Turkey Beer and Slack-Asses

Slack Asses:
It's been a long time since we've posted.  And I'd say, that as Emperor of Brewtherville Labs Brew Club (which is self-appointed, not assumed to be the leader of the bunch and anyone can name their own title) that it is my responsibility to make sure the blog gets updated.  But it's not.  And I don't want to be a bitch nag about it.  That said, let he who said, "I'll write the blog because that's what I do", write your fucking blog.  That blog is two beers overdue.  So, I'm skipping over that beer and moving on to the Turkey Thyme beer.

Turkey Beer:
I have very fond memories of going to my great Grandparent's house for Thanksgiving.  My Grandmother has this amazing secret stuffing recipe (a requisite for all Grandmothers) and a bowl full of butter with some succotash in it.  I wanted to brew a beer that embodied Thanksgiving.  I wanted Rosemary, Thyme and Sage in the beer.  The first issue was what type of beer to make.  After a research sabbatical evening at Alewife it was suggested by beer connoisseur and one time homebrewer Jon C.  He suggested a Dunkel or Marzen.  I came home with a mixer of malty beer threw in some fresh rosemary from the garden and tried them out.  The winner was a brown ale.  The maltiness and lack of hop aroma and bitterness really went well with the rosemary.  And, at the same time I got ambitious and wanted to do an all grain brew.
There are basically three ways to make homebrew and it has to do with the malt you use.  The basic level is the syrup malt. This is malted barley that has had the sugars extracted and boiled down into a syrup.  The next level up is dry malt extract (or DME).  This is similar to syrup, but instead of a liquid, it is powdered.  The next step up is a big step which requires additional equipment, namely a mash/lauter tun,and you need to be able to boil large volumes of water. See the previous post for the all-grain description

Recipe:
10.5 lbs of Crystal malt
0.28 lbs of Chocolate malt.
2 oz. Williamette whole hops, 60 min
1 oz. Kent Goldings pellet hops, 2 min
Two large sprigs of rosemary at 15 min,
1 Tbs of ground sage at 15 min,
1 Tbs of ground thyme at 15 min.

4 Gal of strike water at 163DegC for 1 hour.
4 Gal of Sparge water at 170DegC for 20 min.

Boil it all down, add hops at hop schedule, add spices.

Cool, ferment, bottle.

First of all the initial gravity (amount of alcohol-able sugar) was really low (like 1.024).  After a week, it wasn't fermenting.  I went to The Thirsty Brewer and asked guru Tom, what the deal was.  He took one look at the recipe and declared, "This recipe is horrible".  Horrible!  Horrible?
Let me take this opportunity to educate you.  Malted barley can be separated into two groups.  Base malts and specialty malts. Base malts are malted and dried.  They have a bunch of alcohol-izable sugars in them and have the special enzymes to break down bigger non-alcohol-izable sugars into alcohol-izable sugars. Specialty grains are malted kilned so that the sugars caramelize and are not broken down into alcohol-izable sugars we well, PLUS, the awesome enzymes are toast.  So basically that meant that I didn't have many alcohol-izable sugars in my beer.  Tom suggested that I add 4.5 lbs of DME to the beer.  So I did.

The end result was a very interesting beer.  Not good per se, but interesting.  It had an aroma of tomato paste, but you could taste the rosemary on the tongue, and the sage and thyme as an afterthought.  Really, you'd have one bottle and think, this sucks.  Then the next, "Oh.  It's not that bad".  But really it was.  Next year will be better. The best thing about it was the label.

Cracked-Car Kolsch Ad

Thoughts going forward

While we're still waiting for Cracked Car Kosch posting #'s 3,4,5 and 6; and the new beer (I won't spoil it).. I wanted to post a few thoughts for our next round.

First, a few terms.
Grist: the crushed grains that go into the...
Mash Tun (proun: Mash toon): the pot where you heat the grist. Interestingly enough, typically made out of a 5 gal sports cooler.
Mash: it's when you use all grains (grist-no malt extracts or syrup) to make your wort.  Also a fairly rad TV show.
Sparge (NOT proun: Spooge): once the grains are mashed at certain temperatures for certain times, you need to rinse all of the extra sugars out of the grains.  Got to get the goodness out, SAY YEAH! [That's the Reverand Al Green BTW] This is done in a...
Lauter tun (proun: Lawter Toon): The vessel that allows the water to filter through the grist bed extracting any sugar that's left.  We want the sugar.  Sugar=alcohol.
Balling Degrees: Scale indicating density of sugars in wort. Devised by C J N Balling. OR: "The members of Brewtherville Labs have shown varying Balling Degrees."
Brake: the crap/sludge/schmeg/spooge at the bottom of the boil pot or fermenting pot (more on that later).

Brewtherville Labs is stepping up it's game.  We've had success after success with the extract brews.  So far, our "mistakes" have turned into gold (mostly).  We could keep on keepin on, but I say increase the Balling Degree (which has very little to do with sugar).

