Barlow Brewing

Here’s a strange little admission: I had never done a collaborative brewday until a few weeks ago. 

It’s not a secret or anything.  It is just a bit surprising since I’ve been brewing for 14 years at the time of this blog post.  Sure, I’ve hung out with someone who was brewing and I’ve had prospective brewers watch me brew before, but I’d never worked together with someone to brew beer until the big bock brewday I just did with my friend Greg.  I guess that’s a long time to have, essentially, worked by yourself. 

There’s a huge opportunity in working with another brewer and seeing their methods, peeves and shortcuts.  And I’m sure that I would be a better brewer now for working with peers and gathering some solid best practices over the years, but brewing alone has some benefits. When you brew alone, you establish YOUR method.  You get a rhythm to your day and timing down in the repetition.  Also, you get a good feel for tweaking your methods since you are the only person performing all of the brewing actions.  Put another way, if you are the only person doing everything, you are going to be a bit more consistent batch to batch. (Albeit, perhaps, consistently either bad or good.) 

But these are minor advantages and, honestly, they could be my unconscious attempt to justify why I always ended up brewing solo. 

Fast forward to October during a homebrew club meeting and Greg and I discovered that we had both had plans to brew a doppelbock in December.  This seemed like a great time to join forces.  And, of course, like all great ideas it quickly swelled from the realistic brewing of a doppelbock to the absurd idea of a marathon brewday that would net us 12 gallons of doppelbock and 12 gallons of eisbock.  This is makes the day a game of logistics, because the beers are similar but not quite the same. And you are talking about 80 pounds of grain and still unknown, once you factor in the chilling, amounts of water. 

LOTS of water

After we each bought a bag of grain (Greg bought a 55# bag of Munich and I bought a 55# bag of pilsner) and a couple of weeks of planning, I drove over to his house, in an unusual early December snow, to commence to Bockapoolza.  It started off very orderly, although our 10 gallon mash tuns were filled to capacity with the grains need for these high gravity beers. 

Greg: Mashing like it was his job

Me: Pretending to work.  What a hobo.

From the “don’t try this at home” department, we created a mash tun totem pole.  Just. Because. We. Could.

There was down time in between, of course, where I acted like I was doing something important. We, unlike a side by side brewday, we had to stagger our batches a bit. This was simply because Greg had a homegrown wort cooling system (made from a pond pump and using blocks of ice, simple but genius) that we wanted to use to get the bock worts down to below 50 degrees. 

Double Boiling

The double boil went smoothly and the heat from the burners kept his deck warm and dry from the snow. 

Extreme Yeast Starting

 Since these were big and lager beers, we needed to go strong on the yeast we were going to pitch.  Greg headed up this effort and started up two beastly batches of yeast.  After he talked to the Wyeast people, he went with the Wyeast 2206 Bavarian lager and Wyeast 2124 Bohemian lager yeasts.  The doppelbock received 100% Bavarian yeast, and the eisbock received 35% Bavarian and 65% Bohemian yeast. 

Four Carboys of Love

In the end we came out with 24 gallons of finished beer, although I think it was a much longer session than we both were expecting.  But it went by quickly due to the amount of brew (or busy) work that needed to be done and we had a few beers and a nice lunch during the session.

What did I learn? Honestly, less than I expected.  But, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have anticipated all that much knowledge would be dropped into my head because of what we were trying to do. We weren’t co-brewing a simple 6 gallon homebrew batch that we both could have done blindfolded.  We were attempting something bigger and stranger than either of us had ever done before.  This was a very cool collaboration, because of the teamwork and creative thinking we need during the day, but there were very few opportunities to swap methods.

What was interesting is that I came away with a clearer idea of what kind of brewer I was.  Greg is a big front end planner in grain and water ratios, and then he lets the beer be the beer it wants to be once it hits the fermenter.  I’m the opposite, which isn’t to say that I don’t wring my hands over recipe formulation and double checking my numbers in brewing software.  I just work in more of a zen state DURING the brewing since I’ve done this so many times, it just have a feel for it.  Put another way, when you are riding a bike you don’t actually put any thought into leaning into a turn.  It is instinct.  I don’t get obsessed with the numbers once the brewday begins.

This isn’t to imply that my fellow homebrewer is inexperienced. He’s a great brewer.  Greg just goes into the relaxed zen state during fermentation. That’s where I get bunged up, take meticulous notes and sweat the fermentation temperatures.

That’s another reason why I dig homebrewing so much.  I’ve documented before that I love that this hobby uses all of the creativity and science that you can throw at it.  Both sides of your brain can get nice workouts.  But, for me, the act of brewing is a few hours of meditation and getting in a groove.  A runner’s high.

So, in the meantime, scheme a plan and brew with a friend. Don’t wait as long as I did.

A friend of mine did this sort of year-end wrap up on his blog, and I thought it was cool and decided to do one of my own.  For the hardcore homebrewers out there, or those who are trying to break into the ranks of the pros, my list is modest. But the number of batches and gallons I did during 2009 feels a bit absurd to me as a guy trying to hold down a job and a family.

