Beer Extravaganza (Part One)

Hello everyone.

Whoa!  How did I manage to go a week and a half without blogging?  I knew it had been a while, but I didn't realize it had been that long.  I guess I better get to it, then...

Rob (Beer) Happenings

Last week I brewed a batch of one of my most favoritest beer styles, the India Pale Ale (IPA).  It was surprisingly the first time in the seven or so years I've been brewing that I've tried to brew an IPA.  I don't know why that is.  I love IPAs. 

Fortunately, this attempt turned out better than some of my other attempts at brewing.

This particular batch is called "Ol' Deaths Whisper," and I picked up the ingredients in a conveniently pre-packaged bag from the Home Fermenter Center the last time I was in Eugene, OR.  Their website appears to be down right now (which is why I linked to the Beer Advocate site instead), and I hope that doesn't mean they went out of business, because they have great brewing supplies at really reasonable prices.

This was a "partial-mash" recipe, and for those who don't homebrew, I'll explain what that means in a moment.  But first, let me give you a quick rundown of the entire brewing process.  You start with some barley grains that are soaked in water until they start to sprout and release a lot of sugar.  The grain growth is then stopped by roasting, toasting, or some other method that usually involves a large oven of some sort, and this gives you malted barley. 

When it's time to brew, you soak the malted barley (and sometimes other types of grains, depending on the recipe) in hot water, and basically make a tea out of it.  Next, you get rid of the spent grains (you can feed it to livestock, or compost it, or even use it to make bread) and boil the tea down, adding hops to give it flavor as well as bitterness to balance the sweetness of the malt.  This gives you an "unfermented beer" called wort.  You let the wort cool to room temperature, and then add yeast to ferment the wort (lagers are fermented at lower temperatures). 

Over the next few weeks or so, the yeast turns the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.  Once this is done, you now have beer, and all that's left to do is to carbonate it, either by bottling it with a little sugar for the yeast to eat and convert to more CO2, or by kegging it and adding carbonation from a tank.  I used to be a bottling guy, but since we moved, we picked up a second fridge, and I'm now all about kegging.  Cleaning and sanitizing one keg is immensely easier than cleaning and sanitizing three dozen or so bottles.

But making a "tea" out of ten, fifteen, or even twenty pounds of malted barley and/or other grains is no easy task to do in an average kitchen.  There is all sorts of equipment out there to do this at home, but most of it is out of my budget at this point.  Someday...

Anyway, this particular recipe is a "partial-mash," which is a small amount of specialty grains tailored to the recipe plus a large amount of malt extract, which is essentially a condensed version of the malted barley "tea."  First, I extracted the "tea" from the specialty grains, in this case 3/4 lb. of amber crystal malt, and 1/4 lb. of Munich malt:

One thing brewing requires is a lot of water, and despite us having a well, our water quality isn't good.  It won't make you sick, but it tastes disgusting.  Maybe you like the taste of sulfur, but I don't.  So I used a filter.  The other problem is that we don't have great water pressure here, and when you combine that with a faucet-mount filter, the water comes out like a trickle.  Seriously, I often pee bigger streams than this:

Once the grains steeped for their allotted time, it was time to rinse as much of the sugars out as possible, in a process called "sparging."  I poured two quarts of 170 degree water over the grains:

I know the above photo doesn't show the hot water being poured over the grains, but I was brewing solo, and it's difficult enough to keep from spilling water and/or wort all over the kitchen, let alone trying to do so while also taking a photo.  Just use you imagination.

Next, it was time to add the extract.  This recipe was one of the few I've ever tried that called for both liquid and dry extracts.  I don't have a photo of the dry extract, but just imagine a tannish-brownish colored Kool-Aid mix.  Here's the liquid extract:

I don't like using the word, "liquid," to describe the extract, because it's not exactly liquid.  It's somewhere between the consistency of honey and molasses, and it takes several rinsings with hot water to get all the stuff out of its container and into the brewing kettle.  Meanwhile, you also have to keep stirring the kettle, because the extract you just added tends to immediately settle at the bottom of the pot instead of dissolving right away, and that inevitably leads to scorching.  I've had some delicious smoked porters before, but I can't imagine a scorched beer to be any good.

