Hooray for Halloween !!

Okay .. after my typical hiatus, I am back for slightly more blogging.  There was a good 3 month hiatus wherein I had to replace the deck, not once but twice.  After having my wife "help me", she proved that warning you see on the oil based stains for wood.  IT IS FLAMMABLE !  One minor deck fire later, and replacing half the substructure, stairs and railing later, and it was back in service , better than ever !  Wish I could say the same for the wallet.

But I digress.  Fall is approaching, probably my favorite season.  The leaves turn, the air gets crisp and clean and cool .. football returns !  Cheerleaders return, and my thoughts also drifted to what would I brew for Halloween ?  Let's see .. I know .. pumpkins ... pumpkin pie .. pumpkin pie beer ???   Well, pumpkin ale anyway.  I was very excited and looking for it .. vision of pumpkin pie ale swirling in my head.  I could just taste it.  In getting ready, I decided to try a few store brands.  Tried the Uinta and Shipyard brands.  Disliked the Uinta .. liked the Shipyard.  What I really want to try is the Sam Adams blend .. never had a bad Sam's.

Browsed the internet and various brewing websites and forums .. could only find a few recipes that sounded promising .. however, I wanted to use real, fresh baking pumpkin .. the problem is I haven't seen any in the stores.  I finally went into my local homebrew store, MainBrew and got a recipe from them which used canned pumpkin.  Though I was told repeatedly that the pumpkin addition did very little, as it would get boiled off and no taste would truly be imparted .. at least not anything noticeable.  I just wanted to add it, for me , so I know it is there and hopefully a little bit of the feel of the pumpkin meat will be retained.

I purposely planned my brew day for Sunday .. fellas .. this is a MUST !!  Great excuse to stare at the football games while cooking beer.  See, you're just doing it for the wife and kids.. by doing this I am not taking quality family time from them over two days !  HA HA HA ! (evil laughter).  So gt the recipe ready .. some old historic one that is close to the one brewed many moons ago in the confederate times.  Hunted down the spices .. locally a neighbor had most of it .. cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, molasses, pumpkin, and a couple more that escape me at the moment .. can look it up for you if interested.  Anyway, Games on TV .. Check ... gear in the kitchen ready to begin the day .. check !  Game on !

Also, there were some toasted oats required for the recipe, so step 1 was to toast them on a cookie sheet in the oven at 350 for 15 minutes.  Once done, crush them with a rolling pin .. looking to fracture the husk, not crush them .. mix it in with the other grains, add the grains and molasses and bring it to 180 in the 8 gal brew kettle.  Again, I much prefer doing a full volume boil rather than the 2 to 3 gallons they say you can use when extract brewing.  Feels more right, you can exceed the 5 gallons a bit and get some extra brew.  Watch football game and stir occasionally .. look at those cheerleaders too.   Time to remove the grain and bring it to a roiling boil.  Takes me forever to do inside .. that gap between 180 and boiling for 6 gallons on an indoor stove .. even though it is a dual burner takes an eternity !  Bad fr the gas, and bad for time management , but lots more football time I guess.  Got to get a propane tank for that outdoor turkey broiler and do it faster.

The additions were an unusual time pattern .. but it kept me busy and my mind occupied.  It was nice once I had the cinnamon in there.. really started to smell like I was baking a pie.

Once done, I had the usually daunting and scary task of carrying a boiling 6 gallons in the kettle over to the kitchen sink across no mans land, strewn with the debris of toys, food and carpets.  This is really the 2nd think i most want to eliminate from my brewing process .. outside I can run the garden hose where I need it to be and roll the kettle over by the grass for the water discharge.  Plus, I am always worried it will slosh over the top (yes I put the lid on though) and burn me .. knowing I couldn't remove my hands from the danger lest I drop 6 gallons of it.  Slow and steady wins the race.  All went off without a hitch and I got it cooled down and transferred to the fermenter.  Does anyone else squeeze the liquid out of the hops ?  I heard someone at the brew store mention that, but it is not something I had previously done.  In my method, I cool the brew down with an immersion chiller and drain straight out the kettle through the ball valve and spigot and directly into the fermentor.  The bazooka filter keeps all the hops and other items out for me .. and then I dump the hops and wash.  Maybe I need to squeeze them prior to and drain into the fermenter as well ??

