With the winter of Upstate New York beginning it’s long decline, it’s time to start thinking about summer beers. I had originally wanted to squeeze a doppelbock into the lager season, but that’s not going to happen this year. It’s probably a good thing though as I have been on a bit of a “big beer kick” and I need some more session beers.
This weekend I decided to tackle an old favorite, the pilsner. Only this time, I wanted to really do one that I wanted, not just one that I thought would fit a style. This is meant to be a hoppy pilsner, inspired by Mammoth Brewing Company’s Golden Trout Pilsner. A friend brought me a bomber of this from Cali and I really enjoyed it. It was a hoppy interpretation of the pilsner style that is listed as a German Pilsner, but I would call it a modern-American Pilsner. While it didn’t receive a lot of “BA love”, I thought it was a great brew. They listed it as being made up pilsner and vienna malt with all Noble hops. Not a lot of really useful information. So I used the ingredients and went forward.
My brew came out something like this:
18.5lbs UK 2-row pilsner
3lbs Vienna
60 min – 3oz Saaz
30min – 1oz Hallertauer, 1oz Tettnag, 1oz Pearle
Cool down – 2oz Saaz
Dry hopped – 2oz Saaz whole-leaf
For the actual brew, I decided on a protein rest and a double decoction. The second decoction was for getting the mash-tun up to mash out temps. The protein rest was 122f for 35 min followed by a 20min decoction consisting of 4.5 gallons. When the decoction mash was added back to the mashtun the temp was 155f where it rested for 45mim. The second decoction was only for 13min and consisted of 2.5 gallons, but still brought the temp up to the desired 168f mash out.
I sparged for about a half hour and at the end, I was a little light in my volume so I topped off with two gallons of water before the boil. After the boil, I was a little low in my volume, but I was high on the gravity so I topped off with some water to get to my desired 1.044 OG.
The idea here is a simple pilsner with a great hop profile, some tradition with a more modern smack. Hopefully it comes out. It might not be in any styles, but it’s going to be cooling me down this summer.
I know it was a while back, but the Bobby Brown Ale that I brewed before Christmas has been on tap for a few weeks now and I entered a bottle into a club brew competition so I wanted to get my notes down.
Over all, this was a pretty straight forward brew day. Single infusion of about 8 gallons at 170.5f to get a 158f grain bed temp. I held this for an hour, mashed out and sparged all as normal. The pre-boil gravity was 1.049 (target was 1.045).
When everything was all said and done, I was a little low on my volume and high on my gravity so I added some water to get the volume I was looking for.
Now as I mentioned, I entered this beer into a “club only” competition to get some feed back on how things went. These club only competitions are a lot of fun because you get some input from guys who really know their beers. This is even better than just bringing your beers to the homebrew club because sometimes at brew club you end up trying so many different beers, your pallet can really get scorched.
Anyway, unfortuniatly with this brown ale, I had some problems with my bottling again. In this case, I know exactly what I did wrong; I used DME for priming instead of Dex. This is actually not a bad thing to do, you just need to adjust the volumes appropriately and I obviously made a mistake. Otherwise the feedback was good even though I was reaching in entering this beer into an “English brown ale competition” (it’s more of an American Brown) so all things considered they responded with descriptions that fit what I was going for.
Did I win, nope, but competitions are not all about winning, they’ll all about those review sheets IMO anyway.
A little more than a week ago I received an invitation from Josh Solomon, Director of Sales for US Beverage Net, to visit their offices in downtown Syracuse. Funny thing is I’ve walked by their building for the last 5 years and was finally able to get in and check it out. The building was vacant for a number of years and they have been one of the new tenants, remodeling their floor to include a demo bar, conference rooms and a bunch of offices. But I’m not here to talk about real estate, I’m here to talk about beer.
As a quick overview, US Beverage Net has a patented process for measuring the flow of beer through keg lines and relays the information into a web-based user interface. The user interface allows managers, brewers and business executives to monitor real-time statistics about what brews are selling, track innovatory and beer temperature. The video below is quick peek at how the system works:
The system allows managers to see how much beer is being sold with the information from the registers at the bar against the actual beer that flows through the beer lines. Innovatory is tracked in real time and allows managers to know the status of kegs on tap. Over time, information is collected so that larger bars and beer operations can produce reports to show trends in purchasing, beer choices and sales. This is really precise measurement where most bars and brew pubs rely on simply lifting kegs and quick counts.
