Brown ale, in just about any of its varieties, is probably my favorite style of beer. Northern English, Southern English, American, even the granddaddy Old Ale – I love ‘em all. So today’s beer is going to be a big winter American brown. Here are the basics:

Big American Brown
3.5 Qts
1.75# Marris Otter
1.5 oz British Crystal 50 – 60L (I like the character it gives over the American 40L or 60L)
1 oz Chocolate Malt
0.75 oz Victory (I like the toastiness this gives brown ales)
0.375 oz Willamette @ 90 min
0.167 oz Willamette @ 35 min
0.125 oz Willamette @ 0 min
WLP001 Yeast

My methods were a little different this time from the last brew, but not much. First off, the grain crushing. I read on the More Beer forums that some people were using a blender to “crush” their grains. It seems easy enough, so I gave it a go.

As per the recommendations in the forums, I put one cup of grain in at a time. Three two second pulses seemed to do the trick, resulting in a “crush” that left some kernels intact and ground some to flour.

For the most part, the result isn’t much different from the Corona mill I’ve been using, and since this took a fraction of the time and was infinitely easier to clean up I think I’ll stick with the blender method for all my small batches.

The next change in method was the bag for the mash. I went to the hardware store and picked up a two-pack of 5 gallon paint straining bags for $2. It’s way better for the beer-in-a-bag mashing setup than the little grain sack I used last time. Here it is sitting in the water with the thermometer and steamer basket waiting for some grains:

In addition to the new mesh bag, I decided to change the sparging technique…by eliminating it entirely. I just heated up enough strike water to make up for the grain absorption. The water got heated to 160F and the grains were mashed in. The temperature dropped to 155F and I tried to keep it there for an hour. It involved some stirring and adding some heat to the kettle every now and then, but not as much as last time. Then I just pulled the bag out and let it drain over the kettle for a few seconds while I turned the flame on for the boil.

I didn’t really squeeze the bag, like I’ve heard some people do. I just let it drain off and threw the whole sack into the sink to cool down. This method, with the blending and mashing in the kettle, got 75% mash efficiency, which is roughly what I was getting with the 5 gallon cooler and batch sparge method on my 2.5 gallon batches a while back. So I’m pleased as punch. Let’s move on and see if I can’t screw this up somehow.

I boiled for an hour, throwing hops in at 60 and 5 minutes as my recipe was originally written. Then when it came time to cool down I noticed that there was WAY too much wort in the kettle. Back on the heat for another half hour to try to boil off more water. That’s how I ended up with a 90 minute boil with hops at 90, 35 and flame-out. After all that I ended up with too LITTLE wort – 3 quarts instead of 3.5. Not a big deal, I guess, but it would have been nice to finish up having gotten just about everything right for once.

This beer’s stats:
OG = 1.062
IBU = 61
Expected FG = 1.015

Assumptions for next time:
Evaporation rate of 2.25 qts/hr
Mash efficiency of 74%
Brewhouse efficiency of 64%
Total brewing time of 4 hours

I bottled my first beer of the season tonight, though I’m not sure what it is. It was an experiment to test the beer-in-a-bag process as seen in this post on The Brewing Network forums. The process worked great, but I didn’t bother putting together a recipe and just threw hops in all willy nilly. That was kind of dumb.

The final product is seven bottles of what I’m going to call a blonde ale. It dropped from 1.043 to 1.010, which gives it about 4.3% ABV. The hydrometer sample was a little more bitter than I had wanted (probably due to my low original gravity), but I’ll just let it sit and mellow out for a while before I make a final judgment. And I saved the yeast cake so I can make some more beer this weekend without running out on Friday to buy and overpriced vial of White Labs from the local shop. This time I’ll throw a recipe together beforehand, though.

The real point of this post, and most of my posts really, is to say that if you think you a) can’t brew beer or b) can’t brew all-grain beer, you’re wrong. It’s easy and you can do it in your kitchen in not much time and without that much space. So get to it.

There’s a food market in central New Jersey near where my parents live called Delicious Orchards. They’ve got lots of great fruits and veggies, gourmet coffee and tea, chocolates and candies from places I’m not sure actually exist, cheeses, cakes…you name it. But the best thing they have is apple cider. Awesome apple cider. They make these killer apple cider donuts with it that are painfully good. Painful because I eat too many and get a stomach ache. That good.