Fermenter is bubbling away and I will have some dry hopping to do with vanilla, nutmeg and hops.  I am thinking of adding cinnamon to that mix as well .. see what happens.  All I know is it smells good, hopefully tastes amazing and I look forward to it's initiation on or just prior to Halloween.  It has garnered a fair amount of interest so I know I wont be drinking it alone.  Ill try to keep you updated better.

I have a few photos and will upload soon .. check back .. daddy's time is over for now.

Have a good brew with good friends.

Wow time flies when the kids are around

Well, I have been completely negligent in keeping this blog up to date .. sorry about that !  But alas building a new deck and other lovely distractions have sucked up all my time.

Around April I quickly realized I was running out of beer and undertook a month of rapid brewing ... made another batch of my famous Citra IPA (going to make this the one I ALWAYS have in stock), some English Brown Ale (it's a Newcastle clone), and a Strawberry Blonde Ale.

Starting to get low again .. got ingredients for another batch similar to the Citra IPA, but the stores are all out of my beloved key hop, so it will be a one-off experiment with Citra pellets (only like to use whole leaf when i can, but what do I know, right ?).

I'll be good and get some photos and catch back up to speed once this summer slows down .. can't wait. 

Any good suggestions on a favorite beer ?  The only one I would desperately like to clone at the moment is the new beer called "Clutch" by New Belgium.  Though this is a blend and a tough one I am told on the Beer Smith forums.  :( 

Need to investigate lagers more..  talk with you soon , and Happy Brewing.

My first Brew Kettle

Well, as with many things, my good intentions of catching up to where I am at in my brewing experiences has gone out the window, but I hope to catch it up sometime .. kids, work, sun in my eyes, taxes, sandman beating on me .. all that good stuff is conspiring to keep me off the blog. 

As a gadget nerd, who always like to get the equipment or tools that people use to do things the right way, I am already drawing blueprints in my head of a brewing structure (tree style) that I know I can't afford for a while yet.  Nevertheless, step 1 is when I buy equipment, to make sure that I plan ahead and get stuff that is adaptable and can be used in my grand evil plan/scheme of a brew tree.  Therefore, as I just don't have enough friends coming over for some brew, and I can only take brew to work to pass off to coworkers on rare occasions, and I can only drink so much myself, I chose to stick to 5 gallon batches, at least for now, before moving up to 10 gallon batches.

Thus began my shopping for a Stainless Steel pot to do a full boil cook for a 5 gallon batch.  They always say to assume about 1.5 gallons to evaporate during the boil and cooking, so you need 6.5 gallons minimum, I chose to start with 7 gallons and then account for some free-board when boiling so it doesn't splash or boil over; add 1 gallon and I ended up with an 8 gallon brew kettle.  I also wanted to get it ported (holes in it with threads so you can add accessories), but wanted to price the difference between one that came with welded plugs on it that you screw right into, or one where I create my own holes and then use weld-less fittings. 

When researching these options on various home brewing boards, it seems to be like the HP versus TI conflict amongst my fellow engineers, it is pretty evenly split, even though the HP side is the right one in the engineering world !   Bottom line, when pricing the similar kettles, I found that the one I selected that came with ports manufactured into it, and with a SS Ball Valve and plug for the currently unused port, was within a few dollars of one where I would have to drill and weld or drill and buy similar SS weld-less equipment, I went for the less hassle option and got this (see below) from Morebeer.  They sell this same one at my local brewpub, and I prefer to throw business their way, plus the benefit of walking out the door with it, but with free shipping it was almost $20 less so I got it from the internet.

