Thursday, October 28, 2010

“What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself.” -Abe Lincoln-

File Under: Truth In Advertising

It stands to reason that mere weeks after I first started blogging about our adventures in beer-making, all hell would break loose, and all those exciting feelings that build momentum would be replaced with anxieties that sap it.
Lebron knows what I'm saying!

Let this blog post be a testament, as if we needed another, to the validity of Murphy's Law.  Let it also be a warning to all the braggers and showoffs of the world.  Once you start actively publicizing yourself, and walking under a particular banner things are bound to go wrong.  You hear that, Lebron?

Doug and I have recently been confronted with a myriad of problems ranging from STILL not collecting enough beer at the end of the day, to the approaching end of daylight savings time.  Our bottles are moldy, and our brew pot is moldy and our beers won't carbonate and....WAIT!  Hold up!  It's time to stop and reset.

Our exploits in the land of extract brewing, while preparing us for most of the riggers of all-grain brewing, have given us somewhat of a false sense of confidence.  We thought we would switch to all-grain and have more than a running start.  We thought we'd transition easily into the new disciplines and make great beer off the bat.  We thought wrong.

Things have been shaky and there is this voice in my head saying, "The wheels are coming off.  The wheels are coming off.  The wheels are coming off."

We're confused.  We're struggling with the learning curve.  And those voices in my head can't be normal.  Oh wait, the voices just told me they are, in fact, normal so forget it.

Tremendously Interesting Beer
 Anyway, whether or not I am going crazy is not important.  What's important is the lesson we learned.  We do not brew beer with our egos or our good intentions.  We are not guaranteed quality brews because of our fancy new equipment, and we certainly have a long way to go.  We brew good beer with solid brewing practices, high standards for sanitation and the best quality ingredients.  As we have adjusted to the new techniques and the more labor intensive regimens we might have forgotten this.

These lessons can be extrapolated out over the beer industry at large.  These days, while there are plenty of tremendously interesting and quite delicious lagers and ales to choose from, record growth in the "Craft Beer' market has created a banner under which inferior, and sometimes downright disgusting, beers can hide.  These days the simple fact that a brew comes from a small brewery and is branded as being a craft beer is enough of a selling point for that beer to get shelf space in a liquor store.  Never mind what it tastes like.  It is from a small brewery so it must be good, right?  No, no, no...That is so wrong.

Crappy Album
Think back to the early 90s if you will.  There was a phenomenon called Alternative music, thusly named because it was different from what was in the mainstream at that point in time.  After a year or so a very interesting thing happened.  Alternative music was now the mainstream, not the alternative to the mainstream it once had been.  This inspired a million sound-alike bands to jump into the fray, walking proudly under the banner of alternative music.  Suddenly, alternative music was the same shit I had been trying to get away from.  It was meaningless, MOR crap.  The scene collapsed under the weight of itself as more and more people cashed in.

Crappy Beer

Being slightly ahead of the curve in music and beer, I have been able to mostly avoid the trappings of alternative becoming mainstream, although I have to admit to owning that crappy Sponge album from back in the day, and I have to admit to buying some really crappy beer.

What happened in the music mainstream back in the 90s is exactly what is happening in the beer industry as we speak.  People are buying beers just because they are brewed by independent breweries and avoiding beers brewed by large worldwide breweries on those merits alone.  This is dangerous.  How many times does a consumer need to buy a crappy craft beer before they avoid craft beer all together?  Afterall, eventually it will be difficult to tell what's what.

My point is, drink what you like.  Research what's available and make informed choices when you purchase something.  Also, don't dog the mainstream.  As much as I like to brew and drink interesting concoctions, there will never be a day when I am too proud to throw back a couple Buds or Coronas.  In the end, real quality will trump the feeling of being part of a scene.  The scene will fade, but real quality will endure.

So how does this all relate back to our brewing troubles?  I guess I started to believe my own hype.  I've been planning and talking and scheming and bragging and I lost my way.  I forgot that all the hype and talk surrounding what we are doing is, first of all, self perpetuating, and secondly, ultimately meaningless if we don't or can't deliver good beer every time out of the gate.  At the very lease, it can't be flat or have mold in it.  :)

mb

In Primary: Botz Stout #2 - A higher alcohol stout for the cold winter months.

In Secondary: Wheat #8 - Pear infused goodness

Next up: Belgian Red #3 - 11/7/10

In the hole: Toasted Ale #1 - 11/20/10 - Made with home-toasted 2-row barley.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Separating the Good From the Bad

File Under: My favorite kind of beer is the kind with alcohol in it.

Today is exactly one month since we brewed our first all-grain beer - the Belgian Red Ale.  Since then, the sweet wort we produced has gone through a number of significant changes.  First it was dosed with 500ml of Belgian Ale yeast starter.  Then it fermented for ten days.  After that, it sat in secondary fermentation vessels for 2 weeks, conditioning and refining itself.  Finally, last Thursday night we added primer and put the stuff in bottles where it will sit for another two weeks (or longer) before we can finally have a sip.