So one day I decided I’d try to make some hard cider with some of this stuff. I mean, I’ve got all this equipment for fermenting things and I love cider, so why not? They sell two kinds: regular and tart. I’ve never actually had the tart, but I’m sure it’s good. For this experiment I bought a gallon of the regular stuff. The process was simple – dump some cider in a gallon jug, chuck in some yeast, pop an airlock on it and wait. I used some ale yeast I had sitting around, probably WLP001 California Ale but I honestly can’t remember and I lost the notes for this. I don’t even remember when I did this, because I only just found the bottles of it this morning. The bottles are labelled “Cider 7% 6-20-08″ so I’m guessing I threw it in the primary in April, secondary in May and bottled in June. But that’s a wild guess.

I put one of the six bottles in the fridge for a couple of hours to try it out. When I poured it into a glass, this is what it looked like:

Glass taken from my favorite local bar. It says “Bud Light” on the other side.

Crystal clear. You could even read the paper through it!

This is how I always read the paper. Through a glass of booze.

And the taste? VERY dry, as I expected. Lots of apple in the nose, crisp carbonation and a smooth tartness in the finish. None of the ale yeast flavors I was expecting and way smoother than I thought it would be. I guess forgetting about it for 6 months helped. So if you’re into dry ciders (not the Woodchuck-style stuff, or whatever it’s called), then you should definitely give this a shot. Get some decent apple cider and add yeast. The end.

Here’s another fun story:

The reason I was in the pantry looking into the boxes of bottles was because I decided to bottle the mead I had made. That’s right – mead. See, about the same time I made the cider I guess I thought it would be fun to make mead. I’ve never had mead and have no idea if I like it, but it’s just as easy to make as the cider. I got two pounds of good orange blossom honey and some spring water (I don’t know about my tap water for unboiled fermenting applications, yet) and put it all into a gallon jug with a packet of champagne yeast. Airlock and put away.

They say the best way to make mead is to forget about it because it takes a long time to age out the harsh alcohol flavor. Well, I actually forgot about it. I found it in the back of the pantry with a notecard that said:

MEAD
15 April 2008
2# Orange Blossom Honey
Champagne Yeast
OG = 1.080

So it’s been sitting on the lees (dead yeast) for a while now, which is probably not good. But it was extremely clear. So rather than rack it into a secondary I just bottled it. The hydrometer sample read 0.990 which means it’s about 11.6% ABV, so I expected a bit of an alcohol bite, despite the long wait. I tasted the sample to see.

Now maybe I have no idea what mead is supposed to taste like. I’m thinking of a dry white wine sort of flavor. The nose was strangely good. A little honey and a little floral – very good. The actual flavor was a bit like flowery Triaminic – not very good. I bottled it anyway in the hopes that it will taste better with age, as I keep hearing on the mead forums. Unfortunately (or fortunately), due to a stupid mistake involving a loose spigot, I only got 5 bottles out of the 3.5 quarts that I had in the fermenter. One of them went right into the fridge for a chilled taste test later tonight. If I’m going to judge how it ages I might as well try one cold now, right? Right? Oh, and I decided to not carbonate them. There’s so little residual sweetness (i.e., none) that carbonation might make it seem harsh. So still it is.

One more brewing related endeavor:

I love coffee. I’m not exactly a coffee snob; I drink Dunkin Donuts coffee almost every day and will get a cup at any diner I go to, which is a lot since I live in NJ. But I do drink a lot of coffee and at home I usually brew good, fresh coffee and I almost exclusively use a french press because I think the extra work is worth the extra flavor. But I’ve been reading a bunch about cold-brewed coffee and thought it would be fun to try. Some say it sucks, some say it’s a great way to get low-acid full-flavor coffee at any strength – there’s only one way to tell. I read all sorts of different methods but settled on this one:

Ground coffee and cold tap water in a 1:4 ratio in a french press for 12 hours. Pour through a coffee filter after pressing to filter out any remaining sludge.

