Bryan's Fat Tire clone...

I'm talking to Bryan on the phone as I'm drinking this beer, and so I wasn't really thinking about taking too many notes as I was discussing it, but hey, what the heck..

It's supposed to be a Fat Tire clone beer, but I'll be damned if I know what a Fat Tire tastes like, as it's not really available out here. It's coming from a Grolsh bottle with a truckload of yeast stuck to the bottom, but this presents no more trouble than to make me really may a bit more attention to the pour. I know for certain that I've got a deep mahogany colored beverage in front of me, though. An American Amber has a good range of color it can occupy, so I'm sure he's in the ballpark with this. It's got not much of a smell on the nose with the exception of a faint brown sugar note. Sorta like Brown Shugga by Lagunitas, but not offensive, like Brown Shugga is (one man's opinion!). Other than that, not gettin' any hop aroma. No hop flavor either, as we go further along. It's got a bitterness to make the beer perfectly drinkable, but it's definitely a malt forward product. It's clean, and a bit of a fruity ester comes along in the flavor, but not much.. certainly not enough for me to pinpoint what the ester is flavored like. Like I said, it's clean, no defects, and well brewed. I'm thinking I liked some of his earlier reviewed beers a bit better, but this is still a well made, solid beer. Nothing wrong with it, and I'd drink another one.. but my first choice would really have been his Belgian style thing first.

Come on Bryan, get that All-grain rig together and let's see what you can do. and put some frickin' hops in the damn thing!

"Dangerous Belgian" beer, by Bryan.. review.

Here's Bryan's latest thing to review of the three he sent my way. In addition to the usual process, I'm joined by fellow beer taster, Commando Jody, who is splitting this thing with me.

On the nose, I'm getting a hint of a peach-y sort of thing, but can't put my finger on it. Jody thinks apricot, but this aroma is too strong for that he says.. evasive smell, it is. It definitely has that Belgian flavor to it. It's well done in the flavor department, no mistaking it's a Belgian inspired beer. We're both picking up some really interesting fusel alcohols, but they're not mean ones, and they're very faint.. they're just letting you know this is a big beer sort of thing, but not being obnoxious about it. Jody says it's got a sweetness about it that keeps on going, even though the beer is dry in finish, the sweetness keeps coming along well into the finish. Super clean otherwise, with no off flavors, and it's all appropriate for style. Again, another winner. I'm not sure of this is my favorite of the three he sent in that cardboard box across the way.. they were all really good, but yeah, this might be the best of the bunch so far. It's not a standout in any particular way, just well done on every side. I think the only thing I might do to change that beer is dry it out a bit, but that can't be done with an extract brew.. when Bryan get's his all grain system together, I'm thinking he'll be a force to be reckoned with..

Bryan's "Blackbery Wheat" review...

Here's another of the three that Bryan sent my way, via UPS.. first, a visual:

Bryan's Blackberry Wheat

I'll be damned if I can find the info sheet Bryan sent my way for these beers, so I'll have to wing this one and not be able to provide the info he sent for the brew like I did for the last one. Anyhow, it pours out with a relatively foamless head, which was a bit surprising from the pretty explosive 'pop' the Grolsh bottle gave when I let the top go on this one. It's not a clear beer, but rather a pretty hazy thing.. forgiven as it's a fruit beer, and sometimes those never clear quite right. On the nose I'm getting the blackberry pretty plain, and what I wanna say is a pinch of banana, but it's so fleeting I'm really not sure. Carbonation bubbles readily rise to the surface, so I know it's well carbed up. The body is big and fluffy, with the berry flavors carrying along quite well. I have no idea of the abv on this beer, but it doesn't present any real big alcoholic notes to give away that it's a huge beer or anything.. I really have no idea what its strength is. I'm getting a bit of a bubblegum flavor on the third sip and onwards, which I think would be irritating in most other beers... but is this case, seems to compliment the beer, making it appear almost 'Belgian-y', inadvertently. Heh! There is no astringent, tannic or mouthfeel issues here from use of the fruit. It seems to just work. No hops come into play at all, except for the balanced, background bitterness hops that are letting the rest of the beer take the stage. About 1/3rd of the way into the beer, and the bubblegum flavors are taking over more and more.. they're not objectionable, but they're becoming more of the centerpiece than the fruit flavors are, which I'm not sure is what Bryan was shooting for.. but snap, it's still working in the beers favor. Now towards the end of the pint, the bubblegum is definitely the dominant flavor, with the Blackberry taking a back seat. Curious that, the flip-flop of flavors from the beginning of the pour.. but there it is. It was enjoyable all the way through, bublegum or no. Mind you, that would have been a serious no-no in damn near any other brew, but in this one I think it can be overlooked. I think if Mr. Gold renamed this a the Belgian Blackberry Wheat, he'd have quite the showpiece to brag about...

