Two Beers One Night

It had been a while since I spent an entire evening brewing and had a few unused fermenting buckets lying around, so I decided to put myself to the test by brewing two beers in one night! Luckily I carefully chose the recipes to make sure I wouldn't be up brewing until 4 am.

If you look at my recent posts, you'll notice I've been using a lot of darker malts. This has created a problem for me given my New Year's Resolution... I'm not always in the mood for a heavy/darker beer. At this moment, I probably have enough chocolate stout to last me the entire summer. Hence I've decided to start using a lighter variation of malts in future experimental recipes in general.

It also happens that summer is coming, so I decided to take it to more of an extreme and brew both a Berliner Weisse & Pilsner, both of which are beers I have made before.

In the past I've used the Berliner Weisse recipe for a peach weisse, which actually turned out to be quite refreshing. I'm still undecided as to whether I'll modify it before bottling at all. Maybe another fruit beer or maybe just keep it simple.

Either way, the Berliner Weisse was extremely quick to brew. The recipe simplified consisted of 4 lbs of dried malt extract, 2 ounces of Hallertau hops, and White Labs Berliner Weisse yeast. As you can see there are no grains involved, so the only part that needs to be boiled extensively is the hops (and the malt extract for sanitization purposes).

Having set aside the Berliner Weisse wort to cool, I still had plenty of energy left and decided to push forward with my pilsner! Currently I'm down to my last few bottles of the Efficient Czech; really just saving them for special occasions at this point. I did enjoy the prior outcome, so I figured I'd replicate my success... however with a bit more experimentation this time!

I cloned my original recipe except for one thing: I threw in 2 lbs of beechwood smoked malt grains. You may recollect my previous encounter with it with my rauchbier. However, that did not end so well and I didn't get to enjoy a nice smokey beer. My intention is to give this pilsner a slight smokey flavor that doesn't overpower the beer altogether; a lighter version of a rauchbier suitable for the summer. However, it's going to be a fine line, which I may have crossed but hopefully not. I'll find out soon enough!

Time wise, the smoked pilsner was a quick brew as well; the only time consuming process being steeping the beechwood smoked malts. By the end of the brew session, the evening still have plenty of time left!

Gushers & Bombs

It's been a little while since my last post; although travelling and other obligations have prevented me from trying anything too wild brewwise recently. However, clearly my beer did not appreciate this and decided to scream for attention... in the form of a bomb.

My variation on a Rauchbier was the culprit. Every bottle of it I've opened has been a gusher; an overly carbonated beer that spills everywhere. It tastes great, but I typically lose about 65% of it to the foam overflow. See it in action below.

As much fun as this seems, I lose way too much beer and run other risks; so let's go over what's happening.

Most homebrewers I encounter typically keg their beer as it's easier and less time consuming. I've almost concluded I'm the only person that actually enjoys bottling. With a keg, you typically force CO2 into it to create carbonation. However, bottling works differently. Before you bottle, priming sugar is added to your batch. This acts as a small amount of additional fuel for the yeast to consume. As the yeast consumes sugar, pressure is created, just as with airlocks during normal fermentation. However, there's no escape for the gas and the pressure builds up creating carbonation.

Typically this is straight forward... until you hear a loud boom and find that a number of bottles have exploded leaving glass shard shrapnel scattered throughout the room. I'm quite glad I was not in the room at the time.

Some of the remnants of the bottle bomb

Due to every bottle gushing and their exploding siblings, something different is happening here. There's too much fermentation occurring inside the bottles. This typically means one of three things. If I added an excessive amount of priming sugar, this may be the result. However, I used the standard amount which I've used with every other beer, so this is probably not the reason.

This leaves two other possibilities. The first is that not all of the sugars were fermented. However, I let the beer in the fermenting bucket for about 6 weeks, which is more than enough time for ale yeast. It could have fallen asleep, but there is no specific reason why it would have. Something like a temperature change could cause that, but the temperature remained consistent. To conclude whether this was the cause, I could have measured the gravity of the beer before fermentation and before bottling. However, I neglected to do so... so too late now.

The third option: during the bottling process, the beer was unintentionally infected by something able to consume the sugars that the beer yeast isn't. Typically, this produces an off flavor; and this beer tasted great.

Hence I have no definitive conclusion, although it's one of the last two: infection or unfermented sugars. The good news is that I learned a lot from this experience. I'll be even more careful with sanitization, use a hydrometer (to measure gravity), and most importantly of all... keep any future gushing beers out of rooms where I spend a lot of time!

Honey

It's been a busy few weeks so I haven't had much time to brew. I did however discover that a Boston based homebrewer's club exists (www.wort.org), which was a great experience. I learned so much from the people there, including a few out of the ordinary brewing techniques.

