Krausen Rising

So sad, my last brew day was September 25th of last year. I made a saison. I wrote about it. At the time, I’d just bottled, and I was worried that it wouldn’t carbonate. That turned out not to be a problem. The problem, and this one is particularly tragic, is that the recipe called for spices, and I really should have used them. I’ve popped a few since I bottled them, and there’s a slightly too honeylike maltiness that I don’t like. I was hoping it was a problem with attenuation, and that once the bottles were fully carbonated, the flavor would go away, but I’m not so sure now.

I’d never noticed that honey malt flavor in saisons before, but one of the double-edged benefits about homebrewing for me is the tasting experience I gain from my mistakes. Since I’m an autodidactic brewer, I make weird recipe altering choices, or I brew under less than optimal circumstances - uncontrolled fermentation temperature, poor sparge efficiency due to equipment and user malfunction, untested hop strain additions because I buy what’s available - and due to these variables, I often end up with unbalanced beer. I’ve made IPAs so grapefruity they seemed like beer cocktails*, learned first-hand about oxidation after allowing my fermentation temperature to hit 92+ degrees F, uh… I forget what else. I don’t really want to dwell. But after each of these experiments, failed or otherwise (my first partial mash, a poorly sparged, super low gravity wit, was awesome), I suddenly find myself able to pick out small amounts of flavors I previously hadn’t noticed. I’m pretty good at tasting oxidation in beers, for instance, and after my grapefruit IPA, I can’t handle certain hoppy beers with that fruit’s trademark sharp citrus flavor that I used to dig (Green Flash’s Le Freak is one example). So now that I underspice my saison, I’ve found a malt flavor I don’t particularly like when it is too prominent - this honey thing. It would work under different circumstances, I’m sure, but it’s not working in my saison.

But what makes this saison, and my knee-jerk spice stinginess in the brewing of it, so tragic is this: tonight, before pouring myself a small glass from the ole tap-a-draft in the fridge, I first ground a tiny bit of black pepper and one single coriander seed and sprinkled them in a freshly rinsed glass, swirled it around a bit, then removed the obvious chunks. I sniffed the glass to be sure I could smell a bit of spice, then poured about six ounces of the saison in there. It was great. I loved it. The black pepper and coriander balanced out the overly malty flavors and brought out the character of the yeast perfectly. Motherfucker. This is, however, great incentive to brew another batch, and soon.

* I’ve heard that complaint about West Coast IPAs before - “Eww! It tastes like I’m drinking grapefruit juice!” Yeah, well, you should try my IPA (brew #07 - I still have a few bottles left) before you shoot your mouth off about unbalanced commercial IPAs. My fuckup makes those beers seem balanced.

On September 25th, 2008, I brewed a Saison.  I bottled it March 1st, 2009. ‘Sokay, it’s 7% ABV, it can handle five months and some change in secondary. I took the recipe from Zymurgy. There was an article, “A Saison for Every Season”, a lovely article, written, I believe, by one of the members of the Maltose Falcons down in Southern California. I decided against using spices, though, and I ended up adding extra malt extract, out of fear of a low gravity, so it’s a modified recipe.

Saisons seem to usually come with spices. I decided against it because I was in a particularly knee-jerking mood. I think it had something to do with drinking too many overly spiced wits. Also, I wanted to see whether spices were necessary with a Saison-specific yeast.

Here’s the recipe:
9 lbs. Belgian Pilsener malt
3 lbs. white wheat
0.5 lbs. Vienna malt
0.25 lbs. acidulated malt
2 lbs. light dry malt
1.5 lbs. Belgian Candi Sugar (added 5 minutes from flameout)

2 oz. Sterling pellets - 6.0% AA for 60 minutes
2 oz. Vanguard pellets - 4.4% AA for 5 minutes

White Labs WLP568 (Belgian Style Saison Ale Yeast Blend)

13.4 quarts of mash water
17 quarts sparge water

Protein rest @ 120F for 20 minutes
Mashed at 150-155F for 1 hour
Ended up with 6.5 gallons of wort at 1.048

Boiled, adding additional extract and candi sugar.