And something to think about as you can see from the pic .. if you are still cooking inside, make sure you have clearance for your selected pot .. I got 2" of clearance from the microwave, but it only is restricted on the back half so I am good.  So far so good, performed 1 cook in this new pot.  Kettle in action:

You can see the grain bags in there.  The largest impact I noticed with the full boil was that it seemed to take forever to get from removing the grain bags to where the brew was boiling.  Some things I need to check with the experts:  should I in fact be doing full boil with extract ?  Typically you boil down to about 3.5 gallons and when adding your mix to the fermenter, you add a frozen 1 gallon block of spring water (to cool it down and add volume, then I would wash some water through the hops to bring it back up to a total of 5 gallons. 

The benefit i wanted from the ball valve was to just drain out via gravity directly to the fermenter.  As usual, I forgot the 1 gallon frozen block of ice, and elected not to use my ice cubes, so I drained it hot through the 1/2" food grade hose I had.  I also cheaped out and did not yet buy a screen filter to screw into the port with the ball valve, thinking I could hand screen the hops out (whole leaf hops).  Well it didn't work that way .. the hops got into the ball valve, and while draining out it got plugged which created an instantaneous drop in the volume going out through my hose, so the pressure difference collapsed the hose, and the high heat temp of the brew softened the hose such that now it is permanently deformed in a collapsed state and is almost unusable :( .   What I learned ... get a wort chiller and a filter screen !  I bought the parts from Home Depot to make my own wort chiller, btw, this is a wort chiller ... http://morebeer.com/search/102204/beerwinecoffee/coffeewinebeer/Immersion_Wort_Chiller_-_Standard ... which is running cold water through some copper coils to cool down the brew, but found I could just buy one cheaper and pre-assembled, and not have to bend it from Mainbrew (the local brew pub).  I also bought a bazooka screen filter instead of making one from Mainbrew .. though some people have taken a braided SS hose used for plumbing in hooking up the water supply to the sink, gutted it, and stripped off the SS braid, put it on a nipple with a hose clamp and use that as a filter (the SS braid).  The next brew will work much smoother and not take so long to complete.

This virgin batch in the brew kettle was a cream stout.  Tastes good !  Nice color and flavor.  The next style is unknown at the moment, though I am leaning towards another Citra IPA, with which I will use the wort chiller and bazooka screen.  The only thing I am nervous of is transferring the hot kettle over to the sink area to run the water through the wort chiller ... ah to be outside with a garden hose ! 

Additions to the kettle in the near future ... I want to mount a temp gauge in the extra port so I can have continuous real time monitoring of temp without removing the lid and sticking in a thermometer, which is more important I think when doing the all grain method and rinsing water through the grain where the temperature of the rinse water is very important.  I would also like to get a sight gauge mounted .. which will require drilling my own hole in the kettle and using a weld-less kit to install it .. .nervous about that.

Here is the buckets I keep my wash and sanitizer in during the brew for cleaning everything.

My First Brew !

So .. On to my first Home Brew adventure.

My neighbor who let me help him with his batch was supposed to be available to cook it with me, but the timing didn't work out.  Would have liked to have had him there, but I wasn't afraid to go it alone.  After all, the folks at my local home brew store, Mainbrew ( www.mainbrew.com ) had not only kindly enough sold me the ingredients, but had also given me written directions to follow that included everything from the boil of the grains to the hop schedule and how to bottle.

After pondering the many varied types and styles of beer .. I settled on an Irish Red for my very first batch.  This also meant going to my neighbors to borrow EVERY single piece of brewing equipment that I would need.

First discovery ... it is a PAIN to cleanse and sterilize everything, but that is what is required.  I bought some Straight A as a cleaner and Star SAN for the sanitizer.  The first step in prepping for my first batch was to stop recycling my beer bottles and begin saving them.  Darn the luck, I had recycled my bottles a couple weeks earlier, so a man's got to do what a man's got to do.  Time to get another Sam Adam's sampler case from Costco and make some empty brown glass bottles !!

