The Screwy Brewer

Brewin' The 420 Special Wheat Beer

2013-05-17T23:56:00.001-04:00

This weekend I brewed my very first batch of warm weather drinking beer, my all time refreshing favorite too, a summer wheat beer. The recipes starts out with a good amount of Munich malt, a bit of CaraVienne malt added for good measure, a fair amount of German Wheat malt with half as much Flaked Wheat. This current version is an all grain recipe that I've developed myself over the years, it was originally an extract recipe with steeping grains using Muntons Wheat DME and some dry wheat yeast I rehydrated.

420 Special Wheat

I pitched a nice healthy 2 liter starter, made from 2nd generation East Coast Yeast ECY10 - Old Newark Ale™ yeast, it's one of my favorites and I use it now for brewing most of my Ales. I should call it the Special International Wheat beer since the recipe's yeast is American, but more than likely an English strain brought to the US by Peter Ballantine himself way back in the early 1800's.

2 Liter Starter Of East Coast Yeast ECY10 - Old Newark Ale™

The addition of German malts, English yeast and American Citrus hops makes this a really special beer that has a style all it's own. Adding a tiny amount of freshly crushed Coriander, one small pinch Grains of Paradise seed and about an ounce of bitter orange peel to the grain bill creates a very interesting wheat beer that's refreshing and citrusy.

The choice of yeast for this recipe makes all the difference in the world, especially if you've never been a fan of those styles fermented with heavy flavor German yeasts. I find using a clean well attenuating strain like White Labs WLP001 - California Ale Yeast™ or East Coast Yeast ECY10 - Old Newark Ale™ fermented at 65F gives this recipe an IPA like flavor and aroma with little influence from the yeast itself.

Drinking The Smokin' Oaked Rye

2013-05-09T22:02:00.002-04:00

I've been enjoying this oak smoked rye beer for over a week now and I love it. Nearly every time I brew this recipe I change it up somewhat, even going as far as pitching different Lager or Ale yeast or adding American oak flavors to an already highly hopped beer. It still amazes me just how great freshly brewed and fermented beer tastes and it's awesome having the ability to brew yourself a perfect beer and love the way it tastes at will.

The recipe has finally evolved into what I can only describe as an incredibly interesting beer that's under 6% alcohol, best when moderately carbonated and served up in clean beer glass. There's that combination of flaked rye, pale and amber malts and lots and lots of Citra, Amarillo and Cascade hops that make up the base of the recipe. The addition of American oak chips to this aromatic beer adds subtle hints of vanilla and a slight toast flavor making it even more interesting than I would have thought possible had I not tried it..

I've brewed the same base recipe, 3 weeks in a row, I start out by emailing my grain bill to Princeton Homebrew and then taking home freshly crushed grains for the next days' brewing. Joe Bair has been crushing grains and brewing beer as long as homebrewing has been around, he also owns the LHBS, always provides great service and has the freshest ingredients available. I started washing and propagating yeast myself using yeast I bought from Princeton Homebrew, 'yeast so fresh you'd want to slap it', is what I'd order because the yeast I got there was often less than a month old.

Anyhow I thought I'd give you all an update on how much I liked my smoked rye ale, I know it's in a very unique category since I don't recall anyone marketing a citrusy hopped beer with oak and rye additions for extra flavor. There's even a some chocolate malt thrown in to deepen the beer's color. As I look back through my brewing notes reminding me that I had pitched the equivalent of a 4 liter starter into this beer for a fast really aggressive fermentation. This beer has great head retention and lacing, with a medium body and really well balanced finish it tastes so good I can't wait to keg my next batch.

Add Toasted Oak Chips To Your Next Beer

2013-04-20T04:20:00.000-04:00

I finally decided to go ahead and add oak chips to my now fermenting Rye Ale, it's been a week since I brewed it and the primary fermentation completed quickly. Within 8 hours of pitching the yeast the airlock was bubbling away and a steady stream of StarSan bubbles flowed down onto the lid of the fermentor. I'm including a picture here of the inside of the fermentor to show how high the krausen rose inside the fermentor during the first week of fermentation, my best guess is the krauzen rose 6 to 8 inches high at it's peak.

Soaked 2 Ounces Of Toasted Oak Chip For 60 Minutes

The backbone of this 6.5% ABV beer is mostly all Pale Ale malt with much lesser amounts of Amber, Carapils, Chocolate, Crystal 60 and a bit of flaked rye for spice. The recipe also called for a generous amount of American Yakima Valley hops added to the kettle at various times during the boil which produced beer with a lot a hop flavor and aroma. I'm very interested to find out how the oak flavors come through and how long it'll take to get just the right amount of flavor. I could let them soak for as long as 3 weeks but frequent sampling and tasting is the best way of getting just the right amount of oak while letting all those other high quality ingredients come through too.

Krauzen Ring Inside Fermentor After Aggressive Fermentation

I guess until I get to add oak chips to my fermenting beers a few more times the whole process is going to seem a little awkward. The entire oaking process took most of the late morning on into early afternoon, although I did have time to organize my communications equipment and watch Archer on NetFlix too. I weighed out 2 ounces of American Oak chips and soaked them in water for about 90 minutes to prevent them from drying out and burning, this was on the advice of a very good cook familiar with using cedar when grilling.

Only The Chips On Left Were Toasted For 20 Minutes

With the oaks chips spread out evenly on a sheet of aluminum foil put on top of the broiler grill I set the broiler timer to 20 minutes and after about 10 minutes I began to smell a faint smell of damp burnt wood fill the kitchen. I checked in to see how the toasting progress was going a few times to make sure there were no signs of smoke or flames. Towards the end of the 20 minutes the now toasted oak chips filled the entire house with a pleasing aroma of toasted American Oak chips.

Two Mesh Sacks Containing Weights And Boiled Oak Chips

I boiled the toasted oak chips in water for a good 10 minutes before cooling them down and putting them in the nylon mesh hops sacks with stainless steel hardware inside to keep them submerged under the beer. The mesh sacks worked a filters that strained and captured all the chips while I collected the now dark aromatic water in a sanitized bowl. I didn't want to risk infecting the rye beer with wild yeast and bacteria living on the oak chips and in the the process they got toasted, boiled and handled with sanitized utensils and bowls.

Electric Toaster Oven Set To Broil

American Oak is said to add a light vanilla flavor to beer and I believe it will add some new and interesting flavors and aromas to just about any beer, when added in just the right amount. I'm dealing with multiple variables here to hit just the right balance including amount of oak chips, the length of time they come in contact with the fermented beer and the amount of toasting complexity the oak chips will add.

The amount of work that went into this recipe was about 3 hours or more than it would have taken to simply make a dry hop addition, but the aromas and flavors the oak will add to the beer are so different that it's completely worth it to me. This week the beer will be sampled often to check the hydrometer readings but to also taste the beer as the wood flavors begin to develop, this is going to be an awesome week.

I took a gravity sample and drank it the other day, the beer finished at 1.019 just a point off from my calculations and the first sample was yeasty so a real sense of this beer's taste won't come until bottling day. The fermentors in the refrigerator where I leave it to cold crash for another day or two while I decide to bottle it or keg it.

The Ultimate Decorative Wall Mounted Bottle Decapper

2013-04-07T20:42:00.001-04:00

It's always fun and a great feeling to introduce folks to the world of home brewed craft beer. It's also nice when one of those folks hand delivers a one of a kind bottle decapper. I picked the most appropriate spot on my garage wall to hang it too, alongside the refrigerator where all the beer's kept and the garage door for easy access. The decapper's size, shape and rugged design work perfectly together to make it a real conversation piece that works and looks great too!


Screwy's Own Custom Bottle Decapper

I take a lot of care along the way to make sure I brew, condition and serve the best tasting home brewed beer I possibly can, a beer that's unmistakeably good and appreciated by other brewers. It is only fitting that the bottled beer be opened with a sense of style. I can't explain what it's like having such a cool piece of brewing gear hanging on a nearby wall making bottle opening fun to do.

Handcrafted Using Wood From Drambuie Cases

The decapper is build from boards taken from a very old wooden liquor crate and then hand cut and assembled using brass hardware and glue. As the bottles are opened the caps fall directly into the cap catcher below, which can easily hold over 50 caps with room to spare. When it comes time to empty the cap catcher just hold a container under the decapper and pull down on the belt buckle parts mounted underneath to open the hinged bottom.

Money For Nothing And Your Yeast For Free

2013-03-03T13:38:00.002-05:00

Brew better beer and save money in the process by washing your own yeast for reuse in future brews. Always have a fresh supply of healthy yeast on hand and brew like the pros brew, it's a lot easier to do than you might think. The most obvious benefits of washing your own yeast are always having a good supply of viable cells on hand when needed, brewing way better tasting beer as the new yeast generations adapt to your brewing environment and saving lots of money on future yeast purchases.

On bottling day after having bottled up the very first batch of my 1960's Era Ballantine IPA recipe, one that I had spent a very considerable amount of time researching before creating the recipe and brewing it, I decided to wash the East Coast Yeast ECY10 - Old Newark Ale™ yeast that was at the bottom of the fermentor and store it for later use when making a starter to pitch into my next batch of beer. After cold crashing the washed yeast for five days at 36F the yeast cells flocculated out of suspension and formed a thick cream colored yeast cake on the bottom of the jar. Using a turkey baster I carefully sucked the top layer of the yeast cake into the baster and squirted the yeast into a dozen liquid yeast vials for storage.

East Coast Yeast ECY10 - Old Newark Ale™

The yeast in the vials when stored at 36F in a refrigerator can retain a reasonable number of viable cells for up to 6 months or more. The yeast in the vials eventually settles out of solution and forms a thick yeast cake at the bottom of the vial, about half the amount per vial when compared to the nearly full vials White Labs ships its yeast in. When I'm ready to use my previously washed yeast I make a starter by adding two vials of yeast to a 2000ml Erlenmeyer flask filled with a 1.040 wort and set it spinning on a stirplate. As a side note I found it to be easier to use StarSan for sanitizing the vials, caps, jars, turkey baster and anything else that may come into contact with the yeast. StarSan is fast acting and just as effective as boiling everything and it saves a lot of time besides eliminating the need to handle boiling hot jars, lids and water.

One Gallon Of Washed Yeast Slurry

I fill a tall one gallon jar up with filtered water, boil that water in a small pot it for 15 minutes then let it cool down to 72F leaving the lid on the pot. Once the water's cooled to the same temperature as the yeast cake left in the fermentor I just pour in all the water and stir it all up together by gently mixing the yeast and water with a sanitized spoon. With water and yeast all stirred up into a nice slurry together I open the spigot on the fermentor and fill the sanitized gallon jar up with the washed yeast slurry. The yeast in the slurry will slowly start to separate from the beer as the yeast cells began to settle out of solution and form a thick layer of yeast cake at the bottom of the jar.

Vials Of ECY-10 Estimated 50 Billion Cell Count Each

After tightening the lid on the jar again and spraying it with StarSan I put a sheet of plastic wrap over the top of the jar, held in place with an elastic band, then put the jar in the refrigerator. About 5-7 days later the same milky yeast slurry becomes sparkling clear as the yeast settles out of solution and compacts at the bottom of the jar. Using a sanitized turkey baster I carefully suck up the thick yeast paste on the bottom of the jar, this is where all the healthy new yeast cells are, and fill up the vials for storage.

Excess Yeast Slurry At Left Washed Yeast Vials At Right

I always make starters when using my washed yeast, even if the washed yeast has been stored in the refrigerator for only a week or two. Starters are all about having healthy yeast cells and then increasing the cell count. As for determining actual cell count in each vial I use an easy and reliable method, I fill up a White Labs vial with washed yeast, let it settle out and compact on the bottom of the vial and then eyeball it against what ship in a new vial of yeast. I know that White Labs ships 80-100 billion cells in their yeast vials and they contain about twice the volume of yeast stored in my vials of washed yeast that seem to contain about 50 billions cells each.

1.040 Starter Wort With Yeast Nutrient And Crumbled Hops

I start out with 2000ml of filtered water and add to it 1.5 cups of extra light DME and mix it together thoroughly in a small pot before bringing it all to a boil for 10 minutes. I put in a small amount of pellet hop as a preservative and a pinch of yeast nutrient to help coax the yeast into producing plenty of very healthy new cells in the starter. At this point making a yeast starter is really just like brewing up a low alcohol mini batch of beer, but instead of using it to make beer it'll be used solely for the purpose of making more healthy yeast.

Cold Crashing The Boiling Wort To Pitching Temperature

Once the starter wort is the same temperature as the liquid yeast I pour two of my stored vials of yeast, each estimated to hold 50 billion healthy yeast cell, into the Erlenmeyer flask through a stainless steel funnel. Next I pour the cooled wort through the funnel and fill the flask up to the 2000ml line and give the yeast and wort mixture a small burst of pure oxygen to get them off to a running start. The stirbar gets dropped into the flask and I spray a square piece of aluminum foil with StarSan and fold it over the top of the flask to cover the opening. Two things should be noted about covering the flask top with aluminum foil, you only want to fold it loosely over the top to allow the Co2 produced by the yeast to escape the flask and be replaced with room air. Also the bacteria and other things that are known to infect beer can not crawl, so there is a zero chance of anything bad getting inside the flask while it's opening is covered with the foil.

Phases Of A Typical Starter Taken 12 Hours Apart

Even when boiling extra light DME to make my wort it has a darker color when it's first poured into the Erlenmeyer flask as shown in the first image on left in the picture above. But that soon will change as the sugars in the wort are consumed and processed by a rapidly growing population of yeast cells. When all the right starter conditions have been met a more than doubling the original yeast cell count can be excepted, I'd like to think my final cell counts are coming out consistently to close to 240 billions cells per starter.

When making a yeast starter it's critical to formulate, as precisely as possible, the recommended inoculation rate of viable yeast cells for 2000ml of 1.040 starter wort. I use a very simple formula where my inoculation rate starts out as close to 100 billions cells as possible and I expect that number to increase to between 220-240 billion cells once the starters finished.

Pitching Rate Calculator

I like to pitch what some may feel is a large starter, I base my pitching rate calculations on two things the alcohol content expected once fermentation has completed and the type of yeast being used as being either an Ale or a Lager strain. My current dark ale recipe was calculated to come in 8.4% ABV and for that fermentation to go smoothly knew I needed a pitching rate of nearly 300 billion healthy viable yeast cells. I've spent the past several years fermenting my ales and lagers at their lower temperature ranges and expecting aggressive fermentations with minimal lag times. I'm on a mission to get the cleanest tastes from my malts and other additions and not have them muddied up by a bunch of yeast induced esters, unless you're into farmhouse ales and sour beers you'll probably agree with me on this one important piece of information.

Cold Crashing Starters At Day 1, Day 2 And Day 3

At the start of the new year the first recipe I brewed was my Hammerfest Marzen Lager, over the years I've brewed this style using several different ingredients and approaches to brewing, fermenting and lagering in order to find one that produced the very best tasting beer. I can't do all the brewing calculations needed on a typical brewday, or brew a recipe on paper, I rely on my brewing calculators to do most of the work for me. A medium to low gravity 5.5% ABV lager beer fermented at 52F needed a pitching rate of nearly 400 billion viable cells to ferment a five gallon batch, so I had to make two starters in parallel that week.

White Labs WLP820 - Oktoberfest/Märzen Lager Yeast™

At the end of the day all I wanted was the yeast I had no intentions of pitching a gallon of nasty tasting starter wort into my five gallon batch of beer and ruin the taste of it. Placing the starter flasks in the refrigerator at 36F for 3 days did the trick. The starters were very cloudy after coming off the stirplates but began to clear by the end of the first day and had completely cleared by the third day in the refrigerator. Pouring off, or decanting, the starter wort from the flasks and leaving just enough to swirl the yeast cake into solution from the bottom of the flasks and the yeast was now ready to pitch.