Aerated with a stone for 30 minutes

Pitched a 20oz starter (made at 12:30am that day), wort was at 80F

SG: 1.076

October 12th, gravity was 1.024

January 29, 2009, gravity was 1.022
Added 1 packet of Red Star Pasteur Champagne Yeast that I’d mixed with about 2oz of unfiltered, warm tap water.

March 1, 2009, FG was at 1.022
Bottled into 1 3.5 gallon plastic bottle (tap-a-draft system), 9 12oz bottles, 3 16oz bottles, and 7 22oz bottles.

Tasting notes as of bottling:
Light amber in color
Some residual sweetness, though not too strong
Nice malt flavor like malted-milk kind of malt (as opposed to cereal or biscuity)
Somewhat citrusy

We’ll see if the bottles carbonate. I used the regular amount of sugar, so the tap-a-draft thing could get ugly.

I’ve been a little down on brewing for a few months, now. A couple beers I made turned out disappointing, and one of them (#07, the IPA) may have had some minor infection that made it taste way way too harshly grapefruity. My Imperial Stout hung at around 1.032SG (between 8-9% ABV, I think). I was just having no luck at all. Then I made a Hefeweizen and never got it into secondary (see previous stuck fermentation in my only other carboy). My friend and great homebrewer, Nate helped with good advice and positive comments, but I was starting to get very discouraged, though I didn’t want to admit it. Friends and fellow Beercrafters Christy and Brad have been brewing up excellent extract-only brews, and sampling their craft has been encouraging me to get my hands back in the boiling wort again.

With the goal of re-entering the brewing world, yesterday I bit the bullet, did a bunch of cleaning and taking stock of my brewing equipment, sanitized my wine thief, and took me a sample of my hefe. It’d been sitting in the primary since March 22 (that’s five months it sat there), and looking very glum. Shockingly, it wasn’t bad. Maybe it was bad, but not as bad as I thought, but I dunno - it tasted like a mellow but definitely German-style Hefeweizen to me. Banana phenols and all. I ended up bottling it in two 3 Liter plastic bottles (Tap-a-draft system), a 22oz bottle, a 16.5oz bottle, and a 12oz bottle. If all goes well, I’ll enter it in the Punk Rock Homebrew Contest/Festival/Party thingamajig coming up on the 30th.

After sampling the Hefeweizen, but before bottling it, I tried out my Imperial Stout, previously stuck at 1.032, last checked March 22nd (the day I brewed the Hefeweizen). It’s now down to betwee 1.023 and 1.025, which puts it at around 11% ABV, pretty much what I’d hoped for. It’s incredibly smoky (that was a lot of Rauch malt), with chocolate undertones and a bit of tamari. It reminded me somewhat of a smoky, less tamari-laden Old Viscosity. I’m in love with it, but it’s definitely a sipping beer. I hope to bottle it in the next week.

Now I’m planning my next beer… maybe another all-extract Hefeweizen, just bottled without sitting in the primary for five fucking months.

I’m going back to pre-sparge days for this week’s brew - an all-extract hefeweizen - from a kit, no less! Awesome! The kit’s just 6lbs. of “wheat” DME (60/40 wheat/barley), a couple ounces of low-alpha hops (I’ve already forgotten the strain), and a bottle of WLP300 - hefeweizen yeast.

I’ll be making an all-grain whit some time in late April/early May. This is for simplicity and fun. I keep upgrading my equipment and complexifying my process with each brew, which is the reason I’m making an all-extract beer this time. I’ll still have a yeast starter, and it’ll be a full boil, but other than that, it’s back to my first four beers. Not that I’ve come all that far. It’s #11 because it’s the 12th beer I’ll have brewed (the count starts from 0).