Anyway, an interesting review for me, and I’m sure it will inform my 2010 brewing.

- Number of Batches Made – 20
- Number of Gallons Made – 119
- First Brew Day – 1/3/2009
- Last Brew Day – 12/5/2009
- Number of Beer Batches – 18 (14 ales and 4 lagers)
- Number of Cider Batches – 2
- BJCP Homebrew Competitions Medals Earned – 3 Gold, 5 Silver, 5 bronze, 1 Honorable Mention, and The Dominion Cup Plato Award (Best All Around Brewer)
- Batch with Highest Alcohol – 11.21% – American Barleywine “Wendigo”
- Batch with Lowest Alcohol – 3.8% – Mild “Sonic Death Monkey”
- Average Alcohol Across Batches – 6.49%
- Favorite Brew – “Cleopatra Jones American” Brown ale (Big, hoppy brown ale riffing off McDole’s Janet’s Brown ale)
- Favorite Brew (Runner Up) – “Fritz the Cat” American Wheat ale (a 50% wheat American wheat beer hopped only with Amarillo hops, a Gumballhead clone)
- Favorite Brew – “Stupid Sexy Flanders” Flanders Red (Sours are tough to brew and age, but this Flanders Red aged was on French oak, Pinot Noire and the Roeselare blend was amazing)
- Worst Brew – “Hop Surge” American IPA (It fermented out too low, and I added malto dextrin to bring it back up. Just ended up sweet and gross)
- Worst Idea That Turned Out OK – “Bombay the Hard Way” Coconut Curry Hefeweizen (I thought this one might end up a carbonated marinade, but it did well and won a medal or two.)
- Best Idea That Turned Out Just OK – “Bad Yama Jama” Sweet Potato Ale (It was a good beer, but I should have cranked up the spices and potatoes a bit more)
- Favorite Name – “Stupid Sexy Flanders” (The Simpons are always an inspiration)
- Approximate Amount of Grain used in 2009 – 287.45 pounds (average of 15.97 lbs/brew)
- Approximate Amount of Hops used in 2009 – 56.89 ounces, or 3.55 pounds (average of 3.16 oz/brew)
- Biggest Equipment Upgrade – Converted a 15 gallon keg into a keggle (brewpot)
- Biggest Trend – Sour Ales – Batches Brewed – 4
- Biggest Trend (Runner Up) – Oak Aging – 4 batches aged on French oak

I was quoted today in a Charlie Papazian article in The University of Virginia Magazine. 

The connection between those two is that Charlie Papazian graduated from UVa in 1972 with a nuclear engineering degree.  If you don’t know anything about Charlie, do yourself a favor and read up on the father of homebrewing, and find out about the significance of his hard work for the homebrewing movement. Here’s a few of the thoughts I shared with the magazine:

When I got my first homebrew kit back in 1995, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing book came with it.  This was before the internet and, later, during the early years when we didn’t know what to do with the World Wide Web. Unless you could hang out in the local homebrew shop, or buddy up with a more experienced brewer, not having that book was like not having an instruction manual.  You were lost.

Books have come out since that time that are more technical, and go much deeper into the science of brewing, but he was the first American to write a book that taught the novice how to brew.

And he gave us the phrase: “Relax, Don’t Worry, Have a Homebrew.” That might sound trite or too hippie in today’s society, but it was just what the new homebrewer needed to hear. Brewing great beer requires meticulous sanitation and attention to detail and, if you think about it too much, you become overwhelmed and paralyzed with worry.  Charlie gave you the confidence to just brew, and get better at it each time.

In the big picture, he founded the Association of Brewers, which later turned into the Brewers Association, and the American Homebrewers Association.  These are important organizations that protect the rights and interests of craft and homebrewers.

The brewing industry has changed, too. Every year the big American breweries lose market share, but craft breweries are growing in leaps and bounds.  These craft breweries were started by homebrewers who were bored by what the big boys were making.  These craft brewers went pro, which is every homebrewer’s dream, and they embody Papazian’s creativity, work ethic and sense of fun. 

He’s the father of American homebrewing, and he continues to be important to homebrewers and the brewing industry today.

But you know all this already don’t you?  Don’t you?

The University of Virginia article about Charlie Papazian

I’m not an expert on cider. I’ve been brewing beer for more than a couple of years but, in terms of cider, I might be a step above a newbie.

The good news is that there are experts out there and, just like with brewing, I find there is a direct correlation between the ones who know what they are talking about and their willingness to be remarkably helpful and patient with your questions.   In other words, if you are asking advice of an “expert” and he or she is an asshole to you, run the other way.

I’m fortunate enough to have a master cider maker in my homebrew club, and he is the inquisitive man behind this wonderful cider-making thread.  He has connections with local orchards, and has made cider with many types of apples, yeasts and sugars.

