11/1, 2008: the final kit: Sierra Nevada Clone

The election is only three days away; thanksgiving comes up in only three weeks. We need one more brew. Enter the Sierra Nevada clone from MBS.

Ingredients:
Mash bill:
6lbs Gold LME
8oz Carapils
8oz 10L Caramel

Hops:
2oz Perle (60 min)
2oz Cascade (2 min)

HIGH attenuation dry yeast

Note: recipe predicts SG 1.042-1.046, FG 1.010-1.012. We'll see what happens with the yeast change.

SG, though, is 1.032 at 87 degs

11/2: 9am -- bubbling strong

11/6: shook up beer. (temp outside of carboy = 68)

11/8: racked -- Gravity is at 1.011 at 59 degs

11/12: FG is 1.010. Close enough. Bottling time.

Bottle key: A/S

10/25 -- the penultimate kit: Hop Head double IPA

Our previous trip to Midwest Brewing yielded not only the late- (but great-) performing porter kit, but also the promise of huge hop flavor. Most recipes we've seen, before and since, even ESBs, require no more than 3 or 4 ounces of hops in the entire process. This one called for 6. Hopes were high -- if we'd been more savvy and knowledgeable at this point in our learning, we would have been able to predict the ultra-bitter flavor a 60 min boil of chinook hops would yield. But we didn't. Anyway, onto the recipe.

10/25 -- the boil.
Grains:
4oz Aronette
12oz Caramel 60
8 oz Victory

Extract:
9.3lbs gold LME

Hops:
1oz Chinook (11.5 goddamn percent)
1oz Cascade 5.4%
1oz Centennial 10%
1oz Crystal 4%
(no boiling times recorded for any of these, although I seem to remember starting with the high-alpha hops and adding the others later.)

Dry hop
2oz Cascade 7.4%

5:23pm -- SG: 1.053 at 71 degs

10/30

7:26pm -- dry hopped w/ 2oz cascade. Gravity = 1.021

11/5

Obama becomes USA's first black president and apostle of hope. SG remains 1.021. On track for weekend bottling.

11/6

Giving it a stir for good measure.

11/8

FG = 1.021. Time to bottle.

Bottle key plain.

Note: Feb 22nd

We just finished drinking this batch the other day. The balance between hop flavor and bittering units never arrived at any kind of happy medium -- the bitterness was overpowering, and the flavor never emerged over the top. Additionally, one's head felt uncomfortably swimmy while he drank it; I chalk it up to the low alcohol content and the correspondingly high sugar content. We couldn't taste the maltiness because the hops were simply overwhelming, but in terms of flavor, alcohol wallop, and drinking experience, it's back to the drawing board. Incidentally, we've just improvised with an ESB in which we double-dry hop with Kent and Cascade. We'll see what happens in a month or so.

October 15th, 2008 -- The MBS Porter Kit

On Sunday, then, I sprang out of bed at my customary time of 6:00am. It was like Christmas morning. I threw on a jacket, jumped in my car, and sped over to the Powderhorn Brewery.

The place was silent when I arrived. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The mice would arrive later. I made myself some coffee, brought the Times in from outside, and waited for the shuffling from upstairs.

After working through Week in Review, I brought up the brewing equipment and opened the Porter kit. Like a Christmas present. Below are the contents.

6lbs Dark LME
8oz Carapils
8oz Black Malt
1oz tradition hops
1oz Glacier hops
Muntons dry yeast [this is the same yeast we'd been using]

Now I got to the brewing journal transcription, which, somehow, fails to correspond with my memory. I don't know what we did for this whole day (we probably spent most of it arguing about something inane) but we didn't start brewing until the early evening. Some Christmas.

Onto the journal --

6:40pm
Begin to heat 1.5 gal water and specialty grain

7:20pm
Begin boiling malt extract in 3.25 gal water

8:28pm
Hot break? Added hops (Traditional) [did we brew this one inside? We definitely brewed indoors once during the fall, and the boil is never quite as energetic inside as it is on the turkey-frying burner, and so the question mark makes me think we brewed inside...]

9:13pm
Added finishing hops (Glacier); no hot break. [Must have been indoors...]

Sometime later in the pm
Pitched yeast, added cold water. OSG 1.039 [Jesus Christ, that's not much sugar. We also sucked at reading the hydrometer]

10/16
9:00am
Bubbling away

8:00pm
Still bubbling -- basement temp 62 degs

10/20
No bubbling -- stirred it up. Temp 52 degs. SG = 1.025

10/21
Moved beer upstairs (near heater) -- downstairs temp 55 degs

10/23
Reading all fucked up. Stirred a second time. Reading (before stirring) 1.028

10/25
Racked into carboy. 1.020

10/30
Reading 1.018
Tastes like flat porter, NOT too malty like previous batches [we were getting ahead of ourselves with this note]

10/31
Reading 1.018. Ready to bottle

11/1
Bottling results in 25 22-oz bottles and one 12-oz. Stored batch under kitchen table until ready.