Once all the extract is in the kettle, it's time to bring the whole thing to a boil, stirring frequently until all the extract dissolves.  A nice foamy layer will form at the top:

Eventually, large bubbles will break through the foam, and that's when you know it's boiling.  That means it's time to begin adding hops, starting with the bittering hops, in this case, one ounce of Chinooks.  This recipe called for three different types of hops: Chinooks added at the beginning of the one hour boil, 1/2 ounce of Cascade hops (flavoring) added 40 minutes in, and 1/2 ounce of Columbus hops (aroma) added in the last five minutes. Each type of hops came in its own hop bag, which is basically a little pouch made of cheesecloth material to hold the hops in (and to easily remove them at the end of the boil):

After the boil, I ditched the hops and added some filtered cold water.  I then covered the pot, set it in an ice water bath in the sink, and let it sit there until the wort dropped down to about 75 degrees.  Then it was time to siphon it (some brew kettles have spigots, but mine does not, hence the siphoning) into the carboy, which is a glass container where the fermentation happens:

Once all the wort was siphoned into the carboy, I added more filtered water to make about five gallons total.  The temperature was still a little warm, so I held off on adding the yeast.  If the liquid is too hot (or too cold), the yeast will die on contact, and there won't be any fermentation, or at least not the good kind of fermentation.  So while I waited for the wort to cool a little more, it began to settle and form cool-looking bands in the carboy:

Finally it was cool enough to add the yeast.  I aerated (shook up) the carboy to get everything going.  By the next morning, there was a lot of activity already.  The bands were gone, and if you looked closely, you could see all sorts of movement inside the carboy as the yeast was gorging itself on the sugars.  There was also a layer of foam at the top from the CO2 bubbling up.  By about 24 hours in, the foam had built up pretty high and begun to work its way up the blow off tube, which is a tube attached to the carboy with the other end submerged in water, so the excess carbon dioxide can work its way out of the carboy, but fruit flies, bacteria, and other crap in the air can't find its way into the carboy and ruin the beer.

From then on, I just checked on it periodically, making sure the temperature stayed in the 65-75 degree range.

Here it is today, one week later:

It might be hard to tell from the photo, but there is still some fermentation going on.  But it has already peaked out.  The foam that went up the blow off tube has receded back into the carboy.  A bunch of sediment has built up on the bottom.  In a few days I'll check the levels, and if things look good, I'll probably siphon as much of the beer out as I can--leaving as much sediment behind as possible--into a secondary carboy, and then let it sit for another week or so.  Then it will be time to siphon it out of the secondary and keg it.  And in a week or so after that, if all has gone to plan, I'll have some delicious India Pale Ale on tap at home.  Yay!


In Closing

I've got lots more beer news, including a report (with photos) from the beer tent at the Fall Fest at Schweitzer Mountain last weekend, as well as three new (to me) beers I've tried at home during the past week.  But I've reached my blogging limit for the day, so you'll just have to stay tuned until next time. 

Now here it is, your moment of Tucker (or what happens when Tucker jumps off the dock right after you do, and you don't realize he's doggy-paddling away in the water above you as you're coming up to the surface):

I think it's time to trim his nails.

Rob

Brewing Pics, The Truffle Shuffle, and My 200th Post!

Hello everyone!

Welcome to my 200th blog posting (if you don't count my posts on other blogs, that is). Hooray! I have no big fanfare for this milestone, but that stuff is pretty overrated. Besides, I have other things to talk about!

First off, I promised photos of the beer adventure, so here goes:

Here is the wort happily boiling away on two burners on the stove. There's not a whole lot to do at this step except to just occasionally stir it and sit back and sip some beer. Hey, I can do that!

After boiling the wort for an hour, we needed to cool it off before trying to pour it into the carboy for fermentation, or else we'd have a repeat of the disaster from last week. The helpful guy at the Home Fermenter Center suggested placing the kettle into a sink full of cold water to cool it faster, and it worked quite well.

