First State Brewers Blog

I’ve brewed the last two weekends, and it has been great - I can’t really explain the long hiatus (1 1/2 months) other than I was busy with other things… But last weekend I brewed 10 gallons of my black honey ale (w/ 4 lb buckwheat honey), and yesterday was a 5 gallon batch of Queen’s Darkness IS (8 oz of molassas). The Queen’s Darkness came in at around 1.084 OG, and the Black Honey is something on the order of 1.065-1.068 (will back calculate when I keg it).

I repitched about 1/2 of yeast from the honey ale into the stout, and had signs fermentation within 2 hours. It is rocking this morning. I also used the product from American Hop Plugs yesterday, which How Do You Brew? is currently carrying, and I must say - I really liked them. I will definitely look at buying and using more hop plugs in the future. They are expensive ($3/oz), but the convenience of dropping hops into the kettle in 1/2oz plugs is really nice… and they smell very fresh. Joe and Marlana have lots of Hop Plugs inventory, so if you are a “whole hop” fan as I am, I would strongly encourage you all to check them out as a viable alternative. Its amazing that those little plugs expand so much in the kettle.

My next brew will probably be “Homegrown Ale 2007″ or an American Pale / IPA. I’m itching to use my Summit hops in something, and I’ve got 2 lbs of Amarillo hops to play with. With all the dark stuff I’ve brewed recently, something on the lighter end of the color spectrum is probably a good idea too.

“I… like… big… beers and I cannot lie
You other brothers can’t deny
You crave rich malt pouring in your face
Sticky hops and belgian lace…”

So I won’t give Sam Calagione’s “Pain Relievas” a run for their money… but I crack myself up.

OK. So this past Sunday I brewed another 15 gallons of Choking Sun Stout. Ever since my American Brown Experiment with Brian I’ve been dying to see if I could do a bigger batch as a single mash using just the gear I’ve got. We used Brian’s burner to heat our mash-out water, and I don’t really want to run out and get a new burner just for this setup when I know I’ll be going to a sculpture at some point… So for this solo batch I did things different. Same gravity setup, as with the 20 gallon batch, but I only did 15 gallons (1.070 OG)… and I heated sparge and mashout water together, transferring the sparge water to the HLT when it hit temp and heated the rest of the mashout water to boiling. It all worked just fine… I probably could have even done a 20 gallon batch if need be. These 28 gallon kettles are monsterous… and the kettle with a false bottom works awesome as a mash tun. I need to work out a better system for keeping the tun insulated - the sleeping bags work, but they’re a PITA and are getting pretty craptacular with wort and malt stuck to them - should be fun trying to get them clean.

As of 7am this morning, they were very visible signs of fermentation, and things were rocking as of 5pm this afternoon. Big batches rule.

Latest count towards my 200 gallon limit - 160 gallons from 15 batches. Its actually been 180 gallons brewed, but 20 gallons of that went home with Brian, so I’m not counting those towards my total. And before you all start screaming DRUNK!!! and pointing the fingers, we’ve given away nearly 50 gallons this year… and another 50 is basically sitting in our basement in kegs and bottles. So no, we didn’t drink all of it. YET.

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).

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.

Been busy the last couple of weekends. I spent Father’s Day de-labeling and de-funking about 8 cases worth of bottles that I have amassed over the past 6 months. 6 cases were 12oz bottles, and about 2 cases were belgian-style 750mL bottles / Champagne bottles. It took me about 6 hours, a 1/4 cup of PBW, and a whole lot of scrubbing… but in the end, I have bottles for another 20 gallons of whatever I deem worthy of going into a bottle instead of a keg.

This weekend I broke in my new 28 gallon Hot Liquor Tank by brewing 20 gallons of Travelers & Tourists Belgian Red Ale. I won 2nd place at the Buzz Off competition in the Dubbel category, but I really didn’t intend for it to be that (it just fit that category best)…. I just wanted it to be a damn-tasty belgian-style brew, which it is. It even seems to satisfy Oliver’s picky palate. The HLT has a cool site glass on the side that shows the current liquid level, and ultimately I’ll get digital readings from the site glass too. This time around, I mostly just used it for no reason at all (Could have used my kettle)… but I really wanted to break it in.