In other news, I came home from vacation to find our house sitter had collected these little guys and arranged them into a centerpiece:

Some tomatoes from the garden, as well as some reddened Jalapeno's and Hot Cherry peppers too.. looks quite nice there.

Bryan's 'Honey Ale' review

My pal Bryan, whom I've known for a bazillion years from back in the day, lives out in Arizona. He recently took up brewing and we've been communicating recently about his adventures in the hobby as well as his gearing up for construction on a new home brewery. I'm excited to see what this fellow comes up with, as he's an accomplished fabricator and has his own shop out there. In fact, some of you in the audience may have heard of this fellow while we've been talking over a beer here as this is the very same guy who welded my brewery frame together at an age that wouldn't even get him into a bar. He's been welding and fabbin' *that* long.

In any case, Bryan sent me this via the mail for some deconstruction and evaluation:

Bryan's 'Honey ale'

As you can see, it was shipped in a Grolsch 16oz bottle. You can also see a healthy head of foam on there. When I opened this bottle, I nearly crapped myself, as the carbonation in this bottle was so high, I'm surprised it didn't grenade in the box during transit. This is is *carbed*. Anyone who has brewed with honey knows, it's the gift that keeps on giving.. giving bubbles, that is. Honey is sort of a complex sugar, and the yeast can eat it, all of it really.. but they tend to do so slowly. Sometimes sneakily. Sometimes like 'Rocket Mead'.. heh. Sorry, inside joke.. mostly.

Anyway, let's take a look, eh? Because it was fairly over-carbed, the explosive opening looks like it released all the co2 and blew up the yeast on the bottom of the bottle.. as a result, it's all cloudy. We can't really tell if she was clear or not as a result, so we'll have to pass on that.. the head of foam has held for a few minutes so, so that seems to be working. It's a light gold color brew, and the lacing on the sides is holding up pretty good. Bryan set the recipe for this extract beer along with the beer itself and he indicates 2.5lbs of honey was involved in it's creation. This honey is clearly apparent on the nose, thanks that that generous use. On first sip, I'm hit with a a pretty apparent honey flavor at first, followed by a mild/moderate fusel alcohol note. Since Bryan fermented this at room temp in AZ where it's 80 degrees right now, I'm surprised that this isn't more of a fusel bomb. Surprised it came out this clean.. huh! There's a relatively firm bitterness to this beer, actually doing a good job of balancing out this much honey. It's not enough to come through in the flavor or aroma, but the bitterness works for this beer. I'm not sure how strong this beer is, because Bryan doesn't have a hydrometer at this time, but a quick run through of QBrew of these ingredients in a 5 gallon batch size gives me something like 7%+ abv. Yikes! It's not small. About halfway through the pint I feel it's effects already.. If this beer had some note of hop at the end, it would be *that* much better.. as it is, it's a tad one dimensional, but it's a certainly drinkable beer. It could also use some more time in the fermenter, to work out some of this honey, but not much else to complain about. It's clean tasting with nothing 'off' about it. Nice job on a first beer, esp. once containing a weird ingredient like honey.

Here's the recipe he sent along, if you were curious:

Bryan's Honey Ale:  

Fermented 14 days @ 80 degrees

2 lbs of 10L Carmel

6 lbs of light liquid

2.5 lbs of honey

2 oz cascade 

1/3 oz 60 min

1 oz 45 min

2/3 oz at finish

American ale 1056 yeast

American Homebrewers Association Conference 2011

Just got back from the A.H.A. conference in San Diego, California the other day.. it was quite an event. If you're not familiar, the American Homebrewers Association is *the* biggest and only homebrewers conference of it's kind. Nearly 2,000 people attended this thing this year. Not sure if it out does the GABF festival I'm so fond of, but it was very informative. Here's a few pics from the four days I was out there..

