All Citra APA

So I found a bunch of Citra hops at the new homebrew shop in Gilbert and decided to use them to brew a single hop beer. Based on a recent experiment I did with a SMaSH beer, I knew that you could learn a ton about a hop this way, but I also learned that the SM portion could make the beer unbalanced and less than perfectly drinkable. I decided to take a well documented American Pale Ale recipe and only change the hop portion to end up with the same IBUs at around the same time in the beer, and a generous dry hop. Brew day went well, although I am still having problems hitting my mash temp without making some kind of adjustment after doughing in. My winter problems were too cold my first warm weather brew was too hot. Despite this, I have had no problem actually maintaining 60 minutes at within 3 degrees of my goal temp. I pitched the yeast just a few degrees above my goal (I think it was 72) and fermented for 10 days at 68 degrees, let it rise to 72 for day then set it to crash for racking. 12 hours after setting it to crash it was down to 55 degrees. I am also using this as a bit of an experiment to see if I can ferment at lager temps this summer. With a bit of good luck I hope to get this beer force carbonated by Sunday in time to take at least a taste while dry hoping, with the ultimate goal of having this beer to share for the June ASH meeting.

All Grain Breweing

So I have now fully transitioned to all grain brewing after finishing my 4th all grain batch. It has really become quite a bit of fun and I would definitely suggest to anyone who has made the move to full boil to also make the move to all grain. Upcoming enhancements include a build and automation of a heat stick so that I can heat my strike water while I sleep and wake up to start brewing immediately. I would also like to look at moving to a larger kettle through the conversion of a keg and hooking up a march pump to move my wort out of the boil kettle with the possibility of an eventual single tier build.

Raffle Pale Ale Tasting

So I took some initial tastes of the Pale Ale I brewed and discovered it to be quite flat. Not CO2 wise just lacking in flavor. It wasn't quite a bitter as I expected and there was really no hop aroma. So even though I knew all along that I would need to, I rediscovered the fact that I had to dry hop. I grabbed 1 oz of Summit hops from the LHBS and started the dry hop of my 3 gallon keg on Friday. I tasted it on Saturday night and it was developing, and tried it again of Sunday and found it to be darn near perfect. I like the taste of Summit dry hopped. It is the hop used in Widmier's Drifter Pale Ale as a dry hop and I love that beer and this makes it quite similar. The only issues I have now are that it could have used more bittering. This is probably due to the use of some old, poorly stored hops. Additionally the color was a bit off. I split this between my fear from the last pale ale I brewed coming in too dark and the brewing software that calculated the SRM much higher than it came out as. I am pretty sure that the software was wrong as the recipes I based this on all called for more crystal than I used and I now see why.

All Grain Kolsch Brew Day

So I decided to finally take the plunge and try my hand at all grain brewing. I had been slowly acquiring the parts and pieces for it. I moved to full boils last summer, and I built all the parts to convert a cooler into a mash tun over the winter. I broke down and bought a 5 gallon round cooler at Walmart for $20 and ran to the homebrew store on Friday to pick up the ingredients. For my first brew I decided to start with a Kolsch. I really enjoyed the one I brewed last spring and wanted to try it again. I made a yeast starter on Friday, got up at 6 on Sunday and started my brew day.

My recipe called for 11 pounds of grain and I was mashing with 3.5 gallons of water. My strike temp was 161, with my mash at 150 and once I doughed in and checked my temp I found that I was at around 160. I think that the problem came from my poor temperature taking procedure that really didn't get my thermometer deep enough into the water of the HLT. I dumped in some air temp water that I had sitting around and that brought the temp right down to 150. I mashed for an hour, recirculated the run off 3 times (although I didn't note a lot of clearing occurring in my run off, it was pretty clear to begin with) and move on to sparging. I sparged with another 3.25 of water and after it all ending up in my kettle, I found that I was a bit short of my expected boil amount (maybe 2 gallons). I quickly heated up some more sparge water, but decided to start my 90 minute boil with the 5.5 gallons I already had in my kettle. It took almost a full 30 minutes to finish with that extra sparge (next time I will make sure I have some extra water heated and waiting for sparging, along with another pot to catch my first runnings). I added my hops just before adding the 2nd sparge run off, brought it up to a boil again. At the end of my boil I had a bit less wort than I expected, some of that was due to the longer boil. I pitched the yeast at around 68, and will ferment at 64.

I am reserving the right to judge this brew until after I have a chance to taste it, but I can say I was not displeased at the process itself. I need a second pot (around 3 gallon) and it would be cool to have a larger boil kettle so I can end up with a touch more wort and less boilover risk, but these are the things I learn.