Oxygenated Wort Prior To Pitching Yeast Is The Best

Yeast nutrient has long since been included in all of my beer recipes just the way using pure oxygen and a micron diffuser to oxygenate the wort has replaced all other forms of aeration prior to pitching the yeast. During the early or aerobic phase of fermentation the yeast cells begin taking in nutrients, building strength, storing up energy reserves and reproducing at a very aggressive rate. They continue converting oxygen and nutrients into energy and reproduction until nearly all the oxygen in the fermenting beer has been depleted.

Now during the primary fermentation, or anaerobic, phase the yeast rewire their pathways and start converting the sugars in the fermenting beer into Co2 and alcohol. By reducing the length of time in the aerobic phase the excessive build up of flavor precursors are also reduced and the primary fermentation that follows can easily convert those precursors before going dormant at the end of the fermentation.

The Four Phases Of Fermentation

Phase 1 begins as soon as you pitch your yeast and is referred to as the lag phase, which we brewers want to keep as short as possible. The yeast are using up the sugars and oxygen in the wort to load up their food reserves, they won't ferment anything until they've been well fed. Stressing the yeast out with too high temperatures or too low numbers of viable cells will prolong the lag phase and the fermentation will take longer to complete while increasing the amounts and types of off flavors like diacetyl that may or may not ever condition out.

Phase 2 starts as soon as the lag phase ends because now the yeast have enough energy stored up to start multiplying, this is referred to as the growth phase. This is where you begin to see a bit of foam floating at the surface the wort from the production of Co2 and the pH and oxygen levels of the wort will start dropping. If you've pitched enough healthy yeast at the right temperatures into well aerated wort the lag time should have been 6-12 hours and the yeast are now full of energy and off to a very healthy start.

Phase 3 begins as soon as the growth phase is done and is triggered by a lack of oxygen in the wort, this is known as the fermentation phase. This is the phase where the production of Co2, alcohol and your beer's flavor is at it's peak and the wort temperature rises 3-5F higher than the ambient air outside the fermentor. The yeast will stay in suspension, so they come in contact with as many sugars as possible, over the next 3-7 days before they run out of sugars to eat and flocculate out to the bottom of the fermentor. Higher temperatures during this phase will produce more esters or fruity flavors and aromas, like the banana flavors in a hefeweizen. It's interesting to note that another cause of ester production is wort that hasn't been aerated enough.

Phase 4 is the final phase of the fermentation process and it's referred to as the sedimentation phase where the yeast begin consuming and converting any remaining flavor precursors in the wort like diacetyl that will produce off flavors in your beer. During this phase the yeast cells are preparing themselves to go dormant and storing up energy reserves for their deep sleep, even though this is where most of us flush them down the drain. I'd like to point out that the amount of cleanup work left for the yeast to do is dependent on how well we treated, or mistreated, our yeast during the first 3 fermentation phases.

During the sedimentation phase I raise the temperature of my fermentors 3-5F and hold it there for at least 3 days before bottling or kegging my beer. I do this because the yeast will only convert the flavor precursors they created earlier if the beer is warmer than it was when they were created. There is a limit to this rule though since the yeast can only do so much cleanup before they go dormant. Once the yeast go dormant any remaining flavor precursors will be left in your beer to produce off flavors.

Screwy's Golden Age IPA

For you history buffs out there Ballantine IPA was once the largest most popular selling beer in America beating out another upstart of that time named Budweiser. At the height of their fame Ballantine owned their own grain warehouse, malting house and even had their own hop oil extraction process which they used in abundance in their beers of the day. The original 1960's era Ballantine IPA was recorded as having been a 7.5% ABV 60 IBU aged in wood for up to a year before bottling. I've researched the historical records for this original recipe and managed to create an all grain version I call 'Screwy's Golden Age IPA' fermented with East Coast Yeast ECY10 - Old Newark Ale™ yeast, the original strain of yeast used back then in the Newark NJ brewery.

Brewing With Copper - Verdigris Myths

2013-02-24T12:17:00.000-05:00

A little over two years ago I published a post on constructing a 5 gallon mash tun using a round Gott type water cooler and parts readily available from Home Depot and other hardware stores. Since then I've actually built another one using the same parts list and have made wort with them to brew all styles of beers including IPA, Stout, Rye, Wheat you name it. The design has proven to be very reliable and I'm happy to say I've never had any issues with either of the tuns I've built, no stuck sparges or leaks of any kind.

12 Gauge Wire Coil Inserted To Prevent Collapsing The Braid

Recently someone raised a question about using copper in the brewing process and the possibility of verdigris poisoning caused by wort coming into contact with copper. If you've ever seen copper roofs, drain pipes, statues or the water lines in some homes that have a green colored patina, well that is what's formally called verdigris. It's been documented that you should always wash your hands after touching any copper metals that have a coating of verdigris because in large enough amounts it has been reported to cause nausea and vomiting.

Inspection Of Copper Inside Braid After More Than 2 Years

The issue of verdigris contamination when using copper parts in the brewing process had come up while I was designing the mash tun and I had found out is was not a concern for several reasons. Of course brewers have been referring to their kettle as 'the copper' for centuries since they were in fact made from copper. I also read a Brew Your Own magazine article titled Metallurgy For Homebrewers that explained copper's role in brewing that dispelled a lot of myths surrounding verdigris.

"Copper is relatively inert to both wort and beer. With regular use, it will build up a stable oxide layer (dull copper color) that will protect it from any further interaction with the wort. Only minimal cleaning to remove surface grime, hop bits and wort protein is necessary. There is no need to clean copper shiny-bright after every use or before contact with your wort. It is better if the copper is allowed to form a dull copper finish with use. " ~ John Palmer November 2007

After Hundreds Of Mashes Not A Hint Of Verdigris Anywhere

I tore down my braided hose and inspected all the copper and brass parts and found no signs of verdigris at all, what I did find is just as John Palmer had pointed out, the parts all had the stable oxide layer and dull copper color that protects the wort from verdigris. The copper and brass parts are no longer bright and shiny as they once were when I first assembled them for use in the mash tun designs, but they are protected by the stable layer of oxide that continues to protect the wort from picking up any dangerous contaminants.

Inspected, Reassembled And Ready To Go

As for cleaning and maintaining the mash tuns all I've ever done is remove the spent grains and thoroughly rinse out the insides with clean water until there were no grains left inside. Then I just turned the tuns upside down with the top facing down on a towel and a small air space under one side so all the water drained out. Once most of the water was drained I turned them right side up so they just could air dry. I've read posts in some forums where white vinegar and salt, or StarSan was used to clean the copper parts and get them shining like new. After reading John Palmer's article I decided I'll just use clean water to remove and bits of grain and keep the protective oxide layers that have already built up on mine.

Screwy's: February 2013 qBrew Update - Homebrewers Recipe Calculator

2013-02-23T11:08:00.000-05:00

The February 2013 qBrew ingredient database is now available for download and it comes with 6 great recipes to get you started. This month's update includes a greatly expanded selection of yeast, extract and grains to make brewing up your next recipe easier than ever before.

Click here to get the February 2013 qBrew update

Brewing The 2013 Hammerfest Marzen Lager

2013-01-21T11:13:00.000-05:00

3B. Oktoberfest/Märzen:

Rich German malt aroma of Vienna and or Munich malt a light to moderate toasted malt aroma is often present. Clean lager aroma with no fruity esters or diacetyl no hop aroma and Caramel aroma is inappropriate. Dark gold to deep orange-red color with bright clarity and solid off-white foam stand.

Grist varies, although German Vienna malt is often the backbone of the grain bill with some Munich malt, Pils malt and possibly some crystal malt. All malt should derive from the finest quality two-row barley. Noble hop varieties are most authentic. Somewhat alkaline water (up to 300 PPM), with significant carbonate content is welcome a decoction mash can help develop the rich malt profile.

OG: 1.050 – 1.057, IBUs: 20 – 28, FG: 1.012 – 1.016, SRM: 7 – 14, ABV: 4.8 – 5.7%

The preceding description was taken from the Beer Judge Certification Program description of the Oktoberfest/Marzen Lager style beer, the topic of this month's post and my first lager beer brewing project of 2013. The five gallon recipe I created calls for pitching 435 billion yeast cells of White Labs WLP820 - Oktoberfest/Märzen Lager Yeast™ at 56° F and fermenting at 50-54° F until a hydrometer sample reads 1.018, signalling the start of the diacetyl rest, then raising the temperature of the fermenting beer to 60° F over the course of three days.

Using a single infusion mash at 154° F for 60 minutes I included a small addition of Melanoidin malt to the grain bill to provide a big malty flavor and reddish color without having to do a complicated decoction mash schedule and extended boil on brewday. The other two grains used in the recipe are German Vienna malt, with roughly half as much German Munich malt, making up the backbone of the grist. The goal of this recipe is to produce as authentic tasting a Marzen Lager beer as I possibly can using my current brewing process. This beer should deliver all it's flavor and aroma from the recipe's malts, with no distractions caused by esters or hop additions to get in the way.

Oktoberfest/Marzen Lager

Size 5.50 gallons: Estimated IBU=27, SRM=11, OG=1.057, FG=1.014, ABV= 5.5%

For bittering I chose to use Czech Saaz hops and a smaller amount of Slovenia Styrian Gold in the kettle to offset the malt sweetness and compliment the malty biscuit aroma of the grains. I used my local tap water, which is not considered to be hard, filtered with a two stage G&E water filter before using it in the mash, I haven't had my tap water analyzed yet and I didn't add do anything else to modify the water profile to increase the hardness to 300 PPM. Well there we have it all the background information about the beer style the ingredients the brewing process and what to look for in the finished beer.

I picked up a really fresh vial of White Labs WLP820 - Oktoberfest/Märzen Lager Yeast™ at Princeton Homebrew and made a series of yeast starters over the course of a week to step up to the number of viable cells needed to ferment this beer. To prepare the starter wort I added 1 cup of extra light dme to 2 liters of filtered water then added a small pinch of yeast nutrient and boiled for 10 minutes. Once cooled and just prior to adding the vial of yeast I hit the starter wort with a burst of pure oxygen, dropped in the stir bar, poured in the yeast and sat the flask on a stirplate for 24 hours.

WLP-820 Lager Yeast Starter

Once the krauzen had peaked and fallen I took the flask off the stirplate and set it in the refrigerator for a couple of days to help cold crash the yeast before decanting off the starter wort. I then repeated the steps to create a double batch of starter wort using the same proportions and split it equally between two 2 liter flasks. The first starter doubled my cell count to 200 billion viable cells, by splitting it in two and repeating the process using two stirplates and two starters at once I eventually ended up with the 400 billion viable cells needed to ferment this beer.

Cold Crashing 4 Liters Of Starter Wort

The yeast propagation process took a week to do and it had to be coordinated so it was completed in time for brewday when I would decant the starters, discarding the oxidized nasty tasting starter wort, and then pitch only the yeast. Since adding the decanting step to my yeast propagation process I have tasted a noticeable difference in the finished beer, enough of a difference that I decant all my starters now including the ones made using Ale yeast. Instead of making the starters the day before brewday now I make them 3 or 4 days before brewday, to allow the yeast enough time to settle out of the wort, it's a small adjustment to the brewing schedule and very easy to get used to.

60 Minute Full Rolling Boil

The grains were mashed for an hour followed by a two gallon vorlauf and a 45 minute lauter using a fly sparge with 174° F strike water until the kettle had 6.5 gallons of wort in it. The hop additions were put into the kettle at the start of the lauter and remained there until flameout to make room for the wort chiller that was used to drop the temperature down to 56° F prior to pitching the yeast. Near the end of the boil some WhirlFloc and yeast nutrient was added to the wort to help drop any proteins and cold break material out of suspension and provide the yeast with an energy supplement, both intended to reduce off flavors and promote a cleaner fermentation.

Wort Chiller And Pre-chiller Setup

During the course of the one hour vigorous boil a lot of Dimethyl Sulfide or DMS is boiled off, preventing the levels from building up too high and causing off flavors in the beer that smell like cooked or creamed corn. As the wort is cooled the DMS levels begin to rise again and if not cooled quickly enough the cooked corn off flavors start building up again in the wort and if left unchecked those off flavors will carry over to the finished beer. It's really important to cool the boiling wort down as quickly as possible after flameout to prevent the the formation of off flavors and also to greatly reduce the risk of infection. I did a simple calculation and found that cooling 5.5 gallons of 212° F wort down to 56° F requires removing around 6,800 BTUs of heat. My wort chiller with the pre-chiiler attached is capable of removing about 15,000 BTUs of heat and lowering the wort to 56° F in a little under 30 minutes. Even with the potential to remove such a high rate of BTUs from the wort the trick is to continuously stir the wort to keep it moving and in contact with the chiller coils or the insulating properties of the wort will greatly reduce the cooling efficiency.

1.057 Original Gravity Reading

Once the wort had been chilled and racked to the fermentor it was given a 60 second burst of pure oxygen to oxygenate the wort prior to pitching the WLP-820 starter yeast. The fermentation chamber had been precooled to 47° F a few hours before putting the fermentor inside it and a few hours later the temperature had leveled off and was held at a steady 50° F where it will stay for the majority of the fermentation. Nothing is better than bringing your wort up to a boil and then down to pitching temperature in as little time as possible, it's better for your finished beer and it also makes your brewday shorter.

Marzen Lager Samples Prior To Pitching Yeast

Based on several prior lager fermentations the primary fermentation and the diacetyl rest should be completed in about three weeks time and after that I'll rack the beer to a clean secondary and put it in the refrigerator and let the beer cold lager for 6 weeks so that the beer will be ready to drink in March 2013. Traditional Oktoberfest/Marzen Lager beers were brewed in the spring and fermented in caves over the long hot summer months to be enjoyed in the month of March, my approach is not historically accurate in that regard because I won't have the patience to wait 22 weeks before drinking this beer.

Hammerfest Marzen Lager

This batch was carbonated and ready to start drinking the first week of March 2013 and it tasted amazingly good. I love the good clean malty flavors and aromas of a cleanly fermented Marzen as much as I love some of the hoppiest IPAs I brew. When the glass is poured and you're ready to take a sip you can smell the malt aroma and taste the clean malt flavors without any hint of yeast or other fruity esters. The carbonation, head retention and mouthfeel all worked together perfectly and the finish was pleasant, not at all bitter or cloying with hints of malt that made me want to drink another.

I have another 2.5 gallon corny keg of this beer sitting on 12 psi of Co2 in the refrigerator and it'll be ready to drink in about 5 days. I moved the beer from the fermentor to sanitized corny kegs after 3 weeks of fermentation at 50F and another week of cold crashing in the refrigerator at 36F. The corny kegs were filled with the 36F beer and then placed in the fermentation chamber at 50F for another 3 weeks to allow the beer time to condition. All these extra steps and extra time produced a really clean tasting beer that showcased the flavors and aromas of the malts used in the beer, this recipe is a keeper and I look forward to brewing it again then next time I decide to treat myself to a great tasting lager beer.

EdgeStar Deluxe Mini Kegerator

2012-12-16T15:17:00.003-05:00

I guess I was good this year, SWMBO decided to get me the EdgeStar Deluxe Mini Kegerator & Draft Beer Dispenser as a gift and at first I was a bit skeptical. I've done a lot of reading about kegging systems, kegerators and beer taps but I've never even heard of this one before. I've seen those giant sized Heineken and Newcastle five liter beer cans at the liquor store many times but I never gave them a second glance since I hadn't heard much about them before. After giving the idea of owning yet another beer delivery system and what new possibilities it had to offer so thought I decided to keep the new beer dispenser, do a little bit of research and figure out how to use it.