At one point, Matt took off his shoes, and I sent him to soak smelly feet in the tub because I was worried the wort might absorb some of his raunchy feet smell.

Actually, he's just washing and sanitizing the spanking new carboy. It's too tall to fit under the faucet at our kitchen sink, so we have to use the bathtub faucet. I don't know why Matt put his feet in the tub as well. Maybe he thought we were making wine.

There's the shiny new carboy. It looks just like the old one, except the bottom isn't blown out. Having a bottom that isn't blown out helps it hold liquid more easily.

Once the wort had cooled to the appropriate temperature, we transferred it to the carboy and added the yeast.

Here it is in its new home for one to three weeks. At the top is a rubber stopper with a hose that goes to a small bucket of water. The reason for this is that once the wort begins to ferment, it needs to ventilate. The yeast "eats" the sugars in the wort that was extracted from the barley and oats, and then it "pees" alcohol and "farts" carbon dioxide. I apologize for the scientific terminology in the last sentence. Anyway, the carbon dioxide is emitted as a gas, which takes up more volume than a liquid. So there has to be a way for it to escape, or else it will at least blow the lid off if not completely breaking the glass.

However, we can't just leave the wort exposed to the air since there are nasty things in the air that could ruin the beer, such as bacteria, dust, flies, etc. So with the bucket of water and the hose, the gas bubbles out through the water in the bucket, but the bad stuff can't go through the water and up the hose to get into the carboy! It's brilliant! Not that I invented the concept or anything...

Here's a shot from Saturday morning. I had decided to let the wort ferment in the spare bedroom because I could crank up the heat to 68 degrees and close the door. We might be freezing in the rest of the house, but at least the yeast is comfortable! It turned out to be a good idea because the yeast started going to work right away, as you can see from the foam in the photo. Since the photo was taken, the foam has expanded so much that it's traveled all the way up the hose to the bucket of water, and now the water is brown and smells like stale beer. But it's bubbling faster and more rapidly than any batch I've made yet, which means things are progressing nicely!

If it stops bubbling before this weekend, I might try bottling it then. If not, maybe I'll try in two weeks or so. We'll see.

* * *

Switching gears a bit, today Cathy and I ran walked the Truffle Shuffle. It's a two mile race to raise money for Committed Partners for Youth, which I don't know much about and quite honestly don't care much about. But at the end of the race you get a chocolate truffle, and this was an excuse to get out of the house and do something outside, so we decided to go ahead and give it a go. We had to register, and of course we were given our race numbers.

I like to post photos of myself like these in order to keep me humble. This one is exceptionally terrible. What's with the stupid head tilt? And look at how white and pasty my skin looks! I look as if I've just served 30 days in the hole!

Moving on, we walked the route, and we finished in about 42 minutes, although I think we would have finished sooner if the crowd hadn't been so huge. The first leg was exceptionally slow going because of all the people--the crowd was moving much slower than my usual walking pace--until things began to thin out. But that doesn't really matter all that much. What was important to me was that I finished, and that I didn't finish last. Fortunately there were really old people and a few people in wheelchairs, although even some of them beat me! Cathy would've definitely finished sooner as well if I hadn't been slowing her down with my craptastic knee. But she's a trooper, and so she was willing to slum it with me and the rest of the gimps bringing up the rear.

Had I been thinking, I would've taken a few shots of the race and the crowd. But sometimes I forget the obvious. Oops.

The crowd was an interesting mix, even though there were way too many kids for my taste. But a lot of people brought their dogs, so it all balanced out. There were a few people dressed like truffles, and there was one guy who ran the whole course while also, as far as I could tell, juggling those bowling pin shaped juggling things.

I also had a lot of fun hearing bits and pieces of other people's conversations as we passed each other. Here are my three favorites:

• "I mean, if you're peeing fire, you should just go see the doctor."

• "Just because she owns a book, that doesn't make her a witch."

• "You've doomed her to a lifetime of making fun of round-headed kids."

Eugene is such a great place to overhear strange snippets of conversation. I'm considering submitting these to Overheard Everywhere.

