Does This Smell Off To You?

Simple Stout tasting

2010-01-13T17:40:00.001-08:00

I'm currently enjoying one of the last few bottles of that simple stout we made. The rest was either consumed or given away.

Have you ever had Guinness on tap? Think that without the funky nitrogen bubbles and a little sharper bitterness from the roasted barley. It's at 7 weeks now and really smoothing out. At 4 weeks it was carbonated and drinkable but pretty harsh. Unfortunately, that's when most of it disappeared.

I'll definitely make this again and wait longer to break into it. I was originally considering trying a sour mash on this, but it just doesn't need anything more. For as easy as this recipe is, and the assertive but not excessive alcohol content of the final product (5.5%), I dub this:

No Bull Stout.

Snowed in! So...

2009-12-11T06:05:00.001-08:00

Let's give this sucker a taste.

Well, first off, the texture is wrong. I think you can see from the picture that it's crumbly and loose. The curd never knit together properly, which I'm sure is a fault of my inexperience. That could be forgivable, but ...

Yuck. Smells and tastes like a musty old sock. When it was first cut and still wet, it tasted vaguely how jack cheese was supposed to, but now that it's dried out a little there's nothing but feet. It's been tossed. Hopefully the cheddar (and the gouda that'll get waxed later today) don't suffer from the same problems.

And now, a bonus photo of my back yard earlier this morning:

It's supposed to keep snowing all day.

Plan "B"

2009-11-22T13:14:00.000-08:00

Well, I was planning on doing that example beer on Wednesday, but I couldn't find my yeast. So, I ordered more along with ingredients for a super-simple stout, and I'll show you the process for a full five-gallon batch of that for now. I'll still do that small batch of bitter, just not today.

Okay, these are the ingredients:

9 lbs Maris Otter (that's an English malt)

1 lb roasted barley (un-malted barley that's been cooked to darn near black)

1 oz Northern Brewer hops

1 packet Danstar Nottingham ale yeast

I'm going to be trying out my new mash tun, which is just a term brewers use for whatever vessel you are soaking the grain in. That soaking process at a controlled temperature is called a mash, and what you are doing there is allowing the enzymes already present in malted barley to convert the starches still in the grain to sugar.

Anyway, I'm using a new 70 quart Coleman cooler here, and I haven't modified it with a screen of any kind to help in draining, so we'll see how this works.

Okay, so I've heated my water up to 77 degrees celsius, dumped my grain into the cooler and added the water, and stirred to get everything mixed together and soaked. The temperature after the 10 lbs of grain cooled things off is about 67 c, which is exactly what I wanted. I'll close the lid and leave this be for an hour, by which time the mash should be finished.

After an hour the mash is done, I've checked the temperature again and I haven't lost a degree celsius, which is great. The cooler is doing its job. Now I'm going to sparge, another brewer's term that basically means rinse. I'll add some more hot water to bring the temperature of everything back up to about 77 celsius, which is hot enough to deactivate the enzymes and also adding some more water so I can get more sugars into solution. I'll stir gently and drain into my kettle, then add another 2 gallons of hot water to rinse the rest of the sugars I didn't get the first time. I could keep doing this ad infinitum, but I'm content with just 2 additions of water.

Here I'm draining using a colander under the drain to catch the grain that's spewing out along with the hot, sugary liquid (that's now called wort). This is working, but before I brew again I'm going to put in a slotted manifold or something like that so I don't have to use a colander next time. Lesson learned.

And here's the damage. This spent grain is now good for composting, or putting ~1/4 cup of in a loaf of bread.

Now I've got a brew kettle full of wort, about 7 gallons of it. I said I was making 5 gallons, right? Right, between what's going to evaporate during 60 minutes of boiling, what's going to get sucked up by the hops, and what I'm not going to be able to use due to sediment when fermentation is finished, I'll end up with about 5 gallons.