EdgeStar TBC50S Deluxe Mini Kegerator and Draft Beer Dispenser

I drove over to the liquor store and picked up a five liter mini-keg of Newcastle Brown Ale to use as the first draft beer to test out my new dispenser. Once I got home with the mini-keg I put it in the refrigerator while I did a quick read of the instructions to figure out what I needed to do in order to get the setup working. To set up the dispenser for a first pour I flushed out the beer line with a dilute solution of Oxi-Clean and water by pushing a cupful through the beer line, out the tap and into cup. They give you a small plastic bottle that snaps onto the beer line connector all you do then is squeeze the bottle to force the cleaning solution, followed by clean water, through the lines and tap.

The min-keg I bought was already cold, it's recommended to refrigerate the mini-kegs for 10 hours before loading them into the dispenser because the dispenser is better at retaining the beer temperature at 38F than at cooling a warm keg down to it. Although the beer in the keg lasted only a little more than an hour it did manage to pour perfect beers at a cold temperature the entire time it sat on our counter. The real cooling capabilities test would be to plug the dispenser into a car's lighter socket for power and serve beer outdoors on a hot day.

EdgeStar 5-Liter Mini Keg Beer Dispenser Tap Conversion Kit

It seems that for such a really cool device, the design resembles that of an espresso maker, there would be more brewers committed to using the new DraughtKeg with a wider selection of beer styles to choose from. Although I did enjoy the taste of the Newcastle Brown Ale, which was the first DraughtKeg beer I tried, so did many of the guests at my latest party. So far I've only seen Heineken and Newcastle beer packaged in the DraughtKeg but I'm already on the prowl for the other beers too, which may or may not require the optional Co2 conversion kit. And according to the Beer Tap Systems website the following beers are now being packaged in 5 liter mini-kegs using the newly patented DraughtKeg technology.

Heineken
Heineken Premium Light
Newcastle Brown Ale
Coors Light
DAB Original Lager
Spaten Premium Lager 5 Liter
Warsteiner Premium
Paulaner Hefe-weizen
Bitburger
Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale mini-kegs
Molson Canadian
George Killians
Bell’s Oberon

Having the optional mini-keg and Co2 gear gives me another reason to drive over to a local pub and have my mini-keg filled, fresh from a newly arrived 'Firkin of the days' craft beer. If the 1.25 gallons of beer seems like a lot of beer don't worry the min-kegs will keep beer fresh and ready to pour for up to a month, which is a relatively long time in beer years.

My Imported 5 Liter Mini-Keg

So setting up and using the pressurized Heineken and Newcastle DraughtKegs was child's play but the next two items remaining for me to master are still the most challenging. Using the min-kegs and the Co2 conversion kit instead of a growler for taking home some draft beer from a local pub and using the mini-keg and Co2 conversion kit for my home brewed beers. In either case the main thing to get right will be the carbonation and Co2 serving pressures needed to pour the perfect beer.

Sanitized With 1.3 Tbsp. Priming Sugar Added

When calculating how much sugar to use to naturally carbonate the mini-kegs it's recommended to use 50% less sugar than you would normally use when carbonating a 12 ounce bottle to hit the same carbonation volume. Example: To hit 2.5 volumes of Co2 for a 12 ounce bottle using a bottling bucket filled with 5 liters of beer you would add 7.5 teaspoons of pure cane sugar to the bottling bucket and fill the bottles to about an inch below the cap. When using a single 5 liter mini-keg you would fill the keg to one inch below the top of the keg and add only 3.75 teaspoons of sugar to get the same 2.5 volumes of Co2 into solution.

Filled Mini-keg With Rubber Plug Inserted

Using a small funnel I poured 1.3 tablespoons (4 teaspoons) of pure cane sugar into each mini-keg, after first sanitizing the kegs and funnel. By adding this amount of sugar and filling the kegs what I hope to be about an inch below the top of the kegs this should give the beer between 1.8 and 2.0 volumes of Co2. From everything I've read so far about refilling the min-kegs to prevent over carbonating the beer and ending up in foamy pours. Most information I've read by homebrewers suggest starting off using half the amount of priming sugar typically used when batch priming for 12 ounce glass bottles.

Bottoms Up Brown Ale FG 1.012

I have to admit the next time I refill these min-kegs I'm ether going to give them a 10 minute soak in OneStep to reduce foaming or buy a small digital scale the reads up to 15 pounds accurately. By using StarSan to sanitize the mini-kegs this time it was nearly impossible to view how far below the top of the keg the beer level was. There was so much foam from the StarSan and the hole in the top of the mini-keg is so small that even when using a flashlight it didn't help see how high the level was getting. The best thing would be to fill the mini-keg up on a small digital scale and stop once the scale read around 10 pounds.

Bottoms Up Brown Ale First Pour

I poured my first glass from the unit yesterday into a clean tulip glass and got quite a lot of foam in my DogFish Head Palo Santo recipe brown ale clone. The foaming issue was easily resolved by just pouring some beers and after about four pours the foaming had been reduced to normal levels. The two mini-kegs I bough cost about $22.00 apiece and they don't have a built in relief valve used to release any excess Co2 pressure that builds when naturally carbonating the beer.

Cool Looking, Compact And Quiet

When naturally carbonating the mini-kegs I added 4 teaspoons of pure cane sugar, or half the amount I would have used for 12 or 22 ounce bottles, to each 5 liter min-keg to target 2.5 volumes of Co2 and the carbonation level in the beer itself was perfect. When I get to tap my next mini-keg I'll use the piercing tube to release all of the built up Co2 pressure before hooking it up and attempting to pour a beer. I give this unit two beers up, it's a nice compact quiet unit that is very cool to look at and easy to setup and use.

Screwy's Aluminum Burner Frame

2012-11-24T11:00:00.000-05:00

I bought a 32 quart boil pot because it allows me to do full wort boils without fear of having messy boil overs and overflows that are a pain to clean up from the stove top. Another benefit was that the pot was wide enough to straddle two gas burners on my stove at the same time that allows me to apply twice as much heat as before when using smaller diameter pots. So from both a convenience point of view, no more messy spills to clean up, and an efficiency perspective using two burners to boil the wort faster this larger pot is just perfect. But the one thing that bothered me was how long the cast iron burner grates held heat, which was causing my wort chilling to take longer.

Screwy's Aluminum Burner Frame

So after giving it some thought I ordered a length of 1 1/4" x 1 1/4" x 1/8" inch aluminum tubing and made my own custom burner grate. Aluminum is a very good conductor of heat and it doesn't hold onto the heat nearly as long as the cast iron grates did after flameout so cooling off the wort takes much less time now. Another benefit of using the burner frame is that it directs the flames upward towards the bottom of the pot instead of letting the flame blow outwards and away from the pot. The ends of the frame are open so I made two deflectors from a light gauge aluminum sheet and rolled them to match the radius of the boil pot.

Aluminum Burner Frame With Flame Deflectors

Once I had all the pieces of the frame together I was ready to fire up the burners and heat up some strike water to see how well my new design worked. As expected the water heated up much faster than it did before when using the cast iron burner grates that came with the stove when I bought it. The new design kept the gas flames directly under the pot eliminating blow out and concentrated the heat where it would do the most good. I also noticed that the top of the stove around the frame wasn't as hot as it used to get with the cast iron grates, which used to be an issue too when trying to cool down the wort after the boil.

Concentrated Heat Source Equals Faster Boils

The strike water hit my target temperature in no time at all with both burners cranked up all the way and the 1/8 inch thick aluminum tubing showed absolutely no signs of melting or weakening so now I couldn't wait to boil some wort. During the very first full wort boil I noticed yet another unexpected benefit when using the burner frame, a much more vigorous boil and a more uniform 'bubble' pattern. When using the cast iron grates I noticed one side of my boilpot always had an area where the boiling bubbles broke the surface even though the pot straddled two gas burners. Now since the two burners were separated by a piece of aluminum tubing they both worked together to heat up the tubing which in turn transferred that heat to the center of the boil pot.

Burner Frame Applies Heat To The Center Of The Pot

Instead of having a single area of bubbling wort the boil now had three areas where the wort was bubbling up from the bottom of the pot. The heat was so even now that the top of the bubbling wort looked like it was split right down the middle by a pattern in the shape of the letter 'I'. I could tell I was going to have to recalibrate my pre-boil volumes now, using the burner frame definitely improved the efficiency of my boils and increased the boil off rates too. Another thing worth mentioning is that since the surface of the burner frame is perfectly even and the pot bottom sits flat on top of it with no high or low spots there are no rattling or buzzing noises either.

Concentrated Heat Produces More Vigorous Boils

To cool the wort faster it's also important to remove as much heat from the stove top and burners grates as quickly as possible because they work against the cooling efficiency of your wort chiller by keeping the bottom of the pot hot. To help cool down the stove top faster I remove the small diffuser pieces from the ends of the frame and direct the air from a small fan to blow cool air against the sides and under the bottom of the pot. It's incredible how much faster the aluminum tubing of the burner frame cools off compared to the how long the cast iron burner grates that came with the stove used to take. With that extra heat load taken off of the pot's bottom and sides the wort chiller can easily get the wort down to pitching temperature a whole lot faster now.

Faster Boils And Cooling Equals Shorter Brewdays

My gas stove has the standard gas burners that come with the average home stove and they're rated at 7,000 BTUs, I also have adequate air ventilation, to exhaust outdoors and supply fresh make up air, for all the gases and vapors produced during the boil. To calculate the CFM's needed for ventilation I added both burner's ratings together, which totaled 14,000 BTUs and then divided that by 30 and came up with 467 CFM's. The other part of this equation relates to the size of the area you need to provide ventilation for. A typical bathroom requires a complete change of air 8 times per hour or 8 ACH's in order to provide enough fresh air when in use.

Drinking Beer Is A Very Enjoyable Pastime

To calculate the CFM's needed to comply with the ACH guidelines I multiplied the length times the width times the height of my brewroom, to get the total cubic volume of air in the room. Next I multiplied that number by eight, to represent the number of air changes per hour, and then divided that number by 60 to get the number of cubic feet per minute needed to eliminate any hop aromas from lingering during the boil. I like the smell of boiling wort and the aromas that the hop additions add to the brewroom, as do most all the brewers I've brewed with, but some folks don't and they would benefit the most when using the ACH sizing calculations to size an exhaust fan.

The Screwy Brewer: November 2012 qBrew Update - Homebrewers Recipe Calculator

2012-11-12T13:53:00.001-05:00

Keep your qBrew recipe calculations, ingredient lists and much more up to date with this easy to install database update.

The Screwy Brewer: qBrew - Homebrewers Recipe Calculator

Kegging 101 - Getting Foam Free Pours Everytime

2012-11-04T15:16:00.002-05:00

I connected my corny keg's beer out ball lock to an inexpensive picnic tap using a 5 foot length of 3/16" id vinyl tubing that I bought from a local Ace Hardware store. When I pulled the trigger on the picnic tap I watched as my Screwer In The Rye Lager began filling the vinyl tubing on it's way to my favorite beer glass. What a difference this pour had going for it compared to the last pours I had tried, this time there was absolutely no foam in the vinyl line as the beer filled my glass.

Lemon Sharks Love Screwer In The Rye Lager

I used the same beer line picnic tap gear two weeks ago when I brought my corny keg to a party so we could enjoy some nice beer on tap instead of having to lug around all those cases of bottles. I got to show off my newest beer toys too, a Co2 serving dispenser that uses 16 gram cartridges and an insulating corny keg sleeve complete with freezer gel packs. As cool as my new mobile beer delivery system was the pours were anything but spectacular. Although we did have a lot of fun trying to devise ways to pour our beers without all that foam.

Screwy's Mobile Beer Delivery System

What I did differently this time around was change the force carbonation method to set and forget and I couldn't be happier with the results. The previous time I cranked the gauge to 30 psi and gassed the 36F beer in the corny keg for a little over 24 hours, which had over carbonated my beer to the point it was impossible to get a good pour through my picnic tap. The sweet spot for my setup is 10-12psi with the beer at 36F for about 5-7 days, this resulted in both perfect pours, carbonation and no wild foaming!

12 PSI Pours Really Fast Through 5/16" ID Tubing

There are also some less obvious, but just as important benefits, to using set and forget like no more venting Co2 from the corny keg to serve your beer at a lower psi to prevent foaming, and releasing all that great beer aroma in the process. The system is also balanced so that the carbonating pressure is the same as the serving pressure, each foot of 3/16" id vinyl tubing adds 2 psi of restriction, using a 5 foot length adds 10 psi to balance things out just right. As time goes on I'll be tinkering with the length of tubing used with a picnic tap, some folks have claimed all that's needed is a foot or so to get a good pour.

Five Foot Length Of 5/16" ID Tubing For Perl Tap

I've learned that the five foot length of 5/16" ID vinyl tubing that connects my corny keg to a 'Perl Creamer' tap, mounted in the side of my refrigerator, serves beer about twice as fast as I think it should. While the same length of 3/16" ID vinyl tubing serves beer a little bit slower than I think it should. I can do several things here like replace the 5/16" tubing with 3/16" tubing to see if the Perl tap pours are faster than a picnic tap and cut a foot off the 3/16" tubing and see if the picnic tap pours get faster. Decisions, decisions decisions...

Great Beers Deserve Beautiful Pours

Preparing for kegging begins about 5 days ahead of time, that's when I put my fermentor in the refrigerator for a nice long cold crash. During this time the cold temperature helps to clear the beer, as the yeast and other particles drop out of solution. After 5 days in the refrigerator I transfer the cold beer into the corny kegs and put them back into the refrigerator with the Co2 gauge set to 10-12 psi for up to 7 days. Today I'll be enjoying some fresh Screwer In The Rye Lager on tap as I brew up another batch of my Bottoms Up Brown Ale, knowing that I've finally mastered the art of the pour.

Go All Out With Your Next Fermentation

2012-10-18T07:55:00.002-04:00

I have to tell you I was a bit skeptical myself about using pure oxygen when preparing my wort for fermentation, but after having done two batches I'm already convinced it is well worth it. Let me explain, the beers I'm drinking now are way, way better tasting than anything I've brewed prior to oxygenating my wort instead of just aerating it. Using oxygen is also saving me valuable time on brewday, a one minute burst of pure oxygen is all that's needed, while eliminating any risk of contamination when aerating with air for extended periods.

420 Special Wheat And East Coast Yeast ECY12 - Old Newark Beer™

Truth be told I started adding yeast nutrients to the wort boil at the same time I began using pure oxygen to prepare my wort for pitching yeast. I now add both a capsule of Servomyces nutritional yeast supplement and half a teaspoon of yeast nutrient to the end of all my wort boils to provide the yeast with a rich blend of sugars and minerals during fermentation. Maybe it's the combination of pitching, at the time of this post a fourth generation two liter starter of ECY-12 yeast at high krausen, adding yeast nutrients to the boil and then oxygenating the wort prior to pitching the yeast but there is a very noticeable difference in the quality of the finished beer now.

Additional information: Yeast Nutrients Make Better Beer by Christopher White, Ph.D

Attenuation Chart (Courtesy of White Labs)

For one thing the pitched yeast lag time has increased by about 20-30%, I don't notice much activity in the airlock for at least 18-24 hours but the beer's final gravity is finishing several points lower than it used to in prior batches fermented without oxygenation or nutritional supplements. Using aeration you can get at the very most 8ppm of oxygen into your wort by vigorously shaking your fermentor for a minute or using an aquarium pump, HEPA filter and air stone for at least five minutes.