The bottles need to be brown, do not use the clear or green bottles, and the darker the better.  Why ?  Because light can get to and ruin the beer.  The dark color filters more of the light out to help avoid making the beer go bad.  There is science behind all of this, but I will not bore you with it, plus I can't recall all of the various aspects of it, but it is available with a quick google search.

To clean the bottles, soak them in a bucket of water mixed with the Straight A.  After a couple hours the labels should fall off by themselves or with a very minor bit of effort.  Once the labels have been stripped free, you need to clean all the glue residue off the outside of the bottles and run a scrub brush inside of them. 

What I did, and your opinions and methods may vary ... I bought two 5-gallon buckets at Home Depot and wrote all over the side of them "BEER ONLY",  and fill one with Straight A and the other with Star-San.  I run all the equipment through each bucket before beginning the brew process, and leave it there with the lids on until I am done.  Then after the brew process, or transferring to the secondary, I simply remove the lids and use the cleaner and sanitizer again for the cleanup.  Before dumping the cleaner and sanitizer out, be sure to get the fermentation bucket, brew kettle, etc as well as all the small hand equipment. 

The brew took a while, and it isn't easy with 3 kids and a wife to find a few hours to do it all, but I managed, so can you.

All of my batches to date have been done with Extract, not all-grain brewing.   I also bought a special plastic fermenting bucket and a plastic Better Bottle Carboy from Mainbrew.  I was nervous but it went well.  I need to buy a thermometer as I didn't have one that went up to 180 so I used a meat thermometer .. after cleaning and sterilizing it.

The beer had a nice aroma and good red coloring.  I keep my fermenting bucket in the laundry room, as it is the most out of the way place for the kids .. if they pull the rubber stopper out, the beer may get contaminated, so try to minimize the risk.  It felt good to hear the beer gurgling away for a few days while it fermented .. the gurgling sound is from the air being forced out by the fermentation process through the water trap.  After a week in the fermenter, I transferred the beer back into the carboy for another week, storing it again in the laundry room.  After that, the next step is bottling.  The longest part of the bottling process was putting the bottles in the dishwasher for a wash cycle (NO SOAP !!!) and a sanitary rinse.  Once done, my neighbor taught me the tip of putting the beer in the bottles on the bottom tray (door) of the dishwasher so if there is a spill it just goes into the dishwasher and not on the floor or counters.  Before bottling, don't forget to add the mixture of corn sugar and water to create the carbonation in the bottle.

A couple bottles were consumed during bottling and a couple broken, but I still had a good couple cases of beer.  After aging and thorough sampling, the beer was ready to be drunk and shared after 3 weeks in the bottles, which I also stored in the laundry room.

The beer turned out very well, everyone at work liked it.

I knew by this point that I enjoyed this process, and wanted to grow and learn so I could make custom tailored brews to suit the tastes of the wife, friends and family.

                                                    The carboy aging in the laundry room. 
                                                    (Note:  As light is still the enemy, I leave
                                                    the box the carboy came in over the top
                                                    of the carboy to protect it.).  Notice the
                                                    water trap in the rubber stopper .. this is
                                                    to let the pressure relieve itself while
                                                    preventing contaminants from getting in.

                                                   Transferring the cooked brew from the
                                                   Brew Kettle to the Fermentation bucket,
                                                   sifting out the hops.

Step 1 - I like to Watch ! ;)

Sorry to dissappoint, but no sexy pictures or videos here .. I just know what guys like, and that's beer .. am I right fellas ?

To ease myself into the process, I asked my neighbor ..who sadly .. got rid of his boat before I could mooch some time with it .. if I could watch him and help him brew his next batch of beer.  This I did .. all the while peppering him with questions and sampling his previous batch.  It seemed easy enough.  Heat some water up, throw in this syrupy stuff called Malt Extract and cook it while periodically adding hops. 