The Tiki pavilion draft system, designed for the A.H.A. conference. 

Just *some* of the beers being poured at the Brewing Network festival party on Wednesday..

The 'Ale Camino" Beer Utility Vehicle, with 350 IBU's of power.

Ron Jeffries from Jolly Pumpkin, pouring me a beer. 

Gary Glass and John Palmer, legends. 

Dan Gordon of Gordon Biersch showed up with a few bottles to share at one of the seminars..

That's a 9 tap Randall system. Sheesh.. 

These are the beers that didn't get drank from the judging. There were hundreds..

Yeah, it was quite a thing. Coming to Penn in 2013, as we heard.. might see you there.

A couple of geeky brewing graphs..

So, Jody came up the other day and we brewed up a Porter in the garage. Inspired by James Spencer and the current science experiment he's got going on over on Basic Brewing Radio (podcast..) we decided to measure a few things while doing up our brew. First, we measured the specific gravity in Brix at several points during the mash, to see how the O.G. went up, down or stayed the same. Of course we figured it would go up, sure. but I was sorta surprised by how much this went up. Here's the graph:

So, again, measurements for the mash sugars were measured in Brix for sake of simplicity, repeatability and not having to screw with the extra layer of temperature correction, since we measured on my ATC refractometer. If you do the math (ok, I'll do it for you.. ) you can see we started off at something around 23.6 Brix when we finally got the temp stabilized at the 153 degrees F we wanted. We used the pump to recirculate the mash fully before each reading, and then we just ran off some wort into a pyrex jar and took our sample from there. Then we measured at various points along the way until an hours time had passed.. and strangely, the curve still hadn't flattened, meaning that either it was just going to keep going for a bit more or maybe just take a steep nose dive in it's climb and flatten out. Who knows? An hours mash time is plenty for this kid any day of the week. The difference in the original reading and the end of the house reading is 0.014 Original Gravity points, for those of you not into the Brix/Plato thing. That's not insignificant. It loks like from the moment of mash in, to about the half hour mark, you get the most bang for the buck (time) spent.. but if you need another point or point and a quarter, spend the extra half hour in the mashtun and then start running off. It looks like only about a point and change was gained after the 30 minute mark, which translates to 0.004 O.G. points or so.. it's something to consider, I guess.

An interesting thing happened here during this brew. Now, normally, I calculate for 82% brewhouse efficiency here at Second Shift Brewing.. but I normally only do a half hour long mash, then start my sparge. The results I get are good, and I base this half hour mash time off the new info that's getting kicked around which seems to indicate the vast majority of the starches are converted by around the 20 minute mark. So, I round that off to half an hour and call it OK. The interesting thing was that we had calculated this thing for a 1.058 O.G. beer.. but in the end, we came out with 1.063 O.G. I was puzzled at first by this, because I rarely miss my mark by that much.. but apparently, this hour long mash increased my brewhouse efficiency so much, it skewed the numbers right up and off the chart for this beer. So, Jody.. that's gotta be the reason why that happened. This occurred to me in the car ride this morning after I dropped off the kids. :)

Here's another chart for you:

This one is the readings we took on the wort that was draining from the mashtun into the boil kettle. We took readings on the wort as the kettle filled up, so the Galons of Water Sparged on the left side is the amount of wort that was in the kettle when we pulled a sample from the hose as it was flowing into the kettle, and the bottom line there is the poins in Brix (labeled incorrectly as Plato.. rats!). As you can see, the tun was originally running out at nearly 25 Brix at first, but as the sparge continued, we measured about 4.8 Brix at the 10 gallon filled level.. and we finished out at 2.5 Brix when we actually had our entire pre boil volume of 13.6 gallons. This info would be useful to know if, say, you wanted to do two beers from one batch of grain.. and you could gather the first 3.0 gallons or so of super high gravity wort, add a bit of plain water for evaporation losses, and boil and add hops to that on the stove top, while grabbing the rest of the wort of lower gravity stuff and doing up a regular strength beer from that in a normal sized boil kettle. I'd do this and fill my mini keg up with barley wine for the winter and be happy with that, since I could ferment it in a standard 5 gallon glass fermenter and probably not have any overflow issues. FYI, this was a 24lb grain bill that this came from.

