Sure thing, Boss!

Sign of the (Behind the) Times

Just a shitty pun, folks. Letting you know that after a month in primary, I'll be bottling that ESB this weekend. Wish I had a keg, bottling is getting to be a pain in my ass.

Now hold on while Billy Joel writes a song about it.

Three Way

New recipe. I'ma call it: Dale's Ale Pail.

8.00# Maris Otter
3.00# Light Munich
0.75# Crystal 60L

Mash, sparge, boil, throw in a buncha hops.

Let you know in a month.

The Grain In Spain

Stays mostly in Spain.

But this homegrown shit? Watch out.

That's right, it's all-grain time. Make the jump. Piss standing. Disregard females, acquire currency and all that Ducreux shit.

So anyhow. I pieced together a mash/lauter tun (aka MLT). The truncated idea, if you needed to ask somebody, is that you've got to get your grain wet and keep it hot for a long time. About an hour. Which is a long-ass time for me to do anything.

Luckily, enzymes do most of the work while the "brewer" can go dick off. They make short work of long-chain carbohydrates, breaking them down into digestible pieces. In a way, I like to think of the enzymes as butchers, and the yeast as refined members of society. More on that later (probably not).

Here's the deal, chipmunk. Bought a bunch of fittings and braids and tees and supply lines and all that happy-pappy poo-poo.



With a hacksaw, some teflon tape, the concentration of a coked-up chihuahua and a little luck, this is what happened.



And BY-FRACKIN'-JOVE, it works.



Doesn't leak a damn drop, unless I tell it to.

Anyhow. Next step? Acquire grain, heat water, add water to grain, steep, drain, rinse, drain, add hops & boil, rack, ferment, bottle and drink.

How you like me now?

Let's Get Mashed!

Until this point I've been dwelling in the realm of extract brewing. There are plenty of pros to brewing this way. First, it's easy. Just throw a bunch of goop in a pot, boil it with some hops and other grains, add yeast and voila! Beer!

To me, the biggest downside is that you have less control over the malt profile of your final product. And have you SEEN what they're trying to get for a pound of LME these days?! So, being a cheapskate control freak, I've decided to move to all-grain brewing.

To that end, I now have a 45 quart cooler that's about to be retrofitted with some stainless steel braid (a water heater supply line should do well) and a valve. Once everything is put together, I'll try my hand at mashing and batch sparging some new beer. Can't wait.

Bottled Up

Serves as a metaphor for plenty of things these days.

Without getting too personal, let us suffice it to say that the Kirin Lager clone is bottled and on its way to greatness.

Resurrecting Some Old Favorites

Well, I gave up beer for lent, so tonight has been nice. Taking a stroll down memory lane, having one of (almost) each of the ales I've brewed so far.

So far: the Holiday Cheer is the real surpriser. It has only gotten better these past four months. Orange peel has copulated with ginger, the cinnamon made friends with the hops. I'm ready to brew another batch just to have it around this Christmas.

Otherwise, the Old Speckled Hen clone is still tasty, probably second best. The Vanilla Porter, while still good and which has improved with age, ranks last of these three. But I still maintain that I'd buy any of them at the store. So, woo.

Racked the Kirin Lager clone to secondary today. The tiny sample I had showed some promise. I'm hoping that carbonation will add something to the wateriness. If it does, this will be a successful lighter-bodied beer experiment, and I'll have to give the WLP060 blend another shot.

Now, soon enough I'll crack a bottle of the 60-Minute IPA clone...don't wait up.

Happy Easter, everyone.

2010 Brew Day #1: Redux

Quick FYI. Bottled the IPA yesterday.

The FG of the Dogfish Head 60-Minute IPA was 1.011-ish. I need to go back and calculate the OG (since it was an extract brew) to see what the ABV is.

I could have drank about a gallon of the stuff before bottling it. Even flat, it has a fantastic hop aroma and complex hop flavor, no doubt from the 60-minute continual hop addition.

God bless America.


Quick FYI #2. The Kirin Pseudo-Lager is looking good. Will probably rack to secondary this weekend, then wait three more weeks before bottling. That should put it in good shape for its due date in May.

2010 Brew Day #2: Kirin Lager

Mission accomplished. No, seriously.

Brew day #2 is wrapped up. The Kirin Lager clone is done, hanging out in its carboy, waiting to ferment.

Tomorrow will likely be bottling day for the Dogfish Head 60-Minute IPA clone. It's already spent 4-5 weeks in one carboy or another. It's looking the clearest of all the ales I've brewed so far, so I expect greatness from this one.

If it's not great, I will drink it out of spite, like so much Super Bowl reuben dip.

UPDATE:
3.14.10 @ 15:30 - I've heard a couple of bubbles escape the blow-off tube.
3.15.10 @ 23:30 - Been churning along all day. Good volume of CO2 being blown-off.

Kirin Ichiban

I have my doubts about this, but I'll give it an honest try.