It actually boiled over once, and you will forever see warnings that this will happen during the process of adding the extract to the water.  However, I have never experienced this problem.  Am I not getting it hot enough ?  After the 60 minute boil, You dump it into a special plastic fermenting bucket with a frozen gallon of spring water (making sure to remove the plastic container of course) to help cool it down.  Throw it in the corner to cool down further and when around 70 degrees F, add the yeast.  Air and open containers, and dirty equipment is the enemy.  You don't want any stray yeasts or other organic matter to get into your brew or you will end up with that infamous "Skunky brew".  You leave the beer in the fermenter until the "bubbling" is down to one bubble every 60 seconds or so.  It bubbles because you insert a water trap into the top of the fermenter.  The pressure in the fermenter is increasing through the fermentation process.  As the pressure inside exceeds the external pressure outside, a bubble of gas will find its way out and through the water trap and vent to the air.  As the fermentation process dies down, the pressure does also and the bubbling will slow down significantly. 

After that, you siphon the beer off of the residue/sediment on the bottom of the fermenter and into a glass or special plastic carboy.  A carboy looks like a 5 gallon water jug that you would place on a water cooler at the office or at home.  You typically leave the beer in the carboy for at least a week, then you keg or bottle it. 

When I went back to the neighbors to help him bottle it, more sampling was required.  It tasted alright , but not up to snuff to the sample of his previous batch.  The reason is this newly brewed beer is still "green", and had no carbonation as of yet.  While bottling I also managed to break 2 bottles.  It sounds worse than it is though .. basically the neck of the bottle fractured .. so we screened it for glass particles with a filter sock and had more "samples".  I could get into this !

Once bottled, you need to let the beer sit in the bottle for at least 2 weeks, but a month is far better.  It gets better with age, just like wine.  The carbonation in bottling results from boiling some corn sugar in some water and adding it to the beer just before bottling.  The sugar will ferment while it is capped and the beer will continue to get better.  a 5 gallon batch will make 50 12-oz bottles or so.  Not bad for around $35 in ingredients.  It will help to find your local brewing supply store.  They are all good guys that will help talk you through the process and help in creating your beer recipe til you know what you are doing.

I am definitely going to try this.

Why the blog ?

Welcome to my little corner of the world.  In this blog I will get sidetracked and talk about a myriad of things, but as the title conveys, the overriding theme, for now at least, will be to follow my entry and progression into the art of Home brewing beer.  How and why I got into it, my thoughts on equipment, beer styles, getting more involved and technical in the brew process, where I procure items, my experiences brewing and drinking, and how to share this fun new hobby.

I am a married dad of 3 kids living in the NW who is into many things, and, like most men, I can NOT resist those little shiny things that cross my line of sight to distract me from my reality.  After moving to the Bethany area west of Portland a couple years ago, I was finally able to buy a home and move into our new neighborhood. 

The first thing I noticed when looking at our future home was a neighbor who had a nice big shiny ski boat out in front of his house.  It called to me, and I instantly knew at least one neighbor I was hoping to get to know well ... as in how about we go to the lake and do some skiing, fishing, BBQ'ing and drinking !

During the moving and unpacking, I discovered the neighbor with the nice boat I coveted had a son who was the same age as my oldest son .. prospects brightening !  Fate then intervened, as upon meeting and talking with the dad, I hit on the fact that he is a successful home brewer who would be happy to help me learn about and get into the process, and share equipment while I "discovered" if it was something I would like to begin doing on my own.  He also told me he happened to get all his equipment and indoctrination into the fine art of home brewing from one of my other neighbors, who had progressed into larger, better equipment and all-grain brewing.

I claimed I was only going to "try" it out and make a batch to see if I liked it first, but my mind had already been made.