Brew day in the coming weekend

I'll be brewing this weekend. I've decided that I'll brew a cream-ish pale ale. If there's time to brew the following weekend, I'll do the Bohemian Pils that I've been formulating in my brain.

The pale ale I'll be doing will be brewed with mostly Pale Ale malt, plus a bit of Cara Foam and Pilsner malt. I'm hoping that the clean flavor will balance well with the Cascade or Amarillo (haven't decided which yet) hops I'll be adding.

I've chosen to use Safale-05 yeast. It's clean fermenting, efficient, and has desirable flocculation characteristics. 12 gallons of it should polish off quickly. Since I'm aiming for a 5% beer, this should easily be sessionable. We'll see how it turns out. With the Brown Ale being so well received, it and this pale might become my house ales. Then the focus can be on seasonal brews.

My brewery ... new and improved

Wanna see some sweet schwag?



Yeah, that's 3 Blichmann Engineering 20gal pots. The one in the middle has the ball valve removed for cleaning, along with the auto-sparge and false bottom.

On the ground, you can see 2 809 march pumps, and 1 Blichmann Engineering Therminator. I'm psyched to use them.

In addition, I have 2 15.5 gal. fementers which have racking cane arms. Not as sweet as a true conical, but they allow me to pipeline 12+ gal batches to keep the beer flowing.

What home brewing looks like

I figured that I'd give an overview of what brewing looks like.

My brew day started at 9:00 am - visual inspection of the equipment. The following items were cleaned, and sanitized:
- blichmann 20g hlt/mlt/bk
- Latrobe 15.5g keg, outfitted as a fermenter
- 48qt cooler (transfer vessel)
- Mash paddle
- Boil kettle spoon
- Immersion Chiller
- Various Tubing
- Various Gaskets

At 10:30, everything was cleaned and ready - with one minor hiccup. We had no propane. Our journey takes two hour and a half side-track.

@1:00 pm - dough in.


MMM.... look at all that grain. Dough in was at 122F for 15 minutes, with a quick (emphasis on this) direct heat step to 150F.



Looking at the grain here, you can see the coloring has already begun. This was as I was stepping to 150F.

@2:30 pm - Mashout and Sparge.



Here we see the transfer of the first sweet-wort to the 48-qt cooler. Transfer from the cooler back to the kettle is a bit nightmarish, however, the cooler would not have allowed us to get the kind of gravity we were looking for from this brew.

@3:15 pm - Boil this bad larry

(NOTE: the picture below is not of the boil)


@5:30 it was chilled down and in the fermenter. The yeast were firmly establishing their hold on the deliciously sweet wort that would become beer.

... One and a half months later ...



A rich creamy head, with a hazy brown body.

And of course,



AHHH! Delicious.

A weekend of brew

I'm getting everything for my new single-tier stand this weekend, so I'm hoping to brew a quick session ale. Perhaps a cream, or a simple pale. The grain bill will probably include some wheat and either pale ale, or 2-row. Not sure which yet. I'm excited to brew on this stand and calculate my efficiencies. Plus, it'll feel awesome having a pretty well controlled system. I'm hoping that regardless of the extreme cold that will abound, I'll get really steady temps. The only thing that can help with that is spending a few hours messing with the burners and learning what the pots want to "let go of" as far as heat goes. Since the MLT will be direct fired, I can use the HLT to pre-heat the water, spray over the grain-bed to get close to the approximate temps, and direct fire to the exact infusion temp I want. I can then fill the hlt with more water and be heating that while the system mashes. This should shave about 1-2 hours off of my normal brew day.

I'm also pumped because for the first time ever I'll be possibly treating my water to get an optimum mash. Again, since I'm shooting for an OG of somewhere between 1.050 and 1.065, I'll want to monitor the mash, and perform a proper mash-out.

All in all, I'm pumped about brewing this weekend. Hopefully I'll get the chance.

MMM... beer

In regards to yesterdays post, Question #1 passed. Oh well.

In the past few weeks I've managed to ferment and keg a sweet sweet brown ale. I'm calling it an "India Brown Porter" - it's more hoppy than your standard brown ale, supported by a large backbone of malt and alcohol. The end recipe looks like:

Boil Time: 60 min
Batch Size: 8.5 gal
O.G.: 1.077
F.G.: 1.018
Eff.: 68-72%
IBUs: XXX (To be calculated)
Yeast: Safale US-05

15 lbs Maris Otter
10 lbs German Munich, light
4 lbs Crystal 60L

1oz Czech Saaz (60)
1oz East Kent Goldings (60)
2oz Czech Saaz (30)
2oz East Kent Goldings (20)

Mash: Because I have a stainless mash tun, I can do "proper" step mashing, so I gave it a 15 minute protein rest, followed by 45 minutes at 150 and 20 minutes at 156. No mashout. Were I to make this using only single infusion, 152 would be fine. I don't think the malts really benefitted from the protein rest, but it did let me clean out the fermenter and get all my stuff together.

This beer is a simple recipe, that comes out just brown enough to look like the local leaves. You'll notice the lack of a clarifying/protein binding addition. That was intentional. I wanted this beer to be hazy. The head retention is spot on; mouth-feel after sufficiently carbonated is incredible. Next time I'll probably dry-hop with some Czech Saaz to give that beautiful floral hop aroma. As it stands, it has a strong malty aroma with barely a hint of the hops within.

I find MO to be a great base malt, and the melanoidin content from the munich malt really complements this beer. The addition of the crystal helped to bump it into the 7%+ area, which means it's definitely not a session ale. Overall, I'm really happy with how this recipe turned out and will probably be making it in the future again. Once I start sharing it around, I know it's going to go quickly.

I'll probably do 12 gal. the next time I make it - but since my bottleneck is fermentation space, I'll have to choose when this beer is made. I'd also like to try about 10lbs less grain overall and see if the less syrupy mouth-feel makes a better difference.

Stay tuned for pics of the brew process and the resulting glass.

Alcohol Tax

There's a vote today on the Alcohol Sales tax - I hope it doesn't go away. That's probably a good chunk of change that Massachusetts needs. The justification "Alcohol already has an excise tax paid" is silly - that tax is paid by the brewers when they manufacture or import. It's paid to the feds and to the state of manufacture. Since the majority of alcohol sales come from non-mass locales, we lose out on a lot of alcohol revenue. Plus, it almost guarantees that the $10,000 bond paid by a brewer will either stay the same, or increase. This makes creating new breweries and brewery related jobs even more difficult to establish for those of us who are "little guys."

Just some musings.