Hitting Our Temperatures

FILE UNDER: Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% malted barley.

Here's the scene: It's 9:00 am Sunday morning.  For the past half hour I have been pulling seemingly unrelated pieces of junk out of my house and piling them in the backyard.  A couple buckets, two propane tanks, some coolers, a tightly coiled, highly polished copper whatever-mabob, a very large stainless steal pot and its smaller cousin, plastic bag after plastic bag with unknown payloads and, to top it all off, an oar.  From the neighbor's view, I am either going away to Chemistry Camp or building a bomb.  And I haven't even lit the 210,000 BTU Bayou Classic propane burner yet.

The burner has me a little spooked, to be honest.  Once you hear the hell-fire-hiss and feel the pillows of escaping heat bombarding your face when it does it's thing, it puts a little fear in you, hence my tentative stance as I go to light it in the above photograph.  PssssssssssssssssssssssssssFFFFOOOOOOOOTT!  That's sort of what it sounds like when you're right up next to it and it finally ignites.  Then, it lets out an ungodly HAW that persists until we turn it off.

The Bayou Classic, however scary, is one bad-ass piece of equipment, and something so important to our process that we'd be out of business without it.  210,000 BTUs can boil ten gallons of 50 degree water in ten minutes.  Yes, I know.  That is pretty impressive.

While boiling things super fast, and the hissing blue flames and all are really super cool, self-amusement is not our ultimate goal.  For today we make the eighth iteration of our wheat beer and hitting our temperatures is important.  Wait?  What?  Hitting our what?  OK, here we go...



Bayou Classic 210,000 BTU Burner



A quick lesson in beer making:

1.) Steep cracked malted grains in water to convert starches to sugars

2.) Boil, adding hops for bitterness, flavor and aroma

3.) Cool

4.) Add Yeast
5.) Allow to ferment
6.) Bottle
7.) Allow to carbonate
8.) Drink

When I wrote that little piece of obvious beer-geek jargon, 'hitting our temperatures', I was referring to step #1 - Steeping.  Steeping is much like making a cup of tea.  Add hot water and let sit.  Steep too long and the tea will be bitter.  Steep too short and the tea will be weak.  Timing is extremely important in tea and in beer.

Unlike tea, however, our wheat beer requires that the grains steep at certain temperatures for certain periods of time, and that the temperatures be raised significantly as we go.  Also, instead of a tea cup, we use a converted Coleman Xtreme Cooler that has been retrofitted with a draining system of our own design.  All of these things complicate matters, and can easily trip one up on one's way to making good beer.  Questions such as, "How am I supposed to raise this mash from 104 degrees to 140 degrees if I can't apply direct heat?" might be thrown around.  The answer, of course, is to add a certain volume of boiling water.  That is where the Bayou Classic comes in.


The Mash Tun Covered With Towels

 So our plan was to hit 104 and then rest a half hour, then go to 140 for another half, then to 158 for an hour then 170 for 20 minutes.  Using the numbers I had crunched all week, we added our first volume of water to the grain sitting in our converted Coleman cooler/mash tun and WHAT?!?!?!?  112 degrees!!!  OH NO!!!

We fucked up.  All of our following numbers were based on us hitting 104.  Now what?  This is when Willy Wonka's assertion that invention is mostly perspiration began to ring in my ears.  We are off the script.



Mr. Wonka



We adjusted the volume of boiling water for the next infusion.  Hoping to hit 140, we came up at about 127!

"What's the matter, Mr. Wonka, too hot?"

"Too cold!  Far too cold."

If it were only as easy as adding an old, dusty coat to the brew to raise the temperature!  With no other options, we weighed a gallon of water, boiled it and slowly added it to the mash tun until we hit 140 degrees.  Then we weighed the water again, calculated the difference and realized that we were about 2 quarts ahead of where we should be in total volume.  Fine!  We can live with that.

20 Gallon Brewpot

We hit our next temperatures right on, drained the bad boy into our twenty gallon brew pot, sparged with another 8 gallons of water and were ready for the boil.

The rest of afternoon was easy, but during those uncertain moments when we were bouncing between temperatures and volumes of water - the 93% perspiration part - we learned something.  You have to roll with the punches.  Even the best laid plans can backfire, the most crunched up numbers can be wrong.  When shit goes down, you can either abandon ship or grab the bail bucket.  We managed to bail ourselves out, by using our brains and by not giving up.

I can imagine that some of you readers out there must be wondering just what happens if we don't hit our temperatures.  Well, let me tell you, it would not be pretty.  You ever see that movie 'The Blob'?  Something like that.

Beer gone bad. THE BLOB!!!

In all honesty, not hitting our temperatures can change the character of the beer greatly.  A very malty beer can become a thin, highly alcoholic brew.  A clear beer can become a cloudy one.  Most importantly, though, we need precise practices to allow us to compare one brew to the next, thus allowing us to make good beer better, to constantly improve upon the last one.  We want to make good beer.  Good practices make good beer.  Tighly controlled practices are good practices.