My Japanese father-in-law will be visiting sometime in April or May, so I've decided to try my hand at brewing a lighter beer. I'm not really equipped to do an authentic lager, but thankfully White Labs makes a yeast that allows the homebrewer to cheat a bit.

The WLP060 American Ale Yeast Blend is a combination of their California Ale yeast and some lager strains. It alleges to finish clean like a lager, at fermentation temperatures closer to those you'd expect for an ale.

Kirin Clone:

4.5 lbs. Extra Pale Dry Malt Extract
1.0 lbs. Rice Syrup Solids
0.5 lbs. German light crystal malt
1.0 oz. Saaz
1.0 oz. Hallertau Hersbrucker

Boil 45 mins. then add:
0.5 oz. Saaz
0.5 oz. Hallertau Hersbrucker
1 tsp. Irish moss

Boil 13 more mins. then add:
0.5 oz. Saaz
0.5 oz. Hallertau Hersbrucker


Predictions:
Malt extract won't do this lighter-bodied beer justice. The yeast will still exhibit some of the fruity and spicy tones that ale yeasts tend to produce, making the final product less identifiable as a lager...which technically it should, but won't, be.

No worries, and here's to hoping this turns out as a crisp addition to the home-brew stash.

Did You Know...?

...It is estimated that one out of every one-hundred people in the United States is a homebrewer. I guess they said the same thing about some of the Hell's Angels, but those "one-percenters" were known for something very, very, very different.

So, the next time YOU think about crashing a plane into a building because you're angry with the IRS, consider doing something more productive with your time*.

*Unless you're a really crummy angry drunk. In that case, try a cool, refreshing Fresca. The bitter citrus flavor and bite of aspartame will melt your troubles away and calm your Type II Diabetes.

2010 Brew Day #1: We're All Clones...

At least getting started in the homebrew world, I suppose that most of our beers are. It's in our nature. We like it, then we try to make it - or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

For me, it was Old Speckled Hen (not pictured above). Found a great deal on brewing equipment one day, drove up a mountain to get everything, came back and started looking up recipes.

But since this is about 2010's Inaugural Brew Day, enough with the blah blah. Let's make with more drinky.

2010's INAUGURAL BREW DAY: Dogfish Head 60-Minute IPA CLONE Recipe (pictured above).

Grain Bill:
9 lbs 8 oz Pale Liquid Malt Extract
1 lbs Crystal 40L
0 lbs 8 oz Carapils

Hops:
1.00 oz Warrior [15.00 %]
1.00 oz Amarillo Gold [8.50 %]
1.00 oz Simcoe [12.00 %]

1.00 oz Amarillo Gold [8.50 %] (Dry Hop)
1.00 oz Simcoe [12.00 %] (Dry Hop)

Yeast:
White Labs WLP001 - California Ale Yeast


This recipe couldn't be much simpler. The only thing involving about brewing this beauty is the 'continuous hop addition' over a period of 60 minutes. Thus the name "60 Minute IPA." But you knew that. You also knew that the 60 Minute IPA stands head-and-shoulders over the possibly even more renown "90 Minute IPA," which is maltier than your high school summer job. Enough digression.

Standing over a boiling kettle of hot wort, tossing in a hop pellet or three at a time felt silly at first, but should really take this brew somewhere. After dry-hopping...watch out.

Only technical snafu was the pitching of the yeast at about 60F. White Labs suggests pitching at 70F and, well, nothing else. This homebrewer never had to wait more than eight hours to see a boisterous fermentation occurring. This time around, it took about 30 hours to really get roiling. BUT! The kreuzen is the prettiest of all homebrews so far. Looking forward to a tall, clean crisp one sometime after Easter.

2009: The Beer in Review.

End-of-Year Recordkeeping:

1. 5-gal: Old Speckled Hen clone.
2. 5-gal: Holiday Cheer (Charlie Papazian recipe).
3. 5-gal: Apfelwein.
4. 5-gal: Vanilla Porter (Dry Dock Brewing Co. recipe).
5. 5-gal: Old Speckled Hen clone - modified.

Hard to believe that four batches of ale got brewed in this apartment last year. And I'd have paid money for any one of them at the sto'.

The biggest surprise was how fast the Holiday Cheer went at the New Year's Party. Two-and-a-half gallons (12 bombers) disappeared. The next morning, there were still plenty of bottles of macro- and microbrew beers sitting in their cardboard cases outside, right where they were before the Holiday Cheer arrived.

The most pleasant surprise was the first batch of Old Speckled Hen clone. It was amazing that such good beer can made at home with a little attention to detail.

It looks like the Vanilla Porter, extract recipe provided by Dry Dock Brewing Company, will be the underdog of '09. Overly vanilla, too tart and not enough body at first, it has developed into a porter that starts with strong vanilla tones and finishes smooth, almost more like a stout than a porter. Great mouthfeel, nice aftertaste (if a tad sour) and overall good beer.

Old Speckled Hen v2 was bottled on 01.24.10, so it should be ready for a trip to Steamboat Springs in a couple of weeks. We shall see.