I thought I wasn’t much of a cider fan, but it turns out I just have a narrow window of what I enjoy right now in a cider.  I like there to still be a good amount of apple flavor and some lingering sweetness.  After trying my friend’s various batches, I chose the one that I wanted to have 5.5 gallons of.  My cider recipe and methodology is his.

So here is cider-making, from fresh-off-the-tree apples, from a homebrewer’s perspective:

This one started with 6 gallons of fresh apple juice from a local orchard.  The mix was 80% Stayman apples and the last 20% were a mixture of Empire and York for a little tartness.  As a side note, merely picking up the fresh squeezed juice is definitely a nice change from a 4 or 5 hour all grain brew day. Once I got the carboy home, it was time to go to work.

The clock starts ticking once that juice is pressed.  With homebrew, you want fementation to start as soon as possible.  If it takes too long, there are unfortunate side effects that will definitely take the shine off your beer.  With cider, you dealing with a lot of highly fermentable juice that is full simple sugars that are raring to go and, here’s the urgency, they are covered with wild yeast.  You can take all of the apples and carefully wash their skins before crushing them, but that yeast and bacteria is still there.  In order to have a controlled fermentation, with the yeast of your choosing, you need to pitch your yeast and get it fermenting quickly.  There will still be that wild yeast in there, but a healthy starter will safely outpace the spontaneous fermentation that would naturally occur.

The next step was to add some sweetness to the juice and to bump up the gravity a bit.  The starting gravity of the juice was 1.050, and I brought that up to a 1.065 with the addition of 24 ounces of turbinado sugar and 16 ounces of dextrose. Turbinado is an easy to find unrefined sugar, that adds a sweet complexity, which can be found at any good grocery store. Dextrose is the simply the same priming corn sugar you would use to bottle condition a beer.

I simply poured both sugars into the carboy with some yeast nutrient, and then I stirred it up for a minute an aeration wand attached to my cordless drill.

Next up was a pitching the yeast and, despite the fact I never rehydrate the Safale US-05, I did so with this batch just to be safe.  It seems like I’ve been using this strain a lot lately, but it is the way to go for very clean and attenuated beer.  Also, it was the recommended yeast from my cider friend and my favorite of his batches.  Once the yeast was in there, I put the airlock on the carboy and let go at room temperature.

Fermentation of ciders is a very low-key event if you are a homebrewer.  There is a krausen of sorts and CO2 is bubbling out, but it is in no way the violent creation of alcohol and flavors that beer is.  At peaking fermentation, it is simply bubbling like a soft drink.  That is as calming and charming as watching goldfish swim around a tank, but I really do prefer when things blow-up (real good).

The tricky part of a cider, at least for me, is stopping the fermentation.  Ciders are so full of simple sugars that, left to their own devices, they will ferment down to bone dryness.  The first cider I ever tried to make dropped down to a 0.990.  For those not familiar with gravities, this means that enough alcohol was produced to make the cider thinner than the density of water.  It wasn’t bad, but it was a little high in alcohol and it put a hurt on your head the next morning.

There are two main ways to halt cider: K-Meta or cold crashing.  K-Meta (more properly referred to as potassium metabisulfite) will drop out your yeast and halt fermentation, but those with more sensitive palates will detect a residual taste.  Sodium metabisulfite will work interchangeably with K-Meta, although some might have minor concerns about adding sodium to the cider.

My local expert only cold-crashes, so that was my method, as well.  The sweet spot (pun intended) for me was 1.006, so every few days I would wine thief out some of the cider and test the gravity.  Once it hit 1.010, I put the carboy in the cooler and dropped it down to 32 degrees Fahrenheit. In an act of kind chance, the cider stopped fermenting at 1.008.  That was close enough for me.

I left the cider in the cooler for another week to try to clarify and drop out anything else in suspension. I bottled it soon after and let it bottle carbonate.

(There will be a picture of the cider in a glass here in the future…..)

How did it turn out? Flavor-wise, I’m very happy.  It is slightly sweet, and a nice bit of apple flavor up front.  I will have to review it on a separate blog post at some point down the road.  Despite adding sugar at bottling time, it did not carbonate much at all.  That doesn’t really bother me, but for the next batch will pitch some fresh yeast at bottling. If you have the capability, keg carbonation is probably the easiest move.

Will I do this again?  Sure.  It is amazingly easy and cheap. ($18 for 6 gallons of juice, and a few dollars more for the sugars and yeast.)  It is a nice change from the usual brewing skills I use, so I’m flexing different muscles.

In a way, cider making seems a bit more like making wine.  With homebrewing, you need fresh ingredients and mad brewing skills to make a good batch of beer.  With cider and wine, you still need great skills, but the majority of the battle is in having the best apples or grapes.  I recommend using fresh apples if you have the ability to get them.