The equipment was pretty much the same as my other 20 gallon batches - I used the pump skid to move hot water around (From the HLT on the burner up to the 10 gallon cooler reservoir), split the mash into 2 different tuns, and used my 14 gallon kettle as a measuring grant. The after first 13 gallons sparged, I pumped the remaining hot water into the reservoir cooler, put the kettle on the burner, and then pumped the wort up into the kettle. Then it was time to start sparging the second 13 gallons using the second tun.

The wort was an absolutely gorgeous reddish-brown color, and smelled heavenly. I tried to be careful not to get too much air into it during the pump transfer, but some happened anyways - hopefully not enough to cause hot-side aeration.

Boiling 26 gallons of wort is just such a cool feeling. It was a really long brew day (about 9 hours), but in the end I got some pretty great beer (and alot of it). The hop additions did a really good job of catching hot and cold break (they formed their own filter bed ontop of the false bottom), and about my only big mistake was forgetting about the Candi Syrup and Corn Sugar addition until about 5 minutes from the end of the boil (were supposed to be added around 15). I had to scramble a little and didn’t incorporate them as smoothly as I wanted to, but in the end I didn’t have any scorch marks on the bottom of my kettle and the wort was the correct target gravity (1.070 SG by hydrometer).

Fermentation is nearly done at this point - almost 48 hours later. The kraeusen has started to subside, and the airlock CO2 bubbles are coming more slowly. The yeast was pitched at 66 degrees, and rose to about 73 while fermenting. I don’t want the yeast to prematurely crash… so I have wrapped some sleeping bags around them to try to retain some of the heat and let the yeast finish up.

I love 20 gallon batches.

This weekend I brewed the 10 gallons of belgian pale that I referenced in my last post - using the out-of-date Wyest 3864 Canadian Belgian strain that Joe and Marlana from HDYB had in their fridge. I propogated the heck out of it - stepped it up using almost a gallon (4 qts) of starter wort. I should have plenty of yeast for the next 20 gallon batch of TnT Belgian Red in a couple weeks. I am really hoping for good things from this starter batch too - I went a little wacky, as I tend to do from time to time. I used Magnum for the bittering hops (which is not wacky), but used Sorachi Ace for both flavor and aroma at 10 minutes and 3 minutes (1 oz per addition). This hop is Japanese, apparently from the Sapporo brewery, and is supposed to have a lemony character - and I thought to complement the hops, I would also add 0.5 oz of bitter orange peel (no big deal - 0.25oz per 5 gallons) AND over 1 1/2 oz of fresh chopped ginger root.

As it is fermenting, the ginger aroma is definitely wafting out the airlock. I just hope there is enough ginger character left in the finished beer that you can either smell it or taste it. We recently used more than that in a Teriyaki marinade, so I am assuming 1.5oz in 10 gallons won’t overpower the beer, but rather subtlely compliment the other “summery” aromas of lemon and orange peel. I thought about zesting some lemons and throwing that in the secondary, but that is probably too much.

The 2007 Buzz Off is this coming Saturday - I am curious to see how my 3 entries do. I am not expecting any ribbons, but since this is my first time entering into the belgian styles, I am interested to see what the feedback is.

I can’t say that I’ve been really busy this memorial day, but I have gotten some stuff done. Probably the biggest thing was brewing 10 gallons of Witbier, at least half of which will go on to become Mango Mama” witbier (a fruit witbier with… uh… mangos). The brew day went resonably well, although I did stick the sparge pretty good after about 3 gallons. More hot liquor, a good stirring, and a second vorlauf later it sparged flawlessly.

I also am getting activities queued up for next weekend, when I will brew 10 gallons of belgian pale with - Wyeast’s Canadian Belgian Strain!!! WOOOT! I stopped by Joe & Marlana’s shop (HDYB) on Saturday, only to discover that they had another (expired) package of this stuff in the fridge. Since I do starters, that didn’t slow me down one bit - I was so thrilled to get another pure culture of that strain. I brought it home, smacked it, and within 16 hours the package had started to swell. It is now downstairs on the stirplate propogating to a good sized volume for next weekend. I will then take the slurry from my 10 gallon batch and use it for 20 gallons of Travellers & Tourists Belgian Red in a few more weeks. YEAH!!! Next time that strain becomes available, I will probably get 2 or 3 of them - LOVE that yeast.

