Sparklers

I'm wading in with sparklers. I've had some sort of beer blog for long enough now, I've earned it.

Pride of place in my rudimentary home bar is my Higene beer engine. Pride of place at the end of the swan-neck is a sparkler! I've read almost every other blog post and forum thread on these plastic things so far and I can't summon a third of the passion for anything that most drinkers have for one side of the argument or the other. As I see it, it's horses for courses.

Small, loose sparkler.

No sparkler: Brewer's choice, drinker's choice. Doesn't knock out much carbonation, fluffy head. If the beer is hoppy, it will still be hoppy. The southern pour.

Loose Sparkler (r): Quarters the beer. Much the same as not using a sparkler, really.

Angram Sparkler: These sparklers come in a variety of colours, with each having 16 holes of different sizes: green has holes of 1mm diameter, black 0.8mm, and white with holes at 0.6mm. There is a lot of resistance in the smaller holes. I just tried to blow through one of each.

Angram sparklers.

The green Sparkler is 'known' as the southern one, while the black one is known as the northern, for Yorkshire style beers. Interestingly, the only reference I have seen for a red sparkler, states that it is for Burton Style beers. Maybe it knocks out some of the sulphates.

I bought four Angram beer engines for an indecently small sum. One was marked 'Irish Stout', and had, firmly welded to the swanneck by old beer, a white sparkler. This, I presume*, pours with a thick, creamy head, as you'd expect on a pint of draught Guinness. Pub gas (a mix of nitrogen and carbon dioxide) was 'invented' to mimic hand-pulled beers, without the fuss of decent cellermanship.This mix delivers the likes of Guinness and creamflow beers with a low dose of carbon dioxide, making a smooth, creamy drink. Also known as nitrokeg.

The serving discussion should include the type of spout, of which there are two, swan neck and short. The swan neck is used with the sparkler, placed at the bottom of the glass, where there is a nib at the end of the sparkler to keep the holes about a centimetre off the bottom of the glass. This generates a lot of swirling cloud that settles up into the thick head and a crystal clear beer. Incidentally, the Guinness style cascading bubbles thing? Not unique to Guinness at all. The short spout allows the beer to fall into the glass, generating a nice, loose, bubbly head.

Not like this! Aaargh.

There is a lot more to the spout thing than I could hope to explain. It's about the drop in pressure as the beer exits the spout, and how this releases the carbon dioxide and so on. There's some chemistry involved with the oxidation process, too, I read, though I find that hard to believe simply because of the low temperatures and short times involved in this. People keep spouting stuff about how the beer aerates as it goes into the glass, and develops extra flavour. If anyone pours my pint like <--- that, they'll be pouring me a-bloody-nother.

In all, I have absolutely no preference, though I have noticed the beer is a little more bitter without the sparkler. I only own swannecks for now, and I hope to buy a short spout for one of the Angrams, just so I can see if there's a difference, but it's pretty low on my list of priorities.

For completeness, here are a variety of sparklers, including some fancy ones for soft drinks!


 *I'll be brewing a stout soon enough, and can't wait to try it through a sparkled beer engine. I read elsewhere that the sparkler vastly improves the maltier beer styles.

Beer engine happiness.

I suffer from chronic nostalgia when beer is concerned. I absolutely love beer engines and the velvet beers they dispense, even though I only had my first pint of cask about 5 years ago. But in my mind I've been an old flat-capper for decades. This is why I had to buy a beer engine from the internet.

Ebay is a fantastic source of everything. I got mine about two years ago, from some pub somewhere or something. I don't know. About £40 delivered, anyway. It worked fine for a year (that's about 3 brews), before it started pumping more beer out from the piston seal than it did from the spout. I finally ordered a new seal set for it last week.

Seal kits are a little expensive. I'd say about the same as their weight in gold. Crap for a few bits of rubber. But they are very unique bits of rubber, and at £28 delivered, you'll soon realise you'll make the money back in sheer joy at not having to wipe the carpet after every pour.

I'm not going to go mad on the detail here, but hopefully the following pictures will help you see what's inside of a Higene beer engine.

The key is to put it back together EXACTLY as you took it apart. Take photos or draw or arrange neatly on a table. Mostly it's fairly simple, but the cylinder needs some care.

If you buy one new and it's not working great, then force some water into it (with a hosepipe is best), and let that sit for a while to loosen up the rubber seals a little. You might find it works fine. You'll still want it taken apart and cleaned. You'll see why when you do it.

  I've replaced the pipe from the top of the cylinder with a 3/8" JG to 3/8" stem (elbow) and a shorter piece of braided hose. It works much better than the bit of kinked hose, and the original hose was black with age.

 Washer Left; curved edge facing down/trench upwards, second washer (big & brown) above that, kept in place by the third washer, and the fourth just floats somewhere up the piston rod. I bought the seal kit and was horrified to see that the brown washers start life transparent. 

 These pictures really aren't in any order.

If yours isn't pulling a full measure, then adjusting the thing in the picture above will sort it out, after a little trial and error. Or just pull another bit out.

The key is to swear a lot when putting it back together.

When fixing it to your bar (what do you mean you don't have a bar?) it will be quite rough on whatever the bar top is made of. Not in a scratchy way, but in a "if your bar top is not nailed down properly it's coming off" kind of way. Also, it only goes half -way on, so cutting a slot out of your bar top will support it better, but it's not strictly necessary. I'll post some pictures of my bar towards the end of summer.

Eyes on the prize... Yeast handling

What's that thing you say about wise men, or the more you know the more you whatever? Well, the same applies in brewing. I've spent the last four years honing my brew kit, my mash efficiency, bottling and kegging, recipes and above all else speed, or brewday efficiency. I'm getting the hang of it now, I think. However, one thing still stands in my way; taking good care of my yeast.