Anyways, after the boil we came upon our second area in dire need of improvement - cooling down the wort.  See you can't just throw yeast into 212 degree wort and expect it to do anything other than gracefully pass away.  In a perfect world, you throw the yeast into about 72 degree wort.  The challenge is to reduce the temperature of the wort by 140 degrees as quickly as possible.  On Sunday it took 40 minutes, which is long enough for a variety of wild yeasts and bacterias to set up shop in our wort, but these are discussions are for another day.

Bubbles!

I'll end with this: One of Willy Wonka's lesser known quotes goes like this: "Bubbles, bubbles everywhere, but not a drop to drink - yet."  As our boiling pot continually boiled over last Sunday, leaving green hops residue all over my driveway, and foamy bubbles up and down the sides of the brewpot, I was thinking the same exact thing.  Good call, Willy.

mb

All Grain, All The Time

File under: To Really Make Chicken Soup from Scratch, First Create the Universe.

So now we're some kind of big shots because we brew 'all grain' as opposed to 'extract'!  I write that with subtle sarcasm, but also with a certain amount of pride.  It is a right of passage for most brewers; the beer-making equivalent of taking off the training wheels.  And now, with training wheels off, we meander quite wobbly down the sidewalks of Brewsville.



Transferring from Primary to Secondary.



Extract brewing is like making chicken soup with canned broth, frozen veggies and some cutlets.  All grain is like going to the farm and buying a live chicken, removing the bad parts and throwing it in a pot with some water and salt, cutting your own fresh veggies and so on.  Both can be considered homemade, but only one is from scratch.  That designation - from scratch - essentially means that we control everything.  It complicates matters, and now, while we were once the masters of the extract-brewing universe, much like modern-day brewing He-Men, we are now reduced to He-man's much weaker alter ego in the all grain universe.

First on the list of things to improve: making enough beer.  In a perfect world, after we finish all our stirring and boiling and adding of strange looking ingredients, we should have eleven gallons of beer.  Eleven is the magic number.  Five and one half gallons go to one fermenter and five and one half gallons to the other.  This way, when we move the beer to secondary fermentation we can fill the 5 gallon carboys (large jugs) with enough liquid to displace all the air in the carboy, thus preventing oxidation, while at the same time leaving behind the nasty crap that settles to the bottom of the fermenter.  Confused?  In more simple terms, we need to fill to 5 gallon vessels to the tippy top while leaving behind the nasty stuff.

Empty Space is filled with air.  Air is filled with Oxygen

Last night, as we transferred the beer from primary fermentation into secondary fermentation, we noticed that instead of having our desired eleven gallons, we had more like nine.  That is bad.  About two inches of oxygen-rich empty space remained at the top of both carboys.  The oxygen can then bind to proteins in the beer and basically make it go stale over time.  Stale beer is gross.  I think if the brewery had a mission statement, somewhere within the bylaws or whatever would be the quite obvious, but apparently often overlooked, statement STALE BEER IS GROSS.

Luckily, lately our beer hasn't stuck around long enough to carbonate, much less go stale, before it's been metabolized and, how you say, returned to the earth?  So there has been little concern about staling.  Oxygenation, however, is a major concern of ours and our first time out we blew it.

There are plenty of other things on our improvement list - too many to list at this time - but it is safe to say that we are on our way.  As we improve, slight differences in water temps, grain types and amounts, hops types and amounts and so on will make huge differences in the final product.  I promise not to bore you with the majority of those details. 




Nice!  The Inside of the fermenter, post fermentation.

 Otherwise, we did pretty well.  The beer was dark amber, smelled of malt and hops (not feet and skunks) and was relatively free of floating particles of proteins and yeasts.  Two weeks from now we can bottle it (or keg it depending on our mood) and then fight the urge to drink it before it reaches maturity.  That is always the hardest part.

This Sunday we try again with our eighth iteration of our wheat beer.  We did a little prep last night by grinding twenty-one pounds of grain.  Last time we turned the grinder by hand.  This time we used an electric drill and it was simply awesome.  What once took over a half hour now took five minutes.

The wheat beer is a medium bodied, moderately alcoholic American Hefeweizen, brewed with Northern Brewer, Centennial and Hallertua hops and fermented with fresh pears.  Adding the pears to primary fermentation leaves a crisp, dry finish with only a hint of pear flavor, as most of the pear essence is carried away on the backs of little carbon dioxide bubbles as fermentation finishes.  Cloudy and yeasty, with pear, banana and clove notes, we're hoping that as we make the jump from extract to all grain the integirty of this fine brew remains.

(An Aside:  This is Wheat #8.  Wheat #6 made two and one half cases of twelve ounce bottles.  They never made it out of my kitchen, as Doug and I drank every last one of them, mostly before they were fully carbonated.  Calling it good would be an understatement.  Wheat #7 was kegged and served this Fourth of July at Doug's annual party and it kicked in forty-five minutes.  All this to say, Wheat #8 has some big shoes to fill.)