* * *

Anyway, I want to send a hearty thank you to the three or four of you who have kept up with my blog since the beginning and have put up with all 200 of my goofy, sometimes paranoid and/or idiotic rantings. I seriously think about each of you whenever I write, and I'm glad I can share a part of me with you, even if "I'm not getting paid for this."

Let's see if you can stomach another 200...

Rob

Round Two

Hello everyone!

Round two of the Oatmeal Stout beer brewing adventure happened tonight, and it seemed to go relatively smoothly. I mean, no carboys exploded, and very little wort ended up on the kitchen floor, so Mission Accomplished! If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go here to get caught up.

As it stands now, the carboy is full of wort and yeast, and the whole shebang is doing its fermentation thing in the spare bedroom. Tomorrow I'll post some photos of our adventure. But for now, I'm going to bed because I'm tired. Brewing and drinking beer takes a lot out of a person!

In the meantime, the answer to the What Is It contest is: a twig on a sewer grate. Nobody guessed correctly, so I'm keeping the grand prize for myself! Oh wait, there isn't one.

Rob

Disaster, AKA How Not To Brew Beer

Hello everyone!

I've calmed down a little. I'm starting to see that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, that life does indeed go on. But I didn't feel that way less than 24 hours ago. Yesterday evening turned out to be one of the most horrific, disastrous evenings of my entire life. And while I may be able to move on and continue with my life, the scars will always be there. I will never forget.

It started innocently enough. In fact, things were going quite well until the incident. I had invited over my brother, Matt, and the two of us set out to brew a batch of "Blackbeard Oatmeal Stout" beer, using ingredients that we had picked the day before. I'm far from an expert home brewer--as you will soon see--but this recipe looked straightforward and simple enough, so I wasn't worried. Maybe I should have been.

We gathered our supplies and went to work. It started out surprisingly smoothly. We placed 1/4 pound of Dark Crystal Malt, 1/4 pound of Chocolate Malt, 1/4 pound of Roasted Barley, and 1/2 pound of Flaked Oatmeal in two quarts of water that was carefully heated to 165 degrees, and we steeped the grains for 20 minutes, just like the recipe directed us. For you novices, malt is a grain (in this case, barley) that is put in water to begin germination and then immediately dried in an oven. This brings out the sugars, which can then be drawn from the grain through steeping, and the resulting "tea" can eventually be converted to alcohol during the fermentation process. Here's what our batch looked like:

The steeping of these grains creates the basis of the beer or ale, which is called wort. Wort is essentially beer before it gets fermented. It's very sugary and sticky, and it has no alcohol yet.

After the steeping was completed, we poured the remaining liquid into the enormous five gallon boiling pot, straining out the grains. We left the spent grains in the strainer and poured another two quarts of water, this time heated to 170 degrees, over the grains and into the boiling pot, again following the directions carefully. This step is called sparging. Basically, the point is to get as many sugars out of the grains as possible. More sugars = more flavor and more potential alcohol.

Next, we added 6 1/2 pounds of Dark Malt Extract and 1 pound of Dry Dark Malt Extract to the wort. Malt extract is basically a concentrated version of the stuff we made on the stove. It's very sticky and gooey with a consistency like molasses or honey. The dry malt extract was powdery, and this was the first time I'd ever used the dry kind. We then added enough water to make about 3 gallons total, and brought the whole concoction to a boil. Both types of malt extracts dissolved easily enough, as they were supposed to, and everything was going as planned. Once the wort started to boil, we added 1 1/4 ounce of Perle Hops, which were in a small, meshed baggie, and let the whole thing boil for an hour. Among other benefits, hops give beer its unique, bitter flavor to balance out the sweetness of the grains. Despite the assertions of the assclowns at Keystone, bitter beer is not at all a bad thing. Also, practically every beer comes in a "specially-lined can." It's all just a clever marketing ploy to keep you from thinking about how crappy their beer is.

Anyway, since there isn't much to do during the hour-long boil, we sat down with Cathy and had some dinner, and we pretty much just hung out and made small-talk the whole time. Things were going exceptionally well, a little too well.