My process has been honed over the years, as I've improved my recipe design, mashing, boiling, hop additions and all the processes in between and after (bottling and kegging, serving temp, condition). The intermediate step, fermentation, is all down to the yeast. Mishandled yeast can, at best, behave a little odd, throw out some unusual flavours, or take a while to start or stop. Sometimes a poorly treated yeast will give you some bad flavours and aromas. I've got to the point now where that kind of thing is no longer tolerable, and it's apparently bad form to blame the yeast. Acetaldehyde (green apples), Diacetyl (butterscotch), solvents (pear drop esters at best, nail polish remover at worst) phenols (smokiness or pepperiness) and some rubbery aromas if allowed to die and disintegrate in the wort.

So, in the same way as I developed my other brewing skills, I'm now paying some close attention to my yeast. I do have a microscope, but haven't been able to use it properly yet, as I can't get hold of Haemocytometer plates. Nevertheless:

1: Pitching rates- at it's simplest, for a standard strength ale (up to SG. 1060) a single sachet of dried brewers yeast will work fine. For a lager, buy two. They're not expensive. Rehydration can take place before, or by addition to the cooled wort. Rehydration advice found here: http://www.fermentis.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/SFA_S04.pdf

For wet yeast (or liquid yeast) I believe one vial treated well will work for a standard strength ale, and again cough up for two if you're brewing a lager, but preparing a starter is the best treatment here.

Repitching yeast from a previous batch (slurry) can help reduce the cost of buying two or more sachets or a vial. Depending on how fussy the yeast, or how obvious it will be in the final beer, I'll either pitch straight onto the yeast cake in the fermenter, or scoop some out (in a sanitary manner) for use later.You wouldn't pitch a pale beer straight onto a stout yeast cake, for example.

2: Temperature- best not to pitch while too hot, or to have a temperature jump from yeast temperature to wort, or large fluctuations in temperature during fermentation (with the exception of a specific fermentation profile, like crash cooling, Diacetyl rests or increasing temperature for Belgian style beers or for attenuation). Also, keep the beer at a suitable temperature for the beer. Warmer temperatures tend to create more esters, while cooler fermentations, though slower, produce a cleaner beer.

Most beers ales are fine fermented between 16 and 20 degrees C, but do check. Also, picking yeast best suited to your actual ambient temperatures can work. WLP029 Kolsch yeast is a warm lager yeast, fermenting a clean beer at ale temperatures, and I've got Nottingham to work quite well at quite low temperatures.

3: Style- pick a yeast suited to the beer style brewed. I'm spending a few extra euros for wet yeasts, of which there is a much wider variety. Spending more money on Saaz and brewing water adjustments, pilsner malts and making space in the fridge is a waste without the perfect yeast for the job*. That's not to say that good beers can't be brewed with other yeasts, of course. Stout brewed with Belgian yeast, IPA with Brett,

My next step is to make a stir plate (read here for the reason I chose not to http://www.jimsbeerkit.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=70926), and aquire some Erlenmyer flasks in order to make some starters a few days in advance. I've bought a pressure cooker to sterilise wort in jars, and then I'll feel I've really got the hang of brewing.

*And for this prize of which I mention in the title, the yeast is Vermont IPA yeast (Conan). This is being fermented warm in my specially designed fermentation chamber (which has cost about a tenner to make from begged stolen and borrowed gizmos). The beer is an America IPA for the Galway brewer's competition. It didn't make it in, after all, but I enjoyed drinking it, I suppose.

Judging at the National Homebrew Club competition

It's a tough job but someone's got to do it!

1st March, St. David's Day, and I've to catch the 0430 bus to Dublin. It's a long trip down, but it's the last in the series of my journey to becoming a judge. It's been emotional.

The last beer before lunch.

The day started with registration; getting your name badge and picking what you want for lunch. I was asked to judge category 10A, American Pale Ales, so sat down at a table next to Sarah, owner of the new N17 brewery in Tuam. It was a pleasure to judge alongside Sarah, who certainly knows her stuff. We were within 2 or 3 marks on all beers, so allocating a score was fairly straightforward.

miniBOS

Once we'd judged our flights, a total of 9 beers, I think Sarah went and found the Stout table and I settled amongst the American IPAs - as if I hadn't already had all the hops I could take!

The judging was quite easy in terms of picking which beers suited the style more than others, but filling in all the spaces was a little tricky on some scoresheets. I hope the information I put in is useful to the brewers.

After that I sat down to clear my palate and head for the mini Best Of Show round, which took place once all the category 10 beers had been judged. That left me and Ronan about 18 beers to sort through and pick the best.

Sorting through 18 beers to quickly asses which deserves to go through to the Best Of Show in Cork was like drinking 18 shots of beer. The aul head was spinning by the end of it.

As bus o'clock drew rapidly nearer, the silver medal in category 1 was announced, and it was me! A quick gulp of champagne, a handshake or two and I ran off out the room, up the street with a big grin on my face!

I had a fantastic time. The taxi driver who took me to the bus at 4am asked me if I was getting paid for judging, or even getting travel allowances. To be honest, with all those lovely beers, people and the craic, I'd nearly consider paying for the privilege of judging again. Thanks to Renier, our steward, as well as all the other stewards who helped us in the miniBOS.

What a day.

Interested in being a part of Ireland's biggest homebrew community?
www.nationalhomebrewclub.com

Happy New Year again.

This must be my fourth or fifth new year as a homebrewer by now.

First, thanks to anyone who got in touch this past year to leave comments or ask questions. I hope I was helpful, and will try to do more of the same this year. To that end I'm:

• a few weeks off becoming a BJCP approved beer judge
• putting my name on the judging list for the NHC
• taking an online course in Beer Chemistry from Oklahoma University
• still brewing many and varied beer styles
• growing ingredients to make some very personal beer

But I won't be doing the following:

• a dry January.