Discovered that 5 oz priming sugar [the amount that comes in the kit] does NOT equal 3/4 cup, or what most books recommend for bottling.

[End Notes]
After letting it age for three weeks, we carried this beer to Thanksgiving, where the reviews were mixed. It wasn't as malty as previous batches (we settled on having used too much priming sugar in the bottling process as the reason for the extra sweetness), but it also wasn't as rick in flavor as most porters tend to be. Nonetheless, with 15 friends sitting around a bonfire in the cold northern Wisconsin night, it was pretty popular. We managed to bring 8-10 bombers back home with us, where they have remained, being consumed very slowly, until this day.

There is one final note in the brewing journal: January 18th -- Tastes goddamn delicious.

A couple of months of aging, apparently, does wonders...

October 14th, 2008 -- The Trip to Midwest Brewing Supply

After working through two lackluster ales that we generated in August -- both of which tasted vaguely like fresh (but cold) bread and gave us headaches -- we decided that a consultation with the experts was in order. On this sunny, warm Saturday, then, we hopped in the car, each of us armed with his pet theory about the underlying cause of our unsuccessful beer, and drove to St. Louis Park, the home of Midwest Brewing Supply.

One of us (and it's hard at this juncture to recall which one) blamed the age of the dry yeast we were using. It was his theory that the yeast quit on its sugar-eating early and went dormant too soon, leaving tons of fermentable sugar in the finished product. The other of us obviously thought something different, though at the moment, as we steep grains for another ESB, we can't remember what the other theory was. Either way, we had a lot riding on the advice of the brewing experts at the supply shop.

At the store, we got the following advice: the yeast is likely to blame, but probably not because it's old. It's more likely that the yeast just lies down a little early for no particular reason. If we shake the brew up after the initial burst of fermentation, get that yeast back in suspension, things might go a little better for us. We bought a basic Porter kit and a "Hop Head Double IPA" kit, and, possessed of our new knowledge and full of hope, returned to start the porter.

The Pale Ale, first iteration

On August 23rd, the day we bottled the Amber ale, we brewed up a pale ale kit -- we didn't trust our knowledge enough to buy our ingredients separately, and anyway, Swoboda had been carrying the kit around for years, from Seattle to Pittsburgh to Minneapolis. And canned liquid malt extract doesn't go bad, right? Probably not. What follows is a transcription of the brewing journal.

8/23 -- 6:33pm
Starting Pale Ale Kit

6:58
Steeping grains in .5 gal water: 12oz crystal malt [no degrees specified]

7:06
Grain at 175 degrees

7:20
[this is what the journal says. Can't figure out exactly what it means] Started 1.5 gal w/ 6.6 lbs of Cooper's Light Malt [Extract]

7:27
Added .5 gal grain-steeped water

7:40
Malt and grain mixture begins boil

7:43
Hot break: added 1.5 oz Northern Brewer Bittering Hops (6.8%) [wish we knew what kind...]

8:25
Added finishing hops (1.5oz Willamette 4.1%)

8:30
Removed mixture from heat

10:00pm
OSG at room temp: 1.047

10:20
Pitch yeast [important side-note: we did not document the yeast variety because we didn't know shit about what we were doing. Tragic results. We'll get to that later.]

8/24 -- 5:00pm
Bubbling going strong

8/25 -- 1:00pm
Bubbling slows

8/28
Racked to secondary (SG 1.022)

9/9
Bottling (FG 1.019)

Interesting note: nothing in the journal indicates that we ever tasted this beer. Obviously that's not the case. In fact, we drank the hell out of it. But, as I recall, largely in order to free up bottles for more (hopefully) successful brews. As the SG readings indicate, the alcohol content of this beer was extremely low. We theorized like wild men about potential causes -- old malt extract? old yeast? wrong fermentation temp? -- but the taste was way off. Like the Amber Ale, this beer tasted super sweet -- unfermented fermentable sugar obviously remained. We were drinking, then, syrupy 3.2 beer. If we even managed 3.2% ABV. We fixed it eventually, but I'll leave that for another post.

Amber Ale -- August 6th, 2008

I'm obviously going back quite a ways to retell this story, and I apologize in advance for embellishing or distorting any of the actual events. I do that sometimes.