Tasting a non-carbonated beer is sort of like eating cake batter.  You can get the essence of what it MIGHT be like when it's done, but really it is nothing like eating a cake.  Still, every time Doug and I bottle our beer we put aside a small portion in a pint glass, stare at it for a few minutes, smell it and then taste it, and though it is hard to make the jump from the taste of the non-carbonated version to the finished product there are some very important things we can ascertain from drinking the flat beer.

Bottles, covered with sanitizing residue
First, and most importantly, we can tell right away whether our new beer made it through fermentation without getting infected with the many wild yeasts, bacterias and molds that have been know to ruin a brand new brew.  In the past eighteen months we have dumped nearly forty gallons of new beer due to infection.  Infection comes from some sort of oversight in our sanitation process as we go through the steps of making the beer.  It's a total bummer, mostly because it can be avoided.  Good sanitation practices are the cornerstones for good beer, and probably require their own post to fully explain.  The good news on Thursday was that our beer was not infected.

Second, we can get a good idea about what the hop character is going to be like from A.) the bitterness of the brew, B.) the hops flavor that comes through and C.) the aroma of the brew.  Since this is our second Belgian Red Ale (we made an extract version in the spring) we were interested in making some subtle adjustments to the hops profile.  Belgian Ale yeast will almost certainly give the brew fruity notes - though this particular strain is less fruity then other Belgian's - but it's fruitiness, coupled with our use of the relatively new Citra hop, made the original Belgian Red slightly out of balance.  As it was, it was already a sweet, malty brew, so we dialed up the bitterness and backed off the flavoring hops to hopefully balance out the fruitiness with more bitterness.  Luckily, I think we came close to the mark.

The last thing we can ascertain from the flat brew is whether we achieved our intended color.  There's no use calling it a Belgian Red Ale if it comes out brown.  Seriously, I know this sounds elementary, but we made four amber ales that ended up brown and another black ale that was brown.  Something went seriously wrong with those those beers.  This beer, however, resembled mahogany wood stain and was nearly opaque - sort of like a red stout.  After two more weeks in the bottles, as it continues to condition, it should clear to translucent, but the color itself was spot on!

Bottling beer is by far our least favorite part of the process.  For one thing, it is extremely time consuming.  It is also another opportunity to infect the beer with the many floating bad guys that would love to live in our beer.  But mostly, there is no creative aspect to it.  It's grunt work.  Fill a bottle.  Cap a bottle.  Fill a bottle.  Cap a bottle.  Before we can even get started, however, we need to sanitize all the bottles by filling them with solution and then emptying them out.  Gallons of water are wasted.  The sanitizing solution turns our skin cells to soap.  My kitchen floor gets all wet.

Doug with a growler of the good stuff.
Ten gallons of beer will fill about five cases of twelve ounce bottles.  To help things along a bit we used an assortment of sixty-four ounce growlers, three liter swing tops and green seven-hundred-fifty milliliters bottles.  We only bottled a twelve pack of twelve ounce longnecks.  It really speeds up the process, but at the same time makes it so we need to commit to a least a couple beers every time we pop open a bottle.  I think we can live with that.

Once we had all the beer bottled we cleaned the kitchen from top to bottom and then set about the task of moving our recently brewed wheat beer from primary fermentation to secondary fermentation, or racking.

The main reason for racking the beer is to get it off the yeast before the yeast begins to die and releases byproducts into the beer that would certainly cause off flavors.  It also allows for suspended materials, sulfuric odors and flavors and tannin bitterness to settle out of the beer.

Future Star: Our Wheat Beer
This time we were SURE we had enough beer to fill those carboys to the tippy top without having to suck up any gross sludge off the bottom of the fermenter.  Except, once again, we messed up...

The problem this time was displacement.  Put anything with mass into a volume of water and that volume of water will rise.  Pretty simple.  I think I learned that when I was a child.  It's funny, though, how, under certain pressures, one can forget such a simple thing.

Our wheat beer is brewed with a dozen or so pears.  Pears have mass.  When there is no screen or filtering system in place between the brew pot and the fermenter there is a good chance that 12 pears will pour out into the fermerter, displace the liquid and make four and one half gallons look an awful lot like five gallons.  Once again, we didn't have enough beer.  Noted.

On the positive side, the final gravity of our wheat beer was around 1.012 from an original gravity of 1.048.  That yields an alcohol by volume percentage of 4.7%, which is exactly what we were aiming for.  To read more about gravity and what it all means, click here:

Thanks for reading.

Next Brew: The Botz Stout #2 - A higher alcohol stout to keep us warm this winter. 10/23/10

In Primary Fermentation: Nothing

In Secondary Fermentation: Wheat Beer

mb