What’s next?  Something that is affectionately being calling “Lambicide”.  A cider made with a lambic blend of sherry and wheat yeasts, as well as brett and lacto.  Here comes the sour cider……

BTW – The simple recipe:

5.5 gallons of fresh apple juice (in this case: Stayman, Empire & York)

24 ounces Turbinado

16 ounces Dextrose

1 Package of Safale US-05 (not rehydrated)

Some Wyeast Nutrient Blend (per instructions)

I took an accidental hiatus from the blog for a while.  Yeah, I fell off the blogging horse, so I’m dusting myself off and getting back on track.

I’m still moving forward with split batches, and I’m still trying to squeeze as much learning as I can out of these brews.

Sour Saison

My sour saison split is still getting funky. That was the one that I split a saison into two 3 gallon carboys, and I pitched brettanomyces B on one, and the cultured up dregs of an Avery Brabant on the other. They are still aging and they have both dropped ~0.001 in the gravity department.  The biggest difference between the two, from my infrequent visits to them, is that the Brabant is showing the signs of having some pediococcus and lactobacillus.  Neither are particularly enjoyable to taste, but these things take time to clean up. Before it is all over, I’m sure I’ll be adding the last bits of some sour commercial beers in the brett-only saison to fill out the flavors and complexities of the beer.

I might be bottling these beers in the near future. Although they have only been souring for about 3 months, I was aiming for more of “at bottling time” addition of brett than the long souring and aging variety.

Robust Porter

The robust porter split is done and bottled, and I’ll be comparing the robust porter fermented with Safale US-05 against the same wort fermented with the Safale-04 in a future blog post. I’ve tried them side-by-side once and there were slight, but obvious, differences. I’m not sure what I was expecting to find with this split, and I think I’m still better off not having expectations until after the last taste.

Belgian Dark Strong Ale

The next split was my Belgian Dark Strong Ale which is going three ways. Six gallons of the BDSA went down in a typical fashion with lots of grain, some simple sugars delivered through cane and candi syrups, and that was all fermented down with a gallon starter of the White Labs WLP530 Abbey ale yeast.  This was a relatively small BDSA, and it weighed in only (merely!) at an 1.081 OG. After that fermented down, I bottled about a gallon of that beer and then pitched the Wyeast brettanomyces lambicus on the rest, along with pinot noir & French oak. 

The third part of this brew was a gallon that BDSA wort that was fermented with Safale US-05 yeast (a clean, American strain).  What exactly is the style of a beer that has the malt and sugar bill of a Belgian Dark Strong ale, but is done with a California yeast?  A dry and malty Old Ale? I don’t know.  We shall see.

Mild

The latest split brew is a Mild, and I will probably bottle that this week.  This is a low-alcohol session ale that weighed in at 1.038 OG, and it  finished at 1.009 (and rockin’ 3.8% ABV).  I’m really happy with how this one tastes so far. It is as close to a worty, grain flavor as I’ve ever gotten out of one of my homebrews without being cloyingly sweet, as well.  The other part of the split was the same exact beer and yeast (Danstar Nottingham), but I threw in some French oak when I pitched the yeast on the second portion of the mild. I’m only leaving the wooded mild on those oak cubes for two weeks, and I will be bottling that one, too, this week.

Sour Cider

The last atypical brew that I have in motion isn’t a beer at all. It is a cider. Now, I made a cider a month or so ago under the tutelage of a fellow homebrew club member who is the cider master.  That turned out great, but I am making another batch of cider with the questionable idea of fermenting it with the Wyeast 3278 Lambic Blend. I had a plan to go brett-only, but it takes time for the brett to take off and this is fresh juice (off the tree, into the press, and into the carboy) with lots of wild and unpredictable yeast on the skins and in the press.  This mixture of two brettanomyces, a Belgian wheat, and a sherry yeast strain, as well as a lactic acid bacteria, will hopefully beat out the unknown critters.  I picked up the fresh juice last night (which was 50% Staymens, and 50% Pink Ladys) and I added the sodium metabusulfite to hold the natural yeasts at bay for a time.

A friend, in a moment of genius, has called this… thing “Lambicide”.  I don’t know how that name CAN’T stick.

The Battle of the Bocks

A few weeks from now, I have an epic brew day scheduled. My friend Greg and I are planning to do two 12 gallons batches at the same time. One will be a Doppelbock, the other an Eisbock.  At the end of the day, we should both go home with 6 gallons of each beer. No experiments or splits are planning for this. That 24 gallons should be enough.

Details of the above beers and ciders will follow….

So here’s the story of the chocolate cherry robust porter.  It was my latest split batch, and it ended up going three ways.

The inspiration for the chocolate cherry brew came from the cocoa nibs I won from the Dominion Cup homebrew competition.  I won a little over 2 lbs of Askinosie Chocolate cocoa nibs (which are the same ones used by Dogfish Head for their Theobroma beer) and knew that I had to work them into a beer somehow.

I had planned to do a porter, and it seemed like a good time to combine the cherries (which I had bought months ago and frozen) with the cocoa nibs to create some sort of black forest porter.  The cherries will add some sweetness to the beer, and I figured the nibs would help balance that out.

I think this story will have a happy ending.  We’ll see.