Firstly, and with huge thanks to certain members of the National Homebrew Club here in Ireland (with a supporting part played by Bus Eirann), I'm well on my way to becoming a beer judge. With only a few more weeks until the beer tasting exam (with no less than BJCP President Gordon Strong as proctor), I've to continue tasting beers (harder work than it sounds) and sit an hour-long online exam.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to feel out-of-my-depth learning about beer biochemistry, with words like Polysaccharides and 1,4 - alpha linkages.

Brewing Botanicals

I've beer to brew, including some for the March 1st Nationals held by the National Homebrew Club in Dublin, and I've been promised a Brewferm Mash Kit by HomebrewWest.ie to review.

Finally, I'll be growing Yarrow, Wormwood, Sage, Tansy, Hops, Bog Myrtle and so on, in order to make the most interesting beer Mov-town has ever tasted.

For now though, I'm going to finish up my notes on Lipids, have a cup of tea, and think about the next blog post: "How to be come a Beer Judge".

If you find any of the above interesting, there's a good chance I'll mention it some more in the following posts. For now though,


Happy New Year.

Hobgoblin Plus

Note: this beer won Silver Medal in the Milds, Bitters and Ales category in the National Homebrew Club competition on 2nd March 2013.

This morning I’ve put on the biggest mash ever! I have a very limited mash and sparge capacity, and the 24l coolbox is something I’m looking into getting, as it can keep 20-odd litres of mash hot for hours, if necessary. For now I’m still working with 10l mayonnaise tubs with holes drilled through. Not particularly efficient, it’s got to be said; so all my recipes are currently worked up to account for only 60% efficiency. Which mean mashing a lot of grain. I mashed 6 kg, which needed nearly 20l of water. You don’t need to be a mathematician to see it won’t all fit in at once.

Then, by misreading the recipe (it is morning, after all) I added more amber malt than I’d called for. If you’re familiar with the Hobgoblin clone recipe that’s going around (I’m sort of following Orfy’s), then you’ll see that any amber malt is too much. But it was going out of date, and I hadn’t got a chance to use it properly (the only recipe I tried it in was undrinkable because of the obscene amount of DMS present). It’s going to be an interesting beer. It’s also going to be about 6% and barrelled (in an old youngs white thing) for the rest of the winter months, and for a final experiment, I’m going to add gelatine finings to it, to see if I can get it clear a little quicker. It’ll also make it technically illegal for vegetarians to drink, which is such a pity…

Apart from all that it’s a standard all-grain, all-hassle brew.

I’ve found a friendly neighbourhood farmer who’s willing to take the grain off my hands. Though they specialise in organic, and because I don’t use organic ingredients they have to give it to the cat, or something, but it means I don’t have it hanging around unnecessarily. Hops, though. What to do with them?

The beer finally landed in at 6.1%, and after a week it had plenty of condition and was MUCH clearer that it would have been had I not fined it. I’ll definitely use gelatine again for the keg, as it was cheap and easy to use, at one sachet per 4.5 gallons. Also, the 300g or so of amber malt, which did taste very obnoxious after one week, did mellow out nicely in the second.

Next time I’ll use more hops for aroma (still not sure what I’m doing wrong there), and until I get a bigger mash tun, I’ll be reverting to half extract and half mash, as it’s a lot more manageable.

Finally though, to some positives:

1: Don’t be afraid to substitute a half pound of acid malt for a half pound of pale malt (or add an acid rest to your mash schedule), as it vastly improves efficiency if your mash ph as so far been a bit high (that’s alkaliny).

2: Gelatine finings are dead easy to use (better for a homebrewer than the fish finings, as it’s so easy to store and prepare).

3: If you have a cheapo Young’s white beer/cider barrel, put a short length of tube over/in the tap, as it makes dispensing a breeze. Today’s hangover was entirely due to enjoying pouring the beer so much that I repeated the experience ad nausem, so to speak.

 

Pictures to follow, once Blogger behaves itself.

Next up – Dave Line’s Tiger Beer 1038!

Post Brewlab Beer

It's been a month since I set off for windswept Sunderland to learn how to make my beer a little bit better. A whole month! Seems like only yesterday. Having said that, it's lucky they sent us home with the notes, as there was too much information for 20 drinkers to completely absorb.

If you have a wort chiller, the next bit doesn't apply!

The main issue for me is DMS (Dimethylsulphide), which is a taste/aroma compound which makes the beer taste and smell of cabbage, or overcooked sweetcorn. It can be present in small amounts and affect people's drinking pleasure differently. For me, though, not nice. So, after brewlab, have I got rid of it?

Well, in short, so far, yes! And thank God too, because it was ruining my beer. It was all about the cooling. The precursor to DMS compounds can be found in malted barley, and aggravated into existence during mashing, but then evaporated during a long rolling boil, to below noticeable amounts. Which is great. No problems then.

The DMS compounds continue to form, however, as the wort cools down, and longer cooling periods, as used by myself with no way of chilling the wort, can bring the levels of DMS back up to really  noticeable levels! So, although I don't have a cooling coil yet, it's on the list. I did, though, manage to maneuver the hot copper into a sink with cold water, which made short work of bringing the temperature down to about 60oc. Now we'll have to see after fermentation is complete if that was enough!

The recipe was for my usual Golden ale, which means that in spite of all the hops, there's no room to hide any unruly smells.

No pictures with this one, as I couldn't take a picture of the smell. Maybe in another couple of years.

Harvest Ale #1

Fresh hopped Harvest Pale ale:

5oz, on the button.

It feels like ages ago that I got excited about the first hop shoots nuzzling at the surface of the soil. Now they’re drawing the attention of the council’s planning department! So, after nearly 5 months, I can finally reap the rewards of months of doing nothing; it’s basically looked after itself. Well, ok, I did rig up a zig-zag of Poundland plant wire, but that’s about it. The regular watering thing that plants seem to like wasn’t labour intensive this year, thank you Gulf Stream, and although I did manage to throw on some tomato feed once or twice, it was only because I was feeling guilty about having done, frankly, nothing. But now I’ve a brew day to plan. Some sort of pale ale should prove a hearty canvas for the piney Nugget hops I’ll be harvesting from the one bull-bine. Only one bine flowered, so I’ll probably only have quarter of a pound of wet hops at best, but lesson learned for next year: cut back all bull shoots, not just some. Success favours the brave.