Wow, I'm spent! Too much long head stuff there.. good job Jody, couldn't have gathered this data without you! Speaking of Jody (the head brewer over at Blue Label Brewing) I believe he said they were offering a free beer sampler over there with your purchase of enough gas to get to his tasting room, and no more strings attached. Drop in and tell him I said hello!

NYC, sneak attack & fryathon..

So, me and the Boss headed off to NYC for a concert. Went out to see Chromeo at Terminal 5. Heck of a show, and had a great time there. This is the only decent pic I got of them, as the light show was driving the camera nuts, making it had to get a shot.. most came out black.

We also visited the USS Intrepid while there, and saw a few neat things.

This is gonna be the new controller for my automated brewery..

And this is the new kettle setup for the 40 gallon brewery.

We also hit up Grumpy's coffee and some blah place called Starbucks while walking around the next morning (we stayed the overnight at Ink48 again.. nice place!). Right after we left this Brooklyn Industries store is when we found the parking ticket on our window. Drats.. 

After we got home, we decided to celebrate with a massive fried food extravaganza with my new deep frier.. we had all sorts of things, like this bunch of onion rings, fried Hot Cherry Popper poppers and some fried dough. The poppers made me pay for everything I took from them them the next morning.

And lastly, Barbie the dog was brutally attacked and beaten up by this baby over the weekend as well. I was rooting for the baby..

Monday rolled around soon enough and Geoff and Mike came over to brew. We worked up a sweet pale ale (shocking!) after a few hours and we hope to have that on top here in the next few weeks or so. Stay tuned for that.. 

Brewin' with Savvas..

Did some brewing with Savvas and Geoff down and Savvas' parents place.. had to go there so we had some shelter from the cold in their garage. Heck, we froze up one hose during the brew session as it was.. a bit chilly, yep. Turns out it was Sav's first 'solo' all grain brew day.. I had no idea until he said so after the beer was all finished up and in the fermentor. He looked like a champ out there. ;) Here's some shots of the event..

Running off the second half of the batch sparge..

Geoff, looking large and keepin' an eye out..

Skimming the crap off the top of the just boiling wort.

So, all in all, the day went well. He got 1.057 on a recipe that called for 1.053, but he also got about 1/2 a gallon less volume than he had planned for.. he's gonna be topping up with some boiled and cooled water on return to the homestead and things should be right on track for this Northern English Brown. We'll see how this thing tuned out in a few weeks or so.. stay tuned!

The Brutal Truth: Jody's Octoberfest.. sorta.

This was, of course, going to be a Brutal Truth on Jody's Octoberfest, as stated above.. but this bottle was presented to me in a plastic bottle with a carbonator cap attached to the top.. and when I poured it into the glass I have in fornt of me, it was mostly flat. There's a couple of bubbles in here, but not much. It's not really a fair game like this.. so, I'll give it a quick run through, but don't judge this beer on tap at his house on what I'm saying in here.

Aroma: A really faint Nor'Easter style aroma resents itself here, except like, 1/4 of what that beers nose is like. I get a microscopic note of some esters in here, with a bit of a sweet note as well. It's damn close, but these aromas are so faint with no carbonation to lift them. I'll go 8/12 here, because what there is is awesome.. but it must be hampered by the carbonation thing.

Appearance: I can read text on the screen through this wicked ruby colored beer. Gorgeous color, for sure. No foam whatsoever, though. Because of the clarity and fabulous color.. I'm torn on this.. but it's just ham-stringed with no bubbles or foam. 1/3

Flavor: Moderate hop bitterness, fabulous maltiness.. finishes relatively dry, which is surprising for the flavor you get here, with it's sorta not sweet-but Munich'y flavor. Tricky, that. Well done, still.. 15/20, hurt by it's lack of 'lift' from the bubbles.

Mouthfeel: Medium body still, with no carbs, but of course it's flat in the long run. Fabulous finish.. Again, well done here too. A bit of a slickness in the finish.. not a diacetyl thing, though.  2/5

Overall Impression: Ah, my kingdom for carbonation! This beer would have scored huge, if not for that one glaring defect. This is a great beer, that aside. Not my favorite style, but I can appreciate it on occasion.  All in all, 7/10, because of an huge amount of greatness bruised up by one huge aspect of blah.

