Krausen Rising

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 changed the name of this blog from “Climbing” to “Krausen Rising”. Originally, this was to be a blog about hiking, brewing, and playing music, with the idea that all of those things are part of my progression, my climb, through life. Turns out, I don’t have the poetic nature required to write about hikes over and over and not repeat myself constantly. I plan to have more posts about playing, but this blog has become primarily a blog about beer.

On which front… the Maddhouse IPA suddenly started fermenting again. I noticed signs of fermentation after I plopped in the two ounces of hops for dry hopping. I swirled the beer in the carboy a bit after I dropped in the hops, and the next morning, I noticed some foam on top of the beer. I thought maybe it was the hops (pellets) dissolving into solution. Just in case, though, I gave the carboy another gentle swirling (being careful not to suck the water from the airlock into the carboy). It’s been a little over a week, now, and the foam is obviously a thin yeast “cake”, and the air lock is producing bubbles about twice per minute. This is after at least one week of absolutely no acitivity. The temperature, which has been a steady 64 - 68 degrees F since secondary fermentation appeared to stop, went up to 70 last night. This fermentation confuses me. When I racked to secondary, the beer was at 1.010. I didn’t expect it to go down any more. I did add a cup of a homemeade vodka/herbal infusion. I wonder if that could have added more sugars to ferment?

Last year, the Bistro held their first ever Barrel Aged Beer Festival. I missed it. As usual for me, I wasn’t particularly into barrel aged beer when the festival happened, but hearing about it planted a seed in my brain, and since then I’ve tried and enjoyed some barrel aged beer. It was the Oaked Bastard that shone a glorious bright light in my head and really got that seed a-growin’, so by the month before this year’s festival, I was excited. As I’d figured, the weather was not great. When Jen and I showed up, around 1:00pm, it was drizzling. When we left, a little after 5:00pm, it was raining. But that wasn’t a big deal. If anything, it lightened the crowd, which meant more beer for me.

I paid my $25 for a fancy glass and six pours and finagled a list of beers at the fest (they were out of lists at the front, so I had to find someone kind enough to give me theirs, not actually a difficult task). Usually I have my first beer at the front table, since there are always good beers there and I want something now, but a quick glance over the list showed that Port Brewing’s Angel’s Share 2006 and 2007 were both at this festival. I made a sobriety-inspired quick and efficient beeline to the table with the Port Brewing beers. I had a vested interest in the Angel’s Share, since I’d just purchased four bottles of it online, never having tasted it. Sometimes I’m a sucker for the limited edition. The Angel’s Share had the look of an epic, awesome beer - thick and brown, with an incredibly rich-looking head. I took it back to the table, gave it a swirl, and sniffed it. Huge malt, wood, vanilla, port - overwhelmingly awesome, basically. I took a sip and any doubts about my $64 online purchase dissipated. A sipping beer as good as any of the cask strength scotch whiskeys I’ve ever had. Yum!

The rest of the day was bliss. At first, I thought I was doomed to disappointment after trying first the 2006 Angel’s Share. The Bear Republic Black Rye (my second beer) was a bummer, not because it was bad, but it just couldn’t stand up to the strength and thickness of the Angel’s Share. It was the hoppiest beer I tried. I decided to go for a sure thing, and popped over to the Stone Russian Imperial Stout tap. I was not disappointed. By the time the day was over, the Drakes Imperial Stout with blueberries, the Schooners Old Woody Barleywine, Port Brewing’s Yellow Bus, and the Valley Black Cat all blew me away, amongst others. I’ve decided it’s time to start buying multiple bottles of, say, Stone’s Russian Imperial Stout, and cellar (closet, actually, but you know what I mean). I’m sure the results won’t be as great, but it’s worth a try.

I took tasting notes, though after the first hour or two I was overwhelmed by the task of writing down all the impressions each huge, complex beer made, so eventually they degenerated into something along the lines of “woody, bourbon, blah blah blah”. Regardless, I’ll post my notes when I have a chance.

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!

Okay, my second Session post, hopefully a bit more inspired than the last one. This month’s session is sponsored by the incredible Lost Abbey. This day’s session hosted at this post on the Lost Abbey brewer’s blog.

Well, shit. Four of the five categories I use on this blog are covered in this session’s topic - Beer, brewing, drinking, and music. So of course, I have no idea what to say.

Maybe I should talk about their most recent awesome confluence in my life.

Anderson Valley Brewing holds a Beer festival every Spring, around May 5th. I’ve been there twice now. Both times have squared my interest in beer, (as in, $beer_interest = $beer_interest * $beer_interest) but this last one brought in music, as well, and revitalized my two-year lagged interest in brewing.

The beers at the AV Beer Fest are plentiful and awesome - the freshest and most diverse I’ve ever tasted. Only Toronado comes close in variety, but nothing beats the massive, diverse crowd. This year I was lucky enough to finagle a pass to the Brewer’s campground from a friend with friends. We spent the night wandering from camp site to camp site, but eventually ended up at the Lagunitas camp, where their house band (I forget the name) was playing an awesome set of music that sounded like it would have been comfortable in SST’s lineup in its heyday. Between that and the keg of Hairy Eyeball, I was transported into another blissful and much more stumbly realm (in my defense, I think I was co-existing in two planes at once - one this here regular ball o’ mud, and one a cloudy ethereal place without roots or tent spikes - so it was hard not to stumble a bit). I don’t know how it came up, but I found out my friend and shreddin’ guitarist Christy had been trying to put together a beer-based metal band for a while, but couldn’t find anyone else who’d commit. By the next morning, the lineup was near complete - Christy and Brad (who I’d driven to the event - a crazily dextrous bassist and pro recording engineer type) on guitars, Suzie (the friend with friends) on keyboards and occasional woodwind instrument, and me (beer enthusiast) plucking at the bass. By the next afternoon, Brad’s roommate Steve (musical prodigy, also pro recording engineer type) on drums. The name had been decided on months, maybe years before. That was the easy part - Beercraft.

Since that day, we’ve combined good beer, good smoke, and occasional practices (very busy people in this band) into a highly fermentable mash with four songs (a fifth on the way) about drinking, brewing, and the ghosts of both. Our intent is to play breweries, beer fests, and parties - where there is good beer, we go.

I’ve arranged to take a day off work every other week to brew. Not so complicated, since I was taking a half day off every week for pager duty (I’m on-call every other week - we arranged a paid day off per week of pager duty at work). All-grain or mini-mash means six hours or so brewing for me, and I’m not always stoked to lose an entire weekend day to brewing.

My next brew, next Tuesday, will be a simple pale ale. I’ll be trying to control fermentation temperature somewhat, with a half-assed system involving a 48 quart cooler, a stick-on thermometer, and icewater. I’d like to upgrade to something along the line of Ken Schwartz’s Son of Fermentation Chiller, but I’m not the handiest fella around the house, so I’m putting that off.

After that, I think I’m going to go for what I’m thinking of as a Porter with Belgian aspirations - something dark and roasted with some smoked malt, maybe coriander seeds and/or orange peel, caramel sugar syrup (what’s often referred to as kandi sugar), maybe some more adjuncts, like chipotle peppers. Shooting for an ABV of 9% or so, which I think from my calculations, if I can get 83% or better attenuation (not extraordinary in the world of Belgian beers), means a starting gravity of about 1.085.