Easy enough. I realized afterwards that post-press filtering probably isn’t necessary, but it wasn’t difficult so I don’t feel like I wasted any energy. To make a cup of coffee, I boiled some water in a tea kettle and mixed it with some of this cold-brewed coffee concentrate (boiling water to concentrate was 4:1). A little sugar and a little cream and it was…weak. Maybe I need to use a larger ratio of coffee to tap water in the brewing process, or even in the cup. I don’t know. It seems handy to have a bottle of coffee concentrate in the fridge to make iced coffee whenever you want or to have “fresh” coffee at work that doesn’t involve joining the coffee club and drinking Foldgers. I’ll try it again, but I think I may just prefer stronger, bolder coffee than this method is capable of producing.

Those are my stories. Sorry for the lack of photos for most of it. The pictures would have been boring, anyway.

I was away for a while but now I’m back. It doesn’t really matter why but here’s a quick summary for those who care (i.e., nobody): There were some ruined batches and some equipment failure at the beginning of the summer and then I didn’t feel like brewing and then I didn’t have time. This morning I had the urge and the time so I did. The end.

This tiny batch brewing was getting on my nerves. The tiny batches themselves are fine but my inability to hit my targets and brew a successful beer as planned is a real pisser. So I put together a new plan for mashing that simplifies the whole process (I think) and ran a test batch to see how it works.

Here’s the basic approach: I mashed in the kettle with the crushed grains tied up in a mesh bag and sitting on a metal steamer basket at he bottom of the pot (that kept the grains from scorching). Doughed in with all the pre-boil water needed. The grains absorbed some water so I poured boiling water over the grains after mashing until the water was back to the volume I needed (a tea kettle, wire mesh strainer to hold the bag of grains and a pre-marked metal ruler to gauge the wort volume worked perfectly for this). I used a candy thermometer to keep an eye on the mash temperature and hit the kettle with some flame whenever the temp dropped too low.

Easy right? No mash tun to worry about, no stuck runoffs, no juggling multiple pots of water at different temperatures for mashout and sparges and all that crap. I got this idea off one of the homebrew forums and adapted it to my stovetop brew. I think it’s something the Aussies call “brew in a bag” or something. I don’t remember and I don’t feel like looking it up right now. Point is, it was easy and it seemed to work. I used 2 pounds of 2-row for this just to see what kind of efficiency I’d get then picked out some hops based on the pre-boil gravity. Here’s a basic rundown (yes, I took notes, shut up):

2 lbs Domestic 2-row
0.5 oz Styrian Goldings (2%AA) @ 60 minutes
0.25 oz ” @ 30 minutes
0.25 oz ” @ 5 minutes
WLP001
Mash @ 155F for 60 minutes
Pre-boil volume = 6.75 qts
Pre-boil SG = 1.027 @ 60F
Post-boil volume = 4.5 qts
Post-boil SG = 1.043 @ 60F

As you can see, the post-boil volume is way higher than the 1.050 or so I was expecting based on the pre-boil SG. I guess I misjudged the boil-off rate. No big deal, really, because it still looks like a decent beer to me. The brewhouse efficiency is about 65%, which I’m fine with. I don’t really care what the number is as long as I can get that number each time, or close to it.

So that’s the method I’m going to use for the next batch and just try to dial in the boil-off to nail my SG. The whole thing took 4 hours from getting stuff out to putting everything away and was WAY easier than the way I’ve been doing things. I even cooled the wort down in a sink of ice water rather than use the immersion chiller. This may be the easiest way to brew all-grain I’ve ever come across. 3 liters on the stove mostly with equipment you have around the kitchen anyway. Awesome.

Conclusion: I’m brewing again and it looks like this might be a successful first beer of the season. Huzzah!

A symbol of man’s hubris

I’ve been gone for a little while, but I’m back now.  I had some business trips and then I was sick and then I had to travel again.  But now that I’m back I have some funny stories for you all (both of you reading this).  Well, not so much funny as depressing.  See I’ve had some beer related failures lately and since I’m an honest guy I’m gonna tell you all about them.

Failure the first – my 3 liter kegs.  The cap fixture I made leaked.  I tried different washers, gaskets and even some epoxy but I just couldn’t get the thing to hold pressure.  I’m working on a solution at the moment which will hopefully be shown on this here blog at some point in the not-so-distant future, but in the meantime I’ve got a bunch of beer sitting in 3 liter bottles that I can’t really access.  So I caved in and bought the Tap-a-Draft you see in that picture up there (25 buckaroos at one of my LHBSs).  Voila!  Beer!  The rye ale in the picture is quite tasty, by the way.

