Somehow I got Ellie to agree to brew this beer. It's another kit from MoreBeer. Here's the ingredients:
8lb 2-row
2lb Munich
1lb Vienna
1lb Crystal 40L
4oz Chocolate
0.5oz Magnum 12.3% @60min
0.5oz Saaz 2.9% @20min
1.0oz Mt. Hood 5.5% @0min
WLP036x2 with 1 liter starter. Lot number 1004255. Date Apr-23-14
Whirlfloc and Servomyces.
Now for water. Ellie and I wanted to use 50% Ridgecrest water and 50% distilled and then some salts. But I ran out of Chalk. This really upset me and I think Ellie could see it. She told me to not worry about, do the best we can and roll with what we got. In the end we put 2g of Gypsum and 2g of CaCl. This gave us some calcium and balance out the Cl and SO4. We came up short on residual alkalinity and ended up with too much sodium. Ridgecrest water has too much sodium which is why we cut it with distilled. So we'll see.
Got the mash tun assembled no problem. We noticed a slightly foul smell
in the ball valve. It appeared to be in some trapped water in the ball
valve somewhere. Every smelled great right up until we opened to valve
and some water came out and we smelled it.
Other things that went wrong were that I forgot the water filter for the tap. So, I had to go get that. Ellie mashed in a little too high and we added to much water. The mash seemed to settle at 151F. The pH was a little high at 5.5ish. Not too bad.
We are now eating while the grain mashes. She made some food and it was good. I cleaned up a little while she was cooking. I'm already really tired and I think we got a few hours to go still. She has to get up really early to hang with a buddy on a road trip. I'm rambling now. Back to beer.
Ok, it is now midnight and we are all done. Clare hung out for a bit. Ellie did a lot of the work. I lifted heavy stuff. But she brewed the beer. Even if the witnesses find that statement debatable we got the spend the evening together and I am happy about that. There was nothing really mentioning. The OG is 1.050. This is a little lower than I thought we would get. The beer tastes bitter. I think if we lager it properly then that will diminish. Nonetheless I'm tired and want to go to bed.
Friday, January 24, 2014
Saturday, January 4, 2014
First Kolsch
First Kolsch. Similar to the house blonde. I thought I wanted to try something different with EKA. So I figured we'd try a different yeast. Why not a Kolsch yeast?
Things have already been interesting, Last night I made a starter. When I woke up this morning to check on it, the stir plate had stopped, there was a thick layer of yeast on the bottom and it was HOT! I put it in the garage because I thought it would be cooler there then in the house. I don't know how that's going to really effect the beer but we are going to give it a go anyway.
Also, when I went to type this up on the computer my battery is TU. Need to replace it. Typing this on Ellie's old laptop.
Lastly, when I went to pull the ingredients from the fridge I forgot I bought an once of Amarillo. So I guess this won't be the most traditional Kolsch. I'll add it in the last minute.
Anyhow, here the ingredients:
8lbs 2 row.
0.5lbs crystal 10L.
1oz Willamette 5.2AA @60min
1oz Amarillo 8.4AA @1min
WLP029 x2 02/14/14 Lot# 1002198
10 gallons distilled
2 gram gypsum
5 gram calcium chloride
2 gram epsom salt
whirlfloc
servomyces
10:25am - Typing some stuff now. Got water all made. Ready to start the brew day.
11:10 - Mashed in at 150F. Well smooth. pH about 5.2. So far boring.
12:06 - Sparging. First screw up of the day. I mounted my ball valve on the mash tun backwards. I was able to rotate the valve so the lever is pointing down and can be opened a little bit. This caused the mash tun to leak so it's getting fun.
2:32 - Boil non eventful. I got the chiller in there and all hooked up. I did shorten up the re-circulation portion in an effort to keep it from stalling. It only stalled once, so that's good. Once I killed the boil and started the chilling water there was a problem. There was a kink in the line. It built up a ton of pressure and when it straightened itself out it shot boiling water at tremendous pressure into the basin which splashed up into my face. The left side of my cheek just under my eye is burned and it is a little painful, I think it will be ok. But it could have been much worse. I could have hurt some poor person like Ellie or Kevin who would have been in there. Lesson learned.