Here's a general layout for an all grain batch.
Select your grist.  There are many different kinds and they each have their own qualities.  For example, Crystal 20L is very lite and can be used for lighter colored ales.  Crystal 80L gives a nice darker amber color.  These are roasted to different degrees.  Pilsner malted barley is very light and obviously used for Pils, chocolate malted barley is used for stouts.  With an all grain mash, you can create your own combination, like a Black Imperial IPA or a great hoppy lite beer (great idea Danny).  The combinations are endless.
Second step: Mash the grist.  This can be done in a number of vessels, but we'll do it in a lauter tun (which I am in the process of making.  You need to steep the grist in ~152deg of water for about an hour.  Drain the wort into your boiling vessel (recycle the first few quarts back into the lauter tun to get rid of any big grains that come through).
Sparge the grist with clean ~170 deg water to kill the enzymes that are converting carbs to sugar and wash out the good sugar.  After the sparge you should have about 6.5-7gal of wort.  This wort will boil down after a while.  You can separate the wort into two boiling pots if you don't have a nice big 15 gal copper kettle pot (but really who doesn't) and combine them later.  I have a line on a nice big 10 gal crab steamer pot, but I'm not sure our normal burners are going to handle the volume.  We'll see.
After you have collected the wort,  take a hydrometer reading.  Are we at the OG we want?  If not, boil down a bit to concentrate.  If we're over, either dilute with water or suffer the consequences of a 10% ABV brew.  Now, it's time to boil and add hops and all that good stuff.

After this, it's kind of business as usual, but for a few tricks...

How to clear the crud.
1. Add Irish moss at T-15 min.  This will act to gather brake so it does not end up in the final beer. 
2.Cool the wort in the boiling tun.  We're going to start using a wort cooler.  I'm making one on the cheap.  As the wort cools, certain proteins and schmeg that we don't particularly want in our beer (I don't speak for Jason) will precipitate out of solution and fall to the bottom.  We can do a whirlpool stir to get the brake to the middle of the boiling tun before we rack to the fermenter (where they won't end up).
3. Bonus round! We filter the wort through a whole hop bed which will collect these proteins and add a little hoppy goodness to the brew.  I've ordered 3 lbs of whole hops from a grower/distributor in Oregon.  This will also add a good bit of oxygen to the wort to help the yeast ferment.

Carbonation:
The dude at the Thirsty Brewer (who we love) gave me the goods on priming the beer for bottling. [He also gave me the equation for calculating how much malt extract to use in the wort to get a desired OG/FG, which as a pre-2 beer scientist, I love]  He suggested using malt extract instead of corn sugar.  This has pros and cons.  It can affect the taste of the beer.  Malt extract will impart a larger body which you may not be looking for.  Corn sugar is easy but has very little flavor and character, but is highly effective (even in the fermentation phase).  Basically different beers require different amounts of priming sugar.  Two things can affect the amount of carbonation.  First, incomplete fermentation can cause an excess amount of sugar to be in the wort when the beer is conditioned.  Second, the amount of priming sugar was not optional.  Either the volume was too low/sugar concentration too high; or vise-ah vers-ah.

Hops:
For bitterness your hop selection should be dependent on your need.  If you want hoppy bitterness, you want a high alpha acid content and add it early in the boil (like 60 min).  More aromatic hops (larger Beta values) should be added toward the end of the brew.

That's all for now.  I'm out.

Anyway, I've learned a few tricks that should improve our beer 3.14159265 (prime) fold.

Cracked Car Kolsch Part Deux

When last we left...well, reread Part One.

All I can say about our first attempt to brew the kolsch is this, "When you fall off the keg, you gotta get right back on!"



So, after another trip out to The Thirsty Brewer for another round of supplies, Bill and I gave it another shot.

Being of one mind and determined vision, we powered thru the brewing process in an efficient--and mostly sober--manner. This time around, we decided to use a plastic 5 gallon water bottle from my water delivery service. The best part, we wouldn't even need to clean it back out when we were done with it. One quick rinse, and then right out on my front walk to be returned with all my other empty bottles. (We have done this a couple times now, and I have yet to hear from the water company asking me what the hell the dried crud is in the jugs.)

So, we finished up brewing and it was then time to cool down the wort. If only we had remembered to get a couple bags of ice. What to do? What to do?

Thankfully, I'm an idea man, Chuck:



We raided the fridge, and got the beer up to the five gallon mark with ice, some Hello Kitty icepacks and cold water. Now it was time to sit back and get the wort down to 75 degrees. About 2 hours later that night (a school night, I might add), we were only down to 80 degrees. Throwing caution to the wind, I pitched the yeast and went to bed, but I left the beer in good hands:



We brewed on a Thursday, and the fermentation hit it's stride on Sunday. The initial overflow was fairly chunky and bubbling like crazy. It was only after a few days that I was able to switch over to the airgap on the top of the carboy. Fermenation continued on for another 4 days or so after that, and then calmed down.