Failure the second – bottling.  Because I’m an idiot, I decided to secondary some beers in 3 liter bottles, but that’s not the idiotic thing.   The idiotic thing is that I capped the bottles instead of plugging them with air locks, because I figured they were done fermenting and any degassing wasn’t going to cause any trouble in a plastic soda bottle.  Boy was that dumb.  The beer built up some carbonation and when I transferred them to new bottles and added some sugar…KAPOW!  Foam out the wazoo.  I only had to lose one batch of beer to realize my mistake, thankfully.  The pale ale was lost to the foam demons, but there’s still a bottle of brown ale and a bottle of dry stout left.  I can’t carbonate these now because they have CO2 in solution and the addition of sugar will blow them up so I think I’ll just have to force carb these with the Tap-a-Draft.  No big deal.

Other things:

I bottled up the IPAs I had in primary, skipping the secondary altogether.  They’ve been sitting around for about 4 weeks now so they went right into some 3 liter bottles with about 3/4 ounces of sugar each.  One of them had a really low OG (1.050) and hit 1.012 with some Sixpoint yeast (76% attenuation and ~5% ABV).  The other  started at 1.058 (still low) and got some Pacman yeast that I had cultured from a bottle of Shakespeare Stout.  That one hit 1.008…86% attenuation and 6.5% ABV!  That Pacman yeast is a killer.  And it tasted pretty damn good out of the primary.  The only thing I didn’t like was that it didn’t flocculate nearly as well as the Sixpoint yeast or the White Labs 001 that I normally use.  Oh well.

Still haven’t figured out my low efficiency problems, but now that I have some empty fermenters I can get cracking on that.

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted anything new for a couple of days. The fact is, I haven’t brewed anything in a couple of weeks – mainly because all my fermenters are full and I don’t want to rush my beers (and cider). Also, this week I was out of town visiting a manufacturer for work. While this may not sound like the story is getting exciting any time soon, I promise that beer is involved. One of my co-workers (let’s call him J.) knows that I am a sucker for a good beer so he recommended a local brewpub called Iron Hill Brewery in Lancaster, PA. I trust this kid so the first night we were in town we drove out there.

Below is a basic overview of their current beers. Keep in mind that I didn’t take notes or anything while I was there because I didn’t want to look like a tool. Also, I was – and continue to be – suffering from a pretty bad cold so my senses of taste and smell were (are) dulled. But the place was cool so I think it deserves a review anyway.

So for 7 bucks you can get a sampler which contains a 4 ounce glass of every beer they have on tap. Not just five or six of their pre-selected favorites – but ALL ELEVEN BEERS! That is fucking brilliant. They get an A+ for that alone. But how was the beer, you ask? Here’s a brief rundown of my recollections:

Light Lager – I didn’t expect much from this, which is probably why I was so surprised. It was crisp and refreshing with very little aroma to speak of. But it had a terrific yet mild malt flavor and slightly sharp finish. This is the beer they brew for the “American Lager” crowd and I was really impressed with it.

Raspberry Wheat – The server suggested we drink this one last because the post-fermentation addition of raspberry concentrate tends to stick to the palette. I didn’t do as I was told and was grateful – my night would have ended with this beer and that would be bad. This beer was way too sweet for me. It tasted like someone mixed juice into the beer after pouring it. I’ll be up front with you and say that I don’t really like the whole fruit-wheat genre of beers, and this beer is a primary example of why. When someone gives me a fruit flavored wheat beer that doesn’t taste syrupy I’ll change my tune.

Vienna Red Lager – This was actually a little disappointing for me – I wanted it to be a little more complex than it was, I guess. There was a nice bready malt flavor and a sharp Saaz zing to it, which was really good. I can’t really put my finger on it, but this seemed a little one-dimensional. Maybe it’s the cold talking.

Ironbound Ale – Here’s their American pale ale, can you guess the hops? Four varieties, they say, and I definitely taste the Cascade and Chinook in it. The moderate caramel malt flavors were almost, but not quite, hidden by the assertive, citrusy hops. The server said this is their best-selling beer and I can see why, it’s like a light IPA that you can drink all night. This was also J.’s favorite beer of the group.