3:37 - Done. Chilled the beer too much. It is now 60F which is too cold for this beer. It should warm up ok. But note to self that we need to monitor the temp when chilling more closely. The OG is 1.047. It tastes good. My face feels better. Eager to eat, watch football, drink beer, and hang with my family.
Things have already been interesting, Last night I made a starter. When I woke up this morning to check on it, the stir plate had stopped, there was a thick layer of yeast on the bottom and it was HOT! I put it in the garage because I thought it would be cooler there then in the house. I don't know how that's going to really effect the beer but we are going to give it a go anyway.
Also, when I went to type this up on the computer my battery is TU. Need to replace it. Typing this on Ellie's old laptop.
Lastly, when I went to pull the ingredients from the fridge I forgot I bought an once of Amarillo. So I guess this won't be the most traditional Kolsch. I'll add it in the last minute.
Anyhow, here the ingredients:
8lbs 2 row.
0.5lbs crystal 10L.
1oz Willamette 5.2AA @60min
1oz Amarillo 8.4AA @1min
WLP029 x2 02/14/14 Lot# 1002198
10 gallons distilled
2 gram gypsum
5 gram calcium chloride
2 gram epsom salt
whirlfloc
servomyces
10:25am - Typing some stuff now. Got water all made. Ready to start the brew day.
11:10 - Mashed in at 150F. Well smooth. pH about 5.2. So far boring.
12:06 - Sparging. First screw up of the day. I mounted my ball valve on the mash tun backwards. I was able to rotate the valve so the lever is pointing down and can be opened a little bit. This caused the mash tun to leak so it's getting fun.
2:32 - Boil non eventful. I got the chiller in there and all hooked up. I did shorten up the re-circulation portion in an effort to keep it from stalling. It only stalled once, so that's good. Once I killed the boil and started the chilling water there was a problem. There was a kink in the line. It built up a ton of pressure and when it straightened itself out it shot boiling water at tremendous pressure into the basin which splashed up into my face. The left side of my cheek just under my eye is burned and it is a little painful, I think it will be ok. But it could have been much worse. I could have hurt some poor person like Ellie or Kevin who would have been in there. Lesson learned.
3:37 - Done. Chilled the beer too much. It is now 60F which is too cold for this beer. It should warm up ok. But note to self that we need to monitor the temp when chilling more closely. The OG is 1.047. It tastes good. My face feels better. Eager to eat, watch football, drink beer, and hang with my family.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Hell day continues
The beer gods do not smile upon me today. After the whole black lager disaster I forged onward. I bought new serving lines for the beer as mentioned in the previous post. After trying out the first line I went back into the house to attempt to make a second, longer line. I must have had some type of beer leak in the keg and in the time it took to make a new line and get back to the fridge the entire keg had emptied into the chest freezer.
It was a surreal experience. I didn't even notice as first. I put the new line on and plunged the tap down and all I got was air. As first I thought that the new line had a leak because all I heard was air. But that didn't make sense. Even if I had a leak it would leak beer not air. I looked at the bottom and it was all white with beer head which didn't really register at first since the chest freezer is white anyway. Once I figured it out I was sad.
I told Ellie and she seemed to really be sad for me. Like the good trooper and wife that she is she snapped into action and began scooping the beer with a ladel from the bottom of the fridge into pitchers. I was so disheartened that I wanted to just dump it all but I glad she didn't let that happen.
Afterward we poured some into a growler for a crazy lazy who liked my shirt and Ellie drove off to deliver it while I poured some into a growler for a party tonight. We drank the rest. I then proceeded to clean up.
Lessons learned. Be sure there are no leaks when installing new beer lines.
Silver linings. Now I have a temp controlled fridge that has been freed up to lager the black lager.