At this point I add the hops, in a mesh bag for easy removal later. Lots of brewers wait to add their hops until after the boil starts, and you can add different amounts at different times in the boil to emphasize bittering, flavor, or aroma, but all I'm interested in here is bittering so I'll add them now, which also helps prevent the boil-overs that can happen when you add them later.

Yeah, that sucker is spanning all four of the burners on my cooktop. Be sure and do what your weight coach in high school told you and keep your back straight when you lift it. Deadlifts are good practice for brewing.

Now I just put the spurs to it and stir every once in a while until it boils to prevent scorching. Once it comes to a boil I'll start timing 60 minutes, and it's important to pay close attention for the first half-hour or so just in case a boil-over starts.

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

When there's about 15 minutes left in the boil I'll introduce another piece of equipment, my wort chiller. This is a length of copper tubing used to cool the wort quickly to a temperature yeast like. It works by running cold water through it while it's immersed in the hot wort. I'll stick it in the kettle so the heat can sterilize it. One thing to note if you've never used one of these before is that they usually have some water in them from the last time, so when you put them in boiling wort that water is going to turn to steam and spew out. Be careful.

Once I turn the heat off, everything that comes in contact with the wort must be sanitized. I use a solution called Star-San to do this. You dissolve it in water and it uses oxygen to kill microbes. There's also a product called Iodophor that does this with iodine, but that tends to dye your stuff funny colors so I stopped using it. It works just as well though.

I've also got my yeast sitting there rehydrating. I didn't used to do this and it worked anyway, but I recently found out the manufacturers include nutrients in their dry yeast that help them get off to a quicker, healthier start, so I decided to start following the instructions on the package. I know, instructions. Bleah.

And here's the cooling setup. Note the decorative basement utility sink. I'll let this go until the wort is down to about 70 degrees, at which point I'll rack (siphon) the wort to a fermenter, pitch (add) the yeast, and aerate (shake the everloving crap out of it to get as much oxygen dissolved in the wort as possible).

Looks like science!

That's about all. After the fermenter is full, I dump the yeast in, slap on an airlock, and cover the whole deal with an old shirt to keep light from skunking the beer before it's even beer. In a couple weeks I'll bottle and in a couple more it'll be ready to drink.

And that's how I make beer.

This Beer Thing - How's It Done?

2009-11-17T12:44:00.000-08:00

When I've told people I make my own beer, they're often interested. It's an inherently interesting idea, I think. There's something fascinating in a glass of beer - the smell, the taste, the foam and the bubbles. The allure is only amplified in that it's usually considered an "adult" beverage. The idea that one could produce it outside of some industrial process is an intriguing one.

But brewing beer is, at its core, a simple thing. You soak some grain in hot water, allow yeast to convert what is extracted into alcohol, and there's your beer. Everything else brewers talk about and do is just making the process easier, faster, more repeatable, with better results. There's a lot of lingo and a lot of equipment, but what is necessary to produce a drinkable beer? What's the least you can get away with?

A friend asked me recently how he could get into brewing and linked me to some starter kits he'd found. They usually run between $80-$120 and include the stuff you'd need to produce some 5-gallon batches of beer, minus the ingredients. But is such a big outlay necessary? Isn't there a way somebody could dip their toes in without shelling out a hundred fifty bucks before they even know if they enjoy it? I think so. I'm going to try.

I'm going to brew a gallon of beer, from start to finish. I'm going to keep the equipment as basic as I can. I'm going to use a very simple recipe and, because we're dealing with a small quantity of beer, the ingredients aren't going to cost very much. In the interest of limiting any specialized equipment I'm not going to list what you'd need to bottle the finished beer, because it's not strictly necessary. You can drink un-carbonated beer and be perfectly happy doing so. If you were to bottle this you'd need another $20-$30 worth of stuff, or a friend with said stuff.