In my continuing mission to spin out a lot of different beers out of single batches, this one started as a robust porter towards the lower end of that style.  It began as 6.5 gallons of 1.055 OG robust porter. (Definitely at the low end of the style.)

I took 1 gallon of the cooled wort and pitched Safale 04 dry yeast into it, which is a quick fermenting English ale yeast.  I let that go at room temperature, and it appeared to be done within 48 hours. A later tasting will tell me if it fermented a little too hot, but it dropped down to a 1.010 FG.

The remaining 5.5 gallons where racking into a carboy, and I pitched Safale US-05 onto that, which is a neutral Cal Ale-type yeast.  That was ramped up from 68° to 72° F degrees over primary fermentation, and it finished out at a 1.011 FG.

I racked about a gallon of the US-05 robust porter into a small jug, and I set that aside. 

Here’s where it gets interesting.  I decided to put the remaining 4.5 gallons of US-05 robust porter on cherries and cocoa nibs.

First I thawed and de-pitted 8 pounds of cherries. This always ends up being a harder and messier work than I remember from the previous time. 

Only 2 pounds when I took this shot

The pits

There are many different ways and times to add fruit to beers. If you are working with fresh fruit, it is a good idea to freeze them at some point. The freezing process will help rupture the cell walls of the fruit, making it easier to extract flavors from them. Freezing is also a good way to insure that you can capture the fruit at peak ripeness.

If you are adding fruit to primary fermentation, you’ll want to steep them in the wort at flame out, or hold them at 160° F to sanitize them.  Since I wanted the freshest fruit flavor possible, I added them to this beer in secondary.  Sanitation is important at this stage as always, but once a beer is past primary, the alcohol level is high enough and the pH level is low enough to discourage the growth of contaminating organisms.

Keeping as clean as possible, and having a sink full of a Star San mix nearby, I prepared the cherries and then pureed them in the blender.  I added that 8 pounds of cherries to the secondary carboy and, on top of that, add 6 ounces of cocoa nibs. 

6 ounces of Cocoa Nibs

With all the those additional sugars being added, I made sure to suck up a little yeast when I was racking the beer over and it promptly started to re-ferment again.

Who dumped a Slurpee in my carboy?

Yeah, it looks unsettling, but the samples I’ve taken so far taste really, really good.  Like drinking a chocolate covered cherry with liquor inside.

It is going to be hard to figure out what the ABV for this will be.  The cherry puree floats on top and the hydrometer read 1.014 right after secondary racking.  It looks like it has dropped back down to a 1.012 again which might put us in the neighborhood of a 6.3% ABV beer.  Honestly, that number is probably wrong, and I’m not all that worried about it.

This one was put into tertiary last weekend, and will be bottled soon.  More on that later.

I’m looking forward to comparing and contrasting the differences between the S-04 and the US-05 yeasts.

In the end was left with:

1 gallon of Robust Porter fermented with Safale S-04 at 6.0% ABV
1 gallon of Robust Porter fermented with Safale US-05 at 5.8% ABV
4 gallons of Robust Porter with cherries and cocoa nibs fermented with Safale US-05 (??% ABV)

I’m also still working on a name for this one. Maybe a foreign name for black forest.  Perhaps it will be Forêt Noire .

A recipe will follow with the tasting notes.

So, I swore off brewing pumpkin beers a few years ago.

It’s a perfectly fine beer to brew, but I’ve brewed them twice over the last few years (once with real pumpkin and spices, and once with just the spices) and that was enough.  But weird ideas and challenges change everything.  Like brewing with sweet potatoes.

Well, the original plan was to brew with yams, but it was difficult to find yams locally, so I grabbed some North Carolina sweet potatoes.  (BTW – Yams and sweet potatoes are not even distantly related.  Good. To. Know. But that didn’t stop me from naming it “Bad Yama Jama”.) 

As far as pumpkin beers go, what’s really important are the spices.  The pumpkin doesn’t really add any flavor to the beer and only a small amount of fermentables.  As long as you brew a good beer and then throw allspice into it, TA-DA you will have a pumpkin beer.  The idea, this time, was to use something unusual in the mash and put a twist on pumpkin ales. 

There isn’t much information out there about brewing with sweet potatoes, so I just made it up as I went along.  First, I bought four pounds of NC ‘taters and I cooked them in the oven for 90 minutes at 350 degrees. 

Once they were nice, soft, and juicy, I skinned them and crushed them up for the mash.

I was assuming that the smashed up sweet potatoes would give me the nastiest stuck mash ever, but they were relatively easy to use.  I put the 4 pounds of sweet potatoes in 10 pounds of grain, and I really don’t think the whole thing would have become messy unless I had used about 10 pounds of potatoes.   I held the whole thing at 152 degrees for 90 minutes in the hope that that would be long enough to convert some of the spuds into something fermentable.