The first thing I notice when I open the brick-and-mortar brewing journal, so to speak, is the exhaustive quality of its earliest entries. Here's precisely what appears in our first entry.

4:10pm, 8/6/2008
Begin heating
1.5 gal water
(grain in bag): 8oz crushed crystal malt, 4oz black patent malt, 4oz chocolate malt
also soaking two 1.5 kilo cans of Cooper's Amber malt extract in hot water

4:20-4:25
Removed grain with strainer (ed. note -- sparging grains loose was a dumb idea)

4:25-4:30
Added 2 1.5 kilo cans of Amber extract

4:31
Boiling begins

4:33
Cluster bittering hops added (1oz 7.4% alpha acid)

4:36
Clean break

5:10
Added .5oz Willamette finishing hops (alpha acid 4.1%)

5:20
Strain out hops and remaining [grains]

6:07
Specific gravity = 1.048, temp 83 degrees

Yeast hydrated in 105-deg water for 10 minutes; yeast added, beer moved downstairs.

COMMENTARY -- I'll do this after each stage, I think. It's easier than doing it all at once at the end.

This was my first batch of beer ever; it had been a few years since Aaron had brewed anything. We were incredibly nervous, cautious to the point of paranoia not only about recording every little thing we did with regards to the process, but also about religiously sanitizing our equipment and following the recipe to the letter. We were using a kit that Swoboda had purchased in Seattle and had been toting around for a number of years. When it came out too sweet (and probably too low in alcohol content), we tentatively blamed the old yeast.

Before we ever started the fire under the wort, we spent a good amount of time with our new bible, "The Complete Joy of Home Brewing," by Charlie Papazian. Incredibly, given the hours we spent poring over specific-gravity tables, pictorial how-to guides, and so on, we somehow managed to ignore the author's most important advice, which he includes at the beginning and the end of nearly every section in the book: "Don't worry. Relax. Have a home brew." I guess we didn't have any home brew at the time. But a beer sure would have calmed us down.

Interesting things I notice now -- for an Amber Ale, one and a half ounces of hops is not a lot; that brew could have used more bitterness. Similarly, we only boiled for, what, 40 minutes? A standard boil, it turns out, is an hour long. I don't know what the effect of a shorter boil is -- or was -- but it probably didn't allow all that bitterness and hop flavor to get into our beer. Also, I notice that none of our paranoia -- which I remember quite clearly -- makes it into the journal. The number of times we had to re-sterilize instruments or our hands or whatever, the shrillness of the cries -- "Wait! Did that spoon just touch your pant leg? Re-sterilize!" -- are comical to recall. Not that we're less careful now (though we probably are), but dealing with wort is more familiar to us. The idea that we started to brew a simple beer at 4:10 and didn't move it downstairs until 6:15 speaks to how unpracticed our operation was. Today, we not only brewed up our Stout, but we also transferred a porter to its secondary and added oak cubes for flavor, and we dry-hopped our ESB and took it off the yeast, as well. And we did a 60-minute boil. But the whole operation was over in about the same amount of time. We're way more efficient now.

Plus, the very memory of having to store a fermenting ale in the basement because it was the only place in the house cold enough to keep the yeast active -- and we could only hope that the temperature remained below 75 degrees -- is nothing but a memory to me. Now we ferment next to the radiator upstairs, as it's the only place in which the temperature might stay above 60 degrees all the time. Snow is falling out the window. Back to the journal.

8/17/2008
Specific gravity=1.019. Beer is cloudy, yeast on surface, no bubbles coming out of lock after second day. Smells like beer. Tastes like beer, but still malty and sweet. Did the yeast do its job?

8/18/2008
Specific gravity=1.019

8/19/2008
Specific gravity=1.016. Racked beer into glass carboy. Mold and scum on airlock (at waterline).

8/23/2008
Bottled. Specific gravity=1.017

COMMENTARY:
Not only was the finishing gravity high, but we sucked at measuring it -- after this episode, I stopped involving myself in the data-taking part of the process entirely. I mean, what's more likely -- that the SG actually dropped .003 in one day after so much time in the primary, or that one of us, most likely me, misread the SG on one or more occasions? And there's no way the SG went UP ever. Unbelievable. Back to the journal:

9/1/2008
First tasting. Super malty, like a Belgian more than an Amber. Very dark, very sweet, very heavy.