They're all perfect.

The pale will be 2lbs maris otter, 1oz crystal & 1oz wheat, and ¼ oz Northdown (bitter) per 5 ounces of fresh hops. Thinking about it, it’s probably too much, as the equivalent is about 5oz aroma hops in a 5-gallon brew (fresh hops weigh between 4 and 6 times more wet than when dried). Though after consulting the forums where it seems that more is more, more might be enough. Besides, it will be easily spread over the last twenty minutes of the boil.


So on Harvest Ale eve, about three weeks later than the microbrewers who were at the Kent harvests, and nearly a week later than some Dublin homebrewers (I’m quite far north, have I said?), I finally set the alarm clock for an interesting brew day. I haven’t dreamt about homebrew yet, but if it’s going to happen, it’ll be tonight.

Harvest Day: 18-09-2012

Hot, hot, hop.

Woke up to a wet and windy day, and thanks to some sort of bizarre cold, absolutely no sense of smell - hardly conducive to a morning of brewing with fresh hops!

The first thing to do was to measure up the hops, so I knew how much of what to make. As it turned out, my estimate was spot on: 5 ounces of fresh hops. So I set half a gallon of water to heat up, and mashed in the malts. I left it, checking occasionally that it was at the upper end of the 60s (temperature, that is). Then, sparge, boil, and in with ¼ ounce of Northdown hops to bitter the pale ale. Once the wort had been boiling for 40 minutes I begun to add small handfuls of fresh hops and became frustrated at how little I could smell! Was it the lack of hop oils? Was it the small quantity of hops being added? Or was it, hopefully, the absence of my olfactory senses for the day?

The whole with went into a glass demijohn at 1045, which wasn’t far off estimate, and then in with some yeast from a couple of weeks ago. It’s not fermenting yet, but with any luck by this evening there should be a krauseny mess all over the living room floor.

There’s very little I can do now, for a couple of weeks, except the usual bottle palaver. However, in a couple of weeks there will be an honest appraisal of the beer, but in the meantime, there’s bound to be an update on the next beers up, namely:

#4, a hoppy golden ale, with a fantastic citrus aroma,

Chocolate and Passionfruit Porter, which may or may not be a stroke of genius,
WHT Tayleur’s dried Rowanberry brown ale, and finally,
CIDER! If I can get hold of some apples!

And maybe, by next September, I’ll have both more hops and a hopback to really force in the aroma, sense of smell or not!

Wet hopping . . .

So, a malt order has been placed and the hops are so nearly ready to harvest. I've been following Paul Corbett from Charles Faram hop merchants on Twitter and they've had their first harvest down in south-east England somewhere, so I figure I can leave it a week or two yet, up here in a north-westerly part of Ireland, with emphasis on north.

The early stages of hop cone formation. We're a bit on from there.

The hops I'll be using will be Goldings for bitterness (bought), and the home-grown Nugget cones for my taste and aroma additions. The internet thinks I'll need to add 4 or five times more hops by weight than if I were using dry hops, so the batch size will largely depend on the crop, which while better than last year, is not a prizewinner!

So check back soon for a post about extra-hopping a kit beer (John Bull IPA), and then some time after that for the wet-hop experiment, which will go something like this:

7lbs pale, 1/2lb crystal, some goldings to the tune of 30-odd IBU, then nugget additions at 15, 10, 5 and 0 mins of the boil. I'll probably bottle the batch as I want to show it off (nobody ever visits the house for barrelled beer) so I won't be dryhopping. I'll ferment with whatever's spare in the fridge, really.

Hope that's the appetite whetted. And thanks be to the brew gods that 70% of the Irish grain harvest has been saved! Hurrah! - courtesy of Aertel at 2am.

Irish Stout

Happy St. Guin Patrick's Day!

It’s St. Patrick’s Day again. I wouldn’t normally spend three weeks preparing for a party, but it’d be a poor show if I hadn’t made enough beer to satisfy at least four Irishfolk. I’m not pandering to a stereotype here, by the way, just going by the last two years. The Tiger Beer will remain a secret, hidden from drunken, lecherous eyes; Kindleweisse is practically undrinkable, thanks to it tasting of cloves and nothing else. But a Golden Ale* will be available to reward paradees (people who do the parade).

But, because it’s St. Patrick’s Day, it’s only right I should brew a stout... even if only to thin out the feckin’ Guinness. I’ve only made two gallons for reasons better, but not entirely, known to myself. It’s a sweet stout, with crystal and chocolate malt in place of flaked and roasted barley (no it’s not a porter). From the bottling leftovers, it’s very, very nice. But it only has 6 days to condition. Will it be long enough? Not satisfied that secondary fermentation is going to be sufficient (bottling gravity was 1015, OG was only 1042!) I put them in the bed with the electric blanket on. It didn’t work. I’m still tiling the fireplace**; so with no proper heat for a couple of days, it may be very sweet, very flat stout! Never mind. I’ve no doubt it’ll go down well after a mile long parade.

Having homebrew on St. Paddy’s day is a flimsy tradition for me, seeing how I forgot last year, but it’s nice to have a house full of people and homebrew at the same time. They’re usually mutually exclusive. I’ve made pretty labels, bottled them in glass, and there’s at least some sort of beer to please everyone, and some Carlsberg to disappoint. So with any luck I’ll have a captive audience to test out my recipes. I'm placing listening devices down the back of the sofa so I can hear what people really think. Let's face it, noone's going to tell me bad things when I'm giving away free beer!

Now then, on with the rest of the preparations to people-proof the house. Nail everything down, hide the ornaments, light candles and bake bread. Oh yeah, and finish that fireplace!