The boil was straight forward, and I added some of the spice in at flame out.  It is really easy to go over the top with spices and it is impossible to take them back out.  So, I just used a ¼ of a teaspoon of nutmeg, allspice and ginger and one cinnamon stick.  That won’t be enough, but the tweaking of the spices happens after fermentation when I make a tea of the spices and add them to taste.

The key to this kind of beer still lies, in my opinion, in the spicing.  The sweet potatoes didn’t add that much in the way of fermentables that I can uncover as my efficiency rates were not much higher than I would have expected without the potatoes.  Perhaps, at tasting, I will find an improvement in mouthfeel.  And, if I do, it could just be psychological.   

I haven’t bottled this one yet, but I probably will within the next week.  It was a fun and creative experiment, but I need to double the amount of sweet potato to make this one stretch my brewing skills.   And I doubt I’ll do that again soon.  Well, until I get another absurd idea.

For giggles, here was the recipe.  (The mish-mash of hops was because I was using leftovers.)

Bad Yama Jama – (Spiced Sweet Potato Ale)

Starting Gravity: 1.050 (9/7/09) Days @ 68º F
Final Gravity: 1.010 (9/23/09)
5.23% alcohol (by volume)
Apparent Attenuation: 79.31
Real Attenuation: 64.36

Mash (@152º 90 min)
11 lb Maris Otter
0.5 lb Crystal 40
0.5 lb Crystal 105
0.25 Special B Malt
0.25 Melanoidin Malt
4 lbs NC Sweet Potatoes (Baked for 90 minutes at 350 degrees, peeled and mashed)

Boil (60 minute boil)
0.25 Hallertauer Pellets (3.7 AA) (60 min)
0.20 EK Goldings Pellets (4.75 AA) (60 min)
0.33 Horizon Pellets (10.9 AA) (60 min)
0.25 Nugget Leaves (Homegrown) (12.0 AA) (60 min)

Spices at flame out:
1 Cinnamon Stick
1/8 tsp Nutmeg (ground)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (Boil – 15 min.)
½ tsp Brewer’s Choice Wyeast Nutrient Blend (Boil – 10 min.)

Primary (68º F)

Safale S-04 English Ale

Spices made in tea and added to Primary after fermentation:
1/2 tsp Allspice (ground)
1/8 tsp Ginger (ground)
1/8 tsp Nutmeg (ground)

I went down to the Dominion Cup BJCP competition on August 29th with a few of my fellow homebrewers from the CAMRA club in Charlottesville, Va.  The Dominion Cup is the largest homebrew competition in Virginia, and it is run by the James River Homebrewers, which is the Richmond homebrew club.  The three of us were going to help out during the competition in three different roles, and it was my first real chance to see a BJCP judging in person.

The Cup happened at the Capital Ale House Downtown and took place in the Music Hall room behind beside the restaurant and bar.  It was intimate place to see a band, but it was big and roomy venue for a beer judging to go down.  It was a long and dark room with exposed brick walls and dark wood, but the judges were ready with flash lights in hand.

I was assigned to be a steward which basically entails making sure that the judges have everything they need to score and judge their assigned beers.  That means getting the table ready with a pitcher of water, crackers, cups, pens, a dump bucket, the appropriate forms, and any other items they might need.  That’s the easy part.  The interesting, and more challenging part, is keeping the paperwork orderly.  The judges are filling out Beer Scoresheets, and you are trying to keep those straight while juggling the Cover Sheets (to organize all the related papers with each entry) and the flight sheets which track the individual and agreed upon scores for each beer in that category.

The great thing about these competitions is that the beers are judged without knowing the brewer for each beer.  That’s important if you want real and honest feedback from the judges.  Now none of the judges that I met would have been anything less than honest in their reviews of the beers, but it really is hard to say that any among us wouldn’t be unconsciously influenced by knowing the brewer and our perceived notion of their brewing skills and reputation.  To avoid that, beers are separated into the appropriate BJCP guidelines, and they were all in 12 ounce, brown bottles without labels or marks on their caps.  Each bottle then gets a competition label conveying which style of beer it has been submitted to and its cryptic number, which is only linked back to the brewer info’s on a computer held by organizer of the competition.

So part job of the steward job is keeping all of the information together and organized so the right scores and feedback get to back the organizer and the homebrewer who made it.  That is the real bottom line in these competitions: getting quality feedback from experienced judges so you can make better beer and hone your craft.

Of course, the cool part for a steward is being able to listen in to the judges as they talk about each beer after they have thoughtfully filled out their sheets.  It is beer geeking at its best.  You can also taste along with them and compare your mental notes with the experts.  I worked the morning and afternoon sessions, and in the first I was assigned to one of the American Pale Ale tables and, being a popular category, that is all that those judges scored.  For the afternoon, I was assigned to the Porters table and that encompassed Brown Porters, Robust Porters and Baltic Porters, which can vary from each other in significant ways, but they are all still competing against each other in the Porter category.