APA Brew Day

So this was a week of many brewing firsts for me. It started with my joining the Arizona Society of Homebrewers, a local homebrew club. We did a tour of a local distributor's warehouse and sampled some beers. I also won part of their monthly raffle and chose some hops as my prize: 1 oz whole leaf Warrior and 1 oz whole leaf Pallisades. I decided that I should brew something up using these hops for next month's meeting, and picked an APA. It was the last of the styles that I wanted to rebrew from my early failures. In order to brew, I needed to move my American Wheat out of the fermentor and into a keg. I also was interested in finishing my stir plate to make a starter for this beer. I worked through this in before the weekend and got around to brewing on Memorial Day. I was sick and tired of the continual threat of boil overs, so I grabbed a fan and used it to majorly reduce the risk. Batch turned out OK, but I can say I am not a huge fan of using whole hops in the boil as it made racking a bit difficult.

Rebrewing

I have finally reached a point where I am ready to go back and rebrew some stuff. There are still some things that I want to try, but I want to start eliminating things that I didn't enjoy and think about having something like a regular rotation. Before I am willing to commit, there are 3 beers that I brewed in the past that I would consider failures, and feel that I should try and get them right before I decide that I don't want them in the rotation. The 3 are my DIPA, American Wheat and an APA (actually it was an EPA, but that is almost splitting hairs). I am going to start with the American Wheat. I consider this the closest thing to a drain pour I have ever brewed and I am sure that I could be a real crowd pleaser. So I am planning on brewing on Sunday, even though my fermentor is still full as of today. I will rack my brown to a keg tonight, and I will clean out my other carboy on Saturday so that I will be ready to go on Sunday. I am also thinking about bottling up the remainder of my mild. I still don't have my 5th tap, so I have little problems moving ahead with staying one keg down. I am also thinking about bottling off the rest of this keg of cider and move on to my Halloween batch. Plus I am ready to start another cider and will need the keg space for aging.

Nut Brown Brew Day

I wanted to brew yesterday and Sharon wanted to take Mary to try out a church, so I got up at 6 am to brew. I actually started the night before with setup and steeping my specialty grains, along with filling the kettle. This way I rolled out of bed, started the burner and I was moving. Got the water to a boil before 6:45 and was cooling the batch by 7:40. Cooling was a bit more problematic. The ground water temp has risen and I only had a single gallon jug of ice form my recirculating ice water system. In the end I got the wort down to around 75 and then tossed it in the fridge. I was done with cleanup and everything by 9. As of 7 PM there was still no activity in the fermenter.

I had hoped to be writing about a finished kegerator, but I have 2 outstanding issues. One of the taps I got was bad and I will be sending it to Northern Brewer for a new one. The second issue was that I was ordering tailpiece assemblies from BeverageFactory.com, but they haven't even shipped it after placing the order a week ago. I will go back to checking the local homebrew shops to see if I can't pick the parts up and cancel my order, with a hope that I will have a kegerator missing one tap by the weekend.

Tasted the Lefse Blonde last night and it has really come around with some cold conditioning. I really enjoyed it and it will be quite tasty for this late spring, early summer.

Kegerator is Finished...sort of

I am going ahead and posting a picture of the finished kegerator even though A it is not really finished and B I don't like the picture much and note that I have already cleaned it up quite a bit since the picture was taken. Since previous to the taps being installed my entire interaction came from the top down, I didn't notice how ugly the sides looked. The truth is you can't see it real well unless you are looking at it from a distance, but I have gone and cleaned the front and painted over some scratched and nicks. Additionally I am missing tap handles, but this tough as the ones I want run $35 a piece and I was not real happy about dropping another $175 on this project right now. I am also missing the pieces to connect the taps to the liquid, but I have had a tough time finding someone with all of the parts in stock and other than More Beer most places sell it in 3 separate parts. The single tap that is hanging out on the right is the one closest to the door and will be my root beer tap. The one on the farthest left will be cider and the 3 in the middle will be an assortment of beer. I put a bead of caulk in between the collar and the fridge to help seal some gaps and to help secure collar down. With the weight of the collar and the lid it is pretty stable, but the caulk should keep it from being jostled. I am pretty pleased with the results. I now have more storage room in the kegerator, although it is harder for me to reach the bombers I keep on the floor next to the kegs. I will make up for this by storing more in the floating basket on top. You can see that I also use this as a place to store my tailgate supplies. During football season this means all sorts of condiments, but right now it is just 2 bottles of mustard. I also have my yeast, hops and grain for my next brew, which should be a Nut Brown on Sunday.

Kegerator Update

I have finished building my collar and have removed the lid from the freezer. It looks good, I just need to drill holes for the taps and to run the hoses in plus attach the lid to the collar. Today the rest of my shanks and taps come in from Northern Brewer, so this weekend I should finish my install for at least one or two of the taps and may even be pouring 3 beers, 1 cider and a root beer from taps by Sunday. I have decided that once this is done I am chucking the rest of the 12 oz bottles I have sitting around in my garage and free up a little space. I am also extra motivated to clean out the garage to make it a little nicer to show off the finished kegerator.