If I were starting from zero, here's the equipment I'd need:

No. 6 Drilled Stopper
$0.85

Bubbler Air Lock
$1.10

No. 6 Solid Stopper
$0.95

Auto Siphon - 1/2" racking cane
$12.99

1/2" ID Siphon Hose - 6 feet
$3.00

1 Gallon Clear Glass Jug - 2
$7.98

Lab Thermometer
$6.99

Brewmaster Filter Bag
$5.50

Total equipment cost: $39.36
(All links are to Northern Brewer, where I order most of my brewing equip and ingredients)

I'll also need a pot large enough to boil a gallon and a half of water, but everybody with a kitchen should have one of those. And a lid for the pot. And a spoon.

As for ingredients, well, first I need to decide what I want to make. In my case, this is easy, because I already have some stuff lying around so I'll use that to test a recipe for an Extra-Special Bitter, a style of English ale. If I had to buy it:

English Maris Otter - crushed 2 lbs
$4.50

Simpsons Medium Crystal - crushed 1 lb
$2.50

Simpsons Dark Crystal - crushed 1 lb
$2.50

Briess Victory - crushed
$2.25

Fuggle Hop Pellets 1 oz.
$2.99

Danstar Nottingham Ale Yeast
$1.45

Total ingredients cost: $16.19

And that should be it. I won't be using all of those grains, but they aren't sold in lesser quantities than a pound. I'll post the recipe when I actually get to brewing it. This should produce a golden-brown beer of about 6.5% alcohol with a malty, bready quality and balanced hop aroma, bitterness, and flavor. That's what I'm going for, anyway. I thought about doing this with malt extract instead of starting from grains. That would be simpler, but I'd be stuck with whatever grains the extract maker included in it instead of choosing all my own. It's really not that hard to do all-grain anyway, and especially in a batch this small all you need is a big pot of water.

So, for a little over 50 bucks we can try this out and see how it goes. Actually, if you're like most people with a kitchen, you probably already have a candy thermometer, which reduces the cost by $7. If it turns out you hate brewing, you're only stuck with about $25 worth of equipment you'll never use again. Not too bad.

The dwarf laughs heartily and quaffs a flagon of mead...

2009-11-12T18:54:00.000-08:00

Doesn't look like much now, does it? That's a mead (technically a cyser) I cooked up a couple nights ago that won't be ready to drink until 2010 is nearly over.

11 lbs Ohio wildflower honey

1/2 gallon apple cider

1 tbsp ground cinnamon

Wyeast 4184 Sweet Mead Yeast

4 gallons water

1 guitar case

If I hadn't drank half a gallon of cider there'd be more in there. Some things to remember if you're interested in making mead? You can boil the water to sanitize, but make sure it's cooled off to about 115 F before mixing in the honey. You don't want to boil the honey, it does weird things to the sugars and isn't necessary anyway, as honey is extremely inhospitable to bacteria (Alexander the Great was mummified in honey). And since honey isn't a happy place for microcritters, you'll need to add some yeast nutrients to the must if you want a healthy fermentation. I used 1 tsp each of DAP and Fermaid-K when I pitched the yeast and the same earlier tonight after I saw the fermentation was bubbling along happily.

Check back in about 6 months and we'll see what we've got here!

Waxin' the cheese

2009-11-12T18:16:00.000-08:00

No, that ain't a euphemism. Tonight I'm waxing the first hard cheese I've made. It's supposed to be a Monterey Jack cheese according to Ricki Carroll of cheesemaking.com. I may have missed some of the temperatures and messed up the pressures it was pressed at. We'll see how it is in about a month or so. Or less. Considering my history with letting homebrew age as long as it should I might not make it. I start by setting an old pot full of cheese wax in a pan of boiling water. This ensures the wax can't get above 212 degrees F (the boiling point of water), which is enough to sterilize the wax and kill any microbes it touches on the surface of the cheese, but not enough to ignite the wax or cause any smoke. Since I'm using a small pot, the 1 lb of wax I have is deep enough to wax half of the 1 lb cheese wheel at once. You can see what I'm doing here:

And here's the waxed cheese after a couple coats:

Looks cool, huh?

To help keep track of what was made when, I used a spoon to drop a little wax on top and stick on a label:

Now, if I can just hold on until Christmas this should be something great.