Rapidly Cool Full Wort Boils To Pitching Temperature

Either of these methods creates a lot of wort foaming that can lead to issues with overflowing fermentors, head retention and lacing in your finished beer as well as increasing the risk of contamination. I use a 2 micron stainless steel diffuser and run enough pure oxygen through it to form a stream of very fine bubbles and I let it run for a full minute before pitching my yeast starter. At this rate flow rate, using the chart above as a guide, I can estimate that I am putting about 9ppm of dissolved oxygen into my wort which is the sweet spot for the beers I've been brewing.

Higher Yeast Production With Nutrients

The most notable change is in the taste and flavor of the beer now each sip tastes very clean, I mean there are no distracting off flavors so every ingredient you put in the kettle comes through clearly in the finished beer. I've been focusing mostly on my 420 Special Wheat and Screwer In The Rye recipes the past several months and since improving my yeast preparation as I have described earlier they have both developed an unmistakable clean flavor and aroma that leaves a really nice taste in your mouth after each glass.

Control Fermentation Temperature For Better Beer

Since East Coast Yeast ECY12 - Old Newark Beer™ yeast has an optimum temperature range of between between 53-68° F which is much lower than most Ale (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) yeasts but it is not a true Lager (Saccharomyces uvarum) yeast. I always pitch a healthy two liter starter into my five gallon batch and keep the temperature down around 55-57° F during the lag phase and then allow it to rise to 59° F for the primary fermentation phase. Once the primary fermentation has completed I add my dry hops and let the temperature slowly rise to 68-72° F over the next week. I then move the fermentor to my refrigerator to cold crash at 36-38° F for about four days before kegging or bottling it up.

Collecting Washed Yeast After Kegging The Beer

Once the beer has been bottled or kegged it's the best time to collect and wash the yeast from that fermentation to add to your yeast library for later reuse. I fill up a large pickle jar with filtered water, boil it for 15 minutes to remove as much oxygen from the water as possible, then cool it down to the same temperature of the yeast cake in the fermentor. Then I sanitize the jar and pour the cooled water into it, dump the water in the fermentor and then swirl the solution around for a minute or two using a long handled Teflon spoon. After a few minutes I open the valve on the fermentor and pour the washed yeast into the large jar until its full, a little while later I use it to fill up the pint mason jars I use to store the yeast.

I made the decision to just bite the bullet and go all out to treat my yeast the best I could. I wanted to find out for myself exactly how much of a real difference added nutrients and oxygen would make and I was pleasantly surprised. If you have been considering making the move to pure oxygen do it you won't be disappointed.

Oxynator Oxygen Gauge And 2 Micron Diffuser

2012-09-10T07:50:00.001-04:00

I recently purchased an oxygen regulator and a stainless steel 2 micron diffusion stone from Rebel Brewer only to find out that the regulator and stone had different sized hose barbs. The regulator had a 1/8 inch hose barb and the stone had a 1/4 inch hose barb. Needless to say connecting the two with a piece of vinyl tubing and getting an air tight seal was no easy task.

Rebel Brewer Oxygen Regulator And Diffuser Stone Hookup

After a lot of trial and error I was finally able to get it connected properly. I used a length of 3/16 inch vinyl tubing and soaked one end in near boiling water and stretched it until it slipped over the 1/4 inch hose barb on the stone. I then cut a one inch long piece of 3/16 inch tubing and slipped it over the 1/8 inch hose barb on the oxygen regulator. I soaked the other end of the tubing in the hot water and used a pair of needle nose pliers, slipped inside the tubing, to stretch it until it was large enough to fit over the tubing on the regulator.

Doubled Up 3/16 Inch Tubing And Hose Clamp On Regulator

Although the folks at Rebel Brewer suggested that I do this, just as they'd advised other brewers who bought the same setup from them, you think they would have offered the stone and regulator pair with the same diameter hose barb.

Completed Air Tight Connections On Diffuser And Regulator

I know from my fish keeping days that the tinier the air stone bubbles the more efficiently the oxygen is transferred and absorbed into liquids. In the case of an aquarium and aeration stones using room air you can double the surface area of the fish tank, allowing you to keep more or larger fish, but the bubbles have to be really small. For getting oxygen back into wort the same principal is also true and in time I'll get the flow rate and duration just right.

Regulator Adjusted To Provide The Finest Bubbles

Yesterday I used the new oxygen setup for aerating my wort once I'd pitched my pitching. I soaked the diffuser stone and tubing in StarSan for 10 minutes, placed the stone at the bottom of the fermentor filled with five gallons of wort opened the valve and let the oxygen flow for 30 seconds. The next morning the airlock was busy pumping out Co2 as I've come to expect, in a few weeks I'll know if using the new oxygen setup makes a difference but so far the lag times were very short and the primary fermentation very aggressive.

Left Handed Threads Fit Oxygen Tanks From Home Depot

Using the new oxygen setup shortened up my the brewing day, by eliminating the manual aeration I used to do using a long handled spoon, by nearly 10 minutes. When brewing this batch of beer I also added White Labs Servomyces and White Labs Yeast Nutrient to the end of the boil and also added some expired dried yeast to the boil of the two liter starter when I made it. I've used good sanitation when washing and storing the yeast and maintained good temperature control when pitching the yeast and fermenting the beer and I can't wait to taste the results for myself.

Easy DIY Ale Pale Modification

2012-08-10T10:08:00.002-04:00

Recently my short lived love affair with the autosiphon came to an abrupt end once I discovered valves. Sounds crazy right, well read on and I will explain to you exactly what I mean. The very fist 6.5 gallon plastic Ale Pail I bought was to be used as a fermentor and it had no 1 inch hole drilled in it for a valve, so I bought an auto siphon too in order to get the beer out of it. I soon found the longer auto siphon and tubing was a pain to use and a bit too challenging to clean, sanitize and store for my liking.

Stock 6.5 Gallon Ale Pail Fermentor

The next Ale Pail I bought to use as a bottling bucket came with a 1 inch hole drilled in it about 2 inches off the bottom for a valve that I attached my bottling wand to. The only issue I had with this was how high up the bucket wall the center of the hole was, this was done so that the bucket could sit flat on the floor without the valve getting in the way. But I had noticed earlier that the valves are built to swivel without leaking, from the vertical to the horizontal position, and they could possibly be mounted an inch lower on the bucket wall without hitting the floor.

Using Auto Siphon To Fill Bottling Bucket

Then one day it hit me! Just switch things around a little to use the bottling bucket as the fermentor since it's valve was already mounted high enough off the bottom to keep the trub from getting into the bottling bucket. Say goodbye to the long auto siphon, now I simply connect a much shorter length of tubing directly to the valve to fill the bottling bucket and a whole lot faster too. Now that the 'bottling bucket' is used as a fermentor I had the opportunity to improve the bottling bucket too. One big pain point I had with the Ale Pails delivered, with the valve hole pre-drilled, was when using them as a bottling bucket I had to stick a wedge under one end to get all the beer out of it because the valves were mounted too high off the bottom.

1 Inch Spade Bit Drill And Valve Assembly

Take it from me this is going to be the easiest DIY project you're probably ever going to take on that returns such a huge benefit on bottling day. I marked the side of the fermentor with a sharpie aligning the center of the hole perpendicular to the handle and 1 1/8 inches from the very bottom. This allows enough room inside the bucket to spin the lock nut which in turns compresses the gaskets on the valve stem so there aren't any leaks. Once you've marked the location of the hole lay the bucket on it's side, put the 1 inch spade bit in a variable speed drill and drill the hole.

Drilling A 1 Inch Hole Using A Spade Bit

Needless to say it doesn't take much pressure, or a very high drill speed, to drill a hole through the soft plastic fermentor wall so go slowly. As the fine point of the bit goes through the wall you'll start to see marks in the plastic from the shoulders of the bit, this is where you want to keep the bit aligned so it begins to cut a nice even circle all the was around the center of the bit.

1 Inch Hole Drilled In Wall Of Ale Pail 1 1/8 Inch From Bottom

It only took about ten seconds using moderate pressure and drill speed to plunge the bit though the side of the fermentor. I used my fingers to pick and pull off any bits of stringy plastic left on the bucket before lightly sanding any sharp edges with a small piece of fine sandpaper. I did this to keep the hole as clean as possible before attaching the valve to the bucket.

1 Inch Hole Before Cleaning And Attaching Valve

Once the hole has been drilled and cleaned up its time to install the valve assembly. This will require a little bit of effort because the hole is just tight enough that the valve stem has to be threaded into the side of the bucket. Make sure the outside gasket has been slid onto the valve stem then using firm pressure begin to screw the stem into the hole while keeping it straight and level. Once the outside gasket on near the valve body is touching the wall of the fermentor its time to reach inside the bucket and slip the inside gasket on the stem and screw on the inside nut.

Valve Body With Gasket Screws Into The Hole

Let the valve spigot hang over the end of a flat surface to allow room to turn the assembly without hitting anything. Mounting the valve this low on the fermentor means you'll have to swivel the spigot horizontally when storing it away. It also means that you'll be able to fill your bottles with practically every last drop of beer without having to tilt the bucket to one side so it can flow out of the valve. It is just high enough though to keep those little bits of trub that somehow made it into the bottling bucket from getting into your bottles.

Bottling Bucket Shown On Left Fermentor Shown At Right

I unscrew the valves from the fermentors when cleaning them after transferring the beer to the bottling bucket, sometimes I find a little bit of trub buildup inside the valve body or accumulating around the inside gasket. It only takes me a few extra minutes to make sure the entire assembly has been thoroughly cleaned and sanitized before each use. I really don't mind taking the extra time to make sure I get a good clean fermentation.

Transferring And Aerating Cooled Wort To Fermentor

Using valves and tubing to transfer beer is a whole lot easier and a lot faster than transferring beer using a racking cane or an auto siphon. After making this simple DIY modification to two of my Ale Pales I wouldn't dream of going back to the way I used to transfer my beer. So far I've been relying on gravity to keep my beer moving but I'm already beginning to see the benefits adding a March pump would make to my brewing process. I'm happy with the valve and tubing upgrades made to my kettle, fermentors and bottling buckets. I really couldn't have imagined what a huge difference they would make to my brewing process if I hadn't actually gone ahead and made the changes.

Twist The Valve Handle And Let Gravity Do The Rest

Low Cost DIY Wort Pre-Chiller

2012-07-15T06:17:00.000-04:00

In my seemingly never ending search to find the most efficient brewing processes to reduce the total time I spend in the brewroom I decided to build a pre-chiller to cool my wort down faster. During the hot summer months here in the northeast my water temperature coming out of the faucet is nearly 70F, which makes cooling boiling wort down to pitching temperatures time consuming and a real challenge. A large part of all grain brewing has to do with heating up liquids and then cooling them down, both of which take a lot of time. But in the summer months cooling wort down those last 20-30 degrees can take a very long time and may not be possible without taking some extra steps.

Forty Feet Of 3/8 Inch Soft Copper Tubing

A pre-chiller's sole purpose is to cool down the water you run into it so that it is several degrees colder by the time it gets to the inlet of the wort chiller placed in the boilpot.The advantage is that it allows the wort to be cooled down much faster than would otherwise be possible using the water coming directly out of the faucet. The pre-chiller design is simple and easy to build once you have all the parts needed and it works great. I bought two 20 foot lengths of 3/8 copper and with the help of a brewing buddy it was easy to wrap the tubing around a small pot to get the right diameter for the coils. The two coils were then joined together with a short piece of vinyl tubing and fit inside a plastic cooler I had laying around the garage.

Wort Chiller, Pre-Chiller And Sink Connections

The concept is simple the thin walled copper coil is placed inside the cooler and filled with frozen water bottles or ice and topped off with cold water so that the entire coil is fully submerged. The tap water then slowly travels through the forty feet of copper tubing getting chilled down along the way until it is fed into the wort chiller. The chilled water then flows into the wort chiller that is submerged in the hot wort in the boilpot where it becomes quickly heated and then is returned from the chiller and then run down the drain.

Cooled Wort Drained Into Fermentor For Pitching

My new boilpot is great too what I like the best about it is that it straddles two gas burners so heating strike water or boiling wort is a lot faster. The valve at the bottom of the pot is just such a nice feature to have too, it makes transferring strike water or wort a whole lot easier. The size of the pot is perfect for my five gallon batches I just fill it with about six and a half gallons of wort, boil it for 60 minutes, chill and fill my fermentor with five gallons of wort ready for pitching yeast.

Cold Break At Bottom Of Boilpot Wort Transfer Is A Breeze

I chose to brew my Screwy's 420 Special Wheat for the first time using the new setup, it's an all grain light citrusy summer wheat beer fermented with WLP-001 American Ale yeast and dry hopped with the addition of some nice 'C' hops for extra aroma. I've brewed this recipe several times now using both WLP-400 Belgian Wit Ale and WLP-001 American Ale yeast strains and the differences between the two are striking.

Third Generation House Strain Of WLP-001

The WLP-001 ferments clean at 68-72F leaving plenty of room for hop aromas and other flavors to come through whereas the WLP-400 adds a lot of it's own character to the same ingredients making for a 'heavier' beer. Either way I love them both and look forward to drinking this batch in about three or four weeks.

Screwy's 420 Special Wheat - Light And Citrusy Summer Ale

Having cooled my wort for years using the combined wort chiller and ice bath method I can say without a doubt that the combined pre-chiller and chiller method just flat out works better. The main irritation I had with the ice bath method is that without constant stirring or circulation the water in the ice bath nearest to the pot wall gets really hot while the water further away stays colder. That thermal insulating effect combined with the 70-72F water coming out of the faucet made the last 20-30 degree drop in wort temperature take forever.

When cooling down boiling wort using the pre-chiller the initial drop in temperature from boiling to around 110F happens really fast but the real magic here is watching the remaining drop in temperature from 110F to 68F continue to tick down steadily. The final drop to pitching temperature happens a lot faster than when using just the tap water that hasn't been pre-chilled first.

Identifying Washed Yeast - What To Look For

2012-06-24T11:36:00.001-04:00

I've learned a lot about yeast this year, a lot more than I knew even a year ago. Since I started washing and reusing the yeast I use to ferment my beers with I've discovered how to identify some of the different strains too. Yesterday after bottling a batch of Mr. Beer/Coopers Bavarian Weissbier, washing the yeast and putting the mason jars in the mini-fridge where I store my yeast strains I saw 6 jars of yeast that I had forgotten to label.

Screwy's 420 Special American Wheat

You've been there too I'm sure where you put something off thinking I'll do it later while I still remember and then days go by and surprise you have no clue which was which. Well fortunately after being in the refrigerator for at least two weeks the yeast had stratified into very distinct layers and the order that the layers were stacked made it fairly easy to tell the strains apart.

Left To Right ECY-12, WLP-001 And WLP-400

The two unlabeled strains were White Labs WLP001 - California Ale Yeast™ and East Coast Yeast ECY12 - Old Newark Beer™ with the WLP-001 being a top fermenting 68-73F ale yeast and the ECY-12 being a bottom fermenting 53-68F lager yeast. As you can see the fermentation requirements and characteristics of these two strains are very different and mixing up the temperature ranges would really produce some uncharacteristic flavors for either strain.