Meanwhile, I've been thinking a lot about branding.  Branding is important, but that remains for another time.

mb

Brew To Live

FILE UNDER: If I write it down, it might become real.

 When I get home from work this Thursday evening I'll enter the house through the side door, which leads to the basement.  In the corner of the musty and moldy, pre-Prohibition cellar I'll find two six gallon white pails tightly sealed with white lids, and equipped with clear, plastic airlocks filled with a clear liquid.  The idea is to get both of these buckets up the stairs to my third floor apartment without making two trips.  The idea is to save energy.  The idea is to disturb the contents of these pails as little as possible.

It will not be an easy task.  For one thing, the stairs are old and creaky, pushed in on both sides by hallways too narrow and from the top by ceilings too low.  For another both pails weigh over 50 pounds each - about 40 pounds of liquid sitting on top of 10 pounds of trub; the fats, grain husks, proteins and inactive yeasts, not to mention a small portion of my lawn, that has been settling out of the liquid above it.  Bulkiness be damned, I'm taking them both at the same time.  Not out of laziness, but more out of conservation.  I have a couple hours of work ahead of me, it's a week night and I work during the day.

But it's OK.  In fact, it's more than OK.  It is absolutely necessary.  For within these buckets is beer, and not just any old beer.  It's my beer.  Mine in that I own it.  Mine in that I made it.  Mine in that the recipe resides on a thumb drive on my key chain.  More accurately the beer belongs to me and to my partner-in-beer-brewing-crime, Douglas Weinberg.  We are the brew masters.



Douglas Weinberg and Michael Burt



Here's a picture of us.  The perceptive eye will notice a couple of dudes standing in front of a lake at sundown holding some cans of mass-marketed, mostly watery, commercial beer smiling like it's Christmas morning.

We like beer, and I bet at the time that picture was taken we would have maintained that our beer palates were as developed as anyone’s.  We drank good beer (read: all grain/micro) all the time, but at those times when mass quantities were required we always reached for the old standby, the one in the easiest to carry package or with the cheapest price tag.

We found out, however, that not only were our palates underdeveloped, but we didn't even know what we should be looking for.  Heck, we didn't even really know what beer was made of.

For the uninitiated, beer is made of water, malted grains, hops and yeast.  The German Reinheitsgebot, adopted in 1516, actually made it illegal to call a malted beverage 'a beer' if it contained anything other than the aforementioned ingredients.  Five-hundred years later, things have relaxed a bit (except, of course, in Germany where the Reinheitsgebot is still in full affect) and brewers are using everything from rice, wheat and corn to old boots and bird's nests to make brews that will further carve up the malted beverage market.

Large, corporate brewers in the States and around the world routinely use rice and corn to raise alcoholic content and lower body while significantly lowering production costs.  Cheaper beer that gets you more drunk; essentially the reason you will never see me scoff at a mass marketed beer in a can.  Small breweries have taken to using exotic ingredients to create brews that range from mildly unique to bonkers, from double digit alcohol levels to hops levels that would take a thousand Miller Lites to equal (even with their bullshit 'Triple Hops Brewed' marketing campaign.)

Over the last 18 months, as I have immersed myself in everything beer and have contemplated fermenting everything from rhubarb to radiator fluid, I often find myself thinking the Germans may not be too far off, for with little more than their four ingredients an infinite number of delicious and intoxicating concoctions can be created.  Stouts, porters, Belgians, Oktoberfests, pale ales, and on and on and on can be created with just these ingredients.  To me it’s amazing.  It’s like a miracle.  Mass market beers are so refreshing.  Extreme beers can be more complex and interesting than fine wines.  It’s amazing what can be done with simple, fresh ingredients, a little know-how and time.

Why brew it if you don't share it?

This brings me back to the two, fifty pound, six gallon buckets in my basement.  Within ferments a Belgian Red Ale, brewed according to the Reinheitsgebot (save for the little bit of my lawn that got in there) in my back yard two weeks ago.  Thursday night we'll move it into a secondary fermentation vessel to let it mellow and clear a bit more before we bottle it two weeks later.  After spending about a month in the bottles it will be ready to drink.  Yeah, it's a long time to wait.  It teaches patience.  It also reinforces organizational skills.  But, in the end it allows us to be creative and to share the fruits of our creativity with our friends and families.  Good fun!

If the last eighteen months have taught us anything it's that anything is possible.  Some of our brews have been slightly left of foul, others have been a revelation - the type of experience that lasts long after the bottle has been drained.  And if anything is possible, then perhaps it is a possibility that someday soon we can drop the 'home' from home brewer.

If we can drop the 'home' from 'home brewer' than maybe we can also drop the 'mass' from mass market and the 'extreme' from extreme brewing.  Then we could just brew - for us, for you, for all.

This page will be dedicated to documenting progress as we grow into our over-sized dreams of someday giving a lot of people hangovers.

mb