I have kegged my Lefse Blonde, and took a few tastes although no full glasses. It has a nice Belgian character to it. It is not going to be a super easy drinking beer, but I already have the Mild on tap and am going to be brewing a nut brown next and planning an all grain cream ale after that. A complex beer on tap wouldn't hurt.

Fermenting Update

After what was easily the longest lag I have ever experienced or expect to experience, my Lefse Blond was bubbling away on Friday with a very fresh krausen. It was still going strong on Sunday, and I would guess the lag was from last Sunday until Friday or a full 5 days. I plan on slowly ramping up the temp a degree a day for the next few days to ensure that the fermentation finishes off strong. I will probably not rack it next weekend, with the time that I will be spending on the other side of town visiting Lee and Kyle while they are in town. Family comes before beer, at least when it means that I won't be around to work on it.

Lefse Blond Brew Day

Haven't brewed in a long time, and I was running out in the fridge, so I sat down on Sunday to brew. The Lefse Blond is an incredibly easy brew process with no specialty grains just 2 kinds of sugar. Boiled up 5 gallons of water, dumped in 6 lbs of malt extract and a bag of candi sugar. Once I felt that was mixed, I dumped in 1.5 oz of Spalt hops and started my 60 minute boil. No boil overs and a pretty easy process, other than keeping Rachel from getting to close to the rig. Dumped in my flavor hops along with a Whirfloc tablet and then flame out and cooling time. This was the second time I used my sump pump freezing water cooling process. I brought the temp down to under 120 using tap water then switch over to the pump. I was able to get the wort down into the 60's before racking it to my carboy. This was the best cooling I had ever done and could have pitched the yeast immediately, but the smack pack was a bit old and hadn't swelled yet. I waited 10 hours, then just pitched the yeast anyway. It was lagging, but I expected this and will give it 72 hours before even thinking about it again.

Widmer Pale Ale is Back

I don't remember if I blogged about this beer back when they first released it in 2007, but I vividly remember drinking several six packs of this in the summer of 2007. It has to be the most balanced, drinkable pale ale I have ever had. I spent quite a bit of time when I first started homebrewing looking for a clone of this beer as it was a limited edition and I was in danger of never having it again. I never did find a recipe, but now it doesn't matter. I really love the unique taste of the Summit hops and the beer was really supremely balanced. As soon as I find this in the store I will be picking up a six pack and may have to think about trying to grab a keg for the old kegerator.

2009 Mesa Strong Beer Fest

Hit the fest this weekend and wanted to let folks know about some of the beers. Best beer I had went to the 2007 Stone Old Guardian Bourbon Barrel aged. I have had Old Guardian before, but after being aged in the bourbon barrel it was extra yummy. Slight oak flavor and just a hint of the bourbon. Most interesting beers was a tie between the Chipotle Stout I had and the Coconut Coffee Stout that Matt had. I enjoyed mine and Matt hated his. Other notables were the Serpent Stout from Lost Abby and the Winter Wobbler from Four Peaks. I waited in line for over a half an hour for a chance at a taste of DFH's World Wide Stout. Missed it by about 20 people, so I had to settle for a 90 Minute instead. Pretty good fest, overall I have no doubt that when compared to next weekend I will see this as the more personal and low key of the two. Next up GABF in Tempe with a whole crew of people. Crowds and long lines. The oddest part of the fest next weekend is that the lines will be longest for really bad beer.

No Brewing & Killing a Keg

So I had originally planned to brew on Sunday, but I forgot to pick up water so no go. I did finish off my keg of Milk Stout on Sunday. It was a pretty good beer, with the only problem being some scorching that occurred during the boil which left some kind of break material in the finished beer that never dropped out. This leaves me with the mild and the red. My CO2 tank appears to be empty and I am going to blame this on the red being hardly drinkable at all. I am really considering dry hopping this beer to make it a bit more to my liking. I can't commit to brewing next weekend as it is Valentine's Day, but I am going to give it a shot on Sunday.

Lagunitas Cruising with Ruben and The Jets

I picked up a bottle of Lagunitas Cruising with Ruben and The Jets ale last week and decided to crack it open today. I see most websites listing it as a Imperial Stout. The bottle makes reference to an ale but that is it. It is dark, roasty with a brown head so IS it is. This is much more complex that most Imperial Stouts I run into. Very spicy taste with a good bit of sweet raisins in the nose. Very little of the roasted nose that I would expect. There is a roast to the taste but this is almost secondary to the spicy sweetness. It does have what I would call a Lagunitas quality to it, probably from the use of a proprietary yeast strain. It is interesting enough to keep my attention, but not something I would seek out.