ECY-12 With Trub Layer Under Yeast

As it turned out the jars containing the WLP-001 yeast stratified with a thin layer of trub lyiing on top of the creamy white layer of ale yeast. With the ECY-12 the trub layer was clearly visible underneath the the creamy white layer of lager yeast. Luckily I had taken the time to label several other jars of WLP-001 and ECY-12 from prior batches so I had them to use as a comparison. The end result enabled me to label three jars as WLP-001 and the remaining jars as ECY-12, now I'm feeling a lot more organized and secure in the fact that my next fermentation will be done using the right yeast.

WLP-001 With Trub Layer On Top Of Yeast

As of this posting the WLP400 - Belgian Wit Ale Yeast™ has still not completely stratified the less flocculant cells are still in suspension after a week in the refrigerator. Already clearly visible under the yeast layer is the trub layer which consists mainly of proteins and dead yeast cells. In all instances the creamy white layer is the yeast layer and no matter how you proceed from here in using the washed yeast it is this layer that really matters.

WLP-400 With Trub Layer Under Yeast

If you decide to decant the washed yeast slurry too soon before the layers have completely finished stratifying you will undoubtedly pour off some of the least flocculant cells which are key to getting the maximum attenuation during fermentation. I have a dedicated mini refrigerator that I keep all my yeast jars in and it doesn't get opened too often which is a good thing. I've used my washed yeast to make a starter after storing it there for six months and the beer it made was great.

Money For Nothin' And Your Yeast For Free!

The PALE ALES Big Brew 2012

2012-05-10T14:39:00.003-04:00

One of the unexpected benefits of doing business with a LHBS in your area is the affiliation they may have with local Homebrew Clubs and their members. One such benefit that I found to be a whole lot of fun and a great learning experience at the same time was the PALE ALES annual Big Brew held in celebration of the American Homebrewers Association's National Homebrew Day. The weather was cloudy but everyone's spirits were high as we setup all the brewing equipment and planned out the brewing process that would ultimately include 140 pounds of mixed grains.

Preparing The Big Brew Mash Tun

We started heating up the strike water by 9:30 AM, we needed 55 gallons heated to 170F in order to hit our 154F mash temperature and 1.25:1 mash thickness. In order to heat that much water it took a combination of 6 brewing rigs, varying in capacity from five to fifteen gallons and constant temperature monitoring, and then we manually transferred the strike water to the mush tun. When working with very hot water there's always a chance of spilling or splashing hot water so it's not a good idea to wear sandals, sneakers or shorts to help prevent burning yourself or someone else.

Carefully Pouring In The Strike Water

During the 60 minute or so mash there was plenty of good tasting homebrew, bagels and cupcakes to sample and keep us busy as the timer ticked down closer to the lauter. We even got to help some of the brewers out of a real dilemma by draining their kegs of very tasty homebrew so they could sanitize them and use the kegs later in the brewday.

Brewing Great Beer Requires Attention To Details

After a good lengthy vorlauf the wort was running clear and the lautering began in earnest as each brewer waited patiently to have their boil pots or fermentors filled. I decided to take my portion of the wort home with me to boil on my stovetop which is how I do all of my brewing, although several other brewers decided to buddy up with brewers who had setup their brewing gear on site. As soon as my fermentor was topped off with wort I snapped on the cover and drove it a short distance to my house where I had the wort boiling in about a half hour.

Hot Wort And Cold Beer, What Else Can Be Said

One wort, many different styles. Brewers were given a bunch of options to select from when it came to which hop additions and yeast selections they wanted to brew their wort with. For the yeast selection I decided to go with White Labs WLP007 - Dry English Ale Yeast™ and a two liter starter made the day before. For the hop additions I chose to use Columbus for bittering, Whitebread Golding Variety for flavor and East Kent Goldings for aroma. The grains, hops and yeast used in the recipe were supplied by Princeton Homebrew, the recipe itself was loosely based on an English Brown Ale style but with a bit more IBU.

Size 5.00 gallons: Estimated IBU=66, SRM=18, OG=1.077, FG=1.019, ABV=7.5%

11.50 pounds Optic Malt (Marris Otter)
01.25 pounds Crystal 40L
01.25 pounds CaraPils
00.25 pounds Carafa III

1.5 ounces Columbus pellet hops @ 60 minutes
1.5 ounces Whitebread Golding Variety (WGV) @ 15 minutes
2.0 ounces East Kent Goldings @ 2 minutes

My Actual OG Was 1.072 @ 65F

Another big benefit of the Big Brew was not having to deal with mashing or getting rid of all those spent grains once I got the wort home. I boiled the wort made all my hop additions, cooled it down, aerated and pitched my starter then set the fermentor aside in a 68F location to ferment. There was plenty of activity in the airlock around 12 hours later and fermentation was in high gear the next day. All in all the Big Brew was a huge success in my book, something I'll look forward to doing again, without a doubt.

The End Of A Really Great Brew Day

For the past two weeks the fermentor sat undisturbed on the basement landing where the temperature stayed at 68F so it was ready to bottle this weekend. I was anxious to taste test it and get the final gravity reading too. The beer fermented down to about 1.015 and it tasted really good even uncarbonated. There was a nice balance between the malts and hopping which to my surprise didn't turn this beer into a hop heads dream, instead it had a nice English Ale flavor and aroma with great mouthfeel.

Final Gravity After Two Weeks Was 1.015

This beer will make a very nice addition to the standard fare of hopped up Pale Ales and Lagers, Stouts, Witbiers and Rye Lager beers. It's my first time using White Labs WLP007 - Dry English Ale Yeast™ but it won't be my last, I harvested several mason jars of WLP007 from this initial batch to use later this year when I plan to brew this English Brown Ale again.

English Brown Ale Bottling Sample

Once I finished bottling I rinsed the yeast cake left in the bottom of the fermentor with boiled water that had cooled down to 70F. I poured the water on top of the yeast and trub and stirred it all together using a large sanitized plastic spoon. Then I poured the yeast slurry into a large sanitized pickle jar where I let it sit to stratify the yeast into separate layers. The very top dark layer of beer I then poured off before filling three sanitized mason jars with the remaining slurry.

The Four Distinct Layers Of Washed WLP007

WLP007 is very flocculent and it drops out of your beer very quickly once it's done fermenting. The very bottom layer is comprised of dead yeast cells and trub from the fermentation. The very top layer is made up mostly of beer and the tan layer just below that contains the least flocculent yeast cells. The light creamy layer beneath that contains the most flocculent yeast cells that have settled to the bottom the quickest. I store those two middle layers of yeast in the mason jars in my refrigerator set to 36F and then pitch them as needed into my next starter.

Making A Starter From Harvested Yeast

2012-04-29T11:57:00.000-04:00

Last month I brewed a version of my of my Screwer In The Rye Lager pitching two bottles of East Coast Yeast ECY12 - Old Newark Beer™ yeast into a five gallon batch. The recipe is all grain with a 1.060 original gravity and at 59F it fermented down to a 1.014 final gravity in just under three weeks time. The fermentation took off vigorously with a short lag time and the beer was a huge hit with those lager lovers lucky enough to sample it before it ran out.

Early on bottling day I filled a 16 quart pot with about a gallon of filtered water, put the lid on it and let it boil for about 15 minutes to sterilize it. I removed the pot from the heat to cool off leaving the lid on, this water would be used to rinse the yeast out of the fermentor. Once I sanitized my bottles and bottling bucket I put the pot in an ice water bath to get the sterilized water equal to the beer temperature. I transferred the beer from the fermentor to the bottling bucket leaving just the trub in the fermentor.

Then I sanitized a long handled plastic spoon, glass half gallon pickle jar, four pint mason jars and the lids to get them ready for the next step. I poured a half gallon of the sterilized water directly on top of the trub in the fermentor and used the spoon to gently mix the water and trub together to get the yeast into solution. After a minute of gentle stirring I carefully poured the mixture in the fermentor into the pickle jar filling it up to the very top and screwed on the top. I set the pickle jar aside and went back to bottling up my beer.

Stratified Layers In ECY-12 And WLP007 Yeast

The healthy yeast layer we're really interest in storing has a nice light creamy color and it is located just above the heavier trub/cold break layer at the bottom of the containers. The ECY-12 lager yeast on the left is a medium flocculent yeast so more cells will tend to stay in suspension longer than the highly flocculent WLP007 ale yeast on the right. When washing any strain of yeast it's important to harvest a good mixture of both the more flocculent and less flocculent cells in each type of yeast to assure your future fermentations will continue to attenuate as fully as the original strain.

Mason Jars Filled With Washed ECY-12

Buy the time I was done bottling my beer the slurry in the pickle jar had started separating into separate layers, with the heavier hop particles and dead yeast cells settling out first at the bottom of the jar. The very top of the slurry had a thin layer of something and in between the two was the larger layer of yeast. I laid the four mason jars out in a line and filled each one up half way then went back to the first jar and topped them all off in the same order. What was left in the pickle jar was mostly all gritty looking trub that I washed down the sink after screwing the lids on the mason jars, labeling and putting them in the refrigerator.

Freshly Rinsed And Stored Yeast

Fast forward to this past Friday morning when I started off my day by brewing up a 1.040 batch of wort to use in my starter and taking a mason jar of stored yeast out of the refrigerator to warm up. A half cup of light DME mixed in with 1200 ml of filtered water some old dry yeast and boiled for 15 minutes was all it took to get going. Once the wort and yeast were at the same temperature I sanitized my Erlenmeyer flask, funnel, stir bar and decanted off most of the water from the mason. I shook the yeast and water in the jar to break up the flocs, get all the yeast into solution and then poured it into the flask topping the flask off with the starter wort. I dropped in the stir bar, sprayed the top of the flask loosely covered the opening with a piece of sanitized tin foil and set the flask on the stirplate.

ECY-12 Yeast Starter Before Pitching

Several hours later a nice layer of krausen had begun to form on top of the starter which peaked around eight hours later. I left the starter spinning on the stir plate until I was ready to pitch it into my wort the next day. I began the making the starter on Friday morning and pitched into a batch of wort around 3:00 pm the next day as soon as the wort cooled to the same 60F temperature as the yeast. This time I remembered to hold the stir bar in place with a magnet so it didn't end up inside the fermentor for a few weeks. The wort from the flask smelled good, there were no off odors when I pitched it and the fermentation started quickly. I checked the air lock this morning and there was already activity from the Co2 being created from inside the fermentor.

Aerated Rye Wort With ECY-12 Starter

The fermentor is now safely tucked away inside my fermentation chamber where I'll keep a close eye on maintaining a 59F temperature throughout the fermentation. It'll be a few weeks before I get to taste the fermented rye beer and compare it to the first batch I brewed last month but judging from the 1.060 original gravity reading, color and the taste of the wort before pitching the yeast this batch is definitely off to a great start.

Screwy's Recipe 71 - Screwer In The Rye Lager

2012-03-28T10:15:00.002-04:00

For the past several weeks I had been thinking about brewing a Rye beer so I did quite a bit of research online reading everything I could find related to brewing beer using Rye malts. The styles of beer that I've been brewing lately have all tasted good and now that I successfully converted my extract recipes to all grain I was ready to brew something new. But before a I could create a new recipe I had to actually drink a Rye beer to get a sense of what a Rye beer tastes like. So one afternoon Mike brought over some Sierra Nevada 'Ruthless Rye' beers for us to try out and later that day a new beer recipe was born.

Chocolate, Crystal, Pale Malts And Flaked Rye Grains

We've been drinking Sierra Nevada Pale Ale for quite a few years by now and they were one of my favorite beers so I was happy to learn they just released a new style called Ruthless Rye made with rye malt. To us the new beer had mostly the same SNPA taste and flavor except at the very end when you could clearly taste the clean spiciness of the rye. The spicy character of the rye malt became less and less noticeable with every new sip of beer and when we had to switch back to drinking their Pale Ale we immediately knew we were drinking a different beer.

Sierra Nevada Ruthless Rye In Glass While Racking My Clone

The color of my Screwer In The Rye matched perfectly with the color of the Sierra Nevada Ruthless Rye we'd been drinking while transferring the cooled wort to the fermentor. Brewing a new experimental beer was very exciting for me and I took extra steps to make sure it would come out tasting as close as possible to the beer I was cloning. I spent a few hours over the course of the next week calibrating my brewing thermometer, which I found after a year of use had drifted 3-4F. I used qBrew to create the ingredient list of grains and hops I would be using and then put together the rest of my brewing plan and entered them into the batch notes and saved them.

Washing The Rice Hulls Prior To Adding To Mash

I found from my research that flaked rye is an adjunct and it should be used in a recipe in a similar way as flaked oats or flaked wheat to avoid stuck sparges. I also read in several threads where some brewers rinse their rice hulls under running tap water before putting them in the mash tun, while other brewers claimed there was no need to and they just poured them right into the mash tun. I've used rice hulls many times before when brewing my wheat beers and never rinsed them but for my first attempt at brewing the perfect Rye beer I decided to rinse them thoroughly before mashing them. It was clear to see that the rinse water used to clean the rice hulls did contain a whole lot of rice related debris and it took about three good rinses before it started to look clearer.

After Recirculating The Wort Sample Was 1.074

At the start of the lauter I recirculated the wort for about 30 minutes to setup the grain bed and get the wort running clear before adding it to the boil pot. I used a 60 minute single step infusion mash at 154F to prepare the wort and a fly sparge at 168F for 45 minutes to fill the boil pot. I always take a hydrometer sample at the very start and very end of filling the boil pot with wort. The temperature corrected readings for this rye beer were 1.074 and 1.032 respectively, which confirmed the conversion rate was good and there was no chance of extracting tannins caused by running off too much wort.

60 Minute Boil With Hop Additions

I'm a firm believer in first wort hopping now because I find myself using this method of increasing hop utilization in all of my beers now. It's pretty easy to do and the way I decided on is to take the bittering addition, which in this case called for a 60 minute boil, and just put it in the boil pot and let the wort flow through the hops until the pot is full. Since brewing this way I have never noticed any astringency or vegetable matter off flavors in any of the styles I've brewed using FWH additions not even in the really hoppy IPA styles. I put all the pellet hops I use in hop sacks and then remove them all just prior to cooling the wort down adding boiling water to the wort as needed to keep the pot full.

1/2 Tablet Of WhirlFloc Keeps The Cold Break Out Of The Fermentor

By using hops sacks to remove the hops after the boil and the addition of some WhirlFloc 10-15 minutes before flameout helps a lot in keeping the cold break inside the boil pot and out of the fermentor when racking the wort. I've found that reducing chill haze and producing a clear, clean tasting beer requires care during the lauter when recirculating the wort as well as using a fining agent to help settle the trub and using an autosiphon when transferring to the primary fermentor and bottling bucket.

Pouring East Coast Yeast's ECY12 Into Aerated Wort

Of course using good fresh yeast that provides the right attenuation and flocculation characteristics for the style of beer you're brewing is important to produce a great tasting beer that's both clear and clean tasting. After a good long boil any oxygen that was in the wort has been depleted and it has to be put back into the wort in sufficient quantities so that the yeast can load up their food reserves and multiply, keeping the lag and growth phases as short as possible. Once all the oxygen in the wort is used up by the yeast a healthy fermentation will begin with a vengeance and soon after the yeast will drop out of suspension further clearing the beer. Cold crashing the fermentor for a day before transferring the beer to a bottling bucket will also make the beer clearer and cleaner as more yeast will drop out of suspension before going into your kegs or bottles.

East Coast Yeast ECY12 - Old Newark Beer™ Fermented At 59F

The fermentor spent the next 3 weeks inside my fermentation chamber with the temperature of the fermentor held between 57-59F, a few days before bottling I let the temperature rise to 62F for a couple of days before transferring to my bottling bucket. The last five days in the primary fermentor is when I added my finishing hops and let them soak in the beer for five days, this last hop addition really brought this beer to life because the samples I drank during bottling had all the up front aroma that was missing at the end of the boil.