I went out to Beer, Beer, and More Beer and bought me an 8 gallon kettle with a spigot, notched lid, and an immersion chiller, and now I’m all about the all-grain (next up, though, an all-extract imperial stout because I’m sick to frickin’ meow of all-day brewdays). Then I went over to the Oak Barrel and picked up about 12 lbs. of grain, a vial of WL’s good ‘ol California Ale Yeast, and some ahtanum hops. For grains, I used a 8.5 lbs. of 2-row (American), three different colors of crystal (40, 60, and 80, IIRC) and some Vienna or Munich. I wants me a nice, strong copper ale with good hops (also using amarillo and magnum that I stashed away before the beginning of this here hop shortage that has hop wranglers out killing one another and any innocents that get in the way). Then I waited two or three weeks, because who wants flavorful malt, right? Really, I was just busy, then sick, then, well, it was three weeks later and time to brew.

First, of course, I tested the new equipment on water. Can my stove heat 7 gallons of water to the boiling point? Yes. Does the spigot on the kettle leak? Yes. Okay, tighten everything. Does the immersion chiller work? Yes, but you have to really tighten down the vinyl tubing coming out of it to avoid drips.

Once I determined my new equipment worked, I set aside some time to brew. The night before, I mixed up my yeast starter, but I’d had a bit too much to drink and I waited until about 1:00am to mix it, so I don’t really remember the process very well, and I’m sure that contributed to the epic lag time I experienced with this beer.

My first time using my new equipment and doing a full boil yielded one major problem - I ended up with about 1.5 gallons too much wort at the end of the boil. I probably should have boiled until that 1.5 gallons was gone, but I was pressed for time. So once again, instead of the gravity I wanted (1.057-1.060), I ended up at 1.052 or so. Not so horrible, really, but I’m getting sick of these weaker-than-desired worts.

It took only about 35 minutes to chill the wort to pitching temperature. I racked and pitched, then set it aside. For the next four days, I waited, and nothing happened. Finally, on the fifth day, as I was about to pick up some more yeast, the fermentation began. It was still cold enough in the house that I needed to heat the carboy for an hour or two every day, bringing the temperature up to between 64 and 68 degrees. It would then drop to just below 60 overnight, and I’d heat again. A blow-off tube was crucial.

Which brings me to my next problem - laziness. Bubbles were still coming up for three weeks, and I never racked it off to secondary. Also, I never replaced the blow-off tube with a proper airlock. Also, I never changed the water in the bucket holding the blow-off tube. Combine all that, and I ended up with a bit of mold in the water sitting in the bucket with the blow-off tube, and when I racked to secondary this past Saturday, the beer tasted bad. Not sure just how bad, yet. Not sure if it’s an infection, nastiness related to overlong contact with the trub, or if it’s just the more complex than usual grain bill tasting funny when young. I’m going to wait a week and see. If mold starts growing on top of the beer, I know it’s an infection. If it just sits there and glares at me, I’ll take a sample, have a taste, and see if I want to throw it out or bottle it.

I set out to brew a pale. At the end of brew day, looking at the starting gravity and bitterness units, I figured I’d probably call it a “session IPA”. Now that I’ve racked it to secondary and had a taste, I think I have to call it a straight IPA. I ended up with 85% apparent attenuation, from 1.055 to 1.008 (making it about 6% ABV). At the moment, it’s a light-bodied, dry IPA, distinctly bitter, but not overwhelmingly so (for my west coast palate), with a load of hop flavor and aroma - citrusy, and a little spicy. I just added two ounces of Amarillo pellets to the secondary, which will increase the hop aroma quite a bit. This beer is almost ready to drink. It’s the first beer I’ve brewed that I won’t be throwing most of the hydrometer sample down the drain.

I meant to brew my Imperial Porter with Belgian Aspirations last week, but was put off the task when some of the local de-gentrifying agents attempted unsuccessfully to steal my car, ruining the steering column in the process. I couldn’t pick up the ingredients I needed, and ended up in a funk that meant I wasn’t in the mood to brew, anyway. Looks like I’ll be brewing the Porter some time in early December.