Now beer is an interesting asset for a bar. While we (beer geeks) can really see the value in tracking the beer flow on a high end beer like Chemey, most people in the bar/restaurant service industry see beer as a low-cost, high profitability product. This can easily lead them to ask “why should I care?” – I have to say, when I first learned of US Beverage Net I asked myself the same thing.
So what makes this valuable to customers? After talking with Josh, I’ve learned that they’ve found a few hot-spots for customers and have an enticing opportunity for future growth. First, restaurants with multiple locations that see a large volume of beer flow through their lines can quickly realize the value of tracking “beer loss” (includes everything from people who waste beer that is foaming by leaving the tap open to overly friendly staff that like to treat their friends). It allows for accountability and in some cases, US Beverage Net was able to identify 20% loss of beer and, with some basic review of staff and practices, were able to get the losses down to 2%.
Now while it’s easy to see how hundreds lines with beer flowing inefficiently can lead to quick turn around on investment dollars, but how can this help a brew pub? Empire Brewing Company is currently using the system and brewer Tim is able to accurately monitor inventory so he can plan out brew sessions, asses the effectiveness of recipes with sales information, and do all this from the comfort of his home. The web-based user interface has created a situation where he can pick and chose the time he needs to spend in the bar so he doesn’t have to walk into the coolers picking up the kegs every night to monitor supply.
Finally, they’ve got some interesting prospects for the future. US Beverage Net has recently signed on with a few distributors. Now this is interesting because they can provide access to distributors to have a real-time view of inventory at bars and restaurants. This can save them man hours, gas and increase efficiency of the beer distribution process. There is also the possibility for US Beverage Net to, as they build their client base, compile information for brewers and the beer industry to provide an immediate snapshot of consumer reaction to beer in the market.
Over all, the upside of this product is great. It’s especially attractive given the current economic climate and everyone’s desire to stretch every penny. This quote from Jake Wright of Quaker Steak and Lube says a lot:
“We have had a FULL return on our investment for the installation and a full year of fees from just ONE busy night, moving from a variance of 20% the week before we notified staff to just 3% the week after. The system worked from day one, the support from the Bevnet team was immediate when needed and most importantly the cost was amazingly low. No hassle, easy to use, low cost and immediate ROI.”
Syracuse is a great beer town and US Beverage Net is a great beer company using innovation to help modernize the industry we support. Cheers.
This weekend I started a project I’ve been meaning to do for a while. My garage is sheet rocked, but the previous owner never taped and mudded.
So this weekend, I spent a good 16hrs taping and mudding. This week I am going to treat the many water stains and paint. When it’s all done, I have some cupboards to hang up in there and finished semi-gloss finish on the sheet-rock.
I consider this a semi-beer project because I brew in my garage. Since I spend 5+ hours in there staring at the water-stained unfinished sheet-rock every other weekend, this seems like a great way to spruce-up my brew space.
I’m not going to bother with pictures until I brew again, but I should have some real brew news in the next few days.
It’s been a while since I did this one and the first time I did this as an experiment in “Reiterated Mashing”, but this time with a 20gal mash tun, there was no need to split the mashes. This was a 10 gal batch that I used essentially the same recipe:
Ingredients:
————
Amount Item Type % or IBU
30.00 lb Pilsner (2 Row) UK (1.0 SRM) Grain 75.0 %
8.00 lb Rice (1.0 SRM) Grain 20.0 %
2.00 lb Pale Malt (6 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain 5.0 %
3.00 oz Saaz [4.00%] (45 min) Hops 15.7 IBU
Munich Lager 2308
For the rice, I used off the shelf rice for this and cooked it before I was brewing this morning. I burnt some of the rice so I didn’t use that stuff in the mash. I cooked it like I would for a big batch of rice. It worked well enough. The mash lasted for 70min at 150f, it dropped about 3 or 4 degrees over the time, not bad considering it was in the teens in my garage.
The first running were 19brix (1.079) totaled about 6gal (out of 12.5gal of strike water). I only ran one sparge because the pump ran through the water pretty fast. The second running was 14brix (1.057) and brought the whole volume up to about 12 gal total. The pre-boil gravity was 18brix (1.075).
I dropped all 3 oz of hops in for the 45 min and let it go. No boil overs and a 1.074 OG made for a great brew day (I know, don’t ask me, there must have been a bad reading on my pre-boil gravity).
After airating and adding the four Beano pills per 5gal, I pitched the yeast and now it’s waiting to see the temp of my secret lager corner in my basement. I have to get my hands on some Kaffir Lime leaves for the secondary.