At this point, let me take a moment to go over a couple of things. Brewclub has been an awesome experience. The social aspect, the science aspect, the manly aspect and the drinking aspect. All good. You know the one thing that sucks about Brewclub? Scrubbing the damn labels off the bottles. Sierra Nevada labels came right off after a good soak--some of the others?...not so much. Those guys went right into the recycle bin.

Once all the labels were off, I mixed up a batch of sanitizer (I used iodophor, and was pretty happy), and basically submerged all the bottles and equipment for a few minutes. After that, I started going a little crazy and sanitized everything I could think of: my water bottles, some old growlers I had, the cat.



We heated up the priming sugar in a small pot of water and added it to the batch right before bottling. Not only is this an effective way to help ensure the sugar is evenly dispersed, it also helps to bring the batch closer back to the original five gallons (replacing what we lost during fermentation overflow.) Did it get the beer all the way back up to 5 gallons? We shall revisit this topic in the future blog: Why does my Cracked Car Kolsch Keep Cracking?

After a little toast--it tasted like warm flat beer, so we were pleased--we bottled the beer and packed them away for a two week nap.

As for the final result:



Liquid goodness and oral fireworks. We were very happy with the final product. It still packed a bit of a punch (somewhere in the high 5% range) and it had much more flavor than I would have expected for a 'lawnmower pils'. The color was spot on and the clarity was much better than I thought it would be. There was still a bit of sediment in the bottle, but no floaties swirling after the pour.

It was definitely a thumbs up for the Cracked Car Kolsch...despite our best efforts to sabotage it.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

My last Cracked-Car Kolsch exploded in the cabinet.  I had one and a half of these delectable brews and shared the rest.  I was saving this one for a rainy day.  As Florida Evans said when grieving James's death, "Damn, Damn, DAMN!!"

Cracked Car Kolsch

“So, I’m in a brew club with five other guys. Only one of us knows what he’s doing…and I’m not him.”

-Excerpt from a dialogue at The Thirsty Brewer


Thus began a journey of perseverance and dedication in the face of incredible odds and monumental lapses in both reason and the basic laws of science. What shall we take away from the following account? Karma loves a good beer.



Part 1:
After a very successful first batch by Steve and Matt, it was my turn to step up to plate with my partner, Bill (beer, not life—not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Our goal? A kolsch. In keeping with the season, Bill was looking for a beer that would be a nice compliment to crabs, apple pie and little kids running with sparklers. I was just looking for something that wouldn’t make me throw up until I at least drank a few 6-packs (more commonly known as Thursdays.)



With beer recipe in hand, off I went to the Thirsty Brewer for supplies. I would highly recommend a visit to this store for any home-brewers out there. The guy behind the counter was very helpful (i.e. he didn’t laugh at my ignorance), the place smelled like hop-heaven and the prices were great. With a box of ingredients, a bottle of sanitizer and an air of self-confidence, I strutted out of there like John Travolta at the beginning of Saturday Night Fever. Little did I know I would be shuffling back a week later like Charlie Brown after he hung that one bulb on the Xmas tree and it bent to the ground.



The following evening, brewclub assembled. After the introductory round of secret handshakes, the reading of the minutes and a sampling of some other homebrew that was destined for a shelf in Obsoletion Central once our beer was completed, we got down to business. (**I would like to take this moment to come clean to my fellow club members. It was at roughly this point that I realized you are supposed to refrigerate the yeast until the day of brewing. I did not. Heavy exhale. Weight lifted.)



The recipe was fairly straightforward: http://stores.intuitwebsites.com/MarylandHomeBrewInc/store/content/kolsch.pdf , and since I thought ahead and started boiling the water earlier, we shot right thru things at a much faster rate than our predecessors. All that was left for the night was to cool down the wort, pitch the yeast (that phrase still sounds not quite right) and make some more empty bottles.



At this point, I would like to take a moment to describe the professional representation in brewclub (I have changed the names for matters of personal professional privacy):

Stev: scientist by day, founder and the one guy in brewclub who knows what he is doing (see introductory quote)

Scot: Educator (yeah, it’s only middle school, but he has been doing it for a while and--up until the Corona incident—he has shown sound judgment)

Mat: Assistant Principal and tallest member of Brewclub.

Bil & Jas’n: I know these guys have college degrees, but I’m not exactly sure what they do. I think Jas’n provides sports therapy for dogs and Bil is a transpondster. I don’t know for sure, but they are definitely white-collar.

Me: I’m the only blue-collar member and I have an English degree but I don’t teach, so I basically bring nothing to the table.



So, what I’m trying to say is that someone other than me should have realized it is not a great idea to pour steaming wort into an ice-packed glass carboy (from the Arabic qarraba meaning big jug, FYI). The one saving grace is that, while the entire bottom of the 5 gallon jug did break completely off, it was sitting inside of a larger tub, so my kitchen floor (and wife-allowed future brewclub hosting dates) remains intact. It was a lesson learned, and I rested easy knowing that it was everyone else’s fault the batch was ruined, and not my fault for failing to refrigerate the yeast.





Stay tuned for Part 2

Gary and Wyatt's Weird IPA