It was a surreal experience. I didn't even notice as first. I put the new line on and plunged the tap down and all I got was air. As first I thought that the new line had a leak because all I heard was air. But that didn't make sense. Even if I had a leak it would leak beer not air. I looked at the bottom and it was all white with beer head which didn't really register at first since the chest freezer is white anyway. Once I figured it out I was sad.
I told Ellie and she seemed to really be sad for me. Like the good trooper and wife that she is she snapped into action and began scooping the beer with a ladel from the bottom of the fridge into pitchers. I was so disheartened that I wanted to just dump it all but I glad she didn't let that happen.
Afterward we poured some into a growler for a crazy lazy who liked my shirt and Ellie drove off to deliver it while I poured some into a growler for a party tonight. We drank the rest. I then proceeded to clean up.
Lessons learned. Be sure there are no leaks when installing new beer lines.
Silver linings. Now I have a temp controlled fridge that has been freed up to lager the black lager.
Black Beer Tragedy
To start, the current EKA is the best. The soft water is the way to do this in the future. The lower temp and the starter helped generate fewer esters. I'd bet next week it will clean up more and taste even better. I think the next time I brew, I will brew even colder, with more yeast, and a starter. That should make it as clean as possible. Then we can add in some crystal malt and a little amarillo and then I think I've got my beer.
Some things I learned recently.
- You can make beer fizzy by shaking it up but you will also put all the yeast in suspension and the blonde beer will be yeasty for a week or more until it settles out.
- Beer lines need to be small in ID, large in OD, and long. I saw a way on the internets to use that really tiny fridge water lines. I'm going to try that. http://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/comments/1te7c8/how_to_14_icemaker_tubing_beerlines_great_pour/
Ok now for the reason of this post. The temp control box has died. I believe it happened during a brown out a couple of days ago. It appears that the brown out caused the file system to become corrupted. The pi is unable to be booted at this point. It makes me sad. I have backed up the code so that's good. But not the temp data or the logs. I may be able to mount the drive on a linux box and extract some of those pieces of data. I'll try that later. They are not a huge loss. The worst part is configuring the box to execute the code I wrote. Permissions needed to be set up. Configurations to make the serial port behave a certain way at power up and so on. Those will take a while to remember. What I think I need to do is figure out a way to clone the drive so that I will be able to quickly recover from this issue in the future.
Worse yet is the potential status of the beer. It is a lager and I wanted it to be kept at 52F for a few weeks. It has warmed to the garage temp for the past few days. I sampled it and it is finished fermenting. The FG is 1.010 and it tastes good. So I think I will leave it at the current temp until I keg it.
Some things I learned recently.
- You can make beer fizzy by shaking it up but you will also put all the yeast in suspension and the blonde beer will be yeasty for a week or more until it settles out.
- Beer lines need to be small in ID, large in OD, and long. I saw a way on the internets to use that really tiny fridge water lines. I'm going to try that. http://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/comments/1te7c8/how_to_14_icemaker_tubing_beerlines_great_pour/
Ok now for the reason of this post. The temp control box has died. I believe it happened during a brown out a couple of days ago. It appears that the brown out caused the file system to become corrupted. The pi is unable to be booted at this point. It makes me sad. I have backed up the code so that's good. But not the temp data or the logs. I may be able to mount the drive on a linux box and extract some of those pieces of data. I'll try that later. They are not a huge loss. The worst part is configuring the box to execute the code I wrote. Permissions needed to be set up. Configurations to make the serial port behave a certain way at power up and so on. Those will take a while to remember. What I think I need to do is figure out a way to clone the drive so that I will be able to quickly recover from this issue in the future.
Worse yet is the potential status of the beer. It is a lager and I wanted it to be kept at 52F for a few weeks. It has warmed to the garage temp for the past few days. I sampled it and it is finished fermenting. The FG is 1.010 and it tastes good. So I think I will leave it at the current temp until I keg it.
Saturday, December 7, 2013
Schwarzbier
I wanted to make a Schwarzbier. But I don't know what the hell I was thinking when I bought the ingredients. I wanted to go simple and just use pilsner as a base malt. Also, I wanted some kind of de-bittered specialty grain so I went with Carafa II. Ok. There are other specialty malts and I didn't get them. Soooo, it will be a black pilsner beer. Not sure if anyone who drinks it will think it is a Schwarzbier or if it will even be good. But here we are, so let's do it.
