21st Amendment's Bitter American

I forgot some stuff so I ordered them up from MoreBeer. While I was at it I ordered up 21st Amendment's Bitter American. I had it when I was in San Fransisco over the holidays. Here's the ingredients:

7lbs British
1 lb Munich
0.8oz Crystal 15
0.8oz Crystal 40

1oz Cascade - 90min
1oz Liberty - 15min
1oz Cascade - 1min
1oz Cascade - Dry hop
1oz Willamette - Dry hop 

WLP060 x2 - Apr-10-14 - Lot # 1004115 - 2 liter starter

10 gallons distilled with salts below:

Whirlfloc
Servomyces

Ok. We had a tragedy. The stir plate overflowed in the night. The yeast clogged up the fan as well. It was a mess. Here's some pics of the disaster.

It's really not so bad since I was planning to upgrade it anyway. This just gives me an excuse to do just that.

Vic came over for the first time. He seems to be getting into the hobby and wanted to see how I do things. Once he got here everything went really smooth. Nothing bad comes to mind. For this brew I plan to make the cut off temp a lot lower. My hope is that this won't upset the yeast so bad and make all those yucky esters.

So I guess that's it. A short post. See ya soon!

Kolsch tasting notes

The Kolsch is horribly estery. Similar to my other blonde ales. I almost can't drink it. I'm not sure if they are beer esters or acetaldehyde. I don't think it is acetaldehyde since that is usually from green (young) beer. This beer was in primary for three weeks. It was pitched cold at 55F and fermented at 65F. After three weeks it was moved to a keg and lagered at 34F. It been in the chest freezer for two weeks now and as it cleans up, the taste becomes more and more pronounced.

So either the taste was always there and as the yeast dropped out and stopped contributing to the flavor of the beer it became more apparent or as the beer sat in the keg it become more estery. I the former rather than the latter although I have no data to support my theory. What I need is a series of experiments to run this thing down. I've done some before like when I put the beer in plastic bottles and fermented it but I think I need to go a little more overboard here.

As I try to beat these easters out I'm continually going colder and pitching more and more yeast. Maybe I have it wrong. Maybe the right thing to do is pitch the correct amount of yeast at the correct temperature. Maybe the cold is what is upsetting the yeast and causing them to drop out of suspension.

One thing I'd like to note is that the starter for the Kolsch was different. First it was very hot. I left it in the garage and it was hot to the touch the next morning. Just before I pitched it, I smelled it and it smelled more estery than any starter I've ever had. Maybe that yeast was already stressed from the starter. Maybe pitching from the hot starter to the cold wort caused it to become stressed. There are a lot of variables here that I can't know. The next beer is a bitter and I'm going to do two things. First I will ferment at 69F. Haven't done that in a long time. Second I will cool the starter down to the pitching temp by adding wort before pitching.

It the bitter comes out wrong, I'm going to try to some more experimentation. Hell I might just do that anyway. One thing I thought of recently was that the chest freezer is a common element to all this eastery beer. Maybe when the freezer turns on it cools things too quick and causes the yeast to become unhappy. Maybe a good test would be to ferment a batch in the chest freezer and ferment a batch in a cold room in the house and compare.

Ryan's Dusseldorf Alt Bier

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.