Big Red Jeff Foote meeting fans (Ryan Whittman is cutoff on the left)

I apologize for the letting my posts go this month, March Madness has me going a little crazy because there are still TWO CNY teams in the tourney, SU and the Cinderella story of the year, the Cornell Big Red.  With all that said, I am still going to find some time to brew this weekend.

The last time I brewed an IPA it was November so I figured I am due for another one.  It’s always great to have an IPA on tap.  So Bryan and I will be brewing a 20gal batch.  Here is the plan as it stands:

• 44lbs American 2 row
• 2lbs Cyrstal 20L
• 1.5lbs Crystal 60L
• 1.3lbs Cara-Pils/Dex

Simple enough base recipe that has worked for me the past few times, it’s a target OG of 1.056 so I am trying to keep this one on the lower scale of alcohol for the style.  Here is what I have for the hops schedule:

• 4oz Magnum 60min
• 2oz Centennial 60min
• 2oz Cascade 30min
• 2oz Cascade 20min
• 2oz Cascade 1min (cool down)
• 4oz Cascade dry hopping

Keep in mind that there are two 10 gallon kettles and four 5 gallon fermentation vessels so it will only be 1oz per vessel on the dry hopps.  I am going to get a fresh pack of 1056 American Ale yeast to use and we’re on our way.

So, tonight I will be up at the Carrier Dome watching the Cornell Big Red try to upset the Kentucky Wildcats in the

Picture from a game at the dome this year

Sweet 16 after the Syracuse Orange put another team to bed.  It’s a great time to be in CNY with a basetball jones!

Cheers!

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.

Cheers

The brew tower in action

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:

Recipe Specifications
————————–
Batch Size: 10.50 gal
Boil Size: 11.70 gal
Estimated OG: 1.080 SG
Estimated Color: 3.9 SRM
Estimated IBU: 15.7 IBU
Brewhouse Efficiency: 60.0 %
Boil Time: 45 Minutes

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.

That’s about it for now, cheers.

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Cheers!

*UPDATE – It looks like the RSS feed issues has resolved itself so now the feeds are updating properly.  You might want to talk a look and make sure, but this is going to be the most recent post until the week after Thanksgiving.

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It’s a pretty interesting combination of information and access, but I’m not sold on it’s usefulness.  What are your thoughts on it? 

Cheers

UPDATE: My link now works for people not logged in.  Sorry about the mix up.

With that said, I was thinking tonight, while I was reviewing some of the judging notes from brew competitions past; does this make senses?

This came to me when I kept getting comments like “not enough hops” and “good, but I expect more of [fill in the blank].”   I sat there thinking about the many people that tried the beers in question, some of whom had a decent beer pallet, and wondered if the people I spoke with were just being nice, or if the judges were looking for something I wasn’t seeking to deliver.

Mind you, these beer judging notes are more than a year old.  This wasn’t some hard cheese I was still fighting to get down.  Instead I was thinking about the process and how it promotes bigger and bolder, where in reality, drinkability and pallet-ability sells.

Take for example the wit that I submitted.  It was  admittedly an easy drinking wit for the style, but the comments I received sounded like it left something to be desired.  I am not sure about all of you, but when I try to push someone to try Ommegang Witte who likes Blue Moon, I generally get a negative response.

It’s not to say that what we as brewers and beer geeks value is not worthwhile, but sometimes I don’t think that we celebrate the breweries that are doing it on a larger scale using the “less is more” concept.  The concept of “drinkability” is really lost in the beer judging format (IMO) and we as brewers often times overlook it as well.  I found myself poo-pooing Otter Creek because they came in twist off caps.  Meanwhile, my mom grabbed a 12 pack for me (because she is awesome and always looks out for cool beer stuff for me, note the many growlers she has grabbed for me) and I really enjoyed them.  Not because they were big, but because they were subtle and drinkable.

At the same time, the one beer I had that placed…ever, was the Kafir Lime Imperial Lager.  This brew was huge in alcohol, but light in flavor.  It was an outstanding example of the power of lagering on beer and wound up at about 8.5% ABV, but drank like Spaten.  This one wowed the judges in the “specialty” category(or ‘not otherwise specified’ category) and got me second place.  I was able to meet with the judges after at a brew club meeting and found that they were in love with the drinkability after trying so many unique flavors.  Their taste buds had had enough.

This brings me to my long, drawnout point; is there a better way to beer judge?  Seriously, it’s not like this practice dates back to the dawn of man.  Is there a better way to weight like beers and taste, not for just for our personal likes, but for the greater pallitability of beers?  I’ve been thinking about it all night and I honestly haven’t thought of anything, but there must be something.  Can we preserve our taste buds and still reasonably qualify beers?

Who knows?  I certainly don’t.  I’m going to wash this thought down with a Saranac and think about the one man I would love to have heard diss my beer.

It took me a little bit of thinking before I came up with my idea, but once I did, it seemed to make sense.  While in-line filters are actually kind of hard to find, I was able to locate one on the web for like $10.  My plan was simple, set this thing up to that it fits into my racking process so that the beer runs through the in-line filter before it goes into the keg. 

Parts

 So, I want the hose that connects to the racking cane to run into the in-line filter and then into my keg.  Simple enough.  The parts were pretty basic:

2  nylon barbs, 1/2 with a 3/4in thread
1 swivel hose adapter 3/4 to 3/4in

Put together, it looks something like above.  While the concept was sound, the swivel  3/4 to 3/4 adapter doesn’t seal so there is no suction.  The swivel adapter is not necessary, so I’m going to give it another run with something a little more secure.

One quick note is that I boiled all of the parts before trying them and got some petroleum byproducts in the water they were boiled in. 

More to come on this, I will be updating, but thoughts and comments on this are welcome…

In case you missed the news, the Monday Night Brewery crew, my barefooted nemesis to the south, had a recent new addition to their family.  I wanted to take this opportunity to congratulate them and wish them all the best.

I was really impressed with how throughly they covered the process and even got into cask ales (Stonch would be proud), how the basic keg works, and all sorts of fun.

If you missed this and can catch it on a rerun, I HIGHLY recommend it. It was pretty good.

Cheers

Hops: My cascade hops took off this year! They are blooming as we speak. I had a minor beetle attack with these strange little guys that had shinny shells and they were very slow moving. My non-chemical solution was to burn them. They sat right on top of the leaf so I just took a butane lighter and burned them. They haven’t been back since so I guess it worked!

CO2: My CO2 regulator that I picked up from Harbor Freight seems to run with a little too much pressure. If I don’t drink for a night, the pressure gets all heady and is way over pressured. It won’t go low enough for serving PSI so I switched that one out to the small tank as that one runs beer more steadily in a single session as opposed to my keggerator which will go on and off from night to night.

New Beer: Finally I have been trying a lot of new brews! Empire brewing company has some great beers on tap. There were two great ones that stood out to me; the Saison and the Doppelbock. Both were great. I also had some Cooperstown Brewing Co. “Special Ale” that tasted like a bock (IMHO) that I thoroughly enjoyed. The brew that takes the cake though is the Southern Tier Uber Sun imperial summer wheat. This thing is a really big beer that is smooth and easy to drink. It’s a sipper, but not too heavy and does not make you pay in the end.

It’s been busy with work, but not too busy to keep track of Monday Night Brewery. Jonathan, I hope you’re feeling better. Best wishes in a speedy recovery.

Cheers