* The post below mentions the Golden Ale, and I think it also says something like “at least make a passable pale ale”. Well, it’s a very good Pale Ale, but not a particularly good example of a Golden. Back to the drawing board with that recipe, I think. I’m not short of recipes for Pales.

** Last year’s promise was to get the stove in by St. Parick’s Day. This year’s promise is to tile around it.

What to do with a spare 8 hours.

A Sunday evening alone, the perfect opportunity for things I’m not allowed to do when Ms Homebrew’s in: listen to jazz, and brew beer. Ms Homebrew doesn’t mind me watching the rugby, even when it’s on at the same time as an Eastenders omnibus, but jazz? She’s no time for it. “It’s messy sounding”. And homebrewing’s just plain messy. I’m wearing slippers now, while I brew. Once upon a time my homebrew outfit included waders.

I’ve been a bit busy with non-homebrew related stuff, so I’ll condense the last two brews into a single paragraph, seeing as nothing particularly exciting happened. 5 gallons of tiger beer made, from Dave Line’s recipe, to which I was largely faithful; and Kindleweisse, a whatever’s-left-in-the-cupboard wheat beer. The first has been lagered in the shed (in the plastic bucket, at about 9 degrees, so not really lagering, I know), the second, Kindleweisse, an American Wheat beer, has been soaking up the heat from the stove, occasionally exciting the cat. It did take a little while to start fermenting, but once I’d put it where the cat usually sits, it sprung to life. Cats do know the warmest spots.

I’m making a batch of Golden Ale. I’m not really sure what makes Golden Ale. Everything else I’ve brewed has either been pretty dyed in the wool as a style, or written about enough for me to reproduce it with some confidence. Even Kindleweisse, which was only made because apparently in some countries you can ferment a wheat beer with a top fermenting (ale) yeast, and was the result of a read through Daniel’s book.

Even on the Internet there’s not much about ‘Golden Ale’. As far as I understand it’s a relatively new term, coined in 1994, which is enough time for the Internet to have an opinion on it. Nevertheless, I did find the following: It’s a golden sort of colour, between 3 and five percent alcohol, little in the way of a malt profile, but plenty from the hops, which should produce a crisp, dry beer, with a feeling of bitterness, and a powerful hop aroma.


To that end, I’ve used 7lbs 8oz pale malt, 4oz each of wheat malt and barley flakes, 1.5oz Fuggles (hops) and 1/3 oz of Styrian Goldings (also hops) to give an IBU of about 30 (which may or may not be typical of the style). I’ve mashed low and long to remove any trace of flavour from the beer, but I’ll put it back with late additions of whatever Styrian Goldings I have left, and plenty of Cascade. I’ve also used some Burton water salt treatment to help with the hoppiness. I was toying with the idea of using acid malt, to lift up the pH, which I gather the Pilsner producing countries do to create a crisp flavour, but I chickened out of that in favour of something that would, if all else failed, make a passable pale ale. I also tried this: put in your copper hops before the wort comes to the boil and the wort won’t kick and spill over the place – it works.

Ah, and now I’ve distracted myself with writing, and I can’t remember if the boil started at ten to ten, or ten past! D’oh.

New Year's Resolutions

This year I’m going to continue to observe my ‘No Carlsberg’ resolution from a few years back (it’s harder than it sounds), and to it I’ll add ‘Spend more time in the kitchen’. That means brewing!

So, did you get a homebrew kit for Christmas, and have found this blog after Googling some home brewed beer related words? Then isn’t Google clever, sending you here. The following is some advice to those new to the hobby, or as is often the case, those returning after years spent having a family.

Brewing your own beer from a tin, box or bag is really easy, and very rewarding.

Your basic kit is:
Your tin kit (plus 1kg / 2lbs of sugar)
A 5 gallon bucket, plus lid
Bottles
A 5ft-ish tube to siphon your beer
Sterilising stuff
Anything else is needlessly fancy: hydrometer, thermometer and so on. People have been brewing without these for thousands of years.

If you’ve been given just a tin your kit won’t be as instant as all that, but as most homebrew starter kits come with everything you need, you can get cracking right away. If you do need anything from the above list, you’ll not go far wrong with your local farmers co-op. Start there. And while you’re in the co-op, get yourself some wood, put up some shelves, as you’ll soon need more space than you know. This ‘hobby’ is addictive.

Now I have no intention of reproducing the instructions given with your can, as I’ve yet to brew from a tin that had insufficient instructions within. However, I’ve some additional info here, which may help understand the instructions.

Firstly, don’t let the instructions scare you. Whilst I too can’t stress enough the importance of cleanliness in brewing, it’s not something you need to stress about. The instructions are likely to give you nightmares about making 5 gallons of malt vinegar. This simply isn’t going to happen. If the bucket is dirty, wash it up. A clean bucket should then be sterilised with any old household sterilising stuff (Milton, VWP, a weak bleach solution), and rinsed until there’s no trace of your cleaner or steriliser. Now it’s ready to use. There’s no need for lab coveralls and industrial steam cleaners. It’s homebrew.

Now go back to the instructions. The next thing it’s probably going to harp on about is how quickly your wort is likely to become infected. Your wort is the watery malt extract stuff you’ve now got 5 gallons of, which hasn’t yet been fermented. If you leave the bucket unattended for a day or two then yes, you might have a sour tasting, very weakly alcoholic, undrinkable beer, but if you pitch (chuck in) your yeast into the wort as directed, you’ll have no problems. Put the lid on, put it somewhere not too warm, not too cold, and leave it for 12 hours. After twelve hours, or a day, or whenever you’ve got time, open the lid a little and take a peek. There should be a lovely, fluffy cloud-like layer going on, with lots of brown bitter-tasting bits sticking to it, and the smell can be anything between a loaf in the oven to rotten eggs. This is normal. Normal. Replace the lid having not sneezed into the bucket or dipped in anything unsavoury, relax, and continue to follow the instructions.