Just before the hour was up, we cleaned and sanitized the carboy. The carboy is a big, five gallon glass bottle in which the fermenting takes place. Sanitizing is the worst aspect of brewing in my opinion, but it has to be done. If there's any bacteria or anything weird in the carboy, the beer could end up tasting weird, or it could even end up going bad or not fermenting properly. So everything the beer comes in contact with after the boil has to be sanitized. Before and during the boil are not such a big deal since the boiling kills any bacteria in the mix.

Once the hour of boiling was finished, it was time to pour the wort into the carboy and wait for it to cool enough to add the yeast. We positioned the carboy on the floor, and Matt stood there carefully holding the funnel while I poured the wort. Amazingly enough, I managed to pour all 3 gallons (which was actually probably closer to 2 gallons after boiling for an hour) into the carboy without spilling a drop.

And then it happened.

I heard a sound that I had never heard before. It was somewhat like a dull, popping sound, almost like when a champagne bottle's cork pops off, but deeper and more dull sounding. It was immediately followed by a "glug, glug, glug" sound, and I watched a thick, heavy, dark brown liquid rapidly gushing out of the bottom of the carboy, spreading across the kitchen floor. I realized right away what had happened. I was supposed to put some water in the glass carboy before pouring in the wort. You remember the wort, right? The liquid I boiled on the stove for an hour? The liquid that I had let cool for all of maybe three minutes before pouring it into the glass container?

While the carboy's glass is very thick, even it can't handle the nearly-boiling wort, particularly since we had sanitized it with cool water just a few minutes prior. Here's the thing: I was supposed to put a gallon or so of cool water in the carboy or directly into the wort in the boiling pan before pouring it into the carboy. I forgot this step. It was a very, very, very crucial step, and I forgot.

I screwed up royally.



I thought of all this as I watched the wort spill all over the kitchen floor. And for the first few seconds, I actually thought, "No problem, we can still make this work!" But that only lasted a couple seconds before reality set in. I stood there realizing that three hours of work--not to mention about $80 worth of carboy and ingredients--had just gone down the drain. Except the wort hadn't really gone down the drain; it had gone all over the floor. And I stood there like a jackass holding an empty boiling pot while Cathy and Matt scrambled to gather every towel we owned to try to soak up 2-3 gallons of the sticky, gooey mess.

It went everywhere. Fortunately, we own a lot of towels for some reason. We soaked up what we could, and the we used every towel in the house, including the two outside in the cat's box. We then immediately washed the them in the washing machine, and there was enough to fill two loads. At one point, Cathy discovered that there was more wort behind the stove. So I moved the stove, which was surprisingly easy to do, and we found some back-up towels to get as much as we could of what was left. It's a good thing that there was more linoleum underneath, or the disaster would have been even more disastrous.

Believe it or not, this was taken after most of the wort was soaked up. I apologize for not having more photos, but we were fairly busy at the time!

So then we spent the next hour or so with our crappy Swiffer (that we realized after we bought it only works with Swiffer brand cleaning fluid and Swiffer brand cleaning pads) unsuccessfully trying to clean up the sticky layer the wort left on the floor. After several Swiffer sessions, we took my brother home, and what a great Friday night he had! We then went to Rite Aid--where my shoes made a sticky sound on the floor when I walked--and picked up a mop and some Pine Sol. I mopped everything twice with the Pine Sol, including under the stove, and things were still sticky when we walked on it this morning, so we had to mop yet again. There are cracks in the corner behind the stove that are probably now sealed with malt extract. I bet the ants are going to have a field day this summer.

Here's what's left of my carboy:

This photo was taken this evening. Notice how shiny our floor is now!

I spent the rest of last night drinking Black Butte Porter and generally feeling like an idiot. I do feel somewhat better now, however. I'm done wandering around the house absentmindedly saying, "That sucks!" If there's a bright side to all this, the area behind and under our stove is probably cleaner than it has been in decades. And of course, I will never again make the mistake of pouring boiling hot wort into a carboy without first diluting it.

As far as the Oatmeal Stout goes, I ain't no quitter! I'm going to try again next weekend. Stay tuned.

Rob