The Rye's Final Gravity Finished At 1.014

My latest Rye beer recipe is now been in the bottles and keg naturally carbonating since last Saturday and it will be ready for sampling in about another week and a half. Based on my initial impression of this recipe I have very high expectations since the rye flavors were noticeable but not cloying and the mouthfeel seemed as if it would be spot on once the carbonation levels were reached and the beer chilled to serving temperature. All in all my latest creation left me with a good feeling of accomplishment considering all the things that went into brewing this nice new beer and what could have gone wrong as in any new recipe but didn't. Now it's just a waiting game waiting for the yeast to add that nice soft natural carbonation to what already tastes like a remarkable beer.

Screwer In The Rye!

Today I got to drink my very first Screwer In The Rye Lager! It's been naturally carbonating for eight days and I put a few bottles in the refrigerator around 6AM this morning. I'm so excited, it's my first attempt at brewing a Sierra Nevada Ruthless Rye and I can't wait to try it cold and carbonated.

Screwer In The Rye Lager

This beer is nicely carbonated, somewhere between an ale and a wheat beer, loaded with spicy aromas and clean tasting, absolutely delicious. The first thing I noticed when lifting the glass to take a sip was the nice rye aroma that gives you a hint of what's in store, followed by the unmistakably complex hop presence. It has a rich dark color with good mouthfeel, long lasting head retention and the blend of rye, malt and hop flavors and aromas are not at all cloying in any way.

Great Mouthfeel, Head Retention And Lacing

Somewhat darker in color than a Sierra Nevada Ruthless Rye this very tasty rye beer has already become one of my favorites. I imagine paring this beer with any type of barbequed meats, steaks, ribs, burgers or chicken and it will stand up to and enhance their flavors perfectly without over powering them. If you're tired of brewing the same old pale ales and are looking to try a rye beer style go for it you won't be disappointed.

After making a few very minor tweaks in the grain bill I was able to brew this beer with just about the right color I wanted, this tweak is really more about aesthetics than anything else. The other change in my process involved pitching a 2 liter starter of East Coast Yeast ECY-12 that I had washed and propagated from my brew's original fermentation.

Screwer In The Rye Lager II

This is a great tasting beer with a nice spicy rye aroma combined with just the right balance of rye and hop flavor to give the beer a clean satisfying finish. It's a nice variation of an IPA although there really is nothing pale about it but it is very hop forward with just the right amount of spice. The addition of the Crystal malt lends just the slightest hint of caramel sweetness and adds enough body, lacing and head retention to last from first sip to last.

I brewed this recipe again in June 2012 about four months after posting this original story and made several adjustments to the recipe. I switched out Crystal 10L for the Crystal 20L in the first recipe to get the color a little lighter and after removing the rice hulls completely the sparge still didn't stick. The next time I brew this recipe I have a couple of new tricks to try to get the color just a shade or two lighter yet.

Screwy In The Rye Version III

My First 10 Gallon All Grain Brewday

2012-02-26T15:21:00.002-05:00

There was snow on the ground and I could hear the wind howling outside as I poured my morning coffee and put together the list of things to pick up at Princeton Homebrew. Today I would be kicking my brewing game up a notch by increasing my brew volumes to 10 gallons. It wasn't all that long ago when I first made the switch to 5 gallon batches from single Mr. Beer sized brewing. It soon became clear to me that it didn't take much more time to brew 10 gallons all grain recipes as it did to brew Mr. Beer sized batches.

6.5 Gallon Ale Pails

Now that there are two 5 gallon mash tuns ready to use on brewday it made sense to go out and buy some 6.5 gallon Ale Pails to use for fermenting and bottling my 5 gallon batches.While there I also picked up another 20 quart boil pot to use with the extra volumes of wort I produced now on brew day. I haven't abandoned my smaller Mr. Beer fermentors, I still use the six of them to make smaller batch sizes that are perfect for experimenting and making slight variations to the base recipe.

10 Gallons Of Screwy Witz Witbier Primary Fermentation

I've got the square footage to pull it off so I've managed to keep my brewing process indoors, I do 10 gallon batches in my brew room on my gas range. It makes the weather irrelevant to a certain degree I don't care if it's snowing, raining or blistering hot outside I can just focus on brewing my recipes. The other advantage I find when brewing indoors is everything is already there sink, stove refrigerator brewing supplies bottles, fermentors and storage area.

Indoor Brewing Has It's Benefits

Every brewer has to learn how to brew different styles of beer on their equipment and it can take a while before the volumes, temperatures and brewing steps are perfected using a particular setup. Increasing my brewing capacity meant adapting my Mr. Beer sized batches to use multiple mash tuns, boil pots, larger fermentors and increased storage capacity. Timing all the processes together so that brewing all 10 gallons were completed in as little time as possible was important too.

Increasing Wort Volume Using Multiple Mash Tuns

As part of my plan to brew 10 gallons of beer in a single day one of the main goals was to lay out the brewing steps in such a way so the brewing was completed in the same amount of time as it took me to brew 5 gallon batches. I theory the obvious choke point in the whole process would be the wort cooling process, no matter how much wort I could boil I knew I could only cool down 5 gallons of hot wort at a time. In practice I found that this wasn't as big a problem as it first appeared.

Staggered Brewing Times Keep The Wort Coming

Of course brewing 10 gallons batches in a single day meant picking up all the ingredients the day before, getting an early start on brew day smacking the yeast packets and heating up the 170F water to burnish the mash tuns so they were preheated before adding the grains and strike water for the mash. At one point in the brewday I had all four burners going heating up strike water and boiling wort at the same time. Brewing is mostly all about temperature control, calculating water volumes and precise time measurements. Of course sanitization is an important part of brewing too but in the hotside of brewing it's pretty easy because you get to boil everything.

Rapid Cooling Keeps The Brew Day Short

So I took a lot of notes and learned a lot of new things about 10 gallon brewing as I brewed my first large recipe. The timing for heating the strike water, mashing the grains, boiling and cooling the wort all worked out pretty much as I had anticipated they would when planning my first larger all grain batch. In the end the results turned out to be exactly what I had hoped they be, double the amount of beer at the end of the brew day. The other thing that did kind of surprise me a bit was the enormous amount of beer I had to bottle, which is by all means a very good thing. As more and more people try my recipes there is less and less doubt in my mind that I'm definitely on to something here with this brewing thing of mine.

Packaging And Storage Needs Are Larger Too

I found out I could store fifteen 12 ounce bottles inside each cardboard box that my one liter plastic PET bottles originally shipped in, I don't really use the plastic PETs anymore and it's a shame since I have plenty of them already. Yesterday I was able to bottle both batches of my Deutschland Hammerfest Oktoberfest/Marzen Lager and my Screwy Witz Witbier recipes. It took more than 200 bottles to fit it all but naturally carbonated they should be ready to drink in another two weeks.

Screwy's Recipe 65 - Screwy Witz Witbier

2012-01-14T23:40:00.000-05:00

Over the past several months I've been slowly converting all of my favorite extract recipes over to all grain. I've converted my Stouts, IPAs, Oktoberfest and several others over the past six months saving my wheat beer extract recipe for last. I was a little anxious about converting the wheat beer recipe to all grain because I would have to add flaked wheat and flaked oats to the mash. I've never used flaked wheat or flaked oats before and I was worried that if I didn't do it properly I could get a stuck mash. A stuck mash would mean wasting an entire brewday and ending up with no beer to show for it, not to mention throwing away all those ingredients.

Wheat, Oats, Barley, Hops And Secret Ingredients In Screwy Witz

Thankfully the morning I picked up my grains Joe Bair was helpful enough to explain which step I had to do differently in preparing the mash when using flaked ingredients. Thanks to Joe's advice I was able to brew two 5 gallon batches back to back without running into any problems or getting a stuck mash. Once the mash was completed brewing an all grain wheat beer was just the same as brewing any other all grain recipe as far as the lauter, boil and fermentation went.

Screwy Witz Witbier At Four Weeks

The last time I brewed a Belgian Witbier it was from an extract recipe had I ordered from Mr. Beer in 2010. I had spiced up the recipe back then by adding crushed coriander seeds and orange rinds to provide some citrus notes and some cardamom to add bit of spicy heat. Back then I hadn't really developed a taste for this style of beer yet but lot of people who tried it really liked it. Since then I'd been brewing wheat beers using DME and steeping grains and those recipes produced a nice drinkable wheat beer that was a hit with the people who drank them. So I set out to convert my basic wheat beer recipe from DME to all grain, with further plans in mind of using some adjuncts to create as many different wheat beer styles as I can.

I Love A Good Wheat Beer Any Time Of Year

Now with any fear of a stuck mash out of mind and far behind me I focused on creating the perfect Belgian Witbier recipe, one that I thought came the closest to what I wanted and others would expect in the final beer. My goal here was now two fold convert my DME recipe to all grain and then extend that conversion further out into the BJCP guidelines for a true Belgian Witbier which states 'Moderate sweetness (often with light notes of honey and/or vanilla) with light, grainy, spicy wheat aromatics, often with a bit of tartness. Moderate perfumy coriander, often with a complex herbal, spicy, or peppery note in the background. Moderate zesty, citrusy orangey fruitiness. A low spicy-herbal hop aroma is optional, but should never overpower the other characteristics.'

Flaked Oats, Flaked Wheat, Wheat Malt, Pilsener Malt And Rice Hulls

Within a week and only after having invested a lot of time doing online research I put together my final ingredient list. I emailed the list over to Princeton Homebrew and anxiously waited for the reply from Joe Bair confirming when he thought he could have my order ready and which of my preferred ingredients were in stock. I know whenever I email an order in to be filled it depends on how hectic it is in the store before I get a reply confirmation back. I always make it a point to send my list over well in advance of my planned pick up time and remember on the drive over that I may have some time to look around and ask questions while I wait to pay for my order.

Mixture Of Rice Hulls And Malted Grains Go In First

The day I picked up my ingredients Joe asked if I'd ever done an all grain wheat beer before and I said no this would be my first time. Joe suggested that I first add the malts, rice hulls and strike water to the mash tun and mix them all together until they hit my mash temperature, making sure there was enough room and strike water left on top of the tun so when I added the flaked oats and wheat they were submerged.

Flaked Wheat And Oats Added To Top Of Mash

Loading the mash tun was easy to do even though l had never done it this way before. The idea was to simply create a sort of filter bed made up of rice hulls and grains that would prevent the thick proteins from the flaked oats and wheat from sticking the mash. I just added a cup full of pilsener malt then a cup full of rice hulls and then a cup full of pilsener malt then a cup full of wheat malt until all the hulls and malts were in the mash tun. Then I added strike water until I reached my mash thickness, stirred all the grains together hitting my mash temperature and leaving enough room for the flaked grains and additional strike water.

Mash Tun Topped Off And Ready To Go

Into the mash tun went the rice halls along with the Belgian pilsener malt and German wheat malts. I filled the tun up to the 4 gallon mark when I hit my mash temperature of 152F after mixing all the rice hulls and grains together with the strike water. Next I poured the flaked wheat and flaked oats on top of the mash and then added enough strike water to fill the tun up to the 4.75 gallon mark and then screwed on the lid and began the 60 minute countdown. After doing this for the first time I realized that this whole process was easier to do than it was to explain and it made perfect sense. The rice hulls mixed in with the malts provided a deep enough grain bed that the mixture of flaked oats and wheat on top would never be able to clog up the filter and cause a stuck mash.

Single Infusion Mash And Fly Sparge

Since the flaked oats and wheat had to sit undisturbed during the entire mash process there was no need to open the tun or mess with it for the entire hour. I built this mash tun myself and have used it dozens of times so far and it always holds the mash temperature from start to finish. I start out by preheating the mash tun with about 2-3 gallons of 170F water for 20 minutes or so only dumping it out just before I'm ready to add in my grains and strike water.

Vorlauf The New Wort Until It Runs Really Clear

Right after I stir the mash and tweak my mash temperature I screw on the lid of the mash tun and immediately place two folded towels on top of the lid to help hold in the heat and keep it from escaping through the lid. Since the cooler itself was designed by the manufacturer to hold cold liquids the lid wasn't engineered to hold in heat but the folded towels placed on top of the lid provide the needed insulation.

Adding The Screwy Witz Special Ingredients To The Boil Pot

One of my favorite parts of the brewday were spent preparing the spices that went into the boilpot along with the hop additions and bitter orange peel. I put all the spices in a small plastic container for convenience and then just added them all to the boil at the same time. Belgian Witbier by style should use Noble hops that complement the citrusy coriander and spicy cardamom induced flavors and aromas that are unique to this style of beer.

Cooling Down The Wort To Pitching Temperature

If there's one step left in my brewing process that needs further improvement it's the wort cooling process. I learned a lesson in physics about the heat transfer in liquids the first time I used a water bath cool my wort down. Unlike hot air that rises up drawing in the cooler surrounding air to replace it as it's being heated water acts a whole lot different. With my sink filled with 55F water and a bunch of frozen water bottles I found that the water closest to the boil pot was really hot. But the further I moved my hand through the water away from the boil pot the colder the water temperature was. I ended up using my mash paddle to carefully stir the water bath to keep the colder water circulating against the side of the boil pot.

Racking Cooled Wort To LBKs Using An Auto Siphon

As the wort was cooling I gave it several good stirs to keep the hot wort in contact with the cooling coils and the side of the boil pot. This really sped up the cooling process a lot by preventing a thermal barrier from forming around the colder coils and pot surfaces. Another benefit of stirring the wort is it forces all the cold break to collect in a neat little pile on the bottom of the pot making racking only the clean wort into the fermentors much easier.

Screwy's Recipe 64 - Burstin' Out Pale Ale

2011-12-01T17:11:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to have the house to myself long enough to brew two all grain IPA recipes back to back. I picked up the ingredients Friday afternoon at Princeton Homebrew and started preheating my mash tun by 11:00am on both Saturday and Sunday mornings. Having this much uninterrupted brewing time allowed me to focus on some of the finer details of my brewing process and to try out a few new ideas. I was even lucky enough to take home two 125ml bottles of East Coast Yeast's ECY-12 which really made my day.

2-Row /Crystal 10L Malt With Cascades, Centennial And Columbus Hops

My goal was to brew an American IPA style beer using mostly 2-Row as the base malt with just a bit of Crystal 10L to add some sweetness. The idea was to let the hops come through loud and clear so I used a hop schedule that added more than half of the IBUs in the form of flavor and aroma hopping. While I was at it why not include first wort hopping in the process too, and so I did. The ECY-12 would be the perfect yeast choice to ferment this beer too because it's such a clean fermenter at 58F, it's a lager like yeast but not really a true lager yeast.

The bittering levels for an American IPA are between 60-70 IBUs and this recipe calculated out to be 71 IBUs with an original gravity of 1.061. I started my hop schedule by lautering 5 gallons of wort onto an ounce of Columbus hops and then adding another ounce of Centennial at 20 minutes and the other 2 ounces of Cascades at 10 and 7 minutes before flameout. I also held a couple of ounces of Cascades in reserve to be used for dry hopping once the primary fermentation is done. With 15 minutes remaining to the boil I added a tablet of WhirlFloc to help coagulate some of the proteins and make them easier to keep out of the fermentor.

