoe (which, I suppose is now a “standard” IPA hop now), and Perle. This is what we came up with:
- 10 lbs Maris Otter
- 2 lbs Vienna
- 1 lb British Mild
- 1 lb Cara-Amber (in lieu of Victory malt)
- 1/2 oz Simcoe 12.9AA (FHW) – whole flower
- 1 oz Perle 6%AA (30 minutes) – pellets
- 1/2 oz Nugget 13%AA whole hops were added at 20 minutes
- 2 oz Perle 8.8%AA whole hops were added at 20 minutes
- 3/4 oz Simcoe 12.9%AA whole hops were added at 10 minutes
- 1 oz Perle 6%AA pellets added at 10 minutes
- 1 oz Perle 6%AA hops added at flameout (when the burner is turned off)
- S-05 rehydrated sachet
OG was 1.062 (measured)… expected was 1.073
IBU 76 calculated, but it feels higher
Color 11-ish SRM
FG was 1.008
For brewday/ batch notes, I have:
We mashed at 153 for just over an hour in 4.5 gallons of water that was treated with 5.2 mash stabilizer, then sparged for 45 minutes with 4.75 gallons of water at 180*F.
During the sparge, we added our first charge of hops (also called First Wort Hopping, or FWH). 1/2oz of Simcoe 12.9%AA whole flower hops. FWHs are “said” to provide the perceived bittering of a 20 minute hop addition while boosting the flavor contribution.
After we ran off the 7 gallons of wort, it took nearly 70 minutes to bring this thing to a boil on our stovetop. This was January, after all, and it was all of 6*F outside… I do have my limits as a brewer.
No 60 minute hops (start of boil) were added. This was a late hopping technique brew
We chilled her down, and pitched in a rehydrated 11.5 gram sachet of Safale S-05 yeast. We had yeast activity within 4 hours, which is a happy sight for me.
Primary went for 2 weeks, before I needed the carboy for another beer (see post RE: Failte), when we racked this over to a secondary fermenter. I then dropped another 2 oz Perle pellets in there for dryhopping. Secondary continued for the next 4.5 weeks… which is longer than I generally like to dryhop.
She was bottled on 25 February 2010, and as I sip the first offering from this beer a week later, I think I am pleasantly pleased with this recipe. The Simcoe provide an interesting fruit component to the flavor and aroma (passionfruit), while the Perle stay true to the databooks in providing an interesting minty quality that I cannot quite define.
This one will be brewed again as is for sure. I would also expect to do a variation with some other high alpha English hops, like Challenger, or Pilgrim… and maybe even Millenium.
It’s aliiive!!!
The inaugural post on the RYWBC website! Soon to follow (probably this weekend) will be a write up on the Irish Red brewday from a week ago… ‘cuz I’m a slacker.