I don’t know if this is part 1 in an ongoing series, but seeing as I’m mostly creating my own recipes rather than brewing from kits or recipes in books, and there are plenty of equations that go into determining things like BUs, ABV, potential OG, etc., I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself writing exciting, math-based posts in the future. Hence the title.

My equations come mostly or entirely from Ray Daniels and his thoroughly wonderful Designing Great Beers. He doesn’t cover every major style, particularly now with the Belgian explosion well underway, but his coverage of the classic German and British styles is very useful, and the initial chapters on water, hops, yeast, and malt are great regardless what kind of beer you brew. He dedicates three chapters to hops alone!

But enough of book larnin’. Onto practical applications, and awesome funtime math problems.

In the IPA I just brewed (which is, by the way, the best-looking beer I’ve ever made as it sits there with a three inch thick, creamy krausen, still slowly bubbling at 70 degrees F after five days), I used two different hops in four additions. The hops are all pellets, and include Centennial at 10.4% alpha, and Amarillo at 8.9% alpha. My cheap-ass plastic scale kicked the bucket just before the last two additions, so the last two measurements are suspect. But I’m not entering any contests, so I don’t really care.

Hop additions to my new IPA:
1.25 ounces Centennial @ 60 minutes
0.75 ounces Centennial @ 30 minutes
1.00 ounces Amarillo @ 20 minutes
1.00 ounces Amarillo @ 10 minutes

I’ll be adding another couple ounces, probably of Amarillo, in the secondary, but dry hopping doesn’t extract any alpha oils according to Daniels, so they won’t enter any equations.

To determine the IBU, first I need to adjust for the gravity of the boiling wort, as gravities above 1.050 impede utilization. That’s a simple equation. Daniels calls it Cgravity (correction for gravity).

Cgravity = 1 + [(Gboil - 1.050) / 2 ]

My final gravity for five gallons was 1.055. My boiling volume was 3.5. Multiplying 1.055 * 5 gets the amount of GU (gravity units) in the wort. Dividing that by 3.5 gets the gravity of the boiling wort, 1.078.

Daniels’ equation for determining IBU is as follows:

IBU = Woz * U% * A% * 7,489 / (Vgal + Cgravity)

Woz = weight of hops in ounces
U% = utilization percentage of the hops
A% = percent alpha acids of the hops
Vgal = volume in gallons of the final wort
7,489 is a constant. I forget what for. Read the book.

Utilization percentage I determined from a table in Daniels. Here’s my math:

IBU for 60 minute hop addition:

1.25 * .3 * .104 * 7489 / 5.7 = 51.24

IBU for 30 minute hop addition:

.75 * .24 * .104 * 7489 / 5.7 = 24.60

IBU for 20 minute hop addition:

1 * .19 * .089 * 7489 / 5.7 = 22.22

IBU for 10 minute hop addition:

1 * .15 * .089 * 7489 / 5.7 = 17.54

Total IBU:

115.60

That’s a huge number! Daniels’ style guide for IPA says 40-60 IBU. Of course, that was also before the hophead explosion. Lots of explosions in US brewing lately. I have a hard time believing the numbers I came up with, but Daniels gives a simple example beer that uses a little over half an ounce less hops at only 5% alpha, and comes up with a little less than half the IBUs I did, so maybe that’s right. Of course, there’s also a saturation point, and I put all my pellets in a hop bag during the boil, which will probably impede utilization, but still, I’m expecting a very hoppy beer.