I have also been doing some work on the user interface program for the sculpture… but you all are probably not terribly interested in that. I’ve been trying to zero in on what the design behavior would be like for setting the screens up, etc… and I think I’ve arrived at a fairly user-friendly method. It will be mostly drag & drop, with many of the properties being set by simple mouse clicks. I’ve got the drag & drop working, and have the point control working pretty well for a number of different things. The drag and drop turned out really nice - I managed to get the images to show up partially transparent - looks much cooler than the “outline” style. Right now I’ve got control point manipulations drawing just the outline because it started to look a little jumbled with the translucent style. Screenshots are below.

My hope is that this stuff can be used as a development platform by other folks who want to do something similar for their sculptures - they won’t have to struggle as much creating the user interface and can focus in on all the more fun stuff, like the electronics and piping.

Tonight I moved my 20 gallons of Amarillo pale ale to secondaries and began dry-hopping with 3/4 oz of whole Amarillo hops per 5 gallons. It is a beautiful sight - can’t wait to get this stuff in kegs and start drinking it down. With another 20oz or so of Amarillo hops left, I’m not terribly worried about running out.

Part of the evening’s activities included capturing nearly 1/2 gallon of thick, rich yeast slurry. I have no use for it, so if you are interested let me know - But it was just too good an opportunity to pass up. This is some serious pitching yeast, you all - almost no break material, and majorly healthy after plenty of Servomyces and 1.050 beer to chew on.

Yes, today is a brewing day in the Sever household - the first in over a month! I’ve been seriously slacking, but more on that later. Today is a peated scottish ale, probably in the 1.050 to 1.055 range. Its one I have been meaning to do for some time - the ingredients are about a year old, so hopefully things will work out just fine - but the Golden Promise 2-row and Peated Malt were purchased some time way back when some club members did a big order to North Country Malt Supply>. Its not that I couldn’t have done it before, or that I couldn’t have used these ingredients for something else in the meantime - I just always managed to slide something in before it. Since the peated malt is over a year old, it has a much more mellow and subtle aroma (and I am guessing flavor) than it did back in March 2006 when Scott Bieber asked me “what did you DO to this?!?!? It tastes like peat moss!!” It obviously won’t be ready for folks to try at this year’s Jerry & Joyce St. Pats extravaganza - but I’ll probably torture folks with it sometime around May or June.

I’ve been very busy doing research for a semi-automated / computerized homebrew sculpture. I say “semi-automated” because I don’t want to just press the GO button and it does all the work - I want the computer to do smart temperature control and facilitate some of the more tedious exercises while brewing like measuring out water, or doing mash steps. **I** still want to be the brewer, but I want to exact a level of precision and repeatability over my batches that I don’t have right now. I also want to be able to capture brew session data and have the ability to analyze it later if something truely wonderful happens (or awful, as the case may be).

So instead of brewing, I’ve been playing with electronics - programmable microcontrollers, resistors, capacitors, logic chips, LEDs, etc. - I used to know all that stuff, and have managed to forget it in the years since I learned it in college.

If you feel like amusing yourself, go to the Tech section of our website and check out “Electrobrew”, my tentative name for this endeavor. I don’t know what the project will ultimately be called, but that’s good enough for now.

I won first place for my Choking Sun Stout at War of the Worts XII, which got me a $50 gift certificate to Keystone Homebrew Supply up in PA. Looks like I am going to have to make a pilgrimage to spend it, but there are always tons of other things to do in Philly that would warrant the trip.

Also, looks my family and some friends are all going to the Belgian beer festival at Ommegang in July. After reading of the experience from the assistant brewer at Iron Hill Newark, I convinced my wife that pitching a tent among the other bohemians was not something we wanted to do, so we are looking at getting a cabin some (walkable) distance away where we don’t have to endure the all-night drum circles and idiots stumbing into our area, begging for late-night handouts.

Last but not least, we are MOVING our blog from Blogspot to our domain and using the Wordpress platform. Blogger has been reasonably good for us, but honestly I feel better having it on our own site. If you are reading this entry at http://www.firststatebrewers.com/blog/ then you are already ahead of the game.

If not, start checking http://www.firststatebrewers.com/blog/ instead, because that’s where we are headed.