First State Brewers Blog

As you probably have heard by now, the Beer Hunter, Michael Jackson, has passed away. I was shocked when I read John Biggins’ email. Heidi Derr just sent me an article by Lew Bryson that had me in tears. The comments on Lew’s post tore me up!

I remember when I first got into brewing close to 20 years ago and watching “The Beer Hunter” on the Discovery Channel. Soon after watching it on TV, I ordered a copy of the video for my self. The First State Brewers made many trips to the University of Pennsylvania to see him at the annual Book & the Cook beer tasting event. On one occasion I got him to sign my copy of the World Guide to Beer.

Through Michael Jackson’s video and writings, I developed my interest in beer and my desire to travel to other beer brewing regions of the world. My travels to England and Germany are proof. I’m sure he will be in my thoughts when I go to Ireland next Spring, as well.

So, this weekend I urge you all to seek out the best beer you can find and salute the life of this great man!

UPDATE: Also, thanks to chazzq for alerting me to an obituary in the Washington Post.

The First State Brewers have been on 2 international beer tours. The first was a trip to Germany in 2002. The 2nd trip was couple of years ago split between York, England and Marburg, Germany. Now, plans are being made for a trip to Ireland!

We are looking at possibly going around St. Patrick’s Day or Spring Break of 2008. If you’re interested in joining us, please let me know.

Here’s a Google Map that I will be updating with possible destinations. Click on the thumbnails to get a description of the attraction. Zoom the map in to see all the attractions at that location. If you know of a place we should visit that’s not on the map, please let me know so I can add it!

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I recently received an order from Libbey.com of their Poco Grande glasses which work remarkably well as tulip glasses for belgian beers. My dogfish glass bit the big one a few months back, and it has been paining me to drink my belgians out of wine glasses (I know, how snobbish). The Libbey glasses aren’t the perfect tulip shape, however they do not have crap printed on them and they were relatively inexpensive, so I won’t complain. If I wanted, I could even go out and get these ones printed or etched with a logo.

I am also entering a couple beers in Malt Madness with my buddy Brian. Two of them are my own (Travelers & Tourists and an Abbey Brown, both in the Dubbel category), along with a co-entry of our Saturday IPA and the Gnarleywine we brewed in October of last year (Which is fan-f’ing-tastic, by the way). I think Brian is also gonna enter some of his own beers - maybe the Hazelnut and another. I am interested in hearing some feedback on my belgians and our hop monster children… And hopefully I’ll be putting one of my kegs of it on tap here in the not-so-distant future.

No brewing this weekend for me - at least not beer. Instead I’ll be polluting my equipment with some dirty crustaceans - turns out a 14 gallon kettle with a false bottom is the perfect crab-steaming vessel too… Booyaa!!! We’re getting a half bushel of #1s to split between Donna, myself, one of my sisters and her husband, and my parents. While not brewing related, guarenteed we will be sucking down some suds to go with our crabs and I am using brewing gear to do the deed :-D.

Yesterday I brewed the base for another beer destined for fruiting - a darker-colored wheat. The day went VERY well - I was done brewing in under 5 hours, and with cleanup it was about 5 1/2. The yeast, an expired packet of Wyeast 3056 Bavarian Wheat that I nursed back to health through a couple starters, took off in under 12 hours. I guess its not really a “wheat” since i formulated it with only 25% wheat malt instead of 50%, but it will certainly be wheat-ish.

Once primary fermentation is complete, I will rack it into a secondary with some of these monsters - blackberries we picked a few weeks ago at Milburn Orchards. We managed to fill a flat in under 20 minutes, these things are so huge. They are all in our freezer right now (individually flash-frozen), so I will thaw them out, mush them a little to break out the flavor, and then load up the carboy with them. I’m thinking 4 lbs (2 per 5 gallons).

This weekend one of our projects was to clean my “beer room”, the unfinished part of our basement. It has needed attention for some time, and it now looks worlds better than it did. One of the projects I completed was reinforcing the shelving where our commercial beers are aging. Its a relatively meager collection, however it was heavy enough to start bowing the 1/2″ particle board it sits on. The reinforcement slats will completely eliminate that issue for quite a while.