I was very impressed by palates on the judges and their ability to pick out nuances out of the beers.  One of the huge obstacles in judging can just be taste fatigue.  Realistically, they are only having a few ounces of each beer, but after having a few ounces of 9 beers, my mouth started to get a little tired.  I could certainly drink more than that, and did afterwards, but it a challenge to keep your taste buds focused after wave after wave of beer.  I respect their ability to do so, because I don’t think I’m there yet.

Yeah, this is pretty much my only look.  It is all I have to work with.

Greg did some judging, so he got to see the competition from the other side of the table. 

Tom was a cellarman with Mark from the James River Club.  They had a good but, probably, an occasionally frantic time.   

After the second session was over, it was time for the Best of Show judging.  That was composed of the best beers from each category.  I’m not quite sure how the BOS judging works because it must be hard to compare a Flanders Red with an Oatmeal Stout with a Bohemian Pilsner, etc.  It must just be one of those blink moments where the heavens open up and a few beers just shine through.  

As you can tell from the picture above, it was show of colors and flavors.

In the end, it was a very successful trip for the CAMRA guys.  We got to see how a BJCP competition works, and the club walked away with 15 medals in the competition.  I was very happy to receive the inaugural Plato award, which is a “Brewer of the Year” award, for the most 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd place finishes.

Final results from the 2009 Dominion Cup: http://dominioncup.jrhb.org/DomCupWinners2009.php

Some takeaways:

It looks like putting on a competition of this size is a ton of work.  The Dominion Cup had 366 entries which is very impressive and a big jump from the previous year.  One of the things my club wanted to check out was the feasibility of putting on a competition of our own in the coming years.  We now know that it will be just as difficult as we had imagined.  I have to give lots of credit to the James River Homebrewers for making it all look so seemless and easy.  We know it couldn’t have been, but they did a great job.

The feedback  sheets were good, illuminating and I’m honestly still plowing through those.  Often, the hardest part about feedback is deciphering the handwriting of the judges. (Hint: Cursive = bad.)  Overall, the beers I thought would do well did, and the beers I thought were average, or off style, did just ok.  My highest scores were for my “Fritz the Cat” (Gumballhead clone) American Wheat beer, which scored a 43, and my “Cleopatra Jones” American Brown Ale, which scored a 39.  My lowest were my 27 for “Up on Cripple Kriek” (Kriek Fruit Lambic) which was one of my first sour beers and it really didn’t get sour enough, and my Cherry Waterloo, which scored a 28.5 and it was the subpar side of a split batch of Berliner Weisse.

And it was interesting to see how my younger beers fared.  I submitted an American Barleywine that was only 9 months old, and it took 3^rd place.  And that same 9-month old barleywine, that I aged a little longer on bourbon and oak cubes, took 2^nd place.  Also, my Flanders Red, which is a beer that often doesn’t find its stride until about 18 months, got a 2^nd place medal and it was only about 4 months old.  I’m pretty geeked to see how these beers will taste when they start to hit their peak.

The big surprise, for me, was seeing my entries in the Spice/Herb/Vegetable Beer category do so well.  My Chai Milk Stout (no clever name) got a 1^st place medal, and my Bombay the Hard Way Coconut Curry Hefeweizen got 3^rd place.  (Which is very surprising because I thought that was a failed experiment, but it just need time to age and mellow.) That was very cool, and further fuels my mad scientist method to brewing.  (I should be posting something soon about my Sweet Potato Ale brew day, too.)

Once again, it was a great time, and we look forward to competing again next year.  The club is now more determined than ever to get some of our members BJCP certified.

The second split batch experiment happened on Sunday night with my latest saison.

I’ve done a few saison homebrews, and I always find I enjoy the soured batches just a little bit more. Saisons are not complete strangers to sour, and some of the more famous examples of the style from Brasserie Fantôme and Brasserie à Vapeur  are amazing because of those notes.  I find souring adds more complexity to the beer, and I find myself ramping up the acidulated malt that I put into the mash a little more each time.  The idea behind this experiment was to ferment a saison and then to add brettanomyces to sour the batches and add further complexity.  Put another way, I wanted to sour these the old fashion way.

It started out as one of my standard saison batches with the not-so-secret ingredient of some acidulated malt.  It started out with an OG of 1.068, and I fermented it at around 80 degrees.  It dropped down to a 1.006 less than a week later, and then I let it sit for another week just to clean itself up and let the yeasts drop out.  (I say “yeasts” because I pitch a saison yeast, in this case WLP565, and then a clean Cal ale yeast, the Safale US-05, 48 hours later to insure the beer dries out enough.)

On Sunday (8/23/09), I split the batch evenly between two 3-gallon carboys.  Into one carboy I pitched a vial of White Labs Brettanomyces Bruxellensis (WLP650), and into the other I pitched a starter I had ramped up from the dregs of an Avery Brabant.  (Yes, this is deviation from the original souring gameplan.)