Before brew day, I was too lazy to do these equations. During brew day, I was too occupied with actually brewing the beer to do them. The only math I did that day was to figure out how much DME I needed to add to make up for the extreme inefficiency of my mash. I was worried that my mere four ounces of hops wouldn’t be enough for an IPA. Looks like my fears were a little overblown. I’m expecting a final ABV of between 4.7% (assuming 65% AA, unlikely with White Labs’ California Ale Yeast) and 5.6% (assuming 78% AA, definitely the high end, but perhaps possible with the aforementioned yeast). I will definitely be bottling this one as soon as possible (two weeks in secondary, max). I’ve had between 78% and 85% attenuation with the previous beers I brewed with this yeast (The WL website says 73% - 80%, so I guess that’s not too far off), so who knows.

I had my first Tuesday Brewday yesterday. It was a combination of disaster and triumph. All my brews are a combination of disaster and triumph, so only the details are different. Or as the Bard of New Jersey would say, “It’s all the same - only the names have changed.”

First, my fuckups:

I forgot to make a yeast starter. I was so proud of my yeast starter last time. What a thrill that was. Well, this time, I just had to toss a vial of California Ale Yeast into the final wort. No huge deal, except I was hoping to have an ale fermented with a starter, and a relatively controlled temperature during fermentation to see if it made for a less homebrew-tasting brew. Plus, no starter means longer lag time, and who loves lag time? It was also, however, an experiment with Centennial and Amarillo hops - I’m using only those two in this beer, because I suspect they are the hops I love - so I’ll still learn something from this brew.

Second, and probably biggest mistake - no food provisions. I buy groceries for dinner on a need-to-have basis, so there’s nothing in the pantry. We have some staples, but I’m not going to make dal while I’m boiling wort. I ended up overcaffeinated, light-headed, hungry, and stupid. I blame the time change for confusing me as to when I should be hungry. I made a quick burrito run while I was waiting for the mash to finish, but even after the burrito, I was feeling the caffeine overload. Fortunately, the Dornado showed up with his brains and a little brawn and he helped me calculate how much dry extract I needed, as well as helping to measure it out, handing it to me so I could stir it into the wort (after I’d added the first hops [in a hop bag], of course, because otherwise, where’s the challenge?)

I tried some completely lame version of batch sparging, as well. I ended up getting something like 50% efficiency, which means 11 pounds of grain (one of them crystal 40) gave me enough gravity to make a bitter, not a pale or IPA. Fortunately, I’d stocked up on dry extract, so I added about 2.5 lbs to the wort, resulting in an OG of 1.055 - 10 points less than I wanted, but not bad, and more in line with the pale I was intending to create.

There were also triumphs:

I no longer fear the brewing process. I don’t get fuddled and wonder what to do next. Yes, I forgot to heat my sparge water while the mash was going, which cost me about half an hour, but generally, things went smoother because I am more familiar with all the steps and why they are taken. I particularly like that I can look through my brewer’s log to make adjustments to the wort, as all the efficiencies and whatnot that are specific to my system are sitting there waiting to be interpreted. The more beers I brew, the more I can refer to my own logs for advice.

My biggest triumph, though, was the cooling process. Next to bottling, cooling is my least favorite part of brewing. It may actually be my least favorite, since it’s the most dangerous, contamination-wise. I have yet to put the time and effort into buying and setting up an immersion chiller, so I take my 20 quart pot, plop it into the sink, run water around it with the sink hose (gun-type valve removed), and dump ice bags into the water 1/4 to 1/2 bag at a time. This time, I figured out that plain old cold tapwater does a lot to cool down a 180 degree wort - not so much ice is necessary at first. But when the wort gets down to 90 to 100 degrees, the cooling slows way down. That’s when the majority of the ice should be used. I managed to cool down the wort (3 - 3.5 gallons) to 80 degrees in about 40 minutes. The 1.5 to 2 gallons of filtered water I added to the carboy did the rest, knocking the temperature down to about 70 degrees by pitching time.

I very much hope to have a 9 gallon kettle and an immersion chiller for my next brew (two weeks!), so my porter with Belgian aspirations can be a full boil.