In addition, I made a decent attempt at cataloging the homebrew I have in kegs and bottles - the kegs were relatively easy, and I went ahead and included the 30 or so gallons I have in secondary fermenters that will be kegged over the next 2 weeks or so. The bottles were a little more challenging, but not too bad. Now I have a good idea of what bottles I shouldn’t worry about drinking, and what I need to start rationing.

Next weekend I will brew a Blackberry Wheat using some “free” yeast from Joe and Marlana at HDYB. They had a Wyeast propogator pack of their 3056 Bavarian Wheat strain that had expired, and offered it to me gratis (along with my purchase of the 3 sacks of grain). As I make starters for all my yeast strains, it didn’t worry too much - I’ve got a rockin’ 1L starter of it on the stir plate right now, that I’ll let finish out, settle, and then I’ll decant it and pitch it into another 2L of wort prior to pitching next week. I should have a good cell count by then, despite the yeast’s humble beginnings. Once the beer is brewed and fermented, I’ll rack it ontop of 4 or so pounds of the blackberries we picked at Milburn Orchards a few weekends ago.

So I haven’t been Blogging very much lately… I have been kind of busy. Doing what, you ask?

Bottling and brewing my friends. And both in large amounts. In the picture you’ll see 10 gallons of American Brown Ale on the left that I brewed this past weekend with the help of my friend Brian. It was a 20 gallon batch we split 2 ways, and we did some experimenting with my equipment which went really well. He did a better job summarizing everything that happened than I could, so I won’t even try to repeat it here. For a change, our experimentation all payed off. I think one of my favorite points was when we shoved my squirrel mixer in the mash tun and managed to get a perfectly mixed mash within a minute or so… that squirrel mixer is just the perfect size for a 28 gallon mash tun, and I’m fairly certain our arms would have fallen off trying to mix that much grain by hand.

The middle 2 carboys are actually the starter batch we did for the ABA, our hoppy-as-hell, used 1.5 POUNDS of hops IPA. Once again, Brian did a great job summarizing that day here in his blog. I bring it up because I also experimented with this batch, and it was a failed experiement - I tried to weight the hops down using glass marbles and a hop bag. As you can tell from the picture… it didn’t work. After spending many frustrating minutes trying to shove a hop bag full of marbles and hops into that tiny friggin opening in the top, I was conviced it was a bonehead idea - but I was determined to persevere in my endeavor. Lesson learned - next time I’ll leave them in there loose and just shake the carboy every few days. And NO I WILL NOT TRY TO USE MORE MARBLES. If you tried stuffing it through a one inch hole, you’d understand too. God help me trying to get them back out.

On the right is 10 gallons of peated scottish (from the previous post) that will soon be racked ontop of several ounces (like 3 per 5 gallons) of bourbon-aged oak cubes. 5 gallons of this batch is going to a friend… so I hope it turns out as good as the last one did.

That brings me to bottling. LOTS of bottling. 15 gallons in a week, to be more precise. The 20 gallon batch of TnT that I brewed several weeks ago has conditioned enough and was ready for packaging, so I kegged 5 gallons and the rest went into glass containers of various sizes. The 1L bottles on the lower left are for Joe and Marlana at HDYB, 1 case of the 12oz bottles are going to my cousin Drew and his bandmates, and the rest …. well, I’m sure that Donna and I will put them to good use.

All that bottling certainly reminded me why I like kegging so much. I’ve got like 8 cornies sitting empty at the moment - But with 30 gallons to keg in the next few weeks - They’ll fill up really fast.

I’ve got some fat sacks. You know you want some. I picked up 3 bags of Breiss 2-row Brewer’s malt from HDYB today - Joe cut me a deal since I bought 3 at a time. Add that to the sack of pilsner and 1/2 sack of Maris Otter - I gots the goods.

My peated scottish brewed on Sunday is winding down… just in time for a 20 gallon batch this weekend of American Brown Ale with my buddy Brian. The sack of Weyermann Pilsner comes courtesy of Brian as well - Thanks a ton, man. Very cool. We’ll use the rest of the Maris Otter (top bag - about 25 lbs left in there) with a portion of Briess 2-Row Brewer’s malt this weekend, repitching yeast from our batch of Saturday IPA a few weeks ago. This batch won’t use nearly the hop bill the last one did - I think right now we’re only looking at 6 or 7 ounces for 20 gallons, whereas we used 24 oz in that IPA.