However, last night I finally had the chance to brew again; this time with a recipe I've had since President's Day: the White House Honey Porter. In the past I've brewed the White House Honey Ale, which is currently waiting to be bottled.

The interesting thing to me is that both of the White House Recipes contain honey (given they have their own bee farm).

Not from the White House bee farm

However, I'm honestly not too familiar with using honey in beers yet. I've always wanted to try to make mead, which is honey based. However, the only beer recipe I've used it for previously was a Honey Amber, which actually turned out quite well. But, it was surprising that it wasn't particularly sweet, nor would you necessarily realize that there was honey in the recipe from the taste.

After researching it a bit more, the Honey Amber seems to make sense. The boil time makes a big difference in what the honey adds to the beer. Honey naturally contains a lot of living organisms and bacteria, that give it a good amount of flavor and aroma.

You have to boil the honey in the wort for sanitization. However, if you boil it for 20+ minutes, you are likely to kill off many of the things living in the honey resulting in a lack of that aroma and honey flavor in your beer. However, there will be a good amount of highly fermentable sugar left for your yeast to convert to alcohol.

So it depends what exactly you are looking to do. For my two White House Honey recipes, I used variations which boiled it for about 30 mins, so I'm not expecting a huge honey flavor. However, the original White House recipes suggestion boiling for only 5 minutes. Either way, I'll find out soon enough and I'll be drinking like a president regardless! (recipes below)

Today I'm Drinking: The Efficient Czech

I recently found a few bottles of the 'Efficient Czech' lying around. It was actually the first beer recipe I concocted myself back in October. My goal was create an inexpensive pilsner variation with the resources and capabilities I had.

A pilsner is a type of lager which was created in a Czech city called Plzen (actually quite a cool city). Today, numerous beers are based after this style including Pilsner Urquell, Stella Artois, and many American beers.

Now a very important characteristic a pilsner is that it's a lager, not an ale. This is a significant difference in the brewing process. They both use different types of yeast. However, the lager uses a bottom-fermenting yeast and is works at lower temperatures, ~55 degrees for a long period of time (often a number of months). An ale is top fermented at a higher temperature, ~65-70 degrees, and is much quicker process.

For me the implications of this are that I cannot currently create a real lager as I have no consistent location or temperature control around 55 degrees. Since I was also just getting into brewing when I brewed the Efficient Czech, 3 months felt too long to wait for an experiment.

Hence I decided to add all the ingredients of typical Pilsner, but use an Ale yeast. This is where the name 'Efficient Czech' comes into play. The yeast will get the job done much more quickly than a lager yeast. This also plays into many of my experiences in the Czech Republic. If you've ever been there for non-vacation purposes, you will have found that getting even some basic tasks done takes a lot of time. It's a very different pace of life; and although still improving significantly, it's easy to see some of the remnants of the past communist structure. Compared to Boston's fast pace, it seems inefficient, although of course there are tradeoffs.

Anyways, enough about the name, and more about the beer!

The recipe is as follows:
-5 lbs pilsner malt extract
-2 oz Saaz Hops
-Munton's Ale Yeast

It's pretty straight forward. Sticking to one type of malt; the Saaz Hops are grown in the Czech Republic and are used in almost all pilsners. The only wrench I threw in was the ale yeast, which we've already discussed. And all of the ingredients together were quite cheap.

The end result: a pretty tasty and simple beer. It's on the lighter end and very drinkable. The only particularly distinguishing characteristic was the yeasty flavor to it, which a lot of people actually liked. I think I'll actually recreate a variation of this soon so I'm ready for the summer months!

Today I'm Drinking: Reeb

It occurred to me that I seem to post exclusively about the brewing process, but have neglected discussing the most fun part of the process... the taste and consumption of that beer that so much blood, sweat, and tears (j/k!) went into. Hence I'll be occasionally posting a 'Today I'm Drinking' segment.

On the menu today is a beer that many of you who've followed this blog should be familiar with from the following posts: Experimental Recipe Selection, Explosions!, and Krausen Uprising. The name for this one came quite naturally: Ryan's Explosively Experimental Brew (Reeb).

To get a clear idea of what I'm attempting, take a look at the recipe selection post. It certainly turned out interesting. It has two really distinct characteristics. The first noticeable feature is that it's quite sweet. This was to be expected as I wanted a higher % beer, and they generally end up on the sweet side due to the additional malt. This flavor was pretty apparent, especially as I had leaned towards darker malts.

The other characteristic was the hoppiness, which I had attempted to cut down upon. I think I may have chosen the wrong hops and should have gone with something milder, because they were still quite apparent. And that certainly wouldn't be an issue, but the clash of sweet and hoppy is kind of strange. It's definitely still an awesome beer, but very unusual. If I had redo the recipe, I'd aim for a more guinness/stout like level of hops.

