Brain Enema of a Savage Mind

New year, new beer!

This year has started out really good in terms of beer for me! Other things haven’t been bad either, but I’ve hit the ground running in terms of both one of my most favorite hobbies and professionally as well.

In terms of homebrew both my wife and my parents gifted me with shiny new homebrew toys. From my parents I got a really nice Monster Mill 3 grain grinder. My wife got my a Bayou Classic SQ-14 propane burner. While I’m the one who does most everything in the kitchen from cooking to cleaning, I know she’s happier to not have to maneuver around me on a brew day just to get a snack or some milk for Gabriel. So now I’ve been working on moving my brewing experience to the garage. It’s a little colder, but there’s a lot more space, and it is much easier to clean things up afterwards.

The first new brew day in the garage wasn’t smooth sailing. I knew there would be some extra work figuring out how to deal with new processes and set things up in a new space. What I hadn’t been counting on was my mill utterly failing. At first the free spinning rollers wouldn’t spin. Then nothing spun and the torque from the drill tried to rip off my thumb. Fortunately I let go of the drill quick and the mill simply tipped dumping grain all over. I had been smart enough to use old musty grain to test the mill out with before putting the good grain in. Occasionally I can be forward thinking. Anyway after about two hours of banging on it finally fixed the issue (the hopper needed to be bent in a little bit as one of the edges of the hopper was just barely touching the roller, but created enough friction to keep it from moving). Once working it was great! Sadly my first brew day was hours longer than even brewing in the kitchen had been. Fortunately my second garage brewing attempt was much better, and was about an hour quicker than I’d normally have; and that’s even after doing a 90 minute boil on a bunch of pilsner malt!

Professionally speaking I’ve been the assistant brewer at Rogues’ Harbor Inn for roughly 9 months. The start of this year saw the release of the first beer that is based off my own original recipe! My first ever commercial brew was a Robust Porter. It’s a little different than the homebrew version that I made. I generally get much better attenuation at home than I do at the brewery. As a result the commercial version of my porter was a little sweeter, but that actually worked out well. It accentuated the chocolate malt and gave it a nice espresso and chocolate character. The homebrew was a little more roasted since it finished drier. I’m happy with my first commercial recipe and I certainly hope other people have been enjoying it as well!

I’m hoping this trend continues, not just in my beer related portion of life, but in all facets of my life! I could use a really good year since the second half of last year was less than stellar for me.

Cheers!

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The Homebrew Setup Grows

My first homebrew set was a Christmas gift from my parents more than ten years ago. It sat unused in a closet for about a year until I moved in with a friend whose excitement about the idea of brewing beer caused my to finally open up the box and start working on a first batch of beer. The brew equipment was your typical two bucket setup. We used a stockpot that I had to boil the beer. It only held a couple of gallons so we had to add water to the fermentation bucket to bring it up to five gallons. The beer itself was your average extract kit. It was some generic flavor and when it was ready to drink I loved it! No, it wasn’t even close to being the best beer I’d ever had, but it was the first beer I made and it was tasty and that right there got me hooked. Since then my diversity of equipment has grown. I added more buckets, then carboys, a bigger pot, beverage coolers turned in to a mash tun, an even bigger ported pot from Blichmann, and most recently a March 809 pump.

My main brew day setup currently consists of the Blichmann Boilmaker 10 gallon brew pot(which is also used to heat water for the hot liquor tank and for the mash), a 10 gallon Rubber Maid cooler that has been converted in to a mash tun. In theory I should be able to do a bit over 20lbs of grain in it. So far the most I’ve used with it was 17lbs for an IPA I have going. Right now I have a second 5 gallon cooler that serves as a hot liquor tank, but I’m probably going to replace that this summer with a 10 gallon one. I use glass carboys for my fermentations (6.5 gallon ones for primary fermentation which then gets racked over to 5 gallon carboys). When the beer is ready it gets put in to 5 gallon Cornelius kegs(old soda style kegs) where it then gets put in the kegerator to carbonate(forced carbonation) and to be served. Most of my beers take 3 to 4 weeks from the point I start the brew to the day I’m ready to drink them. Once I have all the plumbing I need I’ll be using the pump to transfer hot wort so that I don’t have to lift the heavy kettle to the stove. Everything is currently transferred via gravity so it involves a lot more lifting than I’d like to do.