Just wanted to note that I purchased my tickets to the Mark Haugan Birthday Beer Bash 2009 aka Mesa Strong Beer Fest. They are holding it at the end of Feb (day before my B-Day) this year. Lagunitas should be there with tastes of Maximus if I so desire. Some great breweries are announced and I can't wait to post about them. Check back in a month. Next up for homebrewing is the Belgian blonde. Look for me to brew this next weekend or the weekend after.

Mild Tasting

I went ahead and grabbed a taster of the mild I kegged this past weekend. It wasn't quite fully carbed, but the style should be a bit light of CO2 versus things like a pale ale or IPA. The nose on this beer is incredible. It has notes of chocolate and great maltiness. The flavor is somewhere around a light nut brown. I taste a nutty flavor with a pleasant maltiness to it. This is going to be a very easy drinking beer. Sharon liked it, but is looking for more CO2, so I will up the PSI a bit. I followed this taste with another taste of the milk stout I have on tap, so I can compare the 2. The mild is definitely easier to drink. Without the stout roast flavor it goes down easy. I could see having the mild on tap year round, where I think it might be tough for me to drink the stout in the warm months. This has led me to think that I should concentrate on the milk stout keg for a while. I am also still thinking about experimenting with bottling from the keg, as I have a nut brown and beligan blonde kit waiting to be brewed and I don't want them to sit around too long. I will have to wait at least another 2 weeks (no earlier than January 25) to brew the blonde next as I am too busy the next couple of Sunday's, but I will need to have fridge space by February 15 or so to move the blonde.

What Happened in December

Let's start with what I brewed. On Sunday December 21 I ran outside and brewed my NB Mild kit. It was easily the coldest brew day I have done. I thought that being able to sit by the burner to keep warm would not be bad, but I was mistaken. I ended up breaking out gloves to keep from freezing. I had a boil over, but this was due to being distracted and inside taking care of the kids for a bit. I racked this beer to a keg on January 3rd but due to a bad arm, I did not brew on the 4th like I had planned. I finished off the Wit keg this past weekend as well. I have the fermentor and keg sitting outside soaking in Oxyclean. I also have a plastic bucket out there that I need to rinse out and start another cider soon while the temps are still low and easy to control. I should try and get 2 cider batches done while the temps are down, but right now I need to finish off the keg I have on tap so I have some place to put all of this cider. The mild will be ready to tap in time for my 1/2 marathon completion party, where I can start having a beer or two more frequently during the week. I ran over a bottle of my red to the neighbor while I was off and he seemed to enjoy it as a easy drinking beer. I still find it a bit sweet and would love to dry hop it, but I am thinking about bottling an bunch of it up then hitting about half a keg with the hops. I was able to hit the Lost Abbey party at Papago on 12/18 after doing some Christmas shopping. I got Old Viscosity and Gift of the Magi on tap and it was a great party.

Transfers

Moved my Red and 5 gallons of cider into kegs yesterday. Expect to see an update on the taste of the beer next week. The cider will sit for a while. I still have close to 2.5 gallons on tap and 5 gallons sitting upstairs. I plan to start another 5 gallons of cider this weekend and hopefully brew a Belgian Blonde (Lefse Blonde from Northern Brewer).

Red Ale

So by request I am brewing a red ale. I ran to the homebrew shop on Saturday to pick up a kit. I went with a Brewer's Best kit for expedience as the shop was kind of busy. The kit came with a small can of extract, 2 lbs of light DME, 2 oz of Willamette hops and a sealed back of specialty grains, black patent and some crystal. I steeped the grains in a gallon and a half on the stove while I heated up 4 and a half gallons in the fryer. Once the steep was complete, I dumped the run off into the kettle. In no time I was boiling and added the malts. A few minutes later came the first 1 oz hop addition for 55 minutes. The last 5 minutes saw another hop addition along with a wirfloc tab. This was the first time I was using my new chilling system. I ran the IC with tap water until the temp was under 150 then I hooked the IC to a sump pump in a bucket of ice water. I ran the pump and returned the runnings back into the ice water. The result was 85 degree wort in about 15 minutes. Next time I'll use 4 gallons of ice and I should be able to get the wort down to below 80. I pitched 2 packs of hydrated Mutton's dry yeast. This worked real well on my sweet stout and I think that the higher cell count will help attenuate my beer better. I pitched at around 83 degrees. A bit warm but frankly cooler than I have ever done it and 8 hours earlier.

Tailgate for First Game

So here is my post for the first tailgate.

It isn't happening. No one can come so I canceled the tailgate. I am thinking of going to Four Peaks before the game so look for a review of their new Endless Summer beer.