Pigiron Porter – A delicious example of the style – chocolatey and roasted with a very subtle hint of raisin in the background. The finish was rich and bitter with a hint of espresso. As J. noticed, though, the carbonation seemed a little high which muted the subtler flavors of the beer.

Nitro Pigiron Porter – Same beer as above poured on nitro. This solved any problems the beer may have had. The chocolate flavors came out stronger with some coffee and raisin mixed in. It was fantastic and creamy as all get out with a long espresso finish. Probably my favorite of the group.

Belgian Abbey Dubbel – In the interest of full disclosure I’ll come out and tell you that I’m not a big fan of this style, either. (Beer snobs across the blogosphere are cringing). I respect, appreciate and even admire a good Belgian ale I just don’t particularly like them. Maybe they’re too sweet for me – or maybe just too Belgian. Michelle loves the Belgian beers and I’m trying to find ones that I really dig, I just haven’t found too many yet. So my review of this beer would be unfair. I’m sure it was good, I just didn’t care for it much.

American Brown Ale – This is one of my favorite styles, probably because of the way it pairs with good barbecue. This particular one may be the most American of all American browns I’ve ever had. It had a deep mahogany color and rich chocolate flavor topped off with an assload of Cascade, Centennial and Chinook. It tasted like someone threw the hop additions for an American pale ale into the kettle of the brown ale. And I liked it so much I got a growler of it to go – which is how I learned that this gets old a little fast. I love the idea of it, but in practice I’d like the brown ale to be a little smoother than the c-hops make it. Still a great beer, just stop at one.

Saison (seasonal) – Here, oddly enough, is a Belgian beer that I like. Even with a cold I could tell this had a great aroma. The flavors were full and fruity without being overbearing (to my anti-Belgian tastes). And the finish was perfectly crisp and refreshing. It seemed strange to have this as the seasonal beer in February, but I could be wrong on that. Either way, it was really frickin’ good.

Belgian Abbey Trippel (seasonal) – I gave my sample to J. since I was driving and don’t care much for the style, anyway. He had no problem accepting the offer.

Russian Imperial Stout (seasonal) – Another style that I just love. I drank this one last in lieu of dessert and I think it was the right choice. It was rich and roasted, full of espresso and toffee flavors, a punched up with citrusy American hops (it worked in this one). What a great sipping beer. (Or chugging beer – but at almost 10%, watch out.) I should have gotten a Reserve Bottle of this stuff instead of the growler of brown – my mistake.

There they are – all eleven of their current beers. I think there’s actually a chocolate stout going on tap tonight, but I’m back in Jersey now so I can’t check that out. Overall, I think the beers were good with the highlights being the Ironbound Ale, Nitro Pigiron Porter and the Russian Imperial Stout. The food was pretty good, too, and the space was really comfortable. They’ve got cool shit like the Mug Club and Bottle Reserves and they sell growlers for $15 ($11 for a refill). I recommend it if you ever find yourself near one of these – check their website for locations and more info.

Let’s stop talking about our (my) problems for a minute and talk about something cool – like gadgets. Now I’ll be the first to admit that I have a problem when it comes to gadgets and tinkering. It could be that I’m an engineer and that’s just the way we work, but I think it’s deeper than that; I think it’s genetic. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a TV repairman back when there were actual vacuum tubes in those things (TV’s not grandfathers). And my father is always building, repairing or modifying something in his house – currently he’s bugging me to get some infrared emitting diodes so he can make a bunch of battery-powered Wii sensor bars…for real. It only makes sense that I’m a tinkerer – and infuse all my hobbies with that tendency. I put together mash tuns from Igloo coolers and made a little wort chiller from some cheap copper tubing from the hardware store. So what would be next? Behold!

You are a blinding brilliant light from heaven.

Now I may be biased, but that has got to be, without hyperbole, the coolest damn thing mankind has ever and will ever know.

Alright, I’m a little biased. But do you even see what that is? That’s a 3 liter soda bottle turned into a KEG! I’m just a tad bit excited about this, as you can see. Now I know this isn’t the most original thing in the world – a google search or a browse through some of the more popular homebrew forums will show you that this has been done before. Now you’re saying,”Well, so what? You did something that a bunch of other brewers already did? What’s the big deal?” To be honest, it probably isn’t a big deal, but I’ll explain what I did anyway and you can decide if it’s cool or not.