Botanical Acids

A technique I mentioned a few posts ago was finally put into practice over the weekend: dry hopping. It's the process of adding hops to your brew after the primary fermentation has taken place.

The purpose of this is to give your beer even more a hoppy aroma and flavor. If you've ever tried IPAs or other beers with a floral taste, dry hopping is probably the culprit. However a significant characteristic of drying hopping is that it doesn't increase the bitterness of your beer. Essentially you're grabbing the flavor of the hops without adding bitterness.

The reason behind this is the way in which hops bitter beer. Each variety of hops has something called an alpha acid rating, which signifies what % of the hops is alpha acids/oils. The more alpha acids, the more bitter a beer will be. However, this relates to dry hopping because alpha acids are only released when the hops are boiled. Since there is no boiling taking place with dry hopping, no alpha acids are released and the beer is not bittered at all.

Alpha acid 5.7%

Alpha acids during boil actually plays a big role in recipes. Oftentimes they'll call for multiple varieties types of hops, one boiled for a long time for bittering and then one boiled minimally for flavor. For example, the White House Honey Ale recipe (which I brewed in honor of President's Day) calls for Kent Goldings hops to be boiled for 45 minutes, then the fuggles for just the very last minute.

Anyways, back to my dry hopping experiment. I created a pretty simple pale ale as the base. My main decisions were in the hops to use. During the boil, I went with warrior hops, which have an extremely high alpha acid rating of ~16%. They are commonly used for bittering purposes, especially in IPAs.

For the dry hopping, fuggles were the hops of choice as they were one of the suggested varieties and add an will give the beer an earthy flavor/aroma. As you can see above, the alpha is 5.7%, which is significantly lower than the warrior hops; but I'm using them both for different purposes.

You can get whole hops, but the pellets work just as well

Anyways, the process was quite simple, as I just cut the bags open and threw them into the fermentor. There are other methods involving strainers, but this was fine for a first attempt.

Now just a couple final things to note. One of the first thoughts that came to my mind was sanitization, which is the most important part of brewing. Everything that ever comes into contact with the beer is sterilized via boiling or otherwise. However, we're not boiling these hops... and I'm certainly not going to soak them in a sanitizing agent; so adding them sounds like we might be asking for an infection.

However, we do have a few things going for us. The fermentation has already taken place, so the sugars consumed and an alcohol content already exists. The hops come from clean packaging conditions (taking the open photo was actually probably the biggest risk, as minimal as it may be). Importantly, hops have anti-bacterial characteristics and were initially added to beer to act as a preservative. That preservation maybe one of the main reasons IPA (India Pale Ale's; Indian climate/distance) are so hoppy. However, that's a history to explore another day. Anyways, given all of these factors, dry hopping should be safe.

A final point I should highlight is that the hops should be left in for less than a week. If longer, they apparently start to give off too much of a grassy flavor. Hence, I'll be bottling this brew in less than a week and let you know how it turns out!

Not Quite Moonshine

I'll start off with a .gif of very active fermentation. Since my last experiment (cider) non-beer experiment was completed, it was time to try something new. While browsing beer-wine.com, I found something interesting: 24-hour Turbo Yeast.

When I started brewing, I always had wanted to see what happened when I threw yeast in with sugar or kool-aid. However, after researching it, there were a few issues. First, yeast is like us... it needs nutrients. It cannot live off sugar alone. When brewing beer, this is typically not an issue as the malts contain the necessary nutrients. Also, my kool-aid idea wouldn't work either because some of the chemicals in it would hinder the yeast.

However, what was included in this Turbo Yeast packet was everything needed for fermentation except for the sugars. Nutrients included. Hence, this project was pretty easy. All had to do was boil 6 lbs of sugar and sterilize the carboy, then add the yeast when ready.

The idea is that it will be at 14% in a 24 hrs. The .gif above was taken at about 16 hrs. It's difficult to see and I didn't have too much time to setup the shot, but the top layer of the carboy is fizzing like crazy. Later on, the bubbles grew a lot larger as well.

It should be ready by now, but I don't really know what to expect. I will certainly need to add some sort of flavoring I think. The carboy was quite cloudy last time I checked, so I'm also wondering if I want to let the yeast and nutrients sink to the bottom, then harvest it. Either way, I'll taste it and make a decision soon.


PS: An interesting point on the packet instructions were to avoid using an airlock. I was trying to think of the reasons behind this. One could that it was so active, it would almost certainly cause a blowoff. The lack of an airlock brings up the thought of contamination. Typically contamination happens when other yeasts from around the atmosphere find their way into your beer. However, my theory is that this yeast is so fast acting and powerful, that it muscles the other potential yeasts out. Also, the final product is done so quickly that there's little time to become contaminated.