It’s amazing how this hobby has grown in to quite a passion for me. I like the brewing process every bit as much as I do enjoying a good beer. I’ve had some times where many months pass between brew sessions, but I always come back to it. There’s still a lot more growth to do and things I can get to enhance my homebrew setup. It’s a great adventure and I look forward to the next chapter of it!

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The Art of the Brew

Since the completion of my new mash tun my desire to homebrew has been back on the rise.  Over the years it’s come and gone.  There have been periods where I was making a couple beers every month.  Then suddenly I’d go half a year without brewing.  I’m sure there were any number of factors involved, but I know that my last falling out with homebrewing had to do with the fact I was really tired of doing extract batches, and my previous couple of all-grain batches had been absolute failures.  Those failures were not procedural in nature, but were due to poor equipment and setup.  So I sort of shelved the whole homebrew thing for a bit.  Last month I got all the pieces to put together a new mash tun, and my first brew with it had pretty damn great efficiency - creeping up towards 80% which is more than I could have hoped for.

I’ve already gotten in on the recent group buy for bulk grains.  Now that I can do reliable all grain mashes and no longer just mini-mashes, 55lbs sacks of my base malt are going to be essential.  For now I think I’ll be going with Maris Otter, but that may change later down the road.  I’ve always liked Maris Otter – it’s a very clean grain with good extraction.  I’ll also have to start picking up some 10ish pound bags of speciality malt so I can give my beers all the character that they deserve.

My first all grain batch with the mash tun was an IPA primarily using Ahtanum hops.  I’d been wanting to try these for awhile so I figured an IPA was the best way to showcase them.  I also decided to try and get a little bit fancy with this IPA and put about 8 ounces of Gambrinus honey malt in to it. I’ve heard people saying the honey malt barely adds any honey flavor, to people saying that even a tiny amount imparts a huge taste.  I guess a lot of it is a matter of perspective and soon enough I’ll find out how I feel about 8 ounces of the malt.

The IPA just went in to the keg today so now it’s chilling down and carbonating.  Come this weekend I’ll get to taste test my first all grain batch that actually fermented like a mad demon.  It smells great, it looks great, and I can’t wait to find out this weekend if it tastes great!

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Big Orange Mash Tun

All the parts arrived over the weekend for my new mash tun.  My old setup was a five gallon cooler with a half-assed home made false bottom and some plastic fitting.  Not at all an ideal setup, but did a decent enough job for partial-mash stuff.  Still I had been itching to get back to all grain brewing, but knew I needed a better setup if I was to get decent enough efficiency.  Plus with only a five gallon cooler I could really only do about 10 or 11 lbs of grain in a single mash.  A lot of my all grain recipes are over that amount, or else right around it so all grain had always been a pain in the past.

With this new setup I should be able to do approximately 24 pounds of grain in a single bash.  That means I can pump out some high gravity monsters of five gallon batches.  I’ve got all the ingredients lined up today for making an IPA.  14 pounds of grain are all crushed and ready to go in to the mash in just a little bit.  This will only be my second brew since Gabriel was born, and my first all grain batch in I can’t remember how long.

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Bottles of beer.

There had been a delay in bottling any of our homebrew that was caused by great laziness.  Sanitizing bottles is slow, messy, and really annoying.  I’m not a fan of the whole bottling.  Though I will admit once I actually get underway with it, it’s not as bad.  Getting the motivation to start the process is the difficult part.  Tonight we managed to get a little bit of motivation to take care of bottling one of the three beers readied to be bottled.  The other two will get bottled this week which will then free me up for making the next beer.  I’m thinking the Maple Porter is the next beer on the docket.

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