8.5 lbs Pilsner
12oz Carafa II
1.65 Hallertauer 4.1%AA @ 60mins
0.5 Hallertauer 4.1%AA @ 20mins
0.5 Hallertauer 4.1%AA @ 0mins
WLP830 x2 with 1 liter starter (stir plate) Lot num: 1002989, Date 3/4/14
Here's the water:
3:00pm - Got everything measured out. Boiled O2 stone. Going to start heating up strike water. I'm considering this the start of the brew day. If done by 9pm. Then we all good. Also, I bought some tubing and connectors and stuff to improve the cooling process. More on that later.
3:31pm - Got the water done and am heating up the strike water. Got the grain milled. Pulled the mash tun off the shelf and stuck my nose in it when I opened it, just like everytime. And it smelled foul. Almost like a mild vomit smell. I narrowed it down to the ball valve. I put the steel braid, washer, and ball valve real quick into a PBW solution with super hot water. I'll leave it for 15 mins or so. Since it's on the hot side, any infection will be killed in the boil so I'm not too worried but I plan to clean that valve more thoroughly and today. And if the beer tastes like shit, we'll know one possible reason why. I may just replace that ball valve. Maybe completely disassemble it and see if I can clean it.
3:54pm - Mash temp was a little high, 158F. I added some room temp water to get it to 151F. After the PBW wash the ball valve smelled a little better. I will re-access after the run off and give it another smell. Also, I will be sure to order up a new ball valve. Maybe it's time to replace the old mash tun. Also, pH came out a little high 5.5ish instead of 5.2. Probably won't be real bad but I think it goes to show that it won't be as dark a beer as I think it will be. Haven't had a bad brew day in a while. This day is going badly. It's my fucking birthday. Doesn't this brew day know. There's only one thing left to do I think. Time to start drinking. I bought some Gordon Biersch.
4:06pm - A bird flew in. I yelled at it. It flew out.
4:25pm - Sat down for a sec. Wanted to note that my temp controller box is having an issue. I made it such that the two key executables fire up upon boot up. But the tempcontroller program doesn't work. If I kill it, then restart it, it works. I think the issue is that the Pi I/O requires permissions that I had to setup to get pi user access to the I/O ports. I don't sudo the tempcontroller executable in the startup script so I don't know which user starts this up. It works when I log in and kill the process and restart because when I log in as the pi user, I now have permissions. Ergo, I think I have a permission issue. I just thought of this just now after having had beaten my head on the issue last night. Late last night. Working on my first Winter Bock. It's good.
5:50pm - Took a 30min break for Chinese food. Mongolian Beef. Pre-boil gravity is 1.042. Higher than I thought it would be. Kevin is on his way over.
6:14pm - Things looking up a little. I tried the wort. No vomit. Ellie feels the same. The wort tastes good. So maybe the malt bill is not so bad. Also, I fly my new plane tomorrow. So that's good. The vomit odor in the ball valve is completely gone. I made sure to clean the crap out of it. I'm gonna pour me another beer.
9:03pm - Done. OG was 1.050. A little higher than what I thought but that's ok. It tasted good. Looked a little more dark brown than black. I should google translate dark brown beer into German and use that to name this beer. Kevin came. We had good talks. The new cooling system worked like a champ. Basically we use the basin as a sump and re-circulate ice water through the coils. We got the wort down to 50F in 25 or so mins. Really fast. Everything else went without a hitch so I guess we'll see what happens.
8.5 lbs Pilsner
12oz Carafa II
1.65 Hallertauer 4.1%AA @ 60mins
0.5 Hallertauer 4.1%AA @ 20mins
0.5 Hallertauer 4.1%AA @ 0mins
WLP830 x2 with 1 liter starter (stir plate) Lot num: 1002989, Date 3/4/14
Here's the water:
3:00pm - Got everything measured out. Boiled O2 stone. Going to start heating up strike water. I'm considering this the start of the brew day. If done by 9pm. Then we all good. Also, I bought some tubing and connectors and stuff to improve the cooling process. More on that later.