Parts:

3/8″ brass female tee
3/8″ brass close nipple
3/8″ brass couple
3/8″ threaded liquid-tight strain relief
3/8″ threaded quick-disconnect socket
1/4″ barbed quick-disconnect socket
2 x 1/4″ barbed quick-disconnect plugs
1/4″ barbed schrader valve
5/32″ vinyl tubing
1/4″ vinyl tubing
picnic tap
CO2 tire inflater
hose washers
steel shims
teflon tape
3L soda bottle

I am born anew in your genius.

Assembly:

This should be pretty obvious from the pictures, but I’ll run through it anyway. Wrap teflon tape around all the threaded fittings. Run the 5/32″ tubing through the tee (as shown) and slip the liquid-tight fitting over the “out” end and tighten it up (not too tight, you need the beer to flow smoothly). On the other side of the tee screw on the threaded quick-disconnect and on the bottom of the tee (where the tubing is coming out) screw in the nipple. Now drill a hole in the top of a 3L soda cap 5/8″ in diameter and screw that onto the nipple – it should sit tightly against the bottom of the tee. Put a hose washer and some shims in the cap and screw the coupler onto the nipple tightly (I used a wrench for this, everything else I just hand tightened). Heat up some 1/4″ tubing and push it over the “out” end of the 5/32″ tubing – this is a tight fit and may take some work, but it’ll go. Put the 1/4″ barbed female QD on the other end of the 1/4″ tubing and the main body is done.

Nor indeed was the world, nor history, nor anything that the human eye has ever captured.

The parts that I added that I didn’t see on anyone else’s version of this “keg” are the quick disconnect fittings. I thought it would be neat if this could be treated just like your average keg. So take some 1/4″ tubing and stick a QD plug on one end and the picnic tap on the other and on another piece of tubing stick the other QD plug and the schrader valve. Now you can pump some CO2 in and dispense.

Unbelievable. You are a modern master.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself,”A schrader valve and tire inflater? That’s not ‘just like your average keg’ at all!” And it’s not, but with the QD fittings I can get a CO2 tank and regulator and hook that up to this and then it would be just like your average keg – except very small. Small enough, in fact, to fit in the door of your average refrigerator if you got a paintball CO2 canister, which is my plan. I needed to verify that this thing would work before getting the regulator, though.

It is like looking into the face of god and seeing him smiling back saying, “You are my most wondrous creation”.

As you can see, this does work. Not the best pour in the world but I’m just getting used to it. For now I’ll be priming the 3L bottles and using CO2 to push them but hopefully I’ll be able to force carb soon and can set the carbonation a little more precisely. Now you may be thinking to yourself,”This is cool and all, but how is it any better than / different from a Tap-A-Draft?” The answer: it really isn’t much different except for the ability to use a tank and regulator and that you get to put it together yourself.

Keep in mind, if you plan on doing this, that beer should not be stored in these bottles for very long. They are both light and oxygen permeable, so if you want to age your beer for more than, say, six months you should bottle them in brown glass or actual steel kegs. For beers that are going to be had young or for taking to picnics or parties, this could be a cool gadget to have around.

If anyone wants part numbers from McMaster-Carr, which is where I got almost all the pieces, shoot me an email or leave a comment and I’ll hook you up.

Scrumtrillescent!

Ever since moving from 2.5 gallon to 3 liter batches my efficiencies have been terrible. I was getting 70% or so on the old system and now can’t get over 55% on the small system. It’s driving me a little crazy. I’ve tried sparging with more water and boiling longer, doing two sparges, crushing past the point of mortal fear (which led to insanely poor run-offs but didn’t help my efficiency at all) and playing around with different mash-out and sparge temperatures. Nothing seems to work.

On Saturday I brewed an IPA targeting an original gravity of 1.066 but got about 1.045 at the end of an hour. So I boiled for a little while longer and got it to 1.050 and called it a beer. That brew was going to get the Pacman yeast that I had just cultured, but since it was so far off target it got some Sixpoint yeast still in the fridge. Still being tormented, I attempted another brew on Monday.