In the end, a 33/50 isn't something to be taken lightly. Cold and flat, this beer still kicks the crap out of a lot of commercial beers on the market in this same segment. If properly carbonated, this thing would easily have been a 40+ brew. It's that good. One mans opinion, of course..

Zone control and eHLT..

I think I pretty much failed to capture any of it in photos, but me and Jeremiah took the eHLT for a spin last Friday and brewed up a batch of stout with the new eHLT in action. It performed flawlessly and I love the conversion. I am, so far, highly recommending this procedure. The new stout uses 12% roast barley, up 2% from the last batch, and I dropped the chocolate malt 1% as well.. we'll see hw this works out. Unfortunately, when I got home I found the Breiss Roast barley is only 300L instead of the normal 500L of most other brands.. but the SRM numbers came up into Stout territory, so we'll just have to check that color when it's in the glass. That beer is still in the fermenter, and the Amber is up next on deck.. so it'll be a few weeks before it's test time. Stand by for that..

Otherwise, I had a bit of a run in with this thing a couple of days ago:

That's a zone control power head motor you're looking at there in the top picture, and the housing it normally is bolted to in the lower picture. The motor itself failed, the housing was fine. In my particular heating setup, with a hot water boiler, a circulator pump and a couple of zone control valves, this things job is to either open or close the appropriate zone valve to let hot water through into the correct baseboard heater. If you failure, like I did here in the upper lever of my house, you might get a valve stuck in the OPEN position.. which results in unbearable heat all the time, unstoppable, unless you turn off the boiler and kill the heat. Since this broken condition was discovered at midnight when I got home, I had *all night* to think about it, and no idea what was actually wrong with the thing. Long story short, the next morning I got up, packed the kids off to school and sent the momma to work.. and then broke out the internet and became an expert on hot water heating systems in about two hours. After I got my education, I started diagnosing the issues from the thermostat to the boiler.. and eventually found this thing to be the culprit. A quick trip to T-town and $37.37 later, I ha the new part installed and it's been working fine ever since.

Who's the man?

Tis' all for now.. tomorrow, I have that Salsa making class to go to and then the Commando party in the evening after the kids concert. Maybe get some pics from the party to post up.. then, I'm gonna cut down all the lettuce and arugula in the hoop house and call that project finished. I just noticed I had a couple of lettuce plants keel over and die, so I think about mid to late November is about all I can really expect from a hoop house for keeping things alive. Time to get the rest of the nutrients into that lower bed and get some manure in there to do it's thing over the winter. Good times!

Oh yeah, also got my new sourdough starter fired up and I'm trying to get my first firm starter to do it's thing as I type this. We'll see how that goes..

Big Brew at Don's Dad's house...

Just wanted to share a few pics of the Big Brew we had at Don's Dad's place, sponsored of course, by Don's Dad & Mom as well as Don himself. Great time was had by all. This event also marked the debut of two brand spankin' new brewing rigs, Don and Geoff's metallic monster and Jeremiah's half electric, half propane Frankenbrewery. Here's a few pics of the event and attendees to document the fact that the damn thing happened on Saturday, November 6th, 2010...

Jeremiah with his newest brewery creation.. eHLT!

Timmay and Eric, spargin'.. 

Geoff and Don's new single spine gravity tree..

Launch controler..

Mike Hill, doing something mysterious..

Will and Alex, goofing around.

Jody, rockin' the Top Tier. Classy..

The fruits of Jer's and my brew day.. 5 gallons each of Am. Amber. The newest revision..

Jer took home all of the brewer spent grain that day to feed to some local cows. Damn, we're green!

So, yeah. Resounding success. And I think we may have even inspired some other non-brewers to maybe look into the process. Seems everyone had a pretty good time..

Amaryllis and Spinach..

Hmm.. a bit of a slow time recently. Got some SPinach growing slow but sure out in the hoop house. Check it:

Spinach

This was taken a couple days ago, so it's a bit bigger than this now, but still small. The Arugula is almost near the zone where I'd consider almost calling it 'Baby Arugula" and eating every last leaf of it in a baby Arugula salad.. but it would literally be entirely gone if I did that.