1.080 Start Of Lauter 1.030 End Of Lauter And 1.060 Original Gravity

I used a single infusion mash for 60 minutes at 155F to prepare the wort for lautering. after the wort was running clear I took my sweet time fly sparging and filled the 5 gallon boilpot in a little over 30 minutes. Since the ECY-12 yeast is a medium attenuator and this beer comes in at just under 6% ABV I chose a mash temperature of 155F, your mileage may vary if you use a lower or higher attenuating yeast or a higher ABV brew. For a lower attenuating yeast you may want to mash a few degrees lower and just the opposite for a higher attenuating yeast. Whichever yeast you use be sure it ferments cleanly without producing excessive ester, phenol or other overpowering flavors that will interfere with the up front hop character so important in an American IPA style beer.

1 Ounce Of Columbus Hops Added As First Wort Hop Addition

The trick to getting this high IBU beer right is in getting all that great IPA hopping without turning the beer bitter. I've used First Wort Hopping several times in my IPAs and I'm a believer in any process that claims increased bittering without introducing any harsh resin or vegetable off flavors. So into the boilpot the Columbus hops went submerged in hot wort for the entire 30 minute lauter, another 30 minutes while the wort reached the boiling point followed by a good 60 minute boil. The other big challenge to making a good American IPA is loading up the wort with enough hop aroma and flavor so that it will remain hop forward after spending a month or two in the bottle or keg. I've heard from other brewers and experienced it myself where a nice hoppy beer at bottling kind of losses it's aroma after sitting in the bottle for a few months, this is what I'm trying to avoid by using the hop bursting technique.

Vorlauf Wort Until The Grain Bed Sets And The Wort Runs Clear

If you've done all grain brewing before and used a mash tun you know the first few quarts of wort to drain out during the lauter are pretty cloudy and loaded with bits of grains as shown in the picture on the left. After recirculating, or performing the vorlauf process, until the grain bed has been set the wort runs clear as shown in the picture on the right. I took the extra time to recirculate the wort before lautering so that only the clearest wort went into the boilpot. The lauter itself took a little over 30 minutes, I always set a timer at the start of the lauter and adjust the flow so I fill a quarter of the pot every 7-10 minutes until it's filled with 19 quarts of wort. I keep the lid on top of the boilpot the entire time to keep the heat in and any flying bugs out and it takes my stove 30 minutes to bring the wort up to a boil. As the water in the wort evaporates I replace it about halfway through the boil with boiling water I keep in a separate pot just for that purpose. At the end of the boil I remove the hops sacks and add enough of the boiling water so that the wort level is a half inch down from the top of the boilpot. That's just enough room so the wort doesn't spill out when I carry it over to the sink and put my wort cooler in it to cool the wort down quickly.

Screwy's Burstin Out Pale Ale

Size 5.00 gallons: Estimated IBU=74, SRM=5, OG=1.061, FG=1.015, ABV= 5.9%

Recipe:

Click to download this recipe file for qBrew

10.5 pounds US 2 Row

0.5 pound Crystal 20L

1 ounce Columbus (pellets)

1 ounce Centennial (pellets)

3 ounces Cascade (pellets)

East Coast Yeast ECY12 - Old Newark Beer™

..or...

White Labs WLP001 - American Ale Yeast™

Mash at 155° F for 60 minutes.

Boil for 60 minutes.

Ferment at WLP001 at 68° F (18.8 °C), ECY12 at 58° F (14.0 °C) until final gravity is reached.

Click to download Screwy's latest qBrew database

Directions:

Infusion Mash: (Soak mash tun in 8 quarts of 170° F water for 20 minutes, preheat and dump it)

Heat 21 quarts of filtered water to 165° F

Pour 14 quarts of 165° F water into mash tun

Mix in 11.0 pounds of crushed grain mix at 68° F

Pour the remaining 165° F water to fill mash tun to 4.50 gallon mark

Stir water and grain mixture and adjust to 155° F and mash for 60 minutes

Fly sparge with 168° F strike water to set mash bed to 168° F

Lauter for 30 minutes adding 19 quarts of sweet wort to 20 quart pot

Full Wort Boil:

Add 1.0 ounce Columbus hops as the FWH added to boil pot during lauter

Add 1.0 ounce Centennial hops with 20 minutes remaining to boil

Add 1/2 tablet WhirlFloc with 15 minutes remaining to boil

Add 1.0 ounce Cascade hops with 10 minutes remaining to boil

Add 1.0 ounce Cascade hops with 7 minutes remaining to boil

(Dry hop 1.0 ounce Cascade hops after primary fermentation for 5 days)

Primary Fermentation:

Use autosiphon to prevent excess hop and grain debris from getting into fermenter

Fill two Mr. Beer fermenters equally with wort and top off with filtered water to just above the 8.5 quart mark

Aerate wort and pitch WLP001 at 70° F or ECY12 at 60° F

Ferment to final gravity, raise to 3-5° F over 2 days, dry hop and hold for 5 days

Secondary Fermentation:

n/a

Keg/Bottle:

Keg and force carbonate at 30 psi for 2-3 days at 34°F

..or..

Keg with priming sugar, purge with Co2 and naturally carbonate for 7-14 days at 68°F

..or..

Bottle prime and carbonate at 68° for 14 to 21 days

Adding Mr. Beer Yeast As Nutrient

Once the wort got up to a good hard boil I started my countdown timer. The wort boiled pretty much unattended for the next 40 minutes before I had anything more to do to so I started getting my next hop additions, wort cooler and racking cane ready. During this time I gently rolled the ECY12 yeast every once in while to mix the cells up into solution in the bottle so they all poured out easily into the fermentor when pitched. The East Coast Yeast bottles contain a huge amount of yeast cells packed into a large 125ml jar. I have no problem splitting a single jar into two separate jars for pitching into each of my two 2.4 gallon fermentors since each 125ml jar of yeast is capable of fermenting 5 gallons of beer.

Each ECY Bottle Contains Massive Cell Counts

The ECY12 is priced the same as Wyeast or White Labs liquid yeast and each ECY jar contains at least twice the amount of yeast in a typical smack pack or tube, making using this exceptional yeast a no brainer. Not to mention that the yeast is grown locally by Al Buck, hand delivered in a cooler to Princeton Homebrew my LHBS and is awesome for fermenting just about any type and style of beer. Princeton Homebrew is the exclusive distributor of East Coast Yeast and currently ships up to 7 vials anywhere in the United States for $16.00 including ice pack and bubble wrap. Orders are now available to be placed online using PayPal and you can subscribe to the ECY Google Group by visiting the Princeton Homebrew website and getting the latest East Coast Yeast inventory information. You should act fast though the last shipment was sold out in just 21 minutes.

Sanitize 2 Bottles, Split And Pitch Into 2 Fermentors

With 5 minutes remaining in the boil the brewhaus aromas coming off of the wort were by now unmistakable and pure heaven to breathe. Even with the continuous movement of fresh air being blown in one window and hot boil vapors being exhausted out another window at a fast rate it was very obvious to anyone in the room we were making beer. As the count down timer rang out signaling the end of the boil I used a pair of sanitized stainless steel tongs to begin removing all four hop sacks from the boil pot. I placed them inside a strainer placed on top of a small aluminum pot to allow any remaining wort to drip out before emptying the spent hops into the garbage. I learned the hard way that spent hops and grains need to be drained, bagged and taken outside to be disposed of as soon as possible on brewday. The first and last time I didn't do that the brewhaus got infested with fruit flies, it seems they really like breeding in spent hops for some reason.

Giving The Boiling Wort Some Final Stirs Before Flameout

To help cool the boiling hot wort down quickly I filled one side of my double sink up halfway with cold water and about a dozen frozen water bottles to get the temperature of the water even lower, basically making a huge ice bath to place the boil pot in. After removing all the hop sacks and pouring in enough boiling make up water to raise the level of the wort up to a half inch below the top of the boil pot I carried the boil pot over to the sink and placed it in the ice bath. I quickly put my wort cooler into the boil pot and connected it to the sink after routing a vinyl tubing from the discharge end of the cooler to the drain of the other double sink. As the boil pot sat in the ice bath I opened the valve on my filtered water faucet letting the water flow into the ice bath raising the level up to an inch below the top of the boil pot, to totally submerse the wort in cold water. Using the ice bath with the wort cooler to cool down the hot wort dropped the wort temperature very quickly from 212F to 90F in about 10 minutes or so. I was able to get the wort down to it's 65F pitching temperature in about another 20 minutes, stirring the wort once or twice to keep the hot wort in contact with the cold sides of the boil pot and cooler coils helped it along.

Large Double Sink Makes For A Huge Functional Ice Bath

With the wort cooled down to pitching temperature, the hop sacks removed and the fermentors and racking cane sanitized it was now time to transfer the wort to the LBKs. Stirring the wort while it was cooling off helped form a nice pile of trub in the center of the boil pot which worked perfectly with the racking cane and clip I use to transfer the wort. Since the thickest part of the trub pile is near the center of the pot and the racking cane hangs close to the wall of the boil pot the wort is easily transferred clean to the fermentors. Once again having a double sided sink comes in handy because by simply putting a temporary shelf across the top of one side, placing the boil pot on it and the fermentors in the bottom of the other side allows the wort to transfer by gravity. I found the top of an old unused cooler that fits perfectly across the top of my sink without sliding and therefore eliminating any chance of accidentally spilling hot wort. The top is made of plastic which is easy to clean and sanitize as needed, it was a very lucky find for me and I use it all the time.

Happiness Is Racking Clear Trub Free Wort Easily

As all the racking and cooling was going on I managed to keep turning and gently shaking the two bottles of East Coast Yeast I was going to pitch. I do this to get as many cells into suspension as possible by keeping them stirred up and preventing the cells from sticking to the bottles walls. I do this with all brands and types of liquid yeast because I want to end up with as many cells as possible in my fermentor and not inside the bottles to be thrown away. Another interesting fact I found out is that fruit flies are also attracted to yeast solutions whether it be rehydrated dry yeast or liquid yeast. I mention this because it took me nearly a week to eliminate the infestation of fruit flies from my brewhaus and until I did I got a first hand look at what they were attracted to. If you've ever had a similar experience you know what a nuisance they can be especially when your transferring cooled wort and pitching yeast, they seem to be everywhere and shooing them away gets to be a real pain.

Pitching Half A Bottle Of ECY12 Directly Into Fermentor

With the wort transferred to the fermentors, the yeast stirred up into solution and both my hands hurting form aerating the wort for several minutes it was time to unscrew the top of the bottles and pitch the ECY12 yeast. Once the yeast was pitched it was back to aerating the wort all over again for several more minutes so that I could get as much oxygen as I could back into the wort before screwing on the fermentor lids. After boiling the wort mostly all of the oxygen that was present in it before the boil was now gone. Since yeast need oxygen, during their initial lag and growth phases in order to multiply and build up energy for the upcoming fermentation, aerating the wort is the only way to put the oxygen back in it. Sore hands are the price I pay for manually aerating the wort instead of investing in an O2 tank, gauges and diffuser stone which would make aeration much easier and actually increase the levels of oxygen to higher levels than when using a spoon.

Cleaning Up The Mash Tun After The Lauter Was Done

A typical all grain brew day takes me 5-6 hours from start to finish including cleaning up all my brewing gear and storing it away until my next brew day. I brew 5 gallon batches now all the time and rack the wort that's made into two 2.4 gallon Mr. Beer fermentors. I started out doing it this way because I bought 6 of the smaller fermentors when I first got started brewing beer and since then I have found them to be pretty versatile. They are easier to carry around when full and to clean when empty. Their smaller capacity let's me fill up two of them from a single 5 gallon batch and allows my to ferment or dry hop one of them a little differently than the other and judge the results to see which one is the best. It also allows me to mix the two together to take the experimentation a bit further if needed. The LBKs work well as secondary fermentors and double as bottling buckets too and it's not too rare that I have all 6 of them in use at the same time.

Final Gravity Reading 1.012 At Bottling

The Burstin' Out Pale Ale was ready to bottle in about 10 days after pitching the ECY12 yeast into it and fermenting it at 58-60F until I got the final gravity reading of 1.012, which actually finished about 2-3 points lower than qBrew had calculated. I always naturally carbonate my kegged beer so I added to each 2.5 gallon corny keg 5 tablespoons of pure cane sugar boiled for 5 minutes in half a cup of filtered water then cooled down to 68F. This comes out to roughly a half a teaspoon full of pure cane sugar per 12 ounce bottle and adds between 2.5 - 2.75 volumes of Co2 which is just perfect for this style of beer.

First Pour From Bottle At 12 Days

Bingo! What more can I say, at only 12 days old this beer is already perfect. I'm not sure how to describe it but I'll try. The first thing you notice when opening the bottle is that familiar 'ppfftt' immediately followed by an aroma that is undoubtedly what you'd expect from an awesome IPA. Not bitter at all but full of hop aroma and flavor with great lacing and head retention. The ECY12 cleanly fermented this beer letting all the hop aroma and flavors through with absolutely no traces of astringency or resinous off flavors. I only had two bottles to sample but they were both delicious so I just racked a corny keg in the refrigerator for drinking this weekend. I feel like I've died and gone to hop heaven.

Naturally Carbonated And Delicious

After sharing this beer with a few of my favorite hop loving friends, and some family members that don't care for hoppy beers at, I am now convinced that this recipe is destined to be real favorite of mine. Full of American hop aroma that hits you square in the face as you lift the glass to take your very first sip. Next thing that takes you by surprise is the soft smooth mouth feel and the amount of pure hop flavor in each sip.

Perfectly Balanced, Not Bitter And Naturally Carbonated

Nothing stands in the way of the beer when delivering the most favorable hop flavor and aromas directly to you with each and every taste. Its soft golden color reminds me of fields of grain waving in the wind on a midsummer afternoon. Burstin' Out Pale Ale's unsurpassed long lasting foam, superior lacing and 'session' beer-like qualities are deceptive of it's nearly 6.0% ABV alcohol content. I'd suggest this beer with a pepperoni pizza while sitting down watching a good movie.

What Every Brewer Should Know About Yeast

2011-11-24T16:16:00.000-05:00

As a new brewer it took me quite a while before I was able to understand what was going on inside the LBKs during 'the fermentation'. I see posts here all the time from new and conditioned brewers alike about off flavors in their beer and how or why they have them. So this morning I decided to sit down with my morning coffee, since I couldn't sleep anyway, and try to set the record straight and try to explain the 4 things every brewer should know about yeast.

Here's how I view the relationship between yeast, off flavors and fermentation temperatures throughout the typical beer fermentation. While I'm writing this with brewing an Ale in mind the same principals apply equally to Lager fermentations too.

Phase 1 begins as soon as you pitch your yeast and is referred to as the lag phase, which we brewers want to keep as short as possible. The yeast are using up the sugars and oxygen in the wort to load up their food reserves, they won't ferment anything until they've been well fed. Stressing the yeast out with too high temperatures or too low numbers of viable cells will prolong the lag phase and the fermentation will take longer to complete while increasing the amounts and types of off flavors like diacetyl that may or may not ever condition out.

Phase 2 starts as soon as the lag phase ends because now the yeast have enough energy stored up to start multiplying, this is referred to as the growth phase. This is where you begin to see a bit of foam floating at the surface the wort from the production of Co2 and the pH and oxygen levels of the wort will start dropping. If you've pitched enough healthy yeast at the right temperatures into well aerated wort the lag time should have been 6-12 hours and the yeast are now full of energy and off to a very healthy start.

Phase 3 begins as soon as the growth phase is done and is triggered by a lack of oxygen in the wort, this is known as the fermentation phase. This is the phase where the production of Co2, alcohol and your beer's flavor is at it's peak and the wort temperature rises 3-5F higher than the ambient air outside the fermentor. The yeast will stay in suspension, so they come in contact with as many sugars as possible, over the next 3-7 days before they run out of sugars to eat and flocculate out to the bottom of the fermentor. Higher temperatures during this phase will produce more esters or fruity flavors and aromas, like the banana flavors in a hefeweizen. It's interesting to note that another cause of ester production is wort that hasn't been aerated enough.