UPDATE:
Oh, my heart is all a-twitter! Shortly after I posted this, I heard a “tweet” kind of popping noise behind me, where sits the carboy of my new beer, and lo, I had heard the first bubble of fermentation pop through the airlock! I’ve never heard the first bubble before! Baby took her first step!

I was unable to take my first mini-mashed beer, a Belgian-style whit, to Tidal Wave this year (instead I drank a six pack of Lagunitas Kronik/Censored copper ale). I brewed too late. A week ago I bottled the brew into three six liter plastic bottles, for use with the tap-a-draft system.

I sit here at work drinking the results. There’s a bit of a funky young hop flavor (Scottr noticed it - I attributed it to the wheat at first taste, but I think he’s right - it’s a not altogether pleasant hop funk). Even with that, it’s my best beer to date. It makes me excited to brew again, and finally I have some homebrew to sample as I make more homebrew.

I bottled my I2PA tonight. Based off Russian River’s Pliny the Elder, but with the initial (and strange) mashed hop addition coming from my own Nugget harvest from a year and a half ago. I dried the hell out of those hops in the attic, then shoved them in an airtight, glass container and put them in the freezer. They stayed pretty fresh-smelling for almost two years. So I made them my whole hops addition.

I am very good at messing up. This manifested itself in several ways during the brewing of the I2PA, though from what I tasted tonight at the bottling, none of that mattered. The main mess-up was just after I pitched the yeast. I shoved the stopper all the way through, into the carboy. I figured that would either ruin the beer or make no difference, so I grabbed a different stopper and let fermentation begin. Fermentation commenced about 24 hours later, a long wait, but it’s a strong beer. The air lock’s burbling never reached the insane heights of my previous brews, but I think that’s because I moved the fermenter into the back room, the computer room, all the windows of which have been towelled, sheeted, or otherwise covered to allow me to clear a dungeon in Oblivion, mid-day, without having to mess with my gamma settings. So that room has a steady, nearly cave-like temperature.

Yeah, so, a week or so after brew night, I racked the Stopper Hopped Nugbuster into the secondary fermenter (from a 6.5 gallon carboy into a 5 gallon carboy). I tasted it during this racking, and it was delightful. Hoppy as hell, high alcohol content, sweet malt. As expected.

The next night I brewed the Tidal Whit, so named because it must be ready in time for Tidal Wave, the annual free metal festival in San Francisco. For this brew, I did my first mini-mash. It was a clusterfuck. First, the lady and I went to Lanesplitter in Oakland for some pizza and beer before the brew. We figured we be home no later than 7:00, as we were meeting at 5:30. As luck would have it, we ran into some friends and ended up drinking more beer (Jen drinking more Diet Coke) and getting home around 8:30. The brew commenced around 9:00. Jen crashed around 10:00, and I finished brewing around 2:00am. This was my first mini-mash, I was already half-drunk when we got home, and I drank two more 22oz bottles of strong beer during the brew. When I staggered out of bed to piss around 6:30am, I checked up on the fermenter, and found it was already bubbling. That’s the quickest fermentation I’ve ever seen. I pitched around 1:00am, it was bubbling less than six hours later.

I learned something from the Whit. As I watched it ferment, I feared the worst. There was a nasty cake of yeast around the top, long chunks drifting down from the cake, tendril-like, into the wort. It looked hellish and slimy. Yeast is always a base creature, but this looked to me exactly like I imagined a wild yeast infection would appear. I’ve been waiting at the edge of my seat for the past week, and finally today I racked the Whit, the first time I felt it was okay to sample it. Turns out, that nasty yeast cake is the infamous top fermenting yeast cake of yore. Belgian yeast is primitive and still not entirely domesticated. It left a crust in the fermenter that the I2PA didn’t. But it tastes fine. It’s a weak one - between 3.5% and 4.5% ABV - but it should be great ice cold with carbonation, exactly what I hoped for.

Next up, disappointment. Somehow, the beer you make always makes a change for the worst between bottling and drinking. I don’t know how it happens, but I am ready.