Finally, exercise patience. So it says leave your beer in bottles for 3 weeks? Leave it 6 and you’ll be amazed at what you’ve created. Don’t forget to tell everyone about it now; you’ll never make it through 5 gallons on your own.

Brew 20: Looking like a Mmmild winter, 5 gal of Dark Mild, 3.5 – 4%

I’m making more beer, because I don’t think the 5 gallons of Hobgoblin is quite enough. Another 5 of mild ought to see me through to New Year. The mild, as it happens, purely by coincidence, is just a low alcohol version of the hobgoblin recipe. Honestly, the recipe is all from my head. I had 4.5lbs of light DME left over in a bag, going solid, and I thought a mild would mature in time for Christmas, y’know, so I could give the odd bottle out, if I can bear to let go. It was only afterwards, looking over the recipe, that I realised it was close in proportions, just about 2/3s of the gravity. Just as well the Hobgoblin tastes great, then.
Uh, yes… I did open up a bottle after barely two weeks.

So, to conclude the post, here is my mild recipe, called ‘Mmmild’, even though there’s no way of knowing if it’ll taste that good for a number of weeks. I’m really just assuming that it’ll be great because it’s made of beer.
4.5lbs Light DME
12oz crystal 55L
2.3oz. chocolate malt
1oz maltodextrine/carapils
All the above, plus a pinch of salt, prepared in the usual extract/grain way.
Then, 0.3oz Magnum, 0.85oz Fuggles, and 0.4 Styrian Goldings all at 60 mins.
Followed by Irish moss and some more hops for flavour and aroma. Fermented with Safale US-04 (English Ale)

I’ll rack it into a secondary, so that if I do manage to part with some bottles as some sort of gift, there won’t be a ridiculous amount of yeast at the bottom. I know it’s harmless, you know it’s harmless, but it does look odd. Fortunately, if some yeast does end up in the glass, the chocolate malt will have darkened the beer sufficiently to cover any of that cloudiness up. There could even be a bit of chill haze, if that’s the way it turns out. So long as it tastes nice, eh? Seeing as the Hobgoblin clone I’m currently drinking tastes so fantastic, I imagine a ‘lite’ version will go down equally well.

By the way, it tastes like Rum and Dandelion and Burdock, and I love it! But what if nobody else does? Maybe I shouldn’t give any away after all.

Brew #19: Brew Hobgoblin Clone, 5 gal, 5.8%abv

Which brings the total number of gallons of beer (not including ginger beer or cider), to a gut-busting, liver-loving 60 gallons, or about 480 pints! No officer, I’m not still over the limit…

The latest is a Hobgoblin clone to Orfy’s recipe, and is conditioning in a plastic barrel downstairs, with bluetack plugging a CO₂ leak, and a “drink on” date set for December. Although it’s a partial mash, with half malt, half extract, I did mash 6+lbs of malt, which is tricky enough, given my sparging capacity is 2 gallons, which I only found out after putting in two and a half gallons of mash.

It’s very clear to me that I’ve still a lot to learn, but as I’m sitting by the fire, contemplating my next brew, I’m very happy with how far I’ve come in the last two years, especially given that drinking isn’t necessarily conducive to learning much. Bags of crushed malt are now taking preference over tins of ready-mix, and I’m now considering (optimistically) malting my own home grown grains.

The next brew will probably be something from ‘Home Brewed Beers and Stouts’ by C.J.J. Berry, as I’ve some dried malt extract needs using up, and I’ve filled the shed, undersink cupboards and two shelves in the porch with empty bottles, it seems only right to fill them up with something, before Mrs Homebrew loses the rag and… recycles them! I want something quick and easy, so it’ll be something like a mild, I imagine, so I can get drinking it pretty soon. Also, they make great gifts to the over 18s, and the primary gifting season is nearly upon us.

Whilst making/drinking all this homebrew, I’m still working out how much CO₂ is produced from one 5 gallon batch of fermenting booze, as well as trifles like how to measure mash temperatures now the expensive thermometer’s broke, how to pour a pint of beer as opposed to a pint of head from the pressure barrel, and why the beer tastes so different from bottle to bottle! I suppose the only way to work these things out is to keep doing it all again, until I’ve perfected everything. After all, it’s not about the destination, but instead about the journey. Though I won’t be undertaking any journeys until the last of the 480 pints wears off.

Pride before fall (or by winter, at the very latest)

Tuesday night I set my alarm for 6 am. It was dark, quiet, and way before I’d usually get up unless there was some sort of emergency. In a way, there was. The homebrew supply is worryingly low (I’m drinking white wine as I write this, and if it weren’t for Mrs Homebrew’s birthday last week we wouldn’t have any of that)! As a result, I was forced up way before dawn in order to get a small all-grain brew going before the day’s choir commitments got in the way. Oh, and I borrowed a thermometer for the mash that very much needed to be back in someone else’s fridge by half 8, so six was as late as I could leave it.

I’m making a gallon to try a new recipe, and I’ve only enough stuff for one anyway. It is a trial of Dave Line’s Fuller’s London Pride, from his book ‘Brew Beers Like those you buy’. The beer bottle says ‘Target, Challenger and Northdown’ are the hops used, whereas the book opts for Fuggles and EKG. Naturally, I’ve gone for Fuggles and Styrian Goldings, as that’s all that was in the freezer.

My morning was spent mashing 1lb 6.5 oz of pale malt and 1.6 oz crystal, followed by a 90 min boil with the hops. The mash and sparge went well, though I’m still struggling to juggle jugs of hot water and the perforated chopped tomato tin I use to spray the grain bed gently. I’ll show you what I mean in a picture one day... actually, for that I’ll need a fourth hand.

Then an interesting weather phenomenon occurred halfway through the boil; a small Cumulo Nimbus formed at the kitchen ceiling. It was a beautiful sight, and at a certain angle a rainbow shone through from the striplight on the roof. I opened to doors and windows to let some of the steam out. Apparently condensation on the walls annoys Mrs Homebrew even more than burnt caramel on the stove, which ranks pretty high.