Did some bagels up yesterday. I've had better end results, but the process this time was really nice. Here's a step by step timeline..

A large dough round

Split up into smaller rounds..

shaped and risen..

Boiling the bagels..

The best of the bunch. 

Other than that, here's a snapshot of the Amaryllis I'm grown. Again, thanks Dad. This one is a trip!

She's geting' pretty big now, and you can see where the flower is gonna form eventually. Neat stuff..

The IPA I've got downstairs that I made with Timmay is just about done doing it's thing. Should be able to keg that in a day or two and get it ready to go online.. but I'm still really looking forward to the Dubbel I made with Jeremiah that's right ahead of it in the que. Speaking of brewing, I failed to get pictures of this, but last night I went out into the shop and bored a huge hole in the side of my HLT at about the 3 gallon mark. Then, today, I brought that kettle down to the welder guy next door with instructions for where to weld in the SS nut that I got from McMAster Carr to fit in the electric element. I'm still hashing out some details with my electrician friend Dave E. from down south CT, but we'll get it figured out sooner or later. It may or may not be ready for the next brew session I do here, but the next beer I do up will most certainly be the one on Nov. 6th with the Commandos at Don's Dad's place in T-Town. Stay tunes for a million pics of that event.

'Quebec' Citra single hop brew and garlic bed prep..

Me and Timmay whipped up a single hop IPA the other day (code named 'Quebec'!) all IBU'd up with just 12.3% AA Citra hops for the duration. Here's a couple of pics of the operation in action, including a mash paddle solo by Tim, the throttling of the growler of yeast to give up the goods and the finished product in the bottle, pre-ferment. Check it:

Mash paddle solo..

Yeast wrangler, or yeast strangler?

That's 5.5 gallons of good times waiting to happen right there!

In other news, I did some work prepping the upper bed for the overwinter/garlic planting. Here's the upper bed, all llama manured up with two 10 gallon buckets worth of manure spread over the top. I spread the manure for the obvious reasons.. good, well processed organic material, with a small amount of all the right vitamins and minerals. But I also added a couple other things, including Greensand and Bone Meal. The greensand is a sandstone, which is mainly used as a soil conditioner. It helps soils with too much clay loosen up and, conversely, helps soils with too much sand stick together a bit better, so as not to be totally limp-wristed when you go to work in it. It also has trace amounts of some minerals, mostly potassium. Since the upper bed I planted used a lot of topsoil, instead of the soil-less mix I used in the lower bed, this stuff I hope will come in handy to make this stuff a little bit nicer to work with. It got a touch compacted this past year. I also added the Bone Meal as well, for the phosphorus it contains. I get most of the Nitrogen in the beds from direct application of fish emulsion, so I didn't add anything with nitrogen to the beds. Hopefully, next year wil be fantastic in comparison this this time around, with all this prep work I'm doing now. Supposedly, the overwintering of the beds with the manure and supplements is one of the best things you can do to the joint.. if you try this in the spring, the stuff hasn't broken down and added what it's could have added in that short amount of time. The compost will probably overwinter in the composter and be added in the spring as a top dressing, I'm thinking. We'll cross that bridge later.

Here's some pics of what it looks like now..

Yeah, I'm inadvertently organic.

In other news, the hoop house is still intact and functioning well. I lost a piece of tape on one of the ends,  so far, but still working well just the same. On an average 50's -ish temp day, if you stick your hand under the plastic, you can easily feel that it's 10-15 degrees warmer, and more moist inside than it is outside. I've also re-evaluated my plan with this thing and now I'm just looking to see how long I can get the plants that are in it to live into the cold months, through various degrees of frosts. The reason being, if next year I plant a bunch of lettuce and broccoli and spinach and I know the cold frame will extend the harvest up until the middle or end of November, or maybe into December, then I know I pretty much need to eat up everything inside it by that time. So, I've got a few lettuce and other things still around in there that I would really like to eat now, but I think in the name of science, I'll leave them be until I see how long they'll last inside the hoops. They sure look delicious right now, though.. hmm..

Stay tuned for the garlic bulb planting episode coming up..