One quick note is that this was my first time using my brew tower pictured above. It worked awesome. There are wheels on it and it has breaks. It’s a sturdy tower and with my pump in my system, it allows me to do most of my brewing without having to hoist my mash tun up and down a bunch of times. Plus it doubles as an organizer for my keggles and burners.
As I mentioned in a previous post, Santa came early for me. In early December my wife had me pick up my 8.8 cubic foot Frigidaire chest freezer from Olum’s. This got me started on my quest to build a proper kegerator, something I’ve been dreaming about for a while now.
One thing to note is that while I did buy a lot of new parts, I had a 20lb CO2 tank and most of my ball valves already from my previous kegerator. Here is a quick overview of my costs:
two ball locks (remember, I already had 3 beers on tap so I had some parts)
Mat for the floor of the freezer $9
For anyone familiar with kegging and beer flow, I used 3/16 hose at 5″ for each tap to minimize foamy beer. Here is how I came up with this:
Beer line temp: 38-40f
Keg pressure (psi): 12-15
volumes of CO2: 2-3 on most beers
beer line ID: 3/16
Rise to tap: 1′
beer line temp: cold
Here is how it works out: 5 ‘ Length = 12psi(1′rise x.5)-1)/R (line resistance)=2
I know it’s a little confusing, but if you Google line resistance/ beer line length, there are a lot of great resources. Every situation is unique so I don’t want anyone to think they should just copy what I’m doing.
To finish the whole thing off I painted it with white extra-glossy indoor/outdoor paint. I had considered finishing the wood and doing some fancy stuff, but at the end of the day, it was a few weeks worth of work already and I didn’t feel that the extra effort was going to increase my satisfaction with the whole thing. The extra glossy is a must because beer WILL SPILL and you want a slick surface.
If you add in wood and about a million trips to the hardware store, I had close to $600 wrapped up into this project (including the $220 for the freezer). But, in the end, I have this:
And here is the video on how it all came together.
Happy holidays! Santa was good to my hobby this year. I gained a chest freezer that I turned into a four tap keggerator and a custom built brew tower. More to come on both of those as well as the 20 gallon Old Ale brew day, but for this post I wanted to share a review of CNYBrew Friend Jeremy’s Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter. Jeremy recently made the change to all-grain brewing and has a few batches under his belt. The recipe was by Danny Conn and is available here, Jeremy was looking for a brew to give out to friends for holiday gifts. Here are Jeremy’s comments on the brew he made;
I scaled my recipe down to 2.5 gallons to fit into the 12 1 Liter bottles I had. I also didn’t use the oak chips as I had never used them before but had read that it is very easy to go overboard and I didn’t want the oak to dominate the flavor.
7.5 lb Pale US 2-Row
1.25 lb Munich 10L
.75 lb Special Roast
.50 lb Caramel 120L
.50 lb Caramel 45L
.12 lb Chocolate 350L
.50 oz Columbus – 60 Mins
.30 oz Goldings – 10 Mins
Mash was the same as above. 60 min boil. I used Wyeast 1056 (with starter) instead and my fermentation temp was a bit higher at 70 degrees. It was in the primary for 2 weeks and then I racked into a secondary on top of a Madagascar Vanilla Bean that I had cut down the middle, scraped out the inside, and then chopped into quarters. I soaked the pieces in a bit of bourbon for a day beforehand. I left it in the secondary for another 2 weeks and added half a cup of Jim Beam Bourbon at bottling.
Now I had this while my wife and I were over for dinner, but Jeremy was nice enough to give me a bottle to try on my own. I enjoyed it over some football, here are my notes:
Aroma: I noticed a lot of fruity smells in the nose, there were some light vanilla tones, but very subtle. Vanilla is a forgiving additive for a beer, it plays nice. The fruity aroma was pretty intense and probably a result of the warm fermentation.
Head: A pretty thin head until I poured it more aggressively, this happens in beers with higher alcohol content, he may want to increase the dex on the next time around. The color of the head was cream/off white and reminded me of a cream ale head.
Color: Deep rose red to a mahogany color, a nice color for a porter. The clarity was fantastic on this brew, there was no chill haze or sediment in the brew.
Taste: There were hints of fruity esters on the front end with the creamy vanilla flavors following on the back end. Clean finish with all the flavors being subtle and nothing really overwhelming the beer.