So, having set the alarm for 6, and by four in the afternoon the beer is frothing away very merrily, which isn’t bad at all. And neither is the state of the kitchen. The walls need a go over with a hair dryer, and I’ve a bag of wet grain I need to get rid of. I’m very happy to report that what went into the bucket will probably end up a lot like an English bitter, and we’ll see how much closer it gets in about 3 to four weeks!

St. Arthur, Patron Saint of Guinness

I’ll be celebrating St. Arthur’s day (22nd Sep, if the campaign has passed you by) by drinking some stout I’ve brewed myself. I’m only making a gallon because I’m not really a stout kinda guy, and every last one of my mates will be mooching promotional pints of the ‘real thing’ in town. Nevertheless, it’s important to observe Irish tradition by brewing this, a uniquely Irish beer, a beer that’s been around for nearly as long as marketing, which is the third oldest profession. Whilst doing a little research, I found this article in the library, and I faithfully reproduce part of it here:

First brewed by pagan settlers to Ireland c. 3000BC, the forerunner to Guinness was a beer made with burnt bread, mashed by the enzymes found in saliva, and made bitter with Dandelion and Yarrow. Years of brewing and celebrating followed, with little sign of change in the recipe. Then, at around the same time as the Romans were befriending Western Europe, St. Arthur (then known simply as Arthur the Sot, causing leading academics to wonder if this is the origin of the abbreviation St. for saint, as a mistranslation) began brewing stout more like the stuff we know it to be today. To begin with he pioneered a primitive malting process, bringing out the natural sugars found in the barley, instead of the much cruder way of grinding the bread into flour, baking with it, forgetting about it overnight until it burns, then mashing with saliva. This new brew was considered far superior to the older beers, however in order to get the dark colour drinkers were used to, St. Arthur still included portions of burnt bread. An early recipe, found carved into the an Cuin nEas stone, locally known as ‘Beer Stone’, located in county Meath, describes how St. Arthur used 8 parts malted barley to one part burnt bread, in order to make the beer he is famed for. Also found on the same stone is an early numerical system, believed to be a tally used to advertise and sell the beer. The contemporary currency was small rocks with holes in, and academics calculate that the price of a pint of St. Arthur’s beer was half a round stone with a hole in, and the modern equivalent is 4-euro 85c, a price now only charged in Dublin and hotels. Truly, St. Arthur’s contemporaries valued this beer highly!

In the 18th and 19th century many styles of beer were invented or developed by brewers, thanks to updated malting, kilning and brewing techniques, and the discoveries of Louis Pasteur. However, current versions of St. Arthur’s legendary brew have made only little steps towards modernity. Not much has changed from the original recipe carved into a stone nearly 1,800 years ago, and developments in yeast strains allowing brewers to use pure yeast strains in their beers have not been entirely taken on board by brewers at the Guinness factory; there are still vats in the St. James’ Gate brewery where the wild yeast strain Brettanomyces is actively encouraged in order to maintain the taste that would have been familiar to drinkers four thousand years ago.

The article then goes into detail about palaeontological evidence of early Guinness drinkers and some interesting facts about the mysterious death of St. Arthur, and the amazing feat of surviving on his beer alone for 40 days and nights, but it’s the above section that interested me most.

So, I’ve brewed to the basic Guinness principle, 80% pale malt, 10% flaked barley and 10 % roast, unmalted barley. However, to make it a little different, I’m using 5% roast and 5% chocolate malt instead of just 10% roast, mainly because I’ve got some lying around. It’s been boiled for ages in order to try and get the length at 1 gallon, with an O.G. of 1048. Seeing as brewday was the 1st of September, I’m not expecting a very dry stout by the 22nd, but hopefully it will be ready to try and, god willing, will be a suitable tribute to St. Arthur, patron saint of Guinness.

Cider #2011

This year I’ve harassed two people for cider apples, and apart from the absence of wassailing and being chased down the street by an angry man, it’s as typical an old fashioned cider as one can hope to get, and still have a good chance of success. This year the cider contains ONLY apple juice, with one Sodium Metabisulphate tablet (Campden Tablet), and Young’s Cider yeast.

This year the process was simplified too. Rinse the apples a bit, remove anything you wouldn’t feed to a pig, and then mince the rest in a good fruit juicer, stalks and all. The apples are red looking (see photo) and the juice that came out looked fantastic, like a Tequilla Sunrise, but unfortunately the colour hasn’t hung around to be in the actual cider. The stuff that will ferment (O.G. 1046, by the way, which is two washing-up bowls full making one gallon) is a typical yellow-green apple juice colour.

So, with campden tablet in place, I added the juice directly on top, so that it doesn’t get chance to go brown, and I’ll wait 24 hours before pitching the yeast. I think that is so that the tablets have time to react with the oxygen in the apple juice, and not mess up the sweet-toothed yeast.

Once it’s fermented I’ll put it into a demijohn, rack at regular intervals to keep the cider clear and nice tasting, and I’ll try and get it drunk around New Year. 2010’s cider was very dry after leaving it 7 months before drinking, so I’d like something a little sweeter this time, but we’ll see.

This time the whole cider making process took only about two hours, most of which was spent picking bits of apple off the floor, ceiling and out of my hair. Don’t worry I didn’t juice those bits. I do have standards.

An update, is all.

I’ve recently spent a couple of weeks travelling around Ireland, mooching down the west coast, visiting a few festivals; it’s been fun. Fun, but trying to sample all the micro-brewed beers I found on my way round was, frankly, thirsty work. I’ll not go into detail, there’s a fantastic blog for that sort of thing, The Beer Nut, but I will go as far as to recommend Galway Hooker Pale Ale. It’s nearly as good as my own! Anyway, it’s nice to see a healthy industry.