I’m actually an engineer by trade so it surprises even me that I seem to be shooting from the hip in trying to crack this nut. But it’s fun in some bizarre, self-destructive way even if it isn’t always helpful. Monday, however, would be different. Well, not really, but that was the idea going into the brew session. The logic went like this:

For some reason, all my small brews have really low efficiencies even though the larger brews had decent (i.e., livable) efficiencies. Rather than keep trying to figure out why the small brews are different, why not just formulate the recipes around those efficiencies? I can deal with an extra few ounces of grain per beer.

A not-so-exhaustive run through the old sessions showed that most of the small brews were pretty close to 50% efficient. One was about 55 % and one was 48%, but they were all pretty similar. So Monday’s session would be the same basic recipe from Saturday’s IPA, but tailored to a 50% efficiency. How could that go wrong? Well, I’ll tell you how – I still missed my 1.066 target by 8 points at 1.058 (upsetting but close enough to get the Pacman). Okay, that’s not exactly telling you how it went wrong, just that it went wrong. The reason is that I still don’t know why things are going wrong.

But I have a theory. Hear me out.

In talking about this with Michelle (who is a wonderful listener even when I’m talking about my mash efficiency dilemma) I explained that there should be no reason for such a change from one size batch to another if everything was scaled down appropriately – smaller mash tun, smaller kettle, smaller fermenters, etc. The mash temperature has been spot on, and on Saturday I was able to get a handle on the boil-off rate (3.2 quarts per hour) and use that number for Monday’s session. The question that I couldn’t answer was “What value does not scale linearly with batch size, or what value am I not accounting for?” And while I was driving to work today I think I may have hit it.

(Incidentally, my commute is where I do most of my technical thinking for some reason – both for my hobbies and for work. I should start charging my office for this time.)

The (potential) answer actually sprang from some things I’m doing at work in which I’m trying to find trajectories for different projectiles. In that particular problem, the range we’re dealing with is different from the range we typically use and I was having some trouble getting precise results because of the increased error associated with that shift. Eureka! (And you didn’t know where this story was going, did you?) Maybe my mash problem isn’t a problem with the crush or temperature, but in the accuracy of my water measurements. If I’m off by a cup or two in the larger brews it won’t really matter, but when I’m after 3.5 quarts of wort that cup could throw my numbers off more significantly.

So here’s my plan of action: Acquire a metal ruler to take measurements of the wort going into the kettle and into the fermenter. The wort into the kettle has been unmeasured up to now and the beer into the fermenter is only measured in relation to a piece of tape I stuck on the jug at the 3.5 quart level. And I’m going to brew a simple beer (not sure what kind yet, but probably a pale ale) a couple of times in a row in an attempt to really tighten up my process. Oh, and I’ll take notes as I go so that I’ll know what’s happening from one session to the next (and have something to post here). Sound like a plan?

Wish me luck.

We have Pacman!

I now have enough Pacman yeast to ferment 3.5 quarts of beer.  Just so you don’t have to read through parts 1 and 2 all over again, here’s the process I went through:

Day 1: Carefully poured (and consumed) all but the last ounce or two of a bomber of Rogue’s Shakespeare Stout. Dumped about 4 ounces of 1.030 wort into the bottle. Covered with foil. Shook like hell every chance I got.
Day 2: Saw a thin krausen. When it dropped the bottle went into the fridge.
Day 3: Decanted the new beer leaving about an ounce or two with the yeast. Dumped about 6 ounces of 1.035 wort into the bottle, covered with foil, shook like hell.
Day 4: Nice thick krausen.
Day 5: Krausen dropped – bottle went into the refrigerator to wait for next step.

This is going to be dumped into a 3.5 quart batch of IPA which is mashing as I type this.  Hurrah!

A quick update on my latest starter experiment:

The morning after making the starter there was a very thin layer of krausen on the beer, which means some yeast stuck around in the bottle and went to town on the wort.  That night the krausen had dropped so I put the bottle in the fridge to crash cool it and get the suspended yeast to drop out.  I don’t really know if that was a good idea or not, but I did it so there’s no use crying over it now.  This evening I decanted the beer in the bottle, which left a small layer of yeast at the bottom – not a lot but definitely more than what was there before.  I added 2 cups of fresh 1.035 wort to that (made using the coffee grinder / thermos method, which I’m going to stick with) and shook the crap out of it again.  With any luck, I’ll have a nice cake at the bottom of the bottle sometime tomorrow and the whole starter can be pitched into a batch of IPA or something.

More updates to come.