Phase 4 is the final phase of the fermentation process and it's referred to as the sedimentation phase where the yeast begin consuming and converting any remaining flavor precursors in the wort like diacetyl that will produce off flavors in your beer. During this phase the yeast cells are preparing themselves to go dormant and storing up energy reserves for their deep sleep, even though this is where most of us flush them down the drain. I'd like to point out that the amount of cleanup work left for the yeast to do is dependent on how well we treated, or mistreated, our yeast during the first 3 fermentation phases.

During the sedimentation phase I raise the temperature of my fermentors 3-5F and hold it there for at least 3 days before bottling or kegging my beer. I do this because the yeast will only convert the flavor precursors it created earlier if it's warmer than it was when they created them. There is a limit to this rule though since the yeast can only do so much cleanup before they go dormant. Once the yeast go dormant any remaining flavor precursors will be left in your beer to produce off flavors.

The moral of this post is to always use fresh healthy yeast in sufficient quantity pitched into well aerated wort at the recommended temperature and you will produce some great tasting beer.

Screwy's Recipe 63 - Snowy Daze Barley Stout (all grain)

2011-10-26T06:19:00.000-04:00

Another brewday was here and I still had a couple of hours to decide what style of beer I would be brewing and to finalize an ingredient list. With the cooler weather here now in the Northeast, and the fact that my pipeline was pretty well stocked with wheat beers and assorted pale ales, I decided to go with one of my perennial favorites a nice Chocolate Barley Stout. I've spent a lot of time brewing this style of beer using DME and steeping grains and have gotten the recipe down to where I can consistently brew a great tasting stout that's ready to drink in 4-6 weeks. Now I was ready to try my hand at designing and brewing an all grain version of the same Chocolate Barley Stout extract recipe, a very flavorful and easy drinking brew coming in at 5.3% ABV.

Screwy's Snowy Daze Stout

A very long time ago, maybe as early as 1720s according to some accounts, the term stout was given to represent a strong beer. Although the meaning of stout has changed over the years that followed because it was often used to describe many different styles of beer. At one point in history you could even order a Stout Pale Ale, as back then the word stout meant strong so if any style beer of the day had what it takes (6.6% ABV or higher) it could also be called a stout. By most accounts the most popular beer of that period was a known as a Stout Porter which really described a dark Porter beer that had a high alcohol content.

Victorian Era Ad For Ale

It wasn't until the 1840s when Guinness decided to rename their 'Extra Superior Porter' to 'Extra Stout' that the name became synonymous with a strong dark beer style. When researching history of Stout beer you'll see that it originated from another dark beer style called a Porter. There were different strength porters too, with the stronger brews being called Stout Porter, and they were served to English dock workers who were also known as porters. The ales houses of the day, or Porter Houses, provided some much needed food and drink to all those hard working dock workers so it comes as no surprise that they served Porter House Steaks too. So there you have it, hungry and thirsty Englishmen known as porters going off at the end of their work day to porter houses to eat porter house steaks and washing them down with stout porter ale.

I drink Guinness now and have for a good number of years and while I like it's dark color and creamy barley taste I wouldn't call it a very strong beer. But a lot of people to this day are under the impression that a stout beer means a very strong beer and in fact there are many stouts brewed today that really do have a high ABV but they don't have to. I think it's because of the history of the word stout itself that people today still think of stout beer as a very strong beer.

East Kent Goldings, 2 Row, Roasted Barley, Chocolate and Crystal Malt Mix

I was pretty excited about brewing this recipe because it was my first try at building an all grain stout ale recipe. I had stumbled across a really informative post on the HomeBrewTalk forum a couple of years ago about building the perfect stout recipes. The poster seemed to know what he was talking about and after reading what he had to say I was able to find other information online that seemed to support his recipe.

In this stout recipe I decided that the only hop influence needed would be for bittering because I wanted to make sure that the full aromas and flavors of the roasted barley would shine through. I chose East Kent Goldings because of their earthy and spicy character and mild aroma and I added half as first wort hops and then added the other half to the boil with 30 minutes remaining.

Mashing Stout Recipe Grains For 60 Minutes

I preheated my 5 gallon mash tun with 2 gallons of 170F water for about 20 minutes before dumping the water out and replacing it with grains and strike water. The grains were at 68F so I added 14 quarts of 165F strike water to the tun and then stirred in the 11 pounds of grains needed for the recipe. I then topped off the tun with enough 165F water to fill it up to the 4.5 gallon mark. I then adjusted the temperature by adding a little hot or cold water as needed and gave the grains a really good stir to break up any clumps and eliminate any chance of channeling.

First Wort Hopping 3 Ounces Of East Kent Goldings

Big clumps of grain mean less grains are going to come into contact with the mash water, you can actually still have dry grains inside the clumps when mashing. Channeling means the sparge water doesn't come in contact evenly with all the grains to rinse all the converted sugars off of them and into the boil pot. Instead during the lauter water flows from the top of the mash tun straight down to the spigot via the channels and out into your boil pot leaving precious sugars behind and giving you lower conversion rates and weaker wort. These two things in themselves are the easiest things to correct and a brewer's failure to correct them are probably the single biggest reason for all grain batches lower conversion rates, but they are easy to avoid just by stirring the mash really well.

Fly Sparging Stout Wort After A 60 Minute Mash

So far this recipe was just a theory and it really came to life for me when I first unscrewed the cover of the mash tun and got a whiff of the earthy, chocolate and coffee aromas that were quite powerful. The recipe's grain bill uses only 12% dark malts, 9% Crystal malt and the remaining 79% uses 2 Row as the base malt. I was almost a little skeptical on just how much of the roasted grain aromas would come through but after brewing my extract Stouts I was sure this ratio of dark grains to 2 Row wouldn't be a problem.

By this time the entire brew area took on the aroma and smells familiar to anyone who has ever been to a Starbucks or worked in a coffee plant were they roasted imported green coffee beans to a deep dark color. When lautering the hot wort I got a nice warm comforting feeling from the aromas coming off of the mash and wort as the boil pot filled that was perfect on the first cold day of Fall.

Recirculating A Half Gallon Of Freshly Made Wort

Once the wort was running free of bits of grains I drew off my SG sample and put it in the refrigerator to cool down and then spent the next 30 minutes fly sparging and lautering the hot aromatic wort into my 20 quart boil pot. The wort's OG reading came out to 1.056 which was about 3 points lower than qBrew had calculated which to me wasn't too far off the recipe's calculated 1.059.

Original Gravity Reading Of 1.056

I remember being really excited about brewing my first all grain stout recipe, it was something new and challenging and I knew it would come out awesome. The mash had gone well and I took my time with the lauter and fly sparge making sure the strike water temperatures were good and the grain bed kept covered with no less than an inch of strike water the entire time. Now it was on to the next phase which would ultimately take me closer to brewing the perfect stout, the boil. It took my stove about 20 minutes to bring the 160F wort up to a boil. I left the hop sack in the boil pot the entire time and boiled the wort for 30 minutes.

Stout Wort With First Wort Hops And 30 Minute Boil

With my 20 quart boil pot filled to the brim with both wort and hop additions added a nice rolling boil for 30 minutes things started to get interesting. I had been warming and shaking up my two yeast viles and had already sanitized the 2 LBKs I'd be using to ferment this batch. I also had my wort cooler soaking in sanitizer so I was all set for the coldside brewing that was soon to follow. I think of my beer brewing processes in terms hotside and coldside brewing. The hotside includes everything from openning the grainbags to cooling down the wort before pitching yeast. The coldside includes everything after that including the fermentation, conditioning and bottling or kegging of the beer.

Adjusting Yeast Temperature And Consistency Before Pitching

At the start of my brewing session just as I was preparing the mash tun I took the tubes of WLP004 yeast out of the refrigerator and set them in a bowl of OneStep to so they could gradually warm up to pitching temperature. Both tubes had been refrigerated and kept cold at the LHBS and I did the same when I got them home. Over the next several hours as the grains mashed and the wort was lautered and boiled I would give both tubes a shake or two to mix up the yeast cells with the beer inside the tubes. I wanted the yeast to have a nice creamy consistency when I eventually pitched them into my wort. This is a good way to make sure there are no clumps of cells lumped together and that as many yeast cells as possible get emptied from the tubes when pitched.

White Labs WLP004 - Irish Ale Yeast™ Pitched At 70F

I use a wort cooler connected to my sink to cool my wort down to the yeast's pitching temperature. On average the 8 coils of 3/8 inch copper tubing with cold tap water flowing through it can cool the 5 gallons of 210F wort down to 65-70F in as little 20 minutes. The summer months are more challenging than the winter months are for cooling wort because the tap water in summer may only be as cool as 75F. That's when I fill one side of the utility sink with cold water and frozen water bottles and run a vinyl tubing from the cooler's return line directly down the drain of the other sink. That's just one of the many advantages there are when installing a double sink, the extra capacity is easily reconfigurable to meet the needs of many brewing processes.

Size 5.00 gallons: Estimated IBU=37, SRM=37, OG=1.059, FG=1.015, ABV= 5.7%

Recipe:

Click to download this recipe file for qBrew
8.5 pounds US 2 Row

1.0 pound Crystal 20L

0.5 pound Chocolate Malt (British)

1.0 pound Roasted Barley

3 ounces Kent Goldings (U.K.) (pellets)

11g Danstar Windsor Dry Ale Yeast Rehydrate and pitch at 70° F

..or...

White Labs WLP004 - Irish Ale Yeast™

Mash at 155° F for 60 minutes.

Boil for 30 minutes.

Aerate, pitch at 70° F and ferment at 68-72° F until final gravity is reached

Raise to 72° F over 2 days then hold for 5 days

Keg at 30 psi for 2-3 days and serve at 36° F
I use Mr. Beer fermentors and they hold around 2.4 gallons of wort but I used all 11g of yeast that's typically packaged for 5 gallon brews.

Click to download Screwy's latest qBrew database

Directions:

Infusion Mash: (Soak mash tun in 8 quarts of 170° F water for 20 minutes, preheat and dump it)

Heat 21 quarts of filtered water to 165° F

Pour 14 quarts of 165° F water into mash tun

Mix in 11.0 pounds of crushed grain mix at 68° F

Pour the remaining 165° F water to fill mash tun to 4.50 gallon mark

Stir water and grain mixture and adjust to 155° F and mash for 60 minutes

Fly sparge with 168° F strike water to set mash bed to 168° F

Lauter for 30 minutes adding 19 quarts of sweet wort to 20 quart pot

Full Wort Boil:

Add 1.5 ounces Kent Goldings (U.K.) hops to boil pot when lautering as first wort hops

Add 1.5 ounces Kent Goldings (U.K.) hops with 30 minutes remaining to boil

Add 1/4 tablet WhirlFloc with 9 minutes remaining to boil

Use wort chiller to cool wort to 70° F

Primary Fermentation:

Use autosiphon to prevent excess hop and grain debris from getting into fermenter

Fill the Mr. Beer fermenter with wort to just above the 8.5 quart mark

Aerate wort and pitch rehydrated yeast at 70° F

Ferment to final gravity, raise to 72° F over 2 days and hold for 5 days

Secondary Fermentation:

n/a

Keg/Bottle:

Keg and force carbonate at 30 psi for 2-3 days at 34°F

..or..

Keg with priming sugar, purge with Co2 and naturally carbonate for 7-14 days at 68°F

..or..

Bottle or batch prime and carbonate at 68° for 7 to 14 days

After the first 12 hours the fermentation had taken off vigorously. When I looked in on the progress the next morning I was happy to see that a thick healthy layer of krausen had already formed at the top of both fermentors. With minimal lag time this was a good sign that the fermentation was off to a great start. By the next day the fermentation had completely filled the headspace of both fermentors and one of them was beginning to overflow into the the drip tray. Over the course of the fermentation I had to remove and clean the fermentors a couple of times but overall less than a cup or so of beer was actually lost.

12 Hours Later A Thick Healthy Krausen Had Already Formed

With the final gravity reading holding at 1.016 I figured it was time to bottle this stout up, even though the qBrew calculation said the final gravity should finish at 1.015 this reading was close enough for me.The results were in and I liked them. According to my measurements this stout came in at 5.3% ABV with 190 calories per and 22 carbs per 12 ounce bottle. The other good news was the apparent attenuation was also around 70% which for me is just perfect for this style of beer.

Final Gravity Reading Of 1.016

I had cleaned, rinsed and sanitized fifty 12 ounce bottles and my bottling bucket, bottling wand and racking tubing so now I prepared my priming solution. I used StarSan as my sanitizer for the first time, up until now I had only been using OneStep and I have had good results using it all this time. I decided to try StarSan mainly because it was cheaper to buy and faster acting than OneStep which requires a 10 minute soak to be effective. I poured the StarSan solution into my bottle rinser and then gave each bottle 2 or 3 good squirts just to make sure the entire inside surface was coated with sanitizer. Before placing the bottles on the bottle tree to drain I dipped the neck of each bottle into the StarSan solution about an inch to make sure the cap area was covered too.

StarSan, Bottle Rinse And Bottle Tree

I boiled about 5 tablespoons of pure can sugar in a cup of water and stirred it until the sugar was dissolved to prevent scorching or burning the sugar. After cooling the priming solution down to pitching temperature I added it to the bottling bucket along with 2 tablespoons of pure vanilla extract and then racked the fermented beer on top so it all mixed together as the bucket filled. Once the bucket was filled I used a large sanitized plastic spoon to gently swirl the beer and sugar solution together to make the mixture more consistent, which in turn would make the carbonation levels between bottles more consistent too. Interestingly enough I found that adding pure vanilla extract to the beer at bottling actually enhances the chocolaty flavors of the Chocolate Malt in the recipe, who would have guessed.

Adding Vanilla Extract At Bottling Enhances Chocolate Flavors

When bottling I first put 50 bottle caps in a small bowl filled with StarSan and then using a bottling wand attached to my bottling bucket I filled each bottle to the very top. After removing the bottling wand the level of beer in each bottle fell about an inch leaving just enough headroom for the carbonating beer inside. When each bottle was filled I placed a bottle cap on them and using my finger to prevent spilling any beer I inverted the bottles 2 times before setting them on the table to be capped after they were all filled. Using a bench capper made capping the bottles quick and easy and in no time at all I had 2 cases of bottles capped and ready for carbonation.

The bottles have been carbonating at 68F for almost two weeks now and this weekend end I plan to put a couple of bottles in the refrigerator for a day or two and them sample them. By this coming weekend the beer will have been brewed 4 weeks ago and should be ready to drink. I like to start sampling my home brewed beer after waiting at least 2 weeks for them to finish naturally carbonating and if they taste great then they'll be gone all the sooner.

Snowy Daze Stout Naturally Carbonated And Delicious

This stout is definitely one of my favorites of all times, the flavors of the Roasted Barley and Chocolate Malts just come through amazingly clear. Ready to drink in only 4 weeks the mouthfeel is medium bodied with 2.5 volumes of Co2 for carbonation and actually makes drinking a few in a row easy to do. The most striking thing when you lift the glass is the roasted barley malt followed immediately by a definite but not too overpowering hint of chocolate. I can only explain the clarity of these flavors as being so clear because of the amount and type of yeast I pitched and the all grain ingredients used in the recipe. All in all this is now my most prized house beer recipe, a well balanced and not overly sweet or bitter Stout style that continues to get great reviews from everyone who's tried it.