3:31pm - Got the water done and am heating up the strike water. Got the grain milled. Pulled the mash tun off the shelf and stuck my nose in it when I opened it, just like everytime. And it smelled foul. Almost like a mild vomit smell. I narrowed it down to the ball valve. I put the steel braid, washer, and ball valve real quick into a PBW solution with super hot water. I'll leave it for 15 mins or so. Since it's on the hot side, any infection will be killed in the boil so I'm not too worried but I plan to clean that valve more thoroughly and today. And if the beer tastes like shit, we'll know one possible reason why. I may just replace that ball valve. Maybe completely disassemble it and see if I can clean it.
3:54pm - Mash temp was a little high, 158F. I added some room temp water to get it to 151F. After the PBW wash the ball valve smelled a little better. I will re-access after the run off and give it another smell. Also, I will be sure to order up a new ball valve. Maybe it's time to replace the old mash tun. Also, pH came out a little high 5.5ish instead of 5.2. Probably won't be real bad but I think it goes to show that it won't be as dark a beer as I think it will be. Haven't had a bad brew day in a while. This day is going badly. It's my fucking birthday. Doesn't this brew day know. There's only one thing left to do I think. Time to start drinking. I bought some Gordon Biersch.
4:06pm - A bird flew in. I yelled at it. It flew out.
4:25pm - Sat down for a sec. Wanted to note that my temp controller box is having an issue. I made it such that the two key executables fire up upon boot up. But the tempcontroller program doesn't work. If I kill it, then restart it, it works. I think the issue is that the Pi I/O requires permissions that I had to setup to get pi user access to the I/O ports. I don't sudo the tempcontroller executable in the startup script so I don't know which user starts this up. It works when I log in and kill the process and restart because when I log in as the pi user, I now have permissions. Ergo, I think I have a permission issue. I just thought of this just now after having had beaten my head on the issue last night. Late last night. Working on my first Winter Bock. It's good.
5:50pm - Took a 30min break for Chinese food. Mongolian Beef. Pre-boil gravity is 1.042. Higher than I thought it would be. Kevin is on his way over.
6:14pm - Things looking up a little. I tried the wort. No vomit. Ellie feels the same. The wort tastes good. So maybe the malt bill is not so bad. Also, I fly my new plane tomorrow. So that's good. The vomit odor in the ball valve is completely gone. I made sure to clean the crap out of it. I'm gonna pour me another beer.
9:03pm - Done. OG was 1.050. A little higher than what I thought but that's ok. It tasted good. Looked a little more dark brown than black. I should google translate dark brown beer into German and use that to name this beer. Kevin came. We had good talks. The new cooling system worked like a champ. Basically we use the basin as a sump and re-circulate ice water through the coils. We got the wort down to 50F in 25 or so mins. Really fast. Everything else went without a hitch so I guess we'll see what happens.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
EKA V Soft Water
All out of beer. Time to make more. So I thought I'd make EKA V again but this time I will use softer water.
The ingredients are the same as EKA V.
Yeast WLP 001 Lot number 1003290. A 1L starter was made the night before. Stir plate was used. Kinda.
For the water I started with distilled and went from there. Here's what it looked like:
Started at 4pm. I just finished now at 10pm. I hit my mash temp at 152F and the OG was 1.042. Hit all the numbers.
Some of the stuff that went wrong:
- Stir plate sucks. I need to get going on the new one. My next nerd project. I want to implement a PID controller to maintain the spin rate of the magnet.
- I used my bare hands to open/close the drill bit onto the mill. It tore up my hand a little. I need wear a glove or use a towel or something next time.
- I had my headphones in and was trying to stay very busy cleaning. As a result I never heard/forgot that I was vorloufing into a gallon pitcher and it overflowed and made a mess. I used the mop to clean up. This would be avoided by another person with me.