COMMENTARY:
Matty loved this brew, but it didn't come out how we wanted. I recall the whole batch being too sweet, but the first taste will always be a little off. Most batches get better -- more clear and more even in taste -- with substantial age. We opened the first amber less than a month after we initially brewed it; it was bound to taste a bit juvenile. The other day, we opened a porter for the first time that we brewed roughly a month ago. It, too, was a little bit sweeter than we might have wanted. We'll see what it's like at thanksgiving, after aging in bottles for three or so additional weeks. Again, though, with respect to the amber. I don't ever recall it tasting any less malty, or getting any more clear. Looking at the ingredients, though, we were using extremely dark grains -- it was half dark and chocolate and half crystal malt. The stout recipe we just brewed was identical except it was 2/3 dark and 1/3 light. Not a tremendous difference. I don't know how they expected an amber color out of those grains.

Introduction

An introduction:

My friend and fellow beer lover began brewing his own beer while living in Seattle a few years back. At the time, he and his housemate -- another great friend -- were telecommuting, and had a great deal of time on their hands. They invested in all the traditional homebrewing equipment and created five or six pretty good beers. They had the most success, they said, with porters. As Budweiser ads point out, somewhat disingenuously, darker beers hide flaws more easily than very, very pale lagers like, for example, their own eponymous product. Sadly (for them), clarity is not probably the primary quality a true connoisseur seeks out in a beer. Since that time, Budweiser has begun to market its "drinkability," an unquantifiable quality if ever there was one, as its saving grace. But I guess it does appeal to those who like to drink enormous quantities at once. College seniors who spend as much time applying makeup as they do studying are sure to buy in. But I digress.

My friend took a job in another city, thus breaking up with his erstwhile housemate. Lomg-distance brewing relationships never work out. As one would expect, they split up their equipment. My friend walked away with three five-gallon carboys, two ale pails, a siphon and a hose, 24 22oz bottles, and 18 12oz ones. And an airlock.

When we both moved to Minneapolis this past summer, we resurrected the practice of brewing beer. We started slowly -- an amber ale in early August, and a Pale ale on the final weekend of the month. We wanted to taste our first product before we began our second one. We were all a-flutter as we opened the first bottle. We each took a great sip; we looked at the ceiling as we washed the amber ale around in our mouths; we smiled widely as said something to the effect of, "This is awesome," even as we silently acknowledged to ourselves that it was dramatically more sweet than we had planned. And much darker as well. It was like a doppelbach. No problem, though -- it could have been a fluke. We changed nothing about the process or the ingredients, and we brewed the pale ale right up. Same result.

We took the month of september almost entirely off. The Pale ale came of age, kind of, on the second weekend of the month, but one or the other of us was out of town on nearly every weekend besides. My friend had started teaching, and his time was more precious. I was playing sports and away at tournaments frequently. When my season ended, though, we got down to business in earnest. Two weeks shy of thanksgiving, we're drinking a porter we brewed toward the end of October, we have an IPA and a Pale ale conditioning in bottles, we've got an ESB and a bourbon-barrel porter in the secondary fermenter, and we just brewed a stout today.

My friend and his girlf -- oops, wife -- keep track of their lives, their ideas, their recipes, and so on by means of journals and notebooks. One of these books was called "The Everything Book"; its contents were pretty self-explanatory. But then one day, predictably, the book was lost. And the household was plunged into its own miniature dark age. So it would remain until the seventh son of a seventh son managed to return the ring of power to the mountain in which it was... wait, that's some combination of different stories.

Thus far, we've been keeping track of our vital brewing information in such a journal. But as we amass more knowledge; make more changes to processes, equipment, and ingredients; and brew more frequently; the amount we stand to lose continues to grow. We couldn't stand our own beer-making dark age. We argue about what we've done enough as it is even though we actually HAVE a written record; without it, we'd quickly become a one-man operation producing ales like "Dead Man Porter" or "Murderer's Row IPA." Plus, because we've been working with a pencil and paper, and writing in a 6x4-inch notebook is awkward and laborious, we've neglected to include any of the narratives surrounding the brewing process, and that's where the real gold is. Our journal, as it now stands, contains only the "necessary" facts. It does not chronicle the invention of planterball, the next great American sporting craze, nor does it include mention of our late-autumn pratfalls produced by our efforts to protect the boiling wort from falling leaves. And without that stuff, it's just a list of ingredient weights, specific gravity readings, the occasional historical reference (Obama wins--time to make an ESB for racist Republicans), and so on. And what, really, is the long-term cultural value in that?

Thank God for google and the digital space it affords lowly operations like ours. With a blog such as this one, no detail of our process need escape mention. No anecdote, however trivial, shall go unexplored. That, my friends, I promise to you.

By the way: I'm posting as Aaron Swoboda. But I'm Derek Gottlieb. Our writing styles, I'm certain, are fairly different. You'll be able to tell us apart; fear not.

Next time: the process of retroactively recording three months of brewing begins.