In an interesting capitulation to the holiday, we ended up singing at the Hilden Beer Festival, and gratefully accepted our beer tokens in return. I chose a pint of Metalman, I think twice, and I didn’t pay enough attention, but I think my first was something called Champion. All pales, anyway. I also had a try of Armagh cider. For anyone interested, and I mean really interested, you’ll have your mind blown by the beautiful ciders on offer there.

Finally, my Lorna Light Bitter from Shale’s Advanced Home Brewing turned out nice. It would have turned out nicely conditioned, too, had I lubricated the seal on my Youngs’ barrel. Subsequently, anything after the first glass was airlocked in, and I had to open up the lid in order to get a pint out. That, of course, puts the beer in danger of infection or oxidisation, drawing in the shelf life from anything up to 3 months, to a mere three days. Fortunately, help was at hand. Two brave, selfless individuals who, with a twinkle in their eye, helped get rid of a few gallons of flat but tasty ale. It’s good to have folk one can rely on in an emergency.

Oh yeah, and while I was brewing a stout today I got attacked by a wasp while I was sparging! I can't believe my luck sometimes!

Real life Vs Real Ale

So, there I am, Sunday afternoon, with the promise of an empty house for a few hours. I try and brew when I'm on my own in the house - it's more harmonious that way. I severely dislike company in the kitchen! My girlfriend has gone to the pictures. No sooner than I hear the car pull away and I'm busy brewing up. Once upon a time the words "fancy a brew?" would conjure up images of crumpets and choccy biccies, but today it's 1 gallon of Feile Pale. I've just got to what I feel is the hardest stage, a sparge (rinsing the sugary grains with hot water) when the phone goes. The phone is always upstairs when it rings. Then, once I'd restarted the sparge, my girlfriend comes in telling me the car tyre's flat! Thank God for Papazian's insistence that all home brew be brewed with a 'Here's One I Made Earlier' pint in the hand. It really does make brew-day feel like it's going a lot smoother!

The reason I'm only brewing a gallon is because I'm currently making another adjustment to my Feile Pale recipe.

This time, for 1 gallon:
OG: c.1050, IBU c.50, probably a little more
Pale Malt: 1lb 5oz (90%)
Crystal (120EBC/55lov): 0.7oz (3%)
Wheat Malt: 1oz (4%)
CaraMalt: .75oz (3%)
Magnum: 0.2oz @60
Magnum: 0.1oz @30
Fuggles: 0.3oz @ 15 + irish moss
Styrian Goldings post boil.
Also, I added in 4oz of pale dried malt extract because I didn't account for Mash efficieny when I worked out the recipe. But I really think this is 'the one'! Actual O.G. was 35, because for some reason I've 1 gal, 3 pints in the fermenter! At least I know that if I had done it right, I'd have got 1048 o.g., so I'm doing something right, if not everything!

This is my third attempt at a good pale ale. The first was a little boring, containing only pale and crystal malts, the second, with wheat malt and more hops was fantastically bitter, but still lacked something (sparkle mainly, because I think I forgot to prime the bottles). This third effort is an attempt to nail down some good bitterness levels, having finally got some reasonably accurate scales, and a good depth of malt flavour. However, I won't know if this recipe is any good until it's fermented. Nevertheless, it should taste, at the very least, amazing. I've started bottling into used brown beer bottles with crown caps. Despite the obvious stupidity of hitting the tops of glass bottles with a hammer, I think they look fantastic, especially with the label above stuck to the side with selotape.

I'm going away for a few weeks in August, but before I go I hope to get one last 5gallon brew in; Orfy's Hobgoblin clone. I'll be pitching it on top of the yeast created by Ken Shales' Lorna Light Bitter, just as soon as it's fermented down enough to keg. I've been very encouraging towards it for several days now, and I've been rewarded by a 24 point drop in 4 days. I can see my window of opportunity getting closed and the curtains drawn, but hopefully, with similar encouragement, I'll have time to Keg the Ken, brew up Gobhoblin and bottle it before I go away in ONE week. I've all but washed the bottles!

All in all, I think I'm getting the hang of this brewing lark.

Tiger Beer

Readers of this blog who already know a bit about brewing might occasionally think of me “he hasn’t a clue what he’s doing”, and indeed, some of the time you’d be right. However, to get a proper feel of the everyday low-level incompetence, you’d need a look at every aspect of brewing, including simply ordering malts. After spending 5 hours sitting beneath the letterbox, waiting for my delivery of malts, it only occurred to me after I’d opened the parcel that 25^oL isn’t the same as 25EBC*. So instead of 3kg of light crystal malt, which I’d probably use quite a lot of, I’ve got 3kg of CaraPils, which features in, as far as I can see, two recipes. D’oh! Never mind, I’ve got till Christmas before it goes off**!

So, today, I’m brewing 1 gallon of Tiger Beer to a Dave Line recipe. I’m only brewing a gallon because a) the battery on my drill stopped working, and I can’t finish my Zapap Lauter Tun, and b) because the recipe calls for lots of saccharin tablets, which I don’t want to use, and I don’t think are necessary, so if it turns out they are necessary, I’ve only made 1 gallon of a very dry lager.

So, as promised, here’s this post’s photo: My fantastically top of the range (make that on top of the range) Mash Tun. The WD40 on the right was for essential gas-hob maintenance, and hopefully won’t end up in the beer, but you never know.

The recipe features Pilsner Malt (although it asks for Lager malts), Flaked Rice, Hallertauer hops I’ll be fermenting it with Brewferm Lager Yeast, which this morning seems to be floating on top like an Ale yeast…

I’m not one for doling out advice, but here’s one: It’s quite important to double check your sums before you start brewing. This morning I was only bringing up half of the required strike water (the water in which you mash your malted grains) to temperature. After thinking something along the lines of “that doesn’t look like nearly enough water” but not quite thinking “oh well”, did I quickly add in some more. Oh well, disaster averted, what next?

* One of the three colour-codes used to describe the darkness of the malts, and how it will affect beer.
**A very malty Christmas ale?