- Still have issues with cleanly getting the wort from the re-circulation silicon tubing after cooling. It just makes a sticky mess. I've got to think of a better way.
- The pump seems to have issues moving the hot wort from pot to immersion chiller for re-circulation. I think I need to make the silicon tubing from pump to chiller shorter. It should make it easier on the pump.
- Still issues getting the wort cooled down enough. I can get it cooled very quickly to 75F ish but then I can't get cool water in the big chiller. I run out of ice in the pre-chiller so fast. I just need to remember to buy more ice at the store.
- When I turned on the temp controller I wanted to cool the wort a little before I pitched yeast. So I turned on the force on option and the temp controller seemed to just hang up. I'm not sure what happened but I will need to run this bug down later. I had to kill the process, change the force on option off, and then restart the process and it ran normally fine.
- Too much hot break in the beer after cooling. I need to find a way to settle it out faster. I don't like it just sitting there, not cooling more, becoming more infected by bugs while the break settles.
- If I'm going to keep tweaking water, I should get a scale.
I will say that the water did make a difference in taste. I tried the wort and it was...different. Not sure how it will turn out but I am sure it will turn out different.
Also, I switched the fermenting fridge to the smaller one and plan to serve out of the larger one.
The ingredients are the same as EKA V.
Yeast WLP 001 Lot number 1003290. A 1L starter was made the night before. Stir plate was used. Kinda.
For the water I started with distilled and went from there. Here's what it looked like:
Started at 4pm. I just finished now at 10pm. I hit my mash temp at 152F and the OG was 1.042. Hit all the numbers.
Some of the stuff that went wrong:
- Stir plate sucks. I need to get going on the new one. My next nerd project. I want to implement a PID controller to maintain the spin rate of the magnet.
- I used my bare hands to open/close the drill bit onto the mill. It tore up my hand a little. I need wear a glove or use a towel or something next time.
- I had my headphones in and was trying to stay very busy cleaning. As a result I never heard/forgot that I was vorloufing into a gallon pitcher and it overflowed and made a mess. I used the mop to clean up. This would be avoided by another person with me.
- Still have issues with cleanly getting the wort from the re-circulation silicon tubing after cooling. It just makes a sticky mess. I've got to think of a better way.
- The pump seems to have issues moving the hot wort from pot to immersion chiller for re-circulation. I think I need to make the silicon tubing from pump to chiller shorter. It should make it easier on the pump.
- Still issues getting the wort cooled down enough. I can get it cooled very quickly to 75F ish but then I can't get cool water in the big chiller. I run out of ice in the pre-chiller so fast. I just need to remember to buy more ice at the store.
- When I turned on the temp controller I wanted to cool the wort a little before I pitched yeast. So I turned on the force on option and the temp controller seemed to just hang up. I'm not sure what happened but I will need to run this bug down later. I had to kill the process, change the force on option off, and then restart the process and it ran normally fine.
- Too much hot break in the beer after cooling. I need to find a way to settle it out faster. I don't like it just sitting there, not cooling more, becoming more infected by bugs while the break settles.
- If I'm going to keep tweaking water, I should get a scale.
I will say that the water did make a difference in taste. I tried the wort and it was...different. Not sure how it will turn out but I am sure it will turn out different.
Also, I switched the fermenting fridge to the smaller one and plan to serve out of the larger one.
Friday, November 22, 2013
Scottish 80 Tasting notes
This is my 100th post. I had no idea until just now!
Anyhow, the Scottish beer turned out great. One of my favs. It is malty, sweet, and delicious. Everyone who has tried it has been pleased. I went to visit the bearded brewer today and he gave the following feedback:
- No diacetly
- A little bitter
- A little estery
I think what I need to do is pitch colder. I'll that a go on my next brew tomorrow.
Anyhow, the Scottish beer turned out great. One of my favs. It is malty, sweet, and delicious. Everyone who has tried it has been pleased. I went to visit the bearded brewer today and he gave the following feedback:
- No diacetly
- A little bitter
- A little estery
I think what I need to do is pitch colder. I'll that a go on my next brew tomorrow.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)