The Brett B is a pure culture of that brettanomyces strain and it is often used for secondary fermentation of Belgian beers and lambics.  It creates a medium intensity sour, and it is often pitched at bottling by brewers.  The Avery culture is a bit more of a wildcard.  It is my understanding that the Brabant undergoes a secondary fermentation brett b, too, but it probably isn’t the same culture as the tube.  In addition, it is a bottled beer so I don’t know if any Lactobacillus (Lacto) and Pediococcus (Pedio) bacteria are present which would additional tartness and perhaps add a vinegar quality to the beer.

Since the final gravity of the beer was so low, the bretts shouldn’t have too much to feast upon and that should control the souring to a certain degree.  As of two nights later, the brett b carboy doesn’t appear to be doing anything visually, but its airlock seems to be under a bit more pressure.  The Brabant carboy is getting a white foaminess to it, and may be forming a pellicle. 

I’m not sure how long I will let these beers age and evolve.  I will likely taste them every so often and see if they are in a place where I want to bottle them.  I would think the Brabant, since I don’t know exactly what was in there, might have a better chance of being bottled earlier since it might sour faster and benefit from bottling and a reduced exposure to oxygen.

We’ll see where this one ends up. 

As a sidenote, I did use my wine thief a few weeks ago to fill up a few bottles of the pre-brett saison for tasting and a homebrew competition.  I tasted one right before the split and it was very, very good.  It made it harder to pitch uncertainty into what was an amazing beer, but at least I know I have the recipe I want dialed in for the future.

The recipe for giggles:

Le Moribond – (Saison) 2009

 Starting Gravity: 1.068 (8/2/09) Days @ 80° F

Final Gravity:  1.006 (8/23/09)

8.15% alcohol (by volume)

Apparent Attenuation: 90.71

Real Attenuation: 73.35

Mash (147° 60 min)

10 lb Pilsener Malt

2 lb Golden Promise

1 lb Munich Malt

0.75 Wheat Malt

0.25 CaraMunich 40

0.25 Acidulated Malt (Sauer)

1 lb Cane Sugar

Boil (70 minute boil)

2.0 Hallertauer Leaves (4.3 AA) (60 min)

0.75 Hallertauer Leaves (4.3 AA) (0 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (Boil – 15 min.)

½ tsp Brewer’s Choice Wyeast Nutrient Blend (Boil – 10 min.)

Primary (>80° F)

White Labs WLP565 – Starter made

 Safale-05 – Packet pitched after 48 hours in primary

So far this year, I’ve harvested hop cones from my Nugget vines twice and new fairly Cascade vines once.

I harvested an initial 4 ounces of Nugget cones (the Cascades were still a bit behind) and after drying them they ended up being only 0.75 ounces.  Ripe hops are about 70% moisture at harvest, and they drop down to the teens when prepared for brewing.

The second harvest of hops gave me another 4 ounces of Nugget and 1 ounce of Cascade.  They are still drying so I don’t know their final weights just yet. 

Interestingly, here’s a visual comparison of the two hops.  The Cascade is on the left, the Nugget is on the right:

Cascade (left) and Nugget (Right) Cones

If you’ve happened upon my blog hoping for some high-tech methods for drying your homegrown hops, I am going to disappoint.  I don’t have an expensive food dehydrator where I can hold my cones around 100° F for a few hours and dry them to perfection.  And I haven’t (yet!) constructed a complex homemade system involving fans, thermometers, heating elements and flux capacitor.

I’m still pretty lo-fi, but my method has worked for me for many years.  I simply grab the batch of hops off the vine and put them on a screen that I take off of one of the windows of my house.  I clean that screen up, spread the wet hops across it, and put it in my garage for a few days.  The reason this works is because my garage gets into the 90s everyday during the summertime (or hop harvest time for present purposes), and the screen lets air flow above and below the hops and allows them a better opportunity to dry.

This process only takes two or three days, and it will be necessary to go out there at least once a day to stir ups the hops and rotate them a bit on the screen.  The dried hops will become more brittle and the stem will break more easily when they are done since that is the center of the hop and the last to dry out.

But before you do this at home, look at the condition of your garage.  Does it get into the 80-90 degree range?  Is it free from bugs that might feast on your cones?  Does it get windy in there enough to cause problems?

What does your garage smell like?  I used to store my lawn mower in my garage, and there was an obvious gasoline smell that transferred to the drying hops.  Needless to say, lesson learned.  Look around your garage and smell for things that you DON”T want to taste in your homebrew.

After that, I jam as many cones as I can into sealed bags, I suck the air out of the bags and I store them in the freezer with the type of hop, weight and date written on the side.  I know that some home hop growers cram the cones into stoppered PVC pipes and make their own hop plugs out of them.  That sounds like a fun thing to try in the future, but mine are fine as is.

And what is the alpha acid for my homegrown hops?  I really have no idea.  I’ve read articles from Zymurgy that estimate that homegrown hops are up to 50% more bitter than commercial hops, since they are subject to less processing, but that is seems like some fuzzy math.  Until I figure out a better way, I will just be using my hops as late flavor and aroma additions.

Hopefully, I will be able to harvest enough Cascade hops this year to let me do a wet hop ale.  We will see.