Mouth feel: Early on there was some carbonation burn on the tongue, but nothing too bad and it really tapered off as I drank. The body was clean, crisp and easy to drink with no alcohol burn.
Over all: This is rich, but not overbearing. The vanilla and caramel notes really set this beer off, but it finishes clean on your pallet. This makes the beer very palatable that I might even go so far as to call it a session beer (perhaps it’s a drinking mans session beer, but it’s something I could have a few of and not get sick of). There are only two things I would change; fermentation temp to keep the esters in check and maybe tweak the recipe to give it a little more complexity, but it should be done in extreme moderation as it’s a very drinkable beer and that should remain.
Thanks to Jeremy for sharing his beer, it’s a great beer and I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I did.
This weekend was my first brew session with my “pump in a box” in full effect and things went well. There were a few problems that were caused mostly by my inexperience with priming the pump, but once I got over that hump, things went very smoothly.
For anyone that does not have experience in priming a non-self priming pump, you are essentially trying to remove all the air from the pump so that suction can be created. This takes a few minutes and one thing that is helpful to to make sure that your exit hose is held straight up from the pump. This helps purge any air that could be lingering in the pump head. Give it time. Make sure you wait a few minutes for the process to take place. Finally, once you have the pump primed, the next few times it happens much easier.
On another note, using the pump to chill the beer is not a great way to work. It’s very slow (took about an hour to chill 10 gallons compared to 30 min the other way and I had to keep feeding ice into the reservoir. I am going to re-think this one a bit and see what I can come up with, perhaps a snowbank bath first to knock off the first 50 digrees or something. I’m not sure, but I am not giving up on this one…
That’s right, we’re still cranking on FF and for December, it’s a kind of free-for all on days, but that works for me. I’ve been hit or miss with them anyway. For this FF, the question was about our favorite holiday homebrew.
For me, this brings up an interesting point because I am actually brewing a holiday favorite of mine this weekend! I’ll get to that in a minute. For the holidays, I would say there are three beers that stand out to me. The first was my doppelbock. This was a great beer and I personally credit a lot of this to the fact that I decoction mash. Before you jump in and tell me that modern grains are modified and don’t need a decoction mash, I know. However, I would argue that there is some caramelization of the sugars in the process that contributes some unique qualities to the flavor. Plus its a cool process that pre-dates thermometers, how many things do you do today that do that?
The second brew for me would be the Wilford’s Best Oatmeal Stout I just brewed. I’ve already killed a keg of it! I don’t like that fact, but it’s a stout I am still not sick of. This is a great beer that is easy to drink and a nice little winter warmer.
Finally, my Bobby Brown ale that was the first brew Nick and I made together (shed a tear). This was one of the earlier beers I all-grain brewed and it was my first 10 gallon brew. At the time, we were really happy with the brew, but about a year later we cracked open a flip top of it and it was still awesome! That’s why I am brewing it again this weekend:
Bobby Brown this time around:
20.5lb US2 row pale
4lbd Crystal 60L
.75lb Chocolate malt
.25lb Black patent
2oz Norther Brewer 60min
1oz Cascade 30min
1oz Cascade 15min
1oz fuggles dry hop
Irish Ale Yeast (reused from some of my earlier brews)
The yeast is different on this one, but everything else should be the same. This will also be my first time using my pump and my newly installed sparge-arm so hopefully everything functions.
Over the past few weeks I have been working on following the “Pumped up Toolbox” project from BYO where author Ryan Locakard (follow him on Twitter @Ryan_PA) makes his pump a convenient carrying case for brewing odds and ends while also making it more mobile. I found this project after I had been thinking about introducing a pump into my brew process for a while. This project came along at the right time as Nick is no longer brewing and Bryan is in the woods for the next few weeks controlling the deer population so I’ve been hoisting my mash tun on my own for a while and it sucks.
Over all, I would say this project came out to about $220 give or take some money. The large expenses were the pump, the shock buster outlet adapter (to keep from electrocuting myself) , and the quick release valves which will allow me to easily change the pump from sparge water to circulating my water for the chiller.
Below is a video I made about the project. The pump is working and the project was really easy. It should be a handy addition to my brew process and save me from another hernia operation:
CNY stands for Central New York for anyone who doesn't know. I am located in the Syracuse area and enjoy homebrewing beer. I've been brewing since 2002 and currently I all-grain brew most of my beer. I make a lot of gadgets and try to document them as well as possible on this site. I also try to document recipes and brewing techniques. Hope you have fun and remember to relax and have a homebrew!
